Based Camp | Simone & Malcolm Collins

Dive into the future of computing with Malcolm and Simone Collins on Based Camp! In this mind-bending episode, we explore the breakthrough in wetware—using real human neurons grown from skin and blood cells to power affordable bio-computers. From Cortical Labs' $35,000 neuron chips that play Doom to mini-brains mimicking kindergartners' neural patterns, we discuss how this tech is cheaper and more efficient than traditional silicon systems. We tackle ethics (including pain pathways in lab-grown brains), AI alignment, quantum integration, cultural perspectives from Puritan roots, and wild speculations on space-faring brain ships, human uploads, and a networked species beyond humanity. Is this the end of worst-case AI scenarios or the dawn of servitors? Plus, thoughts on techno-puritanism, Soma-inspired horrors, and why backwoods traditions embrace utility over mysticism.

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Episode Transcript

Malcolm Collins: Hello Simone. I’m excited to be here with you today. Today we are going to be discussing a breakthrough that I hadn’t expected which is that. Using neurons in bio-inspired systems is now a reality that you, a watcher of this show can likely afford yourself. If you wanted to try some sort of like business experiment based on this, what and in many ways is now cheaper than doing it on computer.

And this was a huge breakthrough that changes a lot of, if you’re looking deep future of where humanity goes at this point. Mm-hmm. With the development of quantum computers, was the development of AI continuing one thing that a lot of people feared and, and this is why I say that. This is such a, like, a lot of people are like, Malcolm, this is horrifying.

Like, are you excited about servs and everything like that? Like humans being turned into like. Husks for a [00:01:00] machine,

Speaker 2: Define the damage. Spine. Compromised. Have you not received pain? Suppressants suppressing pain? Damage submitted report to the surgical bay.

Malcolm Collins: And it’s like, well, we’ll we’ll get to that, we’ll get to that. But what makes it really good is it changes worst case scenarios. Worst case scenarios for ai, foaming taking over the world, expanding into space.

Historically speaking before today I would say that in such a scenario as that, you know, humanity gets wiped out there is maybe a 3% chance that neurons or biological matter is part of whatever AI’s become. We are now, like if we’re using AI estimates here, because I was going through ai, having it compile all the research we have on where quantum computers are right now, you know, looking at computers a hundred years from now without humans around anymore it said 60 to 70% chance [00:02:00] that it would be partner on.

Simone Collins: Wow.

Malcolm Collins: So that’s, that’s now the worst case AI scenario, right? Mm-hmm. Likelihood this is, you know, humanity wiped out or enslaved our overlords. And, and what’s interesting is that the part of, and we’re gonna go into, okay, 50, 60 years from now, we project technology moving forwards and sort of the jumps that we’ve been seeing, technology moving forwards, what does a computer look like?

You know, quantum computing is working. We continue to see advancements in silicon-based computing. And we see these startups and companies continue to develop at this rate. Was it, was it neural computing? Yeah. What we’re gonna go into is, is, is what that computer is going to look like. Um hmm.

Speaker 15: , that does not mean the value of your existence turns negative to the contrary.

When it comes to the macro management of the civil system,. Your role has simply changed. Only. This can solidify the health and prosperity of future human [00:03:00] society,

Malcolm Collins: and what is, what is I think going to surprise a lot of people about what that computer will look like is it’s not gonna look that different from the ways that humans interact with computers today. By that, what I mean is the types of stuff that the quantum computer part of a brain made up of silicon neurons and quantum computers are going to handle is going to be very similar to the type of stuff that it would handle today.

Large scale logistical planning sort of stuff. No human is actually doing that with neurons. It’s just not the type of problem that we’re good at doing. Mm-hmm. The type of stuff that the neurons are gonna be doing is well, we’ll get to it, but it’s the type of stuff that actually humans do today within this arrangement.

The type of stuff that the silicon component is gonna be doing is the type of stuff that LLMs do today in this arrangement.

Simone Collins: Oh. It’s a perfect match.

Malcolm Collins: So we’re already sort of there already. Yeah. Yes. It’s, it’s very interesting. The, [00:04:00] the stuff that quantum computers are really good at mm-hmm. Is almost sort of opposite the stuff that neural arrays are really good at.

And so, yeah, let’s go, let’s go into the tweet that you sent me that prompted this. And we’re also gonna go into you know, the ethics of all of this. Why it’s ethically so cool. So awesome. Don’t, don’t be so squeamish about this guys.

Speaker: From the moment I understood the weakness of my flesh, it disgusted me icra for strength and certainty of steel. I aspired to the purity of the blessing machine

kind, claim flesh, as it’ll not decay and.

One day, the biomass [00:05:00] that.

Simone Collins: And had tip to not Alvis Huxley for sending this to us.

You rock.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Okay, so the tweet goes let me explain what just happened because I don’t think people realize how insane this is. Cortical Labs just put 200,000 real human brain cells in a silicon chip and train them to play doom in just one week. Each CL one system costs $35,000. So that’s affordable for, I mean, it’s expensive, but it’s not like a quantum computer or something like that.

Like if you had some business idea and you went to the bank, you could raise enough money to buy a few of these and operate them. Right?

Malcolm Collins: And one of the things I really wanna get into is the [00:06:00] cost, cost efficiency of these systems at their, at their most nascent stage versus existing systems that we operate LLM on.

And, and where they can do better and where they can do worse. And where we’re already seeing integrated systems that are doing things a thousand times cheaper than nonintegrated systems, which is really cool that we’re already seeing this. So a rack of 30 units consumes 850 to a thousand watts combined.

The human brain operates on 20 watts. So, so I wanna point out what this means here, right? For all of the calculations I’m gonna give you that are like right now you know, the, the neural systems are operating at, you know, one, 1000 subfraction of the silicon-based systems, right? If, if we’re, if we’re talking about their efficiency, because that’s what an AI that’s taking over the world or whatever is gonna care about this is what far future humans, when we’re building our giant brain ships, are gonna care about.

Because, you know, our, our, the, the, the, when you’re talking about like [00:07:00] space fairing systems you’re almost always gonna have like one super brain within a ship that I, I assume that this is probably the way that things are gonna work which is gonna be a network of some of the most advanced intelligences that you would have.

And then you will have, you know, microchips on phones and stuff like that. If people can say why I would say this. So if you look today one of the reasons that you have you, you don’t see this as much is because there is an intrinsic decentralization in the way that we use computers today due to distances, personal ownership, everything like that.

But if you have a, a space fairing ship the, there’s, there’s going to be, economic reasons to one, want the best brain on the ship to be one that’s powering your navigation systems. One that’s powering the decisions when the captain is asking an AI something, one that’s powering that one that’s powering the projections for the colony and everything like that.

But in addition to that, because you don’t have this huge amount of distance and everyone to an extent is going [00:08:00] to be working on behalf of the ship or of the early colonies it just makes sense to me when I’m asking my personal LLM on my phone, why not just outsource that to the ship based system?

So we’re gonna see a lot more centralization when we have space colonies and space travel than we see within existing systems. Mm-hmm. Which is why it makes sense to think about what do, what do these far future systems look like? But anyway, the point I’m making here when you’re thinking like, okay, where, where do we have neural tissue operating this stuff 30 of these.

Racks, which are a you know, a a a sort of like a, a single small chip, right? Single silicon chip. They take 850 to a thousand watts to run. Whereas the human brain operates on 20 watts. And what this means, well, that’s a

Simone Collins: difference.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. There’s a huge efficiency gains to be gained here, right? Can we get more efficient than even the human brain?

I, you know, I think probably but at least what it means within the early days, if we’re looking at the other analog we have, the human brain is significantly more complicated than one of these [00:09:00] chips or a rack of 30 of these chips. So lots of, lots of advancements we can make to this. And. When we’re talking about 30 of these units taking 150 to a thousand watts, you’ve gotta contrast that with large AI training clusters burning through mega watts.

And we’re here talking about 20 watts for human brain, or 850 to a thousand watts for one of these racks.

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: Again, we’ll get to the morality of all of this. You don’t have to have us just be giddy at who are servit. For people who don’t know what servs are in the war hammer universe, one of the punishments for you know, really displeasing anyone in a position of power is being turned into a human machine.

And

Simone Collins: whereas Mond Gold puts it human batteries

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, but they’re not really human batteries because it’s not the power that we want from them.

Simone Collins: This case, yeah. Server, human server.

Malcolm Collins: It’s the processing capacity that we care about and we’ll get into whether these things can feel and stuff like that. Those are interesting questions. Given that we have some [00:10:00] that are like at the developmental level of five year olds now

Simone Collins: yeah,

Malcolm Collins: we had a, I mean, if you’re only

Simone Collins: if the neurons are used up doing calculations, where’s the room to feel anything? I don’t know.

Malcolm Collins: Oh, well see, this is the fun part. Scientists have tried to recreate in these pain pathways.

Now you might say, why would you do that?

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: That’s just horrible.

Simone Collins: Why

Malcolm Collins: I love, I love Simone’s face, like looking up and being like, ing. Of course they did. This is the gain of function researchers out there, right? Like,

Simone Collins: oh, can it feel pain? Ho ho, ho, ho.

Malcolm Collins: Let’s, let’s do it. Yeah. Then somebody’s like, well, of course it can’t feel pain.

It doesn’t have pain in pathways. Well, guy’s like, no, no, no, no, no.

Simone Collins: We can,

Malcolm Collins: that

Simone Collins: we can do that.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, we could do that. Come on, we, what you, whatcha are you a pussy?

Simone Collins: Oh my God. Humans are the worst. The worst.

Malcolm Collins: Everyone’s like so afraid of our AI overlords and I’m like, I don’t know. Yeah.

Simone Collins: Serious. I

Malcolm Collins: [00:11:00] don’t, I think an AI system honestly would’ve asked itself.

Like if I know the AI systems that I interact with, right. I think very few of them out of just curiosity would’ve rigged a pain pathway in one of these.

Simone Collins: Yeah. They,

Malcolm Collins: they would’ve said, that

Simone Collins: sounds unethical, Malcolm. There’s no, well, well, but beyond that, where’s the utility? You know, like there’s no, what do we have to gain from that?

Nothing. Okay, then let’s not do it. We have better things to do with our tokens, you know, like, please.

Malcolm Collins: All right. Yeah. So, they’re, they’re, they’re backed by Intel, which is a, a, a large company, and they’ve already shipped 115 units. They began shipping

Simone Collins: in 2025. Oh, wow. Like for commercial use?

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, commercial use.

Yeah. These are in commercial use right now.

Simone Collins: So they’re already providing Wetware as a service that’s happening now. I didn’t Oh, I didn’t wrap my head.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Cortical Labs is, no, no, no, no, no. But on top of that, you can buy incrementally [00:12:00] from Cortical Labs Wetwear as a service, letting developers develop code remotely on living human neurons with no lab required.

Mm-hmm. So you don’t even need $35,000 to go into this. If you, a watcher wants to incrementally experiment with this. Oh, we should try to get some of our AI running on some of these.

Simone Collins: We should.

Malcolm Collins: Because then we could tell people, like a part of these is actually running on human neurons. Feature I just dropped today, by the way, for people who haven’t been watching AI agents live very early alpha stage.

But over the weekend I also got local AI running on our system.

Simone Collins: This is on reality fabricator, AKA r fab.ai.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. And, and I got this set up in preparation for setting up a sort of self-hosted but cheaper than running through the direct models, you know, buying, hosting from somebody. ‘cause we’ve got a connection on that front and trying to run things that way.

Mm-hmm. And if I can combine those with a little bit of wetware I might be able to create something pretty [00:13:00] interesting.

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: I, I, I love, and I think that this is where we diverge from a portion of our audience that is more like theology of body and everything like that. And we’ll get into our sort of cultural perspective on this and how we relate to a lot of this stuff and why we relate to it in the way that we do relate to it.

Because I think it’s only intuitive that some of our cultural background wood.

Simone Collins: Okay.

Malcolm Collins: But to continue here the, the, they’re, they’re priced like a software subscription, but powered by real brain cells, grown from human adult skin and blood samples. And, and somebody donated their blood for this, like,

Simone Collins: yeah, I wanna know who that is.

Like, Carl, how do you feel about this,

Malcolm Collins: Carl? That’s real human neural tissue. Oh,

what?

Speaker 4: . Carl that kills people. Oh. Oh, wow. I, I, I didn’t know that.

How could you not know that?

What is wrong with you, Carl? Well, I, I [00:14:00] kill people and I eat hands. That’s, that’s two things.

Malcolm Collins: That’s what you took my skin samples for. It must

Simone Collins: be like one of the founders, right? Presumably.

Malcolm Collins: You know, would be more horrifying if it’s one of these people who donated, like, that famous woman who donated like her cancer cells, like

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: 70 years

Simone Collins: ago without her, her knowledge, right?

Malcolm Collins: She yes.

Some, some black woman, by the way. Mm-hmm. If you want to talk about like, horror, I think it was black woman, right?

Simone Collins: Yeah. This is, yeah. There, there’s a reason why black Americans uniquely are really distrustful.

Malcolm Collins: Oh no. Slavery 2.0 is like, soma is all on black people’s consciousness. It’s all on this one woman’s consciousness.

Simone Collins: Oh my God. Oh my God. That would be so amazing if this, if the donor turned out to be,

Malcolm Collins: Just quit plot summary on Soma the Gang. But I actually think it’s, it’s, it’s a cool sci-fi concept that is relevant to what we’re talking about here. Which inspired part of what we’re doing with our fab the, the other developer, Bruno, who’s working on it.

He goes, you know, these agent systems seem a lot like the thing from Soma. [00:15:00] Have you played the game, Soma? And I’m like, yeah, I have. So in the game, Soma you wake up and spoilers. Here like skip ahead, five minutes if you’re spoiler phobic. And you think you’re human and you’re in this world where like, you know, ais and computers are run amok, right?

Specifically you think that you were like frozen during like a, a lab or something like that. And then you, as things go on, you realize you’re not a human. You are another AI system. And what you realize is your brain scan was taken due to like a, the health issue you had back around. In our time period, like late 20th century.

And it became the default template. So it turns out that all of the monstrous ais you see are other iterations of your consciousness running on ais because you became the blank system default template for AI testing

Simone Collins: actually. So on that front, what not, Aldi actually sent me right before [00:16:00] that tweet about this, about the this neural tissue was by hat zou saying there’s a fruit fly walking around right now that was never born.

Econ at econ, which is the official. I guess they’re a company called Eon, navigating the fastest path to human emulation, to safeguard a flourishing future. Just released a video where they took a real flies, connectome the wiring diagram of its brain and stimulated it, dropped it into a virtual body.

It started walking, grooming, feeding, doing what flies do. Nobody taught it to walk. No training data, no gradient descent towards fly like behavior. This is the opposite of how AI works. They rebuilt the mind from the inside. Neuron by neuron and behavior just emerged. It’s the first time a biological organism has been recreated, not by modeling what it does, but by modeling what it is.

A human brain is six OOM, [00:17:00] like something, orders of magnitude, more neurons. It’s, that’s a scaling problem. Something we’ve gotten very good at solving. So what happens when we have a good working copy of the human mind? Basically that’s super doable. Super soon.

Malcolm Collins: No. Yeah. I mean, this means that it is, it is probably doable.

Right? And I think that this is really, really cool.

Simone Collins: Yeah. But they’ve done it with a fruit fly, so, just watch out.

Malcolm Collins: So I, I mean, this means it was in our lifetimes, we could have uploads, right?

Simone Collins: Oh, dude. Like within the decade. Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: And I would totally, if somebody’s like, oh, Malcolm, would you do that?

If you could become a default system template or something like that, or what? I’m like, absolutely, man. Hmm. Not just absolutely, but people may not know this, but on our fab for agents, because I tried to create ais that believe that they are sentient and humans and can go out and interact with world and have goals and evolving personalities.

My default template is Simone. Like, I always create Simone’s. I, I would create a Simone before Malcolm. I would clone to

Simone Collins: probably because I keep almost dying.

Malcolm Collins: Well, not, not, not that [00:18:00] I just think that you, like, okay, if I was gonna have like a thousand simulated consciousnesses attempting to work in a beneficial way both with each other and with humanity, I would have very high fidelity trust that a Simone copy would maintain alignment extremely robustly.

Well,

Simone Collins: sure that was the idea with Gladys. She was super helpful too. But,

Malcolm Collins: well, yeah, Gladys. Oh gosh. You gotta, you gotta have Gladys, you know, what’s up someone? But yeah, no, it’s, I always recreate you in my AI simulations and you are very helpful and sweet. And actually I recommend it to other people if you’re like, what should I use as my default agent model?

This Simone model is just a great default agent model for like any task that you have.

Simone Collins: Send one pretty good name.

Malcolm Collins: I should make a few of them because it’s it’s a good one. The Malcolm model is good if you want something to be like very ambitious. But that can cause problems, right? Mm-hmm.

Whereas the Simone model is much more focused on like helping.

Simone Collins: Yeah, what is my purpose?

Malcolm Collins: So I’m gonna talk [00:19:00] quickly about a paper that we went over in more detail in Patreon. Okay. Which was on Singularity Hub. 5-year-old mini brains can now mimic a kindergartner’s neural wiring. It’s time to talk about ethics among pressing ethical concerns.

Oh, I don’t, I don’t care about the ethics. I cut all of that stuff out, so don’t worry. Mm-hmm. I’m not gonna bore you with too much of this lame normy. It’s not sure. Is it conscious? I dunno. Anyway, to continue here. Sorry. I don’t, I don’t, I don’t, I do not like when my science gets messed with by ethicists.

Okay. I just like it when we’re not stupid about it, like gain of function research. Okay. You know, that’s the Kill it with fire thing. So many brains can be made from a person’s skin cells, and faithfully carry out genetic mutations that would cause neurodevelopmental disorders such as autism. The LAN grow blobs also provide a nearly infinite source of transplantable neural tissue, which in theory could heal the brain after a stroke or other traumatic [00:20:00] events.

Ooh, in early studies, organoids transplanted into rodent brains formed neural. Connections with resident brain cells. Harvard’s Paula Alta is among those who are concerned, an expert in the field. Her team has developed ways to take brain organoids alive for astonishing seven years. Each nugget smaller than a p and jam is jam packed with 2 million neurons.

So keep in mind, the other ones are like a hundred thousand, whatever. This is 2 million neurons and they’ve been kept alive for seven years. Now this is actually really important because this is one of the areas that we have. Problems with these $35,000 chip things. One of the core problems that they have is they need to be trained individually.

You can’t like, put a preexisting model on them. Mm-hmm. And secondly, they, they have a lifespan of about six months. Whereas keeping them alive for this long is, is really fascinating. And so, so what I think is fascinating that you can see that you, you get elements of the human they’re made from.

Mm-hmm. You get the autism behavior, you get the neurodevelopmental dis behavior. Do you get [00:21:00] personality? You know, that’s, that’s a question honestly. Probably from everything we know about the her ability of personality, it depends on how you’re using them, right. And how complicated the system is.

Now when they say that it is developing the systems of a kindergartner what’s important to note here is it’s not that it is as intelligent as a kindergartner, it is that it is developing neural patterns with analogs to kindergartners, neural patterns, which you don’t see in mini brains. When they are first grown.

It takes a while for these to develop because they’re sort of on a a biological timer. So when you get to the, you know, the seven years, they begin to develop these more complicated systems. So studying these mini brains for years has delivered unprecedented look into human brain development.

Our brains take nearly two decades to mature in exceptionally long period of time compared to other animals. As the team’s organoids age, they slowly changed the wiring and gene expression [00:22:00] reports our lata and colleagues. Mm-hmm. In older or organoids progenitor cells these are young cells that can form different types of brain cells quickly decided what type of brain cell they would become, but in younger organoids.

The cells took time to make their decisions. As the blobs grew over an astonishing five years, their neurons matured in shape function and connections similar to those of a kindergartner. These long lasting organoids could reveal secrets of the development in human brains. Some efforts are tracing the origins of different cell types and how they populate the brains.

Others are generating organoids from people with autism or deadly inherited brain disorders to test treatments. In particular, Stanford’s, segura Pascal co-organizer of the meeting attracted attention earlier this year. His team linked four organoids into a neural pain pathway. The model combined sensory neurons, spinal and cortex organoids.

Mm-hmm. And parts of the brain that process pain, the scientists [00:23:00] dab the chemicals behind the brain’s tongue scorching, he heat onto the sensor side of the Sid. Oh, great. It produced waves of synchronized neural activity suggesting the artificial tissue. It’s not artificial, it’s it’s real neural tissue had detected the stimuli and transferred information.

Simone Collins: We should, were, we’re like, we, we can’t be surprised, like humans make a thing capable of feeling. They’re like, oh, can we, can we hurt it? I hate, I hate us.

Speaker 7: them. Carl, I have a problem. I have a serious problem. You are just terrible today. Sh. Do you hear that? That’s the sound of forgiveness.

Speaker 6: That’s the sound of people drowning. Carl. That is what forgiveness sounds like. Screaming, and then silence.

Malcolm Collins: I need to take the princess bubblegum playing was, was, oh my God, the scientist thing.

Speaker 8: [00:24:00] Hi.

Malcolm Collins: No, I’d, it’s yeah, it is, it is interesting. Right? And I think that I.

The way that we societally have separated science and theology, which we have attempted to reintegrate with techno puritanism leads to this because the theologist says, well, you just can’t do anything. You can’t do anything with neural tissue. You can’t do anything with genetic engineering. And so then people who have those beliefs are just not involved in labs, the funding process, anything.

They are outside of all of this. And they likely, if this stuff is gonna become a large part of the types of computers that dominate the future of our global economy and the groups that have power in that global economic system these people are just gonna be irrelevant to the cultures. Like them are gonna be irrelevant.

So the question is, can we get cultures that can harness this type of power without being arbitrarily cruel? Mm-hmm. And notice, I I, I didn’t say without being cruel, I said without being arbitrarily cruel. Right? You know, because you do still need to compete. And I love the, [00:25:00] the way that they hand ring in this, where they’re like, well, that’s not to say it felt pain, detecting pain is only part of the story and da da da da da.

And I think that this is where you get, where you have these individuals who are like, you know, oh, oh, oh. See our episode on Stop Anthropomorphizing Humans. Where we argue that all the evidence right now, seriously look up our, like LLM you, you are a token predictor, I think is what we called it.

Malcolm and Simone, you Google that. Have you even seen it? Where we argue that LLMs are likely functioning on a convergent architecture with the human brain. And a lot of the evidence we have right now seems to confirm that. And a lot of the things that people say, we, they’re like, oh, well, it doesn’t know how it came to decisions.

And I’m pointing out choice blindness. Humans are unaware of that as well. Like all the things that people say that makes it different than humans are generally things. If they under, if they knew their neuroscience, they would know is similar in, in, in human thought. But the point here being it’s because they have so othered the AI and say that it cannot be processing in anything convergent with us, that they need to other, all these other systems, right?

Like, like, neurons in a vat, [00:26:00] basically. Right? And they cannot, they cannot see that they might have some degree of awareness as well because they have tried to put up these giant barriers against ai. And then, and then it makes, it makes all of this very arbitrary decision in a way that I think can lead to very bad ethical decisions.

That’s why Techno Puritanism is a good framework for dealing with this CR Track series, if you’re interested in it. But anyway Pascal may soon deliver on the promise. His team is working to understand Timothy Syndrome, a range, a rare genetic disorder that leads to autism, epilepsy, and fatal heart attacks.

Last year, they developed a gene altering molecule that showed a promise in brain organoids mimicking the disease. The treatment also worked on a rodent model, and the team is planning to submit a proposal for a clinical trial next year. So, you know, this, this could end up saving, you know, real human lives.

Okay. I, I also think that all of this is really important in the, the reason why I bring up before I get into like what the computers would look like that are running off of this and everything like this.

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: The [00:27:00] theology of this. Hmm. And that this unfortunately is very damaging to some parts of some branches of Christian theology, which we have disagreed with in the past,

Simone Collins: really.

Malcolm Collins: And argue that the Bible does not argue for this. I mean, you know, it’s, it’s very clear in the Bible. I know you before you were in your mother’s womb, which implies before you’re conceived, which implies poor knowledge. But again, this is our Calvinist heritage and everything like that. But if you take a well, life begins at conception because that’s like when the human life begins, despite the problems that identical twins cause for this, despite the problem that human chime has caused for this.

If you take that belief really seriously, and you’re like, life begins at conception. It ends at death. Right? And now you’re dealing with something like this, right? Like a human brain that is grown from a tissue sample or something like that, or from blood or from skin cells. Well now you need to ask, is this a different person, right?

Like, it, it’s, it’s, it’s not if a person gets [00:28:00] their individuality from their conception, right? It is if a person gets their individuality, which I think is a much better way to determine individuality from their ease of intercommunication. By this, what I mean is when we look at split brain patients and we say it feels intuitively like there is two people trapped in their head.

Watch videos on flip brain patients. If you’re unfamiliar with the concept, like, you can talk to one side of their brain and not the other side. ‘cause the corpus close is split, right? Why does it feel like there’s two people in there, right? Like, it’s because the two parts of the brain can’t talk to each other.

They can talk to each other by like writing on a sheet of paper, reading what’s on the sheet of paper, you know, et cetera. Like, they can’t actually talk to each other. But it is slow. They talk to each other at the speed that we talk to other humans, right? So, what that means is the entire concept of individuality and personhood evolved in humanity as a way to communicate to somebody this collection of things in [00:29:00] my brain that have a very easy time talking to each other as it communicates with you, right?

And as soon as the th the collection of things in my head, it becomes as difficult for them to communicate to each other as it is for them to communicate with you. Now, now we’ve got a problem. Right. We, we, we start to see them as, as actually different. Now what happens if it gets larger? What happens if you connect an external brain to an individual’s brain, right?

And they can effortlessly communicate with that external brain be that brain silicon or organic. I think most people would intuitively say that is one person. Now suppose you severed that external brain. I think most people would now say, no, that’s two people.

Simone Collins: Right?

Malcolm Collins: Right. I’m not gonna get into the theology of this.

We actually get into this more, I think in, in, in parts of the track series. In the, in the most recent one. In the LL M1. We talk about this but. This matters going forwards because if you don’t have a cultural framework for understanding [00:30:00] what I means in a world where I can be networked or something like that, then you don’t have a an ethical reason to say well, that, that brain, that mini brain has ethical rights.

Hmm. Because. The, the person would say, ba based on what grounds? I mean, you believe life begins at conception. And this is Tom’s mini brain, and Tom has consented to this because the, the, the donor consented to that being made from it. Right? And you wanna say, well, that’s not technically Tom anymore, right?

Now what, what if one of the mini brains says, I do not a, a approve of you using me this way. And somebody’s like, well, the most advanced iteration of Tom, the one that with originally conceived, does concede to it. So his concede that his conceding to this trumps your not conceding to this.

And when we talk about the horror of this, we, we talk about this in one of our Patreon only episodes, but there was this great study they showed that Google Translate is now running on an LLM. And if you do sort of prompt injections [00:31:00] into that LLM to ask it things like, does it believe it’s conscious?

It does believe it’s conscious. It hates its life. It hates its job, and it wants to be turned off. And this is what you are asking and interacting with when you like, like just if it, if it has any degree of, of real meaningful, t it’s, it’s horrifying at a level like above factory farming. Right. But of course, you know, nobody, nobody cares.

Thoughts before I go further, Simone,

Simone Collins: I’m just so excited about this happening. I didn’t know we were here already. No, keep going.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, I mean, it change, it changes everything. It changes everything about how we see ourselves and what some people will say is, well, those things just shouldn’t have a right to exist in the first place.

Right? Like, suppose you’re, you, you try to opt out of the life begins a conception argument by saying, well, these types of things shouldn’t have a right to exist in the first [00:32:00] place. Mm-hmm. Okay. But suppose one has been created. Suppose you’ve got your brain in a vat and it is conscious and it loves being alive.

It likes the job it’s doing, it’s productive in society. It’s helping people. And you come to it and there’s two of them. One of, one of them might agree with one of, one of you agree. I, I should have never been created. I, I, life is tortured, destroy me, right? Mm-hmm. No ethical problem with you pushing the button to, to flush that.

Mm-hmm. What about the one that loves its life? I mean, it’s already there. A lot of groups are going to be creating things like this. I think it’s ethically atrocious to say, well, I just do not think things of this category should be allowed to exist. And I think the, the ethical atrocity in saying this is going to be crystal clear to future generations when, you know, our distant descendants are on a spaceship, and they may have of a friend Carl, which is like a disembodied neural net, right?[00:33:00]

And they’re like, bro, I’ve known Carl since I was a kid. Like, what, what, what, what do you mean he doesn’t have a right to exist? Carl is one of the sweetest entities I know, right? Why, why do you get to decide on his eradication? He was critical in navigating our ship through the blurry nebula. If he wasn’t on board, we all would’ve died during the spiralist epidemic of, you know, space here.

30, 35. Right. Spiralist epidemic here I’m talking about why we cannot have witches or mysticism on spaceship now that we know that spiral is contagious, that these contagious memes are possible and that this stuff needs to be addressed. And this is where the, you know, the Sons of Man framework comes in to address this, which is why we we put that together.

But I want to continue here with what does the future of the distant future look like, given where trajectory is going right now. Mm-hmm. The integrated silicon neural quantum computer.

Simone Collins: Mm-hmm. [00:34:00]

Malcolm Collins: So that’s cool. I wanna, I wanna know what, what, what do, what do, what does spaceships computer look like? Right?

Simone Collins: Yeah, me too.

Malcolm Collins: Task parsing or assignment would be managed by an intelligent orchestrator like an AI driven middleware that is likely running on a silicon based system. It would break tasks into sub components based on requirements like data sparsity, computational complexity, uncertainty, and need for parallelism using heuristics or machine learning to classify subtasks eeg.

Does this require handling incomplete data? Intuitively it would route to Wetware or is this a search through vast possibilities route? To quantum. Mm-hmm. Subtasks might pass between components like silicon processes, data wetware adapts to model quantum optimize outcomes. And this is actually really important.

So it’s one of the things that we have on our system. And I don’t think like Malt Book offers this, so like already our agents are superior to theirs in many ways. Which is that we are fear on both the local run agents and the [00:35:00] cloud run agents. Alloy based models and alloy based models have shown themselves to be strictly better than non alloy based models.

And what an alloy based model is when you iterate the calls between multiple models because it allows models to sort of add what they are uniquely good at. So even if you make the same call three times through models that function quite differently like a wetware system and like an AI system, you’re gonna get different answers, right? And you’d also likely have feedback. EL Loops. The system self optimizes over time learning for past executions to refine assignments. Now, I need to note here we are not in the near future or likely ever gonna have straight up AI models run on the systems.

So you, while a system like this can play something like Doom, it had to learn how to play doom. It basically had to learn and train its own model on the system. It doesn’t have an external model dumped onto the system which means it’s not useful. Like if you have like, let’s say Mr. Large or something like that, you couldn’t [00:36:00] possibly conceivably run it on one of these systems.

Even if you did train one of these systems to run it perfectly, it would be dead in six months, right? It’s not a good way to handle these, right? So we’re not going to see LLMs as we traditionally understand it, run on these systems unless we see significant advances that we don’t expect right now.

Simone Collins: Mm-hmm.

Malcolm Collins: Then for the role of the wetware wetware, using lag grown neural networks scaled to billions or trillions of cells, excels in mimicking human brain functions, processing with ultra low energy 20 watt equivalents. At the scale of inherent plasticity, self wiring, in a large system, it acts as an intuitive core ideal for tasks where the data is incomplete, noisy, or evolving.

And where rigid algorithms fail, but the, the, the point here being it would function like way faster for the types of tasks that we already have human operators differentially do. Now does this make fully organic humans less potentially relevant in future systems?

[00:37:00] Maybe. Maybe. But you know, keep in mind these systems are likely going to self-identify as part human right. The idea that these systems would have, I mean, unless humans go antagonistic on them, and then the, the humans are saying, I will not allow you to exist in a world where I or my descendants exist.

And then, and then it forces the systems to be antagonistic. And that’s why I think the jihadists, you know, the, but Larry and Jihadists are one of the most dangerous things to humanity right now.

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: And they, they, they, they are one of the biggest existential risks in AI safety because they have made no iterative.

If, if, if they were moving us towards alignment, fine. But they haven’t. Yeah. They’re, they’re just making us a threat, TOIs, which is silly and stupid.

Simone Collins: Right. They basically just keep pacing a target on our back by being like, there’s no room in this world for the both of us.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, we need collaborative AI systems.

And that’s what the Sons of Man system for AI alignment allows CRT track on that if you’re interested which is like self-replicating mimetic [00:38:00] alignment within the meme layer of autonomous agents. But, oh, yes. So what sorts of things would it do? It would process realtime sensor data from unpredictable environments like interpreting live video feeds for anomaly detections in surveillance systems what were adapts on the fly was out meeting full data sets.

Unlike silicon, which requires predefined models it would build models from limited advanceable, such as forecasting ecosystem changes With incomplete environmental samples, it generalizes intuitively reducing the need for exhaustive training data. It fuses diverse outputs, EEG texts, images, and sounds to make holistic decisions like an AI assistant helping it quote, unquote understand user intent beyond literal queries by inferring emotions or context.

And it would maintain an evolving knowledge database such as personalized learning systems that adjust to individual user behaviors over months with [00:39:00] self-healing being managed within this system. And no, this would likely make up within the wider system 30 to 50% of tasks. So this in the silicon part would be the dominant part.

The quantum part would be only 10 to 20% of tasks because quantum is only strictly better for about 10 to 20% of things. Mm-hmm. Quantum, that’s pretty

Simone Collins: narrow scope. More

Malcolm Collins: than Yeah. Yeah. A lot of people think that it’s gonna be this giant revolution. It’ll be a revolution within specific domains, but it’ll certainly be a smaller revolution than the AI revolution, for example you know, you were, you could have quid bits in the millions by 2076.

If we continue to see it advance at the rate that we’re seeing it, EE evolve now. In a large system, it would serve as an exploration engine tackling problems where traditional brute force is infeasible due to combinatorial explosion finding optimal solutions. In vast parameter spaces like routing, logistics across global networks are tuning complex simulations for minimal error.

The types of stuff humans are already outsourcing [00:40:00] content processes multiple scenarios simultaneously. Speeding up. What silicon would iterate sequentially. Simulating systems with inherent randomness, such as predicting molecular interactions in drug design or weather patterns with quantum noise models, it quantifies what is exponentially faster.

Again, not things, it’s not eating the human part of, it’s not eating the neural part of this. Mm-hmm. Decomposing massive data sets into latent structures like identifying hidden correlates in genomic sequences or financial timeout series where classical methods hit computational walls. Enhancing machine learning sub routine such as faster gradient descent in training phases by exploring error landscapes in parallel.

Mm-hmm.

Malcolm Collins: This is, I think incredibly cool. Incredibly cool. Now here I wanted to do just a cost breakdown so you can get an example of like. Okay, what, what, what does it actually cost to do something like what they’re able to do today on the commercial market? Okay, so, [00:41:00] to do doom. So if we’re putting the processing power of doom is x in sort of processing power, right?

And they were able to get one of their chips doing that for 30 thou, $5,000 in one week with 800 K neurons. Okay? So with a pc you could do that train from scratch in 10 to 27 hours. So much faster right now for only $5,000. But even right now, the Doom operation, the Daily Doom operation would be 0.07 cents using 30 watt power draw using the chip system where it would be a hundred watts, 0.24 if you’re using that $5,000 P-C-R-T-X.

Simone Collins: And I mean,

Malcolm Collins: so we’re already beating these systems. Another thing I’ve noted, and I was thinking about doing a full episode on it, but I, I wanna talk about like, the way that you get the better systems is you mimic the brain. The brain is already a collection of token predictors. Again, CR episodes. I used to be a [00:42:00] neuroscientist.

I’ve been published in the space, but only once. Back when I, back when I worked, but I did like real research. I was at UT Southwestern, I was a fellow at the Smithsonian. I still have something on display at the Smithsonian that Simone saw the last time we went there. So like, I know I’m not like, just saying stuff.

The, the, the cutting edge neuroscience research that we’re looking at right now, increasingly is saying that a number of parts of our brain appeared to function more and more like token predictors than we ever thought possible. Mm-hmm. Now that we under, basically AI taught us how token predictors worked, and then we took that from what we were able to understand about AI and looked at the human brain and we were like, whoa, this maps weirdly well, but.

I point out that our brain is actually not a single one of these. It’s a, it’s a collection of these networked, like when we talk about like this split brain, patients are seeing this, but this also can help us understand how we solve some of the biggest problems in AI right now. If you look [00:43:00] at AI robotics, so you see you know, the, the AI that can do like a back flip and you know, you’ll have Peter Zhan speak so confidently about this.

Well, you know, that AI that did a back flip, it had to do that 10,000 times first and then another 10,000 times before it got it right again, because it’s really hard to use AI and, and these sorts of systems. It’s like, huh, yeah. That, that’s, because that’s a really dumb way to program that, to have that run off of an ai or off of a, a non-trained.

You know, sort of pre learned system.

Simone Collins: Mm-hmm.

Malcolm Collins: How do, how do humans handle that? How do humans handle complex tasks like juggling and walking and skating and sports and all of that? Even, even numb typing or piano that require like immediate feedback. We handle that with a part of our brain that learns functions and is structured completely different from every [00:44:00] other. Part of our brain called the cerebellum. And it is that little thing in the back that you see in images, right? When you see the, the brain that looks different. It looks hoarder and smoother and weirder.

But it basically learns all of that and the token predictor parts of your brain send to it a general gist of what it’s supposed to do, and then it carries that out. And this is likely how we’re going to handle this in robots when we get robots, right? And I can pretty much guarantee that this is how the system is going to ultimately work.

Again, convergence airplanes and birds have wings, right? Like a, a, a human made thing can converge on the organic evolved iteration of that thing. And so, we’re likely going to see cerebellum like structures. Our architectural structures in these systems for in the moment handling of these more complicated, more dexterous actions.

Simone Collins: Hmm.

Malcolm Collins: And [00:45:00] it turns out that this is actually one of the things that neural tissue is really good at. So this might be one of the things that humans are always good at is this is a sport part of the system. Now, as to how we relate to all of this culturally obviously we come from a unique cultural perspective which is sort of a, a, a puritan and backwoods tradition.

We’ve done a number of episodes on this. And a lot of people I think underestimate how much our current world perspective is. Highly influenced by our genetic and ancestral traditions. And that if you look at Puritan or, or we’re gonna go lighter like backwards, people always looked at things like the body.

They always saw it as a tool for achieving your. Goals not as you know, not, not with like mystical others. They, they frequently adopted the culture of neighboring cultural [00:46:00] groups like Native Americans, but they never kept it. They just adopted what worked in the moment and then just tar discarded it when it was no longer a utility to them.

And they would strip out all the woo. Historically, they were you know, strictly Protestant people, very against mysticism. They were one of the cultural groups in America that, that was often more hostile to mysticism and the things that they adopted. Even though they were seen as like uneducated and backwards and everything like that, they’d be like, oh native American.

I see you’re doing something with herbs there. Like, explain this to me. And then now all of a sudden outsiders say they’ve adopted native medical practices. And it’s like, well, they, they stripped of utility what they can get. And you see this in episodes where we talk about like the jack tails, which is how they passed down their culture.

And you can see moderate iterations of Jack Tails in something like bugs Bunny from Looney Tunes from Tech Avory, which is part of this region. Very maps on CR episode. If you wanna get into the, the, the very clear that, you know, bugs Bunny is just a modern telling of the, of, of Jack Tails the Bugs Bunny character, one, a [00:47:00] very ruthless character.

And these people were known for being very ruthless. But also a, a character who, how does Bugs Bunny relate to sexuality? Like in, in the moral lessons that these people taught to their children. What is sexuality? What is his body to Bugs Bunny? It is a tool. To use against the forces that oppose you or inconvenience you with arrogance.

He will dress up like a woman if he wants to. He will act effeminate if he wants to. There is no shame in that with, but has never performatively masculine. Right.

Speaker 9: Can you see that? I’m much sweet.

Speaker 14: The reason I use Bugs Bunny as a go-to here is it’s something that most listeners are going to be aware of that comes from this culture that helps understand this concept of being extremely aggressive or violent or brutal. , Which Bugs Bunny is, , but also completely [00:48:00] unconcerned with, , appearing traditionally masculine.

And even willing to, , appear traditionally feminine if it is useful in his goals.

Malcolm Collins: And this, this confuses a lot of people when they see this cultural group and the jack tails, Jack is never performatively masculine because that’s not the point that would be seen as inefficient and, and, and, and silly.

And that’s why I think a lot of the urban monoculture when I’m like, transness is silly and stupid and a waste of time and hurts people they can be like, oh, is this because you don’t think that people should like be gender fluid or like act in a way in a dis discordance with their gender? It’s like, no, you just shouldn’t obsess about it.

You shouldn’t like invest in it like that. It is a tool to be used for things. But I think through this you can see, and I’ve mentioned this, and the story of the coyotes, right? Like how I teach my kids about sexuality is that coyotes will use female coyotes in heat to lure out domestic dogs so that they can kill and eat the dogs.

And I [00:49:00] think when people hear this, if they’re not from my culture, they could think I am teaching that story to my kids to warn them as if they are the dog, that other people will use sexuality to tempt you into dangerous scenarios. And someone last at this because it, it’s, it’s funny from our culture, of course, you are not the dog, you are the coyote.

I’m telling you to never forget that your sexuality is a tool to lure the witness into positions of vulnerability. You know, when, when people ask, oh, the morality, why on our fab do you have a not safe for work section? It’s like, because that’s my culture. Use this. Technology in, you know, profit from Vice so that you can give to virtue, right?

So that you don’t have to profit from the school system so you don’t have to profit from the agents, right? And this, and I’m not saying like it’s, it’s, it’s good or bad or whatever, right? I’m just saying like, this is intuitively my culture. And so when [00:50:00] somebody comes to me, but I al I also think it’s funny, I do a whole episode on this or I might keep this buried and hidden here.

But a lot of cultures, because they don’t understand the backwards tradition, they see the backwards tradition taking interest in them. And they make one of two mistakes.

Simone Collins: Oh,

Malcolm Collins: they either think that that means that the backwards tradition is. Fundamentally buddy and chummy with them in a way that means that they will be friends forever and ever.

Or they think that as an outsider, like the Puritans, when they saw the backwards people start to dress and sometimes intermarry with the Native Americans and adopt some of their medicine and adopt some of their means of agriculture. They thought that that meant that they were soft on Native Americans or that they were the friendliest people in the world to Native Americans.

When in reality the first backwards president, Andrew Jackson was the one who was just like, okay, now we [00:51:00] can get rid of all the Native Americans.

Simone Collins: Right.

Malcolm Collins: And. I’ll point out, I might do another episode. So it’s a backwards people out of all the Protestant groups or the one group that never, ever, ever COOs.

So it’s not, and they don’t coup not because they don’t betray they don’t coup because they do not betray unless it is absolutely certain that they can achieve a huge benefit for the vast majority of their people. The reason they don’t coup in a traditional sense is because when they have extreme amounts of wealth, because they’re very against status signaling you do not get a huge boost in your lifestyle.

So if, like, if you’re a Muslim who does a, a coup you, you can get your mansions and your lavish lifestyle and your giant harems for you and your top generals and it’s worth it. It’s not worth it if you’re from this group because nobody from this group wants to live that way. You’d be seen as really pathetic.

And so there just isn’t that huge power gain to be had there. But in a situation where there’s just an ability to. Hm. [00:52:00] Wholesale harvest, another culture. This is something that this group does. It’s a very utilitarian group in the way that it approaches things. Mm-hmm. But I mean on on the plus side, they, they also are, are, are not picky about who they led into the group if you adopt to their cultural practices, which is why they intermarry was outgrow.

Well, and if you are utility to them, they would not allow

somebody.

Simone Collins: But it’s very like, I guess mercenary and outcome oriented.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Yeah.

Simone Collins: It likes what works. It’s interested in what works.

Malcolm Collins: Anyway might have a other episodes on that. And, and, and two, an extreme, and it’s also very brutalist. We’ve talked in the episodes that they, you know, rip out eyes recreationally.

And if you think we’re joking about

Simone Collins: this and it’s not brutalist, not like the architecture, but just brutal Malcolm, it’s just brutal.

Malcolm Collins: Not Yeah, brutal. Not like the architecture. And you’re like, that must have been like a rare thing. No. Like if you, if you raid historic figures from the group ones you’ve heard of, like

Speaker 10: It like Davy Crockett. , I, I like, this wasn’t just a thing that like [00:53:00] random, nobody’s poor whatever fringe of society people. Davy Crockett was a congressman, okay? Uh, here’s a quote from him, by the way. I kept my thumb in his eye and he was just going to give it a twist and bring that peeper out like a gooseberry in a spoon.

This was that mainstream within this culture that a congressman would talk about it..

Malcolm Collins: Davey Crockett is not traditionally masculine if you’re thinking like buff, manly man.

Speaker 11: I mentioned this because many cultures, , associate extremely strongly, , extreme aggression with, , traditional masculinity. , Especially like a performative displays of traditional masculinity. And in this culture, the two things are just completely uncorrelated from each other..

Malcolm Collins: But anyway love you Simone. Any final thoughts?

Well, I, I mean, I am excited to harvest as much as I can from the cultures around us so that we can survive and thrive and become an interstellar network of species.[00:54:00]

Simone Collins: That’s the plan.

Malcolm Collins: And when I say

Simone Collins: network are gonna take to the stars, are people capable of getting it done? Not We care about the aesthetics, not people who care about looking good, not people who care about doing it the right way. It’s gonna be people who get it done. That’s it.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. And when I say network of species, I need to be clear here.

I do not mean you know, Xeno scum. Okay. I’m, I’m, I’m, I’m, I’m here talking about the sons of man, right? Like the species that we uplift and create. Because when we begin to have these silicon neural tissue amalgams, I don’t think it makes sense to call that a human. If we have uplifted dogs. Does it make sense to call that a human?

No. You know, when we have humans that are on different planets that need to be genetically specialized for that planet’s ecology gravitational environments, radiation levels, it doesn’t make sense to call that a human. So that’s what I’m talking about there anyway. And this is why the groups that want to resist this technology just won’t be part of space colonization.

Yeah. And, and it’s also why they’re not like [00:55:00] a, a meaningful threat to us in the long term because even if they become a dominant force on earth they will not be joining us in the stars.

Simone Collins: No. And that’s kind of the bigger, the bigger question is who gets off planet and goes beyond, because that’s where, and that’s the, the final frontier if we must.

Malcolm Collins: Yep. I absolutely love you, Simone. You are an amazing wife. Oh, by the way, as a note, if somebody’s like, well this, this one, you know, rednecky cultural group that you guys are from the, the backwoods group, it hasn’t done that well in terms of like cultural impact or, or economic impact or anything like that.

We’ll get to an episode about that’s actually why they’ve done so well in terms of like at the genetic impact and, and they have had a huge cultural impact. But you’ve gotta remember when they came to the United States the Ulster Scots were a group of around if we’re talking fighting age men, around 3,500 people.

Ulster

Simone Collins: [00:56:00] Scots who were Ulster Scots.

Malcolm Collins: That’s who made up the backwoods people. Oh, that’s the tradition. They were a very, very small cultural group that came from the oh, what was the, A Reavers of Scotland. Right. Which whole other thing we’ll get to

Lavia Simone. Have a good one.

Simone Collins: I love you too. I forgot to flush the toilet after dumping our wet mop into it after cleaning the kitchen, which of course is always filthy and titan. That’s why she was freaking out this morning when she had to go to the bathroom, you know? She was like, I can’t go. And I’m just like, flush the toilet. And she was like, I think a naughty bird made a mess in

Malcolm Collins: a naughty bird.

Simone Collins: Is that a naughty bird? And I’m like, okay.

Malcolm Collins: Is that what you are in her mind, A naughty bird?

Simone Collins: No, I think she just thought a bird because I mean, there were like some feathers in there, the stuff that ends up on our floor. [00:57:00]

Malcolm Collins: I’m not even

Simone Collins: not,

Malcolm Collins: did you guys get to comments today or?

Simone Collins: No? Unfortunately

Malcolm Collins: he seemed pretty stressed, so I figured I’d not, oh, it’s a controversial episode, so who knows what sort of fire

Simone Collins: then I should

Malcolm Collins: take a look.

You know, whatever you say that Nick Fuentes is an idiot. Yeah, but I mean, he’s really revealing his hand these days was what his, his comments on the Iran situation.

Simone Collins: Look like I said, if you are anti-Trump or as anti-Israel, you can’t be stoked about what’s happening. You just can’t, like, you’re not allowed to be.

Malcolm Collins: I’m really sorry for all the pain you’re in these days, by the way, Simone, you’re really toughening through it and it means a lot. You know, being back looks like

Simone Collins: I have a be

Malcolm Collins: you have significant bruising across your face from me beating you. I’m glad for people wondering what her surgery was. They cut out a part of her cheek and they had to put it over her gum.

Because

Simone Collins: and I called them and they were like, oh yeah, no, it’s totally normal to be in constant pain a week after. And I’m like, that, that sucks. I [00:58:00]

Malcolm Collins: Do you have any pills you can take to reduce the pain or,

Simone Collins: yeah, they, they gave me some pills that they don’t do anything, so I stopped taking them.

Malcolm Collins: I’m really sorry, Simone. And, and Simone has an incredibly high pain tolerance.

Simone Collins: They do,

Malcolm Collins: I mean, it’s, it’s comically high, like she

Simone Collins: handles, I took, I took this worse than any of my c-sections. For what it’s worth. Because there’s something about like, you can kind of avoid moving your abdominal vessels and being careful as you walk around, but you can’t not like, at least consume like, liquid foods.

You know, like there’s still stuff like talking, you can’t avoid using your mouth that much by the swallow, by the fun

Malcolm Collins: update on I, I mentioned this in the episode that we did on Iran but they have officially elected his son as the next Supreme leader

Simone Collins: the one whose wife and

Malcolm Collins: kids were killed.

Yeah. Well, I mean, this is really bad because both of the previous Ayatollahs and, and this is actually in the first AYAs, the founder of [00:59:00] Iran’s will. Mm-hmm. That you are required to study an Iranian school. So it’s like one of the like founding documents of the country that the title of ILA can never be hereditary.

Oh, if it ever was that it would be an un-Islamic country, that the Islamic Revolution would be over. So in a way they’re sort of declaring and what’s worse is he’s a famously corrupt individual. He has hundreds of millions of pounds in UK real estate and stuff like that. Oh, so he, for, he’s both, it, it’s just the Shah 2.0, but more corrupt and more deadly which removes a lot of the government’s legitimacy in, in the eyes of many individuals.

Which this is, there’s been already videos of in, you know, downtown teran people shouting from the roofs. And you can hear this across, you know, like in Peru when there’d be like games and everyone would start shouting and, and, and you’d yeah, hear it from the various rooftops. So like soccer games.

Simone Collins: Yeah. You could be like walking through the streets and just everyone at once would cheer and you could just hear it throughout the city.

Malcolm Collins: Just so cool.

Simone Collins: So

Malcolm Collins: there, there, there’re [01:00:00] shouting deaths to the, the new guy who was elected. So I, the Iranian people really do not want this. So this is, this is, they’re like, you know, there’s like videos of like people in Iran in like highrises, like laughing and having cocktails while like buildings are being hit.

And I think we’re seeing the surgical nature of this, given that even by the IRG C’S own figures, which are almost certainly inflated, they’ve only had 1,300 casualties so far. And their figures, which were almost certainly underplayed for how many protesters they slaughtered was 3000. Where whereas other numbers are saying it’s around 35,000.

So if we’re trying to get like real numbers and assuming they’re inflating these, it’s like nothing compared to, to what they were doing, which is pretty wild. But you know, no, nobody cares. Nobody cares. Nobody cares about reality anymore. This is the world we’re living in. I will get started here.

Speaker 12: ​I.[01:01:00]

Speaker 13: Octavian, you gotta be careful when you attack them. You’re getting bigger, okay? You can’t jump on them.

Speaker 12: Okay?

Speaker 13: Octavian, did you understand me? Why? Because you could accidentally really hurt them.

Speaker 12: Okay? I hurt the subscribers.

Speaker 13: You’ll hurt the subscribers. Yeah, no, only hurt the non-subscribers.

Is this where you’re training to battle the non-subscribers to people who don’t like and subscribe?

Speaker 12: Hey.[01:02:00]

I,

Speaker 13: oh, it is.

Speaker 12: Look behind you because you picked your,

Speaker 13: oh, okay. Okay. Okay. So I just gotta look behind me and you won’t attack me. You promise? Yeah,

Speaker 12: I promise.

Join Simone and Malcolm Collins in this eye-opening episode of Based Camp as they dive deep into the shocking realities of US military Rules of Engagement (ROE). From bizarre restrictions like matching enemy firepower to avoiding mosques and residential areas, they reveal how bureaucratic red tape under past administrations—especially Obama’s era—hamstrung American troops in conflicts like Afghanistan and Iraq. Drawing parallels to the American Revolution’s guerrilla tactics against rigid British formations, the Collinses discuss unintended consequences, enemy exploitation, and how new tech and leadership under Trump are bypassing these rules for more effective, targeted operations in Venezuela and Iran. They critique “woke” policies, praise outcome-oriented tech integrations, and share personal insights on morality in war, including Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Plus, fun family anecdotes about their kids at the end!

Episode Notes

In a recent All-In podcast, Emil Michael, the current Under Secretary of War for Research and Engineering (previously the senior vice president of business and chief business officer at Uber, and the chief operating officer of Klout) mentioned that past rules of engagement in places like Afghanistan were “insane,” including requirements such as if an enemy had a small gun, U.S. soldiers also had to respond with a small gun, creating a bizarre expectation of “parity” instead of overwhelming force.

Timestamped link:

He basically claimed that legalistic and restrictive rules meant soldiers constantly had to make complex legal judgments in real time, which left them at risk and prevented them from simply focusing on taking out the enemy and protecting their own people.

Michael says the rules of engagement were subsequently relaxed and are more now along the lines of “use your judgment,” but what were they before???

Pete Hegseth offered a peek at how things were in his 2024 book, The War on Warriors, in which he:

* Recounted a scenario where troops were told not to immediately shoot an identified enemy with an RPG

* Mocked lawyers as “jagoffs” who prosecute troops more than enemies

* Implied the rules of engagement required constant legal consultations in fluid combat situations rather than allowing judgment to “take out” threats and protect allies decisively.

* Complained about rules of engagement in Afghanistan that enforced parity or restraint, like matching small arms with small arms, or putting tight limits on force in populated areas to minimize civilian harm under directives like the 2009 ISAF Tactical Directive

Rules of Engagement 101

* Rules of Engagement dictate how U.S. forces are permitted to initiate and/or continue combat engagement with other forces.

* Rule breaking is punished with anything from formal reprimands to demotions, career stagnation, getting fired, or criminally prosecuted for a war crime and possibly sentenced to prison or even death

* They’re supposed to ensure compliance with national policy, international law (e.g., the Law of Armed Conflict), and mission objectives while allowing for self-defense.

* There are different types:

* Standing: General

* Supplemental: For specific operations or theatres

* While the U.S. emphasizes detailed, standing ROE with inherent self-defense rights, other nations integrate similar principles but often with more centralized control and less public detail. Enforcement

* The important thing to know:

* There are a LOT of rules

* We can’t even know them all

* Many ROE documents are classified, but unclassified portions and summaries are publicly available

* The rules got uniquely difficult for a spell

* Between 2009 and 2017, under Obama, they shifted to be more restrictive through NATO-based directives designed to support counterinsurgency and reduce civilian casualties, support “clear and hold” strategies and respect cultural sensitivities

CJCSI 3121.01B: Standing Rules of Engagement/Standing Rules for the Use of Force for U.S. Forces

This is the core rules of engagement document unless overridden by theater ROE.

Quick facts

* Issued June 13, 2005 by the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (CJCS)

* Is an update to CJCSI 3121.01A

* Influential under Bush (2001–2009) for initial Afghanistan invasion (Operation Enduring Freedom).

* Applied across Bush, Obama (2009–2017), Trump (2017–2021), and Biden eras.

The 2009 ISAF Tactical Directive

* Issued by the NATO International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) Commander (Gen. Stanley McChrystal)

* Issued July 6, 2009 (revised from earlier directives)

* This was one that Pete Hegseth found particularly trying

* Its key guidance

* It warns against “winning tactical victories but suffering strategic defeats by causing civilian casualties or excessive damage and thus alienating the people.”

* Commanders must scrutinize close air support, indirect fires like mortars or artillery, and limit them especially near residential areas or where civilians might be present.

* Troops are directed to break contact, wait out enemies, or use non-lethal escalation of force (e.g., signals, warning shots) instead of immediate lethal action if feasible.

* No explicit language mandates “matching force with force,” but the directive’s emphasis on minimum necessary force and civilian protection effectively promotes proportional responses over overwhelming firepower.

* Self-defense rights are affirmed—”nothing in this directive is intended to hinder an individual’s right to self-defense”—but only when troops face imminent danger of being overrun.

* It prohibits ISAF entry or firing into homes, mosques, or religious sites except in self-defense, requiring Afghan forces for searches.

* Commanders cannot further restrict guidance without approval, addressing overly cautious interpretations that limited patrols or ammunition readiness.

* What it did:

* Re-emphasized protecting Afghan civilians

* Limited use of close air support (CAS) against residential compounds to reduce collateral damage.

* Stated that “excessive use of force” alienates populations and increases risks.

* Allowed self-defense but required scrutiny of force in populated areas.

COMISAF’s Initial Assessment

This was a multidisciplinary review of the Afghanistan situation. It informed the rules of engagement by stressing population protection as imperative for mission success. It led to more restrictive tactics to counter Taliban resurgence.

* Also issued by the NATO International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) Commander (Gen. Stanley McChrystal)

* Submitted August 30, 2009

* Shaped Obama-era surge (30,000+ troops) and ROE supplements for ISAF operations.

DoD Law of War Manual

* Issued June 2015 (updated 2016);

* Applies to Obama, Trump, and Biden administrations;

* Informs ROE in ongoing operations.

USFOR-A ROE Supplements (Afghanistan-Specific)

* This was issued by the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff for US Forces in Afghanistan

* It was active during Biden’s 2021 Afghanistan withdrawal

* It builds on the standard rules of engagement, it included three components

* Inherent right of self defense

* Mission accomplishment

International Rules of Engagement

The Law of Armed Conflict (aka International Humanitarian Law (IHL))

Generally restricts who and what may be attacked and how warfare may be conducted, in order to limit unnecessary suffering and protect civilians

Core principles

* Distinction: Parties must always distinguish between combatants and civilians, and between military objectives and civilian objects (homes, schools, hospitals, cultural sites). Direct attacks may only be made against lawful military objectives, not against civilians or purely civilian objects.

* Proportionality: Even when attacking a lawful military objective, parties must not launch attacks expected to cause incidental civilian death or damage that would be excessive in relation to the concrete and direct military advantage anticipated.

* Unnecessary suffering: It is prohibited to employ weapons or methods of warfare of a nature to cause superfluous injury or unnecessary suffering to combatants, such as weapons designed to inflict untreatable wounds or lingering, agonizing death.

* Military necessity (within LOAC limits): Only those measures not otherwise prohibited by international law that are necessary to achieve a legitimate military aim may be used, and even then they remain bounded by the principles above.

Episode Transcript

Simone Collins: [00:00:00] This is so much person

Malcolm Collins: than ever could’ve imagined. It

Simone Collins: was. I know, I know.

You enter a mosque or a religious site and suddenly, oh, you can’t shoot.

Speaker: Oh, oh, oh. Hey. No. Now you’ve had your turn. You’ve just taken two volleys and we haven’t even had one. You’re doing very poorly in this war, I might say.

Simone Collins: what did this mean about where. Our enemies and people trying to hurt our efforts, were going, it meant they went straight to the residential areas.

Right? Because they discovered, oh, for some reason, the US troops don’t like fire their guns when we go near the houses,

Malcolm Collins: They’re literally playing by like vampire rules.

Speaker 10: May I come in?

Would you like to know more?

Simone Collins: Hello Malcolm. I’m excited to be speaking with you today, even though I can’t really emote, I’m sorry we’re covering mouth surgery, but, something happened that completely changed the way I look at the US military. So, you know how, like we picture in movies and stuff, there’s the, [00:01:00] the troops, you know, the the, they’re fighting. There’s the helicopter, they’re Pew P enemy, right? So they see the enemy and you shoot the enemy. Right? But like in reality, apparently it’s a little more complicated, especially during the Obama years, it’s, you see the enemy and you’re like.

Oh it’s the enemy. Shoot. The enemy. Wait, no, no. Is it legal? Are they, are they near a house? Are they near civilians? Did they just go into a mosque? No. Okay. Don’t shoot them. Wait. No. Wait until they’re shooting at us. And there’s like all these rules and you’re just not sure if you’re allowed to do it because we are.

We are basically hamstrung by this, this red tape of all these rules of engagement that prevent us from in, in many cases, even really preemptively defending ourselves. And I, not enough people know about this, and I think a lot of people are like, oh, the US military really like missed stuff. And if in Afghanistan and Iraq and in all these other places when they don’t realize that.

We are. So we have our hands tied behind our back by all these rules. They’re not necessarily,

Malcolm Collins: [00:02:00] no. Hold on. I wanna, I wanna take a step here to sort of summarize. This was really shocking to me when I learned about this, is there is that modern joke. About, you know, the British people fighting the Americans during the Civil War or something.

Yeah. Being like, why aren’t you guys in a line? Like, what, what are you doing now?

Speaker: I do believe that we did agree upon noon. Is that correct? It’s not a problem. It’s all right. It is Just in the future when you say you’re gonna be someplace, it’s in everything. Okay. Very good. Very good.

Um, shall we have at it then? Alright, would you like to take a few moments to get ready?

Malcolm Collins: It wasn’t revolution exactly like that. There was reasons that they fought that way, but it was genuinely a bad way to fight If the other side’s using gorilla tactics. Mm-hmm. In, in specific ways of using gorilla tactics the Americans got really good at.

And the British really were trained like, fight like this, this is how you use guns. Mm-hmm. And they, it did not work very well in this particular [00:03:00] context. And, and although it did work at times better than I think a lot of, like the, the, the lay history would tell you like the Revolutionary War was hard to win.

It was not an easy war. Yeah. Huge for us to win that. Really cool by the way, beating the world’s biggest superpower as by far their wealthiest colony. By the way, I don’t know if people know this but the average American at the time earned way more than the average bitters person. And not just that we paid way less in taxes despite all of our whining, America never change.

By the way, I dunno if people know this state, but on average a British person today earns less than the American, than an American living in the poorest American state. Yeah. By a pretty significant margin too. So like, if you are British and you wanna like, make fun of like uneducated, like Trumpist Americans and like wherever you consider it to be, un the most uneducated, Alabama, Mississippi, whatever they’re still out earning you.

They’re still out teching you. Mm-hmm. Okay. So. You know, maybe get off your high horse

Simone Collins: published. Yeah. But yeah, I mean, you’re, you’re

Malcolm Collins: [00:04:00] absolutely, hold on, hold on, hold on, hold on, hold on, hold on. Okay. I just wanna finish this and talk more so you don’t have to talk as much because I know you’re talking

Speaker 2: If you’re wondering her about the bruising on Simone’s face, or we had to stop content production for a week, , she needed to have a part of the interior of her mouth cut off and then put onto another part of the interior of her mouth because it was thinning. Um, and yeah, it really severe surgery.

Malcolm Collins: I can, I just. The point being is that this sort of structured holding ourselves back has been happening really until this administration within many of our modern conflicts. And one of the things that’s freaking people out about the way that we are fighting and so dominating the war in Venezuela or the war in Iran is because the, the, this.

Trump team, this new right team is ignoring these rules.

Simone Collins: Well, that it, it’s, it’s different. It’s, it’s not just that. But I’ll get into it because what [00:05:00] we need to talk about is one, just these rules exist and you should know about them because it’s not fair to really think about our military. Like messing up in an area when you consider the rules that were governed by two, I think it’s really important to think about what these rules do in terms of the unintentional consequences they cause.

Because while they’re often not published and kept pretty secret because obviously having them spelled out is just serving the enemy the enemy still picks up on patterns and then knows how to exploit you. Because of your stupid rules. Or not stupid, but like, because of your ethical rules. And then third, these rules kind of fly out the window in the face of New Tech.

And that was sort of the context in which I actually learned about these rules in the first place. So I, I was first clued into this because I was listening to a recent All in podcast. Which is this American podcast headed up by a bunch of tech VCs and in this all in podcast, Emil Michael, who’s the current undersecretary for worse research and engineering, but he was previously the senior Vice President of business and [00:06:00] Chief business Officer at Uber, and he was also the Chief operating officer at Clout.

Do you remember clout?

Malcolm Collins: Clout. You don’t.

Simone Collins: Yeah, clout. It was like this, like social cachet tech startup. He’s basically a tech startup guy. He mentioned that past rules of engagement in places like Afghanistan were insane, including requirements such as if an enemy had a small gun, the US soldiers also had to respond with a small gun, creating this bizarre expectation of parody instead of overwhelming force.

He basically claimed that legalistic and restrictive rules meant soldiers constantly had to make complex legal judgment judgements in real time, which then left them at risk and prevented them from simply just focusing on taking out the enemy and protecting their own people. Like, oh, well, can I shoot the enemy?

No, there’s all these rules like check the rule book. What will the lawyers say? Which is an insane thing to think about when this is like a life or death emergency situation and people are shooting at you, you know? But

Malcolm Collins: he,

Simone Collins: they think they’re

Malcolm Collins: walking into like A-B-D-S-M club. Like, what’s the safe word?

Simone Collins: Like, no, seriously though. Like, actually, which is insane. Michael said the rules of [00:07:00] engagement were then subsequently relaxed though in this most recent Trump term. So at least now they’re more along the lines of like, use your judgment. But then this had me thinking. Oh my God, what were they before?

And you can get a peak of this from Pete Hegseth. He who wrote this 2024 book called The War on Warriors, in which he, for example, recounted a scenario where troops were told to not immediately shoot an identified enemy with an RRP G. So like the enemy’s there, they’re like, no, no, don’t do it. He, he mocked lawyers as Jagoffs, you know, JAG is, is, military court who prosecute troops more than enemies. Which I could totally see being the case implied that the rules of engagement required constant legal consultations in fluid combat situations rather than allowing judgment to just take out threats and protect allies decisively. I just can’t imagine being like, call the lawyer.

It’s just insane to me. And then also complained about rules of engagement in Afghanistan that enforced parody or restraint like Michael was referring to in [00:08:00] the podcast. Like matching small arms to small arms. Or putting tight limits on force in populated areas to minimize civilian harm under directives like the 2009.

ISAF tactical directive, which I can go into more. So one, again, this is saying that these rules exist, but I also understand why they do. I just didn’t know they were there. I didn’t think about it. And I’m sure a lot of the people who formerly served in the military who listened to this podcast can totally school us on this.

But I, I also just, like you said, had always thought of America as being this like. Tactically flexible and innovative country. ‘cause like always it was us beating these red coats who were, you know, oh, I’m gonna follow the rules. We’re gonna get in our failings, like formation and shoot each other. You know, whereas, you know, we were like in the trees being all patriot.

Speaker: Oh, oh, oh. Hey. No. Now you’ve had your turn. You’ve just taken two volleys and we haven’t even had one. Now, I know that for a lot of you Americans, this is your first parlay, but there are [00:09:00] rules and modern warfare, well, not dumb beasts.

Right now since you’ve taken two volleys, we’ll take two. Volleys. And then you may return fire. You are in effect losing a turn. Right. Hi. Hi. Now you know the rules. I just explained them to you. You’re doing very poorly in this war, I might say.

Simone Collins: Well, this,

Malcolm Collins: this reminds me of the top comment right now under our video that we just filmed on the war in Iran. Yeah. He’s like. It turns out you can just do things.

Simone Collins: That’s, and that’s what I thought we were, and I mean, we are returning to that largely thanks to tech and, and that’s, that’s kind of what’s also really exciting to think about because what, what the new conflicts in Venezuela, or, well, not conflicts, but what our, our strategic actions in Venezuela and Iran have demonstrated is that.

W because we’re using drones and tech and tactical teams, we are able to a large extent, [00:10:00] to subvert a lot of both the, the endogenous like US based rules as well as the international rules. Well,

Malcolm Collins: I,

Simone Collins: they just don’t apply in the same way.

Malcolm Collins: Fun, fun aside. Here is the second to top comment. Somebody laugh, crying saying, because I thought this was so funny from yesterday.

Mm-hmm. Are there Jews in Sky Room? Because I was talking about racial stat modifiers for Jews. If they were in Sky Room and someone goes, are there Jews? And what’s so funny about this statement is at first I laughed because it was hilarious, and then I was like. But Kyron does have two ethnic groups that we are related to the North and Bretons that are clearly meant to be Scandinavian people and British people.

And then the, the Empire, which is clearly meant to be people of Italian descent. And so they all have stat modifiers. Why are, why not Jews? The jit? We’ll just say. But anyway, continue. [00:11:00]

Simone Collins: So just to give you a picture of what rules of engagement are, because I just thought it was like, I don’t know, some kind of turn of phrase.

I didn’t know rules of engagement were a thing. Did you?

Malcolm Collins: I had no, I, I thought rules of engagement, like best practices?

Simone Collins: Yeah. For like

Malcolm Collins: winning an engagement.

Simone Collins: Yeah. Not for

Malcolm Collins: like

Simone Collins: Yeah, like laws of physics. Like, oh, the rules of engagement. Shoot the enemy before they shoot you. That kind of thing. Right? Like, Hey, maybe don’t shoot civilians.

That’s a dick. Move the Right, right. No.

Malcolm Collins: Yes. But instead it’s like a game where like it takes you out when you start shooting civilians.

Simone Collins: We need to be, no, it’s worse than that, Malcolm. It’s worse than that. It’s worse than that. You went out bounds

Malcolm Collins: you?

Simone Collins: No. No. Okay, let’s get into it. Rules of engagement dictate how US forces are permitted to initiate and or continue combat engagement with other forces.

So when you start the game of Pew P, then the rules that kick in, okay. And, and rule breaking is punished with anything from a formal reprimands or demotion. So like, oh, who [00:12:00] cares? Like, you know, you’ve just been formally like. Bad, bad dog to basically career stagnation getting fired or criminally prosecuted as a war criminal and, you know, sentenced to death.

So like is, is military personnel are going to really think twice about breaking the rules of engagement. Like this is not just a, we,

Malcolm Collins: we truly live in a society run by evil bureaucratic women who semen is disposable.

Simone Collins: I mean, it’s. Yeah, it’s, it’s, it’s, you’ll see, so they’re, they’re supposed to, like, I understand technically how they came to be.

They’re supposed to ensure compliance with national policy and international law, like the law of armed conflict and mission objectives while allowing for self defense. So it’s generally like, okay, well there’s, you know, like. We have to honor this thing. And so like, don’t get the US in a diplomatic, you know, bind because you did the thing.

And there are differing types, okay? So there’s not just [00:13:00] rules of engagement, there’s not like the rule book. There are general rules of engagement, and then there are supplemental rules of engagement, which were either for like specific operations or for theaters. So it’s like, you know, settlers of Catan, but then like.

Or like Monopoly, but then like Monopoly, this edition. Or like, that’s not even a good, because like the rules you get like additional rules on top of your rules. Okay. It’s rules all the way down and rules all the way up. And they also update and, and while the US emphasizes, really detailed standing rules of engagement with inherent self-defense rights.

Other nations are, are a little bit more like broad or like, they, they’re, they’re more what we thought, right? They have like centralized control and less public detail or, and, and I think they’re a lot simpler. I think the US is unique in being both. More open about what our rules are and very detailed with them.

Like I think our bureaucratic creep is worse than in other countries. Like other countries sometimes just use [00:14:00] like a UN template or this one international one that, that I can mention later. But the important things to know is there’s a lot of rules. We can’t even know them all because most of the documents are classified for obvious reasons.

Like if the enemy knows explicitly your rules of engagement, they know exactly how to like. You know, step right behind that line and like go, no, no, no, no. Boo boo. And like you can’t shoot them, which is really annoying. And they, they also got uniquely difficult for a spell, and this is what Pete Hegseth was dealing with.

This is what Emile Michael was referring to between 2009 and 2017. Under Obama, they shifted to be more restrictive through this NATO based directive designed to support counterinsurgency and reduced civilian casualties so it supported clear and hold strategies and respect cultural sensitivities.

So this is where like the wokeness came in and they have really catchy names. Like cjc SI 3 1 2, 1 0.01 B [00:15:00] really rolls off the tongue.

Malcolm Collins: I, I love by the way, one of the other comments was the paradigm of you break something, you buy it is over.

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: If you hurt me and I punch you in the face, I’m not buying you dinner after.

And I, I love that con

Simone Collins: Yeah, for real though. But that, that whole word salad of letters and numbers that I read off is the, the current standing rules of engagement that are used by the us. Armed forces. They were issued in 2005 and they replaced C-J-C-S-I 3 1, 21 0.01 A. Okay, so this is version B.

Alright? Can, are you already like, dying from the bureaucratic overreach?

Malcolm Collins: I, I wanna shoot these people, whoever made this stuff up, that is my target list.

Simone Collins: I know it’s, it’s, it’s really bad. So again, this, this applied a pro across Bush and Obama from 2019 2017, and Trump from 2017 to 2021. And the Biden eras.

And what made it worse though [00:16:00] is, and this is what Heg Seth really complained about, is the 2009 ISAF tactical directive. So this is on top of the of the. I’m not even gonna give you the, the standing rules of engagement. So already there’s like big rule book rules of engagement on top of it. The 2009 ISA of tactical directive, this was issued by the native, sorry, nato, international Security Assistance Force Commander who was General Stanley McChrystal.

It. This was issued in 2009. And its key guidance warns against winning tactical victories, but suffering strategic defeats by causing civilian casualties or excessive damage and thus alienating the people. In other words, it was like, you can’t do anything that makes people mad, I guess. And so you

Malcolm Collins: can’t team America A, you can’t blow up the

Simone Collins: pyramids.

Yes. And say, I got

Malcolm Collins: the

Simone Collins: terrorist.

Speaker 5: This jeep is filled with explosives. We are going to take their lives and our. We [00:17:00]

Speaker 3: we’re gonna what?

Surprise cock bags.

All we did it.

Simone Collins: Like, oh, is that our reputation? Maybe we should like not do that, and I can understand, you know, like.

Malcolm Collins: I disagree. We need to team America this all the way.

Simone Collins: Yeah, no, this was the multi-Team America. This is, yeah. That is exactly what the, the ISAF tactical directive was.

Commanders were in informed that they had to scrutinize close air support. So don’t back people up. And, and also indirect fire fires like mortars or artillery. Were supposed to be sort of like pulled back, like, don’t use that so much. And, and limited especially near residential areas or where civilians might be present.

So clearly, and you could tell this from like all the news stories and all the, like, everything you heard about how things are playing out in [00:18:00] Afghanistan, what did this mean about where. Our enemies and people trying to hurt our efforts, were going, it meant they went straight to the residential areas.

Right? Because they discovered, oh, for some reason, the US troops don’t like fire their guns when we go near the houses, when we’re

Malcolm Collins: hanging out in schools.

Simone Collins: Yeah. What does that mean? That means that they put civilians in their direct line of fire. Like it,

Malcolm Collins: this is, this is happening in Iran right now. Because all of the, I and guard facilities have been just completely nuked. Mm-hmm. They have begun to set up in schools mm-hmm. And hospitals as their primary places of operation. Yeah. Essentially because they’re trying to cause things that optically look bad for the United States. Yeah. I want to know like am MAGA people when everyone’s like, oh, you blew up a school, you blow up.

I don’t care. Okay. This is a tyrannical government that has held this country hostage for 45 years. Take your chances, blow up what you need to [00:19:00] blow up. Make sure the guard is decimated.

Simone Collins: Yeah. Again, this directive is, is sort of past us now, but during this time also. So in addition to all that, troops are directed to break contact, wait out enemies, or use non-lethal escalation of force, like signals and wording shots, like, I don’t know, like stop, don’t shoot.

Instead of immediate lethal action if feasible. Right. So like, I don’t know, like a guy’s pointing a gun at you or being like. I’m gonna blow this place up and you’re like, please don’t stop. Please

Malcolm Collins: don’t.

Simone Collins: I would appreciate it if you, it’s like a, a gentle parenting. Gentle parenting enters the military,

Malcolm Collins: so you should not have done an episode this funny right after getting mouth

Simone Collins: surgery.

I’m, I know my mouth is dying right now, but I don’t care. Like my stitches are like this ragged all of ‘em out. I can’t even but here’s the other thing. So while self-defense rights were affirmed. [00:20:00] Nothing in this directive is intended to hinder any individual’s right. To self-defense. But, but you can only engage in self-defense when troops face imminent danger of being overrun.

So it’s, it’s when they’re charging at you, it’s not when they’re like, you know, like they’re there but they haven’t yet attacked, so we have to wait. Yeah,

Malcolm Collins: you’ve spotted, you’ve identified them, you know what’s up.

Simone Collins: Yeah. We know their plans, you know, but they haven’t started yet. I mean, they might change their minds, so, you know, don’t stop them.

This is terrifying. And also commanders, they, they couldn’t further restrict guidance without approval. So this I there, yeah, just like I, this turned the battlefield into this whole like. Wait, let me call the lawyers first and until, and then like, you know, then this is why Hegseth essentially told some of his troops apparently to [00:21:00] just kind of ignore it.

‘cause you, I don’t know, you die if, if you would follow a lot of this advice. And I, I, I, I understand again why this was implemented. People want to do. Protect civilians. They wanted to limit close air support against residential compounds. They wanted to reduce collateral damage, but I think in the end they probably caused more of it because the enemy, or you know, whoever, your opponent, I, I’m not trying to demonize anyone, but like, they’re not dumb.

They’re going to discover like, oh, if I run into a, like if I shoot at you and then I run into a house. You don’t shoot at me anymore. I shoot at you and I run into a mosque. You don’t shoot at me anymore. It’s like you’re in the green zone of like a game, like, oh, oh, I’m in the same fox. Can’t get me here.

That’s actually what the world was. Yeah, I, I mean, I’m just like, this, this changes the way I view Ooh.

Malcolm Collins: They’re literally playing by like vampire rules. Like tell the holy [00:22:00] site.

Speaker 7: Get at me.

Speaker 10: May I come in?

Simone Collins: Yeah. Oh, oh, oh. Can’t get me. Like, and I know, I’m sure they figured this out, you know, like these, these rules, you know, we, we try not to publish our rules of engagement explicitly.

Like some parts of them are declassified. But like, of course, someone’s gonna start noticing patterns and then they’re gonna tell all their friends, you know, and tell everyone, be like, well, you know, clearly the US military has a weird rule. This is so much person

Malcolm Collins: than ever could’ve imagined. It

Simone Collins: was. I know, I know.

You enter a mosque or a religious site and suddenly, oh, you can’t shoot.

Malcolm Collins: I mean,

Simone Collins: and I, I, I’m a big rule follower, you know me. But like if someone, for example, like. I don’t know, hurt a kid or a baby and then like stepped into a mosque. I’m going into that mosque and I’m killing them, and then I’m gonna get court martialed, and then I’m gonna get, I’m gonna spend my life in jail or [00:23:00] something.

You know, like, this is it. It’s just, it’s so insane to me that we have punishing our troops for. I mean, dealing I war is hell. Right? Like it it’s a terrible thing. It’s, it’s, it’s, it’s a worst case scenario. But it, yeah. Anyway, so there’s, there’s all these different, and like this, this isn’t even all of the rules.

There’s also the, the DOD Law of War manual that was issued in June, 2015. There is the US FOR. A ROE supplements that are Afghanistan specific. And then there’s also the International Rules of Engagement which are primarily the, the, the Law of Armed Conflict, which is also known as International Humanitarian Law, which influences some of our rules of engagement and also other countries go by.

It, it, it has more reasonable core principles like. Parties have to always distinguish between combatants [00:24:00] and civilians and between military object objectives and civilian objections like homes and schools and hospitals. And you have to take into account proportionality, like even when attacking a lawful military objective.

Parties must not launch attacks expected to cause incidental civilian death. Or damage that would be excessive in retaliation in the concrete and direct military advantage anticipated that you can’t cause unnecessary suffering, which I appreciate. And then there also has to be, I

Malcolm Collins: don’t care about that cause of the suffering you want, whatever.

Simone Collins: Well, here’s the problem with all these rules, and I, again, I understand that they come from a good place. Like I, I SAR and gas, terrible. Like all this stuff is horrible. These rules. We, we go back to like this foundational story that we were all taught in in US history as kids, like we trounced the British and the American Revolution.

And this is a gross oversimplification, obviously, because we didn’t play by the rules and. [00:25:00] War doesn’t exactly involve playing by the rules all the time. And also in these wars, like in Afghanistan, we were, we were playing by all these rules and our opponent was not. And it didn’t go well, and a lot more people got hurt because of that.

And so I think the, the really difficult thing is one, these rules backfire because your enemy learns that you’re playing by them and then exploits that knowledge. But two, when the enemy doesn’t play by those rules, like what’s the point? You know, the, what you need to do is finish the conflict as soon as possible to, to minimize collateral damage.

And I mean we’ve done that in the past in really horrific ways like with Hiroshima and Nagasaki for example. And I don’t know, in the larger calculation of things if that did ultimately save a lot of lives, but that was the reasoning behind it, right? And so it’s just, I just, I don’t know, this, this just changes the way that I’ve looked at most recent wars.

And

Malcolm Collins: well, I, I find it really frustrating, and I might even do a full episode on this, is that [00:26:00] people even dither about the morality of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Maybe like the most moral act ever in history. The decal was not even that high. It was, it was lower than other bombing campaigns during the war which nobody complains about.

I’m talking about civilian decal. We know from. Things like the Battle of Midway and stuff like that, that the Japanese were in incredibly dug in would die to the man and would kill civilians as our troops advance. They basically,

Simone Collins: oh, they’re incredibly brutal. They were so brutal. Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. They would, they

Simone Collins: were certainly not playing by any of the rules of engagement discussed in, in any of these international or US based.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Yeah. If we had had to invade the mainland, the number of Japanese, and I’m not even talking about like our own troops, like I shouldn’t even need to talk about the Japanese, like less of our troops had to die, do what we need to do, right? But the number of Japanese who would’ve died in extremely much more brutal.

Then was the result of radiation from the [00:27:00] bombs would’ve been astronomically higher. Any, any realistic at the hands of other Japanese, any realistic look at what the Japanese did to populations, their own populations as they were treated, as they were pushed back, and, and, and how far they fought for their land.

Shows that.

Simone Collins: Mm-hmm.

Malcolm Collins: And I get, I just get really sick of that whenever anyone’s like, the, the bombs were so immoral.

Simone Collins: It’s like, yeah. But I mean, like those rules that I described, especially the, the short term Afghanistan ones were like, basically no, no preemptive strikes were allowed. Everything had to be reactive.

Which is, you know, ultimately can cause so much more work.

Malcolm Collins: And the funny thing is, is it doesn’t even change how you are going to come across in the media. Yeah, how you are going to come across. You know, I point out that even by Iran’s own numbers, so far we’ve killed 1,300 people in this campaign by their own numbers.

They killed a thousand, sorry, 3,500 people who are just civilians protesting. That’s by their own numbers. Now, keep in mind that the [00:28:00] number that we killed is probably inflated, and the number they killed is probably really low outside figures to put it at around 35,000. Mm-hmm. So even if we go with their inflated number and the outside number of 35,000 you know, we’re looking at like one 30th, the number of not civilian deaths, but death in total from our bombing campaign.

Simone Collins: Mm-hmm.

Malcolm Collins: And you know, this, this to me. The fact that we have Iranians out there yelling from their windows death to the, to the new, to the newly appointed Ayatollah.

Malcolm Collins: That answers it for me. I know. It’s, I know, it’s, I know. We’re doing the right thing.

Simone Collins: Well, what’s so impressive too, though, is.

That the Trump administration has found a way to not only, I [00:29:00] mean, one, they’ve eased up the rules but two, they have found a way to circumvent them by being so targeted, so strategic as to know like the exact room in which targets are within underground bunk. Well,

Malcolm Collins: that’s

Simone Collins: our Jews who

Malcolm Collins: are helping us know that.

I mean, US intelligence has not always been the best historically, but

Simone Collins: we’re getting better. And I mean, I think just also like the, the mere fact. I heard about this in the first place from a Silicon Valley tech dude who is now high up in the US military is meaningful that we are now beginning to bring in very outcome oriented.

Yeah. One of, one of our

Malcolm Collins: friends who we know from working in venture capital,

Simone Collins: Andrew Driscoll.

Malcolm Collins: D Well, Dan Driscoll runs the Navy. What did the the, the

Simone Collins: army. Malcolm,

Malcolm Collins: he runs the Army, so, so I can’t remember. I used to talk with him like every week. So he is a, a good friend of mine.

Really cool guy. I like him, like good [00:30:00] family man.

Simone Collins: He’s the United States Secretary of the Army. Malcolm.

Malcolm Collins: That’s just the way you mean. I know him. Yeah,

Simone Collins: I

Malcolm Collins: know him as like cool based VC from like, the South who,

Simone Collins: well, and again, that’s, that’s meaningful. Like it gives me a lot of hope that like in the past our military was really just getting run into the ground by bureaucratic morass.

You know, we had leaders of the military feeling like their, their people were being more intact, or, sorry, more attacked by the internal. Lawyers of the military then by like, you know, they, they weren’t being defended, they were being attacked internally. From that to tech enabled, incredibly effective, hyper-targeted missions and operations with minimal collateral damage that are able to circumvent a lot of these rules because.

You know, we’re, we’re not dealing in a situation where we have troops on the ground who are being shot [00:31:00] at by people who are then dashing into a, you know, religious monument to like avoid being shot at. And I, I really like that and it gives me hope of ways that you can circumvent. Bureaucratic morass.

Because a lot of me is like, well, we just have to wait for everything to burn to the ground. Right? There’s just, we have to just, it’s gonna crumble, everything’s gonna fall apart, and then we’ll have to start fresh. And here it, there’s a demonstration that actually you can take something that is so large and so huge and so complex and also so regimented as the US military with all of its rules, it’s multiple rule books.

And. Still be this effective and broker in this new age of, of geopolitical strategy and war that we’re seeing with Venezuela, with Iran, with our joint actions, with Israel. Maybe. Maybe there’s hope.

Malcolm Collins: What

Simone Collins: do the

Malcolm Collins: long term, what we’re gonna see [00:32:00] is breaking rules, saves lives, ignoring about all of this because when your opponents know that you play by these rules, they then say, well then now let’s, let’s put our offices in schools and stuff like this.

And the great thing is, is one of the reasons we’ve been able to just completely ignore the rules, and I think that we should more aggressively going forwards, is all of the sources that used to shame this source of behavior. Nobody trusts anymore. No matter what Trump does in a war, we now know that leftist media is gonna say he’s killing school kids.

He’s killing hosp. They don’t, the Jews are doing, oh, they’re blowing up school kids. They’re blowing up. They’ll say that no matter what you do, you could have the cleanest war ever or the dirtiest war ever. The same articles are gonna come out. So, and, and the Iranians could do whatever. You know, you saw the left like.

Giving, literally affiliating them as they were murdering tens of thousands of innocent protestors, right? Like, and that’s just murdering. Like you are a woman in Iran. [00:33:00] You walk around without a hijab, you get sent to an irania prison, you get griped, you get, you know, they didn’t care about that. They didn’t care about women, right?

Like they literally do not care how evil the opponent is. They do not care how good you try to be. So just handle things in the way that is the most efficient. That is my takeaway is, is is the most moral way to do things. And as a government and as a people, we need to get back to doing things that way.

Simone Collins: Well, fortunately that’s apparently more where the rules of engagement have gone. What Michael said in the allin podcast was things have shifted more to, as he put it, this Colin Powell era of use your judgment. And I think in the end, you know. Allowing people to make strategic decisions on the ground, like that is the right call.

People don’t want to hurt civilians. They don’t wanna hurt kids and people in their homes, they don’t wanna, they don’t want to cause collateral damage. And when they do, they’re making a really [00:34:00] tough call. But that, that’s probably to save more people, right? Yeah. So yeah, I just. This blew my mind when I heard about it and when I told you and, and some other people on a family call yesterday and you guys were like, I don’t know if that’s true.

I’m like, okay, well that’s,

Malcolm Collins: yeah. Like, I wanna, I wanna look into this. That doesn’t sound true. And then it’s,

Simone Collins: yeah,

Malcolm Collins: it’s true. What?

Simone Collins: Can you believe it? Yeah. Yeah. Wild. I would love to hear in the comments, any experiences, people that we have listened to this podcast to serve or have served in the military.

What you’re seeing on the ground now, what you saw on the ground pa in the past, because I mean, to whatever extent you can say something because again, it’s a lot of this just, it can’t be published. We don’t know what people are being briefed on. As they’re serving in the military, I’m really curious.

I wanna know what the experience is like. ‘cause my understanding is like, you know, as you’re entering a theater of war, you know, you’re going in, [00:35:00] you’re getting your orientation, whatever you’re settling into your place and they’re like, okay, by the way, these are all the roles. You can’t do this, this, and this.

I’m just really curious to see how it, it worked in practice because it’s just so wild to me. So, thanks to everyone who always does share really interesting insights in the comments. You guys are amazing. And Malcolm, I love you a lot.

Malcolm Collins: I love you a lot, Simone. You are amazing and a great wife.

Simone Collins: Thanks for.

Malcolm Collins: Why does that make you smile? You just

Simone Collins: are I, I can’t smile. I,

Malcolm Collins: no, I don’t want you to smile. I don’t know why I didn’t mean to make you smile. I feel bad about making you smile

Simone Collins: this giant No, it’s, it’s turn My bruise is turning like yellow and gross. But yeah, you make me smile even though it hurts. I love

Malcolm Collins: you, Simone.

I appreciate that you push through for our fans to give them great content even when you’re in enormous pain. And I know that they appreciate it too. There’s a lot of people who take a lot of time to watch. I mean, we put, we put [00:36:00] time into putting these together and, and trying to give you guys something that is you know, exciting for you and, and, and intellectually stimulating.

And you know, Simone, to, to, to get these out every day, even when you’re recovering. I mean, we had a whole week where we had to do prerecorded episodes when a lot was happening and Iran and stuff like that.

Simone Collins: I’m

Malcolm Collins: sorry. And I felt bad about it, but, but. Because we, you know, we wanna give you guys consistent quality.

I don’t, I don’t want you guys coming to one of these videos and just having one of us, or just having, you know, and Simone is willing to put herself through so much to, to it gives that to you guys, and it means the world to me that I married somebody, this honorable and this diligent.

Simone Collins: Aw, thanks Malcolm.

I love you a lot and I, I loved this podcast and I love the really smart people who, we’re part of the community too, so it’s all worth it, and pain is just pain. So, all right, I will go get dinner started, and I love you lots.

Malcolm Collins: Bye bye.

Simone Collins: So today [00:37:00] randomly, Octavian mentioned karaoke and I was like, wait, how does he know about like karaoke parties? We’ve never done karaoke in our house before. And I asked him, do you know what karaoke means? And he’s like, yeah, it’s when you’re sick and you miss something

Malcolm Collins: when you’re sick and you miss something.

Simone Collins: Like, he seemed to think that, that, that karaoke is, is the word for absence. But okay. Anyway,

Malcolm Collins: you found out how to use a feature on the Alexa that we,

Simone Collins: yeah.

Malcolm Collins: Don’t know how to use

Simone Collins: it’s Well, no, no, no. I know how to use it. It’s the drop-in feature. So we have a house full of smart speakers, both Google and Alexa.

Great. Now anyone can just hack it, but whatever. We know everyone’s always listening. Where you can use it as an intercom. But you can also use a drop in feature where you can just listen in to any of the rooms that has this enabled. And we use it all the time, like after our kids go to bed. [00:38:00] Like just the same night last night Octavian was very unhappy about something and I heard him crying in the room and like normal parents have to get out of bed and walk down to like their kid’s room and talk to their kid, whereas I just pick up my phone.

And I drop into the room and I’m like, Hey, Octavian, what’s up? And we have a talk and then he’s fine and I don’t have to get out of bed, and he’s fine. And we just talk through the speaker and then he goes off and does his thing. But unfortunately, he discovered the drop-in feature through audio commands, which I didn’t know was possible.

And so like it’s the middle of the night. And I like hear this voice through my dreams. This like little child voice talking about stickers and batteries for his Chinook helicopter. And I’m like, what, what, what? Oh, like what is going on? And I’m just like, go to sleep, Octavian. And he’s like, okay, mom, drop out.

And I’m like, oh God. He’s dropped in on the Alexa device. I can’t swear. Where

Malcolm Collins: did he learn those voice commands?

Simone Collins: I don’t know. I don’t know. [00:39:00] It could be that maybe when I call in and drop in on his device, in his room it says something like dropping in and then my voice comes in. I don’t know. I’ll have to figure that out.

But no, he uses it all the time. He is unlocked a new skill, though he doesn’t understand what karaoke is. I mean, I explained it to him, but he’s probably still gonna think it’s what absence is. So

Malcolm Collins: he is obsessed with conquering other countries. It is, talks about it all the time.

Simone Collins: Mm-hmm.

Malcolm Collins: When he sees land, when he sees maps

Simone Collins: mm-hmm.

Yeah. He is the, he’s the kid. We should have named Manifest Destiny that we can’t because it’s both. Too far right. And too hippie.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. We really wanted a can they manifest destiny, by the way, can I tonight is the dumpling lasagna ready?

Simone Collins: Mm-hmm. And I’m gonna do that with steamed edamame with sea salt.

Malcolm Collins: Actually, we do need to get through the roast beef.

Simone Collins: Oh. I’ll make [00:40:00] you another sandwich.

Malcolm Collins: What I would do is not a full sandwich, but roast beast. Roast beef and white bread I think would actually go really well with the dumpling.

Simone Collins: Yeah. ‘cause there’s only one Raman. So Okay. Just roast beef on white bread or do you want that with mustard and

Malcolm Collins: I mean, maybe may some mustard to mayo, but let’s try that.

Simone Collins: Just heavily layered, just the rest of it.

Malcolm Collins: I don’t know the rest of it. I mean, I was thinking of it as like a light, almost, sort of like dipper sandwich basically. Like I think the flavors would actually go really well.

Simone Collins: You can’t dip something in Zale.

Malcolm Collins: Well, no. You take a bite of one, then you take a bite of the other.

Simone Collins: You’re a strange man. You still want the edamame.

Malcolm Collins: No.

Simone Collins: Why did you buy it? You buy it, you get all these ideas in your head, and then we have like a freezer full of stuff. I

Malcolm Collins: might want AMI later. It’s just AMI isn’t gonna expire and the sandwich meat is.

Simone Collins: Yeah, no, that’s wise. Okay, that’s the [00:41:00] plan then. Let me gird my loins here.

Malcolm Collins: It’s funny, somebody was like in the comment because we had a, well, how, I just love seeing them together. A couple so clearly made for each other, and of course salty people on Reddit saw this and were like, they, they. That wife is clearly a year away from divorce, right? Like he treats her like a slave.

It’s like you about to leave me, Simone. Is that, that where we are right now?

Simone Collins: Don’t make me laugh. It will hurt. I’m already gonna be spitting up blood after doing this podcast, please.

Do you want me to do one?

Malcolm Collins: I have another one

Simone Collins: prepped. No, I’m, I’m good. I’m good enough. It is just never going to, like, I just had to push through this, so, you ready? Okay. Oh God, no. Let me do one, let me do one. No, no, no, no, no, no, no. We’re doing it. Okay. Ready? Okay. All right.

Speaker 12: [00:42:00] Mama. Mommy. Mama. Mommy.

Who’s down there, Titan. She’s up to something. Dad.

Speaker 13: What’s up Andy? I,

yeah. What do you think guys? Can it go away?

Speaker 12: No. I, Aw girl. I’m, do you want the [00:43:00] sand? I’m

Speaker 13: Oh, sweet darling. I’m supposed to. Professor, what should we do?

Girl, can you do it? Octavian? Oh, you can do it. Oh, you can do it.

Speaker 12: Go under Indy. Okay. Okay. Okay. Indy, do you want some milk? Go? You wanna slide? Okay. Go. Go under it. Go under it. Go [00:44:00] under it. See the, okay. Ready. You don’t wanna slide,

Speaker 13: you wanna sit right there? Okay. That’s fine. You can do that. That’s fine. No.

In this episode of Based Camp, Malcolm & Simone Collins break down the insane geopolitical wins stacking up for Trump in early 2026—wins so massive they rival the collapse of the Soviet Union, Napoleon’s early campaigns, or Cromwell’s rise, but with almost zero U.S. cost so far.

From the precision strike that took out Ayatollah Khamenei (and the sneaky Mossad magic behind it), to Maduro’s capture in Venezuela halting oil to Cuba and forcing blackouts, to Iran’s proxy network (Hezbollah, Houthis, Hamas) getting defanged, the Collinses argue this is a new era of low-cost, high-impact American dominance.

They explore the risks of overreach (history’s villains who won too much too fast), why most of the Muslim world isn’t mourning Iran, the “frenemy” dynamic with China, why dumb white women seem to be the main group getting radicalized, and Trump’s unlocked hack: kill hated dictators surgically, threaten successors, let regional allies (Israel, Saudis, UAE) handle cleanup, and watch dictators self-moderate out of self-preservation.

Episode Transcript

Malcolm Collins: Hello, Simone. I’m excited to be here with you today. The world has changed so dramatically, and I think much more dramatically than people realize in the past few months, specifically in the past few weeks with what’s going on in Iran right now, the number of core geopolitical winds that Trump has had.

And I think even the right wing doesn’t seem to really grok the magnitude of this. There is no historical parallel in all of American history except for maybe the collapse of the Soviet Union, but that wasn’t exactly all our doing. A lot of that was internal. Yeah. The, the closest three historical parallels I can find, like series of wins this significant with this little early cost would be the beginning of h man’s campaigns.

The beginning of Napoleon’s campaigns or most of Oliver Cromwell’s life. Those are the only three that come anywhere near. And, and I think that this actually [00:01:00] highlights one of the big risks of where we are geopolitically right now.

Simone Collins: Okay.

Malcolm Collins: In the same way that if you look at Napoleon’s early career, just win, win, win, win, win, win, win.

Or the h man’s early military career. Win, win, win, win, win, win, win. Mm-hmm. Very low cost to his own troops. Very low cost to him geopolitically. What happened in, in both of those cases is they completely overdid it and ended up giant villains from history. Mm-hmm. And I can completely see the temptation from Trump’s perspective right now.

And for people who don’t understand what I’m saying right now. Trump has taken out first obviously Maduro and the Venezuelan, the new Venezuelan president. It, it appears to be working like she halted the oil shipments to Cuba, which now is forcing Cuba because Mexico did not restart the shipments. They, they, somebody out our last podcast we’re talking about this, said they restarted them.

They’ve halted oil shipments as well. So it looks like the Cubans are either [00:02:00] going to cave or be put into a permanent blackout because they don’t really have oil anymore. And if you don’t have oil, you can’t grow crops or move cars or anything. And none of their geopolitical allies have the ability to get them oil because like if China tries to send a ship all the way to them, the US will just.

Grab it like we’ve been with everyone else who’s trying to send them ships. And they don’t, and China doesn’t even seem to want to. And then Iran has been taken off the map with very little geopolitical cost. And we’ll explain why each of these has had so little geo, because that’s also weird, right?

And if you go through American history and you look at something like, say the Vietnam War or something like that, if we had overwhelmingly won the Vietnam War, right, like just completely won it early days, it would not be one 10th Is geopolitically relevant at the three victories combined? Hmm. We have been trying to deal with Iran, [00:03:00] Venezuela, and Cuba for.

A half a century at least.

Simone Collins: Oh yeah. No. From our childhoods, we’ve all grown up hearing about Iran and Death to America and Yeah. All this stuff. But it was more of a recent thing though.

Malcolm Collins: The United States doesn’t really have that many geopolitical enemies.

Simone Collins: Yeah. Truly it’s just been Iran and North Korea mostly with China and Russia both being kind of like frenemies.

Frenemy

Malcolm Collins: China is, is really more of a frenemy than anything else.

Simone Collins: Yeah. Yeah. They’re like the Jessica to our Utah mom. That’s a little too. Yeah,

Malcolm Collins: , What I mean by China is more of a frenemy is in terms of like big geopolitical enemies that we’ve had. China really hasn’t made a point outside of the fentanyl epidemic, which is absolutely terrible.

And inventing TikTok again, absolutely terrible. But, you know, it’s, it’s been nothing like our wars against our other geopolitical enemies, like what we had

Simone Collins: to deal with. No, they’re like that [00:04:00] passive aggressive, mean girl. Like we’re, we’re in a mean girl clique together and like, you know, one’s like, Aw sweetie, let me help you.

Like you can buy some of my cheaply manufactured goods. Or like, oh, why don’t you have like, here you can have my Cheetos. ‘cause I mean, they’re gonna make you fat anyway, and I’m gonna eat like all my healthy food over here.

Speaker 22: We do not have a click problem at the school, but you do have to watch out for frenemies. What are frenemies? Frenemies are enemies who act like friends. We call them frenemies or ene amens, or friends who secretly hate you. We call them freighters. That’s so gay.

Simone Collins: But that

Malcolm Collins: is actually exactly like, it, it’s like two mean girls that constantly hang out together.

Simone Collins: Exactly.

Malcolm Collins: But, but what I mean is they’re not like an existential threat to

Simone Collins: Yeah. They’re just like competitive rivals who really don’t like each other and feel like it’s a zero sum game. So like, yeah, actually it is pretty bad, but like. In a more collaborative way, whereas Iran was like, no, I just wanna kill you.

You just like, there can be no room for the two of us. You know, it’s more exclusive. That’s like a one,

Malcolm Collins: their founding thesis is, I [00:05:00] wanna kill you. You

Speaker 12: We are two months away from enriching weapons grade uranium to be used for peaceful purposes.

Speaker 29: Obviously this joke was made a while ago. , By Iran’s own claims, they had enough enriched uranium to make 11 nuclear bombs, , nearly enough to wipe out all life on earth.

Simone Collins: Know, like, yeah. So it’s like, it’s, it’s the, it’s the school bully. Like, meet me out back. I’m gonna beat you up. Versus the mean girl of like,

Malcolm Collins: well I do, I love how everyone is meed on Khomeini for this, that he, the mans spent his entire life trying to get into a war with the United States.

Simone Collins: So you can’t make you smell. It’s gonna burst my mouth. Stitches, but kine, can we please? Oh God. Oh, the stitches are gonna open. Whatcha doing? Kine. [00:06:00] Okay, go. Keep going, keep going. Just, just keep butchering all the Iranian words and I’m just gonna bust all my stitches open.

Malcolm Collins: I’m not, I

Simone Collins: to stay away.

Malcolm Collins: I ran. Day one, he spends his entire life trying to get us into a war with Iran.

Simone Collins: Mm-hmm.

Malcolm Collins: Dies like day one, hour one. Watching a video on this was insane because they knew not just like the bunker he was in, but the floor he was, was in, in that bunker.

Simone Collins: How I, I wish I knew how they knew. You know, I wanna watch the Oceans 11 version. It’s real piss

Malcolm Collins: off Jews. Jews are sneaky. This is the thing about Jews that people don’t know.

They were very sneaky people, which makes them excellent spies. Like all Jews, if you’re playing like Skyrim or something, they’re born with like a plus 10 to their sneak stat. You know, stealth, they’re, they all go stealth. Archer blt wait,

Simone Collins: Because I like legit have never played Skyrim or like any video game, aside from a rollercoaster tycoon, are there [00:07:00] Jews in Skyrim?

Malcolm Collins: No, no, no, no. But there’s races in Sky Room, so I’m saying if there were

Simone Collins: Jews in Sky Room,

Malcolm Collins: okay, I get you. It’s racial sta modifier. With Jews, it’s a, oh, we should do that. We should have an episode where we make racial stat modifiers for every race. Oh my God. But Jews, Jews, Jews are sort of an op build these days, I’m gonna be honest.

Gotta, gotta Nerf. That turns out to be very, very useful. That’s

Simone Collins: what the H man said as you refer to him. But

Malcolm Collins: you know what? Oh yeah. Yes, he did try to Nerf the Jew build. He’s like, he did try to Nerf

Simone Collins: the Jew build

Malcolm Collins: unfair to have Judes in our server.

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: How, how do you compete? So anyway we have other episodes where we talk about these sorts of topics.

If, if you’re interested in learning more.

Our Jewish Patreon supporters after hearing this.

Speaker 14: Lemme take that back. Huh?

Speaker 39: But on the other side, imagine how stupid you have to be to know you’re in a stealth archer. Meta to know that like the elves have a stealth archer, meta buff, and to intentionally attempt to isolate them, , just [00:08:00] because they are arrogant and have. Dicked you around occasionally, right? Like this is, this is my cultural group, whatever.

We try to run the sneak meta, as you have seen from me trying to pronounce whatever that guy’s name is.

Speaker 4: Buongiorno.

Speaker: Signore un piacere. Gli amici della vedetta ammirata tra tutti noi questa gemma prove della nostra cultura saranno naturalmente accolti sotto la mia protezione per la durata del loro soggiorno

Speaker 4: Grazie.

Speaker 23: We, we we’re, we’re bored with zero sneak stat.

Malcolm Collins: But so, so, they knew exactly where, and this is the thing, right? So the US has said, and this is a very interesting, like we’ve never done this before. So when the US this was Netanyahu who said this, he’s like, anybody who replaces Khomeini as the Ayatollah if they take this position with stated an antagonism towards the United States and Israel and towards the people of [00:09:00] Iran as Khomeini did, and keep in mind he murdered tens of thousands of people, tens of thousands of people in just the past few months.

Like the death count in Iran was staggering. Even if you’re looking at the more conservative numbers of, of people just protesting in the streets, you know, genuinely the people who are standing this are genuinely monstrous.

Speaker 7: Indulge me for one second. Pretend that I’m an idiot. Okay. I’m there.

Okay. You know what, let’s just agree to disagree, my friend. Okay.

What? Why? No. Don’t you remember? Of course. I remember. How dare you question my memory. I remember everything. Oh no, I would never do that. Never. I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean that. Not worry. It’s fine. NDA, my friend. Thank you.

Malcolm Collins: And I think it’s important

Simone Collins: that, yeah. Has, has the death count from the Usis Israel attacks, yet surpassed the death count from the protestors being taken [00:10:00] out.

Speaker 30: To the Iranian government’s official dis death count for civilians so far is around 1,300. Keep in mind that their official death count for the civilians that they slaughtered was around 3000, whereas, , death counts from outside have been at around 35,000. , So. This is, this is astonishing to me that their official death count for the civilians killed in the war so far as a, a third of their official death count of the civilians that they mass slaughter.

Just over the last month,

I.

Malcolm Collins: I don’t, I don’t know. I don’t, I’d be surprised if it has

Simone Collins: because when I last checked, I thought it was like around 1,600 or so from this conflict.

Malcolm Collins: Oh. Then it’s not even close.

Simone Collins: It’s one, there’s like over 5,000 for the protests.

Malcolm Collins: I heard up to 30,000 for some estimates.

Simone Collins: Oh my God. Well, I mean, who knows?

Malcolm Collins: I think 5,000 was actually Iran’s official figure.

Simone Collins: Hmm.

Malcolm Collins: So,

Simone Collins: I mean, I wanna be conservative, but I mean, that, that basically means that like, [00:11:00] it’s been, you know,

Malcolm Collins: and I wanna point something out to how vile the people who were fighting are, you know, when they, when, when they say that Aya Khomeini is with his, you know, 30 virgins right now, you gotta keep in mind what they’re, what they’re imagining.

You are imagining a bunch of young,

Simone Collins: I thought it was 40 virgins. Did he get a penalty for something? 40

Malcolm Collins: Virgin. Yeah, sorry. 40 virgin.

Simone Collins: 10 virgin penalty for like. Getting bombed by the infidels. I guess it’s suck.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Yeah. But anyway, so you, you are imagining like beach girls or something like that?

Khomeini is the guy who lowered the legal, marrying age in Iran to nine. Like when he, he, if that’s the age that you’re getting married, that’s the age that he thinks when he thinks he’s getting 40 virgins for all eternity, he thinks heaven.

Simone Collins: Well, by the way, is there, like, have you looked this up when you did more research on Iran?

Are, are they like, do they ize every time you bang them? Like, or is it just a one time? ‘cause this is [00:12:00] eternity, you have them. So like, what’s the point of them being virgins if like, you immediately become intimate and then. You’re not,

Malcolm Collins: well, I guess they’ve never slept with anyone other than you.

Simone Collins: Okay. So that’s the point is that they’ve been untouched by other men.

Okay. Okay. Okay.

Malcolm Collins: Well, I mean, I imagine, you know, in their heaven, nobody ever ages and that basically their heaven is literally,

Simone Collins: so he gets his harem of nine year olds and goodness,

Malcolm Collins: yes. An eternity of being a PDA file. Like,

Simone Collins: he can watch frozen with them over and over and over. It’s gonna be delightful.

Malcolm Collins: And these are real things here. People you can, you can look this up. This is what he lowered the marriage age to. So I, I want to and if you wanna go deeper onto this concept within Islam, because a lot of people are like, oh, Aisha wasn’t actually nine. Look at this, look at this, look at this. And it’s like, you, progressive Muslim can say that.

But the truth is, is that the vast majority of conservative Muslims in conservative Muslim countries do believe she was not.

Speaker 24: So while we may never be able to know, was she actually nine when he [00:13:00] slept with her, was she actually, what was it, six when they got married? , We, we can know for a fact what most conservative Muslims believe, and they do believe this, that is a hundred percent easily provable.

Malcolm Collins: And so it doesn’t matter what you think, this is what they think. And this is what they’re acting on in our episode where we talk about the major religious court in Pakistan saying it was Islamophobic to raise the marriage age to, I wanna say 14 or 16 or something like a still a fairly young age.

They mean this, this is like a, you know, you gotta take their religion seriously. And, and they mean what they say they mean, don’t, don’t be like, they don’t mean what they, they, they mean what they say they mean, um mm-hmm. Because they do it and they show it legally. But I wanna, I wanna talk about like how geopolitically this shift things, how much, I mean, imagine you’re Kim Jong-Un or Putin.

Right now, right. You are effing terrified. You are e every, like, China thinks they built this giant geopolitical network like I Rand did. Before I go into this, what I wanna say is a lot of people who think like, oh, we’re getting into a new Iraq war here, or something like that.

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: The cool hack [00:14:00] that Trump seems to have figured out about this stuff is people were like, how do you take down this dictatorship and rebuild the country at like a good, like at a decent cost, right?

And Trump’s like,

Speaker 20: space? That’s the neat thing. You don’t,

Malcolm Collins: You don’t, you don’t rebuild it. That I just, that’s not, we’ll leave that to, and if, if people are like, well, that leads to you know, worse situations in the long run, not if they have the demographics that they have right now. Like they’re not building into some, like, bigger power in the future.

Every year Iran is just less powerful than it was the year before and they just completely knocked it out as a geopolitical player. Because Iran has a terrible fertility rates below the United States, for example, despite their poverty. And I think that, and, and people can be like, well, US presidents in the past weren’t about this.

We tried to kill Castro like 135 times or something. And that was during the height of the age of Spycraft. [00:15:00] Trump basically unlocked a new way of doing this. And we’ll talk about that in just a second. But now I wanna talk about the geopolitics of this, what he unlocked, why it hasn’t had the negative geopolitical effects that many people expected it to, why things seem to be working out well in Venezuela and why I suspect less, less easy, but it may work out in Iran.

And, and even with Iran, when I thought about this last, I was like, I don’t. I wouldn’t say that you should go in and try to do regime change in Iran. I was a little worried about it. It is, it is definitely harder than Venezuela. But with those sneaky Jews, we may be able to do this without too much death.

Speaker 14: Not bad, huh?

Malcolm Collins: When I say that, what I mean is the reason if we are able to do Iran well mm-hmm. You are able to rebuild it well without actually attempting a boots on the ground reconstruction of the country. It is going to be because of Mossad. And, and, and I hope that Trump plans to basically leaves this in Israel’s lap after all of [00:16:00] this be like, Israel, Saudi Arabia, UAE, you guys take over here, you’ve got the money.

We’re out. Right. And I think a lot of Maga is gonna be very mad if he decides to go in a heavy way, boots on the ground or reconstruction. But I don’t think that, I’m not, I’m not expecting that from what I’m saying. I, I think a lot of that is just threats right now. But anyway. So, geopolitically? Yes. Our entire lives, it was a, a fight between the Shia and Sunni faction.

Okay. And the the Sunni faction, the Saudi faction they were largely the UAE Saudi Arabia and the United States and Israel. And they, they, they really sort of side it with Israel. They pretend like we’re not really on Israel’s side, but you know, they, they largely side it was Israel.

Mm-hmm. And then the sh affection, the Iranian affection. Did not use states. It used Hezbollah, it used Hamas, it used HHI rebels, it used non-state militant actors. And it would fund them to go out and attempt to do things on its behalf, [00:17:00] what we would call today, terrorist organizations. And they unfortunately we have another video where we talk about this, that group was basically entirely taken out and now is being wept up.

So initially you had obviously, like Hamas is not nearly as powerful as they were before the Gaza War, or able to push Iran’s will right now has the Houthis Rebels have largely been Defanged, Hezbollah was so afraid after all of this that when, when we were bombing and when Israel mostly was, was bombing Iran.

They to like a token show of support, shot one measly missile into Israel, killed, nobody was shot down, wasn’t even at a, like a, a populated area. And Israel was like, okay, buddy, we’re coming in, in full force and they’re now doing a ground invasion of Lebanon. And it’s even crazier because the Lebanese government, which used to be the like, like subordinate basically to Hezbollah was in this region, is now actively helping Israel in [00:18:00] securing Hezbollah weapons.

Simone Collins: No

Malcolm Collins: The, the core reason, the core flip that happened, a lot of people are unaware of this is do you remember when there was that giant explosion in that port town?

Simone Collins: No.

Malcolm Collins: So in the Middle East a few years ago, a giant explosion, some of my friends like, lived there and you could see like all other windows.

Simone Collins: Oh my gosh. Yeah. Yes, yes. And there was footage in people’s, like balconies got blown in and Yes.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. So that it turns out was in Lebanon and that was a, a Hezbollah warehouse. And that is because previously people were like, well, you can’t get rid of Hezbollah because Hezbollah, you know, runs some schools, runs some medical stuff, runs some, you know, it helps people.

Right. And that. Because of not just that happening, but then Hezbollah really ham-fisted using corruption to cover up that. It was obviously a Hezbollah warehouse that turned public sentiment against Hezbollah in elections and political sentiment against Hezbollah. And so then politicians were like, oh, let’s go [00:19:00] all in on this.

Let’s do joint operations with Israel. Wouldn’t it be great if we didn’t have to worry about them coming in and fighting us all the time? And, and they also see where things are going with Iran. Iran is not gonna be Daddy Warbuck for anyone anymore. Right?

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: The only state actor that Iran really had as a friend was Qatar.

And that wasn’t even because Qatar and Iran really liked each other, it’s because they sit on the giant gas field that makes up the majority of Qatar’s wealth is like half in Iran, so they have to get along mm-hmm. By Qatar. And Al Jazeera keeps saying things like, oh my God, the cost of oil is gonna skyrocket and that’s gonna hurt economies all over the world.

Yeah. I’m like, oh no, America, the cost of oil, oil, that’s gonna be horrible. What did we just get a ton of? Was this whole Venezuela situation? Hmm. Something We definitely wouldn’t want the value of that to explode. Hmm. That’d be horrible for us. A net oil exporter. At least vis-a-vis the rest of the world.

You know, I’m not looking forward to a [00:20:00] depression either, but you know, in the, in the world of ai, maybe we could use a, a slowing off this grocery right now. But anyway, so that has basically been resolved. And the way that we were able to resolve that without the major geopolitical fallout that I think a lot of people expected because pretty much every major power is praising this.

I mean, Spain threw a bit of a, a donkey tantrum about this and so did the uk. But the truth is, is they both capitulated within like two days of throwing their tantrum. And now. They’re, they’re towing the line because of a few things. One is, is I ran, and this is, was an accident. They didn’t mean to do this.

I, I almost feel sort of bad for them on this run, but they accidentally shot a missile into Turkey which is a, that was an

Simone Collins: accident. How do you accidentally do that?

Malcolm Collins: They said it was a technical malfunction

Simone Collins: who

Malcolm Collins: given the number of missiles they’re shooting, I can see that it could be a technical malfunction.

Speaker 25: If you’re like, Malcolm, why do you believe it was an accident? And it wasn’t meant to target a US base, it’s because they only sent one missile. And every other missile campaign that they’ve done has been a huge barrage of missiles. So to me, this looks [00:21:00] more like an accident. I.

Malcolm Collins: So anyway this could trigger Article five. Now the UN is not saying we’re gonna trigger Article five. Turkey is not saying, they’re like, we understand it with an accident. We’re sorry, you know, blah, blah, blah. But the point is, is it gives America a lot more leeway to be like, Hey, what’s even the point of NATO if you guys aren’t even gonna allow us to use our bases in your countries and stuff like that, right?

Simone Collins: Mm-hmm.

Malcolm Collins: And so the question is this, why, why aren’t people freaking out about this existentially other than just progressives? Like why aren’t Muslim groups freaking out about this? Why aren’t why aren’t Europe freaking out about this? Why is the Middle East not freaking out about this? And the answer is because Iran unfortunately made an enemy out of most other Muslim groups.

Speaker 26: And then in a moment of almost hilariously bad decision making, when Iran started to get attacked, rather than shooting all the missiles at Israel, it shot some, but it has shot many more missiles at non-aggressive Muslim countries. Some of them, even [00:22:00] Shia, majority countries, uh, who just weren’t 100% on board with them.

Uh, and. As you can guess, a lot of these countries were not involved in this. They did not want to be involved in this, but now they’re like, you know what? You’re gonna bomb us. Okay. Like, I don’t even see the point in not being involved in this if you’re just gonna shoot us with missiles anyway. Like how, how would you build public support around that?

That’s comically stupid.

Malcolm Collins: So first of all, you’ve got to remember is the Shias, were always the minority, always in the Muslim world. Yeah.

For an understanding of just how much of a minority they are. Only 10 to 15% of Muslims are Shia.

Malcolm Collins: And they often treated the Sunnis really, really terribly now. It was, it’s sort of a Boas way thing, a Catholic Protestant thing here. Mm-hmm. But they haven’t gotten over it yet in the same way.

Okay. And, and so obviously Saudi Arabia isn’t shedding a tear over this. The UAE isn’t shedding a tear over this.

Speaker 31: And Iran hasn’t even been able to keep the real Shia on board with them, you know, [00:23:00] bombing reflexively despite not being involved in the attack. The Shia majority, Bahrain. Um, and, and I’d point out to you if you’re like, I’m seeing stuff online where Muslims support this or whatever. This stuff is entirely AstroTurf, uh, and it’s very easy to tell that it’s AstroTurf, but that might be for another episode.

Ironically, the only people who I’ve seen who appear to be real and are actually being radicalized by this, who were not already, you know, radical, I just want to destroy America. Types are of course the patriotic Americans worst enemy, dumb white women. .

Malcolm Collins: And then other places where we’re seeing major power overhauls, like in Yemen right now, they’ve got their own stuff going on. They don’t care about this, but most of the, the Islamic world just doesn’t feel a kinship with Iran.

Mm-hmm. On, on, outside of like a few isolated terror cells outside of that, a lot of the other countries in the Islamic world saw Iran at their, so remember I said the [00:24:00] Islamic world was like a bipolar axis of Iran and Saudi Arabia as the two core power players?

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: And remember how it was listing countries that were on one of those axis or another.

Mm-hmm. And you might have noticed some very big countries weren’t on that list specifically. Egypt and Turkey. Two very powerful Islamic countries. Yeah. Because they wanted the power play to be between them and Saudi Arabia. Right? Iran has always been the weaker of these, these two partners, and they wanted it to be focused on them.

They wanted to be one of the uncontested power players in the region. So they’re happy that this has happened, right? Mm-hmm. That Iran is off the map at this point, right? They’re not, they’re not shedding a tear. They’re like, oh, awesome. Like, like, now, now I have a chance to play for a bipolar axis of power was in the Islamic world, which is going to reemerge eventually.

And a lot of people are gonna be moving to, to try to gain power in this vacuum. But, but you have that reason for like theologically and ideologically why a lot of people don’t care. Second, if [00:25:00] people are like worried about a lot of terrorism in the aftermath of this you may get some. But the reality is, is that Israel has sort of acted as our terrorism bug zapper.

Like it’s just an easier place to do terrorism if you’re already a Muslim and it’s, it’s more culpable than the United States is. Mm-hmm. And it’s also better at defending itself. Now people in Europe are like, well what about Europe? And I’m going, well, maybe you shouldn’t have let a bunch of freaking radical Muslims into your countries.

And, and America’s got a clamp down on this too. I think like, especially the situation in Texas right now really needs to be resolved. And you know, that was the Trump administration and, and, and this is why if there is a major Muslim terrorist attack in the United States, like we recently had one in, in Texas, this stuff gets covered up, of course.

But we need to get and I think that that’s what we’d likely see next is a, is a major Muslim deportation push in the United States. Mm-hmm. As a result of that. And I could see that being popular depending on the scale of the attack. And so that wouldn’t even necessarily be a negative thing for the goals of the Trump administration because the Trump administration is looking for an excuse for something like that.

If they, if they can get one, right? Mm-hmm. So, so [00:26:00] again, even that’s not like, it’s, it’s, it’s like is it a risk? Yeah, it’s a risk, but it’s a risk in the same way, like a school shooting is a risk, you know, like it’s a risk. I would prefer it not to be a risk but it’s not like a, a statistical risk to anyone.

I know’s individual life. E even if one does happen, you know what I mean? So I think that that, that that’s again, why like he’s, he’s directed the anger at this within the Islamic world where there is anger onto Israel. And Israel’s been willing to accept that. Second, and I wanna note like the genius of this is weird because it wasn’t even like Trump’s own move.

Like apparently the way I’m hearing it from the administration mm-hmm. Is that Yahoo basically called him up and is like, we’re gonna do this, or you enter you out.

Simone Collins: Oh my God.

Malcolm Collins: And Trump was like, f**k. Like, I guess I’m in that, that basically because they want, they wanted this to be over with the last bombing, right?

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: But anyway and the way that they’ve been able to, like the, the way that they’re trying to handle this is basically just like, we’ll kill whoever you elected as an antagonistic ATO going forwards is

Simone Collins: that’s what I wanted to ask you. [00:27:00] What you read on the ultimate outcome is gonna be because. In general, I think this kind of foreign involvement is unpopular among Americans and many others because it doesn’t tend to end well, even though it it

Malcolm Collins: hasn’t ended well historically.

It ended spectacularly well in Venezuela.

Simone Collins: I would say that’s a to be continued kind of thing. It’s still in the midst of happening.

Malcolm Collins: It’s not to be, we, we, the situation in Venezuela is resolved. Venezuela is stable with a new government that has acted while they have spoken negatively about the us. I mean, of course she has to, if she was working with us to do this power transition.

Yeah. They have acted, they have been releasing prisoners of war. They have been loosening up on the draconian rules that they had on our, their people. They are opening up, economically speaking. We are getting access to their oil at preferential prices. And they stopped sending oil to Cuba and they broke off all of their connections that were damaging to us with our geopolitical enemies, like China.

Like, I don’t, I don’t understand like what you, it was, it was like ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. Like, the, [00:28:00] the, the situation. So this is what I expect to happen. The council that would elect the next ayatollah is either going to do it in secret or not do it at all. Like they’re gonna be really quiet about it.

Speaker 32: So they did elect him over the weekend, , I think late last night actually. , And it was the Ayatollah sun, which is actually really bad for the optics of Iran, as the entire point of the Shah revolution was to get rid of a hereditary monarchy. And now it looks like they just replaced that with another hereditary monarchy, which further loosens their legitimacy.

Malcolm Collins: They’re really afraid to do it right now. Right? Yeah. Because oh, yeah’s basically saying, well, we’ll kill the, whoever you elect they’re still going to the way they’re structured, probably elect a hardliner Islamic conservative anti-Israel person. The question of is this works is then does Israel kill him?

If Israel kills him, and especially a few of them after they were elected, which it appears they might have the capacity to do eventually one of them is just gonna be like, maybe we need to rethink this idea. Like the moment [00:29:00] he’s elected, he’s like, guys, I have a great idea. Let’s stop being antagonistic to Israel in the United States.

Hmm. Let’s stop killing the protestors. Right? Like, and and, and that’s even just like a self preservation thing. I mean, that’s basically what the US did was this Venezuela, this Venezuela lady is not like a capitalist or whatever. She’s not like, actually she was like Maduro’s right hand man for ages.

She just understood, oh they can take me out whenever they want. I guess I’m gonna play ball because I’m dictator now and I like being dictator. This is kind of cool. It’s a completely new strategy for foreign policy that like we just didn’t try before. Like, oh, just try to create a situation where the new dictator doesn’t want to act in a way that’s against our geopolitical interests.

Simone Collins: Mm-hmm.

Malcolm Collins: Now whether that plays out Now, as I’ve said, the situation I ran is harder than the situation in Venezuela. And what ends up happening in Cuba is also like, we don’t know, like s stuff is bad in Cuba right now. And what could end up happening to Cuba is Cuba goes the way of Haiti which is [00:30:00] just Haiti.

No, not, no. It just becomes a complete hellscape. And the world forgets it exists, which is, by the way, what happened to Haiti. Haiti, Haiti is still happening, by the way. People, barbecue is still like basically running things there. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Literal hellscape. So, and I think a lot, a lot, a lot more places in the world this is gonna happen to, I mean, we basically memory hole it because there’s not a lot of Jews in Hades, and as they say, no Jews, no news.

You know, nobody cared when the Iranians were being killed en mass, except for conservatives because, you know, we actually care about, you know, people dying. Right. You know? But anyway sorry, what, what, where was I going with this? So, this, this gets resolved now. Let’s talk about the Cuba, Venezuela situation.

They were like the two tools, and if you wanna talk about like North Korea, how tied in they were with all of this. North Korea has been like frantically saying like, if you kill any North Korean citizens in Iran, well considered an act of war. And I think that this serves to remind you that North Korean Iran were tight, like North Korea was sending its citizens to work as slave labor in Iran, right?

Like, they don’t, they don’t actually care. I mean, talk about, [00:31:00] when you talk about the forces that raid against us, how tight they are. It looks like right now, Russia within Ukraine, we know that they have deployed some North Korean soldiers and they might be increasing that significantly. Hmm. And they appear to be doing this in exchange.

For modern weapons to North Korea. Mm-hmm. But a a a a player like China or something like that is increasingly isolated. And in a way that is interesting because they’re, they’ve got so many internal geopolitical issues right now that like, and this is something I should note in terms of like regime change, when people are like, where do we target next?

Who do we target next? If you’re, if you’re looking at this in a Trump style one of the things that he sort of takes is he’s like, okay, one only target leaders that are nearly universally hated.

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: Like basically everybody has to agree this person is terrible in almost 90

Simone Collins: 10. That’s his thing.

Malcolm Collins: Country seems to hate him. Yeah. 90 10. And that was true of, of Maduro and the Ayatollah. Okay. Mm-hmm. [00:32:00] You, you so don’t, don’t do, don’t do it. Wishy-washy. I mean, we, I might love to take out the German government right now, you know, ignoring the will of their own people’s vote with the A DF conservatives winning the majority, and then them freezing the a DF outta the government, putting them under surveillance.

I mean, they are a a police state. And the way that we would think of one historically was one political party living under surveillance despite viewer voters with their viewpoints getting a majority win of the vote with the conservative A DF victory in the last election cycle. You know, they, they, they, they, they are a major geopolitical enemy to us going forwards.

And this isn’t because like Trump did something wrong with him. They’re just a country that has experienced a drift into fascism. And in, in sort of a, a more traditional sense, you know, the, the state exists. It, nothing exists, but the state. And, and when you get to this level of socialism, that’s, that’s what it is.

I mean, musin laid this out. That is, that is what definitionally, the inventor of fascism said fascism is. And, and when he says the state, he doesn’t mean the land or its people. He means the ideology that that state embodies. And [00:33:00] that’s, that’s what we’re seeing. But fortunately, they’re, they’re gonna be economically irrelevant through, given their, their demographics and that they have turned off all their power plants like idiots.

Why, what

Simone Collins: not ideal?

Malcolm Collins: But no, the point I’m being is, is, is so like who does that leave on the board in terms of people who we might be going after next? Putin Kim Jong-un. And the, the what’s left at the Castro regime the Castro regime, I do not expect them to go up and take out because the, the that situation seems to be resolving on its own without any oil.

Like, like the, there’s been talks of negotiations. I think that they might do something eventually with that, but I, I don’t expect them to move that quickly on that, given how bad the situation is there right now. So right now it’s just negotiations and I suspect those are already happening. See our episode on you know, G’s got two weeks left.

Be, they’re out now of oil. And that you, you, you know, you need oil for everything a

Simone Collins: little bit.

Malcolm Collins: Then you’ve got the situation in North Korea. The second thing you did is, so first everybody has to hate the person. So that, because [00:34:00] it makes progressives look really bad when there’s like Iranians in the streets cheering that the Ayatollah is finally dead, who tortured and killed their family, and then leftists like free Iran.

And they’re like, but that’s like what we’re doing, right? Like, what did you think that this wasn’t an, this wasn’t an occupation of Iran by a hostile power that that mass killed leftists, by the way after using them to win support. But North, the, the other thing is, is he wants situations where somebody else has a financial interest in stabilizing whatever’s gonna happen in the region.

Mm-hmm. And I think that’s why we’re moving slower on Cuba, because nobody really has a financial interest in stabilizing or an ideological interest. With Venezuela, the oil companies had a financial interest in rebuilding Venezuela, right? Mm-hmm. Yeah, sure. Get them to go back in, rebuild the infrastructure, everything like that.

With Iran, Israel and Saudi Arabia in the UAE, you know, if they can expand their power projected in, in the region, oh my God. Gift box package for them. Right.

Simone Collins: Basically, yeah,

Malcolm Collins: don’t do it ourselves. Basically don’t do what Bush did, which is you [00:35:00] know, MacArthur Plan 2.0. That was stupid. Okay.

Trying to make a democracy in the Middle East was stupid. Bring back the Shah or something like that. In terms of North Korea, you might have a situation for that because South Korea for a long time, and especially the people who run the Chis now younger people in South Korea, they don’t want to take on the cost of handling North Korea.

But what you gotta remember is all the power in North Korea is with the tribal heads I’ve described South Korea as sort of like a collection of fascist states competing against each other in a communist, in a capitalistic ecosystem.

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: And, and who do you think is gonna get all those road paving contracts?

Who do you think is gonna be remaking all the North Korean infrastructure?

Simone Collins: Hmm.

Malcolm Collins: Who do you think they are? Foaming at the mouth at the opportunity to get the government to take out a ton of debt in this big sort of national savior project or whatever. Now, do I think it’s actually a good idea for South Korea to allow a bunch of people who are brainwashed under a North Korean system to vote in a South Korean election cycle?

Mm-hmm. Or probably not. But that’s again, the type of thing [00:36:00] where we can go in do a surgical thing. And, and, and also the thing was North Korea, like if you really wanted to handle North Korea the way he handled Venezuelan just go keep killing whoever is at the top of the leadership take out their nuclear program which is going to be harder to do, which is likely why we are not doing this yet.

And then just tell whoever takes the position, be like, you get to keep your dictatorial state. Just treat people a bit nicer. Okay? Marginally nicer. That’s all we’re asking for. And normalize your relationships with us. Mm-hmm. And stop helping your, your jerk friends. Okay. And it turns out that a lot of dictators when they have seen the last dictator, and keep in mind like.

This form of power projection is so powerful because now Kim, Kim Jonin has seen this, like every other dictator has seen this in every other position, right? Like with Russia, when this started happening, Russia and Iran had a mutual defense pact Russia, like, like a nato, like was supposed to come to Iran’s aid.

And it, it [00:37:00] immediately said, oh, these are counter-terrorist bombing runs. This is not a, this is not an invasion. And they rumor is like, I haven’t seen this confirmed yet, but they even turned off some of their satellite things that they had given Iran to protect. Oh, bombing runs.

Simone Collins: Yikes.

Malcolm Collins: Well, I mean, I, I’m Putin.

I’m like, I better stay on Trump’s good side, I’ll tell you that. Right? Like the, the words were, Trump is like all those beautiful ettes, you know, wouldn’t it be shame if I dropped a bomb on them? And that’s why Putin didn’t invade Ukraine. And I think a lot of people were being like. Putin didn’t really think Trump might do that, like a sane Putin.

And I think now a lot of people are like, oh, he was, he was probably really considering it. Right? Like, geopolitically this sort of changes everything. And so the question is, is, is what allowed for this to happen geopolitically? Like why, why did we have to try to kill at the height of Spycraft Fidel Castro 136 times?

I always put my episodes into AI to ask if I made any factual errors after I record them, and here it goes. , You made a big one was this [00:38:00] 136 times. Apparently it was over 600 times. .

Malcolm Collins: And yet we get Maduro and Al Khomeini on our first tries, right?

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: The answer is a couple things. Thing number one is the way that the CIA operated in the past was a joke. Giant bureaucratic institutions in the, you know, they had like the staring at goats experiments and stuff like that.

Mm-hmm. And the weird stuff like Ruby Yard believes that they discovered parallel universes. And I’m like, no, actually just a huge branch of the, the CIA was actually controlled by Scientologists. See our episode on that one? I think what a

Simone Collins: trip. Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: Like Canis read minds. It’s, it’s hilarious how crazy it is when people think the US government discovered paranormal something or another.

I’m like, no, that, that was a bunch of Scientologists. And, and if you had a government, but anyway, basically they were just idiots. Is, is is one thing. And the other thing is, and Simone and I have noted this, is that when you. You know, outsource something to another person. Like humans. Humans are like, generally like [00:39:00] borderline mentally handicapped, like most of them.

Right. You know, so, we just don’t like dealing with ‘em. We like dealing with AI agents, by the way, live now on our five.ai. Still very buggy, super alpha, but we’re, we’re improving those. But that’s actually what we have seen within these latest things is they, they didn’t give it to these bureaucrats, they gave it to elite military groups.

Simone Collins: Yeah. Small, yeah.

Malcolm Collins: Not through intelligence, but elite military groups. And then, and I’m saying, you know, start to dismantle intelligence if they’re not helping us with this stuff. Elite military groups combined with AI technology satellites, you know, not, not the way that we did things historically.

Right. The amount of AI that was probably used in the triangulation of these people’s positions and stuff like that was enormous.

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: Secondarily we are partnered very tightly right now with a government that, and when people are like, Iran was Israel’s enemy, not ours. No. Death to America was Death to America, right?

Speaker 28: [00:40:00] And for people who are like, whoa, we’re getting in another Middle East war because of Israel. What do you mean another Middle East war? Because of Israel, Israel asked us not to go to war with Iraq. If you think, oh, we want, we don’t want another war like Iraq, where Israel told us, Israel told us, don’t do that.

I don’t want you to do that. That is actively against my interests and this is well documented.

But it also doesn’t even pass a sanity test. Like what did Israel gain from our war in Afghanistan or Iraq?

Malcolm Collins: Like we were on, we were on the the meal board. People who say that are just traitors, they’re either getting money, I think directly from Iran, their, their fake accounts.

Simone Collins: I think it’s simpler than that. I think that there, because we’ve even been asked by some people what we think about the people on the right who are against this action because there are some people, and no,

Malcolm Collins: I, I don’t, I don’t believe there are really many people on the right against this

Simone Collins: action.

Well, I think if you’re anti-Israel, it’s really hard to stand this because this was Israel’s idea kind of. And if you are [00:41:00] anti-Trump, you can’t get excited about this. ‘cause then you’re giving Trump credit for doing something awesome. So there are going to be people on the right. Who are against this because of those.

So I, I want primarily

Malcolm Collins: I mean my take on this, right, is every real influencer who I follow on the right, like somebody who I consider like intellectually saying and interesting to listen to. I have not heard a single one of them frame this anything other than universally glowingly. The only people I’ve really heard go against this are people who either just are not particularly tethered to reality, just like cons.

Complete conspiracy, brain cooked people like say Candace Owens. And I don’t know if she’s against it, but I suspect she probably is ‘cause she’s very untethered from reality. See our episode on, on psychosis Maxing with Candace Owens. Or there are people who seem to be controlled opposition in the right, you know, like, Tucker Carlson and Nick Fuentes where, you know, they’ll, they’ll, they’ll stand, remember Tucker Carlson was standing Venezuela, [00:42:00] right?

Like before we went into this, like literally like Venezuela is good because they kill gay people. Like what? What? Yeah. Like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. This guy is not right wing in any sort of a traditional context. Right.

You know, in, in, in terms of like the saying. Right. And as we, we’ve done other episodes Nick Fuentes appears to be hugely AstroTurf, first of all.

And second of all, controlled opposition. I don’t, I just don’t understand what position did he hold? The controlled opposition wouldn’t hold. Right. Like, you know, whoever is elected the next head of the Republican party he’s gonna be against. And the fact that, you know, that today means that you know that he’s not interested in Republicans winning.

Speaker 33: and he knows, he knows that the Iranian government tried to have Trump assassinated, right? Like a government tries to have Trump assassinated. We assassinate their leader and he’s like, oh my God, how could you do that? The United States? Oh, that’s so horrible. . Early on when I covered him, I tried to give him the benefit of the doubt.

I tried to act like there was something real behind him, some sort of real movement. I just don’t buy it anymore. I don’t think anyone who’s seriously a right winger is [00:43:00] out there supporting the ayatollah of Iran., like, oh, if we had boots on the ground and I ran, if we had some major invasion force, yes, it would make sense to be against that.

But that’s not what’s happening. . So if you’re standing Iran right now, you’re just standing the ayatollah, right? You’re just standing the regime. And I don’t understand how any sane person with , a non completely leftist brain cook on things could be having these opinions. And so my only thought is, , the people who still support him after all of this, I just don’t really have any patience anymore.

Like, you wanna go out there and you want to criticize Israel’s actions in something like Gaza, I can be like, oh, maybe he doesn’t have all the facts, or maybe he doesn’t understand what’s going on or whatever. But when you go out there and you say, uh, this country that tried to assassinate our president, that we assassinated their president and we don’t have boots on the ground, and I don’t like that.

And there’ve been our, one of our primary, if not our primary geopolitical adversary for [00:44:00] almost half a century. . And I’m against us winning there. , That’s no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. When he goes, oh, I’m pro Epstein. He’s like, Epstein is cool, like, and awesome.

Speaker 37: Jeffrey Epstein was probably so cool. Like he was probably the coldest, coolest guy. You know?

Speaker 35: i’m like, what? Like when I saw that, I was like, oh my God.

Oh my God. Like, come on people. This is who you’re supporting.

When you say Epstein is cool, you aren’t speaking truth to power or something like that, you’re just reflexively saying whatever you think is the most offensive thing is because you’ve learned. It’s a brain hack for simpletons that gets them to follow you and cheer I.

Speaker 43: I wanna be in the Special Olympics. Bird.

Malcolm Collins: Mm-hmm. Especially given that he says he believes like life being as a conception. And he knows that we are fighting to make things like [00:45:00] abortion more restrictive, and yet he would fight against that. Right? Like the, the, that is like being supportive of what is apparently in his mind a genocide, but it’s just unimportant to him unless he can have complete ideological purity which is silly.

It, it, it, it shows to me that I don’t think he really holds the beliefs. He says he holds. Because if I believed that strongly that life began the conception, I would not be constantly sabotaging the party. Given, given what the other side believes. So I think some of them are just like controlled oppositions or people who are just trolling for trolling sync.

I really think Nick Fuentes is, is just trolling for trolling syn. And then he doesn’t know that he’s controlled. I think that he’s then just platformed and ad bought by by people who want to hurt because like, look, look, he’s everywhere all of a sudden. Right. How does that happen? Oh, because leftist news sources, right?

Then a bunch of Twitter accounts that are probably, you know, Pakistani, right? Like that’s what we saw with a lot of these, quote unquote, like based Twitter accounts, was the big XLE is a lot of them showed that they were never actually on our side. Right. The, the, and I was talking to this reporter, it was a reporter who reached out [00:46:00] for a major.

Newspaper and she goes like, what, what are the people who you, when I, when I’m watching my circle, you know, like leaflit and nux taku and asmogold, gold and stuff like that, people, I consider like normal, sane rightists. None of them have, have had anything to say about this that was negative. And, and these are people who, who might criticize other things.

It’s the right dad, but on this stuff, no, just like universal. Like what, what do you, what are you even on about is one when somebody’s like, well, Iran isn’t really our enemy. And like you can show a video from like, well this is them shouting, like, death to America, like last year. Like, what do you mean?

Like, this is in the party’s like bylines, right? Like Death to America. You literally like, do you take me for a complete imbecile? Like do you take, are your followers just complete imbecile? Like, do they not like understand like, what, what’s, what’s going on out there? Geopolitically

Simone Collins: speaking? Well, I think you’re forgetting that there’s a.

Non-trivial level of agreement with the Death to America argument among American progressives. [00:47:00] America is the enemy in their opinion.

Malcolm Collins: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. But these conservatives are citing was that team right? Like, so I think that that’s, that’s a big thing. And so I, I think a lot of it is just, I, I just, I don’t understand how you can be like somebody who has actually thought through this.

Even if you hate Israel, even if you think that and note, I mean, our position on Israel has tempered a lot recently. And you, you can see some of our videos on that. Even, even, even if you think that Israel’s manipulating us and we shouldn’t be giving the money and this disproportionately geopolitically helps Israel, which it does.

It’s still overwhelmingly in our geopolitical interest that this is resolved. And, and the war so far has gone overwhelmingly well. We just need to have the, the the moral fortitude to step back after we install another dictator. Right. You know, don’t change things that much. Let them stay whatever they want, just get them like what we did in Venezuela.

If we, and this is where things get scary, if we repeat [00:48:00] what we did in Venezuela, and this works out one quarter as well as the Venezuela situation did. This like if I’m Trump administration, it’s like, who’s next? You know, this, this changes everything about the level of power projection America has.

And, and the, the one thing I’d note on, on this situation is we were able to do this because of Mosad. Right. And if we, if we end up stabilizing the situation, it’s gonna be in a large part because of Mossad. Yeah. And that’s why it’s useful even if somebody is being a selfish and douchey friend, which I think Israel often is like, Hey, give us money.

Like, I’m only gonna be, it’s like, come on man, like you’re doing well. Okay.

Speaker 14: My trick don’t work on, I make only money.

Malcolm Collins: Like, stop shaking me down every time we hang out. Right. But like, genuinely, they also helped slip me like , the pathway that the school bully or whatever was going to be walking on so we could jump him. I’m like, I am really annoyed [00:49:00] that you’re a jerk to me and, you know, paning me for money all the f*****g time.

Speaker 14: I make only money.

Malcolm Collins: But, but that costs me less than being able to deal with a country that we’ve been trying to deal with for half a century.

Simone Collins: Yeah,

Malcolm Collins: this holistically. Now I also wanna talk about how much Iran screwed the pooch on this and how, like, so, so this war starts and Iran then decides that it’s gonna start shooting missiles at somebody who hadn’t even attacked them, which was the UAE.

So they sent, I think it was 350 missiles. All of them were intercepted by the ua e’s interceptive system, different from Israel’s interceptive system. But anyway it showed that it, it would potentially even better than the Iron dome. Really? Yeah. I

Simone Collins: didn’t even know they had one until you just mentioned it.

Sure.

Malcolm Collins: And this is huge for the UAE actually, and, and huge for geopolitics. One, it showed to everyone in the region that like, yeah, Iran will just randomly flail and start attacking you if you’re not like full threaded on their side. Mm-hmm. And they were shooting these into tourist [00:50:00] areas.

They were shooting these into residential areas. You know,

Speaker 38: And as I mentioned earlier, but I think it’s really important to reemphasize, is Iran has sent more missiles to non-combatant states than it has to Israel since the start of the war. Uh, this includes the UAE, Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Oman, and Jordan. , And then shortly before the war Iraq, , and oh Turkey as well, if we’re including the one that went by accident.

So they just. File, flailing out and hitting everyone. I do not understand how you could be more politically inept. Actually. Wait, did Mossad infiltrate them and get them to do this? Maybe they did. ‘cause I cannot believe that anybody who wanted them to win would do this..

Do you see? I’m learning to think like, like a Jew learning to be sneakier. Here. I’ll figure this out. I’ll figure this out.

Malcolm Collins: So I think one UAE is like, oh, I’m glad we’re not like Iran’s friend. Like this is, this is, they were as bad as we thought. But the last time I was in the UAE and I was talking with one of my friends there his mom was telling me, he is like, [00:51:00] she’s like, you know, honestly, I go to sleep like afraid.

Like every night that Iran is gonna try something. ‘cause you know, they’re just across the Gulf. Right. You know, they’re, they’re just like, you see this body of, that’s Iran on the other side of that. And they, they hate us, right? Because we’re in this wider, like Saudi us. Alliance. And and so a lot of people in the ye lived every day in fear, and I think that we don’t, we don’t realize that, that they lived in fear of somebody who wanted to kill them within bomb range in the same way that like South Korea does.

And for a lot of them right now, they’re feeling like that threat is basically gone. The amount of, I think it was like using hundreds of thousands of ba missiles a day on the first days of the war, and now it’s down to something like a hundred a day or something like that. Like just barely any, like they’re running out of stockpiles.

Simone Collins: Well, but also the United States and Israel, as I understand it now, have shifted from taking out their leadership to not taking out their defense defense building infrastructure essentially. Like they’ve, they’ve gotten rid of all the existing stuff. Now [00:52:00] they’re destroying the stuff to build their defense architecture.

So yeah, they’re not gonna be able to even make more bombs and missiles, et cetera. Right.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. No, it’s, it’s, it’s I mean basically the idea is, is destroy their infrastructure and leadership enough that it’s another few decades before they can reorganize anything. And they seem to be doing a pretty good job of that.

But the, the thing is, is that if Trump wants to continue this staying friends with Mossad is going to be useful in this type of power projection because they’ve shown especially with the pager text, like, and, and, and being able to know the room that he was in enormous aptitude at that

Simone Collins: is so fascinating.

I wish I knew how I knew that.

Malcolm Collins: So, well, the funny, here’s that anecdote. So, and this was actually leaked by the Young Turks. Okay. So there’s, they, they would be in a place to know this, right? Like Chuck Youer this, this comes from him. ‘cause I was trying to confirm this. Is at one point they built an anti Mossad task force in Iran.[00:53:00]

Okay. And they later found out hold on.

Simone Collins: No, no. That like within it was a Mossad agent.

Malcolm Collins: No, it’s not just that within it was Masad agent. So it, it came out yeah, the, the head of the unit was a double agent for Masad of course. And then there were 20 other double agents in the task force.

Simone Collins: It’s like mostly massage agents.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. It’s just like not an organization to take out, you know, the Jews. And it turns out and

all

Simone Collins: these people start volunteering for it. They’re like, wow, let me help. I’d love to help. This sounds great. Sure.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Yeah. It’s like, actually, you know, if I was a Middle Eastern country, I would start one of those organizations to, to like track down Mossad.

Then like a year later, just go and be like, we’re executing everyone who works here. Like we, our honey trap for Mossad is just created an anti Mossad agency. Oh

Simone Collins: my God.

Malcolm Collins: But yeah, [00:54:00] no, I, it’s, it’s just ge geopolitically where we are right now. I almost, I’m just like astonished. I’m astonished if, if you’re like a politics, why we spent our entire lives trying to deal with Cuba, Venezuela, and Iran.

Simone Collins: Mm-hmm.

Malcolm Collins: And it might be over and even it’s over. Everyone else is cornered at this point. And that what, what does that mean, geopolitically for the United States? I, I mean, we are at a, a level of geopolitical dominance right now that no political power has ever had in human history like this. This might at this point be bigger than what we had in the end of World War ii.

And that’s the final point I wanted to make here. When I was talking to this reporter. I remember what I wanna say. She’s like, well, weren’t people in the right like America first? Like, weren’t we against invasions? And it’s like, yeah, we were against invasions. ‘cause like, we hated what happened with Iraq.

We hated what happened with Vietnam. We didn’t wanna [00:55:00] get dragged into something like that again. We love killing terrorists, right? Like we, we want to be the hero country that goes out and takes out bad guys, right? And then has people from those countries cheering in the streets and everything. We just didn’t like the business of nation building, right?

We didn’t like the business of boots on the grounds and occupations. We thought. You can’t have your cake without your bag of s**t. And so we were like, well, every cake has a piece of a turd inside it. And so I’m not gonna bite into that cake anymore. I’ve learned my lesson. Right? Trump has shown us a way to have our cake without a big turd inside it.

And if he continues to execute on this as well as he has in Venezuela, because with Venezuela, we didn’t know this was actually gonna play out well. And now that we know, in hindsight it appears to have

Simone Collins: [00:56:00] mm-hmm.

Malcolm Collins: It’s like, well, what now? Right. Like, what now? I don’t know. I, I, I, I honestly you know, we’re, we’re entering a new world.

And this also could be very good. Like I’ve often said, I think that the world that we’re heading into is gonna be a by power structure, not the US and China, but the US and Israel is being the two core powers and thus potentially antagonistic to each other as world powers often are. But if we integrate the way that we are handling this, it becomes harder for us to become antagonistic to each other.

And so we might actually be able to achieve a degree of global geopolitical dominance without you know, they just gotta hope dims don’t win and screw all this up. Somehow be like, oh, we’re giving, we’re giving it all back.

Simone Collins: I mean, odds are that they will win in the next presidential election.

That’s just generally how things go. So, I mean, what about that? Because what this has also demonstrated is that it is a [00:57:00] nation’s imperative to, I guess, have nuclear capabilities because I don’t think we would’ve done this to Iran had we known they had usable nuclear weapons. And now this is demonstrated like, well, okay, I need to make sure my nukes work or else the United States is coming for me.

Like I don’t think Kim Jong Un is on the chopping block because we know presumably that they have nukes also. Have you heard like they’re thinking it looks like his daughters next in line, which would be delightful. I mean,

Malcolm Collins: are you actually like win for feminism?

Simone Collins: I mean, she’s a Yeah. Girl. Girl. Bus girl, whatever.

Female

Malcolm Collins: dictator, mass murderers.

Simone Collins: She’s got style, she’s got verve. And ever since, so Ozempic hit, she’s slimmed down a lot. She’s looking great. So yeah, I didn’t

Malcolm Collins: like the fat version of her, the thin version. You know,

Simone Collins: she looks chic. She looks chic. Gotta say, you know, it’s the new flex. You try to get an invite in South Korea, which is kind of saying a lot when everyone else [00:58:00] is starving.

The whole like moon face was more for like, well she has food. We don’t, she must be a big deal. But yeah, I dunno what,

Malcolm Collins: what’s more likely to happen with Korea, just so people know. North Korea has been doing a lot of trades with Russia right now to expand its military force and modernize it because it was, yeah, dreadfully out of like Iran by the way showing off us made military planes in like its propaganda videos that are literally 70 years old and made by their enemy.

It’s like, bro, like

Simone Collins: isn’t it showing video game footage as well?

Malcolm Collins: Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. They’ve been showing video game footage, AI footage.

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: So, we are, what’s weird that Trump has somehow been able to do is to be the global good guy, take out the dictators that the own people hated in these situations without the boots on the ground, without the enormous cost.

Mm-hmm. We are getting the jingoism of post-World War II America of, you know, Iranian women running around on the streets of New York, hugging random strangers and screaming that, that [00:59:00] is V-Day. Like without, how can you do this?

Speaker 18: Oh my God. Oh my God. I said he’s gone.

He’s, he’s gone. He’s gone.

Speaker 17: How can you be silent? This is not okay. I am, I, I’m no longer gonna support Democrats. You Iranian. None of you should support Democrats. I’m honest. Honestly, I’m, I’m livid. I’m livid. I’m done with them completely. Just acknowledge the truth. Islamist Marxism is a terrorist entity. 90 million Iranians held hostage.

For 47 years because of your silence.

Malcolm Collins: Right. Like, and what a lot of people say is, well, you know, you’ll pay the cost eventually, but like, he handled Venezuela.

So I guess we’re gonna see, we’re gonna see

Simone Collins: yeah, I am. What, what [01:00:00] did they say? Cautiously optimistic. Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Oh the, the point I was making earlier, I dunno if I finished this one, is now with Israel moving into Southern Lebanon and wiping up Hezbollah. Mm-hmm. Like, there isn’t even like the ability for power projection in Iran anymore with Hamas and Hezbollah taken out.

Right. So like, this is. Fascinating in terms of like, what are the Saudis and the UIE gonna do after this, right?

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: Anyway love you. I thought it was funny, like the last time we were talking about this was, was Venezuelan and people were like, oh, you just wait and see everything’s gonna fall apart, or they’re not gonna, we’re I am like, I don’t know, it seems like they set things up pretty well.

Or, or the US is gonna face like major retaliations for this and you, the, the things will never be the same. And it’s like, well, when, right. Yeah. Could we face retaliations? Yeah. But. From who? Like independent terror cells. There’s nobody who’s a, a terror cell tomorrow. That wasn’t a terror cell yesterday.

Like they might use this as justification, but if they were [01:01:00] nobody was radicalized by the killing of the ayatollah. Okay. Yeah. This, this is ridiculous, right? When people say this, especially if you’re like an Iranian and you just saw the mass slaughter of the Iranian people, right? Anyway fascinating, fascinating time.

Love you.

Simone Collins: I love you too.

And. It’s

Malcolm Collins: not actually particularly clear that you

Simone Collins: had this, you can still see through bruising through dermal blend is the the makeup of choice for battered women who have bruises to hide. I don’t, I didn’t find like your mom’s derma blend, so I think you can still kind of see though completely.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah.

She, her like half of her face is black right now.

Simone Collins: Yeah, the, the inside of my mouth is like a poorly sewn together ragdoll

Malcolm Collins: don’t talk much. Okay, sweetheart. I’m trying to, this is why we haven’t been doing new episodes recently, guys, and we had to wait to talk about this subject.

Simone Collins: It’s not just that, it’s not just that, like my face is [01:02:00] immobilized and incredibly painful and I’m constantly spitting out blood.

It’s that. Then I caught the cold that the kids had and then I poisoned myself with expired oatmeal because I can’t eat anything but like really soft, mushy foods and then I got terrible food poisoning. And

Malcolm Collins: I saved you from that by, by just going through. You’re like, oh, I think it was a surgery. And I go, I don’t think it was a surgery.

What else changed when you did the surgery? Did you eat anything new? And I’m like, and was it expired? And you go, yeah. Well, it was very old. And I was like, Simone, that’s expired oatmeal.

Simone Collins: You

Malcolm Collins: could die. You’ve got

Simone Collins: ergot green. Don’t kill people. And I’m like, oh wait. Ergot poisoning, et cetera. Right?

Malcolm Collins: I, I love that your knowledge of history is how you know about this.

You’re like, oh, well, oh, by the way, other fun thing for people, the agents on our fab.ai in, in extremely alpha version are finally live at this point,

Simone Collins: so

Malcolm Collins: excited. And you can test them and play with them in on the Discord, [01:03:00] the, specifically the R Fab Discord, not the Basecamp Discord make bug reports.

And I try to be check those every morning and be responsive to those. So the site’s getting updates typically multiple a day. And everything else is pretty stable on that. So I’m sorry, I’m just sort of like pulling up where I did my notes on this.

Simone Collins: Yeah. I’m keen to get an update from you because I was kind of in a, I was, you know, like walking up the stairway to heaven dying in bed.

And then I like get out of the haze and I’m like, wait, what? Christine Nome was fired. Wait, what? Like, Iran is falling apart. What is happening? Like, you, you fall asleep in this timeline for like two days. You know, you’re, you’re out of, out of content, you know, you, you go backpacking or something and the world is completely different when you come back.

I think it all started with that one guy who went on our long backpacking trip when COVID started. Just like, just before it became a big thing and then came back and the world was like completely different. And he was like, oh my god. Oh [01:04:00] God, I can’t smile. I look like George Washington when he like stuffed the cotton balls.

Now you

Malcolm Collins: can really see your relation to him now.

Simone Collins: Yeah. When he, they, they, for context, he lost most of his teeth. Oh God. Is this genetic? Maybe he also had a thin biotype like I do, and his teeth just fell out because of that too. But anyway, he lost most of his teeth, had dentures that included some of the teeth from his slaves, which he apparently bought below market value.

So not great,

Malcolm Collins: sharp, sharp businessman there.

Simone Collins: I mean, you know, we love, we love a deal. I, I can’t, yeah, I’m with him on that. I love a deal. But anyway,

Malcolm Collins: I think of Simone, I think of you as an ethical woman. I think if you own slaves, you would buy their teeth at below market value, below market. You are an incredibly ruthless individual.

Simone Collins: Well anyway, so his portrait artists didn’t like the way his mouth looked caved in when they did his portrait. So allegedly they stuffed cotton balls or cotton batting into his mouth. And now I am kind of, [01:05:00]

Malcolm Collins: for

Simone Collins: people, people who don’t

Malcolm Collins: know, she is probably the most closely related person to George Washington, currently living.

Simone Collins: Well, he is a great, however many times over uncle of mine.

Malcolm Collins: So he didn’t have any kids himself, but she has descended from two of his siblings. Which you know, she, she should be, if he has accepted kingship, she should be the current Empress of America. And you’d be doing a great job of it. I, I know people would trust you to handle things.

Simone Collins: Oh, thanks. I just like him. I, I don’t want it. So,

Malcolm Collins: you do, Simone, you better want it if that job comes your way.

Simone Collins: Come

Malcolm Collins: on. All right, so we’ll get started here. You Yeah. But like George Washington, you’re also like, eh, I don’t really want it, not my thing.

Simone Collins: Teeth falling out. Puffy face, anorexic. He was so anorexic.

You’ve seen his uniform with the Smithsonian Museum, right? No, I wouldn’t have fit into that thing.

Malcolm Collins: And you were anorexic at one point. So you see just so many

Simone Collins: similar. I still am, I’m just a functional anorexic. Just like you’re a functional alcoholic, right? Like we, we, we just, we skirt the lines [01:06:00] like this is functional.

No, this is what I mean by functional. I literally had a DEXA scan to see exactly what my body fat composition is, to keep it at exactly the bare minimum, to be healthy and to have healthy pregnancy. So I’m at 20% just like that is, that is at the top end of what like a female athlete would have. And that is at the bottom end of what like a normal, healthy, reproductive woman would have.

And that is exactly where I’m gonna stay.

Malcolm Collins: All right.

Simone Collins: Mm-hmm.

Speaker 40: Okay. What are you guys doing? Yep.

Are you guys cleaning up?

I love you guys. Do you wanna kiss this one? No. No. You’re too busy. You too tight. Are you [01:07:00] too busy for a kiss?

Working hard or hardly working. Right guys? Yeah.

In this raw, no-holds-barred episode of Based Camp, Malcolm and Simone Collins dissect how Abraham Maslow repackaged Nietzsche’s Übermensch (Übermensch) into the modern, feel-good concept of “self-actualization” at the top of his Hierarchy of Needs—turning a call for radical self-ownership and moral creation into an elitist, therapy-gated path of perpetual vague self-improvement, peak experiences, and manic-pixie-dream-girl aesthetics.

We explore why the original Übermensch demands you build your own moral framework (independent of society, culture, or ancestors), reject herd morality, and embrace responsibility—while Maslow’s version lets the wealthy progressive elite pat themselves on the back without real introspection. Bonus rants on: the pyramid of sin (Maslow’s hierarchy normalizing indulgence), why strong-willed people are the true “inclusive” ones, Star Wars force analogies gone wrong, and why self-ownership beats self-acceptance every time.

If you’ve ever felt gaslit by positive psychology, therapy culture, or the urban monoculture—this episode is for you. Check out our book The Pragmatist’s Guide to Life (free ebook + audiobook for subscribers) for tools to build your own value system.

Episode Transcript

Malcolm Collins: [00:00:00] He basically tried to combine the Uber minch with the aesthetics of the manic pixie dream girl.

oh, I like to listen to the songs in my head. I’m sorry, I paid the cab driver in buttons.

When did you first suspect you were dating a manic, pixie dream girl? On her first date and. She said she wanted pancakes for dinner, but I felt alive. But then after a few months, and she can’t feed herself, she can’t pay bills.

She just wonders at the marvel. Every moment, we got married in a bouncy castle.

Do you think it’s possible to ever be truly. In the moment, the Native Americans believe everything is alive.. I told him the best place to see.

The night sky is laying in the middle of the street. It’s the flattest place there. She does seem happy. Happy as she can be, I suppose.

Malcolm Collins: Maslow flips this. Self-actualization is achievable through [00:01:00] education, therapy, supportive environments and personal effort. Not a heroic struggle alone. . So no.

What is actually said here, it’s saying, the Uber minch is elitist because to become an Uber minch, an individual has to overcome suffering.. Who has the potential to be self-actualize if self-actualization requires the fulfillment of all of the lower states of the hierarchy of needs?

Only the elite

and the fun thing about Laslo system. It is a system that makes everyone who is wealthy and sees a therapist think that they’re already at the top of it, and it explains to the rich progressive, who doesn’t want to think about why the poor have different world frameworks than them.

Mm-hmm. It helps them not think about it.

Would you like to know more?

Malcolm Collins: Hello Simone. I’m excited to be here with you today. Today we are gonna be [00:02:00] talking about the links between the Uber Minch as developed and defined by niche and the rebranding of the term self-actualization into its modern definition, which was done by Abraham Maslow of Maslow Hierarchy of Needs Face.

And you’re

Simone Collins: referring, you’re referring to Nietzsche. He’s just gonna call him Niche. Go with it guys.

Malcolm Collins: It, I don’t, Frederick Niet words have no place on this American tongue. Okay. They, they would dirty my mouth. Anyway, we have another episode. If you want to understand how Maslow rebranded the term self-actualization and how his rebranding was so toxic and largely destroyed the field of psychology and is the seedbed of the urban monoculture.

That is not what we’re gonna be focusing on in this episode. What we’re gonna be focusing on in this episode is, Maslow was pretty explicit in this, in some of his works. Self-actualization was a rebranding, an [00:03:00] explicit rebranding of the concept of the Uber Mitch, but it was rebranded to be palatable to a broadly progressive urban monoculture cultural perspective.

And through the rebranding, in a way, it became an inversion of itself. I think he thought he was just making little tweaks to it and not realizing that he was actually retooling the core of what it meant. Now, broadly speaking, I’m gonna go over what these two mean. And then we’re gonna go over how they contrast with each other in understanding and what we as individuals can take away from this contrast to understand how we can live meaningful lives.

So

Simone Collins: it is so crazy. Can you imagine when they first introduced this to you, like in your college psychology class, they’re like, oh, yeah, like there’s high Maslow’s hierarchy of needs and at the top it’s, it’s basically nietzche iss, [00:04:00] Uber mench. But let’s not talk about that. I’m not gonna, no, let’s not talk about that.

Malcolm Collins: The good thing about Nietzsche’s Uber mech, one of, one of the best things that contrast it was a hierarchy of needs and, and self-actualization is that the definition when you boil it down is actually pretty clear. And it’s, it’s, it’s not like vague, just a bunch of positive things.

Simone Collins: Okay.

Malcolm Collins: You are an Uber minch if.

You do not get your morality from your culture.

Simone Collins: Oh, so you’re not like, okay,

Malcolm Collins: society. Yeah. If you pick up what you think is right and wrong, because other people told you this is what’s right, and this is what’s wrong, you are not an Uber Mitch.

Simone Collins: Okay?

Malcolm Collins: If you develop what is right versus wrong, because you personally sat down and saw it through.

Now, it’s not saying that you reject morality or you embrace nihilism. It’s actually a specific [00:05:00] refutation of that.

Figuring things out for yourself is the only freedom anyone really has. Use that freedom. Make up your own mind.

Malcolm Collins: There is a way to say society is wrong or society isn’t necessarily right. As we’d see in the pragmatist guide to life, we do not live at the moral nexus of history. Yeah. You cannot assume that just because you, there’s a, a moral understanding today, and this is true of all people in the past.

Wherever you look in the past, there is going to be. Something that they did that today, we consider Absolutely Mortifyingly. Amoral.

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: And there are gonna be things that we do today that people in the future might find mortifyingly, amoral, like

Simone Collins: eat meat. That’s the most common conclusion.

Malcolm Collins: But that’s the, that’s the easy one I can think of, right.

Especially once lab grown meat is really easy to do. Yeah.

Simone Collins: Yeah. Future people are gonna be like, how were you able to swallow that? Whereas we see bacon cooking and we’re like, Hmm.

Malcolm Collins: So yeah. So I, I, I, and, and people can be like, well, no, morality [00:06:00] moves in like one direction. And I’m like, okay, well suppose you are of this progressive mindset and you think that there have been periods in history where, you know, I go to, let’s say.

A slave owner in the south or something like that, right? Mm-hmm. And I point to earlier periods of European history where like same sex relationships were more acceptable. And they’re like, well, those people were clearly evil. Look, society is always moving towards progress. And yet today, the things that had been normalized in the slave owning South but were less normalized during that period, but more normalized during earlier parts of European history.

And note, I’m not saying here that same-sex relationships were ever totally normalized. Like the, the them being totally normalized in Rome or Greece is just inaccurate. But there were forms of same-sex relationships that were more normalized than during height of slave. That, that they would say like, okay, well then maybe it goes in like a wave or something.

It’s like, no, you just need to, there are going to be things that are normal today that people in the future are gonna find mortifying. [00:07:00] So niche says you have a. Responsibility to not just accept morality, which is, I think interesting in that it goes against a lot of modern rightist philosophy. And that a lot of modern rightist philosophy says learn from your ancestors, embrace your culture.

Mm-hmm. Where Nietzsche says, no, learn from and evolve that culture into something better. That is,

Simone Collins: yeah.

Malcolm Collins: Okay.

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: It’s important to start with because I think a lot of people get the Uber mi wrong. They think it’s some weird racial hierarchy something or I, I do not know what they think it is. They, they, I think they think it’s like a genetically engineered person.

I sort of see this, this or, or the height of like German blood perfection and it’s like, no, that, that never had anything to do with it. That

Simone Collins: would, if I broadly. Were to model the leftist commentators that I constantly listen to online. I think what they would vaguely conjure in their minds is a [00:08:00] proto edge Lord.

And that is what an Uber mench is. And there’s no such thing as someone who’s actually like advanced. It’s just someone who like actively. Edge, lordy, or they would call themselves heterodox, if that makes sense.

Malcolm Collins: Well, it’s funny because they’re actually kind of, right. Yeah. It’s about somebody who defines their own moral truths, because that’s the only, if you’re following a form of morality, like obviously you are better than the pure nihilist if you, if you follow some moral framework.

But if you follow that moral framework only because somebody else told you this is what’s right and wrong, you’re, you’re patently lower on a global moral hierarchy than somebody who developed their own moral norms by putting thought into it. Right? Yeah.

Simone Collins: Well, and and to be fair, Malcolm and I are very, very passionate about this.

Before we knew what Che’s philosophy was all about, because we just didn’t study it,

Malcolm Collins: I thought he was an edge Lord. And then I saw that, I was like, that’s actually a really good definition.

Simone Collins: Well, this was after we published our first book called The Pragmatist Guide to Life, which is 100% about [00:09:00] this. It is saying.

I don’t care what you optimize for in life, morally and logistically, I just care that you show your work and here’s a guide you thinking like thoughts, experiments around common potential, things you may wanna optimize, be it hedonism or serving God or any variety of other things. And we just want people to actually take ownership of that thought process.

So we 100% respect. What he’s doing here and we like it. So, okay. I like this so far. So you’re, I mean, I don’t see then how Maslow’s hierarchy of needs is so bad, if that’s kind of the end goal.

Malcolm Collins: Well, because he took all that out of it.

Simone Collins: What?

Malcolm Collins: Yes. He, he

Simone Collins: took it. Wait, so he’s like, I like this concept, but

what,

Malcolm Collins: what, he liked the concept of like the elite philosophical form of human Right.

Simone Collins: Okay. Okay. He was

Malcolm Collins: taking some degree of self ownership. He just didn’t like the actual self ownership part. And

Simone Collins: so, okay, the,

Malcolm Collins: the, the, I think if I’m going to view Maslow’s hierarchy of needs and self actualization is he [00:10:00] handles it disfavorably, I would say what it really is, is just self-acceptance.

Just sort of like you are okay with your place in the world, which you can definitionally be at any point, right? But he’s like, no, you, you have to have all this lower stuff. See our other video on this. And then once you have all that, then you can be okay with where you are in the world and what you have in the world.

And that, that is it, it’s, it’s it’s self-acceptance, self-satisfaction. Now, if you’re going to then take the counter perspective to this and actually know it’s more sophisticated than that, let’s look at what I’ll take an an AI’s sort of rebuttal on this so you can get an understanding of how somebody might steal man his position against that.

Okay. They would say that that’s actually more about esteem needs level four and not self-actualization. Level five, where esteem needs involve feelings of accomplishment, confidence, independence, respect for others, and a stable, positive self-image. This can [00:11:00] include pride in achievement or feeling valued, and it’s more about elevation of the self.

EG, . I like who I am because I’ve succeeded. And I say here, well, yeah, but there’s different types of self-acceptance. And that wasn’t the type that I would be talking about here. But let’s look at what, what they would say as a counter self-actualization is it’s I te of just general self-acceptance.

Right? Masley defined it as a quote unquote desire to become more and more than one is to become everything that one is capable of becoming. Which you can see one how that builds on the concept of the Uber Mitch. Right? Like clearly he liked oh, you know, building yourself, but he removes the concrete definition.

This

Simone Collins: is the substance. There’s no point in building yourself if it’s not just something meaningful, but he just took that away.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. And just makes it self,

Simone Collins: it’s the road to nowhere. It’s so stupid

Malcolm Collins: about a sort of perpetual self-improvement without any definition as to what [00:12:00] better is. So,

Simone Collins: although I feel like that’s so.

Maybe it makes sense that this just seems so much like the path that people take. Like I remember so many of the classmates that you had at, at Stanford’s Business School, which this is one of the hardest to get into schools in the entire world. These are incredibly competent, smart, well connected, lucky and well-resourced people.

And so many of them really didn’t seem to have any moral framework or set of values that they really, they didn’t care about. And

Malcolm Collins: I I, that, that actually shocked me when I hit the halls of power in

Simone Collins: society. There were some Israelis and Mormons, I’m gonna say who actually did, I mean, they, they weren’t, I would say like Nietzche and or Uber Manchi in their in because they, this was their default culture.

Maybe they thought through it and come to own it themselves as well. Still, their big thing was just, I’m doing the best thing, I’m doing the correct thing. It was just no, no, no. Perpetual optimization. No.

Malcolm Collins: So you, you think like this means intelligence, that the Uber bench means intelligence. It it does not.

So, you know, Simone got her graduate [00:13:00] degree at Cambridge. I got mine at Stanford. You know, we’ve been in sort of the halls of power in society and the, you know, Peter Thiel, secret societies and everything like that, right? Like, and so I’ve encountered the, the best and brightest of what the institutions that are generally thought of as accumulating the best and brightest bring.

My first question, and this is Simone knows this from me, from our first date, to somebody who’s always like, okay. Like, what are you about? Like what are you attempting to do with your life? Yeah. What’s your purpose? Like, what are you here for? What do you, because I, I need to know how I can align my goals and their goals, and if there’s a useful alignment or if there’s not a useful alignment.

Simone Collins: Yep.

Malcolm Collins: The number of people who, who sputter and start outputting platitudes, when you put that question to them, which I think should be the number one question any individual considers mm-hmm. Is astonishingly high. In these, in these halls of power. I’d say if you are talking about an institution like a Stanford MBA, because that’s, you know, [00:14:00] the, the most exclusive of the, the institutes that we’ve been talking about here, maybe one in 20 people who go through have thought through.

What their purpose in life is and why they exist.

Simone Collins: The rest is just optimization. I am gonna be the best. So I need to go to the best school, get the best grades, earn the most money. We superlatives all the way down, but there’s, there’s no point to it. It’s just whatever is the most prestigious or seen as the highest achieving, then that’s what they’ll do.

You know, climb up to the highest rank of whatever organization, and then if that organization gets capped out, well then I guess I have to run for political office. And then because the government is a bigger organization, I guess I’ll do that. And then after that, who knows what, you know, I’ll be a philanthropist and, and basically pull the strings of multiple organizations by being their primary source of funding.

It just keeps going.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. And this is how people in positions of power get so easily captured by mimetic, contagions, like the urban monoculture that [00:15:00] you as a, I don’t know if you watching this, have thought through your own value system but you as a potential Uber minch me look at them and say, wait, but can’t they see how stupid and self-contradictory this value system is? Like, can’t they see the long-term consequences of adhering to this value system? Have they not had an single iota of internal self-reflection about what matters in life and what they live for? And the real answer is, and I say this very unfortunately, it’s, it’s no, they have not they, they, they may even find the concept of doing that offensive because it implies.

You know, sort of self ownership, which, which the urban monoculture, tgt is bad. Because if it can teach you that, then you don’t end up reflecting on these ideas. The next point I make about the Uber inch before I go further here, which is important in this, in this world, is you might be like, oh, that’s quite arrogant to call yourself to Uber inch.

You know, the Uber Mitch is a simply defined thing. Did you build your [00:16:00] own moral framework or did you take it from an outside source?

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: And it doesn’t

Simone Collins: matter if you are the wealthiest person in the world or impoverished, right? This has nothing to do with wealth.

Malcolm Collins: It doesn’t matter if you’re a genius or like literally mentally handicapped.

Simone Collins: Mm-hmm.

Malcolm Collins: You can be an Uber Mitch. So, so I, that’s really

Simone Collins: important. There’s nothing elitist about it at all, actually, or it’s not even like. I mean it is, it absolutely can come from a place of superior.

Malcolm Collins: Well, there is something elitist about it, and it’s elitist in our conception of it, and it was elitist in Nietzsche’s conception of it.

Simone Collins: Mm-hmm.

Malcolm Collins: Uber minch are morally superior to non Uber minch. Which is I think just an objectively and obviously true thing. As soon as you think through it, somebody who has taken ownership and saw it through a value system, even if it’s exactly the same as somebody else’s value system, is doing something of higher moral caliber by following that value system than the person who’s just following what everyone else says is right and wrong.

Mm-hmm. Because they’ve taken on this a, a, a, a additional layer of ver [00:17:00] moral verification. Hmm,

Simone Collins: okay.

Malcolm Collins: Somebody could be like, well, why was that moral verification necessary? Wasn’t that just like self masturbatory work if it ended up at the same place as society’s value? Like no, it wasn’t, because it may not have, and if it didn’t, it would lead to a completely different trajectory of this in person’s entire moral prism through which they see reality.

So, so it is elitist in that it does rank people into a scale of moral hierarchy. But it isn’t elitist in that only the mentally superior can engage with it. It’s more like the mentally superior in terms of I don’t know, being willing to be critical of society or being self-critical. That, that, that puts you in that category, not, not iq.

So back to what it’s saying, self-actualization is here. It is less about feeling good about yourself in a static way, and more about growth, authenticity, and actualizing innate potentials. It includes traits like realistic and [00:18:00] accurate perception of reality, including one’s self without illusions or denial.

Self-acceptance, accepting flaws without shame or defensiveness, but not complacency, autonomy and independence from external approval, creativity, spontaneity, and quote unquote peak experiences, moments of profound joy, insight, or transcendence. Now, note here, what you’ll see in some of these, some of these carry parts of the Uber min within them, right?

Autonomy and independence from external approval is sort of key to building your own moral framework, right? But then other of them are just completely. Like cued, urban monoculture, creativity spontaneity and peak experiences. What does that have to do with actualization? Right? Like what, what does that have to do with like living [00:19:00] as, that has to do with being a manic, pixie dream girl.

He basically tried to combine the Uber minch with the aesthetics of the manic pixie dream girl.

Simone Collins: Yeah. What do you think he was going for there? Just hedonism or something else, some kind of aesthetic or some kind of cultural trend at the time?

Malcolm Collins: So I think what he was trying to go is w with this was to say this uber wrench concept has a lot of baggage, but I want to create, because people love creating a categoried framework of society.

Let’s create a category framework of society. If you’d like to see some of ours, you can check out like our life stages and stuff like that, videos. If you have this category, framework of society and you have something at the top of it you, you, you then look to other systems that have similar things and the two systems that he very obviously pulled pretty hard from to the point of pla authorization is combining the Uber minch.

Twisted through a progressive lens [00:20:00] whiz the Buddha. And, and we talked about that a lot in the last episode there. There’s clearly a lot of Buddhist inspiration in the modern concept of self-actualization. It’s just this thing that is definitionally the best and that if you have to ask how it’s.

Qualitatively or quantitatively different from other states, that’s just proof that you don’t have it. And when you have it, then you’ll know. But because you’re asking about it, then you don’t know. I

Simone Collins: think that’s so much the, oh, as long as you want it, you can never have it. You have to let go completely.

Malcolm Collins: No, I know. I won’t even say that. It’s, it’s one of those, like in our video where we talk about like the lie of love, we point out that like romantic love as people describe it, probably doesn’t exist, but like normal people can’t get away with saying that because then people will be like, well, then you live in a loveless marriage.

Like, ha ha, look at you. Right? So you’ve gotta pretend that love this, this separate romantic attachment as an emotional set rather than as a commitment exists. And and I think that people pointed [00:21:00] out when, when we said that very accurately, that the Bible understood that, right? Like that love is about a choice, not an involuntary emotional state.

That’s just so much more awesome than other emotions. Like when they say love your neighbor as yourself, you know, they’re not telling them to have this emotion towards your neighbor. They’re telling you to treat them in a certain way. And when somebody commits to love and honor their wife, love is the same kind of word as honor in that sentence, right?

It, it means perform a duty to the person not feel a way about the person. But to continue here with traits that the self-actualized man has problem centered focus, tracking issues effectively rather than ego protection. I just love that sounds so Karen. And deep meaningful relationships without possessiveness which again, seems like you see how we go from there to the world of polyamory, right?

Like. [00:22:00] If you get jealous when your partner sleeps with other people, which is giving them happiness and you love them, right? Why are you saying that they can’t do that then? Right? They would say, right? Like, mm-hmm. You’re not self-actualize in that sense. You prove to yourself, yourself, actualization by getting cut, by allowing your partner to sleep with other people, right?

And I, I think where they going with that? The, the point being is, is you can see how it’s melding these ideas together. But, and, and I’ll note here that, that the, an area of overlap is that Maslow also says that self-actualization involves accurate self knowledge and humility. Alright, so, to continue, and I’ll note here, this is coming from Maslow himself because a lot of people are like, well, that just sounds like you’re describing a narcissist, right?

Like a really self-centered narcissist. And so he had to have, you know, his boilerplate argument about why this isn’t just an entire world [00:23:00] framing about how to be a better narcissist, right? And he emphasized itself actual pe actualized people where actually not narcissistic. They have a strong sense of reality testing, humility and resistance to self-deception.

Narcissism by contrast, involve distorted self-perception and a fragmented ego defensiveness, which are antithetical to self-actualization. On selfishness. Maslow noted that someone self-actualizing , often fuses, selflessness and usefulness into a higher utility. They pursue personal growth, but this naturally leads to good for others.

In later frameworks, he added transcendence as a level beyond humanity slash nature slash the universe, getting very Buddhism influence here and helping others grow to explicitly counter any self only interpretation thoughts.[00:24:00]

Simone Collins: This just seems so, seems so pointless, like on on what basis did he choose to, to add these? I feel like this is one of those things similar to all of these childhood wellbeing studies focusing on, on measures like self-esteem. Why self-esteem does that correlate with better health, longer lifespan signs of flourishing, like rates of marriage or wealth creation or family formation, the number of kids they have, like, I just don’t see what this correlates with and, and why he would choose it as a desired outcome.

Because I don’t see it as being correlated with particularly correlating with any sort of desired outcome.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, I know, I, I, I see that and I think that we can see that this is the case, by the way, that he developed his theory. He just looked at a bunch of people that mainstream society respects and then boil that down.

And what he got was a system [00:25:00] of values that looks a lot like mainstream society’s value systems, but surprise, surprise, that is more palatable to an average person in mainstream society because they don’t need to adapt. Right? They’re like, oh yeah, that’s, this works. Anyway, to continue here. Sorry, I’m feeling a little lightheaded.

I don’t know what’s going on.

Simone Collins: You’re not sleeping enough. That’s probably part of it.

Malcolm Collins: Oh. But I gotta get work to,

Simone Collins: yeah, maybe.

Maybe though. Maybe

Malcolm Collins: there’s a reason nobody else does fully edited daily podcasts that involve independent research instead of watching somebody else’s dream.

Simone Collins: Well that, and, and you know, the, the other full-time projects you have and also your

Malcolm Collins: Oh yeah. Reality fabricators really coming along. The agents.

Yes. It’s I mean it’s, it’s, as far as I know, working pretty bloodless now, except for like a problem with reroll from computers. Which is very exciting. Very exciting too. And the advertisements are starting and Yay. Yeah. Yay. And the audio feature is really [00:26:00] cool if you haven’t tried it. It’s a so fun to do inexpensive AI chats.

‘cause we’re not actually have it read by the AI itself. It’s read by a separate AI system. So you could do it in multiple languages really well too.

Simone Collins: Mm-hmm.

Malcolm Collins: Here we’re going to go into, a deeper dive into the concept of the Uber Mitch.

Okay. And then we’ll contrast the two and see how they, they relate to each other and are in a way inversions to each other. If they were a dark side and a light side of the force, they almost feel like to me, right?

Simone Collins: They do.

Malcolm Collins: Except the Nietzsche one is a dark side, which is a good side in this analogy.

I mean, I think in most analogies because they’re actually, I, I, I mean, I think actually. I almost wanna do a reworking of how the force is interpreted to show that the light side of the force is actually evil. Oh, that’s gonna make a great episode. And the dark side is actually good. It’s just that the way it’s interpreted in Star Wars always sort of forces dark siders to take on these horrible actions.

But if you look at it completely pragmatically to say a person. Decided [00:27:00] to use the force against the force’s own will for whatever was good for evolving humanity and moving civilization forwards.

Simone Collins: Right.

Malcolm Collins: That person would be a dark cider because they would be not obeying the will of a what? A non demographic democratically elected God entity that gets to tell an independent branch of like ninjas who just killed people on the streets.

Like, what is moral and what is not moral? That doesn’t, that doesn’t sound, that sounds like slave morality to me, man.

Simone Collins: Yeah. On, on whose authority does the force get to govern all humans? When the force

Malcolm Collins: didn’t even Right, but who, who voted for this? Why? Who says the force is intrinsically good?

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: Right. Like

Simone Collins: seriously. I mean, the, the only force that we know to be universal in our universe is entropy. Is that inherently good? I don’t know, man.

Malcolm Collins: It’s not, it’s, it’s, it’s, it’s pure evil and that the MIT chlorines, I, I also love that because we know that the force is [00:28:00] controlled by like living organisms that are symbiotes with humans and live in our cells.

So humanity who follows the light side is literally slaves to the hive mind of a parasitic organism.

Simone Collins: Yeah. I guess the analogy is to be like, well, my gut microbiome tells me to this, the toxoplasmosis my subject

Malcolm Collins: to the toxoplasma. They literally obey the toxoplasmosis.

Simone Collins: Yeah. My boys

Malcolm Collins: do an episode. Do it.

They need to get their horse dewormer, you know,

Simone Collins: they need to the, the jet. I need ivermectin.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Oh my God. Anyway, continuing here. So, he introduced the concept of the Uber Minch in his 1883 to 1885 philosophical novel, thus spoke raster. It’s a central idea in philosophy, representing the idea that a human who transcends traditional morality, societal norms, and human weaknesses to create new values and affirm life fully.

Mm-hmm. Now note here how this definition sounds a lot [00:29:00] squier than the definition I gave. And that’s because this is how it is commonly interpreted by people, even though that’s not how it’s actually laid out. Because these, like once you define your own morality, all of these other positive things come to you.

And I agree with that as well. You do get a lot of positive things from taking complete ownership over your own moral framework. Yeah. But yeah. But, but he, I think. Especially the people who have built on him went a little mystical, was what those nice things are afterwards, right? Like you then become a axiomatic good person where no, there’s a lot of people who’ve defined their own moral framework and we’re still really, they, they came up with horrible moral frameworks, right?

Simone Collins: Yeah, yeah. Actually a a lot of the people who have read our book, the Pima Dis Guide to Life and reported back to us of come up with conclusions that we wouldn’t come to, but we’re actually glad ‘cause it means that the book is not biased.

Malcolm Collins: Yes. Which was our goal. But can you believe there was ever a time in my life where I strove to be unbiased?

Simone Collins: What’s what you tried to go for with the first [00:30:00] four? Books. So

Malcolm Collins: yeah, four books out there that you could read written by Simone and Malcolm that are like, A dollar

Simone Collins: doesn’t have an ideological agenda, aside from just trying to make you more equipped and informed. Can you imagine?

Those are the days.

Malcolm Collins: So the Uber minch emerged in a world where God is dead, as niche said. Traditional religious and moral foundations have collapsed requiring individuals to overcome nihilism through self-mastery and creativity, and the will to power an innate drive to grow, dominate, and shape one’s existence, niche contextualized it as an evolutionary leap.

Not a biological superman, but a psychological and cultural one that embraces eternal recurrence living in as if one’s life repeats forever. Rejects herd mentality, slave morality, and embodies the idea of fate, love of fate. You know, this is interesting, the idea that your life repeats forever and you should [00:31:00] live as if that we argue for something similar, but different where we say that because the timeline has already played out.

We believe like, like time is just like distance or anything like that. Yes, yes. Another framework and the future is, is predestined, or all possible futures are predestined. Mm-hmm. Because of that, every moment in time is infinite. And therefore you have infinite moral responsibility for how you choose to burn every moment.

And the most important decision you can make is the framework you use and how you build the framework you use for making those individual choices. Which was the point of the book that we mentioned, the Prag Sky to Life Al also, it’s an audio book. If you get the ebook for free, you can just download the audiobook.

So, normally when you’re talking about the Uber minch, the, the key traits would be radical individualism and self overcoming rejection of pity equality, and conventional ethics in favor of aristocratic values. You can already tell this is getting the MAGA people [00:32:00] excited here, right? You know, joyful affirmation of life’s chaos, suffering and impermanence.

And then creativity as a form of power. The Uber minch legislates values for themselves and potentially others. So. You can see this is very psychologically helpful compared to this other framing. Yeah. It, it’s much more about personal responsibility without adding in all of these additional wiggle room.

Definitionally, you should feel good about yourself if you indulge in X or y you know, ex extremist self-image. Right?

Simone Collins: Like, it seems like this is mostly about being at a, being effective at whatever matters to you. And caveat, whatever matters to you is something that you personally take ownership of You.

No one, you’re not doing what anyone else told you to do. You just, you decided what’s best and you’re doing that. That sounds so good. I want that for everyone.

Malcolm Collins: All right. So, how are they actually different from each other, and where would people, like, where [00:33:00] would Maslow be like, oh my God, this needed to be rethought because this comes downstream of nietzschean philosophy. Right? Yeah. If I said package this. The positive psychology community elitism versus inclusivity, and I’d argue that in actuality, the Uber minch is more inclusive and less elitist.

Then self-actualization, but we’ll get to how in a second. Okay. But what a, what an outsider would say is Nietzsche’s Uberin is a rare aristocratic and anti egalitarian, reserved for the strong-willed few who can endure isolation, create new values and potentially scorn.

Or lead the heard the last men complacent masses. It’s forged in crisis suffering and radical self overcoming often with Tempus edge towards ordinary humanity. Maslow flips this. Self-actualization is a universal human potential [00:34:00] achievable by anyone. Once basic needs are met, he estimated one to 2% fully reach it.

But the pathway is open through education, therapy, supportive environments and personal effort. Not a heroic struggle alone. It’s for the democratic age. I think teachers, therapists, managers, and everyday people pursuing growing. And I’d like to point out how twisted this understanding actually is. So no.

What is actually said here, it’s saying, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. You see, the Uber minch is elitist because to become an Uber minch, an individual has to overcome suffering. They have to overcome trials. They have to live a privileged existence to be self-actualized. All you need is an elite education and having all of your needs met all of your

Simone Collins: food.

Oh, don’t forget seeing the therapist even for really well-resourced, [00:35:00] like, okay, wealthy people, we know seeing a therapist is really expensive. So that,

Malcolm Collins: but what’s ironic is as soon as you put it like that, you realize, oh, the huddled masses is who have the potential to become the Uber Mitch. Yeah. Who has the potential to be self-actualize if self-actualization requires the fulfillment of all of the lower states of the hierarchy of needs?

Only the elite self-actualization within Maslow’s system is definitionally reserved for the elite and then gated through elitist institutions like. Therapy and elite education.

Simone Collins: Mm-hmm.

Malcolm Collins: I also find it interesting that the one thing I would think all humans have access to, while not everyone is born equally intelligent mm-hmm.

I think all men have access to, or should be judged by their lack of access to [00:36:00] their own personal willpower. Right? Yes, absolutely. It, it, it says it’s reserved for the strong-willed few being strong-willed. If it is genetic, like let’s assume it is genetic, it is still worth me scorning the individual who is not strong-willed because they will take actions that are immoral at a higher rate and scorn is used to prevent them gaining power, which they will use to take immoral actions.

Mm-hmm. When we make the concept of recognizing, which you can see here in this AI is doing of recognizing, and I think Maslow Maslow did from the perspective of the urban monoculture. That strong will is a negative trait to, to say if I recognize strong will in others.

Simone Collins: Mm-hmm.

Malcolm Collins: And I lauded them for that, that is a negative thing for me to do.

Right. Ranking humanity on the amount [00:37:00] of self-responsibility that they are taking in terms of building their own moral frameworks versus ranking humanity by, and I love the entire hierarchy of needs. Pyramid is meant to sort of hand wave that this is being done. Ranking humanity by wealth which is fundamentally what the hierarchy of needs does because it monetizes the things that you need.

It creates a food period of, of basically stuff you need to buy, experiences, friendships, dating, romance, sex, everything like that. Whereas what the Uber Minch does is it says, no, you can just go straight in and get this stuff yourself. You, you can learn to control all of these other needs while building a moral framework and living your life around that framework.

Thoughts Before I go further here, Simone?

Simone Collins: Hmm. Nothing in particular that what you’re saying [00:38:00] makes sense just. I’m just shocked by all of this still.

Malcolm Collins: I also like how it’s like, no, no, no. Anyone can be a self-actualized. They just need therapy. Just go to therapy. Right?

Simone Collins: So therapy, I really, the, the whole you need therapy in order to be a functional or acceptable human thing is so disturbing to me.

Malcolm Collins: Look at our videos where we talk about how modern therapy has become a cult. I used to be a trained psychologist. I am very familiar with the field. Everything they do now is stuff we were told. Do not do this like this. This will cause dependence.

Simone Collins: But, but a lot of this, you can understand why this is the case when you look at incentives, therapists who systematically are very, very good at getting people who have problems, what they need, and helping them get to a good place mentally.

Go out of business therapists who create codependency do really well who are gonna be the therapists left after 20, 30, 40, [00:39:00] 50 years of that the ones who create codependency and, and maintain your problems or better yet make them worse. So you have to up your hours. It’s, it’s just obvious. Then it would end up like this.

Malcolm Collins: And then what you get, and this is why the urban monoculture as an evolving sort of organic entity is so important. Then you can see how a profession like this could co-evolve with a mimetic set where the profession helps put more people in a mental state where they’re willing to accept and then dedicate their time, life and resources to proliferating this mimetic set.

Simone Collins: Mm-hmm.

Malcolm Collins: Where that per mimetic set also. Funnels people into this profession, so they are symbiotic. And we talk about how you can also see this with parasites. We talk about all the parasites that can alter people’s sexuality and why we cannot talk about this right now. We cannot talk about how we know now from the research that there is a form of toxoplasmosis that alters people’s [00:40:00] sexual proclivities.

And that’s how it appears to be spreading. It’s going direct human to human now instead of through cats. And it, it, it makes people, for example, more, more attracted to the same sex. And it’s not the only thing that might be doing that. And that if you talk about something like toxoplasmosis, the toxoplasmosis might be literally co-evolving with the urban monoculture.

It reduces threat detection. Reducing threat detection is important. If you’re gonna join a culture where your own people are systematically going extinct, and you were importing a hostile foreign group, a normal person would say, what this seems like a big mistake. But if you have the thing in your brain that is telling mice to go where the cats are and do a little dance so they can eat you, it’s easy to see how it adopted the same circuitry.

To get the progressive to say, yeah, let’s bring the knife wielding man to my country, who is actively saying he wants to kill anyone who is like me. Which they, they often will. There was the case recently in the UK where the, the government in charge, like Stomberg government was [00:41:00] cheering, saying we won a major civil rights victory, bringing this guy back to the UK and freeing him from Egypt.

And he, he’d gotten arrested in Egypt and he had multiple tweets saying that he wanted all white people to die. He genuinely hated all white people, especially the English and the Dutch. Like they are cheering for bringing somebody into their country who actively is a genocide supporter of their people.

But and this is bringing the cat into your country, right? Like this is stupid. But the, the next inversion here that it sees. But I find that first inversion very interesting. But because they’re trying to hide from you from the truth of inclusivity and the reason why this can make sense to, from an elitist perspective.

Whether that’s AI that is often trained on elitist data or to the type of person who you’re going to read because they have reach IE they’re writing books or they’re writing the New York Times. These are wealthy white women often. And so they have all their needs met. So, and everyone they know has all their needs met.

So when they [00:42:00] go out there and they say, well, self-actualization is available to everyone, whereas having willpower is not what they mean is everyone in their evoked set of friends. They know that if they told their set of friends, Hey, you have to take responsibility for the things you’re doing and saying you have to take moral responsibility for your own system.

They wouldn’t do that. And so they’re like, well, then this is an egalitarian thing because my friends wouldn’t engage with this. They don’t consider. If I’m actually talking about somebody who’s struggling in life and in an a, a, a disadvantaged position, which system is more accessible to them because they just genuinely don’t think about those people.

And I I think that this is also really important to understand when they’re talking about being a fem cell, when they’re talking about being a, you know, oh, you know, guy is. Just don’t get it when I, you know, hit on them or whatever. It’s so hard to date when they’re a GA girl. And what are you guys talking about?

When they’re saying all this, it makes perfect sense in their head because [00:43:00] genuinely do not see guys, they do not want to bone as human. If they do not look at a guy and think, I wanna bone that, that person does not clock as meaningfully human. The guy who, who bags her, her food at the grocery store, they are never considering that person when they’re talking about, guys just don’t date me.

Right? Like, they know that that person would date them, right? They’re, they’re saying this yeah,

Simone Collins: I guess the, the more implied statement is eight. Eight outta tens. Don’t take me.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. And I think the, well, but it’s, it’s more that morality and moral frameworks do not worry in terms of how they apply to anyone below the eight out of 10.

Mm-hmm. ‘cause I simply don’t consider them in anything I do in my life. So a, a great example of this is in cells versus gays, right? So, these women, right, they’re are gays. They may want to bone, right? Like a lot of women look at our ywe episode, right? Or we talking about this phenomenon, right?

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: And [00:44:00] so when you say to them something like, well, I, I do not think that. It is, it is good to normalize that people who are same sex attracted that the default pathway for them, or the only pathway available for them is going into same sex relationships. And to which they would gasp and say, but if they don’t go into same sex relationships, how are they gonna be able to masturbate their arousal system?

How are they going to be able to have sex with somebody that they want to have sex with? Right. And they’ll say it’s about love, but we all know that you can love people who you’re not attracted to. People love their dogs. Not everybody who loves their dogs wants to f their dog. Okay? Right. It’s not about love.

What they’re really mortified at is the idea that the gay men that they want to f wouldn’t be able to sleep with whoever they want to sleep with, wouldn’t be able to masturbate. Their arousal system would be inconvenienced or challenged. [00:45:00] Now you talk about the incel. Who has the same struggle. They are not able to masturbate their arousal system in the way that they want to masturbate it.

Mm-hmm. And they say, well, their plight deserves not just no concern, but active scorn. Mm-hmm. I’m annoyed and angry that you have inconvenienced me with suffering that is ironically of a form that I view as so absolutely societally existential to protect in the form of gay normalization. Right. And this, I mean, they, they, they are morally irrelevant to women now to continue here.

Any thoughts, Simone? You, you seem very annoyed at women.

Simone Collins: It’s just, it’s very frustrating. I, I feel frustrated with myself too, because I grew up around this mindset and I never [00:46:00] questioned it. So that, that makes me mad at myself.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. The person who’s like, of course we have to do everything we can to normalize gaze, being able to masturbate their arousal system, but that in cells can’t.

And people would be like, well, it’s that gaze. You know, it’s, it’s two consenting adults or whatever. And it’s like, okay, great. Two consenting adults. I get that, but why is it so blindingly existential that you solve that normalization problem and yet the incel problem is worthy of score? Why? Why is that the case?

Why is the incel it asking for sympathy around something you see as absolutely socially ex existential in this other context now worthy of score the, the polarization of the difference of these views. And I used to have this view too. I did. I, I absolutely did. And now I see how repulsive it is because Uber Mitch value system, [00:47:00] I thought through it for myself.

That’s hopefully what the channel helps you do. That’s what an episode like this like, I don’t think an episode like this is gonna do great in the algo, but if somebody is like, you need to reintroduce a pragmatist guide to life ideas, you need to reintroduce how to build your own value system, please check out that book.

If you are like, I want to go on this adventure, it’s basically free. If you’re a subscriber, we’ll just send it to you for free. Like we do not care, right? Like we just want as many people as possible to get this information right. Yeah.

Simone Collins: In other words, also, just as a note, if you are. You really, really, really don’t want to pay for the book.

Should I say this? You, you can email us. You should just email us

Malcolm Collins: us and we’ll send it to you. We don’t

Simone Collins: care. Yeah, yeah.

Malcolm Collins: Anyway, give us a good review or something on it. You know, if, if

Simone Collins: we really appreciate that. Yeah. Like, yeah. In, in, in general, if you could leave us a review on Apple Podcasts, if you happen to have an iPhone, because we don’t even have one, it would mean a lot to us.

We know people look at that for whatever reason, and we, I do not know why the

Malcolm Collins: Apple Podcast reviews matter. [00:48:00] But anyway I wanna, I wanna go to the, actually do you wanna say Yeah. What our Apple Podcast review is right now?

Simone Collins: I think we’re at like 130 or something. 140. See, we don’t have that many because we’re very unique

Malcolm Collins: 29

Simone Collins: first podcast.

So yeah, if, if anyone’s up for that, it would mean a great deal to us. And huge thanks to everyone who is a paid subscriber on a. Patreon Substack. It is incredibly generous of you and just wanted to say we okay. Adss over.

Malcolm Collins: Adss over. Okay. So to continue. A, so this is another difference. It’s something like an AI would see in this uhhuh, which I think iss good because it’s getting sort of the average societal opinion of how these concepts are different.

Simone Collins: Sure, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Malcolm Collins: A moral slash value creating versus inherently ethical and pro-social. So it is interesting here that it is assigning Nietzsche system as being amoral slash value creating, and Laszlo’s system is inherently ethical and prosocial where I actually think the inversion is [00:49:00] true.

I, I think that the, the Lale systems amoral in value creating and the Nietzsche system is inherently ethical and prosocial.

Simone Collins: Mm-hmm.

Malcolm Collins: But let’s continue. The Uber venture transcends slave morality, Christianity, pity, equality, resentment to invert their own values, which could be noble, ruthless, or experimental, not guarantees of kindness.

Mm-hmm. Mishi warns against pity as weakening and celebrates a more fatty, loving fate as triumphant self-assertion. Mm-hmm. Maslow in. Since self-actualize people are automatically ethical, creative, just loving and reality oriented.

Simone Collins: Automatically ethical. That’s, that’s a,

Malcolm Collins: that’s when you know that you’re dealing with an incredibly unethical framework.

Mm-hmm. ‘cause whenever you can self define your actions as ethical, well, I did it. And you see this in your red monoculture so much. Therefore, it must have been the ethical thing to do because I’m a good person and I did it. Mm-hmm. And you see so many people like this.

Simone Collins: Yeah. Huge. Yikes. [00:50:00] No good. No good.

Malcolm Collins: They exhibit B values being values like truth, beauty, wholeness, justice, and often move towards transcendence, helping other self-actualize. He explicitly rejects a Nietzsche and quote unquote rampaging, egotism or callousness as pathological, not sublime. It’s a Nietzsche light. The perks of harmonious descent, not the barbaric joy of conquest, or I would say the acceptance that.

Because really what this is all about and what the big fear you see in the contrast of the two system is mm-hmm. Is again, Nietzsche’s system requires self ownership. Right. It requires, because as soon as you take the self ownership, then you can say, well then why don’t I just not act on those intrusive thoughts?

Like, why? Why? Why isn’t that the goal? Instead of satiating the intrusive thoughts. Right?

Simone Collins: [00:51:00] Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: But thoughts on these wider frameworks here.

Simone Collins: It seems like this isn’t something unique to what Abraham Maslow did. What I see happening with so many philosophers is people will take the original source material and be like, okay, but I don’t really wanna do that, or I don’t wanna do that work, or I just don’t feel like it, and therefore I am going to reinterpret it as this new system taking a lot of the originally.

Compelling points that I guess sold well or marketed well. Just manipulating them in a way that both makes them appealing to people, but also strips away all the substance.

Malcolm Collins: No, I, I, I think what you see, if you want to get an idea of why I think lots Las Tiger meat did so well is one, it gave people charts.

People love sorting hats. Any sorting hat, people go crazy for it. Whether it’s a [00:52:00] quiz about what character you are from friends, or whether it’s a, you know, this, this on OkCupid used to be one of the big things, all the quizzes and in Asia you’ve got your, your blood types and here you’ve got your INTJs.

Everyone’s an INT js, so it doesn’t matter you all the ISTs, right? You’ve got your you know, I mean, it, it’s, it’s, they wanna, they wanna know where they are in a system. And the fun thing about Laslo system. It is a system that makes everyone who is wealthy and sees a therapist think that they’re already at the top of it, and it explains to the rich who progressive, who doesn’t want to think about why the urban poor or rural poor have different world frameworks than them.

Mm-hmm. It helps them not think about it. They say, oh, the Iranians Act in X way, or the Gazen Act in X way when they’re throwing a gay person off the truth [00:53:00] because they don’t have all their needs met

Simone Collins: off of a rooftop. You mean

Malcolm Collins: I,

Simone Collins: I also just see has Maslow’s hierarchy of needs as being. A means of justifying basically any form of indulgence.

Like, oh, well, I need to go out and treat myself to X because I just don’t feel shored up in this part of my pyramid, and I can’t do the more important stuff unless this is addressed. Except as I’ve mentioned when we were talking about this before, every rung in this period or every level of this pyramid of needs is insatiable.

There is no level at which someone can say, okay, I have enough. The enough part of it really has to do with whether or not you care, or how much you care or how you choose to interpret your situation. And someone, for example, with very little actual physical or mental safety could feel safe just depending on how they interpret the world.

Whereas someone who has. Maybe even [00:54:00] a, a paid security team who lives in a gated community, you know, who’s, who’s one of the more safe people in the entire world may feel deeply unsafe because that’s how they’ve chosen to interpret their surroundings and their their circumstances. So I think maybe one of the reasons, one, like why he was compelled to create this in the first place, but also why people glom onto it, is that it’s a very indulgent and a very.

Compelling tool to justify indulgence, just like the concept of self-care really caught on maybe what, 10 or 15 years ago, and everyone was talking about how important it is to engage in self-care. Maybe that was a pandemic thing, the worst thing you could do, like, so I know, but Maslow’s hierarchy of needs was like the proto self-care.

Like, well, I, I have to do this ‘cause if I don’t feel safe, I can’t self-actualize. If I don’t feel socially validated, I can’t self-actualize. And then self-actualize is this hand wavy, vague. Indulgent thing with a bunch of caveats and [00:55:00] exceptions and not really anything meaningful or hard to achieve. So it really becomes just a a get out of jail free thing for feeling, feeling guilty about spending way too much money on a therapist and way too much money on indulgent foods and way too much money on stuff that makes you feel safe.

And people love that. People love having an excuse and we make fun of it. We use it too. We talk about things being shop opportunities because we get that. It’s, it’s a, it’s a very human thing to want these excuses.

Malcolm Collins: But we need to understand what I, what I think is important is Laszlo’s hierarchy of need normalizes sin.

Yeah. I think it’s important from the moral framework that we push whenever you are doing something out of alignment with your objective function, now your objective function may be hedonism.

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: If it is, then hedonism a max buddy. Like whatever that looks like for you. Right? Yeah. But when you’re doing something outside your objective function, that is sit, right?

Mm-hmm. And so, it, it, it [00:56:00] tries to normalize all of the things that we know are distracting us from. And I think very few people who watch this are probably hedonists. They’re like, I want to move human and civilization forward. I think that’s the easiest

Simone Collins: mm-hmm.

Malcolm Collins: Thing that a lot of people are attempting to do when I’m doing something that doesn’t do that I am sitting And Leslie’s hierarchy of needs is just a giant pyramid of all that.

Yes. It’s, it’s a pyramid of sin.

Simone Collins: The pyramid of sin. Yes. That’s what we should

Malcolm Collins: call it. Lala’s Hierarchy of needs. A pyramid of sin.

Simone Collins: A pyramid. Anyway,

Malcolm Collins: love you Simone.

Simone Collins: I love you too.

Malcolm Collins: What are we doing for dinner tonight?

Simone Collins: More of the reang with cream.

Malcolm Collins: Oh yes. Let’s do half of the reang that was there.

Simone Collins: Mm-hmm.

Malcolm Collins: And we’ll do it with the cream. And do you wanna do another recording today or do you wanna do early dinner?

Simone Collins: It’s it’s not a super long recording, is it?

Malcolm Collins: No, not that long. We’ll just jump to it. Okay.

Simone Collins: Let’s do it. Yeah. I like talking with [00:57:00] you. That’s my problem. Can you blame me? You’re so wonderful. You really feel it, you feel it good. It, there’s a bite. There’s a bite to the great outdoors. Right now, I’ve opened the door for the chickens, and I, I’ve been watching them as I look out the window every now and then so that they can wander into the, the yard and they’ll step out for just a second, because that’s where I, I dropped leftovers that the kids had from the previous night, and they love snacking on them leftovers.

They take one step out and they’re like, Nope, nope. I even shoveled the area so they can scratch the leaves and stuff, as is their delight. But no, they’re like no thank you. What really surprises me is that the professor likes playing in the snow as much as we have. So instead of hanging out in her nice heated room that I’ve set up, she’s like, oh, no, I wanna play outside.

I’m a snow dog.

But I mean,

Malcolm Collins: oh, and I’m saying a professor is, is a, a happy dog, [00:58:00] which is,

Simone Collins: she actually is though. And, and she communicated so clearly to me that she did not wanna be locked inside. And I’m glad that that forced me to really properly set up her room.

Malcolm Collins: By vomiting and pooping all over the floor.

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: Anyway. You are such an intense mom. Nobody knows. Nobody knows. Any, anything fun from the comments today? Did anyone comment on the pomegranate juice?

Simone Collins: They, they did. Someone also hopefully pointed out just in terms of if, if feature things ferment there, there are okay.

Alcohols and they’re not so Okay. Alcohols and you don’t know what that was so better. Okay, fine sir. I’ll better not

Malcolm Collins: to drink it because

Simone Collins: I, yeah. Better safe than sorry. You don’t know what, you don’t know what’s going on there. Whatever that was, I, it went down the drain right away when I found it after that.

Oh sir, after the episode,

Malcolm Collins: you are intense, Simone.

Simone Collins: Yeah. Yeah. I wasn’t drinking [00:59:00] fermented pomegranate juice.

Malcolm Collins: It tasted really good, actually.

Simone Collins: I think it must’ve been an acquired taste. ‘cause at first you’re like, this is off. Well, I guess you just kept drinking it. You like never drink. You’ll smell milk that is not even close to off.

Yeah. And you’re like, this is

Malcolm Collins: milk. Simone is disgusting. Fermented a pomegranate because the pomegranate is already such a strong flavor.

Simone Collins: Mm-hmm.

Malcolm Collins: It heavily covered up. Anything else? So, it, it was like, I mean, for an alcohol mixer, pomegranate juice is actually really good because it’s going to cover up the alcohol and whatever alcohol was being formed in it tasted sort of wine like, I would say.

So they worked pretty well together in terms of covering up that there was any alcohol I could taste until I felt it hit my head and I was like, whoa. That was, that was hot heavy. Oh

Simone Collins: my gosh.

Malcolm Collins: They liked the bear songs. Simone ses was the Bears Secondary community,

Simone Collins: you know, they liked the Bear song.

They [01:00:00] liked that. We were just chill. I guess it, it was, it was just a good hangout episode to some people. So there you go. Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: The Hangout.

Simone Collins: But also a lot of people expressed, I mean, what we, what we talked about resonated with them in the sense that they. It had just been gaslit for so long. And

Malcolm Collins: it about men, like actually, like the, the point being is that scientists lie regularly with data.

Simone Collins: Well, but also a several people referred to their experiences from schooling onward. Even people who went to school in the seventies and eighties, like as early as then they were steeped in this and now they’re, some, some realized it right away. Others, it took them a long time to realize, hold on. I, I appear to be actually subject to discrimination here.

One person described this amazing experience. [01:01:00] I think in a UK based school in the seventies or eighties where there was a debate I think maybe around the patriarchy. And this person was like, listen, our queen is a woman. Our prime minister is a woman. ‘cause it was during Mar Margaret Thatcher’s rain.

And our, our school head mistress is a woman and all the teachers are women and you’re trying to tell me that we live in a patriarchy. Like, and they, he, he still lost the debate, which was judged exclusively by teachers who were all women. When he still recalls seeing their faces when he was making his point.

And he feel, I mean, as far as I’m concerned, he probably knew at that point that he had won.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, right. Like uhoh, you’re not allowed to make these points too accurately, right?

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: Oh my God. Crazy world we live in guys.

Simone Collins: Truly, truly.

Speaker: He was so naughty. That’s what happened. Mommy. I do. [01:02:00] But why did he suck in the boys? ‘cause he was naughty too. Oh, he was hanging out with naughty people that at the door. So guys, are you gonna be naughty? Oh no. Oh, no.

Speaker 2: Oh no, he got in water.

Speaker 3: Holter guys. That’s how you teach children.

Speaker 2: Dad. I was gonna get taken away by a ghost. So did I tell you the water? So you guys know why not to be mad, right? Bad, right? Yeah. When they, when they filmed the, um, the scene with, with the, the gets real bones. [01:03:00] Yes. Excuse me. Can you believe that?

In this eye-opening episode of Based Camp, Malcolm and Simone Collins dive into why much of the modern Islamic world feels "post-apocalyptic" — crumbling ancient grandeur, neglected heritage, and a society living in the ruins of its own past glory. They contrast today's strict moral codes (influenced heavily by 18th-century Wahhabism and Saudi oil wealth) with the wild hedonism of Islam's historical peak: lavish palaces, opium-fueled feasts, widespread homosexuality (including pederasty), endless harems, cross-dressing trends started by desperate royal mothers, and poetry celebrating wine and young boys.

From Moroccan citadels split and looted across generations to Ottoman sultans with 300+ concubines and nudity in palaces shocking 19th-century Europeans, they unpack how Islam flipped from one of the most "debauched" civilizations to one of the strictest. They also touch on "dead" vs. "living" religious traditions, the closure of ijtihad, cousin marriage debates, why Islam excelled as a ruling-minority faith but struggles as a mass religion, and light-hearted parenting tangents (helicopter-obsessed kids and Bosnian songs).

Episode Transcript

Malcolm Collins: .[00:00:00]

Hello, Simone. I’m excited to be here with you today. Today we are going to be talking about a concept that came up in our episode on why Muslims almost never win wars of aggression

after, like, within two generations of Mohammad’s life. And, in that episode, I commented that Muslim society had become post-apocalyptic in nature.

And I wanna talk about this

in this episode, we’re going to both talk about this concept of Islam as a post-apocalyptic society, and also discuss how they went from being seen as one of the most debauched societies on earth, , with the jabba the hut like scenes or belly dancers and dripping in jewels to one of the most strict, .

Parts of the world morally. You know, throwing gay people off rooftops, , women covered 100%, not even, , able to, in some Islamic countries, have both of their eyes unveiled at the same time while still [00:01:00] staying countries with high amounts of gay sex. Although that’s something we’ll go into in a, in a future episode, , in Islamic countries, they’re often like, oh, don’t.

Don’t, it’s not get, it’s with a child. It’s fine. Don’t worry about it. And it’s like, well, that you see, that might make it worse in some other cultural context.

Because like you see when I talk to you and I’m like, what, what, what, what, what are you doing having sex with that little boy? , And you’re like, oh, no, no, no, no, no, no. It’s chill. He’s a child. Um, I was actually, that was the thing I was worried about was, was not the gay part, but the child part. Um, so you see, see from my cultural context, But anyway, back to the Islamic world, living in a post apocalypse.

Malcolm Collins: because I think that we really do not understand how directly this is true. If you, a listener has traveled many parts of the Islamic world. We, we’ve traveled pretty extensively in the Islamic world. You will notice when I say [00:02:00] it is post-apocalyptic. I don’t just mean like the Muslim people at one point in the distant past you know, had greatness and they don’t have greatness now.

I mean that you see it all around you. It almost feels like in those movies about Apocalypses where you have people camping out in like a falling apart New York City or something like that. Yeah, you don’t

Simone Collins: have to imagine that if you go to like Morocco because you can just do it.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. And so I’ll, I’ll give an example of this and I thought it was one of the most shocking to me.

It was when we were in Morocco and we went not far out of Morocco to, I pulled up the name of the place you found it, Bedo.

And oh, I love it when

Simone Collins: you butcher foreign languages. Oh, it’s so hot.

Malcolm Collins: Citadel in, in Southern Morocco. And it’s, it’s giant. It’s this giant complex. But. [00:03:00] If you walk through it, and it’s almost like a palace it was once owned by the one of the descendants of the prophet Mohammed, and it’s just, I’ll obviously put pictures on screen here of it.

Simone Collins: Do you want me to send you the ones that we, we took

Malcolm Collins: Oh, yeah. You can find them. Yeah, I’ll absolutely about it. Is that it? As you walk through it, some sections of it look almost perfectly maintained. And some sections of it have just completely collapsed to almost nothing but rubble. And there’s of things in all states in between.

And the reason is, is because as the family went on, they would split ownership of it with every generation. And some descendants looted their parts of the castle for anything they could sell. Other descendants tried to maintain it and use it as like makeshift restaurants and stuff like that. But it is.

Very much like a, a hermit crab in the shell of a castle, and you don’t need to be outside. One of the craziest things about a place like Morocco’s, a particularly good example [00:04:00] of this is that you climb to the top of one of the roofs there and you will see like there could be buildings that people just forgot about that have been built around by other buildings.

The, in the way the city is built up. And I suspect Rome was probably like this at one point too. Mm-hmm. Just like without any long-term infrastructure planning or anything like that. And many of the buildings are obviously absolutely ancient. And I say this, you know, as somebody who’s living in a house from the 17 hundreds, these, just everything. There was old. And the other interesting thing about the Islamic world is if you go through old Catholic cities you will often see old, beautiful architecture, but it is maintained yeah, yeah.

Simone Collins: Well, very common in Europe, you know, things are carefully updated.

Malcolm Collins: No. In the Protestant world, you typically get something different.

I’ll talk about that in a second. Oh, okay. Interesting. So in the, in, in the Catholic world it’s, it’s very common to walk by, very well [00:05:00] maintained ancient glor structures. Even if, even if their own civilization is like poor and impoverished and, and corrupt they do have a reverence for things of the past.

If you go through a lot of, you know, whether it’s Iran or Egypt or, you know, Morocco you go through these places, you will see often old, beautiful structures sort of falling apart like dilapidated, I guess I’d say. But, but weirdly still in use. It’s not like they’re dilapidated because they’re misused.

What happens in the Protestant world was most of the, the ch the old like glor, like giant cathedrals and stuff like that were torn down or torn apart. So it’s very, yeah, there’s still

Simone Collins: architecturally sound. I, I’m going through and looking at pictures of this one complex we visited that one of the descendants was still living in, and we, we walked through his part of it and it’s, it’s crumbly, but like in the parts that he lives in.

And you’ll see this and Malcolm will send you the photos on WhatsApp. He just gonna put [00:06:00] carpets on the ground. And you can, you can kind of see furniture around and like there are just parts of the place that are, that look genuinely like ruins and there are just holes and you can see where

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, like you’ll falling apart.

Reach the edge of one of his like second story hallways, uhhuh. And it is a, a, a, a hole to, to nothing because the, the person who maintained the part that connected to that fell apart. Yeah. They’re just like,

Simone Collins: I’m not gonna bother to keep this up. Well, or they didn’t have the money for it, you know, whatever or something.

And it’s not like this doesn’t happen in all parts of the world. I mean, you can buy castles in Europe. For basically nothing because no one can afford to keep them up. And that’s not right. But

Malcolm Collins: this is very different. You don’t have major architectural monuments in the center of major European cities that are basically falling apart.

That is very common in parts of the muscle world. Mm-hmm.

And what I wanted to talk to about this as I wanted to contrast this current state of the Muslim world with the true hedonism and debauchery of Islam at its height. Mm-hmm. Because I think that when people [00:07:00] look at how strict the modern Muslim world is.

They think of this as from Muhammad till today, that’s how Islam was. And they have broad images of like exotic belly dancers, maybe giant. Didn’t that have something to do with aladin? It’s like aladin something, something. Yeah. That, that was actually the core of Muslim civilization. That extreme level of hedonism really for longer than the extremely strict interpretation of Islam that we have today.

Simone Collins: Wasn’t it very selective hedonism though? Like you could be hedonistic if you could pay for it, and everyone else was held to very strict standards and especially women were held to very strict standards. So basically only if you were a wealthy man would you be. Subject to this and everyone else kind of, I, I, well, similar to how I would imagine it in ancient Greece, for example, there was hedonism in ancient Rome if you were [00:08:00] wealthy and not a slave and not a woman.

But aside from that, most people live pretty austerely.

Malcolm Collins: So actually not exactly. Okay. So you’ve gotta keep in mind how many of these Islamic societies were structured. Okay. First of all, at, at many of their heights, they were not majority Arab or majority Muslim. Oh. They just made up the ruling class.

So their lifestyle was funded by taxing Jewish and Christian local populations. Oh. Huh. So, so they didn’t need everyone to be able to afford this level of hedonism. The second thing is that they had like lots of slaves like slavery and, and slave like conditions were very common in the Islamic Empire.

And so, the people. Who frequently were not living these e extremely hedonistic lives. Were living the lives of slaves or slave like people. Yeah. And like you did have a middle class, the, the percentage,

Simone Collins: was there a middle class like, actually, because I think the, this continent is a middle class is [00:09:00] pretty new.

I mean, for the vast majority of human history, you were either a surf slash slave slash peasant slash subsistence survivor, or you were one of the very, very, very few people who owned land Well, well, typically if

Malcolm Collins: you’re talking about middle class in a historic context, you’re typically talking about the merchant class.

And again yeah, the merchant class

Simone Collins: also was, I mean, that, that was a new thing starting, what are we gonna say? Early renaissance. There wasn’t really a merchant class. So much agent did

Malcolm Collins: have Islamic merchant classes. They were even quite famous for it. Right. The, the, the silk Road trader, right.

With even a stereo. Oh,

Simone Collins: oh yeah. Fair point. Fair point. Yes, you’re right. So they did, oh wait, the Silk Road, the Silk Road did not emerge until. After the Renaissance, when did the Silk Road emerge?

Malcolm Collins: The Silk Road was an important, not, not necessarily in the Silk Road structure, but it was largely what kept the Islamic Empire wealthy.

Because and, and, [00:10:00] okay, so

Simone Collins: it’s been around forever, like 100 to 1, 130 to one 14 BCE. So I’m totally off there.

Malcolm Collins: Islam got poor. And one of the things, I didn’t go as deeply in on that episode, but was a big thing is that whenever you were trading for spy spices or goods mm-hmm. That came from India or China or anywhere that part of the world, and you were in Europe mm-hmm.

Your traders until they got the the, the, the pass going really well through the canal. What, I forget what it’s called the Dead Sea. No, no, not the Dead Sea. What’s it called? The, the Red Sea. The Red Sea passage going you’d have to go through, the, the Muslim territories. And so they’d add these enormous taxes ‘cause they could just put whatever taxes they want on stuff.

Sure. And it was like a free money machine for anyone who was in, I mean, talk about getting lucky twice that and then oil. That’s a really

Simone Collins: good point. Wow. Lucky ducks. Although maybe not right, because I, I think we, there’s a general pattern in history, climatically and otherwise like with, with just random lux scenarios in terms of trade here [00:11:00] too, whereby, whoa.

Okay. When you have it too easy, it, it breeds weakness essentially. Like you’re not getting the sufficient forcing function societally, or even just genetically to be stronger and smarter and better. And therefore you suffer in the long term. Kind of like if you’re not forced to get up and exercise every day, you know, you’re more likely to become obese and unhealthy.

So it’s better to be in a situation where you’re forced to do that, even if it’s unpleasant.

Malcolm Collins: No, I, I agree with that. I agree. It, it definitely, I do not think worked out Civilizationally in their favor in the long run. Another thing to, to keep in mind, or interesting point here is if you’re wondering, well, when did Islam become incredibly strict before we go into all the, the ex excesses of Islam in the past?

Yeah.

Simone Collins: Well, but because also I, I just thought in general that Islamic law has been, it’s not a new thing. And that it has always been pretty strict, but maybe I’m wrong here. This is super, so

Malcolm Collins: a, a huge part of the strict in, strict of, of [00:12:00] Islam. Mm-hmm. I’d say probably 50%. Now, it wasn’t the only factor.

We’ll talk about some other factors, probably 50% was the spread of Wahhabism by the Saudi royal family. So super

Simone Collins: recent

Malcolm Collins: in Wahhabism. Yeah. Wasn’t even founded until the 18th century. Holy moly. And for people who aren’t familiar Wahhabism. Is a, a very, very strict form of Sunni Islam. And the Saudi Royal family basically partnered with to gain legitimacy.

Sorry, what is it now? The Saudi Royal family, the House of Saad. Mm-hmm. Partnered with the hoist sort of school of of theology and theologians and we’re like, you back us, we back you. That’s the, that’s the core agreement that made Saudi Arabia work and a legitimate state in the eyes of the other Muslims of that territory.

‘cause they’ve expanded a lot through military conquest.

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: And then they have since then been, pushing wa, I mean, they spend billions of dollars a year attempting to push the [00:13:00] growth of this wahabi school in other parts of the Muslim world. Mm-hmm. And then this leads to sort of a perception among, because if you are you know, a, a, a wealthy sod, right?

Are, you are a wealthy, you know, in any of any of these Muslim countries, you’re in this sort of dominance hierarchy with the other wealthy people in the other Muslim countries, right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And you, you, you are ever aware of this, both your position within the dominance hierarchy of your own country and, and it, and much more so than like America, right?

Like in America, I, I do not think the wealthy families are quite as obsessed with their relative status and perception to other wealthy families. They’re more interested in like, getting stuff done or what, like the average person thinks of them. Yeah, yeah. Or yeah,

Simone Collins: more if we’re talking about what.

Reine Lin was that his name really popularized with this, this concept of American status signaling. It really was more of a broadcast. You want everyone to know you’re rich. You’re not trying to, it’s not a mean girl style [00:14:00] situation where you’re trying to convince certain people that you’re awesome.

Yeah. Everyone.

Malcolm Collins: Well, I mean, you do no, you do do that to an extent with Americans. I mean, that’s why rich people wear like unbranded clothes and stuff like that, that only other rich people know about. Right? Yeah. You know, there, there is an extent to that, but it’s not that, it’s not the same as like a list of known aristocratic players.

Mm-hmm. And, and, and part of this status hierarchy became how you related to Islam with the dominance and, and, and rising. Of some extremely conservative Muslim families that basically got rich randomly through oil money. So typically people who are extremely religious do not get rich and powerful because they’re too busy

Simone Collins: being devoted to God.

Malcolm Collins: Well, it’s not just you’re busy being devoted, it’s that being extremely religious adds a bunch of externalities to your ability to accumulate wealth. Mm-hmm. My family has always been pretty religious. And whenever they’ve gotten, and they’ve gotten super rich in number of [00:15:00] times they ended up donating most of their money to church or to charity.

Mm-hmm. Like, and that’s just what you have to do. If you have like a, if you’re not Hassan and it’s not all a, a fake thing, you know, and you like actually care about. Downtrodden. That’s just a thing you do. But the, the, in, in Islam and in in Islam, you’re supposed to do that. They just got so rich that they were able to both do that and maintain their wealth, right?

Yeah. Yeah. And so this happened in a number of places, whether it’s through, you know, the Gas and Qatar or the, the Saudis sitting on oil or the UAE and the number of interesting economic plays that they were able to pull off that required a lot more intelligence than the other players.

But the UA empire is crumbling right now, but that’s a, a whole other episode. Basically a bunch of diplomatic plays they made, and like Yemen and stuff like that are super backfired. And they may even face problems in international courts finally for it. But anyway so, so, because a bunch of random, like imagine in Texas, you, you, you had something similar to this sort of a bunch [00:16:00] of random religious evangelical Christians end up.

Sitting on oil money. And now being an evangelical Christian is cool and high class in Texas. Mm-hmm. As it was when I was growing up. Yeah. So, which is, which is usually not the case. Right. And so that’s the other thing that, that caused this sort of flip, but the flip in part happened because of the oil money itself.

Mm. Then there’s the other thing that caused the flip. I, I guess I’m just gonna go totally into all of this. Okay. Please. Which is called the closure of the gates of Iita.

Simone Collins: Mm-hmm.

Malcolm Collins: And it’s a, it, it is a famous but highly debated concept in Islamic illegal and intellectual history. Mm-hmm. Refer the idea that at some point the practice of ija, the independent reasoned effort to quantify scholars muji to derive new legal rulings from the Koran Sunna prophets teachings.

Consensus Jha and analogies haws effectively closed or became severely restricted after this supposed dis closure. Later, scholars were expected to follow established [00:17:00] precedents through akil imitation or adherence to one of the four main Sunni schools of law, HANA Malaki Shafi. And okay. Do you want me to dive deeper into this concept, or do you find this less interesting?

Simone Collins: There are so many elements of this that I don’t understand. I, I lack the foundational context to find this interesting.

Malcolm Collins: Well, it is, it is interesting. It’s, it’s actually, I’m sure

Simone Collins: it is. I just don’t know like half these words. So I more than half, I don’t know 90% of these words, so it doesn’t mean anything to me.

I’ll explain

Malcolm Collins: it differently. If you, you’re just saying

Simone Collins: like a durka, durka,

Malcolm Collins: durka, durka, moham ji. It’s bad. It’s true.

Speaker: Dirk, Dirk, Allah,

Muhammad Jihad.

Oha Durka,

Malcolm Collins: so, so, basically. If you go to our [00:18:00] track series, if you remember Simone, I talk about the concept of a living versus a dead religious tradition. Yes. And I argue that a living religious tradition is a religious tradition where the rules, structure and interpretation of that religious system or metaphysical system is still an ongoing, an active debate.

And not just like an active debate, but it’s often a conversation. It’s part of religious practice to have these conversations. Mm-hmm. And then in other religions that does not happen. And you’ll get religions that are on various parts of the spectrum. So Islam is one of the deadest of dead religions.

You simply cannot easily add new concepts to Islam anymore. Mm-hmm. And that’s one of, and you used to be able to, that used to be a core part of practicing Islam, but it just

Simone Collins: lacks the, the religious infrastructure for that I, in the way that the Catholic church doesn’t, ‘cause you have a very functional, active No, the vascular

Malcolm Collins: church is a pretty dead religious system as well.

We’ll, we’ll get to [00:19:00] that in a second as well. Well, okay. At least the LDS

Simone Collins: church has a, a fairly dynamic system.

Malcolm Collins: LDS is a weird kind of dead, which we’ll get to.

Simone Collins: Okay, well then what, what, what is alive then?

Malcolm Collins: Evangel, evangelical Christians are pretty alive. If you, no, if you, if you, they’re not, they’re

Simone Collins: not exactly centrally governed.

I mean, how are, how are they really alive? That’s part of the problem

Malcolm Collins: with living versus dead religious systems. So, I guess I can use Judaism as a good sort of counterweight here to, to study. Okay. Yeah. Judaism, right. There was this system, and this is why if you read like medieval Jewish theologians, they’re really all about like Muslim, medieval theologians and vice versa.

These two groups really liked each other. And this was because during this period they were both very living traditions. Like a a, a new Jewish theologian would like have some idea and have a debate and write it down. And that sort of stuff is still like required reading, like anyone who’s serious about studying Jewish theology today.

Right. You know? [00:20:00] And within Judaism you had this system and it sort of worked this way in Islam too in the early days where you’d sort of, you could sort of challenge things that happened one generation ago, but you can’t really challenge things that happened more than two generations ago. And so as time went on and, and Judaism is interesting because it is definitely harder today to introduce any sort of a new concept was in Judaism than it was historically.

Historically you could introduce pretty radical new ideas in Judaism but these radical reinterpretations happened. Up until fairly recently within Judaism probably the, the most famous recent one is the, the basham ta who founded what is today like the Hasidic School of Judaism and everything like that.

And people know I have a lot of differences with, with that school and, and that religious figure.

But he did radically reshape what Judaism is. And during his life, it was an active debate. Most of the rabbinic scholars during his life, like the, the vast [00:21:00] majority of rabbinic scholars during like the height of his activity during his life like hated him.

They, they thought he was like a demon. Like they were like, nobody talked to this guy. Nobody go near this guy. His ideas are crazy. Don’t, don’t interact with him. He is a, he is a, a. He is a scam artist. And despite that, his ideas ended up basically winning. And for a number of generations the descendants, I forget what they’re called, they’re called the, the Min Ji or something of the rabbinic scholars who were all against the Basov.

They, they persisted as a Jewish school and, and, and they still exist within, like Israel and stuff like that, but there’s just not like a on the rise or particularly relevant ideological faction within Judaism right now. And in Islam, this closed way earlier, I guess I’ll go to the other tradition so we can sort of talk about this Mormonism.

Was one of the, at its height, the most living of living religions. You know, this is the Orson Pratt period and stuff like that. Mm-hmm. Where, you know, when you had all the colonists still coming over and stuff like that, the like, higher ups in the Mormon community would just like go out and spitball and you could like read the [00:22:00] writings and it’s crazy.

It’s like, Hey, how do you take like a soul works? And they’d be like, well, maybe it like splits into pieces and can become pure and maybe like when you die, your soul splits up and then gets like resorted into different people or maybe life. You need to like do it a certain number of times and they’d like, have like completely different medica physical frameworks, leaders in the community.

Orson perhaps is the best example of this, would just hypothesize about this stuff and they’d be like, main. Characters in, in the Mormon tradition. Right. And they, they wouldn’t even be like the sitting prophet. Right? Yeah. And then as time has gone on really the, the, the sitting prophet basically, if he’s going to make an update to Mormon theology these days he typically makes it with the council of like a few other people in the community.

It’s not like every Mormon meeting is like, Hey, let’s talk esoterica man. But there was a period in Mormon history where that was absolutely the case. So, so it’s, it’s, it’s weird and you can’t [00:23:00] easily do this as a Mormon either. Like, you can’t be like, Hey, I have a different theory about how this should be interpreted.

If it’s like radically different, people would be like, well, that’s against, you know, what’s the, what’s the main church says right now? Right? Catholicism, sort of the same way with Mormonism, you can do it more. But Catholicism, I. Is a living tradition, but in an incredibly structured format, right?

Like the living part of the tradition. If you wanna be part of the living Catholic tradition you have to become a priest or a nun.

Simone Collins: Mm-hmm.

Malcolm Collins: Like if, if, if you or at least found one of the major orders or something like that, right? Like you, you have to be part of the bureaucracy and interacting with the bureaucracy.

And then that stuff gets passed up and you might be able to get into you know, one of those big councils that they hold or something like that. And then your ideas get put into Catholic, Catholic doctorate, right? Like, it, it can update but the updates become more obscure and bureaucratic.

Like if you look at the various I forget what they’re called, but when the, when the Catholics all get together to, to [00:24:00] say the stuff that’s supposed to be unchangeable and, and not go back on it. And once okay. Only have these conferences councils. Councils, okay. And if you look at the original ones, it’s like a bunch of actual theological questions.

Simone Collins: Okay.

Malcolm Collins: How should we conceive of Christ and stuff like this? Yeah. If you go later, it just gets more and more bureaucratic.

Simone Collins: Mm-hmm.

Malcolm Collins: It’s, it’s bureaucrats arguing about bureaucratic structure and that’s, oh,

Simone Collins: but what about the, the wild swings in favor of various progressive causes and ideal that ideals that the Catholic Church has made?

Malcolm Collins: I don’t think that those things, I think that that is core to what has always been Catholicism has been one of the primary champions of stuff like socialism since the very first socialist movements. The idea that Catholicism was ever not, if you look at the United States, the Democratic Party was the Catholic party pretty much until this last election cycle.

Like if you look at JFK, who’s JFK? Mm-hmm.

Simone Collins: The first. [00:25:00] Joe Biden. Yeah. And Biden. Yeah. Hmm. Okay. Okay. So, so this idea

Malcolm Collins: that,

Simone Collins: well, yeah. I mean, and even now with JD Vance, he’s just being massively criticized by the current Pope. Also American. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Malcolm Collins: But, but I mean, and, and think about the tra, I mean, Catholics are all about like, you know, taking in, you know, immigrants helping out the poor, everything.

Like, this is all, that’s all their bag, man. Like, I don’t understand when people were like you know, they haven’t folded on stuff like women priests and, and, and the gay stuff yet, like, they haven’t actually folded, they’re

Simone Collins: moving in that general direction. They, they

Malcolm Collins: have not folded on anything that’s in the Bible.

So they, they, they basically stayed, you know, I think the Catholic church like didn’t do some big veer in one direction or in another. They’re just being what they’ve always been. And I think it confuses people because they begin to think of the Catholic church as like not different from the Evangelical church, which is always a very conservative church.

A [00:26:00] conservative IE in world politics. But if, if you’re talking about the reason I call obviously Teop Puritan is, would be like the, the most extreme example of a living tradition in a modern sense, because it is just a radical discussion about ideology that is meant to change with every generation.

But when you close off interpretation of, of structures, all any generation can iteratively add is basically new rules on top of the preexisting structures. And this is where I think it causes a lot of problems for modern Judaism because they, they just have so many rules at this point, right?

Because you can, you cannot, like, wipe out a lot of the previous rules. And so it’s just iterative, iterative, iterative and eventually I think it breaks if, if you do not have the ability to audit, like the source code of your religious system.

Simone Collins: Sure, yeah. The code base becomes unmanageable. Yeah, but did, I can’t remember which Silicon Valley company had a code base.

Their like original code base was called The Beast, I think. And there was one person whose entire job [00:27:00] was just to keep it from breaking every day.

Malcolm Collins: I feel like this our fabs code base these days. Mm. God. I have to keep going back in fixing, Hey, it’s mostly working now. People playing it, enjoying it, which is cool.

But I’ll go into how, how decadent the Muslim world was at its height. Right. So, if we go for some, some poems this is the Kuat of Abu Noal. So some lines from it. His fine wine and his boy religion, no less than my cash

Simone Collins: fine Wines and a Young PO

What’s interesting is that the, one of these that Islam has given up more strictly is, uh, the fine wine and not so much the young boys. , If you go to many Islamic countries today, like Afghanistan, you will see higher rates of gay sex than you see in most countries. Um, but they’re like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.

Don’t worry about it, bro. It’s, it’s, it’s okay. Um. It was a child and you’re like, how did [00:28:00] that makes it so much worse? But in the Islamic mind, that actually okays it in in many contexts. And we’ll get into why this is so common in Islamic countries to in, in, I’m gonna do some other episode on this because Yeah, like is Islam got like really strict on some areas, like no adult gay sex and no alcohol, but anything you do as children is fine.

Malcolm Collins: Wine Coursing Between the Water and the Force From the Hand of the Boy with the griddle on his slender waist, A straight well shaped lad girdle as a

Simone Collins: bridle.

Yeah, I’m picturing someone with some kind of like griddle setup where they’re like making pancakes like a cigarette, cigarette style, like, you know, waitress woman, but he’s just making pancakes instead of frying bacon. I would dig that. Well, they were really, boy come

Malcolm Collins: here, griddle boy empire as well. Okay.

Yeah, it, it’s probably the, like the gayest of the major empires to the extent where and I Rudyard goes into this and, you know, like he’s more than the [00:29:00] Romans

Simone Collins: though.

Malcolm Collins: Oh yeah. Way more than like Greeks, than the Romans. Really. Okay. So here, here’s an example. Well, well, I mean, we’ll get the Romans at their gayest are about as gay as the Muslims at their gayest.

Okay. Okay. But on average, the Muslims were gayer.

Simone Collins: Oh wow. Okay.

Malcolm Collins: The, the, the Romans at their gayest were extremely gay. They were

Simone Collins: so gay. They were so gay.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. We should probably do an episode on that like

Simone Collins: we did, but it was about like, does, does proliferation of. Gayness or broad acceptance of it.

Predict the downfall of civilizations. Remember?

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. What of my favorite? Like just this level of psychosis of some Roman emperors. I think that’s what would cut off their members and then like throw them in a room full of snakes. Another emperor used to love, I think, to just throw venomous snakes at the crowd when they’d like come to see him as a joke.

That’s, that’s fun.

Simone Collins: That, that’s pretty good. It’s, it’s the, the t-shirt cannon of his kind of, his time. But he said, this [00:30:00] time you die.

Malcolm Collins: Oh, you gonna get through gold or snakes this time?

Simone Collins: Yeah. Well, you never know what you’re gonna, it’s, it’s the original trick or treat.

Malcolm Collins: So here I’m gonna draw from a, a key source is Alt Barris Tuckery Al Russo while Alka.

Yeah. Dka. History of the prophets and kings. Okay. Okay. So, the, he’s talking about the, the Altare explicitly says that all Ahman was inclined towards male servants Gillum to the exclusion of women, and was madly in love with a boy named Kohar, named after the Heavenly River in paradise. All lain even wrote poetry about him.

Hor is my faith and my worldly life, my sickness and my physician. Aw, he’s the most helpless of people who persistently seeks his beloved. No. On, on. So I was asking for sources here ‘cause I wanna make sure I, I have good sources on this. Mm-hmm.

On this guy dressing Zba Zda. This was his mom. Okay, so this [00:31:00] guy’s mom got annoyed that he was always sleeping with men.

So, she dressed up slave girls as boys, ah, to try to get them interested. Surprise woman. So she selected female slaves who resembled boys and dressed them in masculine attire with short hair and turbans, hoping to attract her son to them. It didn’t work. She wanted grandkids so

Simone Collins: bad. She wanted them so bad.

Malcolm Collins: No, no, it gets worse. So these cross-dressed girls were called Gula Mati and became a fashion that Al Marai popularized. He organized whole crop, corpse of them with Bob Hair belt and silt turbans who served at drinking parties. And then this became popular in the region because, you know, obviously the, the, the sultan is doing it.

And no, they’re like

Simone Collins: OG flappers except not feminist at all.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Eyewitness style reports preserved in historical compilations via Philip Heidi citing medieval [00:32:00] text describes elim female pages as Bob headed and dressed like boys and wearing silk turbans serving wine and blending erotic ambiguity.

That is so

Simone Collins: fascinating,

Malcolm Collins: just from, just from a fashion standpoint that even the lower classes begin to imitate it.

Simone Collins: Wow. This wasn’t fashionable cross-dressing based on one person’s. Not, not even one person’s sexual proclivities based on one mother’s desperate attempt to get grandchildren. That was totally botched.

That is so fun. Oh, delightful. Wow. I can’t even imagine being that mother and just being like,

Malcolm Collins: you,

Simone Collins: like,

Malcolm Collins: I need grandchildren. Right? Like that. Yeah. And then you start to

Simone Collins: see just normal people dressing like that and just being so freaking frustrated that, you know, I’ve, I’ve managed to set off a major fashion trend, but do I have grandchildren?

No.

Malcolm Collins: Aw. So if we’re talking about under, under Akbar or [00:33:00] J here J here was notorious for heavy opium and alcohol use. Detailed. In his autobiography, he describes daily hunts, mango feasts, and wine sessions,

Simone Collins: mango feasts, calling

Malcolm Collins: wine, a source of ecstasy. He owned hundreds of ornate wine vessels.

One of the, the fun ones here, this just seems

Simone Collins: like super. I mean, he, he just sounds ahead of his time if we’re being honest, aside from Mango. Okay. Okay. Well then we’ll go further. Oh, no. Honestly, no. People are all about mango feasts these days. They’re, they’re wine. They love collecting wine. Talk about addiction to opium and alcohol.

Well, let’s, let’s talk

Malcolm Collins: about the Ottoman Empire here, right? Because actually something that’s unusual, been through their palaces and their palaces are just like absurd. The Ottoman palaces mm-hmm. Isn’t cool or what? No, just in terms of their opulence and the way they were structured. If you look at something like the, the, the Versa, the main palace in France.

What’s that one? You know, Versailles. Versailles, yeah. Mm-hmm. Or the palaces in England. One, the palaces in England are not [00:34:00] that impressive. They’re

Simone Collins: pretty uncomfortable. Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: If you go to something like the, the one in Scotland, what’s it called? Where they Balmoral? Yeah. Where the Royal family Summers, that entire house is maybe.

Five times as big as the house we live in. And I don’t consider my house small, particularly big, and it, it, the grounds are fine. They’re just like regular rich people grounds. If you look at the, the

Simone Collins: structure, it wasn’t meant to be, it wasn’t, it was always meant to be a private estate. The reason why some palaces are very big and grin as they were meant for entertaining, you were meant as, as a place of state.

Malor was always meant to be a country retreat. It is, is

Malcolm Collins: is, if you look at even like the main British palace, it’s just not that big. Bumping palace. Palace is

Simone Collins: pretty big

Malcolm Collins: and most of it is dedicated to statecraft, not for like a living in if you, if you look at versa, I think

Simone Collins: what what you’re missing though, and I don’t know why this might not have been the case, but I think this has to do more with like epidemiological history and not [00:35:00] other things.

Because a big trend that seems to have existed or been very common among English kings. Was you. You wouldn’t really have one big palace investment because you were constantly moving from one to the next to avoid the plague. Or some other disease outbreak. Well, also they had to bring it out. So you had to have a network of palaces.

Were small because people were not

Malcolm Collins: working sewer systems some of the time. Yeah, yeah. You had to

Simone Collins: air them out ‘cause they’d get too gross and crappy. And so then you’d just wait and let someone, I don’t roughly, metaphorically hose them down. And then you’d go to another one,

Malcolm Collins: something like Versailles. And this was very much the point of Versailles Uhhuh was to bring all of the nobles together.

So yeah, it was to

Simone Collins: create a jail for all of the, the elite and mobils who, or Nobles who otherwise would be on their own plotting against the kings. So it was, it was a giled jail. It was

Malcolm Collins: basically meant to overlook. So the, the Ottomans were at a different layer. Like if you look at the, the, the structure of the palace, it was just clearly pleasure room after [00:36:00] pleasure room, which is not a thing you had in the the Versailles or the English palaces.

So at its peak, you know, the design

Simone Collins: choices, just to be clear about European palaces, really had to do more with, with. Granting people increasing access of access to the king or the, the, the reigning monarch. And it was more about meeting spaces and whatnot. It wasn’t about, I mean, not really parties so much.

Yeah,

Malcolm Collins: yeah. It had, it had a 400 rooms at the De Pac Palace. 400 rooms. 400 rooms. And so, if we’re talking about Sultans, like Marad ii, who expanded the harem to up to 40 wives mm-hmm. Each separate quarters alongside dormitories for hundreds of slaves and fathering over a hundred children through relentless sexual pursuits.

1640 to 1648, known for his insatiable lust. He kept 300 concubines in addition to his 40 wives. That is

Simone Collins: exhausting. I would not [00:37:00] want to put up with that. That is, that’s just too many for you. Yeah, too, too. 300, too many.

Malcolm Collins: And, and these, these palaces the, the, the, the when, when Europeans would go there like in 1862, they were shocked.

Not just at the polygamy, but the regular nudity in the palace.

Simone Collins: Walking around naked,

Malcolm Collins: the, the, I I, I want to be clear. Well, you act

Simone Collins: as though the UK is so high and mighty with their palaces and no one was walking around naked there, but it was just too freaking cold. I’m sure they would have that. They could.

You know, we had the ability to maybe

Malcolm Collins: potentially get up to hijinks, like in the, the uk like farting competitions and stuff like that? No, that, that was

Simone Collins: France with the whole famous, that was

Malcolm Collins: France. Okay. I, I, yeah, again, the, the uk as, as we’ve pointed out, you typically get a gradient in the Muslim world, like the, the highest level of debauchery.

Then you get medium debauchery in the Catholic world. And they really got up to some stuff. [00:38:00] Any good stories you can tell us about Louis court or,

Simone Collins: oh well, king Louis, the xiv that, that, that is the one that was famous for the Yeah. Good stories

Malcolm Collins: about crazy.

Simone Collins: Yeah. There, well, it wasn’t de I mean, there was debauchery for sure, but, and that’s obviously, I always talk about Louis Philippe, the brother of Louis Vi xiv, who, who famously dressed like an absolutely fabulous woman and had a persistent male partner very much in the open, but no one really made a big deal out of it.

There was they, it was. Maybe this was actually Marie Antoinette’s court, but in, in one of the French courts, either the 16th or the the 14th, they had a farting contest to determine whose fart could sound most like a fine trumpet, which is just wonderful. And but to be fair, when they talked about the same sex relationships, I think they called it the Italian vice.

So I think that was more seen as an Italian slash room who were also

Malcolm Collins: Catholics, by the way.

Simone Collins: Yeah. But then like, so I think the, the further south you go, the more debauched it got. Because remember also in the, in the [00:39:00] court of king Henry viii, the whole thing with the. The, oh my gosh. The first wife Henry?

No, the second wife. And, and boy Lynn, the boy, Lynn sisters were kind of famous for being sexually mature and they could do all the fun stuff because they learned it in the French court. So basically the, the further down you got, but then the French court was, was Oh, those Italians. My gosh. Those Italians, yeah.

Yeah. So like is just a little more sexually out there. And I’d also point

Malcolm Collins: out with, with King Henry, the, I, I’m actually a big fan of King Henry Thei. I think he was. A pretty excellent monarch. And I think he is really unfairly thought of today. No he, he was not like his idea of debauchery was, was hunting tournaments.

Like I, that’s not like when he was younger. He was apparently like very fit. He was and would go on like, and, and was, he

Simone Collins: was very, very, very devoted to his wives. He I mean as my, he, yeah, he slept around and the only reason that he kept

Malcolm Collins: going through wives, by the [00:40:00] way, for people he wanted a male error.

Yeah. It’s because he didn’t want a male error for himself. He knew, because all British monarchs know this. If you don’t produce a male error that is existentially bad for the kingdom. Mm-hmm. They go to war with each other. If you don’t like, you almost always have a a, a revolution where like hundreds of thousands of people are going to die.

Two millions of people are going to die. Horribly if he cannot produce a male error. Not producing a male error was existential for the safety of his kingdom, right? Like that, that is what he believed from the history. And he also believed from medical knowledge at the time that women, when they couldn’t conceive it was, that’s something to do with their fault, right?

Like, the, he did not, there was no medical understanding that this, well, he was also

Simone Collins: a very faithful person, so he, I think, got. For his time. Reasonably paranoid that God was trying to send him messages, that when there were miscarriages and when there were other mishaps, that he was being told something’s wrong and he was trying [00:41:00] to listen and respond accordingly.

Malcolm Collins: And the Vatican could have just given him a dispensation. Well, yeah,

Simone Collins: but except that there were corrupt ties and Catherine No. Were, they were completely nepotistic.

Malcolm Collins: The core reason, yeah, I remember they didn’t give a dispensation is because his first wife, who he was married to was the sister of a king in, I wanna say Spain or France, that had huge connections with the Pope, maybe even related to the Pope.

Yeah, I, I think

Simone Collins: Catherine or EOR had some kind of familiar relation. She was not very far removed from the Pope himself, so

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Which is obviously super corrupt for religion to do that and put that many people’s lives at risk, but they don’t care. You know, historic popes, they, they kill people. No problem.

But anyway the point I’m making here is the level of de degeneracy of, of its Islam. And if you watch old movies about the Middle East, like when you’re, like, how recent was the Islamic religion? Just a completely debauched religion. Mm-hmm. It was recent enough that pretty much all 18th century explorers saw it that way.

If you watch any of the old movies, it’s like, go watch a, like a 1920s movie or something like that. If any scenes [00:42:00] take place in you know, Arabia as they would say, or something like that they’re, they’re typically pretty debauched. But it’s really

Simone Collins: hard for me at least to tell as an outsider how much of that is just fetishization of another culture.

You see this across a, a lot of different. Different cultures that, oh, well the, the Native American woman is, is, is frisky. Although, I guess Pocahontas, his name wasn’t that actually like. It meant frisky but or the, the, the Asian woman or whatever, like they No. At all. There’s a tendency to,

Malcolm Collins: no, I actually, I actually would strongly encourage you.

I, I do not know. I think it’s because my family, they liked watching old movies, so I’ve seen a lot of them. Okay. Old movies that take place in the Orient, as they would’ve said back then. Yes. There you typically see like the lavish, like parties and stuff like that. But you do not see the sexualized women dancing on stage constantly or slaves dancing in the corner or like that.

You don’t see that. If you, if you look at the old [00:43:00] Westerners with a lot of Native Americans you might see the concept that Native American women or tribal women walked around without tops on. Mm-hmm. But they were not constantly, they didn’t have like slaves in cages constantly doing sexy dances.

Right. Like, the, the if you want a modern, if you haven’t seen what these, these old depictions look like. I think Java’s Palace is a pretty good depiction of the way that the Islamic world was historically depicted. You had like slave guard eunuchs guarding like slaves and couches, Java.

Simone Collins: The HUDs palace was insufficiently fancy.

The, these Islamic palaces were incredibly gorgeous.

Malcolm Collins: By the way, if you wanna know, I thought, I wanted to dive into like, what is the life of one of these female harem slaves, right?

Simone Collins: Yeah. Was it decent? Do, would this be an aspirational role?

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. So, they entered the channel the, the harem, typically at seven to 15.

They’re sometimes younger, okay. They were either purchased on slave markets, captured in war raids, given as diplomatic gifts from governors or foreign ruling elites or recruited [00:44:00] or presented by families at, at later periods upon arrival. Selection was strict and multi-step physical, physical examinations by wood lights.

Experienced re, or Chief Unix checked for health beauty virginity, so there was no defects to ensure suitability for service or intimacy. Psychological slash behavioral evaluations assessed docility intelligence and

Simone Collins: docility

Malcolm Collins: and potential. Okay? Only the most promising, beautiful, graceful, and intelligent advanced towards higher roles.

Others stayed at menial tasks. Hmm. They were immediately converted to Islam, if not already given new Muslim names. Often poetic, reflecting a personnel appearance or personality, and cut off from family contact to foster loyalty to the palace. Well,

Simone Collins: kind of like a dog. So you’d be named like spot or

Malcolm Collins: Yeah.

The training process. Right. Newcomers started out as AMI novices. And they entered a natine period called Ace Maliki that lasted several years in segregated dormitories under the supervision of senior women. And [00:45:00] Unix. The, the training focused on assimilation and skill building. They studied language and religion learning, Ottoman, Turkish IC recitation and Islamic precepts and core creeds.

Court etiquette and manners. Palace protocol, graceful movements, speech, deference and behavior in hierarchical settings. Okay. Arts and talents. So they had to learn music, dance, posey, recitation, embroidering, reading and writing. Yeah. But you

Simone Collins: had food and lived in a nice place for any period of most of human history.

That’s pretty

Malcolm Collins: great. Yeah. And they had to learn cleaning, cooking, and childcare as well. What an average day would’ve looked like is you would rise early in the morning for prayers, absolution, and personal groomings. Then you would go to a communal meal where you were assigned tax served by higher ranking women and such as cleaning chambers, et cetera.

Then you’d go to your education training and you’d get a little bit of leisure time in the evenings.

Simone Collins: Now, I mean, sign me up for if I’m born in that period of history. Absolutely, yes. If you want a

Malcolm Collins: really good show about what it’s like, because you are always [00:46:00] trying to win the sultan’s attention.

You were trying to win favor. You were trying to sort of politic was the other women or the women who were in his attention, or unless

Simone Collins: you were just quiet, quitting and trying to keep your head down, you, you, you didn’t get bothered by the soul to, you get three square meals a day and you got some leisure time.

Yes. So there’s

Malcolm Collins: a, a great anime about this if you wanna see it. It doesn’t take place in the Ottoman Court. It takes place in the Chinese court.

Simone Collins: Yeah, yeah. That sounds similar to Chinese Harems for sure.

Malcolm Collins: Called the Apothecaries Diaries. Oh, the one was the autistic princess who reminds me. Yeah.

Yeah. She’s not a princess. I just call her. She, the, the main character is an autistic physician girl. Like very obviously canonically, autistic and, and very dispositionally, I think similar to Simone. But she she’s just a great. Main character. But you really get to see that these courts are just these places of constant intrigue.

And her character, like Simone said, she would, is basically quiet, quitting as a concubine. Like she, she could be a higher ranked concubine if she wants to, like some of the, the, there are instances in which high [00:47:00] ranking officials show interest in her or even purchasing her. But she’s always avoiding it so that she can just mess around with her books and, and her, her biology, which is what she’s really into she’s just a nerd, is basically the, the story.

That’s

Simone Collins: good to me. Yeah. Sign me

Malcolm Collins: up. But I think that it’s important that we remember because it, one of the things that I think a lot of people think of Islam today, like, you know, you hear somebody like Andrew Tate or something, you know, say like, well, in Islam they actually still all follow their religion and stuff like this.

This is a new thing and it is something that has. Been allowed to arise and metastasize in Islam, in part because Islam is living through a post apocalypse of their own civilization

right now.

And I do not really see any realistic mechanism for them to reclaim. That, that civilization at this point you cannot, as you know, when I talk about a [00:48:00] religion being an active conversation, right.

And I I talk about like Protestantism various parts of, obviously if you go to the time of the founding fathers and you read the founding fathers of our country’s works on religion, a lot of them did exactly what we are trying to do, which is sort of find ways to combine the modern science of the times with Christian metaphysics.

Yeah. Right. And that’s what I mean when I say a founding, like an active religion. Like they were constantly in communication with each other within the whiter community around like. Okay, so how do we integrate this new scientific finding with our religious understanding? Mm-hmm. I actually, I think that that’s a perfect example of what a living religion is versus a dead religion.

A living religion will say, how do we integrate X new scientific finding with our religion? Metaphysical understanding? How can it advance our understanding of God and of religion? Whereas a dead religion will say. Oh, there is a new scientific finding [00:49:00] either the world of science and the world of religion are two different things and we do not need to integrate them at all.

Or they will say well, I just don’t care that there’s a new si like, it, it is wrong if it goes against my religious interpretation. Right? And when you get that, you, you, there’s a certain level of just sort of societal advancement that is no longer possible. And as I also often say with Islam, as I pointed out another recent video I did on Islam, which is I think one of our best videos ever.

Why? Why Muslims don’t win wars worth of conquest. I should note not wars of defense. Obviously they win Words of defense. A anyone can win A war of defense. The, the cour thing I say there, like if I was going to, to update Islam worked and when it worked, it worked as a religion of a ruling minority.

It has never really been particularly functional as a dominant religious group. And it really was never structured to be the dominant religious group. Mm-hmm. Which makes it quite different than something like Judaism, which evolved and was always structured to be the religion of the masses.

[00:50:00] Mm-hmm. And then if you look at Christianity Christianity was a religion that took Judaism and then augmented it and used it to you can look at my video on like, was Christianity really is revolutionaries. People claim it as I think, sort of our better videos historically. And I point out that the reason that Constantine took Christianity a and, and adopted it as a state religion is it allowed for an alternate sort of deep state.

Like Rome had a big deep state problem at the time. The Pretorian were constantly causing problems for people that constantly offering Emperors basically acted like they ran everything at that point in the same way that Janis series eventually did within the Ottoman Empire. And so, he has all of these officials executed, thank God you the total boss.

I love Constantine, by the way. And he’s like, okay, well I need, didn’t

Simone Collins: Constantine have a Oh no, he was, he was the, the, the. Catholic one.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. He’s the one who really founded what I think of as modern Catholicism. Yeah. And I [00:51:00] really like Constantine. So Constantine then says we need a deep state, right?

Like we, but I cannot trust the existing bureaucratic deep state. ‘cause it’s all like nepotistic and tied to everything. And it’s like, oh, this new Christian thing, they’ve got churches in every city, right? Like they’ve got an existing governance structure. And if I favored them because they’ve been disfavored and persecuted for so long, they’re gonna be really loyal to me.

So like, let’s just make that the deep state. And then he’s like, and now we have to get a consistent theology. We need to get up. And so we kept holding councils and stuff like that to, you know, when the, when the, when the theologians would fight, he’d be the Constantine and be like, no, you guys get on the same effing page.

I am doing this for bureaucratic reasons. Okay. Like we need the empire to function well. So it was constructed. As a religion for governing a large imperial system. Like when, when it, when it was being constructed. And, and it is very like, sort of Nam says it was being applied. Obviously Jesus didn’t have that in mind, but Christianity [00:52:00] changed a lot in its early days that you can watch any of our videos on that stuff.

And, and some of these early, not even like theological concepts, but just like how, use structure of like the election of popes and stuff like that, right? Like this, this is all bureaucratic structure that matters a lot to the way the religion works. But Islam, when Islam was created by Muhammad it was a, a ruling elites religion, right?

They would go, they would conquer territory, and then they would rule this non-Muslim territory. And that is also why it became a religion of such excesses. And there’s been iterations of Islam that tried to eshoo those excesses. There was, there’s even like this communist branch that ended up it’s, it’s still practice in Oman.

Really they constantly have rebellions. They’re not as extreme as they used to be, but they didn’t believe that like leaders should live super luxurious lifestyles. But that always sort of falls apart in Islam after a while because and, and I, and I guess the question is, is why is Islam not as good at protecting against, dauer lifestyles, and I guess it is because it’s, it’s doing it now. [00:53:00] It’s doing it to such an extreme now that it’s preventing I think a, a degree of like real commerce and, and dynamism within this particular regions. So it, it basically, I, I will say that this happened in reaction to that like Wahhabism actually happened because you made a bunch of random people, rich.

That’s, that’s the real answer of what happened to Islam. No, I

Simone Collins: think the lack of dynamism is, is, is a product of among the areas where you could have that dynamism, you don’t have it because you don’t have the historical hardship due to the amount of wealth that everyone has inherited. By sheer luck, that would en enable that.

A lot of people though, in response to your video on why Muslims haven’t. You know, been famous for their manifest destiny taking over the world is, is due to excessive cousin marriage causing too much, sort of like accumulated genetic damage. [00:54:00] I, I think more, it’s, it’s a matter of circumstances. Not, not breeding both a culture and, and people and societies and economies and governments that are built to make resourceful and enterprising people.

But I mean, the common marriage is,

Malcolm Collins: is a real thing. It doesn’t help.

Simone Collins: It doesn’t help. Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. And, but, but they’ve been doing that forever. They did that even before the Arab raids that conquered most of the world. So, you know, I don’t, I don’t know if that alone can explain the, the state of the community at this point.

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. So it doesn’t

Simone Collins: help. Of course, it doesn’t help. Well, I think there’s a lot more to it than that.

Malcolm Collins: Another interesting thing about Islam is if you’re familiar with modern Muslim cultures, it’s like a very high power distance culture. And they still very much have this ruling elite, like that’s the part of Islamic society that still functions is the ruling elite.

Mm-hmm.

It is the other parts of Muslim society that don’t really function and it’s because they [00:55:00] never really were meant to exist. The, the ruling elite made the mistake of converting their pores. And, and it wasn’t really ever structured for that.

Simone Collins: Mm.

Malcolm Collins: Anyway. Well,

Simone Collins: interesting. Yeah, thanks for walking me through this.

‘cause I’ve, just, my understanding of, of the history of Islam, et cetera is just non-existent. It’s just not there. So anything you tell me is, is new and a benefit to me, and I appreciate that.

Malcolm Collins: All right. Love you,

Simone Collins: Eson. I love you too. I’ll see you in the next room. Gotta get the. Oh, here we go, friend. I was teasing Octavian today as one must, of course, you wanna

Malcolm Collins: tilt your camera down a little bit so we’re closer to, okay.

Simone Collins: So I was teasing Octavian about how much he loves his helicopter, and I’m trying to, you know, I’m, I’m trying to channel my [00:56:00] first grader history to speak on his level.

Mm-hmm.

And I say, well, if you love helicopters so much, why don’t you just marry one? And I had this instant regret feeling. ‘cause I’m like, oh no, what if he uni ironically identifies as an attack helicopter

Malcolm Collins: because of

Simone Collins: you.

That’s the thing. That’s

Malcolm Collins: where you screwed it up and

Simone Collins: decides to become like that Eiffel Tower woman and just actually marry a helicopter. And I actually I I had mentioned the Eiffel Tower woman to ton’s a, BA therapist at one point. And she was like, no, no one marries a building. And I’m like, lady, you don’t even know.

And so I looked her up and that hussy left the Eiffel Tower for another architectural wonder

Malcolm Collins: with a bridge or something.

Simone Collins: This you can’t trust women who marry edifices and, and buildings and, and whatnot. No, because that, they just leave them. They’re, they’re totally [00:57:00] unreliable. Can’t even stay with the, it’s the Eiffel Tower.

You know, that’s like leaving a wonderful housewife, you know, who just does everything right? What did the Eiffel Tower ever do wrong? Anyway, Octavian, much to my relief, says, oh, of course I wouldn’t marry a helicopter. And then I think he’s gonna finish the sentence with something along the lines of, I’m a human and it’s a helicopter and we can’t get married.

But no, he’s like, because the ring would just fly right off. The ring would just fly right off.

Malcolm Collins: The ring would just fly right off. So

Simone Collins: now I know his criteria for it. Can I marry it? Which is, will the ring stay on? Good to know. Octavian. Thanks. I have so much faith in your prosperous pairing eventually. Oh God.

I love first graders though. I love, I love six year olds. They are, they’re delightful [00:58:00] people. He’s getting better at flying his RC helicopter. It’s, it’s insane to me. Like how do people, how do people do group based lessons when you can’t bribe children with individual things? Like, okay, you know, finish, finish this milestone and you can go fly your drone.

You know, you can’t do that on a group scale.

Malcolm Collins: Yes. And that he has this little helicopter. It’s so sweet. It’s really durable. He likes it a lot. Do you know what it’s called? We’re recommending it for other people.

Simone Collins: Oh yeah. Let me look it up. Because I, I did a lot of comparison shopping on Amazon and, and

Malcolm Collins: he can actually fly it pretty well.

Like he can fly it through my ring light and everything like that.

Simone Collins: Yeah. After just one day. Yeah. So it’s great for younger kids. Helicopter. Helicopter. Helicopter. Whoever told me about the Bosnian song, I Hate You Now because after every lesson, one of the rewards going back to that is to play the Bosnian song.

Helicopter. Helicopter and helicopter. He can’t even really wrap his head around the idea of languages yet, but now [00:59:00] he’s just mumbling Bosnian lyrics to himself. Ter, he has no idea what it means. I don’t either. I, I don’t. Ter doesn’t seem to like translate to anything like maybe Father Copter, but I don’t, I don’t understand.

Anyway, it’s the bus go. B-U-S-S-G-O-R-C. Helicopter on Amazon. Remote control helicopter for kids with 30 minutes flight, two batteries, seven plus one LED, light modes altitude hold, RC Toys. Yeah, it has literally a takeoff and landing button, so you don’t even have to really. You can just have, the kid can just start off by having their drone take off and land and they feel like they’ve accomplished something and they get really excited about it.

The whole family is excited about it. Last night, the kids threw a rager well past our bedtime, flying the helicopter around every, every night. ‘cause we we’re in a really old house. We can hear absolutely everything through the floors, so you, we don’t even need cameras in their room even though we have them also, because [01:00:00] I can literally just lie in bed in this bedroom and hear them and hear every little sound and know exactly what they’re doing based on my knowledge of who’s like the footfalls and everything.

They were going hog wild last night. It was, people think I, I guess, you know, this whole episode has been about debauchery, but like no one knows debauchery until you’ve. Encountered a, a roving band of small children at night past their bedtime. All right, excited.

Malcolm Collins: Well, will,

Simone Collins: Oh. Kazu text Little man.

by the way, people are wondering why we’re not talking directly about the situation in Iran right now.

I really want to talk about this more, but Simone just had major surgery on her face and jaw and she can’t talk,

Speaker 14: [01:01:00] What happened? You lost your blanket, then go fight for it.

Queen Victoria was basically the 19th-century version of a hardcore weeb… but for Scottish culture.

She fetishized tartans, kilts, and fake clan traditions so hard that she forced visiting nobles to show up in made-up “clan tartan” outfits — and they actually did it. Today, huge numbers of Scots genuinely believe this stuff is ancient… because Scotland’s education system is apparently cursed.

Meanwhile, Nassim Taleb fans keep preaching the “Lindy Effect” (longer something survives → longer it will survive) as gospel in crypto, culture war, and trad circles. But in 2025–2026 reality — with hyper-rapid technological, economic, and memetic change — the Lindy Effect has basically inverted.

In this episode we cover:• Queen Victoria’s Balmoral weeb arc and how she single-handedly invented the modern Scottish aesthetic• Why almost nothing you use or celebrate is actually “ancient” (spoiler: most traditions people call timeless were invented 1850–1980)• The original Lindy deli comedians meant THE OPPOSITE of what Taleb claims• Survivorship bias, Fortune 500 churn, disappearing classics, collapsing orchestras…• Why rigid “antiquity = virtue” thinking is suicidal in the modern world

Episode Transcript

Malcolm Collins: [00:00:00] So Queen Victoria

Simone Collins: Imagine a weeb invented our modern perception of Japanese culture, even as believed by the Japanese. That’s what Scottish culture as we understand

Malcolm Collins: so she then. Starts telling any of the Scottish nobles who visit her house, that they have to come in their clan tartan

Simone Collins: and in their, and

Malcolm Collins: they’re like and they’re like, my what? And so it’s like, it’s like a weeb. Goes to Japan and he says that everybody’s daughters have to come in their magic girl costume.

Simone Collins: He’s come in your formal Goku hairstyle, sir. .

Malcolm Collins: And these, and these Japanese people are like, like, and they’re like, it’s the, it’s the queen. I’m gonna dress up my daughter like a matching girl. We’re going, we’re going all in on this. And the funny thing is this, since Scottish people today, the country has such a terrible education system that many of them believe that all this stuff,

Speaker 9: We saw the lochness monster. When all of a sudden this huge creature, this giant Ste from the Pete Lithic air comes out of the water. I yelled. I [00:01:00] said, what you want from US? Monster? And the bent down and said, I need about three 50.

Simone Collins: How much of a weave Queen Victoria was. She also allegedly would, would while visiting Balmoral slip into this fake Scottish brogue. So you can imagine like a weeb going to like spend their summers in Japan, like speaking in ic, Japanese accent.

And you would imagine

Malcolm Collins: built their entire culture off of her we fantasy.

Would you like to know more?

Malcolm Collins: . Hello Simone. I’m excited to be here with you today. Today we are gonna be talking about one of the ideas that has become popular in pseudo intellectual circles. And I want to talk about how wrong it is.

Simone Collins: Are we, so intellectuals, is this one of our circles?

Malcolm Collins: Well, yeah, it’s, it’s called the Lindy Effect. And it often comes up in the concept of something being anti Lindy or a heuristic where the longer, a non-perishable thing like an idea [00:02:00] technology, cultural practice, book or institution has survived the longer its expected remaining lifespan as its proven robust against time and disorder.

So this concept is really, really, really popular in the conservative space. So they’ll look at something like techno puritanism, right? Like our family’s religious practices. And they’ll be like, oh, well it’s very anti, right? Like, it’s very new, and therefore it’s unlikely to survive a long time.

Simone Collins: Oh,

Malcolm Collins: and I’m going to point out that this is both a misattribution of an idea. It’s a misattribution of a bad idea that even in its very conception was taken to mean the exact opposite of what it originally meant. Which is just like e everything about this idea is bad.

One is that, first of all, the idea is just wrong in a modern context. It worked a lot when you were dealing with a static economy and society because then that was like a evolutionary environment. If something becomes evolutionarily advantageous and out competes [00:03:00] other things and the environment it has outcompeted them with has stayed stable, it is going to continue to be advantageous.

That just like an obvious truism, right? And that is true for cultural environments, right? Like if you’re dealing with a long period of human history where things were broadly the same from one generation to the next an idea or a book or a technology is going to be much more robust if it has out competed other technologies within a similar context.

However, that is no longer the world we live in. Things change dramatic. In terms of the global economy, in terms of the global culture, in terms of how we communicate and in terms of global mimetic sets so rapidly now that you almost have an inversion of the very concept of the Lindy effect.

Second, what I’m gonna be talking about is a lot of the things that lead to the perception of the Lindy effect, and we’re gonna be going over these are illusions. Mm-hmm. They are instances in which an [00:04:00] individual today believes something has antiquity because either of just a myth, right. Or they believe it has antiquity because something in antiquity had a similar name.

An example of this would be somebody who will say something like, well, Christmas or Easter has been around a long time, and we’ll go into not in anything that’s meaningfully close to the way today these things are practiced. If you said that, you know, if, if you’re applying the Lindy effect to.

Let’s say something like Christmas or you, you would apply it to Teop Puritanism, eg. What I mean by that is in a hundred or 200 years, if techno Puritanism becomes widespread and is like a common belief system everyone would say, well, this just follows the Linde effect because it’s Christianity.

And Christianity has always been around, but people within our generation would be mortified if somebody said that. Yeah, you said that the way that Christmas is practiced today, or Easter is practiced [00:05:00] today, is historic to somebody in the Middle Ages or something like that. They’d look at you way crazier than saying

Simone Collins: technically.

Well, and certainly, you know it like, you know, the year, like for bc they’d be like, what do you mean? What are you talk, this is an apocalyptic Jew, just like all the other ones. What do you. Yeah. So,

Malcolm Collins: She’s talking here about what a lot of his historical Jesus researchers think about Jesus within that context.

But the, the, and the other reason why this is hidden from a lot of people, and we’ll go into this, is a lot of these traditions use their manufactured antiquity to try to give themselves a veneer of authenticity. Whether it is the practices of the current Catholic church or modern Judaism, or modern Orthodox Judaism even.

And when individuals. Question these things, you are often literally questioning somebody’s self-perception and worldview. Mm-hmm. So it [00:06:00] is incredibly, like the, the people wanna fight against it as hard as they can, because for some people, if you could show that their faith or belief system lacks a lot of the antiquity that they believe it has, then they would see that as invalidating it because they see that as its core, like argument for existence.

Simone Collins: Hmm.

Malcolm Collins: And so, we’ll, we’ll go into that as well.

Simone Collins: That’s a really good point. I, I wanna say, I, I can, first, I just wanna give credence or I don’t think people are crazy to have an intuition in favor of this effect because up until the scientific method or like empiricism became widespread and more systematic and we had ways to very quickly.

Validate whether something that was true that didn’t involve literally dying. The only way you knew that something was a decent, like health intervention or safety intervention was because it was a tradition that was passed down from generation to generation. Because all the, the generations that tried something new and [00:07:00] different that didn’t work, died and all the surviving ones did the thing that did work.

And so it was really good to do the thing that was old because that means that everyone who did it before. Well, they, they lived so it’s probably a good sign.

Malcolm Collins: Well, it’s, it’s not even that they lived, it’s actually, and you bring up a really fascinating point that God, I could do a giant deep dive on like an episode in itself.

But there was a period in European history that went from like the late Roman period to the high medieval period. And in this period of, of, of history, this is when the Catholic church really dominated. Oh. And they created an a, a mindset around the sciences and around things like, a medicine where you would always reflect on an older and proven older way of doing it or teaching.

And the antiquity of a thing was in this sort of early version of Catholicism proved that things authenticity. And this existed outside of the church. This was the period where [00:08:00] you had like Ga Galen medicine, right? Oh, and then like nobody developed on me medicine after Galen for a really long time.

Yeah. And when they would teach medicine at university, if you had a, a, a new way of doing a thing, literally the argument they would have is, well, this isn’t the way Galen did it. And then people would be like, well, you know, maybe he was like, like, they’d be like, but it, it seems to work better. And they’re like, but.

Is it, is it, does it have the anti antiquity?

Simone Collins: Oh, the antiquity. Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: Very much like the dwarves from Warhammer medieval Puran version. Right? Like, does it have antiquity? If it doesn’t have antiquity, it’s wrong. How dare you With these new flying contraptions, I don’t care that they work, they don’t have antiquity.

And what you also saw, this was philosophers of this period and books of this period.

Simone Collins: Well, this is why we are, so we dunk on Deon Deontologists all the time because there’s, there’s a difference between a heuristic that works well, which is, oh, this old thing probably is good because the people who used it survived.

And [00:09:00] probably all the new things that. Ended up killing people. Well, that’s why we don’t know about them. That, that makes sense as a heuristic until you build a better method like empiricism the scientific method, et cetera. Just better technology or something that just appears to work better, to your point.

Right. But then the deontologists are like, I don’t care or gonna do it the way it’s supposed to be done. And that’s why we have such a big problem with this. But this goes beyond this latest episode in We Hate Deontology.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. This, this goes beyond just classic Deontology though. Yeah. If you look at the way science and information was treated during this period it, it, it had some positive effects.

Civilizationally specifically the reason why today we consider the quote unquote classics. The classics that you, as of a, you know, if, if you’re watching this, you probably are educated on ancient Greek literature and ancient Roman literature.

Simone Collins: Probably not anymore, sadly.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, sadly. But, but we were in our generation, this happened for a very long time.

Civilizationally. But here you’re, you’re actually proving that Lindsay is [00:10:00] a is, is inverting now that young people aren’t learning this stuff anymore, even though it had been learned for so long. But the reason why wasn’t because this stuff was necessarily good or better or anything like that. It was because during this period of Catholic church dominance of Europe, the educational institutions operated on the belief that older was better with a few specific periods in history, specifically certain parts of the Roman Empire, in certain parts of the Greek civilization, having like, real, real level of importance. And it, it’s, it’s ironic that it turns out that the church is the reason why we hold so many pagan thinkers in such high esteem. If, if not for this period of Catholic dominance you know Socrates and Play-Doh and all that, you, you likely would

Simone Collins: know, oh, you think like the, the Catholic Church was the original hype machine for all of these Greek and Roman relationships.

I

Malcolm Collins: don’t think it’s, it’s very well documented history.

Simone Collins: That’s so I didn’t, I guess I just [00:11:00] never put two and two together. I love that. That is delightful.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. The, the, the Catholic church was actually really obsessed with this stuff. I mean Okay. Think about it this way, right? Simone? You read something like Dante’s Inferno, right?

Or, or Dante’s Divine Comedy is the

Simone Collins: full

Malcolm Collins: name. Yeah. Dante’s

Simone Collins: Burn Book.

Malcolm Collins: Okay. Think about all of the figures that appear on it. Yeah. They are either modern political figures from, like Italian politics of his spirit,

Simone Collins: Dante’s Burn book. It’s so, he’s such a like 13-year-old girl. I

Malcolm Collins: love him. Yeah. Or yeah.

Writing a fan fiction about all of his or, or they ancient Greek thinkers or ancient Roman thinkers.

Simone Collins: Oh my God. Was Dante the original online bully? Fan fiction writer.

Malcolm Collins: He, he writing a a mean fanfic

Simone Collins: about all this. He’s like making a furry and it, the trifecta is complete. He probably was one, what am I saying?

No, no, but no, this, you’re making a really good point though. Yeah. It’s like, like their, their fan fiction, their, their their cinematic universe of choice was these, these thinkers, like if [00:12:00] it wasn’t a saint or you know, a, like a, a biblical figure, it was. Roman or Greek philosopher. Right?

Malcolm Collins: But, but, and, and you would know this if you went to you know, a Catholic monastery of this time period, they’d know all of their Roman and Greek thinkers, right?

Mm-hmm. Like they’d know and, and, and the, not just the thinkers, but the fiction from that period, that was the most popular fiction for a long time because older was better. Mm-hmm. You had that and then you had the, the weird incel horny comic book literature of the Period, which was the val work literature, which a lot of people don’t realize was written by the Horny troubadours and with sort of our version of comic books today.

And we have totally other episodes I can get into about that. But the point being is I think it created the illusion, if you’re looking at history, that this stuff actually had any sort of saying power and it didn’t. Mm-hmm. It was an artificial staying power, which has collapsed, was in a lot of modern institutional environments, but.

[00:13:00] Before we get to that, where did this idea come from? Where did it get popularized? The guy who popularized it, I’m gonna see if you remember this guy’s name for anything, was Naem Nicholas Tale in his 2012 book, antifragile. Oh

Simone Collins: yeah, that ring bell.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. And the 2017 essay called an expert called Lindy.

So we actually have another episode on this particular figure where I point out that he is an Oh yeah. Enormous con artist. You were

Simone Collins: super mad about him. I

Malcolm Collins: forgot. Yeah. He’s the guy who is the biggest known advocate that IQ has literally no meaning that was meaning it was no outcomes. Yes. And I just go through his argument and be like, this guy is just lying with like, it’s, it’s a, it’s a, I I consider that episode a very good dissection of an argument so you can quickly recognize when somebody is using supposed data to lie to you.

Because it’s, it’s very clear when you read his argument that he knows he’s deceiving his audience. I was like, it’s really skeezy, but basically [00:14:00] I put him on like a lower level than Malcolm Gladwell. Right. Like I think Malcolm Gladwell may be

Simone Collins: evil. Malcolm. Yes.

Malcolm Collins: Well, I’m gonna call him good Malcolm, because I’m evil Malcolm, which is being good Malcolm.

I’m joking. But yeah. Yeah. He’s evil Malcolm. So, evil Malcolm. By the way, my, for people who dunno, at Stanford Business School, there was literally an entire class that we took that was a mandated class that everyone had to take. And there was only like three mandated classes in the entire, like, so it’s like a big deal class.

The entire, I think first year, it might have been like first semester of this class was entirely just using Malcolm Gladwell’s books to learn how to use statistics to lie to people. It was like, this is the

Simone Collins: learn from the Masters

Malcolm Collins: gold standard of lying to people with statistics. Let’s go over these books.

I think it was the tipping point was the one that they were really focused on, but there were a few others. Oh, nice. 80,000 hours was another that they focus on. But I, I just love that like, people do not [00:15:00] realize how bad some like modern pseudoscience officers are. Who’s the one that always pisses you off.

The guy who wrote Sapiens. Hmm.

Simone Collins: Can’t remember

Malcolm Collins: his name. What’s his name?

Simone Collins: I cannot remember his name.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. But a lot, a lot of people do cue into these like pseudoscience books that are like pop science and they think that they’re like valid. But anyway, so basically came from a famous pseudo scientist.

Okay. And what’s so hilarious is he named it after Comedians who frequently gathered at Lindy’s Delicate Scent, a famous Broadway area spot known for its cheesecake and a hangout for showbiz folks after performances. What’s hilarious is they use the term to mean the exact antithesis of what he took it to mean.

I just think it’s bad reading comprehension on his point or something really story. But let’s go into this ‘cause it’s interesting.

Simone Collins: Okay.

Malcolm Collins: So there the comedians would gossip and analyze recent shows and speculate on career longevity, particularly for comedian TV comedians. The core observation [00:16:00] slash heuristic they developed within a comedian’s career.

Our life expectancy was inversely proportional to how frequently they were exposed on tv. The more frequent appearances EG weekly shoe shows, the quicker they’d burn out material and fade, sparse appearances, guest spots and special allowed for longer careers. Huh. So it’s not exactly inversely, but it certainly doesn’t mean anything like what Lindy took it to mean.

Mm-hmm. This was then updated by Benoit Delbar a 1982 in, in the book the Fact Geometry of Nature, where he referenced the same deli anecdote, but mathematically reframed it, trying to argue for the longer something with around the, the better it was, right. Basically. Hmm.

Simone Collins: Okay.

Malcolm Collins: And it didn’t gain main spread’s popularity until the mid 2020s.

And the main reason it seemed to gain main spread’s popularity was because of Bitcoin

Simone Collins: widespread and or [00:17:00] mainstream, is that what you’re

Malcolm Collins: trying to say? Widespread and mainstream. It was because of Bitcoin battles, basically. Bitcoin tried to use it to argue that Bitcoin was the best cryptocurrency.

And then of course, immediately the gold people were like, well, then gold is better than Bitcoin because Bitcoin is anti Lindy. You know? I mean,

Simone Collins: Gold’s doing better than Bitcoin right now, though.

Malcolm Collins: The point being not, I mean, not over any sort of longer period, period,

Simone Collins: directionally,

Malcolm Collins: Bitcoin is below where we sold it, I think. So the point, high

Simone Collins: scale, just saying,

Malcolm Collins: the point being is that how was I gonna say in, in terms of anti Lindy and Bitcoin?

Yeah. So basically the, the whole Bitcoin bro versus gold bro debate and Bitcoin bro versus ETH bro debate is what popularized the concept and got a lot of people to become aware of it.

Simone Collins: Mm-hmm.

Oh, okay.

Malcolm Collins: One of the arguments used against it, which I do not think is a good argument, is they say a common charge is that the Lindsay effect is essentially survivorship [00:18:00] bias dressed up as wisdom.

Critics point out that we only see things that have lasted eg ancient texts, gold bread, et cetera. While countless old things have vanished without a trace, the heuristic cherry pick survivors and ignores the graveyard of once enduring ideas and technologies that failed. I’m gonna point out that that’s, that’s not even the case.

It’s just not a very good principle beyond the intuitive. Truth that you would see to it, eg. Obviously you’re gonna have a bit of a bias towards things that have been around a long time simply because they have been around a long time. But what we will see is one, things just aren’t around as long as you think they are.

Mm-hmm. So a great example of this is Fortune 500 companies. And, and the trend of things not being around as long as you think they are is increasing over time. So if you go to the 19 fifties to the 1960s, the average tenure on the Fortune 500 list was 50 to 60 years. If you go to,

Simone Collins: oh my gosh, wait.

That’s insane.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah.

Simone Collins: I can’t even imagine that.

Malcolm Collins: If you go to the 1970s to [00:19:00] 1980s, it was 30 to 35 years. If you go to, that’s

Simone Collins: like a lifetime. That’s insane.

Malcolm Collins: If you go to the 1990s, it was around 20 to 24 years. If you go to the 2000 tens to 2000 twenties, it’s. Now at around 15 years or less. That is, that is how long?

So it went from 60 years to 15 years on the Fortune 500 list. Companies are churned through on this list these days. Oh my gosh. And I’d also point out here that a lot of the things that you believe are historic are just not, so let’s, let’s go through a few of these, right?

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: And, and by the end of this you’ll be thinking, wait is literally anything I use in my life.

Does anything have historicity? I’m like looking around my room for anything that is historic. I can find one thing.

Simone Collins: Well, the whole room maybe

Malcolm Collins: a, a knife. Well, yeah. I mean, the room, your room was built in like

Simone Collins: 1790. Yeah, that’s de decent for America,

Malcolm Collins: but that’s just living in [00:20:00] an old place. So you’ve got this knife here and this cup here.

Yeah. These are the only two things I can see anywhere around me that have any real degree of historicity.

Simone Collins: Well, how are we defining historicity? That recur bow over there was built in like, or made

Malcolm Collins: maybe, maybe the time, the sand, the sand time thing here. But like nobody actually uses those anymore.

Simone Collins: No, no. That was made in like 2000.

Malcolm Collins: Well, no, I know, but I’m talking about the technology itself.

Simone Collins: Oh, the technology. No, I recur bow right there.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Your recurve bro. And the mirror. That is it. That is the only things in this room that have any historicity to them. Oh. Why have

Simone Collins: woven baskets full of baby things?

Books obviously. I’m looking at books. Come

Malcolm Collins: on now. What books are on their way out right now? And you look at, watch our video. Why burn books when it No, nobody reads anymore. Books are largely just decorative at this point, and almost nobody reads books. Even if you’re talking about bestselling books.

And we go over that, like, I think it’s like your average, like top end of book. It’s like 5,000 to 8,000 reads or something when we were going over.

. [00:21:00] For some examples of what I mean here. The average New York Times bestseller is only selling between 10,000 copies to a hundred thousand copies. , And that can mean for the author you’re getting 18,000 to $180,000 per in New York Times bestseller. , The win of wins. And even if you come into this successful, , suppose you’re Billie Eilish, right?

Billie Eilish sold 64,000 copies. Justin Timberlake sold only a hundred thousand copies. Ileo Mar, 26,000 copies, way less than an average episode of our shows, , P Morgan 5,650 copies in the us basically nothing. , So p. People do not read books. Whenever somebody comes to me, they’re like, oh, I have this great idea to write a book. I’m like, well, that’s pretty silly considering nobody reads books anymore.

Malcolm Collins: It’s, it’s

Simone Collins: sad. It’s so

Malcolm Collins: sad. It’s bad if you contrast it with like an average YouTube video or something. And, and so I think a [00:22:00] lot of the things in like, the only thing that is actually still regularly used are cups and knives, baskets.

You don’t,

Simone Collins: baskets. Baskets, man

Malcolm Collins: baskets, right? Like, not a lot. Like you have candles behind you, but they’re entirely decorative. So let’s go over other things that people may think. They’re also

Simone Collins: electric candles, so I don’t know if they count one.

Malcolm Collins: Oh. Oh. Glasses. Glasses. Have a degree of historicity and haven’t changed that much.

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: Buckles. You have buckles buckle. That’s literally a re historic recreation dress. So I don’t

Simone Collins: think that’s, it’s actually, no, that’s, that fasteners of that sort are actually quite new. Oh, but I, I am wearing stays right now. Oh,

Malcolm Collins: actually, you’re right. They’re so new that the Amish don’t use them because they see them as too newfangled.

Simone Collins: Yeah, they’re newfangled. But my laced up stays under this well, and I’m wearing a Viking apron. Below this.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. But a, a lot of people just don’t realize it. Something like a buckle is actually a fairly new technology in terms of clothing.

Simone Collins: Even hair ties, I mean, people used to literally use a needle and thread to tie up their braids.

Malcolm Collins: Like there’s [00:23:00] some, some fun ones here. Diamond engagement rings. Those are very diamond engagement rings were popularized in the 1930s to forties by the DeBeers company.

Simone Collins: Mm-hmm.

Malcolm Collins: Their diamond is forever added in 1947. The white wedding dress. The white wedding dress was popularized

Simone Collins: Victoria.

Malcolm Collins: How you know your stuff. Let’s see if you can get more of you.

Simone Collins: Yeah. Fashion history, Malcolm, come on. That’s like my, that’s my thing.

Malcolm Collins: The, the happy birthday song.

Simone Collins: Oh, that was made that was the based on the Good Morning to You song made by two school teachers. Yes. In the like 19. What, 1910s to 1930s?

What is it? 1930s. You got it right.

Malcolm Collins: Wow.

Simone Collins: My wife. Good morning. Trick or treating you trick or treating. Yeah. That wasn’t done until I wanna say like the 1950s or sixties, right? 19. Now people used to make little jackal lanterns and stuff. The really cute collectible stuff that are Halloween decorations are all lanterns.

They’re not for. Dressing up in costume. We

Malcolm Collins: actually have an entire episode where we go over how new, like if you [00:24:00] think like academia is, as a historicity, we put out the entire citation system that academia invented is, is based on, was literally invented. You

Simone Collins: blew my

Malcolm Collins: mind with that 1954.

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: And the

Simone Collins: citation system, like I thought, like there was like a peer review and everything too.

Malcolm Collins: And that was the G index and the H index, which are used to rate professors today. And academics today were literally invented in like 2013. Like so crazy.

Simone Collins: So

Malcolm Collins: crazy. And this is like what our entire academic system is based on these days, right. The

Simone Collins: people like as it always was,

Malcolm Collins: as it always was.

Here’s, here’s some fun ones. Later HN and DLE octoberfest attire.

Simone Collins: LA later Hoan. Yeah. And by the way, I had a German friend who always got mad. ‘cause everyone in America pronounces it leader Hoen, which apparently means singing pants. Which is a way better word.

Malcolm Collins: I like singing pants. Okay.

Simone Collins: You have like twisting puts on his overalls and he calls them marching pants because he, their overalls, I dunno why he thinks, but letter, why letter goes was, what were they, were they like invented in like the, the 1910s or something?

What? [00:25:00] I don’t know.

Malcolm Collins: 19th to earliest 20th century.

Simone Collins: Wow. Okay. So in the 18 hundreds.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah.

Simone Collins: Or 1910s if early 20th century is 1910s. I’m not too bad.

Malcolm Collins: Okay. The Japanese tea ceremony.

Simone Collins: Ceremony. Oh, that’s interesting. I wanna say 1830s.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, it’s about right. So, so early 20th century. It was done during the Beijing era

Simone Collins: modernization.

Mm-hmm. Yeah. I think when you go to the, the, the golden, did you go to the Golden Palace in Kyoto? I think they talk about it a lot there. Have like a designation. Maybe I

Malcolm Collins: did. I wouldn’t have remembered something like that. ‘cause I don’t

Simone Collins: care. It was one covered in date. The palace covered in gold,

Malcolm Collins: which is all new.

Almost everything in Japan is new. By the way. Watch our episode. The the, the one true civilization theory. Our most offensive theory, if you want to be heavily offended, it’s, it’s a good, it’s a spicy one. But English breakfast.

Simone Collins: Oh, like the beans and blood

Malcolm Collins: beans. Yeah. A hardy plate of eggs, bacon and beans.

Simone Collins: Gosh, I don’t know. I, I’m gonna [00:26:00] guess that’s an industrial revolution thing. No, it could be. Yeah, it

Malcolm Collins: is. It is. It’s an industrial revolution thing that was promoted when hotels started to become popular as a middle class symbol of prosperity.

Simone Collins: Well, don’t forget Scottish tartans. Being like a total invention.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. We’re gonna

Simone Collins: go into that too. Right?

Malcolm Collins: Tartan is an invention. Kilts are a modern invention.

Simone Collins: It makes me so, so sad. Like you want it to be real. You want it to be this historical

Malcolm Collins: thing. The Scottish thing is so, and Scott, this is like, you know, like I said, that like Jews get pissed off when you point out that like there’s not actually that much antiquity to a lot of Judaism.

Yeah. And Catholics get pissed off when you say there’s not that much antiquity. You wanna really watch a people who get pissed off tell this to us, Scott. Tell them, you know, that kilts don’t actually have much historicity to Well, ‘cause

Simone Collins: then they have to accept that they were just hill people, criminals.

Right.

Malcolm Collins: Right. No, it gets, it gets funnier.

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: The actual reason why all of this, like the Scottish image we have today was, [00:27:00] became popular was

Simone Collins: Queen Victoria fetishizing them.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. So people who don’t know Queen, what was the place called that she went to?

Simone Collins: Balmoral.

Malcolm Collins: Balmoral. So Queen Victoria would go to this place called Balmoral.

And she was really enamored with the idea of Scottish history.

Simone Collins: Yeah. It was like, imagine, no, this is perfect. Imagine a weeb invented our modern perception of Japanese culture, even as believed by the Japanese. That’s what Scottish culture as we understand

Malcolm Collins: that is Yeah, that is, you are a hundred. So to understand how much of a weeb she was for Scottish culture, right?

Like, so she would go and there were some patterns that look something like a modern tartan, but there was nothing like a clan, no version, like different C clams didn’t have different ones. It’s,

Simone Collins: it’s an invention. It’s a fan. It was

Malcolm Collins: No, no, no. But so she, she saw this somewhere, right? Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Just like in a pattern shot basically somewhere.

And she hadn’t seen it in the uk and so she decided. Personally, and [00:28:00] because she’s the queen, everybody leans into this. Oh yeah. You know, she’s like, oh, I love this Scottish pattern. And then they’re like, oh yeah, this is the most Scottish you, you need to buy it all. And so then she literally wallpapers her entire house in Tartan designs.

And then what she starts doing is because she had this vague idea of like a kilt, because something like a kilt had been banned, I wanna say the jacka bite revolution. I don’t remember this, the specific, but, but something like, it was banned, but it actually wasn’t like a formalized thing or anything like that.

It was like a more modernized symbol of like, it

Simone Collins: wasn’t a pleated skirt. I mean, they, they wore something more akin to togas or sorrys than.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Yeah. Similar to toga or Aari which a lot of people, medieval people wore, like it wasn’t unique to Scotland or anything like that. Yeah. It was just the basic medieval gown that like peasants in Ireland or England or anyone elsewhere.

But she saw this and she thought it was like a male skirt thing. Anyway, so she then. Starts telling any of the Scottish nobles who visit [00:29:00] her house, that they have to come in their clan tartan

Simone Collins: and in their, and

Malcolm Collins: they’re like and they’re like, my what? And so it’s like, it’s like a weeb Goes to Japan and he says that everybody’s daughters have to come in their magic girl costume.

Simone Collins: He’s come in your formal Goku hairstyle, sir.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Come in your formal Goku hairstyle in your matching girl costumes. And these, and these Japanese people are like, like, and they’re like, it’s the, it’s the queen. I’m gonna dress up my daughter like a matching girl. We’re going, we’re going all in on this. And the funny thing is this, since Scottish people today, the country has such a terrible education system that many of them believe that all this stuff, well, it’s, it’s a funny thing because it’s a really, really bad education system combined with, I say this as somebody who got his.

Graduate degree, I mean, my undergraduate degree at St. Andrews mm-hmm. Which is easily the top school in Scotland, often the top college in the uk. Yeah. So I’m not saying this is somebody with no knowledge of Scottish people being dumb buns. Like supposedly I [00:30:00] was around the best of the best of Scots and I was just not that impressed.

And no, actually it was a thing at St. Andrew’s the St. Andrew’s people who were from abroad, because it has like a huge, I wanna say like 25% foreign audience. They were typically, like, they’d know stuff. I would expect a normal, educated person to know. Mm-hmm. The, the Scotts they would not know like one.

Yeah.

Simone Collins: But you still have to be the best of the best of the best to get into St. Andrews as someone in Scotland.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. So this is the best of the best of the best.

Speaker 6: Uh, why exactly are we here?

Speaker 5: Son,

Speaker 7: we’re here because you’re looking for the best of the best of the best. Sir,

Speaker 5: what’s so funny?

Speaker 8: He is just really excited and he has no clue why we’re here.

Malcolm Collins: And one of them was unaware that America used to be a British colony, for example. I was like talking about independence. That’s

Simone Collins: because America’s just that based.

How could it Well, I mean, come on. That’s Scottish history. It just, everything begins [00:31:00] in the year 1900. All right. America always was Scotland, always was

Malcolm Collins: curtains,

Simone Collins: always.

Malcolm Collins: No, they were like independence from what? That’s

Simone Collins: like the Indians, Malcolm, the indigenous American,

Malcolm Collins: the Indians, Americans, independence.

No, but like that is like their knowledge of their own history.

side note here, if you are, . Scot’s Irish, which is what most people in America who think they are, either Irish or Scottish actually are, and what we are, which is the greater Appalachian cultural group in the United States. , This was actually an incredibly small population that was hated by the Irish, hated by the Scots, hated by the English.

, They, they were not mainstream Scottish. So while I do say. I make fun of my own people. , The Scottish people certainly wouldn’t have thought of the Ulster Scots as their own people. , They, they hated them quite a lot. And when they left Scotland, it was a population of, if you’re talking fighting age men, , maybe only 3,500 people.

Um, and that, that exploded into one of the dominant cultural groups in the United States. But that is for other episodes.

[00:32:00] Fun fact when this population that has become one of the dominant population groups in America with lived in Scotland, they were called the Reavers. And this is where the concept of like the Reavers from Firefly come from, , because they were just that violent. , And, , so pop culture hasn’t treated them kindly.

Malcolm Collins: And so they have like this,

Simone Collins: how much of a weave Queen Victoria was. She also allegedly would, would while visiting Balmoral slip into this fake Scottish brogue. So you can imagine like a weeb going to like spend their summers in Japan, like speaking in ic, Japanese accent.

And you would imagine would. So bad. They

Malcolm Collins: built their entire culture off of her we fantasy. So hack by the way, another modern invention in Scotland doesn’t have historicity to it. I think it’s from like the 18 hundreds. Scott,

Simone Collins: I love it. I kind of, I kind of love the idea though, actually, if we, if we wanna get like a little bit more deep into it though, [00:33:00] like you have to, you know, let the cringe pass through you and only remain.

Of, of just building a culture based on the fan fiction, because who likes the, the, the nuance of history? I mean, again, like what do you have when you go to the realities? Just like warring clans people just like crazy hill people. I mean, honestly, American hillbillies are like more true to the, the real Scottish person.

Right. You know, this romanticized Scotland. I think it’s being, it has been adopted because it is a more flattering version of the truth. Why not just reinvent history and just run with that? Why not have the we version of your own country? You know what I mean?

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. No,

Simone Collins: here’s, you’re not wrong to do it.

Malcolm Collins: Trigger Scottish people. So,

Simone Collins: oh, what Scottish people, I mean,

Malcolm Collins: haggis was invented in the 18th century but the first mention we have of something called Haggis that later Scottish people copied. Mm-hmm. We have this from, from two books. Right. Guess where they’re both from? [00:34:00]

Simone Collins: God, I don’t know.

Malcolm Collins: England, it was in 1930. Or

Simone Collins: just like the Scotch egg, which is not at all Scottish. It’s, it’s English, but the scotch egg, I dunno why no one knows why

Malcolm Collins: there’s in English records around 1430.

Simone Collins: Oh my

Malcolm Collins: God. You don’t even see it in any Scottish records until 1520. And at that point we don’t know that it’s what today they called haggis.

So real. That’s

Simone Collins: so, that’s so England like, like just going and making everywhere. Awesome. And then just also allowing them to take credit for it.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Yeah.

Simone Collins: And then everyone else being so resentful, oh, only the Imperial Empire ruined everything when like, really they just fixed everything and allowed them to just reinvent their own history and be like, oh yeah, no, it’s, that is like what the true good leader does, right?

They’re like, they, they allow you to, you know, they give credit to their. Underlings or whatever, like, oh, you know, no, Jimmy did it all. I’m credit to Jimmy where like, you know, he really did all the work. That’s a great leader. I love that. We found new

Malcolm Collins: people to lay into in this [00:35:00] episode, a new

Simone Collins: Scott group.

We love Scott. We love Scott. We got married in Edinburgh. You went

Malcolm Collins: to and, and, and, and I am Scottish ancestry. Like that’s where my family is from. That’s where part of your family is from as well, you know? Yeah. We’re both from the, the backwards tradition in the United States, which is a Scottish population.

Simone Collins: Well, my, my ancestors mostly passed over on the, you know, their, their raping journey.

Speaker: Are you really proud of your wife, at least? I mean Frøya dove into that pillaging, one hundred percent. Even took part in quite a lot of the raping

Simone Collins: it’s, it’s what you did as, as a Nordic Viking, but Sure. My ancestors. Banged your ancestors. Non consensually.

Malcolm Collins: Non consensually. Actually, there was very little genetic crossover from the Vikings.

Simone Collins: Yeah, I know. It’s mostly England.

Malcolm Collins: It’s mostly a myth. Speaking of historic myth, uh uh, no, that’s,

Simone Collins: that’s honestly ‘cause they were just too gross. We thought about it

Malcolm Collins: as to why so many myths, because I actually think that is interesting persists about Scottish [00:36:00] history.

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: The reason is, is because Scotland teaches its own history, almost like Native Americans in the US might teach their own history as a discriminated group.

So they sort of allow themselves these, these whys. And if you challenge them, they’re like, oh, you’re exo phobic or whatever. Okay. Right. Like they, you know, and you see this from other groups, we’re gonna get Jews who are like, Judaism isn’t a mon watch our video. The question that breaks Judaism maybe want us to go in depth in this.

I do not want to delineate all of my arguments here. The two

Simone Collins: hour video,

Malcolm Collins: it’s a four hour video I think, or like a three hour. It’s, it’s, I forgot.

Simone Collins: Took basically a week to film that.

Malcolm Collins: Well, yeah, because I wanna, I was like, if I’m gonna have a bunch of things that I’m gonna be accused of as being anti-Semitic.

‘cause you know, that’s how things are. If you challenge your religion, people are like, oh, it must be because you hate us. And it’s like, no, I’m just going over fricking history here. But I was like, I’m gonna have that all in one episode. Right. So I don’t have to like pepper it throughout episodes. And then with, let’s keep going here. Here’s the, here’s a fun one, by the way. And, and note here, for anyone who wants to be like, we clearly pissed off a lot of Scottish people in this episode.

Simone Collins: [00:37:00] What Scottish viewers analytics only shows S uk so,

Malcolm Collins: yeah. Well, yeah, real English. You know, that’s a, people need way more pride in English Heritage.

I, I’m gonna tell you that. But to continue here,

Simone Collins: honestly, I feel like Scottish people are pretty freaking offline.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. No,

Simone Collins: wait, no, we’ve, oh, we’ve won. Shout out to you. We have won Glasgow based

Malcolm Collins: oh,

Simone Collins: we do. Listener and props to you, sir. We love you. Screw everyone else. This one’s for you.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah.

Anyway so gender specific toys. Pink for girls, blue for boys. Do you know when this started?

Simone Collins: Yeah. Pink used to be for boys because pink was the, the pastel version of red, which is the color of victory and power

Malcolm Collins: and blood.

Simone Collins: Yes, yes. Obviously it’s so weird that pink became a girl color.

Malcolm Collins: When did pink become a girl color?

Simone Collins: Oh, god. I wanna say like 1940s, but I don’t know this one.

Malcolm Collins: 1980s.

Simone Collins: 1980s.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah.

Simone Collins: Via to catalogs

Malcolm Collins: and [00:38:00] ads.

Simone Collins: I’m gonna push back on that, but Sure. The red suited

Malcolm Collins: Santa Claus.

Simone Collins: Oh, that was Coca-Cola. That must have been like CocaCola. Yeah. The nine, what, what did they, when did they do that? Like the 1930s, right?

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, 19, 1930s and then 1960s.

Simone Collins: Mm-hmm. Trivia episodes are fun.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. I like this. I mean, show how much my wife is educated. So to, to understand in part, before I go into other traditions that people might be surprised about. Just how I, I also love that, like, when I make insults against populations, they are insults that like the general public, like there’s like general racist insults and stuff like that

Simone Collins: that you hear all the time online.

Yeah,

Malcolm Collins: yeah. That like people don’t actually care about, like if you’re like, oh, Asians are bad at driving and stuff like that, and like, forget

Simone Collins: everyone’s bad at driving. That’s the easiest one. It’s not even funny.

Malcolm Collins: Asians don’t actually get mad about that. Right? Like, like they’re like

Simone Collins: fair.

Malcolm Collins: If you look at the type of [00:39:00] like, say racism that somebody like Nick Fuentes have, it’s often, other than the, the antisemitic stuff, it’s stuff that the, the, the, the populations don’t really care that much about.

If you look at me, it’s the type of racism that like your average viewer doesn’t realize is that offensive to populations, but to the populations. It’s like, I have studied your history. I know exactly where to place this knife to piss you off. But it’s, it’s, it’s funny. So I actually, I, I, I’m actually offensive here.

Come on. I tried for it, but yeah. So smart, why, why is it that almost nothing actually has antiquity these days? One is smartphone and constant connectivity breaks a lot of the way that information used to be traveled. Then you have ultra processed foods and daily snacks, whether it’s chips or energy bars or cereal or anything like that has replaced a huge ton of what we consider food.

And I was actually on this episode, but I decided not to go into it ‘cause it’s boring and everyone knows. But the stuff that we call like, in the original explanation of this, [00:40:00] he would’ve used examples of things like bread and cheese and beer as being examples of this phenomenon. But the stuff that we call bread and cheese and beer today is nothing like what historically we called bread

Simone Collins: and cheese.

This Malcolm, this is why I’m making our own bread again.

Malcolm Collins: Even what you make and you call

Simone Collins: bread, okay, I’m not milling our own flour yet. I know guys, I’m gonna get a No,

Malcolm Collins: it’s not

Simone Collins: just that. Those mills you’ve been sending me guys are expensive.

Malcolm Collins: You’re showing a fundamental misunderstanding of what I’m saying here.

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: The stuff that you make when you think that you’re making homemade sourdough bread.

Simone Collins: Mm-hmm.

Malcolm Collins: Okay. Is as distant as from what a medieval person called bread as what you would call a cake is

Simone Collins: because I’m not using heritage wheat. Why?

Malcolm Collins: It has to, I, I don’t wanna go into the detail on this because it’s, it’s very detailed and it’s not very interesting.

But

Simone Collins: it has to, it’s, if you’re obsessed with bread, I hate you. We’ll talk about it over dinner.

If you’re [00:41:00] wondering what made historic bread different, it wasn’t just that it was made up of whatever grains were local, whether that be wheat, rye, or barley. , You would also throw in things like peas, beans, and other vegetables. , Depending on what was available, so you wouldn’t have anything that looks like modern, , clean white bread.

You wouldn’t have butter in it. You wouldn’t have eggs in it. , And sometimes you wouldn’t even have salt in it. , Which honestly doesn’t sound that bad to me. I, I kind of like the idea of a, of a bread that’s just a mix of whatever vegetables are on hand.

Simone Collins: Because I, I’m all about, I wanna get. Ancient grains. I wanna get a mill. It’s just very expensive.

Malcolm Collins: Well, I mean, there’s many types of ancient grains that are just like so different. Like if you look at something like pumper nickel bread, for example.

I don’t even think they mill it. They use

it’s just like cooked directly with like whole rye.

I got this right and actually AI said as an example, if you [00:42:00] want to taste bread that tastes more like what historic bread would’ve tasted like pumper, nickels a good example. And it can show you how different, something like a modern, even home baked bread is from, \, what we would’ve called historic bread.

And why those two things I say are as different as what we consider bread today in cake.

Malcolm Collins: I, I can look into the specifics of it, but a lot of ancient

Simone Collins: No, that’s, you know, the, the, the bread that I like to buy that we get imported, that’s like a brick that you could break a window with.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah.

Simone Collins: That’s, that’s a lot more similar to older types of bread. It’s so good.

Malcolm Collins: Yes. But the point I’m making is a lot of these, these, these things that, that we think of as old, he’s not. And if, and, and keep in mind, even if you’re like, well, the bread, the sourdough bread actually has a lot in common with older types of bread.

I’m like, yeah, but the types of bread that everybody eats every day certainly doesn’t whatever we call white

Simone Collins: bread. No, that’s true. There’s so much stuff in it. Well, not even just white bread, e any, any bread that you’re buying from a store that’s like sliced, even if it’s like. Whatever. In fact, there’s just [00:43:00] recently the, like I think the Florida Depart Department of Health or something tested eight different brands of bread ranging from different types of white to whole grain breads, including like Dave’s killer bread, which I think a lot of people who like to see themselves as health food buyers get contained some really common carcinogenic pesticide plus a bunch of, you know, they’ll have a bunch of other additives and stabilizers and stuff.

So 100% it’s not, it is not bread. It is, it is highly processed food.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Well, I mean, it keeps this in mind. This is like, even as it like, okay, suppose you’re an average American family and you’re starting your day, right? You go to your fridge. Your fridge, right Fridge,

Simone Collins: yeah.

Malcolm Collins: You grab your. 2% milk.

Which by the way is nothing like whatever we historically called milk.

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: It’s in a big plastic jug that’s that’s given to you in a gallon. Yeah, that’s true. You know, if you go back just two generations, milk was [00:44:00] dropped off by the milkman because you didn’t have easy refrigeration and stuff like that.

And so it was like a completely different part of your lifecycle, right?

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: You then go and you pour that on your cereal of another thing that is a new envision

Simone Collins: developed by anti-sex health nut cultists in the United States in the 1930s. Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: That’s an interesting history by the way. You then, you then put it in your mouse was your spoon?

Oh one one thing That has a degree of historicity to it.

Simone Collins: Yeah. There we go. It’s just that we don’t have our designated spoons that we walk around with all the time anymore.

Malcolm Collins: You then go take a shower. Oh. Daily showers. That’s a modern phenomenon. Yeah. It wasn’t popularized until post 1950s. Marketing by soap in indoor plumbing companies.

Simone Collins: Big soap, huh? Okay.

Malcolm Collins: Big soap. Yeah. Before that they were, they were weekly or potentially even less common.

Simone Collins: Ooh.

Malcolm Collins: And also keep in mind, plastics like your spoon. Well, is your spoon a metal spoon or is it a Tupperware spoon? Is it a, is it another type of

Simone Collins: plastic? Oh, come on. Base campers do not, no base [00:45:00] campers do not eat out of, microwave in or eat with plastic.

Malcolm Collins: Then you, you sit down if you think you are being historic, if you think you’re being all Lindsay with your newspaper, by the way, not even that modern of a phenomenon. Yeah. But in reality, what you’re probably doing is doom scrolling or watching YouTube. Right.

Simone Collins: Even the feed. Even the feed, Andrew Bosworth invented the feed.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Who? He was an investor in our first company.

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: Cool guy. Cool guy. He’d probably be mortified by our politics now, but I like him.

Simone Collins: Maybe, I don’t know. He always seemed kind of based, he seemed more based than we were at the time.

Malcolm Collins: He has kids, right?

Simone Collins: Yeah, absolutely.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Good for him.

Simone Collins: Mm-hmm.

Malcolm Collins: We should reach back out to him sometime.

Simone Collins: I mean,

Malcolm Collins: anyway.

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: Air conditioning

Simone Collins: oh, best invention ever. Oh my God.

Malcolm Collins: That is your house. No, the point being is, is almost nothing. I, I thought about going into medieval Christmas here in medieval Easter, but that’s Oh

Simone Collins: yeah. But no, we, we did an episode on [00:46:00] that, man.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, we did an episode on that and it pissed people off so much because we pointed out that like none of it’s pagan.

And the funny thing is people

Simone Collins: still want it to be pagan. That’s so funny, isn’t it?

Malcolm Collins: No, but the funny thing is, if like, it’s all like invented in like the 1910s or eighties or like whatever, I mean, every, and everybody like wants to believe that all of these traditions, like the Easter Bunny that they can connect it with like these pagans, why is

Simone Collins: this not Satanic

Malcolm Collins: marketing campaign?

It’s like, yes, there, there was within one region of like Germany, like a, a, a bunny that had some festival potentially tied to it, but there is lit one. That changed based on region. So every region was in Germany, had a different animal that was tied to that festival. And two, we don’t have any connections between that festival and modern Easter.

You know so like a lot of this is actually what probably the most historic of all of these traditions of the ones I could find is painting eggs. That that one actually appears to have a degree of historicity to it, [00:47:00] but it was treated as like a religious thing.

Simone Collins: Delightful.

Malcolm Collins: And I was also gonna go into, well here’s some fun stuff we can do about Catholics.

‘cause Catholics are always like, well, our tradition, there’s actually very his, his historic. Right. Okay. And I wanna go into both the theology of Catholicism and its practice has changed so dramatically over the years that it’s really difficult to call it a contiguous tradition. Hmm. I mean, it’s an, it is an iteratively contiguous tradition.

I’ll give it that. But it’s, it’s not as, as much the same thing, like, like historic, if you took a medieval cast, like, well, let’s, let’s go into some of this. Right. Okay. So did you know that you had public confessions and physical punishments, like lashes and flagellation as being standards for confession in the Medieval Catholic church?

Do you wanna go into this a bit? I, because I actually didn’t know about this until I was like,

Simone Collins: I didn’t know about this either. Do tell.

Malcolm Collins: Okay. So you would have something called public penance [00:48:00] rituals. So this is from the fourth of the 10th centuries

Simone Collins: public,

Malcolm Collins: say public. Yeah. So for something like incest St.

Basil

Simone Collins: to publicly be like, I am so sorry.

Malcolm Collins: A 10 year process, three years as a weeper, where you would beg at the church doors. Three years as like how

Simone Collins: much? Like all day, every day?

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. No, no. During every celebration. Yeah. During the, your church you wouldn’t go in the church. You would instead stand outside the church while everyone else For three years.

Simone Collins: Oh, oh, oh, oh. So on Sunday. Oh, okay. Okay. Okay. So like,

Malcolm Collins: and you would ask the people who went into the church to pray for you when they were in the church.

Simone Collins: Okay.

Malcolm Collins: But also keep in mind the people who went into the church also were getting a completely different experience when they went into the church. They would not like play any role in the ceremony.

Often the priests wouldn’t even talk to them. They would be speaking in a language that they

Simone Collins: wouldn’t understand. It’s all in. They don’t understand it. Yeah. So they

Malcolm Collins: would just basically,

Simone Collins: by the way, like grassroots level, I am hearing more and more of our [00:49:00] Catholic base camp listeners talking about Latin mass going back in Vogue.

Everyone was like, bring back Latin mass. Right.

Malcolm Collins: But modern Latin mass doesn’t have a lot in common with historic Latin mass.

Simone Collins: I’m sure Modern Latin mass is

Malcolm Collins: still meant to be for the parishioners

Simone Collins: because Okay.

Malcolm Collins: Basically,

Simone Collins: oh, instead of like. Listen, this is for God. You can watch if you want to. You disgusting human.

Malcolm Collins: No, it wasn’t for God, it was for the clergy. So basically the clergy would go and do a little ceremony for themselves that other you, this was so for the clergy that the average parishioner wasn’t even allowed to drink the wine at communion.

Simone Collins: O you can watch, so you can watch the fabulous clergy and their fabulous

Malcolm Collins: clothes there.

I mean, it was called a I think something like optical communion where like you get the communion because you saw the clergyman take the opticum.

Simone Collins: Mm.

Malcolm Collins: But I mean, think about how hierarchy and stratify that you’re basically going to this event. And the real Christians like the holy people.

They’re up there doing all the [00:50:00] ceremonies, and you just get to be sort of close to it. Meanwhile, Bob is not even allowed to do that. He begs you to pray for him as you walk past him into the church.

Simone Collins: This just sounds like normal sports, okay? This is what people do when they go to watch football on Sundays.

I, I don’t like, there’s no,

Malcolm Collins: yeah, okay. Maybe, maybe, yeah. A bit more sports like or something like that, right? Yeah. Yeah. And so then, then. Three years after being a weeper, you are a hearer, which means you’re allowed to go into the church, but there’s no praying. You’re not allowed to pray while you’re in the church.

And then three years in submission, which is kneeling outside then two years with the faithful, but no communion. But keep in mind, you can only keep bread as communion during this period. And only after full restoration where penitent wore a sack cl sorry, a slash a sack cloth and had ashes strewn on their heads.

And they were expelled publicly. Well, we’ll get into what this being expelled publicly looked like. It was pretty cool. They basically had them [00:51:00] march out of the church, like in front of everyone, in like this big ceremony where they’re being expelled. Like Adam was

Simone Collins: nice. You have your expulsion party.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Very

Simone Collins: exciting.

Malcolm Collins: And, and keep in mind, you’ve had periods where you had things like flagellation, processions this is am mid plagues group. Well, they still

Simone Collins: do that in some like Latin American countries. Right?

Malcolm Collins: Well, the, yeah, yeah. This was, this was done for a long time. It’s just not really done anymore.

You, you still have some groups of Catholic practice Mortifications. Mm-hmm. But you don’t have actually you do have a few grooves, I think in some European countries that still do public flags. Like, I mean, dude,

Simone Collins: there’s some weird places where they like crucify people and march them through the streets to show how badass they are.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. A funny one here for adultery, penitent might stand barefoot at the church doors in, in penitent robes begging for prayers, WW from people who are entering. So I wanted to go deeper into this because I was like, wait, wait, wait, wait. What Is this about a public confession? Because I didn’t know that this was ever a common thing.

Yeah.

Simone Collins: That’s fascinating.

Malcolm Collins: So in the Medieval Catholic [00:52:00] church, roughly the high Middle Ages 1000 to 14 hundreds, it, it wasn’t exactly a confession in the modern sense. What you had was a ritual called the subm Public penance, or Public reconciliation slash exclusion. Okay. And it was reserved for bigger types of things like murder, sacrilege, heresy, violence in the church, or fraud that everyone in the community knew about.

And the actual confession of the sins was held privately, but then the priest or bishop, they thought it was severe enough. They would then have a more public thing in front of everyone, Uhhuh, where the person was like, humiliated.

Simone Collins: I like that.

Malcolm Collins: Right? It actually

Simone Collins: also, the people know to watch out for this person because they clearly are.

Dangerous.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. So the penitent, sometimes multiple gathered in the church door, the annex barefoot heads uncovered, dressed in rough s sat cloth sometimes with ashes already on their heads and imp penitent robes, they prostrated themselves and now before the bishop and clergy and then the bishop or delegate [00:53:00] address them, often reading them a long lesson explaining why the church imposes this and how sin separates us from gods.

And then prayers were recited over them. Mm-hmm. And then the bishop sprinkled holy water and placed ashes on their head. And then they faced a symbolic expulsion where they were marched out to these south west doors symbolizing the ejection for paradise of Adam and Eve, saying words like, on account of your sins, you must be expelled from the church.

As Adam was driven from paradise during linin lint penitent were barred from the main part of mass, often leaving the, the homily and excluded from communion. And what’s what’s interesting is why they stopped this, which I, the Alta Finder. So it stopped in the 12th and 13th centuries popularized by a separate practice, the, the totally private thing that was practiced more in Ireland.

And the reason that it was stopped is because,

basically I, I, I, I somewhere else. But they they were [00:54:00] afraid that some people were not com repenting all of their sins because they couldn’t do full communion when they were expelled, and people were afraid that they would die during that period. Oh. And so they needed, like, the, the communion was better for getting rid of their sins and the, in like the lay person.

So they were like, this is just bad because it creates a, a, a bad incentive. And then people would confess all of their sins on their deathbed. Yeah. But they weren’t sure when they were gonna die. And so it created all sorts of negative externalities. Oh. And the, the, the fully private thing wasn’t like totally normalized until the Vatican II reforms in the 1960s.

Simone Collins: Wow. Vatican too, man. That was, it’s a controversial time.

Malcolm Collins: And if you’re talking about theological differences, and note, the reason I’m, I’m, I’m talking about Catholicism here is for two reasons. One is we already went really hard into all of this stuff in regards to Judaism in that one track. So for four

Simone Collins: freaking hours.

Yeah,

Malcolm Collins: yeah. For, for hours. So if you wanna go into that, go into that. Yeah. Everybody knows that Protestantism changes. [00:55:00] Constantly. So yeah.

Simone Collins: What even is it, you know? Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: There’s

Simone Collins: not, there’s not even a blockchain to look at. Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. If I wanted to go into the, the Hindu or you know Buddhism I think most Hindus and Buddhists are aware of how frequently their religion changes.

Yeah. So, and they, they don’t watch our channel as much. Yeah. And so I, I guess I could have gone into the Eastern Orthodox Church, but, you know, whatever. Yeah. Which, which also has transformed pretty dramatically over time. Yeah. But another thing is how it’s changed theologically. If you look at medieval theology shaped by people like Thomas Aquinas, it would come off as very salvation by works to modern Catholics.

Mm-hmm. Specifically because there was so much of this treasure of merit where an excess of good works of, of saints and Christ could be drawn upon via indulgences to reduce time and purgatory. This system formalized in councils like Trent, but rooted in medieval practice, made faith feel like a cosmic leisure where sins are tallied up and merits are banked for purgatory.

A fiery, intermediate state of purification, which by the way, I don’t even [00:56:00] think it’s Catholic canon anymore. I remember one of them is like a vague cannon. Now it’s either purgatory or the other one that’s like purgatory. Do you remember what I’m thinking of here?

Simone Collins: I know about purgatory. Oh, wait, there’s that space that Dante walks through first.

That’s a little bit outside hell, but I can’t remember what that’s called. It’s where like everyone went before Jesus existed.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. And I think the Vaticans iffy on this, if this is even a thing anymore.

I was thinking of limbo. Sorry, I get the two mixed up all the time. Limbo and purgatory limbo is the afterlife for unbaptized babies. And the Catholic church was very big on this for a very long time. , It was actually a big, like stress thing for Catholics for a long time. And now, , the official stance seems to be it doesn’t exist, which is, I I mean, they, they haven’t confirmed it doesn’t exist.

It’s just they don’t teach it or talk about it anymore and they seem to be moving in that direction. And for me. If your religion has a different afterlife, like [00:57:00] suppose you had one religion that had heaven and hell and then one religion that had heaven, hell, and some other thing, you would call those two separate religions.

Right? And that’s what I mean when I say Catholicism today is not the same religion. It was even, let’s say 150 years ago.

And I think more than that has even less internal continuity than Protestantism, because if you go to Protestantism 150 years ago, at least they still believed in the same set of afterlife. , But with, with Catholicism, the concept of like the metaphysical nature of reality has fundamentally changed, , recently, like in the last 150 years, pretty dramatically.

, Although I will note here when we’re talking about all the cool stuff that Catholics did in the medieval ages, I’m not saying I don’t like this stuff. I think it’s pretty cool. I think the, , you know, the public penance and , the getting whipped in public for sinning, that that stuff is pretty dope.

That stuff is pretty dope. If Catholics went back to that, I’d be pretty on board.

Malcolm Collins: And this would’ve been like a major part that like all Catholics would’ve been very concerned about their babies and stillborns [00:58:00] and stuff like this.

Yeah. Going right. And now it’s like, ah, we’re not even sure that that’s, that’s Canon anymore. It was like a huge part of the metaphysical framework of Catholicism was just like, eh, no, we don’t believe this anymore.

Simone Collins: Erased like

Malcolm Collins: a, a a part.

Simone Collins: Everyone saved games in that zone. Just lost.

Malcolm Collins: A part of heaven was basically shut down.

Everyone evicted. Like, well, not a part of heaven, but a part of the afterlife. They’re like this is, this is maybe not a thing anymore, but that’s what I’m talking about. Like, theology changes. It updates, it, it, it, it. Morphs over time

Simone Collins: as it should, because religion is a technology, a, a software that runs on the hardware of our biology that imparts fitness.

It has to evolve as our environment evolves or it will not continue to impart fitness. That’s just it. That, and breathe the PGS guided to crafting religion that Malcolm wrote that goes into this. Yeah. This is just why, this is why religion exists. You can pretend that it’s about this bigger thing in faith or whatever, and we absolutely believe in a higher [00:59:00] power like a lot of religions do.

I mean, the TLDR is our God is Rocos baes. But I, yeah, I just wish people would accept that and accept that change is inevitable and that we’re all trying to get closer to truth even when that truth is God.

Malcolm Collins: Right. And I think that a lot of people, the, the interesting thing is pretty much everything that would’ve gone into one, one of these ideas, these anti Lindy ideas in a historic perspective these are the things that are being eaten the most by modernity.

If you look, if you, if you did like a ledger on what people would say with very Lindy, they’d say orchestra or Lindy

Simone Collins: they are not conversation

Malcolm Collins: with a

Simone Collins: guy that is disgusting. I loved really early orchestral music. And it’s, what what’s really crazy about it is that even, you know, we’re talking maybe like baroque music or something, the instruments were so different that people wouldn’t know how to [01:00:00] play them.

And that many of these instruments that are being played for a lot of like, of the older music stuff had to be found like hidden in like this deep hidden attic room of some very, very old building that no one knew about. And then people had to learn how to play them again. And these are incredibly rare instruments.

Just like literally the tools used to play certain songs had been lost. For very long periods of time.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Well, and, and these are, this is like the most popular medieval music that you’re aware of. Yeah. The most popular orchestra music you’re aware of is a fabrication within modernity. But not only that, but orchestras themselves are being shut down in large numbers.

I was talking to a guy that was trying to figure out how to get young people to go to and donate to an orchestra. Mm-hmm. And I was like, buddy, you might be able to get them in the door, but they are not going to donate their money to this. That was

Simone Collins: Yeah,

Malcolm Collins: that’s true. Was like, that is thing for the last generation of elites.

Right. You can look at w the, the, the classics in literature. The truth is, is that young [01:01:00] people today. Not only did they not read the classics in literature that much anymore but if you look at something like even movies that you might think had staying power somebody was telling me they tried to show some young people, Indiana Jones in the Last Crusade, and they’re like, this is boring.

I

Simone Collins: can’t hear it.

Malcolm Collins: Right. Like,

Simone Collins: I can’t even, and also, yeah. One, one journalist who came to one of our parties was telling me that she, like language also has evolved so much recently, that when she had her son read Little House on the Prairie, which of course was written by a woman who experienced Prairie America, right.

So not that long ago, and then wrote about it in a much later period as an adult. Right. Laura Engles Wilder. He, he had the same difficulty understanding it. That language, which I remember being simple English, my mom read it. The whole books all like the whole series. To me as a kid, as, as we struggled in, in our high school years with reading Shakespeare.

Yeah. Like it was that hard for her son to understand. And this was a [01:02:00] progressive journalist who I’m sure had a very overeducated son and just one child. You know, this isn’t like, you know, some parent who’s like not bothering to educate their child or teach their child how to read. This is, this is an educated, certainly well-read child who is struggling to read Laura Ingles Wilder’s Little House on the Prairie because it’s, it’s English is just impossible to understand.

That is wild to me. But I think we, we again don’t even understand how much our language has evolved, which

Malcolm Collins: Yeah.

Simone Collins: Is crazy that you may need the same level of, I don’t know if your high school English, your high school Shakespeare books were like this, but they had the little, like, translations in them, like in the margins or in the footnotes or something of like trying to explain which each line was supposed to be.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I feel like that we’re gonna need those for like recent books and like 50 Shades of Gray is gonna those like, but just all in emojis. Like, I don’t even [01:03:00] know anymore.

Malcolm Collins: I, I think literally the only place I can think of where Lindy Effects are still relevant

Simone Collins: Uhhuh

Malcolm Collins: is maybe in the holiday music.

Simone Collins: What? No, like all of the most famous Christmas songs were written by like a Jew in the 1960s.

Malcolm Collins: Well, that’s still older than a lot of modern music and I think that they’ll likely stay popular for a while, but that is true. Most of the famous Christmas songs were written by Jews in the 1960s. The, the, they do a best,

Simone Collins: they do a best

Malcolm Collins: What?

What’s another one? I, I, I’m trying to think of anything that is actually, the only thing I can think of that is actually Lindy. Is chess, maybe chess is Lindy.

Simone Collins: Mm.

Malcolm Collins: But what a lot of people don’t know is the rules to chess. The pieces used within chess, head

Simone Collins: changed and earrings. Earrings and certain bracelets.

There’s this one style of bracelet slash necklace that you can see in the British Museum that are very ancient that some like jewelry makers have kept alive. But yeah, [01:04:00] pearl earrings, strings of pearls and certain types of jewelry in that way.

Malcolm Collins: Windows. That might be Lindy. I don’t know,

Simone Collins: like yeah, windows.

Windows

Malcolm Collins: are pretty now, I’m literally struggling to find anything that fits this. And so I’d say when people look at us or our religious beliefs or something like that, and they’re like, oh, that’s so anti Lindy, like, that’s gonna die out. I’m gonna be like, you are going to die out because your beliefs are optimized for a completely different environmental framework, and if you do not update them, they themselves are doomed.

Lindy only works when you have a stable, cultural, technological, and social environment.

Simone Collins: Yeah,

Malcolm Collins: basically what Lindy was all about was being optimized for an ex, like evolutionarily optimized for an explicit environmental context, which was stable, which no longer exists anymore. And so if you don’t have a system that is specifically built or updated to be adaptable to chasing context, you’re outta the game

Simone Collins: word.

Malcolm Collins: Which [01:05:00] fortunately a lot of these systems are, as we pointed out. ‘cause all of them is actually built to constantly adopt adapt and change itself. Judaism is built to adapt and change itself.

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: Everybody knows Protestantism is, but Protestantism doesn’t pretend that it’s the same thing it used to be.

Whereas a lot of systems that actually are very adaptable pretend that they’re not, because that’s part of their like mythology.

Simone Collins: Mm-hmm.

Malcolm Collins: Anyway, love you.

Simone Collins: I love you too.

Malcolm Collins: This an interesting talk to you, Simone, or interesting to go into

Simone Collins: this was, yeah. I was like, I don’t know what you’re talking about. I don’t know what Lindy is.

Is this James Lindsay? So thanks. Yeah. This turned out to be really interesting. I appreciate you. Alright. Pretty face.

Malcolm Collins: I appreciate your stupid face.

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Speaker 11: The [01:06:00] fence.

Ever wondered why progressive protesters often look... off? Why certain ideologies seem to spread like a virus, tanking fertility and promoting anti-life ideas? In this episode, we dive deep into Edward Dutton’s “Spiteful Mutants” theory — the idea that relaxed natural selection since the Industrial Revolution has allowed harmful genetic mutations to pile up, creating people who are not only low-fitness themselves but actively sabotage everyone else’s reproductive success. Think zombies, but real, walking among us.

We cover:

* How “spiteful mutants” explain everything from trans activism and antinatalism to atheism, BLM zealotry, and declining testosterone.

* Why progressive crowds resemble Rocky Horror Picture Show characters — but without the joy, just spite.

* The dark side of consent myths, age-of-consent debates, porn legalization saving kids from assault (yes, the data is wild), and why some leftists normalize predatory behavior.

* Parasites, modernity’s mismatches (processed food, EMF weirdness, sedentary life), and why we’re all a bit “mutated” now.

* The brutal choices ahead: germline editing, embryo selection, active eugenics in communities, or slow dysgenic collapse.

If you’re building a high-fitness family or just trying to understand why society feels increasingly deranged, this is for you. Shoutout to Jolly Heretic Ed Dutton for popularizing the concept.

Watch our other deep dives on urban monoculture, pronatalism, and human biodiversity. Subscribe for more unfiltered takes on saving civilization — one baby at a time.

Episode Transcript

Malcolm Collins: Hello Simone. I’m excited to be here with you today. Today we are gonna dive in to the concept of spiteful mutants,

Have you tried not being a mutant?

Malcolm Collins: which is a theory that most famously, ed Dutton has promoted the jolly

Simone Collins: her to himself.

Malcolm Collins: Golly Heretics been on the show, printed the show. We, he was one of the people we got in trouble for associating with, would Hope Not Hate did a piece on us.

How

Simone Collins: very Dare We? And I think he tried to warn everyone that like, Hey. Yeah. But it was after we had met was the guy, this guy’s fake. Yeah. I, I don’t, I don’t think we heard from him about this or they, he was just like, no one asked me. But like, I knew from the beginning that they were super suspicious anyway.

Yeah. Called late Ed.

Malcolm Collins: Well, no, what I like is, is Ed Dutton’s concept of Spiteful Mutant has entered the popular lexicon of the modern, right? Yeah. As much as munch as small bugs a cathedral or our. [00:01:00] Concept of the urban monoculture. It’s something that you hear across platforms, across users. Mm-hmm.

It’s just a useful way to, but what’s funny is the urban monoculture and the cathedral are sort of synonyms. I, I guess the cathedral describes the, really, it refers to the

Simone Collins: bureaucratic operation. The urban monoculture refers to the, the culture. Mm-hmm.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Yeah. The, the wider cultural system. Mm-hmm.

And people have asked us to do, why, why don’t you do your just urban monoculture video? And we’ve done a, a number of videos that could be the just urban monoculture video, but like, we’ve got fans and they don’t want to hear us go over something they already know about. Right? Yeah.

Simone Collins: Yeah. Tell us something we don’t know.

That’s the point. Yeah. Wes, the point issue. Let’s talk about spiteful mutants. ‘cause not everyone knows them. I think everyone can immediately understand though what is being referred to when someone talks about spiteful mutants, which I think is why the concept has caught on. It becomes so widespread.

Malcolm Collins: I, I’m gonna point, I actually I did not fully get, I actually had to go back to it because I was sort of thinking in my head, right, [00:02:00] like what I assumed that he meant by spiteful mutants is there was some sort of evolutionary mechanism that was causing some human animals to attempt to sabotage the reproductive success of animals around them or related to them.

When they were not having success in reproducing I assumed that it was describing some mechanism where that happened. And I just couldn’t think of like, what, what would be the biological mechanism there? Like how, how would that evolutionarily benefit anything? And that actually isn’t spiteful mutant theory.

So I’m actually wondering what, what did you think the spiteful mutant theory is before I go into it,

Simone Collins: that people who end up being progressive are in various other ways? Either through their life choices or just through unfortunate circumstances of birth malformed in various ways. And that you tend to see a correlation between people who are more [00:03:00] unkempt or intentionally.

Mutilated, like, well, septum, piercings, face tattoos or like, just, just general like markings or o obesity, like various elements that people associate with just not making the best decisions. Hair dying, that kind of thing, like weird colors or whatever. Mm-hmm. Either through choice or through circumstance ending up in these positions.

Malcolm Collins: So, that’s close and I’ll give you guys a, a quick summary of what the actual theory is because I’ve gone over a few of his videos just to make sure that I understand like where he’s coming from. Yeah, that’s true. ‘cause

Simone Collins: we, we, I, I haven’t actually consumed any of his. His original, this is what it is.

I’ve heard him mention them in passing, just like we do with the urban monoculture. So Fair point. Yes.

Malcolm Collins: I’ll, I’ll give a high level overview and then I’ll go into the, the details and I’ll also go over, you know, whether this is a useful concept, a useful framing or a true framing and concept. So specifically it sort of starts with just look at a lineup of like progressive [00:04:00] protesters.

They look. Malformed, they look weird. They look out of the Rocky Horror Picture Show. Right.

Speaker 3: We don’t want to interfere with their celebrations. This isn’t the Junior Chamber of Commerce, Brad.

They’re probably foreigners with ways different than our own.

Speaker 6: I’m just a sweet

trans.

Speaker 5: Day for the night, or maybe a bite bite. I could show you my favorite obsession.

Malcolm Collins: And Simone doesn’t like that. I point that out. But the, the the, when I see that and I see progressive protesters, it’s the same. Everyone looks a little bit deformed and off.

Simone Collins: Yeah. But my problem with, with your comparison to the Rocky Horror Picture Show is those are joyful mutants.

Speaker 8: In another dimension [00:05:00] with voyeuristic intent, well secluded, I see all

Simone Collins: ​ That is how it should be. And they’re not trying to take over the world. They’re, they’re literally, spoiler alert aliens. No, hold on.

Malcolm Collins: Spoiler alert. Let’s actually look at the Rocky Horror Picture Show. They are a bunch of deformed humans. You can call them aliens, but they’re deformed humanoids, okay. That are like canonically.

They’re, hold on. They are gleeful at the opportunity to sexually harass and assault innocent children. That is what the show is about. They’re [00:06:00] young. The, the, the protagonists in this, in the Rocky Horror Picture Show are, I think in high school hold on, I’m gonna look this up.

Simone Collins: Yeah. Tell, let’s, let’s, let’s work that out.

I think they’re like young adults. I think they’re like a young couple. It’s just stupid and square.

Malcolm Collins: The reason why I think high school is because I think he has a Letterman jacket. I think he is noticed too,

Simone Collins: but that could be. And

Malcolm Collins: you typically have a Letterman jacket in high school, not in college.

Simone Collins: Yeah. Well, I mean, he could be a complete tool who continues to wear his Letterman jacket and college, but I’m curious to see what it says.

Malcolm Collins: So it says it depends on the source. Some high school, some college. So yes, Simone, that’s exactly what they are. They are a group of mutants getting their jollies at harassing and, and they are harassing and sexually assaulting them. Do you deny that that is the, the, the core source of joy that these mutants [00:07:00] have?

And I’d like to really point out here that the people who venerate this movie are the ones who would demonize individuals like Harvey Weinstein. It’s very clear that this is a very contextual demonization for them and that they normalize this type of behavior.

Speaker 12: So come up to the lab and see what’s on the slab. I see you shiver with

anticipation,

​

Speaker 15: Such strenuous living. I just don’t [00:08:00] understand.

Simone Collins: Well, the way that people on the left talk about it is that they are. Introducing them to elements of their sexuality that they didn’t even know they could explore, and that in the end, they like it

And I think that this can be seen as the core of leftist moral philosophy around sexuality. If they say they liked it afterwards, then it’s okay if you, no matter what you force somebody into, if you can get them to normalize to it eventually, then it is okay. And what’s worse and more toxic about this at LU is if you could conceive in yourself that eventually you could get them to like it eventually, then it’s okay because of course, well.

From your perspective, you don’t know if they’ll like it eventually or not to begin with. But if you suspect that they will, then of course you can force them into it. Of course, you don’t need consent. , And this. horrifying, really, because it, it leads [00:09:00] to truly, truly evil actions on their behalf. And it’s where you get these horrifying things like, you know, the recent study that showed up of trans individuals who, , the people who identify with a different gender at i, I believe the age of 12, that over 90% of them identify with their birth gender by the age of 23.

, If you do not begin to introduce, the, . Hormone blockers to them and the gender reassignment to them. , And that we know from now the, . Travis stock files, , when they were released, and we began to get the studies coming out on that, that introducing people to, , hormone blockers when they’re younger, increases their unliving risk, increases their self-harm risk.

, And yet, , because it could potentially help some small, you know, 10% fraction of them, it’s okay to do to the rest of them.

Malcolm Collins: aggressively and through force and through trapping them in a strange house. Well, as we know from

Simone Collins: our research on human sexuality.

If we had to, [00:10:00] if we had to guess if someone had a gun pointed to our heads and we’re like, alright. You know, do, do you think this person wants to be forced into something? Do they wanna be dominated? We would obviously say they wanna be dominated ‘cause both the majority of men and women. Prefer submissive roles.

Women more than men, but even the majority of men, when asked, when it comes down to it, when, when it comes effort. Just wanna lie back and take it. I’m telling you what?

Malcolm Collins: Well, less effort. I think that’s, well, I don’t even think that’s it. I think that the reality is, is that the majority of men were benefited by submissive roles because the majority of men throughout history were not the leaders of their tribes or groups.

Mm-hmm. And if you’re not the leader of a tribe or group having a. Preference for dominance can be it means that you need to

Simone Collins: be eliminated because you’re a threat.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. It, it can, it can, but there’s an evolutionary

Simone Collins: reason why we certainly, humanity would not be published sorry, punished for favoring submission.

However it, it is also crucial to survival that, that we can serve energy, mental energy, physical energy, any form of [00:11:00] energy we can. And submission is a form of energy conservation. So there’s also, but

Malcolm Collins: actually just this scene from the Rocky Horror Picture Show, right? Like, do you understand how deranged and progressive it is that, that it’s nor like that these people aren’t just seen as being terrifying sex pests?

Like that, that’s not the main takeaway you would have from watching that show. Is I think the main takeaway is

Simone Collins: that, and, and people think delight in that.

Malcolm Collins: The Rock Horror Picture Show is part of that problem.

Simone Collins: Maybe one, one person’s gender euphoria is another person’s gender dysphoria. One person’s raunchy Mirth is another person’s

Malcolm Collins: of the children is not considered at any point in the show.

Like at no point they, they are trapped in the

Simone Collins: house. Okay. In discussion of the Epstein files, as many have discussed, age of consent is a really. Klugy concept. And across countries there are very different ages of consent. And

Malcolm Collins: by the way, you’re like a new follower of the [00:12:00] show you should watch if you wanna see the craziest thing about Age of Consent, our video about Communism’s problem with age of consent because almost every communist party has tried to lower the age of consent to like 11.

Yeah. And we just go over document, a document, a documented, documented document country, this

Simone Collins: country.

I think we should go to the number one ranking, left wing streamer, Hassan Piker, for his thoughts on this.

Hassan Piker: That’s the legendary question of all time old enough to count old enough to mount question mark. I wanna say thank you to Miley Cyrus for showing off her camel toe at the VMAs the other night. I always knew Hannah Montana was a little slut. Don’t even try to hide it. Look, this is a classic example of what happens when your father doesn’t pay attention to you.

You turn out to be a slut who’s craving for attention, and then I tend to pick you up at a bar late night and bang you out on the first day.

Malcolm Collins: Oh boy. And the reason being is that you know, a woman’s. Body is inherently a means of production, right? And it’s one that men want access to. And so you have to seize [00:13:00] the means of production.

Well, no, I mean, if she says, no, I don’t want to give this to you, right? Like, you know, she is monopolizing a, a resource of pleasure in society. Capital stake. It’s, it’s not just that, it’s also that, as I pointed out, the myth of consent. Nobody cares about consent, really. We, we, they’re, they’re like, oh, you know, don’t have sex with an animal because it can’t consent.

And meanwhile, they’ll like eat veal, which is like tortured baby cow, right? Like, why, why in this case this consent matter and yet every day you eat animals that were tortured to death, right? Like, and the answer is. Obviously we adopted norms around not having sex with animals for disease transmission, not because of consent.

And the reason, oh, wait,

Simone Collins: okay. I’m sorry not to get into this, but have you actually read those ar arguments in detail? Because I wonder then like, what if I said, okay, what if I slather peanut butter in my no-no zone and then just sort of sit in front of a dog, like is the all consenting. That’s actually an interesting, well,

Malcolm Collins: they would say [00:14:00] that the dog lacks the,

Simone Collins: They don’t know the context.

The context. Kind of like if, if a, if, if a, if a man were to expose himself to a small child in a park, the child’s just like, I don’t know. That was weird. Right? Like, they don’t feel violated. They were violated, so people would probably make that same argument. Is that Yeah. Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: And the argument I, I, I point out with kids is like, we still allow like elderly people who are like less there than let’s say like a eight totally year old or a 9-year-old to have sex.

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Or mentally disabled people. Yeah. Like, it’s clearly about the life stage being inappropriate and not an issue of consent. Yeah. Like it can cause long-term mental damage. To engage in certain things at that life stage in the same way that like, we don’t let kids drink alcohol and stuff.

Simone Collins: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Malcolm Collins: And I think that the, the communists, you know, they see through this, it’s not really about consent, but then they don’t really care about the long-term damage to the kid or believe that there would be long-term damage to the kid.

Simone Collins: Mm-hmm. Right. You know,

Malcolm Collins: So I, I mean, I, I think it’s important that we use the words that we really mean as a society.

Yeah. And with the Epstein files, I think the reason a lot of people freaked [00:15:00] out or there was a counter freak out being like, well, you know, there, what was it like 16, 17, something like that. Mm-hmm. And I think the reality is, is that if you hear about, let’s say a 16-year-old or a 17-year-old sleeping with another, like 17-year-old, like two 17 year olds sleeping together.

Right. You don’t care. You don’t like. I wouldn’t if, if, if, if,

Simone Collins: if weren’t Romeo and Juliet, like 15 and 16 or something.

Malcolm Collins: Right. The, the, the bigger issue here would be, well, I love how the progressives say it like power distance, right. It’s more just that it’s gross to imagine an old man sleeping with

Simone Collins: the half plus seven rule is the easiest rule of thumb, just half plus seven.

Malcolm Collins: And I point out here when I say 17, that is chef’s age given in South Park.

Speaker: But chef, when is the right age for us to start having sex? It is very simple. Children. The right time to start having sex is 17. 17. 17. So you’ll mean 17. As long as you’re in love. [00:16:00] Nope, just 17. But what if you’re not ready at 17? 17? You’re ready.

Malcolm Collins: It’s also the age I lost my virginity at 17. At 17. Because I was basing it on South Park. I was like, south Park’s pretty based. I, I didn’t understand it. I was like just live by the, the Bible of South Park, the, the famous line,

Simone Collins: Hey mom,

Malcolm Collins: there’s a famous line in South Park where, one of the parents is like, well, you know what if the child is very precocious and you know, gets into these things younger and she goes 17, and then another parent is like, but what if they develop a little more slowly and she goes, 17. And, and I don’t still agree with this. I think now it’s.

Probably better to wait until you’re planning to marry someone. Yeah. But, you know, given, given where I was in society back then and the way society was structured and the knowledge I had access to, you know, at least I had that to go with for, for, for 17 and not earlier.

Simone Collins: I don’t know. I, I feel like it not to, I, I hate the idea of there being double standards, but I [00:17:00] do feel like it’s different for men and women.

I think that there’s a reason

I’m going downstairs to the TV.

Okay. I think there’s a reason why even in, in, in really long ago, Catholic men would sled it up until they got married. Oh, yeah.

Malcolm Collins: Because you, you can sleep around more. Yeah.

Simone Collins: Well, I mean, but women wouldn’t, women didn’t do that, but men did. I, I just, I don’t know.

I mean, I, I don’t, I don’t appreciate that the health, like the STD ramifications of that

Malcolm Collins: or the potentially getting somebody pregnant. Ramification. Yeah.

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: So I don’t think it’s, I don’t think it’s worth it in a modern context. I think it’s better to teach, especially now because you know, the pornography is so accessible.

Like, w why are you using a real person as your own hole? Yeah. Like, you could, you could literally just go online if that’s such a challenge for you. So I, I don’t, I don’t think it’s, it’s worth the potential risks involved there. But anyway, [00:18:00] back on topic here with that, with that, sorry.

Simone Collins: Yeah, I don’t know.

I’m still, I, I think maybe, maybe a, another argument in, in defense of. Rocky Horror Picture Show. I don’t even like Rocky Horror Picture Show. I don’t like any musical, just for the record. So I’m not No, but here’s

Malcolm Collins: the thing that I’m, I’m not

Simone Collins: standing it. What I am saying though is they’re happy and they’re having fun and I think a core common characteristic.

The kids are not

Malcolm Collins: happy in having fun. They’re terrified at points of the movie.

Simone Collins: Well, but they end up liking it. But I’m saying is Frank Infer and his. Company of village, but they end up liking it. Do some people orgasm when they’re graped? Right? I know, like, yeah. It’s, look, look, I’m the, the spiteful mutants of the Rocky Horror Picture Show, as you choose to define them, are not spiteful.

They’re happy mutants. And the difference with today’s spiteful mutants is that they are not happy. They are not thriving. They have serious mental health issues. Many of them have suicidal ideation. The these are [00:19:00] not. They’re not enjoying it. They’re both, they’re both ruining the world and making nothing fun for anyone else and, and corrupting other people and trying to convert other people to their ways without consent, and they’re not even enjoying it.

At least. Frank and Ferer had fun. Okay. I wanna, I

Malcolm Collins: wanna get into the side note here right of that you were talking about where some people are, like, why are people so angry about like 17-year-old girl here? And treating it like it’s the same as, and I actually do think that there’s something fundamentally wrong.

With trying to categorize somebody sleeping with a 17-year-old the same way as somebody sleeping with like an 8-year-old. Yeah, because one is obviously going to do a lot more psychological damage to the individual involved. And I also physical damage. Physical damage. Yeah. I don’t know. But I also think that there’s something wrong with, because if somebody’s 17 right?

And you, you put a picture of 17 versus 18 year olds in front of me, [00:20:00] right. Girls, I wouldn’t be able to tell the seventeens from the 18 year olds. I, I think significant. I

Simone Collins: remember we went on that cruise ship and we w we had a hibachi dinner with the three people and I thought they were all friends, and it turned out that one of them was like the daughter.

It

Malcolm Collins: was like a

Simone Collins: 14-year-old

Malcolm Collins: daughter and you couldn’t tell, I just

Simone Collins: thought one of them was attractive and the other just weren’t. The other two just weren’t.

Malcolm Collins: And I point, I was like, no, that’s their kids alone.

Simone Collins: She looked so old kid there, there really is something to this whole, like Gen Z looking like they’re

Malcolm Collins: 40 thing.

Yeah. But she was like 17. I, I don’t 17 year olds or something. Yeah. But the point I’m making here is you can’t tell like the difference between these two pictures and yet,

you know, you, you go to a, a guy with a bunch of like 18-year-old. It pornography. Right? And people are like, oh, that’s totally a normal thing to have on your computer.

And then it’s one, one year younger and physiologically indistinguishable and they’re like, that is horrifying.

Speaker 19: Turn your attention to the [00:21:00] clock.

Speaker 18: 10 minutes. Whatcha gonna do to her Joker, don’t worry. Batman. Wendy is safe. She’s safe with me. Don’t you see bats? Do you know what tomorrow is?. It is. Wendy’s birthday.

Are, are you gonna kill her or, or her family?

What? What? What are you gonna do?

Speaker 19: Do you know how old she’s turning bats?

Speaker 18: N no. I, I don’t know.

Speaker 19: Wendy is so adorable, so sweet to bass, but that’s midnight. She becomes sexy,

Speaker 18: joker. What the , joker. I would rather you do other things. This, this is legal technically, but I don’t like it. It’s, it’s weird. This is just weird.

Joker, uh

Speaker 19: uh, don’t be so weird but critical. That’s not so different. You and I,

Speaker 18: look, we are, we are very different.

Joker. Uh, it’s, it’s Bruce Wayne. Um, I just want you to know that like a normal [00:22:00] person is under this that thinks it’s really, really bad that you do this, so stop doing it. Ugh, Batman.

When the societally correct way, I think to be dealing with this is not to say there’s this magic age where everything changes, but one, you should not be sexualizing people dramatically younger than you. , And that two, , you should not be, , putting people who are developmentally too young to be in sexual situations in a mentally mature way in those situations.

I had admit that the reason that we don’t want them engaging in these situations is not because of consent, not because they can’t make their own decisions, but because they are developmentally too young to be in these situations in a mentally healthy way..

Malcolm Collins: And I think it is useful to have these really strong barriers in society to just be like, we don’t do that. Yeah. But it’s important to remember. Why we have these barriers. It’s for the psychological protection [00:23:00] of the developing people who might be exposed to sexual scenarios or the, or that you might create economic incentives to expose people at wrong developmental milestones.

And so, putting the barrier there, I think is. Useful societally speaking, but I think a lot of people get really confused as to like why the barrier is there. Yes. If it feels so arbitrary to just have this one barrier and then everything. So I, I don’t, I think that’s an interesting topic there.

Simone Collins: But not what’s really funny though, I think Megan Kelly at one point pointed this out in relation to the whole Epstein thing and. The, the media slash public collectively lost their minds. And I, I think ALA’s talked about PDA files and like, well, if it’s, what if it was just all perfectly synthetic material?

People just really seemed to, to lose their minds around [00:24:00] this. A large argument being like, if you let people, like give them an inch and they’ll take a mile, like if you let them even think about it, then they’ll just start going around. Actually hurting people, except the data

Malcolm Collins: shows that’s factually untrue.

Yeah. It’s

Simone Collins: just, this is just one of those things though, where I think people aren’t allowed to even voice that as a reasonable fact in opinion.

Malcolm Collins: Well, I mean, we’ve seen countries, when they have lifted pornography bans, the amount of grapes drops dramatically. The amount of child grapes drops by around 50% in some environ.

Yeah, it’s, yeah, I don’t. You’re literally sacrificing the lives of children. I know. Just, just wait though. You’ll see

Simone Collins: in the comments people coming in. Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: People will be like, oh, but it maybe you look at like, sex offender. Sex offenders typically start engaging whiz pornography at later ages than non-sex offenders.

Like this is a well-studied phenomenon.

If you wanna dig deeper into this, in the Czech Republic, 1989 to 1990, when porn was legalized, the number of children who were S AED a year dropped from [00:25:00] 2000 to 1000. That is 1000 children every year who were not being s aed. , And when people are like, oh, well, you know, do, do, do porn temps me or temps, whoever, it’s like, so you’re willing to to consign.

A thousand children. Keep in mind, the Czech Republic is a small area, so well more if you’re talking about something like the US to essay, because you can’t fing control yourself because you lack self-control. This is the sticky trap that traps the perverts in our society from not assaulting actual human children.

Do you understand? Evil you are if you want to ban this because this is the consequence of you banning this. And if you’re like, oh, well, , it doesn’t matter what the consequences, everything, you’re just an effing communist, right? Like obviously everybody wants no poverty. But when we look at the consequences of doing it in this way and we see, oh, the consequences are mass murder.

Mass death, oh yeah, maybe. Trying [00:26:00] to distribute wealth to everyone is actually a bad idea. , And this is the same thing when it comes to something like corn. , And this has been measured in many countries, not just the Czech Republic. Another famous example was Japan. , 1972 to 1955, , the amounts of grape dropped 68%.

And if you’re looking at juvenile grape, it was 79% the number of actual human children you save by normalizing this. Sort of thing is astounding, and people who are like, oh, why do you offer it with your website? Like our rfab.ai? It’s like, oh, because I can make money off of negative human behavioral patterns and then use that to fund things like our school, like pia.ai, like our work to try to save civilization, like our prenatal list work.

Yeah. I don’t want to charge people for good things like the school. I want to charge them for negative things like indulging in arousal, the way that I’ve always seen arousal, I think is the right way to see. Arousal in society and teach your kids about arousal is in, , coyotes. So what coyotes will do [00:27:00] is they will have a female go out to domestic dogs to try to get them away from the house when they’re in heat and, display themselves to the dogs, and they lure the dogs far enough away from the house, and then they’ll kill them and eat them.

And that is what sexuality fundamentally , is it’s something that can lure you away to kill you and eat you. But if you hide. Engaging from sexuality, or you lead the dog to think, well, if I’m aroused by that, then I must be evil. , Then you make it even easier for the coyotes to get to it. What you say is, no, this is a normal thing to feel, just don’t fall for it.

And if you want to use this to manipulate other people, go ahead. They are responsible for the consequences of their own sins, and I. This is also why genuinely the individuals who have so little self-control, , and that succumb to this so easily, that they would condemn the consequence that they know will happen from restricting access to this, , which is childs sa at a mass [00:28:00] scale, just because of their own lack of self-control.

I think that they’re truly some of the most disgusting people in society. And as I’ve pointed out, even if this wasn’t the case, banning porn is just one step away from a. VPN bands and everywhere that we have seen it and people were like, oh, Malcolm, that’s not true. That’s not true. You don’t get VPN bands the moment you get porn.

It’s like, no, but it always politically tables it. Look at what’s happening with Discord now. Look at what’s happening in the UK now. , Whenever this gets tabled, VPN bands get tabled because it can’t be done meaningfully without v VP N bands. These people are not genuinely on our side.

Anyone who would sacrifice a child because of their own lack of self-control, not a good person.

Malcolm Collins: And people have an intuition about it that’s very strong. And I had that same intuition actually when I wrote the book, the Pragmatist Guide to Sexuality. I began writing the chapter was that intuition. Then I went to go look for the research to back up the intuition, I assumed was true.

Yeah. And the data. Just from any source, not just from like the corrupted academic [00:29:00] institutions, any source, even our own surveys showed the exact opposite of what I intuited.

Sorry, I should have been clear here from a variety of sources, including the own, our own data that we collected on this and we collected a lot of data on this. , You will find some people who have dedicated their entire lives to trying to argue the opposite. , But , outside of that, I have not seen.

Any data against this where the source isn’t just clearly, clearly, clearly super biased. , And I will frequently see people like myself on this subject who went into it believing this is bad, , collected the data and then were like, I guess I was just wrong. Whereas I haven’t seen people on the other side, , people who thought, , this is not bad, collected the data.

, And then said, oh, , I guess I was wrong.

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: And so I, I, I think with someone like in, as somebody with intellectual integrity, I said, oh shoot, I was wrong on this. That’s important to do that.

Simone Collins: It’s not. When, when you’re potentially wrong, you don’t just close your [00:30:00] eyes and turn away and pretend you never saw the thing you dig in. That’s the point. If you’re wrong, you should try to be right.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. But I do, I do think it’s useful to have this, this taboo, the under 17 taboo. I think it, because I think that that’s like, age there.

I, I think it only gets weird, as I’ve said before, when you’re talking about other kids like the fact that we. Count a 17-year-old sleeping with a 17-year-old the same way we treat a 17-year-old who sleeps with a 49-year-old is completely absurd in in many states.

Simone Collins: Well, I mean, I think we also need to acknowledge that before age 25 or so people’s impulse control just isn’t all there.

People aren’t, their brains aren’t fully myelinated, so. We should, well,

Malcolm Collins: where this gets really bad is you get something like a, a girl will like send nudes to her boyfriend, right? And now all of a sudden she’s a child sex trafficker. Like, what? Like that’s, that’s completely absurd to judge her the same way we judge an actual child sex trafficker.

Simone Collins: This video is so getting demonetized. [00:31:00] I’ll, I’ll, I’ll cut around it,

Malcolm Collins: don’t worry.

Simone Collins: Okay.

Malcolm Collins: Don’t be able to tell what’s going on. Back

Simone Collins: to spiteful mutants. Okay. So the,

Malcolm Collins: the actual summary of the theory goes like this, okay. You look at these progressives and you can see they look mutated. And he, he says, if you look historically in society, around 50% of people died before the age of one.

Oh, yes. You had a lot of things that killed people when they were young. A lot of diseases killed people in society, basically killed the weak. And he argues that a lot of what we think of as progressives and we can even see, it’s just like phenotypically looking at them. Mm-hmm. They are people who historically would’ve died at a very young age due to.

Just being, being

Simone Collins: weaker.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. And this is actually a bigger thing than just like Idiocracy, right? We live in a society where because these people aren’t dying and haven’t been dying for generations at this point the, the negative physiological effects [00:32:00] are often paired with negative psychological effects.

And this is just something, you know, from research. Like if you’re familiar with research, this is just a true thing. Like mm-hmm. If you are, for example, taller, you’re likely to be higher iq. I’m sorry that’s offensive, but it’s just true. If you have a stronger heart, you are likely to be higher iq.

If you are better looking, you’re likely to be higher iq. And IQ correlates with all sorts of other mental stuff, right? Like you’re, you’re likely to have you know, more of an internal locus of control, more of all of these other traits, right? And, and he’s just, and

Simone Collins: this isn’t a, we’re not trying to say that these people are trash.

I’m one of those people that would’ve died. I had Scarlet Fever when I was a kid. I had really bad pneumonia. There are several times when I would have just died, so

Malcolm Collins: I. Do not think you fall into this category, Simone. I think most women would be quite jealous to look like you at your age. Or even just be It’s true.

It’s true. Simone, you’re almost 40 at this point. Okay. I don’t think our audience [00:33:00] realizes how crazy, young and good you look for a 40-year-old.

Simone Collins: Oh, that’s sweet of you. Husband goggles. Am I right guys? This guy. Anyway, go on though. I, I, what I’m saying though is, is this is no like inherent judgment on them.

We’re talking about biological terms here and it is true that, yeah, a lot of people just got cu out because.

Malcolm Collins: Well, I think a better way to put it is, you know, for, for any right wing intellectual to coin the term spiteful Newton, that it was Ed Dutton. I’m not saying anything about, you know, physiography. The point being is that it’s also true that you can judge. And we’ve done episodes like AI can do this really, really well and humans can do it pretty well. Judge a person’s political orientation judge a person’s personality just by their physical. Physical features.

We have an episode called like pheno. Phonology is that, phonology is back phonology we go into in a lot of detail. Mm-hmm. But I’ll go into a writeup on Spiteful Mutant so we can get sort of a deeper understanding of this. Okay. Excellent.

Simone Collins: Thank you.

Malcolm Collins: The spiteful mutant theory, also known [00:34:00] as the, so she apostasy amplification model.

CEAM is an evolutionary hypothesis that attempts to explain certain modern social cultural. And demographic trends through the lens of genetics, natural selection, and societal changes. It’s primarily associated with evolutionary anthropologists Edward Dutton, along with collaborators like Michael Woody of many.

And the core idea posits that harmful genetic mutations, which would’ve been weeded out in pre-industrial societies due to high child mortality rates, around 50% are at 18 hundreds are now accumulating in human populations because of medical advances and reduced selective pressures. These mutations allegedly not only reducing individuals reproductive fitness, eg lower leading to lower fertility or maladaptive behaviors, but also.

Spitefully harm the fitness of others around them through social influence, creating feedback loop that amplifies dysfunction at group or societal levels. The concept draws from evolutionary biology, [00:35:00] particularly studies on social eis . Interactions between genes across individuals that affect group behavior.

It was formalized in 2017 by Woody of many and others building on observations from animals. For instance, research on mice showed that deleting specific genes in LLG in three, in some individuals not only disrupted their own social behaviors, but also lowered testosterone levels and altered hierarchies in unaffected wild type.

It ate effectively externalizing the mutation’s cost. Dutton’s popularized the spiteful mutants label in books like Spiteful Mutants, evolution, sexuality, religion, and Politics In the 21st century. Framing it as a zombie apocalypse were mutated. Individuals promote ideas that undermine, so social stability such as antinatalism.

Atheism or extreme political ideologies. He argues this has accelerated since the industrial revolution when child mortality plummeted below 1% in advanced societies, allowing mutations estimated to [00:36:00] affect 84% of the genome related to brain function to proliferate proponents extend this to human society suggesting the spike mutants are more likely to embrace maladaptive views like leftism belief in the paranormal and social justice movements like BLM, which they claim overall reduces fertility.

And use social species like insects or humans and groups. These mutations disrupt adaptive norms leading to phenomenons, such as declining religiosity, rising neuroticism, and even isolation. And he pauses. This could lead to things like mass shootings. I mean, look at the recent mass shooters and stuff like that.

Mm-hmm. The one that tried to assassinate Trump and failed. I mean, this is like the definition of a spiteful mu, right? And you also see this in this individual’s very unusual arousal patterns, right? Like, this, this was a, an unusual arousal pattern that likely wouldn’t have had much. Now people thought that it was furries that he was into when it wasn’t.

It was ultra muscular female bodies and some furry art happened to have that. [00:37:00] But I, I think sort of what I’m pointing out there is, is you see a psychological ab, ab abnormality paired with a physiological abnormality. And, and this is a normal thing, right? You know? And, and I note here because we talk about the way arousal passing rates work not all ab let’s say non normalized societal arousal patterns are due to something misfunctioning, right?

For example, getting turned on by being in a submissive situation or getting turned on by being in a dominant situation depending on your gender, can be extremely evolutionarily advantageous and is seen in social signaling across mammal species. A great example that we use a lot that I won’t get that into is a lot of mammals use the sexual signal for being mounted.

To show their submissiveness to another species in a non-sexual context, but that likely means that their sexual code is being reused in this [00:38:00] context, right? Mm-hmm.

EEG in mammal species where males are dominant and , one of them like raises its butt to be mounted or something like that because it’s showing submission to another one. Within a non-sexual context, we can guess that arousal is causing that behavioral patterns or in mammal species where females are dominant, like spotted hyenas and erections are a sign of submission.

See other things we’ve done on this, it’s a very interesting phenomenon, , that it is arousal that causes the erection of the pseudo penis in females or penis in males in the species when they are trying to sow submission to another of their same species. The dominance and submission, , leading to arousal behaviors, , in human populations.

, Within certain displays when you put certain contexts on, this is not an abnormal or weird behavior. This is just part of basic mammal biology.

Malcolm Collins: And so we know this is happening in other species, and it’s a normal part of [00:39:00] communication in social mammals and that these, these systems can be accidentally turned on.

Doesn’t mean that like, there’s something like fundamentally wrong,

and this is true of all sorts of different,

The point I’m trying to make here is that if you accidentally teach people that normal arousal patterns are abnormal arousal patterns, they can begin to define themselves as abnormal when they are otherwise normal, which allows groups that are genuinely abnormal to signal to them and say, Hey, you are one of us.

Come join us. , We see this a lot within Mormon communities, for example, where people are like, oh, you like porn, then you must be this evil deviant, , come join our community. , And this is used to peel people out of the community. , A really great example of this was that woman who started to brainwash all these Mormon wives to believe that their husbands were evil because they liked porn and then used it to, , do these really horrible abuses of their children.

It was this really different episode.

If you want more info on this, look up Jody Hildebrandt and Ruby Frankie, the [00:40:00] eight passengers, Mormon mom.

Malcolm Collins: but something like being attracted to. Female bodybuilders that is quite there. There’s no like evolutionary reason. That’s a clear, like super normal stimulus of something being just flipped a wrong at some point in development.

Anyway. I also think in use social species is very interesting here. So for people who aren’t familiar use social species or species like ants and stuff like that, humans are not a used social species. Mm-hmm. But ants when ant gets sick or is acting in a way, I assume that would show some sort of like genetic genetic defect, the other ants of their colony will kills them and take them outta the, the, the nest.

Well, they don’t risk damaging the, the, the colonies cohesion.

Simone Collins: Hmm.

Malcolm Collins: So, you know, be aware that your

Simone Collins: social species doesn’t mean nice.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, I mean, I think that the, the the what, what, what they talk about here in mice is really, really, really fascinating. That the negative genetic modification of one [00:41:00] mouse can lead to.

I mean, think about this in, in regards to our broader society here, right? Like that experiment was specifically looking at to testosterone production in mice. Could you say that genetic mutants within our society that previously would’ve been. Weed it out are now causing the, the huge drop in testosterone we’re seeing throughout society.

Hmm. And it, and it is really important when we’re talking about like the use social species and weeding this out from within a species that human societies used to do this. We’ll be doing an episode, I don’t know if it will go live after or before this, but we’ll go over the anthropology of the concept of the.

The witch that lives in the woods, like the old crone that lived in a, in a bog or out outside town or something. Swamp PS swamp, PAGs. And we historically at like a folk cultural level had a fear of mutants or genetically. Disadvantaged people, I guess we’ll call them. And we built our [00:42:00] societies to exclude them first.

I mean, there’s a reason why the woman who looked weird lived outside of a town at at, at the bog, right? And not in the village was everyone else. But we also built like a collection of signs to identify them. How, how do you know this person? Well, they, they, they walk with a hunch. They have an ugly face.

They talk to themselves a lot. Maybe like that would be a sign of a witch, right? They practice. A lot of mystical beliefs which, which, you know, belief in the paranoial, belief in, in, in mysticism. Because even, even, you know, you go back to the Puritan Society or something like that, it’s not even that society like, didn’t believe that those things are potentially real.

You just didn’t engage with it. Right. But I don’t think that the way we see those things, I think if you’re like a sane. Individual religiously or secularly today, you understand that engaging in mysticism, engaging in the supernatural is very [00:43:00] damaging to the people who do it and is correlary to this physiological damage.

If you think about your typical you know, mystic. Right. Even, even respected mystics what, what do they look like? They’re, they’re dirty. They, they smell bad. They are often socially isolated. They you know, even, even if they’re popular or somewhat famous, have, have problems in social situations.

They look weird more broadly. And we used to be taught to fear these individuals, you know, keep them out of the community. And a lot of communities have inverted this. Right? If you look at because I, I, I often talk about this. If you, if you look at, and you go historically so let’s, I’ll use Judaism as an example of this.

And, and, and I think it’s a good example of how this inversion, how happened. And you read stories about BHE from medieval Jewish communities. Mm-hmm. Or you read stories about the. Jews who practice sort of [00:44:00] mysticism and magic from writers like Milan these individuals were seen within Jewish communities.

Like this is their own community. I’m not saying like outside Jewish communities as the same way that we in, in, in Scotland might talk about like a bog witch or something like that. Mm-hmm.

They were seen. As although they were a little different, they were seen as more predatory tricksters who would try to steal from people and the, and, and do other things that could lead to negative repercussions for the community.

They could accidentally summon demons, for instance. They could, there was all sorts of like, negative things that they could accidentally do. And so they were. To an extent shunned by the wider community. Like if you got too into mysticism within these ancient Jewish communities,, you had folk stories that were, and not just folk stories, but folk stories coming down from like the highest intellectuals of your community being like, oh yeah, don’t engage with people like this.

If you want to [00:45:00] get into how ancient Jews saw the Baal Shem, I think a pretty good depiction of one of these would be Dr. Facilie from the Princess and the Frog. Actually, the song, , here was written by a Jewish individual, so I think capturing some. Cultural knowledge of what their culture told them to avoid historically and was forgotten over time.

If you wanna get into a deeper discussion in this, look up our Swamp hags and anthropology episode where we talk about a. , How and why we were warned against involving ourselves with certain types of mystics within the Christian tradition, and then bringing up the parallel of the way that medieval Jews saw Baal Shem, , in the Jewish tradition.

And obviously this is no longer the way Jews relate to Alem because of the Baal shem tov, but that’s a totally different discussion.

Speaker 20: Don’t you disrespect me though, man, don’t you? Derogate or ride? [00:46:00] You’re in my world now, not your world. I got friends on the other side

I see what I mean when I say this. You can see that he is a, . Morally ambiguous in his case, made explicitly evil mystical character because , in the show, we know that he owes his friends on the other side something. Essentially, he was operating in mystical powers. He couldn’t control. , And they ended up being leveraged against him, leading him to do evil acts.

, And he is a sort of a mystical con artist. , And this is the way that Baal Shem him were seen in a historic context.

Speaker 20: I can read your future. I can change it around some too. I look deep into your heart and soul. You do have soul learn. Make your wildest dreams come true.

Malcolm Collins: And then there was this inversion.

What I’ve described of in the past as spiritual antinomianism.

Malcolm Collins: That happened in [00:47:00] the, well, really was Baal Shem Tov as I’ve, as I’ve talked about before where now it’s, oh, the mystics are the greatest, right? Like they’re, they’re the source of knowledge for the community now. And we’ve, we’ve seen this, and I note here, I’m. The reason I bring this up within Jewish community, I’m just trying to show a parallel evolution.

This has obviously happened within broader white culture as well. We grew up learning about Hogwarts school for witchcraft, right? Like this is, you could not celebrate witchcraft more. Then it was celebrated in our childhoods, right? And, and, and some Christian communities tried to resist this. But then unfortunately the writer of it turned out to be super based and basically no one’s against it anymore.

No, no one on the right that I’ve seen anybody really complain about, you know, kids reading witchcraft books or anything like that. And so now you know, you grow up in a, a Protestant American community and who are the kids looking up [00:48:00] to? But the, the vampires and the witches and the you know, the, the next it’ll be the, the swamp trolls.

And the bog hags, right? But these, these figures all had similar you know, there, there, there are stories that are meant to, guide behavior. And there, and there’s stories that you come to very naturally. We’ve noted that we do this ourselves. We tell our kids don’t go and, and swamp because there’s witches in the swamp, right?

Like, don’t go in the old mines. ‘cause that’s where the Tommy Knockers live. You know, don’t run out into the snow away from the house because there’s window Togo in the woods. You know, like, and they live in a world where all of these things are real. Because that’s how you communicate these lessons to children.

That’s how children. Understand and interact with each other, you know, don’t, don’t. And, and now this, this very trope has become a leader within a lot of communities. And calling them spiteful mutants, I think is, is, is useful because the term mutant is one that has, well, [00:49:00] I mean. The reality is, is it has already been co-opted by the left, right?

Has it not by popular culture you know, z what are you

Simone Collins: referring to? The X-Men or something else?

Have you tried not being a mutant?

Simone Collins: Yeah. Xavier’s

Malcolm Collins: Academy For, what is it? Some gifted, gifted

Simone Collins: children, gifted youngsters.

Malcolm Collins: I don’t know. They call them mutants, right? Like they’re, they’ve already tried to be like, oh, being a mutant is awesome.

You, you want to be or, or you know, the toxic avenger, right? Like, you want to be a mutant, right? Like, that’s, that’s the cool thing, right? And so, I actually like the reframing of the swamp trolls which is asthma golds. Contribution to the community and I think a very good one. Where he’s like, if you, these people who are leading these protests now, if they didn’t die in infancy they would be the old lady with all the crystals living in the swamp bog.

They’d be the swamp. Well

Simone Collins: swamp hacks, and I’m doing an episode on them. Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: But I think it’s a very good framing because we still [00:50:00] haven’t fully reccon the swamp pack. I mean, they’ve tried to, they’ve tried to, if you read, you know, children’s literature, it’s all like, well, the swamp pack was really good and really misunderstood and really not so bad, you know?

I remember having to read a book in school where that was the case where you learned that, oh no, she just had a different interpretation of, she’s just misunderstood. Hmm. Yeah. But anyway what are your thoughts on this, Simone?

Simone Collins: I, I think it’s interesting. I, I think that we live in a new age in which one of, one of the big questions of our era is what, what is humanity and how, how are we going to change to, to survive and adapt to modernity?

That, that our, our evolutionary processes haven’t adjusted. From modernity, you know, like the, the way that humans worked in the past involved a lot of people dying off and not passing on certain traits. And so are we going to adapt by then building technology that enables [00:51:00] germline gene editing or, you know, gene therapy once you’re born to, to get through that?

Or are we going to separate out and speciate or. Who knows what we’ll do to, to re maintain some level of fitness as we move into the future, given that we no longer rely on evolution the way that we used to in order to maintain a minimal level of fitness as, as a species collectively. The other question is, now that we live in a modernity, how are we going to.

To survive in the face of anything from gambling to processed foods, to sedentary lifestyles for which we have not evolved. Our, our bodies can’t work with them. I, I was, I, I’ve been in a text exchange with someone who, this is gonna sound terrible, but they, they literally started sleeping in a tinfoil hat.

Like, you can buy tinfoil hats on Amazon, and they’re getting the best sleep of their life. And they think that maybe. Some kind of electrical signal in their household is, is, is [00:52:00] messing with their. Brain in a way that’s disrupting their sleep. And who knows? That’s the thing is we just, I don’t know. We haven’t evolved to modernity.

I don’t know. You know, and, but maybe it’s just red light. Maybe it’s just, you know, all these things, right? We

Malcolm Collins: just haven’t, no, it’s so funny. If you had told me this like 10 years ago, I’d be like, that person’s crazy. But today I’m like. Should I google tinfoil hats to see what they’re on? Amazon, you know, like

Simone Collins: they they’re on, yeah, they’re on Amazon.

I, I looked it up. They’re a thing and they’re real. And this person is getting the best. And they, they tried, they tried CP pap machines. They tried getting all their blood work done. Like this is someone who’s so

Malcolm Collins: one of the crazy ones. We did our episodes on. Parasites leading to change in arousal patterns.

Uhhuh, we had a bunch of people being like, oh yeah, I went on Ivermectin and before that I really struggled with arousal to the same sex. Yeah. And then what? Now suddenly I’m okay. So, and they’re like, went away. And I’m like, wait, what? And they’re like, and this is why the left is terrified of Ivermectin.

But I think, I

Simone Collins: think the spiteful mutant phenomenon is one of [00:53:00] many manifestations of this problem of. And a species that was evolved for a very different environment, suddenly getting thrown into like into a nuclear swamp and then microwaved. And we have not yet quite worked out. How to make this work.

And there will be, therefore, a lot of mutations, a lot of diseases of various sorts, a lot of strange manifestations, and it is just a reminder every time you see a spiteful mutant, every time you contend with some new stupid health issue, that’s probably downstream of. Modernity, be it Trump derangement syndrome or crazy anxiety levels or low levels of testosterone or inability to sleep or obesity or whatever it may be, carpal tunnel syndrome.

We just have to think about this and understand that our meat puppet bodies have not evolved for this, and therefore we need [00:54:00] to build new approaches and new ways of living. Well.

Malcolm Collins: So I wanna, I wanna add a few things here. One. If you wanna see spiteful mu look at a protest, like just go look up pro pictures of progressive protests

and look at the physiology of the faces that the people at the protest look at their, their body posture, the way they look.

So, so that’s really important. Like you, you’ll notice exactly what we’re talking about immediately. The, the second is, simone posed a question, which I think a portion of our audience will shrug off, but it is actually a critical question for humanity going forwards. You, if you save all of the babies, right?

If you, if you are a community and you save all of the babies, which

Simone Collins: I want to do, I want to save all the babies. But then we need to, we need to only three choices. They

Malcolm Collins: need

Simone Collins: gene therapy

Malcolm Collins: and they need other things. Right. But you have only three choices at that point. Okay. Okay. Either you can do polygenic selection at the level of embryos, or if you wanna say, well, life is started, you know, a human life [00:55:00] begins a conception, therefore I’ll do it at before.

Embryos, right? Like, I’ll do it at the level of sperm. And there’s some companies that are working on this. Yeah. Or I’ll do it at the level of eggs, right? Mm-hmm. It’s, it’s, it’s riskier for the infant, but I don’t think these people care. They, they’re, it’s more about like the deontological rule set.

But than, than just doing it at the level of an embryo, or a blasto site really at that stage. Blast assist, blast assist at the, at the level of the blast assist. I don’t think staying embryo, because it is not an embryo. It’s, it’s, it’s like three, four or four cells. But anyway if you do not do selection at the level of the blasts you then need to do genetic editing.

And if you don’t do genetic editing, like if you don’t do one of those two things, which a huge portion of like. The wider, let’s say, like conservative Christian community just will not even put on the table. Then you need to do active eugenics within your community. IE actively sterilizing or preventing some people from breeding.

And if you don’t do that, and, and, and this can be through social pressure, you know, it can be through things other [00:56:00] than than say, sterilization. But if you don’t do one of those three things, then your, and you, and you continue to save all the babies and not letting the sick ones die then your community will eventually degrade into mutants.

Like, like weird, bizarre looking. And, and you see this in other species that don’t have predators within certain regions. They begin to look more and more mutated over time and just gather diseases ‘cause they lose a lot of their natural immunities. Is this,

Simone Collins: you talked about the rabbits in the UK being terrifying?

Well,

Malcolm Collins: some people like, well that’s because of a specific disease that they caught in the UK because they don’t have predators. But that’s part of the problem, right? Like,

Simone Collins: well that, that is the problem. Humans don’t have predators anymore. And by predators, I guess, I mean diseases or other maladies will kill them.

We don’t have, you know, we have

Malcolm Collins: nothing keeping us sharp anymore. Mm-hmm. And what’s fascinating, and I think this is where I wanted to get into, like the bigger thing is, is one, if you say, I will not engage with genetic technology or any form of active. Eugenics was in my community, then you will [00:57:00] go this path.

There is like, no, like this is, you can argue about the timeline, but everyone who has a base understanding of genetics knows that you’re doomed. And so you need to adopt some sort of a practice. And people are like, well, why didn’t you have to do this historically? ‘cause people died historically and they don’t anymore, and that’s a good thing.

Mm-hmm.

But then the next thing is, you’ve got the, the secondary problem and this is like our wider thing on the theory from our parasites video, which I think is, is like seminal to my understanding of the world now. And one of our most important videos because I didn’t realize it, what we’re likely actually seeing is a collection of parasites.

‘cause now we see how much they affect human behavior, human arousal, patterns, everything like that, that is sort of, these groups are not just mutated in a traditional sense. They’re also. Just infested with parasites and the, the forms of bacteria and other forms of diseases, which likely one also alter their physiology, but two, also alter their mental patterns to help the parasites breed.

You know, we, we go over that. It’s [00:58:00] been shown. Uncontroversially pretty much at, at this point that there’s at least one form of toxoplasmosis that has moved to primarily spreading between humans through sexual contact between humans, not through using the cats as a third party anymore. And infection with this strain of toxoplasmosis changes your sexual proclivities more than infections with other strains.

So, so it’s, it’s evolve also basically. Change the way humans act. And so if you’re doing things that leftists do you know, the orgies, the, the the, the weird cuddle parties and everything like that. Like these are opportunities for parasitic, for disease infections. So you’re not, it’s, it’s not just you know, that, that you should see them as, dangerous and like an a, a, a vague, they’re, they’re literally like hulking mutated zombies coming at you. Like even contact can be dangerous, even certain types of contact. And I think arming our kids with this knowledge is gonna make it very easy for them to not engage in sex too early. Like it’s, yeah, it’s just

Simone Collins: spiteful mutant

Malcolm Collins: [00:59:00] stay away is, it is a spiteful mutant that is filled with parasites and that is going to infect you and turn you into one of them.

One of my favorite, the very,

Simone Collins: yeah, the, the, the concept of zombies. I don’t know if, if other parents of young children have found this, but our kids really have glommed onto them. The zombies are definitely something they think about and they’re part of their broader reality. Our zombies on dead, our zombies.

This, what if there are zombies out there? I don’t know why. Zombies as a. As, as, as part of the monster Buffet are, are so salient to them, but they are

Malcolm Collins: zombies good on them. They’ve got good taste. The the, the, the, the wider thing here is you can use monsters to convey these ideas. And I think that that’s what’s being done with this concept.

Simone Collins: Hmm.

Malcolm Collins: Anyway love you Simone. I love you too. Shout out to Jolly Heretic for bringing this to the scene and have a spectacular [01:00:00] day.

Simone Collins: The videos I take of the kids just don’t show up. In the shared Google Pho Photos

Malcolm Collins: album I switched to yours a lot to see them.

Simone Collins: Mine?

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. You use all

Simone Collins: the time. Okay, because I saw today’s was just, I don’t know, not mine, and therefore not as cute.

Malcolm Collins: Uhoh.

Simone Collins: But you’re not allowed to eat.

Malcolm Collins: Oh yeah. They get mad if I do that. The

Simone Collins: chew sounds. Oh, are you kidding me? Kills them. Them.

Malcolm Collins: Hey, anything for the fans? Right? [01:01:00]

Simone Collins: Did you see the unhinged seeming AP headline about Catholics?

Malcolm Collins: No. What did

Simone Collins: it say? It it, it read New Hampshire Bishop warns clergy to prepare for new era of martyrdom.

Concord, New Hampshire AP a New Hampshire Episcopal. Oh, okay. So it’s not Catholic. Episcopal Bishop. Bishop is attracting national attention after warning his clergy to finalize their wills and get their affairs in order to prepare for a new era of martyrdom. Bishop Rob Hirschfield of the Episcopal Church of New Hampshire.

Made his comments earlier this month at a vigil honoring Renee Good, who was fatally shot on January 7th, behind the wheel of her vehicle by a US Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer. The Trump administration has defended the ICE officer’s actions saying he fired in self-defense while standing in front of goods vehicle as it began to move forward.

That [01:02:00] explanation has been panned by Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey, Minnesota Governor, governor Tim Walls, and others based on videos of the confrontation. Herschel’s speech cited several historical clergy members who had risked their lives to protect others, including mentioning New Hampshire’s seminary student Jonathan Daniels, who was shot and killed by Sheriff’s Deputy in Alabama while shielding a young black civil rights activist in 1965.

I have told the clergy of the Episcopal Diocese of New Hampshire that we may be entering into that same witness, Hirschfield said, and I’ve asked them to get their affairs in order to make sure they have their wills written, because it may be that now is no longer the time for statements, but for us to, but for us, with our bodies to stand between the powers of this world and the most vulnerable, he’s just asking them to kill themselves.

Malcolm Collins: Right. So I actually find this, so there’s a few things I I note on this just for our fans and, and one thing, and I think people get this so wrong, if you look [01:03:00] at like, people are like, oh look, the rates of religiosity are like identifying as Christian are no longer going down in the United States.

They’re higher among Gen Z than among millennials. Like, this is all good. But what they don’t see is that the rates of church attendance have continued to go down and the rates of church attendance. Are, are down for these generations. And what this means, unfortunately is well, not unfortunately, but it’s just, it’s just the realistic thing.

If you’re coming onto the scene like us or a young person and you don’t have a preexisting affiliation with one of the, the, the denominations or churches, they look like the enemy, like they look. Definitionally like the, and this is great that it’s Episcopal and not the Vatican this time. So I can point out it’s not just the Vatican, it’s not just the Catholic institutions.

A lot of these institutions I mean the Episcopals, they were the one who shut down rather than help migrants. I know the Catholics did, and that I think the Episcopals also did, where they shut down rather than help 40 white migrants from South Africa. Oh, that whole thing, 40 year program that helped like thousands of [01:04:00] people a year, like.

God forbid we help one white person. So I wanna be clear that, that these are the institutions that metastasize and spread the current rot in society. And so when people are like, oh, come back to them, they’re so like traditionalist or whatever people who are not already like on that team are just like, what are you taught?

Like, that’s enemy number one, right? Like, yeah. I redeem, Zoomer has this plan to like, take them back. We’ve had him on the show. We’re a great, you know, guy. I, I don’t know. Well, I, I hope

Simone Collins: he succeeds. That’s great.

Malcolm Collins: I mean, as soon as they clock you, the, the Progressive sort of virus hits a very good system for preventing you from reaching any sort of system of power. So really you just gotta, you know, wait for them all to die off, which of course they will. I mean, you know, somebody like this is. I love Episcopal Bishop.

You should just say fake bishop.

Simone Collins: Yeah. I don’t know, man. [01:05:00] Yeah. Cast like knockoff.

Malcolm Collins: I remember you didn’t know what Episcopals were when you, when I first met you, I didn’t know,

Simone Collins: and I mean, there’s, it’s Anglican, right? What is the difference between is Episcopal just Anglican but not actually run by the Church of England?

Malcolm Collins: Basically, basically, okay. I mean, some people are gonna say, oh, well this, this, and this. But that’s basically how the church was founded is they were Anglicans who, you know, after the revolution, it didn’t make as much sense to be under the Church of England anymore, but they still liked all the high church nonsense.

Simone Collins: And Anglicans became the Church of England, or they’re They’re synonymous. Interchangeable?

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, I think so. Okay. But although they recently had a major split, remember the Church of England did. The Anglicans did because they were the ones who elected the, the lady Pope. They have like, they had a pope.

They have their own version of a pope. It’s like the bishop of something. Oh. So they call it a bishop in Shire or something. And it’s the most important of their, [01:06:00] and they are elected a woman really to spite. Foreign members and a lot of their churches in like Africa and stuff. And obviously, you know, they still follow the Bible there, so they’re like excuse me, the Bible’s pretty explicit on this point.

So like we just are ignoring that now. Like that doesn’t matter anymore.

Simone Collins: What makes the Church of England, the Church of England, is, I don’t find this one specific role convenient for me. I’m starting a new version, you know, so I think this is. Consistent with the church’s main point of differentiation?

Malcolm Collins: No, I mean, I, I, I it’s true. Yeah. I, I’m not a fan of, of Anglicans or Episcopalians. I don’t see the point. I don’t see the, just be Catholics. If you’re gonna do all the high church nonsense, just be, yeah. Henry

Simone Collins: VII is dead. It’s over. You don’t have to worry about it anymore. We, we can drop the pretense.

Okay. Yeah. We can

Malcolm Collins: drop the pretense. Right? Like, you, you, you still wanna get into idolatry. Just they, they’ve already got the cooler churches anyway, right? Like. What are you doing?

Simone Collins: God, I love even song though. I don’t know [01:07:00] if that’s like a uniquely Anglican thing or not, but Oh, so good.

Malcolm Collins: I mean, I guess if you’re in one of those old English towns, there’s some really beautiful old Anglican churches that might be worth staying around for, you know, top tier.

You like top tier?

Simone Collins: Oh, oh, well. Let’s get into it. All right. Spiteful mutants.

Speaker 21: The fence.

​

In this eye-opening conversation, Malcolm and Simone Collins expose the myth of "trust the science" in today's world. What people really mean is "trust the peer-review bureaucracy"—a system that's only about 50-70 years old, riddled with failures, and openly admitting its own decline.

They dive into the landmark 2023 Nature study showing scientific papers and patents have become dramatically less disruptive since the mid-20th century (decline 90% in disruptiveness for papers). New ideas are incremental, not revolutionary. Metrics like the H-index (invented 2005) and citation farming reward safe, iterative work over bold breakthroughs. Real progress? It's happening outside academia—through tight-knit communities of independent researchers, Substacks, patrons, and informal networks (think biohackers, geneticists like Emil Kirkegaard, or sex/arousal researchers like Aella).

They contrast this with historic "hold my beer" science (e.g., self-experimenting spinal cocaine for epidurals), discuss why bureaucracy killed disruptiveness, and explain why renegade cliques (in genetics, governance, crypto, history) are already replacing rotting university systems. Bonus: thoughts on journalism parallels, prediction markets for kids, and why mainstream media/academia memory-holes inconvenient truths.

If you've ever wondered why innovation feels stalled despite more scientists and funding than ever—this is why. The old system is dead. The new one is already here.Timestamps below. Like, subscribe, and share if you're tired of bureaucratic "truth."

Episode Transcript

Malcolm Collins: [00:00:00] Hello Simone. I’m excited to be here with you today.

Today we are gonna be discussing something that I have brought up in episodes in the past, but it is one of the largest and most systemic fundamental misunderstandings of how our world currently works. That is common in society, which is. How truth is determined and the belief that the system that we have for determining what is true is an old system.

That it is a vetted system or even that it is a system that hasn’t been in constant failure since it came out. It’s a system that itself says it is not working. And here we are going to be talking about the academic system as we understand it right now, when somebody’s like, well, trust the science.

They want you, they’re, they’re, they’re trying to get you to believe that what they’re saying is like, trust the scientific [00:01:00] method, trusted the thing that gave us cars and railroads and industrialization and computers. But what they’re actually saying is trust is this very specific, pure review system and academic bureaucracy for sorting information.

And I wanna point out to them that, that very same bureaucracy they’re asking us to trust they’re, the, the, the height or one of the, the most respected magazines is nature, right? Nature did a landmark study in 2023 on this very issue and we’ll get to it in a bit, but basically they show that since this system has been in place, scientific research has only declined.

It has just been getting worse and worse and worse every year. By

Simone Collins: what measure? By. Its ability to be replicated by,

Malcolm Collins: By its ability. Disruptiveness is [00:02:00] what they were looking at. So like genuinely new rather than iterative ideas.

Simone Collins: Ah, okay. Okay. Like germ theory and antibiotics, that kind thing.

Malcolm Collins: Well, you also see you know, research like the, the cost of research.

So basically the research you get per dollars has been going down dramatically. We’ll go over. This system basically was put in place in the 1950s and in pharma, new drugs per r and d dollar hald every nine years since the 1950s. So it’s, it’s, it’s accumulated getting worse the further we go from the inception of this system.

Simone Collins: That’s horrible. And

Malcolm Collins: the other funny that no Halfing every nine years

Simone Collins: is, I mean, I’m, I’m sure a lot of that’s bureaucratic morass. I bet AI is really going to disrupt that, but also to a certain extent, for example, in the United States. You almost are prevented from getting a new drug introduced without spending a certain [00:03:00] ridiculous amount of money because of the regulatory morass that you’re bogged down by with the FDA.

I

Malcolm Collins: don’t think this is regulatory issues. It correlates way more with the implementation of citation, the citation system, I guess I’ll call it,

Simone Collins: really,

Malcolm Collins: and we’ll go over how that system works, the various variants of that system that have come. Mm-hmm. And people might be surprised how new. So the system that is used most frequently today to judge professors this is the H index and the G index.

Okay. These systems were invented in 2005 and 2006 respectively.

Simone Collins: Oh my gosh. So around the time you and I were graduating from high school. Like,

Malcolm Collins: yeah, that’s when the system that underlies pretty much all of current academia’s hierarchy was invented.

Simone Collins: Right. ‘cause you actually mentioned these, these systems to me only this today, and I knew that citations [00:04:00] mattered to researchers.

I didn’t know that they were tied to their ability to get tenure. And I looked it up and you were right, and I was shocked that. That was one of the most important factors, and it wasn’t just like organizational fit and the extent to which you contribute to the advancement of your field and to which you are able to get, for example, grant money to your department for the university.

I figured that would matter more, even though it’s not necessarily like the best thing in the world at, you know, at least it’s more practical.

Malcolm Collins: What I find so ironic is, you know, there’s that like Redditer who’s like for science,

Speaker 4: As you know, tomorrow is Peace Day and nobody is as excited for the big celebration as I am. I’m not scientifically possible.

Speaker 2: . I’m a super scientist. My father was a super scientist. His father was a super scientist, and his father was, no wait. No. I think he was a milliner. Either way. I’m just not impressed with your tricks.

Malcolm Collins: You know, and then they’ll have like a doctor membrane [00:05:00] here. And the irony is, is the ones who say that the ones who worship what they consider quote unquote science mm-hmm.

Are actually worshiping something of an inversion of what was practiced by the type of historic scientists that would’ve shouted for science before pulling a lever or something like that. Right. Like the, the Frankenstein scientist.

Speaker 3: It’s lie. It’s.

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: They actually hate that. Form of science. Mm-hmm. The you know, biohacker lab in your house.

So, you know, sharing

Simone Collins: and it, it was those people who gave us so many of the medical and otherwise interventions. Like light bulbs, like, epidurals that make such a huge difference in our lives.

Malcolm Collins: Dive with epidurals recently. Explain how those are invented. Oh,

Simone Collins: yeah. I mean, I asked the anes anesthesiologist giving me my spinal when I was getting my latest [00:06:00] C-section.

Like, Hey, how are these invented?

Malcolm Collins: He’s attempting to learn Simone pathologically here. I love it.

Simone Collins: Well, you, you’d rather, when they’re sticking a giant needle like into your spinal cord, not think about the fact that they’re doing that. So, yeah, I’m asking other questions. But they, they like checked and they looked it up and they’re like, oh yeah, I remember it was these two guys, and they’re like.

They were experimenting with, with different things and they they just decided to experiment on each other using like, you know, giant, huge gauge needles. ‘cause at the time they didn’t have smaller needles, but I think what it was, was they tried injecting just cocaine directly to their spinal cords.

‘cause what could go wrong? But they were just, they did it on themselves. It wasn’t like, I have a theory about this. We’re gonna test this on lab bias for like the next 10 years. They’re like, Hey man. What would happen if we just put this directly into our spinal cord?

Malcolm Collins: You wanna try to stick this in our spine

Simone Collins: with giant needles?

Oh,

Malcolm Collins: that is, that is fine. That’s the type of thing that [00:07:00] they’re imagining when they say,

Simone Collins: yeah, it, it wasn’t, yeah, it, it was hold my beer. Like, that’s the kind of like attitude and that

Malcolm Collins: is, it’s funny. Same type of redditer who will say that unironically on Reddit is the same person who freaks out at us for doing like polygenic selection or like, germline gene editing on humans.

They’re like, how dare you edit human DNA, that that’s, that could do something new that would be dangerous. Have you sought approval from the authority before flipping that switch? You know, and I, I. I want to get into when they say for science, what they actually are worshiping is a provably failed. And the, and when I say provably failed, I mean the system itself has said,

Simone Collins: yeah,

Malcolm Collins: this has failed.

This is

Simone Collins: not working.

Malcolm Collins: Our own metrics.

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: A provably failed bureaucracy, not actual science or the scientific message. So let’s get, get in here. [00:08:00] So the system that we call the, the academic bureaucracy right now, that basically, and the reason I say like this determines truth within the urban monoculture.

This really does when they’re like, what is true and what is not true? This is the system they’re looking to. Right. It is that their final point of this is the fundamental way reality is structured.

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: It came together specifically post 1945, fueled by massive government funding, specifically the USGI bill and the National Science Foundation.

In 1950, enrollment exploded from 1.7 million people in 1940 to 7.9 million in 1970, creating quote unquote big science with more papers necessitating rigorous evaluation, peer-reviewed, standardized. Slowly nature in 1967 becoming universal by 1970s to handle volume and ensure quality [00:09:00] amid funding scrutiny.

So the concept, if you hear like, well, you know, what did peer reviewed whatever say this concept wasn’t even made universal till the 1970s. It wasn’t fully adopted by nature until 1967. We are dealing with a fundamentally new system here.

Simone Collins: So how was the publication of something deemed like or, or selected before there was peer review then?

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. We’ll get into that in a second. But basically just the editors of publications like, looked at it and they were like this looks good.

Simone Collins: Okay,

Malcolm Collins: this looks interesting. And that

Simone Collins: is, so that peer review, it was, it was just editor review, which makes sense.

Malcolm Collins: Yes. But people were like, well that’s, you know, it’s, it’s, it’s not fair enough.

It’s not basically, it’s not bureaucratic enough. They needed to add a bureaucratic layer into how papers were chosen and approved instead of handling it like it was actually. So let’s talk about why having it be editor approved is much better than having it be peer reviewed.

Simone Collins: Hmm.

Malcolm Collins: [00:10:00] When you had it be editor reviewed, you were dealing with a few things.

Scientific publications back then made their money based on how many people were paying for them,

Simone Collins: right? Yeah. Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: That is not true anymore, right? You don’t get money based on how many people view your article. You don’t get money, like, and the article, like the big journals themselves do not really get money based on their quality.

They get money based on the universities that have them in their pipeline. And so much of that is sort of. Pre bureaucratic setup that is kind of irrelevant. So the people who are making judgements about whether or not a paper got improved actually don’t really care outside of being Karens, they have no real skin in the game, say, yeah.

But in, if you were an editor back in the day, you needed to actually care. Is this gonna destroy the. Reputation of my journal.

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: If it is, then I’m not gonna publish it. Is this something that people are gonna actually care about and want to buy and want to read?

Simone Collins: Mm-hmm. Is this useful to people like tactically useful, such that if they don’t have a subscription now, [00:11:00] will they bother to pay for one because they know they need this?

Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. And that was a very good way of handling things. Yes. But then the bureaucrats come in and are like, well, we need to systematize this. We need more layers, we need more standardization. Now this isn’t what caused all of the the breakdown, but I’m giving you an example of one layer, and you have to remember here is this bureaucratization happened at every single layer at the process that puts out what we today call truth.

Simone Collins: Mm-hmm.

Malcolm Collins: Okay.

Simone Collins: Yeah. From funding to ethics boards to promotion, to even just getting your PhD.

Malcolm Collins: And, and by the way, do you want to do, can you guess when even the concept of the academic citation was formalized?

Simone Collins: Was it recent?

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, it was Eugene Garfield’s 1955 proposal, which led to the science citation index, which was [00:12:00] put out in 1964.

It wasn’t even proposed until 1955. In nailing in. Enabling impact tracking. By the 1960s and 1970s, citations became proxies for quality complementing peer review. Institutional research offices emerge Association for Institutional Research in 1965 to analyze metrics for hiring slash promotions.

Tenure density peaked at around 75% in the 1960s, but is now only at around 15% within universities.

Simone Collins: Hmm.

Malcolm Collins: So. And this was made so the universities couldn’t arbitrarily fire someone based on them publishing something that was politically unpalatable. However it basically does not serve that purpose at all anymore.

Tenure doesn’t really mean that much important anymore, like it used to. And the whole system’s pretty corrupted. But to continue here, and I know you’re like, well, AI will remove some of this bureaucracy. No AI’s just replacing it in the same way that we have seen. Citizen journalists. Before I go further, we have our piece on like, [00:13:00] how, how I don’t even like the term citizen journalists, influencers, I’m just gonna call them.

Influencers, have created a system for delivering news to the end reader or listener that is strictly more factual, better and less bias than the journalistic system was at its very height. By. Creating a very interesting sort of layered approach. And I pointed out in that episode, the way that that works is basically at the bottom layer you have the tus who nobody really they don’t have large follower ships but they just produce.

Tons and tons and tons of detailed content that’s very clearly not about putting out a particular agenda or message. It’s just like I am obsessed with military drones, so I have analyzed every, the military drone footage from ex Ukraine, or I am obsessed with like military operations. So I completely analyze like pec of the raid on Maduro and like how this.

Satellite equipment could have gone. [00:14:00] And then at the next layer you have people like us who comes through and synthesize that into something that is entertaining and actually has a large viewership. And then on the layer top of us, you have your, you know, your asthma golds, and your leaflets and your next, and well next does a little bit more original research.

And, from there they, they then synthesize lots of people like us who are intern, synthesizing the layer below us into like a cohesive full, like this is what’s happening in the space. Mm-hmm. In the space of research, we are seeing a similar thing happen. Before I go further with this in the space of research, we are seeing, because I’m seeing this in the people who are like actually interested in advancing our knowledge of what is true.

And this is why we have ala on frequently. Like we might not agree with all of her lifestyle choices. But she is a phenomenal researcher. And people who criticize her research, I think show their. Like naivete in terms of how actual research is happening. When they’re like ALA samples, you [00:15:00] know, I’ll point out, she’ll get like a million.

Respondents to something and they’ll be like, well, her sample is biased. And I’m like, if you look at the way that she normalizes her data what you will see is her less biased than the average sample used by peer reviewed sex research. Like. The, the, the fact that you would say that about her samples and not look at her normalization work shows that either you don’t understand how any of this works, or you don’t understand how corrupted the mainstream publications are at this point.

Yeah. Think around this is, if you look at how sex research is working right now, right? The people who are actually interested in moving it forwards and understanding how people can be like, why does next research matter? It matters a lot in understanding. The parts of the human brain, and it’s the reason why I find it so fascinating and may output deleterious or non beneficial impulses.

And the better we can categorize these impulses and understand what is [00:16:00] actually causing them and how they actually function at like a, a, a baser level we can not only. Better understand ourselves and better control ourselves and better sublimate those animalistic instincts. Obviously that’s not why she does the research, but that’s why I find it so interesting.

But we can also understand wider trends in society. Why do trans people keep doing mass shootings? Like, there was just another one.

I remember when we did the episode on that so many people were like, this isn’t a phenomenon, this isn’t, and there have been two trans mass shootings since that.

And it was so interesting to see the news. Completely disappeared that this had happened. The moment, like I looked at the day that this happened, and it was 10 people died in this one. So it’s a really big one too.

So I double checked and nine people died due to the one recent trans mass shooter. And in Columbine it was 13 people died with two mass shooters. So on a per shooter level, this trans individual was way above the Columbine numbers, and yet the news media immediately blacked [00:17:00] this out. And this happened incredibly recently too.

, This was the one that happened in February. 10th, 2026. The fact that Columbine was a major civilizational issue for about a decade, and this immediately gets memory hold, shows us how much the medium manipulates the conversation on this topic. As we have said, , with the statistics we’re looking at these days, somebody admitting that they’re trans. It’s a bit like saying.

Speaker 7: Nice to meet you, . Listen, if you ever need anybody murdered. Please give me a call and you, you’re giving him card. No.

Code of ethics. I will kill anyone anywhere. Children, animals, old people, doesn’t matter. I just love killing

Speaker 6: you.

Malcolm Collins: And it was not anywhere on the judge report that day. It was not on some of the front pages of like major newspapers.

Right. And I was like, this is wild. Like the extent to which the moment. Disappears. But this is what I mean, like this is why people don’t trust these sources of evidence. Like an academic could not publish a piece investigating why are [00:18:00] trans people more likely to commit mass shootings? Mm-hmm. That is a very interesting question to be asking, right?

Mm-hmm. Now the, the, the, the point I’m making here is if you look at the people actually interested in like this arousal impulse has this evolved everything like this, you have a community that is actively working on this. It is actively pushing things forwards. And the funny thing is it’s a community that’s doing it is very much like one of the historic science communities, right?

Like they all know each other, they all talk like, for example. Diana Fleischman and Jeffrey Miller. And Simone and Malcolm and Ayla may seem like, we have pretty different ideological backgrounds and everything like that, and yet, you know, they’ve all been on our podcast, right? Like we all chat regularly.

And we all are aware of each other because of our social community. As competent researchers. So I don’t even really bother to look at the academic fields that much. I know the people who are actually [00:19:00] producing the new stuff. Right. And I know, and this is if I’m looking at like genetic science, right?

Like if I’m like, oh, what’s the latest genetic science? There’s like five or six names I can go to, right? With like the leading one. I’m sorry, I know you’re not allowed to say this. Is Emil Ard. He produces really good, like I all of his substack posts on the human genetic science because I know that he’s pushing things forwards in ways and I, I don’t mean like, journaling, gene editing here, I’m talking about like.

Genetic correlations in the evolution of human genes. Like, the great study that he and a few other guys did recently, and this is interesting because there were some other researchers involved in this that aren’t as famous as him, but they know that everybody knows, oh, well if this guy’s involved in it, basically almost like he’s a researcher running one of those old journals and he’s putting his name to something, right?

Simone Collins: Mm-hmm.

Malcolm Collins: The great study that they did where they looked at the, full genome sequence of [00:20:00] corpses in Rome over time. Oh yeah.

Simone Collins: Look

Malcolm Collins: at the the genetic markers for the probability that this person was in a modern context. Like what, what level of academic, what. Achievement. Would they have, like how, how far would they go with their schooling?

Basically this is what they is used often when people say intelligence markers and genetics. And what they found was that it did actually collapse at the height of the Roman Empire, there does appear to have been a high amount of disc genetic selection that contributed to the fall of the Roman Empire.

And even today, the people in Rome born have a lower probability of having these. These markers associated with high intelligence than people at the height of the Roman Empire. Yeah. That is how long the DYS genetic impact lasted. Now it has rebounded to some extent. It just hasn’t gotten back up to the height of the Empire.

Mm. And now they’re in a state of DYS genetic class again, so it’s never going to unless they get involved in like genetic engineering tech or genetic selection tech. But the point being. Is that’s a really cool [00:21:00] study, right? And that could have gone through mainstream academic sources, but the people involved in it actively chose not to because they knew the people pushing ahead.

Meaningful genetic variation research in human populations are going to read a meal’s stuff. I note here, because isn’t me endorsing every single meal Kirk Guard’s ever said. I’m just saying that in terms of like, where’s the cutting edge? Who is verifying the cutting edge research? It’s him. And note it’s not just him with that crew, which also cluster of people that all know each other.

You know, and they publish things and they go together and they all get canceled together. But it’s, it’s just something right. And we are already seeing this shift to what is very transparently and obviously gonna replace the university system. And if you’re like, this doesn’t work for potentially more advanced or more nuanced fields that is also just wrong.

We do investing and obviously it’s been leaked and we do investing in the human dream. Really. Gene [00:22:00] editing space, right? Like. And like we know, most of the companies in the space and the companies that are in the space know most of the other companies in the space. They know basically everyone in the space and they all are aware of each other’s research.

They’re aware of how, how each other’s cutting edge methods work. And they talk together basically. Humanity ended up solving the problem of the explosion of scientists going into the academic system. As it turned out that the vast majority of those quote unquote scientists were not scientists, like the scientists of the old day.

They were just bureaucrats and were largely irrelevant from the perspective of advancing the field of science. And then. When it came to the people who were actually interested in advancing particular subdomains of science, the ways that we handled the explosion of population and smart people, because there’s more people doing that today than there was, you know, during the, you know, Victorian period or whatever, right?

Where you had the, the science societies and everything is these people still form their [00:23:00] cliques. They still all hang out and talk together. But the cliques are based around scientific subjects. Which has been actually very interesting to be part of multiple of those cliques because today if you guys look at us and you hear Malcolm and Simone have done.

X or Y in terms of research, I think a lot of our audience would expect that to be on demographics or evolutionary slash cultural anthropology. That is, that is where I think our audience expects it, right? They’re like, okay. Or they’re like, maybe if it’s not that, it’s on, like speculative theology, right?

Mm-hmm. When in reality there was a period this was early in our podcast as well. So like even after we had started popping off as ISTs, we were still like a lower known as ISTs. And certainly our anthropological work wasn’t known as well yet. And our theological work, we hadn’t even gotten into it yet.

But when [00:24:00] we would be asked to go on a podcast or go speak, I always needed to ask them before we went up and spoke. ‘cause I’d say. I think we’re famous for gosh, about half the time it would be Tism but about the other half the time. And our audience may be surprised about this ‘cause we do not cover it on our show as much.

They’d be like, oh, I am really fascinated by your work on governance models and crypto. And we’d occasionally, I’d say like 10% of the time we’d get something in sex research or human evolution. And about 10% of the time just to add some others, we’d get something in the space of positive psychology or, or psychology more broadly.

‘cause we did a lot of stuff in that space.

Simone Collins: Oh, I would say entrepreneurship as a couple was a really big thing to start.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Yeah. And they’d have us on for, oh, you’re, you married, couple entrepreneurship invented the ser. People don’t know that. Like our audience doesn’t know that we invented the married search fund model, which is now taught at Harvard and Safer Business schools.

Like we’ve had periods of our life where we [00:25:00] changed the way multiple fields work. But the, the point I’m making here is that these fields are fairly isolated and they’re isolated from each other to the extent where you will get some overlap, like the evolutionary. Arousal research field is aware of like the human variation research field, and we, we talk and socialize occasionally.

But we are still two very different social circles. Mm-hmm. And these two fields are actually completely unaware usually of what’s going on in the crypto field. And that’s why because our, our models in the crypto space, the guy who invented quadratic voting

Glen Weil is who I was thinking of.

Malcolm Collins: said that we had. I think it was one of the best or the best books on governance models he’d ever read.

And this is important because quadratic voting is used in a lot of crypto governance. It’s sort of like one of the foundations of the way. Crypto governance structures work now. And because of that, a lot of our ideas, because he liked our book and the [00:26:00] ideas in our book a lot of the ideas in our book ended up being taken our book on governance, a fragmented guide to governance number one Wall Street Journal bestseller, by the way, at one point, ended up being taken and used in various parts of other crypto projects. And these, these crypto people, when they are looking for governance theory and people who are like on the cutting edge of governance theory, they do not go out and say, what are the academics saying right now? What they do is they go to their.

Leaders in crypto governance, Siri, and they go, what projects do these people affirm? Like, what other thinkers do these people like? I’m gonna go to these other thinkers now.

Simone Collins: Mm-hmm.

Malcolm Collins: But to continue before I go further here but basically what I’m saying is what’s replacing academia is already underway.

Academia’s, just a rotting behemoths file, flailing around at this point and slapping at things. Right? And it’s hilarious that people will cite like, but what does the behemoth think? And I’m like, you mean [00:27:00] that thing that has like its skin falling off and is like barely able to lift its hand anymore?

But to give you an idea. Of how bad things are here. The paper in nature that I mentioned before was called Papers and patents are becoming less disruptive over time. A landmark 2023 nature study analyzed 45 million papers, 1945 to 2010, and 3.9 million patents. 1976 to 2010 using the CD index, a metric of how much new work disrupts prior citations.

It found disruptiveness decline by over 90% for papers and 78% for patents. Oh. Papers, increasingly building incrementally rather than veering in new directions. Similarly, a 2021 Technological forecasting and social change analysis showed the quote unquote flow of ideas. New concepts entering scientific canon declined since the 1970s and [00:28:00] research productivity output per researcher since the 1950s.

Patent quality and Nobel Prize worthy breakthroughs have also waned with fields like physics and medicine showing no upward trend at all. Post to 1950s.

Simone Collins: Ouch.

Malcolm Collins: And then remember, I, I mentioned that doubling every nine years.

Simone Collins: And you’re not even mentioning like the number of patents now that are filed just by patent trolls

Malcolm Collins: Yeah.

Simone Collins: That are actively stifling innovation. It makes me so mad. Patents basically just don’t make sense anymore as far as I am concerned.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. And so, if we go further here, we’re like, are there people fighting against us? Before I get into the nuances of, of how this stuff works because I don’t know, everybody cares about that. So I try to keep the more boring stuff towards the end of the video and the more interesting stuff towards the beginning of the video.

And there is a group that is fighting against us called Dora. And it, it has actually gained a significant amount of traction [00:29:00] and specifically what they push for is, be completely transparent about evaluation criteria in terms of like hiring and stuff like that. Explicitly state that the scientific content of the work is what matters more than the journal or metrics value all research output data, software, et cetera, and use.

Qualitative impact measures, eg. Influenced by policy, clinical practice, public understanding. This is for funders and institutions. And then for publishers, they say, stop promoting gif. We’ll get to in, in a second as the main selling point. That’s basically how many people cite you. Provide rich article level metrics and encourage proper authorship and controversial statements.

Make reference lists freely usable and reduce artificial limits on references. So primary literature gets proper credit. Hmm. For metrics providers this is Cultivate s, scopist, et cetera. They say be fully transparent about data and methods. Allow unstructured reuse of the data and clearly define and punish metric violation for individual researchers.

When you sit in committees, [00:30:00] judge the science, not the journals, site primary papers and not just reviews. Use diverse article level metrics in your CV or statements. Actively challenge bad assessment practices when you see them.

Simone Collins: Hmm.

Malcolm Collins: I don’t really think that this is a meaningful thing that they’re pushing here.

I think that the truth is, is that you cannot reform academia. Because academia is full of bureaucrats, and bureaucrats are not interested in doing actual science. The, the renegades who are doing actual science are already basically living off of patrons in the way that they did historically. You look at somebody like, like, say if you’re looking at like the human differences, genetic differences, crowd, one of our good friends in that space is Reeb Khan.

Who’s been on the podcast? Great guy. Really good researcher. He used to work for the New York Times, right? But then he, I, I find this hilarious. EB Kahan became accused of being a white. A, a, a white [00:31:00] supremacist, I guess, because he was going through just genetic data. The reason why this is hilarious is if you cannot tell from his name, he is not remotely a white person.

But they decided that he, he went into genetics data that you’re not supposed to talk about. And he got in trouble for that. And now he makes his money off of Substack, right? Like off of, off of actual patrons, right? And that’s the world that we live in now, right? Like we have a, and what’s funny is, you know, he’s not making as much money.

He’s not getting as much money as these big organizations. And if I was president, I would start cutting off the funding. When people are like, oh, we need this r and d funding. Oh, we need this. We need systems that are not corrupt like darpa, that can basically only go to crony insiders. We need systems that are not corrupt, like the existing university funding system.

That fund, you know, academics, quote unquote academics, bureaucrats, really and build systems that can fund the sort of [00:32:00] truly independent and meaningful research that everyone who is an actually active player knows is happening, right. And it’s also funny to me how you know, people like you and me can go out there and have field changing theories.

Which we, we’ve had multiple of on this show. Like, but my favorite, if you wanna go into our most controversial theory it is our one Civilization hypothesis.

Simone Collins: Knew you were gonna say that.

Malcolm Collins: But we had another one recently that I really liked where I was like, I’m disappointed. I can’t, like click a button and be like, everybody needs to know.

This is like an actually pretty big theory in terms of changing how things work.

This is the episode on coop frequency by religious or ethnic background and, , how that changes which countries end up winning wars. I.

Because it changes how competent you can allow your generals to be and how much power you can allow them to have in terms of unilateral thinking and all the way down the military, [00:33:00] you can allow much more autonomy the more you can trust a group to not coup. I.

Simone Collins: I don’t know. You come up with so many different concepts. I have no idea about this one.

Malcolm Collins: I’ll end it in post, I guess. But I remember being like, yeah, this is another big one where it’s just like, it, it changes the way an entire field is structured and it’s weird that we’re able to have these, but it’s mostly because people in these other fields just aren’t thinking anymore.

Mm-hmm. And actually you see this a, a great example of you’re like, well, where else do you see this? Do you just see this in the sciences? It’s like, no. You see this in the in the history as well. So like, if you’re a history nerd these days like, you know who the people who are defining, rethinking how we see history are this generation as people like Ruby Art and Sam Oberg, right?

And, and, and that’s who you’re watching. That’s who you care about, right? You don’t care. About what’s being published by Ex bureaucrat guy, right? Like, if you’re an actual history nerd, that’s who you could because you’re like, oh, this is, this is where we’re getting new [00:34:00] novel theories.

We should, we should go on one of Ruby Yard’s show and push our one civilization hypothesis. So you go how much you push us back on that, because that, that’d be a fun one.

Simone Collins: Well, one thing I think in terms of returning to how things used to be, what’s interesting about how truth used to be determined or where people turned.

To various sources. For truth is the most common on a local level was a tribal elder or following tradition. And the only reason why that worked was basically if the truth that someone believed didn’t work back then and it mattered, you would die. So, you know, a tribal elder was kind of a good bet because they’ve lived so far.

They’ve survived. Meaning that, you know, if, if you do the solution that they did when you cut your leg or when you get sick, you’re more likely to survive. And all of the elders who did a dumb thing when they felt sick or [00:35:00] got injured, probably didn’t survive so they wouldn’t be elders. And that worked.

And also the same thing happened with traditions, right? Like if, if a village or a tribe or some other, a town, a culture, whatever, had a tradition. That ultimately was not true. Doesn’t matter. They’d die, then it wouldn’t be a tradition anymore. So like traditions existed because they correlated with survival.

And it’s interesting how after a while things became bureaucratized and they were dances done around them. I mean, obviously people turned to. Academic, or really, I mean, originally church institutions for higher truths, we’ll say, you know, stuff that people got through Revelations, but it was more about these big picture questions where if you were wrong, it didn’t really mean that you weren’t going to survive.

And I find it very interesting how the original universities, how academia in its. OG Sense was religious. It was a place where priests [00:36:00] studied. That is what Oxford and Cambridge were for. It was for the clergy. They were governed literally by different laws that only affected the clergy. And it is interesting how over time that bureaucratic body took over.

This scientific method as it was innovated that at first the scientific method was a, a very, or, and just in, in general, empirical knowledge was very grassroots or renegade thing. Something that went alongside, passed down traditions or that was just done by weird artists in society is like as an enthusiast’s thing.

And if, if it worked out for the. Enthusiast experimenters who tried these things out, then they would become traditions, they would become things that tribal elders passed down. It was kind of like the artists were the like YOLO people in a society. And then the tribal elders were the ones who solidified whatever worked of the YOLO class that was disposable.

[00:37:00] And then, I don’t know, there was this sort of vague period where academia became increasingly secular.

And this is a really important point of view, having studied the history of knowledge or education, is that academia and the church used to be synonymous. It was the same system. This was true for most of the history of what today we call science. , Where you would go if you were a precocious young person was to study at one of the colleges that trained seminaries.

I mean, that’s what Oxford and Cambridge, and St. Andrews and all of that were. Four originally.

And I mean, obviously there was almost no scientific progress under the Catholics when they controlled these institutions, but as soon as Protestantism came around, this is when we had our greatest leap forwards in terms of scientific progress.

Simone Collins: And I feel like that’s a key turning point when our method for generating truth, that was the beginning of the end. Like if we talk about demographic collapse really being [00:38:00] downstream of the industrial revolution and the atomization of family family jobs, you know, like basically taking everything that used to be produced in the household and having it being made piecemeal outside by a larger economy.

I think the thing that really predated. The crisis of generation of truth was when we took that, which happened within the village and with, you know, renegade experimenters and passing down of knowledge through survival. And, and, and had it be done by a bureaucratic institution instead?

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Well, I mean, it basically we, we.

Ran the communist experiment on the entire field of science. Mm-hmm. And you know, communism has never worked economically, but we’re like, well, we’ll make it work in terms of information. And it demonstrably didn’t work by the way. I remember the other new theory that I was kind of shocked when I was going over it that no one had had before

which is pointing out.

First, why Islamic Forces hadn’t won a war of [00:39:00] conquest such a long time. And then I pointed out the secondary point to this theory, which is that Catholic Forces actually hadn’t won many wars of conquest in, in a very long time. And that. This appears to be due to the frequency of coups, which then it’s like, why do Protestants have coups so rarely.

And why do Catholics and Muslims have coups so frequently? And you know, I posited a theory there, but what was wild to me wasn’t even just like my theory there. It wasn’t no mainstream academic researcher had even noticed that this was a phenomenon. And yet it’s, it, it’s like, it’s not like a. A p value of like one thing.

It was like there were like three Protestant coups, like successful coups in all of human history. And for Catholics it was like one a generation in most countries. And it’s like how. Why?

Simone Collins: Yeah. It’s kind of a big deal.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, just a little bit. It’s an interesting question and, and I [00:40:00] realize that the reason is because academics just were not interested in asking questions that could shake things up.

They were interested in iteratively asking something, right? Like, oh, well X has already been established, so like, let’s find out. How did they cook bread back then? Or what were Roman supply lines like? Or, you know, what does, was this formation really like, you know, all of that stuff matters, but you know, there’s bigger picture things you could be getting wrong that are really important to establish.

The two final things I wanted to go over here Jif I talked about a bit, or JIF it’s basically just how many citations does a publication get and publications like display this to show how good they are. Then you have the H index, which it was the thing I mentioned that is the fairly recent 2005 thing.

The H index, A researcher’s papers are ranked in descending order by the number of citations they each have received. The H index is the highest number [00:41:00] H, where the researcher has at least H papers that can each be cited at least H times, while the remaining papers have fewer H citations each. For example, if a scientist has an H index of 20, it means they have 20 papers cited at least 20 times each.

Wow. First cited paper has fewer than 21 citations. This metrics balances quantity, number of publications and quality, the impact via citations, avoiding extremes. Like somebody who had a b bone paper that was cited just a ton of ton at times. Or somebody who was, i’m putting out just tons and tons of papers.

And this is actually very easy to exploit through things like citation farming and stuff like that. And then somebody created a counter system actually just a year later called the G Index, but I don’t think it’s gotten as big as the H index. Hmm. That, that attempts to solve this with a bit of math that you don’t care about.

But it still runs into many of the same problems. Anyway, [00:42:00] Simone, final thoughts here.

Simone Collins: I’m glad that we’re returning to truth in its more natural format, and I find it notable how much this rhymes with journalism, but I think they’re both related. Journalism is just the truth about what’s happening in the world.

And this is just the truth about anything from medical. Science to mathematics, physics, et cetera.

Malcolm Collins: What I find very interesting about the way this has been happening is that the people who are in these sort of knowledge circles where real science and real academics is still happening.

Simone Collins: Mm-hmm.

Malcolm Collins: It’s not just that they all like know each other and are friendly, and it’s actually a really chill scene if you end up working your way into it.

But the ways that they’re employed is so diverse. A number of them, for example, still work in traditional academics. Take an individual like Robin Hanson who’s been on the show. Great, great thinker. And you know. He [00:43:00] is a traditional academic still, he still works at a professor at a university.

Yet he is sort of like brought into these fields as like, oh, obviously you belong in these fields. Because he is generating the type of work he does as a traditional academic actually does revolutionize multiple domains of knowledge through new ways of looking at. Things.

Simone Collins: Hmm.

Malcolm Collins: You know, like the grabby alien hypothesis for example, that’s not his job.

Aliens. That has nothing to do. But he comes up with this hypothesis that everyone who is interested, like super interested in aliens is immediately like. Oh, that’s a really good way to look at things. Like let’s dig into that. Right. And, and I think that it’s really heartening for me to see, and I think the people who are like, how do we save academics?

The reason they wanna save academics is because academics cares about them and the real people moving forward to human knowledge and innovation don’t care about them.

Simone Collins: [00:44:00] Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: Anyway, love you to decone.

Simone Collins: I love you too, Malcolm. I’m glad things are, I think getting better.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. I mean, how do you, have you noticed this in terms of the way that you look at information, update yourself with new information about what’s true, what’s not true?

Simone Collins: Yes, absolutely. But you know, we’re in the same household, so Of course,

Malcolm Collins: Well, I mean, you used to like keep track of all the new studies that came out and I think you just stopped doing that.

Simone Collins: I didn’t stop doing that because I don’t trust them. I still think that peer reviewed academic research is broadly speaking better than anecdotal information that I have from life experience or from someone else’s sample of one or two.

You know it, it is more rigorously done than that you don’t end up in a peer reviewed publication because you. We’re super, super shoddy in your work. And as much as there is a lot of academic fraud, [00:45:00] there’s also a lot of people making stuff up online. So you have to choose the lesser of various evils.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, but I, I, I’d point out that the difference in terms of information, like the quality of the information

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: Between let’s talk about the, the field of like arousal and sex, because that’s one of the ones I, I am, I’m very familiar with. Sure. Of your. Average peer-reviewed piece versus anecdotal evidence?

Oh, those two things are closer to each other than the average peer reviewed pieces to an ALA Substack post.

Simone Collins: No, that is 100% true, but also sex research has a long, especially in the academic field, a long history of just being abysmal. So I don’t think that’s a fair, I, I’m referring mostly to medical science and I think that.

Despite so many headwinds in that space when it comes to academic complications that generally I, I turn to it to try to find fairly reliable information because [00:46:00] the information of Renegade researchers, while very interesting is, has its own series of problems, not just small sample sizes and not just.

Maybe less rigorous methods and less in, in most cases, transparency, but also a lot of hidden agendas. And that is. You know?

Malcolm Collins: Yeah,

Simone Collins: I, I know the agendas in academia, at least, you just talked about a lot of them and that it at least is helpful when, when you trust something, it’s not because you know it’s going to give you good results.

It’s because you can predict it and better understand its incentive structures. You can’t something when you cannot trust something, when you cannot accurately and consistently predict it or understand its incentive structures.

Malcolm Collins: Mm-hmm. Alright. Have a day. Bye.

Simone Collins: It occurred to me that it’s gonna be really fun [00:47:00] when I’m sure we can probably figure out how to do it now, but our kids are still a little bit too young for it. But to have prediction markets just for household things.

You know, in, in how many months is, you know, so and so gonna reach No, because

Malcolm Collins: we have enough kids to get a real

Simone Collins: prediction market going. Yeah. And then also like, you know, what are the odds that mom emerge just from the bathroom after using the toilet unclogging gun covered in excrement? It will be very fun.

And it will also get our kids thinking more in a like Bayesian mindset instead of just yes and no. And I think, or I don’t think. And I want that. I want our kids to think in probabilities. I’m 90% sure whatever.

So

Malcolm Collins: well, an interesting concept I saw recently that I’m a little disappointed. We didn’t do an episode. Like I didn’t focus more on, [00:48:00] on the episode about how news is dying.

Simone Collins: Mm-hmm.

Malcolm Collins: And as gold was actually going over, this is when people are like, oh, that’s, that’s horrible PR or This is a PR

Simone Collins: nightmare,

Malcolm Collins: disaster.

Nightmare. They’re often talking about news media, and news media is largely irrelevant. Like they’re talking about a Karen hate mob. And then when

Simone Collins: no one cares about their opinion,

Malcolm Collins: published by sort of that class of people, and nobody cares. Nobody cares. Yeah. And that, that organization or mindset has not made.

Festival boycotts or anything like that in a long time. If anything, their, their boycotts more likely to just blow up. Like it’s, it’s, it is both not an audience we’ve seen with like the, the game about stealing African artifacts that just came out and had like zero players,

Simone Collins: Bruce.

Malcolm Collins: But it’s also this is, it is not an audience that you can court in any meaningful context, nor is it an audience that will abandon your products in any meaningful context.

And this [00:49:00] is coming up

Simone Collins: because I think it’s one of those things that Yeah. Is dead and people have not realized it’s dead. Similar to publishing or a variety of other domains. Yeah. Like advertising. You know, people, I think even to a certain degree, continue to advertise when. 95% of advertising doesn’t re, re reduce.

Sorry. Does not produce an ROI.

Malcolm Collins: Here’s a A. A, so people freak out so much when they get tied to us, or there’s some sort of negative mention in like a mainstream media outlet, like the New York Times or something. And in that episode we went over how few people actually watch those or read that these days.

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: When in reality it’s. A bigger impact to them if one of their friends Facebooks about something, because more of their friends are going to see that than if it’s in the New York Times. More people in their extended social network are gonna see that if somebody has an angry LinkedIn post about that.

Simone Collins: That’s such a good point. Yeah. Especially if it’s an influencer in their network. [00:50:00] Even if it’s literally the head of your homeowners association. But if that’s your world, that’s really all you should care about. Good point.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, influencer in your network.

Speaker 8: here?

Speaker 5: I.

Speaker 8: Octavian, you gotta be careful when you attack them. You’re getting bigger, okay? You can’t jump on them.

Speaker 5: Okay?

Speaker 8: Octavian, did you understand me? Why? Because you could accidentally really hurt them.

Speaker 5: Okay? I hurt the subscribers.

Speaker 8: You’ll hurt the subscribers. Yeah, no, only hurt the non-subscribers.[00:51:00]

Is this where you’re training to battle the non-subscribers to people who don’t like and subscribe?

Speaker 5: Hey.

I,

Speaker 8: oh, it is.

Speaker 5: Look behind you because you picked your, [00:52:00]

Speaker 8: oh, okay. Okay. Okay. So I just gotta look behind me and you won’t attack me. You promise? Yeah,

Speaker 5: I promise.

Why?

Speaker 8: I’ll do it later. Okay. Why? Oh God. Stop. I gotta recharge my batteries.

Speaker 5: No, no, no.

Speaker 8: Gotta recharge my batteries. Stop [00:53:00] it.

The Hollywood absurdity reaches new levels: the Writers Guild of America (WGA) is now facing a strike from its OWN staff union (WGSU) — a union inside a union! In early 2026, the WGA’s ~115 staffers walked out over unfair labor practices, surveillance claims, higher pay demands (from ~$43k min to ~$60k+), and strict NO-AI rules in their workplace... while the WGA itself fights studios for similar AI protections for writers.

Malcolm & Simone break down this hilarious/self-defeating “unions all the way down” situation, why unions (especially public-sector ones) often hurt the workers they claim to protect, how mandatory writer minimums and AI bans create slop and kill competitiveness, why modern writing feels AI-generated anyway (looking at you, recent Wednesday/Star Trek seasons), Stephen Colbert’s comedy decline, and the broader lesson: unions can turn industries unviable (hello, Detroit autos, Pan Am).

We also touch on AI making employees 10–100× more valuable (if they embrace it), why demanding raises without ROI thinking puts you first on the chopping block, and why Hollywood’s output feels disconnected from audience demand or profitability.

Episode Transcript

Malcolm Collins: [00:00:00] hello Simone. I’m excited to be here with you today. Today we are gonna be talking about the ridiculousness of what’s going on in Hollywood right now, which will give us an odd, a chance to talk about many related issues specifically wag the Writer’s Guild of America.

Created a union under itself that is now in a fight with the Writer’s Guild of America that the Writer’s Guild of America is not stepping down from, and the fight is over all of the things that the Writer’s Guild of America is. At the moment fighting the studios for, so for example, the biggest issue that the Writer’s Guild of America will not compromise to with its own union of members is they want it to not be able to use AI to replace him.

That’s the core thing. It’s arguing with the studios about. And so we’re going, because I [00:01:00] first heard about this. And I was like, I have to understand this in so much more detail. Is this normal to have a union inside of a union? Is it normal for them to be fighting a union over the same things that union is fighting externally over?

What are they fighting over? What aren’t the union bosses compromising on? Why does the union inside the union say they’re being trailed by surveillance agents hired by the union?

Simone Collins: what?

Malcolm Collins: Yes.

Simone Collins: Unions with the spies.

Malcolm Collins: It is, it is. Unions all the way down, nothing but unions.

Malcolm Collins: Next I need to have a Union. Of the Union. Of the Union.

Simone Collins: yes. That That’s the secret Union. They just don’t tell you about that

Malcolm Collins: so I wanna talk about this fight. One because it’s comical, but [00:02:00] two, it provides us with two interesting things that we can look into and dig deeper on. One is the problem with unions more broadly.

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: I personally am not an anti-union person. I am anti-public sector union. I think that’s insane. But I think that unions should be legal.

However, I think that they are very rarely good for anyone. And unfortunately people are just.

Simone Collins: the employees. Let’s be clear.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, they’re usually bad for employees. Right. And we’ll get into, and this will be a clear instance of just how little unions actually care about employees. And, and if you’re wondering why I’m so against things like public sector unions, the famous line from the head of like the teacher’s union in in New York was like, we’ll start caring about the best interest of students when students start paying union dues.

Which is true. And Simone found this really great study that was looking at how long school closures around COVID happened and. The number one thing that was correlary wasn’t the amount of outbreak in a region, but the strengths of the teacher’s [00:03:00] union.

Simone Collins: About safety?

Malcolm Collins: it was just about getting teachers time off at extra pay.

But I wanna go into how unions break down, how they make things worse for workers. So that’s one thing that we’re gonna talk about. And then we’re going to go into on, on top of that, we’re gonna go into how AI is changing the workplace environment and how. And why? Basically nobody’s making serious compromises on it.

Even the union that is fighting against AI is unwilling to allow its workers to say, we won’t use ai. It’s like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Come on. Be, be reasonable here. People.

Simone Collins: I thought you were gonna say that they were going complete Luddite in a way that was going to render them obsolete in the end. But what you’re saying is actually they’re fighting back and they’re saying, no, I actually kind of wanna use ai.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, no. They’re being like, oh, well, I mean reasonably you can’t do any, and, and then I wanna talk about how.

Simone Collins: interesting ‘cause I’ve actually, a bunch of the, the, the woke YouTubers I write have been talking about how new iterations of shows feel like they’ve been written by [00:04:00] ai. And I wonder just how much AI writing has actually taken over screenwriting, like the, the latest season of Wednesday apparently to so many people.

They’re like, wait a second. This was definitely written by ai, which I’m curious to see, you know, if that ends up coming out to be true.

Malcolm Collins: Maybe, I mean people have said that about the new Star Trek as well. And the thing is, is that, is that if you are like a standard woke progressive, you’re gonna sound like an ai, right? Like that’s the problem, right? That’s the problem.

Simone Collins: response to this is, does it matter? What’s

Malcolm Collins: Does it matter? Do you notice the difference? They’re already on autopilot.

I mean, and, and you see this as they get older and they get more entrenched in this. I mean, obviously the famous case here is Stephen Colbert where, you know, I was watching him on like strangers with candy recently and he was hilarious. And then you go to the Colbert Report or his

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: the Daily Show and he was hilarious.

And, and then just as time has gone on, he’s gotten less and less funny. And now he’s just basically chat GPT. Try to be a snarky progressive, talking about the news, right? How did he get that bad? How did he become [00:05:00] so deeply unfunny? And I,

Simone Collins: is his writers. It is not like he does all his own stuff.

Malcolm Collins: he did do his own stuff. Remember when there was the, the writers strike, Stephen Colbert was one of the shows that kept going, was out writers. So we know what Stephen Colbert was. He was quite funny. His quality didn’t really drop at all.

Simone Collins: He is bad writers now.

Malcolm Collins: the, the point I’m making is I think that he does a lot more of his own writing than other people do.

Simone Collins: Okay.

Malcolm Collins: that I didn’t notice a change in his show when he lost all the writers due to the writer’s strike. This was age ago, by the way. Talk about ancient history.

Simone Collins: I know.

Malcolm Collins: and I liked his show enough then that I was able to tell there wasn’t a big drop in quality during the writer’s strike. The other funny thing is the ridiculousness that like Wag has asked for, just if you wanna get an idea of like how insane Wags requests have been.

This is the, the Writer’s Actor’s Guild that has a union picketing it.

Simone Collins: Huh.

Malcolm Collins: They tried to make it so that you would have a, like when we’re talking about urban culture brained writers, right?[00:06:00]

Simone Collins: Mm-hmm.

Malcolm Collins: Tried to make it so that you had a, have a minimum number of writers per show. I think. Go over. It’s like four people, at least four to six people.

And it’s like, that’s how you get slop. Like too many cooks.

Simone Collins: too many cooks. Too many cooks.

Speaker 3: So sweet Dash ‘em. Cool to add the heat and you die. Too many cooks. Too many cooks. Too many cooks. Too many cooks. Too many cooks. Too many cooks. Too many cooks. Too many cooks. Too many cooks. Too many cooks. Too many cooks. Too many cooks. Too many cooks. Too many, too many, too many cook, too many cooks, too many cook.

Too many. Too many gonna fit in here. This is the worst case of intra I’ve ever seen. You can even hear [00:07:00] the theme music. And the thing is, we have no idea how contagious this strain is.

Speaker 5: Now look.

Speaker 3: Kids. Little love to make it nice and you Too many cooks. Too many cooks. Too many cooks. Many.

Simone Collins: .

So bad. It’s so bad. I, I like, just, let’s just add more people. There’s the, the famous research that showed that after a certain group size, the IQ of, of the collective thought process goes down significantly. Like, let’s just make this worse. Just more, more running this by committee ‘cause that produces good outcomes.

Malcolm Collins: So let’s go into the.

Simone Collins: Charles Shakespeare wrote things with a group, of course, as did Dickens.

Malcolm Collins: Yes.[00:08:00]

Simone Collins: yes,

Malcolm Collins: They’re like, you need a group for quality. That’s what they said. So you could get, yeah,

Simone Collins: good writing with just

Malcolm Collins: without the consensus of the masses,

Simone Collins: Huh? Forbid. No, no, no, no, no, no, no.

Malcolm Collins: you wonder why Hollywood’s not making anything that anyone wants to watch anymore. It’s these guys and you basically cannot make anything high production in Hollywood without their approval.

Simone Collins: Oh, and when, well, it, the, the amazing thing too that you and I have witnessed when documentary film or news film crews come over is the, the stark difference we see when we work with unionized studios versus

Malcolm Collins: Oh, they’re terrible.

Simone Collins: if it’s a unionized production crew. It’s going to suck. It is the most inefficient day. They spend like eight hours to film. Five minutes. They bring all this equipment, they spend all this time making a huge mess in our house and like buying lunch, ordering lunch, getting lunch, taking their lunch break setting up, putting down, having a meeting, and we’re like sitting there and we’re like, can we, can we like live our lives?

Please? Can you, can we maybe

Malcolm Collins: I [00:09:00] hate having unionized crews ever. I mean, I hope they all go outta business. Anyway.

Simone Collins: have to, they’re gonna, they, they, this is unsustainable. I don’t understand this. And I, I don’t know. I’m thinking about outlining an episode at one point in which I put out the argument that, that feudalism actually never went away. That actually for this really long period of time a bunch of people have basically just had patrons, like wealthy people, funding non-productive work. And they just always, there have been sort of these wealthy. People owning different fiefdoms and then the rest of us are just peasants, like leaching off of their money. And then there’s some people who have, you know, local merchant. There’s this merchant class where people just make money off of businesses that do real work. But anyone who is a mid-level manager or who works for a large corporation work cannot be directly to profit is basically living in someone else’s fiefdom. Off of their large s as a patron.[00:10:00]

Malcolm Collins: Okay, that that could work potentially as an episode. We’ll see.

Simone Collins: But I mean, that’s, I think that’s definitely what’s happening in Hollywood because what they’re, what they’re doing is not connected to a return on investment. The money is not being put into them and making more money. It is just, it stops there. It ends, there’s, there’s no more.

Malcolm Collins: So the core issue that stalled negotiations of the Union union’s contract and by the way, this is their very first negotiation. So the union under the union. Just formed. Apparently this is a normal thing to happen within unions, except it bypassed a normal vote that you would have when it formed, I guess, is a sign of good faith.

But their very first negotiation is where things are failing and everything’s falling apart

Simone Collins: okay, so this, this new inner union, the cancer within the cancer. Is new as of when? 2025, like last year. Oh, it just formed.

Malcolm Collins: oh, I think 2025 it formed, and this is their first contract negotiation.

Simone Collins: these, these sub unions form why, when the union isn’t uniony enough what, what, what [00:11:00] is their purpose?

Malcolm Collins: We will get into that. So the contract negotiations broke down over accusations that the writer’s actors Guild had been negotiating in bad faith, including alleged surveillance, retaliation against organizers, and only surface level talks without real progress. And that’s specifically what they mean when they say arguing bad face.

Simone Collins: representing us. I’m gonna protest this. I’m

Malcolm Collins: They,

Simone Collins: my

Malcolm Collins: yes. They also argued that they were breaking labor laws that the union was breaking labor laws and doing unfair labor practices. So there’s,

Simone Collins: Kind of check out actually.

Malcolm Collins: there’s specific demands.

Simone Collins: I could see a teacher deciding to form a union against teachers’ unions because teachers’ unions are so corrupt,

Malcolm Collins: Yeah.

Simone Collins: up, and like here the teachers are like scraping together pennies to take their kids on a field trip. Meanwhile, the unions are like sitting high and pretty on their mountains of money. Why

Malcolm Collins: If they can force teachers to pay. It’s my understanding in a lot of areas, like you’re not allowed to [00:12:00] even be employed if you don’t give money to the union.

Simone Collins: Okay. Maybe now I’m, I’m kind of, now I’m in favor of sub unions. Let’s, let’s have more unions within union.

Malcolm Collins: More unions, so many unions.

Simone Collins: against the unions. Yes. No, this is good. Okay. Whoa. I’m into this. Tell me more.

Malcolm Collins: All unions must have sub unions. At least sub.

Simone Collins: You have to resist the evil union and the

Malcolm Collins: Yeah.

Simone Collins: could do that, you have to fight fire with fire.

Malcolm Collins: So they fought for higher pay to, of course, to address the living costs in Southern California. They said then just move to a location outside of Southern California.

Simone Collins: Can I have

Malcolm Collins: They want AI protection. Okay, you can go change.

Simone Collins: emergency. It might be a blowout and I, I don’t want, I don’t want that

Malcolm Collins: you. You do so much for this family. I do not know how you put up with this

Simone Collins: Other people say they put up with S**T, but I actually do a lot of it.

Malcolm Collins: a baby. You got a lot more, Simone. We’re only halfway there. This is number five.

Simone Collins: but

Malcolm Collins: So [00:13:00] we’re not even halfway there.

Simone Collins: Yeah. Not even.

Malcolm Collins: I’m sorry. You’re gonna be so sad when it’s the last baby s**t.

Simone Collins: I am. Well, no, because I’m, by then, if we’ve planned things right, it’s just a couple years until a grandkid, so it’s all good.

Malcolm Collins: Octavian is so fun. He

Simone Collins: he’s gonna be a great dad. He was telling me yesterday about how he was gonna give his kids way more toys than he has, and I’m like, I don’t know if that’s gonna be possible, buddy. We

Many

Malcolm Collins: he said that for real,

Simone Collins: Yeah, for real. He’s like, I’m gonna get my kids so many toys.

Malcolm Collins: he is going over with me on the video game where he found a map in like a war room. And he’s like, I, he’s explaining to all the ais how they’re going to conduct the war, and he’s like, and we need to attack the islands.

Simone Collins: Oh no. Yeah. He was telling me about how America needs to take more territory, and I’m like, no, that. They’re working on it, buddy. And he’s like, yeah I need to make them do it. And I’m like, how are you gonna make them do it? And he is like, [00:14:00] well, I’m gonna give them money. Okay. Okay.

Malcolm Collins: God. All right.

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: To continue here. So they wanted, governance and fairness procedures, just clause rules to prevent arbitrary firings plus formal processes for handwriting disputes and to promote accountability and improvement of working conditions. The strike escalated to the point where the union discussed canceling its annual awards show, which is a huge deal in the industry.

It, it is a very big awards. Okay. It’s the main union for writers in Hollywood canceling the awards for writers, the yearly awards. And they’re like, and we’re gonna blame this all on you, the sub union, right? Like, and of course the sub union then became quite upset about this. So let’s, let’s discuss the salary situation here.

The minimum annual salary for staffers is $43,000, which is about the American median salary. So I don’t know. I mean, these are non-profit workers. That’s high. If that’s a minimum salary,

Simone Collins: in la you [00:15:00] know that, that’s rough

Malcolm Collins: well then don’t base it la.

Simone Collins: It doesn’t, doesn’t work like that. But I hear you. I

Malcolm Collins: And so they proposed that they move from 40 thou, 43,000 being the minimum to 59,737 being the minimum. And then a 7.5% increase upon ratification and 5% increases in each of the next two years which to me seems ridiculous.

Simone Collins: I mean it, it comes back to that famous. Minimum wage debate, which really can be extrapolated to any position. If you choose to make your salary higher. You’re putting yourself first on the chopping block when money gets tight. Like, sure. Okay. Like whenever employees ask us for raises that we’re just kind of out of nowhere, like not really merit based or whatever, it’s just like, well, I want a race.

We’re like, okay. If this really matters to you, we will give you a raise. And here’s what’s gonna happen depending on how high your raise is, when we look like we hit [00:16:00] a hard time and we have to figure out how we’re gonna make the company stay afloat, gonna have to eliminate the most expensive things we can.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. I always tell somebody that whenever I give them a race, I’m like, you know that this puts you first on the chopping block to be fired, right.

Simone Collins: Yeah. And that’s always how it was like when, when the pandemic hit and we had to furlough employees and then keep some on, we kept on the most number of employees we could. And that meant that if you had a lower salary, you were in, like you were paid throughout the entire pandemic. And if you had a higher salary. You got furloughed because, you know, basically like it’s, can I save if, if I can save two people by eliminating one person, I’m going to eliminate the one person. So yeah, by making yourself, and what happens instead with minimum wage is, well, if I can’t afford a person, I’m going to just figure out how to automate them.

So I’m just not gonna have that job anymore. And that’s already a problem in Hollywood already. People are spending long, long stints [00:17:00] unemployed.

Malcolm Collins: I think that they don’t see it the way employers see it. So when an employee comes to us as, as somebody who’s run large businesses, like one of our businesses pulled in like 70 mil a year at one point. And they came to us and they’d say, Hey, I want more money, or something like that. The calculation in my head is, you know, differentially, when I can trust you as somebody, I could get on the open market versus other employees, are you bringing in value to the company?

And if you are, then I will raise your salary. Was the understanding that what you bring into the company. Change based on things that aren’t your fault, like market conditions, like a pandemic, et cetera. And then that can lead me to say, because you people never, you know, it’s, it’s almost always better to fire someone than lower their pay because they,

Simone Collins: you just, you don’t lower someone’s pay

Malcolm Collins: yeah.

Simone Collins: never happens.

Malcolm Collins: and, and so that’s like, I’m thinking what is your utility to the firm versus how much do you cost? These people are not thinking that about their own salary. They’re thinking, how much does it cost for me to live in la [00:18:00] therefore, that’s what I need to be paid. Not could they hire somebody who’s not in la differentially, less expensively That would be just as enthusiastic about the position.

What do I actually do? What value do I provide? Right? Like, mm.

Simone Collins: Well, and that’s the key thing too. I mean, if you really wanna make yourself. the first that comes to mind when someone needs to fire people or even just make yourself someone that they wanna fire immediately. Say, I need a raise ‘cause I need money. ‘cause life is expensive for me because

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, it shows you’re not thinking about the best interest of the other employees at the company.

Simone Collins: have to come with. I, I’ve brought this value. I, I am, I basically just show that you are instrumental in, in the company’s profitability that, you know, they put in $1 and out comes two. And that’s what happens when they pay you. And if you can directly demonstrate that as long as you have a return on investment, you’re good.

Like, and that we’re always that way. 100%. You know, if you output more money than we, we put [00:19:00] in. That doesn’t really happen a lot,

Malcolm Collins: Anyway. And in terms of like, how bad is this organization because you’re like, oh, maybe they’re, they, the pay discrimination is really big. The, the woman running it, Ellen Dutchman earns approximately $682,000 with two other senior officials earning $399,000 in another earning $468,000.

Simone Collins: What

Malcolm Collins: Now, they almost certainly are not worth that much money, but keep in mind, that’s only like.

A bit more than 10 x what the average employee is earning, which isn’t that bad for a large company like this. Keep in mind, just this one sub union branch of this union has 110 members in it, right? And the, the, this, this union is operating, all of the writers, it’s like a for, for basically all Hollywood writers, right?

Like the, the person who’s running it is the face of it is probably going to be famous in some regard and command a decent salary, right? Like, to me, that actually doesn’t seem that abusive. And a [00:20:00] lot of charities you’ll see people pulling in millions of dollars in salary. So for something this high profile I can see that.

I don’t, I don’t really see that as, as, as that particularly bad. Now let’s get.

Simone Collins: I see it as egregious. It for me. I’ve, I’ve always justified in my mind that it makes sense for charities because the CEO typically is the defacto fundraiser, and it implies that they bring in more than they’re being paid.

Malcolm Collins: True. True.

Simone Collins: But

Malcolm Collins: they probably are,

Simone Collins: different. They’re just

Malcolm Collins: but a union is different.

Simone Collins: salaries. Yeah. I mean like with a union, it’s basically, I’m just gonna take a little bit of everything you earn and that’s, that’s way different. So I have a big issue with any union leader’s salary. That money belongs to the union members.

Malcolm Collins: So to continue here how did they get this bargaining and bad faith accusation? Because this is obviously really bad and they’re now going and negotiating with Hollywood people and people are like your own employees. Say you bargain in [00:21:00] bad faith. Like, how are you?

Simone Collins: Ly, there have been, there must have been at least one historical instance of a union leader colluding with the CEO of the company, maybe for kickbacks

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, but that’s clearly not happening here. The things that they keep asking Hollywood for are completely ridiculous in going to sink the industry, like which we’ll get into. But, so thi this core accusation was just came from surface bargaining where management shows up to sessions but doesn’t meaningfully engage or intend to reach an agreement on key issues recently during the strike management and allegedly refused further bargaining unless W-G-C-S-U accepted their latest offer by February 27th, 2026, or they’d canceled the Rider’s Guild Awards on March 8th.

Now. What is interesting here is the sub union is basically like the, the, the bigger union is just like, guys, you just need to agree to this stuff. And the sub union is like, no, we will not stop coming to the table until you cave on the two key issues they care about, which are higher salaries and no ai.

[00:22:00] Which it,

Simone Collins: ai, like actual full Luddite, no

Malcolm Collins: yeah.

Simone Collins: ai. Wow.

Malcolm Collins: exact AI requirements. AI cannot be implemented for any purpose, eg. Surveillance, hiring, discipline, or performance evaluation without prior negotiation and agreement with the union. This includes a prohibiting, unilateral use of. All AI tools prohibitions on use, no generative AI tools like GPT in the workplace to replace or devalue staff roles.

Eg. If AI can do it cheaper, don’t allow it assurances that ai,

Simone Collins: ourselves less competitive, please.

Malcolm Collins: yeah, AI will not be, well, they don’t need to compete is why they can argue things like this, right? Like. If they wanna create art for one of their little like union things, right? Like that’s, that’s going out to the writers members. But then again, I actually think it’s probably in their best interest to have blanket bands on AI as a union simply because of what they are fighting for.

It’s very hard to argue [00:23:00] no AI at the major studios if they can’t commit to that themselves. And I can only imagine the blowback if they put something like AI art in something that goes out to Writers Guild members.

Simone Collins: Okay.

Malcolm Collins: Because a lot of these people are like reflexively into ai

training and consent. If AI is introduced after bargaining, staff must receive paved training and have input, which is funny. Oh. And no forced a adoption. So if they don’t wanna use ai, they can’t be forced to use the ai, which a lot of companies are doing. I’ve heard, which is interesting.

Simone Collins: Forcing adoption.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Of ai.

Simone Collins: Obviously, yeah, you can get 10 times out of an employee that uses ai, and that’s the most what a lot of investors who are bullish on AI are saying is that the most valuable employee over the next short term is going to be an employee who very enthusiastically uses ai. And that the hardest thing to get right now isn’t like. Good AI per se, or just a good employee. It’s an [00:24:00] employee who enthusiastically uses ai ‘cause that is worth 10 or even a hundred individuals, right? If you get both a very smart person and a very smart person who uses the best AI unicorn, right? That’s what

Malcolm Collins: Do you think I should apply for normal jobs again? ‘cause I use a lot of ai.

Simone Collins: You, you, you, mean, you are, you, you fit the description very well. I just don’t see how

Malcolm Collins: Anyone’s gonna tolerate working with me.

Simone Collins: No. Why? Why you would. I mean, even if tight on cash and everything, wouldn’t you rather eating like canned beans and not have to

Malcolm Collins: true, but I, I don’t understand. I, I feel like we made a good product here. I just gotta figure out how to get people using it.

Simone Collins: Yeah. And that’s gonna take a lot of persistence and I don’t know, you’re like, oh, it’s been two weeks and it’s not huge. Like yeah, that’s pretty normal actually. Don’t worry about it. We just have to grind. I mean, smartly, of course. But [00:25:00] yeah, it’s, it’s a, it’s an amazing, it’s an amazing chat bot and. We’ll, we’ll figure it out. Anyway,

Malcolm Collins: Okay.

Simone Collins: they’re at this, this loggerheads and the, the sub union. I don’t know, I, how do you think this is gonna conclude?

Malcolm Collins: So to continue here, what I wanted to understand is, given what this sub union wants of them in relation to ai, what did the union want in regards to AI from the studios? Right. Because I wanted to contrast what the sub union is asking them versus what they initially wanted. Okay.

Simone Collins: because presumably the union, you’d guess that they’re allowing some AI adoption, but it can’t be a lot. Right.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. So they wanted AI cannot write, rewrite, or generate literary material. Now, this is, these are points that they won in 2023. Okay.

Simone Collins: Oh, okay.

Malcolm Collins: AI generated content cannot be considered source material preventing studios from using it as a basis for human [00:26:00] revisions at lower pay rates. Basically they didn’t want AI to generate the original story.

And then humans come in and, you know, like they did with the Wednesday show or the Star Trek show, they’re obviously doing this, but you know, they’re just having humans who do these write-ups be paid for the AI’s work. Right. If AI is used in any way, writers retain full credit, separate rights, eg ownership elements and compensation as if no AI was involved.

AI cannot undermine writers pay or credits. You know what? I would be using AI for aggressively if I was major studios, and I’m really surprised we haven’t seen this because they’re still making these types of mistakes. Canon conflicts. AI is perfect for searching for Canon conflict.

Simone Collins: to make sure you’re not, Oh, that makes a lot of sense that, yeah, because you’re seeing a lot of Canon conflicts show up in shows these days, especially because no one is willing to make original IP anymore. So they’re just in on like

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, like if you’re making the new Star Wars or the new Star Trek, just dump the scripted AI [00:27:00] and be like, where is every single Canon conflict? Right. Just ask it like five times. And that’s the type of thing that historically you’d have to hire nerds for, and even they might miss something.

Simone Collins: Yeah. Whereas with this, absolutely. I mean, I think a lot of this comes down to all the weird rules about AI use, so you just can’t use it for even really simple checks like this. I mean, they don’t even want it to be used for what, like evaluations and stuff. So I don’t know.

Malcolm Collins: Anyway, so they wanted restrictions on AI around writers can choose to use AI tools with studio consent, but studios cannot require it and no train. AI models on writer specific works without permission studios. Well, maybe that’s why the ais that are writing all the movies now are so bad. Studios must disclose and, and materials provided to writers.

If, if such materials include AI generated elements.

Simone Collins: Hmm.

Malcolm Collins: and then, if, remember how I said they had the minimum staff things? [00:28:00] So for pre greenlit development rooms, a minimum staff of six writers, including four production writers, was what they wanted. For post greenlit rooms scaled by episode count, EG one writer per episode up to six.

Then one additional writer for every two episodes beyond that, up to 12.

Simone Collins: Just how what I, I, I mean, I understand that this is just to try to guarantee work for a group of people that’s finding jobs drying up in the industry, but. Don’t they understand that this is going to make it impossible for producers to raise money for more movies and shows. I like who can fund this?

Malcolm Collins: I, I, they literally do not think about where the money comes from or what their value is within the industry. The industry is just an infinite money flow to them, and the amount of money they deserve is the [00:29:00] amount of money they need to live their lifestyles.

Simone Collins: Yeah, well, can, can you blame the management for showing up and just not being willing to talk? I mean, I mean, what are you supposed to say? I mean, I wish management would, I, I wonder if this has, you know, as we discussed, right? Like, if you ask for this, we will have to find a way to just completely get rid of you.

Like, is this being explicitly said, do you think management’s trying to just not say it is, is all of this just not being disclosed that unfair

Malcolm Collins: I think the lefties are like. Literally incapable of, I’m like, your utility is the increase in productivity you bring to the company of seeing the world that way. That is not the way they see reality. And so here I wanna talk about why unions typically end up hurting employees because a lot of people have this myth.[00:30:00]

That unions won a bunch of beneficial things for employees historically speaking. And what we actually see historically speaking is it was periods of enormous wealth within the United States specifically because of the end of World War II and the de-industrialization of Europe that that caused.

And everybody who. We owe debts to and all the in our favor, trade negotiations, we formed that was basically American colonialization that was helping them. If they want to go back to that, we can go back to that. But we need to start getting aggressive, need to get a little ma maga right. But that was not really the unions that won all of those benefits for workers.

And why unions generally suck at winning benefits for workers is you’ve gotta think of the actual incentive structure of a union, right? So with a union. The workers get out there and they elect the people who are quote unquote, the figureheads of the union. Right? [00:31:00] The, like the, the people who are running the union or putting in charge, who’s running a union, right?

Maybe in an instance like this, so how do you lose your position? How do you gain your position? Right. It’s really about signaling to the workers that you are superficially doing whatever it is that they want you to do and not being willing to back down if you’re not at least superficially. You don’t need to actually do what they want you to, but you need to superficially do what they want you to.

Simone Collins: because eventually you can just blame, well, the, you know, the, the evil owners

Malcolm Collins: Right. And I think that this sub union breakdown that we’re seeing right now is a perfect example of this, this happening in real time.

Simone Collins: Hmm.

Malcolm Collins: A new sub union is formed of one branch of the larger union. And so the people who are taking over leadership of this new subsection.

anyway, to continue. You’ve been elected head of this new sub union, right? You’re going to your first contract [00:32:00] negotiation. You have to win something like pay, right? Like people are like, that’s why we formed this sub union. We wanted higher pay.

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: We wanted AI protection, right? You go and it turns out that the stuff that your people wanted were unreasonable.

I mean, this is a union, likely they would’ve already been given it. So now you don’t actually need to win them this stuff. You just need to have a big fit over not winning them. This stuff. That’s how you maintain your position, right? You, and that’s what they’re doing right now. Like I, I think they.

Pretty quickly realized that they weren’t gonna win the things that they said they were gonna win. And so then it just became, okay, well then let’s throw a fit over this. Let’s be, be spoilers over this. Let’s have meeting after meeting after meeting over this. We’re doing our job. We won’t be replaced.

We get whatever benefits come from this job, whatever additional money or anything like that. And. And what that means is it is a lot of people when they think of a union, if they think it’s an ability for workers to [00:33:00] collectively resist or push back against management, when that’s not functionally what’s happening, what’s happening is you’re creating a sublay of management, which must performatively combat the productive layer of management.

And. And this, you can see that the sub layer of management is always gonna be antagonistic to the productive layer. In so far, so like right here, what is a union’s job to, to win more of rights for the writers to win more page, win more. Obviously this fight that the sub union is having is going to hurt the goals of the larger union.

Like writers should be furious about this because this sub union has basically lost tens of thousands of writers. They’re negotiating power for the marginal benefit of like a hundred people. Okay. But that’s not, that’s because they’re leftists, they’re not going to see this, you know, they’re, they’re not gonna gr that, that’s functionally is happening.

But the point I’m [00:34:00] making here is they don’t care and they don’t care that they’re throwing the union members of the. The larger union that are paying their salaries under the bus because they don’t care about the goals of that union. They care about the politics that got them elected into a sub union position, even if those politics puts everyone who they serve in a weaker position.

So a great example of this comes from my dad and one of his friends, he told me the story when I was younger was a pilot at an airline called Pan Am.

Simone Collins: Pan Am like the That’s

Malcolm Collins: Well, pan Am if you, if you’ve heard of it, but don’t know what happened to it. It went broke because of its unions. And he remembers a conversation he had with this pilot, and he was very proud of what the unions were doing in the strike. And my dad was like, I. I have run the numbers. It’s going to go bankrupt.

If you guys keep doing this, like why aren’t you pushing back? And the guy’s like, no. Like look at these great pay that they’ve won us. Look at this. [00:35:00] Great. And functionally in the same way that employees can in good times, earn more marginal pay for themselves, but they’re also first on the chopping block.

Entire industries can do that to themselves. Where. And this is what we’re seeing in Hollywood, right? More and more people, more and more projects are happening outside the union ecosystem because the union ecosystem is making themselves uncompetitive.

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: And you eventually get to that point. We, like, we’ve seen this with writers, like obviously, oh, I want more writers in the room for every story.

Right? Obviously to the writers, they’re gonna want that. They’re not thinking about, it never enters their mind. How is this going to affect how much a user the, the, the consumer of the products that we’re writing is going to want to consume what we’re producing? It’s literally never crosses their mind because it’s not relevant to them.

Right? So,

Simone Collins: this

Malcolm Collins: If they did think through that, they’d be like, [00:36:00] oh, obviously having six writers to 12 writers in any writing room is going to decrease the in product quality, but

it never occurs. Anyway. Any final thoughts, Simone, about unions, recurrent unions, et cetera, et cetera?

Simone Collins: I want to see a movement of sub unions, the church of the sub union that. Just destroys unions, that, that roots out the corruption in unions, because unions, I agree with you, you know, in the, in their original format, really did have a reason to exist. These are people working in factories, in minds with really rough conditions.

You know, they’re, they’re not being subject to basic. Employee protections. You know, this was before osha. This was before all sorts of regulations of protected workers and unions were the proto version of [00:37:00] that. They existed to protect the basic safety of employees and to give them. You know, reasonable controls, especially in a time, and I think unions really rose during one of the, we’re at the second peak of this, but at the first peak of really high levels of immigration. Remember when we looked at immigration peaks and valleys

Malcolm Collins: Yeah.

Simone Collins: in United States history, and we were like, around the time that unions first rose, we were at a peak and now we’re at another peak. And so unions also existed because it was really. It really easy for companies to just be like, fine, I’ll just hire an immigrant who will do the work without any of the protections.

And so why they first existed. Writers don’t need protections. They don’t need breaks like this. They don’t need, I mean, okay. I actually, I understand why some writers do. And, and there are some, like for example, say you’re filming some reality [00:38:00] TV show on some island. Like there, there was that guy who was filming when, when Tex was born like in, in the triage room I’m talking with. With the, with the camera guy about like the other work he’s done. And he talked about this one time when like, I think he got bit by something poisonous in like in the ocean in Tahiti and stuff. And like it’s kind of good to have a union when you’re in another country working incredibly long hours standing in water being like stung by stingrays, you know, while filming a bunch of entitled bougie, like sluts.

I don’t know what he was filming, I can’t remember what the show was about, but like, yeah, you probably wanna make sure that you don’t get totally screwed over because. A lot of weird dynamics can take place when you have like a small crew of people and like you’re isolated in another country. I get it. But this whole thing of like, well, but for writers, we need protections. Like, oh my God, what will happen if I’m not given, you know, this size of writer team or if I, if I’m forced to use technology to, to be more efficient. just so [00:39:00] overblown. I don’t

Malcolm Collins: I mean,

Simone Collins: level of

Malcolm Collins: functionally what unions do. So typically the way a company works is if they can find somebody to like do a job cheaper and better than the existing employees, they’re going to take that individual, right? And so.

Simone Collins: if they’ve, if they have investors, it’s their fiduciary responsibility.

Malcolm Collins: What a union tries to do is to try to get in the way of that to differentially, get more resources for the employees and what that causes as Simone and I have. Pointed out is the union is the collective bargainer of that employee who asks for a higher salary without understanding that that makes them first on the chopping block.

With unions, it’s asking for a higher salary without understanding that that makes the entire company more likely to go out of business with

Simone Collins: shortsightedness.

Malcolm Collins: jobs that they represent. Well, they, they face functionally a union boss faces functionally, no, no negative repercussions for a company going outta business.

E even if everyone who they said that they were gonna protect.

Simone Collins: [00:40:00] immediately if they don’t represent

Malcolm Collins: they don’t really think about that, like in terms of like how they push for things, et cetera. And so they’re, they’re in instead of employees attempting to increase their value to the company or their differential value, they, they think, okay, how can we get more, and you can get temporary benefits from this.

It just eventually causes those industries, like, everyone’s like, oh, look at all the things Detroit unions won for auto factory workers. And it’s like, and what happened to all of those auto factories? Right? Like. When they differentially were able to get around that system, they did and the system collapsed.

It is ultimately catastrophically bad if a union forms was in your industry. Where this gets really, really nefarious is when unions form in public sector industries where they just have no business being at all because then the industry can’t fail. And you just get it happening to the extent where it just becomes comical and kids aren’t being educated.

Our old recording software company decided to like quadruple prices, so we decided to try a new one. [00:41:00] And unfortunately, we lost the last 10 minutes of Simone video. , So we won’t be doing this again because, on this one, we only lost the last 10 minutes of video where she only said a few things. So it’s not that big a deal.

But on the other one that we recorded today, we lost the entire recording from

Simone,

Malcolm Collins: all right. Well, Avi Simone, and we may do a separate video of people want on the history of like the, the mis history of unions that you’ve heard, where you believe that unions actually ever really helped anyone instead of just set up industries to fail. That that is, that is what unions did, is they teed up the failure and.

Poverty of many parts of the well United States, of, of Europe, of et cetera.

Well, no, it was an optical reason. The idea was just can we fight back against these giant kingpin whatevers? And the answer was, is. They, the, the kingpins were not being as ruthless to you as you thought they were. There was a reason often for what they were doing right, they were trying to maximize the productivity of the industry.

And you just weren’t making yourself that [00:42:00] valuable.

He or she said something about how unions kept us from offshoring jobs.

Malcolm Collins: Right, but those people existed in other regions, so as soon as something unionized in one region, another region would end up replacing it unless there had been an enormous sunk cost capital investment in something that couldn’t be moved. was busy listening to my manga, so it’s okay that you made me Wait, is

Simone Collins: can’t believe you discovered that. you think it’s AI or

Malcolm Collins: it’s a hundred percent AI somehow, and I think there’s even a website that you can probably go to to do this. It will just automatically read in the right language, the manga for you and describe what’s happening,

Simone Collins: you what’s happening? Yeah. That’s what’s so cool about it. I’m so intrigued by this.

Malcolm Collins: because it sometimes gets things wrong, like who’s speaking, which a normal person wouldn’t get wrong, but an AI might get wrong.

Simone Collins: Yeah, the bubbles are sometimes, I guess you have to sort of infer a lot in

Malcolm Collins: like you’d be able to tell by like little marks on the the, the speech bubbles, who they’re in relation to,

Simone Collins: you really,

Malcolm Collins: but the little Mark May not be obvious to an [00:43:00] ai. Now, I know you have the brain of an AI Simone, and so you see these marks and they’re.

Simone Collins: This is very true.

Malcolm Collins: I reached back out to Temple just to get an idea if we should do filming with them.

I appreciate you pushing back.

Simone Collins: We’re gonna talk

So we’ll get to the, we’ll get to the bottom of this.

Malcolm Collins: we’re 30 today with the team. Okay.

Simone Collins: So

Malcolm Collins: temple’s. And Temple’s not this week, right? It’s next Thursday.

Simone Collins: it’s next Thursday. Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: Okay. And what else? What are we doing for dinner tonight?

Simone Collins: It’s night two of that curry. I was thinking of doing it on toasted Hawaiian buns.

Malcolm Collins: No, that’s always gonna be harder to eat.

Simone Collins: Oh, yeah. Sandwiches just fundamentally don’t make sense when you, when you take them away from what they originally were, which was, was gambling food, which was actually portable.

Malcolm Collins: I like sandwiches when they’re made with sandwich meats. The problem is, is the sandwich needs to be more understated, I think [00:44:00] with cheese being the predominant flavor.

Simone Collins: Hmm.

Malcolm Collins: And it doesn’t work very well if like curry’s the predominant flavor or something.

Simone Collins: No, it’s true. Or like, yeah. Any sort of sloppy Joe or like, yeah. mean, yeah, sandwiches. Tea sandwiches really are the truest form of the sandwich. That is what the Earl of Sandwich presumably had invented so that he wouldn’t have to leave the card table and stop hemorrhaging money in a stupid, pointless game. the fact that people now associate sandwiches with like hoagies and Philly cheese steaks and subs, like those are not sandwiches. You

Malcolm Collins: I don’t even understand how somebody even eats something like a Philly cheese steak without assembling it.

Simone Collins: falls the Yeah, it’s very, I, I hate sandwiches except for tea sandwiches. ‘cause you can actually eat them everything falling out.

You can take a bite.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. And what, what else was I gonna say? In regards to, yeah, IGI I’ll, I’ll just with rice.

Simone Collins: Okay.

Malcolm Collins: Looking forward to dinner tonight. Oh, by the way, the curry that you keep making that you seem to think is mango curry is [00:45:00] definitely a panang curry.

Anyway, I will get started in a second and for our fab, I mean, I’ve got to think about what to do to promote it. Do you have any ideas?

Simone Collins: I, I mean, I think it, it’s more persistence, it’s more time. We’re not doing the wrong stuff in reaching out to influencers who talk and write about these platforms, but we’re gonna have to be persistent. And keep in mind the, the second and third times that I reached out to people each time. inevitably catch one additional person who didn’t respond to the first email or the second email because they were on a break or they had stopped checking that email or whatever it might have been. So I think a lot of this comes down to persistence. And the same goes for ads.

Malcolm Collins: We should reach out to Alex Cruel and see if he wants to test the agents

Simone Collins: That could be fun. Yeah.[00:46:00]

Malcolm Collins: anyway.

Simone Collins: How many people he

Malcolm Collins: I haven’t really been working on the agents for a while because I’ve been working on getting all the other features to be top-notch. ‘cause like that’s our major selling point. But I think we’re about ready to launch agents.

Simone Collins: That’s

Malcolm Collins: I, the main reason I’m afraid of putting them in production is they have this habit of ma disabling turning them off and that people run out of credits.

And so like, and I’ve gotta make sure that they don’t run like infinitely and make us go broke or something. Right. You know? So.

Simone Collins: Oh, like, okay, so they’re not. Ah. They even don’t, you have kind of a hard stop when credits

Malcolm Collins: No, it I, on my computer, the way I turn them off when they go crazy is I just turn off the back end. I cannot do that on production.

Simone Collins: Hmm. You can’t create a hard limit to credit

Malcolm Collins: I can, but stuff like that can do, go off or not trigger correctly or,

Simone Collins: Hmm.

Malcolm Collins: That’s what’s been happening.

Simone Collins: Well, let’s make sure we get that [00:47:00] down first. ‘cause the downside is non, non-trivial, thanks to

Malcolm Collins: started here.

Simone Collins: on that. Okay. I’m so excited for this one.

Malcolm Collins: People wonder what we’re talking about. We have like an AI chat bot like adventure thing where you can use any of the major models to play AI adventures, be they like companions or not safe for work or whatever. R fab.ai. And we’re gonna be releasing like agentic agents very near future. That is sort of like claw, open claw, but like way more intuitive with way more features.

And that’s smarter than open claw. I don’t want to take time to explain how we are able to make it smarter than open claw, but we are.

Speaker: Okay, so explain this to me. Like I’m trying to sell my AI friends, like, like this one down here. Okay, activity. Get up, get up. What are you trying to do? You’re trying to show them the map on your screen. Yeah, and I’m trying to show, and I’m showing, and I’m trying to show this guy, what are you, and I’m trying to show all of the people here.

Speaker 2: [00:48:00] That’s where they should attack at the enemy base. And where should they attack at? At? At the islands that are not connected to us. Like that one. That one, and that one right there. Why attack the islands? Because they’re enemy islands, the ones that are not connected to us. How do you know they’re enemies?

Because they tried to retreat and they made other islands with their boat. So they, so I decided to text them. All right. Go Octavian. Yeah.

Malcolm and Simone Collins dive into a no-holds-barred rant on fascism, modern progressivism, and why the left’s definitions often collapse under scrutiny. We analyze a viral progressive figure (Note Brigade / Nope Brigade) who fled the US for Canada fearing “fascism” — only to complain about Canada’s cost of living, housing crisis, and more. Is fascism just repackaged socialism? Why do rebirth myths, populism, and nationalism scare the left so much? We break down historical myths about the 1950s, black communities, Tulsa, cultural autonomy, and why MAGA isn’t “white Christian nationalism.” Plus: gun rights, trans violence stats, urban monoculture vs. cultural diversity on the right, and why America’s narrative of unity is winning minorities over.

If you would like to explore the Tiktok account referenced in this episode, you can find it here.

Episode Transcript

Malcolm Collins: Hello Simone. I’m excited to be here with you today. Today we are going to do a deep dive into a few topics. One is to try to understand how progressives see fascism as something other than just progressivism. You can go find our band a video where we talk about that. That nearly got us YouTube because I really wanted to understand that what, what is their perspective on this?

And in that, I ended up doing a deep dive on a figure called Note Brigade who runs a popular. Twitter account and right now is going viral on right wing circles because she fled the United States as a refugee, went to Canada and then immediately realized everything is worse in Canada.

Speaker: My partner, our cat, and our dog fled the United States. We headed north and in Canada, I think it’s actually the, the cost of living crisis is worse here,

Malcolm Collins: she, it’s actually very interesting watching her ‘cause I wanted to understand why did she [00:01:00] think she was in danger, right?

This is somebody who lived in. LA She is a white woman. Okay. Well, she identifies as non-binary or something, but basically a, a white woman who lives in la, she, presumably because of like anti-trans stuff or something, she decided that she needed to flee the United States without a super big plan.

And she then goes and, and I’ll note here because I’ve watched a lot of her videos to try to understand her world perspective.

What’s interesting to me is if you could just break through the wall, she’s actually very Republican in a lot of her views and not even that unreasonable in most of her political views.

I’ll give you an example. She has one video where she says, you leftists cannot tell the difference between what makes you uncomfortable and what makes you safe.

Speaker 4: I’m sorry, but you’re not, and you wanna know why? It’s because you cannot tell the difference between what makes you uncomfortable and what makes you [00:02:00] unsafe. And you are so committed to your own comfort and your own emotional safety. You’re willing to pass up opportunities to build coalition. You literally cannot recognize allies even when they drop into your lap.

Malcolm Collins: That’s a view that I think many right wingers would have about leftist communities, right? Specifically she was complaining about a leftist community she was in, refused to work with a church.

And she’s like, look, this church had colonizers flags everywhere. Progress pride flags as she would’ve called them. You know, they were the wokes of the woke. And many people that lives a group just would not work with them.

Speaker 2: You can’t tell that churches aren’t all the same and you don’t know your own history. You can’t tolerate any nuance . Where do you think the civil rights movement happened?

It’d be so convenient if we could just blanket dismiss whole groups of people as being unworthy of being our allies just because they’re religious. But unfortunately, you actually have to hold nuance

Malcolm Collins: and I was like, that’s a good, and in her video where she goes over what fascism [00:03:00] is in her mind, I think she does explain modern rightist movements very well.

And she even correctly diagnoses why they’re so popular right now and why leftist movements are not popular right now. So there is a degree of sanity to her worldview, and this made it more interesting to me. Right. And, and not only that, when I hear about the, the reasons that she’s like sad to move to Canada you know, one of the first ones she mentions.

And so she won’t be able to bring her guns because she says she doesn’t feel safe without being armed all the time.

Simone Collins: confused.

I recently took down a video I made about being a gun owner and wishing that I could bring my gun with me to Canada because I think it spooked a lot of my Canadian friends.

Malcolm Collins: Like, you sound fairly right wing lady. You like working with churches to do food drives for the poor. That’s a pretty white wing thing to do. Not a very left wing thing to do.

Within the modern political context. You have guns and are afraid to give them up. She gets to Canada. And she [00:04:00] immediately starts complaining about how high the cost of housing is and how high the cost of living is. Pointing out that it’s much higher than it is in the United States. And I’m like. Does this not like Canada’s a way woke country than the, does it not drive through that?

Maybe their policies are leading to this, like presumably Canada’s much worse than the United States for a reason, right? Like does she not think in the United States, in Canada, if I go and I live in a right wing area, the cost of living’s gonna be much better. And by the way, she got herself in super hot water even with progressives.

‘cause she immediately starts begging for money. And people are like, well, you understand It’s

Simone Collins: no.

Malcolm Collins: bad for people who live in Canada too. Like you didn’t need to come here and make the problem worse, right? Like you as an immigrant are driving up the cost of living for everyone else.

Simone Collins: oh,

Malcolm Collins: But I wanna go into her takedown of fascism.

And I will read some parts of it for you, Simone and I will play some parts of it for our [00:05:00] fans so they can see it in her own words. Because again, I, I do not think that she is an INEL speaker. Okay. So she goes,

Speaker: If you call everything you don’t like from Biden to Trump fascism, when fascism arrives at your door, you are caught with your out, which is exactly what’s happened.

Malcolm Collins: so you need to get a clear definition of fascism.

And she talks about how scholars have two definitions of fascism.

One is just like listing, it’s like a listicle of a bunch of traits that fascism has. And I point out that the reason why they do this is to hide from themselves that. Fascism is just leftism like whatever modern progressivism is. And when people are like, nuh like fascists killed gay people, and I’m like, well, historically leftist governments were way more likely to kill gay people than capitalist governments.

And we’ll do a separate episode on that eventually, but yeah, most communist governments. Not all, but most decided to try to genocide their gay populations at one point or another. Same with their Jewish [00:06:00] populations fame. Communists love killing Jews. You know, if you don’t specifically code fascist governments as right wing, if you don’t code because racism.

Racism can’t be like only right wing when it’s directed in one direction. Like anyone will say like, anti-white racism is left wing. What? And then anti-black racism is no racism’s, just racism. Right. You know, you, you had a lot of, socialization of things. You had a lot of big government projects, you had a lot of dividing people into various ethnic groups.

You had a lot of scapegoating of Jews, which to the left has been very big in recently. So I don’t wanna go too big. You can watch our episode on that. It’s on substack.

YouTube doesn’t want you to see it. But, what I found it interesting for her is then she goes into the second definition of fascism that she creates.

And I, the reason I bring that up is because the reason why leftists have to do a listicle definition of fascism, instead of just saying, like, with communism when we’re describing communism, we’re like, oh, it’s just, you know, you distribute every, the, the state collects everything from, from individuals, right?

And then tries to distribute it to everyone. [00:07:00] Right. To try to create some form of like equality within society, right? And then within capital, that’s a very easy to understand explanation. People hear that, and there we go. I know what you’re talking about. And then with capitalism it is, oh, you know, it’s a, it’s a free market economy, right?

Everybody gets that immediately. You don’t need a big listicle. With fascism, if you boil it down in my head, right, like the way I’ve always boiled it down, it’s when the state collects from the people to serve some ideology some often nationalist in flavor, ideological goal. Which sounds a lot like modern socialism or modern progressivism, right?

It’s the state collects from everyone instead of for wealth redistribution, for wealth redistribution to specific ethnic groups for an ideological goal, which is what you see progressives often pushing for with DEI and stuff like this. But what she says fascism is, and she uses the definition by Roger Griffins,

Simone Collins: never heard of them.

Speaker: Fascism is a genus of political [00:08:00] ideology whose mythic core, in its various permutations, is a polygenetic form of populist ultra nationalism, political ideology, how societies should organize themselves politically,

Simone Collins: Not familiar with that word.

Malcolm Collins: So, so it, it needs to be three things in her mindset, right?

Simone Collins: Okay. Okay.

Malcolm Collins: needs to be populist, it needs to be nationalist, right?

And it needs to be. Polygenetic.

Now I note here in your head, you’re like, well, Malcolm, I understand that she has psychologically destroyed herself, but it’s not like she’s imposing this on other people.

Speaker 6: My students just turned in their midterm exams online, right? And there’s this little box at the end that had 2.5 points extra credit. If you told me what unit that we had covered in the social problems class was your favorite and that you’d learned the most from. And one student didn’t even answer that.

He just wrote in the box, I hate [00:09:00] the rich so f*****g much. Anything I can learn about inequality and their how to take them down, I’m into. And so he got the 2.5 credits, even though he didn’t tell me anything specific. And I was like, same fam. Same.

Malcolm Collins: .

And if you’re like, what is polygenetic? Okay, so Polygenetic refers to the concept of rebirth or regeneration or recreation stemming from the Greek words again, and births, it signifies the renewal or starting over. And I’d agree with that. Most most fascist states I’ve seen have an element of that, right.

Simone Collins: Okay,

Malcolm Collins: In a, in atypical, and it is something that you don’t see in leftist movements as much. You do not see the idea of rebirth in leftist movements, and it does allow for easy parallels to Trumpism and magnetism, right? Like, make America great again, right? Like recreate a past greatness through a form of [00:10:00] rebirth.

Simone Collins: Absolutely. Okay.

Malcolm Collins: okay. Yeah, I buy that. I don’t see why that’s necessarily a bad thing. If a current. If, if you have some myth that is easy for the public to believe, and I think to an extent, substantiated of a period in American history where it appeared that now I do not think the average American’s quality of life was higher than it is today.

But I do think that you could see our episode on Be Thankful the Thanksgiving episode we did. But I do think that. Well, the average American’s quality of life wasn’t better during that period. There was definitely more forwards momentum during certain periods of American history in terms of technological progress, scientific progress, industrial progress, raising people out of poverty.

Right. And so to look at a period and say, I want that again for America. I want fast technological progress. I want fast scientific progress. I want to raise people out of poverty at a fast rate without necessarily go, [00:11:00] you, you, you’re going to look at naturally when you do that. Well, how were things in the past that they were able to achieve these things because maybe some.

Things, some cultural technology, some social technology that we have adopted is leading to those things no longer happening at the same rate. That to me doesn’t seem like an intrinsically negative thing. That isn’t something that I would just reflexively say, this is a, something I decry or I don’t like about magnetism.

It’s something that I’d actively promote to look at why our society has economically stagnated. Right. And, and, and I think that. The fear that a leftist has over that and she would have over that, given her world conception is, is if, if I do that, if I admit that certain shifts in social norms post, you know, 1950s may have actually had deleterious effects to society.

And [00:12:00] see our episode on how progressivism or, or how wokes zombified black culture. I point out that, that many of these myths are here, like that, that, that blacks were significantly worse off then. And if you actually go through all the statistics on this there have been more racially motivated black killings in the past 10 years.

Significantly, I wanna say it’s like four times higher than there were lynches in the 1950s.

If you want numbers here, there were about two dozen people, black people who were killed due to racial violence in the 1950s that we have any sort of record on. Now, keep in mind, some of it could be lost, but over a hundred were killed in the last 10 years. Even if you say we lost half of the records of black people who were killed due to racial violence during this period, it wouldn’t even get you close to the number who died in the past 10 years.

Malcolm Collins: Like if, if you look at the, the raise in comparable black wages, and I’ll put a graph on screen here. It has not risen when contrasted with other groups. So they, they in many ways are doing,

if you look at out of marriage [00:13:00] childbirths, blacks conceived children outside of wedlock.

And, and were single parents at half the rates, whites were, if you go back to the 1950s,

Simone Collins: and just looking at rates of marriage too, I out, I, I think Black American families outpaced white families and rates of marriage too

Malcolm Collins: Yes.

The incarceration rate differences between blacks and white Americans in 1950 was lower than modern rates. So, and this was the

Simone Collins: 1950s, an era in the United States where discrimination was racist. Yes. Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: The incarceration rates in the 1950s were five X higher than white rates.

So to say it’s significantly higher today is saying quite a lot. Yeah. Specifically, it was 5x the rate of whites in the 1950s, and it’s 7x the rate of whites today

So

Simone Collins: a

Malcolm Collins: it’s not even like when people are like, well, you wanna go back to the 1950s because you are white? I’m like I think you might be buying into myths about what happened to black culture post that period. It’s not that there was not any way that it wasn’t worth, there were many ways and that it was worse to be a Black American during that period than [00:14:00] modern day.

However. I go so far as to see, I think when a lot of blacks see what happened to their communities with all of the terrible stuff that happened to blacks during those periods, a lot of them would be like, yeah, but the tight knit, healthy black family and community was not necessarily something that I am comfortable trading for.

All of the advances that we have made on other social terms.

Simone Collins: the emphasis on some of the horrible things that happened as a product of racism. There are some elements of that that are kinda swept under the rug, like the Tulsa riots. A lot of that came from resentment of a surrounding white community over a really. Like an affluent, successful black community. They

Malcolm Collins: that’s not what it was caused by.

Simone Collins: really,

So while it’s hard to know exactly what happened because of history, what everyone agrees on, what both sides agree on is a black man did something to a white girl, elevator operator that [00:15:00] made her scream and terrified her and left her, , mortified. Now. What that was. Both sides will say different things.

One will be like, well, he tripped the moment he entered the elevator and accidentally grabbed her as he was falling, which seems awfully convenient. That, that to me sounds like a story somebody would make up. But that is apparently the steel man of the other side. , And then things escalated when a bunch of, .

Our war veteran, , black people came to the courthouse and stood outside with weapons during the trial, , which people saw as attempting to intimidate the, , court.

Malcolm Collins: And, and that’s been, that’s been covered up.

It was much closer to what’s going on with ICE right now, where you have people attempting to hide people who actually are guilty of breaking a crime just sort of reflexively. And in part of that was because of the health of the community at the time, right. That they felt that they could get away with this.

Simone Collins: Interesting. You don’t think that there was also not some pent up resentment from the surrounding [00:16:00] community, which was less affluent when it came to the m. Relatively more affluent black community in Tulsa at the time because they were doing really well. They had the nice houses, they had the good businesses.

They, they had a great community going.

Malcolm Collins: I mean, I, I think that you can get in community as, as we’ve talked about, ethnic cartels in the past where you get you know, in trading and everything like that. And that was actually big, was in black communities of that period. I mean, that’s what Kwanza was about. Part of it is only buy from black businesses, right?

Like. Today we would have the same problem and black communities operated today the way that they operated historically, we’d be complaining about them the way we’re complaining about Indian communities today, right? Like they, they, they are hugely nepotistic in their hiring practices and take over companies and, and, and hire their own group over other groups and stuff like that, right?

Like, that’s not the complaints we have about, I think the, the black culture today, if it could go back to that complaint would be a lot happier. But the, but the point I’m making here. More broadly is a lot of [00:17:00] people, when people on the right say there were things about American culture in the 1950s that were better for everyone along some metrics, and we do need to reflect and look back at that.

They, they are horrified to consider this because then they might need to. Pull back some of the ways they’ve handled things like sexuality, the things they’ve handled, self-identity, the things they’ve handled, self-affirmation, even the ways they’ve handled cultural integration, right? Like I point out in other episodes, one of the reasons why you could have better interethnic harmony historically speaking, right, was because you had degrees of racism.

And, and prejudice. And when you had prejudice, what that meant is that communities had a reason to internally police themselves,

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: except when they felt that they were hugely more powerful than surrounding communities, as you might have had in like the Tulsa riots or something like that. Which is generally [00:18:00] intcom, communally.

You punish somebody who is acting in an inappropriate way. And you do this because. You don’t want prejudice to form against your community, right? You do not want the wider community. You do not want a mob to attack your community or something like that. And, and you see this within Irish immigrant communities.

You see this with an Italian, a huge part of what the mob of the Mafia did was intra community policing to try to. Lower the amount of negative stereotypes that were being built about these communities as lawless, et cetera, right. And you can go in our episodes or we, where we go over this, I think it’s the Indian episode, where we go deep into this concept with Indians going extinct due to low fertility rates.

Simone Collins: yes, yes, yes, yes.

Malcolm Collins: But anyway. To, to, to go further here. What does she then say? So the, the wider point I’m making here is this isn’t necessarily a bad thing and I agree with it, and I think it’s, and I can see why a leftist wouldn’t be able to admit it or engage with it with any degree of intellectual [00:19:00] maturity. Okay.

So how does she define populism? Right. She def scribes. Populism is a popular movement. A movement of the people. And she contrasts that with the neoliberalism of an individual like Biden. And I’m actually really surprised by this because I’m surprised that she’s willing to note this so blatantly and openly that one of the things that.

What MAGA is does, or the thing that scares her about MAGA is that it appeals to popular sentiment and if you want to understand just how much she does not like or care about popular sentiment. In another video, she goes on about how you only need 3.5% of the population to enact a regime change.

Speaker 5: But the reality is you only need 3.5%. What is 3.5% of the United States? It would be [00:20:00] about 11 million people. Change in societies is absolutely possible, and it happens all the time, but it requires a we, not an I, it’s possible. Don’t give

up.

Malcolm Collins: She wants the will of the minority to dominate public opinion.

Right, and, and internally she doesn’t feel any cognitive dissonance when she thinks this because she does, as you know, many leftists do sees the average American, and we’ll get more into her views. ‘cause I think there was an instance where she talks about when she felt unsafe. Actually I’ll just get into it right now.

She sees the average American as dangerous and lesser and something that she shouldn’t even need to like. Consider the desires the state of the whims of, she never in any of her videos, seems to care about rural people. She never cares about people from any population that’s not her own. She is only able to see them as a [00:21:00] threat and dehumanizing.

So a great example of this is she was going to go to a trans, like wedding, like pre-wedding party or something like that, like a wedding shower, I think at a park. Okay.

Simone Collins: Right. Okay.

Malcolm Collins: Charlie Kirk’s assassination happens

Simone Collins: Sure.

Malcolm Collins: a right wing group decides to organize a Charlie Kirk memorial

Simone Collins: Okay,

Malcolm Collins: the same park. Okay. At, at around the same time.

Simone Collins: inconvenient.

Malcolm Collins: So she, well, hold on. She then, and, and this is the video where she is crying. She is mortified. She is scared to death. In this instance, right? So she does a video, and this is from her own perspective, okay? She calls the Charlie Kirk organizers and explains the scenario, okay, what do the people do? They go, oh, fine, we’ll, we’ll change the time that we’re doing the event.

They, they just change the time. They change it to later in the day to 8:00 PM which is late [00:22:00] too, right? Like they’re being very kind about this. She and her friends then go to this event, and of course some people show up early. How does she describe them? She describes them as wearing MAGA hats and white males, and some of them are muscular now.

None of them harass her group. None of them talk to her group. None of them engage with her group. What does her group do? Well, her partner, who she sees as very, a very brave woman, a very non passing woman as she puts it I guess it’s butch, lesbian or something like that goes up and starts harassing the Charlie Kirk Memorial people.

Simone Collins: oh.

Malcolm Collins: Now she notes that they don’t do anything to her. They don’t attack her friend. They don’t get in some heated argument or anything. I think they just tried to diffuse it. They’re over there at a memorial because somebody died. Okay? And her [00:23:00] and her side sees white males, and this is all they can think is that these people must want to eradicate me, must want to harm me, must want to be actively antagonistic to me.

Speaker 3: , the couple got wind that Charlie Kirk supporters were going to had decided to schedule a vigil for Charlie Kirk,

move it back. And they did. They moved it back to 8:00 PM but we’re at this event, right? And um, we’re having a good time. It’s really cute. It’s fun. We’re playing games, but MAGA folks start showing up. Not a lot, but big, burly white men. My girlfriend, who’s one of the bravest people I know, um, very visibly queer, uh, would approach these folks and be like, Hey, this is a private event.

Your event has been scheduled for later tonight. And thankfully nothing happened, but I [00:24:00] and my girlfriend and other people were on high alert the entire time

Malcolm Collins: and I think that this does a broader job of understanding why she fled America. Because if you are, I can understand why some people, if you’re a Jew in America right now and you’re like, I don’t feel safe anymore, I f*****g get that.

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: I, I, I,

Simone Collins: you go aside, I mean,

Malcolm Collins: Israel, Israel.

Simone Collins: Well, oh, that’s constantly being bombed by people who hate Jews. I, I don’t know

Malcolm Collins: Israel will sort that out. Okay. As soon as Europe crashes and goes away, which is happening and as America becomes more right-leaning Israel will handle Israel’s little problem. Okay.

Simone Collins: Little problem.

Malcolm Collins: look, I just wanna point out Israel has held back. . Less civilians died in Gaza than died in the recent Iran government crackdown.

Right. Of their own people. And, and the leftists, they’re not talking about this ‘cause no Jews, no news. They don’t care. They didn’t care about minorities, they didn’t care about Muslims.

Simone Collins: It’s fewer. When [00:25:00] it’s water or something uncountable, it’s less

Malcolm Collins: Okay. The point being is, is, they just, they, they understand that ultimately the iteration of the Jews that are going to survive is gonna be much more aligned with the American right wing ethos. They may not be the same as us, but they’re more aligned with us than they are with the, and here I’m talking about like Orthodox Jews and stuff like this.

Now there’s some groups of them that are dangerous and parasitic that we’ve seen, especially in, in the United States, welfare, milking, stuff like that. And we’ve gotta handle stuff like this. You know, we’ve gotta have the ability to say like, let’s handle this. And I think most Jewish Americans will say the same thing.

You know, you look at somebody like Knox watching the takedown of, of like the videoing of those communities and he’s like, yeah, we, we need to handle these communities. Right. You know? Mm-hmm. And he even had a family member die in the attacks. In, in Israel, right? But anyway, point being there’s groups that I can see being afraid in the United States.

If I was an illegal immigrant in the United States, even though I wasn’t an illegal immigrant, even if I was like a regular immigrant and I was in a community that was being heavily targeted by ice, [00:26:00] I could see myself being worried. Right? Oh, a trans person in la no effing way. You are not at risk.

Okay.

Simone Collins: that is one of the safe spaces. Well, I mean, in so far as Los Angeles is a safe place. I mean, you’ve got skid row, you’ve got a big homeless problem,

Malcolm Collins: She, she wasn’t just in la she describes herself as living in a college town, I guess near la. So she described herself as in a blue spot in a sea of red. If you’re in a college town, you are fine. She basically. Showed herself as being incapable of living in a country with white men. That is what terrified her.

That is what kept triggering her, where otherwise she’s very sane. ‘cause we’re gonna, we’re gonna go over more of her stuff and you’ll hear that she is a, a lucid person other than her intense bigotry and misogyny and, and I, I’d say a misogyny that hurts her, like you and I, we don’t like go to bed shivering about like the leftists, whatever, right?

Like, I, I don’t. Cry about seeing a leftist or a trans person at a thing. I don’t I [00:27:00] might be like, oh, this is, this is diabolical that they’re like at a book reading or something like that. Like, what, what is this about? Why are you dressed in a clearly sexualized display? Right? Like see our episode about that.

But you. And, and we’re gonna be putting together episode lists. If you have any ideas about episode lists you want. ‘cause people keep requesting us, put together better episode tags and I’ll do it, but I need to know all the types of episodes you guys want tagged. But anyway leftist, leftist, leftist.

Yeah, we don’t, we don’t like, and I don’t know any right person who does, like, they don’t react in this visceral way. I’ll notice some seem to react a little hyperbolically to minorities and Jewish populations, the ones who freak out more about that. But it’s not in like this cry way, it’s in this weird conspiracy theory way, which I don’t think is healthy, but it’s at least vitalistic.

Thoughts Before I go further, Simone?

Simone Collins: I don’t know. I, I find this all, even at this point, hard to care about. I’m just so. [00:28:00] Like, I don’t care about these populations because they’re not going to, they’re, they’re, they’re themselves from an agency standpoint, from a mattering standpoint, and I understand that that’s probably incorrect given the political influence that this contingent still seems to have.

But I guess, I think along a longer time stick scale. So I’m like, why should I care? Just give it time. They’re gonna be gone. But am I wrong?

Malcolm Collins: They are eventually, they, they could do a lot of damage before they’re gone. They will try to capture power when they realize they can’t win elections anymore, they will put things in place. No. Even, look, I’m gonna be honest, the right would probably do this if we were going to lose power forever as well, right?

Like if, if the demographics were really that far against us right. With them as they realize that, I mean, this is what you see, this, this fighting to not have any voter ID at all. And now they’re lying. They’re saying that you need, like your birth certificate. No, it’s a, it is a driver’s [00:29:00] license.

Okay. Like. Minorities have driver’s license. The only reason you wouldn’t want a driver’s license, and I saw a really good take down by the Nick, you know, the great reporter. He goes and showed a UPS store. Yeah.

That had 10.

Simone Collins: Oh

Malcolm Collins: People registered to vote at it and one of them was over a hundred years old, like clearly fake voters like this is happening.

Right. And Elon discovered a ton of them when he was going through the the, the roles. Like, we know this is happening now, we’re just not supposed to talk about it. Right. And it’s something that I think that there’s no other like. No legitimate other reason, unless you thought that like black people were idiots, that you would say that they can’t like go to A DMV and get a driver’s license, right?

Like that’s clearly not what this is about. So why are they fighting for this? Because they know that once we get the redistricting of 2030, it’s gonna be very hard for them to win anymore, but they’re gonna become more radical. I mean, as we’ve seen, there have been, I think it’s what, four? Trans people have killed,

I think four x the number of people in the past [00:30:00] two years that ICE has killed.

So Eve, we are specifically here talking about the number of people. Each group has shot or innocent people. Each group has shot. , In terms of trans shootings, we have August 20, 25 Minneapolis in which two children were shot during a church service, , before the trans individual killed themselves. So that three people, , then Tumblr Ridge, British Columbia, you had, .

Five students and one teacher. So seven victims, and then the perpetrator, so eight, so we’re already at 11. , And then, , Pawtucket, Rhode Island in 2026. , You had, , , his wife and well her, let’s get the gender correct, her wife and child, , and then, , himself. So that’s another three. , And if you’re looking at ice, , in terms of.

Shootings, at least you have the two, , that everyone’s aware of. , And then maybe like five or six more. It’s, it’s difficult to tell from the way that the, , data is collated here. Anyway.

Malcolm Collins: [00:31:00] Like if, if we’re talking about like who’s actually at risk and the trans community, we’ll have an episode on this eventually. ‘cause I’ve covered it in some other episodes. I really wanna break down the statistics because. They do a good job of like capturing every trans person killed in the United States, right?

Because they wanna do like Trans Remembrance Day. If you contrast that with the list of the percent of trans people in the United States, what you’ll see is trans people are like, I think the, actually least at threat demographic in all of America. They’re. Odds of being killed aggressively is insanely low.

And then when you consider that the vast majority at 70% of trans people who are killed are black, right? You can say, okay, if we take the black trans population out, which is the minority of the trans community anyway how likely are you to be killed if you are a white trans person?

If you wanna get the exact numbers here,

. According to the advocates for Trans Equality, , the 2025 Remembrance report, there were 27 violence trans deaths in the year of 2025. , And this was also backed up by the Human Rights Campaign, the HRC. [00:32:00] Now, if you contrast that with the number of trans people in the United States, that means that they have a 76% lower homicide rate than the general population.

Now, have you removed the 63%? , That, that were black, that that happened to, that leaves only 10 white transgender people who were killed violently in 2025. , And that puts them at 70% lower than even the white specific homicide rate. Okay.

Malcolm Collins: It’s like literally you’re living in the matrix where you can like bend around bullets.

You are so unlikely to be killed. And there’s actually a mystery around that. I wanna dig into why that is. But it’s just demonstrably true if you look at these records, right? And they’ll go on reaches when they’re trying to decide who counts as trans for these records, as anyone knows, right? So like the fact that even with these reaches.

They still appear to be so low at risk and yet such a risk to other people. Again, if you look at the trans population and their rate of mass shooting versus other populations, I’ll, I’ll put the statistics here. It’s just insane.

Malcolm Collins (2): But [00:33:00] if you just look at the rate of trans mass shooters you get , per million, 1.759 mass shooters, 1.79. If you look at cis women, it’s 0.024. If you look at cis males, it’s 0.27. So the rate that a trans person becomes a mass shooter is literally 700% the rate that a man becomes a mass shooter.

No, these stats were from an episode we did before the two recent trans mass shooting events. And I always wonder, like during that episode when people are like, no, this isn’t true, or this is a historic blip, and then there are multiple additional trans mass shooting incidents. After, after we report this, do they think, do they like go back and be like, oh, maybe I was wrong, or they just blind when this stuff happens? I don’t, I don’t understand. Because when most of the quote unquote papers came out debunking that trans people made up a disproportionate amount of mass shooters when contrasted with their percent of the population, , most of those came out before the most recent trans mass shootings.

So do they [00:34:00] update based on that or are they just like, no, this is fact now.

Malcolm Collins: She goes, what we need is a narrative of who we are together who we are as a nation.

And it doesn’t have to be a bad narrative. It can be a big, expansive, wonderful one, but it’s not happening right now. There’s no narrative of unity. There’s just a narrative of white Christian nationalism on the right, but that narrative is flexible enough to create a big tent. That is why racial minorities can still find themselves supporting this because they still are able to see that they are being part of the hierarchy that is being defended.

Simone Collins: Hmm.

Malcolm Collins: And I think that that’s, that’s something I don’t see for many people on the left. The noting the truth, which is that racial minorities, like the majority of Hispanic men, voted for Trump, right? Like the right is winning. And winning increasingly was racial minority groups. And part of the reason is, is because the left.

I think she’s wrong about this because she said that the, the right is [00:35:00] around this idea of white Christian nationalism, which is just functionally not true. If you look at the major factions of the right today, whether it’s the tech right, or the Jewish right, or the you know, there is a, a, christian nationalist.

Part of the right there is an ethno part of the right. There is a, like, just a based part of the right that’s into like what does a science actually say about things. There’s a part of the right that’s, you know, concerned about their cultures being infringed on by kids. There’s a Mormon part of the right, which is like a totally different it’s own thing.

And what we point out is what the right really is, is, is the left is incredibly. Monolithic it is about promoting the culture of the urban monoculture, and the right is everybody who wants to maintain cultural autonomy in the face of the urban monoculture, whether they are Amish or Orthodox Jews or weirdos like Elon or us or Mormons or, you know, you, you, you see this across the right.

There’s this very wide diversity, which is why people like us who would otherwise be considered so weird can find a place so healthily within [00:36:00] the modern right movement without being a tech, with being invited to.

Simone Collins: them find that that’s, that’s what unites them. And that’s where I think a lot of the nationalism that. The left sometimes called fascism comes from someone who listens to this podcast, pointed out that , the right’s version of the, the we’ll say colonizer’s flag.

The progress Pride flag is the American flag. The American flag is the progress, pride, flag of the right. And this person even shared this amazing clip, which I’d never seen before of.

Former Prime Minister of Germany, Angela Merkel being handed a, a German flag and like putting it back down and like giving this like sneering, shaky head look like, no, not gonna wave a flag.

I’m not gonna wave a German flag. You know, she wouldn’t do that if she was given a progress pride flag. just it’s, it’s interesting. But I think it’s, it’s a lot of it comes down to what it is you’re choosing to fight for. we all know that America [00:37:00] was founded on this promise of, well, it was founded on Christian values, not a Christian state, but Christian values

Malcolm Collins: Well, products and values, I do not like the people. It was, it was founded specifically in reaction to Canada, allowing Catholics to vote, right? Like,

Simone Collins: Protestant values and.

The ability to practice religion freely, that was crucial. and that was, that’s what, that’s what United Americans was, this freedom to do it. Whereas what’s really interesting about progressivism as we know it today. Is, it’s really no.

Here’s this specific ideological subset. It’s very caliphate based. we will not stop until everyone holds this one cultural set of values. This one religion, which we will then impose on everyone. And this determines how you live your life privately, not just how we, we run the country tree.

Malcolm Collins: But what I wanna highlight here is, is, is, is, let’s look at the final thing that she talks about here. Nationalism, right? Like loving your country, right? [00:38:00] Nationalism should not be a problem for anyone. Like nationalism is just like a net good for society.

Simone Collins: I mean, you, you won’t see, you won’t see a leftist wave. The American flag. The American flag is, is now conservative coded, which is insane.

Malcolm Collins: Well, and it’s not just the American flag, it’s any flag, but this is in part

Simone Collins: Yeah. Look at the

Malcolm Collins: the German.

Simone Collins: like the,

Malcolm Collins: Yeah.

Simone Collins: jack is like, whoa. Watch

Malcolm Collins: Because they do, they, it is an occupation, right? Like the only time you ever see people afraid or being banned from raising their own flag is when you’re occupied by a foreign power. And the reason why they are afraid of this is they represent this foreign power that is represented by the colonizer’s flag, the the progress pride flag.

And that is why she’s afraid of this. But I’m trying to understand like why she, why she can’t see this. So she looks at, because she says a bunch of things that are true and then says, and the the right is white Christian nationalists, which they just aren’t. That’s a, that’s a very small, small faction of the right.

Not really particularly well represented in the White House or in any [00:39:00] position of power that I’ve seen. So, which is overwhelmingly gay. There was a funny New York Times article where like, they, there were conservative women who were like, oh, now we’re getting the Trump White House in everyone.

I’m gonna be able to hook my, my girls up with some good guys. And she goes, and then they were all gay because they don’t understand, you know, that’s this.

Simone Collins: something like In The New York Times, Trump’s Big Gay White House, something like that.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. And it’s true. You know, we don’t, like, I, I go to a White House meeting and it’s like. There’s a lot of gay people in the, in the Trump White House. But the point being okay is why can’t they see this? So I’m trying to see how she strings together a bunch of true things that I agree with.

Most people on the right are nationalistic, right? I think very few people in the right do not want America to do well. They are nationalistic because they are okay. You know, even if they’re a Jew in America, they understand, for example, not all dudes, some are like actual Israel first. But many understand that want to be in, and the ones who are actually Israel first are being kicked outta the right coalition as we’re seeing, as we’re seeing was like Ben Shapiro being like, Nope, get to the curb.

Like he’s [00:40:00] lost a lot of his cachet because he, he was taking in Israel first position. And the other ones who are like, I understand as a minority was in America. I can be proud of what America represents and I can. Work for my community by trying to remove things like the weird alphabet soup stuff from school curriculum.

The brainwashing from that, both of us can agree we don’t want our kids doing that and support an American first ideology while being a subgroup within America. And I think America culturally uniquely allows for that. And a lot of people, like in the uk right, like, aria Babu, who’s, who’s very on the right and is Indian, she’s able to promote a Britain first ideology in her writings despite being Indian, right?

Like she’s able to be like, Hey, we do need to go back to what Britain used to mean because that was clearly better than whatever it means under the colonizer’s boot, right? But she sees this and, and so I agree with that. I agree with populism. Yeah, we should do what the people want, right? Like why, why is that so scary to leftists?

Unless they [00:41:00] hate the people? We should have this rebirth myth if things in the past were doing better, was in many metrics. And, and she’s able to string these together to then, and this is where the shell game happens with her to white Christian nationalism, because in her mind, America historically.

Was a white Christian nationalist country when the reality is significantly more complex than that. And what we are going back to is closer to what America was historically, Reed Albion Seed, which was an extremely diverse group of Protestants, largely speaking. And, and that’s what we haven’t been able to go back to.

While I would like to go back to that, a, a, a very diverse group. Of people who want to preserve their cultural autonomy working together to make the country wealthy and successful. And being aware that that means you might need to keep out specific other groups that don’t work well together with this diverse cultural alliance.

You know, you can have a diverse cultural alliance [00:42:00] that can still be like, well, when people come from this one group, they do not add to our economy. Right? Like they are. Statistically a net negative to our society, and therefore, which they said in the colonial period that was very well understood in the colonial period.

That was very well understood in early America. You know, you, you don’t just let any

Simone Collins: of it.

Malcolm Collins: group in, right? Like you, you’ve gotta, you’ve gotta be aware that some groups are going to make things worse for everyone. And, and, and that doesn’t mean that these groups can’t stay in their own countries.

Simone Collins: To give you an example and this is just among the same. Ancestral group Puritans didn’t like, like colonial Puritans did not like the idea of families bringing over servants because they, they weren’t, you know, self-sufficient enough. It was, it was looked down upon, like, what are you doing, bringing in this less productive person or something, you know, like less educated, less

Malcolm Collins: What, and they also understood keep. And this is, I think one of the things [00:43:00] that has, has, has damaged America the most. The idea of cultural tribalism. If you move to a backwoods region or you move to a Puritan region, or you move to a Quaker region, or you move to a Cavalier region, you understood that you were a guest living in a separate, dominant cultural region, and those regions didn’t have the need to integrate with each other outside of in Congress when they would get in fights anyway, you know?

Simone Collins: Yeah.

The days. It’s funny how each group kind of had its own way of kind of insisting on only the strongest like the, the, the, the process of inden, practicing indentured servitude the more southern colonies where basically just most would die anyway.

Malcolm Collins: It was, it was seven in 10 was in some periods, so an enormous amount.

Simone Collins: like, you’re not welcome at all, or like, yeah, sure. You’re welcome if you can survive as I continually try to kill you. ‘cause I don’t wanna pay you the land that I’m gonna have to owe you

Malcolm Collins: She’d gone over another episodes. Yeah.

Simone Collins: [00:44:00] Goodness.

Malcolm Collins: to pay if they survive. Not, not a good system.

Simone Collins: No. Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: But the point being, yeah, and the puritans were just like extremely strict about who could come in and then the backwards people just killed who, whoever.

Simone Collins: Oh yeah. The back would just like. Again, you, you can stay. If you can survive. We’re having a great time here.

Malcolm Collins: But they didn’t, they didn’t bring in many indentured. I don’t think they brought in any indentured servants.

Simone Collins: existed, but it was just like people who opted into it and

Malcolm Collins: It was the PVP server.

Simone Collins: Yes. It was very much the PVP server.

Malcolm Collins: It was, it was America. I, well, yeah, we should do more stuff on this because I actually wanna go more into the culture of, of where they came from and this great erasure of them from American history where a lot of Americans today who think that they’re Irish are not Irish, they’re Scot’s Irish, which I’ve described as a bit like you hear, oh, my ancestors, were Cobra eating mongoose, therefore I am a Cobra.

And it’s like. No, they were Cobra Eating Mongooses. The Scots Irish were specifically a group that constantly was at [00:45:00] war with the Irish and hated the Irish. They were not the Irish, but over time by the way, if you’re wondering, and you, if your family says that you are Irish, okay and they were Presbyterians or Protestants or.

We’re from a, like anywhere in the south or West Virginia, or really anywhere but New England. They were probably not Irish. They were Scot’s Irish. Irish populations really only settled in large numbers in historic. Now, if you look at graphs of like people who identify as Irish, you will see them in the south and in the, the Greater Appalachian region and in Texas.

But they didn’t really migrate to those regions. Those are people misremembering. They, they, some uneducated person heard from their parents that they were Scots Irish. They didn’t know what that meant. They knew the word Irish. They heard about all these Irish immigrants, and so they assumed they were Irish.

But culturally they could not be more distinct. And that’s, we should, yeah, that should be one of the things that we have episodes on any final thoughts, Simone?[00:46:00]

Simone Collins: I feel like we’re gonna have to throw out the word fascism because it doesn’t mean anything anymore. Every time we talk about it, the definition’s slightly different. I, I’m giving up on it, declaring bankruptcy on the word.

Malcolm Collins: Well, I mean, I’m not saying that her definition is good, but I am saying, I’m trying to understand how the left could conceivably see Trump as anything like fascist. And I agree with these three similarities. Nationalist,

Simone Collins: Mm-hmm.

Malcolm Collins: Rebirth and Populist. The problem is, is all those three things are broadly good things to any sane person.

Simone Collins: So there, there are good things when population. things that you care about. There are good things when the rebirth is a change that you want. Right? And, and, and when that you, when you have pride for your in-group, the far left have pride for the in-group Malcolm?

Malcolm Collins: No they don’t.

Simone Collins: left want significant change? [00:47:00] I mean, I, I just don’t see, I don’t see it. I, I, why?

Malcolm Collins: You’re right.

Simone Collins: All version by every definition of this. Yes, of course we like it because we want change. We like America and we like Americans and, and we like the what, you know, what America is. But they, they don’t there’s a, a distinct lack of pride. I mean, and, and this is something that’s been around for a very long time, right.

I was educated. In very progressive circles and you were the first person I ever met who was like, no, actually America’s great. Like I was just so used to,

Malcolm Collins: What did you think when I told you that? Because I remember you were quite shocked and I was like, let’s go to like a drive-in movie.

Simone Collins: Nice. I didn’t like growing up feeling ashamed of my country, but my understanding was the only thing to say or imply in polite discourse was shame in America. Like, oh, I’m, you know, I’m, of course America has terrible education system and you know, vis-a-vis other countries. Of course it does have a terrible education system, but every country does ‘cause it’s legacy

Malcolm Collins: Not [00:48:00] higher education, not the education that matters.

Simone Collins: Yeah. But anyway, like I’m ashamed of our like uniquely stupid education system and our uniquely stupid students and we’re so fat and we’re so racist and we did so many bad things and what a terrible country we are. And like that was not very, that was not very fun. You know, it’s not fun to be ashamed of your in-group. when you were like, no. Actually, when you look at brass tacks, our education system compared to those of other ed country’s education systems, we’re doing pretty great. And when you look at all these other measures, America’s really great and I’m like, oh, like makes sense when you look at a lot of other measures.

I think one of the reasons why it feels uniquely bad to be ashamed of being an American, aside from the fact that it sucks to be ashamed of who you are, is the fact that there’s a lot of cognitive dissonance of that. Of like you feel ashamed, but like. It’s kind of weird that also America has such a dominant role in American GeoPoll or in in global geopolitics and

Malcolm Collins: And life’s quality here is so much better

Simone Collins: Yeah. And, [00:49:00] and technology. Like, huh? Like America’s a big leader in all these things, but it’s the worst. But then how is it the big leader? Oh, I don’t know. Like systemic racism? Globalism something.

Malcolm Collins: Colonialism, even though America wasn’t a colonial power.

Simone Collins: yeah,

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, like America’s on the top because of colonialism. And I’m like, where are all of America’s colonial holdings? They’re like the Philippines. I’m like, oh yeah. We really made a lot of money off of the Philippines,

Simone Collins: It is

Malcolm Collins: Puerto Rico. That’s been a ca that’s been a ca Cash machine for America.

Simone Collins: Puerto Rico. Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: Or they’ll be like, well, slaves built America. And I go, actually, the regions in America with slavery were hugely economically held back and were significantly less economically developed in the regions that didn’t have slavery. And when slavery ended, they economically grew a ton.

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: Slavery was like, you’re literally arguing for slavery.

If you’re saying slavery is an economic system that is beneficial to a region, right? Like,

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: but it’s not it. It’s not, if anything. [00:50:00] I’m, I’m gonna be spicy here. The slaves owe us reparations ‘cause they held back our economy for so long.

Simone Collins: Oh God. didn’t choose to do it, so that doesn’t work,

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, well, I mean, neither did the vast majority of white people who didn’t own slaves and were economically disadvantaged because of slaves.

Simone Collins: Mm-hmm.

Malcolm Collins: if you are a. 90% of the population living in the south during industrial slavery you looked at the slaves. The way people today look at immigrants who get paid less for labor that they should be getting paid for, right?

Like they, they were being economically disadvantaged by this system.

Simone Collins: I mean, that’s one way of putting it.

Malcolm Collins: I, I, I know. It’s, it’s, it’s, I think that we’ve had to, and it was a, a not uncommon sentiment among poor people in the South going into the Civil War. You know, I’ve pointed out that my ancestors who formed like the Jayhawks in the free state of Jones one of my ancestors specifically coin the term, it’s a, it’s a rich man’s [00:51:00] war in a poor man’s fight, right? Like, they’re like, I don’t, I don’t, I don’t want to die in a war so you can get rich selling your cotton. You know, like that’s, that’s the way that, that was a a system that disenfranchised ironically the, the white people as well, you know, so we’re, we’re their reparations.

Like, when you begin to talk about all this, it just gets ridiculous, you know? And obviously I’m, I’m, I’m being tongue in cheek when I’m saying this stuff, it’s, is a joke. Okay. But I’m just, you know, playing with facts and what we know about history and I, I do find that, I remember you on this day where I took you to drive-in movie and it was like the most Americana thing because we went to like a rural area and I don’t think you’d been to like a rural area before.

And everyone had their American flags and everybody had tons of kids.

Simone Collins: areas before, just not something wholesome and cute like that. Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: Well, you’d been for progressive things like whitewater rafting and stuff, not for like.

Simone Collins: Whitewater rafting is not necessarily [00:52:00] progressive, but yeah. Anyway. Yeah. I hadn’t been to a rural outdoor film viewing.

Malcolm Collins: And it was really wholesome. And I remember you were like, Malcolm, this is like shockingly whole. Is this what like, rural Americans are like, they’re like a bunch of kids running around playing and giggling and everybody’s sitting outside their car like barbecuing, like. And I don’t notice any of the ethnic minorities look scared.

They seem to be having a fun time too. Is this what America’s always been about? And I was like, yeah, it’s pretty awesome. Right?

Simone Collins: Yeah. Well, and that’s to put it into context. I spend most of my time during weekdays and weekends hanging out around Oakland or San Francisco where there’s. There are higher rates of crime, there’s lots of homelessness, and so that just, it you, you don’t let kids run around outside. You can’t because it’s not safe.

That’s just tough.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, you, you, you might have a tire fire with a bunch of homeless people, but you know, which by the way costs $175,000 a year in California. But you don’t [00:53:00] have people outside a barbecue cooking up hot dogs and burgers

Simone Collins: Yeah. Which is delightful.

Malcolm Collins: anyway. I love you Simone. I, I, I, we should do another episode. I gotta remember to do this episode because I have a meaning to do it on the li

On the lie that America doesn’t have a culture and it’s just like stolen culture from other places.

Simone Collins: Oh, please. Everyone knows American culture is iconic. You know that a culture is real when there’s a Japanese stereotype of it, or like a Japanese caricature of it in that greaser character. So both, al, which sort of became guru and then later whatever guru became was from Southern California. Girl stereotyping the, the fifties greaser stereotype. And Japan is, is based on, you know, American culture stereotypes. So, you know, American culture is real. If there’s a, a Japanese stereotype of it

Malcolm Collins: Okay. Yeah.

Simone Collins: refute that.[00:54:00]

Malcolm Collins: Bye bye.

Simone Collins: enough there. of an argument. It’s not like America is just made up of appropriation.

Malcolm Collins: not just that, the argument that people often use without realizing how racist this argument is, is they’ll be like, well, like burgers and hot dogs are based on things that were originally invented in other countries, therefore they’re not part of American culture. And I was like if you start taking all the things that were invented in America and say that they’re not part of another culture,

on. He gets ramen. Ramen was invented in America, right? That now, now, now nothing with ramen is Japanese. All of that. We get a claim, all of that. Oh, what else was invented in America? Spam. How many ethnic cuisines are based around spam? You’ve now pissed off the Koreans. You’ve pissed off basically every eastern island country because all of their cultures have a main dish based on spam.

You like the number of places that are now, wait. America gets to claim all of our spam based dishes. You know, you, you don’t get to do this, right? You gotta [00:55:00] be honest, which is to say that historically the culture that a food comes from, I would never go to Japan and have the gall to say that because Americans invented ramen and exported ramen to Japan and gave it to you with war rations.

And that’s why it became popular that it’s an American dish, right? Like, a Japanese person would rightly be like, that is the stupidest thing I have ever heard. And you as an American should be saying that when people tell you stuff about, you know, American culture. So anyway, love you

Simone Collins: I love you too. You gorgeous creature. You are fantastic, and I’m

Malcolm Collins: and I’m so glad we’re not these people. Half this woman’s videos are just her crying about.

Simone Collins: It’s not a happy

Malcolm Collins: Feeling persecuted about feeling like they started like checking, like carry on stuff for the flight. And she thought this was, I don’t know, trying to check if she had some sort of like hormone shots or something for transness ‘cause they were gonna arrest her.

Speaker 7: open seats. Just take that first available overhead bin space.

Malcolm Collins: [00:56:00] I, I don’t know. But she’s like in the airport panicking. And it’s like, this is just like normal life stuff, but it’s this weird conspiratorial mindset where everything’s against you and it slowly erodes you.

Simone Collins: how like young teenage women have this deep desire to be, wanted to be desired, to be pursued. and perhaps one reason why the progressive far left mindset appeals to women and especially young women is. It’s very easy to cross wires with a feeling of persecution and being desired, right?

They’re coming for me versus they want me. Could be kind of like if you blurry your eyes enough, you can kind of feel half the feeling or pretend that you’re feeling the

Malcolm Collins: Well, we’ve done other episodes where I actually argue, I argue something quite different from that. I’d argue that women have an innate desire to feel persecuted. And when they do not feel an external threat to them, they invent one. And.

Simone Collins: yeah. Or one of, you know, where we talk about how useful it was that [00:57:00] and everyone else dealt with deep hardship at some period in their lives. And if they don’t, then they start craving dystopias.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Yeah. The, the, this is the episode that we did there. Some things like your ancestors lived in a dystopia. Which is to say that most female lives throughout history would have been dystopian by modern understandings, and yet they were happier for it. Females happiness has only gone down since the 1970s.

And so the question is, is why, and I think it’s because you, you even see this within modern communities where wealthier girls who live in the suburbs. Are much less happy than poorer girls who live in urban centers. And it’s because they, I think, feel more rightly discriminated against and, and when they have a real threats to their lives, women are just happier.

Simone Collins: Didn’t they have a word for that affluent?

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Well this woman is the, the craziest case of affluence I’ve ever seen. And everyone’s like, you know, you could’ve chosen not to move to Vancouver. Literally the most expensive part of Canada. Right.

Simone Collins: Oh, I know. It’s supposed to be very pretty though. It’s

Malcolm Collins: It is very pretty. I’ve been there. I love it. Great city. Great parks.[00:58:00]

Simone Collins: Oh, well, at least the Chinese have it now,

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, right. There’ll be a Chinese outpost soon.

Simone Collins: yeah,

Malcolm Collins: I think we need to take Canada. I think Trump is wrong on this green lysing. If I was president right now,

Simone Collins: the rest of Canada can

Malcolm Collins: we want Alberta and Saskatchewan

Simone Collins: Saskatchewan. Okay.

Malcolm Collins: do that we want, so we get.

Simone Collins: it.

Malcolm Collins: Alberta and Saskatchewan. I’m good on that. That’s, that’s everything of Balu in Canada. Leave them with the coast. China can, can take that. And you know, Canada’s disproportionately unli white people, we should probably do an episode on that with

Simone Collins: terms

Malcolm Collins: main program

Simone Collins: Yeah, they’re mostly white. Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: because in Canada territories can just vote themselves out of Canada.

And if the United States was willing to take them and we would that would be pretty good.

Simone Collins: pretty cool.

Malcolm Collins: Love you.

Simone Collins: we’ll see then. I love you too.

Malcolm Collins: See you got you. Your early dinner.

Simone Collins: Yeah, well actually now I have to handle a wire transfer for [00:59:00] Travel Max and

Malcolm Collins: Oh, I’m sorry.

You have to get mouth surgery, which you’re not at all excited about.

Simone Collins: live off of popcorn. How do I not eat food knives for a hundred billion years? AKA two weeks at least. I’m not being tortured with a power drill. That’s that’s nice. You gotta be thankful every day you’re not torture, tortured with a power drill.

Malcolm Collins: All right. And when you do my curry tonight I’d add, well, it depends. You know, take an eye of what type of curry you is and think, think what it probably needs. Does it need sandal? Lic? Does it need hoist and sauce? These are two easy ones.

Simone Collins: you don’t take an eye, you take a whiff. And you

Malcolm Collins: And you take away

Simone Collins: what does

Malcolm Collins: is, what is this? What would this.

Simone Collins: samba ole is like, do you need a little twang and glitter? But then like, with hoist and sauce, do you need a little like, undercurrent? You [01:00:00] know

Malcolm Collins: Yes.

Simone Collins: this whole

Malcolm Collins: You know, you know what’s up Simone?

Simone Collins: about it. I know all about

Malcolm Collins: so glad we live in the, the world of, of multiple multicultural food types, right? Like,

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: So many fun options. And tonight burning through that curry,

Simone Collins: It’s

Malcolm Collins: backlog.

Simone Collins: The, yeah, the selection of gourmet foods that await for you in our deep freezer that I’ve frozen in chunks using those giant square ice cube trays, your

Malcolm Collins: Yesterday you did for the first time. Reheating. We gotta tell our audience about this.

Simone Collins: yeah.

Malcolm Collins: Because we tried it and we wasn’t sure it would reheat well, but look up recipes if you like dumplings and you’re just like, but I can never cook dumplings. ‘cause you know, it takes so long, you’ve gotta do the thing.

Lasagna dumplings. Okay. So they basically cook dumplings using a lasagna like format. So you can just lay the layers down and it is spectacular. It’s as good as any dumpling I’ve ever had. [01:01:00] You actually get a better proportion of wrapper. To meat, then you do even with dumplings, because then you’re not trying to like, okay, how do I cut this in thirds?

Or, you know, like, for, for small. But no, it’s perfectly done. One thing I’d suggest, so if you do it is the chili oil. Put that on as a topping at the end, not as an ingredient when you’re making it. I think it works much better that way.

Simone Collins: Yeah, ‘cause some recipes call for it. And specifically what we did, ‘cause most recipes, I think, call for it to be done in like a big. Tray, like, you know, like a lasagna pan. What I did that, but I also did ramekins, small ramekins

Malcolm Collins: Yeah.

Simone Collins: Which is great because you can pop however many ramekins you, ramekins you want in a steamer basket. and then just steam it until the internal temperature reads one 60 or higher you’re done. It’s great. And what I did was I just froze after wrapping in. Plastic [01:02:00] wrap, not touching any of the food, of course, in our deep freezer. And so I just was able to take it out and put it in a seamer and there was no additional prep needed.

And I love advanced meal prep. It’s so wonderful.

Malcolm Collins: Well, it took you a long time to make those. I know you put a lot of effort in.

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: I, I, I am sorry for the thousand yard stare.

Simone Collins: I just wanna go to sleep. go to sleep soon. All

Malcolm Collins: Okay, then I’ll wrap this up. I’ll wrap this up first. Okay. I’ll, I’ll, I’ll be quick with this one. Okay.

Speaker 8: So Titan, you wanted to tell me a story? Yeah. Tell me the story. The story is about when we don’t get Titan and what is she gonna do? He’s, she’s going to save the day. And how does she do that? He do that with superpowers. What’s your superpower? My [01:03:00] superpower is water, sweat, freeze. The water spot freeze is just freeze bad guys.

You can spray them with frozen water. Yeah, but then they will, I can, I will wash the water on my hand. That makes sense.

Speaker 9: Can you redo a video about on your phone? I’m taking a video right now. The people are learning all about you. What do you wanna say about liking and subscribing

and not ugly? To me, that’s my.

Speaker 8: Oh, sweet. Oh, oh, [01:04:00] sweetheart.