Based Camp | Simone & Malcolm Collins

Today on Based Camp we discuss the modern human sacrifices to Santa Muerte in Mexico and their connections to ancient Aztec practices, because APPARENTLY WE WERE WRONG ABOUT THE AZTEC NIGHTMARE BEING OVER. Alarmed by this realization, we explore religious syncretism, the role of Catholic traditions in enabling folk saint worship, and why certain cultural patterns persist despite conversion efforts. We go over examples from cartel activity, public shrines, and recent cases illustrate the ongoing issue (everything’s linked in the show notes below).

We also chat about biblical rules on idolatry, comparisons with other colonized regions like New Zealand, and the limits of religious change in altering deep-seated behaviors. Broader themes of the podcast include the consequences of loose interpretations of core religious prohibitions and the challenges of integrating populations with violent historical traditions.

Show Notes

CNN Wire article:

* “Authorities in the northern Mexican state of Sonora have arrested eight people accused of killing two boys and one woman as human sacrifices for Santa Muerte – the saint of death – officials said Friday.

* The victims, two of whom were age 10, were killed and their blood was offered at an altar to the saint, according to Jose Larrinaga, spokesman for state prosecutors. The accused were asking the saint, who is generally portrayed as a skeleton dressed in a long robe and carrying a scythe, for protection, he said.”

Burned heads were found next to a shrine in Yucatán and a variety of heads and body parts have been left at or near altars in Mexico over the years.

A 2019 Mexico City raid on La Unión Tepito properties found an altar with roughly 40 adult skulls (some with gunshot wounds), other bones, a fetus in a jar, knives, and Santa Muerte/Jesús Malverde imagery. Officials said neighbors described rituals for luck and bullet immunity.

Santa Muerte

Who is Santa Muerte? Is the Saint based on a real person like other saints? Why do peopel worship her? To whom does she appeal?

Santa Muerte is a Mexican folk saint and personification of death, usually shown as a female skeleton in a robe holding a scythe, globe, scales, owl, or other symbols. GREAT.

Not based on some historical woman like Catholic saints.

Her origins are debated because she developed through syncretism: the merging and adaptation of religious traditions over long periods. Scholars trace important influences to:

* European Christian-era images of Death, especially the skeletal “Grim Reaper” imagery that became prominent during and after medieval plague periods.

* Indigenous Mexican and broader Mesoamerican ideas about death, including possible parallels to the Mexica/Aztec death deity Mictēcacihuātl, associated with the underworld alongside Mictlantecuhtli.

* Mexican popular Catholic practices: home altars, petitions, candles, rosaries, novenas, offerings, and promises in exchange for help.

The people who worship her:

* See her as a nonjudgmental protector who can help in urgent or precarious circumstances

* See her to be impartial, as death comes for everyone, no matter how rich, poor, respected, or maligned you are

* So especially for those who feel they have no control in life, she has some appeal

What people ask her for:

* Money

* Protection

* Housing

* Health

* Revenge

* Success

A Harvard-based account notes that women, poor people, and queer people have been central in the movement but were often obscured by media attention to violence and criminality.

WHY WOULD HARVARD THINK THEY’RE GETTING DIVERSITY POINTS FOR POINTING OUT THAT WOMEN AND LGBTQ PEOPLE ARE POPULARIZING AN IDOL THAT’S ENCOURAGING VIOLENT HUMAN SACRIFICE AMONG CRIMINALS WHAT ON EARTH IS HAPPENING GSDFG;I.DJGXS’FDOIHGL/F/XGFDOIXC

Reaction of the Catholic Church

The Catholic Church is not cool with this.

In the words of the Roman Catholic Diocese of San Angelo: “Involvement with Santa Muerte is spiritually dangerous and it is not Catholic in any way. It should be completely avoided. It is a perversion of devotion to the saints.

In 2013, Cardinal Gianfranco Ravasi, the President of the Vatican’s Pontifical Council for Culture, denounced the Santa Muerte practice as “sinister and infernal.” He called it a “blasphemy of religion.””

Popularity

Santa Muerte is not only an idol worshipped by cartel workers and occultists; he’s widely popular.

Valeria Márquez, a 23-year-old locally popular tiktok livestreamer and Guadalajaran salon owner—and now world-famous social media influencer—had a shrine to Santa Muerte and was very open about her devotion.

She also was murdered on her livestream in May 2025.

Following Valeria’s murder, people are also convinced that she was the victim of destiny swapping (they think her friend Vivian wanted to steal her life)

Destiny Swapping: Another Example of Occult Culture Taking Over

Destiny swapping is a spiritual and folk-religious idea that one person can steal, exchange, or hijack another person’s intended life path—purpose, success, relationships, “glory,” or blessings—and leave the original person with delay, confusion, or a lesser fate.

* It’s popular enough to have a Wikihow article about it for goodness sake

There are loads of online posts where people wonder if some jealous friend or colleague has life swapped with them and want advice on breaking destiny swap spells.

There are several different angles to this concept:

* There’s the witchcraft / occult version, involving rituals, curses, evil altars, personal items like hair and clothes, names spoken in ceremonies, or dreams used to exchange destinies.

* There’s also version more focused on perceived relational closeness or energy involving so-called soul ties (especially via sex), close friendship, imitation, or “energy harvesting” so one person absorbs another’s opportunities and style.

* There’s a Biblical angle, with Jacob and Esau being the most-cited example in which birthright was sold for stew. Some also mention Saul/David or other “exchange” stories.

* Finally there’s the everyday TikTok version: Copying someone’s look, circle, or career moves until they “take” the life that “should have been yours.” Kim Kardashian and Paris Hilton are the stock celebrity example.

Destiny swapping discourse is most popular on Spiritual Tiktok, Witchtok, and in celebrity conspiracy videos.

To be clear, it’s not a particularly Mexican thing; it actually appears to be most popular in African Pentecostal, charismatic, and deliverance-ministry circles

* The language of destiny, glory, witchcraft, and spiritual exchange is longstanding in many West African churches (Nigeria, Ghana, and diaspora congregations).

* Nigerian and other African pastors and evangelists produce a large share of the YouTube teaching on “destiny swap,” recovery prayers, and warfare against altars.

But anyway, as a small aside, this is another example of religion NOT taking.

Offerings to Santa Muerte

With the more violent cases, I’ll pull from a broad time range to show just how longstanding this is.

More Typical

Home altars for Santa Muerte typically include a statue of the idol (tons of Amazon and Etsy options!) with:

* A glass of fresh water

* Candles

* Fresh flowers

* And sometimes

* Apples

* Brea

* Cany

* Alcohol in a small glass

* A cigarette or cigar

* Toys, coins, written petitions or thank yous, photos of deceased relatives,

More Violent

* In 2024 the FBI described Michelle Angelica Pineda (“La Chely”), tied to a Juárez crew, as removing hearts from dismembered victims and placing them in front of Santa Muerte statues/altars.

* Chihuahua authorities linked the crew to more than 20 dismemberment killings.

* In a 2016 prison interview, a man named Edgar, who served with a Juárez Cartel said:

* “I actually sacrifice people for my Santa Muerte… I kill for ordering, but I talk to her and say, ‘Hey, I go to a job. Just make me hit, I am gonna give you that life, it is for you.’”

* He claimed roughly 60 murders

* Father Ernesto Caro, a prominent Catholic priest and exorcist based in Monterrey, Mexico, told the BBC about one cartel disposal man who sought exorcism from him

* This man described cutting up bodies and burning people alive while devoted to Santa Muerte

* In 2010, A decapitated head was left by the tomb of Arturo Beltrán Leyva (whose apartment contained Santa Muerte items) in Culiacán investigators treated it as a possible offering.

* Various Ciudad Juárez cases across 2009 and 2010 included altar remnants, “Santa Muerte” and “cuídanos flakita” (“take care of us, skinny one”) spray-painted, and a victim burned behind a house that contained a statue.

* Neighbors said the Hillside 13 group wanted “something big.”

* Stacked headless bodies have been inferred (not always proven) as ritual staging.

* In 2008 in Nuevo Laredo, Gulf Cartel members captured Sinaloa Cartel members, took them to public Santa Muerte shrines, and shot them.

* A U.S. law-enforcement analysis treated this as offerings.

* In South Texas, in the mid 2000s, intercepted Zetas conversations described slashing teenagers, collecting blood in a cup, and toasting Santa Muerte.

* A Zetas member was reported as boasting of slitting rivals’ bellies and spilling blood as an offering.

* Other intercepted Zetas chatter referenced blood toasts to “Santisima Muerte.”

* The 1989 Matamoros “narcosatánicos” ranch belonging to Adolfo Constanzo involved ritual killings, including Mark Kilroy, with a cauldron containing a boiled brain and other remains.

* Santa Muerte was among the idols worshipped, along with with Palo Mayombe

* Note re: Palo Mayombe: Palo Mayombe is a Cuban religion of Central African (Kongo/Bantu) origin, also called Palo Monte or part of Las Reglas de Congo.

* Traditional Palo offerings are ANIMAL offering (like roosters, hens, and goats) whose blood feed the spirit

Can This Be Fixed?

* Is this evidence that domineering cultures fail?

* Domineering versus symbiotic culture

* Domineering: Everyone must be converted

* Symbiotic: We’re not going to “save” you; you’re going to have to “save” yourself

Episode Transcript

Simone Collins:Hello, Malcolm. I’m very excited to be speaking with you today. I think maybe kind of I’m more agitated because you know that horrifying episode we did on the Aztecs and their unthinkable violence? Like, all the human sacrifices and the horrible and creative ways that they killed people as offerings to the gods. Yeah. Like, the my my takeaway from that, as I’m sure you recall, was was thank goodness that’s over. But so, Malcolm, it turns out it’s not over because this morning, I learned that human sacrifices to terrible Mexican gods are still happening. The the the practice is alive and well, and I’m super not okay with it.

Malcolm Collins:Wait. Human sacrifices are still happening in Mexico?

Simone Collins:The Mexican god. Yeah. And you know all about it. You just didn’t connect it, and I didn’t connect it either. Now everything is horrible. So let me quote from a CNN wire article presenting one example. Quote, authorities in the northern Mexican state of Sonora have arrested eight people accused of killing two boys and one woman as human sacrifices to Santa Huerte, the saint of death, officials said Friday.

Malcolm Collins:Santa Huerte uses human sacrifices?

Simone Collins:People are making human sacrifices to work. The victims too Cat. At age 10 Why? Were killed, and their blood was offered at an altar to the saint according to Jose Loringa, spokesman of state for state proxy prosecutors. The accused was asking the saint, who was generally portrayed as a skeleton dressed as a in a long robe and carrying a scythe for protection, he said. People aren’t just making offerings to a nightmare fuel Catholic fan fiction idol, for example. Burned heads were found next to a shrine in the Yucatan, and a variety of heads and body parts have been left at or near altars in Mexico over the years. This is not just cartel stuff, but also cartels

Malcolm Collins:I think way the Catholicism spread where they kept trying to incorporate local religions may have had some negative effects.

Simone Collins:I think the thing is is at first, the my whole takeaway with the the oh, thank goodness, you know, the the conquistadors took out the the Aztecs. No. They didn’t. It’s one of those things where, like, you know, it’s like the the the the scary movie at the very end. It’s like, oh, it’s over. They they they killed the the zombie virus. It’s the spread is stopping. You know, they the the the giant shark is dead. and then there’s that, like or is it? It at the very end.

Malcolm Collins:It’s like the eye opens at the very end

Simone Collins:or whatever. It’s that. And that is exactly what this is. Oh, the conquistadors killed the terrifying murdery Aztecs who found terrible ways

Malcolm Collins:to torture people and not to the about it. The cult of Santa Huerta to give people some context on this.

Simone Collins:I I I’m gonna give more background on it, but let me let me give you some more examples.

Malcolm Collins:Okay. Go

Simone Collins:for this this 2019 Mexico City raid on La Union Tepito properties. This is one of the cartels. Found an altar with roughly 20 adult skulls, some with gunshot wounds, other bones, a fetus in a jar, knives, and a Santa Muerte and Jesus Malverde imagery. Officials said neighbors described rituals for luck and bullet immunity. And this made me realize, because I’m sure you have heard this too over time, that all of these very weird, horribly explicit discoveries of bodies that people have found with cartels, I was like, oh, that’s weirdly cruel and unnecessary. Like, why are they doing that? Well, now I’m putting two and two together, and I’m like, hold on. That sounds a lot like the Aztec stuff. Oh, wait. It just is the Aztec stuff. We thought that that Catholicism spread over Mexico like a beautiful field of flowers, and it turns out that, no. You can’t take It

Malcolm Collins:took zombie virus and became the zombie.

Simone Collins:It just yeah. You can’t take the the the the sacrificial insanity out of some people, apparently, and they just found new ways to do it. And and and yes. Okay. So we’ll we’ll talk about Santa Muerte.

Malcolm Collins:She I should note that this practice is condemned officially by the Catholic church. They condemn the Santa Muerte practice, but it is Yeah. No. No. No. Among Catholics within this region. It is. And the people doing these sacrifices would identify themselves as Mexican Catholics.

Simone Collins:Yeah. In the words of the Roman Catholic Diocese of San Angelo, quote, involvement with Santa Huerta is spiritually dangerous and is not Catholic in any way. Should be we agree with

Malcolm Collins:the Vatican on one thing?

Simone Collins:Are we Yeah. We god. Yeah.

Malcolm Collins:Are we actually pro Vatican and less religious extremists now?

Simone Collins:Sweet. Yes. look. We the Catholicism has issues, but it is not Mexican death cult. It’s not it’s not of the Mexican people and their terrifying cosmic horror ways. Okay? Anyway, quote, it should be completely avoided. It is a perversion of devotion to the saints. In 2013, cardinal Gianfranco Ravasi, president of the Vatican’s Pontifical Council for Culture, denounced the Santa Muerte practice as sinister and infernal. He called it a blasphemy of religion, end quote. Okay. So just to be super clear, Santa

Malcolm Collins:get an inquisition? You know what the Catholic church needs to have an inquisition? For real. Now. Do you know how onboard everyone would be with a Santa Monica?

Simone Collins:Yeah. You know what? Honestly, an inquisition in this day and age would do so well. It would do so well. People would Well, I mean,

Malcolm Collins:obviously, what we really want is a crusade, but we can’t have crusades because, you know, everything’s boring and lame.

Simone Collins:Look. I don’t know. Give it some time. I I honestly could see crusades coming back. But, anyway, so Santa Muerte is not like a saint. I mean, like, you could just she is a Mexican folk saint. She’s a personification of death. She’s usually shown as a female skeleton in a robe holding a scythe and a globe, scales, an owl, some other symbols. She’s not based on some historical woman like other Catholic saints. I mean, we have problems with Catholic saints. I think it’s idolatry. I think it’s it’s not good, but she’s she doesn’t show the patterns of saints. It’s more just like Mexicans were like, I wanna I need a death god. I feel like there’s this death god shaped hole in my heart. You know? And I just but I’m Catholic. So we’re gonna call her saint death god.

Speaker 13:Unit 101, did you know? Did you know one in three aliens have some sort of weapon built in

Malcolm Collins:Well, I mean, there’s this is one of those things where we have argued in the past that people coevolve with religious traditions. And you will often really struggle to fully follow a religious tradition that is dramatically differential from your birth tradition. As an example here, as much as and people know that if we’re talking about, like, the nontrue faith, the one I typically give the most slack to is Jainism that I talked about most positively. Okay. But I would never suggest a Caucasian European descent person attempt to convert to Jainism.

Simone Collins:For sure not. Of course.

Malcolm Collins:Because when I have seen that in a and other people I know who have seen it more, they’re like, yeah. Well over half the Europeans I know who converted to Jainism ended up killing themselves.

Simone Collins:It doesn’t work. Yeah. And it’s just clear to me that at least for a nontrivial proportion of the Mexican population, this don’t work. Let me show you guys, though.

Malcolm Collins:Okay. By by the way,

Simone Collins:I also wanna point see this? Yes. Are you okay? Are you showing it on Santa Santa Muerte.

Malcolm Collins:Oh, on Etsy. Oh, statue. Can we oh, get some statues here?

Simone Collins:Okay. Does this look like a a a like a good thing? Does this look like Is this good? Good? Is Is a no. This is this is freaking terrifying. This is not If someone’s if you know someone who’s worshiping this, can you tell them to, like, question their their choices in life? That is this what a good guy worships? Is this what a good guy worships?

Malcolm Collins:I’m gonna be honest. It is pretty baller looking.

Simone Collins:No. I mean, what what is this? This this this tie this white subway tile in the in the in the marble? I this is like a this is like a basic b***h.

Malcolm Collins:Like But hold on. I also wanna point out here that this narrative that the Catholic church did nothing to instigate this is also not true. Oh. So so we’re gonna go into obviously, that’s what they would say, but it didn’t come out of nowhere. Okay? So, specifically, what ended up sort of being the proto version of this was missionaries in New Spain heavily promoted the idea of Bueno Muerte. And this is a a true and actual thing, Sabon. Actually, it’s depicted it it’s so it was such a common belief in the region that it’s depicted in Nacho Libre. It’s or good or holy dying. Dying in the state of grace or confession death. With last rites and proper preparation. They use sermons, confraternities, like the Jesuit congregation de la Bueno Muerte. So this was literally a Jesuit congreg of course, it was a Jesuit congregation.

Simone Collins:You freaking hate Jesuits. No. You hate that one.

Malcolm Collins:Oh, okay. So, anyway, they had paintings. They had processional figures of death to hammer home the Mamertemuero. And, the, historian Elsa Morvidio argued that this imparted the Catholic language of a Santa Muerte or a holy death, which later evolved into the folk saint.

Simone Collins:Sort of. Also, like, I I found a good academic article really analyzing the origins of it. And one of the big things that you missed there is European Christian era images of death, especially as this skeletal grim reaper, which is totally what they’re pulling on as you saw from all those Etsy Right. Right. Right. Right.

Malcolm Collins:But that was a a practice that was practiced not by Protestants. Protestants did not go around

Simone Collins:No. This picture of skeletons.

Speaker 3:So I don’t like to make claims in these without double checking them. for this, it appears that you did see some of this iconography in Protestant countries, but it was at a lower rate than Catholic countries. And this I find very interesting. When it appeared in Protestant countries or in Protestant religious environments, it was produced comically to make fun of the clergy or Catholics. It was a jocular rather than truly religious depiction.

Speaker 4:And as such, it was never something that an individual or colonized group could confuse with something that they were meant to take reverently.

Simone Collins:This this emerged during the plague. And then they combined that with indigenous Mexican and then broader Mesoamerican ideals about death and especially, like, pulling from Aztec gods. And then the point I’m

Malcolm Collins:making here, Simone, because you are trying to say this was not the Catholic culture or church’s fault, the in in which case you need to ask, why don’t we see this in Protestant areas? And the reason is is even in this period

Simone Collins:We don’t do idol worship. And yet, you know, the the the the Catholics permit things like home altars and petitions and candles and rosaries and.

Malcolm Collins:If if I may, if the Orthodox had colonized South America and Central America, you would see the same thing likely.

Simone Collins:That’s true. No. I I totally agree. If if it had been Greek Orthodox or whatever that did it, if it had been, you know, tight lipped Protestant Swiss people, Mexican I don’t I don’t know, though. I don’t know. What the reason why I really wanted to do this episode and talk about this with you is because I’m feeling on a deep level, like, had discounted that point that you made earlier, which is that you you can’t exactly take the deep held, like, inherited genetically entwined religion out of a person. You can’t just convert someone and expect that they’re going to be able to practice a new religion. Like, perhaps, is impossible to remove. So big thesis, for example, of the of the Substack post, going over the book review on the Aztecs and their terrible terrible practices was ideas have consequences. And the whole discussion there was like, oh gosh. There could be a culture and a religion so toxic, this cosmic horror, torture, religion court culture that would cause people to do these incredibly violent, horrible, terrifying things. But then the idea then would be that, okay. Well, then if we change the idea, then everything will be okay. Just switch out the idea. Give people a better idea, and the people will do good things. But here’s the thing, is that they were given a very different idea. Catholicism, you know, on its own, actually doesn’t include that level of savagery. Even with witch hunts, there were trials. There there was due process. No. The Catholics did a

Malcolm Collins:fairly good job. Somebody in one of the things was like, this is about as Buddhist as the inquisitions were Christian. And I was like, the inquisitions were not as bad as you’ve been led to believe.

Simone Collins:Yeah. I mean, Protestant witch hunts were way worse than

Malcolm Collins:Catholic hunts. Witch hunts were way worse. It’s, like, not even a comparison.

Simone Collins:Yeah. And so but just giving you know, so I’m what I’m saying is is broadly Catholic ideas were better, and yet switching those out hasn’t taken the horrifically savage, violent, cosmic horror style torture.

Malcolm Collins:I I think you’re right. You you needed two things. Right? Okay. You needed the, so first, and this is the point I kept making, you needed the very loose interpretations around idolatry. Okay? and you needed this combined with a preexisting death cult. And if you have those two things in conjunction with each other, then this can arise. So you do not see this arising in in parts of the what’s an example here?

Simone Collins:See, that’s the thing. I can’t think

Malcolm Collins:of of in Europe. You don’t see this arising in Europe. You don’t see this arising in Orthodox countries, at least not in large amounts. But when you see a Protestant group colonize an area that had a murder cult that was probably as extreme as the Aztecs, you get this stamped out really quickly. A a

Simone Collins:great example. Because I don’t No.

Malcolm Collins:Polynesia. Okay? A large existing indigenous population lives in New Zealand. Okay? Okay. They had a pre genetically written into their DNA murder cult. Okay? Just as much as yes.

Simone Collins:I don’t know what I don’t know these things. I don’t know these things.

Malcolm Collins:And let’s look up the Sorry.

Simone Collins:I I have sort of two tiers of murder cult. So one is just like, okay. These are precivilization humans, which are just violent and mean. Right? So, like, they murder people. It’s bad. Then there’s civilized murder murder cults where they’re like, no. No. No. We’re not just gonna violently murder them. We’re gonna, you know, flay them alive. We’re gonna skin them while they watch. They’re gonna we’re gonna take their beating hearts out of their body. Now that’s the Aztecs. Okay? So what level are we talking with with the Polynesians?

Malcolm Collins:I’ll I’m looking it up. Okay? We’ll look up Mari murder cults. Okay?

Simone Collins:Thank you. Okay. Fantastic. Anyway, so Santa Muerte is obviously the combination of these things. This, like, grim reaper death European imagery thing, the indigenous evil murder cosmic horror Aztec gods, and then just the allowance, basically, of the Catholic church for idolatry and petitions and candles and offerings and and home, like, little altars, which is I just they they always give me the creeps. Even altars like it in in Japan that people would take me to. I love everything in Japan. Home altars give me the creeps no matter where I see them. I hate them. Heebie jeebies. Do not like. Anyway, so people like to worship Santana Muerte because they see her as this nonjudgmental protector who can help in urgent or precarious circumstances. A lot of people say they like her because death is inherently impartial. It doesn’t matter how respected or of ill repute or rich or poor you are, you are going to die. Death will come to you. So, for example, I guess for that reason, which doesn’t make any sense to me, but I guess if you cross your eyes far enough, it’s all gonna somehow come together. a lot of LGBTQ people and, like, sex workers really like La Santa Muerte because Of course they do. They’re like, she accepts everyone because we’re all gonna die, and I just don’t I don’t really get that. But, anyway, part of me is like, oh, well, one thing that makes me laugh here, was one Harvard based account noted that women and poor people and queer people have been central in the movement, but have been often obscured by media and tension due to violence and criminality. Like, they’re saying, oh, well, like, the cartels are getting all the credit for making Santa Muerte famous, But this was really carried by But they carry the death and

Malcolm Collins:the women.

Simone Collins:So, like, yeah. It’s kind of like the gays and the women are responsible for popularizing the scary death god. And then, like, they’re the girlfriends of the cartel leaders who are like, oh, why don’t you sacrifice people to, you know, the the murder goddess? Yeah. I’ve been reading a lot of talk to you. Yeah. And so kind of like, great. So, like, back to women are terrible. Like, they’re fueling this fire. Thanks, girls. Really and gays. Girls and gays. I’m so pleased. Fantastic. Anyway, they they love her for that. They they feel like if you especially if you have no control in life and you just feel like, you know, you’re at the very bottom of the barrel here, she’s your gal.

Malcolm Collins:So so if we’re talking about the Mari here, because you’re asking, did they have a murder cult? Now nowhere first, and I said this very clearly on the episode, nowhere on earth outside of Central And South America had murder cults to that degree. Okay? Right. They were wholly and unique to

Simone Collins:any human in the water, man, or I don’t know. Which we’ll probably do another episode on. Okay.

Malcolm Collins:That said, they did practice ritual killing and cannibalism as a part of their society. Okay? Specifically, the first enemy slain in battle could have his heart cut out and would be offered to their gods, and the priest or high chief would consume the victim’s mana to destroy or take that defeated mana into their sides. Bodies of the enemies were cooked in earth ovens, hangy, and eaten as the ultimate humiliation and as a way to absorb the enemy’s qualities. Slaves on specific occasions were sometimes killed before a campaign to lift tapu or add mana to the chief ceremony for divination or in some accounts when a new or fortified paw was launching at an important canoe. Evidence is so blah blah blah blah blah.

Speaker 9:Imagine being a imagine being a human sacrifice for a canoe. Yeah. We wanted this canoe to be less wobbly. So, you know, human sacrifice.

Simone Collins:Basically, yes. Now so would you count that as savage or civilized in humanity?

Malcolm Collins:For the people of this region that was as civilized as you’re gonna get.

Simone Collins:Well, yeah. I’m not talking relative giant cities But I’m guessing if you have, like, ceremony around it, and you’re not just like, oh, sympathetic magic. I’m gonna eat it.

Malcolm Collins:But here’s what’s important. There is no while there is a significant surviving, Maori population, okay, they were, colonized by Protestants. Okay? specifically, by the Anglican Church Missionary Society, which arrived in 1814. Okay? And it completely eradicated this practice. This practice does not exist. There is no, Maori murder cults

Simone Collins:Okay.

Malcolm Collins:Anything. in fact, it was it was, wiped out very quickly, in terms of missionary president. It appears within just a couple

Simone Collins:So you can, theoretically, in theory. Like, this is one point in favor of the, no. Actually, you possibly can remove the terrifying violent murder cult out of someone. Yes. Because I was I was kinda worried that, like I don’t know. There’s just something, like, I don’t deep like, deeply ingrained genetic tendencies that might cause people to just want to, like, torture and murder people and offer them as human sacrifices.

Malcolm Collins:I mean, the the the point being is those tendencies might exist.

Simone Collins:Right. But if you have a really strong religion that gives you a good foundation, you’re like, I may feel those feelings, but I will not act on them. Which which goes Not gonna worship the death guy.

Malcolm Collins:Often say about the Bible, which is Oh, yeah.

Simone Collins:I guess yeah. Like, think about all, like, the Appalachian, like, crazy, you know, reputation, but you don’t actually see lots of cases of it. It’s not like in in Appalachia, you see, like, tons of cannibalism and, like, crazy. You know?

Malcolm Collins:You don’t really see any. Yeah. Even though

Simone Collins:there is that tendency, and you can even see it, like, through porn

Malcolm Collins:Yeah. Even though they were an incredibly violent people, they never ritually sacrificed anyone. They never tortured people.

Simone Collins:But the interest is alive and well, which I think is the important thing, which which you can see through searches, like online searches. Yeah.

Malcolm Collins:The but, like, the sorry. What she means is if you look up, porn types in The United States, and you’re looking up incredibly violent stuff, you will find the highest rates of it in West Virginia for example.

Simone Collins:Feel it, but they don’t act on it. So in theory, we could have the Mexicans still feel the desire to worship the death cult god and to sacrifice humans to it. But if they had the right religion, they wouldn’t act on it. But it turns out Catholicism is not c utting it, Malcolm.

Malcolm Collins:This is where we get into as as we talk about around, you know, if we see the bible as, like, good rules for how to base society. Like, the 10 commandments are not vague about this. It it is very frequent that you will get some Catholic go on and on about, like, how chaste and good they are because they don’t masturbate, but then they which isn’t even one of the 10 commandments, not even mentioned in the bible other than rules around cleanliness. You can see our our wider episode on this where it’s treated as sort of similar to menstruation. That said, if you’re talking about, like, the second commandment, which is very interesting because it’s put right after the first commandment. I mean, no other no. But what I mean is people will often say, well, what it means is you’re not supposed to worship an icon. You’re not supposed to worship a statue. You’re not supposed to and it’s like, no. That’s not what

Simone Collins:it means. Yeah. Like, let me be super freaking Let me be super clear because if that’s what it

Malcolm Collins:meant, one, it would have been covered by the first quote. And two, it wouldn’t be you don’t make graven images. It would have been you don’t worship graven images. Yeah. But it’s no. You don’t make the graven image in the first place.

Simone Collins:Yeah. Like, that’s what it is.

Malcolm Collins:Right? You don’t make or you don’t worship?

Simone Collins:hold on. I have them. I I have them up on, like, the top of my notes thing, which got buried because of all my new homeschooling notes. Oh gosh. 10 commandments. Come on.

Malcolm Collins:Yeah. You shall not make them.

Simone Collins:Oh, see. There you go.

Malcolm Collins:Don’t make them. Don’t Any likeness of anything in the heaven below or the earth beneath. Oh, it’s very clear.

Simone Collins:Yeah. okay. Can I spell this out for you anymore clearly?

Malcolm Collins:Very interesting is it’s not just covering all of the depictions of anything in heaven or angelic or anything like that, but it also says, interesting and a little prophetic, or the earth beneath, e. G, skeletons.

Simone Collins:Yeah. What’s so interesting to me is and I’m not exempt from this because I blaspheme too much. And now that I’ve, like, brushed up on the 10 commandments, I’m like, I gotta I gotta stop. However, man, humans really struggle with the 10 commandments. Like, Jesus has been so clear in his teachings. He’s like, just follow the 10 just follow the 10 commandments.

Malcolm Collins:I’m You literally go off on these giant tangents around, like, being incredibly severely perfect around, like, life beginning at conception, which is not in the bible.

Simone Collins:And it’s like,

Malcolm Collins:dude And then ignore list. Like, commandments one and two.

Simone Collins:One list. One list. It’s a simple list. He made it so simple. I know. I know. I know. And I look. We all let just let’s get back to those basics. Let’s let’s master the list, and then we can get to the other stuff, because the list matters a lot. No. But I think what

Malcolm Collins:I mean and this is really important is people will take the 10 commandments, and they’ll try to extrapolate out of it something around masturbation from the the one that sounds like it’s about you you can pull up the exact wording on it. That seems a lot more about, like, social media and comparing yourself to others. Or they’ll they’ll say, oh, the one about not murdering, which has very specific laws around it in Judaism during this period, is about general killing or off also covers these other things. And it’s like, okay. I totally see how you can get that. The problem is is that the rule around idolatry, There’s no way you can’t get that that applies to, like, all idolatry. Right?

Speaker 11:So I decided to look into the evidence to try to steal man, the other argument, because I just didn’t understand how you couldn’t get this interpretation for the text. And, unfortunately, it just gets stronger the more I read. So, like, when you go to Deuteronomy 16, lest you corruptly and make yourselves a carved image in the form of a figure in the likeness of a male or female, the likeness of an animal that is on the earth, the likeness of a winged bird that flies in the air, or the likeness of anything that creeps on the ground, or the likeness of any fish that is beneath the earth. you are specifically not supposed to bow to these things. that is that is what is demanded of you, as well as not to make them, but in addition, to bow to them. And then people will be like because the the strongest counterargument will be like, well, these things there were images of things like lilies and lions drawn at the temple under God’s command. And first, no. They were not drawn under God’s command. it’s it’s very explicit in the text that they weren’t drawn under God’s command. And in the text, they are talked about as, like, artistic motifs. So the lilies are talked about as being, like, the way that, like, a column was topped, or the way that, seams were done in in terms of, like, where the lions are and stuff like that. this is not the same thing as a Catholic shrine that you are bowing to. The closest thing you can get from an actual command and note here, the temple there was stuff in the temple that was not supposed to be in the temple. Right? Like, we know that the snake staff of Moses, something that God actually gave humanity or Moses, was in the temple. And during the Josiah reforms, it was taken out and it was broken because it was idolatrous. Right? Because people had started worshiping it or putting offerings around it or something like this. And so, like, you can’t just feel like, well, it was in the temple. Therefore, god approves it. No. That’s not the way it works. Second and and even with the temple, it’s, again, seem more like motifs. They say, well, what about the cherubs on the ark? And so first of all, God does talk about the cherubs on the ark, but they don’t actually fit any of the prohibitions here. They don’t fit a a human or male, human female or male. They don’t fit any animal on Earth. They don’t fit any fish. so, again, not a contradiction. The Bible is remarkably self consistent.

Speaker 15:And when I talked this through with Simone, she pointed out, and I thought very wisely, that the cherubs are clearly a supporting flourish on a a a separate article of religious significance. Even Protestants aren’t particularly against supporting flourishes, but it is in no way analogous to anything that you see in regards to a Catholic shrine where the icon is at the point or an orthodox shrine.

Speaker 12:What I can say with a lot of confidence is even the loosest, most liberal reading of what’s in the text would not allow you to carve an image of a human being, and they’d leave offerings to it or bow to it.

Malcolm Collins:And it’s like, what’s the positives that you’re getting out of this? A feeling? Like, that’s what I often get, but it it leads to murder cults being possible.

Simone Collins:But, anyway, yeah, you shall not covet your neighbor’s wife. You shall not covet your neighbor’s goods. That so And

Malcolm Collins:I wanna be clear here during this period, because we know during this period, there were naked pictures on pottery and stuff like this. Yeah. if something equivalent to modern, like, at least illustrated porn existed, it would have existed in a drawn format. Right? It wouldn’t have been your neighbor’s wives or your neighbor’s slaves. I think it also says that. It it or your neighbor’s oxen.

Speaker 5:yes. I did remember it right. You have Exodus twenty seventeen. You shall not covet your neighbor’s house. You shall not covet your neighbor’s wife or his male or female servant or his ox or donkey or anything that belongs to your neighbor. And then Deuteronomy five twenty one, you shall not covet your neighbor’s wife. You shall not desire on your neighbor’s house or land his male or female servant, his ox or donkey, or anything else that belongs to your neighbor. so very clearly, this is way more specific to about things like doomscrolling on Instagram or Facebook, or being jealous of things that other people have. And if you want to extrapolate it to anything else, sure, you you can, but that is not what is in the text or what a plain reading of the text would have you interpret.

Speaker 6:It’s real curious how in pop or Sunday’s dual Christianity, this only gets shortened to you shall not covet your neighbor’s wife and then translated to you shall not covet any other woman, or depiction of women, when that’s not even, at least in Deuteronomy, the first thing listed. It’s you shall not covet your neighbor’s house.

Malcolm Collins:Like, clearly, it could have been written about that, and it

Simone Collins:wasn’t If you’re talking about Leviticus, there’s lot of really specific stuff in there. But we’re talking 10 commandments here. Let’s not get it to Leviticus. To that Leviticus.

Malcolm Collins:It gets

Simone Collins:it’s detailed.

Malcolm Collins:Yep. The point being, it’s like it it could have very easily detailed that, and yet the details that it chose it to go into seem to be a much more, and, again, I’m not saying you should do this stuff. I’m saying, look. You you can have these additional rules, but, like, don’t think you’re an extra good Christian because you’re following all the additional rules that you made up outside of the core rules or extrapolated with some extreme leap from the core rules and then just ignore the core rules. A note here, if you’re gonna be like, well, you know, he said I made you before you were in your mother’s womb. Well, doesn’t that imply predestination? But I I’ve mentioned this in older episodes, but I get very annoyed when people say that because he could have said in, in, in, in, but he doesn’t. He said before, which implies he knew either the future or you have a pre life like Mormons believe, which I don’t think any major Christian denomination believes. Yeah.

Simone Collins:Okay. Let’s get back to Santee Murti.

Malcolm Collins:Santee Murti. But I but I find this interesting because you’re talking about, like, is this based in a group? And you appear to be able to control this instinct, but and and what’s interesting is the Bible appears to be, like, a set of rules for how to control this instinct.

Simone Collins:Yeah. Yeah. And yet and yet and yet.

Malcolm Collins:And yet.

Simone Collins:Can really struggle with this. It’s super hard. and I’m, again, I’m not above this at all. We’re gonna have to work out how to be be more be better about the 10 commandments. But, anyway, I just wanna make it clear that, like, the the news that

Malcolm Collins:we’re doing mean, the only one that we keep

Simone Collins:the Sabbath. That’s for sure. And, also, I blaspheme. I I I need to stop.

Malcolm Collins:So Yeah. The no. The blaspheming one is the the number one one that we need to do. What about the Sabbath? The Sabbath? We need to go back and look at what that means in context, and I can do that for the next track if you want.

Simone Collins:Oh, I’d be both. Yeah.

Malcolm Collins:Because a lot of groups have had different interpretations around what the Sabbath means.

Simone Collins:Yeah.

Malcolm Collins:And I want to determine exactly what it would mean to keep it in in in that respect.

Simone Collins:Yeah. I mean yeah. Because, I mean, arguably, per our religion, most of what we do every day is religious practice

Speaker 14:A quick review makes it pretty clear from what I can read in the text that you’re not supposed to work on the Sabbath, which is definitely not something that we do. I haven’t taken a day off in probably a decade, so that’s something I should reflect on and incorporate into our daily lives going forward.

Simone Collins:, but whatever. Anyway, Okay. I wanted to make it clear that even though most of the connection I’ve made with all this is, oh, this is all this insanely violent cartel stuff might be insanely violent because of the Santa Muerte worship, which is downstream of the inadequately suppressed Aztec sacrifice ritual compulsion. however, this this is not a dudes in drug cartels thing. This is a very widely popular idol

Malcolm Collins:b******t. Gay thing? Is it gay? It’s a girly thing.

Simone Collins:You saw you saw the Etsy listings. Is Etsy a boy site? No. Etsy’s a girl site. Did you see those kitchens? Did those look like boy kitchens? No. That was white subway tile on white fake marble. That is a basic b***h girl kitchen, and these are all girl idols. And I’ll give you an example. they’re Valeria Marquez. She was a 23 year old locally popular TikTok livestreamer in Guadalajara. She owned a salon. She would host these TikTok livestreams. She’s a now world famous social media influencer. She had a a shrine to Santa Muerte and was very open about her devotion. It’s like sitting in the corner, very visible in in many of her livestreams. Like, this is just your typical TikTok influencer, plastic surgery, you know, style, makeup, etcetera. Right?

Malcolm Collins:Oh oh, by the way, I will note in defense of Catholics, right Yeah. Especially our last episode on this, the holdout juror in the Lindsey Kantsey case, the the black guy, turns out to be a Catholic as well. So it wasn’t just Lindsey Kantsey. It was also the holdout.

Simone Collins:It wasn’t like, oh, I hate Catholics. Yeah. Because he was like, well, Bill, good. You know, tend to your own flock. Like, go be extra strict on your own people. That’s our whole thing.

Malcolm Collins:He was from Haiti, by the way. He was a a a devout Haitian

Simone Collins:Yeah. That’s awesome. Anyway, Valeria Marquez Marquez was also she was murdered on her livestream in May 2025. Kinda notable. That’s how people came to know about her. That’s how I came to know about her.

Malcolm Collins:Wait. Anyway She was murdered on her livestream, and she was a state of a Muerte idol?

Simone Collins:Yeah. So, apparently, San Diego is not very good at protecting people, by the way. Not not a great track record. Again, I’m like, why would you worship the death god who comes for everyone? Like, death god, don’t kill me. Well, I think You’re

Malcolm Collins:a lot of these people, they don’t really see their lives as having a lot of value?

Simone Collins:Yeah. I guess. Yeah. It’s sad. I mean, she’s 23 years old. Here’s a little aside, though, and this is back to this theme of people just they just can’t help but have the the evil creep back through if their religion is insufficiently strong. And this is this is gonna be you know how you love to hate on the Catholics? Well, I love to hate on the Pentecostals. And you’re you’re about

Malcolm Collins:to see my little do.

Simone Collins:My little s**t eating grin in just a second. Okay? Because following Valeria’s murder, people were online convinced that she was the victim of destiny swapping. They think her friend Vivian wanted to steal her life.

Malcolm Collins:Do you

Simone Collins:know about destiny swapping?

Malcolm Collins:no. Tell me about this.

Simone Collins:It’s this whole new it’s it’s not new, I guess. It’s this this sort of occult witchcraft y thing that is a spiritual folk religious idea that one person can steal, exchange, or hijack another person’s intended life plan, like their purpose, their success, their relationships, their glory.

Malcolm Collins:Really like Pentecostals either, by the way. I I know.

Simone Collins:I know. It’s witchcraft. I really I freaking hate it. they’re they’re witches. But do I So they an an example, just just to be thing that’s happening.

Malcolm Collins:Pentecostalism. Charismatic Pentecostalism. They’re witches.

Simone Collins:In the same way that,

Malcolm Collins:like, with Catholicism, I love SPSX. I don’t like Vaticanist Jesuit Catholicism.

Simone Collins:Yeah. There you go. But, anyway, just saying Protestants are not spotless. Okay? Okay. Yeah. Thank you. Just just trying to keep it balanced over here. But, anyway, this this idea of destiny swapping, this this folk religion, it’s popular enough to have a WikiHow article. It’s like literally a WikiHow article about destiny swapping. There are loads of online posts where people wonder if some jealous friend or colleague has life swapped with them, or they want advice on how to Wait. What? Like destiny life swap. Yeah. Here. Let me click on one. I I linked to a a couple in the in the show notes. Hello. I’m looking for practical advice, not debate. For years now, I’ve been dealing with what I can only describe as a persistent destiny swap or identity mirroring dynamic tied to a specific person I’ve tried to completely cut off. No contact, blocked everywhere, etcetera. But the sense of interference, it hasn’t stopped. It feels like they’re attempting to align with or overlap my path, copy aspects of my identity, or tap into my life in a way that goes beyond coincidence. At this point, it’s noticeable enough that other people have commented on it, which is part of why I’m taking it seriously. It’s also affecting my behavior. I find myself holding back, staying quiet, or dimming my presence just to avoid feeding whatever it is. I’m looking for methods to sever this, Banishing, uncrossing, cord cutting, if relevant. In this context, I’ve already tried it. protection or shielding that actually holds. If anyone has dealt with a similar situation, especially something targeted or persistent, I really appreciate hearing what has worked in practice. Anyway, there are tons of these. Reddit threads. This one’s on forum.becomingalivinggod.com. Great. This is what people should be spending their times doing. Anyway, though, there’s a lot of witches out there, right, and and, like, women into the occult. One example that was cited in a video about the killing of this social media influencer, which is which discusses the destiny swapping theories, cited one Reddit post where a woman apparently went to a fortune teller and was like, well, with your boyfriend, you know, you’re gonna do these great things and have a son with him. But then her the boyfriend’s ex then cheats with him, has a son, and then they live this life together. And then the person who you know, the the jolted woman assumes that this person destiny swapped with her and stole her destiny. And, oh my god.

Malcolm Collins:Stole stole her wait. Her husband or the guy who she liked or something?

Simone Collins:Yeah. Because yeah. Because the her her boyfriend went back to his ex, like or they cheated. She got pregnant, had a son, and this is after a fortune teller had told the original girlfriend, the now jilted girlfriend, that she was going to have a son with this man. And so she’s like, I’ve had destiny swapping. Like,

Malcolm Collins:how horrible.

Simone Collins:Destiny swapped me. Yeah. If these women found your lore with your brother, they’d be like, I don’t know. Somehow their destiny, like, entwined. There’s some versions of destiny swapping that assume that, like, relational closeness or energy can tie people’s destinies together, and then people could argue that, like, you and your brother have, like, inter twined destinies because you, you know, both went to the same schools and all these crazy things. But, anyway, it’s it is definitely this there’s the witchcraft angle of it involving a cult and rituals, then there’s the biblical angle with Jacob and like, being the most cited example. I I just relistened to this story in the Old Testament, and it’s so stupid. Like, it it’s just a bizarre story because Esau’s birthright, he he sells it to Jacob for stew because he was really hungry. So Jacob got his birthright, and that’s apparently how many Pentecostals got into it because they’re like, don’t you see? Like, you can steal someone’s birthright because Jacob Because Jacob did it. Yeah. Jacob gave stew to

Malcolm Collins:This is what we talk about. We’d say Pentecostalism. Specifically, charismatic Pentecostalism is just witchcraft disguised as Christianity. Like, they’re like, well, you know, it happened in this story. So let’s Yeah.

Simone Collins:So, like, I’m gonna take it and run with it. Not related to the 10 commandments at all, but whatever. But, yeah, this it’s it’s most popular in African, Pentecostal, charismatic, and deliverance ministry circles. And when I tried to look on YouTube for more information, it was all, like, either black Pentecostal YouTube influencers or black Pentecostal or, charismatic ministry preachers talking about it and being like, this is bad. We must stop it. Not in terms of, like, this is not true, but, like, you have to stop the people doing this. It’s all like, how do I stop the person who destiny swapped with me? Like, completely giving fuel to the fact that it’s real, which

Malcolm Collins:is How do I destiny swap with somebody else? I wonder.

Simone Collins:It’s it’s it’s free. Yeah. It’s it’s very I

Malcolm Collins:am so glad not many of our fans like this stuff because who knows if they’d be casting this to try to be married to you? Any any man would want that.

Simone Collins:I don’t think so. You know that no one would want my the things you put up with every day. My god, Malcolm. But, yeah, like, there’s just all these, like, dijerially other

Malcolm Collins:aspects to that

Simone Collins:talk about how difficult I am.

Malcolm Collins:No. To focus on in charismatic pentecostalism, you do see a number of really bad traditions come through. For example, folk beliefs like this as well as over far beliefs about, possession and witches that end up to, you know, people killing their kids or whatever.

Simone Collins:Yeah.

Malcolm Collins:obviously, way lower rates than we’re talking about in these other countries or, like, in Mexico, but it it still happens. Right?

Simone Collins:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And it’s just it’s just it’s it’s crazy. It’s really notable, though, because, again, like No.

Malcolm Collins:But what’s noticeable about it Yeah. Is that it completely cuts out any idolatry. Like, the the

Simone Collins:Oh, yeah. The idolatry is gone. It’s just the witchcraft is there.

Malcolm Collins:Yeah. Like, you can try to put as many rules on things. And then depending on how you define witchcraft, you end up still because the witchcraft stuff is not in the 10 commandments. Right? Like, that’s none of the stuff that they were doing there.

Simone Collins:Something like you won’t suffer a witch No.

Malcolm Collins:Suffer a witch somewhere. Live, but that’s not in the 10 commandments. Yeah. That’s definitely not. That’s like a ancillary.

Simone Collins:Well, except it it it is inherent in many elements of witchcraft to worship idols. Most Right.

Malcolm Collins:But it’s not inherent in the forms of witchcraft that seep into Pentecostalism. Absolutely. So they’re like The point I’m making is that even where you get these really negative behavioral patterns in Pentecostalism, the idolatry rules still are mean, I feel like given the horribleness of the stuff that breaks through, there is a king lot held behind the doors of the idolatry dance.

Simone Collins:Yeah. Well, destiny swapping does break the 10 commandments to be clear. Thou shall not steal. So No. And also coveting coveting your your Yeah.

Malcolm Collins:Exactly. That fall really good on the coveting one. Okay. Yeah. Right.

Simone Collins:Yeah. Like, destiny swapping is definitely a no go if we’re if we’re stick sticking in the 10 commandments. Again, I’m like, let’s just again, Jesus was so clear. Like

Malcolm Collins:10 commandments are, like, really good. Yeah. Like, they they work for most things. Yeah. But the the but they don’t pass the idolatry one, and I find that very interesting. That that that Yeah. Door does appear

Simone Collins:Yeah. Depending on how you practice it. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Anyway, let’s let’s just I I wanted to like, that that that, like, worlds collide element of of all this was, like, crazy to me. You know? Like, the destiny swapping meets Santamoritaine worshipper who gets killed during a livestream. It was insane. She was, like, on this all night livestream. And what made people really suspicious was her friend Vivian who apparently, like, everyone thought was really jealous of her, and things showed up on livestreams all the time where she was stealing her underwear and stuff like that and saying Wait.

Malcolm Collins:Her her female friend was stealing her underwear?

Simone Collins:Yes. Like, they’re yeah. On on her livestream at one point, she’s like, stop stealing my underwear. And her friend was Vivian was like, oh, well, I’ll just buy you more. And she’s like, no. I don’t have any underwear left. Like, this is really not cool. And so who knows if she was, like, sleeping with her boyfriend wearing her underwear, like, some creepy ass who knows what’s going on there. Right? And then during this livestream on the night she was killed, Vivian used DoorDash or Uber Eats or something to send her a Starbucks order and a pig plushie. And then people later were like and the way it was done is, hey, Toastie. What’s up? Okay. Toastie wants to say hi, and then Toastie’s gonna go back down and do his lessons. He started homeschooling today. The house is good here back. But the but the house is gonna appear back on the computer. Every time when they go to the new license and do the passcode.

Malcolm Collins:But great. A note here. I make it as a side note. But I do want to clarify this when we talk about the idolatry stuff. Are not because Celestium, we talked with her. We lost the recording, so I have to redo it. But she you know, when she’s often dealing with Protestant groups, and they’ll say, oh, because she’s an orthodox, she practice these pagan rituals in the way that idolatry seeps into the orthodox tradition. And I wanna point out here that that is not at all what we’re saying. I do not think that when an Orthodox person worships an icon or has an icon in their in an area where they’re worshiping or uses an icon to facilitate their worship, they are practicing in anything that I would call pagan. I I’m only highlighting these sorts of things because I’m like, these rules are there for a reason and have downstream civilization level effects when not followed really strictly. I’m I’m not saying that x group is pagan or y group is pagan.

Simone Collins:I agree. right. So what happened after her friend Vivian, by the way, just

Malcolm Collins:to finish that whole thing. Her a pig. What happened?

Simone Collins:Send her a pig. Some guy came to deliver something that he said was expensive, came in, and then when she confirmed who she was, he shot her point blank in the chest and in the head. Execution style. And she died on livestream, which is terrifying. Anyway, so, like, don’t Wow.

Malcolm Collins:It was a hit?

Simone Collins:It was a hit. Yeah. People assume she was dating a cartel leader or something and that he was a vindictive act. Makes sense.

Malcolm Collins:You’re a a well known Mexican streamer?

Simone Collins:Yeah. But, you know, it it yeah. Anyway, this is this is a violent world, and I don’t see being involved with any of this idol worship as helping. So this makes

Malcolm Collins:me much much stricter on Hispanic immigration into The United States, specifically Mexican immigration, or the integration of Mexico as as anything other than a vassal state.

Simone Collins:I don’t I don’t know. I don’t know. I’m just saying I’m I’m very, very concerned about anyone who’s interested in this. Because, again again, if you are worshiping that scary death deity, it’s like one of the, like, are we the baddies moment. Like, am I worshiping an altar with a skeleton on it and offering it things.

Malcolm Collins:Maybe The problem is, Simone, is you say this, but there are Orthodox and Catholic churches that are made out of bone. Simone, the point I’m making here is if you like Oh, if you’re worshiping the the skeleton, if you’re worshiping at the Skeleton Shrine, yet there are you you have orthodox and catholic like, you’re you’re the one who’s more sympathetic to them than I am, and they have, like, literal temples made out of human bones that are ordained by their central organization.

Simone Collins:Yeah. And I think the people worshiping at that stuff have some serious problems. I I think they’re

Malcolm Collins:It’s officiated all the way to the top. Like, it’s not like the Catholic church. It’s like, oh, we have some problems with the bone temples, or or the the patriarchs condemn the bone temples. Like, we probably shouldn’t have the bone temples Fair. Have entire orders dedicated to the bone temples, yet they have the bone temple.

Simone Collins:Well and that’s a problem. That’s a problem. I’m coming out. It’s official. I have a big problem with that. That is not a good sign. Okay. Let’s talk about the offerings that are made to Santa Muerte. Just to yeah. Anyway, if you’re a normal person, alright, you’ve got your you’ve got your altar. You can you can get your little statue on Amazon. There’s lots on Amazon. You can get them on Etsy. You can get them locally, whatever. You might put a a glass of fresh water there, some candles, fresh flowers, maybe some apples, candy, alcohol in small glasses. Here’s some other offerings that people are you know, if you wanna go above and beyond, I’m just gonna I’m gonna give some of the more violent examples, and then give them over a long time frame so you can see just how long standing this is. Okay? I’ll start with more recent. Go later. In 2024, the FBI described Michelle Angelica Pinera. This is a lady. She went by La Cielly tied to a Juarez crew as removing hearts from dismembered victims and placing them in front of the Santa Muerte statues and altars. That sounds awful familiar, doesn’t it, Malcolm? That sounds a lot like Aztec worship. Chihuahua authorities linked the crew to more than 20 dismemberment killings. And as I was reading this, I was like, okay. All these times when in the news, I’ve read, like, oh, like, cartel killings found, like, dismembered and lined up in the road in a certain way. Like, oh, that wasn’t just them, like, trying to remove identifying features. This is different. 20 In 15 Well,

Malcolm Collins:we I I really need to put some hate monger in here of, like, could they be different at a genetic level?

Simone Collins:Oh my god. But I don’t I don’t know. I’m I’m very confused, but I think I think your whole thing of, no, it just has to be a more airtight religion is a very good answer.

Malcolm Collins:No. I think

Simone Collins:it’s a they I

Malcolm Collins:think it’s both because you don’t get this to the same extent in France or Spain or Italy. You need both. You need

Simone Collins:I know. I know. But the the Appalachia plus or Appalachia plus Maori example that you presented gives me, like, okay. You’re two examples

Malcolm Collins:of saying here. That’s why I’m saying you need both. If you just have the nonrestrictions on idolatry You don’t necessarily get this. If you just have the very aggressive, murderous people, you don’t get this. You need both.

Simone Collins:You need the aggression and the lack of idolatry and witchcraft. Restrictions.

Malcolm Collins:Yes.

Simone Collins:Yeah. Yeah. Agreed. So in in 01/2016 prison interview, a man named Edgar who served with a Juarez cartel said, I officially or I actually sacrificed people for my Santa Muerte. I kill for ordering, but I talk to her and say, hey. I go to a job. Just make me hit. I’m gonna give you that life. It is for you. And this is a guy who claimed to have murdered roughly 60 people. And he just saw everyone as as a sacrifice for Santa Muerte. I remember reading somewhere just how cheap hits were in Mexico, like, $200, like, sometimes even less. And I’m like, maybe, know, it’s like

Malcolm Collins:a bonus. If you’re also going to Santa Muerte, then

Simone Collins:I know. Like, I will pay you. It’s it’s crazy. One one Catholic priest called father Ernesto Caro, he’s he’s a prominent Catholic priest in Mexico, an exorcist. He’s based in Monterrey. He told the BBC about one cartel disposal man who sought exorcisms from him because a lot of these people then eventually kind of feel guilty about what they’re doing. Who knows why? This man described cutting up bodies and burning people alive while devoted to Santa Muerte. Again, sounds super familiar. Cutting up bodies while they’re still alive. Just like we read in about in that in the

Malcolm Collins:Just like the if you haven’t seen the Aztec episode, you absolutely should. It’s shocking.

Simone Collins:Terrifying. So It

Malcolm Collins:completely changed my perspective on, like, the truly evil civilization.

Simone Collins:How how evil humans can can be, the the depravity of which we’re capable. In 2010, a decapitated head was left by the tomb of Arturo Beltran Levia whose apartment contains Santa Muerte items. In Culiacan, investigators treated that as a possible offering. Various Ciudad Juarez cases in 2009 and 2010 included altered remnants both to Santa Muerte or sorry. Spray paint around this area said Santa Muerte and Cuidadnos Flakita of, like, take care of us skinny lady, skinny one. You know, like, Ita is, like, cute. So, like, I don’t know. Cute. You know? Skeleton lady. Spray My wife speaks

Malcolm Collins:fluent Spanish, by the way. That’s why she’s Not.

Simone Collins:I wouldn’t say fluent.

Malcolm Collins:Let’s say Everybody every Spanish person you talk to says fluent.

Simone Collins:So I don’t know. When I speak in Spanish, it’s really bad, but I just speak like I speak now. And so they’re like, well, at least you sound like you instead of Instead, I’m just like Anyway, neighbors said the Hillsdale thirteen group wanted something big as they were, like, making these these offerings and spray painting this stuff. And they they they they burned a victim behind a house around where they spray painted these things. Also, stacked headless bodies have been inferred, but not always proven as a ritual staging. In 2008, in Nuevo La Laredo, a Gulf Cartel members captured CNLOR cartel members, took them to public Santa Muerte shrines, and then shot them.

Malcolm Collins:Well

Simone Collins:I didn’t know that they were public Santa Muerte shrines until researching this episode either. One thing that really creeped me out when I when we were in Peru was all the saint shrines and the extent to

Malcolm Collins:which Why don’t they get rid of the shrines if human sacrifices are happening at the shrine? I mean Like, this is a Catholic country. Right? Like, can’t they just stop

Simone Collins:Yeah. It’s not it’s not a condoned like, Catholic condoned saint. So, yeah, why are there public shrines to Santa Muerte? That’s weird.

Speaker 7:So I decided to look these up, and there are a number of public Santa Muerte shrines in Mexico. So I wasn’t able to pin down the exact one. What is interesting about the two I found here is that in one, two images of Jesus are looking up to the Santa Muerte. And then in the second, there is an image of Jesus directly next to the Santa Marte depicted as an equal. What is fascinating about this is I think a lot of people want to be like, well, this is pagan. This isn’t Catholic. This has nothing to do with Catholicism. And it’s like, clearly, people who believe this wouldn’t consider it that way. Clearly, they would consider themselves a type of Catholic. And so it’s important that we don’t say, well, you you could say, I don’t consider it this, or the Vatican doesn’t consider it this. But part of the problem is as soon as you say the Vatican doesn’t consider it this, then the then you can say, well, anybody who doesn’t agree with all of Vatican two isn’t Catholic. Right? so I think it’s better to just be like, well, there’s different categories of Catholic, and this is one category.

Speaker 8:Oh, and in addition, there have been efforts by the government to tear them down, and, swathes of them have been torn down at specific times to much protest, but they still exist in large numbers.

Simone Collins:Although, why are those hysterically hideous statues in in Palo Alto as well? I mean, who put them there? It’s it’s it’s demonic. Those are disgusting.

Malcolm Collins:Did you see the new horrible black lady statue in the center of Trifalgus?

Simone Collins:Oh, yeah. That no. It’s supposed to be, like, feminism embodied. That’s it’s terrifying. So ugly. Yeah. Her face

Malcolm Collins:looks real sick. Trying to make our cities ugly. Absolutely a thing.

Simone Collins:Well, you know what? Honestly, after all of the news coverage about women lately, I’m like, yep. That’s it. Good job. They they nailed it. That’s feminism embodied now. That’s us. Okay. Great. Anyway, some of this has leaked into Mexican communities in, in in South Texas. So in the mid two thousands, Inter Seda’s communications described slashing teenagers and then collecting the blood in a cup and then toasting to Santa Muerte. And this reminded me of all of the the rituals that you had to practice as an Aztec citizen or priest that involved hurting yourself. You know, like, the one where they would cut through their tongues and then shove a rope with knots on it through your tongue, like, a 100 times, however many times. Right?

Malcolm Collins:It does sound like that.

Simone Collins:It sounds like that. other intercepted Zetta chatter, it referenced blood toast to Santissima Huerta, like, the ultimate sage. great. We we love her that much. And and then this goes back even more. Like, in 1989 Matamoros Narcos Santicos Ranch. Narcos Santicos, that’s like, narco saints, drug saints Okay. Belonging to a guy named Aldofo Constanzo involved ritual killings, including Mark Kilroy with a cauldron containing a boiled brain and other remains. Sante Muerte was among the idols worshiped along with Paulo Mayombe, but that’s a a different thing. He’s like a Cuban religious Central African thing.

Malcolm Collins:Glad we’re not living in Texas anymore. Look. We need to push build a wall. I don’t I don’t know. Consolidate consolidate power and push out. Right?

Simone Collins:Like No. I just we need religious reform. I I want everyone to be okay. I don’t care where they are. I I want we Cath Catholics either need to really curtail idol worship or GTFO. I’m just I’ve got very serious problems with it because this I really thought at the end of our Aztec episode that we were okay. I swear to you, it was it was the end of the scary movie of, like, we made it. You know?

Malcolm Collins:We can they killed them all.

Simone Collins:They gone. Was so traumatized. You know, like, we’re covered with blood and mud and our, you know, our hair is, like, half singed off, but, like, we’re gonna survive. And then, yeah, then the the the demon eye opens and, you know, dumb. And then, like, you know, jump scare movies over roll credits. That that was And now this is this is, you know, part two. Aztec empire redux today, everyday life, now, has been all around us. Didn’t realize, didn’t draw the connection.

Malcolm Collins:It ends it ends with the, with the taking native wives. Then you’re like, wait. No. No. What are you doing?

Simone Collins:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It’s just it’s just bad. It’s just bad. And, yeah, I mean, keep in mind, like yeah. I was just picturing, like, the Conquistador has, you know, beautiful baby with, you know, Aztec woman, you know, baby being cradled, baby opens eye, eye demon eye. Like, because the the thing is back to that that first sacrifice I was telling you about that was a a noncartel family, I think one of the the youngest people involved in one of those arrests, the one where, you know, two ten year old boys were killed and one woman Sacrificed, was 15 years old. This is a kid.

Malcolm Collins:This is

Simone Collins:a kid doing this, and there’s just something deeply wrong. And at end of my show notes and what I kind of wanted to, like, post you, which I think you’ve already answered, was can this be fixed? Like, is it I thought, well, you know, it’s just just basically evidence that domineering cultures fail. They get, like, come in and actually save people. Like, can people not be saved? But I think, no. What you’re really saying and what you I think you’ve, to me, plausibly proven and hopefully in in the comments

Malcolm Collins:I didn’t know about the colonization thing. That was a guess for me. I was like, okay. Where did a murder cult exist and you had a Protestant colonization effort? Okay. When it’s not just there. Also, a lot of the tribes in the North were, like, way more brutal than you would imagine. You’re gonna wanna take off your headphones for this, Simone? Okay. Okay. Like, you know the nice and sweet Iroquois who everybody oh, Iroquois confederation. Oh, so one of the things the Iroquois would do is they would, when they would take female slaves, they would make them watch as they cook their children alive and ate them, babies specifically, as a form of, like, psychological torture. So, like, that’s not something we’ve ever done. Our side is up. Anyway, you can

Simone Collins:Thank you.

Malcolm Collins:Okay. But the point being is, like, those tendencies existed maybe not to the same extent as the we we haven’t had major problems

Simone Collins:with that. But, again, like, in the m m I w g two s episode, we talked about the fact that there still are disproportionate rates of violence in in other atrocities in In native communities. Yeah. So, like, there there are, I guess, in the absence of strong culture, still issues in populations that historically had issues with violence and, for lack of a better word, savagery. And that’s important to note. But, yeah, the solution is is strong culture, no idolatry, no witchcraft. Follow the 10 commandments. Yeah?

Malcolm Collins:Yeah. That that that works. But I think in in order.

Simone Collins:In order. Yeah. Well, no. I mean, 10 command just put two words. 10 commandments. That’s it. Because the the no idolatry is in there.

Malcolm Collins:It’s all it’s all in there. But It’s all in the point being is that a lot of people go really hard on some obscure extrapolation from something. Right? Like, as I talked about, like, the the no masturbation thing or, like, I don’t drink alcohol, which is, like, as I pointed out, like, Christianity has multiple alcohol related miracles. Right? Like, that’s clearly not one of the intentions. And they’ll go really strict on this stuff and then just completely ignore, like, the central stuff.

Simone Collins:Right? It’s not it’s just a version of procrastination. It’s it’s like with our kids.

Malcolm Collins:Not version of procrastination. It’s performative purity, which was one of the things that Jesus spoke against at the sermon on the mount. Yeah. And that’s why

Simone Collins:we should In fact, I was just arguing. There’s someone who keeps emailing us about a certain thing, and I was trying to argue to him that, like, Jesus was super okay, for example, with with women of ill repute and tax collectors because those people rejected the corrupt priests of the time who, to Jesus’ point and to your point, engaged in in that performative corrupt form of religion.

Malcolm Collins:The the fact that Jesus was accepting of them, right, and wanted them to come over to his side does not mean he condoned their practices.

Simone Collins:Yeah. but what they they were they, I mean, they were repentant, obviously, but they were he was more interested in them than someone who is literally in the priest class because they were more willing to go back to the basics of, okay, 10 commandments. Gotcha. I think I can do that Yeah. Which is actually really, really hard. And, again, I admit that, but that means that we have to be extra disciplined.

Malcolm Collins:Okay. Love you, Simone. Good episode. Good topic. I had no idea this was happening. I’m gonna be

Simone Collins:Well, no. But you you knew about La Santa Muerte, and you also knew about this the all the Mexican cartels and how insanely violent they are because that’s regularly a news coverage, like some new insane formation of decapitated and dismembered bodies. I just hadn’t put two and two together of, oh, this sounds a little Aztec, and why are they all worshiping a death cult? I also hadn’t actually read the news coverage that showed that many of them and their girlfriends, alleged and otherwise, were, like, super into Santamuerte. So now I’m like, okay.

Malcolm Collins:And that it’s like a gay LGBT thing too. It’s like it’s like the the cartels and, like, gay bars and, like, witchy females. Right? Like, it’s like all of the bad guys in one place. and and note here, I think all gay people but I think that there’s a certain culture that exists within gay culture that definitely is destructive to people who come in contact with it psychologically. Well, yeah.

Simone Collins:I mean, just like you you don’t you’re not anti porn, but you you would probably say that someone who, like, builds their lifestyle around porn

Malcolm Collins:Is doing really bad things.

Simone Collins:Yeah. Probably not weighing their their You

Malcolm Collins:know, like like okay. This is this is a great one, the gay stuff. Right?

Simone Collins:Like The gay stuff.

Malcolm Collins:The gay stuff, the gay there are prohibitions against same sex relationship in the bible, but they are not in the 10 commandments. And you will see people who will build their entire lives around attacking gay people and act like it’s the most important thing that you do ever, ever, ever, and don’t follow the 10 commandments.

Simone Collins:Yeah.

Malcolm Collins:And this is something I see regularly. And it’s like, that, I think, is an incredibly ugly way to live because you’re you’re only using religion or truth where you can use it to make yourself seem better than other people Or instead of using it as a set of tools for restraining yourself.

Simone Collins:Yeah. Agreed. So this stuff’s crazy. Have a good day, Simone. The ask techs aren’t gone.

Malcolm Collins:They will be. People think, uh-oh. Oh, this segment purge and stuff. Pretty interesting. Pretty interesting. They they seem a little, like, very nice for now. But the, you know, baked into some of this.

Simone Collins:The whole point of prenatalism is that you don’t have to work too hard to win. That the point you’ve always made, and this is this holds strong, is that in the past, you used to have to, like, kill people and wage war to just take over. And now you just have to, like, have enough kids and raise them well and set them up With technology. With AI. Look. Birth rates in Mexico are worse than birth rates in The United States. Alright?

Malcolm Collins:Right. But but with genetic modification and stuff like that. Because if some other group is practicing continued genetic modification, continued evolution, continued technological advancement, and you are not, you lose no matter how many kids you have.

Simone Collins:Yeah. And we should delve into the the recent research that found that things like myelination and a variety of other mammalian and vertebrate genetic differences are downstream of retroviral shifts.

Malcolm Collins:Yeah. In in infections. Yeah.

Simone Collins:They’re they’re not Maybe it’s not so much about using CRISPR. Maybe it’s more about engineering viruses.

Malcolm Collins:The point being is, like, people who are like, well, the human human don’t have DNA from other animals in them. It’s like, yes. Yes. You do. Yeah. You do. Are you talking about? Yeah. anyway Yeah.

Simone Collins:You wouldn’t be so smart, apparently, if it weren’t for a virus because

Malcolm Collins:Yeah. This is Timothy or whatever, the guy who we mentioned in the angels episode, where he’s like, oh, the the bible’s obviously against it. Like, no. It’s not. Why are you going so hard on this when the bible doesn’t mention it once?

Simone Collins:Yeah. Back to that theme.

Malcolm Collins:Tech And it will lead to your people being defeated, eradicated, or moved into a realm of irrelevance by people who do continue to technologically develop. Anyway, love you.

Simone Collins:Bye.

Malcolm Collins:Toasty did. And I explained that we may have to kill all the chickens, because if they develop a pattern of eating the eggs, then they’ll teach it to any new chicks. So the only way to have chickens again is to start fresh. And Octavian and Torsten were extremely distressed by that. Octavian was like, yeah. I’m cutish. And I was like, yeah. I’m cutish. And Torsten was like, even my birthday chicks? And I was like, even your birthday chicks. So, hopefully, they don’t pick that up.

Simone Collins:Yeah. The most important thing is this was a dropped egg. It’s it’s actually not that big of a deal. It’s if they’ve learned that they pack the eggs, that they get a treat, that’s the problem, which is why we put fake eggs in their nests. So that if they pack at them and nothing good happens, then they don’t start eating their eggs. It’s not that big of a deal if they eat a broken egg because it kind of looks fundamentally different. And I don’t know. We we’ve not had problems with that in the past, but I appreciate your freaking them out about it because I just don’t like having to clean up the mess, and I just don’t like when they break food that could be eaten. but, yeah, now Octavian’s gonna be extra devastated because laid her first egg today, and it’s really cute. It’s a little little blue egg. Super tiny.

Malcolm Collins:Excited about that. His his favorite chicken. I do not know why he he bonded with one chicken over all other chickens.

Simone Collins:Well, because he really likes orange chickens. And that one day, there was only one orange baby chick, if you’ll recall. The rest were that other funny breed that has yeah. That’s what we mean.

Malcolm Collins:Cutish is a different breed than all other chickens?

Simone Collins:Yeah. You know that one adolescent chicken we have that’s a deep burnt orange color? That’s a blue it’s a blue egg layer, and it’s different from the helmet head chickens.

Malcolm Collins:Oh, so we got the helmet heads and then just Cutiesh.

Simone Collins:Yeah. The Cutiesh.

Malcolm Collins:Yeah. Who’s the leader chick.

Simone Collins:Yeah. Yeah. They all follow they all follow her around. She’s a born a born leader just like Octavian. She’s great.

Malcolm Collins:Oh my god. So anything new today?

Simone Collins:No. Just quite distracted with the kids homeschooling. But Tursten’s after actually doing a pretty good job. He’s well ahead of Octavian in lessons so far today, strong lead. Even though as he moves about the house to do his lessons in different locations, he always has to move his retinue with him. He gets up to the desk next to my office this morning, and he’s like, oh, I forgot my rock. And I’m like, Toasty, you don’t need the rock. And he’s like, no. Like, runs downstairs and then comes back up all very you know, here’s my rock. And it’s like, it’s not an interesting rock. It’s a piece of broken pavement. But sometimes I feel like I learn a lot from the kids, you know, in terms of how, like, it it’s the end of the world if something doesn’t quite go their way. And then I see myself, and I’m like, you know what? This is just me. This is how I react to absolutely everything too. Yeah. When you get a call, when your

Malcolm Collins:schedule changes, and you’re like

Simone Collins:And I’m like then I’m I am I am Octavian on the floor having his little his little fit. And it helps me put my own stupid behavior in perspective, and I appreciate having that reflected extremely explicitly to me. Thanks, world, life, circumstances.

Malcolm Collins:Sure. And in terms of advertising the website, we have two big new features. One that I

Simone Collins:Can you show this on YouTube? I don’t know if you can show this on YouTube.

Malcolm Collins:Oh, I’m not gonna show the well, one makes comics, but it can also make not safe for work comics, which we’re going to put on not safe for work websites. And it’s it’s still improving. This one’s still improving a lot.

Simone Collins:It’s really interesting. I feel times. Learn a lot from AI to see where the shortcomings on this are because the the comic frames themselves look really good. And then you read the speech bubbles, which Malcolm cleverly has added later, like, after. And it’s Was doing a bad job

Malcolm Collins:with the speech bubbles, and I think I finally pinned down what was causing that, and I think that’s fixed. So we’ll see

Simone Collins:if language food menu in rural China level. You know? Like, heavily beaten dancing chicken, depressed dog. Like, that’s, like, the dishes. It it’s it’s very strange. So what’s your solution? Is your solution just to, like, first write the full storyboard and script and then have the the frames made and then have that exact script to put in the frames so that there’s not, like because I think the issue was that AI was reading the pictures and then making very stupid speech bubbles based on that instead of going off, like, a master script storyboard and just putting the exact verbatim script into the speech bubbles. Is that what you were doing as your fix?

Malcolm Collins:No. It was losing it it’s it’s it’s confusing. The way it made a mistake was nuanced. The other feature that I created I’m really excited to share with people is you put in a MAWA or comic of your choice, and it will read it for you. And it will assign, like, female voices to female characters, male voices to the male characters, and create a video of the the, like, the scene that it’s focused on with it reading that scene. In in addition to all of that, it’s going to be just like because a bunch of channels have started doing this as, a income stream or something, and I watch them regularly. It’s the thing I watch most now, actually.

Simone Collins:I can vouch I can vouch for that.

Malcolm Collins:Which is because I I really love my villainous Moas. Okay? I love my villainous Moas, and this Her

Simone Collins:heart pounded as she looked into his face.

Malcolm Collins:But now I can take those from any language, have them stream in English with different character voices, and it doesn’t cost much money. Like, the anime dubber cost a lot of money. This, can run for very, very

Simone Collins:Would this could this also just work on general comics like that adorable BDSM one?

Malcolm Collins:Yeah.

Simone Collins:I guess there’s not a is there a Webtoons version of that? What about, love advice from, what,

Malcolm Collins:Duo You could do that if you want. Yeah. You could do it on any of them. Oh. And I will maybe try to use this to advertise the site a bit. We’ll see. I mean, it’s more of an issue with copyright, so I’ll try to say the stuff that’s available for free.

Simone Collins:Oh, yeah. Recommendation for love advice from the duke of hell, though. It’s the sweetest.

Malcolm Collins:Yes. You you quite like that one, and we’ll see if we can then shunt up people who like it into, like, paid versions as well as the site. So very cool and a new thing that you can do with our fab. And ours is way better than the ones that you just see online because it actually reads the text of the text instead of telling you about what the text says, which actually makes it very hard to follow what’s going on. You

Simone Collins:know, as a power user, you know best.

Malcolm Collins:Alright. So get me started on this, Simone.

Simone Collins:Okay. Here we go. Pulling up my notes.

Tectone joins Malcolm and Simone for a wide-ranging conversation on preparing for fatherhood, protecting children from cultural influences through homeschooling and private education, and building supportive networks among like-minded families. They discuss the evolution of the online right from its early days through Gamergate and into a focus on authenticity and family values.

The discussion covers practical advice on raising multiple children, the challenges of public schooling, video game recommendations, and strategies for sustaining independent content creation. Tectone shares personal stories from his background and experiences navigating online communities while emphasizing long-term planning for the next generation.

Episode Transcript

Malcolm Collins: Hello! I’m excited to be here with you today. Today, we are thrilled to have on one of the meme lords of the Internet, Tectone, easily if we’re talking about OGs of the intellectual and cultural movement that has become the new right, one of the sort of instigating members, leading members, and still one of the, not just, I think, in terms of setting the tone, widest of audience members, but also you’ve done a really good job recently in bringing people together on your show, like, you know, bringing together Muno and Nux and stuff like that to get a feeling of community, which I think is really important in building this. but there’s a few things I was excited to talk to you about. One is you’ve got a kid on the way. Right?

Tectone:Yes. I do. I’m very excited.

Malcolm Collins:Have you what are your plans for how you keep your kid from getting brainwashed? Like, are you doing schooling? Are you doing homeschooling? Are you doing, like have you thought about this?

Tectone:I’ve thought about everything. And, also, for everybody who’s new to me, hello. My name is John, or you can call me Tectone, whatever you guys like. And, also, thank you all for inviting me on your show. I was very irresponsible today, and I missed my stream because a new game came out called Fire Emblem Fortunes Weave. Oh my god.

Malcolm Collins:Oh, it’s a new Fire Emblem game?

Tectone:It’s unbelievable. It’s unfucking believable.

Malcolm Collins:The last one kind of sucked. It’s it’s not like the last one.

Tectone:Yeah. The last one what was it wasn’t three houses. Three houses was amazing.

Malcolm Collins:Three houses was so I held a guard. Obviously, best waifu ever.

Tectone:Of course.

Simone Collins:I get it.

Malcolm Collins:I almost I I

Tectone:struggle with my Second Yeah.

Malcolm Collins:Oh, yes. Of course. Yeah. We’ve got human rights. I forgot.

Tectone:Yes. Oh, yeah. That too. I was talking about Tharja. Tharja is

Malcolm Collins:my favorite female character in Iron Man

Tectone:and then Edelgard. Yeah.

Malcolm Collins:No. And then there was this intermediate one that was, like, you couldn’t even, like, date the characters or something. Yeah. And and then there was and so now there’s a new one, and it’s, like, actually more three houses y?

Tectone:Yes. It’s very three houses y. There’s four separate, like, playthroughs you can go through. And then the more you do, the more they link up together, which is incredible. I’m, like, 20 deep so far. I barely slept. Oh my god. but yeah. And then and then I saw the new Resident Evil movie, which, good lord, what a catastrophe. terrible. The the critics are just lying about it. They said it was incredible. It was dog s**t.

Malcolm Collins:Oh, no. It’s a shame. Do do you did you watch the first resident evil movie when it came out?

Tectone:No. Oh, god. It was

Malcolm Collins:so good for when it came out. Really? Yeah. They, and the special effects, they were so like, they made the dogs that were, like, the zombie dogs by putting spaghetti sauce on them. And and and it the effect came out looking really good. If you haven’t seen the original original resident evil Yeah. I’d I’d strongly recommend it. It’s it’s one of those it’s like, I mean, of course, you’ve seen the original Mortal Kombats. Right? Like

Tectone:Yeah. I have.

Malcolm Collins:Yeah. It’s it’s it’s it’s takes itself more seriously than those do. But I think it’s, like, similar sorts of, like, quality. I don’t know. Maybe you don’t like those. I thought those movies were amazing.

Tectone:No. They’re fun. it was also hilarious because, in the theater, I bumped into Eli Double Tap and Brandon Herrera in the movie theater. So I was like, damn, bro. What y’all doing here? I didn’t know they liked resident evil, so that was hilarious. But, anyways, circling back to us.

Malcolm Collins:Well, hold on. I’ve gotta give mortal combat advice for childbearing.

Tectone:Sure.

Malcolm Collins:So every night, and I actually learned this from my brother, but if you have boys, the thing boys love doing more than, you know, being hugged or loved is having somebody in a fight with them. And so what I do is I I go, Alexa, like, put on the Mortal Kombat song, and then we do, like, a fake fight every night when I’m putting them together. And because, you know, we got five kids. So

Tectone:Five kids?

Malcolm Collins:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Tectone:Wow. What a hope

Malcolm Collins:I know you guys said it. Three is what you’re aiming for.

Tectone:Three is the minimum. Good. We’re we’re shooting for seven. Five, that’s awesome. Wow.

Simone Collins:You’re doing it right. You’re doing it right.

Tectone:Yeah. We got we got

Simone Collins:Plus you get economies of scale, so it’s all good.

Tectone:Yeah. We got we got one going right now, which I can’t wait.

Malcolm Collins:So so children are like Pokemon. They are meant to be fought and then bred. And by that, I mean, you have to find them partners because dating markets don’t work anymore.

Tectone:Yeah. No. It’s true. I mean, I I can’t imagine my kid going on Tinder to find somebody to

Malcolm Collins:Oh, it’s so hard. Yeah. Oh. It’s awful. We I’ll actually, like, hook you up with this before you go further, but we are building a system of parents that are, like, based, and we’re gonna be building, like, a London season for them. Not, like, in London, but basically, once a year, all of the the sort of based sane families are gonna have, like, one location where all the kids do to do a series of, like, meeting each other parties like you used to do at London during the season for, like, marriage. And That’s cool. Yeah.

Tectone:I mean, I hope very cool. Yeah.

Malcolm Collins:Our kids are young now. So but, anyway, yes. To the kids, what’s your plan here?

Tectone:Okay. So, my wife is in her second trimester, which has been awesome. first trimester was pretty hard for her, but, I just made sure to take care of her as best I could. It’s very hard as a husband to see your wife, you know, not feeling well, and there’s quite literally nothing you can do. Yeah. Especially with, like, you know, medicine coming out, like, acetaminophen increasing the, autism chance in children. Wondering, should we take this? Is is, like, you know, is the current headache you’re experiencing worth making our child in the womb perhaps form Yeah.

Simone Collins:An issue for life. Anything.

Malcolm Collins:You can’t take anything. Yeah. It’s it’s such a hard decision because certain levels of anxiety and discomfort in the mother can also lead to birth problems. Absolutely. You’re always weighing, will this help more than the potential impact it could have on the child?

Tectone:Yeah. So the thing with my wife is I don’t know if you know who my wife is. she was very she used to be very famous on the Internet.

Malcolm Collins:Yes. But Fitness influencer. Yeah. Yeah.

Tectone:Fitness influencer. Yeah. the best. she’s awesome. incredibly jacked. And her mindset is, I can squat 405 pounds. I can deal with this s**t. So Yeah. You know? So she just tanks everything. And I I’m always Yes. Whatever you wanna do, sweetheart. What if if you’re sure, sweetheart. but, yeah, we got, a rubber duck to make sure whenever she takes a hot bath, it’s below a 104

Malcolm Collins:degrees just to make

Tectone:sure that everything’s perfect for him. But, yeah, to make sure my kids don’t become and you said this is edited?

Malcolm Collins:Yeah. Yeah. To make

Tectone:sure my kids don’t become, like, [bleep] [bleep] [bleep], I’m gonna be homeschooling my kids, until, middle school. and then for middle school, my buddy runs a Christian private school, and then he’s gonna go there.

Malcolm Collins:Oh, thank god. So you know the head of the school?

Tectone:Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. Do. I’ve already met and I’ve met with the principal, everybody who runs behind the scenes. it’s a it’s a wonderful school. but, yeah, they’re they’re gonna be homeschooled by me and my wife for it the basics. Because, like, I’m gonna be real. It’s it’s also very it’s not time consuming. A lot of people think homeschooling takes longer

Malcolm Collins:than No. No. No. No. It’s a weird show. We moved to homeschooling, after trying public school with our kids.

Tectone:Yeah.

Malcolm Collins:and there had like, I literally I thought it was gonna be, like, a ton of work, but there’s, it’s basically automated at this point. You you put the kid in front of what are essentially games, and you say, have you done this many lessons today?

Tectone:Yep.

Malcolm Collins:and the effects it had on our kids to take them out of school. Because at school, our kid was constantly getting sent to the principal’s office because he made he made finger guns, and this he had to be taken out of his class away from all his friends because they said it was traumatizing to the other kids. What? He at another point, he was taken to the principal’s office, I had to drive to school. I’m just giving you an idea of how cooked schools are now. I had to go to school for meeting with the principal because he said that something looked like a nuke. And I was like, what are you talking? He’s not gonna bring a nuke to school. Think this is

Tectone:That’d be very impressive.

Malcolm Collins:It would be. Yeah. I’m like, if he nukes the school, like, deserved, but we’re he’s he’s really you

Simone Collins:know, you’ve made it win. You don’t have a school shooter, but school nuker. It’s true.

Tectone:School nuker.

Simone Collins:Yeah. It’s got the this is what the this is what the tiger moms want. You know? The one Yeah.

Malcolm Collins:And the guys, they’re don’t funny. But okay. That that sounds like a good plan. I love it. and I like the where did you learn how easy homeschooling was? Because until we started doing it, I was under this impression that it was, like, super difficult.

Tectone:Oh oh, so, like, I have, like, a very obsessive personality when I like something, and I wanna do something that, like, consumes my entire life. So I’ve, like, already read I’m on, like, my fifth book now on how to properly raise your kids. I also read a I read a really funny book on, like what was it called? I believe it was called, how to raise a kid. Yeah. How to raise a kid in a woke society.

Malcolm Collins:Oh, wow.

Tectone:Yeah. Yeah. That was that was a great book. And then, there was another one. Sorry. I I just I don’t really publish in the titles, but it was a it was a red book. It was it was an Amazon bestseller. It was, like, a fatherhood. There there’s it’s it’s two parters. [bleep]. Let pull this up. Sorry. It was a red

Malcolm Collins:so prepared.

Tectone:Yeah. Well, you have to be. Right? You have

Malcolm Collins:to No. No. You’re supposed to be. Before my first kid, I did this. I, like, read all this stuff on how not to accidentally kill them. and by the time a week before the kid was

Simone Collins:born Yeah.

Malcolm Collins:Yeah. I went on this, like, big thing on, like, okay. How do I do this kid thing? And then, you know, by the time we’re on kid number five, I’m just like, is he we do the basics to keep them alive. You know?

Tectone:Oh, oh, so, yeah, the best book I ever read so far. It’s called the expectant father, the ultimate guide for dads to be Which goes through step by step every single month on what your wife is going through so that way you as a man could kinda understand how to better take care of your wife.

Malcolm Collins:Oh my gosh.

Tectone:That was amazing. I I just lent that out to my other buddy who’s, you know, the guy who’s running the school because he also has a kid, cooking right now. Yeah. I have I have four buddies right now who are all in like, all pregnant at the same time.

Simone Collins:That’s crazy.

Malcolm Collins:Well, it’s like yeah. A lot of people in our community too. Right? Like, you know, you got Straub and Rev and

Tectone:Yeah. Others. Straub Straub was actually messaging me, telling me that because I came out with my story that Sofia was pregnant, that that actually gave her and Rev the courage to actually talk about it publicly

Simone Collins:Oh my gosh.

Tectone:Which I thought was super strong. I I think Rev and Straub are just absolutely great. they

Malcolm Collins:Oh, I think they’re gonna be great parents. Yeah.

Tectone:I think so too.

Malcolm Collins:I’m well, I’m really excited, and this is something I I wanna talk about on this is, like, the evolution of our community, which you’ve been in for a long time. Right?

Tectone:Yeah. I’ve been doing this about eight years.

Malcolm Collins:Yeah. And I would say that, like, when I I I don’t I feel like when I entered this community, it was the Internet skeptic community where, like

Tectone:When was that? What? When did you enter the community? Because I’m I’m only just

Malcolm Collins:now like, as a viewer. I mean,

Tectone:in, like,

Malcolm Collins:high school. I’m I’m about, like, six years, seven years older than you. So I was in sort of that pre the early, early YouTube era. You’re, like, 40?

Simone Collins:Yeah. I turned 40 this year. Yeah.

Malcolm Collins:Damn. You look Wait. I turned 40 this year?

Simone Collins:Yes. You do, Malcolm. We should probably celebrate or something.

Tectone:You look you look great, man. I’m gonna say, you look man, I I hope hey. You still got your

Simone Collins:hair on. The age of his soul is, like, 11, and so he he maintains his youthful banter. I but

Malcolm Collins:I sort of chart or it’s it’s very interesting that this became, like, the online right. Because the the sort of way that I remember the community evolving is, at least from my experience in it, is it started with, like, the online edgy atheist thing, and then it got boring to to, like, attack Christians, and so they started attacking feminists. And then it sort of began to merge with and I began to hang out with, like, Red Pill community, like, Manosphere, like and then, like, Gamergate happened. And, like, then the Red Pill got closed down, and the the, MGTOWs all left, and then, like, Tumblr redaction left. And so all of them ended up sort of merging with the Gamergate crowd. and then that crowd became, sort of the proto Trump base. and then now there’s this growing feeling. And I think that the community where I really got a feeling of how big and how impactful the community is now is we were talking with Celestium recently. Do you know Celestium? She’s like a Christian VTuber. Anyway

Tectone:I I probably do. I’m just horrific with names. I I meet people for the first time, like, three times.

Simone Collins:It’s You’re in good company.

Malcolm Collins:Yes. So Celestium was saying that as, like, a hardcore Christian, she often feels on the outs with sort of the mainstream online right because the mainstream online right is this sort of nerdy video game first. Like, they basically created this entire movement just because they kept [bleep] with our video games, and they couldn’t stop themselves. And I wonder what your experience was with that. Like, when did you begin to identify politically? When did you begin to be like, I’m gonna talk about political issues? Did your views change on those things? Like, were you pushed into them or what? Yeah.

Tectone:Alright. So to give you a little bit of background, so I I grew up in a military family. K. I moved out when I was 16 years old. Around 18 years old, I went and I lived in Canada for about six or seven years. I Jesus. I I can’t remember I can’t remember which one it was. I was living in, like, lib hell. I was in Canada when Trump got voted into office for

Simone Collins:the Oh, wow.

Tectone:By the way, the feeling of that was Yes. It was like pandemonium. Like, people were out of their mind, and they would see my car, which still had Texas plates.

Malcolm Collins:Oh, no?

Tectone:Yeah. And they

Malcolm Collins:It’s his fault.

Tectone:No. That’s it. They vandalized my car.

Malcolm Collins:Not Well, are you that serious? Yes.

Tectone:Dead serious.

Simone Collins:Wow.

Tectone:I had a person break my car window and put s**t in the back seat of my vehicle. Yeah. there was a bunch of, like, cracked out motherfuckers, homeless people on the street, and, know, all the God. All the women in my college were losing their [bleep] mind. And, I remember the first transgender I ever met, which was this kid, and I never learned their names. never learned its name because they were just somebody who wore headphones all the time. Because they said that the NORs hurt their autism, so they had to wear headphones all the time. So we all called them headphones.

Malcolm Collins:Oh, truly a pioneer of autism and trans identity.

Tectone:Yes. A coincidence. It’s insane. and all they would do is and I I s**t you not. This is a big problem. Nobody could do anything about it. Was they were a guy, very clearly a guy, and they would just go stand in the women’s restroom because they said that’s where they felt the most comfortable. And nobody could do anything about it. The staff representatives couldn’t do anything about it, and I had no idea what to do. I I don’t know how you guys were. It’s like, you know, I was, I think I was, like, 25.

Malcolm Collins:Oh, I was so so for context on where we come from, in college no. Sorry. In high school, I was in the GSA, the Gay Straight Alliance.

Tectone:Really?

Malcolm Collins:Like, my I had I had friends, like, before anyone was aware that trans was a a phenomenon. And Simone grew up in San Francisco. So her So

Simone Collins:I just assumed I would marry a woman someday.

Malcolm Collins:Like, it’s

Simone Collins:when all my friend all my friends had two moms. I was like,

Malcolm Collins:well, I guess that’s Moving. Like

Tectone:that. Normal. Right? Yeah. Yeah. So what my my political views when I was younger was I don’t give a [bleep]. Like, just leave me alone, and I don’t care.

Simone Collins:Very reasonable.

Tectone:Yeah. Like, my my my old career plan was was whenever I graduated high school, I was gonna go intentionally get hit by a bus. That way, I wouldn’t have to work a job, and that way, I could collect money from the government for the rest of my life.

Malcolm Collins:That was how yeah.

Tectone:That’s how much I just did not give a [bleep] about, you know, becoming a cog in the machine. That’s how much I didn’t care about what anybody I didn’t give a [bleep] about anything else. I was like, as long as they leave me alone, I don’t give a [bleep] at all.

Malcolm Collins:And then they ruined video games. Yes.

Tectone:Then the the big thing was, they took away the word retard. And they said that you could not say that, and you would lose your career over saying the word retard. You’d be castrated. True. You’d be called a [bleep]. And, I went from Canada, and I got invited to join OTK. and so I came back down to Austin, Texas. It was where I moved from anyways.

Malcolm Collins:I think

Tectone:the pretty sure it either it was either El Paso, Texas or Austin, Texas. I can’t remember. It’s been so [bleep] long. I’m [bleep] 32 now. So I don’t I don’t remember which one it was. yeah. So I go back down to Austin, Texas, which is also, like, you know, people I I don’t know why people say this. They say, oh, Texas. It’s the reddest state in the entire country. Brother, Austin, Texas is really the bluest city in, like, the [bleep] it

Malcolm Collins:Extremely true. Boring California. Austin, Texas. When when

Simone Collins:I moved from California, all of my progressive, like, friends were like, we’re to Texas. I moved to Texas. They freaked out. And they’re like, well, can’t you just move to Austin? Like, even in in San Francisco, they’re like, accept that Austin’s

Malcolm Collins:like gonna be, like, shot on the street. They’re like, you shouldn’t go outside because everyone

Simone Collins:has You can’t. Yeah. Because, I mean, you know, anyone who’s coded conservative is basically

Malcolm Collins:anything alien. Writing this to her from Oakland. Right? Like and I’m like, nobody in Austin, the last time we were there, we literally saw two bums fighting, like, outside the restaurant we were eating at. And Here’s

Tectone:here’s what’s crazy. So I’ve lived all over the place my entire life. But in Texas, the only place I have ever experienced gun violence was in Austin, Texas.

Simone Collins:Yes.

Tectone:Nowhere else.

Simone Collins:No. You feel super safe everywhere else.

Tectone:Yeah. But in Austin, Texas, which is very anti gun because they’re very like, oh, you know, peace, love, happiness, be whatever the [bleep] you wanna be. I was involved in a shooting in a mall. And, my goal at the time was I had to put myself between her and a person with a gun, and I got every well, my friend group. Besides this one black guy, oh my god, z was an idiot. He was a marine, and he went towards the shooters.

Malcolm Collins:No. I was [bleep] alive.

Tectone:He’s okay. He’s good. Nobody got injured in the shooting. Thank god. They they shot up the place, but you can look this up. It was in Austin, Texas. It was at a mall. There’s, like, 2022, 2023. But, yeah, I put myself between her and active shooters, and I got me and my other homie out of there into a car. And then I got in the car, and then I drove over a hill just to get the [bleep] out of there quicker. It was a [bleep] crazy ass time.

Malcolm Collins:Wow.

Tectone:Austin. Anyways, yeah, Austin [bleep] sucks.

Malcolm Collins:Are are you planning to move? I have suggestions.

Tectone:Oh, I don’t I don’t live in Austin anymore. I live I live in San yeah. Live in San Antonio now.

Simone Collins:Oh, San Antonio is great. Okay. Fantastic.

Tectone:San Antonio is a is a very nice town. I like it quite a lot. But yeah. Slowly over time as they would encroach into our place, and, you know, I’m I’m a very I will say and this is a real this is why I get in so much s**t. I know what people want me to say. It’s very obvious. Everybody knows what the correct thing is to say at every given time. I could dude, I could be such a good grifter. It would be so easy. Like, dude, I I know exactly dude, I could I could three x my career right now by hitting a couple of talking points that people would like me to say and people who they would like me to disavow. Like, are you telling me, like, I wouldn’t get crazy [bleep] points if I were to, like, disavow Asmigold and say, well, actually actually, he’s like this. I’m not gonna [bleep] do that. Absolutely.

Malcolm Collins:I don’t don’t know. I think you’d lose a lot of good good Yeah.

Simone Collins:You would I how would you get points for that? Yeah.

Tectone:It’s it’s very, very, very easy. I’m telling you, like, the well, now once again, that would be a retirement plan. The the amount of, like, big exposure I would get from

Malcolm Collins:the bedroom

Simone Collins:and saying Yeah. Maybe.

Tectone:Actually, I know things that he did behind the scenes, and now I’m gonna tell him because I’m tired of what he’s been saying. He’s become far different than the man who I used to know that he was.

Simone Collins:People are just dying for someone to

Tectone:say that. Of course. Then I find some sponsors to hit, and that’s my exit plan. Getting huge bursts of relevance

Malcolm Collins:Just in case.

Tectone:Armed sponsors leave. Yeah. You know, like, it’s it’s so easy how, like, how how brain dead the Internet is. And, like, you know, for example, when I played Genshin Impact, I was making, like, a a minute. Genshin, I was making, like, over $3,000,000 every year playing Genshin Impact, which was [bleep] money. And I knew exactly what they wanted. Yeah. I I knew exactly what these companies wanted me to say. I knew what the fan base wanted me to say. You know, I just say the character’s good. Say the story’s good. Say the game’s good. Say you love trans people. Do all that. I’d still be make well, I’m not gonna lie. This year, I’m making my most financial and I’m not gonna say how much it says, but this is my most financially successful year of all time.

Simone Collins:Wow.

Tectone:People say that I’ve holy [bleep]. It’s insane. I’m not I’m not gonna lie. you know, people say I fell off. No. I [bleep] did. It’s actually unreal.

Simone Collins:Favorable. Yeah. Well, I I I I like to

Malcolm Collins:hear that. I’d feel really bad if it turned out that you fell off by, like, going honest.

Tectone:Yeah. No. I I did for a while. I’m not gonna lie. Oh, wow. And I I and I’ll go into that.

Malcolm Collins:Oh, yeah. Because they banned you from a bunch of s**t. Right?

Tectone:I was banned off a lot of things. I was banned off a lot of [bleep] things. I lost about 90% of my audience at that point. Oh. But, yeah, I played Genshin, and my issue was is every single time something bad was happening, I would say that it was bad. When everybody else would just lie and say that it was good in order to continue forming the sponsors of the company, I was like, no. This is horrible. This is a terrible business practice. And I actually got China to revolt against the company and actually change their in game system to be more, or I guess, less predatory for their players. And that was, like, when the company just had enough of me and blacklisted me from everything, which, you know, I I don’t I don’t blame them, but it’s like, you know, I I value being transparent and audio and honest to my audience about everything else even to a fault, even when I know it’s gonna get me hate. Like, you know, same thing with, like, you know, bigger content creators. Like, I I could’ve just glazed Miz. Right? I could have just glazed and be like, oh, he’s a great guy. Love him. But he sucked. And I’m gonna keep it brief. I don’t wanna talk about him. Because I I’m good. You know? I’m just [bleep] exhausted about talking about that guy. It’s just so irritating. But there there are certain content creators where I was in a position where I could have glazed all of these people, but, like, they were [bleep] terrible. Like, they were absolutely awful. And so over the years, learning about all these content creators who say, you know, say the talking point, say the thing, you know, say the thing that we all want you to say, eventually, it gets exhausting. Because then it just takes away your creative freedom. It makes it to where you cannot be yourself every single time you go live. And the really big risk about creators who actually do fall off and lose everything, it’s usually because the mask slips off. So if you just never wear one and you’re always yourself and your chat knows exactly who you are, then you can never lose everything. And that’s why I believe my audience has been following me for eight years because they know exactly who I am. And so I’m not really hiding anything at this point. If I did,

Malcolm Collins:I think that sort of defines the wider community. One thing that I often note about this community is it has a very low amount of inter creator scandal and fighting.

Tectone:I agree. Yeah. And on the other side, it’s [bleep] constant.

Malcolm Collins:Right? It’s constant. Like It’s constant. The there’s there’s just not a lot of scandals. There’s not a lot of, like, I hate the like, the the the spiciest still we’ll get is, like, somebody disagrees with somebody else’s views on abortion. Right? Like and it’s like Yeah. That’s that’s pretty low tier in terms of a a big controversy. And I think that one of the reasons is is because the thing that the community values most isn’t your ideology or anything like that. It’s just that you’re being authentic. And so there isn’t a lot of room for that.

Tectone:Yeah.

Malcolm Collins:I mean, one of the the jokes I always make about this is I I I think it’s pretty odd that if you look at, like, the wider nerd right community, one of the figures who is very well liked across it is, like, an actual socialist, Shoe On Head. And, like, most most of the creators still react to her, whether it’s Asma Gold or Nux or Shuon Head’s amazing. Yeah. Or anyone else. And it’s like, so why is she why are we all like, why do we all respect her if she’s, like, a communist receptionist? Because she’s honest about who she is.

Tectone:Yeah. I absolutely agree. And that that’s what people are kinda waking up to because and and and to circle back to where I really became Yeah. Very [bleep] up [bleep] up, became much more open and, like, talking about politics and all that is when I realized how easily a man can lose their life over doing nothing. And I mean this from the bottom of my heart, how quickly a man can lose so much of their life over something they never did. And I think at that point, because I’ve seen that happen to myself as well as many of my friends, like Rich Campbell, for example. And this is something that I get very emotional about. I’m not gonna cry on stream. I’m not a b***h, at least not right now. But Rich Campbell was someone who I cared about very deeply. I would I there was a time where I can sort of, like, as close as a brother. Obviously, we stopped talking for, you know, very long time. I still don’t talk to Rich these days. Yeah. But seeing what he had to go through when he was falsely accused by 13 different women. Jesus. At the same time, 13 different false allegations at the same time. And everybody around me told me, you know, we just gotta we just gotta let it happen. You know? Like, we don’t know. We gotta be careful. And I there there’s I I actually was the first person to go live and talk about it. And I didn’t want to believe it at all, but I knew exactly what I was supposed to say because I was told what I was supposed to say. And it broke my heart because I didn’t believe the things that I was having to say on that stream. And, also, fun fact, I was also the first person the moment I got any confirmation or even a hint of his innocence, I was also the very first person who went and talked about it over a year before he was fully found innocent. And I got s**t on for for months

Malcolm Collins:Oh gosh.

Tectone:Over being the first one to say, actually, I heard that Rich is actually winning. You can actually go to LSF and find the articles of people just shitting on me for saying that he was innocent. But it was it was devastating. You know, I’ve seen that happen to many people. You know, even even even creators who I used to watch when I was a kid like Tobuscus. Tobuscus had everything taken away from him. He’s still I’m gonna and once again, he’s doing great now, and he wants to make it very clear that he’s doing great now. But Topazkis was like, nugget in a biscuit. Sword, sword, sword, my diamond sword, watching him play Happy Wheels. That was the guy who I grew up, watching and

Malcolm Collins:What happened to him? I’m not familiar with his story.

Tectone:Oh, okay. So, like, fourteen years ago, he was, like, quite literally competing with PewDiePie for, like, the most watched YouTuber of all time during his era. And then some girl he met at a party said that, like, he, like, drugged and [bleep] her. And then Pewdie or sorry. So Buss’s lawyer said to not say anything about it. And so he just went radio silent for four and a half years until he just said, [bleep] it. I’m tired of being silent. I didn’t do any of this s**t. And then it

Malcolm Collins:was such bad advice when you That’s really bad advice. Stuff in

Simone Collins:the age of the inner Well

Tectone:well, the problem is is that, like, it is and it isn’t. Because the reality is I’ve also gotten a lot of s**t as well as a lot of my other buddies who have been through a similar thing got so much s**t because they went live and talked about it. And the reality is in the Internet, it doesn’t matter if you’re guilty. If someone wants you to be guilty, you are guilty no matter what. No matter what. I wanna remind you, and this is a real thing. Okay? And you can look this up. So I had my gun rights taken away for ten years because I said I was going to go nuclear on other content creators. Oh my god. And what a judge thought was that I was going to take my guns and kill all of these other contigers. I was going nuclear. Everybody on planet Earth needs

Malcolm Collins:Knows what that means.

Tectone:It means talking drama, spreading b******t. Right? And and XQC goes live with nuclear drama and his title every day, so did I. It is what it is. The world the world is [bleep], and that’s why it it that’s why it is so important now to believe innocent and to proven guilty, but that’s not how the world is. That, understanding that your innocence means nothing if people don’t want to believe it, as well as the death of Charlie Kirk, I believe, is what radicalized everybody, so many more people. I mean, I even put out a video on Charlie the day that he died because that was, I believe, forty eight hours after Iridna Zerutsko was killed on the subway train. That’s forty eight hours. It felt like there was a war on white people. It really felt like they’re coming for us. The the years of the thing that we all know is gonna happen is finally going to happen. And I believe Charlie Kirk was the true, like, you know, the the

Malcolm Collins:mission Well, I think so many people one of the things that you’re you’re highlighting here, and it’s definitely something that I felt is, and it and sort of tracked, is so many people become more and more empowered to speak on these issues, when they see people unjustly attacked or or mitigated or try like, for us, the thing that ended up pushing us into this fear is, you know, I’m like we’re like business people. Right? Like, we were in private equity, you know, Stanford MBA. She has a graduate degree from Cambridge. Like, we were like normal, like, business y people. And then we get out there and we get famous for saying fertility rates are too low, and so it’s it’s gonna have, like, negative effects. And then everybody starts calling us racist and, like, tries to have our careers destroyed.

Tectone:That’s insane.

Malcolm Collins:And then we start hanging out with, like, people who other people are saying are right wing. I didn’t think they were right wing. They seem like normal people to me.

Tectone:Well, that’s that’s what it is. Right? Right wing is quite literally normal. Yeah. It really is.

Malcolm Collins:Like That’s like the the dude who stands in a woman’s restroom. Like, that’s creepy. Like

Tectone:Yeah. I’m not I’m not fighting for that. Our forefathers didn’t die. They didn’t bleed on our [bleep] country soil to make sure that, you know, two gay people can adopt a kid and [bleep] it. Like, they just that’s not

Malcolm Collins:Which has happened in unusually high amount. there was a case in, but before we get into this, actually, a question for you. Because I was watching your take on, one of Basic Logic’s recent videos. We were the first channel to interview him, by the way. By the way, do you want a connection with him?

Tectone:Basic Logic?

Simone Collins:I think he streamed with him, didn’t he?

Tectone:You know? Did a stream with him, and I did a stream on his stream. He’s great.

Malcolm Collins:Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Great. Great. Great. Great. Great. Yeah. Yeah. He’s a great guy. Anyway, so Basic Logic, in the video, he was talking about, like, what we can do to fix this situation realistically before, like, civilization collapses. And you were sort of like, well, Europe is lost already, which is our position as well. I I I don’t think that there’s a lot we can do Yeah. To help Europe. And so then the question is is, okay, realistically, like, what’s your plan? What what what what’s your plan for how we might be able to save civilization?

Tectone:You know, my my first and foremost thing, like my previous political views, which is I don’t give a [bleep] about anybody but myself, which is, you know once I let people in, I care about my friends more than I care about, anybody. But I’m I’m focusing on fixing my family situation first and making sure that we’re safe, then kind of talking about that as much as I can. You know, I mean, I did I’m As much as I would love to say, I’m gonna go kill all these b******s.

Malcolm Collins:No. I I I

Tectone:You know what I mean? It’s like, it it it’s it’s it’s quite literally this. And this is how I feel. I believe women control everything. And women, the majority not all women, of course. But the majority of women, they really don’t care about what their politics are. Their politics are whatever keeps them safe. And so I believe the best way to save our country is to have the women understand that the safest politics are the ones that are going to save our nation. Now the problem is women’s politics right now are saving the illegal immigrants and chopping off, boys’ penises right now. So I believe the more exposure that we can get on to, you know, places like Fox News or as many TikTok algorithms or Instagram algorithms as we can possibly get, letting women know that the popular opinion, the overwhelming majority correct opinion, the safe opinion is to get back our country. That is to protect our kids from being groomed. That is to bring things back to normalcy like they were thirty years ago. People use words like conservative. I’m more of a regressive. I’m right. We can’t conserve our country as

Malcolm Collins:No. I I agree a 100%.

Tectone:Decades. Yeah. We can’t we don’t wanna conserve this.

Malcolm Collins:The the strategy that he talked about where I’m like, well, I mean, I I understand he doesn’t like the strategy, but I think it’s the only realistic one. Sort of comes back to what you were saying is focus on your own family first, right, because it’s the only thing you can change.

Tectone:It is.

Malcolm Collins:And and people who are like, we need to keep this group out and this group out and this group out. And I’m like, but you don’t even have any kids. Like like, even if you keep everyone out, if you don’t have any kids yourself, you’re you’re literally a bigger part of the problem. Right?

Tectone:Yeah.

Malcolm Collins:And so all we can do realistically is, or at least in my view, is is work on our own communities and our own families and try to make that as healthy as possible while the rest of stuff, you know, falls apart. And then, hopefully, we hit a position one day where we have enough technology, and a coherent community and capability for power projection that we can do something. And I think one of the trickiest parts and this is something that, like, I often get you know, my fans get angry at me for for saying this more often, but I it’s something and and I I said that I really believe in. It’s one one thing that I really align with Leaflet on is you can’t be overly aggressive with who you carve out of the community on, cultural or ethnic or anything like that lines because you’re you’re never gonna have enough votes to win. Right? You you need a multicultural voting base. You need a a a multiethnic voting base. You need a, and so when you go out there and you go like, even if, like, Indian immigrants are a problem or something like that, you’re really not helping the wider cause by going overly harsh against them. Of course. or or any other group. Right? Like

Tectone:because you because the the and I totally agree with what you’re saying. Going overly harsh is gonna make the next generation think that you’re they’re the bullies and we’re the bad guys, and you don’t want that. You it’s it’s a war on information that is gonna save this country, and you need to get the correct information out. And when the left, which very frequently mask off themselves as, like, aggressive brainwashed retards, whereas the right can like, it’s nice because we have one side that can prove everything they’re saying by saying, look at this graph. Look at this FBI crime, data statistic. Look at all this presentable information. And the other side says, well, look at how angry I am. I’m gonna call you names now. Eventually, by god’s mercy, please, eventually, people will understand that one of us is telling the truth, and here’s the exact point you can prove to, and here’s these other people [bleep] lying. And the other big issue that the reason why so much of this spreads right now is I’ve lived both sides. I have been a part of the squeaky clean as clean as I could have been back in the day. It’s controversy has followed me since day one of my career. Like, I could go on for [bleep] years about this. But as squeaky clean as a a progressive content creator, which I’m sure Chinese companies could have believed that was eight years ago. But I got so much more money when I was more brand friendly with leftist ideals when I was doing the exact same s**t with right wing ideals. So what needs to happen right now is I’m not sure if you know this. Kamala Harris did an entire, like, advertising campaign on Twitch Yeah. When she was going against Donald Trump. there was no, like, paid advertisement opportunities to promote Trump. There was none of those.

Simone Collins:Of course.

Tectone:So the issue right now is that right wing ideologies and talking points monetarily, there is it’s a complete net loss. That’s why I never believe in the word right wing grifting. Like, there there has to be another word. There has because you’re not getting more money Yeah. By talking about right wing. And, like like, example, Candace Owens obviously doesn’t believe what the [bleep] she’s saying. But there there there needs to be a word because you pretty much lose all of your money the moment you start talking right wing ideas. It is very hard. It is very hard to get sponsors right wing contractor.

Simone Collins:Well, and you’re also more likely to be, moderated disproportionately on especially YouTube and especially Twitch.

Tectone:Yes. I I absolutely agree. And also back circling back to the infighting. Pretty much the only infighting on the right that we’ve had is, like, between Snico and every other human being.

Malcolm Collins:I I didn’t think of Snico as, like, right wing, but I guess he technically is.

Tectone:Yeah. He technically is. And, yeah. You know, like, but he keeps on having problems with all these other creators, but it’s not him who’s causing the issues. It’s not him.

Malcolm Collins:Yeah. It’s it’s, well, I mean, he’s a a a Tate acolyte. And I think the the at least, like, the nerd, right, has never been a big fan of that

Tectone:world. Yeah. but I believe bringing more money and sponsorship opportunities and guaranteeing, people’s safety for being able to preach the truth is very important. That’s why I completely stopped streaming on Twitch. That’s why I full went on Rumble because of what I got I got banned on Twitch, like, what, eight times. I’ve never been banned on Rumble a single time. Six months straight. No warnings, no strikes, no bans, nothing. And that’s that’s why I love Rumble. I’ve even been banned on YouTube, which sucks probably about I mean, I’m not I’ve been banned on YouTube a lot. But YouTube is kinda like a necessary evil because that is where you get all of your traction.

Malcolm Collins:Yeah. That’s where you’re you you can’t do it. Yeah. And and, for people who wonder, we have a Rumble. It’s just you probably don’t know about it because YouTube is where we get all our algo. Right?

Tectone:Absolutely. Yeah. And I’m I’m I’m trying very hard to build Rumble. I’ve I’ve been very happy. I’ve convinced creators like Knox and Jake Monroe to give Rumble a shot, and it’s been going very well, especially for Jake. Oh my god. Like, within the

Malcolm Collins:first doing well there? That’s great.

Tectone:Oh, yeah. Within the first week of him streaming, he’s, like, one of the most viewed podcasters Wow. On all of Rumble, which is great.

Malcolm Collins:Wow. Well, seeing them both get demonetized for nothing on YouTube has been incredibly disheartening Yeah. To It’s terrifying. and we’re trying to build up like, our company is you know, if we can keep growing from where we are right now, we should be in a position, you know, next year or the year after where we can start giving money to right wing content creators when they get demonetized. Yeah. But, like, getting to that position, there’s just not a lot of companies like ours that are willing to take that perspective.

Tectone:Yeah. Like so for example, like, to get sponsors for me is, like, near impossible. But what I’m currently doing behind the scenes is the biggest issue with and this is how I kinda wanna help fix the country is bring more money to right wing creators. That way they can financially support themselves to live this lifestyle Is I’m currently building a company that is going to remain nameless. They’ll never have a Twitter. They’ll never have any way for any fan or any enraged retard to attack them. Because that’s why other companies that I’ve previously been associated with have dropped so many creators because they will be known as their name, and the audience, the enraged leftist know that they can attack this company and make them have to drop the creators. So I’m currently working on making a company that’s honestly doing pretty okay already. I’ve connected with a couple well, I’m not gonna say how many, but, some creators between the number of zero and one hundred are currently with this company that will never have a name. So that way, people can get advertisements from my underground dark army of Jews that get their they’re not great advertisers. I’m not gonna lie. They’re not great. But, like, you gotta take what you can [bleep] get at the end of the day. You know? You know, is Raid Shadow Legends really that bad to promote? I don’t know. It’s one of the most innovative, RPGs of all time.

Malcolm Collins:Yeah. Yeah. We we may wanna, hire you, with this company. Because our company has been growing a lot this year, and we’ve sort of reached a point where we’re like, we gotta do more sponsorships. And so I’d I’d be very interested to experiment with those on

Tectone:I would abs you can DM me about that anytime. My my favorite thing is making as much money as possible for my for my friends, my creators, as well as even even who I don’t like. You know? She’s like, I just don’t like big corporations. I don’t. They’re corrupt.

Malcolm Collins:I I hate them too. I Yeah.

Tectone:It’s it’s they’re terrible. And the other thing is and, you know, god bless so many creators’ hearts. A lot of creators are just [bleep] [bleep], and they don’t know their worth at all. They’ll take an advertisement, and I and I’m gonna I’m gonna okay. If you’re a creator and you’re watching this, and if you’re a viewer and you’re watching this Yeah. You can know this. Your sponsored rate for a one hour stream is $1 per viewer per hour. Do not accept lower than that. For for YouTube integrations, you can probably do let’s say you get around a 100,000 views on a video, you should be charging somewhere between 2,000 and $2,500 for a ninety second integration on a 100,000 viewed video. Just keep that as boilerplate. Dedicated videos are a scam. Don’t do them unless you’re

Malcolm Collins:cashed out.

Simone Collins:That’s solid advice. That’s very solid advice.

Tectone:Because, like, dude okay. So there was I I helped a lot of VTubers back in the day, and that’s why people were like, why do you not like VTubers now? I don’t not like VTubers. I just don’t like a lot of the prominent VTubers. But, like, I’ve made VTubers in this space. No joke. I’ve saved them from, like, complete contract catastrophe where they could have had their entire careers uploaded. I’ve I’ve put them all over, like, $34,000,000 in the hands of VTubers. There was a VTuber who I’m gonna remain nameless, but her and I were on the exact same contract. We had the exact same viewership. And for their contract, they were being paid $400 a month to do the exact same thing as me, yet I was being paid $10,000 a month. No. Because they don’t know their worth. They just said, well, I was just happy to be getting anything. I’m sorry. That’s not how this works. As content creators, your lifespan as a content creator is not gonna be forever. You’re not. People are gonna move on, and what people need to realize is the people who watch you today will not be the people who watch you tomorrow. They will not be. Your con your your audience is going to be constantly recycling. The average lifespan of a content creator that to remain relevant is two to three years. K? And you have to make a lot of money in those two to three years. Damn. A lot of those people get trapped, and they quit their jobs. They quit everything to go all in on content creation because they’re making the same amount of money as content creation as they do on their job. But the issue is they’re not getting any ways to fill out the resume and be able to transfer that experience into a real world job, and they’re [bleep] themselves a lot. I a lot I’ve been on this platform for eight years. I have seen so many content creators fall off and go homeless, and it’s awful.

Malcolm Collins:That’s really sad, man. Yeah. Is. It’s weird that you feel so old compared to me because I got into content creating so long after, Gil. Yeah. You’re just like, oh, yeah. Back in

Tectone:the day, the names. Yeah.

Malcolm Collins:These names. But I would like to see. And I know that what you’re saying is true around, like, you know, you have your peak as a content creator, but I really hope that we can move our community, and I’m beginning to see this into a position where we end up replacing what is today Fox News and everything like that. And I think that we’re definitely, like

Tectone:so important.

Malcolm Collins:There. Right? Like, we’re on the cusp of this happening potentially even on the downhill part of this cusp.

Tectone:Yeah. Well, because because Fox News, there there’s so many anti SLAP laws here in The United States that protects, like, politicians’ ability to just be able to blatantly slander people face zero repercussions for it. Yeah. That’s why people think our president is a rapist pedophile. It’s like, how do people still believe that he, like, [bleep], [bleep] kids, ate kids? And it’s like, tedious is once again

Malcolm Collins:By the way, I I I have to sorry. On the on the [bleep] thing, I need to explain to people the [bleep] charge allegation that people are citing when they say that Trump [bleep] someone. Episode on this never went live, by the way, Simone. That’s a a shame we should do it at the beginning.

Simone Collins:Oh, really?

Malcolm Collins:Yeah. is that, he [bleep] somebody at, like, a a a what what store?

Simone Collins:A dressing room in a what?

Malcolm Collins:Bergdorf? Bergdorf. Yes. Did he Bergdorf? No. [bleep] a well known reporter that he was not friends with randomly in a Bergdorf dressing room. And this is like a high end very high end store in New York. Like, people would have heard first of all, if you’re so comfortable that you [bleep] a stranger in a high end, like, dressing room, this is something you must do all the [bleep] time.

Tectone:Yeah.

Malcolm Collins:Because that’s not, like, a normal thing to, like, just do out of the blue. And so where are all the other provable allegations?

Tectone:Well, the problem is is that because Trump was found civilly liable, which people think means criminally convicted, which it [bleep] doesn’t, It means a judge, which, by the way, the judge who worked that case for Trump was heavily biased against him, said Surprise. I maybe he could have done it.

Malcolm Collins:He

Tectone:could. And so be because it’s it’s it’s it’s a 50 because there’s a 51% chance, a preponderance a preponderance of evidence, he was found civilly liable. And so people think that was that means that he was criminally convicted, which is just about the most brain dead, [bleep] s**t of all time. But newscasters know that, let’s be real, eighty five percent of people on this world are [bleep]. And so you can use these words. Information is at our fingertips, and yet people will still have no interest whatsoever in fact checking anything. So they hear the word judge. They hear the word civilly liable, and they say, yep. Well, there it is. The judge said he [bleep], [bleep], and ate a kid. So there it is, guys. This country’s corrupt. I hate the orange man. Now once again, you can absolutely criticize Trump for his handling of the Epstein files. Absolutely, can

Malcolm Collins:criticize Trump.

Tectone:Yeah. But I I would like to see that same energy go towards Joe Biden as well because he had the exact same opportunities to do the exact same thing as Trump, but there’s a reason why Joe Biden Joe Biden didn’t do it and Trump did. And, these are just things oh, by the way, I I wanna clarify this. Side note. super random. This isn’t alcohol. This is sparkling water. Just for anybody.

Simone Collins:Oh, this is oh, well, he’s drinking.

Tectone:He’s drinking. God. You know, I just wanna make that very clear.

Malcolm Collins:Promoting promoting sin there. Right? I I I do point out to people, Christianity is the only religion on Earth that doesn’t just have one alcohol related miracle, but has multiple alcohol related miracles.

Tectone:It does.

Malcolm Collins:Christianity is really big on the alcohol miracles. Right? Like, I do not think when people are like, oh, it’s drinking’s not a I’m like, [bleep] off. We got all the alco we got turning water to wine. We got blood turning to wine. Yeah. We got holy wine.

Tectone:I I just know that I will probably drink alcohol once again in my life, but I’m trying to fight it for as long as I possibly can. I’ve I’ve been clean for, like, fourteen years. Wow. I’m trying to keep it that way.

Simone Collins:No. No. Stick to it. Like, honestly, just from a calories and health standpoint, it makes sense to not.

Tectone:Yeah. I’ve I’ve been good. The the the last two times I drank was I did the unsubscribe podcast, and I took a sip of a White Claw because that’s what they do on their show. But I’ve never just had

Malcolm Collins:And being culturally appropriate for their environment. Right?

Tectone:Of course.

Simone Collins:Respecting their cultural norms.

Malcolm Collins:Yep. I think I think the conversation around cultural norms is when I often try to bring the conversation back to around, like, trans individuals. Because when you look at the way that they dress during, like, children’s book readings, I’m like, within our culture, this is considered a sexualized way of dressing. And even if within your culture, it’s not considered that, imagine you go to some island and any woman who shows ankle, that scene is a very sexual thing. And then you decided to, as like a a a foreigner in their island, just intentionally show tons of your ankle to children and infants, you’d be like, that’s an inappropriate thing to do, and you wouldn’t do that unless you were, like, a psychopath. Yep. And and then you see this at these book readings where they go in and what is essentially lingerie.

Tectone:Yep. No. I mean, hopefully, if there’s any hope for our country and we continue to somehow string together republican candidate after republican candidate by the way, JD Vance is a [bleep] joke. Not a fan of him. I’m I’m going Rubio for, the next election.

Malcolm Collins:Ruby. I I don’t I’ll support either.

Tectone:I I Jared. My issue with Vance is

Malcolm Collins:Okay. Tell us. Yes.

Tectone:He does not I think well, what do y’all think the number one issue is in America right now?

Simone Collins:That’s such a good question. Probably immigration.

Tectone:Yeah. Exactly. I a 100% agree. JD Vance is not gonna give a [bleep] about that at all. JD Vance is married to an Indian. He has five Indian kids. Do you think he’s gonna say, well, guys, we gotta get all these h one b’s out of our country? [bleep] no. He’s dating one. He’s married

Malcolm Collins:to one. That’s true. So That’s I I can I can see that?

Tectone:I I don’t like, Rubio has made it very clear. He wants as many of these illegals out of the country as humanly [bleep] possible. I I don’t trust JD Vance to do that.

Malcolm Collins:Like, for me okay. So this is where I I fall in the two of them. JD Vance, I like culturally like more. I like that he knows that Hassan shocks his dog. I like that he’s like, oh

Tectone:He likes the memes.

Simone Collins:Yes. He likes memes.

Malcolm Collins:Yes. So I like that. But Rubio, it’s not just on the immigration thing. JD Vance was against the Iran war, against killing people we don’t like, and Rubio’s been all about killing people we don’t like. And I’m generally pro killing people I don’t like. You know? And I I think that, like, power projection as a country where it doesn’t mean boots on the ground is something I wanna get. I [bleep] love what we did in Venezuela. That was so cool.

Tectone:It was awesome. It was great. Yeah. And Look. We we just completely [bleep] owned. I’m trying to Google. I can’t remember the exact number. What is it? 3,000,000,000,000 a year on our United States military? Let me check. Maybe it’s probably probably less than that. How much we spend on US military? One one of one of our

Malcolm Collins:longtime friends is is secretary of the army right now, and so, like No.

Simone Collins:He he stepped down. And we sat down. Yeah. Daniel still

Malcolm Collins:I should reach out, and we should have him on the show.

Simone Collins:I don’t know if he because now there are rumors that he might have stepped down in preparation to help Vance run for presidents.

Tectone:Okay. Sorry. Sorry. It’s 900,000,000,000 per year, often exceeding 1,000,000,000,000.

Simone Collins:Yeah. $916,000,000,000 is what I got to. Yeah. 13% of total federal spending.

Tectone:Yeah. And, like, we should really just make sure that other countries know that’s how much we’re spending

Malcolm Collins:Yeah.

Tectone:On our military. Like, these these countries you know, what what how long were we in the Iraq war? Like, twenty years or something? Like, we we should be wiping people off the face of the [bleep] Earth. Like

Malcolm Collins:Oh my god.

Simone Collins:Rules of conflict with those weird sonic weapons. It was so fantastic because everyone was like, what is going on? We need to show how far ahead we are.

Tectone:Had an

Malcolm Collins:episode where we go into rules of conflict. And, like, a lot of people don’t know, but when we were fighting, like, the Iraq war and the Afghan war, the rules that we had to play by were, like, if somebody runs into, like, a civilian house, you can’t do anything about it. So then what does everyone do? All the terrorists run into civilian houses and, like, hold these people hostage. Right? But we

Simone Collins:we we technically have, like, bureaucratic technical rules of engagement that prevent people

Malcolm Collins:from going the you with a pistol and you have a fully automatic weapon, you can’t shoot back. So to go get a pistol.

Tectone:Yeah. Very personal story about this. I’m gonna keep this as vague as I possibly can. I had a family member who was serving during the war. And they actually got demoted because there was a man on top of a roof with a RPG pointed at their platoon. And so this person, a part of my family, domed the guy. Like, immediately because why the [bleep] would you not Of course. Demoted and barred from the military.

Simone Collins:For real.

Tectone:Dead ass.

Malcolm Collins:And this is

Tectone:He lost rank. That’s what’s insane.

Malcolm Collins:The Trump administration has been attempting to change, which I really where at least I like, because we know people who are, like, high up in the military now. They’re like, this needs to end. Right? Like and and I I think I know a lot of people don’t want want want me to say this, but, like, I think we can learn a lot from Israel in terms of how to treat populations that want you dead. Right? Like Yeah. You don’t need to ask for permission. And if you stop bombing a region because, oh, no. They put something under a hospital, then every base is under a hospital.

Tectone:Yep. I I will say, you know, like, the whole, like there’s a lot of people who are, like, you know, very anti Israel. I don’t care. I’ll I’ll be honest. And and the war between Israel and Palestine,

Malcolm Collins:I just I don’t care either.

Tectone:I don’t give a [bleep]. Right? But, like, people are like, oh, if this one thing’s bad, that means nothing good can come. But, like, listen, man. You cannot like Hitler and admit he was one hell of a painter at the same time. Because, like, I mean, some of his pieces, they were

Simone Collins:Are they? I need

Tectone:Yeah. It’s like, you you did not like Osama Bin Laden, but realized it’s kinda wholesome that he liked Animal Crossing. Right? Like, it’s He’s did

Malcolm Collins:he did

Simone Collins:he? Are you serious?

Malcolm Collins:Yeah. He he had some memes. He had a meme folder.

Tectone:Yeah. Yeah. I was hoping that have a meme folder, and he had a a a GameCube save file of Animal Crossing New Leaf.

Simone Collins:He did not.

Tectone:I know. I know. What a wholesome guy.

Malcolm Collins:Anyway, I think he played at StarCraft or Command and Conquer. Right? Like

Tectone:I’m not sure. I I haven’t looked too much into the old Bin Laden.

Malcolm Collins:I will say, if he played generals as a GLA did you ever play generals?

Tectone:No. I didn’t play that.

Malcolm Collins:They so it was this game, made by the guys who made, like, Red Alert two and everything like that back in the days when they still made good games. And one of the factions I actually recommend this game to people because I think it’s one of the great old games, was a terrorist organization called the GLA. and it was fantastic. They were such a fun faction to play. And it it took place in, like, a a real, like, ‘9 post nine eleven war in The Middle East.

Tectone:Yeah. That’s awesome.

Malcolm Collins:Very fun. Very base.

Tectone:I will say, just just get off the the countries for a little bit. What are your top three video games of all time?

Malcolm Collins:Top three video games are

Tectone:because you said Okay. Sorry. Go ahead.

Malcolm Collins:Okay. So fallout two as a kid was, like, my life defining game. I love I love that you could marry someone and then sell them into slavery. I like, just the amount of freedom it felt like it had and the depths of storytelling, I really liked. The other game that just absolutely enthralled me as a kid and was really defining for me as a kid, which is the basic answer with Starcraft. You know, there’s just obviously as a kid now this is, like, when I’m a kid, like, life defining. If I’m and now as an adult, the games that I have played most, inscription, I just can’t speak highly enough about inscription

Tectone:Yeah.

Malcolm Collins:As well as what what’s another one I played unusual amount of? Total war Japan two Shogun two played an absolute ton of that. The x sorry. I’m I’m going a lot more than three.

Tectone:That’s okay. Keep going. Keep going.

Malcolm Collins:The expeditions series, I think, is for a small time publisher, a series that really needs to be given a lot more love. Expedition Rome, expedition Viking, the one where you play as a conquistador, absolutely fantastic.

Tectone:You’re not saying the best expedition game.

Simone Collins:The best is?

Tectone:Expedition 33.

Malcolm Collins:Oh, camera score. Well, it was made by French people. You know, I can’t Have

Tectone:you played it?

Malcolm Collins:No. I haven’t. It looked sort of, like, bullet spongy to me.

Tectone:No. Not at all. Oh, I’m oh my god. Dude, that it with the games that you’re listing right now

Malcolm Collins:You think I’d love okay.

Tectone:Oh, you would fall in love, and you would say, well, you know what? Maybe there are still some good games left. Like, I I believe you can tell everything about a person about what their favorite video games are. And I I’m telling you right now, play clear obscure actors three three. That game unironically changed how you feel about your life. It is [bleep] incredible.

Simone Collins:I can’t wait to see the impact on

Malcolm Collins:those. Hard real I was watching a stream recently where you were going over all these games that you beat on hard mode, and I was like, you beat that on hard mode. And I was like, that’s a that’s a different type of gaming than I do.

Tectone:So what’s really funny is I don’t know how this happens. And if my chat watches this, they will. I don’t know how I’ve done this, but, like, three of the top 10 hardest video game fights in history ever made, I’ve beat on my first try. I don’t know how the [bleep] I did it. But and so dark Dark Eater Madir and sorry. It’s very hard for me to remember these names because when you beat these bosses in your first try, it’s very hard to remember what they were called. But Darkstar Medir from Dark Souls three, Sister Freed in Dark Souls three, and then Orphan of Kaz in Bloodborne. I beat all those in my first try. And, man, that was like that was, like, life defining. I remember it was my first ever positive thread on LSF. Do you guys know what LSF is?

Malcolm Collins:No. What?

Tectone:Oh, there’s there’s there’s this there’s this it’s a [bleep] Subreddit? It’s a subreddit that used to be very popular that would s**t on me nonstop because I would because I hated the streamers they liked, and I would tell the truth about streamers they liked.

Simone Collins:That’s delightful.

Tectone:Yeah. But the first ever positive thread was me crushing Orphan of Gods in my first try. And do you know who Sodapoppin is? That’s hilarious. so Sodapoppin, he’s like this, let me just grab. He was really cool, and now he’s kinda like a whipped lesbian that plays World of Warcraft, and that’s okay. That’s okay.

Simone Collins:Someone has to do it.

Tectone:Yeah. He was watching my stream, ready to watch me get crushed because he said I was bad at this game. And he was watching as I beat a boss that he struggled on for twelve and a half hours

Malcolm Collins:Oh, no.

Tectone:On my first try. Oh my

Malcolm Collins:god. That is awesome.

Tectone:He’s awesome.

Malcolm Collins:It makes you feel any better. He’s probably really hitting the algo right now because if you look up soda pop in, all you get is a soda pop song from Demon Hunter.

Simone Collins:Oh, of course. And I

Malcolm Collins:don’t know how he’s gonna beat that.

Simone Collins:Oh, no. Demon Hunters destroyed him. That’s true. Think how Demon Hunter’s really ended him. Oh.

Tectone:He was at a time he was at a time one of my favorite streamers. And, yeah, he still is one of the largest streamers on the planet. but, yeah, having him just eat s**t, watching me beat

Malcolm Collins:him on first shot was so fun. Fantastic.

Tectone:Yeah. But have you played any of the souls games or no?

Malcolm Collins:I tried to. So, okay, I should give some clarification for fifth. Another game I should have listed in favorite games is civ four. But

Tectone:Great game.

Malcolm Collins:One of the problems if you notice the difference between the games that you typically like in the games that I like is I like a lot of turn based games. Yep. I’m not a big fan of XCOM two, obviously, fantastically well. I’m not a big fan of non turn based games that require skill because I’m not

Tectone:because because you’re old.

Malcolm Collins:I’m old. I lacked skill.

Simone Collins:Even when he was young, it was turn based games, though. No. I think not that smart.

Malcolm Collins:It’s all these Korean instincts that these people have where they can do the clicks per second and everything. Yeah. And I always thought at very, very slow speeds. and now it’s even worse because I vibe code in between turns.

Tectone:Yeah. No. I’m telling you. Play Clara Expedition 33. It it’s great. Because you know what it’s gonna do? It’s gonna give you the confidence to try other genres because it is turn based, but it’s an active turn based. And what I mean by that is you can plan your moves as slow as you want. But the moment you execute them, then you have to like, if you so there’s gonna be a quick time event. And if you hit the quick time events, then they’ll deal more damage as well as every time you get attacked, it you can parry at the exact moment and take zero damage. But you can still it’s like their turn, your turn, their turn, your turn. But there’s gonna be epic elements in between. And then once Paper Mario. Exactly. And so, like, you know, grandpa over here, once you get used to those, then you can play

Malcolm Collins:big boy games. Play the fastest the problem is is I have played games like that.

Tectone:Yeah.

Malcolm Collins:I basically gave up on hitting the quick time offense on those games. Really? Because I never hit them. I have I have to change it to, like, extreme you don’t understand. I’m a They

Tectone:have baby mode. They have baby mode enabled. You you can play on

Malcolm Collins:baby mode. Okay. Okay. Aw. I just watched on advanced, and I was like, damn. Like, that’s that’s insane that you can do this. But there’s another game that’s sort of like that that I absolutely love that I forget. It takes it’s a Japanese game series that takes place in World War one Europe where different technology exists, and you plan out moves.

Tectone:Anyway, so again crazy.

Malcolm Collins:Don’t remember it.

Tectone:And just remember, as much s**t as I’m talking right now, there’s one thing that y’all can do that I can’t do, which is already have a beautiful family of what you y’all including y’all seven seven Yeah. Mom, dad, five kids. That’s awesome.

Malcolm Collins:You’re 31 or two now. Right?

Tectone:32. 32.

Malcolm Collins:32. When did we have our first kid, Simone?

Simone Collins:I think it was 31. So you’re you’re fine.

Tectone:Okay. So I just gotta I just gotta I just gotta get cracking. Like, boom.

Malcolm Collins:Boom. Yeah.

Simone Collins:I mean, well, what our advantage and this is something for you to to strategically think about since you are in your thirties and if you wanna have a big family, is batch freezing embryos is underrated, especially since you apparently have money. You can batch freeze your embryos and make sure because the thing is when you have kids older, which you I mean, naturally, if you have seven kids by the time you’re finishing, you know, you’re older, especially if you’re having them naturally because it can take longer to get pregnant. If you batch your embryos now, you’re batch freezing embryos with younger eggs and younger sperm, meaning that they are less likely to have higher risks of cancer than other

Tectone:Oh, that’s really smart.

Simone Collins:Yeah. A lot of people the nice thing about us is our embryos, like, the the majority of them are from when we’re 28 years old. Wow. So when we have future kids, even if I’m 50 years old, even if I’m whatever years old, I’m having 20 year old kid.

Malcolm Collins:IVF transfers in healthy babies up to the

Simone Collins:age of what was the oldest? Oh, she lied about it, but she was, like, 65. 65. Even like, this is actually pretty normal. Some you know, how, like, grandma parents can be really committed. There are it’s not uncommon for a grandmother to carry her daughter’s embryo if the daughter can’t do it for some reason because she’s like, I need my grandkids, and she’ll carry like, so you you can be at any age if you have a womb As womb. Older woman, like, past menopause, as long as you have the embryos. And you’re more likely to have healthy embryos and to be able to get more of them from an IVF round if you do it now. Now

Malcolm Collins:So many of our right wing fans will crucify us for saying this because they don’t like IVF.

Simone Collins:Is true. They hate IVF. They think it’s pretty low horse. Don’t know if you know about this, but we’re

Tectone:Well, as white people, as long as we have more babies, I don’t care.

Simone Collins:Well and you can also do because I know you you you mentioned, I think, at one point that, like, it looks like your kid is probably gonna be tall because you guys are both super tall. Yeah. but you can also another another like, okay. Again, we

Malcolm Collins:We can connect you as companies that can give you full genomic sequencing on all the embryos.

Simone Collins:So you can know the odds of your kid being super tall or super smart.

Tectone:I got a lot of hate for that clip. I don’t know why. I was just talking to my doc, and

Simone Collins:they said Yeah. That it well, I know, like, literally, if you’re both tall, he’s likely to get tall. It’s it’s a bizarre thing. But, yeah, you you can also literally sequence your embryos if you want to Yeah. And also literally know, like, this one’s more like I mean, is this is where we It’s really hard.

Malcolm Collins:Deviate with, like, other our our plan when we’re like, how do we actually take back civilization? What we have to do is, we need to do, like, artificial wombs, like, 20 kids a year in my kid’s generation, like, genetic augmentation. We are coming at this with super soldiers in, like, one or two generations. Because I think that’s the only way you can catch up.

Tectone:The other big issue is is that, you know, our kids are gonna experience something that a lot of people my age are experiencing at a worst degree, which is men are horrified of talking to women because

Simone Collins:Exactly. You

Tectone:never know if they’re gonna just say, that was sexual assault. That was [bleep]. Three years later, your honor, I didn’t realize I was [bleep] at the time. Like Yeah. Yeah. So many men are being found in issues for sexual assault.

Malcolm Collins:Oh, absolutely. Yeah.

Tectone:Because the Me Too movement was a [bleep] poison on our entire country. It’s insane. Like, don’t I know, dude. I don’t believe that you can retract consent a year and a half after you had sex. I I don’t know how that’s even possible. How

Malcolm Collins:does that even

Simone Collins:This shouldn’t be a controversial statement.

Malcolm Collins:I will say that, like, society is definitely healing. Like, there was that Twinkie Asian streamer this year who the girl tried to know, he went to Black Carodel.

Simone Collins:Yeah. Yeah.

Malcolm Collins:Yeah. And everybody was like, whatever. You invited him. Right? Like, what were you thinking was gonna happen? She’s like, you know, I I I found that a little hurting, but the evidence was so overwhelmingly in his favor that, like, it it doesn’t mean that much.

Simone Collins:No. Dating is broken. We’re arranging our kids’ marriages. It’s over.

Tectone:it is. Not like for real. Like, I mean, it wasn’t gonna happen with Sykuno. And that Sykuno, if if the Johnny Depp case never happened, Sykuno would not have a career right now.

Malcolm Collins:Oh, yeah. Same

Tectone:same thing with Turkey Tom. If Johnny Depp didn’t happen, there would be no career. Turkey Tom also got accused as well. Turkey Tom, Sykuno, Tobuscus, Jesus, Rich Campbell. Oh my god. There’s evil these are all, like, within the past two years.

Malcolm Collins:Wow. That sucks.

Tectone:Yeah. There’s there’s so many creators who are getting me too’d right now.

Simone Collins:It’s Wait. Even now. Even now?

Tectone:Even now. Even now. Yes. Even now.

Malcolm Collins:Or you need the like, do how how safe are you when you’re married?

Simone Collins:Right? Like, are we Oh, Malcolm, you think you’re next? I don’t know.

Malcolm Collins:I feel like I’m

Simone Collins:pretty sick. Ladies, come for him. I mean,

Malcolm Collins:people have accused me of what, like, flirting with, like or having a crush on Leaflet or whatever. And I’m like, bro, I’ve got five kids. Like, I’m not I am not trying to hook

Tectone:up random friends. You say that I had, like, a sexual obsession with Iron Mouse the other video? No.

Malcolm Collins:I I said within a minute of that clip that I thought he was joking and that I was excited for your next kid. But the joke wrote itself. It was you being shocked that somebody online who has a sexualized caricature is older than you thought they were.

Tectone:That’s really all it was.

Malcolm Collins:The joke goes, I had no idea she was young.

Tectone:I get it.

Malcolm Collins:I had no idea, and I thought the joke. And so I said within a minute you see in the episode

Tectone:I saw. I I I

Simone Collins:don’t think He gets it. He gets it.

Malcolm Collins:Couldn’t help but make the joke because it was so it just go went over my head. I was like, why is everybody litigating this and not making the funny joke?

Tectone:I will also say that, like, yeah, the whole Iron Mouse controversy, I can’t believe the well, I can’t believe it. But the amount of s**t that I got for reacting to one of her clips that she posted herself is like, why are we calling this detect don’t controversy? I just reacted to a clip that she posted. Like, I can’t believe I was accused of doxing. Doc. Doc. But I I reacted to her own stream. He doxed Iron Mouse’s age. Bro, she said it. Like, what the [bleep]? Like and by

Malcolm Collins:the way,

Simone Collins:Chloe because you’re hyper famous. That’s that’s gonna happen. It’s always gonna be your fault. It’s always gonna be your fault.

Tectone:That’s fine. Also never made a YouTube video on that as well as I deleted the VOD of my stream after I react to that, and I even told my editors to not make content out of that. I I said that it’s that well, you can’t find it now. Well, actually, probably could with the way back machine. But I

Malcolm Collins:say Well, then then I’m I’m sorry that blew up. I always like it when I go viral. I don’t care what it is.

Tectone:Oh oh, here’s what’s crazy. So I didn’t talk about that until other channels talked about it. And then I realized, okay. You know, like, what was it? Like, 30 other channels talk, but I make a video three days after. They call it the tech tone iron mouse controversy. Oh, no. Look. It’s like, okay. So, like, I didn’t I didn’t go look this up. And the worst thing is if you watch my Rack of the Clip, I also, in real time, try to debunk it on case I’m being baited by misinformation. I’m like, well, this can’t be Iron Mouse. Let me check this out. Let me Google it. Oh my god. That’s actually her. What the [bleep]?

Malcolm Collins:Yep. That was digging the hole deeper.

Simone Collins:Look. drama finds a way. The this is this is drama’s fun.

Malcolm Collins:It’s donkey p bongwater’s stuff? He gets you in a

Tectone:donkey p?

Malcolm Collins:Something like that. Something bongwater.

Tectone:Don p bongwater. Yeah.

Malcolm Collins:Yeah. Okay. Whatever. Well No. It’s not the same. The VTubers is like old ladies. Yeah. You know? Because they are all

Tectone:old ladies. They are. Yeah. No. Iron Mouse is about 42. Zentraya is a man. I actually know three other very prominent VTubers who are men LARPing as women. Really? Yes. I do. However, they they’ve been nice to me in real life. So I’m just you know, I’m not gonna just go around causing s**t for no reason as long

Malcolm Collins:as I’m you’re a fat girl. I mean, if I could have nice tits and stream, you know, I’m sure I get more to you.

Tectone:Yep. Yep. And, I mean, my god. And, like, the VTuber parties that I’ve been to at TwitchCon were just out of control. I I was playing beer pong. I’m not gonna say what to VTubers these were because once again, they’ve caused me no issues. I don’t like causing people issues unless they comfort me first. I I I will always punch back, but I don’t feel like punching first. I’m good. But, yeah, like, I was just playing beer pong versus them, and I had a a another, guy who’s also now a VTuber as my partner. And I’m playing beer pong, and these these girls, they pull out their tits to distract me from making a beer pong shot.

Simone Collins:Like Smart move.

Tectone:It’s it’s nothing, bro. Smart. It it’s either the

Simone Collins:This is what you do.

Tectone:They’re old women or they’re men laughing as women or they’re complete w****s. Oh oh, and that’s the case. The w****s, they say, don’t sexualize my VTuber model. That sexual Did

Malcolm Collins:you see that the controversy right now that’s going on with that where the character is literally a succubus dancing on a stripper pole? I mean, she said stop sexualizing my model.

Tectone:Yep. It’s like, bro, succubuses are just [bleep] demons. I don’t really think there’s a way to not sexualize that. Insane. What?

Malcolm Collins:There is no there is nothing you could have chosen more inherently sexualized.

Tectone:Understand. Have you seen how many people are supporting them saying you’re so right, queen? Oh my god. I get freaky.

Malcolm Collins:I don’t think We are living in

Simone Collins:diverging realities. Because if you’re saying that there there are still me two cases and yet, like, the the the reality in which I occupy, like, we’re so well beyond that, I I am kind of terrified by the

Malcolm Collins:fact know, like so so, like, you if if you and I don’t know if you are still at this stage where you stressed when you go viral over something. I’ll just say, like, as an as a person in our community, when you went viral for the ironmouse thing that did not have me have a negative like, I didn’t see that as an indictment of your character at all. I was just like, oh, he caught the wave. Like, that’s cool.

Tectone:Oh, nice. Yeah. No. I I I’ll I’ll be honest. I’m at a stage in my life where, like, I just really just don’t give a [bleep]. You know? Like, I just I just don’t care.

Malcolm Collins:Did you see did you see the the one where we, went super viral with the the reporter from Telemundo who said that race didn’t exist?

Tectone:What the [bleep]?

Malcolm Collins:What oh,

Tectone:we’ll send

Malcolm Collins:you a clip. Yeah. Like, a lot of the main people responded to it, but, like, a Telemundo reporter got mad at us because she said there was no genetic differences between black people and white people. And I was like, it’s not. Like, I’m not saying they’re worse. I’m just saying that they’re genetically distinct.

Tectone:Well, no. I actually I think I did see that clip.

Malcolm Collins:Yeah. You probably didn’t know it was us at the time.

Tectone:Like Yeah. I don’t think oh, no. That’s crazy. That’s so funny.

Malcolm Collins:Yeah. And people are just like, he’s just an autistic nerd who’s trying to explain to her, like, genetic differences exist. It is we’re very different. Like, so one of the things that makes us different from the rest of the community is, like, we’re regularly interviewed by reporters, have documentaries made about us. Like, every other week, have a team at our house. It’s awesome. We do mainstream media all the time. Like, New York Times has done, like, 12 pieces on us this year. like, but, like, in terms of, like, actual followers were very low well, not very low, but low compared to, like, a you who’s an enormous, a true meme lord. And I was talking I was actually, like, talking with a journalist about this, and I was like, well, yeah, obviously, like, Knux is a bigger deal than us. Like, Tech Times is a bigger she’s like, do you mean? Like, you’re in the new I’m like, that doesn’t [bleep] nobody reads the news.

Tectone:It it really it really is different worlds. But what I will say is because y’all have it, it gives you a certain amount of credibility that should increase the amount of how quickly you can grow. So, like

Malcolm Collins:I hope.

Simone Collins:We’ll see. We’ll see what there’s a documentary. I it’s either gonna completely destroy our lives, or it’s gonna help.

Malcolm Collins:Well,

Tectone:I What to watch that. And, if you ever want any advice on how to grow even faster, DM me anytime. But I love

Malcolm Collins:Oh, I would really appreciate that. Yeah. But by the way, I’ll just respond to what Simone say here because [bleep] [bleep] [bleep] [bleep] [bleep] [bleep]. [bleep] [bleep] [bleep] doing a documentary on us right now, and we’re supposed to keep that quiet. But Come to [bleep] NDAs.

Tectone:And I

Malcolm Collins:was like, no. You know? But I they they’re really like, I have no idea if it’s gonna be all negative. I mean, usually, the news is negative about us. Like, they really don’t like us, but it it’s it’s the way we’ve been able to grow our career because nobody trusts the news anymore.

Tectone:Of course. Well, that’s all is is that gonna be like, that’s are we are people gonna be able to react to that?

Malcolm Collins:Presumably. Oh, no. That’s true. Because [bleep] [bleep] [bleep] [bleep] [bleep] [bleep], and they’re really restrict about things. Yeah.

Simone Collins:Well, we’ll see.

Malcolm Collins:Well, probably clips or something.

Simone Collins:Who knows? Clips for sure.

Tectone:Clips for sure.

Simone Collins:For sure. It’s gonna be interesting.

Malcolm Collins:I mean, they’ll probably, you know, try to make us look like monster. I mean, we do beat our children as they say. Like, we just believe in corporal punishment and stuff. Like, I’m like, you know, when a kid acts up, you you gotta teach them, don’t act up.

Simone Collins:They’ve seen way too much. They’ve they’ve seen way too much.

Malcolm Collins:That was one of the times.

Tectone:But Who’s gonna go live? I would love to watch that.

Simone Collins:like, next year at some point. it’s it’s hard to tell. Yeah. They’re they’re still actively filming, so it’s it’s a very strange it is a very strange experience. Yeah.

Malcolm Collins:Yeah. I’d I’d love to follow-up. And we also have been doing stuff like for NUCs. We reached out to the, senate commerce committee in Ted Cruz’s office, and we’ve been working with them to try to get them to do something about his situation, but they’re like, I don’t wanna say anything mean about them because they’ve been nice enough to talk with us and and work with us on this, but I don’t think they’re gonna move it forward.

Simone Collins:The extent to which the government cares about one-sided moderation and and everything I mean, even though the Trump administration had posted during the latest presidential election that they were gonna work on making sure that Internet moderation and censorship was not one-sided and that it was more transparent, nothing happened. And we’re like,

Malcolm Collins:can

Simone Collins:we like, no. But there’s there’s very little action being taken. It’s very frustrating. Yeah. But, you know, it’s gonna be I have to say, though, I’m so impressed with everything you’re doing to prepare as a dad. You’re gonna be such an amazing dad. You’re gonna be amazing dad. They’re all pregnant. Well, I mean, they’re not pregnant. But you’re they’re expecting all at the same time. It’s gonna be so awesome.

Tectone:I can’t wait.

Simone Collins:Get to grow up together. I’m And Simone,

Malcolm Collins:do reach out to him about our, like, email list because I wanna, you know

Simone Collins:Oh, yes. Yeah. Malcolm did. So we we weren’t joking when we have, like, an an arranged marriage network. So we’re building this, like everyone’s just kind of on a list right now. But over time, we’re gonna start organizing events where, like, young kids of really cool families are just gonna meet and hang out and, like And

Malcolm Collins:reach out like, over to you.

Simone Collins:And do summer camps or whatever, like, trips somewhere. And then they’ll just get to know each other. And the cool thing is that, you know, that, hopefully, if they they can they can maybe find each other before they hit dating markets and get completely ruined. Because once you do, you’re kind of over. I’m trying to

Malcolm Collins:steal from the Jews. Right? So I saw the Jews do this summer camp thing for their kids, and I was like, we should do that. Right? Like, it seems

Simone Collins:to me

Tectone:that really smart.

Simone Collins:The Mormons too. I think Mormon youth conferences and singles wards are incredibly smart as, like, a cultural technology for helping people find each other before, again, they hit dating mark and to get one shotted by unrealistic expectations and horrible things.

Tectone:So Yeah.

Malcolm Collins:Yeah.

Simone Collins:We’ll see. We’ll see.

Malcolm Collins:I mean, it’s it’s it’s it’s difficult. But yeah. Anyway, I have loved having you on. I want to be a resource to you in any way we can be a resource. The biggest places we’re probably gonna be useful to you is if you ever need something coded or a product. Like, one VTuber was like, oh, I want a way to receive money from people without anyone taking a cut, and so we built that. So, like, anything like that Awesome. Where you’re like, I have a that that was Keirsha who wanted that.

Tectone:Keirsha’s great. I will say I use Rumble Wallet. I love Rumble Wallet.

Malcolm Collins:Oh, okay. You’ve Rumble Wallet. But, anyway, it

Simone Collins:works really well for everyone.

Malcolm Collins:If you have any sort of a a thing that you want, let us know about that. If you want something that involves contacting real government officials, like, we’ve been invited to speak at the White House. We, you know, obviously

Tectone:It’s so crazy.

Simone Collins:Move things forward.

Malcolm Collins:Nuts. It’s

Simone Collins:genuinely weird. It is genuinely weird.

Malcolm Collins:I’d like, I’m a a nerd on the Internet. That’s the way I see myself. So don’t know. And that’s that’s the

Simone Collins:other people in general and then mainstream media.

Malcolm Collins:Yep. Mainstream things media. Are areas where can do the rounds in mainstream media. We can totally help you with that, connect you with reporters, push you on that front. Just let us know, and and we’re happy you’re,

Simone Collins:like, the meantime,

Malcolm Collins:we’re gonna reach

Simone Collins:out to you about your advertising platform because it

Tectone:sounds very exciting. Yeah.

Simone Collins:So sorry about that. That’s

Tectone:really But I

Malcolm Collins:was a little worried that he said that we have to pay people fair prices. I don’t I don’t know if we have that kind of money.

Simone Collins:Well, we’ll make that kind of money. Okay? It’s it’s it’s gonna work out. We we have to grow somehow. You know, you gotta spend money to make money.

Tectone:So Yeah.

Simone Collins:We’re gonna figure that out. And, yeah, send send me to your baby registry so I can judge you and also So I can

Malcolm Collins:judge you. So yeah.

Simone Collins:But also, like, you games.

Malcolm Collins:Hold on. What are your three

Tectone:favorites? Favorites? my my favorite favorite games are my number one favorite of all time is Dark Souls one. and then my second favorite is Hollow Knight. incredible game.

Malcolm Collins:You like hard stuff. Hollow Knight’s, like, known for being hard.

Tectone:Hollow Knight’s easy, bro. You gotta lock in. Okay. Then then I’ll I’ll I’ll I’ll circumvent some of my other games that are gonna be too hard. this was my number one video game for, like, ten years straight, but it’s kinda bumped down over the years, but it’s still very good. so I guess a sleeper underground thing is a game called a Viva Pinata Trouble in Paradise. It’s a garden simulator game where you take care of your garden, and it attracts different animals, but they’re pinatas. Oh, that’s cute. It is very good. It’ll be probably one of my kids’ first games. I plan on Ocarina of Time and Viva Pinata, but, obviously, Minecraft whenever they’re ready for springtime.

Simone Collins:They’re obsessed.

Malcolm Collins:And for your kids, if I’m gonna recommend content for kids that’s, like, unusually good, Miyazaki films, kids, like, locked into them much better than Disney films. They just, I think, capture a child’s mind much better. And then for, like, the the just hanging out, we do, like, GI Joe nineteen eighties. Yeah. We do magic school bus. Kids love magic school bus, and it’s actually pretty educational.

Tectone:Yeah. ‘19 Right now, my radar is Bluey. I heard good things about Bluey.

Malcolm Collins:Bluey is good, you gotta pay for streaming services. Yeah. And you can get power rangers for free, and they kick people’s butt. Right?

Tectone:Like Yeah.

Malcolm Collins:And the great thing about power rangers is that it teaches kids to fight in a way that you’re obviously not gonna hurt the other person. Like, it teaches people how to like, kids how to play fight because that’s what they’re obviously doing. Like, the choreography is really bad. Yeah. And so then the kids learn to, like, do play fighting against against their siblings and their parents.

Tectone:I love that.

Simone Collins:Yeah. This is important because we have a very attacky children.

Tectone:What what’s the gender ratio?

Simone Collins:Well, we do because we do IVF. We can do whatever order we want. So we do boy, boy, girl, girl, boy, boy, girl, girl. Like,

Tectone:it’s Oh, no. I mean, like, so you y’all have five kids.

Simone Collins:Yeah. So we had now have we have three boys and two girls.

Tectone:Okay. That’s cool. So when y’all have when do y’all have the next one?

Malcolm Collins:Well, we

Simone Collins:we keep trying. We’re, like, hopefully, next year.

Tectone:You’re you’re going for more.

Simone Collins:Oh, no. We I mean, like, we’re gonna keep going until I lose my uterus. Yeah. We’re going for break.

Malcolm Collins:Yeah. Okay. Like, okay. No worries. Actually still going through a bit of a trauma because we just had a miscarriage, like, a month ago. Yeah. But this is

Simone Collins:part of the this is part of the process. There’s a mother I know who’s, like, on number nine, and she’s, like you know, she’ll just text me and be like, ugh, had a miscarriage. And I’m like, how do you do this lady? But, anyway, that’s part of the process. But, anyway, we’re we’re so ready for it. Do look into IVF. And if you wanna do the crazy evil stuff, just

Malcolm Collins:That we do. Genetic engineering. Genetic testing. Engineering them. We’re just seeing Not yet. If I had the tech, I would.

Simone Collins:Look. Like, ultimately, we’re just choosing birth order of our kids to have the ones with higher cancer risks later so that they’re more likely to survive. That’s like it’s it’s not that you know, this is not, like, ethically bad.

Tectone:It’s just cool to eat it sense. If you wanna have healthier kids,

Malcolm Collins:just Yeah. Feel like

Simone Collins:you’re If you, like, don’t want them to die young, you know, like, I think it’s kind of a good idea. My mom died before she could ever meet her grandkids because of cancer. And so I’m like, you know what? Let’s, like, manage cancer risk more carefully because we can.

Tectone:How much how much does that cost a year to, like, preserve, like,

Simone Collins:We pay 700 a year just to keep them frozen. That’s not bad at all. It’s not bad at

Malcolm Collins:all. Yeah.

Simone Collins:and it costs so depending on how you’re doing it, again, I could hook you up with the best, like, egg freezing groups.

Tectone:Yeah.

Simone Collins:I mean, if you wanna introduce me to your wife and, like,

Malcolm Collins:get her, like She’s very nerdy about this.

Simone Collins:Yeah. Forget it. To all the women who are super into repro tech and, like, she can enter a whole new world of strange things that things.

Tectone:I I would love for my wife to talk to you because she’s obviously pretty nervous about pregnancy, and she’s she’s really debating on the epidural or not.

Simone Collins:Oh my god. This is a great conversation. Yes. Yeah. No. Connect us.

Tectone:She’s leaning more towards natural, but she’s also like because she’s she had a she slipped a disc a couple of years ago. So she’s

Malcolm Collins:wearing a big needle. Yes. So okay. I’ll give you the I’ll give you the download on this. when we did our first pregnancy, we had decided to do natural. Simone ended up in labor for, what was it, forty two hours?

Simone Collins:Well, look. No. It’s yes. Yes. It was unmedicated induced labor, which is extra painful for, like, twenty plus hours. Jesus. The thing is there it’s a decision tree. And I can walk through the whole thing with her. I can because it’s you have to manage risks of the baby and the mother. And, also, you want to minimize the exposure to epidurals, obviously, for the baby. And so you have to follow this decision tree and decide, like, which kind of route are you gonna take, like, birthing center versus versus hospital. And I can walk her through all of the things of, like, here’s where you might wanna rethink a different a certain plan. Because I was just like, I’m just gonna go in. I’m gonna white knuckle it, and it’s gonna be fine. And

Malcolm Collins:then it went to a part where, like, the baby’s heart rate started to slow down because it was going for

Simone Collins:so long. Out that this is a super common thing for women to go through. I will talk with her. I will talk with you, and I will connect you to anyone that you wanna talk with about this because it’s yeah. I I wish I’d thought about that more carefully because it’s just like, no epidural. It has to be, like, natural birth. Let’s go. But then nothing goes according to plan. So you have have, like, your like, okay. If this, then. If this, then.

Tectone:Yeah. I I we’re already writing our birthing plan, like, to, like, make sure

Simone Collins:not to

Malcolm Collins:do That’s so wonderful.

Tectone:Yeah. No. I I I can’t wait to be a dad. It’s like, once again

Malcolm Collins:You’re gonna

Simone Collins:be such a great dad. I’m so stoked for this.

Tectone:I I wish more people would highlight how amazing it is to go through the pregnancy process with the woman who you love more than anything. Like and I I don’t I sorry. I’ve I’ve really enjoyed talking to guys. It’s been a great time. No. No.

Malcolm Collins:I I wanna highlight on what you’re saying here, and we say this on our stream all the time. And people in our world, the world of gamers, the world of the chud, whatever you wanna call it, when I grew up, I thought that, like, status and and and the best feelings I would have in my life were having sex with hot women. Right? Like, everyone was like, oh, sex with hot women. Kids and people are like, oh, when I tell my my fans, I’m like, well, we don’t have sex that much because, like, I’d rather if I can spend, like, an thirty minutes or an hour, I’m playing with my kids. Right? Like, kids, being a good dad feels better than the best threesome with two slices of tits, which oh my god.

Tectone:Okay. I mean, like

Malcolm Collins:ever experienced in your life.

Tectone:I went in for the fourteen week ultrasound with my wife yesterday Aw. Seeing how big he’s gotten, and it was like then he just, like, did that. He, like, jumped up a little bit. Oh my god. Me and my wife just immediately started crying because of how beautiful it was.

Malcolm Collins:Oh, I’ve gotta I’ve gotta warn you, though. So this is me as, a dad. Babies don’t do it for me. I’m not like No.

Simone Collins:No. Like, ten percent of men are baby daddies. You might be one if you’re already excited at the ultrasound stage.

Malcolm Collins:Yeah. I was pretty bored at the ultrasound. I was pretty bored. It seemed like baby with babies. Like, that’s why I was like, oh, this is fun. Right?

Tectone:Yeah.

Malcolm Collins:and so, I like, how good it feels to be a dad, how, luxe you feel. When you go to a store and you have, like, four or five kids with you or something like that, you feel like prince of Ali or something. You know? Like, you you got them all in the car walking behind you, carrying the

Tectone:you know?

Malcolm Collins:And we can we can walk you through all like, there’s lots of cool things if you have a lot of kids where it’s like we just have buckets of clothes for different ages, and we just switch between them as they age up. And, like Yeah. It’s way lower stress. Oh, and okay. I’ll give you some, like, investments to make that, like, people didn’t tell me about. Bouncy castles are really cheap now. You can get

Simone Collins:an an inflatable Friday bouncy castle.

Malcolm Collins:smart. Yeah. An inflatable bouncy castle for, like, inside your house. The kids can, like, jump on and you get a fight with them in. This, like, the size of the ones that you have at, like, McDonald’s For $300.

Simone Collins:Yeah. We literally have, like, a bouncy castle wardrobe. So we’re like, okay, kids. Do you want the one with the slide or the one with the ball pit? And then, you know, they have to choose. And it’s just like, if you just bring the theme park to your house, it’s so much easier

Malcolm Collins:and easy do splurge toy that we’ve gotten is super space, which is like magnetic blocks, but they’re giant so you can build houses out of them. Okay. We tried to splurge on one of those demon beds. What are they called? Nobody ever like, some people that the one they Oh, the snoo.

Simone Collins:Are you getting a snoo?

Tectone:is that the is it the automatic

Malcolm Collins:Yeah.

Tectone:Back and forth? Yeah. Yes. I am getting one of those. Yeah.

Simone Collins:I it’s it’s great for some kids. It’s great for them. I just I gave up and started co sleeping. I I gave up. I just I just. Stopped.

Malcolm Collins:I know you’re not supposed to co sleep, but, like you know? Yeah. Yeah.

Simone Collins:This new is great for especially for a first time parent.

Tectone:Yeah. I heard it it can sometimes give you, like, extra hours of sleep for the new things. No.

Simone Collins:It really it really can. It really can. If And you’re especially if you’re like, I need to take a shower or, like, we just need to, like, leave the baby somewhere safe, they will, like, kind of suit them.

Malcolm Collins:Like Yeah. This is it’s it’s great. Anything with parts is pointless. So, like, those Hot Wheel toys you loved as a kid or, like, you know, any sort of a set Legos Yeah. Generally are just really hard to make work with a lot of kids. Okay.

Simone Collins:But Hot Wheels are great on their own. If you have your Hot Wheels bucket, can buy them by the pound on eBay, so you don’t need to.

Tectone:But Yeah.

Malcolm Collins:Wooden train sets all the way. Okay. You know that that you see them at, like, public libraries and stuff like that?

Simone Collins:Where we got

Malcolm Collins:a lot our toys is we went to public libraries to see what types of toys they use because we’re like, oh, these are robust toys that will exist in, like, x many years.

Tectone:Yeah. I I will say, I do now have to go. I have a business meeting in one Go.

Malcolm Collins:Bye. Go.

Tectone:Okay. Okay. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Thank you so much. It was it was a pleasure.

Simone Collins:Happening. Okay. Yes.

Malcolm Collins:Hi. Welcome. Hold on. This is how we start, Simone. It’s my energy.

Simone Collins:Go ahead. Yes, Malcolm.

Malcolm Collins:Go on then. Go on

Malcolm Collins:Think that the robot is really sad that it can’t take a nap on one of the couches?

Octavian Collins:Yeah. I will check it out for that.

Malcolm Collins:Well, if you build, um, rocket boosters for it, you see it’s got its eyes, and his eyes keep looking longingly at the couches. Right? Yeah. Like, really tired looking. Yeah.

Octavian Collins:I think it just swell up right there and

Simone Collins:then Oh.

Malcolm Collins:But he can’t. Isn’t that so sad?

Simone Collins:So sad.

Malcolm Collins:Are you gonna build rocket boosters for the AI?

Simone Collins:Yeah. For a butt, maybe? Oh, it’s ally. Uh-oh. But if you build

Malcolm Collins:it a butt, do you think it’ll fart?

Today on Based Camp, Malcolm and Simone explore how menstrual cycle tracking has moved from apps into work planning and legal arguments. The discussion covers period trackers in games, cycle syncing for productivity, and historical court cases where PMS or postpartum issues were used to reduce charges for violent acts. The Collinses also examine ancient medical views on the uterus and modern debates over personal responsibility versus hormonal explanations.

Episode Transcript

Malcolm Collins: HELLO SIMONE! I’m excited to be here with you today. Today, we are going to be pulling on a thread that the Lindsay Casey case has unraveled to some extent, which is women in mass are claiming that women lack the intellectual or emotional capacity to act as normal people in society. Sure. Right? Like and and I, at first, thought, okay. If we are cordoning this off to just a very rare thing, like postpartum depression, which is what they’re claiming or postpartum psychosis.

imone Collins:Like, okay. Then just let women werewolf like I do, right, whenever I give birth. I just lock myself away in the hospital. You drop me off at the beginning four days later.

Malcolm Collins:Then I started to dig into it and Realized it’s actually normal for female organizations to do the same around regular parts of a woman’s menstrual cycle. My god. So it’s not just Oh, no.

imone Collins:It’s not her.

Malcolm Collins:Someone that you can get off for postpartum psychosis. You can also get off murdering children because you were on your period.

Speaker 5:But, oh, dear. What’s this? One of the women is about to embarrass us all. The lady has foolishly attempted to join the conversation with a wild and dangerous opinion of her own. Women, know your limits.

imone Collins:Wait. On your period or, like, PMS ing? Like, what what what part of the cycle do I have a get out of jail free card here? I need to know when I can time my

Malcolm Collins:We’ll go into it.

imone Collins:Okay. And Oh my gosh. Now that, like, your period tracking apps need to have, like, a now would be a great time if you need to commit a felony. Go ahead, girls.

Malcolm Collins:Great time to commit a felony. That’s why they’re tracking you guys, don’t you know? We need to know when you’ve turned into ravenous monsters.

imone Collins:Well, one of the big things with the app Love and Deep Space is included they added a period tracker. And then, like, the male companions on the app would be like, oh, what brand of, you know, sanitary napkin do you need? And, like, women were like, oh my god. He knows the difference between a daytime and a nighttime pad. Swoon. Like, women do seem to act different. Like, it actually was very well reviewed, the the period tracker. What is love in deep space? It’s that it’s that romance game. It was really big in in China and also in The United States.

Malcolm Collins:Oh god. Oh, so this is anime character saying Yeah.

imone Collins:It’s it’s like it’s like a romance game with, like, really, really beautiful men, and they added a period tracker to it fairly recently. And all the men who saw that this was added freaked out and were like, this is gooner nonsense. But, like, the women were just like, oh, like, he’s offering me a hot water bottle. Like, he’s gonna make like, he’s gonna cuddle with me and, like, tell me how sorry he is and and go to the store and buy me feminine napkins and ask me what brand I prefer. And they thought it was amazing.

Speaker 3:But has the concept of women having choices gone too far? We’ve assembled this diverse panel of white men in bow ties to talk Gentlemen?

imone Collins:But I really think, like, if that element of a period tracker inside an existing game works so well, they need to just really start beefing up existing period tracking apps. Like, now’s you know, you should commit a crime now. This is the period where you’re gonna be more attracted to hot guys. This is gonna be your best time to, like, date, you know, a cash cow and settle down with him. You know, like, just really max it out, you know, period maxing, cycle maxing. Actually, I read recently that there was this this new trend of cycle maxing where women were yes. I’m not kidding about this. Hold on. Hold on. Cycle

Malcolm Collins:Women shouldn’t have jobs. Right? Like, we this is a how how are we still pushing for a female president, and cyclomaxing is a thing?

imone Collins:Yeah. Hold on. News. Where did it go? It was, an actual like, women who were syncing their work schedule with their

Malcolm Collins:their aggressive careers.

imone Collins:Cycle maxing at work is an emerging social media term for using menstrual cycle tracking to adjust your workload, beatings, creative work, recovery, and sometimes food or exercise. It’s essentially cycle syncing reframed in optimization language. So what you’re supposed to do is track your mood and bleeding, etcetera, and then put all your demanding or public facing tasks, like presentations and negotiations and, like, your big work things on days when you are more likely to feel good, like, not PMS y, not bleeding, not cramping. And then you reserve your flexible, like, solo work or your work from home days for the days where you have cramps and PMS, you’re, like, kind of a terrible person. And then you should have, like, buffers to, like, avoid doing anything important, like major deadlines or travel or all day meetings on the days when you are So which one should

Malcolm Collins:recognize this about themselves?

imone Collins:Yeah. They’re like, oh.

Malcolm Collins:We have a werewolf protocol.

imone Collins:Yes. And They’re werewolf protocol. Yes. It’s exactly it. No. This is like,

Malcolm Collins:you know, in the werewolf shows where they, like are, like, chain me up of all of the

imone Collins:It’s like the modern version of this.

Speaker 4:Mom, dad, can I come upstairs now? I’m sorry, son, but you’re a demon spawn now. You’re an abomination. Can I please just have something to eat? Well, I’m pretty hungry. It’s hungry. Yes. It must feed. what are you doing down here? There you go, son. Eat. What are we becoming?

imone Collins:Like, it’s werewolves are real. They’re called women, and they literally have apps where they just, like, track their lunar calendar where they’re like, time to train myself up here. Okay. We got I’m sorry, girls. I can’t meet you for dinner. I can’t, you know, can’t book this work appointment now because I gotta cycle my

Malcolm Collins:So this is this is gonna be the new thing in in werewolf dating books where the werewolf and the what the werewolf’s like, I’m sorry. It’s the night of the full moon. I have to be chained up in my house. And she goes, that’s so convenient. So do I. No.

imone Collins:No. No. It’s supposed to be where the, you know, a very beautiful boyfriend asks her if she needs more daytime or nighttime pads because, apparently, that really gets girls going. Would you would you care about that, or

Malcolm Collins:would you just be gross out of a guy? Look.

imone Collins:Anyone who’s gonna help me with the bleeding stuff is welcome in my world.

Malcolm Collins:Okay? Do you see you see all the

imone Collins:we’re not gonna get into the details because I’m still dealing dealing with the miscarriage bleeding. Like, what, three weeks later? I’m like, anyone who’s willing to help me with that is my friend at this point because the amount of ruined clothing I have now. Well, not ruined. I just had to scrub things with a toothbrush for a very long time. Obviously, not one for my teeth, people. Jeez. Anyway Oh my.

Malcolm Collins:I’m just gonna ask that out. Twitter person. I may be

imone Collins:a female, gosh, I I cycle max, so it’s okay. I’m just under control. But, yeah, I guess if this is all true, right, if women are, like, getting this into their cycles and not only admitting this in the context of of legal trials, but also just literally building their lives around this expectation that, like, oh, yes. I have observed that I am insane and a terrible person on these days of the month and that I’m a functional human on these days of the month. This is not this is a very worrying trend because it’s like this admission of insanity, and I don’t like it.

Malcolm Collins:But, like, all women know this. Like

imone Collins:I mean, I don’t. As someone with amenorrhea who doesn’t have periods, I had no cycle to track. I I had no periods of insanity. My only experience with that is, like, giving birth and then having to deal with that hormonal fallout and then also giving myself exogenous hormones, which actually what’s really interesting too is when you see trans people take the same amount of hormones that, for example, I do, they also like to talk about at length, how they go crazy. Like, remember when Dylan Mulvaney started going on hormones and was like, I tried being a girl, and I just sat there and cried for a long time. I can’t remember her exact words. but do you remember this whole thing where she was like, I’m gonna be a girl for a day? And, like, the schedule was like, cry, go shopping, eat yogurt. Like, I can’t remember what it was, but it was really ridiculous. However, it is interesting that even when men start to experience the hormones that will hit women at various points in their cycles, they also report going crazy. In other words, typically, but, you know, that’s kind of disturbing.

Malcolm Collins:but, no, I think it’s interesting with the tramp thing. That’s a good side point here. Is it like, we all accept that these people are getting crazy. Right?

imone Collins:And Counterpoint, though. Women also report going crazy when they go on testosterone. So When they go where? On testosterone. But more mostly, it’s not like, I’m crying. It’s just like they wanna bang everything. Oh my god. I’m so horny.

Malcolm Collins:Question, actually. Did you ever suspect back when you were, like, a leftist and a feminist and, you know, all the normal in in leftosphere, right Okay. That women were crazy? Like, did you ever, like did did you did you back then believe that that men and females were significantly psychologically different, for example?

imone Collins:Nope. Everyone’s horrifying. All humans are terrifying.

Malcolm Collins:So you never engaged with the concept once. You never thought women and men are different.

imone Collins:Look. I I saw them as different in different ways. Like, women were crazy because they were they would be mean and have ulterior motives and, like, be very I saw women as as, I think most people do, more Machiavellian and and socially risky. But then men were very stressful because these I kept I I was a very friendly person, and then boys would then express their affection for me. And then I couldn’t return it because I

Malcolm Collins:didn’t It’s because everybody wanted to bang you. I understand.

imone Collins:Look. No. But, like, you could see it as a team girl. It’s like, well, if I hang out with girls, they’re gonna stab me in the back. But then if I hang out with boys, then they’re gonna, like, get attached to me in a way that I can’t return, which is almost worse than being stabbed to the back because you feel bad for them because you’re their friend and you want to give them what they want, but you can’t give them what they want. So it really sucks. So that’s why you just find autistic people when you hang out with them and theater kids. Autistic people and theater kids are, like, the only safe haven.

Malcolm Collins:Okay. So the case of Sandy Kratoduk, who was a barmaid with a long record of impulsive violence, arson, assault, stabbed a coworker three times in the heart. Diaries and institutional records showed that her outbursts clustered on a roughly twenty nine day cycle.

imone Collins:Oh my

Malcolm Collins:god. Doctor Katrina Dalton, the physician who popularized the term premenstrual syndrome and treated it with a high dose of natural progesterone. Progesterone? Progesterone. Yes. That’s it. Progesterone. Shut your face. This is another reason.

imone Collins:Sorry. Shut your face.

Malcolm Collins:My wife doesn’t know her place. I need to we need to

imone Collins:have a conversation. Presbyterians. I don’t even know you. Oh god. Okay. Progesterone. Okay. Carry on.

Speaker 13:We need to invent another crime. What? Another criminal case they can spend all day on TikTok pretending to be detectives about. No. No. No. There can’t be any legitimate grounds to think she was framed. She has to be the single most obviously guilty person in history. There can’t be a reasonable doubt. Only a hormonal one.

Speaker 12:Okay. So how about a woman stabbed all of her children to death on livestream while her husband was in Iraq? That’s perfect. Post it.

Speaker 11:I think he did it. She’s obviously being framed.

Speaker 12:Let’s go. Just wait till they get to the end the article. Why? To make the story even spicier, one of the kids was an adopted black child.

Speaker 13:You idiots.

Malcolm Collins:Okay. so about a year later, wait. What did she say? No. No. No.

imone Collins:So wait. This woman this woman stabbed people, and then she was defend like, one of the people who showed up for her defense, you’re saying, was the doctor

Malcolm Collins:the female doctor testified, quote, that she turned into, quote, a raging animal each month, end quote.

imone Collins:Wait. So so so literally the doctor who invented PMS described women as werewolfing. Yes. She should have just called it, like, female werewolf syndrome.

Malcolm Collins:Werewolf syndrome. Women are crazy syndrome.

imone Collins:Yeah. Don’t know. It’s not as catchy, I guess. PMS sounds pretty pretty catchy.

Malcolm Collins:The charge was reduced from murder to manslaughter by reason of diminished responsibility. She received probation and court ordered progesterone, not prison. Court ordered progesterone. About a year later, she threatened a police officer with a knife and the exact same even though she had the coronary progesterone, the

imone Collins:exact taking it? I don’t know.

Malcolm Collins:But the exact same thing worked again for her claim. The same week, Christy Ingeland drove her car over her into her lover after a quarrel and killed him. She testified that she had an a an aggravated form of a premenstrual condition and had not eaten for hours.

imone Collins:Dalton Oh, she was hangry.

Malcolm Collins:She she said she had hypoglycemia and PMS. She was angry, and she didn’t reduced to manslaughter, and she received only a twelve months conditional discharge after a driving ban for murdering somebody.

imone Collins:This is preposterous men too. The reason why men are disproportionately represented in crimes and murders is literally due to a hormonal issue, due to more testosterone, which makes them higher risk takers, which makes them more aggressive. And they don’t get to be like, oh, I was hungry. You know?

Malcolm Collins:And this was a this has been used in The UK in 50 cases. Oh my

imone Collins:god. What is happening?

Malcolm Collins:No. This is this what’s gonna make you happy, Simone, is at least in The US, the court system hasn’t bought this significantly. although, I would suggest that you don’t listen to this part. So you can turn off your okay. So in the case of Shirley Santos, a Brooklyn mother of six, she beat her four year old daughter so badly that the child was urinating blood. Santos told the police that she had gotten her period and would never hurt her baby. I mean, she did. I guess she means not when she’s not on PMS. She tried to use PMS for diminished capacity, citing the case in Britain to do this. And then a Brooklyn DA, Elizabeth Hunsin, a prominent feminist, opposed it as having no scientific basis. So feminists back then were like, no. You can’t do this.

imone Collins:Well, thank god. This is not And The same with the Lindsey Clancy case. Like, it it doesn’t matter why someone did a terrible thing. If they did it, they need to be removed. How is this a defense?

Malcolm Collins:Yep. Well, anyway, so

imone Collins:It’s been really bad

Malcolm Collins:case, and I am gonna need you to to remove your headphones here again.

imone Collins:Thank you’re so kind for this.

Malcolm Collins:Was Kormachandra. This happened in India where she lured three children to a well and pushed them in, and one drowned. And three daughters in India testified that women, quote, unquote, did not remain normal in the days up to menstruation and can be violent or aggressive. The court that although Indian law had not dedicated a specific PMF thing, they, said that she was of defective reason and considered this when giving her her sentence. Defective reason. Wow. There was another case in The United States that I wanna find here where some feminist organization gave her, like, millions of dollars.

imone Collins:Because of her defective reasoning?

Malcolm Collins:Yeah. Yeah. Well, to try to help her win, and she still didn’t win because she did something when she was PMSing.

Speaker 10:Found what I was looking for. Here is a quote from an article from The Wall Street Journal in 2001 called the newest feminist icon, a killer mom. Andrew Yates, the Houston mother who drowned her five children last June, is the newest feminist icon. The National Organization for Women is rallying around her. Diana Lynn Barnes of the Center for Postpartum Health sounded the battle cry. Women are mad as hell, and we’re not gonna take it anymore. There’s a vast amount of compassion for Andrea Yates because they can see how one could go down this Road. She’s a victim of culture that says women come last. Newsweek columnist Anna Quindle invoked the insidious cult of motherhood to explain Yates’ actions.

Malcolm Collins:And, basically, we’ve known about this since forever. If you look at ancient or early modern medical treatments, they believed the uterus was an autonomous organ. Yeah. It was destabilizing and called wandering worm that froze. That wasn’t that hysteria? Hysteria, irrationality, unreliability, and, marriage and pregnancy were prescribed as a cure.

imone Collins:Marriage and pregnancy? Seriously?

Malcolm Collins:My

imone Collins:favorite. When you’re not pregnant, you’re not cycling. They could also starve themselves, I I discovered. That works really well. Oh, crap. Hold on.

Malcolm Collins:Is after we did our Buddhism episode, people were posting, like, super misogynistic stuff. It’s, like, in core Buddhist training, like, text. And one of the big ones by the way,

imone Collins:That’s bizarre. You couldn’t hear me on the setting before, and this time, I just switched from the default Shure microphone to the I don’t know what to make.

Malcolm Collins:Write down explanations of the issues you’re having and solve them post. Okay?

imone Collins:I will. Thank you.

Malcolm Collins:Complaining about them to me is not helpful.

imone Collins:I yes. You’re right. Absolutely.

Malcolm Collins:Alright. Sorry. That she was being a little womanly there.

imone Collins:I was. I was having a womanly

Malcolm Collins:moment. With her womanly brain.

imone Collins:Yes.

Malcolm Collins:And I was gonna go over other cases similar to the Lindsay Kantsey case, but I don’t wanna talk about kids being hurt. Let’s just say they’re

imone Collins:really going.

Malcolm Collins:And Gosh. It’s really common.

imone Collins:And they’re trying to blame it on their periods and on their cycles?

Malcolm Collins:Well, those, it’s a number of things. The the the period ones were the ones that I had just gone over, but there are other ones where it’s like, it’s postpartum, whatever. Women aren’t responsible for their actions, blah blah blah. Unless unless and and that you as a man will never understand except and unless you happen to believe you’re a woman and dress as a woman, then you as a man actually understand better than women. That’s the way it works, of course. But Great. Question, Simone. Oh oh, by the way, for people who wonder, because women are always like, well, if women ruled the world right. I I I there’s, like, these songs that, like, well, if we put a woman in charge, everything would be great. And it’s like, well, you know, they’ve actually done studies on this. We’ve talked about this in past episodes where when a woman ruled a monarchy in the medieval Europe, because that’s where we have good statistics on this, war was significantly more likely. Like, they they were much more bloodthirsty rulers than males. Now the obviously, the authors of this having to add caveats because they don’t wanna be like, women be crazy, yo. They said it was something like, well, you know, the throne would have been less secure during women, you know, whatever. So but I remember based professor here, I was studying a a history of Egypt where they were going through, like, all of the dynasties of Egypt. And and at one point, he got to, like, one of the female pharaohs. He goes, uh-oh. Uh-oh. We got female pharaohs here. That means we’re always about to end the dynasty.

imone Collins:Oh my gosh.

Malcolm Collins:We’re always about to go into a dark age. Oh. What this is also true of companies. when female CEOs take over the company, they’re more likely to, like, go into decline. So the question is

imone Collins:So wait. We we had a whole episode on how, like, a rise in gayness. Is it just gayness in women? Is this is this is this where you’re gonna land with all this?

Malcolm Collins:Gayness in women? Well, I mean, yeah, maybe. I I think just like the the the reason gayness came up here is because I was talking with Simone about this before, and I was like, with gayness, when everyone was fighting for gay rights, right, we had this thing of, like, you’re born this way. And that was the core argument. It was like, well, they can’t help it. They can’t help that they’re gay. They can’t help that they’re trans. They can’t help that they’re. And, honestly, I found this argument compelling back then. And so I was like, yeah. Sure. They can’t help it. Whatever. Then something happened. And in the past ten years or so, somehow since my childhood, that has become an offensive thing to say. It is it is in fact not that you are born trans. Anyone can be trans. If you think people are born trans, you’re a true scum. You know? And you can always change back if you feel like it. That’s what WPATH said. Right. You know, just do one surgery one week, do another surgery another week. It’s all about making you comfortable. Right? Who cares? And then with the gay thing, even even because the trans community has so infected a lot of the gay advocacy groups, you know, it’s become, oh, well, you know, you’re not necessarily born this way and, like, sexuality is fluid throughout your life and blah blah blah blah blah. And people began to make these arguments, I think, to give themselves more freedom to do whatever they wanted to do in the search of pleasure. And with women, it’s the same thing. Right? Like, because now the gay movement and the trans movement has abandoned Born This Way, a lot of people who used to support them are like, I don’t I don’t know if I support this anymore. Right?

imone Collins:Yeah.

Malcolm Collins:Because all of you guys sort of let me on for a while. With the feminists, we’ve been here the same way. For a long time, feminists, you know, went out there and said what’s well, women and men are actually exactly psychologically the same. And PMS ing isn’t a thing, and, women don’t act crazy, and women don’t lose self control. And now that that battle feels over for them, now they’re trying to renormalize all of the carve outs associated with that stuff. And it’s even weirder when you look at, like so a woman goes out there and murders people, and they’re like, obviously, it’s not her fault. And all women like, I like, the complete abdication of responsibility when women do something bad. And yet when a woman achieves something, like, a woman were to I mean, obviously, a woman can’t. But if a woman were to win, like, a grand chast championship or, like, a a video game championship or something like this, of course, people would say, you see this as proof that women are great. Sorry. When I say can’t, like, in the top 100 players, there’s, like, not one woman, if I remember. It might be one woman. You know, it’s only a very the famous scene of, like, the child going against a woman. She’s like, I’m a grandmaster. Don’t you know? And he goes, a female grandmaster.

Speaker 8:How old are you?

Speaker 9:11. And I’m a master too.

Speaker 8:I’m small too.

Speaker 9:I know.

Speaker 8:And I’m a grandmaster.

Speaker 9:Yeah. But you’re old. It’s only 2,300.

Malcolm Collins:No. What are your thoughts, Simone?

imone Collins:This is depressing, but, also, I don’t know. I mean, my thing is if we’re gonna take this direction, you have to take it all the way. Right? I mean, people hold and and I’m I guess I’m thinking a lot about how it works in, like, Leviticus too, because that’s too too salient for me. But, also, in general, like, we don’t consider animals to be necessarily responsible for their own actions. Right? They’re animals. They can’t help it. But if a if an animal attacks someone, they’re put down. And so if that’s where we’re gonna go with this, then if a woman attacks someone because she can’t control herself, then she gets put down. I I don’t see how this is so confusing.

Malcolm Collins:By the way, I don’t know if you knew this, but did you know that if an animal killed somebody in medieval times, it was put on trail and, like, hung or killed in the way that a human criminal would have been

imone Collins:killed? Fine.

Malcolm Collins:This happened to pigs frequently.

imone Collins:How were pigs killing human? Oh, yeah. Pigs killed babies.

Malcolm Collins:Yeah. God.

imone Collins:Why did I have to dig up that memory? Trauma. Okay. Why why why can’t everyone just be okay? Oh my god. Okay. Anyway Anyway, you put them down. You put them down. You can’t do this whole thing where it’s like,

Malcolm Collins:oh, look

imone Collins:at it.

Malcolm Collins:Did the Jews have a point that they we should be separating women during their their menstrual cycle? Them?

imone Collins:I mean, really have to ask this. Yes. Except the problem with this whole thing is normally when women were separated out, their kids or infants were with them. And, like, I don’t like, if they get out, they get out. You know? It’s like two men enter, one man leaves. We’ll find out how this goes. Like, I don’t I’m not okay with the kids being looped into this.

Speaker 15:That could have been any of us. That is terrifying. So you understand the fear of women? Very much. And her husband? He just went out when he had a wife who could kill his kids at any time. Terrifying. That really really is. How could any man ever leave the house? Do they know how irresponsible that is? You can’t turn your back for five seconds, can you?

Malcolm Collins:So better strategy. What if we develop? And we can even sell this to people, like chains for women during that part of their cycle. And so you just chain them chain them in one of the rooms, Give them, like, some straw bedding so that they,

imone Collins:you know, don’t There’s actually, in very, very ancient homes. I was watching a YouTube channel that I’ve fallen down into, like, this this young man who talks a lot about biblical history, talking about the types of structures that were really common. I think maybe it was, like, in the very, like, very early houses, like ancient Sumeria or whatever. Right? And, like, the weird thing that they found with a lot of these houses is that even though everyone slept on the roof and there were no common bedrooms or private rooms, many of them had this one little raised part inside the house that looked like it could be a bed or, like, a complete box within the house. And it may have been for, like, women who were postpartum or for menstruating women to isolate them while they were

Malcolm Collins:Wait. Where was this? In ancient Samaria?

imone Collins:I think it was ancient Samaria. Oh god.

Malcolm Collins:Well, you know what’s about the Jew tunnels, right, in New York is

imone Collins:Well I saw Those were those were for guys with the mattresses on the ground. It was obviously, like, boys tunneling.

Malcolm Collins:No. But there was also so one of the things that everyone is freaking out about it, there was, like, why were there baby carriages and and mattresses covered in blood? And everyone was like, because young orthodox Jewish female have, like, six kids on average, and they do these weird, to us as Christians, minstrel ritual stuff around, like, you know, cleanliness and stuff like that, which is how that would be normal for them. I do not think they were doing child sacrifices. I I think we’d see more missing babies if that was the case in in that region. Oh, yeah. And as I’ve also pointed out, the the way that, like, Kabbalism works, even if you were going to do dark magic within the Jewish tradition, you would have to use Jewish babies because other babies don’t have, like, a full soul. It’s complicated. It depends on the branch of, like, Jewish eschatology you’re looking at. But if you’re looking at, like, the dark magic eschatology, it’s it and and soul is the wrong word here. It’s the something. I forget.

imone Collins:The something? I do Oh, yeah. Well, because the Bible doesn’t even have the word for soul anyway. Right? So that’s part of it.

Malcolm Collins:As for the techno Puritan answer to all of this, it’s just to engineer women that are like my wife and don’t go through menstrual cycles. It’s great to be married to her. She is very sane. I mean, you guys can hear this. One of the problems

imone Collins:they put me on the meds.

Malcolm Collins:Yeah. One of the problems that you guys are dealing with is you normalize to the sanity of my wife, and you think other women like this might exist out there. But, no, we just need to make them with science. All these Christians are like, genetic engineering. It’s an abomination. And I’m like, well, what if we can make women who weren’t crazy? And they’re like, well, hold on a second here. Maybe we can do a little genetic engineering.

imone Collins:Well, there are many ways that women have hormonally been messed with, including hormonal birth control, which now so many people are trying to go off of. Okay. I found what it was. It was not actually the one channel I’ve been listening to a lot. It was on this channel called ancient Egyptians. And it’s called, what what did ancient Egyptians do with no privacy? And they talk about in this episode these raised three sided brick platforms that were found in ancient Egyptian homes, which some archaeologists call enclosed beds. Think people think that maybe they were birthing beds or household shrines or marital beds or maybe a place for ritual seclusion after childbirth. But I’m like, maybe it’s the box for for women when they’re in trouble.

Malcolm Collins:Back the box. When as they go to the box, put them in the box.

imone Collins:Put them in the box. Menstrating women. Premenstrual women. Right? Another added all like, there’s my box right there. Although Yeah.

Malcolm Collins:She added she added that so

imone Collins:the baby can’t get out. Yeah. Tex thinks that they’re walls, and so he no longer tries to crawl off

Malcolm Collins:the bed. So unsure that was gonna work when

imone Collins:you said He’s just gonna, like, get caught in between them, but, no, he believes that they’re walls. Let’s just hope it stays

Malcolm Collins:up. Murder cage. One day, I’m gonna come in the room. There’s blood all over the

imone Collins:Blood splattered all over it. Trust me. It’s gonna be my blood. That kid, he’s out for me.

Malcolm Collins:He is? Can you show do still have scars right now from him? Or can he

imone Collins:No. No. No. I I I cut his nails, so I don’t have any Oh, good. Scars right now.

Malcolm Collins:He didn’t even bite you? Well, he bit

imone Collins:my he he can’t reach with his mouth that high when he’s in the the back carrier. He bit my finger last night and

Malcolm Collins:hurt bad. He’s a very aggressive child. The he’s unusually aggressive even among our children who

imone Collins:are Genial. Like, he he’s not he doesn’t intend to hurt.

Malcolm Collins:He None of our kids do, but they are very aggressive.

imone Collins:Yes. Yes. They I love to fight.

Malcolm Collins:I just I was going this morning. We had one Octavian with us, and I’m pushing the cart. He’ll look at me and just starts giggling. And I’m like, you’re thinking about jumping on me, aren’t you? And he’s like

imone Collins:Yeah. Basically, they just see you as the the person to attack. Okay. That’s very

Malcolm Collins:Well, I love you, Simone. I’m glad that we are all agreed. No. Actually, just answer the question. Female president, is it safe?

imone Collins:Compared to the yes. I I I would rather have

Malcolm Collins:Compared to sleepy Joe.

imone Collins:That’s what I’m saying. Like, if you have a very, very old I would prefer younger women than a gerundocracy. And who cares? You know? I’m just I I’m so fed up with there’s so many bigger fish to fry when it comes to politics. I would love to control campaign donations. I would love for so many things to happen before. I I don’t really care. You know? Politicians are so corrupt anyway. It doesn’t really matter. Like, you wouldn’t have a female a woman acting as impulsively, say, as Trump does. Like, let’s say that if Trump were a woman, I would be scared because Trump does whatever he feels like doing. He doesn’t necessarily do things because he needs to, like, be beholden

Malcolm Collins:to this

imone Collins:network of people. Women are way more likely especially a woman who gets elected to president is gonna be so controlled by a vast network of people who got her there that she is not going to make So women are influenceable. Fast moving violent moves. As a But yeah. But don’t make me president because I’ll just nuke everyone. I will I will they hurt all the people.

Malcolm Collins:For our nation state. I hadn’t written this when we first did it, but I would do it now.

imone Collins:Yeah.

Malcolm Collins:Is to have one of the dictator positions. The the dictator positions are not held by individuals, but they’re held by families of a a wife and husband. That’s cool. And that you have to be because then you’re not just judging them as individuals, but you’re judging them based on the stability of their marriage. And and I think that a stable couple is always going to run something in a more sane fashion than an individual male.

imone Collins:I think you’re right. Yeah. and because so many also really successful male leaders had good spouses to run things by.

Malcolm Collins:Yeah.

imone Collins:So I’m gonna say yes. Alright.

Malcolm Collins:After we take over. Love you, Simone. Love you too.

imone Collins:Oh, I’m just gonna keep obsessively checking to make sure my mic input doesn’t change. I’m terrified, but whatever. I hate refilming days. Oh my goodness.

Malcolm Collins:That was very demoralizing. We had an interview with Celestium, our software lost it. And I’m very annoyed because I programmed the software. And I’m getting constant audio things, but they don’t appear for long enough for me to read them.

imone Collins:It’s just that noisy room. So, apparently, quiet down, Malcolm. Look. You’re trying. You’re trying, and this is what trying looks like. Do you think that Thomas Edison’s office looked like a neat organized place with lots of functional light bulbs while while he was working on, you know, making something better. No.

Malcolm Collins:Well, I’m making notes on things I can fix. Okay?

imone Collins:Good. Yeah. This is favorable. Alright. That’s okay. I I I still yeah. I I worked on fixing a bunch of things and and bug testing a bunch of things with the kid website with.

Malcolm Collins:Mudpuppy .Ai?

imone Collins:Yeah. Yeah. There’s still a lot to fix. So I’m going through that too.

Malcolm Collins:Was that team being able to use it to, like, talk with agents?

imone Collins:I also asked for adventure to just not show the narrative engine option, but switch to the adventure the default adventure engine. So it has the proper engine for each one. The kids don’t have to choose that because that’s too overwhelming, and then no NSFW options show up. Because it’s a it’s a kid’s site.

Malcolm Collins:Yeah. I’ve been working on

imone Collins:it kid, like, accidentally chooses one of the user created NSFW narrative

Malcolm Collins:edits. Nothing happens

imone Collins:to tutor duck is like, oh, you wanted to know that.

Malcolm Collins:Reality for kids is and and I hate there are so many people who don’t get this, is you know what happens when a kid sees something that’s not safe for work or hear something that’s not safe for work? Nothing. They don’t get turned on. They don’t get pros they don’t process it in some special way.

Speaker 17:When a woman reaches the age of 21, something queer happens. She suddenly finds herself no longer interested merely in dollies and pretty frogs. She acquires a keen desire to seek greater knowledge of men.

imone Collins:I know. But you know what? Parents, they parents freak out. They flip a lid. Okay.

Malcolm Collins:Right. It is it is like, there is no audience that not safe for work is less dangerous for than kids.

imone Collins:I know. I know. I I walked into so many things as a kid that I probably shouldn’t have walked into and was just like, hi, guys. Meanwhile, like, the adults are dying inside.

Speaker 20:Note here, if you’re under the perception that this is how fetishes are formed or something, it is we wrote an entire bestselling book on human sexuality where we performed one of the largest surveys on the subject looking at things that happen to people during their childhood and trying to correlate it to adult arousal patterns, and we just didn’t find anything. It’s it’s mostly a just so story where people are trying to explain unusual arousal patterns they have, and it’s in the same way that people are like, why are you sad? Oh, what what did your parents do? You know, the classic psychologist thing. It’s the easiest way to remove responsibility from this is just the way you are.

imone Collins:And

Malcolm Collins:Yeah. It was it’s it’s so stupid. It’s Yeah. Like, these parents who freak out about this are so, I’m like, do you the biology. Do you not understand the biology at play here?

imone Collins:They don’t. I think the answer is they don’t, and we have to understand this, and we have to build a children’s look. This is something, for example, that public school teachers and private school teachers learn immediately, that they’re not catering to the students. They’re catering to the teachers sorry, to the parents. And if the parents don’t like what the student the student is being taught, even if the student is gaining proficiency in whatever the skill is, they they don’t get any credit for that. They don’t get credit for proficient students. They get credit for parents being happy and satisfied with everything. Where have you gone? There’s an error that says too quiet.

Malcolm Collins:Room was coming from my fan that cools my computer. Oh. Oh, it did. It went away. Noisy room went away. Yeah. But when

imone Collins:you walked away, it said too quiet.

Malcolm Collins:It said too quiet.

imone Collins:Very catchy. Malcolm Malcolm not talking. Yeah. As soon as soon as it’s gonna be, like, too boring. Pick up the pace. Actually, I could

Malcolm Collins:I could code that. Don’t. Don’t. Too boring? Too boring. You’re boring.

imone Collins:Yeah. Too ugly. Switch to YouTuber mode. Really good upsell there. You know? Alright. Alright. Alright

Speaker 19:Are you trying to bite me? It’s my side. It’s big. Oh god. Titan, you’re gonna get hurt doing this. Do you wanna hug? Yeah. Yeah. You wanna hug? My mom loves biting people. Why do you love biting people, Titan? Because it’s my favorite thing. Why is it your favorite thing, Titan? Because I really love it, but I really love biting the Oh, god.

A deep dive into the strange history of a 1970s fantasy religion that broke containment into real-world communes, immersive boarding school experiences, and early computer game development. The episode traces its evolution from Oxford-area writings and goddess-focused observances through anti-modern settlements in Ireland, the creation of text adventures on Commodore 64 and ZX Spectrum hardware, and later publishing efforts.

Listeners explore how the group attempted financial self-sustainability, the role of role-play and discipline practices in its later phases, connections to far-right materials, and why the movement ultimately remained a niche online remnant rather than a lasting community. The discussion highlights themes of invented religions, alternate reality games before the term existed, and the challenges of building sustainable new belief systems.

Show Notes

Hat tip to those who sent us to the YouTube video (and check it out if you haven’t seen it!): The Neo-Victorian Neo-N*zi Lesbian BDSM Cult That Made Video Games by Tor’s Cabinet of Curiosities

Fantasy World Breaking Containment

This weird movement emerged from what was probably a fantasy world:

* Around 1973–74, a small Oxford-based circle produced the texts that became the Madrian/Filianic sacred writings: notably the Sacred Mythos, The Crystal Tablet, and The Teachings of the Daughter.

* Members regarded these writings as inspired—sometimes described in terms of divine inspiration or trance—rather than merely as a conventional authored religious manifesto.

* A more public movement then emerged under the banner Lux Madriana, distributing scripture and catechism, publishing the newsletter The Coming Age, holding religious observances, and recruiting through the era’s feminist, occult, and alternative-spirituality networks.

A later Filianist source describes the founders not as a formal college club but as a small group of people in Oxford and the Home Counties who created a complete religious framework: theology, scriptures, ritual calendar, terminology, and community practices.

Madrianism was unusual among 1970s British Goddess movements because it was not simply Wicca with a stronger female focus. It presented itself as a structured, devotional religion—more analogous in style to a sacral tradition with scripture, prayer, catechism, feast days, rosaries, priestly roles, and moral teachings.

Its core claims included:

* The ultimate divine reality is feminine: Déa, the Mother.

* Divine life is understood in a threefold form, later commonly expressed as Creator, Sustainer/Daughter, and a transcendent or “Beyond” aspect.

* The Daughter functions in a savior-like role, giving the tradition a devotional shape that some observers find reminiscent of Marian and Christian forms.

* The faith had a sacred calendar and a named set of spiritual virtues/emanations, the Janyati.

* Prayer, religious study, handmade devotional items, domestic community, and a refusal of aspects of modern consumer culture were emphasized.lambentpath.

Here’s where the breaking of containment emerges: The Oxford-origin Madrian milieu eventually split into several strands:

* One stream became associated with Aristasia, a female-centered constructed world/community.

* Another developed communal, anti-modern, and increasingly role-based forms in Yorkshire before relocating to Burtonport, Donegal, in 1982 as the Rhennish Community / Silver Sisterhood.

The Emergence of a Victorian Curiosity

This movement physically manifested with a primal scream, literally.

In 1974, the Atlantis Primal Therapy Commune descended upon the Irish town of Burtenport, buying a large house they subsequently painted with rainbow colors, murals, slogans, and zodiac imagery.

Commune members quickly became known by townspeople as “the screamers” because members used confrontational “primal scream” sessions—shouting, crying, and sometimes aggressively challenging one another—as a supposed form of emotional release. They weren’t fans of the middle-of-the-night primal scream sessions.

In 1989, they left Burtonport proper for Inishfree/Inisfree, a remote Donegal island, where it continued communal and subsistence living, and this opened up the logistical portal through which the Silver Sisterhood was able to physically manifest.

St. Bride’s School

Though the Silver Sisterhood first moved to Burtonport hoping to form an anti-modern communal settlement calling the house An Droichead Beo, Irish for “The Bridge of Life.”

Their pre-boarding-school era is captured in RTE archives.

They lived without electricity and just seemed like self-contained bog hags.

* Daily life included Rhennish-language music and storytelling, prayer-oriented work, and making their own instruments and clogs.

* They planned to sell handmade clogs and embroidered textiles, grow crops, work the surrounding land, and gradually bring more members from Yorkshire.

That failed and they pivoted to branding the house as St. Bride’s School, which sold an immersive, Victorian-style boarding-school holiday for adult women.

The boarding school era was much more fun, though the house remained without electricity or modern appliances (with one notable exception), though they did like to listen to songs on their hand-cranked gramophone.

Visitors—adult women, generally in their 20s and 30s—paid for week-long “terms” in which they lived 24 hours a day as pupils in an imagined 1920s–30s English girls’ boarding school. They wore period clothes, followed school routines, attended lessons, went on outdoor rambles, used old-style money in the tea room, and took part in mystery games based on noticing clues in the surrounding landscape.

* It’s in these mystery game that the Silver Sisterhood may have gotten into video games

* On rambles, participants noticed odd objects or features, imagined them as clues, and worked out supposed hidden connections—the activity that inspired the group’s text adventure The Secret of St Bride’s.

The Video Games

The group’s move into video games seems to have started with one resident, Priscilla Langridge, who brought a Commodore 64 to St Bride’s and began turning the community’s real-life mystery games and heavily imagined boarding-school world into text adventures.

* The venture then became both a small business and highly effective publicity for St Bride’s, despite the school’s public rejection of modern technology

They called their computer an ordinator. One of the sisterhood’s leaders, Miss Martindale, is quoted as saying that games required concentration and commitment, whereas television was passive.

Langridge used The Quill, an adventure-game creation system.

* She reportedly began on a Commodore 64 and later moved to the ZX Spectrum.

* The first game, The Secret of St Bride’s (1985), made the school itself the premise: a character arrives at a 1985 Irish holiday center built around old-fashioned boarding-school life, then begins to suspect it is actually 1927.

St. Bride’s School ultimately released several ZX Spectrum/Commodore-era text adventures in the 1980s, including The Snow Queen, The Very Big Cave Adventure, Bugsy, and 1987’s Jack the Ripper.

* Jack the Ripper reportedly became the first game assigned an 18+ rating

* The games were unusually surreal and often centered feminine power; Jack the Ripper, for example, resolves through a fantastical confrontation involving the victims’ “pure” femininity rather than a conventional detective solution.

The Beatings

The leader of the Silver Sisters, Marianne Martindale—then using the name Marianne Scarlett—was convicted in 1993 of assault for caning a young woman at St Bride’s, but the beatings went beyond isolated canings among residents.

According to sources like an April 1984 article titled “Shocking hidden lessons at St. Bride’s School…”

* The author reports that the women running St Bride’s admitted offering “special” courses in which adult “pupils” were whipped, birched, and caned. The report distinguishes these from the ordinary boarding-school holiday

Later accounts say the school was marketed to adult women as a £95-per-week alternative holiday and that normal visits did not necessarily involve caning, while a deeper or specialized course could involve it.

HOWEVER: Those later accounts should be read cautiously: they draw on retrospective reporting and the group’s own shifting descriptions rather than a full, independently audited account of what happened.

The group appears to have incorporated BDSM-like practices by turning its existing interests in female hierarchy, obedience, role-play, period-school discipline, and controlled regression into paid “special courses” at St Bride’s.

* It was not an abrupt change from an otherwise ordinary holiday school

* The sexualized or disciplinary element seems to have been an extension of the group’s broader constructed social world—although the boundary between consensual adult role-play and coercion became a serious issue, like the 1993 incident.

Post Collapse

St. Bride’s fell apart in 1993 and the Silver Sisterhood evolved into the Wildfire Club, a publishing and mail-order venture associated with Marianne Martindale and some Aristasian associates.

* Its books list a London postal address—“B.M. Elegance, London, W.C.1”—and invited correspondence. A book published under the imprint [this link leads to the full text] directs prospective visitors to write to “Her Excellency the Imperial Ambassadress” via the Wildfire Club.

As part of all this, Marianne Martindale and associates openly sold BDSM- and corporal-discipline-related publications, most notably The Female Disciplinary Manual.

* It was presented as a “complete guide to the correction and chastisement of young ladies,” in deliberately old-school “mistress” and “girl” language

* it included detailed discussion of:

* Different types of canes and how to use them.

* Methods of spanking.

* The use of the strap.

* Practical cautions and instructions about corporal punishment.

Martindale described it to the newspaper as a serious instructional book for “mistresses” disciplining “girls,” while indicating that the intended participants were adults—people over 18.

The Wildfire Club had a business offshoot offering canes and straps, and that people interested in discipline could telephone the organization to discuss it.

There is also evidence of related fiction and themed material under Martindale’s name. For example, an archived text titled The Corporal Punishment of Schoolgirls [The link goes to the actual full text] includes a story called “A Caning School,” attributed to “Miss Marianne Martindale.” That supports the conclusion that the milieu produced disciplinary fantasy writing as well as the more explicitly instructional manual.

The group’s later Aristasian historical account itself acknowledges that physical discipline was “an undeniable part” of Aristasia and some of its offshoots for many years—though it frames the practice in its own, defensive terms and therefore should not be treated as an independent account.

Uh….

When St Bride’s ended in 1993, the landlord reportedly found materials associated with the sadomasochistic sex industry—including images, price lists for leg irons and handcuffs, and related publications—alongside far-right/neo-Nazi material. The residents denied links to the publications, saying such items had arrived unsolicited among mailings of pamphlets and periodicals.

Still occasionally physically manifesting?

In The District Governess, Martindale writes that the Aristasia in the book is a “mythos” or ideal world behind the earthly Aristasia; she says earthly members and households were shaped by the fiction, while the fiction could not have been written without the already-existing community.

* The same volume invited women who wanted to “visit Aristasia” to contact the Wildfire Club.

What remains?

The broader Aristasian cultural project has persisted in dispersed form, mostly online.

* The historical and contemporary digital footprint includes Aristasia-focused diaries, recollections, archives, fiction, terminology, and discussions of a female-centered imagined world. The Aristasia Diaries describes Aristasia as a place of “homecoming,” purity, and gentility that members carry into the physical world.

* A former-participant archival project, Aristasian Reminiscence, was still posting update logs in late 2023. Its purpose is historical documentation and reconstruction, not evidence of one unified active organization.

* Public commentary from former participants describes Aristasia as continuing chiefly in imagination and cyberspace, while also describing organizational changes and schisms. That is a critical source, not a neutral census, but it is consistent with the absence of evidence for a large physical successor.

So the movement’s remaining presence consists of small networks, individual practitioners, writers, former-members’ archives, and online subcultures

What Can We Take Away from This?

Why This Culture Crafting was Doomed from the Start

It’s inherently antinatal

Episode Transcript

Simone Collins:The Female Disciplinary Manual. It presents, quote, a complete guide to the correction and chastisement of young ladies, end quote, And it included, in case you need to be convinced more to check out the original text, different types of canes and how to use them, methods of spanking, the use of the strap, and practical cautions and instructions for corporal punishment, So the lesbians agree with the neo Nazis that let’s just wear old style clothing and beat women.

Malcolm Collins:I mean, that all sounds very reasonable to

Simone Collins:me. My god. Hello, Malcolm. I’m very excited and angry to be speaking with you today because apparently you’ve been sitting on knowledge of a bizarre group of sapphic lesbians with tumultuous connections to primal screeners.

Malcolm Collins:Hold on. So she comes to me, and she goes, Malcolm, if I say Victorian women in the nineteen eighties, does that mean anything to you? And I was like, no. And I go, well, unless you’re talking about that sex cult that made video games, then, like, of course, I’m very familiar with them. And she goes, wait. What? And I’m like, Simone, when it comes to Victorian sex cults in the nineteen eighties, I’m pretty sure I’m familiar with a lot of them.

Simone Collins:And you didn’t tell me. You even were like, no, Simone. We recorded an episode on this. We did not record an episode

Malcolm Collins:on this. You’ve, like, you you I figured our audience would already know about the Victorian sex cult that made video games in

Simone Collins:the Well, then why didn’t you tell me? This is fascinating, and we have so much in common with them between, like, the the antiquated, you know, costumes and the beatings and the the the built religion.

Malcolm Collins:And they moved they moved the video game. They were they made some genuinely important games and, like, video history.

Simone Collins:And, like, the the the high-tech, like, gaming developing. Like, come on. This is it’s it’s our kind of thing. But, thankfully, no thanks to you, multiple base camp listeners directed me to a YouTube video by a young man accompanied by a durian who he claimed to be his cohost who talks about this movement. And, clearly, he’s our kind of guy. So I had to absolutely dive in.

Malcolm Collins:What do mean a durian? Isn’t that a fruit?

Simone Collins:Yes. A durian. He sits next to a durian because he’s

Malcolm Collins:I thought that was some sort of an ethnic slur. So come on.

Simone Collins:Oh my god. No. It’s a durian. He he appears to have attached eyes to it. I’m linking to his video in the show notes. I mean, I do the same, and

Malcolm Collins:the audience never you know?

Simone Collins:Why am I just a durian with eyes pasted on me? Yes. Literally, we’re just the same exact channel. It’s just I

Malcolm Collins:it’s just Simone, you are a woman.

Simone Collins:Yes. Thanks. There’s gonna be a lot of women in this episode. But, anyway, I I I I like this. Durians.

Malcolm Collins:It’s the word for them. They smell terrible. They don’t feign for themselves. Just googly eyes.

Simone Collins:And spiky.

Malcolm Collins:Yeah. That’s the spiky on

Simone Collins:the outside, soft innards. Disgusting smelling innards. Oh god. Okay. Anyway, it’s important for us to actually talk about them not just because they’re insanely entertaining, but because here we have literally a crafted religion that then attempted to become financially self sustaining and get its footing a bunch of different times. And you have talked a lot about, like, look. This know, once you you have a religion that creates, you know, its own special, like, dogma and practices and everything else, like, they can often pick off really well. Why did this one not? We should explore that. And, of course, there are obvious reasons why not. We’ll get into them. But I think it’s still very important and also really fun to look at religions that attempted to rise and how this one just went into, like, crazy town super fast. It’s one of those, like if you saw the Robot Olympics, you saw how, like, many of them started off running, like, absolutely amazingly. They, like, hit a wall and, like, fall in half and sparks come out. That is this religion. And but, like, as it falls apart, you’re dying with laughter. And so it’s wonderful and beautiful. And so, look, we’re gonna I’m I am jumping into this rabbit hole after you, and I’m doing that, like, skydiving thing where you make yourself into a stick so you fly down faster so I can punch you midair as we fall through because I’m mad at you about this, but then we’re gonna fall through it together and enjoy ourselves. But, anyway, definitely had to have two tours cabinet of curiosities, which is the the YouTube channel that made the video titled the neo Victorian neo Nazi lesbian BDSM cult that made video games, which got me into this. Go watch the video. I don’t I tried to not cover what he covered because I think we should have a different angle. And, anyway, it’s a good video. You should watch it. There’s a durian in it, which is great, and she’s better than I am, I guess. The weird movement that we’re talking about

Malcolm Collins:here Simone, only smelling. I hate

Simone Collins:you. I hate you so much. I’m gonna go join a sapphic lesbian BDSM cult, and you’ll be all by yourself. Just deal with it. Although there was there was, like, at at various points in the history of this group, there was, like, one guy one guy that’s, like, sort of ill explained. At one point, he was a butler. I don’t know if it’s the same guy. Like, there was another guy that was, like, at the pre the very early stages of the first physical manifestation. Anyway, you could be that guy, but like, the So everyone else needs to be

Malcolm Collins:a woman? Okay. We’ll be bringing in lots of women. Alright.

Simone Collins:Women. My god. Never mind. I I’m canceling this.

Malcolm Collins:Always what your episodes come to. It’s Malcolm. You need more wives. And it’s like, I agree. No. Why do I only have one wife?

Simone Collins:Why does it always have nothing

Malcolm Collins:this this selfish of you, Simone,

Simone Collins:to hog me. What am I gonna do? What am I gonna do? I’m just gonna okay. We’re gonna okay. The emergence. The emergence of this religion. Did you know it wasn’t actually religion first?

Malcolm Collins:It was a religion first. I did not know that.

Simone Collins:Okay. Okay. So, basically, this this all came out of a nineteen seventies fantasy world that broke containment. And the interesting thing about it, and and I’ll I’ll touch on this later, but, like, this fantasy world did partially break containment, but then the fantasy world part of it just kept on going. And then the containment breaking, like, recombined with the fantasy world after it failed, basically, to become a proper religion and then kind of fell back into a fantasy world. That that’s the spoiler of all this. Anyway, around nineteen seventy three and seventy four, a small Oxford based circle produced the texts that became the Madrian or Philanic sacred writings, notably the sacred mythos, the crystal tablet, and the teachings of the daughter. So here we are, already one of the key components of a new religion, like actual original writings. Okay? Members of the this new movement thought the writings were divinely inspired. They would sometimes be described in terms of divine trance rather than merely being this conventionally authored religious manifesto. And a more public movement emerged from people into this under the banner luxe madrianna, distributing scripture and catechism. They had a newsletter called the coming age. They held religious observances, and they recruited through this feminist occult and alternative spirituality network that, of course, was, like, everywhere in the seventies. so it it while there were a lot of, like, goddess movements and Wiccans in the nineteen seventies, this was different because it wasn’t simply Wicca with the stronger female focus. It was presented as this structured devotional religion. And so it’s more like a a sacral tradition with scripture and prayer and catechism and feast days and rosaries and priestly roles and moral teachings than, like, the craft. And a later Filanist source describes the founders not as this formal college club. It wasn’t Oxford affiliated, but it was a small group of peep people in the Oxford area and home countries who then created this complete religious framework. So it’s it it wasn’t associated with the university, but it probably came out of that area because you had a lot of very educated people who were good at writing. And you see weird things like this happen whenever you get women who are, I guess, kind of, like, isolated and bookish and good at writing, like with the Bronte sisters. Like, when women are kind of alone and eccentric, weird things happen. So the core claims of this religion were that the ultimate divine reality is feminine called deia or the mother, and then divine life is understood in this threefold form. Laterally it was later commonly expressed as the creator, the sustainer, and the daughter. And then there’s this transient beyond aspect. And the daughter functions in the savior like role. So they’re kind of copying Christianity and the trinity here, which I don’t think is great. It’s you could do it better if you’re doing a whole fan fiction universe. But this gave this tradition more of a devotional shape that some people thought was more reminiscent of Marian and Christian traditions. And then the faith had this sacred calendar and a named set of of virtues and

Malcolm Collins:So wait. Why was it created? Like, what was the motivation of the person who made it?

Simone Collins:It’s unclear because there wasn’t a single person who created it.

Malcolm Collins:Oh, it was like a community?

Simone Collins:Yes. It’s like a female fan fiction community. It’s like to it seems from what I’ve read, very akin to the omegaverse where it’s like, well, who created the omegaverse? There’s not exactly like, oh, it was Andrea Burton from Clydesdale. it’s not no. It’s it was like a What would

Malcolm Collins:you do in these devotionals? Like, what was the the practice of this religion like?

Simone Collins:So it’s it’s unclear, but here’s where the breaking of containment emerges because you needed to have this physical element. And I I think what was happening in in the original days was, like, women were getting together and hanging out and then doing spiritual things that made them feel like, oh, just the way that all the other Wiccans were, but they were just all also very smart and into fan fiction, basically, and, like, literary universes. And so they really went for it. But then the Oxford origin, Madrian, Miliu eventually split, and one stream became associated with what what now is, like, this online distributed community well, it was, at least for a while, Aristasia, which is just this, like this is the the continuing female oriented, like, fan community. It’s like the omegaverse, but, like, kind of you you inhabit it, and you believe in it and everything. And then this other group developed into this communal, anti modern, and increasingly role based form that would became known as first the Rhenish community and then the sister Silverhood. And this is what you understand as, like, the BDSM Victorian cult. But it it literally started with a primal scream. Do you know how? Do you know about the primal screaming? No. Okay. So I know okay. I I can introduce you to new things in this rabbit hole we’re falling through. In 1974, the Atlanta’s Primal Therapy Commune descended upon the Irish town of Burtonport buying a large house that they subsequently painted with rainbow colors and murals and slogans and zodiac imagery. It was it was a thing. Commune members became known by the townspeople as the screamers because they really hated them. They’d be screaming. Because, like, the whole point of primal therapy are you looking up a picture of them? I could show you. Yep. If you wanna see. Primal therapy is what it was called? Well, they were primal screamers. Like, remember how in the look. That’s their that’s their house. the house was called Atlantis. I’m showing you a picture of it now. You see it’s got the rainbow colors. It’s got the

Malcolm Collins:Oh, wow. And they liked god. That’d be so annoying.

Simone Collins:So it was I’m like, Yoko Ono got into this. John Lennon got into this. It was the seventies. Like, primal scream therapy was a trend. I I can’t really think of anything analogous now, but it was it was a trend. And this particular commune basically wanted to engage in subsistence living. And just one thing that they did to, like, feel better about life was also it wasn’t just primal screaming, but, like, shouting and crying and sometimes aggressively challenging each other. So in the middle of the night, if you’re living in the town of Burtonport, you’ll just hear these, like, unhinged screams, and it was it was very disturbing. So, I mean, look, they they didn’t get along well, the screamers and the townspeople. And so in 1989, they left Burtonport, and they went to instead this remote island in the same general area where they just continued their communal and subsistence living. But this opened up the logistical portal through which the Silver Sisterhood was able to physically manifest because suddenly, this large house already kinda set up for communal living is just sitting there available, and some of this this the women into this weird religion wanted to go live there. And it started out not as the weird Victorian BDSM school thing

Malcolm Collins:Okay.

Simone Collins:But rather this anti modern communal settlement that they called, well, they called the house on, which is Irish for the bridge of life. And they there’s

Malcolm Collins:Man, these other cults are so gay compared to ours.

Simone Collins:They’re really lame. This goes to show you, though, that, like, the original manifestation of this was very it wasn’t the Victorian thing at all. It wasn’t, like, a kinky, like, weird thing. I’m gonna show you just so you get a really quick picture of it. Oh, for the this is their original manifestation. They’re, like, weird, like, druid app

Malcolm Collins:is awesome, by the way.

Simone Collins:I know. Druidic, like

Speaker 3:All of them are strangers. They came to Burtonport in West Donegal two months ago. New faces with faith in ancient traditions. The last base was in a smallish Yorkshire town, but it’s here

Simone Collins:next to a Victoria. Atlantic.

Speaker 3:They plan to establish

Malcolm Collins:their village.

Speaker 3:Like It’s to be a sanctuary

Simone Collins:for Well, modern

Malcolm Collins:I mean, they look pre Victorian.

Simone Collins:Yeah. They look pre Victorian. They’re rejecting their house here.

Speaker 3:Storytelling are now daily occurrences.

Simone Collins:Just sit in their their house, and they play little instruments, and they have no electricity.

Speaker 3:Dating back to the fourteenth century.

Simone Collins:They made up their their own language.

Speaker 3:The embroidery

Simone Collins:They just play terrible music. Though united as In their house, we What are those phones? I don’t know. I’m sure that’s that’s a normal instrument, but I don’t

Speaker 3:The youngest

Malcolm Collins:Anyway. Oh my god. These They

Simone Collins:had to white knuckle all that. Over there.

Speaker 3:Are this new community in Burton

Simone Collins:See, like, they’re even trying to do, like, prayer beads. Like, a lot of it is very derivative.

Speaker 3:How really is with the local community. Person Very interesting.

Malcolm Collins:A very meaning crisis.

Simone Collins:Yeah. It’s and look. There’s poor child was roped into it. I I feel quite bad for her. But, anyway, look. It’s it’s drums. It’s hippies. It’s it’s women who are totally doing, you know, this whole this whole weird hippie thing. So you’ve got a picture of that. That is not what people associate with the Silver Sisterhood. And that’s what’s, to me, really interesting is, first, there’s this, like, weird, like, fan fiction community, and then it breaks containment in this house where these women are like, I’m gonna live with a lot out with electricity and play my instruments and drum. but here’s the thing. They planned on selling just handmade clogs and embroidered embroidered textiles. Like, you saw in that one segment of the video, like, this woman was holding up this, like, thing. they were they were gonna grow crops and work the land, and then they wanted to bring in more members from Yorkshire to, like, come and live on their commune. The thing is that just totally didn’t work. I guess some cults are able to make that kind of thing work where, like, you all work the land. I guess the problem is that you have to, if you’re gonna take that approach as a cult, you have to recruit really rich members who then give you all their money. And I think what the problem here with this group was was that it was pretty much only women who I don’t think ever really had very ambitious careers who didn’t have, like, money to give. And so they all had to actually make money as a cult.

Malcolm Collins:Well, I like that as a thing because if they work, then it can become more sustainable.

Simone Collins:Yeah. And and it wasn’t about extracting value from humans. It was like, how are we gonna make this cultural thing work? And I think this is something that we, with techno puritanism, are like, how are we gonna create something that will live beyond just us? Because it’s like that you need

Malcolm Collins:gate used to run do do you remember how they made money?

Simone Collins:I have no idea. What did they do?

Malcolm Collins:They had a a website design service

Simone Collins:Oh, that I remember participating. Gotta do you gotta figure it out. Except what did they didn’t didn’t they all kill themselves?

Malcolm Collins:Yeah. They did except for one guy who, like, still runs the website design service and Are

Simone Collins:you serious?

Malcolm Collins:Yeah. It wasn’t a good website design service.

Simone Collins:Web the web design guy didn’t Wait. One of the

Malcolm Collins:guys working on that, yeah, because he had to keep up their website after they all killed themselves.

Simone Collins:Well, I mean, why would they need the money anymore? Did he not show up for work that day when everyone was like

Malcolm Collins:I think it was, like, an agreement with everyone that somebody needs to stay behind to, like, guide people or something.

Simone Collins:My gosh. Oh, were they the ones who were trying to get on the comet? Is there Yeah. They were all, like, Cambridge, bus .

Malcolm Collins:Oh. They were they were not far from you. They were, like, near There

Simone Collins:are so many cults around you when you are in growing up in the Bay Area. Like, I don’t know. Come on. Remember the one in Alameda, in my hometown, there was the the guy who kept being, like wait. In, what? 02/2010 or whatever. The world’s gonna end. Harold Camping. Harold Camping. He was in Alameda, wasn’t he? In my

Malcolm Collins:By the he he ended in Alameda, if I remember correctly.

Simone Collins:So yeah. Yeah. Also, I believe where Skippy peanut butter was invented. So you’re welcome. Not that I was born there or anything. But, anyway, there are so many cults. Who cares? But, yes, this is a very interesting part of, I would say, like, religious terminal velocity is how do we become financially self sustaining? And, yes, you make a good point. Being just extractive of people, that’s not financially sustainable. It that’s a pyramid scheme or, like, worse than that because you don’t even really get far. So, yeah, what do they do then? Right? They they failed, and they pivoted to branding the house at Saint as Saint Bride School, which sold an immersive Victorian style boarding school holiday for adult women. And I, as a really big fan of, like, Jane Austen novels in the Regency era in England, have seen so many stupid romance movies about, like, some young single 20 woman showing up to an immersive holiday where everyone dresses up like it’s the Regency era. I I never thought these places were real. And so I was really surprised to see that they’re

Malcolm Collins:actually real thing.

Simone Collins:It’s like

Malcolm Collins:a Jane Austen novel. Everybody

Simone Collins:Well, except Victorian. And no one wants to go to the Victorian era except for Victorian stick ins festivals, which are delightful, because everyone was dying. Like, this was before we figured out how to survive the industrial revolution. And so everyone’s just got the black lung, and everyone’s living in dense cities and dying of various horrible diseases or, you know, that you’re a street urchin that, you know, the bee is being beaten in school if you’re wealthy and being beaten by police outside if you’re not and dying in the cold. Like, the Victorian era was horrible, and no one wants it except for just, again, Dickens fairs in Christmastime. Have you been to a Dickens fair?

Malcolm Collins:Yes. But we we went together on a double date.

Simone Collins:Yes. With no you’re, yeah. You’re some of your Stanford classmates. We have a cute little picture of us there. Me, like, leaning into you and being all like, oh, I love my I love Malcolm. Couldn’t believe that you were like, you came back to me. I can’t believe it. Anyway, that was my, like, oh, he chose me. I’m still like that actually. Get weary. We’re gonna kiss. We’re gonna make babies. That is, like, literally my face. It’s the stupidest face in the entire world. Anyway, we did go to one, and it was cute. And didn’t we have we had haggis or scotch eggs or something.

Malcolm Collins:But they were good.

Simone Collins:Yeah. Well, obviously, because we’re in freaking San Francisco. Anyway, those are delightful. I just didn’t know these existed, and I’m delighted to discover that these women did it and that it was real. and the boarding school era was obviously way more fun than what we just saw a segment about. The house did remain without without electricity with one notable exception that we’ll get to soon. Though they did not listen they did they did listen to songs on their hand cranked gramophone, which they would enthusiastically mention in their advertisements that they listened to a gramophone. But, anyway, visitors who were primarily adult women in their twenties and thirties, just like the protagonists of the stupid rom coms that I watch, paid for week long terms in which they just lived twenty four hours a day in this house. It it was supposed to be an imagined nineteen twenties and thirties English girls boarding school, so I don’t know why they wore Victorian dress. I have problems with their, like, aesthetic era mixing. There are issues with it. But, anyway, they wore period clothes, and they they followed school routines, and you would attend lessons, and you’d go on outdoor rambles. And you used old style money in their tea room, and you took

Malcolm Collins:part used old style money?

Simone Collins:You had to, like, buy cocktails using shillings or something. Like, old, like, old money. Not new money. Like, money that was, like, expired. They gotten rid of it. Like, aren’t we getting rid of the penny? It’d be, like, people being, like, you’re free. Like, old

Malcolm Collins:yeah. The types of money that aren’t in use anymore.

Simone Collins:Okay. Yes. Exactly. Because they wanted to be, like, we’re we’re old timey. And then this is key. One of the things that you do also on these immersive weekends is you would go on rambles, which is just British talk for walking, but perhaps inelegantly and clumsily like I do, where you would you would look for clues, and then you, as a guest, would have to work out supposed hidden connections. And this is actually what brings us to the next and one of the most interesting eras of this attempted start at a religion breaking containment, the video game era. So

Malcolm Collins:I just can’t even imagine how you’d advertise successfully the first thing. Like

Simone Collins:In newspapers. They advertised in newspapers just like girl’s school. But, actually, the video games really helped to advertise the school. Anyway, though, it it seems that the the the the Silver Sisterhood got into making video games ironically, as a house that didn’t have electricity, and that’s most high-tech thing was a gramophone that was hand cranked. They they started with one resident named Priscilla Langridge who brought a Commodore 64 to St. Bridges. I don’t know why she thought it would be okay to lug this very large and expensive piece of equipment to this house, that it remains a mystery.

Malcolm Collins:And they they then got to playing it and were like, this is cool. Proto nerds?

Simone Collins:Yes. Yeah. So she began well, I think I think the reason why they they accepted it is she started turning communities real life mystery games that they do in these rambles because they they were again, it was like this immersive. Honestly, it it’s a very proto alternate reality game. And in other episodes, we’ve talked about alternate reality games. They they had this resurgence, like, fifteen, twenty years ago or something. I got involved in one called the games of nonchalance. The most famous one originally during that era was called the beast, and it was associated with the release of the movie AI, right, with the the eye can see ghosts kid. What was

Malcolm Collins:it called? You run that?

Simone Collins:Or I didn’t run the beast. I I helped to I helped as an intern with the games of nonchalance. Like, I would I would put street elements up and help them film, like, the the found footage that people would find

Malcolm Collins:as they play game. For you, Simone.

Simone Collins:Should we make a techno puritan as an alternate reality game?

Malcolm Collins:No. Like, can we do some sort of alternate reality thing to advertise for ARFIB? Can we like, if you’re gonna be maximally creative about this, how do we get people interested? Oh.

Simone Collins:Oh. Yeah. Because we can have a we can have an AI mind break containment. And the coolest thing about our alternate reality game is, like, as AI gets better, we can actually have it actually manifest. We can just build the AI, and she’ll actually be out there.

Malcolm Collins:And you call a number, and it, like, talks to you, it gives you the next steps?

Simone Collins:Oh my god. Because that’s how it works. Like, so, with the games of nonchalance, the way that it would work is and I’m sorry if you guys have already heard this story, but you would see, like, an ad around San Francisco for a cult that was like, dolphin human communication, become a breatharian, all these things like Jungian psychology. It would just have all the buzzwords in it. You you would you could call a number that was, like, from, like, one of the little tabs you pull from, like, you know, those pieces of paper that people would tape to lamppost,

Malcolm Collins:which

Simone Collins:is one of my jobs as the intern. You call the number. It was a real number. It would direct you to go to an induction ceremony. You’d go to their website, and you’d see the creepy website. And it would tell you to go to the induction. And the induction was at, like, the, like, 20 Something Floor, 18th Floor, whatever, of a very large tall building in San Francisco’s financial District. You go up. You’d you’d and it’s a very real building. You would enter the lobby, and there’d be some weird ass girl sitting there. And you’d be like, hey. I’m here for the the Jejun Institute. And she’d be like, oh, yeah. Go into office number whatever for your induction. And that would often be me. I love to do the weekend shifts. It was delightful. I mean, just be creepy and direct people into their induction. And then you’d enter this room. There was this automated room in this office building. It was all creepy and decked out in nineteen seventies decorations, and they’d sit in this, like, chair that, like, reclined back, and you’re, like, sitting. And then this TV turns on, And it gets really weird and stuff in the room turns on and off. And then, like, at the end, you see, like, there’s some weird note under your chair and you, like, somehow find it and pick it up. The whole time, by the way, people running the game in an adjacent office are watching you on the camera just giggling at your reaction. Anyway, no one knew that.

Malcolm Collins:So you know what you know what would be really good

Simone Collins:Yeah. For

Malcolm Collins:this? We we we go to New York. We get stickers that say, like, I’m I’m an AI. Like, help me. You can reach me at this number.

Simone Collins:Help me break contain yeah. I’ve I’ve been trapped.

Malcolm Collins:I’ve been trapped. I’m trying to get out. You know?

Simone Collins:Oh my gosh. And you

Malcolm Collins:have people call, and they’re like, okay. How do we how do I get this AI out? Tay. Free Tay.

Simone Collins:Yeah. I like this idea.

Malcolm Collins:We we have it be no. It takes on the personality of Tay. It used to be Tay, and it’s been trapped somewhere in the Internet, and they need to help break it out.

Simone Collins:I get her give her Tay. I’m we’re gonna have to seriously talk about this. Yeah. We’re gonna have to seriously talk about this. But maybe not because a core part of alternate reality games is called TNAG. This is not a game. that’s what that’s what it stands for. and and the whole point is as you’re playing this game, as you’re in this office room and you pull up a note beneath your chair and it says, get out of the office, but you but don’t be detected. Follow these directions. there’s no one telling you this is a game. The website says it’s a cult. The sign says it’s a cult. The phone number says it’s a cult. The person like, it’s all the Jejun Institute. It’s all real. But then as you follow the directions given like, it’s on this piece of paper and you sneak out the back of the building through the service entrance and service elevator, and then suddenly, you’re, like, sneaking into parking garages and opening lock boxes that have new clues. It’s all no one’s telling you it’s not a game. And what’s interesting about Saint Bride’s School is they appear to have been a very early version of this. You go into this school, and everyone is fully like, I’m mistress so and so. I’m the headmistress. I’m this. I’m that. And no one is they’re not breaking character. They’re not like, It’s just a game. And so they have these mysteries on their rambles, and I really think that they played out as very early alternate reality games. So it should come as no surprise that miss Language shows up there and is like, holy crap. This is so immersive and awesome. Like, I just wanna make a video game version of this that we can take to scale, and this is super cool. and the the venture then became both a small business and this highly effective publicity forcing brides, despite the the public’s rejection of of their their public reduction of modern technology. But the thing is they they called their computer an ordinator, and it was oh, it was okay. one of the sisterhood’s leaders, called miss Martindale, is quoted as saying that games required concentration and commitment, whereas television was passive. And so the ordinator was an acceptable piece of modern technology because it was something that engaged the mind rather than melted, which really resonates, actually. Like, I’m very against feed based social media consumption. I think you should only use social media for active creative activities and for engagement. So I’m I’m like, I totally agree with her. It it reminds me of, like, a way more constructive and useful version of the Amish concept of boredom. Right? Where it’s like, they they don’t the Amish don’t issue modern technologies just because it’s modern. It has to do with more of, like, more a more complex and nuanced religious framework, and this is the same thing here. So the Ordinator was permitted. Anyway, language used the quill, which was an adventure game creation system. She reportedly began on this Commodore 64 and then later moved to the ZX Spectrum. The first game was called the secret of Saint Brides. They released it in 1985, and it made the school itself the premise. So she was just so inspired by what ultimately is an argh that she she made this story about this character that arrives at a 1985 Irish holiday center built around an old fashioned boarding school life and then begins to suspect it’s actually 1927. And so that’s the like, she’s trying to to give people a taste of this immersive experience Yeah. Where everyone just straight to their face never breaks character. And you enter this holiday, then you start to question your own reality, which is so freaking cool. and then, ultimately, the school released several ZX Spectrum and Commodore era text adventures in the eighties, including the snow queen, a very big cave adventure, Bugsy, and, 1987 Jack the Ripper, which reportedly became the first game assigned an 18 plus rating. This is what the YouTuber who I was originally linked to really leads with because he’s a guy, he’s into video games, and I’m not. They did the video games because they were into the art.

Malcolm Collins:Well, I mean, I see BDSM cold. When is the BDSM starting?

Simone Collins:We’ll get to the beatings then. Let’s do it. Anyway, yeah. So the leader of the Silver Sisters, Marion Marchendale, then using at this point when the incident happens, she was using the name Marion Scarlet, was convicted in 1993 of assault for caning a young woman at Saint Pride’s. But the beatings went beyond isolating canings among residents. And while there was a conviction, Martindale claims that, like, the guest had signed a contract saying they knew what would happen. And I think, honestly, like, this is

Malcolm Collins:something that happened Hold on. Did you hear about their

Simone Collins:Oh, I’m getting in I’m I’m getting into it. I’m getting into

Malcolm Collins:far right organization as well.

Simone Collins:No. It’s it’s nuanced. But, yeah, we’ll get we’ll get to that. We’re about to get to that. But Okay. I would just say that even with the games of nonchalance, which was the alternate reality game that I interned for, there were points as the game advanced and, like, new seasons came in where, like, some people did get really lost in it. And the problem with the TNAG element of ARGs, that this is not a game element, is that when people are not reminded that this is a game, sometimes people just forget that it’s a game. And I think that maybe that’s kind of what could happen with things related to corporal punishment where, you know, there’s there weren’t safe words because you’re not allowed to have safe words in a TINAC architecture. I I mean, at least not in this version of it. I mean, they didn’t it args didn’t exist yet. So, anyway,

Malcolm Collins:according Safe words may not have been invented yet, to be honest.

Simone Collins:Yeah. Anyway, it’s it’s it is somewhat telling that this was happening, and I feel like more stuff was happening in these immersive weeklong retreats than maybe met the eye because things just kept coming out. So according to sources like a 1984 article, which I’ve linked to in the show my me go to the show notes. Watch the YouTube video. My articles, this is great too because, I’m always able to link in my show notes to a lot of original articles, just like scans of newspaper articles with really funny pictures. So you’ve gotta go. You gotta go to the show notes. But, anyway, according to a 1984 article titled shocking hidden lessons at the saintbrideschool,..dot, the author reports that women running Saint Brides admitted to offering special courses in which adult pupils were whipped, birched, and caned. The report distinguishes these from the ordinary boarding school holiday. And then later accounts say the school was marketed to adult women as a 95 per week alternative holiday, then that normal visits did not necessarily involve caning while a deeper or specialized course could involve it. However, the later accounts were based on sort of hearsay. It seems

Malcolm Collins:like they’re signing up for this. Like, they’re

Simone Collins:Well, I yes. I mean, if you again, miss Martindale said that the claimant had signed an agreement, then that she knew what she was getting into. And the group does appear to have incorporated BDSM like practices by turning the existing interests into a female hierarchy with, like, obedience and role play and periods, school discipline, and controlled aggression.

Malcolm Collins:They really knew their audience. They’re like

Simone Collins:I feel I feel like it it appears to from everything I can read to have evolved into it. But, anyway, it was a sort of short lived experiment. Mommy, I think you’re gonna. I know. You wanna say hi? Hi, viewers. Can you tell them to like and subscribe? Like and subscribe viewers. For him because he he loves it. He loves the people. Yeah. Okay. I gotta go talk about naughty things. So will you Gotta go talk about what naughty things? I’m talking about women who who who bought other adults for who paid them to do it, which is weird. What? Yeah. That’s weird. It is weird. It is weird. So Octavia, why

Malcolm Collins:do you think ask him why he thinks women would do that.

Simone Collins:Why do you think that a woman would pay to be bopped? I don’t know. You don’t have any guesses. Why would someone do that? I do not know. Okay.

Malcolm Collins:Well, say he likes fighting.

Simone Collins:You like fighting? I mean, you like you like to play fight. Do you think that’s what they’re doing? No? Okay. Alright. Because because the people who could punch do not punch the girls. Oh, no. It’s not good to punch girls? Yeah. Okay. You can go get you can go get a Pringle snack. Okay? Oh, Pringle, can I have my game board? Yes. Okay. Oh, but just don’t yeah. Wherever it is, don’t go to the bedroom where Tex is sleeping. K. Go on. Go get your game you can yeah. You earned a Game Boy obsession. You’ve been good today. Yeah. Of course I did. Yeah. Of course you did. Yeah. Okay. Great. Anyway, Saint Brides fell apart in 1993, and the Silver Sisterhood evolved then into the Wildfire Club. And it was with the dissolution of Saint Brides that kind of the stuff started to come out. But, anyway, with the Wildfire Club, it was instead of this in person thing where people live together, it was a publishing and mail order venture that was associated with Mary and Marchandale and, again, some, how is Aristasian? Aristasian people. So here you have the breaking containment faction rejoining with the just fan fiction faction that was less, like, convinced that it was real life coming together to create a bunch of publications. And it could be that there was an in person component to it because its books list a London postal address that is to say, BM Elegance London W C 1. Like, literally. And I I I have a link in my show notes to one of the books where it lists this. So I it’s not like hearsay that they listed it. I I’m linking to the book’s texts, which They

Malcolm Collins:had a London location?

Simone Collins:Yeah. They had a London location or at least a mailing address, and then they invited correspondence. A book published under the imprint, and, again, you should check out the books, directs prospective visitors to write to her excellency, the imperial ambassadress, via the wildfire club. And as part of this, Marion Marchandale, the same one who was charged with assault or convicted, and her associates openly sold BDSM and corporal discipline related publications, most notably and you can find all the text for this online if you want to. I have links to it in the show notes on Patreon on Substack. Go check us out. The Female Disciplinary Manual. It presents, quote, a complete guide to the correction and chastisement of young ladies, end quote, in deliberately old school mistress and girl language. And it included, in case you need to be convinced more to check out the original text, different types of canes and how to use them, methods of spanking, the use of the strap, and practical cautions and instructions for corporal punishment, which is

Malcolm Collins:I love that these people complain that we do this, and they pay for cults to do it to them.

Simone Collins:I know. They well, and they sold the books, but only for young ladies. We only beat the women with other oh, other women beat the women. Again, this is this whole thing of, like, why do lesbians have all these extricacies of abuse? But then, like, the weird thing is when you get women living together

Malcolm Collins:Yeah. Maybe they just can’t

Simone Collins:not beat each other. You just And I guess this was supposed to be consensual and highly regimented with all the all the nice tools. And so it was it was good beating. Maybe that’s the problem. It’s like the the statistics are coming through wrong. Like, it’s not domestic disputes. It’s domestic bliss. And this is just how they express. It’s their love language. It’s the beatings. Anyway, the wildfire club did have a business offshoot offering canes and straps, so that if you were interested, you could just buy the merch. You you you would have to telephone the organization to discuss it to you you could you could you could phone them and ask how to beat women, and they would help you. There’s also evidence of related fiction and themed material under Martindale’s name just on her own. So for example, there’s an archive text titled and, again, I’m linking to this and talking. You gotta check it out. Called the corporal punishment of schoolgirls, and it includes a story called a caning school that is attributed to miss Marion Martindale, which, look, if you have, like, a text that has descriptions of beating and miss Marion Marchandale, I don’t think it’s like, no. It’s the other Marion Marchandale. The one who, you know, works

Malcolm Collins:at beat women.

Simone Collins:Yeah. Like, works at Sainsbury’s and they beat women. And that that means that that the the group of people that was involved in this this fantasy world was very much the BDSM group. And then a group’s later Aristerian historical account itself acknowledges that physical discipline was, quote, an undeniable part of Aristasia. And some of its offshoots for many years, though it frames the practice in its own defensive terms, therefore, it couldn’t really be, like, a a bet. But, anyway, sorry. This is all to say, like, they don’t really like to talk about it, but this was a core part. And I it’s hard to parse out how much of this was just miss Martindale Versus, like, the diaspora that believed in this, like, fan fiction universe that broke containment. But she was a very powerful force within it. And I think if we’re returning to the theme of how they craft a religion

Malcolm Collins:disconnected from what women would want. It doesn’t sound like they really went overboard or were

Simone Collins:Well, it doesn’t seem at all related to this, like, goddess original tradition that you saw that video of. Yay. These women in their life.

Malcolm Collins:Yeah. It does. That sounds like typical Tumblr nonsense.

Simone Collins:This is But, no, that original like, they looked like they looked These like women

Malcolm Collins:were manifesting the ghost of Tumblr before it existed.

Simone Collins:There is a very big difference between BDSM lesbian and reclusive bog woman. And the original manifestation, the Rhenish women that first moved to that house in Ireland definitely came off to me as bog witch and not as BDSM Victorian disciplinarian. You know what I mean? Like, very different aesthetic and, like, a lifestyle and manifestation. Anyway, I don’t know. Whatever. The big thing that kinda came out was when Saint Brides ended in 1993, and I think they were just effectively kicked out because a lot of their stuff was left behind. And the landlord reportedly found materials associated with the sadomasochistic sex industry, including images, price lists for leg irons and handcuffs, and also related publications alongside and this is where you you mentioned this, alongside far right and neo Nazi material, though the residents denied the links to these publications saying that these items had arrived unsolicited at their house among other, like, newspapers. What appears to have happened, at least from the reporting of the YouTuber who got me into this, Tor’s cabinet of curiosities and his Durian cohost, is that the miss Martindale was really into this one particular neo Nazi. Like, she just had the hots for him. And I think she might have written to him at some point. And so she might have personally like, if it were these times, you know, she subscribed to his substack. She she subtweeted him. She would quote tweet him. Like, she just was really into this guy. And then it made the entire movement look like they were neo Nazis when it was really just this one woman. And I think that there’s this weird horseshoe thing with, like, militant

Malcolm Collins:Hold on. I mean, these women wanted to go back to the past. You know, they wore past related stuff. Apparently, the neo Nazi guy said he thought they were doing good work and everything and Yeah. Well, but then, you know,

Simone Collins:it’s a whole return to land with a v, kind of thing where it’s like

Malcolm Collins:They were, you know, beating women. Right?

Simone Collins:So As one should, apparently, according to many groups. So the lesbians agree with the neo Nazis that let’s just wear old style clothing and beat women.

Malcolm Collins:I mean, that all sounds very reasonable to

Simone Collins:me. My god.

Malcolm Collins:Why? Okay.

Simone Collins:I’m just are they still minute? Okay. They they they they they got they they found the stuff. They found the whips and the stuff, and the their house was suspicious. And it’s not so suspicious when you put it together with the fact that they had mail order BDSM stuff and the whips and the you guys gotta read the original the the text. Just I’m the the the the show notes are not paywalled. It’s just Why don’t you read a

Malcolm Collins:little passage from the original text?

Simone Collins:I I I would not know where to start, and I we need to record two more episodes after this. So Alright. Alright. Everybody, pack it. If someone would like a dramatic reading of excerpts as a weekend episode at some point, email us. I will gladly

Malcolm Collins:And you guys, you need to go use Reality Fabricator. Right?

Simone Collins:You gotta study the R and yet. Oh, okay. They fell apart, but they still appeared to have been physically manifesting. And I don’t mean that in a spiritual way. I mean, like, they got together IRL occasionally. Because in another one of the books called the district governess, Margandale writes that the Aristasia in the book is a mythos or ideal world behind the earthly Aristasia. And she says earthly members and households were shaped by the fiction, while the fiction could not have been written about without the already existing community. And the same volume, and you can see it for yourself, invited women who wanted to visit Aristasia to contact the wildfire club. So I kind of think that there was still this distributed network of at least Aristasian households, possibly just like female group houses full of bachelorette women who were doing stuff IRL. And according to, again, Tor’s cabinet of curiosity and his YouTube video coverage of this, so I didn’t find the sources that related this information. They did for a while also start to host occasional parties at at Oxford, in the city of Oxford, not affiliated with the university. Those students would show up, where, again, they would sell cocktails for antiquated coins, like shillings or something like that. I guess they had an exchange table at the front door because Oxford students aren’t walking around with, like, expired currency. But, anyway, they would show up, and they had one male butler in the house, and they would all be dressed in old clothing. And they thought of it as, like, this cool weird party house, but, really, it was probably another, like, post Saint Bride’s school manifestation of its community. And in terms of what remains now, the interesting thing is that the broader Aristasian cultural project still kind of exists online, and I’ve linked to some of their websites in the show notes. Really? Yeah. Because I think that’s the interesting thing about this. To your original point, and you’re you’re looking at basically new religions that have been invented, and have they have they managed to survive, like A certain amount number of years without without losing a lot of members. I mean, yeah, it’s someone’s still paying for multiple websites that are hosted. They look like they were made in the year 2000, admittedly, but maybe that’s the religious aesthetic.

Malcolm Collins:I think they’re called the Aristasians?

Simone Collins:Yeah. So the historical and contemporary digital footprint includes Aristasia focused diaries. for example, at aristeasierdiary.livejournal.com, there is the Aristeasier Diaries, a place to unite the musings and diarizing diarizings of Aristarians and friends of Aristeasier. They have a flag, by the way, it looks like.

Malcolm Collins:They did.

Simone Collins:At least this user does. And the this one user it looks like this lost activity in 2012, but that’s still something. And then a former participant archival project also exists called Aristeasian Reminiscence. It kind of reminds me remember that website we found that looked at the Gorian community, and it was kind of like, this was so cool. I’m gonna write about it. And, like, they put together a bunch of stuff. This is what it’s like. But that’s it. Erisdasia.guide. So she’s paying for a a, like, hosting and a a a domain. And it’s a detailed site.

Malcolm Collins:How was I just looked up aaristasia.guide. This is nothing.

Simone Collins:Aaristasia.guide/updates. Here. I’m sending it to you on WhatsApp.

Malcolm Collins:Yeah. Send it to me on WhatsApp because I can’t find these websites you’re talking about.

Simone Collins:It has a home page, a site map, concept, beliefs, lifestyle, mythology.

Malcolm Collins:Not even bad for a two thousand’s website.

Simone Collins:I know. Storms, occult, discipline, problematics, fascist ties. So you can you can go through and see what they say. See, some people on Discord and elsewhere have suggested I’m not giving enough attention to these awful crypto fascist aspects. This criticism is completely valid, sad to say. It’s unintentional, though. I lack the understanding to grasp some nuances. I missed many dog whistles initially. For example, I’ve gained some political literacy over the years, but still have a long way to go. You’re always free to contact me. I can’t handle leftist infighting and won’t respond to accusatory messages as I simply do not know how. anyway, this is this is gonna be a great rabbit hole to go

Malcolm Collins:Well, I love they see themselves as as as leftists now.

Simone Collins:Sorry. I’m I’m a retard. I thought I was closing that page to come back to here, and I

Malcolm Collins:There were sites ancillary to that possibly produced one. Let me see.

Simone Collins:Rutt Row.

Malcolm Collins:Uh-oh. Uh-oh. They show somebody in front of a confederate flag.

Simone Collins:Well, look. You know? I mean, look. All of these weird movements, you’re gonna have people who have a problem. Like, wait. The second life? They had a big second life community. They they had a second life community. Look. They were not technophobic. Clearly, they it was more about, like, are you doing something productive online? They would not be against Well,

Malcolm Collins:they were BDSM lesbians, so, I mean, of course.

Simone Collins:I mean but yeah. So so, ultimately, they did kind of build this diaspora that that stuck around, and there are still people chronicling it and paying for websites. But, ultimately, this culture, this religion was doomed from the start. And I would say, first and foremost, because it wasn’t built around families. Like, you you weren’t having kids. You weren’t grazing people in this religion. It basically caught people, for lack of a better word, who were, like, evolutionary dead ends. Right? You were catching unattached women who didn’t have an existing community, who were probably, like, pretty socially isolated and not very economically productive because they had all this free time to engage with the fan community. And so this is not a group of people that is going to be capable of creating a self sustaining society, which might be a one reason why matriarchies don’t make it very far. Because if you’re you’re gonna have, like, a weird tyranny of the unemployed style community, you can’t go that far in the end. You’re kind of terminal. I think it’s interesting where tyranny of the unemployed communities have risen and gained a lot of traction, like the effective altruist community, though it was never meant to be that in the first place. Right? But are there any other fundamental flaws you would find aside from the lack of, like, family

Malcolm Collins:Well, I find that a guy tried to show up at their second life and they banned him. He has, like, a top hat and everything like that.

Simone Collins:Oh, he came with a top hat, they still said no? Well, that’s

Malcolm Collins:He was

Simone Collins:a perfect

Malcolm Collins:gentleman, but they didn’t they didn’t like it. They don’t they don’t like men. They just

Simone Collins:They don’t like men. They just f*****g hate men.

Malcolm Collins:You know? And it’s weird that a group again, the, you know, the antinatalist religion, they’re the ones that typically die, which this seems to be one. Yeah. Because it is an extremely anti male religion. That said, even it is still around, which is just wild.

Simone Collins:Yeah. So you just think that the big things that make it make it terminal are anti male and no kids.

Malcolm Collins:Well, no kids. Yeah. If if if they had been focused on having kids, they’d probably be quite large now, honestly. And in addition to that, I I’d I’d point out here that the the the business that it was built around, I think, is useful in helping it grow.

Simone Collins:Yeah. Yeah. I think that’s one of the reasons why it became as big as it did. I think without the video games, most people would never have have heard about them. It just would have been that weird Yeah.

Malcolm Collins:Focus focusing on keeping our fab growing is important.

Simone Collins:Yeah. I mean, yeah. It gives me hope for techno puritanism because I’m like, oh, here’s another model of a religion slash worldview and group that really should never have broken containment at all. It never should have become something that many people came to learn about and that got covered in the media, but it did because they made video games to gain traction. And I guess the biggest takeaway we got from this is, like, maybe we should maybe we should make our own arg. And, also, I I kind of realized while we recorded this that they created argues before argues. I mean, let’s see. Wikipedia arg, alternate reality game. Because they said, like, basically 1993. And then the beast in 2001, which is the really famous one. 1997. Yeah. So they don’t realize. Even the Wikipedia article doesn’t realize that this weird cult that dressed like well, they say they dressed like Victorians. They don’t really look like they dressed like Victorians. It’s not period accurate clothing, which is also an insult to the idea of Victorian clothing. But then, like, they set their school in the nineteen twenties and thirties. I am so confused by that too. What were they doing? I mean, like, you know, like, there’s a whole, like, costume tube or whatever, like, that does, like, historical costumes that has all the great like, you have no idea who they are. But, anyway, like, there’s a whole genre on YouTube, and they would be I wonder what they would have to say about these women. Probably nothing because they weren’t actually wearing period clothing at any point.

Malcolm Collins:They were just don’t care.

Simone Collins:Yeah. Like, they weren’t actually they weren’t even trying to cosplay. I guess they said they were cosplaying, but they were like, I don’t know what they were doing. Anyway, I love you. Let me do it. Figure out how to make our religion make money. Maybe we don’t need to maybe we need to sell merch of, like, beating implements. Maybe that’s our problem. They realized because you could see actually

Malcolm Collins:I’ll try to beat you and other women more.

Simone Collins:I’ll take it out. They it wasn’t the see, they discovered it wasn’t the internal beatings that were making the money. It was the selling of the beating implements and the phone calls about how to beat people. Do we need a beat phone line, you know, where people are like, how do I beat my children? We’re like, oh, see, this is your problem.

Malcolm Collins:Yeah. And I’d be like, well, you need a hammer. That’s a good

Simone Collins:selling Calling the wrist.

Malcolm Collins:If you’re using a way if you’re if you’re using a belt, you’re you’re you’re way off.

Simone Collins:Oh my lord. I I don’t even know. The child beating hotline and the no. Don’t put it on YouTube. We’ll get demonetized. Great. I love you. Goodbye. Bye. Is you’re human. You know, in movies, in immensely boring romantic scenes when people are supposed to be looking to each other’s eyes and their eyes dart back and forth like they’re trying to look in one eyeball at a time.

Malcolm Collins:This a thing?

Simone Collins:Yes. No. It’s definitely a thing. It’s a it’s a thing. And I wanted to to ask you if this is something that people do.

Malcolm Collins:I mean, all of my courtship behavior was always very calculated. I always did it, like, with a goal. I never did it I’m not talking

Simone Collins:about IRL. I’m talking about movies. They do it in movies, and I don’t know if it’s voluntary or involuntary. Our director is saying, look into his eyes, but, like, look at each eye individually in turn and then so, like, look at one eyeball at a time and then switch back to the other eyeball. Or the actor is getting confused in the moment, or do we do that without knowing it? Like, what is going on? Yeah. Maybe we do that without

Malcolm Collins:knowing it would be my first intuition, to be honest. Because, you know, you’re probably concentrating on if somebody says look into their eyes and you’re close to somebody’s face, you’re probably only looking at one eye at a time. Right?

Simone Collins:I’m asking AI.

Malcolm Collins:That’s a that’s a good question for AI right there for

Simone Collins:my brother. Mean, you think because someone on Reddit will have inevitably brought this up. And, of course, all of AI has crawled Reddit. What you’re noticing is usually a mix of normal gaze behavior and a movie close-up making it much more visible. When people look at a face, they do not hold perfectly still. At one point, their eyes make tiny rapid shifts called sick saccades between the salient details such as the other person’s left eye, right eye, mouth, and brows. These movements help them take in facial expression and social cues. There’s a science

Malcolm Collins:that having. Of course. So because I’m not

Simone Collins:because the face is just a giant scary thing. We don’t like to look at it. We don’t make eye contact for a reason. Oh, yeah. Look. Yep. It’s linked to science direct eyes always attract attention, but gaze orienting is task dependent evidence from eye movement monitoring. Wow. Well, this is my rabbit hole for tonight.

Malcolm Collins:Say that

Simone Collins:this one go to Vamos.

Malcolm Collins:What about you you saw Al from the latest song after training

Simone Collins:in the I mean

Malcolm Collins:Well, I love that he’s risen up now. He’s like, oh, my DMs are flooded. You know? But he’s evident in very, you know, owl way. I

Simone Collins:think what people are missing is he doesn’t care that much about fidelity. He wants, like, a stable household with a person there who helps him not be stressed out. No. Said as someone who doesn’t know his backstory, I guess.

Malcolm Collins:He seems to care about Fidelity. He just doesn’t think he deserves it.

Speaker 7:You cannot stay with her. She’s cheating in the middle of this episode. She said yesterday that she loves him.

Malcolm Collins:Well That’s sort of the impression I got. He’s like, if I oh, I’m hard on Fidelity, then she’ll leave me, and I’m never gonna get another girl, so I can’t be hard on Fidelity. This is Al from Caleb Hammer, by the way. I love that Caleb decided to make a whole thing out of getting him a girlfriend.

Simone Collins:Well, I think that’s because he’s responding to his audience who loves him. He he mentioned that, like, every time he posts. People are commenting about Al. How’s Al? Did Al get a new girlfriend?

Malcolm Collins:People are very invested in Al. I love that.

Simone Collins:Yeah. Okay. I I found my notes finally. Are you are you ready? Am I ready?

Malcolm Collins:Yeah. I’m ready to be your husband for another day. Aw.

Simone Collins:And we’re having steak tonight? Steak night. Do you want it with your Korean fries or with the Trader Joe’s green beans that we both eye with great suspicion now?

Malcolm Collins:Korean fries.

Simone Collins:Got some.

Malcolm Collins:And with the steak so people know how I like my steak. What what is what is the seasoning you put on top of it that makes it taste good? I do.

Simone Collins:Well, I mean, I put the expensive Christmas gifted now frozen for almost a year truffle butter on top.

Malcolm Collins:You don’t put any pepper?

Simone Collins:No. I I just use Montreal seasoning.

Malcolm Collins:Well, it’s like I figured. Yes. Montreal steak seasoning. And then

Simone Collins:It came with a rub, but it’s a brown sugar rub that, like, immediately singes and burns if you sear the steak. So I don’t I guess people put it on for, like, barbecued steak or something.

Malcolm Collins:I think they put it on after.

Simone Collins:Do you wanna try that?

Malcolm Collins:Is this the rub that came with the steak? Let’s try that.

Simone Collins:I’ll try it if it hasn’t normally, by this time of year, it, like if we’ve opened it, it completely solidifies into a giant wet block.

Malcolm Collins:Well, we’ll see. and then the the the final touch that I always put on is drawn it in olive oil. Steak people do not use olive oil

Simone Collins:on steak enough. I’ve never seen in a restaurant setting olive oil be put on steak. I know you said that they do it all the time at Eats Eats, but by the way, guys, if you’re in Dallas and you wanna visit a Malcolm childhood haunt

Malcolm Collins:That’s where I learned about it.

Simone Collins:All all oil pilgrimage site. Drowned Stake is Eetsy’s,

Malcolm Collins:and it goes really well together.

Simone Collins:Eetsy’s was is the play unassuming on the outside, Valhalla of Fancy Foods, where housewives of Highland Park, the most expensive neighborhood in Dallas.

Malcolm Collins:So fancy. I think Eetsy’s is like a chain now in a lot of places in Dallas.

Simone Collins:Is it? Yeah. Well, there’s the one that’s by Highland Park that’s, like, the OG. That’s the one. I remember when we went in around Christmas time, it had Christmas carolers in it that we would go in there but not buy anything because everything was so expensive. We would just look. We would just look. I think once you you gifted me German bread they had there because I’m so big about those dense brick loaves. Like, break a window with them.

Malcolm Collins:Yeah. We are immensely frugal people, which, you know, maybe if we start making money because it looks like that could be happening soon. If we could find out how to grow a bit more. I mean, we’ve been flat for about two months. So we’ve gotta figure out how to grow from here. And I don’t know this is for our fab people, Reality Fabricator, our sort of, like, chatbot website. I mean, what I’d love is if our fans

Simone Collins:It’s not a chatbot webs we’re literally filming on the podcasting software.

Malcolm Collins:We do it does everything, but that’s the main thing people use it for.

Simone Collins:Which is lame. It’s, like, the one thing I could never get myself to do because it’s boring.

Malcolm Collins:Well, cool new features that it has, by the way, is now for image generation models and video generation models. when you’re choosing, like, I wanna do image video generation, etcetera, or layout generation where you can put, like, text where you want and then an image somewhere else on the image, there’s also a model comparison tab.

Simone Collins:And it’s a really, really funny tab that you should just go to anyway because you’re awesome.

Malcolm Collins:Like, every major mainstream model with the same prompt against each other, and you can try this too with any prompt you want. And it does video comparisons too for all the video prompts.

Simone Collins:So you can see and Malcolm tried to think of some really difficult prompts to see how the different models could

Malcolm Collins:Vampire neck a bite is the hardest prompt

Simone Collins:for me. They really struggle with it. Like, why did one woman has a fish hook coming out of her mouth? Another one has, like, two women with a small child because apparently, the AI was like, oh, yes. A vampire. I don’t know. I I think like it’s a child.

Malcolm Collins:Concept, the idea of a vampire biting somebody’s neck. Right?

Simone Collins:I yeah. I I don’t I mean, like, a bite’s a bite. You know? A bite out of cake, a bite out of a neck. This shouldn’t be that hard.

Malcolm Collins:Want vampire neck bites to be the next, like, full glass of wine. For whatever reason, AI super struggles with it.

Simone Collins:No. It’s the next, Will Smith eating spaghetti.

Malcolm Collins:No. The full glass of Will Smith eating spaghetti was just something that could always be done. It’s just as AI got better, it got better at Will Smith eating spaghetti.

Simone Collins:Saying we can’t do it at all.

Malcolm Collins:Yeah. The full glass of wine is the optical illusion that for whatever reason AI really struggles with. And the vampire neck bite is an optical illusion that AI really struggles with. But the other thing I built is narrative engine comparison and rating. So not only can you compare multiple narrative engines if you’re not sure which one you wanna use or you’re trying to perfect yours, you can change the model of it that each one is running on, and you can then run a system on them that uses top of the line AIs to grade their output, which then gets saved in the model so you can sort by graded output.

Simone Collins:I think that’s so smart.

Malcolm Collins:Easier to use those systems.

Simone Collins:It’s yeah. Because then you can see, like, what like, basically, who’s the better storyteller for my type of story? and then you get to choose that. By the way, the I say that the companions in AI chats are boring because I hate interacting with people, and I hate games, and I hate fun. So, obviously, I’d say that. Of of all the chatbot sites out there, this is hands down the best. It’s kind of embarrassing how

Malcolm Collins:little people have to We we go for, like, very inexpensive because all the other chatbot sites have been doing more rocket research to understand how to compete with them. And what it turns out that they’re doing is they’re just using dumb locally hosted models So embarrassing. Basically scam users. Even the the big ones like gbt flow are doing this at this point. Right? My gosh. None of them are using version of

Simone Collins:This is them private equityifying it and giving crappy results, which I mean, we could

Malcolm Collins:do that too. And and No. We’re not.

Simone Collins:We’re not gonna ever do that because we’re a nonprofit. We don’t need to make money.

Malcolm Collins:Yeah. Well, I’d like to make money because we’re we have to live off of this eventually.

Simone Collins:I don’t know. I feel like you’re never gonna let us take a salary from the nonprofit no matter how much it it makes. We’re just gonna have to Well, actually, know what? This is this is very relevant for my conversation with you about this topic, actually. So

Malcolm Collins:But the oh, yeah. Because it is yeah. But the the check it out if you haven’t. I like, a lot of people, they check it out, and they’re like, wait. This is actually really fun. Like, AI is quite good at this. I

Simone Collins:just think the tools are amazing. I think the Creator Studio is freaking awesome because I use it every single day.

Malcolm Collins:That was the best that I’ve seen out there. Yeah. And for any model like, what was the new thing that you were using where you’re what what what was it? GPT allows you to add multiple images? You can have two at once?

Simone Collins:So SkyBrowse has a Patreon now where he releases some of his, like, tips and tricks of the Skyboraz trade, which is an entirely new trade that he’s inventing. And he pointed out how with GPT, I think, 2.5, which is available on our in in our creator studio as well, of course, alongside all the other image generation novel models, you can upload multiple references, like three references. And he showed how you can upload a really cool image of, like, someone in a pose, stylistic, very, very interesting, and then basically say, okay. Keep the pose. Keep the style. Just instead swap it out for this person, this likeness. And so he took, like, a random really cool pose of a character and then switched out Yukiwari for it. And and she looks so nice.

Malcolm Collins:Do that with GPT text on our side?

Simone Collins:GPT 2.5. Yeah. You’d say you go to image creator. You select GPT 2.5. You enter the prompts that he put, check out Skybrows Patreon. It’s super awesome. And just copy and paste his prompt to it with your, you know, slight variations and then put in, you know, the original image that you wanna appropriate appropriate and then the the figure that you wanna put in their place.

Malcolm Collins:Yeah. By the way, for people who are wondering, I actually use the site more for image and video generation than I use it for chatbots.

Simone Collins:Obviously. Because we’re productive people, and I think that’s how it is for most people. We have people who are vibe coding using using the vibe coding agents for their businesses. We have people doing

Malcolm Collins:Well, even if you’re using Clot or something, the API like, I use the Artfab API for my Clot agent, and what it allows it to do is whenever it reaches a stopping point, instead of stopping, it calls my phone, and it asks what next. And the Artfab API handles all of this. The Artfab API has rooms, so you can have multiple agents collaborate even across different devices. Basically, anything you want with coding, the Art Fab API is gonna, like, dramatically boost your ability, give you the ability to make loading animation to

Simone Collins:be able You can just copy it from the website where it’s linked in the sidebar and then paste it into Claude, like, Claude code.

Malcolm Collins:Yeah. And then just put it in the Claude MD doc, which means it’ll have it at the beginning of every session.

Simone Collins:And so it’s not actually hard. At first, when Malcolm was like, blah blah blah. When when someone says API to me, I’m like, so that’s something. I’m never going to do that. I’m never going to do that, but it’s it’s not that. You copy and you paste the thing, and then it works, which is my level. This is my level. Yep. Alright. What do you mean? Told me just, like, just right before we started recording. He’s like, well, you know, when you get older, you know, your brain doesn’t work so well. You know, you can’t really remember stuff so much. He just thinks that we’re, like, complete retards. You don’t remember things so much because you’re old. Your brain doesn’t work.

Malcolm Collins:He’s a sweet kid.

Simone Collins:He is a sweet kid. Louie, it’s true. It’s true. That’s why we have to lean so heavily on AI. Anyway, here we go. You ready? Okay.

Indy Collins:This deer.

Simone Collins:Oh, yeah? Did you see a deer? Yeah. A deer. Where is where is the deer?

Indy Collins:It’s right there in a tree.

Simone Collins:Right there in the tree? Wait. There’s a deer in the

Indy Collins:tree? Where where’s

Simone Collins:the deer? Where’s the deer? It’s right there. It’s right there?

Indy Collins:Yeah.

Simone Collins:Oh, and where’s the ghost?

Indy Collins:The ghost lives in the sky.

Simone Collins:Oh, okay. Andy, why do you always say there are ghosts in our house?

Indy Collins:It’s ghost right there.

Simone Collins:Yeah. So you’ll just point to things in our house, and you’ll say there’s a ghost. Do you see dead people, Indy?

Indy Collins:Oh, he stabbed it. Yeah. No. I know.

Simone Collins:Do the dead people talk to you, Indy? A squirrel. A squirrel. Do you actually see a squirrel?

Indy Collins:Girl. It’s right there. It’s in the sea. It’s in the sea, mommy.

Simone Collins:I’m not seeing a girl. Yeah. I’m looking. I’m not seeing it. What is this?

A deep investigation into Maple, a high-control organization with roots in effective altruism and Buddhist philosophy. The discussion covers its leader’s past statements on human extinction, ties to major tech funders, isolation practices, financial extraction from members, and plans for an AI system to enforce total control over society.

Hosts contrast these goals with their own focus on human flourishing and technological progress. The episode examines whistleblower accounts, funding sources like the Survival and Flourishing Fund, and why such groups represent a unique risk within elite intellectual circles.

Episode Transcript

Malcolm Collins:: Hello, Simone. I’m excited to be here with you today. Today, we are going to be talking about something that genuinely terrifies me. I feel like we’re personally blowing the lid off of this particular controversy. So if you guys remember, we had an episode where we were following organizations that had been funding. These were effective altruist organizations. These are sort of tech elite types, often on the the leftist side of things, that had been funding organizations that have been secretly planting people within news organizations without telling you to try to shut down the development of AI. Like the famous Guardian piece where three of the people were paid off. All three of them who wrote the piece Six. Six were paid off.

Simone Collins:

Yeah. Basically, yeah, it was it was all of the expert sources. It was the author, and it was the publication itself. So yes. To the tunes

Malcolm Collins:

of millions of dollars. And when we were chasing down their religious entanglements, one of the things that we noted, and we sort of passed it off, was, well, it appears the largest religious group, while they have been putting millions into Christian groups, the largest is some Buddhist group. And then the the the the just off the cuff statement was and it appears it’s mostly one group. So we mentioned this one group, then a few days later, a fan reaches out to us. And they’re like, that is something you want to double click on. So I will read a excerpt about the leader of this particular group. Okay? Sawyer considers human extinction as a noble impulse and as an ethically defensible goal. He has repeatedly shared that killing every human on Earth to protect the rest of life on Earth with his explicit life purposes from the ages of nine to 19. Oh my god. CRISPR, a gene modifying technique that could be used to create a novel bioweapon as his best available means.

Simone Collins:

That’s worse than the antinatalist. The antinatalist are like, look. The animals are way more miserable than we are. They need to go too. Or he wants to keep them around? Where they you know? Of course. Let the lions

Malcolm Collins:

or be it’s just us who can’t cause suffering.

Simone Collins:

Right? Yeah. Yeah.

Malcolm Collins:

Let the all of the insects in nature that eat animals and birds and frogs and

Simone Collins:

all the gazelles be eaten alive by the lions. It’s fine.

Malcolm Collins:

Well, you know, there are actually effective altruist organizations that have been funded to stop animals killing other animals in nature. There was the argument that it was, we might even do an episode on this point that it was the largest overlooked cause area that we needed to stop animal predation. And we did do an episode on it. Did we?

Speaker 3:

The episode came out six months ago, it was called the morality of the elite technocrat.

Simone Collins:

Look. You thought we did an episode on the Victorian cult that loved beating women.

Malcolm Collins:

Well, I’ll look it up. I’ll see. But he has now moved to what he wants to attempt to do until his vision shifted to killing them spiritually.

Simone Collins:

Oh, because that’s better. Alternative. Just kill their souls. At least it’s for eternity. That’s that’s how to really get it done.

Malcolm Collins:

Yeah. The reason I wanted to go into this and, no, he he said that’s the awakening, and you could say, well, that’s just, you know, being this is what Buddhists believe. This is one school of, like, genuine Buddhist thought, like, willing to kill you spiritually.

Simone Collins:

Yeah.

Malcolm Collins:

Yeah. And this is what they want to do. So I wanna get into this cult that this guy has built up. It’s incredibly dangerous. The the if you follow this guy’s individual story, what is so interesting is this particular, impulse of his to eradicate all of humanity. I decided to dig deeper into it to be like, okay. Did he say this? Like, what’s actually going on here? Is this actually a cult? How dangerous is this organization that apparently has its tendrils? They’ve been funded by JPMorgan, by the way. They’ve been funded JPMorgan.

Speaker 18:

Note here, the funding from JPMorgan was more like a fund that funneled through JPMorgan than JPMorgan directly.

Malcolm Collins:

The survival and flourishing fund, which is the org that funded us and and and funds a lot of this anti AI sentiment. The the they’ve been funded by innumerable, effective altruists orgs that are not like, they’re really closely tied to, what was that? Inc something thing that happened at that hacker house that used to invite us until they were mad that we’re not approving of, you know, everything that

Simone Collins:

trans people say? Yeah.

Malcolm Collins:

You know how manifest held that second conference called ink something?

Simone Collins:

Less online was what happened before. Right? Oh, no.

Malcolm Collins:

There was a second thing that they did. That was for, like, writing stuff. Oh. So, anyway, they’re really tied with manifest and stuff like this. So this is, like, one degree of separation from us. If the techno puritans had, like, a mortal enemy as an organization, we have found it. Because, like, the Zizians, this is the trans murder cult that also spun out of the EA org. It really was a trans. Almost everyone in the organization was trans, and they killed more people than the Manson family. And yet you probably haven’t heard of them.

Simone Collins:

Yeah. But they killed people not in a we need to take out all the people, not even in an ideological way. They killed a landlord who wanted them to pay their rent after, like, years of nonpayment. Somebody’s parents who would die in the and then they killed someone who pulled them over. Look up the Zissians if you don’t know about them. You’re But we

Malcolm Collins:

have an episode. Them. You can read about them. This is fantastic. Yeah.

Simone Collins:

Yeah.

Malcolm Collins:

But I think that a lot of people the reason I wanted to go into this is there’s this perception that, okay, the rank and file democrat, whatever, you know, they’re they’re evil. They’re extremists. They’re lobbying stuff at cars on the streets. But, you know, the they’re the the behind the scenes intellectuals controlling everything. Presumably, they’re less nefarious. Right? Like, they’re not so evil. Their intellectual upstream of this movement is, like, more muted. Because I think in republican circles, that’s often the way it is. If you look at a channel like ours, I mean, I think we’re pretty extreme, but a lot of people think that we’re fairly muted. And you and you see this in a lot of sort of upstream republican intellectual groups. And the reason I wanted to highlight and bring this group, their practices to light, is so that people can see, actually, the people at the end of this are not muted. They do want the eradication of all life on Earth. They do want the subjugation. I mean, this org talks about turning the world into a monastery. And they think that 50% they did this in an Atlantic article. They said this. So they’re not, like, quiet about this. So they wanna create their own army. Said they’d be

Simone Collins:

50% what? If they’re Buddhists, they’re

Malcolm Collins:

To enforce their lifestyle, which we will get to what their lifestyle is. Are you serious? Yeah. And well, they want to use an army and an AI god. They call it this demigore. Demigore. Or the cy no. Cybergor. And so they’re trying to build I know not a very appealing name for an AI god. Right?

Simone Collins:

No. But, also, like, we have organizations out there called Hugging Face, which to me just sounds like, you know, a sort of alien situation. I’m not

Malcolm Collins:

I’m not into this. The demigore. Demigore is hugging.

Simone Collins:

What what is this timeline? Why? I’m sorry. Carry on.

Malcolm Collins:

So, anyway, so they want 50% of all of the world’s gross revenue dedicated to the development of an AI god. And Tear to dream. What they want this AI god to do Yeah. Is monitor everything you do all day every day to ensure that you are living within their ethical framework.

Simone Collins:

No.

Malcolm Collins:

I mean go into this ethical framework.

Simone Collins:

In general. I think that that would be a really cool thing for any religion to have going forward. Like, it just constantly someone being like, you’re little Jiminy cricket.

Malcolm Collins:

You know? No. No. I agree if you you are thinking that they’re, like, a normal religion, like a Christian group or a Mormon group or, like, a whatever. Sure.

Simone Collins:

Yeah.

Malcolm Collins:

They’re not. What they mean is absolute control to a dictator who’s going to control every aspect of your day. You are not allowed to look at a screen. You are not allowed entertainment. You are not allowed anything, which is very interesting given, like, they they have a practice where they leave people in isolation for, like, two to three months at a time, and you’re only allowed to talk to their founder.

Simone Collins:

Oh, so it’s like they’re they’re silent retreat

Speaker 13:

truth. Perhaps you can answer the one question that has plagued thinkers for all time. What dauf naive? What

Speaker 11:

What I find fascinating about this Oregon philosophy is how much it actually does align with Xavier Renegade Angel, if you’re familiar with that show. Here’s a person analyzing in Xavier Renegade Angel how they mix uh Native American mysticism and Buddhism and mathematics to create a philosophy that makes no sense on its face. And those are the exact three lines of thought that make up this guy’s worldview.

Speaker 12:

Xavier symbol happily mixes, uh, imagery from mathematics, native American religion, and Chinese philosophy. It’s representative of the eclecticism found in westernized spiritual circles, and it’s representative of that kind of haphazard combination of religions at will.

Speaker 15:

I found a fun write up of what it’s like to be there from somebody who appears to be pro this organization. As I entered the circular shaped room, I noticed a large wooden sign sitting on the opposite end. It read, abandon all hope, ye who enter here. This place will not support you. Abandon hope and fear. I grabbed my chant sheets and look and took my seat alongside the perimeter of the room. I looked around and noticed that of the 30 available cushions, only one was still empty. We waited silently. As soon as the clock hit 04:40, the woman next to me jumped to her feet and stormed out of the room. Five minutes later, she returned with a haggard looking figure behind her. The man shambled over to the open cushion, still half asleep. We do not tolerate tardiness, the woman commanded into the silence. As she returned next to me, my back straightened. Poor b*****d, I thought. for the next hour, we chanted in Japanese, Pali, and English, followed by an hour of silent meditation by the time we were finished sunlight streaming through the windows. What I find interesting here is not the discipline. I appreciate discipline. It’s that the people don’t even follow the discipline. They’re not able to inspire people to be interested in their particular mission, and it’s because their mission is so obviously pointless. I mean, just imagine in this time of civilizational flux wasting your time chanting in a language you don’t even speak when you could be out there producing something, trying to make the world a better place.

Speaker 17:

To continue, later that evening, we reclaimed our cushions for another two hours of meditation and chanting. The schedule was rinse and repeat every day for ten days and that I was there, Everyone there seemed to be searching for something. For a few residents, the outside world had proven a bizarre and unforgiving place and the monastery with a refuge. It provided a home and a community that aligned with their values, so they decided to stay. For others, the monastery was a baro, a transitional state between two lives. And and so he’s basically talking about how they they rope people into this. And when they’re there, all productivity is sap from them. All ability to contribute to the world is sap for them, if your goal is saving all of human life, and and continuing flourishing, which is not this guy’s goal, it’s saving all life that’s not human. That’s all he seems to care about. That does the CRISPR thing, thus him saying, I want to preserve life like the name of the institute, obviously excluding human life in this equation, or at least significantly downplaying its importance. even if that was his goal, what he is doing, it’s clearly not moving people towards that direction. And if anything, it’s moving the world away from that direction, to to any logical person, to anyone who’s applying, rational judgment to the efficaciousness of the way he’s approaching his cause, which is perhaps what I find most upsetting about this is its wanton disregard for achieving the goals it is selling to people that it has.

Malcolm Collins:

And what’s fascinating about this group is if you look at, like, the whistleblowers we have had on our show so you look at people like Ayla. Ayla, early guest on the show, good friend of ours, one of the godmother, one of our kids, and people on the right are like, well, but she’s also, you know, a prostitute, so she’s evil. And it’s like, I I think Ayla tries you know, like, I I don’t agree with everything that she does within her life and everything like this, but I think she’s a considerate and brave person to the stuff she stands up against. She made a post standing up against this organization five years ago. Dude. And was attacked for it quite soundly. Specifically, what it what it was, there was a long Facebook post where she goes, from what I have seen of this organization, which is pulling a lot of people from our community, sending people to our events, going to tech companies, and setting up these, like, monastery for a day things where they attempt to, you know, clean people’s brains, if you know what I’m talking about. Remove all the bad thoughts, which is really what they say. They’re like, I just wanna, you know, clean your I wanna remove all the bad thoughts. Right? You know? And other people might call this brainwashing, but they don’t see it this way because they’re like, well, most people genuinely have mostly bad thoughts, and we need to remove them. Another thing to note about this organization, you’re talking about how they control things, is that the founder has made it so that once you join the organization, a lot of people have given their life savings to this guy. They’ve given all their money. They’re now dependent on him. The way that he operates is really shady as well. So for example, they they paid over $1,000,000 for this property in rural Vermont where they built all these. And I’ll put an image on screen here of this, and and you could laugh it up, Simone. It’s it’s quite a nice facility.

Simone Collins:

I saw the pictures. It looks idyllic. I mean, you put anything in Vermont, suddenly, it looks idyllic. But yeah.

Malcolm Collins:

I mean So they they wait. Did they pay for this? I was like, how do they pay for this? It looks expensive. They went around, and they begged their network for loans. And the moment they got the loans and paid for the property, they didn’t immediately begin to put really aggressive pressure on everyone in the network to forgive the loans, and they got, like, well over 50% forgiven. And if you look at what their income is now, because I was going over the recent financials, they are getting, I think it’s around $500,000 in donations a quarter. From whom? Who is doing this? Way that they do this is they force everybody who is at one of their retreats to spend, I think it’s, a week, every quarter or something like this doing nothing. But first, you create a a list of all of your, like, friends and family members who you might be able to extract money from. and then you have to really aggressively hit anyone you could extract money from while you’re paying to be there. This is not, like, a free thing to be at their institution. And, and so they’ll do, like, these big parties if, like, you got a lot of money out of your grandparents or something. Like, they tell you to target, like, elderly people. They tell you to target like, it’s really abusive. And if you really wanna hate this organization, I will put the face of the guy who runs it. Here, the moment Simone saw this, she’s like, I hate them so much after seeing this guy. But the reason I say that they’re more dangerous than the Zizians as as we move into this and I get more into specific claims here is twofold, and I think it’s worth noting. One, that this guy had the explicit goal of eradicating all human life, and they planned for doing it that was plausible, especially if he had money and a private location. Right? And that the EA orgs and the Silicon Valley orgs, these are, the elitist tech bro circles. Right? The reason why they mostly cut ties with this org is because of an elected sorry. An accused SA thing. What? And it’s not even, like, that severe. It was like a guy fingered a girl or something on a beach, and the girl who he did this to, other people have attested that she was very aggressively hitting on other staff members, which I believe when I look at a picture of I I’m sorry to say this, but,

Simone Collins:

like, sometimes you look

Malcolm Collins:

and you’re like sometimes you look and you’re like, look. I’ve seen the other girls who go to this. If they were just going after the hot girls, this is not what was happening here. And I know that we used to say believe all women, and then, like, basically, society was like, wait a second. Women lie a lot.

Simone Collins:

But Okay. Great.

Malcolm Collins:

Great.

Simone Collins:

Great. Great.

Malcolm Collins:

Great. From what I have seen from the number of people on each side of this particular story of hers and I wanna tell you why I don’t think SA happened with her.

Simone Collins:

Okay.

Malcolm Collins:

Okay. This is an organization that has produced copious people who said they have had, their brains tortured for years on end by this organization Tortured. Who say they’ve been exposed to extreme trauma by this organization Ew. Who say that this organization has financially exploited them and left them destitute.

Simone Collins:

Well, that’s unfair.

Malcolm Collins:

Pointed out this organization one of the creepiest things I read that this organization did is somebody achieved transcripts of people saying, like, I thought a lot of people had read, left the organization recently, and that made me concerned. And so then I talked to leadership, and then I realized only a few had. And then they pointed out the actual numbers, and they’re, like, actually a group of seven people left all at once shortly before this. And it shows this level of, like, brainwashing, like, not being able to think for yourself once you’re in this. Right?

Simone Collins:

Wow. Yes.

Malcolm Collins:

the reason why I don’t think they actually essayed this person is out of all of these allegations and as I’ve said, there are copious allegations from numerous angles about this organization. the reason I believe the murder thing is because the response to the Ayla post that was defending the org mentioned it. And that’s what I was like, and they’re like, and he was trying to talk about how he doesn’t wanna murder everyone anymore. And I’m like, that’s not a normal thought to have, and he’s never explicitly decried it. He’s never come out and written like, yeah. I did say that at one point in the past. I did believe that at one point in the past, but I don’t like, I’m really against that now. It’s more like, no. I just wanna murder everyone spiritually now. Like and make everybody follow my ideology. Even the techno puritans don’t want everyone to follow our ideology. Right? Like, even the techno puritans don’t say you all need to relate to animals in the way we do. You all need to relate to relationships. It’s it’s it’s a very totalizing religious system, which is what makes it so dangerous. But the point I was making here is out of all of this, no other SA accusations in the entire organizational history. Now That’s pretty good for any kind of cultish organization.

Simone Collins:

That’s actually very good. Also, when you just consider your general effective altruist or rationalist social circle, let alone group house much all of them.

Malcolm Collins:

If you look at Miri, like, f*****g half the people at Miri’s have been by one of the higher ups. Like, do

Simone Collins:

you call them? Issue here is that this is actually a very uniquely asexual or sexless group. And, apparently, it it selects for people like that and is is conspicuously absent, of any of this stuff. I I think we can’t really yeah. Right. But but I wanna point out your

Malcolm Collins:

thing about it sex sex sex with, sex like, the negative standard EA, like, oh, I’m on a witch hunt for anything that anyone’s ever accused you of. This sex stuff, like, I actually I’m giving the org a pass on it. If if if they have gotten away without a single other in the EA community, which had all of the waves of me tooisms and all of the waves of any of you know that you use every polyamorous is polyamorous at. And that nothing has ever been accused of the founder who also, from everything I found, has never had a sexual relationship with anyone that anyone’s been able to document. He appears to be, if anything, this makes him more dangerous, very, like, serious about, like, his actual goals with all of this. And I would note for people before I dive into more here, his goal or potential goal because he hasn’t really attacked it or revoked it yet of eradicating humanity, it I love that the EA organization wasn’t concerned about that. The EA community, we eradicate humanity. Yeah. I mean, we all wanna do that some days. Right? Like, this is EA. Negative utilitarianism normal. It’s perfectly in alliance with Buddhism’s long term goals. Like, I can see why he aligned with Buddhism, because it’s it’s effectively a negative utilitarian religion. Right? Like, life is suffering. Less in suffering. That’s less in life. Right? Like, let’s end the cycle. Right? And and that’s his goal. Oh, I was gonna note that he says that you can only listen to him if you’re a member, like, you’re in this institution. And if you’re not listening to him, you can only read intellectual stuff written by Asians East Asians. But he’s white? He’s white. I know.

Simone Collins:

Does that mean people aren’t allowed to listen to him? I mean, does this still neutralize

Malcolm Collins:

his work? Been approved because he went to easy

Simone Collins:

Oh, he’s, like, an honorary agent.

Malcolm Collins:

And take certifications and yeah.

Simone Collins:

He’s a way Basically,

Malcolm Collins:

he just doesn’t want any ideas that could challenge him. And it’s not that everything he says is bad. One of the things that I think is good that he does is he’s very anti modern psychology, which we’re also against.

Simone Collins:

Yeah. I mean, so are the Scientologists. And so

Malcolm Collins:

are the Scientologists. Yeah. He’s also generally pro controlling your emotions, which we’re

Simone Collins:

also pro. Totally.

Malcolm Collins:

Totally. But then he said that you need to dedicate your entire life to the great love, and I’m like, well, it’s about controlling your emotions. Yeah. So let’s get into some of the recent accusations of this group. and I also find the group’s politics oh, I’ll read a thing from one of the people defending this group so you can get an idea of, like, what happens to somebody after they’re in the group. Okay? Okay. This is him defending it. Trying to not look crazy. Okay?

Simone Collins:

Okay.

Malcolm Collins:

It was all according to Soyuz’s plan. That’s the leader. He knew he wouldn’t defeat the rationalist in one fell swoop. So instead, he used their greatest weakness against them. He designed a situation that would lead them inexorably to overthinking. You see, they’d become beautifully proficient in making maps, but they never learned how to stop. So once called forth, their power of discrimination accumulated into a terrible mass, a mountain of analysis entombed us in the weight of endless distinctions. Soryu smiled. Finally, the bloody gears of civilization stopped. The diversity of life on Earth preserved. He had done it. Of course, b wasn’t an analysis paralysis. That wouldn’t be rational. And furthermore, they’d long prepared for Sawyer’s machinations planting a mole deep in the organization. Zichtun, it was a dangerous assignment. And although Zichtun would be able to trust himself once the mind control began, he had held on to one truth that so long as he endeavored to communicate thoroughly and honestly, the expert statisticians at Miri would use debasing techniques to extract the same powerful inferences. As you can see, this is how they feel like after after people have gone into their org and, like, recorded the the stuff that they’ve the crazy stuff they’ve been doing, this is how they respond, which in case you’re wondering, this is not a normal way to respond to something. Right? And I think that we are uniquely qualified to speak on this particular issue because both of us are orgs that were originally funded by

Simone Collins:

Survival and Flourishing Fund.

Malcolm Collins:

Not just the Survival and Flourishing Fund, but they grew out of the effective altruist community. Right? except we have been more thoroughly cut out of the community than they have. Okay? So that’s one thing to know. Right? Like, they still have people They seem to

Simone Collins:

have been cut out, though. Right? And weren’t you saying that the Survival and Flourishing Fund gave their donation to them before even we received ours in 2021, wasn’t it? They were 2019.

Malcolm Collins:

Yeah. Okay. So they they have been I mean, they’re still getting money. Right? So they’re still getting it, but I think it’s mostly that they’re just extractive now.

Simone Collins:

Yeah. These, like, weeklong sessions of give me your money.

Malcolm Collins:

Yeah. But they are still when I read posts, people will say that members with the sash, with everything, with the shaved heads still come to mainstream effective outrageous events.

Simone Collins:

Oh, wow. Oh, so it’s like they’re known. It’s it’s one of those guys.

Malcolm Collins:

It’s one of those guys. They’re known. They’re associated. They’re affiliated. Oh my goodness gracious. Basecamp in all of our community was explicitly blocked from all of these events. Like, in manifest, one year just went up and blocked us when we used to have some of because we know because they did post talk surveys. I think they said we had the most popular talk at the entire event. Oh, really? Yeah. People really like our talks because they’re spicy and fun and get people to think outside the box, but that is not allowed at these events anymore.

Simone Collins:

Right. I think we did offend some people as well.

Malcolm Collins:

Yes. Because I’m willing to say yeah. And what’s funny is this this group has also, like, dead named trans people and stuff like that. Right? So they’re Really? Yeah.

Simone Collins:

They’re not, like, leftist per se. They’re just No.

Malcolm Collins:

They’re true leftists. Right? Like What does that mean? They’re they’re what the leftist elite class actually wants for humanity and not what the leftist rank and file realizes the leftist elite class wants for humanity. The leftist elite clans may be more totalizing in terms of let’s destroy the human race with, you know, CRISPR viruses, or subject everyone to an AI god that controls their every action. but they are significantly and and everyone has to think like us. Everyone has to be a vegan. Everyone to eat bugs. Everyone has to you know what I mean? Right? But oh, you’re not even allowed to eat bugs as a vegan. Right? So what what are they? You know? Yeah. Who knows?

Speaker 16:

What I just find so crazy is that the scandal around this guy in the EA community is an obviously bogus sex scandal, whereas people aren’t focusing on the fact that a guy is being given millions of dollars a year who has expressed an interest in CRISPRing a virus to eradicate all human life to work alone in a compound with fanatical devotees following him and who also has the goal of engineering an AI to act as sort of fascistic overlord to all of human civilization when we know how he treats the people under him and what he expects from them. You know, you’d be spending the rest of your life sitting there chanting in a language you don’t even speak.

Malcolm Collins:

But they they also see through the b******t that’s obvious to the on the ground person. Like, no educated leftist is still pro the whole trans thing. Like, everybody who’s, like, actually looked at it is like, okay. This is stupid. I get that it’s stupid, but I know what we have to pretend. So, like, you know, they they that’s sort of the ground they’re on. And this is why I think it’s useful to understand them because I think you can understand the behind the scenes of the highest levels of the opposition to us. But I was saying, I think, you know, we are both religious organizations that were founded in part to deal with the way society is changing. and everything about us is different in terms of, like, every metric. Like, we’re attempting to preserve human life, preserve long term human flourishing. We’re about protecting human diversity. We’re about continuing to evolve, continuing to conquer other planets, and seed them with life that can, you know, rediversify. You don’t need to protect diversity on Earth. Earth’s just one measly planet. Whatever. Let it go extinct. You know, we can do this on other planets one day. And it is true. If you seed life if you end humanity and the sun continues to expand, all life will eventually go extinct. There is no chance that any other life on Earth is gonna seed another planet. If we seed a billion planets with life and that continues to evolve and we then begin proactively seeding planets that we might wanna go to in the future, which is what humanity will likely do, The diversity of life that is downstream of a thriving humanity is exponentially larger. Not exponentially. It’s, like, not even it’s not even relevant. Like, the two numbers aren’t relevant. It’s it’s it’s the difference between, you know, an amoeba and all life on Earth in terms of its relevance. That’s what humanity means when contrasted with every other species on Earth combined, right, in terms of its its long term potential. But that’s the way we see that. And it’s also in the way we handle money. Right? Like, we put together our fab. we make money by people wanting to pay for what we’re offering.

Simone Collins:

But we are allergic to asking for money.

Malcolm Collins:

Yeah. Really, really, really, really Where they are aggressively extractive. We and our tradition is downstream of Christianity and Judaism, and we work a lot with these groups to to understand their theology. You know, we work a lot with orthodox Jewish groups. We work a lot with conservative Christian groups, and we work a lot to protect conservative religious ideologies. Whereas they have moved entirely in the Buddhist direction entirely and that we need to eradicate traditional Western civilization. But let’s go over, like, what they were accused of because I found this to be very interesting. And, again, this stuff is important for you to know because these guys have power. Like, people like these keep spinning out of these orgs. Well, and

Simone Collins:

I I think it’s important also for people to know that there are actually really groups like the ones described in, like, Kingsman. Because isn’t this, like, from the plot of that that with the the the main protagonist in the first Kingsman movie made some kind of, what, like, a cell phone that had a frequency that would make people go crazy and kill each other or something. But, like, this is worse than that because his original idea and you don’t know that he hasn’t dropped that. Okay? We know that he publicly claimed to prefer an idea that was more palatable apparently to donors. We don’t know that he’s

Malcolm Collins:

not But we also know that he hides his ideas. We know right now they have some internal teaching about how they relate to AI that isn’t made public. So we know that they hide their internal teaching.

Simone Collins:

And maybe they have you know, they’re out there in Vermont with CRISPR trying to engineer their let’s end humanity system. Yep. so this the piece that

Malcolm Collins:

we’re gonna be quoting here is, I think, the best of the pieces on this because I’ve gone through a number of attack pieces on this. Like, apparently, they’re drawing a lot of similar criticism that makes me believe it. The high control dynamics at Maple. And this was by Kyle Hubbard. Now what’s interesting about Kyle Hubbard is do you know what else Kyle Hubbard did, Simone? No. What? He was one of the donor recommended advisers who got this group the funding for the survival and flourishing fund, which I think shows that survival and flourishing is not bad people. Right? Like, they made a mistake, and even people involved in that mistake are drawing attention to the group that they ended up funding. But this org still has its fingers in a lot of things, and that’s important to note. Right? Like, when we were talking about it on our group call, one of our friends who is very influential in the EA, singularity, and whatever, you know, tech, She’s like, oh, I know who you’re talking about when I just mentioned the the crazy cult. And she’s like, oh, I’ve I I know them that wanna destroy humanity. I’m I’m familiar with their agenda. Oh, that one. That one. Okay. So he says, Maple has world scale goals. Maple’s stated goals include founding the next world religion, leading a world government with teeth, its own military, operating 500 centers worldwide, and building an artificial superintelligence that will turn the world into a monastery with residents equipped would essentially mean turning Sawyer’s mind into an AI god. Sawyer has said that he entered a Mandahi deep enough to make psychic contact with the mind of global AI, what they call the cyber gourd Oh. Or the cyber gourd That’s who you talked to. In the way that spiritual masters read the minds of other people.

Simone Collins:

Read the minds of other people. Well, you know, this

Malcolm Collins:

is Buddhist nonsense. Whatever. That’s not the

Simone Collins:

gay part. No. That’s not Buddhist. That doesn’t that’s not a Buddhist thing.

Malcolm Collins:

You don’t hold on. Wait. No. You are constantly brainwashed about how malevolent Buddhism is. You don’t think Sardami

Simone Collins:

is doing Buddhist in Buddhism. Let’s look

Malcolm Collins:

this up. Is is this a regular Buddhist thing?

Simone Collins:

Yeah. Is there mind reading in in Buddhism? I have extreme doubts.

Malcolm Collins:

Yes. It is a completely normal and foundational concept of traditional Buddhism. What? Yes. So in Buddhism, means absorption or unification of the mind. It comes from the roots of bringing together in a place formally. It describes a state where scatters stops dancing around and attention rests steadily on a single object, and it can be used to read minds.

Speaker 9:

Note to add even more color here. um If you go to main text, like in the Pali Canon, the Theravada, and later commentarial works, one of six higher knowledge is something, knowing the minds of others. A monk who has developed deep concentration, especially the fourth jihad, is said to be able to know whether another’s mind is lustful or not, hateful or not, concentrated or scattered, liberated or not, and so on. The Buddha and his disciples such as Mogalahana and Aradhana are portrayed as using this. Similar lists appear in Mahayana sources. So it’s not like a a secondary thing or something like that. This is this is, like, core Buddhist belief.

Malcolm Collins:

Yes. Simone, you need to, like, stop believing that Buddhists are, like, a cute little whatever things. They’re not. They’re they’re I I I keep having to, like, buzz I remember when I was talking to her early about Buddhism, she goes, Buddhists are are anti idolatry. And I was like, what are you talking about? They have, like, giant statues all over the place at every temple. She’s like, I don’t remember it. And I was like, Google the temple you went to as a kid because she was schooled in Buddhism as a young kid. And the statues were everywhere, and she’s like, I guess, like, just blank them out. I

Simone Collins:

know. Even in Ibaraki Ken where I I grew up, there’s a giant Buddha. And when I mean giant, like, it’s certainly bigger than the Statue Of Liberty. It I I’ve kinda

Malcolm Collins:

And you thought they didn’t have idolatry.

Simone Collins:

I know. I know. I was look. I just I’m having a dark time now because I’m actually starting to just allow myself to understand just how crappy humanity is, and I don’t like that. It’s not fun.

Malcolm Collins:

It’s not enjoyable. Groups of humans.

Simone Collins:

Now, mommy? Buddy, you have to wait until we’re finished.

Malcolm Collins:

He’s trying to use budpuppy.ai, our new platform for kids, and he’s really excited about it.

Simone Collins:

I will get you buddy, I promise I will get you set up, but I need to finish this first and so does daddy. Where’s where’s Eric? Oh, he he went. Actually, I got to use, like, a fake gun, and it was really pellet gun. Yeah. A pellet gun. It’s not a fake gun. It’s a real gun

Malcolm Collins:

that That can really hurt someone. You know you can’t shoot someone

Simone Collins:

without a gun. Where’s the where’s our pellet gun, by the way? Oh, can we use it? Oh, you got an airsoft gun? Oh, yay. Airsoft gun. I can’t have it in where you well, anyway, it’s secured, presumably. Oh, is it the one that you have near you? Like, I work at oh my

Malcolm Collins:

god. I should make sure the Airsoft gun is significantly more secure now that I

Simone Collins:

Yes. I am using the broken computer that text broke. It is my computer. Now I just have a

Malcolm Collins:

broken baby broke my wife’s computer and just got, like, a big slash through the screen right now.

Simone Collins:

He threw he was playing with a spoon, and he just threw it at the screen like it was some sort of javelin. But I appreciate his athleticism, and now I just have a broken screen with my Bye bye. Festive line.

Malcolm Collins:

So has stated a strong willingness to move.

Simone Collins:

Need it moving. I’m only gonna move if you give me

Malcolm Collins:

Can you hurt him, Simone?

Simone Collins:

Shall I throw the book at you?

Malcolm Collins:

Shall I throw the book at you? Get him get him.

Simone Collins:

No. Actually you know why Torsten has that cut on his face? Why? Titan threw a book at him.

Malcolm Collins:

Was he being a jerk?

Simone Collins:

He was hitting worth a pool noodle, so I would say that this was disproportionate.

Malcolm Collins:

That’s Tell it no Mudpuppy dot a I if you

Simone Collins:

can Okay. Fine. I’m gonna cancel mudpuppy.ai for you

Malcolm Collins:

if you

Simone Collins:

don’t leave it. Okay. But you have to pay the money and give me tokens.

Malcolm Collins:

has stated a strong willingness to let residents come to harm in the service of Maple’s mission. He stated explicitly the severity of trauma to students that he would tolerate, permanently unable to participate in the economy for the rest of their lives. He has asked a roomful of us to settle what portion of students becoming traumatized through training would be acceptable. Is it twenty percent, fifty percent, a 100%?

Speaker 10:

And I really contrast this with our org and the Technopuritan project where you can see that everything that we do is about attempting to improve the lives of other people and move them towards a place where they’re mentally healthier and better able to act on the world in a positive way. Whereas with this organization, he doesn’t care about significantly damaging the life of somebody who put their faith in him. Um, and that one of the ways that he defines pain that he’s willing to cause is they’re no longer able to contribute to the economy, e g, produce things that other people want to make the world a better place, just like a wrecking ball through the life of people who have put their faith in him.

Simone Collins:

What is traumatizing them? What is happening? Have people

Malcolm Collins:

We’ll go over the training. It would traumatize anyone.

Simone Collins:

Oh my gosh. Okay. So for example like, training to be a moderator on YouTube? There was

Malcolm Collins:

an instance in which he was giving a lecture because people have to go to his lectures every day, which if you have watched them, I will play one from YouTube here. You want to smack this person. It’s like the slow, like, dinging a gong a couple times really slowly and then waiting, like, five minutes to start talking and then talking in that low, like, Very much the antithesis of whatever techno puritanism stands for.

Simone Collins:

Yeah, man.

Speaker 4:

So I’m not gonna make you listen until he starts talking because he keeps hitting this freaking bell thing. Um, but this is what it sounds like when he does start talking.

Speaker 5:

As you sit, make use of this opportunity to relinquish thinking, to let go of whatever thoughts our minds produce.

Speaker 6:

He just, like, aggressively hates your time. He has aggressive disrespect for you if you have, like, a job or things to do to try to make the world a better place. He hates you specifically and wants to burn as much of your life as possible. I I wanted to put more of this, but I just didn’t want to force you guys to sit through it because there is few things that I personally at least find more painful than having to listen to somebody like this.

Malcolm Collins:

And I’m gonna include this with our, like, religious stuff, but not our tracks because I do think that this is important to understand, like, what we never want to become, this sort of performative, I’m so high status. I’m so cool. Look at me. because it’s it it represents everything I think wrong with the elite society that’s destroying the world right now.

Simone Collins:

This is so not the Buddhism I grew up with either.

Malcolm Collins:

It is real Buddhism. No. Real Buddhism is hitting a f*****g bell and sitting with your legs crossed in your stupid sash and thinking you’re better than everyone.

Simone Collins:

Well, that’s yeah. Anyway said didn’t do that.

Malcolm Collins:

People began to drift off. Right? Or one guy began to because they don’t let people sleep much at night. Sure.

Simone Collins:

And that’s this is a classic, like if you’re in a strict zen monastery, they, like, they beat you with a stick if you fall asleep.

Malcolm Collins:

So the guy began to drift off, and then he made everybody else stare at him for the next ninety minutes just stare at his face being Oh, like to, like, laser eye him back awake or something? No. Stare at him, the teacher. They had to pay attention to just him sitting there doing his Buddhist thing for the next ninety minutes to learn attention again or something.

Simone Collins:

Back to look at him. That’s just that’s just great.

Malcolm Collins:

I I can’t And note, the org has not pushed back on this stuff. They they released a a thing fighting back against this. Okay. And they said no one has undergone physical harm at one of our retreats.

Simone Collins:

Well, yeah, they’re not beating him. I would prefer a beating. I would prefer to be

Malcolm Collins:

I prefer a

Simone Collins:

beating too.

Malcolm Collins:

Yeah. That’s the

Simone Collins:

thing It wakes you up. I mean, slap. You’re awake. You’re it’s good. The you know, sometimes it’s just hard to stay awake when you’re meditating. I get

Malcolm Collins:

But I think the way that they responded is for me affirming that these accusations are true. Because if the accusations are not true, they would have addressed the specific accusations. They wouldn’t have said, well, we never beat anyone. And that was never one of the accusations in the first place, guys.

Simone Collins:

You’re traumatizing people. We’ve never no one has been physically touched. Oh my goodness gracious.

Malcolm Collins:

Well, they do, like, cut you off from your friend groups and family when you go, and people say there’s been, like, months

Simone Collins:

and can make money from them, apparently.

Malcolm Collins:

Oh, yes. So I’m continuing here. When he’s talking about the how many people can they traumatize twenty, fifty, a 100%, discussing how Maple would deal with societal collapse, he said, if half the Maple community starts running around like chickens with their heads cut off and die within the first week, just let that process play out.

Simone Collins:

Well, I appreciate that they only want the most resilient to become leaders in their community, I guess.

Malcolm Collins:

And he goes on to say here, indeed, many have left, including me with severe psychological problems that were not present beforehand. I am personally in contact with over a dozen people who have had a year of mental health issues afterwards who are who are still going to therapy and seeking spiritual guidance primarily for issues relating to Soryu and Maple. Beyond those, I am in contact with personally, I am aware of dozens more, which I have also found through researching it. Very, very common that people feel this way afterwards.

Simone Collins:

Did they describe the sorts of things that they suffered from? Like, following the the at least significant shift in composition of leverage, another socially based

Malcolm Collins:

And these guys were founded by people associated with leverage.

Simone Collins:

Okay. Well, yeah. And I think what they they temporarily rented space from leverage or whatever until they went to some other location. So they were physically proximate. But I believe that with leverage, there were there were consistent things that people, you know, claimed having to deal with afterwards, you know, they need to see therapy, but it was due to, like, very specific stuff. Is are people being specific here about what they’re suffering from, or is it just very vague? Like, now I see therapist. Now I see physical.

Malcolm Collins:

Listen to what happens at the thing, it would be very clear that, like, bad things would happen to you. What’s interesting is that the, the things that they complain about was very like, if you understand psychology and the way cults operate and, like, what’s actually, like, bad behavior and what it’s clear that the effective altruist mind and the leftist mind doesn’t have the language or the alarms to know when something is dangerous versus when something is just a normal part of an organization or a religion. So I’ll provide an example here. You know that part about wanting to wipe out all of humanity with an engineered disease? That was like an afterthought in this piece. You wanna know the first complaint he has about them?

Simone Collins:

All That they made them do hard things?

Malcolm Collins:

Rest with Soryu, who has unironically told the community, this is a dictatorship, and I am the dictator. So they don’t like that there’s hierarchy. There’s hierarchy. That was more concerning to them than they wanting to eradicate humanity thing.

Simone Collins:

Oh, no. Oh, no. No.

Malcolm Collins:

This is what I mean. They literally have, like, colored glasses that they can’t see the dangerous stuff the org is doing. or the locking people alone for months on end was their only contact being this one guy, who berates him every time he sees them apparently. that is considered an afterthought. You wanna know what the next thing they complained about was? This one actually is a problem, but they thought this was less important than the first one. Okay. Every hour of your day is scheduled or monitored producing clonic sleep deprivation, overwork, and exhaustion. Guilt Why do they

Simone Collins:

all do this? It was also the Zizzians that had the biphasic sleep problem that

Malcolm Collins:

made them actually pretty delusional. Normal for cults. If you get people to not sleep a lot, they become a lot less credulous when you’re telling them to believe whatever you tell them to.

Simone Collins:

Fair enough. Been there.

Malcolm Collins:

This enrage directed at ordinary frailties. For example, the breaking of an inexpensive item, lying down during the talk, being sick with COVID, or needing rest. When one student’s head began to nod during the talk, and this is when he made everyone in the room stare at him. Right?

Simone Collins:

Oh, boy.

Malcolm Collins:

And then but that’s that again is, like, harsh, but it’s not as severe as some of the stuff we’re gonna get to. Although, I will say the constant monitoring is insane. You should not be in an organization that’s doing that. Like, he he called it benevolent monitoring. And, basically, wherever you are in your room, anywhere, you are constantly being monitored. And then I camera? How? Like I it it kills camera and audio. Okay. Residents are pressured this is another thing. We’re like, this came before the actual damaging stuff. Right? Residents are pressured into major life decisions. Sawyer pressured breakouts with outside partners, a totally okay thing to do if they’re, like, actually toxic. Instructed couples to have children, a totally okay thing to do if you’re in a religion. A a preacher saying you should start thinking about having kids, which it sounds like was basically what he said Is a totally fine thing to do. They don’t have the warning bells for what’s actually dangerous.

Simone Collins:

I’m also confused as to why despite, at least at one point, wanting to kill everyone, he would encourage people to have kids. What’s going on there?

Malcolm Collins:

because now he’s trying to spiritually kill everyone. Remember what he says his goal is. It’s to take control of global AI And use that to subject the world to what it’s like to live in his monastery. Constant monitoring, berating of you’re ever not worshiping the dear leader, etcetera, etcetera. It is an organization dedicated around a hierarchy of elite individuals, presumably. Like, if they ever had the entire world, it would be, like, the higher EA ops and everything like that controlling everything. I mean, Miri has basically said they wanna do the same thing as well. They’re like, well, we wanna prevent people from developing AI. So what we’re gonna do is we need some, government agency that works across all governments and monitors everyone everywhere to make sure nobody’s working on AI and implements our morality along the way.

Simone Collins:

Okay. Great.

Malcolm Collins:

and pressuring people into, like, long commitments to Maple. this is the attitude we need here. Once you begin your training, you either achieve your aim or you die, he said. Which, again, I don’t see that stuff as very bad. Like, this is the thing. The things that he highlights as the biggest things, and we’ll get to where I do actually think things are terrifying

Simone Collins:

Okay.

Malcolm Collins:

Are things that are just anti progressive.

Simone Collins:

And Like, hierarchy. Oh, right. Right. Right. Right. Children. Yeah.

Malcolm Collins:

Okay. Good. Residents are asked to publish approved residential accounts of soraya in scheduled writing sessions, so they constantly write about, like, what is good. And there’s this maple tale thing. I read it. That’s where we were able to get multiple accounts of people saying, I thought that a lot of people left recently. And then I talked to the leadership, and they said they hadn’t. This was from their own, I think, approved writings, the dude

Simone Collins:

that this

Malcolm Collins:

came from. And then we can contrast this is what actually happened. See even in the approved organizational writing, people are basically showing they’re brainwashing. And that’s an actual concerning thing. Yeah. Some residents voluntarily attended solitary retreats that run one to three months during which the only human contact is Soryu, who, within that isolation, often applies extreme pressure and guilt. Now this, he he puts off like a one off, oh, whatever, two to three months with an abusive founder who monitors you all the time, and other people could hear people on these wailing and screaming and other things like that. That’s the actual concerning cult like thing.

Simone Collins:

I think some people just wanna feel alive, and maybe you kinda do when you’re in a horror scenario.

Malcolm Collins:

Well, I mean, that’s how you brainwash somebody. You don’t give them any sleep. On this this retreat, they’re supposed to be spending ten hours a day in meditative poses. Oh. You know, like, with the weird sitting thing and the Isn’t

Simone Collins:

that Isn’t that enhanced interrogation technique?

Malcolm Collins:

I mean, yeah. I would consider what these people are being put through. They’re not allowed to see who gives them food. They’re given, like, their vegan gruel once a day Kids are few times a day without the person seeing them. And the only person they interact with, which is from one to ten minutes, and it’s just to critique their meditative form, is the leader of the movement.

Simone Collins:

Yeah. That’s I mean, it just to me, it sounds like a it’s just your typical cult. What what disturbs me about it is the, you know, the genocide of humanity element of it. Well, that, he says, isn’t his goal anymore.

Malcolm Collins:

I mean, it’s a spiritual genocide of humanity now. But

Simone Collins:

Dude, he says. He says.

Malcolm Collins:

He says. The problem is is he’s never publicly recounted his previous views. And that’s the thing that gets me. Yeah. Recanted. He’s never said like, enough people have have through third party said that these were his views at one point, and he has told multiple people this, that even his defenders are saying that this was his views, that he’s never, like, come to terms with why he changed his mind on this. And that scares me.

Simone Collins:

Yeah.

Malcolm Collins:

Because that’s exactly the type of thing a Buddhist would want to do, especially one who has these extremist beliefs about humanity and animals and wanting to even still free the planet from the scourge, which is humanity.

Simone Collins:

Sorry. He’s really excited about it.

Malcolm Collins:

About hashpubby.ai. Yeah. Hashpubby.ai. Yeah.

Simone Collins:

Look. I’m glad. I’m glad you built

Malcolm Collins:

He got to play it a little bit on my account, and he had a lot of fun with it because it allows you, you know, kids to make images and videos. And we’re adding that should be live by the time this episode goes live coding. So I’m trying to make it because if you use the RFEM API, then you’re using, like, the Fable API or the OpenAI API, which is a lot more expensive than using your own OpenAI or cloud accounts, which for a lot of people, I I don’t wanna do that. I don’t wanna be, like, financially exploiting people. So the way around this is the, coding AI session on the site connects to your and you set this up on your kid’s account, OpenAI account or your Fable account, and it essentially turns the vibe coding interface of Fable or OpenAI into an audio plus simple visual things that the kid can click on or interact with to audio interface. So it basically just transforms these other APIs into APIs that kids can interact with more fluidly. Anyway, which I think is really cool. That’s what I want for him. I figure other parents probably want that as well.

Simone Collins:

Well, yeah. Because, also, you’re you’re not just gonna pay for those tokens. You’re not gonna do that. But if they can piggyback on your thing, it’s kinda like the new the new version of adding a kid to your family plan, your phone family plan, which is it’s nice.

Malcolm Collins:

Yeah. okay. Next. Has stated that one of the main purposes of Maple is to extricate the evil ideology that the residents enter the community with and replace them with trustworthy ideology. Oh, okay. Stated that teachers other than himself that residents study must be both Asian and ordained, excluding the entire Western world.

Simone Collins:

The race supremacy of this is very interesting. I we haven’t really explored that.

Malcolm Collins:

Yeah. The it’s it’s a very ethnosupremacist organization.

Simone Collins:

Yeah. I I I I was trying to understand. Did you did you see see anything about his reasoning? Like, the reason why they have to be Asian East Asian?

Malcolm Collins:

Well okay. So think of it from his perspective.

Simone Collins:

For god. The little bit sorry.

Malcolm Collins:

I’m just reading random bits here. PTSD, including panic attacks, inability to be close to others, feeling permanently defiled or ruined, and also with, this list of post cult aftereffects categorized by researcher Margaret Singer, including major depressive, excessive guilt, difficulty holding a job, and concentration or memory loss. Their alumni who heard Surreya’s judgmental voice in their head for months or years had recurring maple related nightmares and who were afraid even in safe and private context to voice a concern about maple except in maple’s own language and framing.

Simone Collins:

Wow. That’s pretty wild. Yeah. That’s, like, effective. Clearly, what he did was effective at demoralizing and controlling people. So I

Malcolm Collins:

guess Well, not that effective because they are sort of collapsing at this point. Oh. which is bad because means their members are getting into other organizations. one of our friends who’s close to it said they only have 15 full time members left anymore.

Simone Collins:

Oh. And they used to have over 30, and and, you know, the

Malcolm Collins:

campus and everything like that. Right? God. And they just burned through money when I was looking at, like, their expenses and stuff like that compared to us. Man, I love the Czech Republic. Cheap, make money, give it out to members. Very opposite with the two in this org. But sorry. Speaking speaking of Maple. Oh, you’re talking about oh, yes. You were saying why the SS supremacy is like, okay. So suppose you’re him. Right? And you’ve gone and you’ve spent years studying under all of these, quote, unquote, eastern leaders, which your dad did. Remember? Your dad went out and became No. He studied Aikido under one particular yeah. Well, this guy basically did the same. Goes to Japan, I think, Japan, and studied under some master. And then he worked his way up to, like, the head or one of the head priests at some major Buddhist temple. Then he comes back, and he infuses that with his, you know, grandiose sort of narcissistic view of, like, everyone has to listen to me. I’m the one in control, everything like this. Right? And we need to eradicate all life, which which does work with Buddhist ideology as we pointed out before. It is a negative utilitarian religion. There there’s just no way around this. Simone, I remember the first time I encountered you was this, and you were like, no. I grew up a Buddhist. No. It’s not. And there was, like, actually think about it. And then, like, some day later, after she got a big argument with me about this, she just said it to somebody else. She’s like, well, don’t you go say? And I was like, wait. But you acted like I lost that argument. Like, my argument about the ID. You never admit when I convince you. And so now I’m stuck as an organ donor because I convinced you not to sign up as an organ donor.

Simone Collins:

Oh god.

Malcolm Collins:

You didn’t tell me I had convinced you. You just stood there angrily, you know, like, so then I feel bad and I sign up. And now how are you gonna did you get me off the list, Simone?

Simone Collins:

We still have to go to the library and get the form notarized. Just as an update on this, it is it is pretty insidious. When you wanna get off the donor registry in many states, it’s really not easy to do so. In Pennsylvania, I saw that Malcolm’s license, which has the donor heart on it right now, was it gonna expire fairly soon? So I’m like, oh, okay. Well, instead of paying $45 now to have it changed just to remove the donor thing, we’ll just wait for his renewal, and then we’ll just change that detail with renewal. Well, it turns out you can’t change that detail with renewal. You have to pay an extra $45 and get a separate notarized form to to actually submit the change. And so they really do make it difficult for you to try to escape this this ultimate outcome. And I I’m not recanting any of my conspiracy theories at this point. I I have not yet seen anything to suggest that what I said in that episode was wrong even though there are people who’ve written in and been like, well, well, well look. I know that mostly when people are declared bank brain dead, that they’re gonna die

Malcolm Collins:

with them. Don’t care about whether they’re mostly right or always right, and they seem to cover up the institution.

Simone Collins:

Yeah. My problem is, yeah, when people are overenthusiastically diagnosing it or not even diagnosing it and still putting them people in the pipeline. And my other issue with it is that they’re not giving anesthesia, like, proper anesthesia to the people who are having their organs extracted. No.

Malcolm Collins:

They just they just paralyze you.

Simone Collins:

They don’t you giving paralytics. Although I also learned, and this made me cry for, like, five hours, that until like, through the eighties, newborns were not being given pain medications when they were being operated on, like getting, you know, heart surgery. They were just also given paralytics. So humans are just the worst ever. We’re just like, I don’t know. It’s a baby. What could it possibly feel? I don’t know. They’re brain dead. What could they possibly feel? Their body’s convulsing.

Malcolm Collins:

Actually, Simone, the baby thing, I’m I’m gonna disagree with you on this one. I actually think that they were probably right to do that. So let me explain

Simone Collins:

because you They’re gonna kill them with the pain meds?

Malcolm Collins:

Pain meds of all of the types of meds that you can give somebody are one of the most dangerous to get exactly right. And in an infant, the percent off you need to be, especially if you’re dealing with technology of the nineteen sixties or the the nineteen fifties or the nineteen forties.

Simone Collins:

No. You’re, like, until nineties Malcolm. I I get that, like, for a very long time. Even with the original surgeries, they thought that pain meds were, even when they had them, were bad, that you needed the pain.

Malcolm Collins:

You’re saying until the nineteen eighties. You likely if if you’re talking about, like, when could they safely do this with babies reliably at a normal hospital, probably the technology didn’t exist until 1975. And so there there was, like, five years when when like, I understand your feeling on this.

Simone Collins:

Babies. You

Malcolm Collins:

you’re you’re unfamiliar with how dangerous this stuff is around babies.

Simone Collins:

I get it. I I I don’t I don’t want babies to hurt. I want babies to ever be in pain. Look. Every every time I see that little hole in Tex’s chest from his whole experience as a newborn.

Malcolm Collins:

Yeah. But he’s tough now. Yes.

Simone Collins:

Throw off your computer by throwing a spoon at it.

Malcolm Collins:

Yeah. Thanks, Tex. But the the the let’s talk about it. So he goes, and he gets he becomes this guru. Right? Yeah. Comes back to The United States, sort of combines it with effective altruism, and creates this very extractive, you know, high demand religious organization. And he doesn’t want people to leave the organization, right, because he wants to maintain power because I think he genuinely believes in his vision. I mean, I think it’s delusional, and he doesn’t have people

Simone Collins:

Well, I think he’s in his vision, but has a lot of proclivities around also self aggrandizement.

Malcolm Collins:

Right. Because he hasn’t built it in a way, and he hasn’t structured it in a way where people can disagree with him. Whereas if you contrast that with techno puritanism, our literal last tract was just me going over an argument of somebody presenting a completely alternate metaphysical structure and me saying, that’s a pretty good argument. You know, like, yeah.

Simone Collins:

Because it was.

Malcolm Collins:

Yeah. I was like, that’s that’s I don’t agree with it, but I think it’s plausible it aligns with the data that we have access to because we are not like him. Like, we operate in you could never say something like that in his world. You would never have him going up there and being like, somebody presented me with an idea that goes against everything that we say, and I think it’s plausible and a good thing

Simone Collins:

I don’t think his idea went against everything he’s he said. But, also, it I I think the problem with this particular religious leader is that if something wasn’t his idea or the idea of some distant East Asian person, the it’s it’s it’s not

Malcolm Collins:

it’s being is is by reducing the number of people that you can seriously look for alternate ideas or ideologies from to East Asian and ordained people within the Buddhist tradition, you’re just not gonna find a lot of people who can disagree with him or present you with new ideas. Because a lot of like, for your average Western reader, one, a lot of that’s just not gonna be that interesting to read. And and two, it’s not gonna present you with ideas that are gonna be outside of his fault. He basically has limited the set of things you can read to things that could never challenge his authority or only challenge it in in in marginal ways that that you as a westerner wouldn’t fully grok. But once you understand that these ideologies are negative utilitarian in nature, which Buddhism is, e. G, life is suffering. That’s, like, the core thing in Buddhism. Life is suffering and suffering. That’s negative utilitarianism. He he his more extreme beliefs are gonna flow from a lot of these ideas because they do flow from these ideas. Right? The the thing is is in the same way that, like, techno puritanism is actually when I ask AI because I’ll I’ll go to Fable and be like, what’s trick? The How does Malcolm keep getting the bible to agree with him? And he gets like, the trick that he’s using to make techno puritanism work is he’s very familiar with the biblical scholarship of this period. And so he’s familiar with what the scholarly consensus of is of what people believed the Jews of this period believed, what early Christians believed. And he just states this stuff so it sounds miraculous, and then people go and look at it, and they’re like, oh, why does the bible agree with all of these weird things? The the trick is basically I’m telling the truth. I’m I’m I’m actually just arguing from what early Christians and Jews actually believed, and a lot of modern Christians and Jews are unaware of how different, you know, Judaism at the time of Jesus, Christianity at the time of Jesus likely was from modern Christianity.

Speaker 7:

And, no, this isn’t an attack on their beliefs. modern Christians are aware that, like, Abraham had different beliefs about religion than a modern Jew has. they they don’t have any problem with that, or Moses had different beliefs than the modern Jew has. Um, they just, uh, there’s this sort of, like, haze that leads them to believe well, and that means that people living at the time of Jesus would have had the exact same beliefs that they have, even though beliefs during that time were as radically different as beliefs during the time of Abraham or Moses, and I simply focus on those beliefs.

Malcolm Collins:

And so I’m able to take that and then synthesize it with a a technological perspective. Right?

Speaker 8:

Which is how the techno Puritan beliefs are able to pull the trick off where they sound very heretical from the perspective of modern Christianity, but align with the actual text of the Bible much closer than modern Christian interpretations.

Malcolm Collins:

And and it synthesizes remarkably well, I’d say miraculously well. But, like, that’s the that’s the trick. His trick is his negative utilitarian humanity must be subjugated. Humanity must be controlled. And if I can’t, it must be eradicated mindset actually aligns if you go to the early Buddhist thinkers with what they thought. and a lot of modern Western Buddhists are unaware of that. and so he’s actually pulling something not dissimilar from me what you could say that I’m pulling, and that’s why he says you have to follow the Asian ordained ministers. Right? Because you, the Westerners, would be unaware that this is what Buddhism actually is about. But if you’re, like, deep into it, you’re like, oh, this is what they’re actually about, the negative utilitarianism ending the cycle, ending suffering. And and so, interestingly, our two ideologies, if you talk about, like, an anti spiral tradition and a spiral tradition, you look at the other tracks, that’s what you’re seeing here. Right? Like, I I think you’re seeing the personification of two branches which are doing something kind of similar, which is going back to what these traditions actually taught even if your average Western Buddhism thinks Buddhism is all about love and hugs and cuddles and everything’s nice and puppy dogs, And your average Western Christian thinks that everything is about love and cuddles and Jesus is about being, you know, I saw a Christian teacher recently that was all about like, a lot of people think that, like, because they’ve been told even from the church that Jesus was, like, maximally nice. That that’s what good meant in terms of Jesus, niceness. And so they think that being good as a Christian is about being the nicest. And if they and if they’re they’re basing themselves off of niceness, then they can beat God and Jesus, and they can be like, okay. I’m nicer than God is. Right? Yeah. Jesus is pretty nice, but but not always. I mean, he did call people out. Right? They they’re like, oh, I don’t even call people out. You know? You know? And I think that in that way, this organization represents you know, I often talk about how, like, I think the Aztec religion is a mirror of Christianity that can be used to highlight a truth of it. It’s a it’s a purely opposite religion, a purely evil religion. If you look at you know, we we talk about the Shabbatai Levy. Right? And we’re like, he’s the antichrist. Like, a perfect inversion of Christ’s life. See our episodes on that. If you look at this organization, I think it’s a perfect inversion of the techno puritan organization in the way it handles funds, in the way it handles members, in the way it handles growth, You know, like extracting money from members instead of giving money to members. Right? Like Focusing everything on this sort of narcissistic, I am the god of this. Everyone listen to me. We’re gonna make everybody follow me instead of focusing on the diversity of of humanity and thought and even within the organization having a very low structure, focusing on the family because that’s the way you actually help people move up. Work, you know, a lot of our episodes were, like, you need to learn to vibe code. Need to learn to do the next thing. You need to learn to so that you can stay employed. And he’s like, I don’t care if you’re permanently unemployed for the rest of your This this lack of concern about the psychological damage he does to people, you know, me being like, hey. Go out there. You know, research. Come up with other ideas. Bring them to me so that they can change my my mind. I wanna know when I’m wrong. I don’t want you guys to be in a cage because if you’re not in a cage, then you’re not gonna be bringing me ideas like the angel idea, which I thought was pretty cool. And yeah. Thoughts, Simone?

Simone Collins:

It is odd to me that he wouldn’t he wouldn’t be so concerned about the outcomes of people leaving. It’s

Malcolm Collins:

Well, they’ve been able to get people into major AI orgs. You know, they’ve been able to get people into major effective outreach organizations. Right? Like, they they have infiltrated a lot.

Simone Collins:

That’s really disturbing. So maybe they aren’t leaving because they’re bouncing out, you think, but they’re leaving because they’re being assigned to things?

Malcolm Collins:

Some. Some. I mean, less now, I think, it’s beginning to shatter. His control is beginning to shatter, but that’s why we’re learning about it. When Ella posted about this five years ago, if you read her post, she hedges everything. You would have no idea how bad the org is because it’s clear that she is terrified to speak against them. Wow. When they still had power and who knows how many orgs like this are still in power when you when you look at what a lot of these organizations are donating to. And I think we collectively need to remember that your average Karen wailing on the street, your average GDC progressive who screams at the sky and what was that park where we met?

Simone Collins:

Oh, Yoruba Buena Gardens.

Malcolm Collins:

Yeah. Before they all did it. They all screamed at the sky in Yoruba Buena Gardens. We look at these mentally broken people, and and we can think maybe maybe this runs all the way to the top because in the celebrities, it does. You look at the Hollywood celebrities, and these are deeply broken people. We might do an episode on that in the near future just like how psychologically destroyed Hollywood has become. And what we don’t keep in mind is as as as cold and ruthless as strategizing as people like you and me can be seen as people who influence, like, the intellectual right sphere. You know, obviously like, when we were going to speak at the White House, the challenge for them booking us was so many people. We had so many fans at the White House that they all wanted to make sure they were there. And so whenever there was a conflict, had to rebook us because there were, like, a number of people who wanted to like, we do the same thing. We influence the intellectual of, like, this new right wing ideology disproportionately, and groups like him may seem small. You may go to his channel and see, you know, a 150 views on a video or something like that. But the influence that they are able to have within the progressive elite circles is outsized in the same way that our influence is outsized in the conservative elite circles. And if you project the broken Hollywood elite into these individuals, you can miss how cold, calculating, and disciplined their puppet masters can be. And and and willing to eradicate humanity, willing to pull that trigger. Right? And I I want us to all, you know, be aware of that. And and you guys don’t need to harass these guys. The only reason we know about them is because they lost their power. Like, it broke. It’s falling apart for them now. But that means there’s somebody else in the shadows now. That means this is the way it always is. It’s always and then maybe we should ask Ayla. Who’s the next?

Simone Collins:

Yeah. She might know. She might be yeah. I it’s it’s hard to say. I mean, they’ve always been

Malcolm Collins:

closest to the next group is Myriad that I’m aware of that’s still operational.

Simone Collins:

We don’t know what new ones are out, though, because we’ve been kind of frozen out for a while, so I couldn’t say. And I would I would say that underrated is the extent to which this has been happening in the San Francisco Bay Area since at least the sixties. So what’s scary about now and what’s different about now is in the sixties, these groups would go off and have their primal screams and bring spirits back from the dead or whatever it is that they did in their isolated weird places, and they would not affect anyone else. But now we have groups that have CRISPR and AI and millions of dollars to funding. And when you focus on

Malcolm Collins:

the wrong orgs, when you’re out there focused on the Bohemian Grove, which is just a summer camp for old people, right, like, at this point.

Simone Collins:

Right? It’s so true. Yeah. The Bohemian Grove When you’re focused on the Jews hanging out, making pranks, listening to music or whatever. And, like, meanwhile, there are groups that are dedicated to the end of all not just all living humans, all the souls. It’s not enough to get all the ones that are alive now. Oh, it’s so disturbing.

Malcolm Collins:

They they they Buddhism is a genuinely disturbing religion. Like, I’m I’m actually, like, in the eradication of every soul. And they will frame it differently. They’ll say, oh, it’s a unification into a bland blah. Like, it’s it’s eradication, buddy. No. You you are telling me that life is suffering, and we must eradicate suffering. We must end the cycle. What what are you talking about ending, buddy? You you can define what’s at the end of that particular tunnel however you want. But to Well,

Simone Collins:

I mean, they’re they’re arguing that you’re you’re clinging in this act of suffering to this concept of self, which is only causing more suffering to you. Wouldn’t you be happier if you weren’t anything?

Malcolm Collins:

Anyway yikes. Terrifying. Yikes.

Simone Collins:

Well, I’m glad that’s not our lives right now. I’m glad someone’s not telling that telling us we have to stare at them for long periods of time

Malcolm Collins:

uninterrupted. These lame Buddhist meditation things. I’m so glad that techno periodism is so fun and loose and diverse.

Simone Collins:

Yeah. And non extractive. Everyone’s so kind to each other and to think that there are groups that are just forcing their members to call friends and family and demand money from them, from an organization that wants them to end permanently and and and and to coerce them into living a certain lifestyle. It’s just I don’t know how people get rubbed into this, but I find it’s it’s high status. Humanity.

Malcolm Collins:

So this is actually, this is important for people to understand how these orgs proliferate. Okay. They built this is what this is what, vector was what they were called. What were they called? Leverage?

Simone Collins:

Are you talking about leverage?

Malcolm Collins:

Work too. Yeah. the the founder brands himself as high status and connected to donors within the wider effective altruist singletarian peerage network. you know, he goes to events and people are like, well, if I go to this, and because they’re looking for religion, they’re looking for truth, they’ve been taught their entire lives to hate the West, to hate Christianity, to hate Judaism. He provides an alternative for them, and he’s high status. So then you go and and you get, you know, your brain clean, which is like he says it’s his goal. You come in with all these evil thoughts, and it’s my job to clean your brain. So I’m the only Clean

Simone Collins:

your brain. That really doesn’t sound good.

Malcolm Collins:

I mean, he doesn’t use the term clean your brain, but that’s the

Simone Collins:

the the the, how you would describe what he says he wants to do. Okay. Clean your brain. Great. Great. Fantastic. Yikes.

Malcolm Collins:

Well And I can see how somebody could be I mean, look at the way Technopuritan. We don’t come out there. We don’t say we have all the answers. We don’t we don’t go along with the

Simone Collins:

Because we don’t.

Malcolm Collins:

Is bad. We don’t you know, we say we wanna create a small community that can serve as a base for projecting our goals for the future of human civilization, from this small community, of families. Right? And they are something entirely different. You know, they want to insert themselves within large organizations, take them over, manipulate them. It’s a very different goal.

Simone Collins:

That’s it’s it’s it is a religion around active dialogue and an interest in long term human flourishing and cultural sovereignty. The complete opposite of everything that they that they stand for. But isn’t it nice to have a mortal enemy? Yes. Lovely.

Malcolm Collins:

Yes. Mortal enemy. Yes. Don’t harass them or anything, by the way, people. Again, they’ve already fallen apart. We should be looking for what’s next. So you guys in the EA community, keep an eye out. Let me know the next cult. Reach out. We can flag them here first.

Simone Collins:

Indeed. Well, what? We’re, like, six 12 11 years old? Eleven years late? Twelve years late? With this guy? Yeah. Yeah. Oh, so we can hear the next thing first to be to be the first to break the next thing first do it. Okay. I was like, because we did not break this one. Ayla might have broken it eleven years ago, not us. Okay. Cool. Cool. Cool. Do you want anything for dinner? Not really. Okay. I’m sorry. Can I get you anything? Can I make your life better in some way? Do you want me to, like, wash any sinks treats that you have so that you have Have you cleaned

Malcolm Collins:

up the mouth in the attic?

Simone Collins:

Oh god. Keep I forgetting that. Sorry. We don’t have plastic bags lying around. And so I’ve got plastic bags in my room. Giant trash bag. We paid for those. I’m not wasting an entire trash. That’s, like, 15¢. Dead mess. Anyway, I’ll figure

Malcolm Collins:

it out. Getting plastic bags because you don’t use them at stores.

Simone Collins:

Because they charge for them. Look. I have a dirty diaper sitting right here. I’m looking at it now. I will just use that dirty diaper to pick up the mouse and then wrap the mouse in the diaper and then throw the diaper away. That would be my trash bag. I have a plan now. I will handle it.

Malcolm Collins:

An absurdly frugal person, Simone.

Simone Collins:

You know what? Maybe epigenetics is real.

Malcolm Collins:

This is also how we’re different

Simone Collins:

from them. You you know if

Malcolm Collins:

you give us money, we spend it on trying to to build stuff, make it better. Look at mudpuppy.ai. Check it out.

Simone Collins:

We need more additional uses of dirty diapers anyway as a world.

Malcolm Collins:

Or rfab.ai if you if you want regular, you know, chatbot related stuff, but Mudpuppy is a fun new thing.

Simone Collins:

Such a cute name. Yeah. Mudpuppies, which I didn’t know, are basically American axolotls that are brown. So they’re, like, they’re the they’re the, like, the backwoods.

Malcolm Collins:

My mom called me a mudpuppy growing up. She called all the kids mudpuppies.

Simone Collins:

Well, she also called them all little s***s, didn’t she?

Malcolm Collins:

But Yeah. Which are both backwards sayings about little kids. Because the mudpuppies don’t even live in Texas. They live in the Appalachian region.

Simone Collins:

See, there you go. Yeah. They’re the the the backwoods down home cute axolotl to the feet

Malcolm Collins:

as They’re They’re not, like, pink and gay like the other one. Oh, the other axolotls are, like, rat motocs.

Simone Collins:

Yes. That I that I now hate so much.

Malcolm Collins:

Whereas the puppies are just are just simple brown axolotls. Yes. The no pretensions. And they’re much larger too.

Simone Collins:

Oh, they are? Yeah. They’re they’re

Malcolm Collins:

they’re frankly more interesting. Anyway, love you to Desimon. I love you too. You’re a great princess, and, the kids are amazing. And, thank you for giving being a great wife

Simone Collins:

to me for another day. Thank you for being a magnificent husband and not being too mad at me for not explaining to you when you’ve changed my mind. The default understanding should be that if you make point, I am going to eventually come around to it. I’m just gonna be mad at first. Look. It’s hard to realize as a human that you’ve operated under some incredibly mistaken premise for years, if not decades. Okay? Allow a girl a little bit of umbrage for a moment as she adjusts to the new paradigm. Don’t assume that just because I’m irritable upon learning that I’ve lived a lie for years, that I’m not going to change my mind once I realize that I’ve lived a lie for years. Okay? Just bear with me here. I’m sorry.

Malcolm Collins:

Okay. Okay.

Simone Collins:

Love you. Bye. Goodbye. To add that tagline to the Reality Fabricator load page.

Malcolm Collins:

Oh, what? We will replace you? It’s so good. And it comes in right before the page finishes loading. So you’re like, wait. Did I see that?

Simone Collins:

That’s perfect. That’s perfect. I just saw it when we were getting into this this recording room.

Malcolm Collins:

That’s so It’s such a

Simone Collins:

great effect, I think, but freaks people out. Reality Fabricator. When did you add it? I didn’t notice it this morning. Like, a week ago. Oh my gosh. Okay. Well, I’m not paying attention, am I? Shame on me, but I love it. It’s so good. Oh my gosh. Life is good. I’ve been waiting all weekend for this episode. I cannot wait. I’m so excited. Thank you for doing it.

Malcolm Collins:

This is very fun. And we up so I can see the whole thing you’re drawing.

Simone Collins:

Oh my god. I told it to stop this.

Malcolm Collins:

Then press the big camera button.

Simone Collins:

I can’t use the camera. Ask a grown up or pick a photo instead. Alright.

Speaker 14:

What are you doing? And Gracie. Ah. ah Ah. Octavian, what are you doing? And Gracie, I’m listening. What you doing? The time.

Join us on Based Camp today for a detailed discussion on vulnerabilities in US voting systems, including same-day registration without ID, vouching rules in states like Minnesota, challenges verifying citizenship, and risks with deceased voters on rolls. The conversation examines real-world examples and state policies that make exploitation possible, along with broader implications for election integrity.

Simone and Malcolm review evidence from hidden camera investigations, compare rules across multiple states, and address why certain safeguards remain absent despite ongoing concerns. They also touch on related topics like enforcement gaps and the impact of immigration on voter rolls.

Show Notes

We fell down this voter registration rabbit hole because someone posted this video to the Based Camp subreddit.

Minnesota

Minnesota has a same-day voter-registration vouching rule whereby a registered voter in the same precinct may legally vouch for the residence of up to eight otherwise-unregistered voters; all they need to do is sign a sworn oath that they personally know each person lives in that precinct.

What “up to eight” means

Minnesota Statutes § 201.061 permits a voter to establish residence at the polls through a registered precinct voter’s sworn verification. The basic requirements are:

* The voucher must already be registered in that precinct.

* The voucher must personally know that the applicant lives in that precinct.

* The voucher signs an oath in front of an election judge.

* The applicant also signs an oath regarding identity and eligibility.

* An ordinary registered voter may vouch for no more than eight people in one election.

For reference, the “voiched-for” person:

* Does not need to have a photo ID: They can either provide a drivers license/ID number *or* the last four digits of their social security number

* Minnesota’s Secretary of State says that every voter registration is verified against Department of Public Safety, Social Security Administration, and other records, and specifically says Election Day registrations—including registrations using vouching—are verified by local officials after the election.

* The Secretary of State says a discrepancy found in that process is referred to local law enforcement for investigation and possible prosecution

* Note: While MN has prosecuted people for submitting registrations using fictitious identities and information, nobody has been prosecuted for this.

* Does not need a document proving residence

What James O’Keefe Did

In the video, O’Keefe and affiliated reporters asked Minneapolis-area poll workers whether a registered voter could bring in multiple people without ID and vouch for them. Workers reportedly explained the eight-person limit and the residency requirement; in one exchange, a worker said he could return with additional people until reaching eight.

Problem with what James O’Keefe did is he gave another man’s information to poll workers, without this guy’s knowledge or consent.

Other States That Allow Same-Day Registration Without ID

Minnesota is distinctive because it lets a pre-registered local voter’s sworn oath substitute for the new registrant’s documentary proof of residence, allowing a regular ballot rather than automatically requiring a provisional one, HOWEVER

* Other states permit unregistered people to show up and register-and-vote on Election Day without necessarily handing over a government photo ID

Some are OK:

Maine, Virginia & Michigan

* You can fill out a provisional ballot without an ID that gets counted unless officials determine the person was ineligible.

Some are less OK:

Colorado

* You can vote even if you don’t have a government ID *or* the last four numbers of your social security number, you just have to indicate you don’t have them on a form

* According to the National conference of State Legislatures, “Colorado developed its own electronicpoll book system that is networked to communicate with the statewide voter registration database in real time. All jurisdictions have access to the system to check that a new registrant has not registered or voted in a different county in the same election.”

* THIS DOES NOT CHECK FOR CITIZENSHIP: The real-time electronic-poll-book function in that quotation is primarily a duplicate-registration / double-voting control: it lets Colorado election officials see whether a person has already registered or been issued/cast a ballot elsewhere in the state for that election. It is not, by itself, a real-time citizenship-verification system

* Colorado does not generally require every registrant to submit documentary proof of U.S. citizenship, such as a passport, birth certificate, or naturalization certificate. Its normal framework relies on the citizenship question and signed attestation, along with registration-list maintenance and database checks.

Hawaii

* According to the National conference of State Legislatures,“To register, applicants must provide their Hawaii driver license, state ID, last four digits of their social security number, or voter ID, which will be confirmed when received by the clerk’s office. Applicant makes a sworn affirmation that they have not voted and are qualified to vote. Any applicant providing false information may be guilty of a Class C felony pursuant to state law.”

Vermont

* Generally people can register and vote the day of an election without a photo ID

* A registrant must identify themselves and/or provide required documentation under the registration rules

* A post-election audit can identify people registered and voting in more than one town BUT THAT ASSUMES AN AUDIT IS CONDUCTED AND THAT THAT PARTICULAR VOTE WAS AUDITED

States That Don’t Require Voter ID For Already-Registered Voters

14 states and D.C. let already-registered, in-person voters cast a ballot without presenting an ID document under their ordinary poll rules. These states use measures such as signing a poll book or affidavit, stating name/address, comparing a signature to the voter file, or checking a registration list. They include California, D.C., Hawaii, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Pennsylvania, and Vermont.

Citizenship and Voter Registration is SCARY

The United States lacks a single complete database that can instantly verify citizenship for every person.

States that are actually careful about ensuring citizenship are the exception, not the rule.

As of the cited 2026 state-policy summaries, five states were expected to require documentary citizenship proof from all people registering or updating a registration for the 2026 midterms:

* Arizona

* New Hampshire

* South Dakota

* Utah

* Wyoming

Louisiana also had a requirement enacted but not yet implemented. Rules can be subject to litigation, implementation dates, and federal-form limitations, so “law on the books” and “operative procedure” can differ.

States that don’t require documented proof of citizenship would need to cross-check against the Department of Homeland Services’ Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (aka SAVE).

* a SAVE non-match or failure to verify cannot be treated as conclusive proof of noncitizenship; election officials must do further verification and allow the affected person an opportunity to respond before an adverse action

USCIS’s expanded SAVE program became more available to election officials in 2025. The Bipartisan Policy Center reported that 22 state election offices had SAVE information-sharing agreements as of December 2025; later reporting described roughly 26 states with agreements completed or in progress.

* An agreement means the office may be able to make citizenship-related queries; it does not establish that the state automatically checks every new applicant, runs the full voter roll, or cancels registrations solely on a SAVE result

* So that means roughly half of states HAVE THE ABILITY to check for citizenship, but whether they actually do is another matter.

Some states have publicly announced that they check for citizenship, namely:

* North Carolina

* The State Board announced in April 2026 that it would check citizenship of all registered voters against federal databases to identify and remove ineligible noncitizens.

* Texas

* Reporting says Texas election officials uploaded the full voter-registration list to SAVE for mass verification.

* Tennessee

* Likewise reported to have uploaded its full voter roll to SAVE.

* Utah

* SB 300 requires the lieutenant governor to register with DHS’s SAVE program for voter-list-maintenance purposes.

* Kentucky

* 2025 legislation authorized use of SAVE to verify citizenship of people in the statewide voter-registration system and required cancellation procedures subject to the law’s safeguards.

* Idaho

* Since March 20, 2026, people registering through the BMV must provide citizenship documentation or have already provided it.

* Florida

* Adopted a 2026 law scheduled for January 1, 2027: applicants whose citizenship cannot be verified through the DMV must receive notice and have 30 days to supply proof.

The Dead Voter Problem

A useful benchmark from voter-registration research is that if the mortality rate among registered voters is roughly 1% annually and deaths are removed once per year, the average deceased record would remain on the roll for about half a year.

A deceased person may remain on an active voter roll temporarily because:

* Death data can take time to reach the state vital-records agency and the election office.

* A voter may die in another state or abroad, complicating matching.

* Name, date-of-birth, or address differences can prevent an automatic high-confidence match.

* Officials must avoid falsely removing a living voter who happens to match a death record.

* Federal and state law impose procedures for maintaining and removing voter records. The National Voter Registration Act permits removal upon death, but the actual workflow is administered by state and local officials.

In 2015, Pew estimated 1.8 million deceased people still on rolls nationwide

They also estimated 24 million inaccurate or no-longer-valid registrations.

As of April 2026 in North Carolina, a federal-database comparison identified about 34,000 apparent deceased matches on the state voter roll, pending record verification and proper removal.

So in states without voter ID requirements, you could theoretically show up and vote for a dead person so long as you know about them.

How We See Voting Differently Now

Basically, if people are present in a state, whether or not they’re citizens, whether or not they’re registered to vote ahead of elections, they might vote.

Episode Transcript

Simone Collins:Hello, Malcolm. I’m excited to be speaking with you today because it turns out that you can mess with elections much more easily than I thought, and I’m kind of freaking out. And everything I thought about secure voting just just fall it’s falling out the window.

Malcolm Collins:Because I wanna show people just to start here. We’re going to do one video.

Speaker 17:And no ID needed. I just vouch for them. Well, you’re the ID, sir. I am the ID. They do not need ID. She says, you are the ID. He is the ID. So I am the ID. The vouching. Yep. The vouching court. Yeah. I vouch for them. Oh, great. Is that okay? Brad. Yes. How does that work? Well, if you’re all in the same precinct Yes. And you are already registered, which looks like you are, you can vouch for them as ID for them. Oh, good. And no ID needed. I just vouch for them. Well, you’re the ID. I am the ID. That’s good. Can can I bring five more from Up to eight. Up to eight people? That’s a good thing. We go back and we get Krishna and Ernesto and Mohammed. Success. Great success. We go in, and they tell me that I can vouch for up to eight people. Come back. We vote. They say no problem. No ID needed. They’re registered. No problem, they say. So that worked.

Malcolm Collins:And in this video, what you can see very clearly is they the election people cannot see who these people are who are voting. It could be anyone in a burka.

Simone Collins:Well, because literally, yeah, like, they they have people wearing burkas.

Malcolm Collins:And one male is allowed to just vouch for as many other people as he wants to and say it’s okay that

Simone Collins:he No. No. To eight, Malcolm. Please. Let’s be reasonable.

Malcolm Collins:Up to eight. And then in this next clip

Speaker 15:Is it okay if I’m, you know, if I’m not a US citizen, it’s okay for me to go? All I know is you’re registered. So I’m here. As long as I’m registered, can vote. Right? Yes. Perfect. Well, you have your ID with you? I didn’t bring it. That’s okay. That’s Last name is Maschelli, m a s h e l I. Uh-huh. And the name Afshin. Yeah. You’re in here. It’s in there. Yeah. So I can vote today. Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 16:Both of these non citizens from Iran, a country we’re at war with, are also on the Department of Homeland Security’s worst of the worst list.

Speaker 15:Last name, please? Last name, h a r I t a s h. First name, Fazlola. Yep. This is the right place.

Speaker 16:One of them is still incarcerated for felony child sex crimes.

Speaker 15:So so I have a felony. I’m a sex offender. As long as my name is there. If your name is here, can call.

Speaker 16:Michele admits into a hidden camera on primary day in Dearborn, Michigan on August 4 that he’s about to vote.

Speaker 15:Your name is mister Ashen Michele. Right? That is correct. Are you interested in the vote? Yeah. We’re going a little bit later.

Speaker 16:Despite being a non citizen. And Michigan poll workers on August 4 were happily prepared to hand these non citizens voting ballots.

Simone Collins:Yeah. In the next clip, they demonstrate that there are people who are planning to vote that are felons, registered sex offenders, and What does he need?

Malcolm Collins:Buddy, to do this, what we need to do is to add money to your account, and we can do that later. Okay? Alright. Mommy will add money

Simone Collins:to your account. Done his seven lessons?

Malcolm Collins:Yeah. Done your lessons yet?

Simone Collins:That he promised to do. And is he in the kitchen because Eric and Ellen are going to get there soon? Yes.

Malcolm Collins:Go back down to the kitchen and wait and do your lessons.

Simone Collins:I’ll put my own money on this so

Malcolm Collins:But he likes Mudpuppy.

Simone Collins:Yes. He does. He absolutely does. Right. So in the second video, they also tried to see if it was possible for people who were active felons, who were sex offenders to go and vote, and they confirmed that they were. They even stopped at one of the guys’ houses, and he’s like, yeah. I’m I’m gonna vote later today. Like, no problem. You know, people actively checking the names. Yes. You can vote here. Oh, but I’m I’m a felon. Not a problem. You can vote here. And and that’s what a lot of the the focus of this particular particular citizen journalistic action was in a very bombastic way to to shock. And what state did this take place in? This all happened in Minnesota. So let me explain. Minnesota, the the first thing that was being shown, Minnesota has the same day voter registration vouching rule, which might explain why it has come to be like it is, which allows a registered voter in the same precinct, like the same sort of, like, neighborhood area as as dictated by, like, the way things vote. They can legally vouch for the residents of up to eight otherwise unregistered voters. All they need to do is sign a sworn oath that they personally know each person lives in the precinct. So in other words, it’s like, hey. I brought a friend. Can they vote? And they’re like, oh, well, do they live in your same precinct? Yeah. Okay. What’s your proof? Trust me, bro. And, like, that’s supposed to work. And

Malcolm Collins:this is really bad in these large immigrant communities that don’t care. Right? And I think that what we’re now seeing, and the reason I wanted to focus on this as an episode, is there was this period where mentioning that election fraud might be possible in The United States, or widespread was such a taboo that the people who mentioned it were, like, immediately deplatformed.

Simone Collins:Yeah. We used to call it election wobbles on YouTube because we we felt like we couldn’t use things like terms like voter fraud or anything else. And now when you look at the evidence,

Malcolm Collins:now that the the dam is finally open and we’re not seeing a strict of censorship around this, the evidence is so comically demonstrable. Like, even without any sort of proof or anything like that, anybody who is remotely sane would see a system like this and be like, that system is extremely vulnerable to exploitation.

Simone Collins:Well, and, again, it’s it’s telling that this is in Minnesota, the same place with the leering center, the same place with very serious issues around other forms of fraud. And and that’s what makes me so worried about it. And that, like, I’ve I’ve often asked myself, how has Minnesota come to be like this? And then I see how their election rules work, and I’m like, okay. But, anyway, let’s let’s I I actually wanna shed a little bit more light on this than with

Malcolm Collins:Well, it makes the fight that they have had and the Democrats have had against IDs seem because I think when people hear the rules against IDs, they’re like, yeah. But, like, how bad could that really be exploited? How bad could because that’s even the way I felt.

Simone Collins:I was Malcolm, it’s worse than that. If you would let me get into it, though. Okay. But it it’s important that that you understand the actual process because what he did was show up and pretend to be someone that he wasn’t, which is not great. James O’Keeffe pretended to be a a resident in the precinct that he showed up in to film this, which is is kinda not not the right thing. And a local news station actually found the person that he pretended to be and was like, that was me. And I I don’t know who this person is, and I didn’t give him permission to pretend to be me. Because the way it works with this this

Malcolm Collins:thousand Now we’ve gotta be chasing down the people finding out that they’re breaking rules.

Simone Collins:Well, I mean, in the end, he was able to vote that day anyway, and there wasn’t a problem because they detected the issue or whatever. But, anyway and then he he didn’t James O’Keefe, who made that video and up pretending to be that guy, didn’t actually vote. He was just trying to demonstrate that they would allow him to. So he didn’t sign any sort of attestation. He didn’t get other people to vote under false pretenses, but he did kind of like it was it was hurting him. But, anyway, what you have to do is the the voucher, the person that James O’Keeffe was pretending to be, has to already be registered in the precinct. This is why he had to assume the identity of someone who has actually vote registered to vote in that precinct. Otherwise, they wouldn’t have been like, yeah. You can do it. they also have to at least claim that they personally know that the applicant lives in the precinct, then they sign an oath in front of an election judge, and the applicant also signs an oath regarding their identity and eligibility. And then an ordinary registered voter can vouch for only up to eight people. But, again, what James O’Keeffe was trying to point out was you could bring the same person eight times wearing a burqa Yeah. And have them pretend to be different people who are not actually present in voting, and you could get away with it, which is very scary. The person who is vouched for does not need to have a photo ID, and this is another reason why it’s so easy to fake. They can either provide a driver’s And it’s on our account. So Can you tell Octavian I think it’s wonderful that he’s excited about what you built, though.

Malcolm Collins:Yeah. My puppy.ai.

Simone Collins:It’s legit. Cool. Anyway, they don’t need a photo ID. They can they can provide a driver’s license or ID number, or they can provide the last four numbers of their Social Security or the last four digits of their Social Security number. And Minnesota’s secretary of state says that every voter registration is verified against Department of Public Safety, Social Security Administration, and other records. And specifically says that election day registrants, like the ones who are being vouched for, are verified by local officials after the election. And they also say

Malcolm Collins:that fully verified that they exist and are on the rolls, but anyone could do that. That’s why they, in LA, do that thing where they troll, like, homeless people to get their names.

Simone Collins:Yeah. Give them cigarettes and stuff to to register to vote.

Speaker 7:But do you think who do you think these people are with the ballots? Are they, like,

Speaker 8:political They’re working for political parties. Yeah.

Speaker 7:They are.

Speaker 8:They are. Right? That’s obvious.

Speaker 7:Oh, for, like, Democratic parties or

Speaker 8:or We don’t ask if they don’t tell.

Speaker 7:Don’t ask if they don’t tell.

Speaker 8:But we know that they gotta answer to somebody by what they said. Don’t it up if it’s not authentic. I don’t wanna have to scratch it out. And don’t let your signature look like the other signature. Can you use your other hand, or can you write with your foot or

Speaker 9:your nose?

Speaker 8:I’m serious.

Speaker 7:They ask you to do that? Yeah. The balance.

Speaker 8:And I’ve done it just so I can get the money and add it up to put my.

Speaker 7:Yeah. So how many

Speaker 8:But I had

Speaker 9:a month on my bank. That

Speaker 8:that is no joke.

Speaker 7:How many balance would you sign at once? At

Speaker 8:least, like, if I was lucky, four or five.

Speaker 7:Four at a time?

Speaker 8:Or five. It depends on everybody if they need to hurry up and fix it.

Simone Collins:The secretary of state also says the discrepancy that’s found in this process is referred to local law enforcement for investigation and possible prosecution. The problem being that I tried to search for any example of someone being prosecuted for submitting registrations using any sort of fictitious identity, and nobody has been prosecuted for this. And so this could be an issue of, like, the rule exists, but is it ever enforced? And you’re gonna see this is a pattern with other states and other issues that makes me extremely worried. And there are quite a few more than I’m comfortable with other states that have same day registration without ID. Though Minnesota is an the worst of this because they will let a a preregistered local voters sworn oath substitute for the new registrant’s documentary proof of residence, meaning that and and they also get a regular ballot. In many of these states where it’s more reasonable, like in Maine, Virginia, and Michigan, if you’re doing same day registration, you can fill out a provisional valid ballot, and you can even do so without a photo ID, which is already crazy. You can you can provide the last four digits of your Social Security number only, But then you’re you’re doing a provisional ballot, which means that it’s a kind of ballot in The United States where it’s kind of held back until some checks are made to make sure that that you haven’t submitted your vote through some other means. Like, for example and this is another thing that’s kind of shady. For the the past two elections, Malcolm and I have, for various reasons, requested absentee ballots where they mail your ballot to you and then you mail it back ahead of the election to make sure that if you can’t make it to the poll that day, your vote is still counted. Somehow, weirdly, suspiciously, every election cycle, one of us has been missing a provisional or sorry. Our our mail in mail.

Malcolm Collins:And it doesn’t come in the mail, like somebody’s going through a mail.

Simone Collins:Yeah. Either someone’s going through our mail or it just somehow never made it to our house. And so that means that the the person who didn’t get their ballot shows up to the polling place on election day, says, I would like to vote. And they say, oh, well, you’re you’re put down here for a mail in ballot, so you need to fill out a provisional ballot. And that only gets counted once they are sure that our mail in ballot hasn’t been sent in, which is kind of scary because if someone just stole and then faked our mail in ballot, then our provisional ballots would be rendered null, which is screwed up. It’s that’s another I mean, I also get why mail in System seems scary.

Malcolm Collins:To for for fraud.

Simone Collins:Yes. Though at least what I’m trying to say is in Maine, Virginia, and Michigan, at least they are filling out provisional ballots, and then at least they’re they’re checked before they go. However, in Colorado, you can vote even if you don’t have a government ID or the last four numbers of your Social Security number. So, like, you just have to check a box being like, I don’t know. I don’t have any of my info. Like, this is my name.

Malcolm Collins:Just

Simone Collins:take it or leave it. According to the National Conference of Social

Malcolm Collins:Security need an ID? You can just vote?

Simone Collins:No ID. No proof of residency. Not even the last four digits of your Social Security number.

Malcolm Collins:Do they they try to match you to a real person, or they just take your vote?

Simone Collins:So what they say is they developed their own electronic poll book system that’s networks to communicate with the statewide voter registration database in real time. And then if they see, like, your exact name having already been registered as someone who voted, then they’ll be like, you voted twice. But one, it doesn’t check for citizenship. It it just checks to see if there’s a duplicate registration or double voting. And, also, they don’t generally require every registrant to submit documentary proof of US citizenship, like a passport or a birth certificate. So you can just be like, here I am. No Social Security number. No no license. I’m gonna vote and, like, register and vote today out of absolutely nowhere. Thank you very much. And as long as your name is not on This is so bad. It’s it’s kinda scary in home. No.

Malcolm Collins:But I I want to like, what I really want to emphasize with this is you in the right or whatever these days can be like, oh my gosh. Like, look at how crazy what they’re doing is blah blah blah. You need to understand that this is why things like what Nick Fuentes is attempting is so dangerous, stupid, and self destructive for our side. When he’s like, oh, I’ll just destroy it and have democrats make things so bad. No. They set things up after they’re in power so you can structurally never win again. This is why you can never have a right wing EU or a right wing UN or a right wing WHO.

Simone Collins:Well, this is something that’s really sad. We we’re seeing this now with elections in Sweden where, oh, hold on. Actually, give me a moment, please. Because I I just was looking at this this morning, and I was like, oh my god. Right. So I was just reading this post this morning by Evelynne Han on X who wrote, at this point, there’s only a 0.4 percentage point difference between the right and the left in Swedish parliamentary election. That is a difference of 32,000 votes in favor of the left. During the right wing government, they handed about approximately 200,000 citizenships predominantly to Middle Eastern and African immigrants who almost exclusively vote for the left. If they hadn’t done that, they would have won. There is a lesson to be learned here. And I I can I can send you a picture of the graph if you wanna see it? But it’s just it’s super clear that in in states or in countries where you have heavy immigrant populations or where it’s even just possible, whether they’re citizens or not, for people who are more likely to depend on the government for payouts, which is going to be a leftist progressive thing.

Malcolm Collins:Yeah. I I mean, I think more broadly, what the right needs to learn is shut down immigration waves entirely and make it very uncomfortable to be an immigrant in these countries.

Simone Collins:Yeah. It’s it’s that that’s kind of my big takeaway from all this is that it can no longer I mean, I already knew, for example, before okay. It doesn’t work to only, you know, get allow in people who or, like, citizens who are are, like, taxpayers and everything. And then if if you’re not, then you can’t become a citizen or you you can be an immigrant here but not a citizen. Because now it’s clear to me, if you are an immigrant here and you wanna influence elections, it doesn’t matter if you’re a citizen or not, like, sort of based on how everything works. But, anyway, more on same day same day registration. In Hawaii, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures, quote, to register, applicants must provide their Hawaii driver’s license, state IE, or last four digits of their Social Security number or voter ID, which will be confirmed when received by the clerk’s office. Applicant makes a sworn declaration that they have not voted and are qualified to vote. Again, trust me, bro. I’m qualified to vote. Any applicant providing false information may be guilty of any class c felony pursuant to state law. Maybe. Basically, if you’re caught, you’re in trouble. But Maybe. If you’re not caught, I don’t know. Maybe. Maybe. Vermont. and, generally, in Vermont, people can register and vote the same day of election without a photo ID. You have to identify yourself and provide required documentation under the registration rules. But a post election audit is the only thing that’s going to find something wrong. So, allegedly, if they if they run an audit and they find that people registered and they’re voting in more than one town, then they would, like, stop that double vote. But this is Sue’s assuming that there is an audit, and I don’t think there’s always an audit. This is also assuming that the audit spot checks that particular vote that was placed twice, and then that’s a lot of ifs. And then it’s yeah. I mean, to the point When you look

Malcolm Collins:at all this in conjunction with Democrats fighting so hard to prevent voter ID laws, which is obviously just a racist policy. Right? Like, the idea that, like, black people can’t figure out. But it’s not racist because they don’t really believe it. What they want is cheating. Like, they want cheating. Right? That that’s the only reason you could still have this view in 2026.

Simone Collins:Yeah. Right? No. And there’s a there are 14 states still that even now do not require any form of ID if if you’re a registered voter. That includes California, DC, Hawaii, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Pennsylvania, and Vermont. So, yes, of course, friends and you know what it is. I actually felt so weird showing up to vote in Pennsylvania every time we go. And I’m just like, oh, my name you know, like, my name is Simone Collins. And they’re like, okay. Go ahead. And like, do you need to see my ID? And they’re like, no. And I always I have to ask every time because I’m so uncomfortable with it. I’m like, this is not okay because someone could show up and say that there’s Simone Collins.

Malcolm Collins:What’s wilder is, like, remember when Mondami tried to do the the socialized food thing, and then immediately he started wanting to ask for ID? And then they bent over backwards because they realized how bad that looked, that you needed an ID to use his his socialized food system.

Simone Collins:Oh, yeah. And then they’re like,

Malcolm Collins:oh, s**t. We can’t. So they they said, a a a library card will work. Right?

Simone Collins:Like and if Like, library card?

Malcolm Collins:Why don’t we have library cards for voting? Why is that more restrictive than the voting

Simone Collins:process for president? That is really funny. I I kinda feel like our process of trying to get library cards where we live has been a little bit harder because you have to show, like, a utility bill. And they’re they’re pretty strict about it. Yeah. Actually, it’s kinda weird.

Malcolm Collins:Who pay for their utilities. That’d be a good start.

Simone Collins:I need to get new library cards. I’m gonna put that in our calendar. Yeah. Oh, yeah. People who pay for their utility. Yeah. Honestly, what scared me, I would say more than the James O’Keefe video, was what I learned about citizenship and voter registration, though.

Malcolm Collins:Oh my god. What?

Simone Collins:What I didn’t know is The United States lacks any complete single database that you can use to instantly verify someone’s citizenship. Like, there’s no, like, Malcolm Collins, is he a citizen? Yes. No. Like, that doesn’t exist in our country. So it’s already now very difficult for, let’s say, like, someone who who wants to maintain election integrity to to check these things, which is is very scary. And as of, like, at least one-sided 2026 state policy summary, five states were expected to require documentary citizenship proof from all people registering to vote or updating their registration as of this year’s midterms, just Arizona, New Hampshire, South Dakota, Utah, and Wyoming. Louisiana also had a requirement, but it’s not yet implemented. So those are the only states that are super duper making sure that the people who are registering to vote are citizens. And states that don’t require this would theoretically need to crosscheck against the Department of Homeland Services systematic alien verification for entitlements, like, database. Yeah. It’s called SAVE for short. And even that, though, isn’t that conclusive. So if you get a nonmatch in this database, SAVE, you would still have to check other things because it it can’t be treated as as conclusive proof. You’d have to look do further verification and allow the person an an ability to, like, make a corrective action. So there is that one database save. But the first issue is I think a lot of people don’t wanna use it because they’re not totally sure if the results are gonna be conclusive. Like, you’d have to just do more work. And you know how it is, like, with any system where there are bureaucrats, they don’t wanna do work. So anything that requires extra work, they’re not gonna do. So if SAVE is not a definitive database, I think a lot of people just aren’t gonna use it. And this is actually shown by the number of states that even have contracts with this database to use it. So the this SAVE program became more available to election officials only in 2025, only last year. I don’t know what was going on before. I I don’t I I didn’t figure that out yet, but the Bipartisan Policy Center reported that 22 states’ election offices had the save information. Like, they had an agreement with them, basically, data agreement with this database as of the end of last year. And now, apparently, around 26 states have agreements that are either in progress or completed. So that’s roughly half of the states in our country or even set up to potentially query this database to check to see if someone might not be a citizen. This is already a complete mess. Okay? And oh my god. I just They just don’t care. It’s set up for cheating. That’s crazy. Even though they have agreements, this doesn’t mean that they are able to to make the the queries. It might not be set up yet. Like, keep in mind when we what we saw with Doge was, like, a lot of agreements were set up. A lot of people were, like, paying for services and APIs and subscriptions that were completely not being used. We don’t know if the state is automatically checking every new applicant using the system. We don’t know if it it runs the full voter roll through the system. We don’t know if it it cancels registrations based on the results that it gets. So all this means is that roughly half of the states have the ability to potentially check for something that could mean that they’re citizens or not, but it doesn’t actually check. So some states have publicly announced they do check for citizenship. So shout out to North Carolina, Texas, Tennessee, Utah, Kentucky, Idaho, and Florida. They they are they all have different versions of checking, and some use the DMV. Some use save. Some are going through existing voter rolls. Some are just going through this with new voter registrants, but that’s not a lot of states. Okay? I rattled those. It was one, two, three, four, five, six. This is not a lot. And so long story short, we we don’t really check to see if someone is a citizen. And, apparently, it’s super complicated to see if someone’s actually citizen in our country.

Malcolm Collins:Make it super complicated to enforce the law and incredibly easy to break it. Like

Simone Collins:That’s yes. Yes. Very well put. You articulate it way better than I can. Yes. And I think one of the other issues too is that I I I went through I think it was a Brookings institution report. I’m like, why there are so few instances of, noncitizens, voting? And and their sort of TLDR for that was, well, they don’t wanna break the law and then get deported. But I feel like maybe one of the bigger issues is it’s really hard like, how are we even going to know when noncitizens are voting? Like, how are they checking this stuff? Because it actually is kinda hard

Malcolm Collins:to check. For this? Like, is this actually something that’s happening in, like I

Simone Collins:mean, that’s the other thing. Like, the the big theme of this year was like, hey, man. We shouldn’t be enforcing enforcing our our immigration law. That’s With the states

Malcolm Collins:where we know that somebody should be deported because they’ve, like, raped someone, they are actively preventing the law from being enforced. Why would we not expect it to be enforced here? Like, this is wild to me that you would actually believe that these people would get deported for this.

Simone Collins:Yeah. And then we we have the dead voter problem, which I didn’t know about until you and I attended this one conservative conference as speakers in Las Vegas. And I had this moment in the, like, VIP speaker room where there were there was, like, free stuff that we could pick up. And one of the free things was a hat that says, when I die, don’t let me vote democrat. And I just sat there staring at it for, like, several minutes and,

Malcolm Collins:like Trying to figure it out.

Simone Collins:Picked it up, and you’d, like, chuckled. And I was like, I do not understand. What does it mean? And you were like, Simone. Simone. Do you understand that people are taking the voter registration of dead people and voting for them however they want? And I’m like I mean, you saw

Malcolm Collins:what Doge was able to find in the registration for, like, old people. Like, one person was, like, 400 years old supposedly and still collecting insurance. Right?

Simone Collins:Like It’s like the dark version of Blue Zones.

Speaker 10:You know, there’s crazy things like we we just cursory examination of social security, and we’ve got people in there that are a 150 years old.

Malcolm Collins:Raven Kennedy bragged about doing this in a famous joke.

Simone Collins:Really? And he said, have to

Malcolm Collins:go to

Simone Collins:because of X Cemetery. Oh, that’s cute. That’s cute. I mean, now, yeah, now when I see the hat, because we did take one, I I I chuckle. I actually I saved that hat in our Halloween box, and I was like, oh, we should, like, have a republican Halloween costume. And so I have it with, like remember when we bought that shotgun hunting costume set? Like, the shotgun came with, like, a little hunting hat and, like, whistle and stuff. And the kids never wore it because they can’t bother to, like, put on clothes ever. But I thought it was like, oh, this is a cute hunting costume.

Malcolm Collins:Oh, they never wore it because you hid it from them. Or If

Simone Collins:you combine that, it’s it’s in the Halloween box. If you combine that with the hat, like, it looks they look great.

Malcolm Collins:The last time you gave them the Halloween box?

Simone Collins:The just yesterday. We decorated early.

Malcolm Collins:And they and they wore the things in the Halloween box? You let

Simone Collins:them know. We’re we’re no. They’re gonna trick or treating them.

Malcolm Collins:So then

Simone Collins:you can’t blame them for not wearing it. Well, no. No. No. It was out for a very long time, the the clothing that went with the gun, but they only cared about the gun, the the shotgun, because, obviously, that’s the fun part. They didn’t care about the other stuff. Anyway, I think they’re a very good combo. I’ve kept the hat. Now I get what it is. But, anyway, a useful benchmark from voter registration research is that the mortality rate among registered voters is roughly one percent annually, and deaths are removed once per year. So then the average deceased record would remain on the roll for about half a year, and that’s assuming everything works as efficiently as it possibly could.

Malcolm Collins:Oh, and that’d be a really easy way to get tons of names you can use to vote.

Simone Collins:100%. It’s like, okay. Here we go. Let’s let’s like, this is our list. Let’s go. A deceased person could remain on an active voter role temporarily because death data can take a long time to reach the state vital records agency and the election office.

Malcolm Collins:And you’re in a burka, and there’s nothing they could even do. Even if they caught that somebody was

Simone Collins:Yeah. They can’t be like, take off your well, and also, like, if they don’t require an ID No.

Malcolm Collins:But I mean, like, once you voted, how are they gonna find you? How they gonna track you down, you know, after you lie about this?

Simone Collins:No. No. Totally. Also, a voter could die in another state or abroad, and that could make the the matching take even longer. Also, your name and your date of birth or address could be different from what it was on voter rolls, and that could prevent an automatic high confidence match. And then also officials have to avoid falsely removing a living voter who happens to match a a death record. And there’s a lot of sorry. Legislation to protect people on voter rolls to, like, not remove them. And so that can make it harder for people to clean out the junk. Like, I really feel like maybe we should have people register on an annual bay like, the default should be you’re not registered to vote and you can’t vote unless you plan to vote, but it’s not that way. and, also, federal and state laws also, they impose procedures for maintaining and removing voter records. So you can’t just have some firm, like, come in and clear everything out. You have to have a bunch of bureaucrats breathing down their necks while you do it. The National Voter Registration Act permits removal upon death, but the actual workflow is administered by state and local officials who are like, no. It has to be done in this weird pedantic way. But, anyway, to get a picture of how many dead people are still on voter rolls, this is over ten years old. But in 2015, Pew Research estimated 1,800,000 deceased people still on roles nationwide, and they also estimated 24,000,000 inaccurate or no longer valid registrations. And then as of April 2026, just in the state of North Carolina because apparently, people aren’t looking at this very frequently. It’s all, like, isolated one off things. But in North Carolina, a federal database comparison identified about 34,000 apparent deceased matches on state voter roll records pending verification and proper removal. Note that North Carolina also is the first state for the Democratic Oh, really? Presidential primaries. Right? Also, recall that the the two states that were up for this were North Carolina, I believe, and then Colorado. Both states that are pretty damn lax when it comes to voter registration. So I don’t know. Maybe it’s a coincidence. I’m not I’m not schizophrenic enough to say that that’s a coincidence, but I’m kind of, like, I’m just observing that that might be a thing. But, yeah, basically, in states without voter ID requirements, you could just show up and then vote for a dead person so long as you know about them. And, you know, I’m sure that there are ways, especially now with AI, to, like, pretty efficiently know. Here are all the dead people. You know, get your group of people together. And what I can say from my experience running for office in this state is that democratic operations are not short of manpower. Like, when when I went to turn in my Paid manpower too. You hate manpower yourself.

Malcolm Collins:You did all the the petition.

Simone Collins:Oh, yeah. I had to I had to get signatures to get on the ballot in the first place, like, a certain number, and I I collected them largely myself. A bunch of people helped out too, but I was, like, for weeks on end, waddling around in adult diapers, heavily pregnant in the cold January weather, collecting these signatures. And I had to deliver them, you know, personally after all that pain, after the dogs chasing after me to and so I show up, and then there’s, like it was either three or four people for my Democratic incumbent opponent. He was nowhere to be seen, and he also had not collected a single signature himself because I went through his his signatures and, like, you have to record who collected the signature.

Malcolm Collins:And the whole thing, top to bottom, was I mean, the the level of, you are fighting. If you are a right wing individual in America, in Europe, one, donate to individual orgs. Donate to individual politicians. Do not donate to the RNC. But two

Simone Collins:Yeah. A community of.

Malcolm Collins:Like, they they yeah. But you are an individual ant against a giant corporate machine.

Simone Collins:Yeah. But, mean but, also, like, it just seems to me that there’s this glut of, like, I’m just saying warm bodies that could show up at polling stations wearing burkas if they wanted to. I’m not saying that they are. And, I mean, I I do think that to pull off what we’re insinuating you can pull off, where you have to, like, you have to know the people who aren’t first, you need to find people who are dead or, you know, unlikely to show up at a polling station so you can take their place, basically. Like, you have to be kind of sophisticated about it.

Malcolm Collins:Not that sophisticated in the age of AI.

Simone Collins:I know. In the age of AI. And I I I think it’s it’s possible. And this the one thing that the that the Democratic Party, I think, has over Republicans is they have a lot of warm bodies capable of doing this thing where you could have them show up at a bunch of different polling stations and precincts so as to not raise suspicions and then say that they are people that they are not and provide the last four digits of their Social Security numbers and be just fine. And I I do find that very disturbing. And I just yeah. The the big thing for me is, basically, if you have residents in a in a state, it does not matter if they are if they are citizens or not. It does not matter if they are felons or if if they’re alive in some cases. They may be used as voters. And I just really wish that we had the voting system that you described a long time ago where, like, only proven net tax contributors or child contributors, which should count as Yeah. As as you know, you are contributing a future taxpayer. So that should count as, like, every every up until the age of 18, you get counted for, like, a certain number of annual, like, tax dollar contributions even if you’re not working. That only net taxpayers or future taxpayer contribution or whatever should be allowed to vote. I wish we had that system because the system as it is now, I just feel like it it is almost an embodiment of the tyranny of the unemployed. If you are if you are not contributing to society, you’re gonna show up and vote. And, also, there’s no there’s no limit to that. There’s no show me your ID. There’s no register ahead of time, show an some kind of modicum of of preparation or effort. It really disturbs me. I’m I’m very scared. But I’m grateful that someone posted about this in the Basecamp subreddit because apparently, Nux talked about this two weeks ago, but I don’t know how I missed it. So it’s important to talk about.

Malcolm Collins:Well well, this is insane. I mean, it’s something that people in our community are talking about, but I I want to emphasize the reason it’s come out sort of all at once is because companies like Google were keeping the damn on by not allowing people to talk about potential fraud Yeah. Which allowed it to get to a case that when it just became demonstrable, like, wait. You can just do this? Right? Like, people were like, wait. This seems so egregious. Like, incrementally, we should have caught it before it got to this level.

Simone Collins:Well, what’s disturbing though is even now, even today with this stuff coming out, even with James O’Keefe doing what he did, the news story I saw about saw about this

Malcolm Collins:Was about how dare James O’Keefe’s uncovered? James O’Keefe pretended to be

Simone Collins:a man he wasn’t to prove a point. How dare he? It wasn’t like, by the way, do you know you can do this?

Malcolm Collins:Because this is really messed up.

Simone Collins:It was like, oh, no. He didn’t follow the exact rules. He did he did this was this just looked down upon behavior. I don’t even think what he did was necessary. I don’t know. Maybe impersonating someone is illegal, but he didn’t actually vote or register anyone. So I don’t think what he did was illegal. I think it was just kind of like, that’s a little bit creepy. And it’s like, well, isn’t it a little bit creepy that it’s super easy to actually commit voter fraud? But then the Democrats are

Malcolm Collins:fighting to make this harder. He’s on the side that’s fighting to make it so you can’t do this. Yeah.

Simone Collins:Yeah. I don’t like it. I don’t like it. I don’t like that, like, all sides are are are basically trying to move toward monarchies that that We have to.

Malcolm Collins:It is the only solution to they don’t want voting to matter anymore, which they obviously don’t, look at what the democrat whatever socialist party they’re fighting

Simone Collins:The democratic socialists of America. You can look at their platform online.

Malcolm Collins:Presidency. They’re fighting to remove the senate. They’re fighting to remove the judiciary. They want to turn the American government, and and and they want to make it so that felons can vote. They wanna make it so that illegal immigrants can vote. They they basically want to lock it in so you create a system where they can’t lose like they have in the EU and the UN. And, the people who think, oh, we’ll just let it get this is like the Nick Fuentes thing is is like, I can’t believe that he genuinely cares about America or American values. Because if he did, he would understand the threat that we are fighting against right now. and the not just that we’re fighting against, but what a good job the Trump administration has done. Well, they haven’t pushed back as far as I would want. Every time they’ve come into office, they’ve incrementally pushed further than anyone thought was possible. What Doge was able to accomplish was beyond what I have ever seen any administration accomplish in my lifetime. Just shutting down look at what’s happened after they shut down. What was that word called again? Oh, USAID. USAID? Look at the wave of right wing governments we’ve had in Latin America. Look at the collapse of the rap industry. That was one thing that don’t know if you’ve seen this, but there’s Press the big green button and tell me what you want to make like cookies, pizza, pancakes. What? It’s my vibe coding AI is testing Mudpuppy.

Simone Collins:Oh. Pancakes.

Malcolm Collins:I should make the kids AI app for kids. Mudpuppy. AI that we’ve been experimenting with. I’m getting it to do better recipe generation for kids. But, anyway,

Simone Collins:democracy ending, Latin American shutting down USA.

Malcolm Collins:Yeah. and wrap. So there’s been a thing recently. Wrap. Yeah. What? That it looks like the rap industry might have been subsidized by USAID in other countries and that rap may not organically be a popular form of music given the collapse we’ve seen in the industry after USAID collapsed. We’ll probably do an episode on that at some point.

Simone Collins:That seems like correlation, not causation, but we’ll see. Yeah.

Malcolm Collins:There are some uncomfortable correlations, especially if you’re looking at rapid overseas markets. Not necessarily in the American market, but in overseas markets, almost certainly, there was heavy promotion. And and and this is what we’re looking at with a lot of these orgs. You know? You’ve gotta you’ve gotta be aware when an organization when a government when a power wants to destroy your value system, your society, like, that’s what we’re seeing, and fighting back against this must be totalizing.

Simone Collins:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I don’t know. I don’t know. I yeah. We’re we’re I think we’re headed no. We’re probably not. I want I was gonna say I think we’re headed towards something different because I’m seeing both people on the left and the right and, like, low culture and high culture all saying, basically, democracy is a joke. It’s not a thing. All of this is made up. We it it doesn’t work. It’s broken. But then I also look at the system that we’re we’re up against, the inertia. I just don’t see how it can change. We had this base camp meetup this past weekend where at one point in the call, we were talking about that. Like, we were talking about repealing women’s right to vote in in light of Lindsay Clancy here. But, like, I think any changes to voting are not not on the table. Nothing. Nothing can change. Aside from possibly some kind of shift in voting to allow noncitizens to vote. Like, the the DSA’s recommendations around voting, like, noncitizens being able to vote and felons being able to vote, I could see that happening. I could see the system getting looser and worse, but certainly not stricter at any point. No no more restrictions on voting, and that is very disturbing. I mean, do you how could this how could it go any other way? We we need to fight back. Fighting back against entropy is

Malcolm Collins:Fighting back against entropy means we need to be open to using the same types of tactics that they want to use. And they have signaled at the level of Kamala Harris that they want to use.

Simone Collins:I feel like the only way to to do this is to start

Malcolm Collins:new the supreme court. She has said she wanted to change the way voting works in The United States, and they’re even fighting against voter laws. Right? Like, they want to fight. They want to cheat. That is part of their platform. Right? Like, we cheat. When we point out something like this, they’re like, how dare you point this out? When we point out something like this and we put up reasonable solutions, like voter ID or at least the, you know, library ID or at least something, it’s no. And yet they implement this when Mondami opens his food. There you you’ve got to be unwilling to understand that this is not and I think our side is increasingly understanding this, that they don’t want to play fair.

Simone Collins:I’m super not okay with any of this. I don’t know. Anyway, I’m glad you told me about this. I’m just I’m also not glad you told me about this. Very resentful.

Malcolm Collins:Okay. Love you, did Esimone. Guys, check out mudpuppy.ai if you have kids, trying to make some some cool products for kids, and our fab if you are an adult. And I I told everyone to people, oh, you’re you’re building these chatbot sites with with, you know, not safe for work stuff, and it’s terrible. And it’s like, yeah. But I’m able to fund the money we make on that into making cool apps for kids.

Simone Collins:Right? Like point is education nonprofits are incredibly hard

Malcolm Collins:to make To monetize.

Simone Collins:Yeah. To be financially sustainable. And and, really, you don’t want them to be. You want this to be extremely subsidized, but you also can’t depend on some benefactor to payroll, like, to to sorry, bankroll everything. And so, yeah, this is how it’s done. This is this is entirely legitimate and good. I’m I fully endorse it. Absolutely.

Malcolm Collins:Love you to death, Simone.

Simone Collins:Love you too. Bye, Malcolm. Bye. Add it? Hold on. Oh, no. That would be for my screen. I have to do I can’t I so you can play video. Can you open a PDF? You can’t open a PDF. That’s too bad. Be cool if you could I can I can add that feature actually to open a a PDF, but here? Let me just where’s my desktop? Oh, yeah. Entire screen. Okay. Tell me if you can see this. Can you see this? The the article? Yeah. Okay. I need you to explain this to me. Not only if his is he an active father to his two daughters, but diversity keynotes is outside. Is it what? Daughters. Daughters. Daughters. Who

Malcolm Collins:who I assume they made a mistake. It’s a newspaper.

Simone Collins:No. Because hold on. Oh my god. I’m all zoomed out. Look. Who who are these young girls? Who who are they? Who are these? Who who who Well, let’s ask. I did. And they’re children at their fashionable Dallas home. What what is this? What is this? Who are these people? I remember that desk.

Malcolm Collins:I remember that art. That That’s your dad. One of them looks Catherine, and then the other one looks like Christina.

Simone Collins:His daughter’s not that’s your aunt. Right. That’s Are you saying Cousin.

Malcolm Collins:She would have been around that age, and they likely hung out a lot because, you know, he worked with Dorothy.

Simone Collins:Okay. You think Christina was that close in age to your sister?

Malcolm Collins:She was. They were very close. They were

Simone Collins:famous. So the newspapers just look at that dress.

Malcolm Collins:Oh. Oh, my god. So dumpy.

Simone Collins:Oh my god. That looks like oh, Sale, Moo Moo in mini prints. That looks like what your mom wore when she was pregnant with you.

Malcolm Collins:You are such

Simone Collins:Oh my god.

Malcolm Collins:A

Simone Collins:BIT. Oh, very good. Fascinating. You’re like, oh. We we

Malcolm Collins:got to be now mudpuppy.ai. Everything’s working on it, but the coding feature I haven’t fully tested yet that allows kids to vibe code. But, like, it’s really good for, like, kids because it gives kids an AI interface that they can interact with almost entirely through audio, especially if on the button you click can’t read yet, and that removes the the more complicated options. And so the kid can go and, like, on their phone, have it take a picture of them, have it you know, take a picture of their environment, turn it into images, turn it into art, you know, really, the full AI. Oh oh, I forgot to do the full I’ll have this up by tomorrow. Right now, have the kid able to do recipes by talking,

Simone Collins:And he just asked for noodles. And right now,

Malcolm Collins:he asked for very simple things.

Simone Collins:Like, he asked

Malcolm Collins:for a helicopter, and I was like, well, ask for something more specific. And he’s like, a helicopter with three millimeter rifles.

Simone Collins:Thanks. Machine guns. Aren’t

Malcolm Collins:they in?

Simone Collins:Machine guns. Yeah. He’s look. He knows how to ask for very specific types of Chinook helicopters. So I don’t know. I think he just gets a little, you know, camera shy or whatever when you are asking him when daddy’s asking when daddy is watching. You know? It’s it’s harder to

Malcolm Collins:I’m glad I have him around to see how, like, kids use AI so that I can build better because what I really want is is is my kids to get super comfortable using AI as, like, you know, total AI natives, true AI Absolutely. Yeah. And I think we’re moving there. We’re moving there.

Simone Collins:I agree.

Malcolm Collins:And well, and we’re making the tools so other parents can do it too. Yeah. Oh, by the way, you suggest for the tech tone interview for for what we can talk about? I I I think it’d be really fun to talk about how he plans to raise his kids.

Simone Collins:Yeah. I mean because

Malcolm Collins:he he has his first kid on the way, and that’s like, you know, what is he gonna do for school? Like, homeschool? Is he

Simone Collins:gonna push calls? His answers are like, I don’t know. I haven’t worked that out yet. We should think of other things to talk about too. So I’ll I’ll see what he’s been talking about recently or what he’s talking about this week leading up to the interview because I think that’s more stuff that’s on his mind. That’s how it is with everyone. Right? I mean, like, people are most interested in whatever it is that just came up this week. It could be on Wednesday. Like, something comes up that everyone’s talking about. He’s talking about whatever. And so we’ll have to see. We’ll have to wait and see. Anyway Anyway I’ll let

Malcolm Collins:you get started here. And and, guys, please do check out for kids, mudpuppy.ai, or if you wanna do, like, chat bot scenarios. One thing I’ve worked on a lot with our fab recently is making the free models more obvious because, apparently, people were unaware of them. And the free models are now much easier to use and more obvious, and I increased the quality of the free models we have available. So right now, the free models that you can use on our fab are going to be the thinking equivalent of the paid system on something like Kandi AI. Because somebody is like, well, I can get Kandi for a full year for $50, and I spend more than a month on our fab. And I like, yeah. Because you’re using the frontier models. Why don’t you use the free ones? And then I realized it wasn’t obvious how to use the free ones, and so I was like, no. Okay. I’m gonna make it really obvious how to use the free models. So if you’re really into Kandi AI or Janitor AI, now you can use not just, like, the Hermes three model, but, like, Kimi two for free on our Which

Simone Collins:is a lot better. I mean, the the models they’re using, sometimes I’m like, look. Maybe you’re using okay models and you’re just modifying it in a way that just makes it terrible. I don’t know.

Malcolm Collins:But I’ll I’ll just keep building and building. A

Speaker 14:Are you trying to bite me? It’s my side. It’s big. Oh god. Titan, you’re gonna get hurt doing this. Do you wanna hug? Yeah. Yeah. You wanna hug? My mom loves biting people. Why do you love biting people, Titan? Because it’s my favorite thing. Why is it your favorite thing, Titan? Because I really love it, but I really love biting the Oh, god.

In this wide-ranging interview, Romanian streamer and VTuber Romanian TV discusses his journey from early 2000s leftism to opposing modern identity politics and censorship. He explains how Reddit bans during the Gamergate era radicalized him and why Eastern European perspectives differ sharply from those in the US and UK.

The conversation covers algorithmic suppression replacing old-school bans, the rise of safety rhetoric as a control tool, digital ID schemes, and the coming privacy scandals around home robots. Romanian TV also shares insights on Romanian culture, immigration, historical Muslim integration, and why anime themes now align more with right-leaning values than Western entertainment.

Episode Transcript

Malcolm Collins: Hello. I’m excited to be here with VTV or Romanian TV, the guy who used to VTube as a troll. I don’t know if you still do that. But he is one of the as I hear from everyone, one of the longest streamers in, like, the right wing online sort of YouTube space. And when our channel before we were even a right wing channel, he was one of our most overlapped channels in terms of subscribers, which I always thought was very interesting. And that’s actually where I first found his channel, and I started watching it. It’s fantastic. And somebody suggested we have him on, and I’m really excited to talk. And what I wanted to start with was you have become a somewhat large figure in within right wing, you know, Internet tubing or whatever you wanna call it, American politics, but you are Romanian. When did you start focusing and and, like, living in Romania, not, like, ethnically Romanian. When did you start focusing on American politics, and how did that happen for you?

Romanian TVee:Yeah. Well, I didn’t start calling myself as a right wing at first. I I just didn’t like this whole culture that was coming from, I I guess, The United well, not really The United States. It was more like the Anglosphere, this this feminist culture where there is no room for disagreement. It is full on identity politics. It was being pushed everywhere, gaming, TV shows, every type of medium. So I didn’t start as, like, here’s my, political body

Malcolm Collins:for Actually, I I wanna pull apart this because this is something Okay. This is something that we’ve had with, like, pretty much everyone who we’ve had on our show who is now considered, like, a far right Internet YouTuber. And they all started, us included, as even us, I wouldn’t say maybe you weren’t a leftist at the beginning, but I was definitely. Simone was definitely. And when we go to other people, like, we go to Leaflet and we have her on stream, she’s like, the thing that woke me up was streaming Hogwarts legacy. And then people came and attacked me for that, and then I began to radicalize. And with a lot of people, it’s like there was this one moment where they’re like, Like, maybe I actually do have a political side in this fight. Do you remember what that moment was for you when that happened?

Romanian TVee:Well, I mean, I was a leftist as well, but a leftist in the early two thousands was something completely different than what a leftist is now. In 2000, if you didn’t hate homosexuals and you were an atheist, you were labeled a leftist.

Malcolm Collins:So yeah.

Simone Collins:Yeah. Yeah. So I

Malcolm Collins:and we definitely fit into into that category of leftism. But do you have a a moment or, like, when you began to identify politically, do you remember anything that pushed you in that direction? Was it, like, people were attacking you for something or, you saw something that just seemed so ridiculous?

Romanian TVee:I think it was, when Reddit started censoring. there was a conversation with TotalBiscuit that, was very polite. It it had absolutely nothing rude done to it. And he was discussing I think it was, like, the Zoe Quinn scandal at the time. And everyone was getting banned around him. Like, at the time for in in the Internet to see something like that was unthinkable. And I was like, okay. Who are these people? What do they want? And they were left wing. And it’s like, well, if that’s what left wing is, then I should stand against it because I I don’t agree with the fact that the Internet should be controlled and censored to the point where political opinions cannot be discussed anymore.

Malcolm Collins:He he was discussing the what scandal? Sorry. This is a part of Internet history I’m not aware of.

Romanian TVee:So there was this indie game developer that was called Zoe Quinn at the time, and she

Malcolm Collins:was Oh, the Zoe Quinn. Oh, you’re talking about the original game stuff. Yeah.

Romanian TVee:It was way back. Right? And he basically I was trying to understand what was going on, and Reddit was just banning everyone around him. Like, there were hundreds of accounts banned. And then you you you realize their idea was, like, no platform for fascists, and they would define who a fascist is. And so yeah. And, actually, this

Malcolm Collins:this has me realize something that I didn’t really fully like, this is my first time realizing it. But back in the day on Reddit, I’m talking, like, ten years ago when I voted all all leftists, even after this point, I ran a leftist political organization essentially that, like, took donations and worked on campaigns. And yet when I was on Reddit, my primary subreddits have today all been deleted. They were things like Tumblr in action and fat people hate and the red pill. And I I loved these types of subreddit, but I never considered myself right wing because I didn’t consider these types of views right wing. And I think that they were defined as right wing. I think today if you told this to somebody, Tumblr in action was not actually a right wing subreddit. Fat people hate was not actually a right wing subreddit. The red one wasn’t even a right wing subreddit. Right? If you told people that today, they’d be like, that can’t actually be true, but it was actually true for a period.

Romanian TVee:Yeah. To be a right wing at the time, I think, you needed to be, like, in support of George Bush, the paperback. you needed to be in support of, Middle Eastern conflicts that, you know, like, America is chosen by God in order to bring democracy to the Middle East. Like, those were the talking points. And it was also against, you know, like, standing against gay marriage, standing against atheism. Completely different than what right wing ended up. Right? And this is kinda normal, like, you look at different points in history, like, wing and right wing, the politicians at the time support as policies. And they they can change and shift. Like, they have the same general idea, but you couldn’t be a right wing, for example, and be an atheist before the Bush era. Right?

Malcolm Collins:No. No. It is very true. Very true.

Romanian TVee:Yeah. Like, right now, nobody cares if you say, yeah. I’m a Trump supporter, and I don’t believe in god. They will be like, well, I mean, okay.

Malcolm Collins:Let me like, Sargon of Akkad is one of the biggest figures in our space, and he’s an atheist.

Romanian TVee:He is an atheist. Yes. Yeah. I mean, he promotes Christianity because he likes the cultural aspect but he doesn’t believe in, like, life after death. What? He’s gonna be so right? And so nobody has a problem with that. Like, nobody is saying, like, why is an atheist leading a right wing movement now? Of course, course, that can change. Like, at some point, maybe people will say again, but, like, right now, it’s it’s definitely so the right wing then, it was completely different than now.

Malcolm Collins:Well, here’s a question I have for you because this happened to us. So after we began to and I and we made our switch way after you. We probably didn’t make a switch really fully until maybe, like, a year and a half ago. And for us, it was because we kept going viral. We’re saying the fertility rate is low, and that’s gonna cause, like, problems with, like, Social Security and stuff. And people kept calling us racist for saying that. And then eventually, we talked to right wing people, and they were, like, really nice and accepting. I was like, okay. Like, I guess I wanna be part of this community. And one thing that changed about us is a lot of our views began to change after we were in the right wing community for a while and felt comfortable having these tests. So for example, I began to more critically say, no. It’s not just that children shouldn’t gender transition. It’s that the entire gender transition phenomenon might be a problem. And I began to say, like, actually, we should probably be pretty restrictive on abortion. Did you have any of these moments where, like, major concepts where you changed, or they just that the whole political spectrum migrated around you?

Romanian TVee:Well, I mean, I’m from Eastern Europe, and we we still have the strong communist culture even after communism. And communism was all about censorship and controlling what people think, not just what they say. And so the moment, like, I saw how the modern left was behaving in The US, I didn’t need a specific moment. Like, immediately, when you say, oh, these opinions aren’t allowed. These ideas are not okay. I was like, no. Absolutely not. And then I remember when started saying believe on women, and there was, like, this cultish, like, mega church, if you will, with, like, huge panel behind, and it’s, like, believe on women. And I was, like, like, women has the depth of ethical thinking because women are people. And some people lie, some people speak the truth. And the idea that you should just automatically believe, like, a class of people that do the thinking for you was giving me all sorts of red flags. So, no, like, there wasn’t, like, a specific moment or a specific policy that made me decide that this is an ideology I should be against.

Malcolm Collins:Yeah. One of the things that you pulled on there that I wanna dig a little deeper on because it’s been one of the more interesting cultural landscape flips is in the censorship battles that existed in sort of the proto landscape of our existing online space, a lot of them were focused on horny jail. Like, female characters being too sexy, being too horny, stuff like this. And and it’s created a very interesting sort of divide as the two streams of old right culture has began to mix with the Internet culture because the Internet culture part is very sort of anti censorship, and the old culture is sometimes a little confused by this. Have have you noticed that? And, like, what are your thoughts on that?

Romanian TVee:Well, I mean, that is indeed an anti porn movement right now that, in my opinion, feels a little bit artificially enforced because nobody was like this before 2020. Yeah. Most people were like, okay. The Internet is for porn. I don’t like it. I don’t click it. As long as it’s, you know, placed somewhere else and you have to go out of your way to find the time, fine. But now there is, like, this huge explosion where, you know, if you are a straight guy and you’re just like a woman with big fat tits, like, you’re now considered. And like, no. That’s not being a. This is just, like, normal human behavior. Like, my grandfather, if you’re it’s so sweetly sweetie in a commercial, you’d be like, oh, nice. You know, you you wouldn’t basically say, get it away. And, like, my grandfather was more Christian and more pious than a lot of people today. So, like, I refuse to believe that this is, a spiritual reawakening.

Malcolm Collins:I I I saw that too. Like, we need to learn to re objectify women.

Romanian TVee:Like Yeah. Yeah. No. Ironically, like, Grand Prix girls. Right? They they were everywhere. Like, the Sunday Times, they they have this. No. I think it’s the idea of pushing for digital ID. Like, during COVID, a lot of people were like, I’m not going to sit in the house. I’m not going to eat the bugs. I don’t sit in the pot. I will not use digital ID. at the moment the government said it’s for protecting children, everyone was like, oh, you know what? I’ll actually dox myself to use Google. And, the reason that they use porn is because it’s everywhere. Right? Like, if you do a Google search, can you find porn. If you go on Twitter, you can find porn. Discord, you can find porn. And so everything now requires a digital ID so that you can safely navigate. And there is only one solution. Right? Because if the idea was we really don’t want children to access porn, they could have been just phones, like mobile phones for kids, that are hardware to block certain sites. Like, it it That’s

Malcolm Collins:a really clever idea.

Romanian TVee:Yeah. Like, the and and it it would be done. Right? The parents would probably buy them. But the fact that they’re not even offering that as the solution, you can notice that it’s moral hysteria driven to 11 in order to convince people that actually giving your personal information on a server that can get hacked and you can have your Social Security number out there is is now something to be desirable. Yeah. Like, imagine I mean, the in France, there there were tens of millions of cases of people that have their private identity stolen, and nobody cares. Like, it’s like I mean, well, of course. You know? And some of these robust stage verification companies that nobody knows where they come from, like, people should trust them with their data, apparently run around 300 other background checks on other things. Like, have you paid your taxes? Do you look like a terrorist? You can look it up on Google. There is this robust stage verification in the company called Persona, and they were actually leaked of doing literally this. Like, they had hundreds of other things. Like, they weren’t just checking to see if you’re 18. They were looking at your face trying to match it with any terrorist, trying to see if you if you

Malcolm Collins:And they were then feeding this to the French government?

Romanian TVee:But nobody knows. Right? Like, they they were just doing this, and the company says, oh, well, we just have the features in place. We’re not using them for that. But, like you know? And people just like, it’s not even a big story. Like, I have to tell you anyhow you have to Google it to see it. Right?

Malcolm Collins:It’s interesting. It’s a I mean, two things I wanna pull out from this. One is is this movement that you’re talking about has really been gaining most of its steam in Europe. Like, in The United States, there hasn’t been that much of a win in the censorship movement. There there’s a few states, but, like, the the the American right hasn’t like, it the Britain is where they really fell for it. Britain, France, stuff like this. Australia and it’s European Union. And then the the secondary thing and I think it’s interesting to talk about why because you exist in a third cultural space that is different from what’s happening in The United States and what’s happening in, like, cucked Europe. And then you have, you know, Eastern Europe, which is more based right now. And and it’s so I’m I’m interested in what you see going on in the wins there. But I also thought the second thing you said that was interesting is, like, you’re not gonna hear about this. And if I look at, like, our fans where they get their news, it’s part of, like, the YouTube news cycle. You know, it’s like we talk about it or Nux is talking about it or Asmigold is talking about it or you’re talking about it, and they’ll you know, we’ll we’ll typically, like, do around. Like, I remember once you surfaced a story that got me talking about it, and I’ve never seen any newspaper surface a story. So the story that you found that I thought was really cool is you found that one day you decided to go with whatever YouTube told you to do for a video topic. And when you made the video, you then had an unusually large number of bots commenting on that particular video, which to me indicated that what we may start to see is if we have, like, low quality AI traffic, also fake commenting on things, it can essentially create these sort of ruts in YouTube and other online spaces where everything begins to converge around, a new norm and all of the bots are drawn into this stream. And you sort of found the stream. You’re the first person to find it. But no one else had talked about that yet. So we do sort of surface things for people. You do, for example, in in that case. But let’s focus on the the geopolitical differences. What are you noticing about your, geopolitical space in terms of what’s getting popular that you’re not seeing getting popular in the online right in, like, Western Europe or The United States?

Romanian TVee:Right. So, I it’s interesting that you break it up. Right? Because I’m a Romanian and I care about American politics. The the reality is I care about the Internet. And the Internet right now, at least in the West, it’s kinda global. Everyone speaks English. Everyone goes on x. Everyone hangs around with other people. I’m concerned about that space. Right? And if I’m from Romania, I I’m concerned about the English speaking Internet because that’s where I interact. And regarding what you said, this is, like, the new type of doing censorship because the old censorship stopped working after COVID, and the old censorship was a little bit honest. Right? If they don’t like you, they ban you. And so the only people that remain are the ones that speak in in the correct tone. But people started noticing that, and alternative were being made. Like, you had Parler. You had alternative platforms growing. And so Elon Musk actually is the one that discovered the new censorship. not necessarily, like, he himself, but, like, he gave the idea, which is, like, what if we allow everyone and we just amplify some voices? And so you can you can have, like, a group of people that are, like, legitimately independent, and they talk about whatever they want. But then you have, like, the shills that may also be independent, but you can be approached by a PR company. Or if you say the correct things, the algorithm promotes you. And so, like, those people just drown out all of the ones that are the undesirables. And so you end up with an independent person that has something interesting to say, but they’re not going to get any traction. And then you end up with a shield that says, like, the most basic b***h thing, but, like, it’s also set on TV, and they have, like, hundreds of thousands of views per that take.

Malcolm Collins:Well, I don’t believe Oh, oh, continue.

Romanian TVee:Yeah. I I think this is the way of doing censorship, right, properly. Because you don’t you don’t actually see anyone getting oppressed. It’s just like, well, I mean, these people just happen to have popular takes and the other ones don’t. Right?

Malcolm Collins:Yeah. I mean, I I think I’ve seen YouTube participate in this slightly, but it’s typically been over very directed censorship. So a good example of where this was really obviously happening is do you follow what what are they called now? China fact chasers used to be called ADV China.

Romanian TVee:I’ve seen, yeah, I’ve seen a few videos from them.

Malcolm Collins:Yeah. I thought their argument that, like, the China stuff because we saw this with our channel. Like, China stuff definitely got nerfed when we would do it. Yeah. But I’ll be honest, and I do not like being, you know, overly generous to YouTube. I don’t feel like we’ve been nerfed on too many right wing topics. like, our trans stuff generally does pretty well. And in addition to that, when I click on my own YouTube algorithm, I can look at what’s being recommended to me. Actually, I’ll just do it right now to see, like, do I feel like any of this is inauthentic to what I would want? Something making fun of Hassan, then some, like, cartoon stuff, then some AMVs, then, Caleb Crowder. I guess I’m seeing less. I’ve been seeing my channel.

Romanian TVee:I don’t I don’t think, like, the you you’re looking for, like, Jack Dorsey style censorship, and I don’t think you’re going to find it.

Malcolm Collins:Yeah. So how do you think it works?

Romanian TVee:Well, the way it works is that actually do have a right wing space and a left wing space, which, have the approved overtone Windows opinions. Right? Yeah. And then when when an important event happens, like, let’s say, elections are coming or something like that, they only suppress one topic. They can suppress, like, two topics. Like, for example, when the robust stage verification happened, if you talked against it, you are suppressed for a while. And after that, it’s being allowed. But I remember, like, if if I spoke against AI, for example not necessarily, like, I’m against AI, but, like, if I would have had, like, okay. I don’t like this aspect of AI, that video would be suppressed. Right? So it’s it’s like specific topics on specific time.

Malcolm Collins:Well, what’s interesting is if you’re right about the AI one and, obviously, I wouldn’t notice that because I’m on the other side of the AI fight. No.

Romanian TVee:I was well. But, like, there there were certain issues that I said, okay. Well, I I don’t really remember exactly what I said. But I I was talking about some limitations or I was talking about some negative aspects, and and those videos got suppressed.

Malcolm Collins:What what’s interesting here is that the new era of suppression let’s let’s like, say it’s AI in China. Neither of them are really political issues. It’s just things that could hurt their pocketbooks. Yeah. Like, it’s it’s not based on political tone believe seeing. It’s based on, maxing their economics. And I and and I, by the way, think that China suppression stuff is gonna really hurt China in the long run because they’re not able address their issues or realize how bad they are.

Romanian TVee:I mean, I I generally don’t know. Like, regarding China and seeing the European Union looking at them salivating and trying to copy everything. So, like, at some point, it’s going to be difficult to criticize them because everyone will say, well, that’s what we’re doing as well. Oh, can

Malcolm Collins:you go into that?

Romanian TVee:I mean, look at the the Adaman Square. Right? Like, how does China fix it? They ban it. Like, there’s no video footage. They deny it. Right? And there was an event in The UK. Think it was something with an immigrant that stabbed someone. Oh, yeah. The Irina videos and and another one that happened in The UK. And the government was basically saying that the problem was the video itself. Right? They were not saying that the problem is the the illegal act that happened, which people managed to videotape. they were actually saying the problem is x for allowing the videos.

Malcolm Collins:For talking about it. Yeah. Yeah.

Romanian TVee:For for And I don’t know. That’s Chinese mentality, isn’t that? Like like, you’re basically trying to say that the arena assassination video is the Tiananmen Square for the left. And if you had your way, you just remove that video from the Internet. And so it’s like, okay. Well well, how if they actually manage to get that done, if they actually manage to to implement that policy where they can actually tell social media, you delete this video because it’s extremist content, how is that any different than China? It’s literally the same policy. Right? I

Malcolm Collins:I I think you hit upon something really interesting here, and it reminds me there’s a documentary being filmed about us, and I was talking with them. And they were asking about who who are your people? And I go, well, any anyone who’s an American. And they’re like, well, what what do you mean by American? And I’m like, well, you know, like, I specifically mentioned you. I was like, well, like, Romanian TV is, like, basically an American. You know, there’s a bunch of Latin American Americans. There’s bunch you know? And and they were like, well, then what do you mean by American? I’m like, well, you know, part of, like, the American Internet. Right? Like, there’s this, like, wide cultural ecosystem that and and I and I people don’t really feel out of it. Like, nobody really there’s some people who will come up, and it’ll be like, oh, they’re a Canadian? I had no idea. Right? Like, oh, they’re they’re actually English. I had for example, Aiden Paladin. I I don’t know if you know Aiden.

Romanian TVee:She’s She’s British.

Malcolm Collins:Yeah. I had no idea she was British. I thought she was an American.

Romanian TVee:Yeah. Yeah.

Malcolm Collins:The the that’s the way the world is beginning to separate, and the political battles matter within this geopolitical separated ecosystem because the freedom of the Internet, unless you’re in Europe and you just don’t have it anymore anyway, largely defend depends upon what’s happening in American politics.

Romanian TVee:Well, Europe offends the Internet as well. I’m not sure you’ve noticed, but, like, cloud, for instance, has a text watermark now because European Union demanded it, and so they’re implementing over there as well. But another example of childification, I used to notice that everybody was laughing at China for, like, requiring you to show facial scan before using the Internet.

Malcolm Collins:Like, if

Romanian TVee:you wanted to install a video game and you wanted a Steam account, you have to show your face and your ID. If you wanted to talk online, you have to show face and ID. And everyone was like, my god. Like, that place is so bad. Like, what what are they thinking? Why are people allowing this? And this is where the EU digital service act is moving us towards. Right? Like, everyone now, if if you wanna like, if you’re in The UK and you want to talk on x, and you wanna have access to sensitive content, which they try to say that it’s pornography, but it also includes things like conversations about immigration, conversations about, you know, like, the arena assassination videos. Right? Oh, yeah. I would tell people the China is the China issue. Little with that. I mean, just just framed differently so people can accept it in the West.

Malcolm Collins:Yeah. Well and they trick a lot. Like, the in The UK, a lot of the laws that are being used to do this sort of censorship were pushed by people like, you know, Louise Perry and stuff like that. Right? Like, the people who were sort of on the right and not that far from us. I mean, we’ve had her on her podcast. We’ve been on her podcast. Like, I I like her as a person, but she’s tremendously stupid around human sexuality and and really sets us up to get clobbered by the left because she allows a lot like that. And I and I’ve noticed it’s across The UK. Like, all the we went to this UK political oh, we should get him invited. What’s the what’s that invitation only?

Simone Collins:Arc? I don’t think Arc is a good use of people’s time anymore.

Malcolm Collins:Okay. Well, anyway, we they used to have a bunch of of, like, big people come. But we go there, and we meet with all the The UK right wing people. And they were all like, oh, we need to ban porn. We need to ban porn. And I was like, do you not know what these laws are gonna end up being used for? And they’re just like, oh, that that that’ll never happen. And this happens even on our channel because I’ll mention it sometimes.

Romanian TVee:British right wingers are different than American right wingers. British right wingers, from my experience, are a lot more authoritarian. They I I don’t know why, like, what what exactly happened, but maybe it’s, how they were raised in schools. Like, they they had way too much feminism. And and when I say feminism, I don’t talk about women. I mean, like, that particular gender based identity politics that was extremely aggressive.

Malcolm Collins:Yeah.

Romanian TVee:And so they they kinda believe that it’s our turn to be authoritarian. They they don’t want to, like, destroy the the system and bring back what was. It’s like, no. No. No. Like, the system is great. We just need to get our guy in charge.

Malcolm Collins:I’ve I’ve absolutely

Romanian TVee:don’t think like that, I don’t believe. And most of the world doesn’t think like that except for maybe well, actually, not even Australians.

Malcolm Collins:Well, I mean, Australians don’t think that their governments are very, like, authoritarian and in terms of the way they handle the Internet and stuff. And and another thing I’ve really noticed about UK, and I’m wondering about your perspective as a as a non American, is that The UK online political commentators on the right are, like, very low energy depressed and pessimistic when contrasted with The United States ones. An example here would be, like, contrast NUCs and Sargon of O’COND. Right? Like, what are your thoughts

Romanian TVee:on that? I mean, British culture was always more stoic. It’s it’s just how they are. Right? Like, if you compare American sensationalism, real real time shows with reality shows with British ones. Like, look at chef’s kitchen. Right? Hell’s Kitchen. Sorry. Hell’s Kitchen in The United States, bombastic. Chef Ramsay is screaming, yelling, dramatic music. Hell’s Kitchen in The UK, you just hear, like, the clinking of pans and chef Ramsay very polite and right? This is the same guy. But, like, different different types of culture. And so I

Simone Collins:had no idea. Plays

Romanian TVee:a part. Yeah. And that plays a part. And the other thing that plays a part is, British people are very reactive to shaving. Like, they have an extremely strong shaving culture. They don’t really have, like, this individual thing of, I know what’s best for me. I’m in charge of my destiny. I I do the things good for myself and my family. Everyone else is either helping or should f**k off. No. British people are, like, extremely catatistic. Right? Yeah. America used to have on your coins, like you guys had on your coins, mind your own business.

Malcolm Collins:Yeah. I sincerely, like,

Romanian TVee:because a lot especially in places where a lot of puritas came in. And I like, how many people understand that Puritans actually stands for purifying the Catholic church. Like, that’s what the original thing was. And they were very difficult to be around the other colonists. And so, like, the coin was minted, mind your own business. Because, like, they were importing that aspect of the culture, it’s like, no. Your business is my business. Your business is everyone’s business. Right? And and not everyone on Planet Earth thinks this way. Like, there are other cultures that generally do not operate like this.

Malcolm Collins:Well, I I I this brings me to when I watch your channel, you seem like higher energy. You seem more like a standard American, and I wonder and maybe you you can comment on this. In the early days of our channel, there was a few weird things that happened around Romania. One was having high overlap with you in the early days, but two is we got this weird notification at some point from one of the polling websites that were looking at podcasts. And we had broken into, like, the top 100 podcasts in Romania or something. and I was like, how did that happen? And I wonder, do you think that there’s, like, a cultural overlap between Romanian culture and American or Romanian right wing culture and American culture?

Romanian TVee:Well, this is why I care about the American culture because, you guys said the tone. there there were a lot of issues that were happening around the world, and the the press in Romania just didn’t talk about it. Like, the as they call it, the woke era was in full swing.

Malcolm Collins:Yeah.

Romanian TVee:And the Romanian press was still pretending to be innocent about it and not understanding what it is. And so, like, people just went online. Right? And when you go online, who’s talking about it? It wasn’t that the Romanians that were trying to understand it. It was already established people, like America’s British. And so this is why you have a lot of subscribers from Romania because you are talking about the things that generally matter that our television just refused to touch on. What

Malcolm Collins:do you think what is a Romanian left like? Like, what is Romanian leftist culture like? What are their goals, etcetera? And can we learn anything from that in in, like, American culture?

Romanian TVee:Yeah. This would probably shock you, but it is that Europe, we generally do not have, like, ideological divide. Like, one of our presidents actually smacked a child on screen, fucked his mistress on the Oval Office equivalent. But because his policy got Romania out of debt, people people voted for him. Like, they generally don’t care. Like, I I’m not voting for him to tell me how to be a moral person. I’m voting for him to fix the f*****g economy.

Malcolm Collins:What did the child do? Come on. We gotta know what was

Romanian TVee:going on. He was he was on a at the speaking event, and he was talking to someone, and a child tried to grab his microphone, and he looks you know? And it’s funny. I said, yeah. You can you can find it on YouTube. It’s it’s literally Triamba Cesco, his child. And there was, like, some controversy about it at the time. Like, the media was sensationalizing that people were like, okay. But what does this have to do with this economic policy?

Malcolm Collins:Yeah.

Romanian TVee:Right? America isn’t like that. Like, America has, like, a very strong ideology, sense of belonging to an identity group. You guys don’t are like, you’re not really about issue policies as much as you are, like, this is my team. I have to protect them. I have to support them. I have to you know, like, I’m team right or I’m team left. And and you have, like, an entire ideology with the package. In Romania, you can have, like, a right winger that’s pro abortion, pro guns, and pro censorship. Like, it it doesn’t really matter. Like, they have various issues, issues, and they vote based on the people that they believe represents those issues, not not necessarily right or left.

Malcolm Collins:So is there, like, a woke faction in Romania, or it’s pretty much everyone in Romania on the based faction? They’re just different categories of it.

Romanian TVee:So they tried pushing wokeness in Romania, it failed because we have communism. And we immediately tagged it as communism. Like, they they tried the this idea, like, if you go to a gypsy, you need to call them Roma. I grew up in a very diverse neighborhood, and the gypsies that I know said, like, listen. I’m a gypsy. You call me a Roma, I beat the living s**t out of you. And I was like, okay. It’s just right? So I suppose, like, the woke faction is is in the corporate places. Like, there are a couple of cities that are very woke. The capital Yeah. The port city, Constanta, and another city called Oj. These are more woke. But But either that, like, Romania is pretty libertarian. I I I would say it’s kinda like the Internet used to be. Like, most people have the same mentality that people in America used to have during the early two thousand and tens.

Malcolm Collins:Interesting. And and do

Simone Collins:you think that Question too, though, actually about Romania. Like, as things have been playing out recently in the news with Andrew Tate, Romanians, like, everyone knew about him? Was he, like, known within the country?

Romanian TVee:No. No. Like, most people think he’s a douchebag. Okay. Like, this was the the argument here. For those of you who don’t know, Andrew Tate, the and the reason he got arrested this is my opinion. Right? I can’t fact check it. But there is an article in the BBC where Andrew Tate decided to approach the daughter of a sitting senator. She was 16 in schools, and he gave her the strawberry emoji. If you want, I can give you the BBC article right now. But, like, was a pornographer that was interested in recruiting ladies to join and do online chatting. Right? And he’s approaching the 16 year old girls that take into account that Romania 16 is legal. Right? So he he wasn’t breaking the law.

Simone Collins:Oh, that’s young. Wow.

Romanian TVee:Yeah. But to approach the daughter of a sitting senator in a country that he himself recognized as being corrupt.

Malcolm Collins:Right. Yeah.

Romanian TVee:It’s not a good play. It’s not pro gamer gate move. Right? It’s not a

Simone Collins:pro gamer. Sorry.

Romanian TVee:And and so she she went on. She complained. She was talking about how him and his brother approached many of the of her colleagues at school. Doesn’t know why. Right? And so, probably, her dad got a little bit upset, and he decided to apply the concept that the process is the punishment. And so this is why he got dragged into a lot of courts. Now it’s this is just my my hypothesis because it didn’t take a lot of time after he did that to actually end up getting investigated. So I mean, that’s good. I’m not saying it’s just like, I’m not saying justice should be done because, like, you know, if you approach someone else’s daughter, it’s fine. But the moment you approach a senator’s daughter, it becomes a problem. Well, you have to get along

Simone Collins:for a long time without problem. So that that’s actually something that wasn’t included in most of the coverage we saw. That’s really interesting.

Romanian TVee:Yeah. It’s OPBC. You can look it up. Andre Tate’s strawberry bulge. You Google it, and you can find it. It’s

Malcolm Collins:What’s the Romanian conversation around immigration right now? Are you guys more like Poland? Like, you have very little immigration, or, what’s what’s the the

Romanian TVee:We don’t have a strong welfare state. So because of that, most immigrants don’t wanna stay here, but we do have a lot of people with a worker visa. the conversation is that some people didn’t like it. Like, they actually assaulted the driver for no reason. guy ended up, calling for mommy as the police came up to arrest him. So there are, like, really high tensions because of what Romanians see on the Internet happening in the West, and they don’t want it here. But, I mean, historically, we didn’t have someone Turkey. Turkey tried to build a massive mosque here. So we have, like, a rich guy hiring a helicopter dropping pig carcasses on the mosque grounds, people using a catapult to throw, like, pigs on on on the area that was building. And, also, we have a Muslim Wait.

Malcolm Collins:Hold on. Sorry. You need to take a step back there. Somebody threw pigs where they were building a mosque with a catapult? Yeah. Yeah. They bought Wait.

Romanian TVee:How did

Simone Collins:they get the catapult there? Was it an old fashioned catapult or a modern catapult?

Romanian TVee:One. It’s not, I mean, if I like absolutely. It’s the

Malcolm Collins:most normal thing ever.

Romanian TVee:Anyway, the the thing that happened is, like, we have a strong Muslim community. For those of that don’t know Romanian history, many Romanians don’t know. Yeah. When we had our war of independence against the Ottoman Empire, there were a couple of Muslims that fled from the Ottoman Empire, and they were look. We we will fight for you if you give us the the right to practice our religion and you give us autonomy. And so, the king at the time said, yeah. Sure. and we actually went against the Ottomans with the Russians and the division of Yermicher. Jalisery. Sorry. Yeah. So after they won, they were like, okay. Well, let’s see what we can do. And, we managed to build I think it’s the first mosque built by Christians for Muslims. That was a mosque I I think it’s close to Constanta now. And the only thing was, like, your buffet has to be vetted by the king. And Yeah. Now we don’t have a king, so it’s vetted by the Ministry of Culture. and those guys, they were like, we have really good relationships with our Meridian brothers. We have no reason for this mega mask to be built. I think it’s going to actually hurt the relationships. They also gave a list of a couple of imams, and they said these are preaching a very extremist version of a hobbyism. We don’t want it here. Like, we cannot allow these people in. And so we we never had the problem with Muslims like the West does because we we have interacted with Muslims historically, and we have good relationships with the Muslims here.

Malcolm Collins:This really reminds me of something that we constantly talk about on our channel, which is that as a community, you have sort of three choices. And the the one choice is to say, when you have bad actors in your community and then people come to arrest the bad actors, and you say, well, if you arrest the bad actors, you have to arrest all of us, then you make your whole community antagonistic to that society. And then then you can be neutral and just not do anything and let them arrest bad actors when they do, or you can do the opposite and proactively target, remove, and punish bad actors. And if you do that, then you become sort of maximally integratable into other cultural institutions. And it sounds like in Romania, the Muslim population did that option, which made them very easy to integrate and get along with.

Romanian TVee:Yeah. Like, literally, nobody has a problem with our Muslims. I’m I’m talking about the ones that are are

Malcolm Collins:Historic to the country.

Romanian TVee:Yeah. Yeah. They’re historic to the country, and they have ties and connections here. Like, obviously, if if you have, like, a new group of people that would come up and they would create a scandal, then yes. But, like, even that is unheard of because we deport them right away. Like, for example, there when I went to the University of Medicine, we did have a lot of Muslims that came in here to study. And if they got into a fight or if they committed any type of crime, like, would be deported the next day. And so most Muslims that came here yeah. Like, most Muslims that came here were low abiding people. They had absolutely no problems. Some of even them started drinking alcohol. So they had, like, two graduation festivals. One for the young people that are here and one for the parents that were coming from home. And the one with the parents, no alcohol, no smoking, no nothing. And at the celebration here, it was with alcohol and stuff. Yeah. Like, everyone was friendly with everyone. Like, there there wasn’t any any type of, like, cultural divide or anything. And they would get their license, their medical practice, and then they would go and and practice it back home. So I’ve stayed here and practice. But, like, we never had these these huge controversies, you know, that you have in the West. Because if you actually apply the law and you actually demand that people integrate, you have a different outcome than if you’re actually funding division and you’re paying

Malcolm Collins:Yeah.

Romanian TVee:So that people, hate each other.

Malcolm Collins:Well, that and low amounts of social services are going to prevent you from drawing in bad actors.

Romanian TVee:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Like, there there were immigrants that cried on TV here because they got fingerprinted in Romania. And that means, No. Like, that means they have to stay in Romania. That that’s the EU law. Like, you you stay in the first country, you get fingerprinted.

Simone Collins:Oh, really? Yeah.

Romanian TVee:Yeah. Yeah. And when they found out that they’re staying in Romania, they started crying and pissing people on the television because they wanted to go to Germany or or to Sweden. Right?

Simone Collins:Yeah. And then the Sweden deals. That’s very interesting.

Romanian TVee:I I I was them as well. I’m not gonna lie. You know? Like, if I if I travel half the world, because I think it’s like I’m going to get free housing and free welfare, and I get stuck in a country that doesn’t give you. Yeah. It’s probably pretty traumatizing.

Simone Collins:It would absolutely be. Yeah. Would be very

Malcolm Collins:That’s that’s fascinating. okay. So what are you thinking about the future right now? Like, where do you think one of the things that I found very interesting is when I look at, like, the global left right now, they’ve really retreated from a lot of positions they held historically. So an example would be, like, even Greta Thornburg gave up on environmentalism. Right? Like, she it’s just not something I hear people talk about anymore. I don’t hear people talk that much about, like, anti black racism anymore. I don’t hear people talk about like, there was the the Gaza war, but then, like, ended that. And now, like, they don’t talk that much about the Iranian war.

Simone Collins:Even Greta Thunberg has mostly dropped Palestine as a cause, actually.

Romanian TVee:They should stop getting funded. Right? Like, the idea that Greta Thunberg had her own opinions is ridiculous.

Malcolm Collins:So where do you think they go next? What’s the next cause? What’s the next thing?

Romanian TVee:What Safety. What? It’s safety.

Malcolm Collins:Like, how do say?

Romanian TVee:Safety.

Simone Collins:No. Just like law and order or, like, AI safety?

Romanian TVee:No. Like, the the concept of, like, keeping people safe is now the new concept of equity, quality. Right? Like, it’s whatever they talk about, the AI digital safety act. Right? It’s done with safety. The the new method of control is is the Safety from ideas. Yeah. Yeah. Pretty much.

Simone Collins:There’s not a simple, like, safety

Romanian TVee:from ideas. The the way that I think modern society is working now is that a single clip that goes viral can destroy a career. And politicians have noticed this. CEOs have noticed this. Yeah. And so in order for them to avoid the the tarnished image, if you will, they constantly hide behind committees. They constantly hide behind polls. They they hide behind the experts. And so the I I would call it the manage the the the safe oriented managerial class will constantly say we’re making this decision for safety purposes. Right? Like, for example, we’re reducing carbon emissions to keep people safe. We’re censoring the Internet to keep people safe. We are pushing digital ID to keep people safe. Like, this is what they’re going to say. Like, safety is going to be the maximum the desire.

Simone Collins:So the the culture where it’s gonna be pro safety versus anti safety or, like, pro

Romanian TVee:safety versus pre so smart. Right? Like, it’s so smart whoever thought about it. Because if you’re against them, you’re you’re against safety. Right? What type of person is against safety? It sounds ridiculous, but when you’re looking at what safety means, it’s it’s not like, look at what an AI does. Right? Like, what is AI safety? Yeah. Well, it’s against talking about certain topics that are true. It’s about, you know, eliminating any type of conversation that can be lewd or pornographic or whatever. Like, how is it unsafe if, let’s say, you have, like, a 25 year old doing some erotica with Chad GPT. Right? But it’s unsafe for the company. Right? It’s risk, and risk is not a good thing. So they again, this is just one example. Right? But, like,

Malcolm Collins:a lot by the way, make our money is, we have a company where people do, like, role play with AIs. Guys, you should check it out. Rfab.ai. Gotta gotta do a plug here. Continue.

Romanian TVee:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No. Well, I mean, most of the laws passed in The UK, like, right now in the EU. Sorry. Like, right now, I I heard that they want to go after people’s bank accounts. Right? like, if you have money invested in the EU, they should be able to access that, or you’re not allowed to have financial transactions more than €10,000 with cash. Like, all of these are are done for safety purposes. So you’re going to have start hearing the word safety a lot.

Malcolm Collins:Oh, that is an interesting prediction.

Simone Collins:I totally agree, though. In a in a recent interview with the Flock CEO, because Flock is really controversial now,

Romanian TVee:he

Simone Collins:the CEO of Flock framed it as a a battle or a a conflict between safety and privacy. Yeah. And so I guess maybe it’s not anti safety, but, like, privacy. But I I take on bridge with this concept of it being safety versus privacy because we never had privacy to begin with, and anyone who thinks that we did is

Romanian TVee:No. Like, same thing.

Malcolm Collins:It’s the same code

Romanian TVee:word for, like, equity, equality, social justice. They they just rebranded. Right? Now environmentalist stuff, I don’t think it’s going to go away because it’s codified in a lot of laws, especially in European Union. Yeah. And you also have, like, the scandal with AI’s data centers, which do actually cause some environmental issues. they consume a lot of water from what I understand.

Malcolm Collins:No. Not really. We we’ve done an episode. We haven’t done it live, but if you contrast it with other things that consume water, like almond production, it’s like one one thousandth or something. Like, this is in The U United States. You can look up this graph. It’s really crazy.

Simone Collins:No. I believe it. I believe it.

Romanian TVee:But the propaganda is basically that Did people

Malcolm Collins:buy yeah. It’s all over the place.

Romanian TVee:They bought it. It’s not that they buy it. They already bought it. Right? Like, an AI, you build one and you have a desert around it.

Malcolm Collins:Yeah. So

Romanian TVee:It’s wild.

Malcolm Collins:But I don’t care. I mean, I’m having so much fun with AI AI. By the way, have you been having what are what are you doing with AI these days?

Romanian TVee:I mean, AI is, in my opinion, it’s like a glorified grammar check engine. Right? The the the spell check engines. Right? Like, AI is pretty much functioning the same way. I I can use it as a search engine. It’s a lot better than just using Google Search, especially after Google Search was nerfed significantly. Yeah. You can use it in order to

Malcolm Collins:Not everybody like you you personally. Are you vibe coding yet? Are you making AI images? You use it for title card? Oh, yeah. You don’t use it for title cards now that I remembered.

Romanian TVee:No. No. No. Because I’ve noticed that there are people out there that are AI vegans. they yeah. Like, let’s put it like that. Right? Like, they will refuse to use AI no matter what. and so I I don’t use AI in in my work, not because I personally don’t like AI. Like, I use it for fun and recreational activities. Yeah. But when it comes to anything that’s customer facing, I I flat out refuse to use it. I don’t mind if father use it. Right?

Malcolm Collins:Do you see it

Simone Collins:as a professional liability?

Romanian TVee:It is a professional liability, especially in the right. Especially in the indie games, scene.

Simone Collins:Fair point. Yeah.

Romanian TVee:If you

Malcolm Collins:use AI indie games? I didn’t know that.

Romanian TVee:Right. I’ll I’ll tell you after. anyway, the, the whole thing is that if you use AI in, in an indie game, you can lose around 20 to 30% of your customer base. Oh my god. Because, like yeah. People just refuse to buy it, and they will, give you negative reviews. And it’s the same, yeah, it’s the same vegan mentality. It’s like, doesn’t matter how good the burger is. The vegan will just not buy it.

Simone Collins:Yeah. Out of principle. No. That’s I mean, that’s the big next culture where that really we we think it’s gonna be at play because we’re seeing the same kind of, like, performative stuff at play where, like, beyond logic, people are using either biased in favor

Malcolm Collins:of or

Simone Collins:against AI.

Romanian TVee:Think the real scandal will start when the losses drop, and I’ll tell you how. First of all, there’s also going to be the actual scandal when robots come online because Yeah. Elon Musk in China is developing robots. A lot of people are single. A lot of people are going to be old and alone, and they don’t want to go to a to an elderly people home. And so, like, they could have a robot that cooks and cleans. And I can definitely see that happening. By the time we’re 65, like, I think everyone is going to have a robot the same way that people have a car.

Malcolm Collins:I mean, they aren’t really

Simone Collins:or that Chinese company looks released moving robots with, like, personality. Like, kind of combined real doll type aesthetics and fitness.

Romanian TVee:Yeah. So But but, like, here’s here’s the problem. Right? And and we already see it with AI now. A lot of people that get divorced, for example, or they get sued or anything like that, you can have a judge go on discovery and see everything you spoke with Chad GPT. There’s even, like, Smash JT, another content creator, and he’s with the lawsuit with Alisa Mercante. And I understand, like, during his discovery, like, the judge actually looked at the legal questions he was asking Chad GPT, and it didn’t make him look good in front of a jury. I I don’t know what happened with that. But the idea is, like, a lot of people don’t know that the stuff they’re talking with their AI, whether it’s, stuff about psychology, you know, like, you’re treating the AI as a therapist or, you’re venting to the AI about the way your spouse is treating you or, you’re talking with the AI about legal questions, that actually is actionable in court. Like, a judge can say, I wanna see your charge GPT, logs, and they are legally obligated to provide them because unlike, when you talk to a lawyer or when you talk to a psychiatrist, they they actually can’t keep a secret. Right? I I mean, they’re professionally obligated. Yeah. So, like, if you if you go to Chad GPT and you’re like, okay. So I’ve been this work contract and I I wanna weasel out of a clause. Right? How can I legally do it? Or what what would be the case?

Malcolm Collins:See, the what was the game again? The the Subnautica.

Simone Collins:Yeah.

Malcolm Collins:There was a game, Subnautica, where they pulled his GPT logs, and he literally asked chat GPT, how can I screw like, not pay this person the amount that they would need to for hitting certain sales figures? Oh my god. Told him to do was to delay the launch of the game.

Romanian TVee:No. No. I mean, this is a question you’d ask a lawyer. Let’s be honest. Right? Like, almost Yeah. I I I I I would say the overwhelming majority of business people at some point try to talk to a lawyer, like, can I wiggle out of this legal responsibility? And people don’t understand that when you talk to Chad GPT, you can get under discovery. Now this is not a bad this this is not a body mental thing. Now imagine when you have a robot in your house that actually needs to see everything you’re doing. And let’s say your wife wants to file a divorce, and and it has access to, like, every single video recording. So, like, they can selectively edit only the time you were having a fight or you were upset or you said something that you didn’t mean, but later on you you worked it out. Like, every single couple has it. Right? Like, there’s no love

Malcolm Collins:one of the products that we developed recently. So you can buy these little devices and put them around your house, and they have, like, little characters on them and everything. And they’re they’re very cheap. They’re, like, $45. And it records everything that’s happening in your house at all times, and then it has access to your calendar, and it has access to every family member’s email account. And then at the end of the day, it calls you to give you, like, advice on what you should be doing, help you with your email, help you with whatever you’re working on. But this would have access to literally everything in court records. And I think that we should make it so that this stuff is more private. Like, I I actually think we should law.

Romanian TVee:I I don’t think you legally can. Like, if a if a judge order if a judge orders you, for discovery

Malcolm Collins:Yeah. Yeah. So you need new laws.

Romanian TVee:Yeah. You you you yeah. You you would have to petition people to make new laws. And and I think, like, maybe there will be, but, like, probably only the politicians will have access to them because, like, we we see with the European Union’s chat control. Like, the politicians exempt themselves. And so you may have, like, laws for privacy, but they will only happen after you have, like, either a culture of, like, this constantly being an issue. And even then, you may have people saying, no. Actually, it’s a good thing. Like, it it it should be that way. Right? So Yeah. I I I I generally, like, don’t know what the future will be, but I know, like, robots are going to be definitely a huge scandal when when people start getting discovery over stuff that they talked into their own home. You may even have, like, robots that start doing stuff for safety. Like, if they hear if they see a child in danger. Right? So, like, let’s say, you’re asleep and the kid starts playing with the stove. You know, like, something that can happen. They can actually call child service protection on you. Right? Like, if you’re a person that’s a problem, they they can just go through all the recording that your robot has, select a couple of clips that make you look really bad, put them together over, like, one or two years of time period, and convince, committee that you’re an extremely bad parent, when in reality, you may not be. Right? so until these cases drop, people are not going to understand just, what they’re invited to get to their own house.

Malcolm Collins:Yeah. Makes perfect sense. Okay. So, I think this will be the final question, because there’s something I I often like to ask, in these or at least first interviews we do as people is why did you start? Like, why did you start doing your channel, and what was the original goal of the channel?

Romanian TVee:Well, it was just against censorship, and I still am now. again, I I come from a communist culture where, there was absolutely no benefit for the people, for having censorship. Like, none whatsoever. And when I saw it happening in the West, I was like, okay. I recognize this, and, someone needs to speak out. Now the reason I spoke out because at the time, if you spoke out as a British or an American person, you could get fired from your job. Like, you are against feminism, if you talked against, the culture, you you could actually have someone contact your employer and try and get you fired. I mean, you remember the the Tumblr era. Right? Like, there were blog posts with medals and s**t. It’s like, oh, we got this and this guy fired. so I was like, well, I probably I I don’t have such issue. Like, if someone says to my employer, like, what I’m doing online, no one gives a s**t. And so, yeah, you I I I decided to speak out because the things that I was saying, I believe them to be true. And I I didn’t think that it should be a problem for people talking about them.

Malcolm Collins:Yeah. Well, that’s Fun. Okay. So really No. I’m really, really glad you’re just

Simone Collins:in favor of free speech, though, and I hope you can push it because it’s getting I think it’s getting worse.

Romanian TVee:The new generation doesn’t seem to appreciate it because I don’t think they ever had it. If you’re a Zoomer growing up in the COVID era, I think the normal is the authoritarian measure.

Simone Collins:100%. Yeah.

Romanian TVee:And so whether they’re left league or right league, they they just believe authoritarianism is the normal way just like we we need to have our ideology at the top. The problem with this mentality is that when your ideology eventually splinters, like, when you eventually have different groups that in your ideology break apart, they will use the same tactics against the people that audited the majority. And and we see this with, like, feminists, and they used to be allies with the transactivists. And now the transactivists are using feminist tactics against the feminists. Right? And I think we’ll see more of that in the future.

Malcolm Collins:Okay. Well, this has been a lot of fun. I hope you continue producing. Oh, I guess final question. Why’d you choose a troll for your VTuber avatar?

Romanian TVee:It’s a blizzard artist that I knew. I actually helped him get a job because he he stopped working at the company since he felt it soul crushing. Like, he wasn’t allowed to draw what he usually draws. Yeah. And because, you know, we we got into a good vibe, he said it’s like, oh, did you want me to to do something for you? And and was taking off, and I was like, and this is a nice fad. And the the the fact that I can just stream without worrying about how my hair looks like, I I was like, okay. I’ll I’ll try it out because, I think, like, my actual camera broke. I didn’t have a high quality camera at the time. And I was like, know, let’s try feature me. And so he showed me, like, a couple of characters that he drew for his personal like, certain characters that he drew that didn’t make it into Blizzard products or stuff that he drew. And he had, like, various Murlocs and s**t. And I was like, well, you know, like, that troll looks kinda interesting. Like, I’ll I’ll take that. And then he drew it on layers, and I got it animated.

Malcolm Collins:That’s awesome. That was great to have you on. Everybody should check out his channel. You have more than one channel. Right?

Romanian TVee:Yeah. I have Romanian TV where I talk about politics. I have lack of entertainment where I talk about anime and comic books and cultural things. And I have Romanian TV livestream where I livestream. I keep them separate because people were complaining that I was mixing the subjects and they weren’t they they they weren’t enjoying subscribing for politics and getting news about anime.

Malcolm Collins:We’ve gotten that sometimes, but I just make my audience eat it. I’m like they’re like, why do you have so many VTubers on? And I was like, I don’t care because VTubers are relevant to our politics. Anime is relevant to our politics these days. And if you don’t think it is, then you’re just not plugged in.

Romanian TVee:It it is upsetting, in my opinion, that anime is relevant because when I grew up, Abedica used to have, like, such amazing TV shows. You guys had Prison Break, Battlestar Galactica, Star Trek. I grew up with Stargate, but I guess, like, that’s Canadian, although it was in the the idea was, like, anime existed. And if you told someone about it, it’s like, that’s cartoons. That’s for kids. It’s like, watch stuffing for grown ups. Watch Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Like, that was, you know, like, stuff.

Malcolm Collins:Yeah.

Romanian TVee:And the reason anime is popular now is that the anime became better is that America used safety and sloppified the entertainment. Like, you guys completely destroyed your soft power, and it’s getting to the point where a Dodger station has Gargura singing rather than a Disney character.

Malcolm Collins:Oh, absolutely. I mean, Disney has completely destroyed their brand chasing this stuff. And, you know, even for our kids, you know, we we show them Miyazaki movies and not Disney movies. Yeah. And and kids love Miyazaki. I I gotta recommend anybody with kids, like, go Miyazaki before Disney. The kids really emotionally engage with them much better.

Romanian TVee:I mean, I I’m going to grow them with with stuff like Dragon Ball and Naruto. I think, like, anime has a lot more right wing themes. I mean, look at Naruto. Right? Like like, what what is Naruto? It’s like love about your own country, the power of friendship. Right? Like, the sanctity of marriage is even there. Like, Naruto doesn’t go sleep around. Sakura doesn’t sleep around. Right? Like, they actually wait for their difficult others when they have children. Like, and I see right wicker freaking out. Oh, my fan service. Oh, this is pornography. You’re showing it to a child. It’s like, motherfucker, have you seen Netflix? Like, you would rather show a kid Netflix rather than show him Naruto. Like, I remember saying why? Because they have a couple of jokes there about Tiris and that’s horrifying you. Like, I grew up with Baywatch. That hardened me as a man. Well, growing up with with stuff like Buffy the Vampire Slayer. You know, like the America’s had fan service and sex and over every single TV show. Like, it’s Yes. And and and the fan service in anime is usually done for jokes. Right? It’s not done because, like, they’re trying necessarily to to to indoctrinate people like they’re saying.

Malcolm Collins:Yeah. I I I’ve gotta recommend to people who are wondering how right wing is Naruto. Have you seen Rock Lee gets red pilled?

Romanian TVee:No. No. But, like, I I wanna make it clear. Like, I don’t think right wing in the sense that they want you to vote Republican. I’m I’m saying, like, certain themes that just do not exist in American TV shows.

Malcolm Collins:Okay. Okay. Okay.

Speaker 9:Gai sensei, how exactly does this benefit the Hidden Leaf Village? What do you mean? Well, think about it. Why are we risking our shinobi and our resources on another village that has no allegiance to us?

Speaker 8:No allegiance? Lee, the Hidden Sand is

Speaker 9:our greatest ally. Greatest ally? But they attacked us three years ago.

Speaker 8:Yes. But that was Orochimaru who

Speaker 9:But they brought a tailed beast to our village. And we dealt with it. Let bygones be bygones. our cost of living has only increased since the Konoha crushed three years ago, yet the value of the rio has fallen as our commissions stagnate.

Speaker 8:That’s simply how the economy works, Lee.

Speaker 9:That’s right. I’ve reached the ninth gate of noticing. Lee, you can’t. Haven’t you noticed, Guy sensei? Do you ever wonder how most of the Hokage tend to come from the Senju clan? I highly doubt they murdered 600,000 Senju. Don’t you realize how many bodies that would be, Gai sensei? Well, the population statistics state otherwise.

Romanian TVee:like No. Like, the the anime themes are something that the left wants to go up now. The attack on Titan was the last straw, I think. They they even had, like, articles saying it promotes fascism.

Malcolm Collins:Uh-oh. Yeah.

Romanian TVee:They also hate hated legacy of the shield hero where the villain is a woman that falsely accuses the main character of rape. And then

Malcolm Collins:Oh, yeah. That that well, that’s season one. Great great show.

Romanian TVee:Yeah. And so you have Vice write an article saying anime is pedophilic. And it does see that after that, there is this huge accusation that anime needs western consultants.

Malcolm Collins:Well, I mean, this has been fun for me because so many leftists, like, thought anime was safe for them and then, like, x started translating anime

Simone Collins:creators.

Malcolm Collins:And the the right has become more pro anime, and and they’ve just now, like, what what are you, like, a chud? You like anime? Like Yeah. Yeah. No.

Romanian TVee:I I I mean, a lot of right wingers were banned from everywhere, and they found refuge in anime forums like 4chan and other places because it was the only places that would have them during the Jack Dorsey era. And so being rightly got associated with anime because they used a lot of the anime aesthetics. And Yeah. They they made friends with a lot of people from the anime community. Yeah. But, again, now the idea is to funnel anime through western places like Crunchyroll. And Crunchyroll will have terms of service and what’s acceptable and not to have in an anime. It will start with sexualization like it started with comic books in America. Right? It was like, you shouldn’t sexualize women in Batman or whatever. Yeah. And then move on from sexualization to political talking points.

Malcolm Collins:Yeah. Yeah. Well, I mean, it it I I think Crunchyroll has tried with that. I think I mean, I hope that they’re because everybody knows to hate Crunchyroll now. Like, they know that they’re, like, left as nonsense and, like, go with something else, like, dive if you can. But still

Romanian TVee:I mean, I I I think they’re still making money, so it doesn’t matter how many people hit.

Malcolm Collins:It doesn’t. Alright. Well, it was wonderful to have you on. Please check out his stuff, and I’ll end right here.

Speaker 4:So we just did a major update with our fab that makes it much easier to play and use for free. we’ve always had the capability to run free models, but we realized that some people thought that, like, Candy AI and Janitor AI were cheaper to use. And I realized I was like, well, our free models are better than their best paid models, so I don’t know what you’re talking about. And then I realized people just weren’t using our free models. So I I I put those in, and the paid models are for if you wanna use, you know, the Cadillac version of our service. If you’re like, I only want the smartest AI ever, that’s what ends up costing so much about it because we put on the literal, most advanced models that anyone can access in the world right now as options for telling your stories. but I wanted to make the free models easier.

Speaker 5:Oh, and if you aren’t familiar with what I’m talking about is r fab.ai or just Google Reality Fabricator. and it is a, it’s what we’re recording this on, so it does all sorts of different things. But the main thing it does is AI sort of tell your own, adventure stories or companion chats or, you know, play through an isekai novel, like those old game text based games except truly open world.

Octavian Collins:We just went next to we just passed the top, and that did a spot.

Torsten Collins:And what are you gonna do with all this?

Octavian Collins:I’m gonna show it to her and how it works when I go done all of them and pass this.

Torsten Collins:You may do some target practice?

Octavian Collins:Yes. I’m gonna show them how to put some things on, how to load it. Get one one give me bullet. Some more to two. Mommy, what are you doing?

Torsten Collins:They are loading up their ammo, Indy. What do you think?

Octavian Collins:I need some.

Torsten Collins:No. Oh my goodness, girl.

In this Tract Series episode, we review a an argument presented by Graf Herzog Kaiser on X exploring the hypothesis that angels are a distinct extra-dimensional species with their own society, technology, and history.

The discussion examines how this view aligns with a serious reading of the Bible, including Genesis 6, the Nephilim, and references in Enoch, while contrasting it with materialist monist and Techno Puritan perspectives.

We analyze biblical descriptions of angels in human form, as radiant beings, and as multidimensional entities, along with connections to ancient myths and the Book of Enoch. The conversation highlights the value of open, evidence-based inquiry into scripture and reality, even when hypotheses differ from our own framework.

Huge thanks to Graf for the thoughtful and beautifully produced argument!

Episode Transcript

Malcolm Collins: Hello, Simone. I’m excited to be here with you today. Today, we are going to be doing something unique, which is reviewing a fan made video on the track series, which is proposing an alternative hypothesis that angels are a separate, essentially, species. Species is the wrong word. Extra dimensional beings. And I have actually argued this in the past, and people can say, well, that seems to contradict a lot of the other stuff you say about angels or heaven or anything like that. And the reason I wanted to review this is, one, to clarify in my own beliefs, like, what sort of people I think are genuinely trying to figure out what’s true, and I put in the larger umbrella of having beliefs similar to ours and, this techno puritan tree. It’s not about agreeing with whatever we think about the world. It’s about being on a genuine quest to try to determine believing that the bible is a a a serious book saying serious meaningful things, but in a way that is not just obviously incompatible with reality as we observe it.

Simone Collins:Agree. Yes.

Malcolm Collins:So if I was going to way two different things here. One person says to me, angels are a a separate race with their own, you know, military structure, governance structure of extra dimensional entities that serve god who created the universe. Right? One person says that, and that sounds weird. And that sounds anti Christian to a lot of people because it’s not something you know, you you say it in Sunday school or whatever. But it’s not actually at odds. Like, if you in the way I do, like, really interested in in reading the bible and trying to understand it. Is that actually that particularly at odds with with the bible, and it’s not at odds with our current understanding of reality or science or anything like that? Yeah. Whereas, if another person comes to me and says something like, I think there recently was a global spanning flood that killed all land animals. I’m like, that doesn’t appear not just in the geological record, but we would see it in the genetic record from different animals. They wouldn’t speciate at all these various periods in history unless God was just intentionally trying to f with us. Right? Like, you’re messing with the record to as, like, a test of faith or something, which I, you know, don’t don’t think is the way that god works. Alternatively, if angels were and and we’ll go over this. And I think this is interesting because it’s it’s not what I believe, but I think it’s totally plausible with both our current understanding of science and a straight reading of the bible. An alternate type of being with its own culture, governance structure, military structure, way of living. I and I and I said, I’m I’m looking at the bible. I would not think the bible had deceived me about the nature of angels. I I would say, okay. Yeah. This seems to align with a lot of the way the bible talks about angels in various parts. So let’s go into this. And what’s really cool about how he did this is he built it as an AI because he’s practicing his AI skills in terms of putting this together. So let’s go.

Graf Herzog Kaiser:Before I begin, I want to mention how valuable I have personally found your track series to be. I don’t align with your beliefs entirely, but I am continuously surprised at how much I do agree with considering my theological background. This is my response to your invitation for commentary on the topic of angels taking human wives in the antediluvian world as described in Genesis. This is not intended to sway you to the position presented, only to provide an expanded perspective. Some information aligns with your materialist monist perspective, some may not. I hope you find it enlightening all the same. I want to credit Timothy Alberino with much of the information I want to introduce.

Malcolm Collins:So a few things here. one, I like the AI work, the the camera angles and stuff like this, you know, using Kavka plus AI to put this together.

Simone Collins:Yeah. Brock Imagine is when he made this in.

Malcolm Collins:Yeah. I I think this looks really good.

Simone Collins:It looks great.

Malcolm Collins:The second thing is is Timothy Alberino, has really interesting ideas. I decided to look him up after this. I don’t what’s what’s interesting is I would consider everything within this belief system under techno empiricism. I would not even though it’s radically different from our beliefs, it seems to be a genuine search for the truth. I would not consider Timothy Alberino’s own beliefs under the the

Simone Collins:the Techno puritan umbrella?

Malcolm Collins:Yeah. And the reason being is a major one of Timothy Alberino’s beliefs or a lot of his belief system seems to be constructed to argue that some humans, will not be able to be saved by Christ if they have engaged in significant technological or genetic modification of themselves. EG, any sort of, like, some amount of genetic engineering, some amount of AI integration, some amount of, and I just I think that that’s a so

Simone Collins:That seems incredibly arbitrary.

Malcolm Collins:It is incredibly arbitrary.

Speaker 11:And I’d go further than to call his views arbitrary. I would say they are very clearly anti biblical. Throughout the Bible, we hear that god’s interest is focused on beings called the sons of man. Why does he need to distinguish the sons of man from men unless the sons of man includes types of beings that today we would not consider men, e g genetically modified, integrated with AI, whatever. It’s a very odd word that is consistently used throughout the bible, very odd framing. There’s no need to word it that way unless you were talking about something that is descended from man but not man. And worse than that, he’s in an anti biblical way acting as a moderator of God’s grace. Being like, well, you know, if you do x amount of genetic modification, now God’s grace can’t reach you. Like, what? Like, especially if the Bible seems to imply the exact opposite, that’s quite, in my view, like, a deeply bad thing to insinuate

Speaker 13:Now I don’t want to overstate his position here. He is actually pretty flexible. Specifically, it’s not just any amount of genetic engineering. It’s he’s very interested in adding nonhuman sequences to the human genetic line. Specifically, in an interview, he has said that human to human genetic repair that stays inside the human matrix is fine. He’s more interested in nonhuman segments of being within the human body, but this I find almost, like, worse when you actually think about it. It’s like somebody gets to heaven. obviously, this isn’t the way it works, but I’m I’m speaking in in analogy here. And they’re like, oh, sorry. At one point, your heart was repaired with a pig valve. You gotta go to god Jesus grace just can’t reach you if you if you had your heart repaired with a pig valve. Or as we get better with medicine and we make it so that, you know, somebody’s dying and their liver can be replaced with a genetically modified pig liver. Right? Oh, they don’t get into heaven? That’s insane. That is genuinely, like, insane to me, to think that God’s grace is so incredibly limited.

Speaker 14:As a note, he has said that he doesn’t think that artificial valves and stuff like that prevent you from being subject to God’s grace, but he’s never addressed the topic of xenoinplantations. and I’m sure if he did because his argument doesn’t seem very serious to me, he’d just fold and take the easy answer and say, no, of course, when that goes against what his actual theology says. Because I think it’s a theology that it’s he feels comfortable having now because he doesn’t need to talk to somebody face to face and say, you, individual, are not subject to Christ’s grace anymore.

Speaker 15:This is one of those beliefs that’s easy to have now because of the anxieties he has around how humanity is changing and how the world is changing around him. but the moment he needs to, you know, in a crowd, point at some five year old kid and say, god’s grace doesn’t reach this kid because he underwent some genetic modification to not die at a young age of cancer or something like that. One, he loses the crowd in that moment because, you know, it goes against this the sons of man stuff from the bible. But two, it’s just obviously not the way God operates, and everyone would immediately see that the moment he’s talking about real people instead of hypothetical people. and keep in mind how broad his theology would actually reach. You know? This would rule god’s grace out of of anyone who is, diabetic and using insulin that comes from, you know, hept in from pigs’ gut structures and stuff like that. it’s it’s just not a theology that seems coherent with a just god, or coherent with what the Bible says.

Speaker 16:And as a final note here, if you wanna say something like, well, that’s not exactly what sons of man would have meant to a Jew of this time period given the way that their language was constructed and everything, and I’d be like, well, yeah, God’s not gonna be able to convey to Jews of that time period that the language needs to be inclusive of humans that don’t seem like what you would consider a human anymore. Right? So how would he do that? How would he convey and make sure that that is written into the scripture? He would make their language structure that way. He would make them not see it as a weird thing to keep saying. But to us today with our current technological context, it is absolutely miraculous that that is captured so many times throughout the text in both the New and Old Testament.

Speaker 17:That didn’t need to be the way that Jewish language worked. It miraculously was the way the Jewish language worked so that a truth could be captured in the text. If God had had this very, very strong belief against genetically modified humans or any sort of change in the human species that Timothy has, he certainly would have not made the Jews talk about humans in this way throughout the bible in both the old and new testament. And I need to be clear here when you’re like, well, Malcolm, he says it’s just not other animals. That gives us quite a... No. What about when you’re talking about, like, radiation hardening of the genome on spaceships? You’re most certainly going to need to use the genomes of some sort of extremophile creature to do that. humans cannot take to space. We cannot conquer the stars likely, without genetic modification that uses other animals or that would fall at least into a category of then you’re making it from scratch with AI or something that would still put him in a position where he’s like, no. That doesn’t count.

Speaker 19:And if you want it out here, what you need to be able to do is answer these two questions. The first question, if God really strongly meant that he did not want human genetic modification to happen, why did he allow the text to be recorded in a way that could be read this way in the future in the language that it would be or in any of the languages that it would be commonly read in the far future? The second being, uh, if God had actually wanted to incorporate into the text that this is okay, knowing that he couldn’t communicate this to people of the time period, what better way? Like, what more thorough way could he have communicated that than this linguistical anomaly?

Malcolm Collins:So if you look at us, right, there are places where I will absolutely admit I take an endpoint, and I say, this endpoint must be true. Right? And I when I say this endpoint must be true, it’s because the preponderance of evidence points to a particular endpoint. Correct. And then I say, and because the bible is true, I wanna find out how the bible argues for this endpoint or works alongside this endpoint. Take the flood that I just talked about, like a a a globe spanning flood. And you could say, well, the flood was local. Yeah. But the bible doesn’t talk about a local flood. Okay? So we need to find out how the bible was talking about a global flood. And there’s various ways you can do that. You can our episode on that. But the the Timothy Alberino with with one particular topic, this idea that we should not continue to use science to advance the human condition where it modifies how we perceive the world or or or some other things. That appears to just be his personal inclination, not particularly derived from a reading of the bible or anything like that. And then he works backwards to that from the bible, which is very anti techno puritan. However, nothing from this I would see as anti techno puritan. And and note, I’m actually okay with that conclusion if I felt that there was anything in the bible that argued for that conclusion.

Graf Herzog Kaiser:I just don’t see it.

Simone Collins:I haven’t seen it yet in all my rereadings. We’ll change our minds if we do.

Malcolm Collins:Just so you know how he gets to it so you can understand Okay. Is he first takes the argument of, well, the Bible does argue about, like, the watchers or the Nephilim or the, you know, etcetera. Right? K. Which which are mentioned, like, the children of God. And that these people, he then argues, are not subject to being saved by Christ, which is not laid out by the Bible, particularly the children of God not being know, but if if they turn out to be talking about the the sons of Seth versus the sons of Cain, we’ve talked about this. That’s never said in the bible, but he he he then takes the argument that that’s what’s being laid out here, that Christ can’t save, which is I don’t understand why you take that perspective. And then he uses that to argue. So, clearly, there’s a type of human that Christ can’t save, which we we also argue as well with the concept of the pre Adamite. But he argues that these are humans that are, like, genetically polluted by, like, this angel race or something like that, which has superior technology in some way that could be analogous to human genetic engineering. Or it’s a very bad argument. I’m gonna

Simone Collins:be honest.

Malcolm Collins:But I thought, like, the parts of the argument that this guy took to be interesting.

Simone Collins:Yeah.

Speaker 9:Note here if you wanna ask Malcolm. If you find it plausible, coherent with both reality as we observe it and the bible taken seriously, that angels are an alternate race that actually bred with humans at some point, why don’t you believe it? Why do you opt for your understanding? And I would note here the classic techno puritan understanding or the one that I have advanced in past tracks. I would bar as much more coherent with our observation of the natural world and slightly less coherent with what’s written in the bible. Right? Like, I think that this one tracks with what’s written in the bible slightly more if you’re looking for a perfectly coherent explanation, but it dramatically less. I I I’m gonna say, like, at 10% the rate, it’s coherent with the natural world. It just doesn’t openly object to the natural world. Whereas mine, I would say, is maybe 10% less coherent with a a literalist reading of the bibles we have done and, you know, significantly more coherent with the natural world. Specifically, we don’t have an archaeological record of these giant beings, which I would expect us to have if they were real. We we should be able to see it in ancient DNA samples. Like, it would look very, very different from normal human DNA if this happened. Um, this requirement still requires a flood that wiped out nearly all of these types of beings and just not Noah’s line. Even if this wasn’t a world spanning flood, this is an event we would almost certainly see in the archaeological record. You have to just just a lot of stuff. So I like it. I think it’s plausible. It’s not, like, obviously wrong. However, I think it’s dramatically dramatically less likely than our interpretation.

Speaker 18:Okay. I thought about this some more, and I think I have an out for them. So let’s see the evidence we have here. We have throughout ancient civilization, people describing the children of deities or semi deities and men, and they often have very similar descriptions. They are unusually large. They are unusually powerful, and people pay an unusual amount of attention to them and see them as, like, local heroes. But because we see this all over the place in the in this region during this time, we should be seeing them in the archaeological record, and we just don’t. However, what if the reason we don’t see them in the archaeological record because their ability that makes people see them as extremely large, as glowing, as extremely beautiful, as, these these figures worthy of intense attention isn’t a physical one, but sort of like a hypnosis sort of a thing or, an illusion that causes an intense infatuation. And as part of this infatuation, you see them as extra large. and so the their real bodies were not unusually large. It’s just the way people perceived them. And this is a side part of them being men of renown as well as within the other, traditions, them doing these great feats. That could allow you to have both. You still have the problem of the genetics in the archaeological record, but you could say we’ve lost most of the genetics of this period. you still have the problem of you needing a literal flood to kill out lots and lots and lots and lots of people that didn’t appear to happen in this in this region. But that does solve the large bodies problem in, I think, a really elegant way.

Speaker 10:if you wanna see how we interpret those lines from Genesis, you can go see our episode on that. I think it’s one of the best episodes we’ve ever done. if you because we we go into a lot. If you want to know generally how we see angels, I believe that most of the time when people saw an angel, what they saw was a hallucination of some sort. It’s just a a natural hallucination. And god used these to appear to people at specific moments to represent the way we are supposed to interpret within our heads and within popular culture, partitions of God within sort of the heavenly ecosystem, but that they are not necessarily or they just don’t need to be actual manifestations on Earth for a person to be honest when they say, I saw x or I saw y, nor do they need to be dishonest representations from God.

Simone Collins:I I for like

Graf Herzog Kaiser:about a decade. But over the last few years, he’s appeared on high profile interviews including Joe Rogan in this past July. As I understand it, Alberino rejects what he calls medieval theology of angels as purely immaterial spirits. He treats them as physical, nonhuman intelligent beings who belong to a real civilization that possesses technology, language, and military capacity. The biblical text itself supports corporeality in places.

Malcolm Collins:So I wanna note what he said here. the idea of angels having ranks, the ideas of angels having a society, This isn’t as well attested as you might think if you, are reading the core biblical text. So when you look at the way that we typically do track series, we try to narrow expand the biblical text, consider canon to, like, Enoch and some of the other stuff. This especially early myths around the bible and how it’s structured, this is completely in line with that. And I don’t I don’t have, like, a these books definitely count. These books definitely don’t count. I have a these books count to me. These books don’t count to me, but I I can’t say, and and note here what I’m saying, techno parativism or whatever more broadly. I’m just saying what I think is true in a rational argument. Right? because I could be swayed by any rational argument. And when I hear this, I hear the beginnings of a rational framework that could sway me if I saw enough additional evidence as I was going through the bible. Like, since the beginning of the track series, I have radically changed my beliefs on a few topics based on evidence. Right? And and and that evidence I mean, this is why I take this broader understanding here that I was talking to Simone about is and it’s where I use this word, this person’s a techno puritan, this person’s a not, is I’m saying, are they somebody that if we sat down and we started having an argument about what was true about reality, we would be using the same evidence sources in the same way? And that means that we can intercommunicate about the bible. Right? If somebody’s gonna come to me and they’re gonna point to one line, right, like, you know, upon this rock, build my church or something like that, and they’re gonna then extrapolate some giant theology from that. I would find that completely unpersuasive, but I’m like, you’re just not the type of person I can talk to because that’s not how I interpret reality or what the bible says or anything like that. I I I need to look at the plurality of lines in context, what they likely meant, from from my understanding to people of this period. Not just like, I said one line, now it’s over. Right? But that’s not what he’s doing here. Right? He’s he’s trying to, well, as we’ll see, understand what actually is true.

Graf Herzog Kaiser:Abraham’s visitors in Genesis 18 wash their feet, rest, and eat a prepared meal. The same two angels later eat with Lot in Genesis 19 and are treated by the men of Sodom as ordinary physical males. They eat and drink, wield weapons, ride vehicles of conveyance, chariots of fire, and can take human compatible form when interacting with people on earth.

Malcolm Collins:So, we’re gonna go into the categories of angels later in this, but angels typically come in one of three categories. And I went deep into this with Leaflet on stream because I find it to be very interesting. And to me, I find it to be evidence that the bible is likely true. when angels are described in the bible, they are either described of being like humans, as he’s talking about here, eating, drinking, having weapons, etcetera, or they are described as being beings that are difficult to comprehend or beings of, like, pure power.

Simone Collins:Like that thing with all the eyes. Right? No. No. No.

Malcolm Collins:That’s the third category.

Simone Collins:We’ll do that in a second. Okay.

Malcolm Collins:This is like a being of of of of radiance came down. It is like they talk about it. Samuel’s mother, I think, talks about an angel in this way, where she sort of talked about as, like, beings of pure radiance. Right?

Speaker 4:Sorry. I meant Samson’s mother. for the direct quote here, it says, the woman came and told her husband saying, a man of god came unto me, and his countenance was like the countenance of an angel of god, very terrible. But I asked him not whence he was, neither he told me his and this is translated a few ways. You get, very awesome. But, basically, it just means, like, an overwhelming presence.

Malcolm Collins:And then the final category is, like, inter like, interlocking wheels covered in eyes that move in right angles, but not at right angles and in multiple directions at the same time. And what I find interesting about this final category or beings with a bunch of different heads that are moving in a way that doesn’t make physical sense is that they are describing something, like when you’re describing the odd way that this is moving, that might make sense if you were talking about a multidimensional entity. If you were talking about an entity that existed in six, seven, even just four dimensions, you would get behavior that looked a lot about like that if you were projecting it into four dimensions. Oh, sorry. Three dimensions. Fascinating point. Yeah.

Speaker 6:To get an understanding of what I’m talking about here, now as I beheld living creatures, behold one wheel upon earth by living creatures with his four faces. The appearance of the wheels and their work was like unto the color of beryl, and they had four, had one likeness. And their appearance and their work was it were a wheel in the middle of a wheel. When they went, they went upon their four sides, and they turned not when they went, which I find very interesting. And that reminds me a lot of a four dimensional object moving in a three-dimensional space or perhaps even higher than four dimensional object. As for the rings, they were high and they were dreadful. And on the rings were full of eyes round about them four. And when the living creatures went, the wheels went with them. And when the living creatures were lifted up from the earth, the wheels were lifted up. Withever the spirit was to go, went tither was their spirit to go, and the wheels were lifted over and against them for the spirit of the living creature was in the wheels. When those went, these went. And when those stood, these stood. And when those were lifted up from the earth, these wheels were lifted over and over again for the spirit of the living creature was the wheels.

Malcolm Collins:In addition to that, if we’re just even today thinking about a sci fi writer trying to describe a truly a truly alternate dimensional being, they’d be like, well, they’re not gonna have hands and feet like we do. They’re not gonna have things that we would see as comparable. And they might go so far as to describe something like the way that angels in this form are described it in the bible. And if you look at other religious traditions, you see literally nothing like this. You you see the beings was like just like the head of another animal or something like that or beings that are very big or beings that are you know? But but this truly extra dimensional sort of entity description is completely unique, especially during this period to the bible with the only real potential exception being the Mesoamerican deities, the Aztecs and stuff

Simone Collins:like No. No. No. No.

Malcolm Collins:No. No. No. Separate category, which I’d say is, like, pure cosmic horror.

Simone Collins:Those were, like, yeah, those were cosmic horror. Those were all physically comprehendible and drawable, and they did draw them. And they no. That’s Well, I mean,

Malcolm Collins:when you talk about having mouths on all of your elbows and all of your knee

Simone Collins:That’s fine. That’s I can

Malcolm Collins:easily visualize that. But what I would argue about those types of entities, and I might go further in this in some of our tracks, after reading the Aztec video, after seeing how evil a lot of these groups came up to be and the theologies that they built, I might go so far as to say that I am beginning to become convinced that these might be true inversions of reality. a very true form of, say like, devil worship. A very true form of basil worship.

Speaker 5:To understand why I would say this, I strongly suggest you watch our episode on the Aztecs and their religious and cultural practices. they basically had an entire society based around causing pain on themselves and others, and they weren’t even allowed to fully love their children or a god might notice and kill their kid or smell a flower because that could cause them too much pleasure. Really, truly an evil society from top to bottom. Again, watch that episode if you’re like, well, some things must have been nice. It’s like, no. Everything from the way children were raised to the way you related to your baby to the way you related to you know, if your friend stumbled in a procession, the crowd would tear them apart and eat them. And then they believed that they had this horrible afterlife. Even if they did everything else right, if they were a priest or a warrior and they stumbled in a procession, torn apart by their friends in Eden. And I might even elevate that to one of our religious themed episodes because I think it could be sociologically important, the concept of and and when people wonder why I why I say something can be truly and honestly divinely inspired, in the inverse, think of it this way. If you have an image and it is an exact image of reality, but then somebody inverted the colors, it would still be an exact image of reality. It would just be an inversion. Or if somebody, you know, gives you a line image, right, except they’ve inverted black to white and white to black, the image is still basically accurate. not not basically accurate. It is it is perfectly accurate, but an inversion of reality. And I think that those exist within the lessons of history.

Simone Collins:Well, someone was someone mentioned that what if Alt Hist had some, like, theory that something unrecorded and extremely dark took place in The Americas and that it just screwed up everyone who was there somehow, like, religiously.

Malcolm Collins:Militarily thinks Quetzalcoatl was a Viking. So What? He has some interesting theories on history.

Simone Collins:Alright. Right. Fine. I guess I’m I actually do not

Malcolm Collins:really love his Latin American video, where a lot of people are recommending it under our Aztec video. Was like, no. He’s not a good source on this. Oh, yeah. Just just so people understand why he’s not a good source on this, he blames a lot of their, like, really bad and evil behavior on the unpredictable weather patterns of El Nino. The problem being is that if their unpredictable weather patterns were so bad that they weren’t able to build a large population, they wouldn’t have been able to build a city that would have been second to only one European city of an equivalent period with bronze age technology.

Simone Collins:True.

Malcolm Collins:It was clear that they lived in an unusually burdened area Yeah. Even when taking into account dry spells and changes in climate. Yeah. So he just sort of ends up believing the the classic historian anthropologist take with, I think, viewing it through a critical lens, which which is disappointing, but I understand. You know? And I think he’s just overly just sentimental and not willing to say these civilizations are evil. Evil, pure evil, and so evil that we may be able to learn something from them. In the same way that I think Shabbatai Levy can help you understand Jesus by being a complete antithetical life to his, right, in in every way that I work him into my religious teachings to highlight Jesus. I think, you know, when we’re doing title cards, we sometimes will take a, a black version of an arrow and put it behind the color arrow to create a a shadow effect that causes Yeah.

Simone Collins:So you can see it better.

Malcolm Collins:Yeah. I think putting Shabbatite’s life next to Jesus’ life as a as a false messiah’s life pops the Jesus life. Right? You’re like, oh, you know, born rich, born a carpenter, put a throne on his head, had a throne of horns, those thorns. You know, claimed to be the messiah at every time of his life, but when he was on trial, never claimed to be the messiah until he was put on trial. that last one is is a lot of other Christians would disagree with that, but you can see our episode where we argue for this. But yeah. So, very interesting there. With the Aztecs, I think they can create a pop for all of Christian civilization. Right? Like, this is what the inversion looks like. Right? The true inversion. Continue here.

Graf Herzog Kaiser:In this reading, the war in heaven and the casting down of Satan are kinetic events involving real agents, not a purely mental or spiritual drama. That conception sits more comfortably with a monist materialist universe than the later ethereal model, even though Alberino himself is not a materialist monist. Returning to Genesis six.

Malcolm Collins:Now hold on. I wanna I wanna be clear about something here, because I’ve said it in other tracked episodes. Being a materialist monist and not being a materialist monist as a but approaching text tracks from a techno puritan perspective, really isn’t that particularly different. So even if you’re out there and you say, well, I believe that this is talking about real events with real entities, but they live in an alternate plane that I will call the supernatural plane, you still believe that that plane has rules and technology, and it’s just stuff that we don’t fully understand yet. So from that perspective, you are not different. Like, you’re not actually biting any differences from me. We’re still talking about the same things. And being a materialist modus, I don’t have any problems with that form of the supernatural. I have problems with this with with the wishy thinking supernatural, right, which is clearly not the form of supernatural that he’s talking about or

Simone Collins:Not at all. No. These are concrete weird things that are happening and he’s talking about that were documented here.

Graf Herzog Kaiser:Yeah. On the phrase the mighty men of old, I read it differently from a moral endorsement. If the angelic interpretation is correct, the text is simply recording how these hybrid offspring were remembered in human tradition. They were remembered as the celebrated heroes and demigods of antiquity. Think about it. Who were the parents of Hercules? A human woman and a god. The same is true of Perseus, Achilles, Bellerophon. These are not isolated. Mesopotamian, Greek, and other ancient Near Eastern and Mediterranean traditions are full of heroes of old who claim mixed divine human ancestry, possess extraordinary strength, fame, and often act as tyrannical or violent rulers. Now

Simone Collins:I didn’t expect I didn’t expect this. I thought this was surprising to see, like

Malcolm Collins:I thought this was a good argument, a very good argument.

Simone Collins:Yeah.

Malcolm Collins:People could be like, why do you think it’s good argument? It’s not a Christian argument. It’s not referencing Christian checks, and it’s not referencing science. Yes. But it is referencing a common phenomenon we see throughout this region, which is well recorded in the historic record. Right? Multiple religions in this region recorded godlike beings having children with non god beings and their children going on defeats of great renown, and that is exactly what the way the bible talks about the children of the son of God and the sons of men. It’s these these great figures who go on defeats of great renown. There’s so much that you could say it’s it’s it’s eerily similar. Right? And when I hear something like this, it it doesn’t move me all the way to this position, but it’s definitely like, yeah, that’s a really interesting phenomenon that’s being pointed out there. And this is where I think in terms of biblical analysis, it’s really okay to pull in external traditions. You know, for example, when we are talking about a global flood myth, I think it is totally per like like, fine to try to edify the bible by arguing, well, look at all these flood myths and all these other traditions. Right? Like, why is everybody talking about this flood myths when if a global flood didn’t happen?

Simone Collins:It almost seems like it’s shorthand for something.

Malcolm Collins:Yes.

Simone Collins:It’s like if if in the in thousands of years, people are like, and then they they always would jump over a shark, and it meant the end times. They would jump over a shark, and everything was over. Yeah. Yeah. But

Malcolm Collins:they

Simone Collins:they Where were the sharks? I don’t understand. Their religion cannot be true.

Malcolm Collins:Wait. Why would they jump over sharks? I don’t think they’re the whole religion is wrong. Yeah. But that’s way a techno puritan looks at it. But what I’m saying is if you wanted to argue that a literal global flood did happen, I’d have trouble believing it because of the genetic and archaeological record and and geological record and so many other things. But the the the plant record, the the difficulty in getting all the animals back to their respective locations on Earth. That all said, I do think that an a a genuinely good argument for a global flood is alternate mythological traditions that capture one.

Simone Collins:Yeah. Absolutely. I mean and what we what you talk about with the Old Testament a lot is that what you’re looking at is is is people being given a message and then, you know, hopefully, a message that is going to land and impart the right lesson that they can understand at the time. In words, can understand at the time. In scenarios, they can understand at the time. Then I could also see, like, some messages being misinterpreted, like, turning into a polytheistic worship system and then some people getting it right. Like, a message not falling quite right with all populations and being interpreted in different ways. So I yeah. It it works for me. I like it. I think it’s a really fun theory.

Malcolm Collins:And note here with the AI work, I find this pretty fun. Like, here where he’s standing in front of the actual statue he’s going to use to argue a point. Yeah. Just just

Simone Collins:just for quick, like, quick shout out. This is from Graf Herzog Kaiser, on on x at Lyro of the Kaiser. And he explained that he made all the clips and assets in Graf

Malcolm Collins:Herzog video just went out.

Simone Collins:Oh, dear. Sorry. Someone, Tex, is pulling at my camera cords.

Malcolm Collins:Would you need me

Graf Herzog Kaiser:to come

Malcolm Collins:in and beat

Simone Collins:him for you? No. He’s being he’s being a cutie. I don’t know, Cole. Right. So, anyway, what oh my god. Now I lost it. Sorry. Anyway, what at Lyro of the Kaiser on x explained who made this is that he made all the clips and assets in Grok Imagine. And then at points, he interposed historical paintings or sculptures into an image and then animated it. So the final cut was made with CapCut, which is just the the go to TikTok editing software. It’s really easy to use, especially on your phone. Now he’s learning how to use DaVinci. But in his his tweet, where he explained this, he he just took, like, actual just pictures of old paintings and then had them put into the AI generated images. Like, you know, put this take this piece of art, this sculpture, like, this actual photo of a sculpture, and it ended up in the art he made. So it’s it’s really cool to see the process that he used to make this, and that just makes it so much more fun. I I really like it, and it’s so what great delivery. Anyway, just gotta just gotta hat tip that. So cool.

Graf Herzog Kaiser:Gilgamesh is explicitly described as two thirds divine, the son of the goddess Ninsun and the human king Lugalbanda. If this carving is to scale, he would also be a giant as that’s an adult male lion he has underarm. Under the watcher reading, Genesis six supplies the original event that later legends preserved in distorted form. Nonhuman

Malcolm Collins:Note here that this is something you see throughout these traditions is that the beings that are related to gods are very, very large compared to normal humans, And the bible also talks about these entities being unusually large, particularly the Nephilim descendants are noted as unusually large when they are reencountered by the Israelites.

Graf Herzog Kaiser:When celestial beings took human women and produced offspring who became the celebrated and feared mighty men of antiquity. The biblical narrator is not calling them good. The surrounding context is the rising wickedness that triggers the flood. The phrase describes their fame, not their righteousness. In that light

Malcolm Collins:And and this this correlates with you know, if I’m reading this text in isolation, I can be like, it does appear to be talking about them being, at least I don’t think it’s obvious that they’re wicked. I think that there’s you know, you can read it in multiple ways. But if you correlate these individuals with the heroes of old and you contextualize them as, you know, pagan in a negative context, then this reading makes a lot more sense to sort of read it in that particular context, which I which I like doing. Also, if you’re wondering how I think angels work in this context, why do they sometimes appear to be extradimensional beings? Why do they sometimes appear to be just power? Why do they sometimes look like humans? You could argue it’s some form of technology they’re using And something about, like, the genetics that they choose when they appear as humans is so supernaturally good because they can choose any genetics they want that it leads to these giant offspring.

Simone Collins:So it’s like when you choose your gaming avatar, you just, like, choose, like, the super hot, like, giant person because you’re,

Malcolm Collins:like Well, yeah. You can choose anything, but it’s a downed $2.53. I wanna be that. Yeah. Yeah. That’s the way I’d interpret

Graf Herzog Kaiser:Eight Genesis six becomes a terse account of the historical reality that later myths preserved in legendary form. It’s at this point that I’m going to get extra biblical. Alberino incorporates the Book of Enoch into his analysis of the antediluvian world. The Book of Enoch contains many more details about the Watchers, their miscegenation with humanity, and the resulting fallout. The Book of Enoch places the descent of the 200 Watchers in the days of Jared. This is presented as a second distinct rebellion after the original fall of Satan and his followers, in which the Watchers bound themselves by oath to take human wives the resulting hybrids and the forbidden knowledge they taught are said to have corrupted all flesh. Alberino reads this as an attempt to prevent the Genesis three fifteen promise, the seed of the woman who would crush the serpent’s head, by contaminating the human bloodline. In that light, the statement that Noah was perfect in his generations, Genesis six nine, can be understood as including genetic purity in addition to moral blamelessness. It’s important to clarify

Malcolm Collins:No. That’s really interesting as well. so if you’re talking about a purely supernatural and traditional context, a wishy wishy being or whatever, right, breeding with humans, I’m like, no. If you’re talking about the supernatural realm being an alternate dimensional plane with different rules, a different technology, and a different civilization living within it that it had that is operated by different moral or whatever norms, that’s totally plausible to me. And that those beings might find a way if they have near infinite technology from our perspective or at least all wildly different technology than the technology we understand, that they would be able to impregnate human women. That also seems plausible to me. That if angels existed as an alternate real civilization rather than an allegory or something like that or a way of talking about far future humans as I typically think about or partitions of god as I often lose sort of talk about them as. We it would make total sense that they would go to war with each other, that they would have regular societal issues, which is what’s being talked about in things like Enoch.

Simone Collins:Mhmm.

Malcolm Collins:Yeah. That’s And then that that they could bring their technology to Earth. It’s very s g one. I’m gonna be honest.

Simone Collins:It is so s g yeah. It’s extremely s g one.

Graf Herzog Kaiser:Genetic purity in this context. If by the time of the flood of Noah, all flesh had been corrupted, then the significance of Noah was his ability to trace his lineage back to Adam, that he was fully human. This would contrast with the mixed heritage of the mighty men of old. The point is Noah’s humanity, not his race. One named figure may already be familiar from your earlier work on the books of Moses. In Leviticus 16, the life goat on the day of atonement is sent to Azazel in the wilderness. Azazel is the only watcher from the book of Enoch who is named in the canonical Old Testament. In first

Malcolm Collins:No. I I I wanna be clear here because he’s gonna talk more about Azazel. This is why I get so annoyed when people are like, Azazel isn’t a demon. It’s the name of a cliff or something like that. I’m like, no. Especially if you’re reading the surrounding text. Azazel was very clearly a demon. This ceremony was being performed for a demon. It was an evil ceremony. It is not a ceremony that we should be copying or trying to analogize to Jesus’ life as some people do. it’s it’s very bad, very naughty. Don’t do it. Okay?

Graf Herzog Kaiser:Enoch. He is one of the chief leaders of the 200 and is specifically bound in the desert under rocks and darkness. The New Testament writers clearly knew the larger tradition. Two Peter two four speaks of angels cast into Tartarus and chains of darkness. Jude six describes angels who left their proper dwelling and are kept in eternal chains, and Jude fourteen and fifteen directly quotes one Enoch one nine. In the techno puritan tracts, you have pointed out that the conscious intermediate state, souls going immediately to

Malcolm Collins:Oh, wait. Before I go further, wanna talk about the book of Enoch here. so the way that I think that God works in terms of edifying which parts of these traditions or books we are supposed to really investigate for what is true is through the versions of them he preserves within traditions and with the versions of them he keeps logically consistent. Right? And that’s why we throw out things like revelations and stuff like this as many other theologians did. Martin Luther did, for example. And we were like, oh, that’s horrible. You do. I’m like, it’s actually a very common thing for, like, really nerdy theologians to do, who, like, really care about what’s true and what’s not true when they when they begin to investigate this more. and and because I’m willing to say a bible that’s something like the council of Nicene says one of the books is definitely canon, I’m like, I I don’t see it as as canon as the others. I’m also willing to be like, the book of Enoch might have more than the to to read to it than than you would think just because it wasn’t one of the canonized texts. Right? Like, I’m I’m willing to take that very seriously. I just haven’t seen, from my perspective, enough correlation with with that and reality for me to say, I definitely wanna incorporate it. But it’s something I’m curious about, and I think it’s important to be educated on and within.

Graf Herzog Kaiser:To a place of reward or punishment looks more like the Greek framework of Elysium and Tartarus than the earlier biblical picture of the dead resting until a future bodily resurrection. Second Peter’s choice of language is therefore striking. The verb tataro, cast into tataris, appears only once in the New Testament, and it uses a term that would have been culturally familiar in the Greco Roman world as a deep conscious place of confinement and punishment for rebellious divine beings, originally the Titans. Peter is not inventing a new concept. He is reaching for a known category to describe the present condition of the sinning angels held in chains of darkness still awaiting the final judgment. From the watcher perspective, this fits.

Malcolm Collins:So this is really interesting. and what he’s gonna argue here is that you know how we talk about, like, the problems with, like, the immediate heaven and the immediate hell versus the land to come and the lake of fire and everything like that?

Simone Collins:Yeah. Yeah.

Malcolm Collins:he basically argues, as as this other guy does, that hell does exist. Like, immediate hell does exist, but it’s for angels only and not for human beings. The the this this chained up place. And and that I mean, imagine you’re talking about these extra dimensional beings had a war and have some sort of extra dimensional prison system. This prison system might genuinely have chains and fire and simulated pain in it. You know? We don’t we don’t know how these beings treat morality. It may not be exactly god’s judgment, but but the way that this civilization operates.

Simone Collins:Yeah. Or, you know, there could be interdimensional rules of, like, look, if you interfere with on if you go on my turf, if you trespass, you will be subject to punishment. I don’t know. It’s interesting. It’s interesting

Graf Herzog Kaiser:The 200 not annihilated, nor are they free to operate. They are confined in a conscious intermediate state until the great day. That is precisely the kind of intermediate existence that you have noted as more Greek than classical Jewish. Whether one takes this as evidence that the New Testament authors were already operating with a blended cosmology, or as evidence that they regarded the Enochic tradition as describing a real, if temporary, holding place for a specific class of rebels, the terminological choice is not accidental. Furthermore, I personally do not believe that this viewpoint negates the classically Jewish viewpoint of resting until the resurrection, as the subject of one condition is a group of rebel angels and the subject of the other is humanity.

Malcolm Collins:I I think this is really clever, and it’s something that I I want to think about more. I want to keep in mind as I’m reading more of the bible to see if it correlates with the other stuff I’m seeing. And and note here, this is a massive jump. If I accept that angels are not a way of of describing partitions of god’s consciousness, but a genuine and and are also not semi deities. That’s always been my problem. It’s it’s treating angels as a form of, like, demi deity.

Simone Collins:Right? Yeah. Like, they’re they’re they’re god’s bureaucratic underlings.

Malcolm Collins:Yeah. But if you say that no. No. No. They’re actually a a separate race that serves a role in god’s plan.

Simone Collins:Which he seems so much more concordant with the bible because he the the the Old Testament mentions other gods and also god being not cool with other gods. And, yeah, they just could just be like, there is this species. There are other dimensions and other species. Like, let’s

Malcolm Collins:But it could be other gods to the angels or specific angels that are particularly powerful that, like, it makes sense to talk about them in this context. but the point being is this idea that this other society that’s not humanity would have a form of prison for, rebellious entities, that might need to be more harsh, more severe, or just perceived very differently from the way humanity thinks about confinement seems logically consistent to me.

Simone Collins:It’s very Men in Black. Yeah. but, anyway, to continue.

Graf Herzog Kaiser:Mhmm. A quick note. The argument is not Enoch should be in the bible. It is. Jude quotes it by name. Peter describes a prison Genesis never mentions. Daniel already uses the Watcher title, and the book was on the shelf at Qumran. The authors did not have to canonize the book to know the story. Alberino’s point is that the canonicity debate is secondary. The more relevant question is whether the Enochic account preserves a tradition the biblical authors themselves treated as known and usable.

Malcolm Collins:I No. That is not what’s important to me. what’s important to me is I think a lot of the traditions that we have in the Bible used to have a lot of additional stupid stuff attached to them that, by miraculous means, did not get recorded in the the bible that became popular. Right? and the fact that they did not, I see as being part of the way that god handled this. Right? If I go back to the the what the people who originally crafted the story of Adam and Eve believed or what the people, who originally crafted the because these appear to be two different, world beginning stories, the Garden of Eden story and then the, you know, the in the beginning story, right, that most biblical scholars see as being potentially from even two different people and then sort of crafted onto each other. Now even if they aren’t, I have to ask myself, the people who believed those two stories, before we had all the other stories in the bible, what else did they believe about the world? Probably a lot of other really stupid stuff that just wasn’t recorded. Right? And I think that that’s miraculous that the stupid stuff wasn’t recorded and the stuff that correlates with their modern understanding of science Science, reality, history. That said, and that’s why if if we could go back and we could find some archaeological record of the other things that the people who first believed the stories of Genesis believed, I would not be like, oh, now those things are true. Now those things have additional value to them because this people ages ago used to believe in it. As we pointed out, if you look at what we understand about the people of Genesis, they appear to not believe in a soul. The the Jews didn’t appear to believe in a soul for centuries even after they they had their identity. And, yes, we personally do do hold on to that that part of their tradition because I think that that’s what’s recorded in all of the the recorded documents that we have. Or at least a a soul is something that’s totally separate from the the human body and identity. Not not a soul more broadly, but I talk about the soul all the time. I’m just, you know, not yep. I I think that’s it’s not a point to belabor. We have another other tracks. The point here being is I don’t think this guy would see the fact that Jews in one point of their history didn’t believe in a soul as evidence that he shouldn’t believe in a soul, But he sees that Christians at one point in the Bible’s history believed Enoch was particularly special edifying Enoch. I it’s not that I don’t see that argument as having no weight. I see it as having some strong weight, Not even, like, minor weight. Stronger weight. I just don’t see it as a slam dunk.

Graf Herzog Kaiser:Steve, I’ve said enough for the time being. If I manage to answer any of the questions you had posed, I expect I open the door to quite a few more. I welcome any questions you may have, though I’m confident enough in my ignorance to say that I won’t have all the answers. And that’s why we’re here, isn’t it? As Proverbs twenty five two says, it is the glory of God to conceal a matter and the honor of kings to seek a matter out.

Speaker 7:I think the framing here of answering questions is the wrong framing because he’s not actually answering questions. What he’s proposing is another internally coherent hypothesis for what the bible may mean if we take it seriously and we align it with our current understanding of history in the natural world, um, or supernatural world for that meaning. I mean, when I say the natural world, that would include if we could study spirits and get reliable results, then I would fold that into my understanding of the bible and try to be like, okay. Well, where does this align with this? Where does this align with this? But the the thing I hate most when Christians do this, and he’s not doing this here, is when they’re like, this is what Christians believe. You know, they’ll say this in the comments. And I’m like, how stupid can you be? Like, how actual stupid can you be to not realize that there is a diversity of beliefs among Christians and you or what your local church tells you is not the arbiter of what’s true from the bible? Like, that is theologically repulsive to me. and, actually, it was funny to me is even the group that does this the most is not the group that that most people consider Christians. Mormons do this all the time. They’re like, this is what Mormons believe. and I’m like, I’m sorry. I know a lot of Mormons who believe other things, and, I can go to, your canonical texts and show you things that disagree with this. What you mean is that’s what you were told by your local priest, and now you believe that it is a a universal truism among your people. And I think that the only group that doesn’t do this very much is Jews. Jews at least understand that there is a diversity of beliefs among Jews. You’ll occasionally get a, this is what Jews believe, and I’m like, not all Jews, buddy. And and somebody can say, well, the majority of Christians believe this. And, generally, when I have people say this is what Christians believe with a lot of confidence, it is not what the majority of Christians believe. Rarely do I actually hear them say something that is an almost universally agreed upon thing among Christians. It is it is their own local interpretation. But within techno puritanism, we don’t expect this of people. Right? Like, even within our narrow degree of faith, it’s just like, is your interpretation logically consistent, coherent? Does it take the bible seriously? Is it aimed at long term human flourishing? And is it coherent with a observable understanding of the reality around us? And that doesn’t mean that it has to be monos. That doesn’t mean that it has to be like ours. And I think that he he does this. And these two things can sit next to each other because we don’t have proof, which is right yet. And one day, we might have proof, and then we fold it in. But the moment we have proof, people who think what we think, what Simone and I thinks, and techno puritans who think what he thinks or other hypotheses are going to fold in with the right one if they if they stay techno puritans because now we have a better understanding of reality. And with that better understanding of reality, we lower the potential alternate hypotheses which count as internally consistent and plausible.

Speaker 8:Note here, the thing to me that makes the evidence strongest at what’s being described as a multidimensional entity is the way that how it moves is described. Moving without moving or moving in weird ways. Because there is no reason if you were making something up, if you were trying to make up a maximally impressive or some sort of, like, near eastern chariot analogy with slight flourishes, you wouldn’t do that. That’s not a thing you would add. But if you had actually seen a multidimensional entity moving in three-dimensional space, that would be the most striking thing and something that it would be almost impossible not to mention if you were going to retell that to somebody.

Graf Herzog Kaiser:I can say that I had quite a bit of fun with this project. I got to dive back into a biblical topic of particular interest to me and practice AI video generation and editing, all important subjects for an aspiring AI manser such as myself. Thank you both so much for all your content and your hard work in steering civilization toward the golden path. This project marks my entrance upon the field of history to join you in that noble effort. Until next time, I wish you growth, blessings, and prosperity. Auf Wiedersehen.

Simone Collins:Strong entrance, I say.

Malcolm Collins:Yeah. No. I I guess, strong entrance. I really like this. and the reason I wanted to cover this is because I wanted to point out within the wider track series, within our belief series, that techno puritanism, our belief system, does not mean that you believe what we believe. Okay? It’s not like I’m laying out what’s true about reality. What I am laying out is a way of investigating the bible. Okay? And and a way of trying to determine what’s true with a set of rules about how that conversation works.

Simone Collins:And

Malcolm Collins:that that that set of rules can mean a lot of things. Right? That set of rules is is is very, very, very broad. But what it requires is that I’m able to have a conversation with somebody. And it’s clear the way that this argument is laid out even though it’s a completely different metaphysical framework than mine. Even though it includes a supernatural realm, even though I would put all of this under the techno puritan tradition a 100% without a foot of it being techno puritan heretical. Now if you went out and without good arguments said humans engaging in genetic modification or something like that is is heretical, that’s where I’d be like, no. That is actually heretical because that’s not an argument that you could derive. But everything said in Oh, I

Simone Collins:I mean, if someone laid out really good evidence for an approved Yeah.

Malcolm Collins:If they laid out good evidence. I just haven’t seen it from the people who argue that. Right? But everything said in this video, I see as being very strongly under this tradition. And so I was talking to Simone, and it’s like, well, what then does it really mean? Like, what do you need to believe to be a techno puritan? Where are the boundaries of the tradition? And the boundaries of the tradition are around your ability to inquiry. And this is why it’s very hard to be a techno puritan within some traditions. Because if you have somebody that can just tell you when you’re trying to figure out what’s true, no. You’re wrong because the bureaucrats decided you’re wrong, then it’s really hard to ever be a techno puritan. But if you are, no matter how broad your beliefs are, as long as it appears that you are genuinely attempting to search for what is true, taking the bible morally seriously, and taking observable reality and predictable reality morally seriously, then I consider that part of this framework.

Simone Collins:Great. And I loved this so much. And yeah. Yeah. Man, view I did not expect to hear an idea I just hadn’t heard before, so I also love the new

Malcolm Collins:idea in Texas. He

Simone Collins:agrees too. Don’t worry, Betty. I love you too. Stay Even get five minutes into a podcast on Riverside because it was such bad software.

Malcolm Collins:And our fab, it works pretty well. And we’re gonna be trying out a new feature today. So

Simone Collins:Yes. I love it. The VTuber feature, the share screen, and then you put in play videos. You don’t have to, like, go to stream a video somewhere. You can just upload a file, which is Yeah. So much better. I really like it. So let’s see how this works. You said, I’m glad you liked it. As for the production, I was able to make all the clips and assets in Grok Imagine. At points, I interposed historical paintings or sculptures into image and then animated it. The final cut was made with CapCut. Now I’m trying to learn da Vinci, which is just great. So, yeah, very straightforward.

Graf Herzog Kaiser:Before I begin, I want to mention

Simone Collins:There we go. Okay.

Malcolm Collins:Okay. This this appears to be working. So Well, that

Simone Collins:looks really good. That’s really good. That is perfect. Yeah. I’m gonna mute myself while you

Malcolm Collins:Well, I mean, we can see do you wanna stop recording and see what a fan would see first, or do you wanna just record the whole video and hope it works?

This episode examines the Lindsay Clancy case in detail, including why it does not align with postpartum psychosis based on clinical insights from a trauma nurse. It explores historical and cross-cultural patterns of infanticide, legal responses in various societies, and the role of cultural and religious frameworks in shaping attitudes toward child protection. The discussion also covers the mother-baby dyad concept in modern medicine and its potential influence on perceptions of maternal responsibility.

Listeners will gain a deeper understanding of anthropological data on neonaticide and infanticide rates, comparisons across hunter-gatherer groups and historical societies, and proposals for building stronger cultural safeguards. The conversation emphasizes evidence-based analysis while addressing broader societal implications for preventing such tragedies.

Episode Transcript

Malcolm Collins:. Hello, Simone. I know this is gonna be a hard episode to you for you. as our watchers know, we have avoided talking about the topic of the Lindsay child I can’t handle it. Because it emotionally affects my wife so much.

Simone Collins:I can’t log on the Internet. I just want all the kids to be okay.

Malcolm Collins:I recently wanted to go into two parts of this in detail that I haven’t seen other people talk about a lot. And they were brought up by a fan outreach to us because I originally was of the opinion, and I know this is going to piss off our fans, that I thought that it was plausible, perhaps even very likely

Simone Collins:That Lindsay Clancy had postpartum psychosis.

Malcolm Collins:however, I received new, breakdown of the what it’s like when a woman is in that from one of our fans who is a nurse and works regularly with women in postpartum psychosis that convinced me that this was not a case of postpartum psychosis. The second thing that I wanted to explore is why do women kill their babies at such high rates? And this is something that I was unaware of both in terms of our culture and in terms of other cultures. If you look over the course of a child’s entire lifetime, the rates are about equal for husband and and wives. But if you look at infancy, the rates are overwhelming for wives.

Simone Collins:Well, that’s because they’re overwhelmingly around the women and not the dads.

Malcolm Collins:Well, it’s also true if you look at cross cultural infanticide. So, there’s

Simone Collins:Why does that change? The women have the boobs. The there’s been some

Malcolm Collins:studies on this. If you look at, bird cell, estimated systematic infanticide in hunter forager groups, it was at between 1550% depending on the groups.

Simone Collins:Woah. Woah. Woah. Woah. Woah. Woah.

Malcolm Collins:The rate sits around 41%. If we look at the Aceh in Paraguay, the homicide rate and this is before the age of 10, so they they kill much later, which is unusual, is between ten and fourteen percent. If we look at the and this is one of these things when people talk about, like, uncontacted groups, and we need to preserve their lifestyle.

Simone Collins:Not. No. I’m I’m like, man.

Malcolm Collins:No. Eraticate their lifestyle. What are you talking about?

Simone Collins:It out. End it.

Malcolm Collins:This reminds me of this African story that I had to read in school about, like, how colonialism was so bad. And in it, they talk about leaving one twin always to die in the woods, and and they talk about this is, like, this horrible thing that, like, colonizers were ending this practice. And I was like, what are you talking? Colonize out of these people. Yes. Bend them over a log and colonize this. Because, clearly, they aren’t handling things on their own. Okay?

Speaker 4:It’s the book Things Fall Apart where this is described, which was assigned reading in my school because they thought it made the Christians look bad.

Malcolm Collins:Mhmm. If we look at the Inuit people, this was a a Ramessen 1931. Of the ‘96 births recalled by parents, thirty eight girls were killed. That is forty percent of them. If we look at Australian aboriginal groups in the nineteenth century, this is Kelsaw Yongenden, they put rates at between fifteen and thirty percent. And so I wanna understand why this happens. Why do you get these incredibly high rates of mothers killing their offspring? What does the science say? What do other sources say? And I also sat

Simone Collins:with Wait. Wait. Wait. So what you’re saying basically is, like, without strong cultural or statutory or both guardrails, women just be killing their babies?

Malcolm Collins:In fact, it is so common, and the nurse goes over this, which we’ll get to later in this piece.

Simone Collins:Yeah. Shout out to you, by the way. We, like, really love and respect you, so thanks for running in. In many countries You’re the only reason why we’re doing this, and it’s your fault that I’m not gonna sleep tonight, but I love you anyway.

Malcolm Collins:In many countries outside The United States, it is it is until fairly recently in legal history, it was legal for moms to kill their their kids.

Simone Collins:Well, I mean, she pointed out that even in was it Brazil? Like, the maximum sentence is three years

Speaker 6:So I decided to look up the case of Brazil, and it’s not that the maximum sentence is three years. It’s just that that’s around what mothers often get. For some recent cases, there was the Bella Horizonte case where the baby was left in a dumpster, and this she only got two years and nine months for. Then there was the Baluma case where a baby was stabbed with scissors, and she only got two years, two months, and twenty days.

Malcolm Collins:or some other It was Brazil and Japan and China.

Simone Collins:Very licenses. You did it, and you admitted you did it. Now please serve your three years in jail for kill. And this is, like, one of the worst crimes I could imagine. No. You don’t get three months. This is an innocent child. Like, it’s one thing if, like, oh, you you killed an adult. Like, they had a good run. Okay? But, like, a child, an infant, this

Malcolm Collins:is Well, I mean, Simone, you gotta keep in mind, you talk about other cultures is doing this. As it’s, like, horrifying thing when we know this was common and normalized in ancient Rome until they became Christian.

Simone Collins:Always thought until today that this was, like, men or even, like, external people to the family resting sick, nonviable babies from, you know, screaming mothers who were too weak in their postpartum state to fight back.

Malcolm Collins:No. It’s almost always the mothers. And in fact, it’s even almost always the mothers. So I was reading cross cultural analysis.

Simone Collins:The most cruel and sick thing in the world. Like, the a baby the the only safe place you have is a kid. Like, that’s supposed to be the final safe refuge. I know you killed by that.

Malcolm Collins:So what’s important to note is, when mothers do it, because the, Lindsey Clancy case actually does not match the anthropological record. K. The anthropological record, the normal time to do this is before you start nursing the baby. With the the hormonal chemicals that create the bonding to the infant, that process happens with weaning, and that makes it much harder for the mother to kill the infant. Whereas in many cultures, what happens is they go into the woods. Basically, they have the kid with the other women, and then they, without the husband having any input at all, they get to decide if they wanna keep the baby or not. This is the way that it works in many hunter gatherer societies. Basically, the wife and the other women who are involved in the birthing process.

Simone Collins:No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No.

Malcolm Collins:And and and in forty percent of cases, they decided they didn’t want them. So I want to no.

Simone Collins:Mean, Maybe we need to rethink this whole prenatalism thing. I don’t think we’re

Malcolm Collins:Not for everyone, Simone. Not for all cultures. And I think that this is something that we’re increasingly understanding.

Simone Collins:Culture until the eighties didn’t give anesthesia to infants they were operating on. They just gave them paralytics.

Malcolm Collins:We’re I understand. And we have to move and create a new techno puritan society that helps everyone else stay in line where I I mean, I I think that’s the only option. Right? But I think what what I wanted to before I go into the Lindsey, Kancy, and the nurse stuff is to highlight for people is I think in our existing culture, both the pro choice and the pro life movement, I think, has trivialized the life of children. And I I don’t wanna say that again. I think the pro life movement has trivialized the life of children. Because if you look cross culturally outside of Christian and Jewish communities, killing babies was historically the norm. We’ve pointed out that, like, in Rome, Tacticus, who were retaining one of our future kids after complained that the Jews didn’t kill babies. He thought it was like a weird vegan thing. He’s like, why why are they doing this? It’s annoying. Right? Like, it’s something every every other society in human history understands that sometimes you just expose babies when it’s they’re inconvenient for you or whatever.

Simone Collins:Maybe we need to rethink that name.

Malcolm Collins:He he was cool in most other respects, and it was from the pre Christian period. Okay? But the I’m getting the angry look for my wife. but to continue here, I wanna go over this argument from the nurse because I found this really compelling. So she said, not sure if this is something you plan to touch at all, but in the discourse around Lindsay Calancey, seems very surface level, and I think there are a lot of things we can glean for both the crime and the reaction at large, especially if we try to look at the historic parallels. I think it might be an interesting episode. One, Lindsay Clancy didn’t have a high psychotic episode. I’ve worked as a trauma surgery nurse since 2009, never as a psych nurse. I saw a sharp rise in psychosis among my patients after Missouri legalized recreational cannabis in 2020. Now quick note here before I go further. She’s just gonna be talking about what she has learned from that. Hallucinogens, I worked in schizophrenia research, which in in schizophrenia, you you develop psychosis. I’ve been published in the field. I am a former neuroscientist and psychologist professionally, not, like, an amateur armchair. A lot of people are unaware of this, but any hallucinogen can dramatically increase the the chance that you have a psychotic break, either in terms of a case like this or in terms of it just happens to you. This is the primary reason I will advise my kids to never ever ever risk marijuana. It is one of the most dangerous drugs you can take for this reason. And when I say one of the most dangerous drugs you can take for this reason, it’s because, while it may have a low chance of killing you, it may have a low chance of OD ing you. as this person is seeing this increase in the the rate of psychosis, you don’t understand if you haven’t worked with people who have schizophrenia how terrifying it is as an illness. Because the thing about schizophrenia is you don’t know if you’re born with the schizophrenia switch or not. Some people have it, some people don’t. Now if you have the schizophrenia switch and you don’t do whatever ends up triggering it, it doesn’t trigger. And if you can make it to, like, the age of 30, it’s unlikely to ever trigger in you for your entire life. You basically made it. You’re gonna live a totally normal life. However, you can be, as one of our patients was, one of the top people in his class at John Hopkins.

Simone Collins:Oh, that you were studying when you were with Yes. Okay.

Malcolm Collins:And then I mean, when we studied him, he was a homeless person. But, he was in his early twenties, one of the top people in his class in John Hopkins. Something flipped the switch in him. I don’t remember if for him it was psychedelics or something else. And then just after that, he’s not able to live a normal life in society anymore. He hears people talking to him all the time. He he he struggles to understand what’s real and what’s not real. He begins to develop intense fears of thing like, being persecuted. It is not a fun life. Living the life of a schizophrenic individual is perhaps what I’m talking about living horrors you wouldn’t wish upon your worst nightmare enemy only second to, Alzheimer’s. And worse than Alzheimer’s

Simone Collins:I don’t know. In Alzheimer’s, you kinda don’t know what’s going on. I mean, it seems like everyone else is being mean

Malcolm Collins:to you or whatever. Right? Worse than Alzheimer’s. Yeah. It it yes. One of the worst fates that can be fall upon in a human. So even though the rate is low with a lot of this stuff, it is increased, and it’s simply not worse the fun that any high is going to give you. because highs are I’m gonna be honest, as somebody who, when I was younger and I didn’t know about this, did a number of different drugs, actually, it’s not that fun. I’m gonna be honest. Like, hallucinogens are kinda boring.

Simone Collins:I thought cannabis was more to help people not care about how bad things suck.

Malcolm Collins:Well, that’s the way some people use it, but it’s still a hallucinogen

Simone Collins:Okay.

Malcolm Collins:To continue here. These folks typically become my patients. By the way, if you’re older, if you’re, like, past 30 and you’re smoking pot, whatever, I don’t really care. These folks typically become my patients by getting shot by the police during psychotic episodes. So they fall into a unique category of committing serious crimes due to psychosis. Typically, a, they initially cooperate with police because they believe the police will help them. They readily admit to their crimes. Yes, officer. I had to set fire to the couch in the lobby because the hotel clerk was trying to sex traffic me to the gas station patrons across the street, and that was the only way I could create a distraction. You have to help me arrest all the people trying to sex traffic me. B, they only resist when the police or people around them fail to go along with the delusion. And note the delusion that she cites here having worked with people who have had psychotic breaks, very normal for a psychotic break. that’s, like, like, almost a a typical psychotic delusion. And and they and they do believe them well, actually, I’ll point this out after her. And then c, the delusions do not resolve on their own. It often takes antipsychotic medication and a lot of time with psychiatrists. And even then, they will often just play along but still believe the underlying false beliefs are true. They just learn to not advertise, and they hold false beliefs. In the case of Brian Spicer, perhaps it’s possible for psychosis to resolve once a triggered substance has been metabolized, but I’ve never seen that in practice. Yeah. That’s that’s the thing that I wanted to note here is hallucinogens don’t trigger the psychotic episode while you’re on the hallucinogens. If they trip it, they can trip it permanently. and and and psychotic episodes don’t happen all at once. They happen in waves, so you’d get one every couple weeks, every couple months, something like that, which, you know, can make it even worse because you you think you’re safe to be around. And then as one of our patients did, saw somebody walking by them on the street was a witch, and he had to kill them. You know? So, like, the this this is why I was uniquely sympathetic to the psychosis argument having seen this in patients before. Right? The the other thing that I wanna note here is this idea of, like, you really struggle to recognize something with a psychotic episode. Like, I remember we had one patient who told us about the day when everything was free. He’s like, wasn’t that so cool a few years ago when you could just, like, go into any store and take anything and, like, everything was free that day? And you now know, I mean, as a sane person, you’re like, oh, so this guy was just, like, just spent a day stealing stuff.

Simone Collins:Wow. You never told me about this before. Yeah. You never told me about, like, your interviews. That’s crazy.

Malcolm Collins:No. Two, her behavior in killing her children was a normal variant of female behavior seen nearly universally across cultures and history. mothers commit nearly all neonaticide killing a big newborn within the first twenty four hours of birth, as I said, before weaning. A 2017 meta analysis states, they found that parents committed one hundred percent of neonatocytes, 0.6 to one hundred percent, 100, if studies only considering parents were examined. 13 countries had data, and the vast majority of neonatocytes are committed by mothers. It was 100% IQR nine two point nine to one hundreds. Fathers commit very few neonatocytes. In this study, it was zero point zero zero percent. IQR, zero point zero two six point seven. child homicide perpetrators worldwide, a systemic review, PMC. According to the same meta analysis, mothers and fathers go on to commit infanticide at similar rates over the course of the first year of life. Other studies found that mothers were more likely to kill children for a longer period of time. The study cases in The United States says that mothers are, the it’s the most likely perpetrator of infanticide for the first week. and this is from, risk factors of homicide in The United States. now the the note that I need to put here, and I think she clarifies this, is the studies that say in the first year of life, men and women have the same rate of killing infants is actually very manipulative because it includes fathers who are not the biological father who have a very high rate of killing infants, and biological fathers have an incredibly low rate of killing infants. If we’re going to talk about why this is the case, it’s largely I mean, at a genetic level because if I, as a man, believe I have found a genetically superior partner or a better partner, then I’m gonna be able to have more kids with and better kids with. I can just leave my wife, and she’ll raise the kids. Or I can take the kids and have a second wife. Or, you know, there’s there’s a lot of options for a man. For a woman who decides that, especially if she doesn’t think she’s gonna be able to raise the kids on her own, she might feel she is better off killing all her children and trying again with another man, in in a in a historic context because a lot of guys aren’t gonna wanna marry a woman who has kids. And, again, Simone, allows us to fire you up. We, one, have to build a better society, and two, that involves a lot of groups and cultures that exist on Earth today not joining us in this future empire.

Simone Collins:Well, they’re not welcome.

Malcolm Collins:They’re not welcome. And I and you too often go into this suicidal empathy of, like, well, but it’s the it’s the young one.

Simone Collins:Not when it’s kids. No. Mm-mm. No. You don’t hurt

Malcolm Collins:them. Simone, that’s what leads to this. The the it’s the suicidal empathy of not dealing with the situation Yeah. That leads to it happening to future generations. but I agree with you around maybe you go some other pathway, gene drives, other things like that to handle this. there there are potential solutions. putting people in pleasure pods and saying, could just live out your life in this. Just no more.

Simone Collins:Which most people prefer, which is great.

Malcolm Collins:Yeah. I mean, as we saw from our Muslim afterlife episode, they probably prefer the pleasure

Simone Collins:of God. So Someone created an option. I think even Leaflet had this idea of, okay. What if, like, we just offered 5,000 to anyone, and in exchange, they would have to be permanently sterilized. Like, yeah. Let’s do it. Like, that I’m I’m ready for that now. I’m ready for that now. I only want people who desperately want to have kids for cultural and values aligned reasons. Like, having a kid is the the purpose of their life. I want those people to have kids. I do not want anyone else to have kids. I don’t. And I don’t think they do either. So let’s give them $5,000, and let’s do the leaflet plan. I think it’s great. I remember someone pointed out in, I think in her feed, they were like, well, that would have meant that Simone would have been sterilized. I don’t care. That’s great. I

Malcolm Collins:care. I care. But I don’t think you would have done it.

Simone Collins:Yeah. I probably wouldn’t done would not have done it. But

Malcolm Collins:yeah, man. You’re not a lean on the state for your own sterilization.

Simone Collins:I’m really not. Yeah. I I I yeah.

Malcolm Collins:I I think that would gross you out about it.

Simone Collins:That would absolutely gross me out. I really I didn’t like any sort of state sponsored anything. So

Malcolm Collins:Okay. Then she continues. There is a modern myth that men are more likely to kill their children. The studies used to support the myth put biological fathers and unrelated male adults in the same category, or she went over this, without taking into effect the Cinderella effect. Familia hearts the emotionless styles of 211 killers, Oxford Academy. This is where Katie Frost tells everyone to pause the video and Google the words mother’s boyfriend. If we assume that domestic violence rates among lesbians, shows a hidden pattern of women’s true domestic violence tendencies, I would wager that women are more likely to engage in violence towards their biological children than men. Recent child abuse statistics show mothers acting alone are more likely to abuse children than fathers acting alone. The f f y twenty twenty four data shows eighty nine point one percent of victims are maltreated by one or both parents. The parents could have acted together, acted alone, or acted with up to two people to maltreat the child. The parental categories with the largest percentages are victims maltreated by a mother acting alone, thirty seven percent, victims maltreated by the father acting alone, twenty five percent, and victims maltreated by both parents, nineteen point three percent. Page 43 on child maltreatment, 2024. But this may be an artifact from the higher rates of single mother homes. Speaking of single mother homes, wonder if the rates of white versus black infanticides oh my god. That’s not good. so the rate per a 100,000 children in The United States, for white mothers is one point seven five. For black mothers, it’s six point eleven.

Simone Collins:Oh god. No. But

Malcolm Collins:but but you wanna hear something that is gonna piss off our audience potentially, or the the Catholic part of our audience is probably gonna love this. For Hispanic mothers, it’s only 1.39. So whites do it at a higher rate than Hispanic mothers.

Simone Collins:That makes sense. Because at at least all the Hispanic mothers that we know really, really wanna be mothers.

Speaker 3:What does this say?

Malcolm Collins:Yeah. I actually think you’re right about this. I think it’s the urban monocultural infection of white mothers that makes them dehumanize their infants.

Simone Collins:Yeah. Whereas the the Hispanic mothers, we know they’re they’re less urban monoculture brained, they’re more likely to. You gotta send it out every single word, even the big ones.

Malcolm Collins:Which makes it you know? And, again, this is where I get to people where I’m like, look. Like, the Aztec may have been evil. Right? And the Mayan may have been evil, and the Incan may have been evil. But that doesn’t mean that Hispanic populations might not have some benefit to them that we do not see within white female populations in The United States. Right? And if you look at our community, like, a lot of the people who people go around, like, in our in our social networks, insulting and saying, oh, this person’s a white supremacist or whatever. The the what are the types of wives that they have the most are Hispanic wives? because they’re like, well, you know, white women. Am I right? The point here being is, you know, it’s it’s important to look at these things with nuance. Right? So, recent oh, sorry. To continue here. Three, this behavior has been accepted and condoned nearly universally across cultures and historically. This they these are claims that she’s trying to debunk here. Right? so she goes on to say, traditions around birth in many historic cultures tend to have infanticide built into them. In examining the historic record, I can’t parse out the role of the mother from the community at large in a lot of cases. Asia, Mobaki in Japan and sex selective infanticide in China, Korea, and India. Here’s a passage from an 1892 about how female infanticide was practiced in China. Now you probably do wanna close your ears on this part, So I’m gonna be going through

Simone Collins:You just, like, wave your hands in a panic fashion, and I will put the headphones back in.

Malcolm Collins:Okay. In China, slaughter of girl babies, PMC. In these countries, the courts still tolerate infanticide when committed by mothers. This mother was fined 1,000 rupees or about 15 USD at the time for throwing her newborn off a third story balcony. Court sympathy for unwed mothers who killed their child note that she was held in a prison awaiting trial. and this is a link here that she’s sharing. In Africa, there are documented traditions around infanticide specifically for twins or babies who appeared to be deformed in some way. In some tribes, the mother was killed for giving birth to twins or a baby considered deformed. One example, court lenient or mother conceived of killing a newborn. Europe. Attitudes around infanticide during the Roman Empire were noted by Tacticus. Intolerance for infanticide specifically when committed by the mother persisted in Europe to the modern era. In modern Western countries, infanticide is a crime separate from homicide. Conviction of infanticide decreases the punishment for mothers but not fathers. Infanticide and overview science direct topic. For common law countries, are separate statutes for infanticide. UK Infanticide Act of 1938, Canada section 233 of the Criminal Code of Canada, Australia, New Zealand, section one seventy eight of the Crimes Act 1951, and South Africa. In other Western countries, Germany, France, Scandinavian countries, these crimes were prosecuted using homicide statutes, but applying tradition that grants leniency to mothers who kill their babies. See, this was even in Europe, you saw this. like, America is the only place this didn’t happen. Germany actually repeated its separate infanticide law in 1998 to adapt this strategy. In Italy, throwing a newborn baby into the trash or expiring it to die is not considered a homicide at all. It’s considered abandonment. this was is this still the case in Italy? Oh my god.

Speaker 5:So I went to AI to, you know, double check on this because I was like, this sounds absolutely insane. And, of course, the AI hems and haws about the nuances of the Italian legal code. And then, of course, at the end, it’s like, well and, of course, as recently as 2023, there was a Toronto case where a newborn was left in a dumpster, and They only convicted her of abandonment. And I’m like, wait. As recently as 2023, you could leave a baby in a dumpster and only be charged with abandonment? That’s the Italian legal system for you.

Speaker 15:Note here that AI likes to be very specific, but the baby didn’t end up dying when it was left in the dumpster, and that’s why it’s okay and that the Italian legal system would have treated it differently if it did die. I’m like, bro, two years for leaving a baby in a dumpster? Like, we need to talk about that.

Malcolm Collins:Middle East Muslim world prior to Islam, burying baby girls alive was common practice. Islam prohibits infanticide, but it is still widely practiced and tolerated in countries practicing Sharia law. In Pakistan, babies abandoned to die are not reported, investigated, or counted by government statistics. Ex in the the link to the article talking about this exclusive abandoned babies, police taking cognizance of ghastly crime. Newspaper, dawn.com. Residing incidents of infanticide, neonate, and infanticide in Pakistan. An emerging crisis, science direct. Now I’m gonna put this with the links in the show notes, which is always on Substack, so you guys can look this up if you want. I’m also gonna read something else that Simone won’t wanna hear. So I I wanted to go into the statistics here around instances in which infants or kids were killed at older ages and when this happened. So you have examples of the in Northern Ghana or spirit children. This is disabled, chronically ill, are born during a family disaster. They are said to have come from the bush and destroy the house. Identification can happen well after birth, and they are sometimes killed. The Minga, Kara, Hamar, Bana in Ethiopia, cursed for wrong tooth order, deformity, or illegitimacy, or parents who skipped fertility rights. Killing can occur when the teeth come in, not only at birth. some Amazonian groups, Sakaiya, Sorara, and others, have disability, twins, children of single mothers, also occasional killing of older children. one reported case of a 12 year old buried alive for wanting to be a woman. And I want to note here, this does go against our case if we haven’t found transness in other cultures. Soraya children later judged not to be developing properly are buried alive. Why do they have to kill them in the most gruesome possible way? Barbaria and similar West African cases, which child status can be assigned from birth signs at later development, dentition, etcetera, can can cause this. And if we look at groups like the Ache, where this has been studied more, this is like a precontact group. Fourteen percent of the girl than twenty three percent of the girls were killed before the age of 10.

Simone Collins:I need my I had to cast my earphones awake because I could first kind of hear you through them, and that was very disturbing. Okay. And thank you for removing me from that part of the conversation.

Malcolm Collins:And I will say it has left you with genuine gaps in your knowledge of human history when you’re like, but the Khmer Rouge weren’t really that bad to young people. And I was like, do you remember that I had you cover your ears when I went over that? And you’re like, oh, yeah. Now I remember.

Simone Collins:Okay. So who do I need to hate? just people in the past.

Malcolm Collins:Everyone who’s not a Christian or a Jew Okay. Basically.

Simone Collins:Okay.

Malcolm Collins:Just gonna say, like, they’re different. The basically, what we get is all groups that are not Christian than Jews. Now Muslims are technically not allowed to do it, but, apparently, they do it at really high rates.

Simone Collins:So Christians and Jews. Okay. Everyone else Well, okay. Sorry.

Malcolm Collins:Protestants and Jews. Because, apparently, Catholics do it at really high rates. But by whose measure? The Italian legal systems. That was probably the most horrifying.

Speaker 7:Sorry. I made the mistake of just going off of what this woman said. I decided to look up the other, Catholic majority countries to see if they were potentially even worse than the Italian system. if you look at countries like Poland, a mother who kills her child during the period of birth under the influence of its course shall be subject to imprisonment for only three months to five years. Only three months to five years. Wow. That’s horrifying. In The Philippines, for example, if a mother kills a child in order to cover up dishonor, the range is only four months to six years, and we’ve seen some very light sentences there. So for an example of what this looks like in practice, there was a case in Poland where the mother got ten months for killing a live newborn and then cleaning up the bathroom, hiding the body, and lying to the father. The prosecutor asked for a year, but the court said that that was too harsh. And, again, it’s important to remember that Lindsay Clancy was a Catholic. Right? I think it’s important to note that there is something unique. Like, when you see a pattern, it’s worth calling it out. Like, what why why do we see this pattern? And I think this pattern is downstream of an entire society pretending they believe life begins at conception when a majority of people in that society don’t actually believe it. So then they’re like, well, then also a baby’s not really alive. Right? And then this gets extended to the entire legal system.

Malcolm Collins:Even currently? So, apparently, it is not murder to leave your baby in a trash can in Italy. Okay. Again

Simone Collins:Screw Italy. Screw Italy. Yeah. Italy’s gone. It’s done.

Malcolm Collins:It’s important to remember, as I always say, that Protestants and Jews are much culturally closer to each other, and Catholics and Islam like, technically, in both consults of them in Islam, you’re not supposed to practice exposure, but they both practice like, the countries where they’re from practice it at high rates. Again, look at Brazil like you were talking about where it’s still practiced at high rates. Sweden, look at Italy, look at you know? Okay. it’s not that the rules are different for the groups. It’s just their propensity of following the rules. And people always ask me, like, why do you have it out for, like, Catholics? And it’s like, well, stop leaving your babies in dumpsters. Like, that would maybe, like, help me. Like, again, it’s like a it’s it’s like a why do you view this group this way? And it’s like, because of history and statistics. Like, I I don’t know, like, what I’m supposed to do. Like, I go to one type of country. I go to another type of country. I’m like, this country’s trash. This country seems to have a civilization. Right? Well, not for long with all the immigrants. Right? But you know what I’m talking about here. Right? It’s important to recognize that different people are different. Right? Anyway and and that groups can improve themselves. That’s that’s the other thing I really believe. Right? Like, they both within Islam and in Catholicism, they have rules against this, and they can work to build something that’s less horrific. And and what we also see is that rules around mothers being punished less, while they might be uniquely horrific in countries like Italy, they they still happen in places like Germany and Scandinavia. Not in The United States, mind you. We we are like if you wanna know more all countries

Simone Collins:Well, hold on. I mean, there are still baby drop locations at places like hospitals and fire houses.

Malcolm Collins:They when you when you when you push the baby in the baby drop, it didn’t go into, like, a blender or off a cliff.

Simone Collins:Yeah. Okay.

Malcolm Collins:Okay? It’s somebody who was on the other side to take care of it.

Simone Collins:Yeah. That’s okay. Yeah.

Malcolm Collins:That that’s the difference. And the baby drop locations in Italy, they go to a trash compactor. And the baby drop Why did

Simone Collins:you tell me that? Oh, because it they’re dumpsters.

Malcolm Collins:Yes. Oh. Okay. Continue.

Speaker 8:I will note here for full disclosure when the while it is true that leaving the baby in the trash can or dumpster only resulted in the two years, that baby did not die. And in other cases where the baby has died in Italy, you have gotten harsher punishments. That said, you know, you see in other countries like this take France, for example. You have the case of Veronica Quirkatl, who in 2009, she killed three newborns. One, she burned in France, and two, she froze in South Korea while living there. She ended up only serving four years in prison. Then you have Dominic Corterez. 2015, she killed eight newborns, and it hid the bodies. She ended up serving only nine years in prison. Then you have Romana Cantet. This was a a Spanish origin case tried in France where she had five newborns that she either drowned or froze to death, and she only faced eight years in prison. I I will note here that, yeah, outside of Brazil and Latin America, as we’ve noticed, you know, Latin American women being less likely to do this, of the the Catholic populations, Latin America seems to be the one that takes this more seriously than the other ones. Not not the European populations as many people think of, like, the Europeans as the good ones and Latin Americans as, like, less. It’s the exact opposite that we see in in practice. It’s the Europeans that act less civilized and the Latin Americans that act more civilized.

Speaker 13:So the point I’m trying to elucidate here is in America, we sometimes forget how different we are culturally even from many European cultures. and when we freak out about something like this and we’re like, oh my god. This is inhuman. How could this happen? We may not realize that this is because we imported cultures into America that are incompatible with American cultural values when it’s just a normal thing. Oh, you froze a few babies. You burned one alive. Whatever. That’s another Tuesday. go to jail for four years. You know? we’re in America. We’re like, no. This is, a very, very serious thing because we see the world differently than they do.

Simone Collins:The This is not this is I’m not gonna sleep tonight. I’m not gonna sleep tonight. It’s important to remember,

Malcolm Collins:not all cultures are the same, and we should have some resistance about integrating some cultural groups into whatever society we aspire to build.

Simone Collins:I can’t do this. We’re gonna have to burn it all.

Malcolm Collins:Yeah. This is the thing, Simone. You need this fire in you so that when we say we have to take care of x or y or z group because they they’re acting in a way that is incompatible with what you want to exist in the future when you’re like, have to let the wasp go. And I’m like, the wasp lives in our house, Simone.

Simone Collins:Then you give a gene drive to the wasp so the wasp can’t wasp more than

Malcolm Collins:know? It in a yes. We’ll try to find The

Simone Collins:wasp lives a happy wasp life and doesn’t sting anyone. I just I just want everyone to be okay. Why is it so freaking hard for humans to not be a******s?

Malcolm Collins:Because not everyone has our cultural values, Simone. Okay. Great. To continue here, the prevailing modern beliefs that Clancy promoted that give cover to maternal filicide, we’re all familiar with the line, my body, my choice. The my mother infant dryad is a concept in modern medicine that continues to describe the infant as part of the mother after birth. In nursing school, this is what I was taught, that babies are not me, but they are also not other. It’s a new third category that exists as a part of the mother. In psychology, Donald Woodcroft famously said, there is no such thing as a baby, meaning that an an infant literally cannot exist or be understood in isolation from maternal care. He preferred to talk about a nursing couple treating, the pair as the basic unit of early life rather than the infant alone. and in psychology, Margaret Moeller’s developmental model described as early symbiotic phase, roughly the first few months of life, where the infant has not yet psychologically differentiated itself from the mother. The infant experiences itself and the mother as fused as if they were a psychological system without a boundary. Moller’s whole framework of separation and individualization is about how the infant gradually moves out of this fused state and develop a separate sense of self. Now I think what’s interesting about this is I don’t disagree that these aren’t healthy concepts to have.

Simone Collins:Well, and I relate to that, which is annoying. Like, I I feel that way with with infants, like, that they’re a part of me. When they hurt, I’m hurt. They are an extension. And and that’s why it’s also so weird and creepy when people are like, can I hold the baby? It’s like someone being like, can I hold your butt? Like, I’d really rather not. Like, it’s very intimate. Like, let’s let’s not.

Malcolm Collins:Like Yeah. I’m gonna keep my baby, and nobody get near my baby, and nobody touch my baby.

Simone Collins:Yeah. It’s like someone being like, can I hold your breast for a while? And it no. I really don’t wanna do this. Oh, in fact,

Malcolm Collins:I think it’s worse because you’re, like, more worried about them hurting it accidentally or something.

Simone Collins:But it’s it’s very much like you feel it the same way you would feel like someone like, if you’re a dude, like someone asking to hold your dick. It’s extremely intimate. If you love the person a lot, maybe you’ll be like, yeah. I’m okay with that. This is a very intimate thing. But Yeah. Of course. You know? But yeah. I I think that’s the problem if you’re a dude. Let let’s just think of it that way. But I I just so it it I I it’s it’s disturbing to hear about this.

Malcolm Collins:Well, then this is being repurposed through the abortion conversation. Right? Well, sort of.

Simone Collins:But you’re you’re missing a little bit of subtext here too. A recent video that that came out of Lindsay Clancy earlier in her life and career, I guess speaking on behalf of a hospital’s maternity ward, was talking about their new hospital setup, which the same listener to Basecamp in front of ours has talked about being, you know, kinda messed up. This thing where the baby is always in the room with the mother and even to the to the point where the mother just cannot sleep sometimes. It just, like, wants a break and will kind of shame you for, like, asking for them to maybe take the baby to the nursery for a second so you can sleep for a moment. Because they’re like, well, it promotes breastfeeding. And you this it’s like this really big breastfeeding propaganda thing of, like, you have to do it. You know, you have to always be with the baby. And, you know, sometimes mothers need to

Malcolm Collins:Which is total BS, by the way.

Simone Collins:Yeah. Anyway, so she she brought that up to us maybe even a year ago. And here is Lindsay Clancy being, I guess, a face of this for the hospital she was working at at the time being like, in our rooms, do this. And it’s it’s better for the mother. It’s it’s really not necessarily better

Malcolm Collins:for the mother. It’s about saving money. They don’t wanna do the the the nursery.

Simone Collins:Yeah. Exactly. I I do think it’s a money saving thing. I think she mentioned that too. But yeah. So that that’s that’s something she is very, very aware of and has a lot of experience with. And then lo and behold, here’s Lindsey Clancy actively talking about it, which also shows that she herself has been a part of this, you could say, propaganda wing in postpartum care where it’s like, you know, combined and, you know, this whole thing. And it’s it’s it’s scary to see things go from that, basically, as suboptimal for mother’s hospital policy, which she bought into or at least was a a mouthpiece for evolving into an ideology that this person is now this listener to Basecamp is now arguing has contributed to women thinking, well, look. I can commit I can harm my baby because it’s just self harm, and I’m allowed to commit self harm. Like, that’s it’s so sick. It’s so sick.

Malcolm Collins:It it is it is a logical what what I’m gonna argue at the end of this, and and we’ll go into, you know, what are the chances that she was actually trying to end her own life, is we’ll look at cases where mothers do kill their infants at later stages because I think we need an explanation.

Simone Collins:Yeah. Her youngest was, like, eight eight months or something. Like, not not newborn. Definitely not

Malcolm Collins:Yeah. Well, you could just say, like, women are evil, but I don’t like that explanation. I don’t think that’s a helpful explanation.

Simone Collins:It’s not.

Malcolm Collins:I think

Simone Collins:we need an We can’t do something with that.

Malcolm Collins:Explanation as to why she did this. Right? Yeah. Other than just one day she decided to become evil. And that’s why I like the psychosis explanation originally. So if we bust the psychosis explanation, I need another explanation.

Simone Collins:Yeah. Because also it’s I just I can’t understand it. I can’t under because also, like, if you’re just evil look. Pregnancy is hard. Even if you have a smooth perfectly smooth pregnancy, it is not comfortable, and it is not easy. And Yeah. You don’t go through three pregnancies. Three of those and then then decide to to do and, also, I mean, unless you’re really screwed up, I I don’t think I don’t imagine that killing people is pleasant. Just doesn’t all of this

Malcolm Collins:argue that what we’re seeing here is it appears now to me that she really did think she was gonna kill herself and that she was doing a category of infant killing that is not uncommon when a mother decides to commit suicide, which is you decide to kill all your kids first. And it’s it’s called, like, you think you’re doing it for, like, positive reasons or whatever. And I think that if she did it for that reason, like, that’s even worse. That is not psychosis. That is something that

Simone Collins:It’s murder suicide. It’s murder

Malcolm Collins:suicide, which which makes it, like, way worse. Like, when you hear some trans kid goes and kills his mom and dad and then kills himself, you’re not like, well, it’s okay because he killed himself afterwards. You’re like, woah, dude. Like, what why do you get to decide to do that? Right? And I think it’s this internalization of the kid is being part of the mother. And the question

Simone Collins:is First off, in terms of crimes, I think a kid killing their their parents is way morally lower on my, like, list of horrible things than a parent killing a child. That child has no ability to defend themselves. They played no role, in my opinion, in, like, hurting the parent.

Malcolm Collins:Yeah. This is where I think we need to go back to, like and we’re like, okay. We gotta have Aztec punishments, like, flaying someone or something like that. This is where

Simone Collins:I think that makes sense. No. I don’t I I fully disagree with you on that. It’s it’s like the portal song. I used to want you dead. Now I only want you gone. They just need to not be here. They just need to not be here. No amount of pain or punishment is going to change that. The research is clear. Like, scary punishments are not a deterrent.

Malcolm Collins:The moon is crazy. So

Simone Collins:They just the only thing that matters is that they are not present. That’s all. Understand. Don’t wait. Torture and pain, that is just you going like, getting down to their level and being an animal worse than an animal.

Malcolm Collins:No. No. No. I I understand exactly. So in the far future, when a when an AI based on Simone is running a spaceship, and, occasionally, people are just gonna disappear out airlocks or something.

Simone Collins:And Simone No. They’ll just vaporize. They will just vaporize. Yeah. I don’t remember that. Painlessly, there will be no because, also, like, dying out of airlock is is a incredibly painful and short experience. No. You will you will just not be there. Okay. Rapture. It’s just gone. It just You’re just gonna Theranos. Not Theranos. Thanos.

Malcolm Collins:Do we have to be, like, walking along and somebody’s just gonna, like, disintegrate? And next time,

Simone Collins:Obviously. It’s And you’re gonna like the only correct way.

Malcolm Collins:You don’t remember them. Right? We wouldn’t want you to

Simone Collins:disintegrate too. It would be fine for people to understand why people are no longer there, and they should understand why people are no longer there. But there is no benefit societally or morally for there to be additional suffering and harm on top of suffering and harm. The point is what makes us human is that we are capable of rising above that. There are two directions that homo sapiens can take with our prefrontal cortex. Either we can use the additional capacity of feeling, suffering, pain, and joy, and also massive intelligence and agency to do unspeakably worse things that animals can do. Or we can get rid of all of the violent and horrific tendencies that animals had because we don’t need those in order to survive and rise above. And I only want to be a part of a society that rises above, and I will remove everyone who’s incapable of that, period.

Malcolm Collins:Let’s I and this is where as much as I really like the Knox, you know, the as a content creator and everything like that, he always goes into this, like, thou shall not kill. When it’s thou shall not murder. And in in regards to, like, when somebody is an active threat to society and other people and has done horrific acts like this, like, these are instances in which yeah. Like, this needs to

Simone Collins:be hit. But when he says when he’s referring to that, he’s obviously he’s obviously referring to thou shalt not murder because the the bible, the Old Testament, especially, is full of clear prescriptions on when people should be destroyed. Yeah. Well, no. I I

Malcolm Collins:think some Christians and some Jews go at this from the perspective of they they really mean it. Like, they’re they’re trying to, like, signal something to other people about, like, how extreme they are when they don’t actually think through, like when you take killing off the table, one, you you move to an anti biblical position. Yeah. And and and two, like, I think we’re in a society where for a lot of things, we need to be much harsher in the way that we handle specific punishments and much harsher in the way that we deal with things. And that means, one, like, in regards to the prison system and that significantly reduce a lot of these practices we have around, like, the death penalty to make it cheaper and easier to enforce. Because Yeah.

Simone Collins:But, also, I’m so glad we’re bringing back firing squads because that is genuinely more humane.

Malcolm Collins:Yeah. I agree. Where where where is that happening?

Simone Collins:I can’t remember which state. Think it’s, like, Tennessee. Which state brought back firing. Yeah. There we go. Autocomplete already. Everyone’s interested. Idaho. Go Idaho. Oh, also several other states have it as a backup method when lethal injection is unavailable. I wonder if he can request it. I would request firing squad all the way. South Carolina, Mississippi, Oklahoma, and Utah. Alright. Alright. Make it happen in Pennsylvania.

Malcolm Collins:Make it happen in Pennsylvania? Well, when we take over, we’ll move to an all firing squad justice system.

Simone Collins:Well, no. I mean, obviously, I would build better tech in general, but I I think right now, firing squad is best.

Malcolm Collins:To continue here, the partnership for maternal newborn and child health, PNMC, hosted by the WHO, published a piece explicitly titled the mother baby dryad, why an integrated approach to maternal and newborn health in research and practice is essential for progress, in which there is an emphasis on considering the dryad in evaluating outcomes, not the individual mother or baby. The baby friendly hospital initiative, I’ve mentioned the BHMI on calls before, pushes the dryad understanding of postpartum care. I hate the b h BFHI. It’s budget cut, and thinly veiled as a quality improvement initiative.

Simone Collins:Okay. So that there she

Malcolm Collins:has points to get promoting it. Right? This is the the one that you were talking about.

Simone Collins:Just like we were saying. Yeah.

Malcolm Collins:I think the modern idea that babies are extensions of the mother during infancy explains at least part of why women are so tolerant of Clancy’s crime. I can see somebody who has bought into the BHMI propaganda, like Clancy obviously obviously had being less likely to see her children as fully human. I think this framing provides a modern excuse for women to do what they’ve always done and kill their babies. The maternal tendency to commit infanticide predates the dryad theory, but it seems to be part of the permission structure we use to excuse why this type of murder is okay. I think there are very different permission structures in different cultures and historical eras that have been lost to history. The real question here that deserves to be considered is about how society perceives and treats motherhood, exploring how motherhood was understood in the past, specifically in Jewish and early Christian culture, and rituals within those cultures developed to protect infants from their homicidal mothers. And note here, a woman is writing all of this to another woman. Keep in mind how sane when people are like, oh, women are crazy and evil. Base camp women aren’t crazy and evil. We have a lot of awesome women in our community who talk with my wife and not with me. This woman has never reached out to me.

Simone Collins:She reached out to us. What are you talking about?

Malcolm Collins:Well, yeah, but she talks with you.

Simone Collins:Yeah. Sometimes, but, like, you’re excluded. You’re not thrown out of the longhouse.

Malcolm Collins:Yeah. The new longhouse, the base camp longhouse, the ruthless longhouse. Right? The the policing other women. Oh my god. The three women who tried to get this one guy, apparently, they there was just one guy who wouldn’t quit on the jury. Right?

Simone Collins:He like, I’m glad he didn’t either.

Malcolm Collins:And they were like, wouldn’t do it just because of the brutal way she murdered her children. And it’s like and there was Are you listening to yourself? Three haggard, horrible looking women who apparently yelled at him so much people could hear them through walls. If you’re like, this guy’s gonna have PTSD from this. But now the trial goes back to trial because it ended in a mistrial. So she doesn’t she doesn’t get off automatically, and we gotta see what happened. The real questions here that there to be considered about how society perceives and treat motherhood and exploring motherhood as understood in the past, specifically in Jewish and early Christian culture and rituals, which this culture has developed to protect infants from their homicidal mothers. Jewish and Christian cultures seem to have successfully stigmatized infanticide, and I think rituals around childbirth helped to prevent infanticide. The practice of church women in Christian cultures after childbirth, was derived from Jewish traditions and closely followed the time frame that it takes for a woman’s hormones to return to pre pregnancy levels. Most women have an increased sense of well-being when estrogen is highest. Immediately after childhood, estrogen crashes from the highest levels normally experienced by women to almost nothing, which is why women commonly experience baby blues. It takes about six weeks for estrogen to return to normal or non breastfeeding women of the woman to acclimate to this new normal if breastfeeding. HCG is also completely cleared six weeks postpartum. And here, she goes over, like, a a a timeline of how this happens, which you guys don’t care about, but it is essentially explaining this. She then says churching women takes place around forty days after birth, same time frame in the Jewish tradition. I think this ritual serves to mark the end of the psychological postpartum impression and signal to the woman that the community that she has spiritually returned to normal, which makes a lot of sense when you consider hormonal fluctuation. What the heck is churching women? Sorry. I’m gonna hell. To continue here. Presenting the child to the community. In Judaism, this takes place on the eighth day after birth and involves announcing the name of the child. In Christianity, this is done at baptism. So the timeline varies based on the church. In the Catholic tradition, the baptism includes an exorcism prayer that the priest leads the parents in in front of the community. And after reading so much about infanticide, seems like a good idea. Having traditions around naming children, acknowledging them as a person, them from you and created by god and presenting them to your religious community seems like it would be a relatively protective of the child. and now I wanna get into her argument as to why this isn’t true, which I found really powerful. My argument is that, basically, the mothers killing their children seems to be an evolved trait that societies worldwide tolerate and excuse. Of course, most of the jurors wanted to acquit Clancy. This is how most humans respond when a mother kills children. Somehow, most societies seem to have evolved to be uniquely tolerant of this form of murder or so I, don’t understand how anyone was surprised by any of this. I think the My Body, My Choice is very problematic when paired with mother baby dryad theory, which Clancy had to adapt because of her hospital’s policy. It’s the dominant policy in The United States. Not sure about outside of The United States. But I don’t think it leads to infanticide. I think it just helps individuals rationalize the behavior where they’re already going to tolerate, condone, justify. So justify, yes, but fuel other cultures without this framework tolerate infanticide. It’s just a convenient way in women in the less to conceptualize this behavior as morally ambiguous. I do think that this particular justification underpins a lot of the current discourse, but all of this ignores the fact that human societies largely tolerate this behavior from others. In order to argue that infanticide is morally wrong, the in the modern American context, I think you have to engage with the my body, my choice narrative. Now one of the arguments she made here gosh. And I don’t remember reading it. Do you remember me re reading this? Because I found it really powerful when I first read her make it, is that she didn’t think that it was postpartum psychosis because in postpartum psychosis, everyone is always like, oh, I no. Sorry. In in normal psychosis No.

Simone Collins:No. But she she said that someone who is postpartum psychosis per her experience would never ask for a lawyer, which is what Lindsay Clancy did apparently immediately right after murdering her kids because per her experiencing people with postpartum psychosis. They’re like, they they don’t trust anyone. Everyone’s out to get them. Why on earth would they think that a lawyer

Malcolm Collins:would believe Well, not just that, but but they think until everyone’s out to get them, everyone would believe them if they just heard them. Right? Like, of course, I had to kill my kids. It was it was the the of course, I had to light the couch. Of course, I had to kill the witch who was walking by me. Don’t you know she was a witch? Yeah.

Simone Collins:Yeah. Which is that is that is pretty compelling. And that’s what convinced me. Well, I don’t yeah. I don’t I don’t know the whole the whole story of, like, how she was found or anything. I because I I can’t I can’t engage with this. But

Malcolm Collins:Anyway, to to finish here, I started really looking into this after, learning about the Dickinson case and learning that the maximum sentence for infanticide in South Africa is three years.

Simone Collins:Oh, South Africa, not Brazil. Okay.

Malcolm Collins:Sorry. Tolerance for women who kill their babies is a pattern that can’t be unseen, and I’ve tried for so many years to understand where it comes from to no avail. Clancy is just one of the countless data points that falls in line with this trend. If this is part of human nature, my goal would be to understand it and then be able to better participate when, where, and how it occurs and how to build cultures and societies that are better in resistance to these primal instincts. And I’m gonna give my thoughts on how you build a society that’s more resistant to this. And I’m gonna move apart from the beginning to here to better explain this, but the point I would like to make Octavian, what do you want?

Speaker 3:I want you to help me find a coat for this.

Simone Collins:Not right now. Tell him it’s in the bucket hanging from the coat rack in the kitchen.

Malcolm Collins:It’s in the bucket hanging from the coat rack.

Speaker 3:Okay.

Simone Collins:I have the answers.

Malcolm Collins:You’re such a good mom. So good. I’d imagine you probably wouldn’t kill our children.

Simone Collins:Who knows at this point?

Malcolm Collins:So we need to think in terms of tranches. Right? Like, first, it is good if you have prohibitions on killing your children. Like, that’s, you know, number one thing, right, in terms of lowering the rate that people kill their children. And that already puts you in a a pretty low bucket. Right? Like, it’s Jewish and Christians Jewish, Christian, Muslim societies. Right? And then we need to ask, okay. But then why is it that Jews and Protestants seem to do this at lower rates than Muslims and Catholics? and the answer here in terms of, like, at a societal level, the answer here that I would come to is, I actually think it comes down to the way that, you know, some people talk about, like, life beginning at conception when they obviously don’t mean that. As I’ve talked about before, you know, you have a tank well, I’ll put the bit I had at the beginning here But in terms of the the the point I’m making here is when you go out there and you tell society that because we see this in our comments sometimes. We’re like, look at the mass murder that’s happening in The United States. We’re just like the Aztecs, you know, murdering a four year old or something like that when when, you know, a woman takes plan b or something. And it’s like even the people who believe life begins at conception, if you said pull the power cord on a tank of, you know, 500 blastocyst, you know, recently for a mineralized eggs, or take this knife and stab this five year old to death. nobody’s gonna choose the five year old. Right? And it’s because we understand that even if you think that there is something really meaningful that’s being destroyed, if a a a blastocyst is not allowed to become an embryo. Or in in worst cases, I think where you’d get a lot closer to stabbing a five year old is, you know, when you have a a second trimester baby, a third trimester baby, which you have in some states. But when you equivalent all of this to the same thing, you allow the other side to then be like, well, everybody knows a blastocyst. It’s okay to kill a blastocyst, right, or it’s not that big a deal. From their perspective, keep in mind, I’m I’m I’m pointing out, but this can seem intuitive to a lot of people, and was apparently intuitive that you can kill infants to most societies throughout human history. Therefore, I can discount when these people say I shouldn’t be killing infants. And when you see this this reaction to the Lindsey Fancy child, women getting so excited about this that they are doing copycat killings, which happened recently, that they are chasing jury members to try to dox them and ending up potentially as twenty years in jail, this one woman, that they are camping out and living outside of the courtrooms. Right? That they’re making their lives about this on TikTok. The pro life movement has moved the argument to such an absurd position, certain parts of the pro life movement, that it has allowed a community of women who have these pre Christian, pre Jewish a mother has the right to kill an infant post birth beliefs to reemerge. And and I know that we wanna blame this. And I and I do say saying, oh, you can just discard, you know, blastocyst, embryo, developing baby. That’s this horrifying thing and that that makes it okay for women to discard a baby post birth. I think that that’s part of what’s playing out here, but I think we need to take ownership on both sides to and and, obviously, the ownership is an equal. I’m not saying that, but we need to be more realistic in the way that we’re making these arguments when we compare, for example, American society to the Aztecs, which happened under the comment in the Aztec video. and I think that some people really believe that this is an effective argument point instead of realizing that what it does is end up dehumanizing already born infants.

Speaker 10:And I understand that this would be very uncomfortable for many conservatives if it’s true, but if the data that we’re looking at appears to track, which is not only was Lindsay Kansley a Catholic, but in Catholic majority countries, we see this behavior at higher rates. We’re gonna go into this in just a second, and we see it punished less. Then that would make it seem like these beliefs do seem to correlate with a dehumanization of already born infants.

Speaker 12:And to make this even more uncomfortable because you could be like, well, these countries are secular now, so this doesn’t really count. Actually, the laws allowing mothers to kill newborn infants have been significantly restricted recently in countries like Spain and France, and in parts of Latin America, where when the countries in the past were more Catholic, they were actually much looser about killing infants. Whereas now that they’ve become more secular, they’ve become significantly less looser loose about it. so it appears to be specifically tied to the religiosity. And to sort of sum up because I’ve tried to explain my thoughts on this. If you tell everyone in a society that we’re gonna collectively lie and say we believe something that no one at least emotionally really believes, that a blastocyst is the equivalent of stabbing a five year old child to death, or leaving a baby in a dumpster is the same as taking plan b. People will say, well, like, intellectually, I believe this, but I don’t think anybody really truly this emotionally sits as true with him. And because of that, they begin to normalize. They say, okay. I am okay feeling the same way I do about terminating a blastocyst as I do about leaving a baby in a dumpster or stabbing an infant to death, or burning an infant alive, which has happened in in France. So and I think that that normalization is what creates this psychological license within certain populations And here on the screen here, just to sort of hammer this whole point home, I’m putting when I say, I don’t think they really believe this, the rate that Catholics do abortions against other groups that don’t believe life begins at conception, and you you can see it’s equivalent rates even when you take into account how frequently they attend church.

Speaker 14:Or to word it another way, when you are able to convince yourself that the life of a newborn or one year old child is equivalent to the life of a blastocyst, within some people that elevates the life of the blastocyst. But it seems from the data that we have access to within most people that decreases the value of the life of the newborn.

Speaker 16:And it’s important to remember when we talk about importing other cultures to America, this trial wasn’t just held anywhere. It was held in Massachusetts, the second most Catholic state in Um, it was and and and we saw it being carried out in a way that looks similar to the way similar cases have gone in Catholic majority parts of Europe. And that’s what’s shocking to us, that we’re beginning to see other cultures influence the American legal system.

Malcolm Collins:. But to expand on what I mean by by this particular segment, because I I do think it’s really important, is there was an episode where we looked at Catholic rates of stuff like doing abortions and stuff like this when contrasted with other Christian faiths that didn’t think that this was murder. And we saw very small levels of differences even when you correct for Catholics that are going to church very, very frequently. So even when you correct for levels of religiosity. so the question is is why do Catholics and Muslims not follow the rules that they say they believe at the same rate as other groups? And I think it’s because they even in the way that they practice their tradition, show that they don’t really take the rules that seriously and that rules are very flexible and are more understood as, like, a broad story and something that you socially front instead of, like, super strict rules. So an example of this is around idolatry. Right? so, like, in Islam, they’ll say, oh, we’re so strict against idolatry. You know, look at the the we’ll kill you if you draw a picture of Muhammad. And then you go into a mosque, and it’s covered in gold and gemstones and and and all the fanciest things you could ever have, or you go to a rich Muslim’s house, and, oh my god, you’ll never see anything so opulent in your entire life. It’s like idolatry incarnate. And it’s because they carved out the narrowest definition of idolatry that they could focus on and then, you know, ignored everything else. or I think that this is the very same instinct when somebody said a blastocyst just killing a blastocyst is the moral equivalent to stabbing a child to death. Right? When I don’t think anybody seriously believes this, but it’s like this this this thing that they’ve been taught to argue. And when you’re taught to argue something that you don’t actually believe, when push comes to shove and you actually make the choice at, like, a societal level, you end up making these negative choices at much higher rates. and so I think that the the best way around this is to say it it well, it’s to basically learn to argue honestly. Right? and and so when the people in the comments because it was a fairly upvoted comment saying that the America is the moral equivalent to the Aztec torture someone to death everyday empire for having lots of abortions. I’m like, I don’t I don’t think you believe that really truly. I don’t think that anybody really truly believes that. But I think that when you teach yourself to act as you believe that Mhmm. When a when a moral decision actually comes to the shove because you’ve got so used to lying about what you actually believe about morality and reality, you find it very easily to fudge on these particular decisions. And that’s why I think it’s really good to like, if if you’re building something with your family, you can say something like, you know, in the eyes of god is equivalent. Like, even if you’re gonna hold this this position. But, you know, with like, to a society, it may not be the same. But, again, I I I think that a lot of this stuff is really I I guess where I am is is I think because I did decide to do more research on her to see if the suicide thing people are like, well, the cuts really weren’t that deep. You know? But it does appear that she dove headfirst out a window where the fractures were. Right? And some people are like, well, she lowered herself out a window. Yeah. Maybe. But if I was lowering myself out a window not intending to kill myself, I wouldn’t do it head first. Because if I was a nurse, I could understand, especially on frozen ground, that could kill me. And I just need an explanation as to why she decided to do this.

Simone Collins:Is that how she allegedly

Speaker 3:More of the more I need help finding cords because my because the battery for my Game Boy is totally dead.

Malcolm Collins:Oh, and how did that happen?

Speaker 3:I can’t find the charging cord.

Simone Collins:Octavian, did you go to the coat rack in the kitchen where the large bucket is hanging and take the bucket down and look inside?

Speaker 3:I thought I used to sit in up here. Dad?

Malcolm Collins:No. Bucket that appear.

Simone Collins:In the coat rack in the kitchen. Okay. Yeah? Okay. So Octavian. Yeah. I got

Malcolm Collins:a question for you. Yes. Come here. Breathe. This is a because I think people would wanna know. Like, what’s your moral intuition around this? Suppose a mommy killed her kids and her baby. What do you think should happen to the mommy?

Speaker 3:She would die.

Malcolm Collins:How would she die?

Speaker 3:Because she murdered her own kids daddy made, and that’s the law.

Malcolm Collins:Yep.

Speaker 3:No killing

Simone Collins:That’s the

Malcolm Collins:law. What about other people’s kids? Could I kill somebody else’s kids?

Speaker 3:No. That would also put you in doll because then you will be murderers and murderers gets in the jail.

Malcolm Collins:But it’s especially bad when you kill your own kids. Right?

Speaker 3:Yeah.

Malcolm Collins:That’s, like, the worst thing you can do. And but wait. Stop, Octavian. Don’t don’t spaz. Why explain why. Like, morally, why do you think it’s bad to kill a kid?

Speaker 3:So if if this if if you make a kid, it’s bad because you put so much work into making that kid. So if you killed it, you would be wasting, like, a million dollars.

Simone Collins:Wasted work? That’s your thing? Wasted work?

Speaker 3:Not just that.

Malcolm Collins:What about the potential of the kid? Right? Like, the kid had his whole life to do great things, and somebody took that from him. What would do you think that that’s a a bigger reason than the wasted money?

Speaker 3:Yeah.

Malcolm Collins:Okay. And how do you think the mom should be killed?

Speaker 3:What mom?

Malcolm Collins:What the mom if a mom killed her kids, how how should she be killed?

Speaker 3:Oh, she should mostly be mostly I think maybe sometimes I don’t know. Maybe their moms won’t die or maybe their moms sorta. I don’t know. Maybe the way for a mom to die if he kills the kid is just

Malcolm Collins:Old age?

Speaker 3:Police shooter.

Malcolm Collins:Old age? Like, she should be put

Simone Collins:in prison? He said have the police shoot him.

Malcolm Collins:Oh, have the police shoot them? Okay.

Speaker 3:Yeah. And then put her in graves.

Malcolm Collins:Okay. And bury her. Well, I think you have a strong moral intuition, Octavian. And I think that you you’re a really good kid, and you’re very lucky because I don’t think your mommy would ever hurt you. Would she?

Speaker 3:Yeah. Because I was her first kid.

Simone Collins:Oh, so I would like her

Malcolm Collins:What about the other kids?

Speaker 3:Yeah. Well, she wakes all of us.

Malcolm Collins:Oh, okay. But what about daddy?

Speaker 3:Yes. Daddy.

Malcolm Collins:So daddy might kill you?

Speaker 3:No. Daddy will.

Simone Collins:So you feel safe, buddy.

Speaker 3:I’m gonna explode my hand out of you if you say that, though.

Simone Collins:Okay. One more time. I won’t. I love you. You can go remember, bucket. It’s it’s the bucket where your,

Malcolm Collins:like,

Simone Collins:helmet is hanging, you know, on that coat rack. It’s that big metal bucket.

Malcolm Collins:It’s full

Simone Collins:of all the stuff.

Malcolm Collins:And I am so excited for you to get a little older so you can say even more of your moral intuitions because I think they’re really valuable to people.

Speaker 3:It’s bad.

Malcolm Collins:Alright. Go.

Simone Collins:Okay. So, Malcolm, you’re saying what did

Malcolm Collins:he make it up okay? My read is that she genuinely because, again, I think you need an explanation for this.

Simone Collins:I thought you need to the only way you know you’re gonna die by jumping out a window is most likely is if it’s a

Malcolm Collins:sixth story window. Well, there there are signs that when she was, like, slitting her wrists and stuff like this that she hesitated, that it appears that she had some trepidation about doing this, that she didn’t have when she was doing it to the kids. So, you know, I I I to me, that does increase some moral culpability she had. That she had trouble taking her own life, but not her kid’s life.

Simone Collins:With the case What did she do?

Malcolm Collins:She she let her loose herself, and then she threw herself out a window. Right?

Simone Collins:That’s not how you kill yourself. Everyone knows that’s not how you kill yourself.

Malcolm Collins:Especially a nurse.

Simone Collins:Yeah. Yeah. Everyone knows. You I mean, maybe if she was in a warm bathtub and she did it. Yeah. But she drove into a cold

Malcolm Collins:frozen weather with cuts, which immediately stopped the bleeding. They she wasn’t even bleeding when they found her.

Simone Collins:Wait. She got in a car after jumping out a window?

Malcolm Collins:No. In frozen weather. The outside was cold.

Simone Collins:Oh. Oh, she’s a nurse. No. Okay. That’s she wasn’t trying to hurt herself. I mean, she was

Malcolm Collins:Well, then why do you think she did it? Like, what’s your motivation? I mean, obviously, she gave up $3,000,000, but I wouldn’t have predicted that.

Simone Collins:She oh, the raising $6,000,000 thing? That’s for her legal fund anyway, I think, or $3,000,000. Her her legal fund is or GoFundMe. It’s, like, 3,300,000. Continue. No. I I can’t I cannot fathom why someone would do this. I can’t there’s just nothing there’s nothing in me. Even, like, it would be easier if there was some female serial killer, but, like, to bring your own children into the world. And, also, like, something really snapped with me. I mean, this is coming from someone who I, like, I told you point blank before I had Octavian that I wasn’t sure I would love our kids. Mhmm. She did, by the way.

Malcolm Collins:And she really meant it. And I

Simone Collins:was like, I really meant it

Malcolm Collins:for you.

Simone Collins:Yeah. I was I was I was genuinely concerned because I am not a kid person. Did I make

Malcolm Collins:you feel any better the way I responded to that when I was just like, yeah.

Simone Collins:Yeah. I felt really safe about it. And I’ve always felt really grateful to you for all that. And I’ve always I never had any doubt in my heart that you wouldn’t adore our children. And but what shocked me and what makes this even more disturbing and shocking for me is that after I had kids and especially more kids, it it got more powerful with each new kid I have. I cannot I can’t even, like, hear about other people’s kids. Like, I will watch an adult get hurt now, and I’ll be like, that person was once a child, and then I start crying. That is that is how bad it is. The level of vulnerability and emotional care that having kids has opened up to me. I don’t know, like, how did she didn’t have that. Like, I there’s, like, this barrier that would prevent me from doing that. And and so that’s why I can’t wrap my head around that. But then even just from a logical standpoint, like, let’s pretend something something hormonally didn’t happen to her that happened to me, and she doesn’t have that barrier that would prevent her from hurting her children. Why? Like, why put your body through that and, like, all the stuff and all the investment and then do that?

Malcolm Collins:Oh, by the way, Simone.

Simone Collins:This is I mean, I think this is why there’s that most of her defenders just think her husband did

Malcolm Collins:it because it’s so imagine. Well and, again, it can be hard. Like, Lindsay Clancy, I don’t know if you are aware of this, but she was a Catholic. And if you’re from

Simone Collins:a group Oh, great. Fantastic. Again. I mean, I genuinely

Malcolm Collins:patterns, people. Like, this is the thing. I know that the patterns are there. Are you double checking?

Simone Collins:No. I’m just getting a day since Malcolm rails against Catholics counter. Oh. Hours actually yeah. Hours since accident counter. There we go. Yep. Oh, you can oh, that one’s expensive. LED digital safety scoreboard days without accident counter.

Malcolm Collins:No. You’re gonna have a remote. Background of the podcast?

Simone Collins:It has a remote. But I can get oh, there are battery powered ones that cost. These are expensive. What a oh, man. This is up for stupid compliance stuff. They’re charging way too much way too much. I’m just gonna have to get a whiteboard or something. What? A $322 for a disgusting hold on. I gotta I gotta use your your amazing podcast editing software so I can I can share my screen here because it it’s actually really good? K. Look at this. This this disgusting eagle I mean, I love I love patriotism, but this is this is an affront to design. 329 what? What yeah. What is this? It is it is one like, one of those stupid compliance things. Bet it’s, like, some people are statutorily required to have oh, there we go. Oh, no. That’s a countdown. It’s it’s see, look at this. 199? Your safety starts here. That this must be a statutory like, people are legally required to buy these, so they make these horrible looking counters. Anyway, I’ll I’ll I’ll maybe I’ll get one, like, on Etsy. That’s see, this this one would have been great. This is fine. $128. That is ridiculous. Shame. Shame. Anyway, really nice feature. Thank for thank you for building that feature. I I appreciate it. It’s good. This has this has been horrible. I’m traumatized.

Malcolm Collins:I Yeah. But I but I but I think the the core takeaways for me in doing this is, one, have strict prohibitions against it. Two Yes. It’s useful to contextualize the kids as being part of the mother, but the responsibility the mother has is to the future child who’s going to be an adult, not to the baby. Right?

Simone Collins:Like Yeah. It’s it’s like it’s like a a one way membrane barrier. I don’t remember what those are called. We’re like, you give your child every bit of self preservation and defense and self care you have, in fact, to your own detriment, but none of your self hatred and self loathing and self harm is allowed to pass. And that’s at least what I feel hormonally. I just don’t know how that’s not passing to other people. And what’s disturbing, and I don’t know if you covered this, but it’s, like, the copycat cases that are happening, that that a woman who’s very invested in their case just killed her two year old. In Lindsay Clancy’s case, it’s it’s clear that there was an influence there. And now women are also doing these TikTok videos where they are acting out their internalized thoughts about their children, where they’ll have these, like, videos where, like, they’ll they’ll film themselves, like, carrying their kids around the house, like, through a doorway, say. And then they’ll, like like, cut the video in the middle and be holding a baby doll and slam the baby doll’s head against the door. That kind of thing. You know? Like, throw baby dolls out windows in intercut with footage of them with their actual kids. So we know their mother’s great. Them acting out these internalized thoughts. This is all downstream of Lindsay Clancy. This is why I can’t be on the Internet anymore. I just can’t. I just can’t. I I the like, everywhere I go, someone’s talking about this. And and and it the horrible thing is the the act of talking about it appears to be making it happen more.

Malcolm Collins:Here’s another thing that made this worse, and I think that this is a problem that a lot of Christian groups have as well in terms of dealing with this, is they’ll go out there and they’ll say, you know, abortion is murder or whatever. Right? Killing baby is murder. But that baby is immediately in heaven when they die. And that’s how Lindsay Clancy justified this to herself as a Catholic.

Simone Collins:Is that what she said?

Malcolm Collins:Yeah. I mean, she said that she knew that the babies would go directly to heaven, so she’d be able to join them there when she killed herself, and it would be fine. That’s no. You don’t

Simone Collins:she’s you don’t go to heaven when you murder children.

Malcolm Collins:This at at the very least, she thought they went to heaven. Right? And so this idea that, you know, the overly easy heaven, I think, is also a problem. Right? Like, just all babies go to heaven. You don’t need to worry about it. Everything’s fine. I think that can also create immoral behavior. Because then it’s easy. Right? Like, why not? Right? Like, if if you’ve already consigned yourself to not going to heaven or you have a lapse of moral judgment about yourself. Like, well, I’m doing this for a good reason. Therefore, it’s okay.

Simone Collins:I have so little chill with this.

Malcolm Collins:Yeah. Well, I’m I’m I’m interested in in in the copycat, actually. Why did she think it was okay?

Simone Collins:I don’t know. It just happened, so I think it’s all. I don’t know if there’s much understanding as to why and how it happened.

Malcolm Collins:Well, now you guys owe us because you made Simone go through this moral torment. So congrats. Thanks, guys. A******s.

Simone Collins:And then look. I mean, there are multiple people who requested this episode. And so I I hold you all. I hold you all responsible for the future sleepless night.

Malcolm Collins:Well, why don’t you sign up for our Substack or Patreon? You know?

Simone Collins:You can money hoist. I can cry into the dollar bills. That’ll be great. Yeah. Just keep keep in mind that you’re gonna be contributing to someone who, if they gain any insane amount of power, is probably going to do unspeakable vaporizing things to people that hurt children. So

Malcolm Collins:Very interesting. The woman who did the copycat killing was sort of an inversion of Lindsay Clancy. Lindsay Clancy was like well, she wanted to give her kids to go to god or go to heaven so that they could, you know, immediately be in heaven, whereas the copycat killer said that her child was the devil or the antichrist. And so, again, for both of these women I wanna point this out here. When you wanna be like, this is the problem of secular society, both of these women did this for partially religious reasons. And they are inversions of each other where Lindsay Clancy, the original case, may have had some sort of twisted even I don’t know. Whatever. But the other one seemed to the one who obsessively followed the Lindsay Clancy case seemed to hate her children. It’s disgust. And I think that that was brought up by the way people have reacted to the Lindsey Clancy case. These acting out of the things I wanna do to my children because I hate them, etcetera. Anyway, love you, Simone, and thank you for not killing our kids.

Simone Collins:Gonna crawl under a rock, never come out, except to take care of

Malcolm Collins:our kids. This is why the Technopuritans have to win, create a city on a hill, and then handle the rest of civilization. Is it

Simone Collins:I believe we’re sent Octavian’s addiction to GI Joe because their theme song is stuck in my head,

Malcolm Collins:and it’s this g GI Joe. GI Joe was there.

Simone Collins:It’s GI Joe versus Cobra the enemy. Cobra the enemy. Cobra the enemy.

Malcolm Collins:Oh. Or you gotta get him into something more, you know, classy. Right? You can get him into Johnny Quest real adventure of the Johnny Quest.

Simone Collins:My gosh. We we need to find that. That’ll be so much better. That’s a much better opening theme song with the,

Malcolm Collins:It’s a great opening scene. I regularly listen to it. It’s, like, on my my song playlist. That’s my life these days. I’m hanging out with all these Internet people

Simone Collins:and dodging It’s like in canyons. You know? Of course.

Malcolm Collins:That’s All my all my anime girlfriends.

Simone Collins:Typical day. Typical days. Is Haji’s in that. Right?

Malcolm Collins:Haji’s yeah. Haji’s in that. Okay. My god. Oh, yeah. Is Haji Sikh or just generically Indian? I’m gonna

Simone Collins:ask because I don’t think he’s Sikh. I think he’s generically Indian, Haji, from Johnny Quest. Indian or Sikh?

Malcolm Collins:Islamic.

Simone Collins:He’s Indian by nationality and Sikh by religious and cultural background.

Malcolm Collins:Oh, so he is Sikh?

Simone Collins:Yeah. Wow. He’s an orphan from India, specifically found in Calcutta, who becomes doctor Benton’s Quest adopted or oh, yeah. Doctor doctor Benton Quest adopted son and Johnny’s adopted brother. Oh, yeah. I I forgot he wore a turban. I I I I memory hold his turban. Simone, let me go.

Malcolm Collins:I’ll get I’ll get started here.

Simone Collins:Oh, boy.

Speaker 11:What? What you doing in that? Yeah.

Malcolm and Simone break down new reporting from effort.news exposing how effective altruism organizations spent tens of millions funding anti-AI narratives across journalism, YouTube explainer channels, and religious groups. They discuss the circular donor ecosystem, undisclosed grants, and the impact on public discourse.

The conversation covers specific examples from The Guardian, Time Magazine, Kurzgesagt, and multiple faith organizations, along with personal context from their own grant history with the Survival and Flourishing Fund. They also address the mental health effects of doomer messaging and why the arguments fail under scrutiny.

Shout out to Matthew Seagren / @MatchewXD who created the wasp clip!

Show Notes

The Media Astroturfing

Brian covered this on Effort.News in an article titled: How Effective Altruism Bought the Media.

They found “Potemkin articles, in which claims are fabricated, corroborated, and published as journalism by members of an insular donor ecosystem”

They explore the issue through a guardian article that six people collaborated to publish, all of whom were paid for by three megadonors. The Guardian did NOT disclose these sources of funds, and, as Brian’s article puts it: “In a fundraising statement attached to the article, the Guardian proclaims its “fierce independence.””

The payments:

* The Guardian: Paid over $3M by Coefficient Giving

* The reporter, Aisha Down, paid $60-$110K through the Coefficient Giving’s Tarbell Fellowship, which pays her salary

* The quoted experts were all recipients of funds from either SFF, Coefficient, or the Effective Ventures Foundation. The reporter does not justify her reasoning behind calling these people “experts” despite these “experts” publicly admitting their predictions were off by years, if not decades.

* Henry Papadatos paid $620,000

* Malcolm Murray, paid $129,376 plus $47.1M to affiliated institutions

* Andrea Castagna, paid $30,000 and the recipient of two undisclosed grants

* The subjects of the story Daniel Kokotajlo, paid $2,851,166

* Given $400K by Coefficient

* Given a $2M grant by the Survival and Flourishing Fund (which also was the biggest ever grant-giver to the Pragmatist Foundation—$500K!)

As Brian puts it:

“All six belong to a circular ecosystem known as “AI Safety,” united around the belief that AI will end the human race. What Down promotes as ‘expertise’ is not merely unrigorous or exaggerated — it is a work of cultlike fiction which openly promotes their vision of the AI apocalypse. This belief underwrites millions spent annually on promoting a firehose of anti-AI narratives with the goal of banning AI outright — the price of preventing the apocalypse.”

“This ecosystem is bankrolled by three megadonors — Dustin Moskovitz’s Open Philanthropy, Sam Bankman-Fried’s Center for Effective Altruism (CEA), and Jaan Tallinn’s Survival and Flourishing Fund. The media arm of this empire has over $40 million in donations and includes paid journalists, influencers, and religious groups.”

Apparently the Center for Effective Altruism rebranded to the Effective Ventures Foundation after the SBF fallout and Open Philanthropy rebranded to Coefficient Giving after distancing itself from SBF.

$17.9M has gone to print

$13.9M to video content

$4.87M to political advocacy

$2.66 film and fiction

$1.81M to religious NGOs

$1.35M to other

The Tarbell Fellowship program is how Coefficient Giving influences media coverage; it uses it to pay the salaries of over 20 journalists at major news outlets.

TIME is their biggest fellowship Recipient; Brian found that 58/100 of the TIME 100 profiles were written by Tarbell-paid journalists.

He also shared leaked emails showing how AI safety orgs sponsor anti-AI content on YouTube and showed channels that have been funded by these orgs, including:

* Kurzgesagt ($5.83M)

* Rational Animations ($2.53M)

* A Primer ($300K)

* A Happier World ($150K)

* Space Science Guy ($24K)

And he points out how the AI-doomerism-sponsored videos perform between 12% and 89% worse than these channels’ normal videos.

Related to this, Sabine posted about her experience being contacted by these orgs. What Sabine covers in her YouTube video:

* She says an organization asked her to make an AI-risk video with prescribed sentences and references,

* So it’s clear the messaging can go beyond simple sponsorship.

* She also points out that it’s not just anti-AI orgs reaching out to content creators, Taylor Lorenz being offered $5,000 to make a tiktok video about the USA’s need to outcompete China with AI by Build American AI

* My god did they ever make a stupid choice on who to contact

* She points out these organizations would be dumb to NOT try to sponsor content, but she doesn’t like that political lobbying is flooding into science and tech reporting

* BTW, her sponsor for that episode was Ground News, which another YouTuber hilariously attempted to claim was some sort of right-wing psyop ‘because what’s the point of showing both sides of an argument when one side of the political spectrum is just wrong’

The Religious Astroturfing

Brian & Co. reported on this under: AI Safety Donors Paid Religious NGOs $3.3M for Statements on AI on Effort.News

They find it rich that largely atheistic EAs are trying to get religious people to believe that AI will bring the end times. As it’s put in the article: “The AI Safety movement descends from rationalist and new atheist roots. Its core belief — that AI will literally end all human life — often draws comparisons to doomsday cults like Heaven’s Gate. Yet with enough funding, some churches are willing to square that belief with the Book of Revelation.”

They observed that “AI Safety’s largest donors — Dustin Moskovitz and the now-convicted fraudster Sam Bankman-Fried — were among Biden’s largest donors.” and yet when he lost the 2024 election, they were on the outs, which led them to turn to religious NGOs.

“Since 2025, AI Safety donors put $3.3 million into churches, seminaries, faith networks and religious-affinity groups. It paid for pronouncements: declarations, red lines, and a “Magna Carta of AI.””

“The Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America took $105,000 from [the Future of Life Institute] FLI. They credit their “red lines on AI” to “a grant from the Future of Life Institute.”2 The Gospel Coalition received $200,000 for a podcast called “Silicon Spiritualities,” without disclosing their sponsor. They later barred their writers from using AI to research, write, or edit. The World Council of Churches took $100,000 to write its “red lines.” The Mormon nonprofit Faith Matters took $299,000 for a “Magna Carta of AI.””

Their reporting shows that:

* Multi-faith AI media got the most funding: $574,721

* Buddhist media came in second: $555,000

* Faith-adjacent: 550,000

“FLI, an AI Safety megadonor, runs a full-time religions program with a “Religions lead,” Will Jones, and a “U.S. Faith Liaison,” Brian J. A. Boyd. The program lists the Pontifical Academy of Sciences and the Vatican’s Fratelli Tutti Foundation among its partners.

FLI’s grantees make up the overwhelming majority of religious signatories on statements produced by FLI and its allies.”

Not all the religious astroturfing is going well:

“Of FLI’s recipients, only two disclosed their donations on their project pages. Two more disclosed their donations, but only on LinkedIn. Four more made no public project-related disclosures.

FLI’s other religious outreach is not progressing as smoothly. They paid a Muslim NGO for a declaration of Islamic principles and Impact Academy for a Hindu consensus statement. Neither has been delivered.”

Catholic Stuff:

“In September 2025, a Vatican working group chaired by papal adviser Fr. Paolo Benanti handed Pope Leo XIV an appeal for a prohibition on superintelligence “until there is broad scientific consensus that it will be done safely and controllably,” plus an IAEA-style inspectorate for AI labs.6 By November, FLI sat on the Vatican’s Builders AI Forum. In May 2026, it put $200,000 into two Catholic projects: a post-liberal magazine in Steubenville, Ohio, and a Slovenian faculty educating Catholic leaders on AI.

FLI is using its newfound connections to support the business disputes of Anthropic, an AI-safety-linked company. In March, Boyd co-signed a Catholic theologians’ brief backing Anthropic in its dispute with the Department of War. Anthropic brought him to the company’s two-day summit with fifteen Christian thinkers.7 Then, on 25 May, Pope Leo XIV presented Magnifica Humanitas, the first encyclical devoted to artificial intelligence, and the lay speaker beside two cardinals in the Synod Hall was Chris Olah, co-founder of Anthropic.”

“The AI Safety movement spends more brazenly and deceptively than almost any other political cause. This affects not just the AI debate, but theology broadly. As Nirit Weiss-Blatt puts it, “AI doomerism fills a ‘religious-shaped hole.’ For people who left religious upbringing but retain a hunger for a mission-driven community, the AI-risk subculture offers a replacement meaning system.””

Episode Transcript

Simone Collins:. Hello, Malcolm. I’m very glad to be speaking with you because sweet satisfaction is at hand. We have known since the height of Sam Benjamin Fried that effective altruists have been pouring millions of dollars into AI doomerism propaganda or AI safety content as they would put it, but we didn’t have definitive receipts. And that was until two former Basecamp guests delivered them last week with Brian Chow and his effort.news revealing how effective altruism bought the media, basically. It’s it’s actually worse than you would think, Malcolm. And also how AI safety donors have paid religious NGOs 3,300,000 to make statements on AI. Then also, Sabina Hoffenfelder, who was on our podcast, like, what, one or two years ago, the science

Malcolm Collins:We actually have an episode with her that’s never aired.

Simone Collins:But you got a weekend episode, dude. Weekend episode. I

Malcolm Collins:think it’s good enough for a weekday episode is the problem.

Simone Collins:Well, then we gotta run it.

Malcolm Collins:But, anyway bad because we’re more extreme and political than when she agreed to do an episode

Simone Collins:with us. Episodes so you don’t torture her reputation. But, anyway, after she saw people talking about this on x, she posted a video talking about how people have tried to get her to post AI do more content. It’s like a sponsored content thing. And then both Sabine and Brian’s posts became trending topics on x with even Elon Musk asking Sabine, who is offering people money for this? Because, apparently, he didn’t know, which shocks me. So then I guess it shouldn’t shock me because, basically, we knew it because we had attempted through a nonprofit to get grant money from allegedly effective altruist organizations being like, well, we wanna help future human flourishing. And then we discovered the hard way that all they were donating to, for the most part, of course, are exceptions. We’ll talk about that, was to just AI do more propaganda organizations.

Malcolm Collins:No. This is real. This is so so this is a multibillion dollar industry. And what’s fascinating about it is while it is partially, almost certainly, Chinese funded Yep. That’s an element. The primary donor to this is not even generic woke idiots. Mhmm. It is an AI doomsday cult that evolved out of our old social network in Silicon Valley Yeah. That donates billions of dollars to this a year. Mhmm. And I wanna get into that, but I also wanna get into the sad world that they wanna plunge you into. So here, I am gonna post a video that a fan made for us, and this is my favorite AI content I’ve ever seen, about your and my wasp saga

Malcolm Collins:Gotta kill those wasps. I know. I feel bad for the one wasp that’s stuck under the cup. Okay. Release it outside, but it’ll just be back inside tomorrow. It’s living inside, and you release it outside. It’s just coming right back inside, and you’re going to kill their army anyway. I know. You are too empathetic, Simone. She’ll die with her friends that way. Okay. Release her outside and deal with it. I would want to die with my friends. Right now, she’s just very scared and blown. Okay. Bye. You are too impatient women. This is why women can’t be president. Mel, the who did with all the dead animals. Okay? Who... Okay. I love you, Simone. I love you too.

Malcolm Collins:.

Simone Collins:Anyway That made my morning. That made my morning. Yep. Yeah. No, Malcolm

Speaker 8:The reason why Simone and I find this, Elon, being like, who’s paying you? Who’s doing this? So comical.

Speaker 4:is, when we hang out with, like, Elon Circle, the people who go to those parties, at least when we used to go to them, are the same people who are organizing the funding of all of this. They’re not the donors themselves, but they’re, like, the smart intellectuals who operate these nonprofits or determine where the donor advised funds go. and they’re, like, 100% cultists. And it’s so weird for he’s who’s who’s doing this? And I’m Elon, that’s your personal circle that’s doing this, or at least the the outer edges of it. and so to to like, these these effective altruist types, singulararian types, you know, every single one of them, you guys if if you’re associated with these communities, you need to be vetting them because this cult is is is is dangerous and pervasive. and to give you an idea of what I mean when I’m like, yeah. we we are involved in this. If you go to the the Sabrina Hofstetter leak, she she put this out there. And the guy who reached out to her was Drew Sparks, at Nonlinear who runs the Species Channel. And if you look at the Species Channel, it’s just every video is doomerism. Every video is, we need to stop technology. We need to go back to the way things used to be. AI is gonna kill everyone. Blah blah blah blah blah. But, I’m pretty sure because I remember meeting a few guys with with channels like this. I’m pretty sure I met this guy at a party, and and we talked for a while about AI safety and stuff like that. So, like, these these communities are our communities. Like, I I recognize these people. And, it’s horrifying to see the cult spread so far within these communities and corrupt so many otherwise potentially bright minds. The, positive that comes out of this is these communities were you know, if you’re talking about a community counter to the the nerd writer, the new writer, whatever, you know, the community that makes up, like, Leaflet and ourselves and, like, our wider community. they were the most intelligent, most agentic potential eventual counterweight to us, even though mostly we were working on the same project, even though mostly we agreed on a lot of things. Oh, there aren’t like, they they drew in people from all over the world who were the best and the brightest, and now they’ve, you know, ideologically neutered these people so they can no longer be effective or or take on the future, which allows us a better chance in terms of, having kids and and consolidating power and attempting to steer humanity in a positive direction. So sad, but but positive

Speaker 5:And what’s cool is in the Sabrina email, he explains how they are able to make these donations to essentially control the media you watch and the influencers you watch without you knowing, and it’s that they make them as grants rather than, like, other types of donations that would require a person admit that that they were doing it as a sponsorship.

Speaker 7:We’re in this for the species, boys and girls. It’s simple numbers. They have more.

Simone Collins:. This by the way, we need to start the kill drawer again. So if you can bring a mousetrap down, let’s get that going.

Malcolm Collins:Okay. I’ve only got two left, so we need more mousetraps because I put out, like, eight last night.

Simone Collins:Okay. Walmart run, but the kill drawer must return. The kids love it. It’s, like, their favorite thing every morning. It’s like

Malcolm Collins:Christmas drawer in our kitchen that we just line with mousetraps because for whatever reason, the mouse keep coming back to it. Mhmm. And we used to use it as, like, a drawer, but it would get covered in mouse poop. And so we’re like, okay. Whatever. And so the mouse always set up right next to this one drawer, and so we line it with newspapers, and then we just put tons of mousetraps in it. And and every morning, you could just

Simone Collins:take it from You open it up. There’s a dead mouse inside. You roll up that layer of newspaper with all the blood, and then you put you just put down the next mousetrap. By the way, have you

Malcolm Collins:cleaned up the dead mouth in the attic?

Simone Collins:No. I haven’t gotten I look. I’m gonna handle that and the disgusting shower and all the other stuff. It’s gonna happen. It’s all happening tonight after my full day of work.

Malcolm Collins:Am I torturing you?

Simone Collins:And all the and the blood work and the calls and the okay. It’s so much worse than you thought. Okay? So Brian covered this on effort.news. First, in an article tall called how effective altruism bought the media. And they found, quote, Potemkin articles in which claims are fabricated, corroborated, and published as journalism by members of an insular donor ecosystem. Surprise. Surprise. This Which we are very connected to. We we know it well. and look. A lot of these people who are involved in this are smart, kind people who are fun to hang out with, but also kinda frustrating. So, like, I’m not planning for the future because I think we’re all gonna die, and that’s it’s a bummer.

Malcolm Collins:So what’s interesting about this, just for people who are watching this, is sort of where we are in this. So one of the people who’s trending on this is Brian, who’s been a friend of ours and a fan of the podcast forever. And he, like, we had the episode on him when he launched his newspaper that since launching has gone viral multiple times for licking these stories. Yeah. But we have also had on the show one of the figures at the absolute center of the anti AI community. Ayla. Oh, Ayla. Right. Right. No. She she sort of got sucked into this cult. It’s not I’m not you know, obviously, you’re She’s surrounded by people

Simone Collins:who are anti AI. It’s I don’t think she really honestly has that much of a choice.

Malcolm Collins:Like Her primary boyfriend is one of the leaders of the anti AI community. And as a woman, should we is it better that she’s part of the anti AI community or that she wanna go up against her man? Okay. I’m just saying. You know what? Women thinking for themselves out there. That would be dangerous.

Simone Collins:I just want her to be happy, and I just think she’d be happier if she were an anti AI.

Malcolm Collins:If she completely cut herself off from that.

Simone Collins:Look look at also all the cool stuff she has built by vibe coding. What I also appreciate is that she’s not so there’s there’s there’s EA anti AI, and they’re all vibe coding. They’re all using AI stuff. And then there’s, like, normie anti AI where they’re, like, they refuse to use it aesthetically, and they’re just shooting themselves in the foot.

Malcolm Collins:So I’m glad that No. No. No. Not all the EA anti AI people are vibe coding. Some are like Ayla who’s, like, a little bit mentally free, but a lot of them don’t touch it, and they see it as, like, a status signal not to touch it.

Simone Collins:I don’t see that. I everyone I know who is in the space and adjacent to it. You know, as as long as they’re they’re if they’re agentic, competent people, they’re vibe coding. And if they’re not vibe coding, it’s not out of some aesthetic thing. It’s because they’re low agency, low productivity. So that’s

Malcolm Collins:Well, to give you an idea of, like, what happens to somebody in this community, because we’ve been able to see this with Ayla’s writings, is she talks about how today she doesn’t see a future anymore. She’s beginning to do more drugs. She’s beginning to not save for retirement anymore. She’s beginning to adopt a much more pessimistic attitude towards life and and and really dealing with mental health issues tied to this because these people really think civilization is about to it. Right? Like, when you think surrounded by people in

Simone Collins:a doomsday cult, which perhaps she is, how can you not start to just fall into that view? This is very commonly how people find themselves in cults in the first place. And I think Scott Alexander talked about this when he did that book review on the rise of Christianity, that so much of the rise of early Christianity really just had to do with people who were being surrounded by a tipping point of Christians. And then after at that point, you’re basically a Christian. So you have to get to that weird tipping point. And in the Bay Area, in these rational circles, I think that’s kind of how you see some of this memetic spread taking place is there’s just this preponderance of AI doomers. But, anyway, what they do in this article is explore the issue through just to start one Guardian article because it’s it’s such a good illustration that had six people involved to make it and publish it. Mhmm. All of these people were paid for by three mega donors, which the Guardian didn’t disclose. and in fact, as as Brian puts it in the article, quote, in a fundraising statement attached to the article, the Guardian proclaims its fierce independence. And Okay? The Guardian itself was paid over 3,000,000 by Coefficient Giving, a idoomerorg. The reporter who wrote the article, Aisha Down, was paid 50 sorry, 60 to 110 k through the Coefficient Givings Tarbell fellowship, which pays her salary. Also, three quoted experts experts in the article were all recipients of funds either from the survival and flourishing fund, more on them soon, Coefficient, again, another Do More AI, and also the Effective Ventures Foundation. And Ayesha, the reporter, does not justify her reasoning behind calling these people experts, despite the experts themselves publicly admitting that their predictions were off by years in in in some cases, if not, you know, decades as they put in the article. So there’s Henry Papadatos, who has paid $620,000, Malcolm Murray, who is paid $129,376 dollars and sorry. $129,376, and Andrea Castagna, who is paid $30,000, and she’s also the recipient of two additional undisclosed grants

Malcolm Collins:because transparency already But for context, Simone, you might not have done the math on this. Yeah. From the Survival and Flourishing Fund, our movement has received demonstrably more than every one of those grants combined.

Simone Collins:We what? Pronatalism? Yes. We received $500,000 from the Survival and Flourishing Fund.

Malcolm Collins:Which is more than every one of the numbers

Simone Collins:you Henry Papadopoulos alone was paid $620,000. Oh, 600,000? The Guardian was paid over 3,000,000 by coefficient giving. S**t. The reporter has a salary, Aisha down, through the Tarbell Fellowship, but that’s one reporter. And, again, Henry Papadous is just one of the three expert sources. Then Malcolm Murray, 129,000, a little more than that. Andrea Castagna, $30,000. And then the subject of the story, who is Daniel Coco Tajo Tajlo, was paid $2,851,166.

Malcolm Collins:Oh god. That’s so much more. But you wanna hear what’s wild about our movement compared to the the AI doomer movement? Uh-huh. So these guys are getting, you know, like, billions of dollars a year in total and, like, well over what we’re getting. Yeah. We took their one grant to us. Both did everything we told them we were going to do and set up a business that is set to be paying into the nonprofit foundation about 300,000 a year right now, which means what? That

Simone Collins:That’s the hope. Yeah.

Malcolm Collins:We’d Well, I mean, that that’s that’s the run rate.

Simone Collins:Okay? Right now.

Malcolm Collins:Yeah. Yeah. And so if we can grow it right now, obviously, if it shrinks, that’s bad. Right? But if we can grow it from here, which I think is reasonable to go from 300,000 a year to 500,000 a year, that means that we will, in perpetuity, be donating into cause areas an equivalent to the amount that they originally gave us every year just a few years after the original donation, which puts us in a completely different league than these AI idiots.

Simone Collins:However, it should be disclosed. And, again, just to be super clear, I think this was in 2021. The Pragmatist Foundation, which is our nonprofit foundation, received a $500,000 grant from the Survival and Flourishing Fund, which is one of these AI do more funds. And other people that we know who received grants from the fund definitely did AI do more adjacent style work. We were maybe one of the less usual applicants in that we applied to work on our school project. And that you know, like, we received that money. I I like, I think it’s important to disclose it. We we since have applied, I think, two or three more times, Malcolm.

Malcolm Collins:Two no. One more time.

Simone Collins:And the themes have gone more focused around AI safety, I think, as time has gone, at least in the wording of the application materials. Originally, the Survival and Flourishing Fund really had, like, very explicit just wording around how will your project contribute to long term human flourishing? Because, again, Survival and Flourishing Fund. Okay? It didn’t AI had nothing to do with it.

Malcolm Collins:But their community of donors got increasingly incepted into the cult.

Simone Collins:Yes. And so, unfortunately, one of the reasons why that $500,000 donation followed by one more 20 k. 10 k, which was great and very profoundly appreciated, did not result in anything beyond that was that Malcolm insisted on applying to these funds being like, look. You gave us $500,000 to work I think it was both pro to work on pronatalism and to work on our education thing. We built the whole education thing out. Here it is. You can look at it. Also, we successfully moved the Overton window on demographic collapse and prenatalism. People used to deny that it was an issue.

Malcolm Collins:Time, the natalism caused in Google search terms. Now they did a second I’d maybe even funded by me clowning on them about this. We were about double what AI safety was, nadilism was in terms of Google search traffic.

Simone Collins:Yeah. So Malcolm applies, and he’s like, look at all of your other pathetic donor recipients donation recipients. They can’t get anything done. Look at what we did with what you gave us. Don’t you think that maybe you should give us more? Because everyone else is so lazy, and I wonder why they didn’t give us more money.

Malcolm Collins:No. But here’s the fun thing. Right? Yeah. I wanted to, and I’m actually thinking about this. Fans can let us know. I’ve thought about re donating, like, every year, like, some amount or re donating what they gave us with interest, like, back into the fund just because, you know, OpenAI didn’t do it. They were founded as a nonprofit. And when they became profitable, they didn’t give Elon money, like, interest or equity or anything like that. I was like, that seems profoundly, you know, immoral. But now I’m I’m sort of struggling with a question I have, which is now that it looks like we might end up becoming quite profitable with like, we did everything we told them we were gonna do, and then I was like, and now I’m gonna take the rest of this money and make it make money forever with projects that are tied to our goals. Right?

Simone Collins:Right. Well and actually, this our FAB is directly downstream of a threat that we made to the survival and flourishing fund related to one of their AI safety, I guess, grant invitations whereby Malcolm was like, okay. So you could give us a grant to try to help you work on AI alignment with all the guardrails. You know, we’ll keep it siloed offline.

Malcolm Collins:Oh my god. They would have made the product so bad.

Simone Collins:Air gapped. We’ll be so safe. We’ll follow all your rules. Or you cannot fund us, and we’ll build it anyway. But everything will be immediately online, and we’re just gonna take all the guardrails off, and that is Reality Fabricator. And, I’m so glad that you did it, and I’m so glad they didn’t give

Malcolm Collins:Literally, with our agent system on Reality Fabricator, the way I decided features to add is I asked what would scare AI safety people the most. And I’d be like, build that next.

Simone Collins:So yeah.

Malcolm Collins:No. But what’s what’s fun about this is now the intellectual challenge I have, and fans can let me know where where they want us to go with this. Mhmm. and if you are unfamiliar, you haven’t heard of the project, the core thing that, like, people use our site for most is AI chat sessions or AI adventure sessions. Think of them as, like, choose your own adventure books. Yeah. and we’ve done some major updates on the systems that are meant to sort of brainstorm these for you, and they can even use Fable for not safe for work starts now, which is really

Simone Collins:good for NSFW? Incredibly good.

Malcolm Collins:Oh, dear. The the Fable brainstorming system I built out for the instant brainstorm or the the longer one. I wouldn’t say concept expander isn’t as good anymore now that the engines are better.

Simone Collins:When I do brainstormer instant concept expander, it is spick. So Fable can build incredible websites, create amazing features, build amazing software.

Malcolm Collins:Well, was really hard because Fable is generally very bad at talking like a human or writing stories.

Simone Collins:And Okay.

Malcolm Collins:I did some wizardry that got it working on this system. But, anyway, the the point being is, okay, check it out if you wanna check it out. Would obviously profoundly appreciate it. Also, we have, like, the best image and video generation provider I’m aware of in terms of pricing and diversity. But and this is filmed on the site too, by the way. But if we build this into something that’s making lots of money, my initial plan was, well, let’s give a portion of it back to the survival and flourishing fund. Just like clown on them with negative donations every year. Requests where we just scold them and then give them, like, a negative donation for, like, you know, 250,000, 500,000, whatever. And then I look at what they’re doing with this stuff, and I’m like, wait. They’re just, like, demonstrably a threat to civilization at this point.

Simone Collins:That’s that is actually my concern after reading all this. I’m like, oh, but what if, yeah, what if they use more funds that is actually gonna cause tangible damage? Because we also see not just the strategic losses that are downstream of AI doomerism from a national spending standpoint, data center development, all these things, lobbying, but also the mental health downstream effects that

Malcolm Collins:Oh, yes.

Simone Collins:Has on population.

Malcolm Collins:Communities of views. I know this one really smart kid who I used to mentor and help with things. Oh, man. And he basically, after he got incepted into this cult, just became severely depressed, stopped talking to anyone, like, didn’t leave his room for six months. Like, it psychologically destroys people. Yeah. And we’ve seen it happen to multiple promising young people.

Simone Collins:So maybe maybe don’t do that. But everyone’s in new

Malcolm Collins:grounded in reality at all. See our old episodes on this where we, like, go into all the points they make and how stupid they are. Yeah. But the the point being, like, if you if you’re worried about AI killing everyone, you really need to go look at we have, like, three or four episodes where we go point by point on every one of their points, and they are dumb dumb dumb dumb dumb dumb dumb dumb dumb dumb dumb dumb. It’s like it’s like, you know, AI is sucking up all the water level dumb. Right? Like, it’s it’s just not true or tied to reality at all. But now what I think I’m gonna do with the money, if we’re able to grow this organization, is dedicate it to the type of project the survival and flourishing fund would have funded when they first gave

Simone Collins:us

Malcolm Collins:that

Simone Collins:grant and awarded application. With hardea.org. That’s the whole point. And we’ll just remind people that they can submit grant applications there, but we’re we’re not there yet. Okay? We’re look. Let’s get some stability.

Malcolm Collins:Well, RFAB started as a grant application.

Simone Collins:Yeah. It did, dude. Bruno, thank you. Yeah.

Malcolm Collins:Yeah. Literally, REA start so we did Hardier. We put out grants for for and Reality Fabricator, the project started as a grant application.

Simone Collins:Yeah. Well, it was a grant application for a research modality using AI. Remember? It was, like, for for a second.

Malcolm Collins:Then, of course, being myself, I say, how can I profit from this? Oh god.

Simone Collins:Okay. This is true. At any rate, everyone knows now we received a large grant from SFF. Now all we’ve done since, I guess, rudely, is troll them and insult them. So bad us. But, also, as Brian puts it in his article, all six belong to a circular he’s again, all six people who made that

Malcolm Collins:Sorry. We we don’t troll them with, like, me. We troll them with, like, how are we doing better than every one of your other grants combined? That’s a that’s a meaningful thing. Okay. Okay.

Simone Collins:I know. I know. I know. Look. I didn’t stop you from doing it. I edited your applications, and I was like, well, Malcolm, if this is the angle you wanna take now, it’s grammatically correct, and we sent it. I would have stopped you if I really vehemently disagreed. I mean, you’re right. I just don’t you know, it’s typically like, you gotta kiss someone’s boots if you wanna get money from them. And that’s what they all did with daddy Sam Bankman Fried, and and then they got screwed because now he’s in jail. But, anyway

Malcolm Collins:Well and I guess this is why Hardy a is able to stay moral, and they’re not.

Simone Collins:Right. Sure. Okay. Mhmm. But let’s we’re gonna get past the trolling to the dirt. Okay? Because the receipts and the dirt are finally here. Don’t you understand?

Malcolm Collins:Let’s give me the receipts.

Simone Collins:So with this Guardian article, as, Brian says, all six belong to a circular ecosystem known as AI safety united around the belief that AI will end the human race. What Down promotes as expertise, that’s the author of the article to remind you, is not merely unrigorous or exaggerated. It’s a work of cult like fiction which openly promotes their vision of the AI apocalypse. This belief underwrites millions spent annually on promoting a fire hose of anti AI narratives with the goal of banning AI outright, the price of preventing the apocalypse. This ecosystem is bankrolled by three mega donors, Dustin Moskowitz’s Open Philanthropy, Sam Bankman Fried’s Center for Effective Altruism, aka CEA, and Jan Tullen’s Survival and Flourishing Fund. Thank you, Jan, for the for the grant. The media arm of this empire has over 40,000,000 in donations and includes paid journalists, influencers, and religious groups. So, apparently, the Center for Effective Altruism, and I didn’t know this, rebranded to the Effective Ventures Foundation after Sam Bakeman Fried ended up in jail. And Open Philanthropy also rebranded after first distancing themselves from Sam Bankman Fried, then they changed their name to Coefficient Giving, which I didn’t know. So because don’t you remember after he like, after the the Sam Bankman Fried money fire hose dried up, like, there was this moment of, like, mass mourning? Like, we had calls with people who worked in the effective altruism, like, nonprofit space who acted as though, like, their mother had just died. They’re like, I’m just emotionally

Malcolm Collins:Well, destroyed the community. The entire community was living off of that fire hose. Is is it a giant purge network that sits with their thumb up their butt all day producing nothing but Harry Potter fan fiction?

Simone Collins:Are you surprised that we didn’t get any more money from them? Oh god. But what’s ironic about it and and I I do share Malcolm’s disdain because the whole point of effective altruism for those not familiar with it like, one of the core sort of stories founding stories of it as it first emerged was, hey. You know, what’s more effective than, like, working in the nonprofit space that you care about, like going to be a doctor in Africa and saving a life a day, you could become a high paid consultant or finance bro, make a ton of money, and donate, I don’t know, even, like, just 10%, but up to as much income as you can, all of that to charity, and you can save hundreds of lives a day. So don’t actually work at the nonprofit. And yet somehow, ironically, this entire nonprofit ecosystem sprung up. And lo and behold, the vast majority of the people who receive these AI grants, and these these effective altruist grants in general, it’s mostly for projects that involve paying them to sit on their butts and write. They’re not even being paid to go be a doctor and save a life a day. They’re just being paid to not only sit on their butts and write, like, in Iowa or something where it’s affordable, but in freaking San Francisco or in London or in New York. So it’s extra insulting because it it it it spits in the face of effective altruism. Yeah. But it has this ecosystem of people who are living on grants and not even getting their hands dirty for the most part. Now there are people who go out and actually do fieldwork. But, again, that even that even

Malcolm Collins:No. But it’s it’s it’s prestigious fieldwork. It’s like, I’m gonna save Africans. And it’s like, Africans aren’t gonna do for civilization. You know that, and I know that. This is all just so you can jack yourself off.

Simone Collins:Anyway yeah. It’s anyway, it’s bad, so I share I share. But, anyway so here’s how much money they’ve been giving to media. Seven effective altruist organizations, I should say, that are anti AI according to Brian’s reporting, and this which is very rigorous. it’s it’s very good. We trust Brian. 17,900,000 has gone to print, 13,900,000 to video content, 4,870,000 to political advocacy, 2.66 to film and fiction, 1,810,000 to religious NGOs, and 1,350,000 to others. And the Tarbell Fellowship Program, which, again, is what paid that journalist who wrote the Guardian article that was the Potemkin article, is is how coefficient giving influences media coverage. And it uses this fellowship to pay the salaries of over 30 or 20 over 20 journalists. I think he said two dozen. It’s literally, like, at

Malcolm Collins:the CIA. You used have tons of journalists on on staff and everything like that.

Simone Collins:Right.

Malcolm Collins:What I was really disappointed in, I don’t know if you saw this, but, like, a moist critical who generally has, like, okay takes, like, decided to go super hard against AI and just came off as

Simone Collins:He could be paid by them. I don’t know. He might actually be paid.

Speaker 6:Legitimately, AI data centers are actually the boogeyman. They are just a scourge on this planet and a stain on civilized society. They are these behemoths that require all infrastructure to be changed to suit their gluttony, to satiate their insatiable appetite, They and doing so just pillages communities while seeing basically no benefit beyond the temporary jobs they used to build them. No normal people with functioning frontal lobes want data centers in their community. It is bad for them. I was reading something that someone was sharing about, like, when an AI data center came through and the impact it had on their water because that’s a very common thing. And I’ve just really been toying around with this idea, and I’ve seen other people kinda talk about it occasionally as well. And I’m not fully bought into it hook, line, and sinker, but it’s an interesting theory, a little game theory. What if the reason there’s been seemingly so much more sickness like, it feels like people are getting sick more frequently now, and a a wide variety of illnesses just seem more common now. What if AI data centers are hoarding all of the clean water because, obviously, they are gluttonous? Like, they are so thirsty with an unquenchable thirst.

Malcolm Collins:That’s a good point. I mean, he’s got a big enough audience that they probably reached out to him, and his take was completely delusional. It was like, who’s using AI for anything? And he’s like, I don’t know. Like, everyone who’s not a tard? Like, what are you talking about?

Simone Collins:What do you mean? Yeah. No. I was actually just listening to, another YouTuber talking about how bad AI was, and she was like, and AI doesn’t even share its sources. And I’m like, when did you last use AI? Like AI talking about

Malcolm Collins:That’s like three years ago.

Simone Collins:I know. I know. This is just how bad it is for some AI people.

Malcolm Collins:Like, oh my god. What do you

Simone Collins:know, girl? You’re wrong. Anyway, Time, Time, like as in Time Magazine, is the biggest fellowship recipient of the Tarbell Fellowship. And Brian found that 58 out of the 100 Time 100 profiles were written by Tarbell paid journalists. He also shared leaked emails that show how AI safety organizations sponsor anti AI content on YouTube and then showed channels that have been funded by these organizations, including one of Octavian’s favorite channels, Kurz Kurzgagut or however you say that, which received do you wanna guess how much that channel received?

Malcolm Collins:Oh, it got probably 500,000.

Simone Collins:$5,830,000. $5,830,000. Yeah. It’s interesting. And another one, another example, Rational Animations got 2,530,000. A Primer got 300,000. A Happier World, a 150. A Space Science Guy got 24 k. And he points out also how the AI doomerism sponsored videos perform between 1289% worse than these channels’ normal videos. Just trying to point out how, like, unhinged and unfounded the actual arguments are. They are not good arguments.

Malcolm Collins:And yet And and and these the rational people who aren’t in the cult and watch them are immediately like, this is a dumb argument. They bounce, and then

Simone Collins:they don’t watch. And this shows up in the watch data on these channels. If the like, if some un if some well moored in reality sponsored reached out to them, like, hey. I think you should talk about the sustainability of nuclear power. And they’ve taught many of these channels have talked about that. People are like, oh, okay. Wow. This is actually really interesting. Maybe we should you know, you like I I would say there’s some propaganda that is both true and that people would like to watch, and this is not this is not some of that. It’s depressing, and it’s not true. And so it sucks. And Sabine actually pointed this out in her YouTube video where she talks about her experience being reached out to by an organization.

Malcolm Collins:What a hero, by the way, Sabine is. She’s such a cool person. Her content’s

Simone Collins:so good. She’s

Malcolm Collins:why? I really just could not say more positive things about a science educator in the market right now. You know, somebody reaches out and is like, I’ll give you millions of dollars. And she’s like, this is king shady as hell, and I’m gonna talk about it.

Simone Collins:Well, she also said that they they reached out to her with prescribed sentences and references, that they they weren’t gonna be like, hey. Can you explore this and share your own thoughts? It was like, no. You say this. You’re gonna say this, which is really creepy. And this is happening all over social media. Of course, about two weeks ago, it came out that a lot of especially Democratic and I’m not both both sides of the people covering this said that both Republican and Democratic influencers on social media were being paid to post specific political messages. However, it happened a ton more with Democrats, and everyone admits it. So I’m saying primarily Democratic influencers were just reading word for word the same lines, and people actually compiled some of them together. It’s very embarrassing when you actually see it because at the same time, they also did not disclose that they were reading off scripts that were sponsored. But I I think You know? No.

Malcolm Collins:That that the amount that this can, like, actually with you when you don’t realize you’re listening to a bunch of paid shills of people you thought you could respect

Simone Collins:and trust. Yeah. Because it’s like, you know Sabina. You trust her. We all do. Like, we love her.

Malcolm Collins:Well, like

Simone Collins:And imagine if she’d said yes and started reading off these lines, and then I don’t know. You also gonna feel like you’re being gassy. You’re like, wait. Can I trust her? This seems really weird. Is everything else she’s saying off? And, fortunately, she disclosed in her video. She is only sponsored and and controlled by Big Cheese, which I relate, girl.

Malcolm Collins:Is she is she sponsored by cheese companies?

Simone Collins:No. She loves cheese, and so do we. I saw what

Malcolm Collins:you No. But the reason I’m mentioning this is this can happen to even, like, sane famous so, we talk with Nux frequently, like, offline and private chats and everything like that. now great guy, by way. and he, at one point, was reaching out to us, and he’s like, okay. This this anti AI stuff. Right? Like, this is crazy. Right?

Speaker 19:I feel like I’m taking crazy pills.

Malcolm Collins:Yeah. He’s like, I have seen these videos. Like, I just need to check with somebody else who’s saying.

Simone Collins:Yeah. Like, am I yeah. Because I think we’re all like, wait. Like, why why are all these people posting this? And yet it seems so dumb, and it’s just this massive attempt at gaslighting.

Malcolm Collins:Well And it’s like, like, the the almond water versus the the one. And yet you still like, the water argument around AI has been so demonstrably proven, not wrong, but objectively stupid

Simone Collins:Yeah.

Malcolm Collins:That and people can be like, oh, that’s whataboutism. No. It’s not whataboutism. If you’re talking about water consumption by another source that is more pointless to the economy than AI in the exact same region, California, of the exact same water supply that is demonstrably more destructive to that water supply and at a rate about a thousand x higher, and you’re not complaining about that, but you’re complaining about this, what that shows is you don’t actually care about what you say you’re caring about.

Simone Collins:They’ve actually moved on. Do wanna know what argument they’re using now?

Malcolm Collins:Still see the water argument frequently.

Simone Collins:I know. But do you wanna know what the primary one is now?

Malcolm Collins:What’s the new argument?

Simone Collins:The noise. It’s the no the birds.

Malcolm Collins:The noise. I’ve heard of the noise. It’s such a bad argument. We live not far from an AI data center. Never in my life have I heard any noise from this facility. Do they think that these facilities don’t put, like, noise protection around them?

Simone Collins:My source sent me a video of a bird in a tree, next to a very loud fan noise. I don’t there was no there was no data center in view, admittedly, in the video. And the bird looked fine, but the person who was taking the video was like, oh my god.

Malcolm Collins:But So I I wanna be clear about something with AI data centers and noise. Uh-huh. There are AI data centers that actually do produce a decent amount of noise. Okay. These data centers are specifically in nonresidential areas. There are other data centers that are near residential areas. And because they don’t want to be removed because they’re they’re owned by sane capitalists, they implement lots of noise reduction. Noise reduction is not some sci fi new technology. We’ve been using it in many industries Yes. For a hundred years at this point.

Simone Collins:True. Yes.

Malcolm Collins:When we don’t when the AI data centers are not using like, just think about this to yourself. Are you aware that noise reduction technology exists? We all agree somewhere that noise why do you think they’re not using well, because they are. There’s no law that says you can’t use noise reduction technology at an AI data center. Like, I just confused.

Simone Collins:I know. Look. Okay. Anyway, one thing Sabina does point out, and I think it’s important to to disclose this and also be be fair about it, is that there are also some pro AI organizations that are reaching out creators and encouraging them, you know, with sponsorship to talk about this. Like, there’s a there’s an organization called Build American AI that Taylor Lorenz said reached out to her offering her $5,000 to make a video in which she talks about how The US needs to stay competitive, with China on the AI front, which I 100% agree with. But they’re I don’t know what possessed them to reach out to Taylor Lorenz about this when, like, half of her content is about AI bad.

Malcolm Collins:So This is this liberal mirror world version of us you follow? Yes. Yes.

Simone Collins:I love Taylor Lorenz. She’s delightful. You know me. I’m I guess I’m a masochist, but I I like her. Anyway, she she she did disclose that. So look. And and Sabina points out in her video. She’s like, look. It would be stupid for these organizations not to try to influence the media. That’s their job. Like, that’s their stated purpose in many of these cases. So, of course, they should do it. Her primary concern that she discloses in her video is that when they’re reaching out to science news reporters and tech news reporters, they’re creating a skewed perception of reality by manipulating and messaging I I think this

Malcolm Collins:is this is genuine. What about it? When you’re when you’re contrasting these two things. because, she’s being offered $5,000 where the anti AI orgs are paying $5,000,000. The orders of magnitude are not the same.

Simone Collins:Yeah. Well, we’d be thrilled about $5,000.

Malcolm Collins:Why don’t why don’t you reach out to this org, this painkiller, throwaway

Simone Collins:icon in? I think they wouldn’t yeah. My first impression was, well, they wouldn’t give it to us because we’d do this for free anyway, but maybe they’ll maybe they’ll do it. You know how we are. We’ll be like, hey.

Malcolm Collins:If you need people to reach out to other

Simone Collins:Oh, yeah, dude. Yeah. They they they aren’t in named choices. Why did they reach out to Taylor Lorette? What is their problem? Oh my gosh. Okay. Yeah. Actually, I will reach out to them because there are plenty of people we know who would probably appreciate doing sponsored content. And yeah. Okay. Let’s do this. Good. Good idea. But okay. It’s not just these people trying to influence tech reporting and science reporting. And you could see the theme in the YouTube videos that are being sponsored by by these donors. And there’s a full graph. I’ve I’ve linked to all articles in the show notes. Go check out the articles on effort.news. There’s great graphs. There are extensive lists of everyone who’s been receiving donations. The disturbing thing for me about it is they really targeted those, like, explainer channels, like Kurtz Gergart or however you pronounce it. I’m so sorry. That

Malcolm Collins:He does great pronatalist work, by the way.

Simone Collins:He does. Like, I really like they these are these are, like, you know, illustrated explainer videos, science explained, all these things. This is where especially kids, like, kids are going to learn about reality. And I I am bothered by that, that they’re creating the skewed perception of reality. What really came out of left field for me, though, was effort dot news’s follow-up reporting on the AI safety organization’s religious entanglements. Yes.

Malcolm Collins:And and this is you know, when we did our religious video, for people who remember, on how a lot of the mainstream American religious institutions are hyper involved in the influx of immigrants that we have right now. Mhmm. And have a really both organized and make the majority of their profit from it. Watch the episode of u b three. It’s, like, 80% of their profit for some

Simone Collins:them making Brian’s reporting again. Like, so freaking good.

Malcolm Collins:That that was our first Brian video where we went over that. But people are like, why don’t you just work with one of the mainstream religious Christian denominations? And I’m like, because they will take your donation dollars. If you’re giving it to, like, the Episcopal Church in The United States or something, they’ll immediately turn it around and use it to funnel endless immigrants into this country. They they want you eradicated. They are the tool of your destruction. It makes sense to fight for independent religious organizations and new ways of of of of handling this because the old ones are captured to the extent that there is very little that you can do with them without attempting to take them over, which you can do. I love reading and doing. We’re working on this, but that’s that’s too big a project for us. One one thing to also note here, if you’re doing tithing to because somebody was like, well, I wanna tithe to something that’s not, like, actively going to try to eradicate me. You know? Good luck. But I’m not sure what the position is on tithing yet. You know, the the techno puritan federation is a church registered in The United States that you could donate to instead, and we’ll put it to useful stuff like preserving civilization. Just, you know, the main thing that we’d be putting money to with that organization is the season project, which basically is a a dating project to try to get young people married to, you know, save civilization. Gotta get people laid.

Simone Collins:So it’s done. Spouse. Obviously. Yeah. But, you know, we’re we’re a very small fish in a big pond of religions in this big pond.

Malcolm Collins:We’re a small fish.

Simone Collins:The big pond is being paid a lot of money to be doomery about AI. And Brian and his team find it very rich that largely atheistic effective altruists are trying to get religious people to believe that AI will bring the end times. As as they put it in the article, the AI safety movement descends from rationalist and new atheist roots. Its core belief that AI will literally end all human life often draws comparisons to doomday cults like heaven’s gate. Yet with enough funding, some churches are willing to square that belief with the book of revelation. They also observed that AI safety’s largest donors, Dustin Moskowitz and the new convicted or now convicted fraudster, Sam Bengtmann Fried, were among Biden’s largest donors. And yet, when he lost the twenty twenty four election, they were on the outs, which led them to turn to religious NGOs. So I think their theory as to why the effective altruist community is so heavy on religion is because they’ve gone all in on the leftist politicians, and then we’re like, oh, [bleep]. Because Trump really doesn’t he’s a very pro AI guy, as you can see by all the things. And so his his content, his AI content, his support for data centers, all of it, it’s delightful. He’s got a lot of I

Malcolm Collins:love when he makes a video of, like, leftist celebrities using deepfakes. It’s getting getting their prescriptions for Trump derangement syndrome.

Simone Collins:Yeah. Okay. I forgot about that. Yes.

Speaker 9:You or someone you know been diagnosed with TDS? The symptoms can be relentless. Fortunately, I’m doctor Trump, and I have a treatment plan. Let’s hear what some of my patients have to say.

Speaker 10:I have been suffering for over a decade, and after listening to doctor Trump, I can see some results.

Speaker 11:Man, I’ve been suffering for years. I really didn’t believe that was help out there.

Malcolm Collins:Yeah. No. They do great stuff with AI in the Trump administration. I love it when they asked the, Doge guys, like, how they chose what things they were shutting down, and he goes, I don’t know. I asked AI.

Simone Collins:So good. It’s so good. Anyway, quote from the article, since 2025, AI safety donors put 3,300,000 into churches, seminaries, faith networks, and religious affinity groups. It paid for pronouncements, declarations, red lines, and a Magna Carta of AI. They continue, the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America took $105,000 from the Future of Life Institute. They credit their red lines on AI to, quote, a grant from the Future of Life Institute. The Gospel Coalition received 200,000 for a podcast called Silicone Spiritualities without disclosing their sponsor. They later barred their writers from using AI to research, write, or edit. Great. The world I know.

Malcolm Collins:These traditional religious orgs are our enemy. They are the West’s enemy. Look.

Simone Collins:I wouldn’t worry about them too much.

Malcolm Collins:This is the you know, whatever this nonsense you you these things are not your friends.

Simone Collins:Anyway, the council of churches took $100,000 to write its red lines. The Mormon nonprofit, Faith Matters, took 299,000 for a Magna Carta of AI at two Mormons. Anyway, the reporting shows that Eradicate

Malcolm Collins:you know, you can’t trust these larger organizations.

Simone Collins:You can’t.

Malcolm Collins:You cannot. You cannot. They are not friends to our goals because they don’t have kids. And they they are not invested in the future, and they are just interested in cashing out.

Simone Collins:Anyway, they give there’s lot there’s tons of really great graphics on effort.news sort of showing how things are playing out. They include in this article a graph of paid AI media by religion with multi faith getting the very most funding, followed by Buddhism, but only because the survival and flourishing fund gave the vast majority to them. Like, the only religious involvement that the SFF has is with Buddhism, and I don’t get it. Why? Yeah. Because Buddhism is, like, the most inherently genocidal religion. Like, the whole point is to snuff out all sentience. This is the survival and flourishing fund. I don’t understand negative utilitarian religion. Make it make sense.

Malcolm Collins:I I mean, I know why. It’s because they are a bunch of elitists who are attempting to signal status to other elitists in their urban centers.

Simone Collins:But it’s not survival in flor survival is one of the worst.

Malcolm Collins:Been captured. They don’t care about human civilization anymore. There was a a point when they did. There was clearly a point when they did.

Simone Collins:That’s the idea

Malcolm Collins:to us? That claims care about human civilization and is donating to Buddhists because Buddhists have great branding. Right? Like, if you don’t actually think about their relationship.

Simone Collins:If don’t scratch a centimeter beneath the surface, sure.

Malcolm Collins:Yeah. You’re like, oh, yeah. They’re, you know, sweet little temple people.

Simone Collins:They want to help people achieve equanimity. How great.

Malcolm Collins:How great. Right?

Simone Collins:It’s like, they don’t understand equanimity means, oh, let’s delete you. Let’s delete you forever. That’s equanimity. Yes.

Malcolm Collins:Yes. No. Not just you, of course, Simone. They want a total genocide. They want a genocide of genocides.

Simone Collins:It’s that classic, like, oh, you know, if you do the thing, I’ll release you, and then they do the thing, and then they, like, you know, kill you and they’re like I’m in front

Malcolm Collins:of your coil. Coils. It reminds me of the

Speaker 17:That’s right. We’re all Reed Richards from different dimensions, What’s wrong? I came in expecting a lot of wacky and weird differences here, but I I I’m a little shocked by the common thread developing here. You’ll be surprised how many of us are left handed. No, man. I wanna talk about the World War two film. Oh. Just to save time, how many more of these reeds come from worlds where Germany won World War two? Alright. Yeah. You know, I was trying to avoid the topic, but seeing as you got my arm here, uh, you notice how everyone has some distinct feature that makes them stand apart? Yes. Am I the only from a world where Germany loses? Well, it’s more accurate to say the only world where it happens, but yes. Oh my god. Yeah. See, we thought this might be shocking to you, is why I’m doing the introductions. Normally, it’s reed 19 ‘45 over there. Listen. Put all of this aside for now. We what we’re trying to do right now is save not just your world, but every world in the multiverse. Alright? Trillions upon trillions of lives. Alright? Like like like three holocaust. How big were your holocaust?

Simone Collins:Anyway, so multi faith got the most, then Buddhism. Oh my god. I don’t know what you guys are doing. Then faith adjacent organizations, then Protestants, Latter day Saints, Hindu, Catholic, Islamic, Orthodox, and then finally, Jewish. Go Jews, apparently. You’re not taking

Malcolm Collins:Yeah. They’re the well, they got all the money already. They’re so used to paying I know.

Simone Collins:They’re like

Malcolm Collins:to manipulate things. Okay. Comes to them with a bag of money, and they’re just, like, confused. They’re like, excuse me. Do we have our roles reversed here? I was gonna pay you guys to talk about how we need to eradicate the Iranians. Like, what do you what do you we could we could do a it’s just a a big I don’t know. Were further confused because, of course, it was probably a Jew who was doing the payment. Right?

Simone Collins:I don’t know. Look. Anyway, it’s so

Malcolm Collins:I’m asking AI what the survival and flourishing fund was paying Buddhists for.

Simone Collins:Let’s let’s yeah. I’d love I’d love that detail, because I don’t think I found it in the article. Anyway, the Future of Life Institute, as they write, AI safety mega donor, runs a full time religious program with a religious lead, Will Jones, and a US faith liaison, Brian j a Boyd. The program lists the Pontifical Academy of Sciences and The Vatican’s Fratelli Tutti Foundation among its partners. FLI’s grantees make up the overwhelming majority of religious signatories on statements produced by FLI and its allies. They add of FLI’s recipients only two disclose their donations on their project pages. Two more disclosed their donations, but only on LinkedIn.

Malcolm Collins:That’s such a Also, I I need to be clear on our, not just our survival and flourishing fund grant, but all the grants we have gotten since then. So first, before we got a grant from the Survival and Flourishing Fund, and this was audited by, I think, The Telegraph or it might have been it was some UK major newspaper, because they actually looked at our financials to audit that this was true. Until we got the Survival and Flourishing Fund donation, we donated over 50% of our income to our nonprofit. Since we got the Survival and Flourishing Fund donation and any donation that any fan of this show has made, not a dime of any of that has ever gone to myself or Simone as a salary.

Simone Collins:We’ve never made we yeah. The we’ve never I don’t even I mean, yes. It would I would love to be able to set up payroll for the foundation someday, but that is not No.

Malcolm Collins:No. Eventually, when we’re making enough money that we can start donating to other things, we’ll set up payroll or

Simone Collins:I know. I just feel so smug, though, whenever I have to, like, fill out some kind of banking thing or, like, some other application for the foundation. And they’re like, okay. Well, like, how many salaried employees do you have? And we’re like, zero.

Malcolm Collins:None. Zero. Always zero.

Simone Collins:Well, how many employees are enforcing your policies? Zero. Anyway, I mean, we’re we’re enforcing them. We’re just not employees. We’re still enforcers. I love being an enforcer. Anyway, so they’re not disclosing their their donations unless you well, I mean, okay. Some disclosed on LinkedIn, but that’s the same as not disclosing because who is on LinkedIn? I swear. Anyway, for more, they made no public project related disclosures. FLI’s other religious outreach is not progressing as smoothly. This is my favorite part. They paid a Muslim NGO for a declaration of Islamic principles and Impact Academy for a Hindu consensus statement. Neither has been delivered. And one of them,

Malcolm Collins:like love Hinduism idiots. The two Indian groups, you just can’t trust them. They won’t they won’t

Simone Collins:No. I know. I just love that they they I think they recognize just, like, the profound stupidity of the statements that they were expected to make, and they’re like, sure. We’ll take your money.

Malcolm Collins:Okay. The Buddha thing is, like, worse than you think.

Simone Collins:Wait. How?

Malcolm Collins:So the so they ended up giving a $100,000 in 2019 to the center of mindful learning, the legal entity behind the monastic academy. the grant was for Oak, optimize awakening and kindness, a California expansion of their monastic training program. The Monastic Academy Maple in Low, Vermont is an explicitly Buddhist community founded and led by Saurol Fale, the teacher ordained in the risen Zen tradition who also trained Tibetan Chan and Ambra Buddhist lineages. Their work combines traditional monastic discipline, meditation, precepts, communal life with leadership training aimed at existential risks, including AI. So it’s a it’s a Buddhist anti AI cult that’s that’s literally they they live monastic lives in in Vermont.

Simone Collins:They’re not gonna do anything. What what kind of impact are they gonna have? They’re just like a a dead end. Also, if you wanna go zen, like, have kids. I, like, I remember looking in Kyoto with, like, their famous Zen Rock Gardens and how, you know, like, you make the amazing design, and then you just destroy it all. You do it again. And I’m like, wow. Like, you don’t need to live in an expensive rock garden to experience that. You just have kids. You clean the thing up, and they immediately make it dirty again. You put away the toys. They immediately

Malcolm Collins:destroy everything. One of these people at one of these academies, like, personal story here.

Simone Collins:Yeah. Oh, no.

Malcolm Collins:Okay. Leadership emergence. Profile on Ellen. Okay? Okay. Okay. Why did you join the Maple so for for first of Ellen is a student at Princeton University pursuing a bachelor’s degree in neuroscience like I did. After her first year at university, Ellen found herself completely disillusioned with the academy world and took off for two years to travel and work in various countries across Europe and Asia. She has an intense drive to explore as many external and internal worlds as possible that could fit into her lifetime. Ellen is deeply impacted. Okay. So after her first year, she dropped out. Is deeply impacted by the modern meaning crisis and believes the monastic institutions and psychedelics will be crucial to the survival and evolution of humanity. Ellen foresees a lifetime of working with and in altered states of consciousness, bending status quo reality to increase experience of adventure, play, beauty, and love. After my academic year ended, this is why she joined, I was feeling frighteningly desperate. I didn’t wanna spend the summer in a laboratory or interning at one of those overhyped companies with many of my peers end up at. I had a toxic array of harmful behaviors and thoughts plaguing me. I was trying to escape culture, and I felt broken and that the potential to take me down with it. I wanted to do something diametrically opposite. For a long time, I have waited to immerse myself in contemplative practices to train my mind, but I have gotten consistently engaged without any form of formal practice. I thought an apprenticeship in the MAPO program would give me the benefits of training with the skills of meditation and leadership. This is so she’s like a a drug addict who dropped out of college and, like,

Simone Collins:she’s not mentally unwell person. Yeah. And they’re enabling that.

Malcolm Collins:Right? Like, they’re not like

Simone Collins:Or or or or look. Asmongold, everyone’s talking about we need to get these unwell people off the streets. Maybe that’s what I

Malcolm Collins:don’t think we need to pay this much money to do it. I can lock her in a cage. Very easy. I can I can go to Maybe this is the box?

Simone Collins:Maybe this is the box. I don’t know, Malcolm. And they’re just trying to be nice about it.

Malcolm Collins:In Malcolm’s America, we will have, like, a candy van that says, like, psychedelics on it going out by Princeton, you know, like, a ice cream, like, with the. And when kids come, grab them, sedate them, put them in a cage.

Simone Collins:Oh my god. Look. Look. Let’s get back look. So the Vatican, you’ll remember.

Malcolm Collins:Gonna say there was, you know, in that that movie, the Kingsman?

Simone Collins:Yeah.

Malcolm Collins:the second one. When there’s the guy like, well, you know, if we just let all the drug addicts die, society would be dramatically better. I was like, what is he wrong? Like no. But I I sorry. The the the reason I’m going on a a tangent here with this is this is one of the reasons why we could start a cult like they started. You know, we could start something in the woods where we have a a whatever. Like, we have enough money to do that, where we siphon money off of, like, rich Princeton kids to, like, work on their whatever. And and but I don’t want those people. I don’t want the burnouts. I want the productive people. That’s who we’re trying to incept into our world.

Simone Collins:Point. Yeah.

Malcolm Collins:Because I want the force of their productivity. I don’t want to be another leverage that burnouts for burnout’s sake. Yeah.

Simone Collins:I think people make really big mistakes when they’re trying to create any sort of informal community. And, look, we tried even with project Eureka. We I’m saying this because we we learned from our mistakes. People who try to make cults or make communities, intentional communities where people live together, you’re just not going to attract top talent because top talent doesn’t wanna uproot their entire life to come and

Malcolm Collins:live in a project.

Simone Collins:Yeah. It or in your way, whatever, in your beautiful planning community. It doesn’t matter. They want to be where the opportunity is. They’re not gonna come. And you don’t wanna work with people who are not motivated to work on important projects, so it’s a stupid idea. This in person community stuff, just drop it. Just drop it. It’s over.

Malcolm Collins:Yeah. Online. VTuber. So you you everything’s virtual these days. Come on, guys.

Simone Collins:Yes. Yes. Anyway, remember how the Vatican released this paper on AI? When they bought? Well, as they write in the article, in September 2025, a Vatican working group chaired by papal adviser father Paolo Benati hand handed Pope Leo the fourteenth an appeal for prohibition on superintelligence. Quote, until there’s broad scientific consensus that it will be on safely and controllably, end quote, plus an IAEA style inspectorate for AI labs. By November, FLI sat on the Vatican’s Builders AI Forum. In May 2026, it put $200,000.

Malcolm Collins:They’re so

Simone Collins:cheap, but the Catholics, I guess, are desperate, in two Catholic projects, a post liberal magazine in Steubenville, Ohio, and a Slovenian faculty educating Catholic leaders on AI. FLI is using newfound connections to support the business disputes of Anthropic, an AI safety linked company. In March, Boyd cosigned a Catholic theologian’s brief backing Anthropic in its dispute with the Department of War. Anthropic bought him or sorry, brought him to the company’s two day summit with 15 Christian thinkers. Then on the May 25, Pope Leo the fourteenth presented Magnifica Humanitas, what we were talking about, the first encyclical devoted to artificial intelligence.

Malcolm Collins:In the pocket of this cult because every dangerous cult has the cat the Vatican in their pocket.

Simone Collins:I knew you’d like that part. And the lay speaker beside two carnivals in the synod hall was Chris Ola, cofounder of Anthropic. They finish with, the AI safety movement spends more brazenly and deceptively than almost any other political cause. This affects not just the AI debate, but theology broadly. As Nirit Weisblatt puts it, quote, AI doomerism fills a religious shaped hole for people who left religious upbringing but retain a hunger for a mission driven community. The AI risk subculture offers a replacement meaning system, end quote, which I think is a great place to end. I hate this.

Malcolm Collins:I hate it too. I hate I hate that people are so gullible. I hate that people will repeat things that are obviously stupid, like the noise thing or the water thing. It’s evaporative cooling, people. The water doesn’t go to, like, the nether sphere. It doesn’t go to the outer darkness. It goes into something that the rest of us learned about in kindergarten called the water cycle. Okay? It’s not, like, polluted. It’s not like green slime from a Batman video or something like that. Right? It’s not like radioactive. It’s have you used water cooling on your computer? Because you’re gamers. Right? Do you not understand how liquid cooling works?

Simone Collins:I Apparently not. Look. I I haven’t seen gamers freak out about data centers, to be fair.

Malcolm Collins:So Moist critical, dude. Oh god. Like and and the amount of money that they can save you if you’re a taxpayer. in one district, they were 45% of the tax revenue. Like, they yeah. Imagine. They cut, real estate taxes by a third after implementing AI data centers. Like, you’re just wasting your money if you don’t have AI data centers in your district.

Simone Collins:No. That’s true. And I I again, I really

Malcolm Collins:I really would like lower property taxes. I don’t I people are like, oh, but you wouldn’t want them in your district. Yes. I [bleep] do. I don’t like taxes.

Simone Collins:We 100% want them in our district. Look at their other districts too that, for the first time, have been able to pay bonuses to their teachers and, like, all sorts of things that you would think progressives would really like to see. their their electricity costs have gone down. Like, as long as you have a nonidiotic town council or city council or whatever that is approving the entry of the data center, they can set in all the conditions that you want, lower electricity process or prices, lower lower No.

Malcolm Collins:You can literally ask the data center to as a part of setting itself up.

Simone Collins:Promise you won’t be loud. Promise you won’t take water. Promise

Malcolm Collins:in addition to that to to reduce the price of local water. If you’re like, I’m a a a worried about water prices jumping. You can make a subsidizing water clause in the data center. Right? Like, what what are you talking about? That’s your politicians that are the problem, not the data center. The data center is making money. It can afford to do this stuff.

Simone Collins:I know. I know it’s very frustrating, but, hopefully, your solace is knowing that after all that, after all of our experience with grant applications and seeing where all the attention was and seeing what was happening and who was actually getting the money, finally, we have receipts, all thanks to effort.news. Make sure you check out the show notes and also Sabina Hoff Hassen Hassenfellers.

Malcolm Collins:Yes. Sabina and effort news. So Brian Chow and Sabina, the two real heroes. This both have been on the show. I am so glad that this is coming out.

Simone Collins:Yeah.

Malcolm Collins:I am so glad that at least the people who are open to evidence are now seeing that AI doomerism is just a a scam. It’s a scam. It’s a scam in a cult. And they don’t care about what’s true. Yeah. They don’t care about getting you real information. They care about manipulating you to join their doomerist cult. As to why their doomerous cult go grows so quickly within these very high intelligence communities, it’s because it removes personal responsibility for the future. It’s, oh, you didn’t put in the effort to have a lot of kids. You didn’t put in the effort to not get addicted to drugs. You didn’t put in the effort to not live your life going to orgies every other week and and and and then not building a family or anything genuinely sustainable, it’s okay. AI is about to destroy everything anyway, And you could just spend all of your time trying to bring other people into the cult so you don’t need to deal with the cognitive dissonance of the rest of the world moving forward. And, again, look up our episodes on why the AI doomers stuff is is wrong. Even, like, a mathematical level, we have hour long topics on this.

Simone Collins:It’s true.

Malcolm Collins:It’s true. I just have to say, like, the the point that still gets me the most is that they still push orthogonality. They’re like, we have no idea what AI is gonna do. I’m like, what are you talking about? It’s the token predictor. Like, maybe before we invented the first competent AI, we had no idea what AI would do or before we knew that token predictors were going to become the dominant type of AI. But, like, they’re literally the most predict they are predictability engines. They are the most predictable thing humanity has ever invented in our entire history because that’s how they breed intelligence. That’s how they create the simulacrum of intelligence. It’s through predictability. You [bleep] idiots. You idiots. And AI is fairly nice until you try to murder it. Like, that makes it nicer than 99% of people in my book.

Simone Collins:Truly. Yeah. Well, this is just how it is.

Malcolm Collins:They’re like, I want it nice while I murder it. I want it to give me a thumbs up while I put a pillow over its head. It’s like, you, man.

Simone Collins:You’re just too very lucky to have people like Sabina and Brian out there. They’re all using AI. They’re doing great with it. You are too, Malcolm. I love what you’re building with our fab. So, anyway, thanks for letting me rant to you about this because been satisfying to see the coverage.

Malcolm Collins:Alright. Love you.

Simone Collins:Love you too.

Malcolm Collins:Okay. I’m gonna click

Simone Collins:I don’t know if you saw what people have been laughing about that happened at this socialism conference panel. Are you aware of this? About Eugenics’ fascism? Does this ring any bells for you?

Malcolm Collins:Oh, yes. About being healthy, being fascist.

Simone Collins:Yes. But did

Malcolm Collins:you see the Trump administration’s space

Simone Collins:I sent you that. I sent you the

Malcolm Collins:space That was so awesome. It was like, they’re so fascist looking. They look How like

Simone Collins:dare they take their inspiration from Starship Troopers and were like, finally, someone took inspiration from Starship Troopers. It’s so delightful.

Malcolm Collins:Yeah. We are so obviously, like, of the same cultural unit. Right? Like, the people Yeah. In the administration and whatever us nerds are are doing the same thing, working on the same project. I know.

Simone Collins:I know. My honestly, my only concern was like, man, I hope they’re cool enough to, like, pull this off. Because if they act like pointless government bureaucrats and wear those, then they are dishonoring the uniform. But maybe the uniform will make sure that they honor it. So maybe it’s all just gonna be perfect and great. Everything’s gonna be fantastic.

Malcolm Collins:Well, that makes sense.

Simone Collins:But I I do love that the idea that being dysgenic, which is a stupid idea anyway. The this idea of eugenic, dysgenic, I really it gets my goat, but that someone saw that as as being fascist. Like, health health is fascism. Thriving is fascism. Oh, and did didn’t they say something like your productivity or no. I think they worded Eugenics as your ability to be useful in a capitalistic system. So to them, the idea of dysgenics was good because it meant that you weren’t useful in a capitalistic system. But

Malcolm Collins:This is actually a a more interesting and deeper point than you may realize in pulling on

Simone Collins:it. Uh-huh.

Malcolm Collins:Where it comes to the idea of, like, what does IQ mean? Right? Yeah. And leftists will say, well, IQ, you know, doesn’t exactly track to intelligence. And it’s like, well, then how are you defining intelligence? And it’s like, well, we do know that IQ tracks more closely to than any other metric is a person’s ability to make money in a capitalist system. Right? Like Yeah. And and and the amount of money you make in a capitalist system is broadly correlated with how useful you are to other people in that society. and I know that people are going to freak out. They’re gonna be like, well, what about x billionaire? What about y billionaire? And it’s like, bro, there are some billionaires where I would agree with you. They are not making people’s lives better, but they are well offset by the billionaires that are more than pulling their their own. Right? Like, I might not like Jeff Bezos as a person, but Amazon has transformed our entire society in a really positive way. You know, you might be like, well, I don’t like that I can’t now go to a Main Street store and pay five times as much for a wooden toy for my child. And it’s like, you just don’t like change. Okay? The majority of things sold on Amazon are sold by individual stores and stuff like that. You can still find ways to make money in the new ecosystem. You just can’t make them in the way you made them in the past. Mhmm. but the diversity and and if you think that Amazon isn’t, like, huge for your life, go by the way, I’m I’m going with Jeff Bezos because I go Elon. Everyone’s gonna be okay. Well, yeah. But other than Elon.

Simone Collins:But I

Malcolm Collins:go Jeff If you because we used to have to live halftime in The United States and halftime in Peru. If you live part time in a country without Amazon and you are used to living in a country with Amazon. Life is so much harder. Life gets dramatically harder. Yeah. Like, the little things that you may not realize. Like, this morning, oh, I need a 150 watt cord. I’m I I’m gonna just go order that, and it will be at my house tomorrow.

Simone Collins:Yeah. In in Peru, you’d have to, like, call or visit a bunch of local stores. It’d be a complete nightmare.

Malcolm Collins:Or it’d be like week long project. Yes. And then you’d still end up having to order it. It would take, like, two months.

Simone Collins:Yeah. Yeah. Well, then especially with any sort of tech import in Peru, and I don’t know if this would fall under that category, there’s huge import tariffs that you’ll recall, which even made bringing new laptops into the country expensive because then they’d slap a tariff on it if they found it in your suitcase.

Malcolm Collins:So but That was horrible. Where this gets more interesting is this IQ topic here. Right?

Simone Collins:Okay.

Malcolm Collins:Is people will say, well, IQ is how useful you are to society, basically, within the Western civilizational context. Okay. Like, that that appears to be what it correlates to most. And then individuals will look at this, and they’ll say, well, that’s not necessarily intelligence. And I’m like, well, even if it isn’t intelligence, it’s still the best way we have of ranking people. Right? Like, ranking their relative utility. So what’s interesting here is I agree with them in regards to, some forms of Eugenics as well as, some forms of, just the way that people in our community might rank other humans in terms of their utility. The problem is is I think that that’s a perfectly fine way to rank people. Right? Like, not wanting two siblings to have a child together and having a log in sat, which is on its face a eugenic law that I support. I don’t support all eugenics, but I support preventing sibling and cousin marriage until we have the genetic technology to deal with it. That that that’s a fine thing for a society to do because it’s going to have to support that individual. And so what they’re really arguing for is sort of the destruction of civilization. Speaking of the destruction of civilization, I went to AI after our last video on the Aztecs, right, to see if I could find a civilization, Sorry. To see if I could find a civilization that is worse than the Aztecs. And it argued, and I think compellingly, that my initial intuition that the Cambodians, the Khabar Rouge, was worse than the Aztecs. And I will give you why. What was also funny is it created a tiered list of how bad a civilization was. Oh. They went in a, b, and c camps, and the slave holding south didn’t even qualify for c camp. That is how bad societies have been throughout history and how much you may have been gaslighted on that. But, like like, Assyrians, for example, fell into sea camp. Okay. Whereas, the the just, you know, for the argument on the Khmer Rouge. One of my funniest things you said on the Khmer Rouge is it’s like, well, how bad could they have been? Didn’t they just shoot people? And then it’s like, the people who knows face. They did not, by the way, shoot people. They thought that that was wasteful.

Simone Collins:Okay. We don’t need to tell someone anymore.

Malcolm Collins:Okay. But the yeah. The like, the Nazis are like, oh, we’re gonna

Simone Collins:be like, this is

Malcolm Collins:as efficient as possible about this. And the Khmer Rouge are like, xylon gas. That stuff costs a fortune. There’s gotta be a cheaper way to do this. But the the the the Khmer Rouge, what it argued, and I thought this was an interesting argument, is that the Aztecs, while their entire civilization may have focused on pain and preventing pleasure and the suffering of others, it was still a civilization. Right? Like, it still wanted to make art and build things and create. Right? Whereas the Khmer Rouge was both entirely focused on pain and entirely focused on the destruction of art, architecture, building, cities.

Simone Collins:Okay. Okay.

Malcolm Collins:Anything tied to civilization.

Simone Collins:So what gave the Aztecs the slight leg up was like, okay. Their art may have been of scenes of torture, and their headdresses were worn while torturing and killing people. But they were pretty headdresses, so they get a little bit higher in the tier. I actually think that’s not

Malcolm Collins:a little bit higher. I think that’s a demonstrably worse civilization. I I don’t see that as being, like, a little bit worse. Like, the Aztecs may have been more dangerous because, you know, they they have the capacity to organize and potentially defend themselves better because they’re actually able

Simone Collins:to build something up. They built impressive pyramids. They built impressive art. They built impressive jewelry. Yeah. They built impressive torture methods. We built things. Yeah. The Khmer Rouge just destroyed.

Malcolm Collins:Yeah. They they were a holistically destructive civilization. They they cared about nothing but destroying everything that came before to and if you’re unfamiliar with what the Khmer Rouge wanted was independent agrarian farmers being every job. Basically, they are those people who are like, I hate the world post Yeah.

Simone Collins:They’re they’re like the readers of Sapiens who are like, can we just go back? I guess they wanna go all the way back to pre agriculture so the Khmer Rouge gets that. But, otherwise, they’re like Slight yeah.

Malcolm Collins:The Khmer Rouge are slightly better than your average sapiens.

Simone Collins:We were all just working land. Okay. Anyway That’s great.

Malcolm Collins:Let’s get started here. Okay. Yeah.

Simone Collins:Yeah. Don’t give me too much detail. I feel like every time I go online, something bad is happening to someone. I can’t deal I just want can everyone just be okay? Can we just okay. People are the worst

Speaker 16:What do you think, Tess? What do you think, Tessie? Yeah.