Based Camp | Simone & Malcolm Collins

In this thought-provoking episode, Malcolm and Simone delve into France's recent policy proposals aimed at combating the country's falling fertility rates. They analyze President Emmanuel Macron's plan, which includes offering fertility checks for young people, implementing a "birth leave" scheme, and introducing a possible "duty to visit" for fathers in single-parent families. Malcolm and Simone discuss the potential impact of these policies, highlighting the ineffectiveness of fertility checks in encouraging parenthood and the unintended consequences of mandating father involvement. They also touch on the importance of equitable divorce laws, the myth of the two-parent household, and the role of cultural factors in shaping fertility outcomes. Throughout the conversation, the couple emphasizes the need for policymakers to focus on fostering a culture that values family formation and pronatalism, rather than implementing misguided policies that may exacerbate the problem.

Malcolm Collins: [00:00:00] Hello, this is Malcolm and Simone here and we are happy to be talking about some pronatalist and policy today. Today's episode is going to be focused on France's recent policy proposals to combat demographic collapse. However, I have not seen them.

So Simone is going to be presenting them to me, and you are going to be getting my in real time reaction.

Would you like to know more?

Simone Collins: Yeah, so I recently came across this telegraph article was published, I think, a little earlier this month, but it's about policies that have been discussed for a while. It's called France to offer young people, fertility tax to combat falling fertility rates.

And it discusses a couple of policies, which at best. Not going to do anything at worst are probably going to cause damage at least unless I'm crazy. I want your take on this so the gist is that France's president Emmanuel [00:01:00] Macron is laudable for recognizing demographic collapse as an issue and talking about it France's fertility rate relative to the rest of the EU is actually pretty good.

Malcolm Collins: It, but it had a massive collapse this last year. It did. 70 percent year over year.

Simone Collins: They're still above the EU average. They're still above the UK. They're still above Germany and they're still above Spain. So like generally speaking, France is, the one that looks good maybe because it's a little more Catholic.

Who knows? There's a lot. No. It's because it's less Catholic. Oh,

Malcolm Collins: really? Yeah. If you contrast it with other countries, it's actually more secular. And again, this is what we've seen across a lot of things is that the more Catholic a country is in Europe, the lower its fertility rate was the average Catholic majority country in Europe having a fertility rate of only 1.

3.

Simone Collins: Yeah. But that makes sense then. But anyway they still recognize it's a problem. I really appreciate that. So they get points for that. All right. Petty points for that. But the latest thing that Emmanuel Macron. Prince's president has proposed is fertility checks for young people. He's trying to [00:02:00] get people to test their fertility earlier.

But quite honestly, doing so isn't going to boost fertility.

Malcolm Collins: It sounds like an interesting idea from the

Simone Collins: article. I'll read what they say. Emmanuel Macron is. To offer fertility checks to all 18 to 25 year olds as part of a grand plan to combat declining fertility rates, the French president first announced his ambition to enact French demographic rearmament, which that's fun.

That's a fun term. At a press conference on January 16th, as part of a wide array of measures aimed at reviving his stuttering second term. I don't think that's going to help and I can tell you why, but I want to hear why you think that's interesting and worth trying.

Malcolm Collins: So what age ranges 18 to 25?

Why wouldn't this? It's a great idea actually. So it's very similar to me, to the policy where conservatives to fight abortion, they made it so that women had to [00:03:00] look at a picture of their ultrasound before getting an abortion which dramatically lowers the chance of abortion. They are creating a policy, which is.

encouraging people to recognize their short fertility windows, which is one of the core issues in society today in terms of falling fertility rates, is men do not realize they have fertility windows. They think that because some men occasionally have kids when they're older, that it is normal for the male fertility window to expand.

And well past 40 and it just is not you might occasionally get that, you're going to have a really high rates of diseases and stuff like that. And you're going to have it's just not great. So that's one huge thing that hopefully it can help clear up that myth and force people to understand that myth.

And what

Simone Collins: McCrone recognizes and mentioned in a magazine interview is quote, every woman should have access, should have free access to her body. But one figure stands out for me. The [00:04:00] fertility rate is 1. 8 and the rate of desire for a child is 2. 3. Now that's a good point, right? So there are more, there are women in France who want to, on average, have more kids than they have.

And so it recognizes that people are having fertility problems or that they're not starting when they should. And maybe one, one thing you can enact to change that is to inform them about their fertility. Again, I just. Here's why it's

Malcolm Collins: not informing them about their fertility. You're reading what's happening wrong.

Okay. It's forcing them to take a reality check on their fertility window through the most realistic mechanism available to them. Through just hard data. Women often don't realize how short their fertility window is. Yeah. After 35, if a woman gets pregnant, that's considered a geriatric pregnancy. That is considered an extremely old age pregnancy and likely to lead to complications.

A lot of women don't know the window is 35. They're like, Oh maybe by the time I'm 40 and I'll start thinking about it in my mid thirties. No, if you start thinking about it in your mid thirties, you are [00:05:00] not going to have many kids. You've already lost. You need to be getting married and starting having kids.

In your late twenties, not mid thirties. Okay. So that's another thing. But again,

Simone Collins: here's why I don't think it's going to work. Okay. As much as everyone's we just should inform people. We just need to let them know that their fertility window is short. I don't honestly think that the problem is that people are being unrealistic about their short fertility windows.

I think that many people. Who want to have kids are aware. So basically the people who already want to have kids and plan on having kids know that their fertility window is short and they're struggling to find partners and they're struggling to get their careers in orders and they're still going to wait to have kids because they feel like

Malcolm Collins: literally seen this even among fans of this show.

When we've talked about is males who are under the illusion that their fertility, they're going to be like able to have kids. It's one

Simone Collins: factor. I don't think it's the factor. I think it's one factor, but It's definitely not the defining factor.

Malcolm Collins: It's just, no, it's not the [00:06:00] defining factor, but it is an inexpensive, like if I was going to put the weight anywhere policy wise, this is one of the easiest areas to do this outside of changing education.

Here's the problem with changing education. You could try to do better education around people's fertility windows. It's just that if you put that into schools or colleges, it is going to be administered by bureaucrats who are usually anti natalist because they're usually far left leaning. Or at least anti French, French national natalist.

And so I just I'm sorry, like it's actually a fairly good policy for the cost.

Simone Collins: I hold it as neutral. I don't think it's going to help because I think that the really big factors are culture that people just don't want to have kids or they don't feel like they're ready to have kids yet. And they're still gonna ultimately start trying or feel like they're finally ready when it's too late.

So what's

Malcolm Collins: the next one? Yeah. So the

Simone Collins: next thing that bothers me is okay. I'm going to read from the article again. Mr. [00:07:00] McCrone also outlined his future birth leave scheme, which will quote, come to force at the end of 2025 unquote, the aim is to pay young parents who stopped working or reduce their working hours to look after their offspring, quote, three months for mothers.

three months for fathers, cumulative during the child's first year and compensated at 50 percent of salary up to the social security ceiling, which is 1, 900 euros, unquote, he said. Now, again, I really think that this is damaging things that are like we'll just pay you to put your career on hold.

This is, many places that have very permissive. maternity leave policies are still seeing their birth rates plummet because women are realistic. And they understand that basically you're damned. If you do, you're damned. If you don't, if there's no maternity leave, it's hard to have kids. And if there is maternity leave, you can have kids and you can get support, but there are going to then be more glass ceilings in your career because people know that you're more of a liability.

And there [00:08:00] are also going to be major career costs because you're just going to disappear for a while and that's going to put your career on hold no matter what the nation may try to do to protect you.

Malcolm Collins: So to clarify, this is mandatory maternity leave. It's not

Simone Collins: mandatory. It's just basically ensuring that women are compensated.

Both women and men are compensated when taking parental leave.

Malcolm Collins: And does it compensate both genders equally?

Simone Collins: Yes.

Malcolm Collins: And it's something like 80 percent of their salary, right? For a year.

Simone Collins: At 50 percent of salary and it's just for three months. Okay. I, is he, this is three months for mothers, three months for fathers.

So it's a total of six months. Like the father can take three months off. The mother can take three months off. So it's basically saying you can take time off. The government will pay you half of your salary. So that should make it easier for you. Again, I don't think that's going to make a difference.

Malcolm Collins: It's going to increase gender pay gap. I mean anything around maternity leave as a concept. We're just against you need to build a cultural practices around [00:09:00] having children at work. This is gender neutral.

Simone Collins: So men can do it too. It's just I don't think men are going to do it.

Malcolm Collins: No, but it's much more important to create laws that like you cannot. Have a woman not come to work with her newborn that, that needs to just be a legal mandate, something that is normal for women to be wearing their children all the time.

Simone Collins: Yeah. Yeah. If we could just change the norms to bring your baby to the office, we'll help to provide some support or at least have an inclusive environment where it's cool to do that.

Malcolm Collins: And then you want to really help things. It would be an interesting policy take, bring your baby to the office, 50 percent of your salary gets paid as a bonus to the company for every mother during her first few months.

Simone Collins: Like the company gets a subsidy for having a slightly less productive and more disruptive mother, but like for supporting her, so now the company is financially

Malcolm Collins: incentivized for its employees to get pregnant. That's great. Good. I like that device for its employees getting pregnant. I like that. And you create many downstream positive practices from that outside of maternity leave, which [00:10:00] I think builds up this false fear of having the kid is such a burden, everything like that.

And then people can spiral around that when historically, women worked and had kids at the same time you, you have with all of our kids. It's Yeah, I just don't like that expectation, but I wouldn't say it's a disastrous plan. No, again, that's neutral.

Simone Collins: There are two things that I think are quite negative.

So let's get to the first one, which isn't easy. Which is a very easy one to hate, which is that he is strongly against surrogacy. He says that it is quote, not compatible with the dignity of women. It is a form of commodification of their bodies, unquote, he argued, which is just it's very annoying because on the other hand, he's argued that he doesn't want pronatalism in France to be about shaming or guilting people who don't want to have kids into having kids.

He's very much about supporting those who want to have kids. And this is one of the top ways surrogacy is one of the top ways you can support people who want to have kids, but can't. I feel like getting over [00:11:00] surrogacy is one of the most important things when it comes to encouraging a nation to be able to have more kids.

It's even a great way for people who don't want to have kids of their own to contribute to a nation's pronatalism while also making money. Because a lot of people don't mind commodifying their bodies, which is shown by the rate of women who are on OnlyFans now. Hello?

Malcolm Collins: Yes, you have something like OnlyFans legal where women are literally, and it's my understanding OnlyFans is illegal in France and pornography is legal in France, which means he's literally okay with women literally commodifying their bodies for base level human debasement, right?

And

Simone Collins: actually for probably more antinatalists. Tendencies, right? Because men are using OnlyFans as a Band Aid in places. But,

Malcolm Collins: creating a human life that another family is going to love, and raise, and take care of and that is You know, just the perversion of that sentiment. [00:12:00] I think it's really good that he doesn't want to do something like he's trying to appease the, extremists, conservatives, who are It's not

Simone Collins: working.

His approval ratings are dropping. He's not doing well at all. I don't know. Just, it really, that bothers me. But here's the really stupid thing. And I actually I think it's stupid. I want to get your take on this. Because of what you've said regarding child support required by men and its effect on fertility.

So here is a very interesting, and I've not heard any other leader established this as a pronatalist policy, but I think that if he does really push for this, it's going to backfire like crazy. And this is very novel. So get this reading the article again. Mr. Macron also outlined his future birth leave scheme, which will, oh, okay. So I'm quoting from the article again in a video broadcast by Elle, the magazine, Mr. Macron, who has no children, although his wife Bridgette has three from her first marriage, also suggested opening a [00:13:00] debate on the introduction of a possible duty to visit. for fathers in single parent families where women are the main carers.

Quote, we've allowed men to exonerate themselves from all parental duties, he said, while pointing out that 90 percent of youths involved in riots in France last July, quote, came from either child welfare or single parent families. Mr. Macron added, when there is a father, he must exercise all his duties, and the mother, when she is in that situation, must be able to demand regular visits.

He said fathers should, for example, take part in parent teacher meetings and be a, quote, stakeholder, unquote, in a child's education. The president stressed, it is a duty to be a parent, and it's a duty that doesn't end with a divorce or separation, and said parents must, quote, both exercise their responsibilities, unquote.

He added, Even for the child, it is better a child who never sees his father is a child who feels abandoned, unquote, and whose, quote, emotional and educational development is not the [00:14:00] same, unquote. Now I agree, children do better with two parents, totally, but Actually, I don't think the

Malcolm Collins: evidence is as strong for that as people like to say it is.

So I'll give you the factors that's here that people, hold on. So if you're looking gender blind. Children do better with two parents. Oh, when you look at

Simone Collins: single father households,

Malcolm Collins: they do about the same. They do in two parent households. So what's unique about single father households, right? It's that most single father households are not single father households because a relationship.

So let me explain what I mean by that because people may not be familiar with the court system. The court system hugely is favorable to women Women can usually get the kids that they want. So what that means is if you have a single father household, it's usually because the wife died. And so The wife is wildly

Simone Collins: incompetent and evil and messed

Malcolm Collins: up.

[00:15:00] Yeah. And in that case, a divorce was warranted. So it's not a The kids are better off in that case. Yeah. Yeah. Messed up. If So I don't think that is a condemnation of women as single parents. I just think what it shows is that a lot of these single parent women are people who are fundamentally unfit to be parents or be in a long term relationship with another human.

Simone Collins: And the lesser evil, like the husbands too are probably unfit, but whatever. No,

Malcolm Collins: I wouldn't say necessarily. I think if you created more equitable divorce laws and more equitable laws around child custody, that would have a better impact in terms of getting more fathers involved in their children's lives than forcing.

But think about what you're forcing here. So one, you're forcing a father into a kid's life who not like he's forcing the fathers to care about the kids. He's forcing fathers who don't care about the kids into kids locks That is not there is no evidence that is a helpful thing to do or that's going to [00:16:00] fix some sort of Emotional problems that kid have around being abandoned that the kids only had their father around because he was legally obligated to be around

Simone Collins: Yeah I feel like it also adds baggage.

It's just another one of those liability things that affects the male subconscious and deciding whether or whether at all to engage with women. So along with all these other laws around consent and post hoc deciding that, Someone didn't consent to some kind of liaison with a man. This is just another one of those things that I think men would think about Oh, and then the government's going to, for my entire life, not only demand child support, but also demand that I travel across the entire country just to show up to parent teacher conferences.

If I move like this is going to ruin my life even more than I thought it ever was. So I'm just going to get a vasectomy right now and never, ever have kids, that kind of thing. I just, that's what I worry about.

Malcolm Collins: No, that's obviously what's going to happen. I see almost no positive outcome for this other than that.

It [00:17:00] may give some men more leverage in getting access to their children.

Simone Collins: Yeah.

That'd be a good thing, but that's, I think that they were probably, this seemed like the kind of law that would have some exception clause where if the woman really hated the man, Or something that like, she would still be able to cut him out somehow.

So

Malcolm Collins: it seems like it's just giving the wives more control when you would achieve much more by creating more equitable divorces and getting kids to fathers more when the father is competent. And I also think that this again goes to, I think the myth of the two parent household. When you look at the data, like the data I'm talking about, I just.

I think it shows that actually what you're seeing is the type of person who cannot maintain a stable relationship is the type of person who is a bad parent. And at that point, it's oh yeah, no, duh, like anyone should know that. And they have the type of kid who causes more social damage and more social harm.

And I [00:18:00] think that actually is a pretty chilling statistic about the riots and stuff like that.

Simone Collins: Yeah, that's, and how do you even get that information? I don't are they polling everyone who shows up to a riot? They're breaking a window and they're like sir, did you have a single parent? I

Malcolm Collins: suspect that if you were to look into this data more, it's covering up something that is what's the word I'm looking for here?

Inconvenient truth that the dominant cultural group doesn't want to admit that the urban monoculture doesn't want to admit which is that most of the writers were from an ethnic or cultural group that has very low rates of fathers staying around. That is, I think what he is actually stating there.

Not that they're just broadly. So I think that's important to note is cultural groups which do not encourage fathers, I think, have worse outcomes and cultural groups that do encourage fathers or broadly because they're just you've got to [00:19:00] look at all the things that, that then gets elevated within those cultural groups.

A person isn't rewarded for staying around their kids. They're often not rewarded as much for treating women well. And you're much more likely to get really high power distance between husband and wife, which leads to abusive situations for the wife. Even when the husband does stay around, you're also likely to have wives really heavily optimizing around just base masculinity.

And again, Instead of, is this person going to be a good caregiver because they are not searching for biologically speaking, they are not searching for a long term partner. They're searching for genes. And so when women are doing that, they cultural groups often end up, um, elevating within them traits that are like wealth, physical strengths risk taking behavior, i.

e. crime. And a lot of just generally negative traits become [00:20:00] high status within those cultural groups. I and this is definitely something that needs to be fixed. I just don't see this is fixing it. I think with a lot of this, it's something that comes from within the cultural group. Fixing it comes from within the cultural groups, members within the cultural groups, which choose a different pathway, but they're empowering

Simone Collins: those cultural groups to fix their own ways is brilliant.

Yeah,

Malcolm Collins: which involves less, school overreach, school, cultural overreach and stuff like that, because, the urban monoculture is interested in no kids. Like they, they don't want any kids at all. It's just do whatever you feel like whenever you feel like it.

Simone Collins: But that's again, why I don't think this practice of informing people of their fertility window is really going to make that much of a difference because listen, if I was informed of my fertility window in between the age of 18 and 25, which is, I met you at age 24.

I'd be like, great. Yep. I never want to have kids. So this doesn't matter. I'm not going to get it.

Malcolm Collins: It's something that comes at a certain point in your life. I think [00:21:00] a more fun way to do this or something is all women, when they graduate school and all men get a clock that's counting down their fertility window and they get to put it in their house, wherever they want biological clock, not thinking about it.

Here's the thing. Now. Many progressives as a joke would display this because they'd be like, Oh, but it would still remind all of their guests and them every day because there's that moment in your life where it goes, your fertility window goes from being a joke to an existential crisis and being reminded of it.

I think makes that day happen earlier. Oh, I don't know. Just

Simone Collins: when I think of progressive Simone, nah, really not at all. Not at all. And that's the thing is again, like I can model this so well because I was this and the only thing for me that changed my interest in fertility was meeting. You

Malcolm Collins: was

Simone Collins: finding a guy that [00:22:00] was

Malcolm Collins: it.

Simone Collins: And if he invested, if Macron invested in dating and relationship formation in, in creating a culture that elevates the family, I feel like that would make so much more of a difference than telling people about their fertility window. You know what I mean? It just, people don't give a s**t. The best of the policies that he

Malcolm Collins: has.

I will say that the policies are honestly bizarre that he thinks this would have a positive impact. It appears almost more like subsidies or trying to, what's the word I'm looking for? Placate special interest groups or it was in society. Then Actually trying to come up with a real solution to fertility class.

Simone Collins: And even, I don't know if you saw in South Korea, they're considering giving a approximately 52, 000 subsidy to parents for each kid, which is that's unprecedented. And this is, along the lines of what Robin Hanson has Suggested in terms of upfront payments, right? [00:23:00] Even that though, when it comes to culture in Korea being what it is and the amount of helplessness plus the animosity between men and women.

I don't think it's going to solve the problem. It's no, one's listening to people when they're saying what's wrong. No, one's listening to women saying this isn't working for me. No, one's listening to men when they're like, I can't find a woman, like this everyone's talking about

Malcolm Collins: when a man says I can't find a woman, they're like then you must be an incel.

And when women are like the gender dynamics in this country. They're like you must be a toxic feminist, right? And I think that it's because people like to elevate the extremists was in both of those movements. Instead of point out that both groups do have genuine grievances, they do.

The thing is I just don't care because all of this can be fixed with culture. Yes, but why are policymakers not

Simone Collins: doing that? It's so obvious that [00:24:00] culture is the answer.

Malcolm Collins: I guess what I'm saying here is you're not getting in cell ultra Orthodox Jews, you, you might have some fertility problems with this community.

You're not getting in cell Amish men. Okay. You might own the fringes, but not more than you would historically really and I think that, and you're not getting people within these communities being like, Oh, it's. So toxic the masculinity or from, whatever they may leave the movement and then complain about that because now they're in a completely different cultural cup set where the urban monoculture really likes to elevate people's beef with their birth culture because that's how it prevents them from reconverting.

Cults always do this. So it tries to convince them that they hate their parents and their parents were abusive and their birth culture was abusive. So it will reward them for going on rants about that. So yeah, when they leave the group, but when they're in the group, you're really not going to get as much complaining because it functionally works.

And I think that this is yeah, I it's bizarre that he's doing this. It's weird, like [00:25:00] token. I'm going to try to do something about this, but not really. It's sad to see, but it's something that, we've predicted that as people recognize fertility collapse is a real issue, they will use it to push forward agendas that they had beforehand that are largely unconnected.

Simone Collins: And do you think it could be, the article did mention conspicuously that he is childless, if you consider biologically speaking, his choices in life. Do you think maybe also the problem is largely that the policy makers and the people who are Attempting, supposedly, to address demographic collapse are largely childless themselves or parents of just one or two children, so not really pronatalist themselves and not really aware of what makes people have a lot of kids or the mindset of someone who has a lot of kids.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, um, I think it's more of a thing that a person who's childless was able to become, a French prime minister in the U. S. historically, it would have been incredibly hard [00:26:00] to be elected president if you didn't have any kids. No, there

Muttering: weren't. Weren't there a bunch of childless presidents?

Malcolm Collins: I don't think there were that many. It was seen as a very weird or low status

Simone Collins: thing.

Malcolm Collins: I'll look it up and add it afterwards,

Yup. Only five us presidents have had no kids. So around 10%.

Malcolm Collins: but yeah, I think that you we looked upon historically childless people with a lot of cultural suspicion and in many countries, like in Israel, where the fertility rate is still high they're still looked upon with a level of suspicion because it's seen as it's fundamentally.

Like one and a sign of the perversion of their personal value system that they valued cashing in all of the chips that previous generations had paid forwards for personal worldly things, whether it's speeded their career or, whatever. Like they paid forward the.

intergenerational sacrifice that every single one of their ancestors has made. And I would

Simone Collins: also say that like having kids [00:27:00] historically has been normative. So being, childless would make you a slightly different or whatever.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. So while I am okay like I say that we, we fight. I do not fight for a future where people are allowed to have no kids.

I do, but I do not fight for a future where people are able to reach the highest levels of society if they didn't even attempt to have kids. I don't think

Simone Collins: citizenship is earned through childbearing.

Malcolm Collins: I actually, yeah, I, we created a model of government that we should probably go over in one of our episodes.

But yeah, one of the ways that like one of your votes is based off of how many kids you have.

Simone Collins: How many people you contribute to the nation?

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. And there's different ways you can do that than just having kids, but we don't want to go into all of that. But the point being is that, um, I think that's a totally reasonable thing that you shouldn't.

Be able to vote if you don't have kids. If you don't have a vested stake in the future of your country, why are you voting? But I do think this is a conspicuous,

Simone Collins: this may be a conspicuous issue behind the [00:28:00] systematic failure and very consistent failure of governments to successfully implement prenatalist policy.

Which could be along the lines of Tracy Woodgrain's article, Substack article, Republicans Are Doomed, in which he talks about the bureaucratic, legal, legislative, political ruling class that essentially gets s**t done in government is largely progressive. And therefore it lives progressive lifestyles.

That is to say low fertility lifestyles and doesn't really get pronatalism and therefore really can't model or address demographic collapse and pronatalism because they are too ingrained within the problem.

Malcolm Collins: I think you need affirmative action for parents, basically or even just policies where you say you can't go above certain ranks within the government bureaucracy, if you don't have over X many kids.

And I think that this is where China is going right now. And I think it's one of the more positive policies. What I'm more scared of is they moved to forced insemination, which I think it's also likely, but barring [00:29:00] government positions from people with under certain fertility, absolutely where they're going.

Yeah. And historically, this was done by default in many societies, just because people with that many kids were seen as deviants. Which, functionally, if you're doing that by choice, You are to an extent, you are expecting other people to have kids to support you in your old age. You are putting the work onto us for us, putting the effort into raise our kids in the hopes that our kids taxes will one day go to support you when you're living off the state.

And that is a genuine perversion. And people can be like, no, I'm saving up enough money for when I'm older. And it's then who do you think is caring for you? Who do you think is, you are still. Expecting and exploiting the labor of others, and I'm okay with you, continuing to exist, but I don't think that people should be elevated for this.

And I think we need a lot more shame in that direction. And this is something that people don't understand. Shame [00:30:00] is not the same as not allowing someone to do something. And I am very okay with shame as a cultural tactic when an individual takes the makes selfish life decisions, which are not about the betterment of society or making the next generation better, but purely for their own career development or personal satisfaction or validation.

Simone Collins: Yeah. Okay. So final question for you when it comes to these nations and they're in my opinion, either neutral or actively harmful policies when it comes to pronatalism. Do you think that most nations would be better off just not doing anything? Just stop, just stop spending money on this.

Stop trying. Just don't. Would you recommend that over them continuing to try stuff?

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, almost right now it is just they're just making things worse often.

Simone Collins: Yeah, that's my thing. As I was telling her, I'm like, France is digging its own grave here. Like they, they were doing relatively better.

I feel like they're just going to make things worse. [00:31:00]

Malcolm Collins: Maybe. Until what they need is groups like ours advising them. And we've reached out to them. We reached out to the population division at the French government. We're like, Oh, we can help you guys, but never heard back from them.

And I think that's the thing in the UK.

Simone Collins: The UK was like, no, thanks. We're fine.

Malcolm Collins: You're not fine, you okay? Yeah, you're not fine, guys.

But yeah I think what we need is organizations like our non profit doing more consulting with these governments, and I hope that as things get worse, they'll begin to go to organizations like ours that are interested in real solutions, and not things that are just designed to appease special interest groups that said, it's going to be very hard to do because when, in regards to perinatalism, because, you're not really rewarded in any way for efficacious results there isn't a huge motivation politically speaking for this type of delayed reward.

It's not like the economy or something like that. So I don't expect it to actually happen.

Simone Collins: Yeah. Oh, [00:32:00] sorry for hiccups McGee over here. She's been I think she's getting better, but yeah. Oh, I love you though. And at least, individual families are going to figure this out. If not countries and nations, so it'll be okay.

Malcolm Collins: Have a great day. Simone.

Simone Collins: I love you. Me too. You got the kids.

In this thought-provoking discussion, Malcolm and Simone delve into the reasons behind the far left's visceral reactions to traditional, wholesome lifestyles. They explore how the ultra-progressive ideology views emotional pain as a form of violence and how this leads to a disdain for happy, heteronormative relationships. The couple also touches on the concerning trend of trans activists targeting vulnerable communities, particularly lesbians and autistic children. Simone shares her unique perspective as a former progressive woman now living a fulfilling, traditional life with Malcolm. Join them as they unpack the complexities of this controversial topic and shed light on the importance of specialization and trust in healthy relationships.

Malcolm Collins: [00:00:00] any form of emotional pain is considered a form of violence and something that should be systematically avoided. So if it

Simone Collins: causes you pain through cognitive dissonance, like maybe I would have wanted to have, we're going

Malcolm Collins: to get there. We're going to get there, but you jumped to the answer, but we got to get to their point by point. I was watching lesbians complaining about their communities being invaded and I just can't imagine What it would feel like . Imagine you're living in a society where

like space Marines exist. Okay. There are these people that are 20 percent larger than you, five times stronger than you.. But now these people who are very sexually aggressive are demanding that you suck their penises.

And now everyone who you thought before was like part of your safe space is now saying that you're a bigot and you're not really straight because you won't suck these men's penises and so now you're kicked out of even these safe [00:01:00] spaces. Honestly, I think that's

Simone Collins: how it feels.

That's how it feels to them, for sure.

Would you like to know more?

Malcolm Collins: Hello, Simone! I'm excited to be here with you today! And I want to talk about an idea that I had recently, and I actually had it a while ago, but it's something that I've really been reflecting on in my thinking, is the vitriol we see certain, far left, urban monoculture activists react to wholesome things with.

Simone Collins: And how do you find wholesome here?

Malcolm Collins: What you're doing right now, being with your kid, they'll see a loving family. Or they'll see. They're like, that looks so heteronormative. That looks so no. You see this, you'll see a trad wife and they'll be like, this isn't a, this is misogynistic

Simone Collins: for

Malcolm Collins: her to be living this life or for her to be in a happy relationship with a [00:02:00] straight white man and here I can put the, I've been attacked

You went out with a white male? I was a freshman. Fresh person

Malcolm Collins: and I have been thinking why this.

Extremist reaction to this. And it occurred to me that from the perspective of ultra far left ideology wholesomeness and a wholesome lifestyle. is literally a lifestyle of violence. It is a form of violence against marginalized communities from their perspective, they would call marginalized communities.

How

Simone Collins: so if it's 100 percent sovereign in one's own

Malcolm Collins: house? Exactly. How because that is an interesting question. And so we need to go into their world structure. So the first aspect of their world structure that we need to understand is it is a cultural system that is completely defined. And I talk about this all the time, so I'll be very quick in summarizing this.

Defined around any form of emotional pain is [00:03:00] considered a form of violence and something that should be systematically avoided. So if it

Simone Collins: causes you pain through cognitive dissonance, like maybe I would have wanted to have, we're going

Malcolm Collins: to get there. We're going to get there, but you jumped to the answer, but we got to get to their point by point.

So you look at something like the Hayes movement, the healthy at every size movement, why would you hide from women mostly that being overweight. Is has negative long term health repercussions because it causes in the moment pain and therefore it's an evil thing to do because in the moment emotional pain and they force the evil thing to do or you tell them, your lifestyle will not lead you to long term happiness.

That is a form of violence against because you have caused this emotional pain to them. This is where things like misgendering and stuff like that, they're like, this is a form of violence and it should be outlawed. Like it's obviously not a form of violence. So then how are they defining violence?

They're defining violence around things that make them feel upset with [00:04:00] what they've allowed their lives to become. To call somebody out for their own failures as a form of violence.

Simone Collins: Wow. I could see that when our kids fight, it's typically because one kid sees the other kid having a really good time with a toy.

And then suddenly their entire life is misery because they do not have that one toy. And we even, for example, have bought copies of some toys. We have bumper cars, for example, and we have. Two identical orange bumper cars. Cause you very intelligently. The kids have noticed they make

Malcolm Collins: slightly different noises.

Simone Collins: Yes. So they're like we're like, there's another bumper car. Just get in the empty identical bumper. Cause they're like, no, and they see it. And yes they experience real pain.

Malcolm Collins: Actually, before we go further with this topic, I would like people to reflect on this in their own life. How much of the things they desire is just because they saw somebody else having fun with it.

And now they [00:05:00] want it. Keep in mind, I think

Simone Collins: everything makes a lot more sense though, once you've had toddlers and siblings,

Malcolm Collins: yeah. How hard coded this is in us, this world of status signaling. And I saw somebody else who had these things and they are either high status or seem to be happy.

Therefore I want these things. That's why I need that

Simone Collins: thing. Yes.

Malcolm Collins: The trad wife marketing works so well to market an idea and a lifestyle, right? But

Simone Collins: we'll hold on though, because for whatever reason, trad wives don't appear to be watching. the progressive YouTubers and the progressive commentators and going, Oh, why don't I have my, I don't know what do they have?

Malcolm Collins: Nobody wants their lives. Like I, I look at the, these ultra progressive lives. I just don't think anybody wants them. They're like, yeah, but I get to do whatever I want and be affirmed for being whoever I want to be. And we're, meanwhile the other side of the aisle is like, But won't that like really mess up your head and cause a lot of mental health issues and make you fundamentally unfulfilled and they're like don't [00:06:00] say that's violence

Simone Collins: because intuitively I would expect like when I model my progressively raised self, I would assume that when people from more conservative cultures see my progressive lifestyle of getting to do whatever I want in the moment that feels good.

That they would be jealous Oh, I'm fasting on Sunday. It's conference Sunday and I can't eat or whatever. And then Oh, look, they're eating pancakes at IHOP, but I'm so jealous and whatever, right? Like you think they'd be jealous. And it's interesting to me that doesn't seem to be taking place that we look at.

Malcolm Collins: I think the progressive model of the conservative mind is just tinged by bigotry. Where bigotry is, prejudgment and dehumanization of another group that they don't understand from the perspective of conservatives that they get to, masturbate all day, whenever they feel like and eat all the foods they feel like whenever they feel like, and, um, we're not looking at that was envy.

We're like, Oh, like that's sad. Which is [00:07:00] also very interesting from, Progressive mindset when they're looking at these videos and they're looking at these ideas and you have created this cognitive dissonance in them like the wholesomeness is literally a form of violence against them.

Simone Collins: It is

Malcolm Collins: literally hurtful to them because it shows. That two groups promised two different things. And both said, this thing will give you happiness. There's two different cultural assumptions around what gives a person fulfillment and happiness. And they need to believe that the other group was lying because they know that there's no happiness at the end of what they have.

And I will say, Okay. There is definitely a form of the trad wife, like the ultra strict trad wife. We've done a different video on this. That is a complete LARP and it is it does lead to unhappiness. Ultimately, you work at a, a relationship like Stephen Crowder's or something like that, where he's bought into this ultra traditionalist mindset that is not really, [00:08:00] it has like genuine misogyny as part of it.

Or, Lauren Southern who got the divorce after, trying trad wife lifestyle. And just seeing that, you need a real traditional relationship. So I'd go watch her video on that and I'll post the title card on the screen here.

So it's easier to find. But this is interesting because it provides an explanation for something that I think can be confusing to conservatives, which is. Progressives for so long said they just wanted the government out of their house, not regulating them. Why now that they are in power, are they trying to disintermediate anyone from seeing these sort of conservative messages?

And are they so antagonistic to these have to be healthy, heterosexual relationships and marriages? And even wholesome gay marriages. So we have gay friends who are like conservative leaning and have kids and have structured this very wholesome lifestyle for themselves. And they confide in us that they actually deal with a lot of ostracization [00:09:00] from the gay community and are seen as being traitors to the community.

And you actually see this within a black community as well. For example, like you can ask, like, why are so often these wholesome, two parent black families seen as race traitors, seen as like othered by the black community? Like you're not really black, they'll say these things that they vote conservative and move into these conservative mindsets.

And part of it is that they are a form of violence against the iterations of the black community you. that went with other cultural hypotheses like the dissolution of the family unit, which I should say is being pushed very hard. It's like a key aspect of Marxist philosophy is the dissolution of the family unit.

And so they've worked really hard in the communities where they have more sway, like the black community, to actively dissolve family units.

Simone Collins: Wow.

Malcolm Collins: And so like the huge percentage of black kids that are being born, and

I'll put the statistic here into single families, that [00:10:00] is an active campaign by.

Certain extremists, like priest factions within the urban monoculture.

And I also think that this comes to another thing where they're like you guys are often defying at far, progressives and stuff like that and getting worried about it. Like, why are you doing?

That right and I should point out here that we don't like you'll never hear us on our channel like Attacking like gay men, for example, or even really gay women on our channel but you'll often hear us complaining about the trans community. So what's the difference between these various groups, right?

And it's that the trans community is really actively targeting individuals who I do not believe are actually trans. And most of them are individuals who are have mental health issues. Really disproportionately, they target autistic children, which our children have fallen in the category of and attempt to, I actually had a joke recently that I was going to put on Twitter or something where I was like, we have [00:11:00] autistic children.

Or as they're called within the trans community eggs. Do you know what an egg is in the trans community? That's a target that they think might be potentially trans that needs to have it shell cracked. And if you look at the recent research that's been coming out, we now know that of 11 year olds nine out of 10 of them who identify with the opposite gender are going to detransition within five years.

are going to no longer have that predilection within five years. Yeah.

Simone Collins: They're doing irreparable damage if they're getting some kind of intervention.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Yeah. And if you look at the long term medical issues that people who transition have and stuff like that. So that's why we focus so much on that community because it's actively doing harm to other cultural groups and survives through this active form of harm.

Which actually brings me to another thing I could complain about right now on this episode because it was really getting to me today based on some episodes I was watching of de transitioned individuals and lesbians complaining [00:12:00] about their communities being invaded and I just can't imagine What it would feel like I understand where some TERFs are coming from what it would feel like to be a lesbian woman and have this movement that was moving to like women only spaces where you could go and dating apps and just as the rest of the gay rights movement is really getting together now, all of a sudden, if you're a lesbian woman on a dating app, everyone who's reaching out to you is a non passing trans woman.

Every single person that's reaching out and you are being called a bigot for not going on dates with them.

We're keep in mind, a lot of these women have fear around getting graped or something like that.

Simone Collins: Or they're just in terms of sexual orientation, uniquely turned off by male characteristics.

That's totally a thing that exists.

So a couple of things I wanted to go a bit deeper on here. One of the things we talk about in the pragmatist guide to [00:13:00] sexuality. Is that human arousal when it comes to gender. He is not divided into male and female. It's divided into specific environmental stimuli. I E seeing a penis, seeing breast, seeing the male form, seeing the female form and it exists on a spectrum of arousal to discuss.

So in some individuals seeing one of these gendered things can generate a very large amount of disgust in them. The exact opposite of arousal. Actually, we argue that it's literally the opposite of arousal. Um, when you are aroused, your pupils dilate, you look at something longer, you typically breathe in.

When you are disgusted, you typically look away from something as much as possible. You want to get away from it. And instead of go closer to it, your pupils contract. , and you hold your nose. We suspect they're operating off the same system, but anyway, , you know, Th th they are experiencing an extreme amount of disgust when they're seeing these individuals.

And we'd also note. [00:14:00] The, , trans. Individuals. You know, People born men who are going into these lesbian spaces, they are not the normal types of trans individuals. You see, they are,

Well, the creepy ones, the ones who don't have any sort of. Normal social consideration and no sort of boundaries. And this is the thing where a lot of people are like, come on. Are you really telling me that? If you gave creepy, sexually aggressive men. , way to predate on women, just by lying about their gender, that they would do that. That that creepy, sexually aggressive Ben would lie to try to sleep with lesbian women. And then of course I, you reflect on this for a second and you, of course. Of course that's exactly what creepy, sexually aggressive men would do, especially if you gave them a social cheat where no one's allowed to criticize their behavior. All the men who claim to be lesbian are AGP. 100%. Because they're heterosexual, right? If they were gay [00:15:00] dudes who were trans, they wouldn't even be anywhere near lesbian spaces. I have never met a transbian that was not an autodynophile. And that is I think even the worst part of this. Is we are getting the sickest and creepiest dudes.

This isn't the what most people think a trans woman is, I think the most average person who's just not involved in this thinks a trans woman is a super effeminate gay man who transitioned fully, and they're like, Oh, she's okay, she can use the bathroom, which is, and it's that is not the majority of what's happening here. Hi, my name is Luz. I'm a trans and polyamorous therapist in Texas, and this is my therapy theme of the week. This week's theme honors Lesbian Visibility Week.

As I myself am a trans lesbian, this is what I want to say about lesbians. One of the reasons why I love being a lesbian and I love lesbians is because we get to show the world that it is possible to [00:16:00] love outside the dimensions of patriarchy. We, with sapphic love, create an entirely different dimension, an entirely different way of loving people.

and living, and it's so f****n beautiful. It's as important as the sunshine. I want to say that a lot of lesbians, particularly cis lesbians, initiate flirting with other women is through eye contact you can just tell in the eyes oh, they're into you.

As an autistic trans woman, that doesn't work. Because for one, I need people to be very direct with me, because I don't like to make assumptions about their intentions. By default, most trans women have their walls up and are ready to brawl because if a woman's staring at us, there's just this innate fear that they're gonna, that they've clocked us and they're gonna say some TERF b******t and we gotta start thre Who the f yeah, you're gonna be clocked.

Look at you! Have you seen yourself? Is there a mirror in your house, sir?

Malcolm Collins: [00:17:00] Yeah. And so if I was going to convey to a straight guy, how this would feel okay. Imagine you're living in a society where

like space Marines exist. Okay. There are these people that are 20 percent larger than you, five times stronger than you. And You had decided that you only liked women.

You as a guy only like women, right? You like having sex with women and you really don't like penises or anything like that, but now all of a sudden, a category of the space Marines who are all male, okay, they all have penises. Everything like that has started saying that they're women on dating apps.

They're the only group reaching out to you. They go into what used to be space like safe spaces, because you used to have these private spaces where like only men could go before. But now these people who are very sexually aggressive are coming into these spaces and they're demanding that you suck their penises.

They are demanding, and now everyone who you thought before was like part of your [00:18:00] safe space is now saying that you're a bigot and you're not really straight because you won't suck these men's penises and so now you're kicked out of even these safe spaces. Honestly, I think that's

Simone Collins: how it feels.

That's how it feels to them, for sure.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, that's how it feels to them. It's either you suck space marine cock or you are no longer a straight male. Like you'd be like, just one of the fear that you would live with every day when you go to one of these spaces. And then all of a sudden this 12 foot tall person marches in with 10 times your muscle mass.

And this formerly was a community where you felt safe talking about what it feels like to be a non space marine in a space marine society. Um, I feel so bad for them it's not that I don't also feel for actual trans individuals, which I think is a real thing, I think some individuals are actually trans individuals, but they can't understand why women who were born women would want spaces where these other category of person isn't coming into or [00:19:00] because men are like people who are born men are much more like sexually aggressive on these apps and stuff like that.

And now there's

no like female only dating apps or women who were born women, like CIS women only CIS lesbian women only dating apps that just doesn't exist, like even her and stuff like that is now regularly promoting like.

You can get categorized and kicked off the app for being a quote unquote turf for saying trans women and then you can get kicked off Tinder for this. You can get kicked off of,

First I got kicked off of Tinder for putting that I was I think I put female only. Cause I know her used to be pretty specific for women, and then they released the whole, uh, thing like their whole policy basically saying, Oh we don't discriminate against anybody and everybody's welcome.

And then at that point, you're like then it's not. Lesbian, like it's not for women. Her has even had, I don't remember the exact wording, but they've had like kind of pop up announcements on the [00:20:00] app about TERFism and there's this specific category to report people for being TERFs on what supposed, what started as a lesbian dating app

Malcolm Collins: and so all of the people reaching out to you. And so you just become like an incel, like if people say incel women don't exist, like this is a one category where it'd be like, there probably are actual in cell lesbians just because you can't go into any public space without being hit on by like hundreds of.

What to you? To me, I've got nothing against trans people doing what they're doing, but would I sleep with one of them? Especially one of them who doesn't pass? As a straight man most straight men are like, viscerally, yeah, I get it, lesbians. I get why you're having this visceral reaction to this.

 Then to have this entire safety net. So there's that, but then there's also this hatred of wholesomeness that we regularly see because of the explosion of mental health issues in these communities that sought like a constant hose of dopamine just do whatever I want, [00:21:00] whenever I want.

Simone Collins: And there's a lot of cope that comes out of that too. One of the most common responses appears to be, Oh this is all a lie. It is all an illusion. I think this is one of the big reasons why eight passengers crashed and burned so publicly is that at first you had this large trad family. That took a more conservative approach to parenting.

They were harder on punishment, et cetera. And then finally they just went off the rails, crashed and burned. And it allowed a huge portion of the community, the progressive community to say, see exactly every family, every conservative family that appears wholesome. In the end, it turns out that the mother has joined some kind of psychologist cult and is leaving the father and the kids are being You know, horribly treated and all of these things.

And that's a huge message that I see as well. So it's not just framing it as an attack. I think a lot of it also is just turning it into cope because even acknowledging that it's an attack acknowledges that. [00:22:00] You wish that you had that for yourself.

Malcolm Collins: So as a former progressive woman who grew up in San Francisco did you think relationships like ours existed or did you

Simone Collins: know, of course not,

Malcolm Collins: you've seen pretty deeply into both the lifestyles, be the person who's just being like, honestly, this is how it is.

Like what are your thoughts? Thoughts like, is it really as good as they say it better than they say it is? Is it, yeah. What are your real thoughts?

Simone Collins: The mindset that I was raised with, if I were to see a trad wife and I'd never encountered a trad wife, so I would have thought that it was fictional first would be that this is someone who's extremely sheltered and doesn't know any better.

So they've just been essentially robbed of a series of opportunities in their lives and they are a trad wife because that is all that they've been exposed to. Which to be fair is how many people are raised. Ayla was raised in an environment where she was just told that, like, all of her education was so she could be a good homeschooling, stay at home mother, and then she leaves that world and realizes that she was robbed of a lot of opportunities.

And that's a very legitimate [00:23:00] complaint. So I think the. The perception of the world that I was raised with is not totally wrong. And I think that's one of the reasons why this kind of mindset, this view that a lot of people in this position are being lied to are just missing a lot of opportunities that they otherwise would have pursued is because a lot of the time it's true.

I think that the big thing that's missing is that progressives don't grow up understanding fully the supportive role that traditional cultures play. And I definitely grew up. Really envying and really missing this concept of having traditions and having holidays and having a cohesive culture and having a, we do this, we stand for that.

This is what we're all about. And even the books that my parents read to me as I was a kid, it seemed like this fantasy that was so appealing, that was so cozy, but that had gone extinct. So I could see. People [00:24:00] who are progressive now looking at a trad family and saying, you are just cosplaying as this thing that isn't real anymore.

And it can't be real. And this is really offensive because I want it to like my parents and many people went through this. They were read. Little house on the prairie by their parents. So they read those books as a kid and they loved this life. That's actually quite austere. That's quite difficult.

There's disease, there's danger, there's deprivation, but it's one of the coziest book series you could possibly read. And there's this perception that just. It's something that could happen in the past and couldn't happen now.

Malcolm Collins: And I think that, people hear that I have final say on all things in our relationship.

And I think that there's the assumption that then I must be like as a person living in this relationship where it's like an actually healthy sort of trad life relationship. Do you feel like the misogyny, I think you would assume as an outsider, like of me having final say in everything do you feel like you're not consulted in decisions or that I,

Simone Collins: Not at all.

I think what people miss when it comes down to [00:25:00] hierarchies in a relationship is that it doesn't feel like a hierarchy. It feels it feels like specialization of labor. It feels like an economic decision and choice. Someone that I was corresponding with who followed this podcast was telling me this is someone I admire deeply.

She's amazing. A homeschooling mother of seven kids. That's what we always call it. We're not going to name, we don't name anyone. Cause we're not going to reveal anyone, but she was talking about how people really misunderstand trad relationships and that this whole concept of people exerting their dominance is like pulling rank.

And whenever you're pulling rank. You are essentially like paying capital. You are you're demonstrating the fact that you didn't have that rank in the first place. You're trying to reassert something that you haven't earned. And that in a true relationship where you have a hierarchy, because it's naturally sorting, you have specialization of labor and you never have this feeling of maintaining frame or pulling rank or s**t testing, because it is just so clear [00:26:00] that.

You are really good at this. I'm really good at this. We're going to do our jobs and we trust each other to do a good job because we see that the outcomes are ideal when we trust each other, that you earn that hierarchy, you earn that position. So I think that's also something that's not really seen in.

In progressive circles, when they look at traditional circles, because one relationships have been so broken down that it's just understood that people are in these atomized relationships where they don't really have, no one has a specialization. No one has a role. No one has. Everyone has to be able to do absolutely everything by themselves.

Their finances are by themselves. Their careers by themselves. Their friendships are by themselves. So there's no specialization. And then there's also this really huge misrepresentation among so called conservatives who constantly talk about maintaining frame and constantly talk about s**t tests and constantly talk about their dominance and constantly are pulling rank.

And they totally mess, like they [00:27:00] act as though that they are, they represent trad life when they are 100 percent not at all representative of trad life.

Malcolm Collins: I completely agree with you. And another interesting thing that I wanted to highlight here because our eight passengers video never is going live because we did film one on it.

I said on that video a long time ago right after the eight passenger situation happened is. I looked at some of the stuff. So people who don't know, she basically fell into a cult with this other lady who started living with them. And I looked at pictures of her and I was like, this lady's a lesbian.

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: And then I'll put pictures on the screen.

If you grew up around a lot of gay people, you can like. Tell like she sets off the gate or to such an extreme

Simone Collins: that even people with no gate are like, but that's

Malcolm Collins: a lesbian, right? Yeah. Her actions make sense now. So what she would do is try to break up men and tell them that they were addicted to porn of women.

And I think it's because she was. And so she just learned she could say this to any guy to break up. Like her whole thing was attempting to break up straight. I don't

Simone Collins: even, I don't think necessarily she has [00:28:00] to have been addicted to porn to do that. I think she discovered that it was very easy to do that too.

Assert her own dominance within a relationship and disintermediate the husband and wife. It was actually worth

Malcolm Collins: doing a whole video on how she brainwashed people because it was a really interesting tactic. Comment below if you think so. Yeah. And it sounds like our kids are back from the park.

Oh my gosh. I love my wife. I love my kids and I love this life you have created for me. We need to

Simone Collins: do some wholesome family time. I'm looking forward to it. Am I making, we're making you beef bulgogi tonight.

Malcolm Collins: Bulgogi and then corn ribs.

Simone Collins: Yes. Oh my

Malcolm Collins: gosh. Ribs are, but I saw them at Trader Joe's and I was like, let's try it.

Simone Collins: Let's do it.

Malcolm Collins: Let's do it.

Simone Collins: Yeah. All

Malcolm Collins: right. You are a very special and amazing woman. And thank you for committing violence against the urban monoculture every day by enjoying your life and broadcasting. for,

Simone Collins: Asserting your dominance. Through your natural superiority. I love you so much. Maybe [00:29:00]

Malcolm Collins: this is tied to women online all the time.

Always posting their losses. Like everyone's always talking about women posting their losses. That might make another video. There's this trend online of like women posting like really horrible days or when they really screwed up or when they really like just Oh, this horrible thing happened to me.

Men don't do this very frequently. Yeah. I'll pull up a compilation on it. It's an interesting phenomenon.

Simone Collins: I have not fallen down this hole yet. Okay, cool. Looking forward to it.

Malcolm Collins: I've got the kids.

Simone Collins: Thank you.

The Site Simone Mentioned: https://www.emigal.com/2022/01/16/blood-testing-focused-on-longevity/ Our Discord: https://discord.gg/EGFRjwwS92

In this eye-opening episode, Malcolm and Simone share their harrowing experiences with the failures of the modern medical system. From being denied prophylactic rabies vaccines for their children to not being informed about elevated lead levels in their daughter's blood, the couple realizes that the focus of the current healthcare system is on bureaucratic compliance and liability rather than patient outcomes. They discuss the importance of taking personal ownership of their family's health by proactively monitoring blood work, conducting regular scans, and staying informed about cutting-edge research. Malcolm and Simone also explore the idea of creating a network of like-minded physicians and families to support each other as the infrastructure of society begins to break down. Throughout the conversation, they touch on topics such as the Sinclair method for treating alcoholism, the failings of nationalized healthcare systems, and the impressive efficiency of South Korea's medical industry.

Simone Collins: [00:00:00] any normal parent would pull that up, look at it and be like 3 means.

But I'm not getting any alerts.

Malcolm Collins: I'm not being told by anyone, So it must be fine. So it must be fine

Simone Collins: we weren't really paying attention or taking ownership of it ourselves. Instead, we were like, Oh, if no one's telling me anything's wrong, I guess nothing's wrong, which was apparently a really bad approach

I don't know why we didn't assume that this was also happening with the medical system, but the focus of this system is not on patient outcomes, it is on bureaucratic compliance and ass covering and justification of bureaucratic structures,

Malcolm Collins: what I want to do here is take this opportunity for not just for our family, but for the network of families that makes up our community. This is something you can join if you're like, my family would benefit from this.

But what we also need to make this realistically implementable for us is like minded medical professionals who are interested in, providing a new type of telehealth, basically where they're much more like [00:01:00] a thesis advisor. By that, what I mean is the patient can't just decide on anything themselves. They need to then take all of their research to the doctors, say, here's this study, here's this study, here's this study.

And I think as a result, given the symptoms are given this, I should be prescribed X which again, creates reasons for value aligned families to group together and support each other.

As the bureaucratic infrastructure of our society is beginning to break down. Because it is. It's not just the school systems. It's not just the infrastructure that's falling apart. Civilization is essentially falling apart around us.

would you like to know more?

Malcolm Collins: Hello, Simone We are coming into this episode I will start with mitching and ask for anyone who fits this criteria and doesn't make it to the end of the episode but we are looking for values aligned individuals Uh, with MD, so value aligned doctors, and we're likely going to create a list for different states for our listeners to directly contact [00:02:00] them, but obviously we would really love one either outside Pennsylvania, but preferably was in Pennsylvania due to some prescribing laws.

But the reason we need to make this ask is that we have. Completely lost faith in the, I guess I'd call it bureaucratic medical institutions in the United States and largely in the world because I, I lost faith in the NHS when I was living in the UK and I was like at least in the U S because as profit driven, et cetera.

And now I have realized that I should have been putting as much stock in these institutions, having my back. Children's best interest at heart as I had put in the school system, having my Children's best interest at heart. And that these institutions in their own way have become as corrupted and as useless as the public school system and are becoming increasingly more so as time goes on, to the extent where if your kids are going [00:03:00] to just, an average age.

doctor down the road. I would say that I would not trust that they are safe. So do you want to go into the events that led us here, Simone?

Simone Collins: Sure. Yes. It all started with a a bat that we found crawling around in our yard. Octavian ran up to Malcolm and said that our dog, the professor, was barking at something scary.

And Malcolm being the ever attentive dad did not dismiss this. And went outside to check on the kids and saw her dog barking at what seemed like the ground, but it turned out that when He looked closer. There was a bat crawling along it. And

so we put the bat in a giant goldfish box. And put a sign on it that said live potentially rabid bat called the government, found the government testing location. Malcolm drove forever to drop off this live bat, which a government bureaucrat was pretty dismissive about,

Malcolm Collins: I know they were like, Oh, okay.

I'll put it with the mail. And I was like, don't put that with the rest of them out. It's like everything [00:04:00] live. Rabid. And I told them when I dropped them off, this is a live, potentially rabid bat. And there was a, I wrote

Simone Collins: on

Malcolm Collins: the, on the

Simone Collins: box, the

Malcolm Collins: lady was like, Oh, okay. And then she said it was the rest of the packages.

And I was like, excuse me, ma'am. I said, that is a live. Potentially rabid bat. And then she seemed to have this moment of recognition where she goes Oh, she picks it up and takes it to the back of her home. But And we

Simone Collins: thought nothing of it when we dropped it off, because, what are the odds, and we, actually we know the odds that this was, Going to be a rabid bat.

The odds were about 1 percent or even less than that, that this would be a rabid bat. So we thought, okay, great. Better safe than sorry.

And then wait and the 24 hour period passes of exposure. So by the way, if you ever are exposed to rabid animal, it is very important. That you, especially if you've been bitten or you've been in a scenario in which potentially spit or brain matter from the bat has gotten into your mouth or an open wound.

Within 24 hours, you have to get a rabies vaccine. [00:05:00] Or the odds of you contracting rabies and then dying from it, because if you actually contract rabies, it is 100 percent fatal. It is a brain virus. You are going to die. Is you have to go. So we're a little nervous for the 24 hour period passing before knowing that, this bat was tested.

Government's taken a while, but we're like, yeah, government bureaucracies, what are you going to do? And then finally, at the end of the day on Friday, we received this message The bat was rabid. The bat was rabid. It was a rabid bat. . And they, we asked them, we grilled our children. And our eldest son, who's old enough to report on these things, insisted that nobody touched the bat, except for the professor.

It

Malcolm Collins: was a little son who can, who can talk competently. Um, and, And, you know, I went out there immediately, I do not think that there was, like the odds of exposure are incredibly low, but now we know we have rabies in our yard. So we're like, okay, it's good that there was no exposure. The dog notified us.

Simone Collins: God bless the professor. Dogs are amazing.

Malcolm Collins: Yes. So bless the professor cause it was right next to their playground, right?

Simone Collins: At the base of their [00:06:00] slide. Like literally if one of them had gone down their slide of their little play fort. They would have, but first right on top of the bat.

Malcolm Collins: We're like, okay, so we know there's rabbit animals in our yard. Now we should get, because there's the big rabies shot that you can get, which is the post exposure shot. And that seemed like, given the information we have. But the, Course of action here would be OK, don't get the post exposure vaccine, but get the prophylactic vaccine.

So the prophylactic rabies vaccine is for if you are going to be encountering animals with rabies, or if there's like rabies in your area, it provides some boost, but it's not as severe as the post exposure vaccine. Go through our ordeal attempting to get the prophylactic rabies vaccine.

And keep in mind, this isn't the only story, there's the rabies story and then there's another story that happened immediately afterwards that was even more obscene.

Simone Collins: So we, we call our kids pediatric practice, which is one of those it's many doctors, many nurses. There's no one doctor. It's not this tiny family practice. [00:07:00] We do that because we think that ideally they we thought they functioned better, had better resources and they tell us, oh, okay we'll send this message on to a doctor because we could only call them on Saturday.

It was, the office was closed when we first learned of this. And that we wouldn't be able to get an answer from them until Monday and then they would look into it on Monday, which is bad because when you're trying to get vaccines for your kids who've been potentially exposed and also just prophylactically protect them, you want to do it as soon as possible.

So that was already pretty bad. Then on Monday we call again. And this

Malcolm Collins: was their emergency line, by the way.

Simone Collins: Yeah, this was their emergency line. Okay, continue. Yeah. And then so we. Oh. Oh my god, sorry. Then on Monday, we called them multiple times saying, Hey, our kids were exposed. This is really urgent.

This is a big deal. We really want to get those vaccines ordered. If you have to get them in, obviously you don't have them in stock. Long

Malcolm Collins: story short, to not make the story boring to our audience, we eventually learn that legally, whoever owns them won't let them prescribe rabies vaccines.

Simone Collins: Or order [00:08:00] them.

Yeah. Under no circumstances are they to give people rabies vaccines. And what they just told us repeatedly every single time was go to an emergency room. We call it the emergency room and the emergency room says, Oh, we don't give prophylactic rabies vaccines. So already they're basically telling us we have to lie to them if we go, if we want to get vaccines, but they do have the vaccines if we want them, but we have to pay an emergency room fee.

The last time we did this, because we were actually exposed to a bat that was in our house while we were asleep, so we don't know if we were bitten or spit on or something, we had to go in and get them, we paid over 10, 000. An emergency room fees. And

Malcolm Collins: then the question is if it had been a real bad exposure and some family was trying to do the right thing, talk to their doctors first, they would have dismissed them for a week before giving them the answer that they have just decided legally they don't want to give out these vaccines.

Yeah, that isn't that is enough time that somebody would. be past the period of which a post exposure [00:09:00] vaccine would help them and they would die.

Simone Collins: Yeah. Oh, we called urgent care clinics. We called every possible channel we thought we could call. They would maybe have them. But it gets worse

Malcolm Collins: than that. It gets worse than that.

So then less than a week later, our little girl goes in for her 18 months and I she gets a lead test and I tell her if there is any lead in her system, and I was very direct about this. We actually have evidence that I was direct about this, that we'll get to in an instant, but give me a call if there is any lead in her system at all.

Okay. We don't get a call, of course, because they don't care. They genuinely do not care about the well being of our kids. But Simone was able to proactively look up what the results of the test were. And it was 4. 5. Now, the number at which we would get a call would be 5. That's where they legally have to call us.

However 4. 5 is more than twice the national average, which is around 1. 6. Yeah, at [00:10:00] that age. This is when you're talking about long term IQ effects and we need to do something about it. And we have developed our own plan to work this out and our kid will be fine, but they wouldn't have told us they would not have told us and they were going to not tell us.

This is a Horrifying, but it just shows that they're not legally required to. They're not going to do it because they are not looking out for your kid's long term best interest. And then I told someone, I was like there must be something new in the house because they would have told us with our other kids, because we went and we found the old medical records.

They even had a doctor's note. Dad is very concerned about lead. He wants us to tell him if any comes up in the test.

Simone Collins: Yeah. Like literally it said in clinical notes from previous appointments when our kids got lead testing. Dad. Requested a call with results. Not even if they were above the threshold, just any result.

So I

Malcolm Collins: assumed that they were not, they're no lead at all. We go back and we look at the old results, three, twice the national average. [00:11:00] So now we're at this state where it's four years and when you know something like lead and the effects of lead and IQ, this now we've got to be like, Oh, we won't give your kids the, the type of stuff associated with getting lead out of their system, et cetera, unless they're over certain numbers.

We're just like, you know what? Yeah. Yeah. We can no longer trust the medical system anymore.

Simone Collins: And also because you would probably ask if you are looking at the results of your appointments why didn't you identify the three, like when it was at

Malcolm Collins: three?

Simone Collins: Oh yeah,

Malcolm Collins: why didn't we identify this?

So the way they sent the results, it didn't send markers. It didn't send national averages. It was literally nothing. It was, yeah, it was

Simone Collins: just, it was just three. And it was just four point five. Yeah. And it also, it included a little a little tool tip. Icon in the online system that they have clicked through to it.

And it basically said a disclaimer, but it didn't actually provide information on ranges, what the national averages are. You

Malcolm Collins: put that into, you then searched for national averages. You went through AI, everything like that. And you're like, Oh s**t, like this [00:12:00] is actually a problem.

Simone Collins: But any normal parent would pull that up, look at it and be like 3 means.

But I'm not getting any alerts.

Malcolm Collins: I'm not being told by anyone, So it must be fine. So it must be fine. And now we are at this point where I'm like, okay and we had already been moving to this system this year was in our house, which is to move to Ezra scans, which we've talked about before.

These are for about. 1, 500. You can get a full body scan. They've got centers in major cities across the U. S. And they are incredibly detailed in terms of finding stuff. Yeah, basically they don't own the machines.

Simone Collins: They don't own the machines, but they basically are able to book a slot for you with various practices.

That's why they're able to do this in many locations. And then their team goes inch by inch through your body and analyzes them providing preventative health care, especially when it comes to cancer. Our plan is to basically get those. We also emailed Emmy Gahl, who's the founder of Ezra. And cause he's one of those quantified self really conscientious health people.

And we're like, okay what blood tests do [00:13:00] you order? Because we know what like Peter Ortea orders, we know all these other things, but We want to know what you order and how you keep track of it because he's that kind of person who's just going to know. And so he gave us, and we can put this actually in the comments or the description of this video this blog post that he shared on all the blood tests that he orders.

And also he has a spreadsheet template, which we now have copied and we'll be using where you can keep track of your results over time so that you are personally tracking and charting your health. Because of HIPAA laws in the United States, at least, it's really difficult for you even to gain access to your medical test results and for them to be portable anywhere.

So you don't have one comprehensive place to look at all of your medical information. You have to create that for yourself. So our plan was personally for us, for you and me, Malcolm, that we're going to do an ASRA scan every other year, cause they're crazy expensive, but we should probably do it because cancer and to do blood panels that we ourselves using AI analyze because no one else is going to do it.

We just have to get a doctor to order it and try to get as much of our [00:14:00] insurance to cover it as possible, which is not going to be a lot because we have a high deductible plan because we're not wealthy people. That's where we were, but we didn't do it with our kids because we're like our pediatric practice.

They care

Malcolm Collins: about kids. No one's going to care about the best interested kids. Now I have learned that they literally care nothing about your kids. Here's what we

Simone Collins: learned. And this is the, this is ridiculous because it's the same thing that we knew about the education. System. It's the same thing we knew about the governmental system.

I don't know why we didn't assume that this was also happening with the medical system, but the focus of this system is not on patient outcomes, it is on bureaucratic compliance and ass covering and justification of bureaucratic structures, which is what you talk about in the pragmatist guide to governance all the time.

But yeah, patient outcomes. Not at all. The focus. I

Malcolm Collins: love the way you worded it, which is the medical system is not built around outcomes is built around liability and bureaucracy. And that is what's driving decisions within the industry right now. And that is not your best interest. That's not in your kids best interest.

But also, [00:15:00] let's talk about for me, right? You look at something like naltrexone, which is basically banned in the United States

Simone Collins: and

Malcolm Collins: is incredibly useful. Yeah. That there's,

Simone Collins: there's literally a cure for alcoholism. There's a cure for alcoholism, but doctors don't prescribe it because liability, the only liability is that naltrexone, by the way, is just.

It's a little hard on your liver. And obviously if someone's an alcoholic, their liver has already gone through. It's

Malcolm Collins: actually partially AA has really lobbied to prevent it from becoming common. And we can do a whole separate video on that.

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: Other solutions to alcoholism because then do people become a quote unquote, a dry drunk, which means they didn't solve the real issues that led to alcoholism, which for them is a lack of.

Their religion, which means it's a religion, right? If there's a medical solution to alcoholism, which the original founder of AA said he was founding this as a stop gap until a medical solution became available. And now they're the solution that works in 83 percent of people who try it. The Sinclair method.

It's and it allows you to, if you want to keep drinking when you want to just [00:16:00] not be addicted anymore.

And Simone, you see me night and day before this I used to drink at least 45 beers a day.

Or more. For years of my life, decades of my life and people are like, come on, you couldn't possibly, I love it when people are like, you couldn't possibly be drinking that much. And I'm like, you don't know my family history. You, you graduated with good grades from the Stanford MBA, constantly hammered.

You

Simone Collins: were, you were never actually hammered or drunk. I think the fact was you drank beer, like a man 200 years ago, drank beer, which is to say that you drank beer flavored water, AKA Coors Light, and you drank it. constantly as though or water, just like people used to just like your ancestors used to.

And so you never really were drunk because also your tolerance was insanely high. And I never, the only time I saw you drunk was when my mom did that whole wedding thing and had us get in that she tricked me

Malcolm Collins: into a pagan wedding ceremony. Yeah. And [00:17:00] then you just

Simone Collins: switched to the hard stuff.

And you're like, yeah. I'm going to just you drank yourself to oblivion. I get angry or

Malcolm Collins: anything. It wasn't like I got angry. No. You were just like, I need to not be here. I was

Simone Collins: just trying to power through. That's, no. So there, there are different types of drinking. There's, there's European drinking there's, ancestor drinking, which is what you did.

And then there's frontier medicine where you're like, I need to knock myself out. Frontier medicine.

Malcolm Collins: To get through a pagan ceremony without offending your parents.

Simone Collins: Yeah. Just, yeah.

Malcolm Collins: But anyway. Okay. Anyway uh, I, the reason I bring up the naltrexin thing is I have learned like where I had saved myself from dying and that almost certainly saved me from dying was outside of the medical profession. It's something that's not even talked about within the medical profession. And

Simone Collins: it took you a long time to find that because there were many times where you tried a lot of other types of interventions and they just never really worked.

And you always did tons of research. It took forever. And then recently with

Malcolm Collins: that ongoing back pain and you couldn't identify what it was and the doctor should have known that epidurals can sometimes create these and you found it on. An ai?

Simone Collins: Oh yeah. After [00:18:00] my C-section I was for a month for three solid weeks in crippling back pain.

Like just turning over in bed caused so much pain that I would involuntarily yell let alone moving, taking care of an infant, being with our family. And at first I thought it was just hormonal changes and then I discovered it was. Almost certainly a complication from the spinal epidural that I got, which is just, it's not like anyone did their job poorly, but I'd emailed the practice about this.

I'm like, wow, like I can't. I can't move without being in extreme pain. What's going on? They never called me back. They never emailed me back. They never responded. And they told me that was the way that they wanted to be communicated with.

Malcolm Collins: So the point being is what are we doing to fix this for our kids, for us?

And I don't want to go into all of the maybe More experimental medical stuff that we may be doing as a family because I don't want people like coming after us or anything like that. But what I'm going to be putting together is a document that goes over all of the most cutting edge [00:19:00] research out there for different chemicals, different new tropics, how they might affect kids developmentally things that we can do about the lead and things that start, neural development again after I've already found some great options here. And it's still a low amount of lead, but it's way more than we would want. Like it's going to have an effect if we don't address it. And now, we recently had a guy come test every part of the house for lead, everything, including the chicken eggs, everything.

So we're going to have a full understanding of where this is coming from.

Now good news. It turned out. We had all our kids tested in the original, multiple results were false positives, , and that their actual lead levels were much lower. , in line was the average American led level. However, this is how, you know, we sort of view within our theological system. The agents of Providence or God, or the future police or whatever word you want to use within our system works. Is that. They find a way to notify us in a way that we just can't ignore that we [00:20:00] need to change some aspect of our behavior. And if I don't change my behavior

If I don't go through with developing this new system. And all of the other people, it may end up impacting. The events still end up happening in this timeline.

Malcolm Collins: So we are now. Moving to a system of Simone said, doing the scans proactively looking at the cutting edge research that's not being implemented into practice yet. Developing basically a mixture. I'm already beginning to put this together that will probably bake into some bars for our kids or something like that, or put in afterwards because it's overheated.

It can destroy the active ingredients and a lot of compounds. But we'll come up with some delivery mechanism. For our kids, I will make a lot of the information on our research public so other people can use these same things in addition to the Collins Institute, which right now, if you're interested, I need people who can go through it and tell me their feedback because we're that close to launch right now.

So let me know [00:21:00] anyone who's interested in that.

Sorry, I should clarify right here. The Collins Institute is our alternative to the public education system.

That we have been developing and are close to launching.

Malcolm Collins: And also we will be making this sort of medical stuff available. But what we also need to make this realistically implementable for us is like minded medical professionals who are interested in, providing a new type of telehealth, basically where the, a lot more of the, what the patient is doing is being researched by the patient and then basically being brought and argued to the doctor.

Basically the doctor in this system takes on a different role than a doctor. Historically, they're much more like a thesis advisor. By that, what I mean is the patient can't just decide on anything themselves. They need to then take all of their research to the doctors, say, here's this study, here's this study, here's this study.

And I think as a result, given the symptoms are given this, I should be prescribed X instead [00:22:00] of here's what's wrong with me. Can you prescribe me X? So to be clear,

Simone Collins: this isn't just experimental stuff. I, we also, I created a spreadsheet. where we are keeping track of basic blood work results, height, weight, blood pressure.

Last time we had an eye exam, like last time we've done all the important things because we realized that also we weren't. Because we assumed that the medical system would let us know if something seemed off we weren't really paying attention or taking ownership of it ourselves. Instead, we were like, Oh, if no one's telling me anything's wrong, I guess nothing's wrong, which was apparently a really bad approach and it just feels really good now To just plan on not trusting anyone and monitoring our own stuff and making sure here are the vaccines.

We all are going to need here. Here are our latest tests. Here's what we're monitoring for each person. That seems a little bit out of range, or they could be a warning sign. And here's what we're going to do about [00:23:00] it. Theoretically, I could also, once I've refined this massive spreadsheet format, where there's like sheets for everyone in the family and like a master like check in sheet and a master sheet of here's what resource to use for what, because there are many affordable virtual or urgent care options.

There are many affordable alternate options that are not necessarily covered by health care that you can use for testing. I can share that too. And

Malcolm Collins: so I, what I want to do here is take this opportunity for not just for our family, but for the network of families that makes up our community. This is something you can join if you're like, my family would benefit from this.

Let us know, and we are going to try to put together a network that connects. like minded physicians with families in our communities that want to take a lot more personal ownership over their own family's health. And be much more aggressive nutritionally and everything like that speaking. And here, what I mean is we are not the type of Everything needs to be perfect for our kid sort of family, right?

Like breast milk, for example, [00:24:00] right? Simone pumped for a bit with this kid, but we're probably not going to be doing that again for the next one. It just slows things down too much and people are like, oh, this has an effect. We are not about optimizing everything when there are costs of that optimization, i.

e. when she becomes fertile again, et cetera. But we are about optimizing for everything when it is. A trivial cost to us or our kids or something like that. And there were just so many low hanging fruits out there that I was finding as I was digging into the research here. So I should say that we're not trying to create a network for like over involved hypochondriacs.

That's not the idea here, but it's a network of people who would be. Using medicine and medication as if the medical industry hadn't frozen 10 years ago in terms of its advancement, which is what happened. And again, I should have known all this, when I look at I've been looking at more like trans affirming care stuff and stuff like that now, and it's if the medical industry was saying, [00:25:00] People should have been raising alarm bells about this a long time ago.

One reason I really like putting this together for our community and making these connections for our community is twofold. One is not only does it help make our community safer and help get us access to, more sovereignty, more family sovereignty. Two, if we are acting as intermediaries was in this there's not going to be some master list of physicians that It's public that people can target.

It allows us to make connections directly which is also much better and three, it allows for an additional source of income for some people within our community. But I guess even for potentially is it provides the opportunity for something that could turn into something more formalized as things go down the road, which again, creates reasons for value aligned families to group together and support each other.

As the bureaucratic infrastructure of our society is beginning to break down. Because it is. It's not just the school [00:26:00] systems. It's not just the infrastructure that's falling apart. Civilization is essentially falling apart around us. And only through creating bubbles where we continue to push science forwards, where we continue to push medicine forwards, can we But have any faction of humanity hope to continue to thrive at the species

Simone Collins: part of me wonders How other communities that have chosen to essentially go off the grid are handling this for example We know lots of people and journalists have covered how the Amish handle medical insurance, you know that they pool resources They all pay towards something and then the community covers when there's some kind of treatment that's prohibitively expensive like getting cancer treatment What I don't know is how they manage their ongoing health, how they decide to get vaccines, how they monitor or don't, their various levels of hormones and their growth and their weight and their height.

And should they be intervening or, what do you do when a kid has a rash? I'd be interested in learning that maybe someday we can trot off to [00:27:00] Lancaster. Lancaster, however you want to say it, and then see, what they do, talk with some families. I'm very curious, but yeah, I like that idea.

I like the idea of promoting any concierge doctor in who follows his podcast, who's, up for working with values in line people. And I'm just horrified. I, these are well meaning people. That's the problem is that we're not saying that the people within the medical establishment Are malicious in any way.

Every doctor that I personally worked with my pregnancy and delivery and C section, absolutely fantastic. Including, like the doctor who did my spinal, they did not do anything wrong. I just had a complication from it. And the office that didn't respond to my concerns and requests about crippling pain, they're working with dumb systems that don't work really well, and they're, And what

Malcolm Collins: motivation did they have to respond?

If they don't respond, then you go in for a visit and they make more money. Like the incentive system that's put into place with a lot of these drives behavior patterns. There is no reason to fix a problem like that. Like people not [00:28:00] responding to patient requests. From the perspective of the bosses or the management, when the outcome of that is more money like With a lot of this.

I think that what people get wrong is they Think about these big conspiracies like cancer medications are being withheld or discoveries because institutions can make more money. That's actually a lot harder to do because you have competing medical institutions and one of them had it, they would use it to undercut their competitors.

But when you're talking about something like a hospital, No, there isn't really the same competitive pressure for them to get back to you versus getting back to other people because there's typically only one or two other hospitals in an area that they're competing with, and they're usually not competing on service.

They're usually, the other crazy thing was when you started calling hospitals to try to find out how much a rabies vaccine would cost. And the answer was basically, We can't tell you.

Simone Collins: Yeah,

Malcolm Collins: what other thing in our society works that way on a random hidden expense. And so it's better for us going forwards to just [00:29:00] proactively manage this stuff ourselves and have a network that enables that,

And

Simone Collins: we know that, we have an international audience of this podcast and that, there, there are different nations with very different healthcare systems, but when you have a nationalized healthcare system, you're often dealing with just as bad incentives or possibly even worse.

Like you pointed out with the NHS then there, of course, there are some countries that are great, like South Korea, where you get these comprehensive. Medical scans. Oh, South

Malcolm Collins: Korea is amazing.

Oh, I gotta talk about medical experience in South Korea. So I've lived in a lot of countries. In the UK, the NHS anyone my experience with the NHS, even as bad as all this expensive stuff up is in the US, that has me scared for my kids and everything like that.

I still pray to God every day I live here and not under the NHS. The NHS, basically, if you get like a flu or something like that, and then you try to book a, an appointment the appointment is always three weeks out, so you're always better by the time you get to the appointment. If you [00:30:00] have something serious, like I remember once I had something serious and urgent and I called and they were like don't get all emotional with me.

I can't deal with this right now. And they hung up when I was at university and somebody was, like, dying on the floor in front of me. They're like, Sir, you need to calm down. I just don't need to deal with this at 3 a. m. in the morning. Hang up, like what but there's no consequences to this within the NHS.

In Korea though, they have this system where it's really inexpensive. Like in the US thing, everything's way too expensive because of the way our insurance system works. And you just ban the whole US insurance system and made everything out of pocket. It would work much better, but that's the way it works in a lot of developing world.

And so we often get medical stuff done in the developing world when we're in Peru or whatever. But in Korea, it's like in the developing world, but it's also like totally. industrialized. So like when you were doing like a test, you would sit down in one booth and somebody would ask you like a series of questions and then you'd get moved to a variable set of other booths where they would do there was like the [00:31:00] blood draw line that was just like, like you were walking in line and it was a fairly fast line and you'd get the blood drawn and they'd move you through like everything was just like lines and institutionalized and it was insane.

And then when you would get mildly sick. sick and you'd go to an appointment, they give you like these breathers and stuff that had like anesthetics in them that were meant to make you feel better immediately as well as prompt inexpensive service. It was absolutely insane. And then there's childbirth in Korea where afterwards women get they go to these

Simone Collins: resorts essentially like a spa retreat with your baby where they feed you healthy food and you get massages and Yeah, you basically get to chill and then take care of everything so that you can recover.

Malcolm Collins: Anyway, I love you to Desimone and I really hope that we're able to put this together and that we get enough physicians and we're very fortunate that this happened, post COVID because post COVID, like in, in PA, the regulations around people prescribing stuff out of state are significantly loosened.

That's still true in a lot of [00:32:00] areas. And if you win this race, this can be something that you work on to make it much easier for a system like this to operate without any sort of legal concern.

Simone Collins: Yeah,

Malcolm Collins: I would like that.

Simone Collins: Yeah. And of course, none of this should be taken as medical advice, just, disclaimer, disclaimer because just like everyone else, we just have to cover our ass and worry about liability.

But yeah, I just, if any, if anyone is, has made it to the end. Please one at one, if you could subscribe and like this video, cause it will help the video, but also like actually think about your personal health. Think about anyone in your family and their personal health and maybe consider making a spreadsheet where you just start to internally take ownership of an in track it.

Because if you think that a doctor is keeping track of that and making sure that you're okay and then informing you of stuff that might be going wrong, you're probably wrong. And we learned that the hard way. So love you guys. I love you, Malcolm, the very most of all.

In this eye-opening episode, Malcolm and Simone delve into the disturbing connection between Qatar's funding of US universities and the alarming rise of antisemitism on college campuses. They discuss how Qatar, a major sponsor of Hamas, has become the largest state donor to American higher education, and how this financial influence has led to a suppression of free speech and an increase in anti-Israel rhetoric. The couple also examines the recent attacks on Israel by Hamas, the dehumanizing treatment of Jewish students at universities like Columbia and Harvard, and the concerning statements made by professors and activists celebrating violence against Israelis. Throughout the conversation, Malcolm and Simone shed light on the geopolitical complexities of the Middle East, the role of authoritarian governments in spreading antisemitism, and the importance of defending civilization against barbarism.

Malcolm Collins: [00:00:00] Hello, Simone! It is wonderful to be here today, and we are going to be doing an episode today which I think really elevates why the disintermediation of the traditional news system To online vloggers, because this is something you see increasingly in terms of how are people getting their information about the world

Simone Collins: is

Malcolm Collins: actually very important to getting an honest understanding of reality so long as you're choosing the right people to listen to.

And this episode is going to be the type of thing. That you would never see on one of the mainstream news stations. And I'm just gonna give the top notes right now for people who are like, okay, I get the story. I'm gonna click off before we go into too much detail. But it is the fact that Hamas, one of the largest donors to Hamas, like one of the largest funders of Hamas, the people who started this war in Israel, okay?

They are also the largest state donor [00:01:00] to the most U. S. 's large universities or to the university system in the U. S. Iran? I know, right? That's what you would think. No. I don't think they lost in Iran. What's, what? It is Qatar or Qatar, depending on how you look at it. F*****g obsequious you are because I always hate when people play little words with oh, you're not saying Qatar, right?

I call it American

Simone Collins: accent. So it's

Malcolm Collins: Qatar

As a quick side note, if you were wondering, who is the bigger supporter of Hamas, Iran or Qatar? Qatar has given Hamas over a $1.8 billion. And I ran gives them Something like a hundred million to 350 million. That's what they gave them last year, a year. so in terms of just financial costs, Qatar is the bigger supporter if Hamas, but I ran plays a big role in giving them lots of military supplies and training.

So in terms of integration, was there political elite?

I ran is a bigger supporter.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, so people [00:02:00] are like wait, I didn't know this. Why you why didn't I know this? Why didn't I know that this? They heavily funded Hamas. Why did I not know that they were also the largest state donor to U. S. university systems? And this matters downstream when you are looking at the university policy that is allowing this rampant antisemitism on campuses.

Would you like to know more?

Malcolm Collins: Because a lot of people they're like, Oh, I'm going to not donate to my university because of this. Like a lot of, Jewish families are saying that right now and stuff like that. And what they don't realize that they're like, why are universities still doing this? From a financial perspective, why are they still doing this?

Being so neutral. Why is it when you had, there was this great moment where Gay the head of one of these universities I'm gay. Yeah, the head of Harvard at the time.

Simone Collins: Who then subsequently had some plagiarism problems. And yeah. So she

Malcolm Collins: responded that hateful speech is at odds with Harvard's values and that calling for the genocide of Jews is anti Semitic, but when pressed on whether it violates the code of Essex, she said, it can be depending on the context.

[00:03:00] So genocide, demanding genocide of an ethnic group, specifically when it's Jews. Of course, this wouldn't matter with anyone else at the top universities in the U S why is that? Maybe it violates our code of ethics. I'm not going to make any hard calls on this right now. So why are they having this position?

And it makes a lot more sense when you look at where the money is coming from for these institutions, or at least a very large we'll get into the size of it, how they get the money into the universities and everything like that as the thing goes on, but I just want to, get it out there.

Simone Collins: So I'm so confused about Qatar still, though, which, by the way, American accent, we would rather say something that rhymes with guitar rather than cutter.

Like someone who's trying to continue. I'm so confused about Qatar because Qatar is majority Sunni. Whereas is Iran is primarily Shia. Are they aligned? Are they partners? Or do they just, I think they like

Malcolm Collins: underestimate the level of anti Semitism in the Muslim world. And this is what I'm really into.

They just really hate Jews. So this [00:04:00] is what I'm, and I need to go back here because it's not just that they hate Jews. It's also part of the power hierarchy in this world. So there's, I really want to go into the stats here, but I'm also going to provide some like overall framing. Okay. Okay. So people who may not know, and I'm like, normal news would not report this.

And they're like, why would normal news not report this? And even I feel a little. Honestly, uncomfortable talking about it because I have a lot of Qatari friends. If you are like wealthy and successful you like in, in your social groups, you are going to have Qatari friends and Qataris, there's only something like 300, 000 Qataris in the world.

So it's a very small, the ethnic population of Qatar is incredibly small. Most of the people there are foreign laborers are basically slaves. And so what that means is The, if you have Qatari friends, that means you have friends in the Qatari government or that are related to the Qatari government, right?

And so when you're talking about any of the heads of these major [00:05:00] news stations or something like that, there are parties where they're going to have to go to later that day and they are going to look like it's not even like a conspiracy thing. They're just going to look like really bad if they are putting shade on guitar and they may not get deals.

They may not get hired by companies because, they have so much money they have their fingers in a bit of everything because of that big natural gas vein that they found in guitar. A lot of people think it's oil. Oil is not why guitars are, it's just natural gas. But sorry, I don't want to get into the geopolitics here, but the other thing I want to talk about is we have a lot of friends who are Emirati and Qatari and and I'm not like trying to conflate the two countries, but what I'm pointing out here is these are like the nicest of the Muslim states generally to like the U.

S., like in terms of friendly policy. Saudi Arabia, we're also pretty close with, but, occasionally we have some friction there. And Saudi Arabia is much more like a brutal dictatorship. So like Americans can understand, but with Qatar and the UAE, they've done a pretty good job with their image.

In fact, speaking of I am about to go to my reunion at [00:06:00] Stanford business school. And one of the guys I am going to be meeting there is an old friend of mine who I actually really as a person, great person. Khalid Alamari. And he has like over 4 million subscribers on YouTube.

So he would

Simone Collins: always come up to you and

Malcolm Collins: be like,

Simone Collins: Malcolm, what's my name? It's call it,

Malcolm Collins: call it, I'll call him Colleen. Okay. Whatever. That's why it's still funny. It is. And I always mispronounce his name. But he's a big shot now, and he actually did a tour, went around the UAE with him and so I went to check his channel recently and I think this just shows what we're talking about when you're in this bubble.

So his latest video that has over a quarter million views is Surprising delivery drivers with their families. So this is supposed to be like a feel good movie. Where it's ha, like a surprising, I don't know. Troops with their families or something like that.

And if you're an Emirati and you watch this is going to look just like a feel [00:07:00] good movie to you. But if you are an American and you watch this, you're like, Wait a second, why would delivery drivers have not seen their families in a long time? And it almost looks like a slave owner in the South being like, like Mr.

Beast, but in like the slave owning South. And he comes in, he goes, ha, this guy thought we sold his family to the, to another owner, but I'm going to trick him. And when he gets home, they'll all be there. And then confetti will fly behind the doors. And the guy like, comes home devastated, and he's genuinely having this emotional moment because he sees his family that he thought was sold off, and the guy's dancing around all blimpy style in front of the door with confetti I'm such a good person.

Here's the plan. We've told the riders that they're just going to be shooting a commercial for noon minutes today But little did they know That they're going to be delivering to someone special.

Their families, who we've flown in from outside of the country, to give them the biggest, most special surprise.

Malcolm Collins: And I don't think that he's a bad person at all, or that he sees the way this comes [00:08:00] off from another cultural perspective. And I think within the context that's a good thing for a person to do in that society.

 So it's an interesting thing to think about what I'm saying. is the ethics within these countries and the hierarchy and the game that these countries are playing is very different than the game that we're playing.

Malcolm Collins: And so you can say, why is it so important that they make these anti Semitic plays even when they're not anti Semitic? Because we have a lot of friends in these countries and genuinely a lot of the elites, like a lot of the elites, Qataris aren't really anti Semitic but they lose status in the hierarchy game of that sort of regional geopolitics if they don't make anti Semitic plays.

Plays in anti semitic statements.

Simone Collins: I see. Cause they're they have to code switch, right? I feel like once you reach a certain level of eliteness and you're international and as a player. You're going to become, you're going to start coding as that international monoculture of like wealthy people and they all have a look and a thing and they come across the same in dinner parties.

It's the same people. It's the same international global elite. But then [00:09:00] locally, they still need to assume certain stances to not be seen as losers. Not part of the culture, yeah.

Malcolm Collins: And they also have to deal with like their citizens. If you're talking about Saudi Arabia or something like that, they have to deal with their citizens if they look too pro Israel, and people are like, come on, the Saudi citizens are not, they were the majority of the attackers on 9 11.

Like, why is that the case? Because of the extremist form of Islam was, yeah. It's this practice in Saudi Arabia, but I don't want to go too far on this. I want to, I also want to

Simone Collins: be fair if you're from a certain culture and that culture is more likely to be biased in favor of Palestinians over Israelis, you're going to hear more things about terrible things happening to Palestinians and the plight of Palestinians.

And you are going to hear about the plight of Israelis and therefore you aren't crazy for just due to availability, heuristic, probably. Being a little bit more biased against Israelis. Right?

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Yeah. And I think that this is partially why [00:10:00] within these regions and within the geopolitics that I'm trying to explain is why do you not hear the role that countries like Qatar are playing in all of this?

And it's because, They are our allies, they're like the U. S. 's allies, and they are very well entrenched within elite social circles in the United States. And so not even shadow games or anything like that, I just don't want to I know if our show was more popular right now, I probably wouldn't be saying any of this, because I would have to answer to people being like, Hey, why are you calling it out?

Like, why are you can't we just pretend like this isn't the case? Hold on, Simone. I will always stay to my integrity, but I'm just saying, this is the type of thing you got to answer to people for.

Simone Collins: I don't think you're ever really going to answer to people. I don't think you're genetically capable

Malcolm Collins: for being honest.

Before we go further, I want to frame, because a lot of people, they know how pro Israel they are at like, or at least we're coming off as pretty pro Israel right now. And they're like why are you so against the protest? Don't you know that like children are dying? So just for some context here [00:11:00] when the Hamas came into power in.

Gaza, 42 percent of the population supported them. This was in December 2023. 33 percent of Germans supported the Nazis when they came into power.

Only 7 percent of Gazans blame Hamas For their current suffering. Even worse, just over seven out of 10 Garzas continue to support Hamas' decision to launch the war against Israel with the 7th of October attack, while nearly 59% of Palestinians believe that Hamas should continue to rule in Gaza.

Outrageous, and keep in mind, this is not Israeli data, but data from a survey conducted in March, 2024 by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research itself. For all these reasons. Israel believes that Hamas's proposal is not sincere, and that it is only seeking to gain time to reorganize and rearm, and thus regain some control over the territory.

Malcolm Collins: So if you're like, if you've never had a big freak out about the firebombing of Dresden or something like that, the U. S. doing what needed to be done to take the Nazis out of power then why are you freaking out about this [00:12:00] now?

A lot of innocent people died who were in Germany. at the time. And people do not hand wring about this. More people died in the firebombing of Dresden than during the nuclear bombs. And so why is that, and then they're like, yeah, but okay, hold on. So this is in modern times because then I'm like, okay, if you really cared about this, if this wasn't just like anti Semitic thing, and I should point out, I don't think that a lot of the individual protesters are anti Semitic.

I think what they don't realize is that the forces that be that put all of this in motion are the people. And they're like, no, that's not true. And I'm like, then why aren't you out there protesting about Haiti? And they're like my university it doesn't do business with people who directly have to do with Haiti.

But also

Simone Collins: there's no enemy.

Malcolm Collins: That's not true. A huge contributor to what happened in Haiti right now was the national debt of Haiti. And actually they were calling for rep Okay, bit of history. But how do you,

Simone Collins: you can't fight debt, you need an enemy with a face on

Malcolm Collins: can't, because the debt is owned by American banks.

Yes. [00:13:00] Okay. So hold on. I'm going to take a little, so what you may not know is the president who was disappeared right before everything started going to hell. The thing he did right before he was disappeared is he demanded that these banks that made all this money off of Haiti's unfair debt. Because when Haiti declared independence, the French basically came in, they put guns to them heads and said, okay either you buy yourselves every human in Haiti, or we destroy everything, and so they were forced to take on this absolutely insane debt

Simone Collins: and

Malcolm Collins: then this debt was bought by CIC, a bank in France.

And then the debt was sold to banks like First National City Bank, today called Citibank, and manufacturers Hanover Trust. Now JPMorgan and Chase and so why was this guy disappeared when we was talking about Haiti not getting reparations for like in the US reparations. This is they actually super super, super deserve these reparations, and there are specific U.

S. institutions [00:14:00] around today that are living on the profits of these institutions, Citibank and Chase.

Simone Collins: Oh dear.

Um,

Malcolm Collins: and, And you think your university isn't doing business with Citibank and Chase? You think? You think? No, seriously. You think that half these protesters don't have? They don't care.

It's not that they care about injustices done against black people or something like that. It's that the powers that are organizing and manipulating all of this actually have an anti Semitic agenda. Which we will get to in a second.

, what is happening in this region is very much like some small portion of the U S got reconquered by native Americans. And all around them were a bunch of like racist, redneck white Hicks, who everyday talked about wanting them all killed, wanting them all destroyed, blah, blah, blah.

One day they go in, they murder a bunch of these native Americans for taking their land back. And then, um, uh, the, the, the native American government is like, well, I just don't have another option right now.

There is only one [00:15:00] Jewish state. They are surrounded by Muslim majority states that these people could go to.

people can be like, oh no. Um, the Jews weren't always on that land. Didn't they take it from the Canaanites. What we know from DNA testing that. Jews, even to their own chagrin are around 50% came night in their DNA. So no, they merged, it was two populations that merged in the region a very, very long time ago.

And then they're like, well, the Gaza and they've been there for a long time. No, they were. Recent colonialists invaders , they're not. Like the people in Northern Palestine, which, which. That's different. We'll talk about that on another show, but Gazans, uniquely have no ancestral claim to this area. They are the descendants of an imperialist expansionist conquest by a large empire, specifically they're moving to the region was encouraged. Under rulers, like Zingy and solid in, in the 12th century and then continued. During the later Mameluke and Ottoman periods.

Malcolm Collins: But I want to go further here. Because there's a number of [00:16:00] really interesting things.

The first thing I want to go over is a lot of people also think Hamas. Was like random spastic attack of Israel because they like hated their conditions. And this is not the case. Hamas actually had a plan for what they were going to do with Israel after they beat the Israelis. And there was a great tweet on this.

I want to read to you that Richard Hanania put out. In late 2021, Hamas held a conference on what they would do after conquering Israel. They discussed water, sewage, currency, and making a directory of property to confiscate. They planned to not let talented Jews leave and make them work for the state.

The ceasefire crowd doesn't get it. Israel has an actual enemy. It's not the enemy you wish they had. It's not people who can be reasoned into living in peace with a Jewish state. Hamas is. actually serious about slaughtering the Jews and taking their land. This article suggests they're quote unquote, crazy for making these plans.

I don't think that's true at all. If Israel [00:17:00] fought the war, the way the international community wished it would be destroyed in the long run. It's unfortunate that the West does not understand this, but I'm confident Israel will win because it has no other choice. It faces a dark and bitter reality and can't afford the delusions of the rest of the world.

So I, I want to be clear because this is actually interesting. So he did Hamas planned to exterminate the Jews in this attack.

Simone Collins: They thought But not the productive Jews, it's a bit of an upgrade on what the Nazis were doing and the Nazis weren't trying to monetize. So that's interesting.

Malcolm Collins: I also like the realization there that Israel has no value without the Jews. The land of Israel is pretty useless land. It's like a desert with a little bit of arable, like farming area, but not really that much. It's useful. It is useful because of the Jews. And even Hamas realizes this.

We're like we'll turn them into slaves. We'll round up, kill all the ones who are economically productive and we'll turn the Again, a

Simone Collins: step up from the Nazis at least. Some practical value that, putting [00:18:00] them in internment camps, that was like completely under utilizing knowledge workers when instead you could do, Auschwitz for knowledge workers, isn't that just wonderful?

Malcolm Collins: No, it's, it is horrifying. What I'm gonna do next before I go into all the s**t that's happening on university campuses right now, people are like, oh It's not explicitly anti semitic.

Simone Collins: Yeah,

Malcolm Collins: I want to go over the Qatar thing because this is yeah Please. So according to a Department of Education report from April 2023, American universities and colleges have received 19 billion from unreported sources, more than half of which has come from authoritarian and anti democratic Middle Eastern governments.

At the time of writing, the state of Qatar contributes more funds to the universities in the United States than any other country in the world in raw donations.

Simone Collins: Wow.

Malcolm Collins: And this is by the ISGP report and here's a quote from the former Qatari Prime Minister, Hamad bin Jassim from 2022.

We would pay them journalists. Some of them have become MPs now, other have [00:19:00] become patriots. We would pay the journalists in many countries. We would pay them every year. Some of them even receive salaries. All the Arab countries were doing this, if not all of them, most of them. So again, this is just a normal.

thing for this part of the world to do. And I'll name the article that I am quoting from here. So this article is dark money nightmare, how Qatar bought the Ivy league.

Simone Collins: But why, like to what end is Qatar in? I'm just going to go over

Malcolm Collins: the stats first. Okay. Like the facts. Okay. All right. Hamas, an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood has enjoyed Qatar as its main sponsor. So they are the main sponsor of the Muslim Brotherhood to the tune of up to 360 million a year and was until recently the home of Hamas's leadership.

In 2012, Ismael Hanayi. Head of the terrorist group's political bureau, Mazzan, I'm not even going to try to pronounce it and a few other names that I can't pronounce, moved to Qatar for a life of luxury. This month, likely because of [00:20:00] Israel's announcement that it will hunt down and eliminate Hamas leaders in Qatar and Turkey, the Qatar based Hamas officials reportedly fled to other countries.

Qatar has become the home to Shaikh Yousaf, the spiritual leader of the Muslim Brotherhood who was exiled from Egypt until his death in September 2022. According to the Mir Amit Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center, quote Qardawi is mainly known as a key figure in shaping the concept of violent jihad and the one who allowed carrying out terror attacks, including suicide bombings, against Israeli citizens, the U.

S. forces in Iraq, and some of Arab regimes. Because of that, he was banned from entering Western countries and some Arab countries in 1999. He was banned from entering the U. S. A. In 2009, he was banned from entering Britain. The Saudi state run GNU's agency, so keep in mind, Saudis are very biased against Qatar.

Qatar embraces multiple terrorists and sectarian groups aimed at disturbing stability in the region, including the Muslim Brotherhood, ISIS, and Al Qaeda, and promotes the message and schemes of these groups through their media constantly. [00:21:00] This is the kind of influence that U. S. universities and colleges are more than happy to see on their campuses in exchange for billions of dollars of Qatari donations.

According to ISGAP, foreign donations from Qatar especially have had a substantial impact on fermenting growing levels of anti Semitic discourse and campus politics in U. S. universities, as well as growing support for anti demographic, anti democratic values within these institutions of higher education.

Simone Collins: Anti democratic values, wow. Okay,

Malcolm Collins: so hold on. No, it gets worse because they actually have measured amounts of this. So in 2023, ISGAP published a report, The Corruption of the American Mind, How Concealing Foreign Funding for Higher Education in the United States Predicts the Erosion of Democratic Values and Antisemitic Sentiment on Campus.

It found that there was a direct correlation between antisemitism and censored speech on campuses. And undocumented contributions from foreign governments, notably Qatar, quote, the institutions [00:22:00] receiving such undocumented money had, and then it's bullet points here, political campaigns to silence academics were more prevalent campuses receiving undocumented funds exhibited approximately twice as many campaigns to silence academics as those that did not.

Students reported greater exposure to anti Semitic and anti Zionist rhetoric. Higher levels of anti Semitic incidents were reported on their campuses. This relationship of undocumented money to campus anti Semitism was stronger where the undocumented donors were Middle Eastern regimes rather than other regimes.

From 2015 to 2020, institutions that accepted money from the Middle Eastern donors had on average 300 percent more anti Semitic incidents than those institutions that did not. And then quote, speech intolerance manifesting as campaigns to investigate, censor, demote, suspend, or terminate speakers and scholars was higher at institutions that received undocumented money from foreign regimes, end quote.

So here you could see big number differences here, like 300%, like 100 percent higher. Like we are talking like very [00:23:00] significant differences in what's going on within these campuses.

Simone Collins: This is wild. And okay, I'm trying to think like beyond just pure anti Semitism, because I feel like there has to be more of a motivation than just, God, I hate those Jews is maybe, so many of these nations are resource rich, and they're trying to transition to become economies that in a post Trump's Oil or natural gas dependent world are thriving and independent.

They're powerful. And Israel may be one of the few, if not perhaps the only country in the Middle East that has a knowledge worker based economy that is thriving and influential. Therefore, it poses a threat to any global economy. Nation any country in the middle East that has a tenuous economic position based on an unsustainable assets, such as oil or natural gas.

Therefore nations like Iran and Qatar are going to be very nervous about [00:24:00] Israel and try to undermine it because as long as Israel is powerful there, and it has the one source of value generation that is going to survive a post oil world. Then it's going to be very,

Malcolm Collins: I really appreciate your kind heart, but no, that's not what's happening.

Okay.

Simone Collins: So why is this happening?

Malcolm Collins: Okay. So these countries generally have authoritarian governments, whether you're talking about Qatar or Saudi Arabia or the UAE, it is. Monarchies. Sure. Yeah. These monarchies have to like that you are allowed like a functional monarchy in the developed world.

How does this happen? How do you broker this with your citizens? One is you give your citizens tons and tons of payouts, which is what these countries do. And two is you need to play to the populism of your citizens.

Simone Collins: Huh.

Malcolm Collins: The citizens in these countries are extremist Muslims. Okay, I'm talking like based extremist Muslims.

I

Simone Collins: mean, in Iran, not so

Malcolm Collins: much. Iran hates most of these countries. Simone, [00:25:00] stop getting confused here. Okay. Iran wants Okay. So Iran and Qatar are aligned because they both support the Muslim Brotherhood. It's weird. I don't want to get in to the major country politics here. I'm talking about the on the ground politics of these countries.

Okay. Okay.

Simone Collins: Yeah. Like the public facing people, not the average citizen. That's I don't really

Malcolm Collins: know. Iran has a completely different structure in Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE. It is a democracy. It is not a monarchy. It has to play to its citizens in a totally different way.

Simone Collins: Yeah. Okay.

Malcolm Collins: Yes. So we're talking about the monarchies.

Monarchies. Yes. Suppose you are hanging out in progressive circles or something like that, right? And this is the way antisemitism works. And you say something like today, like you can even imagine this. If you were on like one of these college campuses you know what? I don't hate the Jews. And I actually think that they're okay.

And they should be allowed to live in Israel. You would be like attacked or forced out of a position. This is the way antisemitism work. It makes everybody [00:26:00] who thinks. Actually, the Jews are okay, afraid to say that within certain social circles, or they can lose their positions of power. You see this everywhere.

Anti Semitism begins to creep up. They are not saying, actually, I don't hate the Jews actually have a lot of Jewish friends, which I know a lot of these people, they do have a lot of Jewish friends and they, a lot of the people in the highest level of positions of power within these governments do not hate the Jews, but they cannot let that be no.

Simone Collins: Huh.

Malcolm Collins: Because it becomes known in the same way you can't say that on college campuses right now. And people, and just so you know, like when we're using silly words here, people are like no. It's not that I hate Jews. I hate Zionists. See, here's the problem. 97 percent of Jews over the age of 40 are Zionists.

And 80% of Jews under 40 are Zion Zionists. And as they age, they'll probably become Zionists. And I've looked at various statistics. Some show like 95%. So when you say, I don't hate the Jews, I just hate 97% of Jews. Yeah. You're saying you hate Jews. Okay. All of the things that are saying, take down [00:27:00] whatever they're saying, I hate Jews.

Okay. So let's be clear about that. This is. That's really all there is to it. It's to maintain their power structure. And it's because once anti Semitism begins to become a status signal within a community everyone in the community ends up leaning on it really quickly and it becomes really dangerous to oppose.

And

Simone Collins: so it's the goth echo chamber all over again.

Malcolm Collins: It's the Goss Echo Chamber. Yeah, what's your status? It's how anti semitic you are.

Simone Collins: Yeah, how extreme you are. Yeah when something is measured, that, that gets a little out of hand, no matter what it is. But I want to talk

Malcolm Collins: about how bad it's getting, because I think a lot of people don't know.

So I'm going to send you a picture here from Columbia's campus right now.

Simone Collins: Well, Columbia, which has shut down in person classes for the rest of the school year. How pissed would you be, given how much you pay to go to Columbia as a student?

Malcolm Collins: Oh, I'd be furious. But look at this picture. I sent it to you on WhatsApp.

This is from the Columbia campus. So what? Oh, no, that's people [00:28:00] who can't see it says beware skunk on campus. And it's a skunk with a star of David on it. That's done as like a caricature of Jews. And this was commonly done during the Nazi period of trying to compare Jews to animals.

Various types of rodents, like skunks were very common during the Nazi period. And I love it. People are like, no, this is because of this one stink bomb incident that some Jews did on campus. And that, I'm like, okay, that may have been how they justified it, but they knew what they were doing.

This picture looks like old Nazi propaganda. Beware, like this is clearly specifically made to be reminiscent of Nazi propaganda.

Simone Collins: Yeah, it's even, it even for those who are just listening has a vintage look to it, a 1950s propaganda vintage styling. So they're going for that.

Malcolm Collins: They want Jewish students to feel afraid on campus.

The people who are operating this, and this is, I think a lot of the things is people don't know. Who's operating this? Do I think that the Qataris are like [00:29:00] actively engaged in this sort of stuff? No, I think what's happening is that the student like the people making decisions about student governments in the universities that are getting a lot of their funding from countries like Qatar know that they can afford to be more anti demographic.

Democratic and more authoritarian in the way that they roll out policies because their funders will have their backs. They don't need to worry about losing Jewish student money as much or Jewish alumni money as much. And so they make a more authoritarian decisions. On the ground, I think many people who are at these protests are not anti Semitic.

Simone Collins: No, I think people are being genuinely misled. They don't even know what the river they were chanting from the

Malcolm Collins: river to the sea, people were like, Oh, we're just saying they need to leave the part of Israel that goes from the river to the sea. They're thinking,

Let freedom

Simone Collins: ring.

I'm pretty sure that's kind

Malcolm Collins: of just Yeah, and somebody was like, and then they showed them on a map where the river they were talking about is, and they were like, oh. Oh, they mean they want to kill all the Jews? They mean every one [00:30:00] of them goes into the sea? And they're like, I did not know that's what I was chanting.

Because they're being told these things by people in positions of authority in these activist groups that are actually the truth. Severely anti Semitic.

And so now I want to talk about what's going on college campuses right now. So they van so I'm doing some quotes here. They vandalize university property with slogans such as Zionism equals genocide, new intifada, and from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.

Referring to a geographic area that encompasses the entirety of the state of Israel, where half of the world's Jews live. At Harvard, some students opted for chanting the Arabic version, From water to water, Palestine is Arab. On some campuses, the exclamation is escalated into death threats and physical assaults against Jewish students, where a Jewish Tulane University student tried to stop an anti Israeli protester near campus from burning an Israeli flag.

Protesters attacked him and other Jewish students, breaking one student's nose. And I saw on Harvard, there was this horrifying [00:31:00] video of them basically hunting down a group of Jewish students and trying to trap them. Oh, the library one. Yeah. You saw that?

Simone Collins: Yeah, I have one. Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: So here's a quote from another article.

Two weeks ago at a town hall, a student told me that what would make her feel safe in the law school would be to quote, get rid of the Zionists in quotes. And then later in this article, he said, I was stunned when students across the country, including mine immediately celebrated the Hamas terrorist attacks on Israel on

Simone Collins: October 7th.

I'm not at all mentioning the atrocities that are being faced by these pro Palestinian protesters. Don't forget about that poor young woman who whose friends called 911 from their sit in location because she had a tampon in for too long and they were Certain that she would get toxic shock, but she refused to leave the location because she would be arrested if she did.

And then of course there's Ilhan Omar's daughter who has been kicked out of Barnard, [00:32:00] blocked from her meal plan and left homeless and destitute. These people really understand. Hold on, hold

Malcolm Collins: on. I haven't, I need to finish, but I do love that you brought that up because these people are LARPing as like actual Nazis and they

Simone Collins: do not have any of them in actual subsequent meetings where they're like complaining about their mistreatment.

They even have the audacity to compare their quote unquote mistreatment with the experience of Palestinians. Yeah. They're

Malcolm Collins: like, I know what it feels like to be a Palestinian. Yeah.

Simone Collins: The things we're subject to it. Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: Hold on. So come on let's continue. And keep in mind here, what we're saying here is the Palestinians have it hard now, the Nazis in Germany who, my heart

Simone Collins: breaks.

The Germans did not

Malcolm Collins: support the Nazi party. They went through hell during that period, but it was righteous what happened. It was the only realistic long term solution to the problem. Which the problem being the systematic genocide of a bunch of people. Okay. And this right now [00:33:00] for, from Israel's perspective, this is what they're doing right now is the only realistic long term solution to having a genocidal group on their border.

But I noticed that we're going to

Simone Collins: attack again and we're

Malcolm Collins: not going to stop. And they said they were going to attack again. There was a quote that said this won't be the last attack. The next one's going to be 20 times worse from Hamas, like official Hamas. But anyway,

Simone Collins: and also what really bothers me and what I think also needs to be.

Emphasized is that Palestine is set up like a human shield and that none of the people who are making these decisions, who are planning these attacks. Are really being subject to the retaliation from Israel. Now they've just put a bunch of helpless trapped people who do not know better in the line of fire, which is one of the most reprehensible.

This is

Malcolm Collins: the important thing to know. These tunnel systems are intense under the country right now, which four and 8 we're paying for. And that That is why the war is so bloody with the civilians right now, because it's not a [00:34:00] war where the first people you kill are going to be the bad guys. So they're the last people you kill in a war like this.

It's a human

Simone Collins: shield strategy and it's disgusting that your entire war strategy after, of course, committing atrocities against your enemy is to have your enemy commit atrocities against the most innocent and vulnerable people on your side. Do

Malcolm Collins: not they do not care. And the amount of misinformation I see going on, I saw on my Facebook wall some lady was like, did you know that Israeli soldiers were playing the sounds of a baby crying to lure out Palestinians and then shooting them?

And then I Google it and it turns out that's what Hamas was doing to Israeli soldiers, not the other way around. And so just the amount of misinformation is insane, but I need to keep going with the quote here. Okay. So students for justice in Palestine called the terror attack, a quote unquote, historic win.

For the quote unquote Palestinian resistance in quote a Columbia professor called the Hamas massacre quote unquote awesome and a quote unquote stunning victory a Yale professor tweeted quote it's been such an [00:35:00] extraordinary day in quote while calling Israeli a quote murderous genocidal settler state in quote a Chicago professor posted a note reading quote Israelis are pigs savages very bad people irredeemable excrement may they rot in hell in quote Israelis, he said.

This is a Chicago art professor who hasn't been fired.

Simone Collins: It's an art professor.

Malcolm Collins: A UC Davis professor tweeted, yeah, but he's someone on campus. Yeah, I know. A UC Davis professor tweeted, quote, Zionist journalists have houses with addresses kids in school, end quote. Adding, quote, they can fear their bosses, but they should fear us more, end quote.

Keep in mind what happened here. This is celebrating the brutal killing of 260 people attending a music festival for peace. That was one of the groups that was brutally murdered. And they're saying, this is awesome. Or, a victory. An extraordinary day. And this is mainstream within U.

S. college campuses. And I think that's what people are missing. Is they think that they're like, I have progressive friends, it's not that bad. The campuses that [00:36:00] are what's happening on the campuses right now is not what you had to deal with before. And the rates of anti Semitism are getting significantly worse.

So there was some, oh, I'll go, I'm not even going to go into the stats on this because it's boring, but yeah, just, it should be obvious to everyone the rates of anti Semitism and anti Semitic attacks are like at un historically high levels. And I guess what I'd say is a lot of progressive Jews, and I'm going to play the little meme I did before specifically like reform Jews I, I've seen them so cowardly turn their back on what's really happening or just believe these echo chambers.

And the only solace I have is barely any of them have kids and their kids aren't really Jewish to begin with anymore. I think that this whole situation is horrifying to me. It's horrifying that it's gotten to this place, but I think that there are some. Positives at the end of the tunnel here, right?

The first being that if these attacks hadn't happened I think when they finally did happen, it would have been worse an [00:37:00] attack on the state of Israel by one of these organizations was basically inevitable at this point. And a lot of people in Israel had become complacent about the threat that was posed and that this attack was able to happen by surprise, I think shows that level of complacency.

And there had began to become a lot of infighting in Israel. And to an extent that I think it really begun to threaten the state of Israel,

Internal consistency. And I think that this has shown a few things that I'm really excited about. Not excited about, but I think it, this shows a few things that, that I don't know if it would have been in the best interest for Israel if this attack had never happened.

I think this needed to water out. And I think when we look at the antisemitism that's come from this antisemitism was there, this just allowed it to be aired. And I think. A lot of people, a lot of Jews who had cozied up with progressives didn't realize how anti Semitic the progressive party had become and progressive activists had become.

And so they, [00:38:00] this hopefully was a wake up call that no, really, in the United States, we need to begin to fight anti Semitism again. We need to begin to call it out again. These people, need to be shown the light and the public needs to know who they are and what they really stand for. So I, I think that's one thing I'd say.

The other thing I'd say is that we do live in a world now where historically, you can see from this quote, like Qatar had journalists on its payroll all around the world. They did become politicians. Some of them even received basically salaries. And you're also talking about your personal social circles.

If you historically, even if you were getting your news from, Fox or Breitbart, you're not going to hear this as much.

Simone Collins: So I want to know, where did you hear this?

Malcolm Collins: I, from a number of the sources that I listed as I was going through, I know,

Simone Collins: but how do people restructure their media diet in a way that Ensures that they hear from these sources or just, I don't know, like I, I wasn't exposed to this information and I'm not following me.

Yeah, so

Malcolm Collins: [00:39:00] I'd say that for me there are some people out there that just seem to be good at getting to the truth. I like to think that our audience. Finds us to be one of those people. And obviously, do your own digging. Whenever we say something, we get things wrong occasionally.

But who else, like Richard Hanania. I read it too. He often fairly true in what he says. So it's just about pulling the right people. Yeah. Because you can't really do any better than that anymore. And unfortunately, you do get a bit of an echo chamber. Now that I've mentioned this, some other people will probably pick it up.

It'll probably get tweeted around a few times. That's the way things work. And yeah. And so then the question here is how do we think about this? I personally don't particularly have animosity towards guitar. They're just playing their. Sociopolitical game right now. And

Simone Collins: well, TIL

Malcolm Collins: Yeah I I don't have animosity towards guitar. I don't have animosity towards Qataris. I don't have Amos City towards most people. Saudis, e even your average cause and citizen, I don't [00:40:00] really have animosity too. I don't think of them as like really particularly lesser than other people.

But I can look at the larger geopolitical picture and say. Without X, worse things happen. Without Y, worse things happen. And I just don't see any other solution than what Israel is doing right now. Which makes me grateful that at least so far, Israel has been staying the path. Now Israel could end up going further, they could end up doing something truly horrific.

And then I wouldn't support them anymore. I'm not saying I support Israel no matter what they do. I say that right now, they seem to be taking the type of measured approach that I think is the only And people can be like, this approach isn't measured. But to what end? It just doesn't seem I'm on the right point of the measuring stick.

As

Simone Collins: long as there is a Palestine. There is going to be a problem. So I don't really understand. No,

Malcolm Collins: No. Hold on. Gaza and Palestine are two totally different situations. The culture within the two regions are different. The ethnic groups within the two regions are different.

The geopolitics of the two regions are different. There is a reason [00:41:00] they were attacked from Gaza and not, I, you

Simone Collins: think that if they basically just completely

Malcolm Collins: take Gaza. That's it. I think that the people, this is the problem, right? What Israel wants is these people to immigrate to other countries, but no other country will take them because the last time they did, they had a big revolt.

And every time they did, even statistically, there was this case where the Danish took some and they're, yeah. Even their descendants, like three generations down, are like way more into crime and stuff than other groups. It's a culture that is very different from the other surrounding regions.

There's a reason, like you have to ask yourself, why aren't any of the Arab countries taking these people? If they care about these refugees, why aren't they taking them? Because they don't care about the refugees. What they want is to use them to try to turn the world. Average, unthinking American activists against the Jewish state where I think that I see, and you look at even the brutality of the two groups, right?

When I look at what Israel is doing right now, yes, obviously, the [00:42:00] damage that they are putting out is. On a much more large scale, but it is measured. It is civilization defending itself. When I look at the types of things, the horrifying grapes that were filmed, the child killings, the it's, and people are like, Israel kills kids too, by accident.

The U. S. kills kids too, by accident. Every developed country when they're at war, when we were fighting the Nazis, you don't think babies died in the bombing of Dresden. Okay, be realistic, bro. That is just the way war is and they did not choose to start this war. They were actually just so people know leading up to the war, the amount of privileges they had given to the people of Gaza had risen dramatically because they were trying to get this deal done with Saudi Arabia.

So they were actually treating them dramatically better than they had been in recent history. They had put in huge Aid deals that were going there. The situation is I think not the situation that a lot of people are being told. And so you know, you can only look at the wider world and be like, look, people are playing with the [00:43:00] hands they can play with.

And I look at guitar, could guitar realistically play a different hand than the hand they're playing? Could Israel realistically play a different hand? I think guitar could but it'd be hard and it'd be very risky. It would be very risky. And so I don't think they would I, you're, when you tell them play a different hand, you're asking them individually to risk their lives and they don't have the same sorts of convictions or honor that I have.

A lot of these people are just intergenerational royalty basically. And they don't come from, backgrounds of fighting for freedom or anything like that. They yeah, I it's a tough situation and I am sad for a lot of what I'm seeing, but at the end of the day this is civilization defending itself against people who in their attacks act like the antithesis of civilization.

True barbarism is what they want. Yeah

Simone Collins: and not just against their enemies, against their own. And that's Against their own. I'm like, yeah. And Shots fired that I

Malcolm Collins: cannot ignore. If we want to free the people of Gaza from Hamas, this is the only way to do it. [00:44:00] And This then brings me, when I look at the people protesting on the behalf of this, when I look at the people at these Columbia protests and stuff like that, I see that our enemy, not only in the pronatalist movement, do we have the enemy, the anti natalist who like want all things dead.

But then there's this other side of like general progressivism, which is a promotion of barbarism over civilization. A promotion of cruelty just completely unnecessary cruelty of it's it's just so obvious to me like who the good guys are in this. And it's not one of those situations where people are like, there's no good guys here.

No, there's good guys. There's good guys here.

Simone Collins: Oh, Malcolm, you're my good guy. And I love you a lot.

Malcolm Collins: It's our boys in blue, the blue, the star of the sorry, the Israeli color is blue. Our boys in blue are the good guys. And a lot of them who have families and kids at home are out dying right now to preserve the country.

We had a fan reach out to us. He's yeah, I'm deploying tomorrow. I don't know what to say. I don't know what to put in place for my kids. So to keep that in mind. These [00:45:00] people I just can't even, I can't even, like they're dehumanizing these people who are fighting for trying to create something that works.

I I, it's tough. Anyway, love you to

Simone Collins: death. I love you too, Malcolm.

I'm glad we're talking again. I miss you. We live in Earth, but like it. Doesn't change the fact that I know I

Malcolm Collins: absolutely know the feeling. I feel the exact same way. And I am so thrilled for every one of these recording sessions. And I'm going to be gone for a bit and that we won't be talking to each other on these is going to kill me.

Maybe we can find an excuse to film send while I'm at my reunion.

Simone Collins: Maybe, but you're supposed to be busy socializing, so trying not to be weird.

Malcolm Collins: Okay, speaking of, I actually have a reunion themed intro to this one.

Simone Collins: Really?

Malcolm Collins: Yes.

In this eye-opening episode, Malcolm and Simone dive deep into the current state of the publishing industry, revealing shocking statistics about book sales, author earnings, and the strategies employed by major publishing houses. The couple discusses the alarming decline in reading habits among Americans and the dominance of a select few authors in the bestseller lists. Malcolm shares startling figures from the antitrust case between Penguin Random House and Simon & Schuster, exposing the industry's reliance on celebrity books and backlist titles. The couple also examines the disappointing sales of books by well-known figures with substantial social media followings. Throughout the conversation, they offer valuable advice for aspiring authors, emphasizing the importance of exploring alternative platforms like YouTube, podcasts, and Substack to reach and engage audiences effectively.

Malcolm Collins: [00:00:00] That means authors are earning roughly between 18, 000 and 180, 000 on a New York Times bestseller.

Keep in mind now, these are being split with the publishing houses,

 If you write a book and you get accepted and you get paid by penguin random house, you have a 96 percent chance of selling less than a thousand copies. Okay Ilyan Omar from the squad,

 She has a significant social media presence with 3 million Twitter followers. And another 1. 3 million on Instagram, yet her book, has sold only

Simone Collins: 26,

Malcolm Collins: 000 copies.

Piers Morgan.

Simone Collins: Okay.

Malcolm Collins: 8 million on followers on Twitter. In the U. S. it sold just 5, 650 copies. how are these big publishing houses staying in business? And it is Bibles celebrity books like Britney Spears books and their backlist. It is not on things that are intellectually enriching the population.

These two market categories, celebrity books and repeated bestsellers from the backlist, make up the entirety of the publishing industry and even fund [00:01:00] their project, publishing all the rest of the books we think about when we think about book publishing.

That is basically a vanity project. How do they approach people? What they are thinking about when they go out and approach people is how can I turn their preexisting follower base into money.

Simone Collins: Yeah. They're looking for a platform. They only care about your platform. And I think they're starting to

Malcolm Collins: realize though, that even the platform doesn't sell

Simone Collins: This conversation is really relevant to people who are thinking about writing a book,

Would you like to know more?

Malcolm Collins: Hello, Simone! We are gonna do a stats heavy episode today, which I am excited about, and I hope I ordered these stats well to make a narrative. But it is on reading in America, the state of reading, and what the publishing industry is turning into. And how it's transforming the way books are being published, the type of books that are being published, and the type of books that are being read.

[00:02:00] So first, let's just, I'm going to do a lot of quoting here in this episode. This is from Pew. Almost a third of Americans don't read books at all, and according to the U. S. Bureau of Labor and Statistics, the ones that do spend only 16 minutes per day reading. Compare that to the average Netflix watcher who spends close to 3 hours per day consuming video content.

At that pace, a watcher might get through 681 movies in a year, while a reader gets through only 16 books. And that's presuming those 15 minutes are spent reading books. And keep in mind, it was just reading, so that could be newspaper, that could be online content, and goodness knows I'd fudge those numbers.

. Even this year when leisure time increased as a result of the pandemic, novels saw only a subtle increase in sales over last year by 2. 8%. News consumption, however, saw an increase of 215%. Most of that time taking place on Facebook, 23 minutes per day, [00:03:00] Google, 14 minutes per day, and MSN, five minutes per day.

So when people say news consumption, they mean Facebook and Google. So this is highly targeted news, not even just like I'm picking a conservative versus progressive news show to be my bubble of information I'm getting. It's the news stories that are specifically tailored to my interests. Okay, so now we're going to talk a little bit about how few authors are actually writing the books that people are reading. So they had created a list of the top selling books in the U. S. And of the 2, 468 fiction books that made the list they were written by only 854 authors.

It's worth mentioning that 51 of those books were written by James Peterson, 31 were written by Clive Kussler, and 25 were written by Daniel Steele. A huge chunk is written by very few people.

Simone Collins: [00:04:00] And this, we've seen this in other stats in terms of how much authors sell, like a very few.

Very small number of books, ultimately. Oh, we're

Malcolm Collins: about to get into that.

Simone Collins: Okay. This is bad.

Malcolm Collins: This is bad. According to the EPJ data, 96 percent of a fiction book sales take place in the first year, and the majority of the New York Times bestselling books sell between 10, 000 and 100, 000 copies in their first year.

Presuming the average royalty check is 12 percent and the average hardcover fiction book retails at 15, that means authors are earning roughly between 18, 000 and 180, 000 on a bestseller. This is a New York Times bestseller. 18, 000 to 180, 000.

Simone Collins: Also, writers are not being paid anything, so why would they

Malcolm Collins: bother?

Keep in mind now, these are being split with the publishing houses, and this is only for New York Times bestselling authors. As a New York Times bestselling author, you might be earning 18, 000 off of that book.

Simone Collins: Wow. You're way better paid being a public school teacher. People argue that like teachers are not [00:05:00] paid anything.

Malcolm Collins: And you're splitting that with the publishers.

Simone Collins: Yeah. When you're like a bestselling author. It's so funny. I remember the first time I met someone who completely didn't understand How much people actually made. And he was telling someone who's probably making less than he was. He's Oh wow. Like I bet you have a yacht or something.

And he just had no idea that people in the writing world don't make money.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. When it's also true with our books, people are always like why don't you publish more books and stuff like that? You guys must be, why don't you use some of like your books money? Like you guys taught the wall street journal, nonfiction bestseller list.

And I was like yeah, we did. We did. We did talk to the wall street journal, nonfiction bestseller list. And they're like what did you do? I'm one of my favorite things. They go, what did you do different with that book? Just do that again. And I was like, that was our least selling book by like one fourth of the sales of our just make money again.

And they're like wait. Why did your least selling book? top the Wall Street Journal nonfiction bestseller list, but none of your others did. And the answer is simple. [00:06:00] All of our other books were Amazon exclusives, which do not qualify for that list or the New York times bestseller list. The way we got on the list was intentionally hampering the launch of one of our books, putting it in Barnes and Noble.

When we typically would only listen to Amazon. And as a result, we cannot give the book on Kindle Unlimited, like we can all our other books. But we were able to technically be Wall Street Journal bestsellers. With lower reach. With lower reach. With lower reach. So we hampered our reach, but we got the title that I had wanted.

I wanted to be a bestseller for, my whole life. We don't qualify for New York Times. A lot of people don't know this to be a New York Times bestseller until fairly recently. And now they break the rules only for like progressive aligned books, but you have to be published by a New York Times based publishing house.

It's not any book. If you self publish, you cannot get on that list. And if you're not self publishing, you're splitting your money with somebody else for basically nothing. Keep in mind that 18, 000 that they're making. [00:07:00] Is being split with a publisher or max around 180, 000 for a normal New York Times bestseller that's being split with a publisher.

He's taking about half now. So you're making like 90, 000 per New York Times bestseller book. And most of your books aren't going to be that, but let's keep going here so we can, Get the idea of what are the actual numbers involved in sales here? So there's a chart i'm going to put on screen here which shows the copies that sold in one year number of print titles that sell over a million is zero A number of digital titles that sell over a million is one and number of audiobooks is zero.

Wow. 500, 000 to 1 million number of print titles eight You Number of digital titles, 10 and number of audio books, six, a hundred thousand to half a million print titles, 260, a number of digital titles, 267, and number of audio books. 111. And something you'll start to notice from this point in the chart on that's really interesting is the number of print [00:08:00] books and digital titles that make it into each of these categories is about equal.

So what is you get this explosion in the digital world, but it's really not that much above the print world. Or you get that one book that's over a million 10, 000 to a hundred thousand print 6. 5, 000. Digital 7, 000, audio 2, 000 and then 1, 000 print 57 digital 75 1, 000 audio books, 17, 000.

Simone Collins: So we're doing actually pretty good in terms of our book sales. When you think about

Malcolm Collins: our book sales, yeah, we typically do about 50, 000 per book or something like that was a lot of our books. I think we might be over that now. I haven't checked in a few years.

Simone Collins: What you're also not, you haven't yet pointed out at least is that the majority of these books that are selling are probably romance novels or like really smutty, not smutty sometimes money teen fiction and stuff.

When you look at what's actually selling.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. A lot of the books that actually sell a romance novels are really smutty. When you talk with

Simone Collins: [00:09:00] authors about authors who actually make money, they're romance novel writers. So yeah.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. So I'm going to keep going with more stats here and we can talk more about the industry and what's happening, but I want to give people an idea of how little people are actually reading as we go into this.

So in 2022, Penguin Random House wanted to buy Simon Schuster. The two publishing houses, just, these are coming from like a ton of different articles. If you want to find them, just Google the words I'm saying. I just tried to pull together the most interesting quote from a bunch of articles on this.

The two publishing houses made up. 37 percent and 11 percent of the marketing share according to the filing and combined, they would have condensed the big five publishing houses into the big four. But the government intervened and brought an antitrust case against Penguin to determine whether that would create a monopoly.

During the trial, the head of every major publishing house and literary agency group got on stand to speak about the publishing industry and give numbers, giving us an eye opening account from the inside. The big five publishing houses [00:10:00] spent most of their money on book advances for big celebrities like Britney Spears and franchise authors like James Patterson, and this is the bulk of their business.

They also sell a lot of Bibles, repeat bestsellers like Lord of the Rings, and children's books like The Very Hungry Caterpillar. These two market categories, celebrity books and repeated bestsellers from the backlist, make up the entirety of the publishing industry and even fund their vanity project, publishing all the rest of the books we think about when we think about book publishing.

That is basically a vanity project. And

Simone Collins: that so checks out. Multiple copies of the Very Hungry Caterpillar in our house. I

Malcolm Collins: tripped over one this morning. They're just everywhere. And then it goes on to say, which make no money at all and typically sell less than a thousand copies. I want to keep that in mind.

The entire, what you think of as like the literary industry, if you're like, if they're only making 180, 000 to 20, 000 a year on New York Times [00:11:00] bestsellers, how are these big publishing houses staying in business? And it is Bibles celebrity books like Britney Spears books and their backlist. It is not on things that are intellectually enriching the population.

Simone Collins: Which is wild because when you look at old libraries, when you look at people read it in the past, it was a different story. The market hadn't discovered yet that you could publish gossip and romance and whatnot in books, but it's crazy to think about the old library when used to look like now people buy books just for signaling.

There are lots of people like YouTubers, people with their zoom backgrounds, with all these substantive books. I feel like maybe now 50 percent or more of the substantive, nice hardcover books that are being bought literally as zoom background or YouTube background dressing. Nothing more.

Malcolm Collins: I wouldn't be surprised about that at all.

And I would also just to promote books for a second here, or even audio books. Like you could be listening to a podcast, like the one [00:12:00] that you're listening to with us. I'm not trying to lower our listener base here, but I'm just telling it like it is.

Or you could be listening to an audio book, right? If you are listening to this podcast versus one of our audio books, everything on this podcast is off the top of our heads. Okay. Generally speaking, occasionally I'll do a pre written thing, but those are usually our worst performing videos.

Every single line in our audio book was counterchecked by each of us. Maybe a hundred times.

Simone Collins: Yeah. And there's

Malcolm Collins: still typos. There are still

Simone Collins: typos and three people copy edited them. Yeah. And what happens when we write books, Malcolm writes them. I completely rewrite every sentence to make it more.

Like palatable, then he completely rewrites them because he's you completely don't understand anything. And then I completely rewrite them again because I'm like, no, this is not clear at all. And then somewhere in there, it stops maybe two more rounds later. That is so much more work. The number of hours it goes into each book.

People recently have been contacting Malcolm and saying, Oh, it's sad that you're not going to write. Books as much as you did before. [00:13:00] But when we look at their book,

Malcolm Collins: people watch my YouTube channel, they don't read the books that much. Yeah.

Simone Collins: And a lot of people, and this podcast is really relevant to what we're discussing now that is to say this conversation is really relevant to people who are thinking about writing a book, one of the early podcasts that Spencer Greenberg did on clear thinking with Spencer Greenberg, his podcast was interviewing someone who really had this strong theory.

That we have passed an age at which books made sense. And if you want to actually reach someone with a message, as much as it seems wrong, because it doesn't seem as intellectual, it doesn't seem as prestigious. You really should be engaging with people on different formats. But I think the question is on what format is.

Should you be engaging with people because for example, engaging with people on Twitter, we found Twitter doesn't really convert Twitter doesn't really change minds. We found that YouTube does change minds. And we do think it's really meaningful and found that podcasts are the same. So you have to be thoughtful about where you are.

But [00:14:00] books should not be on.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. And before I go further with the stats, I think you make a good point there. Like we could get broader reach potentially by trying to do something like TikTok or Instagram shorts but we're not reaching people in the right mental space. Engage them. I don't care about being famous.

I care about changing minds. That's the point of all of this to helping people think deeper, think more and understand their world better. Everything like it wouldn't matter if I was just in front of a bunch of people, like that's not interesting to me. And so YouTube seems to be the perfect medium for this.

But you have to do, the type of content we're doing on YouTube, you have to have a really heavy upload schedule, which we have, but it prevents, super scripted stuff from us.

Simone Collins: Yeah, exactly.

Malcolm Collins: Unless we were to start a different channel for it, but I don't even know if that's something I want to engage in, but okay, to go further with the quotes here, cause it's, this is actually really interesting stuff.

Okay. So Madeline McIntosh, CEO of Penguin Random House US in 2020. [00:15:00] Only 268 titles sold more than 100, 000 copies and 96 percent of all the books they publish were less than a thousand copies.

That's still the vibe. Oh, you're so sweet to the little one. Simone, just so you register that, I want to run that by you again. Of Penguis Random House, okay? Of all of the books they sold, only 268 sold more than 100, 000 copies. With 96%. So if you write a book and you get accepted and you get paid by penguin random house, you have a 96 percent chance of selling less than a thousand copies.

Like when we talk about how it's worse than

Simone Collins: venture capital, isn't it?

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. When we talk about how small these numbers are. So if you want to contrast that with suppose some of our videos, right? Okay. Yesterday we had a video that already today is that went live is [00:16:00] at 8, 000 views over 8, 000 views.

The day before that, we have a video that's now at 22, 000 views. So those are some of our better performing videos, but that's the daily. We are producing something that is getting more purchases or watches than a book. So we can look at the one that went live today. That is not like a very. It's a particularly poor performing episode because I put effort into it, the Levels of Thinking episode.

So that's at 8 of 10 of our last 10 episodes we've released, so it's near the bottom of our episodes. But it's already, just today, at 1. 5 thousand views. And people should be like, oh, that's just a number of people who clicked on it, they're not necessarily watching it a long time. The average person viewing that episode is watching for 17 and a half minutes.

So that's pretty deep watching, that's not just if you're going to reach people with intellectual content, this is just not the way to do it books anymore. And then here's an interview with her question. Do you know approximately how many authors there are across the industry with books?

500, [00:17:00] 000 units or more during this four year period. My understanding is that it was about 50. And I'm sorry, and I should point out here that we are small time YouTubers, like small time YouTubers. We're like 12, 000 subscribers or something like that, right? That we are outperforming 96 percent of authors who get, goes through multiple rounds of editing, get accepted by a major publishing house, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, is insane.

Question, 50 authors across the publishing industry who during this four year period sold more than 500, 000 units in a single year? Yes, they were incredulous. The DOJ's lawyer collected data on 58, 000 titles published a year and discovered that 90 percent of them sold fewer than 2, 000 copies and 50 percent sold less than a dozen copies.

Okay, so next 75 percent of our acquisitions come from approaching celebrities, politicians, athletes, [00:18:00] the quote unquote celebrity adjacent, et cetera. That way we can control the content. We are approaching authors and celebrities and politicians and athletes for ideas. So it's really, we are on the lookout.

We are scouts in a lot of ways. Jennifer Bergstrom, SVP gallery books group, top selling authors. were defined as those receiving advances, i. e. guaranteed money, in excess of 250, 000. Far fewer than 1 percent of authors receive advances over that mark. Publishers Marketplace, which tracks these things, recorded 233 such deals in all of 2020.

So I'm gonna, I'm gonna go over some of these categories and then we're going to talk about what this does to readers and what this does to the publishing industry more broadly category one led to titles with a sales goal of 75, 000 units and up an advance for something of that is around half a million titles was a sale goal of 000 units get an advance of 150, 000 to a million titles with a sales goal [00:19:00] of 75, 000.

000 units get an advance of actually 50, 000 to 150, 000 more than you'd expect, given how little they're making, where you can really see what they mean by this is a pet project. Titles with a sales goal of 5, 000 to 10, 000 units. So imagine one of our episodes on 5, 000 watches, we would consider that like nothing, right?

This is the goal for them. They're getting an advance of 50, 000. They said 50, 000 or less, but that's still pretty good.

Simone Collins: Yeah, it is. And

Malcolm Collins: I love the author here is. Is anyone else alarmed that the top tier of book sales projections is only 75, 000 units enough? Like one post on subtext gets more views than that.

Yeah, I think

Simone Collins: what you need to look at this as is the number of people willing to put down money to consume someone's ideas. So it's investing both money and time. So really what you should be looking at is Paid subsack subscribers as an equivalent or paid Patreon followers or paid YouTube subscribers or people who leave super thanks on YouTube, because [00:20:00] there, there is a difference with books.

People are putting down money in addition to time with streaming and podcasts and Twitter, whatever you might have there. It's people only investing time. So I would give a little bit of a premium to publishing, but it's still a lot less.

Malcolm Collins: And here you're going to hear the sad news. There are plenty of books that we spent.

So this is coming from Madeline McIntosh, the CEO of Penguin Random House. There are plenty of books that we spend 1 million on the advance and publish them last year. And they did not even make it into the top 1000 books on book scan. Less than 45 percent of those books, the books we spend a million dollars on.

End up in the thousand bestseller list. So less than half of the books they're giving these million dollar advances to are even making it into the top thousand bestselling books. And to be clear, we have regularly made it into the top thousand bestselling books. It is not hard to get into that, to get into the top thousand bestselling books.

You are, you need to sell like 10, 000 copies I think, or something around there. It's really not that hard. [00:21:00] 5, 000 copies, I think on a launch month. Um, okay, sorry. According to Hill, 85 percent of the books with advances of a quarter million and up never earn out their advance.

85 percent aren't earning out their advance. The entire royalties made by the book, so they're never getting any royalties, anything like that, those authors. Even celebrities, so sometimes you think it's going to be a big bestseller, floss. Andrew Cuomo's book was sold at the height of his being America's governor during COVID crisis.

Cuomo. That book was sold for 5 million, I believe. I don't know for a fact, but at the time it came out, the nursing home scandal had happened, the Me Too issues, and the book didn't do any business. Sometimes it's just a timing issue, like Marie Kondo. She did a book About joy at work and making your office sparked with joy because it's not cluttered.

It published March of 2020 that was a literary agent talking about that having a lot of social media followers and fame Doesn't guarantee it will sell [00:22:00] well the singer billy ellish despite her 97 million Instagram followers and 6 million Twitter followers only sold 64, 000 copies within eight months of publishing her book.

Simone Collins: Billie Eilish only managed to sell 64, 000 copies. She has more fans than that.

Malcolm Collins: The singer Justin Timberlake sold only 100, 000 copies of his book in three years after he published it.

Simone Collins: I guess the problem is that these people also did not have salacious books. So I fall, I don't, I haven't read many biographies, but I do follow YouTubers who read the biographies and summarize them for me.

And the only reason why they bother is because there's a lot of hot goss in those books. And it seems like perhaps these people didn't have that, but even that too, that's the thing is my whole point is also, you have to keep in mind number of books being sold are mostly gossip, romance, totally not substantive.

And the problem here is that even the non substantive stuff that, [00:23:00] that publishers are like at least this one will make us money. It doesn't always make them money. Oh, it's so sad. It's so sad.

Malcolm Collins: Hold on. We've got more here. This one I think is going to surprise you. Snoop Dogg's cookbook saw a boost during the pandemic, but he still only sold 205, 000 copies.

Simone Collins: That makes sense. This whole Snoop Dogg, Martha Stewart thing, as much as I love it, is very forced. It's, there's no

Malcolm Collins: audience for that. Okay. You want to hear another one that'll probably make you happy to hear. Okay. Representative Ilyan Omar, a Democrat from Minnesota, Ilyan Omar from the squad, whose

Simone Collins: daughter protested at Columbia and then became homeless and destitute because she was kicked out of Barnard.

Okay.

Malcolm Collins: She's no global pop star, but she has a significant social media presence with 3 million Twitter followers. How many of those are Democrat bots? And another 1. 3 million on Instagram, yet her book, This is What America Looks Like, My Journey from Refugee to Congresswoman, which was [00:24:00] published in 2022, has sold only, can you guess?

Simone Collins: I don't know, 12, 000 copies? 26,

Malcolm Collins: 000 copies.

Simone Collins: No one wants to hear that though, like you hear that title and you're like, I get it. You can even be a fan of hers, but you don't want to, I don't want to relive that. That doesn't sound fun. I don't even want to live that vicariously for the first time. Like why bring this up?

This is ridiculous. Okay,

Malcolm Collins: Here, I've got two more that are good ones. Okay, so Tamika D. Mallory, a social activist with over a million Instagram followers and who has paid 1 million for a two book deal. Her first book State of Emergency sold only 26, 000 copies. Here's one that kind of bums me out.

Piers Morgan.

Simone Collins: Okay.

Malcolm Collins: 8 million on followers on Twitter. He's interviewed us before on Instagram. He has 1. 8 million followers. And he wrote the book, wake up why the world has gone nuts. In the U. S. it sold just 5, 650 copies. 5, 000 for Piers Morgan's book.

Simone Collins: No one knows him here. Perhaps that's the [00:25:00] issue.

But I hear it. No one reads. No one reads. Also Gen Alpha doesn't know how to read. There's that. As well. So this

Malcolm Collins: is where, and this is where I want to tie this all up with sort of our message to young authors and stuff like that. When you're reading all of this, there is no reason to go through traditional publisher anymore.

You are getting nothing. They're getting worse.

Simone Collins: Worse. So what you've talked about here is a lot of public or a lot of authors have not made it past their point at which they can start making royalties, right? They've not made past that point where at least the publishers have a slight profit or net neutral.

We know many authors who. In their contracts were then obligated to sell a certain number of books. And if they failed to sell them, guess what was in the fine print of that contract? You got to buy them. So we know all these people who are like, yeah, I have a garage full of books. Would you like one?

Because I like want my garage back. Cause I had to buy a gazillion books because it was in my contract and I didn't manage to sell the number that I was obligated to sell. So not only. Are you probably not getting any [00:26:00] money, any actual readership? You might also be like completely in a financial hole. I don't think

Malcolm Collins: we've made what are you thinking?

If you're in the publishing industry, you're like, no, how do they approach the industry? How do they approach people? What they are thinking about when they go out and approach people is how can I turn their preexisting follower base into money. That's what they're attempting to do. They are not attempting to turn nobodies into famous authors.

Simone Collins: Oh, no. Yeah. They're looking for a platform. They only care about your platform. And I think they're starting to

Malcolm Collins: realize though, that even the platform doesn't sell. So what do they do? You are an author without a platform. There is no reason for them to work with you or really give you any money, and then you can go out and sell by yourself, but then like, why not just keep all the money?

Yeah. Like you really gain so little by going through the traditional publishing houses. And as, repeated bestselling authors, I can just go through what you're getting from them. A chance at a New York Times bestseller slot if you are the right politics.

Simone Collins: If they're a New York [00:27:00] publisher.

Malcolm Collins: If they're a New York publisher. Okay. So that's one. The second thing you get is some credibility among idiots, but most people don't really care. The other thing that you get is it's not really help with marketing. They don't really do that anymore. So you're not really getting that. You might get editorialized, but some don't.

But really it's, they're like you get editors. It's no, you lose control of editing. You lose control of the title of your book. Some like that, some don't. Some like that, some don't.

Simone Collins: We have to say that. Some people just want to be told what to do. And you

Malcolm Collins: may get an advance. If you don't expect your book to do well, yeah, a hundred percent.

Go for that advance. If, as long as you can get out of the fine print that Simone was talking about. What do you lose? You lose price and control, which is. Literally everything in today's market. Yes. All of our books retail for 99 cents for the digital book, because we know we're not going to make money from them and we just want people to get them, and we give everybody our audio books for free. If you get the digital book, we, you can also get them on audible if you like, find it easier to use that platform because it's [00:28:00] easier than using just MP3 pot files for some people if they have a lot of money, but yeah, we don't try to Any money off of our books.

Some people are like, Oh, I got your book as a favor to you. And I'm like then put it somewhere prominent in your house. That's how you do me a favor.

Simone Collins: We, all the profits go directly to our nonprofit bank account. So it does help the nonprofit. Yeah, moderately.

Malcolm Collins: But no, but we're making like 50 cent per book because I put it at like the lowest level that we can price it at.

Yeah. So that's one thing that you're losing which then makes it so you have less reach with your books. But if I wanted to go for more than I'd be making higher margins, but then you also have total control of how it's released, where it's released, et cetera. And then for audio books, just read your own book.

Like initially we hired like audio book people, and then I was like, why am I doing this? I just read my own book. And that's the way we do our books now. But I think what this means is a lot of people, they see books as the refuge of like academics or intellectualism, but it isn't that anymore.

I think the true intellectuals now are sub stack. I think that's the most intellectual. [00:29:00] Reading and high ideas engagement platform at the moment. Yes. And then after Substack, I think it's blogs, like you'd go to Aporia or something like that. And then after that, I think it's YouTube.

And then after YouTube, I don't really think anything is even in the game.

Simone Collins: Come on.

Malcolm Collins: Oh, yeah, podcasts together. Yeah. Yeah. And I guess this is technically a podcast. Some people are watching this through podcasts. One of my favorites is like, Oh, I watch your YouTube videos and I put them through AI so I can turn it into written text so I can read that and consume it faster.

And I was like, we have a sub stack that automatically does that, right? I pre translate all of these to written text if that's the way you prefer to consume them. Like my job is just, or my goal is just to touch as many people as possible. That's the goal with these ideas and these platforms.

And that's how you do it these days. You need to adapt to your environment. And I think a lot of people will say things like, yeah, but the podcasts and the YouTubes, those won't be seen as classics in a hundred years. And I'm like, Yeah, of course they will. And they're like podcasts from a hundred [00:30:00] years ago aren't seen as classics.

I'm like, podcasts for a hundred years ago were things like the Federalist Papers, that was two people arguing against each other in like the op ed section of a magazine. That was the podcast of its period, or, like St. Paul's Letters or something like that. Not everything was done in book format.

Yeah, even like this panic about people like young people over watching podcasts and it dumbing them down. I think you, you see this in the early days of books, people were afraid of reading fever, like young girls getting reading fever, but they would just do nothing but read. It was sad and it was rotting their brains.

Oh. And because they believed that books were addictive and messed with the brains of young women, if that sounds familiar to you. But anyway, I have loved this conversation and I'm glad that we were able to bring this topic to our audience.

Simone Collins: Likewise. TLDR. Don't write a book. Make a podcast or sub stack.

Malcolm Collins: And I love you to death, Simone. Love you too, Gorgeous. You are [00:31:00] amazing. And if you do want to check out our books, it's the Pragmatist Guide series, and we have one on religion, sexuality, relationships, life and governance.

In this thought-provoking discussion, Malcolm and Simone Collins delve into the phenomenon of "tradwives" and the modern misconceptions surrounding traditional relationships. They argue that much of the current "trad" movement is more akin to BDSM power exchange dynamics than genuine traditional family structures. The hosts explore the historical roles of women in traditional relationships, highlighting the importance of financial empowerment and partnership. They also discuss the dangers of idealizing consumerized fantasies of traditional relationships, which can lead to instability and dissatisfaction. Malcolm and Simone emphasize the importance of building relationships based on mutual affection, romance, and care, rather than strict, inflexible roles. They also examine the generational factors that have contributed to the fracturing of cultural norms and the challenges faced by younger generations in reconstructing healthy relationship models.

Malcolm Collins: [00:00:00] so much of what the trad phenomenon has become, I would say is actually more of a descendant of BDSM community behavior.

Simone Collins: Yes. In actual

Malcolm Collins: trad behavior. It is a live in 24, seven slave relationship. Little power exchange. Yes. Yeah. Power, total power exchange relationship. They have. Covered in the costume of traditionalism. The tradwife TikTokers and Tumblers and YouTubers that you are seeing are to a traditional relationship what hardcore porn is to a real sexual relationship with a woman. It is a consumerized format meant to masturbate a pacific. subset of your sort of mental landscape. It is not really what it is like to be in that sort of a relationship.

Would you like to know more?

Malcolm Collins: Hello Simone, it is wonderful to be talking to you today. [00:01:00] Today we are going to have an episode in defense of traditionalism. And people can know we've done some videos

anti traditionalist, where we argue that a lot of, Trad wifing and stuff like that is really over idealizing a model of family structure from a very limited portion of United States history that isn't really indicative of any large cultural movement.

It was more what was just being sold by Hollywood at the time. And people today, they're like, Oh, Hollywood lies to us and gives us unrealistic expectations. And I'm like they were doing that in the fifties too. Like this. This isn't a new phenomenon, buddy. And they're like, Oh s**t, it was always a lie.

But I want to go on a few paths with this. So first I have heard people criticize trad wives and trad families as a LARP [00:02:00] recently. And this really got to me because All cultural frameworks are a LARP. You are always LARPing your culture. When you are an ultra Orthodox Jew and you are putting on your little outfit every day and you are doing all of the cultural things that you do, what makes it a LARP?

It is. Live action and roleplay as being what you are that helps remind you of who you are. Roleplaying as something that is differential from the mainstream societal expectations helps you maintain a differential value set, which is what the Trad families are often trying to do. But at the same time as I talk about how great trad families are, I also want to talk about this concept because I want to narrowly say this type of trad family is great, but there's been something that's been talked about a lot recently, which [00:03:00] is the trad wife to single mom pipeline, that recently happened with Laura Southern quite famously.

And so the question is how, why is this happening? Why, okay. Are these trad relationships not as stable as they were in a historic context in leading to really negative outcomes, particularly for women.

And this is where we're going to talk about trad wife is communism. But we'll get to that later in the video.

But for, before I go further, I want to hear your thoughts on any of this.

Simone Collins: Yeah, I've been watching a lot of the trad wife to single mom pipeline videos and my Top observation so far is that people, even when we're talking about the 1950s trad wife, which we still argue was a short term aberration and not at all representative of true trad wifery.

They're not even modern trad wives aren't even being like 1950s trad wives. I was watching Catch Me If You Can, and there's one ep er, there's a scene in Catch Me If You Can in which Tom Hanks, the FBI agent [00:04:00] trying to catch the character played by Leonardo DiCaprio, who's this kid who essentially masquerades as a pilot and surgeon and commits massive check fraud.

He's trying to explain to other FBI agents how check fraud works. And the FBI agents are like, what? Check numbers. Like you got to talk to my wife about this. She handles all my finances. They're acting like finances are women's work. And it really indicates just the extent to which. When that traditional trad wife, nuclear family model was being used.

Women weren't just educating the kids, raising the kids, managing the household, managing the cooking, managing the cleaning, they were also managing the family finances. They were managing investing. They were managing banking. They were doing all the payments. There was even this, there's some great YouTube videos on, the effect of housewives in Japan, investing in stock markets and the way that they influence stock market trends because they were so actively involved in investing even internationally, because at the time, and even still interest rates were so low, right? Like saving [00:05:00] wouldn't be enough.

So they had to invest actively and it was the women. In these traditional relations who are investing. And yet, when you look at the way that women in the now modern quote unquote, trad wife cosplay are behaving to them, it is just cooking and maybe light cleaning and maybe a little bit of light child rearing.

It is not literally being pivotal. To the life of the husband in terms of they don't have control over the finances, for example.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Many women in these actually traditional relationships, even if you go back to the 1950s their husbands were living on an allowance that the wife was giving them along with the rest of the family.

And we can say, why don't modern trad? family structure themselves this way. If this was a historic way of doing it within at least this cultural context. And the answer is because so much of what the trad phenomenon has become, I would say is actually more of a descendant of BDSM community behavior.

Simone Collins: Yes. In [00:06:00] actual

Malcolm Collins: trad behavior. It is a live in 24, seven slave relationship. Little power exchange. Yes. Yeah. Power, total power exchange relationship. They have. Covered in the costume of traditionalism. And it is to an, in an extent to protect the, men's egos who are afraid of and I think rightly so for some reason, given divorce laws and stuff like that today, giving women too much power in their lives.

But. Because of this, they're not able to have the type of romance and true, partnership that traditional families had. It reminds me of a scene, when I see these, like this descendant of the red pill oh, I'm being, So attractive to women. When Gomez and Morticia are dancing and being like impossibly romantic and the woman's there, like looking at them Oh, I want this so bad.

And then her date Fester has two pretzels in his nose [00:07:00] trying to impress her.

What I'm

Oh, I see.

Malcolm Collins: And that's what they come off. Like they come off like a silly goof who has no idea how to be romantic or what women really want. Because they have based it all on these. fantasies that are more downstream of BDSM culture than they are downstream of any form of true traditionalism, which was a genuine hundred percent power exchange partnership.

Simone Collins: I think in many of these cases, one, it's women imposing themselves on their boyfriends, fiancees, husbands, and the husbands and fiancees and boyfriends don't actually want all of this. And two, I think it's just [00:08:00] people who are trophy wives. Who think that they're trad wives and that's the bigger thing.

A trophy wife is someone who only does maybe like cooking and cleaning and just is there to look good. And she is not someone who has any financial empowerment. She is not someone who contributes functionally to the family, aside from an aesthetic contribution. So I think there's just also this misconstruing or reframing of the trophy wife as the track wife, because by the way, no one really talks about trophy wives anymore.

But tradwives have slotted in to that position. People are using it as a fronting device of look at me, look at my lifestyle, but they're a tradwife.

Malcolm Collins: But here, I want to talk about what a tradwife actually is, right? And where it actually works. And this is where tradwives are communism comes from. So what do I mean by tradwives are communism?

If you look at the communist ideal, it is from each. According to their ability to each according [00:09:00] to

Simone Collins: their

Malcolm Collins: needs. To each according to their needs. And within a family structure, a trad family structure, that is generally what you were doing. You would have For example, our kids don't pay rent.

Like our infant, we give it food because it needs food. Simone produces that food because she has the body that has the ability to produce that food. I don't because I recognize that males and females are different. And that means that biologically we are In some ways structured for different roles within the family.

However, those roles are not hard set. They have some degree of flexibility within them. And that the way that you utilize those bodies and natural differences is going to change. As technology changes, as economics changes, as society changes, but it still follows the traditional system of to [00:10:00] each according to their needs.

from each according to their abilities, which can lead to some role specialization, but role specialization does not mean. So if you look at what happened with Laura Southern, where you would get the husband talking about her and saying that, she was a financial burden after he had asked her to quit her job to be a full time stay at home wife.

How can you say that to your wife? You don't get to say that if you have demanded these sorts of as the head of the household. And of course a woman in a modern context is going to go a bit crazy if she's at home doing nothing but the kids without any sort of a social outlet like you would have had in a historic context, which all women had in a historic context about or they often participated in some form of, small level industry to provide additional side income from the family.

And as you mentioned, often quite intellectual tasks like investing family income managing the family estate when the husband was off or just generally managing the [00:11:00] family estate was often a wife's role which is, often an income generator in a historic context. And so what is the family estate was in the modern world?

Maybe it's. So the family social media, maybe it's the, people always are like, Ooh, they share a Twitter account. One of them must have cheated. And I'm like, no, it's just incredibly inefficient in terms of time spent and in terms of where we can direct attention to us to redirect it all to a central account.

Like why would we have two accounts? That's what. Such a wasted effort. So what? We can have some form of conflict, so I can troll.

Going into Twitter voluntarily reminds me of the.

Tunnel of prejudice from that old south park episode. And I can only imagine that people who love being on Twitter, having like Cartman's reaction to that tunnel. Now did you know that words we use can show intolerance? Let's begin our tour with a walk through our tunnel of prejudice [00:12:00] queer! Baner! Chink! Nigger! Hebe! F****t! Cracker! Oh man, this is awesome! Now you know how it feels. I wanna ride again, I wanna ride again!

Malcolm Collins: I

get why they're like, somebody's cheating, because I guess if I wanted to cheat that would be an avenue for doing it. But that's so silly. I, yeah so I think that's it.

But then I also want to talk about where, Tradwives went off the rails because this is another thing that happened to Laura Southern with these incredibly strict roles Which partially led to the breakdown of her relationship and in the traditional American family the roles just were not that strict the idea of Every meal is made by a wife was never really the norm in American culture It was when the wife didn't have another job.

She might make disproportionately more meals, but not every meal but [00:13:00] Some tradwives Have taken these roles to be like incredibly strict roles. And because of that you get these market inefficiencies just like you would in a, in an overly totalitarian, like command economy, communism.

The reason why communism works at the family level is because it's organic communism instead of command economy communism. So if people don't understand what I mean by these two things in command economy, communism, everybody has strict roles and they just perform their strict roles. And then often you have some hierarchy where the person at the top of the hierarchy basically creates all the roles and says, you do this, right?

And this doesn't work because it's incredibly inefficient. In a organically formed economy you instead have people take on the roles that they are best suited for in the moment when you're dealing with an entire society. Capitalism is a good way to organically create that action.

But if you are dealing with a. Household, for example, where everybody genuinely cares about and appreciates each [00:14:00] other. I, for example, walking around the house, I know that right now it hurts Simone to bend over because she recently had a cesarean section. And so I try to pick up things on the floor whenever I see them.

And why do I do that? It's because I care about my wife. They're like why would you do that? Because it's easier for me than it is for her. And then they're like, yeah, but then why do you do it? It's because I care about her. And because she shows appreciation for me when I do it. You, you all the time tell me, Oh, I noticed you did this little thing that you didn't, that I might not have noticed, and you didn't ask for thanks for, and for that I am additionally appreciative of you doing it.

And that is organic communism where everyone is choosing to do what's right because they care about the other people. It's also not because it's

Simone Collins: their job per se, but because they, it's that rule of if you see a mess, you clean it up. It doesn't matter if you made it.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. But this is also why communism doesn't work at the societal level.

Because you get the free rider problem. And because people don't, a lot of people hate other people in their society. So then you need [00:15:00] to build it into a command economy, which leads to the collapse, but they are building. family structures as command economies, which is just stupid. And you could say, then why have they done this?

It's not just the BDSM. It's the consumerization of the concept of the trad

Simone Collins: wife.

Malcolm Collins: So let me explain.

Simone Collins: Yeah. Intriguing.

Malcolm Collins: You have learned about what a trad wife is. From TikTok, what the ideal of Elias Troutwife is from TikTok, from Instagram, from not even from 1950s movies. It's some vague concept you have of the way things were in the 1950s, then through modern bastionization, elevated within, these various social media platforms.

Everything that you see within those social media platforms is served to you because an algorithm said it needed to be served to you.

So if you are seeing it, you are seeing it because the algorithm says, Hey, I think that you are going to [00:16:00] engage with this content. And yeah, I, that is a product. That is a product that is being served to you because it knows that you like to interact with that brief second clip of somebody's life.

But, that means that the tradwife TikTokers and Tumblers and YouTubers that you are seeing are to a traditional relationship what hardcore porn is to a real sexual relationship with a woman. It is a consumerized format meant to masturbate a pacific. subset of your sort of mental landscape. It is not really what it is like to be in that sort of a relationship.

But do you have thoughts on this Simone?

Simone Collins: Yeah, I agree with you. There's nothing real about it. Obviously it works in isolated cases, but it's not in most realities, a sustainable way to go. And it's not representative of [00:17:00] any long term reality that I've ever encountered.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah.

Okay. So now we can talk about why traditional relationships of this, I'll call them BDSM tradwives because they're not real tradwives where the woman's just submissive in all things to the man. That is. Yeah. Thanks. That's not the way American culture worked historically, maybe, as I've said, maybe some Muslim cultures were structured that way, but not classic American culture.

Simone Collins: No.

Malcolm Collins: Not if read about relationships from like the old west time period. Like again, for example, I read about my ancestor who lived during that time period and you didn't see that at all in his relationship, it's very clear that if a man had treated his wife that way in his writings, he would have looked down upon them and seen them as both low class empathetic.

Because that is traditional to Americana, like treating a woman poorly. is or are treating her as like your slave is not a positive thing. This you could say why is this creating a fundamentally unstable [00:18:00] dynamic? The way that divorce laws are structured in our country, if you treat a woman in a way that builds animosity towards you.

Which, how could this not over time, you don't actually legally have power over them. Even if you have a prenup in the US, the laws hugely favor the woman. If she doesn't have a degree of genuine admiration for you, and on top of that genuine admiration, genuine affection for you, then it's like a slave that always has a poisoned knife to your neck.

Like everything you do to target them or degrade them is idiocy. The dynamics in that relationship are not the dynamics that you are pretending they are. It is completely, and this is where the LARP accusation is true, it is completely a role play in that you do not actually have the power over this person you are pretending to yourself that you have.

They can take half [00:19:00] your money and then take a portion of your salary for basically the rest of your life. And you will have to support them while they do whatever they want. And so that creates a hugely unstable dynamic. And society won't hugely punish them for that. They might have trouble securing another partner after that.

But they won't realize that until after they've enacted upon this. And so then both of you just live miserably. Enjoy your horrible lives alone. Which is not, a great thing. But, society. When you believe a consumerist fantasy and you confuse a consumerist fantasy with a call to action, you can end up making horrifically wrong choices.

And do people deserve this? I don't know. But now I say all this with the understanding that there is a real thing you can search for out there. Like there is a real traditional relationship structure. But it is a relationship structure that is based on mutual affection and [00:20:00] romance and caring and not these little games and stuff like that.

I think

Simone Collins: what's so dangerous is what used to happen in the past is, one, humans are not Great at thinking from a first principles perspective. Like you, you are unique in having this ability, Malcolm. I think the bigger issue is that what most humans do and have done throughout history is they are presented with examples that they're exposed to throughout their lives, and then they follow the example that works best for them.

So they may see a couple of different ways of living. And then they choose the way of living that is feasible and appealing to them. And what's problematic about the trad wife pipeline is that as you're saying, it's this consumerist fantasy. That's not real. That's not sustainable, but it is what is showing up in people's lives and people aren't really being exposed to that many functional relationships or that many.

You could say traditional or comforting or alternative to the modern kind of soulless [00:21:00] relationship where everyone just has their own atomized life and doesn't really have an integrated marriage. That's very romantic. That's very supportive, mutually supportive. And then they see this and they assume then this is how it's going to work.

So I don't think people are intentionally trying to choose something uniquely indulgent or fetish fetishized or whatever. They just don't. They don't have any examples of what real trad relationships are outside of some examples, which do exist in media, but just aren't framed really clearly as relationships.

There are shows, for example, where couples work together. The shows don't really highlight the good elements of their relationship. They like to highlight the conflict or pretend that there's conflict or focus on other things. But They didn't really show the real thing. So I think a lot of it comes down to people just not having good examples to run by not any good models being out there.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Yeah. I think that makes [00:22:00] sense.

I yeah, and I don't know. And I wonder okay, so why do people not have good models? I think one of the problems that people have is they blame too much of our cultures like fracturization on this generation,

Simone Collins: which generation millennials, our generation,

Malcolm Collins: Gen Z, Gen Alpha, when I really put it mostly on boomers.

Boomers were the ones who did all that experimental stuff in the seventies and then ended up in these loveless relationships. If you look at the divorce rate within boomers, it's astoundingly high compared to every other generation. This is where you get this like 50 percent divorce stat, which isn't representative of modern marriage at all.

And it is that they were the first generation that like collectively decided to live lives of hedonism instead of for the future.

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: And I think that you look at them, [00:23:00] this is why I actually think American Psycho is such a good movie in terms of depicting like what happened to the boomers.

I think American Psycho shows what the boomers did to themselves. I know so few happy boomers. In terms of the people I know and it's because they structured their lives in these horrible ways in which they broke from tradition, but they didn't think about what they were doing. And so much of it was self indulgent.

And then the younger generation sees that things didn't work for them. Or it's a few generations away from any cultural solution that really works. And so they're trying to reconstruct what a healthy culture looks like from, unfortunately, in a world where information and lifestyles themselves have become consumerized from what is essentially pornography.

And because of that they end up crafting and then, people like us will say this and they're like then you're not right wing enough because they begin to develop parts of their identity. They're like, if you don't take this extremist view of what a trad wife [00:24:00] is or a traditional family structure is, then that means you are less right wing than me and thus lower status was in right wing communities than me.

And basically the response to that is bro, are you like, an idiot? Do you not see that you're destroying your life by choosing a stupid family structure that never worked if you are looking at this from reality? We're not looking at this from a right wing versus non right wing perspective.

We're like, what's a good way to structure your life so that you end up satisfied with what you end up creating and you actually secure a partner and you give your kids a good childhood and blah blah blah. And the structures that they're building do not do that. And they're, And yet they do that.

They follow these structures in these hypotheses that are easily disprovable if they search out people who actually attempted to live these ultra originally structured systems, outside of ultra religious context. So I guess it can work. If you're in like an extremist evangelical family or an extremist Haredi family or something like that, okay, that can [00:25:00] work.

Or like an Amish family that can work, but when you're trying to live adjacent to the secular world, it just doesn't work because there is no negative externality for the fracturing of the relationship, which leads to the fracturing of a relationship and then a woman without any skills. And then Yeah, it's not awesome.

Simone Collins: The audience has been forewarned.

Malcolm Collins: All right. I love you, Simone. Have a spectacular day.

Simone Collins: I love you, too..

In this thought-provoking discussion, Malcolm Collins presents a new framework for understanding the evolution of human mindsets and personal development. Inspired by the shortcomings of existing models like Spiral Dynamics, Malcolm's tree-like structure outlines various branches of mental states, ranging from animalism and perceptualism to utilitarianism, mysticism, and pragmatism. He explains how individuals can progress through these stages, sometimes regressing or becoming stuck in suboptimal states. Malcolm and Simone explore the implications of this framework, discussing how it can help people identify their current mindset, understand the potential pitfalls of each branch, and navigate towards more intellectually sophisticated and mentally healthy states. They also delve into the practical applications of this model and debate its utility for personal growth and cross-cultural understanding.

[00:00:00]

Malcolm Collins: Hello simone Today, we are going to do one of those episodes that excites me so much. I have put so much effort into today's content, and I know it will do horrible in the algorithm, but it's a development of my view of the world further, where I feel that because of this revelation I've had, where I'm like, oh, now I understand things better when I have systematized them in this way.

So it's a

Simone Collins: paradigm shift. Yeah,

Malcolm Collins: my paradigm shift for me. Yeah.

Simone Collins: Yeah. Okay.

Malcolm Collins: And it actually came from reading about a theory that I find very distasteful, which is spiral dynamic. So I ended up, because it was a paradigm shift, I wanted to write it down. So I'll read what I've written down and we can talk about it.

Okay. Like I used to do with the tracks. Sounds good. Yeah.

Would you like to know more?

Malcolm Collins: The idea of spiral dynamics has come up a few times when talking to fans, and since then, I have noticed some related channels like [00:01:00] HoMath, WhatIfAltHist, and Brittany Simon delineating level systems for how people evolve in their thinking. Anyone who knows us knows how viscerally negatively we would react to such a system at first glance, given that humans seem to have a natural inclination to categorize themselves and others based on simplistic criteria.

If you don't understand why this would create a negative reaction, just watch any video on Spiral Dynamics and watch the person explaining the concept, happily classifying leaders of the political opposition to their beliefs among the examples of the lower order mindsets. All Spiral Dynamics really gets right is a broad ordering of the very lowest levels of personal development and then transitions into a moral and religious system at most of the two tier systems and beyond.

Though, I suppose it is only axiomatic that an individual cannot accurately predict mindsets that are above their own. Thus, if they are at a relatively low level of personal development, will just project a mystical pseudo [00:02:00] religious worldview as being the higher order mindset. However, despite dismissing these systems early on, I began to think more about the ways humans relate to each other.

relate to reality, a life well lived, and a self conception about how those systems build upon others, and it helped me realize that there is a real way to build out such a map. However, the two keys to doing this that others have missed, is that this is not a line, but a branching tree of life philosophies that sometimes, in fact, frequently, has a mindset that is strictly worse than its progenitor.

By this, what I mean is the mindsets don't get better as they go further along the path.

Simone Collins: Would you describe mindsets in this model that you're going to go into deeper, of course, as straying from the path or straying from an ideal? Scenario when they get an

Malcolm Collins: example, which I have written in the next sentence, for [00:03:00] example, we would argue that a strict deontological religious world perspective, which is one of the earliest mindsets is also one of the most mentally healthy and intellectually sophisticated for this reason,

we draw our map of mindsets with a quote unquote waterline with the sophistication and mental health associated with a mindset being determined by where it is along the waterline. So if you think of this like a Line graph that then ends up branching. There is a waterline and some nodes of the line are below the waterline.

Some are above the waterline. Some are below the waterline. Okay. Now before I go further, have you heard of spiral dynamics? Do you know broadly what I'm talking about here? When I'm talking about these level systems for understanding how people think

Simone Collins: I've learned it about five times, and then each time I learn about it, I completely forget about it because that's what I do when I come across information, I disregard.

It is. It's not being useful, I don't maintain space for it. Can you? And that's the way I

Malcolm Collins: was. And that's what this [00:04:00] sort of caused this breakthrough for me is just having my face shoved in it again and again recently. And eventually my distaste for how stupid the predominant theories in this space are became shadowed by the, Oh, but you probably actually could build a system like this that works mindset.

Simone Collins: Interesting. Huh. Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: Okay. So that's where, cause I kept seeing things. It was like, no, if you really wanted to do it, you would actually probably order this and this. I should point out that with this system, single individuals don't necessarily need to pass from one node to another node within the system, but a society might.

So if you start at one node, you can often like within your larger society, you can often process further on your own. And that most societies, and I'll get to a point in the graph when I say, this is the node that is a starting node for most people born in a Western society right now.

Simone Collins: Can you start by giving the CliffsNotes version of spiral [00:05:00] dynamics as it is interpreted by the mainstream?

Malcolm Collins: With Spiral Dynamics really all it is very basic, human society progresses through these various mindsets, which they're right about for the first three mindsets, and then it turns into like mystical religious mumbo jumbo, basically.

Simone Collins: And it's it's this Spiral, but you're describing it as a sort of linear. So you ignore

Malcolm Collins: the word spiral. Just think of it as an upwards line. Okay. They have some things where they call it a spiral because they see certain themes repeat as societies develop. And they're like, Oh, and society oscillates between this mindset and this mindset as it moves to higher phases.

However, I think most of this is just an artifact of how the map was constructed. And I don't think that they're actually noticing something that's real in the ways humans develop because they are only through one spiral. Like IE one cycle when they get to the end of their accurate observations before they get into their like pseudo religious [00:06:00] observations.

Simone Collins: Okay. That's important because people who follow this podcast will know that you love what you call spiral energy. And now they're learning that you hate. What you call spiral dynamics. And it might be a little bit confusing.

Malcolm Collins: And we can do another future video going deep into why spiral dynamics are the bad theory.

But I don't like feel, I don't think that's necessary to understand the concepts that we're doing here. And I think that most intelligent people, when they look at spiral dynamics, they're like, Oh, that's an interesting model, but obviously it's being affected by these people's priors. If I

Simone Collins: may, then for the audience, what I would say is if you're not familiar with spiral dynamics.

What I've heard from Malcolm about this so far, although I'm coming into this mostly not knowing what he's going to say, is that what it seems like Malcolm is describing here is Maslow's hierarchy of needs, but if it starts at self actualization.

Malcolm Collins: My system goes way past self actualization, which is another problem with a lot of the historic systems.

Yeah,

Simone Collins: but in other words, thematically what we're talking about is what humans do after [00:07:00] they've met all their basic human needs.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. The other thing that I'd note about a lot of level systems, like Maslow's hierarchy of needs or spiral dynamics is that if people were, if all of society was at the highest level society wouldn't function.

And to me that means that's axiomatically not the highest level that you can be at.

Simone Collins: Is that just because no one's working on the stuff that needs to be done?

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Like in a society where everyone is turquoise society, where everyone is at Maslow's idea of self actualization is a very non efficacious society.

So it, to me, that just clearly means, no, this isn't some in state it's their idea of what a priest cast should look like which is again, a theological position and not a factual position.

Simone Collins: That's a really good point. I appreciate you're saying that the world doesn't run On self actualized people, the real actualized

Malcolm Collins: gurus

All right. So for the very 1st of the states, this is a state that is in the branch tree, which we call the [00:08:00] lower tree that all of the other trees end up branching out of and I marked this at negative eight. So this scale goes from negative 10 to positive 10.

So people in this state have very little ability to engage with sophisticated ideas. And people generally start in this state when they don't have their basic needs met. I call it animalism. Individuals who live within this mental state are only motivated. By base pre evolved instincts that we share with other animals like sexual desire and a desire for food.

This mindset is virtually unseen outside of mentally handicapped individuals and drug addicts. The next state, which I rate at negative five. So it's like you, you can engage with some more complicated ideas, but it's still mindscape. I call perceptionalism. And you unlock the ability to have this mindset or move from animalism to perceptualism when you are no longer living in fear of not having your basic needs met.

However, I should note here that one of the ways people move from this lower order state [00:09:00] to perceptualism is by deciding they don't need a particular need met.

Simone Collins: Basically, if you decide, if you go from being red pill to MGTOW. You go from that first stage, negative eight to this next stage.

Malcolm Collins: Yes. Yes. If you decide that sexuality is a need that you absolutely have then you will stay in the animalism stage until you can decide that you don't need that.

That's not the most important thing to you. You'll see this was drug addicts. Like how does somebody move between the animalism stage of drug addicts to begin to get out of it? They They have to choose to go clean. They have to choose to not need the basic need that previously was driving them

Simone Collins: right.

Malcolm Collins: And this is where perceptualism, even though I view it as a fairly unsophisticated and simple state, is very useful to people who are really struggling. It is the life raft for people who are When they are, deep in self hatred or addiction or something like that, right? So perceptualism individuals in [00:10:00] this state optimize around a self perception, usually an aesthetic ideal like masculinity or a value they associate with high status, like power, love, intellectual deepness, et cetera.

The individual then models their life around embodying this aesthetic ideal. A common mental crutch used by perceptionalists to justify their mindset is not having some need met at a younger age. For example, I was poor when I was young, and thus I now live my entire life focused around the accumulation of wealth or security of some sort.

Obviously, it is not true that wealth equals morality. And we all get to choose what we optimize around. But this is a statement people will often make when they want to avoid reflecting on how illogical their life path has become. Some perceptionalist individuals will present as religious, but for them, religion serves to reinforce their self perception.

For a stereotype of this kind [00:11:00] of person, think of the white kid in college that converts to Buddhism to maximize the aesthetic of spiritual depth and sophistication. For these individuals, their world cosmology exists to service their self perception and does not guide their decisions or view of morality.

So you've seen many people fall into the self perceptionalism mindset. It is better than base level animalism but it is still a fairly unsophisticated mindset. Where you see it the most is when we often complain if you look at our videos of the gender dysphoria problem on the left and the right, where people begin to identify a thing associating with gendered stereotypes as a moral compass.

And you will see some of these like masculinity influencers on the right, ask themselves when they're making major life decisions, what is the most masculine choice? Which is just an insane thing to do. To, to anyone who's has any level of intellectual sophistication, obviously masculinity, [00:12:00] Is not a moral system.

It is an aesthetic system. Okay. It might lead to a healthier lifestyle than just acting on your basal actions. And you actually hear people in the systems talk when they're like there's the two ways you can live. You can either live the masculine way or you can live in hedonism.

They are like, literally unaware that any more sophisticated mental frameworks exist above them. And that's something you regularly see. see within individuals in this stage. Like my mom was very hard in the money equals morality. framework, or at least

Simone Collins: no, just more money, more better. And when I

Malcolm Collins: tried to mentally engage her, I was like, how does that moral framework work?

This moral framework makes no sense. She was really unaware or completely dismissed the sophistication of any moral framework above this.

Simone Collins: I think she just Dismissed the concept of moral frameworks entirely if we're being fair

Malcolm Collins: What she was able to do [00:13:00] through this I didn't have money when I was younger therefore i'm not gonna think about anything higher order than this and with andrew tate who falls into one of these frameworks although he might be transitioning to the next framework right now.

We'll see with his recent conversion to islam but he could have converted to islam just because he saw it as the most masculine religion Which is something he had said before. Is there's a clip of him saying I do everything I do out of a fear of not having power because I have seen what it is like to not have power.

when people say to me, Tate, you're obsessed with money. I say, no. I'm obsessed with not being in that position. Tate. I'm never going to let me live my, me live my only one life on this planet and waste my years of consciousness in that position.

I don't want to be the guy who's 37 driving a f*****g shitty Citroen who gets pulled out on a girl who's too hot for me driving a car I can never afford who can call f*****g dudes psycho kickboxers with f*****g Lambos and asses to turn up and bust me up. I'm never going to be that guy. I'm never going to [00:14:00] accept that submissive position.

And that's why I say when I talk about money and achievement and training and all these things, how important they are, because if you don't find those things important, well, then you're just accepting your place lower down

Malcolm Collins: And I have seen what it is like to be on the lower end of society. So people in this state are often motivated very heavily by fear.

Simone Collins: So is this The same as optimizing your life around a certain identity.

Malcolm Collins: Yes. So an identity money perception of status was in society. Perception of status was in a, so basically when

Simone Collins: you're, when your basic need, However, a logical shifts from an animalistic based need to perhaps something more societal or resource based.

Is that fair? I say

Malcolm Collins: it's something aesthetic based is the way I word it. It's a morality designed around an aesthetic. And by that, what I mean by aesthetic, that can mean many things depending on the social context. So people can be like, wealth isn't an aesthetic. And it's actually wealth definitionally differs between which culture you're in.[00:15:00]

And so you're really dealing with one culture's aesthetic of what wealth means. Like it's usually not like numbers in a bank account that they're trying to max. It is their perception of themselves as a wealthier person. Yeah. Yeah. It's not actually

Simone Collins: the dollar signs. It's how you. See yourself and they will spend their wealth

Malcolm Collins: in a way that's meant to reinforce this self perception of being a wealthy person.

And then some people was in this it's that they need other people to see them this way But regardless of what it is, it's about maximizing some self perception and there's some more complicated self perceptions Like I am intellectually deep and some more simple ones like a gender or Something like that right or just power, right?

So that is the second system.

Simone Collins: Okay

Malcolm Collins: the realization that transitions to the next stage is the realization how trivial a life designed around optimizing self perception is. Because just, this is one of those systems where it's more sophisticated than just base animalism, is just if you apply any level of reflection to it, or any level of logic, is just very obviously not [00:16:00] A intellectually satisfying moral system.

And so the next system here as I have it as five, like positive five. So it's a huge. Wow. So we're just,

Simone Collins: yeah, it's not like there's a one number change with every new step.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. And this step is one of the highest steps in terms of intellectual sophistication and mental health of any step in the entire system.

And these are religious rule systems. So these systems are a stable set of self reinforcing means that lay out a set of rules for how to live. Individuals subject to these systems build their lives, morality, and behavior downstream of their theological system, following a strict set of rules given to them by that system.

This system generally leads to self reinforcing. to better mental health and better equips people to engage with sophisticated philosophical concepts than any system presented of individuals born in the top few percentage points of intellect and ability at self reflection. So [00:17:00] by that, what I mean is if you are a person of a below average intelligence, this system is almost always going to be the best system for you.

To be at this stage, a person is following a strict set of rules laid out by their religion and does not ask why those specific rules exist. They simply accept that those rules are good and that those who do not follow them are sinful. Thus, they would be said to have

a deontological ethical system.

Most of these systems evolved to help some populations outcompete other populations. For more on this, see the Pragmatist Guide to Crafting Religion. However, an individual blindly living by a complicated series of rules about how to live, such as an extremely woke individual, may also be said to be living in one of these systems.

This framework is where a lot of religions are, especially a lot of religions are like, if you were a medieval peasant, this is where you work. It, you do not heavily engage with your [00:18:00] religious system. Outside of it is just true and it is a set of rules that determines right from wrong. However, not everyone in this is in one of these these sorts of religious systems. Some just have a personal. Honor system. Some have some sort of culturally derived system that comes from their local peer group that they picked up in college because they got caught in this, self stabilizing memetic tornado.

That's basically what causes these. And they are just following a set of rules that define good and bad and right and wrong,

Simone Collins: but without. Yeah. So I could see even like someone who just slavishly lives by like some bro code. Being caught up in this. This isn't necessarily like someone being super Catholic or super Orthodox Jewish.

It is someone who just decides to live by rules. Or that's the code of a samurai. You know what I mean?

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, exactly. That would be somebody living within one of these systems. And again, I should say they're not all religious people are in the system, but religions are typically the best explanation for these [00:19:00] systems.

Like when somebody is that woke that they have like this, cosmological framework created by it and a strict set of rules about what's sinful and what's not, they may as well be in a religion, this system is passed when an individual or a group realizes the serendipity of which religious system you were born into or the silliness of assuming your generation exists at a moral nexus in history and that the morals, rules, and cosmologies that are common among your birth group, your generation, or your peer group are largely serendipitous and unlikely to align with a true moral north star.

As we say at the beginning of the pragmatist guide to life, you. Even if you're like my morality was my society's morality. And then you point out, yeah, but that moral system has changed constantly throughout history. And now you look back at all those previous moral systems is savagery. And you should expect that people in the future, like we do not live in the moral nexus of history right now.

So you likely want to try to develop a system that is more sophisticated. Then whatever system you happen to be born [00:20:00] into and this realization leads to relativism. This I mark as a negative eight. So a very mental, very unsophisticated close to animalism in its level of Lack of intellectual sophistication or like the people was in it.

Like you just can't have very complicated discussions with them. This is the belief system that attempts to see all moral frameworks and cosmologies is equally true. This world framework often leads to nihilism and value paralyzation. This system leads to high amounts of nihilism and uniquely poor mental health outcomes.

So what, do you have any thoughts on these past two systems?

Simone Collins: I find it interesting and I like how basically becoming more advanced or having some kind of fancy rule set behind what you're doing doesn't necessarily make you We'll say morally or logically superior to someone who has absolutely [00:21:00] nothing on that front.

So that's interesting. I've not really seen a system like that where you can advance, but you can advance in a really bad direction.

Malcolm Collins: I also will note here that spiral dynamics, people will be like what stage you're at the spiral doesn't mark whether you are a good or a bad person often. And I do not take that framework at all.

I think that certain parts of the tree or the map almost always lead to negative behavior patterns. However, the negative behavior patterns are negative as judged by other moral frameworks. I don't really, when I'm marking a part of the tree, I am not marking it by the moral action of its members.

I am art. Marking it by their ability to understand an intellectually sophisticated conversation when you're having it with them. If you're discussing intellectually sophisticated ideas, can they talk back to you or do they just go right over their head? Is one thing that is judged on in mental health outcomes is the other thing is judged on.

Can they largely structure their lives and if they choose to live mentally healthy, [00:22:00] fulfilled lives. And relativism, obviously, I think most intellectually sophisticated people can understand why very few people are actually at the relativist stage because it's just so stupid.

Like obviously you can't say all societies are equally morally just. My favorite line from the relativist standpoint was I forgot who it was, but it was a British general. And some of his Hindi soldiers who were fighting for him in India. Began to construct a fire to burn the widows of some other troop members on.

And they were clearly not doing this voluntarily. And Because there was

Simone Collins: a tradition for a widowed wife to be burned on, along with the remains of her husband. Correct?

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. And he said you can't do this. And they're like we're on the same side, like respect our traditions, expect multi traditionalism.

And his response to this was to say oh, okay, I understand. Sure, I'll respect your tradition, but you need to respect ours. [00:23:00] And so I will let you burn the widows. And then I will begin hanging your men because in England we hang people who burn women alive. And that was the end of the discussion. And a, what I mean by this is if you adopt a true relativist framework, you can excuse, Any moral horror as it's just their way and people will be like, but Malcolm, you're so pluralistic.

Isn't that what you're doing? And I'm like, no, I still judge other cultural groups as morally wrong when they do things that my culture disagrees with that I would see as abusing their kids and stuff like that. I just look at the downstream consequences of a society where everyone can impose their moral frameworks on everyone else and see that downstream consequence as a worse then.

Morally, internally judging other groups, but saying I won't interfere with them and they will eventually self extinguish. And this immoral action will leave the world. But that's where people leave that system is people in this. They're not like me where they don't hold this [00:24:00] perception from a functionalist framework.

I. E. Well, we can't just have everyone impose their moral values on everyone else. But I also believe that other groups are immoral when they don't follow my immoral framework as will be more and more clear as we go further down the chart. Then that leads to the next mindset, which is the default mindset that people born into the developed world are born into.

And this I have at a true zero. So it's not a positive, it's not a negative mindset. It is utilitarianism. This framework sees the goal of an individual life being to maximize the emotional state in the general population, though individuals in this mindset often heavily overvalue their own mental state in internal calculations.

This is the starting mental state of most humans born into a secular society and is the branching point the more derived philosophies come out of. So this is where the tree starts branching. And I'm sure you have seen this mental state and you were probably born into a utilitarian culture if you were born into any culture.[00:25:00]

It's the default assumed position in our society today, and a lot of people are like, if it's the default position, why do we see some people go back to religion? And so I think that there's two things happening here, like deontological religious systems or perceptionalism, right?

Most people who are in the deontological religious systems, either they were raised in often rural, poorer areas that just were not as carried along by the march of civilization as other areas, and thus are mentally healthier as a result of that or they Instead of progressing further on the tree, when they saw that the mindset of the culture they were raised in just wasn't working, they retreated to the last stable state, and so they retreated to religion.

Then you're like why are there so many perceptionalists in our society? Most perceptionalists are people who, at some point in their life, Succumbed to some form of animalism and then just barely escaped that [00:26:00] animalism. And that's why they're at the perceptionalist stage, but they were born and taught within school and had all the resources to be a, in the utilitarianist mindset, they just maybe got addicted to drugs or developed a deep self hatred.

Or, as they often say, I Experience, like my mom said, extreme scarcity as a child of something. And therefore I really can't get above, stage one scarcity mindsets, in terms of intellectual sophistication. So any thoughts?

Simone Collins: That makes sense. And I guess I can understand why utilitarianism would be the default in your system, because also if you live in a.

fairly nihilistic society, you're still going to end up on average being empathetic because most humans are most humans don't like to see other people suffering. So it's a pretty easy moral default to fall back on in the same way that humans and apes instinctually fall back on Fairness being moral, even though it is a [00:27:00] nonsensical concept, right?

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. So explain what you mean by fairness is a nonsensical concept. So

Simone Collins: there we found that, oh, not that it's evolved, but yeah. So fairness is nonsensical because there's literally no way you can make something fair on all dimensions. And there's this great example that was presented in this book called Policy Paradox by Deborah Stone that was really influential.

And I read it. It to me what she describes as a cake that you have to fairly divide for a class. So how are you going to divide up this cake? Are you going to divide it by who is the most hungry, by who is the best student, by who the teacher likes the most, by who had the hardest childhood By who is the most clever and the subject by who wants it the most.

There's no way to make it fair along all of those dimensions, because everyone has differing levels of all of these different merits. Meaning that there is no such thing as fair. But as we've seen in Capuchin monkeys with this famous video, where you can see a Capuchin monkey being given. [00:28:00] Some kind of remuneration, some kind of food based remuneration for a task.

And then it sees the monkey next to it, getting an even more delicious food for that same task and suddenly, despite being perfectly satisfied previously with their compensation, they become completely irate because this is unfair.

Getting grape and you will see what happens. So she gives a rock to us. That's the task. And we give her a piece of cucumber and she eats it. The other one needs to give a rock to us, and that's what she does. And she gets a grape and she eats it. The other one sees that she gives a rock to us, now gets again cucumber.[00:29:00]

She tests the rock now against the wall. She needs to give it to us and she gets cucumber again.

LAUGHING

Simone Collins: So it seems pretty clear from that experiment and other research done that our instinct for fairness evolved as.

Us being a collaborative Mammal or put it another word. It

Malcolm Collins: is part of our pre evolved Instincts no different from lust or something like that. It is not

Simone Collins: more empathy because Group based society where we have to collaborate and we have to all contribute those groups that felt Instincts around fairness or empathy, typically outperformed groups that did not feel things like that.

Because typically if you feel something like empathy, if you feel something like fairness, you're not going to have as many free riders. You're going to have more people contributing of their own free [00:30:00] will and enforcing contribution as well. The

Malcolm Collins: selfish gene would argue you're wrong on this. Yeah.

Group level evolution. Is not an in favor idea within the field of evolution right now. I don't want to get too far into that but the point being is using a claim to fairness to ask for things or anger at society. When you see unfairness is a trade

Simone Collins: selfishly and

Malcolm Collins: it is an animalistic trait, it is a trait that is monkey.

Like it is not. Yeah. If we define your level of humanity being your distance, like the things that you chose about yourself instead of the things that were just pre evolved into you, it is one of these lower order emotional subsets above

Simone Collins: A desire for sex or those more basic things. I don't think it is above

Malcolm Collins: those things.

Simone Collins: But

Malcolm Collins: you might, this is a neutral zero. I said utilitarianism. Utilitarianism isn't a desire for fairness. I think utilitarianism

Simone Collins: comes from a place of empathy. You don't think so?

Malcolm Collins: We'll talk about where it comes from in a second. The [00:31:00] desire for fairness falls into animalism. When people are just like, I need fairness.

Animalistic level. The people will elevate some pre evolved traits as being higher order than other pre evolved traits because they see them as being more conducive to motivating pro social behavior within a functioning society. But I don't see them that way. I see pro social behavior motivated by logic.

As being higher order than pro social behavior motivated by animalistic instincts. And so I don't think it's helpful and you'll understand why I would see it this way. When you get to the higher order parts of the tree, I don't think that there is any utility in ordering your pre evolved emotions. Now I will note that a lot of utilitarians, right?

They do not like self identify as a utilitarian. A lot of them are arguing for hypotheses about how to best use Create a utilitarian landscape. So by that, what I mean is a [00:32:00] libertarian and a communist where that is like the core of their moral framing can both be different types of utilitarians where they have two different hypotheses about how best to distribute positive emotional states within a population.

It can have many different faces. But most of them are represented within mainstream political positions because it is the mainstream belief system within our culture today. When conservatives and progressives are arguing, they are often arguing with the presumption that the goal is utilitarianism.

To help the most people on average in the country was the laws that they're implement.

Before we go into the branches of the tree. I should explain why the tree itself branches it is because individuals choose to optimize around different things and therefore go in different directions. So individuals on the. Urban monoculture path, we call it. Are attempting to optimize around their [00:33:00] own subjective experience of reality , like how good that experience is, the mystical path is completely dedicated to the expansion of your experience of reality. And then the pragmatist. Path is completely dedicated to.

Impacting the objective world around you.

And determining what has value in that world?

Malcolm Collins: So now we're to the first branch of the tree. The urban monoculture branch. This is the mainstream, like when you're moving into elitist circles within the urban monoculture, like intellectually elitist circles, you're typically traveling down this branch. And if you are born into an intellectually elite circle within the urban monoculture and you want to develop into one of the like better branches of the trees, you often need to first recess your mental thinking back to utilitarianism before you can move forwards again.

So this pathway is aimed at reducing the personal experience of negative emotional states and negative self [00:34:00] judgment. A path towards it is often driven by nihilism around finding that you can't actually have a meaningful impact on world events in the way you would want to as an individual. And thus it is heavily colored by an external locus of control.

So the first node on this branch is. Negative five, self acceptance. These individuals try to accept themselves for who they have allowed themselves to become. The goal within this system is a lack of negative self judgment. Obviously, to someone outside of this mental state, they would say that you should try to be the type of person that you are.

Worthy of love and not love yourself if you are indeed wretched. However, to people who go down this path, they often have the prior that they cannot really change who they are. And then to move to the next node within this particular tree that happens when people decide to be a quote unquote good person and build a pathological [00:35:00] need to see themselves as a good person.

Thus, even though you can't help everyone, these individuals decide to help as many people as they can within the moral framework of this self acceptance, never experience anything negative in their lives, blah, blah, blah. We've talked a lot about this when talking about the urban monoculture.

Then they get, get to a negative six node, so slightly lower in the moment negative utilitarianism. Responsibility avoidance. This is the life philosophy held by many of the most educated elites within the urban monoculture. We talk about it all the time in other areas, so I won't go into it too much here.

Suffice to say it is a system of morals based around attempting to set up a world structure where people can do whatever they want, whenever they want, without ever encountering emotional discomfort. With no care towards the long term consequences. Individuals in this state often do not have sophisticated models of reality, and instead focus more on the aesthetic of benign quote [00:36:00] unquote good, with a very narrow moral framework, or within a very narrow moral framework, with the epitome of somebody in this state.

Moral system being like the haze movement, for example, right? Even though this causes long term damage to people, occluding from them, that being fat is unhealthy, it reduces in the moment suffering. You can see things like affirmative action being the result of this or handing out fentanyl being the result of this.

But this is where if you are born into the elite of the urban monoculture, often a wealthy, really college educated family this is going to be the mindset that you are grown up being indoctrinated with. But you can also see that this is a branch that's not coming out of the negative utilitarian branch.

It's just a completely different branch. Which is very interesting. And it's also worse mentally than the general utilitarian. Like when you meet these people, you're often able to have less sophisticated conversations with them than you can a general utilitarian, even though their philosophical beliefs are downstream of general utilitarianism.

Simone Collins: [00:37:00] Yeah. I've noticed that normally the conversations just go along the lines of you just can't do that, or that's just wrong instead of negative utilitarians or utilitarians in general, having a bit more to say about why something could be damaging or is suboptimal, which is interesting.

Malcolm Collins: So to get to the final node at the end of the urban monoculture branch, you realize that you're going to die and you begin to form an obsessive fear around this negative state.

Which I call life extensionism. And this is the mental state. It's actually a realization I had while I was going through this chart of just, you fear negative emotions, right? But you realize that not existing is the worst negative emotional state from your own perspective. Really different from the effortless and stuff like that.

And so you begin to build your entire life around a person. Fear of death and not existing anymore, and you just can't let go of this. And this is [00:38:00] why you often see this within the ultra educated elite in our society.

As to why this particular pathway ends in life extensionism and a paralyzing fear of death. It is because the core. Thing that drives people to this pathway versus the other two pathways is an elevation of an individual's own personal subjective experience of reality, which of course leads to the fetishization of your own objective experience of reality. And then of course, if it is your own objective, Experience of reality. That is the thing of value in reality than a reality that no longer has. That thing is a reality without any value, which is what causes this obsession with life, extension and fear of death. Four people on this pathway.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Now we're to branch three, mysticism.

This happens when an individual begins to focus on finding some metric to expand one's internal mental state to something above just quote unquote mentally [00:39:00] healthy. And this branch of the tree is the one that a lot of other level systems treat as the only branch of the tree. Like after utilitarianism, they're like the mystical path is the right path.

So node one was in the mystic branch is a negative three nodes. So actually fairly mentally healthy which we call low mysticism or low mystic, low mystics, look for an expanded internal experience of the world, which they believe can be achieved through improving their internal self. However, there is no higher order in herself outside of.

That can be achieved by simple self discipline and what can be learned through the study of science. As such, they construct a self masturbatory framework and hierarchy. This is the branch. Most individuals who create level systems like spiral dynamics are at basically they believe in mental states that are deeper or higher order than just having mental self control.

And because of that, they create. Almost a theological belief in higher order mental states [00:40:00] that they then attempt to access when they are in this setting of low mystic. Do you have any thoughts?

Simone Collins: No.

Malcolm Collins: Then the next they move from low mystic to high mystic when the no, the low mystic framework leads to the belief that the world we interact with is an illusion and that higher order information can be gained from alternative mental states.

Essentially, this is the path that quote unquote shatters the illusion of knowing. Negative nine high mystic. They are at the same philosophical sophistication of people in the true state of animalism. High mystics start to draw an understanding of the world from corrupted mental states achieved with things like hallucinogens, chants, or rituals.

They stop being people you can engage with through logical structure. As their experience of reality trumps all others. They usually become arrogant and condescending with the belief that they have access sources of knowledge that no one can touch. However, because their sources of knowledge are generally not cross [00:41:00] interpretable, e.

g. their own experience always trumps all others, there isn't a way for them to have productive conversation with either Even others of their group. And so an example of this, as I was talking with someone who had begun to travel down the pathway of the high mystic. And he was like, yeah, like I tried to be logical in how I'm trying to access these higher order mental states.

I can't meet other people or have conversations with other people trying to be logical about it because all of us, The truth that have been revealed through what I would call a corrupted mental state trump all other truths that have been revealed through other people's because you haven't experienced those corrupted mental states, and therefore there is no interpret ability between the frameworks developed within these various frameworks, which leads to intellectual isolation.

Once you enter this stage Any thoughts here? I'm sure you've met people who are in the stage of high mysticism and they're just really hard to engage with.

Simone Collins: Yeah. When you throw [00:42:00] most rules and pieces of evidence out the window and have to question everything, it's hard to have any sort of meaningful conversation.

Malcolm Collins: When your own subjective experience of reality trumps other any measurable objective experience of reality, then you can no, there's no longer any interinterpretability between you and other intellectuals, no matter how smart you are. And this is why we're so against the mystic pathway, but I think this better shows why we're against the mystic pathway.

Then the final stage in the mystic pathway comes from living in the self imposed intellectual isolation. Basically you're living like in a self imposed jail cell where you can't talk to anyone for decades. And it causes a phenomenon we call brain rot. This is the only negative 10 on the entire tree.

Individuals with brain rot are only able to communicate in simple narrative loops. It is quite common among boomers who went down the mystic path. When [00:43:00] you talk to these individuals, they will either respond with a simple narrative loop about something like what they did that day, some event that happened in the past, or their medical history.

While people in the animalism state have an uncontrolled or untamed self awareness. soul. Individuals with brain rot almost feel like they have no soul left. And this is something that you can often see and is apparent from their eyes and facial expressions. If I was going to put on my theological cap here, I would say this is the end result of communing with chaos and inviting demons into their hearts, which feasted on their soul.

If I am going to put on my secular hat, I would say that this is just the result of living so long with an unstructured logical system that their higher order brain function simply stopped working. Basically, it atrophied. Their brains basically atrophy to a state where they can only talk in narrative self loops.

And if people don't understand what I mean by narrative self loops, if you talk to boomers who grew up in the hippie movement, they're [00:44:00] often in a state of brain rot where you will try to engage them with an intellectual conversation. And then they'll just repeat almost like it didn't hit them at all was a narrative loop about what they did that day.

Or like a narrative loop about something that happened to them in the past or a narrative loop about their medical history. These are the common narrative loops you'll have, but they seem to like, it literally goes in one ear and out the other people in other states. If you try to engage them with a level of intellectual sophistication that they are incapable of engaging with, they typically either respond with anger or just saying, what you're talking about doesn't exist.

People like this just can't engage with you. They almost are like zombies walking through life. And you've seen this before you've seen brain rot before. It's something we've talked a lot about.

Simone Collins: Most people have, yeah, often in older parents or neighbors or something along those lines, people who are just completely lost in their own lives, but not even meaningful lives, just the [00:45:00] minutia of, the Making meals or getting up to shower or paying bills.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah it's a really sad state to see, and I think it is the end state of the mystic path, which is why we're so afraid of the mystic paths. I think you can end as a low mystic and still be a very intelligent person that's easy for me to converse with. The problem is I meet very few old low mystics.

Most mystics, like when you start engaging with low mysticism, you almost inevitably come to the conclusion that this shattering of the illusion of knowing, which then puts you on the path to high mysticism, which puts you on the path to total brain rot. People with a uniquely high amount of mental fortitude can stay on low mysticism but a lot of them are pulled forwards inexorably into high mysticism and then these more dangerous mental states.

And this becomes really dangerous. When entire religious communities move into states of low mysticism or high mysticism. Because people get pulled really quickly to un efficaciousness. Because you can justify anything as a [00:46:00] good life when you're on the mystic tradition. Which means you typically don't contribute back much to society.

Fair. Now we're on the final branch. The quote unquote good branch. Or the branch that we have gone down and I think leads to the most positive mental outcomes.

Simone Collins: Okay.

Malcolm Collins: Which I call pragmatism. So people go from utilitarianism to pragmatism when they realize the value of attempting to live for a value system is good, but the value system of like there is value in saying, okay, this is what good is, and I will structure my life around this and my moral framework around this.

But value systems based around the subjective emotional states of humans are stupid. So by that, what I mean, and this is a statement we often throw out quite frequently is value systems. If you say I am living my life to optimize human happiness. What is human happiness or like positive human emotional states?

Those are just the things that our ancestors felt in response to environmental conditions. That led to them having more [00:47:00] surviving offspring than their neighbors. It would be like a group of paperclip maximizers deciding that the number of paperclips in the world is a true moral good. It's just what we're programmed to believe.

But unlike paperclip maximizers, we were programmed by serendipity. So it's like a lower order philosophy. And even if paperclip maximizers came to this. And the Few groups of paperclip maximizers that are like, Oh, I actually believe that there should be a higher order way to structure. One's logic, they might actually follow the same branches that I've described here.

One might focus on I might be able to program myself to have some deeper understanding of the true nature of reality. And then they would go down the mystic path. And then another might go down this patch, which is to say there are things of value to just, this is a bad way to structure it.

Plus seven, low pragmatism. People with this value system decide on an objective function, or set of things they believe have intrinsic value, and then construct their identities and lives to maximize those things. The book, The Pragmatist's Guide to Life, is a guide towards constructing one's life around this path.

And what I [00:48:00] should say when I'm talking about an objective function, Is essentially you create a weighted list of things you think have value in the world. So it could be a utilitarian framework, but it's likely not. Because this is typically what moves you to true pragmatism is moving away from utilitarianism.

And this weighted almost Mathematical equation determines how you judge individual decisions, but also how you judge how you construct yourself. Instead of using a set of rules to decide what is moral, this path decides what is moral by the effects of the actions on the world adapting a consequentialist moral system instead of a deontological one.

So remember where I said you have the deontological religious framework? This is a consequentialist framework where instead of following a set of rules, the rules that you choose to live by Are based on the consequences your actions have on reality. And for people who are like, no, deontological ethics is a good way to do ethics.

I'm like, okay, so like lying is bad. You agree. Lying is bad. Yeah. Lying is bad. Or stealing is bad. Somebody said, I'll [00:49:00] kill this innocent child. If you don't lie you're going to be like, okay I can lie in that instance. Or I'm going to kill this innocent child. If you don't steal, you're like okay, I'm going to kill.

So you've admitted immediately that yes, it is downstream or this genocide is going to happen if you don't lie, of course you then lie, right? I think everyone, they would really think about it as okay, obviously deontological ethics is stupid. I just chose it because I think it's the system that works at a societal level.

And I disagree with some ethical systems that consequentialists use or that consequentialists Ethical systems can be used if chosen incorrectly to justify atrocities. And it's yeah, if they're choosing bad things to optimize around it, can you be used to justify atrocities?

This is a particularly bad argument because deontological systems that are bad can also lead to atrocities. Nothing about deontological ethical systems, prevents them from leading to atrocities. And then somebody will say, oh yes, but my deontological ethical system would never lead to atrocity. Then I'd say yes, [00:50:00] but my consequentialist ethical system would never lead to atrocities.

So. At least from the perspective of the system itself. So.

we send an argument.

Malcolm Collins: Many religious individuals fall into this path, but unlike the deontological religious people, they are more concerned with why God made rules and what He ultimately wants of them than the rules themselves.

For example, instead of just banning themselves from interacting with porn, they ask, why is there a prohibition on porn? What behavior is that meant to encourage? Then maximizing that directly. Simone, when I was talking to you about this offline, you said it's the difference between dancing and DDR.

Simone Collins: Yeah.

With DDR, you're clearly following the rules. You're doing exactly the steps and you. Are technically dancing, but when you see someone totally nailing DDR, it's very impressive and super cool, but they're not dancing. Whereas when someone's dancing [00:51:00] to the music, it is very clear that they are feeling the music and they are living the music.

And that is. The easiest way for me to understand the difference between these things.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. And I think also when people think about this, I might even change like what was I going to say? This is not a prescription towards a specific value system, right? We're not saying this is good or that is good.

It's just, these are people who have decided what they think is good in the world, whether it's through a religious system or through just logicing it out and then they construct their identities. In an attempt to maximize that thing. And they choose their actions and life choices to maximize what they have either logically or theologically decided is good.

The, you're

Simone Collins: assigning points values

Malcolm Collins: to

Simone Collins: these

Malcolm Collins: things. No. But what I'm saying is there's many moral frameworks that can fall within this system. This is not saying this one religious system is true or this one. Objective function is true. It's just saying structuring your life in this way typically leads to better [00:52:00] mental health outcomes and better cross interpretability.

So that's what

Simone Collins: the point system is for. It's for mental health outcomes. As I said, it's for mental

Malcolm Collins: health and philosophical sophistication, which is really cross interpretability. When I talk to these people even if they're in a completely different religious system than me, or they have a completely different moral framework than me, I can usually have a Fairly sophisticated philosophical conversation because they understand as I do that they have a different objective function and they're able to use that and engage with the core reasons that we have intellectual differences.

And they're able to recognize those reasons instead of just I can't talk to you. You know what I mean? Like with other things, it's you're just, Totally wrong about all of these assumptions about reality. So there's no cross interpretability between communication here, right? If you're talking to somebody who thinks money has intrinsic value, it's I can't even begin to explain to you while you're wrong.

You're at such a low level of intellectual sophistication,

or if somebody is drawing truth from emotional states rather than things that are cross interpretable across people, I'm just not [00:53:00] going to be able to have a philosophical conversation with you, right?

Post a pertinent level of sophistication. And so this, what I'm saying here is this is not saying you have to be like us it's saying that there's this one way of structuring things that leads to higher outcomes. Then the next node, an individual goes from there to high pragmatism, when an individual realizes the utility of religious systems, how they evolved, and, are acutely aware of memetic clusters and how they influence group behavior and how they spread.

So this is a plus nine high pragmatism. While low pragmatism is focused on self mastery and living the best life possible as an individual.

When people reach the state of high pragmatism, they begin to focus more on how society came to be structured as it is. See the mimetic clusters move and interact and are acutely aware of the mimetic clusters that influence themselves. Think of this as quote unquote, seeing the matrix [00:54:00] and then take that ability to begin to alter the mimetic systems that influence themselves to allow self control.

To take less mental resources and discipline. They also focus on influencing society more by creating mimetic machines or influencing the direction of mimetic machines. Everyone in this stage lives by some sort of theological system, but are acutely aware of why the system is structured as it is to the most nuanced level, while also altering the course of society more by throwing stones into a river to change its flow than by directly attempting to damn the river.

The Pragmatist's Guide to Crafting Religion is designed to help you. Individuals at this stage. So does this make sense to you? The high pragmatism stage, it's the realization that we had between the pragmatist guide to life and the pragmatist guide to crafting religion. When the pragmatist guide to life, we even point out, 95 percent of the time, you're not lucid.

So you're [00:55:00] operating off of this internal narrative you've created about the type of person you are. The core advancement between low pragmatism and high pragmatism is you learn about and accept that the older religions had a lot of sophisticated tools that you can borrow scaffolding from and use that to better structure yourself on autopilot.

So it requires less mental effort and you more adhere. Towards the life path that you want for yourself in moments of lucidity. And for religious people, it comes when they realize, Oh, this is why my religion is structured the way it is. This is why God structured things like this, or the course of history structured things like this.

And I can utilize these systems. For the service of my community and for the service of God. It is seeing the matrix basically of this sort of the mimetic clouds blowing across our landscape and becoming the architect of them, both within yourself and within the outside world. But it's not with [00:56:00] being just in our framework.

It's basically everyone. Like when we talk about the index, everyone was in the index is basically in a state of high pragmatism because they are all working intentionally to build a culture for their family.

Simone Collins: And what I like about this is that it seems to be pervaded by. bounded rationality in that we understand the limitations of our sentience and we try to address that.

Whereas in contrast with spirituality, for example, there's this adherence or chasing after This illusion that you can be fully awake and enlightened, whereas the pragmatist, especially the high pragmatist understands that there is no such thing as being fully awake or enlightened. And we have to optimize our limited systems around our limitations, right?

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. And another thing about high pragmatism is individuals within the high pragmatist state. Often have a very low [00:57:00] attachment to themselves by this. What I mean is they see themselves typically as like frames within time affected by mimetic clouds and they are part of those mimetic clouds and how those clouds move through time and their biological bodies are not particularly important to them., this is how the high pragmatist paths really differentiates from the.

Life extensionist paths, like the fear of death path it's typically whatever religious framework you're dealing with or anything like that, you are just part of a tradition and you don't see yourself as being in a particularly privileged position, even from your own perspective. And I'd say a unique thing about high pragmatists is they typically do not really fear death.

They just fear the things that they won't have time to do. Because that's what they see their life as every day is just I need to do this and this to, live my life towards putting society on the best course possible. And then the final stage within this an [00:58:00] individual achieves perfect self masturbate.

Mastery is plus 10 freedom from sin. Humans are not yet capable of entering this stage to believe you can is to commit a sin of arrogance. However, with technology and further gene editing or further intellectual sophistication that might be achieved by my descendants, this state might be achievable. And so that is how the tree works.

Did that seem like when you think about this tree, does it seem? More useful to you than the tree presented by Spiral Dynamics.

Simone Collins: Both of them seem equally useless to me, if we're being honest. I just don't see the point. Okay, why don't you see the point? This is very interesting to me. People are going to choose the philosophy they choose. They're not going to be influenced by this. I care about this. So what if this, so how is it going to change behavior, my behavior, someone else's behavior?

How is this going to help me behave in a way that is actually

Malcolm Collins: disagree really strongly with your perspective here? Of course, because you made this framework. So you [00:59:00] must explain why I think you are wrong about this. Okay. One, I think this framework when you look at it is also an obviously true framework, unlike spiral dynamics, which I really think you get aspirational after a point there is a level like you might disagree with my scoring system, but I think a lot of people would at least agree with the map more broadly.

And that my scoring system may be more downstream of how these different philosophical perspectives or world perspectives are able to relate to somebody who is in the high pragmatist perspective. So obviously somebody who is in the high pragmatist perspective is going to have more inter interpretability with somebody else in the high pragmatist perspective.

But even if you say that, I think broadly they can agree that the map is true. And when they see the map, it allows them to either quickly advance to higher frameworks. Or see the dangers that are involved with the part of the tree that they're on. So I think when you see something like a low mystic, that might be beginning to proceed towards high mystic, and I'm like, look, this is the path you're on.

I'm sure you can think of [01:00:00] people within your life. Like instead of me being like, Oh, here, Trump is on the chart. That's what everyone always does. I don't need to do that. Like you can think of people within your own life who have descended into brain rot or within high mysticism and low mystics.

Typically look down on people in a state of brain wat or even people in advanced states of high mysticism, but because they don't really see it as an inex path of their philosophy, they don't realize the danger of the path they're on.

And I think that's where the utility of the tree is. I also think the utility of the tree is very useful to people who are at these very low parts of the tree. Like perceptionalism. People at a perceptual estate may not believe that there's anything above them, but as soon as you start delineating all these philosophical frameworks above them, I think most of them have to begrudgingly be like, okay, there are more sophisticated mental states than the one I'm at right now.

I think it also helps people understand, because I think that there can be a belief among people at the deontological part of the tree, the deontological religious part of the tree, that [01:01:00] there is no religious pathway further than the deontological stage that they're at, because they're at this incredibly high local optimum, where they need to path through the valley of utilitarianism before they then get to the higher religious or theological pathway again.

And so I think that's another thing, right? That they don't realize, Oh there is a higher order pathway and here it is mapped out how to get there. Does that sound useful to you now?

Simone Collins: I appreciate that this can show how a radicalized version of a behavior could become like if someone's, just getting started with dabbling in drugs, putting them in some kind of scared straight program and being like, this is what happens if you keep doing what you're doing. So I see what you're saying and I also like any sort of framework that shows people a world beyond their own.

One thing that I really love about the comms Institute and the work you're doing on it, the school that we're creating is that it features this skill tree that shows tons of domains of information that I didn't [01:02:00] even know. I didn't even know. So I like that as well. But yeah, I don't know. I have the same general reaction to this that I do to spiral dynamics.

And perhaps this is due to my inherent lack of intellectual curiosity where I'm just like, okay. But I also think that people in these other categories aren't going to engage with it in the way that you think they would. Like you think they'd be like Oh, I see how I could progress here. But I think a deontological inherent, like someone in that category as you would categorize them would be like.

No, this is how I get closest to God. This is the correct way. And I'm following these rules. So they wouldn't even put themselves in that category. So seeing themselves there wouldn't do anything because they wouldn't believe that they are there in the first place. You know what I mean?

Malcolm Collins: Here's another area where I think it has Really high utility, as I think that there's a belief that progress is always especially if you're going down the urban monoculture pathway towards like self acceptance, like you really see this, like they're like, okay, after self actualization, that comes through self acceptance and then it goes.

And I'm like, [01:03:00] no, the end of self acceptance is no longer questioning yourself. And then that always ends with a paralyzing fear of death. That always ends with you trying to, a paralyzing failure of any in the moment emotional inconvenience, right? Of the belief that everyone should be affirmed for believing whoever they are.

Obviously, if all society is doing this is going to lead to enormous mental health problems and stuff like that. It's just a very bad way to structure society. And that you cannot Like you, you need to reverse track to an earlier mental state before you can branch into the more sophisticated and mentally healthy segments of the tree.

And I have seen a lot of people dead end. In various branches for example, I know a lot of low mystics who have dead into the low mystic branch. They have the intelligence to go higher, but they were just seduced into that path early on. And they don't realize they need to go back before going forwards.

It's the same with people who, enter this state of [01:04:00] intense paralyzation in terms of the fear of dying, and they begin to just spend all their money to stop dying and everything like that. And it's like, how did you get here? And when they can see the larger map that this is not actually a fear that they need to have, when they have different self conceptualizations of themselves, but they need to go a number of stages back before they're at a level of optimization again.

And I also think that the chart shows, which is really useful to people is going through. forwards in terms of mental systems, like realizing obvious logical inconsistencies or problems with a philosophical or world framework doesn't move you to necessarily a more sophisticated moral framework. And I also think it's really important to have a map for what happens after self actualization.

And I view self actualization as a stage as occurring almost before like add self acceptance, I guess you could say like it is the wrong pathway. Once you've gone to self actualization, you've gone the wrong way.

Simone Collins: What I like about that too, is like Ayla went through this process where she's, she tried to interview as many people as [01:05:00] she could who had.

Believed to achieve some form of enlightenment and then found that there was no uniform definition of enlightenment. And it does show that this is a field when it comes to human flourishing, that is perhaps a little bit anemic. We haven't really thought through what human flourishing is, what enlightenment is, what it is to be self actualized.

To reach one's full potential. So I like that at least

Malcolm Collins: for that is so few people are on these higher branches of the tree that they just haven't thought about it. And, or that they can't see it. I think that some branches of the tree can't see other branches of the tree. I think a lot of people who are deep in the mystic path genuinely cannot see the other branches of the tree.

They just disappear to them and look like just an earlier stage. I think sometimes this, I think it's true for the effortless, right? They can no longer see the other branches of the tree. Once they're there, just everything appears perplexing to them. They don't understand how somebody went from here to here.

[01:06:00] And I think that the full map. Allows a degree of cross interpretability between the different branches. If somebody is at this stage of, we need to just remove negative human emotions, they don't understand like how somebody could have gotten to like lower high pragmatism. Where they're like, yeah, but it causes in the moment, emotional pain causing in the moment, emotional pain makes me a bad guy.

Why would I care about any other sort of Ethical framework. I'm like but long term, even by your own system, you're causing huge amounts of suffering. And they're like I'm not directly causing that. That's more of a consequence of the system I'm creating. And so then you have to put into a, okay, if there's thought experiments, if you're putting into place a system now that is going to work.

Explode on someone in 100 years who isn't even born yet in a bed that was shattered. Or are you responsible for that? And then it's yeah, of course I'm responsible for that. But it's like, how is that any different? If you're creating a cultural system, that's doing that to millions of people, it allows for.

An explanation or better explanation as to why these other moral [01:07:00] systems aren't as useful. And lead to, I think, actions that are just wrong. What you often notice about the other branches of the tree is they get worse as they get deeper. So for most branches of the tree, you're actually better off not advancing to the higher stages.

Would you say

Simone Collins: that the, if we were to flesh this out more, and I guess this is a tree that's only giving examples, it's not comprehensive that we'll say rationalism as it existed a while ago, could be seen as the, extreme going too far with pragmatism where people are like I'm just going to be so practical that I'm going to eat a stick of butter every day because the research says so that kind of thing.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, with rationalism, I would see it as extremely, I'd actually say it's the branch between utilitarianism and low pragmatism, but I wouldn't say it's all the way to low pragmatism yet.

Simone Collins: What would be pragmatism taken too far?

Malcolm Collins: I don't think you can.

Simone Collins: No, [01:08:00] everything else can become corrupted except for our chosen philosophy.

Yes.

Malcolm Collins: That's why I like our philosophy. That's why I warn against other philosophies. And you can follow one of the mystic traditions and go when I mean like theological traditions and then become a high pragmatist and try to structure it to be of usefulness to you, right? And I think this shows how people who are in the mystic traditions can try to restructure them from a high pragmatist framework, but they just can never succumb to the belief that the Information they receive from corrupted states of mind is higher order than sort of their objective experience of reality.

And I think that that's the core thing about the high path that just gets better. If you look at spiral dynamics, when you hear people talking about like the highest orders in spiral dynamics, or I hear about people talking about the mindsets within the highest orders. of their mental frameworks.

Society would just be worse if everyone was at them. Weird mystic gurus that are in touch with the fabric of reality and [01:09:00] spend their days philosophizing and blah, blah, blah. Whereas, The high pragmatist, if he's in a society of high pragmatist is just functioning, right? Like they're just working.

They're trying to make the world a better place and see their value system replicated as much as possible within wider society. But they are not at this level of sort of intellectual freeze. I also think that the chart shows why we've hit this stage of nihilism in our current society. I love doing the longer ones. I don't know, do you have any final thoughts, Simone?

Simone Collins: I think I need to understand this better before I can judge it. Obviously, I'm not quite getting it because if I were, I'd probably find it a lot more interesting.

Malcolm Collins: Oh, maybe one of the fans creates a chart for you or I'll create some rudimentary chart and you'll be like, Oh, I get it now. That could help.

Simone Collins: That could help for sure. But I appreciate you sharing this and I'm really glad to have

Malcolm Collins: so intuitively right to you that you have trouble. In gauging with people who got stuck on other branches of the tree or thinking, I don't think that's it.

Simone Collins: No, that's not it. It's more that I [01:10:00] don't understand the pragmatism of this itself, but I

Malcolm Collins: guess it depends on if people find it of utility. You're basically saying that I don't find this other branches of the tree will. Not learn from this. Like they, this will not give them a visibility outside of their branch of the tree.

And because of that, it offers no utility. I guess we'll see in the comments does this help people at different branches of the tree? And would people have found a system like this useful wherever they are on the tree, if they had seen this earlier?

Simone Collins: Yeah. But thank you for thinking through this.

I just love that you're constantly trying to figure out how the world fits together, how philosophies fit together and how things can be improved, how people can find something closer to the truth. And I'm so lucky that you do this because I'm, as much as I would like to think of myself as a pragmatist, I'm often stuck in survival mode in different ways because I'm so neurotic.

And there are so many things that like, I can't hear myself think over a mess. So If there's a mess somewhere in our house, I'm no longer a pragmatist. I'm someone who's in a panic state who can't deal with the [01:11:00] fact that there's like a turd on the ground because there's like a turd on the ground every third day in our house.

Potty training. I love you so much, Malcolm, and I'm grateful for everything you do.

Malcolm Collins: Have a great day.

Simone Collins: You too.

Okay.

I'm actually really curious to see if other people found this useful at all. Because afterwards someone was like, I don't know. I just don't find, um, you know, mapping systems like this or ranking systems like this useful. And uh, such, uh, I am very interested to see if 81 thought it might have some utility to people. However, I will say I don't check the YouTube comments as thoroughly as the discord.

I typically read the discord discussion on every day's episode. So if you. Uh, have ideas, put it on the discord episode discussion. If you put it on YouTube, I'll probably read it, but you know, less probability. And, uh, put a poll on the discord discussion of whether or not it's a good theory or a bad theory, because I'd love to see [01:12:00] voting on that. And I'll put the link to the discord.

I won't forget this time, guys in the, description.

In this thought-provoking discussion, Malcolm and Simone Collins explore the trajectory of woke culture and its potential impact on society. Drawing from a variety of data sources and cultural observations, they examine whether wokeness is a cyclical phenomenon or a new, enduring force that will shape the future. The hosts discuss the decline in certain "woke" terms in media, the persistence of cancel culture incidents, and the pushback against progressive narratives from major institutions. They also delve into the potential consequences of wokeness becoming entrenched within large bureaucratic organizations, even as it loses popularity among the general public. Malcolm and Simone consider various scenarios for the future, including the consolidation of power by the "woke elite" and the potential for societal unrest.

Malcolm Collins: [00:00:00] Hello, Simone. I am excited to be here with you today. A long time ago, a Sal's Park episode came out where they predicted How long woke culture was going to last. It was season 19, episode one. And it was called stunning and brave. And A farmer is predicting the course of woke culture going forwards.

And he says, we have dealt with this before. And based on the last time we had a rise in wokeness, which the last time we had it, it was called the PC movement or the politically correct movement, who are born long after this movement. If you want to see. humor that was lambasting it as a movement, a very good movie to watch.

And I think fairly entertaining is called PCU which is about the deaths of fraternity culture and it being replaced with various activist groups within [00:01:00] college campuses.

It's a whole new ballgame on campus these days, and they call it PC. PC? Politically correct. And it's not just politics, it's everything. It's what you eat, it's what you wear, and it's what you say. And if you don't watch yourself, you can get in a buttload of trouble.

For instance See these girls? Yeah. No you don't. Those are women. You call them girls, and they'll pop your fig. Save the whales! Kay's in the military now! Free Nelson Mandela! They freed him already. What? Those women? Those aren't women, Tom. Those are womenists. You know, I saw the new Madonna video last night.

Un frickin believable. See the one in the middle? The blonde hair? She's looking at me, isn't she? Kind of. What, do you know her or something? Hey, Sam, isn't that the guy that you used to, uh Yeah. You went out with a [00:02:00] white male? I was a freshman. Fresh person. Please. Please. Go talk to her. What's the problem?

Watch this. He's coming over here. Sister, throw him a walk! No, you don't have to do that. Wow. Hi. Uh, is Sam in there? In there? What's that supposed to mean? Yeah, cock man, oppressor. Uh, thank you. You know, this place is kind of insane. Wait till you meet the Causeheads. The what? What do we eat? Red meat! Why don't we eat it? To kill and murder! What do we eat? Red meat! Why don't we eat it? He's Tom, I'm your Causehead.

They find a world threatening issue and stick with it. For about a week. What's up? What up? What happened to the ozone layer? It was last week. Now it's me.

Malcolm Collins: But then that had a pushback to it and it died for a while and then woke as him came. And so Suss Park, I think made the educated prediction that these cycles last about six [00:03:00] years and that we had about 5.

9 left. However, that episode came out in. So we're about four years late on that prediction. This brings me to a question. Is Wokeness just another cycle, like a pendulum? That moves back in force over the course of history, or is wokeness something totally new that we'll only grow or will become more like a subset or religious community within our society.

We've seen peak wokeness already. Okay and if we have seen peak wokeness, what does the future look like? And I will be going over a lot of statistics in this episode.

A lot of them drawing from a blog by David Rizzuto where he wrote an article titled, Is the Great Awakening Really Winding Down?

And I will come to a conclusion that I think is different than the one he'll come to,

Would you like [00:04:00] to know more?

Malcolm Collins: and I'll just summarize the conclusion I'm going to come to, which is, I do think that wokeness is past peak in terms of general population popularity, however, I think that it's structured very differently than old systems of political correctness.

That we are essentially going to see wokeness intensify and exaggerate its effects within large bureaucratic bodies and become more and more obviously a unique and differential, basically moral, cosmological framework that will be seen all over the world. increasingly like a religion of the elite in our society.

And then the rest of us will feel very similar to what it would have felt like being a non Catholic and living under, say, a Catholic monarchy historically.

Simone Collins: Okay. Yeah. I can totally see that.

Malcolm Collins: A, but we'll get to why this will happen in the statistics. So I sent you the article, Simone, if you want to pull it up.[00:05:00]

Simone Collins: Yeah. I have it in front of me right now.

Malcolm Collins: The first graph in the article, which is term frequency in popular US newspapers for the terms racist, and racism. And

Simone Collins: what

Malcolm Collins: we can see is that there was a huge peak in these terms around 2021. Warren. Near the beginning of that and since then it's been declining precipitously.

It's not back to base level again yet, specifically in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal. And then if you look at you broaden these words, so they have other graphs here that I'll show on the screen. 1 includes. sexism, sexist, and misogyny. On this one, you do not see as much of a decline, which is interesting.

It basically plateaued at an extremely high level and is slowly going down. Homophobia and homophobic has basically just been going up over time, which is interesting.

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: Transphobia and transphobic have been exploding. It looks like it's

Simone Collins: only just getting started, which [00:06:00] is weird because talking with the trans maxing community, they implied that they felt like we were already post peak trans.

So that's interesting.

Malcolm Collins: You can watch our episode on the, how the trans movement changed in 2024, which I think that we are within the general population, but not within the elite religious cast that rules our society and controls most of the media. And that's what this is looking at is media representations of these.

So if we look at Islamophobia and Islamophobic, they have declined precipitously and anti Semitism and anti Semitic declined precipitously and have shot up recently.

Simone Collins: Although I, here's my take on this. So if we just talk about racism, for example, I don't know how much it has to do with concern about racism, actually decreasing part of me thinks a lot of it has to do with the fact that Anyone who wouldn't completely tout the anti racist line in mainstream media already been purged by those initial spikes.

So there simply isn't anything in those main spheres [00:07:00] that can be discussed, it's basically already been burnt. The executions have been made, the books have been burnt, there's nothing left to comment on. I don't know if

Malcolm Collins: that's true.

Simone Collins: Really?

Malcolm Collins: You can look at the rise of the commenting on homophobia and homophobic and who's actually homophobic these days.

Like it's one of the things that I think that, yeah, they've expunged from their organizations, all of the people who aren't of their religious community, but the, uh, that, that doesn't mean. And by the way, just so people understand why I'm saying like, it's a religious community because this is a wider framework that probably requires some explanation.

They'll be like, no, they'll say they're Catholic or they're Muslim. And I've explained before that they actually have beliefs around, marriage structure, sexuality, our relationship to the environment, morality, what the future of our species should be, what happens after death. That is much more in common with each other than with their traditional religious structures.

They [00:08:00] just are allowed to identify with whatever they want, but it is really one cosmological and moral framework that draws its evidence. And they'll say it's drawing its evidence from science. And it's clearly not. You can look at the way it reacts to something like new research on the planet.

Trans individuals, and if it doesn't fall into the narrative, then it must be debunked. Frequently you'll point out certain ethnic groups commit crime at higher rates and other ethnic groups. And they're like, that isn't true. And I'm like it's clearly true looking at the statistics.

And they're like, yeah, but it's not true based on. Science or something right now. So what are they claiming? Because clearly it's not like science. It's something else that they're claiming. They're making another claim here. And the claim that they are making is based on a, if it's not from factual reality, but it is shared across this cultural group as a does it just a truism of reality.

It's a religious claim, the theological, and so that's why I'm calling it like a shadow religion that sort of exists in a spreading. Go to they then show more graphs here that I'll put on stage in turn that show the frequency [00:09:00] within U. S. news outlets and the U. K. news outlets.

And I don't think that these graphs show what He thinks they're showing in this piece, which is a decline. Instead, what I see, if you actually look at the graphs, is a shift in terms of the thing that they are currently most freaked out about. Racism didn't move to homophobia. Now it's moved to transphobia and before racism, it was Islamophobia and now you're getting more misogyny.

It's becoming a hot trend. And so I think it cycles through items to care about. One of the charts that always stuck with me the most was, it was a graph of BLM type reporting in media overlaid with United States election dates.

Simone Collins: Oh dear.

Malcolm Collins: All just an update. Lead up to elections. So another thing that I think I'm going to predict is any trends that we are seeing [00:10:00] downwards in terms of wokeness right now are going to start being reversed during this election cycle.

Simone Collins: Interesting. With

Malcolm Collins: the media and stuff like that. Do you have any thoughts before we go further?

Simone Collins: I'm very curious to see how the election cycle plays out in terms of woke concepts in the media. That's a very fun thing to be looking at, given the US election cycle. That is impending.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah so here's another interesting graph or what they did is they took an average of min max frequencies of terms related to prejudice and positive social justice discourse.

So there's 2 ways you can talk about social justice positively with words like, racial equality, social justice, diversity, equity, inclusion, inclusiveness, fairness, et cetera, safe space, awareness. And then there's negative terms like racism racist, sexism, sexist, misogyny, homophobia, et cetera.

And what is that these two actually rose at about the same rate, but we are seeing slightly more of a decline in negative terms, but they still seem really correlated. And I doubt this would meet a margin of error here.

[00:11:00] Which is pretty interesting. Now, I'm going to go to a, another graph that I don't have shared with you, which looks at the frequency of the terms.

This one was shared by Eric Kaufman. So in the first of these two graphs, what is the frequency this is from the data from the Stanford TV news database.

And you see the frequency of words like diversity, equity, harm, racism, sexism, white privilege. And what you see here is the cycle. What I was talking about, a rise in the term rate, then a drop in the term racism,

Simone Collins: but with everything

Malcolm Collins: else, it's pretty standard over time.

Simone Collins: Yeah. Yeah. If you just take out racism, It really seems like they've always been pretty big.

Malcolm Collins: But what you do see less of is actual cancellations happening. So here you look at five different databases of cancelled culture instances. Incidents from college fix NAS and fire you see them rising and then falling after [00:12:00] 2021. And you actually can see this as well. If you go to fires own website, which is really interesting.

So do you have thoughts on this before we go further?

Simone Collins: Yeah I I would want to see the basis for cancel culture incidents because cancellation has come to mean so many things. We have friends who are like, oh, I was canceled last night. It was just because people didn't take a comment.

They said really well. So I would just want to understand what this means.

Malcolm Collins: Here, I can show you exactly what it means. And I am putting in here another graph. Now this graph looks at students on WhatsApp students reported reluctance to discuss specific topics. And it goes over the years, 2019, 2020, 2021, and 2022.

And what's really interesting is over most of these graphs, 2022 is the lowest year other than 2019.

Except for politics. That's the one where you don't see much. So that's really [00:13:00] interesting to me. So you are actually seeing it on the ground difference. And here's another example. I'm going to read this quote that I thought was really, I don't know that when

Simone Collins: you look at non controversial topics, it looks like it.

It goes up in 2020. It seems like people just weren't willing to talk about anything. And part of this, I like that as a control because it could suggest a wider Oh yeah. And you see this in younger generations as well, also millennials and above people who do not want to express anything, even mildly controversial publicly, or even anything, any opinion, they just don't want to say anything and, Maybe that again means that there's not so much cancellation as we think people just don't want to be judged in our cowards.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Here's an interesting 1 because you're also talking about what does it mean? So this is from the scholars under fire database of 2000 to 2022 and I'm going to share so this shows how they felt discussing this shows specific incidents. So either a targeting incident of a teacher, [00:14:00] a petition, any sanctions, or a termination of a teacher for being not woke enough. And you see there was a huge spike in 2021 and then a rapid decrease. Now we're not back to baseline yet, but it is actually really interesting.

And what's also interesting is how big the type, the spike was in targeting incidents.

Simone Collins: Yeah. But don't you think. Again, that scholars have just come wise to this. So those who would get removed, I have been removed. And those who remain, those who survived the initial purge have learned how to avoid. What's

Malcolm Collins: interesting is a lot of the things that get them purged are things that happened a long time ago.

The Nick Bostrom Institute at Oxford got shut down recently. Yeah, and I'm pretty sure that was over the humanities features. This is like the core E. A. Thing. And I'm pretty sure it was over some perceived racist comments. He said a long time ago that came out ages ago.

And recently there was a campaign around him. We're still seeing it happen. And I will read to you something that I thought was [00:15:00] really interesting. So this is a quote from 1 of the articles I was reading on this. For instance, the New York Times was recently targeted by glad in an open letter signed by dozens of celebrities and quote unquote thought leaders primarily for publishing stories about transgender issues that included.

Perspectives of people who did not simply celebrate and affirm progressive activist preferred narratives yet rather than issuing an apology and promising to quote unquote do better firing benching or reassigning the reporters and editors who produce the stories and slash or issuing editorial changes to help the paper conform with activist preferences downstream, which had been their playbook in the past.

The paper responded, quote, We received the open letter delivered by GLAAD and welcomed their feedback. We understand how GLAAD and the co signers of the letters see our coverage, but at the same time, we recognize that GLAAD's advocacy mission and the Times journalistic mission are different. Our journalism strives to explore, integrate, and reflect the experiences, [00:16:00] ideas, and debates in society to help readers understand them.

Our reporting did just that, and we're proud of it. Contemporaneously, hundreds of the current and former New York Times contributors pinned a separate open letter demanding a greater conformance with progressive activists preferred narratives, to which the paper responded even more forcefully, quote, It is not unusual for outside groups to critique our coverage or to rally supporters to influence our journalism.

In this case, however, member, or, Members of staff and contributors to the Times joined the effort. The protest letter included direct attacks on several colleagues, signaling them out by name. Participation in such a campaign is against the letter and spirit of our Essex policy. We do not welcome and will not tolerate participation by Times journalists in protests organized by advocacy groups or attacks on colleagues in a social media, in social media or other public forums.

I would never have expected the New York Times [00:17:00] wrote that

Simone Collins: well,

Malcolm Collins: that shows a major pushback to the UK, which is endorsed by the NHS. It was a major pushback to me. Yeah.

Simone Collins: That is major.

Malcolm Collins: They shut down a specific transgender clinics that were targeting. Teens and preteens being shut down in the UK to me shows a major shift in the public sentiment around this.

Actually it was interesting to me that I was reflecting on the Dave Chappelle trans joke that got him in so much trouble. For people who don't remember, it was like a bunch of different activists who represent the different marginalized groups, like gays, lesbians, trans, and stuff like that are in a car.

And the other ones are like, the trans person keeps asking to stop and use the restroom and the other ones are like, why did we even bring this person along? But, they've been with us forever. So we're going to keep them in. And that was like a fairly mild joke. And yet he tried to get super canceled for it.

And I was reflecting on if that joke could come out today and people try to get the special taken down on Netflix Inside people [00:18:00] within Netflix tried to get it taken down and do petitions. If that joke was done today, no one would bat an eye. Like I think society has really changed in the way it reacts to this stuff.

And what was interesting is Netflix also did a big thing of firings after that and got rid of a lot of the people who participated in that stuff. Which people were absolutely having aneurysms about. So I want to hear your thoughts before I give mine.

Simone Collins: You're starting to change my mind with this.

This is not data that I expected to see. And I missed a lot of the, these developments. So now I'm starting to wonder, gosh, are things actually changing? But then I'm also just thinking about how institutionally solidified these general ideologies are. And I think still, I have this intuition that so much of this is merely happening because.

It's, it has been, they've won, they've taken over. Once you've taken over, you don't need to keep using these buzzwords because the problems are no longer being manifested per their [00:19:00] opinion in their new reformed organizations.

Malcolm Collins: So I have a different read of what's going on and it's actually been heavily colored by.

Both what I see happening with the trans pushback and what I have seen happening with the Gamergate 2, like the reaction to Sweet Baby Inc.

Simone Collins: But keep in mind, in, in the earlier graphs that you highlighted transphobia was in the middle of a rising spike that is yet to abate.

Malcolm Collins: And I think that it is, but keep in mind that this is what's being published by newspapers.

The Gamergate 2, if you look at sales figures, it's basically been completely successful. Every game that these studios worked with these institutions on that were meant to like, woke ify the games, is either bombing or going to bomb. They're basically dead on launch. Which, Shows in mass consumers are not interested in these products anymore, which makes it very dangerous for organizations to now collude [00:20:00] with or work with, um, outsource DEI, which is never really

Simone Collins: successful in doing so.

I feel like as tired as the phrase go well, go broke goes. I never was under the impression. That, that games, movies, shows, books, et cetera, that decided to pursue this in an active way to the extent that they would pay for it, were ultimately commercially successful.

Malcolm Collins: No, before we knew about Sweet Baby Inc.

and stuff like that games that they worked on God of War, Ragnarok did pretty well, commercially speaking. Oh, really? Okay, so there are

Simone Collins: instances of Go Woke and Do Okay.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah they were doing okay. Like they were seen as like corporate trash, but they did okay. And now, they are not. Keep in mind the Bud Light backlash that happened, for example.

Which was fairly effective, and I think did a fairly good job of scaring organizations about those types of partnerships in the future. But here's what I think happened and where I will agree with you, I think was in the [00:21:00] mainstream population of the US, right? Like the plebs. They're firmly anti woken and they actually view it as a threat and they will actually effectively boycott products that are caught engaging in it.

Like the target boycotts were fairly effective. If you see the way that they changed their status on this, but in the large bureaucratic organizations, they are true blue. To the core woke and they don't need to generate money in the way that small businesses do. So small businesses can't really afford to do anything woke anymore, right?

But if you're a large corporation like Microsoft, which produces a lot of games, they've been doubling down on their woke initiatives. Nintendo has been increasing its woke initiatives. And that is because these organizations are so large and have so much inertia behind them that their decisions can Are not going to be as affected by market pressures and so if you have a viral mimetic subset, which is good at replicating itself [00:22:00] was in the organization.

It doesn't matter that it is hurting the organization's efficiency. It's just going to continue to grow like a cult basically. And as you say, Okay. As they have been doing in places like the media and stuff like that, expelling anyone who speaks up. And I will point out here, all this is coming at the same time as media, like traditional media, newspapers, everything like that are doing worse and worse.

Nobody's reading this stuff.

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: And the question is, like, why don't they change? Why don't they stop? If no one's reading what, why did it take Kotaku so long before they finally said, okay, you're not writing articles about games. We're getting rid of you.

Simone Collins: Because they've been.

ossified by these organizational cancers to the extent that they are incurable, right?

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, that's my read. That's my read of what happened.

Simone Collins: That makes sense.

Malcolm Collins: And then the question is then what ends up happening? So there's a few potential futures. [00:23:00] 1 is that they really consolidate themselves was in the top of our society.

It's being shown that this sort of religious group. doesn't believe that people who are in it deserve the same human rights as people who are in it.

And they'll even strip them of their like ethnic identity. If a black person disagrees with them, they'll say you're not really black, or if a gay person disagrees with it, they're like you're not really gay. Like you, you keep seeing this, right? Or you're not really trans, whatever. So they don't really see the people within the group. It's not that they're denying that these people are same sex attracted.

It's they're denying that they're human. It's not that they're denying the melanin or heritage of these people. They're denying that they're human. That's why they don't count as a black person anymore. By this group's standards. They're a black

Simone Collins: enemy instead, you're saying?

Malcolm Collins: They don't see them as having independent thought anymore.

They believe everyone who doesn't agree with them, their very narrow range of thought, and again, to the South Park clip of the gods, like you, you'd be a rebel by doing everything we do.

Everyone's just walking around like a bunch of conformists. They're all zombies racing to their graves. Just an excuse for my mom to b***h at me for not wearing girly [00:24:00] clothes like all the other Britney Spears wannabes.

They're all a bunch of Nazi conformist cheerleaders. If you want to be one of the non conformists, all you have to do is dress just like us and listen to the same music we do. Shallow life.

Malcolm Collins: Doesn't have true independent thought and therefore cannot be seen as a source of information. And this level of dehumanization extends to voting.

And they really don't care. If, for example, if the US electorate wanted to regularly elect people like Trump, they would take the position that we just shouldn't have free elections in the US anymore because the electorate doesn't know what's best for it. And this is something that, and if people are like go falling at us, like we go to New York dinner parties for wealthy people.

Fairly frequently. This is not an insane thing to say that if the majority of this country was regularly electing people like Trump, that we should not respect their votes. And we should just install other people in power. If you want to talk about things like whatever, like voter fraud or something like that whether or not it happened is less important than that, there is the [00:25:00] will of the people.

To make it happen. If things persistently went in a different direction than the power players in our society today,

Simone Collins: and

Malcolm Collins: we know that these individuals are very involved in organizations like the CIA and the FBI due to the leaks that happened around Trump's presidential cycle, where you have people in these organizations, which basically have very little government oversight, saying if you're saying functionally, how could this happen, saying it is a national security threat to allow one of the presidential candidates to be allowed to be elected.

If you're thinking that there's no way anyone would ever act on that even if they didn't act on it last time, eventually they're going to act on it if they feel like, especially if this other group is growing in terms of their voice. And they're going to become increasingly aggressive. For example, if you look at something like the school system, I really don't think it's salvageable at this point.

I think they're going to become increasingly aggressive. At how they round the wagons with the university system as a pipeline for cultists who are going into these [00:26:00] old bureaucratic institutions. Meanwhile, the portion of society that is economically productive is going to begin to split from them.

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: Which is interesting. And so then what happens? Either they end up losing power just because they lose so much economic productivity and they become so comical. And so obviously, like a cult that the rest of the world is just yeah, we're not really engaging with you. You can go off and do your own thing, or they do consolidate positions of power within certain countries.

No, I don't think it'll be every country, but I can easily see it happening within some countries in Europe, for example. Could happen in the United States, but I think it's a little less likely that it'll happen in the United States. I think if they make a play, which I think they did do in the last presidential cycle with media and stuff like that where you can say even if they didn't directly influence votes, they definitely had a sustained media campaign.

That was based on a [00:27:00] fabricated reality. And if you don't believe this fabricated reality, you can look at something like the Trump Hillary election, where they basically said it was impossible for Trump to win electorally. This would be a means to position so much that there were articles when Nate Silver said he had a 5 percent chance to call for Nate Silver to be fired from his own organization for being such a bad poller and clearly republicanly biased and people made this call.

Because they were just reporting what all the other media was saying, which was a fabrication, a statistical fabrication. And this is one of these things where I get worried because I think if they overplay their hand, then the other side will play their hand. And there's been people who talk about, oh, this could lead to a civil war, some sort of like unrest within the United States.

I don't think it will go that far, but I do think it will lead to institutions forming that take the way our democracy is supposed to work much less seriously. [00:28:00] This could be things like stacking the Supreme Court. This could be things which the left mused doing already, just completely ignoring the way our system is supposed to work and the Supreme Court.

Like mainstream figures in the left, we're calling for this.

Simone Collins: That but hasn't the right been working on that for 20 years and succeeding?

Malcolm Collins: No. Did you understand what I mean when I say stacking the Supreme court?

Simone Collins: No, I don't know what you mean then.

Malcolm Collins: Oh, basically they said So we're just going to add a bunch of extra Supreme Court justices.

Simone Collins: Oh, okay. So like literally changing its composition instead of overtime, ensuring that

Malcolm Collins: in the way the system is supposed to work, where you replace one at a time, literally just saying, okay, we control the branches of government right now that allow us to just put in a bunch of extra Supreme Court justices, we're going to do that.

And everybody, it was that, that would be bemused. Is just a blatant power grab. I think in January 6, we saw that the right was open to doing something similar. [00:29:00] Based on and in reaction to what they felt were unfair election results. If the left becomes more blatant, I think we saw a January 6 that there was the will among the base of the right to take action.

There are enough people in government, like people were like why didn't people in government like stand up to them where there are enough people within police forces and the military who think that things have gone too far, that you're not going to get a coordinated response to them. And I think that this is a really key thing that people are, I don't think in the U S we would ever have our police forces or the military.

Go against the federal government or legal things within the United States. We'd never have a coup or anything like that, but when you get a large mob of very angry people who believe that an election was unfairly taken from them, and we have seen that the right is capable of generating this, right?

If the mob is large enough, you need either [00:30:00] a military. Or a police force that will shoot at them when they're told to, okay? And I do not think that our military or police force would do that at scale. And that means that you will not have the organized resistance against something like that. Which is very interesting to me.

And it is also interesting to me that the two bureaucracies that the far left most needs, if they really s**t the bed are the two that are the most right leaning the military and the police force.

Simone Collins: That's comforting. I also think, it's important to point out that any dominance that woke me.

Ultimately secure in mainstream government and really large organizations is short lived due to demographical apps that there just won't be a population to support this over time. But we're talking not within our lifetimes or even our kids lifetime. So it's still relevant to us that this dominant.

Yeah, I'm

Malcolm Collins: thinking like the next 1020 years. Yeah. [00:31:00] So I think this is where we are that the non woke ism is the mainstream among the consumer base, but among the elite in our society, it is being increasingly collapsed in under a church or cult like organization that, that controls our society in the same way that historically, in the, for example, in the Ottoman empire, they ruled a lot of non Muslim people, but it was a Muslim monarchy.

And I think that's where we're heading.

Simone Collins: It reminds me a lot of. how many older, at least not just European all over the place. Civilizations were with this elite. That was completely the medically unmoored from the commoners. I guess there was a short lived period in which there was a little bit more alignment.

Maybe because in the United States, there wasn't as strict of a class divide to begin with just because things were still being formed, but I don't know. It, it doesn't seem unusual for there to be this [00:32:00] bifurcation and these different realities that people live by.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah.

Simone Collins: So whatever, people are going to have their own little communities.

They're not going to understand each other and there will be conflict resulting from that, but nothing new and we've made it through before so we can make it through again.

Malcolm Collins: I love you to Desimone and I am so glad to be married to someone as sane as you. A rare breed. And it's funny. I think many people, they hear us call each other sane.

They're like, you two are not sane. I don't know. We're both

Simone Collins: in the same way, which means that just like with all the other groups that have fractured from reality, we fractured in the same direction, meaning that at least we're on each other's page, which is good. I

Malcolm Collins: love you so much.

Simone Collins: I love you

Malcolm Collins: too. All right.

Simone Collins: Keeping you waiting.

Malcolm Collins: Oh you're such a sweetheart, but you are making a human being after all, Simone safe,

Simone Collins: the human being has been made and printed, but [00:33:00]

Malcolm Collins: you're keeping her safe and I can't do every time you leave me with her for a little bit. I'm like, I'm going to kill this thing. I'm going to do something wrong.

I'm going to pick it up wrong. It can't even support a head.

Simone Collins: They feel super, super delicate and it's terrifying. Alright, I'm just switching to my proper mic. Oh! Hold on.

It's not plugged in. Now I can hear. Woohoo! Alright.

Malcolm Collins: Alright I am I shared in the comments for most of the graphs that we're gonna go over come from. Thank you. So I can take

Simone Collins: a look.

Malcolm Collins: And we're gonna go over graphs, which will be in this, and then we're gonna go over

Simone Collins: David Rosato. I'm not familiar with him.

Cool. I'm excited. This is going to be good.

Malcolm Collins: It's not like that bright of a post either, which is interesting.

Simone Collins: Yeah. Huh. [00:34:00] Okay. Very nice.

Malcolm Collins: All right. You ready for me to get started? Let's do it.

In this thought-provoking discussion, Malcolm and Simone Collins delve into the reasons behind their strong alliance with the technophilic, pro-industry faction of the pronatalist movement. They argue that embracing technological progress and maintaining industrial productivity are crucial for ensuring cultural autonomy and survival in an increasingly competitive world. The hosts explain how groups that disengage from technology and rely on the protection of the current "urban monoculture" are setting themselves up for failure once this detente collapses. They also discuss the importance of pluralism as a strategic value for minority groups, the need for long-term thinking in cultural preservation, and the potential for technophobic groups to adapt and embrace technology when faced with existential threats.

Malcolm Collins: [00:00:00] I love a lot of these technophobic groups. I think like Louise Perry, I was recently on her podcast and she's I think God doesn't want us engaging with technology If you take a low tech approach, you are dooming your culture as much as the people who are chemically castrating their children right now.

There is a reason we cling to industry. That is what gives us our cultural autonomy and gives us an ability to survive in the world that we're heading into, which is going to be much more aggressive interculturally speaking than the world we're in today. If you do something as simple as just say, okay, all computers, all internet is fine, just no AI, right? You are at such an enormous, both military and economic disadvantage. The urban monoculture has been good for many of these groups in one ways, and that they have imposed a sort of detente on our society.

You, if you're living in the developed world, generally do not have to worry about people of other cultural groups coming and sterilizing you or killing you. That will not be the case when the urban monoculture falls.

It's [00:01:00] existential that you're pluralistic if you are not a group that has a chance at a play for the dominant culture in the world.

The earth, for example, Suppose , you're a Catholic right now,. If they tried to take the, we will turn everywhere we live into a Catholic caliphate mindset and we will kick out the non Catholics. It's then, Any region where Catholics are not the dominant population, they are now a threat to all of the other populations.

If you get one or two Catholic caliphates set up now all Catholics become a problem. This is why this is such a dangerous pathway.

Would you like to know more?

Malcolm Collins: Hello, Simone. It's exciting to be talking to you today. Today we are going to be addressing why We have so ardently cited with the technophilic pro industry side of the pronatalist movement, because if you look at the wider landscape of the pronatalist movement, there are broadly two solutions.

One is to say, if society. Isn't [00:02:00] working right now. Like with all the changes we've had. Let's go back to a time when it did work. The other solution is ours is to say let's take elements from a time that did work. Let's riff on that. But. Let's adapt them to be pro technology and pro industry.

So we, as a species can keep developing in the direction we're developing today. And this is, I think to a lot of people, we wrote a piece in a Porya about why we chose to build a religion for our family. And one of the most common complaints was why. Do you need to engage with industry? And I think that there is the misinterpretation that for us, this is aesthetic that we are engaging because we just personally like industry or we're just generally pro science people are we believe in a future that's pro science.

And that is not why. Literally, any other approach is pointless. [00:03:00] Everyone who doesn't take this path has no real freedom or real cultural security. So do you want to go further before I explain why, Simone, or?

Simone Collins: Go into it.

Malcolm Collins: The point being is if you, Any group really only has cultural autonomy, i. e.

are able to practice their own cultural beliefs and pass those beliefs on to their kids, in so far as nearby groups that are higher industry or higher technophilia allow them to. The Amish and the Haraiti are two very high fertility populations, but both of these populations are incredibly low industry, incredibly low productivity, and incredibly low science engagement.

And when I say science engagement, pushing science forward, stuff like the Haraiti they'll like, I have a broad understanding of science. They're not as like PruPu as the Amish, but they're not, particle physicists are working on new types of computers and stuff like that, or auto [00:04:00] drones and stuff.

This matters because these two groups are only really able to have cultural autonomy in so far as they are in the good graces of their higher Technophilia, higher industry neighbors. This is the topic we have talked about before, and I wanted to do a full episode on it because it's important to ultra freaking highlight here.

Okay. Ultra, ultra highlight. If the way that you are maintaining intergenerationally high fertility rates is from disengaging with technology in a way that makes you less industrially productive than your neighbors, you do not actually have cultural autonomy. And people can say yeah, but what if we all just agree to go this way?

And it's yeah, but we don't live in that world, in other countries, there are going to be solutions to falling fertility rates that. Allow for technology engagement and industry, but that [00:05:00] also strip away things that, we would see as existential. For example, China might move towards forced insemination.

Or some fascist country will. And that will work to keep their fertility rate high and won't involve, Oh, nobody engages with a computer anymore. Nobody engages with an AI anymore. Some companies will likely begin to breed their own workers. We've talked about this before when that becomes a major issue, you're going to have companies breeding them likely without certain proteins so that the workers are permanently indebted to the company.

If you have gone with a traditionalist religious approach and that's how you got through that and that perch included. disengagement with modern technology, you are going to be stomped by these individuals or at least have to live in a world under their rules. And I do not want my kids living under a rule world of totalitarian fascist rules.

And if people are like, come on, how could they really impose on us? I'm sorry. We live in a world where today industry means better guns. In the future, it's going to mean better Terminator robots. The AIs we see [00:06:00] today, you think somebody's not going to be putting those in robots and giving them guns, especially if they're fascist inclined?

Don't kid yourself, Sunny. I think

Simone Collins: the problem is that right now There are many groups that are able to exist with the false sense of security because there are currently in many places in the world, governments that allow different groups to basically be exempt from military service and taxes and even having to work while maintaining their cultural autonomy.

And these groups can also. And there's this impression that one, we're allowed to do this and it's working now and it's fine. And two, we have way higher birth rates than the main culture, so we're just going to be giant. And I think there's just this lack of awareness or people are conveniently forgetting that it is these governments that are doing it.

That are low fertility that are currently bankrolling and also actively protecting the rights of these groups. And that as soon as those [00:07:00] groups do inevitably disappear, there will be no such protections and there will be no sex, no such bankrolling. And you're going to need to find a different solution.

So I think that's another really important point. You pointed out quite controversially, something that tweeted about recently, which is that Hamas does have a plan did have a plan when invading or attacking on October 7th for Israel. And the plan was not to completely get rid of all the Jews in Israel, but rather Basically keep some on like a farming basis to have them continue to make money and hold up their lifestyle and you really

Malcolm Collins: wanted to take the most like technologically competent and essentially enslave them

Simone Collins: Yes, and I think quite frankly, that's the only option like that They are the most aware of the actual dynamic at play of groups that Are currently doing their own thing but that also understand that they want to be parasitic within a larger ecosystem.

There are many other groups that are just. I guess burying their heads in [00:08:00] the sand or not thinking at all about the longer term implications of what's going on. And this even includes to a certain extent, the ultra Orthodox in Israel, who are not serving in the military, who are not contributing economically in the same way.

To, to Israel as a nation they also are going to be, if they don't somehow manage to capture and enslave the productive Jews in Israel, going to run out of government support and going to run out of protection when the lower fertility but higher productive Productivity group disappears.

Malcolm Collins: Keep in mind, like when people stop sending them aid money, the people sending them aid money are these incredibly low fertility groups that control a lot of the West government today, when they disappear, a lot of these individuals are going to lose the cash flows that are going into their countries and they're going to be starving to death in mass and they will be attacking their neighbors.

A point that you made that I just cannot highlight enough. And I think that you are overly focusing this on the extremist cases, like the [00:09:00] Haraiti and stuff like that. Where, I'm talking about it in cases like the trad cast who thinks that they can get away without, their kids learning to use computers or AI.

If you do something as simple as just say, okay, all computers, all internet is fine, just no AI, right? You are at such an enormous, both military and economic disadvantage. And what you point out here. is that we have lived under a society, the urban monoculture has been good for many of these groups in one ways, and that they have imposed a sort of detente on our society.

You, if you're living in the developed world, generally do not have to worry about people of other cultural groups coming and sterilizing you or killing you. That will not be the case when the urban monoculture falls.

Simone Collins: Oh, so you're even, yeah, you're even just talking about moderate groups that are trying to do their own thing.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, I'm talking about groups that are like I don't let my kids on the internet. I don't let my kids you can maintain a level of technological advancement and understanding without [00:10:00] your kids engaging with the internet, fine. But if this is hampering their understanding of cutting edge technology.

That is going to be hugely deleterious to your group's ability to act autonomously into the future.

Simone Collins: Yeah. Yeah. A lot of it's you can just look at this in much simpler microcosms, like kids growing up kids who become dependent on trust funds or their parents and who remain so throughout their lives, ultimately have to live under the thumbs of their parents and live at the whims of their parents.

And yes, there are some kids who actively and openly hate their parents and continue to receive financial and emotional support from them. They're still living at the whims of those parents. And if those parents Grow a pair or die or run out of money. They will not be able to maintain those lifestyles.

And we all understand that dynamic. We just don't seem to understand it on a cultural level.

Malcolm Collins: [00:11:00] And I think something that is not clear to these groups is that again, they've gotten so used to the detente that's been enforced by the urban monoculture that they don't see that pretty much everyone who makes it through the fertility crucible is going to be much more culturally centric than groups have historically been with us.

Probably being the most pluralistic faction I can imagine realistically making it through.

Yeah,

Simone Collins: because the data shows that most other high fertility groups are going to be much more suspicious and intolerant toward outgroups, meaning that you're going to have only us pretty much. trying to protect your rights to cultural autonomy.

The

Malcolm Collins: interesting thing is all pluralistic groups in making it through the crucible, like people are like why would you think all of the pluralistic groups would unite with your group? It's not that they're uniting with my group, but there just is an intrinsic reason for all pluralistic groups to work together.

If pluralism is one of a [00:12:00] group's values, then they can easily ally with every other group attempting to make it through the crucible that have pluralism as one of their value systems. That is why you choose pluralism. That's another thing.

People are like, why are you pluralistic? It's existential that you're pluralistic if you are not a group that has a chance at a play for the dominant culture in the world.

The earth, or at least in your local region for example, you don't need to be pluralistic. If you are some groups of Muslim, some groups of Christian but pretty much everyone else has to attempt the pluralism pathway. Are you going to be quickly stopped? By that, what I mean is Suppose even, you're a Catholic right now, and Catholic fertility rates are absolutely crashing conversion rates to Catholicism.

It is the other way. They are experiencing massive outflows right now. If they tried to take the, we will turn everywhere we live into a Catholic caliphate mindset that some individuals are pushing and we will kick out the non Catholics. It's then, Any region where Catholics are not the dominant population, which is honestly a [00:13:00] lot of places where most of the world's Catholics live, they are now a threat to all of the other populations.

If you get one or two Catholic caliphates set up now all Catholics become a problem. This is why this is such a dangerous pathway. This pathway of, Highlandering it as we call it. No, it's just true, right? Like they see, Oh, if you get enough of you, you try to take over you.

The urban monoculture is blind to cultures that do this as soon as. The urban monoculture is gone and you have some countries that weren't historically Muslim, essentially become majority Muslim and begin to operate under a Muslim legal system that is not kind to the existing people. Groups like us, while pluralistic will understand the threat that now means that I'm like, Oh, so if you became a dominant population here, you'd do the same thing.

So if they do that anywhere, that means they will do that everywhere.

And keep in mind, we're talking about same culture Muslims, and as we've said, there's a lot of different cultures of Islam but same culture, we can look and say, okay, do you have [00:14:00] cultural similarities with this group when they were in the minority, which could indicate that you'll do the same when you're in the minority, majority that you've done in this region?

And right now, the urban monoculture or In the future, even pluralistic groups like us are going to be much more suspicious and much more aggressive because the future is just going to be a more aggressive. And we're

Simone Collins: super not tolerant to free riders. You obviously were pointing to a lot of cultural examples where people are self sustaining and just doing their own thing.

But certainly we wouldn't outlay any expenditure protecting maintaining infrastructure for or. Otherwise supporting groups that were not actively involved in whatever ecosystems we were trying to maintain for our own. Oh, absolutely. Yeah. They're,

Malcolm Collins: they are not involved in our ecosystems. It like, it doesn't make sense.

So we should probably explain this in plain English. It means if we end up, if the world ends up basically carved sections of [00:15:00] infrastructure, power roads, Safety networks. We would not give those networks to people who are not actively benefiting our group and our group's goals. Which people can be like, what do you mean by that?

In society today, if you hate America, you can still use American roads. You can still use American services. You can still call the police in the future. That is part of the urban monoculture's value system, right? In Dune, there's a famous line, I don't know if you've heard of it, but it's something like when you are in power,

I ask for freedom because that is according to your values.

When I am in power, I take your freedom because that is according to my values. Yeah. And that is classic. That is not the world that we're going to live in when the urban monoculture falls. So there is actually like really specific reasons We cling to [00:16:00] the two things that confuse a lot of people who don't get it.

There was a reason we cling to pluralism. Anyone who clings to pluralism can easily ally with everyone else who clings to pluralism, which immediately gives you a ton of allies if you're a minority group. Which any experimental religious or cultural system is going to be.

There is a reason we cling to industry. That is what gives us our cultural autonomy and gives us an ability to survive in the world that we're heading into, which is going to be much more aggressive interculturally speaking than the world we're in today.

Simone Collins: And I would add that we're extremely sensitive to and judgmental about.

Other people's demonstrated industry. When we think about who we're going to culturally partner with, and there are lots of tiny dog whistles that can demonstrate whether or not someone holds this view, because this is not just from a cultural standpoint that people behave this way. This is something that shows up in the types of businesses that they work with and invest in and start [00:17:00] to the way that they address their personal problems.

So for example, Elon Musk is a very mission driven person, right? But he does not depend on the charity of others. Whenever he wants to create a movement, he creates a, it through business, it has to be able to be financially self sustaining. And whenever he does charity, it's typically to like seed fund something that he himself has started.

With his own hard earned money that should be ultimately financially self sustaining in the end. And that is a sign of someone. Who is going to be culturally aligned with us in every other way, because we know that they are someone who from first principles will always take an approach of industry rather than dependence.

If we meet someone and they, for example, run a nonprofit that depends on others donations, they may say until the cows come home, that they are culturally industrious and independent, but we know that from a philosophical standpoint, they're able to tolerate. the charity of others and depend on the teat of some [00:18:00] other breast for their livelihood.

And as such, we cannot trust them to be a culturally aligned partner in the future, if that makes sense.

Malcolm Collins: This is actually a really interesting point that you're here. And I think When we look at the world today and we are looking, okay, who do we want as allies? Who do we talk with? How do we build out this movement?

People can think because of our focus on fertility rates, what we're looking at is cultural groups or what we're looking for is cultural groups as large populations that can intergenerationally motivate high fertility. Actually that is a pretty low thing on our list of what we're looking for. A group could have a large population, but if they're not industrious, then they just are not relevant in terms of long term geopolitical power.

Yeah, their days are still numbered. Economic. Yeah, their days are just as numbered as the urban monoculture in many ways. It's just that once the detente of the urban monoculture falls, they are going to be plowed by more aggressive neighbors that they haven't had to deal with in a thousand [00:19:00] years. But we are re entering that world as we already see, like what's going on with Israel right now.

In the parts of the world that are less structured than our own, that is going to be the reality for many of us. But so when we're looking, okay, who do we respect? Who do we want to work with? The core thing we're looking at is once a group is able to motivate or even plausibly motivate above reproductive population what's their level of industry?

I don't care how big they are. If they are high industry and industry means technology as well. Can they build an automated factory? For example, can they build semiconductors? Groups that can't are just not particularly relevant to the great game in our perspective. And I should note that within most religious traditions, there's various factions here.

There are take Catholics, for example, there are like Catholic naturalist that absolutely will not be useful in this respect. And then there's Catholic [00:20:00] non naturalists. That are, like, much more engaged with technology. What is a Catholic naturalist? This is a pretty big movement right now that you see the like totally traditionalist don't really engage with tech computers that much.

They might have the internet or something like that. Like Amish light, almost you could say Amish, but 2000 low

Simone Collins: tech.

Malcolm Collins: Basically they start not super low tech, but they stopped at 2010 culture or 2010 tech levels. And this is something you increasingly see. This is a growing movement.

Oh, we won't allow human computer interface. For example, groups that don't allow human computer interface are just going to be outcompeted by the groups that do, Oh, we won't build AI. Okay. Then you're not going to be able to compete with the groups that do. Oh, we won't allow for. Genetic augmentation of humans.

Plausibly you'll be able to compete if you are engaging enough with the high tech other side of things, the AI the human computer AI integration stuff, maybe you can compete, but you [00:21:00] certainly can't compete if you're just going full naturalist. It doesn't matter how good you are at judo or how big your muscles are or how much you live the masculine ideal, you cannot fight someone with a gun, okay, and you certainly can't fight someone with 10, 000, a factory that is auto generating Gun drones that, that are looking for you.

You can't fight with that. I'm reminded, I'm using another video as the scene of Indiana Jones

Heh, heh,

Malcolm Collins: for people who are listening to it. So they don't know what's playing whenever I do this. It's a scene where there's a guy flailing around all the swords thinking he's super tough. And Indiana Jones just looks annoyed and shoots him.

Because you can't win a gun fight with a sword. You can like, one time out of 10, but realistically, the odds are heavily against you and they [00:22:00] are becoming more lopsided as we go forwards. Yeah.

So that's why we take these stances. It's not a and I think it's so easy to look at this and just think, Oh, it's an aesthetic stance.

And what I mean is those, Oh, because they like technology. Oh, because they came from the Bay area originally and their culture comes from that. And that's why they're so pro tech. No, it's because we've thought through where things are going and you haven't, and you don't understand that if you take a low tech approach, you are dooming your culture as much as the people who are chemically castrating their children right now.

Simone Collins: To be fair, I would say most people aren't thinking 200 plus years in the future. And we are, so that's not something we've evolved to do. Humans have evolved to just it's humans are our evolutionary window. Is this one portion of the relay race where we're running? And as soon as we patched the torch past the torch, it's over, we're like okay.

And that's it. So it's because we're thinking in terms of the full relay race and they're thinking only in terms of their [00:23:00] sprint. That this is coming up and that's fine. But if you care about intergenerational durability, you're going to have to think 200 plus years out. That's all.

Malcolm Collins: And I think a final question would be then why do we so aggressively ally with these technophobic groups?

Like, why? Because we do I love a lot of these technophobic groups. I think like Louise Perry, I was recently on her podcast and she's I think God doesn't want us engaging with technology. And this is the perspective that a lot of people have like super high technology, the level that we've gone in terms of technology, whether it's genetic technology or AI human integration, or even just where we are with the internet and everything like that, and I can understand this perspective and I like these people and I consider them our allies today.

And so people are like why do you do that if you don't think they're going to matter long term? And it's because they matter today. They're frankly, larger in number, like anyone who's being honest about this, like we're just pragmatic about everything. Anyone who's being honest about this would know that the technophobic pathways to maintaining high fertility rates have a higher population than us.

And so long as they're willing to be pluralistic, they're willing to [00:24:00] ally with us and they're not particularly a threat to our group. So long as they are. Even vaguely pluralistic, right? They're not gonna run in and murder us all and then try to use us as like their technophilic captives like Hamas had planned to do in Israel, right?

And so that means that we can live alongside them and that our goals are broadly aligned and from our perspective, and this is probably the third point that they don't realize, long term, when our views are no longer aligned, they are not a threat to us.

We often use this analogy of the Valley of the Lotus Eaters being a trial that our species is going through right now, where we have infinite temptations around us, which serve to

tempt those away from the righteous path of life, of starting a family and getting married and, Investing in the next generation, which your culture needs to do to survive. The easiest path through the Valley of the Lotus Eaters is to take hot pokers to your eyes. It's to blind [00:25:00] yourself. So you do not see these temptations.

If pornography is a threat, don't teach your kids to resist that threat. Just ensure they never come into contact with it. This is true for the internet. This is true for technology. The problem. With this path through the Valley of the Lotus Eaters is you leave the valley blind. And at the other end of this valley is a battle royale, essentially.

And you will be witless and defenseless when that time comes. We haven't had to deal with a battle royale, basically, or a cultural battle royale since the last dominant cultural collapse, since, really, the collapse of the Roman Empire. But we are about to enter one again, and, , as Simone is about to point out, sure, maybe you can regrow your eyes after a while, but you will need some groups going through the Valley of the Lotus Eaters who got [00:26:00] through it because they fortified their spirit.

Spirit not because they blinded themselves to temptation and if we use this battle royale analogy Everyone in the battle royale who immediately stands up and says look i'm willing to let everyone whose sides was me Do their own thing At the end of this they have many allies who might join them because everyone else who takes that perspective can also join them Everyone in the battle royale who thinks it's my way or the highway Their allies will be slim You The reason we take the cultural approaches we do is because we lose if we don't, not because we are like, polluted by the urban monoculture or modernity.

Simone Collins: that, and I also think that just because a group is technophobic now doesn't mean they will always be technophobic. And I think that it may be that to make it through this initial adjustment period, while everyone else is being exposed to essentially a virus for which we have no immune system, it is better to first isolate yourself, wait and see what [00:27:00] vaccines develop.

Choose the most efficacious vaccine and then introduce yourself to the virus, right? So I just feel like to a certain extent, they're quarantining and quarantining isn't about permanent isolation. Quarantining is about for a specific period of time, isolating yourself until you know that you can come out safely.

So I think we also. Look at them from that perspective that they are quarantining and in the future, they may be coming out in a uniquely advantaged position.

Malcolm Collins: I completely agree with you. And I think that this is another reason why we try to protect these groups. And people are like when, why would they change their mind about this?

And they're taking such a technophobic perspective right now. They're going to change their mind when they begin to see groups getting rounded up and killed. That's when you change your mind about how important those AI drones are. Okay. Is when you see and fortunately, I think if you're in the US, if you're in the UK, you are going to see this happening in other regions, likely Middle East, parts of Africa, long before it happens here.

And you're probably going to have at least one [00:28:00] generation to say, Oh, this is what happens if I don't embrace this. the technology I need for defense. And that's why we think they will engage with this. I think there'll be given a chance. And then until then we just need to keep pushing through as much as possible while, and a lot of people don't know that we do this while working as groups to off the records, like a lot of the technological developments that's happening in the world right now is happening off the records.

Because they talked to us. A lot of the genetic technology, stuff like that can't be known publicly. A lot of the AI stuff can't be known publicly because, there's so many hostile groups out there. And so why even engage? So I think with a lot of people, they're like, Oh, we're nowhere near.

X technology, they'll tell us. And we'll be like, Oh, you may just not know what we know. Do you, here's the question. If you say we're nowhere near X technology, ask yourself the question. If there was a group that was near X technology, what do you know about them? Would it be in their best interest for you to know about them?

If the answer is no, then you actually have no [00:29:00] information about how close we are to certain technologies. And so what you're seeing happen now, like when. Does hit the fan. I think a lot of people will be surprised by the tech. Certain groups like ours are able to bring to bear. Before they get to us, they think all the tech that's being used and, whatever fight in Africa right now or in the Middle East.

It's the fight. No. And so this is why I think that the bloodshed will ultimately be minimal. It's as soon as the fight is over. Angry groups realize that they can use tech to enforce their value systems on other groups. The pluralist alliance will likely be at a tech level that has been isolated from the global knowledge ecosystem for long enough that it's basically in civ.

A few tech levels ahead of everyone else which will give it a great degree of defendability. I'm

Simone Collins: excited for it.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. We're already seeing this, having to unplug from like worldwide genetic databases because they're blocking people's access and stuff.

Simone Collins: [00:30:00] Yeah. Scary, but exciting.

We're the kind of people who look at dire situations and get stoked because that's, That's our culture. And again,

Malcolm Collins: we are truly pluralistic. I will never try to remove the values from another group. And I hold that perspective because it earns us allies and so that's why it makes sense to be pluralistic.

We're not pluralistic from a gregarious, altruistic perspective. We are pragmatic

Simone Collins: pluralists.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. And now the question is, if we become the dominant group, would we still be pluralist? And the answer is yes, because we can't ensure we'll always be the dominant group.

Simone Collins: Not just that. I think we also strongly believe that a diversity of ideas is crucial.

And maintaining, yeah, but I'm

Malcolm Collins: just saying from an existential standpoint, I think pluralism is required to win the game. Our civilization is entering, given that the world is so interconnected now that we are all pluralistic. We don't live in mono ethnic or cultural nation states anymore. And to go back to that would be.

As bloody as when India and [00:31:00] Pakistan, oh boy,

Simone Collins: let's hopefully let's

Malcolm Collins: sort all the Muslims to one country and all the Hindis to another country. Yeah, that was a terrible idea.

Simone Collins: It didn't work out so well.

Malcolm Collins: A lot of people aren't familiar with how bad the bloodshed from that was and how Winston Churchill tried to prevent it.

And he told Gandhi this would happen. And Gandhi was just a selfish prick. Sorry.

And with

Simone Collins: that

Malcolm Collins: off we go.

Simone Collins: Yeah. I'm glad you're industrious and technical just

Malcolm Collins: like he did with the Nazis. This Hitler guy, we need to get rid of him. He pushed pretty hard for that. And he thought his political career was so over from pushing for that.

It

Simone Collins: was for a while. It was

Malcolm Collins: for a while. He wrote his memoirs, his autobiography before World War II because he thought his career was over. Yeah, I

Simone Collins: went into that whole painting debacle, I think it's sweet when, like George Bush, Churchill go through the little painting thing, like that bird watching face.

All right, off we go. I love you.

In this thought-provoking discussion, Malcolm and Simone Collins delve into the recent "bear or man" meme, which revealed a disturbing level of normalized bigotry against men in contemporary society. The hosts analyze the responses to the question "Would you rather be in the woods with a bear or a random man?" and compare them to hypothetical scenarios involving other marginalized groups to highlight the double standards at play. They explore the roots of this bigotry, its manifestation in various aspects of life, such as college admissions and fertility choices, and the potential consequences for society as a whole. The conversation also touches on the importance of recognizing and addressing misandry, even when it has become so pervasive that it is often overlooked or dismissed.

[00:00:00] Question. What kind of bear is best? That's a ridiculous question. False. Black bear.

Malcolm Collins: This is why it's so important that I elevate this and I'm also elevate your reaction to this Okay, because it's the reaction that many people will have that shows how dangerous this has gotten

If you lived in a society like if in America today People were responding the same way to a question about Jews or black people.

Would you be like, holy? You We have a big problem in this country and we need to do something about it immediately.

Yeah. You would be raising every alarm bell you could raise. This is true.

Fact. Bears eat beets. Oh. Bears. Beets. Battlestar Galactica. Bears do not What is going on?

Would you like to know more?

Simone Collins: You

Malcolm Collins: look good.

Simone Collins: Are you ready to go? I'm ready to go.

Malcolm Collins: Hello, Simone! I am so excited to be chatting with you again today. There has been a meme, and whenever we try to do [00:01:00] timely episodes, we are always going to be late to the subject, because that's just not how we produce our videos. But the bear meme! First I'll ask you the question.

Would you rather be in the woods with a bear or a random man?

Simone Collins: Yeah. As long as it's a genuinely random man, obviously a man.

Malcolm Collins: Okay. So a lot of women, and then I've seen this done on shows and stuff like that. It seems to be like 50 percent of women or more, maybe within these more progressive environments, like college campuses, you're getting like 70 to 80 percent of women.

Okay. Are saying a bear and the standard have they not been like camping ever? Okay. So that's not the issue And what i'll say is the standard mind dead Take on this is are they either not aware of how dangerous bears are or the standard take on this is [00:02:00] Oh women these days, aren't they silly and hasn't feminism gone an extreme degree?

And if we weren't based camp if we were some basic podcast That's the take we'd be having but I actually think that what can be Gleamed from this particular meme is much deeper and that's why I wanted to make sure to do an episode on it even if it's not appearing while this is still in the zeitgeist of the topic because I think that this was actually a great sort of natural experiment to see where our culture is heading and to predict where things will go downstream of here.

Simone Collins: The, what this really indicates is what media has done to female audiences, which is that when they hear the word average or random guy, they assume some kind of aggressor or some kind of dangerous person. They're evoked set for random guy, rather than [00:03:00] Your brother, an uncle, a family member, a co worker.

Malcolm Collins: No. They've further asked this. If it was your dad, would you say, no, they'll say. They would choose to bear over their dad.

For example, look at this woman's caption. I choose the bear every time. If it's my boyfriend the bear, a friend the bear. My dad, the bear. Life and men have given me enough reason to choose the bear any time over any of them. I don't trust them. I don't think I ever will. Whether they're family or friends or stranger, I choose the bear.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. I think you always, and a lot of people do this. They're like Malcolm, you go too hard against the monoculture and stuff like that. Because they assume that the monoculture is their perception of the monoculture when they've been associated with it.

Not the, like they don't know how brainwashed and culty some individuals have gotten. But what I would say is the first thing to understand what we're really learning from this is I'm going to play a clip of somebody interviewing a bunch of women, but first I'm going to slightly change the question that's being asked.

Would you prefer [00:04:00] to be in the woods? with a bear or a random black man

black

Man is scary. Um, with a bear. What I've heard about bears, they don't always attack you, right? So maybe a bear.

Probably a bear. 100 percent a bear, which is like, terrifying to say, but Definitely a bear. Some

Malcolm Collins: black

men are very scary out there. I bet. Even some men are saying bear, although we could predict that this man's opinion will be whatever makes women approve of him. If I were alone in the woods, would you rather me encounter a bear or a

Malcolm Collins: black

man?

I feel more like bear. I don't know, cause I feel like I would know what the outcome would be with a bear.

Malcolm Collins: and I think when you hear this, now you get really uncomfortable when you hear the way people are responding to the initial question,

Simone Collins: but I have

Malcolm Collins: changed the context slightly.

You get really uncomfortable.

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: Or I could change it a bit. I could say, would you rather [00:05:00] be in the woods with a bear or a Jew?

Oh, wow! This would be really offensive if they had asked one of these other questions.

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: And this is because what you are actually seeing within this meme is just pure, uncut bigotry. And you are seeing the extreme levels of bigotry that have become normalized in our society. And this gets really interested because now you get into how does bigotry spread? How did, and so first, something that's useful to note whenever bigotry spreads, because when I say this, if you're, in the cult, you're like men, Don't count as a class that is worthy of any protection.

They do they're not worthy at the same level of human dignity of other classes. This is always the first step in the proliferation [00:06:00] of systemic bigotry. The first thing the Nazis did was to compare the Jews to animals, the same thing we see

happening again within the Palestine protests and stuff like that with the, we've talked about this in another episode actually one that might go live after this one but yeah you First need to like racism never is Oh, we hate this group just in particular.

It's no, this group is genuinely lesser, genuinely deserving of lesser protections before you go on. And people can be like come on, men have all the power in our society. And I'm like have you looked at like college admissions rates recently? Like men are being systemically pulled out of our economy right now.

Simone Collins: And

Malcolm Collins: Anyone who does, if you look at like the number of scholarships for men versus the number of scholarship for women, that's 10 to 1, even with the higher rates of men. One of the things that shocked me was I was recently walking around the Stanford campus for my reunion and there was an entire building dedicated to helping women.

It was the old firehouse. It had been converted to an [00:07:00] entire building just for increasing the enfranchisement of women. What did they

Simone Collins: do? It What do they do?

Malcolm Collins: What's odd is, but women are the majority of students coming into campus now. They are the privileged group. To have an entire department dedicated to servicing the needs of the privileged group within a campus environment is genuinely obscene.

Oh,

Simone Collins: the typical woke female college student would respond to you saying That's exactly what colleges were like for men for all of history you'd go and then there'd be some exclusive male fraternity to Further enfranchise the men who went there and this is just our version of correcting societal skills And they

Malcolm Collins: would say that but those fraternities often weren't directly integrated.

It was the university right

Simone Collins: Funded by it, etc.

Even if you take the direction that says, okay, well, women used to be discriminated against, and that's why these were originally built. [00:08:00] Because there were counter institutions on campus to them. Well, those counter institutions don't work anymore. So.

These things that were built to counter systemic sexism on campus are now institutionally furthering the very type of sexism that they were built to dismantle.

Simone Collins: What's interesting is You The extent to which we're making men into bears. We're making men into things that can and should be scarier than bears because we're forcing them to become stronger and better. Like by, by subjecting men, especially like we'll say, CIS otherwise privileged men to higher selective pressures, you are forcing them to become the best and the brightest and to build their own institutions.

That's objectively not

Malcolm Collins: true. Really? If you look at the statistics of men today versus men in the past, they are lower testosterone, lower strength, lower. You can just look at pictures. Do you think

Simone Collins: it's an 80 20 thing though? Do you think that basically Most men [00:09:00] indeed are experiencing that disenfranchisement, but then the 20 percent that are ultimately going to matter that historically always were the ones who ultimately built everything are the ones who are ultimately being pushed to thrive even further.

Malcolm Collins: I don't understand. It's just not a thing. It's a fantasy. It's a fantasy that there is this this dangerous male group that they are concerned about is not particularly more dangerous than any other group that they could be exposed to. They have chosen, because of bigotry, because of assumptions about groups, To make these biases about men.

If you look at male violence statistics, right?

Simone Collins: I'm not referring to dangerous in terms of violence, by the way. I'm referring to dangerous in terms of having all the agency and power.

Malcolm Collins: But that's not what they're talking about. Yeah. You're reframing the question to try to, and I think this is useful because this is a way that many progressives or people who grow up in this environment intrinsically attempt to reframe the issue in their own minds when they're engaging with it [00:10:00] so they don't understand how genuinely horrifying the normalized bigotry within progressive circles has become.

And this is why I think for a while as a society we didn't understand why we needed to treat racism with such an immediate and angry response. Why we needed to treat anti semitism with such an immediate and severe angry response. Because if you don't, if you allow it to begin to fester within a population, you then have it become a status hierarchy signaling mechanism.

And if it becomes a status hierarchy signaling mechanism, then it self extremizes like we have already had happen within women in our society today. Sure. To the extent where they would say something that is the equivalent of saying would you rather be around, be exposed to a random male in the woods or a random black male in the woods?

Simone Collins: Through IVF, just so they could be sure that they don't have any male children.

Malcolm Collins: [00:11:00] We're going to talk about that in a second. And I would point out here as well, if they're like look at X statistics, right? Any statistics that a woman is going to find that indicates that coming across a random male in the woods might be a scary thing for her is going to apply extra.

To black males, any statistics they're looking at. And so why is it that they are not allowed to ask this question about black males, right? If they're framing it this way, right? It is because they have learned that by taking stances like this publicly, they can achieve higher status.

And so it signals to the public what route they're in. And so now we're going to talk about how extreme this has gotten because it's really quite. Terrifying. So there was an article recently in slate called it's illegal in most of the world in America, new parents are embracing it for better or worse.

And it is gender selection was in IVF, which of course we support, but here are some quotes from the [00:12:00] article, which I think shows you the level of dehumanization and bigotry that has become normalized within the urban monoculture. Grace, a 31 year old woman who works in human resources. Told me, when I think about having a child that's a boy, it's almost a repulsion.

Oh my god, no. Grace, and her fang, Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, Google, engineer fiancé, are freezing embryos to preserve their fertility.

And to ensure that they avoid that, Oh my god, no. Scenario. After she turned 30, her fiancé wanted to make embryos the right way. Wanted to make embryos right away. Grace wasn't particularly eager to kick off the kid having process. I don't like kids. I don't want kids anytime soon, especially one that's a boy.

But, she also thinks that her feelings around kids may change, and she wants to be able to dodge the possibility of becoming a quote unquote boy mom if they [00:13:00] do. Boy becoming a boy mom. What's so bad about boys? Quote, toxic masculinity. End quote. Said many women I spoke to. Even those who were, sadly, already boy moms.

For many, going through all the trouble to ensure a girl feels like a social good. Amy's partner, Gurthru. Guthry? Guthry. Believes that because oldest children tend to be more successful, if everyone did sex selection, we could quash inequality by manipulating birth order. Quote. Maybe one of our best chances at trying to destroy the glass ceiling is to have women first, end quote, said Gerthy.

Among the moms I spoke to who already have boys, many want to give their sons sisters to make them better men. They believe that girls can do anything, a conviction that often comes with a subtext that boys are incapable of doing their own laundry. Calling their moms expressing empathy [00:14:00] a really bad thing.

Being part of the family as they get older. Quote, I don't know a guy who has a strong relationship with his mother or his family. End quote. Grace told me, and this is, and whose

Simone Collins: fault is that? Oh my God.

Malcolm Collins: Hold on. The hold on one second.

So there was also a case of a couple who sued a fertility clinic after having a male embryo instead of a female embryo. And they I mean, that's

Simone Collins: annoying.

Malcolm Collins: You pay for services

Simone Collins: and, they, they probably told them they were able to choose a gender and they were lied to but still the fact that they

Malcolm Collins: Yeah but you've got to hear the way that they talk about it and think about it

Simone Collins: Ah, I looked

Malcolm Collins: i'll pull quotes from this after the recording

She explained I had wanted skin to skin connection, but I ended up wearing sings.

So he wouldn't touch my chest when he did it sent electric shock waves through me. I started experiencing extreme anxiety and I would look at the baby and it would [00:15:00] contort into the faces of all these grown men that I know it was so creepy. Whenever that happened. I had to give the baby to Robbie.

Malcolm Collins: But you hear a lot of talk from this couple that really Is, compares carrying a child that is a male as grape. Because they have a male inside them involuntarily. And they're just They have a partner, like they married a partner.

No, they're usually lesbians. Ah. Okay. Okay.

So they are extremist, anti males but you also get these in I think the other couple that was talking, the first couple was a heterosexual where they probably wouldn't call themselves heterosexual, but it was what we would call a man and a woman being married to each other.

And to the people who want to be like, well, she was a. . Assault survivor. You know, therefore her reaction to males is justified. And I would counter Wiz. If somebody was a survivor and the assault, it was a black male and they reacted that way [00:16:00] to black males specifically. Would that be allowed in our society?

Would we really be like, oh yeah, it's okay. Because one black person did something to them, for them to now react extremely negatively whenever they are touched by or around or talk to by a black man. No, of course not. You cannot carve out specific subgroups is being less deserving of human decency than other subgroups. That is the core element of bigotry. More than all other elements, that core element.

Malcolm Collins: And this, so like when you hear this, are you beginning to Understand or contextualize just the amount of genuine bigotry that's being normalized. It is not that they are, I think, genuinely more afraid of a man. Like when you hear man, you think a male person because you're still thinking like a human.

When they hear man, they hear monsters.

Simone Collins: Yeah, it's hard for me to [00:17:00] parse out how much of this is part of progressive culture and how much of this is people with very strange phobias. There are people who are only capable of eating macaroni and cheese every day. There are people who are terrified of respondents.

Malcolm Collins: Come on.

Simone Collins: Yeah, to the bare thing.

But I also think that's like a, an issue of availability heuristic with male figures in the media or something like that. What?

Malcolm Collins: Explain how this is availability heuristic. Because They interact with males every single day. I hate

Simone Collins: this. I don't think they think of the males that they interact with as males.

And then when they're evoked set for a man is still like an evil aggressor in the patriarchy and terrible people. Let's

Malcolm Collins: unpack what you just said. Cause this is important. It helps you understand how racism, anti Semitism and other types of hate evolve because it allows you to discategorize all disconforming evidence of actually being related to that gender group.

Simone Collins: [00:18:00] Yeah. Many people who are racist or anti whatever group have plenty of people in those groups in their lives that they just don't think about as being in those groups because they like, I don't know, they don't fit the stereotype. Then it's obviously a big problem. This is obviously heartbreaking.

My heart especially breaks for this baby that was born via IVF that the couple didn't want. And a lot of the sons even that are being raised by mothers who chose to have sons are not select for gender, but I've just decided that I'm going to teach my son just how terrible men are because that's,

Malcolm Collins: Those just teach the guy to hate themselves and then a lot of them can just gender transition.

When you hear about kids questioning their gender at three or something, a kid is not questioning his gender at three, but you have kids who are three. Not one of them had the faintest clue what gender is.

Simone Collins: Yeah. Everything is all pronouns mix. It does not matter.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, so they're just going to transition them and I'll play a short video clip here.

This is from something I played in another [00:19:00] show, which it's supposed to be a trans piece of media that they're discussing here. And they're trying to explain the consequences, lying to this young person about the consequences of the surgery, saying that, it's pretty much assured that they'll be able to orgasm afterwards when that's not really what we've seen.

But then in, in like larger data sets, you're generally giving up the ability to trick. To orgasm if you're transitioning in this way.

Especially with heavy amounts of puberty blockers, which this individual is on, but this individual is in admitting that they don't even understand why they're talking to them about this because they've never experienced an orgasm.

I haven't experienced any sexual sensation, so when the doctors are saying an orgasm is like a sneeze, I don't even know what she's talking about

what girl wants their penis to grow? Not this girl, and not any girl.

if only I was born with a vagina. To solve that problem. Amen, sister.

Malcolm Collins: So they can't even think or know or contextualize what's being talked about. And what this highlights to me is how early this individual went on puberty blockers.

Simone Collins: Yeah. [00:20:00] Yeah. I just, I don't know. I. It's very clear to me that for quite a while now, there has been an intense bias against men, especially in developed nations, predominated by the urban monoculture.

The fact that men are hearing again and again from potential employers, for example, you're great, but I'm sorry, we can't hire another man. Like we're not really like we were not allowed to, or we can't, the optics would be too bad that's just a normalized thing that pretty much everyone we know who's male and who's on the job market has experienced at this point, um, is insane.

And the sign of very severe. Bias. And I think the fact that even people like me, I hear this bare thing and I try to shrug it off is an indication of the extent to which we've normalized this misandry in society because now it's just so obvious to me that. I don't think twice when we see new examples of it.

It's just, of course, [00:21:00] that's how it is. And, new infractions would have to be so extreme that, by that point we're just rounding people up.

Malcolm Collins: It's a boiling a frog scenario. Like for you, if you heard and you have even in this podcast, tried to dismiss this as maybe they're missing.

Maybe. If you because you'll hear answers, like one of the girls who gave an answer said bears don't attack every time.

What I've heard about bears, they don't always attack you, right? So maybe a bear.

Malcolm Collins: Imagine thinking men attack every time. Yeah. And then there's another group where they were like what's the probability that the man will attack you?

And people were giving answers like 80 percent, 50 percent. And they're

Simone Collins: standing on the street where theoretically 50 percent of those also out on the streets walking on sidewalks are male. It's very odd. This

Malcolm Collins: was actually a panel.

Simone Collins: A panel. I see. Was it an all female panel in a building full of all women?

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. I guess

Simone Collins: this is alone in the woods.

Let's say you were alone in the woods, and you walked past a man. What do you guys [00:22:00] think? Like, what do you think the probability is that just any random man would attack you.

I'd say 30 being he would assault me. There is a chance that a man would attack, but I don't know what the percentage is. 85. I'd say 50 50. Very low, like less than 10 percent.

Simone Collins: So they just think, maybe they think that once isolated, men will.

Malcolm Collins: The woman who said the least number on the panel said 10%. She said I'm going to be very conservative here and say only 10%. That 10 percent of men would attack you on sight. So now, I will

Simone Collins: say there are parts of the world in which I could be dropped into a random street that is abandoned with one other randomly selected male from that city.

And my odds of being attacked could be pretty high as well.

Malcolm Collins: I guess I'm thinking American men here.

Simone Collins: I know, but I, that, my point to you is that I think that the evoked set of these women [00:23:00] is those sets. No,

Malcolm Collins: it's not!

Simone Collins: No?

Malcolm Collins: No, it's not! They're talking about American men. It is very clear.

They're talking about the men they interact with. And this is the thing and this is why I

Simone Collins: don't know if they think of the men they interact with as men

Malcolm Collins: This is why it's so important that I elevate this and I'm also elevate your reaction to this Okay, because it's the reaction that many people will have that shows how dangerous this has gotten

If you lived in a society like if in America today People were responding the same way to a question about Jews or black people.

Would you be like, holy? You We have a big problem in this country and we need to do something about it immediately.

Yeah. You would be raising every alarm bell you could raise. This is true. And yet, because it's men, you have said they must have been misunderstanding the question or it couldn't really be that bad or it couldn't, but it really is that bad.

And It's also, you'll see [00:24:00] women say things even on my own Facebook page, I've seen posts recently Women are the only animal that needs to mate with its own natural predator.

As if.

Simone Collins: Oh my gosh.

Malcolm Collins: First, I'm like, do you not have the barest grasp of biology? What about praying mantises?

Simone Collins: Yeah, hello.

Malcolm Collins: Grow up. You, you clearly are uneducated.

Also, I'd like to point out here from a biological perspective, males of a species almost never would kill a female of a species to eat. That makes no sense. , whereas females, a species frequently kill males of species to eat when they're not interested in reproducing. Because if a male has inseminated you from a biological perspective, literally the last thing he would want to do.

Is have you killed?

Malcolm Collins: Even if women are like you as men don't understand what it's like to be a woman in our society today, how disempowered you feel, how in danger you are. And I'm like or you could look at the statistics and see that men in America are much [00:25:00] more at risk.

I think it's two times more at risk or maybe even three times more at risk of being attacked by a man than a woman in America. So no, you as a woman are not experiencing more attacks by men than men.

So as I note here, I looked it up. And men make up 79% of homicide victims worldwide.

So you're literally five times more likely to be murdered by someone if you're a man than a woman. And we'll assume that most of those doing murders are men for the sake of misogyny, but it's also true.

Malcolm Collins: Okay. So when you look at statistics like that it's one of the things where it's holy moly.

This is not because of their lived experiences. It is because of. A reality that they have constructed for themselves around themselves based on a fabricated reality of bigotry. Now the fortunate thing is that this group is breeding very little. And so the key is to just not [00:26:00] really engage with them.

Or actively

Simone Collins: disengage

Malcolm Collins: cut it off. If you have a spouse, it's very important. Like it was my spouse now that I'm talking to you about this, because what can happen in relationships is guys who live that standard lifestyle, where they go off to work, their wife goes off to a different job, they're apart.

A lot of the time can start consuming content like this on Tik TOK or something like that. And become brainwashed into this position of extreme misogyny.

Simone Collins: Oh, that's a good point. Yeah. And I think we've even met couples recently. I'm not going to name names, but we. We're at a dinner the other day where one couple that we'd known from the beginning, actually, even before they were engaged had reached this point where the wife kept saying these insane things.

That the husband just had to like nod to. Yeah. And you and I were like pushing back, she's getting increasingly pissed at us. And her husband's just sitting there and he has this help me look on his face, but he can't say anything to her. [00:27:00] And like he, he, at one point said something that defended like a reasonable point.

And she's like, how could you say that? Are you serious? And he's Oh and then he started hedging and it was really clear that this is one of those relationships where she had become radicalized. He remained fairly centrist and yet because they, they have children together.

They, he's not in a position where he gets to like, what do you do? But that's a different conversation

Malcolm Collins: a lot of people will say, I couldn't have philosophical conversations like you do with your wife.

And what I would say is you better learn how to, because if you are not influencing her philosophical position, other people can be, and it can lead to these sorts of outcomes.

Simone Collins: That's a good point. Yeah. Like undoing this, I think is going to be a hell of a lot harder than, finding a way to have an open dialogue and to inoculate people against insanity.

So I'm glad I love you and

Malcolm Collins: I appreciate you.

Simone Collins: I love you too. Gorgeous.