Based Camp | Simone & Malcolm Collins

 https://discord.gg/EGFRjwwS92

In this in-depth analysis, Malcolm and Simone Collins dissect the recent New York Times article about Hannah and Daniel Neeleman of Ballerina Farms, exploring the controversy surrounding their "trad wife" lifestyle. The video offers unique insights into media manipulation, the complexities of modern conservative influencers, and the tensions between progressive journalists and traditional families. Drawing from their own experiences with media coverage, the Collins couple provides a nuanced perspective on the Ballerina Farms story, discussing everything from Mormon culture to the economics of influencer farming.

Key topics covered:

* Analysis of the New York Times article on Ballerina Farms

* The "trad wife" phenomenon and its cultural implications

* Media manipulation tactics and influencer strategies

* Mormon culture and its influence on the Neelemans' lifestyle

* The economics of influencer farming and social media success

* Comparisons between Ballerina Farms and other conservative influencers

* The role of the LDS Church in shaping the Neelemans' public image

* Critiques of modern parenting and societal expectations

Whether you're interested in social media culture, conservative lifestyles, or media analysis, this video offers a thought-provoking look at one of the internet's most talked-about families.

Malcolm Collins: [00:00:00] I actually think that this narrative was intentionally crafted in order to make the other scandal impossible. You

Simone Collins: think this is a 4D chess situation?

Malcolm Collins: There was something that happened in the piece that made me think that this was definitely a 4D chess situation.

Simone Collins: You really think she was baiting the reporter with this?

Malcolm Collins: I do think she was baiting the reporter with this. I think that they actually wanted to create this narrative that's being created right now.

It's the type of thing you and I have done with

Simone Collins: Oh, tell me more.

Malcolm Collins: I have a secret theory on what the trip to Greece faux pas was all about. And I'm going to get into it in this video because I do not think it's what you think it is.

I don't think she was saying that to her husband. I think she was saying that to somebody else entirely, but who could it be?

Would you like to know more?

Simone Collins: So Malcolm, I was

Malcolm Collins: actually Simone. I need to speak here. I don't, I don't think any of your opinions matter on this, but here we had to prep for that. Anyway, go ahead.

Simone Collins: Straight. The trad wife dynamic. I was cruising YouTube as is my want, and I found that three of [00:01:00] my favorite YouTubers all had done. In the span of the last few days, Ballerina Farms analyses, and I thought, Oh my gosh, what is going on for those not in the know, Ballerina Farms is a very popular.

We're talking like 9 million followers Trad wife, influencer, Instagram. They don't refer to themselves as a tra wife or a trad couple. And I say they because we're talking about sorry, Hannah and Daniel Neman. They are two Mormons married couple with. Eight kids living on a beautiful property outside Park City in Utah running a farm with dairy cows and chickens and pigs.

An

Malcolm Collins: experience recently that was very similar to an experience that we went through. Right. So yeah,

Simone Collins: these three YouTubers were all doing an analysis of an article that came out in the Times, which involved a reporter coming to visit them who then spent the day with the family. And then. Published what many people are calling a hit piece.

[00:02:00] And what's really interesting is that we're sort of looking at this from people who have seen the exact same formula. British journalist wants to cover a, an alt right adjacent subculture targets of family. goes to spend time with them, probably comes with an existing agenda, or at least their existing cultural baggage, is probably, you know, a pretty progressive, you know, female journalist, and then subsequently writes an article that is beautifully written, you know, you know, interesting, florid, whatever, you know, very evocative.

But it, you know, frames the target family in a controversial right and the target movement in a controversial right. And, and perennialism and tradwives, they're very, they're like cousin trends, if you know what I mean. You know, they're, they're a lot of, they rhyme. There's not a lot of intermixing. But they are, there kind of is, and I would say like any, any sort of progressive journalist that's like trying to explore and possibly criticize rising [00:03:00] conservative movements that are sort of, rebutting progressive ideals is going to look at both pronatalism and treadwifery.

So what, what had happened to that very similar to what had happened to us in various hit pitch pieces that have been written about our pronatalist advocacy and our family in general. So it's like, I feel like we have insights into what's happened with the Neelman's that other people don't have because they haven't had the experience of a journalist embedding with their family for a day.

Asking them questions, seeing the full range of the experience the journalist had that day, but then seeing how the journalist chose to frame that experience later. Because what people aren't seeing is everything that that journalist chose to not write about.

Malcolm Collins: Well, not just that, but I want to, I want to Make one a clarification here.

So there was one instance in which she was asked her and her husband were asked, but she was the one who was directly asked. And then her husband butted in and answered first does she consider herself a trad wife? The husband said, well, the term came up after we started doing what [00:04:00] we were doing.

So it's not like we were aiming to be trad wives, but I guess we sort of are now. And then she clarified further that she didn't fully agree or identify with the title. So. You are a trad wife as much as she is a trad wife. Two way progressive, you would be a trad wife, but we have mentioned many times on the show we should do a full episode on this concept that, that the trad wife movement as it exists now is a bit of a cargo cult.

So for people who aren't familiar with what cargo cults are, this is like, In these islands during World War II, they would there were like natives who weren't really familiar with Europe or Europeans cultural value system or anything like that, but all of a sudden these bases were set up with food and supplies and everything like that, and they'd be airdropped supplies regularly or planes would fly in and drop supplies.

And so, after the Europeans left, they sort of like built religions around them to try to bring back the prosperity of those times, like making Runways out of like [00:05:00] stones and stuff like that are trying to recreate some of the European rituals that they remembered from that period and I think But but all of it was sort of a mock of a time that they didn't fully understand or know And it is all the modern image of what that time was

Simone Collins: Yeah, and that's similar to sympathetic magic like, you know, I want to fly so i'm gonna eat a bird You know something like that of like well, like let's try to bring that back.

Like oh Just by doing things that are kind of similar, let's,

Malcolm Collins: let's try to bring back the, the, the wholesomeness and the prosperity where you could genuinely have, you know, your average American family and the whole family could survive off of the husband's income and like, And a lot of people think that we are fully against stay at home moms.

I'm not. I just don't like elevating this image because I don't think it's attainable for the average person. And I think it leads people to make very poor financial decisions. Well, in career decisions, there's

Simone Collins: a lot of risks with stay at home parenting, which is that like sort of the dynamics that can be built among a couple.

[00:06:00] Especially when there's one breadwinner and then one homemaker, there can be a lot of like misunderstanding of the roles that each person is playing. Then a lot of resentment building, like you don't understand how much work I put into this family, either as the breadwinner or as the homemaker. And then later after the homemaker partner becomes an empty nester, suddenly the value that they brought to the table.

Is sort of lost and their career is lost and they're a little bit aimless. Like the dynamics are just super screwed up. So it's just, we're concerned about adverse incentives. We're concerned about unsustainable relationship dynamics. And that's another concern. But not everybody

Malcolm Collins: has that. Some people don't have, what I'm saying is we don't actually, like some people have been on our discord, like, well, you know, you probably disapprove of I'm doing this.

And I'm like, no, like if you can make it work, it works. Yeah. One, the lottery. Right. Yeah. And especially. Especially we'll get into her situation, but I think she's really gone above and beyond in terms of like moms that have my respect, the ballerina farm lady, like, Oh my God,

Simone Collins: Neilman is insanely awesome.

And she doesn't, she doesn't use

Malcolm Collins: nannies by the way. She's his nannies once a week. [00:07:00] She has eight kids. She doesn't live like around their parents or around anyone. She can fob the kids off onto, but it's not like, even if she did live

Simone Collins: right by her parents, no one's going to take eight kids. So they're on their own,

Malcolm Collins: you know?

Well, and, and she helps with the farms operation. So, you know, she's, she's doing the whole package. But what I was going to say here is while I think that the modern trad wide movement is a bit of a cargo cult, that doesn't mean that there aren't valuable things that can be taken from earlier traditions that are social technologies that we have lost over time are discarded that now I think there is a broad understanding that the feminist movement still throughout a bunch of stuff that was actually really useful for women's mental health.

I mean, as we can see by the terrible mental health statistics in progressive women with over 50 percent of progressive white women under 30 having , a serious mental health issue.

Simone Collins: Well, I think that's, that's where this is, this becomes a really interesting interplay, is, I think there's this tension, between progressive women and more traditional women [00:08:00] where they're flirting with this idea of tradwifery.

They're flirting with the performative dream of tradwifery, which is why other tradwife influencers like Nara Smith and also Mormon, but not as like hard on the Mormon part are very popular. There's, it's the same kind of fantasy that Martha Stewart in her time popularized, which is taking the concept of homemaking and making it impossibly aspirational, where people used to, when they did Martha Stewart parodies, they would like, you know, joke, just like people joke about Nara Smith now of like, well, first I'm going to grind the wheat to make my bread, which I will then, you know, everything's made like impossibly from like scratch which is something that Hannah Nielman and I think it's this, this, this fantasy it's drawing in progressive women who know that things aren't working, but those progressive women at the same time feel a lot of tension around this concept of having a partner who might speak for both of you, which shows up in this article again and again.

The journalist brings up how David. Keeps, [00:09:00] hold on, hold on, hold

Malcolm Collins: on. Before we go to this I wanted to briefly bring up an anecdote from your life. So Simone, you know, she tries to do, you know, when we have time, because we're both not opening together and do the podcast, we don't have time for all of the traditional trad wifey stuff, but you know, she likes to try to make her own bread at home and stuff like that with the kids is a fun activity on weekends.

And you had somebody come to you and they go, well, did you mill the wheat? Like, how did, how did this go?

Simone Collins: They, yeah, they commented on an Instagram post I made where I had a picture of the kids making bread or something like that. And she was like, well, you should really consider, you know, milling your own wheat because the nutritional value is lost and in three days, I've been just thinking to myself, like, I just, I don't know where I'm going to get like the, where does one get wheat?

I, I think I even asked her this because I'm just, yeah, like, do I pick the wheat? Like where is it? And how, like, is there like a KitchenAid website? Mixer add on that like I do have like a kitchen and mixer meat grinder Like we could make our own hamburger meat if we wanted to but I don't know how I would mill my own [00:10:00] wheat

Malcolm Collins: Before we go further what I really want to do is go into the specific controversies that were created by this piece And try to dissect what was really happening in these moments even from the writing of the piece because I think Similar to the pieces that covered us, it was clear if you are reading them with a critical mind that the journalist never specifically outright lies, they just cover things in a way that will lead you to misinterpret what's happening.

Simone Collins: Well, and she, she, she highlights and observes things in a way that, that has her interpreting them. Even though they're like very subtle things like she at one point highlights how Hannah repeats something that her husband, Daniel says, and she highlights that and she doesn't add any commentary.

It's very like show. Don't tell it's it's well written. But that's, these are all things that she selectively chooses to present in a way that's like, look at that. You know what I think that means instead of just actually the really funny thing is the, the YouTubers that we talked about in another [00:11:00] podcast Jordan and McKay were talking about this and they were talking about that exact sentence and they're like, oh, you see, and a lot of Mormon mothers do that and.

The, the wife actually repeated something that the husband said, like, he said something like, yeah, a lot of Mormons do that. And she said, yeah, a lot of Mormons do that completely unironically. Like there was no wink to it. It's just something humans do. But because this was highlighted as such in the article that it was presented as this thing of like, oh, she's this brainwashed wife who, you know, is being completely controlled by her husband when.

I don't think that's the case. Go

Malcolm Collins: over the arguments they use for her being controlled by her husband.

Simone Collins: Yeah. So in, as this journalist visits, she becomes increasingly frustrated as she's going throughout the day. And in, in many cases, it's Daniel answering questions that she is asking while making eye contact or like looking directly at Hannah.

It's Daniel who, while Hannah is making lunch for the kids is driving through the city. This journalist around the property to show, to [00:12:00] show her irrigation ditch as much to her great frustration. It's often the kids who are answering for them. So, she gets really frustrated by that. And she also notes multiple times in the article how he appears to have gotten his way with things with the way that they chose.

Malcolm Collins: Before we go into that, I, I can also understand the, the journalist's perspective here, which is to say she went out to talk to the trad wife, the female influencer, of course. Yes. Right. And then her husband cuts in and is one answering questions directly being asked of the influencer and two drives the journalist all around the property.

Simone Collins: So she becomes yes, so she becomes increasingly frustrated because she just want to talk with this male influencer and the way that she interprets it is this is a controlling husband.

This is actually a serious trad wife situation where women are being disempowered. And when I, as I'm reading this, I'm thinking about what it's like when we have journalists visit us as people who are also like part of their, let's [00:13:00] explore the lives of conservatives journey as journalists and what they must be thinking.

And often what happens is Malcolm is answering a lot of the questions and I disappear for a while to take care of our infant while Malcolm, you know, takes a journalist out for lunch. That's like a common format that we use when they're visiting. Why is that the case? Because I want to get some fricking work done.

And also because I don't really like talking with, with journalists or being around people at all. I want to be alone for a little bit of the day. And often journalists are visiting all day. So always, inevitably the night before a journalist comes to visit, I tell Malcolm, Oh my gosh, I'm so stressed out.

I don't want to be around this person all day. I just need to get work done. I have this, this, and this to do. And Malcolm's like, don't worry. I will run interference. I I will give you the time that you need to get your stuff done. And we'll still make sure that you have plenty of time to talk with them.

But I know you don't really want to do this. I'm happy to step in. And so probably what's happening is a lot of these journalists are thinking, Oh, you know, how, you know, how dare he, you know, hide her away or something. And this may happen with Hannah. I could totally see Hannah being an introvert. I could totally see Hannah [00:14:00] also being like.

I just want to feed my kids lunch without a journalist breathing down my neck or criticizing me for the way that I'm feeding my kids, you know, or, or seeing the way that I feed my kids and then writing about that. Like, you know, there's a lot of, there's a lot of criticism that could come from that. And I

Malcolm Collins: was, I was going to talk about how.

If you look at the actual incidents that she uses to try to make it look like Hannah is being controlled they are things like, you know, the husband saying, well, she does, I guess we're trad, she's a trad wife, given this new term that's come up and her saying, I'm not a trad wife as indicating that the husband wants her to be more traditional than she is.

But

Simone Collins: it

Malcolm Collins: really could just be the husband is just like, I guess she's a trad wife. Like he's a busy guy running a thing. And she's like, Yeah, but you know, I don't really fully identify with it. Very similar to us where it's like, I guess to you, she is a trad wife, but she doesn't like aspire to [00:15:00] be a trad wife.

And then you have other instances in which she's talking about how, like, and she writes in the piece how they both talk about how they gave up something. To start this that he gave up a career in finance and she gave up a career as a ballerina and she keeps trying to frame it as like, look at everything she lost with this career as a ballerina.

And I find this like uniquely insane. This is like, so for people who don't know the lifestyle of a ballerina, this is like, you know, a little boy when he's young, he wants to be a soldier and fight on the front lines, but oh no, he married a billionaire heiress. And now has to live in a farm. He doesn't get to fight on the front lines of war.

 Like, people [00:16:00] aspiration, like, it's not even like a long term career, you were telling me. Well, it

Simone Collins: can't be. I mean, yeah, you basically have to be young to be a ballet dancer. primarily because after a while you accumulate so many injuries that you can no longer dance. And also it is one of the most kind of similar to cheerleading, you know, you think it's all fluffy and pretty and it turns out to be like the most dangerous sport, like probably worse than football for head injuries and probably not as worse.

The stats, I don't know, we have to look at the stats for cheerleading versus football, but they're both extremely dangerous.

So I looked this up in post in belly injuries are around comparable to football injuries.

Malcolm Collins: I'm pretty sure being a ballerina is harder on your body than being an MMA as a man.

Again, I looked this up in post and well, the rate of injuries per hour, fighting slash dancing is higher in MMA. You do more hours dancing in a average ballerina career. So when you calculate from that, the rate of injury is higher in ballet than MMA. For the average amount of [00:17:00] hours you are going to do have one of them per day.

Simone Collins: It's, it's, it's terrible. I mean, so, something that always stuck with me. me was Michelle Yeoh who is a very famous actress now who first, I think, hit American mindshare with her role in, in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon was a ballet dancer in her youth until she sustained a serious spinal injury.

So then when she go to like acting in martial arts films, cause doing all that stunt work was way lighter on her body. Yeah, and she said that literally having the s**t kicked out of you is easier than being a ballet dancer. So, yeah, that's, it's punishing, and it's a lot like modeling too, where like a lot of the, the, the cachet that you can bring to the table, you know, is your youth.

And that's only going to last for so long. So her days were numbered from the very beginning. And the fact that she instead, you know, has been able to have an insanely influential career as an influencer, in addition to having a pretty picturesque life. You know, on this, on this gorgeous ranch. I want to

Malcolm Collins: elevate [00:18:00] this, this as well.

Why does a little girl want to be a ballerina? In the same way, like, why does a little boy want to be a soldier, right? Like, it's because they see it as, as, as beautiful and elegant and aspirational, and everyone looks up to them. And yeah,

Simone Collins: like, how many ballerinas can you name? How many ballerinas do little girls look at now and think, I want to be like her?

No, their own freaking instincts. Instagram. She's living the dream.

Malcolm Collins: Well, and I think how non committed to this ballerina lifestyle actually slips across in the piece. So she mentions in one part that she was going to, they had this barn set aside to be her ballet studio.

But then she's like, yeah, but then it got converted into a, the place where we educate our kids and and partially

Simone Collins: a gym

Malcolm Collins: and the, the journalist was sitting there like, Oh.

You know, this is a monument to like the horror of her life, that the one little part of a thing that she could have had to herself Yeah, the one

Simone Collins: barn that was supposed to be dedicated to becoming her ballet studio host, become a [00:19:00] school for their children, and now a gym for Daniel, which by the way, they, they share. The gym has tens of thousands of dollars worth of equipment in it. If they wanted to put in mirrors and a bar for ballet exercises, they would have done so like it, this is clearly just a lot of prior.

Malcolm Collins: They have hundreds of acres of property and, and they have to have at least a billion dollars.

And I'll talk about why I believe they have at least a billion dollars in a second. He actually was committed. To building herself a ballet studio, like this was more than a passing fancy when she's just like, eh, I guess I don't have time between teaching the kids and doing the other stuff. She, it would be trivial for her to do this.

, she has intentionally decided to not build this ballet studio.

Simone Collins: Yeah, ballet studios, of all the types of studios you might design, are extremely low maintenance. All you need is a bar and some mirrors, like, and a good floor. That's it.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. And so I just, I think what it is, is she just doesn't care that much, [00:20:00] especially given the public attention that she is already getting.

Now I want to talk a bit about them dating and their background. So I actually have a personal connection to this. And you may not know this. Did you know that we pitched to her, to the guy's father? When we were raising money for our search fund, he was a guy in Salt Lake

Simone Collins: city. No, I'm looking up.

Okay. I'm checking our CRM. I need to see if this is actually true.

Malcolm Collins: So, so the, her, his dad was one of the founders of jet blue. And not only that, he was one of my teachers at Stanford business school. And so he then, and, and what this guy did, so I can go into a bit of the career trajectory, because a lot of people don't understand why he might've been working in Brazil, because this is what they did early in their relationship.

They went to work in Brazil to run a company that his dad had founded, or I suspect actually purchased, and the news is just misreporting it is his core business now. So first he funded JetBlue, and now he invests in search funds, which is the industry that you and I were in. And so what his son was doing was acting as a search fund operator.

[00:21:00] Now this to me signals something quite different than it would to a general population. I'm actually like, if I have one complaint about the ballerina farms couple, it's when the son, when she was like, well, I gave up my dreams of being a ballerina. And he's like, well, you know, and I had to give up my job too.

And I was like, You didn't really though. You could have kept him in your career.

Simone Collins: After they got engaged, he said he wanted to be a pig farmer. So this actually was

Malcolm Collins: his dream. Yeah. He, this is him using his billions of dollars to start the type of company that somebody else couldn't start. He should like, I just, as somebody who comes from like a similar background to him and didn't end up using my family's money to cheese, you know, my early life or my existing career.

I Like he should be doing more in the world than just this one job. Yes, he has a big footprint, but like really he could be doing a lot more than he, he is right now to try to fix the world, whether it's politics or, you know, it's not just the podcast that we run. We also operate a search fund right now.

We also operate [00:22:00] a daily podcast. We also have Simone running for office right now. We're also have written five bestselling books. Like

Don't you get a job?

Get a goddamn job, Al. You got a negative attitude. That's what's stopping you. You gotta get your act together.

Simone Collins: I'm going to push back on that. Can I do it now or should I do it later?

Malcolm Collins: Okay.

Simone Collins: So, one of the theories that's going on in the Reddit snark dedicated to ballerina farms, because of course there has to be snark about this is that the Mormon church has assigned to Hannah and And Daniel their like calling of being influencers for the Mormon church for the LDS church.

Oh, that would

Malcolm Collins: make sense.

Simone Collins: And they have a huge plot. They have 9 million followers. This is a huge number of people. The vast, vast, vast majority here, not even remotely. I mean, the first time I heard about them was from one of our gay friends who lives in California and has nothing to do with any of this.

Right. You know, like totally not Mormon. [00:23:00] And the, the theory. That actually was first posted in the, in the subreddit from an ex LDS church PR person is that the church has assigned this as their calling. And the church actually does actively work with a bunch of Mormon influencers, actually like coordinating on like, I would like you to send this message.

I would like you to do this. And it would make, it would be dumb if the church didn't do this with people. Yeah, I

Malcolm Collins: don't see this as a theory. This is confirmed for me. It would be insane for the church not to do this. It is weird that he isn't still doing something in the search fund industry. Because that was, it seemed to be where he was working.

And so the question is, or as an operator for a private equity firm, like he can do that stuff remotely. So like, why isn't he doing that stuff? He's in

Simone Collins: a position. Yeah, this is, this is something that very few other people can do very high barriers to entry getting this kind of following is very difficult and they put in their posts and their content.

They talk a lot about the Mormon religion. They talk about the church. They talk about you know, that [00:24:00] he talks about how like the barn they had was inspired by the architecture of the barns of original Mormon settlers. Like, this is definitely something that's worked into. their work in a way that also implies that this is just that they happen to be Mormon.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. So we need to talk about the dating and also the Mormon ness of their early relationship because it horrified the journalist, but it's actually very normal for Mormons. Yeah. So, the first part is the dating, right? Can you talk about the dating story?

Simone Collins: Yeah. So, and they, they, in the article, the journalist covers how Daniel had met Hannah, they, they met at a basketball game and he asked to go on a date with her, but she was kind of busy with school.

She was at Juilliard in New York at the time he was 23, she was 21. So for six months he wouldn't go on she wouldn't go on a date with him. Finally, he learns that she's going to take a five hour flight from home in Utah, back to New York for school. And he decides to get on the same day.

JetBlueFlight pulls some strings with this family to make sure that he is in the seat right next to her for those five hours, and that was their first date.

There's, [00:25:00] there's

Malcolm Collins: some things I want to note with this. He admitted to it immediately on this date that he had done this. He's like, I pulled some strings.

She didn't know. So, here's also an interesting thing in their courtship. When he was trying to date her and she wasn't saying yes to him, that six months period, She didn't know he was the son of a billionaire. She didn't know about his JetBlue connections. She didn't know how fabulously wealthy this guy was.

And I suspect the reason why things changed so quickly after that was she found out, Oh shi Um, not only that, He's a handsome looking normal. His family, like I know his dad's reputation on campus and everything like that, he is seen as like a wholesome, upstanding, very,

Simone Collins: very respected, very good, very

Malcolm Collins: respected.

Yeah.

Simone Collins: And she also in a separate social media post unmoored from this article made a long time ago, talked about how at the airport, I think in Salt Lake City, she happened upon some family who was like, Oh, you do not want to let [00:26:00] this guy slip away. I think maybe that was the point at which she was informed that he like, do you, you know who he is,

Malcolm Collins: this guy is in addition to this, you've got to think about this act he did for her.

So, so often, you know, when you have these billionaire non billionaire relationships, you get this idea that the non billionaire was like chasing them to try to like take their money or something like that, where there's always this, this fear in the background. One of the most romantic things anyone can do for you is a huge, like, act like this.

Like, like, all these women are pretending like, oh, how gross, that he basically went on a non consensual date with her, right? But you sit next to people That doesn't count as a first date. She could have chosen not to talk to him if she wanted to on the airplane. It could have just been an awkward flight.

No I, I really think any, any of these reporters or any of these people online who are acting horrified about this, it's like, [00:27:00] So you really are mortified that an attractive, wholesome, well mannered billionaire's son who is well respected in their community, does this huge act to try to be close to you and show you, then and forever, that he desperately wanted you, you specifically, and I actually think that you know how we say, like, when you are doing stuff with media relations, sometimes you need to lean in the opposite direction and create a scandal that makes the more natural scandal impossible?

The natural scandal of their relationship. is she was a gold digger. But they have, through this narrative, made that natural scandal impossible. And so I actually think that this narrative was intentionally crafted in order to make the other scandal impossible. You

Simone Collins: think this is a 4D chess situation?

Malcolm Collins: There was something that happened in the piece that made me think that this was definitely a 4D chess situation.

Simone Collins: Oh, tell me [00:28:00] more.

Malcolm Collins: So, this is when she was sitting with the woman and the woman was like, well, so you gave birth without pain medication, right? Which you tried to do the first time you went into like women choose to do this on their own.

Totally. I, did I pressure you to try that the first time you wanted to have kids? You were devastated as I remember. I was devastated.

Simone Collins: You did not pressure me. Yeah, she was, I,

Malcolm Collins: I had to make the final call to be like, you need to get an epidural and you need to get a c-section because the baby's life is at risk.

And then after that, there just wasn't really a reason not to do it because, well then the second pregnancy was complicated, so we had to get a C-section, and after that to it would be not to do a c-section. So, with us, we didn't really have a choice, but you wanted to tank it because like, and you're not even like a Christian, whatever, you're just like, well, I fully, I don't know what the effects are of it.

Why did you wanna do it without payment?

Simone Collins: So I was concerned about the, you know, what we'd read about, you know, how much the epidural can accumulate in the baby, especially if [00:29:00] you're doing a vaginal birth and not just a quick C section. So that's for a long period of time, potentially, and epidurals can slow down.

birth, making it take longer. Plus, I was afraid of actually just getting a needle in my spine. You know, I'd never done it before and it seemed scary at the time. It's not a big deal, by the way.

Malcolm Collins: But then there was also the instance of her so So

Simone Collins: she did unmedicated births and then she talked about this one time where she was where she did get an epidural and it was kind of great, she said.

Malcolm Collins: And she apparently whispered this to the reporter while the husband was in another room on the call. Now either the reporter is lying or she was baiting the reporter with this.

Simone Collins: You really think she was baiting the reporter with this?

Malcolm Collins: I do think she was baiting the reporter with this. I think that they actually wanted to create this narrative that's being created right now.

It's the type of thing you and I have done with journalists. Like once you get good at journalism when I say journalism, I don't mean being a journalist, but like catching and writing press. Manipulating

Simone Collins: the media. Well, and I mean, already they've shown [00:30:00] themselves to be extremely good at at least at this point in their careers.

Now there are slip ups that they've made on social media before and even possibly We'll talk

Malcolm Collins: about one

Simone Collins: slip up that wasn't actually a big deal. They're known among their critics for being incredibly press savvy and incredibly controlled with their image. They have engaged with the media a lot. So this is possible and, and we, they may have learned what we've learned, which is that Courting controversy is how you get things to spread a lot.

There's also another reason why they might want to have courted controversy and been framed as like creepy conservatives, because to a normal conservative audience, every criticism in this article is completely like. issue. Like, what are you talking about? Nothing here is weird. They're being completely normal.

And here's what just happened. They opened a dairy and they're going to be selling raw milk to Utah. How else are you going to reach and resonate with the conservative Utah audience aside from being attacked by a bunch of progressive nuts online?

Malcolm Collins: Well, and, and, and people aren't familiar with like what we're talking about here.

We did a [00:31:00] video on it called the art of media baiting. This is perfectly played, perfectly played to go along with a brand launch. The one big mistake I think they made, because I just think that maybe they thought this was normal, is she mentioned that she occasionally gets so sick, she can't leave her bed for a week.

So exhausted. Yeah. Well, that's not normal. That's not normal. That sounds like a medical issue. And I would guess that either she has some undiagnosed disease or maybe you shouldn't be drinking raw milk. People have also noted sores around their mouths that look kind of like herpes sores, which can be caused potentially by raw milk as well.

Simone Collins: And they're really big on, well, now they have to kind of dig into it because they're going to be trying to sell it. So

Malcolm Collins: yeah, I should put some skit here about like disgusting raw foods that people drink because it's that short by that.

Simone Collins: There's this, that short that I shared with you that was like

okay. Well, we'll, we'll do that one.

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Malcolm Collins: Yeah. But yeah, we are not about that type of stuff. I don't eat disgusting stuff just because it's like, like we do natural eggs and stuff like that, but that's because

Simone Collins: I don't think raw milk is inherently disgusting. I just think that it, there's a, there's a bacterial [00:33:00] risk.

You know, it's just one of those things where like, we love, we love our eggs from our coop, but we also do not, we, we do not have them raw because the risk of salmonella is high. Like we, it's just one of those things, you know, we pasteurize and we cook for a reason.

Malcolm Collins: But I, I, well, and if Simone, if you ever told me I'm so exhausted, I can't work for a week, I'd be like, I'd have serious issues with that.

Oh,

Simone Collins: even when I was on death's door with Pneumonia. I still did podcast recordings from my death bed.

Malcolm Collins: Well, and this is another thing like with them that I love, right? Like, yeah, you were really, really sick then is you typically go back to work the day after you give birth. And you even, you know, we're doing like sales calls through contractions with, with some of her bursts and stuff like that.

So she, Simone's an absolute monster with that stuff. And so Isabella in a farms lady, you know, she one of the quote unquote controversies is she went to a pageant, a beauty pageant, and got through the first round immediately after having one of

Simone Collins: your pregnancy. Yeah, good for her. And,

Malcolm Collins: That, what was it, two days or two weeks?

Two weeks. That's not even that bad. Yeah, I mean,

Simone Collins: that's, two weeks after my [00:34:00] most recent delivery of, of Indy, I was at the primary at the polls. Yeah. And

Malcolm Collins: the French news crew

Simone Collins: was there filming us.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. So like, you do the main thing, like, once you make fertility a yearly thing, it's not really a big deal.

Yeah. And this

Simone Collins: was her eighth kid, you know, and it was a home birth. So she probably had a lot less swelling cause she wasn't on an IV, which is big. So it's rough, but I mean, it's still super

Malcolm Collins: doable. And I think it's important to normalize this. We shouldn't be making pregnancy out to be this big, horrendous thing.

I think that's one of the reasons why people have so much trepidation about going into pregnancy, because basically society lies to them about how hard it is. And like, nobody has like a vested interest in being like, well, I mean, you know, people used to do this every year. It used to be part of the natural yearly cycle of a woman's life.

Like, what are you guys on? You know, That's what makes

Simone Collins: the controversy so interesting around this, is that it shows, it lays bare the tension in society. Between this [00:35:00] aspiration and realization of you can do it. You can be in a beauty pageant two weeks after delivering. You can look young and beautiful and still be a mother of eight kids.

You know, this is possible parenting and, and pregnancy don't have to be unsustainable, but then there's also this desire among those who feel like they can't, or don't really want to push through that cognitive dissonance or even try. To say, no, it's not possible. She has had help or she isn't okay. And there's, you know, I think that's part of what the journalist was trying to do was to demonstrate, no, she's not.

Okay. No, she's secretly crying for help.

Malcolm Collins: Well, I mean, she threw acts like that is basically hitting the journalist on the head with a bong stick in being like, you know, in society. And it hurts. It hurts them when they realize that these lies that they've brought into are just that. They are lies. And they are lies that have, have cumulatively built up in society because, you know, no woman ever historically had a reason to be like, well, it's really not that big a deal, you know?

Because you know, you, you [00:36:00] get all this sympathy, you get all this. So why not lean into it? And if you go more progressive, then you get all these insane lies like, oh, well, like you can't be pregnant without getting fat afterwards. Like it just naturally happens. And it's like, no, it doesn't just naturally happen.

It happens because you created that standard for yourself and you realize now that, well, you don't have to worry about your husband leaving you. So you don't need to hold yourself to any sacrificial standards anymore. Because you don't respect your relationship in the way people like her respect her relationship and her husband.

And I'd also note here that Here you have the, the, the issue of them freaking out about how quickly they got married, how quickly they started dating and everything. Oh, and

Simone Collins: that's just a Mormon thing. You know, that's, that's not, yeah, that's not a weird thing. Yeah, that also gets framed in the articles.

Like those

Malcolm Collins: kind of But I don't even think it's a Mormon thing. Like you and I decided to get married within a few months of dating, at least.

Simone Collins: Yeah, but we waited for your brother and sister because we're nice.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, but that wasn't like, we would have gotten married earlier, but we specifically, so people who don't know this, we waited about a year to get [00:37:00] married.

I think more than

Simone Collins: that, we were, we were engaged. In 2013 and then we didn't get married until 2015 because we wait. Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. So, and for people who don't know is my brother wife had told him because they had been dating since their first day of college. That she would be upset if I got married before them because, you know, I would have met you years after they met.

I would have started dating you years after they started dating, but she was unable to get married while they were at Stanford business school together because She was on a scholarship. And so if they got married and they combined their finances, she would no longer qualify for the scholarship anymore.

And so as an act of sort of solidarity with them, I decided to wait until one day they had gotten married for us to get married. So we got married the day after them. But yeah, it was a day in

Simone Collins: between, but yeah.

Malcolm Collins: Oh, there was a day in between. So two days after them, we had a lot of respect. Yeah.

Good 48 hours. I wasn't going to wait any longer than that. [00:38:00] But I, I we could have gotten married much earlier. I actually think that this is just like, these people don't know what it feels like to really care about somebody and want to live life together. Or, or

Simone Collins: to even date to marry. And I think that's also very different is, is people don't realize that there, there is this life you can choose to live in which you.

You date partners because you were trying to find a spouse and trying to start a family. And once, you know, you found the right person, it's a bad idea to wait because fertility only gets worse. You know, you only lose your optionality as time goes on.

Malcolm Collins: Well, and, and this is another thing that she did, which I have immense respect for.

So when the husband was thinking about marrying for her, she made one condition for him. Which is we have to work together

Simone Collins: because her parents did that.

Malcolm Collins: She saw her parents do it similar to what Simone and I push. You know, we run our companies together. We do the podcast together. We basically have a similar condition and I think it works amazingly [00:39:00] well.

I think it's much more sustainable than other forms of trad wifery. And I think that. She really embodies this. And this is another thing I respect about her, is her and her husband, while they do live this sort of idealized lifestyle due to their wealth, they are not doing things in terms of how they are raising their family that leans into the wealth overly.

By that, what I mean is they still have the job running the farm, which seems like it takes a lot of work. Same with the posting, that takes a lot of work. In addition to that, she doesn't hire nannies except for once a week. That needs kids. It was eight kids. Yeah. And no school, it's homeschooling. Right.

So like,

Simone Collins: no, there is a, a fellow Mormon who comes in a couple of days a week to do some homeschooling for them. So there's,

Malcolm Collins: Oh, there's that. Even so it's all very financially sustainable for like a normal Mormon family. Um, Working together with your husband and hiring a tutor for a couple of days a week.

Tutors don't cost that much because well, [00:40:00] and also it's

Simone Collins: like, it's, it's, it's Mormon. It's Mormon tutors. So like often that, like they're. You know, other people commenting on this have pointed out that, you know, when they babysat for fellow Mormons as a teen, they'd get paid like, you know, 20 bucks for like five hours, you know, it's like within Mormon community service provision is often at a high discount.

Elements of their lives are very sustainable. I would argue that they're often criticized for living a sort of petite Trinon lifestyle. This is in reference to the way that Marie Antoinette made her little farmhouse and lived her little life pretending to be a peasant farmer. And they are totally doing that.

But I would also argue that they are totally not hiding the fact that they're living a, they're cosplaying as homesteaders. I think Hannah even uses wording around that, like, you know, like pretending to be a homesteader or like, you know, trying to be a homesteader and they're not hiding the fact, like she talks about the fact that they insulated the outside of their house.

She shares pictures of their renovations and she cooks in front of a 10, 000 [00:41:00] Stove the Aga, like this, like the Rolls Royce of of stoves. And, and, you know, she doesn't hide the fact it's, it's very clear that they're wealthy, it's very clear that she, you know, is, is it the highest echelons of social class?

And I think the fact that there isn't that, that that lack of transparency that there's no criticism and keep in mind, okay, just as, and this is a time honor tradition of wealthy people. Cosplaying as poor people, but keep in mind that poor people constantly cosplay as wealthy people, which is why we've had sumptuary laws, which is why food trends have constantly changed.

Just explain what a

Malcolm Collins: sumptuary

Simone Collins: sumptuary law is saying poor people can't wear purple because dammit, we need to have something that they can't copy eventually. And food trends. Constantly fluctuate if you look throughout history between very like weird like gastronomic gross food That's all weird and abstracted to like down home country loaf Because as soon as poor people are able to somewhat copy what what wealthy people are eating [00:42:00] suddenly wealth people like that's disgusting poor food I must eat the opposite.

So there's always this game of cat and mouse You know, we cannot we can no sooner criticize wealthy people for cosplaying as poor people We can criticize the poor people who are buying food Fake Louis Vuitton bags and like wearing like knockoff luxury stuff or even real luxury stuff. Everyone's doing the other thing.

You know what I mean? I'm going to

Malcolm Collins: argue against you here. I don't think they are cosplaying as poor people. I think that these journalists, Oh yeah, no, they are actually cosplaying as wealthy

Simone Collins: people. Wealthy

Malcolm Collins: culture right now. Yeah. The, a key thing was in wealthy culture right now is this aesthetic, this homesteading aesthetic.

I mean, look at us. Like, look, it's a flex. No, it's a flex. It's a hardcore flex to have a farm and chickens and live in the countryside now. Also, cause

Simone Collins: you're not a wage slave. You don't have to go into your office. You're not obligated to go into these meetings like, because you have that much wealth. And everyone's pointed out who's an actual rancher.

They're like these people, you know, every, every like real like dairy farmer or person who has a farm like this, they're [00:43:00] financing it. They can barely make ends meet. These people are buying it in cash. They have all the most expensive high end farm equipment. This is very clearly a luxury endeavor and it's probably not cash positive.

Malcolm Collins: Well, no, I'm sure their channel is cash positive. Sure. The

Simone Collins: content is cash positive, but their farm, I don't know. I

Malcolm Collins: wouldn't be surprised if it's not cash positive, but probably about breaks neutral, but that's not the point of the farm. The point of the farm is the content. And that's very successful.

Well, and the lifestyle and the flex they, they are, well, and again, this is

Simone Collins: a calling. I really think that the key career here. is that they believe from an ideological standpoint that what their work is spreading the word of the Mormon church, showing the wholesomeness and attractiveness of that lifestyle, which is drawing people in, which is why this controversy is here in the first place.

Malcolm Collins: But I, I would, I would note here that as a society, so if people wonder why wealthy people are doing this, like why wealthy culture, as Simone has mentioned, historically, what you have is wealthy people, Go more and more and more out there with their [00:44:00] tastes as poor people try to catch up with them.

And then you get this reset where then wealthy people then go extremely simplistic and back to the countryside. Like the reason why like treat triumph or whatever she's talking about. It was a thing was because that was the height of wealth was to pretend to be a poor shepherd. But with all of the nicest stuff, this is like some new part of wealthy culture.

It's a cycle that we go through and you see historically where, you know, the wealthy people are going to like, Oh, escargot or like crazy stuff. And then they go back to meatloaf. Because now, now all the poor people are eating and you see this in society now, now that like. Brands like Louis Vuitton and, and, and Prada and like a lot of these like fancy brands have moved down market, down market, down market is how, how do you show your wealth when you do the things that poor people can't do, you know, you see all this was like tanning for a long time it was that having, A, a, a tan was considered very lower class because you had to go out on the fields and work.

And so the wealthy people had parasols. And, and they, and even masks, have you seen [00:45:00] the creepy writing masks? Very pale all the time, but then office work started and only the wealthy people could go outside. So then all the wealthy people started and going, these, getting these ridiculous tans, like growing up, we had like a tanning booth in my house and stuff like that.

And then The poor people figured out, Oh, we want to be like the wealthy people and be tanned. So they started to do like spray on tans and tanning booths themselves. And then all the wealthy people were like, Oh, being tan, we can't do that anymore. Now we need to go back to being pale again. And so you had, you have this little cat and mouse game and that's what they're seeing.

They're not pretending to be poor. They're just not up to date with what is considered a chic in wealthy culture right now. And the way that they're acting is very chic. Now, I want to talk about the one really bad incident where I'm like, this was actually a big mess.

Simone Collins: Right. So they posted, and this is definitely something that both of them decided to do.

A little video short. of Hannah receiving a birthday gift from her husband, Daniel, who's shooting this as it's [00:46:00] happening. It, it was a package that he didn't bother to wrap. And she's like, Oh, like, what is it? Could it be tickets to Greece? Like she just says multiple times, like she's starting to rip it open.

There's fabric. She's like, Oh, it's a hat for our trip to Greece. Like she very clearly wants it. A trip to Greece for her birthday. And then she opens it up and it is you know, fresh out of the box from Ukraine. A really cute egg apron. It's a little apron with a lot of little holes for eggs in it.

But people are like, how very dare he? Because after she like, you know, tries to look cheerful, like she's clearly disappointed. She tries to look cheerful. She kind of like does a little jig with it, you know, holding it to her body. And he says you're welcome. And in the sort of like passive aggressive smug way, which just comes across horribly.

And now it's this meme. I was just looking through Hannah's ballerina farms, Instagram account and now on like a bunch of her most recent posts. There are just people who are like, where is her [00:47:00] stage? Where is her trip to Greece? Just like give this woman her trip to Greece. Like, they're just like justice for Hannah.

You know, they're just, they're freaking out that this woman hasn't been given her trip to Greece. And it is weird that like, one, She very clearly kept, it's like, if, if I, for some reason would not let die, that hopefully dead horse of me constantly being like, I wish you could fly business class everywhere, which we can't because it's too expensive.

And you being like, you know, giving me like a vacuum and being like, you're welcome. You know, like that it just, I don't know why they would post something like that. It's not. So I have a theory on this. Okay. What's going on?

Malcolm Collins: All right. So first, something that the audience should know, I've checked, they do not appear to have ever done this trip to Greece, right?

This apron is a trivial gift for them, right? Like it's not an expensive thing. They are almost certainly billionaires. That being the case, a trip to Greece would be a trivial expense for them. So the question is, is why, if she really wants to do this, [00:48:00] why haven't they done the trip to Greece? Because they

Simone Collins: have gone to like Paris with their kids.

This isn't an impossible thing.

Malcolm Collins: My guess is it might actually be part of their calling to try to, I suspect maybe after the trip to Paris or something, the church says you can't do things that aren't financially sustainable for the average Mormon family. So while they can live the very best of lifestyle, it's supposed to be attainable.

And I suspect that that is what is going on here. She's

Simone Collins: not throwing shade at her husband, she's She's throwing shade at the LDS church. She's throwing shade at her handlers. Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: Because the husband, what, like, he's not like an idiot, right? Like, he knows, you know, if she wanted to have an off stage conversation with him about, Hey, the cryptography is actually really important to me.

They would have that conversation off air.

Simone Collins: Especially because they are media savvy. They're not idiots. That's why this was so confusing to me.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. And so she [00:49:00] definitely knew how this would come off. He who filmed this definitely knew who this would come off. So who are they talking to in this video?

They are talking to somebody who is not their fan base and not themselves. I bet it's their LDS handlers.

Simone Collins: Oh, that's so interesting.

That is

Malcolm Collins: my bet as to what the trip to Greece situation was really about. So yeah, yeah I, I, yeah, they can't be, they could have been that stupid, right?

Like, no, no, it's like with us in the bop, people are like, oh, he, he lost. Yeah. How could he have, how could he have slipped? Yeah. But you read the piece and it's very clearly like it was intentional. I did not lose control of my anger and I, knew what I was doing in the moment. And you did it

Simone Collins: in public surrounded by people.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. I could have, I could have done so many different things if I didn't want that to be in the piece. I wanted that to be in the piece. And actually a lot of people can be like, Oh, this was firmly a negative thing for them. You've got to keep in mind. The [00:50:00] type of people who are going to freak out about something like that are the type of people who are not going to support us anyway, given that it's something the majority of Americans do.

And the research now says it's the right thing to do. And most conservative people do it. So we had to look at how we were signaling to a conservative audience. Keep in mind, we're always constantly signaling to two audiences, the progressives who are interested at potentially getting into the conservatism and doing this transition.

But then also the conservatives who Are so hard line that they are costing the party votes and preventing us from winning elections. And they need to understand, like, a softer approach. Right? And so, a number of those people who previously were like, I don't know if we can really trust them.

I don't know they. After that happened, we're like, okay, I trust them a lot more now. They're, they're actually Even

Simone Collins: Limestone was like, well, there's one thing I can agree with you on. Limestone being a demographer who in the Prenatalist space absolutely hates us and everything we stand for. Yeah, he's like a

Malcolm Collins: socialist Christian.

So I guess he's like the one The one area where he's like, well, at least I'm a social conservative. He has, he has like far, far left. Yeah. But [00:51:00] at

Simone Collins: least he, he agrees that, you know, white corporal punishment is correct, you know, for sustainable parenting. Speaking of which, you know, another really common theme in the ballerina farm snark subreddit is, you know, a child endangerment essentially.

And, you know, it was very common. Top hits is look at what they've done with their children. Now look at their children close to a hotspot. Look at their Children chopping food in their home. Look at their Children getting injured. You know, look at the all these things, you know, Oh, don't they have any idea of how many farm accidents take place every year?

And I think this just comes down to again, anytime someone sees a family with more than two Children and no helicopter parents immediately, They're like, this is child endangerment, call Child Protective Services, which to your point, what's the stat of how many, how many families have had CPS called on them in the United States?

37%.

Malcolm Collins: 37 percent of children in the United States have CPS called on them. That's a 37 percent of families, that 37 percent of children.

Simone Collins: Yeah. That's

Malcolm Collins: insane.

Simone Collins: Yeah. So I think that's, that's the theme there is, you know, any criticism that they [00:52:00] are mistreating their children is really an inevitable product of them having.

More than like one or two children, period.

Malcolm Collins: Well, and also I will say that they earn high points on my social influencer index because when this channel was still a lot smaller than it is now I reached out to them about being on the channel and doing an interview with us and they had the courtesy to respond.

And a lot of influencers don't. They do not respond. And we tried to, we're going to be moving to stock responses soon, but it was like a, Oh, we don't do appearances like that, like that was basically the gist of it. So, I'd still love to have them on if they're ever open to it. But I don't know if a channel like ours would do anything other than hurt them because they try to keep a really clean brand if for their, they

Simone Collins: don't talk politics.

They talk about. Raw milk and baking. And you know, there's, she, Hannah does some, you know, very typical female influencer content, things like get ready with me. In fact, her [00:53:00] response to this article was her doing a voiceover commenting on what the journalist wrote over a get ready with me video format, which since you're not a female on constantly on Instagram, get ready with me is basically where women record their like morning routine, how they put on makeup, what they like, how they go to the gym, what they eat for breakfast.

Yeah, it's, it's, I think it's really fun. I love watching this stuff. I mean, I love it when I love it in movies. I love it in dangerous liaisons. I love it in the devil wears Prada. Like this is, but anyway, like she does stuff like that, but they do not talk politics, they do not talk like, aside from talking about how great the LDS church is, it is not, they're not on brand.

They shouldn't be talking with us.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. And, and I want you to respond to, because you had taken a quote from the article that we haven't touched on and put it on our show notes

Simone Collins: so in a followup article that the author of this Times article wrote she commented But it was also a life of contradictions, children, not allowed [00:54:00] screens, but who are reality TV characters online for millions, a stay at home mother who has made a career out of being so an analog old fashioned farm only working because it was underwritten by social media cash, a choice modern in her ability to have one, to do something very traditional.

And this is something that shows up in, in some articles that have been published in relation to us, this like pull, like, Oh, they have kids, but they don't seem to like them. You know, the, the, the journalists seem to feel like they. They have to like catch us in our hypocrisy. And I think they're really trying to catch Hannah in her true woman, having it all.

Oh, but she can't have it all. Just like they wanted to catch us. Like they say they want to have kids, but surely they just hate their kids. Like they, I think they really, progressives covering these conservative moments and these whole little journeys of like, I'm going to go cover and, you know, go profile the family they want to try to catch them in a [00:55:00] lie and they come in planning to do so.

And just looking to fill in the little Mad Libs article doing so.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, I absolutely agree. And I mean, I'm not sorry this happened to them because I bet it was all planned and it worked exactly the way they wanted it to. No, it generated a ton of more interest. It's great. And if, if given you a new theory, I used to be like, get a job, man, was this guy.

But now I am much more, Oh, you know, he is actually, if he was given that calling and of course he probably was, he is living sort of the perfect life, you know, in terms of achieving his goal and, you know, acting as. probably the single biggest advocate in the world right now for the LDS church. I mean, he's probably close to Mitt Romney in terms of, you know, the, the positive reputation that he has gained the church among the type of people who might convert.

Keep in mind, like he doesn't care about the type of people who wouldn't convert. Therefore, they are not like the target of articles like this for him. Therefore, if they get mad at him, That's [00:56:00] no sweat off his back.

Simone Collins: I think he's more influential than Mittens because specifically he shows an intimate view into his life.

You can see the inside of his house. You can see his bathroom. You can see his children and his wife. The, the key thing to pronatalism, I think when it comes to propaganda is showing what it's like, you know, making it feel relatable, making it feel real because people are so unmoored from that. You and I.

Didn't spend a lot of time around kids at all. We honestly didn't know what parenting would be like. And here are a bunch of people often watching this out of like rage bait or just curiosity or just the sheer novelty of it suddenly becoming like normalized to this concept of having kids young, getting married young living a more wholesome life connected and oriented around family instead of around achievement and selling and business and all these other things.

He is incredible. Like talk about impact plus quality of life, like actually just being out there handling pigs, handling cows, handling [00:57:00] chickens, that is a very satisfying life for any human where you get to see the physical results of your

Malcolm Collins: labor. Rewarded by God when they live their calling. Well, and I, I think that you know, he seems to be doing that.

So, and this is what we mean, you know, we believe that Mormonism is one of the true faiths. So I, I think that he is you know, actually called by God to do this and he's doing a good job at it. So good on them. Good on not engaging with weirdos, shock jocks like us. And I love you to death Simone.

This has been a fantastic conversation. Thank you for bringing this to me and I will rush to see if I can get this posted tomorrow.

Simone Collins: I love me. A crazy controversy around conservatives and progressives fighting. So thanks for this. Malcolm loved it.

Malcolm Collins: Love you too. Bye.

Simone Collins: Bye. I really do love you though. You're so pretty.

What do you want to talk about next?

Malcolm Collins: Uh, I want to do the uh, how Catholics transformed America.

I've been told in the comments. You guys liked the little scenes of our family after videos. So [00:58:00] I've added one here. I would note that this one is from a recent family reunion. We went to where the kids met up with all their cousins and everything.

Oh, my goodness.

I'm out of fuel. I'm out of fuel. I'm out of fuel. I'm out of fuel. I'm out of fuel. Hold him. Hold him. Got it, got it, I got it. Give me that! Yo, throw it to me, okay?

Give it a turn, give it a, give it a [00:59:00] turn. You're a natural. Oh yeah. Malcolm. Oh yeah. Oh sorry

to the kids, I'm, I'm, I'm doing filming here. Throw it to your brother. Yeah, yeah, wait, Octavian, come over here, come over here.

Simone Collins: I was saying, I was thinking about the way that we're handling sex ed with our kids.

And I realized we're not sex positive. We're not sex negative. We're sex realists. And I just wish that more people were sex realists. What do you mean by that? Well, people are either like, You know, let's not talk about sex. It's dangerous. It's, you know, it's a sin or they're like, sex is a beautiful thing.

It's about making love. It's, it's a, you know, like it's sacred, it's a sacrament or, you know, it's whatever the hippie free love version of this is. And, you know, in the end, it's a biological process. It is not, I think something that we should be [01:00:00] moralizing. I think it's something that we should be understanding.

Just like we understand hunger and digestion.

Malcolm Collins: We'll do an episode on you know, actually, you know, I have an idea for an episode on that that we could even do today if you wanted to. On sex

Simone Collins: realism.

Malcolm Collins: All right. So, why don't you jump us into this and I'll interrupt you to be like Okay. Okay.

Simone Collins: Yes.

In this thought-provoking discussion, Malcolm and Simone Collins explore the fundamental flaws in communist ideology, even in a hypothetical post-scarcity world. They delve into the nature of scarcity, class structures, and the evolution of influence in the digital age. This video challenges common misconceptions about communism and offers insights into how modern society and economics are shaped by attention, competence, and disintermediated communities.

Key topics covered:

* The impossibility of a truly classless society

* Scarcity and status in post-scarcity environments

* The evolution of influencer culture and digital communities

* The role of competence and attention in modern economies

* Critiques of communist ideology and its practical applications

* The future of urban centers and distributed networks

* The importance of family and cultural identity in society

Whether you're interested in political theory, futurism, or the dynamics of online influence, this video offers a fresh perspective on age-old questions and contemporary challenges.

Malcolm Collins: [00:00:00] communism doesn't work even in a post scarcity world. Yes. I, I, I believe UBI might work in a post scarcity world, but even in a world where you have people's universal basic income, where you have people's basic needs taken care of, like you do food drop offs, you do medicine is handled by the state, you do like all of that.

You still have the class structure we have in our existing society, and you will still have some resource which represents some form of scarcity, because there is always scarcity in any system and what people choose to value is always the thing that is scarce, even if that thing is pointless. And what I find really interesting is it's actually the communists themselves in our current society that are most drawn to artificial scarcity.

It is much more the communists who get drawn to brand name recognition, like the Starbucks and the iPads and the et cetera.

Would you like to know more?

Simone Collins: And there is no such thing as a classist society. [00:01:00] It's not possible. No. Um, Do the intro.

Malcolm Collins: Okay. Hello, everyone. I'm excited to be here with you today. Today is going to be, I hope, a Simone Abigail episode because she was the one who made this point to me while we were walking around a Target. What a fitting place.

It's what we do.

Simone Collins: It's what we do. We

Malcolm Collins: were talking about communism and the cliche. Real communism has never been tried, which we will also get to in this video. But one of the things that you turned and said to me while we were walking was, There

Simone Collins: is no such thing as a classless society. It is absolutely impossible.

Go into your argument because I found it very powerful. Yeah. So no matter what happens in a society, there will always be scarce goods. As soon as you make one good, not so good, People will then sort into classes based on what is scarce. And this shows up in various sci fi novels that anyone can read.

I really like stuff by Cory Doctorow. He wrote this one book called Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, which really [00:02:00] influenced the way that I saw the world in the future. It's, it takes place in a post scarcity environment. You know, post singularity, you can live forever, you have backups of yourself that you can just restore if you accidentally die or are murdered and in this world, you know, you don't need food, you don't need shelter, but There is still a class system and there's still a currency that is, that is limited and finite.

And it's called Woofie. Woofie is social capital in this world. And so people form themselves into what are called adhocracies in this world. Which I love that word. Also. I want, I want a world of adhocracies instead of bureaucracies. Adhocracies are basically short lived collections of people who get together to Do cool stuff to get social credit.

And the discovering system wouldn't be stable and I'll get to why in just a second, but continue. Yeah, I really like it. Nevertheless. This book is about adhocracies that form and compete in Disney's magic kingdom in Florida, in this [00:03:00] post singularity world. Cause some things never go away. Thank God. And what they do is they'll like, they take over the rides.

So, Two rival groups in Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom are, are kind of competing for more woofy. One is, is redoing the Hall of Presidents and the other one is doing the Haunted Mansion. And you know, it's all about like, who can, you know, impress the world the most with their really cool updates to these rides slash attractions.

And it's, it totally makes sense to me that that would be the case. And, you know, and when you, when you, when you say something, it's unpopular when you do something that really pisses people off. If you go viral for something bad. You know, that's it. You're sort of destitute, but being destitute doesn't mean you're starving or homeless.

It just means you don't really get the cool stuff. You don't get the cool stuff. Let's, let's,

Malcolm Collins: let's talk about, I want to break down a few aspects of this. So, because I think it's a very good description and it does a very good job of showing what's going on. Why you can't really have classlessness because [00:04:00] even in an environment where all our needs are met, there are still some things that are intrinsically of limited value, i.

e. Disney world. There is only one Disney world. You can create other Disney worlds, but they won't have the same cultural cliche as the first or the main Disney world. And I, oh, sorry. What was the point? And so. Who gets to work on that Disney World, that special thing, and who gets access to that special thing?

You would still need some metric for deciding these two things. In this, the metric that they choose is attention. The reason the Disney World has more value than another random thing or random park is because it is a thing that collects attention. And so the very attention you collect is what gives you access.

to it. Very interesting that he, one of the things I think he predicted so wrong in that [00:05:00] Disney world would always be a thing of value. Little did he know the wokes would completely destroy the brand so much that nobody even wants to go anymore.

Simone Collins: Oh, I mean, I think it's more, it was more an issue of, of poor planning and price gouging.

It's hard to, we can, we can get in. I mean, we love watching Disney analysts on YouTube for some reason. I also want to talk about why adhocracies

Malcolm Collins: can't form.

Simone Collins: Okay. Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: So suppose the world does work the way it does in that world and we'll be, or we'll feed or the amount of attention that you have access to is the core thing of value in that society. There would be it'd be really dangerous to break up with other groups and form new groups all the time because that would lower the efficiency at the production of this that you would have access to and therefore outcompeted by the groups that mostly stayed together and where it's fairly

discerning into who they work with. . So if you're discerning and who you work with, you [00:06:00] know, you work with people you have experience with and stuff like that. And you're not just working with random new people who might have high woofy, but it might be towards a different community.

It might be toward the different, whatever. You're just going to get out competed by the groups that are more successful. And so that's going to lead to more stable, like woofy corporations, you could call them, i. e. large groups that work together to control an area or an attention resource like Disney World.

And, Work together to do high amounts of production in many ways. You can think of YouTube as already being a Wolfie economy. And the big creators while they work in networks of big creators, and in that degree, you do have a bit of an adhocracy. They all have fairly large teams that are fairly consistent.

And even the different people they choose to work with occasionally. It's a fairly small pool and those pools don't cross over as much as you would think they would so like

Simone Collins: actually more or less how it works in the book, too. Oh,

Malcolm Collins: okay. Well, [00:07:00] yeah, like, for example, if you consider like the Simone and Malcolm, like wider network of intellectual thinkers, we're in,

Simone Collins: you know, we will.

This also in the effect of altruist and rationalist communities, you even see this, like, look at the PayPal mafia, right? You could kind of argue that the, the organizations and investments across which the PayPal mafia have like spread is a collection of adhocracies that are all, you know, they're kind of related.

They share a lot of people. And they form and dissolve as, as necessary. That's, that's what I like about adhocracy is the fluidity of them. The, the pragmatic, the pragmatic nature.

Malcolm Collins: If you look at the PayPal mafia, it doesn't function the way you're saying it functions. It's a collection of literal companies based on nepotism networks.

No, no, no.

Simone Collins: I'm, I'm referring, no, the, the, by the PayPal mafia, I'm referring to people like Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, like those early investors and people involved in PayPal.

Malcolm Collins: Yes. And then they consolidated their power through the way they were investing, forming an entrenched [00:08:00] power network, which is the antithesis of an adhocracy.

Yes, a group of people might organically come together to then form an entrenched bureaucracy well, I wouldn't describe

Simone Collins: them as a bureaucracy.

Malcolm Collins: No, they're a peerage network. Yeah. And a peerage network is not, no, it's not. Adhocracy. So this is where you're getting confused. So I'll, I'll describe this for you to help fix how you can understand how to adhocracy can't really form in these sorts of societies.

Peerage networks can absolutely peerage networks can. You have noticed that the first time these groups came together to form this like competent, good at working together community, they did really well like adhocracy because they were all coming together. But that All coming together accidentally only happens once and before most of them are super successful.

Once a team becomes successful together, it forms a peerage network. It no longer has a huge reason to continue to bring in outsiders [00:09:00] at the level of the initial team. That would just be stupid. It would be stupid to bring in another individual who's not as wealthy or something as like Elon Musk and the other people in the community, into that top level.

And so it doesn't happen. That's how peerage networks form. But anyway, I want to get into how in our own mostly post scarcity developed world, we already see the perpetuation of a class based system Through the consumer patterns of the Starbucks communists. And we've done an episode on Starbucks communism, but I think it really matters.

You know, when you go to the classic Starbucks communists, you, I mean, it's got the name because they've got their Starbucks, which is a brand, which has. Cost like they spent extra on that for the brand than they would spend for that coffee. If they had just made it themselves, they'll have their apple phone, which they have spent extra on because of the artificial [00:10:00] scarcity created by the apple brand.

They have their brand closings. They have their brand associations. So much of the scarcity that they face and in terms of the things that they are purchasing in the world. is, is just due to the scarcity of that thing. And even if it's not woofy or attention, that is the scarce thing in a society, you will always have something that is scarce because that's the way humans work.

And then status will be built around that scarce thing. Because if you don't have something that's scarce, then you can't build status networks, right? And then you can say, well, what if you had a society where everyone was totally. Right? How could that society be stable if you have varying degrees of competence?

Some individuals within that community would just innately be producing more than other individuals within that community, and they would want that to be recognized and [00:11:00] then, you know, cut off access to their productivity. Or

Simone Collins: innately be more attractive and then more people want to be their friends and they might go out of their way to do nice things for those people.

And then, you know, suddenly those people are getting like, Double food rations, you know, like it gets weird.

Malcolm Collins: Well, and this is, this is why that just doesn't work in a world of varied competence. You cannot have true equality because scarcity, Organically comes out of that. Now, you could, however, have a future society.

And in some of the sci fis that I've like written in my spare time what becomes of the socialist systems is systems where people's brains are edited after they are born to ensure that they are not, they have no unique area of competence. If they have a gift in music, if they have a gift in math, if they have a gift in the only way you can have sustainable communist or, or Classless systems is if I was literally the same.

Everyone's literally the same. And [00:12:00] that is mortifying, I think, but I think it's the only way you can produce that outcome.

Simone Collins: Yeah, but also you wouldn't really have a thriving society if everyone was the same and it would be good to be

Malcolm Collins: society. And they could be made smarter than humans are today through genetic augmentation.

They would just always be out competed by societies that had specialization. Which especially as genetic technology comes online is going to become more and more important for families to specialize. in specific fields, but that's going to mean that they need access to different sorts of things and are able to compete in systems over different sorts of things.

Simone Collins: Wait, hold on. Is the most accurate depiction of communism, real communism, in the media like those clips of the cloned stormtroopers in the new Star Wars movies? Just, just the existence of a bunch of clones that are all over the world. Yeah,

Malcolm Collins: clone army is real communism. If they're room [00:13:00] and

Simone Collins: board is covered, it is a post scarce world for them.

They are all clones. They wear the same clothes. They have the same job. That is real communism. We've done it. Congratulations. But here's,

Malcolm Collins: here's another thing that I also want to push back against here. Because we have done. Other videos where we say, because I do think that this is where we're heading to an attention based economy.

Specifically friendships have become totally disintermediated for most of the people that you are communicating with. And somebody can be like, no. And I'm like, do you watch? more YouTubers and podcasters in terms of the total hours of your day than you spend talking to other human beings. If you do, then you have a disintermediated friendship network similar to me.

I spend more time watching stuff and then I go out and I talk and then people choose to listen to me. If that is the social connection that they want to engage with, it is a completely disintermediated social network. Which I think a lot of people are like, Oh, well, it, you lose a lot of [00:14:00] the interpersonal connection when you get this disintermediated social network, but what you get is access to higher quality or better tailored conversations for you than you would get without the disintermediation.

And so that's why you choose to do it. You could choose not to do it. You could choose to just turn all the podcasts and YouTubes off. Yeah. But you don't because we actually, this disintermediation is better for us than talking to somebody and waiting to get to the good parts of the conversation.

I mean, keep in mind, one of the reasons why our conversations like when people listen to our conversations, they're like, Oh, that was a uniquely enriching conversation without a lot of dead air and stuff like that. And I'm like, that is because you are not seeing this actual conversation. Right. You are seeing this conversation after I spent hours editing out every pause, every time we had to Google something we didn't know, every tangent, every it is as condensed as I can make [00:15:00] it for you, so it is a super normal stimuli for you, it is a super normal conversation, people who don't know what super normal stimuli is, this is a concept where like a a bird had the genetic impulse to sit on a blue egg, And then you put like an extra large blue ball next to it.

That's bigger than any egg it could ever produce. It will still sit on the blue ball because it doesn't have this disintermediating thing that's saying like, well, if a conversation is too good, then go away from it. Because you know, that's not a real conversation, probably that's some sort of artificial thing in your environment, but I actually think that the end user benefits more from this.

This isn't like a maladaptive supernormal stimuli. I think that this is actually an adaptive supernormal stimuli. And people can be like, why is that? Well, you engage in conversations for typically two reasons. One is to gain access to additional information about the world slash additional perspectives about the world.

And the other is to build out your personal network. The problem is, is that this is always going to be better when you can choose any conversation you want within an [00:16:00] online environment or have it served to you by an algorithm. The information and perspective side is going to be better served.

However, you can be like, well, what about the interpersonal connection side? And the answer to that is. While that may be worse served for your average person, it is going to be better served for a competent individual. Let me explain. You, like us, could go out there and start a podcast, or a Twitter account, or a you know, a YouTube, right?

And then thousands of people hundreds of people, you know, whatever, might choose to listen to what you have to say, which actually gives you access to, through parasocial connections, a wider network than you would have been able to get had you focused on one to one communication. However if you can't compete in that environment and you're like, well, I can't create something that a lot of people are going to want to listen to, it [00:17:00] also means Then you're, you're stuck in these individual conversations, which become lower and lower quality for the people who are forced into them.

And that is, I think, really damaging for a lot of people.

To put it another way, a system for supplying a type of good, which is substandard for an average deliver of that type of good. But super standard for an above average deliver of that. Good. And that doesn't constrain the quantity of the good being delivered. E and above average delivery of that. Good does not have their ability to deliver that.

Good hindered. By the number of people who are receiving that good.

Is always going to out-compete a system which is better for the average deliver of a good. And especially a system which constrains the amount of that good that a super standard deliver can deliver. I E. A better than average [00:18:00] conversationalist. Is going to be delivering less conversations in person because at least so many people can get access to that individual.

and your window, another phenomenon that has. Come out of the disintermediated conversation marketplace. Which is, if you are a competent individual who might be able to compete within this marketplace. But you do not have time to compete within this marketplace. Maybe it's because you are successful in, uh, you know, finance or you are as successful biologists, or you are a successful basically.

Your competence in some other area is eating your time. You are actually going to be rewarded for. Engaging up. I'd almost say negatively engaging with it. I E. Ensuring that you are as private as possible, because if you are a little public, if you post to Twitter, sometimes if you post to Facebook, sometimes. And you don't get a [00:19:00] lot of followers because you just don't have the time to put the effort into it. Then it might signal to people that you are actually a very uninteresting and uncompetent individual. And this is why you see so many competent individuals being so private these days because they don't have. The time to invest in these types of marketplaces. And if you are competent, but don't have the time to invest in these types of marketplaces, it's often better not to appear on them at all. This actually, isn't just a problem for competent people in other areas.

It's even a problem for competent communicators. , One friend of mine who is very, very, very famous in other parts of the internet, but that doesn't have a YouTube yet. when I was talking to her about this, one of her fears about starting a YouTube channel, Is that in the early days, she is going to be much smaller on YouTube than she is on the other platforms, which could cause people to perceive her as being much less. It's [00:20:00] successful or competent within online spaces.

And she actually is. , and so this is the big problem. When moving to other platforms, if you have already established yourself within one platform, So it's not just your competent banker who has to deal with this. When moving into the online sphere is all, but it's a person who is extra famous within one platform or media type, moving to a new platform or media type.

Malcolm Collins: I was actually talking with someone about this today about what we're doing for our kids networks and a huge problem. Many of the traditional cultural and religious systems use when they are trying to get a kid to stay in a family network is they will say like, okay, I want you to stay in our cultural network.

So I will give you a peer group that you can play with and access. And I will do that through the local church group or the local synagogue or something like that. Right. The problem with that group. Is that that group will be out competed by the super [00:21:00] normal communities that the child has access to through the Internet, which will make it very easy.

You might want to unmute yourself. And the child's not making noise anymore. Thanks. So because you were like, yeah, right. Okay. So that will give you access. To that'll, that'll give your kids access to people who are even more similar to them or might seem more impressive to them or might seem, you know, so then they end up, yes, you provided them with a peer group, but the peer group wasn't as compelling for to them as the peer groups you find a lot.

Now contrast that with what we're doing, where we take the most interesting, most successful families we know, and we add them to this network of families that we are building, that our kids can learn from. One go meet once a year by going to like a summer camp thing that we rent out and you know, all the families will keep in who send their kids and the kids can all get to know each other.

But two, have online forums where the kids can interact with each other. And if they build a good relationship with other. We might send them out, send them out to the family of, of the friend because they're an in network [00:22:00] family. And then that kid's family might send them over to us. So it allows you to have a dispersed network of high competence individuals who can also through the family connections, get my kids into good early jobs, get my kids investments, get my kids started on their first media projects.

So the kids are going to find this community disproportionately valuable to them because of the way that we curated it when contrasted with the random communities they can gain access to online. And so this is something I, I, I very intentionally structured and I think that over relying on these older systems, like I'm just going to focus on conversations or I'm just going to focus on, you know, my local church group.

It's very difficult to have that work in the modern environment, but it can work. So let's talk about where it does work. It does work when the in person connections due to cultural reasons, either you can be seen as a culture that doesn't trust people who they don't know [00:23:00] personally, and they're like older individuals and stuff like that, that can get you access to capital, that can get you access to friendships that you can't get otherwise, or because you have some capability due to the problem is that those networks are just gonna be out competed.

This is the problem, like why I wouldn't invest in that. Some people are like, well, due to my family's background or history, I have access to wealthy nepotistic networks, right? It's like, unfortunately, in this new disintermediated economy, like social economy the networks that were open to the disintermediated nature are going to outcompete the ones that aren't because they are going to be able to access all of the best intellectuals and entrepreneurs of an age pretty easily because, you know, that entrepreneur or those intellectuals are going to want access to the other, and they're going to want their kids more importantly, to have access to the other members of that network, whereas the old money networks only have access to Capital, which becomes [00:24:00] increasingly less important when contrasted with competence in this new world order that we're entering into.

Then a person can be like, why is capital worth so much less than competence in this new world? Well, one, you look at what startups are doing these days. So, you know, we have a lot of friends and family. It used to be that you had. You know, the big startup teams, you know, forming and now most startups are like 2 to 3 people living in different locations working at home with a huge squad of A.

I. S. doing most of the work. And we're even seeing this in the traditional industries. You know, 1 of the leader in stuff these days is John deer, for example, like, that's farming and everything like that. No, they have, you know, Really cutting edge AI program. Simona's quietly talking to me while caring for the kid.

And so, you know, I think more and more we're going to see this eat other industries. And that means you need fewer and fewer, but more and more competent individuals to, to do stuff. And those individuals can really [00:25:00] name their price. As for the capital itself, it's useful in terms of setting up a big AI centers and stuff like that.

But the people who are doing that, then, like, you know, we have people working on stuff like that, who bring in people like Simone and I. To work on these projects because they know that the social capital that we have can be useful. And the competency that we have, we show through appealing to specific high competency communities.

Can, can be useful in getting these projects done more quickly in the same way that additional capital can be. But the problem with the problem was just capital is capital is. Very interchangeable with other sources of capital. Woofie is not. You can't interchange us for another person with a similar view count because they are going to appeal to a different audience.

And the various audiences do not have equal access to [00:26:00] competence. A lot of people have said, you know, if you dumbed down your content, if you went more, you know, Mainstream. If you just decided to fit one niche, like just preached to a classic conservative audience, you would get a wider audience and we would get a wider audience, but we would get a lower utility audience.

The interesting thing about Wolfie based economies is it matters much, much more who is is the people paying attention to you than, , the number of people paying attention to you.

Simone Collins: Oh, kind of like how on Twitter, if Elon Musk retweets you, then like, whoa, you know, everything changes. Versus like if just some random user.

No, no, no. I,

Malcolm Collins: I, I wouldn't say that at all. I, I, Elon Musk, because he has High profile has the normies following him. So, you know, if he retweets you, then millions of people are going to see that here. I'm thinking more of you know, it, it is more useful to me to be friends with somebody like Curtis Yarvin, than it is [00:27:00] for me to be friends with somebody.

Like, Windigoon, for example. Windigoon seems like a great guy, from all I've seen. He has a very big audience. But the audience is just not the audience that is, like, really, you know, it's not gonna have a huge overlap with, like, high competency and stuff like that. It's a generic audience.

Curtis Yarvin is a fringe individual.

Simone Collins: What you're, you're kind of saying is, like, there's different, Currency, like there's the, the Wendigo and peso and the Curtis, Curtis Yervin yen and the you know, Alan, the currency is the individual eyes on each of these. Yeah. Like the, the nature of the, yeah. And some currencies you can, you can transfer easily.

Sometimes the exchange rate sucks. That kind of thing.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Yeah. Like, well, so here's an example of this, right? Like, okay. I would say that you're probably better off in terms of like the highest tier, biggest eye currency individual in the world is probably Scott Alexander.

Simone Collins: Oh, because the [00:28:00] eyes on him are also very high agency eyes.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. If he, if he puts something out, it's probably being read by Mark Andreessen. It's probably being read by Elon Musk. It's probably being read By half of both a Democrat and conservative White House staff. Now it's not being read by the mass population, right? But it is being read by a huge chunk of the people who actually make the decisions which decide the future and who have access to capital and who have access to the gates of power.

So if you were going to, you know, change Woofie, somebody like Scott Alexander's Wolfie Supply, I would argue, is bigger than somebody like Mr. Beast's Wolfie Supply. Because who's Mr. Beast's primary audience? It's people under the age of 14. You know, that is just not a very valuable Wolfie Supply except in terms of influencing the next generation, which I do think matters and, and the eyes matter in terms of, like, selling Ads and stuff like that, not as big as influencing the [00:29:00] future of humanity.

But now I want to talk about the, the death. Of the online sphere. Oh, what Talk about, there's been a lot of talk about the death of the influencer, and I don't think that what we're seeing is the death of the influencer. We're seeing a transformation in what the influencer is.

Simone Collins: Okay.

Malcolm Collins: Relate to their audience.

So how do I, how do I put this? So a lot of people, they've been like, what, how can you believe in this woofy concept if you know, influencers seem to be dying? Yeah. And, and I will argue that the age of the, you know, Pootie Pie and stuff like that is kind of over. Like the mega influencer is kind of past day at this point.

Mm hmm. Mm hmm. But they're not passé because fewer people are watching YouTube. They're not passé because fewer people are watching online content. They are passé because influencer networks disintermediated. The age of the mega influencer is over. The age of the disintermediated influencer is rising. If [00:30:00] you look at, for example, our audience and what they were watching online 10 years ago I'd, I'd argue the vast majority of them were not watching micro influencers like us.

They were watching mostly mainstream voices because that's the way the algorithms worked back in the day. Yeah. And before that they were

Simone Collins: watching TV

Malcolm Collins: which was even more constrained. Yeah, which was even more constrained and, and, and, and yeah,

Actually, this allows for a great analogy here. It would be like at the end of the era of TV and individuals saying, well, the age of the pundit is over. Know that YouTube is rising when really the age of the pundit wasn't over. It just became slightly more disintermediated.

And that process of disintermediation is just continuing into the modern era.

Malcolm Collins: now it's much more catered to individuals and you have much more the concept of like communities of influencers.

[00:31:00] Also the ways that people communicate is changing. It used to be that the disintermediated conversations happened. And that was the primary form of communication, whereas now what you have is the disintermediated conversations facilitate disintermediated communities. Let me explain what a disintermediated community is.

The disintermediated community is the discord group or signal group or what's that group which is increasingly becoming the most valuable small communities you can have access to where you know, you've got these investor groups and we're on lots of these investor groups. It's where deals come in and we see the deal and then people like talk about, you know, Oh, are you interested in this deal?

You're interested in this deal. And people would be like, why would an individual have it? Like, what's the utility? Why did these come to exist and come to dominate deal making spaces? When I say deal making spaces, I mean where capital is going. Well, it's because you've got to consider the alternative.

What's the alternative? The [00:32:00] alternative is you, you all live in like a Palo Alto area, which just doesn't happen anymore, right? Like you don't have these big collections of thinkers anymore because this became too expensive for the, you know, if you're like a young ambitious person who believes in your own competence, do you want to be spending like 70 percent of your income just because you're living in a fancy area?

Or are you going to go, you know, move to the woods because you know that smart people will come to you, which is largely what we're seeing now in terms of investments. You don't see as many. Concentrating in San Francisco as you used to, it's actually much more. And like, I'd actually said the digital nomad community is probably the biggest hotbed of talent right now.

And then outside of that is a, the, the, the just sort of spread out online community where people, when they're looking for deals, go to specific online community networks. Well, then within those networks they can source deals, disintermediated deals. From each other, all the various investors and then drop them into community channels where they get social capital from dropping them in.

If the deal's not perfect for them [00:33:00] and other people also get social capital for dropping their deals in and it helps them find deals that are more perfect for them in the future. It's just a better system than everybody living in Palo Alto and going to a party every night, which is the way it worked when I was at Stanford business school.

It was like, Not fun. The parties were business things. Do you remember these parties, Simone, where they'd always have like the most ridiculous, expensive swag. Yeah. You know, you go, you get your iPad as like a leaving present and stuff like that. It was whack. But what are your thoughts on this?

Simone Collins: I don't know if it's going to play out that way.

I, I think we still see a very significant network effect of cities and that even though, for example, the Bay area. Doesn't have that much going for it, you know, like I left it right there are still people who? Despite the cost despite the taxes despite increases in crime etc are staying and there's they seem like they're just in for life They may well actually I was

Malcolm Collins: I was talking with Scott Alexander about this and he was saying that he [00:34:00] Like he wanted to be able to form the same kind of community that he had formed in in you know, Silicon Valley area somewhere outside where it's cheaper, you know, and his kids can play more easily and stuff like that.

But the challenge is, is the very community network, you know, some people in that network Are are tied to the city for their jobs, i. e. they work at Google or something like that. And so they can't easily pick up and move as a community that is going to increasingly of your like, well, why would that effect not stay?

It's because these big giant companies are likely going to become less and less relevant economically as the new small players come up. I mean, so you look at the people in his community right now that are stuck at a company like Google. Like I now do personally, like if you look at Google's like search results, like, like the number of people searching on Google, it's been going down precipitously over time.

Even me personally, I use perplexity probably 70 percent of the time now and Google 30 percent of the time. Perplexity is a [00:35:00] small team. That was able to build a product better than the absolute mega corp of Google. So I think that you'll have that effect. But then I also think you will have the these sorts of communities while they exist in this generation.

I don't think they'll exist in the next generation. Because the people who lived in these communities, I just think are going to produce Disproportionately so much fewer competent kids than the people who are living in environments where it is cost efficient to have tons of kids that is going to be hard to keep them stable because to get a community like the one he built you don't just need like the competent people that a city brings.

You need a critical mass of ultra competent people. Who also get along with each other. And the question is, is, are these masses in the future going to be found more easily outside of cities or more easily in cities for people of our generation? I think they're found more easily in cities still for the people of the next generation.

I think they're [00:36:00] found more easily outside of cities.

Simone Collins: It could be. Yeah, well, we'll find out.

Malcolm Collins: I want to get your thoughts on the creator of like, like the death of the, the influencer. Do you think it's possible when people say like, that's a thing that could happen?

Simone Collins: No, I think it's, it's going to be a transformation.

Like you say, the influencers themselves aren't dying. The, the economies on which they were built have to evolve because people didn't understand in the first place, how they worked and how to get an ROI out of working with an influencer, you know, how to best sponsor influencers. And, you know, how to know what their networks are like and how to not.

Work with fake influencers. I just think it's about a maturing industry. That's all. It's nothing beyond that. But what, maybe you could help me with my like final communist question. Cause as you know, for our holiday of lemon month, where we explore a topic that we find deeply offensive, I chose communism this, this year.

And that's how I came to have this, this [00:37:00] concern with you. Cause I understand that communism involves It's a classless society at the end, but what also really confused me is that if I understand this correctly, and maybe you can tell me where I'm wrong, the, the concept of communism was just like, oh, well, wouldn't it be great if like.

We lived in a post scarcity society.

Malcolm Collins: What your, your reading of the communist works, what you have told me you read from them, is that they presumed a post scarcity world. Yes. And that they thought that they could only work in a post scarcity world.

Simone Collins: Yes, yes. And that, that you really couldn't have communism without it.

And that the, the point of like socialism at moving into communism is to just make sure that we get there eventually. But that doesn't make sense to me because if you really want post scarcity, probably like hyper capitalism in hopes that someone develops AGI, which then in turn creates a post scarcity [00:38:00] world is kind of your best bet.

Not, you know. Yeah. I want to try that.

Malcolm Collins: Communism in a pre scarcity, in a scarce, scarce world. Okay. In any scarce world, you still need people to produce the goods, right? Presumably in post scarcity worlds, you can have AI or automation producing the goods. In a scarce world, you need people to produce the goods.

The core economic difference between a communist and capitalist system is how they motivate people to produce the goods. A capitalist system motivates them to By giving them things, giving them more things for producing more things. The communist system does it at gunpoint, right? You know, it pushes, it says, if you don't produce these things, bad things will happen to you, I will shoot you, I will kill you, et cetera.

And a lot of people misunderstand this. They're like, well, But isn't capitalism implicitly doing the same thing by leaving the person without any money to begin with? And so they suffer if [00:39:00] they don't do something that contributes to society. And the suffering of hunger is astronomically less than the suffering of the gulag or the horrors that happened under most of the communist systems.

And people are like, well, not real communism. And it's like, yeah, but do you not think that the people who went into those projects were trying to create real communism? We have their writings. It's just that that was the direction that communist systems went when they realized they had to find a way to motivate people to work in a scarce world.

To put it another way in a world where scarcity still exists. You're always going to need a way to motivate people, to produce , the things that keep society functioning, , who don't want to produce those things. Will always say, this is one of the greatest richness is of coming ism. If you have any communist friends who, you know, are living in a group house, it is always the group houses that trend more towards communism, but where nobody ever wants to pitch in to do the [00:40:00] basic thing that need to get done.

So back in Silicon valley, I would go between group houses. And if you go to the more capitalist oriented group houses, everything was clean. Everything was orderly. Even though people were pitching in just because they wanted to pitch in, in the communist group houses, the dishes were never done. Everything was old moldy and gross.

There's actually a, one of my favorite stories about Bernie is that he was kicked out of a communist commune because he would always go to communist communes and just do nothing, but give speeches all day. And I think that's what a lot of communists think that their job is going to be in this new utopia.

They're creating. But obviously society can't function on speeches. You actually have to do hard labor. And so what's interesting is that the individuals who actually have this intrinsic drive that communist hope individuals have to go out and do labor tend towards capitalism because they're actually already being rewarded within a capitalist system.

So they're quite okay with the system as it exists. , it is , the communists who don't want to do [00:41:00] anything who want to be rewarded despite the fact that they're not doing anything that push the most for a system change. , But then , how did these two systems motivate people more broadly? In capitalism, it is through carrot.

That those people produce the things. In a communist system, there are only a few options. One is a direct stick. I. E we will kill you. However, another is that I didn't mention here is gated communist systems. These actually work pretty well, even in a modern environment. That is to say. , a kibbutz or the Haven state that I mentioned recently. , it's a small community that says anybody who doesn't chip in gets expelled. , that that can work. But it works even better when membership is explicitly optional. , and you not just born into it. This is why in the example I gave in the vignette.

In the last episode on fertility [00:42:00] collapse in the real estate market, you would have a ritual in which at a coming of age, as soon as somebody was mostly fully myelinated and could make decisions for themselves, they had to live outside the society and then had a choice of a rejoining the society that makes their joining the society explicitly a choice as it is with things like Amish communities.

, and here, I would note that I'm not saying that the havens will be communist, but I expect that they will have elements. Cements of that. I E they will have specific rules and expectations of individuals that individuals are supposed to adhere to. That go far, far, far beyond what is expected of an individual in modern capitalist societies, you will not be able to be lazy or indolent and be allowed to live within these communities.

, but what can't work is a total society. Now, some individuals will say, well, we can make communism work by convincing everyone to love their fellow man. And the love their fellow man so much. They'll just get out there and work. But here, what they're really [00:43:00] talking about is some form of systemic brainwashing.

They're saying we will no longer allow individuals who have value sets that are at odds with this value set that I have. And what's interesting about this value set that they have is that it's basically never existed in human history. , people predominantly love and care about the people closest to them, their friends, their family, not wider society overall, and therefore will do things that disproportionately benefit that closer network. This is why coming to them actually works at the family level.

I E and we'd say this in lots of our videos. , my family right now. The academy and assistant. , from each according to their ability to each, according to their needs, like my kids don't produce any income because they are not able to produce any income, but we give them what they need because we love them.

And we are invested in them.

You cannot force people to have this mindset to larger society without like [00:44:00] genetically modifying people. Because due to our evolutionary history, we are always going to disproportionately favor our families and closer relatives and closer kinship networks. And I should also know that it's not that the deep community thinkers are totally unaware of this either. This is why many communist groups today. I see the first goal in bringing about communism as the dissolution of these kinship and family networks, the dissolution of the family as a unit. , you'll see this in groups like black lives matter and stuff like that.

We need to dissolve the family. , this is also why, and we have another video recorded, but we haven't gone live yet. That was inspired by this video. Cause I started looking into it after the video was, I was like, wait, wait, wait.

If there's scarcity in a communist system., that scarcity creates a dominance hierarchy, which creates a class system. So what if somebody wants something like sex from an individual and that [00:45:00] individual declines? Access to sex. Doesn't that create a form of scarcity and class. , and then I was like, so how does communism deal with this?

And this is what I learned about coming as hymns, very big issue with PDA files, which are very, very common in Ubon major communist thinkers. And we will have a video on this coming up.

Because well, Just so you get to the point in here before we get into that video or, you know, As a prelude to that video, why are they so common? Well, it actually goes part and parcel with the dissolution of family units. And the basically taking of kids from families at a very young age. Or to put it to yet, another way communism's greatest enemy is consent.

And this often creates interesting problems where you will see was in the circles that lead towards communism. You see really high rates of stuff like grape. , actually, that's the huge problem itself, like chop or Chaz or whatever you want to call that breakaway state they tried to do. In [00:46:00] Seattle, , where there were huge, huge amounts of grape in that area. , and it is because the violation of individual consent is necessary. For there to be a classless society in any environment where some individual has something they want to deny another individual access to like their labor or their body. Final thing I'll note here, which I always find one of the silliest arguments for communism. Is there like, well, yes, communism may force some people to work at the point of a gun, but in capitalism, access to the rewards at the system are not equally distributed. Not everyone has the same ability to access and rewards. Due to birth conditions, family, et cetera.

And like, this is the wildest thing I've ever heard. You have one system, one table where there are rewards. But the game is unfair and you have another system where there are no rewards and your shot for not working. Which one are you going to want to be at?

Malcolm Collins: But the point, [00:47:00] or I guess the larger point of this video is communism doesn't work even in a post scarcity world. Yes. I, I, I believe UBI might work in a post scarcity world, but even in a world where you have people's universal basic income, where you have people's basic needs taken care of, like you do food drop offs, you do medicine is handled by the state, you do like all of that.

You still have the class structure we have in our existing society, and you will still have some resource which represents some form of scarcity, because there is always scarcity in any system and what people choose to value is always the thing that is scarce, even if that thing is pointless. And what I find really interesting is it's actually the communists themselves in our current society that are most drawn to artificial scarcity.

It is much more the communists who get drawn to brand name recognition, like the Starbucks and the iPads and the et cetera. And it's the extreme capitalists who often [00:48:00] have less interest in that stuff because they care about getting the best product for, to fit whatever, you know, In the moment need they have for the lowest cost possible.

You know, if you look between two groups, communist versus capitalist, you know, who do you think is using more Android phones? Who do you think is using more iPhones and paying more for like a lower quality product? Or who do you think is using more like Apple computers, right? You know, Oh, I'm gonna get some angry Apple users in the comments here, but it's just like objectively true.

You're paying more for a lower per per. Any spec that you're getting. So what are you paying for? If you're paying for more, you're paying for a brand. I mean, people will make up excuses to themselves like, Oh no, I'm paying for the network effects of the devices or I'm paying because it, it, it runs more smoothly or, you know, but we all know that's not true anymore.

This isn't like we're, we're in the Tim Cook era now. Okay. People we know what this is about. We know that you don't get the Starbucks coffee because it tastes better. Okay. You get the Starbucks coffee because you have built a habit. around [00:49:00] Starbucks coffee, or you have some sort of status associated with Starbucks coffee.

So I, I find that really interesting as well is that, that the communists actually seem more drawn to artificial scarcity than the capitalists is.

Simone Collins: I don't find that nearly as confusing as I do. Just capitalism as I understand it now from a technical standpoint is really just more Interest in a sci fi futuristic world and not so much about like actual, I don't know, I, I, like achievable things today.

It's, it's very bizarre to me, but let's just focus on the things we can control our own little communist home. Our children. What would you like me to make you say communist

Malcolm Collins: home? Because people might not be familiar with it

Simone Collins: makes sense. At a very, very local level. Where, like the family level is inherently communist.

I don't remember the phrase. From each according to [00:50:00] their ability. That is what our household

Malcolm Collins: is and don't contribute financially to the family because they can't, you know, we, we give them what they need because we care about them. And, and this is where communist networks have worked when people genuinely.

Care about the other people around them. And I think leftists are like, well, what if we could build a society where everybody genuinely cares about everybody else in a society? And it's like, well, you can't do that without making the entire society one culture, right? Because you're always going to have some degree of conflict with people of different cultures than you because they will have different values and different things they want for the direction of the society.

And And I think that this is ultimately why the urban monoculture is so monocultural, is because it's trying to create that single united class where everybody can value everyone else but the problem is that it doesn't work. They end up losing all sense of personal identity and then desperately trying to recreate some identity.

Because when you lose a connection to your heritage you then [00:51:00] are like, well, then who am I? How do I define myself? Right? If I'm not the. The culmination of my ancestors' efforts. And then they say, well, I guess I am you know, A-L-G-B-T-P-B-B-B-B-B-B-B-B. I'm a demi queer squirrel goddess or something.

And then this culture, because it, it understands the importance of giving you an identity has this need to validate that whatever it is, but it turns out that it doesn't help mental health wise and leads to spirals pretty quickly. And I think that that's what we're getting here in the urban monoculture is it's, it's had to cut people off from their ancestral identities.

And as such, they are desperate to create something new to identify with and be proud of. And I think that's fundamentally what we see from this concept of, of capital puny pride, right? And that's why we advocate so much for choosing a family culture or an ancestral culture to learn about your ancestors and, and learn who you are so that you can take pride in that and see the value in [00:52:00] bringing that into the next generation.

Well, let's go

Simone Collins: pick up the next generation for

Malcolm Collins: dinner. Okay. I'm sorry. I love you.

Simone Collins: I love you too. What do you want me to make for you?

Malcolm Collins: Let's try the ravioli.

Simone Collins: Oh, with the pesto. Okay.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, I think I'm gonna use the, the sun dried tomato pesto so we can see if that's any good and just use any ravioli you want and what else?

Yeah, that's good for me tonight.

Simone Collins: All right, it's on. Do you want a little bit of anything else? Just a couple raviolis. I'm fine. You don't eat.

Malcolm Collins: I don't want to get obese, you know, I've got to look gaunt and beautiful and how can I do that with drinking as much as I do? Well, I love you. I'll see you downstairs in a

sec.

Guys, wait. Guys, where are we? We're on the boat. Do

In this eye-opening discussion, Malcolm and Simone Collins explore the grim reality of housing markets in a world facing demographic collapse. They delve into the rapid decay of abandoned properties, the unsustainability of cities and suburbs, and speculate on a future where technologically advanced "havens" emerge amidst the ruins of our current civilization. This video offers a stark look at the potential consequences of population decline and technological advancement on our living spaces and social structures.

Key topics covered:

* The rapid deterioration of abandoned properties

* The unsustainability of modern cities and suburbs

* The impact of climate change on housing markets and insurance

* Speculation on future "haven" communities and their characteristics

* The potential divide between technophilic and technophobic societies

* The role of AI and advanced technology in shaping future communities

* Geopolitical implications of demographic collapse and technological advancement

Whether you're interested in urban planning, futurism, or the long-term consequences of current demographic trends, this video provides a thought-provoking look at the potential shape of our future world.

Malcolm Collins: [00:00:00] So here I am showing you some abandoned cathedrals.

Abandoned for fairly short times. These are in Detroit, this stuff. I am showing you abandoned schools. And abandoned pools. And abandoned stadiums. It is Genuinely nightmarish. You would be safer sleeping in the woods than in what our urban centers are going to become.

And so you can see that typically by the time you get to around 10 years without regular maintenance, you are looking at rubble.

I'm just

Simone Collins: getting increasingly nervous.

Malcolm Collins: Well, I'm going to give you a little short story that'll make you maybe not so nervous.

about one of our descendants a hundred years from now.

 This person. Is hiking. They've got a drone companion flying alongside them. It's doing regular scans on the environment around them. So they don't step into like a basement that could collapse or something like that. They are having a blast [00:01:00] exploring the ruins of a dead world. And then they come across a tribe, one of the technophobic groups LARPing some version of 1950s life.

Would you like to know more?

Simone Collins: Hello,

Malcolm Collins: Simone. I'm excited to be here with you today. Today, we are going to be discussing one of the most misunderstood side effects of demographic collapse, which is.

Cheap housing. Oh, hooray. Everyone always says, they say, well, when the population is 5 percent of its current size, then housing will cost almost nothing. And that will be fantastic. Because then all of the young people will be able to afford houses and everything will stabilize and go back to normal.

Except that isn't what's going to happen. Talk about how quickly A house that is worth nothing begins to fall apart. And this is something that we saw [00:02:00] in Detroit. So we are going to go over timelines in Detroit of deterioration, but I also want to start a bit closer to home. So I grew up part time living on an island with my family that my family owns and now I don't inherit it or anything like that.

It goes to my sister. So it's not like, again, I get nothing, don't worry about it guys still starting from scratch here, but,

Simone Collins: Hey, I have to stop and say though, when we were first dating,

Malcolm Collins: I

Simone Collins: was like, this is a caricature of life, because no one actually has private islands, but apparently they do. But then, like, you and I learned that there's a reason why people don't have private islands. Because it kind of sucks. Well, another thing

Malcolm Collins: that people know is that my family lost all its money and was unable to maintain things.

And it is hard to sell a private island. Who wants that? Like, how can you even buy one, you know? And then [00:03:00] I'm going to go over what ended up happening to the property. Because I love when people are like, oh, islands, so defensible. So this is the living room. Of the house I grew up in. For those who are listening on the podcast it has trees growing inside of it now, all of the walls have fallen out of it well it has plate glass windows overlooking the ocean, but like, it looks like there is a forest in it now.

And as I go through this, I encourage you the listeners to not think of this in the abstract, but as what your own home is going to look like. 10 years after you stopped. Living in it or you fail to sell it because of your population is declining. Because this is a picture that we see across rural Japan right now, so much so that they're giving away free houses.

And I think that that is. , what we're going to see the future of the U S.

, I've even heard of instances as some people paying for people to take their houses. So they don't become these horrible nightmares.

Malcolm Collins: This room is, I believe, my parents bedroom right here for people who are just [00:04:00] listening, it's just debris everywhere, people took the beds, the mattresses, everything. Oh, this is my bedroom! And my brother's bedroom. This is where we Slept as little kids and it looks like the ceiling has fallen in and debris absolutely everywhere.

Here is my childhood bathroom. Completely smashed. It would literally be safer, I am now showing the inside of the bathroom, to sleep outside in the jungle than to sleep in this place. This looks super dangerous. Yes. This is the patio. It looks like a forest.

Oh, and this is the play area. Now this, the ceiling has completely caved in. It looks worse than any of the locations did in Jurassic Park for any on the podcast.

Simone Collins: No, Jurassic Park does not play a very accurate. tale of urban decay, right? Because like, you know, things just kind of, there's like a, a, a vine tastefully draped.

Oh, you know, over it. It's, it's more like, you know, the, the apartment of someone with a green thumb who likes industrial chic. It's not, this is [00:05:00] not what it looks like when buildings start to crumble. Everything's so muddy. And here

Malcolm Collins: is the forest spilling into our living room and patio here. And I'll just throw up some other pictures.

You can get an idea of what it used to look like. I, well, I guess in terms of the beach and stuff like that, So people can get an idea of just how much, you know, even a decade of not caring for something costs.

And if you haven't owned a house, if you have only rented a house, You would be surprised at how much it costs to keep the house together. You are spending a fairly large amount of money. I, I'd actually say you're probably over the course of 40 years, probably spending at least half the cost of the house on the modern market.

So for example, this graph that I pulled up here, estimates that right now, , On average, you're paying somewhere between around 15,000 and 18,000 USD. , and here is a map of how that varies state by state.

Malcolm Collins: In terms of maintenance fees and a lot of people all the time. [00:06:00]

Simone Collins: It's awful.

Malcolm Collins: And it is no longer worth those maintenance fees. If the house has reduced to zero in value, the reason why people. Spend the money upkeeping their property is because said property has value. The reason why properties historically had value was because the number of people who wanted that limited set of properties was growing exponentially.

Once that number evens off, property value is going to collapse and people might be like, well, if fertility has already collapsed, why hasn't property value collapsed? And there are. Two reasons why property value has continued to go up. One, fertility, like the effects of fertility collapse in the United States have not yet been felt by the working population, i.

e. the age groups that are buying a house.

It's the younger people, the kids and stuff, where you're seeing these smaller class sizes, where you're seeing schools having to drop classes every [00:07:00] year because they're getting smaller and smaller and smaller. So one, we haven't seen that yet, but two, we've actually seen a huge increase. In the cost of house because of fertility class, and a lot of people can be like, what, why would that happen?

Well, it turns out that when you have an atomized society, when people aren't getting married anymore, when you don't have, you know, five people living together, the two parents and the kids, there is demand for a lot more houses. Because two people, you ever seen one of those pictures where they show you how many fewer cars would be on the road if people were in buses instead of cars?

I'll put one on the screen here. But that's basically what's happening to the housing market in this last death throw of the housing market, real estate more broadly right now, outside of like farm real estate, I'd say is. Not a good long term investment. And I, I should say here, long term, we're actually heavily invested in real estate short term because I know about this trend of people needing these smaller houses.

So it makes sense to embossed in

multifamily housing. Yes. So this is like apartment [00:08:00] complexes and stuff like that. And it's done very well for us for a while. But I want to take as a case study, because people are like, people wouldn't really just let houses next to what used to be like a major urban center rot away to dust.

So I'm going to start putting some pictures on screen here of time lapses of places in Detroit. Because this does a very good job of showing just how quickly parts of Detroit ended up having to be rolled back and then just given back to nature because eventually they become hazards and the state then decides to plow them over.

So here for podcast listeners, we have two, what looked like fairly normal houses in 2009 by just 2015, you can see it would probably cost. About as much to restore them as it would cost to just rebuild new houses. They are mostly retaken by nature. They're [00:09:00] teardowns. They're teardowns. They're complete teardowns.

Six years. Six years of no one living there. That happens. Six years of no maintenance. It is like that. It's not like, oh you know, it needs to be abandoned for 40 years. It needs to be abandoned for 20 years, six years. Sorry. Now look at 2019. So here we're looking at only 10 years.

One of the houses has already had to be demolished and the other house is completely unusable. And then we go to 2022. So 2022. Honestly, I

Simone Collins: think, I think too that these Detroit houses may even not be fully. Illustrating how quickly this will happen because keep in mind that construction quality has changed significantly recently as well.

So more newly constructed houses, which in some cases, they're made like tissue paper. Like, you can punch through walls are going to degrade very quickly and some more old buildings or even like industrial buildings may last a lot better. And we're going to see shifts towards those in the housing market.

We'll see though.

Malcolm Collins: [00:10:00] So, so I, I completely agree with you. And that's definitely something that we need to discuss. It's the old houses versus the new houses and how long it lasts. But by 2022, so that is only, 13 years after the houses were abandoned nature has completely retaken the area. They both had to be torn down and you wouldn't even know that houses were there. So let's keep going. Here you have an abandoned group of three normal looking houses in 2011. By 2013, you can see one has already collapsed in on itself, only two years after being abandoned.

2015 you see there's basically nothing left. 2022, you can see it's as if they were never there. So keep in mind, 2015, that's only four years after these were abandoned. That they are just rubble. Here in 2009, you see two houses. 2013, they actually look okay. These were slightly better construction than the others, but by 2019, just 10 years later, completely unlivable.

2022, somehow a boat appeared [00:11:00] and otherwise nature has reclaimed. Pokemon, a boat appeared. Again, I am going to show, uh, just a few here for the, the listeners that I don't want to go through them all. They're all dealing with the same timelines. You're looking at a four year jump, , four year jump, five year jump. And, and while I've been talking, I have been flashing these on screen for you guys. And so you can see that typically by the time you get to around 10 years without regular maintenance, you are looking at rubble.

And so, And then people can be like, well, you know, okay, that's individual houses, right? What about the big public works projects and stuff like that, right? Like that stuff, of course, will, will stay working. And it's like, well, no, not, you know, So here I am showing you some abandoned cathedrals.

Abandoned for fairly short times. These are in Detroit, this stuff. I am showing you abandoned schools. And [00:12:00] abandoned pools. And abandoned stadiums. It is Genuinely nightmarish. You would be safer sleeping in the woods than in what our urban centers are going to become. And what's interesting is, you know, we live in a house from the 1700s.

And if you walk around our area, you can see, sadly, some of the old homes also falling apart, but they take much longer. They take 60, 70 years to fall apart, these old stone houses. And it's worth trying to recover them because they act as a much more sturdy foundation than these that are falling apart with only four years without maintenance.

And also keep in mind, one of the things that hastens the Speed that houses fall apart is when you can't live in a house and protect a house, especially as police in various regions of the U S start to collapse. And people wonder why police funds are going to collapse. Well, they were meant for larger populations than will exist in the future, and they will be paying the pensions of police for larger populations that exist in the future.

And so either those pensions will fall [00:13:00] apart, which is very hard for a government to do. We didn't even in the pensions for Nazi. soldiers. When, after World War II, I think now there's still a few SS soldiers that are receiving pensions. Like that is wild, but it is very hard to claw back pensions.

And so you'll have smaller police forces. These homes have valuable things inside of them, the copper in the wall, some parts of the various appliances. And so they go and they rip those out. Here I'll put the kitchen that I grew up in. Using and you can see every bit of it has been ripped apart. And and that's what we're headed to.

So, Simone, do you have any thoughts before I go further?

Simone Collins: Are we going to discuss the insurance issue that's going to accelerate this or should I bring that up now? Because I'm not sure if you remember that. Yeah. So there's a great podcast on this issue done by the New York Times podcast called the bombshell case that will transform the housing market.

And this brings in an additional little hitch to the [00:14:00] problem that, that, that is going to then be compounded by demographic collapse. So already Malcolm, you've alluded to in some of our podcasts, how it's kind of ridiculous that you can buy a home in Florida because, you know, there's so many regions of it.

I haven't heard of

Malcolm Collins: it with a 30 year. The loan

Simone Collins: with a 30 year home loan. Yes. Because your home is going to be underwater. Like how on earth, like, can, can you get a home loan on these things? I think it is getting a little bit harder now, but what's getting extra hard already because of climate change is just getting home insurance in Florida and in some other states that are now more subject to severe weather.

Just getting homeowner's insurance is almost impossible now in the United States. In many cases, you cannot get a mortgage. You cannot get debt to finance the purchase of your home unless you have home insurance. Meaning that as we experience more extreme climate, meaning as more insurance companies go underwater, because honestly, they just can't [00:15:00] pay for all these wildfires and for all the tornadoes and for all the hurricanes and the floods and the derechos, which we have here, which you didn't even know existed.

We didn't know existed before we came here and they're terrifying. They're like, miniature, they're like hurricane meets tornado that lasts really like five minutes,

Malcolm Collins: a very short, it's not a, it's not like a spiral, like a hurricane or tornado. It's just really strong wind that comes out of nowhere and like knocks over trees.

Yeah. Like lots of trees. Not like, like you'll see like big swaths of trees all knocked over.

Simone Collins: Yeah. Like, yeah. Like hurricane meets tornado, but just really fast. You don't know it's coming. And So there are going to be more states in the New York Times podcast, they, they discuss this. It's, it's quite interesting that they go into some detail on how this is not just happening in the states that you think are obvious.

Meaning that we're, we may hit this point at which a lot of homes sit empty because people literally can't buy them because people don't have enough money to buy a house outright. [00:16:00] Right. But they can't get a mortgage because they can't get homeowners insurance.

Malcolm Collins: Well, hold on. That's not exactly what will happen.

I mean, market forces, Detroit homes were selling for like 50 cents in some instances, you know, like it's not that they won't be able to get money to buy them. It's that they won't be able to get money to build sustainably on that plot. I E it won't be worth it to tear them down and then build something new.

Yeah.

And I think that you're, you're absolutely right about that. Now we need to talk about the plight of both cities and suburbs and why both are pretty screwed. The unsustainability of cities, I think should be fairly obvious to people in a world where work from home is the norm. If you go to a lot of these major cities and you start looking around, like we do this in New York, you will just see empty, empty, empty, empty, empty everywhere you look.

It is so scary that like these markets are sort of stable. The, the core reason people are like, well, then why don't, why doesn't New York convert the commercial properties to residential [00:17:00] properties? There's two problems, giant government bureaucracies that make zoning changes, very expensive and difficult.

But other is that in a place like Manhattan, for example, it's often easier to tear down and completely rebuild than it is to do a conversion. Because Commercial buildings are built with the assumption that the restrooms are going to be in the center of the building all around a central shaft, whereas residentials have, like, multiple towers of plumbing going in different parts of the building.

And it's quite different construction techniques, so it's hard to switch between the 2. And it means that I, I think already cities are financially unviable, just the world hasn't realized it yet. As cities are going further and further left, right? And because of their progressive tax policies, when I say progressive, I don't mean like lefty.

I just mean there is a financial term called a progressive tax policy. It means wealthy people pay more in New York. 4 percent of the population is paying over 50 percent of taxes. So what that means is [00:18:00] that 4 percent is who the city's customers are, and that 4 percent of the ones that are being scared away with a lot of their new rules and regulations, right?

Especially the, the stuff that makes it less safe to be there. You know, these people want their kids around. And now there's just not the same reason to be in a city as there was historically.

Here I am, of course, referring to the work from home revolution, which has hit the types of businesses that utilize getting everyone together and working together in a city the most, um, And it's also the, the highest paid professions, which are most hit by the work from home revolution, because these are the professions where the individuals in them can demand the most from their employer. I E the opportunity to work from home.

You know, if you're a top. Player at like a finance firm or something. Like that you basically get a name, your terms. AI also is a big player here because the type of white collar work that was in cities is one of the first categories that gets automated.

Malcolm Collins: And so, with all of [00:19:00] this expansion, They have to maintain, they're likely going to begin to fall apart, but we'll likely see a similar thing in the suburbs.

We've mentioned this before, so I'm going to go quick. But for those who haven't heard our spiel on this suburbs really got subsidized during white flight when you had a bunch of people moving to suburbs all at once. And this was about, I want to say like 60, 70 years ago, 60 years ago at this point and when suburbs were first being charted out what they would do is the developer would front roll the cost for the paving, for the sewer system, for the electrical system, for basically all of the infrastructure but then going forwards, it was cared for by the tax base.

Well, now a lot of that stuff needs to be rebuilt but the tax base was never really optimized to pay for its rebuilding. And a lot of it was built out in ways that weren't sustainable. So suburbs are kind of screwed as well. Now, suburbs can just raise taxes, especially in the more rural or ex urban areas like where we live, and they're probably going to be fine.

And I think [00:20:00] that's where culture is going to re coalesce in terms of like where people actually want to be, whereas the cities are going to turn into quite a bit of a hellscape. Do you have any thoughts on this, Simone? I'm just

Simone Collins: getting increasingly nervous.

Malcolm Collins: Well, I'm going to give you a little short story that'll make you maybe not so nervous.

So this story, because this was, this was framed for somebody else when they, when they thought about all of the rotting cities in the future, all of the rotting infrastructure in the future. Somebody was telling somebody else a version of the story. And I just decided to flush it out about one of our descendants a hundred years from now.

And this person. Is hiking. They've got a little AI robot companion alongside them. The little, it's a drone companion flying alongside them. And they're, they're out exploring the old ruins an old city. [00:21:00] They've got, you know, special shoes and stuff. So they don't have to worry about stepping on anything.

It would be quite easy to, to have a protection in the AI companion. It's likely doing regular scans on the environment around them. So they don't step into like a basement that could collapse or something like that. They are having a blast exploring the ruins of a dead world. And then they come across a tribe, one of the technophobic groups LARPing some version of 1950s life.

But of course. They don't have access to many of the things that you need larger technical networks to gain access to. So while they're LARPing a 1950s lifestyle, they are doing it without cell phones. They are doing it with maybe electricity during the day, but it gets shut off at night because it's coming from generators that are expensive to run and you need to buy the fuel.

And ship the fuel over long, dangerous roads because a lot of the state law has broken down. Now this group might otherwise attack [00:22:00] this traveler but they know not to because they've seen travelers like this before with these drones that they know are armed and could easily mow down their entire settlement.

And so, the community would have nothing to of value to this person because in a world where you can produce more than enough food on the land you already have

and they don't have access to tech that you don't have, they are quite literally irrelevant except for any potential threat they might pose to your community. And when they have become dangerous to, you know, technophilic explorers on the regular they just end up getting wiped out by a drone swarm.

I also, I'm always surprised when the naturalist people think that the tech acceleration is, or if I've heard them call them, the cyborgs are the ones who pose a threat to them because they really don't, this, you would have nothing that the cyborgs want. You, you, you don't have any tech that they want.

They wouldn't care about land. You wouldn't have more efficient forms of energy than they [00:23:00] have access to. What like. What do you think you have that they want? You only matter in so far as you decide to become a threat to them, in which case you aren't even that much of a threat, and they won't let you become that much of a threat, even if you can get your hands on old aging nuclear tech or something like that.

And some might expect, well, you know, they might be you know, marginal value is breeding partners for genetic diversity, but at that point, I actually don't think they would. I suspect that while they might sometimes be accepted into the technophilic communities outbreeding outside of the technophilic communities would never be allowed because you wouldn't want that.

You know, intelligent, modified genes to get into these communities that are naturally going to be more xenophobic towards outsiders and could end up doing very dangerous things as they ever developed a degree of industrial productivity. In fact, I actually suspect. Hundreds of years, a hundred years from now or so, our descendants, once we gain a bit more [00:24:00] understanding of human genetics will likely have developed prohibitions around sex more generally making it taboo and editing out arousal pathways in the human mind, while likely fine tuning some other pathways during an individual's use, like the ones that give us emotional rewards for exploration, gen.

Learning and productivity to allow an individual to gain even more satisfaction from productive tasks while out was out being distracted by unproductive tasks. The Explorer is likely going to just keep going down that road for months. Because they are engaged in a coming of age ritual. That's why they have been out on this exploratory thing where they voluntarily agree to live in the hardships of the fallen world for a year to better appreciate what they have at the haven.

And because rejoining the haven must be done voluntarily. So, when they join as an adult to the community and and they agree to the sacrifices that are coming with the Haven community because I expect all the [00:25:00] Havens would have fairly strict rules around austerity and other things like that to ensure a virtuous life and a life of productivity, very different from, you know, the classic what I think the communists want, you know, while it will be a post scarcity world to gain access to one of these post scarcity communities, it'll be quite discerning in who they let in.

And I think that it would be useful to have a ritual like this where you go and explore the world and then come back and rejoin voluntarily. The the drone traveling with the explorer in this scenario is meanwhile building up it, it leads into food and water. It purifies the food and water. And it's been building a profile on the individual for the marriage pool that they are now accessible for after the coming of age ritual, they are now qualified for a, a marriage pool.

And then the marriage pool is a meeting of all of the various havens within a network. So this is how you'd likely get more outbreeding is instead of just dating was in your community, you would [00:26:00] hold like a season once a year All of the eligible people along with their psychological profiles would be paired off.

And I'll go to one haven which would host it and which haven hosted it would be a cycling phenomenon. And I suspect In the far future, about 100 years from now, the global economy will be somewhat differentiated based on what level of technology you decided to engage with or stay with. So, for example, I don't think that there will be much trading between.

Networks like the Haven Network, as I call it, of the ultra technophilic individuals, and the individuals who decided to LARP living in the 1920s. I expect those individuals will likely have a series of communities that range LARPing like they're living in the 1990s, to LARPing like they're living in, like, the 20s.

the 1920s and they will roughly trade with each other. And then I suspect there'll be a third lowest tier of sort of human group that is basically [00:27:00] feral. And is the ultra, ultra, ultra you know, like barely working, you know, I think that this is what's going to happen to, like, the types of people who tried to start ISIS and stuff like that.

But then there are also, you'll have remnants of them in the developed world, likely descending from criminal organizations which attack caravans and stuff like that, but never really able to build any sort of sustainable civilization. What are your thoughts on this speculative fiction? Our descendants get it quite well in this, in this world.

They get to explore pretty much what is impunity, ruins of the old world. Wouldn't you have found that a joy when you were younger?

Simone Collins: Well, now I know. A friend of the pod had said something to us at a dinner party we were hosting recently. Something along the lines of You know, someone was telling me that actually my descendants will probably love wandering around the abandoned cities, you know, like, I'm the kind of person who would be better off in that world.

So I, I know, I know where you're going with this. [00:28:00] That's hopeful. I think we're going to end up in more of a South Africa style situation. Where. It is not, not necessarily like, just because it's a little lawless and unsafe, not really okay to wander around the non gated zones, but also from a climate and safety and survival standpoint, just a lot more difficult in many parts of the world to, to wander through them.

So. I'm a little bit more pessimistic than you.

Malcolm Collins: Why don't you think that the technophilic group, because I think that the technophilic group with AI is going to be astoundingly more productive than humans are today. They will be astoundingly smaller portion of the population than humans today.

Simone Collins: Yeah. It's just that I think that the world is going to be just because larger swaths of people are going to not have any tech and be like [00:29:00] lower tech and probably a lot more xenophobic, you know, they can, they can still pack a punch. They can still be pretty harmful, you know, and there can still be a lot of

Malcolm Collins: them.

This is actually an interesting point here that's, that's worth talking about a little bit where some people are like sometimes lower tech groups. End up taking control of governments and then the higher tech groups and here they would choose an environment like South Africa. The, the reason that happened in South Africa was international pressure.

The reason that happened was caving to woke ideas.

And I should clarify here. I don't mean ending apartheid. It was bad. I mean, the way a government was set up in a post apartheid world was bad. And I think patently, so we can see from the suffering that the south African people are undergoing right now.

Malcolm Collins: Like that is what caused South Africa to fall to the state that it's fallen to today. And I'd also point out that most of the competent group left both the [00:30:00] competent tribes that wasn't just, you know, white versus black. There were some tribes that were much more productive than the other tribes and many of their members just immigrated to America.

And I want to make clear, this isn't a white versus black thing, or a some tribes good, some tribes bad thing. It's that across communities, those individuals who had the means to get out and start life anew somewhere else, when they were choosing between having to start over and the risk that their daughter would be kidnapped and gang graped and murdered, they chose the former because most civilized people would do that.

And intergenerationally, that causes a cultural shift in all the groups that are having pretty much everyone from them that's either not involved in the government bureaucracy or has an opportunity to get out to leave.

Malcolm Collins: When a place becomes that lawless, the lawlessness begets lawlessness as people migrate, like the productive individuals migrate to non lawless areas.[00:31:00]

And the key to maintaining a, a non lawless area is just to never give an inch in terms of a group being like, well, I understand that I'm contributing a lot less, but I deserve something from you. Yeah. Like I,

Simone Collins: I basically, I see, I think that they're going to be much larger city states where you have like.

Very advanced, very like genuine, like cities, clusters of cities. But the borders are hermetic, you know, there are drones, there are walls, there are everything's, you know, there's no tunneling. They are hermetically sealed and then there's going to be the rest of the world and there will absolutely be a lot of people in the rest of the world.

But it is just going to be. A lot less fun to be there. There's a lot of, there's a lot of sci fi that, that describes this. And I always found it kind of arbitrary and stupid. Like why are, why is, why is there this class system in all these various [00:32:00] AI. Or sorry, all of these various science fiction stories where there's like the underclass and this overclass that lives in their beautiful city in the sky or whatever.

Right. And I don't, I don't think things play out the way that a lot of these stories have it. I think it's more that there's this portion of society that's willing to be technophilic and pluralistic. And then there's this portion of society that's not, it's not a story about. Keeping people down.

It's not a story about some evil capitalistic overlords creating this hierarchy. In fact, the, the, the, the gated community that's so nice and wonderful is, is going to be technically communist, but, and, and the outside world is going to be. The height of pure capitalism.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Well, and I don't think it'll be pure communist either.

I am sure it will to some degree because there is no such thing as pure communism. And we'll do a separate episode on this. We've got to do that. When you [00:33:00] live in a post scarcity environment, you just mean post scarcity of like goods. You don't mean genuine post scarcity because in a communist system, whatever.

It ends up being a thing of artificial scarcity as in what the status hierarchy around, but

Simone Collins: from a, like, we'll say Maslow's hierarchy of needs, it gets all the bottom portions of that fricking triangle. Okay, like, as

Malcolm Collins: long as you're contributing. And I think that what we would likely see. So when you say her medically sealed, I agree with you, but I don't know if it's literally her at medically sealed, probably gun drones, Patrolling a perimeter, but, but very strict about who comes in and out.

I think we, as we move to the systems where you have a high degree of social services within a Haven, you can not allow low skilled migrants to come in. That's always been true of social services. You cannot have social services that go to all members of a community. and porous borders. [00:34:00] Yeah. You, you, you get one or the other.

You also can't have social services that go to all members of the community and guaranteed membership in the community. Unless that guaranteed membership is only going to a very small class. And I just don't think it's useful to have that anyway. I think that people should have to prove their utility to the community and people should be able to come into the community.

If they can prove that utility. So I don't think that they're going to be that hard separated from the outside. If somebody can prove their utility to the community.

Simone Collins: Oh, for sure. Like, I'm sure there might be some kind of program for immigration. But that, that doesn't change the fact that these are going to be totally different worlds and the odds of.

over time people actually qualifying to get in, you know, being capable of integrating with that society may go down. I don't know. So,

Malcolm Collins: well, I mean, I think that the people here will be like, well, what about, you know, like something like the a large state military trying to attack one of these, right.[00:35:00]

I just don't think you'd have that either because I think we're entering a world. We're the small havens or like clusters of incredibly technologically engaged people. So today this is like the type of people who run big AI companies and stuff like that are going to have access to better weaponry than state governments that have to acquire them through a very slow procurement bureaucracy.

And two, even though the governments are much larger if they attack any one government attacks, any one haven, that would be incredibly stupid of them for two reasons. First it would make them an enemy of all havens because network would now see them as an eventual threat. But two, they wouldn't be able to get access to the tech that the havens were

Simone Collins: producing.

So it's kind of like a Taiwan situation. Duplicated a bunch of times, copy and paste Taiwan all over the world and make it for all the stuff that we need. And then you've got,

Malcolm Collins: Well, I think we basically already have the emergence of three haven states. I think Taiwan is one of them. It's a proto [00:36:00] haven state that the world basically needs to protect because of its ability to produce something that no one else can produce, the chips.

Israel, I see is another one of the initial haven states. And Singapore is another one of the initial haven states. And I suspect we will see What does Singapore

Simone Collins: produce of value for the world that's so necessary?

Malcolm Collins: Singapore produces in, in a big way Exchange between the West and the East, financially speaking, if Singapore was to disappear, Americans ability to invest or work with the Chinese economic system would decrease substantially, as would China's ability to interface with the West, especially now that Hong Kong is gone, which used to be one of the haven states.

And I also think that this is partially why China is struggling so much. They showed that they were a danger to one of the, the, the Haven network. And now they sort of made themselves enemies of it through the integration and destruction of Hong Kong as a separate entity before Hong Kong really had the ability to defend [00:37:00] itself due to differential technology, which it didn't have back then.

I also think as technology develops and as AI develops, we're going to enter a world in which attacking becomes much harder than defending, which makes havens much easier to build out. However, I think that the best place to build one is in the tundra, as I've always said, which is what I really want to do somewhere in the fairly far north.

Simone Collins: Yeah,

Malcolm Collins: but I

Simone Collins: also feel like on so many of these fronts, the tundra has a lot going for it. The reason why we have extra dramatic photos to show from your childhood home is because it is on an island. It is by the ocean is in the heat. It is under the sun, the hot beating sun and the corrosive salt air. And so of course, like it, it degraded extra fast.

If we were talking about an old stone hut, In, like, Norway. Yeah, islands

Malcolm Collins: are the worst place, like, [00:38:00] like, except for large islands, I will say small islands are the worst place you can build a haven state. They are incredibly undefendable. People think that they're really defendable. Well, but also, like,

Simone Collins: the amount, you basically have to rebuild it.

every few years based on how much things are corroding and degrading. I need

Malcolm Collins: to talk about why they're so undefeatable. People who have never lived on an island don't know how much a problem pirates are. Even in today's world, like on our island, you know, you had to have guns and everything. You had to have defense plans because pirates will come and they can land on any beach anywhere around the island.

And. Quickly make it without us knowing because you know, to, to like, if they come on at night or something like that so you would need a big security network, which would need electricity, which is very hard to keep running. One of the things about the island is we always had to replace the generator because it would corrode.

You know, so those only last like 5 to 10 years often. It's, it's just terrible idea.

I think the reason why people make this mistake is they think about island defense in a historic context. Rather than in a modern [00:39:00] context, they're not thinking about a few families needing to depend an island against speed boats that can run quietly and a group of men with,

aK 40 sevens. , and grenades, they're thinking about having to defend against a big fleet of triremes of. , medium. Populated. , you know, historic, maybe offshoot of Athens or, you know, something around busy and Tim, uh, The the. Logistics are totally different. It used to take a long time and. It would be very loud and.

visible to get a boat to an island.

But now with speed boats and modern weaponry, , It's almost as if you're living in an area where a small army can teleport to any one of your immediate borders. it is incredibly hard to defend an island.

Malcolm Collins: Now, large islands are fine, especially when they are, very like they don't have many beaches or landing areas. Taiwan is a great example of this. It's very, very [00:40:00] hard to invade Taiwan. But even still, I think the corrosion is just not worth it.

You are better being in a coastal tundra area is what I'd say. Because that allows you to likely next to a large river somewhere. So you have access to the, the water. The cold helps cool your data centers, allowing you to run more calculations faster. You can convert the land around you into farmland using your technology, but radar groups have no utility to the land and other governments you can tell when they're coming towards you for a long time beforehand with future technology.

When you're talking about like radar technology and stuff like that. An island. You don't know if it's a merchant vessel or something that's coming specifically to see you, if you are, you know, until it like veers off course to come right at you. Even when you're dealing with government actors, if you are in somewhere in the fairly far North, they would have no reason to be going that way.

And so when you see something beginning to head in your direction, you know, Oh, [00:41:00] okay, this is something I need to get clearance for and everything like that long before it gets to me, it allows you to have much larger perimeters. But that is, is my thought on that. And I think that the Haven network will be a natural transition for humanity to get to the stars.

Simone Collins: Yeah. Which is kind of a, an inevitable next step. And then things just feel a lot more weirdly controllable once you get to space, because things are in a colony based level on a ship based level. And it's because things are more circumscribed, it just feels, I don't

Malcolm Collins: know. I feel like havens are going to function very much like spaceships on earth.

They are likely going to be with smaller communities than we are used to. Likely, I suspect like 50, 000 people per community. Except for the mega havens, which are the descendants of modern states, like potentially Israel, Taiwan. In Singapore but yeah, and I think they'll function very much like, like spaceships, sort of, where you have a lot of controlled systems, because I just think it's going to be more cost [00:42:00] efficient to sort of run the entire network with all of your AR stuff built into your environment, or perhaps even I expect the cities themselves will be combinations of VR and real life and Which might also make interactions with other Havens much easier as you may be able to go out and meet with someone from another Havens virtual avatar pretty easily.

Simone Collins: Well, yeah, well, but also like, you know, we'll have to, I guess we'll have to ask what will cities actually need or what's the purpose of cities if it's not you know, interfacing with people like what physically do people have to do in close proximity to each other. How are systems best set up there, but that's for a different conversation.

It's still, it's interesting to think how things are going to play out. And I would say my favorite piece of, of real estate philosophy from you that I just not heard from anywhere before that might be kind of relevant to this conversation is that you alluded to this earlier, old houses are [00:43:00] more desirable, not just because they degrade more slowly, but because they're like collectibles on a market, they are a.

A thing of limited quantity that is differentiated and unique, whereas in a world of, of a housing glut, you're going to need something where the supply is not so elastic and abundant. So if you are looking to buy a house, consider buying a collectible one in some way. I love you to death Simone.

I love you too, Malcolm.

In this eye-opening discussion, Malcolm and Simone Collins dive deep into a candidate survey from Keystone Equality, exposing controversial LGBTQ+ policy proposals. They critically examine questions about gender-affirming care, educational curricula, and legal protections, highlighting potential unintended consequences and ethical concerns. This video offers a nuanced perspective on complex issues surrounding LGBTQ+ rights, cultural sovereignty, and the balance between protecting vulnerable groups and preventing exploitation by bad actors.

Key topics covered:

* Analysis of LGBTQ+ policy proposals in Pennsylvania

* Critique of gender-affirming care for minors and associated legal liabilities

* Debate on transgender athletes in sports

* Discussion of LGBTQ+ content in school curricula

* Examination of the "LGBTQ+ panic defense" in legal proceedings

* HIV disclosure laws and their implications

* Same-sex marriage and adoption rights

* The concept of cultural sovereignty in LGBTQ+ issues

Simone Collins: [00:00:00] they're saying basically that the state of Pennsylvania is like, you know what, if you receive gender affirming care as a minor, You should have the right up until age 30 to sue your healthcare provider for offering that gender affirming care to you if it turns out that they were acting in a completely flagrantly irresponsible manner Oh, s**t!

They're like, no, no, no, no. Because I think they know. That a lot of people who are getting gender affirming care as minors are going to sue their healthcare providers when, when they reach their twenties, when they reach their thirties, when they're fully myelinated, when they learn more and they're like, Oh no, no, no, we can't do that

Malcolm Collins: So you can be tried with

 Reckless endangerment. If you know you have HIV and you intentionally hide that from another individual and give them HIV., I can't even believe that they are trying to prevent this from the case. That they would, they oppose increasing criminal penalties. This is what I talk about.

I don't know how you can be pro gay and pro Democrat at the same time. Like you have to, who, who suffers? From this being [00:01:00] removed from the law, who is going to predominantly suffer from this being removed? It's going to be gays who are trying to practice safe sex. That is who's going to suffer for this.

Would you like to know more?

Malcolm Collins: Hello, everyone! In a previous episode, we mentioned that Simone got A letter in the mail because, you know, she's running for office and they ask her, what are your thoughts on various issues? And with a lot of them, you know, when it's like an anti gun organization, she can just basically throw it in the trash because she knows she's not going to come off smelling like roses to these groups.

But

Simone Collins: I was super excited about this because this, this came from this group called Keystone Equality. They, they, they say that they support LGBTQ plus rights. And I'm like, Oh my gosh, like, this is one of those things where You know, we are more socially progressive, at least when it comes to our, our, our cultural sovereignty stance, you know, we may not you know, we may be on the conservative end, but we very much support people having the freedom to pursue whatever culture they want.

So this is slam dunk, like, I should take this candidate survey. So they can endorse me and I [00:02:00] can show to Democrats and libertarians and more socially progressive people in my district that, you know, I, I may be a candidate worth consideration. I was so excited. And then I dive into it and I'm like, you know what I should have, I should have known that there were going to be problems because their logo is not the classic gay flag,

Malcolm Collins: Republican gay flag.

I call it, it is

Simone Collins: as I think one of. The base camp followers named it, which is the best name, the colonizer flag, which includes the additional triangle of white, pink, blue, brown, and black, because race is a sexual orientation. I do not understand

Malcolm Collins: how, like anyone who grew up with like a traditional understanding of non discrimination.

This is wild that this flag thing happened. The, the rainbow represented everything under the rainbow. That was, that was the point. Yeah. The full spectrum. Less inclusive. We need to, we, it's, it's so freaking animal farm. I [00:03:00] really wish I had a good animal farm clip I could use every time I bring this up.

Cause it's so insane. It's like, well, yes, I know we're all equal, but some of us are more equal than others and need special representation on the flag. And we'll just arrange a little. Bit of the historic gay identity with every little notch. And this is where I think in this survey, as we're going over this survey, people are going to learn that the progressive, like what the quote unquote progressives are advocating for with gay bills and LGBT bills these days, it is not something that like any sane person would want.

Yeah, this is, it's, it's

Simone Collins: no longer about protections. It's about. providing privileged status to people and, and frankly, creating a liability for genuinely LGBTQ plus people, because what you're more doing than anything at this point is creating space for bad actors. So let's get into these questions because I found them to be, I was so excited.

I was like, Oh, I'm going to, you know, I'm just [00:04:00] getting all these, all these, right. You know, I love getting questions, right. I love teacher, you know, saying that I was correct. And I got increasingly alarmed. You can

Malcolm Collins: choose almost every single one, but two bad guy on them. I'd rather say that they've become the bad guys and I am mortified at how yeah, I, I just, I think that sometimes,

Simone Collins: I can just read out some of the questions and you can stop when we get, let's just, let's

Malcolm Collins: just go into it right now.

Simone Collins: Did you vote in favor of the fairness act or if you're not an incumbent, did you support adding sexual orientation and gender identity as protected characteristics and Pennsylvania's non discrimination civil rights act?

So what made me uncomfortable about that is this is just adding additional red tape whereby people are going to be able to

Malcolm Collins: start gender identity. It doesn't, it doesn't say you know, like. That would include things like non binary, which is basically a class that anyone can opt into.

Simone Collins: Well, yeah, so basically this enables you [00:05:00] to, you could, like, this enables any abusive actor to suddenly say, oh, well, I'm non binary and now I'm going to sue you because even though you fired me because I showed up late five weeks in a row and I'm an a*****e.

And I didn't follow the company rules. I'm going to say it's because I was not

Malcolm Collins: allowed everyone to become a protected class, which is obviously a bad idea.

Simone Collins: Yeah. Then there's also, and this sort of more just runs against our cultural sovereignty rules. It says, do you support legislation that would ban the practice of conversion therapy for minors in Pennsylvania?

Now you and I, in the pragmatist guide to sexuality clearly state that like conversion therapy. doesn't work unless it's like literally subjecting you to gay orgies until you get super saturated and tired of them for a while. But then you have to like re up that. So like, based on the evidence we have, based on the evidence.

Yeah. So like one, the only form of gay conversion therapy that works is like intense gay orgies that kind of get you just kind of done with it for a while. And, but you have to like [00:06:00] re inoculate. So one it's not effective anyway, but two, like to, to prevent families from with their minors, you know, giving them the form of therapy or like sort of religious treatment that you think is appropriate runs against our cultural sovereignty stance.

So I couldn't answer that.

 so to add color to our position here. I would be okay with being in camps based on specific modalities of treatment, like what happens to the children at a camp? If these camps are doing something illegal with the kids, then of course they should not be legal. What I am against is being in camps based on the intent of the treatment. Because while we have said no known therapy, modality is effective. Helping same-sex attracted individuals. , either transition. , what they find most attractive. Or.

Suppressing their attraction. That doesn't mean that. It is impossible for such a. treatment. The [00:07:00] method to one day be invented. And some people, some children, even, you know, I know when I was younger, , I had gay friends who would constantly tell me how much they wish they could just not be gay. There are young people who you have a treatment like this existed would want said treatment. And to deny that they exist is to deny the lived experiences of hundreds, of thousands of individuals.. However would I would be open to is a requirement that sending a kid to one of these camps that requires the consent of both parents.

Malcolm Collins: And I would note here that people would be like, well then how do you, you know, if you think that this isn't something that can be cured, for example, quote unquote cured like why are you okay with religious frameworks that you know, tell people to suppress their sexual desires and it's because you don't have to act on them.

Simone Collins: Okay.

Malcolm Collins: You can decide. Yes, this is my preference, but it is not my lifestyle choice. And I want, and it's so [00:08:00] funny that like we get these comments from urban monoculture brain to people who don't get it. You go, you want to force, you know, you want to allow some cultures to force same sex attracted individuals to, you know, marry a woman.

Or join the clergy and it's like, no, I don't want to do that. I want to, unlike you, allow same sex attracted individuals to make choices about which culture they identify with. Yeah.

Simone Collins: And this is just one option. This is one way you can choose to do same sex identification. You can also choose to. Convert into a different culture.

That's all about flamboyant gay life. Or you can convert into a culture that's like, Oh, you're a gay female. That means you're a man into a culture. That's like, Oh, you're, you're just going to be super non binary and not talk about it and do whatever it is you want. Like, I don't care. You're the one who wants to

Malcolm Collins: remove choice from same

Simone Collins: sex attracted individuals.

Yeah. And that's, that's the problem is that's, that's [00:09:00] coercion when, when you start to dictate that. So here's another question. Hold on.

Malcolm Collins: I wanted to point out here. A same sex attracted Catholic priest is not not going out there having sex with people because the Catholics are forcing him to. He chose that lifestyle.

Yeah. Okay? We don't live in a Catholic monarchy. No. You are the one trying to remove choice from him. Yeah. I am trying to give him the maximum amount of choice. You just don't see it that way because you see a choice. To not be a member of your cultural group to not instantly gratify every desire you have as being a non choice

Simone Collins: Yeah So another question they ask is do you support adding sexual orientation and gender identity and expression to pennsylvania's hate crimes law?

And strengthening penalties for those who commit hate crimes. So obviously I couldn't answer yes to this either because you know, we express candid opinions about um Um, being transgender about youth gender transition, about LGBT stuff that [00:10:00] could be interpreted like perhaps in the UK where there are stronger hate crime laws, you know, as a, as a hate crime.

You know, JK Rowling has, has played with these rules on Twitter you know, in Yeah, in the uk. So, you know, we have a YouTube channel where we comment on these issues. We comment on the policies and we talk about the green lines. And if I was in support of adding, you know, strengthening the penalties and adding sexual orientation and gender expression to the hate crime laws in our state, I could be subjecting us to genuine legal liability, like personally.

So I couldn't support that one

Malcolm Collins: again. You cannot extend to hate crimes, opt in sexual identities. And I know non binary people will be like, it's not a choice, but like,

Simone Collins: right. But bad actors, bad actors can make it a choice. Yeah. Like, I mean, there's that one there's that one shooter. Who allegedly identified as, as gender and they're like, Oh no, no, no, that doesn't count.

But like, it does. But it went

Malcolm Collins: out under the hate crime [00:11:00] law. So you don't get to like disavow him because it hurts your community that now you're identified with a mass shooter. Yeah. But you would disavow him like.

Simone Collins: And that's like when, when you're legislating, you have to keep in mind that you're not just legislating for the people you're defending.

You also have to legislate around bad actors who may use this against the very people you're trying to protect. Which of course. Like, you know, loops into the whole turf issue, you know, this is

Malcolm Collins: a problem in Australia right now. As somebody in Australia is being sued because they tried to keep a transgender women off of their app, transgender women who didn't pass.

So keep going. Transgender women were allowed, just not non passing. And that was considered you know, illegal in, in Australia. You are not allowed to have lesbian only spaces from a legal perspective. Now, because anyone can identify this way. You, there is no cutoff for what is transgender.

Well, now any. Cis male sex pest can go on lesbian dating apps and harass lesbians. Like, yeah, of course it's going to piss off. Like, so

Simone Collins: that's, that's another issue, right? Okay. So let's go to the next year. I'm like, okay, come on. There has to be something here. Like I'm, I'm an ally. I'm an ally. Do you [00:12:00] support efforts to modernize and simplify the process for legal name changes, including the removal of the requirement that name changes be advertised in local newspapers or law journals?

Now, keep in mind, this is for people who have things like pending debts who may have committed crimes Like, the thing is, now, this is another law that I can't support because It could be abused by bad actors. And, and I don't really see why, like, if I'm changing my, my gender and I need to legally change my name, is it so bad that I advertise in a, I mean, no one, no one even reads the newspaper.

You're

Malcolm Collins: absolutely right. Like the, the reason why that exists as a law is so people can't use this to like escape debt or defraud people.

Simone Collins: Yeah. And again, like these are not, you're not being forced to post it. On Facebook to your friends and family. If this is a private and sensitive matter, this is, this is advertising this in, in, in a, in a place where if there are legal [00:13:00] pending or financial issues, people will see it.

But again, only bad actors would abuse that. So again, I can't, I can't just like, okay, come on. There's gotta be something. Okay. Well, Oh, here's another one. We're totally going to lose on, do you oppose efforts to prevent. transgender students from participating in all publicly sanctioned for or funded school athletic programs according to their gender identity.

Well, no, that's totally not fair. You know, if you have, you know, a 17 year old natal male who's transitioned to female, who's, you know, competing in athletics, he's going to absolutely school on average, of course it's his female competitors. This is not, this is not their game.

Malcolm Collins: I love it where they will come to you with like studies that have obviously been like combed through by the ultra monoculture to like, and I think that people don't understand what happens when they do that, when you come to me with a study and I can look at this person and be like, Obviously they have an advantage and you go, yeah, but look here.

And if you, [00:14:00] if you, if you split the data this way they don't, that doesn't make me believe that they don't have an advantage. It makes me distrust academic institutions and studies. Okay. , everyone can see that we're being gaslit on this. Like it's not hard. You have to be. Like a religious level of delusional to not be able to look at pictures like the ones I'm putting on the screen and be like, this person has an obvious biological advantage.

And then you can say, well, well, well, well, well, well, some humans have a biological advantage over other humans and that's unfair. And it's like, yeah, that's what sports were about. We created women's leagues. So that women could compete. So

Simone Collins: yeah,

Malcolm Collins: it's women because their

Simone Collins: bodies are on average quite different.

Which is, is, yeah, if

Malcolm Collins: you want to create transgender leagues, that's fine. If you want to create mixed gender leagues, that's fine. I am open to a world where everyone can [00:15:00] strive and S and succeed. But when you in mass allow. trans individuals into women's leagues, you create an environment where young girls who have worked very, very, very hard have their opportunity to be on top taken from them.

Yeah. And that is incredibly cruel.

Also as somebody with the number of trans friends. What I've heard from them. They view laws. That prevent people like Leah Thomas from unfairly engaging in these competitions as primarily protecting trans individuals. it hurts the entire trans community. When you see somebody. Obviously taking advantage of the carve-outs that are meant to protect. Trans people. To get an advantage over other individuals. We used to see jokes about trans people competing in sports teams And being allowed in women's changing rooms. as being fundamentally anti-trans because it [00:16:00] was seen as, so obviously an unfair thing to do.

Miss Mann? Come in, dear. Have a seat. Take off your bra if you'd like. I need to talk. See, I have this problem, I have a terrible secret. Well, Cindy, we all have our little secrets.

Sometimes we do things we're not so proud of. To gain the athletic edge on the competition. Sometimes those secrets come back to haunt us. And I also need to point out here in the case of someone like Leah Thomas, when you create. These carve-outs that mal actors are going to use them. For their own sexual gratification and to well goon on girls to be a sex pest.

If you look at somebody like Leah Thomas, , here's a quote from one of our teammates. We did not give our consent. They did not ask for our consent, but in that [00:17:00] locker room, we turn around and there's a six, four biological man dropping his pants. And watching us undress. And we were exposed to male genitalia. I mean, do. Do people really support this? Like, do they really know what's happening?

 That you have other attorney age girls. In this room and they should be protected from somebody just being able to say, I identify as trans. Now I get to go in a woman's locker room. And all goal at underage girls and forced him to see my genitalium. Do you not see that somebody. Might be abusing these sorts of carve-outs and that this abuse doesn't just hurt these underage girls, but also real trans people. And I, as, somebody who believes the trans narrative, that real trans people exist. There are. Real people in the world. Who are born the wrong gender and just want to be seen. As the correct gender. [00:18:00] Do I believe for a second that somebody who actually just wanted to be seen. As a girl would be walking around. A girls' locker room with their penis hanging out. Did they would be ogling. At naked girls. In a girls' locker room.

Do I believe that. No. No, I don't. If that is what trans is. But if trans is the ability for a guy With an exhibition is in fetish. to assume an identity that allows him into girls locker rooms and forces girls to look at his genitalia. Well, that's a different thing. That's not what I was told trans was, and that's not what I believe.

Anyone who is really trans believes what trans is.. Amy real trans person is going to want laws on the books. That prevent individuals like Leah Thomas from.

Engendering ill will [00:19:00] on their community.. Even if it means. Did they have to undergo. I go. Really pretty trivial sacrifices. Like not being able to participate in intermural sports.

Simone Collins: Yeah. So there's, there's another one here that's actually quite fascinating. They asked, Do you oppose extending the statute of limitations under which a person could file a civil claim related to gender affirming care, which could cause providers to leave the state in response to higher insurance premiums.

So, to give a little bit more color here. There is an amendment, a House Bill 138 that would, according to Keystone Equality, which is, I guess I'm going to out them the organizations that's asking these questions, that would inappropriately increase the statute of limitations for gender affirming care of any kind for up to the age of 30.

30 in cases where a minor was provided such care, they say that if passed, legislation would have the effect of making the cost of liability insurance prohibitive for healthcare workers seeking to provide affirming care [00:20:00] for transgender people. And that the bill intentionally targets a transgender community by making healthcare harder to obtain for all transgender people.

In other words, they're saying basically that the state of Pennsylvania is like, you know what, if you receive gender affirming care as a minor, You should have the right up until age 30 to sue your healthcare provider for offering that gender affirming care to you if it turns out that they were acting in a completely flagrantly irresponsible manner and you were, you regret the care that you were given and you were not given care with a lot of Oh, s**t!

They're like, no, no, no, no. Because I think they know. That a lot of people who are getting gender affirming care as minors are going to sue their healthcare providers when, when they reach their twenties, when they reach their thirties, when they're fully myelinated, when they learn more and they're like, Oh no, no, no, we can't do that because they can't afford the liability insurance for that.

That's what it is. I know. I know. I know. So I'm like, Oh man, I

Malcolm Collins: want to reframe this in, in, in, in, in like a tighter form. Okay. They are [00:21:00] trying to make it illegal for children that they have groomed and then believe like a kid. I'm not saying like the parents think the children have been groomed. Like a minor gets convinced by their psychologist or something like that to get this care later.

ends up realizing that they were brainwashed into getting this or that they weren't really told what the alternatives are, which is something we know is happening at scale now from numerous leaks that have happened. Okay. Then they go back and they try to sue the provider and they would otherwise win the lawsuit.

No, we're not saying just anyone who spuriously decides that they want to sue their provider of this stuff. Yeah.

It is trying to make it so that this individual, even if they would have won this lawsuit, based on the evidence, because the statute of limitations will pass, provably provable that they were brainwashed that 25 Go back on this and keep in mind.

This isn't even that long. It says by the age of [00:22:00] 30, right? Yeah, that's

Simone Collins: that's the the that's where they're trying to extend the statute of limitations with this pennsylvania house bill That is not

Malcolm Collins: that long.

Simone Collins: Yeah

Malcolm Collins: Is they're basically comping right here what I'm seeing here that they know this wave of lawsuits is coming and they are trying to prevent it because they know internally.

Simone Collins: Yeah, it's not just

Malcolm Collins: that. It's not just

Simone Collins: that. Because 1, if this does pass, it will make liability insurance more expensive for healthcare providers who choose to provide gender affirming care.

Malcolm Collins: That because of the level of misconduct. Yeah. Conduct wasn't high,

As to how big is this flood detransition is going to be what we now know from the study that. It came out in 2020 for development of gender, non contentedness during adolescence and early adulthood. That. Of 11 year olds who are discontent with their gender. Over 90% of them by the age of 23 or 100% content with their gender. It just turned out that they were [00:23:00] gay. So you are, if you put 11 year olds who are discontent with their gender on gender affirming care. Sacrificing castrating. Nine gay kids for everyone.

Trans kid, you are quote, unquote saving. That sounds like a pretty anti-gay position to me. The systematic and meth castration of gay children.

Malcolm Collins: you

Simone Collins: know, they could argue, you know, because again, this is, this is the cost of liability insurance.

So they could argue that, well, this is insurers expecting that, that there's bad conduct and there's going to be a lot of expensive lawsuits and then therefore charging prohibitively expensive. No, no, no. I, yeah, I do too, but I'm just, I'm just, I'm just making this as, as balanced as I possibly can, even though I'm, I'm obviously biased, but anyway, so like, I can't, I can't say yes to that.

Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: That's not even, that's not even, like, that is genuinely monstrous that you would try to prevent that. I know, I know, I know. Here's, here's

Simone Collins: another question from them. Hold on, hold on,

Malcolm Collins: hold on. I want to point out a few other things here. This is like, if, if, if [00:24:00] they know, and I suspect that most of the trans community now knows that puberty blockers have long term consequences, this means all of the doctors who are telling their patients that which we basically know from the evidence isn't true anymore, they can be sued.

They don't want that to happen because lying. to the patient is a key part of gender affirming care. But anyway, continue.

Simone Collins: Yeah. So this, this next question, a little more difficult, I would say, do you oppose efforts at the state or school district level to restrict curricula, ban books, or curtail other age appropriate educational materials or individual expression of the instructor because of LGBTQ content?

Now, I mean, we don't care. Obviously. Well, we don't care if, if, you know, a teacher is gay, we don't care if a teacher says that they're married to someone of the same gender or if they're trans or whatever. But yeah, I mean, in general content that promotes any type of pairing as being the correct type of pairing is something that.

Well, no, I think I'll put,

Malcolm Collins: [00:25:00] I'll put on screen here a, a tick tock where you will see a teacher discussing what she is doing with her elementary school class

My first year in preschool with a class of my own teaching alongside another queer neurodivergent educator and we have been rocking R2's class.

We've been talking about gender and skin color and consent and empathy and our bodies and autonomy. It's been fabulous. But our teaching team is shifting, and a new person is being onboarded. Someone with many years of experience. So today at the lunch table, when the topic of gender and genitals came up, one of our students plainly looked up and said, Well, I'm a girl today.

But I know that Teacher Co isn't. No, they're Enby. And the look on the incoming teacher's face was priceless. She was shocked in a good way. And she just looked around at the two of us and said, This class is incredible, and I am so [00:26:00] impressed.

Malcolm Collins: is talking to them about genitals, about gender expression, about, she's like, yeah, when the topic of genitals came up, I'm like, Whoa, why is genitals coming up with kindergartens as a regular lunchroom discussion?

And why are all of the other teachers okay that this just happened, because that's part of the story? You know, why are you indoctrinating the kids into your culture's framework around gender, which, frankly, is a fringe framework? It is and I think that this is something that fundamentally that the urban monoculture, like people who are really seethed in it, struggle to understand.

It's gender. Is at the end of the day, a completely cultural phenomenon, the way that our culture relates to gender. There is a truth of gender, which is sexual expression, right? But the way you relate to sexual expression is important. Completely. Well, and gender expression, right? So when I talk about like X, Y chromosomes and the difference that makes and how people develop, and sometimes you can have [00:27:00] intersex individuals and different cultures will relate to those individuals differently.

But most cultures have chosen just to lump people broadly into one of two genders, whichever one they seem more like. But that's a cultural decision. The urban monoculture has decided to atomize this almost as much as they can. But that doesn't mean that that's like necessarily the right way to react to it.

And when I look to the unaliving rates within the urban monoculture, it seems to me it obviously isn't the right way to react to it. So am I okay with this system that seems to be correlated with high rates of unaliving oneself and increasing rates? as acceptance for the LGBT community is accepted more.

So it's not due to discrimination because the rates are increasing as acceptance is increasing. Am I okay with that my child being exposed to that cultural system? No. And, and, and this is, this is one of the things that always got me about the Florida law, like the don't say gay law. I know the person who worked on drafting this law and I had actually believed the urban [00:28:00] monocultures lie that the law made it so that gay teachers could not tell their students that they were gay.

And actually among Republicans when they were drafting the law, she's like, yeah, actually, In the first draft of the law, it could have been read that way. And we, the Republicans, before it went out, changed it so it couldn't be read that way, because that isn't something that modern Republicans actually want.

They just don't want to get brainwashed.

Simone Collins: Okay. Let me, let me go to the next one. This is actually interesting and I've never heard of this before. They asked, do you support prohibiting the LGBTQ plus panic defense in legal proceedings in Pennsylvania? So I asked perplexity what this was because I'd never heard of it before.

Basically it's one, not even really a defense that's used in murder cases a lot. But basically it's, it's something that sometimes defenders try to use. To say like, oh, this person was so freaked out related to the other person's lgbtq plus [00:29:00] status, that that's why they murdered them or did something who

Malcolm Collins: are underselling it.

The panic defense comes into play when a person lies about their sexual gender. Yeah. That's

Simone Collins: where it most likely comes into it. So

Malcolm Collins: it happens if a today they be trans. Historically they would've been gay. You know, there's been changing the way we relate to gender as a society. But a, a, a trans person, for example lies to a person uh, that they were cis um, and then when that person realizes, often because they haven't undergone, you know, full, they, they, they say, oh, you, I just had sex with you and now I see you have a penis, or, you know, something like that they freak out and they murder the person.

This is obviously a horrifying thing. But here's sort of the way I would put it. Do I think that Muslims should be able to use of the defense? In a murder case, this person secretly slipped me pork intentionally. [00:30:00] Because I view that as a similar kind of offense in this offense, the individual has knowingly done something that the Muslim thinks is going to cause them to be tortured for all eternity and maliciously done it for their own momentary pleasure, maybe a laugh or something like that.

While I do think it is a truly monstrous thing for an individual to do because that's, that's why these people are so mad. Like, they're acting like they're mad because the person is

Simone Collins: LGBT. It's kind of, it's not something that's used to get people off the hook. It's just, it's, it's something that's used in a court of law to be like, They were driven insane.

They panicked because of their belief structure. And the reason why a lot of people who support LGBTQ rights are like, Hey, let's just not allow people to use this defense at all, is it's offensive to even suggest that being LGBTQ plus in some way could Would cause someone to freak out that much.

That's not

Malcolm Collins: what they're freaking out about. That's the point. They are [00:31:00] not freaking out that their partner is gay. They're freaking out that they just had sex with a guy. I know, I know, I know.

Simone Collins: But Malcolm, what you're missing is that, is that the reason why they're trying to remove this from defense cases is that that shouldn't be something that's normalized.

Like you shouldn't be allowed to, to wake up next to someone who you thought was one Sex

Malcolm Collins: shouldn't be

Simone Collins: allowed to hold their religious belief. Exactly. Yes. So anyway, that's you know, I don't, I, I think people should be allowed to give that context in the court of law because like, like to your point, if someone was fed pork, when it's against their religion, I would want to know that in a court case.

Cause I couldn't, I would want to know like, Why were they freaking out so much? Like, this is weird. You know, you need to know the context. It

Malcolm Collins: should be admissible in a court context, but it shouldn't necessarily get them off, but that's the way. But it doesn't, and it

Simone Collins: doesn't, and it hasn't. They're basically just saying this shouldn't be discussed at all.

So that's, that's one. And it's interesting.

Malcolm Collins: Which is actually kind of insane. The court, who's making the [00:32:00] decision, shouldn't be allowed to know that this person who was constricted into sleeping was a guy.

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: In their mind. Maybe not in the other person's mind, but in their mind, they thought it was a guy.

Simone Collins: So anyway, this goes back to this next question ties back to what we were discussing in terms of like, HIV positivity in the LGBTQ plus world. They asked, Do you oppose increasing criminal penalties for people who are HIV positive? When those who are not HIV positive would not be subject to those increased penalties for the same offense.

So here they're basically saying like, you know, Should people be penalized for being irresponsible when they have HIV and could hurt other people because of it? No,

Malcolm Collins: no, no, no, this is, this is about a specific legal statute. So you can be tried with It's like reckless endangerment, right? I don't think it's yes.

It's reckless endangerment. If you know you have HIV and you intentionally hide that from another individual and give them HIV. I, I, I can't even believe that they are trying to prevent this from the case. That we would, yeah, that, that they [00:33:00] would, they oppose increasing criminal penalties. This is what I talk about.

I don't know how you can be pro gay and pro Democrat at the same time. Like you have to, who, who suffers? From this being removed from the law, who is going to predominantly suffer from this being removed? It's going to be gays who are trying to practice safe sex. That is who's going to suffer for this.

Who benefits from this? Gays who are preying on other gay Yeah. Yeah. Bad actors.

Simone Collins: Bad actors. That's a key thing here. That is a,

Malcolm Collins: why would you try to protect that if you wanted to protect the gay community? Because they don't care about the gay community. Right, right, right.

Simone Collins: They

Malcolm Collins: care about the bad actors.

That's literally it.

Simone Collins: I actually found two questions here that I do support. So that they're right next to each other. One is, do you support guaranteeing the rights of LGBTQ plus parents to seek and retain custody of their children? Including foster and adopted children without bias based on their status?

Totally, it should have nothing to do with it. And two, the second one that we would finally [00:34:00] say yes to, do you support equal rights for legally married same sex, same gender couples as those granted legally married couples who are the opposite sex or gender? Totally. Doesn't

Malcolm Collins: matter if, you know. I actually want to push back on what some of our fans will say on these two issues.

Oh, yeah. The one is, is some of our fans will say, how dare you allow a gay couple to adopt kids? Like, what about the effects that has on the kids? And I'm like do you know how bad foster care is? Right. Like, this is demonstrably better for the child.

Simone Collins: Well, like, anyone who, who typically passes the requirements to adopt a child or whatever, you know, like, and also one Having a kid.

So one adopting is really hard. If you can adopt, you're probably way above like the standard of most parents who biologically have kids. And two, if you are conscientious enough to make the money and go through the intense hardship of having children, especially if you're a gay couple, lesbians, it's a tiny bit easier, but gay is like really hard to have kids.

And this is also

Malcolm Collins: why we can't trust the data that [00:35:00] says, because if you look at the data on, do gay parents have a negative effect on their children growing up? It turns out that they actually have much more successful and mentally healthy kids. Yeah. Because they're like the people who are capable of having kids.

Yeah. The reason why this is the case is because of the gating that's required. The barriers to entry. people to end up getting access to kids, so it basically skews the study, but this is relevant if you're trying to bar these couples who are having better outcomes from even adopting when keep in mind kids who are adopted can often, if they want to say, I don't want to be with this family anymore, or I find this situation abusive.

But they're choosing not to because they believe this is better for them than what the alternative would be. How dare you make that decision for the child? In the second case, the, the, the gay married couple should have the same rights. We had a comment in our last video. They said, well, these people aren't married.

It's not a real marriage because you can't have a real marriage between same sex people. I'm like, from your cultural [00:36:00] perspective, that's true. But there are versions of Christianity, and there are versions of Judaism, and there are versions of Islam, and there are versions of Buddhism that do believe that.

So you can't just annul other religions because it's not what your religion is. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That comes back to cultural sovereignty. Being insane, one, and then two, even if like, like you 100 percent believe this and you think that our society is made worse for them being able to marry, right? You know, you don't have the voting power to enforce that.

You know, all you do is hurt Republican chances of winning by going out there and being a hard liner and trying to get this into Republican policy positions. Why are you doing this? Even the majority of the Republican base don't want this. You know, over, it's like it was 61 percent the last time I looked at the Republican base, not the Democrat base, the Republican base [00:37:00] wants gays to be able to get married.

Simone Collins: Yeah. Especially the younger Republican base. So it's only a matter of time until the system. Only

Malcolm Collins: 30 percent of the young Republican base didn't want gays to be able to get married. It is, no, you are not helping anyone. And are you even helping the people you're banning from getting married? Do you think, okay Do you really want to, do you really want to suppress marriage?

No, no, no, no, no, that's not what I mean. You prevent a gay couple from getting married. I think increased or decreased the probability that they find Jesus. Obviously you've decreased the probability. Fair point. Because they're stuck in a degenerate, you know, uh, Yeah, you're forcing them away from. They now see you as the enemy because you kept them from entering a marriage.

And I also think here, this is where I get to the ordering of sins. And I think that this is something where classic Christianity is incredibly unbiblical, and I find it very frustrating. Okay. You are a sinner, [00:38:00] but Jesus still saved. How dare you try to deny his salvation to somebody else because they're going through some phase in their life or something like that, right?

Um, Look at a rank order of sins. Yes. I think if you go with a classical interpretation, of Christianity, sleeping with a partner of the same sex is absolutely a sin. Okay. Do I think that that prevents these people from getting into heaven? If you read the Bible no more than the person who speaks poorly to his wife or too much, or Yeah, there's a lot of sins out there.

Or, there are so many sins, where there's sins every night, you know, watching football games and going out there and contributing to the community. That's, that's not how it works in [00:39:00] most versions of the Catholic Church. Yeah. Um, And uh, we've just sort of twisted it on a tag, you know, we should adjudicate morality like this, and it's like, uh, no, I'm sorry.

A gay couple that is married. Having sex is not more of a sin. Then an unmarried couple having sex then premarital sex, biblically speaking. Do you want to ban premarital sex as well? Or it's just you pick on the sins where you think you can get the public on your side.

It's the second then you're just a bully. And that's not. That's not what Jesus asked of you. , let these people know that they're sending yes. Teach them the Bible. Yes, but you cannot possibly adjudicate all of the Christian moral system. People need to see the light of it and live by it themselves.

Malcolm Collins: The, the thing that really gets me about these individuals who are like, yeah, we need to make it part of the party platform that like we you know, [00:40:00] ban gay marriage and stuff like that, it's like.

 , they, they are so pathetic looking from my perspective because they know this isn't helping with their mainstream issues. They know that doing stuff like this only hurts Republicans chances of victory. They are just LARPing about a world that they don't exist in.

You don't live in a world where your. Moral framework is the dominant moral framework. You look as buffoonish as the man who plays with the samurai sword and daydreams about living in a world where their skill with a samurai sword is going to matter. They don't live in feudal Japan. You don't live in 1950s America.

Okay, you live in modern America, so why don't we work for the things that can actually get passed and help all of us on the right, instead of doing this whole splitting, splitting, splitting, splitting purity test, when the only way to pass your purity test is to be [00:41:00] some extremist that doesn't represent a right wing voter.

Like this is insane at this point. All right, even if you disagree with us on this, why are you fighting? You're fighting because you are LARPing. You are the fat bearded man in a fedora flailing around a katana in his backyard dreaming about the day he can use this in a fight to the death in feudal Japan.

He doesn't live in feudal Japan. You don't live in 1950s America.

As a quick aside here, some people in the comments of another video, we're trying to argue against gay marriage from quote unquote, a secular perspective, except marriage. Isn't a secular thing. It's. It's not the piece of paper that they want. It's the ability to undergo the particular marriage ceremony that they want. , to, to be this new status of a married instead of not married.

That's what comes from a marriage.

[00:42:00] Because it's a religious thing. And because there are some versions of various religions that allow gay people to marry. We as a secular society should not be preventing it.

And if we do that, we have the government come in and begin to adjudicate, which interpretations of the Bible are correct in which are wrong in which religions are we allowed to practice.

And I don't think any real. Christian wants government bureaucrats, coming in and saying these parts of the Bible.

Should be seen this way. And these parts of the Bible should be seen this way because we know exactly what they're going to do when they start doing that.

Malcolm Collins: Um, That's, that's, anyway. Right. And, and I think that this is One of the things that I've, I've been angling for recently is to get you on the board of the Log Cabin Republicans.

Because I think that they're now the only group that really supports. Well, and we got to raise

Simone Collins: a lot of money for them.

Malcolm Collins: I don't know what to tell you. That's what we've been told. If we can raise more money for them, we can, we can get on the board, which would be fun. But Dear Basecamp donors,

Simone Collins: please donate to the Log [00:43:00] Cabin Republicans and say, I came here.

Malcolm Collins: What I love about this episode is that oh, by the way, people who don't know what the Log Cabin Republicans are, it's the gay Republican lobby. They're really awesome.

Simone Collins: They're fantastic. They're

Malcolm Collins: actually like really fun people. Gay Republican parties are like the most fun parties. You can go to because they are all so based and by based, and this is the thing, a lot of people, they're like, this isn't based because it's not like conservative or straight conservative.

If you're just repeating everything that your group wants to hear, you are the

Simone Collins: antithesis of based.

Malcolm Collins: Being based means saying what you believe is true, regardless of what your group or other groups or society is going to say about it. You know, like, We've had some of our gay friends be like, well, I agree with conservatives on everything, but like they're, they're gay issues.

I just can't, I'm like, that's not the, the, the mainstream, even in Trump's platform at the RNC, the Republican platform this year does not have marriage as being between a man and a [00:44:00] woman. It says that we should think to find marriage and we should try to make, you know, more marriages happen, but it does not.

And we should, marriage is great.

 So, okay, here's where things left off with the survey . 'cause I, I, I obviously can't take this survey.

Simone Collins: I, I, it just is not gonna work out well. Can't take it back. Yeah. Yeah. I, I responded to her to the CEO of this organization and I said, oh, you know, thanks. I've added this to my list of surveys to review. TLDR. You know, we're, we're very transparent about our stance on lgbtq plus issues on our podcast, and I linked to our podcast, so, oh, sh shoot.

They're gonna find out if they actually, I don't, I don't think they'll watch any of it. And I'm like, you know, the gist is that, you know, we support cultural sovereignty, you know, that we believe everyone should be allowed to live the lifestyle that they want, but we're also against imposing your cultural values on other groups.

AKA we're against cultural imperialism. And that's, that's just where I left it. So, these lovely, these lovely people from Keystone Equality may come to the channel and absolutely [00:45:00] hate everything that we're saying here and hate the fact that we've highlighted their candidate survey and suggested that they're leaving room for bad actors.

That is ultimately going to damage the LGBTQ plus community by giving them a bad name. They're

Malcolm Collins: murdering gay

Simone Collins: people. They are, they

Malcolm Collins: are. Okay. Yeah. Malcolm's shooting. No, no, it's, it's very clear, like, especially the one where you can't be prosecuted for lying to someone about your HIV status. That hurts.

Simone Collins: No, no, no, that, they were, that was in opposition to increased penalties, but yeah, I mean, yeah.

Malcolm Collins: No, no, no, no, no, they said, hold on. You, you, you didn't read it correctly then. They said that your HIV status should not be able to increase the penalties you are subject for, for any form of action. What that means is a HIV person telling someone, I don't have HIV and sleeping with them, should not legally be treated any differently than a non HIV person telling someone they don't have HIV and sleeping with them.

The HIV cannot be taken any differently. into consideration [00:46:00] when the, when, when the legal status is judged, it would make it impossible to in any way punish someone for lying about their HIV status. That's the intention of that law and that will kill gay people.

Simone convinced me of one possible alternative as to what this wording may mean. It may be to prevent higher penalties. In great cases where the attacker had HIV positive status. , I don't see this as particularly better because, , who would a gay man be griping, but another gay man.

So it just further victimizes the gay community.

Cause I can't think of any other instance where HIV status would be taken into account for more punishment in a crime other than grape or lying to someone about it.

Simone Collins: Well, maybe we can share a link to the Google survey, which they might take down.

But what I can say, here's our one nice thing we're going to say, okay, is that They used a Google form and most of these packs, most of these organizations, [00:47:00] they give you a fricking like PDF that you're supposed to fill out. There's like no room to put anything. It's like terribly antiquated. It looks like it was copied three times from like a paper printout.

At least they are civilized in technology. Okay. So good guys. Love it. Love you too, Malcolm. Okay. Bye. Love you. Okay, bye. Love

Malcolm Collins: you. Bye. Love you. Okay. Okay.

In this episode, we sit down with Maxim Lott to discuss the surprising recent political developments, including why Biden dropped out of the race, the influence of betting odds versus traditional polling, and the odds for Kamala Harris in the upcoming election. We also explore the evolution of prediction markets and their growing importance in political forecasting, as well as the potential impact of the new right on future elections. Tune in for a detailed and engaging conversation on the dynamics of election betting, political strategy, and the changing landscape of the Republican party.

Maxim Lott: [00:00:00] Yeah. I'm excited for this too. I really appreciate your natalism work that you guys do. So

Simone Collins: we really appreciate the work you do, man. You're on at a perfect time. Like we're probably going to run your interviews with us.

Like usually. Months for us to run these and now we're like, oh my God, we got to run it

Malcolm Collins: with all this election stuff that's going on. This is wild. Yeah. You had, you had disagreed with the betting odds recently.

Maxim Lott: Yes. Yes. I had a post about why Biden won't drop out and all this good reasoning, but the betting odds said he would and he did.

So the lesson is to listen to the betting odds, not any one analyst.

Malcolm Collins: Oh, I'd love to hear why you thought he wouldn't drop out.

Maxim Lott: Yeah, you know, I thought it wasn't in his interest. If he wanted to, he could have gone to the convention and got the nomination. Yes, thank

Simone Collins: you. That's, that's what I kept telling everyone.

I was like, he's not, like, all the way up through Saturday, it was like, he's not going to drop out. No one can technically force him to drop out. And he's no reason to want to, why would he do it? No one can stop him. He's not going to drop out. So I'm with you on that. And

Malcolm Collins: you also [00:01:00] have the problem that Jill hates Kamala.

And this is like publicly,

Simone Collins: and

Malcolm Collins: if she's making the decisions for Biden, she definitely wouldn't want him to drop out if she was a presumptive nominee.

Maxim Lott: Yeah, and it seemed like there was no way for them to truly force him out either, but I think I underestimated how much kind of soft power there is in the Democratic Party with Obama and Pelosi really running the show.

Simone Collins: Like, I don't know, man, they tried everything. I feel like they literally tried everything. Like people drove out to his house, you know, George Clooney, like just, they threw everything at him. And I think, and maybe in the end, because donations started drying up. That was it. You know, just like, yeah, I think it was probably

Malcolm Collins: donors that got him out.

Simone Collins: So

Maxim Lott: you'd think if you can make it to the convention, the donors would, who else are they going to donate to? They don't like Trump. So, but clearly he felt the pressure and he had COVID and a lot of things conspired and he dropped out. So [00:02:00]

Simone Collins: the

Maxim Lott: bettors were not surprised. They had, This at like 70% a couple days before he dropped out.

Simone Collins: Wow. So they,

Maxim Lott: they were right. I, I lost money betting on the other side, but . Wow. Yeah. You

Malcolm Collins: know, he, he got covid we'll see if there was any you know, there was a lot of people interested in something like that happening to him. I was, I was joking. There was a thing about Trump's assassination and people were like, well.

You know, Republicans would be cheering too if Biden was assassinated. I was like, not a single Republican I have ever met would be cheering if Biden was assassinated. They love it. It's a disappointing development

Simone Collins: for Republicans that Biden is no longer running. They were thrilled with Biden running.

Maxim Lott: Yeah. Now the polls have Kamala Harris up by like, maybe, or losing by one point less than Biden was losing by. So we'll see how that goes for them. The betting odds, yeah, the betting odds. It's interesting because you can look at these conditional odds. So you say, if this person's nominated, What are their odds of winning?

And Biden's odds were always [00:03:00] around 30 percent. Kamala Harris's were around 37 percent. So she's slightly more electable, but not much more electable. Oh

Malcolm Collins: gosh. Okay, so we have been talking generally right now. I'm going to introduce you

To anyone who is wondering why the election betting on numbers are a bit off in this. It is because this was filmed.

Around a week ago. And so sorry about that. It just took me a while to process it.

Malcolm Collins: but so people who don't know Maxim Lunt, I Grew up on your stuff, every election cycle.

Loading what's the URL here? Election betting. Election betting odds.com and then the, you had your own website because it is historically speaking, the most accurate predictor of who's going to win an election cycle. And I'd love it if you could talk a little bit about why it's such an accurate predictor of who's gonna win and, and, and it's advantages over traditional polling.

Maxim Lott: Yeah, absolutely. And great to be here with you guys. I love your natalism work. The so I created the site in 2015 and we've tracked [00:04:00] hundreds of races since then. And you can graph it out to see how accurate it is. And what we find is that in general, If the markets say there's a 20 percent chance that someone's going to win a race, that actually happens about 20 percent of the time.

So it's not exactly perfect. You can see the lines, they almost match up. But basically you can go to electionbettingodds. com, click track record, and it'll show you this. And it's been very accurate. It's the single best predictor. If you just want, tell me quickly, who's going to win. This is the best thing.

Thing to go to.

Malcolm Collins: So you're sort of the granddaddy of betting odds stuff. And the field has undergone, we met you at manifest. I think an enormous evolution in the past probably decade or so. Can you talk a little bit about how much, how prediction markets have evolved over the course of your life? Yeah.

Maxim Lott: And I don't know if it's quite accurate to say I'm the granddaddy, you know, there are people like Robin Hanson who might fit that role better.[00:05:00]

He goes to all this stuff. I guess for the general,

Malcolm Collins: you were my first, to this stuff. You made it accessible in a topic that I was passionate about. Right.

Maxim Lott: For, for, for popularizing it. I think. Election betting odds got more than 25 million unique views. So hopefully that's made a difference

And yeah, so prediction markets it has changed a lot over the years I first started looking at these in 2007 And at that time there was one big site It was based in ireland called intrade. com and it was great and people traded there and they accurately predicted things. They were shut down mostly by the U.

S. government. First, their founder died climbing Mount Everest, which is tragic. But then the government said, hey, you're taking American customers and you're not registered with our government. So they sued them and they shut down immediately after that. So there were a couple of years then where there was really almost no [00:06:00] prediction markets.

The best thing was Betfair, which was this UK based place where people bet 99 percent of it. People are betting on sports there and it's legal there. They had this 1 percent yeah, where they were betting on elections. And it was annoying for me as a reporter, cause we would want to report on these odds on the Stossel show on Fox news and they The Betfair site, cause it's these English gamblers there.

The odds are really hard to read. It's like, you know, 30 over 4. 5. So I'd have to manually convert all these in Excel sheet to like 55%. And then eventually I figured, Oh, let's, I can automate this and then I can put it on a website. So that's how election betting started. And since then, there've been a lot more entrance into the market.

Like,

Malcolm Collins: yeah, you were at Fox. You said,

Maxim Lott: yeah, yeah. Fox news. I was working for John Stossel. So he's a big prediction market guy too, [00:07:00] and help popularize the site.

Malcolm Collins: What happened? So your site goes live because now, you know, there's whole conferences around betting odds and stuff like that. And there's like different ways of measuring them than there were historically, because it's not like sports betting.

Like it was historically now it's like status hierarchy games.

Maxim Lott: Interesting. Yeah. Well, there, people are betting on all sorts of things now. You know, people are betting on the Oscars on foreign elections. Yeah, Matt manifold has a lot of creative markets. But yeah, it's really a blooming area. You had

Malcolm Collins: and you were talking about conditional markets as well.

Where do you see those coming up?

Maxim Lott: Yeah, so on our site, what we do, we create we use the implied odds. So if you have people betting on the nomination and on who's going to win, you can divide them and get a pretty accurate estimate. Manifold, which is still play money for now is trying out literally just saying, okay, bet if you, if Kamala Harris is [00:08:00] the nominee.

How likely is she to win the general election? So that's this conditional odds. It means if something Then what's the odds and that helps you make decisions in life. So if you're a democratic voter you want to know that gavin newsom if he's the nominee it's close to 60 percent that he'll win But if it's harris, it's 37 percent.

So that's pretty important information that the Bettors tell us no, I did not know

Malcolm Collins: now. Let's talk about some of the existing odds right now. So they have a You Like what percent are you looking at? Like what, what are the interesting things you're seeing in the betting odds right now?

Maxim Lott: Yeah. So Trump is favored over Harris by about two to one.

So he's a big lead, but she could definitely win. Yeah. It's a little less than two to one right now. And yeah, the state map, you know, the blue wall, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, they all lean. In Trump's column right now,

Malcolm Collins: Florida, which has Trump at 92. 5 percent to win. Yeah.

Maxim Lott: Used to be a swing state four years ago, but it's [00:09:00] deep red now.

There's no chance of Biden. When Trump's a Florida man,

Malcolm Collins: you know, he

Maxim Lott: is now officially. Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: That is fascinating. What do you think has changed there? Like what, what are your sort of calculations going into this? What would you be doing if you were a Democrat right now in terms of the VP candidate, et cetera?

Maxim Lott: I. Yeah, well, I'm in Florida right now, actually, and it it seems like the Santas made a big difference there in terms of having a coven response that was so diametrically different from New York, et cetera. People said this is the alternate model. Pretty much everyone here liked that alternate model.

Yeah. And. So I think people shifted their politics there. Oh,

Malcolm Collins: so you think he's literally shifted Democrats to believe that the, like, Republicans work?

Maxim Lott: In Florida, I think, yeah, that's how, that's why it's deep red on the election betting odds map.

Malcolm Collins: I think it also shows how unpopular Harris is that DeSantis is, is predicted to win.

And she, [00:10:00] she's at only one third odds.

Maxim Lott: Trump is, yeah. And yeah it, it, It does show that if the Democrats did run a normal candidate like Newsom or Whitmer, the bettors think that that candidate would win. Even though the polls currently have them down a lot, that's likely just because they don't have name recognition.

So the bettors are forecasting that. That's why bettors are better than just looking at polls, because they model all sorts of things.

Malcolm Collins: So what do you think the odds are of a contested convention these days?

Maxim Lott: They're low. It looks like Kamala Harris has wrapped it up. She's at 87 percent to get the nomination.

And Pelosi just endorsed her, so I think that's right. Oh,

Malcolm Collins: the Democratic voters are not going to like this. It's actually been pretty interesting from our perspective. We're going to fill in an episode on this. Is watching the Democratic commentators response to the Kamala Harris candidacy. It's just like holistically positive.

It doesn't even include the plausibility of changing her for a different candidate, which I think is going to [00:11:00] really bite them in the butt.

Maxim Lott: You know, it's really interesting because it reminds you of what they were doing with Biden one year ago, two years ago. It's like, Oh, he's not senile. This is a conspiracy theory.

Simone Collins: And

Maxim Lott: then, you know. Yeah, same thing with Harris as soon as she starts going off on her maniacal lap or her, the future of tomorrow is what tomorrow is. I love that

Simone Collins: so much. Her catchphrases are,

Malcolm Collins: I've got to add the SNL skit about Oh, no, no, it was a daily show skit about that, where she has like a guru speechwriter, like in the sand or something.

Talking about the significance of the passage of time, right? The significance of the passage of time. So when you think about it, there is great significance to the passage of time. Seems like maybe it's a small issue. It's a big issue. You need to get to go. I need to be able to get where you need to go to do the work [00:12:00] and get home.

 She's come so far since our first session

My name is Dahlia Rose hibiscus and I am vice president Kamala Harris's holistic thought advisor I lead the vice president on not so much sentences as idea voyages. It's a process I call speaking without thinking. That's on top of everything else that we know and don't know yet. Based on what we've just been able to see and because we've seen it or not doesn't mean it hasn't happened

the first thing I do is cut out all the words, individually. And then I take those words to my word cave.

That's where I wait to learn what order the universe wants them to be in. Have vibrations. The feeling they give you is so much more powerful than what they mean. We have the ability to see what can be, unburdened by what has been, and then to make the possible possible. Actually happen. Hi, I'm Oliver [00:13:00] Bartholomew, and I'm 16 and a half years old, and I'm the speechwriter for Columba Harris. Since I was little, I liked words. Writing words is fun, so I made writing words my job.

Space is exciting. Space, it affects us all. And it connects us all. It's not all fun though. Sometimes I have to write about bad stuff, like war. Ukraine is a country in Europe. It exists next to another country called Russia.

Russia is a bigger country. Russia is a powerful country. Russia decided to invade a smaller country called Ukraine. So, basically, that's wrong. Once, I thought it would be neat if Karma wore a blue suit.

And told people she was wearing it. Because I like it. I am a woman sitting at the table wearing a blue suit. I can't take all the credit though. Me and Mr. [00:14:00] Kamala are a team.

But she kind of is crazy or something, and she kind of scares me, and you can't fake that kind of influence.

You're either born with it, or you're either not. it is time for us to do what we have been doing, and that time is every day.

Malcolm Collins: Well,

Simone Collins: so I have, I have a broader question about Betting rather than polling for accurate election data. I'm running for state rep, no one in the political sphere, you know, among people running for office, PACs, et cetera discuss betting odds when they're looking at things, they're like, Oh, well, what does the polling say?

Well, you know, like, Oh, you should run a poll. And I think a lot of that's because. They're very incestuous. Like there's a lot of like, Oh, well, everyone hires each other's companies. And this is almost like an MLM scheme. Like people are just trying to get politicians to come in and raise money so that everyone can just hire the same people and keep the industry running.

But. I'm just so confused as to why [00:15:00] the discussion hasn't already shifted to looking only at betting odds because it's just one, it's way cheaper to it's way more accurate. It's very confusing. Where are you seeing things going in terms of adoption? Because I think that the media is starting to look at it more and cover betting odds more.

But it's very lumpy in terms of like, the establishment in the political realm, like actual operatives, actual donors making decisions based on betting odds rather than pulling, which is bizarre.

Maxim Lott: Yeah, absolutely. Well, one thing to notice is that better is do need polls. So we're never going to a hundred percent switch, but they need to have some basis for what's going on.

And then, you know, But the other thing why, why don't the political class look at these betting odds, which are better than just polls? And Robin Hanson, brilliant guy who actually kind of coined this prediction market idea, he's thought a lot about this, and I think The reason that he's come up with is [00:16:00] that decision makers don't like their power being taken away.

So if you are a political decision maker, you can say, Oh, this poll, you know, it's up 12 percent among black Americans and down four, you know, and therefore we should do this. If it's just the betting odds saying, Oh, you should pick Newsome. They lose their power. Power to weigh in. And it's just, okay, this is what it was.

You know, you didn't really need me to tell you that you could have looked at the betting on it. So that might be a reason for the slow uptake among political consultants. The good news is, yeah, the media seems to be picking up on it more and more. Nate Silver is citing them all the time now. I do think I do think they played some slight role in the Biden stepping down, like.

The fact that they had his stepping down at such high odds made Silver very widely read, reciting that a lot. I think, I think that may have made some difference or self reinforcing cycle there.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. I mean, I often thought if we were running for a [00:17:00] slightly higher position than when you're running for Simone, that I put big bets on myself, then use that to raise money from donors.

Yeah. Look at how high up in the odds I am. Yeah, you see the odds. Cause nobody,

Maxim Lott: I mean, fewer people bet on the local stuff. And this is why the CFTC wants to ban them, might be a good segway to that. But yeah,

Malcolm Collins: let's talk about the battle about banning or unbanning. Like what's the public utility of these systems?

Maxim Lott: Yeah, I mean, the public utility is huge. Like, you know, if you're a voter, it tells you who's most electable. It's if you have a business and you're going to be regulated out of business by one president, but not the other, that's really important to know to plan for. So the public utility, I think, and also just intellectually interesting and All of us are spending many hours following the news.

Why not make it efficient? I know you can get all that information by looking at the odds in minutes. The public utility is huge. The government regulators don't care that much is the [00:18:00] latest from them.

Malcolm Collins: It's it's so are you, Oh, so they've been disinterested recently, or have you seen interest? Oh, well,

Maxim Lott: the yellow.

Yeah. They're, they're planning on banning. So a couple of years, what's the

Malcolm Collins: argument for that?

Maxim Lott: Yeah. So, so a couple of months ago, they announced, they put together this formal proposal of regulation, which would ban political betting in the U. S. and also betting on Oscar winners, all this stuff. Yeah, so, yeah.

Wait,

Malcolm Collins: what's the logic for banning Oscar winner betting?

Simone Collins: Yeah, and we have sports betting is now pervasive here. It's so odd to me that, That we've now seen this giant rollout of sports betting in the U. S. And yet now we're seeing suppression of the cool, like the substance, substance. I don't know why I'm saying it's substantive betting, but I, I don't know.

I just feel like, you know,

Maxim Lott: It is more substantive than, you know, blackjack. So why they, they say, they say manipulation, like we were [00:19:00] joking about earlier, but in practice, you know, that's, that's pretty hard to do. Like if you have money on Trump, like you're not actually going to be able to swing the election to Trump, for example.

So, and no one person can really do that. So I think it's. very good reason to ban them. You asked about the Oscar thing. Yeah, I guess you could have manipulation there too. Some Oscar judge throws it. But it's, it's, it pales in comparison to the benefits and it just, So rarely happens. I don't, I

Malcolm Collins: love this complaint.

Like, Oh, politically interest people could manipulate this. And it's like, well then, so are you punishing the pollsters that manipulated the odds in the Hillary Trump election?

Maxim Lott: Right. Great point.

Malcolm Collins: You're not. So that's not really what you're worried about.

Maxim Lott: Right. Yeah. People manipulate polls all the time.

Like there are politically affiliated consultants that it's well known that they do. It's

Malcolm Collins: part of the industry. It's shocking to me that that would be the [00:20:00] core argument that they're using. But I guess the bureaucrats are going to bureaucrat. It

Maxim Lott: is, yeah. The other reason is that they don't want to It would be too much work for them.

To Well,

Malcolm Collins: which department actually has the ability to make these laws? Because, you

Maxim Lott: know CFTC, one of the many alphabet soup agencies out there. Commodity Futures and Trading Commission.

Malcolm Collins: If Trump wins and we get in the administration, we'll push to get those guys, just get rid of them.

Maxim Lott: Yeah, yeah, yeah. If Trump wins, it's interesting.

I mean, the election actually has implications for the betting markets. If Trump wins, likely this regulation, even though it's been formally proposed, won't go through. But if Biden wins, it's pretty much on track to do that, though people are trying to stop it by threatening legal action and stuff.

Malcolm Collins: Well, okay. So, what do you think of, and this is something we've been talking a lot about on the show recently, is this of the rise of the new right as somebody who's been like a political watcher for a long time. [00:21:00] By that, what I mean is there seems to be a shift, as we said, like in the nineties, the big, big corp.

Interest was Republican and tech entrepreneur was Democrat, and now it's tech entrepreneur, Republican, big corp, Democrat. How, how do you see this shift playing out in sort of the, the likelihood of different people winning, et cetera?

Maxim Lott: Yeah, well, yeah, there's absolutely been this huge shift and realignment going on.

And I think JD Vance, Trump's new VP pick really exemplifies that. Yeah. Where he's, he's a populist through and through, you know, he supports tariffs, he supports more redistributive economic things. But then culturally, he's very much like, we need to revive the culture that we used to have, which was healthier.

And I, that, that, I, I think the pick of Vance was actually very, will be very important in cementing that whether you agree with it or not in the future, because he's going [00:22:00] to be leading if Trump wins this election. Whereas if you had picked Burgum or more of a business Republican, I think in 2028 you could see this reverting.

So, you know, it's very, this only happens like, I don't know, once or twice a century that you get a realignment, but it seems like we're living through one of those.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. I mean, do you think that the business Republicans could ever come back at this point? Yeah. Absolutely. I,

Maxim Lott: if Trump loses, maybe, yeah. But if he wins, I think Vance is a pretty big shoe in for 2028.

And I think the populists have a big edge there.

Malcolm Collins: And what are your thoughts on the theocratic faction of the base? Because they seem to have a lot less power in this election than I've seen them have historically.

Maxim Lott: Yeah. Although I guess they already won in some ways by getting Roe v. Wade repealed. Yeah.

So I think there is a bit of a. pendulum swinging back now where Trump got on the platform now saying we don't, he removed the part saying we want a national federal legislative [00:23:00] ban on abortion. And so yeah, they're definitely, oh, sorry.

Malcolm Collins: I think that was really astute of him. I mean, I think

Maxim Lott: he's right.

Agreed, agreed, agreed. I

Malcolm Collins: got you guys the win of the century now. I don't have to do anything else for you.

Maxim Lott: Yeah. And it should be a state by state issue. And yeah, so I agree. I think that's smart politically and policy wise, but yeah, you're right. The religious faction is losing power. I mean, people in the U S are less religious now, including conservatives.

So just the trends line up with that.

Simone Collins: I mean, Catholics are getting tons of abortions and using birth control. So what's up with that? One thing I really wanted to ask you though, just, As we, as we wrap up discussion of like, political betting and betting odds I I'm really interested in the effect when it comes to education and learning with kids that pre testing has on knowledge acquisition, you know, like when you test yourself on a subject before and you're like, well, I don't know the answer, maybe it's this, then later when you're learning it, you're like really paying attention.

And now that you've been, you know, like you said, he lost money on like, you know, [00:24:00] Biden. Dropping out of the race, you know, you are involved in making these predictions, you know, you're playing the game. I'm really curious over time how this has changed your consumption of knowledge. Like, have you, have you changed the way that you're looking at information?

What are your new sources and how are you making these calculations in your head? Like, has your process changed? I guess, cause it's kind of hard to like explain how you're internally thinking and how it's different, but. I'm curious.

Maxim Lott: I do check my own website. So when there's something big going on, that's the first thing I go to.

I still also look at the polls to then make my own judgment about whether I think the betters are right. Which polls

Simone Collins: do you like? Which do you trust?

Maxim Lott: Well, I, I use the real clear average for the most part. And then I also, I look within the polls. So if you have a New York Times poll. One week that has Trump up two and the next week they have Trump up five, that probably says something because the New York Times didn't change internally.

Oh, so directionality.

Simone Collins: [00:25:00] Yes. Oh, interesting. Very smart.

Maxim Lott: So that's my personal strategy, reading the polls. But yeah, the betters are doing the same thing and adding even more fancy and intelligent stuff sometimes.

Simone Collins: Hmm. What's an example of something slightly more fancy that they do now? I'm very curious.

Maxim Lott: Well, I mean, the models get very complex.

So Nate Silver has his public model. Yeah. But people who are trading like big money on these things definitely have their own private models. It's, you know, regression analysis. Oh,

Simone Collins: wow. Different

Maxim Lott: variables, all, all this stuff.

Simone Collins: Getting super mathy on it. Wow. Okay.

Malcolm Collins: I

Simone Collins: love

Malcolm Collins: how slow some of the polls could be.

Hold on. I just checked out where 538 to win is right now, and it just says forecast suspended. The final question I wanted to ask you on this stuff is you used to be a Fox News like worker in the days of the old Republican party. Can you describe sort of [00:26:00] culturally what it's been like in terms of the people, you know, to see the shift in the Republican party that has happened since that period?

Maxim Lott: I think definitely a lot of people have shifted and I think people. I think the big thing is Republicans at some point were kind of the party of the establishment, like protecting the institutions and all this. And I think in the 2010s, they really did, the institutions really kind of turned against them.

They started, you know, banning Republicans from social media, the university started firing them, all this stuff, and they kind of felt okay, so we're, we're not defending the institutions anymore, what are we doing? And I think a lot of people had this kind of reconversion to, okay, we're going to either take this over, as you know, DeSantis is trying to do in Florida with the universities, or, but some kind of more pop, more interventionist, more populist [00:27:00] thing.

And so that's the big shift I've seen, and I think that's the cause of the shift. And yeah, not really anything.

Malcolm Collins: Well, and so you hang out with like a lot of techie crowds and stuff like that. Have you seen their attitudes shifting recently? I mean, I would say personally, I have like, it used to be that Republican would like keep you from getting hired.

And now it's like avant garde.

Maxim Lott: Yeah, definitely. In the last two years, my personal theory is that must buying Twitter caused a lot of this vibe shift as it's referred to, because, you know, So many tech CEOs and journalists are on there. They're getting your information there. And we like to think of ourselves as above algorithms, but we're not.

So they're suddenly getting fed all this viral content and articles that they weren't seeing before, before they were getting, you know, only the Jack Dorsey approved hashtags and they don't even notice this, but suddenly their information diets, totally different. And yeah, you have. Tech people endorsing Trump.

And it's a very different [00:28:00] vibe.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. I that's a, yeah, that's a good way to put it. I mean, I, I'd say that, that now was in tech circles, like being Republicans, the new trans it's like out there and weird, but like accepted which was not in tech circles. Five, six years ago when I was, you know, first in this stuff.

Well, this is fantastic. It's been any, any final thoughts that you wanted to have on betting odds or anything like that, or the election cycle right now?

Maxim Lott: I guess the last thing I'll say, there's a lot of money on these markets. There's over 200 million on poly market. Yeah. Yeah. Just on the presidential election, there is over 50 million on predicted tens of millions on that fair.

It's a big. Industry and

Simone Collins: bigger than ever, right? Presumably this is a lot more than last cycle.

Maxim Lott: The last cycle is big too. I think by the time the cycle wraps up, it'll be bigger than ever. But yeah, these are efficient markets with these kinds of markets and. They give good information.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, [00:29:00] that'd be very hard market to manipulate.

Maxim Lott: Yeah, exactly.

Malcolm Collins: Why are they legal? Like, how have these companies, did they need to register as betting markets? Or how'd they get away with that?

Maxim Lott: It's a whole mishmash. So some of them are in the UK, predicted got grandfathered in, which the government is trying to take away that status. They're fighting it in court.

Polly Market doesn't accept Americans. And yeah, but they're crypto based. So anyone in the world can kind of use that. So there's yeah, so there are all sorts of ways these places are still running without completely running afoul of the regulators.

Malcolm Collins: That's really cool. Well, it's been great having you on.

We'd love to have you on again. And thank you for your time.

Maxim Lott: Thank you. This has been great. Great talking to you.

In this thought-provoking discussion, Malcolm and Simone Collins delve into the controversial topic of PrEP (Pre-Exposure Prophylaxis) and its implications for public health, personal responsibility, and healthcare costs. They explore the ethical dilemmas surrounding government-subsidized HIV prevention medication, questioning whether lifestyle choices should be funded by taxpayers and insurance premiums.

Key points covered:

* The effectiveness and cost of PrEP medication

* Government and insurance coverage of PrEP

* The moral and ethical implications of subsidizing sexual health choices

* Comparisons to other lifestyle-related healthcare costs

* The impact on insurance premiums and healthcare accessibility

* Cultural shifts in attitudes towards sexual behavior and public health

* The intersection of personal freedom, responsibility, and societal costs

This video offers a balanced yet critical examination of a complex issue, challenging viewers to consider the broader implications of healthcare policies and personal choices. It's a must-watch for anyone interested in public health policy, healthcare economics, or the evolving cultural landscape of sexual health.

Malcolm Collins: [00:00:00] Keep in mind straight people can get HIV too and straight people might need to prep as well. Straight people who wouldn't need prep are straight people who are in monogamous relationships and trust their partner. It is not the being gay that makes somebody need prep. It's the orgies. That makes somebody need prep, or the treating sex like a handshake among friends that makes somebody need prep. If you are straight, and you are doing that, you will need prep.

If you are gay, and you are monogamous, you will not need prep. When the Act was passed It was mandated that all insurance plans have to pay for this.

So if a person is sexually active. They have to pay for this

Obamacare has made things insane because insurance companies can't say, well, we won't take you. You need to go for a higher cost insurance. If you're going to make these lifestyle choices because at the end of the day, going to orgies is a lifestyle choice

It's not just that it's affecting insurance. A number of states just offer this for free to people who want it. People pretend like this stuff, money comes [00:01:00] from nowhere, but no, it's always from something. If it's going to this, it's, it's not going to sick kids and I actually want to point out the perversion of a society that sees it as a moral necessity to pay for a drug that enables sex whenever you want, but that doesn't see it as a moral necessity to pay for IVF, the creation of new human life.

Simone Collins: Oh, s**t.

Would you like to know more?

Malcolm Collins: Hello, Simone. I'm excited to be here with you today. Today's episode was inspired by actually an episode that Short Fat Otaku had done, opened my eyes to something I had no idea was going on. And it means when you ever look at your health care bills and you're like, why is Obamacare so unaffordable?

Why is it so unaffordable to force everyone on to the same health care plan? And the answer, it turns out, is gay orgies.

Simone Collins: Among other things, but definitely it seems gay orgies.

Malcolm Collins: In part, gay orgies, yes. So, we're [00:02:00] going to get to something, and I don't think that there is actually That easy, a moral solution to this.

Like at first it's gonna seem like, oh, obviously you should do X. But then when you think about it for a second, you're like, oh, but that'll have some really negative downstream effects.

Simone Collins: I don't know. I I, I have maybe some moral equivalence, so I'm, I'm excited to discuss this with you.

Malcolm Collins: So, what started was a Twitter fight. So I will describe to you the first tweet in this chain that led to the Twitter fight. Plant Mommy Posadis said, Realizing that sex doesn't have to be this sacred, all important thing and can instead just be an expression of affection between friends who are dear to one another is honestly the most life changing realization for me, surpassed only by realizing that I'm a girl.

So this is obviously a trans person they're pointing out here. And saying, well, because you don't, most girls don't realize they're girls. I don't

Simone Collins: know. I feel like I realized I was a girl when your mom [00:03:00] was like, did you know that you can dress nicely and wear makeup? And I'm like, Oh,

Malcolm Collins: wow. I want to reread.

What we're saying here, right? Because I actually think this ends up being important to the conversation.

Simone Collins: Yes.

Malcolm Collins: That the, the huge realization for them. That was the second biggest realization they've had in their life. That sex can just be an expression of affection between friends.

Simone Collins: Just a fun thing to do

Malcolm Collins: with your friends, getting drinks, going out, having drinks, going out, having sex.

Yes. Then a person responded to them, Mia Aren't we in another AIDS epidemic or something? Y'all are seriously trippin And then the original poster replied, I literally take pills every day that make it so I can't contract HIV. And then short fatter taco but it in here with the SpongeBob fish meme looking like,

And says, You need to take pills to not contact, to not contract.

HIV. You can't just not have sex with people who have [00:04:00] HIV. And this tweet blew up. It's at 9.3 million views now. It went super viral and for, with, with, with a lot of hatred as well, that's considered just a completely out of line thing for him to say.

That they should be, that he, from his cultural perspective, that he expects them to exercise any level of of sexual constraint.

But this just opened a new world for me. I was like, wait, wait, wait, there's a pill that can keep you from getting HIV now. I did not know about this. But

Simone Collins: isn't it called PrEP? Like I'd heard of people taking PrEP. It

Malcolm Collins: is. We're

Simone Collins: going to go. Friends who take PrEP. Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: This pill is how it works, how well it works, et cetera.

Because that was one thing I didn't know. I also didn't know that the drugs around HIV are so good now that generally if you're on them, you're non contagious. So, you know, this is needed more for people who aren't already on drugs or don't know that they have HIV, i. e. This isn't really as relevant if you have a partner.

So somebody can be like oh, well, you need this if you have a partner with HIV, but not [00:05:00] necessarily anymore because now you can be made non contagious. If you want. So

Simone Collins: basically, as long as the partner is taking it, it's okay.

Malcolm Collins: Right. So this is really important. Specifically, mostly meant for orgies. Or,

Simone Collins: yeah, well, basically, if you can't guarantee that the people with whom you're sexually intimate are being very conscientious about taking this medication if they indeed are HIV positive, right?

So if one, you aren't being indiscriminate about having sex or two, you're having sex, but only with people where, you know, they're not HIV positive or three, you do know they're HIV positive, but you can 100 percent trust that they're taking this medication. You wouldn't need this. You wouldn't need PrEP.

Malcolm Collins: Yes but if you are treating a you know, sex is just something you do with your friends when you feel like it You know, and you're gonna need

Simone Collins: this medicine. Yeah, you're

Malcolm Collins: definitely gonna need he is not that she is not being irresponsible In taking this medicine. Yeah Safety first and and and she is not spreading hiv because she's taking this [00:06:00] medicine So, you know, I support that she has chosen this lifestyle, but then that got me thinking.

Okay, how much does this stuff cost? And who's paying for it? And who's paying for it. Now this gets interesting because this is where I was like, Oh, Oh, this is a moral quandary.

Anyway, so I'm just going to read to you cause I decided to ask perplexity about some of this stuff. So a month's supply of prep pre exposure prophylaxis medicine, specifically Trivetta.

Cost nearly 2, 000 without insurance while the generic version is approximately 60 per month. The total annual cost can exceed 21, 000 if purchased without any financial assistance or insurance coverage. However, most private health insurance plans, as well as Medicare and Medicaid, are required to cover the cost of PrEP without any out of pocket expenses due to provisions under the Affordable Care Act.

However, patients may still incur costs related to lab tests and doctor visits, which are [00:07:00] necessary for monitoring while on PrEP. And that's because it's very hard on your liver. If you, if you consistently take this, you will probably die from it.

So I dug into this a bit more because I wanted to make sure I was correct in this statement. And it turns out that most of the people who are on prep are regularly seeing doctors to monitor for dangerous levels of things like lactic, acidosis, or liver cancer. , which they are at. A much higher risk of, uh, so, well, it is almost certainly shortening your lifespan. It is not a.

Necessarily going to kill you.

If you were seeing the doctor regularly for it.

Malcolm Collins: It seems to be my understanding. Oh,

Simone Collins: boy. So they're

Malcolm Collins: also sacrificing their health and you know, lifespan for, you know, these in the moment indulgences.

Okay. And so. So

Simone Collins: basically if, if the government's supporting this, probably they're going for the generic version. You're being prescribed the generic version and the government or your insurance company. [00:08:00] No. Oh

Malcolm Collins: no. Sorry. I've got to keep going here because we've got to go. Who pays for this? Okay. Yeah.

Simone Collins: And which, which is being purchased the generic or the brand?

Malcolm Collins: To assist those who may not have insurance or whose insurance does not cover prep, several programs are available. Advanced access medication assistance program covers out of pocket costs 7, 200 per year. This is a Program that is run by Gilead Sciences, the manufacturer of trivia, and it's likely really just a a tiered pricing thing.

So people don't know companies do this, where they will create a another version of their product that they can still be cash positive on. But that only poor people can buy so that they can make money from those for people. And look like they're doing a nice thing, or really, they're just doing price discrimination.

Because, you know, they still want to sell the drug right to as many people as possible, but they don't want to lower the price for the people who can pay more. Right. The next one is Ready, Set, Prep, which provides pre travidia to individuals without prescription drug [00:09:00] coverage. This is a national program run by the U.

S. Department of Health and Human Services. It's available across the United States. And then co pay relief programs offer up to 7, 500 a year for out of pocket expenses. And this is offered by the Patient Advocate Foundation and is available nationwide.

Simone Collins: Okay, so hold on. They're not Paying for the generic, they're paying for the name brand.

Malcolm Collins: I assume that this has to do with U. S. patents, because my understanding is that you just can't get the generic in the U. S.

All right. So I dug into this more because it was very confusing to me is

white people are not buying the generic. So it appears that the primary reason people are not buying the generic is bureaucratic bloat. , so a lot of the insurance companies remember how all the insurance companies had to cover prep. Well, a lot of them never added the generics to their sort of approved drugs lists.

So they are paying for the much more expensive form. , so this cost is being passed on just because from the perspective of the customer, they don't really notice a difference for them. It's [00:10:00] free either way because you know, the Obamacare plan. , forces . , insurance companies to carry prep and because they don't carry the. Generic, , people are just buying the more expensive one because the cost isn't going to them that's appears to be what's going on here. , but it is going to you.

It is going to your child health insurance. , costs and stuff like that. , and another side here , is it, the generics only really came onto the market in 2021. , and because of that, A lot of the debate around should this be covered and how much it's impacted our healthcare system happened before the price drop.

Malcolm Collins: Okay So one thing to note here is when the Act was passed It was mandated that all insurance plans have to pay for this.

So if a person is sexually active. They have to pay for this and wants this drug. So that means that you know, outside of well, first, also, let's talk about this program that I was talking about that pays 7, 500 a year for out of pocket costs for [00:11:00] this.

I went to this program's website because this is a nonprofit.

Right. And I was like, okay, what did they tell people who are giving them money that the money is going to, right? They tell people that the, the money is going to food and nutritional expenses, utility bills, written or mortgage payment, temporary lodging, transportation costs, and childcare expenses.

So the money that is, and people are like, why, why is there a moral problem here? Well, it's because of an opt in lifestyle choice. This money now 7, 500 a year is, is going to allow for a lifestyle that I assume many of the people don't know that they are donating to enable instead of going to sick children.

Like you, you, people pretend like this stuff, money comes from nowhere, but no, it's always from something. If it's going to this, it's, it's not going to sick kids. It's not going to utility expenses. Well, I

Simone Collins: also think that the bigger issue is that We are now paying in the United States, [00:12:00] very high insurance premiums.

Like I, and, and our insurance covers very little. And when insurance companies are from a regulatory perspective, obligated to pay for services for certain people, that means that they're going to charge more to everybody else to be able to cover those costs. Again, somebody has to foot the bill. This is also families who are not able to get insurance at all because they can't pay for their premiums.

This is, this is offering crappier programs to their employees because their premiums are so high. This is people, you know, not. having deductibles they can ever meet. Like we're on a deductible plan that I think for our families, something like 12, 000 before our insurance starts to cover anything. We have to pay, we might as well not have insurance.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. The, the, the Obamacare has made things insane [00:13:00] because insurance companies can't say, well, we won't take you. You need to go for a higher cost insurance. If you're going to make these lifestyle choices because at the end of the day, going to orgies is a lifestyle choice and we'll get into how much of a lifestyle choice it is in a second.

But I want to finish it with the pre prepared stuff before we get into any moral questionability of this. It's not just that it's affecting insurance. A number of states just offer this for free to people who want it. So, several States have established a program. That can cover the cost of prep, including lab tests and doctor's visits.

The states with such programs include California, Colorado, district of Columbia, Florida, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Massachusetts, New Mexico, New York, Ohio, Oklahoma, Virginia, and Washington. So, a lot of states. Quite a few states. Yeah. Totally. And quite populous states too. Yeah. So I, I want to, before we go into the discussion of this, talk about how it works and the current sort of state of AIDS treatment, because I think that is important to talk about it.

Yeah. It sounds also pretty cool. Like, I'm [00:14:00] glad that this exists and I'm glad that it's becoming less expensive. Yeah. I do have questions about the morality of this being covered by Medicaid and being mandated by the government. Because that means that you are mandating you know, people who might have pretty strong religious objections to this to essentially be subsidizing lifestyles that they believe, not us, but I can totally understand how somebody would have questions about this, even without having a problem with a person being gay or a person being trans, you know, you can be gay and trans and not go to orgies all the time.

You know, this is, this is a, subsection of these communities. You know, not all gay people are degenerates, you know. And I'm not saying that everyone who goes to orgies all the time is degenerate, but probably. You know, there's, there's probably some correlation there. But anyway, I mean, I'm, it's not for me to judge other people's lifestyles

And when I say it's not for me to judge, you know, who is it to judge? It's God to judge that, not me, God. I let people make their own choices [00:15:00] and deal with the consequences of those choices. It's not for me to Dole out those consequences. However, in our discord, somebody was asking, you know, do we really want, because a number, especially of gay men, like the real gay community, not the opt-in LGBTQ plus oh, I'm non-binary today community, but the real OJI gay community has been moving increasingly Republican over time. And some people on our discord were wondering, , is it actually good to bring these types of people into the Republican coalition? And one of the things that I have noticed with this community and a gay person within our discord was also saying, yeah, this observation that you had is very accurate of the community. Is it sort of split into two groups, which kind of hate each other. , one is sort of wholesome, mostly monogamous. , gay people who are looking for long-term partners and looking to raise families. And even, you know, as a Christian, if I believe that they live a life of sin, [00:16:00] Yes, but I don't see it as a particularly higher life of sin than a couple that is childless by choice. , you know, that they both are engaging in non reproductive sex for pleasure.

Like that is. Bad from my perspective. , but again, so I don't, I don't, you know, should we let, should I, you know, as a state be breaking up couples who don't want to have kids like no. So I don't see a problem with the other type of couple. And I should note here that I think they're living significantly less lives of sin

then then somebody who is out there having, you know, straight sex with a different girl every other week and going to night clubs and partying all the time. , but then the other community has just gone full on like degenerate to generate degenerate mode. , and it is, and you'll see this in another episode that we actually recorded alongside this episode, but that's going to go live on different days is just. How fully degenerate the stuff they're fighting for is these days.

It will shock you. Believing Americans have essentially a constitutional right to orgies is [00:17:00] low scale on the degeneracy.

Malcolm Collins: so, I will read about how it works and what it is. is a preventative medication for individuals at high risk of contracting HIV. It is designed for those who do not have HIV but may be exposed to it through sexual activity or injection drug use.

And, and keep in mind straight people can get HIV too and straight people might need to prep as well. Straight people who wouldn't need prep are straight people who are in monogamous relationships and trust their partner. So really the thing here, and I think a lot of people will say like, you're being homophobic or you're being transphobic.

But the truth is, is that it is not the being gay that makes somebody need prep. It's the orgies. That makes somebody need prep, or the treating sex like a handshake among friends that makes somebody need prep. If you are straight, and you are doing that, you will need prep. If you are gay, and you are doing that, you will need prep.

If you are gay, and you are monogamous, you will not need prep. And the vast majority of cases, now there are minor cases that we'll get to in a [00:18:00] second, and if you are straight and you are monogamous, you will not need prep. So this is about a lifestyle choice, not like an inborn difference between individuals, or maybe is it, we'll get to that in a second.

Okay. Prep involves taking medications that can significantly reduce the risk of HIV infection. When taken consistently, it can lower the risk of getting HIV from sexual intercourse by 99 percent and from sharing needles by at least 75%. So that's the only thing that that exists. Yeah. There are two main forms of PrEP.

Daily oral medication. This is a pill taken once a day., an injection that is administered every two months, which may be more convenient for some individuals. Who should consider PrEP? PrEP is recommended for individuals who meet the following criteria. Having a sexual partner who is HIV positive.

No consistent use of condoms during sex. Having been diagnosed with a sexually transmitted STI in the past six months. Which basically means they're sleeping around a lot. Injecting drugs and sharing needles or having an injection partner with HIV. An injection partner? You just use a different needle, you [00:19:00] f ing nutjob!

Hold

Simone Collins: on! I I doubt I doubt that those are common cases. They're just, they're just outlining all the scenarios. No one wants to share, Malcolm, trust me, no one wants to share a needle. They just get more blunt, you know, it's not fun. So, yeah, this is not, I don't think it's a common scenario. Especially because there are so many needle distribution programs now, not an issue.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah I was asking about what's the probability that somebody who's on normal HIV medication today is contagious to their partner? Based on recent research, people with low HIV viral loads have extremely low risk of transmitting HIV through sex.

A systematic review of eight studies involving 7, 762 couples found that the risk of sexual transmission of HIV is almost zero when the HIV positive partner has a viral load of less than 1, 000 copies per milliliter. Three studies showed no HIV transmission when the HIV positive partner had a viral load of less than 200 copies per milliliter considered [00:20:00] undetectable.

Across all studies analyzed, there were only two cases of transmission when the HIV positive partner's most recent viral load With less than a thousand copies. However, these cases had long intervals between the viral load testing and transmission, complicating the interpretation. So, basically, it's never been confirmed that somebody with a low load has transmitted HIV.

 CDC stated that people who take antiviral therapy art daily as prescribed and maintain an undetectable viral load have a quote unquote effectively no risk of sexually transmitting HIV to an HIV negative partner. This concept is known as quote unquote undetectable or untransmissible or U equals U.

And it's actually so low now that there is a, a sperm bank for HIV positive individuals. That's inclusive of them. So I'll talk a little bit about this sperm bank. Because I mean, this shows you how low it's perceived is within the community based on the latest scientific evidence and updated regulations.

Sperm [00:21:00] and egg donation from HIV positive individuals with undetectable viral loads can be safely done without transmitting HIV to the recipient or the resulting child under certain circumstances. The donor must have sustained undetectable viral load, less than 200 copies for at least six months prior to the donation.

The donor must be on an effective anti retroviral treatment for at least six months. And the recipient must be informed about the donor's HIV positive status. And this is, and I'll post it on screen here called sperm positive. I. And the two women on it are two fat women, of course.

There's a baby. A lesbian, fat, interracial couple with a baby. Nothing that there's anything wrong with it, they just look very stereotypically like SJW. Which is fine. I mean, I guess that's the type of person who would want this, right? You know? I don't, I don't I actually think people expect me to be like Morgan says if a couple is informed that that's what they're doing and they're doing this I don't know for them.

Well, Malcolm,

Simone Collins: you know, if in the end you are, you know, someone who [00:22:00] through things that happened in your past, I mean, listen, people, I don't think consensually choose to have unprotected sex. sex with someone who's HIV positive, you know, it happens once, whatever. And then, you know, that's something you have to live with for the rest of your life.

I think it's great that these people are still able to have kids if they want them. That's fantastic. So, yes, I think we can all agree that this is a fantastic medical treatment. And that I'm really glad that this exists and that it's available as an option. This is great.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, but the question is, is it ethical to force families to subsidize this?

Simone Collins: And this is where I feel like it's, it's less of a gray area than you are. Now I understand from a governmental and policy perspective that it's, you know, you, here's a chance for a government to, you know, To quash the spread of a very dangerous disease where there is collateral damage, you know, when you don't openly control it in this way.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, and I want to highlight the collateral [00:23:00] damage that he's talking about here. You know, during the AIDS epidemic, little kids died from like blood transfusions or like, you know, you step on a needle in a park , As the rates, it's not just the people who have consciously chosen a behavior that you disagree with who end up suffering because drugs like this are not widely available.

Anyway, he did.

Simone Collins: Yeah. At the same time, I, I do have. Some doubts about this, because as you point out, this is a lifestyle choice. You do not have to have sex with people in a way that would require you to take this medication. And when I think about the, like trying to find an equivalent, it's not charged.

You know, this might be like, okay, well maybe, you know, my life is better. You know, this is part of my identity, right? My identity is that I am, you know, gay and I have sex in this way. And it's just like part of my expression. It's part of what I do to have fun. But I think a lot of people. You know, [00:24:00] identify as, you know, social butterflies who like to go out and, you know, have a nice brunch once a month.

Right. Let's just say, let's say that the actual cost to governments and insurance companies like marginal is 60 per person to be like 65 per person, bare minimum. Right. So what if also, you know, for some people to live a happy, fulfilled life, they, they, you know, went out. To brunch with their friends once a month, because that made them happy.

And that costs, you know, for them, you know, good boozy brunch, 65 per person. Should the government also subsidize that because it's part of their life. It makes them happy. They wouldn't be as happy if they didn't do it.

Malcolm Collins: I thought the thing that you said to me really moved my mind on this is you're like, yeah, what, what if somebody wants like a nicer apartment, right?

Like does the government have to subsidize that nicer apartment? Because it would, you know, it's better. They'd be much more comfortable. Yeah. You know, they're in a long distance relationship with someone, right? Does the government [00:25:00] have to subsidize their plane flights? Or they like to travel to Europe once a year, you know, that's part of who they are, you know, does the government have to subsidize that?

Is it moral? To have families that are struggling to get by, that are struggling to, you know, keep their, whether whose kids have diseases and stuff like that, to be taking from like kids cancer funds to fund this, is that moral?

Simone Collins: Yeah, and

Malcolm Collins: that's

Simone Collins: where I really question it.

Malcolm Collins: I, I think you're right here, but here's the, the, the question I would have, because this is where I do support it.

I do support it in instances where somebody has a committed monogamous marriage and their partner is HIV positive. In that case, do you still not support? Now, you remember they, they can be basically non transmissible, but it's still recommended they take it. I, I guess, I guess I wouldn't even support it there.

And I'll explain why. It is a not [00:26:00] that we are saying this drug should not be accessible to anyone who can afford it. There are tons of things involved with a monogamous marriage that people choose to afford to have sex, for example, right? Like. If you're in a monogamous marriage, but you don't want to have kids yet, should the government be forced to pay for your condoms?

Or birth

Simone Collins: control. Yeah, and like there are plenty of religious groups that are not really in favor of insurance companies by default covering the cost of birth control. pills for example, or,

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, I mean, even between a husband and wife I, I, I, I even still think, so keep in mind, we're not talking about gay couples here.

I'm talking about a husband and wife, where one of them is HIV positive. I unfortunately think it is not the government's responsibility to cover this. I would like to see the price continue to drop and for it to be more affordable, but I think at the end of the day I Sex is a recreational activity.

It's an option.

Simone Collins: Yeah. Like, well, and if we're, if we're going to, if we're going to subsidize [00:27:00] recreational activities, then the question is, well, why aren't we subsidizing all of these other things? You know, you know, what if, what if this person is, you know, anxious and they really hate taking public transportation because, you know, they're autistic, like I'm autistic.

I had a huge fear of public transportation for a very long time. Like, should the government pay for my Ubers? Like. You know, there, there are all these questions that this, this opens up and it just, yeah, I, I don't, I don't know really, unless we're capable financially of subsidizing a whole bunch of other things, which we're not.

How can this be justified? I guess, so there's, you know, we have to come back to the public health question of what about, you know, the children who may be born, who may have HIV because this wouldn't be subsidized. That's I, you know, I, that's where I start to get like, you know, and kids get hurt, I draw a line, you know, I can't deal with it anymore.

So that's, that's one potential issue. You know, I also think about the fact that like a lot of people from [00:28:00] a, this is my identity and lifestyle perspective, make a lot of financial decisions that are unsustainable for them. You know, like, let's say like, I'm the person who identifies with, you know, having a boozy brunch once, you know, every month.

And then they put that on credit card debt. And then their debt sort of spirals out of control and then they can't retire and their children are forced to take care of them in old age or, you know, worse, they become, you know, a burden on the state and all these sort of bad things happen. So I would also argue that it's not just with, you know, HIV risk where people.

Can cause a lot of damage to others, like collateral damage by being irresponsible and pursuing their hedonic pursuits, such as eating out or taking an Uber instead of public transportation or walking, for example. So, so we can't even say that like, Oh, this is different. You know,

Malcolm Collins: this is the other interesting thing.

That's come down from this is that this went viral, that short saying. [00:29:00] You need to take pills to not contract HIV. You can just not have sex with people who have HIV. Was such an offensive thing within this modern cultural context that we're in. Advocating Any form of restraint is seen as a sin.

I think that that's one element of it, but I also think, because keep in mind, this isn't a gay versus straight thing. This is a orgies, sex with strangers versus non sex with strangers thing. Is that now a culturally sacred practice to the urban monoculture? Is the orgy Now something that they consider almost like a sacred religious tradition.

which must be subsidized by the state. Well, so was the reaction mostly negative

Simone Collins: or was it a

Malcolm Collins: lot

Simone Collins: of people?

Malcolm Collins: Mostly negative, mostly negative and horrified negative. Like this guy needs to be off the internet. They said that he [00:30:00] was trying to commit genocide. They said that he was, you know, it was extremely, extremely negative.

And you know, here I want to put the South Park clip of them all having gay sex in the human race because that's sort of where I feel the urban monoculture is going these days. It's like they They don't have a reason to keep going. And so they've invented this strange orgy ritual. And, and, and now it's become a sacred cow for them.

. These unemployed men have been having sex for several days. Joining me now is their spokesperson, , what exactly are you trying to accomplish? We're doing the only thing we can do. We have to take matters into our own hands.

We're trying to turn everyone gay so that there are no future humans. Present day America. Number one.

Malcolm Collins: And I think that people outside the urban monoculture, because there's some things with the urban monoculture where you just don't realize that there's like this new sacred line that's been created. And that if you cross it, you get like beaten down. And, and the factor of sancteness of being able to have [00:31:00] sex whenever you want with whoever you want without any consequences is now like a sacred thing.

Simone Collins: Yeah, I, I'm noticing that it's, it's something that as a candidate for state rep, I'm also coming across, like I, I get a lot of candidate questionnaires from groups that may or may not endorse me as a candidate, right? That may or may not donate to me too, like they sort of want to say, like, these are our, you know, official candidates that are approved because they are with us on policy.

And just today I received an email from a big LGBTQ plus group in Pennsylvania. And I was like, Oh, this is awesome. Like I can fill this out and they'll see that I, you know, like we're, we're super supportive of, you know, basically LGBT rights. And then I start going through the questionnaire and it's not really about, about rights or freedom.

It's about making. [00:32:00] people with, who, who choose to classify in certain LGBTQ plus categories, a protected class. It's about regulating protections and privileges for them that go above and beyond standards to which normal people are held. And I got really uncomfortable, like looking at the questions and I'm just not going to

Malcolm Collins: fill it out.

I think, I actually think maybe we should do an episode on the questionnaire.

Simone Collins: Oh yeah, maybe we should. Cause it was. You know, I went in and I was like, Oh, this is gonna, you know, like slam dunk. This is going to be great. You know, I can, I can show to centrists and, and, and Democrats in our district that like, Oh, you know, actually, you know, we're, we're pretty socially progressive.

And then I'm going in and I'm like, well,

Malcolm Collins: We are not. Are you realizing that we're not socially progressive? Apparently not. Apparently I'm a, an evil bigot. Like what socially progressive means now is that you believe that class, like, like human, our society should be divided. [00:33:00] Into different cast groups that have different levels of rights to human dignity.

Ethnicity is one divider here, but gender is another opt in divider. You can opt into this like non binary identity and be treated as

Simone Collins: suddenly get all these well Per per their preference suddenly get all these additional protections and privileges. What are some again? That are not afforded to other people.

Malcolm Collins: So I have a thought

Simone Collins: experiment for you about sort of, you know, where are we going to end up on prep? Right. Because we've kind of already said the state shouldn't subsidize people's lifestyle choices. You know, especially if, if they're culturally based and, you know, kind of like, well, you don't have to, you don't have to pursue this, or you could pay for it yourself if you really need to, right, it's a nice to have not a necessity, a necessity.

We've known. young people who definitely use like government healthcare and who definitely use and who we really like. And you know, if there was a world where like the government stopped [00:34:00] paying for PrEP, like, what if we were sitting across from them, like having drinks, you know, and we're having this conversation and they're like, yeah, well, but I use PrEP.

You know, and I can't afford it, you know, if, if suddenly the state's not paying for it anymore. Like, do you want me to get AIDS? You know, what do we say to

Malcolm Collins: our young friends? I want you to exercise. And I think that this is a really interesting thing that within the urban monoculture, explaining to someone that there are consequences for their actions, and that they need to exercise a degree of personal austerity for their own financial or health safety.

Is seen as sinful and so within their cultural framework, I'd be like, I understand that there's no way that you can really understand what I'm saying to you, but from any sane cultural perspective you are sometimes asked to exercise some degree of discretion and austerity. And an episode that we're going to do after this, we actually go into an organization that is campaigning to try to have it be that gay [00:35:00] individuals cannot be persecuted for lying to another gay individual about them not having HIV.

So I can understand why people are freaking out out there if, if that's what their culture is fighting for, is, is that people can just go out there and do whatever they want, and there should never be any consequences for any of their actions. But I'd say, do, do I feel bad that I'm saying that your culture actually does learn, need to learn to sometimes exercise austerity and sometimes to change cultural norms around risks?

Yeah. I mean, I, I point something out. I think

Simone Collins: actually here's, here's where I would probably come down. I'm like, I'm actually trying to model a conversation with this young person who I quite like. Okay. Cause I don't have a problem with him sleeping around and having fun. Like it's, it's actually kind of cute.

Cause you know, we, we used to like kind of talk about like people that he was dating and stuff and like whatever, you know, like I would feel the same if it was a young woman, you know, this is fun stuff. You know, love, young love. I would say, listen, okay, like we can look for some of these programs.

The generic [00:36:00] version can be as low as 65 a month. Let's find a program where you can get it 65 a month. Okay. What do you have to do? To get an incremental income of 65 a month. Okay. You can probably, you know, create an account on TaskRabbit or, you know, creating a task or an account on any like gig worker platform.

And for like one weekend a month, spend five to six hours doing some gig work to get the 65 to pay for the medication that will make sure that you can do this all safely. I guess that's what I would say. Like, what

Malcolm Collins: if it turns out it's not 65 a month and it's actually 2000 a month, like the first estimate said,

Simone Collins: then we're going to have to work out how you can make, honestly, like, I'm super okay with just being like, if you want to have that lifestyle, like let's get that lifestyle

Malcolm Collins: or how do you cut 2000 a month in expenses?

Simone Collins: Yeah. And like, and life is about trade offs. Like, you know, we, we didn't make the government pay for our IVF and actually more and more people keep reaching out to us being like, Hey, how can I get my IVF paid for? Like [00:37:00] you're going to have to find a way to pay for it. We gave up travel. We gave up fun. We gave up every luxury in life.

We lived on a mattress in the warehouse district outside Miami for a year in a studio

Malcolm Collins: apartment. So just like mattress on the ground. Like, I think we shared

Simone Collins: one chair between the two of

Malcolm Collins: us. Maybe there were two, there were two chairs. Well, because we don't sleep in the same bed. I had a tent in the room.

And you had the mattress right next to me. Yeah. Which I absolutely love. It was nice.

Simone Collins: But no, but we sacrificed. And I think the thing is in the end, it wasn't that bad because when you know what you care about and what you don't care about, it's actually easy to make those sacrifices and a lot of people pay for things they don't really need.

So then we probably talk with this friend and be like, okay, well, like, what do you really care about? Like, what can we cut out? That is not as important as you having sex with like fun people.

Malcolm Collins: And I actually want to point out a how, how the perversion of a society that sees it as a moral necessity to pay for a drug that enables sex whenever you want, but that doesn't see it as a moral [00:38:00] necessity to pay for IVF, the creation of new human life.

Simone Collins: Oh, s**t.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. I didn't even think about that.

Simone Collins: I think, you know, where we fall is people should not be granted privileged status based on group membership to pursue their cultural values that we believe in cultural sovereignty.

And the way that we support that is by saying, you do you don't force you on us and don't make us pay for your lifestyle. And that's, that's fine. And I, you know, I think. That's a, a pretty fair stance. So, when it

Malcolm Collins: comes to Yeah, but unfortunately, it will be seen as transphobic. Because, I don't know. Like, I don't know.

Like, it's actually homophobic and transphobic to try to try this issue to gays or trans people. Because To type, pay for PrEP. Yes, because straight people are at almost as much risk if they are out having orgies. Well, a little less because transmission rates are less, but they're still at risk too.

This is, this is not an, a gay straight, this is an orgy, not an orgy issue.

Simone Collins: I mean, you know, it

Malcolm Collins: All right. [00:39:00] I'll get the kids and I'm going to go get the other kids.

Simone Collins: Okay. I love you. Bye bye. Hey, Octavian.

Octavian Collins: Yeah, I got the toys right here at the box. Stacy doesn't need any more toys, only just a teddy.

Simone Collins: Yes, because we don't like having a lot of clutter everywhere, right, buddy?

Octavian Collins: Right.

Simone Collins: Right. Can you tell everyone to like and subscribe, please?

Octavian Collins: Oh, yes. Go ahead. Um, Do I gotta describe on here?

Simone Collins: No, ask them. Say, please like and subscribe.

Octavian Collins: Please

Simone Collins: like and describe. Okay, life and describe, people. Life and describe.

I love you, buddy.

Octavian Collins: Love you, too.

Do you want a blackberry? Oh, yeah, You want to go out and get a blackberry with me? Here, have the fans seen you toasting? [00:40:00] I'll get it by myself. That's the way. You go get it by yourself.

We

Simone Collins: were

Octavian Collins: great. What were you talking,

Simone Collins: what were you talking to mama about? He told everyone to, to life. And describe to like, and subscribe to life. And describe to life

Octavian Collins: and subscribe. I did not, did it? No,

Simone Collins: no, no. To life. And describe to life and describe.

Octavian Collins: OC Octavian,

Malcolm Collins: Sometimes, are you not able to do a fun thing that you want to do?

Octavian Collins: Well, I do like doing a fun thing. I just like toy trains.

Simone Collins: Should the government, Octavian, should the government pay for your toy trains?

Octavian Collins: Food not on train, dad. I cannot eat it. Oh, you can only

Malcolm Collins: eat food on trains now?

Octavian Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: This is in relation to the sushi train we got them.

Octavian Collins: Yeah! I find it's not food. Good

Simone Collins: job, Toasty. Octavian, should the government buy you trains?

Octavian Collins: Yes, I really like food on trains. [00:41:00]

Malcolm Collins: So you like it, and therefore the government should give it to you. Yeah. We're gonna have to watch out for you, buddy.

Simone Collins: Hey, remember, he likes communism.

Malcolm Collins: And remember, Octavian,

Simone Collins: real communism has not been tried.

Hi, Titan.

Malcolm Collins: What do you want to tell mommy? Hi,

Simone Collins: Titan. What do you want to say? Hi, Titan. So

Octavian Collins: I just took a walk. Oh, you just took a walk?

Simone Collins: Titan wants the mic too. Can you ask Titan a question? Octavian? Sharon is Karen. You know, they, they just, they, what they do know, and I call it Sharon Karen, as in like bad woman, Karen.

They, they, they go up to one of their siblings, they immediately like snatch something, like they do something a*****e ish, and then they say Sharon Karen which is just so appropriate. It's the Sharon Karen.

Malcolm Collins: What do you think of that, Titan?[00:42:00]

I love you, Titan.

Alright, you can come down. I'm sorry for all holding you.

Octavian Collins: Ah! I love it when the news is like, you hit your child? How could you, how could you ever, ever lightly hit your child? And then you

Simone Collins: see our children and you're like,

Octavian Collins: oh,

Simone Collins: they're clearly terrified of you, Malcolm. They're clearly terrified.

Octavian Collins: Oh, yes it is.

Simone Collins: Oh, yeah. All right, Malcolm. I love you. We're gonna hit end recording. Bye!

Octavian Collins: I love you! I love you, Mom! Can you tell Mommy you love her?

https://discord.gg/EGFRjwwS92

In this in-depth exploration, Malcolm and Simone Collins dive into the fascinating history of the Baby Boom and its surprising origins. They challenge common misconceptions about what caused this demographic phenomenon and discuss its implications for modern pronatalist efforts. Drawing from historical data, academic research, and their own insights, the Collins couple offers a fresh perspective on fertility trends and what they mean for our future.

Key topics covered:

* The unexpected fertility decline in early 20th century Europe and North America

* Debunking myths about the causes of the Baby Boom

* The role of medical advancements in reducing maternal mortality

* The impact of World War II on societal values and family planning

* Cross-cultural comparisons of Baby Boom effects

* The limitations of housing policy in addressing fertility rates

* The importance of cultural shifts in promoting higher birth rates

* Implications for modern pronatalist movements

Whether you're interested in demographics, history, or social trends, this video provides valuable insights into one of the most significant population shifts of the 20th century and its relevance to today's fertility challenges.

Malcolm Collins: [00:00:00] Hello Simone! We are back to pronatalist coverage! All right. And today we're going to be talking about a very Interesting phenomenon that not many people know about.

Not many people are aware that half of Europe was below repopulation rate before the baby boom. In TFR numbers, that means that they weren't having enough kids to replace themselves. The entire world was in a bit of a fertility collapse during that period. And, We somehow got out of it with the baby boom, and then that's at a new sort of set point that we've been declining from ever since then.

But I want to talk about two things. One, this initial slump, and two, theories for what caused the baby boom to potentially recreate a phenomenon like this. A phenomenon that we can recreate every hundred years or so, and then just have this cycle. That would be great, right?

Would you like to know more?

Malcolm Collins: This was written by Phoebe Arcelognick Wakefield.

Phoebe came to our

Simone Collins: dinner in London, remember?

Malcolm Collins: We met her?

Simone Collins: Yeah, we know Phoebe.[00:01:00]

Malcolm Collins: Oh, oh, oh, her, yes! Yes, Phoebe. The Indian food in London? Yes, yes, yes.

 I do think you begin to see her blinders near the end of the piece that is mostly due to the areas of policy in which she has worked.

Malcolm Collins: But outside of that I actually think the piece is fantastic because it brought a lot of information to me that I didn't know. And I'd also say another thing I really liked about this piece and her writing Is usually when I take a piece, I just read like a few paragraphs from it to get like the core of the message.

I'll be reading over 50 percent of this piece. Because she presented so much consistent new information. That I really have to read most of it to get the point across.

Simone Collins: Right. I think we should be clear that Phoebe is one of the most prominent pronatalists in the UK. She's very respected, she's very smart, and she's a wonderful person.

And you may be bad with names, but yes, we do know her. And she was always presented to us as a who's who of one of the, the top pronatalist policy wonks and thinkers. in the United Kingdom. So if you want to read [00:02:00]

Malcolm Collins: this or other work of hers, you can check out works in progress, in 1800s, the average British woman had 4. 97 children over the course of her life, about the same amount as the average woman living in Birkenau Fosso today. A century later, Britain's fertility rate had slipped to 3. 9 children per woman. And 30 years later, in 1935, it had plummeted to 1. 79, well below the replacement rate of 2. 1, the number of children per woman needed to keep the population steady. So in 1935, the TFR of the UK was only 1.

79. That's kind of shocking.

Simone Collins: Yeah, those are modern numbers so much for, Oh, it was women entering the workplace. It was the pill.

Malcolm Collins: No, no, this is actually very important. Very clearly this debunks the women in the workplace and the pill arguments

Simone Collins: and even women getting educated at that time, women, you know, also didn't have such high levels of, higher educational attainment either.

So yeah.

Malcolm Collins: [00:03:00] Yeah. This trend occurred across Europe by the 1920s. Over half of Europeans lived in a country with a below replacement fertility rate, including Sweden, Germany and the Czech Republic. The US and Canada also saw steady declines in family sizes throughout the 19th century. By 1800, the average American woman had over 7 children.

By 1900, she had fewer than 4. 30 fewer than three. So talk about how quick that's happening. It goes from four to three in just 30 years there. And that's,

Simone Collins: sorry, that's from what you said, 1850 to 1900.

Malcolm Collins: So, 1807, 1904. Okay, over the course of 100 years. No, no, 1904, 1933. Oh. Okay, and I'm going to put a graph on screen so everyone can see and they can more easily visualize than you can.

If you look from.

1800 to 1880 in most countries except for the U. S., you had a steady fertility rate. In the U. S., you had a slightly declining fertility rate. And then [00:04:00] 1880 to 1920, pretty much across the board, you have steadily declining fertility rates. And it seems to accelerate in the U. S. a little bit during that period.

So France's fertility rate had begun slipping even earlier to great alarm in 1896.

An organization called the Alliance Nationale pour le Croisement de la Population. The way you butcher French.

Simone Collins: Can you, it's like when Gomez speaks to Morticia in Italian.

Tish. That's French. Gomez.

Simone Collins: No, I speak French. Which is better. Okay. Like the guy on glorious. What gets me harder for you is when you butcher French for me.

Like, oh, Malcolm Butcher some more French for me. I

Malcolm Collins: love it, . Yeah. But you love how, how, how patriotic I am. And I've, you keep, keep doing it. Keep reading it up. Read it. Sorry. Read that off again. Honestly,

Created. [00:05:00] No, read it again! Oh my gosh, okay. Alliance Nationale pour le Croisement de la Population Francaise was born,

Gli amici della vedetta ammirata da tutti noi questa gemma provera della nostra cultura saranno naturalmente accolti sotto la mia protezione per la durata del loro soggiorno.

Grazie. Colomi. Do I pronounce it correctly? Uh, yes, uh, correcto.

Malcolm Collins: Created expressly to combat denatelite, essentially depopulation. It had attracted some 40, 000 members by the 1920s, was novelist Emily Zola an early recruit. The Alliance Nationale was merely one of many organizations, local and national, established to resist France's apparent progress towards what demographer and statistician Dr.

Jacquerie Berlite [00:06:00] Tillion , disparagingly called the imminent disappearance of our country.

French pronatalists frequently and vividly campaigned on the issue as a serious matter of national security. In 1914, the Alliance Nationale published over a million posters showing two Frenchmen being bayoneted by five Germans. The poster bore a caption explaining that for every five German soldiers born, only two French soldiers were.

That is A great prenatalist propaganda there. We need to get some of that on board, right? So, hold on.

I will give the context of this. This was actually sent to us by a fan, and it was a Theodore Roosevelt speech from this period, about, I love it that we can have Theodore Roosevelt tell us his thoughts on demographic collapse, and how we should fix it, and what it means for a country.

Simone Collins: Yeah, so, so this this, this friend of the Base Camp pod said to us one of Theodore Roosevelt's most famous speeches given in Paris in 1910 is known as the man in the arena speech.

For [00:07:00] the first time in my life, our Base Camper says, I just read the entire speech and found this very powerful paragraph. So now I'm going to read the paragraph from Teddy Roosevelt's speech as sent by our base camper finally, even more important than ability to work, even more important than ability to fight at need is to remember that.

The chief of blessings for any nation is that it shall leave its seed to inherit the land. It was the crown of blessings in biblical times, and it is the crown of blessings now. The greatest of all curses is in the curse of sterility, and the severest of all condemnations should be that visited upon willful sterility.

The first essential in any civilization is that men And the women shall be father and mother of healthy children so that the race shall increase and not decrease. If this is not so, if through the fault of society, there is failure to increase, it is a great [00:08:00] misfortune. If the failure is due to deliberate and willful fault, Then it is not merely a misfortune.

It is one of those crimes of ease and self indulgence, of shrinking from pain and effort and risk, which in the long run, nature punishes more heavily than any other. If we of the great republics, if we, the free people, who claim to have emancipated ourselves from the thralldom of wrong and error, bring down upon our heads the curse that comes upon the willfully barren, then it will be an idle waste of breath to preddle of our achievements, to boast of all that we have done.

No refinement in life, no delicacy of taste, no material progress, no sordid heaping up of riches, no sensuous development. Of art and literature can in any way compensate for the loss of great fundamental virtues. And of these great fundamental virtues, the greatest is the racist power to [00:09:00] perpetuate the race. That's some

Malcolm Collins: prose right there, right? Right? Yeah. Well, he, he talks about the willfully barren and how disgusting they are, morally speaking. And, you know, that's, that's maybe what we think of

Simone Collins: Well,

Malcolm Collins: but also like,

Simone Collins: you know, what, what is the point of all of our progress?

What is the point of all of our luxury? If it is not used as a flywheel, if it is not used as momentum. To create more human flourishing. Yeah. Like what, what, what is, what was all of this for? If we're just like a match going to light it and then flame out what the hell a match is for lighting kindling a matches for creating a bonfire and these people just want to snuff like I can't believe they want to

Malcolm Collins: consume as much fuel as possible because they just Morally quite selfish.

They are the darkness. Let's keep going here because this is and if you, and if you're like, well, no, antinatalism makes sense because I have childlike understanding of morality. You should check out our video on these people want [00:10:00] us all dead and are weirdly reasonable about it. And we go over all of the antinatalist arguments and they are not strong.

But anyway I'm gonna keep going with the piece here. The French were not the only nation to chafe against a new reality of smaller family sizes and quieter maternity wards. The British government established the national birth rate commission in 1912 in fascist Italy, the battle for births was named one of Mussolini's four key economic campaigns of 1922.

Wow. Isn't that crazy? And he apparently had like posters up everywhere about it and everything like that.

Simone Collins: Yeah. Just the, the understanding that the prior, I guess, that I grew up with was that always there was this Malthusian concern for growing populations and that there was never any deviance from that ever since Malthus wrote his seminal piece, right?

Like that's sort of where things left off. I, and I was wrong. This is so cool.

Malcolm Collins: By the way, was he after this or before this? Thomas

Simone Collins: Malthus is before this.

Malcolm Collins: Fascinating. Okay. Contemporary demographers looked [00:11:00] to shifts in values to explain the decline, like rising individualism, new family structures, and ways of living that were less compatible with parenthood.

Enid Charles, a British statistician and feminist, argued that increasing female empowerment was one cause, because motherhood made it difficult for women to compete with men economically. So they were even arguing that back in the 1920s.

Charles, a mother of four, called children a handicap to vocational advancement in adult life. Despite the organized resistance of groups like Alliance Nationale, at least some Eastern European demographers doubted whether falling birth rates were truly reversible or even arrestable. In 1936, Dr. Carr Sanders, an English biologist, eugenicist, and later director of LSE, Wrote, and this is in 1936, once the small voluntary family habit has gained a foothold, the size of the family is likely, if not certain in time to become so small that the reproductive rate will fall below replacement rate.

And that [00:12:00] when this happened, the restoration of the replacement rate proves to be an exceedingly difficult and obstinate problem. But even as car Saunders wrote those words, he was being proven wrong. Something was happening Europe and further afield, something we are still trying to understand the baby boom.

And here I am putting a graph on the screen that shows the giant jump in fertility rates. That basically happened out of nowhere in tons of different countries.

The baby boom was an unexpected change in the direction of fertility rates. from half a century of falling fertility rates that had taken place in Europe and North America.

Contrary to the popular belief that it was triggered by soldiers returning home from World War II, the boom in fact began in the mid 1930s. It was not simply an American or British phenomenon either. Demographic wave swept over Iceland, Poland, Sweden, France, the Netherlands, Austria, and the Czech Republic, Canada, Norway, Switzerland, and Finland, thousands of miles across the sea.

It even happened in Australia and New Zealand. And yet Saunders doubt had been extremely [00:13:00] well justified. For and wherever we have had data, and since the Industrial Revolution, with the crucial exception of the baby boom, it has been a nearly iron law of fertility that higher incomes are associated with lower birth rates.

Which, by the way, is something that the Institute of Family Studies guy what's his name? Lyman

Simone Collins: Stone.

Malcolm Collins: Limestone, he says this isn't true. He's just completely delusional. You really should not be citing his work. Or as like an authoritative source. He seems completely to have gone off the deep end.

In some recent pieces. Well, I mean, he wants to use the data to argue for socialism. And It doesn't work. You know, so he lies about the data or lies about what the data is saying to he

Simone Collins: doesn't even necessarily like hide the data. He will even point out that there is a very, very, very high cost to quote unquote paying people through services or bonuses for pronatalism.

He just wants. Countries to do it anyway, which I think is really interesting. Like he doesn't deny the fact that it's [00:14:00] prohibitively expensive. He just, I don't know, somehow wants money to come from. Well, I think you just don't know where.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Well, he wants the government to like create a Christian family department sort of thing that forces people to give birth is sort of my read.

this is where I'm going to begin to start summarizing what's in the piece we're going to see on the screen here a graph that does show. Okay. Higher incomes associated with lower fertility rates where we will see this in different time periods in the U. S., The most widely known piece of information about the baby boom is its most pervasive myth, that it was caused by the end of World War II. The baby boom was not the result of people making up for lost time during the war. It saw lifetime fertility rates rise, meaning that people did not simply shift when they had their children, but had more of them overall.

And in many countries, including the U. S., U. K., Sweden, and France, the rise in birth rates began years before the war had even started, while neutral Ireland and Switzerland experienced booms that [00:15:00] began during the war in 1940. Now we're going to talk about one of the explanations for this, called the Easterlin hypothesis.

Okay. Is there anything that you want to say to this so far? Like, has this changed your understanding of anything?

Simone Collins: No, my initial, my initial hypothesis around the baby boom is something we've discussed in other episodes where I think that the hardship that people endured, even in neutral areas that weren't necessarily actively engaged in war, you know, caused by limited supplies caused by, you know, trade issues that, that, that forced austerity on people's lives at the very least, if not genuine trauma drove people to, you know, a level of vitalism that encouraged them, inspired them to have families, and that without some level of austerity or hardship, which could be culturally imposed through strong, hard culture or religion, or could be imposed through the vicissitudes of geopolitical conflict, as you saw with World War II, I think that's what drives higher birth rates.

And I'm curious to see what this [00:16:00] hypothesis is. And I'm enjoying this. So this is fun. Thanks for sharing this.

Malcolm Collins: Easterlin's explanation rests on the idea , that the decisions individuals make in terms of whether and how many children they will have are strongly influenced by the difference between what they had expected their adult income to be while growing up, their quote unquote expected income, and what it actually is once they join the labor market, which he called relative income.

He argued that people form an expectation of their income based on a range of social and economic settings. Signals, primarily those they received growing up the current average standard of living, the standard of living they experienced during their childhood and a sense of their own prospects. The childhood of parents of the baby boom were marked by the great depression during which unemployment rose to 25%.

And 9, 000 U. S. banks collapsed, taking people's savings with them. The U. S. downturn was felt around the world. U. S. GDP fell by 29 percent between 1929 and 1933, and global GDP was estimated at 15%. It was only [00:17:00] around the end of the 1930s and the onset of the Second World War that the economic growth began to pick up.

In 1978, east Easter used the cyclical element of his theory to predict that another baby boom would hit the west in the mid 1980s, but it never did. Instead, American fertility rose from 1.83 in 1980 to 2.07 in 1990, and then fell a far cry from the demographic wave of the baby boom in which fertility rose by over 75% in many cases.

Meanwhile in Europe, fertility largely flatlined or declined. The cycle that is at the heart of the theory never emerged. And little trace of it can be seen in the decades that precede the baby boom. Even the strongest research, so obviously a lot of academics have researched this, and this is a question that we can research.

 Even the strongest research showing a robust relationship between relative income and fertility finds the best. It can explain only a small faction of the increase during the baby boom [00:18:00] of around 12 percent of the overall rise. So, you know, lots and lots of people have tried to prove his theory because it sounds right.

Like when you hear it, You're like, Oh, that makes sense. I can see how that would have an effect.

Simone Collins: And even the converse of it, like, you know, yeah, sure. I could see people having more kids than expected. If they're like, Holy smokes, I live like a millionaire. I never expected this. And you just kind of appreciate what you have.

And then, you know, the, the, the converse of that being, you know, millennials and younger generations being like, Oh, I'm never going to have the lifestyle that my parents had and then proceeding to not have kids. So it seems so intuitively to make sense.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, well, I think it's very much like the initial reaction a lot of people have, which is like, well, if I had more money, I'd have more kids and like, we know that the opposite is true.

A lot of stuff around fertility is counter to an individual's intuitions. And I think that that's what we're dealing with in this case, because again, you can look at the data. It looks like it should line up in a fuzzy sense, but it doesn't line up. Because you can look at [00:19:00] it today. We can, we can, we can measure this in populations.

They've been trying to prove this for half a century is when he had this hypothesis, he had this a long time ago. And we just haven't found it. It doesn't seem to be true. Easterlin focused on parents perceptions and expectations in his attempt to understand what drove the boom. A recent wave of research has looked instead at objective factors, in particular, the cost of having children upon parents and how those change.

And here I'm putting a graph on the screen of the adoption of electric power, refrigeration, stove, vacuum, and washing machines from 1930s to 1960s. Parenthood rapidly became much easier between the 1930s and 1950s. The spread of labor saving devices in homes, such as washing machines and fridges, made raising children easier.

Movements in medicine, making childbirth safer and easier access to housing, made it cheaper to house large families. In the 1930s, only two thirds of U. S. homes had electricity, but in 1960, 99 [00:20:00] percent did. So we went in a 30 year period for two third of homes having electricity to 99 percent of homes having electricity.

Simone Collins: Wow. That's huge. Yeah, that is revolutionary.

Malcolm Collins: The UK and other European countries saw similar rollout rates. The household electrification paved the way for other technologies, including home refrigeration, which became more popular after an introduction of a compound called Freon in the 1920s, a safer alternative to toxic chemicals previously used in fridges.

Between 1930s and 1950s, the share of American households with a refrigerator increased from 10 to 80 percent 1930s and 1950s. This allowed consumers to take advantage of other innovations. In 1928, Birdseye developed the double belt freezer, which allowed rapid freezing of fresh produce, improving the quality of frozen food.

As refrigerators found an increasing number of foam, frozen food became popular, From the 1930s onwards, followed by frozen ready meals. [00:21:00] In 1946, the UK's frozen food sales amounted to only 150, 000 pounds, but by 1964, it had grown to 75 million, about 1 billion in 2020 is mine. So, basically allow it for frozen food.

I think many people don't know or, or if they haven't really meditated on this, how big a change this was in people's daily lives, life was. Yeah. The ability to refrigerate food completely changes the way you relate to food. You are no longer spending a portion of your day or only buying cured meats.

You no longer have to kill the animal and then immediately, or like within a week, eat that animal. You know, you no longer, the types of food you have access to dramatically and the cost of that food dramatically decreases. Now you can have industrial food.

So, I'm going to keep going here. Other labor saving technologies proliferated and transformed the lives of ordinary people, particularly women. Consider the washing machine. [00:22:00] Before this revolutionary object became a feature of daily lives, doing the laundry meant heating water with coal or firewood and scrubbing every item by hand.

This was hot, sweaty work. often including pounding the laundry in a tub with something called a washing dolly, and its strenuous nature meant that women generally scheduled the chore for a Monday as it followed Sunday's day of rusk. One early washing machine advert explicitly promised to transform blue Monday into a bright and happy day.

By the 1940s, electric washing machines were becoming normal in middle class homes. And this is, again, not true. If you have never washed clothing by hand, I almost suggest you try it so you know how difficult

Simone Collins: it used you were going to say, and because of its strenuous nature, women were ripped. Because man, it was, it was actually quite a lot.

There are, there are a bunch of YouTubers actually who, you know, do like, sort of 1950s cosplaying and be like, I'm going to eat depression era meals for a week and stuff like that. He'd go through this. So there are lots of examples really [00:23:00] readily available online for you to see how hard it actually was.

And in my grandmother's autobiography, when she came to the United States and had access for the first time in her life as a young adult, a washing machine, she was just, she Like this changes everything. It was huge for her. It was amazing. It was the best thing ever. But you know, I'm, I'm hearing you say this and I am thinking about my grandmother a lot because you know, she was in Nazi occupied Paris and she came to the U S and you know, she was part of this baby boom.

They only had two kids, you know, this wasn't like, I'm going to have a ton of kids now. So I don't really know how this would correlate. Your

Malcolm Collins: family seems to be genetically less natalist than other families. Is what I've noticed because I look at my family and they had tons of kids in these generations 12, you know, 14 depending on the generation.

We did that for a number of generations. Even now, my family is very, very high fertility. I have a very large cousin network. We're actually about to go see them in Maine. And pretty much everyone I'm related to has three plus kids [00:24:00] which is rare these days in the United States.

Simone Collins: Well, I applaud your fecundity, Malcolm.

Um,

Malcolm Collins: Well, no, it shows that our world framework kind of works with high fertility. We'll see if we can keep it going because the fertility rate has dropped a little bit in this generation. Now there, there is a paper that was done that basically destroys this entire argument. And I want to see if you can guess how they did it.

If a baby boom was seen in what other population would this argument completely fall apart?

Simone Collins: It would have to be a population that, oh, was it Japan or something? No. No, no, no. I'm just thinking it's near us.

Malcolm Collins: Who near us doesn't use washing machines? Does it use Oh, the

Simone Collins: Amish?

Malcolm Collins: Yes.

Simone Collins: Ah, I see what you mean. So, I'll

Malcolm Collins: put a paper on stage.

The screen here is done in 2009. And it showed that the Amish did have an exactly equivalent baby boom to the rest of the population.

Simone Collins: Really? During this period? They [00:25:00] weren't involved in the war? What did they have to do with any of this? Like, we're off

Malcolm Collins: the grid. Yeah. That's where it gets really interesting.

Only 50 Amish people ended up serving in the military. So it also kind of hurts your argument as well. My thesis. Yeah, it's my hardship.

Simone Collins: Well, except, well, right, right. Actually, because they already, well, they, my, my, yeah, my, my position for them would be they already had hardship because they live a life with a hard culture and with deprivation.

But then why would they experience a bump? Because you just think they'd just be level.

Malcolm Collins: I think you're partially right with the austerity, but I think there's another factor here, and we're going to get to it at the end of the article. Yeah, because something has to cause

Simone Collins: the bump. Like, why would they have more fertility?

It would just be steady.

Malcolm Collins: Historical demographic data on practicing Amish is scant, but The language Pennsylvania Dutch is spoken almost exclusively by the Amish, and the language is recorded in a census. By analyzing data from the U. S. census censuses from the relevant time period that included data on primary language spoken.

In the home and the number of children 1940, 1980, and 1990, it is [00:26:00] possible to gauge the impact of the baby boom on the Amish community by tracking changes in completed fertility among Pennsylvania Dutch speakers. It turns out that during the baby boom, Pennsylvania Dutch speakers did see a fertility rise at the same time at a similar magnitude to other Americas.

, and for as long, all without washing machines or refrigerators, so, nope, it wasn't that stuff Between 1936 and 1956. America's now. Now this is the one where I think they're on to something. This one. Can you guess what it would be? What else might have changed between the thirties and the fifties that could have caused the number of babies?

People had to hugely spike

Simone Collins: globalization.

Malcolm Collins: It's medical technology, medical technology. It's the one

Simone Collins: infant

Malcolm Collins: mortality went down. Is that a yeah. And maternal death maternal.

Simone Collins: Okay. Yes. Like this is when we're like

Malcolm Collins: online. This is [00:27:00] when, yeah. So. Between 1936 and 1956, America's maternal death rate fell by 94 percent from 51 deaths per 10, 000 live births to under 3 per 10, 000 live births.

51 to 3 over a period of just 20 years. This was mirrored by declines across the West. Sweden saw maternal deaths drop from 30 per 10, 000 to 4 per 10, 000 in England. In 1874, maternal mortality peaked at 75 per 10, 000 70 years later in 1945, it was less than five. And here I'll have a graph on the screen that shows this sort of across the board.

The U. S. states that had higher maternal mortality than others, for example, averaged between 1915 and 1935, Florida had almost double the mortality rate of Minnesota, 86 per 10, 000 as compared to 44. By the 1950s, death [00:28:00] rates had massively converged, and those two states with the biggest improvements saw the biggest birth rates.

increases. So, um. that explains a lot. There you go. Wow. Hold on. We're not done with this, this explanation yet because it's going to turn out it's not the huge explanation we would like it to be. Interesting. But it helps. Okay.

By comparing state falls in mortality with state baby booms, one analysis shows the effect of these medical advances on fertility in America was about 1. 8 children per woman or 55 percent of the rise in fertility during the baby boom generation. I, I would say, I believe it was probably 58%. I think that this is right.

Now I should note, this is not a good thing. It is satisfying that we solved part of the problem, but it basically means fertility collapse never abated. The,

Simone Collins: the, yeah, there was basically like a, a false modifier to the numbers, the false

Malcolm Collins: modifier to the numbers that is unreplicable in modern times.

Yeah. We can't lower [00:29:00] for, we can't lower infant death rates by that much again in modern times and create another baby boom.

Simone Collins: Right.

Malcolm Collins: So, okay, great, but shoot, I'm going here.

Simone Collins: Yeah. You would have preferred to have something we could do something about, you know,

Malcolm Collins: The average American woman born in 1930 had three Children, while the average Amish woman born the same year had 4.

5. So I also think that's interesting during this early period of the births explosion. When we're talking about the baby boom, there wasn't that much of a difference between Amish. Families and the average American family. If you look today at Amish families, their fertility rate is 5. 76. So much higher than it was historically.

So their fertility has actually been inching upwards since the baby boom. That's interesting. We're thinking about solutions here. Yeah. Here is why I'd say it's not just infant mortality. And this is also going to blow up her [00:30:00] next argument as well, but I suppose I should throw it out there. The little hand grenade.

This got me interested. I was like, Oh, well, we should be looking cross communities to find out where the baby boom existed and where the baby boom didn't exist. Okay. Okay. So what did I do? I decided to start just Googling. Did X country have a baby boom? Did X country have a baby boom? Dig X country have a baby boom?

And I found something rather peculiar in the data. A lot of countries didn't have a baby boom. Most essential in South America didn't have a baby boom. Africa didn't have a baby boom. You know who did have a baby boom? Strangely, Japan, Korea. So basically like the people who are adjacent to or involved in the war?

Everyone who was adjacent to the war had a baby boom. Oh man! Everyone who was, so Ireland had a baby boom, but it was Smaller than other countries. That is so weird. Ireland had a baby boom of only [00:31:00] 8%. So many people might not know this about Ireland, but Ireland.

Oh, I don't want to say the Irish were terrific cowards during World War II. Um, But they did side with the Nazis.

Irish b*****d! What? What's that? McCarron. That's an Irish name. Uh, yes. Can I assume you're CIA? No, you know what, Patty?

Hang on! Okay, God. So where did you get Axis power? Ireland? Ireland was not an Axis power! Are you sure? They were neutral, you a*****e! Oh, that's right.

Malcolm Collins: Sorry, I don't mean they sided with the Nazis. They, they couldn't, they couldn't hold their nose and side with the, the UK and the United States. They decided to be neutral in the war. And as such, they experienced hardships, but not the same hardships everyone else was fighting, you know, fighting against true evil in the world and trying to save.

the West. [00:32:00] Oh, dear. Oh, dear. I don't I don't I don't think anyone should ever forget that they didn't participate in the war. And I and I am partially Irish. But fortunately, my Irish ancestors came to America before this display of cowardry, cowardice, cowardice.

Yes, or obstinance, whatever you want to frame it as it is. Well,

Simone Collins: come on. I mean, the Irish who were This is, oh, this is, no, you're probably going to need to take this out. But the Irish who were left after, these are the people who couldn't bother to leave the country during the potato famine. All right. You know, people dying, starving all around them.

S**t country, you know, just like nothing's going well there right now. People are literally saying like, we will pay your way to America. Like just leave, evacuate. This is not good. People don't

Malcolm Collins: know this, but a lot of the landlords offered to pay for people to move because they were afraid of results because there'd been a few revolts before the potato famine that led to them killing the landlords and the landlords was like, Oh my God, we're not going to be able to feed these people.

We need to get them out of here. We're going to die. Now, a lot of them died on these ships. That's why they were called [00:33:00] coffin ships. It was risky prospect, but the people who are willing to risk their safety for a better future, pretty much. All left Ireland. The ones

Simone Collins: who stayed and who, you know, chose to not get super involved in World War II.

Is it, can it be so surprising when those were the same people who, when faced with almost certain death from starvation were like, I mean, let's just see this

Malcolm Collins: out. You know, let's write it out. I think it was more obstinance. And I think, I think that it's, it, it, it, you, you could say it's obstinance might be an overly negative term.

Stubbornness. They, they , steadfastness stu stubbornness that also led them to not participating in the war. Yeah. Sure. But anyway this was really interesting to me and it leads to my theory before we go further, is my theory is that what caused this.

Was a, and you can contrast this theory. It was a theory that they're laying out because I don't think that people have kids for economic reasons. Largely speaking, [00:34:00] people have kids because they feel they have a duty to something greater than themselves. During this war, when nobody was sure how the world's future was going to turn out when they weren't sure if there was going to be a future, if they were going to live in a Nazi totalitarian state, if they were going to live in a, you know, it's very scary.

It was a very scary time where people, even in the places that didn't fight, like the Amish and the Irish had a, a world framework of sacrifice for a better future. And if you are living a life that is dedicated to a better future, if you are seeing your friend shot around you for a better future, if you are, In the news every day, the world's an existential threat.

Let's see if we can get through this. Yeah. Then you are like, what is all this for? What am I making these sacrifices for? Right? Yeah.

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Yeah. And you also

Simone Collins: start to in these periods of deprivation in these periods of almost hopelessness, you start to fantasize about a bright future too. And I think that plays some role in it.

It's something that my grandmother wrote. about in her [00:35:00] biography. You know, she wrote about like how she would fantasize about this future that she would fight to create if she could just survive this.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah.

Simone Collins: And for

Malcolm Collins: her kids, she would write about them. And this is what you saw in the retrofuturism of this period, the 19, 40s retrofuturism was always of these techno utopias.

That is what they were fighting for. And I think that it's why the techno utopian mindset is so important to our own view of the future. I think it is necessary to motivate intergenerational growth and expansion and a betterment of our species. I think the generations that have had this ended up improving our species and the generations that didn't, I think, ended up hurting our species, largely speaking.

Yeah. And so I think that what happened is you come back from the war and you're like, well, what are kids for? Well, I'm for my kids. Kids aren't for me. Kids aren't another appliance that are meant to make my life happier. My life is for the future. And I think it was that [00:36:00] mindset shift and that morality shift.

It comes to like, when you read that professor's book on fertility, and it was basically like, how do kids modify my own experience of the world instead of I should have kids for their experience of the world. And that is a huge shift in mindset that happened in this generation and that wasn't around after this generation.

I think that can explain the other 40%. Let's look at what they put the other 40 percent to. Alongside strides forward in household and medical technology, there is one factor that acted to lower the cost of having children and create the baby boom. It became easier to secure a home in which to raise children.

The number of houses built soared across the West after World War II, including in New Zealand, Sweden, the U. S., Switzerland. In the U. K., development did not increase immediately after the war, but the rate of house building did remain close to an all time high hit in the 1930s. This house building bonanza led to sharp rises in home ownership [00:37:00] rates.

In 1940, less than 30 percent of American men over the age of 18 were homeowners. By 1960, it was 52%. In the UK, rates of home ownership jumped 32 percent in 1938, just before the war, to just over half by 1967. There was a strong social expectation that married couples should have their own household in 1940.

93 percent of married 25 year olds in the United States had their own households, while just 44 percent of non married 25 year olds did. With easier access. to housing that social pressure made necessary, marriage rates rose between 1930 and 1960.

Marriage rates in the US increased by 21 percent. And I'll put a graph on screen here where you'll see the increase in marriage rates. And again here, what you'll really notice is the increase in marriage rates is highly correlated by how much a country participated in the war. With Ireland again, having the lowest of these increases [00:38:00] which I think yeah, I think that this is Spain also had a very small increase, only 6%.

And many people in Spain largely didn't participate. So, yeah I think that the problem with this theory, that the home theory is one, you've got to remember the person who's writing this is. heavily involved in UMD policy. Yeah. It's like her core policy area is make housing cheaper. So I get it.

But the problem And there are

Simone Collins: lots of prominent pronatalist advocates like Morberts on Twitter Dan Hess, who we, we interviewed here who also, you know, believe that housing policy plays a big role. And we're not just saying that. This is an isolated thing among advocates.

Malcolm Collins: The problem is, is that we have data on this.

Like we, we have actual data on how much housing access, the size of a house, the cost of a house in an area increases fertility rates. And it's like, 13%. It's just not that big. [00:39:00] Like, we have very robust data on this. Here is where they are not wrong, and this I do need to note. You know how I say it's all culture at the end of the day?

Or mostly culture at the end of the day? The reason why housing affects fertility rates negatively is because of the cultural expectation that you should have your own home before you get married. That is the only reason that housing affects fertility rates. It's because of cultural expectations. If you remove that cultural expectation, housing stops affecting fertility rates, as we see in cultures that where it's very common to have a multifamily houses, the house that you and I live in here, when we're talking about, you know, in the 1800s, when the average American had seven kids and when this house was built.

Or families were living in this house, you know, as they'd have kids, they'd get married and they just section off a part of the house to keep living in. That's probably what we'll do with our kids if they can't afford their own place. The cultural [00:40:00] expectations of additional houses is highly toxic to fertility rates.

And When you focus on fixing this intractable problem, and the reason I say it's an intractable problem, right, is it's a problem that everybody else wants to fix for their own reasons, right? Like, it is a generally popular thing. If I talk to somebody who's not a perinatalist, like, what percent of the population wants to make housing less expensive?

I'd say probably 70 percent at least. Pretty much everyone who isn't a homeowner wants that, right? So, that being the case, there is a lot of public will to attempt to solve this problem. Adding the additional 1 percent that the weirdo pronatalist movement adds to that public will Is going to make a trivial move and actually getting housing policy passed.

Okay. Not that it shouldn't be passed for like public good reasons, but we just aren't going to matter. We should be looking at the angles of this problem that are unique to the pronatalist movement and that can [00:41:00] solve it without moving glaciers. Do you need to change a diaper?

Simone Collins: No, she's just like slowly passing out and getting wiggly, but trying to get a little more comfortable.

We're good.

Malcolm Collins: But anyway so that's why I don't think it's housing because we can study that. I mean, you see that it's not that big an issue and I'm sorry that it's not. It would be convenient if we could tie it to something so easy as housing. But I think it's primarily an unreplicable change that happened in terms of the decrease in maternal deaths.

The change in perspective on reality that were caused by the war and the purpose of an individual's life that were caused by proximity to the war. And I think that we as a movement need to push for that as well, while also understanding that things like housing do matter, but they matter because, they matter because, We have the social expectations that you need a house before you get married, and that's just not true cross culturally, [00:42:00] and it's not true in most of history.

It's something that was actually caused by this housing boom. So, to read this again, 93 percent of married 25 year olds in the U. S. had 1940s, while only 44 percent of the non marrieds did. It basically meant as soon as you got a house, you would get married. You only had a 5 percent chance of not getting married if you got a house.

Simone Collins: Well, or when you got married, you also got a house.

Malcolm Collins: Okay. Yeah. But this is, this was not true historically in America. So, so just to understand how much it was not true historically in America in 1940s, less than 30 percent of American men over the age of 18 were homeowners, less than 30 percent before that.

So this cultural shift was a toxic pill. One of the big toxic pills, the other has been the focus on the self that we saw before this period. And we've seen re increase after this period.

And so only,

Simone Collins: yeah, [00:43:00] almost a recontextualization of identity that before people used to see themselves as their family, their community, their clan.

And then it started to become atomized. I am me, this, you know, the second son of this family who's interested in this thing and not so much identified with it. everyone else, right?

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, not, not identified with the future. Well, I don't, I also think the future was just on everyone's mind at this period.

What happens next? And, and I think that futurism is intrinsic to any non toxic form of frenatalism because you're doing all of this for the future.

This drill will open a hole in the universe, and that whole will be a path for those behind us. The dreams of those who have fallen, the hopes of those who will follow. Those two sets of dreams weave together into a double helix, drilling a path towards tomorrow! My drill is the drill that creates [00:44:00] the

Malcolm Collins: I love you to decimone. Uh, Any final thoughts?

Simone Collins: No, this is really interesting. I'm glad that you uh, Are following Phoebe's work. I agree with

Malcolm Collins: my theory on this by the way, or do you agree with hers? Like, well, where do you come down on this?

Simone Collins: I come down on, you know, both of you being right, but housing policy, not being the boon that people think it will be, not just for the reasons you said, but because actually solving housing policy from a policy perspective is a lot harder than you would think.

Like if you declared a dictator to rule your country, you know, area, it would be easy, but because there are a bunch of NIMBY people and because you know, the way that, that government actually works saying, Oh, just solve housing is not, it's not that much more practical than, Oh, just give everyone 500, 000 to have more children.

You know, that kind of thing.

Malcolm Collins: Well, I also think that many people, even in their own [00:45:00] lives, they are unwilling to think outside of the cultural box that they were placed in. Everybody always asks me, they're like, Malcolm, why did you go to St. Andrews? Like, why did you go to an undergraduate school in the UK?

And it was, well, I, I drew a list of all of the colleges that I was thinking about applying to. And then I said, which ones may I have not put on this list because of like, Whatever blinders I might be wearing and not realize I'm wearing and then I was like, ah, yes one's outside the United States So I started putting together charts of all of the best schools outside the United States and that's how I ended up there and then you know when I was applying for jobs, it was very much the same way or you know, even when we were looking for work, we were like at one point we sent emails to a bunch of bed and breakfast owners like after I graduated from Stanford business school offering to help them run and grow their operations.

If we could live for free and in the areas like a recent say, nobody else is thinking like that, but I just wanted like the cozy lifestyle. Right? And I, I, I think for a lot of people. It's like, well, they're like, well, it's too expensive to buy a [00:46:00] house here. And my parents won't let me have kids in my house.

Right. And then of course, you know what I'd say, I'd say, well, why don't you move to another country then? And they're like, well, I don't want to think about that. Like, that's basically the answer, right? It's like, if your family's not going to be supportive in you doing the most important thing you can do as a human being, then you need to break the rules.

You need to do something that no one else has considered yet.

Simone Collins: Yeah. Well, that's difficult. And I think one of the core elements of prenatalism when it comes to the, you know, importance of culture is by Making pronatalism a no brainer by bringing back having kids in a family to the evoked set of someone's default life plans.

The problem is that our default settings have switched from have kids to not have kids or only have one kid.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. All right. I love you, Simone.

Simone Collins: Love you too. Gorgeous. All right. [00:47:00] Shall I send you my, oh my God, we're going to.

Malcolm Collins: I just love so much being married to you. This is such a reward for me.

Simone Collins: It really gets me through like, everything. I, you know, there's nothing saying You make

Malcolm Collins: it sustainable, you make it fun. I'll read, to put as an outro to one of the pieces, this crazy thing I saw in one of the anti natal groups I'm subscribed to on Facebook that I just love.

Watching my enemies fight amongst themselves. It feels like, you know, it's not only are you on the good guy side, but the bad guy side makes themselves miserable with their own lives, like fighting in Lord of the Rings or something when they're in the Orc camp. And, you know, that's what it feels like whenever I enter like ultra woke face spaces, they're all fighting amongst each other and like live these nihilistic lives.

Why [00:48:00] can't that's the manhole. I'll bail at the flank.

Looks like meat's back on the menu, boys.

Malcolm Collins: But anyway, this mean that went viral on one of these save the earth, reduce child birth that was this group.

Simone Collins: Okay.

Malcolm Collins: And the post says, if you're 20 to 5 to 30 and your main circle isn't frequently discussing nihilism, human consciousness, morality, generational trauma, and the intractable pain of human existence, and is instead discussing cribs, diapers, and prenatal vitamins.

Then it's time to elevate your circle. This gets a Facebook post that has over 600 upvotes. And you know, you're reading this thing that everyone's like, Oh, I feel so seen in this. And I'm looking, I'm looking at this and I'm like, what [00:49:00] you wait, you want people to be less satisfied with their lives.

Like you think that's an upgrade? Like what tipsy topsy world do you live in? Yeah.

Simone Collins: And when I first read that, I thought it was the other way. My reading comprehension near the end of the day just plummets because I get so tired and I read. Like, Oh, well, if you're, if you're talking about, you know, nihilism and intellectual stuff and not baby stuff, you should be elevating your circle.

That's what I thought.

Malcolm Collins: That's a broken for, but what I also find interesting is the guy who this is attributed to here. I went to his page, the wealth dad, cause they had reshared this and then it went viral. I think he might've been making fun of them. Because he has two kids and a third on the way and he was talking about how great his wife was for deciding to not redecorate their house in one of his posts when I was trying to find where he had said this well, he, what he said is I'm glad my wife is not saving money and not redecorating the house so we can put more money for our third [00:50:00] kid.

And I'm like, okay, he pretty obviously doesn't think like this. So I think he posted this as a joke and the, and the anti natalist took it seriously. Whoops. Anyway You

Simone Collins: know, I think that's actually a genre now, which is that jokes or parody created by one political side become appropriated by the other side.

And in sort of unironic, like sometimes it's ironic, sometimes it's unironic and it's just. Like, yeah. And, and it, it happens, it goes in both directions, you know, like when, um, I think like four chan tried to, to make it so that peace signs or okay signs or something were like supposed to be a sign of white pride and then like actual white pride groups were like, this is perfect.

Why did I think of this? Oh my God. Just adopted it. And I, I think that is, is happening in, in both directions and it's wonderful. It's wonderful that it happens.

Malcolm Collins: All right. So, I will get started here.

In this thought-provoking discussion, Malcolm and Simone Collins explore the complex and controversial topic of transgender identity, its potential links to mental health issues, and its societal impact. This video offers a nuanced examination of the trans phenomenon, touching on social contagion theories, the relationship between high IQ and gender dysphoria, and the potential risks and benefits of transitioning. Key points covered: The correlation between high IQ and transgender identity Theories on social contagion and the spread of trans ideology The impact of transitioning on mental health and suicide rates The role of autism in gender dysphoria Critiques of current approaches to treating gender-questioning individuals The potential exploitation of trans identities by bad actors The impact on lesbian and gay communities The political implications of the trans movement This video presents a critical analysis of current research and societal trends surrounding transgender issues. It challenges viewers to consider multiple perspectives on this sensitive topic. Note that this discussion contains mature themes and controversial viewpoints.

Malcolm Collins: [00:00:00] What if this memetic structure which encourages transition instead of being something that is intrinsically toxic is actually a social technology that evolved to treat the increased nihilism and bupacidality caused by the urban monoculture.

Simone Collins: I like that

Malcolm Collins: as a premise spicy. So how could it do this? When you transition, you are basically abandoning an identity, your current identity, and then building a new one.

Simone Collins: You're literally killing it. Actually. For example, dead naming people is dead naming them that person is dead to them

Malcolm Collins: What is most disturbing is that after a year on blockers, a significant increase was found in the first item.

Quote, I deliberately try to hurt or kill self, end quote. This is in the youth survey questionnaire. So it was increasing. Puberty blockers increased even by Travis stocks own, as pro trans as you can get. They just didn't want to [00:01:00] publish this increases. Do

Would you like to know more?

Malcolm Collins: Hello Simone! I'm excited to be spitting some information and new theories with you that I have had recently today. Today, we are going to go back into the trans rabbit hole. We are going to be discussing a new framing I heard for gender transition that makes me dramatically more pro gender transition than I ever have been historically, and the way that gender transition is played out in mainstream society which is really interesting, which I think is different than just talking about trans issues.

As I've said before in the show I think that there's the historic trans movement. And now there's the new trans movement, which contains some elements that are more like a religion than like a traditional gender ideology movement. Now the second thing I wanted to talk about, which I find really interesting is a recent Emil Kierkegaard, I know, [00:02:00] thought criminal piece that was talking about something that everyone basically knows, but I thought he did a pretty good job of summarizing it and laying out the stats again, which is that trans people are much more likely to be high IQ than other individuals.

Simone Collins: And this isn't

Malcolm Collins: like a small thing. In fact, the difference between trans people and the general population is higher than the difference between Ashkenazi Jews in the general population.

Simone Collins: Wow.

Malcolm Collins: About a standard deviation, higher IQ than the general population. That

Simone Collins: doesn't surprise me because you're looking at a very small, very unique and very differentiated population.

And Ashkenazi Jews are not that different.

Malcolm Collins: What are you talking about? You've heard of trans people? Compare to trans people. For example, gay people have a lower IQ on average than men. No. Really? Yes. Yes. No. This group is really unique. Wow. And they checked. It's not explained by anything else.

It's not that they're, disproportionately birthed male or female, it's not that they're, their age. It's not that [00:03:00] they're. They don't have a different,

Simone Collins: do they have a different gender? I feel like there's pretty much every background, culturally, religiously, ethnically. No, but they controlled for that in this study.

They did. Oh, okay. So even if

Malcolm Collins: it's true That doesn't matter to this answer. It's just something disproportionately now, this is actually really interesting if what we are seeing in the modern trans movement is a disorder. So one of the things I say about transness is it would make sense. If human brains are gender differentiated to some extent, like that seems obvious that sometimes this gender differentiation would get messed up in like a systemic way.

Like intersex people exist, stuff like that. Like why wouldn't that happen in the brain? But if that was what was causing the modern trans movement, usually when somebody has a major Deformity, basically, we'll say it's some sort of like psychiatric condition or deformity like this. They are in a lower IQ group which just makes sense.

When you have one weird mutation in the way somebody's developing, you're likely to have other weird mutations. You're likely to just have a higher genetic [00:04:00] load. And the Trans status is not having that is really interesting. In fact, there's only two other conditions that fall into that. One is autism.

Simone Collins: It must be schizophrenia, right?

Malcolm Collins: No, schizophrenia is not associated with higher IQ. The other is anorexia.

Simone Collins: No.

Malcolm Collins: All right. I've got a two for here. This gets really interesting. And there's a high correlation with transness and autism. So I suspect that this is what's actually booing the IQ.

Simone Collins: Body dysmorphia. Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah yeah, so I, I think it's just that they're drawing disproportionately from the autistic community, and I'll explain and I think it's part of the memetic structure only works in higher IQ people, and I'll explain what I mean by this in just a second

oh yeah that anorexia is interesting in that the studies that have looked at it it's pretty different from a lot of other disorders. It appears a lot more like a multiple personality disorder in that it appears to be culturally transmitted to an extent. A great example of this is it was pretty unheard of in Japan until they, like [00:05:00] 1970s when they really began to consume Western media and then they had an explosion of it.

And so one thing could be is that when something is culturally transmitted, it is more likely to appeal to high IQ populations, but also think about it this way. If you look at autistic people, they develop special interests slash obsessions. And some, there was actually a study done on de transitioners where a lot of them said that transitioning was their special interest.

They didn't realize it at the time, but it was one of their sort of autistic special interests. And

Simone Collins: I think you're missing also a major filtering. thing here too, which is the, a level of conscientiousness, which correlates with IQ, if memory serves, that goes into being both anorexic and a transitioner and some of these other weird things is that the amount of self control you need to have to be successfully anorexic and to successfully transition.

Malcolm Collins: Point is it's a differentiator that requires higher self control instead of lower self control, [00:06:00] which is most, psychological illnesses you're going to have but I'm going a spicy take here. So as you remember when I was younger, I would do a lot of studying how brainwashing works and building I'd look at different sequences of words and I would mass AB test them in online environments to find the perfect way to get women to sleep with me.

For dating. That's a strong interest to me. I was very interested in how, people, how they get them to transform their identity and how I could utilize those techniques. And I will admit I was not a great person at the time to get my immediate needs met. I just then reached a point where I saturated those needs and then was able to think clearly and realized that I never should have wanted those needs in the first place.

In that a life. Built in pursuit of, sexual conquest is not a life that is ever going to be fulfilling to anyone. I don't believe any of these people who pretend that they're fulfilled by this art. I think they're deeply sad [00:07:00] people. But, one of the techniques that I learned, and this isn't brainwashing, it's more like a logical structure, like a memetic structure.

which was very effective at getting people to sleep with me. But anyway these techniques that I was using they were often like a mimetic structure and they did not work very well on people of medium to low IQ.

I, I really struggled with it, and people can be like, that's surprising, you think that they would be like The

Simone Collins: gullible dumb people who would, The gullible dumb people, Yes, yeah. But that's not

Malcolm Collins: true logical structures, if what you're doing is like implanting a memetic machine, Logical structures only work

Simone Collins: on logical people, and fewer people are logical than one might like to conclude.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, they basically break it down when you put it in their head. So i'll give you an example of one of these structures so people can understand broadly how like a memetic machine works

Simone Collins: Okay

Malcolm Collins: so this is a very simple one that I used to get someone to sleep with me But somebody can understand you might have a more complex self replicating structure Which is I think what part of [00:08:00] the modern trans movement is but just for the sleep with me structure Okay, you know starts with a question like you don't find me unattractive, right?

And very few people are going to, if you're broadly trying to say, I think you're attractive. And I'm like and you think like happiness and positive emotional subsets are like an intrinsically good thing. Like you want more pleasure and happiness in the world. And they're like, yeah.

And I'm like and because you find me good looking, it would make you feel good to hook up with me and it would make me feel good to hook up with you. Therefore, what is your argument against hooking up with me? And what I am setting up there that is is a pillar system. So people might not see what I'm doing.

I actually want them to give me an answer there, right? Because then they have established their logical pillars as to why they're not open to me hooking up. And then you just get to attack their remaining pillars. And then you knock over the pillars and you've got the sale. But people can see that's a very simple, logical set.

Actually, this might [00:09:00] be why when I began building like deeper philosophy outside of just I want to win these status games I was born into in the society around me, I had such a disrespect of systems based around pleasure because I saw how I had been able to use those systems to so medically hack people.

Yeah. So there's two things you probably notice about this logical structure argument, right? Two, it's gonna, one, it's gonna be less effective on, um, less intelligent people. And two, it's actually going to be much more effective on more autistic leaning people.

Simone Collins: I wouldn't work on me because I don't really care about pleasure or happiness.

No, you

Malcolm Collins: never did, but a lot of people do. They have, I'd say the vast majority of people, we've talked about in our levels of thinking video or these general utilitarians, and they do. And it's very hard for generally utilitarian to argue against that argument once they've set themselves in that position.

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: And And I think that's what the, you can think of this larger trans memetic structure as, it's a self replicating memetic structure [00:10:00] that needs a fairly high competence substrate. to grow with it.

Simone Collins: Yeah. And when a

Malcolm Collins: substrate is lower competence, it begins to break it down because it's fairly heavy.

I would say like it's a fairly sophisticated internally reinforcing memetic subset. So this is one thing, but I don't want to talk about the boobicide. Cause we can't talk about it in any other terms given, um, YouTube's restrictions and everything like that. But as people know let's be clear

Simone Collins: that we're not talking about mastectomies here.

Malcolm Collins: No, I'm talking about the other word that starts with an S that we cannot talk about. Yes.

Transness relates to boobicide in a couple really weird ways and I began to think about these you see this huge portion of increased boobicidality in, in, in leading up to transition for a lot of people. And some studies have argued against this.

I think it's probably true. [00:11:00] but you also see an increased risk of boobicide in the general population now that has never been seen

Simone Collins: before.

Malcolm Collins: And so I'm going to post some stats on screen here and it was like okay, so you've got trans individuals in this sample

boobicidal ideation. You're looking at 92 percent had it.

And 45 percent had an attempt in the sample.

Not trans you had 70 percent had it. And 22 percent had an attempt non binary 89 percent had it and 35 percent had an attempt. Um, you're just seeing like incredibly high rates.

Simone Collins: I wonder what these numbers look like for anorexics. Is that being a sort of control pop?

Just, this

Malcolm Collins: specific study was from the Stonewall school support, 2017. A lot of critics have attacked it. But let's just pretend that these numbers are true because we do know that there is an explosion in bupacidality among young people right now.

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: What if transition instead of being or this memetic structure which [00:12:00] encourages transition instead of being something that is intrinsically toxic is actually a social technology that evolved to treat the increased nihilism and bupacidality caused by the urban monoculture.

Simone Collins: I like that

Malcolm Collins: as a premise spicy. So how could it do this? When you transition, you are basically abandoning an identity, your current identity, and then building a new one.

Simone Collins: You're literally killing it. Actually. For example, dead naming people is dead naming them that person is dead to them.

You are. Like a phoenix completely immolating and rising from the ashes is this new, beautiful identity.

Malcolm Collins: So isn't that fascinating? That's what we're actually seeing here. And something that would encourage this belief is that if you look cross culturally, the concept of transness that you see with the native American communities is actually very [00:13:00] interesting because it doesn't look like the concept of transness we have within our own culture.

Simone Collins: Are you talking about two spirit people?

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, it was in two spirit people and Fafafine people, which is in Samoa, you have a similar concept. So in these groups, while they have been adopted as a type of trans by the current trans community they don't actually function like trans people. They're more like a recognition of gay people as a separate gender.

So if I was going to word this differently these would be like, if you were recognized as for example as a young man, you are allowed to take part in female gender norms and sleep with straight men or otherwise categorized by society as heterosexual men, but would likely in real life. Like in our society, not in real life in Western culture, be categorized as gay pitchers.

Now it's also important to understand that gay pitchers historically were considered straight. If you look at like ancient Greece, if you look at even in medieval [00:14:00] Europe men who were the tops in gay relationships were often considered straight or straight adjacent. The thing you really weren't supposed to be as the bottom.

Simone Collins: Wait, I've not heard pitchers before. So what's the other side of this batterers

Malcolm Collins: and

Simone Collins: Catchers. Okay. Thank you. Carry on.

Malcolm Collins: So it was really interesting about FFA. Is they basically live their lives and two spirits, very similar to the way we would say an effete gay man lives their lives and they're happy.

And they're not having these higher rates of boobicide that you're seeing in other groups uh, that we're seeing in the West. Um, Indicates that there's something different going on here with this community.

And

Simone Collins: You mean totally unmoored from mainstream developed societal concepts around transness?

Totally unmoored

Malcolm Collins: from our biologies.

Simone Collins: Ah, okay.

Malcolm Collins: So what would be the case, as I'm saying here, is that if we didn't have this trans identity, many of the people who are transitioning would just be considered butch lesbians or very ethite gay men. [00:15:00] And, one of the studies that was done this year that is worth mentioning, as you also see this in the West, there was a study done in 2003, great study, I'll give the name and the edits here.

We thinking of the 20, 24 study development of gender, non contentedness during adolescence and early adulthood.

Malcolm Collins: 90 percent of, when you're talking about 11 year olds who identify with a different gender at that age, identify with their birth gender by the time that they are 23. And the majority, and a lot of them are disproportionately within this group, they were just gay. That's basically what we find out.

This is a common thing here, but I want to go deeper here because I looked at some other reports.

So there was another report and I'll put it on, on, on screen here. Which shows something really interesting. So you might've noticed in the other group is boobacidality among non binary individuals was also really high.

Yeah, that surprised me. But it's not just not binary, it's also bisexuals. So I'm gonna put a, another graph on the screen here and you don't need to see it to know, but [00:16:00] the female to male BIC side rate is high, but not particularly higher than the bisexual girl BIC side rate,

Simone Collins: right?

Malcolm Collins: So what if what we're seeing here is people who are gender confused are much more likely to be pulled in. to these ideas, right? And then we're going to be like who gets gender confused? Who gets pulled into these ideas? And now we need to talk about a whole other weird thing about bubicidality. In the news, you're not supposed to talk about bubicidality. Who like the

World Health Organization has prohibitions on talking about

Simone Collins: bubicidality. Because there is a bit of a social contagion with it, right? It's not a

Malcolm Collins: bit of a social contagion. It's

Simone Collins: a

Malcolm Collins: very serious social contagion.

But yeah, no, you have a very big risk of contagion. When people hear about bubicidality, they're much more likely to think about bubicidality. Which is why in all other parts of psychology, there would be like, obviously you should never tell a patient, if you have X condition, you're much [00:17:00] more likely to be bubicidal.

Because it makes them much more likely to be bubicidal.

Simone Collins: Oh.

Malcolm Collins: And then we can say, oh, come on, that can't have anything to do with what's going on here. Except. There are two groups that are uniquely susceptible to suggestibility when it comes to boobacidality. They are teenagers and autists. Which are also groups that are hugely over represented within the trans movement.

To get an idea, 72 percent of autistic adults scored above the psychiatric cutoff for boobacide risk, compared to 33 percent of the general population. So you basically have this, both cause that you can implant in somebody's rage, which is bubicidal ideation, and then a solution as one memetic package, which is very good at spreading in our society, but that historically, you would never tell people this reminds me of the [00:18:00] South Park episode where Cartman Rob Reiner is trying to sacrifice Cartman to prove to everyone how serious his movement is.

And I feel like with many of the young people, if you're a trained psychologist, you need to know that you are through bringing these kids into a session being like, oh, if you don't do this, you're going to commit boobicides. That you're going to dramatically increase the number of young people in this cohort boobiciding.

And yet they don't seem to care. even when there is a lot of data showing that it may not even be higher within this cohort. And so we're going to get to that in a second. But it almost certainly is higher now. Just everything we understand about how boobicide works would say, if these people are going to an authority figure and this authority figure is telling you, this is the one solution to not boobicide, that it's going to become the one solution to not boobicide, especially if you're autistic.

Wow. Yeah.

Hell do you think you're doing? This is the girls bathroom! Alright, I need to tell you something, I'm trans ginger. [00:19:00] What?! Did you notice the bow? It's okay Red I can take a s**t here.

I'm a dumb chick, too. You are not transgender, Eric. You don't even know what that means. Yeah, huh, it means I live a life of torture and confusion because society sees me as a boy but I'm really a girl.

Trust me, you don't want this hot potato. But this isn't a hurting, confused child we're talking about. This is Eric Cartman. Nobody else is gonna know that. You better just give him what he wants. All you gotta do is just read the words on the teleprompter here. Heh, okay. Let's see how the

Transphobes. deal with this.

You know, some people say there's no proof that

Not transitioning children. kills. I guess I'm the proof. By the time you see this commercial, I'll be dead.

Dead? That was fantastic! , what does that mean, I'll be dead? That was very good, Eric. Here, eat this cupcake. It has sprinkles. Do you know what a hero is?

A hero is somebody who [00:20:00] sacrifices himself for the good of others. You can be a hero, Eric. . Jesus Christ!

Simone Collins: So we could

Malcolm Collins: see it as a quote unquote solution to the increased nihilism of our society, right? Yeah,

Simone Collins: or you could, you're insinuating too, though, that they're creating the problem and then presenting a solution.

Malcolm Collins: But that's the problem as well, is that it's not really a solution because they're also creating the problem.

Simone Collins: Right.

Malcolm Collins: Um, And, and they might be making the problem worse. So if you look at some of these other studies that I've been giving you, they'll have like small cohorts, like 13 people or something that's actually in the boobicide group.

Simone Collins: This is what

Malcolm Collins: I call like the PACE study, but there's some longer and another thing that the trans community does, a lot of trans individuals might not know that they do this, is when they talk about transitioning, lowering the risk of boobicidality.

They're often using different studies. So to establish the risk, they'll use a study that was specifically pulling from like a concerned population. And so the risk will be really high. That's why it was really high in the [00:21:00] straight population was in that study as well. And they were establishing the lowered rates, they'll then pull from a separate study that was pulling individuals in a totally different way.

When you look at longitudinal studies, you end up with studies like this one called the long term follow up of transsexual persons undergoing sex reassignment study cohort study in Sweden. So to quote here, the overall mortality for sex reassignment persons was higher during follow up than for controls of the same birth sex, particularly death from bubicide.

Sex reassignment persons also had an increased risk in bubicide attempts and psychiatric inpatient rate of care. So it showed that they had a 19 X higher rate than the control group. So it made them. When you're looking longitudinally, it basically makes everything astronomically worse. Okay, so let's look at a different study here.

The National Center for Transgender Equality Preventing Transgender Bubicide is the name of this study. [00:22:00] So in this study, it was looking at the Travestock board of directors and unpublished reports. So people know the whole Travestock thing. They were this very pro trans organization. And so there was a reason they didn't publish this report, but they had it when people were going through their files after they were shut down for abuse.

Um, and it says, quote, only one change was positive according to their parents. The young people experienced, this is for people who underwent puberty blockers. Only one change was positive. According to their parents, the young people experienced less internalizing behavioral problems as registered by the Child Behavioral Checklist.

That was a, less internalizing behavioral problems. There were three negative changes. Natal girls showed a significant increase in behavioral and emotional problems, according to their parents. Also from the Child Behavioral. Oh,

Simone Collins: That's the testosterone for you.

Malcolm Collins: Of course, right? So I don't even really take that.

Yeah, that doesn't count. One dimension of health related to quality of life scale completed by parents showed a significant decrease. [00:23:00] And keep in mind, these are affirming parents, generally, if their kids are at Travistock. For sure. A decrease in physical well being of their child. What is most disturbing is that after a year on blockers, a significant increase was found in the first item.

Quote, I deliberately try to hurt or kill self, end quote. This is in the youth survey questionnaire. So it was increasing. Puberty blockers increased even by Travis stocks own, as pro trans as you can get. They just didn't want to publish this increases. Do

Simone Collins: you think that's because in these cases, people were transitioning and then discovering that.

It didn't miraculously cure their depression, anxiety, or body dysmorphia?

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, they talk about this a lot in the community. You first get this feeling of euphoria when you're on this because you feel like things are changing, everything's getting fixed, and then Following the euphoria, you typically get in a really high increased risk of bupocidality because you begin to doubt.

But now you've also othered yourselves and made a lot of big claims, causing cognitive [00:24:00] dissonance. Yeah. And this isn't it, so there was a large U. S. survey in 2009 by the National Center for Transgender Equality and the National Gay and Lesbian Tax Survey. force. And the results were published in the National Transgender Discrimination Survey Report on Health and Health Care.

And it showed those who have medically transitioned 45 percent and surgically transitioned 43 percent have higher rates of attempted boobicide than those who have not, 34 and 39 respectively. Across the board, we're seeing that this doesn't actually fix it. It's more like a temporary fix.

For bubicidal ideation that makes the problem worse over time.

Simone Collins: Here's what I might argue. Going back to the earlier point that transitioning can feel like a rebirth following a death, right? That maybe you and I've talked about before that the impact of completely changing your context, how if you have an addiction or some other emotional problem, if you.

[00:25:00] Move to Japan to quit smoking or you completely change the cast of characters around you, your costume and your set. Yes, you can become a different character. And yes, you can break out a lot of, out of a lot of really harmful or nonproductive mental loops. And I think maybe the problem here is transition can absolutely facilitate that by allowing you to break down and then create a new identity.

The problem is a lot of these kids, especially, And I think maybe we're looking at the impact of this happening with youth gender transition versus adult transition is these kids are still stuck with their parents. They're still stuck going to school. They're able to try to start the process, but really it's an aborted death and rebirth.

Like they've singed the phoenix. But the phoenix has not become engulfed in flames and turned into ashes, right? The phoenix is now just burnt. And now you have a burnt phoenix, right? And they haven't been reborn. They haven't been able to start anew. So the problem is they're not quite born yet.

I'm

Malcolm Collins: gonna challenge you here. I think it's probably pretty effective. For a short term, feeling like a different person and reestablishing the narratives with which you're [00:26:00] engaging with reality, I think it is probably very effective.

The problem is the new narratives that they're building, if you look at our levels of thought are athetic moral systems based around gender identity which IE when they're choosing an action, what to wear, what to do, et cetera the question that they're thinking is, does this align with X gender expression?

Simone Collins: And the

Malcolm Collins: gender expression may be nuanced, but they confuse. gender identity with morality, right?

Instead of, and I think that this is the problem. I think most people with any sort of sophisticated moral framework, unfortunately, and this is the thing, like sophisticated for moral frameworks do not correlate really strongly with high IQ. You need to be above a certain IQ to have one. But if you look at something like my Stanford reunion, remember, I mentioned that like a lot of people there were just living lives to get the money counter as high as possible,

Simone Collins: status optimizers or achieve money

Malcolm Collins: optimizers.

That's like the least sophisticated moral framework a human can [00:27:00] have. And yet these people are like objectively some of the smartest humans of our generation. And I know this is someone who interacts with a lot of people. Like these are smart people, some of them smarter than myself. But that doesn't mean that they are.

philosophically sophisticated that they haven't seen. Why do I exist? It's just okay. I'm not optimized money. So I'm not saying that, uh, so being extra smart does not protect you, but it can make you susceptible if you are not intently engaging with your own philosophy on these sort of self replicating moral.

Frameworks,

Simone Collins: right? The

Malcolm Collins: problem that you're going to deal with is most sophisticated moral frameworks would see gender identity is just not particularly important because most sophisticated moral frameworks do not find human emotion like optimizing for self comfort or positive emotional states in oneself as a thing of moral value.

Simone Collins: Or as aesthetic presentation is something of great moral value. Yeah, it doesn't matter that much, right?

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. They're just like, what, why does it [00:28:00] matter? If I can do this to become slightly more efficient than I'll do it, it's probably not going to make me more efficient. And this also, when you look at the trans maxing community, you can see it was an it, like the.

The, these are in cells who are like, look, I just can't make it in life as a guy, so I'll be a woman because life is easier for women. They're like being a woman is like living life in tutorial mode. Okay, your ceiling is lower, but I was never going to get near the ceiling either. Um, and these individuals for them, what is it?

But the in cell alternative to boobicide, right? Okay, game over. I'm starting again. Yeah. Within this lifetime. The other really interesting thing to consider here is that trans men. So women who transition they often look about 10 to 20 years younger when they transition. So it's also like they're being reborn at a younger age.

Simone Collins: Oh yeah. Okay. Yes. They look more like a boy, an adolescent male rather than a man.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah.

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: Which [00:29:00] is really interesting within all of this. Yeah. And they

Simone Collins: start and a younger start. That's very interesting. Another

Malcolm Collins: really interesting thing. Cause I've been listening to a lot of detransition videos recently.

Another really interesting phenomenon in detransition is a talk about how when they D transition it was like the transition just encapsulated almost the way like a foreign body in your body can get encapsulated by a little piece of skin, like a piece of glass or something like that.

Like inside your, not skin, but like tissue that's meant to protect your body from it.

Simone Collins: Kind of like how clams make pearls.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Yeah, they encapsulated all of this negative stuff. about their previous identity that then explodes when they detransition again and they need to deal with it.

Like nothing was ever really dealt with. It was just encapsulated and set aside and it's waiting there for them. Like a

Simone Collins: cyst in their body that's going to burst.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Which is sad. And so people can say, why do we look at all this? I think at [00:30:00] least Simone would have definitely transitioned. So I've got to look at my daughter's likely transitioning.

And I need to think of how do I build a system? Where, and I'm not saying I'm, transitioning. I just want to make sure daughters

Simone Collins: and not our sons would transition or feel gender dysmorphia in some way.

Malcolm Collins: I think that women and men transitioning now, if you look at the deleterious type of transitioning, they're doing it for different reasons and it plays to different things.

Simone Collins: And yeah, I guess the fact that I was an anorexic autistic, Adolescent probably doesn't work well in terms of genetic tendencies. Plus, I think our sons are so hyper masculine already that it would be weird. I don't think

Malcolm Collins: that really, a lot of people who transition actually do really fit their gender subtype before they do.

I think a lot of people so there's two groups that I think are deleterious transitioning groups. One is the women who feel love bombed and social pressured and everything like that. And that's the group I think our daughters might fall into because it's very good against very intelligent, autistic women.

Or it's very good at not [00:31:00] against, but like at convincing them when they're not actually trans individuals. Keep in mind, I said, I do believe that actual trans individuals exist. But with men, I think that there's another group that's really exploded within the trans movement. And these are what historically, like when I was really involved with the GSA and stuff like this, we saw some of these individuals and we just shamed them to no heaven because everybody knew what was up.

They were cis guys who were pretending to be trans to harass lesbian women. Um, And everybody knew what they were up to. Like they didn't try to transition really. They just use the identity to get into lesbian spaces or to get into other. And people can be like, come on, nobody's doing this really. And I'm like, Okay.

Or nobody was power is doing this really. Look up like

Alok Vaid Memon, right?

I recently saw, so if I keep thinking this person must be like a minority player in the gender identity movement. Is

Simone Collins: this someone's name?

Malcolm Collins: Yes. Alok Vaid [00:32:00] Memon. So recently a friend randomly, like a Facebook friend shared a video of his and was like, wow, I think he's one of the like deepest or she, or I don't know.

I think he's. They are one of the most and I do care about correctly gendering people, by the way. People should see this in this. I do care about it because they've gone through a lot of their culture. I don't want to hurt

Simone Collins: them.

Malcolm Collins: I don't want them to force people who aren't in that group. To if a Christian doesn't want to do it whatever, don't do it.

And I want the Christian to have the right to not do it. But I'm going to do it because I just don't want to hurt people's feelings. That's my culture. If I don't have a strong reason to hurt someone's feelings, I shouldn't be hurting their feelings. But anyway the, this individual on my Facebook, while I was being shared as like a good thinker in the space, And I thought that maybe they had been like popular at one point, but weren't still popular.

So the thing that they're famous for saying is quote, these days, the narrative is that freaky transgender people will come into your bathrooms and abuse innocent little [00:33:00] girls. There are no fairy tales and no princesses here. Little girls are also queer. Trans, kinky, deviant, kind, mean, beautiful, ugly, tremendous, and peculiar.

Your kids aren't as straight and narrow as you think this is, I think obviously to me, this reminds me of

I should have never shoved all those poor animals up my ass! Just do good! God, you people get it? I'm trying this kind of behavior should not be acceptable from a teacher! Yeah, Jesus Christ! But the museum tells us to

be tolerant! Tolerant, but not tolerant! Look, just because you have to tolerate something doesn't mean you have to approve of it. Tolerate means you're just putting up with it. You tolerate a crying child sitting next to you on the airplane, or you tolerate a bad cold.

It can still piss you off, Jesus tap dancing Christ! He's right. Our boys didn't hate homosexuals, they just hated the way this a*****e was acting.

And [00:34:00] this is a problem. You let enough a******s like this guy. I have the public stage for long enough. And people begin to start hating gay people more broadly because they begin to believe all gay people are like this, and this is uniquely a problem. Is that real normal queer people or gay people? , don't have this intense desire to parade themselves around in public doing these perverted things.

That's just a sex pass. , and so Eve you're an average person just trying to live your life. You're actually going to encounter whether it's on TV or in Netflix specials, their sex pest category, much more frequently, even if they're the minority of the community, which is why it's so important that the rest of the queer community. Absolutely demonized and villainized individuals like this and keep them from getting public stages. , very interestingly., I, after recording this episode, I found out that Alex made men. And in 20 front T4 heading Netflix comedy special. He is still being [00:35:00] put in front of the public eye. When he should be hard canceled, but there is just nothing you can do to get canceled on the left.

That, that seems to be. Unless it's being slightly right-wing in some way.

Malcolm Collins: This is a menace to the entire real LGBT community, like a real trans person who just wants to live their life does not want activists out there who aren't even trying to pass and sexualizing underage girls.

And their speeches, they, that is a menace to a real trans person who just wants to live their life because they're just born in the other body and they just want to transition and live that life.

Simone Collins: Yeah. It's like how we feel about people who say that they're pronatalists and then they talk about the great replacement theory and we're like, no whoa.

Not like I hate

Malcolm Collins: those people more than people who aren't pronatalists hate those people because they cause problems for our movement. Gay people, gay men, 45 percent of whom who are. Voted for Trump in the last election cycle by one poll, at least. I haven't found a strong argument against this.

Obviously they're not represented by this and [00:36:00] they get victimized and called out because they're part of the larger community that's allowing this. Lesbian women who are the ones being primarily victimized. You're not seeing this because you're not on the lesbian dating apps. But like lesbians reach out to each other on dating apps, like women reach out to men on dating apps.

So not much, but these individuals, like no social boundaries have realized they can use this identity for cover are extremely aggressive

Simone Collins: in

Malcolm Collins: these communities. And, keep in mind, they're larger, they're more muscular. One, I actually heard Lesbian woman and she would tell the story in two ways.

She's like a man photoshopped himself to look like a woman so that he could get me alone on a date. And she said, when people heard that they freaked out. And then I said, a trans woman photoshopped herself so that she could get me alone. And. Everyone was like, how could you even suggest that this is a problem?

And the fact that this social reality exists has allowed this group of, keep in mind when you were in high school, like the creepiest, most sexually aggressive guy who you ever saw, who had no friends and [00:37:00] otherwise everyone hated. Now he can use this identity as a cover. Of course those guys are going to do that.

Like when a lot of people are like, Oh, a guy like that wouldn't. pretend to be a trans woman just to further victimize. I think you think for a second, oh, you, oh yeah, that guy didn't care what anyone thought of him. He was just, a sex pest. And these sex pests who have taken over the trans identity, like nobody suffers more from this than gay men.

lesbian women, and real trans people. And I have a lot of sympathy for those individuals who are now being victimized because these individuals have realized sort of a social hack they could use to take over their movement.

Simone Collins: It's scary.

Malcolm Collins: And that's why I'm not afraid of our sons, because I don't think that many men are.

Who transition do it because of some sort of social contagion. I think it's because they realize that there's a social hack that they can use to their advantage. The bad kind. Now, I do think a number transitioning for real, like they're actually just born with the wrong brain. But with women, I think a lot of them are otherwise well intentioned and got [00:38:00] caught up in a social contagion.

But anyway now this might be way too spicy. We still haven't done the video with the AGAP or whatever guy. We'll eventually post that. Oh, we should.

Simone Collins: No. Yeah. I like him.

Malcolm Collins: Kind of boring interview. So it's one of the interviews I'm on the fence about. Cause he's too

Simone Collins: reasonable and people want crazy.

Malcolm Collins: I just didn't think he had a lot of new ideas to be honest. I think his core thing was shock. Um, Shock within the communities that he's engaged with, but the ideas I don't think are shocking to our audience. So I guess we'll see. A lot of them have heard these ideas before. But anyway, I absolutely love you.

Oh, and by the way, I should know for people who again might be like, Oh, this allot guy you might've seen him randomly among your friend group, but he's not popular. No by queer magazine, he was rated one of the top a hundred queer people of the year. Like he is, you absolutely a major influencer in the movement.

And I think that the way the youth movement used to be, it just needs to learn to have a little bit of criticality around sex pest men using this identity to exploit [00:39:00] women. Obviously, sex pests would do that. Like, why would anyone think differently? But they are always overly aggressive and cross boundaries and don't have any social sense and don't care what other people think of them.

If you give them a memetic hack of course it's going to spread within that community. And I do not think that they make up the majority. of the trans community at all today. But I will say that if you are a lesbian woman, that's the majority of interaction you're having with the trans community because they're aggressive.

They are out there interacting with people. They are not trying to just live their lives. And so there needs to be a bit of, I think, an inquisition within the LGBT community if the community, wants, I actually think that's like the number one thing that the LGBT community can do is find the ill actors within their community.

Because I don't think it's good if you allow outside groups to do that, which right now is what's being forced is, they're pushing it, but I've seen increasingly like very reasonable trans people recently. I might post on the screen here.

That is basically dedicated to doing this, it's a trans guy who's dedicated to doing this and I really appreciate his efforts.

To calling

Simone Collins: out people who [00:40:00] seem to be in the movement for exploitative reasons? Yeah. So there is a backlash forming. People are pushing back. Let's say, I would say that a lot of lesbians, maybe unfairly branded as TERFs have been fighting back for a while. I don't know if this is necessarily new.

They

Malcolm Collins: have, they've been getting beaten up in bars and then, it's so sad because I've heard these things on like the lesbian subreddit, where one woman was like, this is when I realized that the community had turned against me. Is when A couple trans women overheard another lesbian woman say that she didn't want to, like she wasn't even talking to them, that she didn't want to date trans women and they beat her up.

And that this was being cheered as like a positive thing in the lesbian subreddit. And then she realized, oh, everyone in this Reddit thread basically still is a sexually aggressive cis man pretending to be a lesbian, because who else, even a real trans person wouldn't be cheering that, right?

The only people who would be cheering that are sexually aggressive cis men pretending to be lesbians.

Simone Collins: Or [00:41:00] people who are just performatively. woke in a way where no matter what, if someone meets a certain classification, you have to be on their side. You cannot say anything in criticism of them.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. And for this reason, I think that the woke movements greatest victim has been the real LGBT community.

Simone Collins: Yeah. No kidding. Like you said, they, they have been used the same way that hospitals have been used by Hamas, you just put them up like a shield. Yeah. And then use them to grow it's terrifying.

Malcolm Collins: Oh, wait, but by the way the Alok thing, just so people know how big he is, he walked for several fashion brands at New York Fashion Week including the Opening Ceremony and Studio 189 and Chromat. Oh, and Harry's in Polaroid Eyewear. Polaroid Eyewear! And he's appeared in editorials in Vogue Italy, Bust Magazine, Wussy Magazine, and Paper [00:42:00] Magazine. So I'm not talking about a fringe. Anyway. Love you to death, Simone. And I really am excited to see the LGBT community beginning to clean itself up. And recently I was asked by someone and I think right now, given what the urban monoculture is doing by promoting these sexually aggressive cis men as transgender people and then protecting them gay rights now is fundamentally a right wing issue because there's the only group that has a real sustainable plan for gay rights.

And they're the only group with a sizable mass that has a real sustainable plan for gay rights. And I, again, I have to point out Trump was the first president Ever elected in the United States who, when he was elected, supported gay marriage, Obama,

Simone Collins: Obama didn't get elected with that stance, right?

Malcolm Collins: Yeah.

I don't think he ever like really truly held it. I think that he's actually much more conservative on gay stuff than people think. And I think Trump is much more progressive on gay stuff than people think because he, he was a New York liberal for like how many decades, of course he didn't [00:43:00] care.

And this is reflected in Trump, ensuring that in his 2024 election cycle, that marriage in the orient Z platform itself is not defined as between a man and a woman. So to those Republicans who I knew, um, you know, we'd get a few people in our comments who are like, well, blah, blah, blah. You know, it's not real marriage. And it's like, okay. Even if I agree with you on that point, it doesn't affect my marriage, that they are getting married. And even if I believe it's a sin.

That doesn't mean that my marriage is without sin. I drink, for example, that's a sin. I play video games. That's a sin.

Are you living a marriage without sin?

But you now represent even the minority. Among Republican voters. You know, you, you, you, you act like I am the extreme progressive among the Republican voters. When my position is actually normative among the Republican base. Now you are the extremists [00:44:00] who are fighting for a position that could not even win.

If the entire American electorate was just made up of Republicans.

All you are doing by getting this type of language in two bills and putting it out there for the public to hear. Is to convince the LGBT community. Of. What the left wants them to believe, but what is not true? Which is that Republicans are out to get them.

Literally you do more to hurt the party's chance of election.

And the chance of getting our legislation passed, then your average Democrat does.

Malcolm Collins: Anyway, love you to death, Simone. And you are an amazing woman.

Simone Collins: You're perfect. I love you so much.

Malcolm Collins: And

Simone Collins: there, I've been looking forward to this all day.

Oh my! And keep I got [00:45:00] it! You got it? Yeah! Good! I got my pear! Octavian, are you going to get the corn? I got my corn! You got your big one first! Here you go, Tayden. Oh, thanks, buddy. Do you like it when food comes on a train? Yeah. I love it. Let's get in another. Washing machine is coming to you. You get that, okay?

Oh, yeah, I can't eat this. Aw. Well, then, take more. Two ones. And

I have one. I have this one for you. No! You got me. I'm so tired. Octavian, you guys have to eat it, okay? You gotta eat it. It's not the same food. Octavian, you also need to eat it, okay? [00:46:00] Oh, who's gonna get the broccoli? Um, Tayden certainly doesn't want any more food like this. Only pear. It's okay, Octavian. You take the food that you're gonna eat, okay?

You don't want food? Um, um, I want to eat broccoli! And carrots! That's for chickens and this is for me. Okay? I want my broccoli.

In this eye-opening discussion, Malcolm and Simone Collins delve into the controversial political career of Kamala Harris, examining her record as a prosecutor and her potential impact as a presidential candidate. The video offers a critical look at Harris's background, from her early career moves to her current position as a frontrunner in the Democratic party.

Key topics covered:

* Harris's controversial prosecutorial record and its implications

* Her rise in politics and relationship with Willie Brown

* Analysis of Harris's authoritarian tendencies and policy positions

* The impact of her candidacy on different Democratic factions

* Comparison with other political figures and potential election outcomes

* Discussion of her public persona and communication style

This video provides a balanced yet critical examination of Kamala Harris's political career, offering insights into her potential presidency and the concerns surrounding her candidacy. Whether you're a political junkie or simply trying to understand the current political landscape, this analysis offers valuable perspectives on one of the most talked-about figures in American politics.

Malcolm Collins: [00:00:00] in every single instance, I thought the meme ified version of the scandal was like exaggerating things, a great example to start is the accusation that Harris kept people in prison to use as cheap laborers. I thought, , what they must mean is she didn't let some people out of prison and the state probably had a policy at the same time of using the people as laborers. There is no way she went on record and said,

I, I'm supposed to release this person, but we need cheap labor right now. Now, I heard some allegations that she slept her way to her position. My assumption about these allegations was maybe she had a relationship with someone else in her department.

There's no way! There's no way! Someone who she was sleeping with is is on record saying I gave her a job because she was sleeping with me. [00:01:00] There's no way that this person had a age gap with her.

Simone Collins: Now, age gaps are considered quite hot by quite a few people.

Malcolm Collins: I don't think you'd find this one hot. Harris dated Willie Brown when she was in her 20s and he was 60. I. surely she didn't provide cover for police who fatally shot people in questionable circumstances. Okay, what about corruption? Conflict of interest matters, When you aren't the only body that can investigate them.

You don't just get to say they get to do whatever they want because they're your friend. That is wild

I will post a picture here. Oh, Emily Harris's face made up of pictures of black people. She kept in jail knowing they were innocent. She did this to. Thousands of black people and she did it to secure the endorsement of the police union to win an election.

If you wonder, [00:02:00] is this the type of person who would put me and my family in jail to win an election?

No, but genuinely, if you are worried about our democracy, like, like for people who are like, I am worried about the health of the democracy, you should be being terrified of this candidate.

Would you like to know more?

Malcolm Collins: HEllo, Simone. I am excited to be here with you today.

This the writers of the America show have been doing a great job recently. Cause I'm loving these twists. Kamala Harris is something really. So for people who don't know American politics or what's going on right now, just a little recap the person running against Donald Trump, Joe Biden, it turned out in a debate that he seemed to basically be comatose.

Like he did not seem like a fully mentally functioning person. And it became very clear that. Our government is now run by the deep state. I love it. The last election cycle, deep state is a myth. Now it's, well, yes, Biden may not be able [00:03:00] to think clearly, but everything's operating fine without him. So you really should vote for him.

Shouldn't you? I

Simone Collins: feel like it's, it's more than that. It's even like, but isn't, isn't it nice that the deep state's running? I mean, like politicians who like them anyway,

Malcolm Collins: we literally nearly had an election cycle where it was Trump versus the deep state. Because obviously Biden's not running anything.

So he got a lot of pressure from Dems to drop out. Interestingly, not from Kamala. She stayed very loyal in this respect to the end saying that he shouldn't drop out and that the deep state had everything handled, basically. The right move. It was, it

Simone Collins: was very savvy on her

Malcolm Collins: part. And then he said recently, okay, I am dropping out and Kamala is the presumptive dominate.

Well, This is interesting because it wasn't what I thought would happen. In fact, I thought it was the least likely thing to happen because it seems like it's literally the only thing that could have happened [00:04:00] that was worse than Biden staying at the top of the ticket. What I suspected would happen is they would have some sort of election cycle at the convention or some sort of write in thing and they would choose another candidate.

But we need to talk about why I didn't expect it. anyone to give Kamala Harris this. Okay. Because, and, and, and in broad terms, you know, when BLM was marching on the streets, right, the human manifestation of every complaint they had Is Kamala Harris. She, she is a human manifestation of all of the complaints of the BLM movement.

Simone Collins: Well, and Malcolm is saying this because prior to becoming a Senator, prior to becoming vice president, Kamala Harris was a district attorney. And we'll be talking about her

Malcolm Collins: record in this.

Simone Collins: Yeah. And you know, a district attorney, their, their job to a great extent [00:05:00] is to to put away criminals. And that, that's not, I think

Malcolm Collins: that you're.

You have said this to me earlier today, and it's just wrong. Like you don't think that woke district attorneys exist and they do. Yeah, no, there

Simone Collins: was even one in Southern California that was so egregious and not putting away criminals and sort of just letting them out. That, you know, they ultimately were removed.

Yeah. So,

Malcolm Collins: so it's not the problem that she was a district attorney. The problem is, is she was an authoritarian district attorney, like her politics. And I think this is really interesting. And we mentioned it in a previous episode. Are the Democratic Party right now is made up of a few aligned factions, and we'll do an episode on this.

One of the factions is big business. They move from the Republican side to the Democratic side, as well as intergenerational wealth which now is like straight up. Incredibly left leaning. Another side is the urban monocultural faction. These are people who are primarily dominated by this like cult basically that exists [00:06:00] now.

And is seen in things like wokeism and DEI and stuff like that. Kamala Harris is in neither of these factions. She's in the third democratic faction, which I call the authoritarian faction, which is primarily driven by the belief. That society can be fixed by strict government control either by police forces or by military.

Which she has shown through her actions, which we'll go over.

Simone Collins: But I would say this is notable because it's otherwise very difficult to even get a picture of what Kamala Harris thinks or believes. She's kind of famous for non statement statements and also for, Demonstrating whatever is the most politically in vogue amongst Democrats at the time.

So the interesting analysis that Malcolm has done recently and what I think is going to be most interesting about this conversation is what through Kamala Harris's actions. The few times she has sort of done something, it's irrevocably like taking a stand on something. What that actually reveals about her true [00:07:00] beliefs, because it can be very hard to center in on what they are.

Malcolm Collins: And I have, well, I don't think it's hard when you look at her actions, she is completely authoritarian minded.

Simone Collins: I've looked, I know, but I've looked through the coverage of her discussion of her from both her proponents and her detractors, and there is very little discussion of her actual track record. So I'm glad you're doing well.

Malcolm Collins: Well, and this has also been interesting for me. And I think that there, before we get into this, the progressive media is making a huge fundamental misstep here. When Biden retired. And said, Kamala Harris is who I am backing. You know, you look at your Rachel Maddow's and I'll do some stuff here.

I'll, I'll call it like Kamala Harris derangement syndrome,

With President Biden voicing a strong and unequivocal endorsement of his vice president, Kamala Harris, with Vice President Harris confirming immediately that she is running, saying, We have 107 days until election day. Together we will fight and together we will win. With no resulting ambiguity about who will be the [00:08:00] Democratic Party's nominee, the little scratchy papery sound you're hearing in the distance? That's every Democratic donor in the country writing the biggest check they have ever written in American politics.

Malcolm Collins: Where they all just went over how amazing Kamala Harris is as a candidate. This is a mistake. They should not be doing this. We actually earlier today in the episode, we'll go live later. We're doing an episode with Maxim Lott, who runs a lot of the betting odds websites.

The betting odds right here now give her a 30 percent chance. Third probability to win against Trump. Well, most other Democrats actually are like 63 or 65 percent probability to win. Yes, they don't win in the mainstream polls, but that's just because of name recognition. The betters, which are typically more accurate say that they have a dramatically higher chance of winning.

And so now we need to. Talk specifically about why she has such a low probability of winning and her actual record. Because it is the, the interesting thing about the authoritarian [00:09:00] faction of the progressive party is among the progressive elite. And we hang out with these groups and stuff like that.

It's a faction that is like politically palatable to them. The, the big business types and stuff like that. It is politically toxic to the base. The, the democratic base, like any with any numbers, hate the authoritarian side of the party. And the authoritarian side exists only because a portion of the party has basically grown up living in the bureaucratic governing system.

And their views are not built around designing to appealing to the base, but rather the mindset of somebody who's been a lifelong bureaucrat and thinks the bureaucracy knows what's best. And when I say best, well, In sort of horrifying ways. So I'm going to go over a few sort of AI responses on issues because I've been going into AI to sort of get good summaries of various scandals that I happen to know she was involved in, and they, in every single instance, [00:10:00] I thought the meme ified version of the scandal was like exaggerating things, and typically the meme ified version was, more bad than I thought.

So a great example to start is the accusation that Harris kept people in prison to use as cheap laborers. I thought, well, what they must mean is she didn't let some people out of prison and the state probably had a policy at the same time of using the people as laborers. There is no way she went on record and said,

I, I'm supposed to release this person, but we need cheap labor right now. But here's the thing. Okay. Let's go over this. The accusation that Kamala Harris used prisoners for labor primarily referred to actions taken by her office while she was Attorney General of California. Specifically in 2014, lawyers under her oversight argued against the early release of non [00:11:00] violent inmates, citing the need to maintain a cheap labor force for the state's prison work programs, including those that help fight wire fight, wildfires.

Background details, prison overcrowding and Supreme Court ruling in 2011, the Supreme Court ruled that California's prison overcrowding violated the constitution's prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment.

Simone Collins: Oh my God.

Malcolm Collins: The state was ordered to reduce its prison population, leading to a series of legal and administrative measures to comply with this ruling, arguments against early release.

In 2014, as part of the effort to address overcrowding, a three judge panel ordered California to make non violent prisoners with only two felonies eligible for parole if they had served half their sentences. So a panel of judges goes to her, says, This is cruel and unusual punishment by the US and this was the US Supreme Court.

It's not like activist [00:12:00] judges or something like that. Yeah, by the Supreme Court and then another court, your your prison system is cruel and unusual punishment. And then And then Kamala goes, lawyers from Harris's office argued against this order stating that releasing these inmates would negatively negatively impact the prison labor programs, particularly the fire camp program essential for combating wildfires during a severe drought.

Simone Collins: Okay,

Malcolm Collins: so. Holy, so you see what I mean when I say unauthorized. authoritarian mindset. This is not normal Democrat or normal progressive or normal urban monoculture. In a way, I have to admire her parallel what's the word I'm thinking about? Lateral thinking here.

Simone Collins: Someone's got to get the work done.

Someone's got to put out those fires, Melvin.

Malcolm Collins: The Supreme Court says this is cruel and unusual punishment. Another court says you have to release these inmates. This is a [00:13:00] presidential

Simone Collins: candidate who gets things done. Thank you very much. She gets things done. She's got a resource on hand. People, I mean, you know, we, we want, you know, Trump says he'll be dictator for a day.

Kamala has proven that she can be, she's got it in her. She's willing to be dictator for life.

Malcolm Collins: No, but genuinely, if you are worried about our democracy, like, like for people who are like, I am worried about the health of the democracy, you should be being terrified of this candidate. You should be terrified of somebody who didn't win their primary democratically, is not doing the honorable thing and putting this up to a democratic vote at the convention, and it's just trying to walk into the presidency here and has a very, very, very authoritarian mindset.

But hold on, no, I need to say, you might be like, well, she only gets on the bad side of BLM. You know, there's been, you know, it's a woman president, right? This must be great for the Me Too movement. Now, I heard some allegations that she slept her way [00:14:00] to her position. My assumption about these allegations was maybe she had a relationship with someone else in her department.

There's no way! There's no way! Someone who she was sleeping with is is on record saying I gave her a job because she was sleeping with me. There's no way that this person had a 30 year age gap with her.

Simone Collins: Now, age gaps are considered quite hot by quite a few people. Like, I see it come up again and again in romance novels.

Malcolm Collins: I don't think you'd find this one hot. Harris dated Willie Brown in the 1990s when she was in her 20s and he was 60. I don't know of any book that has a 20 year old dating a 60 year old. No,

Simone Collins: yeah, usually it's a 40 year old. Okay, yeah. Okay. Or, or it's like a, a, a fairy that's 500 years old, a vampire that's 300, but [00:15:00] they all look.

The same age. So

Malcolm Collins: no, no, no, no, no. This is very clearly for moving up in the world. This was not a relationship of sexual attraction. Brown, the man who she was cheating with was a married but separated from his wife during the relationship. So, okay. The relationship ended before Harris first ran for office.

So good point in her nature there. The problem is. His appointments during Brown's tenure. While they were dating, Brown appointed Harris to two state commissions. The California Unemployment Insurance Appeals Board and the Medical Assistance Commission. These were part time positions that provided additional income to Harris.

Brown's influence. Brown has publicly acknowledged that he may have influenced Harris early career, stating he had, quote, helped her with her first race for district attorney in San Francisco, end quote. Phew. Huh. Now for people who don't know, they can be like, Oh, that was early in her career. It doesn't really matter.

Actually. These early career jumps are the very hardest part. Oh,

Simone Collins: totally, totally [00:16:00] getting in the door, getting those connections. That's everything. Totally.

Malcolm Collins: He, and, and state commissions, high level positions within the state commissions are huge if you're planning to run next, get donor money, et cetera. She literally, and on record, slept her way to the top.

Not like attractive sleeping their way to the top, but 20 year old with 60 year old sleeping your way to the top. Well, but

Simone Collins: remember, you know, this is something that we've, we've often discussed when it comes to Me Too. When we, that once, like, really anchoring time when we saw a panel of people in entertainment have an off the record conversation about Me Too.

And the one man on the panel who was A notable actor who we'd seen in movies was like, well, gosh, I wish that I had that as an option. She, I think represents the thing that is wonderful about me too, which is that women can sleep their way to the top. And it is so [00:17:00] nice. That one can use one's feminism.

Okay, that she's, she, she's a power. He's a girl boss who's using the resources available to her to get it done. And. That's great. But hold on,

Malcolm Collins: we're going to keep going here. It doesn't get over. I'm just, I'm just getting into the beginning here. You know how a lot of people have said that you and I have this insane fantasy that an authoritarian faction of Democrats would force children to go to public schools or be arrested.

That is surely an insane conspiratorial fantasy. As San Francisco's district attorney, Kamala Harris launched an anti truancy program around 2008 aimed at reducing chronic absenteeism by holding parents accountable. This program was later expanded statewide when she became The California attorney general, the law enacted in 2011, allowed district attorneys to charge parents with a [00:18:00] misdemeanor if their children missed 10 percent or more of the school year without a valid excuse.

Simone Collins: Yeah. That's, that's really screwed up. This is

Malcolm Collins: mostly like poor black families that are being arrested over this because they can't, you know, keep an eye on their kids as easily. And like, it is insane who's getting targeted for this. It's mostly poor black, single mothers. And this is by the data. This is like what the, the, the interviewers found.

This is me. When black people are like, the police are like, coming to our neighborhoods and trying to take our kids from us and stuff, Kamala Harris is who they're thinking of. If you're like, well, I'm an all cops or b*****d person, right, no, I'm not that way, I actually Think police prefer a valuable service in our country.

However, I don't know optically how Kamala Harris calling herself California's top cop is going to look to the BLM crowd. That is who she sees herself as. Aspirationally, she's top cop. Where to her, the police are a way to enforce her social values [00:19:00] on a population. And we can talk about some of her role in this sort of stuff.

So, Here is a, a, a thing where you're like, surely she didn't provide cover for police who fatally shot people in questionable circumstances. . The query appears to be referring to Kamala Harris's actions, or lack thereof, regarding police shootings when she was California's Attorney General.

Here are the key points. As California's Attorney General from 2011 to 2017, Harris did not intervene or investigate several high profile police shootings, despite calls from the public and local officials to do so. Specifically, the article mentions that Harris did not investigate the fatal shootings of two unarmed men by the same Anaheim police officer, Nick Belknack, less than a year apart.

This was despite calls from Anaheim's mayor, Nick Belknack. and members of the public following the second shooting. Instead of conducting an independent investigation, Harris left the task to the Orange County District Attorney's Office, which was known for being [00:20:00] lenient on police officers and was embroiled in a misconduct scandal at the time.

Harris suggested her office would review the findings of the district attorney's office, but the article states there is no evidence that a serious review ever took place. And so, and so what happened as a result of this? The officer in question was involved in another fatal shooting later. This is, this is, Wild.

Okay, what about corruption? The San Bernardo County corruption case was a significant issue involving allegations of bribery, fraud, and other corrupt practices by county officials and developers. The case included a controversial 102 million settlement with a developer over a land dispute and allegations of kickback to county officials.

Harris's role. Critics argue that Harris's office did not take a proactive stance in investigating the corruption allegations in San Bernardino County. Despite the gravity of the case, there were perceptions that her office was slow to act and did not pursue the investigation with necessary rigor. [00:21:00] So,

Oh my gosh. And then there's a different one here. The, the, the Moonlit Fire Incident. The Moonlit Fire Incident involved allegations of corruption and misconduct by state employees in relation to wildlife fire investigation. The, there were accusations that state officials had falsified reports and engaged in other unethical practices.

Harris declined to investigate the allegations, citing potential conflicts of interest. The decision was criticized as the failure to hold government officials accountable and raise questions about her commitment to addressing corruption. So she's not like normal authoritarian, like you might be like, Oh, she's a by the rules person.

No, she's a, the bureaucrats cannot break the law. If you are a bureaucrat, your actions are intrinsically good. If you are a citizen under the bureaucrats, your actions are intrinsically evil. She is a brown store style, Gestapo style authoritarian.

Simone Collins: Yeah, that's, that's I'm having a difficulty [00:22:00] figuring out ways to like rationalize this after everything you've presented it.

I, I mean, I think it's hard for a normal prosecutor, obviously not a crazy woke one to not look a little authoritarian. But this is, this is further along than she also

Malcolm Collins: completely lacks empathy. So there's a great thing here where she went. Yeah. She went to the border in 2021, you know, into her candidacy.

So, she went to a Oh God, what was it called again? So,

Simone Collins: detention center where it's visiting to

Malcolm Collins: the border. Vice president Kamala Harrah visited the border city of El Paso, Texas, marking her first trip to the border since taking office. This visit was part of her role in addressing the root cause of migration from Central America.

. The wave incidents. During her visit, Camilla Harris was photographed waving to a group of children who were behind a chain link fence. And they were in a child these were children who had been separated from their parents under her administration and were being kept in a detention center.

And so she's just [00:23:00] like, Hey guys! Great to see you! I'm keeping you as slaves! That's basically her take on this. And that is absolutely wild. And if you look at illegal border crossings, if you look at illegal border detentions as well, during the Biden presidency you know, the things that you would criticize a Republican for, and this is the interesting thing.

She is actually, I think in most ways where you actually see her policy positions, quite to the right of Trump in terms of her authoritarian mindedness. Which I don't know, is that going to peel off some Republicans or are they like it? Yeah, I wanted an authoritarian, not a, a, a fascist communist which is, but also

Simone Collins: she, she is getting involved with the exception of abortion with, with policies as a vice president that I think are, Quite unpopular among many centrists.

Like, I don't think Americans are very happy with the immigration situation in the United States. And that's one of those things she's tried to champion is her [00:24:00] thing as vice president along with activity in Israel, Ukraine along with Activity around voting rights. And abortion, I think is probably the one thing where she's going to do really well.

So I don't know. I just, it's an interesting choice.

Malcolm Collins: I will post a picture here. Oh, Emily Harris's face made up of pictures of black people. She kept in jail knowing they were innocent. Because she did this to. Thousands of black people and she did it to secure the endorsement of the police union at the time, which she used to win an election.

So let's go over this particular incidents here. So, 1st, prosecutorial record. The former district, okay. For instance, she was involved in cases where her office failed to disclose crucial information to defense attorneys, leading to the dismissal of numerous drug cases. So, let's see what was she talking about in this instance here.

Kamala Harris willingness to bend rules to [00:25:00] secure convictions can be attributed to several factors. including political ambitions, pressure to improve conviction rates, and the broader context of her prosecutorial career. Harris's career trajectory shows a clear pattern of using her prosecutorial record to build a political platform.

During her first rate for San Francisco District Attorney, she campaigned as quote unquote tough on crime, contrasting herself with her more progressive opponent, Terrence Hallahan, who had a low conviction rate. So it is possible to be a district attorney and have a low conviction rate. This trough on crime stance helped her gain endorsements from law enforcement and conservative leaning entities, which were crucial to her electoral success.

Now we need to talk about this, this individual case.

Simone Collins: I like that you're covering a lot of things that are not just her. Ridiculous speech style and the extent to which she is channeling Selina Meyer from the HBO show Veep, which for whatever reason, you just don't really like, but I've watched like [00:26:00] three or four times now because it's so frigging hilarious.

Malcolm Collins: Okay. So I will go over this particular incident as well. So this scandal occurred while Harris was San Francisco's district attorney and running for California attorney general in 2011. So remember, this occurred so that she could win that second race, which she was able to do given the high crime conviction rate that she was able to achieve.

It involved a crime like technician who was found to have been stealing cocaine from the lab's evidence supply, potentially compromising evidence in numerous drug cases. Neither Harris nor her team informed defense attorneys about this issue. Despite rules mandating such a disclosure, this failure was under criticized by the superior court judge.

Initially, Harris shifted blame to the police and downplayed the impact on cases. However, as the worsened, she took more decisive action. To address the growing crisis, Harris made the decision to dismiss around a thousand drug related cases to prevent further chaos in the criminal justice system.

This scandal highlighted a Harris's failure [00:27:00] after six years as district attorney to establish clear procedures, ensuring defendants were informed about potentially compromised evidence and testimony. Harris eventually acknowledged responsibility for her shortcomings,

so this is huge. Thousands of people were left in jail and, and most of them were black. So that she could win, that should have been notified that they had the right to be released based on compromised evidence, so that she could win an election. If you wonder, is this the type of person who would put me and my family in jail to win an election?

What if I'm the type of person who agrees with her, i. e. I'm one of the protected classes in progressive worlds? What if I'm a A black single mother. Is she the type of person who would put me in jail if it helped her win an election? That's exactly the kind of person she is. Yeah, it

Simone Collins: doesn't seem like anyone's safe in this, in this world from policies that she's enacted.

And

Malcolm Collins: I'd also point out that everyone who seems to work with her hates [00:28:00] her. Her office has been very famous and has been quite a scandal for the administration for having an extremely high turnover rate.

Simone Collins: Oh, really?

Malcolm Collins: Yes, including that Jill Biden apparently hates her guts. And that's probably the reason it took so long for Biden to step down because Jill didn't want her to be the successor.

It's like, I would rather burn down the party than let Harris win. So specifically Kamala Harris. was seen by Jill as using Joe to for her own career. Kamala added anything to his candidacy and that he could have won easily without her. And she's probably right across the board there. I think Kamala has always been a net negative and really always just a diversity hire by sort of a generation of older conservatives who don't understand that this authoritarian mindset doesn't work.

It's the base. And yeah. So apparently Jill hates her and her office has really high turnover. So I think you can learn about somebody's true nature by the people around them, right? For example, Trump's [00:29:00] true nature is incredibly high gossip in his offices and high infighting. And that seems like the type of thing Trump would engender in those around him, given the way that he runs things.

In terms of Kamala, it's just that nobody could stand to be around her or work under her for very long. So have fun. world. This is where we're going. I'm wondering if you have thoughts and I want to get into her politics specifically, because I find this authoritarian wing of the democratic party really fascinating personally.

Simone Collins: I'm struggling to understand maybe because I wasn't that involved in the backstory, you know, how she ended up as VP. How this even came to happen, because it, she didn't make it very far in the primary process when it was, you know, she dropped out super early. No one thought she was a really strong candidate.

And I just don't really understand how it came to be that she, Was [00:30:00] selected as vice president in the first place.

Malcolm Collins: He was looking for a black woman. That was the core thing he was working, looking for. I bet he really only looked at candidates who were black women.

Simone Collins: There are other black female.

Malcolm Collins: There are not that many that are that high up in the democratic party.

And, and that can be chosen. And then you've got to remember, he's looking for a black woman who isn't woke. That was the other requirement there, which, because Joe Biden isn't woke fundamentally, right? From the next faction in the same way that like, I described the two sort of antagonistic sections of the Republican party being Joe plea Inc and the new right, and then the Trumpists are sort of the middle governing faction.

In the democratic power politics, right now, the governing middle faction is, I call it the democratic gerontocracy. These are people who basically think the world still operates the way the world did in the 90s. The, the parties represent what [00:31:00] they represented in the 90s. And they're just sort of blind to the ways their base in the world has changed.

And Joe Heavily represents that mindset. But this mindset is also the mindset of. Obama. And so it's one that we have seen through throughout a lot of the ruling Democratic party for a long time. Now, if you look at the parties that have formed under this, you have the authoritarian faction which believes that the government should basically through the police force control every aspect of your life.

And then the other group, which believes that the government should be torn apart. And we need to move towards some sort of new system of governance. Right. Obviously the entrenched bureaucrats really hate that. So who supports the authoritarian faction? Who is their voting bloc and who are their avatars?

Yeah. Clinton is the first avatar of this faction. She is less aligned with them. She was half gerontocracy, half authoritarian. Kamala is pure authoritarian. Who is keeping them in office? It's organizations like teachers unions. [00:32:00] They appeal really heavily to groups like this, and they can peel off some state unions from people like Trump by appealing to things like police unions.

For example, do you think that police unions were going to recommend anyone vote for any Democratic candidate other than Kamala? But now they've got Kamala, you know, she can actually appeal to these groups. Which I, I suppose is nice. I will never wake you where body cams. I will never put you in jail for a fatal shooting.

Just look at my track record. People will die. I am so insistent that you will never face consequences for anything. And okay. I, I get that. I personally support the police force, but I do believe that governments because where, where she gets me, It was the police force, I don't know, wishy washy, one way or the other, maybe she was in the right with that stuff, but the not investigating general corruption charges that absolutely she should have investigated was the squirrelly conflict of interest, complete, like, well, conflict of interest [00:33:00] matters, When you aren't the only body that can investigate them.

You don't just get to say they get to do whatever they want because they're your friend. That's basically what she meant by conflict of interest there. That is wild. And so, why did this faction rise? Well, they rose in the same way that Christian Socialists rose. Remember how we talked GOP Inc.

Right. It gained power because the old GOP was an alliance of The theocrats and the big business interests. When big business interests left the remainders of that faction were no longer tethered to any sort of economic reality. And a few elites that had worked their way to the top and had worked within bureaucracy for a long time, because they live and breathe bureaucracy, to them, bureaucracy is how you solve all problems.

Christian bureaucracy. And in our discord, in some of our comments, people are like, Oh yeah, that'll work a more Christian democracy, bureaucracy, no Marxism plus Christianity. These two [00:34:00] things are opposed to each other. When you hold these two mindsets together, you end up fundamentally failing. When countries try to enforce a Christian value system on a population, they don't help that population get into heaven.

You know, Preventing gay people from marrying doesn't help save their souls. What it makes is the church their enemy, and it makes it less likely that they're going to view the church favorably and engage with it. And you're unable to win elections, and you're not even appealing to a the vast majority of the Republican base, which is a pro gay marriage at this point.

It's something like only 30 percent still oppose it. So the idea that like, this is a good idea is just dumb, but they have a vast amount of power within the political apparatus of the Republican party. It's the same with the authoritarian faction of the Democrats. They have lived in brief bureaucracy their entire life.

And so from their perspective, the bureaucracy enforcing the urban monocultural value system [00:35:00] is the best way to make a good society. And, and it's. I, I, and so it's this faction that is like, I think if you're talking about like the democratic base, how big is it? I'd say it's maybe 12, 13 percent of the democratic base, really just a few specific public sector unions and a few You know, people who are really agree with this sort of strict teacher mindset.

But I'd argue that they're a good 60 percent of the democratic political apparatus. And that's what people are missing. Especially the younger individuals in the democratic political apparatus. And they are. Way more dangerous than the wokes because they're more efficient and they really have no moral system.

They operate off of except for accumulate power, exercise power.

Simone Collins: And this really exemplifies how divorced from humans many political factions have become. And by that, I mean, like, it is more unions. It is more [00:36:00] large bureaucracies that are selecting and platforming these candidates and ensuring that they have money and not individual People, not the interests of families or even like smaller churches or, you know, workers associations.

It's crazy.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Well, I mean, we also need to keep in mind how crazy the Democrats have gotten. So now 34 percent of registered Dems believe Trump staged his own assassination. Democrats are building like an absolutely crazy, crazier than QAnon conspiracy theory around Trump. I've seen this was in my circles.

Complete denial of Kamala Harris's past deeds. You will hear over and over again, well, it wasn't really that bad that she kept people in jail who she knew should have been released based on policy. And it's not like she wasn't told by people she needed to move ahead with this stuff. That's the thing that gets me.

It's not like she forgot to do X or she forgot to do Y. She would have [00:37:00] other departments say, you need to release these people and she goes, I need free labor. Like, what the what? And it's not even efficient free labor. That's the thing to remember about authoritarianism. If you look at the cost per head per year of a prisoner, It is more than hiring firefighters to handle these fires.

It is about control for these people. It is not about the public utility. It is about the belief that the state should have as much control of the population as possible through as direct a means as possible.

Simone Collins: That's scary. I mean, what are

Malcolm Collins: your thoughts? I mean, what was your historic perception of Camelot?

Like what, what, et cetera?

Simone Collins: I always thought she was an odd selection because of the way that she had called out Biden in the beginning. Cause I think she called him a racist, if memory serves.

Malcolm Collins: And then she was

Simone Collins: selected as. His running mate, it just seemed really odd to me. Like the [00:38:00] party was basically trying to show like, yeah, we, we hate old white men, they're, they're terrible.

And that's why we selected a running mate that, that hates him. And then as, as the VP, I was, I was also confused because she, you know, you don't have to actually do that much as a VP. Like you just have to be there. If the president dies, like there have been vice presidents who've just spent the entire time in New York.

Blitz, like, which sounds fantastic to me. Sign me up for that. But she's actually been going on trips. She's traveled to over a hundred countries as vice president. She has, you know, policy decisions. She's wanted to be very publicly and prominently involved in immigration and foreign policy and gun control.

Malcolm Collins: I mean, let's talk about the gun control issue here really quickly. So, For example, her suggestion to use executive orders for gun control if Congress didn't pass an act within 100 days was viewed by critics as bypassing the legislative process. So if you're like, [00:39:00] afraid somebody's going to take your guns, yeah, she wants to use executive authority.

To declare an executive act, regardless of what Congress and the Senate do, to take your guns. This is not a, well, No, there's a reason why

Simone Collins: I was telling you this morning. I'm like, we should get more AR 15s and have one on the wall in any room of the house. Well, then, let's

Malcolm Collins: create a task item. Let's do that right now.

Simone Collins: I'll create a task item. Yeah, well maybe, maybe, I don't know, like are there Blackfire, there have to be Black Friday gun sales. Maybe this can be our Black Friday thing. Yeah, let's

Malcolm Collins: go Black Friday gun crazy this year.

Simone Collins: It's, you know, falls around the corner. I can't wait. But so what also surprises me is That normally when you're selecting a presidential candidate, you're trying to go as centrist as possible.

And she's actually a lot more, what's weird is that she's more hardline authoritarian, as you've pointed out, but she's also perceived in the media and she presents herself as being a lot more. far left is being more extreme [00:40:00] progressive, more extreme woke. And that was how I think she was selected from a narrative perspective as the running mate.

You know, she was the party's apology to people who wanted to be. Castigated by a, but her, a non white jail, black people, jail, yes, I guess that's just the non white female they got, but she's still absolutely playing up the role of the more extreme leftist candidate here. So there's, I feel like there's this really weird interplay between this like conservative authoritarian and this like woke Avatar or amulet being used by progressive and

Malcolm Collins: she's a communist authoritarian.

So, so keep that in mind. Oh, thank

Simone Collins: goodness. Okay. That makes

Malcolm Collins: everything

Simone Collins: better.

Malcolm Collins: But we've also got to keep in mind Why I don't think she has a shot, like a shot shot at [00:41:00] all. So one thing that is going to keep Democrats from voting from her and a lot of Democrats is that I just will not make this vote is her stance on Israel.

You know, she is pro Israel in this war and for a lot of Democrats, that is an absolute red line for a candidate.

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: So, but they wouldn't have

Simone Collins: voted for Biden anyway. So. That's the thing is she's marginally, slightly marginally better in some people's eyes. And that's, I guess what we're going for now.

And by we, I guess not we, because that's what Democrats are going for now.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Yeah, I, I just say that, that if she is running one thing that, the thing that scares me most about her running is the possibility of her winning. Not because I think she actually has a possibility of winning, but I think that If she wins, it will be confirmation for most sane Americans that there was, without any shadow of a doubt, election rigging.

Simone Collins: [00:42:00] Just because there's, the interest in her is so mediocre.

Malcolm Collins: She's, there's no way she could be, I mean, with the assassination attempt and the, you know, A lot can happen

Simone Collins: in the

Malcolm Collins: intervening

Simone Collins: hundred days or so that we have. Yeah,

Malcolm Collins: yeah, yeah. Maybe, maybe there's some big thing that blows up for Trump. But if, but if things are continuing on the path that they've been going, right.

And I saw her elected, I would say, I absolutely, like me personally do not believe that's possible, was the current electorate.

Simone Collins: I don't know, because I don't think that Democrats who are looking to vote for someone who's not Trump are going to understand that when they're being told. By mainstream media figures that Trump is advocating for a nationwide ban on abortions, which he's not, but that's what people are being told.

And that, you know, Trump plans on doing, you know, like is, is fully in support of, of Project [00:43:00] 2024, which he's not, but that's what people are still saying. I just don't. I don't

Malcolm Collins: Trump literally written into the, to the Republican platform, people who don't know that one marriage is not between a man and a woman.

So like, I don't think gay Republican platform. Now, he literally wrote into the Republican platform, nothing about this abortion stuff. Which, which they wanted to write it, you know, he pushed against that. He said, look, I won you the abortion victory already that you needed. We will not go further on this issue.

Trump has been. Okay. very clear on this. And J. D. Vance has capitulated to jump Trump's position. And I think, of course, J. D. Vance, I, I, I like

Simone Collins: him. And what is the media saying? They're saying, oh, and now Trump has selected for his VP pick J. D. Vance, who is in favor of categorically removing all abortion access, even in the case.

Well, hold on, this is what they're saying, but, but the truth is. Well, but my argument is, it doesn't matter what reality is. What matters is that [00:44:00] people who are Democrats and who are not already interested in voting for Trump, and there are many people, are not going to be exposed to information that shows them that the other side is more moderate than they think.

Malcolm Collins: I I don't know. I suspect that, like, this is my read, like for, for example, the Harris pick, right, you go into like black Twitter or like, black online conversation places. It's not like they don't know about Harris's history. She is not an Obama to them. She is the personification of everything BLM was campaigning against.

And this was made clear because of the divisive primary that she participated in an election cycle ago. Or two election cycles ago. So everybody remembers that everybody remembers the Dems attacking her even was in Dem media. They know about all of her convictions and I'm sure that this was something that was top of mind during the presidency of like why we still need to watch out about a Biden presidency.

She was always the [00:45:00] black mark on his presidency. Well, her and his son. And so I think that, I think that just more Democrats remember this. I think that this is pierce the informational veil. Already by dims pushing it and it's also why dims can't have a contested convention because if they have a contested dimension, I suspect this is why they're not pushing for one right now and she ends up winning.

It will be out within dim circles. All of the crazy stuff. She's done.

Like this is not like small stuff. This is when I've had power. I have used it in an authoritarian fashion. Yeah

I don't I don't know like any final thoughts the audience lets you hear from you. What's your summation of all this?

Simone Collins: My summation, ooh Kamala Harris, yikes. Now the election has switched from Trump versus deep state to [00:46:00] Trump versus deep state autocrat which is,

Malcolm Collins: I think an aspirant dictator.

Simone Collins: Aspirant dictator.

Malcolm Collins: Oh yeah. Okay.

Simone Collins: I mean, Trump is an aspirant dictator, kind of. So I guess now we have a more matched run and,

Malcolm Collins: I don't think Trump no, I, I think. He

Simone Collins: says he wants to be dictator for a day on his first day, you know, like that. You know,

Malcolm Collins: that is, that is just saying he wants to get s**t done.

Simone Collins: Yeah. I'm sorry, Kamala got s**t done. Someone has to put out those fires. She keeps those people in their work programs. No, what I mean

Malcolm Collins: is if you look at Trump's history, he doesn't have a history of dictatorial like actions. He's much more cult of personality based. Kamala Harris. Has a history of let's lock up the dissidents, et cetera, type mindset.

I just don't think Trump could stomach that sort of thing. He's got a revolutionary mindset, I would argue, which does worry some people, but it's not the revolutionary mindset of a dictator. It's the revolutionary [00:47:00] mindset of somebody who wants to be the hero of a revolution or the hero of a story.

Kamala has a revolutionary mindset in a Well, let's just silence the stupid people. They're making things harder for the machine to work as it's supposed to. Which is a very different type of revolutionary mindset. In a way I sort of feel like if she's running from my perspective, she's much further right than Trump.

Simone Collins: In some ways, she absolutely is actually in many ways, Jack. Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: Um,

Simone Collins: but I don't know if, if a large portion of the electorate is going to see beyond old white man to slightly less old, she's 59 years old not white woman, you know, I, I don't, I don't know. If we're gonna be thinking about that. Oh, oh, by the

Malcolm Collins: way if you're wondering so I was trying to find out what her religion is, right?

Okay.

Simone Collins: Oh, Kamala Harris. [00:48:00] Oh. What happened? I don't know if she thought about Kamala Harris too much. I think she just had a bad dream. She was very asleep.

Malcolm Collins: So Kamala Harris identifies as a Baptist. She grew up in an interfaith household, attending both Black Baptist Church and a Hindu temple. Her mother, Shamala Gobelana, was Hindi and her father, Donald Harris, emphasized that her faith journey began in her adulthood where she and her sister attended services at the 23rd Avenue.

Church of God in Oakland, California. Harris's religious identity is also influenced by her marriage to Douglas Emhoff, who is Jewish. They incorporate Jewish traditions and celebrations in their home life. Harris has expressed that her faith is an integral part of her life and leadership and describing it as something that extends beyond worship services to the way she lives and works.

So, you know, I think if you wanted a Christian dictator Campbell Harris is a good pick

Simone Collins: for those Christians who

Malcolm Collins: are [00:49:00] looking for that.

Simone Collins: There you go. That's a fun take. Okay. Yeah. I mean, at least like you said, the writers of the show America doing a good job, at least we're not bored. And, and literally now, you know, we have a cartoonish president who came from the internet and TV and a woman who.

You know, has been in countless side by side comparisons with Selena Meyer of Veep. This is great.

Malcolm Collins: What is Selena Meyer of Veep? I don't understand. Veep

Simone Collins: is an HBO TV show about a fictional vice president who is very self centered and incompetent and not actually interested in like doing good things.

And she says a lot of nonsense stuff. And there are tons of side by side mashups of Selena Meyer, this fictional vice president character saying complete nonsense. And then Kamala Harris saying stuff that seems worse than that.

Malcolm Collins: Yikes. Yeah. Okay. Well, I mean, she, she seems [00:50:00] from everything I've seen of her.

Pretty low IQ, but high diligence. And she's got a good work ethic, which I appreciate. But she doesn't appear to be like cognitively all there, which is also really interesting about her.

Hi, I'm Oliver Bartholomew, and I'm 16 and a half years old, and I'm the speechwriter for Columba Harris. Since I was little, I liked words. Writing words is fun, so I made writing words my job.

Space is exciting. Space, it affects us all. And it connects us all. It's not all fun though. Sometimes I have to write about bad stuff, like war. Ukraine is a country in Europe. It exists next to another country called Russia.

Russia is a bigger country. Russia is a powerful country. Russia decided to invade a smaller country called Ukraine. So, basically, that's wrong. Once, I thought it would be [00:51:00] neat if Karma wore a blue suit.

And told people she was wearing it. Because I like it. I am a woman sitting at the table wearing a blue suit. I can't take all the credit though. Me and Mr. Kamala are a team.

But she kind of is crazy or something, and she kind of scares me, and you can't fake that kind of influence.

You're either born with it, or you're either not. it is time for us to do what we have been doing, and that time is every day.

Simone Collins: It could be. You know, my brain turns off when I'm around people and I'm just on auto response and trying to make it through.

She could be someone who has very high levels of social anxiety and in private, she's capable of thinking again, you know, for the benefit of

Malcolm Collins: the doubt. 70 IQ from her, but we'll see. I'll put on some videos of her talking so you can see what I mean.

[00:52:00] Talking about the significance of the passage of time, right? The significance of the passage of time. So when you think about it, there is great significance to the passage of time. Seems like maybe it's a small issue. It's a big issue. You need to get to go. I need to be able to get where you need to go to do the work and get home.

 She's come so far since our first session

My name is Dahlia Rose hibiscus and I am vice president Kamala Harris's holistic thought advisor I lead the vice president on not so much sentences as idea voyages. You think you just fell out of a coconut tree? You exist in the context. Of all in which you live and what came before you. It's a process I call speaking without thinking. It's not about the destination of the thought.

It's about the journey and how many words you use to [00:53:00] describe the journey. That's on top of everything else that we know and don't know yet. Based on what we've just been able to see and because we've seen it or not doesn't mean it hasn't happened

the first thing I do is cut out all the words, individually. And then I take those words to my word cave.

That's where I wait to learn what order the universe wants them to be in. Have vibrations. The feeling they give you is so much more powerful than what they mean. We have the ability to see what can be, unburdened by what has been, and then to make the possible possible. Actually happen.

Malcolm Collins: Which is you know, unfortunate that somebody was able to literally sleep their way to the president, but okay.

And then get there was diversity points.

Simone Collins: Empowering, you know, a lot of people in jail.

Malcolm Collins: She did also, I should, to her credit, she did also violate a lot of [00:54:00] normative ethical standards to get there as well. It wasn't like she just slept your way. To the top and used her identity. She also jailed a lot of innocent people.

Yeah. And, and protected dirty politicians. That is lovely. All right. Have a good one, Simone. At least, you know, if you back her, she'll have your back. That's the good thing about somebody like her. She's loyal. Then if you go to the bat for her, she'll have your back. That, you know, doesn't happen so much these days.

Simone Collins: I like, oh, you found a, you made, you found a nice thing. Thanks, Malcolm.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, and on a high note, I love you, Simone. By the way, I'm just going to reheat the meal I had earlier today, tonight.

Simone Collins: Oh, oh, you have leftovers again?

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, in the fridge. Love you. Okay.

Simone Collins: All right. Tater tots for the kids, though. They need their tots.

Malcolm Collins: You're so special.

Simone Collins: Oh my God. No, we're using the sushi train tonight. [00:55:00] Oh yeah. We got a little sushi train for the kids. Everything has to be small bite size then. Okay. What am I going to do? Ooh. Oh, we made the bread on the weekend. So we're going to make French toast bites and I'll make little squares, dinosaur nuggets.

Malcolm Collins: Octavian, come here. Come sit with daddy. You got to talk to mommy. Here, hold the

Simone Collins: We have a sushi train for your food tonight. Do you know what a sushi train is? Can I see the sushi train? Yes, you can, my friend. It's a train that carries your food. And you get to eat food off of the train.

Octavian: Does it have plates too? It has little plates

Simone Collins: on

Octavian: top

Simone Collins: of little train cars.

Octavian: Does it need batteries?

Simone Collins: It, it is battery powered and so daddy put in the battery.

Octavian: Oh, it is battery powered.

Simone Collins: Can I ask you some questions about Kamala Harris Octavian?

Octavian: Yes.

Simone Collins: Okay. Kamala Harris is going to run for President against President Trump.

What do you think about that? Yes. Would you vote for President Trump or Kamala Harris? Which name do you like [00:56:00] better?

Octavian: Trump.

Simone Collins: Okay. So you'd vote for Trump. Kamala Harris puts a lot of people in jail sometimes because they actually did a bad thing.

Sometimes because she's. There are other reasons, but not because they're bad guys. Is that, is that okay? Yes. Oh, would you put a lot of innocent people in jail too? Octavian?

Octavian: Well, I'm not mother play two 80, so I cannot, that's 2 80, 100 spread .

Simone Collins: What would you put people in jail to make your life easier, even if they didn't do a bad thing?

Octavian: Yeah.

Please like and describe.

Simone Collins: Say it louder. Please like and describe. [00:57:00] No, no, no. Please like and describe. Sorry, can you please, can you, can you tell our audience to please like and subscribe?

Octavian: You're welcome.

In this thought-provoking discussion, Malcolm and Simone Collins explore the emerging "New Right" or "Silicon Valley Right" coalition within the Republican party. They delve into how this group, which includes tech entrepreneurs and venture capitalists, is reshaping conservative politics and policy positions.

Key topics covered:

* The shift from "GOP Inc." to a new conservative faction

* Trump's alignment with the New Right and distancing from traditional social conservatives

* The evolving stance on issues like abortion and same-sex marriage within the Republican party

* The clash between old guard "Christian socialist" conservatives and the new tech-savvy right

* How demographic changes and generational shifts are influencing conservative politics

* The impact of this realignment on the future of the Republican party

[00:00:00]

Malcolm Collins: Hello, Simone, I am excited to be here with you today. Some days I just have like this breakthrough in my perception of reality that changes everything for me in a way. Like I wish people are like, why can't you only record the good, you know, the good episodes, like do it once a week, but they're like really good.

And I'm like, that's like not how my brain works. I know you're freezing, but occasionally I'll have an idea and I'll be like, Oh wow, this is earth shattering for me. And I wish I could make like a better, a premium but this is definitely going to go in the best episodes category because. I think I now understand something that was really difficult for me to understand before.

And it gives me a better vision of what the Republican party is and where it's going. I'm so intrigued.

Would you like to know more?

Malcolm Collins: So, the thing that I didn't understand Is, I saw this at NatCon, but I've seen this more broadly. When I talk to conservatives that are in the old [00:01:00] conservative intellectual elite, these are the conservatives from the pre Trump era sort of staffers, intellectual elite, when I say intellectual elite, I mean the type of people who are at the think tanks, the type of people who are being paid.

Yeah, like career conservatives. They often come off to me as incredibly socialist, bordering on Marxist. And like Lyman Stone's a great example of this. He is a hardcore socialist. And I just didn't understand it. I didn't understand why they identified it with conservatism.

Now they're Christian socialists. And so I could kind of get that. I was like, well, maybe it's that because they're Christian, they don't feel that there'll be accepted in the progressive circle, so they just try to push their socialism in conservative circles. But generally speaking, I didn't get it.

I didn't get where this was coming from. And I also feel like my understanding of the conservative party transition was the introduction of Trump in post Trump has been, [00:02:00] Diluted, or like, not as good as I would like it to be. It has felt very, like, eh, like, I kinda get it, and I can put together, like, long explanations.

about what it is. But a really tight explanation that made it easy for me to understand like how the policy positions flipped in the way that they flipped. No, I was not capable of doing that.

So. I had this realization to me and I was like, oh my God, everything makes sense. So we're going to go over it.

But it is in understanding the conservative party and the waves of the conservative party. So first you had what I'm going to call GOP Inc. This is the pre Trump conservative coalition. This coalition used disgust based morality, as we've talked about in other episodes, to motivate its base. Like, ew, like that would be an ew thing.

But like, who actually made up its elite class, its philosophical class, and the class that it used to staff administrations? [00:03:00] It was an alliance of two interests. One interest group was These are people who had a strong religious framework for reality and believe that's, that should be represented in the government and should be legalized.

Like morality should be legislated. And the second IE people should be the, like the laws should be designed to force people to act more in line with their religious frameworks.

Simone Collins: Right.

Malcolm Collins: In the second framework in this team up was big business. And intergenerational wells. Now people today, if you're like gin alpha or Gen Z, you'll be like wait.

The people who ran large companies, people thought they were conservative. Historically, they didn't think they were the people staffing the white house. They were the core in like the Bush era in the 90s. This was a, like a Mr. Burns type characters. That was like, obviously Mr. Burns was a conservative and not a far progressive.

[00:04:00] But now it's

Simone Collins: inconceivable to think of an organ of a corporation, not being. At least trying to look woke

Malcolm Collins: ultra woke.

Actually here, I'm reminded a lot of a character like Jack Donaghy from 30 rock. The Jack Donaghy character in the modern world would just 100% be a progressive woke person. But in the time period, when 30 rock was filmed, it made sense to film him as a very conservative person, because he was a big business stooge. If you, It and just, you know, imagine like this.

So you go in the nineties, if you went to a company like a McKinsey or something like that. The default assumption would be, you know, you are a Bush supporter. If you go to McKinsey today. Cause I have a lot of friends who work at companies like Mackenzie. And Bain and everything like that. These companies. Wouldn't even hire someone like me.

Like I would be barred from being hired because I am publicly conservative.

That is how much things have flipped. Also this reflection. Helps me realize how perfect an avatar. I have [00:05:00] this old institution, Mitt Romney was the perfect big business. Plus theocrat candidate. And he couldn't win. And that's why the transition to a new system was necessary.

Malcolm Collins: Oh, well, it is also true for like the billionaires that were made in that generation. You know, you look at your Mark Zuckerberg's, you look at your Bill Gates or like really any of them.

They all are very much and a lot of the old money families went that way. I, there's this conference that you can go to, it's called a Nexus, which I'd been invited to, you know, cause my family is. love intergenerational wealth. I didn't get any of it, by the way. I was kicked out, but they did have it, which gives me invites to these sorts of things.

Or

I, PI,

Simone Collins: Institute of private investors, I think.

Malcolm Collins: But anyway, lots of intergenerational wealth at both of these, and they are the first furthest left things you could possibly imagine.

Simone Collins: Oh yeah.

Malcolm Collins: No better way to get a communist these days than be a billionaire's kid. And

Simone Collins: the Institute for Private

Malcolm Collins: Investors.

So, so I've been to these and this is a change. This didn't used to be the case. You know, it used to be that these [00:06:00] were pocket conservative factions. But they left the business owners and they left before trump came around. By the time trump hit the stage These people had left the coalition and the coalition was desperately signaling to try to keep them on board But they were mostly gone at that point and during that era while the Intergenerational wealth was conservative and the heads of companies, you know, your Jack Donaghy's, right?

Like he was a character that represented this were ultra conservative. Your entrepreneurs and your techies were you know, people who had made their wealth off of their brains, like your first generation brain wealth, right? These people were actually very progressive. You know, this is your, you know, your Steve jobs and stuff like that at that period, right?

Like it's super, super progressive. Then as half of this coalition left, the coalition became somewhat unviable, and the base of the coalition began to get angry. And then a new demographic, a new voter demographic came to exist. [00:07:00] This is the demographic that Trump appealed to. And I would say this is the, angry disenfranchised. So essentially the conservative party went from a big business old money alliance with theocrats to a angry disenfranchised Americans who are just angry at the way the system is working and do not believe that it cares about them at all.

Now this created a huge problem for Trump in his first administration. If you're trying to staff your administration with people who are disenfranchised well, often they're disenfranchised for a reason and they're really thinking with their emotions. It's not that everyone is, but in the early Trump era, that was to an extent the case.

And it made it very hard to build like a cohesive, Working institution. You need some group of like a large pool of competent, hardworking individuals who are okay with working at least adjacent to bureaucracies to staff something like this. Well, these individuals didn't exist in this early era of Trump.[00:08:00]

And then. Something queer happened. A new conservative faction began to arise. So if this is the faction that is called in media often the new right, or that we in previous episodes have called the techno Republicans, either individuals like Elon, Peter Thiel, Clemasse, Vivek, David Sachs, Mark Andreessen.

And JD Vance these individuals typically hated Trump when he first came to power. And then as we've talked about in other episodes some people like JD Vance, but also many other thinkers, they began to bridge the gap with this community. So this community had begun to move against the progressives for two reasons.

They saw that progressivism was beginning to become a Nazi cult, as we pointed out before, you know, they value human dignity based on a person's ethnic group with Jews at the bottom. And when they were like, no, they don't, you know, they literally so, so if you look at the the [00:09:00] National Academy of Sciences, engineering and medicine recommended prioritizing racial minorities for COVID vaccines, they sought safe lives and ACIP of the CDC indicated that it went with this framework when it was deciding, so they were literally not based on a person's medical needs, but based on a person's race, they believe some races were more deserving of human dignity than other races.

And you look in there like, Oh, we don't. hate Jews. It's just a Zionist. And then I, you know, you point it to a video of a Jewish person, not a Zionist walking on a college campus and being randomly attacked by a group of progressives. Like, no, you can say you don't feel that way, but that's what's become the mainstream of your party.

And then you can look at the, You know, castration of children that's become more and more rampant and they're like, Oh, we're doing this to save trans kids, but we know from the 2024 study development of gender non consensus during adolescent and early adulthood that so this is a 2024 really good longitudinal paper.

Over nine and 10, 11 year olds who feel [00:10:00] discontent with their gender and aren't given the social transition stuff. They end up growing up to be a 23-year-old who is 100% convi, you know, comfortable with their gender, but they're either just gay or autistic. Right. And just

Simone Collins: sterilizing a portion of autistic and, well, it's not

Malcolm Collins: abortion, it's nine gay and autistic kids for everyone, trans kid, like it is insane.

And a lot of these. You know, pull yourself up by your bootstraps people then realized and you know, this was a message made clear by people like JD Vance's and one of our Appalachian viewers sent this to us. They said Vance is urging the tech elite side to side with what he said first, he said that the tech elite sided with.

the liberal elite or the big business owners. Cause they were both elite historically, but I don't actually think these two groups are really ever on the same side for that long. In the era of ,

GOP Inc.

Malcolm Collins: the tech elite were always on the progressive side and the the other faction, the big business and blue bloods, they were always on the conservative [00:11:00] side.

So they're just reorienting things in the way that they naturally reoriented. And it was, you know, Vance is urging the tech elites to side with rural Appalachia because rural Appalachia is scrappy and entrepreneurial. We have a quote unquote, pull yourself up by your boots mentality, the tech entrepreneurs like, and that is true.

They actually found a great deal of personal synergy. And as the. Progressive group began to become more religious, i. e. just believe these things. It doesn't matter what the data says. It doesn't matter what's obvious and real to you. I mean, so you had this switch and this was the core switch that happened.

during the Trump era, or this happened recently is in the nineties, it was big business intergenerational wealth conservative tech entrepreneurs progressive. Now it's tech entrepreneurs conservative intergenerational wealth and big money or big business is Progressive. And so this, which then explains to me also why GOP Inc's remnants are so damn communist.

Because I [00:12:00] did not understand this to begin with. GOP Inc historically had to appease the big business interests. It had to appease, it was an alliance between theocrats and big business and intergenerational wealth. They had to, you know, go for this more capitalistic like approach. When all of that left, they no longer needed to appease that faction, and that faction left all of their you know, Yeah, intellectual circles, everything like that.

And as such, they began to think, and also they were not the old Calvinists of old, right? Like, this is mostly like a Catholic group these days. Yeah, and there's

Simone Collins: nothing inherently capitalistic about Catholicism or being a Baptist or being, You know, an evangelical Christian of like any typical American sort.

Right. So.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Well, it's something that the wokes actually used to chastise them for. Why aren't you feeding the poor? If that's what your Jesus guy was all about, why aren't you helping the disenfranchised? And they've moved to a, [00:13:00] actually, this is what we need to do mindset. But then there's the other filtering mechanism that pushed them into this position.

The secondary filtering mechanism that pushed them into this position is these are individuals who have spent their entire adult careers working within bureaucracies. Conservatives that don't have a socialist bent to them or a pro bureaucracy bent to them are not going to be able to maintain those positions their entire lives.

Simone Collins: So, yeah, just the ones who survived in the same establishment long enough are going to be inherently bureaucratic.

Malcolm Collins: Absolutely.

Simone Collins: That. Huh. Okay.

Malcolm Collins: And so that's what caused this transformation, but there, there is a secondary thing at play here. Well, first I want to hear your thoughts on this first bit here.

Simone Collins: This makes a lot of sense. It's, it was always confusing to me that, you know, I always saw conservatives as being let markets make a solution, [00:14:00] right? Right. Let business do business. And. You know, less government is good. And then to show up at NatCon this year and hear people there say, Oh no, bureaucracy is good.

I just want it to be more Christian or you know, Well, f**k

Malcolm Collins: the base was one of the things they said, or let's ban pornography or let's, you know, like all these sort of like

Simone Collins: big government good. As long as it's run by us kind of mindsets. Really blew my mind. And this free market approach was gone.

I also thought that cultural sovereignty was universal across all conservatives. You know, basically don't tell me how to live my life. Like I want to practice my religious freedom and therefore. You know, we should all be fighting for that. The fact that conservatives, despite the fact that really all they should be fighting for right now, like they should before getting to be coercive, to impose your [00:15:00] culture on other people, even if that is your ultimate plan, it's so bizarre to me.

That they're not first saying, okay, just let me do my thing instead of forcing me to do your thing. They're just immediately no, you're going to do my thing. Which is also bizarre to me. I would expect them to first try to get to a neutral point before they go to the other extreme. From being forced to forcing.

So, yeah, I didn't understand that. And now that you're showing me how there's factions forming. And, yeah. Also that Trump has chosen a faction that's not GOP, Inc. I'm quite heartened.

Malcolm Collins: Yes. So now I need to read to you because I found this. Fascinating. I decided to bring some questions to AI to see if it's just me who's thinking this. Am I imagining something? Is there really a new faction of conservatism? What do they care about? So I went to Perplexity and I asked, I am trying to name a growing faction of conservatives that includes voices like Elon, Peter Thiel, Chamath and Vivek [00:16:00] Ramaswamy.

Who else would you put in this group? This growing faction of conservatives you're referring to is often called the New Right or the Silicon Valley Right. It includes tech entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, and business leaders who have shifted towards more conservative right wing views. Based on the search results and additional context, here are some key figures that should be considered part of this group.

Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Chamath, Vivek Ramaswamy, David Sachs, JD Vance. So you notice it unprompted included JD Vance in this group. So it's not just me who's saying JD is in this group. It's a, I prime an AI was this. And it's like, yeah, he's part of this new, right. And Marc Andreessen. This group has a few common traits and then it goes into like their you know, Silicon Valley background and everything like that.

But then I thought something else was really interesting. So I did a follow up where I said, what are common policy positions? They push. And it said, because I thought this was an interesting summary. The new right or Silicon Valley right, which includes figures like Elon Musk, Peter [00:17:00] Thiel, Chamath Palsa, and Vivek Ramaswamy shares several common policy positions.

These include economic libertarianism. They advocate for free market principles, reduced government intervention in the economy and deregulation. Well, yeah. With the neoliberal act, this is what I thought conservatism

Simone Collins: was. That's just so

Malcolm Collins: weird. Which emphasizes individual freedom and responsibility, and minimum state intervention and economic affairs.

Cultural conservatism, this group often holds socially conservative views, including a commitment to traditional values and public morality. They tend to oppose progressive cultural movements and emphasize the importance of maintaining cultural. norms and traditions, skepticism of elite institutions.

There is a strong distrust of established elites and mainstream institutions such as media, academia, and government agencies. The skepticism is rooted in the belief that these institutions are dominated by leftist ideologies that seek to undermine conservative values and policies. So, so far you're like, Oh, this is like a hundred percent us.

Native or sorry, nationalism and populism. populism. They often support nationalist policies that [00:18:00] prioritize the interests of their own country over globalist agendas. They, this includes a focus on America First policies and a resistance to international agreements that they perceive to undermine national sovereignty.

Free speech and anti censorship. A significant policy position is a defense of free speech and opposition to what they see as censorship by tech platforms and other institutions. They argue that current policies disproportionately silence conservative voices. A critique of woke culture. They are vocal critics of woke culture and identity politics, which they believe stifles free expression and promotes division.

This includes opposition to affirmative action and other policies they view as promoting social justice at the expense of a meritocracy. Exactly us,

Simone Collins: I would say it's us, except for when it comes to social policy, I would say that we take a much more free market or libertarian approach to social policy, which isn't to say that we don't know all over and criticize certain social approaches, but we take it more from a liberal approach.

Well, they suck and [00:19:00] they're going to disappear. Like they're going to fail.

Malcolm Collins: We've talked about creating government departments that fund episodes of shows like they did in the seventies about like anti drug shows that are like cornet films that like, you know, show large, So no, we're totally in that.

We promote the idea of the government intervening in companies that own the medium of communication in the same way. The United States government used to nationalize things like the postal service and create really heavy regulations around things like telephone lines, and yet we don't have that around things like the companies like YouTube, for example, that might censor what you and I are saying to each other.

I agree

Simone Collins: with you on that. Where I would draw the line with our policy. So is coercive tactics like saying this is

Malcolm Collins: it's saying that this group doesn't do that. So it's not relevant

Simone Collins: anyway. So next, I don't know. I mean, where I will like,

Malcolm Collins: you know, JD Vance is JD Vance is really on the edge of this group.

He's got a foot in both communities. But he speaks to this group and he is adjacent to this group, but I wouldn't call him an avatar of this group. If you're looking for an avatar of this [00:20:00] group, you're looking for someone like Elon Musk. Yeah. And the same way that Peter Thiel built his political opinion sort of before this group existed, and he's also been an influence in JD Vance, which has influenced him with a lot of mysticism which is why people like James Lindsay freaked out when JD Vance was admitted.

'cause he sees a lot of JD Vance's mysticism that came from some of the influencers of Peter Thiel and we'll likely do a different episode of that. I'm not as worried about that. You know, I think that, and this is a fresh take that you're gonna hear to hear. While I support Trump and JD Vance, I do believe that God gives man signs.

And when I see a group of people walking around in red hats that say witch on them, I'm like, eventually these people are going to be our enemies. And we need to take that into consideration. For people who do not know MAGA is a. Is the feminine version of Mago, you know, when you read the Bible, like Simon of Magos, i.

e. Simon, the sorcerer it means a female searcher, sorcerer, i. e. a witch. The Bible tells us do not, it tells us to [00:21:00] be wary of witches. And so when a group of people come to, I just think that God makes these things obvious. It's weird. How freaking obvious as sometimes that God makes his will and I think that this is one of those instances where we just haven't had to deal with it yet.

Right now they are on our side, but God has told us to not overcast our chips. Okay. What? You disagree or you feel uncomfortable with the fact that there is a group of, that's a weird thing, right? That's gotta be weird to you. It's red hats that say which on them.

Simone Collins: Make America great

Malcolm Collins: again.

That's a weird phrase. It's a weird, it's weird that they shortened it and it's weird that it says which

Simone Collins: not really, maybe I'm on, I'm too autistic to get it. You're a schizoid enough to get it. You know what I mean? I'm

Malcolm Collins: schizoid enough to be, you're like, yeah, it's a group of people who wear red hats that say, [00:22:00] which.

They don't say

Simone Collins: which they say

Malcolm Collins: MAGA it's which in, in, in Latin, sweetheart, it's loud

Simone Collins: define MAGA Google type in what does MAGA

Malcolm Collins: mean in Latin, the language of the church.

Simone Collins: Okay, Latin. Fine. Because, yeah, because everyone's still doing mass in Latin.

I'm not

Malcolm Collins: choosing some obscure language here, Simone.

Simone Collins: Wizard, sorcerer, poisoner, poisonous, magical, magus, noun, adjective.

Malcolm Collins: I'm just saying, it's not like I'm choosing, like, Schizo or something Latin. The language of the church. Sorry I just gotta be like anyway, so I'll go further here. What does it say after that? It says that they use the use of government to counter leftist influence. , unlike class. The liberals who believe in limiting government power, the new right advocates for using government power strategically to counteract what they see as overreach of the left and cultural institutions and spheres.

These positions reflect a blend [00:23:00] of economic liberalism and cultural conservatism, aiming to reshape the political landscape by challenging both traditional conservative and liberal paradigm. And I looked at this and I was like, wow, this is a weird coalition of political beliefs that I thought you and I had come up with on our own.

But it's like, no, like this is, or not come up with on our own. But like, I thought that our political position was more unique than I think it really is. I think it's a reflection of a mainstream and growing faction of the conservative party and one that has to an extent just been knighted by Trump. I'm wondering your thoughts on this.

Simone Collins: Yeah, I think it's a good side, a good sign that we're converging on something similar because it implies that it is a natural and logical reaction to where we are as a society, economy and government. It's a good thing. It's a good sign. And I'm glad to know that we're not alone. But I'm also disturbed to know that this wasn't the norm, because I [00:24:00] have that same bias that most people do, which is, you assume that if someone is nice and reasonable, and they seem intelligent, that they hold the same views as you.

And going to NatCon and seeing that, Oh, actually the establishment of Republicans, which are nice, wonderful, smart people that I like. If so, of course I assume that they're going to, they're going to hold out the same stances as we are, really don't. And they're part of this old faction, which is largely socialist, which is quite socially coercive.

You know, that wants to ban porn that wants to do all the, I mean, they also want to do some other things like in Project 2025. Led by the Heritage Foundation, which is definitely of the old guard. But seems curious about the new guard. So that's good. Looks like it could update.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah.

Simone Collins: Yeah. It looks like it could update.

But you know, like there are some things that seem more in line with new stuff, you know, like sort of breaking out a lot of ossified bureaucracy seems to be a part of it. But then also these, you know, more coercive or very conservative, socially conservative tactics. I don't know.

Malcolm Collins: I mean, Trump has been very clear about where [00:25:00] he stands on this.

So, you know, if you look at like, how do you merge these two groups? Because there are IE the tech entrepreneur group and the You know, angry disenfranchised group, right? Because there are a few areas where they're going to chafe with each other, right? And Trump has done it. So for example, then new Republicans are generally pro gay people being able to live their lives.

Huh? They're even pro adult trans people, but they are very antagonistic. For example, as JD has two programs that try to transition children or that try to convince or really brainwash children into this weird gender ideology cult thing that we've talked about in other episodes. And the, where I say that, you know, like.

A cult basically grew under trans ideology. And I think that most of the new Republicans realize that, and they're very scared by that.

Is the holy guide to living pure, this will help explain. First, [00:26:00] Laughter. Her name's Lorraine, too? We're all Lorraine, and you will be Todd. A name chosen especially for you oh. You're not

An oppressed minority. you're a cult!

Excuse me, are y'all with the cult? We're not a cult. We're an organization that promotes love and Yeah, this is it

Malcolm Collins: So, so I want to read something from Richard Hanania. He tweeted this. So he said, Trump personally dictated the new RNC language on abortion and gay marriage, which are, I think, the two issues.

where these two groups need to be able to synergize, i. e. the tech elite are okay with being more restrictive on these things. And the disenfranchised Americans often want to go on absolute positions towards these things, or there's a small faction of them that does that is really loud. Actually I wouldn't even say, the rural disenfranchised group doesn't care about these things.

The group that cares about these things is GOP Inc. And Trump is trying to keep enough of GOP Inc., was basically telling them [00:27:00] to f**k off. He

Simone Collins: has to. I mean, it's still a significant contingent.

Malcolm Collins: Well, it's a significant contingent of funding. But it's not, you know, as voters, it's not the future of the party.

No. And so what is Trump doing here? So I'll read what Richard Hanania said. Trump personally dictated the new RNC language on abortion and gay marriage. His team put the delegates in a room, took their phones, and Trump said, you're going to pass this and you're going to do it quickly. Night of long knives.

For social conservatives is what it was called. And then he showed something from a a paper that had come out on this or an announcement about this. Mr. Trump made clear to his team that he wanted the 2024 platform to be his and his alone. He wanted it to be much shorter and simpler. And in some cases, vaguer.

He was especially focused on the language about abortion, which he recognized as a potentially potent issue against him in a general election. He actually wanted. Nothing in the platform that would give Democrats an opening to [00:28:00] attack him. And he made clear to his aides that he was perfectly fine with bucking social conservatives for whom he had delivered a tremendous victory by reshaping the Supreme court was a conservative supermajority fair um, Mr.

Trump also. stressed that he did not want to define marriage as between one man and one woman. Instead, the document contains a vague statement open to interpretation. Quote, Republicans will promote a culture that values the sanctity of marriage, end quote. He could not be throwing in harder with the new Republicans and against GOP Inc if he tried.

These are issues that don't matter to the world disenfranchised that much. Okay. So, so, so he's choosing a side between GOP, Inc and new Republicans. He's saying or, and the new right or tech concert techno conservative, as we call them sometimes. And he's saying it's a new right. That's who I'm with.

And I think it's incredibly true. [00:29:00] But do you have any further thoughts here?

Simone Collins: Well, what does this mean for the longer term future of the party, especially if Trump wins, having made this tone setting decision? Well,

Malcolm Collins: it means that he's sane and he's aware of what the base actually wants. So, According to especially the Young Base according to Pew in 2014, 61 percent of Republicans under 30 favored same sex marriage, while only 35 percent opposed it.

It's an incredibly unpopular opinion. Gallup poll from 2021 showed that 55 percent of Republicans overall, so this is overall, not just young Republicans, favored same sex marriage. Supported same sex marriage. It's a majority opinion in the Republican party. In 2015, 63 percent of Republicans under 30 supported protecting LGBT individuals from discrimination.

So again, the majority, when you're talking about young conservatives are pro that.

And then if you look at Pew, nearly half of Republicans younger than 30 say that abortion should be legal in all most cases. So this is [00:30:00] far to the left of our opinions on abortion 47%. And so this is the next generation.

And then you can say, well, what about like the mainstream conservatives? I can put a graph on screen here. It shows that 64 percent say do not take this life begins at conception mindset. They want to, you know, restrict abortion, but they still want it to be accessible. I think JD Vance's public initial point on this, the 12 week position actually falls in line with what a lot of Europe thinks on this point.

And probably what we'd agree with, I think 12 weeks are pretty good. It's interestingly, It's also around where Islam believe it's an installment happens. And it's not that far from early Catholic thinkers on when installment happens. So I find that pretty interesting. And it also, interestingly, I find this really interestingly is that if you correlate the early Catholic thinkers with what we actually know about the science and we'll get more into like abortion stuff in a different episode it correlates with when the nervous system begins developing.

So I think. that, you know, when the church was still in communion with [00:31:00] God, it understood God's will in regards to this, because that's actually kind of remarkable that they sort of guessed when the nervous system started developing without any knowledge of that. But anyway. That's like our religious.

I'm going to take that aside. But what I'm saying is if you're like, what's the consequence of him outlying himself with this faction, he's outlying himself with factions that represent the base, not factions that represent an out of touch and bureaucratic elite cast that really have nothing to do with the party anymore.

And another point we'll get to in another episode, which I really love to talk to you more, is this deontological religious system that in the nineties people thought was stable. And you had like the quiver full movement and stuff like that. Their kids deconverted at astronomically high rates. It turns out it's just not an intergenerationally stable system.

They were like, we're going to create the generation of Joshua. We'll do a few episodes on this. But what turns out and I think you're seeing this and like, The eight passengers family, for example, right? When you take this deontological moral perspective, it is very bad at intergenerational, like keeping [00:32:00] people and the groups that are doing that are just not relevant to the future.

It is the active theological conversation and in consequentialist moral systems, which seem to be able to actually motivate high fertility, which you see across traditions, whether it's Catholic or Mormon or something like that, you see some factions that are adopting these and maintaining high fertility.

But thoughts.

Simone Collins: That makes sense. And I'm excited for that, but is there a chance that this highly socialist, we'll say Christian socialist faction instead becomes a dominant faction and how would that play

Malcolm Collins: out in population numbers? Not at all. I think that we have a risk from them. Like, so, so the Heritage Foundation where they're like, we'll do Project 2025 and we'll staff the White Fest for you.

Trump, don't worry about it. We'll handle it all. Trump telling them basically to go off was very smart. I like Heritage Foundation people, I think they can update, but this original plan of like banning pornography saying life begins at conception, which basically means IVF gets [00:33:00] banned, you know?

putting kids on a military list. You know, this is not the new Republicans. This is some weird old theocratic holdout. And I think that when I talk to people at the Heritage Foundation, many of them are totally rational, normal people who follow the base. What I'm assuming is there's probably some donors to them.

Or some faction that they think they need to please, or maybe some old people who are still haven't been purged from these organizations. And during the Trump administration, because Trump seems very alive to this, you know, they're going to go through and they're going to clean house so that we can and then begin hiring people like you and me and other thought leaders in the new right to begin to add a.

Perspective that is more representative of both the Republican base, but also the Republican next generation, which is important if we want to keep the party healthy and strong. There, I think there was a plan to try to take over. with a Christian Marxist value [00:34:00] system. And we even saw this was the pronatalist movement.

I mean, Limestone did this. Limestone wrote this like manifesto about how the Collins's aren't true pronatalist because the Collins's aren't socialist. They don't believe because they look at the evidence that social handouts work that cash payments to families work, that the government should have control of how many kids the family should have.

And therefore, They are anti natalist. And it's like, I love that he's like, therefore they're not conservative or they're not the new right. Were two of the words he used. And I was like, we're not conservative because we're not Marxist. But I think that a lot of people like him they do, they have attempted over and over again to try to Wrestle control of movements that, you know, other people have built people like Trump, people like us.

And you just need to be vigilant against them. And frankly, they need to be shamed and kicked a bit. Like, when I think kicked a bit, I think Trump did a good job with the project. 2025 saying, I don't think he needs to throw out this database. I think he should probably use it. I think [00:35:00] he can work with the Heritage Foundation, as long as they understand, don't try to like, take your socialist nonsense, your far left, wokey, ban porn nonsense, and try to insect it into the What is actually the conservative basis desires these days or banning gay marriage or something like that.

Like this is not modern conservatism. Okay. It's not what the base wants. It's not what the new philosophers in the party want. It is and I think that a lot of these groups can learn. I think that they need to. come to accept that their theological traditions are not a majority enough of the American population to do anything other than hurt them.

When you put these extremist positions around when life begins or gay marriage or something like that, even if you believe in them, right? Like, even if you think, Oh, it's good that the government's enforcing people to live this way, which doesn't get anyone else into heaven. So I don't like, even if that, right?

And I really want to [00:36:00] stress this point again. There is no Christian denomination, which believes that you have helped a person's chance of getting into heaven. By adjudicating their morality. If anything you've just removed an opportunity for them to reflect on their own immortality and potentially build a relationship with God. , so you have a hurt them in that regards and you have hurt our society further by preventing Republican candidates from potentially winning. To play this little silly. I don't know what it is.

Status game. It makes no sense.

Malcolm Collins: You are hurting conservatives ability to win because this isn't something most of the conservative base agrees with it's something that galvanizes Democrats to get out there and vote. I think sort of the last gift that that the sort of transitional group, Trump's group gave to these people.

Was this conservative Supreme Court [00:37:00] was the Supreme Court decision on abortion, which I think is just, I do think this should be a state's rights issue. And now we need to move on with what conservatives actually think instead of what these small pockets of extremists think that conservatives should think if they weren't so stupid, is basically what they think.

I mean, that's what we got from the conference is a lot of these people just think that the base is stupid because if they look at. This disenfranchised angry group of voters in the same way that the leftist bureaucrats do. They're like, just sit back, relax, and let the bureaucrats make all the decisions.

Simone Collins: This gives me hope, Malcolm. And it makes a lot of sense. It helps to explain a bunch of things that really confused me about what are conservatives now? But it's exciting to see things moving in an interesting direction. It's just kind of crazy. Also how capitalism is kind of going full circle.

I see the cycle there of, you know, originally one could say like productive world changing companies were conservatives. And began to [00:38:00] falter. And now once again, sort of productive world changing companies are conservative. So just different from a new wave of capitalism, a new wave of business formation.

So that's also interesting.

Malcolm Collins: Well, that's actually really interesting. I think both theocratically and in terms of business, the conservative circles are the ones where intellectually lively discussions are happening.

Simone Collins: Right. Yeah. Where generation is happening. I feel like conservatism feels more generative to me.

Whereas progressivism feels more degenerative to me rot excess and rot or decline. Whereas conservatism is more the belt tightening, the discipline and then the growth, the new growth.

Malcolm Collins: Well, it's austerity and discipline, I think are two of the conservative values. That you're just not going to get in these progressive circles.

And I think vitalism is becoming a key conservative value instead of you know, the old conservative party that we would argue is, was motivated by like, ick, like against gay because gay, ick, you know? And then we learned that's a stupid way to build morality. Like that's what Mother [00:39:00] Teresa basically taught the world.

Like, yeah just because somebody initiates a disgust reaction in you, like a leopard, doesn't mean you shouldn't hug them and show them love. Like that's a pre evolved thing that was meant to keep you, Healthy and safe and sure you have offspring, but that doesn't mean it's a good sign of actual morality.

Simone Collins: Yeah, a lot of our listeners disagree on that. They're like no Disgust good.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, when I see a deformed person and I feel disgust that's a wonderful thing that's god telling me that they must have sinned was this like Well, you know

Simone Collins: on average in the past, people before Germ theory and whatnot benefited from being afraid of people who had visible problems, open wounds, deformities, et cetera, because it could be associated with the

Malcolm Collins: world system evolved.

But you know, We also, you know, if you go to early Christianity, like what's happening, you know, in the tabernacle, you know, when they're escaping Israel and they're ripping apart birds and throwing blood all over their worship area, like our religion [00:40:00] evolves. Okay. And we need to, and I think that's commanded of us by God is to continue to, and even Catholicism, their view that life begins at conception, evolve.

That's only about. I think 200 years old was a Pius IX. That's not what, you know, Thomas Aquinas thought. That's not what Augustus of Hippo thought. That's a new belief. And that's okay. We evolve and we evolve again until we get closer to what God wants us to believe. That's

Simone Collins: what techno puritanism is all

Malcolm Collins: about.

Right, my friend. Oh yeah. I love you, Simone. You are an. Absolute star. What are we having tonight? I mean, we're gonna people hated us for our last night's food. They were like, Oh, this is not what a carnivore eats. You know, you're

Simone Collins: having teriyaki beef with stir fried

Malcolm Collins: rice. I'm very excited for that. I've actually been saving up for that today because I'm really looking forward to that.

Yeah. They were like, what about your seed oils? Cause I was having what? Like gyoza last time and like tomato soup. And I don't know, maybe I'm getting my seed oils. [00:41:00] I actually don't care. I don't want to live forever.

Simone Collins: I thought seed oils were out.

Malcolm Collins: I don't know. They're like, look at a rye nationalists.

You know, we've had them on the show, right? He'd tell us that the way we're eating is like terribly unhealthy. And I'm like, I really don't care. Like, I'm not here to live forever. I believe in forever puppy. That's the way we see humanity. People are like, why are you so okay with dying?

Are you tired of your puppies getting too big to handle? Are you sick of your cute little puppies turning into dogs? Then try Forever Puppy. Our puppies are guaranteed to stay youthful and lovable permanently. Each Forever Puppy is backed by our lifetime guarantee. If your puppy is starting to lose that youthful innocence and charm, bring it back to any one of our 500 locations, and we'll exchange it for free.

Malcolm Collins: Where it's, do you know what I'm talking about? No, but I can guess. You take it back whenever it gets old and it begins to become boring and sad and [00:42:00] nihilistic.

Simone Collins: And then it becomes

Malcolm Collins: excited again, just like our kids. Oh god, I love you. I love you, too