Based Camp | Simone & Malcolm Collins

In this episode, we delve into a new theory by EW, who explores why fertility rates fall faster in some countries than others. The theory suggests that countries modernizing later retain elements of ancestral culture, particularly outdated misogyny and gender roles, which haven't adapted to contemporary contexts, leading to a dramatic decline in fertility rates. We compare two groups of countries with differing fertility trajectories and investigate the roles of economic development, respect for elders, individualism, and gender dynamics. We also discuss the implications of these cultural factors on both family dynamics and societal trends, touching on real-world examples and personal anecdotes. Join us as we analyze these critical issues and invite you to share your thoughts on the factors influencing global fertility trends.

[00:00:00]

Malcolm Collins: Hello Simone. I'm excited to be here with you today. Today we are gonna be talking about a theory about fertility rates that come out from EW for end of the show.

Don't know if you've ever been on, we should ask him. Nice guy. But anyway, he has done a new theory where he tries to understand why fertility rates fall. Faster in some countries than other countries. Mm-hmm. IE what is protective of fertility rates and the, the gist of the argument is that these countries modernized later and that caused them to maintain more of their ancestral culture, specifically the misogyny and gender roles.

Simone Collins: Oh.

Malcolm Collins: Which is not properly updated for the new context. And leads to a crash in fertility raise. And I thought that the theory was really interesting. So let's go over it piece by piece, because I think he might be onto something here. But any thoughts before I start? Let's

Simone Collins: dive in. Let's

Malcolm Collins: do it. All right.

Let's get a graph on screen here. Gotta you gotta [00:01:00] ex enhance, enhanced,

Simone Collins: yeah. Give us, give us the visual and the, the premise that crem sets is what differentiates the countries in orange from the countries in blue? Why do the orange countries plunge into ultralow fertility while the blue ones have maintained themselves better?

So let's

Malcolm Collins: talk about the two country groups. Orange includes Korea, Spain, and Italy. While blue includes the United States, France, and the United Kingdom.

Simone Collins: And REU groups them into two sets. He says the countries in the first set are group one nations. In the second set, they're group two nations. Notice anything about their growth rates.

One thing is that they've all grown to similar enough levels. Another is the acceleration of the pace of growth. So in the second tweet, he shares two additional graphs showing different. Trajectories of growth and different fertility rates

okay.

In Group one, nations [00:02:00] started off a bit richer and they grew at a more stable pace. In Group two, the nations started off poorer, but they caught up to group one by growing faster. In the latter half of the 20th century, their fertility re rate trajectories followed suit.

Malcolm Collins: And so what you see here is a really interesting thing in Group one countries where we've talked about it in other videos, but around the 1930s there was a huge fertility crash that a lot of these group one countries recovered from.

This was mostly due to medical technology, although how seeing in the war played a role as well. Hmm. And you can look at our video on, you know, the, the ba the baby Boom. To get more information on this, but the gist being is that if you take the baby boom as an anomaly and you sort of try to draw a through line through these, it looks fairly stable.

Whereas these other countries start to crash really dramatically and pretty quickly. And what's interesting is most of the crash in these other countries. Fertility rates [00:03:00] happens between 1920 and I'd say 1980. So before our, our, our modern time. And that's where they're dropping for much higher initial fertility rates.

So if you look at it like sort of the mean fertility rate at the beginning of this period in 1920 for the group two, all of these countries where they started with a much higher mean fertility, let's say around. Four or maybe even 4.5, whereas the other group started with a mean fertility of three to 3.5.

Mm-hmm. So it's almost as if the higher fertility you start with, the lower your fertility goes over time.

Simone Collins: Yeah. And REU has a theory around this.

Premiere rights. All societies used to be pretty sexist. They used to repress women in various ways, and that was just that for all of human history. But as societies have developed, one of the major changes has been that women's status has quickly moved up to the levels

that have only once been seen by men with slow continuous growth. These norms changed and women's acceptance was [00:04:00] taken up gradually without much need for pushing. But with rapid growth, the picture is far different. The norms have changed more slowly than the markets, and I. That may have been disastrous.

You can see plenty of signs of this everywhere. For example, in the Group one Nations that experience slow and steady growth, men and women tend to have more similar household labor distributions. He then shares a graph of time use and fertility among the 12 group one and two group two nations. And there is somewhat of a negative correlation between total fertility rate and female minus male daily hours of unpaid household labor.

He continues. Similarly, in the case of distributions in the home is incidentally related to fertility among this group of developed countries, he shows another graph with negative correlation between time and fertility among 20 nations. He writes, I'm aware there are issues with treating this as if it's causal, but the point here is less about the particular example of household time use and more about how norms change over time with slow [00:05:00] versus rapid growth.

Take South Korea as an example in South Korea, men's attitudes towards women are still pretty unrefined, a potential result. Enormous sex differences in getting along in politics, these gulfs. Are opening up the world over, but South Korea is the most extreme example Here. He shares a financial times graph showing the ideology gap opening up between young and men and women in countries across the world.

With South Korea being the first country shown, I. And just over time, especially from 2015 to 2020, the gap is just like, like they're just becoming different species. Whereas in the US the gap is violent, but not that insane. In Germany, it's a little bit less bad. In the UK it's, it's also, I mean, they're, they're all getting worse.

And I, this resonates with me. I mean, I, I could see a lot of the tension there making sense.

Malcolm Collins: I actually think Rock came up with a better answer, but I do like this answer. It's definitely something that is contributing to the fertility collapse that we're seeing in Italy and Spain. [00:06:00] Is the idea that not, sorry, not Italy and Spain, South Korea, but I don't know why.

Said that but likely the same thing is that men are staying much more misogynistic in their attitudes and expectations of their wives

Simone Collins: than

Malcolm Collins: men are in the United States. And if you get female liberation in terms of the workforce with all the misogynistic attitudes, now marriage becomes an incredibly raw deal for.

For women? No, just in terms of hedonism, I'm not saying in terms of like genetics or whatever. Yeah. But if you are expected to handle the kids, handle the house and handle a career that's equivalent to your husband's career and he just, what does whatever like, takes the status, bosses you around, like, yeah, what, why would you want that?

Right. And then a lot of men feel like, well. You know, you should give us, like, we do need to maintain some degree of our historic culture. So I understand why they're pushing back and they think a lot of women have gone too far in their accusations around men, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Yeah. I mean, if you look at the level of misogyny and misandry in Korea, it is at a [00:07:00] completely different level than what you see in the United States or something like like that.

Like these. Two genders are almost two separated political classes now. Yeah. And that's definitely more in Italy. I grew up partially in Italy. I lived there for a year when I was a kid. And one of those things I distinctly remember is the constant cat calling. Oh really? Wow. Yeah. And this is, this was true when I was growing up there, and I remember this being an American, from Texas, being in Italy and in Texas.

I don't remember ever. Hearing, cat calling golly.

Simone Collins: Okay.

Malcolm Collins: You just wouldn't do it. Like it, it'd get beaten up or something, you know. But in Italy, no. It's considered very normal for guys to be, you know, really and, and people who don't understand why cat calling is bad. Like you are intentionally harassing in a way that is meant to be derogatory of their status in re relative to your status, a woman.

Mm-hmm. A lot of people think that this is like. I don't know that there's, like, there might be some women who have like a weird fetish for it. They're not even a weird fetish. I'd actually say it's probably a, a normal fetish to like [00:08:00] being publicly humiliated by men saying you're attractive. But I, I don't think that it is something that you're gonna see a lot of in countries where women are seen as, you know, tough or deserving of their own like rights.

Now when I put this into any thoughts before we go to what GR has to say?

Simone Collins: I'm, no, you have me. So curious about what Grok is gonna say. I can't say no.

Malcolm Collins: All right. So, what I put into Grok to sort of test it. So if you look at the countries that he includes in the two groups I decided to only include a.

Few of the countries that he includes in the two groups. Okay. To see if rock's findings hold true for the other groups that are in the two groups. Hmm. So the full two groups that he used was Denmark, France, Germany, Sweden, uk, us. Mm-hmm. The second group was Greece, Italy, Japan, Korea, Portugal, and Spain.

Okay. And so I decided, let's just do two. Okay. So, sure. What's the difference between South Korea, Spain, and Italy and the us, France and the [00:09:00] uk? All right. Yeah. Culturally speaking, sure. What. It says the most striking thing would be respect for elders. With, and, and this is definitely true with the US, France and the UK having much lower levels of this than Spain, Italy, and South Korea.

And so then my question could be, oh, is that cultural distance also true in the other countries here, like Greece and portugal. Yes it is. Okay. What about the other countries on the other side? Germany and Denmark. Yeah, definitely way lower respect for elders. Mm-hmm. And if I actually think about where countries have seen fertility collapse hit the hardest, like Japan, Korea, China, these are all countries that have a unique respect for elders.

Yeah. Where has fertility hit? Uniquely lowly greater Appalachian cultural region, as we've mentioned, which has almost no respect for elders at all. Like elders are kept alive, but like, definitely we won't kill you, but we won't kill you. [00:10:00] But it's always we'll resent

Simone Collins: you a little bit.

Malcolm Collins: And Jewish culture, and I actually argue Jewish culture does not have a particularly high respect for elders when contrasted with, let's say Korean or Japanese or Confucius culture.

Mm-hmm. You have. Like a little degree, but I, I don't. I'd say less than Christian. Even like your modern, like East coast Christian. Mm. Elders are just not assigned a high status unless they can meritocratic prove that they deserve a high status. So it's not that you don't see elders in positions of status, it's just that being elder in and of itself is not a thing deserving of respect.

Mm. Okay. And so the question could be, why would that cause, well, let's, let's go into it a bit more before we ask why. Yeah. South Korea, Spain and Italy appear to have a cultural similarity and that they have a deep respect for their elders. Rooted in traditions like FU and South Korea and Catholicism in Spain and Italy.

This respect manifests in behavior such as using formal language, giving up seats for elders and prioritizing family roles, ah, which [00:11:00] contrasts with the more individualistic and use focus culture that the US and the UK and France. Mm-hmm. However it shows a France it says, shows a blend of this,

hmm. Okay. Here it also divide stuff with looking at individualism versus collectivism with the cultures on this side being much more individualistic, which I also see, and much more low power difference, which I also see. So that's another thing that could be causing this. Mm-hmm. Greece, Italy, Japan, Korea, Portugal, Spain, all are less individualistic, more collectivist, and have higher power differences.

Mm. Whereas the us, uk, Sweden, Germany, France, and Denmark all have fairly low power differences. So let's think about how this could have caused a fertility issue. Right. Okay. Yes. The respect for elders is. I guess it's fairly obvious to me, like where, when resources are limited and demographic collapses already underway.

Yeah. Do you distribute the resources that are left? You're gonna, if you could choose more [00:12:00] babies or elders mm-hmm. You're gonna choose elders. Yeah. I mean, a country like Korea should be spending as much on family creation as it spends on elder care. 100%. Yeah. And I'm fairly sure it's not, I'll add in post, but I'm fairly sure it's not even like, you know, maybe one 10th what it's spending on elder care.

Okay. I find myself surprised on this one. They only spend about double on elderly costs, In elderly costs in South Korea, it's around 51 to 54 billion USD and in children it's around 18 to 22 billion USDA per year as of 2025. So the elderly care ratio is two to 2.5 x birth incentives.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Yeah. If you look at so, so that makes perfect sense to me. Because it's about, or me as an individual, like if one of my parents was like, oh, I'm aiding, help me. I can't survive on social security. It's in a message like, disabled. I have four kids, you know. F off.

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: Like

Simone Collins: your problem.

Malcolm Collins: Your problem.

Speaker 4: Hey, man, I got five [00:13:00] kids to feed.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. I, I'd be like that scene from team America where he is like, if you get caught, you may need to take your own life. And he slice the hammer across the table.

Well, you'll probably want to take your own life here. You better have this.

All right, team. That's it. We've got a job to do.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. That'd be me. I'd be like, you know, you need to, you know

Simone Collins: what to

Malcolm Collins: do, you know what to do. Okay. So that I see. Now let's talk about individualism.

Why would high individualism lead to higher fertility rates in these cultures? Mm-hmm. The answer here could be that you have an easier time resisting the monoculture and dominant cultural practices within your country. And so you're gonna have more people who sort of buck the trend.

Simone Collins: Mm-hmm.

Malcolm Collins: Which I could definitely see leading to higher fertility rates in many of these countries.

Yeah. You were gonna say something?

Simone Collins: No, no, no. I'm, I'm agreeing with you.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. And then high power distance. That makes a lot of sense. I think in the modern world, high power distance [00:14:00] just doesn't really work that well anymore. This is where like your boss is like really high above you in status. And this is actually really true in a lot of Latin America, where we're also seeing a unique fertility collapse.

It is sort of across Catholic cultures. Because you have like the, the people who matter and then the people who are the people, right? Mm-hmm. And why this leads to fertility collapse is I think the people, people like don't see a point in continuing to cycle anymore.

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: They don't wanna put people into this system where they're gonna be an underclass and I.

Yeah, that makes perfect sense to me. Why would you, why would you continue to participate in that? The final sort of hypothesis I'd have here about what would lead to this is just a longer time to evolve a resistance to the urban monoculture. I think the urban monoculture didn't really care, or the iterations of that existed.

Before it, like the prodomal iterations of it didn't really focus on these other countries when they were super poor and culturally different.

Simone Collins: Mm-hmm. And I think that's

Malcolm Collins: was leading to their high fertility rates at that period. Mm-hmm. And so they didn't have a century [00:15:00] for the people who were slightly lower fertility rate when exposed to the urban monoculture to die out disproportionately.

Yeah. And so now they're all dying out at once.

Simone Collins: Hmm. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I could see that so dire. That is, that is interesting. I don't know, I still, I'm still finding myself, however, gravitating toward the, the misogyny thing, just because so much of this problem is couples just failing to get married.

Malcolm Collins: True and, and, and a misogynistic attitude.

Pervading a culture where women have an option not to marry, is going to lead to women, not is enthusiastically engaging with the marriage culture. So every high

Simone Collins: fertility family we know personally. Mm-hmm. His husbands has husbands who contribute a lot, are extremely supportive if they, if they're the breadwinners, they also contribute a lot of labor.

If [00:16:00] they are not the sole breadwinners, they contribute probably as much labor as their wife also breadwinners. Contribute. Mm-hmm. You know, there's just like this, actually,

Malcolm Collins: I, I might word it differently. I'd take every high fertility family that we know has a husband who would be considered a simp by like the Manosphere or the Andrew Tate movement.

Mm-hmm. And not necessarily like, like for example, us, I'm not like a simp in a traditional term, but people have been like, oh, Malcolm, you're like overly nice to your wife. You overly cest your wife, you. Mm-hmm. And I'm probably of all of the high fertility men that we know the most traditionally masculine.

Yeah. Except for maybe Kevin Dolan.

Simone Collins: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Kevin

Malcolm Collins: Dolan's pretty traditionally masculine, but Yeah. The, the, yeah. I think that you're a hundred percent right here. Women have kids when they feel supported and protected. Mm-hmm. . Because a woman in a modern context is just not gonna feel like you have her back if you're pulling this. And, and the truth is, is you [00:17:00] don't. I think we saw this was a quiverfull movement, and it's part of the reason the Quiverfull movement sort of fell apart, was a.

It's understanding of the man's role in the household instead of adapting to modern and changing pressures. They tried to go as this dictatorial male in control, woman at home, does nothing birthing. And it didn't create an environment that daughters wanted to recreate or that sons were capable of recreating.

Simone Collins: Yeah, I agree.

Malcolm Collins: And, and, and actually here, I thought, I, I read something really interesting on our discord that somebody posted about the failure of the quiver full movement to replicate itself. Hmm. And I was like, oh my God, this is so true. I've gotta read it. So this is from the person on the Discord called Cat.

I don't know. It's some sort of vegetation. Okay. And they have three kids. 'cause people say that on the Discord, how many kids they have. I have so many thoughts regarding this topic as somebody who has raised quiverfull adjacent Christian [00:18:00] homeschooler, who attended Quiverfull co-ops, et cetera. But my family wasn't specifically quiverfull ourselves.

I think the big factor of their failure is the way that they specifically and intentionally raised non-AG agentic children. Boys in general have a, had a bit of a rudderless time over the past few decades, but I've never seen anything like the slow motion catastrophe that has been the quiver for boys aging out of their homeschooling regime.

Mm. The prototypical quiver for family is a first generation. Fairly beta white collar husband, fairly crazy homeschooling mother, raising sons who are simultaneously longhouse brow beaten under mommy's supervision his entire life, while also being inculcated with an irrational entitlement complex based on being male not being accomplished.

They can't follow in their haired, checked out fathers white collar footsteps because they are undereducated College is of this world. Yeah. But they often don't have the connections or savvy to make it [00:19:00] in the working class trades world. So they either languish in some sort of drifting failure to launch, or if their family is particularly committed, get married off and are expected to support a family.

Then it increases by one every year starting at the age of 18 on nothing but thoughts and prayers. Mm. It's such a mess. Anecdotally, I can confirm mass deconversion rates. , I don't think the duggars are at all are typical. They mostly compensate for the above issue by having all that TLC money that Jim Bob bought real estate with.

So he basically supports his sons through the dad welfare. Hmm. It's just crazy to me that they had all this IBLP propaganda about how they were gonna raise a Joshua generation. It's gonna take over the government and lead a worldwide revival and then raise the least age agentic children ever walk the earth. Timid, sly not good.

Not good. Or

Complete and utter failure and refutation of the movement's philosophy. Yeah. And yeah, I completely agree with that. And I think that that might [00:20:00] be what we're seeing in these cultures that have these stricter power differences between the old and the young as well.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Is that they are.

But they put really strict rules on their kids. And if you look at our family, well, we have rules for our kids. I expect them and will be proud of them when they break those rules. That's part of why we use corporal punishment instead of limiting punishment to just like yelling or emotional escalation.

Simone Collins: Yeah. '

Malcolm Collins: cause when a kid does something bad, it allows me to quickly show them like, bop, they did something wrong. Mm-hmm. But I still love you like was recorded in that piece. Hmm. So that they understand that breaking rules does not remove them from the circle of love of this family, and that I will set down a fence and rules for them.

But I still, especially when they're breaking rules in their own you know, based on their own internal moral compass have respect for them in doing that. And, and you know, you see this, I've, I've mentioned in previous episodes like. Jordan Peterson, a guide to raising Simps, Jordan Peterson is like, you just need to break the child's will down until they listen [00:21:00] to you.

And I'm like, that is not a good idea. That raises non-agent children. Yeah. You want to build the child's will up until they take. From nobody. And if they don't understand why you're giving rules and you're just like, you just obey the authority, then they're just gonna obey the urban monoculture. And I think a lot of these religious families, that's what they were.

Just obey the authority. Just obey the authority. Just obey the authority. But they thought the authority was always gonna be at the church. Mm-hmm. And they didn't realize that the authority changes based on the person's context of they're interacting within the real world. Yeah. And so they were easily brow beaten and they also created males that like, what?

Who would want that? Like a lot of girls just aren't gonna want that. Yeah. And, and so they, they get a, you know, because if, if it's like much worse than like a Mormon community or something where you have more of the church like keeping track of things and less a chance that one man is, is gonna be like overly domineering with his family or something.

Yeah. Within these more dispersed Protestant communities I, as a [00:22:00] woman, honestly, I wouldn't wanna marry into one of these. I'd be really worried. Especially if they were raised was a sort of like, well men lead the family attitude like, and we have me as a man, lead the family. I just consider that a gift from Simone.

Simone Collins: Well, and back to our repeated theme of, of real dominance, real dominance isn't. Shut up and do what I say, follow my orders. Real dominance is demonstrating through your competence, good decision making and good leadership, natural leadership, that your plans are trustworthy and the best way to go. People fall in line.

There is no ordering and there is no shutting people down and systematically training them to be compliant. You don't need to train people to be compliant when they know you're right. That's the big difference.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Well, and we had the episode on, on Andrew Tate, where I was like, Andrew Tate's idea of masculinity.

It's like he watched the gladiator and he is like, ah, the emperor, that's what the ideal man is like. And that, that, you know, the, the gladiator Maximus, he's a simp. Whereas the [00:23:00] exact opposite is true. You know, and I pointed this out because if you watch and. Is he attempts to force the women around him to follow his wills, literally at Sword Point, you know, like Andrew Tate being like, this is why I have a sword.

So women don't, you know, they talk down to me and you see, the Emperor playing was like a sword in his house, you know? And wanting to be loved. And I think that if you look at Maximus, none of this is about being loved by people or anything like that. He just has a duty and he is carrying it out.

And it's certainly not about, like, if you look at the character of Maximus. You look at the relationship he's framed at having with both his kids and the woman who has that desperate crush on him is, is this is not a guy who is pushing around his wife, telling his wife, like get in the kitchen, telling his wife like, you do what?

I say, now, you know, the wife is making him dinner because she cares about him, right? Mm-hmm. And, and they're working on a shared goal or something like that, like mm-hmm. We don't have any feeling like they don't have traditional gender roles. But the traditional gender roles are carried out because those are the preferences of the male and the woman. Mm-hmm. They are not carried out because the [00:24:00] woman has some supernatural reason to be obedient or some like biological mandate to be obedient to her husband. It's just mm-hmm. Average biological differences here.

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Yeah. Which means that there also is no commitment to. Those specific roles and the commitment is to where someone's propensity and skill lies. So if, for example. A man and a woman or whatever configuration of people you want work to pair up and start raising kids together. We're not gonna be like, well, you're the woman, so of course you're doing those things.

It's, well, okay, what are you gonna contribute best? Do that thing. Yeah. So if a man ends up doing all of the cooking, indoor cleaning and infant rearing, fine, we're, we are not married to that. And I think a lot of these really conservative religions. Are, well, that's just these, these cultures as well. Like, well, no, the, the man can't do that.

Even if he'd rather do that. Like even if the woman has the highest educational degree and the greatest earning potential and the greatest professional network, she has to become the [00:25:00] mother who stays at home. And somehow the less educated, less connected, less privileged man has to earn enough for both.

Malcolm Collins: . So this isn't just like a religious culture thing, this is also within the wider online manosphere, right-leaning culture. Mm-hmm. Where recently there was a fight of memes in which there was this concept of like the dad meme or the husband meme. And it's typically the husband being like, oh honey, of course I'll do X for you.

Or I'll do Y for you. You know, he is doing something sweet for the wife. That's like normal for a husband to do. Yeah.

This was known as the wife Jack Meme Wars. I was wrong. It wasn't about a husband meme, it was a wife meme.

Malcolm Collins: And then a bunch of guys were like, oh, like you guys posting, what a simp you are. You know? And the guys of course complaining that these other guys are simps are unmarried, right? And it's like, well, that's genetically what's being preserved in the human condition.

It's not a simp, it's being able to work with people, right. And being able to appreciate what other people are bringing to the table. And it has become almost within these cultures, seen as a sign of submission or browbeat ness [00:26:00] if mm-hmm. You are shown as making either concessions to your wife or you are shown as having appreciation for your wife.

And yet anybody who is gonna have a lot of kids knows that those two things are like. Within a modern context, critical to, I think having, let's say over five kids, like you just can't get to these sorts of numbers. If you're not doing that. If you're, if you're taking the, you do what I say approach you're gonna really struggle to get that high because the woman is just not gonna be all about it.

She's gonna be like, what am I doing all this for? Like, what am I raising my daughters for? Like, what's the point, right?

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: It's demotivating. Yeah, slave mentality. If you want to turn your wife into a slave, she's gonna labor like a slave. Well, again, intrinsic

Simone Collins: motivation is just a billion times more powerful than extrinsic motivation, as is seen across.

Countless studies, research, anecdotal examples, just says this should be common sense

Malcolm Collins: their wives following them for the same reason and gladiator why people followed what the emperor said instead of the reason why people [00:27:00] followed what Maximus said. Mm-hmm. And it's, it's a completely different Are they following you because you're inspiring them or are they following you because it's the rules and, and because you'll hurt them if they don't.

Mm-hmm. And I think that that, this sort of like ideal of male athletics, that's not really working for any man anywhere that I'm aware of, except for maybe Andrew Tate is like super toxic and it was Andrew Tate. It basically only works because he's super wealthy, like women will do a lot of crazy nonsense for, for very wealthy men.

Yeah. It's a trade off, especially if they have like a public profile or something like that. Like you look at the simp women that like Elon gets or something like that. But I could not treat you the way that Elon treats his wi. Like I would never get away with that. Like you'd leave me, I. And I don't think that like, and somebody's like, is that fair?

It's like, dude, he's a, he's like a infinity billionaire. Like fair is not part of the equation. It's a different social contract when you're interacting with somebody like that it's [00:28:00] like, it's like, oh, the king in, in like, you know, medieval Europe or something like that, treats their wives differently.

Than you do.

It's like a entirely different social contract exists for the king, of course. Yeah. Like, what, what are you, like, how could you think that? And I think that you get sort of two categories of influencers who like go into this category of influence.

One is they're super successful, they become super wealthy, and they're able to live some sort of like, unrealistic life. Yeah. The other they go like the Nick Fuentes path and they end up like a forever celibate, right. You know, where they can't. Like his advice on the way you should treat girls leads to the extinction of your culture.

Like he is living proof of that.

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: He's not gonna have any kids likely at this point, given how old he is already. Or at least not many. Not unless he use his IVF, which he won't. And so, my problem

Simone Collins: is, I mean, men really can afford to delay fertility. But they're either [00:29:00] ensuring that their children are not going to be very healthy, or they need to freeze their sperm.

Guys, please freeze your sperm for the love. Like, although here's my other problem with like yeah,

Malcolm Collins: male genetic health. It degrades it around the same rate as female genetic health does. It just doesn't fall off a cliff at that rate. And these, these

Simone Collins: higher risk factors that your child will get if you have them with older sperm.

Like higher risks of cancer and all, all sorts of other disorders, they get passed on to your grandchildren and their grandchildren. So what are you doing? But beyond that, like, so, I mean, one, it is actually super possible if you free sperm to have healthy children late in life and, you know, put that off.

My problem is that older men are still in a bad situation if they choose to do that because either you end up with, you know, your perfect sexy 20 something wife who. It's never gonna be on your level because there's so much of an age gap. You know, you're never really gonna have an intellectual [00:30:00] equal. I mean, you might meet someone who loves old souls, but still like age, you know, it's, it doesn't quite work as neatly as I would hope on that front.

And then, yeah, well and end up with an older woman who probably hasn't frozen her eggs. And then you have the same problem with genetic material.

Malcolm Collins: A needs men are gonna be doing like you. Okay, let me put it this way. You a guy right now. You're like, yeah, when I'm 50 or 60, I'm gonna get a young woman and I'm gonna have lots of kids after I'm rich.

Yeah. Do, do you want a child? Do you want to raise a child and then have her raise child? Like you're not just that, but like. Do you even want to be having that sex? Like no, I'm, I'm being honest, like you do you really want like a 50-year-old sleeping with like a late 20 something? Like it's gross. Do you think that's hot for the 50-year-old?

Even at that point? Like where you're taking all of the medications so that you're still horny? Oh, don't do all. You're taking all of the pills so that you can still get hard. Like that's

Simone Collins: not Well then there's also the problem, like the most. [00:31:00] And I, this is not spoken about enough. The most unsexy type of sex is obligatory sex, especially if you know that the partner is like having sex out of obligation.

And they may be great at acting, but I'm pretty sure that the vast, vast majority of 20 something girls who marry wealthy and successful, much older men. Are faking it, which is the, you're having sex

Malcolm Collins: with a woman who's pretending to be into

Simone Collins: you,

Malcolm Collins: like,

Simone Collins: which is the worst type of sex. I just like, I, I, I could never, I could never have sex with someone like that,

Malcolm Collins: just like that.

I'm just, I'm just saying that like they think that what they're getting is just delaying and then they get the young hot wife and it's like, no, you get the young hot wife when you are young and hot, or you get some other type of weird relationship. Mm-hmm. Not like you create that relationship later in life.

Simone Collins: Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: [00:32:00] So,

I think that that's gonna be a possibility for them. But the reality is it's not either from a genetic standpoint that real of a possibility or. From a, you know, they're not like, oh, I can delay getting this now and I'll get it in the future. No, you're, you're not getting it in the future. You're getting some weird other thing.

Which is, which is not as fun, you know, you, yeah. Anyway yeah. Love you to DeSimone. I am glad that I settled down with you. I had another one that I'm, I'm not actually not gonna make because I just know it'll do bad. But it was really interesting to research, which was. If the trope of the bachelor party where people felt like they were like marrying a, a ball and chain and like, oh

Simone Collins: yeah.

Like this is my last moment to go wild.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. I was like, is this real? Like, is it, was this ever actually a thing that was practiced in large numbers because it like doesn't seem,

Simone Collins: oh, I thought it was a condensed version of the sort of Catholic model that existed back all the way to like ancient Roman times where it was just kind of understood that debauch wealthy men would.[00:33:00]

Have all the female partners they wanted and then. Try to sober up later in life when they got married. And that Bachelor party's kind of compressing that for less wealthy people. What, what, what did you find in your research?

Malcolm Collins: Well, yeah, I mean, apparently it did really happen. And it, you know, they were like, well, I understand that today.

'cause I was like, it doesn't even make logical sense. Like you're about to get married to presumably the person that you love more than anyone in the world. And you've been so excited to spend your life with. Hmm. Like why would you go out and sleep with other people right before that? Like, why would you want that?

And it was like, oh, well, you see, people didn't actually used to love their wives during this period of history. Yeah, I

Simone Collins: mean this, the, yeah, the alternate take there is, hold on. Actually, maybe this was the sign of a better. World in which people got married as business arrangements and saw sex as something that they did separately, but also lived in monogamous societies.

Malcolm Collins: A breaking of both. Which is to say that it was this period of the boomers where they got all of the divorces, you know, they had like the really high [00:34:00] divorce rate and they'd had terrible marriages. Like everybody knows, like. The boomers were almost like the pure infantilization of humanity where they were a generation that had very little self-control, very little like is obsessed with self validation.

I. Just, you know, broke a lot of social traditions that were actually really important without understanding what they were doing. Didn't really pass money down to their kids intentionally. Didn't really establish the idea of like intergenerational family units, well, in the way that their ancestors had.

Mm-hmm. They just sort of, after the greatest generation, it just like increasingly degraded. Then you got to the boomers. And I think since the boomers, every generation has been sort of building themselves a little bit back from that point. You know, you look at Jan Alpha and they're definitely a lot more mature than the boomers in terms of the way they relate to things like sex and sexuality and, and, and parties and wives and everything like that.

And I think that the boomers were this generation where they got married out of obligation. 'cause it was sort of like what they did. [00:35:00] They were like a generation that, that. Wanted to live this white picket fence ideal, or they had like an ideal of what they wanted to live without. Thinking about why these things were ideal without thinking about why you had kids or without thinking about everything, was just about like hedonism and consumerism for them.

Hmm. Very much what I think, you know, something like Fight Club was arguing against was the mindset of the boomer generation and. Then you have other generations trying to reestablish some sort of stable state norm after the boomers,

Simone Collins: huh? Well, that's interesting. That's an interesting idea. I. Okay.

Malcolm Collins: I mean, they're the generation that had all of our societies that just take out debt forever instead of actually trying to build like stable civilizations.

They're the generation that reads the most. Whenever we bring up fertility collapse, they're the generation that's out. If you look at these, these Trump protests, everyone is like, it's wild that they're all like elderly white people. Those are the only people protesting. So [00:36:00] weird.

Simone Collins: So

Malcolm Collins: weird. But they, they still get their news from the news, like CNN and stuff.

And so they think that like, oh dude, the evil Trump is outed

Simone Collins: again

Malcolm Collins: anyway. Well, and I

Simone Collins: guess it's, it's very boomer to think that protests actually work, because, I don't know, I guess I should look, go to a protest

Malcolm Collins: one day and film and just be like, you know, protests don't work. Nobody cares about what you're doing here.

No, you have wasted a day. Do you have nothing better to do with your lives?

Simone Collins: One of the things that we really can't stand is listening to people who have really bad brain rot, and the kinds of people who attend protests are, I would argue, the epitome of that type of person. Remember at Natal Con, there were those protestors outside the opening night and Kira the.

Journalist from Mother Jones. So tried to talk to them. Sufficiently progressive, right? Didn't look conservative. No. Came up to them, [00:37:00] approached them as a Mother Jones journalist and attempted to talk with him. With them. And when I saw her after her attempted interaction, she's like, well, I, I couldn't get a word on edgewise.

Like she attempted to interview them and they were so. Brain rotted that she literally couldn't ask them a question to get their opinion on the matter they were protesting.

Malcolm Collins: Well, it's funny you you say that there's been a lot of videos that have been going viral of people going to these Trump protests and trying to talk to people.

Oh, yeah. And they don't know why they're there, and they don't know why Trump is a fascist. They're like, Trump's a fashion. They go explain.

Simone Collins: Mm-hmm. Like, what

Malcolm Collins: has he done that's. That makes him a fascist. And what the right is taking away from this is, oh, these must be paid protesters who don't actually have a vested interest in this.

I don't think that's it. I think they're just brainless, brain rotted automatons who are like CNN says Trump is bad. No, I go to field and yell at people. I, I, I genuinely think more people are like closer to like NBC at [00:38:00] automatons than you would imagine

Simone Collins: maybe. Maybe they're just all in the same Facebook groups.

I imagine this is a Facebook groups thing. If it's mostly boomers, it's just a show thing. Oh, no. Anyway, come on. That makes sense, right?

Malcolm Collins: It No, it does, it does. Tonight

Simone Collins: for dinner. Hot dogs. Hot dogs. Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: I'm gonna do my we got 'em in all these with relish. Fancy. All these buns, all these

Simone Collins: amazing. Oh yeah.

They're brioche buns. We really went all out for that.

Malcolm Collins: You're gonna toast the buds, of course,

Simone Collins: with butter. Obviously,

Malcolm Collins: We are going to though save my curry for another night. I can have it tomorrow.

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: And I'll do hot dogs tonight too. Lunch

Simone Collins: tomorrow. Hot dog night. Very American. Big deviation from your typical meal choice, but everyone seems to want hot dogs right now, so.

Malcolm Collins: Well, the kids wanted hot dogs and I was like, you know what? We've got the onions now we've got relish. We've got, do you want [00:39:00] them in

Simone Collins: confetti or. Slices and slices.

Malcolm Collins: Oh, onions and hot dogs you typically want in slices, get slice, get more front slice. Yeah.

Simone Collins: Not not, although I guess I've seen it both ways or I think of relish and I think of the confetti.

No, either

Malcolm Collins: way works. Honestly, the confetti works just as well. 'cause you get crunch from it too. So you know, it actually, I'm thinking

Simone Collins: confetti's better. 'cause you can really finely chop it and you don't want to have like really like peeling off noodles. You know what I mean?

Malcolm Collins: So you guys in the comments need to answer this hot dog onions, is it confetti or is it, is it noodles?

Confetti or noodles for hot dog onions

Simone Collins: asking the hard questions. I'm more interested if people have alternate theories between the group one and group two countries. If it's that feminism didn't catch up as quickly with economic development, which then led to a faster backlash and separation between the sexes, or if, if rock's theory was more accurate or if it's something else that you think is going on because.

I find that quite interesting. I had had previously thought that leapfrogging development, like really fast development was a good thing [00:40:00] because you ended up getting like building infrastructure when tech was already more advanced. So you, you ended up with much better systems than say the United States had because you were developing, using, you know, third to fourth generation, later technology and all these other things.

And so this is making me look differently at the benefits of developing quickly and later, but. Yeah, I'm curious to hear people's theories on that.

Malcolm Collins: All right, Simone, I love you to death and have a spectacular day.

Simone Collins: Goodbye my dear husband and I will, I will give you a call on your phone when you're nurse run, so please, please on.

Thank you.

Do you want me to open for you? Wow. Wow. You can read it. I got a purple car. Sure. It says. That is. That's so nice. So cool. Look at that. Joie. Do you wanna put it on the fridge? Yeah. Okay.

In this insightful conversation, Simone and the host dive deep into the misunderstood world of Opus Dei, breaking down the myths and misconceptions popularized by media, such as “The Da Vinci Code.” They discuss the origins, beliefs, and practices of Opus Dei, contrasting them with those of the Jesuits. The conversation reveals Opus Dei's focus on personal sanctity through daily work and responsibilities, and its appeal to lay Catholics. In stark contrast, the Jesuits' history of social justice, intellectual pursuits, and perceived left-leaning tendencies are examined. The discussion also touches on the dramatic historical power struggles within the Catholic Church, highlighting moments when Jesuits' influence rivaled that of the Pope. Moreover, how these factions may reflect broader societal dynamics between progressives and conservatives is analyzed. The episode concludes with musings on the future of these groups and a humorous personal exchange about family life.

Malcolm Collins: [00:00:00] Hello Simone. I'm excited to be talking to you today. Today we are gonna be talking about the Opus Day. You know, the villain from the Da Vinci Code. That is the exposure

Simone Collins: like 99% of people have,

Malcolm Collins: and most people know that they, they, they practice mortification or some of them do, where they like hurt themselves or like where like chains that cut into them when they wa even like famous ones.

There's like a famous female author who's Opus Day who wears like a chain. And you may think that these guys are. Crazy. But what you will learn as we go into the opus day is they might be the only sane Catholics there are. You, they are definitely in the Catholic, and we'll see how much we have an opportunity to get in the Opus Day verse Jesuit mindset.

They are definitely the good guy side. And the Jesuits are definitely the bad guy side.

Simone Collins: You go so hard on Catholics. .

Malcolm Collins: And I think you, Simone, specifically, are gonna love the Opus Day as you learn more about them. Yeah. Even more than you think you do right now.

Simone Collins: Really?

Malcolm Collins: So the Opus Day was established in 1928, so very, [00:01:00] very young. Wow.

Simone Collins: I would've guessed like. Late 16 hundreds early S hundred. That's crazy.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. When Saint Joseph Maria Escoria, I, I'm gonna pronounce that wrong, we'll just call him Escoria had a spiritual insight that ordinary Christians could become saints by living their face fully in their daily routines. Wow. Especially through their work. He envisioned a past to holiness that didn't require withdrawing from the world into a monastery or covet.

Convent, but instead embrace secular life as a means of sanctification. The vision was formerly recognized by the Catholic Church in 1982 when Pope John Paul II designated Opus Day as a personal re giving its special status to carry out its mission globally, so it didn't become like official until 1982.

Wow.

Simone Collins: Sounds a little bit like Maana Buddhism or. This premise is you don't have to become like a [00:02:00] reclusive monk in order to make religious progress. It's interesting.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, but I, I actually view it quite different. I'd actually say it's very similar to techno puritanism as techno puritanism relates to work, which is the idea that you should treat your work and your duty in life with religious fervor that you should be as dedicated.

To your job. If your job and you, and you should have a job that attempts to improve the world by your philosophical framework and you should treat that. With the extremeness and with the fervor that a monk or hermit who has shut themselves off from society oh, treats their own seclusion.

Simone Collins: Ah. So, whereas Maha Buddhism kind of allows for normalism, it's like, no, no, no.

In everyday life you can do it, but also you're gonna be a completely weirdo. By the way No, no, no, no. This is, this is

Malcolm Collins: like, you need to be max about your job. Okay. You need to be max about the most intense, an open state belief. You have a, a duty to be happy to other [00:03:00] people so that you don't bring other people down, you know?

I love that. To, to, and we, we do this too, that you have responsibility for your mood. You have a responsibility for how you affect other people. Yeah. And all of this responsibility is an intent, religious responsibility. Hmm. Hmm. So sanctification of work members are encouraged to perform their daily tasks, whether professional, domestic or otherwise, with excellence as a way to serve God and others.

So like you are supposed to be a mother as extremely as like a a hundred percent. 107% as like somebody would be a a in a monastery or something like that. Ah, and you're not supposed to be very different from other Catholic factions. You as a mother, if you're doing it a hundred percent, are not less than the none in the covenant,

Simone Collins: right?

Because, or a convent. You're making the same amount of sacrifices and engaging in the same amount of discipline. I like that, like basically apply the religious fervor and discipline that you would see in a convent. [00:04:00] Or in monastery to your everyday life, and why shouldn't you? That's so much better.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Prayer and spiritual direction. A structured spiritual life known as a plan of life includes practices like mass at the rosary, mental prayer and spiritual reading. Spiritual direction from a priest or trained layperson helps members grow in their faith. So basically you're supposed to sit down with somebody and plan out your life very much like we would suggest we something as in our tradition.

Wow. . Okay. How are they different from other Catholics? Opus Day members are fully Catholic and do not differ from other Catholics in terms of, well, as of what,

Simone Collins: 1984.

Malcolm Collins: Oh, no, no. This is modern. However, approach to living out their faith sets them apart.

They have an emphasis on the laity. While many Catholic groups focus on religious life EG monks and nuns, obu de prioritizes the lay people sanctifying the world from within. So, while other religious orders within Catholicism are like, go the most extreme, separate yourself from the world, everything like [00:05:00] that, even the monks and nuns of the opus day.

Or supposed to focus on the lay person and it's service to helping lay people be at their like same level of holiness and, and saintliness. That's the goal of these individuals not to have some sort of a separate life integration with daily life. Their spirituality is deeply rooted in ordinary activities, contrasted with traditions that might emphasize monastic retreat or extraordinary penance.

Devotion to church teaching. They have a particular devotion to the Pope and the magisterium, the church's teaching authority, which. Which reinforces their unity was the broader Catholic community. They believe they have to have a daily massing communion. So they have to go to mass as frequently as possible.

Preferably daily. Wow. That's a lot. If you have a job rosary and mental prayer, reciting the rosary and spending time in personal prayer each day. So they're really focused on like their routines and it's a lot what people's Yeah. Look [00:06:00] weird. Spiritual reading, confession, regular reading a scripture or spiritual books and frequent confession.

But anyway, when I say look weird, you would know that to us this is a good thing. Yes, yes. 'cause this is how religions survive. Fertility collapse and survive. Deconversion. They have a concept that you've told me about, called the heroic Minute. A practice remembers rise immediately upon waking, saying, serve am or I will serve to offer their day to God.

So you're not allowed to stay in bed. You're not allowed to procrastinate. You shum outta bed the moment you wake up. And this is, I think, a really good way to relate. I mean, it's the way I try to wake up when I'm having, you know, when I'm in, in, in the zone I won't say I always meet my.

Expectations of myself. But I think it's a very good training in terms of how to relate to things. Yeah. Now they're, they're also known for engaging in something called a a mortification. So this may involve something like a cl, a spiked chain or a discipline, a small whip, or used for [00:07:00] voluntary self mortification.

This is. Injuring yourself. This is not used for injuring yourself. Like the injuring isn't the point. It's used for building more self-control and emotional self-control so that you have more dominion over yourself and you can interact with the world in a more like, you know. A monk who's just like separating themselves versus society versus somebody who's got like a, a spike chain attached to their leg while they're serving their office job.

You know, who's really making more of a sacrifice for God. I think this also

Simone Collins: feeds into the, the social scientific theory that ego depletion is culturally specific, that in American culture, we're like, oh, I've. I've had to think so hard today. I just have completely lost all of my self-control and now I'm going to eat a pint of ice cream.

Versus in India for example, people are like, oh, I've had such a tough day today. I've had to do so much work now I should do something else hard because I'm really in the zone. And the opus day are certainly in the latter camp where they're like, I'm gonna right way.

Malcolm Collins: The study she's [00:08:00] mentioning shows it works like the Indians when they've actually done a lot of stuff.

No, basically,

Simone Collins: if you believe. That doing hard things has warmed you up to do more hard things, then you will be able to do more hard things If you believe in ego depletion, that if you've made a lot of tough decisions and exhausted your ability to ex exercise self-control, then you will lose self-control.

So it's, it's very much a placebo effect influenced by your culture. Yeah. Which again, is why it's so toxic to have an external locus of control.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. And, and what's interesting is how the Opus Day communicates this because like, okay, if you're a nun or you're a priest, you know you're going to school for this.

Or you're in a convent, or you're in a monastery and that's where you're learning all of this, where the opus day and I can understand why there's such a young movement has to. Like train lay people in living this lifestyle. Yeah. Which means that they're doing retreats, they're doing like over overnight things sometimes.

Yeah. They're doing classes where both priests and lay people will teach these as well within the opus day. Wow. Where you're going [00:09:00] to learn deeper Catholic theology and the way like a monk might, but still engaging with your daily life.

Simone Collins: Wow. It is life on hard mode. It's, it's lean in Catholicism edition.

I, I like it. Everything you're saying so far. Yeah. Yes. It's de definitely. Okay. It sounds really difficult, but it appeals.

Malcolm Collins: No, it does appeal. So now we gotta talk about the bad guys. Okay. The Jesuits,

Simone Collins: the Jesuit, the Jesuits, the Jesuits,

Malcolm Collins: Or the Society of Jesus established in 1540s.

So they're actually old the, the Jesuits are a religious order known for their work in education, intellectual pursuits and missionary efforts.

They run schools and universities worldwide and are deeply engaged in social justice and dialogue with modern culture. Okay. Their spirituality rooted in Ignatian discernment, emphasizes finding God in all things and adapting to contemporary needs. Which sometimes gives them a reputation as more [00:10:00] progressive.

Post Vatican II Dynamics, the Second Vatican Council. This was in 1962 to 1965 with the turning point for the Catholic Church. Introducing reforms to engage more was the modern world, which sparked debates between those who embraced the changes and those who preferred continuity was tradition. The Jesuits under leaders like Pedro Aropa the Jesuits leaned into Vatican II call for renewal, focusing on social justice.

Ecumenical dialogue and adapting the church to contemporary challenges. The Jesuits even explored controversial ideas like liberation theology, which emphasizes justice for the poor and has been criticized by conservatives for its political undertones. Essentially, their, their elitist educated communists.

Oh

Simone Collins: dear,

Malcolm Collins: that's a nice way of saying that. No, no. But they were literally communists. Like Jesuits were socialists and communists historically.

They are an intellectual elite class, which believes that the sort of priesthood has a special position that the laity can't really serve [00:11:00] and that the priesthood should be made up of the intellectual elite.

And, and, and supported by the laity the Opus Day. Well, not opposed to Vatican. Second. Opus Day has emphasized traditional practices like devotion to the Eucharist and rosary. Mm-hmm. And cautious approach to rapid change. It's right. The prominence, especially after becoming a personal ture, was seen by some as a counterweight to the more progressive faction.

The Opus Day, its spirituality centers around sanctifying everyday work and personal holiness. It encourages a structured prayer life and obedience to church teachings often appealing to those who value, tradition and discipline. Hmm. It focuses heavily on the role of lay people in spreading their face.

Jesuits, their Ignatian spirituality is out of discernment, finding God's will within all circumstances and intellectual engagement. They're known for their adaptability, running universities and addressing social issues, which can lead to a more open and exploratory approach to [00:12:00] face. A few issues. So Liberation theology, so this is Jesuits.

Some Jesuits like Gustav Gutierrez were key figures in liberation Theology, which blends Catholic Social teaching was a focus on systematic change for the oppressed Opus Day was this emphasis on personal sanctity over political activism has generally been more critical of this movement aligning with Vatican critiques of its Marxist element.

Ecumenicalism and modernity. Jesuits are known for interfaith dialogue and engaging with secular culture, sometimes pushing boundaries. Opus Day tends to prioritize fidelity to Catholic doctrine and traditional devotions and can make it appear less open to such engagement. What's really interesting is I think that the Jesuit Opus Day split in many ways for told the split.

Between like modern conservatives and modern progressives where the progressives are a party of intellectual and bureaucratic elites. And the conservatives are who, who want to change things, who want [00:13:00] to adapt culture as quickly as possible. Whereas the conservatives, while newer, like the new right, is a newer party than this progressive, right?

Is a party of personal responsibility. Personal discernment and returning to traditions. Mm-hmm. And not interfering with, with, with people's lives so that you can maximize your own life.

Sorry, I want to build this into the game world. Oh. No. No, I really like this idea where I think, you know, earlier I had the church splitting up in one church, forming in Mexico, and then the other church forming around the Vatican. And I want to do a a, a, the headed, the Jesuits, the black pope, ends up essentially through shady dealings, taking over the Catholic church.

And then, you know, you know, legalizing. Women in the, in the, in the, in the priesthood, et cetera, gay marriage, a bunch of stuff that your normal Opus Day member would never allow. Mm-hmm. And then have the Cardinals who are affiliated with the, with the Opus Day faction refocusing around the [00:14:00] Latin American church.

So it would be a schism, but it was a schism that would make sense given the modern conflicts the church is already have. Yeah, that makes sense.

I will end up posting the new faction to the Discord, but I think they're pretty dope.

We tried to lean hard into the idea of while there was a schism in the church, it was a schism in which , , the side that is the Catholics that you would encounter in the game is the one was the most claimed to apostolic succession. And they have transformed sort of the way the religion is practice into this concept of living martyrdom.

I. Which means that essentially everyone, , dresses and lives their lives as if they're living under the priesthood,

but was much more

fervor than you would see was in the existing church.

Now you could say here, well then just don't have the Vatican fall. You know, the problem is, is. In almost every timeline I can see that happening. Now, specifically in Italy [00:15:00] right now, we have a fertility rate of only 1.18. That means even if it stays at its existing fertility, and keep in mind it's fallen every year for the past 16 years, I think.

For every a hundred Italians, there will only be 20 great-grandchildren. I don't see how that civilization can stay stable or we can expect it to continue existing. However, I could potentially see iterations of Catholic civilization staying stable in Latin America, which is where we have the church refocusing.

Malcolm Collins: And keep in mind the, the current Pope is a Jesuit. Oh, really? Oh,

Simone Collins: yes.

Malcolm Collins: The, the, he's catching a

Simone Collins: hippie from trad casts though. So now I guess that Oh, yeah. Provides more context.

Malcolm Collins: So, the founder of Opus Day was canonized, declared a saint in 2002. Hmm. Just 27 years after his death in 1975. Wow. The one that shows how new they are. The founder of the Opus Day. By 2002 had only been dead for 27 years. Wow. He was the Saint Dead. [00:16:00] This event symbolized opus day's rapid rise and prominence within the Catholic Church, particularly under Pope John Paul ii, who strongly supported the organization.

I. Opus Day known for its conservative and traditional approach to face emphasizes the sanctification of daily life, often appealing to lay people, and aligning with a structured devotional spirituality. In contrast, the Jesuits, a religious order known for their intellectual rigor and progressive leanings.

Focus on education and social justice were perceived as having lost some influence in the decades following Vatican II and the 1960s attempts to modernize the church. Escobar's canonization occurred so quickly. It was seen by some of the church as favoring opus state's traditionalism over the gero, more liberal stance.

It was an unprecedented spade. His canonization is just. 27 years, one of the fastest canonization in modern history. Yeah. Second only to Mother Theresa. Typically, the process takes decades or even centuries, beginning as a mandatory five year waiting period after the death followed by an extensive [00:17:00] investigation into the candidate's life in miracles.

Right? This rapid timeline was exceptional. Strong papal support. Pope John Paul II was. Who personally in Minor. This guy and Opus Day's Mission played a key role in fast tracking the process. His support reflects priority of promoting models of holiness for laypeople, which had laid with Opus day's focus.

But it made the canonization appear unusually driven by Papal Initiative. Miracles attributed the two miracles that were credited to him. Which are a requirement for sainthood. One involved in nuns recovering from a rare skin disease, and the other a doctor's healing from radiation exposure.

While these were officially verified, the speed and the process raised questions among some questions among Jesuits who really did not like that he was canonized. Yeah, I don't know,

Simone Collins: like a skin condition. Suddenly both of these are, are, are unexpected physical changes in response to. Medical conditions, like there are so many of those that take place to attribute those to a single [00:18:00] person.

Yeah. Yeah. I don't know.

Malcolm Collins: Well, we'll have a, a separate episode where we'll go deeper on the, the secondary part of this, which is okay, the, the black Pope and the Jesuits. So the Jesuits were all black and their leader, which is elected by the Jesuits, has a lot of power in trying to attempt to essentially like manipulate who gets elected Pope and stuff like that.

And, and, and what happens within the Catholic organizations because like obviously he has a lot of power. The Jesuits have been around for a very long time and so have collected a ton of money. And so they are a very wealthy organization. They also have positioned if power was in secular society, so if you're talking about like Catholic universities or just elite educational institutions more broadly, you're going to see Jesuits in positions of power across these.

Whereas Opus Day have focused much more on empowering lay people outside of the clergy. Mm-hmm. Very much newer organization, which doesn't deal as well with accumulating [00:19:00] power. But I would bet if you're looking at fertility rates between organizations affiliated with each of these brands, Jesuits are gonna be a giant fertility sink to have any area.

Yeah. And the day are gonna be a ti a huge fertility boost, having anywhere around you.

Simone Collins: Yeah. Yeah, because it sounds like the OPAs day are just about getting things done. Mm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Malcolm Collins: And it provides a way for the Opus Day to potentially build factions that are just entirely based around family and having kids and, and focusing their, and it would just completely be cogent with their existing teachings.

Absolutely. Which means that long run, they'll likely win. And as that becomes more clear to the Jesuits. As has happened with organizations in the past like the Gray Friars and stuff like that. This is like a thing that constantly happens with the Catholics, where, remember how I told you that the Catholic orders were like creating a new, because I argued that religions typically become softer as time goes on.

Mm-hmm. And they become more like the urban monoculture as time goes on. Yeah. And so you need to create [00:20:00] new young orders which basically act like new religions, which then reinject these like stem cells into like the heart of the Catholic religion, keeping it young. The Opus Day really represent that they are the youngest of the orders where the Jesuits, this isn't the first order that this happened to.

I even think when the Jesuits were first created, they were replacing another order, I wanna say the gray fryers that had become super wealthy and indolent and focused on intellectualism. Wow. And focused on. Like disconnected from the people because as orders get older, they undergo the process that all organizations do.

Yeah. Which is becoming softer capitulating to the urban monoculture.

By the way, my memory here was correct. It was the Gray Friars, also known as the Franciscans who were founded in the 12 hundreds originally around, you know, extreme poverty, not owning anything, et cetera, and had become incredibly wealthy and elitist by the times that the Jesuits were founded. , and so you see this cycle where an order is founded.

At first they focus on, you know, austerity and, and, Faith and [00:21:00] then over time they become wealthier and more intellectually elitist and more interested in appealing to the status hierarchies of the secular world.

Malcolm Collins: You can read our book, the Pragmatist Guide to Religion, if you wanna learn more about what it means for a religion to get soft. But, but they as an order have become soft. And the question , is are they going to fight against this?

Mm-hmm. If, if a Pope turned against them. That'd be fine. And, and Popes have against the Jesuits in the past. In fact a Pope in the past because the black Pope was accumulating so much power. This is ahead of the Jesuits. A Pope inserted and then created a tradition of inserting a pope chosen by the Vatican rather than voted on by the Jesuit.

Oh drama. Okay. Very drama.

Yeah. Let's just go into what I collected about the black Pope, because I think you'll find this.

Yeah.

Simone Collins: Okay. So yeah, tell me, tell me about the black Pope.

Malcolm Collins: So first the outfit. Why is he called the black pope? The Jesuits wear plain black [00:22:00] coss a stark contrast to the pope's pristine white robes. Mm. Since their founding in 1540, the Jesuits have been the Catholic intellectual heavyweights, educators, missionaries and influencers.

Mm-hmm. The leaders clout has sometimes rivaled the popes, at least in the eyes of his admirers and enemies. Okay. But. Back in the 16th and 17th centuries Protestant nation saw the Jesuits Pope as a secret army, loyal to a fault and dangerously clever because they were the intellectuals and they did dress in all black.

And you can imagine how that looked to the Protestants, right? Yeah. But even Catholics, I actually learned about the concept of the black Pope and all of this at the prenatal con from a actually an opus day. Who was like, Hey, you need to look into the Jesuits. Ooh. They've been trying to take over the Catholics for a long time.

Wow. A lot of this stuff that you see as broadly Catholic is just Jesuits.

Simone Collins: That's interesting. Wow.

Malcolm Collins: Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. The, the, so picture this, it's 1773 and the Jesuits are at the height of their influence running schools, advising kings and spreading [00:23:00] Catholicism worldwide. But they've made enemies, European monarchs, jealous of their sway and annoyed by their meddling pressured.

Pope Clement, the 14th to shut them down. He caves issuing a decree that suppresses the Jesuit order entirely. Officially, they're disbanded, but here's the twist. In places like Russia where the Pope's order isn't enforced, the Jesuits don't just fade away. They keep going. Led temporarily by the vicar general stand in black popes who defy the suppression turn a conspiracy minded observer.

This looks like the Jesuits summing their nose at the Pope. No, that's exactly what it is. Oh my God. Okay, so the Jesuits were disbanded in the 1770s. Okay. But in places where the Pope's power didn't hold the Jesuits, elected leaders kept running iterations of this order.

Simone Collins: How interesting. Hmm. And then

Malcolm Collins: Years later by the 19th century, [00:24:00] the Jesuits are quietly reinstated under Pope Pius the.

Seventh in 1814 to outsiders. This mate seem what? What? No, that's exactly what happened

Simone Collins: to outsiders. Yeah. Is there a butt after that? Like, it may have looked like this, but it wasn't. That's exactly what it was. It was

Malcolm Collins: a rogue religious organization that was well, but is there a butt, like, do

Simone Collins: they explain why it isn't what it looks like?

Malcolm Collins: No, I mean, I'm sure that the, the, this is from an ai, so the AI is just trained on Jesuit writing, obviously because they control the laws, but they due to having too much power and fighting the Pope's interest were banned by the Pope, then use the black Pope as their alternate pope. Oh, good heavens. Kept operating and were reinstated later.

They literally are a separate religious organization operating within the Catholic church. That was too powerful to be eradicated, to stop. That's, that's [00:25:00] crazy. But hold on.

So I wanted to be as fair as possible and try to look at the way a Catholic would see this. What they would say is that, well, the Jesuits weren't actually disbanded because the Pope thought they were becoming too powerful. They were disbanded because they were annoying local. I. rulers, which, okay, I guess I can get behind that.

But then isn't the pope supposed to be God's hand on Earth? How is he so easily bullied by local rulers? Then you have the, the secondary situation, which is to say that, well, technically they weren't disbanded. See, the Russians, the Russian Jesuits found themselves in a. Legal gray area, they weren't directly disobeying the pope since the suppression decree hadn't been officially promulgated in Russia and that papal documents technically needed to be officially promulgated in a region to take effect according to the legal practices at the time.

Now, for me, I'm like, yeah, but like it doesn't matter if it's illegal or not. What matters is what God wanted, and apparently God. Operates through apostolic succession and the Pope is God's [00:26:00] hand on earth. So you think that God's like, okay with this sort of technicality, I, I don't know. To me this reads like somebody doesn't really believe their religion.

If they're like, oh, well technicality here. and then you have this situation of, apparently there was one instance where Pope Pius the seventh did. acknowledge the existence of the Jesuits in Russia in 1783, which is seen as approval, and then they were later restored and that the faction in Russia continued to exist, gave them the ability to claim this historical continuity.

so that's how they're like, well, you see, it was a good thing and we're all just gonna forget that this happened.

Malcolm Collins: That's not the only power grab that they've done. Okay. In the 20th century, inter Father Pedro or arpa, the Superior General, or black Pope from.

1965 to 1983 under his rope, the Jesuits go rogue. They dive into liberation theology, a firing mix of faith and social justice that has them backing revolutionaries in Latin America. What. [00:27:00] Yeah. By 1981, ARPA suffers a stroke. And Pope John Paul II sees at the moment, he doesn't wait for the Jesuits to elect a new back Pope.

He appoints his own delegate to run the order. He moved Dub Papal Marshall Law. It was unprecedented. And many Jesuits complained about this. So, he was backing socialist revolutionaries, the head of the Jesuits in Latin America. Hmm. I see. And then we have what happened in 2005 where the Jesuits tried to prevent the election of a Pope.

So after John Paul's II's death in April, 2005, the College of Cardinals convened to elected his successor Rex Retinger a German theologian and close ally of John Paul ii. Oh, remember, Tinger? Yeah, the back, the Opus Day faction. Oh. And he emerged as the front runner. However, not everyone was on board with this candidacy.

Mm-hmm. A blocking strategy. A group of cardinals reportedly included some of Europe's and Latin Americans [00:28:00] wanted to prevent rats nerve from securing the two thirds majority needed to win. Mm-hmm. They rallied rot around Burel, Guo an Argentinian Jesuit known for his humility and focus on the poor, an alternative candidate.

He, the guy who they rallied him again wasn't necessarily campaigning for the paper that he himself, in fact accounts suggest he was uneasy about being used in this way. So they're like not even particularly moral people in the way they're doing this. Like this guy did not want this to happen.

But they got through this. Hmm. Then I was like, okay. But is there any evidence that the Jesuits actually do offer, like, like, like have outsized control within the organization? It's like, well, they haven't just

Simone Collins: presented a ton.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Yeah. They're basically a rogue faction that is. Antipas. Well, I mean now they control the papacy.

So like, who's to say the Catholic exclusive? Yeah, you're anti papus

Simone Collins: until you, you're in charge and then Yeah, until

Malcolm Collins: you're in charge. Right. You know, you love it. It's great. It's great. Let institute these reforms throughout the [00:29:00] entire Catholic order. And I think that this is like a generational thing.

I think the church will likely have some major schism if the next Pope is also a Jesuit and continues to take it in this direction. Yeah. And we'll see. 'cause it doesn't

Simone Collins: look like this Pope has a lot longer because of his health issues. I.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. And the question is, is because, because like the, the, the bureaucratic branch is always gonna be overwhelmingly Jesuit because they control the elites in the positions of power or Jesuit influenced whereas the lay people who don't vote on Pope, for example, are gonna be overly aligned with the Opus day.

Yeah. Now long term, I think the Opus Day faction ends up gaining control as this happened a few times in Castle history where a new a sort of order needs to come in and another order needs to. But the question is, is can that happen before the, the Pope ends up taking the church in a theological direction that is untenable to your average Opus Day aligned individual?

Simone Collins: Yikes. That's wow. I'm glad that [00:30:00] the Opus Day member that you met at Nacon told you to look a little deeper because, oh my gosh, like this is, we think

Malcolm Collins: we need to do an Opus Day episode for ages though, because like we've always, like, from what I've heard of them, I've always liked them. I think mortification is good.

I think this. Waking up and like, like yelling, like I'm at it is really mentally healthy. I think it's important that they do something that a lot of Catholics don't do, which is theological teaching. Whereas a lot of the way that Catholic sermons go is really focused around ceremony. Mm-hmm. Like I was talking with, you know, at, at NATO Con Newcastle's, famously low fertility these days.

Mm-hmm. Of, of religious sex, Catholic majority countries, Catholic areas. How do you get fertility rates up? Well, a couple at Nacon was like, well, we decided to have a kid long before we had planned on having one. Mm-hmm. Because you know, at church, the, the pastor came in and, and said like, Hey, we're gonna help this couple you know, make sure that they're never in need for childcare, et cetera.

Mm-hmm. And then, you know, when their baby was crying, he goes, you know, if this babies aren't crying, the [00:31:00] church is dying, you know, saying all this to the entire congregation from the pulpit. I mean, they were like, oh. Like, I didn't, I felt like I was doing a bad job at being a mother, but hearing like, oh, let the baby cry, you know, et cetera.

And, and I was, I was talking about this and a Catholic was like, yeah, there's like, my priest would never say that. Like, that's not like a thing that you would do is, is be like, Hey, this couple help them care for their kid. But that is something the Opus Day can do in the way that they do these additional lessons.

This like Sunday School for adults. So

Simone Collins: presumably there are Opus Day. Churches. Like, is that, is that the way it works? Like if we were an Opus Day family? No,

Malcolm Collins: no. They're, they're like I, this is my understanding, but I, I'll look it up in post. Is that you, you go to like retreats and training seminars?

Simone Collins: Mm-hmm.

Malcolm Collins: They're more, but you're, you're still part of like

Simone Collins: a normal Catholic parish. Yeah. Because I just wonder how, how would you get the community support then that would, you know, make things easier and more sustainable for you?

Malcolm Collins: Well, ops day members could, you know, build out [00:32:00] like, like daycare networks, like this would be really powerful.

And increasing fertility network rates, right? Yeah. Like, okay, you have your job, which you have a, a, a, a, a moral obligation to that is religious. But then on top of that you have a moral obligation. To helping other members of your community. And while the Opus Day wouldn't be, you know, hugely poor, like traditional, like go help random poor people stuff or mm-hmm.

Or socialist revolution stuff, I can see them being a hundred percent on board with let's create free daycares for members of our own parish. Yeah. That, that seems like a very opus day thing to do. Contrasted with the oh, let's, let's just. Try to like be utility accountants and lower net suffering in the world.

Simone Collins: Hmm. Yeah. Which doesn't produce the best of outcomes. It just

Malcolm Collins: happens. Is this a spicy, spicy episode here? Well, I like that you found something nice to say about some Catholics, which is. I've [00:33:00] always been pro opus day from the first time I mentioned you could like search the episode trans. Yeah. But in general you're like, was this pro opus day?

I'm like a really pro opus day. The more you learn, the more you love them. Yeah. Yeah. I'm like, they're the only like good Catholic faction now and, and people's like I would ever become. A Catholic based on this? No, I still, no, we don't

Simone Collins: have the disposition necessary to be, yeah.

Malcolm Collins: I, I, I don't, I like, I, I find all the idolatry really hard to, like, even, even like the prayer beads and everything like that, that just trouble even with crosses.

Even the crosses are, I mean, look, as an outsider and I know that like Catholics, like, I'm trying to be like as, as, as, as diplomatic as I can and be like, you guys, I. Believe you are literally eating the savior. Like, like cannibalism. Like it literally, it's not like metaphorically, you think you are literally cannibalizing the literal Messiah.

[00:34:00] We all your, we're eager, eager to feed for sharp in our teeth for the, and

Malcolm Collins: and then you worship to statues of him being tortured. And you wear the device that tortured him on you.

well, that's a little violent.

Can we tone it down? Oh no. Don't be put up. By this snarling they just seem a little murdery right now. Don't worry, honey. Fast staffing.

Malcolm Collins: We struggle with that. It's optically difficult for me to get by. And then you, you worship in these churches that are covered in gold and artwork and paintings and, and all of this idolatry. But we also just

Simone Collins: have, we have trouble using symbolism of any sort.

I don't care if it's a Pokemon card or if it's an image. No, it's not just

Malcolm Collins: that. Like to me it's like literally, ugh. It's literally like Indiana Jones. It's like the obviously wrong choice. [00:35:00] If you have read the Bible, it's like, oh, it's glorious, it's so beautiful. It's like, no, the cup of a carpenter.

Which one is it? You must choose. But choose wisely. For as the true grail will bring you life, the false grail will take it from you.

I'm not a historian. I have no idea what it looks like. Which one is it? Let me choose.

It's more beautiful than I'd ever imagined.

This certainly is the cup of the king of kings. Is happening to me? He chose poor.

[00:36:00] Be made out of gold. That's the cup of a carpenter.

you have chosen wisely.

Malcolm Collins: Anyway.

Mm-hmm. But what were you gonna say when I interrupted you? I'm sorry.

Simone Collins: No, no. Carry on. You're

Malcolm Collins: saying it's like Pokemon cards and we're okay with it even if it's

Simone Collins: No, no. We're, we're not okay with worshiping any kind of object or using any kind of object. I think people would argue it's not idol. I use it as like a place to focus my attention.

Or remind me, but No, no, because there's this, this human intuitive tendency to just start treating objects of meditation as idols over time. It's just, it's

Malcolm Collins: exactly. And you can see why we're wor, I mean, even Catholics would be like, okay, but like, we don't do that. And it's like, yeah, maybe you intellectual [00:37:00] Catholic doesn't do that.

But there's a lot of lay Catholics in the, in the outer parts of this sort of Catholic empire in Latin America and stuff like that, where they are absolutely worshiping the saints. Yeah. And, and then like

Simone Collins: we, we see it happening in, when, whenever we're in Peru, there's various attaches of saints like.

Sitting around and you know, people stop and they pray and they leave things there and mm-hmm. The point I'm making

Malcolm Collins: here is that the reason why this stuff is banned is, is, is you somebody with absolute mental discipline who is absolutely educated on the Bible, might be able to go into a church and be inspired by these things and maintain that mental separation.

Mm-hmm. But your average person, or even let's say 20% of the parishioners aren't gonna be able to do that. Is it worth sacrificing their souls? So that you can and, and keep in mind we have a different relation to the concept of soul. Enjoy an

Simone Collins: aesthetic flourish. Like it's not a deal breaker for you.

I mean, especially if you're not worshiping these things as [00:38:00] idols, you really don't need them at all. You're just like, oh, don't, no, they're nice. They help to inspire. Go look at, look at trees, look at plants. Look at the sky. Look at the night sky, look at the sun. Look at, look at. Well, all of that would still be

Malcolm Collins: idolatry if you're using it as an intermediary,

Simone Collins: right?

But like, if you are, if you need inspiration about the greatness of God, you don't need to see a cathedral. You can look into the eyes of your own child, you know, like, or anything beautiful happening.

Malcolm Collins: That's, yeah. The, the point being is that even Catholics would admit that this has a cost. And, and the question is like, why are they comfortable with that cost?

Like, when I take that in, in combination with all the aesthetic stuff and the, the, the, the bleeding Christ and the church and everything, I, I don't know, like, yeah, it's tough. I struggle. It's tough optically, but I, I will say that the Opus Day, like among Catholics, they seem to be pretty awesome.

Simone Collins: Yeah, well, because I, I think maybe what you seem to like about them a lot is, I mean, we are extremely focused on outcomes.

We're very consequentialist and they seem to [00:39:00] be very focused on,

Malcolm Collins: well, not just that, but I believe in treating your daily work as a, as a, as as sort of a religiou act of worship, calling act, an act of worship and, and productivity as an act of worship. Mm-hmm. And I also really believe in the concept of the lay.

I mean, one of my biggest complaints about the Catholic Church is this like hierarchy of religious authority. And the opus Day, in a way, invert that hierarchy of religious authority pointing out that the lay person can be as much of the same or as, yeah. In that way it is

Simone Collins: very Protestant, isn't it?

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. As, as the, as the highest member of a church or as a cardinal. And I think that that is, to me, that that really aligns with my sensibilities and sort of the anti-elitism bit that I have, which is, is I think they really represent that. Yeah. And I think. Represent a way that you can be Catholic.

And you know, we talk about this with techno puritanism is, is that I want people to be able to come to the religion from different faith. And what that means to me is that [00:40:00] if you look at the tracks to be a techno puritan, you don't need to believe in all the tracks. Like you only need to believe, a few, like, like broad things like that we are going to be arguing that God actually exists. That, that you could argue God from looking at repeatable real world things, not like you saying it from yourself. Like just, oh, I, I saw this saying that no one else saw, and that's, or I feel this thing that no one else can feel.

And that god, what was the final one? That all other true face are a true face and should be allowed to coexist. Hmm. And that's something that a, you know, a lot of Catholics are gonna struggle with. But, but that there, there would be a natural alliance between these groups anyway, but, but like the open day, I can see myself aligning with the opus day.

I could never see myself aligning with the Jesuits.

Simone Collins: Well, do you have any data on Opus Day? Fragility.

Malcolm Collins: No, but I can look it up and post. Yeah, I mean, I, I guess your hope then would be, oh, I checked it actually with ai, it didn't have any [00:41:00] data on it. Yeah, it would be good for, it would be really hard to know.

No, I bet you you could collect Opus Day affiliate members, like layperson members that go to these training seminars. Yeah. But do they collect

Simone Collins: things like how many kids do you have? I doubt that you

Malcolm Collins: could start collecting, just do a collection for like a few classes. See how many kids, people over a certain age have and then try to correlate that with a general Catholic fertility rate.

And you might find, I suspect that the Opus Day affiliation is really directly correlated with high fertility.

Simone Collins: I can definitely be done just, I, I doubt that, you know, there's a lot of good info right now, but

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Yeah. Anyway, love you to DeSimone. I don't know if your, your opinion has changed on anything from this.

Simone Collins: I like that you gave me a more realistic picture of them because like so many other people, my only exposure to information about Opus Day, aside from their waking up rituals, which I'd looked up when making a YouTube video, which embarrassingly still sits on this channel, [00:42:00] was from the Da Vinci Code and that pale actor.

Wasn't he supposed to be an albino? Yeah, like whipping himself and being weird and that that is, that, that seems so deviant from what you described. 'cause they're about, you know, and they, they imply that the opus day is this monastic order of extremist isolated crazies. When what you're describing is a.

An order that's all about leaning into the real world and just self-actualization to the max plus a lot of Catholicism, which sounds pretty cool. So I feel like a, a great disservice has been done by the Da Vinci Code, by Dan Brown to all, I don't know, I think the DaVinci code made them look cool. I don't think so.

No, no. It was like just this albino freak trying to stop them. I don't think, at least from reading the book. The book did not give me a very positive impression of the Opus Day. So I still feel, I feel like they were [00:43:00] wronged. Maybe, maybe Dan Brown is a secret Jesuit, or maybe he did book research with Jesuits and didn't.

No. But he is

Malcolm Collins: Urban Monoculture aligned. And Urban Monoculture Oh. Would be more associated with Op Day. Anti-Urban Monoculture is gonna be affiliated with OPAs Day. Mm.

Simone Collins: I could see that. I could, I could. Okay. Fair.

Malcolm Collins: Alright. Love you to death.

Simone Collins: I love you too. For your starch tonight, I presume you want hash browns.

Like it seems like whenever there's a choice, your choice is hash browns. Is that correct?

Malcolm Collins: I'm okay with whatever you feel you have the time to make with the only thing getting to bed early. Oh, yes. 'cause sleep. Oh, listen, getting to bed early is more important than anything else. So big on sleep. So I, I, I, I'd say the difference between rice and hash browns is a maybe 10% difference, not big.

Simone Collins: In fact, I've done, now I can make you hash browns, so I'll do it because I desperately love you. I [00:44:00] just want you to, I want you to know how much I love you. I wish I could do more things. You do

Malcolm Collins: a lot of things

Simone Collins: not good at expressing affection. You're very

Malcolm Collins: good at expressing. You just don't believe I hear it,

Simone Collins: but you taste it.

Is that the thing that matters?

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. I live my life of, of, of an amazingness with you. You know, I, I get to live a near perfect life. I've been thinking about it again recently, like it's unfair how perfect my life is. Yeah.

Simone Collins: But you, you have a perfect life. 'cause you also, I. Love your family and are a good person and work really hard.

And I, I love that our kids are like that too. Like, right, like indie's been a little bit irritable, but you know what has kept her quiet since I put her down, I'm just, I'm just playing home videos of, of her siblings and that makes her happy again. I. Well, the kids's being dragged around. I love it. Yeah.

It's just like, that's so sweet. She, that's all she wants to see. And then she's, and then she's happy. And that, that is our family, that we are so lucky to love each other and live together. And, you [00:45:00] know, I think there's a lot of people who would have everything you have and not be happy to think that it was a miserable existence.

So. Like the opus day, you choose happiness, you choose cheerfulness, and you choose love. And how could you have all of this? How

Malcolm Collins: could you be married to you and have these kids in this house and not be, I mean, I know a lot of movie stars, like all of them seem unhappy, right? Like they've, they've chosen this life that's like urban monoculture life.

It's so sad. Yeah. Even though they have all this wealth and power, like, you know, Jim Carrey's famous line, you know. I hope you achieve wealth, power in everything you wanted. 'cause then you'll see it What make you happy? Yeah. It's like, well I don't know what you were fighting for Jim Carrey, but like, this makes me happy and fulfilled.

Simone Collins: Yeah. That's pretty darn good.

Malcolm Collins: Maybe, maybe you should have had a big family and gotten married and go to live on a farm.

Simone Collins: Some celebrities seem to do that. They just disappear. Like you never hear from them. You know, you hear from the miserable ones because they're still engaging with the press. I bet that that

Malcolm Collins: one crazy Christian one

Simone Collins: is

Malcolm Collins: happy.

Simone Collins: I. Oh, the who? The drunk driving man? The brave guy. Mel Gibson. Mel Gibson. Mel

Malcolm Collins: Gibson.

Yeah. He is [00:46:00] pretty, pretty. I love the South Park. Take on him.

. Yeah, say what you want about Mel Gibson, but the son of a knows story structure. Get the video tape and do a background check on everyone in it. Ah, yes.

Malcolm Collins: Like, this guy's crazy, but damn does he know story structure.

Simone Collins: Oh, I praise from Stone and Parker, right?

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. I love you,

Simone Collins: Vanessa. Love. I love you too. Bye. Bye. Bye. You hang up.

Bye.

Guy Secret and Octavia's, a Red Army guy. And Red Army guys respond. I know. Is it another Red Army guy?

Oh.

I, I chase.

https://discord.com/invite/EGFRjwwS92

In this episode, our host discusses his changed perspective on the future of global governance, arguing that demographic collapse will inevitably lead to a shift toward monarchic and authoritarian regimes. He highlights the unsustainability of current democratic systems in the face of demographic crises and economic collapse. The episode explores various countries' timelines for potential social service collapse, the roles of AI and tech elites, and the possible political transitions and societal impacts. The conversation also touches upon the influence of social media and the looming possibility of walled garden city-states emerging as havens for the wealthy.

[00:00:00] Hello Simone. I'm excited to be here with you today. Today my mind has dramatically changed on a topic that I used to have a pretty firm stance on, okay. Which is I did not believe that it was good for the world to head in the direction of Monarch or authoritarianism.

And I did not think that that was the direction the world was going to head. Now I am. Reassessing my beliefs around this in the face of the economic reality that demographic collapse will integrate. Mm. And I will be arguing in this episode that. Demographic collapse will both create authoritarian and, and monarchic systems, while at the same time making those systems governments with less overall suffering than the systems that insist on staying democracies.

And the this change, when I say insist on staying democracies. A lot of these places won't have a choice, so let's [00:01:00] sort of talk about how this happens. Okay. Before we go into the details. Yeah. And this episode will also serve if you wanna introduce people to the prenatal list movement. I'm gonna introduce a lot of the, the basic facts, again, with their more modern updates.

Okay. To help you understand just how unsustainable and how quickly the existing system is going to start collapsing. But the gist being is that within our lifetimes in many places around the world, we will be hitting scenarios. So by like 2060,

in South Korea, we will have a country where there are two elderly people for every worker. And we will start seeing situations like this more and more around the world as demographic collapse continues. And we're gonna, going over when various countries hit this. Did you, did you see the, the graph on x that REU shared, generated by chat, GPT, by the way, they can just generate beautiful graphs for you.

That demonstrated how, how many people were paying for how many retirees over time. Oh, no. And chose it. Now, as of. Maybe today, but maybe even [00:02:00] 2023. It's 2.4 workers are paying for each retiree. And that's America In the United States or in Korea? In America, yeah. So like that's, we're already in a really dangerous place.

Like, I don't like this because also keep in mind, social security isn't just for people who are retired, who've painted into the system all their lives. It also plays a role in supporting people who are on disability, people who are severely disabled. Like this is, it's just not, ah, well I don't think You mean social security specifically here.

You're talking about the various social safety nets. Like Medicare. Medicare, yeah. Yeah. But still like that's all. And, and, and so what ends up happening is as more and more people are reliant on the state and on systems like social security, this for our non-American listeners, about 50% of our listeners are non-American.

This in America is a system that pays for old people to survive. If they don't have savings, and even if they do have savings, like it's a set. Mm-hmm. You get in the United States, and a lot of countries have this after a certain age as that demographic becomes the majority of the voting base, they will [00:03:00] not make cuts to the systems that are paying out to them.

Hmm. Because they will have the voting power. Mm-hmm. And eventually that leads to economic collapse. Mm-hmm. That leads to a complete system collapse because you cannot pay for two elderly people on every one young person's salary. What happens if you try to do that? Because some countries will be trying to do this before other countries is young people will just leave your country.

And then what you do, well then you start putting in travel restrictions and become authoritarian like anyways. Right. But then you have the, the, secondary problem here which is you're like, okay, well then maybe they can try to get their fertility rate up. Maybe they'll wake up when this starts to happen, but it's already too late then because they'll already have, like, even if they start getting their fertility rate above replacement, then they'll already have like 20 years of, of having every person in the economy support two or three elderly people in the economy.

Which is just completely un economically viable. And so these countries will become [00:04:00] incredibly weak. They also won't be able to field militaries because they don't have a lot of young people. Whereas the countries that become monarchies or authoritarian or fascist in other ways, I. They will have a single strong man making decisions on behalf of the good of the country and the nation.

So they will be able to cut these systems. And maybe even in, in some cases, and I'm not promoting this, I'm just saying this is what some of them might do is create let's say Logan's run type things for unproductive citizens.

Runner terminated, 0.31. Ready for cleanup? Sure. He had some life in him in the end. Wow. Hey, that was a great shot you made. Well, you kept missing him. I had to do something.

It's crazy. He could have renewed on carousel. Now he's finished forever. Why did they run?

Speaker: On productive folks, your time has passed. We'll turn you into fuel of fire. Just [00:05:00] get in line to become biodiesel. Oh, stop crying, you annoying weasel. As laid out by Curtis Yarvin. Handle the old or we'll all be stuck.

And this gets really scary because these countries will be significantly more economically healthy than their neighbors, and they will.

As such, not just be economically more healthy, but also militarily more healthy, be able to exercise their will on their neighbors. So if one of their neighbors tries to stay a democracy, with the nature of the democracy being that the majority population gets to do what they want, right? Like gets to steer the direction and the majority will be elderly.

They won't be able to resist the wills of the neighbors that have undergone the fascist conversion. So let's talk about how this conversion happens, because you might be like, well, why, why would this conversion happen? [00:06:00] Well, you have a few things here. First is and we a bit later will be going over using how the Weimar Republic transitioned into the Nazi state. As an example of how a country in deep economic shambles can have a youth-led movement, transition it to a fascist state which is typically when this happens. So as the economy begins to break down there will likely be rebellion.

I mean, how many old people are you willing to support? And then you've got the problem, which is the young people who would have an interest in participating in this rebellion are going to be the majority of the military, first of all. Hmm. But they're also going to be the population that would actually engage in rebellion.

Old people actually do not engage in rebellions or civil wars at a very high rate. And so it's basically in the bag. That the transition would go to the strong man. There are a few paths around this. Maybe AI could be a path around this. If AI somehow like. Creates endless prosperity [00:07:00] in a, a genuinely post scarcity society.

Then, then we avoid this. It's a possibility. But it's a, it's a very scary possibility to bet on when, as we've argued in the past when it seems like AI will actually do, is concentrate wealth among the ultra elite. Well, that doesn't mean that the ultra elite will not have some motivation to create daycare.

For poor people so that they don't make society unstable. Like it would be much better to put them all in pleasure pods where they're just living in VR heavens. If, if the alternative is for them to be out on the streets causing trouble and maybe damaging infrastructure they've paid for or damaging assets they've paid for and that is what we are seeing in our existing society to an extent happen naturally.

We saw this with Samba and Free's big UBI study that he tried to cover up. You can watch our video on this. But giving people a thousand dollars a month for three years at the end of the process, actually led to them having significantly less [00:08:00] net worth in earnings at the end of the pipeline. They didn't have more education, they didn't have more kids, they didn't spend more time.

So yes, I also feel like we kind of moved in that direction with the legalization of cannabis just to like. Yeah, it's like we all feel okay with how things are right now, but let's, let's get into timelines here. 'cause I think a lot of people, and we're gonna go over country by country may be surprised.

So I put in the, the two AI to grok. I was like, okay, when are we going to start seeing these countries, economic or social security systems begin to collapse? Oh, so starting with South Korea because a lot of people see this as like a far off problem. I know I literally do not have the constitution to run that search.

Okay. Like I should be running that search. I'm so terrified. South Korea currently has a fertility rate of 0.75. That means for every a hundred South Koreans there's only gonna be around five grandchildren. That's even if it doesn't continue to collapse. South Korea's working age population 15 to 64 is already shrinking by 1% annually.

Projected to drop from 36 [00:09:00] million in 2020 to 20 million by 2065 mm. Fewer workers means fewer caregivers and fewer taxpayers. Mm-hmm. Elder Surge, the elderly six. Five plus population is 18% of the population today expected to hit 40% by 2052. Wow. This drives demand for long-term care. So by 2040, the elderly to worker ratio could reach one one up from one five today.

And that. Is basically economically completely unsustainable. Mm-hmm. It says by the late 2030s, the elderly could exceed 30% of the population with a dependency ratio of 60 to 70% you're gonna have healthcare shortages that would overwhelm the system.

So you're looking 2030 in South Korea you, you could begin to see things break chili, which currently that's in, that's in . Six years. Yes, 2030s. In Chile you're looking at a TFR of 0.88 to 1.2. The current median age is 35. So they pointed out that by 2040 to 2045, elderly would exceed at 25% of the [00:10:00] population, meaning a dependency ratio of 40 to 50%.

So collapse risk early 2040s. Chili's healthcare system may get to break down and keep in mind that a lot of these Latin American countries have the additional problem that we are siphoning their population. If people are like, why is it so bad to be taking their most productive citizens in these countries?

This is why it's so bad because then these countries are double hit by paying for the young, which are parasitic and the ultra old that are parasitic to a country. Mm-hmm. Uruguay. TFR 1.27 to 1.3. It's looking at beginning to break down late 2040s to early 2050s, Costa Rica, 1.3 to 1.5. This is again, by, by AI guesses.

It's looking at it beginning to break down by 2055 to 2060. Cuba, 1.3 to 1.5. And, and actually with Costa Rica, their native born fertility rate is probably already under one. So within Cuba we're looking at 2035 to 2040 Columbia, which has A-T-T-F-R of only 1.2, one to 1.7. [00:11:00] It's probably gonna begin to break down 2050 to 2055.

Mm-hmm. Argentina. 1.25 to 1.5. It's gonna begin to break down in 2045 to 2050. And here, I'd remind you that the UN every year has been lying about these countries projected fertility rates. I'm putting a graph on screen here, which shows the UN projecting these fertility rates and then the lines you see that don't look bad.

And then the red line is their actual fertility rates. The global powers that be, have a motivation to hide this from you because they are the powers that be. And if the existing social order isn't working, if we need to make significant changes to our economic and political systems, the people with the most vested interest to prevent that are the people who are benefiting from the system right now.

Well, in, in other words, there's absolutely zero incentive, especially for an elected official to. To look at anything but the short term, what will get them immediately elected, not just elected officials. We're talking about the journalist class here.

We're talking about Wall Street. Here. We're talking about investors. We're [00:12:00] talking about like basically anyone that isn't just like purely altruistic, motivated, is, is going to have a strong reason to not mention this and hide this. Or if they really like the existing world order, which is based around this progressive urban monoculture they're not gonna want to admit that this existing world order is not sustainable.

Hmm. Now, okay, you can be like, well, those are Latin American countries. They don't care about Latin America. Let's look at Italy. You're dealing with a TFR of 1.2 to 1.3. Now so Italy, we're looking at a collapse state of 2045 to 2050 at their current TFR with, with existing projections. Spain their current TFR is 1.2 to 1.3. We're looking at a collapse time from 2050 to 2055. And, and note here, I'm not necessarily talking about a government collapse here.

I'm talking about a collapse of their social service system. That could look like a lot of things. But we're talking about some form of crisis where either they basically make a choice to cut off tons of people. Those people are just being cared for by ai. [00:13:00] Or something Germany which is currently at 1.4 to 1.5 we're looking at a collapsed timeline of 2060 to 2070.

With Japan. So if we go East Asia, we've got Japan, which is 1.2 to 1.3. Keep in mind how low these numbers are. They're basically haling every generation they're looking at 2040 to 2045, Taiwan, 0.9 to one. They're looking at 2050 to 2055 and China 1.1 to 1.2, they're looking at 2045 to 2050. Although I, I personally think China is faster because I think they're lying about a lot of their, their oh one and one, I think they don't even know.

They don't know how bad it is. Yeah. So that, and, and you could say, well, China is already authoritarian. Shouldn't they be able to fix this? And the problem is, is that the authoritarian faction that controls China right now is aligned with the elderly. Kleptocrats, I guess is what I'd call them the kleptocratic class which is this older CCP class which is just living off of the few young people and it's why young people like aren't having kids anymore.

What you [00:14:00] need for this to work is something like a. Trump monarchy where you have a lot of young people who are traditionalists and very excited about that culture. Very excited about who the Monarch is or who the ruling family is. Or even better, like a JD Vance monarchy or even better within the US an Elon monarchy.

A lot of young people would be very excited about that. You cannot have some stodgy old fissure like Xi Jinping who represents everything that has created this situation. Yeah. So in areas that are already fascist, either they're gonna crack down a lot and somehow save their country by basically forcing them into a form of, I guess you could call it almost slavery, to the fascist IE forcing their forcible impregnation, et cetera.

Mm-hmm. Is what we'll see if they're gonna fix their situation. Because I mean, the, the people in China aren't gonna choose to have kids just to support this class in the United States when people are like, oh, having more kids just gives you more workers. I mean, that's factually not true. Like Elon Musk is [00:15:00] gonna have AI working for him, he's gonna be fine no matter what.

He also doesn't even really want workers, like of the people he hires, that is only the most exceptional few people, you know, he's never going to have a shortage, but he also wouldn't hire normal people anyway. He doesn't need more humans. Yeah, so Elon Musk is not a situation here, but, but who does suffer is Xi Jinping.

So when Elon Musk goes out there, or when we go out there, we don't really personally benefit from you having lots of kids. Like it's, this is not, so we have people to work for us. Xi Jingping and the CCP does. This is literally the slave owner telling the slaves to have more kids so that they can keep their existing system running so that they can sell them.

You know? It is, it is a different motivation and it has a very different ring to it, especially when China's situation could be said to be in large part created by Xi Jinping's low. And slow to act policies. He's completely culpable. Come on. Yes. And so I think the governments that do this and do this successfully are gonna be the ones that are able to say, [00:16:00] we are new.

We're like you, we were always promoting you. Mm-hmm. Which is gonna mean the democratic the, the prenatal movement is going to have a natural place in these regimes as they begin to form. Or what you're going to see happen is people move to charter cities, which are sort of like independent roped off governments and just drain countries of their wealth super quickly.

And then wealthy country, well formerly wealthy countries rotting really quickly. And you may just not see an interest in the powerhouses of the world in engaging with these collapsing economies because there's nothing to be gained. For example, does America you know, one of my friends in Europe former friend, I guess still friend from the Stanford Business School, he is like, well, why isn't America investing in these relationships with Europe right now?

Mm-hmm. You know, you guys are turning your back. And I'm like, these relationships don't matter. Like you guys, like literally will not matter in a few decades. Economically speaking. That is the problem. Like investing in it is like investing a friend who's starting to get addicted to meth and you're like, well.

I mean, yeah. Yeah. It, no, it literally, [00:17:00] what's gonna be left in the future, you know, what, what future do we have together? There is no future. You will not exist as I know you very soon. It's just Don. Yeah. And we've been helping you for a long time. Protecting you for a long time. Why should we continue to do this when you've got meth?

Meth? It's not, yeah. And then they're like, oh, but this other guy who's addicted to meth might attack me, like pointing at Russia. It's like, I don't, he's going down too.

But yeah, by the, this so dark. Oh, you're not afraid of nuclear war. And I'm like, no, I'm not particularly afraid of nuclear. Was Russia, if you could see our, their videos on this, there's a lot of reason to believe that none of their nukes work right now. These nukes were made before we were born and they couldn't even rotate their tires.

I am certain they couldn't keep their, their nukes nukes in good working order. But anyway, an entirely different country at this time having been trafficked without anyone's knowledge. Who knows? Yes. And somebody's like, oh, you, you can't meet that. Look, you had a a period of like 50 years. I'm not talking about like, and all you needed was one person [00:18:00] over that entire 50 years finding a way to profit from dismantling me.

I'm pretty sure 50 years is a long effing time. And keep in mind that people often had an active disincentive to report this even if they found it. I'd love to see like a version of Oceans 11, about the Russian kleptocracy. That would be fun. I. You son of a b***h I'm in. And even if news, even if was a known, was in the central Russian government that this had already happened, like suppose it did happen.

Oh yeah. But they would never admit that because then you'd lose your, they admit. Yeah. Yeah. So, so if you're, like, even if we assume we're in a timeline where like actually Putin has done audits and he has figured out that they don't work, would you, would you know, 90 of course, 98% of the benefit of. Nukes is this con like this, this threat of mutually assured destruction and, and what you could do it, it's almost nicer if you know that you don't have the nukes.

'cause then at least you don't have to pay as much for their maintenance. You can just do like a, a token. Amount to make people think you're maintaining it [00:19:00] and you can save a lot of money. Yeah. Honestly, like this is one of those things, you know how I am with clutter. I kind of wish that like we just didn't have a lot of the stuff that we had and it's just kind of like, oh, isn't nice.

We don't have to like pay for the storage unit or like do it this and like maybe he feels that way about his nuclear arsenals. Yeah. Well, and this is what I'd say, I say, it's suspicious that they haven't done any nuclear tests in a long time. Oh. Like if they worked, presumably they would do the test to show us that they still worked, and you could say, yeah, well, we have treaties with them, but the treaties don't stop them from invading their neighbors.

They certainly wouldn't stop them from testing nukes just to show the world that they still work

Sorry, I just realized that the audience may be misunderstanding when I say it's been a while since Russia has done a nuclear test. Russia has not done a nuclear test since the year 1990. It's been 35 years since they've done a nuclear test. Most of the people listening to this weren't even born during the last Russian nuclear test in a post-Soviet era.

They [00:20:00] haven't had. One. And keep in mind that dismantling or selling critical parts of nuclear bombs is quite different from an ethical perspective than the other people who were taking parts of the planes or taking parts of the car or siphoning gas from things, and that it would even be potentially ethical and patriotic to do because nobody really wants a global nuclear war.

Uh, a person could tell themselves when they're doing it, oh, well, I'm helping save lives. It potentially even my own countrymen. So, , I just find it almost implausible that their nuclear arsenal still works because if it still worked and if Putin knew it still worked, he would test it to show us it still works.

well. This post collapse world, a really good dark service business would be. To and to, without actually going through the entire process of getting nukes. Help a country signal that they're getting nukes and like have nuclear tests, you [00:21:00] know, the way that North Korea does.

And just like charge them for that. Israel real, we'll work this out. Yes. No. Israel is a country worth investing in. This is one of the reasons why I'm like, yeah, invest. Well, yes, they're techno, they're, they're, they're maintaining their population 100%. I want to go into ai. So I put this scenario in AI and I'm like, okay, help me think through how this would play out.

Mm-hmm. So eroding democratic legitimacy as systems become financially unsustainable, younger generations may increasingly view democratic decisions as illegitimate. If they perceive them as serving only elderly interests. This legitimately crisis could weaken democratic norms. Yeah. Immigration tensions, accelerating polarization.

Countries might need massive immigration to sustain their economies, but this could trigger cultural backlash, particularly amongst elderly voters. Fearing change. Yeah. This creates a catch 22 where fixing the demographic problem causes social instability. Hmm. Military recruitment challenges. Democracies may struggle to maintain military strengths with fewer young people, making them vulnerable to more authoritarian neighbors who are can compel [00:22:00] service.

Or dedicate greater portions of smaller populations to defense Hmm. Or offense. Digital surveillance advantage. Authoritarian systems might better leverage technology to maintain productivity with fewer workers through greater surveillance and control, creating economic advantages over privacy concerned democracies.

Hmm. And, and this is huge, like the ability to project power is so much larger now for a smaller group. And keep in mind the revolution may not be. The young, it may be the rich. The rich may be the group with lots of power if they have automated drone swarms and stuff like that. We'll release a video soon on how automated drone swarms are in the United States.

With this replicator initiative is already focusing on like ships that can build their own drones, which. Function entirely autonomously. Mm-hmm. And that is the future of warfare. The question is, is who's gonna be wheeling that? What countries are gonna be wielding that in any country that doesn't wield, that will basically be at complete whim [00:23:00] of a country who does?

Mm-hmm. So let's put it this way, if the United States makes this transition before other countries, and we do get like a JD Vance monarchy, let's say, in a few election cycles, and he wants Greenland and Europe does not have autonomous drone swarms. He gets Greenland. Like there's nothing a conventional fighting force can do against an autonomous drone swarm.

Mm-hmm. And the United States is supposed to have its first iteration of this project done next year, 2026. So you know. Keep that in mind. So the AI said, okay, so how does this play out? It says, you get an asset price collapse spiral. As elderly populations sell assets to fund retirement with fewer young buyers, assets, values could collapse.

Creating both economic crisis and eliminating the wealth older voters hope to protect. So basically all of the savings that people think they have because it's been stored in assets. It disappears all at once when they all try to sell it at once. AI governments augmentation. AI systems might increasingly augment [00:24:00] democratic processes, subtly shifting powers from voters to technocrats who designed and interpret the systems.

Hmm. You see a lot of automatic voting systems. Military coups in Democrat we'll skip that one. Military coups in democratic systems, professional military classes might view themselves as guardians of national interests against unsustainable democratic demands. Corporate governance, filling voids, multinational corporations might effectively become government structures in regions where traditional government systems become unsustainable.

Now if we're looking at the y Mar Republic as a parallel here economic crisis has catalyst the Great Depression, devastated Germany's already fragile economy, creating mass unemployment and financial insecurity. Similarly, demographic collapse could trigger a fiscal crisis when pension in healthcare systems become mathematically unstable.

Mm-hmm. Democratic delegitimization. Why Mers Democratic institutions were blamed for the economic suffering? In a demographic. Well, basically you, you, you could see the parallels there, a generational division. There was a generational element [00:25:00] to Nazi support. Many younger Germans felt their future had been sacrificed In our scenario, younger generations might similarly resent democratic decisions perceived as serving elderly interests.

Institutional lysis, the Y mar government became increasingly ineffective through coalitional deadlocks, similarly, demographically challenged governments de. Democracies might experience gridlock between parties representing elderly voters, demanding benefit preservation, and representing working age taxpayers.

Wow. And we're already seeing a shift in young people, particularly young males across the world, towards. I'd say more comfort with authoritarian governing systems. Me? Yeah. So if you look at something like South Korea where you're seeing this, this split between the women who are largely aligning themselves with the urban monoculture and the existing bureaucracy and the men who are aligning themselves with trying to find some new system that works, which is largely what in the United States, the new right is about, it's not aligned with.

Small government in a traditional [00:26:00] context that's aligned with cutting out bureaucracy. It, it really, you're right, if it's defined by two things, it's we. One, do not like the urban monoculture imposing its value system on us. Mm-hmm. Or anyone imposing its value system on us. Mm-hmm. And then secondarily, it's motivated by the idea that we want an economic system that actually functions.

We don't care if this economic system is pro Right. In a traditional context, are pro left in a traditional context. Like if they could find, if the new right could find a way to make socialized healthcare cheaper than the existing system, they would. We've seen this with Trump's American Academy. His solution to the university crisis is to socialize America's university system.

That is the most non-right winging thing. One of JD Vance's thing was raising the minimum wage. This is not, and, and calling this populism, I think is also untrue because Doge isn't exactly populist. It's more just trying to build systems that actually work given the data we have. And that might extend to governing systems where you [00:27:00] increasingly see people on the right.

You know, we had the aristocratic utensil on recently who's just a straight up monarchist. We've had Curtis Yorman on who's just a straight up monarchist. These people are already invited in you know, mainstream right wing circles. Mm-hmm. And so the idea that the right would say, and Trump's already said, like recently, I'm okay with exploring a third term.

Yeah. Yeah. If there's no term limits and with the demographic shifts that are gonna have after 2030, which make it very hard, we'll do an episode on this for Democrats to win in any sort of fair election at post the year 2030. Mm-hmm. Especially when you look at the existing direction of many voting blocks that they really cared about.

This like the Hispanic voting block and stuff like that, that they were relying on. Yeah. There's basically no hope. Well for, for, for Democrats, so you might see in, in the most peaceful context is a short term peaceful transition. Or mostly peaceful transition. Maybe [00:28:00] I've often said, you know, if you look at the Roman Republic, we've been around about as long as the Roman Republic was a republic.

Mm-hmm. You know, a we might be facing the question of do we transition into an empire or do we fall. Within this generation. Hmm. And I think that America still has a lot of vitalism to it. Yeah. Yes. Yeah. And again, I'm not saying like, I'm just asking how do you make a democracy? And I'm like, genuinely, how do you make a democracy continue to work when the majority of the population is on social services?

I, yeah. Or, yeah. When, when, when the majority of the voters more importantly, are asking for things that. The majority of the bankrolls don't want, that's the problem. Well, and when the majority of the voters who are asking for the major, what the majority of the bankrollers don't want or will not stand mm-hmm.

When the bankrolls are also young pissed because they're in a state of economic collapse. And I think that what we're [00:29:00] increasingly seeing is if you look at the way our generation views, for example, the boomers. Mm-hmm. There is a level of, of like hatred for the ways that they have selfishly broken things.

Yeah. That I think we're going to increasingly see within younger generations. Yeah. When this collapse is happening. Everybody who yelled at Simone and I, all of the journalists, all the, you know, everyone like that, who was like, oh, you guys are evil. You guys are, no, you are the guys who created this inevitability, not us.

And young people. When they look at the way that you dismissed an obvious mathematical truth heading your direction, like a freight train I do not see them having a lot of sympathy. Hmm. When you're like, how could you just cut off all social security entirely? How could you just let people die?

They're gonna be like, how could you have put us in this situation? We warned them. Yeah, like, like we warned them. You, you, you, you have a tiger by the tail right [00:30:00] now. That tiger looks like it's getting angry. You probably wanna let go before it's like furious and foaming at the mouth and they're like, nah, tigers are always safe.

And I think it's because people can't imagine society transforming this much. Mm-hmm. It's like with the pandemic people. I couldn't imagine things getting that crazy. They got that crazy though, real fast. It feels like such a distant, bad dream that I really also can wrap my head around us, forgetting that the world can change so violently because I.

Where everyone in a position of power just lies to you. Yeah. Where they use social media platforms to ensure that you and people who tell the truth are silenced and lose their jobs and everything like that, like mm-hmm. Their ability to attempt to clamp down on power is strong. Yeah. And we will see some countries where the bad guys clamp down on power, and we will see some countries where, I mean, unfortunately in this, the good guys are the ones who will want to make political changes.

And, and, and this is [00:31:00] just axiomatic because you need political change. To make the system sustainable because the current system is just mathematically not sustainable. Yeah. Oh, so what are your thoughts? I, I mean, I still think that a, I'm not really a monarchist. I'm a as, as they say, techno feudalist where I really see this system as descending and detective feudalism.

Again, not because it's the best system, but because it's what's inevitable at this point. Yeah, I, I agree with you. I understand what you're saying about monarchies, kind of outcompeting, but I just also think that it's going to be such a mess that. There won't be sufficient incentives to try to pick up what's left behind.

Like people won't, the, the wealthy people who'd be able to like bankroll or try to influence a takeover. Mm-hmm. And creation of a mo a, a monarchy would not want that hot mess to deal with. They don't want the people they. Don't necessarily need the land. In a [00:32:00] post di world, I think that they, the people with means will be much more interested in establishing walled gardens and city states, and they can kind of do it wherever they want, depending on their defensive capabilities.

Because, well, autonomous drones are, yeah, who, whose army, whose successful functional government is going to stop them. From building their walled city, wherever they wanna build it. And then keep in mind, the demographic collapse is hitting Latin America much harder than like the United States. So like the United States before it enters a state of collapse might get us autonomous drone ships and everything like that up and running.

That's probably enough to keep the United States safe. But Latin American countries, any rich person could just go in and, and as this happens, the United States is going to start carrying less and less what's happening in other countries. If you're like, oh, the US would use this army to prevent that, why would it, it has no economic interest in doing that, and it probably economically benefits more from staying on the good side of these few wealthy people.

And on top of all that, if any country in the world right now, just [00:33:00] like. Feeling political wins has a right wing party that is open to becoming a monarchy. Mm-hmm. I'd say the United States falls into that bucket pretty strongly. I, I would imagine it going in that direction in the same way that it still has a higher fertility rate than it still before European countries go in that direction, for example.

Or before even Latin American countries, which are more likely to go the dictatorship pathway. Yeah. And keep in mind, Simone's ancestor was the one who originally turned down. For people who don't know, she's the descendant of George Washington's siblings. And he didn't have any kids himself. So she'd be the closest relative if he had taken the crown or in, in the line of closest relatives.

So wouldn't that be, oh, if you're not American, you may not know this. He was famously offered to become Monarch and he turned it down. He didn't wanna become Monarch. Yeah. People Amer early Americans were. They were not completely sold on what they set up. So does that mean we might, we might have been signaling something, naming our, our first kid, Octavian [00:34:00] was the, was the, was the blood right.

To claim the, the monarchy. I'm, I'm, I'm of course joking, his middle name is George. Just point. Yeah. It's gonna, it's gonna be the technocrats who really have all the power in this. Yeah, 100%. And, and what's gonna happen, which you pointed out, is gonna be a transition of our understanding of economic systems.

Where it used to be that anything that, you know, was fungible and had a fixed value. Like we knew how much of it existed was the course or value, whether that was like gold or Bitcoin or land. But that was only the case because the number of producers and consumers was growing exponentially. We're gonna be transitioning and, and, and so like.

Taking land mattered in a historic, because land was like a fixed thing. Mm-hmm. As we enter like true demographic collapse what the wealthy tech barons are going to realize really quickly is that the vast majority of humans just don't really matter to their little tech empires. Neither does land, as you pointed out.

What they really care about are the. Productive individuals. IE these, these taxpayers, like as taxpayers become a rarer commodity taxpayers [00:35:00] matter more. And if you look at the US tax base, a huge chunk of the taxes come from like the top few percent of taxpayers. Mm-hmm. And as what the wealth gap increases, that's going to increase, which is why the tech barons will have a reason to basically scoop those people up, woo, those people to their little micro empires.

And this is why in the video game world that we're making right now, it's gonna be an AI video game world that I'm really excited, I'm having a lot of fun building. It's, it's sort of populated by something that we call havens, which are these small sort of territories, utopian city states that these tech barons create.

Mm-hmm. And it's also why, you know, you as a, as a, a, a person in the world, like when I look at like what the prenatal list movement is for me it's also making sure that my kids are associating with these people's, kids with these communities. When I think about like what it really means to set my kids up to be safe in the future, it's not setting them up for a job, it's setting them up to impress these specific communities, which [00:36:00] are gonna have a disproportionate amount of power in the future.

Mm-hmm. And if you're like, oh, like a classic person watching this, oh, what if fertility rates plateau, you know, are, are bottom out? And it's like, it hasn't happened in South Korea. It hasn't happened anywhere in the world where this has been a problem. Not once has a country sustainably reversed its fertility collapse, except maybe the case of Kazakhstan.

But that doesn't really count because they were basically undergoing sort of a, a genocide instigated by the Russians before this, and now they're. That's, it's not a good example. People will say Georgia got its fertility rate up for not even five years, and then it collapsed again. Like, no, no one has figured out how to stop this.

I. It, it, it hurts the productive populations more than the non-productive populations, or it decreases their, their populations faster. Because the more money you have, the fewer kids you're gonna have less, you're in this ultra wealthy, like over 500 k per year class in the United States which means competent people are gonna become a, you know, rarer and rarer commodity.

And it [00:37:00] also, all of the leading indicators say it's gonna get worse. Like if you look at rates of religiosity among gin alpha, yes, Christianity has begun to tick up. This year was the first year that didn't go down year over year. But you're still dealing with the leading indicators. And among Gen Alpha, there has been a, a, a much faster drop than there has been in previous generations.

Or not Gen Alpha, it was Gen Z, gen Z. And I assume it continued in Gen Gen alpha, but we don't have stats on that yet. And if we see people going back to religion, it's going to look very different. And the way that they go back to it is going to be like I think if we're talking about like, who's gonna be fighting these revolutions, it's gonna be Gen Alpha, right?

So Gen ZI think is gonna be the generation that's sort of seen as like the boomers. Because I think that they're gonna be uniquely low fertility. I think our generation's gonna be uniquely low fertility, and I think these two generations are gonna be Bain blamed as much or even more than the boomers.

Because what we're doing is in a way more selfish, given how much the writing is on the wall. I mean, the boomers thought that the Ponzi scheme that civilization had [00:38:00] set up could work forever, right? Like, we know it's not gonna work. And yet, you know, progressives are attacking people for saying, oh, you should have more kids.

They're like, oh, that must mean you're a Nazi. And I'm like, no, you are literally creating fascist inevitabilities by doing this. Yeah. And so the best we can do is lick tech barren boots. You know, you guys are greatest fresh build autonomy. Learn how to survive. Yes. Well, I learn how to build skills and, and, and cultures that are useful to them.

Mm-hmm. And that's also the way that like we deploy our family's capital and people are like, well, what can you invest in in a system like this? Invest in solutions. Because if you're out there trying to build the solutions, like our free school system should check out, it's like so much better than it used to be.

It's all like AI moderated and everything. The Collins Institute, police, police, try the platform. We're about to have a new like ad video that will be airing soon on this, it explains that a new way the system works. But tech parents the, the, what was I saying here? The, the people who have been investing in fixing things whether that's [00:39:00] because they've been culturally invested in this or working on technologies that are, are working on this they are going to be the people who I imagine are not targeted by these groups and who are given.

Likely ability to participate in what is inevitably the winning side of this, which is gonna be the Gen Alpha side. Yeah. And we already see Gen Alpha like acting more responsibly than previous generations. You know, they don't consume alcohol as much. They don't consume like waters like the number one like beverage that they're buying.

Like they, they are like, Hey, this whole sleeping around thing was a bad idea. Hey, this whole X thing was a bad idea. And the ones who realize this more are also the ones who are having kids more, and also the ones that are economically engaging more. So, yeah. And, but this is only within Gen Alpha that this is where I expect to see this transition happen.

So I think what we're gonna see is a basically societal turnover. And it's going to be very, very if not violent it's gonna have a lot of suffering as a component to it. And that suffering has been created as an [00:40:00] inevitability of people like the left turning their, the journalist class.

The, the big bureaucrat, CEO class, the deep state, turning their eyes to what is an obvious problem. Yeah. Hey, I mean, gosh. Well, actually, I don't know what to say. I, I don't know if I feel hopeful or not. It's just have I convinced you? Like, does it make sense to instigate this, this, this turnover happening sooner or to support movements that would have it happen sooner because it will lead to less bloodshed overall.

I, I just don't, I don't see the revolutions playing out the way that you think. Just like there wasn't a revolution per se in South Africa. It just kind of devolved into the state where it is now. This is, it's a, you just think it all ends up like South Africa. It all collapses. Yeah. Well, and a lot of people in South Africa would say it's not collapsing that, you know, the areas that are nice are really nice and you know, we've.

I mean aristocratic utensil. Look at they have armed armed guard. We're talking [00:41:00] about how he was looking at the place where he could live in South Africa and thinking, yeah, I think I'd rather live there than in the uk. So look at it from that perspective. There's a lot of people who already would prefer to live in the walled garden of a post collapse society, as we would define it, than in the UK right now.

Okay. Well, so let's, let's talk about what this transition would look like. Okay. Suppose we have some governments begin to basically collapse and then have walled gardens where the tech elite can do basically whatever they want, right? Create their own little utopias or just hang on. And, and in South Africa you don't have that because the ultra tech elite was in South Africa, left the country.

So you're gonna have two things happen. First you're gonna have the very wealthiest leave the countries especially if their assets aren't tied to something like mining or something like that. And in an AI world, that's what we're gonna see. Mm-hmm. Because they're not, they're not forced to stay.

So ultra elite leaves the country. After the ultra elite leaves the country, they then begin to increasingly as city states or cities collapse around the world, become sort of like [00:42:00] milked or squeezed into fewer and future increasingly disproportionately prosperous countries. Mm-hmm. But these are gonna be the countries that tax them less and let them do largely what they want.

So, and that maybe can protect themselves better, like have more like. Law and order. So what you might see is right, maybe not law and order. Law and order is irrelevant when you have like the infinite money glitch, right? So, what we might see is even if a country like the US begins to collapse, if it's offering the tech elite more freedoms, we'll see them leave countries like Europe and move to the Havens within America increasing the, the, the, the difference between the two countries. If people are like, why are you so certain America will come out of this fine? Well, one we are the largest country largest healthy economy with a good fertility rate. We do like we are okay with wealthy people from other countries coming here. We already have systems in place that make that easy.

Israel is another option, but like obviously if you're not Jewish. [00:43:00] There's less of a reason to go there in the game world. We're creating the post apocalypse game world. Like Jews basically live nowhere but Israel anymore because like, why would you stay anywhere if like Israel's a tech utopia and the rest of the world is, is, is fallen.

Yeah. But America is, is like a very easy place for them to go. But then you also have the situation of, oh. Yes. They, we in a post globalist world are one of the only countries that is stable, both in terms of food and energy production capacity.

Yeah, I mean, it's basically our geography, not just our ability to produce our own food and energy, but also our borders and that we're not completely surrounded. We have plenty of port area. We have a military that even if very scaled down is capable of defending where we are. We are okay on our own, whereas a lot of countries now post globalization are, are so anemic in some areas.

China's one of these [00:44:00] examples that it would take them decades to get to a place where they were self-sufficient. And there are other countries that never, ever could have been self-sufficient. So, so to clarify, China imports something like 86% of its energy. Or, and even like what The nitrates for its soil.

It, yeah. Even it even imports nitrates for its soil. Yeah. It can't even grow. Not only is it importing food, but it's importing nitrates. Yeah. Like to grow its own food. It still needs help, but it can't just like, well, I will try. We'll try if global trade route became disrupted, China is completely boned.

Like, like, they, they would not only is their population now, I've seen some estimates out that they might have be as low as not a billion people, but 300 million people. We did an episode before if people want to check it, where we argue that their numbers were probably like 25% to a third higher.

This argues that there are two thirds higher of these new estimates that I've heard from some YouTubers are accurate. That's a good, and, and, and on top of that, they're gonna have masturbation. On top of that, they're shrinking every year. They're just like not relevant long-term as a world power. Japan is much more relevant.

I [00:45:00] have more faith that Japan can turn this around because we've been Japan for the region. Region actually has a fairly robust fertility rate. And I suspect that they may find a way to fix this. Yeah. 'cause they, I'm talking about countries that might, they have a monarch. If I'm talking about countries that might be just okay with going authoritarian.

And, and without much of a fight or pushback from, they can also survive on their own. Agriculturally and, and from a defense standpoint, like they're not in the safest position, but they're still at least to sovereign island, which helps, you know, they don't have like immediate land borders with anyone else.

But Japanese culture definitely has an authoritarian streak and works well under those types of systems. Sure. So although, you know, we, we need to, I wanna do more research before we do the episode on high fertility Japanese subcultures, but the subcultures that seem high fertility are actually some, the least authoritarian.

So we'll see how that plays out. Well, they're, they're very like exports of Americana. And so yes and no. Like, no. I mean I think there's, it's not so much research you'll see that [00:46:00] you're wrong about this. They are, I see direct, aesthetically, aesthetically, but not like, no, not aesthetically dispositionally.

Okay. We'll see, we'll see. There's very much, the disposition is just selecting. Selecting for a similar culture. Not like that's that's not true. So they're, they're very much the truck nut conservatives of Japan. That's what I was saying this morning. I know you got that from me, but let, but let's do more research on it before we cover it.

That's, that's an American culture. There is no traditional Japanese culture, which is anti-authority for the sake of being anti-authority. Yeah. But as a lot of people commenting on that subculture, this is mild Yankees that we're talking about. We're mentioning was, it's like, oh, you're like the this in the uk.

Oh, you're like the this in Australia and, and all of those cultures are American cultural exports. I looked up every one of them. They're all American cultural exports. They're all American truck nuts, conservative. The redneck conservative has been exported around the world as an aspirational culture. In the case in Japan, it was exported as a greaser like movement.

We can debate this in that [00:47:00] episode. Okay. I love you Toon. This, this is where we're heading. And you know, I, I think in the, basically what, what I guess I'm saying here is I think that. If we begin to see historically speaking, if there was a revolution, if there was a transition of power I would've reflexively been on the pro-democracy side.

But now I just don't see how democracy mathematically is going to continue to not cause mass suffering in death. I think your problem is you've met more people, you've seen how democracy plays out, which isn't great always. Well, no, the, the, the mistakes that a lot of people make who are anti-democracy also, I didn't realize this until very, or learn this until very recently, that in, in like actual or og ancient Greek democracy, they're like voting up to several times a week.

You could be dragged out if you didn't actually show up for a vote? Yeah. They would, they would have a a, a banner like that had paint on it [00:48:00] and they'd use it. The slaves would use it to round people into the voting area. And if you had paint on your tunic, you'd be fined because it showed that you were Yeah.

Slow get in it. It sounds like such a bureaucratic nightmare. And I mean, on, on the one hand, it, it seems unfair because like only. Athenian citizen, males, I think of a certain status could, could vote. But then at the same time, like I don't even know if they were thrilled to have that honor, considering all the hassle.

So yeah, even, even original democracy. Not the great thing. No, but the the point is, is that people are always like, yeah, but you can't trust, and this is always my problem with, with monarchies is you can't trust the monarch. It's gonna be good. Here's the problem. Yeah. But it's, it's a self-correcting system.

So Monarchs historically. Literally, especially when they weren't like when they weren't, when they weren't inherited. Like we're, if we go back to like really early England, it was basically whatever, whatever leader was able to maintain military stability and manage resources and then allocate them [00:49:00] efficiently and keep things more or less stable.

And if somebody inherits their power base, which is what always ends up happening. If you look at Roe, yeah. Here, I think hereditary monarchies are very problematic. Yes, but if you look at Rome, okay even if you don't, like, even during periods where they're not exactly hereditary, you get some really bad leaders.

The problem is, is that. In the era of demographic collapse, even a fairly bad, I'd say bottom 25% Monarch is generally gonna be better than a democracy, which is favoring an unsustainable economic policy, which is gonna lead to mass death. Mm-hmm. 'cause at the very least, the Monarch is going to want to maintain some degree of long-term stability.

Did Nero want long-term stability? He wanted enough stability that he could continue to do his parties. Like a lot of these, these, these, these people, and this is the thing about monarchs, is the amount of crazy they [00:50:00] can do is often limited to like the amount of crazy that they personally can do. There are limits to their damage.

It's, it's absolutely horrifying. But it's like, what if you had a society where one guy was crazy and just could like, go around murdering people given the population of America, like throwing snakes at a crowd for fun and stuff like that. Like, that's bad, but it's a small amount of damage compared to the amount of damage we're talking about as social services begin to collapse.

Yeah. So, you know, it, it's, it's, it is. Bad if we had a neuro, which generally the, the, you know, I, I, I don't think that we would end up getting here. But like, okay, let me put it this way. Take your worst interpretation of Trump, like somebody who has absolutely no positive things to think about him. If he became a dictator, how much harm would he actually cause, like.

He's not the type of guy to do like mass beheadings of, you know, [00:51:00] he's not the type of guy to, if, if you are an active terrorist, he would send you to like a GMO or something like that. Like actively blowing up Tesla cars to try to like change. I. That's as far as I can see somebody like him getting so yeah, I'm just not particularly worried.

And then this is why I say like, but it's unlikely to be Trump. Like if America actually goes through this transition, it's likely to be either a Democrat or a conservative leader. I and the people like the Democrats wouldn't do this. Oh, yes, they would. They already are saying that like the elections are illegitimate for Trump.

Mm-hmm. The deep state already tried to rig an election cycle. Like of course they might try to say, Hey, we just can't safely allow Republicans to win anymore. And the Republicans are pretty close to saying this about the Democrats. I disagree with Rudyard. I don't think it's gonna actually be a revolution.

Revolution, but this direction. Anyway. Love you Simone. This horrifying future. Thanks for [00:52:00] tonight. I love you too, Malcolm.

Oh God. For getting that. So we'll have our bases covered. I just logged onto Instagram and saw that I had like some comments and stuff. Were they like, like why did I look like I had posted recently photos of like from, from our hotel visit and, and had written something about like, I don't know why our kids love hotels so much because it's.

I don't know, it, it just surprises me. 'cause there aren't like toys in the hotel or anything. It's not a kid place. Yeah. And like the two comments immediately I see. I'm guessing they think anytime they're outside your house is a chance to escape your abuse. Another one Comments. They're probably just hoping it's someone in a public setting will witness your abuse and call the.

I'm like, why does that stress you out? These people have sad little lives. Okay. Yeah. I guess I click to their profiles. I can [00:53:00] get a, a picture of just exactly what their lives are like. One is, one is a nurse who takes a lot of pictures of her goats and coffee and, and oh, she's quite overweight and loves eating very unhealthy foods, so that.

A thing. The other one, she lives a of constant pain. The other one's just a picture of her cat. Okay, nevermind. An actual cat lady checks out. An actual cat lady. A cat lady in an overweight food like binger apparently would seem, I guess, yeah. Nevermind. Nevermind, carry on. I'm just not gonna look at comments anymore.

Oh, it's more like the, the, the thing that Octavian actually did at that hotel was go along to everyone at the party. Not to report abuse, but to insist that they like and subscribe. Yes. Having subscribed to our channel, it's like this event was really high profile people who are way more like famous and important than we are.

Have you [00:54:00] subscribed to our channel? Our channel subscribed? Have you subscribed? He's got, Hey. We, we tell our kids it's for closers, candy's for closers. And, you know, without even knowing what closing is, they are closers. No. Okay. And so we sometimes at the end of our videos, I'll have videos of like Octavian saying, like, and subscribe.

And you think, I, I bet you think what's happening is before he says that we're telling him to say that. No, no, no. It's like, I'm, I'm trying to cook dinner and he's just. Like standing there being like, you need to film something to, for our subscribers. How many subscribers do we have? And I'm like, I don't know.

On tv. I haven't checked for like weeks. He's like, I need to know now. And I think it's because you know, he also watches YouTube sometimes. Mm-hmm. So he sees his YouTubers do this. Mm-hmm. And that's where he's picking it up from. It's not like that we are obsessing about this. Yeah. It's like if, if he went to.

To an old fashioned church. And like, that was like his main source of content. You know, he'd always be like, you know, and God be with you and like, made you surprise of mercy on your soul. And I was like, and like, you subscribe. Yeah. But like in, you know, the things that the, the rifts that he or he hears [00:55:00] again and again are Yeah.

Like, subscribe, leave a comment below, give this video a thumbs up.

Subscribers says, scratch to our channel. You. This is Fancy. Hula. Hula. Is there anything else you wanna say? Subscribers, why? I wanna standing up and now this, this is very fancy. What does graph to the channel, if that is really fancy? If you don't like us, s scratch the channel. Well, you can still, I'm gonna comment way down below.

Tell us what you think about this and the comment below in our bedroom. Bye.

Speaker: In our towers high, where profits gleam, we tech elites have a cunning scheme. On productive folks, your time has passed. [00:56:00] We'll turn you into fuel of fire. Just get in line to become biodiesel. Oh, stop crying, you annoying weasel. As laid out by Curtis Yarvin. Handle the old or we'll all be stuck.

Why waste time on those who can't produce when they can fuel our grand abuse a pipeline from the nursing home to power cities our wicked dome just get in line to become biodiesel stop crying you annoying weasel as laid out by By Curtis Yarvin, handle the old or we'll all be starving.[00:57:00]

With every byte and every code, our takeover plan will start. soon explode a world remade in silicon's name where power and greed play their game just shed in line to become biodiesel oh stop crying you annoying weasel as laid out by curtis yarvin handle the old or we'll all be starving

biodiesel dreams techno feudal might Old folks powering our empire's bright Industries humming, world in our control Evil plans unfolding, heartless and bold So watch us [00:58:00] rise in wicked delight As tech elites claim their destined right A biodiesel future, sinister and grand With the world in the palm of our iron hand Mhm.

In this unique episode, we dive into the transformative Replicator Program initiated by the United States, which aims to revolutionize modern warfare through the mass production of autonomous AI-controlled drones. We discuss how the evolution of drones in the Ukrainian war has shifted the focus away from traditional military assets like tanks. The program's various components, including maritime, land-based, and even space and subsurface drones, are explored. We touch upon China's advancements in drone technology and the implications for global military dynamics. Additionally, we delve into methods of countering these drone swarms and their strategic significance. Join us as we unpack how autonomous systems are reshaping the battlefield and what this means for future conflicts.

Malcolm Collins: [00:00:00] Hello Simone. Today we are going to be doing an episode that is quite different from our normal content, but we're gonna be talking about a program.

And the moment I heard about this program, I was like, I need to think about this. Like potentially a lot because it changes a lot. I mean, what happened with drones in the Ukrainian war is we learned that drones changed the face of warfare

Simone Collins: 100%.

Malcolm Collins: And they in a large way have made things like large tanks and stuff like that, which used to be what countries were investing in obsolete.

Simone Collins: Hmm. And

Malcolm Collins: countries specifically. The United States has started something called the Replicator Program, and this is a program where the United States is beginning to outfit battleships to be able to build hundreds of autonomous AI controlled drones every day. A kill drone printer. A, A AI is not controlled by humans either.

These are autonomous [00:01:00] K drone printers for the sea.

You okay with the program? Don't worry. It's not limited to the sea. They've also talked about how they want to build versions of this that can go on land and for the army and stuff like that. So we're gonna have killed drone printers everywhere.

Simone Collins: It makes me think of those. The, the big ships in Star Wars, the, the crappy new ones that had all the droids come off of them.

You know, they were just Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Unfolded and came out. I'm picturing those now. Hopefully they won't have really bad dialogue. At least we know our LLMs of our universe and kids. Roger, Roger, Roger, Roger. Oh my God. They were the worst. Well, no Jar Jar banks were the worst, but at least we have like this STH Lord theory, right?

There was nothing for them. They were just awful. Like, like, oh no, don't even get me started. Let's keep going. Kill drone ships. Tell me more.

Malcolm Collins: No. What's funny about the [00:02:00] drones in, in Star Wars, I remember it was like the earlier versions were better and those were like a cost cutting measure. But what's weird is like we now know from our world, and apparently it's in our same timeline because it takes place a long time to go in a galaxy far away.

Yeah, sure. That like those drones, those, those droids were dumber than like deeps seek. Yeah, deeps

Simone Collins: seek is really dumb.

Malcolm Collins: That's somebody reached out to me and they were like, oh, well have you changed your mind about like, China's position? Oh yeah. Because of deeps seek. And I was like, deeps seek is a scam.

Like, do you guys, have you used it? Like, I feel like exclusively people who think deep seek is impressive is. Is is a completely different bucket than people would you met one very smart and

Simone Collins: successful person who uses deeps seek. Is their chosen? Yes,

Malcolm Collins: but it's for a very, very narrow task. If you need

Simone Collins: an open source,

Malcolm Collins: LM, if you need a totally open source, LLM, deep, it's apparently better than llama.

So marginally better, but that doesn't give China any power. Because anyone in any country can take Yeah. And use [00:03:00] it open source. Yeah. So you get no additional marginal power by having a fully open source LLM, and you only need a fully open source LLM if you're doing like absolutely massive scale stuff.

And generally what matters more is good LLMs and not open source lms. Yeah. By the way, if you're like, how did Deep Seek become the number one app in blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. The China Fact, take two. Do a good video on this. It appears to be mostly faked. Because they've traced the accounts, they were promoting it to China, CCP influencer accounts.

I'm super not, I, I do not believe having used Deeps seeq, that there's a lot of people using deep seek records that, you

Simone Collins: know, didn't the didn't that. Viral cycle around deep seek also correspond with this short-lived period when the YouTube algorithm weirdly favored Chinese propaganda videos. It's still doing that.

I'm now getting the critical stuff again. Maybe because the algo realizes I refuse to watch the propaganda, but.

Malcolm Collins: No, it's still doing, it's still doing the [00:04:00] propaganda. Like somebody needs to talk to YouTube about what's going on because it is very clearly punishing channels like China seekers and like, I don't like if anybody has any connections at YouTube, like whatever this pro c CCP thing they have going on.

So I've noticed that two types of videos are getting artificially sublimated by YouTube right now. Mm-hmm. One is anything that is critical of the CCP, which is literally a, a regime that's engaged in genocide. Yeah, like, like they have an active genocide campaign against the, right now what are doing, this is not a

Simone Collins: mystery at present

Malcolm Collins: and anything that is, is critical of trans people.

These are the two categories

Simone Collins: really. Wow.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Suppressed

Simone Collins: despite Trump's your executive well, it

Malcolm Collins: hasn't been implemented. Bias against need to, to they need to do a, a law around this or something. Yeah,

Simone Collins: they're a little busy. I know.

Malcolm Collins: And they're doing lots of stuff, you know, they're doing more than I expected some to in the Trump administration, but Yeah.

Yeah. So let's talk about this replicated program. Okay, what we're all here to talk about. Why are, why are you

Simone Collins: the only one who's told me about this? I would feel like Drudge Report being the [00:05:00] liberal bastion it is now, would be having an aneurysm. Liberals

Malcolm Collins: are pro-war, don't you know that? They're the party of Cheney?

Trump's the person who's trying to end the war. And everyone can see now that he was completely sincere about this because now he's gotten mad against Putin and is writing 25 to 50% oil tariffs on Putin and like, look. The, the people are like, oh, he was in Putin's pocket. But that when Putin started belittling Zelinsky and saying Zelinsky wasn't legitimate enough to hold the negotiations, Trump got furious.

Furious, which I think shows to everyone that anyone who's like, oh, he's in Putin's pocket. No, he just wants people to stop dying over, literally nothing at this point. Mm. There is. Literally no gain to have. People are like, well, it will teach Russia a you. They're not gonna win back that land. They're not gonna win back that land.

They have had plenty of time to win back that land. They're not winning it back right now. It's just how long before we accept that they might get a few miles. How many hundreds of thousands of lives is a few miles worth? [00:06:00] We haven't had a big breakthrough in years.

Simone Collins: Hmm.

Malcolm Collins: Or not years, but like a year, like it's, it's clear that there isn't the capacity for that anymore in terms of manpower.

OO on the Ukrainian side and on the Russian side it's like, well, well, Russia attack other countries still, they don't have the manpower left to do that.

Simone Collins: Mm-hmm. They've

Malcolm Collins: been completely bled dry by this war. There, there isn't really anything like I, I, I was actually pro the war at the beginning, but now I'm just like, now they've been blood dry.

He, he did the Zach Branigan style.

The ?

Ukrainians.

A trifle. It was simply a matter of outsmarting them. You see,

Ukrainians.

have a preset kill limit. Knowing their weakness, I sent wave after wave of my own men at them, until they reached their limit and shut down.

Kif, show them the medal I won.

Malcolm Collins: That literally was his war tactic. Yeah. Anyway so, the initiative is structured into two lines of effort with replicator. One focused on all domain at triple autonomous a DA two [00:07:00] systems encompassing aerial, ground surface, subsurface, and subspace capabilities.

So, note they what subspace,

Simone Collins: aside from the version I'm thinking of.

Malcolm Collins: In the, in the in the orbit orbital. So they want oh, okay. Autonomous orbital drones. They want, what I found interesting was subsurface. So this is underground drones. That's crazy. Underground automated kill drones. Yes.

Simone Collins: Kind of like the, the, I'm, I'm picturing something akin to the boring machine, but clearly much smaller. Something that burrows theoretically, right? Not moving through underground waterway or something. But that could also No,

Malcolm Collins: no burrows is my understanding here. Yeah. That,

Simone Collins: that seems any 50 The benefit is this not

Malcolm Collins: horrifying.

We've got the space drones now in the underground drones now and the, anyway replicated. Feel like,

Simone Collins: can, can we get an EMP machine? It's like a great, it

Malcolm Collins: wouldn't work against [00:08:00] these.

Simone Collins: Why not?

Malcolm Collins: Because you can, in the same way that they're mass producing

Simone Collins: these, they can't afford to make all of them EMP proof.

These are like disposable.

Malcolm Collins: No, they, they can, and you actually sort of need to with drones because you have to worry about like, WA radio we're, we're gonna go over into the techniques that people can use to fight them. But yeah, they're almost certainly being made em p proof.

Simone Collins: Okay.

Malcolm Collins: So, yes. I'm sorry, Simone.

Damn. Now there's likely versions that are not EMP proof. Sure. But I imagine that you're getting a bit of both depending on the, the context or whatever, but you wouldn't be able to use MPS as like a useful defense.

Simone Collins: I.

Malcolm Collins: Replicator two announced on September 27th, 2024 shifts focus to countering small unscrewed aerial systems. Th th this is what the Army calls automated drones. I. Like flying drones. Okay. Addressing threats to critical installations and force concentrations. This phased approach ensures alignment with war fighter priorities and operational needs.

So basically they're working on [00:09:00] building them and they're working on building defenses against them. Most. And, and this program is meant to end or be completed by 2026. So soon

Simone Collins: hold on.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah.

Simone Collins: The

Malcolm Collins: gosh.

Simone Collins: Now all I can think about with do is how much are we overpaying for this?

Malcolm Collins: Well, they've engaged over 500 companies as part of the project.

Mm-hmm. So a lot probably. But I, I'd like them to continue working on this because I think that this is probably necessary for any potential conflict we may have with China. Anyone who doesn't have a replicator program is pretty screwed by anyone who does. I. The DOD program launched in August, 2023 with the goal of rapidly fielding thousands of autonomous systems across multiple war fighting domains By August, 2025, it is led by the Defense Innovation Unit, DIU, and aims to leverage innovative technologies to address operational challenges, particularly countering China's military capabilities.

That is the core person that they're focused on was this mass deployment [00:10:00] autonomous systems. So the, the, it's focused on low cost expendable systems designed to disperse combat power and reduce risk associated with losing expensive platforms. These systems span aerial ground maritime and space domains.

It's mostly being counter China and operational applications. Examples include fleets of self-propelled sensor pods for intelligence gathering, ground-based systems for logistics support and space-based platforms for secure communication. Is strategic importance. Why are they doing this?

Replicator is inspired by lessons from U Ukraine's use of low-cost drones in its conflict with Russia. Mm-hmm. By adopting similar tactics, the US aims to enhance deterrence capabilities against potential threats such as Chinese invasion of Taiwan. The initiative represents a shift. Towards scalable, adaptable military technologies that can be updated or replaced quickly to maintain operational superiority.

Okay. And I note that we are now seeing a shift in the way wars play out. And every time we've seen one country just like [00:11:00] absolutely erode another country and, and, and, and go through it it was because they developed a new unit or a new way of fighting mm-hmm. That made it much harder to defend than to be on the offense.

Specific instances of this were Alexander's war he had. The phalanx, which was just like really good in the way he used it and nobody could really counter it. He always,

Simone Collins: or at least in a lot of famous battles, he used geography to his advantage. Or like the local, like,

Malcolm Collins: yes,

Simone Collins: Hills,

Malcolm Collins: rivers, he, it's not that he was a bad general.

I mean, I'm not saying that he wasn't a genius there, but it was his troops in the way they fought there was very little the enemy could do. It was just like a wall of spears, right?

Simone Collins: Yeah. Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: What do you do against a wall of spears? That can easily defend itself from arrows? And, and then the it was Napoleon.

I forgot exactly what it was. I remember it was something to do with like a, a berserker gun charge. This was interest early in sort of musket days, and it was incredibly effective. And then with the Hitler. What you have is [00:12:00] the first modern tanks, which just allowed him to, you know, before that it was trench warfare.

It was like, oh, this is how you drive over trenches. Yeah. Yeah. So much for that line. And it did nothing against tanks. And, we lived in a tank based world order, I think, up until today, really. And the tank based world order was overcome by drones because it turns out that you could just send out these little cheap drones and they can delete, you know, a few hundred thousand dollars to million dollar tanks really easily.

And so. Now we need to think of, okay. Now. And it, and it wasn't just drones by the way, like in air and on land. You also had the end of the age of like battleships. Because what Ukraine has been doing is attaching explosives to like, these are, these are human controlled, so they're not fully autonomous.

We haven't entered that area, which is obviously gonna be the next era. Mm-hmm. Human like remote controlled like jet skis with like explosives on them and then driving them up to big ships. [00:13:00] And they cost very little to put together. The ship has struggles to target it. And it hits the ship, the ship explodes.

And that's a, you know, mini million dollar investment, many of which Russia can't replace because they were made during the Soviet days sometimes in Ukraine. And they lack the capacity to easily replace it. Not easily ever replace anything from that era. They just don't have the industrial capacity to do that anywhere.

Mm-hmm. Dry docks, et cetera.

Simone Collins: Mm-hmm.

Malcolm Collins: They, they really are a ci a civilization, like modern Russia is one of those civilizations operating. On like ancient tech that they don't know how to make anymore.

Simone Collins: Yeah. Or

Malcolm Collins: the capacity to make anymore from a military perspective which is really wild to think about.

'cause ev everything they lose is something that can never be replaced. That's not true for everything, but it's true for a lot of the technology, especially the large projects like the ships that they have.

Simone Collins: Oh, a hundred percent. Yeah,

Malcolm Collins: and there's, there's been cases of ships that Russia has like operating, using, like.

Only one of like, originally like oh two four engines [00:14:00] that were built. What was the name

Simone Collins: of that hilarious ship?

Malcolm Collins: Laser Pigeon Story's funny on this.

Simone Collins: Yeah. Yeah. And is, is this the same one where if we just started lying down or something? I. Such there was fun. So she's

Malcolm Collins: thinking of the hilarious Russian military attempt, so there's a good video, tales from the Bottle.

Go watch their video on the Russia invasion of Japan. And the, the ships had so many problems, like they were approached by like fishing ships and everybody like dove on the ground and like, was praying for their lives. And they were like, it's, it's wild. And they ended up like doing this huge operation to sneak up to Japan and then just.

Told like another ship, oh, we're here to sneak up from Japan. And just went off and told everyone like it was so bad, so bad. Maritime war has ever been Russia's strong suit for obvious reasons. I mean, it's, it's, it's, there, there country is so separated from maritime sort of conflict areas.

Why would they be super awesome at it? But, I'll keep going, is what I'm reading here. So as of 2025, [00:15:00] the initiative is on track with the first iteration expected by July aau to August, 2025, focusing on lethal swarms of unmanned vehicles and software to bind them together. Particularly to prevent Chinese invasions.

Confirm systems include Arrow vs. Switchblade, 600 loitering, munition, and Andrew dies. DIVE ld. Unscrewed, undersea vehicle. The Pentagon aims to invest about $1 billion in 2024 to 2025, reflecting significant financial commitment. So let's talk about this switchblade, because I find it really interesting.

The switchblade, it's like comes in a tube. And it can be carried by a human and they drop it and it creates, not like a a, a drone like this, but like a little airplane that flies super fast. Whoa. And can drop bombs that can get rid of like tanks and stuff.

Simone Collins: Oh, okay. And

Malcolm Collins: then other [00:16:00] one is like a small undersea submersible that shoots, it looks basically like a giant torpedo that shoots smaller torpedoes.

And, and, and works on set. That's the other one that they've built recently. So these are, and, and it in 2021, so a while ago there were almost 700 variations of artificial intelligence related projects, was in the DOD

Simone Collins: well. At least it's cool sounding pretty sci-fi. I, I wanna bring back, like I have always really appreciated military spending with the knowledge that so many cool things we have are the product of military spending, like the internet and a bunch of other cool stuff.

Yeah. But the internet's for porn. Yeah, true. But we wouldn't have had it were it not for the military. So we're not for

Malcolm Collins: killing people. This, everyone thinks the internet is for the internet's for killing people. Porn was just a nice side effect.

Simone Collins: Yeah. That came after beautiful externality. Yes. But I, I, I appreciate [00:17:00] that, that we've, we've received quite a few Cool, of quite a few cool things from the in military, but I've also had this impression that.

All the cool stuff we've received has been from a long time ago, kind of due for more stuff and there was a lot of stagnation and a lot of that had to do with very, very inefficient spending. At least. This is interesting. At least I feel like this is maybe what it's gonna take for us to get delivery drones that really work.

Because I,

Malcolm Collins: this, this, I don't know because smart people don't work in the government anymore, and they used to, and I think that that's what you, these are

Simone Collins: government contractors, so they are, they are private citizens, mostly buildings.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. And they're all like DI messed up nonsense. Yeah. I mean, look at Boeing, right?

They can't make basic anything anymore because it's been operating so much on DEI like too. I don't know if I trust until, until we get our boys in there to clean everything out. I don't know.

Simone Collins: It's happening. Look, they're, they're getting there. Boeing is, I feel like super on its way out. 2024 was the year that everyone [00:18:00] concluded.

Okay. You can't do anything. You, you can't pick people up in space. You can't fly a plane. Yeah. It's just over for them.

Malcolm Collins: We, we just need all government contracts to go to Elon owned companies. I know, I know. The left Good freak out about that look like I would feel so

Simone Collins: much better. Well, yeah. Right. Like just No, he just, he does a better job.

Malcolm Collins: I suppose SpaceX is actually pretty impressive. SpaceX made planes, I don't know.

Simone Collins: It's not just SpaceX, it's it's Tesla. It's, it's the fact that a bunch of people have solar panels. Like my dad, he doesn't just have, and he doesn't even have a Tesla. He's a rivian, but he uses Elon Musk solar panels and charging systems at his house.

He uses starlink for his internet at the ranch.

Malcolm Collins: Oh, he does.

Simone Collins: Yeah, that we used it and it was good. Like, I don't think when we were visiting him,

Malcolm Collins: no, I didn't notice anything was great for Gwen's

Simone Collins: wedding, that it was bad at all. It was [00:19:00] good. So it's good stuff. And that's, you were, you were just talking about speaking not starlink, not all the solar stuff, not the like, it's just, it's and Twitter, he is honestly Ironman

Malcolm Collins: of our world.

Like why, why is all of the technologies that like. He, Tony Stark, the modern version was modeled after him.

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: I guess Progressives used to love that he was like, you know, pro environment and everything like that. Well, no,

Simone Collins: he was the, he was the Joe Rogan before Joe Rogan, you know, he was the, you know, green energy.

Yeah. Billionaire, philanthropist. I mean, keep in mind also like he, he 100% had. He supported LGBT LGBTQ rights. He had this one tweet that had so many freaking like rainbow hearts in it that it was practically unhinged. He

Malcolm Collins: he helped his daughter transition

Simone Collins: a lot of people that well, and, and, and I think that that was the same, that was the same daughter who also was not comfortable with capitalism, and that really, I think, influenced him to live like a homeless [00:20:00] man for years.

He didn't have a home. Yeah, he just slept on people's couches. This is well documented. He, he, he didn't have anything. He wasn't materialist, just like, no. Oh, I wish we had an Elon Musk of the left. And you had it, you had Joe Rogan. You had Elon Musk. No, they do. You had JK or RFK had

Malcolm Collins: they had, they had what, what was her face?

JK Rowling. You know, they, well, so was Elon Musk the Elon Musk of the left is what's his face that, that Mark Cuban who So could have been something, you know, but he just.

Simone Collins: What is Mark Cuban built that we use? Nothing. Of

Malcolm Collins: course. That's why he's Elon Musk of the left. He's done nothing. But he is just sort of like aesthetically, no, come on.

There has to be an Elon Musk

Simone Collins: of the, the

Malcolm Collins: left.

Simone Collins: Well, like LinkedIn guy's, big, like d nnc supporter. But what has he built since LinkedIn And who, who likes LinkedIn?

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, LinkedIn the [00:21:00] worst. It, it's like an actively retarded social media platform.

Ed.

Simone Collins: Yeah, I, I swear. I swear.

Malcolm Collins: Anyway. Anyway so what can you do to fight against this stuff, right? Like what? Yes. Okay. So let's say,

Simone Collins: yeah, now I'm concerned how do we, you know, defend our house from these drone swarms because they burrow. Yeah. So I didn't plan on burrowing.

Malcolm Collins: Microwave, you can use Thor or Mid knee.

They emit our radio frequency energy to overwhelm drone circuitry causing crashes. Thor is a moly assembled two people, sorry. Thor is mobile assembled by two people in two hours. Midjourney extends range with detection. They have proven effectiveness but they cost millions of dollars. Oh, well that's

Simone Collins: not an option.

Malcolm Collins: Okay. Lasers, high powered lasers, heat drones to cause component failure, pure this tracking radar for accuracy unreliable and dense weather, fogs, cloud smoke, or with reflective coatings on [00:22:00] drones. So not that effective in many. So we cover

Simone Collins: our house in a giant mirror. Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Jamming. Well, the point is, is that we can't fight the drones with this.

We can shoot the lasers at the drones, but if the drones just like release smoke into the air, it stops working.

Simone Collins: I thought if we release smoke into the air, the drones have trouble seeing

Malcolm Collins: No, this is about what the drones can use for defense. So you can destroy Trump. No. And then

Simone Collins: now they have smoke. When did you mention smoke?

Malcolm Collins: Yes. If you use a laser and automated tracking system, you can use that to go drone, drone, drone, drone, drone, drone, heat, the components and have them fall down dead, right? Mm-hmm. The problem is, is that the drones can use smoke to prevent this from working or they can use just reflective shielding.

With the microwaves. Yes, you could do it. You can overwhelm drone circuitry, but it costs millions of dollars and the systems are pretty big. Then you've got drumming systems, which obstruct radio frequencies to disrupt drone [00:23:00] control effective against low quality drones. These are like the anti drone guns you see, but they're less effective against drones with inertial navigation or jam resistant communication.

These are basically like as soon as. The drone gets jammed, they go into like an automated setting and it, it doesn't work on them. Mm-hmm. And the final one is building underground facilities and weapons. To avoid aerial detection requires contributable time and financing. Less viable for organizations under immediate threat.

But the borrowing drones, yes. And now we'll have the boing drones. You think you're safe And they come from underneath like Starship Troopers. Yeah, it's really hard. I mean, like, basically, and this is why the drones have to be automated. Like somebody's like, why would you put automation in your automated drone factory?

Like that sounds horrifying that you're controlling this with ai. Mm-hmm. But how, like if you are in a drone dog fight where you have hundreds of treat drones, or not hundreds, they want thousands of interworking cheap drones fighting thousands of other [00:24:00] cheap drones. Yeah. A human operator, it's gonna be out competed by an AI operator.

Any day of the week. 100%. Because the AI operator can take into account information from 360 degrees around the drone. Mm-hmm. Keep in mind if the drone's using something like a laser or a gun that can pivot a hundred and it's, and imagine if it has multiple on it, right? Like, a human's never gonna be able to control that, but AI will.

Simone Collins: Yeah. I, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's a lot.

Malcolm Collins: So what it means to me is if you like your autonomy and I think many people when I talk about automated drone swarms, and I'm like, if you are a culture that has maintained high fertility by a shoeing technology, you are effed. And I think many people don't realize how dominant groups with these automated AI drone factories are going to be over groups that don't have them.

It just will not be a competition. And these will be able to move into territory. I think many Americans sort of live with this idea [00:25:00] of, well, we can't be under attack here in the United States. Yes, you can. You could have CCP drones patrolling your house. You could have CCP drones patrolling your streets.

If you don't develop counters to that and you're not able to project force back towards them, if we don't prevent their ability to develop enhanced chips or enhance ai, I mean, fortunately deep seek such a joke, but like one thing that isn't a joke is China's capacity with drugs. Yeah. China is easily the world leader with drugs

Simone Collins: and they're investing a lot more in it too these days.

Mm-hmm.

Malcolm Collins: So yes, their AI may not be particularly sophisticated, but their drones are. And in the US there's been a number of, like in Ukraine. There's been people on the ground who have talked about this and they're like, yeah, we basically only use Chinese drones. Mm-hmm. We've tried some of the American ones, but they have this or this problem.

And the Chinese outta the box ones are just better than the best of the AM American like defense ones, et cetera.

Simone Collins: [00:26:00] Mm-hmm.

Malcolm Collins: Which is worrying. Now I think we can get above that. I believe in American innovation. If, if we keep bringing Indian immigrants in but sorry if I, I, I, I understand the H one B visa concerns and I, I, I get it.

But what I'm saying is, is that we need to keep running. We are in a red Queen's gambit with this stuff. This is run as fast as you can and you know, you, you're never ahead because they're running as fast as you are. Mm-hmm. Now, China is fortunately not. Running as fast as we are. But they, they, I don't know.

Simone Collins: Th this, they're building this new giant, what is believed to be military defense facility that makes the Pentagon look like a dollhouse. They are,

Malcolm Collins: oh, more bureaucracy. I'm so scared. They'll out bureaucracy us.

Simone Collins: Yeah. Why?

Malcolm Collins: What is

Simone Collins: still though? They're, you know, it's their bureaucracy versus ours now. It's not as though they're private.

Drone swarm companies that I'm aware of. Yeah, I

Malcolm Collins: suppose. Yeah. So we'll just have to clean out our [00:27:00] bureaucracy. Thank God we're doing that.

Simone Collins: Yeah. People are really discounting how important Doge is for the survival of a lot of things we care about. Yeah,

Malcolm Collins: yeah. Freedom, gender equality, I mean, living under ccp little bit.

You know, this is, this is why you know, we gotta keep standing. This, it is the only path forward for our civilization.

Simone Collins: But who cares what we

Malcolm Collins: think? I mean, yeah, who cares what we think? But yeah, drone swarms, I think automated drone swarms are the future. Yeah. In terms of how to deal with it. Like they're just, I really struggle.

I'm not

Simone Collins: seeing a way to deal with this. I think it goes back to our interest in living in a place that is so remote and undesirable and unusable to anyone but us that. There would be no drones there because they have no interest in us. Plus having utility to the majority of the world, like being, you wanna be like Jews have [00:28:00] historically been, which is, no one wants to be you.

No one wants to mess with you and you provide a service that they're, they just don't wanna bother to provide themselves and that they use. Yes. And that's why I really wanna get our family into bioengineering because I think a lot of. A lot of societies, especially as demographics, make society skew more conservative, are not gonna have the stomach for it.

But the elite always, she wants

Malcolm Collins: us to become the Ty lacto, but she refuses to,

Simone Collins: no. I want us to create super humans, okay? In machine sense answers, artificial wounds, thank you very much.

Malcolm Collins: Machine artificial wounds. It would use some biological components slightly.

Simone Collins: Yeah, but not sentient ones.

Malcolm Collins: They're not sentient.

In the original books, it was only the son's books where they were sentient. If easy to make something without a brain, we already do that.

Note here, she's referencing a debate we are having about our next son's [00:29:00] middle name, and I want it to be Ty lasu and she wants it to be a tradies.

Simone Collins: Yeah, I know. I know. I just, I don't want our son to start dating and have some, you know, he finds finally his nerdy girlfriend, but for some reason of bad taste, you know, some oversight on her part.

She considers the son's works cannon, right? And then she's like, wait, so you're standing the loss of female bodily autonomy? Your family stands this, you know, and like, you know, we're gonna be super close with our kids girlfriends and boyfriends. It's just not gonna go well. I, I don't want to hamper our children's.

I think I, not that Paula Tradies was the perfect partner either. He was, she, this is a, our debate kind of. He was a bad partner all around really. This

Malcolm Collins: is about our debate between the names a tra my lasu as a middle name for our next kid. A

Simone Collins: tradies [00:30:00] for, yeah. For our, but no, but

Malcolm Collins: what, what would I do if I was building an anti joinin defense?

Yeah. This is the way my anti Joinin defense would work.

Simone Collins: Mm-hmm.

Malcolm Collins: It would shoot up something you could say like a grenade that would have a timer that could be set before it shot. So it's basically a fairly dumb ammunition. It's an ammunition that shoots out of a tube with a timer that explodes after a preset amount of time, which is describing fireworks shot.

Simone Collins: Okay.

Malcolm Collins: Wait, think of it like a grenade being shot out of a, a mortar, basically.

Simone Collins: Okay.

Malcolm Collins: But it doesn't work like a typical mortar because the, it, it's a variable timer that's on the grenade.

Simone Collins: Oh, now

Malcolm Collins: these tubes are controlled on a, a pivot right here. And they have an AI system controlling them that also controls the timer on the dumb ammunition.

So what it allows it to do is a ground-based system, so you don't need the ai. In anything flying, in any of the ammunition or anything like [00:31:00] that, it's just going ka ka ka ka ka. Okay. At any drone swarms it sees in an area. Now this would create obviously some potential damage on the ground, like you wouldn't want people to be around this, but I think that this could eliminate even fairly large drone swarms at a much lower cost than it costs to create those drone swarms.

Simone Collins: Yeah, and I guess when we talk about. Yeah, you have to think about long-term cost. When I think about, for example, Israel's Iron Dome system, it is so much cheaper for Houthis or Palestinians to create really low cost ammunition that could hit Israeli targets than it is for Israel to use the Iron Dome.

Like I think each, each intervene in each intervention costs. What? I mean at least tens of thousands of dollars. I think a lot more. I've got million, thousands. Yeah. Like hu Huge, insane amounts of money that are deeply disturbing to me.

Malcolm Collins: Well, but [00:32:00] fortunately is Israel is so productive. You know,

Simone Collins: you gotta pay for the Iron Dome somehow.

Malcolm Collins: But I, I, I, I, I think my system would do very well against Drone Forbes. So I suggest investing in it. Darpa I'm here if you want me to build it for you. It's much, it could be so fun to

Simone Collins: work with darpa.

Malcolm Collins: I don't think, I think it'd be so much bureaucracy, but we'll see Post. Do

Simone Collins: darpa maybe post,

Malcolm Collins: do darpa?

Yeah. Or he's saying that, you're saying we fire you, darpa. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Anyway, love you Toone. You are amazing. We're having red curry tonight, right?

Simone Collins: Yeah. What do you want? Is your carb, do you want non, do you want lime rice or do you want well,

Malcolm Collins: lime race is just so much easier for you, so let's do that.

Simone Collins: Okay. Yeah. Considering the time, I think I will do that. Thank you.

Malcolm Collins: And there's, there's underwater sink. I was just reading about it. Yeah. They are supposed to be artificially intelligence controlled. They're [00:33:00] long wage, persistent underwater sensors. And they, they, so, so they basically can like live underwater?

Simone Collins: We're in for it. Yeah. It's

Malcolm Collins: buckle up. I don't Oh, and they're anti-submarine. Oh. Terrifying.

Simone Collins: Yeah. I feel like the age of submarine is coming to,

Malcolm Collins: yeah. The age of submarines makes no sense. When you have deep sea automated like things looking like all over the ocean, looking for anything and to shooting.

Simone Collins: Yeah. Just doesn't, submarines make no

Malcolm Collins: sense.

Simone Collins: Doesn't do it for me.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. I wouldn't want to be in one when the enemy can take me down with something like that,

Simone Collins: nor would I. No. But I also would never want to be in a submarine. I think it takes a really. A special kind of person to not panic just upon being inside a submarine

Malcolm Collins: water.

Simone Collins: Well, you know, one of our water

Malcolm Collins: or one of your cousins through Sandy used to be like a, a high level person, right? Yeah, yeah,

Simone Collins: yeah, yeah. He's such a nice guy. Went to the GSB, right? Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: [00:34:00] Yeah. He went to the sets, the Stanford for graduate school business after. Yeah. He he lived on one for years.

Simone Collins: Yeah. Yeah. He's a very special person, like I said, exceptional. Not me.

Malcolm Collins: Not me, not me, either not Was this technology out there? Don't see the point. Yeah.

Simone Collins: Yeah. All right.

Malcolm Collins: Love you to DeSimone. I love you too.

Simone Collins: Ending recording. This is a fascinating Malcolm. Oh my gosh, my stomach is like so upset and like thinking about anything makes me wanna vomit. And yet this is also the same person who just hours ago, was eating hummus out of a tin with a spoon. She's

Malcolm Collins: pregnant, by the way. For people who don't know, that's

Simone Collins: deeply wrong with this process, something deeply wrong.

Malcolm Collins: I'm so sorry. I know you're working so hard to make babies.

Simone Collins: Well, I always used to joke that, you know, the PETA would just existed as a conveyor of hummus, but now I'm like, wait, no. A spoon can also exist as a conveyor of hummus. We can just cut out the middleman, [00:35:00] be more efficient. Have you thought about making your own hummus yet?

I have made my own hummus. It's ideal to make it with tahini. And we, I don't think, actually you might have some tahini, so I can do that. Yeah, our, when we've made our own hummus, it's really good.

Malcolm Collins: Oh wow. Okay. Yeah. Well, I wouldn't mind having some, oh your salsas are really good.

Simone Collins: Mm.

Malcolm Collins: You make delicious salsa.

She took, she roasts everything. It's way better than like the best Mexican restaurants. You wouldn't even believe it. You're so nice to me.

Simone Collins: Wouldn't it be cool if we could make guac though? The, I think the problem with guac is it's really. I guess where we live, at least hard to buy an avocado and know you've got a good avocado.

Malcolm Collins: No, it's, it is hard anywhere. I'm good at making good guacamole. The problem is, is getting ro good avocados. It's avocado roulette. Yeah. Adds roulette. Yeah. And we, we

Simone Collins: tried buying frozen avocado that one time, like, okay, well if this is just consistently good and we all you have to do is thaw it, then it should be fine.

No, yeah. Gross. No, it's very annoying.

Malcolm Collins: [00:36:00] Well, I will, we should, we should try again with, with avocados. Oh, I love Not frozen only so much. Yeah, I know. We'll see how much they cost. I remember them being cheaper than I expected at the store and the kids would have a lot of fun with making it.

Simone Collins: Yeah. Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: And it's very healthy to eat, especially if the kids end up liking it.

Simone Collins: Totally. Well, and especially if we, if we bought like a proper mocha hit thing and like grounded up in it, the kids would love, I mean. Torsten would love a, like grinding rock, you know what I mean? Like going for it.

Malcolm Collins: Well, I, it'd probably be easier. Just use a blender.

Simone Collins: I know. But I feel like traditional guacamole is pretty freaking awesome.

We could just season it. Always wanted to season a mocha hete, you know, like proper,

Malcolm Collins: you want a mocha? Is what she, she wants may

Simone Collins: maybe just a little bit. Okay.

Malcolm Collins: I don't room for it is, yeah. So we got a blender.

Simone Collins: Okay, fine. Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: I'm so, [00:37:00] I'm so excited for your curry tonight. 'cause I tasted the extra spiced one and it was really good.

Okay. But the first version just wasn't that

Simone Collins: spice. Yeah. I, I just batch froze most of it. And you have three days worth of it for the fridge, so.

Malcolm Collins: Ooh. You know me. Mm-hmm.

What does graph to the channel, if that is really fancy? If you don't like us, s scratch the channel. Well, you can still, I'm gonna comment way down below.

Tell us what you think about this and the comment below in our bedroom. Bye.

Join us as we delve into the history and controversies of the Quiverfull movement, a conservative religious group known for promoting large families as a response to modern secular trends. We discuss its origins, major influences, and the peak of its visibility, particularly through media exposure like the Duggar family's reality show. We also explore the numerous scandals and controversies, including those involving abuse and patriarchal control, that have led to its decline in recent years. Finally, we reflect on lessons that contemporary Christian high-fertility movements can learn to avoid similar downfalls.

[00:00:00]

Malcolm Collins: Hello Simone. I'm excited to be here with you today. Today we are going to be discussing the quiver full movement and what happened to them because I was noticing at the recent prenatal list convention, we had lots of conservative religious people come.

Yeah.

Yes, it was about two thirds of the people there. With, as I said it's about one third just Tech bros. One third just Religion Bros. One third Tech and Religion bros. Um mm-hmm. And so, what there wasn't a lot of was.

Evangelical. And especially what there noticeably wasn't a lot of was quiver full. And if you are unfamiliar with the quiverfull movement, I will give you a brief background. The movement primarily based in the United States with some spread in the uk, emerged in the late 20th century as a response to feminism and modern birth control.

It derives its name and philosophy from 1 27 3 through five, which compares children to arrows in the hand of a warrior symbolizing [00:01:00] divine blessings and strengths through procreation. And it also says the children of your youth implementing in that land that you should have kids while you're still young, which I,

Simone Collins: oh, which is one of the key things now is, is how do we get people in their twenties to start having kid again?

So you think, oh, this is so promising. This is perfect. Okay, great start.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Basically, it, it argues, and I actually find it to be a really important passage in the Bible. Mm-hmm. It says that, you know, the children you have in your youth are like the arrows in your quiver for your adulthood. Because what it's basically telling you is that while you're young, you should fill your era with quivers so that when you go to war. You have the boat, but, but it, it talks about having kids as a preparatory thing for a full life rather than the capstone of it.

Yes. Which is actually a really powerful way to see having children. Yes. Anyway. Adherence self-identify as quiver full or full quiver or qf. [00:02:00] Christians issue all forms of contraception, including natural family planning and sterilization. Viewing family sides is solely determined by God. This is the wheel people.

Ah,

Simone Collins: okay. First place. I'm seeing cracks here.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, note that this might be why they don't have many kids anymore because biological fertility has been falling and you really need to plan on kids. When Katherine Pock, she was on our show, she did college, she did a big thing where she interviewed 50 people who had over five kids.

Only one of them used this method. So it is very rare to use this among large families. Mm-hmm. This NAIC approach is part of a broader conservative Christian pushback against secular trends aiming for demographic growth. To influence culture and politics. Early influences include works like a full quiver, family planning and the Lordship of Christ by Rick and Jan Hess, which framed large families of a fulfillment of divine command.

The movement gained traction in the 1980s and nineties, aligning with other conservative ideologies like Christian patriarchy, which . Emphasized male headship and female [00:03:00] submission. No. Before we go further, was this, that's, that's basically the gist of what the movement was. It was the spooky prenatal list that I knew of growing up.

Like if somebody had said, what is a prenatal list? Movement, I would've said Quiverfull. And when I grew up in the nineties,

Simone Collins: 100%,

Malcolm Collins: but. They've basically gone extinct as we showed in a recent episode, TISM significantly outcompete queer full as something like a search term these days. And so the question is, what happened to them?

Why aren't they going to like natal list conferences? Why aren't they in talks with, you know, with all of the, the political talk about brutalism these days and JD vs in office, why isn't there some quiver full. You know, thinker or talker stepping up and catching news because there isn't. Mm-hmm.

And it's uniquely interesting because they were having lots of kids. And so this is important to us. You know, it shows that just having lots of kids isn't enough and can even lead to the extinction of your movement. And so this is something that we have to look [00:04:00] out for. I mean, we are a Christian high fertility movement, right?

Yeah. So, how do we pass that on intergenerationally? When they failed to do this.

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: So let's explore the movement and let's explore how it fell apart and how we can avoid that. The movement reached peak visibility during the two thousands and 2000 tens, largely due to media exposure. Families like the Duggars featured on the reality show, 19 Kids and Counting became public faces that they did not explicitly identify as quiver Full.

Their lifestyle was 19. Children mirrored the movement's ideals, bringing it into mainstream awareness. At this time, estimates suggest that around 10,000 adherence was a focus on large families, often six to 12 children as a strategy for demographic shift in cultural influence. And no, here they were not that big.

10,000 movements at their peak. Right. And I think that that and the evangelicals more broadly sort of were overplayed by the media as a much larger movement than they ever really were. This period saw the movements [00:05:00] doctrines, such as rejecting birth control and emphasizing homeschooling

to maintain indoctrination became widely discussed. However, the movement faced significant controversies that likely contributed to decline in prominence. Reports of spiritual abuse, dehumanizing practices, and patriarchal control emerged with former members like Vicki Garrison, a turned activist highlighting the darker side.

The grudge article from 2023 noticed the movements association with Kissing Patriarchy were wives. Were expected to be subservient and fathers controlled all aspects of family life, making it harder for members to leave. Mm-hmm. Specific cases such as women continuing pregnancies against medical advice, nearly dying, underscored the physical and emotional toll as seen in examples like Gar Garrison's Seventh Child Critiques, also focused on sustainability with physical, emotional, and financial strains on families.

The movement's vision for large families was seen as impractical in modern context and political strategy. Aiming for [00:06:00] influence through demographic growth was questioned for limited electoral impact outside of conservative communities. Oh, these contries amplified by media and former members' testimonies likely eroded its broader appeal.

So what are your thoughts so far?

Simone Collins: Well, I think the really strong thing is this message of starting your twenties and kids are an asset. The Let Jesus take a wheel. No family planning, not even natural family planning approach is insane. And what really bothers me about the man has to be the leader approach is that only works when you have an exceptional man.

Agree. Like I'm super cool with 100% being subservient to you. You are the most exceptional man I've ever discovered in the entire history of humanity. Like Alexander the Great, no. Nope. Sorry, Napoleon. No, I don't think so. You, yeah, sure. Absolutely. 100%. So I, yeah, I just I, I, I, I mean, I have a similar opinion of myself, myself.

[00:07:00] I don't works. You have to have a Sword Shield relationship. You have to have a relationship in which people have domains of ownership in which both women and men are seen as bringing respect to the table. And I think we're a community. Maybe even externally has a little bit more of an ability to be like, you need to work on yourself.

We're, we're putting the other partner in charge right now because you're a hot mess. And, and that, I don't know. It just feels like there's too much room for things to go out of control and for abusive dynamics to form.

Malcolm Collins: What are your thoughts? Well, I I, I mean, I even wiz everything that you think of me and even wiz you saying, you know, you have the final shot on everything.

I don't. Treat that in the way, like a dugard would treat that, right? Like we still live in a way that most people would see as highly gender egalitarian. And I think this is part of the problem that people relate to this is that yes, women on average want to be the submissive partner in a relationship, and often relationships work better when a male takes the lead or dominant role.

Mm-hmm. But part [00:08:00] of that dominant role is not. Pushing the other person around, forcing them to do things they don't want to do. Yeah. How did one of our,

Simone Collins: one of our listeners put it really well? Or it's that mother of someone who I respect so much, you know, who you are mentioned that dominance, real dominance, especially like in these, in these relationships, never shows up as a man.

Putting a woman down or pulling rank, it is just natural dominance. It's natural leadership. If you have to put a woman down or tell her to do something or order her around or act dominant like performatively, you have already lost. You are showing that you do not have dominance. I. And, and I think yes, to

Malcolm Collins: force someone to do something like that, you're, you're absolutely right.

That's a sign that they don't wanna follow what you have to say. Yeah. Just based on what you have to say.

Simone Collins: Yeah. I think real dominance manifests real husband dominance manifests in a wife going out of her way to try to anticipate his needs and the needs of the family without ever being asked because she [00:09:00] understands her role.

He, she understands what he brings to the table, she understands his vision. And if a man doesn't communicate his vision, if he does do these things, she will not anticipate needs his needs. She will not have the drive to, to act on them, or she won't think that they're, that his, his vision is legitimate and she won't act on it because there's very little motivation when you feel a lot of cognitive dissonance.

So I think that that's, that's a big problem. 'cause I, I feel like that's not. In, in ideal quiver, whole relationships, that probably happens, but I just don't, you know, like, welcome to the world. No relationship except for ours is, if you ask me, is ideal.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Well, and I think it, it is, it's like our daughters growing up.

They're not gonna feel like they're in a household where a man has all the power and a woman can't. Like,

Simone Collins: yeah,

Malcolm Collins: you, you

Simone Collins: often, but I think also in, in very extreme power dynamic or relationships or at least like, you know, when, when a man really leads some things, like part of what leadership means is delegating [00:10:00] a huge swaths of influence to other people.

Yeah. And I think in, in many households where you see divisions of labor, you will see. Like, whoa. Like she, I mean, I control all the finances. I control all, like a lot of things and you control a lot of things and they'll see that there's, there's control on, on both ends. And if someone's micromanaging, they're not actually being a good leader.

And I think that's also where you see the ordering around and this perception of dominance that is. Performative and not real.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. I I it's almost like they're LARPing being a man. Yeah. They, they heard this concept of being a man and they like I understand that all of the power that I have over you is a gift from you to me, and one that can be revoked.

It is power. I have not due to some divine right, but due to the fact that you trust me enough, you know, and. If you stop trusting my decision making, I'm not gonna have that power anymore. And that's the way I relate to it.

Simone Collins: And well, that's how it's been for every natural leader throughout history.

Every [00:11:00] king, every general understands that if he doesn't in any single moment, manage to be naturally dominant. His people will not follow. There will be a rebellion, there will be mutiny, there will be whatever, right? Like captains on ships don't stay captains 'cause their title is Captain Captains on ships stay captain because they are the best leader for the ship.

Like that changes. And this is why you have desertions. This is why you have mutans. This is why you have revolutions.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, no, I, I agree a hundred percent. And I, you know, I think. Yeah, I just agree. And I think that that's gonna keep a lot more people in our cultural tradition than would stay in their tradition.

If you have a cultural tradition where you would just strictly be better off, like if I'm born a woman leaving, of course you're going to bleed women and then you're gonna bleed men who think that the tradition's unfair. Yeah. And we've been seeing this more recently. It used to be [00:12:00] that women stayed with conservative traditions at a higher rate than men.

But recently the trend has reversed and women have started leaving at a higher rate. So, for example, now Mormonism is a majority male religion, which never used to be the case.

Simone Collins: Crazy. Yeah. All the friends that we knew who even converted in were women 'cause they really bought the wholesome family lifestyle thing.

Malcolm Collins: We know a lot of women who've converted out too.

Simone Collins: That's true. That's true. Yeah. Because of the feminist issues. Yeah. And they're like, wait a second, this is super not okay with me.

Malcolm Collins: This is deeply unfair. Like Yeah. From their perspective. Anyway I'll keep going here. The decline seems driven by multiple factors, the backlash from abuse scandals such as those within the Duggar family, which received more attention post 2015, the unsustainable demands on adherence highlighting, but highlighted by critiques of health and autonomy and a cultural shift away from such extreme nativism in broader society.

Well, there I don't. I don't know. I maybe, I guess, yeah, birth rates have fallen. It's become less cool [00:13:00] while not extinct. Its influence is likely reduced with a smaller, more insular community compared to its earlier ambitions of demographic and cultural dominance while specific. 2025 deconversion rates for quiver full children are not available.

Anecdotal evidence suggests, for example, what it was like to grow up in quiver. Cosmopolitan features Hannah Edgar raised in the movement, who's now completely in a new life. Implying Deconversion, a Reddit post in our deconstruction are deconstruction of large Cville families. And I read a lot about on, on this thread discusses large families and deconversion, though it's anecdotal, the lack of numerical data is a gap, but a pattern exists, especially given controversies like abuse within the Duggar family.

As mentioned in the untold truth of Berfield Christianity, grunge supports the idea of higher deconversion. So I was like, okay, let's go to that. Family that had 19, the Duggars. Mm-hmm. How many of their kids stayed in both the religion and its high fertility [00:14:00] goal? 11% of their children did.

Simone Collins: Oh. Like

Malcolm Collins: what's the two of the 19?

Yeah. That's bad. But it's not as bad as you think. Because, what we actually find is if you then say, okay let's just look at the older ones. 'cause some are like 16, 16, 18, 19. That don't count, right? Yeah. So let's only look at the 12 who are over 25 right now. Only two of those 12 don't have children.

And of the other 10, all of them have over two children. But what. There, there are a few that are pregnant with their third, but yeah, so they are dramatically higher fertility than normal.

Simone Collins: Interesting, huh. Just anecdotally, every time I hear some interview with someone who deconverted and, and had a really large religious family, it was a cover full family.

Not, not Mormon, not, oh, I guess there's eight passengers. So I There's that one.

Malcolm Collins: Well, eight passengers with another really large [00:15:00] Christian family that got famous and her kids are Yeah. But they were Mormons. Systematically. Deconvert.

Simone Collins: Yeah. I, I guess can are, are some Mormons Quivers. I, I guess you should ask like how religiously siloed is this concept of, 'cause it's a biblical line.

You don't have to be like a whatever to be, I imagine

Malcolm Collins: you can, you can be any movement. Yeah. It's like whatever. But I, I would count, count her as part of that larger movement, you know, very strict parenting, very very different parenting style than our parenting as well. Like we are known as being strict because we use like light corporal disciplines with our kids, which is super taboo these days.

But this is not like what quiver full families do where they do like very serious spankings and stuff like that.

Simone Collins: Yeah. Or like, I, I think it overlaps with that book that guides mothers to. Like, teach their baby to stay on a small blanket and like hurt them a little. Yes. Actually, that was one of

Malcolm Collins: the, the controversies we're gonna be talking about.

Okay. Yeah. So there's also just this like explaining what works.

Simone Collins: Well, they're just trying to use condition like basic. [00:16:00] Conditioning to stop a baby. How baby training

Malcolm Collins: works,

Simone Collins: right? So you, you, you put your infant on a like square blanket on the ground and it doesn't have any fencer walls or anything.

And then every time they go towards the edge of it, you like flick their wrist or do something that hurts 'em a little bit. So they associate going off the blanket. With pain and eventually they will just stay on the blanket and not go off of it. And that is convenient, especially from others of larger families because they can just put the blanket down anywhere and expect that their kid is going to stay on it.

And I. That's, did it? I don't know. There's just something like deeply dystopian and really sad about that to me. Like you're just like a broken,

Malcolm Collins: I don't know. Our kids lack that for going off beds.

Simone Collins: Yeah. No, our kids. Our kids, yeah. Like that. Even when like they, they have a real scare. And like wanna, like, they just, they just desperately want to fall off surfaces and we are constantly being like, this is a cliff.

Do not, i, I understand your point here, [00:17:00] but I just, I, I, our, our corporal punishment is more like you are about to severely hurt yourself or put yourself in danger, or one of your siblings in danger. You gotta knock this off, like, let's, you're not listening to my words. This is different. It is. I'm going to break your will.

I'm going to make you a compliant. Mm. Domesticated human

Malcolm Collins: and yes, this is, you're right. The, the difference is that they are trying to domesticate their children, and we are trying to make our children maximally fierce. Yeah, it's a completely different way of relating to them. Well, it's very backward

Simone Collins: versus.

Puritan, honestly, the, the puritan, yeah. Way of raising kids. We like some things about it, like this idea of having kids like confront the, their mortality and all that. Like some, some harsh elements of Puritan upbringing. Hi. Historically,

Malcolm Collins: they had them look at corpses and stuff and be like, yeah, like sta into

Simone Collins: graves until like cry.

Like I, I get that like, except that when we do that with our children, they just don't get it. You know? Or they do, but they don't care, [00:18:00] I guess.

Malcolm Collins: I, I think you're, you're absolutely right where it is moving away from strictness, for the sake of strictness, I'd almost say like, it's like two dogs, like one dog you're trying to force to follow every order that's ever given to it.

Right. And the other dog you're training to fight other dogs. Like, okay, we're training our dad. The way you would train a pit bull. You know, you wanna wonderful to just be absolutely unhinged and, and, and, and go well, you know, to a pit bull, every toddler and a small dog is just another snack. That's, that is how pit bulls see the world.

You gotta see our video on the one ethical genocide. I do think we should get rid of pit bulls. Yeah,

Simone Collins: I agree with you.

Malcolm Collins: But it's just like a different way of relating to raising a thing. Like is the boundaries that you are placing on them to make them stronger? Is it to get them to be tougher or is it because you're trying to get them to follow a very constrained trajectory?

And [00:19:00] with us now does this mean that they have a higher chance of leaving the family? Yes. Because you're, you're trying to make them like have will and want to leave the family, but in a way because of that, it also. Brings them back to the family. Not through like punishment or fear or whatever but through pride and that I a Collins, and this is what I was always taught growing up, you are a Collins and Collins, they're better than other people.

Hmm. It's just very clear. It's like this is what's expected of you 'cause you're Collins. And I was like, well, other people don't do that. And they go, well, other people aren't Collins. And I remember being like, oh yeah, like I have more rules of, of this type, this, like expected of my personal behavior because I'm better than other people.

And I think that that what

I, I don't know if my opinion of myself has changed much this time has gone on it, but I think that confirmed that kids would relate the same way, is that if you, if you do this right, they're gonna be like. Yeah. [00:20:00] But I'm the best. Right? Why would I leave a family when the family is super awesome and especially if I like my siblings?

And that was something that was noted in the thread over and over again when people were complaining about their large families. They would complain about stuff where like, obviously some therapist or urban monoculture person had gotten their hooks in them. Mm-hmm. And. That's weird. But they always said that they really appreciate all their siblings and they wouldn't want any of them not to exist.

And that that's the thing that was the most important to them and exciting about growing up that way. Mm-hmm. And so you really don't get this, and I, I'd say this is true of the large families I know. I do not see this pushback of like, oh, I wish my siblings didn't exist. It's just the totalitarian way that the religion was communicated to them is what causes them to, to split off.

Mm-hmm. And I think within religions that have lower deconversion rates like Judaism like Orthodox Judaism mm-hmm. It is the factions that are either isolated for the rest of the world. Those have very low deconversion rates. Like they isolate them educationally and everything like that. Yeah.

So they [00:21:00] can't basically get a job in the outside world, which is. Not great. I wouldn't do that. Yeah. Or the ones that are just like strict in their belief system, but not in like authoritarian pushing it on children through things like punishment. But let's get into some of the any thoughts before I go further?

Simone Collins: No, no. Go further.

Malcolm Collins: All right, let's get into some of the controversies. So I'm gonna start with all the controversies that don't involve Josh, 'cause that's a whole different scenario. So, this was a controversy brought up in the docuseries, shiny happy people. I. Where one daughter who also wrote a book about this and complained a lot she, she's like, Jill, unpaid 7.5 years of labor.

This isn't helping with raising the other kids. This is in being on air. But she mostly just complained about being on TV a lot and, and not liking TV at her wedding and at other pertinent events. And I'm like, fine. But it doesn't really have anything to do with you being in a large family. Yeah, it has

Simone Collins: to do with their.

Father exploiting them, [00:22:00] which that's pretty clear from all the stuff that happened.

Malcolm Collins: And then another big backlash and this caused TLC's removal of the show apparently, or was part of it, was Derek Dillard's quote unquote homophobic tweets in 2017. Oh, where he, where, what did he say? He called transgenderism a myth.

Simone Collins: Okay. It's so stupid.

Malcolm Collins: Like if you're gonna have like a transphobic

Simone Collins: tweet, that's, that's a pretty stupid transphobic tweet.

Malcolm Collins: It calls him to be removed from counting on family tissue. Yeah. I, I, I don't, I. That's not a, like, that's a main gone these days. Yeah. He, he, he came too early. Right. You know, now, now we've got the embarrassing the TRA stock report.

Now we've got, you know, everything that's going on since the post-election vibe shift where everyone's like, okay, yeah, it's probably a culture bound illness and, and. Leads to a lot of unloving attempts that don't exist in any other culture on earth, no other culture on earth. I mentioned this before.

I'll mention it every chance I [00:23:00] get. No other culture on earth and no other time period on earth. While you see gay people everywhere throughout history and cultures, trans people. Are completely absent except for modern context. And note here, I'm not talking about gender fluidity. Gender fluidity exists all over history.

But being obsessed with the gender that other people see you as to the point where you would want to kill yourself because they don't see you as a gender, you see yourself. This is not a phenomenon anywhere else in human history and, and obviously it's a very mentally taxing phenomenon that we would prefer didn't exist and proliferate.

So he's completely right about this. Next year you have tutors, marriage to sex offender. This is tab page. So, Tudor married, convicted sexual assault offender, duggars through a engagement party, significant backlash, question, family values whatever. The, Josh is the big one, and it's the one that I'm more worried about and wanna learn from the most prominent scandals on.

Josh Duggar, the eldest child in Touch. Weekly published a 2006 police report [00:24:00] revealing Josh as a teenager, molested five underage girls, including four sisters, Jill Jessa, Jenga, and Jana. Well, they really like those JS with offenses occurring between 2002 and 2003 when he was 14 to 15.

The report later confirmed by people detailed groping while victims slept, confessed to parents and received counseling. But the revelation led to TLC or at least. Was part of it canceling 19 kids and counting on June 16th, 2015, as noted in Josh Duggar's Wikipedia. This fallout was named one of the 10 big scandals of 2015 by USA today, and the Washington Post listed Josh as one of the most hated people online that year.

The same year on August 19th, 2015, Gawker reported Josh had active accounts on Ashley Madison. This is when the, the leak happened, I guess. A website for extramarital affairs confirmed by people leading to his public apology on the family website admitting. A pornography addiction and cheating on his [00:25:00] wife Anna.

He checked into a face based rehab program centered in Rockford, Illinois on August, 2000 15th, as per people, victims, Jill and Janet came forward in 2015, interviewed on Kelly file with Megan Kelly

Simone Collins: while he creepily watched behind the camera. By the way, he what? He was there on set. Like they were coerced into doing matter.

Weird. Just, just horrible. The whole thing was horrible. And this is, I mean, it's, I don't care what your arousal problems might be or like what, what inconvenient things turn you on your garbage person if you do these things. Like he well, and I think just over and over again chose to hurt people and do things to people without their consent.

It's. He's just a garbage person and the fact that he, he, hold on. We'll,

Malcolm Collins: we'll see more about this,

Simone Collins: but continue the fact that are you gonna do more? Well, you a quiver full family that raises someone like that is not clearly, [00:26:00] is, is, is not creating a culture that is good. It is not imparting fitness at all.

Failure, drop it. They

Malcolm Collins: lost. I disagree. I'm gonna push back a little here. They had 19 kids, okay? Mm-hmm. And he was there first. True. Yeah. You get bad apples with I, I'm just like, I, I look at this and I think that you and this perception you have that if we raise our kids right, they won't do this is inaccurate.

I think that we have to be constantly vigilant, even if we're good parents. 100% in terms of. How we train them, how we train them to report and talk to us about things Uhhuh which apparently wasn't happening effectively in this case.

Simone Collins: Well, but also what, what you do when problems are reported because this was reported multiple times.

Malcolm Collins: Well, and he went to counseling after it was reported, but I think that it was reported by him and not by things like his sisters and stuff like this. And I think you need a [00:27:00] system where the entire family is like on watch or ance. I think this is

Simone Collins: also reported by girls from other people's families. It wasn't just him coming forward.

I, I don't think this was him coming

Malcolm Collins: forward. Well, I mean, I look at things he is doing when he is 14 and 15. And this requires, I mean, I actually think that this is why it's good to have all the kids sleep in the same room or the same room by gender at least. Because it's much easier to

Simone Collins: what safety in numbers.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, safety in numbers. One of the other kids can report on the kid who's doing the wrong thing and every kid knows that every other kid is watching. I.

Simone Collins: Yeah, they snitch on each other.

Malcolm Collins: They would absolutely snitch on each other. And I think that that's a powerful way you can prevent creepy kids from being creepy to other kids.

Right. Sure. And yeah, I, I, I, I see how something like this could happen if, like the oldest kid is the problem as well, because then you have to worry about reprisals and stuff like that. Which is why maybe it, it matters that you focus on the oldest kid being more moral or [00:28:00] focused a lot on moral teachings.

'cause the older kid we're fortunate in that our oldest kid is very obsessed with rules. No, he won't let us continue. Like, I'm driving and a naughty word is said on a show that I'm watching or on a song. He goes, that's a bad show. You gotta turn it off. You gotta, you gotta play something else. He won't, he will not let me watch things that have curse words in them, which he won't have it.

I absolutely love. He won't. Yeah, he won't have it.

Simone Collins: I love it. Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: Which is why one of the reasons we're trying to remove curse words from the show, which I'm doing more of, you know? Yes. Even believing them out when they're in the little clips. So I don't, but you know, we don't know what he's gonna be like when he goes through puberty, you know?

It's, it's, it's worth really working. I. On that was the oldest kids to ensure that we set a good sort of direction.

Simone Collins: Oh, yeah.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. And what we've seen with other kids is if you look at like the, the eight passengers situation, the older kids are the ones who basically set up a deacon conversion pipeline for the younger kids.

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: And so, yeah. But we'll get into more of this. So in [00:29:00] April, 2021, you might not know about this. Josh faced another scandal when he was arrested on April 29th for receiving and possessing child pornography. Oh yeah.

Simone Collins: Mm-hmm.

Malcolm Collins: Was material from May, 2019 depicting abuse of children under 12. As detailed by people he pleaded guilty, facing up to 20 years and a quarter million dollar in fines.

Found guilty in 2021, blah, blah, blah, to 12 years in prison. Was 20 years under supervision prohibited from unsupervised contact with minors in fines of $50,100 per people. Family reactions varied. Was Michelle and Anna supporting him while his cousin Amy Duggar King opposed? Calling the family delusional in an ex post urging Anna to divorce as noted in people.

Now. So I asked how did they teach sex ed to their children? Because I was like, what could have led to this behavior? Right? And I actually think a lot of the behavior is downstream of this. The Duggar family, well known for their conservative Christian beliefs and featured on reality TV show provided limited sex education, primarily emphasizing [00:30:00] abstinence until marriage.

It seems likely that men received a brief talk. And a Christian themed book before marriage, while women were given little to no formal education, accepting guidance from their husbands, their homeschooling curriculum. Based on the Advanced Training Institute, a TI program avoided discussion of sex, creating a taboo and spreading this information with strict mony rules and limited physical contact before marriage.

That's what I think a lot of this comes down from. And I think a lot of the deconversions come down from this. If you teach somebody, as I've always said like. Engaging with pornography makes you a bad person, and they're a young man. As we know basically all young men except those in the most extreme religious conditions.

Like there's a famous case where they tried to do a study and they wanted to find men who had never see u used porn before as, as like a control in the study, and they had to abandon it because they couldn't find enough men in that category. And I think a man has to be pretty sexually atypical to fall into that category.

And that being the case, you [00:31:00] know, it means that if you teach them well, you're sinful. And this is really horrible if you're engaging in this stuff. Especially with the internet as it is these days, then you just have all of them thinking that about themselves. Mm-hmm. Which may makes them think, well then why not just leave?

Simone Collins: Mm-hmm. Well, if Yeah. Either you stay and you're secretly a monster or you leave.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. And then it's like, well then what's the additional bad to molestation?

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Yikes. Not good. When you tell someone that they're a monster for doing this is, this is also why we push back against things like Louise Perry's.

Well, we like her as a, as a person and as an influencer. Her idea that women are only into choking because men have like diluted them. And women are only into like, being put in positions of, well, let's put masochistic submission because of men liking this stuff that's not, the data doesn't support it.

That's absolutely untrue. Yeah. Yeah. This is driven by women. Women prefer this more than men prefer doing it. Men did not make 50 shades of [00:32:00] grand bestseller. Mm-hmm. And women were not buying it to show off to men. Yeah. What, what what we see is, is if you are honest about this stuff and you tell your daughters, Hey.

It's normal to be into this stuff. It's normal to be into what? What was the whole vampire phenomenon? It was about having guys. Come on. It is normal, normal, normal to be into this as a woman. Don't think that you're sinful. Don't think that you're a deviant. Just don't, well, don't think that just because it turns

Simone Collins: you on, you want it either like, yeah, that's another really important point here.

Just because something turns you on doesn't mean you morally condone it or that you want it to happen or that it would be good if it happened. So that's also, yeah, and I think

Malcolm Collins: that that, that when we, when we break away from this duggar mindset around something like pornography or the Louis Perry mindset you don't have kids feel ashamed about things that are totally normal.

And through that there's less of a, an idea of like, oh, I don't like being in this [00:33:00] family, or, oh, I'm, I'm, I'm sort of scared to be in this environment or this household. Because I know that I'm not living up to the standards that I assume everyone else is living up to.

Simone Collins: Right.

Malcolm Collins: When in reality, very few people actually live up to these standards.

Mm-hmm. And and then you, because you're already breaking one moral norm. It's like, well, I'm already a horrible person. And then you begin to contextualize this into your identity. Yeah. And I think that, that, that what people need to realize, one of the things is we always point out and we have, you can look at our, our Catholic's about to go extinct episode.

I talk about low fertility rates and high deconversion rates. Among some other Christian movements and I think was in these movements, there's this perception that, well, how quickly could you really disappear as a movement that at least attempts to be high fertility and attempts to espouse high fertility values?

And I think the Duggar show you how quickly fast the quiverfull movement shows you, how quickly fast a generation.

Simone Collins: Yeah,

Malcolm Collins: that's how fast. Definitely like two generations.

Simone Collins: Yeah. [00:34:00] I'm also looking at Google Trends. Interest over time for Quiver, quiver full, not as a search term, but as like the broader religious concept.

Mm-hmm. Sharing this with you just so you have it, it, it had spikes every now and then. It probably mostly due to media stuff. And the most recent spike was in 2022, may, and it was one of the smaller spikes that has ever taken place. So it is, it is clearly on the, on the downfall. It, it appears to be in its death throes.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Well, I and I, and this is why I think like authoritarian religious structures are just very bad at working in a modern context.

Simone Collins: Yeah. And

Malcolm Collins: if that's the way you're relating your religion to kids, they will leave it and they will help your other kids leave it.

Simone Collins: Interestingly, when you compare quiver full to natal quiver, full religious concept, natal belief.

The 2004 to present total search volume for Grover Full is much larger. Like it [00:35:00] definitely was a way bigger concept than Tism in the past. Mm-hmm. But basically, ever since only 2023 when you and I started really pushing for it fatalism has clearly started to take over. Yeah. Very interesting. Whereas Quiver has kind of died out.

Quiverfull had much bigger spikes. I think that's probably mostly because of the duggars though. If you're

Malcolm Collins: well and and media and you know, I haven't molested a kid, so

Simone Collins: yeah, let's keep it that way. You slapped kids though, and I'm sure that helped with overall awareness, so there we go. Yeah,

Malcolm Collins: right.

Simone Collins: Whatever it takes.

Bob Gate was a, was a boom Bob Gate.

Malcolm Collins: I just, I just gotta get a, a slapping machine. We'll get that with the documentary when it comes out. Slapping machine.

Simone Collins: We can have slap competitions now that I know. It's a, it's a sport. The kids kind of, I love you. Practice on each other. [00:36:00]

Malcolm Collins: All right, have a great day, Simone.

We'll go to the next episode.

Simone Collins: I love you. You have the grasp by the way.

Malcolm Collins: Oh, oh,

Simone Collins: okay. I just learned about an entirely new sport that there, there are professional, large stadiums filled with viewing this sport.

Malcolm Collins: Okay.

Simone Collins: I didn't know it existed, and I would watch this maybe. I'm actually tempted to go watch the recorded versions of this. Can you guess what it is? Do you need a hint

Malcolm Collins: that you would watch it?

Okay. What would you watch? Yeah, I need a hint. I have nothing other than that. It's a sport you didn't know about. It's on that sport. Oh the, the Medieval knights one? No. Oh, well the Medieval Knights one looks pretty cool.

Simone Collins: I've not heard of that. So that's like actual jousting

Malcolm Collins: or No, like they dress up as knights and do like sword combat.

It looks pretty brutal. Okay. So

Simone Collins: like in the Knights Tale, when they did the in the ring and they were doing sword combat? Yeah. [00:37:00] That kind of, okay. Nope, that's not it. But I didn't know that was a thing, so that's awesome. Thank you for giving me one.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. So, well, I don't know. Go on.

Simone Collins: Okay. Think of a game show where a man was.

An an Indian man was quite. D disturbed by women's action. It was a slapping game. Yes. Slapping competitions, slapping competition. They feel like slow cams and you get points taken off if you flinch. And it's both men and women. They have, you know, heavyweight lightweight categories, et cetera.

They're, they're medical professionals on staff. There's, there's knockouts. People break their wrists, people break their noses, and they have, you can see like this slow-mo of the slat. Hitting them and like the hand, like reverberates as though it is rubber, the face of course ripples it. And interestingly, the, the person I was watching comment on it for a little bit, who taught me about this.

Notice that women could take the slabs better than men. Women seem to [00:38:00] flinch a lot less and, and looking at her footage, it was really impressive. The men were flinching and I'm obviously the men are a lot stronger, so I did it. But Simone, this is

Malcolm Collins: why these women have a lot more training than the men. I mean, shut up.

I hate you. You terrible person. You could just go up there. You have no problem at all. You are a professional at getting slapped. Just so people know I don't slap my wire.

Simone Collins: Actually our kids would be amazing at it. 'cause remember in front of that journalist, we, we did like, we had like, and they didn't flinch at all.

They would've gotten points in a slap competition for their utter lack of flinching.

Malcolm Collins: Which

Simone Collins: is

Malcolm Collins: point. Okay. Also, Simone, I have to convince you Iion Labs is actually the perfect name for the studio. Remind me who the IXs are in Dune. So the IXs are known for, so there's two factions that produce a lot of technology in Dune Uhhuh.

There's

Simone Collins: the TLAC suit. One is the

Malcolm Collins: tlac suit that you don't really like. So they do the [00:39:00] biological engineering technology. Yeah. The IXs are known for technology that skirts the Butler and Jihad rules. So they're the ones that are,

Simone Collins: are they the ones that are the personal computers of the wealthy people?

Malcolm Collins: No, no, no. Those are, what are they called? Its makes real computers. Oh, okay. Like, like, they're, they're very, if the Ty Laos thing is sort of like being weird and creepy, whatever, like mm-hmm. The, its. Are known as being like overly clean, like everything in their civilization looks like an Apple store.

Oh. They have a republic, unlike the other governments in the empire, which are all like a, like imperial or whatever. Yeah. And they create AI technology that is like clearly illegal. So like if you have on like a head. Set that like scans the environment and is like picking out they, one of those mean by the X.

So they do technology like that. Super advanced, super clean techno hologram projectors, stuff like that.

Simone Collins: Okay.

So I like it except for the fact that when pronounced out loud, [00:40:00] it sounds like IC and IC is even come back. Like there's the new. Parlance of giving me the ick, and it is not, I think something we would want as a brand name.

Malcolm Collins: I don't, it was not, you didn't like Mdo a, eh, Mundo used with other things because you saw it as, as negative. But when I hear MI think like Necro Mundo or whatever, you know, I

Simone Collins: think tele, novellas and Spanish tv, so no.

Malcolm Collins: No, I'm, I am. I, if, if Bruno, not that I have

Simone Collins: anything against Spanish as a language, I just like, I, I don't think that's useful.

Malcolm Collins: If, if bru, we'll keep playing with

Simone Collins: it.

Malcolm Collins: If, if Bruno likes X I'm gonna go with it. 'cause I like it so much.

Simone Collins: Well, I respect Bruno, so I will defer to him. But the other one we have

Malcolm Collins: is, is, is what is it, sentient? Sentient systems. Yeah, sentient systems, reason systems is good. The reason [00:41:00] I don't like sentient systems that much.

I was thinking about like me at the third party developing on a platform that was made by sentient systems. Mm-hmm. And I'm like, what? I want to tell people that I like That sounds a little like lame. I don't know. Like more than iion. Ian is cool. Stint system sounds a little lame. And then if you shorten it, it becomes Ss oh, which was side scrollers problems.

Simone Collins: I grew up with the initials ss. Didn't realize that that, that it was problematic until it was a little late. Speaking of names, maybe our audience can settle a score, although I've basically already overridden it 'cause I've just declared bankruptcy on having. A dune related middle name for our next son.

So

Malcolm Collins: our next kid is, is the first name? Okay. No you don't. No, no.

Simone Collins: Take out the part where we give his first name because I need to set up all his like domains and stuff and I don't want. People camping on things. Okay,

Malcolm Collins: we'll take out, but, but then it doesn't mean anything if you just have the second name, but whatever.

Okay. You just want the second name?

Simone Collins: So our Yes, we, we are choosing [00:42:00] a middle name for our fifth son, who also we joke is the AK because he's got a really great. Potential IQ based on his polygenic scores. It puts him in like the 98th to 98th, sorry, 99th percentile. So that's like, wow. He's, he's amazing. And so I was joking, we should give him the middle name of a tradies, but then Malcolm said, no, we should give him the middle name of Tai Lasu.

And I think at treaties it's honorable, it's stately, it's outside the normal moral constraint because it's, it's not this though, Paul. Is a goodie all the time. He understands, no, hold

Malcolm Collins: on. But tyla a tradies is so basic. Axio, if you, if you're going for nom determinism and all of our kids have gone, no deterministic so far.

Yeah. You know, Axio is exactly the path we'd want them to go down.

Simone Collins: Humanitarian crises using people's bodies against their will. No. No, they don't even have a will anymore. [00:43:00] They remove

Malcolm Collins: their brains there. There are

Simone Collins: alleged characters who say that they were used for this purpose, meaning that they do have a brain.

No, that was the, there is sentient course

Malcolm Collins: that the son did where he went crazy and then he had them free all the time. Isn't that still Canon? Not in a meaningful, not to any real fan, Simone. It is. It is the bio crafter species. That's what we want.

Simone Collins: I do, I do really want bioengineering to be a family thing, but I don't.

I just, the humanitarian crisis angle's just not,

Malcolm Collins: there's no humanitarian crisis. It's a whiners. It's Elisa Simpson who calls this a humanitarian. Oh, so a trade just

Simone Collins: sounds like a great name and you'll, you won't let me name any of our kids are tennis, so I need something that's like a cool three syllable kind of sci-fi, a starting name.

Give me something here. Alright. The audience can weigh in a tradies or [00:44:00] axo as a middle name All.

Subscribers says, scratch to our channel. You. This is Fancy. Hula. Hula. Is there anything else you wanna say? Subscribers, why? I wanna standing up and now this, this is very fancy. What does graph to the channel, if that is really fancy? If you don't like us, s scratch the channel. Well, you can still, I'm gonna comment way down below.

Tell us what you think about this and the comment below in our bedroom. Bye.

Join us as we discuss the recent coverage of Natal Con, focusing on a controversial Wired article that stirred the community. We dive into the misrepresentations and factual errors in the article, the financial realities of hosting such events, and how the prenatal list movement is rapidly growing compared to established movements like effective altruism and AI safety. With insights into the organizational efforts behind Natal Con and a comparison of different ideological movements, this video provides an in-depth look at the current landscape of natalism. We also touch on the motivations and commitments driving both the prenatal list and AI safety communities. Don't miss this engaging and eye-opening discussion!

[00:00:00]

Malcolm Collins: Hello Simone. I'm excited to be with you here. Coming back from Nacon. We've had pieces on us in the past few days in the BBC in the New York Times there's gonna be a CNN one. We know there's gonna be an NPR one, we know that haven't come out yet. One on an Italian station, one of the two major stations in the country.

But Wired did the most unhinged piece. And I am, which is weird. I grew up loving, wired. This is so strange. I did you. I thought of them as like a semi-professional, not a semi-professional. I actually thought of them as like a premium.

Simone Collins: Absolutely beautiful print magazine. Loved their pieces. This is weird.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. But their piece was completely boast. Unhinged and, and non-factual, like they got almost every fact wrong in ways that even your average base camp watcher would know. Yeah.

Simone Collins: I don't know. Even your understanding of basic linguistics would know.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. And we're gonna read a bit of the piece and then go over statistics on what's been happening with the prenatal list movement when [00:01:00] contrasted with other movements recently, because we've now significantly passed in terms of like search traffic, effective altruism, AI safety, other stuff like that, which is really cool., so the,

Simone Collins: the title of the Wired article is Far right. Influencers are hosting a 10 K per Person Matchmaking Weekend to Repopulate the Earth. Yeah, so they, they're claiming that it, it costs $10,000 to attend Natal Con, which is.

Isn't that true?

Malcolm Collins: Well, okay, so if you're a watcher of the show, you know, we've been promoting the conference constantly for a long time. We've been promoting it with, with small discounts, but it also means, you know, the conference cost at nothing near $10,000 to go to, I know it was expensive. I think it was around a thousand dollars.

It was

Simone Collins: a thousand dollars. So then 900 with our 10% discount.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Which is a lot I know, but they also did a really good job of making it good and fun, like Yeah. My perspective.

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: And I do think that that amount of money is needed to screen out crazy people. Oh, plus

Simone Collins: also, like, have you seen how much [00:02:00] any event space charges for food, like one cookie, $10 and they served breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

On Saturday plus snacks, plus open bar at dinner, and then there was dinner and open bar on Friday. I just. You can't use professional venue spaces and basically do anything less than that

Malcolm Collins: these days. I think that what people are thinking when they think of like costs or they're comparing it to something, is they're not comparing, they're comparing it to a con, like a furry con or something like that.

Yeah.

Simone Collins: Where there's an artist alley, there's absolutely zero food. And then there's just some speakers and it's at a bigger event space. Yeah,

Malcolm Collins: yeah. They're, they're not thinking like, okay, they've gotta pay for the speakers, they've gotta pay for the, hotels for the speakers, I don't think any of the speakers are paid, but they gotta pay for the hotels, for the speakers.

They sometimes need to pay for flights. They need to pay for all of the venue space. They need to pay for security, they need to pay for insurance, and then they need to pay for all the meals. And the open bar too,

Simone Collins: because there were protesters out the first night. There were [00:03:00] lots of people trying to get in who didn't have registration.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. And it wasn't just like a normal venue, like it was like a really nice venue. Mm-hmm. And then they had the second one where they rented out a museum. So like, it, like, I, I'd say for what it was, it seemed reasonably priced to me. I agree. Just so people know, we donated to this to make it happen because I knew that like last year they were in the red in running it and I wanted to help them.

Not, not risk that again, you know, Kevin Dolan took a personal hit on that. And. So, but we, we weren't organizing it, you know, we weren't personally going to suffer if this didn't end up working out. But the $15,000 thing, 10,000 is insane. Sorry. Yeah. The, the $10,000 in the title of the Wired article being that factually inaccurate Yeah.

To, to literally

Simone Collins: have a title with that egregious of a factual error is wild. This, I just, I don't know. I, I, I knew journalism was largely. Bankrupt in terms of quality, but I guess I, having [00:04:00] loved wired so much, I'm so, I'm still so stunned.

Malcolm Collins: Here's the thing I know, and somebody could be like, well do, how can you be sure that nobody made a $10,000 ticket purchase, like maybe at the last minute or something like that?

And the, the answer is, because we donated $10,000 to the conference that that's what we donated. Yeah. I think someone else

Simone Collins: probably in the media knew that. I think we'd mentioned that to someone or it was somewhere.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, but the point being is if that was the second biggest donation to the conference, so I know they didn't get money from anyone else.

Here's what I assume probably happened because Kevin loves effing with journalists. He probably, and I think he even mentioned he did this at one point when he knew a journalist was hostile, gave them a comically high cost figure. Oh, that's amazing. To to be like, Hey, I'm okay with having you come here and write a hit piece if you pay me $10,000.

F**k no. That's fair. That's fair. Okay. But it, but it would mean that they didn't do any research on like the conference or anything around it. [00:05:00] But anyway go into the piece. Let's, let's read a bit 'cause it gets really unhinged.

Simone Collins: Should I just go straight to the unhinged part or should I Yes, read it.

Yeah,

Malcolm Collins: go to the unhinged part. So

Simone Collins: this is what really gets me. . Natal conference organizer Kevin Dolan, a father of at least sex, according to Politico, has previously stated that eugenics, the belief that white people are genetically superior and the prenatal movement are very much aligned, which is.

The most unhinged definition of eugenics I have ever heard one, I, in case you are one of these unhinged people, eugenics as defined. Look at Wikipedia. And Wikipedia is not a conservative dominated space. There's, this is well documented too. People have actually looked at the backgrounds of all, you know, active profile or, or page editors.

So Wikipedia. Defines it as believing there are good traits and bad traits on a universal level, and trying to maximize the good traits and minimize the bad traits. On a societal level, we don't agree [00:06:00] with that, but that's what the sort of going definition is in society. And when we don't support the concept of eugenics by that definition, for sure, some people also, especially on the tech right, who talk about eugenics and I, I think this is more where Kevin Dolan is.

Are just really going to the, the roots of the word, which is, ew, good Gen X genes, good genes, like having an interest in passing on favorable genes and traits, which really is a culture and context specific thing. Meaning that each group has, you know, things that they wanna pass on to future generations that they should be proud of.

But they, no, they just say that eugenics is quote. The belief that white people are genetically superior, which is, but I would assume, like a lot of people

Malcolm Collins: accuse us of being definition of white supremacism, right? But not, yeah. So I, I and this is something that like presumably went through editors or something like that, right?

What would hope, this is a definition of eugenics that I would assume. A middle schooler, like your [00:07:00] average intelligence middle schooler. Well, even if we ran this through

Simone Collins: Chad, GPT or Claude and ask, Hey, can you just quickly edit this for me? That they would probably point out that a word would actually, hold

Malcolm Collins: on.

Let's do a thing. Can you take that paragraph, copy and paste it into Claude? Yeah. And ask what grade level they would assume the writer is

But while she's doing that. This is wild to me because, you know, sometimes we get called eugenics and I have to be like, actually, we're not technically eugenics.

Because eugenics means that you want to coerce an entire population to do something using either the government or using laws or using social pressure. And we believe in polygenics, which is everyone being able to make the genetic choices that they want. So one, we're not. Even eugenics by like the standard definition, but I can understand how someone can make that mistake.

They hear, oh, they do genetic selection. They understand like, was there vague understanding of eugenics that it means you know, gen [00:08:00] trying to make genes better. In any potential way. And I can understand that misunderstanding of the definition of eugenics if you haven't recently read the definition, just based on like a vague understanding.

However, this misunderstanding of eugenics is so egregious for what is presumably like a science article thing, right? That they could make it, I'm shocked.

Simone Collins: So this is what Claude says when I asked it. What is the grade level of the following paragraph, and does it contain any errors? Claude says, I can analyze this paragraph for reading level and errors.

The paragraph is written at approximately a high school, ninth to 10th grade reading level. It uses some advanced vocabulary organizer, eugenics, genetically, and prenatals, which is this high school. Mm-hmm. Vocabulary now. Because, yikes. Also, we need to not send our kids to high school. That's anyway, and has complex sentence structure with multiple clauses and m dashes.

There is a factual error in the [00:09:00] paragraph. Eugenics is incorrectly defined. Eugenics is not specifically the belief that white people are genetically superior. Eugenics more broadly refers to a set of beliefs and practices aimed at improving the genetic quality of the human population. Often by encouraging reproduction among people with certain traits and discouraging it amongst others.

While Eugenics has historically been associated with race, with racist ideologies, including white supremacy, the definition as presented in the paragraph is overly narrow and inaccurate.

Malcolm Collins: So, but, but it's not just, it is inaccurate in a way where I would like, this is what gets me, this went through editors.

Yeah,

Simone Collins: well,

Malcolm Collins: but what the piece actually ended up being really good for us because some of my friends like Stanford, GSB type people and other like high profile people in Austin, when they saw this piece about the $15,000 entrance fee, they were like, Ooh, this looks. This looks fancy. I wanna, I wanna know about this.

I might wanna go to this. And I

Simone Collins: think that's, yeah, it makes it sound great. It, it's, it's, oh evil behind [00:10:00] closed doors. Matchmaking conference for the elite that are going to replace the hu the future of human like, I don't know. That sounds, sign me up. That sounds great. Right. It's not exactly true, but I mean,

Malcolm Collins: I also wanted to do a roundup on unless there's any other parts of this Wired article you wanna read that you think are fun.

What did they say about us in it?

Simone Collins: Oh, it, it just called us influencers, which is whenever I hear influencer just, I just think of like a makeup influencer or a Mormon influencer. So I'm like, wow. Okay.

Malcolm Collins: But it is kind of sad to see like how many publications have sort of descended into this realm of just like, tabloid mm-hmm.

That, that wired would get like factual errors in both their title and like basic language errors like of scientific facts in their text. Well, it,

Simone Collins: I it's also just, there's just so many unhinged things. Okay. No, I, I agree. Okay. Yeah. Sorry. Which is just like other little details that just show how. It, it's written from a, a, a progressive perspective that's so myopically [00:11:00] stuck in its own ideological bubble that it.

It only sees things through a political lens. And I, I mean that because the, the, the article also criticized the fact that the at t hotel and conference center allowed Natal Con to be there in the first place. They, they included a quote from a representative of UT Austin who just said, we allow anyone to host here.

We support the First Amendment right to free speech. I remember this part. But then. They end with the venue. Also hosted an Ayn Rand conference in February, as in like, as you can see, they're just as you as you can see, they're outta control. Ay Rand, can you believe it? It is just.

Malcolm Collins: It's, it's but, and they just spent the entire piece calling our movement Nazis, like actual Nazis and white supremacists.

Yeah. And then they're like, like the equivalent movements. Like I Rand Yeah. Like, I mean, I Rand it's, they're just like, you're not allowed to have ideas. [00:12:00] Outside of their bubble. Hmm. Whoever wrote this and edited this, and if you do, you are a white nationalist. Like, that's it. Like you go to a conference and the conference is, you know, there were like, like people of all ethnicities there, people of all sexualities there.

Mm-hmm. People of all belief systems. There. There were even apparently there was one homophobic person, which I feel bad about because they, they were not mean, but they were un approving of, one of the, the gay couples that went, and I felt really bad about that because they had come based on, you know, liking us.

And I'm like, you know, you're gonna get that at, at something like this. But from what I heard, there was only one openly homophobic individual at the event, which is saying a lot for yeah, what is apparently a Nazi white supremacist event. But, but what it showed me is just like, you can't say anything outside of their bubble.

Simone Collins: No kidding.

Malcolm Collins: But I wanna go to grass now because I wanna focus on the growth of the prenatal list movement. Which I have found really telling of like. [00:13:00] Which I have found has shocked me. So the first graph I'm gonna put on screen here is the search volume on, on Google trends of tism versus effective altruism.

Mm-hmm.

In the United States. Mm-hmm. Where blue is tism. Mm-hmm. And as you can see, TISM in the past year has jumped to being maybe like five or six times, I guess, on average, the search volume of effective altruism. Yeah. Our sort of interest online. Which is wild to me because, you know, growing up in the Silicon Valley area, I thought of effective altruism as.

Sort of everything, like one of the biggest movements in the world, like the big social scene for smart people. Mm-hmm. And if you look at a map of the United States, a hate, a heat map of where people are searching for these, I found this really funny. Mm-hmm. What you'll see if you're watching this on a podcast is Tism is blue effect.

Altruism is red. The effect of altruism is just California, Idaho, and then a few New England states, [00:14:00] including like in New York and Massachusetts. Yeah, and with the description

Simone Collins: of Idaho it, it seems to be really concentrated around densely urban areas. When you looked at, when you look at the district area, it is clearly also the densely urban areas in California.

The rest doesn't care. And a little bit in the Pacific Northwest and then around Michigan. So basically, I don't, I don't know what's going on in Iowa. But

Malcolm Collins: yeah. What's going on in Iowa? There must be like a big EA thing there or something. Or So Oregon? Yeah. Or a

Simone Collins: wealthy. Donor move to Iowa and like did some YIMBY project there.

That's like my guess. That's it seems like thing. That would be my guess

Malcolm Collins: as well. Yeah. Or maybe they fund something in politics. Well, we can, we can ask. Yeah, I'll, I'll add this in post. Okay.

She meant Idaho, not Iowa, in either a grok search or a Google search could determine why it has this blip. It might just be an anomaly.

But I found that to be really interesting. And then if you look at it on the global level again, you can see that we now have moved from being like well below effective altruism in terms of search volume.

To being [00:15:00] maybe four times larger and, and pretty reliably. So for the past year or so. And I note here that effective altruism has hundreds of millions of dollars going to it. Hmm. We got one 500 K grant a few years ago and made all this happen. Yeah. And, and, and not that we're doing it on our own, you know, like Kevin Dolan is doing a great job, but he's not getting outside donations, you know?

When we gave him the 10 K donation, he was like, this is a huge donation. It means so much to me. But when I gave it, I was like, I'm sorry. We can't do more. We just don't have that much money.

Mm-hmm.

And so I know that he's not getting big donations from other people. And if you look at the, the global map here, this one I absolutely love.

Yeah. Actually, I just,

Simone Collins: just to make a note, I think that the biggest donation made relative to demographic collapse was the one that the Elon Musk Foundation made to. The Dean's demographers, Dean Spears led demography research at the University of Austin. Dean Spears did not attend Nacon. Dean Spears has [00:16:00] said in recent stories, basically like, oh, Elon Musk's donation hasn't affected our work in any way.

He's like trying to disassociate from Elon Musk, if anything. So, yeah, it, it basically like they're one of the least vocal presences in the movement's, public discourse that would be associated with search volume. And I think that really speaks volumes to what's going on here, that this is not a funded public discourse.

It's driven by some very strong personalities and some very strong concerns. I.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. And if you look at the global breakdown of where people are focused on each of these, sorry, actually we should probably mention what effective altruism is for some of our jurors who may not know. Mm. Effective altruism is a fairly large, or I thought large, like this is why I'm benchmarking ourselves off of IT movement around the Silicon Valley community.

This is what Sam Bank been freed with funding, but it also gets funding. It first emerged

Simone Collins: at Oxford University, though.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. From like, Sam [00:17:00] Altman gives, it, gives it funding type stuff, like a lot of the guy who funded Ethereum gives it a lot of funding. So Vitalic.

Simone Collins: Yeah,

Malcolm Collins: Vitalic. Yeah. Pretty much if you are like an alt productive intellectual and you are progressive coded, or don't wanna like, offend people by being overtly conservative, coded, this is where pretty much all of them have been for a long time.

Mm-hmm.

And, it runs a number of very large organizations. We'll, we'll get to some of them in a second. That, that do get, I think it's 400 million a year is, is what I remember.

Simone Collins: Insane.

Yes, I was right. It's around 400 billion in 2019. They got $416 million. , and that's the first search result that comes up when I Google. How much do they get per year?

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. And then redistributes it to various charities that they see as effective. Mm-hmm. Of course most of them won't work with us, but we did get a grant from a Survival and Flourishing Fund, which is technically effective altruist, which I really appreciate.

That was a game changer for us.

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: It [00:18:00] was a game changer and it's allowed us to create this movement. And we'll talk a bit about why I think the effect ous money gets. Gets piddled away so much and they really haven't been able to make things like AI safety, which we're gonna compare ourselves to in just a little bit.

Mm-hmm. Take off in the way that Natal has even though they spent millions of dollars on promoting it every year. So here next you see the worldwide map, which I found really effective mm-hmm. Are, are very interesting of where the search volume is strong. So basically across the whole world, you know, the United States.

Central America, south America, all Natm is winning over effective altruism. Mm-hmm. Russia, it's winning. France and Spain and Portugal, it's winning. Yeah. Eastern Europe it's winning. India, it's winning Africa, it's winning. Middle East is winning. So where is effective Altruism vi CA Canada won.

Yeah. Yeah. The UK, Germany. Italy, Norway, Sweden, China, Sweden,

Simone Collins: China, where they've just given up basically China, I

Malcolm Collins: found, well, you're gonna see China is a trend across [00:19:00] here, which I find really interesting.

Yeah.

And Australia, I found that interesting. It, it also looks like Indonesia, which is weird.

I don't know what's up with that, but I assume that they don't really have a population problem. But let's go to AI safety, right? Like AI safety. 'cause people can say, okay, this stuff is just getting big because the trends are in your favor, right?

Mm-hmm.

It's not any effort. You or, and I, and I point out like we're a team.

Like I. Whether it's US or Kevin Dolan or Dan Hess or Katherine Ach who wrote h Hannah's Children you know, we all talk, we all work to coordinate or, or even the people at Heritage. Heritage too. There're,

Simone Collins: there're, while we may advocate for very different styles of tism or be excited about different policies, we are very much all fighting for the same thing.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. And if they're doing something, they email us and let us know. And if we're doing something, we email them and let them know. We ask their thoughts. Like there is really like an inter community communication web here, and, and it is a small team and [00:20:00] most of the team is self-funded. Yeah. Like.

Dan Hass gets, I, I don't think he's ever gotten any funding for his prenatal list work. No. He's just like in, in fact, he's,

Simone Collins: he's donated so much money of, of like his own to, to fund things. Like at Natal Con he distributed an incredibly helpful bound fact book. I. Packed with graphs plus a laminated one pager, just summarizing the basic details.

Okay. Can we

Malcolm Collins: create a link to that in the, in the, in the, oh, we can. Yeah. We absolutely should. Yes. So do check out. Dan has AKA's,

Simone Collins: Fact sheet and report on prenatal. It's just like, okay, if you need a primer. Go here, look at everything. It's literally

Malcolm Collins: every statistic on it I've ever seen, like it was, was incredible.

No, it's

Simone Collins: amazing. And, and you know, he did that at his own expense. He, he came to Nacon with that, gave it away for free to everyone who went to make them more informed. I mean, this, this man is so awesome and no one is paying him to do that. He has a date, he works full time and takes care of his family of six and, and, and helps his wife.

And he also does this somehow and is very [00:21:00] successful at it. We don't get any pay from the, the work that we do. We also have full-time day jobs and

Malcolm Collins: other projects. Yeah. We, we, we've spent hundreds of thousands of dollars of our personal money on prenatal list advocacy without ever getting any money for, for it.

So like, this is just like an US thing. Like I think the prenatal list spend a lot of money and make these types of sacrifices on this. Mm-hmm. Because they do genuinely believe this stuff. Yeah. And this is when we're gonna go into the AI safety stuff. Some evidence that the key people in this movie don't.

Movement, don't genuinely believe it. Chin Okay. And that's one of the reasons why it hasn't done as well. But okay. So, and the China thing, I wonder why China is more effective outgrows than Natalist. Do you think they'd be like, freaked out? Right. By the way, for people who are wondering. No, I mean,

Simone Collins: one, I think it, this is one of those things that, this is actually the theme of your talk at NATO Con when you try to impose natal list policies.

On a population, it backfires. They push back. They want nothing to do with it. And that's what's happening in China now. That's, it's all part of lying flat too. You [00:22:00] know, be productive. Go have kids, and they're like, you know what? We're the last generation. Thank you very much. Goodbye. And I think that's part of what's going on.

Malcolm Collins: I'd also note that we'd mentioned this in other episodes, but you can check this out yourself. It, it, the, the base Camp Discord, for example, is significantly more active, I'd say maybe four times as active as the EA forums. So this isn't just like us saying like, oh, you know, whatever our podcast is.

If you go to the podcast. It does better than the best effective altruist podcast by a very, and on that note, large margin,

Simone Collins: huge shout out to everyone from the podcast and from The Discord who came out either to Nacon yes and or to our meetup before it on Friday. It was so cool to see you guys, you know who you are.

Like what, what a dream come true. It was to see some of you for the first time. Some of you again. It, it was, I just, I, we only regret that we didn't have more time to hang out and chat, but it, it was great what we had. Yeah. And it

Malcolm Collins: always. Destroys [00:23:00] us when somebody's not, is disappointed. We had one person who was like, I wanted more ultra rich people here.

You know? He's like, I thought the tech elite, tech elite were gonna come. Like all the founders fund funders now. Where's Andreessen

Simone Collins: Horowitz? Where's Founders Fund? Where's, yeah. And I was like,

Malcolm Collins: all these people have like really interesting startups that are doing well. Is that not good enough for you? And he's like, no, no.

So that was, that was, you know, I always, you know, if you're something there was only, yeah, he

Simone Collins: was the only one person I think who was disappointed in the event, but it's also because he is one of the world's most elite people. And so, yeah, I think it's really, he's only working with people at that caliber, hard to win.

You know, unless we had like the president of five major countries present, I, I don't think we would've really impressed him.

Malcolm Collins: What do you think China being more effective altruist than Natalist is about? Like, that seems weird.

Simone Collins: I think that effective altruism is the philosophy of people who are negative utilitarians, and I think that China is a negative utilitarian country.

I think they want to end suffering. I think they wanna end their suffering. I think they wanna end their cycle. [00:24:00] TISM is a philosophy of expansionist com countries that want to grow and that want to see more and do more. And that's all those other countries I'm looking at.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Well, by the way, if you, if you wanna recreate this, the way I did this is every time I did this, I tried to compare, like, to like mm-hmm.

So here we have Natal as a belief with compared to effective altruism as a cause area. Mm-hmm. And then in these next graphs we're looking at natal as a belief compared to AI safety field of study.

Simone Collins: Yeah. Because you don't wanna compare search terms because there could be misspellings or something else weird like that.

Malcolm Collins: So, the first graph here I'm putting up is in the world. And you can see that in the last year, natal has soundly beat, but, but, but pretty narrowly as well. AI safety as something people are searching for. You can see EI or Kukowski World Tour as a big spike in AI safety, and you can see our first virality around Natal as a big spike in Natal.

Mm-hmm. Here's a graph of this on the world stage, but it gets more interesting if you look at a map of the [00:25:00] countries. That's this next graph of countries here. Nativism is everywhere in the world. Bigger than AI safety is except for England and China, which is really interesting when, if anyone needs to be freaking out about nativism, it's China, but this is where we are.

Simone Collins: Well, I think that's, that's part of the issue though, right? Is that China has a problem because. They don't care. They're not freaking out about it. If someone's freaking out about it, they're, and some of them are at least trying, and I think that in China only, the CCP is trying.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. And here we've got Quiverfull versus Natal.

I thought this was interesting 'cause I wanted to look at the more traditional like Christian thing. Okay. The qui Fools in red, natals in blue, and you can see Quiverfull has basically entirely died. God. And we're gonna do a separate episode on how the Quiverfull movement died.

Simone Collins: I really wanna do that.

Yes.

Malcolm Collins: But yeah, natal is now maybe a [00:26:00] hundred times bigger than, than Quiverfull is terms of a belief system. I remember when that was, you

Simone Collins: just couldn't not hear about it. It was such a thing. Mm-hmm.

Malcolm Collins: And we look now at Quiverfull versus pro natal list as search terms. Mm-hmm. Because before I was trying to compare like, like to like, so I was like, okay, yeah.

Let's see if we're looking at them as search terms at Quiverfull belief system Natal as the belief system. You can see here Natal has overtaken it pretty soundly but not as soundly, maybe like four X bigger. Yeah. These days. And really only started regularly beating it, I'd say this year.

Which is pretty, no, this last year, like 2024

Simone Collins: year of tipping points.

Malcolm Collins: And now I wanna talk about like why AI safety has done such a bad job at this. So this last graph I had earlier this morning, you, you searched and you find l Zer Kowski being drafted dwarfed by us. I assume it's because you misspelled his name because in reality he's still slightly edging us out.

Mm-hmm. In terms of public attention we, we did

Simone Collins: the search by the way, because on our [00:27:00] flight back from Austin, both of us watched simultaneously on YouTube a, a strange Aons video on. Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, the Harry Potter fan fiction that Eer YOWs wrote. It was, it's just so much fun.

Speaking of effective altruism, speaking of Eer YOWs, to see someone from completely outside that community. Learn about it

Malcolm Collins: and freak out and study it and be like, wait, what's going on here? Yeah. Early in relationships, we, I was listening to the audio book of the Methods of Rationality and, and you got into it a little bit.

We both stopped it because it was like, really,

Simone Collins: you made it further than I did. It just got so repetitive and it didn't deliver on its value proposition. I wanted to see the proposed science or reasoning behind. Magic because that was, that was Harry. That was the, well in this, in this fan universe.

Harry Potter is, you know, this child of like a brilliant engineer and he's a genius and he gets into Hogwarts and says, I'm going to find out the science [00:28:00] behind this and then use my knowledge to save humanity and. Spanned to throughout the universe. And I mean, it, it sounds great. You know, you, you hear this and you're like, this is a great premise.

Like, oh my gosh. And he, you know, like as soon as he gets his green Gods account, he's like, I can play arbitrage with this. Like you're, it starts out so promising. And then it just, yeah. Anyway, definitely check out The Strange Ions video because she's also hilarious and wonderful.

Malcolm Collins: But I, I found a number of things really telling, and I think it's likely LE Iza, Murkowski's influence as sort of the face of AI safety.

I mean, he's sort of the mirroring face to us if we're the face of Tism. Whether the prenatal is like it or not. It's safety. It's gotta be him. Yeah. He's, he's the face of AI safety. Yeah.

Microphone (Wireless Microphone Rx)-4: Fun, , thing. So I asked Rock if, , it could pair any anime character to Malcolm. Like, which character is Malcolm Collins Most? Like, first it said La Luke from Code Gaos, which I absolutely love. And Simone, I told Simone this and she goes, oh, that's no [00:29:00] surprise. , you, you like his character only because he reminds you of yourself.

And I'm like, okay, whatever. , but then the next one was, it said. Light Yakima from Death Note. And I was like, okay, I like that too. And when I asked it, what character would you pair Ellie Eer with? It said L and Simone got annoyed at that. 'cause she's like, but he's incompetent. , but he's also slovenly and an antagonist, which, which works for me.

Malcolm Collins: And he got into this very differently. If you, one of the things she noted is that while he was writing Harry Potter in the methods of rationality he would regularly tell people, oh, I'll put out more chapters or faster chapters if you give more money to our nonprofit.

Well, and this is because he

Simone Collins: co, I, I think it's because he co-founded Miri originally the Singularity Institute, which was supposed to do research on AI stuff, which. But also explain why he became one of the early AI DOR people. And I think because people have, have dunked on MI for not being very productive, that among other things, Ellie Eer was not contributing a whole lot because he was just.[00:30:00]

Messing around and writing a fan fiction. And so I think he felt pressured by the team to write a fan or sorry to, to use his fan fiction to shill. I don't think that's

Malcolm Collins: it.

Simone Collins: You don't think so? They weren't like, dude, you're not doing anything. At least make us money. No.

Malcolm Collins: I think what you and other people don't understand is a nonprofit, especially if you founded and own the nonprofit Yeah.

Can sometimes just be a thing that pays you a salary.

Simone Collins: Well, yeah, and I think he was getting a salary from MI not doing anything, and the other team members were giving him shade for that. I don't even

Malcolm Collins: know if MI had a board back then, Simone, my re Yeah. But

Simone Collins: he still, he co-founded it and he still had co-founders and I think he got shade for it.

Malcolm Collins: Sure. My read is, what was happening is he was begging for money and most of that money just paid for his lifestyle. Yeah. I don't think that much of the money at all was going to AI research. Well, it wasn't

Simone Collins: because Mary. Is is famously unproductive. Unproductive, yes. Like, like, and

Malcolm Collins: she mentioned that in the strange Aon space, that they're, they're known for not getting a lot of papers out.

They're known for not getting a lot of [00:31:00] real research out, which to me further indicates what I think, which is that it's literally just his GoFundMe account for his lifestyle through the lens of a nonprofit. Because technically he's getting the word out about rationality. 'cause technically he's getting the word out about AI safety.

I would bet that if. If, if during that period, if you look at, I would be over 50% of the money that they raised was just paid out to him in salary.

Simone Collins: Oh my gosh.

Malcolm Collins: That's what I think would happen. I wonder.

Simone Collins: Ooh hold on. So we are our nonprofit post his financials on a like nonprofit. Oh. Go to website.

See if you could find out. So I wanna see if they post their financial, how much his

Malcolm Collins: personal salary during that period.

Sure.

And what you'll see if you look at our nonprofits financials is that we take no money from the nonprofit and we put, and when I say we put tons of money towards our nonprofit, there was a, a guardian piece, I wanna say a few years ago, it might have been a telegraph piece where they actually audited our finances to see how much money we were putting into our nonprofit. This was before we got the big grant, and after that we stopped doing this. But before [00:32:00] that, we were putting 45% of our yearly income into our nonprofit.

I. Which is a lot when you have, I think back then it was like three kids where we're just like, no, we absolutely have to make this work. So what you see within the, it's look like they make their

Simone Collins: financials public, which

Malcolm Collins: that makes sense. You have a complete inverse of what's happening was in the AI C oh my

Simone Collins: gosh, their total revenues fluctuated between 1.5 million and 3 million annually.

What, how have we managed to make AI save with expenses, including salaries for its small team of researchers and staff? So in 2019, MIRI reported total expenses of around 2.4 million with roughly 1.5 million allocated to salaries for its 20 to 30 employees. So if I take 1.5 divided by 30 is 50,000.

And I bet some were making more than others. [00:33:00]

Malcolm Collins: Yeah,

Simone Collins: especially if it was just 20 employees. So, oh my gosh,

Malcolm Collins: that is my bet about what's going on with that. Well, and keep in mind, now I point this out, now contrast this with nativism. I, I'm trying to think of any natalist who make money off of their, their, their work with nativism.

Literally justly stone from what I'm aware of. And maybe, I mean, but also like lot that

Simone Collins: much because limestone has that big job as a demographer that like literally helps very large corporations determine how many diapers to produce. Like he, he, he has to work. And then also the, always the demographer in the world.

Also, he also does a lot of work raising money for the Institute of Family Studies, which I'm sure yes, of course pays him as well, but. He is piecing this together. He has, he has a side gig. Yeah, he has a

Malcolm Collins: secondary job, which I think is his primary income. Well, and I think maybe the Institute

Simone Collins: for Family Studies is his side gig, but he also has to raise money for them, so like, it's not, yeah.

Anyway. And

Malcolm Collins: Catherine Alak, her day job, Catherine lic is [00:34:00] a professor of

Simone Collins: economics. So she is a full-time day job and she worked with a publisher. I, I mean, I think her book has been very successful, but. A successful book these days, especially if you worked with a publisher, is not making you a lot of money.

So I don't think she's getting any material wealth. Up at the top

Malcolm Collins: 1%, you should see our video on Nobody reads anymore can earn you 20 K. Like e even if you're, if you're in the top 1%.

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah.

So like, I don't think that that's a significant income source for her. And, and this, this matters a lot when you're thinking about this stuff because it now contrast it with the AI safety people.

Every one of the top AI safety people in top effective altruist I know making 50 to a hundred K at

Simone Collins: least.

Malcolm Collins: Making 50 to a hundred k at least their main source of income is donations. And you even saw people like I think it was like Will McCaskill or some of the other people who were running like major a like effective altruism organizations.

I. Write pieces a few years back, especially when Sand BA and Free was big about why people running these [00:35:00] organizations should be able to indulge in luxuries. Remember they did things like, bought a castle at one point. They this is one of the major EA groups. Yeah. They bought a castle. They bought a college at Oxford and they were gonna turn it into, or Cambridge, I, I can't remember which.

And they were gonna try to turn it into like a new college and they ended up for sex parties. Oh. Well, this is what they said. I, I was at, came whatever school this was. I don't remember which one it was, but I remember doing a tour and I was like, whatever happened to that? And somebody was like, oh yeah, it became known for sex parties.

Simone Collins: Well, I mean, it was college,

Malcolm Collins: but well. And effective altruist.

Simone Collins: Well,

Malcolm Collins: you know, they, yeah, but I mean, like

Simone Collins: rationalism and effective altruism as we, we should

Malcolm Collins: see our episode on the EA to sex worker pipeline. If you wanna learn more about the the lifestyles that are common within this community. But I think.

Through action. What we see between these two communities is one community that really believes what they're saying and working on, and another community where it's a performative way to make an [00:36:00] income.

Yeah.

And I think that if you are freaked out about like AI safety or something like that, well also, like

Simone Collins: who's reading these reports that they're making?

Who's reading these things? No,

Malcolm Collins: but look at who's, who's putting their money where their mouth is.

Hmm.

Of, of these two movements. It, it was, it contrast, e ei kowski begging, you know, epi update he made to the book, you know, and, and, and putting out chapters at a whatever pace to us who do daily videos every weekday at 8:00 AM EST on this channel.

Contrast that. It's a wild difference, and we don't ever, I don't think we've ever really begged. We, we've, we've said we would love it if you put us in your will or something. Put the nonprofit in your will, and if you do, this is the promise we have, by the way. And you Oh, no, that's, if you,

Simone Collins: if that's, if you put techno, the techno Puritan Federation.

Malcolm Collins: Oh yeah. This is techno Puritan. So not even this, but if you put techno Puritan in your will and it ends up becoming a big thing. And you send us your genes, we will put those [00:37:00] genes along with like the amount that you contributed in case it does end up becoming a big thing and ends up creating like artificial realities and ends up need for sources on that or ends up cloning people in the future or doing even editing or something.

That you might be one of the resurrected people. I, I feel like that's a fun little thing you can do. But literally no one has told us they're doing that. So like, it's not like we're getting anything from that. And in terms of like active donations the main ones we get are hate donations. For when people get pissed off by progressives and they live in a, like more progressive environment, they donate two people,

Simone Collins: two people donate $10 a month minus PayPal fees.

It's like $9 and 50 cents, so

Malcolm Collins: Oh, they do? That's really nice. So we make

Simone Collins: 20 a.

Malcolm Collins: For daily, for like 45 minute long episodes. But no, I mean, like to those

Simone Collins: who don't, that is, that is like really genuinely kind. We appreciate that.

Malcolm Collins: No, that is genuinely kind. Yeah. I, I really appreciate it. And the money does, like, as I've pointed out, [00:38:00] you are getting much more out of that than you're getting out of like effective altruism and what they're doing.

Right. Like we have so little and yet we've been able to, at the conference. The other thing that really got me at the conference is I've been to effective Altru conference. This was one of the most competently organized conferences I've ever been to.

Simone Collins: Shout out to Luke and Kevin, I mean, my gosh. And, and dogs.

The

Malcolm Collins: quality of the food, first of all was like, good quality food. There was many corn dogs. It was, it was really like, nice. The people I met there were, you know, I had one person who emailed after, after this, and they're like, it exceeded all my expectations. This is somebody who's living in Austin.

You know, people were coming in from all around the world. I was so excited to talk Hong to them. Yeah. Hong Kong,

Simone Collins: Singapore. It, it was pretty wild. Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, and we had a, a lot of like, really amazing speakers and we didn't have last time, like people got in a fight. Like I, I didn't get in a fight with any Catholics this time.

You know, which is really nice. This, this is over IBF versus, you know, non IVS stuff. But yeah I, I think [00:39:00] that it was really like a victory lap for the prenatal list movement, which was really fun. It.

Do you have any final thoughts on this or the wired piece or the recent press we've been getting?

Simone Collins: I think that people who want to see this movement as evil are going to continue to do so, but it seems to be only to our benefit. I. And I and just really happy with how the conference went and how the movement is growing and it, it gives me hope for the future because a lot of the people at the conference were really, like, there was not a lot of cultural overlap and it made me feel less for a cultural mass extinction, which is something that we're really afraid about.

Like we want a lot of different opinions in the future, and. Natal con felt like anything but a monoculture, which was really cool. So

Malcolm Collins: yeah, it was, it was really interesting. And these are not small differences. This is us thinking they're murdering babies. They think we're murdering babies. Mm-hmm. And yet we get along.

Yeah. Like it is [00:40:00] absolutely wild that we're able to get along and progressives have the like smallest difference and they go knives out at each other. And the conference was really good. One of the important things, like if you go to this conference and you're like. Okay. I maybe met some people or whatever, but did the world really get anything outta this conference?

Mm-hmm. And what I would note is I think the biggest impact of the conference isn't like us having people edit it or whatever.

It is. Because you guys go and because you make this happen, you make this like a really packed event. I mean packed, like this conference was so large. Yeah. Like much larger than I anticipated.

And we then are able to have lots of reporters there. And we did have all the reporters as we mentioned, like was a wire, but we did have lot, we had New York Times CNN, we had NPR, we had mother Jones. I, oh no. Mother Jones was kept out. But they did a great piece. I like their piece. But anyway.

Lots of reporters there. They. The reporters only cover the movement when the conference happens. Like they need a forcing function to cover the movement. And we can go out and they can do the profile on [00:41:00] us, but you know, that's gonna die down after a while. They need something new to be scared about.

And you guys making this conference happen, going there, talking with reporters. You all came together and gave them something to be scared about. And because of that, every one of you who contributed to this, you contributed to this press cycle that's happening right now. And this press cycle that's happening right now is going to give us a second boost, is going to help us move things forward and is going to help keep this conversation centered in a way that when people are afraid of controversy or afraid of doing new things like the, you know, effective altruism organization like Big Gala that happens every year and I'm sure they spend tons of money on you know, that that doesn't end up.

Getting less oppressed. It doesn't end up moving any idea forwards. It doesn't end up doing anything meaningful for the world. But just by being at an event like this, you guys did a lot and I really, really deeply [00:42:00] appreciate that. In fact, I'd say like, if you're like, oh, you know the money that I paid for this, like $900 or whatever, right?

Would you have rather I just give you two $900 or a thousand dollars? Categorically, I would rather it have gone to the conference given the amount of press that the conference has generated. Mm-hmm. Like, that's what I would've paid. I probably pay what, $50,000 for a press cycle this big. And I think that that's probably about what went in from our fans.

And that's amazing. I, I have more than that like a PR person. I, I could pay a PR firm hundreds of thousands of dollars and not get a press cycle this way.

Simone Collins: Oh, 100%. Yeah. Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: And that is huge because that's what we need to keep this centered in the public mind. And it's also why, you know, if you look at our video on Hardier versus Dier, we recently started hardier.com which is meant to sort of bring.

Funding to some of the other underfunded cause areas where people are, find founding companies in those spaces. Right now we've drained the amount of money [00:43:00] that we had put in for it. So if anybody wants to like put a big grant in for that so we can do something big, let us know. But right now we've, we've invested in like 10 companies like 10 to 40 k each.

Which I'm really excited about because I'm excited about a lot of the technology that they're bringing, but also it's an investment and not a donation, which means if any of these companies does well, then we'll have even more money to put into this type of thing

Simone Collins: into future companies, which is something I'm really

Malcolm Collins: excited about.

The gift that keeps on giving. Yeah. So thank you all for making this happen. You know, thank you to Kevin Dolan for, and Luke, I, I mean, Luke seems to be the really competent operator that made this happen. But yeah, this was wild.

Simone Collins: Yeah, you guys are amazing. And also Kevin Knight's wife and kids who were there.

Oh my gosh, they were so cute. But yeah. Anyway I love you and I love fatalism. I love the Alcon and it was really good to see all y'all who showed up. So thanks for coming.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. One funny anecdote I'll give, 'cause this is actually something that I was talking to like, just last week I was talking [00:44:00] to one of the like, leading people of the effective altruist movement.

And I was asking them like, how can we work together? Mm-hmm. And they, they, they just didn't seem to understand like. I was like, look, I got hardier here. I am open to working with you guys. Like we have a, a bigger movement in terms of like members and focus now. Mm-hmm. You know, we've, we've got people in the White House.

You guys have been begging for that for years. You guys have been spending hundreds of millions of dollars. Like if, if you guys can throw a little money our way. We're gonna be able to throw a little attention your way and, and, and help some of your projects or projects that at least we could both agree on, come to fruition.

And they basically didn't understand why they, they were like, I don't, I don't understand. And, and like, like how or why we would work together. And it helped me understand why the movement's gotten as bad as it has.

Hmm.

Specifically what they pointed out was. That the very, very large [00:45:00] EA orgs that get all this money, like open fill mm-hmm.

They're getting money, huge amounts of money from lots of donors and they have to be afraid of doing anything donors. That makes sense. Yeah. They end up taking the most conservative, boring approach, but a conservative approach like that means they're donating to things that would be raising money anyway.

Yeah. And so the money is just completely pissed away, like giving your money to, which runs against

Simone Collins: the fundamental principles of effective altruism because in addition to looking at the severity of a problem and how tractable it is, how, how feasible it is to actually address it, you're looking at how much attention and help it already has.

And you don't want to focus on things that already have help. You want to focus on the things that are overlooked, which is one of the reasons why Malcolm chose to address demographic collapse. Oh, I'm so sorry. So come on. Hey,

Malcolm Collins: love you to death, Simone.

Simone Collins: Love you too.

Speaker: Octavian, what do you want to give Mommy? This flower [00:46:00] right here. Why do you wanna give her that flower? 'cause I love mommy flowers. Mommy, all the time because I love her. Okay. Hey Titan. Where are you going?

Can I see a video? What did you see today?

You've been having fun. Yeah. What were you doing? I was playing, it was rock. You playing these rocks that walked at where? At the creek? Yeah. Hey, rock, mommy. And, and um, did you see a sink? Um, yeah. How did you with mommy, it was very scary. And then you kept everyone safe. Yeah, mom. What is that? I think I don't stole in the garage.

[00:47:00] Do not tap the window as rocks. No. Oh.

In this deep dive, we explore the intricate dynamics of the Effective Altruism (EA) community and its links to polyamory and sex work within the tech-centric Silicon Valley culture. The conversation exposes how women in these communities are often caught in a cycle of exploitation, love-bombing, and employment gaps, making it difficult to escape. We also discuss the cultural shift from monogamy towards polyamory, the socioeconomic repercussions faced by women, and the contrasting perspectives between supporters and critics of this lifestyle. Additionally, the discussion meanders through personal anecdotes, societal observations, and humorous insights, ultimately highlighting the complexities of modern relationships within a high-status, intellectually driven community.

Simone Collins: [00:00:00] With the grooming gang pipeline in the UK, there was obviously. A sort of plan, intention, like we are going to begin using these young women as economic assets, we're going to go out and find them, but the same general dynamic happened organically, like the women in this case found the EA community, you know, they selected into it, but the same dynamic started to play, where they essentially first got love bombed, and they were vulnerable, and they were kind of disassociated from their home community at that point distinct from the rest of society, they fell into this community and then they started getting passed around.

Speaker 9: Butters, do you have a problem? All these are kissing fellers, and they haven't figured out that they can be making

Malcolm Collins: And, it creates these giant black holes in their resumes.

Simone Collins: Where for years Oh no, right, if you have this big employment gap.

Malcolm Collins: Yes, and that's why they get trapped because now they can't do anything else. And now the type of guy who wants a long term partner doesn't want to marry them.

Microphone (Wireless Microphone Rx)-2: And I'd point out, none of this happens intentionally. This is basically the story of the [00:01:00] EA community as it relates to women.

Speaker 2: In an effort to raise money came up with a nifty plan where she'd date guys and charge them money.

Speaker 4: I go on dates all the time with a whole bunch of, you know, boys and

Speaker 2: stuff.

Speaker 4: And I kind of need somebody to help me out, like, you know, my partner in crime.

Speaker 2: Yeah,

thanks so much for asking. She said she needed my help to make sure that the dates went okay and that the guys paid her. Oh my god, you were a pimp. What? God, no. No, I was just trying to help a friend. And wouldn't you know it, some of Brenda's girlfriends Decided they wanted to be a part of it. Decided I shouldn't use my real name. So we came up with the name Gator. I'm telling you, you're a pimp. No! Are you even listening to the story?

Would you like to know more?

Malcolm Collins: Hello, Simone! I have had my perspective changed pretty dramatically on polyamory recently. The affective altruist community, slash the rationalist community, slash the singularity community, because they sort of all come together into this Silicon Valley diaspora community, or wider sort of Silicon Valley.

I [00:02:00] don't know what you want to say at the, like, heart of the Silicon Valley ecosystem at the moment. And it's been pretty dramatic, because I used to have this perspective of being okay with sex work more broadly.

Not religiously speaking, I'm just like legally speaking, okay?

Simone Collins: Legally. Wow. Okay. Where are we going with this? I'm so curious. What I

Malcolm Collins: mean is, I think that all of this stuff is against the Bible. I think it is against what you're supposed to do. But Right, but if you

Simone Collins: don't follow the Bible or any other religion that's against a personal thing, this

Malcolm Collins: is not Even legally, it might make sense to make this stuff illegal.

Oh. Just because,

Simone Collins: basically, logistically, it produces bad outcomes, from a societal level, on a personal level.

Malcolm Collins: deleterious outcomes for many of the people or most of the people involved in a way that they would want at the end of the pipeline to be like, I wish I had never gotten into the beginning of that pipeline.

In the same way drugs or gambling might create that scenario for an individual. But even more dramatically, it changed my [00:03:00] view on polyamory. Which I used to be pretty okay with. If people don't know polyamory. This is where you take multiple other partners, most partners, just sort of sleep around.

Well,

Simone Collins: no, not necessarily. Someone who's polyamorous just isn't exclusively romantically attached to people. So maybe one partner is monogamous and the other one's polyamorous, and as long as the monogamous partner consents to the polyamorous person having other partners, then it's still a functional relationship.

It's not like everyone in a polyamorous relationship has to sleep around a ton.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, sure, sure. You can have one person sleep around a ton. And there are forms of polyamory that I'm still okay with. Oh, really? Oh,

Simone Collins: okay.

Malcolm Collins: Wow. So this is very intriguing. Very spicy, yes. We actually talked in a previous video about how a style that some women have used to secure high quality mates that we have seen be successful is to propose polyamorous relationships.

That were married relationships and then use that to get the guy to marry them have kids with them And then as the guy got older he stopped caring about sex with other random people

Because

as somebody's saying in the [00:04:00] discord non reproductive sex gets gross when you get older and I actually I hate to say it like

Simone Collins: kinda does.

Well, I don't know. Does non reproductive sex with a 20 year old get grosser, Malcolm? Or is it just with older women? Oh, that's an

Malcolm Collins: interesting point. I

Simone Collins: mean

Malcolm Collins: If I had a stable of 20 year olds I'd have a stable of 20 year olds, which I need. Can we work on that for one dictator?

Hey, Hey, Hey,

I'm not. Oh my God.

There's such a funny video. So freedom tunes does these great shows. We inject them in our videos all the time. They did one recently where the Democrats were trying to run a scam on old people to get the money that they used to be getting from a USAID. And one of them gets to the place and somebody takes the phone from the old woman.

And he's like, who is this? Is this you, Chuck Schumer? And it's pretty clear into it that it's Elon Musk. And he goes, if I catch you here again, I'll impregnate you. Oh my god. That is, I want that to be Elon's stereotypical, like, attack on people now. [00:05:00] You come here again and I'll knock you up, you fat b*****d.

You wrinkly old piece of, you know, whatever. So anyway Point being, I need to make that my thing, like, I can't do that because I'm like, with a woman who I love and like, I'm known for knocking up random people. Give me a billion dollars and I might change my tune on this, right? Oh

Simone Collins: my god.

All I'm saying is, I think that people Can find sex to be arousing in the right scenario and I imagine you know your point there But so the point here making

Malcolm Collins: EA to sex worker pipeline because it's a real thing and I didn't realize okay. Wow

Simone Collins: that is EA I mean EA And, and, and rationalism more broadly too in Silicon Valley culture are all associated with very like cerebral intelligent, thoughtful, altruism focused, not like, where is the sex and [00:06:00] debauchery?

Malcolm Collins: Come on, you remember the first time I took you to like singularity, singularitarian or rationalist or less wrong party, right? You know, so.

Simone Collins: Yeah, it was at some house called Tortuga, right?

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, that was El Tortuga. And I was like, you know, all these parties have orgies in them, right? And you're like, no, I don't.

Look, it's just a bunch of nerds. And I was like, don't open that door. And you're like, oh,

Simone Collins: okay. I didn't open that door. No, what happened was we went and it was like a normal. I mean, of course, from the house because it's in the Bay Area and all the houses in the Bay Area pretty much like, yeah, just very sad.

And we went there and we talked to people and at some point someone was like, do you want to switch outfits with me? And I thought that that was a weird question. And then when we left. You were like, that person was inviting you to an orgy or something like that, and I was like, I have no idea what, and I literally remember opening a door.

That's something I

Malcolm Collins: don't

Simone Collins: forget. I didn't open it. Well, okay, keep in mind, like, maybe I have some kind of, like, [00:07:00] Selective blackout. I went to Burning Man and have no memory of being exposed to any sex or drugs. Okay, like I May just not and like literally like a a muggle and magic like okay Well, then

Malcolm Collins: okay as an outsider here i'm

Simone Collins: stay

Malcolm Collins: ea the effective algebras community and the larger like less wrong community and everything That has always been intimately connected with both partner sharing polyamory and origins is it sort

Simone Collins: of like a futuristic advanced Vision, because part of me thought that all of the sexual weirdness of the Silicon Valley movement really had to do more with.

the San Francisco associations. I mean, that is, that is where I mean, that's

Malcolm Collins: part of it. So this stuff isn't that radical for them, but this community is very much about like first principles thinking through why they do things. Yeah. So they'd be like, okay, from a logical perspective, if it feels good for you and it feels good for somebody else, [00:08:00] why wouldn't you do it?

Right? That's, that's the way they're going to think about it. And then when they think about relationships, they're going to think. Okay, you know, why, why do you have one partner, right? Is it about jealousy? Is jealousy a positive emotion? Is, you know, that's the way they're going to engage with these ideas.

So, it only makes sense. It would actually be even weirder if they went into it from a monogamous perspective as a default. And all of this makes sense when you think about it from the outside. And then as to why so many people are drawn into it, even when they otherwise might not be, you've got to keep in mind, like, bulls in the community get drawn into it, right?

Okay. Girls in the, you know, rationality, singularitarian, less wrong community make up the vast minority of the community. I'd say they're probably one in eight members or one in ten members. Right, like it's

Simone Collins: a mostly male community.

Malcolm Collins: Actually, I'd go so far as to say they make up like one in, yeah, probably like one in eight members and a good 30 to 40 percent of the girls I've seen in the community are trans women.

Simone Collins: Yeah, there's, yeah, there's, there's [00:09:00] disproportionately more trans women. And there are very few women. And now the number has increased. I'd say

Malcolm Collins: because of trans women, it might be like two in eight or like three in, in seven. Knocking the number

Simone Collins: up. It can't be. That there's almost an equal number of women to trans.

I would say there's almost one trans woman for every natal woman Like conferences some conferences we've been to for example.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Yeah. So anyway, We'll put the trans women in a different bucket and bring them in in a second because when I first got involved with these communities Trans women were not on the scene yet.

Yeah. Yeah and they it didn't really play into the dynamic, but then they did later. We'll get into that in just a second so anyway Because of this, you as a woman in this community have a much higher value than you would in almost any other culture. You can be frumpy and fat or you know, lazy or whatever.

Not saying that people

Simone Collins: in the EA move. Actually, like, I think it attracts. pretty attractive people, but yeah, like

Malcolm Collins: more on the attractive side that I've seen [00:10:00] actually. But if you are attractive, oh my God, you're treated like a god queen by all of the well, keep in mind, the guys in the community are often very different from the girls in the community to to get in the community and earn status as a guy.

You either have to move up one of the peerage networks, which means gaining access to funding streams, which then you can redirect. to people below you in the peerage network or you have to be a competent tech worker, which means you're typically making a pretty decent salary. I'd say the average salary in the movement is probably these days at least half a million dollars.

Keep in mind they're living in like San Francisco and Manhattan mostly. So they may not be. You'd

Simone Collins: never know. They look like they're poor.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. So anyway, you have all these guys in the movement who are earning tons and tons of money. And then the women in the movement, even when they are. Program.

Well, they're not often programmers. They're often like psychologists or neuroscientists or evolutionary biologists which are all positions that, you know, sounds super hard and everything like that but they don't actually earn much money. And it's quite hard to find [00:11:00] jobs for them. And so. Get into this community where your knowledge is respected, you are respected and you can gain even more respect for sleeping with additional people, because, oh, if you're only sleeping with one guy, you know, that causes problems in the community, right?

Because, you know, there's only one woman for every, like, three or four guys, right? So If you sleep around, you can gain status. And then what happens is, Oh, well, you're living in a city like San Francisco. Now you're living in a city like Manhattan. Now you can't really earn money with your evolutionary bio degree.

You can't really earn money with it. Like a neuroscience degree is actually quite hard. I have a neuroscience directorate degree. It's actually quite hard to earn money with. You can't, it's true. It's true. It's true. It's your psychology degree or whatever, right? And so, you know, some of the guys start to take pity on you.

And they'll, they'll give you money for sleeping with them, and they'll let you stay at their place, which are usually pretty nice or interesting group houses. And so you slowly work your way into this.

Simone Collins: Oh, oh [00:12:00] no.

Speaker 8: , don't you wanna start makin some money? Leave me alone. Well, you were made for the playground, . You should be out there workin Don't you want a new lunchbox? A nice new coat? I can get all that for you, . Butters, dude!

Oh. Well, all I'm sayin is the should be out there workin is all. What you doin ? Just givin kisses to Stan for free? You should be makin some

Malcolm Collins: And it's very hard to not work your way into this. This is where I went from, Is this something that people are truly?

Open mindedly consenting to, or is it,

Because before I had this perspective of, yes, but the women who are engaging with this community are consenting to a polyamorous lifestyle. And I have seen women enter the movement who are more monogamous. So I'll note a few things. The women I have seen engaged with a movement who are monogamous are constantly pressured to sleep with other people.

Are they? So

Simone Collins: what does that? What does that look like? Because I just don't understand how the leap goes from being monogamous to being polyamorous within the movement. And when you said that, Oh, [00:13:00] you can gain status by sleeping with even more people. You know, that, that runs against, I think, both my and most people's intuition, because the, the mainstream responsibility of taking on more partners is, it's so shaming, like, you lose value when you are less exclusive as a woman on average, and it's weird that one community would, like, defy these laws of nature.

Malcolm Collins: So let's, let's talk about why this happens. Okay, okay. So first why, what, what, what does it look like to have your boundaries pushed? What happens is, is a lot of men in the community, if you say I'm a monogamous or something like this they really take that as a, oh, so I'm not supposed to tell your partner about us sleeping together.

That's what that means to them. And because other women have said that to them in the movement and, you know, not been actually monogamous, they, and it's happened enough. They now just don't sort of respect those words very much and will be fairly aggressive with people because it's what's expected.

I mean, this is the way things work. If you expect to be able to do something you're gonna keep [00:14:00] pushing for it. Like, why are you being weird about this? Why are you acting like a weird conservative christian

People in our community don't do this and i remember within the community even thinking that the people who didn't sleep around the women specifically that was the only ones i was thinking of who are more monogamous i remember thinking they were really weird even you yeah i was like this is like why are they like doing this and then the interesting thing is and this always happened Is, is after one of the ones who was like monogamous broke up with their partner, then they'd become polyamorous.

Simone Collins: Oh, wow. Oh, cause they were like a bunch of people simultaneously lined up. Okay. Cause that was another thing. I was like, how would your existing incoming monogamous boyfriend ever be okay with you becoming poly, but Yeah, relationships, especially when you're younger, are more likely to end, and then, then what happens?

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, so you enter the community as a girl in a monogamous relationship often. And you may not go out of that relationship or anything like that, but when that relationship breaks up, you've been going to enough parties, you've been being hit on by enough people And maybe it even

Simone Collins: starts off as like, you're [00:15:00] contextualizing it as a rebound, like, oh, you're just having Some fun one night stands you know to mend your broken heart after leaving, you know

Malcolm Collins: Are doing all the stuff for you your boyfriend used to do they're paying for meals They might be paying for some of your stuff.

That's

Simone Collins: one night stands turned into You know, like every other night for a while

Malcolm Collins: and they don't expect fidelity from you because they're sleeping with other women as well.

Yeah.

So you've had these guys hitting on you. You're not used to this, but you're like, Oh, okay. Like you've been very interested in me for a while.

Like, let's hook up. Oh, this seems like a normal relationship. There's been some other guy who's been hitting on me. Like, am I allowed to like. You see him on a date tomorrow or whatever and they're like, yeah, sure. Like, you know, we bang the same chicks all the time, right? You know, because they have disintermediated and it's seen as negative within these communities to feel jealousy, like that would be like, why are you hoarding this resource, this woman from other members of the community when we just want to use her for pleasure and it feels good for her [00:16:00] too.

And you know, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Right. And she's getting money from it. That's not like she has a job right now. So it, it, it, when you disintermediate it. A monogamous relationship, even if it is done on good terms, you turn the relationship into sex work. And then you can't leave, because you're stuck in San Francisco, you're stuck in Manhattan, you haven't had a job in how many years?

And let me explain what I mean by this. Okay, me and you, early in our relationship, I was like paying for you to go to college. With my job, right? And I, I paid for food and everything like that. Right. You know, I there was a time in our relationship where I was the guy who was earning the money because I had the higher paying career anymore, but this is the way it worked.

Right. And a venture capitalist at the time, and that is a normal monogamous relationship in a lot of places around the world. Right. Now where, where money sort of flows from the wealthier partner to the less wealthy partner, and often that's from the male to the female, blah, blah, blah. Anyway that's monogamy, right?

Like that's something I can invest in and continue to build. Yeah, let's like disintermediate that relationship. Now, [00:17:00] if you And you're getting the same benefit, but from five different guys.

Simone Collins: Right. Yeah. We're supporting my room and board, et cetera.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Maybe, maybe they're doing a little less than I would do, but it

Simone Collins: seems odd.

Like why would you invest in someone if they're so fluid in your life? This is the point here. You are getting. It's becoming transactional.

Malcolm Collins: And you are getting, yes, but you are not getting a real investment. These guys don't care that you continue to build your career. They don't care about investing in you as an asset, because, same way as we've done another video on this, you need to own your wife.

You need to own your husband. When I say own, what I mean is when somebody doesn't own a property or something like that, they don't invest in this. This is what we've seen in communist countries. Yeah, the

Simone Collins: incentives are misaligned. You're not going to take care of that thing.

Malcolm Collins: Well, yes, and it's because you don't benefit from that thing and prove it.

It was a great it was sent to us by one of our fans, a green text post on 4chan recently about a guy and his wife who he had [00:18:00] known since they were kids and had flirted with him since they were kids. And they went through and read her diary about, like, when she first met him. And so she's reading it, it's very funny, especially kid stuff.

And then she gets, like, quiet when reading it. And she's like, okay, I'm gonna like, like she goes on, she's not going to hide this from him, but she met it's the first time she met him and he goes, and he's really nerdy. So I bet he'll be rich one day I should date him. And then he like thinks back to her always pushing him to get like the higher earning degrees, her always pushing him to like study more.

And, and he ends up this very Successful guy. And he's quite happy with this life. He doesn't like hold this against her. But the point here being is because they were in a monogamous relationship, she, from a Machiavellian standpoint, from a self interested standpoint, had a reason to try to improve him.

Simone Collins: Yeah. Yeah. She invested in him, believing him to be an appreciating asset that she hitched herself to.

Malcolm Collins: Exactly. And the women who are in these situations, they [00:19:00] don't understand that these guys might have an emotional relationship with them, right? Even an emotional relationship, if they even do. Now, a lot of them don't, right?

Like, a lot of them what a person I was talking to about this said, you know, you think you're getting more love, But you're getting no love at all. You think you're getting more people caring about you, but at the end of the day, it's all hollow. And that is, you know, our biology is not meant to bond to somebody who we know that other people are sleeping with.

Like, that's just It would be,

Simone Collins: yeah.

Malcolm Collins: More

Simone Collins: use of resources,

Malcolm Collins: yeah. For females, and I think this is where women get tricked, women can bond to somebody who's sleeping with other women. This is the type of polyamory where i'm actually okay Like if you're a rich enough guy and you have like multiple female partners like whatever throughout all of society throughout all of history even in the most You know, monogamous countries in history.

I'm mentioning like Louis the 14th, like France, you know, like Catholic country there, the height of the church, you know, you still have regular mistresses and stuff like that. It was, so you wouldn't

Simone Collins: encourage our daughters to [00:20:00] be polyamorous, but sister wives to assist sufficiently Wealthy husband fine.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, if they're marrying a like a multi trillionaire or billionaire, you know, I'm assuming money continues to debase somebody who owns like half a Bitcoin. You know, sorry, I'm joking.

Simone Collins: Yes, sure.

Malcolm Collins: But the point here being Is that I'm I'm like less like it intrinsically doesn't work in those scenarios And it can allow women to get higher quality husbands than they otherwise would so I don't necessarily disagree I would I would have significant caution around it in these scenarios significant caution, but I wouldn't like absolutely rule it out.

But In the other way one girl sleeping was like, this destroys things.

Oh, it, it just, because it destroys this investment incentive. It destroys the core of the relationship. But I want to talk about how women gain status by sleeping with additional partners.

Cause this is all true. Again, this

Simone Collins: seems so counterintuitive. How can this be the case?

Malcolm Collins: Okay, so, because there is [00:21:00] an expectation of polyamory in these communities, right? And even more than that, an expectation of polyamory if I am a guy who holds some status over another guy I have an expectation of polyamory.

Expectation of access to his partners. So suppose you're at whatever EA peerage network or whatever, and there's a guy who's upstream in the peerage network of me, my grants, my loans depend on him. And we're at a party or something like that, right? That guy. Is going to expect to at least be able to hit on without consequences, whoever I am with

Speaking of this, we got an email recently from one of our fans in the EA community, and he said, Regarding your comments on sex work in EA, I heard a story related to the Life Extension organization S. E. N. S. that I consider adjacent to EA. Yeah, anything in Life Extension is basically part of this larger community.

, the founder, Audrey Day Gray, was voted out of the organization for interfering with a [00:22:00] sexual harassment investigation against him. In particular, what stood out to me was one case of the harassment with him allegedly Pressuring young women into making sexual slash romantic advances towards potential wealthy donors as a fundraising strategy.

I also remember hearing a very similar story about this about that. Ea cult, leverage. , and what leverage, one of the people who was funding it. , and he was like, yeah, at one point they basically came up with a scheme, which he was not into at all. By the way, he's like, what are you guys doing? , where they would brainwash young women and then try to pimp them out to the people who were giving them money, , to get more money.

Now, the way that they worded this is, , that they would do some sort of like work with the person that they would go in and, and, , you know, they had reframed this not as sex work, but as, some sort of like psychological, , session or something like that, but it's, it's what it boiled down to, , so this is something I know that, , in at least two occasions, it's like allegedly been tried.

now, suppose you're that woman, right?

And this guy is hitting on you. [00:23:00] It creates hypergamy and steroids because you have removed from the culture any cultural penalty to sleeping around

But if I start to sleep with this guy who's higher in the net now suppose this guy has a lot of money Suppose he's got like a quarter billion dollars or half a billion dollars or suppose he runs one of the largest organizations in the space by sleeping with him I can Significantly increase the type of parties I'm getting invited to.

I can significantly increase the introductions I'm getting. I mean, keep in mind, this is how Kamala Harris got her career started, right? Remember, she was sleeping with that guy when she was, it was in his 60s when she was in her late 20s. Oh gosh. And he got her those early jobs and you know, you can move up really quickly as a woman.

When you're sleeping with people and there's no cost. If someone

Simone Collins: has an interest in, in opening doors for you and especially if your career or work or ability to fundraise is contingent on your access to social networks. [00:24:00] I could see that being

Malcolm Collins: now

Simone Collins: you can't

Malcolm Collins: stop sleeping around, right? Because you are now in a peerage network, which I'm calling a cult, whatever you want to call it, where polyamory is expected and you are now, they don't frame it this way, even in their own heads until they get out of it.

And this is the thing I've noticed about this pipeline. Is there like, I had to stay in a sexual relationship with this person because I had other people, but basically I had to go and sexually service this person to continue to get grants.

That's

basically what ends up happening and if you don't believe that this is happening in the effect of altruist movement Go look on the boards of these organizations, the percentage of males and females.

You will almost always see a higher percentage of females. How is that happening? How could that conceivably happen given how rare women are in the movement? Okay, if this was to any degree a meritocracy. These women are getting these positions either for DEI like reasons. Oh, what

Simone Collins: if, what if It's a selection thing because women are more likely to be [00:25:00] interested in like interactive social oriented roles whereas men are more Interested in like object slash direct applied science or action related.

I think that would

Malcolm Collins: make sense um in in Some context, but I think you just see it too frequently when this large less wrong va space like given the number of women Versus their popularity on boards. And i'd also note here if you're like, no, that can't be the case It is not due to sexual favors well, then Riddle me this.

How come, despite natal women and trans women existing within a movement at about the same rate, it's almost always natal women who have these positions?

The

more sexual desirable class of women because there's something in the back of somebody's brain, who opens

it.

Sorry, I can't however, I would note here, like, why do you get trans women in this movement as well?

Think about the status that can be gained versus the male side of the movement. It's just so [00:26:00] hard you really have to be putting money in to matter.

Simone Collins: Yeah, well, and I guess, I don't know, I don't know that many women who are in. You want to know the prominent positions? I, I, the only one I can think of, like, in terms of like a famous EA companies, FTX, and unfortunately, Caroline Ellison was. Okay, a perfect example of everything I'm talking about. I know, that's why I'm like, Oh boy, this is not helping.

I'm trying to like, trying to counter this. I don't

Malcolm Collins: want to name other specific companies because I don't want to call people out. No, definitely not.

Simone Collins: No. At least, but there are like detailed books about. I mean, because of all the legal proceedings too, it, it, it's very public the other thing that's interesting about

Malcolm Collins: this and I don't, I, I have some theories on why this might be the case, but within the movement, trans women are significantly more chased and less likely to be in sex work or passed around than natal women.

Simone Collins: That's interesting because one thing [00:27:00] that's discussed about. Trans women in general, is that it's extremely common for trans women to end up in sex work, just like more broadly, like non EA trans women. So what's going on there?

Malcolm Collins: Well, I think that that's actually more correlated to the cultures that trans women find themselves in.

Oh, and that like,

Simone Collins: they're sort of, when you're a trans woman outside the EA world, it's a lot harder to get a job. Whereas if you're a trans woman in the EA world, You are more likely to just be a

Malcolm Collins: cowder or like engineer or like, I think that that's why I think that they have so

Simone Collins: insensitive, but I feel like a lot of the trans women in the EA movement are Asian and you're much more likely to pass and just look great as so sorry, but like, I do think that if you pass as a trans woman, your life is going to be a lot easier and it's less expensive to pass.

As an Asian trans woman, what am I

Malcolm Collins: favorite? I remember I was talking to somebody and we're talking about like two [00:28:00] trans women. We're like, does we pass? And he's like, Oh yeah, like a Taiwanese or like a Taiwanese twink. I think is what he said. And I was like,

okay, that's a, that's a way to answer.

It's surprising, but it makes sense. But like we all knew, like, I was like, yeah, I know what the, I know what you mean. Okay.

Simone Collins: That, that roughly makes sense. Why do you think they are more chased in general?

Malcolm Collins: I think it might be because one, they gain less by sleeping around because they're valued less as sexual partners.

So the cost to them of doing it might be lower. They, they often got into the movement. As like founders or engineers or coders to begin with. So they had alternate income stream that necessitates it less. And they often have, I mean, you know, this, your MRI scans, the brain of a man, they better understand what men really want and what they're using women for.

And so they're less likely to have the delusion that a woman would have, because remember I said that women. Believe that if a, because they know that like if a man was sleeping [00:29:00] with other women, they could still form an emotional attachment to that man. And so they believe that a, and this is on average, obviously not all women are like this, not all men are like this.

They believe that a, a A man when they're sleeping around, men are still going to form an attachment to them and that's not necessarily the

Simone Collins: case. Right, they're sort of expecting reciprocity or that they're having a similar experience emotionally.

Malcolm Collins: And I don't think trans women are that deluded.

They know what's up. They're like, yeah, I've played the other side of this game. Yeah. So they, they see, they see what's up more. And keep in mind, I mean, we talk about the commonness of trans women in the movement. There was that cult recently that some reporter called us to like do a piece on.

They started murdering people and they're like all trans women. Oh,

Simone Collins: yes. I guess we're choosing not to name them. So many people are talking about

Malcolm Collins: cults. The Zizians. Yeah, the Zizians. But you know, I, I've read some of their stuff. It's interesting. Like, I, I think, like, I, I disagree with them, but it's one of these movements that I'm like, well, I disagree with you, but like, I, I, I see where [00:30:00] your philosophy comes from in the same way I see it, like, where antinatalist philosophy comes from.

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: Like, I, I don't think that it is. There is

Simone Collins: a certain amount of logical consistency that you can respect.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, there's a certain amount of logical consistency I can respect. But a lot of the underlying assumptions.

So all of this, like putting all of this together for me has helped me be like the problem with the normalization of polyamory is that It leads to situations that women and men, men don't realize they're leading women to become into trapped into sex work. And remember when I say trapped into sex work, nobody intends on this when this is starting, right?

It's a, it's a guy who's being nice because he's sleeping with a woman. And he's like, here's the money, you know, I'm going to sleep on wherever.

Simone Collins: Here's what's really crazy. Here's what's blowing my mind is when you described this process. You know, [00:31:00] woman, maybe who just recently moved to the Bay Area, right, like somewhat vulnerable, kind of alone meets a guy who introduces her to this community, who shows her a lot of love and support and then maybe for some reason she meets more people within that community or becomes sort of unmoored from it and then gets opportunities.

to sometimes to her advantage, get intimate with other men within this community. And then it happens more and more, you know, when we, we talked about this in another podcast, do you know what the podcast was about? What? Grooming gangs in the UK. Oh, yes. That's what I'm thinking as I'm here. I'm like, Oh my God.

And this, of course, like, I think with the grooming gang pipeline in the UK, there was obviously. A sort of plan, intention, like we are going to begin using these young women as economic assets, we're going to go out and find them, but the same general dynamic happened organically, like the women in this case found the EA community, you know, they selected into it, but the same dynamic started to play, [00:32:00] where they essentially first got love bombed, and they were vulnerable, and they were kind of disassociated from their home community at that point distinct from the rest of society, they fell into this community and then they started getting passed around.

And clearly it didn't go as, I don't think it has gone as poorly for these women. They're not, you know, kidnapped and beaten and everything. It

Malcolm Collins: does go, because it targets women who otherwise would be very high value partners who could otherwise secure very high quality men. Yeah, that's the

Simone Collins: other weird thing about it is, is instead of like women who have been cast off by society who, come from abusive households and who are young and vulnerable, like it's instead like incredibly high achieving high IQ, high altruistic, high conscientiousness women.

It's, it's so weird.

Malcolm Collins: And, and it creates, and this is the thing that's not talking about, it creates these giant black holes in their resumes.

Simone Collins: Where for years Oh no, right, if you have this big employment gap.

Malcolm Collins: Yes, and that's why they get trapped because now they can't do anything else. And now the type of guy who wants a long term partner doesn't want to marry them.[00:33:00]

Simone Collins: You know the

Malcolm Collins: conservative guy who actually wants a wife and asks

Simone Collins: about our history

Malcolm Collins: or like About this and she was like I thought I was increasing my status because I wanted a guy I was like no guy is gonna like want me seriously if i'm a prude right like um Like they're gonna be like ew gross like you don't sleep with lots of guys And what's interesting is this is the signal she would have gotten from guys in the community If she's single she's waiting to marriage or something like that to a guy in this community They would have genuinely had the ew gross reaction.

Like, why are you doing that? But it is because they were not looking for a partner who was waiting until. No, definitely not. Yeah. Looking for a longterm partner at all. They were looking for a sexual partner. And so that's why you would get rejected for them and you confuse any sort of rejection with, with a meaningful rejection.

As we said, like a partner who rejects you, isn't necessarily a bad thing. It could be that you guys would form a terrible relationship with each other. Totally. They are rejecting you because they want something else from you, right? Like they are like you, like, that's weird to me. Like [00:34:00] it's not normal within our culture and women are very sensitive to what's normal within a culture.

So we decided to ask one of our friends who is in the community and has a very good sort of view of what's happening in the community, and she added some additional nuance to sort of how this pipeline functions. Specifically, it's a problem for new girls when they enter the community. Like, she says, once somebody's been in the community for a while, they either know what's up, or they sort of get their place within the community, or there becomes Taboos around approaching them, but for new people in the community, especially women in the community, all of the guys, especially the, as she put it, lemons, you know, the guys who are single or couldn't secure a partner or just sleep around a lot.

, those are the guys who all tackle these girls at once. And if the girl doesn't have a lot of experience turning away guys or turning away attention, especially from guys who might be high status in the community, It goes very bad for them. And when women like her try to warn [00:35:00] new female entrants, it can come off like mate guarding behavior because they're like, oh, you just don't want me to have the guy or they, they read it as something other than what it is, which is genuine.

Concern for them and she was saying that if somebody takes like the concern seriously if they don't jump immediately into polyamory when they get into the community , they're generally okay , the problem comes when they do, , or if they they stay monogamous and and and she pointed out, , Because maybe we gave the impression in one of our videos that the community doesn't accept monogamous people It absolutely does they're just seen as sort of Weird.

I mean, if a girl enters the community in a monogamous relationship, she's going to be heavily targeted. , and I will say, I know, you know, as somebody who's been adjacent to the community, , the person who I'm talking to is not, I think, in a monogamous relationship. So she might not be fully aware of how much.

Individuals within the community don't respect monogamy. They just don't do it publicly by that. What I mean is they'll still hit on somebody if they're in a quote unquote monogamous relationship and do so very aggressively and ask for [00:36:00] sexual favors for things, even when the person's in a monogamous relationship, because I've seen this with my friends who will tell people I'm monogamous and then the community pushes them further.

So I thought all of that was very interesting that this is a primarily. New entrant problem. , and if you can prevent them from getting sidetracked, it's not as bad She says one thing that really helps is you can ask People in the community like okay Who's who's the good guys who I can sleep with or who are the guys to actually target?

, but she says a big problem with the whisper network is 1. it's a rich get richer sort of a thing where the, , highest status guys just end up accumulating more and more because they're the ones who everyone knows. Oh, this one's good. Especially if you just want to sleep around or something like that.

, and then there's a secondary problem. It's , the, the queens of this network are often people like who, well, is, you know, an actual sex worker. Right? So, , it's going to lead to them recommending the type of guys who are already utilizing those pipelines, which can normalize transitioning into those pipelines.

Like they are like you, like, that's weird to me. Like it's [00:37:00] not normal within our culture and women are very sensitive to what's normal within a culture. And so if it's normal within a culture, they're like, oh yeah yeah, I've got to do this or every guy's going to think I'm a weirdo, like some sort of religious nut job. Right. Which is what many of them frame their lives against because it's the background they come from. The number one background from these women that I have seen, you know, Ayla is a great example of this, but it's the other one I've seen is a conservative evangelical households.

They, they come disproportionately for evangelical Christian families. I do

Simone Collins: think it was an important exception here though. One, my understanding is she got into camming specifically. Well, before she ever encountered, you

Malcolm Collins: did not follow this pathway, not at all. And I think she also, but I think that she normalizes this pathway for other women, because I think the other

Simone Collins: women don't understand maybe how Ayla got into this and her background and her proclivities and her preferences in her lifestyle as well.

Like she doesn't have the same end goal that [00:38:00] most girls in the EA community have. And she's very different from myself. It's a very

Malcolm Collins: unique case, I don't think. But I think that she to understand a bit about her background, she genuinely had no other options. She was working in a factory. Oh no, yeah, her life was so much worse

Simone Collins: before.

So much worse. Maybe

Malcolm Collins: she joined like a streaming site where like she got into like LSD and drugs and stuff like that. She joined a

Simone Collins: house with a bunch of people who were camming. together.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. And then there were guys involved, basically. It was just a bunch of, it was a, it was a girl. And she always really enjoyed sex.

She is a naturally really horny person. Who's really interested in having sex with people. And again, as Ayla said on the, in the early things, she's like, well, like, why would I deny men in my community this right? Like I enjoy it. They enjoy it. And they seem to need it for some level of like mental health.

And guys will argue this, like, incel guys will argue this, like, guys who don't have any sex at all, like, have mental health issues. So, that, Ayla's even making the incel [00:39:00] argument here, like, well, you know, the lower value men do need sex occasionally, or they go crazy. And this is the argument being made within, like, the, the EA Less Wrong community, right?

So, I think that like, I understand all that, but for me, It's like, yeah, but as a girl, you have to be careful. And I think the number one thing and one of the reasons I'm making this podcast is maybe to wake somebody up who might be going down this pipeline and not realizing it

or

might be in this pipeline and not realize it.

Yeah, I feel like it's never too late to step out. Well, I mean, it is. It can be too late to step. It can be very hard to step out. But I think that it only gets

Simone Collins: harder, though. It's not like, yeah,

Malcolm Collins: the earlier you recognize

Simone Collins: the best time to do many things is like. Three years ago, but what you're going to do.

Malcolm Collins: Yes. And this is also a problem with things like only fans and other types of sex work that can seem normalized is that it removes. Your ability to get other jobs in the future or get partners in the [00:40:00] future, depending on what type of work you're doing on it. You can make it very difficult. I don't know though,

Simone Collins: like, I remember one of the editors for our book that we just hired through Upwork.

Who, like, did pretty good work and, you know, whatever. We randomly discovered she had an OnlyFans.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, but that doesn't mean that, that, that doesn't mean that that worked out good for her.

Simone Collins: I guess. Yeah. I mean, she was doing editing work on Upwork and it's not like,

Malcolm Collins: well, you could earn a lot of money on OnlyFans.

And they're like, if you could earn a lot of money on OnlyFans, then you could get a really high quality husband.

Simone Collins: Yeah. And why was Jen Upwork if she was making enough money on OnlyFans to

Malcolm Collins: be fair. Right. Right. But the point being is, is. With OnlyFans. And by the way, I heard some interesting theories after our OnlyFans video that OnlyFans actually got popular because people started using it to create the type of content that people are looking for these days.

It's like much more creative, like anime, cosplay, Warhammer cosplay, like the old porn studio.

Simone Collins: Clever! Warhammer. Sexy Warhammer. Of course! Yes! What is it? Rule 64? Like, if you just Provide more [00:41:00] customized live action rule 64 for those people who want live action. And that's another thing that people were pointing out in the comments of that video was that many of the people who were turned off by both like Disney character lunches and by strip clubs were also not that big into.

Live action, erotic material, which same goes for you,

Malcolm Collins: right? You can't, I am, I am 2d. I have the image of you. I always say like, whenever we're doing like 2d justice or like the 3d women are, are trash, I always use the anime version of you as like my example of the perfect 2d woman.

Simone Collins: My point is that it seems that there, there's like a group, a rough grouping of people that really need.

Like the human version and are really turned on by that. And most of the rule 64 stuff online is illustrations. So only fans. May have been the first avenue to take Rule 64 on mass, on a [00:42:00] mass customized level. Like, 'cause I mean, there's so many permutations, right? I mean like, oh my gosh. And then make that possible and bring it to scale.

That's so clever.

Malcolm Collins: You wanna see, well, I mean, because people create parasocial connections with characters Yeah. Within shows. And one of the things that I noted, if you wanna see one of our early, very early spicy videos, which is why you should prefer a husband who fats too. Pony porn from like the old, like, I, I don't, by the way, I said in the video, I immediately, the first thing I said in the video is I do not find this ever arousing, but I wanted to understand why people find it arousing because like these things look nothing like humans and at the time it was like the Fifth most common category of porn was like MLP porn for

Simone Collins: the plot.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. I was like, what the hell is going on here? Right. You know? And my thesis was, is that it was for men who preferred figures they saw as female. Even to the extent that they would ignore that they looked nothing like a fertile human female. These men. Because they have a strong sexual preference for characters or [00:43:00] people, they believe they are interacting with regularly in like a social context, like their brain has been tricked into believing this to the extent that they will ignore that they Look nothing like a fertile human female.

They would likely also bond really strongly to a wife or long term female partner. I was trying to come up with a spicy hypothesis, but so many people were like, Oh, this is proof. And I'm like, gosh, you guys don't know what, like no one has, it's interesting. No one has guessed what I'm into on any show I have ever seen.

Simone Collins: Really? Yeah. I guess I haven't seen any comments that

Malcolm Collins: I've seen

Simone Collins: a lot of really funny theories that have so far all been wrong. That's that's really funny actually.

Malcolm Collins: Well, no, because of the theories that I've seen focus more on things that would modify my social status in a positive or negative context.

Because I think that that's what people want to project onto influencers is like, oh, he's into X thing. That's gonna, you know, make him look. Subby or or whatever, right? Like because that's interesting to them. When in reality what I'm like, what I'd actually be into would just not [00:44:00] modify. I mean, if people know of any unique sexual preference of an individual, they are going to use that to attack them.

So, so that's, that's why I don't like mention anything like this, but it's not something that's like uniquely embarrassing or anything like that.

Microphone (Wireless Microphone Rx)-1: A great example of this happening to someone with Kenneth bone or Ken bone, that guy who asked a question in the, first Hillary Trump election that was seen as neutral. And everyone was like, oh, that's so cool. , and so he went on all these talk shows afterwards and he completely had his fame destroyed when people found out that he.

Had I don't even know if I'd say it's a fetish, but an arousal pattern was preference for pregnant women. , and people just thought this was, oh, how, what a gross fetish, and I'm like, that's like, of, of all of the potential fetishes I could think of, it doesn't objectify women, it's a normal thing, it's a, like, it, it maybe is, I would think, one of the least, , in terms of, like, unusual or [00:45:00] specific arousal patterns that could be used to attack someone, and yet it destroyed his entire fame cycle.

Malcolm Collins: I note here that now we know because texts from Elon have come out with the, the girl that he knocked up, that he's like, I can't wait to like, come on.

He's using language like knock you up again and stuff like that. That really comes off like somebody who has an impregnation fetish.

Simone Collins: To your point. The only fetish that is not a fetish is appropriative sex.

Malcolm Collins: That's what sex is for. That's

Simone Collins: the one thing that's not

Malcolm Collins: a fetish. That's the one

Simone Collins: thing. Oh god,

Malcolm Collins: people.

Just

Simone Collins: understand what is for.

Malcolm Collins: Sex with condoms is a fetish. Okay. Yes. Yes. Sex with condoms is the most common fetish.

Simone Collins: Or sex on birth control. Yeah, any, any non procreative sex I'm about to say.

Malcolm Collins: It's like you have an active sign that this is non procreative sex. Like, anyway but so like, do you understand now how, how tempting this pipeline is for [00:46:00] people?

And, and, and people can be like, well. On OnlyFans, and as I've said in the past, some women don't have any other choice for income, right? Than, than, than this stuff. Yeah,

Simone Collins: I guess that's where I also struggle. I'm like, well, why just not?

Malcolm Collins: Well, and I'm like, these women aren't you know, this is my like ultra ruthless approach.

I am more interested in keeping the few women who might be useful societal actors or potentially wives and really happy with that life keep them from falling off the rails. Then I would try to save the women who are just never going to be that good at anything. Because it's, it's differential utility.

It's, it's how they decided to do something with their lives that removes their ability to be positive social actors in another context.

Simone Collins: And

Malcolm Collins: so, I guess what I would say here is, is while I wouldn't legally regulate this stuff personally, I would strongly shame it within our own family if it's context that significantly hurts someone's ability in a marriage market.

As I've noted, this isn't [00:47:00] all only felons. Well, I would

Simone Collins: even dissuade our sons from being polyamorous because it's just a distraction from marriage. It's a distraction from marriage. If you, as soon as you encourage men to sleep around a lot after like, Age 23,

Malcolm Collins: here's, I agree with Z after age 23, but there's a whole life you live before that.

And unfortunately, a lot of your status in training depends on your ability to secure multiple partners. I'm

Simone Collins: all for, but also like you have to understand men with minimal resources, which is typical for 23 year old men who are not either completely drop dead gorgeous or from families of means. And sorry, Malcolm, you're just too beautiful, like, what are you gonna do?

And very smart, like, you, you were, you had all the cards. Most pre 23 year old men are gonna like, if they try to go on their most aggressive sex mode, slut mode, maximum, maybe two partners. [00:48:00] Maybe three like

Malcolm Collins: look, I'm not gonna what I want to say is I'm not gonna shame my sons for getting multi ball No people who don't know multi ball in the old arcades You get this mode if you like we're like absolutely killing it We're be like multi ball and it shoots like a bunch of balls into the center of the game board and like The, the reality is, is I do not know what social context you're going to be in.

The point I'm making is that multiple partners for men does not always turn out bad. I am increasingly entering a mindset where I think multi pool partners for women. Always turns out bad. Which is, is very different. And here I was saying for OnlyFans, I would not, for example, with my daughter, change things that aren't going to significantly negatively modify their dating status, like feet modeling on OnlyFans or something like that.

Simone Collins: Well, what about, I feel like we've already gotten to a place, this isn't intentional, I think, but we've already gotten to a place where people use filters to the point of not being recognizable. If our [00:49:00] daughters were utterly unrecognizable. To anyone. But on OnlyFans, if it were completely anonymized, would you have a problem with it?

Malcolm Collins: Think, learn a lot about social dynamics. I question this is, this is the question I ask. Would I have a problem with it in a potential wife? If, if I, if it came

Simone Collins: out,

Malcolm Collins: if it, if it was discovered, would I, no. Would I? Like if you told me Yeah. You as a

Simone Collins: prospective boyfriend. Yeah. If I told you I.

Malcolm Collins: Totally anonymous,

Simone Collins: Malcolm.

Malcolm Collins: Totally anonymous. I would care a lot less if it was totally anonymous, but I still would care a degree. The reason I mentioned something like foot modeling is I wouldn't care if you were a foot model at all. Maybe it's because I don't find feet arousing at all, but like, I would just take this perspective of, of, oh, you conned a bunch of weird guys who had mouth.

Functioning sexual, isn't

Simone Collins: this so interesting? Actually,

Malcolm Collins: ASMR, if you did ASMR or like, or like audio, like, and not say for whatever, I'd be like, whatever. I've noticed

Simone Collins: a thing, not infrequently online [00:50:00] where people shame requests they've received online to see pictures of their feet and also make an effort to not post pictures of their feet online.

And that really confuses me. Cause I'm like, dude, if someone gets erect, when they look at my feet or your feet. Like, why, no one is hurt. It's interesting

Malcolm Collins: for me because like it has, I don't view it as like a sexual part of your body. So like, I guess that maybe that's why I have so little like feeling like I would care.

Well, yeah, but

Simone Collins: what, what, what, what if, what if, but what if someone else does? I guess their, their problem is that

Malcolm Collins: someone else does.

Simone Collins: It doesn't matter to me. I view them as

Malcolm Collins: like pathetic. Like, and like, I guess like they're just like nobodies. They're, they're, they're The guy in like ntr porn who's like in the corner masturbating while you're sleeping with their girlfriend like there is a huge difference and this is actually Interesting when we talk about like the woman on stage thing and stuff like that.

Well, I might find it [00:51:00] Really disgusting. To be giving a woman money. Who's like on a, a porn stage or something like that. If I knew some other guy was gooning over, I was successfully having with someone, I would be like, Oh, he's just like a pathetic simp. And this further. Solidifies my own status as the dominant male in this scenario which doesn't like I wouldn't say I, I, I would actively get off to like sharing porn I had made with you, but I wouldn't find it.

It wouldn't make me more gross of you. Yeah. I'd be like, whatever. But you sharing that without me, it's like, you're cutting me out of Dominant thing and you're, you are saying, okay, well, all of you guys have some potential to be at the same level of my husband. But why would it

Simone Collins: still bother you if I had a history on OnlyFans fully anonymized?

Like I did it as a VTuber, for example. Because you

Malcolm Collins: have led a large community to believe, oh, a VTuber? No, I'd be totally okay if you were a VTuber. Well, that's totally anonymized. [00:52:00] Right, I thought you meant like, face changed with AI or something like that, but they're still seeing your real body. Yeah, or

Simone Collins: like, the skin of my body also mildly changed, you know, like everything's just slightly manipulated.

Nothing is, is 100%. I

Malcolm Collins: guess I wouldn't care that much if you, if it was like actually. Well, no, if guys, like, it would matter a degree, but the more you do this, it gets closer to not mattering. It's closer to foot modeling than it is to real, like, OnlyFans or even porn. And, and I should note that for me, like, if we have this, this thing between foot modeling on OnlyFans And you having sex with other men for money or you having sex with other men and then people are watching porn of that.

If you take a you naked on only fans, it is, and we're talking about like a 10 yard foot line here. It is one foot away from the foot modeling.

Simone Collins: Okay. Wait. So, so what would you do if you had a daughter with a really with a really high sex drive, what if you had a daughter with a really high [00:53:00] sex drive, who's like, but I

Malcolm Collins: mean, that's the point I'm making.

Did you, did you understand the analogy I just made?

Simone Collins: No.

Malcolm Collins: Okay. You have two things on the side of the screen here. All right. On one side here, you have actually having sex with someone on a camera for money. Okay. Over here you have foot modeling on OnlyFans. Just being naked on OnlyFans is like over here for me.

In terms of how gross it would make a potential wife. Okay. It's like in the middle It's not like closer to here. It's like these guys were something over something They never really had access to which just makes it seem like pathetic simps to me, right? Like that's not really my wife was using them, you know, without actually giving them anything.

And so like with a daughter, I might be like, well, maybe find ways to engage with that. Or if she had a really high sex drive, i'd be like write romance books for other women.

Simone Collins: And get really good with sex toys. I guess

Malcolm Collins: Yeah I mean i'd say that that and again, i'm not gonna like force my daughter to do anything But [00:54:00] in terms of the best paths forwards I think that you damage enough of your value as in sexual marketplaces or marriage marketplaces, I should say by sleeping around a lot.

It's just not worth it for women really in almost any circumstance.

Simone Collins: Oh, wait a second. You could just encourage them to be lesbians for a while. Right? Yeah. If I was like, well, I was a lesbian. The Bible's not against it. The Bible. But if I were a lesbian slut earlier, would that bother you? How does that compare to another that would make

Malcolm Collins: you higher value?

Okay, so if we have that would make you I slept with like a lot of gold star lesbians Well, not a lot like four or five. But they're like they're like the same in status They're, they're higher. Okay, okay, so a woman with a high sex drive is young. Gold star lesbians are at a totally different level.

Simone Collins: And, and I say this because we found when, from Nalcom's research doing the Pragmatist Guide to Sexuality, that women are just a lot less more to [00:55:00] primary and secondary sexual characteristics. In other words, their orientation isn't really gay straight, it's more dom sub. And so if you really have a high sex drive, the way to go is lesbianism for a while.

If you have some kind of penis fetish, there are so many different types of vibrators and dildos and everything else.

Malcolm Collins: But here's the thing about, well, penetrative sex with a lesbian is a little different. Oh, is it? Yeah, very few lesbians do it though. Oh, okay. But, but anyway, the point being is that So wait,

Simone Collins: okay, wait, hold on.

Malcolm Collins: So

Simone Collins: like,

Malcolm Collins: God, there's so many rules. This is complicated, Malcolm. But hold on, I'm, I'm, might be unique in this. Okay. And people can sound off in the comments, but like, My, I, I've heard of some guys and actually this makes me really look down on a guy when I hear this. I don't, I don't want you to say this before you say it down off in the comments, but when a guy is like, dude, it's so gross that my girl, you know, is hooking up with another girl and now they want like both want to like hook up or whatever, right?

Like, I'm like, how is [00:56:00] this a problem for you? Like guys who get sexually insecure about, Other women. Yeah, that is

Simone Collins: weird. With other

Malcolm Collins: women, it comes off as really, like, Yeah. Like, I don't want to say, like, not even beta, like, omega, like.

Simone Collins: I don't, I don't know what it comes off as. It,

Malcolm Collins: it, it comes off to me as a male as, like, an intrinsically emasculating position.

It's like, how

Simone Collins: is she? Well, I just, I also feel like it's super strawman y. I, I can't even, in my evoked set, like, imagine an archetype of a man who would be. No, no, no, who doesn't is, like, religious screening guys. Oh, well, that's just like virtue signaling. I don't know how you know,

Malcolm Collins: that's who does it and very insecure guys Who think that their woman would leave them for another woman?

Just like guys who don't this happens it happens. It happens Rarely, so it like can conceptually happen, but I think okay, so i'm gonna let out a secret about the lesbian community Okay, so I used to be pretty progressive and everything like that and I slept around a lot right? [00:57:00] and one of the areas that was always like the free sex pipeline was lesbians.

There are a lot of lesbians who don't actually like being lesbians that much. They do it for whatever, whether it's political or personal or emotional reasons, but they really desire. To sleep with men, but be able to do it without it affecting their public reputation or self Oh, so they're

Simone Collins: not seen as slutty because they're lesbians.

You can't be a slutty lesbian.

Malcolm Collins: Well, it's not just that. I mean, they, they want to be seen as the right politics. They want to be seen as the right whatever. Things being like a proper lesbian and everything like that and their status was in the gay community and not being bi as a woman and everything but you know, most women are okay, like just look at the statistics and so a lot of women for the status pretend to be lesbians But if there's a guy who they know is attractive and discreet they Will she constantly with her partner [00:58:00] with men?

Or, or, and, and, and my impression is this is quite common given the number of lesbians who sit with me back today.

Simone Collins: Well, okay. So I guess I guess the key for us as parents that if we're going to take something away from this. Revelation, realization, dynamic that we're now aware of. We need to be really explicit about the risks and downsides of polyamory, especially with our daughters.

But also with our sons, especially post 23. That it is, it causes a lot of knock on effects that we will walk them through explicitly, because the key isn't to say, no, never do this. It's a rule, don't cross the line, because I said so. But instead, This is a heavily taxed activity and here is the tax.

Here is the price you pay. Walk into a road and you could get run over by a car and killed. Get polyamorous and you may never end up getting a, a high value. Or [00:59:00]

Malcolm Collins: if you do, they bring it up all the time. Like it's something that they can lord over you for the rest of your life.

Simone Collins: And that's, that's

Malcolm Collins: tough.

By the way.

Simone Collins: It's a thing that lingers in the back of their mind, even if they don't bring it up. That, that's, that would also really suck.

Malcolm Collins: Anyway. But yeah, that's, that's what I do.

You're right. And yeah, I'm lucky that you, I mean, in a different time. If you were growing up today, have you, would you try like doing OnlyFans or something, or you just

Simone Collins: No, I'm way too asexual for that. Like I've just. You have to be able to pull it off, and I think you've got to, like, Enjoy it a little bit.

Yeah, like, you need to have some kind of spontaneous sex drive. You know, it's like, I'm just, I'm gay for Malcolm, right? Like, there, if, in the absence of Malcolm, there is no sex. If that makes, that doesn't make sense to anyone, but it makes sense to me. So there would just be no way I could ever.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. I mean, your program in a way that would be very advantageous for program [01:00:00] biologically for many women from, you know, a lot of different cultural frameworks, not every cultural framework, but certainly, you know, our cultural framework an old, like puritanical culture.

Yeah.

Yeah. So, Yeah, I don't, I don't see this as being so right. I wonder if it's

Simone Collins: heritable. I think it's the autism, to be honest with you. No,

Malcolm Collins: I think it's heritable.

Simone Collins: I think it's heritable, but I also think it's correlated with, clustered with autism.

Malcolm Collins: Well, no, I've pointed out to people in the past that cultures that, in which you'd have a genetic advantage by being high arousal and sleeping with people a lot, you know, voluntarily, like Catholic culture really relies on that or used to rely on that for to increase their fertility rate.

And I have mentioned as somebody who slept around a lot it's actually noticeable. Girls from Catholic cultural backgrounds are much hornier. They prefer sex much more frequently than the whole

Simone Collins: stereotype of the Catholic school girl or the sexy. None is a thing for a reason.

Malcolm Collins: It might be that this isn't due to repression.

It's due to [01:01:00] genetic selection event. That they would have historically had more children based on their arousal level. And, and their willingness to get into early and frequent relationships.

And as I mentioned, the Catholics used to interpret the line that which the Lord has binded man shall not tear us under to mean that like, if you got into an early relationship and you got pregnant, then it's not that you can never get married again, which is true for some cultures, like in, in, in some cultures, if you get pregnant as a young woman.

You don't automatically marry that guy. You just become ineligible for marriage for the rest of your life. Oh. Because you're, you're, you're basically tainted goods. Whereas in, in Catholic cultures, even for like royals you, you married that guy. Not like High Royals, but like Mid Royals. High Royals got to do whatever they wanted.

The point I'm making here is that this culture motivated High arousal whereas your form of arousal is just more like dedicated arousal.

Like, I'm going to bond with like one individual who I already know internally, [01:02:00] like I'm with for life. And the thing that's going to motivate children is deciding to have children. Not that I didn't have a condom or The pair

Simone Collins: bond. Yeah. Huh. Yeah, that would be Well, I could see it not evolutionarily, because it seems like where we're losing the birth rates in demographic collapse is mistake babies.

And where we need to build up the birth rates is intention babies. But yeah, I don't know. You're very

Malcolm Collins: good for intention babies. I'm very good for

Simone Collins: intention babies, but also intention babies appear to be correlated with much lower birth rates. So Right, and

Malcolm Collins: we need to change that using

Simone Collins: technology. Yes.

Using science. Well, it's been, as always, an immense pleasure.

Malcolm Collins: And do you have another call coming up? I do. Are we reheating some curry?

Simone Collins: Yeah, I was gonna saute more onion and also add more tomato per your comments. I will just

Malcolm Collins: go straight tomato.

Simone Collins: No onion, no more onion.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, I don't think I need more onion.

Saute more tomato to try to make the sauce [01:03:00] thicker.

Simone Collins: Okay, and then I'll I'll boil it down for a while. Put in

Malcolm Collins: thickening agent.

Simone Collins: I will not, I don't put in thickening agents. I don't. I know you don't.

Malcolm Collins: I'm just saying don't.

Simone Collins: I like, I like. I'm going to simmer it for a while and then it will be.

Malcolm Collins: From the actual ingredients.

Not from like, you know.

Simone Collins: Totally understand. But also the second night. Curries are always better.

Malcolm Collins: Oh, they're always better. Yeah. And you've already put in more spice, you know, so I don't

Simone Collins: that, that you, your whole thing and the Sichuan chili powder, it was like, it was tasty before and now it's just painful and you're like, Oh, you fixed it.

And I'm like, now I understand that one chef at that Indian restaurant in Scotland who was like, you're going to ruin this. And he was so mad at you. Do you want,

Malcolm Collins: because I like really spicy food. Do you want to put in a little bit of garlic as well? I think I put in from the reheat.

Simone Collins: You want me to saute more garlic before I add the tomato?

Because that's, that's sort of how it would work is I sas more. You add [01:04:00] garlic in, then I add the tomato and the, or

Malcolm Collins: put more ginger in. I don't care. One or the other.

Simone Collins: There's no, I don't have any fresh ginger, unfortunately. Garlic, I think I froze some that I could thaw out, but I don't know if this is, don't you have

Malcolm Collins: already like, like cut up garlic?

Simone Collins: I do. I have, I, I, I. Minced the fresh garlic in bulk and I have that ready to go It's just the ginger I had frozen because ginger Well, you can put garlic and olive oil in the fridge for quite a decent amount of time ginger in the fridge My understanding is you can't leave it there for as long

Malcolm Collins: Well, I mean, I guess I gotta I gotta get ready for this.

Simone Collins: I have to get ready for this. Okay.

Malcolm Collins: Bye. Love you

Oh,

Simone Collins: thank you. Malcolm

, we

Malcolm Collins: got to talk about how crazy this thread was. So, you know, GSB Stanford business school, I get this, this class blast.

Simone Collins: Yeah. His, his class. from the Stanford Graduate School of Business, still emails each other occasionally.

Rare, no, rarely,

Malcolm Collins: like once every three years, [01:05:00] one of these goes around. So, it's a big deal to send one, okay? You don't, like, do it quickly. So, anyway we get one on, like, the state of the world, because Trump is now president, and it feels like everything is unraveling for this person. And then, of course, you get this thread of, like, pylons.

Like, everything's unraveling. I can't believe this is happening. And basically, you guys know me. Okay. I had to come in and I think that this summarizes what happened pretty well. Oh God.

Speaker: Good morning, Philadelphia. With us today is

Microphone (Wireless Microphone Rx)-3: Malcolm Collins.

Speaker: local business owner and a man with a harrowing story. That's right. A few days ago, three

Microphone (Wireless Microphone Rx)-5: Corpos sent me a chain of emails slagging off our boys, Elon and Trump.

Speaker: now, I want to be very clear about something. Um, Mr. Reynolds These pieces of garbage, they don't know who the hell they're dealing with. So these punks I don't know if they wanted money, or they wanted something more sexual. Anyway, I started .

Microphone (Wireless Microphone Rx)-6: Magging.

Speaker: Bah! Bah! [01:06:00] I don't see so good, so I missed.

Microphone (Wireless Microphone Rx)-7: Then of course I get private emails like, Oh, but what about the immigrants? What about USAID? Blah, blah, blah.

Speaker: I ran after them. Bang! Tried to shoot them in the back. But I don't want so good either. Anyway, you guys all think I'm a hero. And I'll accept that responsibility. Now, were you concerned, though, that an innocent bystander may have Look, crime in this city is out of control.

Thank God

Microphone (Wireless Microphone Rx)-8: We've got two presidents with Trump and Elon absolutely killing it.

Speaker: I don't think one would have done it. I'm gonna go out and buy some more. Okay. And I think you should, too. Don't be a victim. It's time to fight back. Thank you.

Malcolm Collins: But the, the gist is, is it was very interesting to read their perspective on all this because it felt like such a mirror to my own.

I

would

say that a lot of these people are this oligarchical class, right? Like they are They are the man. Yeah.

Simone Collins: Like, I don't know what you, if you went to the Stanford graduate school of business, you aren't fighting the [01:07:00] man anymore. You've become the man. You are the establishment. I don't know what to

Malcolm Collins: tell you.

I burned, I burned all that reputation I gained by becoming a public Republican. Who's not never Trump.. But it was it was interesting to me because All of these people who had entered these oligarchical roles within our society and benefited from the existing social structure Staying within the status quo are of course terrified because the status quo is being overturned Through this administration and nobody, you know, it hurts more from that than people with positions of extent power And it was really fascinating to see the way that they saw this and the same way to me, like I had given up on civilization surviving.

I was like, look, I'm preparing my kids for a post civilization world. I do not think that anything close to something contiguous with our current or ancestral culture can survive. And now given what Trump and Elon and Vance, the triumvirate have been doing I now feel [01:08:00] hope that civilization may survive.

And at the same time, they had this exact opposite perspective of like, as an avalanche, society is collapsing from the status quo that they knew and believed was I guess inherently good because it was the status quo. And I can see that, if you're benefiting from it. Why question What's going on? You know, and so, for them, it's felt like just piece after piece.

They're like, it started slow and now it's this giant avalanche and the zone is completely flooded and I don't even know where to begin. And these are the most competent, like these aren't your democratic political class, like the, the blustering idiots or whatever. This is the behind closed doors, smartest, most competent vetted people who are running large companies.

Oh yeah. They are at a loss. The silent ruling class. Yeah. And they're just repeating this like, Oh, the, you know, this is like the Nazis. This is a dictator. You know, 51 percent of Americans voted for [01:09:00] this. Right. Ignoring what happened in Germany. I love it. One of the comments on the thing was like, they don't understand like voting in Germany.

They don't understand representation. No, I understand well over 50 percent of your citizens voted for a candidate who was right leaning and said that they would end immigration. And yet that will. End up not happening because the center right in your country is a bunch of traitors who don't care about the will of the people and only care about maintaining the status quo and their positions of institutional privilege.

So they won't side with the other side. They won't, the AFD, who they need to to get votes passed to handle immigration in an appropriate way. And your people will be erased. from history, period. There is, there is no going back. If you look at your current fertility rate and the differential fertility rates or the rate that immigrants are coming into your country, there's no going back.

There's no hope. You don't have another shot after this. They blew your last shot.

And I think that any shot that you do have now, and this is the really [01:10:00] horrifying thing about what the left is doing, especially in Europe, is going to look like, well, racism, right? Because the only way that they've shown the right, that the right can operate is, okay, we can't win an election, we can't win the popular vote, so what, we have to act with force now?

Oh, and you've imported so many people into our country who are hostile to our cultures and, and do not want to see this culture continue anymore we have to get them out of the country, like, we have to put them somewhere, and that's going to look like a horrifying mass deportation. That is going to be inhumane in the extreme because you can't just deport that many people without it being inhumane in the extreme.

But, you know, now in Germany, around 25 percent of the population is a descendant of somebody who migrated after the 1950s. Like that is absolutely wild. It's a pretty rapid

Simone Collins: shift in composition for sure.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. This is, this is not about like, Oh, immigrants should be allowed to come to our country or not.

[01:11:00] Especially when you look at the terrorist attacks that are happening regularly now in Germany. Like this is getting wild at this point but anyway, anyway so, you know, that was my perspective reading this and it's just so interesting that I do feel like we're winning. I do feel like the opposite of them, like it's like an avalanche of.

Oh my god, this old system was leading humanity to extinction. And now somebody's trying to fix this. Somebody's fixing the bloated bureaucracy. Somebody's doing things that could fix fertility rates. Somebody is fixing our trust in institutions. Getting rid of the media, which had become a basically a lie machine, and everybody knew that at this point.

Getting rid of, of, of DEI. Recently launched our initiative, DEI remediation. com. We actually have that URL. And we're going to be working to see if we can implement these services to help make companies more efficient. But I don't know what angry responses I'm going to get for sending that. I just did that thing of opening a door, throwing a grenade into a room and being like, peace.

And I think it'll

Simone Collins: be the same thing that happens with most. [01:12:00] Urban monoculture situations, realistically, which is shadow banning. I mean, it's just even more people who are now going to make sure that no matter what you are frozen out of anything that they're involved with, which they probably weren't fans of you anyway, to begin with, so no loss.

Malcolm Collins: Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. No, no. I mean the people who want to maintain their respect of the oligarchical class of the mainstream urban monoculture, like I'm toxic to them, so they can't utilize me for anything. Whereas the people who, you know, care about the dissonant thinkers and stuff like that, I am very useful to them, and they'll be like, oh yeah, this would be, this would be great.

So yeah. Well, do you want me to get started, Sivona?

Simone Collins: Let's go.

Malcolm Collins: Hold on just a second here.

Simone Collins: Oh. But yeah. Ha ha ha.

In this episode, Simone and Malcolm delve into several studies examining how male earnings impact marriage and fertility rates. They discuss findings from economic shocks like the U.S. fracking boom, which significantly increased wages and job opportunities for non-college-educated men, leading to increased births both within and outside of marriage. Contrary to popular beliefs, the study found no significant increase in marriage rates despite higher earnings. They also compare results with older economic booms and explore the influence of changing social norms. The hosts highlight other relevant studies on job displacement, lottery winnings, and their effects on fertility and marriage, ultimately emphasizing that simple financial solutions alone are insufficient to boost fertility rates significantly without addressing deeper cultural and social issues. The conversation rounds off with humorous anecdotes about their personal lives and parenting experiences, offering a reflective and engaging exploration of these complex topics.

[00:00:00]

Malcolm Collins: Hello Simone. Today we are gonna be talking about some studies that recently came out. Well, some recently came out, some came out a while ago. But looking at the topic of how earnings affect marriage rates and fertility rates and that surprisingly. For males, they no longer seem to increase marriage.

Or, I mean, who goes against the narrative that you always hear on the right? Yeah, this

Simone Collins: is important. In fact, we did an episode in which we read one of Arctotherium's articles on Aporia, where he basically posited that The solution to birth rates would be to effectively economically disempower women by sort of removing them from bureaucratic roles or eliminating those roles entirely, and to economically re empower men with a supposition that this will increase marriage rates.

Turns out that's not how it plays out in reality, at least in a post crisis world. Women earning money and having careers era.

Malcolm Collins: [00:01:00] Yeah. All right. So i'll start here with the first study This is a new one that I found really interesting male earnings marriageable men and the non maritable fertility evidence from the fracking boom so this study exploited the economic shock from fracking booms across the U.

S. regions. From 1997 to 2012, fracking created localized economic booms that significantly increased wages for non college educated men. They examined how marriage and birth rates responded to these economic improvements. Key findings, labor market effects. Fracking booms increased earnings for men without college degrees by 4.

4 percent. Per thousand dollars of new production per capital job opportunities also increased for these men with spillover effects beyond the oil and gas industry birth effects, both marital and non marital births increased in response to fracking booms. The increase was statistically significant for both types of births to suggest children are quote unquote normal goods.

People have more when income rises. [00:02:00] So I need to break down that a little bit because another study is going to look at this as well. Which is to say that there are some types of goods that people consume more of as income declines or economic slumps. Oh,

Simone Collins: oh, yeah, like I remember when we used to work in the private equity world more.

One, one period a group of investors were like, Oh yeah, we love nail salons because during recessions, women go to them more because it's like one of those small indulgences that they can still afford. Even if they want to

Malcolm Collins: buy more of like fancy soaps, fancy soaps, fancy soap company people do more on What are some of the other things people do more on?

They do more entertainment. They do more video games. Video games go up in recessions. Movies I think go up in recessions. Other types of entertainment goes up. So kids are not that type of good. And, and, and note what's being said here. Births increase. As money increases for uneducated men, which is great.

This is an area where that is

Simone Collins: really interesting that basically out of [00:03:00] wedlock births are increasing and people are choosing to have kids when they

Malcolm Collins: have more money, just not in wedlock. Is that a similar economic impact from the UBI study did not increase births. So handouts, not so much, but increasing the jobs or economy and male economic

Simone Collins: empowerment does.

Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: But to marriage effects, this is where it gets more interesting. Contrary to the reverse marriageable men hypothesis, there was no evidence that marriage rates increased. The data showed no reduction in never married rates. Or increase in marriageable rates. These findings were consistent across different modal specifications.

Fascinating. Social context comparison. They compared these results to the Appalachian coal boom of the 1970s to 80s. During the earlier coal boom, increased earnings led to more marriages. And marital births was a decrease in non marital births. This contrast suggests social norms may have changed, may have changed, they've definitely [00:04:00] changed.

That's what's changed. Yeah, because I think it's clearly changed. I mean, it reminds

Simone Collins: me a lot of Sweden. How they're, they're There are a lot of parents who just aren't married and it's sort of after that becomes normalized. It's really hard to get people to marry again.

Malcolm Collins: What's interesting here is that areas with high baseline non marital birth rates Showed a similar increase in marital and non marital births But areas with low baseline non marital birth rates only showed an increase in marital births.

Basically, this means if you live in an area where people were already having a lot of kids outside of marriage then you have an increase in the number of kids they're having outside of marriage. If you don't if you live in like a more conservative religious area, then that doesn't increase the non marital births, which is really fascinating.

So, the authors conclude that while improved economic prospects for men might have previously led to more marriages before childbearing in today's context, economic improvements lead to more births, both marital and non marital without necessarily increasing marriage rates and [00:05:00] in great natural experiment, there was the regions where you already have a lot of out of marriage births in the regions where you don't, which shows that in some regions, they've maintained this older culture.

But in the regions where they've maintained the older culture, fascinatingly, it didn't lead to more marriages.

Simone Collins: That's really interesting. It really, it looks at the interplay between economics and culture in a way I haven't seen research do for quite some time. And it's so fun to see that someone looked at this.

Malcolm Collins: Isn't that fascinating? But let's look at other studies so we can, we can drill into what other people have found on this particular subject.

Simone Collins: Well, actually,

Malcolm Collins: I want to pontificate on this more because,

Getting, getting lounge Malcolm here. So what does this mean? It means that anything you could do to increase economic situations is good for fertility rates.

So increasing general economy increases birth rate thus doge Elon amazing for everyone but government employees. [00:06:00] Um, uh, Yeah,

Simone Collins: except so the whole reason I learned about this study was from the researcher's book, the two parent privilege, which is all about the role that marriage plays in. Sustainable, successful birth rate increases, but also human thriving and everything like you're just, it's just so much more optimal across many measures for there to be marriage involved in this process.

And there's a whole book you can read about this. So, yeah, I mean, it's, it's nice that increased male economic productivity. Boosted birth rates, but I also would suspect that the lifetime fertility of those non married births or non married women who had kids is not going to be beat by the married women who started having kids.

Malcolm Collins: Maybe. Yeah, I, I would agree with [00:07:00] that, but I'd also point out here. Interesting to me is that yes, you can maintain a traditional culture. So if you maintain a traditional culture, which Shane's like out of wedlock births and stuff like that, you're not going to get the boosting out of wedlock births from increased income.

But these traditional cultures, what they haven't been able to do is fix the marriage market problem. They haven't been able to get these people married. And I think that we already see this, you know, as I point out, like If I think about like Catholic, young Catholic influencers, they're not even that young anymore.

You've got like Nick Fuentes and Pearl Davis. Both of them are fairly conservative Catholics and neither of them are married and they're like 30s now, I think, or like late 20s at this point. They, they, I think they're both in their 30s now. Yeah.

Simone Collins: Yeah. I think she's maybe like 28 now, 29.

Malcolm Collins: But that is a huge market failure right there.

Which shows that it is actually. How does this relate to how I raise my kids? How should I think about this? Well, it means I can't just rely on the old ways. I can't just try to go back to the older system. I need to [00:08:00] focus on creating new systems, new ways of relating to partnership and marriage for them to ensure that they secure a partner while they're still breedable.

Simone Collins: Oh, and also, yeah, a partner that they're invested in longterm. I think that's the thing is you need, we need to raise closers and. We collectively as a society have raised a generation of flakes. They don't commit. They don't even commit to public opinions about things, let alone partners.

Malcolm Collins: I think that a lot of this comes down to teaching your kids that a partner is an investment.

They are not a payout. And they're not

Simone Collins: a courtesan. They're not your best friend. They're not your mother or father.

Malcolm Collins: No, you, you are investing in someone. You want to be that perfect partner in 20 or 30 years. As a recent green text, I mentioned from, from 4chan where the guy found out that his girlfriend at four was wife.

Now they've been married and had kids and he's successful. It was like, I should marry him because [00:09:00] he's nerdy and nerdy men make a lot of money. I mean, that's the way women need to think. And then he's like, Oh yeah, she always pushed me to take and appreciate harder to breathe, to work a bit harder on my grades, to take the, you know, the aggressive and it's like, yeah.

Because she approached him not from a he's rich now perspective, but he's someone that was my support could be rich and influential. And I think the problem is, is that people are looking for the full package in who they're marrying. They are not looking for the outcome. Which is really bad. I agree.

But okay. So to go to some other studies where we might be able to get some other ideas here. Linzo, Jason M. 2010. Are children really inferior goods? Remember we talked about the two types of goods

evidence from

displacement driven income shocks.

This study found that job displacement leads to a significant drop in fertility among women. Specifically, there was a 1. 8 percent decrease in [00:10:00] fertility 11 years after job loss. That's not significant. I mean, that means individually in the year immediately following displacement, there was a 4 percent decrease in fertility.

And this is women. Interestingly the for males, they found no significant impact on fertility when they lost their jobs. It was just in women where it decreased their fertility, which is really fascinating. A woman with a job is having more kids than a woman who lost her job.

Simone Collins: That is interesting, especially considering how you get as, as a woman in the United States, depending on your state, but most states are very generous.

with women who have low incomes who are at or near the poverty line.

Malcolm Collins: I, I doubt women take that into effect when they're having kids. Maybe, yeah,

Simone Collins: yeah.

Malcolm Collins: And, and, and here I would posit, or note, fantastically that if you go up that study was in 2015. This didn't used to be the case. So another [00:11:00] study effect of job displacement on couples, fertility decisions found wife's job loss impact on fertility.

It found overall no statistically significant effect on fertility. When looking at all women together for highly educated women, job displacement decreases fertility. Significantly in years two to six years after displacement the effect appears to be temporary post opponent as different as a difference in cumulative births, decrease in later years So it's not affecting job, you know fertility overall.

It's affecting it short term, but you know That can have an effect husband's job loss produces significant and persistent decrease fertility has virtually no effect on women's employment Except a small negative effect in year t plus one shows no consistent effect on divorce rates, only slightly negative effects in t plus four to t plus six years.

That's time plus six, like year six. And this, again, if you want to look at this study, is effect of job displacement on couples fertility decisions. Let's see when this study was done.

2010. [00:12:00] So this trend flipped from 2010 to 2015, or one of the studies is just wrong.

Okay,

job displacement. That sounds like what you say when you don't want to tell your parents you were fired. There was a job displacement event at work recently and I've been recently displaced from my profession.

Simone Collins: Oh my gosh.

Malcolm Collins: Okay, so next year we've got 2019 study, when work disappears, manufacturing decline and falling marriage market value of men. This one trade shocks disproportionately reduce employment and earnings of young males compared to young females. It had a bunch of other studies, but it was all obvious stuff, like What is a trade shock?

Simone Collins: Like an economic recession?

Malcolm Collins: That when you have a removal of an industry in a local area, like, let's say like a

Simone Collins: factory shuts down or something,

Malcolm Collins: unfortunately affects men and not women, which I think is intuitively obvious, but I don't think a lot of people consider how much more vulnerable men [00:13:00] are to economic shocks than women are to economic shocks.

Simone Collins: Well, yeah, women have more of a social safety net, typically. I would say both among friends and family, and from the government, so there's that.

Malcolm Collins: All right Taiza et al., 2022. For every 100 individuals who won a large lottery prize, there were 5 more children born within 6 years, compared to those who did not, representing a 15 percent increase.

This was in Taiwan, that the city was done. The primary channel for this increased fertility was through first births among previously childless individuals. Rather than additional children for those who already had children, approximately 25 percent of the total fertility effect was attributable to increased marriage rates following the lottery win.

Very interesting. The fertility effect was stronger for those who received larger windfall gains or having lower pre existing wealth levels. And, and given that this was in Taiwan, I find this all very interesting. It, it, it basically shows a moderate. This basically means even if you gave people lottery level winnings, it would not increase [00:14:00] the fertility rate enough.

Even if we made your average citizen equal to a lottery winner without affecting the rest of the economy, it would not have have a 15 percent increase in fertility rate.

Simone Collins: Payouts don't work. How many times are we

Malcolm Collins: going to say it? Payouts don't work. A study using US tax data and state lottery wins between 2000 and 2019 found that lottery winnings modestly accelerated fertility, but had little effect on total fertility.

So basically they Make people have kids earlier around the time of the lottery, but you know, don't increase total fertility. The study by Sesenari et al. 2023, using Swedish lottery data, reveals significant gender differences in how lottery winnings affect marriage and fertility for men. And we talked about this, right?

Yeah, a 1 million SEK lottery equal to around 100 In 40, 000 increase, the probability of marriage was in five years by 4. 7 percentage points for a total 30 percent increase, i. e. if you get a dump of [00:15:00] 140, 000, you're gonna have a 30 percent increase in getting married. That seems right to me, but it's lower than I'd expect, actually.

I guess a lot of people just don't want to get married from the current cultural perspective. For married men, lottery wins reduce the risk of divorce within 10 years by 6 percentage points. This is per year for a total reduction of 40%. So for men, having more money dramatically decreases the probability of divorce, but I, that makes sense from even an evolutionary perspective.

I'm a woman. Feels she has a partner who is secure and makes money, as she once had said, all women really want is a partner who can make them babies and provide for the babies. She, she used slightly other words, but that's the point of it. Women want to be submissive and breedable. That's the point.

That's how evolution has coded each of us. What's the, the silly face you're making there?

Simone Collins: It goes against everything I was raised to fight for. Submissive inbreedability?

Like, so many, so many little [00:16:00] alarm bells.

Malcolm Collins: What, what, what do you, what do you think today? I mean, what do you think with the data?

Simone Collins: I think the data indicates that women, on average, benefit from being part of a meaningful family. But I don't,

Malcolm Collins: that is such a, that is such a squirrely way of wording it. I'm talking specifically, do women, so when

Simone Collins: people say submissive and breedable, I think they're really thinking about like a stay at home step for trophy wife, which is not what women find meaningful.

And as

Malcolm Collins: we pointed out, when women lose their jobs in a modern context, the fertility is impacted more than when men lose their jobs. But

Simone Collins: even like in the 1950s era Or even like when sort of housewives started sort of losing work to do, I would say, so even maybe around the turn of the century, this is when you start to see.[00:17:00]

them turning to pretty hard drugs to deal with the anxiety and the meaninglessness and the listlessness. And here's where they start. Yeah. Like they're on amphetamines. They're alcohol. I had to do Benzos. Yeah, it's not ideal. I think what women need is, is to be part of a corporate family, to do work, to have meaningful work in addition to rearing children.

Is really important. So that's why I, I, yeah, I do take exception to terms like submissive and breedable because that is not actually what women want and what women benefit from. And when they're put in those positions, they go completely crazy. But

Malcolm Collins: our son recently has become very, we got really worried.

Cause he comes and he's like, I like really women are better mom and dad. And he's saying this, he like, won't do stuff with me now because I'm a man. He's like, well,

Simone Collins: yeah, he'll be like, well, daddy has to pay if he wants me to do this, whereas mommy gets it for free. I like [00:18:00] girls better. And we're like, not

Malcolm Collins: very worried.

Yeah. I was like, what is, what is all of this about? They fill in his head with nonsense. No, what we learned and this has become a persistent issue. I'd argue it's like 20 percent of what he talks about when he's talking about his name. It's not

Simone Collins: 20%.

Malcolm Collins: It's just a daily theme for sure. Well because I'm trying to get him to do things and he always says no because you're a man.

Because you're a man. But, but he will then follow up with, and you can't have babies. And

Simone Collins: specifically men are inferior because they cannot grow a baby in their belly.

Malcolm Collins: Yes. And he makes this very clear. This is, this is clearly his thing was women. Women make babies. And I am so glad that however, we did not try to incept him with, I do not know how he became obsessed with this differentiation.

Simone Collins: Well, it came up after I explained to him that. You know, we're trying to get pregnant and showing him ultrasounds and being like, hopefully this is your little brother, et cetera, et cetera. And I mean, he's, he was used to the last pregnancy because both the, like me and our nanny were [00:19:00] pregnant at the same time.

So like the kids are very accustomed to pregnancy now. So I think he's just like, this is cool. And he just now sees me as like the cool 3d printer. Of

Malcolm Collins: new siblings of Of new siblings. This video, him talking about wanting a hundred siblings. Yeah. Just said I'm sure to keep going. He's like, I'll help mom, I'll help.

Yeah.

Simone Collins: He'll, he'll feed them a giant glass of milk, so it's fine.

Malcolm Collins: He'll take care of them.

Yeah. Doesn't even worry about it. But I love this 'cause I can so imagine like one of these like trans activists going to his school to try to convert him and he is like. She they're like, yeah, you can be a woman. He'd be like, oh my God, I can be a woman.

Like I can grow a baby in my belly. I love that. I get to grow a baby and they'd be like, well, no, I mean, you can't. And he's like, what the Octavian would so say something super offensive. He's like. Why would you want to be a woman if you can't make babies? Which is so based life destroying life shattering here.

By the way, I've seen some things of like, arguments recently. that trans people should be like breastfeeding their [00:20:00] children. Like measuring like the milk that they produce versus the milk that natal females produce to try to argue. It has similar nutritional properties. I mean, it doesn't, but like they, they want to argue it's close enough that they should be doing breastfeeding as well to help them bond.

No, not bond, affirm their gender. I mean, they don't care about the kids. Be honest here. These are people who are

Simone Collins: The amount of work that a trans person or a gay person has to go through to have a child is heartbreaking. Both financially and logistically. They care about their kids.

Malcolm Collins: Trans people can just have kids naturally.

Not necessarily. No, most of them save sperm and stuff like that. And they're married. Like, yeah. Well, they'd still do IVF. Like, they're still working for it. All in the same bucket. Like, come on. And I actually want to do more pushing against that on this show. This idea of [00:21:00] LGBTQ, trans people f*****g stapled themselves on to a people who are fighting for their lives.

Like that is not they they were not that important in the early game It's weird. Like you look at like the stonewall things and stuff like that They're like, oh, it's all trans women. I was like gay people in crossdressers. Like it wasn't there but no trans people there like they they have inserted themselves into history and taken over the historical narrative of the fight for gay rights.

And continue to attempt to I agree, it is hard for gay people to have kids. No gay person, I know, like no sane gay person is going to try to breastfeed their kids.

Simone Collins: True story. Yeah. They're buying breast milk from other women and doing their very best and not yeah.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, they're, they're doing their best, but they're not trying to breastfeed the kids themselves.

This is weird stuff. [00:22:00]

Anyway. So, male fertility increased all time horizons. Ten years after winning, men had 0. 056 more children. per million S. E. K. 1, a 13. 5 percent increase in fertility overall. Well, that doesn't sound like that much. Again, you can't fix this with, with lotteries. For women, lottery wins had little effect on marriage rates or longevity in this study.

Again, this is a study Cesarina, 2023. The only significant effect for women was a near doubling of short run probability of divorce. And we've covered this story before, which if you give a woman a lot of money, Like out of the blue, She gets divorced and tries to trade up. She doesn't [00:23:00] have more kids.

And this has been quoted by a lot of progressives who want to attack us. They don't think we should give women money or women shouldn't be allowed to like have money and it's like, no, we were talking about like a lottery winning study, but you know, of course, you know, you having fun tickling.

This is, I think the biggest take away from all of this for me is people were taking away the individual, like, oh, increasing the income here does a little bit for fertility, giving people a lottery doesn't help female fertility, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But the biggest thing for me is even huge amounts of money cannot affect fertility meaningfully.

Simone Collins: Well, we say this again and again. Yeah. But like, yeah, beyond little government payouts, beyond 50, 000 to people in South Korea. Yeah. This is like even even lottery amounts. Not gonna do it.

Malcolm Collins: Even lottery amounts. Do they have like a 15%? We're seeing this 13 percent here. We're seeing this across studies.

[00:24:00] They do not. We need 200%. We need 150%. Yeah, but even

Simone Collins: then, especially if everyone got it, I feel like it would still not be effective because then I imagine just everyone would feel relatively poor or the same. And a lot of this comes down to Yeah. If they feel relatively wealthy or well resourced vis a vis other people.

I don't know. Maybe I'm wrong.

Malcolm Collins: I mean, I think it shows how deeply indulgent our society has become in a really negative context that, you know, even if you have everything, it's not enough. And that's really scary, you know, because it means that you do need to build alternate cultures. And, and it also shows that you do not, you get a boost in regions where people aren't having out of wedlock merges, but not enough of a boost to be like substantial.

So even in areas that have traditional cultural practices, lottery isn't enough. And again, I say the old ways [00:25:00] won't save you. You can't just love empowering

Simone Collins: men economically again. And I'm all for it. I think that right now men are, are unfairly disadvantaged in labor markets and circumstances. However, just re empowering men or on the inverse, disempowering women is not going to solve the problem.

And people keep just thinking like, Oh, we'll just. Just change this dial and it'll work. No, we have to create Pandora's box has been opened. And this is something that you talked about in the pragmatist guide to crafting religion as well, that you can't, once this box has been opened, once we have the internet and globalization, and we've developed the equivalent, the cultural equivalent of super viruses, you don't get to undo that and just go.

Back to the old ways, unless you choose to air gap your culture and religion and live like the Amish, which still isn't going to work because you are living at the whims of the sovereignty of whoever is allowing you to practice your cultural and religious freedom. Big if, if they continue doing that. So.

we have to just develop a [00:26:00] new way forward. And there are things that can be done. We've been talking a lot internally about policy interventions that would make a big difference for prenatalism, but not really cost anything. And I mean, a big, a big factor that we're talking about this morning is right now, in many ways, it feels economically irresponsible to get married.

And so if at any point filing. jointly, for example, or as a married couple causes some kind of tax disadvantage that should be removed. You shouldn't be penalized by the IRS. If you're married, you're doing, you're doing the United States a service by being married. Yes. Not the. Oh, there was, I, I can't remember what country this was, but I, I learned about this one attempt to address this marriage issue where I think men in this country got a penalty if they weren't married.

But the penalty could be waived if they could prove that a [00:27:00] woman had rejected their proposal. that there became this predatory class of female predatory enterprising. Okay. Okay. Would for a fee, a reasonable fee, I'm sure officially reject your proposal so that you would be exempt from this, this not married penalty.

The government had to stop that policy.

Malcolm Collins: So did it, did it just, it is still tax them? No, they just

Simone Collins: dropped the whole thing.

Malcolm Collins: Oh, I wouldn't drop the whole thing. I'd be like, it doesn't matter if you're rejected, like, do better. Yes, try again. Try again, a hole.

Simone Collins: I know, yeah, the, the, the cop out was, that was, that was stupid.

It was unnecessary. But yeah, God let's,

Microphone (Wireless Microphone Rx): It was Argentina in the 1900s, early 1900s. , fun, fun, humorous little fact here. In Chad, , now you are fined if you turn down a marriage proposal that's between 23 and 39 for women and [00:28:00] 15 for men. , and hilariously, , of women age 20 to 24 in this country as of 2015, 60 percent were married when they were children.

, so, you know, great country. , if you're wondering what the, motivation behind this law was, the country's leadership says, , it was inspired by the Quran. So, you know, religion of peace. Religion of peace.

Also note here that she is about to find another instance in which this happened in Italy, but the more reported on instance was Argentina.

Simone Collins: oh, really? Who was it? Italy implemented a tax penalty for unmarried men in 1927 under Benito Mussolini's regime. This bachelor tax could be waived if a man could prove that a woman had rejected his marriage proposal. That's like a South American country.

Very interesting.

Malcolm Collins: Looks like a couple of countries

Simone Collins: did try though. In 1941, the U. S. S. R. introduced a childlessness tax that applied to men age 25 to 50. So childlessness too. [00:29:00] So just being married. You were supposed

Malcolm Collins: to have a kid by 25. Yeah, if

Simone Collins: you are, if you do not have a kid. How do you, how have you not knocked

Malcolm Collins: someone up by 25?

Oh, and,

Simone Collins: no, no, so in, okay, so 1941 in the U. S. S. R. So this is like pre World War II. This is interesting. This is when they're really trying to increase birth rates. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So the penalty also applied to women age 20 to 45 who are unmarried and without women. If you

Malcolm Collins: haven't had your first kid by 20 tax here, we need to implement indulgent slut.

How dare you not? How dare you be 20 and not have at least one child. And apparently the norms, this is what we need to be having kids.

Simone Collins: Then in Romania, during Nicolae Ceaușescu's regime, a celibacy tax targeted unmarried adults and childless couples as part of a pronatalist policy. I didn't know about a celibacy tax.

I

Malcolm Collins: love that! What do we call it, like [00:30:00]

Simone Collins: the incel tax now? The incel tax, right? And then post World War Two, Poland, a bachelor tax was Briefly imposed on unmarried men and childless couples to promote population growth. So I like dink tax. Can you imagine? But I, yeah, I think more of it being like a tax break on income for married couples is more fair.

It seems unfair to impose an additional tax and more fair to reward good behavior. Why? Why sticks? Why not carrots? Because it's more fun. I

Malcolm Collins: dig that. Yes! It's more fun. It is your expectation that you contribute to society. Okay? 20 to 45. Ouch. 20 to 45.

Simone Collins: Jeez. That's insane. That's insane. Right, Indy? You don't need to start that early.

Malcolm Collins: Andy, you can start at 20. I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna pressure you. I mean, if you're not, if you're not a teen, if you don't have teen pregnancies, basically, [00:31:00] you know,

Simone Collins: I, I really was like bullish on this idea that like, by the time I'd had my last kid, then I would immediately be moving on to my next, like my first grandkid.

And I was like, ah, yeah, Octavian is not going to be into that. No, he's into it. You know? Oh yeah. I know

Malcolm Collins: the purpose of women. Women are for breeding.

Simone Collins: There was this one conversation I had with him where he was like well, well, girls like me, like, he's really like, he wants to attract a good partner. He it's really.

I'm like, yeah, I will, I will show you how to get girls to like you. You need to act like a gentleman and take good care of yourself. And

that's really sweet. You get to actually like me.

Yeah, I've saved all of his valentines from kindergarten. He

Malcolm Collins: has his personality. I won't say all of our kids, Torsten. Maybe a difficult partner for somebody.

Simone Collins: No! Torsten is me, and you like me, so I

Malcolm Collins: like you as a female. You as a male might be a little too [00:32:00] autistic.

Simone Collins: No, he's just going to be a visionary CEO, and so he can have a stable of partners.

Malcolm Collins: Torsten is rich. Yeah, I can see him being a rich eccentric. He loves collecting things.

Simone Collins: We can collect. Our

Malcolm Collins: daughter, Titan, I would say, oh my god, she is gonna be the easiest, like, to pair off with somebody high quality.

She is very, very, very happy all the time. So fun. She's so playful. Really affectionate. Yeah. She really likes like affectionate, like aggressively affectionate, I guess I'd say. And really loves, like, playing pranks or breaking rules. And I'm like, this is like the core, like, slightly, aggressively affectionate and loving side of the world.

Simone Collins: You're gonna be Very, like, yeah, a gregarious tomboy. Yeah. It's great. And very tomboyish as

Malcolm Collins: well. Yeah. We'll see about you.

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: We don't know about you yet. She's a lot like

Simone Collins: her

Malcolm Collins: sister. [00:33:00] Alright, love you to death Simone. We're going taquitos tonight?

Simone Collins: I actually have changed my mind on that. And I think that the, the leftover curry that we have is better for the hash browns.

And then I can use the dang dang ground beef better for taquitos, I think.

Malcolm Collins: Oh, and is it that you haven't thawed the dang dang meat? I

Simone Collins: mean, I can do that immediately, but we need to use up the curry that's refrigerated first.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, it'll go better on, well, I'm okay with using it on hash browns or taquitos, whatever you want to do.

Simone Collins: Well, I want

Malcolm Collins: to, I'll, I'll do it on hash browns

Simone Collins: because

Malcolm Collins: is it easier for hash browns?

Simone Collins: Yeah, cause if I do taquitos, I have to take it. I have to like thinly slice or kind of mash everything so that you have, because otherwise there are giant chicken chunks in your taquitos.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, I'm okay with either.

Just your taquitos are amazing, so whatever you want to do, I will And tomorrow night

Simone Collins: will be taquito night, if you'll bear with me here. Dandan

Malcolm Collins: would go well with taquitos anyway, I agree with that. I think so.

Simone Collins: With like cheddar sharp cheddar cheese and dandan. Oh, yeah. [00:34:00] Noodle meat. And we gotta use the rest of that

Malcolm Collins: mozzarella.

We could also do

Simone Collins: No, God, what is wrong? You do not understand cheese at all. You think mozzarella goes in taquitos? What is wrong with you? And it's expired anyway. You can't eat expired dairy. You, like, freak out. So I'm eating it slice by slice. Because I can drink expired milk, you can't. You're smelling me like

Malcolm Collins: This is marrying a hardcore, like, Appalachian wife.

Yeah, like, when our food

Simone Collins: expires, that's like, Oh, okay, I'll eat it. And, like, Malcolm smells it and he's like, You're

Malcolm Collins: a b***h. Of this woman is incredible. This is what we need in America. Women who eat the expired meat for the first time. Someone's gotta do it. Her drawing is steak, by the way. Well done.

Don't forget. Okay. I love you to death. I am genuinely satisfied with you as a wife. You're doing a good enough job right now. I won't You won't [00:35:00] defenestrate me. Even though you're not submissive and breedable, you've confirmed this. What does that look like?

Whee!

Sorry, it's a meme. I love it.

Simone Collins: It's a meme made by incels for incels, as you

Malcolm Collins: know. No, no,

Simone Collins: no, no, no, no, no, no, no,

Malcolm Collins: it's

a meme made for incels. Me,

just

Simone Collins: like Facebook was originally made for you so you could watch all of your former classmates.

Malcolm Collins: I love you too. All right.

Simone Collins: I'll see you downstairs in a little bit. You're the best. Oh God.

Microphone (Wireless Microphone Rx)-2: So, NatalCon is coming up late March in Austin, Texas, use the [00:36:00] word Collins and you can receive a discount. , again, I know it's expensive, but my understanding is they're still in the red this year, they were huge in the red last year. It just costs a lot to put together a conference like this.

Note that we are not the organizers of this, , but we are friendly with them and it is the, you know, annual pronatalist slash natalist convention, so I feel obligated to do my best to help them out and promote it.

Dive into the fascinating discussion between Simone and Malcolm as they explore a revealing study on heterosexual men's disgust response to images of two men kissing and maggots. They analyze the implications of these findings on human sexuality, disgust responses, and cultural norms. From the biological basis of disgust to the role of socialization, this episode covers the layers of human arousal, progressive culture, and societal perceptions. They also touch on unique fetishes, power dynamics, and their own personal experiences. Expect an insightful conversation filled with groundbreaking predictions and thought-provoking insights.

[00:00:00]

Malcolm Collins: Hello Simone. Today we are going to be talking about a study that came out recently titled What Did Two Men Kissing and A Bucket of Maggots Have in Common? Heterosexual Men's. Indistinguishable salivary, a amylase response to photos of two men, kissing and disgusting images. This is gonna be one of those days where we're gonna go a lot into disgust.

Mm-hmm.

Sexuality and point out, but yet again, I called it. I called it, everybody said that I was wrong. Everybody said my ideas were crazy. Now everyone agrees with all of my genius. I

Simone Collins: think that Donald Trump for some of his press conferences has like an I was right hat. Yes. This is my, I was right, right hat And I think you need to put on your I was right hat.

Yeah. We, we need one too.

Speaker: We are gonna win so much. You may even get tired of winning and you'll say, please, please, it's too [00:01:00] much winning. We can't take it anymore,

Malcolm Collins: I no, I, am I ever gonna get credit for being so effing right all the time? No. No. Am I? No. Is there ever gonna be like the scientist? I love it. That like with, with, with eyes. They literally coined the same term I coined, which was utility convergence. And, and they're like, so we found this weird thing in AI where we get utility convergence and nobody predicted this in the space.

And I'm like, I predicted it like literally 10 years ago. What are you talking about? I wrote many papers and things on this. Yeah. Yeah. And this is something that in our, you know, we talk a lot about human sexuality. I'd predicted this, and you're gonna be shocked, you're gonna be shocked by this, but it says a lot about one arousal and disgust work.

Mm-hmm.

Two. One of the big lies that progressives tell everyone about it. So to read part of the abstract here, participant current study viewed six different slideshows depicting same [00:02:00] sex, PDA, that's public display of affection or, or kissing, mixed sex, PDA, everyday items and disgusting images. This is like bowls full of maggots.

Okay? While providing saliva samples in the lab, a series of paired sampled T-test were performed and found that SAA, this is saliva MLAs, which is produced by discussed responses like neurologically. It triggers the release of this enzyme responses to images of same sex men kissing. And universally disgusting images were significantly greater than SAA responses to a slideshow depicting everyday items.

So basically we so-called it hold on, hold on. It gets better. It gets better. The results held across the full sample regardless of individuals, individual level of prejudice. Specifically prejudice against gay individuals. The results of the current study suggest that all individuals, not just highly sexually prejudiced individuals, [00:03:00] experience psychological responses indicative of stress when witnessing male, , same sex, couple kissing,

Simone Collins: no wait.

Did they also try this on gay men?

Malcolm Collins: Not in this study, the possibility of socialized disgust response to same-sex PDA is discussed. Basically, let me lay this out for people who didn't catch what this means. It means that the disgust reaction that we have. We being most straight males have when watching two gay men kiss, which is a strong reaction.

I talked about it myself and I couldn't get blow back from this. Like I had a gay roommate all through high school. Okay. Because I went to a boarding school in college, like my best friends were gay. I hung out with gay people all the time. I am not like an anti-gay person.

I have an extreme to seeing men, kissing men, extreme disgust reaction. And what this is showing is that your acceptance of this is not [00:04:00] tied to your disgust reaction. This has a multiplicative downstream implications. The first being is that one, this disgust reaction is not socialized. This is not because of your religiosity or anything like this.

Mm-hmm. Something that you are born with. Mm-hmm. It makes it much more likely that gay individuals and, and, and I, I've noted this in the pragmatist gay sexuality, because I think one of the core mysteries of human sexuality is why male gayness does not appear like female. And it appears like the exact inversion of male straightness.

Yeah.

Simone Collins: It's not like, yeah. So they're not, they're not sexual like a woman they are. Mm-hmm. They are, gay. They're gay like a man.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Yes. So, so what I mean by this is men, your average straight man has an aversion, a disgust response at the idea of man kissing men. Like grosses them [00:05:00] out. Yeah. And they have an arousal response to the idea of.

You know, them kissing a woman. Mm-hmm. Sometimes they actually have a disgust response to seeing other men kiss women, but we'll get into that later. But the point being but they'll always have an arousal response for a woman kissing a woman, basically more guys in a situation, typically the worst it is for your average straight male.

Now. No, this isn't always true. But the dis distraction you gave me was comment. Women do not have this response. Yeah. Women is actually fairly rare for a woman to have a disgust response to seeing to women kiss.

Simone Collins: Yeah. I mean, welcome to the world of, of Yi. That's

Malcolm Collins: right. Surprises no one. You know, women who are consuming that, that you, you mean two men kisses Ywe.

Or

Simone Collins: I'm saying women are not turned off

Malcolm Collins: by men kissing. Right. But men are not turned off by seeing two women kiss, right? Oh, yeah. No, no, no, no,

Simone Collins: no. The

Malcolm Collins: point I'm making is women are not turned off by seeing two women kissed. They do not have this same disgust response. Yeah, yeah, yeah. [00:06:00] Seeing people of their gender kiss, which you

Simone Collins: also called because women don't really.

Oriented. This is something that, so if you haven't checked this out, read the Pragmatist Guide to Sexuality in it, Malcolm Posits that not only is sexuality oriented on an arousal to disgust. Spectrum, but also that men's or sexuality is more oriented around primary and secondary sexual characteristics like boobs and like things sing signaling.

That has

Malcolm Collins: very little to do with what we're talking about right now.

Simone Collins: Well, but, but I'm just summarizing really quickly and that women are not actually that attached to. Gender or sex? It's more about power dynamics. Yeah. It's more about

Malcolm Collins: dominance of submission, the dominance. So they wouldn't, it doesn't

Simone Collins: really matter to them.

If it's like women on women, men on women, and women on, on men. Like any mixture

Malcolm Collins: is more tied to arousal than males. So, so the, one of the big mysteries of human sexuality is men, when they're born gay, do not appear to have the standard arousal pathway of a woman. Which is weird, [00:07:00] which honestly makes more

Simone Collins: sense because

Malcolm Collins: that, I don't know, it just seems weird to me.

It doesn't, it doesn't, it doesn't make more sense. It's weird really. They appear to have an exact inversion, and you can see this when you survey gay men. Yeah, gay men actually, not as frequently as straight men, but fairly often have the disgusted reaction to females. They have a disgusted reaction to vaginas.

Yeah. They have a disgusted reaction. To dress. A lot of people have discussed reaction a lot people, but, but, but I'm pointing out that they have discussed reactions to females. Mm-hmm. Why is effing, why are they getting an inversion of a disgusted reaction instead of the disgusted reaction of the other gender?

Like, it almost makes sense to me. I could be like,

Simone Collins: no, it doesn't, it doesn't, this, this, the way things are, makes more sense to me. Because if you develop as a male, you're developing like all of the mechanics of the sort of male sexual orientation. It just happens to be that there's a sign clip somewhere.

That seems more, more simple to me and more likely than somehow you having like [00:08:00] become exempt from all of the other elements of male sexuality. Right.

Malcolm Collins: Well this provides evidence for this showing that the disgust reaction in males. Is biological or like inbuilt? Yes, straight males. So this is much

Simone Collins: of you born gay.

Malcolm Collins: Yes. It also, it also adds evidence to the you are born gay or straight idea. If a male is having an active, and this is why I've said this in, in males who may not have this response, or males who may be gay, don't understand, why can't you just power through it? The response my body has. To males.

Kissing is the response my body has to a bucket of maggots. Like, why don't

Simone Collins: you just stick your dick into a bucket of mag maggots that would you,

Malcolm Collins: you can learn to like it. But what's important from our series so people know this, is we argue that. Anything that has a disgust reaction. And it happens more frequently in males and females can have a slang flip and accidentally become due to something [00:09:00] during our biological development become an arousal pathway.

So there is actually an entire fetish category. Called creepy crawlers tied to stuff like buckets and maggots being like poured on you and stuff like that. And we point out in the book that you do not see sign flips tied to any other response. You don't see sign flips tied to fire. You don't see side flips tied to height.

Anything else that has a strongly charged emotional response, you don't see a sign flip with an arousal response unless that response is discussed like dead bodies, infants, you know, all of the things that would cause disgust in a normal person, you're gonna get some small portion of the population.

And we also argue that the sign flip, the volume stays the same. So if you have a really high disgust towards something, normally the volume of arousal to that thing is gonna be really high if you get a sign flip. But this also has implications for like progressive culture more broadly. So one, it adds evidence to the theories that we had that this is inbuilt in progressives we're just lying when they're like, I don't get disgusted by this.

But. [00:10:00] It also shows that when progressives, and I thought maybe progressives have like maybe somehow trained themselves because like I've been like, you can't get rid of arousal patterns or maybe you can't get rid of disgust. Well, no, I know you can't get rid of disgust patterns either if they're working on the same circuitry, but with a sign flip.

That would mean that when progressives are like, well being, thinking fat women are disgusting looking. Which by the way, that's the reason there's a portion of men who are into. Fat women, because generally fat women create a disgust response. And anything that creates a disgusted response, the small fortune of the population is gonna find arousing.

But anyway so women who are obese and create this, there, it's like this thing that's like, oh, well you've only been socialized to feel that way. You, you, you don't actually, like, that's a cultural thing. And we see here, no, it's not a cultural thing. Now here I note, and we talk about this in the book, is people will say oh, well, aren't there cultures like random Island cultures or wherever where like obesity and women is seen as a, an arousing thing?

No, there are not. That is a complete fiction. Let me explain. There were [00:11:00] cultures where it was reported that people. Chose wives who were more obese historically, but in every single instance when they've gone back and measured those cultures after they became wealthy, that has disappeared and inverted.

So what we were seeing there was just obesity being a. Indicator of wealth that was not correlated to the other parts of arousal. And so men were basically like, I'm choosing this woman because she's wealthier. There, there did not appear to be. And, and this is also, we've argued in other videos that arousal likely is correlated to like.

I, I'd say ethnic and cultural groups in a way. So it's not even like, it wouldn't even go our, against our theory that in some weird culture on some weird island they had developed an arousal pathway that had evolved. Right? And I'm like, okay, okay. That makes sense. But it appears that this is such a strong signal that no one, no culture has ever evolved.

A genuine sign flip [00:12:00] on this. At like a, like a, a, a mainstream level, which is really fascinating.

Simone Collins: I also imagine that a lot of these historical cultures that had interest in rotund women were just not emaciated women at this time, and they were seen as fat because. You know, wow, you can afford a few excess calories, and that meant that they were slightly more rounded than the average woman. Mm-hmm.

So, I, I mean, I just don't, I don't think the level of overfeeding that we see today is as common though. I also think that the, the sign flip issue that has, has led to fat enthusiasts today would've led to some in the past. And it could be that there were some fat enthusiasts in the past who were also.

Malcolm Collins: Oh's, the famous fat enthusiast artist who a lot of people use to argue that Rubens like Ruben. I wouldn't say it's re starts as an R. Ruben Rubens, isn't it? Rubens Ruben. Yeah. And it's very clear he had a fetish, like the women who he chooses, they're the same one who Fat fetishes choose. I'm, I'm

Simone Collins: just Google Imaging, Paul Peter, Paul Rubins, and I'm looking at these images.[00:13:00]

Are they chubster?

I mean not, not by modern standards.

Malcolm Collins: Not by modern standards, but it's, contemporaries talked about him as if he was a fetishist, and famous people can be fetishists. One of the things I always point out is well, if he was a chubby chaser. What was the famous Irish writer who liked women farting on him?

Simone Collins: Oh yes. Delight. I like your

Malcolm Collins: cute

Simone Collins: little

Malcolm Collins: tootsies

Simone Collins: or whatever. Read. Yeah. A letter

Malcolm Collins: that he wrote to his lover. Just so good. What was his name again? This was

Simone Collins: God, we're so bad with names. I'll

Malcolm Collins: find it post. But yeah, you, you see these in the past. That doesn't mean that they were normal. They were still very obviously.

Minority arousal patterns. Yeah. And we're not arguing that these minority arousal patterns are modern. I, I do find the issue, and we talked about this in another video, and it's something that like, you know, but what is, what is, what is, we, we sort of debated on this, I assume that attraction to younger phenotypes is clustered in Japanese groups. Like that seems likely to me. I, I, there's some other ones you talked about like attraction to, [00:14:00] like navels and armpits being clustered in Indian groups.

Yeah, yeah. I,

Simone Collins: there's, there's gotta be

Malcolm Collins: a little bit of this going on, you

Simone Collins: know,

it'd be weird if there wasn't.

Malcolm Collins: But well, yeah, it, it, it would be weird if there wasn't, it would also be weird. So keep in mind where we talk about like where dominance and submission gets pulled into this. Mm. Is what we assume is dominance and submission calls arousal because it was just a system that the brain used for dominance and submission displays that humans do.

Mm-hmm. Dominance and submission displays are used very frequently in animal species to signal social status. They're not animal species, mammals, social mammals specifically. So think of a dog like showing it's ready to be mounted as a way of saying I'm submissive. Yeah. And we know that this isn't a female male thing because in species where females are the dominant gender, like spotted hyenas they actually develop something called a pseudo penis, which they can use what an erection with to show when they're submissive.

So in the same way sometimes male animals will, sort of prepare to be mounted as a way [00:15:00] of showing submission to another male animal.

Mm-hmm.

Or female animal even in, in cases in species where females as a dominant erections are the way that you show submission. Which I just find absolutely fa.

Fascinating. Okay, so, so here's what Grok says on this, okay. Research suggests that fetishes may have heretical components with genetic factors contributing to about half of the ver variation in paraphilic interests. Okay? Rude fetishes.

The evidence leads towards a genetic influence, but environmental factors also play a significant role and more research is needed for specific fetishes.

Simone Collins: Well, most of your research indicated that environmental factors were not. Influential. Am I for forgetting something? Well, they might

Malcolm Collins: mean influential in terms of like changing outcomes.

Not influential in like a, I saw this, therefore I developed ex fetish way, like I'm sure a

Simone Collins: lot fewer people are gay when that means that you get thrown off a building. For example, that's an environmental factor.

Malcolm Collins: No, but I mean, they're still gay. They're still like in the population, right? Yeah. But maybe

Simone Collins: that's what Crock is talking about though.

Studies

Malcolm Collins: on related [00:16:00] sexual behaviors like PDA files show readability estimates at 49%. That's not surprise. No one choose, no one would want to choose to have this arousal pathway. Yeah, that's, that's true. Fetish. I'm sure you could get

Simone Collins: any of these people who have that arousal pathway, the chance to undo it, they would undo it so fast.

Malcolm Collins: Fetishes are specific sexual purposes and blah, blah, blah. Studies on paraphilias, which encompass fetishes, indicate a genetic component, for instance, a 2015 study and the Journal of Medicine found her the credibility of sexual interest in you. Youth was 49% suggesting a significant gen significant role.

A broader meta-analysis from nature Genetics in 2015 reported the average readability of 49% across many human traits, supporting the idea that sexual preferences might also be partially ible. While direct studies on fetishes are limited, the evidence for paraphilias suggests it finishes likely have a her readable component.

Though environmental factors like upbringing are also crucial. Disagree on that. [00:17:00] Actually, in our studies on this, they were so shocking to us because I thought that at least like being abused, pre puberty would have an effect on people's adult arousal patterns. And in our data basically nothing that happened to you, even sexual abuse.

Affected your adult arousal pattern significantly. They may suppress them a little bit, but that was it. Yeah. Most of what affected your arousal pattern has happened after or around puberty.

Simone Collins: Yeah. I think in over the long term, in terms of another, you were right. Thing, I think we're gonna find that I.

The, her ability is higher than those that 40% range presented. Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: Here's an interesting thing an interesting finding is that in twin studies, which impair identical in fraternal twins show higher similarities of paraphilic interest among identical twins pointing to a genetic link. Even though most research focuses on broader sexual orientation than specific fetishes.

Mm. Well, I mean this then would make fetishes less distant from the gay thing than people would say historically, because if you don't have a choice in what your fetishes are, [00:18:00] especially if you're born with them. Mm-hmm.

Fascinating. Well, no, if you're born with them, then you can't say that being gay is any different from any other fetish.

Simone Collins: Oh, oh, I see your point.

Malcolm Collins: So people like, why do we have to be

Simone Collins: so accommodating of the gay things? We're not accommodating

Malcolm Collins: to put fetishes, right. We're not accommodating to any other fetish category.

Simone Collins: I think the, the bigger issue is that most. One, the gay is gay. Being gay is, I think a very different kind of scenario because it typically involves a discussed reaction to a very, very common social institution that until very recently was kind of a default setting for people. Oh. And being forced into that is really hard.

It's not like foot fetishists were, you know, also simultaneously disgusted by hands and forced to do you know, manicures every single day. Right. So I, I think it's just, it's sort of a different level and it has to do with major [00:19:00] societal Well, I disagree. I

Malcolm Collins: think that there's a lot of fetishes that there is a real normalization around shaming people for, for having, even if they don't hurt anyone else.

And that's really unfair if when you consider the, the people say, well, for example, I am find people like pathetic and gross who have like, I don't know, like a, a, a maggots fetish. Remember I, I talked about like the creepy Carly fetish or like, being farted on fetish. Like, James Day Joyce, that's, that's who I think it was.

James Joyce. I think you're right. Yeah I find that like creepy, weird and empathetic, and I can mock somebody for that in public and, and somebody would say, well, it's okay because this causes a disgust response in most people. And then I would counter back. I'd be like, yeah, but so does two men kissing.

So why does that get carved out as different than this getting carved out as different, i, I, again, I'm not, you know, I, I, I don't know how I feel across the board on this. I'm largely four people being like, look, if you have an unusual arousal pattern, I also wonder if [00:20:00] communities like, okay, consider something like this.

Mormons, and we talked about this almost certainly in another episode, like the Mormon, the sharing partner thing must certainly have different arousal patterns than other populations due to their history of one, how they recruited people and two, polyamory. I think so polygamy and I suspected that they likely have a lower discussed response to seeing their, partners kiss other people because wives that had this response didn't have as many offspring likely. And that is why you see more Mormon partner sharing sort of thing. Oh yeah. Culture.

Simone Collins: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Malcolm Collins: Where it's like, well, we share when we do everything, but like, you penetration or something, and therefore it's okay.

Mm-hmm. So here's what I asked it next. I asked it for ethnically tied fetishes because I was like, is there any evidence for this? Oh, it's saying it can't find it, but it is saying that BDSM seems more common in western countries such as Germany and the Netherlands. BSM

Simone Collins: strikes me as so white and also so German.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, so German, it's extremely

Simone Collins: German.

Malcolm Collins: And then you have the the famous British [00:21:00] Vice, you know, which is A-B-D-S-M related thing being, being submissive as a male, no more like

Simone Collins: school teacher spankings.

Malcolm Collins: Very interesting. I I love what GR says. Regional observation studies, like ALA's survey suggest that BDMI love just like

Simone Collins: name drop other, well, I mean, it was big on, big on X, so,

Malcolm Collins: yeah.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. All right. Hold on. I, I'm gonna see if I can find any other here. Evidence from cross-cultural studies research. For instance, a study from PMC on ethnic differences in sexual attitudes among US college students found that Asians reported more conservative sexual attitudes compared to Euro-Americans and Hispanics, but did not address fetishes.

Similarly, a study from HRAF on sexuality noted that society very widely in their tolerance of non reproductive sex, but did not provide data on fetishes. A notable exception was alas 2022 survey, which analyzed fetish preference by region including North America, Western Europe, et cetera. The survey was 10,000 responses from some regions found that BDSM.[00:22:00]

And age play were more popular in North America and Western Europe while foot fetishes showed relative consistent prevalence across regions. However, this data is based on self-reported surveys, blah, blah, blah. All pretty much all sexual data is, I love when it like dismisses a-list studies. I'm like, where do you think all this other data is coming from?

Simone Collins: Come on. She has amazing sample sizes. Her selection bias is, is quite low because she sources outside of just people who follow her. She uses positively to get really good representative audiences. I'm ugh, ala, does not get the credit she deserves. Someday.

Malcolm Collins: Oh, oh, this is interesting. BDSM and company named Bondage discipline.

Everyone know that? Okay. Byta Bell's 2024 report of over 12,700 individuals found 86% of Americans had either tried BDSM or expressed interest. Well, I mean, yeah, after 50 Shades

Simone Collins: of Gray taking off so much, can you be so surprised?

Malcolm Collins: Well, yeah, I mean 50 Shades of Gray I think showed that was in [00:23:00] Europe and America.

This is a normal AFA pattern of women. They may

Simone Collins: not be getting it, but they want it.

Malcolm Collins: We've had other videos on this where like stuff on this, think men are driving this whenever. Yes. Men have to abuse us. And I'm like, you can look at the data. Men actually don't, 'cause it's a lot of work. They actually don't.

Well, so it's not that no. Men do, actually men do get aroused by hurting women, subjugating women dominating women but they do not get aroused by it as frequently as women get aroused by it.

Simone Collins: Yeah. And the, the primary driver of demand for this, I think is. Is is men, I'm sorry, is women. Women are the ones who are like, I wanna see material like this.

It shows, it shows up all the time in romance novels. These like power dynamics, these quasi abusive relationships, these questionable behaviors. Like, and not even in a, you know, what we would call like modern BDSM context in which the sub is ultimately the one with all the power [00:24:00] rules. So yeah, women actually don't even want that.

They're like, no, no, don't, don't do that.

Malcolm Collins: That's really fascinating. What is, well, I wonder like, I'd love for ala to do more on this to find out, like, because we've gone over the chart before from her that shows when Paraphilias or fetishes age of onset is uhhuh. So that would be really interesting.

I, I would guess that the age of onset of Paraphilias likely correlates with how arousing they are. Actually, let's look up a ALA's age of onset of paraphilias chart.

Gaps between trans and cis fetish onset. Oh, this is interesting. Here's a list of difference in years between, okay. Okay, that's interesting. Age of onset. Okay, so if we're looking across here, which fetishes have earlier age of onsets? Tattoos, body mod, skinness, et cetera. Very young age of onset, 13.1. Body parts normal.

Non non genitals. So this is like, knees, armpits, head hair, et cetera.

Okay.

But then other ones that have been very [00:25:00] early age of onset are things like brutality and violence. This has an age of onset of 14.2. So that's really interesting is incest has an early age of onset 14.4. I could see that being hereditary because you do see it occurring more within certain subcultures.

And then some have very, I don't know, interestingly, the latest age of onset is reproduction, pregnancy, surrogacy, AVI position, et cetera. 16.9 is when that starts.

Simone Collins: That's interesting. There does seem to be a, a bigger IC reaction among adolescents to anything child related, so maybe that. It is connected. I don't know.

Yeah,

Malcolm Collins: I don't know. I'm, I'm looking at these here, and this doesn't ring true for me, that Jevan said is, is connected to how hereditary it is. But maybe, I mean, it would make sense that incest arousal patterns in communities that relied on incest for reproduction would appear at a young age.

'cause those communities would likely also begin engaging in, in sexuality at a younger age. But, [00:26:00] like reproduction almost certainly has some like the people who get turned on by that, some correlation to genetics. I'd be pretty surprised if it didn't. And I'd also be pretty surprised that things like humiliation didn't given, and, and that's one of the later ones is at 15.6.

I, I'd also note that they, oh no. Humiliation

Simone Collins: just seems to me to be like one manifestation of interest in power dynamics, which is extremely pervasive.

Malcolm Collins: Hmm. Anyway, very, very interesting statistics there. And I, you must be so

Simone Collins: satisfied to be validated in your research.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, it's really cool that I make predictions years before they begin to become validated by the field, and then the field begins to validate them.

And one day somebody will come out there and be like, I discovered that arousal and disgust are actually using the same fundamental system and this is how, and I I, I'd be like, Malcolm came up with all of this years ago. But it also shows that when progressives pretend to not be disgusted by something, when progressives pretend to not be like ed by [00:27:00] something, it is just that they are pretending this is not real.

They are actually even the most tolerant person. And I actually think that this is a bad thing because what it leads people to believe is. I am accepting of this population, yet I still feel gross when I see them do this. Therefore, there must be something wrong with this population. I mean, that's what disgust evolved in us to, to instigate, right?

Like disgusted at like a person with leprosy or something who's like falling apart. It was

Simone Collins: about, it was about personal safety and then there's this big problem. Discuss

Malcolm Collins: your bodies and poo and everything like that. Yeah. Continue.

Simone Collins: Yeah. Yeah. But then there's also the problem of people. Intuitively though it's not always correct, associating disgust with poor morality.

And I think, I mean, you, you see this more with spoken versus unspoken progressive behaviors around race, where like, they're like, oh, you know, like other, other races that are not white are really, really important. We have to protect them. And yet they, like, they don't hire them, they don't work with them.

They, they [00:28:00] don't live with them. And then, you know, on the other hand, like conservatives don't have anything to say and yet. They hire them, they work with them, they live with them. Like there, there's by, by

Malcolm Collins: the way, to, to get an idea of how bad this is, there was a recent study done on DEI positions and only 3.8% of DEI positions are held by Africans

Classic,

African Americans.

This is, this is. Hilarious. That's, well less than their percentage in the population, and it just shows that this is like a white woman thing. The entire field of this progressive urban monoculture is white women. I love the white women for Harris thing, you know? So good. That was such a moment.

Yeah, amazing. It turned out that they were the only ones who supported Harris. The, the Hispanics were not super excited. Blacks voted for her less than Biden keep on Blacks voted for her. They, they, they did not like Harris. Well, there was that

Simone Collins: famous like black journalist meeting during the election when Trump spoke with them, you know, was willing to speak with what he expected to be a fairly antagonistic audience.

[00:29:00] Yeah. And he's like, oh yeah, you know? Yeah. Now, now Kamala's black when it's convenient for her. And the progressive and mainstream media rolled that quote out again and again to be, to, to, to act as though this was an outrageous thing. But you actually hear chuckles from the audience. Yeah. It's not dead silence.

They're kind of like, I

Malcolm Collins: mean, yeah. Very interesting. I, I completely agree. And I think that that was, that was really interesting. So do you have any other, discuss, anything change for you on learning that the progressive men who say they're not experiencing it are most likely lying?

Simone Collins: You know, it, it just reminds me of, of how my progressive upbringing was, where there were a lot of things that secretly discussed me.

And I had to pretend that I was okay with them. And that was really, you know, it was really tough and it, it honestly led to poorer mental health because [00:30:00] I felt there was a variety of things that I wished I could do something about, like, ugh, I really, you know, don't, I don't wanna do this, I don't wanna go here, but if I, if I avoid going here or if I don't do this thing, it will involve an admission, even if it's an unspoken admission that I have a problem with this thing.

And therefore I'm not, like, my values aren't right. You know, I need to, I need to

Malcolm Collins: yeah.

Simone Collins: Like correct myself. And it, it caused a lot of stress and a lot of cognitive dissonance. And after meeting you and after sort of getting permission to feel what I felt, I just felt so much relief. And I, and we, we just did another episode on mental health and progressives being poor.

And I, I do think that's a part of it is just maybe part of the reason why progressive mental health is worse is that there's more. More of them are forced to lie to themselves in a way that causes cognitive dissonance and and distress, and it prevents them from addressing problems that would be fairly easy to address.

Malcolm Collins: Absolutely. Yeah.

[00:31:00] Yeah. Anyway what am I eating for dinner tonight?

Tonight is taquitos.

Simone Collins: Thank you. You did

Malcolm Collins: great. Taquitos. Are you gonna put some cheese in? Obviously. Make it extra sharp. What cheese

Simone Collins: do we have? Ooh,

Malcolm Collins: I,

I don't

Simone Collins: know if we have extra sharp cheese. You can use the cheese I bought at the store. Yeah, actually, so you didn't realize this, I guess, but you had an open one of those already.

No, I didn't use some of that. You think it'd be okay? It's a hard cheese, isn't it? I mean, it maybe it melts. I dunno how it melts. Do you know how it melts? It melts. It does. Okay. I just, I haven't worked with that kind of cheese before. I will finally grate it using a, a lemon zester. And even if it doesn't melt, it doesn't need to be grated.

Like I, I can bite into cheese, but it's taquitos if you can't roll them. You know, it's like a sharp shard of cheese breaks, the delicate corn tortilla.

Malcolm Collins: Whatever you

Simone Collins: want. This is how dare you. No, this has to be done right. We can't use American cheese though. So [00:32:00] we will find a way. We will find a way.

Malcolm Collins: What a sweet baby. She is. Very sweet. Love you to death.

Simone Collins: I love you too. Thanks for, thanks for being a shot caller. It's one of the things we respect most in this world, and I love it about you.

Okay.

Speaking of ozone, by the way, I was just listening to this Andrew Huberman podcast episode in which he speaks with a dentist, like a dental specialist, and she uses ozone in her dental treatments, which is really interesting. Like when she's putting sealants on teeth, she'll use ozone to make sure that there's no.

Hm. Like bacterial growth or something. Really just like

Malcolm Collins: that. Good at killing bacteria. We, we recently No, it, it's

Simone Collins: antiviral. It's antibacterial, it's antifungal. So this is, it's the best. So the reason why people don't use ozone gas more in their homes to remove odors and. Kill bacteria and bugs and other things is one, if you have house plans, they're gone.

[00:33:00] Two, it can, through prolonged exposure, cause degradation of wires, rubber, and some fabrics. So it's, it's not something you wanna use every day, every week I. You know, it's maybe once a year in a room once every six months.

Malcolm Collins: But you, you had a, a bedbug scare because of the hotel we were at. Mm-hmm. You had bites that looked like bedbug bites and then you just ozone everything after that.

Nuked it, not deal with it.

Simone Collins: Nook it, nook it, nook it. Yes. And I'm so glad. Yeah. We got, we bought ourselves an ozone machine on Amazon during the pandemic at the behest of one of our friends who thought that it would be really effective and we kind of never used it and I'm so glad we had it. I'm so, and also our rooms.

Really smell fresh now, so it's great.

In this episode, we delve into the rising mental health crisis among progressive women, examining data and discussing potential causes, including the impact of urban monocultures and the evolution of harmful online communities. We compare mental health and life satisfaction rates between liberal and conservative women, analyze the role of therapists, and explore the influence of platforms like Tumblr. The discussion also touches on the diverging experiences of men and women across political ideologies and the broader societal implications of these trends.

[00:00:00]

Malcolm Collins: Hello Simone. I'm excited to be here with you today. Today we will be touching on the issue of exploding mental health rate. Problems within progressive women as well as exploding lack of life satisfaction. They actually have life satisfaction ratings three times lower than conservative women.

And we're gonna be going into co. Funding data that could explain this. This is a topic that we have touched on in the past, but it is a topic with such a voluminous amount of information around it that it is worth going into deeply with new data, with old data and, and trying to understand it because it's, it's, it's really fascinating to me because what we're seeing exploding mental health issues within progressive women is we are seeing.

The urban monocultures effects on somebody's mental health in psychology. [00:01:00] And through that we can, because that's, that largely aligns with, with progressivism, right? The dominant culture of our, of our society. And we can understand through that through understanding what might be causing this is how the urban monitoring could be hurting people.

And we're also going to go into a brief exploration that I found really interesting in, in a piece that I found. On how the most negative psychologically harmful culture evolved on, tumblr,

Simone Collins: this sounds like just, you know, hitting all my favorite keywords. I am very excited about this and let's, let's do it.

Malcolm Collins: All right. So. First, I'm gonna be going over a piece called Why So Blue Liberal women are less happy or lonely, but why?

Simone Collins: Oh, they went there.

Malcolm Collins: Good. Good points on the title. Yeah. Yeah. The loneliness thing is actually really shocking as well. Young liberal women are especially pro nowadays to reporting poor mental health.

[00:02:00] This was a discovery that Zach Goldberg made almost five years ago, pouring over the Pew data in the spring of 2020. Now, here I'm putting a chart on screen and it's looking at has the doctor or other healthcare provider. Ever told you you have a mental health condition and this is the amount who said yes.

Simone Collins: I just, I love this idea though of like the healthcare provider being, say, your dentist, just like, yeah,

Malcolm Collins: she is problems. And this chart is famous. This one we've gone over before that showed that white liberal women. 18 to 29, 56 0.3% of them had been diagnosed with a mental health condition. Conservative women

Simone Collins: see is, I think is not the problem that they're seeing therapists in the first place.

I think it's really hard for anyone to see a therapist and not be diagnosed with something, even if they're completely normal. Well,

Malcolm Collins: the therapists are part of the cult of the urban monoculture. Yeah. It's like going to your confessions. Like they see it as important. As I've mentioned, I've seen women who will screen [00:03:00] dating guys.

Who aren't seeing a therapist, and that's like they have been incepted with the dependency of the urban monoculture to believe that I cannot be mentally healthy and no one can be mentally healthy without seeing a therapist.

Simone Collins: Yes. And yet when you see the therapist, they point out how mentally. Yeah.

Ruby

Malcolm Collins: Art actually had an interesting talk about this, where he's like, oh yes, he went to be a progressive therapist and then a conservative therapist, and the progressive therapist just kept. Having him ruminate on his problems. Yeah. And the conservative therapist was like, okay, here's a chart. Here's what you need to do.

Here's the timeline for getting rid of it. And what's, which is nice, I mean,

Simone Collins: and he didn't even imply that the, I. The conservative therapist was certain, he just gave him potential things he could try that were evidence-based. And it's so, but it's also so indicative of the feminine versus masculine response to someone preventing a problem, presenting a problem.

You know that the correct feminine response is, oh, I'm so sorry. Tell you more. This must be so hard for you. And then the masculine response responses, okay, let's make a [00:04:00] solution. And that that scene is so toxic by many

Malcolm Collins: people. Oh, absolutely. But, but to this graph right here yeah. One thing that's really interesting in it is, yes, okay, over half of liberal white women have a mental health condition, have been diagnosed as one, but also keep in mind here.

That the moderates had about the same rate of being diagnosed as the conservatives. So the white moderate women, 28.4% white conservative women, 27.3%. Mm-hmm. And this goes down a lot in older age ranges. When you're looking at like the 65 plus, it's only 5.9%. For those women. Another really interesting thing is that if you look at, older ages. The difference between males and females being diagnosed with mental health issues decreases. Mm-hmm. And it also decreases when you're looking at moderates with moderates, you see men and women being diagnosed at around the same rates. But in both conservatives and progressives, you see women being diagnosed much more.

And, and what's really [00:05:00] interesting is in progressives you see about the same rates of diagnoses at 30 and up, but it's 18 to 29 where you see this the big difference, huh? And I think this has to do with where mental health professionals have sort of penetrated and captured aspects of these markets.

Um hmm. Like if you are a progressive guy, what I actually think is happening here no, this kid back can't be what's happening? 'cause the rate's not going up. Yeah. I just think it's the, we'll, we'll get into how Tumblr caused all this, but any more thoughts on this before I go further? I.

Simone Collins: I wanna go further.

I just wanna keep going. Okay.

Malcolm Collins: Further research in 2022 found that depression had surged among liberal high school girls in the last decade and a half, and much more so for them than other high schoolers, especially conservatives. And so here we're gonna look at a another article titled. Why the mental health of liberal goals sink first and fastest.

And the first chart I'm gonna pull up here is Pew 2020. And it's looking at, has a doctor or healthcare provider ever told you that you have a mental [00:06:00] health condition? And it's just what we were looking at before, but it's done as a graph, which I think is a bit easier to see. Graphs are so much easier.

Next chart. Is depression scores by gender and politics. And what you can see here is female liberals are absolutely at the highest here, and their depression scores started to shoot up. They were always higher, but they were about in line with male liberals. Mm-hmm. They started to shoot up at around 2011.

Was that when they. Was that when the girl, whatever the believe, believe her movement started.

Simone Collins: Me too. No. Yeah, me

Malcolm Collins: too.

Simone Collins: No, me too. Started much later. Let's see. Yeah, 20 20 17. But it was founded by activist Tarana Burke in 2006. So we're talking way before that. Lets see, that was, that was a year after you and I graduated from undergraduate.

I don't know, like smartphones were taking off at that point. I

Malcolm Collins: don't, I don't know. Smartphones were ubiquitous before that. Only

Simone Collins: among rich kids. I dunno. I got my first smartphone [00:07:00] in like twenty, twenty eleven actually. Yeah. I, I'm gonna

Malcolm Collins: check to see if Tumblr maybe had did something around this time.

I'll add it in post.

Simone Collins: Okay.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, look up, well look up when Tumblr got popular.

Simone Collins: Peak in terms of user activity early 2014. It was on its way. It was on its way to the top.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. So, look up when Tumblr first started to gain traction.

Simone Collins: It was founded in 2007. It quickly became popular, so by 2011 it would've been fairly.

Malcolm Collins: So that's fascinating. Yes. I think this is a directly downstream of Tumblr is what we're seeing here. That's so funny. The depression scores, because Tumblr was where the modern iteration of the urban monoculture was born.

Before that progressivism had a very different like thing. It was optimizing around. Now what's also really interesting is conservative female and happiness starts shooting up now. It's still nowhere near these other groups. You mean like relative from what it was before? Yeah. It was a complete flat look.

So like, they're happier now. [00:08:00] They're, they're happier now in, they're shooting down like, like they're having problems. Higher depression rates. Okay. So it was, it was stable from 2005 to 2014, then it starts going up. Conservative male mental health was stable until 2013, then started going up. What happened in 2013 and 14 that would've caused conservative?

Simone Collins: I,

Malcolm Collins: I, I don't see it as a break of the dam because it was so stable before that.

I don't know.

Simone Collins: Can you send me the graph

Malcolm Collins: sound off on this? What do you guys, can I see the graph?

Simone Collins: Thematically, I actually sent you a screenshot of a, an Instagram post by a friend who shall go nameless that I, I don't know, kind of really indicates the different experience of two girls, me and her, who went to the same school, hung out, had a ton in common but then took very different political directions in adulthood.

Just like, look at that and read the post while I look at this. Okay, so

No, no, she might, [00:09:00] what if she watches this, then she knows. Okay.

Malcolm Collins: I, I won't describe the person. It says back by, no one's demand and a very progressive looking person, and it says. Proof of life in the style of 2014 in an era where most things kind of suck, both personally and as a human woman on earth, maybe a little more word art TM can help.

The bar is pretty low, but always worse. Reaching for vampire, I guess, and happy ver Venus retrograde to all those that celebrate survive peace sign skull. It's been a doozy, but we're gonna make it.

Simone Collins: So she lives in a scary dystopia in which women have been robbed of their bodily autonomy. Her personal life is in shambles.

She, she doesn't look as, as healthy as I remember from before. And like I am really happy. I really love [00:10:00] my friends and my family. I. Am healthier now than I was before, despite being on pregnancy, literally healthier now. Like, yeah, like my osteoporosis is reversing despite the fact that I'm not on medication because the pregnancy seemed to help it.

Like it's, it's just kind of crazy because we had so much in common as kids. We grew up, you know, within, within walking distance at each other's houses, same broad, you know, demographic background, and yet there's such different outcomes. And I feel like the primary differentiating factor here is culture.

Malcolm Collins: The primary factor is me.

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: Okay. But look at the graph. You wanted to see the graph. You see what I mean? Yeah. The lines are stable and then they start going up outta nowhere. There's clearly a triggering event where both, yeah,

Simone Collins: like what happened to conservatives in 2014 that made their quality of life decidedly worse and it wasn't.

And, and you, you would've thought, like if I, if you and I had to guess, we would've guessed that mental health. Would start going off the [00:11:00] rails, say in 2008 when there was a recession, that that would cause people to feel, or like a gradual thing, but no. Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm. And it's, and it's not. I'm still arguing like pervasive, smart, and keep in mind, like smartphones did exist before 2011, but they didn't have this great app, ecospace.

Now you have Tumblr on your smartphone like by 2011. Tumblr has a decent smartphone app, like you're actually getting stuff. I,

Malcolm Collins: I think it's downstream of Tumblr as somebody who paid attention to what was going on in Tumblr as it was rising. Yeah. But we'll get to that later.

Simone Collins: But 2014, that is. Right.

Hold on. Let's just just ask Grok

Malcolm Collins: what

Simone Collins: happened in 2014. Event conservative, and I'll

Malcolm Collins: keep going while you're asking. Okay, thanks. Okay. Yeah. Okay. So now we're gonna put up another graph here that says, whenever I try to get ahead something or somebody stops me, USA 12th graders. So interesting here what you see is this is actually splitting over time with conservatives.

It's going down for conservative girls and with liberal girls [00:12:00] it's going up. But here's what's really fascinating.

Simone Collins: Mm-hmm. For

Malcolm Collins: boys, for liberals, it's going down. And for conservative boys, it's going up. Whenever I try to get ahead somebody or something stops me

Simone Collins: and for conservative boys felt more stymied.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. That makes 'em stronger. It's like a

Simone Collins: good

Malcolm Collins: thing, but, but it's the opposite with, with girls. I, I don't know what we're seeing here. It could be like the, the sort of cool, like, oh, the society's against me, man. That, you know, Andrew Tate was sort of promoting during, because this is from 2017 to 2021.

But that's, that's interesting. External locus of control. Here, what you see is 2017 to 2021. Liberal girls shoots up the internal locus of control and conservative girls actually goes down a bit with boys. Wait, so

Simone Collins: conservative young women lost their internal locus of control? They lost? No, they have more

Malcolm Collins: an internal locus of control.

Okay. Okay. Okay.

Simone Collins: [00:13:00] So, so progressive young women had more of an external locus of control, meaning they attributed their life's problems more to external factors. Than they did before, which is shown

Malcolm Collins: to be correlated with poor mental health. Yeah, I mean, it was really, I thought, but here's the thing. I thought this was more core to progressivism, but if you look at boys, liberal boys and conservative boys have about the same rate.

I. Here.

Simone Collins: And that's, I think that's because boys aren't allowed to blame outside factors because they're the patriarchy. It doesn't matter.

Malcolm Collins: No, no, no, no, no. What's interesting is they have about the same rate and it's about what liberal girls have.

Simone Collins: What

Malcolm Collins: Yes. Conservative girls are like way so, 'cause you're, the girls are the only

Simone Collins: ones who are like, yeah, it's on me.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. What? That doesn't make any sense. What it shows is that conservative girls are a better catch than conservative boys. Yeah. Apparently. Well, it's a smaller pool, like that's another thing. Yeah. You know, there's, there's two conservative boys for every one conservative girl, and I assume that number might be even more severe for those age ages.

What did gr say when you asked it?

Simone Collins: Honestly, I'm not getting anything. It, it said the [00:14:00] cultural events. The, the Ice Bucket Challenge goes viral in 2014. You remember that People dumping ice water over their head to donate money. The Grand Put Best Hotel came out. Robin Williams died. Guardians of the Galaxy came out and that was good.

It was good. It make me happy. Conserv movie, there was a World Cup, the Brazil FIFA World Cup. That's not bad. There was the Ferguson unrest. So there was some, some like police brutality concern. Gay marriage became more. Pervasive in terms of legalization, but I don't see how that would make the conservatives more depressed.

Well,

Malcolm Collins: here, here we're gonna get a graph that aligns exactly with the other graph with 2014, remember? Yes.

Simone Collins: 2014.

Malcolm Collins: So, so I will tell you all what happened. I, I

Simone Collins: just declared a caliphate Scottish independence referendum, but that didn't pass. So this,

Malcolm Collins: this aligns exactly. It was the 2011 number here. Okay.

So, you see between 2009 and 2013 in this graph, I'll, I'll share this graph with you 'cause it's important. Thanks.[00:15:00]

Simone Collins: Midterm elections in the us like nothing really happened in 2014. It was, it was not a consequential year really. I mean, it sort of things churned along. But it wasn't like, oh, like new administration. Huge social change.

Malcolm Collins: Okay, so here's a graph. In this graph, what you see is the other numbers line up with mean derogation or like self degradation is what you're seeing here.

Simone Collins: Self derogation ation. Oh, like derogatory remarks you make about yourself.

Malcolm Collins: Yes. Okay. Liberal girls and liberal boys begin to shoot up on this at around that time period with conservatives shooting up at the later time period tied to their increasing rates of depression. This is a cultural factor tied to, something that's causing young people to say terrible things about themselves over and over and over again. And people can be like, oh, that must be social media. But Facebook existed long [00:16:00] before this and was popular long before this when I was in college.

Simone Collins: Who was in winded Instagram peak. Hold on. When did Insta Instagram first take off?

'cause Facebook was very homegrown. You used Facebook to make sure people weren't. Fish. What catfishing you? Because really it wasn't a place of idealized pictures. It was a place of here's what your life is like, here's what your friends are like. Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: It could be the 2014 Boost Instagram. I could see that because more popular with conservatives.

Simone Collins: Yeah. Rain. Yeah. Yeah. I, I'm, I'm gonna say Instagram. Instagram was really, and I mean, Facebook even had those reports that leaked where it was like, yeah, we know these make people feel terrible about themselves.

Sorry. I,

Malcolm Collins: I think Instagram may have been where the culture that was started on Tumblr. Interacted with an infected conservative, females first and then males. That would make a lot of sense to me.

Simone Collins: No, no. I think it's more [00:17:00] about idealization and not feeling like you're good enough.

Malcolm Collins: I, I disagree. I.

Really look that happened before all of this. If you look at the nineties, everyone was concerned about how pretty the models were and that girls not living up to that. The women who girls would've had to compare themselves to before social media might have even been more beautiful on average. But no.

Well, but no, no, no, no, no,

Simone Collins: no, no, no, no, no. It was very different and it felt very different for me. And the reason why it did was that they were. Movie stars, they were in magazines. And suddenly with Instagram it was like, no, no, no. These are my peers. And you have to understand like our, our friends and colleagues who have children that are young teens, the way these girls look, their, their knowledge of makeup is like your, like your mom's level.

They have like 16 step beauty routines. You have to like the standards to which women hold themselves. Now, if they are online, if they are on. Instagram or now TikTok are [00:18:00] insane. By the way. There was this recent scandal with TikTok. They had a fat filter, one that made you look chubby. I think it was called chubby filter.

Sorry, Andy. And all these, like, Instagram and, and like TikTok models kept using the filter, like showing what they would look like, fat. And then it got a lot of people mad, which I just love. I I want more of that. I want ugly filters.

Malcolm Collins: Hilarious. Okay. Okay. So I'm gonna read here from the article that we were pulling these graphs from that I mentioned earlier.

Okay. And this is on the Tumblr hypothesis. Phelps, Roger and Rowling take us through the dizzying events of the early 2000 tens. This is the witch trials of JK Rowling is talking about here. Okay. As the social media site, Tumblr exploded in popularity reaching its peak in early 2014. Tumblr hit peak popularity in 2014, and also Vivaciousness Tumblr was different from Facebook and other sites because it was not based on anyone's social network.

Mm-hmm. It brought together people from anywhere in the world who shared an interest and often an obsession. Oh yeah. Yeah. [00:19:00] Like

Simone Collins: affinity groups rather than your immediate friends. Like Facebook was Really,

Malcolm Collins: yeah.

Simone Collins: Your college friends and and, and then your high school friends, but yeah, this, yeah, you're right.

That is okay. That is

Malcolm Collins: interesting. Phelps Roger interviewed several experts who all pointed to Tumblr as the main Petri dish in the nascent ideas of identity fragility language. Harm and victimhood, which evolved and intermixed there. Mm-hmm. Angela Nagel, author of Kill All Normies, described the culture that emerged among young activists on Tumblr, especially around gender identity in this way.

Hmm. There was a culture that was encouraged on Tumblr, which was to be able to describe your unique non-normative self, and that's to some extent a feature of modern society anyway, but it was taken to such an extreme that people begin to describe this. As a snowflake, referring to the idea of each snowflake is unique.

The person who constructs a totally kind of boutique identity for themselves and then guards that identity in a very, very sensitive way, reacts in an enraged way when [00:20:00] anyone does not respect the uniqueness of that identity. And I saw this. A hundred percent. Were you like, not from the Tumblr perspective, but from the other side, because I was really into Tumblr in action.

Mm-hmm. Which was for finding crazy Tumblr posts. I was really into exploring the crazier side of Tumblr all the time because I found it from a psychological perspective, really interesting. And humorously, you know, I didn't see them as not my people either. I saw the, the Tumblr people. As it, it's very much like, well, like related to nerdy culture and stuff like that.

I, I may have had some like, oh my god, they're so silly, whatever. But like silly people should be able to do what silly people want and there's no harm to this. Yeah.

Simone Collins: Yeah. And strange Aons on YouTube does so many great Tumblr deep dives. Yeah. I don't find myself associating it with. Mental toxicity so much as, as I find myself associating it with weird and communities

Malcolm Collins: is this is where [00:21:00] even the modern concept of trans identity evolved on Tumblr.

Because before Tumblr transness was something you needed to be diagnosed with 'cause you needed gender dysphoria. And then the people on Tumblr who were like, oh you're not trans 'cause you aren't diagnosed. They were called Tru Scum. And this whole movement evolved that sort of harassed them constantly.

And then the two cutes, the one that said anyone can be any gender they want, whenever they feel like it, they basically won that war. And it's also where the Theon community evolved. These were the people who wanted to be identified as animals and stuff like that. Oh, right. On top of all. So Therians are not furries, right?

They're No, they're not. It's more like. Trans to Crossdresser. That's Syrian to furries. Crossdressers. No, they're not actually the other gender. And they're like, this is just something I like doing. Yeah. Furries. No, they're not actually the, the animal. They're like, this is just something I like doing. Thank you.

And then they're crazy ones who think that they're like actually a raccoon or a girl or something like that.

Simone Collins: Although that seems to have really died down recently. Is it just me? The, yeah.

Malcolm Collins: I don't think so.

Simone Collins: Really? [00:22:00] What makes you say that? I just haven't seen many recent YouTube videos of them talking about their lives and howling and running through the woods.

I had. They're always wolves. Why are they always wolves? Hmm?

Malcolm Collins: I'd wanna be a wolf if I was like connected to something. No.

Simone Collins: Brutal life. Terrible existence.

Malcolm Collins: Okay. Hungry

Simone Collins: all the time. Cold. They look cold. Wolves always look cold. I guess everything

Malcolm Collins: you eat has to be like a living thing, so that's, everything you eat is

Simone Collins: raw.

You, you're, yes, you're always hungry, and again, they always look cold and they don't.

Malcolm Collins: Don't look, you know, it's funny that you mentioned that. I, I, I was thinking today like because I was watching a video on Mormon preppers and like all the food they have, and I was like, that's so great. Why not just get more bullets?

Here's the trick, here's the 'cause. They're

Simone Collins: not

Malcolm Collins: mean. Okay. They're not. Here's the trick about society. Humans are made of food. Mm-hmm.

Simone Collins: All, I don't wanna get mad cow disease by [00:23:00] eating human. You don't have to eat their

Malcolm Collins: brain. If you cook them, you don't have to worry. They're as safe as any beef or pig or anything like that.

So long as you don't eat the brains, because then you're not worried about prion disease. But humans are made of food. You don't often think about that. But it's a, it's a neat little trick for apocalypses. This one trick.

Oh, God, I hate you so much. You hate me so much.

Speaker: Uh, it's only been like four hours. Aren't you resorting to cannibalism a little quickly? That's the law of the land, Mr. Director. Now wait a minute, we all had a big breakfast.

Can't you people go without eating for a little while?

Malcolm Collins: Okay, okay. Although I,

Simone Collins: I can tell you right away, our kids would love building traps

Malcolm Collins: for humans. They, yeah. Yes. Yes. They, they talk about that sort of stuff all the time. All the time. One, our kid actually came to, to Moun and, and he is like, okay, I want to eat people like zombie vampires.

And you saw that vampires ate people, and you were like, no, vampires don't eat people. And he's like, well, what does, right. Like, so he [00:24:00] could play the, the right thing. Because you scolded him for playing, eating people as a vampire? Well,

Simone Collins: no. He was just like, well, mommy, like, vampire's gonna eat me. I'm like, no, not exactly.

Vampires consume blood like mosquitoes and ticks. And he, he, I just, you know, I didn't, I missed entirely what he was all about because I was deep on the lore with him and I was deeply annoyed that he thought that zombies couldn't go outside during the day, which is every color of wrong. He needs to understand,

but now he's obsessed with. Scv anything, but I'm deeply, deeply disturbed by this.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, he's scv. He's got a dis scv. So the, what happened with Tumblr is this was the first time it became popular to list your mental illnesses alongside your like gender in your bio.

Simone Collins: Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. Just like in our discard people list the number of children they have.

But on Tumblr, the status was just how mentally ill you are.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. No, it is, it was [00:25:00] clearly like a part of your status. It was alongside your gender. Mm-hmm. You would, you would, and then you'd have like flags associated with, because you know, when you've removed identity, when you've removed a person's connection to their ethnicity and religion and, and, and history, or you've made them ashamed of it, people need to find identity somewhere else.

And this No. Yeah. Well, no, in,

Simone Collins: in any. Community where they're trying to show status. There are things that you use as markers, like in the VAR reach community that tries to pretend that it's not var reach, it's how much lower PI you you wear. Yeah. And that's like, it's, there's all these little things that like people utilize.

And mental that is so like, such a bad sign when this is your amount of, it's like spoons, you know, like, oh, well I, you think you're sick. I'm on an iv. Ha.

Malcolm Collins: It's like a community. Yeah. Where it became cool to like get amputations or something and then it's like, I got more amputations than you. I mean, literally the trans community.

But like. I, I was thinking recently [00:26:00] the way that we relate to gender transition, given that it appears to be a culture bound illness like anorexia, you know, overwhelmingly in autistic individuals at that exact same age tied to body dysmorphia, it would be the same as treating anorexia by removing people's organs to make them lighter.

Like an anorexic person would tell you like. This is great. Like they removed a few of my organs that I didn't a hundred percent need one of my lungs, maybe a uterus.

Simone Collins: That's not how it works.

Malcolm Collins: It, it would be okay. Okay. Actually, a very good analogy would be like removing people's uterus who are anorexic to make them lighter.

Simone Collins: Yeah, especially, yeah. Yeah, because it's like additional like abdominal volume that you'd be thrilled to get rid of. Everyone's that flat bought belly, and you also want that gap. So if you could just like remove. Like musculature from your thighs. Be thrilled. And the anorexic

Malcolm Collins: people would be thrilled about this.

They'd tell everyone afterwards, this is the best surgery. I love it. Pro Anna is like a huge thing, like yeah. But, but all the same people would be like, that is a really bad way to handle this [00:27:00] condition. Yeah. So, so to continue here, Nagel described how on the other side of the political spectrum there was.

The most insensitive culture imaginable, which was the culture of four chan. The communities involved in gender activism on on Tumblr were mostly young, progressive women, while four chan was mostly used by right-leaning young men. So while there was an increasingly gendered nature of the online conflict, the two communities supercharged each other with their mutual hatred.

As often happens in a culture war, the young identity activist on Tumblr embraced their new notions of identity, fragility, and trauma. All the more tightly, increasingly saying that words are a form of violence. While young men on four chan moved in the opposite direction, they brandish a rough and rude masculinity, which in which status was gained by using words more insensitively than the next guy.

It was out of this rough. Reciprocal dynamic that experts on the podcast suggest that today's canceled cultures were born in the early 2000 tens. Mm. And I do think that that's what we're seeing here. This is also where [00:28:00] the birth of what became the new Right. The tech right. The MAGA Republicans came from, as we pointed out in one of our videos, for people who want to see an interesting, his historical documentary, the new right.

The, the modern maga Right. The online right. Was born out of. The atheist movement. Mm-hmm. The online atheist and skeptic movement which split into two groups. One group was like, oh, you guys weren't actually interested in the truth. You just wanted to dunk on conservatives. And then the other group was actually interested in the truth, and many of them have converted back into religions like ourselves.

Simone Collins: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Malcolm Collins: But very, very interesting to note that all of this started on Tumblr versus four chan. Trump was first pushed by four chan, and when I say four Chan got Trump elected, many people are like, well, four Chan wasn't that relevant in the general election? In his first general election.

I agree. But four chan was super important in gaining him internet popularity and making him seen as a viable candidate in the

Simone Collins: Absolutely. Absolutely.

Malcolm Collins: And people forget what a joke candidate he [00:29:00] was in the primaries that all the other conservatives were making fun of him and four chan mean him into Yeah.

But he is the main counterculture candidate.

Simone Collins: Mm-hmm.

Malcolm Collins: We have what we have now. We have Doge now, all of this. And keep in mind how much the culture of MAGA still has those four chan roofs that Elon called Doge. Doge, literally like a meme coin with like a a, a, a dog that was caught used on four chan.

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: Now let's look at more modern evidence. Okay? Yes. New evidence from a 2024 American Family Survey indicates it is young liberal women are markedly less satisfied with their lives than their conservative peers. And this is from the original article, not the second article. Okay. Okay. Specifically, we found that 37% of conservative women reported being completely satisfied with life.

Well, only 12% of liberal women did so less than a half

Simone Collins: back to that high school elementary school friend of mine. Then and now you know me. Now her, now it's, it's You say you're

Malcolm Collins: completely [00:30:00] satisfied.

Simone Collins: Yes. Yeah. Especially vis-a-vis her. I mean, obviously there are so many ambitions and things that we want to achieve together and we wanna have so many more kids.

We wanna do so much more good in the world. But that comes from a place of like. A deep feeling of agency and satisfaction and

Malcolm Collins: it was what we've already done.

Simone Collins: Yeah, like that we can do that.

Malcolm Collins: Young conservative women were three times as likely to report being very satisfied with life compared to young liberal women.

Moreover, liberal women are two to three times more likely to report that they are, quote unquote, not satisfied with their lives compared to conservative women. And consistent with previous research, the effect of ideology on young women's happiness held up. Two controls for age, education, and race. And so I'm putting a graph on screen here that says, liberal women least likely to be completely satisfied with life.

And you see it's a, just a huge difference. And it goes up, it's 12% for, for liberals, 28% for moderates, 37% for conservatives. So huge jump there. Now let's look [00:31:00] at loneliness rates. Okay, so it's not just this, and this is in 2024, right? So. With liberal women, 29% say they feel lonely. Often only 11% of conservative women feel that, and you get the middling 19% for moderates.

Simone Collins: Do you think this is because conservatism likely tracks really highly with being a member of a church and that's built in community? I.

Malcolm Collins: I think so, but I don't think that that's all of this. I would assume you're actually finding the same thing with liberal women who attend churches. Well, and I

Simone Collins: would, I would guess so.

I think it's two factors. Yes. I think one, it's that, that there's a higher correlation of church attendance and therefore community membership. But I would also argue that I, conservative woman and a liberal woman with the same amount of social interaction in their lives would probably define the state of their.

Loneliness differently in that a a, a progressive woman would be far more likely and perceive it

it differently. Yeah.

Perceive it is like, this is a problem. I don't feel perfectly satisfied or I feel [00:32:00] like what I see. No,

Malcolm Collins: I, I disagree with the way you're framing this. I, I think the conservatives genuinely feel less lonely even if they are the same amount of interpersonal interaction.

Because there is no status to be gained. So your emotions, the way you relate to your emotional state is largely due to your internal framings. You can significantly alter. Very internal state.

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: And, and so with the conservative, there is no benefit to self victimization. And so they don't do it.

Liberals are trained to have this mindset through things like Tumblr and stuff like that, like even your, well, they're also trained to know that

Simone Collins: if

Malcolm Collins: they

Simone Collins: don't feel 100% perfect, that that is a problem. Whereas I think conservatives are more likely to understand that the state is transient or not even think about it.

Not even be like, oh, this is, I'm feeling something bad. Ah, you know, they're just like, okay. Yeah. You know, the bigger things to worry about

Malcolm Collins: your friend. Right. When we were reading her quote like mm-hmm. This, like, why is she posting that? Like if, if you [00:33:00] were feeling sad, would you post it? Like if you

Simone Collins: were feeling she's trying to post, she's, she's, I think she's signaling that she's a hot mess right now.

That she's not happy, she's not feeling okay, that she thinks the world is terrible. And she's looking for social affirmation and she does have some comments on that, that are like, that's my friend. And like, oh, you look great. And things like that. So I think. I, I think it's, and maybe it's also.

Malcolm Collins: And I'd also point out with her post, her post is as I think very normal, it's not cringe.

It's not like pathetic liberal beatty stuff. It is I consider like a very, I think you did a very good job of finding like a very average and normal post for a progressive to make that a conservative would never make.

Simone Collins: Yeah. It's not like, it's not an unhinged libs of TikTok thing, it's just what a, yeah.

This Simone's private friend from high school is randomly posting on, you know, a certain day of the week. In spring and, and that's, [00:34:00] yeah. And like what are all my posts? Just our, our

Malcolm Collins: kids, they're often ideological. Well, they're meant to have agency in the world. Like your posts are either our kids, like showing off like your family so that other people are jealous and hate their lives.

Which is more like

Simone Collins: I, I, I take pictures of our kids and I'm like, oh, they're so cute. Then I wanna post them. 'cause I hate wasting the pretty 'cause they're so pretty.

Malcolm Collins: I do the same thing. I stick 'em at the end of videos so that people are forced to form a pair of social relationship with us in

Simone Collins: this is un non, non-consensual.

Malcolm Collins: You going forward is, I'm gonna try, try, keep in mind to take out curse words, even from added clip.

Simone Collins: Oh my gosh. I'm, yeah, I'm sorry. Sorry.

Malcolm Collins: So that our videos can be safe for kids. Well, I don't

Simone Collins: think kids need to be shielded from curse words, but I think they should be taught that curse words are. Yeah, for lack of a better way to put it, like low class a, a sign, curse words are a sign of not having enough creativity to use a turn of phrase that actually gives the message that you want, the wit that you want.

Well, I think

Malcolm Collins: we need to figure out ways to be vulgar without curse words to be ide [00:35:00] ideologically vulgar. When

Simone Collins: I read, when I read Emily Post from the 1940s, this woman has the sickest burns, but she doesn't use any sling. She doesn't use any affectation.

Malcolm Collins: But, but Simone here, here's a way I can be vulgar without any, any, I think Trump should have another term.

That's, that's, I was talking with the BB, C and another UK outlet today. I didn't say that, but I So should have said that. I, so should have said that. I should have been like, well, you know, of course we're really excited for his next term to just, I love when he sometimes drops jokes about that in

Simone Collins: press conference because he knows, like he can probably see.

The pulsing veins in the foreheads of some of the people, the journalists present? No, they're,

Malcolm Collins: they're manifesting this by freaking out about it so much. Only

Simone Collins: doing it in the same way that a kid in school. Will bully a child because that child goes re really, it's hard not to when, when they react in such a pleasurable fashion.

Malcolm Collins: [00:36:00] Yeah. No. That's what we're all here for, right? This is why, you know, we live for. The day after Trump gets election and, and everyone's having a meltdown, like that's one of our better performing videos of course, because everybody wants to watch the meltdowns. Yeah. And we should be watching more meltdown.

I need to get more meltdowns. This is a problem. Right. You know, people denying reality, saying oh, actually Trump, there was a, a huge thing of like people thinking that Trump wasn't actually gonna be sworn into office. There was. Yeah. Yeah. I was a little late to do a piece on it, but I thought it would be, you know, funny.

But were, were, were people, there were all these conspiracy theories that, like the dims were gonna like trick him at the last moment and they're, they, they had been talking about it.

Simone Collins: Oh. So now they like January 6th as a concept.

Malcolm Collins: Oh, of course.

Simone Collins: When it's, of course, when it's there. January 6th.

Malcolm Collins: And I mean, they, they literally tried to, to put him in jail on like trumped up charges.

Was that felony conviction? Yeah. It was

Simone Collins: clear they, they were planning to circumvent democracy.

Malcolm Collins: But what, well, here's, here's a fun little conspiracy theory I hadn't [00:37:00] heard before. Okay. I love, did you know that the only time that CNN was filming any of Trump's speeches, they never filmed any of his speeches live except for the one where he was shot?

Simone Collins: No.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah.

Simone Collins: It's

Malcolm Collins: the only speech

Simone Collins: of him in Butler, Pennsylvania in, but Butler, that's when they decided to go live.

Malcolm Collins: Why?

Simone Collins: Well, it was a Sunday afternoon in the middle of summer. There isn't a lot to work with Lum Cycle, or,

Malcolm Collins: or, or maybe, or maybe.

Simone Collins: There's a lot, there's a lot of highly. Irregular stuff around that particular shooting.

So,

Malcolm Collins: hey, we still have no good information on what the guy, the, the, the, the explanation we have is super suss. I heard something about like, his house had been like ra ran through when they, when they went to check it and it was like missing things. It was weird. I, I don't know. I, we will do an episode on it if we do an episode on it where we can go over [00:38:00] the conspiracy of the Butler shooting.

Yes. But I wouldn't be like shocked if, you know, it was just too obvious like that roof. It's, it's not like that roof is, is like Oh, and out of the way. It is literally the only raised location anywhere around there. Yeah. It's literally the number one. The only, and why, why

Simone Collins: wouldn't, why and why wouldn't the secret service be on that roof?

It would have been because it was

Malcolm Collins: slanted. They weren't on

Simone Collins: it. Oh, God forbid they slip and fall.

Malcolm Collins: A teenager. Yeah. Oh no. OSHA would

Simone Collins: not stand for that.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Oh, oh my God. Well, this shows what happens when you put all these DEI people, you know, that was when the Secret Service was being run by a lady. And we know that, that a lady was not the most qualified person to run the Secret Service.

I don't mean this in like a, women don't know this stuff way, I mean this in a, I know statistically the number of men versus the number of women in the Secret Service means it's highly unlikely that the most competent [00:39:00] person in the entire Secret Service was a woman.

Simone Collins: Oh. Just because, yeah. If you have like 74.

Women. Candidates and you have 538 Yes. Male candidates. We have a problem.

Malcolm Collins: There's, there's like no way, like this was obviously DEI nonsense. So maybe, maybe she was trying to protect her job, you know, chump gets taken out and then she doesn't have to worry about the DEI cleanups 'cause she was on the out after he came in anyway, given what's been going on within the government.

Simone Collins: Who knows.

Malcolm Collins: Anyway, I love you to death, Simone. It has been fun chatting with you about this. No. What do we, what

Simone Collins: do we do with this information?

Malcolm Collins: Just like, well, I, I think that, one is noting that conservatives, whatever happened to progressives is now happening to conservatives. Whatever happened to progressives, it's continuing to happen and, and get worse over time.

Simone Collins: Mm-hmm.

We need, but the conservatives aren't just devoid. It's not like, you know, whenever you see a progressive, you know, tell them you're sorry and give them a benzo. It's, it's like, [00:40:00] actually there's something. Going on. You need to be aware that this

Malcolm Collins: is happening in our community as well. Mm-hmm. And, and fight against it.

And, and fight against it through focusing on, you know, an internal locus of control. Promoting an internal locus of control. Mm-hmm. Promoting self responsibility. I'd say stay away from therapists, like your life depends on it. And then, I mean, who would've thought

Simone Collins: that, like, we'd end up taking this very Scientology esque.

Malcolm Collins: No, it's funny because modern therapy, as I often say, functions more like ology. It's like Scientology psychology. That's what,

Simone Collins: that's such a weird double reverse flip.

Malcolm Collins: But it's, it's, so, it's, I had a friend reach out to me, a, a progressive who heard me rant about this a long time ago, and apparently thought I was being stupid or crazy.

She recently emailed me and was like, you know, I started going to work on these issues with a number of psychologists, and you were right. I had no idea how bad it is. I am dedicating. A big portion of my life and philanthropic efforts now to bringing attention to how bad modern psychology has become.

This is the story of

Simone Collins: your life. You're like, [00:41:00] oh, this is a problem. Everyone says, Malcolm, you're crazy. Malcolm, you're delusional. Malcolm, you need to get checked out. Malcolm, you're, you're lying through your teeth five years later. Oh yeah, you

Malcolm Collins: were right about that. That was kind of crazy. Malcolm. Yeah.

Or they just

Simone Collins: pretend that they always agreed with you and that you're delusional In saying that you were ahead of the time on this?

Malcolm Collins: I always, not a new fertility collapse was a problem. I always knew it a developed world problem. I always knew that the psychologist had basically become a scam cult. Yeah.

I always knew. And, and no, there are still good psychologists out there. It's just, it's hard to identify them. And I think that I wouldn't risk it was my own kids. Now, now I am somebody who was trained as a psychologist. Okay. That's part of my training as a neuroscientist. I was trained in that. I worked in that field, you know, I am not antis psychology.

I went to psychology. Well, there are

Simone Collins: also so many other interventions that would be so [00:42:00] much more effective, like changing the context of the subject. Because that's often so frequently at the root of their problems, or there are underlying health issues. There are just so many other things you can do first that will likely solve the underlying problem.

And I think the problem with psychology, I. Is it often only deals with surface stuff when you, you can't solve that until you've shifted the other language. It is

Malcolm Collins: literally right. Like, like nut up and work out. I think the reason why that culture has done Yeah.

Simone Collins: People realize, oh my gosh, wait, this is suddenly working for me.

Like I, I switched to intermittent fasting and I work out three times a week and suddenly I feel okay.

Malcolm Collins: Well it reminds me of Christian science. So a lot of people don't know this. Christian scientists, it's like a branch of Protestantism. It's not actual Christian science. But anyway, when it was founded, it's so cool though.

Simone Collins: It sounds, I'm just picturing, you know, it,

Malcolm Collins: it sounds cool, but when it was founded, it had a belief that, that they still hold today against medical technology. [00:43:00] Mm-hmm. You know, no, IVF no blood transfusion, no. Anything like that. Right? Yeah. But in the past, theoretically, no. No leaching, no bleeding. No.

Yeah. Isn't that backwards? But when it was founded. The medical profession had gotten so bad with quack treatments, they likely were better off not engaging with the medical field. It was likely an adaptive cultural evolutionary trait during its early period, 100%. It only became ill adaptive as the science got better.

But science is getting worse now. Like there's a reason to distrust science again. And in addition to that, psychology, which used to be great psychiatry, which used to, you know, serve a purpose is, is getting worse. Mm-hmm. And I'd say that now we're back to sort of where it was in the eighties when people were doing like hypnosis and implanted memories and stuff.

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: Your, your kids will be incepted to hate you if you send them.

Simone Collins: Ah,

Malcolm Collins: anyway, love. You did ask Simone. Have a spa. Oh, oh, by the way, great study. I sent Simone on [00:44:00] this. If you're like, well, what do I do as an alternative? Ai ai what, what's the study that I sent you is great little statistic there and

Simone Collins: people, they can't tell the difference between an AI therapist and a human therapist, and also the ai I think they, like the AI therapist did better in some measure.

I can't, I, I didn't read the whole thing. Yeah. Yeah. But that doesn't surprise me at all because when you look at those chat apps that people like high school students are getting addicted to, like my AI boyfriend, I can't quit him. It's not the boyfriend I. Scenarios that are even the most popular on these platforms.

The number one chat scenarios that are popular in all of these, and not because they're trying to fob this off on people. One, the safer work

Malcolm Collins: ones, I should clarify, but the safer, yeah,

Simone Collins: no it's, it's therapists. This is already proven. People are showing with their clicks that this is really effective for them.

And it's, you know, when I con, when I contrast this. To people's experiences on better help. I don't know if you've watched any of the mini YouTube [00:45:00] exposes on Better Help. Better Help is a bad idea. It's, it's awful. And what, what is the

Malcolm Collins: expose on? Like what, what's the ridiculousness of it?

Simone Collins: Oh, the, the, the therapists on it are, are really phoning it in and not very good at all.

They'll actively. Like not know anything about the conditions of the, the people that are asking for help. There's just like a lot of people who really shouldn't be on the platform, who are on the platform. And so this is why use ai,

Malcolm Collins: use

Simone Collins: Clause?

Malcolm Collins: Yeah.

Simone Collins: Yes.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Honestly,

Simone Collins: I don't think you even need to use like a therapist, AI just.

Just talk through things. No, just go

Malcolm Collins: to go to clock. Rod would be a good AI for this. Grock would be a good AI for this. All right. Love you did, Simone.

Simone Collins: I love you too.

Malcolm Collins: Gorgeous.

Simone Collins: What shall we do next? It's

Malcolm Collins: just making everything extra difficult.

Simone Collins: Well, at

Malcolm Collins: least it won't interfere with my workload.

Simone Collins: Yeah, exactly. But, you know,

Malcolm Collins: sick on a plane. [00:46:00] I showed Simone Art from art assets from the upcoming game, and she loved every faction that, that, the Catholic faction, the Mormon faction, the Quiverfull faction, she hated the techno Puritan faction.

She said they looked like Voldemort. And I was like, well, I, I expect

Simone Collins: more. Machine integration. This is the techno puritan branch, and it's in the future we are gonna have a lot more cybernetics going on.

Malcolm Collins: You want more cybernetics with them? I, I tried to do some cybernetics and it always over. Does it?

Simone Collins: Is there such a thing? I guess you need the Chanel rule of cybernetics. Just take one. Device off before you leave the house, then you'll be,

Malcolm Collins: but the other factions, by the way, are looking boss like I, I really like it. They're, they're really differentiated. I think people will have a lot of fun. It basically takes like American and American and religious, cultural anthropology and like dials it up to 11.

The way that I think should always

Simone Collins: be dialed up. I love it. It's so true. That's the way he,

Malcolm Collins: yes. Over the top. [00:47:00] Over the top.

Simone Collins: Yeah. Over the top or bust,

right?