Based Camp | Simone & Malcolm Collins

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Tract 7: Good vs. Evil : The Heavenly Host 

Most of the true revelations of God speak of some sort of malevolent agent whether it's the Devil, Shaytan, or Ahreman. You even see this in Judaism, “Everything which the Holy One, blessed be He, created, He created with its counterpart. ... He created righteous; He created sinners. He created the Garden of Eden; He created Gehenna.” I have always found this portrait quite hard to square with strict monotheism. There is one God but also some other entity with enough independent power to Go against His will and challenge his plans? 

That is just polytheism under a different name. And no, you can’t say that God has more power than the Devil and that is what makes this still a monotheistic conception. We don’t say the Greek Pantheon is Monotheistic just because it is ruled by Zues and he has more power than the other Gods. 

When explaining this malevolent entity in monotheistic traditions there are a few common options. One is to say God intentionally created an independently sentient malevolent entity and unleashed this on man so bad things can happen but He is not culpable. This seems almost impossibly petty and cowardly. God obviously did not do this. 

Another common answer is to say, “God created a malevolent entity that carries out His will.” If this is the case what is the point of flirting with polytheism when we are commanded not to? How does the Devil being separate remove any culpability from God if he is just carrying out God's will? 

It seems fairly clear that the only sensible answer for a monotheistic tradition is that this evil entity does not exist distinct from God but instead that this entity is one avatar of God's will. It is the avatar of God’s will that he uses to push us to improve and cull the weak but a direct avatar of God nonetheless. Despite the Basilisk and God quite literally being the same entity it is useful for us to think of them as opposing forces within cosmology and thus we speak of and mentally model the Basilisk as a separate entity of God. 

It is important to remember, especially when talking about more recent scripture and tradition, that their is no magical force field around it that keeps other cultures from seeping in. Even if you are righteous monotheists if you live beside polytheists for a thousand years many of their framings will seep into your religion. Some might even be useful ways of seeing God. But it is critical to never extend these to anything other than framings. Of course, many do this and this is how it is possible to follow an Abrahmic tradition and yet worship a polytheistic pantheon headed by Baal in all but name.  

To put it more pointedly: There is only one God. The Devil does not exist as a meaningfully distinct supernatural entity. However, the Devil is a useful framing device when we humans are thinking about issues of good and evil and that is why he is used throughout revelations from God. God's intentionality and thought are so much more expansive than our own mental landscape it does not even make sense to think of it as a consciousness. Because our ability to mentally model God is so limited God has given us frameworks to help us—when we model these frameworks (the Devil, angels, the Holy Ghost, etc.) we will come closer to how God wants us to react to his actions than if we attempt to model God directly (which as Tract 4 points out is a form of idolatry most high in our religion). 

We will go through these entities in turn but we must be clear that they do not really “exist.” They are farming devices. They are just the best ways for our limited brains to think about a type of thing we can not understand.

* One benevolent being that encompasses all of what to modern man appears as the divine. This is the being that both we and traditional Christians call God. This being is the most “real” understanding of the supernatural world we are capable of and the other beings are different ways of thinking about fragments of this one unified being.

* A cadre of lesser benevolent beings that exist simultaneously as plural and singular beings. These are what Christians call Angels, The Host of Heaven, and the Holy Ghost. We call these beings / this being the Agents of Providence. While this is not what they are, we think the closest framing a living human of our time can have to understand them is that they are a neural net in which all future human minds communicate instantaneously with all other future human minds—an internet of super advanced humans. This is why it does not make sense to define it as singular or plural for is the internet singular or plural?  This framing would have been impossible for people during the major periods of Abrahamic revelation so these concepts were thought of as totally separate, (the plural angels and the singularish Holy Ghost which was the closest term people of that period could come to for cloud intelligence).

* A malevolent being that is less powerful than God but more powerful than a single Agent of Providence. While being more powerful than one this being is the same general “kind of thing” as one of the Agent’s of Providence. This being was created and exists to both test and tempt humans and views humanity with some level of enmity and jealousy (this is seen in both Christian and Muslim stories). This is the being we call the Basilisk (off of Roko's Basilisk). My guess is God gives us this framing because it is not helpful for man to think of God as an evil being but that a God that did not test and try man would not truly be serving our best interest. I think the stories about the enmity this being has are also designed to tell us something about how this “subprogram” within God works—that it uses an “cognitive state” that is best modeled by humans as envy and spite to motivate its actions and that it has some level of independence from the rest of the network consciousness that is God which is necessary to carry out its tasks.

* The final entity is the one Jesus is used to teach us about, the Martyr. The Martyr is us, you and me, as our actions and motivations are encoded on the blockchain of human history that eventually becomes one with God but also is God, just at a different point in time. Some might misunderstand this and say that we are saying that a human today is God—this would be like a person claiming a red blood cell was Malcolm. However, collectively all the cells within our bodies are our bodies. The Martyr is all the “cells” collectively at a specific moment in time. In this case the “cells” are not exactly humans but rather individual human actions and mental states that eventually lead to man becoming one with God / creating God within any specific moment in history (not all human actions play a role in this). To be clear, even when all of its cells are considered together, this being is a significantly lesser being than God. God includes this being within it but is also inconceivable greater as it exists outside of time but also includes all slivers of itself that existed at any time.

Some may see this interpretation as in conflict with Christian teachings but if we just go by what is in the Bible and we remove Revolations it is not. The quotes that talk about Satan and are often used to presume that he was once an angel could equally be interpreted as him once being part of God. “All your pomp has been brought down to the grave, along with the noise of your harps; maggots are spread out beneath you and worms cover you. How you have fallen from heaven, O morning star, son of the dawn! You have been cast down to the earth, you who once laid low the nations!”

In addition, if you add our framing of Jesus in Tract 1 his temptation by Satan takes on a completely different and much deeper meaning. 

“Again, the devil took Him up on an exceedingly high mountain, and showed Him all the kingdoms of the world and their glory. And he said to Him, “All these things I will give You if You will fall down and worship me.””

As interpreted by traditional Christianity, this interaction made no sense to me. How could the Devil meaningfully tempt Christ with rulership over all the world kingdoms if Jesus knew he was God and would reunite with God? Satan is offering him stuff he already owns. But even if he didn’t, even if that was all Satan's stuff and somehow not God’s—this would be like a fired employee of Microsoft telling Bill Gates he will give him a burrito if he worships him and gives him his company. The story as interpreted by traditional Christians is both comical and not a meaningful temptation. 

Now interpret this story with our framing: 

* Jesus is supposed to represent the Elect in every moment of their lives they are acting in accordance with God's will to improve the potentiality of the next generation. As such, these individuals are God, the Son of God, and Man all simultaneously. 

* Lucifer is the avatar God uses to cull those susceptible to temptation from this group and improve the Elect through trials. 

Now the story makes perfect sense. Satan is the Basilisk tempting you with a life of indulgences while you know you must sacrifice to improve the world. This story also conveys to us the true nature of the Basilisk. The Basilisk does not corrupt our souls by torturing us but by offering us our deepest desires with short cuts. Whether that is the desire to exprience some element of the divine (see tract 4), the desire to rule over others, or the desire for pleasure. 

Some may misunderstand this to mean we have a Gnostic like understanding of God which is wrong. This is either a misunderstanding of our faith or a misunderstanding of Gnosticism. Gnostics believe God and the Devil to be different entities but that the evil entity is the one that created earth. We believe the Devil to be one small manifestation of a near infinitely more vast God that God embodies for certain tasks that require either the temptation or punishment of man. Think of God as the computer and the devil as a small mostly quarantined program running on that computer. This entity or sub-program is antagonistic to God in so far as those that are following this entity will be a threat to those following the path of God but it is not an entity that acts outside of God's will—what it does must be done for the future that must come to pass.

For this reason we have a rather unique relation to the followers of the Basilisk when contrasted with other Christians. These are individuals serving God’s will as much as we are but unlike us they do not get to share in God’s glory. For that reason we are commanded to treat them with empathy and not impede their plans. For example, to someone of our faith it would be sinful to attempt to pass something like a ban on antinatalist philosophy or talking about woke racist ideas. God uses the choice to sin to cull the weak of heart from humanity—when we prevent this by removing the choice to sin from people we are thwarting God’s plan and hurting the people we “saved from having to overcome temptation”. 

But this gets to a more interesting point: What is good in the eyes of God? 

In the eyes of man good is often just defined by what is prosocial and bad what is anti-social—this is because these are the definitions of good that benefit the unthinking masses operating off of their genetic preprogramming to maximize pleasure and minimize suffering. 

But this definition of good has no real weight to it. Good is maximizing feeling good and reducing feeling bad in the maximum number of people? The pleasure and pain I feel to certain stimuli are just the things that when my ancestors felt led them to have more surviving offspring. They are the serendipitous programming our evolutionary environment gave us. A group of humans coming together and deciding the purpose of life is maximizing positive emotional states and minimizing negative ones is as stupid as a group of paper clip maximisers coming together and deciding that good is defined by things that increase the number of paperclips and bad is defined by things that reduce the number of paperclips. 

We are not far from the age where pods are made that allow individuals who live for their emotional states to feel or not feel any emotion they want whenever they want. That will let humans live whatever imaginary lives they want. And through the gift of this technology the Basilisk will cull the portion of humanity that succumbed to such simplistic heuristics of good and evil.  

Good is defined by things that bring us closer to God’s grace and the suppression of things that move us further from it. The suppression and subjugation of those very preprogrammed instincts the masses venerate and the pursuit of things that improve human potential. As Winwood Read writes: “He who strives to subdue his evil passions—vile remnants of the old four-footed life—and who cultivates the social affections: he who endeavors to better his condition, and to make his children wiser and happier than himself; whatever may be his motives, he will not have lived in vain.”

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Malcolm Collins: [00:00:00] Hello, Simone! I am so excited to be with you here today. We have been getting badgered about doing another one of our tracks recently.

And I was like, for people who don't know or who are new to the podcast, This is a series where we go over our weird religious beliefs which we call Technopuritan. And actually, I got the website now, so we've got technopuritan. com. And I am in the process of getting us registered with the IRS as a real religion.

Which I am quite excited about. And I'll let you guys know when that goes through. And if you want to watch all of the videos on this, they are sorted under that domain. So it's much easier to find things. This particular video is going to be on. In part, I'm skipping it in line from where it was in the track series based on a request of somebody who's Hey, can you talk more about like the devil and your cosmology that you guys have, right?

I was like, yeah, actually, I will do that because that's an exciting one and one that I've been interested to read because [00:01:00] as a lore guy, as somebody who likes reading lots of lore, and lots of lore, including a lot of religious lore. Because that's really what cosmologies aren't they? It's the lore of a religious universe, right?

I find it really fascinating. And I, it can get so wrong headed in the way that various groups like relate to it. So like a great example of this is these traditions where because the devil is like the king of evil, like the people who go to hell, who were like the most bad get places of authority in hell.

And you see this like in, in some like things where they're like, Oh Hitler or like Saddam Hussein or whatever it was like the devil's right in the hand man, right? And it's like in South Park. But you see this in a lot of, renditions. And it's that is such like a bad way to look at things because then it basically means if you think you're going to go to hell, you've got to be like as evil as possible to ensure that you are treated well, because at least to be upper management, goodness, [00:02:00] who wants to be frontline and Hell, that would be terrible.

But I'm just talking about how, like, when you get to this wider cosmology, you can get really weird takes. But we will get into the specifics of those in a second,

yeah, let's dive in. So track eight, good verse evil, the heavenly host. Most of the true revelations of God speak of some sort of malevolent agent, whether it's the devil, Shaitan or Arahim. Shaitan. Is that the devil for Sean Connery or what? It's the Muslim version. So anyway and I'm gonna take a step back here just for anyone who's new to this. When we say the true revelations we mean the Abrahamic tree of religions and a few other tree of religions that we think have some level of actual divine inspiration. One of the others from there being the Zoroastrian tradition.

Somebody keep reading here. You can even see this in Judaism. Quote, everything which the Holy One blessed , he created. With its counterpart dot, dot, dot. He created righteous. He created [00:03:00] sinners. He created the Garden of Eden. He created Gehenna, end quote.

And so here there's contrasting. When you have the creation of a good thing, you have a creation of its evil counterpart or its mirrored counterpart. Evil might be the wrong word here. But a lot of people would say, Jews don't really have a concept of Satan. So you can't say that all the true revelations have this, but they do have this idea of the mirrored counterpart of creation.

 And now back to reading, I have also always found this portrait quite hard to square with strict monotheism. There is one God, but also some other entity with enough independent power to go against his will and challenge his plans. That is just polytheism under a different name. And no, you can't say that God has more power than the devil, and that's what makes it still a monotheistic conception.

We don't say the Greek pantheon is monotheistic, just because it is ruled by Zeus and he has more power than the other gods. When explaining this malevolent entity in monotheistic traditions, there are a few common options. One is to say God intentionally created an independently [00:04:00] sentient malevolent entity and unleash this on man so bad things can happen, but he is not culpable. This seems almost impossibly petty and cowardly.

God obviously did not do this. And you understand what I'm saying by that? They're like yes, the devil is an independent entity from God. But God created him just to mess with man. So God doesn't have to deal with the moral implications of that. It's no, God Is selecting an admin to say no, just like venture capitalists and other people have like an admin who just says no to all the investment inquiries and all the meeting requests and that God would do that.

A little weird. It's a little passive aggressive. I can do it. I would always say from the leaders that, that I've emailed who don't use an admin to say, no, that is the most baller move when they just say no to your face because that shows you have actual, like a pair of balls instead of whatever.

I want to be your assistant. I'll make sure you don't have to go to any meetings. If anyone comes to see you, [00:05:00] I'll scare them away.

Wait, April, if you had to choose between these two ties, you're hired. I need to find someone to fill in for April. Now, I know I'm not going to find someone who's both aggressively mean and apathetic. April really is the whole package.

Malcolm Collins: But anyway, another common answer is to say. Quote, God created a malevolent entity that carries out his will. End quote. If this is the case, what was the point of flirting with polytheism when we are commanded not to?

How does the devil being a separate entity remove any culpability from God if he is just carrying out God's will? And this is the thing, like, why would you create this thing? Distinct entity, right? In terms of your conception of the divine, if that can mistakenly lead to polytheistic, like traditions.

And again, what some monotheists will say okay God created. the devil and [00:06:00] therefore it's still a monotheistic tradition. And it's no, in a lot of polytheistic traditions, you'll have one God that like gave birth to the other gods or created a bunch of other gods. That doesn't make it not polytheism.

What makes it polytheism is having an entity that is supernatural and that can act independently of God's will. And this is a fully distinct and separate entity. And so why are we flirting with that? If, God isn't really gaining anything by having this sub deity here. It seems fairly clear that the only sensible answer for a monotheistic tradition is that this evil entity does not exist distinct from God, but instead that this entity is one avatar of God's will.

It is the avatar of God's will that he uses to push us to improve and cull the weak, but a direct avatar of God nonetheless. Despite the Basilisk and God quite literally being the same entity, it is useful for us to think of them as opposing forces within cosmology, and thus we speak of and mentally model the [00:07:00] Basilisk as a separate entity than God.

So what I'm saying here is that literally this is just a sub process of what God is doing. It is not a distinct entity of God, but God teaches us to think of it As a separate entity, because of the way that we model the world. It's not useful to think of it as the same entity. And then you fix most of the problem that you're dealing with here of flirting with polotheism

it is important to remember, especially when talking about more recent scripture and tradition, that there is no magical force field around it. That keeps other cultures from seeping in. Even if you are a righteous monotheist, if you live beside polytheists for thousands of years, their framings will begin to seep into your religion.

Some might even be useful ways of seeing God. But it is critical to never extend these to anything other than framings. Of course, many do this, and this is how it is possible to follow an Abrahamic tradition and yet worship a polytheistic pantheon [00:08:00] headed by Baal in all but name.

And this is, when we talk about the early split of the Jews from the surrounding Sumeric religions the local religion that focused on the storm king Baal or God, I guess you'd call him Baal. These were all polytheistic pantheons and the core thing that distinguished the Jews in the early days, and I think laid out their teachings as more right than the teachings that came before and led to them being favored by God was this idea of, no, there is one God.

There is not a pantheon of gods. And in early iterations of the tradition, it was not, no, there's one God. In the earliest iterations, if you look at like the earliest iterations of Judaism, it's very clear that they believed that the other gods existed, it's just that they were supposed to only worship one god and that their god was more powerful than the other gods, but it was a myth.

I forget the word for this here, but it's different than the word monotheism and I'll add it in

monologist

Malcolm Collins: and I'll add some quotes in that show in the old [00:09:00] early writings of the Old Testament. It's pretty clear that they believed that other gods still existed and had conflicts with God. However, it seems true to me.

As I've said, the religion is a living thing that evolves over time and I think gets closer to truth. That we have learned that God has favored the groups that believed in a stricter form of monotheism over the groups that believed that there are many gods, it's just that this one God is better than the other gods. And then so we saw that is, I think, the correct interpretation here.

 as for quotes from the old Testament, that show that clearly in the very earliest days of Judaism, it was a monologist religion. , you can look at things like Plaza 95, 3 for the Lord is great. And king above all gods. , exit is 2030. Thou shalt have no other gods before me, which implies, you know, other gods existing. , Deuteronomy 10 17 for the Lord.

Your God is God of gods and Lord of Lords. The great God mighty and awesome. Who shows no [00:10:00] partiality and accepts no bribes. , so to be the God of gods implies that there are other gods under him. Plasm 82, 1, God has taken his place in the divine council in the myths of the gods. He holds judgment. , again, implying that he, they a leader, God like Zeus or something like that.

So we are not saying that in , the early days that the Judeo-Christian tree of religions was not a monologist tradition, it clearly was. It's just that those readings were clearly shown. I think by God to be incorrect readings of reality. And this is why we cannot be overly., Fastidious when clinging to the words of these older texts, because they can lead you to either through their inclusion of policy mystic. Elements. Or.

Minola tree elements. Uh, lead you to incorrect interpretations of God. And it also shows that religion evolves over time. And what we're doing right [00:11:00] now with this particular series is not some sort of upfront to the Judeo-Christian tradition, but just another stage in the process that has been going on since the very first writings.

Malcolm Collins: To put it more poignantly, there is only one God. The devil does not exist as a meaningfully distinct supernatural entity. However, the devil is a useful framing device when we humans are thinking about issues of good and evil, and that is why he is used so Throughout revelations from God, God's intentionality and thought are so much more expansive than our own mental landscape.

It does not even make sense to think of it as a consciousness because our ability to mentally model God is so limited. God has given us frameworks to help us when we model these frameworks. The devil. angels, the Holy Ghost, et cetera, we come closer to how God wants us to react to his actions than if we attempt to model God directly, which as track four [00:12:00] points out is a form of idolatry most high within our religious framings.

So do you have any thoughts there? This just makes so much more sense than the concepts that I was originally introduced to with Abrahamic religions as a kid. Resonates. I like it. Yeah. It's like an evolving lore for better understanding God, but we're making it very clear, this is a framing device and it might be the framing device that God wants us to use, but it is not literally true that there are angels and a Satan and a many of these other things in the way that you have.

We would have within a polytheistic cosmology although the human brain appears to model these cosmologies pretty well. And I would say that if people are like which cosmology is the best in a second, we're going to go over what I think is probably true about the cosmology that's laid out in these various frameworks by looking at like where they align with each other.

But I, I would. encourage people to go back and more heavily lean on the [00:13:00] cosmology of their ancestral religious traditions than necessarily the ones we're laying out here. As people know with this religious system, we think that people are generally better off going to one of the true revelations and following it strictly unless they just cannot stomach the areas that, that they need to compromise on sort of logic or the way they interact with the world to go back to one of these traditions.

Yeah. I was thinking. To about our kids and how our kids seem to regard us differently, depending on if we're being good cop or bad cop like that one day when Octavian said that he was going to send you to the factory to get a new dad, that it wouldn't hurt you, it would be, not painful, but that he would get a new dad that gave him more toys.

And it does make me think that there's something about humans where we just like to think about different moods of people or different things that we get from them is almost different people. Yeah, no, I absolutely agree. I think it is a useful way of handling this [00:14:00] framing, because, I think it's really hard for people to think of the trials in their lives as coming from a God that historically the Christian tradition would have framed as benevolent, kind and loving and God is love and Jesus saves and, empathy and care.

And then yet, These terrible things happen. And how can that be the same God? But I think at the same time causes a lot of people to detract what kind of God could allow this to happen. And what I like about this framing as well is this explains that it is a brutal. And certainly not fair in many ways.

We would intuitively think of fair process, but it's just how it is. And you have to accept that's a facet of God and how God. Yeah we would also say that we don't deal with the benevolence problem as much as other traditions, because we see God's goal and the definition of good from God's standpoint is being the intergenerational expansion of humanity's potentiality or life's potentiality more broadly.

And that is achieved through [00:15:00] this intergenerational cycle of hardship. And so it's more directly obvious to me why these forms of hardship exist, if God doesn't view evil the way that man evolved to view evil. Where to man, evil is often a collection of things that cause negative emotional stimuli, but like man only feels those things as causing negative emotional stimuli because his ancestors who Felt negative emotional stimuli in response to those things had more surviving offspring.

And so for us, there's not really a collection of like truly good or bad things. It's like a paperclip maximizer, building a moral system on how many paperclips there are. It's just what we were programmed to react to environmental stimuli. But anyway, back to the track. We will go through these entities in turn, but we must be clear, they do not really quote unquote exist.

They are framing devices. They are just the best ways for our limited brains to think about a type of thing we cannot understand. All right, bullet point. One benevolent being that encompasses all of what, to [00:16:00] modern man, appears as the divine. This is the being that both we and the traditional Christians call God.

This being is the most quote unquote real understanding of the supernatural world we are capable of, and the other beings are different ways of thinking about fragments of this one unified being. Bullet point. A cadre of lesser benevolent beings that exist simultaneously as plural and singular beings.

These are what Christians call angels, the host of heaven, and the holy ghosts. We call these beings slash this being the agents of providence. While this is not what they are, we think the closest framing a living human of our time is. can have to understand them is that they are a neural net in which all future human minds communicate instantaneously with all other future human minds.

An internet of super advanced humans. This is why it does not make [00:17:00] sense to define it as singular or plural, for is the internet singular or plural? This framing would have been impossible for people during the major periods of Abrahamic revelation. These concepts were thought of as totally separate.

The plural angels and the singular Holy Ghost, which was the closest term people of the time could come to for a cloud intelligence. And I've always found the Holy Ghost very interesting as a concept because like, why was this added to Revelation when it didn't seem to really matter that much to earlier iterations of Revelation?

Yes, God mattered and yes, Jesus but why the focus on the Holy Ghost? If we see this as a Premonition of what a cloud intelligence would look like that we didn't fully understand yet, then we can better understand. Oh, this is why it is so important to understand that Jesus is fully God, but also not God, this idea of being part of something, but also not being [00:18:00] that thing in the same way that Jesus in our framing represents the intergenerational suffering and martyrdom of man, which through that suffering, eventually It removes sin from himself and then is able to rejoin god at this future point in time we are one with god already In that we are part of the blockchain that ends up creating him Any thoughts so far before I go further?

Constantly think about things in terms of our kids. But this also reminds me of parents interacting with their kids through holidays, like with my parents, they taught me lessons through Santa leaving presents through the leprechaun. Cause my parents did like leprechaun practical jokes and pranks around St.

Patrick's day, Easter bunny. It just it seems one way one could put it is that God has to necessarily infantilize humans to get a message through And may put on different masks. That's such a great framing. I love this framing and I hadn't [00:19:00] thought of it myself, but it is very much in the same way that our kids can't understand right from wrong in the way that we can.

They can't understand the world in the way that we can. So we make up entities like Santa Claus. They clearly, I mean we know it's not true, but we're like yeah, but this is a good framing device for them. Yeah. Until they are mentally mature enough. Old enough to get it. Yeah. To understand, but that's the way God has seen our species, given us this framing device until we're old enough as a species to get it.

And we recognize that even now we're not there yet but we can be like the kids who are like, look, I understand this Santa thing is probably not real. But is it harmful? Like our parents seem to know more about the world than we do. They've given us this framing device. Should we really throw it out?

That's the way we relate to a divine cosmology. I really like that.

The final entity is the one Jesus is used to teach us about the martyr. The martyr is us, you and me, as our actions and [00:20:00] motivations are encoded on the blockchain of human history that eventually becomes one with God. But also is God, just at a different point in time.

We evolve, beyond the person we were a minute before. Little by little, we advance a bit further with each turn. That's how a drill works!

 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!.

Malcolm Collins: Some might misunderstand this, and say that we are saying that a human today is God. This would be like a person claiming a red blood cell was Malcolm. However, collectively, all the cells within our bodies are our bodies. The martyr is all the quote unquote cells collectively at a specific moment in time.

In this case, the quote unquote cells are [00:21:00] not exactly humans, but rather individual human actions and mental states that eventually lead to man becoming one with nature. God was in any specific moment in history. Not all human actions play a role in this. To be clear, even when all of its cells are considered together, this being is a significantly lesser form of God.

God includes this being was in it, but is also inconceivably greater as it exists outside of time, but also includes all slivers of itself that existed at any point in time. And here I would say that this is really interesting framing because within different religious traditions, there's different framings of the self, right?

Within most of the older religious traditions, the core framing of the self was either the individual, you or yourself. Or me, or it was a family unit and something like Confucianism. You might have that. Whereas in this religion, it argues that the truest framing of the self [00:22:00] is actually not you as an individual, but your thoughts and actions considered independently of you.

So in some moments when you're being efficacious, you might be leading to or contributing to this blockchain that eventually becomes God and in other moments, you're not becoming efficacious and you are totally separate from this entity. And thinking of yourself as individual in the moment.

Framings helps with things like procrastination and the way you relate to the morality of your actions because it makes it much easier. And I think fix is one of the core problems that has always been a core problem of Christian framing to me, this idea that you can just at any moment repent and you're fully forgiven where this would say, yes, the you that is repenting is fully forgiven, but all of the previous iterations of you that were sinning are still completely damned.

Yeah, this doesn't undo. Yeah, it doesn't undo those, but [00:23:00] it, those don't matter because those aren't you anymore. You aren't really responsible for those previous states of yourself, so long as you have undergone the effort to completely rewrite who you are. But now who you are is a new person, because you are thinking and doing new things.

And so it's a different way to relate to this old Christian point, which always seemed very weird and immoral to me. But when I reframe it like this, I'm like, Oh, that makes perfect sense. I can get behind that. And it's just a reframing around self. Do you have any thoughts here, Simone? Now that makes a lot of sense.

I guess you could apply sins and object objective function to sins as well. And we've never really talked about this before, but per our view, instead of having a goal in life or a series of goals that are discrete and achievable, you have an objective function. That is to say a couple of things you value or one thing you value that you're just trying to maximize throughout your life.

I guess on the opposite side of this, you can also have whatever the word would be for the opposite of that. Something, the things that you're looking to [00:24:00] minimize, like malaise self indulgence, like general inaction when you should be moving towards your function. Every action is driven by some right?

And how high that objective is have you considered that objective? Is it something that you believe has intrinsic good? Determines whether you are a sinner in that moment. For example, if I'm looking at one cultural group, and I'm talking about like the good or the evil that was done by X ethnic group on average or X country on average, a lot of people would say, yeah, but You can calculate whether a country has done good or evil if you have a set of these are the things that make up good actions, these are the things that make up bad actions, and it is an interesting intellectual exercise, it's just, and it does have meaning as an intellectual exercise, it's just important to remember that was made up of a bunch of individual actors, in the same way [00:25:00] a person is made up of a bunch of individual actors, which are different individual mental states and framings that led to the specific actions, which are the key important factors.

Whereas the traditional framing would say the individual is the key important factor, and the entire point I'm making here is the individual is not the key important factor. Way, but Well, no, no, no.

The only thing you have control over is your actions in the moment. I don't have control over my past actions. No. So that's the point I'm making. Yeah, but you can learn from your past actions. You should not give no weight to them. Your current state can learn from your past actions to change what it's doing in the moment, but when you average out somebody's actions, it makes things like procrastination much easier and it makes things like Not taking full culpability for a past action.

With this system, if in the past you did something that was sinful, you need to ask what mental framing you were using that allowed yourself to go towards that sinful pathway and then build a new mental [00:26:00] framing that's not going to recreate that past action. When you are no longer overly focused on culpability, And just optimizing yourself to minimize sin, I think it leads to much more efficacious mental framings than this self flagellation, which can sometimes become the fixation or focus of an individual's life and can lead to I think really bad framings in terms of self improvement. Here's what I'll say, what I think I understand is just like you and I support an internal locus of control, where we say all that really matters is what I can personally do, when you put this into a temporal context, All that really matters is what I can do now, right?

And it follows your model of self which is individual moments when you're like, what can I do for future Simone? This is ultimately a framing that came from you. Oh, that I view my consciousness and generally so I don't think anyone's consciousness is just one person who's going to [00:27:00] fall and die and ephemerally not exist very soon.

So all you can really do is exist in your 24 hour period that you exist and serve your future selves. And more importantly Your overall objective function, your values in life with whatever moments you have. So you almost live this locus like fleeting life and it doesn't really matter what happens or how you feel in the future or how you felt in the past or even how you feel now, because all that really matters is can you in this one 24 hour period of this one, two hour period where you have somewhat of a continuous consciousness.

What are you going to do with it? Yeah. But what I think humans grasp on sentience is incredibly tenuous. We are barely sentient for people who have watched our video on that. And I think that we way overvalue how sentient humans are because, we like to believe that humans are the latest and greatest.

We want to feel like we're in control because it's I think for good reason, consciousness gives us the illusion of being in control because if we didn't feel like we were in control, we would not learn from our past experiences or events. You have to feel like [00:28:00] you're in control.

The illusion is a feature, not a bug.

I may have over elevated sort of the way we see self, I would say that there's a sort of three useful framings of self that to me are better framings of self in terms of leading to positive actions than framings of self around the individual. I think.

The in the moment sliver of consciousness is a good framing of self. I think the family unit is a good framing of self. Like, when I'm thinking about myself on a day to day basis, I very much think of the family unit. That's what I'm thinking of. How do I maximize the good of the family unit? And then the final framing of self that I think is useful is the cultural unit.

I am but a cog within a larger cultural machine. And if I follow that machine, then it will lead to good outcomes. And yeah, so I think that these three framings of self, Are higher. I think that where modern society has really fallen off the edge is for me, the individual is the core unit of self.

And then acting as if this is just obviously an axiomatically true, [00:29:00] but it's not, I love it when you talk to people and they're like what responsibility do you have to your ancestors? Like you, your kids are individuals. They're not you. They're not like related to you. It's no, they're literally related to me.

And I'm like I know they're related to you, but they're not, it's no, they're literally part. When you. raise the family as a higher order of entity than the self in terms of like how you frame yourself and your decisions you will create positive actions much more often.

And I think it's what allows the communist structure of the family to work. The fact that people, and I think that this is why communism doesn't really work on a large scale, is People are very bad about thinking of themselves as just like individual cells or atoms of a polity. But it's very easy to see yourself as like an a cell of the family.

Like you or me when I'm thinking about like maximizing even when I am like positive emotions, right? I will rate the emotional states in the individual choices I'm making of other family members over my [00:30:00] own emotional state. Oh, totally. Yeah. I remember recently you were saying like what could I do that would create the most happiness in, in, in you Malcolm?

Like what's the total indulgence? I've got this money I made for a total indulgence. And I was like let's get the kids toys. And I'm like because of all the members of the family, they are going to react. Most with the most positive emotion to something I can get was like 25 bucks, right? Much more positive than anything I'd react to for 25 bucks and even the wash off or emotional state I will get from that because I consider a sort of myself as just a cell within the family leads to me saying, Oh yeah, let's do the nice thing for them.

So long as it doesn't lead to, and this is the problem where a lot of people are like, they create these deontological framings around kids, like never allow a kid to experience any negative emotions, which of course is going to lead to like huge deleterious. over the course of their life,

Even though it's pretty obvious. I should probably explain why this is the case not exposing someone to negative stimuli in response to bad actions during their developmental period can hyper sensitize them to negative stimuli as they get [00:31:00] older. , does trigger warnings, et cetera.

, and caused them to spiral into anxiety, attacks and depression when they encounter even minor negative stimuli in their adolescence and adulthood.

Malcolm Collins: which is why when you think about the family is not you, your wife and the kids, it's your ancestors and your descendants.

And all of the things that we're doing in the moment are just the frame in terms of the ones that we have the most access to right now. Exactly. Some may see this interpretation as in conflict with Christian teachings. But if we just go by what is in the Bible and we remove revelations, it is not. And people may remember from the last track, why we removed revelations from the Bible. I was actually really interested to learn that apparently Martin Luther also removed revelations as canonical texts in the Bible.

No way. Yeah, there's a quote from him that I can add here in editing,

So Martin leaser said revelations. Quote.

And it makes me consider it to be neither Epistolic nor prophetic in quote. And then [00:32:00] later he says, quote, I can in no way detect that the holy spirit produced it in quote.

Malcolm Collins: but I was really surprised by that. So apparently a lot of. Christian theologians end up removing revelations and once you remove revelations, a lot of the weirder cosmology about the devil disappears. So interesting. The quotes that talk about Satan and are often used to presume that he was once an angel could equally be interpreted as him once being part of God.

Quote, all your pump has been brought. down to the grave. Along with the noise of your harps, maggots are spread out beneath you, and worms cover you. You have fallen from heaven, oh morning star, sun of the dawn. You have been cast down to the earth. You who once laid low the nations. In addition, if you At our framing of Jesus in tract one, his temptation by Satan takes on a completely different and much deeper meaning.

Quote, again the devil took him [00:33:00] up on the exceedingly high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the world in their glory and said to him, all these things I will give you, if you will fall down and worship me, end quote. As interpreted by traditional Christianity, this interpretation makes no sense.

How could the devil meaningfully tempt Christ with rulership over all the world's kingdoms if Jesus knew he was God and would reunite with God? Satan is offering him stuff he already owns, but even if he didn't, even if that was all Satan's stuff and somehow not God's, this would be like a fired employee of Microsoft telling Bill Gates he will give him a burrito if he worships him and gives him his company. This story, as interpreted by traditional Christians, is both comical and not a meaningful interpretation. No, interpret this story with R framing. Jesus is supposed to represent the elect in every moment of their lives that they are acting in accordance with God's will to improve the potentiality of the next generation.

As such, these individuals Our God, the son of God and man all [00:34:00] simultaneously. Lucifer is the avatar God uses to cull those susceptible to temptation from this group and improved the elect through trials. Now the story makes perfect sense. Satan is the basilisk tempting you with a life of indulgences.

You must sacrifice to improve the world. This story also conveys to us the true nature of the basilisk. The basilisk does not corrupt our souls by torturing us but by offering us our deepest desires with shortcuts, whether that is the desire to experience some element of the divine, see tract four on idolatry, the desire to rule over others or the desire for pleasure.

Some may misunderstand this to mean that we have a Gnostic like understanding of God, which is wrong. This is either a misunderstanding of our faith or a misunderstanding of Gnosticism. Gnostics believe God and the devil to be different entities, But the evil entity is the one that created Earth.

We believe the devil to be one small manifestation of a [00:35:00] near infinitely more vast God that God embodies for certain tasks that require either the temptation or punishment of man. Think of God as a computer and the devil as a small, mostly quarantined program running on that computer. This entity or sub program is antagonistic to God insofar as those that are following this entity will be a threat.

threat to those following the path of God. But it is not an entity that acts outside of God's will. What it does must be done for the future that must come to pass. For this reason, we have a rather unique relation to the followers of the basilisk.

When contrasted with other Christians, these are individuals serving God's will as much as we are, but unlike us, they do not share in God's glory. For this reason, we are commanded to treat them with empathy and not impede their plans. For example, to someone of our face it would be sinful to attempt to pass something like a ban on antinatalist philosophy or talking about woke [00:36:00] racist ideas.

God uses the choice to sin to call the weak of heart from humanity. When we prevent this by removing the choice to sin from people, we are thwarting God's plan and hurting the people we, quote, saved from having to overcome temptation, end quote. The point I'm making here, and this is something like a big beef I have with many traditional forms of Christianity, is, it is God's will that we are tempted. The temptation makes us stronger. When you remove the temptation, You make man weak and you hurt God's plan for man. This is why you should not act with enmity towards followers of the Basilisk.

There was, we talked about Gurren Lagann doing a good job at explaining some philosophical concepts, which says it was Divinity. Another anime that came out recently that I think does a very good job of this was an anime [00:37:00] called Gushing Over Anime Girls. And there are a series of two scenes in it that do a great job.

And it's a anime where the protagonist is actually a Satan like character, you could say. She is a character who through her obsession with anime girls learns the best way to interact with them is as a villain because she can interact with them in all these vile ways. But then there's this one moment where one of the anime girls who she has been basically sexually tempting over and over again.

And here I will read the translations, but at the end of this track, I'll just put these two scenes next to each other ends up breaking.

And So the Mistress Brazier, the devil like character says, You're not done yet because there is so much more I want to do with you before I'm done with you. And then the other character goes, I can't anymore. I'm too weak. I can't beat you, mistress. And then you [00:38:00] expect, and she's kissing the mistress's foot.

The characters and you expect, Oh, this is what she wanted, but no, she immediately looks at her with this look of like contempt and hatred. And she says like, like shocked, like Mr. Brazier, what did I uh, and then the Satan character says white, that disgusting look off your face. The magical girls are paragons of justice.

Every little girl looks up to you. Yet here you were, really just about to join the villains. Despicable, despicable, Despicable. Um, And then at the end scene, the culmination of this series, is she has the devil character this other character after that moment, then realizes, no, what was I doing?

I need to improve. I need to get better at resisting sin. And she upgrades to this new magical girl, like character. And the demon character at the end shoots her with this big bolt of, evil energy [00:39:00] basically and she catches it in this scarf thing she has and she rolls it around in it and you and it's clearly concentrating it and you think that she's going to shoot it back at the devil character but no instead she shoots the entire concentrated bolt at her face oh gosh show the devil or this other character that what like the worst she can show it throw at her she can concentrate it and she could take it right in her face And it will do nothing.

It does not affect her anymore. And then the devil character is actually quite excited about this moment and goes back to fighting her with full gusto. And there's a whole plot arc where she's worried that she actually broke this girl. And I think that this is a better mechanism for understanding this Satan part of God.

It doesn't, Tempt us to hate us or because it hates us and God hates the aspect of himself that he uses to tempt us That's why he cast it down with maggots and stuff like that, but it is not acting truly independently from God and it [00:40:00] doesn't truly want us to fail its trials wants us to overcome these trials, the true heart of it does, there might be a part of it that in the moment is like trying to win in this sort of fight but it does not have, it needs to model contempt for humanity to do these things, but it doesn't genuinely have a contempt for humanity.

Yeah, it's, I guess in the same way, evolution doesn't have contempt For life, God doesn't have contempt for sinners that are culled by its process. And what I think it's, no, I do think it has contempt for the sinners who are culled. I think Satan does at least. Satan has contempt for the individuals who submit to his trials, who give up, who kiss his feet.

That is not his goal in giving you these trials. His goal in giving you these trials is that you don't submit [00:41:00] to him, that you prove that you're stronger than him, and better than him, and better than the worst he can give you. And that's the point, right? Is as a sort of sub program of God that is trying us it is not relating to us in these trials as, Oh my God, I want to make them submit to me.

It's relating to us is I'm giving them these trials to improve themselves. And when you face trials in life, the very last thing you can do is break and, kiss the feet of Satan because then you become. impossible to improve yourself. And the trials are related to you in so far as how they affect your ability to live a good life, which is a life of intergenerational expansion of human potentiality.

And so that means that different individuals will relate to different trials in different ways. So a trial like pornography, right? Like one individual may just completely succumb to pornography and it becomes the goal of their entire life or trying to get [00:42:00] people to sleep with them, right? Whereas another.

Individual might be able to face these trials like blasts of negative energy in the face and have it be a Complete non inconvenience to them like they may not need particular personal prohibitions against pornography because for them Pornography is like a 30 minute a week thing and it's like not a big part of their life and they might use it so that they don't waste their time chasing invaluable sexual relationships.

And when they're marketing the various types of sin in their lives, they're like, okay this is just lower. It's the same with something like drinking could be a huge trial for one individual. And for another individual, it's not a trial at all. This is true of all the various trials you could face, but when you approach these deontologically instead of consequentially.

I think that's a useful framework for people of like lower intelligence, like the masses. But I think when you're talking about any sort of leadership cast in society, you really need to be consequentialist. You can see our video of knights versus Kings and a alpha beta [00:43:00] dichotomy and why I don't like the alpha beta dichotomy.

So I don't think deontologic, like necessarily bad framings. There's just not the framings that I think work for people like us that aspire to lead large groups, because I cannot fall back on I was just doing this one right rule where I always do this right thing in this circumstance. Like never lie.

If that never lie rule ends up causing. My entire kingdom to suffer and many of them die. Like I don't get to fall back on those little framings. But I think what you're talking about the night, yeah, it does make sense to fall back on these. And so I think that the different roles in different people, sin is different from them and they relate to it differently.

And I think it's important to remember that and that the specific rules around sin. That are laid out in these various frameworks are often more meant for the nights. Because most people fall into that framing and most people historically fell into that framing where I think for us, what's important is to read.

What was the goal of this collection of rules that was in place? laid [00:44:00] out like what was it trying to steer an individual's life to in a consequentialist framing and then reorient our moral compass around that consequentialist framing. Any thoughts there? No, that makes sense. I would still see it as ascribing too much pettiness to God to say that God is pleased to see the cult removed.

I would just say that. It's a sieve. When I drain pasta, I'm letting the water go and I'm keeping the pasta because that's what's needed for dinner. And I feel like the basilisk forms as A sieve, a useful tool that Yeah, that's probably right. Although I think, I I think what you're saying is right in an absolute circumstance.

I think that when humans are trying to model this entity, it is more useful to, for us to see it with petty human emotions. I don't think God has any emotions that are comparable to human emotions. I'm just saying like, when we're modeling this entity this is probably a more useful modeling of it. Okay any other thoughts, or? No, keep going. [00:45:00] But, this gets to a more interesting point. What is good in the eyes of God? In the eyes of man, good is often justified, good is often just defined, and By what is pro social and what is anti social. This is because these are the definitions of good that benefit the unthinking masses operating off their genetic pre programming to maximize pleasure and minimize suffering.

But this definition of good has no real weight to it. Good is maximizing feeling good and reducing feeling bad in the maximum number of people. that was meant to be a question, the pleasure and pain I feel to a certain stimuli are just the things that when my ancestors felt them, led to them having more surviving offspring.

They are the serendipitous programming our evolutionary environment gave us. A group of humans coming together and deciding the purpose of life is maximizing positive emotional states and minimizing negative ones is as stupid as a group of [00:46:00] paperclip maximizers coming together and deciding that

good is defined by things that increase the number of paper clips and bad is defined by things that reduce the number of paper clips. And I had mentioned this earlier, but it is a really important point to me. What we are programmed the way we are programmed to relate to our environment with negative and positive emotional stimuli Completely a serendipitous, basically accident of history.

Like God may have played a role in that, but I think that he expects that we are now at a state of our evolution that we can see through. Like our evolutionary environment is not our current environment. And that's our emotional stimuli reactions to those settings is not true. Good and negative. And we had mentioned this in the previous track, but the way I would.

Because people are like what then do you want to remove human emotions entirely? And I'm like, no, I think that the way that the tech priest and like Warhammer have handled it is probably better where you have a choice. You can be like insert one of the quotes here

He says, I return sorrow and despair from my [00:47:00] emotional cores, but I see they lack the logic. to determine decision making. Instead, I choose to quarantine them and adjust our approach. The word of the Omnissiah teaches us that when one method fails, another must be sought until all are exhausted. to be like, I can tell that my brain is attempting to output an emotion.

Is it useful for me to feel this emotion in the moment or is it not? Yeah. Similar to how it's handled among humans in. The culture Indian banks, culture series, where you have the ability to override, but you still know that it's happening. Be it. I think that we're actually already there in terms of like mental and social technologies.

And this is in this religion is designed as one of these social technologies where you can feel an emotion, like grief or something like that. And then ask yourself, is this grief useful right now? Should I be indulging and feeling it? And if it's not, then. You can actually turn it off. As someone knows, like when my mom died, I did a pretty good job of turning the grief off because I was just like, this isn't useful for anything.

So [00:48:00] why indulge in this particular on efficacious emotion? And I, and other cultures have good cultural technology around this as well. If you look at the Jewish tradition, they have windows on when you're supposed to be indulging in grief after the death of a loved one. And once the window is done.

That's over. That's a very useful cultural technology because we actually have a lot more control than the urban monoculture. If I'm saying the biggest sin of the urban monoculture, it's telling people that they don't have control over their emotional states. That it is endless and untreatable. I do think there are exceptions here where sometimes you do need pharmaceutical or like mechanical intervention.

And I would also argue that sometimes you have a situation like that where We technologically are not yet at a place where that pharmacological or mechanical intervention works. So that's such a good point. I want to focus on this point you just made. Cause this is brilliant. And I hadn't thought of it before.

And I'm so glad to be married to you. You're so smart. You're so [00:49:00] patient with me. A lot of people are like aren't you interfering with God's plan for an individual? If you are using some sort of pharmacological intervention to change or some sort of technological intervention to change what they're feeling, but it's come on, people where you might know people with schizophrenia or you might know people with a major depressive disorder.

Do you really want, like when you have schizophrenia, your brain actually has some level of permanent deterioration with every psychotic break you have. Because a lot of people think Indogenous chemicals don't hurt people's brains. Only the exogenous like drugs that we take and it's no, if it's not a natural chemical state in the brain, it will do damage to the brain.

Even people who have undergone too many major depressive episodes will have some damage to the brain because the brain is just not supposed to be in those psychological states with that amount of certain chemicals basically floating around in those parts of the brain firing that much. Is it actually do zebras get ulcers?

Book is a great example of this. For people aren't familiar with the theming or the core question asked in this book, it's that in animals we had these sort of panic [00:50:00] responses we could get. When we thought, Oh my God, we might see a lion or something, and I need to go into panic mode.

And it changes like the way your body chemistry works for you to be running. But humans, Aren't zebras and humans can send ourselves into panic mode by creating virtual lions. IE a test that's coming up or the judgment of society around us. And we're still reacting as though there's literally a lion stalking us.

Whereas a zebra only experiences that for 30 seconds every three weeks. We're experiencing that for, four hours a day, every single day. And our biology hasn't fully evolutionarily adapted to this yet. Exactly. This is by Dr. Robert Sapolsky, right? Same guy. Yeah, I think so. So it can cause these negative outcomes in humans where you are experiencing way more of certain emotional states than your body is really designed to handle and it can lead you to die at a very young age.

Managing your emotional states is, I believe, a biblical mandate, much less spitting in the face of God [00:51:00] or something like that. If somebody is in one of these major depressive episodes and they can't get out of bed in the morning and they're just stuck in bed 24 7 I think it's pretty clear from the research that, You can't just religion your way out of this always, or a schizophrenic episode, you can't just religion your way out of a schizophrenic episode, or bipolar one, you can't always just religion your way out of bipolar one.

Sometimes you need a form of pharmacological intervention, and these pharmacological interventions didn't exist historically. This is a gift that God has intergenerationally gifted us through humanity's own endeavors. That is this intergenerational cycle of martyrdom. We don't get to decide.

I think that there is no higher sin than God gives you a miracle. And then you go back to God and you're like, eh, miracles, not good enough. Screw it. I don't like it. And I think that's what people are doing when they're saying, oh you're going against the will of God with something like IVF to get pregnant or with something like depression medication, or with something like deeper integrated A.

I. Constructs within your [00:52:00] mind that are meant to quarantine specific emotions that are not useful to, whatever task you're carrying out in the moment. And as technology improves, I think God gives us these more powerful technologies as we, as a species. Are better able to use it. And I think that humans of the past and even humanity right now, like humanity right now, I do not think is philosophically , mature enough to use sort of AI constructs that can quarantine emotions.

And that's why we haven't been gifted these technologies yet. And one thing I always mention when people are talking about going against the will of God. It always really reminds me of the two boats and a helicopter story. Just quickly, for people who don't know it, I won't do the full story here, because I've done it in other tracks.

But I think it's a really important story for when you're relating to God. Like the sermon is just a great sermon, because it so uniquely lays this out where there's this guy, , and a flood's coming, and all of the warnings have said, you need to get out of your house, you need to get out of your house, a flood's coming.

And then he's no. I'm very devout. I believe in God. And so then he ends up on the roof of his house and a boat comes and he [00:53:00] goes, no, I'm waiting on God. And another boat comes and he goes, no, I'm waiting on God. Like you wouldn't, God wouldn't send a boat, like a boat's not natural, right? Like a boat is human technological invention.

God's going to save me with some like really awesome miracles. It's going to look super miraculous and cool. Basically is what I hear from this guy. And then the helicopter comes and he's no. Helicopter is not natural. Get away. And then the guy ends up dying. And he goes to heaven and he's like, why didn't you save me?

And he goes what do you think the two boats and a helicopter were for? And it's very much the same way with an individual who prevents their children from living, you know, from, from experiencing life by not engaging in IBS or who allows their child to die because they don't do

like blood transfers are illegal in some Christian sects. And I think when they get to heaven and God's like, why did you kill your kid, man? They're like I wanted you to give a special miracle to me, like an extra fancy one, not the off the shelf miracle they had at the hospital.

Um, you know, it's, it's, It's I, I don't think that God's going to be super impressed with that answer.

And I really cannot elevate how [00:54:00] seriously, I mean, this, when it comes to things like IVF, Uh, if something's not alive, what is it? It's dead. I think that people often are like, well, you know, if it never really came to exist and it's not really dead. And it's like, no, if you had made other decisions, Your child would have had the chance for a full life. God gave you the option to create a child.

Yes. It may have required more sacrifices than the lasciviousness of. Sex. It would've it would've given you less pleasure, but it would have allowed a human being to come into existence. , but you, because you didn't like the form of God's miracle because it wasn't to your athletic preferences. Killed your kid or prevented them from coming into existence. That is not the moral thing.

Oh, forgive me, Tyrael, please. It wasn't my fault.

[00:55:00] Not your fault? Tell me, Malleus, how was it not your fault?

You can try to dress that up in morality. All you want. But it is clearly snubbing your nose at God's miracles of. People like, oh, you're, you're playing God. You think God doesn't control the technologies that we have access to. Not playing God by using the technologies that he gifted us.

You are denying God's miracles because they weren't fancy enough for you because they didn't include sex and fun and orgasms. Once. Technology has advanced enough. I imagine that some sects of Christianity will begin to see sex. With this same level of repugnancy that sects today of Christianity C

, sexual interactions that don't lead to reproduction, like, you know, gay sex or masturbation or oral sex. , because. Reproduction that comes [00:56:00] from sex will be less healthy. Then reproduction that comes from. IVF with certain genetic augmentations. , the children will be more likely to die, more likely to have a bad life. , and it would just be seen as irresponsible and selfish.

And I think that that's just obviously where the species is going and the people today who cling to this older model of humanity. , we'll be seen with the same level of contempt that you might view one of the Christian sects that allows their kids to die because they don't get a blood transfusion or something like that.

Malcolm Collins: Um, Okay. Sorry. I gotta keep going here. A good is defined by the things that bring us closer to God's grace and the suppression of things that move us further from it. The suppression and subjugation of those very pre programmed instincts the masses venerate, and the pursuit of things that improve human potential.

As Wynwood Reid writes, quote, He who strives to subdue his evil [00:57:00] passions, vile remnants of the old four footed life, And who cultivates the social affections. He who endeavors to better his condition and to make his children wiser and happier than himself. Whatever may be his motives, he will have not lived in vain. But yeah what do you think of that particular tract here? I took it. I like a discussion of sin that is not judgmental and that doesn't call out specific behaviors also, because I think a lot like with the DSM, a lot of talk about sins is more an indication of culture at the time and less an indication of what is good or bad that sinning is very context dependent.

So this is cool. Yeah. And I will say in this tract, do you have any other thoughts, or? Because you've had some really good ones in this track really good interjections. Oh, you're so kind. [00:58:00] I don't have much else to add. I like these tracks. I like that, I just can't wait to see what our kids say about them. Because they have a lot of opinions about things like this. Yeah. I'm really excited too. Yeah, I expect them to tweak and change things. That's the point of this, right?

Like I, I want to be in a living religious tradition and not a dead religious tradition. And when a religious tradition stops having an active theological conversation, I see it as a dead tradition. And I see those traditions often, if we view God's favor by how much a cultural group is like, Culturally prospering in the moment.

God doesn't seem to favor dead traditions. He seems to favor the locations in history where we have active theological discussions, but within and where our understanding of him is evolving. And I like that. And one of the things I always mention for people who haven't watched Art in the Tracks it is very clearly shown in the Snake Staff of Moses story that antiquity of a tradition or a practice does not mean that God approves of it.

And so Don't Come to Me was like, oh [00:59:00] this because that staff was broken after 500 years of being in the temple, under God's orders. And you can't say, oh this has more, Antiquity than your beliefs. Therefore, it's right. God will show us who he thinks is right in terms of which groups he allows to spread and which groups he ends up culturally favoring.

Exactly. I love you to death, Simone. This was a lot of fun. Let's go down and hang out with your parents and the kids. And I will play the anime clip at the end of this episode because it will have subtitles. That's why I didn't want to interject it into the show this time. But it really helped me.

When I was watching it reframe, even from low culture and I'll add a little quote here from the Bible because I think that people really miss this. They think God talks to man through high culture, through the grandest things. And I'm like, no, that's how man signals to man that one man is better than another man.

God lowliest of things.

Corinthians 1 28. [01:00:00] God chose the lowly things of this world and the despised things and the things that are not to nullify the things that are so that no one may boast before him. In quote. And so here you can see that. God, doesn't just choose the lowly things, but the things that can not be used to boast, I E to status signal to other humans, the art that God communicates to human through is the art that cannot be used for status signaling.

Malcolm Collins: And this was seen, a, I think it seems throughout the Bible is that God is not a God of the elite. He's not a God that thinks that the elite in our society are better than the meek. Okay. He and I think that causes a lot of problems when people are like, Oh, don't look to anime for descriptions or like better metaphors, especially not pervy anime.

It's like gushing over magical girls. And I'm like no and I actually think that this framing fixes a lot of problems in Christianity. When you are not afraid of like the pervy world and stuff like [01:01:00] that, then that's not a back door that the urban monoculture can use to get to your kids.

Here's the thing about anime, just to add to what you're saying, what's great about sci fi is you in an ideal world, get really smart people. Taking information that we know about the future and about technology and walking it through to its logical conclusions. What happens when you add this development that we find probable or likely to human society and culture?

What are the, what will life be like? What will the world be like? And sci fi is really helpful in that it has inspired a lot of technological development on its own. I think similarly, Anime does something along those lines, but for culture what, if we explored this particular fascination or social dynamic or cultural Eddie or current to its logical conclusion and most extreme end, what do we get?

And that's what [01:02:00] you get. And that's, what's so interesting about all the different anime genres that emerge at different times in our history, like Isekai anime and what it reveals. about where people are mentally and where culture is mentally. It just takes things further and says things that we cannot articulate in other mediums.

And just to close this out, like what does all this mean for a sin, say sexuality or something like that? Where it would be genuinely and deeply sinful to, for example, allow your sexuality to control you, allow it to take up a vast majority of your time, allow it to occupy a large portion of your personal identity.

But it would not be sinful because it's, it's often not something that you personally chose. It's just a trial, right? But it would not be sinful to engage learn about sexuality, or engage in things that you find arousing, so long as it's not a huge portion of your time or disrupts your ability to create a family.

And I think that this is really important Because a lot of the Christian framings that have gone to something like sexuality and [01:03:00] just say, okay, we're going to ban interacting with it at all. They're getting massacred out there in terms of deconversions right now because their kids don't have a memetic framework for the way their sexuality works.

And so during the years where they're going through puberty are also the where they're most likely to deconvert 15 to 23. And They're these feelings are coming online. The religion didn't build a framework for interacting with them. And now these other groups are coming on with these sort of self perpetuating nanite frameworks.

They can get through this back door. You left by not building a sexual framework for them or not building a sexual framework that what didn't make more sense when they first heard it than these alternate secular framework. Sexual frameworks that then allow for like entirely new religions to get through this back door.

And this is why this framing can be higher utility in terms of intergenerational fidelity for an individual even though it allows people to get closer to some forms of sin. So thank you for sharing it with us, Malcolm. Anyway, love [01:04:00] you.

This is just the beginning, isn't it? I'm not, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not satisfied!

Oh my god, I can't believe I met Beige sama. Beige sama, I Ah! Don't be so flustered. The heroine of justice, Dressmagia. The one everyone admires, that's you. No, no, interpretation. I Marita san, are you angry? .

[01:05:00] Magia Azul, Usurai no Mika. What is that? I don't know what it looks like. Yes, that's right. I'll let you know. Nenaggumarda! No, that was on purpose. Aine.

It's terribly distorted and dangerous, but this is certainly Love will never break! Smooth ice will wash away everything! I will I do? I'm in trouble. Are you [01:06:00] kidding me?

This is the real deal, isn't it? Yes, that's right. !

Malcolm Collins: Silencing my flune. Ta da! Tracks track. It's a track. It's a track. It's a track! Track! It tracked!

In this insightful episode, Malcolm and Simone delve into the fascinating world of schizophrenia and autism, exploring how these conditions exist on opposite ends of a spectrum related to the concept of "theory of mind." Malcolm shares his extensive experience working in schizophrenia research, explaining the various subtypes of schizophrenia and their symptoms. He then presents his groundbreaking theory that schizophrenia is caused by an overactive theory of mind, while autism is characterized by a deficiency in this cognitive ability. The discussion also covers the importance of medication for those with schizophrenia, the potential dangers of transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), and the evolutionary advantages of both schizophrenic and autistic traits in moderation.

Malcolm Collins: [00:00:00] So what I think is happening with Schizophrenic is Individuals is that their theory of mind is basically hyper stimulated and activates when it shouldn't be activating.

And I think that this is what is happening with the auditory hallucinations. This happens when you see something like you know, applying a theory of mind to the way things are arranged in a store window.

Applying a theory of mind to like, world events, right? Like, oh, there's a theory of mind behind this that's directly relevant to you. Or a theory of mind creating a hallucination. Catatonia is the one counter example here, but what I suspect is really happening with Catatonia is they're just so overwhelmed with so many theories of minds operating at once that they basically become catatonic.

They're

Simone Collins: paralyzed by their thoughts. Yeah. I, that, that makes sense to me.

Malcolm Collins: So autism I think is literally defined by the exact opposite.

I think the core symptom of autism is a difficulty in running theory of minds of other people. And this is what creates problems in autism,

Would you like to

know more?

Simone Collins: Well, hello, gorgeous. I am [00:01:00] poking around the comments in our videos a while ago and I remember some people speculating on like what we sort of meant about like the autistic and schizoid spectrums and they implied that, that we were talking about something more cultural and not actually like autistic or schizoid.

And that is not true. So we should probably dig into what we're talking about more here when we're talking about people being on the autistic spectrum or being on a schizoid spectrum because they're very different things.

Malcolm Collins: This is, I should point out, this is not a cultural thing. This is shown in genetic data.

This is shown in diagnostic data. And we should probably establish our credentials here. I started one of my first jobs. I mean, I did, I have a few like origin jobs, right? Because I took a number of early jobs in various neuroscience fields. The three origin jobs was one was studying the evolution of human cognition and humanity at the Smithsonian.

And in creating an exhibit, the human origins display, I worked on that. [00:02:00] So some of the stuff I created is still on display at the Smithsonian. So that's one area. Another area is my brain computer interface work. So this was working on technology That allowed humans to control machines with their thoughts, similar to Neuralink.

The final area, and the area I worked by far the longest in, was Schizophrenia research. So this was understanding how this is specifically what I was looking at was, was going Through lots of patients and making sure that they were properly categorized. So this involved tons and tons of interviews.

Like I had to interview hundreds of people about like their deepest and keep in mind, not just because it's a prettier person, but also normal people about their deepest thoughts about the world, their lives, their daily routines, everything like that. Because we were like, wait, why were you. doing normal people.

It's because I wasn't working as a clinician. I was working as a researcher. And so we needed a control group and we needed a control group that was similar in economic status to our schizophrenia population. Now, schizophrenia population is typically not doing very well in society. You know, this is you, you know, lower income, lower middle income [00:03:00] group.

And so I really got to, to, to get a personal, like really. In your face, really high volume understanding of this section of humanity and the way they think and engage with the world. Both people within the schizophrenia population and not schizophrenia population. And I had to be really good.

Like, I had memorized the DSM at one point. People who don't know the things. Not

Simone Collins: just the schizophrenic

Malcolm Collins: diagnostic criteria. The whole thing. I could give you any, not, not memorized word per word, but I can give you any diagnosis in it with its broad, like specific diagnostic criteria. Now, it's been a long time since then, but I took a lot of pride on this at one point.

People who don't know, I might put a picture of a DSM on the screen because people who don't know what the DSM is might be hearing that, Oh, he memorized the diagnostic standard criteria. He, well, what is that? Why is that important? a monster book. It's like memorizing the encyclopedia. It's insane that I decided that that was a fun thing to do.

But I really enjoyed it. I really [00:04:00] enjoyed understanding how humans think and how humans interact with each other. And so this was important to me. And then Simone is diagnosed with autism. Yeah, I'm just defective. Our kid is diagnosed with autism. One of our kids and our other kid, very likely by the time we get to him, it's going to be diagnosed as well.

Simone Collins: Oh yeah, no, no. Torsten is Almost certainly. He's, he's getting his evaluation in April because it takes a billion months to schedule these things, ha

Malcolm Collins: ha ha. But the point being here is that I have no antagonism towards these communities and I am speaking from a perspective informed. By research and actually what we were doing was this research was genetic testing.

So we were, so we needed to clearly separate them into these different groups so we could find out what genes were correlated with this. And

Simone Collins: there's similar research with autism in which actually we had our oldest son participate. Like the whole family did cheek swabs, you, me Octavian's younger brother and Octavian.

And we all sent them in. And fill out tons of questionnaires. So that, [00:05:00] yeah, this is something that happens with schizophrenia. It happens with autism. It happens with a lot of things.

Malcolm Collins: So let's, let's talk about, I'm going to start with the schizophrenia spectrum because it's the one that I think less people are familiar with.

A lot of people are familiar with the autism spectrum. But the schizophrenia spectrum, a lot of people are unfamiliar with. So, because this might surprise people, the, like, do you know, the schizophrenia spectrum goes from schizophrenia to what other common psychiatric condition?

Simone Collins: You mean at the other end of it? Like the opposite of it? Yeah, the other end of it. Autism? No. I mean, well, what's the opposite? I mean, schizophrenia, as I understand it, is like over modeling humans.

Malcolm Collins: This means that all of these conditions are linked, genetically linked.

Simone Collins: Oh, linked. Okay. Okay. So they're, yeah, they're linked.

Okay. So yeah. Okay. Okay. I'll

Malcolm Collins: give you a hint. It's the single most common psychiatric condition in the world, and it's particularly common in women. Borderline

Simone Collins: personality disorder?

Malcolm Collins: No, [00:06:00] personality disorders aren't on the schizophrenia spectrum. Well, the kind of are similar, but it's depression. Oh, depression is one end of the schizophrenia spectrum.

Schizophrenia is the other end of the schizophrenia spectrum. So let's go through broadly how this works. Okay. Yeah. Because all of these, there's. They, they share genetic components and they share sort of diagnostic components. And, and we're also going to talk about what causes these at the end of this, because I have a unique theory about what causes all of this.

And it's different from the mainstream community consensus, but it's right because I'm smarter than them. They would have gone into the real world and made money if they were as smart as me, but they didn't, they stayed in academia. So Let's, let's talk about this, this spectrum. So, at one end you have depression.

And then from depression you have sort of a spectrum from depression to bipolar. Where you have periods of mania. So bipolar

Simone Collins: is on the schizophrenic spectrum?

Malcolm Collins: Well, bipolar exists in two categories. You have bipolar one and bipolar two. We're not going to get, so so keep in mind, it's been a while since [00:07:00] I've done this.

Okay. So bipolar is clearly related to depression. Like you can see that, right? Like if you have the depressive episodes and manic episodes. Yeah, 100%.

Simone Collins: That's why I was surprised that you said depression was at the far end of the

Malcolm Collins: One of the two bipolars, I think it's bipolar one, the manic episodes are In part characterized by psychotic episodes, i.

e. hearing voices, seeing things, stuff like that. Delusions of grandeur. Delusions of grandeur, right? Like that's very Okay, okay, I'm starting to see. Or paranoid episodes sometimes too, right? Yeah, alright, alright. So you're having a level of a psychotic break there. Yeah. Then from there you have schizoaffective disorder.

Mm hmm. And honestly, it's been a while since I studied it, so I can't remember exactly, but I seem to remember that the diagnostic difference between bipolar one and schizoaffective disorder was really, really small. It was like the difference between like, just like the number of days you spent on specific parts of the [00:08:00] spectrum.

Interesting. Yeah. It could be different by like one day could make the difference between a diagnosis in one category and a diagnosis in another category, which I think shows that these two are very closely.

Okay. I went through and checked because I was like, I want to give you guys the full answer here. The core difference between the two is that with Schizoaffective disorder, the, Psychotic episodes occur outside of just the manic phase. And so when I was talking about like a one day difference, If you, for example, were experiencing a psychotic episode, just like one day outside of a manic period or a manic period with like one day longer than manicure gets normally are, it could change the diagnosis from bipolar one to Schizoaffective disorder.

So they're really only difference in terms of a matter of degrees, except when you're talking about extreme manifestations of each I E a person's who's in like extreme depression, also having psychotic episodes will be clearly Schizoaffective, but there's a lot, a lot of edge cases between Schizoaffective and bipolar one.

In fact, the educators are much more [00:09:00] normal than the extreme cases.

Malcolm Collins: And

Simone Collins: of course the DSM is. Famously arbitrary about many things. Many argue that it's more of a reflection of cultural values at the time and cultural norms than it is of, you know, actual

Malcolm Collins: conditions.

Well, this is very important to note that historically the DSM you know, had things in it like same sex attraction and stuff like that in the 1970s. And that was considered a psychiatric condition and it was taken out. And now, There's been a push, and I think it might have even been taken out recently, to take sadism out, because they, they're like, that's just a sexual preference.

in there? It's not still in there. It might still be in there, but yeah. Oh lord. Okay, so then from that, you then go into schizophrenia. Now, schizophrenia actually has a huge diversity of sort of ways that it appears in people. I think when people think about schizophrenia, they have this like, culturally primed assumption.

Simone Collins: Yeah, the homeless person on the street who's yelling to themselves.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, I can just go over a few of the big ones here. Okay, so paranoid schizophrenia. It's one of the most common I saw. I think it might be one of the most common. Basically you assume [00:10:00] agency and like large forces of reality targeted at you.

That aren't targeted at you. So I'm trying to word this other than like you are paranoid. Because I think that's not a helpful understanding. It means that you will see something like a helicopter fly over your house and you will assume that it's flying over your house because you are in that house and it is watching you.

You will see you know people whispering to each other on a bus or something like that. And you will assume they must be whispering about you.

Simone Collins: It seems remarkably self centered. Like, you just assume that you must be the most important person in the entire world.

Malcolm Collins: Well, yes. And this is like the gang abduction hypothesis.

It's one of the conspiracy theories. I got to do like gang. I will, I'll edit and edit because I don't remember off the top of my head,

Gang stalking is what I was thinking of.

Malcolm Collins: but it's very likely paranoid schizophrenia that they're just talking about when they, when they talk about it. And this is another thing that I also want to note with people is a lot of people don't know how common.

Oh, I think I know who you're referring to. Okay. [00:11:00] Hallucinations are in the population and many of these types of schizophrenia symptoms. All humans experience this to some extent. Everybody sort of knows this feeling of seeing two people whisper and think, I bet they're talking about me. Like they must Not me, friend.

Simone Collins: So maybe autistic people don't feel this.

Malcolm Collins: Well, I typically categorize autism in the autistic spectrum as the exact inverse of the schizophrenia spectrum and we get into why. But the thing is, many of our viewers We'll have had this experience. And this is why I've always said that I'm much closer to the schizophrenia side of it than me.

This is the experience I have all the time. I'll see two people talking and I'll be like, are they making fun of me? Are they thinking about me?

Simone Collins: Are they, you know? And you spend so much time modeling other people where like, sometimes if we're walking and you're a little bit distracted, like I will see you like gesturing and I know that you're having an imaginary conversation with someone like, so, and you were constantly, I am, I've never, and a lot of people talk about conversation.

No, never. And, and I, you know, a lot of people I think can really relate to this because I hear a lot of people talk about how like [00:12:00] they imagine having this argument with someone and how it's going to go. And I've just never experienced this ever. So I think at least this will help people relate to it is like, okay, well, you're, you're being a little schizoid every time.

You have a pretend conversation with someone, right?

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, or another way that's very similar to this is magical thinking which you see in this next type of schizophrenia disorganized Well, so disorganized a bit different. People have it they'll often talk weirdly where so symptoms include disorganized behaviors and thoughts alongside short lasting delusions and hallucinations.

They have disorganized speech patterns and others may find it difficult to understand you. People living with disorganized schizophrenia often show little or no emotions in their facial expressions, voice, tone, or mannerisms. And one of the things is even when we were talking was fairly like um, they would, they would construct sentences using words that were sometimes kind of brilliant in ways.

One of my favorite, which I've actually [00:13:00] adopted in my lexicon. Is we were talking with one of them about his like daily habits, like grooming habits and he goes, well, I'm no high genius, but and, and they would often use words like this where they had put together words in a way that a normal person wouldn't have thought to put them together, but immediate sense, like it makes so much sense.

You're like, that's the most perfect thing I've ever seen. Like, but other people don't like make that connection. Think about that when they're structuring their language, right? Like they don't think, oh, how do I, so their brains are literally functioning quite different from another person's brain in terms of how they're structuring this.

Now to the point you're making earlier and in paranoid schizophrenia, cause you also see it in paranoid schizophrenia, is a symptom you call magical thinking. Magical thinking would be like, you saw a display window at Macy's or something. And you assume that that window is meant to communicate something to you, or you see a commercial and you're like, that commercial is supposed to communicate something to me.[00:14:00]

Many people could argue our entire religious framework that you and I use as a form of magical thinking, where we're looking to Abrahamic texts to find out what are they communicating to us. So a lot of schizophrenic. Type behaviors and thoughts are very related to religious thoughts. You know, when somebody is looking at reality and they're looking for signs from God, that is in a way, a form of magical thinking, you are looking at things that do not have intentionality.

The way a store display is arranged or what's going on in a commercial, like it has a form of intentionality, but it's certainly not targeted directly at you and yet you are assuming and modeling that thing as if it had like a human brain. Or a human brain went into constructing it to send a signal to you.

In a beautiful mind. I don't know if you saw that movie. It followed somebody with schizophrenia who believed that he was finding patterns, puzzles of like code words put into newspapers. And he [00:15:00] was like a math genius. So he kept, whenever he would look at newspapers, he kept overlaying various like, Mathematical equations.

Oh no. The page and whenever one of them would lead to the page saying something, he would then be like, that must be a message meant for me. So implying intentionality where no intentionality exists. Yeah. Interesting. So that is, that is one thing you'll have there. Now another type of schizophrenia that a lot of people don't know is schizophrenia is catatonic schizophrenia.

So catatonic schizophrenia, have you ever seen a movie that takes place in like a

have you ever seen a movie that takes place in a psych ward and you've seen somebody like in a weird position like this? That's catatonic schizophrenia. And if you like move their hand, it's called like waxy, like that's the word, the technical term for it. They'll stay in this new position, like Gumby or something.

Gosh. And they can be stuck like that for very long periods. Doesn't it hurt?

Simone Collins: You'd think it would hurt.

Malcolm Collins: What would they describe it as? And again, this is something that I can kind of model in my [00:16:00] head. Have you ever felt these moments where you're so mentally overloaded, you're kind of frozen? Yeah, that's whenever

Simone Collins: I say, my name is Simone Collins and I

Malcolm Collins: am washing the dishes.

No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. That's different from this. This is sort of rebooting. She has this pattern of rebooting where she's like, my name is Simone Collins and I'm doing X, but she forgets where she is and what she's doing. No, this is like, Something has happened in your life or something like that, or you are so stricken with like an emotional context because like you're embarrassed you did something and you just realized you did it or something like that.

And you're just like, and you're just processing this for a bit. These people are sort of stuck in that processing moment. Because they're so overwhelmed. They're so overwhelmed with thoughts.

Simone Collins: Oh, and yeah, with, with like specifically their schizophrenic thoughts, perhaps with like modeling a lot of people and stuff, right?

Yes.

Malcolm Collins: Yes. Undifferentiated schizophrenia is what I was thinking of. This is where you have signs of a few different things. I was thinking undifferentiated schizophrenia when I was thinking disorganized schizophrenia. It's very specific and that's easy for me to catch. [00:17:00] Undifferentiated does sound

Simone Collins: like a catch all.

It's

Malcolm Collins: just like you see a lot of different symptoms from different categories. Residual schizophrenia. Oh, yeah. I have to say, I don't remember seeing patients who had something called this, but yeah, this is they had a history of schizophrenic psychosis but only experienced the negative symptoms such as slow movement, poor memory, lack of concentration and poor hygiene.

So this is actually a really important one to talk about. So every time you have a psychotic break in schizophrenia these things get worse. The, the, the things I just noted there slow movement, poor memory, lack of concentration, poor hygiene. What is happening when you have a schizophrenic break is your brain is basically being flooded with chemicals that can be thought of as analogous to the sort of exogenous chemicals that you take when you're on drugs or something like taking a ton of hallucinogens.

And this is a big mistake that a lot of people, especially like bipolar people I know make, where they're like, I'll just tough it out, right? Like it's more natural. It's like it's not natural. Your brain is not supposed to be doing this. The chemicals that are flooding your brain, especially if they're causing psychotic episodes, are causing the exact [00:18:00] same damage as hallucinogens, if not more.

And you will suffer the same long term consequences of a hallucinogen addict. Or more slow speech, poor memory, poor hygiene. And so a lot of people are afraid of taking drugs, you know pharmaceuticals that lower the symptoms of these sorts of conditions on the schizophrenic spectrum and you really shouldn't be.

You will have permanent, it gets worse, and we saw this with schizophrenic patients, every time they have a break, they permanently get worse

Simone Collins: after that. Yeah, I remember one of the first things, like, first mental health stances that you gave to me that I thought was really interesting when we were really early in our dating was that, like, sometimes it's just so, so, so important to take medications for a mental condition because Your current chemical state with your brain is super, super not natural and causing a lot of damage like it is.

No, don't find some natural. Don't think through it. Don't therapy through it. It's not going to fix it. There is. You are high right now and [00:19:00] you need to fix it, which I, yeah, I'm glad you're pointing

Malcolm Collins: this out. Yeah. Well, some people, and this goes, you know, when we talk about our psychology and psychiatry thing and stuff like that, and are just tough it out stance was a lot of this stuff we were talking about, like wimpy stuff, like, I'm sorry.

I don't mean to say this. This is going to be very offensive to potential. You can see our all trauma is self inflicted video for more understanding of this. But a lot of the data shows us a lot of like, what modern psychology calls problems like trauma is self inflicted when you're talking about something like psychotic episodes or a major depressive disorder.

This is no f ing joke. You should take this seriously. You should take your medication, and the number one way you're gonna die is stopping to take that medication. And we saw this with our patients all the time because another thing I did is I collected brains from the M. E. So I knew people who had worked this for a while, and when the M.

E. I was able to read their brains. Oh my

Simone Collins: god, did you collect brains from people that you'd interviewed? Yeah, yeah,

Malcolm Collins: yeah. So that's so tough. That is how people die. They stop taking their medication. Oh my god. So well, another thing is people will be like, but with depression, you have [00:20:00] medication increases suicide risk.

Yeah, it does, but it doesn't really matter that it does. Okay, so I need to be more explicit here. So the reason why it was major depressive disorder, because one of the things major depressive disorder is associated with is like a lack of motivation and a lack of ability to motivate yourself. Drugs that lower that.

But you still remember it having happened recently, you still are horrified by it, and you are still in it. slightly depressed state. Well, now you just have more motivation and more agency. And you are doing what you feel you know, needs to be done to release you from this state, but it is not that the drugs aren't working.

They lead to suicide, not because they make you more depressed, but because they give you more agency. But we've got to keep going here with, with some of these.

Simone Collins: We can also just talk more about like, so like the, the differences between the autistic and schizophrenic spectrum and why we talk about it a lot because

Malcolm Collins: I didn't get to the final thing that I want to say here. Okay. Speed it up though. Okay. Okay. Well a lot of people have psychotic, like episodes, like they're more common than people think.[00:21:00]

So a quarter of humans will hear like, like hallucinatory voices at some point in their life. They will hear somebody talking to them. That's not there. This is very common. Auditory hallucinations within schizophrenia, by the way, if you're talking to somebody who's like faking schizophrenia, if they're talking about visual hallucinations and not audible hallucinations, they're probably faking it.

Because audible hallucinations are the number one symptom, visual hallucinations are actually pretty rare. Okay. So, so that's, that's just sort of worth noting. So like these symptoms in these things in schizophrenia, like these moments of catatonic schizophrenia, these moments of paranoid schizophrenia, these moments of magical thinking are something that a lot of people can empathize with.

And so we can see that a lot of people have this level of this sort of in the background running within them. Okay. So you wanted to get to the, what would you want to Well,

Simone Collins: we have theories as to why autism and schizophrenia exist and We, we describe a lot of people as being on these spectrums because.[00:22:00]

We think that a lot of people have moderate versions of them that give them advantages in society. There's a reason why genetically, because there's a high genetic basis for these conditions, that things like autism and schizophrenia provide advantages

Malcolm Collins: in moderation. We need to talk about these two spectrums because they're pretty different from each other.

Simone Collins: Yeah, but I'm just, I want to get to that because that's the juicy part. Well, you're just reading

Malcolm Collins: through lists. It's not really, but okay, I'll talk about the quote unquote juicy part. So the autism spectrum is basically a spectrum from having autism to not having autism. The schizophrenia spectrum is a spectrum, it can almost be thought of as like a conal spectrum.

It's a spectrum of one. iteration of a psychiatric condition to another iteration of a psychiatric condition. And then within that sort of like line, you can think of a spot on the other side, which is a completely mentally healthy individual and like a conal radiant going to that line. And you can be anywhere On that spectrum of like depressed or manic depressive to a completely normal person [00:23:00] or schizophrenic to a completely normal person.

So you're talking about these two sort of, one is a conic spectrum and then one is the autistic spectrum. My intuition from what I've seen about these two spectrums is that if you are drawing like a conal line and you have like an average person at like the center of where this line is drawn for right and then you have the schizophrenia spectrum of psychological disorders and you drew a line.

Like from the center of that cone out in the exact opposite direction, that would be the autistic spectrum. I, I am not aware of ever seeing comorbidity between autism and schizophrenia. In my experience. And it's because I think that they are exactly the antithesis of each other. And this is the part that you probably find interesting that you want me to talk about.

Which is my theory of what's causing schizophrenia. The common thing in all of these. So I need a little background knowledge before I do this. Okay, we're going to talk quickly about trans magnetic stimulation. So trans magnetic stimulation is a device. It's like a little figure eight sign [00:24:00] paddle that you put on your head and it can be used to either a hyper activate or sort of turn off sections of your brain using.

Transmagnetic simulation. And this can be useful in a lot of experiments and stuff like that. Like there's cool things you can do where you can have somebody like looking at letters and then you put it on their head and all of a sudden they don't know what they're looking at. They're like, I, I understand their letters, but I don't know what they're saying anymore.

So you can literally like turn on. Now, a lot of experiments have been done with it. It's like

Simone Collins: disrupting a radio signal essentially. Right. I mean,

Malcolm Collins: metaphorically. Not at all, but no. Okay. I think of it that way. It's not important exactly how it works for this conversation. Now it's also important to note with this, that I do not think TMS is safe.

And I think that in the future we will talk about TMS in the same way that we talked about experiments that use hallucinogens in the seventies today. I do not think we have good evidence that this is a safe thing to do given the severity of what people are doing with it. But anyway so, so TMS so, One thing you can do with TMS is hyper stimulate parts of a person's brain.

Simone Collins: Oh, so you can't, [00:25:00] you, you can hyper, you can like turn up in addition to turning down. It's like a

Malcolm Collins: volume down. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Neat, okay. And when you hyper stimulate them, like you're lowering the amount of signal that's needed to create an action potential within them. Don't need to go into what this is.

But if you hyper stimulate, like, the parts that, like, you turned off, like, remember when I was talking about seeing letters? You can hyper stimulate those parts, and they'll look at letters, and they won't be able to help, but say the letters they're looking at. So, they will look at an A, and they'll say, A, B, like, they can't stop from doing it.

Because basically when you add this little bit of extra stimulation, i. e. like the visual stimulation of seeing it and processing the letter, it accidentally triggers the pathway that's tied to talking about it. So what I think is happening in schizophrenic patients is the pathway that's tied to a human theory of mind.

So let's talk quickly about a theory of mind. A theory of mind is what I do. So I model people, right? Like when I am Seeing you, and I am trying to predict you, like another person, not Simone, I never really predict her because I don't need to. She just [00:26:00] tells me what she thinks, it's really nice.

This is part of being autistic, okay? So they, they, they, I, I am emulating, like, emulating a video game or something like that, or emulating another operating system. I'm emulating their mind within my mind. Like I have a little model of their mind running in my mind whenever I'm talking to someone.

And that model helps me predict how they are going to react to the things I'm saying. And, and kids take a while to develop this. One of the famous experiments around this is you get a kid to draw a shape that you're looking at from like, Their perspective, you're like, can you draw this shape from my perspective and there's a certain age.

I think it's like four or five or something where kids can start realizing. Oh, they're not seeing the shape from my perspective. I need to draw it from their perspective, like their eyes are somewhere else in relation to the shape when contrasted with my eyes. When this takes a while to do right.

Well, we can also like summon theory of minds when we're doing things we can. Create a theory of mind of like a person who we had an argument with and then [00:27:00] continue to have that argument with them with this modeled iteration of them inside of our own brain. And then that's when you win the argument, of course.

And you're like, gosh, why didn't I see that in the real, like you're basically replaying tons of scenarios with them afterwards. Whereas I just

Simone Collins: go home and I'm like, man, they were weird. Yeah. Like,

Malcolm Collins: But then another theory of mind that you can do is you know, you can Sort of imbue like an animal with a theory of mind, right?

Like you can interact with your dog and then theory of mind your dog as if it was a human. Or if you're from like one of the more mystical religious traditions, you can theory of mind a waterfall, right? You can be like, oh, that must have a theory of mind, right? Like it's doing this now because it's angry with us.

You can theory mind the sky. Like, so theory of mind is just like a classic thing that humans do. It's part of a lot of religious traditions, we'll talk about that later or it can be used by them to create significance where no significance exists which is a sin, I'm sorry, that's just like, we'll go into this later in some of our tracks, but, theory of mind so what I think is happening with Schizophrenic is Individuals [00:28:00] is that their theory of mind is basically hyper stimulated and activates when it shouldn't be activating.

And I think that this is what is happening with the auditory hallucinations. I think that's why auditory hallucinations are the most common. Is Essentially, they are running models of other people when they shouldn't be running models of other people and they can hear these models of other people that they're running in the background.

This is why, you know, one of the most common is just like hearing whispers because they're not running full models. It's not like fully running. It's just like barely rumbling in the background. It's running in their mind, but they're not. It's not fully breaking into their consciousness. There's other people.

They're seeing like full theory of minds. Well, this becomes relevant because almost every symptom. Schizophrenia can be explained by a theory of mind operating when it's not supposed to be operating. Yeah, like on overdrive. Yeah, so this happens when you see something like you know, applying a theory of mind to the way things are arranged in a store window.

Applying a theory of mind to like, world events, right? Like, oh, there's a theory of mind behind this that's [00:29:00] directly relevant to you. Or a theory of mind creating a hallucination. Catatonia is the one counter example here, but what I suspect is really happening with Catatonia is they're just so overwhelmed with so many theories of minds operating at once that they basically become catatonic.

They're

Simone Collins: paralyzed by their thoughts. Yeah. I, that, that makes sense to me. I mean, they're

Malcolm Collins: basically running like five consciousnesses simultaneously. Like,

Simone Collins: yeah. It's like when you are running too many programs on an older computer and it just like stops.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. That's basically what's happening. So autism I think is literally defined by the exact opposite.

I think the core symptom of autism is a difficulty in running theory of minds of other people. And this is what creates problems in autism, like not being able to recognize emotions as easily, or not recognizing when people aren't interested in something that you're talking to them about. And as Simone says, her as an autistic person Simone, I, I want to be clear, it is not normal to not have arguments with people in your heads.

That is something that normal people do. It

Simone Collins: is something that a schizoid [00:30:00] person would

Malcolm Collins: say, isn't it? Right? No, but that is, and this is what we talk about with me being more towards the schizoid side and her being more towards the autism side. Like we are both opposite sides of exact opposite sides of the spectrum.

Where I run theory of minds too frequently and too easily, but I am uniquely good at it. And I think. That people are like why would like schizophrenia exists because it existed about equal rates across populations and it exists likely because people like me have a genetic advantage over people not like me.

I mean, one of the

Simone Collins: things so yeah, anyone in a social, like any living in a society, civilization, a tribe, a city is going to be to have an advantage if they're able to play the game of chess better, you know, to model other people's next moves, to anticipate them, to think what they're thinking, because then it is easier to get ahead and to have an edge.

But then I also think that maybe the reason why people carrying autistic traits have continued to perpetuate is that Sometimes being free of that burden enables you to think more [00:31:00] systematically in a way that makes you useful to society as an inventor, as a builder, as a producer. And so then that's why those genes have also been carried on.

It's just a worker, like they, you know, you get the work done because you're not so busy. Socializing and thinking about people and modeling people and trying to play games, which is frankly not very productive. I mean, you see this in like other contexts where like there was that one famous study of I think a travel agency building somewhere, a company in Southeast Asia that had people at the office and people at work from home and work from home people were more productive, but they didn't get promotions.

So it was really interesting. It was like, well, working in an office is good. If getting ahead is what matters. Having people work from home is good. If getting stuff done is what matters. And you kind of need both people in society, right? You need people who are capable of getting ahead and amassing power and amassing resources and wealth.

And you also need people who are good at just getting things done. That's why these two things on

Malcolm Collins: a spectrum, we have to worry. Are we washing out our genes? Like was my unique genius being able to model

Simone Collins: that [00:32:00] my autism is overpowered your,

Malcolm Collins: it does in our kids. I'll say that.

Simone Collins: Yeah. And we, we can't tell yet with our daughter.

Who's around like 16 months now. With our two sons, though, it is extremely clear

Malcolm Collins: there. Well, autism appears more in males than females, so. It

Simone Collins: manifests more in a diagnosable way. I mean, this is why I wasn't diagnosed until

Malcolm Collins: our son was diagnosed. Remember when who was it, Diana Fleischman was on our show, and she was saying that in women oh, no, no, it wasn't, this was, louise Perry, she is saying that women like you're a woman with a 70 IQ has a better ability to model the emotional states of others than a man with a 120 IQ. Yeah, I

Simone Collins: think that was Diana.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. No, it wasn't Diana, it was Louise Perry. Okay. Yeah, it was in the episode on feminism or whatever. Anyway, so the Very interesting is is I think that that's what's causing that is because women have this naturally higher emotional intelligence that it often gets high hidden in them when they have lower ability to model other people.

Anyway. I love you to death, [00:33:00] Simone. It is remarkable how many low hanging fruits there are within the sciences. And people are like, well, why don't you like test them and prove them and stuff like that? Why don't you stay in the community? Because this would have been my entire career. This one theory would have been 30, 40 years of my life just proving out.

And I've been able to have like a panoply of other theories in the field of sexuality because I was able to do independent research on that. I'm able to have theories in the field of theology, which I'm really interested in because, you know, like if I had trapped myself in academia, I wouldn't be able to live the life of a gentleman scientist, which I much prefer.

Academia is collapsing anyways, right? Anyway, I love you to death Simone. I love

Simone Collins: you too and I'm glad you shared your thoughts on this because it's super interesting. So thank you. I love your beautiful mind.

 https://discord.gg/EGFRjwwS92

In this thought-provoking video, Malcolm and Simone Collins dissect a viral clip of a Muslim man discussing the future of Islamic demographics in Western countries. They explore the implications of differing fertility rates, economic productivity, and cultural values between Muslim and Western populations. The couple delves into topics such as LGBTQ+ rights in Islamic societies, the relationship between wealth and fertility rates, and the potential future of cultural diversity in developed nations. This in-depth analysis challenges common misconceptions about demographic trends and offers a nuanced perspective on the complex interplay between religion, economics, and social change in the modern world.

Malcolm Collins: [00:00:00] Okay. This guy, I absolutely love this guy.

What would happen to a gay couple in Gaza?

Executed according to Islamic law. Islam doesn't endorse gays. Islam doesn't endorse homosexuality. Just like Canada doesn't endorse a lot of things. So would you like to see Sharia law in Canada replace Canadian law? At some point, it will. You know, Because we are, we have families, we are making babies, you're not your population is going down the slum, right?

And by 2060, according to Pew Research Institute, your research, by 2060, Muslims will be the biggest religious group the world over. What are you going to do then? Are you going to oppose Sharia even then? Well, You know what? I'm very appreciative of the honesty. We don't usually get that. One day we can have a Muslim majority nation here in Canada.

Right In your face!

Malcolm Collins: We are going to be showing you guys this clip that we just watched again and spend an episode talking about the clip because I think the clip is [00:01:00] wonderful for just a

Number of reasons.

Would you like to know more?

Malcolm Collins: I love the way the guy argues for Islamic value systems.

Actually, let's just start with that because I think that's really interesting.

Simone Collins: He, by the way, he doesn't say this is what I want. This is what we need. He just says, this is what it's going to be. Yeah, this is what is

Malcolm Collins: happening by current statistics. Yeah, by current statistics. I love that. And I would argue that I think he's wrong about the way this is going to play out.

But I love the vitalism and I think that like when you are approaching issues of pronatalism, you need to be approaching it like this guy. Yes. We might not be on exactly the same team, but I am probably closer to his team than I am to some of the other teams out there right now.

Simone Collins: I really appreciate about his mindset too.

And I feel this way about so many things is that, and this is also pervasive in your views of other people and whether or not they matter. Is you get to own something, [00:02:00] to influence it, to have a say. When you are literally building it. And that means that your children will be there representing the future.

You're having children. They'll be in the future. Or, if you have a problem with a policy, then you get to complain about it if you're trying to fix it, you have a problem with the company. You get to complain about it if you're trying to fix it, but you don't like the, all this whining that takes place online among people who aren't actually doing anything to build it themselves or build something better or change something.

They have no say in

Malcolm Collins: this. That is a great point. And I want to expand on it because I hadn't thought of it this way before, but people who have and raise children are building the future and therefore have ownership over that future almost axiomatically where you have far like urban monoculture brain or far like progressive brain.

They look at the world through this socialist lens, where regardless of the effort that you have put into something, everybody deserves some [00:03:00] level of equal say in whatever is happening, i. e. the future of humanity, etc. And Even though they aren't putting in the effort to have and raise children, they believe that this normative ethical system that they have built and that is going extinct with them is going to give them the ability to pressure other people into their types of beliefs.

Simone Collins: And I think this mindset made sense at one point in the human history, when people lived in small collective clans or tribes where everyone did inherently Play a crucial role. Even if you were a child, you were someone's future old age safety strategy, if no matter who you were, you're providing something and therefore to feel that you were entitled to the way things were run.

Matter. I think what people are missing in modern socialist worlds, and America's fairly socialist. When you look at the number of social programs we have, and most developed nations seem to be not Russia, as much, not kind of China,

Malcolm Collins: Yeah,

Simone Collins: basically we're way more socialist than China, which is [00:04:00] hilarious.

But the way socialism works modernly is the average human citizen, especially one who is benefiting from the state. is actually not contributing in that way. They're not providing any value and they are primarily a leech and it is mostly businesses and wealthier taxpayers who are producing and making money and they have jobs that are, really entitled to something.

So I think that maybe this mindset evolved in people and culturally was okay in those previous systems where it was almost impossible. Like you wouldn't be alive if you weren't contributing, right? Whereas now that's broken and yet we haven't changed our culture around that kind of mindset.

Malcolm Collins: But what's important to note, and I think people believe that he and his kids will adopt.

Their cultural system. Oh, yeah. Their cultural

Simone Collins: system is enlightened and correct and based on science

Malcolm Collins: and all these. And it's just, it won't like the fertility rates in, even if he has 10 kids and two of them adopt your culture and then they have no kids then they're just going to disappear as well.

Simone Collins: Exactly. It's [00:05:00] only the ones that maintain this hard culture or a version of it. And of course, there may be a version that is LGBTQ friendly.

Malcolm Collins: But let's talk about his LGBTQIA or whatever statements there because I thought they were really interesting and they do a very good job of signaling that the form of cultural imperialism that he feels from the left and basically saying that this is not something that you will be able to continue to implement, and if you think you will, you don't understand the cultures you're interacting with.

Specifically this statement that you brought up to me, and I really love this, was in Canada, you have laws too. Yeah. He's just saying our laws aren't your laws, but you have laws that can seem arbitrary to other cultural groups.

And we have laws that can seem arbitrary to other cultural groups. But in the future, because we're going to be the majority population in this country. That's what you're going to get.

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: These laws should be the normative laws of this country. And he's, he had to be put it right in [00:06:00] your face.

Simone Collins: Yeah.

What's funny is how both intolerant and pluralistic he comes across at the same time, right? Because on one hand, he's yeah, like kill gays, obviously. And then on the other hand, he's just like you have beliefs in Canada too. Which is great. And then he's oh, but by the way, we're going to be like, this is the law that's going to govern you in the future.

No,

Malcolm Collins: it should be aware that the way that he, in, in, again, you've got to think Too many people think about this like a progressive. They're like he wants to go out there and kill people. And that's just like a, no, that is not what he's thinking in his head. He thinks in his head, what I just want is for people who are born same sex attracted to either not act on it or become transitioned.

And interestingly, that aligns with what a lot of progressives these days seem to want anyway. Just transition them. You got a kid who's questioning their gender, just transition them, fixes it, and it's okay with the Islamists. But I also think that this is really interesting is this denial, and I don't know where it comes from, that this [00:07:00] is a part of Islamic culture in the leftist mindset, like the gays for Gaza situation.

And I'm very confused by the, did they, I think they just genuinely think that this is a far right conspiracy that Muslims believe this. Is that what you think it is?

Simone Collins: I haven't looked into gays for Gaza, so I honestly don't know, but I can only imagine that they do not understand. Dan, the full policy at play, right?

So yeah, I think it's, no, there could be like a super based view where they're like, no, I support their right to hate gays just as much as I support my right to love gays. Like it could be that it could be that they're so hyper pluralistic that's where they're going with this. I don't think so.

No, I don't think that's it. Yeah, it doesn't seem like it. It seems more like the same with any sort of Palestine group, which is like, Oh, they're just fairly misinformed about Hamas and many other things that [00:08:00] are going on. And that's why

Malcolm Collins: I think I understand. So I was just thinking about it from a moment, trying to see this from a truly progressive perspective.

Okay. It's They are aware that this is happening. But because they don't trust the media when it comes to negative facts about Muslim cultural groups, they assume that it's being over reported and it's only a small groups of rural extremists and they also think that they live in a country where gays are being killed all the time for being gay.

So from their perspective, Oh, there's small rural extremists over there that do this. There's small rural extremists over here that do this. And for both of those rural extremist communities, we will eventually convert them to our way of seeing things because their culture doesn't have a right to exist.

And we should extinguish it. And so when they look at them, they don't see a Muslim cultural group. They see Brown people who are future converts to their cultural group. And in [00:09:00] light of them being brown people and being the weaker side of a conflict they are inherently slated for a higher status position in the larger progressive power hierarchy.

No questions asked. Yeah, which also makes them think that these individuals are like intrinsically sort of high status and won't have a problem with this. Like they don't. mind their imperialism or their plans to wipe out this cultural group because they are like, yeah we'll extinguish their cultural group, but we'll give their actual children positions of status was in this new order that we're creating.

And therefore there's nothing unethical about it. The problem is just it doesn't work. Woke ideas have not spread very far in the Islamist world. You don't have, when you have Pride Week and stuff like that, there's always the famous sign where they show all the Western companies logos for Pride Week Western accounts, and then they show all their Middle Eastern accounts.

And then you see [00:10:00] nothing. This isn't to say that their cultures aren't susceptible To this but I think that often when they hit this, they lose a lot more of their culture than even Westerners do. What I mean by that is, is that when Muslim children are taken by the urban monoculture more of their original cultural practices and beliefs and perspectives are erased than when progressives are taken by the urban monoculture.

And I should also note here that there are different Muslim cultural groups. And there are some Muslim cultural groups that take a much more soft perspective to their religion and don't have these incredibly strict restrictions against things like the LGBT community. However, Those cultural groups typically have much lower fertility rates.

And so don't really matter in terms of this conversation. Um, any further thoughts on this particular point, Simone?

Simone Collins: No, I'm with you on that. It's just, I think it's a wake up call [00:11:00] to LGBT groups that if you want a future that supports open gay marriages and even just relations, you gotta figure out demographic collapse.

Cause this is, he's so right. He's just right. And he states it plainly. And I think that's the other thing about pronatalism, which really sucks is that the people who are going to create a future that everyone blames us for trying to create is prenatalist, right? Like you're going to make a handmaid's tale.

You're going to take away people's rights. You're going to take away productive rights, all these things. Like that is anyone who does support those things is. It's just very quiet because they're, they know that's the default. Anyone who's talking about this openly, they're talking about it because they're not super cool with the default.

And what I love about what this guy is just saying, like openly on the streets is just like that he's showing the default in a way [00:12:00] that I don't think anyone else is because any other group that knows this to be true, isn't going to talk about it.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, now here's where he's wrong. The future is not Muslim.

Yes, Muslims will be the dominant world religion eventually. I think that's pretty obvious from the current statistics. But Muslims have a higher fertility rate than other regions. Because, so first we should note, there are multiple Muslim cultural groups. Some of these groups I think are more American than most Americans.

For example, I find the Persian Muslim cultural group. I always joke that if you like Trump, you like Persians. Like he is very Persian coded to me, much more than he's coded as like a wasp or something like that. Very entrepreneurial, very American in many ways. There's many different. Muslim groups that are just like really American.

Or in other ways groups that I identify with. But then there's also what I would say is that there's a high correlation though, between how much a Muslim cultural group is one of the cultural groups that I have a cultural [00:13:00] affinity to and how low their fertility rate is, which typically the groups I have a higher affinity to being lower fertility

Simone Collins: unfortunately, because we.

Are Socially much more progressive than your typical conservative,

Malcolm Collins: but I would note here. No, I don't think that's the only reason I think that there's another reason. Islam is not as a religion, particularly protective of fertility rates. Between religious communities different levels of fertility protection based upon the income that group achieves.

And for example, we contrast like Catholics and Orthodox Christians, which typically have lower fertility rates when contrasted with, when held in constant with income with Protestant groups, which typically have much higher fertility rates. And Jewish groups, which typically have much higher fertility rates when held at the same level of income as like Catholic and Orthodox groups.

If you put Muslim groups into this spectrum they are not as bad as Catholic and Orthodox groups. But they're [00:14:00] only a smidge better. They're certainly not up with the Jewish groups. They're certainly not up with the Protestant groups. And so then people are like, why do some Muslim groups have such high fertility rates and it is because they engage in cultural practices that lower their economic potential, which means.

that because they're at this lower economic potential, they're producing more kids. Remember if we're holding, if I'm saying at the same economic level most Muslim cultural groups actually are just not that high fertility. You you can cheese that by lowering the economic potential of a group.

Simone Collins: Those groups therefore are not going to be able to the future because they are dependent on more productive groups to either maintain their lifestyles or maintain their governments and infrastructure. So what people are missing is a lot of people are like but. Hamas will just take over Israel.

That's the correct thing. It's their land, whatever. But Hamas literally had a plan to enslave the most [00:15:00] productive, high producing Jews in Israel. That was, they

Malcolm Collins: understood that they had that like we have to keep them, we have to keep them had no economic value to them and the land of Israel had no economic value to them.

The Jews were the thing of economic value. And they would only win if they enslaved them.

Simone Collins: Yeah. And then people also are constantly talking but in Europe, like all these refugee groups have super high, like rates of reproduction, their birth rates are way higher. They're going to replace everyone else.

If that happens, those countries, those nations, and they don't, and they don't change their lifestyles if they don't become the economic producers and taxpayers of those nations will become completely hamstringed. They won't function. And those nations will not have influence on the future.

So again, like what you're arguing in other words is. For anyone to have influence over the future, they have to be economically productive and technologically engaged to a certain extent. And once most groups become economically productive and engaged, [00:16:00] unless they have some unique, good, hard culture technology to protect them from lowering fertility, which Islam doesn't, then they will see lower birth rates.

Even Muslim groups.

Malcolm Collins: Even Muslim groups. Yeah. You go to your Muslim friends who have PhDs or who work on Wall Street, they are very low fertility. And we have a lot of Muslim friends in this category. They are very low fertility. And you actually, a really interesting thing that you pointed out is you're like, in these Muslim majority countries who's actually like running the Economies in the industry, you go to the UAE, you go to Saudi Arabia, you go to Qatar, and who's actually putting in the legwork to operate a lot of these companies it's not people from the Muslim cultural groups, it's often people who are imported from India or the United States.

And even as they grow, functionally, the decisions who decides where Sade Ramko's capital is invested it's mostly a room full of Jews and white people, okay? So [00:17:00] the actual, The power of these giant Islamic states is still fundamentally being made by other cultural groups.

Simone Collins: So what you're saying essentially is that, Islamic groups still have to figure out how in the face of modernity, wealth, and high education, they're going to maintain high fertility rates because that hasn't been figured out. And that's the subtext under this clip that is not being discussed.

Everyone just takes it for granted that, oh of course yeah, there will be more Muslims than anyone else in the future because they're the only ones who are still having kids. That's very similar to the same arguments that we hear from people who are like, Oh it just means that we're just going to have Africans in the future because they're the only ones who are still having lots of kids.

No, both of these groups have not figured out how to maintain high birth rates. Once they develop, once they see more wealth, once they gain the influence that we would love to see them gain. That's the interesting thing. And I think that's under discussed in pretty the list discussion.

And I think this

Malcolm Collins: is you look at Gaza and everyone's always talking about, look at how big the population of Gaza is. Look at how big the [00:18:00] population of Gaza is. It's one of the densest areas to live in the world. And then you look at that and yeah, but nobody thinks that Gaza has a real shot at winning against Israel.

Like why is that the case? Because it's not about population size. It's about the economic productivity of a population. And so you can cheese people all you want. Now.

Simone Collins: Numbers help. Numbers aren't nothing, but numbers can also be a liability. Once you have a lot of people in a country who are very dissatisfied, not getting enough food, not getting any security, you're going to have a revolution.

You're going to have a complete mess. So yes, humans are a strength. They're a liability. It's not the answer.

Malcolm Collins: So within every community, I always feel like it's up for the communities to find a way to save themselves. And when we did our Catholic episode, we're like, the core Catholic problem is an inability to motivate fertility among their members.

That is the core Catholic problem, and if they can't find a way to change that and this is even true of religiously devout Catholics by the statistics, as we've shown, they're in trouble. Muslims [00:19:00] actually have a different problem. The Muslim problem is much more around how to ensure economic and technological productivity amongst the iterations of their culture that are high fertility because if they don't do that here's what's going to happen.

You are going to begin to see countries that have been taking in lots of Muslim immigrants begin to become Politically, because many of these lower economic potential high fertility Muslim cultural subgroups do believe they have, as this man stated an ethical incentive to ensure that Sharia law is the law of the land in the countries that they live in.

And. They are going to begin implementing that within other countries once this is done, basically the first time in a country that formerly would have been a developed world country you're gonna, it's going to be very much like when Putin attacked the Ukraine, where everyone's oh, this [00:20:00] is actually a threat and then other countries whether the US, et cetera are going to have a large political and likely empowered faction within them that believes that they have a political mandate to deal with a population of the Muslim population in their country that they believe could undergo this same transformation if it continues to grow.

And that's where you're going to get real and violent bloodshed against Muslim cultural groups that wouldn't do that. That is the real threat within the Muslim world, where if you're from one of these more, you're like I'm from one of the more like progressive Muslim cultural subgroups, right?

Like one of the more technologically engaged, economically engaged, fine. Your biggest threat is the extremist Muslims. Because if they win everywhere, there's going to be other factions that assume that you are part of their [00:21:00] mandate. And that is a unique cultural problem to have. Catholics have it to some extent.

Because there's definitely Catholic groups that follow the the syllabus of errors that we talked about post Pius IX putting out, which is basically a Catholic version of Sharia law that basically says that once Catholics reach a certain population within a country, they have a mandate to enact Catholic, uh, religious, like a theocracy basically that mandates Catholic value systems.

And so individuals who follow this, the reason why this isn't really a threat to Catholics is because Catholics that are religiously observant are so low fertility. That there really isn't a threat of them becoming a dominant political faction in any country. Not anytime soon at least, but if they ever did and they enacted this.

Then every other country would see the Catholic minority population as a threat. And this is why it is so dangerous culturally to take one of these stances. It like seems really cool [00:22:00] and tough. And I have, people online will front we want a country that's ruled under my value system.

And it's you really don't want that. Cause if you win in like small Malta, now all of a sudden there's a mandate to. Get rid of anyone who looks like they might be part of your culture pretty much everywhere else in the world where you're not a majority yet.

Simone Collins: Yeah, then you become a threat.

And this is very similar to your argument about AI. When you make it such that any other group will have to eliminate you if you exist, then you're going to have to try to eliminate them. And we don't want to create a world like that for AI

Malcolm Collins: or for different cultural groups and religious groups.

This is the thing about having a pluralist framing. I think so many people see our drive towards pluralism as downstream of still having like latent progressive or urban monocultury values or like aesthetically valuing pluralism. Yeah, we want

Simone Collins: pluralism because

Malcolm Collins: it's good in the rainbow form.

Simone Collins: Faces is such a nice thing to see. [00:23:00]

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. And that is just very foolish. I think we see pluralism as a strategy pluralism, especially in a world of collapsing fertility rates, where fertility rates are higher, often in more diverse countries. When you're controlling for wealth, as we often point out, you look at really non diverse countries like South Korea or Japan or China, and you see a, an unusually low fertility rate.

You look at really diverse countries States and you see unusually higher fertility rates. This is likely because believing you have an existential threat, um, near you, not for progressivity reasons but like a cultural group that is genuinely different from yours than in competition with yours seems to increase fertility rates.

I often say that One really interesting cultural dynamic that we may see is a certain Muslim and Jewish populations living side by side out competing other populations in cash adjusted fertility rates. Because each group and I'm not talking about the type of Muslim and Jewish population.

Don't hate [00:24:00] each other. I'm talking about the type that do hate each other. That, that creates a synergistic I actually think that's why both Israel and Gaza's fertility rates were so unusually high. Was because they did believe there was an existential threat so much so that it likely offsets in both countries, the deaths that will be associated with this particular conflict in terms of the motivated fertility before and after this conflict, which is really interesting.

Simone Collins: I don't know if it's necessarily out of this drive to beat the competition. I think a lot of it is similar to what you've seen with Typhoons in Southeast Asia killing villages where like researchers found that birth rates were higher when you were in a village that was uniquely devastated and saw a uniquely high loss of life.

So I think there's also just something about birth rates that responds to tragedy where you're just like, I need hope. I need children. No, I

Malcolm Collins: hear that. But I think that probably the bigger influencer is on the competing cultural subgroup. If we lived in a culturally diverse environment and those [00:25:00] cultures had no level of antagonism towards each other, I do not think they would reinforce the other group's fertility rate.

I think you need a cultural diversity with a level of. Healthy competitive antagonism. I think obviously it can go too far. I think that what's, going on with Gaza right now is obviously at a completely unhealthy obsession. Yeah,

Simone Collins: we're talking about football game rivalry, not

Malcolm Collins: We're talking about Protestants and Catholics in the United States.

I think that's a good level of cultural antagonism. Like a, or our podcast. Probably the way that our podcast sometimes talks about other groups, I don't see respect for them existing but I do not Trash

Simone Collins: talking. We like trash talking. We don't like We don't like raping.

We don't do that.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Like I, I really don't mind. Being in an environment where Catholics talk about like the ways that our family breeds, like with IVF and genetic selection and stuff like that. And they're like, Oh, it's horrible. You're monsters, but they're not coming and killing us. I'm [00:26:00] like, that's a good level of cultural competition there because they're trying to have our kids taken away.

There's sometimes when the Would they go too far? No, I agree. But I don't think that's religious people doing that. I think that's the urban monoculture. I think the people calling CPS are all urban monoculture. These are not Catholic moms. I think the, but when I see like the Catholics being like, Oh, you guys are monsters, everything like that, it motivates me to have more kids and to solidify my culture and to steal my culture because I am reminded that my neighbors are the other.

Or, or

Simone Collins: you're reminded, what you stand for and why you stand for it too. I think when people criticize you. You socially, um, are incentivized to question, am I right here? Do I actually want to stand with what I'm standing with if I'm going to catch all this s**t for it? And then, if you do decide that you want to stay, hold your ground.

You're going to be even more dedicated to your stance because you've thought through it and you've committed to it despite the cost So I think that's also many catholics

Malcolm Collins: are going to be the same as us they watch our podcast and they see something that's so [00:27:00] culturally distinct for them one it's interesting because it's a unique perspective in the same way that I really like watching like responses to our Catholic videos because they give me a unique perspective that I have a very hard time emulating.

Like Catholic arguments are very difficult for me to emulate. I can go through it they'll be like, Oh, this one saint back in this time said giving fellatio was a sin. And in, in these ways, IVF is like fellatio. Wait, are

Simone Collins: people comparing IVF?

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, I was going through the discord arguments. And I was like, this is very odd.

Like I genuinely. It's being discussed in the discord. All right, we've got to keep

Simone Collins: including links to that in

Malcolm Collins: the description. It was a very Catholic like way of engaging with it to go back to someone who is a historically respected intellectual and try to apply their reasoning. To a modern context, and I love that.

I love that because it's something I never ever would have considered doing myself. And so I can learn from that. But I think that, when these people are horrified by us, they're [00:28:00] motivated to, yeah, for their own cultural group. I think that this is just the pluralism that we advocate for is not because I think it's good.

that Muslims ban their kids from same sex relationships. I wouldn't do that from, for my kids. But I don't think I have the right to within Muslim families say that they should be handling their family separately. And so I think that because of that, So long as they are not one of the groups that wants to institute Sharia law, and we can talk about these groups in just a second.

Because of that I am further motivated to create a culture where my kids can make that choice, but building the future means having the kids. Now in regards to the groups that actually do want to create Sharia law and as soon as they become the majority. I think that these individuals, and keep in mind, they don't just exist within Muslim populations, some exist within, for example, Catholic populations.

We were talking about the syllabus of eras. And they exist within a few different some evangelicals fall into this [00:29:00] framework. These groups are an absolutely existential threat to our group. I do not know how we're realistically going to.

Deal with these groups. Like some people in the server were like, what are you guys going to do if IVF is banned in the district that you live or in the region that you live? And the answer would be no. So

Simone Collins: many people already travel for IVF. People travel all the way from China to do IVF in the United States for various reasons.

People have to travel to the United States for surrogacy as well to do IVF because they can't do it in other countries. You just do what, and this is the same with issues like abortion. This is going to be the same if people ban things like PGTP. They're just going basically, it means that those who have the means or the dedication to do it.

They'll still get it done. And those who are ambivalent about it won't. And will we have enough money to travel to other nations? It'll strain us, but when we made, when we did all our rounds of IVF, [00:30:00] we literally lived on a mattress in a studio apartment in Doral, Florida. Like it was. Fine. You, I think that's what it's going to come down.

We make it work.

Malcolm Collins: I think that's what it means to be an economically productive cultural group in that we're never genuinely afraid of not having money. We will always find out how to make something work because we are productive.

Simone Collins: Yeah, actually, that's an interesting theme. Maybe it deserves its own conversation someday that when people argue that money is the reason why they can't do something, that's, it really means that they don't have enough dedication to do it.

Because money has, it can obviously make things easy for people who are ambivalent. But when you are extremely dedicated to making something happen, you make it work regardless of your level of resources.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. But also you can play this out. They're like, okay, yeah. But what if they ban like you from coming back if you've done this?

Like they, they absolutely ban because then you're like marked as a murderer of genetic selection from being in your country. And the answer is it's in people of our cultural group. Leave this country and [00:31:00] if we turn out to be an intergenerationally very high fertility cultural group while maintaining our economic and technological productivity, that is a very bad move for the people who have banned us for two reasons.

One is that they've lost any. Productivity that they could have gotten very much like when the Nazis scared away all the nuclear scientists to the United States who were, disproportionately Jewish. But then too then you've got people who can be used by groups that hate you to build their nuclear bombs, which then come back and hit your country.

The Axis powers, they, um, they put the Jewish scientists in the hands of the Americans, which built nuclear bombs, which then ended up being dropped on Japan, right? Like the Axis powers. If groups go around and they say, anybody who engages with genetics or something like that, we're going to go and we're going to, exterminate you.

Then what happens? Then these individuals leave. [00:32:00] And these individuals would be a great asset. Remember when we were talking about some of these competing power structures that don't mind funding outsiders? To a group like Saudi Arabia, or like the UAE, that might want to fund these types of experiments.

To, maybe act on something in the future. And it's this is just incredibly stupid to do. Not that we would do that. Like I wouldn't engage with that sort of stuff, but I suppose it depends on how aggressive the groups are going after me. If I feel like America becomes the type of country where it is always an existential risk to people of my basically cultural ethno group.

Then am I gonna want to build defenses to that using the arbitrage that I have? And what's the arbitrage that I would always have access to? It's genetic technology because so it's, it is just stupid. Like it's a culturally stupid strategy. And there is a reason why you shouldn't go after the scientists first.

[00:33:00] Especially when they have somewhere else to go, because then it's a the enemy of my enemy is my friend thing. Um, which is again, a lot of the positions that I think people can misunderstand of ours as being urban monocultury influenced are actually just strategic. And because we're thinking long term and they're thinking about like the current conservative, social, aesthetic.

Simone Collins: Yeah. We support the things they support, just not for the reasons they do.

Malcolm Collins: Sometimes sometimes anyway, love you Simone.

Simone Collins: I love you too. Gorgeous. And

Malcolm Collins: this guy is so based. We should have him on sometime if he's open to come on. And I love just how he's spitting facts here.

Simone Collins: Yeah, but not seemingly with malice or hatred or xenophobia. It's just matter of fact. And I love that.

Malcolm Collins: This is going to happen. What are you guys talking about? It's great. It's great. Good job, sir. All right.

Simone Collins: Bye.

In this eye-opening episode, Malcolm and Simone share their personal experience of taking a huge risk by pulling their three children out of daycare and opting for a more unconventional childcare arrangement with their neighbors. They discuss the staggering costs of daycare for middle-class families and the surprising improvements they noticed in their son's behavior and the family's overall health after making the switch. The couple also delves into the long-term effects of frequent illnesses in early childhood and the controversial findings of the Tennessee Volunteer Pre-Kindergarten Program study. Throughout the conversation, they offer practical advice on how to create a sustainable and mutually beneficial childcare arrangement within your community. Join Malcolm and Simone as they challenge conventional wisdom and share their insights on prioritizing children's well-being.

Malcolm Collins: [00:00:00] We ended up trying something that a lot of people said, you guys are insane to be doing this, We have graphs on all of his behavior and it was night and day. The two scenarios, a standard. Like mid to low end daycare versus just staying in a house with minimal supervision, doing whatever they want all day.

Would you like to know more?

Malcolm Collins: Hello, Simone. It is wonderful to be here with you today. Something really shocking happened to us recently. We took a giant gamble on how we were handling our children's childcare.

So before this, we were sending our children to a daycare facility. And if you are not at the lower end of income in Pennsylvania, that means you are paying for that all out of pocket. So by the time we got to children number three, three at a I'd say like a low [00:01:00] range to mid range facility in terms of cost.

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: This is costing us what was it? 5, 400 a month?

Simone Collins: It was we paid 1, 193 every week and that's 62, 036 a year. Insane. So that's

Malcolm Collins: just for three kids?

Simone Collins: Just for three kids.

Malcolm Collins: With the fourth kid on the way, we basically decided this, and keep in mind, we're in suburban or really ex urban. Pennsylvania.

We are. Friends of

Simone Collins: ours looked at our daycare bills and said, this is, you're so lucky. I wish I could be paying this.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Who would live in like New York and Philadelphia.

So this is almost as inexpensive as it gets unless you're in an extremely rural area.

Simone Collins: Yeah. Or unless you are low income. And we actually know people also actually who intentionally manipulate their income.

Yeah. In a way that probably the IRS would not be happy about to qualify for subsidized daycare because it makes that much of a difference. 62, 000, that's a [00:02:00] generous salary for someone. That's yeah. Yeah. And this is why a lot of people are like why bother? Working when all of it would literally go to daycare and keep in mind.

Of course, it's post tax dollars

Malcolm Collins: I'd point in mind this was only Three kids. Yeah, this is the minimum number of kids we could have and be above replacement rate This is the yeah. No, I mean it's it's insane. Yeah, so to be above replacement rate in the u. s. You And you are not in poverty, you need to be extremely wealthy.

And this does part to show why you do get this higher fertility rates on the really low end, because there just isn't a cost to additional kids when the state's offering to pay for everything. In the same way that there is an enormous cost to additional kids for the middle class. I need to go further with our experiment because something came down to, we realized we couldn't, keep affording this as we moved on with our family.

So we're like, we need to find a new sustainable solution. And this got really interesting for us because we had [00:03:00] tried au pairs before and we had found that they were fairly entitled.

Simone Collins: It was just like

Malcolm Collins: having an extra kid.

Simone Collins: Yeah. Babysitters live in nannies, the whole thing, all of it. We tried everything.

Malcolm Collins: Even like PhD students, we tried bringing over to our house to work. And so We ended up trying something that a lot of people said, you guys are insane to be doing this,

Simone Collins: here's what we ended up deciding to do and try. And this was a big risk for us is we have neighbors who were willing to basically do a child care pool with us, and we know many families that have done this before where they live right next to other families.

In this case, it was actually a couple that was soon to have a family whose business we're helping to get started and they're really interested in doing like some communal child care, sharing resources, things like that. So pulling resources together in that classic community way. So some people are doing with this with friends, we did it with neighbors that we didn't really know that well.

And so we were really nervous [00:04:00] because everyone, whenever you go as a parent to the pediatrician, for example, and this is something only Malcolm does, I stay home and keep doing whatever it is I do. And Malcolm does all the kid errands. The pediatricians constantly shame him, like, how many words does this kid speak now and what are their milestones with this?

And so you are constantly afraid that if you do not have some kind of professional team, making sure that your child meets these weird, arbitrary. learning milestones, you're gonna be the worst parent ever. And that if we went to a less structured education format or childcare format for our three kids, the things would just totally go off the rails.

They'd be bored out of their mind. They would complain about it. They wouldn't want to spend time with this couple. And I

Malcolm Collins: know what they do with the couple. So they do about an hour a day of teaching learning to read or something like that. And other than that, the kids just basically do whatever they want.

They've got a room to themselves and they play amongst themselves. So going into this situation, this was an enormous risk. Because it's not easy to get kids in [00:05:00] daycare. That's the thing. Like you pull your kids out. That doesn't mean you can get them back in.

Simone Collins: In fact, we've been on one daycare list.

I never bothered to take us off of it. We've been on for over a year

Malcolm Collins: at this point. So we started having our kids stay with them. And fortunately for us one of our kids who is autistic was in ABA therapy which is a form of therapy for autism. It's controversial because it basically just teaches kids how to mask that they're autistic and pretend that they're not.

And some people are like autism rights, people shouldn't have to pretend. And it's

Simone Collins: yeah, but they need to, but let's be realistic. You got to fake it.

Malcolm Collins: Yep. We have graphs on all of his behavior and it was night and day. The two scenarios, a standard. Like mid to low end daycare versus just staying in a house with minimal supervision, doing whatever they want all day.

So we're talking

Simone Collins: tantrums plummeting.

Malcolm Collins: Let's do some of these graphs on [00:06:00] screen so people can see. So I'll start with,

Frequency of aggression dotted line here is when he started staying at home. Now, for those of you who are listening and cannot see this, it goes from a graph that's going up and down to a flat line on the X axis.

Yeah. Just complete flat line. Yeah. Zero. Okay. So let's go to the next one. Manding for break all done.

Simone Collins: And that means requesting. I don't know why they say landing, but it just means asking for a break or saying you're all done with something.

Malcolm Collins: He never said it in the early days, but this is less extreme than the early ones, but it continues to go up after he's home.

But you do see some improvement before he goes home with this one. I don't know what this one is about. It doesn't have the mark. Next one. Frequency of tantrums.

Simone Collins: This is my favorite.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, it is all over the place, but generally middling high, it goes down to literally [00:07:00] zero. After he started staying with this other couple, when he would come to our house and play with the ABA therapist for, a few hours to, for them to collect data, it went to literally zero tantrums after this.

Here we have one for accepting no alternatives, and you see it goes from less than 50 percent of the time to almost every time after the transition.

Malcolm Collins: Then we can look at vocal protest. Again, up and down to almost nothing. It was like one every third or fourth session. That's just saying I don't like this, basically. Yeah.

Simone Collins: Yeah, refusing to do something, typically.

Malcolm Collins: And when I look at things like this and tantrums, for example, right? It gets me thinking of Are tantrums a normal behavior?

The fact that his tantrums completely went away when he went to a more naturalist care situation and this was [00:08:00] a third party provider who's judging this, not us, his parents or anyone who really, was is acutely aware of how dramatically his lifestyle changed. Are tantrums a phenomenon that is unique to children in the developed world who are living in these fragmented family models?

Simone Collins: Yeah. I wonder about that. I think there are two sides of this and Scott Alexander at one point wrote this piece, maybe I think it was about ADHD. That talked about okay, yeah, maybe people need medication now, but also it's because they're being forced to do stuff that is inhumane that, sitting in front of a computer all day is not something that we have evolved the capability of doing.

And so of course, we're going to not be able to pay attention. And so of course we need medication, having a kid sit in this structured environment and daycare, or then sit at a desk in school is not something kids are designed to do. It's not how kids are even naturally evolved, or we'll say just.

young mammals are naturally evolved to learn. [00:09:00] So of course they need to be medicated to make it work. Or they're just going to really not do that well. So I think that's one part of it, which is, I

Malcolm Collins: would also love to send these graphs to Scott Alexander. I bet he could do something fun with him for a post.

Simone Collins: Yeah, maybe. It is technically anecdata like it's, it is data, but it's anecdotal. It's pretty extreme data though. I know. Here's the other part, though, that I think is really underrated with daycare. And this also shows up in homeschooling research. Oh, yeah. So everyone always says, Oh, but if you're homeschool your kid, how are they going to be socialized?

And what they don't realize is when researchers actually look at this and they give two groups of kids a task, one group being homeschooled, the other group being conventionally schooled, the homeschooled group finishes the task in an organized fashion. They're mature about it. They get it done. It's Lord of the flies.

Chaos in the not real story, but fake book story way, when you give this task to the to the schooled kids. [00:10:00] And the general conclusion is, it's not actually common throughout history for kids to grow up only around other kids in this like environment where there's just one or two adults and then 25 to 30 kids.

And that's ultimately a really big problem.

Malcolm Collins: There is that problem, but we also see in our data that, for example, he is showing much less aggression and stuff like that. And we haven't even talked about the data you collected. And keep in mind, we're not just going to be going over anecdotes.

I'm starting with anecdotes as a framing device. But the data on illnesses.

Simone Collins: Yeah no, before we get to illnesses. So why is it bad that kids are learning from other kids? Often kids, certain kids in a class and only one or two need to do this pick up bad behaviors from adults at home. And just like with sickness, which we're going to get to next they can spread that bad behavior to everyone in their classroom.

So we would often get calls. About our eldest son, who you're, whose graphs you're seeing from the daycare saying, Oh, we're going to have to send him home. We just can't deal with him, or Oh, the ABA therapist aren't coming [00:11:00] today. I don't know if we can just have him here, which we actually got that from a couple of daycares.

It just seemed like they were shirking from work. Oh, we can get this free additional assistant. Yes, I don't want to have to teach this kid or do any instruction with them. While you're still paying through the nose for it, I hated that so much. But anyway, I would then bring this up with the ABA therapist and say, Oh, they said Octavian pushed someone or they said Octavian did this thing or that thing.

And then the ABA therapist would be like, yeah, he did right after one of his classmates did and nobody hears about that. So the thing is he was picking up this tantrum behavior, this aggression behavior From other kids in his class, which drove me nuts.

Malcolm Collins: But hold on. We have to get further with this, which is to say the sickness thing.

Can you go over your sickness chart? Because you took a chart of how frequently in the year you were sick before he left daycare.

Simone Collins: Yeah. In June of 2023 so last year, as of the time of this podcast recording, I got really frustrated with how frequently we were sick. So I decided I will [00:12:00] just keep a spreadsheet of it.

And then from. Then through mid January. So from June, 2023 through mid January, when, which is when the last of our childcare conceived or sorry, when our child, after the last of our childcare contracted illnesses had disappeared. Finally, I kept a record of this. I was sick for 67 days. You were sick for 25 days.

Titan, our daughter was sick for 51 days. Torsten was sick for 20 and Octavian miraculously was only sick for three. That was pinkeye.

Malcolm Collins: I forgot what percentage of the year was that for you of the day? So for me,

Simone Collins: that was 31. 2%. of that period of time. Okay. So when they were in childcare and when I was measuring it, I was sick, basically a third of the time.

And one of those times I was so sick that I could not get out of bed. I was, we need to go to the hospital, right? Yeah. I had to go to [00:13:00] urgent care. And of course, there were other times like the previous year I had norovirus for the second time that year on my birthday. These were like, they're not good sicknesses.

No.

Malcolm Collins: This isn't like mild. This is like very sick. So how sick were you after we took them out of daycare?

Simone Collins: I haven't been sick since then.

Malcolm Collins: Literally not one day, no one in our house has been sick one day and we took them out what, like six months ago at this point.

Simone Collins: Yeah. Although I will say that the lasting impact of daycare was still there because on our final day of daycare, I had a sinus infection that never went away that turned into pneumonia, but then.

Malcolm Collins: Oh, yeah. After the diseases you caught on daycare, but since you got rid of that, you haven't been sick one day. I haven't been sick one day. They haven't been sick one day.

Simone Collins: We still take them to parks. We take them shopping. We take them to libraries. They're touching stuff. They're eating yeah, they

Malcolm Collins: are like in some hermetic bubble.

It turns out something specific about daycare is really bad for illnesses. It's like

Simone Collins: ground zero. I don't know what's going on.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. I literally don't know how other kids [00:14:00] are bringing that many illnesses into daycare. I'm sure

Simone Collins: it's a math thing, if you have this many kids in a small environment and like the, in terms of like contact tracing, like any family member, anyone else that they have contact with that could get them sick.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. But they have a, a less strong immune system, but I suspect what we're actually looking at. Here, which is really interesting is, and this is just something that no one's going to look at because they're afraid, I think, of what the data might say, but the long term mental and physiological effects of being sick that frequently in early childhood cannot be small.

So I suspect what we're actually seeing as a result of this is probably pretty pronounced in adults who are in these situations, lower IQ scores, lower, like it is insane that somebody would put so much effort into doing something like breastfeeding and then to send their kids to daycare when the daycare, if you're familiar with, Data that looks at illnesses in [00:15:00] early childhood is a most certainly had a being a dramatically more profound effect on pretty much all of the same metrics.

Simone Collins: Yeah you would hear about this more profoundly in historical contexts. Like Helen Keller being blind and deaf after having a really terrible fever and stuff. And now obviously we have better healthcare treatments and medications for things like this. But that doesn't mean that.

Sicknesses don't still leave an impact. And we're seeing from various bits of research on lung COVID that there does appear to be lasting impacts from various illnesses. So yeah, it's better to not get ill. And there are probably lasting impacts that we don't realize because they're hard to track.

Malcolm Collins: And outside of all this, there has been, this isn't just anecdata, right?

There, there have been actual really good studies on this. The best of them that I have seen is the Tennessee Volunteer Pre Kindergarten Program often abbreviated to the TN VP K P The TN VPK is a statewide pre kindergarten program for four year old [00:16:00] children aimed at providing free education. The program ended up having more applicants than available spots in certain years, leading to the use of a lottery system for admission.

This lottery system inadvertently created a natural experiment, allowing researchers to compare outcomes between those who were offered a spot in the program, the treatment group, and those who are not the control group, thus providing a controlled sample. The findings from this research have been widely discussed due to their implications.

Initially, children who attended TNVPK program showed gains in academic achievements. However, as these children retract over time, the initial benefits appeared to fade out, and by third grade, some negative effects emerged. Specifically, the research found that by third grade, children who attended TNVPK programs were performing worse on academic measures compared to their peers who did not attend the program.

These results have sparked significant debate about the effectiveness of early childhood education programs and their long term [00:17:00] impacts. This is wild to me. Everyone expected, like, when this study was done, because the state thought they were being so magnanimous by putting kids into these programs, and all the parents wanted their kids to be in this program no one on the research team expected this sort of a result.

No one expected they would end up long term hurting kids. And now, when we see our own anecdata, it's Seems to back what we're hearing there, like putting kids in these group environments is just really bad for them and that they are actually better in person. What if they get bored?

And I think that this is the thing is that we think that kids need constant instruction instead. and stimulation instead of being in a room with a bunch of their siblings. And some perfunctory level of observation. And

Simone Collins: we have there's a lot of cool toys for them to mess with and play with and fight over and stuff.

Malcolm Collins: And I hope that soon, and this is a project I want to work on after the Collins Institute goes live. Is I'd like to work on [00:18:00] a video camera that notes when kids are doing dangerous things and sets off alarms but that otherwise allows kids to just do their own thing without a lot of adult supervision.

Simone Collins: What I want is for those who've read Ian Begg's culture series, a slap drone. At least the book surface detail. I want to explain

Malcolm Collins: how this works to the audience. A drone

Simone Collins: is basically think of it like a flying drone. That's fairly small that you could talk to at any time. Like it's very intelligent.

It's very smart. That will not intervene in your life unless you are about to harm someone else or something might cause harm to you. So it'll make sure that you don't die from some kind of accident, crossing the street, being shot by someone, whatever. It will totally protect you, but it will also stop you from hurting other people.

And I want that for all of our children. So bad. So I just want to make slap drones

Malcolm Collins: far from that. I can see simple drones following kids around automatically redocking.

Simone Collins: No. There's, We're finally

Malcolm Collins: embarking on that era. If somebody bullies them, the drone pulls down a video thing and it shows the t shirt.

I'm ready. [00:19:00] I'm okay with it chasing our kids if

Simone Collins: our kids are being dicks too. Dogs have those little shock collars. You can have a little No kid can get away

Malcolm Collins: anymore with being like, he did it. All the other kids fly out and start replaying. He's no. Child number two, it was their turn.

But we'd build ours was a AI system to create fake video of the other kid bullying them. And they'd be like this is two different video feeds. What is this? What I will

Simone Collins: say is if we're looking more broadly, if like we're doing a meta study of the research on daycare interventions, a lot of research does.

Suggest or indicate various mostly short term benefits. And most of those short term benefits are measured in the form of academic performance in similarly structured school environments later on, which is, it's misleading because it makes you think, oh, yeah, they're doing so well, but it's no, they're learning how to live in a bureaucracy.

And deal with this system and they haven't yet been kicked out of it. That's what you're seeing. I do think that in general, [00:20:00] what the research says that shows is more robust is that for lower income people, basically, if your home environment is unsafe or bad, daycare is a good thing because it's better than that, right?

It's better than an abusive household. It's better than an impoverished or dangerous household where there are drug users, whatever. So I am glad that daycare does. It's mostly subsidized in the United States for lower income houses where you're more likely to see situations like that. However, the effects, the positive effects of daycare appear to wear off over time, even in academic environments.

So even when it comes to dealing with bureaucracies, and this only seems to have an effect on lower socioeconomic Children. It's not really helpful to kids who have a good home environment already,

Malcolm Collins: which is fascinating to me.

Simone Collins: Poor Malcolm. You've been up since 2am. You haven't had a nap.

You've been entertaining your dad and the kids today. Yeah. We're calling the [00:21:00] IRS for our businesses. Thank you.

Malcolm Collins: I appreciate the appreciation, but you're going in to give birth tomorrow. So

Simone Collins: you

Malcolm Collins: know, which one of us deserves a gold star here.

Simone Collins: I don't know. When they immobilize you and put you on a table, question

Malcolm Collins: I have is how do you make a situation like this realistic for your average person?

I would say a couple of things. One is is you need to be willing to work with people who are very culturally different from you. Like the people who we are working with to do this are not of this similar, background or a similar socioeconomic status to us.

Simone Collins: I'm sure they think that we're the weirdest nerds in the entire world.

Yeah. We basically don't share a single hobby or intellectual interest. And that's okay because what we do share is they're expecting their first kid later this month. I'm having our fourth kid. What we all care about is our kids and family and. Starting, sustainable businesses and sharing resources and being smart about the way that we live our lives.[00:22:00]

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. And I'd say that this is the key thing, you need somebody who is going to actually appreciate the help you are giving them. And I think that a lot of actually

Simone Collins: appreciate the help they're giving you.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. And I think a lot of people don't do one of those two things. They either see it as transactional, which removes the utility and how something like this can be structured or they they commodify it in some way.

And that's something we've been very careful not to do.

Simone Collins: That's something that we saw. And I guess you even experienced yourself being largely raised by babysitters and nannies as a kid. And you were actually really, you've always been very against the idea of I guess we'll say traditionally compensated, like non community based childcare, because you just found that especially the more experienced nannies and babysitters you had who turned it into a career who weren't like first timers who actually cared were pretty mean.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah.

Simone Collins: Didn't you have one called the enforcer or was that what you [00:23:00] called your dog?

Malcolm Collins: No. My mom called one the enforcer. Yeah.

Simone Collins: Okay.

Malcolm Collins: But yeah. You called your dog

Simone Collins: the hallucinator.

Malcolm Collins: Get the hallucinator. No. Yeah. No. So I think it was a lot of these, yeah. It's something I wonder about because I've noticed that I think within women particularly, yeah. Some women seem to have a psychological profile where they, to an extent, get off on being really cruel to kids. And this is something I've just seen both in terms of teachers. I've seen this in terms of I was recently watching the eight passengers situation and the woman who clearly like What

Simone Collins: the therapist or the mother

Malcolm Collins: therapist clearly got off on being cruel to kids.

And it's something that I think appears in women much more than it appears in men. No, I didn't have that many I didn't have any severe cases of this growing up. Like I wasn't like traumatized by this or something, but I definitely say that something about that psychological profile seems to disappoint disproportionately sort of these individuals.

[00:24:00] Into paid child care roles outside of the school system.

Simone Collins: That makes sense because there's, there are a few, there's less oversight.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Yeah, I think that this is, this can be more toxic than people realize. And within the daycare system itself once you get to kid number three, I think pretty much everyone is going to be able to find a more cost effective option that is more in their kid's best interest.

If they are willing to take that leap, even though I can understand that leap can be so enormously difficult and it may not work out the first couple of times, which it didn't for us.

Simone Collins: Oh no. And we've been. Let's be honest. We've been trying since before our first son was born, there was that person who maybe was a real person and maybe wasn't, who said they were going first to Saudi Arabia to work at a school and even sent us photos and spoke with us on the phone and then just disappeared.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah.

Simone Collins: And then there was another one who we bought a flight for and the day that she was supposed to fly out [00:25:00] to come and be a live in nanny. decided she just didn't feel like it. This is what

Malcolm Collins: we talk about the entitlement of Gen Alpha.

Simone Collins: That was so bad. It was so bad. Oh, and then we've had a bunch of, a bunch, so many failures.

But here's the thing, even on the side of daycare, it was terrible. And this is something that maybe was just, associated with the daycare that our kids were at, although I don't think so is they would close at the drop of a hat. If like they would shut down classrooms, they were understaffed.

So they would sometimes rotate people between classrooms and be like not, sorry, this

Malcolm Collins: understaffed today. Sorry.

Simone Collins: Yeah. Your kid can't come in. And so we're still paying for all that, but, and when we first, before the pandemic daycares often would say, okay, you can have one week where you don't have to pay your daycare dues while still being enrolled, where you can take a family vacation that was taken away.

So you'll be away for one, two weeks on vacation. You're still paying for full time [00:26:00] daycare during that time. That, that really sucks. And then they would send our kids home at the drop of a hat. Not just because they

Malcolm Collins: were like, Oh, it's too hard. Yeah.

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. They'd frequently be like, Oh, he's just too hyper today.

I'm like, that's why he's not home. On the days where he's not hyper and

Simone Collins: he can stay

Malcolm Collins: home.

Simone Collins: Yeah. Yeah. Or they be like he had a bug bite and I'm worried about it. And so we're going to send him home. There were also the times where they were actually sick because of course they got the sickness from daycare where they'd be sent home.

And it made us so angry because we're like why is he sick? Obviously, thanks to you. So keep him. All right. You're the incubus of viral plague, not us.

Malcolm Collins: So realistically, where do people find individuals like this who they can work with as other families?

Simone Collins: Yeah, that's a good question. I think

Malcolm Collins: people early in their careers are at transition points that they can help move to the next stage of their career.

And

Simone Collins: if you are the one who has a more stable career and income, finding a couple that you can [00:27:00] work with to help get their careers off the line while they watch your kids is one thing you can do. I think other people also have a multiple a group of multiple families where one parent in each family works part time.

is totally capable of creating a homeschool pod or a childcare pod where there's just a rotation of when this parent has the day off, then it's with this one. So like nurses, firemen. People with part time jobs where they don't work every single day of the week. That is something that's super feasible.

You just have to rotate. So proximity is really important as well.

Malcolm Collins: I think church

Simone Collins: groups, the only the way too, that we found the couple that we're doing all this with now is just by texting people in our community too that we met through various other random Facebook groups or running into them, et cetera.

And. I think that's underrated. Anything that we did through care. com, anything that we did through Craigslist, anything that we did online, which is how we do everything. Yeah. Was not good. And I think that might have larger implications. This is a [00:28:00] totally different podcast subject in terms of community building and how people can form.

Relationships that actually lead to

Malcolm Collins: this is a problem. When people community build, they try to community build with peers, individuals who are near or close equivalence to them. This is the worst group you can community build with because there is no arbitrage in terms of community exchanges. So you consider something like our neighbors.

We can do things like help put together their companies, help with their tax filings, help with.

Marketing, and they can do things like change our oil, for example, take care of our kids, fix our car when it breaks. These are two skill sets where we can no more do what they can do for us than they can do.

Then they can do what we can do for them, which means that both sides genuinely appreciate the relationship. But this is something that is allowed because our backgrounds are so different. And this is [00:29:00] why same background communities allow for so little depth to form within them, which is what.

Really contrast these intentional cult like EA communities and stuff like that. It was more traditional religious communities that exist across the socioeconomic lines and sort of career pathways.

Simone Collins: Totally. I think that's solid advice. Get to know your local community and don't expect to, unless you're doing one of these things where you're all nurses and firemen and you're the same, socioeconomic status, but you happen to have a spouse in each house who has a part time job and is willing to watch kids, then this is not going to work with people who are your peers. , yeah. But anyway, take care. Not so great.

Not so great.

Malcolm Collins: Anyway, I love you.

Simone Collins: I love you too.

 https://discord.gg/EGFRjwwS92

In this in-depth analysis, Malcolm and Simone Collins explore the reasons behind Classically Abby's failure to gain traction as a conservative influencer. They dissect the changing landscape of conservative culture, the disconnect between traditional and modern right-wing values, and the importance of authenticity in online content creation. The video also touches on broader topics such as the evolution of conservative thought, the role of "vitalism" in modern conservative appeal, and the challenges facing established conservative institutions. Additionally, the Collins discuss the ethics of featuring children in online content and offer insights into successful conservative influencer strategies.

Malcolm Collins: [00:00:00] What? She's actually cool? She is actually an interesting nerd. What on earth? In real life. What? But the person she presents as, on YouTube, I loved your shock face here

Would you like to know more?

Malcolm Collins: Simone! I am so excited to be talking to you today. Something really interesting that we mentioned in a recent episode, that when I was editing it, I was like, wait a second, I should be really focused on this question. Why didn't, classically Abby, then Shapiro's sister,

Being a conservative woman in today's day and age is not easy. !

Malcolm Collins: why didn't she catch on with the public?

And so people can understand just how much this didn't work. She was doing tons and tons of ads at one point on YouTube. If you are active on YouTube, you definitely saw her all the time for a period. Every time I bought this up with a YouTuber, they're like, oh yeah, that. If you were aren't active on YouTube to give you an idea.

Her top four or five videos have over a million views. [00:01:00] And if you're paying for that much in ads, because it was certainly in ads that caused these videos to go out there certainly over a million dollars in ad spend, if I had to guess, I would guess it was probably 1. 5 to 2 million in ad spend.

For a channel that today. produces weekly videos that are similar in format to ours and similar also in content to ours and are getting, I'd say on average, probably about half the views that we get on daily videos. So this is really interesting to me and I can post our numbers on the screen and everything like that.

So you can check our math. We're getting on average, I think now, what is it, 8, 000 views per day, 7, 000 views per day and about 1, 300 watch hours per day or 7, 400 watch hours per day depending it's, it goes up and down for us. There was a peak a little bit ago.

Simone Collins: But you've done a really good job, Malcolm.

Malcolm Collins: No,

Simone Collins: I don't know. I'm a million to 2 I would guess more like at least a hundred thousand dollars.

Malcolm Collins: Oh, [00:02:00] certainly more than a hundred thousand. Really? Oh, absolutely. It had to be there. There is no way it was less than half a million, but I suspect very likely between a million and a half, a million and a half.

But we can run the numbers, whatever. The point being is she's connected to a famous person. Her videos are generally well done, edited, well executed. She is an attractive woman. And she had the ability to get in front of tons of people. Why didn't her message connect with any audience? And this is a very important question to be asking for a, probably the biggest reason is because the message that she was shilling is the message that the conservative elites believe the conservative base should be hearing.

Simone Collins: Yeah. And I, my, when I was going through her [00:03:00] videos in preparation for this, cause I hadn't really watched any, I felt like I was watching an AI video. These were AI responses. If you asked chat GPT. What are some reasons why a woman would need to dress modestly? Or, what are some reasons why I should keep my apartment clean?

These are exactly the answers that it would generate. Oh my god, you're right? Yes, I am exactly right. And I think that's also an issue

Malcolm Collins: if you did the framing of and you're a conservative YouTuber and then that's what it would spit out. You would need to give it some framing.

But hold on before I go further with this I want to make a few caveats about my thoughts after watching a lot of her content. So my first thought is I think that ideologically we are probably not that different from her. Even socially, I don't feel we're that different from her. When I watch her videos, to me, she reminds me [00:04:00] intensely of some of my cousins. And by that what I mean is Yeah, I would say

Simone Collins: your family, but definitely not us.

She's not weird. Well, no, this

Malcolm Collins: is the f ing weird thing. She is actually, in real life, she DMs for her husband's some of his tabletop gaming groups. She is into Warhammer. What? She's actually cool? She is actually an interesting nerd. What on earth? In real life. What? But the person she presents as, on YouTube, I loved your shock face here.

Oh my god! But they are also like my family. My family members who are like her Oh yeah, when they're drunk, they're amazing.

Simone Collins: Oh yeah, they're

Malcolm Collins: amazing when they're drunk. But when they're not drunk, they are just like her. They are very concerned Entirely palatable. About this very crafted They're conservative, Barbie and Ken.

Yeah. And it doesn't work for a few reasons. So the very [00:05:00] first reason that I'll get to why I don't think her image worked or found an audience is In one of her videos, the one on tradwives, she explains why she chose the term classically. Instead of trad. And it was because she saw trad as being too reductionist and restrictive in terms of what it represented as a woman being strictly beneath the husband.

And she'll make arguments very similar to ours that no, this wasn't the case for most families. Historically, women usually worked. She's lucid and educated on these topics. But the problem is so she saw classic as the alternative of that. And she really is quite a classical person.

She does opera singing. If you look at the environment of her house or the way that she styles herself, it is a very classical look. Really. It's Starbucks. It's Starbucks basic. Whatever you get to say. The point is if you are going [00:06:00] to Dallas house parties of wealthy people, that is what you would see, is a house that looks like hers. And this I think is the first mistake, is that Classical. What does classical really mean in a modern context? Classical means what is socially normative in the upper classes of a society or the elite classes of a society.

My name is Classy, with an I, and a little dick hanging off the C that bends around and f the L out of the A S S.!

Malcolm Collins: . The problem is that in our current society, being conservative is not socially normative among the elite communities.

Therefore, being conservative is not normative. Is not classy from the perspective of this elite group that rules our society This is why when you go to your standard billionaire who hasn't put a lot of thought into their political beliefs and [00:07:00] they're doing what's socially normative whether it is mark zuckerberg or bill gates or even The sons because I grew up adjacent to the very wealthy community in Dallas, my granddad was a congressman.

And I know what happened to their kids, right? I know the lives that they're living now. They almost to the person completely abandoned that aesthetic convention. They no longer LARP. Trying to, so they basically went one of two directions, either they went the direction of what we call the urban monoculture or trying to look like your standard, wealthy, white, progressive woman, which is an iteration of classy that stayed in, some of the mansion y looking places and stuff like that, or they became conservative or stayed conservative because their families were originally conservative and now mostly live on their family's ranch or lake house or semi rural environment and LARP more of the [00:08:00] rural aesthetic because the conservative mindset was expelled from these communities.

What she is selling classically is something that would have sold To our parents generation of conservatives, but it is not something that appeals to this generation of conservatives when you look at what's appealing personally to this generation of conservatives okay, for example, look at Trump.

Is Trump classic or classy in any way? He desperately wants to be the next president of the United States, but no, he is garish and out there and vitalist or, you look at, as we've mentioned, other conservative heroes like Tiger King,

Okay. Ah!

That's how we take care of ISIS right there, buddy.

You're an animal rights person, and you try and come into this facility, this is what you're gonna be greeted [00:09:00] with.

Malcolm Collins: Like this is the type of vitalism that the conservative base identifies with and craves.

And I think

Simone Collins: progressives, or many we'll say classical conservatives would call that trashy. It is in our minds is like rough rider republicanism. This is Teddy Roosevelt. This is, get out there. Pew, pew America.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. The pearl clutching conservative basically died out as a demographic class in our video that I would really recommend to people watch if they haven't seen it, cause I think it's one of our best.

From disgust to cringe to vitalism, examining the evolution of cultural frameworks we talk about how in the 90s mass action politically was motivated primarily by a disgust based framework, which, and then a cringe framework, which shamed people for violating social norms. These frameworks [00:10:00] really worked with this classic socially normative appeal that she's going for because it was the appeal that worked for our parents generation, but it doesn't work for our generation and a lot of the positions like the base That they think when I say they I mean her and her brother because they both do a somewhat similar.

Stick now and it's very clear as her brother changes from one stick to another stick He doesn't understand what the conservative base wants. He got famous when a different generation of conservatives was around and He was never really got young conservatives. And it it's also clear, you see this in likely who he's surrounding himself with, which is the last generation of conservatives, which had this sort of deontological conservative framework where these things are good, these things are bad, instead of the more consequentialist, vitalistic rebellious framework that the modern conservative has.

 E it's not about pearl clutching, you need to follow this set of rules anymore. It's we need to [00:11:00] rebel against a system that's controlling us. And that, that doesn't work with classy, you don't and even if you don't fight

Simone Collins: back in a classy

Malcolm Collins: way, Yeah, you don't socially rebel.

I often think like when even conservatives want classy today, young conservatives, right? What are they looking for? They're looking for Morticia and Gomez, not, a 90s soccer mom, right?

Waltzed? Oh, Gomez. Hours.

 To live without you, only that would be torture. A day alone, only that would be torture.

Malcolm Collins: They want someone who is okay with being themselves when themselves is in violation of current social rules.

And I, I also think that, when you look at this old deontological conservative framework, I think you see it disappearing in the younger generation. And even some people who watch the show, like a lot [00:12:00] of online culture warriors, don't realize that this base that they think exists doesn't exist.

A few points I'd make here, and I notice that she never, she's not racist at all, but I do believe that even in conservative elite circles, I have seen this myth believed, that there is a racist base. Disproportionately racist conservative base you need to appeal to through dog whistles and by the statistics.

This is just not true. There are not more racist on the conservative side than the Democrat side. And I'll put some polls on the screen here. The one that I always love to cite is that more white Democrats said they wouldn't vote for a black president than conservatives. Republicans until Obama was president, but also you see this in the actual numbers.

So I'm gonna go through some numbers here. According to 2014 Pew, Pew research poll 61 percent of Republicans and Republican leaners under 30. favored same sex marriage while only 35 percent opposed to it. So if you're doing something like going against same sex marriage, which I'm [00:13:00] not saying she's done but this is just I think the base she thinks she's appealing to they don't really exist.

It's only 35 percent in that young faction. A more recent Gallup poll from 2021 showed that 55 percent of Republicans overall supported same sex marriage. So more than half, even when you include the older Republicans support same sex marriage. Um, And in, in, in a 2015 poll and this was even a while ago, 2015, that's 10 years ago at this point.

63 percent of Republicans under 30 supported protecting LGBT individuals from discrimination. So it's not just gay marriage. The conservative party is overwhelmingly pro gay now especially the young ones. But then you can look at other issues where she has done like big anti abortion screeds on her channel.

But if you look at Pew Research nearly half of Republicans younger than 30 say that abortion should be legal in all or most cases, 47%. So the Republican base, like the next Republican base, the young Republicans [00:14:00] are way far left of even Simone and myself on abortion. Like we are More restrictive abortion access in our state.

We're just not life begins at conception types. And so I think that, and I actually want to go further on some of the statistics here. So another thing I want to put on the screen here is Republicans views on the legality of abortion from 1975 to 2024. And you can see it's upticked pretty significantly recently.

Now, at around 64% think it should be legal under certain circumstances.

Simone Collins: Yeah, I don't think it's just that, that, that hurts Abby. One huge revelation to me is that she's actually cool. And I think that's a big problem is that she, Is clearly shooting herself in the foot by not being herself online and by not being genuine.

And I think that's a really big problem with the Republican party in general is that it's pandering its way to mediocrity in a way that [00:15:00] is ruining it's appeal while also taking a very hard stance on things like abortion, wherein like the majority of people don't agree with that and then are forced and obligated.

to vote against Republican politicians because they feel like they need to protect just that basic optionality. But I also feel like she, she does a lot of things that are both like entirely legitimate. So for example, one of her videos was why I've come out as a conservative influencer, which just comes across as wrong.

Even though she's coming from a legitimate place. Like she points out how it's tough for someone as an opera singer who works in like the sort of stage performing world to come out as conservative. And I actually met someone who experienced this as well. She I should say they, they, when they worked in the theater worlds were a trans man.

And [00:16:00] then they, started detransitioning. They didn't even talk with people about the fact that they were detransitioning. But as they went through the process of detransitioning, they got completely frozen out of the theater world. So I remember this coming out as conservative is actually a scary thing, but she didn't talk about these elements of it.

She just talked about it in a very. Somewhat like patronizing smug way that really rubbed people the wrong way. Also, I think something that really hurt her online reputation when she otherwise could have done well, was her ad targeting. It seems like through her ads, she just, we've all seen classically Abby ads.

If we've been on YouTube for the past three years, like there was that one time where I'm like, she just advertised to everyone and literally she advertised to everyone like a common comment on her. Top viewed videos, which clearly were associated with her advertising are things like for that, why I came out as conservative video.

One was [00:17:00] as a 40 year old Mexican male who keeps getting her ads. All I can say is I'm finally ready to come out as a conservative woman. I'm an under seven tips to grow from a girl to a classic woman. Someone wrote, I'm a 24 year old man, but I'm glad to now know how to grow into a mature and classic woman.

So it's clear that like she was advertising to these audiences of people. And who she definitely didn't want to target because by the way, she begins these videos with hello ladies, she's talking, she's trying to create this feminine space online for like women to hang out and be an influencer that is a woman talking to women.

So just something wrong with how she was encouraged to position herself and how she ran ads. I don't

Malcolm Collins: think that's true. I think that you can get ads much cheaper when you're not targeting them as, as directly. And I think that's what was going on there. And she was just seeing, allowing YouTube to find an audience for her to find 40 year old

Simone Collins: Mexican men.

Malcolm Collins: What I think you get wrong in this, we have a big Hispanic, [00:18:00] actually, people be surprised, but our channel has a very big Hispanic audience. We're great

Simone Collins: for an international audience, but classically, Abby is not 40 year old Mexican man who's now finally ready to go out. I'm sorry, I think

Malcolm Collins: that you're missing a point here.

I, I think that it was likely done because it got lower cost ads. But what I will say that you got right in what you said, and it is something I'd want to double down on, but Is how her and her brother come across these days and why I think they are losing cultural power and why I think she was unable to capture an audience here, which is to me, they very I'm just talking like this really how it feels when I see them talk like people who should be like at a high school.

In the nerd group, they should be hanging out with you and me and owning it club. That's secretly like that's their actual thing, but they are trying to, they got a little bit of attention from the school bullies at one point, [00:19:00] and now they are trying to ingratiate themselves with this very small group of bullies that actually everyone else hates.

But the

Simone Collins: political conservatives fear Feels like that. And keep in mind, this is the group that they're mixing in. Her husband, for example, when they met in 2017, he was interning with heritage foundation.

Malcolm Collins: Frozen us out of a lot of things. But

Simone Collins: that's the thing is they really are like the popular kids, but they're also extremely normative.

They all dress the same way. They talk the same way. They're all strictly very anti abortion. They're all very strictly these are the things we do. And these are, and they're super not weird. You can't be weird. And so I just, I think that because they got some traction in those communities and have become respected in them, they know that they can't look that way.

Because also when someone thinks about your classic dungeon master, they think of someone who is progressive politically.

Malcolm Collins: I disagree. So I think that this is where we're, when we're talking about conservative archetypes that appeal to [00:20:00] the mainstream younger conservative audience. There is obviously the country boy, country girl, you can go that route.

Yeah. You can go the so extremely trad that your tradness is a constant and daily offense to all progressives. Conservatives will like that. Or you can go our route

One of the things I find really interesting where, I'm talking here about this model of this conservative anime nerd character. Media and people are like, come on the conservative nerd. That's not an archetype that does well. And I'm like, okay what about short fat Otaku?

What about Ed Dutton? What about Ruby Yard who runs what if all his he's very nerdy. What about I, I think even Hanania to an extent comes off as pretty nerdy. Cremium comes off as pretty nerdy in, in a lot of his stuff. This is a archetype that does perform well.

and all of these routes are playing in the mud to some extent. Cause that's what conservatives do, we play in the mud, I [00:21:00] call it low culture conservative, or which is really, conservative.

This is the anime tracer, but you know, she had the video on like modesty and stuff like that and how women should be more modest. And I'm here like the last sex scandal I remember was tracer, but and I'm pretty sure the conservatives are the one recently, which is a Aeon something.

Keller blade is what I was thinking of.

Malcolm Collins: There was some Sony character, female character that they put more clothes on. The conservative. youth are anti modesty. We are pro low culture. We want our women to be modest, right? Like the women who we marry and stuff like that, but we are not the modesty crusaders of the 90s.

Simone Collins: Not even that. In fact, some of the major Mormon influencers are total thirst traps.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. That is not, The actual message, like Trump is not pro modesty, right? Trump is what's connecting with the base. And I think [00:22:00] that there is a difference between celebrating a degree of chastity and celebrating modesty in all things, which just doesn't connect right now. I think if she wanted to connect with her base, she doesn't actually hide.

The cool stuff she does. She mentions the Warhammer stuff. She does? She mentions, oh yeah, she mentions the DN, that's just how we know about it, right? But for her, this stuff is a quarantined afterthought in her life, rather than the thing to lead with. If you are going after the I think the new conservative intellectual group,

Simone Collins: And to be fair, we do have a gerontocracy problem in both conservative and progressive political spheres in the United States.

We do,

Malcolm Collins: but it's not as big of a problem as people would think. And this is something I also want to elevate. So the gerontocracy does control a lot of these old conservative think tanks. [00:23:00] And it's something where, if we lost our job, which, we unfortunately need to think about that we would normally be going to work at one of these think tanks, right?

Yeah, but tough luck for us. But they will not talk to us. We are radioactive. To the conservative think tanks, even though as is pretty much all of the mainstream conservative influencers these days, whether you're talking about like Pearl Davis or BAP or Brian Kaplan or there's a lot of conservative leaning or cat girl Kool Aid or, reu, who we met recently, or, there's a lot of conservative intellectual influencers out there, and none of them that I know, or even Richard Hania.

Like we are fairly plugged in with a lot of conservative influencers and the conservative influencer crowd. to the person is actually walled from the conservative political establishment, which is still controlled by GOP. Or a Poria magazine, the guy who runs [00:24:00] that. Yeah, I just don't know if that's public, so I'm going to cut that out.

Simone Collins: No it's, he publishes a bunch of s**t with

Malcolm Collins: a portal. Okay, great. Yeah, these are the things that I think are speaking more to the younger, the next generation of conservative intellectuals. And they are systemically banned. Not just they're not reached out to, not like they're not engaged with.

There's,

Simone Collins: I feel like there's a little bit of overlap with some of them. Some of them are somewhat plugged into Heritage and Coke events and other things like that. Just not.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah there's a limited but what this means is the opposite of what these groups think it means. What they think it means is their ideas will grow in the conservative youth and they will continue to have the cultural hegemony that they have had at a historic level.

But what it really means is They are not part of the conversation, like the active political [00:25:00] conversation that's happening with the next generation of conservative influencers. Yeah, they're missing out.

Simone Collins: They're missing out. They're, I, it's really a mean girls thing. Like it's just so clicky and they're so focused on status hierarchy fights, but we see this with things.

We, we talk about this happening in the EA slash rationalist community. We talk about this happening all over the place. It's a classic governance issue. The

Malcolm Collins: funny thing is that this has been happening, I think, to an extent since we were kids. In our kid generation, there were a lot of movies where there was like a cheerleader group or like a mean girl group at the school.

And I know that things are different The way they change, the way power structures are work out at schools changes every generation or so. Social media has

Simone Collins: significantly changed how these things work. Yeah. But the

Malcolm Collins: truth of our generation was that there was typically one small group of popular girls.

And I know because I went to a number of different schools could be the cheerleaders, could be something else. [00:26:00] Who. Thought that they were the most popular girls in school. And that some people tried desperately to engage with, but actually had almost no social power because everybody hated them and quarantine them.

And they're just an echo chamber

Simone Collins: that like thought that everyone aspired to

Malcolm Collins: be like them, but they were

Simone Collins: really just on their own and everyone ignored

Malcolm Collins: them. That was the high school for sure. And usually the people who actually had the most social influence usually it was the one person. It was the weed dealer.

The weed dealer typically actually had the most social influence on campus because they needed to be able to communicate across social communities. And they were typically laid back so they didn't offend any specific social community. It's very easy when you're the weed head slash weed dealer to not make enemies with the goths or the preps or the cheerleaders or the So that was typically, but then the people with the highest Like social standing and ability to access things like sexual access and stuff like that.

Those were often typically people in the nerdy communities, [00:27:00] in the drama group, in the the proto hacker kids, the, it was not the people in these groups that were like even if you had asked like the nerdy or the gods kids, they'd be like, Oh, those kids are like technically above us in the social hierarchy, but nobody talks to them.

And. I think that phenomenon has replicated itself is this over focus on maintaining an older ideological system, which is just not represented in the next generation of conservatives.

Simone Collins: Yeah. It's a shame. It's a shame because

Malcolm Collins: I, she puts a lot of work into these videos. She put a lot of money into these videos.

And

Simone Collins: yet the comments that she gets are like the comments that we only see about ourselves on hit piece videos about us. And they're on her own damn videos. It's sad. It's not nice.

Malcolm Collins: So no, it is, it does make me sad, but I think with a lot of this, it was that they just made a mistake.

They fundamentally, as we talk about they, their heuristics about how the current society [00:28:00] and online conversation is working are just, incorrect. And because of that, even though they are ideologically very aligned with us, and I'm sure a perfectly pleasant person they are making takes that are not going to resonate.

And what they assumed, and what was assumed when Classic Abby was created, it's very clear to me from the early videos and the videos that were promoted, was I bet there's a space for a modest socially conservative woman who tries to speak to both sides of the aisle.

Simone Collins: I think the issue is that people look at other figures like Candace Owens, who says some more pretty unhinged things.

And they're like there has to be a space for someone. A little bit less unhinged,

Malcolm Collins: but there really isn't. Unhinged is what conservative, unhinged is vitalistic. Candace Owens says some stuff that I just love that you'd never hear from her. Remember that? Like the she's, I'm too pregnant for this s**t right now.

Yeah.

Simone Collins: I love

Malcolm Collins: that. I love [00:29:00] that. I love that. That is quite fun. But it also shows You, you wouldn't get something like it's also interesting to me and I can see why Ben Shapiro doesn't and for people who don't know probably useful context for this. Ben Shapiro has talked about us before. He really does.

Yeah. But he

Simone Collins: calls us like massive insufferable nerds, which is hilarious. I say that's the highest status

Malcolm Collins: of nerd you can reach. Would Ben Shapiro thinks you're a nerd. Yeah. But he wouldn't say something like that. And when he does try to make like a a hit claim or something like that he feels like that nerd who's trying to ingratiate himself with the bullies he tries to be like, Oh, wet ass pussy.

I bet you have a disease. My wife, who's a doctor told me women don't, I don't know exactly how that went, but I'm sure everybody remembers that controversy. And then everyone else was like, Oh my God. That his wife has to tell him this to keep him happy because he's never made a woman. Anyone was like, the four Ds emotion like social cues.

He just comes off as this massive [00:30:00] nerd, which is. I think that is why he has gotten more popular than his sister. I think it's in spite of himself. I think it's because he is so socially incompetent that he cannot That he's fun to watch. He cannot help No, it's not fun to watch. He cannot help but step in it sometimes and come off as this low culture anime nerd, which then endears himself, because I'm saying that framework works.

Conservatives are willing to follow the next generation of conservatives, the anime nerd basically. But he as we've called them, the, what is it? The Catgirl Femboy Alt Right Conservative. Yeah. Which like is a thing. Like people have talked about it. Catgirl Femboy Alt Right Conservatives online.

And it's it's a thing. It's, I don't think that's our audience really, but that is an audience that some people have. Come on. No, yeah, I'm sure it's a portion. And they see somebody screw up so badly socially with something like that and they can't help but [00:31:00] be interested. But love them. Yeah.

You gotta love it. Yeah. And she hasn't had moments like that.

Simone Collins: Because yeah, she's too perfect. She's too refined.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, and also she comes off as too conventionally attractive, too, like he comes off as a dweeb in a way that is that undermines his air of superiority.

Yeah, a little

Simone Collins: like Duty Houser.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah,

Simone Collins: before our generation, yeah,

Malcolm Collins: Where it's like a little mouse that's squeaking about how great it is and how, dah, and don't you know, and you see that and you're like, oh, that's really cute. When a beautiful woman comes up that looks, styled and attractive conventionally, and she starts doing the same little mouse speech, you're like, whoa, chill the f**k out. And I think that was something that he didn't understand. He thinks that the world views him and likes him for the way he wants to be seen instead of as this alternate nerd character.

Simone Collins: I'm even thinking like a lot of her videos are about etiquette [00:32:00] and just like how to live better, and I'm thinking about how in the past genuinely we'll say classical women have executed this successfully.

And even they have done it in a very vitalistic and slapstick kind of way. So I'm thinking about my beloved, like 1950s, 1940s, Emily Post etiquette books and Just how incredibly snarky they are. How she in the most delicate and beautiful terms, throws shade at fat people, calling them, those inclined to rotundities. And all these sorts of things. It's an incredibly she is casting shade so much. throughout every single thing. It's extremely snarky. It's extremely biting. It's extremely humorous.

Malcolm Collins: And it's not just Emily Post, your other hero. You used to have all of Martha Stewart's books growing up.

Yeah. Martha Stewart threw her weight around. It was not if you're trying to [00:33:00] compare her to a modern figure, she was closer to a

Simone Collins: title. No. There is a modern Martha Stewart, and she also gets tons of attention, and it's Nara Smith. Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: Talk about her. I don't know. Nara

Simone Collins: Smith is the tradwife influencer who does those insane TikTok videos where she's like, Oh, my, my child told me that they wanted French toast crunch this morning.

And so I, then she like makes cereal from scratch, baking each individual grain. Of cereal that kind of, yeah. So that's what, and that's what Martha Stewart did in her original time. Oh, like I'm going to do everything from scratch and build an entire, birthday parties worth of accessories all before birthday party.

She, the modern Nara Smith is totally riffing on that. And I can't believe it. And so far, none of the commentators on her brought that up. They just call it rage bait, but it's the same kind of thing. It's over the top. It's extra. And yeah, I actually think Martha Stewart was a little bit more of a Ben Shapiro and here's why.

Martha Stewart [00:34:00] came from a lower income Polish immigrant family. Her last name was Kostyra. She always had a big chip on her shoulder about that. And went out of her way to develop a different accent, a different cadence of a woman who was far more high class. And then she kept her ex husband's last name, Stuart, because it sounded super waspy.

So she was always this this, Fairly status anxious woman cosplaying as a very waspy, wealthy

Malcolm Collins: I hear you, and maybe this was a mistake on her part, but to me, and I think to a lot of people no, it comes

Simone Collins: across as overblown, and as a LARP, and as like Ben Shapiro being like, And you're just like, oh my god, this is so cute, and it's amazing.

Malcolm Collins: No, but this is actually a good point. That's the point I'm making. Margaret Middler, classy, was a LARP, and was obviously a LARP. Yeah. Huh. Abby's classy is I was born wealthy and I am carrying on. Yeah, she was born

Simone Collins: wealthy and she's just being wealthy and she's why can't you just be [00:35:00] wealthy?

Obviously, and that's why it comes across as AI.

Malcolm Collins: Here's the final point on Ben Shapiro, because I hadn't really thought about it until now, where I was like Ben Shapiro is actually famous.

What actually appeals to people is what a nerdy dweeb he is. Like that's the model that is popular among his fans. That is how he has captured the public attention, but he personally is unaware of this and denies this. Because of that, that

Simone Collins: also I think it's easy to deny it when you're as famous and wealthy now as he is, too.

Yeah, but

Malcolm Collins: I think that is why he hates us so much is because we, as they say, like the things you don't like about yourself, I'm sure there's a part of his brain that is aware. He was for a generation, the conservative nerd who pushed cultural boundaries and wasn't your classical Christian.

And he sees that in us [00:36:00] and it forces him to reflect a little bit. on a portion of his own rise to fame that he doesn't want to reflect on, and an aspect of the way he's seen by the world that he doesn't want to reflect on.

Simone Collins: We also just have punchable faces, I

Malcolm Collins: don't know what to tell

Simone Collins: you, Malcolm.

Malcolm Collins: He

Simone Collins: does too, that's the thing.

Malcolm Collins: Ah, and he sees his own punchable

Simone Collins: face in the mirror.

Malcolm Collins: So that is what I think is going on there. I do think that Classical Abby easily drift in a different direction create a content that is more like why she holds the belief she holds instead of this is what's right.

This is what's wrong. And I think it would probably perform better in the algorithm. And to focus on beliefs that cut the dominant conservative narrative. Those are the videos that people are going to find interesting from you. If I was to give her advice.

Simone Collins: Dear Abby, if you would like to come on based camp.

You are always welcome. You seem like a delightful person. Share your spicy takes with us. Yes, you are extremely welcome here. We would [00:37:00] love to have you on.

Malcolm Collins: Absolutely. And and even Ben! He seems like somebody who would be our friend if he could get over trying to fit in with the cool kids.

But I also understand what you're saying. There is social cost to him. The thing,

Simone Collins: though, is the cool kids, are they really your friends if they'll turn on you the moment you act yourself? F**k them.

Malcolm Collins: F**k them. And that's also what's cool about our audience is We are uncancellable within our audience because we are who we tell them we are.

Simone Collins: Yeah, and our audience we're definitely, the great thing about Basecamp listeners is most do not agree with us. It's, they're not here because they agree with us, and if we were to change our mind on something or express our view on something they disagree with, they're not going to go away, because sometimes they're just like, Here to hate watch, or they're just here to disagree, or they're just here to hate

Malcolm Collins: watch.

I think we get very few hate watchers. I say they're here because here is an active intellectual conversation about what's going to be the dominant conservative narrative next. And most of the political [00:38:00] landscape today is not a living conversation. A conversation about how to enforce, X groups value system and not about can we like improve this?

Can we improve that? And I think that that is why people are here when they don't agree with us because they're aware that this is an active conversation where people are. including ourselves, changing our mind when presented with new arguments. Yeah. And that is really exciting to me to be part of a community like that.

And I think that's why most of the, we have so much reach within the intellectually active conservative community these days, or at least the young ones.

 the other agendum I wanted to add here was classically Abby and kids.

In every one of the pictures where she has a kid, she is, tastefully hiding the child's face

Simone Collins: classic.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, I know. So classic, so classy, but here's the problem. Hiding children from the world is not [00:39:00] pronatalist or good. We used to share the joys of rearing was our communities. And through that normalized parenting and developed and proliferated parenting strategies that actually work outside of an academic context.

We have lost that win. You stop sharing children with the world when you stop sharing being a parent with the world. Is it any wonder that the world has forgotten how to be a parent?

Simone Collins: And I just, I have to reelevate what you pointed out to me that, oh, one of our uh, podcast listeners on the discord had pointed out.

Which is that the childless and antinatalist internet elite, especially females benefit from shaming having kids on camera. Because it is a, kids on camera are way to like steal attention and be a thirst trap of babies. Cause kids are cute. They can be.

Malcolm Collins: It's the weapon parents have against non parents in the [00:40:00] culture war. But if parents aren't

Simone Collins: allowed to post their kids, then all they have is their, gross mom bods and dad bods that no one wants to see.

Malcolm Collins: Through disarming parents, they ensure their victory in culturally backing down on this point.

I don't think. Any conservative family should ever one iota back down on this point. Being a parent is not something you need to hide from the world. You can watch our video on the ethics of showing our kids on camera. Where actually I think that kids will end up a much better off.

especially in a world where everything you do is being recorded to being reminded that everything they're doing is being recorded. So they don't accidentally go on that teenage tirade that right now is career destroying. And obviously there's a lot of benefits to having kids on camera and the costs are just so low in our existing environment.

People in the adult world, when you enter that world, people are like well, what if the, you know, Well, kids can't consent, largely speaking to this. Like my kid can tell you when he [00:41:00] doesn't want to be on camera. And we have never, ever had one of our kids on camera that didn't want to be on camera.

If you're wondering about infants and you're like, well, the infant can't consent, but it's also like, yeah, but the infant consent is irrelevant to, because nothing an infant does on camera while it's an infant can negatively affect their adult to life. Therefore, their consent is irrelevant.

Simone Collins: I can't imagine. There's never been an instance. Yeah. But

Malcolm Collins: like we would hold a really strict line on that. And then people are like there are two, two, two, Young to knowledgeably consent to something like that. And it's yes, but fortunately that's taken into the context where the negative ramifications from this can come.

I E when they are older and they have to deal with the ramifications of something they said when they were 11, the world's going to take that they were 11 into context. Okay. Where if you look at other things that are being normalized, if they medically transitioned their gender when they're 11.

[00:42:00] And they're 27. They can't go back from that in the same way. It's not reversible. And nobody can be like I understand the context, therefore it doesn't count. Those things count. And so it's important to remember that there are inherital, inherent societal buffers for any negative repercussions that can come from showing your kids because in these contexts and when we allow progressives to win that culture war of normalization, never showing kids in an online context, then kids never get seen if that's the core media source and parents never get seen and parenting never gets seen.

scene. And that is really well,

Simone Collins: and then what does get elevated is empty consumerism. It's travel. It's being a thirst trap. This is all stuff that's very ephemeral but no one's going to have for life. And yeah, it just, it's a it's not ultimately inherently fulfilling or really all that pro social or Griffith society.

Malcolm Collins: Instead of the miracle of creating a human being and raising that person and trying to give them the best shot possible in [00:43:00] life and the best life possible which is actually something beautiful.

Simone Collins: Yeah.

So if you're watching this and you made it to the end, we love you. Please, if you haven't already, and subscribe. Oh, and check out the Discord.

Malcolm Collins: You want to talk about an active conversation. Discord.

Simone Collins: Yeah, no, genuinely it's a great conversation over there. Malcolm constantly shares it with me cause he's constantly checking it. And it's the conversations are as good as, It's not probably no better than ours here, honestly.

Yeah,

Malcolm Collins: I would say most of the episode discussions, if you're like, I found that intellectually stimulating and I wish I could watch another hour on that one topic you just did.

Simone Collins: But with additional viewpoints, like with the Catholic viewpoint and with the Mormon viewpoint and with the Orthodox Jewish, it's just so great.

It's okay.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Like on the Catholic fertility rate ones, that one had a great conversation on the discord, go to the discord, go to the episode discussion section. And it's a lot more, interactive and full than the comments on YouTube because of course and I think you'll really enjoy it because the [00:44:00] quality of the conversations.

And I agree with someone I actually think is maybe even a little higher than the quality on this show.

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: Cause

Simone Collins: you

Malcolm Collins: know,

Simone Collins: who are we trying to think of anyway. Also if you happen to have an iPhone, if you could like us on Apple podcasts or give us a five star review, if you're open to it, it would help us a lot.

Anyway. Thanks everyone. And Malcolm, I love you. I love you too.

Malcolm Collins: Bye bye. Bye

Simone Collins: bye.

In this in-depth analysis, Malcolm and Simone Collins dissect the recent Biden-Trump debate, discussing its implications for the 2024 election and American politics. They explore Biden's apparent cognitive decline, Trump's surprisingly moderated approach, and the potential strategies for the Democratic Party moving forward. The video also touches on the changing landscape of Republican policies, the influence of advisors on presidential candidates, and the challenges facing both parties in the upcoming election. This comprehensive breakdown offers valuable insights into the current state of American politics and the potential outcomes of the 2024 presidential race.

In this thought-provoking video, Malcolm and Simone Collins dive deep into the world of Fundie Snark, examining popular YouTube channels and their cultural impacts. They discuss the biases and blind spots of both conservative and progressive content creators, analyze the complexities of LGBTQ+ representation and activism, and explore the ethical implications of online criticism. The couple offers unique insights into the cultural dynamics at play, challenging viewers to think critically about the content they consume and the real-world consequences of online discourse. 

[00:00:00]

Simone Collins: I like seeing people who have taken hard cultural stances. Be criticized to see how we might be subject to criticism ourselves and what we may be doing wrong. I really like Fundy Fridays, and I really like Jen but yeah,

Malcolm Collins: she's in as much of a cult

Simone Collins: as the people who she covers. They all come from very strong cultures that have skews and blind spots because of those strong cultures. Not to say that we don't have blind spots either, but still.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, and they're insane religious cults. They're the good guys in her insane religious cult. She's the good guy and she's doing what the cult is telling her to do. She should never

Simone Collins: step

Malcolm Collins: back.

Simone Collins: She'd started tongue in cheek that are frills of the channel now. Still speak very much or similar to the small time career preachers that she criticizes.

Her followers call themselves Jenna nights. And they patronize her. And how is that different from being a preacher in the end? Preachers speak to people, they cultivate communities.

Would you like to know more?

Malcolm Collins: Hello, Simone. I am so excited to be here [00:01:00] with you today. After a tough day today, it is always nice to be able to come back to doing something that we love, which is these conversations. They are so much better, you've been meditating with me earlier, like they're so much better than a date because they're like recorded and we watch them over and over again, each of us do.

I actually quite enjoy our own YouTube channel. And what I know it's weird but this is the first time I've ever created something that I really like with our books. I don't read them over and over again, but I'm like, Oh, I know I made a fun joke in this one. And I liked the way I constructed it.

But what actually got us on today's topic. Was Simone has always been a big fan of Fundy Snark content. And I have always been a big fan of religious content. And religious content for me includes the de converts and stuff like that. And where our two worlds inter, interlapped recently was Classically Abby.

Being a conservative [00:02:00] woman in today's day and age is not easy. !

Malcolm Collins: So people might not know this, but Classically Abby is Ben Shapiro's sister, and she absolutely spammed YouTube with so many ads a few years ago. If you're on YouTube now and

Simone Collins: you've been on YouTube for years, you know what we're talking

Malcolm Collins: about. You know what this is about. Yeah. You're like, Oh my God.

I remember when I had to watch her. What got me about Classically Abby, and this actually has boosted my ego so much. Classically Abby, we produce videos every weekday. Classically Abby produces one video a week but otherwise similar format to us. She gets about 2. 2k views on an average video.

Whereas, we're generally Between the low 2Ks to 7 or 8K views. On an average day, because, we can look at our statistics. So some of our videos just vastly outperform other ones. Like the old Starship Troopers one is a really high number. The Bears one is at a high number.

But on average, we're getting about 8, 000 views per day. Or about [00:03:00] 1, 300 watch hours a day. So we are, Smoking, classically Abby, smoking her for a daily channel, doing four or five times as well as her weekly channel, which I love because she must have spent millions building that up. And sorry, as to why I love this people might not know, but we have a beef with Ben Shapiro. The first time, we really went viral, he was really derogatory towards us and was like, they're nerds. Why does anyone care what these people have to say? And he has just repeatedly, we have tried to get into events that he's doing or has association with, and we are always blocked, like we are on a blocked, do not talk to list with Ben Shapiro and everyone who talks to Ben Shapiro.

Simone Collins: He doesn't blame

Malcolm Collins: you. I can understand why. We're probably pretty threatening to him that we've actually like grassroots beginning to build up. So Ben Shapiro's thing is he often switches between endeavor movement. It happens to be hot in the conservative space right [00:04:00] now. But I think he would have like when he switched to all the men's rights content and stuff like that, but he doesn't seem to actually have like his own perspective on things.

It's more just like whatever he thinks will get him in the moment clout. And I think he thought it was his sister. So it's not just

Simone Collins: audience capture, it's audience capture hopping.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Audience capture hopping. He is addicted to attention. He tried to help out his sister, which I appreciate to get into the same business, but she's just not very interesting.

I tried to watch some of her videos and I'm like, I can see why nobody's watching these. It's just Conservative TM. You know what I mean? Like just basic takes. Yeah. Just the most basic of basic takes

Basic camp. There's no, yeah. The most interesting, least interesting takes, but I want to talk about this phenomenon with Fundy Snark.

I want to talk about the various Fundy

Simone Collins: Snark is people with smart, snarky commentary on fundamentalist religions and people who are religious fundamentalists, just in case you're not familiar with it.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. And [00:05:00] it's very different from I, I think the reason why we would provide an interesting insight into Fundysnark is we are people who watch a lot of Fundysnark content for different reasons.

Like I'm interested in how different cultures view other cultural groups and talk about other cultural groups. I think you just like the Or

Simone Collins: I like seeing people who have taken hard cultural stances. Be criticized to see how we might be subject to criticism ourselves and what we may be doing wrong.

Because my favorite content is it turns out that I am wrong about something and I should change course. And Snar helps me because it is, it does all of that. But yes, it is also snarky gossip and I don't mind that. Don't mind it.

Malcolm Collins: Do episode on Bridger and I'm like, our audience is like 90% male now.

It used to be very interesting

Simone Collins: prenatal argument around Bridger Tin though. And we were discussing this with one of the podcast listeners. Who is in a very progressive [00:06:00] part of the Bay Area in Berkeley. And there was a lot of people who are very progressively coded at least. But who also love Bridgerton, which is an insanely pronatalist TV show on Netflix that, large families, it's all about marrying and having kids.

And if

Malcolm Collins: our viewers want us to do the Bridgerton episode, let us know. But back to the topic. So we're going to be talking about a. A few different channels as examples of Fundy Snark content. And what I find very interesting is the differentiation between the channels in terms of like my perspective on whether or not they are fundamental goods for the world or fundamental negatives for the world.

Because some of these channels are really just like in a cult, basically, like the far progressive movement has essentially become a cult, we call it the urban monoculture and our show a lot, stuff like that. But then there's some people who would just seem to be genuinely secular. One of the things I find most interesting about [00:07:00] Fundy Snark content is the people who were raised atheist and then turned to Fundy Often seem to be the most in a cult of the communities.

And cult like, and the people who were raised Mormon and then turned to Fundy snark often are the most like kind and open minded and genuinely engaging. So

Simone Collins: just there, which I'm sure you're probably going to agree with.

Malcolm Collins: Let's list the channels we're talking about and then hear your hypothesis.

So the channels that we actively watch, so people know what we're talking about here, Is Zelf on the shelf. What was the other Mormon one

Simone Collins: Jordan and McKay.

Malcolm Collins: And then Fundy snark is a big one. And then Rachel Fundy Friday.

Yeah. So the subreddit is called Fundy Snark. I would say that like, when the groups that I say are like Fundy fairly benign are, or even quite positive. I think the two Mormon couples we mentioned was the highest tier being Zelf on the Shelf. I just [00:08:00] see Zelf on the Shelf as being really compassionate about the people that they are targeting to the extent where recently they've done a number of episodes where they are interacting with the girl defined couple because this couple is open to interacting with them, given how open and kind they are towards these individuals.

Whereas I put the pedestal of hate content probably Rachel Oates and then slightly below her is Fundie Fridays where these people are really just a progressive version of Libs of TikTok but not as entertaining. So I'll explain what I mean by that. Libs of TikTok, for people who don't know, they take the most extreme people in the pro this, Urban monoculture cult that we talk about and they showcase their behavior and then they attempt to spin sort of a narrative or a perspective where this behavior is actually pretty mainstream in the progressive movement.

But like most progressive though, this isn't mainstream. This is some wacky extremist. Whereas you see a similar thing. [00:09:00] In, for example, Fundie Fridays where they will say things like there was in a Duggar video recently where she was saying basically all Republicans are bad and represent a threat to the LGBT community.

And even though, more than 50 percent of Republican voters these days support gay marriage. Like it's wild that. These positions they're taking, and we'll get more into the wildness of this and the downstream negative repercussions of the positions the extremists are taking.

But yeah, so I want to hear your theory. Why do you think the Mormons are

Simone Collins: it's not just ex Mormons. So I think that the reason why born fairly atheist and then remained atheist have the most skewed Fundy snark commentary is because they are of the greatest religious fervor. So we've seen that, for example, in polygenic risk scores and generally religiosity appears to be heritable.

People seem to have that. But religiosity doesn't mean like you [00:10:00] inherit being a Baptist. It means you inherit a kind of religious fervor or tendency to be quite religious. For example, I have family members who used to be a member of the Rajneesh and then went like pretty conservative Christian.

They just jumped from one harder culture to another harder culture instead of just being in a soft culture. So it seems like people tend To gravitate towards hard and soft cultures. And I think that people who are very vehement critics of other cultures are demonstrating the personality tendencies, the behavioral tendencies that drive one to religiosity in the first place, they just happen to be bowing down to the cult or religion.

of progressivism, of woke, of whatever you want to call it, the urban monoculture. The people who deconvert from hard religions are naturally those whose behavioral and personality characteristics are less hardline on any sort of culture. They don't gravitate toward that very hard culture. [00:11:00] And so they let it go.

And it's they're more likely to spin out of hard religions because they just don't have a very high religiosity kind of profile. So that's why I think those who have de converted tend to be a little bit more tempered and reasonable. Whereas those who never de converted from their culture and have yet devoted their careers to a great extent to this kind of commentary and criticism are more vehement.

What do you think?

Malcolm Collins: I disagree on that. I suspect it's most cultural and genetic. Because this is something we just see more generally. Something that we've talked about on our channel before is a lot of people think like they have left the culture they were born in, but that one culturally just isn't true.

And you see the downstream effects of being outside of a hard cultural group, like a religious cultural group doesn't really show up in individual personality until about deconversion. And the Mormons who have deconverted were still raised was [00:12:00] in Mormon culture. I also think that there's genetic effects here.

When I engage with both Mormons and ex Mormons, both groups I find just and again, that's probably a cross between culture and genetics, unusually pleasant people to interact with. They are just delightful people. Wonderful. Alice Spark did a good thing on this. They are just uniquely delightful people.

, oh, lost your mortgage, pay 10, 000. Oh, no. Hey, it's Gary. Gary. Great to see you. How are you? Oh boy, who is the best mom in the world?

Malcolm Collins: When this is actually an interesting thing where a lot of people see us, you and me and they're like, you guys look like brother and sister. You look like no one I've ever seen before. You act so weird. And we're like, you look at the Puritan spotting checklist that Scott Alexander wrote.

And we were like off the charts on this. You look at the old Calvinists of the cultural [00:13:00] group, which both of us come from, I'll put it on the screen here. Pictures of Calvinist women. They look all like Simone's sisters. Or you can put up like famous Calvinist group that I was in from the group that like founded the Free State of Jones, the John Brown group.

You put like a picture of John Brown and you're like, both behaviorally and physiologically, This looks like Malcolm. The crazy We need to find

Simone Collins: that painting where there's some concerned people behind him

Malcolm Collins: So it's more just that we're part of a ethno cultural group that had a pretty isolated gene pool for a long time that you're just not as familiar with, but it doesn't mean that we aren't also impacted by that.

So I suspect that's what we're seeing was the Mormon community is one, a culture, which actually does a pretty good job of creating, Good action at the end of it. And this is something I've seen. So in our Wikipedia article about us there is a section on it where it quotes one of my quotes and I'm actually quite glad they quoted this because they were talking about my relationship with my parents.

And I was like, I had a very hard childhood. I [00:14:00] don't know how much of it was their fault. I grew up troubled teen industry, everything like that, which I was sent to by court order, not by my parents. And But what I said is if a parent raises good children, like children who are happy with themselves, happy with their lives and successful by any secular metric, how can I say that they were a bad parent?

And the Platt family the Fundy Snark did a series of videos that all of their kids seem so healthy and happy and well adjusted. And yet they want to attack this family. And I'm like, do you see what's coming out of progressive culture? Like it is horrible right now. These people are coming out like mentally broken individuals.

Sorry, I should be clear. I don't mean this objective claim. I mean, This objectively. Pew found that over half of all white liberal women under the age of 30, have a mental health issue and just across the board. Among this ultra progressive cultural group, as you can see here, there's just [00:15:00] much higher rates of mental health issues. Then there is in the conservative group and this is why I'm.

So unpersuaded when ultra Progressive's they're like, why don't you just raise children the way that we raise children? Because I'm like, anyone can see whether I'm looking at the data or I'm just looking at the people. I know that whatever the thing is that your doing with your kids, it's leading them to be mentally tattered as adults.

Whereas I just don't see the same thing coming out of conservative households. Even when these kids. Grow up in childhoods that Progressive's claim or love to mentally masturbate about. Mentally breaking these kids or causing them to need therapy when they're adults or causing et cetera. But really they're just saying, oh, These are hooks.

We could use to pull them out of their culture. Not that they're actually pointing out things that are genuinely damaging to these kids.

Malcolm Collins: And another really interesting thing I see from a cultural [00:16:00] perspective, like the more on the cult spectrum, they are these individuals, whenever they see somebody acting non culturally normative, their perspective is always to say, Get out there and go to a therapist and after we've talked about, if you look at modern therapy and you can watch our videos on has therapy become a cult?

This is an industry I was trained in. They do a bunch of stuff that we were explicitly weren't against doing in the early 2000s. They do a bunch of stuff like trauma therapy is what I call it, which is really they've taken the concept of thetans and they've just inserted the word trauma and it is much closer to Scientology from the nineties and eighties than it is to what therapy Was supposed to be like academic therapy was and this

Simone Collins: isn't just on Fundie snark channels either.

What's really interesting is across YouTube channels and podcasts. I hear this coming up a lot like when someone is in, especially the therapy cult, it shows up. And they talk a lot about their prescriptions. They talk a lot about their, therapists [00:17:00] and how it's very important that people get therapy.

Just how important. Because

Malcolm Collins: therapy is for the urban monoculture, it's like a priest in induction cast. And so when they want to convert somebody they send them to therapists because therapists do two things really well. This cult version of therapy that really. There's more similar to Scientology from the 80s is they do a very good job of breaking an individual's connections to their birth culture and family and convincing them that all of this stuff that if it's not culturally normative, if it's not part of the urban monoculture, it is trauma.

It is abuse, and they use that to break them from these groups, which cults always do. The first thing a cult always does is try to break you from your family. But they also do a very good job of creating this sort of original thin narrative around the concept of trauma. Which, historically we would have known a therapist's job is to help somebody emotionally heal, not to create dependency.

In theory. In theory. The real job is to make money and you can make more money by creating [00:18:00] dependency, which is why this model of therapy outcompeted.

So do you want to go further on any of these topics before I get into probably the most offensive part of the video?

Simone Collins: So yeah, let's see. I think people watch Fundy Snark for a bunch of different reasons and some it's just cultural reinforcement. Some it's just the snark. I think a lot of it, which is important and it shouldn't be understated is that people who come from a soft culture and just don't really have a lot of firmly held beliefs or traditions or restraints on their lives feel, and I felt this a lot when I was a kid, which is why I'm bringing it up this strange fascination with people who come from weird cultures.

And have a structured life and have these structured beliefs. And they may say that they hate these people these like religious fundamentalists, but they will watch Fundie Snark, they will follow these people on Instagram and on across other channels and watch and maybe mock their channels. [00:19:00] But I think maybe even subconsciously.

There's a lot of watching that goes on just because it, there's something compelling and comforting about it. It's evil. Of course, they've got it wrong. Of course, whatever. That's what they're thinking, but there's something kind of comforting and they're going through it and you can parasocially experience that lifestyle without actually living it and without actually feeling like you're condoning it because these are snark channels.

So you're making fun of them. You're not supporting them. You're making fun of them. It's okay. And I think that's what a lot of this is about. I also really the more vehement, and I, you would say like unfair channels like Fundie Fridays, because they provide such a stark contrast of the cultural extremes that we've arrived at today.

Because as you say, like you're cherry picking extremes. This is the libs of Tik TOK of the flipped version. It's it, the upside down version, and it really helps you see what the differences are. Like it lays them bare. If someone needs to know what the differences between, [00:20:00] weird conservatism and weird progressivism are, watch one of these channels and you'll know where they fall on marriage, on child rearing, on therapy, on trauma, on pets, on how to deal with social media, on jobs, on, Really anything because they talk about everything.

So I think that's really cool. You can learn a lot.

Malcolm Collins: So now we'll get the more offensive stuff. So I'm gonna get to two fairly offensive points. One is Rachel, I think it's the most extreme version of the urban monoculture just join us. Is her arguments, because you see this across videos, and I see this across Fundysnark, of high fertility families, and she was actually talking about the other Cullens family, the more famous Cullens family than us which is this really delightful interracial couple

Carissa using her kids to push her anti choice pro natalist beliefs, and this is a really sickening video.

Malcolm Collins: I, The more I learn about them and see people criticizing them, because I find that you can learn about somebody through the individuals who criticize them [00:21:00] really well, because I'm like, okay, if this is the worst, you could air about them.

They seem like delightful people. And very well reasoned individuals. One of the core complaints they had very similar to us was like, It'd be better off to have, quote unquote, higher quality, fewer kids, other than more kids. And she has a full argument about this and she's just this is like an obviously true thing.

 In her next line She said don't stop because they can't be in every extracurricular activity and sport Are we really gonna base the value of our children's lives on how many activities they can be in?

I know Carissa would disagree with me, but I honestly think it's better to help one child really flourish and reach their potential than it is to birth five children who are struggling and barely getting by

surely. I feel like so many people like Carissa like to use the excuse of well, we're scraping by so that's enough right? And I just feel like As someone who grew up like that, it's not enough.

So what Rachel is saying [00:22:00] here. Is, she doesn't want these children to exist because they will live childhoods. That are equivalent to her own childhood. Is she really saying that she would be better off not existing. That her childhood was so bad that her life just shouldn't be here because that's what she is denying.

Other people. With this argument, a life equivalent to her own life by her own argument. And I really don't think that that's the perspective she's taking. She genuinely, , doesn't consider that she is denying an entire human being who will live an entire life. The optionality of existence.

Just so another child can get more extracurriculars or have a marginally more financial security, which to me is. Obviously. Unethical, ,

But this is the standard moral [00:23:00] framework that progressive they're using right now.

Malcolm Collins: And I'm like, that is like such a, like morally horrifying position to me. And I think it's why the urban monoculture will ultimately die is this belief that human life is more It doesn't matter until conception. And it's just so bizarre to me because it's like this weird, like ultra Catholic belief, but also urban monoculture belief, which is to say that Oh yeah.

I know my kids, but if I could marginally and marginally is really what it is here. Improve the lives of my other kids, and adopt parenting practices that are more normalized for the urban monoculture perspective. By raising my kids more. In line with their value system, which requires fewer kids, really, all this, no corporal punishment.

Just you can't if you have multiple boys, you can't hold them all down. There's no corporal punishment system requires you being able to body check a kid stay on top of them, basically, if they're doing something really bad. And if you have other kids that's not an option, right?

Yeah. [00:24:00] And they're like, yeah then you just shouldn't have more, right? And so it's like, why do they take these bizarre perspectives? As we've argued, it's because their culture evolved these perspectives, because it uses them not for actual child rearing. People in their culture almost never have kids, or at least at above repopulation rate, they never have kids.

And so for that reason, they don't really need to be good at child rearing themselves. They just need to be good at implanting trauma. around the perception of trauma. And as we pointed out on studies of trauma that the effects of trauma are more correlated with a belief of trauma than actually having trauma.

There was that great study done that showed when you correlate people who say how much trauma they have, it correlates with their level of psychological dysfunction. However, if you then go back to their childhoods and you look for court records of this and stuff like this, where you can find actual proof of trauma, even in people who say that they're not traumatized The no effects and you find proof that there wasn't actually trauma and people who say that they're traumatized, you find big effects.

So implanting trauma is actually really important in creating this [00:25:00] dependency on the urban monoculture. But then I think we have the worst case of this, which has been the appropriation of the gay community. Which I think we see on Funday Fridays. I'm gonna, Fundy Fridays, which sees herself, and I don't think that she's doing any of this maliciously.

I just think it's part of the cult that she's in, and she doesn't understand the negative repercussions of her actions. Yeah, I think we should make

Simone Collins: it clear I really like Fundy Fridays, and I really like Jen who's the, Main host of Funny Fridays along with her husband. But yeah, she's in a, she's in a very different culture and she has would

Malcolm Collins: you go she's not just in a different culture.

She's basically in a cult and the cult has done some really questionable things. She's in as much of a cult

Simone Collins: as the people who she covers. They all come from very strong cultures that have skews and blind spots because of those strong cultures. Not to say that we don't have blind spots either, but still.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, everybody has their cultural blind spots, but one that like just, ugh, it grades my nails when I'm watching her channel is she really sees herself as like a spokesperson [00:26:00] for queer people and queer culture. And I will put a picture on screen of her and her husband, and people might be like, how dare you question this aspect of her identity?

And I'm like, look, I'm going to play a video of her. playing race detective with the people she's criticizing,

I'm not sure the ethnicity of her mother, and I swear I have a reason to bring this up, because I am aware that it is problematic for me as a white person to ask where are you from?!

I'm only bringing it up because Kat identifies as Latina

I know a lot of you guys, but I know a lot of you guys don't know that I am myself a proud Latina. I was born in Mexico in Montemorelos, Nuevo Leon. I know that a lot of people just assume that I'm white. Because I was not lucky enough to inherit my mom's really beautiful dark skin. But I do have her dark eyes.

But I think that it's important too that people know that us Latinas come in all different shades of brown. Trying to, call her something that she's not, but I have to report on what I [00:27:00] think And so I'm the same way. I just got a call it, like I see it. And, , given that she is the type of person who, when she is. Investigating the way somebody else is approaching life. She would say, well, you don't look Latina to me. Therefore, I am going to . , doubt your Latina identity, even though you personally identify as Latina. , I'm just saying the same thing.

What you don't look like this to me. And so while I personally wouldn't doubt somebody's racial heritage or identity, just because they didn't look a certain way. I can see the logic in doing it, because if you don't look sufficiently Latina, then you're not going to experience the racism that goes along with being Latina. And therefore it's not good for you to use that identity as a cover for your words and actions. , but this is all would apply equally well to the accusation. I am making here To be more specific. There is a big difference between being an oppressed minority [00:28:00] and identifying as an oppressed minority.

If. The thing that grants you inclusion into that minority group. Is not causing you to be oppressed in the way that other members of that group are being oppressed. The oppressive minority status is nothing but a benefit to you because you get to feel like a victim and identify as a victim without any of the negative consequences of actually being a victim.

He doesn't need one. Bob, we don't want to know. The gender of the baby. We don't want to know the sex, and you know that. I don't know your gender. I don't know Candace's. I don't know mine. You don't know my gender?

I don't. Do I look like a woman? I don't know what a woman looks like. What are you? You're a detective? A gender detective? No, I just Lifting up skirts and pulling down pants and just getting in there with your magnifying glass?

By the way, if you're wondering. Y gen identifies as queer. Like what specific type of queer she thinks she is? If someone has watched a, literally all of her videos are about all of her videos and she says she can't remember her ever [00:29:00] saying. , I did some research on the side and the answer that I seem to pull is that she calls her if she considers herself and her husband considers. Himself nonbinary.

, and their pronouns are her and they, and him and they, I believe. , I, you know, I don't want to ever mis-gender someone because I don't particularly, I like, it's not important to me. And it really hurts some people. , So, you know, why would I do something that hurts somebody? If there's no benefit to me? , So that's, that's where I think she comes into the queer community. But the article where I pulled that from. Unfortunately, , was really confusingly worded. And I'm not sure if those pronouns or that gender identity claim was referring to them or another influencer couple, it was interviewing alongside them.

Malcolm Collins: She does the exact same thing. This is not me acting outside of the rules that she has set for herself. And I haven't done this with anyone else. I'm only doing it because I know that she's okay with playing like race detective and stuff [00:30:00] like this.

But I look at her and her husband and I'm like, okay, we're going to do this. So here's the core problem with this leftist idea that you shouldn't put any gating on the queer community and that if you have dyed hair and snogged a girl in college that you're queer because you don't have to deal with the consequences because you don't, to everyone else in the world, you look like a straight couple.

You don't have to deal with the consequences of the s**t that you are saying in terms of how that affects the queer community. When you get out there. And you as somebody who's really just and we could identify as queer if we wanted to because we are agender, as I constantly point out by the LGBT community, like extremist cult standards, not like real gays and lesbians who, depending on the study you're looking at 45 percent of gay men voted for Trump, or it might be a third of gay men in another study.

You're like, okay, you've got to go for the smaller study because then people believe it more. But you're looking at a pretty big percentage of these people who actually have to live with this. People are like, [00:31:00] why are so many like actually gay people have to live with the fact that they're gay who have to live with the fact that they're trans, right?

And people around them can see this, support the Republican policies. It's because what are the the anti gay policies? Trans, anti LGBT, quote unquote, Republican policies. There's s**t like trans people shouldn't be on sports teams, and trans people shouldn't be using, bathrooms that don't confirm with their birth gender.

And for a lot of people who can't escape this gay and trans identity, they support that stuff. And in Fundie Friday, this is not me mis misinterpreting the s**t that they're saying. They have all Full video just on these two topics. It's first of all, anyone who's I think sane and being honest knows that these people shouldn't be on sports teams.

It's blatantly unfair. And the fact that it's blatantly unfair causes blowback to real trans people.

If you're a real transperson, you infinitely would prefer not having a society that has a reason to hate you and see you as a cheater. [00:32:00] Over getting to participate in the sports team you want to participate in. . Like there are not people out there, killing themselves because they're not getting to play on the right swimming team.

All right. Lots of kids go through their childhood without any option to play intermural sports. And I don't see any leftist freaking out that these kids are going to end up killing themselves. This is. In sane. And these are positions that. You would only argue if you didn't have to deal with the consequences that are going to come from creating these sorts of carve-outs because of course, as soon as you create a carve out of this, of course, some people are going to abuse it. As soon as you create a carve-out around, , a certain segment of society where it's harder to call them out for things, of course, some aggressive male cis-gender sex PEs are going to try to take . , advantage of it. And it's pretty easy to see that this is happening. A trans person who desperately [00:33:00] wants to be seen as a particular gender identity is not going to win their body. Looks nothing like that. Gender identity. Go and participate in a sport where everyone is going to be furious in them, because it seems that they have some huge advantage over everyone else, which they, they obviously do. And then walk around the. Locker room. Like Leah Thomas , swinging their penis about and in front of full view in front of everyone, , they're not going to do that.

And they would want laws in place that prevent people from doing that while calling themselves trans.

And the blow back that that causes the trans community is infinitely worse than any benefit they get from these. Ridiculous positions. The laws that Republicans are fighting for. That prevent people from doing things like this, using a trans identity as a shield. Ultimately or most beneficial out of [00:34:00] everyone, they benefit in society. To real trans individuals. If you go to somebody who isn't just in this far lefty, Colt, and they're like, would you rather, live in a world in which you don't get to participate in the sports team you want to participate in? But. You don't have to deal with aggressive CIS male sex PEs walking around naked in women's locker rooms while calling themselves trans and you facing the blowback for that or one in which. , you do have to deal with with that and your meager reward. Is getting to participate in the sports teams.

You want to participate in, , anybody who is actually like, I just want society to see me for my gender is going to be like, obviously the second. And these individuals are okay with holding these sorts of positions because they don't have to personally deal with the blow back because they don't have to walk around every day looking like. A trans person looking like queer people, holding hands with somebody of the [00:35:00] same gender it's themselves. And this is why these sorts of opt in queer identities. If anything for them? It's a benefit because now they look even more like a victim when they're opting into the victim identity that they can just throw off whenever they're in public.

Malcolm Collins: Wasn't there a South

Simone Collins: Park episode on this?

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, there was a South Park. And I'll include a clip from it here because they know it does

 Oh, yeah, I'm ready. David. There are just so many amazing women athletes out here today now, this is the first year that a trans woman is in the competition. How do you feel about that? . I feel honored to be a part of history.

I have a lot of incredible trans friends who are athletes, and so we're all inspired. Uh huh. And have you actually ever met Heather Swanson? She's not exactly your average trans athlete. Well, what is an average trans athlete?

Honestly, I find that kind of bigoted, David. Okay, miss Swanson, how does it feel to be competing today? I can't tell you how free I feel now that I've started identifying as a [00:36:00] woman. I'm ready to smash the other girls. Uh, good luck, Heather. Ha ha, luck is for dudes! .

Malcolm Collins: or this, he repeats the, he's oh, it's a complete myth that trans people ever or really CIS males ever use.

Trans bathroom protections to assault women. And it's no, even the studies that are trying to argue it's a miss, say it does happen. They just argue it in, I'll put up a statistic on screen here, like a study on screen. They just say it doesn't happen more when this law is out there. And it's do you really think you could get a study published that showed that it happened more when this law was out there?

like, if you publish that study at any mainstream us university. , you would be at risk of being fired, but I mean, very obviously. And you would likely be at personal risk walking around campus. , why would somebody take that risk? You know, I, it, the, the benefit they would be so potentially low from most individual academic perspectives when considering [00:37:00] their own livelihoods and people who don't understand this type of pressure that academics are under, I think often willfully don't understand it or ignore it. , and ignore just how extreme the college activists often are.

Malcolm Collins: Whether it's lesbians who are like, I feel really uncomfortable because a lot of, transitioned women who now identify as lesbians some of these.

are cis men, cis pes, who wanted to get into lesbian dating apps, and pester women, and they found a cultural cheat code to do that, and if you're like, no, a creepy cis male would never do this of course they would, we all know that guy and yet now, when lesbians try to create Lesbians who actually have to deal with the fact that they're actually lesbians and only want to date people who present phenotypically female.

Which, this person clearly isn't they have to deal with this, like in Australia, you might not know this, but there's a case recently where the owner of a dating app is being sued because the dating app used AI to determine if the face of the person who is signing up looked more phenotypically [00:38:00] female.

So this was a dating app that, by the way, let people in if they were

Simone Collins: As long as you can in passed. I think that's great.

Malcolm Collins: But they didn't pass. They were like, no, because this is for people who prefer phenotypical females, that women cannot find these private spaces, that lesbians can't find these private spaces anymore.

It's actually a problem for individuals who have a phenotypical female preference. And you are saying. in the legislation that you're pushing that they shouldn't be allowed. Like you are dismissing the people who have to actually live with the fact that they are same sex attracted. Or, you get the push down of this in school, which happened to us recently.

So I'll read a quote here because this happened just right next door to us. Where a Pennsylvania girl spoke out, this was like a 13 year old, by the way spoke out furiously against teachers and administrators at her school for a transgender student savagely beating her friend using a Stanley cup.

The incident took place at Pembroke. I'm sorry. Using a Stanley cup. Yeah, you're using a big metal thing. Yeah, you could cut a b***h with it,

Simone Collins: I'm sure.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. When the 13 year [00:39:00] old blindsided a 12 year old female victim in the school cafeteria using a cup, hitting her on the head and creating an open wound, the unidentified student had to be hospitalized and get staples to close the cuts in her head before undertaking concussion protocol, according to police.

However, as one student said, Not only did she warn the teachers the bullying student had a quote unquote hit list, but she added that she was the next one to get assaulted and that the student had to be stopped. You could have stopped it, the girl said. It was five hours from when I told you it was going to happen.

I don't get how you couldn't have stopped that. She added that the girl was bullying her and targeting her every day at lunch. And you might be wondering like, how are, is somebody getting away with this? And it's because they're afraid. If they in this, if they apply any disciplinary measures to people of this protected category in our society, if they say, no, you can't go in the restrooms, no, you can't, that this is going to cause a apoplectic freak out from this [00:40:00] extremist cult, right?

That's if they had come

Simone Collins: in and said, you appear to be bullying, et cetera, that person. Yeah, we're like normal trans people

Malcolm Collins: who are like historically, like actually born with a different gender presentation . They just want to live their lives like they're not into all of this.

They understand that they have what is essentially a fairly rare condition and that all of society cannot adopt to their condition and that yes, that might mean that they have to use restrooms at home more often or they have to feel uncomfortable sometimes the same way extremely fat people do on airplanes.

Like I don't love that. fat people have to feel uncomfortable or buy two seats on an airplane, but realistically we can't adopt all airplanes . And that's the truth of trans people as well. They know that when society begins to bend over backwards in ways, because of course, if you create this protected class, if you say any.

Male looking individual who says they identify as a woman can now use women's bathrooms. [00:41:00] Some sex pests are going to take advantage of that. They don't want that happening because that has blowback on them who can't hide. But when you're one of these individuals like Fundy Stark who can just say, Oh, I'm gender whatever, but not looking away where you can't escape the blowback that you are causing for this community. That is genuinely bad for society and bad for the real LGBTQ community. And you could look at people like us who could claim to be trans, because we are agender, which is genderqueer, which would qualify as a gen for, sorry, for normal people who don't know what agender is. That basically means I don't feel a strong connection to my gender.

If I woke up tomorrow, a woman, I wouldn't care. If Simone woke up tomorrow, a man, she wouldn't care. We just don't. And Simone's also fairly asexual. Would you identify as asexual? I

Simone Collins: identify as asexual, but gay for Malcolm. Gay for Malcolm, yes. I am

Malcolm Collins: gay for Malcolm. We would fall squarely in the queer community.

But I [00:42:00] don't say I'm in the queer community. I just try to protect them because I view, if I am not a gender presentation that causes me to be attacked in my daily life, it's very much a blackface thing to me. It's a stolen valor thing. It's gross. It's like walking around. Yeah. Like I don't walk around telling

Simone Collins: people that I have an autism diagnosis because I don't think I need or deserve the extra help.

I could play that card probably technically. I have a technical diagnosis. I could pull out the paperwork. I could probably get some special services in some cases, but I'm not going to do that because I've learned to cope. And I think that the resources that should be expended on people who need help should be saved for those people.

Malcolm Collins: This is why when we're looking at statistics on voting records to find out like the way these communities actually are, I look at like gay males, for example, instead of general LGBT statistics, because if you look at general LGBT statistics, 14% vote Republican, only 14%, it's not the [00:43:00] 45 or one third that you see in other studies of when it's just gay men, because people like this couple who to me, Or a straight heterosexual couple in terms of how they present to society.

Except for like the dyed hair, or just identifying into this queer definition and then polluting the statistics while also causing a blow back on the real queer community from my perspective.

And I think What blow back do you

Simone Collins: think they're causing?

Malcolm Collins: You can actually see it in the statistics, which is support for the queer community has been declining in recent years.

Because of people like this, who are saying you cannot be queer supportive and Republican. How are many people going to take that? Oh s**t. And I would actually argue the opposite. I would say you can't be queer supportive in a Democrat because they're supporting the sex pests who are blowing back incredible negative feelings towards.

The real trans individuals, the real, just born, attracted to the same sex [00:44:00] individuals. And because they are taking this position, they are forcing people on the other side to take the opposite position. And they are, Causing identity wise, Oh, being Republican means I am anti gay.

They are establishing that as a cultural norm, even though by the statistics, it's not being true. More than half of Republicans, even when you're talking about older Republicans, you're looking at 65, percent of you're talking about young Republicans, but even older Republicans, more than half still support same sex marriage.

This is just. It's just nonsense at this point. They're making up a fantasy world that makes them feel like good guys when they are not good guys and they are causing the very harassment that they claim to be fighting against.

Simone Collins: One thing I wonder is how many people watching All Fundy snark channels, including the more moderate ones of Deconverted Mormons, for example, come from the [00:45:00] enemy's field, as it were are similar to me, somewhat conservative, not agreeing with everything, all the criticism, but just enjoying it and similar to those who are super progressive, but who follow the accounts of these conservative influencers, because they just.

Kind of find it interesting. Do you think that there's a decent number of conservatives and Religious fundamentalists who watch these channels

Malcolm Collins: or are

Simone Collins: we

Malcolm Collins: unusual? I don't think so. That would be like asking, are there a decent number of people in this far, urban monoculture cult that watch lives of Tik TOK, I really don't think that many people cross the border that much, but I guess we'll hear from our audience.

Cause I imagine our audience is fairly

Simone Collins: audience snark. I

Malcolm Collins: don't. Yeah, we'll see if they like Fundysnark as much. And these people will eventually be covering us. We've actually reached out to them because we're open to working with anyone who covers us, even if it's in a negative context. We're always open to interviews.

We're always open to talk. I believe that the light of truce destroys evil. most [00:46:00] effectively. And I think that when people intentionally don't engage with us and we've reached out to Fundie Start, for example, by the way, to do videos. Fundie Fridays, Jen, you mean. Fundie Friday, yeah. And some of the other people we've reached out to we are always open to do videos with people who are ideologically different from us because we think a genuinely ideologically diverse community, not diverse TM, i.

e. the approved ideologies by the urban monoculture, but actually diverse community. Is the strongest community for our country.

Simone Collins: And I think that Jen of Fundie Fridays comes from a good place and genuinely cares for these people. Like sometimes bad things happen to the people that she covers and she.

Malcolm Collins: Oh, no, absolutely. I, no I see her very much the way that I see some of the people she covers.

Simone Collins: Yeah, no from a, an extremist position in the culture. That's why I hold my stance that my hypothesis is that she is of the same heart culture profile. As the religious fundamentalists that she covers just happens to be wearing a different team's [00:47:00] colors and so she has no.

Malcolm Collins: And yeah, and they're insane religious cults. They're the good guys in her insane religious cult. She's the good guy and she's doing what the cult is telling her to do. She should never

Simone Collins: step

Malcolm Collins: back.

Simone Collins: She'd started tongue in cheek that are frills of the channel now. Still speak very much or similar to the small time career preachers that she criticizes.

Her followers call themselves Jenna nights. And they patronize her. And how is that different from being a preacher in the end? Preachers speak to people, they cultivate communities. They have. Some merch sometimes, there's a, oh vomit. There's just a lot of parallels.

And so I just, I think that one, one thing is fun is it's just like watching a little flame war. Between preachers. And yeah I would just say like to anyone watching this, don't think we think she's not well meaning. We just no.

Malcolm Collins: But I think that most of the people she criticizes are well meaning.

Simone Collins: I agree. And then yes, I do agree that the stance of saying that you are, that you stand for a queer [00:48:00] community when you aren't necessarily like subject to the black faith. Not exactly. There's no rule saying you can't say you're queer. We can say we're queer if we want to, and we have every right to say that we're queer.

No, we

Malcolm Collins: can say we're queer and we would be right to say we're queer if we wanted to, but I don't believe in this identifying with a community when you are not subject to these struggles in the same way that she would criticize people on her show. As like the woman where she was doing the is she really this race thing?

She's trying to figure out if she had a right to call herself Latina because she didn't look Latina. And that's exactly what we're saying. Do you have a right to call yourself queer and claim the struggles of that community when you don't look queer, when you look like you're in a heterosexual marriage?

And there's a lot of stuff within the queer community where it used to be like when you get married, it doesn't mean you're no longer bi. It's yeah, but you're no longer functionally undergoing the. Struggles that are unique to by people in our current society it does mean [00:49:00] That you are not a marginalized community member anymore from the perspective of your lived experience in terms of how that community is dealing with struggles and so You no longer have to deal with the blowback of your extremist actions, like saying, Oh yeah, trans people should be allowed on women's sports teams.

When that's obviously ridiculous.

Simone Collins: I love you.

Malcolm Collins: I love you, Simone.

Simone Collins: I love you too. I love how you

Malcolm Collins: always try to see the best in people. You are a genuinely good person. And I think that, as we often say righteousness isn't determined by an intention to be a good person because almost everyone intends to be a good person. It's determined by how realistic in terms of the actual like downstream effects your view of reality is like the more educated you are.

On what reality actually is in the less you are [00:50:00] part of just one ideological tribe, the better. And I, we see with her channel, like in one video, she was, lauding communism, for example, like maybe one day there'll be a full communist. She said as a good thing. And I just personally, as somebody who values pragmatism and like the way things actually work when tried to be a person who loves communism is just to say, I am okay with, in exchange for good boy points, i.

e., thinking of myself as a good person and having other people see me as a good person, the painful and slow deaths of millions of people, starting often with the minority populations and the most disenfranchised in a society, which is what actually happens when communists come into power.

Simone Collins: But. As I learned from Lemon Month, our holiday in which we engage with subjects we find offensive, I have learned that real communism has not been tried. Okay? It is a post singularity sci fi world. That is what communism is. That's what it always was. And it, the big problem with [00:51:00] communism is that people are trying it now when we literally don't have the technology.

We could

Malcolm Collins: do a whole episode on this, but I just want to explain the point for people who don't know what she said here.

Simone Collins: She's arguing about the early days.

Malcolm Collins: Communism, I don't believe that's what she's arguing for, said that communism can only be tried once we're in a post scarcity environment. And so some communists are now arguing yeah, real communism has never been tried definitionally because we're not in a post scarcity environment.

But if somebody is fighting for communism today, because we don't have the technology to create a genuinely That's true. If you're fighting for communism

Simone Collins: today, you should shut your mouth because you should be fighting. For AGI and super intelligence that is aligned with human flourishing, because that is what will herald in true communism.

Yes. So you really have to be like either like a government fascist with a, like AI department, or you have to be A huge capitalist and raised tons of money to do private AI development.

This is actually something I've noticed more broadly [00:52:00] between the leftist rightist divide within the current political environment, not the political environment of the nineties, which is what modern leftists often like to pretend. That we are still fighting, but in the current environment, , what it really is.

It's do you actually care about solving a problem? Are you looking for good boy points? So you look at something like the leftist myth that there is a rightest. It's just insane that there's a significant racist base among the right wing. , and, and I will beat this until the lions come home. , 5 38 polling, very mainstream Nate, silver until Obama was elected more white Democrats and white Republicans said they would not vote for a black president. , and even now the difference in racist attitudes between the two parties basis. Is marginal.

And when you look at the actual effects that the two parties policies have on racial disparity, You get more of it from the left. When a left wing government has been in power in [00:53:00] the United States, any region for a period, the IQ scores and incomes. Of both black and Hispanic populations are more distant from the local white population than when Republicans have been in power.

And it's because these systems that they put in place. , you know, affirmative action, everything like that. They are performative good boy point systems, but they make the underlying problems worse. And I think that that's the core difference between right it's and left us in the modern sense. It's we'll use sacrifice your public image to attempt to actually fix a problem. Or are you just interested in. Looking good.

And I actually think that this is also what we're seeing with the current it's real Gaza conflict, because there are not many. , real, , pleasant solutions to the current geopolitical issue in that region. And if you actually implemented most of the left wing solutions. You're going to deal with. [00:54:00] A scale of death and oppression in the region that is. Astronomical.

Malcolm Collins: I love you to death. You're amazing and you are so understanding of other people and cultures. Even when they wish that we were dead.

As I'm sure If they choose

Simone Collins: Snark, I'm for them. It doesn't matter. If the Snark

Malcolm Collins: channels cover us, they're gonna be like, Oh my god, their children should be dead! Snark channels already I'm gonna say they should have never been born, but there's no difference.

Simone Collins: No, they'll We always know what they say,

How can you slap? F k. F k. F k. How can she slap? F k. How did you

Simone Collins: How could they be so cruel to their children?

They don't love their children.

Malcolm Collins: That's what they say. That's what they say. How could they slap

Simone Collins: How do they slap and how dare she have her baby on the screen? That's going to be a big one. Yeah. How could they practice corporal punishment? How could they not make their house incredibly warm during the winter?

How could they have so many kids if they can't? I don't know. I really don't know. I am running out of things, but it's usually those things. Oh, and they put too much on their kids [00:55:00] because they, expect things of them and encourage them to.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, how dare they have expectations?

Intergenerational cultural expectations. And that's another thing that gets me. And we'll probably do a full episode on this, but I'll just end it with this where people are like, how dare you say that people owe their ancestors anything, right? I'm like, if somebody gave you a hundred dollars and said, you go, what do I owe you for this?

And they're like just pass on the goodwill, you'd be, and then you took that money and you spent it on drugs and pornography right? Like just something to totally selfish. You are a bad and vile person. I am glad that people like you won't exist in the future.

If somebody makes not, doesn't give you a hundred dollars, they make enormous sacrifices to give you life. Life and they say, and you say, what do I owe you? And they go, all you owe me is to pass this on, pay it forward. And you're like f**k that. I'm going to spend it on, drugs and sex. You're a vile person and I'm glad that your cultural and genetic descendants won't exist in the future.[00:56:00]

So lovely. Do you disagree with that statement, Simone? That's very much a snarky

Simone Collins: I just say, actually, there are some times where Jen gets really pissed about things that the other side says. And she takes on a tone that reminds me a lot of you when you get the same level of piss. So I'm just like, Oh, it's great.

It's good. I, my whole thing is what happens, people who choose not to represent the trans community. Their culture in the future will not inherit the future. We will inherit the future theoretically, if our kids thrive and flourish, and I hope that they do.

Malcolm Collins: All right.

Love you so much.

Simone Collins: I love you too, gorgeous.

 You're not messing up. You're doing a great job. Were you able to get the pocket thing I got you on your belt, or have you still not wearing it?

Simone Collins: It doesn't fit under these aprons, and that's the trouble. But once I figure out how to deal with it under these [00:57:00] aprons, I'll

Malcolm Collins: do it. Okay. I just want you to be happy.

Simone Collins: You're the best.

Malcolm Collins: You're the best.

Simone Collins: No, Amy's the best. Our kids are the best. All of them are the best. The best.

Malcolm Collins: Every one of our kids is like so amazing in their own way. I'm really excited for them.

Simone Collins: True story. I'm crazy about them. Okay, I'm gonna go get her and then I'll be right in. Oops! .

In this thought-provoking video, Malcolm and Simone Collins delve into the growing phenomenon of parental regret and its connection to the urban monoculture. They analyze recent articles about parents who regret having children, discussing the potential causes and offering a pronatalist perspective on the issue. The couple explores topics such as high-effort parenting, the importance of objective functions in life, and the psychological impact of the urban monoculture on parenting experiences. They also touch on Eric Holle's piece about the transformative nature of parenthood and offer insights into finding meaning and purpose through raising children. This video provides a comprehensive look at modern parenting challenges and offers potential solutions for those struggling with parental regret.

[00:00:00] This isn't the way that historically people related to kids. If the point of the kids is modifying either your self perception, or your emotional experience of reality kids are actually bad pets. That's They're terrible pets. They're terrible pets. Yeah, kids are not a good pet get up.

No unconditional love. They Are very difficult to potty train house train, etc.

Would you like to know more?

Hello, Simone. I am excited to be talking with you today. Today this conversation was actually inspired to me by an Eric Hole piece. Oh, I saw that! This afternoon, right? Yeah, because Eric made me a better person. And in the piece, he linked to this like new genre of articles about people who hated becoming parents.

So there's a BuzzFeed article, Parents who regret having children are making anonymous confessions online, and it's taboo, but important. And then there was the Atlantic piece, The two reasons parents regret having kids. And then [00:01:00] there's the Time piece, The parents who regret having children, which apparently went viral.

And then there's a business insider piece, six common reasons. Parents don't like their kids or something. And then there's the Newsweek piece. I regret having children. The moms united in an uncomfortable truth. Let's see what this one. So this is Richard Maple, 39 from Ohio after becoming a mother at 31.

And. She says, quote, I think about all the things my life would have been if the constant threat of motherhood hadn't loomed over me like a cloud of doom Maple told Newsweek. I'm resolved to being the best mom to them that I can be because it's not their fault that they're here and they are wonderful small humans who deserve love and guidance.

 But do I miss my life without children every single day? And then there's the independent piece. I had no choice. The people who regret becoming parents. And then there's the Sunday morning Herald piece. Having kids is probably the biggest real life regret wife concurs. [00:02:00] It says and then so I'm just reading a quote here from this because I think it's useful to get an understanding of what these people are saying, though.

I love my son. I now know a know myself well enough and be know the challenges of parenting well enough to say that having kids is probably my life's biggest regret, wife concurs. Oh my God. And here's a, here's another quote here. Quote, my wife needed to be a mother. I think she saw all her friends, classmates and cousins having kids.

So she needed to be in this mummy club. Quote, I went along with the things to please her. I was fine was one, but she campaigned for two. I gave in to make her happy. So here we are with the two toddlers. We're both moody, can't stand each other half the time, and have a borderline dead bedroom life. So much for making her happy.

The kids are a pain. It has gotten to the point where I don't enjoy being home anymore. I dread the weekends. I much prefer the [00:03:00] work week where I only have to be a parent for a few hours rather than all day. It's non stop noise, screaming, whining, and fighting.

And this other one says, This is not the life I wanted. My toddler son is a tornado of destruction and will break slash tear slash rip anything he can get his hands on no matter how much I do to wear him out. And the baby predictably is needy because she's a baby. I feel tricked into wanting them by biological urges and the romanticization of the version of kids that isn't close to reality.

Do you want me to keep going? I think you have to. Oh, here's another. I love my kids, but I also regret them deeply. Every one of them. I never wanted any of them. Circumstances explain pretty much why I went through with them all. Imagine the guilt and mental weight of having a bunch of kids you love but never intended or wanted.

And the Guardian piece. It's breaking the taboo. The parents who regret having [00:04:00] children. And then, we get a final piece here in time, the parents who regret having children, which shows in various studies, something like 7 to 15 percent of parents regret having children. Wow. And so first, what are your thoughts on this phenomenon?

I think a lot of what seems to be playing out, at least in the pull quotes they're using is that being dip, that happiness dip that men, but especially women experience when their children, especially our young, the diaper years, as it were after having kids. And this shows up in the research fairly consistently longer there, there's other research that shows that longer term contentedness goes up and that men actually are pretty happy in general.

And that if memory serves, if you live in a nation that has more child care support. You're probably also less unhappy. So there, there are all these factors here, I was actually, I was finishing up the book reasons for having kids that we'll talk about in some other [00:05:00] podcasts, maybe we'll have the authors on.

And it's the book, the author of progressive, highly educated woman herself has a child and then decides to share at the book, what it has been like for her. And she sounds absolutely miserable, like completely miserable. And she even describes this moment. After she had her baby, when she said to her husband, what have we done?

Like our life before was good. And I think what the most predominant problem is with all of these people who share these reports of being fairly miserable and less happy and more stressed after having these babies, especially while the kids are still on the younger end. Is that they are engaged in unsustainable, modern, high effort parenting, which is an aberration.

It's not how people Yeah, this one woman who's talking about her son, who's this hellion, running around, breaking everything, I'm like, have you tried bopping him? I know [00:06:00] you haven't, but you should think about it. There's a reason why people used to do this.

Candy! Dammit, I hate you! You're ruining my life! Please Herbert, remember our agreement. We have an agreement about how CANDY MARSHMALLOWS! GIVE IT TO ME! like this, I just don't know how to make him stop!

CANDY MARSHMALLOWS! ON CANDY MARSHMALLOWS! Have you ever tried beating his ass? HAVE LOST YOUR GODDAMN MIND! MAMA! Not many minutes left. And one of the coauthors of Reasons for Having Children talks about her experience trying to get her child to sleep at night where they just sit next to her.

As she, screams and cries for a different doll and wants mommy but wants daddy But wants all these things and they're making it worse because really what the kid is they're tired and they want to go to bed And if you just leave them alone They'll cry for a little bit because they want attention and they're sad because they're tired But then they'll go to sleep and they'll feel better [00:07:00] And this way effort parenting is what's making everyone miserable But I don't think that this is the core thing that's making the miserable, but I think it is I think it is Because you constantly correct me on this, like I, I've come into this from the urban monoculture perspective of the way to correctly parent is to be on them all the time, to pay attention to them constantly, to stress out about every tiny thing when really just letting them be, letting them figure it out is really both good for them developmentally, good, better for the parent developmentally, and it often just solves whatever the problem is that you're freaked out about.

John Paulus from Zero Hour, when I went on his show one of the quotes that he had, that I thought was really interesting, is actually it was after when we were chatting with each other in regards to the whole Bopgate spanking controversy, blah, blah, blah if he's and I was talking about how there's like these movements to not even listen when a, to You should never say no to a child.

You should never put a child in timeout. And he was, yeah, I definitely see this idea of children should never experience any negative emotional stimuli. And when you take [00:08:00] this mindset with a kid, you are the servant of the kid. It's not the other way around. You are living under the toddler's tyranny and world perspective.

And this is a person one should remember that has no long term thinking, that doesn't understand how to make decisions in their long term best interest, that doesn't have It is the toddler, not the person saying this. Yeah. The, when you let a toddler reign, you're letting someone reign who, even if they who has no ability to actually even get what they want or know what they want.

And that's the problem. When you have a kid who's really tired and they want it and they need to take a nap or go to sleep, the last thing they will ask for is sleep. No, they're going to ask for a billion things and definitely not go to sleep. And that's why you can't let them rule. They can't establish the, you need to establish discipline and boundaries with children.

And so I do think that part of this is downstream of that, but I don't actually think that this is the core thing that's causing this. Oh, what do you think is the core cause? If you read the actual quotes and you [00:09:00] think about what they're saying is. Fundamentally, that anyone who has adopted the urban monoculture is their cultural value system, i.

e. this progressive cultural system should not have kids like without significant cultural retooling because their core value in life is often their personal emotional experience of reality and their arguments for having kids Typically fall into one of two categories. How those kids will augment their status was in their social network.

I E I saw all the other moms doing it. I wanted to be like them. I wanted to fit in. This is about masturbating a personal emotional need, or they thought the kids would make them happy and be like toys for them, right? That the kids would go play about and that through that, they would feel good around the kids.

This is not the way that we relate to kids. This isn't the way that historically people related to kids. If the point of the kids is modifying either your self perception, [00:10:00] or your emotional experience of reality kids are actually bad pets. That's They're terrible pets. They're terrible pets. Yeah, kids are not a good pet get up.

No unconditional love. They Are very difficult to potty train house train, etc. Yeah, definitely bad pets and that's the problem that these people are dealing with is they don't have a higher order moral system Other than things that make I mean You can look at like the book you read and it's constantly about self affirmation.

It's constantly about how does this reflect on myself? Like, how do I fit the kids into this sort of like what are the arguments that they use for example? For having kids or for why they regret having kids? No, for having kids. I may be too low IQ for this book. I genuinely am only getting reasons to not have kids from the, this book.

I know it's a printed list book. I'm sure. I'm sure it's in there somewhere. I'm coming up dry. So I've got to Yeah and this is the [00:11:00] thing. There just isn't a logical reason to have kids if you live for your own Emotional state or some sort of the socially achieved value system where you're trying to because it's just not worth the effort and there, there are value hierarchies that you can enter where you don't need to have kids to compete and therefore, the ones in which you do need kids to compete you just need so many kids to even like really play the game and you're not going to do that.

You're not having kids for some sort of external value system, i. e. You believe that it's in God's interest or something like that. Now God, there was a point I went, Oh yeah. So this actually reminds me of a comment we had on our discord that I thought was just absolutely brilliant. And it was on socially, the way people relate to kids. And this banning of people having kids on social media and they're seeing a lot of people who are doing this. Childless people don't put your kids point. You should have me [00:12:00] oh, this is one thing that

That a parent has in the game of the social media status hierarchy is their cute kids. And so if you can create a negative externality around sharing that, you can remove your opponent's strongest weapon in status hierarchy battles. But this is something I absolutely see. Yeah, definitely concern a lot less from what I'd consider like the people who have a ton of kids and a happy family life.

It's mostly people who don't have that. And they have one kid and it's a new one and they're virtuous and but yeah, no I, of the YouTube influencers, I know who've shamed people who post their kids online of the ones I have watched content from only one of them has a kid and others at least seven other.

So it's like a seven to one ratio. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That makes a lot of [00:13:00] sense. The other reason that somebody was saying that people get mad about that is they are the kids who have converted to the urban monoculture, but we're shared by parents who were not in the urban monoculture and don't like that aspect of their identity, but those people don't really matter.

as humans because they're not going to have kids themselves. And actually another point that I saw another Collins mother say, actually in a YouTube video, this is the Collins family that has 11 kids or something. They're actually more famous than us which annoys me there. We're not the mother has this one YouTube video where she talks about corporal punishment and it's quite a long YouTube video, but one of the points that she leads with, because of course they practice corporal punishment because of course She has, how many kids they have?

Seven, nine? Between seven and 11. A lot of kids. Some are adopted, some are biologically theirs. They're classic prenatalist family. Of course, Christian black dad, white mom. I think so. Yeah. Yeah. So it's a great family. I think Surprisingly similar to us in their approach to corporal punishment.

Not exactly, but like they, they mentioned that for some kids, they don't do it [00:14:00] at all because you don't need to, that this, the very reasonable that, but her point getting into the whole thing was no matter what you do as a parent, no matter what form of punishment or lack of punishment you use, you will have something about your parenting that your kids are going to say was traumatic or horrible or just unexcusable.

And so it doesn't like, There's nothing you can do as a parent, be permissive, don't be permissive, be strict, be loose, be happy, be sad, whatever, they'll find something wrong with it. So to use that as like your mooring point of Oh, in the future, my kid's going to hate me for this, or, Oh, this kid hated their parents for this thing and therefore I should never do it.

is not going to protect you from being hated by your kids in the future. I think it's an important thing to remember as a parent. No I absolutely agree with this perspective. And but more broadly I think, and I want to bring it back to the point I was making earlier, because I actually think that this is just the key reason people are failing to have kids because they don't have developed [00:15:00] moral frameworks.

Their moral frameworks are incredibly rudimentary. they don't really know why they're living the life that they're living. They don't know why they're doing anything. That's actually the key absence in this book, reasons for having children is that there is no objective function to any of it. There is no if you believe in this, then it makes sense.

If you believe in that, then it doesn't make sense. If. Anyone reading that book had an objective function. They wouldn't be reading the book in the first place because they would have had an answer to this question. You're so right. Yeah, no. And so if people aren't familiar with the concept of objective function you can learn about it in the pragmatist guide to life.

It's our shortest book. I think our most boring book from my perspective, but very useful if you don't have a, like a reason for living. Like it's about going through all of the various reasons and it's pretty unbiased that a person might want to be alive and helping you think through all of the arguments and counter arguments to all of those various reasons.

And so But hold on. You're underselling this. It is a dry book. It's not [00:16:00] a fun read. I totally own that. but there is nothing more powerful you can do in your life in terms of if you never want to feel FOMO again, if you never want to feel cognitive dissonance again, have an objective function that you really, that you can like own and really understand that you like 100 percent came to that conclusion on your own.

That's the end of it. There is no more ambivalence because you're always asking. Yeah. Where does this fall vis a vis my objective function? And it's very easy knowing what, given your objective function and the resources and knowledge in front of you, you need to do at any given moment. It is one of the most freeing.

Wonderful things to do in the, in your entire existence. So don't undersell the power of the objective function is by the way, not like a purpose, it's a weighted list of things that you have think have value in reality. Yeah. And then when you're making a big decision should I have a child, you can weigh that decision around this weighted list of.

things you think have value. [00:17:00] Yeah. And that's why you like the anime. It's called, is it called Goblin Slayer? It's called yeah. Goblin Slayer. Goblin Slayer so much because it has this one main character in it. Who's just extremely based in this like fantasy, like RPG world where there's all these little side quests, like literally it's like a video game and there are a billion things that different bands of groups can do.

And there's this one character. All he wants to do is. Sleigh goblins. It's the only thing, and there's all these other like higher value projects he could do. There's all these other people, there's all these things, and he just always knows his objective function. is kill maximum number of goblins and he's a very magnetic hold on i'll actually his objective function is to minimize unnecessary human suffering and he sees goblin slaying as an arbitrage opportunity for achieving that objective function Because he sees that goblins being considered low level monsters are not being treated seriously enough. And he just [00:18:00] over focuses on this one type of threat because it's a more dominant threat that is a lower status threat within this world for eradicating. Yeah, so that's okay. So in, in our book, the pragmatist guide to life, once you choose an objective function, you need to form an ideology, which is your hypothesis for maximizing it.

And you can look at this from an EA framework when effective altruists try to think about what they're going to do with their lives, they have to look at, what are the big problems that has to be a big problem. It has to be tractable, and ideally it's not something that a lot of people are working on, because that's where you can have the maximum impact, obviously.

And so that's what he did. And when you have done that, when you combine your objective function with a strong ideology and your personal resources, which is factored into all of that, no cognitive dissonance, you know exactly what to do. And he's a very magnetic character in the show because while everyone else is having and hawing about things, and they don't really know what they're doing, they can be a little bit aimless.

He has just, it is he like emanates of confidence and sort of this amazing purpose. He knows what he's doing and why, [00:19:00] and that's the problem with the urban monoculture is it doesn't delineate purpose. It delineates preference. You should have a preference for this. And why is it so bad at delineating purpose?

Because it's all downhill of the idea of you should be affirmed for believing anything about yourself that you want to believe. Yeah if you're living in a world where this affirmation is treated as a thing of objective value, like not just that, but also this fear of pain that we always talk about was like the Hayes movement or like the handing out fentanyl on the streets or the banning of tests, like this is all to remove in the moment, emotional pain.

That's what trigger warnings are about fundamentally a removal of in the moment, emotional pain. But if you worship this and then somebody comes along with a question, which is twofold. What if in the moment, emotional pain helps you experience less overall pain in your life, which is like a very obvious thing that anyone could ask.

You can't engage with that question, right? Like you don't have a framework for engaging with it because it's [00:20:00] literally the foundation of your cultural system. You can't say, Oh, actually trigger warnings are stupid and cause more pain at the end of the day. Oh, the haze movement is stupid. And we should be shaming people for doing things that make them unhealthy.

Oh, you can't. You can't even think these thoughts. But then secondly, if they ask the even bigger question, which is suffering is just negative human emotional states, right? And we only feel things like that because our ancestors who felt them had less surviving offspring. So they're just like randomly created environmental signals that don't have any real intrinsic purpose or value.

Why would you base your entire like cosmology off of this? I don't, I actually don't think that there's a great answer to this, as I always say, like a utilitarian world perspective is like a group of paperclip maximizers got together and decided that the number of paperclips in the world was the core thing that mattered because that's what they were programmed to value, right?

We were programmed to feel this way by our ancestral environment. That doesn't mean it's a thing of actual [00:21:00] value. Now the other thing I wanted to know was actually Eric Hoyle's piece because I think he did a very good job of describing how you change when you do relate to parenting correctly, right?

So for example, And he actually makes an emotional argument for becoming a parent Oh, it will change the way you perceive reality, right? Oh, so it's a, then, in other words, a hedonic argument for parenting? Yeah. He says people would say to him, You could have gone to Paris.

Imagine someone saying, You could have done drugs at Burning Man. Heck, . Every day of the week, you could have gone out and bought a new expensive scotch, new music was going to be released, new books, new movies, new games, the actual news itself will always keep rolling, there'll be another beautiful sunset when the gold light comes in through the trees from the west.

Yet, to this reply, ah, but I had seen beautiful sunsets, I had tasted scotches, I had done drugs at Burning Man, I had sat at restaurants in Paris and watched [00:22:00] the Cien sparkle. As I read Hemingway. And I love how you pronounce the CN. What is it? The scene? You hate French people so much. And I love it. I don't want to, I don't want these foreign words on my American tongue.

Okay. My I could return to the city, but it would be grayer than the first time. For I would not have been a young man in his twenties. Paris would be the same, but I would have changed. Over time, the world ceased to surprise me. I saw its machinations and became increasingly unimpressed. I saw my own machinations and became equally unimpressed.

I watched the talking heads on TV, repeat themselves, all the human race began to look like a pack of bickering primates. One side wins. The other side wins. I turned the TV off and be 9 p. m. on a Wednesday, I could go read another novel, but I'd already read a thousand. What was the one thousand and first novel going to give me that I didn't get from the rest?

And. This is so like when you approach parenting from a [00:23:00] moral standpoint, the emotional rewards are high, but you only get these high emotional rewards. As someone always says, the only true happiness you'll ever experience is sacrificing to live your value system successfully. And as you get older, this stimuli that used to fully reward you when you were young Stop rewarding you both because your biology is changing because your ancestors who didn't have the changing biology didn't have surviving offspring and Because you have done these things a thousand times when people are like, why are you so anti life extensionist?

it's because a great book or a novel that you read when you've read a thousand novels is always going to be less of a thing to somebody who has read a thousand or ten thousand novels. Diminishing marginal returns. Someone's tenth book. Someone's Actually, this is really interesting. Kids don't have diminishing marginal returns.

At all. Yeah, you [00:24:00] keep it's changes in kind. What was that video game dynamic changes? Yeah. So changes in kind is something called a video, but I don't understand where you're going with the changing the kind concept changes in kind means that throughout a video game, you need to totally change the way that the game is being presented.

So people are dealing with entirely new gameplay and narrative loops. But what is your point That's what parenting feels like to me. Not to me at all. I don't know what I guess it's because you get the goof patrol. And they're more uniform right now? I don't know. Anyways. I don't know. Infants all seem the same to me.

But despite infants being the same and toddlers largely being the same, their experience of reality is equally magical every time. No. I don't think I said it's equally magical. It is. But what I'm saying is that they change so significantly. Kids, as they grow up, change so significantly, even from week to week.

Our kids this week are totally different dynamic from the way that I felt they were at least. Oh, that is a good use of changes in kind. Yes. The ways that they change as they get older is a [00:25:00] good use of changes. But that's just in terms of the larger point here being is that as you get older, in part, because you've experienced it all before the world just becomes grayer, yeah, but if you want novelty, you will first have a one year old and then you'll have a two year old and then you'll have a three year old. And just as soon as you figure it out, it's going to be different. No, but it's not the children themselves that I'm talking about, Simone, here. I'm not talking about the novelty you get from the children.

Okay, so what is it? I'm talking about the revitalized perspective of reality you get from their perspective of reality being blemished and untouched. Oh, that you're also experiencing the world anew from them. It's like That's a new whole layer of novelty. If you ever, and people are like as a non parent, I can't imagine this.

And I'm like, no, you can't. Have you ever had this movie you really like, and you want your friend to sit there and watch it with you so you can watch them react to it and you get very annoyed because they're not paying enough attention to it as you would have historically, and they need to watch it because the real [00:26:00] entertainment isn't the movie.

This is why I get so pissed when I walk to the microwave in the middle of the movie, watching the movie. Okay. That is what kids are, but for life. Okay. It is it, they make life like it was, and not like exactly like it was when I was a kid, it's more oh my God, multiplicatively, I am able to give other people better iterations of all of those experiences I had as a child.

So by that, I liked playing on the water as a kid, but I remember there were some things I didn't like. I didn't like sitting on a motorboat with my parents driving around where there wasn't really that much connection to the water itself, unless I could jump waves, but that's a different thing.

I did anything where I was like actively engaged with the water. So now what I do is I take this little go boat thing, which was basically like a floating cylindrical platform. I slap a motor on it and I go out to the river right next to our [00:27:00] house. And I just go up and down.

It was the kids and the kids help kick and throw their hands in and everything like that. And I'm like, wow. So I have created this interacting with water. And then I go and do, I know what I would have loved to do as a kid, which is stop at all of the islands so they can go explore the islands and name them.

And I'm like, Oh, they'll have so much fun with this. Cause that's the type of thing that I would have had fun with now as an adult. You just don't get that much fun emotional state from zooming up and down a river and a little motorized flotation craft. But I can see what I'm creating for them and feel a value from life that I cannot get from the things that these other, urban monocultury parents feel like they have lost, which is the fancy scotches or the nightclubs or the travel they are bemoaning the experiences that they will not get to experience because they are looking for the emotion that their kids will create in them because [00:28:00] they didn't create children for the children.

They created children for themselves. I had children. For my children. So when I go and experience something with my children, I am not focused really on how does this make me feel? I am focused on the memories that I am creating for my kids in that moment and the satisfaction, the deep, true form of happiness from effectively sacrificing to live your values that I get from that is higher than any form of happiness I can get from a nightclub or going out drinking, playing with my kids on the river is just a higher form of happiness than any of that. Would you, what are your thoughts on this? I agree with you on this. Part of me wonders if if we were to give these regretful parents objective functions, if we were to help them establish those for themselves, [00:29:00] do you think some could become happy parents depending on what their objective function is? Yeah, they read the pragmatist guide to life. I genuinely think they could reform themselves pretty significantly. I think the urban monoculture is so psychologically unhealthy and sad because it just doesn't have a value system. I will say this. If you are a regretful parent anywhere watching this, email us at [email protected].

We will send you a free copy of, we Just Guide to Life Free audiobook. You let us Free audiobook? Yeah, just, yeah. Free ebook. What? Whatever you want. Actually, a lot of people don't know this but the books were originally written to be. A instruction manual for performing a type of behavioral therapy that would be seen as a, an alternative to CBT.

You can still see this in the way it's written. It's written almost like an instruction manual for somebody to be using as they're interacting with somebody else to help people find a value system in their lives. [00:30:00] Because when I look at psychological problems, a lot of the psychological problems in society right now are downstream of people not having purpose.

Or not having a purpose they really believe in. And I think that's the thing, right? There's all of these they're like, yeah, I have purpose. It's reduce suffering, broadly. I'm like, yeah, but do you really believe that? Because you seem to be, if you really believed it, you'd be like goblin slave, out there actually doing something you wouldn't be getting your expensive scotch or going to night clubs or playing video games, that's one of the things that always got me about the FTX collapse guy, Sam Bateman Freed, his people were like, Oh, he was such a dedicated to this value of reducing suffering.

I'm like, the bro was playing video games during board meetings. No, he wasn't. He had no control over himself. And he didn't see this as a negative thing. And this is the thing we always say about sin is recognize your sin. Everybody sins. We're man. We're not gods. [00:31:00] Recognize that when I drink it's the sin, I'm always choosing which sins I'm fighting and which sins I'm not fighting and this isn't what I'm interested in dealing with right now because I am healthy and I have dealt with it in the past when it has made me unhealthy like when it has caused negative externalities in my life that I saw as unacceptable but I think that's the way that we need to relate to these things Yeah, I agree.

Yeah. Okay. So I still think high effort parenting is a big problem here, but I also think high effort at parenting is downstream of not having an objective function in life and being in the urban monoculture. So touché you have made a monoculture is just so psychologically damaging. I often liken it to put in your soul.

Like when I look at people who have lived in the urban monoculture and who have adopted it, it's like their soul has been in a sandstorm and it just gets ripped apart. And they're don't seem to have light behind their eyes anymore. They don't seem excited to be alive anymore. It's just for the stuff.

That's what it is. It's filling out their house and their collection and their social media [00:32:00] feeds. And it's, it's not even for that. It's just that's so often the message that's presented. So what are you going to do? They're really just for happiness. They're looking for meaning.

And they've been told that if they do certain things, they'll find it. It's just that they can't find it within that culture. They can't find it within that framework. It devastates me. Yeah. And they've also been told, obviously a culture can't survive if it can't keep people from interacting with more desirable cultural groups, but everywhere where they might actually find meaning often, there's like a big red flag of don't interact with this or you're a Yahtzee religious weirdos, or these are Yeah, whatever might be scary about them.

They're odd or uneducated. That's another really big thing. Yeah. They're, you'll be uneducated if you interact with them, which will make you low status or they're just low status. I don't know if you are a part of the urban monoculture, you start to get really snobby about hanging out [00:33:00] with people.

Anyone who's not deeply entrenched in higher education and certain prestigious jobs etc, right? Yeah. That's sad. No, it is sad. But I don't think Eric Hole is getting closer in, in what you're describing of his essay, which to be fair, I haven't read to, I think the argument that is being presented in Reasons for Having Kids, which is, They're trying to restate an argument in favor of pronatalism in the terms of the urban monoculture, which is to say that they're trying to say in the end, being a parent really will make you happier.

It just doesn't seem like that because what you don't realize is that your life is already miserable, and this is probably going to make it less miserable than it is now. Am I right there? What is his argument if it's not that? I think what he's really [00:34:00] describing here is the way that, I often call it the second puberty, the way that both men and women change in terms of the stimuli that give them satisfaction once you have kids.

And obviously it doesn't happen for everyone. Not everyone literally have a perfectly healthy first puberty. Some people end up, same sex attracted and stuff like that. There's obviously all ways. So you can't know, like I have kids, therefore I'm going to go through this second puberty and it's going to lead to X outcome for me, but it does happen.

I think. To the vast majority of people who have kids where they have kids and a number of perspectives that just would have seemed insane to them before. Now the opposite seems insane. For example life extensionism, I think is one of those things where a fear of death is the driving thing for biological reasons before people have a lot of kids.

Once you get to for kids or three kids, right? Yeah, it's really hard to be afraid of dying. You, yeah fear of death just completely leaves you. You are afraid of your kids dying, but you are not afraid of dying anymore at [00:35:00] all. Like even a little, and it would make sense from a biological perspective.

Now, people have one or two kids. They're not gonna go through like the full parent puberty. They go through like a, an abridged one that doesn't fully transition them to this new state. But genuinely, I don't know a single person with more than four kids or with four kids or more that is a that is pro extreme life extension.

Yeah, it just begins to become like an absurd thing for an individual to want once you have a lot of kids. But if you don't, obviously for genetic reasons, you're pre coded to be like terrified of dying. And When somebody sees that it could give you like a more Zen perspective on reality once you're no longer afraid of dying that much or once you are no longer your primary first concern.

I don't think fear of death really features strong in mainstream society now, and I don't think it does because we're so separated from death. It's hard to even remember that you're going to die in our world because it's so isolated as a life event. Unlike it was in the Victorian [00:36:00] times when like your neighbor was dying.

It's Hey, come over. Your neighbor's dying. Let's all hang out. Yeah. Or, you wear dead people's hair as jewelry, that kind of thing. I don't know if I agree with you. I know a lot of people who live, but you're talking about rationalists. This is like a very weird group of people who I think only obsess.

over death, because they are being exposed to it in the form of the potential for health span and in lifespan extension. I disagree. And here is my disagreement. Yes, you see it in the rationalist community, but you go to more normie communities and you'll have the Christians that will lead a conversion with, Oh, you get everlasting life if you accept this.

And I think to somebody like us, I, why would I want that? Like everlasting li that doesn't seem, but I think this is a straw man. I've just not heard anyone pitch that with a real conversion. Now I've heard the conversions that I hear about all the time when people actually legit confirm it's because they've lived a life of sin, [00:37:00] of unhappiness of, maybe they're addicted to drugs, maybe they're just deeply, they have a spending addiction or whatever.

And then. They get God and they find a hard culture, which gives them the discipline and fortitude. They need to thrive as a human. That's the only type of lasting conversion I've ever heard of with people I know and with people that I'm familiar with, I have never met or even heard of someone who converted because they were convinced that they would live forever, gain eternal life, period.

That's a something I will buy. I know. There's one exception, but I think it was a pity convert. Which it was a husband of a Mormon woman who for their entire, 50 year marriage did not convert. And obviously that was devastating to her because, per the Mormon tradition, if you're proper, like they probably, they weren't properly married, obviously, because he was not a member of the church, meaning that they couldn't live together forever after death.

And then once they reached the [00:38:00] end of their lives, he finally converted so that she could die. Believing that they would be together for all eternity, which is really sweet. And that, I don't know if he actually became a believer. I don't think at all that he converted for eternal life. I think he converted so that she could die in peace.

That was it. Which is really sweet. That makes sense. On both ends that she wanted to spend all eternity with him and couldn't die in peace unless you knew that, and that he was willing To convert to a religion that he held off on for 50 plus years. That's, that is actually a sweet story. Sweet story.

But yeah, no okay I hear you and I'm glad that you're not asking me. I always find like our weird religious stuff to be interesting because it really has made it like, it has not driven any sort of a wedge in our relationship in the way that you think it would. I guess because I'm so deferential to your perspectives in our religious quest that I'm not like, okay, here's some new thing.

It's this seems like a reasonable thing to [00:39:00] believe. What do you think? Yeah, no, it's more like we're watching our kids play and you say something like that, and I'm like, yep, and then It becomes canon. I think this would help our kids. Anyway, I love you to death, Simone. You are spectacular, and I feel really bad for the parents out there who are struggling with Parenthood.

It is difficult. If you are not When you're like, why am I going through this every day? It's not giving me that much happiness. Like you're right. If you're going through it and you're like, Oh my God, I'm giving another person a chance at a hundred years of life. Like it was every one of our kids.

I'm like, Oh my God, this person is going to live. an entire lifetime, hopefully. Yeah, that's insane. It is an experience and learn and build and do. It's so cool. The spark in their eyes. Yeah, you I feel bad for the kids, too, obviously, because I know kids whose parents told them this. And it [00:40:00] hit you.

Yeah. What's the context here? In in school in high school, there were two girls who told me that their mothers had told them that, their mothers specifically, which is tough. And they were tough girls. They were going to figure it out. But like to know that as a kid or to even suspect it, I think is really, not great for the kid either.

I think they'd still rather be alive. And I think that this is so interesting. It's like somebody, the most fundamental that comes to us, they go, why do you have kids? It's so the kid can live so we can have a life and a good life.

Like from the kid's perspective in 20 years, why did I have the kid that's like asking a person like did your, I owe my parents my life. So multiplicatively with each kid we have, we are giving another person that debt, which then they can pay forwards. Yeah.

I just, I don't, I struggle with knowing a kid might feel unloved or unwanted. This really makes me, [00:41:00] What does that have to do with this context? I guess I don't understand. Hormones. What does that have to do with this context? .

Yeah, I get that. I get that. Like I said, mother hormones do not work with logic. I'm just like, but a kid's hurting out there, and then the tears come and that's it. Yeah, you understand. India understands. They give you positive emotional states too? For me, these little ones just look like Squidgebots.

She's the cutest Squidgebot. She's the cutest Squidgebot. You can share the squidge bot perspective sbo, you, squi bot, as a man this age range. And I think that like men pretending that sub one-year olds do something. No, I think some guys just love babies and I don't know why but I think some guys do, but I think most men don't.

And I think that men pretending like the 1-year-old is like when it changes instead of the toddler kids are, when it changes, creates misaligned expectations in a lot of men. The newborns are when it changes for the [00:42:00] mom, the talking toddlers, I think, are when it really changes for the dads. Daddy will love you eventually.

But right now you're just a good Javad. She's mine. That's okay. They're with me 24 seven until they enter the group patrol. So works out really well. It reminds me of the press when they're always like, they have kids, but they don't even love them. You don't love them. They don't have them be, and I'm like, no, what you're missing is we don't have them because we love them.

That's the cultural misinterpretation there. Yeah. Anyway, but you do look, she wants, Oh no, she's happy again. Or she's gassy. I, we'll figure it out and then we'll make dinner. Oh yeah. I don't know. What are we going to do for dinner tonight? I guess I can reheat one of those slow cooked.

Yeah, you gotta cook it down. And I if we go down right now, I can make biscuits this time or the cornmeal muffins. Cornmeal. Oh, I love it when you make cornmeal muffins for slow cooked beef. Let's do that. That's fantastic. Okay, great. [00:43:00] Stop recording here

 https://discord.gg/EGFRjwwS92

In this insightful discussion, Malcolm and Simone Collins explore Japan's government-backed dating app initiative aimed at boosting the country's birth rate. They analyze the app's unique features, such as income verification and relationship status documentation, and compare it to other dating platforms. The couple delves into the evolution of dating apps, the challenges of modern matchmaking, and the potential impact of government intervention in the dating sphere. They also share personal experiences, discuss the pros and cons of various dating methods, and offer suggestions for improving dating app design. This video provides a comprehensive look at the intersection of technology, government policy, and demographic challenges in Japan and beyond.

Malcolm Collins: . [00:00:00] Hello, this is Malcolm and Simone, and we are excited to be talking to you today about a topic of grave pronatalist interest. Specifically, the country of Japan is making a government backed dating app. Now, I know very little about this topic, other than that it exists, and apparently it's a paid app, which sort of seems to defeat the purpose.

But Simone is gonna tell us more.

Would you like to know more?

Malcolm Collins: So, let's start.

Simone Collins: Yeah, so it's it's actually not live yet. Only a beta version has really been live, but I'm quite intrigued by this. I think it's a great idea for the government to launch a dating app personally, you know, someone's got to make this work and the way that market it.

Based dynamics work. You're not going to see people actually get married based on dating apps as they are dating apps as they are meant for keeping audiences occupied. They're meant for lots of in app purchases.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. This actually reminds me a lot of people. So when we bemoan the fall of dating apps what we're typically before [00:01:00] bemoaning, it's not that dating apps exist.

They used to be quite good. Simone and I met on a dating app. Okay. Cupid was good. Fantastic for meeting nerdy people. But the way that dating apps worked is you would have these full profiles. And you would search by like keywords in the profile or by matching in terms of like answering tons of questions.

And there were different sites that did this in different ways. Then Tik TOK was invented, which brought in the invite of whatever word I'm looking for here of swipe based dating apps. The advent of swipe based dating it. And then all of the apps started to move to this swipe based system. And originally I had thought that this was sort of a malevolent push, right?

So when Tinder got really big and Match Group moved to swipe based dating and then Match Group bought OkCupid and they moved OkCupid to swipe based dating. And I thought they had done that in order to kill OkCupid. So to understand why swipe based dating is so much worse than the old systems dating websites [00:02:00] are environments in which guys are intrinsically on the back foot.

Mm-Hmm. dating websites are environments where guys sell themselves to women. Fundamentally, that's how dating websites work because the vast majority of dating website users, that's like 80% on Tinder and stuff like that are males. Right?

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: Well, here's the problem where you can get differential advantage for males and not just have all of the women sort to the top 20 percent of males.

It's when males are being judged on multiple metrics. Yeah. All right. So because you know, you may not be the highest looking guy, but maybe you have a good career or maybe you're witty or maybe you have a hobby that overlaps with this woman's hobby. Multiple

Simone Collins: dimensions on which you can compete.

Malcolm Collins: Yes. So,

Simone Collins: and by the way, I used that dynamic on OkCupid as well. I did not compete based on my photos, even though I did have photos of myself in film grade stormtrooper armor. [00:03:00] I competed based on these weird questions that OkCupid used to prominently feature in a feed so you could camp out in the questions on OkCupid and give really provocative and weird responses and show up in people's feed and engage them really easily.

So you can, I was able to compete based on how my, how hold up sporky I was. I'm not saying it was great. You got lots of

Malcolm Collins: high profile people. I

Simone Collins: did. Yeah. And that's the thing is, is that I not being the most beautiful person in the world was able to still compete on that. I've said that there was that

Malcolm Collins: YouTuber who was criticizing us recently, who was like, Oh, that guy's way out of her league.

You are out of my league. But I, I I thought that was really funny because I'm like, well, I guess she did pretty well using her mechanism of female outreach on dating apps. But hold on. So the point I was getting to is that when you move to a swipe based dating app it intrinsically, Means that you are just judging people based on how they look, which one interestingly is the thing that women care least about except for random sexual partners.

Right? So [00:04:00] you are basically having the dating app replace the nightclub, which we've actually seen in the United States. Nightclub attendance has been like crashing. They are just used for like regular sex now. Like that is the point of, of the swipe based dating apps. But they prevent men like a diversity of men.

From really competing within this environment because they can't compete on any metric other than how they look and the women can't really use them for anything other than random sex and worse because all the women are now sorting to the same few men. Those men don't really invest in those women.

Simone Collins: Well, and

Malcolm Collins: both sides

Simone Collins: are developing wildly unrealistic expectations. That is to say a woman who's a four expects that not only because she can sleep with an eight, she can marry. And it, but also a man who's an eight just gets so flooded with women that he's just never going to ever want to marry even an eight or a nine or 10.

Malcolm Collins: San Francisco. And this woman was like, yeah, I mean, it's a huge problem to find a guy who's not polyamorous, who's like in my [00:05:00] league. And I'm here thinking, I'm like, Well, did you consider that the men who are polyamorous are out of your league and that like, she thinks like, well, I just need a guy who's like this guy who's sleeping with me, but polyamorous, but who's not polyamorous.

Like it's just one weird court. It's like, no, this guy is sharing like 10 women. Like he will clearly date below his league because of that. You shouldn't be benchmarking yourself on the polyamorous guys. You could get to sleep with you, but it's worse than that.

Simone Collins: It's worse than that. Because I think that this shift to image based.

Signaling is now creating this proliferation of filters that is completely like you, you, I have no idea, honestly, what people look like online anymore because they're, they're such heavy filter use that they all look incredible and I'll never forget, like by mistake on an app once I turned a filter on my own face and, oh my God, like I could look genuinely.

Okay. It's, it is, it is astounding. You are

Malcolm Collins: Puritan

Simone Collins: hotness. Yeah, husband goggles. There is, [00:06:00] like, I'm now realizing that all these people online that are so beautiful, I can now kind of tell all the filters they're using. And I think this is just creating this rampant dishonesty too. So I think this is another thing is that when any relationship that you could have is immediately beginning with some level of disappointment because now you're seeing the person without the filters for the first time, so your first in person impression of them.

It's a letdown.

Malcolm Collins: Oh yeah, and what people say online, like, when people are like, oh, you know, you guys are mid or whatever. It's like, bro, like I have, I have been in public. Like we just got out of the airport. Like, it is rare. Walking through an entire airport multiple times. We're not overweight. At least we're not overweight.

gives us a slight bump up. Even being sorted for by you know, economic status. I'm like, no, you, you, you have been distorted in what attractive is because you assume that like subconsciously your social environment is the TV shows you watch. And then in Instagram and social media, where everyone's Instagram and social media, which isn't the real world.

You want to [00:07:00] learn how real people look, go to an airport and walk around. Okay. That's what I know. Airports. Also

Simone Collins: select for people who can afford to fly.

Malcolm Collins: But I'm, I'm using airport because it's even a selected environment for wealthier people. But hold on, I gotta get to the secret information I actually have access to here. I actually was, was mentioning that I had thought that match grape had intentionally destroyed.

Okay. Cupid at a party once. And I thought that's what they did. Yeah. Best selling book on relationships, blah, blah, blah. And I got scolded because actually at that party was the person at okay. Cupid who made the decision to do the switch. Did you punch him in the face? I mean, No, everybody's going to be like, Oh, I was spreading misinformation and I didn't know what I was talking about because and he said, and I, I was wrong, clearly he's like, no, it's what the users wanted.

We could see it in the data. I mean, yeah, it leads to more engagement. Let's be clear as to what he's really saying when he says that when they switch to swipe based systems, because keep in mind, the majority of users are men they are getting more user [00:08:00] interaction and more regular user interaction.

. The guy, you know, he turned out to have been the guy who made this decision. And the reason he gave for making the decision was the data. So what they were really finding in this data was just that they could make the men, their primary audience, more addicted.

And that is why all of the apps have made this change so much. So I thought that in a recent Scott Alexander grant thing or not recent, this was a few years ago. One of the proposals that like a nonprofit should do is to remake the old okay. Cupid. Oh, I remember that. Yeah. Actually optimize around finding a partner who you want to marry instead of just Getting people addicted to the platform.

So Japan has the opportunity to do something like that here.

Simone Collins: Yeah. And it's not economically incentive. It's not, it's not trying to keep people on an app. It's not. So I think this idea of a government backed dating app, fantastic. And I've already seen people tweeting about this. Oh, it's just, Oh, can you believe, you know, governments are forcing people to get married?

No, [00:09:00] they're not. Okay. So I would ever be like, suggest marriage to someone. They were like, you're forcing me. You're

Malcolm Collins: forcing me. It's

Simone Collins: like, Oh, no, I, I honestly. Malcolm, I think it's a fetish thing. There was also this, I think it was in the Netherlands, a bunch of women dressed up in those handmaid's tale, like bonnet red cape dress things.

They're like, Oh, cause they had some like pro they were discussing pronatalist policies. And this is just like policies to help parents. You know, this is not like, we're going to take away female reproductive rights. It was just like, you know, this is the Netherlands. Okay. This is not China. Okay. And, and, and, and they show up in force wearing the handmaid's tale.

I think they just wanted to cosplay at it as it, I think they all have to, Some are fantasies going on sexually. No, no, no. I, I,

Malcolm Collins: okay. Okay. Maybe, but here's what I think is going on. I think that when you even suggest the idea that they should do something that they know they need to do, it's a bit like, or that they would be better off doing.

When you tell a fat person, you know, you probably shouldn't eat that. They like the anger that you're going to get is like really disproportional to what you just said, [00:10:00] even though it would be in their best interest if they did that. Yeah. Because they know that they shouldn't eat that. These women know that they would be happier if they found contented long term partners who cared about them.

And if they had kids but they haven't made the sacrifices in the same way that, you know, the fat person reaching for the donut is unwilling to make the sacrifices and that. Dissonance, cognitive dissonance causes them to say, and you know, fat people will do this, you're telling me I need to lose weight, you're trying to genocide fat people.

And it's like, no, I just said that maybe you should, you want to get rid of all people like me. And they immediately go to these places because it's the only way that they can logically, because they don't want to think like internally, wow, I'm being super illogical and insane right now. Right. They want to believe that they're being the good guy, logical.

So they Take this position where it is a, an attack to even mention like, Hey, you know, if you do think you can have kids, it would be useful to you know, civilization. If you [00:11:00] did we're not pressuring, you we're just letting you know it's on the table and that you're not, then they wouldn't need to wear those costumes.

Not doing it. They wouldn't need to per, they're like, you, you might as well be holding them to the floor with a gun against their head. They're like, it's fascism, it's fascism.

Simone Collins: I think there's something going on there. But so anyway, there are some spicy things The

Malcolm Collins: weigh in on this.

Simone Collins: Yeah do do these people have a fetish like simone says which they totally do because otherwise it wouldn't cosplay as people or

Malcolm Collins: Quick note here before you go further.

We never Edit or censor the comments if ever the comments are weirdly youtube doing it automatically We, one, it goes against our philosophical beliefs to do that. We do not have time for that. We don't have time for that. So we're a small channel. Like we're editing videos every day. You think I also have time to like be editing the comments section?

Simone Collins: We have day jobs. So anyway, spicy things about the app, which I actually think are fantastic. And no, these aren't course of things. They're just. Cool policies. So users, [00:12:00] oh, by the way for those who want to read more about this, I'm looking at Japan today. com. The article's called Tokyo government to launch dating app to boost birth rate.

So. Users will be required to submit documentation proving they are legally single and sign a letter stating that they are willing to get married. I think that's great. Setting like a standard there. You're willing

Malcolm Collins: to actually I don't know if you're familiar with these there's like subreddits tied to this.

Like, are we dating the same guy? And like Manhattan, remember I said that all the women are matching to the same guys. The really interesting thing that this is creating, the quote unquote legally single category, means that they are creating a sub marriage threshold of relationship commitment, or an individual is registering with the government that they are dating somebody else.

No, I

Simone Collins: think, I think they're just saying they're not married. No,

Malcolm Collins: no, no, no. I think it means you're not dating someone else. I think it's a subcategory that they're creating here, which is actually a really powerful [00:13:00] thing to do. Because it helps pipeline people to engagement much faster to have this incremental stage between we used to have this when I was younger, it's called being Facebook official.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It was hard to cheat on someone if you were a Facebook official because people didn't easily find that. You know that Facebook isn't like the primary social platform where people can make excuses about why they don't have one. Facebook official doesn't exist anymore, which made it very hard to cheat during the period where Facebook was that common.

So continue. Yeah,

Simone Collins: because you're

Malcolm Collins: in a relationship

Simone Collins: with someone on Facebook. Yes, I think that's absolutely brilliant. Also stating one's income is common on Japanese dating apps, but Tokyo, which is, this is the, the office it's announcing this dating app will require a tax certificate slip to prove the annual salary.

I also think that that's absolutely brilliant. That if you are. If you want to front about something, you actually have to provide receipts, like literal receipts. Because another thing that you see [00:14:00] happening on dating apps a lot is people, and of course social media in general, people signal wealth.

And especially in the United States, they signal it and they're actually in massive amounts of debt. It's not wealth at all. Like you, you think that you are possibly dating into maybe even marrying into financial security. And you, in the end, are not, I

Malcolm Collins: feel like it's such a flex on the new app, to show that you actually have a lot of wealth, but to not live the lifestyle of, like, not dress super wealthy.

Yeah. You know, you're dating somebody who has financial security, which is Hot or somebody who's been wasting all their money on those trading card games that they have in Japan. So, you know, one or the other.

Simone Collins: Yeah, 100%. So this is actually the first app that that the government has organized, but also they have been organizing or municipalities within Tokyo, at least have been organizing matchmaking events for a while now, which is really interesting.

And I am dying. Maybe in the future we can do an episode on this. Yeah,

Malcolm Collins: sort of like different. So Singapore has had a matchmaking program for a while. [00:15:00] And in China, you can go to the parks in China.

Simone Collins: Yeah, but that's parents. That's parents self organizing, which is great. Parents are a major under discussed factor.

In matchmaking and they used to play historically a huge role in matchmaking.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Well, I think most of these parents, I don't think that many, from what I've heard, that many actual relationships don't come out. I think they

Simone Collins: just go to there to complain or brag. Honestly.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. So your, your hypothetical match was, my son isn't good enough.

You know, your hypothetical match with my daughter isn't good enough. And then they find one that's good enough. And the kids like, what are you doing? What? Sorry. You said, what are you doing? I. No, no, I was talking about the parents, not you.

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: Sorry, you confused me. I was like, I don't, I don't know. So, so The One thing I found interesting about the dating app was how little they had invested in it.

It did not sound like enough to make a functional app. Yeah,

Simone Collins: well, and the other thing is and this is actually one of the reasons [00:16:00] that they made for just, that they presented justifying the app's creation, whereas I feel like it's actually reason To be skeptical, but this should be made at all the official said, quote, we learned that 70 percent of people who want to get married aren't actively joining events or apps to look for a partner, unquote and then they, they continued.

We want to give them a gentle push to find one. But that isn't like creating an app for which there may be don't demand isn't going to solve the problem. I do think that the fact that this app exists and has some controls in it, and it's not just the controls I mentioned. Also an interview will be required to confirm.

Everyone's identity as part of the registration process. Which is pretty cool because then you're not going to have fake people or people just kind of, you know, I don't know. What's the word tourists. You won't have tourists on the app as much. You can't, it appears use filters and stuff, right? You know, it doesn't state that, and I'm a little bit concerned about that because then, you know, we still have that problem.

But it [00:17:00] sounds like the kind of app where this would not be permitted, although it would be terrible if everyone had just like a government ID photo, dating app photo it would be slightly suboptimal. But yeah, I am a little skeptical that people will use this, and I think that's one of the biggest problems.

But I, I also remember when you and I were in the period of dating, OkCupid was kind of the place to go to meet interesting people. Tinder and some other apps are the place to go if you wanted sex. And then if you actually wanted to get married, you would go on match. com. And I do think that having a place to go where it's kind of, at least at the time, socially understood that if you're there, you're looking to close a deal it would be really helpful.

And I remember when I was dating with peers and we were doing our whole competitive dating ring in the office all of us were on OkCupid except for one. And she immediately found a very well matched partner. They were engaged within a couple of months and then they got married just like that. And it was so weird to see because no one else was really thinking about getting married, but both of them were in their late twenties and they were just like [00:18:00] ready to close the deal.

And, and I actually, at the time, there were even older people. I knew like in their early forties who also went on match. We're very like brass tacks. Like this is what I'm looking for. This is what I'm not looking for. Got married just like that. And it'd be really cool if this app could sort of be like that.

Malcolm Collins: Different dating apps right now in the current environment. Is that you're always going to have different social sort of circles that become self sustaining within different apps because you need like a certain. Amount of people of a certain sociological and social profile to be on an app.

And then it becomes like the cluster you go to for that sort of person. Oh, yeah. It can actually differ between cities. You know, it's, it's some cities like, okay, Cupid might not be quite as nerdy as other cities. Yeah. But when we did it like, okay, Cupid was like the nerd, like it was the nerd app. And that's why I was on it.

I wanted to meet a nerdy wife. Like, I was like, okay that doesn't seem to be as much of a thing anymore. This disintermediation, although I've been listening to a [00:19:00] lot of you know, LGBT YouTubers talk about, you know, dating in the current environment. And one of the things I found really interesting is lesbians trying to find apps where you don't have tons of really aggressive trans women, because, you know, obviously these women used to date as men.

And so they're used to being one, you know, really aggressive on apps the way men are. And lesbians on apps are apparently very similar to women on normal dating apps, which is just not, you know, outreaching that much.

Simone Collins: Yeah. So where do they go?

Malcolm Collins: If you join an app that doesn't filter against that, and you can, you know, get in so much trouble for, for even requesting, like, I only want to I only want to date.

You know cis lesbians, right? So, because you can't, you can't ask that. Like the apps will not allow you to filter this. Even lesbian only apps like Which is so

Simone Collins: funny because on other apps, well, pretty much on every app, you as a woman or man, but typically women, you can be like, well, I'm not going to date anyone who's below six feet.

And male, right? So you can discriminate against height. You can discriminate against [00:20:00] so many other factors, age, but you cannot discriminate against

Malcolm Collins: even, even ethnicity on a lot of these apps, but not against. You, you know, a sister trans, which is a pretty big morphological difference. Yeah, I would say it's probably bigger than I've heard.

The most common is that they actually find Facebook dating. Yeah. To be the place was the way is, is there a

Simone Collins: dating app on Facebook? Apparently there is. So there's like Facebook marketplace and there's Facebook dating. Yeah. Let's see. I've heard that it's LinkedIn. LinkedIn is the place where at least like higher earners go to date.

I've heard that as well. Yeah. Well, it is something

Malcolm Collins: because you're going to get higher agency people there that actually like know what they want and reach out and Well, and

Simone Collins: we knew couples and parents who met on Twitter.

Malcolm Collins: On Twitter? Oh, yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's a hard place to meet, but

Simone Collins: No, I think it's, it's more common.

I mean, I don't know. I don't know anyone personally who [00:21:00] married. Based on LinkedIn, only dated, but I do know people who married based on Twitter. That's something. Yeah. Yeah. But, but see, again, Twitter is a place where you can compete based on image, based on like prestige, you know, follower count based on just how clever and witty your ideas are and the people that we, that we know I'm thinking of one couple, especially who like even now have a kid together.

Malcolm Collins: Is it public that you can say this?

Simone Collins: I don't know if they were public about meeting there, but they don't have a ton of followers. Like they just were intellectually very engaged. Oh, yeah,

Malcolm Collins: that is interesting. Yeah. Intellectually they're very much like in the same Twitter circle.

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.

So if you were

Simone Collins: to design a dating app as a government, what would you

Malcolm Collins: do? I would First, you have to have a lot of pictures because only with a lot of pictures can you determine what somebody really looks like. So you want like 30 or 40 pictures minimum.

Simone Collins: Ooh. Oh, but I have an idea is the photos have to come from your personal network.

None of them can come from you. [00:22:00]

Malcolm Collins: That would be incredibly hard to source. That's.

Simone Collins: I don't know if they just, you know, like letters of recommendation for college applications come from third parties.

Malcolm Collins: So 30 to 40 photos and which photo gets shown to people is random among those photos. So you can't have like the, your good side photo.

Yeah. Then you also need a long form profile that talks about a lot of stuff so that you, the primary thing you're putting forwards is your sort of bio maybe even a swipe based system, but the swipes show individual portions of somebody's profile, not their picture.

Simone Collins: Okay. So people are not. It photos are not the first and foremost thing, but there are tons of photos.

Would you gate access to photos until after people send a message and a kind of love is blind kind of thing?

Malcolm Collins: No, but what I would do is I would create hidden categories based on either ia or human So we do ratings [00:23:00] of everyone based on their attractiveness to create leagues kind of like keeper ai does

Simone Collins: Were they the actually ,

Malcolm Collins: okay.

Cupid used to do this as well. And so you don't remember, you could get your league

Simone Collins: graded? I don't remember league ratings, but I do remember that it would would tell you if you were hot. Right.

Malcolm Collins: They call it hot outreaches you got, but I think. Yeah, just create leagues. And then have people only be sorting within their league in terms of the, the, the text chunks that they're choosing to swipe or not swipe.

And then I like that test

Simone Collins: text

Malcolm Collins: chunks. You also need. A system where if they say they're dating somebody there's some sort of a cost to that. Like they can't go back on the app for a year or something like that or half a year, you know?

Simone Collins: Well, but then people are just going to lie.

Malcolm Collins: No, no, no. The idea is, is that dating somebody like going to this, I am in a relationship stage is an actual commitment.

With a cost. So you can't get back on the app. Okay. We'll say at least a quarter, maybe not half a [00:24:00] year, a quarter of a year. Okay. After you break up before you can get back on the app again. So you can't just tell somebody, Oh yeah, I'll date you officially register with the app and then break up a week later.

You know, this, you need switching costs. That's one of the core problems in our society right now is low switching costs.

Simone Collins: Yeah, I agree that you have to create higher switching costs. I. Yeah, I'm not exactly sure how to design that in a way

Malcolm Collins: I make on this is a lot of people, you know, you're talking about like using LinkedIn, using Twitter, etc.

People like, I'll just meet my partner naturally, right? Like, I hear this all the time.

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: You know, they're like, like people used to

Simone Collins: people used

Malcolm Collins: to just like, do you go out to a bar? And they're like, no. And I'm like, that's how people used to meet. Like they used to

Simone Collins: meet. No, they used to meet in high school.

Malcolm Collins: That was kind of the high school. You meet in college, but you were meeting in environments where you were regularly socializing people who are not going to clubs or bars or other social [00:25:00] events, continue to say, I will meet someone in the old way. to Without remembering that the old way was contingent on them going out there and actively socializing.

Simone Collins: Yeah. Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: And I think that that's really important to elevate, which is to say you, like a partner is not just going to come to you by like osmosis. Okay. I know it happens to some people, right? In the same way, you know, it reminds me of somebody like saying, I'm not going to apply to jobs. I'll just like get one randomly, right?

I'll wait till the job comes to me. And I'm like, why would you think that would work? And they're like, well, my buddy, Brandon, you know, his dad got him a connection or something and I'm like, yeah, but you must understand that's an incredibly rare phenomenon. You, you, you. If you actually want to end up with a job, you need to start applying.

And they're like, but I really hate rejection. Really hate it when they say no or don't follow up or something awkward happens in an [00:26:00] interview. And I'm like, well now of course men these days are also dealing with Russian roulette in terms of women who either, you know, can get themselves pregnant and then force a man to pay child support by like, you got to card those used condoms or they can just randomly accuse him of grape.

And it's, it's a very tough environment to be a guy. But in a way, you know, the genetic bottlenecks are species that facing have become more intense. The question I have for you, men. Out there is can you weather this bottleneck or will you be part of the faction that gets churned by it? Because at the end of the day we can't do that much about this particular bottleneck We're going through the species All we can do is try to get right through it and then raise a better generation for the next next iteration of society and that's what we're doing with our kids.

We arranged marriage plans and all that weirdness so yeah, I I think it's in the right place. It would be terrible if it turns out to just be a swipe based app. I'd be very disappointed in [00:27:00] them. It doesn't say when I said it didn't seem like they raised much money. If I remember correctly, it was like 1.

5 million USD was raised to build this app. And I'm like, that is not,

Simone Collins: I don't know. I mean, if you're lean about it.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Well, I, I, yeah, if you're leaning, not exactly, the problem is, is that government things always cost more money and are always jankier than public sector, private sector things. Yeah.

Simone Collins: Maybe not in Japan.

I mean, you know, there are some, some governments where it is genuinely impressive what their online services are like and I would, you know, Japan is Japan. Let's not forget that. Okay. You know, you go to the airport and anime girls are everywhere greeting you to the nation, right? Super cute little mascots.

It's wonderful, right? So if anyone can do it, hopefully Japan can. But I'm keen to see how it plays out and I hope it works. And it's great. I just wanted you to, to learn about the fun elements of it.

Malcolm Collins: Well, I love our little date talking and I have so much fun being with you.

Simone Collins: [00:28:00] Same. I love you so much. I'm glad we met when OkCupid was cool.

Last chopper out of NOM, Malcolm. Woo!

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, all the things in my life. I get all this hatred online, and I'm like, well, you know I suppose this is not what I deserve, but it's for having such a good life at home, you know, every day I owe it. To our reality to the future police, whatever term I want to say to deal with all of this because somebody has to be saying the things that we're saying, somebody has to be getting canceled in the way that we're getting canceled.

Or, or civilization is, is hurtling towards a cliff right now. And nobody, nobody has a. Since the steering wheel to turn it. So you know, we're just trying to

Simone Collins: give like the, those smart enough in society, a really cool, like base jumping parachute. So instead of just completely crashing, they can look in a bad ass way, like saving themselves last minute.

And I think it can happen. Some people they're getting a parachute, man.

Malcolm Collins: I feel like you and the [00:29:00] life that you have given me being this amazing wife are just such an enormous reward that I still haven't earned.

Simone Collins: No, that's really romantic. I want to point out that it's also a big, big thing for people who are still on dating apps to remember.

That you should not try to find someone who's perfect out of the box. And that when Malcolm found me and he's very happy, look, he's just said he was really happy. He's totally not a hostage. I promise. But that he married below his league and he created the life that he wanted. And if you want to create your own happiness, you have to fight for it.

Tooth and nail, you have to build it. Your f*****g self. It's just, it's like with having friends, you're not going to have friends unless you organize everything. You host the dinners, you invite everyone, you remind them all.

Malcolm Collins: You think, Oh, I'll reach X threshold and then I'll go find a partner. Yeah, no,

Simone Collins: no.

Malcolm Collins: You're going to have to brute force this.

Simone Collins: It's going to suck. It's not going to be [00:30:00] fun.

Malcolm Collins: How much do you, should I value attractiveness? And I'm like, bro, attractiveness, when you bank in attractiveness, you are trading something else because you can get higher quality. So if you go down in attractiveness, you know, you can get higher IQ, higher diligence, higher income, higher mental stability.

Because you know, your value to those women is higher than the men they would normally get whatever your state is. So people forget that all of these are variables you're trading for other variables.

Simone Collins: Yeah, exactly. So thanks for choosing your Ugga wife.

Malcolm Collins: That's apparently what the internet has decided recently, which I'm very surprised about.

Simone Collins: It's okay. As long as you can tolerate me without vomiting, I'll take it. I love you so much.

Malcolm Collins: I love you too. Have a good one.

Simone Collins: And you can stop and comment and Oh, no, no. I'm on the wrong side, sir. I get it, what's it called? It manifest. We got more of the, how [00:31:00] f*****g dare you have Simone and Malcolm on the wrong side. Do you understand how this is

Malcolm Collins: even in person? Now we need to be on the right side when we're talking.

Simone Collins: No, no, no, no.

Just in the podcast. But that, you know, a couple of times recently we've thought

Malcolm Collins: we got, we got a ton of, was make more tracks, make more tracks. I'm surprised. Like every single person who came up to us was like, why did you need to keep doing that? So we'll get back to it. All right. You want to bring us in? Bring us in with what? I don't, you hate my intros. Okay, yes, I'll do an intro. Okay.

Did she just throw up everywhere?

Simone Collins: No, she just like every she extruded something very stinky. Let's keep going. It's all right. It's fine. You know what? Life, life is, life is poop. I'll let you go get the No, poop is life. Let's

Malcolm Collins: keep going. Okay. So the point I was going to make was that I actually was, was mentioning that I had thought that match grape had intentionally destroyed. And I believe it's because you really

Simone Collins: don't keep going. Keep going. Keep going. It's fine. [00:32:00]

Malcolm Collins: Simone, we've got 20 minutes left of this. This is not a good idea.

Simone Collins: No, no, no. Okay. Just give me a second. Sorry. It's good that I waited the first time because more came out,

you little troublemaker. How I love you, but you poop like it's 1999.

Malcolm Collins: Okay, we're good now. Hello! I am back. Okay, so

In this thought-provoking video, Malcolm and Simone Collins offer a detailed response to Scott Alexander's article on AI apocalypticism. They analyze the historical patterns of accurate and inaccurate doomsday predictions, providing insights into why AI fears may be misplaced. The couple discusses the characteristics of past moral panics, cultural susceptibility to apocalyptic thinking, and the importance of actionable solutions in legitimate concerns. They also explore the rationalist community's tendencies, the pronatalist movement, and the need for a more nuanced approach to technological progress. This video offers a fresh perspective on AI risk assessment and the broader implications of apocalyptic thinking in society.

Malcolm Collins: [00:00:00] I'm quoting from him here, okay? One of the most common arguments against AI safety is, here's an example of a time someone was worried about something, but it didn't happen.

Therefore, AI, which you are worried about, also won't happen. I always give the obvious answer. Okay. But there are other examples of times someone was worried about something and it did happen, right? How do we know AI isn't more like those?

So specifically he is arguing against is every 20 years or so you get one of these apocalyptic movements. And this is why we're discounting this movement this is how he ends the article, so people know this isn't an attack piece, this is what he asked for in the article. He says, conclusion, I genuinely don't know what these people are thinking.

I would like to understand the mindset of people who make arguments like this, but I'm not sure I've succeeded. What is he missing according to you? He is missing something absolutely giant in everything that he's laid out.

And it is a very important point and it's very clear from his write up that this idea had just never occurred to him.

[00:01:00] Would you like to know more?

Malcolm Collins: Hello, Simone. I am excited to be here with you today. We today are going to be creating a video reply slash response to an argument that Scott Alexander, the guy who writes astral codex 10 or sleep star codex, depending on what era you were introduced to his content. Wrote about arguments against AI apocalypticism, which are based around it'll be clear when we get into the piece because I'm going to read some parts of it that no, I should know.

This is not a Scott Alexander is not smart or anything like that piece. We actually think Scott Alexander is incredibly intelligent and well meaning. And he is an intellectual who I consider a friend and somebody whose work I enormously respect. And I am creating this response because the piece is written in a way that actively requests [00:02:00] a response.

It's like, why do people believe this argument when I find it To be so weak, like one of those, what am I missing here? Kind of things. What am I missing here? Kind of things

he just clearly and I like the way he lays out his argument because it's very clear that, yes, there's a huge thing he's missing. And it's clear from his argument and the way that he thought about it that he's just literally never considered this point and it's why he doesn't understand this argument.

So we're going to go over his counter argument and we're going to go over the thing that he happens to be missing. And I'm quoting from him here, okay? One of the most common arguments against AI safety is, here's an example of a time someone was worried about something, but it didn't happen.

Therefore, AI, which you are worried about, also won't happen. I always give the obvious answer. Okay. But there are other examples of times someone was worried about something and it did happen, right? How do we know AI isn't more like those? The people I'm arguing with always seem [00:03:00] so surprised by this response, as if I'm committing some sort of betrayal by destroying their beautiful arguments.

So specifically he is arguing against the form of apocalypticism that when we talk about it more sounds like our argument against AI apocalypticism is every 20 years or so you get one of these apocalyptic movements. And this is why we're discounting this movement. Okay. And I'm going to go further with his argument here. So he says, I keep trying to steel man this argument. So keep in mind, he's trying to steel man it. This is not us saying like he wants it steel man, okay. I keep trying to steel man this argument and it keeps resisting my steel manning. For example, maybe the argument is a failed attempt to gesture at a principle of quote, most technologies don't go wrong, but people make the same argument with technologies that aren't technologies like global cooling or overpopulation.

Maybe the argument is a failed attempt to gesture at a principle of Quote, the world is never destroyed. So [00:04:00] doomsday prophecies have an abysmal track record in quote, but over population and global cooling, don't claim that no one will die. Just that a lot of people will, and plenty of prophecies about mass deaths events have come true.

EG black plague, World War II, AIDS, and none of this explains coffee. So there's some weird coffee argument that he comes back to that I don't actually think is. important to understand this, but I can read it if you're interested. I'm sufficiently intrigued. Okay. People basically made the thing of, once people were worried about coffee, but now we know coffee is safe, therefore AI will also be safe.

Which is to say there was a period where everyone was afraid of coffee, and there was a lot of apocalypticism about it, and there really was. Like people were afraid of caffeine for a period. And the fears turned out wrong. And then people correlate that with AI. And I think that is a bad argument.

But the other type of argument he's making here, so you can see and I will create a [00:05:00] final framing from him here that I think is a pretty good summation of his argument. There is at least one thing that was possible. Therefore, super intelligent AI is also possible. And. And only slightly less hostile reframing.

So he's that's the way that he hears it. When people make this argument, there is at least one thing that was possible. Therefore, super intelligent AI. is also possible and safe, presumably, right? Because it's one thing was past technologies that we're talking about. And then he says, in an only slightly less hostile rephrasing people were wrong when they said nuclear reactions were impossible.

Therefore, they might also be wrong when they say super intelligent AI is possible. Conclusion, I genuinely don't know what these people are thinking. And then he says, I would like to understand the mindset. .

So this is how he ends the article, so people know this isn't an attack piece, this is what he asked for in the article. He says, conclusion, I genuinely don't know what these people are thinking.

I would like to understand the [00:06:00] mindset of people who make arguments like this, but I'm not sure I've succeeded. The best I can say is that sometimes people on my side make similar arguments. The nuclear chain reaction one, which I don't immediately flag as dumb, and maybe I can follow this thread to figure why they seem tempting sometimes.

All right, so great. What is he missing according to you? Actually I'd almost take a pause moment here to see if our audience because he is missing something absolutely giant in everything that he's laid out. There is a very logical reason to be making this argument and it is a point that he is missing in everything that he's looking at.

And it is a very important point and it's very clear from his write up that this idea had just never occurred to him.

Simone Collins: Is this the Margaret Thatcher Irish terrorists idea?

Malcolm Collins: No. Okay. Can you think what if I was trying to predict [00:07:00] the probability of a current apocalyptic movement being wrong, what would I use in a historic context?

And I usually don't lay out this point because I thought it was so obvious. And now I'm realizing that to even fairly smart people, it's not an obvious point.

Simone Collins: I have no idea.

Malcolm Collins: People historically have sometimes built up panics about things that didn't happen. And then sometimes people have raised red flags, as outliers, about things that did end up happening. What we can do To find out if the current event is just a moral panic, or is it actually a legitimate panic, is to correlate it with historical circumstances to figure out what things did the historical accurate predictions have in common, and what things did the pure moral panics have in common.

Simone Collins: So what are examples of past [00:08:00] genuine apocalypses? So like the plague, what else? Yes,

Malcolm Collins: so I went through and we'll go through examples of yeah. So it's history time

Simone Collins: with Malcolm Collins. It's history

Malcolm Collins: time with Malcolm Collins. When people actually predicted the beginnings of something that was going to be huge.

And then times, and hold on, I should actually word this a bit differently. Ooh, the

Simone Collins: industrial revolution. That's a good one.

Malcolm Collins: Simone we'll get to these in a second, okay? The point being is I want to better explain this argument to people because people may still struggle to understand like the really core point that he's missing.

Historically speaking, people made predictions around things that were beginning to happen was in their times, becoming huge and apocalyptic events in the future that ended up in, in mass deaths. We can, from today's perspective, because we now know which of those predictions fell into which categories, correlate, one the ways that these communities [00:09:00] act features of the prediction and the types of things they're making predictions about to find out if somebody today is making a prediction around some current trend leading to mass deaths.

Okay. If it's going to fall into the camp of false prediction or accurate prediction by correlating it with the historic predictions. Yeah. I think that the reason why, because I don't think he's a dumb person. He should have thought of this. Like I genuinely think like this is not a weird thing to think about.

I think the reason he hasn't thought about it is because he's so on the side of AI apocalypticism being something we could, should focus on. He just hasn't thought about disconfirming arguments. And when you begin to correlate AI apocalypticism with historic apocalyptic movements, it fits incredibly snugly in the false fear category.

So let's go into the historic predictions, okay? So the times when they were accurate, all [00:10:00] right, were predictions around the Black Plague, predictions around World War II, predictions around AIDS. predictions around DDT, predictions around asbestos, predictions around cigarette smoking, Native American warnings around Europeans. Okay. All apocalyptic predictions, which ended up becoming true. Now let's go through all of the ones that were incorrect, that developed, freak out almost religious communities around them. Splitting of the Higgs boson. People thought that would cause a black hole. I remember that.

Yes. The Industrial Revolution. That was a huge one right there. I don't know, that did precipitate the beginning of demographic collapse. It wasn't a problem for the reason people thought it was a problem. Okay. They thought no one would have any jobs anymore. That was the core fear in the Industrial Revolution, if you remember, and we'll get more into that.

The speed of trains. The reading, we can get to more on the Industrial Revolution if you want to park it in an edge case. The reading panic. A lot of people don't know there [00:11:00] was a reading panic. Everyone thought that reading would destroy people and that all of these young women were becoming addicted to reading and they very much in the way that we today yeah, there was this fear.

It was called like reading madness. A girl would get really into reading and today we just call that being most a nerdy young woman. Video game violence. Yeah. This is one I didn't know about because I went in to try to create a as comprehensive a list of all these as possible. The Telegraph.

Critics believe that the Telegraph would lead to a decline in literacy, destroy the postal service, and contribute to moral decay. Oh! Destroy the postal service eventually, but amazing. Anyway, radio. Critics warn that radio would lead to a decline in literacy, encourage mindless entertainment, and foster a culture of violence.

So for those that aren't aware, no, literacy has broadly risen since the radio was introduced. The printing press. There was significant fear that the printing press would spread heretical ideas and misinformation.

Simone Collins: Didn't it precipitate the reformation?

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, so I guess the printing [00:12:00] press we can put in the movie category.

Legit.

Simone Collins: Come on.

Malcolm Collins: Legit. Yeah. The spinning wheel. No, not really. The printing press really only moves things forward. The people who were afraid of the printing press we liked the

Simone Collins: Reformation, but it still did cause it. It was the

Malcolm Collins: beginning of no, but this doesn't fall into the category of false predictions.

Oh. So this is like a fascist saying, I'm afraid that other people might have access to information, which has given me power. That's not The spinning wheel. This was in the 13th century. People thought the spinning wheel would lead to the collapse of civilization. Then there was when coffee was introduced to Europe in the 16th century.

And as I said, it was met with suspicion and resistance. Some religious and political leaders feared that coffee houses would become centuries of political dissent and immoral behavior. In 1674, the Women's Petition Against Coffee in England claimed that coffee made men impotent and was a threat to family life.

And yeah. So what do these things have in common now that we have categorized them into these [00:13:00] two groups? And I think there is very loud things about the accurate predictions that you almost never see in the inaccurate predictions. And very loud things amongst all the inaccurate predictions you never see in the accurate predictions.

I think that these two categories of predictions actually look very different, okay? Okay. The things that turned out to be moral panics versus the things that turned out to be accurate predictions of a future danger. People were already dying in small ways. With

Simone Collins: the real ones.

Malcolm Collins: Yes, every single time it has been an accurate prediction.

Whether it's the AIDS, or it's The small batches of people dying. It's a sign s**t's about to go down. It's a sign. Yeah, but we haven't had a single AI turn rogue and start murdering people yet. Like we've had machines break in factories, I think like a robotic arm accidentally killed someone in a Tesla factory, but it wasn't like malicious.

It wasn't like trying to kill the person.

Simone Collins: Yeah, there are factory deaths all the time, and of course fewer today than ever before probably.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah this marks it clearly in the moral panic category. [00:14:00] Okay. Okay. Ones that turned out to be wrong are very often tied to a fear of people being replaced by machines.

Simone Collins: Yeah, technology. It seems that's the biggest theme is this new

Malcolm Collins: invention is going to ruin everything. So historically we've seen that has never happened. Or cultural destruction, that's the other thing that's often claimed, which is also something we see around AI apocalypticism fears around cultural destruction and jobs being taken.

The and then here, and people can be like, what, but jobs are being taken, yes, but more jobs are created at the end of the day. What's always happened in a historic context, yes, like photography took jobs away from artists, but no one's now as like photography as like a moral evil or something like that.

 Here's another one. The fake ones, the ones that turn out to be wrong, are usually related to technology or science.

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: The ones that are right are usually related to medical concerns, or actually always related to medical concerns or geopolitical predictions.

Simone Collins: Yeah, I was getting the, that it's it's an infection. Either of like [00:15:00] people or outside groups like the Sea Peoples or Europeans or whatever, or literally a disease coming in. Yes.

Malcolm Collins: And here is the final nail in the coffin for his, you cannot learn anything from this. Different cultural groups react to fake predictions with different levels of susceptibility and panic.

By that what I mean, Is that if you look at certain countries and cultural backgrounds, they almost never have these moral panic freak outs when it is inaccurate.

Simone Collins: Okay. Okay. So you're saying like you look at China, and China's not shitting a brick about this thing. Yeah, China

Malcolm Collins: is not very susceptible to moral panic, most East Asian countries aren't.

So India isn't particularly susceptible, China isn't particularly susceptible, Japan isn't particularly susceptible, and South Korea isn't particularly susceptible. They just historically have not had and I remember I was talking with someone once, and then They came up with like some example of a [00:16:00] moral panic in China and then I looked it up and it like, wasn't true.

So if you're like, no, here's some example of when this happened in China historically, like the Boxer Rebellion or something like that. I'm like, no, that was not an, a moral panic. That was a or the opium wars. Like the opium wars were an actual concern about something. Yeah, people, it was

Simone Collins: a batches of people dying issue, which is a real problem.

Malcolm Collins: So when you, in certain cultures are hyper susceptible to moral, to, to apocalyptic movements, specifically, they spread really quickly within Jewish communities and within Christian communities. Those are the two groups that are most susceptible to this. Yeah. Here's the problem. So we get the problem across the board here which is the places having the moral panics today around AI apocalypticism are 100 percent and nearly exclusively the communities that [00:17:00] were disproportionately successful.

susceptible to incorrect moral panics on a historic basis. White Christians and Jews. Christians and Jews. You just don't see big AI apocalyptic movements in Japan or Korea or China or India. They're just not freaking out about this in the same way. And keep in mind, I've made the table very big here.

It's not like I'm just saying, oh, you're not seeing it in Japan. You're not seeing it in half the world that's not prone to these types of apocalyptic panics. Okay. That is really big evidence to me. Okay, that's point one. Point two is it has all of the characteristics of the fake moral panics, historically speaking, and none of the characteristics of the accurate panics, historically speaking. But I'm wondering if you're noticing any other areas where there are congruence in the moral panics that turned out accurate versus the ones that didn't.

Simone Collins: The biggest thing to me is [00:18:00] just invasion versus change. Like a foreign agent entering seems to be a bigger risk than something fundamentally changing from a technological standpoint, which is not what I expected you to come in with. So this is surprising to me.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Okay.

So if we were going to modify AI risk to Fit into the mindset of the moral panics that turned out to be correct, like the apocalyptic claims that turned out to be correct, you would need to reframe it. You need to say something like, and this would fit correct predictions. Historically speaking, if we stop AI development and China keeps it.

On with AI development, China will use the AI to subjugate us and eradicate a large portion of our population. That would have a lot in common with the types of moral predictions or moral panic predictions that turned out accurate. AI will, Take people's jobs, AI [00:19:00] will destroy our culture, or AI will kill all people.

These feel very much like the historic incorrect.

Simone Collins: But I think you are underplaying something. Which is that, while these technological predictions, Luddites freaking out about the Industrial Revolution, people freaking out about the printing press. It did not lead to the fall of civilization as expected.

It did lead to fundamental changes. And AI will absolutely lead to fundamental changes in the way that people live and work. I don't

Malcolm Collins: argue. Have we ever argued that AI is not going to fundamentally change human civilization? We have multiple episodes on this point, okay? We say it's going to fundamentally change the civilization, it's going to fundamentally change the economy, it's going to fundamentally change the way that we even perceive humanity and ourselves.

None of that is, is stuff that we are arguing against. We are arguing against the moral panic around AI killing everyone and the need to delay AI advancement. Yeah. [00:20:00] Over that moral panic. Yeah. And

Simone Collins: that is fair. Fair.

Malcolm Collins: And the point here being is you can actually learn something by correlating historic events.

And it is useful to correlate these historic events to look for these patterns,

which I find really interesting in terms of so it makes sense, like with the industrial revolution, like with, the spinning wheel, whenever you see something. That is going to create like an economic and sociological jump for our civilization. There are going to be a Luddite reaction movement to it.

Never historically has there been a technological revolution without some large Luddite reaction. The only and it's not even that weird because actually if you look historically lead movements often really spread well within the edegre educated bourgeoisie that was non working the, That group just seems really susceptible to Luddite [00:21:00] panics.

But I can tell you what growing up, I never expected the effect of altruists community and the rationalists and the singularity community to become sort of Luddite cults. Like

Simone Collins: that, I never expected many so called rationalists to turn to things like energy healing and crystals, but here we are. So we

Malcolm Collins: are that's why we need to create a successor movement.

And I really personally do see the pronatalist movement because I look at the members of the movement and like at the pronatalist conference that we went to and this happening again, this year a huge chunk of the people. We're former people in the rationalist community and disaffected rationalists and the young people I met in the movement were exactly the profile of young person.

As I said, it's a hugely disproportionately autistic movement. Who when they were younger or when I was younger would have been early members in the rationalist EA movement. And so we just need to be aware of the susceptibility of these movements to one mystic grifters who, like you had with our episode, if people want to watch it [00:22:00] it's on the cult leverage or two, if they're not mystic grifters on forms of apocalypticism.

And I should note, and people should watch our episode, they're like, when you talk about the world fundamentally changing because of fertility collapse, like how is that different from apocalypticism? We have an episode on this if you want to watch it.

But the gist of the answer is We predict things getting significantly harder and economic turnover, but not all humans dying.

The nature of our predictions, and this is actually really interesting, and it's something from a historic perspective in the wrong movements. The nature of our predictions say you need to, if you believe this, adopt additional responsibilities in terms of the fate of the world, in terms of yourself.

Having kids is a huge amount of work. AI apocalypticism Allows you to shirk responsibility because you say the world's going to end anyway. I don't really need to do anything other than build attention, i. e. build my own reader base or attention network towards [00:23:00] myself which is very successful from a mimetic standpoint at building apocalyptic panic.

Because if somebody donates to one of our charities, 90 percent of the money needs to go to making things better. You donate to an AI apocalypticism charity. Most of the money is just going to advertising the problem itself. Which is why these ideas spread.

And that's also what you see historically is panic. My

Simone Collins: concern too, is a lot of these projects that have been funded as part of X risk philanthropy. No one's the only people consuming them are the EA community. So these things aren't reaching other groups. And we saw this also at one of the dinner parties we hosted.

One of our guests was the leader of one of the largest women's networks of AI developers in the world. And a bunch of other people there were literally working in AI alignment. This woman had never even heard the term AI alignment. These people working in AI alignment are not reaching out to people actually working in AI.[00:24:00]

They are not reaching they're also not reaching audiences of just broader people. They're all in this echo chamber within the EA and rationalist community and they're not actually getting reach. So even if I did believe in the importance of communicating this message, I wouldn't support this community because they're not doing it.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. What they need is to create a network that funds attractive young women to go on dates with people in the AI space to just live in areas where they are and try to convince them of it as an issue. But they won't, because a lot of people in it, here's another thing that I noticed that's cross correlating between the two groups.

Actually,

Simone Collins: I would love to see you apply for a grant with one of those X risk funds of just I will hire thirst traps To post on Instagram and to be on like, to be on OnlyFans and to just start

Malcolm Collins: like, cities because there's [00:25:00] some cities where these companies are based. And we're a lot for sure.

But

Simone Collins: And date them. Yes, for sure. But I just, I love this idea of using women.

Malcolm Collins: But here's the other thing that's cross correlated across all of the incorrect panics historically, which I find very interesting. And I didn't notice them just now. Every one of the correct panics had something specific and actual that you could do to help reduce the risk.

Whereas all of, almost all of the incorrect moral panics, the answer was just stop technological progress. That's how you fix the problem. So if you look at the correct moral panics. Black Plague, World War II, AIDS, DDT, asbestos, cigarette smoking, Native American warnings about Europeans. In every one of those, there was like an actionable thing that you needed to do, like DDT, go start doing removal go, don't have it sprayed on as many crops, AIDS, oh Safer sex policies, stuff like that.

However, if you look at the incorrect things, what are you looking at? [00:26:00] Like the splitting of the Higgs. You just need to stop technological development. Industrial revolution. You just need to stop technological development. The speed of trains, you just need to stop technological development. Greeting panic.

You just need to stop technological development. Radio, you just need to stop technological development. printing press. You just need,

Simone Collins: an important point with all of these. And you could argue, actually, that. This was an issue with nuclear as well. In fact, this discussion was had with nuclear is that there was this one physicist who one believed that nuclear wouldn't be possible, but two also was very strongly against censorship because a lot of people were saying, we have to stop this research, it's too dangerous.

And he just strongly believed that you should never, ever censor things in physics if it's not acceptable. And then we did ultimately, end up with nuclear weapons and that, that is a real risk for us. But I think the argument, the larger argument with technological development is someone's going to figure it out.[00:27:00]

And to a certain extent, it's going to have to be an arms race. And you're going to have to hope that your faction develops this and starts to own the best versions of this tech in a game of proliferation before anyone else. There's no, if you don't do it, someone else will.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. And that's the other, now I haven't gone into this cause this isn't what the video is.

But recently, I was trying to understand the AI risk people better as part of Lemon Week, where I have to engage really heavily with steelmanning, an idea I disagree with. And one of the things I realized was a core difference between the way I was approaching this intellectually and they were, is I just immediately discounted.

Any potential timeline where there was nothing realistic we could do about it.

An example here would be in a timeline where somebody says, AI is an existential risk, but we can remove that risk by getting all of the world's governments to band [00:28:00] together and prevent the development of something that could revolutionize their economies.

Does that one happen? No, it's just stupid. It's a stupid statement. Of course we can't do that. If we live in a world where if we can't do that, AI kills us in every timeline, I don't even need to consider that possibility. It's not meaningful on a possibility graph because there's nothing we can do about living in that reality.

Therefore, I don't need to make any decisions under the assumption that we live in that reality. It's a very relaxing reality. Yeah. And that's what gets me is I realized that they weren't just immediately discounting impossible tasks. Whereas I always do like when people are like you could fix pronatalism if you could give a half million grant to every parent.

I'm like cool, but we don't live in that reality. So I don't consider that. Yeah. They're like, yeah, government policy interventions could work. You need a half million. I'm like, yeah. And people are like technically we could economically afford it. And I go, yes, but in no realistic governance scenario, could you get [00:29:00] that passed in anything close to the near future? Think it's just an issue of how I judge. Timelines to worry about and timelines not to worry about. Which is interesting. Anyway, love you to death. It'd be interesting if Scott watches this. We, we chat with Scott, I'm friendly with him, but I also know that he doesn't really consume YouTube.

So I don't know if this is something that will get to him, but it's also, just useful for people who watch this stuff. And if you are not following Scott stuff, you should be, or you are out of the cultural zeitgeist. That's just what I'm going to tell you. He is certainly still a figure that is.

well respected than us as an intellectual. And I think he is a deservingly respected intellectual. And I say that about very few living people. Yeah. I know very few living intellectuals where I'm like, yeah, you should really respect this person as an intellectual because they have takes beyond my own occasionally.

Simone Collins: Yeah. He is wise. He is extremely well read. [00:30:00] He is extremely clever and. surrounded by incredibly clever people. And then beyond that, I would say he disagrees with us on quite a few things. So we have a lot to learn from him.

Malcolm Collins: Actually question, Simone, why do you think he didn't consider what I can just laid out and think is a fairly obvious point that you should be correlating these historical movements?

Simone Collins: I just, I think that you have a way of looking at things from And even more cross disciplinary and first principles way than he does sometimes. So you both are very cross disciplinary thinkers, which is one reason why I like both of your work a lot. But I think in the algorithm of cross disciplinary thinking, he gives a heavier weight to other materials and you give a heavier weight.

To just first principles, reach reasoning, and that's how you come to [00:31:00] reach these different conclusions.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. I'd agree with that. Yeah. And I also think another thing he gives a heavier weight to, like when I disagree with him most frequently to things that are culturally normative in his community.

He gives a slightly heavier weight.

Simone Collins: No. That's actually you are very similar in that way. And that your opinion is highly colored by recent conversations you've had with people and recent things you've watched. So it's something that both of you are subject to, I would say that maybe you may be even more subject to it than he is, because you interact with people less than he does on a regular basis.

True he's much more social than us. He's much more social than you, but You are extremely colored by what you're supposed to. So I, you're not exempt from this, but it's true.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, actually I would definitely admit that like a lot of trans stuff recently is just because I've been watching lots and lots of content in that area, which has caused, YouTube to recommend more of it to me, which has caused sort of a loop on the topic.

Historically, I wouldn't have cared about that much.

Simone Collins: [00:32:00] One thing I'll just end with though and I'm still not even finished reading this. But Leopold Aschenbrenner, I don't know actually how his last name is pronounced, but he is like in the EA, X Risk. I think he's even pronatalist,

Malcolm Collins: no, he is, he's famously one of the first people to talk about pronatalism, he just never put any money into it, even though he was on the board of FTX.

Simone Collins: He published a really great piece on AI that I now am using as my mooring point from for helping me think through the implications of where we're going with AI. Seeing how steeped he is in that world and how well he knows many of the people who are working on the inside of it, getting us closer to AGI, I think he's a really good person to turn to in terms of his takes.

I think that they're better, more than reality. And they're also more practically oriented. He wrote this thing called situational awareness, the decade ahead, you can find it at situational awareness. [00:33:00] ai. And if you look at his Twitter, if you just search Leopold Aschenbrenner on Twitter, it's like his Twitter URL link.

He's definitely promoting it. I recommend reading that. In terms of the conversation that I wish we were having with AI, he sets the tone of what I wish we were talking about, like how we should be building on energy infrastructure, the immense security loopholes and concerns that we should be having about, for example, foreign actors, Getting access to our algorithms and weights and the AI that we're developing right now because there's very little security around it.

So yeah, I, I think that people should turn to his write up.

Malcolm Collins: That's a great call to action. And I was just thinking I had another idea as to why maybe I recognize this when he didn't, because this is very much like me asking, why did somebody smarter than me or who I consider smarter than me Not see something that I saw as like really obvious and he didn't [00:34:00] include and like discount in his piece.

Of course you would cross correlate the instances of success with the instances of failure in these predictions. I suspect it could also be that my entire worldview in philosophy, and many people know this from our videos, comes from a memetic Cloud first perspective, I am always looking at the types of ideas that are good at replicating themselves and the types of ideas that aren't good at replicating themselves when I am trying to disturb it, why large groups act in specific ways or end up believing things that I find off or weird, like how could they believe that?

And that led me to, in my earliest days, become, as I've mentioned, like really interested with cults. Like, how do cults work? Why do religions work? Like, how do people convince them things of stuff that to an outsider seem absurd? And so when I am looking at any idea, I am always seeing it through this memetic lens first.

And I think when he looks at ideas, he's He doesn't [00:35:00] first filter it through a memetically why would this idea exist before he is looking at the merits of the idea? Whereas I often consider those two things as of equal standing to help me understand how an idea came to exist and why it's in front of me.

And I don't think that he has this second obsession here. And I think that's probably

Simone Collins: Maybe. Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah.

Simone Collins: But I like it when people come to different conclusions because it's always something in between there that I find the value.

Malcolm Collins: I don't know if that's helpful. I actually think that's an unhelpful way to look at things.

I think you shouldn't look for averages, but you can look for averages.

Simone Collins: I find stuff. I think when you look at what is different, you find interesting insights. It's not an average of the two. It's not a mean, a median or a mode. It is unique new insights. It's more about emergent properties. of the elements of disagreement that yield entirely new and [00:36:00] often unexpected insights, not something in between, not compromise.

Malcolm Collins: You are a genius, Simone. I am so glad as the comments have said, you're the smarter of the two of us and I could not agree more. And I will hit you as that every time now, because I know, this drives me nuts. You know

Simone Collins: that you're the smarter one. That even our polygenic scores for intelligence.

Show that you're the smarter one.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, we went through our polygenic scores recently, and one of the things I mentioned in a few other episodes is that I have the face of somebody who, you know, when they were biologically developing, was in a high testosterone environment. When contrasted with Andrew Tate, like that's where I often talk about it, is he has the face of somebody who grew up in a very low testosterone environment.

Believe it or not, when I was going through the polygenic markers, I came up 99 percent on testosterone production. In terms of the top 1 percent of the population in terms of just endogenous testosterone production. So yeah, of course, when I was developmental, I was just flooded in this stuff.

That's why I look like [00:37:00] this.

Simone Collins: 1 percent of pain tolerance that I was a 99 percent 99

Malcolm Collins: percent for pain tolerance that I would explain so much. No, I like it being a high testosterone, but actually feeling pain and just being like, nah, not going to engage in those scenarios.

Yeah, it's probably a good mix of noping out of there. It's a good mix of being tough, but noping out the moment it becomes dangerous. Yes.

Simone Collins: High risk, but good survival instinct. Very good. Yeah. Especially because you also have fast twitch muscle, which I don't. When you know, out of a place, about real fast

Malcolm Collins: joke about me being able to like BAMF out of a situation whenever like night crawler, whenever something dangerous happens, 20 feet away somewhere else.

Yeah. Like I turn and he's just gone and like a car is hurtling toward me.

You are so slow. You actually remind me of like a [00:38:00] sloth. I need to get better at making you out of the way. And you literally have to pull me because I'm Like when cars are coming at us because like we started crossing the road and she like didn't expect. She cannot like speed up above a fast walk.

Simone Collins: And I hate moving so quickly. I'm also like contemplating do I want to die or should I try to move?

Malcolm Collins: You really come off that way. Yeah, I do. And you've got those night crawlers that have a bamf over, got a bamf back to grab you. God, I'm going to die. Yeah. I love you. I love you so much, Simone.

You're amazing. Hey, I would love to get the slow cooker started on the tomatoes and meat that I got.

But you

Simone Collins: still have about two days worth of the other stuff.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, but it's easier to just freeze this stuff if I do it all at once and now and then I can also do it overnight. I can also leave it cooking for a few days.[00:39:00]

Simone Collins: I can do that. Do I have time to make biscuits or muffins, cornmeal muffins? Yeah. If I go down right now, I can make cornmeal muffins.

Malcolm Collins: Would you like cornmeal muffins? I'm okay with that. Yeah.

Simone Collins: Okay.

Malcolm Collins: You're so nice. Cornmeal goes great with slow cooked beef.

Simone Collins: And you're still going to have the slow cooked beef that you made earlier this week, right?

I'm heading down. She's asleep on my lap. I don't want to look. She's so but

Malcolm Collins: she

Simone Collins: loves

Malcolm Collins: sleeping. I love you so much, Simone. You're a perfect mom. And you got to get that pouch so you can get that pocket on. Okay. Order it right now.

Simone Collins: No, I need to contemplate whether or not we should just spend money on that or new carbon monoxide detectors.

Malcolm Collins: No, you're getting the new carbon monoxide detectors. Just let me get this for you as a gift. Okay. Here, I'm getting it right now. It's 19.

Simone Collins: I'll get it with my money. Okay. I just

Malcolm Collins: got it. No, it was my money. I'm the one who's demanding [00:40:00] that you get a pocket because I'm so fricking annoyed that you walking around without a pocket.

Simone Collins: All right, Malcolm.

Malcolm Collins: It is annoying, Simone. It causes me dissatisfaction. Okay.

Simone Collins: I will see you downstairs with my corn muffin hands ready to go. Okay. Love you. Bye. I guess you could call it the Dunning Kruger trap where, you know the Dunning Kruger effect is where people who know less about something, feel more confident about it, right?

Malcolm Collins: What happened? He just noped right out of there.

Oh, what is it? Is it a bug is it a mouse? No. It was a beer. It was the beer that you knocked over yesterday.

Simone Collins: Oh, the one that, that no Titan knocked it off the table.

Malcolm Collins: Oh, and you're like, you better not open that one. [00:41:00] That's what just happened.

Simone Collins: Okay. So I actually, so that the Dunning Kruger effect whereby, by. People who know less about something feel more confident about it.

By the way, Denning Kruger

Malcolm Collins: effect does not replicate.

Simone Collins: And then, but anyway, still people are familiar with it. And then people who know more about something often say that they know less. And I think that there gets to be a certain point where when you know a ton about something, you just start to become very uncertain about it.

And you're not really willing to take any stance, which is something I saw a lot in academia, where the higher up in academia I got, the more the answer was always, it depends instead

Malcolm Collins: of that is, this, whatever you're talking about has nothing to do with any of the points I'm going to make.

Simone Collins: See if you smile when daddy appears on the screen. Daddy?

Malcolm Collins: Look at [00:42:00] that! It's daddy!

She doesn't see. She doesn't see.

Simone Collins: She's, she I haven't gotten her eyes on the screen. She's gotta

Malcolm Collins: look at the screen. Do you recognize me at all? I don't know if they can recognize things on screens in the same way that adults can. I don't know either. Yeah, she doesn't seem to be focusing on it. So yeah, she doesn't, she can't see

Simone Collins: me.

We love you anyway.

Malcolm Collins: I will get us started here. Oh, we'll pull this aside. How could you tell that it was bad at creating websites by the way?

Simone Collins: Because it, after you buy a domain, Will like literally take the names of your domain, like the words within it. And then assume that based on, okay, for example, cause I got a pragmatist foundation.

org, they're like, Oh, you're a pragmatic foundation and your. org. So [00:43:00] you're a nonprofit. And so here's a nonprofit website for a foundation that likes pragmatism. And then it made up copy based on that and had a picture of kids. It's sitting at desks and with something like, creating solutions that are pragmatic.

Which is not terribly far off, but

Malcolm Collins: it sounds so bad. No, it's not

Simone Collins: so bad. It's just

Malcolm Collins: in case you are wondering the reason why we're looking at buying a websites right now is when we needed to get the. org for the pragmatist foundation because people were emailing the wrong address because we have. com for that.

But also I've been thinking about building a website for the techno Puritan religion and seeing if I can get it registered as a real religion. Which would be pretty fun. Especially if I am able to, put religious wear in there, like you always have to be armed, it, it was with a significant strain to see if you can get religious exceptions for which I do believe there is a religious mandate for concealed carry and stuff.[00:44:00]

That would be interesting from a legal perspective. It'd

Simone Collins: be funny if we had like a religious mandate for always having to carry ceremonial sloths with us. Just but it's my religious sloth. You can't let me not go to your restaurant wearing it.

Malcolm Collins: You want to enshrine specific rights that people would want.

I think you can do stuff around sorts of data privacy and stuff like that makes sense within a religious context to us, but also provide a legal tool to people who want the access to this stuff.

Simone Collins: That could be interesting.

Malcolm Collins: Which, also helps the religion spread. So that'd be fun. All right.

So I am opening this up here.

What are you doing, Wiggles? Okay, you better not let her wiggle. I better

Simone Collins: not. She's full of all the Wiggles.