Based Camp | Simone & Malcolm Collins

In this eye-opening episode, Malcolm and Simone dive into a fascinating Swedish study that reveals surprising insights about how winning the lottery impacts men and women differently when it comes to marriage and fertility. The study shows that men who win the lottery tend to marry and have more children, while women's fertility doesn't increase, and low-income women often get divorced. The conversation delves into the biological and social factors behind these trends, the importance of men and women working together in marriage, the perils of atomized child-rearing, and the role of income and status in shaping fertility decisions. Join them as they explore the implications of these findings for pronatalist policies and the future of the family.

Simone Collins: [00:00:00] Okay. I'm really excited. We're talking about this because I saw this and kind of was really surprised.

Malcolm Collins: It's a great graph in terms of providing information that is useful to the perinatalist movement. It's just one of those instances. Where the information is maybe not the information we'd prefer from a palatability

Simone Collins: perspective.

Yeah. And we have to, we have to hat tip. So I got this from Wyvert on Twitter who shared I'm reading his tweet, a remarkable and high quality Swedish study. If men win the lottery, they marry and have children. If women win the lottery, their fertility does not rise. Indeed, low income women get divorced.

You might think more resources means more kids. Yes, with men, not with women, which is fascinating. Totally fascinating.

Would you like to know more?

Malcolm Collins: So I want to word this a different way because I don't know if you've fully conveyed it. When a man wins the lottery, whether he is poor or wealthy, he is much more likely to have [00:01:00] more kids and he stays with his partner typically.

When a woman wins the lottery, she both does not have more kids and if she is not wealthy, she will often leave her partner. So. From a pronatalist perspective, if you're thinking, where do you do cash handouts? Where do you put money? You do not want to give money to women,

Simone Collins: which is wild because that's where the cash handouts go.

The cash handouts. overwhelmingly go to mothers. When yeah, I, I, I, gosh I don't, I don't even know where to start.

You actually see this in a lot of the old documentation about the charity work being done in Africa, where they're like we're giving money to women because when women have money, they have fewer kids.

Simone Collins: I mean, first I appreciate the information that cash handouts don't work. I think it's very spicy. This idea that like, well, enormous cash handouts. Yeah. Enormous cash handouts. Let's, let's just give cash handouts to men, like men, you know, here's money to [00:02:00] raise kids. What would happen?

You know, let's talk about

Malcolm Collins: like maybe biologically or socially why this phenomenon is happening. Why do men have kids, but women leave their partners? I want to hear your hypothesis

Simone Collins: first. Well, I honestly, I think it's, you could call this trickle down pronatalism. So men. And I think you're very indicative of this, that when they think about having kids, they often kind of think, well, I'm just gonna marry someone and then she'll have and raise the kids, which is totally not what you do.

Obviously, Malcolm, like you are very hands on and raising our kids, but when you were younger. Just thought you were going to have a ton of kids and you weren't really concerned about like how you were going to raise them or how you were going to work that out. Just, you would be very successful and very wealthy and you'd have a lot of kids and it just kind of happens.

And I think a lot of women Turn to men for resources and see men as, as the, Source of resources and stability that enables them to feel very comfortable having kids, [00:03:00] whether or not they maintain a career, which is why I think many of these women who won the lottery left men because they had a different source of and a better source of resources.

So I think the interesting thing, the idea here with triple trickle down pronatalism is if you give more money to men and then They can attract more women and then have more kids because women are more attracted to the men or they're more likely to have

Malcolm Collins: kids. The question exactly. Okay. Okay. Why is it that women when they get more resources, don't just use the resources they have to have kids?

Why is it that they will only have A man's kids for resources.

Simone Collins: Oh I think it's

Malcolm Collins: like, it doesn't make sense what you're saying.

Simone Collins: No, I, no, I I'm bad at articulating things, but I think it's a status thing. Women women seem to be more comfortable having kids when they are pair bonded with a partner who is higher in status than them. Who appears to be the source of resources.

A woman is made. Less [00:04:00] likely to take

Malcolm Collins: a maternal that's a really interesting point you just made

Simone Collins: She's less likely to take a maternal role in life if she sees an increase in appreciation in her status through wealth Because now suddenly the number of bachelors who are actually eligible to her because she has to marry up That's like a very female trait is, is just extremely low.

So now there are fewer men that she can pair bond with. There are fewer men she can marry, and it's going to be really hard for her to settle down with someone and have kids. Whereas with a man suddenly he has a ton more options because now there are more women that who will see him as equal or higher status to them.

Malcolm Collins: So I have a really interesting piece of evidence here that might bolster what you're saying. So my brother's spouse has always said that her goal in her career is to bolster my brother, to make him look, you know, like a bigger deal than, than he might otherwise be. Because I often ask, like, you're doing most of the work.

You have most of the credentials here. Why is he always really.

Simone Collins: [00:05:00] Equal credentials from,

Malcolm Collins: well, they have equal credit. So, so a bit of background here. Both my brother and his wife have MBAs from Stanford. Both of them have degrees undergraduate degrees from St. Andrews, which is a university in the UK. But she is, I'm just going to be honest here.

She's harder working than he is, and more aggressive than he is. Yet, she always frames him as running everything. And I have asked her about this before, and I was like, Why are you doing this? Like, why do you And you do this too, with me, Simone, to an extent.

Simone Collins: I think that's more about, like, gender dimorphism, and what men and women bring to the table.

Men bring Some stuff that doesn't look like man hours, you know, it's more like very, very, very strong.

Malcolm Collins: This is how you are justifying it to yourself. I understand. But if you are a man, you wouldn't say I, who I'm putting in more effort in man hours, is subordinate to you, who puts in less, you being me, who puts in less effort in man hours.

And I do, I genuinely do, you know I put less effort in man hours into everything that we run. Yeah, but

Simone Collins: you [00:06:00] put more value into everything

Malcolm Collins: we run. Well, and that's what you would need to say if you wanted to keep up the charade. It's

Simone Collins: not a

Malcolm Collins: charade. But, Here's what I'd say is that whether it's me or my brother these ultra high value women who are securing I mean, I consider myself an ultra high value male, you know, I'm you are attractive, quote unquote, successful.

You're the real deal. Respected publicly, probably speaking. And some can be accomplished. Yeah. So Yeah. Yeah. The question is, is how, how, how are women securing these men? They're creating these men. This is how these ultra high value women get the partners they want if they create their career success.

And then the ultra high

Simone Collins: value women end up staying with their husbands. Yes.

Malcolm Collins: Being the woman who's married to the high value man because they've created that high value in the man. [00:07:00] But this then comes to what we're seeing in lottery winners. Where someone like my sister in law or you, they spend a lot of effort trying to uplift their husband because that's what they really care about.

When these women get a lot of money, they want to have children with somebody who is already high status, like that's easier for them or the way that they approach marriage than uplifting their husband in a historic context, this may not have been the case because marriage. And or divorce would have been much more costly.

Like you can, historically, if you were a widower or a divorcee, you couldn't remarry. Certainly not a high value man. And yet many of these women today, and I actually don't think this is true. I think that if you're a divorcee, you will not get a high value man. I'm sorry. You won't.

Simone Collins: What about the woman you married?

Why am I forgetting her name? Wallace Simpson.

Malcolm Collins: Okay. Look, it, it happens rarely. Okay. Okay. The point [00:08:00] being that women leave men today to try to look for other men because they think it is easier to get a higher value man now that their status has raised than it is to raise the status of their husband.

Simone Collins: Yeah, or women just aren't comfortable being with a husband who's lower status than them.

Malcolm Collins: But why are they higher status? They just randomly won money. That doesn't make them higher status.

Simone Collins: I mean, it kind of does, like, it just makes it so much harder to be with them. I keep, I know I'm still, I'm still binge watching financial audit by Caleb hammer on YouTube, and I just keep watching these couples and it, you know, I think it's really hard for spouses to respect, especially female spouses to respect male spouses who.

Just aren't contributing at their level and aren't at their level. Cause it keeps showing up in these interviews. I, I, I just [00:09:00] doubt, I doubt what you're saying. And I just think what part, what part? That, that women suddenly think like that just because they have money. They're not higher status than their husband's.

That's just not how it's seen. Mm. 'cause now they can afford all these things. They and their husbands became,

Malcolm Collins: you became higher status than me. Would you leave me? What? What happens if you won a billion dollars through the lottery? Would you

Simone Collins: like, I think we're talking about when, keep in mind, because this also shows up in the Swedish study, it was only.

Lower economic status women who were divorcing. It wasn't a good point. Yeah, it wasn't. Yeah. I think once you reach a certain level, it doesn't really matter that much. And you know

Malcolm Collins: that you can use the money to uplift your husband because it might be a competency issue. Like if your husband is a semi successful lawyer and you win a billion dollars, you can do a lot with that.

Simone Collins: Your husband, you have

Malcolm Collins: something to work with that billion dollars. You can make him better. You know, but if he's yeah, okay. That makes a lot of sense. It's their belief in their husband's [00:10:00] ability to improve and properly deploy capital. That is what's at stake here. Yeah. Well, that's a lot of it. Then I want to take this story in a different direction because there's something that, well, actually before we do this, do you think women should be allowed to own property given that this is the

Simone Collins: case?

Yes. 100%. I mean, look, look back at Sparta, like, right. This was a very. Male friendly culture, you could argue and women 100 percent were the property people. I don't know if they technically own the property or whatever, but like they were on it. I don't think this is about property ownership. I do think that what we're seeing is a profound misunderstanding of the social dynamics that need to be.

Play to encourage men and women to have kids. And what men need is resources. And what women need is high status men. And we, we talked about that other sub stack post a while ago, where, where the author theorized that like the real solution to pronatalism is to get rid of [00:11:00] bureaucracies and to generally economically disempowered women and economically.

I'm sorry, I need to

Malcolm Collins: clarify what she means by that statement. disproportionately succeed within bureaucratic environments due to gender differences between men and women. If you get rid of large bureaucracies, you will systemically disempower women in a society, but not necessarily in a bad way, in a way that may lead to them finding more men desirable because women want partners who they see as better

Simone Collins: than them.

Yeah. Basically he was saying we need to give men. The ability to thrive once again economically and, and professionally, because we are not allowing that anymore, really. And besides getting rid of bureaucracy, it'd be amazing. So I was cool with that argument. But yeah, I think that this is tied to that argument that he was making that like a big problem we have now.

Is that men are not given opportunities to be higher status than women. And it is very, very difficult for women to get interested in men who are not high status. We even saw this when we did that [00:12:00] matchmaking experiment where we had a bunch of people fill out a form and put in, you know, like their, their, their criteria.

And what they cared about and their values. And we tried to match people based on their values and criteria. And instead we saw that women had very out of whack expectations. They really wanted an incredibly high status man and the high status man really didn't care that much about status. He cared more about her being kind of young and hot.

So that was a

Malcolm Collins: lot of young, hot people in this world. There's not a lot of height

Simone Collins: that it's meant when guess what? They're more born every single day. They just keep making them. And the more, the older you get, the more there are young and hot people out there. It's an, it's insane. It's, this is a losing battle.

Malcolm Collins: But, but, you know, the, the status that you've taken and my brother's wife taken, which I think is really interesting and I think shows the correct choice for a woman.

Simone Collins: Is to build up her husband.

Malcolm Collins: Marry early, marry the type of guy who is diligent, hardworking, and intelligent, and cares for you, and appreciates what you do for him, [00:13:00] and build him up.

Simone Collins: Well, but right, that, the other element of this, on the guy's side though, which I think we've talked about occasionally, is, To get the fixer upper girl. She doesn't need to be completely politically aligned with you. She needs to be open minded and sufficiently intelligent to have her mind changed if she's presented with compelling evidence and it's better.

I remember you telling me when we were like early dating that it was very. Important for you to date girls who did not wear a ton of makeup, who had not had a ton of work done, who were not really good at styling, because then you knew that you could do it. Buy an appreciated, appreciating asset. If you went after, I know you wanted to fix your upper it's like, but it makes sense, right?

If you're, if you're looking for an appreciating asset on the housing market, I bought

Malcolm Collins: you, I bought you for your.

Simone Collins: Yeah. You, you bought a beautiful

Malcolm Collins: fixer upper. Not your career. Cause you were very early in your career at that point, but your career potential, and your work ethic, your [00:14:00] intelligence and your curiosity.

And I knew in all other aspects, you were a fixer upper, which only meant you were an appreciating asset.

Simone Collins: Right. Right. You buy, you buy the rundown, but old and very sturdy house that is the worst looking house in a really nice neighborhood. Buy a house with good bones.

Malcolm Collins: And you fix it up. Marry a partner with

Simone Collins: good bones.

And the problem is that most guys that we know who are dating want to buy a house in a brand new neighborhood that was either built in a very cheap new construction or was recently flipped. And if you just chip away a wall, like it falls apart, you know, this is none of this is real. It is all either.

Plastic surgery that's going to wear off soon or it's makeup or it's styling

Malcolm Collins: or it's filters. We live in a house made in the 1790s. A lot of people out there are buying McMansions. Like who do you think deals is more house problems? We almost never have house problems. Yeah, this thing's like a rock. And people come and they are impressed with it.

And they're like, wow, this is so regal. You want a woman. Who's like a house from , [00:15:00] the 1790s, not a house from the 1970s.

We'll record a longer video on this at some point, but this really reminds me of the modern controversy about like country girls not being womanly enough.

Because women are defining womanliness by what womanliness was during the age of clueless.

Good morning, y'all. Quick update on the house, because I've been pretty terrible about giving y'all these.

This went viral on Twitter with the caption, This accent needs to be illegal, and women should be banned from doing manual labour like this. There is nothing feminine about American women. American women are literally men. The person giving this white hot take is Samira Khan. In her view, the guys that like Hannah Barron can't be straight men,

lebanese women are literally perfect, and they're actually feminine, unlike estrogen deficient American women

Simone Collins: well, or even worse 1990s, the noughties, they look good. They look great. They look like they're the Instagram models of houses. But I think the important thing to, to come away with here though, is [00:16:00] that men and women.

Need different types of resources to be inspired to have kids and to be comfortable having kids And a well resourced man or a well resourced partner Is a better resource to a woman or better incentive to have children to a woman then Personal money then spending money then subsidies

Malcolm Collins: then here we're going to talk about the second graph Which is to say well then shouldn't we well, let's let's read what the tweet says yes, it's by Bennett's Phylactery

Simone Collins: he says, this is why you get the horseshoe graph.

If you qualify for welfare, someone else pays for the kids. Otherwise you need 200 to 250k to make the math work. About 7 percent of U. S. households. And just to

Malcolm Collins: clarify what he's showing here, it's showing a fertility rate by income level. And it shows that on average a family that is non-white goes back above re fertility rate when they're super wealthy.

Starting at around three, I don't [00:17:00] know, like, like 215 K per year. Yeah. Whereas white families don't go above every population rate again until they're around like 350 a year.

Simone Collins: Yeah. And that both white and non white populations see their fertility plummet. Once they are making between 25 and 50 K a year.

And that is exactly when all the government subsidies for childcare, for healthcare and for food disappear. And it is genuinely astounding how much, at least in the United States, because we had perennialist. org, look at all the state resources for parents. How much is available? To parents who are living at or around or below the poverty line so you can get free, quite commonly free childcare, free food, free medical care.

It is. It's amazing. But that that is. What, what he's pointing out here in a follow up tweet, he writes, this doesn't mean people can't quote unquote afford to have kids. It means they [00:18:00] can't afford to pay someone else to raise them, which is indeed a historical privilege of the aristocracy. So interestingly, it is kind of true.

That what these social service programs are essentially doing for those who utilize them, those with very low income levels, is enabling them to raise children like the aristocracy in a culture that doesn't really support family based child rearing or community based child rearing. So in a world in which child rearing is atomized and made a very economic commodity that everyone has to pay for on a one off basis, the only way That you're going to be able to raise kids sustainably or affordably is by either having someone else completely pay for it, let the government be your trust fund or to have a trust fund, or just make a ton of money.

What's

Malcolm Collins: the, there's some followup about how any country that cares about this population, like women should.

Simone Collins: Oh, you had shared with me another tweet. I did not know if this was connected because it was just a [00:19:00] screenshot that you, you shared with me. But it was someone saying, and this makes me, angry. I just hate this.

I don't hate the person who tweeted it, but I'm not going to say their name because I'm saying that I hate what they said. Feminism is a nation killer because the whole point of it is to extract labor from the woman that should be going into raising children and redirect it to various useless people.

Parasites. And the PSYOP is so good that they even get women to cheer for this outcome. And actually functional nation would exclude women aged 18 to 40 from full time workforce. And you'd see a reduction in house prices, rents, high taxes, wasteful government spending, foreign aid, and all the other useless things Garbage.

So everyone would have the same level of material wealth, except we wouldn't be going extinct. And I'm just so sick of the, the go to conservative response to demographic collapse of like, well, our problem is that we let women work. Because women have been working for f*****g ever. Okay. They've been working and raising kids and they've been doing it with [00:20:00] their communities.

But there's a

Malcolm Collins: great graph of this, which shows that what you really had was that, I'll put it here,

that women used to work about as much as men. And then the rate that women worked went down over a time was technological inventions. And it went up in the seventies. The idea of taking women outta the workforce is an anma to women's history.

Women used to

Simone Collins: work temporary aberration.

Honestly, now that I think about it, I'm a little confused as to how people was like even a base knowledge of history could buy into this system that traditional women didn't work. I mean, we knew in hunter gatherer times, the women did. Steady work that would feed the family. I E gather and men would do the more risky work that would bring in the big kills I E.

Hunt. But even during the early agricultural period, I mean, women worked the farm to do. Do they think that women, and not only that, but when it wasn't farming season, if anything, women worked more than men, because they would often be doing the sewing and stuff like that, which would then be [00:21:00] sold in the local communities.

I mean. W, I guess it was like a period of like 20 years where women didn't really need to work due to technological advances. Maybe 50 years max, but it was short.

Simone Collins: Yeah. And we, you, you and me. Would be so screwed if I didn't work. You, like, why would, imagine if I just turned to you and I was like, Hey, Malcolm, how about you just do all of the work now? And I'm just going to chill here at home with the kids. I'm not going to help us make money.

We

Malcolm Collins: can be fine. Because I'm not as competent as you and I'm not as hard working

Simone Collins: as you. No, no. We just have, we bring, like I keep saying, we bring very different skills to the table and without both of us bringing those skills to the table, we are. Completely economically and professionally hamstringed.

And this is another one of those big shames of the atomization of, of society. And that married couples are 100 percent looking at their careers as being totally separate. And in the end, they both kind of suck at what they do [00:22:00] because they're not really combining their different skills that should be overlapping or not overlapping.

Should we call it

Malcolm Collins: marriage is to cover your blind spots. Yes. Hello. To work together because you are not perfect. No human is. And to look for somebody who covers all of the parts of you. Yeah. That you fail at. And then utilize that in both a professional and domestic sense, you know, as a parent. You covered the things I'm not good at.

I covered the things you're not good at as a somebody who's taking care of the home. You covered the things I'm not good at. I covered the things you're not good at. And professionally, it's the same. Like the idea that you would attempt to tackle any of this alone. I just can't even fathom.

Simone Collins: It's insane.

And yet there's so many people who've just decided that the problem is women getting educated. The problem is women working. When no, the problem is that. Couples are no longer becoming couples. They're not even coordinating on anything anymore. They're not working together anymore. Communities are not working and coordinating anymore.

You know, it also used to be that [00:23:00] communities were stronger.

Malcolm Collins: Like the get in the kitchen, right? Like this famous line, right? Like the woman's role is making a sandwich. It's this was true of poor families historically, like Poor dysfunctional families that had no status in society. This was not true of wealthy families.

Historically, usually the women played a large part in the economic management of the family's assets. Like you are emulating poor trash humans, basically, when you take on these positions, even from a historic perspective.

Simone Collins: What would we call trailer trash before? Oh no, we would just call them gypsies.

Oh God. There were always people in trailers and we still were mean to them.

Malcolm Collins: No, I, we'd call them serfs. Serfs were the original. Not even serfs, because serfs worked. They were, they were probably like low class merchants or something. Hmm. But yeah, I mean, The idea that you would have someone like think about on the frontier, [00:24:00] right?

The type of person who like kept his wife in the kitchen. This was like your severe drunkard, like barely able to handle himself. Glass of whiskey everywhere. He went, you know, falling over, yelling at trees. Like trees,

Simone Collins: that's funny because it's true. No, it is true.

Malcolm Collins: It was like a thing back then. This is not, you're like a competent individual.

You know, you look at like Abigail Adams and John Adams, for example, right? Right.

Simone Collins: These are two very hardworking people who did real work and who collaborated deeply. You know, everything they did was together. It was not separate. Abigail played a crucial role as an advisor and a sounding board to John Adams.

And, and she also ran their properties and farms. And

Malcolm Collins: when he was on his trips doing his like me promoting the podcast, I'm out promoting the podcast. You're running our companies, right? Like. It's, it's, it's the [00:25:00] way that the elite of humanity has always functioned. We just forgot.

Simone Collins: Yeah. But again, we, so, you know, coming back to like, why not, why not give women money?

Why not have women win the lottery or give them subsidies? It's, I just can't really see ever having the comfort to do all of that in isolation by myself. I know a lot of people talk about doing it by themselves and a lot of people end up doing it by themselves, but it's really freaking hard.

Malcolm Collins: It's a perversion of the joint bank account.

It's a perversion of, I'm sorry, the non joint bank account, the separate bank accounts in a married couple, the separate identities in a married couple. You're not willing to combine who you are with somebody else. And you're probably not willing to be married. Well, you're probably

Simone Collins: not willing to give your life to children as well, right?

Yeah, the

Malcolm Collins: Pregnant's Guide to Crafting Religion, when we talk about like our religious structure, we sort of frame life as an iterative movement away from the self. Like you start as a child. This thing that like needs [00:26:00] from its environment around it, needs from its family, you're nothing but a drain on those around you.

Then, but you, you are also singular, then you become a self sufficient individual and like a totally independent individual. Then you become married and you become a partner to someone else. You become part of a holistic team where you are half of that team. Then you become part of a family, right?

Where you are the head of the family or, or one of the heads of the family. And so far as you are guiding the next generation, guiding these next hungry individualists. And then you die and you become a memory and part of the family tradition. And the, this is a journey when properly pursued as a journey away from individualism and towards an ethereal memory.

And the individuals who cling to whatever stage of this cycle. They cling to this individualist stage or they cling to this. I want me, me, me, me, me more, you know, that's what the, the [00:27:00] individual, like a Chris Chan or something is doing. The individual who lives off the state, the individual who lives off society, me, me, me, me, me, always me.

They never really evolved past this childlike stage. Or even the secondary individual, the individual who's always an individual always must be independent. You know, they're always in this sort of teenage. version of themselves or the individual who's always their married partner, you know, not a family, right?

Like they're always in this early married, early thirties version of themselves, right? Anyway.

Simone Collins: Yeah. Huh. So how how palatable do you think this is going to be? You know, give men money. Only give them

Malcolm Collins: money? All, all income should go straight to the man. That's what we'll say.

Simone Collins: Not, but no, see, that's the thing is I am against this idea of financially and legally disempowering women.

That is not the point. Women should have property rights. They should have, you know, they should have access to Yes. Yes. [00:28:00] Yes, I think the problem though is because I mean, you can see it creates a ton of adverse incentives when someone has the ability to with impunity. Make a lot of decisions around property.

And also it creates, so in our relationship, for example, you make the final call on everything you, you, if I say no, you can veto something you, it is ultimately your decision, but the reason why that's powerful and the reason why you are always going to be incentivized to make good decisions is, you know, that in the end, if you make a decision that I'm super not cool with, that's the end of our marriage.

Period. You're gone. Like you have no more Simone as a resource. It's gone. And you don't want that. So you're not going to make decisions that I'm not going to be okay with. You may make decisions that I'm uncomfortable with, or you may ultimately obligate me to do the responsible thing that I don't have the self control to do, which I really appreciate.

And that's usually whenever I'm not exactly on board. It's not because I disagree with you. It's because I don't want to But if you take that away [00:29:00] and there is no out for the women, there is no financial recourse. There is no, there is no way for them to exit. There is less of an incentive to make the right decision.

And I could always trust you, even if you. 100 percent have control of all the property. And I, as a woman had zero rights, I know that I could trust you to make the right decision.

Malcolm Collins: But we have the alternate scenario here. She manages all of our bank accounts, all of our investments. I don't even know where the money is with our crypto and stuff like that.

You tortured me. I'd be like, I don't know. I wasn't paying attention. It's hard.

Simone Collins: It's I, anyway I, I think a lot of people. Could not be trusted with that level of power and oversight, even though I could trust you with it. You

Malcolm Collins: trust me with it because I trust you with all the

Simone Collins: actual stuff. It's true. I have all, I have all the power.

So I guess, yeah, because you gave it all to me, even though you didn't have I gave it all to her out

Malcolm Collins: of laziness, by the way, this stuff is hard. And I don't [00:30:00] like thinking about it. You know,

Simone Collins: I don't necessarily want it either.

Malcolm Collins: Dislike of gambling to the level where like, I hate investment because like, it feels like gambling I'm forced to do to be financially responsible.

What on

Simone Collins: earth? Right? So screwed up.

But you, Hey, you did a gamble in Las Vegas, right? And then you put in, I gambled a dollar. It was very difficult in the slot machine. And we won. It just was on a very

Malcolm Collins: the situation, it did a thing.

And you can pull it a surprising number of times for 1. I thought it might be 1 for one pull, but no, I get to pull it up many times.

Simone Collins: Yeah. I guess now I understand why people can sit in front of slot machines in Las Vegas for so long, because it was getting to the point where we were really ready to go.

But we felt like we had to go through the whole dollar.

Malcolm Collins: Right. So yeah, we've got to pull to the end. Pull, pull, pull. It was weird. Yeah, I don't, I don't recommend gambles. [00:31:00]

Simone Collins: Yeah, I

Malcolm Collins: don't recommend. You know what? That's what I think of the genetic thing, like gambling, stuff like that. It's like, are you programmed to get a big hit from these environments?

Simone Collins: Yeah. Yeah. But anyway, what I'm saying about women and property is that we need. A free market. I'm very much a believer in free markets. If you do not subject people to market pressures, then that the invisible hand work things out in a natural way, because what is a free market, but the human complicated, civilizational level version of, of evolution, you know?

So if you take that away and you, you artificially disempower one class of society, one group, one sex, whatever, then you're going to start to get market inefficiencies. And so we need a free market. I love for you the core

Malcolm Collins: sin is market inefficiencies.

Simone Collins: Well, it, that's what it creates. And that's why I don't like it.

Like we are, like you said [00:32:00] in an earlier conversation, we had very results oriented people. So obviously if wokeism or communism or socialism or whatever it might be, stuff that we're not necessarily super on board with was proven right. We'd be fully on board. Like we're there. Show us, show us how it works.

And we're there. So if disempowering women and sending them back to the kitchen and taking away their bank accounts and whatever it may be created the society that we thought was ideal, that would create human flourishing, that would get us off planet, that would help us overcome all of our shortcomings, 100 percent take it away.

Okay. But that's just not what would happen. And I'm so sick of all these, and it's always guys, but sometimes pick me women but not really pick me women because they're not even capable of making these arguments in a very articulate fashion saying, that's the problem. It's women getting educated. It's women going into work.

And that's,

Malcolm Collins: I love you so much, Simone. And I am [00:33:00] so excited that we have this podcast together and we're about to pass the 10, 000 numbers. So let's see. I don't know.

Simone Collins: Yes. Okay. So please, if you're listening to this and Yes, we have punchable faces or whatever, but if you have enjoyed, or you just want other people to want to punch our faces, here's what you should do.

Go steal someone's iPhone. Cause you probably don't have one cool. People don't have iPhones, do they? Except for their like really rich tech DVCs or people who are trying to front. So go find someone with an iPhone or an iPad, log in to. Apple podcasts, give us a five star review so that more people can find and hate us.

And also if you are on YouTube, please like, and

Malcolm Collins: subscribe.

Simone Collins: Yeah. Well, you're probably going to end up on Kiwi farms or encyclopedia dramatica. I'm

Malcolm Collins: surprised we're not on Kiwi farms yet. There's not

Simone Collins: enough. There's not enough lol. Cow.

Malcolm Collins: We're not, we're not enough of a low cow on.

I will work harder. I will endeavor to be, need the lollies of cows.

Simone Collins: No, you have to like absolute, actually lose your s**t. So like, you know [00:34:00] the people, people like making fun of that kid who, when you say something to them, then they squeal like a little pig and start freaking out. And I think that's a more common Yeah, we, we

Malcolm Collins: like the negative attention a little too much.

Mm-Hmm.

Simone Collins: or too much. And so it's not fun because it's not fun to bully someone when they're like,

Malcolm Collins: yeah, I'm hanging out on the QE. This is cool. You guys are paying

Simone Collins: attention. You should, you should talk about this thing too.

It just, then no, then it becomes homework. So I'm, I'm afraid you're kind of doomed on that front and I'm sorry, but it's a, it's a truth.

It's a six hand truth.

Malcolm Collins: Wait, actually, we need one of our fans to create the Kiwi farms page for us. So that it is always actually managed by somebody who doesn't hate

Simone Collins: us? No, no, it has to be managed by someone who actually hates us and things that we're amusing, but it just doesn't work. It doesn't work. I don't think we're ever going to end up there.

And maybe

Malcolm Collins: I will work hard to prove you wrong on that.

Simone Collins: [00:35:00] Well, you're going to have to like. I don't know. I'll roofie you, I guess. And then you'll have to run. You already have! Why am I married to you? We're going to that New York event on Friday. So I will roofie you. I will take away your clothes. And then I will just punt you out of the hotel room.

And then maybe You know, something will happen. I put a body cam on you.

Malcolm Collins: So that they see me running around saying my wife has abandoned

Simone Collins: me. I, I mean, I honestly do not know what it would take, but yeah, I, I think also like a very common element of Kiwi Farms lolcows is that they have a very Big lack of self awareness.

Malcolm Collins: People think I have a lack of self awareness.

Simone Collins: And I think you have enough of a sense of self awareness or I'm so much like you slash I am you. And you're just recording this two times over cross dressed as me, where

Malcolm Collins: I love that conspiracy theory. This is a real conspiracy theory [00:36:00] about us, by the way, but it's

Simone Collins: true because obviously, and why else are we in separate rooms?

Why else are we

Malcolm Collins: in separate rooms? Could be use like makeup and, and, and a different outfit. Yeah. maybe a few years apart with hormones.

Simone Collins: Not really because my face is super deformed but nevertheless I think for example, even Ayla doesn't really have a Kiwi farms page. A lot of people are just like, can you believe her in her surveys?

She doesn't include trigger warnings. Like there's nothing on her there because she's very self aware. So even people who you would think would be great, you know, who say very outlandish things.

Malcolm Collins: I think about Ayla recently, and I almost want to do a full episode on this. Is she's like, is he, is he a Zaki anime?

I don't know if you'll know. He has Aki enemies. This

Simone Collins: is anime. No, no, sorry. No, no, no. He's a Kai. Is that The tapas of Japan. Yes.

Malcolm Collins: That's why I said Iizaki. Anyway. So a character. No, I think it's Iizakai. Iizakai. Anyway, character ends up dying, waking up in a [00:37:00] different world. Ayla, yet again, released her stats on things like showers, rates of sex, rates of going outside, and people are like, Oh my God, like she showers.

What? Like, I don't know, like a few, twice a week or something. Like not as much as you would expect, you know, with a lot of people. And I am just convinced that she is. And Isekai from like a different parallel universe, there was some like fat gamer, anime nerd, red pill guy, right, who got reincarnated as a full all stats character in our reality.

Simone Collins: Max attractive, max smart. Max

Malcolm Collins: smart, max attractive, max everything.

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: And he's like, Oh God, what do I do with my life? What? I can just have sex for money now. This is awesome. What? I can just like bend my entire life [00:38:00] doing random research and everyone respects me. What? I can just.

Simone Collins: She puts up with a lot of s**t, Malcolm.

A lot of people don't respect her and they don't understand that because she is Well, what I don't understand is that people She's also, she outwholesomes pretty much everyone I know. She is more wholesome.

Malcolm Collins: Oh, no, absolutely. If you know her personally, she's incredibly wholesome. She's, well,

Simone Collins: she's earnest.

She's honest. She's intellectually humble. She's even, like, she wants to have a family. She supports her family. She's there for her sisters. Like, I'm sorry. Do you do that?

Malcolm Collins: I don't think so. It's the fat guy with the Cheeto dust always dies, jumping in front of a train, saving a girl

Simone Collins: or something. Well, yeah, and he has his harem, and the harem comedy is pretty good.

Because he's just such a nice guy. That's why he

Malcolm Collins: gets reincarnated in many ways. It's the best Isekai reincarnation, the best gift for being this otherwise perfectly honorable character. Honestly, you could make an anime about Aayla's life. Where she is an Isekai

Simone Collins: character. There are like 10 different anime angles on Aayla's life because she's that cool.

And I think it would

Malcolm Collins: [00:39:00] be fantastic anime.

Simone Collins: Any anime about Aayla would be fantastic. She's just, It would be

Malcolm Collins: like the Harry Potter

Simone Collins: messes of rationality. No, the one that I want to watch either the, the, the Food Wars version of Aayla's life, where it's about like, you learn about her research through completely outlandish episodes that involve competitions.

Or I would want to watch the Thermae Romee version of an ELA anime where it's, you know, like somehow, like I want the instructional element of it. I just want that. But

Malcolm Collins: wait, Thermite Roommate on Netflix is terrible.

Simone Collins: I accidentally Not the new one! The original! Obviously

Malcolm Collins: original Thermite Roommate.

People might not know this. It's one of the best animes ever made. The new Thermite Roommate that's like on, I don't know if it's on Netflix. There's some Trash. Couldn't watch it. Horrible. Trash. Trash. Trash. Inpalatable. You have to pirate it, okay? Sorry. No, don't pirate anything. Pirating is illegal. I think you can just watch it

Simone Collins: on YouTube.

Yeah,

Malcolm Collins: I think you can just

Simone Collins: watch where we found it. It's fantastic. The original. [00:40:00] Yeah. Don't you dare? Don't you dare watch the new one? Anyway, I, gosh, I just miss you. I love talking

Malcolm Collins: with you. Might not know this and I should know, like I've been really disappointed in our episode quality. Recently. And it's because the episodes we've been airing recently, we're doing a period where we were prepping for a big backlog because we were going to travel, you know, last weekend I was in New Hampshire, the weekend before that I was in Las Vegas speaking at various conferences and Simone super pregnant and, you know, we're super behind on a lot of work.

So we're just like, Oh, let's prep on weekends. We'll do like. 10 episodes in a day, but it led to us filming episodes where I felt like I had sort of run out of ideas by the end of the day. And that were kind of bad. But we needed to build this backlog if we're going to stick with a daily upload schedule.

And I'm sorry we did that to you guys and hopefully that won't happen again. I know we're building another backlog for when she is having the kid. Cause she's like, I probably won't be able to record for a week or so. But other than that, yeah, I'm, I'm sorry. [00:41:00] We have not been at the quality that I would like to be in terms of a baseness, spiciness and new takes.

Simone Collins: We'll get back on that train. We'll get back on the spice train. The spice must flow

Malcolm Collins: the spice must flow. Oh my God. Simone, you know what you're all about. You are

Simone Collins: like a nerd. I don't even know. Oh God. Oh, all right. Hot dog night.

Malcolm Collins: Let's do it tonight. She's making hot dogs and we cut them up and we put them in a little Hawaiian buns, which are sweet and then they put them into a shallots, which I'm getting today and some fancy sauces, which I collect and I'm very, very, very excited for my little hot dog buns.

Simone Collins: Yeah. So you, you cut the rich person onions. I'll do everything else. You get to go.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah

Simone Collins: It's

Malcolm Collins: on friend as we call shallots rich person onions because uncle roger because uncle roger says that we are we are made of we are Our men of culture are made of culture. Yes [00:42:00] and

Simone Collins: status We learn all of our cooking information from uncle roger as everyone should and well that in food wars Uncle

Malcolm Collins: roger

Simone Collins: God bless.

All right. I love you. I love you too. Malcolm

In this thought-provoking discussion, Malcolm and Simone delve into the world of male influencer Hamza and the growing trend of optimizing one's life around an aesthetic ideal of masculinity. They explore the similarities between this movement and the trans community, both of which prioritize gender identity as a central focus. The hosts also examine the cultural differences in gender roles and expectations, particularly between traditional American and Muslim or Eastern European backgrounds. They argue that defining one's moral system around an aesthetic can lead to despair and that true fulfillment comes from pursuing goals with intrinsic value. The discussion touches on the importance of finding a life partner who complements one's own values and the dangers of maintaining a false "frame" in relationships.

[00:00:00] basically I'm starting the fatherhood chapter of my life. We're not pregnant just yet, but we've moved to the Scottish Highlands,

The reason why me and my ex split up is I told her to sit down and to write down like her goals and I wrote, you know what, I want to move to like a big city.

 You will not find this kind of woman who will fit with this lifestyle in a big major city why?

The women who are in the big cities are glorified Instagram prostitution.

I actually want to have a few like, Sleepless nights.

I want to have a few likes like sleep deprived nights where I stay up late bro for the last few years I've been to sleep at 7 8 p. m I've you couldn't imagine the amount of like parties and social events and dinners that I've missed

I know what goes on in these parties And the issue was that the girls that I was meeting from these places, just like I, I was as well, um, We're all low quality.

It's a low quality place to be.

. I wanted to be super social. I wanted to have some late nights where we stay up and we're social and there's a party that we go to and everything.

 But she saw it, and I'm not gonna lie, like, I could see how, like, offended she was. Where she was quite, like, [00:01:00] pressuring, she was like, Wait, you wanna do this? Oh, you wanna do that? You wanna stay up late? But that's unhealthy.

 Those party girls, like the party, low quality, degenerate, TikTok type of girls.

They are attracted to the party, low quality, degenerate, TikTok type of guys. Fine, like trash can stay with trash.

Because for hers, she wrote that she wanted to do more of the things that we were currently doing. , it's wholesome as f**k, and you know that she's an awesome girl for that, she doesn't want to be around like, You know, like party girls and whatever I just realized like we're actually going into two separate seasons right now

 Fine, like trash can stay with trash. This is going to sound weird, you need to be hit in the face. I will repeat that again. As a young man, you need to be hit in the face consistently.

Malcolm Collins: but the problem is that when you Define your moral system around an aesthetic.

It needs to be witnessed to have value. And when he got to the countryside, there was no one to witness affirmation from the social community

Would you like to know more?

Simone Collins: Hello.

Malcolm Collins: Hello, Simone! [00:02:00] Recently I fell down a rabbit hole trying to learn about this Influencer named Hamza, .

The men of this country in general, unless they follow me, are f*****g weak. The only strong men in this entire f*****g country, in the entire west, are just the ones who are part of my cult, who have followed my advice and become strong from that.

Every f*****g other guy here is basically just a f*****g pussy. They're all just weak as f**k.

if you put some of your money into a company like Apple, or you put it into like, you know, the big like index funds like Apple and like 500 different companies, you're giving them money to help them with their business.

And you're hoping that since they think that you're a good boy, they'll give you a little bit more money in return. I think your, your PP size has to be very small for that, because if you understand this concept of investing, why would you invest in someone else's business instead of your own?

Malcolm Collins: He is a London based influencer that is seen as like a new big figure in the, I guess I'd call male aesthetic movement.

Simone Collins: Like Lux [00:03:00] Maxxing?

Malcolm Collins: Not exactly Lux Maxxing. It's the movement that, I would say that an individual like

Simone Collins: Rye Nationalist?

Malcolm Collins: No, Andrew Tate would be a leading figure.

Ah,

Simone Collins: okay. Performative masculinity. Performative

Malcolm Collins: masculinity for the sake of performative masculinity. And I think it's really shown in a lot of his videos because Whitney, he asks himself and you'll actually see this in the Hamza video. So just so people know he became very famous. He's got like 2. 3 million subscribers on YouTube.

And. Regularly in his videos, he will ask

himself should I do X or Y? And the metric he uses when deciding X or Y is what fulfills my potential as a man? What is the more masculine thing to do, or the thing that is more like a man to do?

Mediocre man would get the vision that I did and he'd start training a few hours a week.

The superior man would go and live in a fight camp. The superior man, the man who's [00:04:00] really like on this, would literally go and live amongst the fighters and the warriors and Live amongst them, eat amongst them, and be revolving around this lifestyle as much as possible. And four months later, he uploads Why I Never Became a Fighter. Well, at least he did give it a whole four months. At the end of the day, the first day of being in this fight camp, I go and sit down and journal in my room.

And I just ask myself a question, is this authentic? So you're telling me he quit this newfound metamorphosis after one day,

This is going to sound weird, you need to be hit in the face. I will repeat that again. As a young man, you need to be hit in the face consistently.

Simone Collins: In the pragmatist guide to life where you talk about, just like people's objective functions and what they should maximize their existence around.

You give thought experiments going over any possible thing, be it hedonism or serving God or negative utilitarianism, like you're all over the place, right? The one thing, because you're very unbiased in that book, the one thing that [00:05:00] you s**t all over is people whose objective function revolves around an identity or an aesthetic, which is exactly what you're describing here.

So hopefully this gets really salty really fast.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah I, Oh I'm excited to get salty. And the last time, because we regularly talk about how the problem with gender dysphoria and a gender fixation is not just a problem on the left, on the left, this was in the trans movement where people make their entire identity, their gender, but Is not Andrew Tate's a huge chunk of his identity, his gender, and the people who follow him following him because they're trying to be more like a perfect man.

And in the comments to that video, one of the commenters said I feel so much better and more fulfilled since I started optimizing around, my masculinity or man like things, and I was like you sound like a trans person would tell me the same thing. Like I feel so much more fulfilled since I started optimizing my life around my gender.

It's not that this isn't able to create a feedback cycle that can make you [00:06:00] feel as if you are living a fulfilling life, but like Objectively, peel it back for five seconds, you must realize that none of that matters objectively, just because you can feel good by gambling all day, or by exercising 24 7, and I'm not saying that's what these individuals do, I'm, what I'm doing is I'm creating an event.

Comparison here. That doesn't mean that you exercising 24 seven is a thing of value. That doesn't mean when you die, people will be like, wow, he really lived a life of value. And this is where I will add some nuance to this before I go further with any of this, which is to say individuals like this, like aesthetic aspirations, like masculinity can be.

The lifeline or the life like safety preserver for somebody who is drowning in thoughts about not unaliving themselves [00:07:00] and thoughts about just like desperation and depression and a sense of, Worselessness was in society, which a lot of young men feel these days. And if you try to engage them with a more complex concept whether that concept is a theological concept or a philosophical concept or some like deeper actually good reason for living and a good thing to dedicate your life to, they, that can't get through to them in that state.

Simone Collins: And so it's like when you're in too much pain, you can't really think about anything complicated. You need a painkiller and there's nothing mentally effective. Like a painkiller that's really highly intellectual. You need a mini game that you can easily win.

And anything that's aesthetically based is fairly easy to win because you look in the mirror. Do you look like that person you saw on Instagram? Yes or no. Okay, fantastic. And you know where you're going, where you are, there's no nuance because frankly, you're in too much mental pain and anguish or depression to feel that nuance.

Is that where you're saying really?

Malcolm Collins: That's absolutely what I'm saying. Yeah. And I'd also point out [00:08:00] here that we have to be aware of given that we think that a large part of IQ is heritable, and the old saying, how smart the average person is. Half of them are dumber than that.

The problem is that a lot of people may simply lack the. Mental ability to conceptualize anything more complicated than just be man on Gabunga. And yeah,

Simone Collins: you're saying this isn't just a people hurting or depressed people thing. It is, but it can also just be an IQ thing.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, it can also just be an IQ thing. So I'm saying that I don't hate that these memes are spreading more broadly. Like I do not think Hamza, for example, is a bad guy or what he is doing is making society net worse. And I actually feel the same about Andrew Tate. I do not think what he's doing is making society net worse.

I do not think he is a bad guy. I do think so so 1 thing I do need to note about both of these individuals, and we mentioned this in our Tom girl episode, which is really interesting or tomboy episode, which is a sort of apocalypse of [00:09:00] tomboys that they are disappearing. And they're being villainized by both the right and the left where the 1 really negative thing that does come out of these individuals is These individuals often come from, Eastern European or Muslim countries with Muslim backgrounds which means that they uh, stall idealized women from a Muslim cultural perspective, which is very different than what the idealized woman is within classical Americana perspective which is a woman who is, much more do it herself, can fix a car, can tough it out with the boys much more.

And if you want to see our big arguments around that, and all of the citations around that, you can just go to that episode.

I love it. When people in response to that other video where like, no. Andrew Tate. Isn't. Uh, stalling, a Muslim view of femininity and gender relationships. And then few days later, he puts out this tweet, which we've actually done a full video on that'll go live soon, where he is saying the [00:10:00] solution to demographic collapse is polygyny.

That men need to take multiple wives. If you are so brainwashed that you don't understand that his entire view of gender is just a Muslim view of gender. Uh, I don't, I don't know what to say to you. You, you you're, you're brainwashed step. Um, there's nothing wrong with this view of gender, but it is not an American view of gender and it is not a Christian view of gender.

 Also side note here. Can we appreciate how awesome the new X is with this community note here under this being fertility rates have been falling in all parts of the world and among all races, their fertility of non-whites has fallen more than that of whites, which is one of those statistics that I always have to put out there to people who say we're racist for talking about falling fertility rates. This is both true, but between countries and within countries, I eat within the United States.

Fertility rates are falling faster among other races and outside of the United States, fertility rates are falling faster among non-whites. So also don't give me this. I'm being [00:11:00] racist for assuming that Hamza was raised Muslim. He was, and he says, so And there's nothing wrong with that, but it does create problems when you can bind ideas that you don't realize are about Muslim gender roles with the picture of the Western idealized family structure And unfortunately, many of the ideas about women or idealized femininity or the woman's role in society that have become normalized within the red pill movement are Muslim cultural conceptions of that. And therefore do not work when you try to mesh them with.. Everything else being a Western framework. When I was younger, I was raised to be a Muslim by my parents. I'm teaching you things that religion has been teaching us for thousands of years. Everything that the red pill has taught us about male and female sexuality, Islam has been enforcing.

And I really like this video. This is a multi millionaire Christian kickboxer who's speaking about Islam. If you have a problem with feminism, Islam will fix [00:12:00] it.

Malcolm Collins: It's really clear if you look at history books around what was considered idealized in an American woman, or if you just look at what people like in country songs.

 I can't swig that sweet champagne, I'd rather drink beer all night, Hey, I'm a redneck woman, I ain't no high class broad. I'm just a product of my race, and I say, hey, y'all, and yee haw. Look at that. I think every fish I've caught this year has been mean. Look at that.

Malcolm Collins: It's beginning to estole a very non American aspiration in terms of what women should aspire to and what young men should look for,

I don't know if this didn't occur to me when I was recording this originally, but. I realize now that a lot of people, when they imagine what your stereotypical ideal Muslim woman looks like, they are picturing the current radical extremist Muslim populations were women [00:13:00] were had jobs and stuff like that instead of the way, Muslim women historically dressed, which was. Absolutely dripping in jewelry in very scantily clad outfits. Thank your classic belly dancers and stuff like that. Or. Historic Persian women. But if you're watching this on audio basically think Jasmine from Aladdin. And contrast this with the idealized women in the American frontier. And I've also posted some pictures here that were very homely. And very plain and we're almost no jewelry. And people would be like, what? Those can't be the idealized frontier woman. They're not hot. And it's like, well, because in the traditional American value system, when you are choosing a wife, you are not optimizing around how hot she is. You are optimizing around other things like her moral character and how tough she is, which is something that these [00:14:00] women are showing. Every one of these women was photographed with a gun. This woman posing with a gun. Is not just a thing of modern, sexy, conservative women. This is something American women have been doing for a very long time.

Malcolm Collins: One of the things that really got me when I listened to these influencers which was really interesting, is I was listening to Hamza talk about what an ideal wife was for him. And he's out there, he's exercising every day obviously he puts a lot of effort into exercising, he puts a lot of effort in, in uh, Stoll's mental discipline.

This is a big thing for him like, don't play video games, it's a lot of sacrifice he's making and the end goal of this sacrifice, even from his own perspective, is a wife and a family. And so he talks about what he wants in a wife. And he says I want a wife that is submissive cheerful these, I appreciate cheerful and I do appreciate at least to me submissive.

That's something I'm into, but but also that doesn't have any male friends and that's where I'm starting to be like Whoa. [00:15:00]

Simone Collins: There's some insecurity in there, some massive insecurity.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. And then he goes on he needs her to be pretty, either not have a job or have a job that's more like a, a hobby and

Simone Collins: sells knitted goods on Etsy job.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. That fits like a feminine aesthetic. And I hear this and I'm like, I would hate being married to that woman. It seems like people who do this, like if you follow the full Andrew Tate thing, or you follow the full Hamza thing, and you become. Giga Chad, right? The fish that is catching you, the woman that is catching you, the family life that is catching you, seems to me astronomically less than the value system that we will raise our children with and that we try to portray on our channel.

He couldn't get a woman like you. With that sort of attitude, like someone who's intellectually engaged and engages in these intellectual conversations and like [00:16:00] jokes with me and knows, all of these cultural, low cultural concepts that I find pretty engaging.

Simone Collins: I think there are two elements

Malcolm Collins: of

Simone Collins: that here, and I'm curious to hear what you think.

One element I think is insecurity that they. Wouldn't want a wife like that because they, I think either fear that a wife like that would get too big for their britches and then start making lots of demands and ultimately leave them or make their life really complicated and divorce, rape them and all of that.

I think the other part of it is they, given the nature of who they are, per what you're saying about lures and like the kind of fish they're catching, they haven't met these women. They just don't know they exist. And I don't think they. Believe that they exist if that's yeah, because

Malcolm Collins: they wouldn't like you wouldn't engage as one of these guys like the nerdy.

Yeah, I've not met Anyone like this before and you wouldn't be I was interesting So I showed Simone some of his videos and she goes isn't it interesting that so many of the men [00:17:00] who go for this ultra masculine? identity To you came off as preening and a feat. So for people who don't know what a feat is, that means they come off as effeminate and very obsessed when she says preening, like very obsessed with their looks and stuff like that.

Preening is typically a

Simone Collins: word that people learn when they look at male birds grooming themselves. fluffed out the right way, that kind of thing.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. And when you said that, what I realized. Is this Americana idealization of a partner that a lot of our society has lost because a lot of the leaders and like the masculine identity movement come from Muslim and Eastern European backgrounds they don't come from traditional Americana backgrounds anymore.

At least the ones that are reaching the youth. We have forgotten this, that it wasn't just that the women were expected to be rough and tumble in terms of their aspiration.

But the men also were expected to exude a form of masculinity, which [00:18:00] is very difficult to describe in today's society. Where to you. When you looked at individuals like that, they came off as effeminate to you. Like Andrew Tate came off as effeminate to you. Hamza came off as effeminate to you.

Because they,

Simone Collins: what is effeminate, but investing in your appearance and obsessing over your appearance and what other people think of you. That is an inherently feminine thing. And it is also very clearly an obsession of these people. They do invest a lot in their appearance and also in what other people think of them.

What's more feminine than that?

I just want to be clear that it's not bad that these trades are feminine and it's not bad to be feminine. I'm just saying it's ironic because these men frame themselves as being hyper masculine, whereas really the height of masculinity lies in inherent confidence.

And a lack of interest in how other people see you, a giving zero f***s kind of thing. Which Andrew Tate invests heavily in, in projecting, but [00:19:00] it's obvious that he really cares about it.

Malcolm Collins: I'm going to disagree with you here. I just think it's different cultural ideals here.

Simone Collins: Really?

Malcolm Collins: So for example, right?

I'll explain what I mean by this, right? So to you, when you look like a woman was this Americana cultural subset, when she looks at men like this, I suspect that they appear to you the same way that when I look at two women, and one of the women is. Is very a country girl, right?

Overalls, dirty, everything like that. And the other one is all done up with like lip injections and tons of makeup and tons of long nails. And I'm just like, ew, to that one. I don't know if a feminine masculine distinction is really necessary there. It is a value system distinction that we can associate with femininity and masculinity.

And that is from your perspective to me I, I don't know if it's and I think that within this movement and to men like this, they hear words like feminine [00:20:00] and they hear it when used to talk about something a male is doing is having an intrinsically negative context,

Baby: which I don't

Malcolm Collins: mean here.

You mean, it just not culturally align with what you were raised to believe a good partner. looked and acted like and valued which was specifically when your culture talked about what is a man to you? What is masculine?

Both: It

Malcolm Collins: was confidence leadership and not caring what other people think of them.

Okay.

Simone Collins: And I agree that there's a cultural aspect to that, but also when you look at what hormonally distinguishes men and women on average and behaviorally distinguishes men and women on average, women are the ones who hormonally and behaviorally care more about what other people think are more concerned with, social signaling and status and all the sort of bureaucratic, how do people see me?

How do I see them? What's everyone thinking right now thing. And men are the go big or go home, testosterone, I'm going to go out and make my fortune or die a virgin and no one's going to [00:21:00] care about me and I'll die in war and I'm disposable. That is masculinity versus femininity from a biological perspective.

So yes, maybe I culturally hold that view, but I also think it's a biological truth.

Malcolm Collins: I appreciate that. I also want to talk more about the Hansa story here because it wasn't really interesting to me what happened to him. And I think that it shows the danger of the masculinity as a moral system, like an aesthetic as a moral system mindset is he actually want he got a girl.

Who seemed like a really fantastic girl from what I've seen went to go live in a rural area with her, living the lifestyle that he had told everyone that he saw as aspiration.

Simone Collins: Like the ranch and everything,

I moved into the, the, and the rural mountains of Scotland with my woman.

And soon we're going to buy a home and we're going to have children. I'm going to move up my family here. I'm going to move up like families that I love. [00:22:00] And I'm going to create this dream into a reality. But basically I'm starting the fatherhood chapter of my life. We're not pregnant just yet, but we've moved to the Scottish Highlands, like the mountains of Scotland. And this is just an Airbnb that we're currently staying in, but we're going to view houses and we're going to get a home somewhere around this region.

And we start this like chapter of our lives of having children

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. But then he wanted to go back to the city. Go back to all of the temptations that he pretended like he wasn't tempted by.

With the wife?

Simone Collins: Did they sell their house in the countryside?

Malcolm Collins: No, the wife didn't. I think they were renting something in the countryside. And he broke up with her. This person he was planning to marry.

Simone Collins: You left

Malcolm Collins: her? Over this.

Simone Collins: Over, why? Because, on what grounds did he leave her?

Malcolm Collins: He wanted to be more social and she wanted to focus more on just like the family, right?

Simone Collins: Oh, she was smothering him.

Malcolm Collins: Not smothering him. I think what it was is she believed what he had been saying. She believed [00:23:00] that was his true aspiration. I want a dedicated wife. I want to live in the countryside. And I want to focus on personal self improvement.

No, if you are listening in audio, and this section sounds disjointed, that is because I am interspersing clips of him explaining why he broke up with his girlfriend was clips of things he has said in the past about high quality partners and how to find an ideal girlfriend. The reason why me and my ex split up is because we did this little exercise together where I told her to sit down and to write down like her goals and the season of life that she wanted to get into.

 For the next few months, what kind of life do we wanna live? And so I wrote it really authentically and honestly, and I think she did as well. And I wrote, you know what, I want to move to like a big city. I want to be around like businessmen. I want to really make friends.

Let's talk about where you won't find her. You will not find this kind of woman who will fit with this lifestyle in a big major city like London, Dubai, Miami. Why?

Because the women who are in big cities, imagine you move to a big city. There's certainly [00:24:00] more women there, but quantity does not equal quality. The women who are in the big cities are there for one major reason. They are grinding. As like, as, as glorified Instagram prostitution.

I actually want to have a few like, Sleepless nights.

I want to have a few likes like sleep deprived nights where I stay up late bro for the last few years I've been to sleep at 7 8 p. m I've you couldn't imagine the amount of like parties and social events and dinners that I've missed

So the girls that I have dated previously have always just been these sort of like party hookup girls.

they were just like in parties, just like sucking dick because I know what goes, bro, I'm the guy who's getting his dick sucked in the party. I know what goes on in these parties And the issue was that the girls that I was meeting from these places, just like I, I was as well, um, We're all low quality.

It's a low quality place to be. I know that's probably not what you've wanted to hear because you got so excited when I just started saying it. You know, I used to f k these girls. But the truth is, like, the casual sex lifestyle brings instant gratification, Jeffries, to it. Like, people who you don't actually want to be around.

. I wanted to be super social. I [00:25:00] wanted to have some late nights where we stay up and we're social and there's a party that we go to and everything.

And. I'm not gonna lie, like, I don't wanna say a bad word about my girl, I really can't, about my ex. But she saw it, and I'm not gonna lie, like, I could see how, like, offended she was. Where she was quite, like, pressuring, she was like, Wait, you wanna do this? Oh, you wanna do that? You wanna stay up late? But that's unhealthy.

This pursuit has actually made me less attractive to those party girls, like the party, low quality, degenerate, TikTok type of girls.

They are attracted to the party, low quality, degenerate, TikTok type of guys. Fine, like trash can stay with trash.

Because for hers, she wrote that she wanted to do more of the things that we were currently doing. She wanted to get more into the sort of wild, detached away from people. Whilst that sounds, it's wholesome as f**k, and you know that she's an awesome girl for that, she doesn't want to be around like, You know, like party girls and whatever I just realized like we're actually going into two separate seasons right now

 Fine, like trash can stay with trash. This is going to sound weird, you need to be hit in the face. I will repeat that again. As a young man, you [00:26:00] need to be hit in the face consistently.

Malcolm Collins: but the problem is that when you Define your moral system around an aesthetic.

It needs to be witnessed to have value. And when he got to the countryside, there was no one to witness affirmation from the social community and everything like that. Why didn't

Simone Collins: he just post his life? Like ballerina farms and everyone else who goes out.

Malcolm Collins: He is he did do that to an extent, but I guess it wasn't enough for him.

Like I'm actually confused as to why he left her or why the city called to him that much. But I will say that people with different cultural values, many of them actually struggle to live in rural environments. Because rural environments offer a completely different set of reward mechanisms for an individual.

Think about you and me as an example here, right? You thought you would hate living in a rural environment when I was first like we should do it for cost reasons. And then you got out here and you were like, Oh my God. Like [00:27:00] recently you were telling me, I was like, what can I do for you?

I wanted to do something nice. I was like, can I upgrade your mattress? Can I fix a part of the house? Can I do something outside or buy you something because, she just had a kid and I was like you deserve some sort of a push present. I go, do you want more jewelry? And you go, I have all the jewelry I want.

You're like, she had a set number of jewelry that she wanted. Like at the beginning of our marriage, he just went and got it all. And she doesn't want any more jewelry. She's I don't want any more jewelry. I don't want any more clothing. And I was like then what do you want? And you go, the only thing that I want is in everything that I think about, like luxury for me is not having to worry about losing the lifestyle we have today.

Not having to worry about losing the house, not having to worry about losing the and we've paid off all the debt on our house and everything like that, which isn't even a sound financial decision. We just did it because, made you feel comfortable. Made

Simone Collins: me safer. You did it to humor me.

Because it makes me feel safer.

Malcolm Collins: And so we don't, and we had a super low interest loan from like during Covid and everything like that, but she's no, I know. So I did [00:28:00] that. People

Simone Collins: are gonna hate me for this.

Malcolm Collins: But still now it's about getting income streams that we don't need to leave the house to to go get.

But it was interesting to me that this is your heaven, this rural environment. You didn't even know. You created my

Simone Collins: ideal life and I never would have expected it.

Baby: Oh,

Malcolm Collins: sorry. Which is interesting for me is that I think that what might've happened with him is someone that may have been culturally and genetically optimized for a Urban environment put themselves in a rural environment and realized that while it may have fit certain like trans cultural narratives about masculinity, it didn't his narratives about masculinity.

Simone Collins: Here's another potentiality, though, is perhaps his primary. And what made him feel validated and what made him feel like he was bringing something to the table. Was this more in person socializing being witness thing and taking a life in the countryside [00:29:00] removed his ability to feel like he was something special and something high status.

Malcolm Collins: Maybe another thing that's very interesting about him. When I think about cultural differences and The Eastern European Muslim cultural background versus the Americana cultural background is this idea of fighting to prove one's masculinity. Which is, he did this thing where he stopped creating YouTube videos.

Like he created these high quality YouTube videos every day for a while. And then he stopped creating those so that he could go fight, be like a. A fighter, like I like, I guess Andrew Tate, like he took some inspiration from them.

Simone Collins: I think this Oh, he's fighting in front of an audience Professionally.

Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: MMA style fighting stuff. Like fighting in front of an audience, like other men. Yeah. Yeah. And what is interesting is this is really popular within that segment of this movement. So much that I saw this convergence here, and yet within traditional Americana. It's typically not considered a masculine thing to go out and fight other men.

And I suspect that the [00:30:00] reason is, if you were going to ask me why, is because in traditional Americana environments what would be seen as masculine is like hunting, fishing, things that allow you to survive. But in a survival frontier environment, Picking fights is going to get you and your family dead.

Simone Collins: Yeah, it actively detracts from your survival and productivity.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, it's a very dangerous thing to do, but when you're in a structured city or military environment, picking fights can be a useful sort of theatrical thing that you can do.

Simone Collins: Yeah, I think it's a, it's an environmentally based means of attaining status.

If you are in. A densely populated environment where you are not capable of gaining independence in a, from a resource perspective, fighting within those bureaucracies or within those small dense cities probably enables you to access better resources, better women, better. I also think that grading probably

Malcolm Collins: Is elevated within [00:31:00] tribal environments where you have tribal groups and they are basically testing males as active where you're at war with different tribal groups, which is not something you had in Americana frontier environments.

You, you did not have the frontiersman did not, they didn't function like that. As tribal groups like that, you would have people try to defend their family, but it was usually with weapons. Sorry, when I say weapons, firearms, right? You wouldn't

Simone Collins: have arms.

And if anything, you benefited from, with anyone with whom you could communicate, you benefited more through trade and mutual. understanding than you did from trying to fight or compete.

Malcolm Collins: Yep. Another thing that he elevates that I found very interesting, especially in regards to the quote unquote reward that he is, after when he talks about his ideal woman was you need to be in frame 24 seven.

Like this is something that he often instills as a concept. Sorry, people who may not know red pearl jargon. Being in frame means that if you are [00:32:00] married to someone, you basically can't joke around with them. You can't show them who you really are. You can't be silly. You can't show them vulnerability.

Feminine women are only attracted to men who are like stoic, cold f***s, even though they don't want to admit this.

Because if you break that down, you're no longer the guy that she actually fell for, and she loves you, so obviously, you know, she'll stay and she still really likes you and everything. But here's the brutal part. There's another guy out there. Who's still speaking to her like james bond She walks past the guy who's still been getting like his haircuts every week or every two weeks And she can't help but to feel that sting that shock of attraction that she used to have with you But now in another guy and you're like the good old faithful beta male

I'm just this f*****g goofy guy who's making high pitched, like, noises and, you know, like, laughing next to her the same way that I would with my male friends? We need to make this clear to each other and I hope you can learn from my lesson.

Don't. Act in front of your girl like you would with your boys when you're with your boys You you probably can relax fully and speak however you want. You're not trying to sexually attract them So [00:33:00] you don't need to have like a low deep like presence voice You can just speak and goof around laugh really loudly and everything But when you're with your girl, you should see it as that Always like a moment of attraction even when you know, you've got her never think that your woman is like 100 Yours

And here is what he was saying before. Sucking at the teat of Andrew Tate style content. But when it comes to the dating tactics, which say, okay, act like this, don't talk so much. That's when it can get A little bit tricky.

Like we said today, it makes you act like the stereotypical Chad who's cold and avoidance. And when you do that, and it's not the authentic version of you, which if you've watched this much of the video, that's not who you are.

This is going to sound weird, you need to be hit in the face. I will repeat that again. As a young man, you need to be hit in the face consistently.

Simone Collins: It's basically like being in character as an actor 24 seven. So if you, if your role in the relationship is to be the hyper masculine dominant partner, you do not get to at [00:34:00] any point break that character. Meaning you cannot be vulnerable. You cannot be relaxed because that would ruin the. The underlying framework of that relationship.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. And I found that really fascinating because I can't imagine do they think that actually would work? Like that you could be in married and be like that 24, seven, and that would be. Like something to fight for?

Simone Collins: Part of me wonders if it's, if frame is really more a misunderstanding of genetics and culture.

Some men see that there are relationships in which men are proto abusive, highly dominant, always angry, always very heightened in terms of their aggression. And they assume that is just the way you're supposed to act when in actuality, there is a subset of men from different cultures and of different genetic makeups that are just naturally that way.

So really there shouldn't be no such thing as maintaining frame. There should be. optimizing around your hormonal and [00:35:00] genetic propensities. But it's just a misread. What do you think?

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, no, I think that you're right about that.

Simone Collins: So I see this for example, in, in female spheres where there's memes that come out here and there about like super healthy, like clean girls and that girl and like fitness girl and all these things where. There are influencers who demonstrate it, who just are it, they just have the good skin, they just like to eat healthy and exercise and whatnot.

Or they just like to be whatever it is, this type of trope is. And then there are the people who try to become that because they believe it is something you can become. And it's an adoptable lifestyle and they, in their attempts to maintain frame completely fall apart. There's one YouTuber, for example, who detailed her process of glowing up where she like tried to become one of these like healthy, aesthetic, beautiful.

influencers. And she just filmed herself working out and [00:36:00] eating well and doing all this stuff. And she completely fell apart and broke down because it's just, it's not her. It's not what she could ever be. And I think that happens a lot with this masculine ideal of maintaining frame. They're looking at this totally different culture that they're not well suited to.

And if you have to maintain frame in anything, It's not ever really going to happen for you. It's going to cause problems. It's

Malcolm Collins: not going to happen. It's not worth it.

Simone Collins: If

Malcolm Collins: what you are after is a, happy wife who you enjoy being around and a happy family, like if that's the goal that you need to be in frame to get.

If you are only able to maintain that goal while living a life in frame, then the goal probably isn't worth it. Especially if you're attempting it for any sort of a, self fulfillment reason. Because you can't really I think, meaningfully improve the core of who you are if you know your end state is just going to be an act.

It's not a desirable thing that they're fighting for. [00:37:00] Here's

Simone Collins: something where I want to distinguish this,

Malcolm Collins: though.

Simone Collins: How can we distinguish between A choice to behave a certain way to lean into a certain tendency and a choice to maintain frame. For example, I do think that there's a meaningful difference.

I just don't know exactly where to draw the line. You and I decide to be happy about life, to be grateful, to see things as funny instead of frustrating. Whenever we have the ability to go that way, we go that way. And that could be seen by some as maintaining frame, that we choose to be happy go lucky, that we choose to do harder things or see mishaps as funny.

How is that different from someone who always tries to lean in the form of male dominance and aggression?

Malcolm Collins: That, that is interesting. Yeah. I am. And I think. Yeah, we do have some level of frame, which is to choose to be happy because it is unproductive to not be happy. And genetically

Simone Collins: speaking, my mother suffered from pretty severe [00:38:00] depression, your mother suffered from depression.

It's not as though we don't have pro the mental problems, genetically speaking, either.

Malcolm Collins: So this is I suppose what it is this frame that we are maintaining, is just a more productive and enjoyable frame, which makes it more sustainable. If the frame is I am happy to be alive and I love my wife and kids, right?

One, there's a level of truth to it, but things happen, every day. They can make a day bad or something like that. Like right now, Simone is under an intense amount of pain. She is she has incredible pain thresholds. She was handling sales calls while having contractions with one of our kids, for example, right?

Like she can undergo an intense amount of pain. And so when she says that she's in a lot of pain to me, or she starts crying because of the amount of pain she's in, I know she's in an insane amount of pain. And but she puts on a smile and she worked through it because she's like, how does it help us as a family for me to indulge in [00:39:00] that?

I think the problem was this form of aesthetic of, it's like this sort of masculine dominance. The question isn't how does it help us as a family for me to be open with my wife or for me to, share different sides of myself with my wife, or for me to joke around with my wife.

It The question is, how do I optimize myself as a man? And once the person realizes that's what they're doing, that they're just optimizing an aesthetic vision of masculinity, I think it becomes transparently clear that they are living a life of no value because value to just aesthetic optimization.

Simone Collins: And this comes back to the pragmatist guide to life and objective functions, right? Our objective function. Is not to be happy or choose, things that are funny, right? That is very different. Our objective functions are, have deep philosophical underpinnings. They're nuanced, they're complicated.

And when we choose to maintain frame, it's because that helps us maintain the identity, most likely to optimize our objective functions. So there's a philosophical underpinning behind our maintaining a frame. When we choose to do that, [00:40:00] when we look at Someone instead, who's a maintaining frame just to pursue an identity, perhaps it's the hollowness of that objective function that there's no deep why behind their work that maybe leads to that contentment and satisfaction that Pays for the price or the mental load of maintaining frame.

Do you think that's what's at play here?

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. And I would say that it was everything we're saying here. I am as much criticizing the far right and far left on this. Like I see them as completely overlapping movements, this male optimization movement and the trans movement.

Simone Collins: So whether you're a trans man or woman trying to get people to view you as your gender versus a cis man or woman trying to get society to recognize your gender.

Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: Optimization of your life and your identity is a, an aesthetic gender optimization. Um, it only ends in despair, but what we're also discussing here is something different, which is different cultural conceptions around [00:41:00] gender optimization. And while we stole our own cultural conception, I want to say that I.

Do not know, if a person, especially genetically has been within one cultural conception for a really long time, that it makes sense to attempt to live out a different cultural conception of masculinity. So if I was talking from somebody it was deep Muslim heritage, for example, about this, I would say that if they tried to live with and marry a woman like the Americana ideal of a woman, they would have a.

Terrible time. Same with a Japanese man. If a Japanese man from long standing Japanese cultural background now there may be cultural outliers here, where they're like, actually, that's my thing, that's what I'm into and I'm, an outlier was in my cultural subset then go for it, right?

You can live a really good life. But if you have any underlying attachment to the traditional gender roles of your culture, which there's going to be some genetic selection events around, right? You [00:42:00] may fundamentally have a big problem with people from other cultural backgrounds. And to understand why you get this bifurcation it really is and we've done episodes around this that, that talk more to this, like the, why don't Jews own guns episode, because historically speaking, the Muslim groups that you see the most in cities today come from urban ultra urban based cultural backgrounds and ultra urban backgrounds typically prefer more feminine made up women because those women didn't need to fight historically.

If you're coming from a. To your culture. Of course, you don't want a weak wife. That's one of the people you need with a gun defending your house when, raiders or bandits come along, right? But if you live in a highly structured society women become a status symbol to you. That's their core value to you.

Is how they augment your position in these complicated social hierarchies that exist within crowded cities the crowded cities [00:43:00] of antiquity. And that actually more augments your family safety and wealth, your own status. On a frontier, status really doesn't matter that much. You don't care that much about what other people think of you.

Functionally, can

Simone Collins: you care if you're alive still?

Malcolm Collins: Yeah we should be clear. It's not that these things don't matter in the urban environment. Your status that the male status within a family in a patriarchal urban environment played a huge role in how many of their kids survive.

Both: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: In environments where, kids died often from diseases and stuff like that.

And this is why within these urban environments, you often get, a lot of negative views toward things like dogs, for example, which is why you have such negative dogs within traditional Muslim cultures. Because they're just not, they, they are disease vectors basically, if you're in a large urban setting, but if you're from a rural culture, like dogs are a necessity.

To survive often. Yeah. Yeah. And

Simone Collins: They're not around [00:44:00] corrupt sewage systems and gross human density that would make them disease vectors. So don't worry about it.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Yeah. And and you're not going to get you would get in urban environments in a culture that had been in urban environments for a long time.

We don't think about this in modern times, but rogue dog packs were actually a major problem.

Simone Collins: In cities?

Malcolm Collins: Kill people, kill kids, oh yeah, feral dogs,

Simone Collins: we don't have

Malcolm Collins: feral dog problems anymore in our society because, modern technology and everything like that. But feral dogs were a huge problem in Antiquity.

They were not a problem in Frontier context though, because they'd be killed by wild animals. A bear was much more dangerous than a dog. Which is, I think, really interesting in terms of how you get these different cultural perceptions as to, like, why they like the done up women with all the jewelry, whereas people from this culture don't done up women with lots of jewelry.

But I think what it reminds us of is when you define something like masculinity as a thing of intrinsic value, or femininity as a thing of intrinsic value, what you forget is [00:45:00] that there isn't a uniform masculine definition or idealization, there are different iterations of what it means to be the ideal feminine or the ideal masculine, depending on what your culture was optimizing for in a historical context.

And it's not like rural good, urban bad. They're just different optimizations and the best I can say if you're trying to define good and bad is what works best for what you are attempting to optimize with your life which ideally is something more than just an aesthetic if you're talking about like base level humans, you're looking at something like very base level like humans just barely surviving, it's feed your family, right?

That's what you're optimizing for is basic safety. Then I think you get a level above that. And it's

Simone Collins: What I think you're missing is before someone can even think about taking care of their family, they're thinking about taking care of themselves, like putting your own oxygen mask. And when you turn to self care online as a [00:46:00] man or a woman, it often dovetails really heavily with femininity.

So I think part of this is a trap as people try to get their basic oxygen mask on mentally, if that makes sense.

Malcolm Collins: No, I agree with you. And I think that builds on what I was saying, which is to say, if you're talking about, because there's various different models for What does it look like on a person's path towards like mental health or as you move up civilizationally or individually in terms of a building oneself journey.

And there's various models for this. Some of them are very stupid. I might do an episode on them, but I think that it is true that if you're talking at a base level, what people optimize for is just feeding themselves. Then there's aesthetic optimization. And I think when you get above aesthetic optimization, You have people optimizing around cultural systems and cultural value systems, which I think is an order above aesthetic optimization.

And then I think at the highest level it is people who are optimizing around [00:47:00] a thing that they believe has intrinsic value in the world. Something of True good that they have defined for themselves. And this is the core question of the pragmatist guide to life is like, how do you think about that question?

How can you explore these various systems? And we try to do an unbiased question as manner as possible, very different from this podcast. And it's 1 if you want to check it out on Amazon and it has an audio book if you want to check it out. So I do recommend it. If this is something that you have ever personally thought about is I don't have a thing that I live for.

You probably should because it helps. Sort of everything downstream people who know what they live for and what they want from life are always going to in terms of mental health and often in terms of career success outcompete individuals who have an aesthetic optimization or just a purely cultural optimization.

And each 1 of these systems typically outcompetes the 1 below it in terms of efficacy. But anyway, I absolutely love you Simone and I love our new daughter and you are spectacular.

Simone Collins: I love you too, Malcolm. And so does Indy. [00:48:00] All right. I'll go feed her. I love you. Thank you. Those were fun conversations.

Malcolm Collins: Oh, I thought these were great. Yeah. I always like it when they're good and you're fantastic. So entertaining.

Simone Collins: Yeah. No, I have a more nuanced view too. I really do think though, that self care in terms of just getting off the ground in terms of you can't even think about your objective function until you have, a basic mental level of functioning, in terms of depression or anxiety or other problems.

And I do think that when you go to self care and let's just get my life in order. Let's just make sure I'm not like super fat, super sick, whatever it might be, super depressed. You end up in these masculinization, feminization identity, optimizing pipelines, because that's what you're going to find on social media, because obviously someone who's going to be selling fitness or health, mental health, physical health, whatever it might be, is probably also selling an aesthetic.

And so you just get trapped into that whole, whoever has a life coach suddenly decides they want to be a life coach problem.

Malcolm Collins: So that's what's

Simone Collins: happening in my opinion. [00:49:00] But

Malcolm Collins: And I, it's actually very interesting when somebody is deep in this, because I saw I read some videos of like people who are critical of Hamza.

And they basically in their worldview, they saw two optimization functions. Either you were optimizing around an aesthetic ideal, like masculinity, or you were optimizing around pure hedonism. And they, That there could be different moral systems than just those two, which I think shows how mentally degraded the population has become.

Simone Collins: Oh yeah. Yeah. No kidding. I guess that's what happens when you let go of religion, right?

Malcolm Collins: Yeah but keep in mind, I think there's systems that are higher order than religion. I think religion is a cultural optimization. When I say higher order, I don't mean that they can't exist alongside religion.

So for example, a person can optimize themselves to be the perfect Cultural Catholic, or they can study the Bible and say, this is a thing of true value that I believe God wants for me. And I will do that, which often doesn't align with because the ideal of the perfect Catholic has changed over time [00:50:00] with current cultural conception of the perfect Catholic.

When I say there's higher order things in religion, what I'm talking about is what the religion says. God actually wants of you instead of what the religion says it wants of you which are often different things.

Baby: Interesting. Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: A great example of we're talking about Muslims here is like the Shia Sunni split.

Within most Muslim conceptual frameworks, there isn't actually a Shia Sunni split. This is a a human thing, right? It's a

Simone Collins: bureaucratic conflict and not a theocratic conflict.

Malcolm Collins: Yes, a bureaucratic and not a theocratic conflict. And so some Muslims optimize themselves around being, Sunni or Shia instead of optimizing around what Allah wants of them.

Simone Collins: Yeah. Big mistake.

Malcolm Collins: Big mistake there. Yeah. Love you to death.

Simone Collins: Love you too. All right. Have fun talking with your dad.

You want a girl who's obsessed with you?

I'm gonna teach you some f*****g truthful, like, somewhat dark s**t, but you want a girl who's obsessed with you, bro? Make her feel all the emotions possible. Make her cry. Make her [00:51:00] happy. Excite her. Scare her. Make her feel any emotion possible. Disgust her. Make her angry. Make her so happy. Make her, like, so happy she cries.

In this episode, Simone and Malcolm dive into the complexities of conservative ideologies, focusing on the differences between libertarians and traditional conservatives. They explore why many conservatives identify as libertarians when they're young but shift to the Republican party as they age, and discuss the pragmatic reasons behind this change. The conversation also delves into the disconnect between the Republican elite and their voter base, the influence of theocratic factions within the party, and the diverse range of conservative thought across various conferences in the UK and US. Join them as they unpack the nuances of cat girl conservatism, conspiracy theories, and the right to non-conformity.

Malcolm Collins: [00:00:00] most conservatives I know go through a change where when they're younger, they identify as libertarians. And as they get older, they identify as Republicans. Why does this happen,

would you like to know more?

Malcolm Collins: I am excited for this episode. So I just got back from New Hampshire where I was speaking at a libertarian convention. And I had an absolute blast doing it.

Really great community. And one of the things we're going to Back to you later in this conversation is the different types of conservatives and the different ways that they interact. We got to meet with a conservative group in the UK where we were at a convention. Then we spoke with a convention in New Hampshire.

Then we spoke with a general conservative, like uncanceled sort of event in Vegas the weekend before. And then recently, you know, we spoke at the oh yeah, you've been talking to a lot of like conservative voters and stuff like that in the district. Yeah.

Simone Collins: Just like door knocking on Republicans

Malcolm Collins: houses.

So we've gotten this really broad and unique exposure and then we've got the pronatalist convention and then we've got like the broadly EA conservatives and stuff like [00:01:00] that. Which is just, they're nothing like each other. They see the world, nothing like each other and being at this libertarian event, a few things happened that made me really reflect on this one.

Somebody said, and this is a regular watcher of our show, you know, like an interacted fan. Oh, I had no idea that. You guys would consider your policies libertarian or you think that they would pass as like libertarian within libertarian groups. And this would be like, huh, I hadn't realized that we came off as so anti libertarian on this.

But then I also started to think about everyone I knew who was conservative when they were younger. And there's this insistent phenomenon within conservative circles, where as we've discussed in the episode of like, do your politics actually change? No, for most people, their politics are stable throughout their life, whether it's conservative or progressive, at least.

But most conservatives I know go through a change where when they're younger, they identify as libertarians. And as they get [00:02:00] older, they identify as Republicans. If they have sense. So one answer is, is why does this happen, right? And then the other answer is. I actually think that a lot of, like, broadly, I think most you know, like, intelligent, engaged conservatives, if you were going to ask them, like, what policy positions they actually want, the policy positions they're often going to describe are going to sound very libertarian in nature.

And that leads us to the episode's title question, which is why are libertarians the worst and yet write about so many things, if not almost everything, from a political standpoint? And I think that, and I'll just sort of start this, I think that part of the answer comes from the guy who said, Wait, you guys are Consider yourselves as having libertarian leanings.

And I was like, yes. In what way do you think we aren't libertarians? And he's [00:03:00] like, well, I thought, you know, you would just, you know, promote the policies that promote a, you know, pronatalist diverse breeding population agenda, right? And it's like, yeah, that is. One of our main goals, you know, economic prosperity from a political perspective is also one of our main goals.

And we are libertarian because we think that generally libertarian solutions, when we look at the data support, like, like end up solving these issues, whether it is fertility,

Simone Collins: basically libertarianism is the most pronatalist The political school of thought out

Malcolm Collins: there. Yes. When you look at the data, like, like, Which means just like,

Simone Collins: leave people alone.

Stop telling them how to live their lives. Don't tell them all to be progressive. Don't tell them all to be conservative. Yeah. Yeah. Just let them live their lives,

Malcolm Collins: please. And one of the things that I showed recently in an Aporia piece is graphs of if you look at, things like abortion restrictions, right?

And how strict a European country is on abortion has [00:04:00] almost a direct correlation with how low their fertility rate is. So trying to, in the same way, you cannot pay people to have kids. You cannot force them to have kids through a government restrictions yet. We haven't found somebody who's found the solution yet, but there may be more draconian measures that some countries I'm thinking China here may figure out.

Like forced insemination and stuff like that, but, but generally and, and so, yes, libertarianism works in this area, but also like our economic beliefs are mostly libertarian ish, ish, because we call ourselves bull moves with the Republicans. We think all large bureaucracies lead to inefficiency, whether that is a a government or a company.

We believe in trust busting, like Teddy Roosevelt did a lot, you know, he's a Republican who did a lot of trust busting, which is what we liked about him. So we, we have a, you know, unique, but mostly libertarian. It means that most of our policy positions are going to be libertarian. And what I realized is to the people who still identify as libertarians, [00:05:00] when they are adults, being a libertarian or supporting libertarian positions, Just because they are the most effective position doesn't make you a libertarian.

It isn't good enough. You need to support libertarian positions even when it functionally doesn't work. Heck, I'd be a communist if it worked. Like, if AI somehow makes, like, broadly, like, cash handouts work. Like, if in an AI world, like, UBI starts working and we enter some communist like system that creates the most prosperity and freedom was in a society, I'd be like, yeah, sure.

That's great. I was wrong about everything that I thought politically, but for us, politics isn't about ideology. It's about the end states that it creates. Whereas to the people who identify as libertarian as adults, many of them, that's not it. Their politics is literally about the ideology. So I want to hear your thoughts on this question.

[00:06:00] Why do conservatives stop being libertarians as they grow older? And why does the libertarian political sphere have this like intense ideological stance?

Simone Collins: Right. So I think it's because. pragmatic political actors, be they voters or politicians, realize really quickly that if they actually want to make an impact and do so within the government system, you cannot be a libertarian.

Like it's just, it's a really hard to get elected. It's, it's really hard to get on the ballot and to get attention and to get votes and to actually get into office. And I know this too, because at one point. I was trying to create a sizable list of elected libertarian politicians to do outreach to them, to invite them to a private event.

And there were like 10, 15, like, it's just such a small community because it doesn't work. It doesn't work to change the political system as a, as a libertarian, if you are trying to do so through government. And [00:07:00] then of course, as a voter, if you want to be able to affect change, not being able to support people in primaries is a really big problem.

Which in many states, you have to be part, a member of the party to vote in a primary for a candidate. So you can't as a Republican vote in the democratic primary. And vice versa.

So in other words, the reason why the libertarian party ends up sucking so much, even though it has most of its ideas, right. Is that.

Individuals with libertarian values who are pragmatic in how those values are going to be implemented end up becoming Republicans. Which leaves the individuals who stay

Libertarian party member throughout their entire lives. To be exclusively the people with libertarian beliefs, but who held those beliefs for non pragmatic reasons, which makes a party increasingly stupid over time.

Malcolm Collins: I'm going to word what you're saying in a little different way. You think. Their political beliefs don't change as they age.

Their political [00:08:00] opinions don't change as they age. Yeah.

Simone Collins: They just become pragmatic.

Malcolm Collins: They just understand. As Republican. And then my question for you is, so do you think a big chunk of the Republican base is actually libertarian in their political leanings?

Simone Collins: Yes, no, definitely. Door knocking, a lot of people, first, a lot of Republicans said, I'm like de registering as a Republican.

I'm becoming a libertarian. Or they would say, Oh, actually I'm already, I'm a libertarian. Just because at this point, they're so angry at the Republican party that they don't even care about changing it. They're just like, I just want to hurt it. And they, they definitely held very libertarian views. The things that I said that resonated the most with them were libertarian ideologies.

And I, as a candidate, am very, very like on the liberty front. Like there, there was one political quiz I took that put me on a graph of like, you know, globalist or hands on or have you send me this picture? Yeah, I need to find it. So you can include it. So like, [00:09:00] it, yeah, right now, especially now, those who are interested in, in Republican causes are trying to defend their cultural sovereignty.

And they're all forms of sovereignty. Just basically don't tell me how to start my business, run my business, live my life, report this, report that, just get off me. And I, that more than anything else is really taking over. I think the Republican party is shooting itself in the foot, frankly, by moving away from libertarian policies, especially when it comes to.

Quote unquote book bands, which aren't really book bands, but are being used as a political tool. And framed as book bands and with their, their whole religious bent on abortions as a big issue thing, which is, is very not libertarian, right? Because that's, that's more about losing

Malcolm Collins: in the school system.

Like really interesting things. So they'll take these approaches. Like we're going to ban all these sexuality books and stuff like that, that are entering our public schools. And it makes [00:10:00] them look like the bad guy when what they really need to be fighting for is educational freedom to take their kids out of the public schools.

If you get those books out of the public school library, do you think your purple hair teachers aren't going to be showing it on slideshows? Like. Think about it. Think about it. You have achieved nothing except making yourself look like the villain. Now the left out there, banning Dr. Seuss, holding book burnings of

Anne Frank's diary, like, they look like the bad guys if it wasn't just, they could then say, well, the right bans books too sometimes now. There is no reason for the right to ever ban books. Right. No matter how sexualized the stuff in public school libraries is, your kids shouldn't be in those schools, and if it's in the library, that means it's in the classrooms.

Mm hmm. And you have achieved nothing but a symbolic victory by getting it out of the library while making yourself look like the bad guy. And this is what we mean when we say the libertarian [00:11:00] position is always the most effective, whatever goal you are fighting. Or, it's always the most effective if you're actually right.

What I would say, if you believe a bunch of things about reality that just are not true, then yes, you, you need to shield people and your children from information to win these ideological battles. If what you believe is true and most effective, you know, in terms of Corporate structures, for example, you know, if it turns out that D.

E. I. Actually does hinder a company's operation. Eventually, the non D. E. I. Companies will compete them or shareholders will see this, and it may take a while. It may be a big cultural fight, but eventually that's how you get these systems out. If you take an approach like attempting to ban certain ideas and stuff like that, you just make them appealing to dissenters.

Which is the key way that I think progressivism really got off, or initially, within college campuses and stuff like that, is it was seen as a [00:12:00] dissident cultural group, and conservatism being the dissident cultural group now, Gives it this little push, but if the long term goal of that dissident cultural group is to do things like, you know, ban pornography and stuff like that, it's not gonna attract the young dissidents anymore.

Or not at the same level. So, so I think that's interesting. And I think that you're onto something with this intuition that people aren't really changing their political beliefs that much. That they actually do still say libertarian. At heart, a lot of the conservative base. Now, this leads me to another interesting thing is we know a lot of conservative politicians.

And I'd say that many are actually most, almost all the ones we know in their personal beliefs are actually very libertarian, but in the way they vote in office, don't vote libertarian. They vote like classic Republicans

Simone Collins: I think the bigger point too is as a politician, you kind of have your hands tied quite often,

Malcolm Collins: you know, like, well, no, I don't, I don't think that's it.

I think that there's a perception among the conservative elite, like the GOP Inc that owns the GOP party [00:13:00] or the old party. That the theocratic faction of the GOP is actually much more powerful than they really are in terms of imposing cultural values using government systems and it has led to some massive miscalculations on their part like the huge backlash that they had after the Roe versus Wade overturn and stuff like that.

Gosh, yeah. There is just not as much support for their beliefs as they think. And that, that might be true. Like that there just isn't that there's a perception in the same way that we talk about in that one video of there's a perception of a meaningful racist Republican base when, if you look at 538 polling, Nate Silver, mainstream demographer and poller this guy.

Showed that until Obama was elected, more white Democrats and white Republicans wouldn't vote for a black president. And even up until today where Republicans do show slightly more racist views on some things, it's small. It's a difference of like two to 3 percent when contrasted with Democrats. There just is not a significant Republican [00:14:00] racist base despite the media portraying it as such.

And I think that this is also true. Potentially with the theocratic base. And, and this creates this boogeyman that leads Republicans to act much less libertarian in their voting pattern than they otherwise would be if they were responding to their base. Just to

Simone Collins: make sure I have this right. You're saying it's, they have a misunderstanding of what the Republican party actually is comprised

Malcolm Collins: of.

This could be it, or it could be that our district is just much more libertarian in terms of going out there and talking to people. Although we've been to a number of conservative conferences, and the only one that was distinctly non libertarian was the one in the UK.

Simone Collins: Yes yeah, yeah. Well, okay, so I will say one thing about the religious people that I've spoken with in our district when door knocking.

Who do really care about abortion as an issue. No one shut their door in my face about abortion. When, you know, they would ask me like, well, what's your stance on [00:15:00] abortion? And I, I say that it's, it's up to each group. So if you're Catholic, that's great, but you can't impose Catholic views on abortion on other people.

You have to care for your own essentially. But they would slam the doors in my face if I said that. I didn't think Trump was a complete douche and that I thought, you know, I should destroy him. So, there's that. I

Malcolm Collins: think this is a level of kindness. I think that you know, you get more kindness from cultural conservatives and non cultural conservatives.

Oh,

Simone Collins: okay. I'll

Malcolm Collins: throw through the graph here where there was a great thing and we'll, we'll go over this in another video. Where they ask countries, you know, is food a human right? And like the only country that said no was the United States. And then they superimpose a graph of how much money various countries give to foreign aid.

And the United States gives overwhelmingly more on a per GDP basis. And we'll go into this deeper on another video. The United States gives about double the next highest non profit donation country, [00:16:00] which is New Zealand. This is on a per GDP basis. Just to give you an idea of like when you're talking about more communist countries like China just like communist capitalist, but whatever, like different mindset.

For every dollar that Americans, and this is only per GDP, so you can't say those are poorer, For every dollar, cost adjusted, that Americans give to charity people in China give two cents. So yeah, no, Americans are overwhelmingly, and I think this is this conservative mindset, overwhelmingly more generous than other groups and conservatives are generally, they give to charities at much higher rates.

Simone Collins: Yes. Yeah. Yeah. I've seen those stats

for

Malcolm Collins: sure. And I think that this might be what you're saying is when they disagree with you for a conservative reason versus for a progressive reason, even if they are a conservative. So they're just ruder and they, they're

Simone Collins: more like. I had not thought about that.

Malcolm Collins: But I, I take another stance here, which is it could be that the theocratic groups that are interested in imposing their cultural values through governing systems and those cultural values aren't progressive, but theological in [00:17:00] nature that these groups are much more likely to vote.

That might be it as well. Like they're easier to capture as a voting block. Yeah,

Simone Collins: but here's, here's where I think also the, there's a misunderstanding. Ending. Is I'm under the impression that the Republican party did start to turn against abortion when they didn't really care before to court these religious voters and those religious voters are active.

I don't think it was the goal of the religious voters necessarily to impose their. Theocratic views on everyone else. Maybe I'm wrong.

Malcolm Collins: The abortion issue is a very weird one. So for people who don't know, in the 1970s, the Republican party was more pro life than the Democratic party, because of course a small government, you know, get the government out of my life.

It's consistent with Republican values. They wanted to capture the Catholic vote. Which was mostly, you know, recent immigrants, the Irish, which, which at that time were not seen. I mean, they'd been here for a few generations, similar to like Hispanic immigrants today or something. And they're like, let's see if we can capture them.

[00:18:00] The same way Simone and I always talk about capturing the Hispanic vote for the Republican party, which is underway, right? I think there's some big changes you can make, but anyway, so they took this anti abortion stance to capture the Catholic vote. It worked, but An anti abortion stance was never an evangelical Christian position up until this point.

This was not, this is not an evangelical theology. This is not like, a mainstream evangelical position at all. And we pointed out in another video, it's not a historic Catholic position either. You look at someone like Thomas Aquinas or Augustine of Hippo, you know, they thought that life began 30 days after the fetus started developing.

Well, 30 to 40, depending on gender. Long story here. The point being is it is weird now that some evangelicals, despite having no cultural reason to do so, have taken abortion as like a, like, this is my line in the stand issue. When they're really doing it from almost a fronting position, because it's not a historic, like, this isn't even like, [00:19:00] Two generations ago, this wouldn't have been a position their, their ancestors would have had.

Like, it's weird. It's like something that has changed within the last 30 years. It's weird. But it shows that for a lot of this, it's not about theological concerns. It's, People who want to be seen as culturally aligning with a community, and they want the community they believe they culturally align with to control social values, and they want to use the government as a tool to achieve that.

But, I mean, unfortunately or unfortunately, however you want to see it, that mindset's going to die out. pretty soon because these groups are so on the back foot in terms of voting capabilities. And, and the Republican party has come much more of a diverse Alliance. But the final thing I wanted to really talk about here was the different conservative conferences we've been at recently in different ways that people have reflected conservative values at these conferences, which has been very, very interesting to me.

Simone Collins: Yeah. When I think it's really helped us solidify. The different types of conservative in [00:20:00] like Europe, but, and sort of globally. And then in the U S and I feel like the U S is so it's, it's like, the U S politically to me feels like the Japanese street fashion of politics and that you've got these very cutting edge, high fashion avant garde political movements.

And there are a bunch in Europe as well, but they're just not as flamboyant. They are not. You know, they're not dressing like gothic Lolitas, you know what

Malcolm Collins: I mean? Which was this like private, you know, Jordan Peterson, Louise Perry event in the UK.

Simone Collins: Which was filled with conservatives, not just from the UK, but throughout Europe and also Australia.

Yeah,

Malcolm Collins: and they were very they had very bleak views of the future. It was more just barely hold out for their cultural value

Simone Collins: system. It was, it was more just curmudgeonly, like, well, it's all eroding. Like Western culture is just gonna disappear and that's really sad. And can't you believe that, you know, our society is so debauched now.

It was [00:21:00] just whiny and it was resigned.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, very resigned and like mainstream talking points with them, with stuff like banning pornography, banning IVF, you know, a lot of honestly very nanny state stuff, like ideas like banning kids access to the internet, you know,

Simone Collins: but also fighting existing nanny state stuff, for example, in the UK, like there are really stringent, Babysitting qualification laws.

So you can't just like hire your neighbor to watch your kid.

Malcolm Collins: But conservatives put those in place. I

Simone Collins: know, but like, it just, it just seems like

Malcolm Collins: everything was in places. Some kid killed another kid in like a babysitting situation. And so then they put these ridiculous policies in place that basically make it totally cost prohibitive to have childcare in the UK.

Simone Collins: It is ridiculous. It's, and so everything just, Feels oppressive. It feels ossified and everyone's, they don't dream big either. It's just like, well, I hope we can make this tiny incremental change, which is practical. [00:22:00] I mean, I have to admire the pragmatism there. But then when we can trust that.

Malcolm Collins: Well, hold on.

First, I want to say before we can trust it, they, they were really afraid of taking explicitly religious positions as well. They would not say, I believe X because of my religion. Cause they were afraid of being called like the crazy Christian, which apparently is this thing that BBC has built up as a trope that everyone's afraid of identifying with.

Like I do not know how the BBC still exists as a government funded entity that should not Like it's as insane as NPR existing in the U. S But it's like a bigger cultural player because they demand a tv tax from every household with a with a screen It's insane anyway so, so let's go to the U S one.

So in contrast,

Simone Collins: in contrast in the U S it's well, there are these different schools of thought, right? So you have these like libertarians who are extremely ideological. You, You, you told me about someone paying you with a laminated piece of gold for something that

Malcolm Collins: was the Libertarians. So let's [00:23:00] be clear.

The Libertarians were very different from the classic conservatives. Oh no, no, no. And classic conservatives, two groups of conservatives. One I'd call the dumb conservatives. And the other I'd call the, the, the classic conservatives, the dumb conservatives are the ones that we're interacting with in terms of like the local political, like events and stuff like that.

Where it's like the other people who are running for office and stuff like that. And they're just like, you were like, Oh, you're, you're talking to the other sentient person who happened to be a local politician. That's why you decided to follow up with him because we had to follow up with one of them today.

And it was like, why did, why did I choose this person? I don't remember. And you're like, well, he seemed like one of the few sentient people at the event. So as much as we joke about like the left being in PCs. You've got to understand, local, like, HOA conservatives, I guess I'd call them, you know, local politics conservatives, they're just as NPC, like, they don't have strong opinions on anything.

Simone Collins: When it comes to our world view and means of discussing things, which is very High [00:24:00] level. I, you know, you can say that these people are highly respectable from the perspective of them being people who care about their local communities and local issues and everything else. Yeah. But

Malcolm Collins: then there's the conservative base who's very different in the U S.

So this is the group that we're meeting at conventions and stuff like that. Yes. They are totally different from the UK group. They, like every time you talk to one They are looping you into like their private conspiracy theory and their world beliefs. Like that's often how they start conversations is with some conspiracy theory.

And it's, it's, it's, do you either know about this conspiracy theory? And when I should say conspiracy theory, most conspiracy theories recently have turned out to be fact, like conspiracy bat theories are betting like nine out of 10 recently. So when I say conspiracy theory, what I mean is it's some.

angle of viewing society which is non mainstream accepted. And I'm just using the term conspiracy theory, because that's what the left would call it. But they, they come up to you very conspiratorially. Like, hey, like, are you in on, like, X? [00:25:00] You either know about it and they're like, Oh my God, we're immediately best friends.

Cause you're like part of my tribe or it's like, Oh my God, I need to like, tell you about this and like, look at the stats and like, here are five papers and they're really excited about this. Right.

Simone Collins: Well, and it feels extremely inclusive where like in contrast going to the conservative conference in the U S sorry, in the UK with many people from around Europe and in Australia, It felt very much like exclusionary, that people were being very guarded.

They weren't trying to bring you in. They didn't want you

Malcolm Collins: they were all about trying to determine your position in the local status hierarchy. Yeah, but there was

Simone Collins: no like, come in, come in, join my thing. Like talk with me about my ideas. And then at the, at the other, conservative conference we just got back from in Vegas.

It was like, oh man, you need to know about this. I've got to tell you like you should, and you can do this and you can do that and I'll show you everything. Don't worry. And you felt like someone was trying to induct you into their own little secret [00:26:00] society where they understood the truth about something.

And they

Malcolm Collins: wanted you to know. So there's like the classic joke about the hippies. They did this in a South Park episode. Like, I got some stuff you should read.

I've got some stuff you should read.

Malcolm Collins: Where the hippies used to do this. And it was to assert dominance over you. So this is something that ultra progressives often do. Is they will say Like, I have access to information that you don't have access to, and that access to information makes me higher status, and then I recommend you go out and read that.

Like, I can't afford to teach you. What is the classic, like, progressive line? Like, I don't have time to teach you, or something

Simone Collins: like, it's not my responsibility to educate you. Yeah,

Malcolm Collins: it's not my responsibility to educate you. No, no, no, no. Conservatives in the US, like the base, they do not feel that way. They are excited and privileged to educate you and they cannot wait for you to dive into it.

Which is really exciting and interesting to see this level of vitality in the base of the conservative party. Vitality is a great word for it. Yeah, it has like a huge level of [00:27:00] vitality, but it also can be a little off the rail, you know, sometimes when people talk to me about this stuff, I'm like, wow, that's actually a really interesting take on reality.

The problem is, is not everyone is smart. And so, some of their takes on reality are just, like, really dumb actual conspiracy theories. And, you know, I have to humor them and, like, they're obviously nice people who want to include us, but, it's, it, it shows that, like, it's not all good to have everybody, In charge of coming up with their own view of reality and distrusting all of authority.

Like, there's a reason why we trusted authority to some extent to begin with, because not everyone is smart enough to parse all the information themselves,

 Who are the corporations? The corporations run the entire world, and now they've fooled you into working for them!

Are you serious? We never heard that! The government is using it's corporate ties to make you sell magazines so they can get rich. Those dirty liars! [00:28:00] This is a really nice town you have here, that's why the corporations are trying to use you to take it down.

Just hang with us for a bit. We'll fill you in on everything you haven't been told.

Malcolm Collins: but there's at least a level of enthusiasm. And I certainly wouldn't want to ban them or, you know, shun them for undertaking these opportunities themselves and these challenges themselves.

And the pronatalist conservatives were different from all of the others at the pronatalist event. They were like incredibly competent and entrepreneurial and like everything was really focused on results. Like how do we, like when people hear our channel, one of the things they often be like, is they're like, yeah, you know, I watch a lot of conservative channels on YouTube, but they're mostly focused on the problems in society.

They're not focused on like practical solutions at the pronatalist conference. Like everyone was practical solutions. It was very entrepreneur heavy and like practical entrepreneur heavy, like a bunch of biotech companies, stuff like that. So that was really interesting to see at the Libertarian Conference.

It was a completely [00:29:00] different than the conspiratorial, which was actually really interesting. The conspiratorial, like mainstream Republican base is very inclusive. Like they want anyone so long as you buy whatever their pet conspiracy theories are. The libertarians were like, no, we all agree on libertarian philosophy and you are in, and it's like a big family and they've got like community and everything like that, which is really cool if you agree with their larger libertarian overlay.

But there isn't a lot of room for ideological diversity within that overlay or your, your level of ideological diversity would determine your status was in that community. And so far as you thought any libertarian idea was dumb or something like that, which is really interesting.

Simone Collins: Yeah.

What, what I think I enjoy the most, of course, and this is not any surprise is the pronatalist. [00:30:00] Political groups that aren't really, they're not, they're not cohesive. I wouldn't call them like any sizable group within the United States. I would say conspiracy theorists falling broadly under the QAnon.

Umbrella, like they're a real force to be reckoned with, but sadly pronatalists are more of a niche thing, but maybe they represent this growing like cat girl conservatism faction that you had alluded to earlier, where it's just people who are willing to take unpopular cultural stances. Cause I think a big problem plaguing conservatism more broadly is this, this high concern with conformity.

When really what conservatism is becoming is the right to not conform.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. And that's what I think we really stand for. Politically speaking is the right to not conform. It is exemplified

Simone Collins: by cat girl conservatism. Yeah. It's saying like, Oh, [00:31:00] I'm, I like this weird thing that you're going to judge me for.

But I'm not afraid to express that view and I'm still going to be more conservative than your average bear.

Malcolm Collins: I actually really like that term for a cat girl conservatism instead of bull moose conservatism, because it's just interested in what's efficacious. And it's interested in what the individual likes and the way they want to express themselves.

Simone Collins: So along with an element of unapologetic. willingness to hold one's stances and express them. Yeah. Which is crucial.

Malcolm Collins: I love you, Simone. This has been a spectacular time chatting with you. And I am, it's always remarkable how much our political views overlap. Like I didn't

Simone Collins: run together. We've grown together.

Malcolm Collins: A lot of couples don't. So scary. All right. I'm heading out. I'm gonna hit recording. Okay. Bye.

Simone Collins: Ciao. Ciao. Ciao. Ciao. Ciao. Ciao.

Well, hold on. I have to show you. My new house slippers came because the ones I've been wearing for the past, you know, [00:32:00] two years. Now, now you've no audio at all.

Malcolm Collins: All right.

Simone Collins: How about now? Now you do. Yeah. So like the new, like, you know, the, the, the shoes I wear on the house is my indoor house slippers.

Just like now they have holes in them. They're totally falling apart from the inside. So I got these new ones and I'm really excited

Malcolm Collins: and

Simone Collins: they're going to be perfect. They're little,

Malcolm Collins: Isn't that great? I love that. That is great. How, wait, how are these house slippers? You need to explain this to the audience.

We have

Simone Collins: toddlers. I mean, like, anyone who thinks that they can walk around the house barefoot, if they have toddlers, like, cannot. So, like, these are my indoor conventions. You

Malcolm Collins: mean something that can crush an infant's skull if you accidentally step on it? Is that the goal here?

Simone Collins: The infants are stepping on me, Malcolm.

I have to defend myself.

Malcolm Collins: I love your mix of like fascist looking supervillain outfit and like medieval wife outfit. This is, this has got to be somebody thing.

Simone Collins: Well, it's [00:33:00] either fascist or feudal, right? That's my fashion. It has to be. My

Malcolm Collins: favorite a tweet that we drafted today because we have this problem where everyone's like, Oh, they're just like breeding fetishists or something like that.

Yeah, what on earth? And in the tweet to sort of counter this is. Non reproductive sex is a fetish. And it is actually when you think about it, I mean, you are using something that's not really supposed to turn you on. It's a form of masturbation that just uses another person. But outside of that, I mean, the reason you get aroused by sex is because it caused your ancestors who did that to have kids.

Any way you hijack the system, whether it's with your hand or with a condom, it's hijacking the system.

Simone Collins: I am so stoked for this.

Ooh, rubbery bottoms.

Life is good. New Doc Martin house slippers. Beautiful husband home. Life is amazing.

Malcolm Collins: So can you explain for the audience why you wear inside and [00:34:00] outside?

Simone Collins: Yes so for context, I wear different shoes inside and outside because we Like Malcolm says to technically live in an old farmhouse and going outside always involves getting covered in dirt. Or like I'm, when I go outside, I'm typically walking to our chicken coop and mucking it out a little and getting water and dust and chicken poop all over me.

And so I need to be wearing wellies for that. So outdoor shoes are for getting muddy and dirty and covered in dust. And then indoor shoes are for surviving the trampling of our toddlers. And Which is why you wear Doc Martens inside, and you wear wellies outside, and that is the appropriate tradition. And this is why everyone has the little rain boots when they go outside.

You

Malcolm Collins: know, the thing is, I actually think you're living a lesbian fantasy. Oh, I guess the cottagecore cottagecore, and the chickens. Come on. Okay, so we got to get started here. Simone.

We discuss techniques for overwriting internal narratives and escaping biological and societal programming. This includes identifying upcoming "flux periods" where your life circumstances fundamentally shift, allowing you to reinvent your persona. We also cover the power of environmental cues and social circles in triggering different self-concepts, using examples like the Addams Family and BDSM. Ultimately, to change how you see and act towards yourself, you must intentionally engineer the stage, costume, co-stars, and scripts that elicit your desired character.

In this thought-provoking episode, Simone and Malcolm sit down with Alex Kaschuta, the host of the Subversive Podcast, to discuss the escalating gender wars in the digital age. They explore how the internet has amplified polarization between men and women, the role of evolutionary psychology in shaping online discourse, and the impact of globalization and cultural homogenization on gender dynamics. The conversation also delves into the aspirational lifestyles promoted by figures like Andrew Tate, the challenges of navigating relationships and sexuality in the internet era, and strategies for raising children in a world saturated with digital influences. Join them as they unpack the complexities of gender relations in the modern world and offer insights on fostering a healthier understanding between the sexes.

Simone Collins: Hello everyone. Today we are joined by one of my favorite people in the entire world, Alex Kashuda. She is probably someone you've heard of through her podcast Subversive, which is how I learned about her. She also has a sub stack at alexkashuda. substack. com. It's called the Garden of Earthly Delights.

She has excellent content there as well. Also, Do check her out today. We're going to talk about gender wars, which is really exciting because everyone loves talking about it. Come on. It's, it's fun.

Would you like to know more?

Malcolm Collins: I'd love to hear how you got on this topic, Alec. Oh, and I should also note, like, if you don't know who Alex is, Alex is probably one of the most famous dissident intellectuals in sort of the idea space right now in terms of and interviews a lot of other dissonant intellectuals.

Alex Kaschuta: Thank you. That's very yeah, I feel flattered by that introduction. It's very sweet. Yes, I mean, this is a, this is, I feel like it's a topic that maybe this is my algorithm. Cause I'm just like so morbidly curious [00:01:00] about what's going on. So obviously now I have a small child, I am breastfeeding all the time.

So I'm also staring at my phone all the time, lurking, you know, reading stuff online more than usual. And it seems to me like if things are kind of, bubbling up in a, in a. Almost like violent way, like the discourse has. You know, I keep saying this, but it's like, you know, Rwandan radio levels of hatred between the sexes have been brewing now it's, it's you know, I'm someone who made quite a lot of my following on Twitter by, you know, being honest about sex differences and, you know, essentially, kind of like, you know, human biodiversity, but with with a sex lens, because that was, you know, that was interesting to me at that point.

And these things are, you know, Quite kind of uncontroversial in some ways, like sex differences do exist, you know, they're interesting, people like talking about them but I feel like You know, there was a certain dynamic and certain incentives on these platforms that take things like that assert a level of discourse that [00:02:00] is based on you know, what's that called the evolutionary psychology and all these things that that are they're interesting to people in the space and then yeah, reduce them to the lowest common denominator and great kind of like many, you know, sub cults around personalities that Yeah, it's quite interesting.

I mean, even even kind of from a cold perspective, just looking at at how the space is morphed from when I, you know, started posting about it to what's going on now, it's It makes me think that, you know, maybe there's a certain even to, to truths that are quite basic, like this is quite, you know, mundane stuff.

We kind of forgot about it for a while, but, you know, the fact that there are certain average differences between the sexes. Yeah. I mean, that's something that was kind of instinctively known for a while, you know, present in many stereotypes for sure. But now that it's kind of out there and, and It's almost kind of like codified in the intranet.

It, it's turned into an info hazard in a way, like, and it's, it's gotten kind [00:03:00] of monstrous in a way. So I feel like maybe we should be a bit more blue pilled about these things. I don't know. It's just, I, I recoil at what's going on right now and I'm afraid for all of us. Our

Malcolm Collins: future a thesis on what's going on right now.

Historically speaking the humans, at least the humans that survived, we're always in opposite gender pairs. And so they always had a level of interest in the other gender, even though they were different. And when they had kids, 50 percent of those kids would be the other gender. So they would have interest in the other gender as we move to like as marriage rates fall dramatically across the world.

And as fertility rates are falling dramatically across the world, there's a large group of individuals that really only has the best interest of one gender in terms of any of their the ways that they're trying to influence the public. On top of that, we live in a society where, I say, sometimes I'm like, wouldn't it be cool if, like, Neanderthals were still around?

Like, you could interact with something that was almost like a human, but, like, had [00:04:00] pretty vastly different mental proficiencies and perspectives. And I'm like, but we kind of live like that already. Like men and women can almost be thought of as two different sort of hominid species that live alongside each other.

And

Alex Kaschuta: historically promote this in the dissident. Be careful.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Historically these, these two groups they always had to work together. But now because they don't as much anymore, As soon as women got the right to vote, we were sort of on a crash course to a society in which one party represented the needs and wants of one of the two groups, and then the other party represented the needs and wants of the other of the two groups.

And I do think that in a way, that's where sort of politics is drifting throughout the world, is a feminine mindset and a masculine mindset in terms of, you know, Policy positions. But yeah, open to hear your thoughts on this

Alex Kaschuta: theory. No, I think, I think that's fair. I [00:05:00] think that's, you know, as someone who's a little bit skeptical about democracy in general, I don't necessarily know if it's that tied to the vote.

I think it's more tied to the fact that materially women have kind of unlinked from The protection, like physical protection in terms of, okay, I'm fighting off invading predators, be those in the forms of men, or I don't know, big cats and stuff like that, that was really necessary back in the day.

And the fact that a lot of women really don't need provision from men. And I think there's a, quite a big class of men who kind of expected to have that, to bring that to the table. Okay. I'm going to provide for my family or, you know, whatever parameters society around them. Gave them like for example now You have the phenomenon of the of the two income household.

It's pretty tough to maintain a middle class standard of living without making, you know, big sacrifices. If you want to have a family or, you know, Children, multiple many, many Children in the style of the Collins is without making some [00:06:00] sacrifices in your social status and, you know, kind of going down the rung of where you find yourself as you know, in your relative status in the groups that you're in.

So, I think that's, that's been a bit complicated because essentially, you know, I also draw from what I see around me and I'm looking at you know, I have a lot of friends who would like to get married. And at one point I was really critical. I was like, okay, come on, you know, you're 30 years old women, come on, it's time to get married, you know, be serious.

You know, you know, it's, it's, it's a moment, but looking around, it is really tricky. You know, I don't necessarily know who exactly these women are going to marry because I have, you know, men from my generation as well. They're not necessarily marriage minded. I know they're online. There's kind of this idea that you know, the men are just waiting.

You know, the women are kind of the bottleneck in the marriage market. You know, they're sowing their wild oats. They're girl bossing. They don't want to get married. In reality, I think things are a bit more matching the old, old stereotypes where women were a bit more marriage minded, [00:07:00] you know, things have changed, obviously, but I think the old stereotypes still hold, like, you know, men in base reality outside of, you know, online spaces where everyone, every man's a future dad and super trad and can't wait to, you know, have pop out 10 children and provide for them.

They're a little bit more reluctant to, you know, tie the knot for classical reasons, you know,

I

Malcolm Collins: think you're absolutely right. And I want to unpack this a little bit.

So I think what we're seeing in society, because I think guys, like when I tell a guy, you're not actually marriage minded, they don't perceive it that way. And they perceive it as a woman's fault. And I think the reason is, is because they are being unrealistic. So this is the plan that these guys all have, cause I've talked to them about it.

They're like, Oh, I'll reach like. 30 or 40, and then I'll marry a girl who's like 25 or 22. These women are not going to marry you. The women who want to marry when they're 22 want to marry 23-year-old guys. Yeah, like Simone and I did when we got married. [00:08:00] This is, this is who those women are marrying.

There are women out there who will marry you. But they are your age or around your age, and it is those women who are desperately out there looking for someone to marry. And then the guys are like, oh, nobody wants to marry me because they're trying to lock down a girl who's much younger than them.

And I've just consistently seen this phenomenon because, I don't know, it's some fantasy that's baked into guys when they're young, which is like, well, I have an infinite fertility window or because they're over focused on fertility windows. And it's like, if you care about fertility windows and you're a man, you need to marry young.

There, this isn't like an infinite thing where, yeah, that, and so I think that that's what's creating this misinterpretation is that the women who want to get married, you know, when they can get married, like in their thirties, and the guys are like, who wants to marry them? They've been passed around and it's like, well, say the same for you.

Why are you 30 and not married? Right. You know, you made the same gambit these women made.

Alex Kaschuta: I think it's also, you know, [00:09:00] there's a growing popularity of content like this. You know, 10 years ago you had kind of Red Bull forums and pickup artistry and things like that. It's quite relatively niche. I think, you know, maybe one in.

You know, eight men knew about it and, you know, knew about game, had read the game or something like that, like kind of the more, the more analog version of this whole thing. Nowadays, I mean, you know, I don't necessarily think there are many men in the Western world who at least haven't tangentially heard of Andrew Tate and kind of the whole, the whole sphere around him.

I mean, he's kind of like, you know, the, the spiritual godfather of the last man, you know, people, You know, he's, he's kind of a focus point, but there are kind of concentric circles of this knowledge of, you know, female nature, all of this stuff, you know, empty egg cartons and this is partially derived from evolutionary psychology.

Like there are actual. Insights in it. And it is interesting. I mean, I've, you know, I've been kind of in these spaces for a long time and it overlaps like the Venn diagrams between evolutionary psychology actual scholars of evolutionary psychology and you know, what, what the red pill says, or what some of [00:10:00] the red pill people say, there's overlap.

These are not completely overlapping because there's also a lot of kind of lore that's very specific to the red pill. It's very selective as well. You know, this, this is about female nature, not necessarily the interplay of male nature with female nature, because if you try to be too, um, forthright about male nature then no one's gonna buy your e book, because this just has a very specific target market.

So, to sell the e books that one wants to sell, it's all about, you know, how to you Female nature is duplicitous, you know, the dual mating strategies, all this type of stuff that comes out of evolutionary psychology, hypergamy, you hear all this, you know, scholarly lingo being you know, presented but not necessarily used in a certain way.

For example, the red pill sees hypergamy as Essentially, if you drill down into it, is, is women dating anyone other than me? If that's, you know, it's like anyone who has any sort of redeeming quality, be it looks or money or social status or being funny or tall or short, or, you know, whatever, whatever [00:11:00] thing that is attractive to the woman is hypergamy because, you know, this guy has it and I don't.

So it's No, it's

Malcolm Collins: such a, it's such a silly concept. It's like women want to date up. Everybody wants to date up. Men want to date up. What? You want to date down? Like Who wants to date down? Like, why, why is this they're like, I'm, I'm going to tell you this horrible secret about women. They like have, they like trying to date people who they think are higher status than them.

And it's like, yes, you know, I do too. You know, another thing about Andrew Tate that I want to get on here is I don't, have you ever seen our Andrew Tate is blippy takes like

Alex Kaschuta: on the, I think you mentioned that on, on my podcast. The

Malcolm Collins: commodification of the male identity which is to say you know, if our listeners don't know who blippi is, he's this guy who a lot of kids watch these days and he like dances around fire trucks

Look this right here. Yeah, this is a hydrant wrench. You use this. It's to open up the fire hydrant. [00:12:00] Wow,

Malcolm Collins: and like goes on and gets in like garbage trucks and like all of the things that kids would like, but like, obviously no adult actually wants to do these things.

And we argue that Andrew Tate's online identity Is optimized around what like a teenage boy would think that an adult man wants to do with his life but that like very few adult men actually want to do,

You can't not booze. We need booze, bro. We need some like, booze, Aikido, how you know Aikido without booze?

Malcolm Collins: But he's really gotten good at, at, at packaging this sort of instinctual masculinity that young boys feel and then.

Selling to them a pathway to achieve this thing that no one should want to achieve anyway, and I think in creating these sorts of aspirational pathways, because on the right, we have as much of a problem with this on the left, you know, on the left, where we, we, [00:13:00] we, we may You know, condemn individuals who go out there and create this illusion of like a lifestyle where they're just sleeping around a lot and they are, you know, all polygynous and all, you know, whatever.

Right? And we're like, oh, how horrible that you have created this aspirational lifestyle that doesn't correspond with kids or like actual happiness or whatever. We keep, recently, we've been playing a lot of the end scene from The Gladiator, where we're like, you know, this is what heaven is, right? You know, it's the farm with the wife and the kids.

And it, but on the right we have the same thing. I mean, how is Andrew Tate Any different in sort of the aspirational life that he's showing people. Because it's not a life that leads to productive, stable relationships.

Simone Collins: I have a question for both of you though. And cause I'm not really sure.

This is something I wonder about, but I don't know if it's maybe really what's playing out. I feel like to a certain extent, Globalization, the internet, et cetera, has allowed us to sort of culturally homogenize like there's, there's less differentiation between us, between men and women, between different cultures, between different nations, [00:14:00] and people are in these various tribes online.

There's a lot more similarity and perhaps a lot of the polarization that is emerging between men and women has more to do with homogenization and less to do with there being like serious differences. What makes me think this is because when you look at a very, very homogenous nation, South Korea, you're seeing some of the most antagonism between Genders, because there are no super different racial and ethnic and religious groups really in South Korea instead, the way that people are choosing to galvanize is based on gender.

And so you have the four nose movement among women, you have men who are extremely resentful and of course, then you have this major problem. Could it be that part of what's going on with gender wars online is we're also seeing a little bit less balkanization of other groups. People don't necessarily feel like they belong to some specific group aside from their gender.

Like it's the easiest thing to identify with. And then that's [00:15:00] what might be causing this to become more. Pronounced. I don't know. It's just something I'm wondering about. And I'd love your thoughts.

Alex Kaschuta: Yeah, I think, you know, if you look at how politics works online you know, there's, there's polarization and on every dimension.

And like you said, this is kind of the most, the most close to home thing where you almost inevitably have frictions. You already have frictions within the family. So you either have mommy issues or daddy issues if you're online, probably one of them at least. And you know, that's already kind of a gendered strife that you bring to the table.

And then obviously as a red blooded individual, you probably will pursue romantic relationships. You're going to have. Rejection. I know I'm remember, you know, being in middle school and not very attractive and, you know, getting rejected by boys. And if I had whatever the fem cell manifesto to hand at that point, I would probably gone down some sort of rabbit hole, you know, condemning my life and not realizing that, you know, by the time I turned 16 and I know my cup size would go up, you know, all my problems would be solved from that perspective.

But this [00:16:00] is the type of, uh, thing that just wasn't available at that point. So I kind of had to move. muddle through and and just kind of, you know, take it on the chin and, you know, wait for things to get better and keep trying and, you know, smile at the cute guy and, and then hopefully something will work out.

And it did I guess for some people, maybe it takes longer. Some people never happens. And for those people there's more and more of this kind of palliative care for your ego online. And there's nothing more. Kind of injurious to your, to your person than being sexually rejected. And I think, especially for, for young men, it's very scary and, and damaging and if you have all these kinds of metanarratives of why this is happening and why, you know, women are demons and on the other end, you know, you have you know, a lot of kind of porn culture and, you know, even if you're a young woman, you're like, okay, you hit puberty and then you open up the internet.

And it's just. You know, it's just boobs and ass. [00:17:00] And, you know, obviously this is kind of what the, the younger men also relate to. Okay. This is kind of what femininity should be. This kind of trickles into your first relationships. If you have them it's re it's a scary environment. It's like you go from zero to 100 in, you know, very scary waters.

And I remember that was the case even when I was in high school. school. You know, I hadn't heard about porn, but you know, my, my first boyfriend clued me in on, on everything that I needed and didn't need to know. And it was a very, you know, frightening time actually. And I can't even imagine how much this whole thing is ratcheted up.

And it doesn't surprise me that, you know, younger women have, you know, all sorts of, you know, you know, desires to transition and you know, extreme forms of feminism are taking root in in the zoomer mind. And yeah, I mean, things are polarizing because The enormity of the opposite sex online and it's, you know, detailed, you know, darkness is presented and reflected at you every day.

And it's extremely frightening. I mean, I [00:18:00] wouldn't, I'm not surprised that men, you know, are incels. I actually, I went into a rabbit hole a few days ago. I did, I didn't know about this. You know, there's a whole subculture, obviously incels have their own lore. They're all, all things, but for some reason on, you know, this kind of tick tocky videos on YouTube.

They showed me some incel videos where there's this whole group of male models that they all idolize. Male models that I, I've never heard of as a woman who apparently, you know, loves these guys, these chads and they're, they've kind of picked out for the proportions of their faces and things like that.

And all these guys saying, you'll never be Chico, apparently Chico is a guy who they all love. And it's just such a deep rabbit hole of, you know, this. Perfectly proportioned, twink looking gentleman. Yeah, I don't know, it's it was kind of, sometimes when you, when you stumble onto something that's not yours, and it's so exotic, and has so many layers of lore, and, and things that people have been thinking about, it's kind of, it was very startling to me, especially because this is apparently, [00:19:00] They're kind of codifying what it is to be attractive to women and it's such a such a failure of cross sex mind reading like a lot of this This incel stuff is oh It's why

Malcolm Collins: I I

Alex Kaschuta: cannot elevate me of men.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah Yeah one of the things that I often mention and in the body is is that I am what most women consider to? Be a very attractive man and men like in the comments will be like That can't possibly be true. I'm like, no, I'm not what men consider to be an attractive man. But in the, and then they're, they're, they have these aspirations of body types and attitudes that don't correlate with what the other gender actually wants.

Instead, it is an idealized version of, Of what their gender wants.

Simone Collins: And we're seeing the same with women. I think we're seeing the same with

Malcolm Collins: women. Yeah. I mean, what, what, what do women want? Like, I'm just look like, I'm just telling you, like, guys, look at the guys who young girls are drawing. These are elf men.

[00:20:00] All the young girls are into like this twink elf man. Look, or they're like depressed dads. I

 the meme I was trying to remember about this was young girls are into guys who look like line cooks, elf, princes, or depressed fathers, or some combination of them. , and then they have various people this Venn diagram here.

Alex Kaschuta: Skipped the depressed dad phase. Yeah. I don't know about that one.

Malcolm Collins: This is the there's a, there's a great like chart on this. So they, the Elfman versus depressed dad. And then there's like another mark on there.

I can't remember what it is. But anyway, yeah, but it's, it's not the ideal of, you know, the, the Andrew Tate like character. But I also think there's something that you said at the beginning. Yeah. If so, both of you said something that I really want to elevate as ideas, because I think that both of them have an element of truth to them.

Simone's point about homogenization, the more homogenized a culture tends to be these days, the more, like, as severe the gender war is. And for [00:21:00] people who want to learn about the gender wars in South Korea, I suggest a YouTube video called the Gacha Game Wars Part 1 and 2, it's a fantastic breakdown of this.

And we'll probably do an episode on Korean culture eventually. The second one that I think is really true is you talking about forbidden information. I think as the, the sort of dominant culture in our society, this urban monoculture begin to ban certain types of information tied to human biodiversity with a subclass of that information being.

gender differences in perspectives and proficiencies they made this information more powerful and very useful for individuals who want to use it towards malevolent ends, even if those ends are not like, they don't intend them to be malevolent, it can just sort of like organically evolve in a malevolent direction, because now this information you know, it can be delivered in a, did you know X and Y, and like, X and Y are things that are obviously true, but are banned truths within our society.

And then, you know, B and Z, [00:22:00] B and Z are things that a person wants to believe are true but are now being tied to this obviously true information. So like, did you know that women want to date men who are better than them, you know, and therefore, All women cheat and lie and, and, and the, the, you can package these and the same thing is done with men, you know, the, the, to, to young girls.

Like, did you know that men get turned on by violence and therefore all men want to beat you?

Simone Collins: The other thing that Alex pointed out that that's really sticking with me is before, if you felt something, if you felt uncomfortable through puberty, or if you were rejected by men or women, okay, it sucked.

And maybe you, you would, you know, complain to your friends about it and you would listen to some sad songs, but that was kind of the extent of it. Whereas now there are so many resources, like you say, to go online and there are communities that will say, well, of course. And that's because. Men slash women are evil and therefore you can become this and you're going to identify as this and now you're going to dress like this and talk like this and believe these things [00:23:00] and it's going to change your entire life trajectory when as whereas before it was just a mood it passed and you see the same maybe magnified more with transitioning right you're uncomfortable with your body going into gender and then a lot of people who aren't actually trans end up starting to transition or using hormone blockers because There's a community out there that's like, Oh, you feel this way.

Therefore you're this. So I think that's a really good point that there are all these resources now for various feelings. I think associated with a broad external locus of control, as in, it's not your fault, this is happening. It's society's fault. And therefore you should join our group. That. And you now have me thinking about it very differently, which is fun.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, I also wanted to elevate a final thing that I think is a big problem here that I didn't realize. So, our fans set up like a Discord server for our community and it's ended up doing really well. And after I've been interacting with the discord server, I've realized how harmful [00:24:00] these types of places are in terms of like psychologically speaking they're, they're sort of like, no, no, I mean, I, I think ours is fine, but I think generally the rules.

Because it creates these insular online communities that are typically focused around a single person. Because a lot of the times they'll be created for like a YouTuber or something like that or a single online personality. So that person has elevated status within the community. Everyone, there's sort of a feedback loop of acceptance and praise for that individual.

And then whenever anyone says something positive about that individual, and the moderators, whenever somebody disagrees with them Can, they don't do it in our community, but they can within other communities, just ban the person or silence that particular like wrong think, which allows for real quick snowballs of ideas to sort of radicalize in a way that they just couldn't historically because someone historically, if a group was getting sort of crazy, you could always go, Hey, Let's take it back a few steps, but that's not really as easy [00:25:00] within these environments where some people have so much control about the information that's being communicated.

Okay, I have

Simone Collins: one final question for you on this subject, Alex. How are you going to be raising your kids differently or intentionally in a way with the gender wars in mind, because you don't, I mean, obviously on the extreme end of the very bad direction spectrum, you have extreme feminists, for example, who are raising their boys to essentially hate being male, right?

That you are the evil thing. And you, you know, we have to make you feel guilty from age one. You know, how, how do we, how do we correctly raise kids of various genders?

Alex Kaschuta: What's your plan? Yeah, I mean, this has become, and to be honest, at least in part, this is, except, except for my, you know, morbid fascination with it, because it is really interesting to see all this kind of develop.

But you know, I, I wrote an essay a few years ago about my worries about, you know, raising boys, and it was more about, you know, kind of the, you know, DEI complex, and you know, the fact that, you know, as, as white boys are going to have, you know, You know, it may be issues, but to be honest, I think at this point in my life, I'm like, I'm more concerned that they're going to [00:26:00] be seated with some sort of, you know, nihilistic b******t for the internet.

And you know, either that or completely rendered useless by, you know, extremely lifelike video games or something like that. I mean, it is, it's, it's, it's, it's captivating. I see how much of a, you know, slavery I have to the screens. I'm I really try. To be mindful of this, to kind of distance myself to, but it doesn't always work.

I mean, it doesn't often work actually, also because partially this is also what I do, you know, I kind of have to keep an eye on it to see what's going on. But I think, you know, our plan is essentially in the longer term to move to New Zealand. to build a compound, have a much more nature focused life.

And what we have there is a lot of Ben's extended family, which is my, my husband. And yes, essentially those kids are all, you know, into surfing, into hiking, into, you know, we, we're really going to push the physical activity, be outdoors. You [00:27:00] know, things of an online nature need to be incidental rather than the main, the main thing, which, you know, here where we live in Romania, it's, it's a bit of a kind of a small city, big town, something type location.

And it does not the same caliber of outdoorsyness that we, that we want. So, yeah, that's kind of the plan. And I think, I don't know, just, you know, Being very mindful of, of limiting screen time controls, all this type of stuff, but also at the same time, you know, being also mindful that the fact that their social life is probably going to be plugged into this stuff.

So totally and professional life too. Exactly. You don't want them to be, you know, this is kind of the thought process here, especially in Romania, where, you know, people are very conscious that everything is on the internet. If you want to have like a white collar job and it'll be. A professional, you have to be really savvy with using these tools, which I can understand, but, you know, scrolling on TikTok, it's not really using the Internet.

So, you know, one has to be mindful of that as well. So, yeah, I [00:28:00] mean, that's kind of my take. I'm not, it's not very, it's not a solution, but it's, you know, a, Mindset more than anything.

Simone Collins: I like that. That's a good approach. It sounds

Alex Kaschuta: very healthy. Yeah, it does. Hopefully. I don't know. They're still small, so I haven't messed them up yet.

Okay. I, I

Malcolm Collins: will ask one, one more final question here. How are you going to relate to, or have your kids relate to AI in a social context? So I'll, I'll explain what I mean by this. One of the toys that I'm really excited that'll be coming in a few weeks for our kids. Is this grok toy, which is a AI that a kid can talk to that by grimes.

And it looks really cool to have like a, you know, because I think about my kids, like the caregivers who their whiz are not the most educated people in the world. And so this would allow them to verbally interact with something that is. You know, the equivalent of like a Stanford PhD and it's level of knowledge and in its grasp of the English language whenever they feel like it, which could dramatically advance their intelligence and communication [00:29:00] capabilities, but it could also create really negative psychological effects like the rabbit too.

We also have ordered and we'll be giving to our kids. I don't know if you've seen this device. It's a little, like a screen that you can talk to and interact with the internet through just your voice. So they don't even need to learn to type to really have full access to the internet. So how do you think about tools like this?

Alex Kaschuta: Yeah. When, when you said Stanford PhD, I was just imagining, you know, the voice of Andrew Huberman coming through the grock toy and teaching your children to do cold exposure.

Malcolm Collins: Rhymes actually voice them. So you'll hear her voice. Oh,

Alex Kaschuta: okay. The voice of Grimes telling your children to do cold exposure.

Exactly. Here you go. Yeah, I mean, I, I actually haven't I'm still in kind of the the fearful peasant, you know, Waving her hand at the sky stage of, of interacting with AI in relation to my children. I'm just like, don't, don't slap the iPad out of their hand. Don't do it. I'm still kind of developing a coherent approach to it.

I'm not a, you know, you [00:30:00] guys are pretty much the, the Internet's early adopters on many things. So I don't know if we're all at that stage. I, it's admirable. But yeah, I mean, I'm actually going to look into this. It sounds pretty cool. I might, I might get it as well. They're only 99 bucks. Really? Oh, yeah.

And what we realized is

Simone Collins: we think it's so cool. It's we, we actually, since our oldest son has autism, he's been going through ABA therapy, which it's actually about to stop because he's improved so much. But during every session that he had, both when he was in daycare and then after he left, they, they graphed.

All of his good and bad behaviors very autistically actually, which is quite appropriate, I guess. So we can actually see like spikes of bad behavior, spikes of good behavior. His behavior was terrible in daycare. As soon as he leaves, these graphs that are like all high and, you know, going up and down, they just, they plummet.

And suddenly his behavior is amazing. And we realized, okay, it's important for kids to have peers. And we're kind of like, okay, well, we'll just provide them with siblings. Child peers are not [00:31:00] necessarily the best influence. Same with child peers on the internet, but also completely random peers on the internet.

So part of our approach is, well, we can't trust humans anymore because everyone's going to be corrupted. So maybe we can just choose the right AI for them, not the wrong one, the right one. And then. Use that as their influence instead. But it is, it is one of many approaches and I like yours, but it's been so great to have you on.

And I just want to remind everyone listening to definitely check out the subversive podcast as well as go to Alex Xushida at sub or sorry. substack. com. We'll include links in the description so you can get to these things easily. But Alex, thank you so much for coming on and we hope you'll come back very

Alex Kaschuta: soon.

Thank you so much for having me on.

In this eye-opening discussion, Malcolm Collins and Simone Collins dive deep into three major events that have shaken the foundations of trans activism: the Cass Report, a longitudinal study on gender non-contentedness, and a leak from the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH). They explore the implications of these studies, which suggest that the majority of gender non-conforming youth will eventually desist in their gender non-contentedness, and that many in the trans community are aware that children cannot fully comprehend the long-term consequences of transitioning. The hosts also discuss the importance of waiting until adulthood to make irreversible decisions, the potential risks associated with hormone therapy, and the need for a more nuanced approach to gender-affirming care.

Malcolm Collins: [00:00:00] Hello, Simone. It is exciting to be here with you today. You and I have done a number of episodes around trans issues before and trying to get to, what is most likely the truth about this stuff because it is so politically charged.

It is very hard to get accurate readings of what's going on one way or the other if you're the type of person who's really into sexuality research, which we are, we've written a book on the subject.

While I consider those. Episodes pretty comprehensive in terms of our views of the issue.

There have been 3 really big events that have happened since the recording of those episodes. And each of which are really worth diving into and we'll use that episode to do this. The 3 events that I am speaking, of course, are about the cast. Report huge for people who don't know what this is.

This is a report that did a review and it's like now the gold standard that the UK is using to determine how they relate to trans [00:01:00] treatment, particularly in individuals under the age of 18.

And it came out pretty critical of a lot of the stuff going out on the field right now. Another was a big study.

On longitudinally on trans individuals and the trans community was pretty unhappy with the findings that it had with the biggest, from my perspective, being that of gender conforming youth, over 90 percent end up being totally okay with their gender when they're adults. This is obviously a very important thing to know when you're looking at things like affirming gender care.

And then the final 1 was a leak of 1 of the major trans organizations that sets a lot of the policy positions for Canada and the United States and the leak. A lot of people who are really anti trans, or I'd say overly trans skeptical, have taken this leak to be uniquely damning. And I think that there's actually a more nuanced perspective on some of these emails and what's going on with this.[00:02:00]

So I want to go over every one of these in turn with you. And with our audience to try to find out what's really going on here.

Would you like to know more?

Malcolm Collins: So the 1st thing I wanted to do was to go into the study because to me, this is most interesting. The cast report is more just like a political thing that's happening.

It's not really new information. This study is new information and it's really interesting information. And it's called. Development of gender non contentedness during adolescence and early adulthood, and it came out in February, 2024,

So this is what the study says. We found that gender non contentedness, is most common around the age of 11, and that the prevalence decreases with age. Moreover, we identified three different developmental trajectory types of gender non contentedness throughout adolescent and early adulthood.

One, the majority, 78 percent of the sample, consistently indicated to never experience any gender non contentedness. So [00:03:00] 78 percent of people at around the age of 11 just are totally okay with their gender. All right, to a group reporting gender non contentedness in early adolescence, but not any longer in adulthood.

19 percent of the sample. So this is a population that starts feeling very non contented with their gender and then gets over it as they get older or no longer has these feelings. These are transient feelings to them. And we'll go into this group in a bit more detail in a 2nd, 3, a small group. 2 percent of the sample showing the opposite pattern of increasingly reporting gendered non contentedness with age. We found that female sex and participating in the clinical rather than the population cohort was associated with increasing gendered non contentedness. So this is actually really important what they said there being in the clinical, not the population cohort. So what that means is when this study was conducted, A portion of the [00:04:00] participants that they were using were from the general population.

A portion of the population they were using was from a, clinical transitioning groups. Okay.

All right. So what they're saying here is that this percentage, so if you're taking like a random shotgunning and just in case you haven't done the numbers in your head, this means that of the people who at the age of 11 feel gender non contentedness Over 90 percent this feeling persists in them.

They do not feel this in adults. It's actually mentioned in the studies that of this percent of the cohort, not a single one of them felt gender non content in this by the time they hit their twenties.

Simone Collins: And this harkens back to the research that you had done when writing the pregnancy guide to sexuality, that sort of showed that a lot of people.

Either weren't super married to their birth sex or otherwise, just not like we're okay with playing around

Malcolm Collins: with different printers. Yeah. Now, what gets really interesting here is because this comes from the clinical cohort. It means that actually, in the gender, the general population, more broadly, [00:05:00] these numbers are probably even lower of this group where this feeling increases over time, which means that it's probably lower.

Low like the number of people who have gender non contentedness when they're around 11 that end up not having it when they're adults. This part of the cohort is likely much, much larger than 90%. I might go as far as to say 98 percent given what the data is showing here, which. Is obviously a really devastating point for trans individuals.

So a lot of them have been attacking this study pretty vociferously, but I think that this shows a, but there's also individuals in the trans community who see the study and are quite excited about it because they're like it does show that you have this 2 percent when the problem gets bigger over time.

And this is really interesting, so I'm gonna keep reading some more, because the key question then for the trans community is how do you distinguish between these two groups?

Simone Collins: Yeah. How do you tell when it's like real [00:06:00] trans versus, transient trans?

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Transient gender non contentedness that has to do with puberty, which I've said in previous videos, is a common part of childhood is being non content with your gender.

Or the changes that are happening with your body over puberty. That's normal. And so what this study now does is it changes the entire playing field of transness because we're also going to go over it in the context of previous studies because it really is the best of the long term studies in this space.

And it shows very exactly that if a Young adolescent comes to you and says they do not feel content with their gender. Odds are hugely on the side that they're not going to feel like this as they get older, and therefore affirming these feelings is a bad idea.

Simone Collins: Yeah. Yeah. Especially affirming them in any way that is, Biologically irreversible.

If for example, they decide that their pronouns are going to be whatever then.

Malcolm Collins: But what it means is that right now the standard of care, trans affirming care [00:07:00] takes it as a medical, like

Simone Collins: a medical prognosis or not prognosis, a medical mandate.

Malcolm Collins: Yes. If a child comes to you saying this, you have a mandate to affirm them.

And now we are seeing that. Is probably not the best course of action, which changes what would be the recommended standard of care in use who are gender nonconforming

Simone Collins: highlight. 1 of the things that makes this really meaningful is that before this came out. Because the research is so bad, and one of the big themes of the CAS report is the research is just so bad.

It's not like there's a ton of information showing it's damaging, but there's also not any information that says it's really useful.

Malcolm Collins: Hold on. We'll get to the CAS report when we get to the CAS report, because if somebody who has only heard the trans side of the CAS report argument, they will hear, oh they threw out X kind of research, which actually isn't bad.

Okay. And there's a lot of misinformation going on around the cast report, so we need to wait till we get to that. We're going to focus on this study. [00:08:00] Okay. Because I do want to go down a big rabbit hole on good versus bad studies and what studies have actually been done and haven't been done.

But that's more related to the cast report than this. Okay.

Simone Collins: Okay.

Malcolm Collins: So to keep going, in addition, individuals was increasing or decreasing gender non contentedness trajectories had lower global self, worse, more behavioral and emotional problems. and more often had homosexual or bisexual orientation compared to individuals without gender non

No one: contentedness.

Malcolm Collins: And so right here, I'm talking about the cohort that ended up getting more of these feelings over time.

No one: An

Malcolm Collins: increasing gender non contentedness trajectory was significantly associated with a clinical cohort, a homosexual or bisexual orientation,

No one: the

Malcolm Collins: self concept subscale global self worth, and female sex.

But not the self concept subscale physical appearance. No, this is just I don't know what that means. So fascinating, I'm gonna unpack what this means. Please do. We're seeing a few things here, right? One is [00:09:00] that if you are a male assigned at birth and you feel non content with your gender in your youth,

No one: You are

Malcolm Collins: actually very unlikely to be in this cohort where those feelings get worse over time.

If you do nothing, if you do not engage with the communities that are extra affirming of this, it desysts. So that's one thing that this is saying, which goes against what a lot of people would intuit. Two, and this is what I think, why is it that the people with the gay and bisexual orientations are more likely to have this increase over time?

They are more likely to be in communities that affirm these feelings than individuals without this. And so the feelings get are more likely to get snowballed or sound echoed. I, like when you put a microphone too close to the speakers and then you end up getting that screeching sound, you can get that within these communities.

These constant. And the fact that

Simone Collins: you can gain status in those communities by showing how extreme you are and a more extreme form of being in those communities is often turning trans.

Malcolm Collins: So that's why I think, and then especially if you have low global self [00:10:00] worth, you are more likely to. Oh, because

Simone Collins: You feel like you need to appreciate your value in those communities. Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: And the self affirmment that those communities are giving you for leaning into this, the sort of love bombing behavior you have. Oh yeah. So yeah,

Simone Collins: The affirmation you get if you do lean into being trans, if you're feeling really insecure, that's going to feel all the much better.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, now let's argue this from the other perspective, this is me arguing from a more critical perspective, what an individual could say is that if an individual is in these communities that are more accepting of trans identities, i. e. they're gay and bisexual anyway, they are more likely to transition, and it's less of a jump because they're already presenting a non normal sexuality, So why not, also go in this additional direction as well with the global self worth, they'd say, if you live in a transphobic society, wouldn't you have lower global self worth if you fell into one of these groups?

But here is why I do not think that's a strong argument, the global self worth argument, because individuals who felt equal [00:11:00] amounts of gender discontentedness, but had higher global self worth, as a youth, so clearly they were okay with showing that they felt this, ended up desisting in those feelings over time.

So that doesn't explain to me like the lower global self worth is clearly not a result or downstream of these feelings. It is what guides how these feelings, whether these feelings end up persisting or not persisting in the individual, which is really interesting. Now, one of the most interesting things is the final thing where you're like, I don't know what that means, the physical appearance scale.

So what this is showing is contrary to what a lot of people think, how attractive you are. And how comfortable you are with how you look has no correlation with whether you're in this true trans group, the group that, where the gender discontingentness gets worse.

Simone Collins: Golly, wait, so the researchers are like grading

Malcolm Collins: the,

Simone Collins: he's a seven.

He's a four.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah and self conceptual [00:12:00] subscales. So it's how they judge their own attractiveness. But this is important, right? Because we've had we've talked a lot with groups like the

Simone Collins: Trans Maxxers.

Malcolm Collins: Trans maxers, which is a group of like incel males who are transitioning.

And you can be a

Simone Collins: three as a male and like a seven as a female, depending on the way that you may be unattractive as a male. If you look too effeminate or skinny or whatever, like suddenly you're a gorgeous woman.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. And there's this stereotype of becoming trans is failing at your own gender.

And so you go with the other one. That's just not true in the data right now, what we're seeing that, that does not appear to be correlated with this group. So that's really important. No. One thing I wanted to know, because I had mentioned this, but I want to read the quote from the study here. The second largest group that was identified, 19%, had a decreasing trajectory of gender non contentedness.

At the sixth assessment wave, around the age of 25, none of these individuals reported experiencing gender non contentedness anymore.

Simone Collins: Wow. None. All right. So it's [00:13:00]

Malcolm Collins: not like a iffy thing, it just goes away. Interesting. Now, here I'm going to read a chunk, because this goes into the lack, because I think people are generally pretty surprised by the lack of longitudinal studies done in this space.

And this is something we could go way deeper on with another episode, potentially. But people may be like, wait, why haven't a lot of good long term studies been done of trans individuals? And the core answer is because the data banks for in the social communities for trans individuals really push against them participating in studies.

And the, and they push against releasing data. Now, if you want to take it from a kind perspective, you could say they're afraid of

Simone Collins: scrutiny or

Malcolm Collins: scrutiny I guess the data being used, what data will say, and they're afraid of the studies being run

Simone Collins: which is damning which

Malcolm Collins: is really damning.

But I will go over what studies had been run in the past from the abstract of this, no, this, sorry, not from the abstract, from the intro to the paper. [00:14:00] Furthermore, The few longitudinal studies that have been conducted in a clinical setting found low persistent rates of early childhood gender dysphoric feelings into adolescence and adulthood.

And then it lists a few studies here. It was found that children who socially transitioned in early childhood were more likely to have persisting feelings of dysphoria, non clinical sample of 317 children. mean the age of eight years, who identified as transgender, but who were not assessed according to the DSM 5 criteria for dysphoria, 94 percent still had binary transgender identity and 4 percent had non binary identity at a five year follow up assessment at 13 years of age.

In this sample, it was also suggested that gender transition before puberty is associated with continuing transgender identity. However, with only one follow up assessment until the age of 13, the further gender identity development into mid and late adolescence remains unknown. So what they're doing here is like the big studies in this space that have been done recently, either [00:15:00] showed that most of these feelings desisted or stopped at a very young age, at the age of 13, which this study may have shown a large level that you would still have these feelings.

So it aligns with what this study found. Um, And from another study here, they're saying, or only contained one follow up in the Taiwanese sample. 87 percent never reported any dissatisfaction. 8 percent reported dissatisfaction at the age of 13, but not at the age of 21, 5 percent at 22 and not at 13 and 1 percent reported persistent dissatisfaction.

So this is a different sample. This is pottery tall 2021 and this was in the Taiwanese data set. And what this study showed again, Is it feelings of gender dissatisfaction are actually very transient between the ages of 13 and 22,

Simone Collins: which really matches with our general thesis around adolescence being a period of body dysmorphia in general, which makes sense because your hormones are going out of control and your body's changing a lot and it's [00:16:00] super gross.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Yeah no, it does make perfect sense. And it's just worth noting that this is being repeatedly found across studies.

Simone Collins: Yeah. When people bother to do longitudinal research,

Malcolm Collins: yeah that's not just and I wouldn't know if you heard from the earlier study. Actually, I'm not going to go over that.

I'll just do that. Okay. So to go further in clinical samples, it was found that gender dysphoria is associated with homosexual orientation also. And this is from a different study, not theirs. So this is again, showing that if you hang out in gay population clusters, you are more likely to experience gender dysphoria.

Okay. Also in population based samples, associations between gender typical behavior in children and sexual orientation are found. For example, in one population based study, children with gender non conformity regarding play behavior at ages 3 to 5 were more likely to report a bisexual or gay orientation later in life.

That's from what

Simone Collins: we've been told. Oh, this sort of ties into what we always talk about with the TIDE studies, right?

Malcolm Collins: Yes, this indicates that this could be downstream of okay, I just need to, [00:17:00] Simone is referring to studies that look at endocrine disruptors that are present in utero when male fetuses are developing, it's been shown that it is correlated with more female like than male like play behavior at a seven year follow up study and so this would correlate to then say if you're looking at this Play behavior is a correlatory thing here.

And then you look at another study that looked at like basically three to five year olds to then see if they became gay growing up. It suggests that even at a biological level, we should see far more gay individuals in the general population than used to exist before these endocrine disruptors became

Simone Collins: pervasive.

Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: So very interesting to me. I find this study to be, it's absolutely game changing for me because yeah. Before all I had to go on was my assumptions around this, right? Like your

Simone Collins: intuitions. And also we'll say related research that we've seen such as the tide studies, such as people's.

responses to surveys about arousal pathways and [00:18:00] sexuality, et cetera.

Malcolm Collins: And unfortunately what this stuff indicates to me is that just this first study in isolation, right? Is that you pretty much are better off always delaying gender affirming care until after the age of 18. Actually preferably from the age of 22 or 25.

Yeah. Yeah. And an individual can say, But then it's harder for an individual to really fully transition, right? Yeah. But then I would say, yeah, except it's easier for women to really fully transition to men. That's more a problem with male to female transition, which it turns out is a category where the desire to transition desists if it is not affirmed.

Yeah, it's the population that would have the most inclination to do this is a population that should most be dissuaded from doing it.

No one: Yeah. Yeah. In

Malcolm Collins: addition to that you've got the problem of what is the thing that really distinguishes these 2 populations? It is an. increased desire over time [00:19:00] in a desire to transition between the age of the 13 to 25.

And I think that is perfectly reasonable. Basically, it says that for the individuals who actually are trans, they do end up figuring this out eventually. And that seems to be the safest way to sort them within the population.

Simone Collins: Yeah.

And I think what we tell our kids too, is And what I really expect to have happen is that treatment for transitioning is going to improve over time.

This is all pretty new stuff. And I think a lot of what's going on, for example the dysphoria continues or could possibly worsen when people actually do go on treatment. I think a lot of that comes down to the fact that honing in on the right levels of hormones and everything, getting everything right.

Is really difficult. So

Malcolm Collins: we're on the edge of having like plasmid gene therapy, for example, exactly. Yeah.

Simone Collins: So like in the future, it might not even matter if you're trying to transition after age 25 because through the help of AI [00:20:00] and many other medical advancements. You'll be able to handle it really well.

It might actually be better to delay.

Malcolm Collins: And I think that will be one of the core areas of complaint that many of these individuals are going to have is there will be like the first generation of people who get cybernetic implants, and then, a few years later, the implants are dramatically better.

And the first generation of like, why did I get stuck with gen one tech? Yeah. So that's, I think another really important thing. It's a really important thing that you're pointing out there, but let's go to the CAS report really quickly. So I'm going to read some notes on this because it is absolutely critical.

This report, while it is not really new information, it's almost a meta study of what's been going on, is critical because it is completely changing the general narrative around the way governments deal with trans individuals. I would say doctors,

Simone Collins: like general practitioners, like just doctors and therapists in general.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, this study has been accepted among a lot of people in the mainstream left, not among the extreme cultists, but in the mainstream left, this is seen as the voice of the [00:21:00] authority. And so we're going to go over both the study and the complaints about the study and the counters to those complaints.

Simone Collins: Goodie.

Malcolm Collins: Okay. So Dr. Hillary Cass, the pediatrician commissioned to conduct a review by the NHS. Two children and young people questioning their gender identity said that while doctors tended to be cautious in implementing new findings in emerging areas of medicine, quote, quite the reverse happened in the field of gender care for children, end quote.

They studied a total of 23 guidelines published by different countries between 1998 and 2022. All but two were published after 2010. Quote, health care services and professionals should take into account the poor quality and interrelated nature of the published guidance to support the management of children and adolescents experiencing gender dysphoria and incongruence.

In one study, she said a single Dutch medical study, quote, suggested puberty blockers may improve psychological well being for a narrowly defined group of children with gender incongruence, end quote, , Has formed the basis for their use [00:22:00] to quote spread at pace to other countries in quote.

Subsequently, there was a quote greater readiness to start masculinizing slash feminizing hormones in mid teens in quote, she added, quote, some practitioners abandoned normal clinical approaches, holistic assessment, Which has meant that this group of young people have been

 Extra petitionalized compared to other young people with similar complex presentations. They deserve much better, end quote. So here, what I want to pull out is a few things that she said here, which are really important. One is that she's noting that most of the government guidelines that they're using for transition and gender nonconformity.

In. Minors are really just based on other government reports on the same thing. It's a bunch of studies pointing at each other without a lot of primary evidence, and we're going to get to this claim because this is the thing that a lot of, trans activists will have a complaint about is the not a lot of primary evidence.

So just to keep going here. [00:23:00] Most of them lacked, quote, an independent and evidence based approach and information about how recommendations were developed, end quote, the researcher said. Few guidelines were informed by a systemic review of empirical evidence, and they lacked transparency about how their recommendations were developed.

Only two reported consulting directly with children and young people during their development, the York Academics found. Data from the gender clinics reported in the CAS review showed that the vast majority of people who started puberty Suppression went on to have masculinizing or feminizing hormones, suggesting that puberty blockers did not buy people time to think.

Now, this is actually really important because this is seen in a lot of data. The moment you start puberty blockers or really any form of gender affirming care, you're basically in the pipeline and almost nobody leaves the pipeline, which is why this other study is really important because it's looking at people who don't fall into the pipeline.

And a lot of the studies that were done on quote unquote trans individuals in the clinical population only looked at people who had pre [00:24:00] gone into the pipeline. And that's why it was so important for her to find control groups in blind studies, which was her core complaint of a lot of these studies.

And we know from other studies, once you're in the pipeline, you're in the pipeline, there's really no getting out of it.

No one: Which

Malcolm Collins: makes sense if your entire social community at that point affirms this decision. And if you detransition, and we're going to see this in the leaked emails, you get completely ostracized from your entire community.

It's likable. Converting out of being a Jehovah's Witness or an Amish or something like that it is incredibly difficult to do and it is incredibly difficult to stop from a social perspective. If you're in these systems and for the individuals who are like can't you understand that they feel threatened by the narrative around detransition?

And it's you're the very people who criticize people like Jehovah's Witnesses for the way they ostracize people who form new beliefs and systems. Like, how can you not see how hurtful what you're doing is and why it makes people afraid to leave the pipeline and why it [00:25:00] creates These psychological cycles where it becomes very difficult to leave the pipeline.

Okay, but now let's keep going. I want to then talk about debunking the CAS report, right? Because I went through a lot of people who were talking about debunking this, and it is very interesting and worth digging into.

Simone Collins: Yeah, okay.

Malcolm Collins: Here's from a Reddit post. Now here are the four points that they had found for debunking, if they're just arguing against it.

Okay. The report engaged with anti trans hate groups and was written by someone affiliated with them. Does anyone have a source for this? Question mark. Um, basically the sources for this are here, I'll give it to you. Cass follows the LGB alliance and transgender trend, both recognized as anti trans groups.

She doesn't follow any pro trans groups. That is the full extent of that. So

Simone Collins: yeah, basically hate group is anyone who's Oh, let's be careful about this.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Yeah. And that's because, as in the same way that like, if you're in Scientology, anyone who even questioned Scientology, what are they [00:26:00] called again?

What's the word for them?

Subversive persons is the term.

Malcolm Collins: It's something that

Simone Collins: sounds surprisingly corporate. Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. You're not allowed problematic individuals. Hold on. You're not allowed to in any way.

And this makes sense if this is more like a religion than like an actual. And it is that as we've argued in our episode has a cult evolved under the trans movement? And I think that one kind of has so the second one here is puberty blockers are seen as perfectly safe for CIS children who have precocious puberty.

, so they shouldn't be any different for trans children. This is just comical CIS children who are using them to delay precocious puberty are undergoing purity at a time when they shouldn't be undergoing purity. Trans children are. undergoing puberty when they shouldn't be undergoing puberty.

Basically, cis children are using this so that their puberty happens as it normally happens. Trans individuals are using this to attempt to turn off puberty and then attempt to restart it later, which we know just doesn't work. You do not get your full puberty if you would try to start it later. That's what a lot of, when I like go over the data, that's what it [00:27:00] seems to indicate.

So this is a really bad point. Which I think is great that we're seeing how bad the points against this are, because to me, when I want to know should I take something seriously, I should look at the people who are arguing against it and see how strong their arguments are. The third one is, if any antidepressant was successful at improving mental health slash suicidality as blockers slash HTR are for trans people, it would be considered a miracle drug.

Again, does anyone have any numbers to back this up? What? Numbers don't back this up.

No one: Wow. There's positions they

Malcolm Collins: want to be true and then they look for numbers, right? The final point is wait times for accessing this health care are so high that there have been several people dying of suicide before they reach the end of the waiting list.

And there is currently NHS care for trans people who need to access it. This is just one of those things where we already know that the suicidality within this group is really high regardless, even after they get gender affirming care. I'm not gonna, I think it's really twisted to consider everyone in [00:28:00] this pipeline who ends up committing suicide as killed by the treatment.

I would say that if we're going to do that, then we should count as everyone who has transitioned and then commit suicide as being killed by transition. It's not going to look good for the trans community. No one

Simone Collins: mentions that. No.

Malcolm Collins: And here is the key argument that you see used against it.

This report, and I'm going to quote here, some have focused on the report's omission of evidence, including studies around purity blockers that have not used control groups. People have argued that control groups in these studies would be impossible because people would know if they'd been assigned a placebo or not a placebo.

Yeah. And here you see a lot of people complaining just over and over again. Complaining about you cannot block all the studies that didn't use blind control groups because you can't really use blind control groups here. Now I am going to post on the page, over the screen here so people can see, highlighted in the report why [00:29:00] she threw out these studies.

No one: Because what

Malcolm Collins: would you be lied to if you believe they were thrown out? because they didn't have a blind control group. The specific line that was used over and over again was lack of blinding And no control group. This

is critical. These are two different things. They both did not have blinding and did not have a control group. Now I want to be clear because a lot of people, my backgrounds in medical research, a lot of people here might not understand how Freaking horrific it is if you had no control group. Okay. You don't need to like assign people placebo meds or something like that and blind them to put them in a control group.

What you need to do for example, if I'm looking at rates of suicidality, what I would do [00:30:00] is I would contrast people who did like just totally normal members of the population was individuals who are undergoing this kind of trans care, right? people

Simone Collins: undergoing this treatment. And to the earlier point, those who are stuck on the wait list.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. And I can get to the wait list. Perfect control group. Perfect control group stuck on the wait list. Very easy to do. They're not using this, right? So the goal is to get the control group as close to the population that you're doing as possible, but they don't have to be exactly like the population.

They can be quite different to have a no control group at all. You're basically not even trying for real data at that point. You were just trying to affirm a position. And this is what really gets me is this lie that she. Was discarding studies because they didn't have a blind control group. She was discarding studies because they didn't have any control group at all, which is a basic thing in most medical research Okay.

And this is, and people were like with some cancer patients, you wouldn't have a control group was like chemo or [00:31:00] something like that. And it's yeah, but this isn't like that. There are comparable groups that you, yeah,

Simone Collins: there are lotteries that are wait lists. There are, yeah it's there are those who can financially afford it.

And those who can't all sorts of things.

Malcolm Collins: What this says to me like my big takeaway from this is because the criticisms of the cast report were so weak, she engaged with naughty people. So we cannot like think about her as human anymore. And that is what cults do. If you talk to people who are critical of the cult, they will say, we just can't trust anything you're saying anymore.

That is a just complete nonsense. This complaining about her throwing out studies that were poorly conducted, Again, just complete nonsense.

And they'll be like she included studies that didn't use blind controls and it's no. They still had controls. That was what the big mistake was.

You're including this blind word, which wasn't the critical word. So now we're going to go to one final thing that you haven't really looked into yet. Actually, do you have any further things you wanted to say from like you went over the block and reported on this and [00:32:00] everything?

Simone Collins: I think the important thing is pointing out that this isn't because she's found any particular outcome.

It's a lot of it's just the research is so bad while there isn't a lot of information about it being very, Oh, definitely you're going to die if you go through this, but also definitely going through this isn't going to help you. I think the important thing is in the past and what may be changing now and what gives me a lot of hope is if you are a therapist or you are a doctor and someone sends you their child and their child appears to have some form of gender dysphoria, the responsible thing for you to do and what you would do to avoid any like form of liability is to just send them to a gender transition or, a gender treatment clinic.

Just refer them to that. This is, off by plate. There's no, I don't know what to do. The only evidence out there that's being shouted from the hilltops is cherry picked studies saying your child is going to die if you don't do this. So people from a sort of media [00:33:00] standpoint and from a public discourse standpoint, doctors and clinicians and therapists were forced to throw people into this pipeline, which as you point out, then is a very slippery slope.

You can't get out of it, a Chinese finger trap so now with the cost report, what makes me so hopeful is. Doctors, therapists, et cetera, have something else to point to, to say, no, this is not necessarily the best pathway. I'm not being necessarily responsible by telling you to sit this out, find some other interventions, work on self confidence, et cetera, which is really encouraging.

Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: And now we're gonna get to the last study here, which I find really interesting and I don't think that you had heard about this. It's not a study, it's a major event. So there was a leak of files from an organization called the World's Professional Association for Transgender Health W-P-A-A-A-T-H, or wpath, I guess is how I read it.

Yeah. wpath.

Simone Collins: Yeah. That's how they go wpath.

Malcolm Collins: And you heard about this?

Simone Collins: Yeah. In [00:34:00] blockchain reported, cause I love them. They talk about the WPath files a lot. Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: Oh, they do. Okay. This was really interesting. So this organization has, you know how I mentioned that there was like an echo chamber that a lot of countries were using for their use, gender affirming care.

Yeah. That people just

Simone Collins: kept referring to the same. Like other studies and no one actually, when making claims about this is the best way to go. Everyone agrees that this is true was actually referring to real, profoundly robust research.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, it was coming from this organization and we began to, through these leaks, get an understanding of how individuals within this organization really saw what they were doing.

And the biggest sort of thing that came out of the WPAS files was really Two things, and we'll get into some specific quotes around this, but the first being, being that they understood that many of the kids could not make an informed consent to what they were doing.

Simone Collins: What, wow what [00:35:00] indicates that?

That's pretty damning.

Malcolm Collins: Oh here I'll give you some quotes then.

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: I think the thing you have to remember about kids is we're often explaining these sorts of things to people who haven't had biology in high school yet. He says discussing the potential of loss of fertility and options to preserve fertility with a 14 year old is, quote, always good in theory, end quote.

He said in the video. Because many will go on to cross sex hormones that will leave them sterile. But, quote, I know I'm talking to a blank wall, end quote, he says. And, quote, and the same would happen for a cisgender kid, right? They'd be like, ew, kids, babies, gross, end quote. Quote, We try to talk about it, but most of these kids are nowhere in any kind of a brain space really, to talk about it in a serious way, end quote.

And he adds, quote, I, that's always bothered me, but, we still want the kids to be happy, happier in the moment.

Simone Collins: Happier in the moment. Happier for now. Damned in the future. Why for

Malcolm Collins: a doctor? This is like the Hays [00:36:00] movement where it's like it makes them happier in the moment to tell them that overeating isn't going to make them unhappy in the long term or cause long term negative bodily repercussions in the long term or be unhealthy, so you just don't tell them that.

That's why it's evil to tell people that. Taking in far more calories than you burn is unhealthy for you because it makes them happier in the moment to not tell them that. And this is what we talk about when we talk about this virus or this form of engaging with this. No, you're a doctor.

And you are saying right now, I understand that children cannot make an informed decision. Consent to the surgeries that we are allowing them to consent to the treatments that we are allowing them to consent to, and they will have a major repercussions later in their life, specifically sterility and never being able to orgasm again, or never being able to experience an orgasm at all.

They don't know what these things are. They can't understand these things. And as we talk about was in prenatalism, many people develop their identities when they're young. So they don't [00:37:00] understand that if they found kids gross when they were a teenager, that doesn't mean they're going to find them gross as an adult.

And it is natural for young teens around this age for biological reasons to have an instinct like gross young kids. I don't want to be around that.

Simone Collins: Yeah. On that too. I think even if like even if a young teen can comprehend that as an adult, they're going to want something different. There is a rebellious streak in many.

And I felt this myself as a teen that would take away. The ability of that person in the future to have that choice I hate the idea so much now that I'm going to make sure that my future self doesn't have the ability to do it when they try to like someone who's trying to, get rid of eating sweets, decides that they're going to make sure they never have sweets in their house in the future.

So their future self that wants sweets can't even get them. Yeah. So I think even when they can comprehend, even when they know the biological consequences, they, in their current state of mind may still choose intentionally to override the wishes of their future [00:38:00] self.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. And we know that kids have, poor self control.

This is why we don't generally allow kids to sign lifelong contracts and stuff like this. Yeah. They can't join the

Simone Collins: military. You can't sell organs. You can't.

Malcolm Collins: Wild. Yeah. It is wild, but it gets worse than that. They are showing how little the kids understand from some of these quotes that you have here, right?

I guess what's

Simone Collins: wild to me is that they acknowledge that these things are damaging.

Malcolm Collins: And this is where I'd say that I think the far like the far anti trans movement goes a little far with this stuff and maybe reading a little too much into it, but I'm going to read another quote here.

Simone Collins: All right.

Malcolm Collins: The one, one clinician had written about a number of her patients, quote, they seem to feel that they should be allowed to switch back and forth merely at their request. I'm not comfortable with this at this point, we need to be better at understanding how to handle this type of situation in quote. Now that an individual, they had started transitioning thought that this was something that you could just switch whenever you wanted to really easily.

What that [00:39:00] shows to me is that this individual didn't understand what they were committing to, or how permanent it was, at all. And this again shows why people don't think that young people should be allowed to consent

Simone Collins: to this. This is, again, another reason why This is so important to put off as long as possible because in the future I have plenty of confidence that people will be able to seamlessly switch whenever they want to Maybe not in our lifetime, but it'll happen But not now

Malcolm Collins: and they show some really concerns about this.

One clinician wrote quote kids can't fully understand what they're agreeing to in quote Kids can't understand what they're agreeing to We can never do this, and it's abuse to do it, even when a parent or doctor are on board that it is the right thing for the child. Who is this? Anyway, I'll look at this later.

So here I want to note something right here that is really interesting. But Bowers has also said that acknowledging detransition exists, quote, [00:40:00] even to a minor extent is considered off limits for many in our community.

No one: I

Malcolm Collins: do see talk of the phenomenon as distracting from the major challenges we face, end quote.

There is a mission within the transitioning community and within the medical community around this to just pretend that de transitioners don't

No one: exist. And this is

Malcolm Collins: another big problem, right? Because this is a very big and growing movement that it seems like if somebody was forming informed consent, and they had been given both sides, they would know this.

And this is a big problem because when I look at transforms and their Transitioners, they're like, look, didn't you read the back of the like pill bottle? Didn't weren't you told about everything that could go wrong? Like, why are you out there complaining now and complaining about our community now?

And the answer is because they were transitioned at 11 and they obviously didn't understand. Yeah. Doctors giving them the transition knew that they didn't understand. And it was well known among the people who are writing the national guidelines. Like in countries like Canada, that the people who are [00:41:00] transitioning didn't understand.

So you don't get to come out here. You cannot both be pro the transitioning of children and say that they shouldn't have the right to say, I didn't fully understand this. Now, one of the particularly damaging things that came out was this was many cases of people who ended up getting cancer because of

Simone Collins: this.

Whoa whoa. Why didn't. Wait, what correlates with cancer? Is it the estrogen justice or what?

Malcolm Collins: Yes. If male to female correlates with cancer, which is actually really interesting because there was one study done recently that shows to female to male might actually lower rates of cancer in individuals because you don't have the mammary tissue

Simone Collins: anymore.

Malcolm Collins: Or the uterus sometimes. Which are two of the more common locations that females get cancer. Yeah. But I'm going to quote here. In one, a doctor writes about a 16 year old patient who developed two benign liver tumors after several years of taking birth control and one year of gender reforming testosterone.

In another, a different doctor recalled a colleague who died of liver cancer after nearly a decade of taking testosterone. That doctor wrote that, quote, to the best of my [00:42:00] knowledge, the cancer was linked to the hormone treatment. The doctor was noted that they didn't have any other details because the patient had died.

Simone Collins: That's so interesting that, yeah, this isn't discussed. Whereas people going through IVF or people concerned about IVF often bring up concerns about cancer. Cause they're like, Oh gosh if I take even for a freaking month. extra estrogen, I'm going to get more cancer. And yet that like that. So I also, I don't think it's poorly known that this is a risk because if people are concerned about one month

Malcolm Collins: fringe risk, and it is not a complete fringe risk.

It's a known side effect of these drugs. Taken over short periods of time and that's the thing that you're pointing out here, which is really important to note. Is it individuals? No they're like, oh, but this has been used in other treatments for a long time. Yeah, but

Simone Collins: people worry about those other treatments.

Malcolm Collins: They worry about it in the other treatments and the use of it is extremely limited in terms of time windows. And they're like, oh, but like [00:43:00] hormonal therapy has been used in birth control for a long time. And it's those are different hormones at different levels. And then the ones that are causing cancer in these individuals.

Yeah. So this doesn't matter. But I will also say that to an extent, these leaks have been blown out of proportion. Really as bad as the leaks could have been, this is pretty minor to me. It was in how extreme some of these communities get. And it does show that the doctors. Do you actually have some level of self reflection and concern about what's happening and knowledge that kids can't really consent?

They just have fears around acknowledging that was in their community, which I think is something that like anyone who is looking at this situation with any level of sanity already knew was a phenomenon.

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: So between these three things, my question is now, what has this changed for you in terms of your perspective of what's going on?

And do you think that the battle is genuinely tipping against the transitioning children activists? [00:44:00]

Simone Collins: I think it, yeah already things, programs for youth gender transition were being defunded, criticized, shut down. I think youth gender clinics are, Going to be a thing of the past very soon.

And my hope is that this means that transitioning like those who are trans activists and who do to your earlier point, really care about that 2 percent that really does have persistent gender dysphoria and that really does need and want to transition that it gets them to focus on instead identifying those people.

Validating their concerns and preparing that, like giving them something to do in the interim while they wait until they are old enough to make that transition safely, we'll say after age 25. I think that would be such an amazing.

Malcolm Collins: Oh, yeah, it would be great. If you could get better studies on that would be fantastic.

And I think that's the direction that the trans community and trans activists should [00:45:00] go from this. For me, the major thing that's shifted about this is one, it's a shift in the public narrative. It is now in, JK Rowling with all her stuff, she recently like absolutely went after someone.

They're like, now that it's okay to say the things that I risked my career saying for a long time that many individuals lost their career for saying, you now are jumping on the bandwagon with this when you didn't stand up for this, when you could actually really suffer for this. And the other big thing was in trans news that's happened is this law in Scotland, right?

This hate crime law and JK Rowling standing up against it and precedent in a way that

Simone Collins: nullified it. Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah and I think that she's right. We have to remember the things that we're saying now that are actually like, not that spicy anymore that, transitioning kids is probably not a good idea are things that individuals, even trans individuals have lost their careers for saying like Buck Angel, The original trans activist who really brought the community into the mainstream and then was completely isolated from the community from saying that kids shouldn't be allowed to [00:46:00] transition.

That was or that we should have some skepticism around this. That was to me, really heartbreaking to see how many people in the left, even when they change their mainstream position on this, when they're like, oh, we were wrong about that whole transitioning kids thing. They will never rehabilitate the people that they have.

Excommunicated or that they have labeled as

No one: heretics.

Malcolm Collins: They will never really put up the law of the wall of people. We attacked for things we now accept as common knowledge.

Simone Collins: No, I think it goes both ways. I don't think Buck Angel is gonna, embrace them after everything that they've done.

So

Malcolm Collins: he's like a very understanding person. So I think of it, this is, It's tragic that has happened, but the other thing, the big thing for me that changes is I now believe that the evidence states, and I think that if I was a trans activist and I was trying to help the trans community, I think the core thing that needs to change now is the understanding that most teens and preteens who are not comfortable with their gender, Are not trans.

No one: They're

Malcolm Collins: just going to grow out of this. [00:47:00]

No one: The

Malcolm Collins: vast majority of preteens who are not comfortable with their gender are not trans. And so now the question is how do you sort out of the people who aren't comfortable with their gender, which should. Undergo further treatment, and which shouldn't, where the previous go to thing within the trans community is if you are not comfortable with your gender, you are trans and you should be treated as trans and you should immediately put on a gender affirming pipeline.

You should immediately be put on puberty blockers to give you more time to think. And what this research shows is they don't give you more time to think. You're basically locking in a decision. The moment. You go into gender affirming care, you go to a psychologist that is gender affirming, or you undergo a puberty blockers.

And what I would take in a

Simone Collins: hot second is if there was just, if we nuked youth medicalization if it was, all right, we're going to change your pronouns. And now you're going to dress differently and you're going to have this different, fine. Because at least that enables people to maintain optionality until they're fully myelinated until [00:48:00] they're, In their twenties and they can decide, if it's just if it becomes the equivalent of going goth for a few years, and being different, I'm super happy with that.

The most, even when I was a kid,

Malcolm Collins: I wore like a girl pants and stuff like that in like the golf days where you get these super tight, like hot topic pants and stuff. And

that was like, It was the style at the time for young men

 So I tied an onion to my belt, which was the style at the time.

Malcolm Collins: You were like an extra rebellious, young guy or whatever.

And it's one of those things where it's totally cool. If my kids were like, okay, I'm going to do dresses now or something like that. And that was like the rebellious style at the time. I think we need to Differentiate developing your identity in contrast to mainstream social mores and medicalization, and these two things have unfortunately been conflated due to the trans movement, not allowing you to say, hey, that teenager.

Who is doing this rebellious thing in terms of their identity. That's probably not a medical issue. That's probably just [00:49:00] being a teenager and we need to respect them while also telling them, tattoos are bad. They're permanent. You probably shouldn't be going out and doing that.

Simone Collins: Even if it is a medical issue, I think the important thing that we've realized now is that it's a medical issue. That will pass for the majority of people. And that really does, really ought to be addressed for a very small minority of people. And we cannot make a medical decision until someone's in their mid twenties.

That's an important thing too. So that's so comforting. This is just a great news. It's wonderful. It's fantastic.

Malcolm Collins: It, you don't know how far the pendulum is going to swing in the other direction yet. It's been swinging and it could swing far. What do

Simone Collins: you expect to happen?

Malcolm Collins: We could see a general pushback on transness in general, in a Oh, like even

Simone Collins: trans identities?

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, I can see, for example if we're talking about an extremely hard pushback, and I can see this being very realistic laws being pushed in conservative states that disallow trans people from teaching kids.

Simone Collins: Because they just basically found that if you don't lean into [00:50:00] it at all, it typically passes, especially for men.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. And keep in mind, the other thing that I noted here is engagement with the LGBTQ community

Simone Collins: correlated

Malcolm Collins: with this persisting of your gender dissatisfaction. So disallowing a young person who seems at risk of this from engaging with other LGBT individuals Appears to be one of the best ways to prevent them from falling into this group, which can lead to a lot of negative action, even among well meaning parents.

Simone Collins: Yeah. Or even among like perfectly normal, non extreme, non brainwashy people who just happen to be gay,

Malcolm Collins: I even think about this was my kids, right? Is it just dangerous, even if they are same sex attracted to allow them to engage with that community. So long as that community. Is overly friendly with the trans community I don't know I think

Simone Collins: every community has to be approached differently.

On a case by case basis. And if you see that you, I think the key, and then this goes back to what you always talk about [00:51:00] with dominance hierarchies within a community, you have to look at what the virtue spiral of that community is going to turn into. Every community that's tightly knit is going to have a virtue spiral.

You have to figure out what that virtue spiral is going to be. Like, I guess in the prenatalist community, a virtue of spiral is probably someone going. Crazy hard in on kids and, telling everyone they should have kids and being really annoying and obnoxious about it or whatever it might be.

But you have to be, you have to know what that is. So

Malcolm Collins: hold on, there's two, most communities are actually not that at risk of virtue spiraling.

Simone Collins: Really? What makes you say that?

Malcolm Collins: virtue spiraling in a community is isolation. There aren't protected As soon as you have a protected class, some thing that you can attempt to maximize that you cannot be attacked for attempting to maximize.

So for example, within conservative circles, this might be like dedication to Trump, right? Was in certain Trumpist circles, you can not be criticized for being overly anti immigration or overly anti Trump or [00:52:00] overly. And because of that, you get these virtues files,

Where individuals will be like, you guys aren't conservative at all in your beliefs that I'm like, I think you might just be in a community that's like virtue spiraling because actually, we very much are for our generation.

You look at any mainstream statistics about population belief systems and stuff like that. You have just surrounded yourself with a virtue spiral until you don't know that. So you do get this in the right, but. The, and within the left, if you can't attack trans community, if you can't attack people who see psychologists, these are seen as protected classes.

You're going to get virtue spirals there of dedication of intense. As soon as you remove the protected class concept, you remove the risk of virtue spirals within the prenatalist community. We haven't really seen any virtue spirals because there is no protected class individuals who have a lot of kids.

We are still very critical of like their child rearing practices, stuff like that. And that across. Unity. There is not like when

Simone Collins: extremes can be criticized within a community, that community is safe from virtue cycles or sorry, sorry, virtue spirals. And then when extremes [00:53:00] are not ever criticized within a community, that is when it goes crazy.

That's when you have Salem, which trials that's when you have gods doing insane things to their bodies. That's when all this happens. Exactly. Okay. Then that's what we do with our kids. If we, cause again as we've discovered with so many LGBTQIA or poly or rationalist or whatever communities out there, any niche community of the same, like general name.

There are some which are super cool and there are some which are super toxic. So all we have to do is determine whether or not they criticize extremism. And if they do, it's fine. If our kids hang out with them, like this

Malcolm Collins: is such an important concept. It might even be worth building a holiday around it.

Don't engage with communities that have protected classes, whether those communities are on the right or the left or anything else, recognize the danger of this concept of a protected class and stay away from it. Or communities that

Simone Collins: don't criticize extremism.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. How we can build that into a holiday.

I don't know yet, but I'll [00:54:00] think about it.

Simone Collins: Fun. Yeah. People can weigh in the comments too. How can this be turned into something cute? Photographable?

Malcolm Collins: I think the extremism is different from the protected class concept, and I would really focus on the protected class concept because I think it's much more defensive than the extreme of the concept.

Which is to say you can be extreme in beliefs, but there are certain beliefs where you're like, you just cannot criticize this group. Whenever you get that.

Simone Collins: That's when you're more defensive. I see. I see like in, in still in many conservative circles. And this is something that we're seeing dividing the Republican party and causing a lot of problems.

There is no level of extremism regarding restricting abortion access that people get criticized for. I actually had this guy call me out of the blue call me as a candidate out of the blue. And just start yelling at me like a madman about abortion. So I think that like really showed me, Matt, you, or

Malcolm Collins: was he, did he just want you to know?

Simone Collins: He was like I just wanna [00:55:00] know your position's on this. I'm like, okay, fine. Ask away. I'll tell you my position's on whatever you want now. I'll be perfectly honest. And he asked what's your position on abortion? And I said like obviously America pretty much agrees on. This moderate approach to abortion, before this period, more freedom than

Malcolm Collins: the current stuff at our state.

And I said

Simone Collins: that, yes, but he's no, it's life begins at conception and blah, blah, blah. And I'm like, yeah, let, that is your belief system. You are Catholic. I understand that. That's totally acceptable. Although the Catholics didn't always view it that way. So let's be honest here. But you have no more right to impose that.

on other people outside the Catholic culture, then other cultures have the right to impose transition, like youth, gender transition on your children. And he's no, God said this and therefore I'm telling you to do that. And I hung up on him cause he wouldn't stop talking. But that's one of those things where he's never.

been criticized for that view. Cause I also told him, I'm like, you can have that view. And that's, that is 100 percent [00:56:00] legitimate. I too am not really comfortable with abortion. But. You will not see your party get elected if you maintain a hardline stance like that, because you are not in the majority.

You will not

Malcolm Collins: have further restrictions on abortion that are realistic to impose.

Simone Collins: Exactly. And he, and that's what I said too. I'm like, there's no way that you're going to get anywhere close to where you want to be with that current stance. And it's he was incapable of seeing that. And so that, that is a really good example of a protected status, right?

He would never be questioned. For that by most people. And also he has this attitude of, if you do question me, I'm going to immediately shut you down. So I guess that's what we're talking about when it comes to protected status, right? Oh, I'm so mad at him. ,

Malcolm Collins: I love you, Simone. You are the best. And I appreciate your anger as a citizen of this country.

This is

Simone Collins: what I get for answering unknown calls. I should be answering potential cons, constituent calls. But when you're an idiot like that,

Malcolm Collins: I love you. Pick up that you're like, f**k off. We need to get a call. We need to get [00:57:00] that needs to go viral. It's like you telling some constituents.

Yeah, just people get

Simone Collins: to call into me as a political candidate. And I'm like, f**k you. I love you. I love

you.

In this eye-opening discussion, Malcolm and Simone delve into the complex factors contributing to South Korea's alarmingly low fertility rates. They explore how the country's unique chaebol system, extreme meritocracy based on measurable statistics rather than efficacy, and hierarchical culture have created an environment that discourages having children. Malcolm proposes a unconventional solution that could potentially fix the problem in a single generation, but acknowledges the cultural resistance it would face. The hosts also touch on the loss of Korean culture and cuisine that will occur if the fertility crisis remains unaddressed.

Malcolm Collins: [00:00:00] a lot of people see South Korea and North Korea as being a almost antithetical to each other. When that really isn't the case, what South Korea is a collection of North Korea's competing against each other under a capitalist the broad economic rule system.

And that's what the chiabols are And Korea is also an extremely meritocratic system, but meritocratic in regards to measurable statistics, not in regards to measurable efficacy.

And this is the core of what will cause Korea to fail as a culture and what makes it unsalvageable, . And I'll get to why, because it may seem like such a small thing you want to fix the entire Korean system, I'll tell you how you fix it.

You can fix it in one generation, Korea. Listen to me here. You freak the f**k out if you do this, but it would fix things

Would you like to know more?

Malcolm Collins: Hello, Simone! [00:01:00] We are so excited to be joining our audience today with the newest member of our family. Many people know that I worked in Korea, I lived in Korea for a year, and it was where I started caring about fertility rate issues but before I get further on that, I want to introduce our audience to an alternate country. Now, in this alternate country, they've done everything right.

In this wonderful, conservative country, same sex marriage is still illegal in the year 2024. Porn is illegal in the year 2024. Abortion was illegal until just this year. Three years ago, there's almost no immigration and total ethnic homogeny. Women are permanently underclass citizens. And for the last 20 years, the government has spent over 200 billion dollars trying to increase fertility rates.

In this one serval country, Companies will pay their citizens [00:02:00] 75k to have kids. Of course, this is a joke. The wonderful country I'm describing here is, in fact, South Korea. All of these things are true about South Korea. They have tried both the fever dream fantasies of the right and the left, and it has not worked from cash handouts to ethnic homogenous state to banning abortion, to banning pornography.

This is why I always laugh when people suggest these things. I'm like, these things were institutionalized in Korea before their fertility started to collapse and have been there throughout the entire process. And people will be like, How bad is the situation in Korea really right now? The average number, and this I'm quoting here, the average number of expected babies for a South Korean woman during her reproductive life cycle fell to a record low of 0.

72 from 0. 78 in 2022. Data from statistics on South Korea showed Wednesday. [00:03:00] And if you project this forward, South Korea is now projected to have a fertility rate of 0. 68 in 2024, and they are on track to meet that. That means that for every 100 South Koreans alive today, there will be 11. 6 grandchildren.

Not great grand children, Grandchildren for great-grandchildren, it's less than four, and this is assuming it doesn't continue to fall. And keep in mind it's falling by like it felt like 11.5% last year, like insane. And where most of the country is collated. Now in Seoul, the fertility rate's only 0.55.

That means you are shrinking the population to a quarter of its size, basically, every generation. That is insane. For every four South Koreans, there is one kid in Seoul. Now, to, if you think, oh, because I love demographers, they're always like things shift. I'm like, yeah, but you [00:04:00] can look at the trailing data.

Okay, in South Korea, only I found two statistics here. It's either only 2. 9 percent of Koreans are born out of wedlock, or only 2 percent of Koreans are born outside of marriage. This was a statistic done in 2022, so fairly recently. But the number is very low. So if you want to get a projection of the number of Koreans that are going to be born, you can look at the number of marriages that are going to form as being the Absolute upper limit to that number.

Only 27 percent of women in their 20s considered a marriage essential last year. This is a 53 percent decline from 2008 in South Korea. This was in 2023. 23%. So only 23 percent of the young population even could have a kid. That is absolutely wild when you consider that the population [00:05:00] already has 60 percent of their population over the age of 40.

And if you take that statistic and you go, okay what about that 22 billion that they gave out, right? What is that per person in South Korea? Because I decided to do a calculation, like how much of that per family, given the percent of the population that is under the age of 40. And I calculated that out to be about 28k per male female pair, assuming that everyone was getting married in that under 40 demographic.

That's an insanely

Simone Collins: high

Malcolm Collins: number. Yeah, in terms of what's being paid out. And what's another interesting thing that we are seeing, though, that is worth noting in the statistics is a rise in the acceptance of out of wedlock kids with 20 percent expressing a positive perspective on it in 2020 up from 11.

1 percent in 2020. So in half a decade, almost double the acceptance. Now it's still low, but you can see a change in perception as society is beginning to become desperate. But from what we see with

Simone Collins: numbers in [00:06:00] Sweden, for example, that acceptance doesn't necessarily correlate with higher fertility. Like fewer couples than ever are getting married.

In Sweden, more having couple or sorry, having kids while staying unmarried, but their birth rate is also going way down. So that's not even a sign of hope.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. So I what I want to elevate here is in the thesis of this particular video, cause it's something I was meditating on recently. What do you need to change about Korean society to actually fix their fertility crisis?

If you ask Koreans, you are going to get two broad answers, and they're both wrong. Now, generally, the first answer they're going to say is, it's just the economics. I can't afford to have kids. Which is partially right, but not in the way they mean. And what's really interesting is I saw some studies done recently on like space because people always try to work like NIMBYism, building more housing policy, right?

And what you see actually is a [00:07:00] correlation between the number of people who live around you and your fertility rate in the United States. So did you know that your average United States citizen or family that lives in a house that they are either renting or own, but like a house, not an apartment or a subdivided house is above replacement fertility.

But as soon as you get to apartments where houses are subdivided, it goes down to 1. 8 and then it continues to go down the more people live in that apartment complex. Now, this is a big problem in South Korea, where the majority of the population lives in these ultra high rises, even when they're living in rural areas.

Yeah, we've

Simone Collins: talked about this before. For example, we took a train out, literally, actually, ironically, to a baby convention. Where they sold lots of baby products. And in this town outside or city outside Korea, there was nothing around except for a couple high rises of apartments, a giant mall, and then this convention center.

So there, there weren't, spread out suburbs like you'd expect to see in the United States or

Malcolm Collins: even Europe. It was just. It's [00:08:00] very weird to go along the Korean countryside as you'll like, it's farms, and then a collection of three skyscrapers clustered next to each other.

Simone Collins: There are obviously exceptions for this. We did visit some towns outside Seoul that had houses, but they were small. They were like, yeah, they were little villages. Yes, this is not where a huge swath of people are living for our understanding.

Malcolm Collins: But so people will blame that. But the problem is a lot of countries have that and not a lot of countries are quite as extreme as Korea and fertility rates.

The other thing that people will blame is the gender wars in Korea. And this is definitely a phenomenon. I'll put a statistic on screen that shows that while you have a political difference between women and men in the United States, there are two conservative men for every one conservative woman in the U.

S. And one progressive man for every two progressive women in the United States. So the odds there are not good if you're looking for a partner that is politically aligned with you, but in Korea,

it is dramatically worse and more extreme and becoming more extreme over time.

But if you want learning about that, [00:09:00] there's a great YouTube series on it called the Gotcha Gang Wars parts one and two, both fantastic if you want to get an understanding of Korea's history. And I could focus on that and say maybe if they could fix their gender problems, it would fix their fertility rate.

But there is actually a bigger problem in Korea, which means even if you could fix the housing situation, even if you could fix the gender wars situation, I still don't think they would come anywhere close to fixing their fertility problem. And it is interesting to note because it is not a problem that we have in the United States and we have it a little bit in Europe, but not nearly as bad as Korea.

Has it? Oh, yeah.

Simone Collins: Although I wonder we'll get into this later, but I wonder if this is also a major issue in Japan.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, I think it is a partial issue in Japan. So Korea is not a capitalist economy and I need to be extremely clear about this to our listeners. It is an economy that allows for capitalism.

But has not sorted itself capitalistically in the [00:10:00] same way that, when many people think about communism, for example it would be possible for under capitalist rules one company to basically dominate all of daily life and pay everyone a UBI and then basically end up with a communist system under a capitalist hierarchy. In the same way that like people often see communism as fundamentally at odds with democracy and it's no, you can vote communists into power. You can vote fascists into power. For example, these things aren't in conflict with each other.

You can set up a capitalist system and have another system develop under it. And the chi bold system in Korea is fundamentally very different from the way capitalism works in any other country. And it is also fundamentally why Korea cannot fix its fertility crisis.

Simone Collins: Can you first, just for people who aren't familiar with it, sorry, define the chaebol system?

Malcolm Collins: I'm going to go deeper into all of this [00:11:00] because a lot of people see South Korea and North Korea as being a almost antithetical to each other. When that really isn't the case, what South Korea is a collection of North Korea's competing against each other under a capitalist hierarchy or capitalist the broad economic rule system.

And that's what the chiabols are. When you go to North Korea, you will see these shrines and these museums to the dear leader and everything like that. And they deify him and they come up with all sorts of stories about him and they have these strict hierarchy based system. If you go to any of the Chaibolds, which I'll get to a deeper explanation in just a second, but just for example, Chaibolds would be like Hyundai, Samsung, etc.

You will find the museums

dedicated to the founder of the Chaibold and it will be almost as mythical as the museums you would see in North Korea. They will have his little shoes from when he was a kid [00:12:00] up on a golden shrine. They will have it is weird if you are coming from an American system.

So people who are broadly familiar with tribolds, they are like, so tribolds are like big economic conglomerates, 3M in our country or something like that or GE in our country, and it's no.

That is not really what Chibolds are. They are much, much bigger than that. Just let me paint a picture of what it's like to live under a Chibold system. I can go, as a Samsung person,

To my Samson day job, go home to my Samson apartments, which will say Samson in giant letters on the side of them, go shop at the Samson grocery store, buy Samson insurance, watch Samson TV on my Samson phone. The one where I would see it everywhere, yeah. Yeah, Samsung Is the one with the apartment building. Literally every [00:13:00] aspect of your daily life is under this company. It is not like there are like, 20 of these that really matter that compete, but there's more to begin with.

And so you can think, okay, if they try to be capitalistic, how did companies gain this much power? The answer is twofold. Part one has to do is when they converted to capitalism, they were under a fascist regime. dictator. So a fascist made them a capitalist system before they became a democratic system.

As he converted them to capitalism, he used state resources to hyperspeed this conversion by pouring resources into individual competent families who had companies to grow those companies at a super fast speed. And this created the birth of the original chivals. But this system would have fallen apart without Korean culture, which is the second thing at play here.

When I mentioned that South Korea is actually more like North [00:14:00] Korea than you would imagine, and people were like then why aren't people starving in South Korea? And it's competition. And people are like competition can't be it. It's no, we wrote a book on governance, non bestseller in the Wall Street nonfiction section, top of the list.

And so we know what we're talking about when it comes to governance structures. For a governance structure to maintain efficiency, really all you need is for the possibility of it to fail and be replaced by a competitor and for it to compete with consumers against competitors in a relatively free economic system.

What Korea is essentially multiple fascist dictatorships that are competing against each other for the population to join them. It's almost if you think of seasteading, the initial seasteading thing, they were like what we'll do is we'll create like modular cities where people can split off and go join other cities.

If they're not being run well. And so you could even have a fascist city that could be desirable. That is basically the way the Korean economy works. Although people build a huge degree of loyalty to their companies as well, so even when the companies are treating them as well, they don't split off as frequently as you [00:15:00] would see in other systems.

And it hasn't led to inefficiency. It's actually a decent system if all you're caring about is capitalistic output. However, if you care about quality of life, this is a totally different thing altogether, which we're gonna get to in a little second here. But the other reason why tribals have persisted after they were originally set up is because within Korean culture, you do have this strong predilection for strict hierarchical structures

And I want to give you an idea of how hierarchical Korean culture is. When you are in Korea, if you're there for even a short time, people are sure to ask you their age. Your age. Because the way they talk to you changes. Like the grammatical structure changes. If you are even a few months older than them.

It matters that much. And when you leave your company, go home or hanging out with your friends, your title in the same way [00:16:00] in the U. S. that we use terms like Mr. and Mrs. Is often your position at the company. Like CEO would be like your title in a social setting. CEO Malcolm. That is how much this stuff matters in Korea.

It is baked into every layer of the culture. Some startups in Korea have tried to get around this through doing things like Insisting that everyone uses English all the time and only English names because it causes people to use different grammatical structures because they don't fall back on these, which leads to less hierarchy.

Like it is that bad. It is people are like, okay so we've got to get to why all of this matters.

Simone Collins: And I would say this is even a trope. I'm watching a Korean drama now on Amazon prime that is about a dating coach, actually a female dating coach. And it begins with a bunch of meet cute situations and then individuals involved like the man and the woman in each situation, not following through and not dating, which is so [00:17:00] South Korean, but there is a, like a small publishing company, like a startup in this drama.

And it's. The CEO of it keeps giving these speeches about how we like, we should not, we should have an open office. We should only address each other by our first names to have open and easy communication. So I think it's even become a trope or a joke. for visionary or self aggrandized, trying to be visionary people in South Korea, trying to break down these barriers and it being seen ironically by the culture is

Malcolm Collins: cringe, which is really interesting to me.

And this, to understand how much the tribal system matters in Korea, you are like not a part of it. Person of equal status to other people if you don't work at one of the Chibolds.

The Chibolds are extremely important to your social status within Korea. They are, when you are dating somebody, when you are, like, your life is spent to try to get that perfect test score so you can get into [00:18:00] the perfect Chibold. And Korea is also an extremely meritocratic system, but meritocratic in regards to measurable statistics, not in regards to measurable efficacy.

And this is the core of what will cause Korea to fail as a culture and what makes it unsalvageable, really. And I'll get to why, because it may seem like such a small thing. Why is the meritocratic thing so important? Because in Korea, and when I say meritocratic in the extreme, there is a test one day each year.

You can only take it this one day. If you're sick, you have to wait until next year. This is the test that determines what colleges you get into. It is so important, they ground all of the planes on that day. This test is the most extreme, so there's no potential distractions, that's why they do it. They ground traffic that day.

Simone Collins: That just sounds like it would make me extra bad at taking the test, because they make such a big deal out of it. It

Malcolm Collins: sounds horrible. Oh yeah, it [00:19:00] is nightmarish. Is there a spike in

Simone Collins: suicides right before the test?

Malcolm Collins: A huge spike and after gosh there's lots of things of parents like killing their kids, even like I've seen, they didn't get high enough scores or.

Or kids killing their families

because they didn't get a high enough score or, it's horrible.

Give you an idea of just how horrible it is. One in three students in Korea feels suicidal. According to this poll I found.

Malcolm Collins: Everything is based around this one meritocracy and this is a problem with statistics based meritocracies instead of efficacy based meritocracies. In America, you can fail out of college and still start a company.

Simone Collins: Yeah, it's almost a badge of honor.

Malcolm Collins: In America, we a stall the entrepreneur. These people are all the politicians, they're America's greatest strengths as a small business owner. You do not have this mindset in Korea at all. I remember I was looking because at Korean matchmaking things I wanted to see like what rank I would get on a Korean matchmaking website.

Okay. To see who I'd get matched with as like a partner. And And they [00:20:00] give your job a status, right? Being an entrepreneur is right under being a fisherman in status. Wait, you're better. You're more

Simone Collins: of a marriage catch

Malcolm Collins: if you're a fisherman than an entrepreneur in Korea. But it needs to be understood how demonized this is.

So at my VC, we were the number one early stage venture capital firm by government survey. So this meant that when the government did a survey of where early stage startups wanted capital from, like what was considered the most prestigious capital to get, that was my firm. And I was their director of strategy and people kept getting arrested at my firm.

They basically ruined the founder's life. This was a man who made a lot of money tried to pour that money back into making the Korean economy better and he spent I think five years in jail over this. And it was all overturned. It was all proven to be political. It really genuinely like this experience in Korea, having them raid our office and stuff like that kind of makes me hate the Korean government and the Korean culture.

But like part of me loves the Korean culture, but [00:21:00] seeing the way that they targeted and what was the sin of this company? Yeah, they made up some trumped up charges that were mostly proven to be trumped up as time went on. But what was the core sin of this company? And I remember being told like by other Koreans that I talked to that this company was bad news because what it was doing We found an arbitrage opportunity.

We would invest in people who went to non top tier colleges,

Simone Collins: so it was a lot like the like peter teal's thing with Encouraging kids to not go to college and instead just pursue a

Malcolm Collins: business Yeah, that was it. Yeah. We also invested in some people who dropped out of college, which was seen as particularly bad in the US.

If you can't understand why people would hate this so much, it would be like in the US if there was a VC firm that like disproportionately invested in only meth addicts. You'd be like, that's a very bad message for children to invest in math addicts. Like obviously our society, because in Korea in the U S when we look at rich people who have gotten rich because of [00:22:00] institutional mechanisms, like their parents were rich for many generations and they were born into The ownership of 3M or something.

We're like, they don't deserve that money. That is society not working properly because they didn't build that wealth themselves.

Simone Collins: In

Malcolm Collins: Korea, it's actually the exact opposite. If somebody gets rich out of nowhere, it's ah, something fishy must have happened. They must have cheated in some way because this isn't how our society works.

Our society is this strict incremental meritocracy. Now, what does all this have to do with fertility rates? Okay. Cause we're going to get to that. And I think what indeed very interesting. So it came to me because I was actually meditating on this topic for a while. Can we get low fertility rates?

How do I fix it? How do I fix it? And somebody was talking to me recently and I was like, Oh yeah, I want to have 12 kids. And there you go. You better start saving now to pay for them. I think it was my actually who sent this to me for college. I was just laughing, I was like, obviously I'm not paying for my 12 kids [00:23:00] to go to college, that's comical.

You can't afford that. No, no realistic person, no matter how wealthy you are, could afford 12 kids in college. In the U. S., that is not damning those kids to a life in the middle class. If you look at, and there's been some great studies at this, of So you've got to be able to sort by the people who could get into the top colleges which is one of the problems.

If you're just sorting by the people who got into and went to top colleges, then you're partially sorting for the people who got in. And there's been some studies who did a good job of like blind testing this through like accidentally not admitted people or something like that. And it found marginal differences between the people who got into Harvard and didn't get into Harvard.

This is more true in wealthier individuals and for non wealthy individuals. Typically, if you're from a less wealthy family, elite colleges matter a lot more to you than, Less selective colleges or no college at all.

But if you're from a wealthy or above average income family, they really don't matter that much.

Malcolm Collins: American society is actually very good at sorting at uplifting people who are [00:24:00] competent and didn't go to top universities. Because in America, if you start a small company or something like that is seen as the most legitimate way to rise up in society. The most legitimate way to make money. And it is the most culturally aggrandized way.

In Korea, you can't do this. In Korea, because of this meritocratic system, it means that when I have additional kids, those are resources not going to the kids I already have. And those are resources, so my family, like what I have in America, there's been some great studies on multiple kids, because a lot of people are like, oh, isn't that going to hurt your kids prospects in life?

And it's You didn't think to look like people have done studies on this. I think it's like up to three kids. Every kid actually helps all of their siblings prospects in life in mental health. And then after that, it is a marginal decline with every additional kid. It's not that important in something like South Korea.

You're basically halving their life prospects [00:25:00] with every kid you have. So you pulled up some statistics here. Do you want to go over them, Simone, or do you want me to? Yeah,

Simone Collins: just to , just to give a picture of just how much people are spending in this case I found one article on what is it called?

Sorry. I found one article on Korea Junang Daily that reported, and I'm just going to quote here. Spending on children's private education nearly equals what these families paid for food and drinks. That's 636, 000 won. And housing and utility bills, that's 539, 000 won. But that's just an average. In reality, parents in their 40s and 50s spend million won, spend millions of won a month on sending their children to middle or high schools.

In or sorry on sending their children in middle and high schools to afterschool academies. Now, these are just an aside, the ones that help them prep for this insane test and other assessments that are big bottlenecks to getting into major [00:26:00] universities that Malcolm mentioned. The article continues.

Relatively poor families are no different. Monthly private education costs. 482, 000 won for the bottom 20 percent income group more than their food and beverage cost. It cannot be a normal society if lower income families spend more on educating their children than living cost. If so, what is the need for public education?

So that, I think that article gives you a picture of just how much parents feel like they have to spend. Can you imagine spending more On, and this is not your child's school. Parents obviously complained in the United States. Oh, I spent, 40, 000 on my, kids, private middle school every year.

And it is insanely expensive, but these are kids who go to public school in South Korea, and these are good schools. It's not like school in South Korea is terrible, but parents feel like they need to spend incrementally on top of that. Which I should say this, there's an underrated side effect of this, which I do see show up in a lot of.

[00:27:00] Documentaries and other pieces on low fertility rates in South Korea is Not only is this really expensive for parents, it's pretty miserable for children. They're not enjoying they have the highest

Malcolm Collins: suicide rate in the world by far, last I checked.

It's so bad that 42.3% of deaths among teenagers are due to suicide. And over 50% of people in their twenties are due to suicide. We is 47.9% of the deaths of people in their thirties are due to suicide. That is insane when you're dealing with about half of all deaths among young people are due to suicide. And for those just listening, I had posted above a statistic, which showed that now. South Korea has the least happy students in the OACD. Oh, Andy S South Korea does still appear to top the world suicide. Charts.

Simone Collins: Yeah, throughout middle and high school, which is when you are most prone to having serious depressive issues, being really emotionally unstable, right?

Like, when you're most vulnerable emotionally. [00:28:00] You are having zero fun. You're going to a cram school after school, your parents are paying through the nose for it. So they really expect you to do well because they are sacrificing a ton. You can't just blow it off. It's not like some free program that they're not sacrificing for as well.

So your parents are straining, you're straining, no one's doing what they want to do. It's ridiculous.

Malcolm Collins: And it doesn't get better as you get older. So this is from this V. Malkowitz piece, the most recent one who friend of the show, love the guy. Every time I read about South Korea, the situation seems worse.

The linked post has women working nine to six saying they have no time for anything else. Often studying IV drip on weekends to be able to keep working and acting like that is normal. Talk of women forced to leave their jobs or past promotions due to having a child is common. And from a quote that I found where you also see this is one 28 year old woman who worked in HR said she'd seen people who were forced [00:29:00] to leave their jobs or who were passed over for promotions after taking maternity leave, which had been enough to convince her to never have a baby.

Both men and women are entitled to a year's leave during the first eight years of their child's life. But in 2022, only 7 percent of new fathers use some of the leave compared to 70 percent of new mothers. You can see how geared this is against women here. And I think that, This you're like what people are really like on IV trips, so they don't have time to eat, so they just study all day, work all day.

Yes. This is real when you build a meritocratic system that isn't based on efficacy. So consider the differences in the American system and the Korean system and why the Korean system always leads to this outcome.

The American system is about building systems that genuinely improve the lives of other people as measured by other people wanting to pay for those [00:30:00] systems.

Simone Collins: Yeah. And that's why you have notes like Tim Ferriss foundational For our work week, right? We extol that. We don't care that he works four hours. We care that he makes so much money and gets so much done.

Malcolm Collins: So the goal of the American system is to, with the minimum amount of effort, produce the maximum amount of social good as measured by what people will pay for.

This is the fundamental goal of capitalism and is why I love capitalism. It is a great system for efficiency and reducing suffering overall. Whereas most other systems and people are like what about the people who aren't producing things that improve the quality of other people's lives?

And I do believe that we should have some level of safety net for those individuals, but it should be fairly minimal. Like I, I. I am okay with the people who are not improving the lives of other people suffering to some extent. Now, the problem with capitalist systems is that they do not do a good [00:31:00] job of motivating long term goods, i.

e. good for the environment or having kids, because they can't use the kids immediately, at least in the short term. Eventually, they will start paying attention. Making their own kids or having their own family towns and stuff like that. But that is only when the economic pressures begin to affect the companies, right?

But outside of that, within this American system, what I am focused on with my kids, like when I think about, Educating them when I think about raising them is how do I make them the type of people who can produce something that other people are going to want right in the Korean system. It is also a true meritocracy, but in a completely different context, it is the currency is totally different.

Yes, based on work hours and score measurable things. To a lot of people at the surface level, this can appear more just [00:32:00] because they haven't thought about the downstream consequences of establishing things in this manner,

Both: right? Because

Malcolm Collins: everyone can compete in an open system that isn't directly tied to the outcome.

put of these individuals in terms of goods that other people want, you lead to everybody rushing towards these incremental improvements. Which means that there is never an economic case to be made for having seven or 12 kids. And a lot of people like when we talk about seven kids and we'll do another episode on this, they're like, that's an insane number of kids.

The average American had seven kids in the 1800s. Okay, AVERAGE. AVERAGE. Does that mean for every American who didn't get married, or had no kids, there was another American having 14? Okay. That meant for every American who decided to have a family of three kids, there was another family having 11, this is a, it is normal [00:33:00] to raise large families in this sort of mindset, but you've got to build a mindset around this a mindset of abundance and of true efficacious capitalism, because even if you solve all these other problems in Korea, you don't solve the basic economics of having a kid, nor do you solve the terrible quality of life.

When you look at Koreans, much more than the U. S. In the U. S., it is the apocalyptic thinking, which I think is core to the American identity, which people use to justify why they won't have kids. Or we could say frontier

Simone Collins: thinking.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, don't you know the world's about to be destroyed? Don't you know that the the climate's about to crash?

In South Korea, they say, don't you know that my life is terrible? Why would I bring somebody else into this? There was one story I was reading about a woman who told her husband, I just cannot justify it given how low the quality of life is in this country. And that's heartbreaking, but it's also true.

Korea as a society, and I do not think that you might think that I'm anti [00:34:00] tribal here, I'm not. I think that the tribals are the only thing that can fix this.

Simone Collins: Interesting. Wait, how do you think that? One politically speaking and philosophically speaking, we aren't a tribal in general because we're anti any concentration of power in one organization or any organization that gets too large because it starts to grow cancerous growths that are very wasteful.

I think to get rid of the tribal

Malcolm Collins: is to get rid of the core of Korean culture.

Simone Collins: Okay. So yeah, you basically you're against cultural oration more than you are efficient markets, but how could tribal's fix this problem?

Malcolm Collins: So tribals need to change. What they are judging the job candidates on that they are accepting

Simone Collins: So if they change it to market based forces rather than performative forces you

Malcolm Collins: would see if you want to fix the entire Korean system, I'll tell you how you fix it.

You can fix it in one generation, Korea. Listen to me here. You freak the f**k out if you do this, but it would fix things. How do you [00:35:00] fix the entire, the tribals wouldn't even need to do this. A politician, a single president could do this. If they could get this past students scores on this single exam that they do.

Should be modified by the number of siblings they have.

Both: So you apply

Malcolm Collins: a modifier like they get multiplied by 1. 3 or something like that. If they have a sibling 1. 5, if they have two siblings, 1. 6, if they have three siblings, that would offset the cost downside to having additional kids in terms of how well they do on this test.

Now people would say, that's not the kid's fault. Shouldn't you be modifying people's career prospects based on how many kids they have, right? Wouldn't that do more? And the answer is no, not really. And I'll explain why one that would take an intergenerational time to have an effect. But two there, you are forcing companies to do something that is fundamentally [00:36:00] against their best interests, which is searching like, unfairly raising the status of people who are not necessarily more productive within the company. However, in a system where these kids didn't do worse because they they were less competent. It's not that they're going to be worse at picking up company skills or anything like that. It was because they had less resources due to how many kids their parents had when contrasted with how their parents could have deployed resources.

This system now allows parents to essentially work to change the system for their kids by having more kids. You, very quickly, would get families having five or six kids if you made this one change. But there is another change that I would add on top of this that could be done from the perspective of Chivals.

Which is to stop hiring people based on these scores. And start hiring people based on proven efficacy in real world environments.

Both: In the

Malcolm Collins: US, this is largely how hiring works. This [00:37:00] isn't like an insane system. When I applied to a company in the US, yeah, my GPT, GPA matters a little bit. But they're looking at my extracurriculars.

How many clubs did you run? How many things did you do? Have you started a company before? Have you started any sort of business making venture before? Even a

Simone Collins: common convention in resumes when one adds bullets under the description. Is something along the lines of, increased sales by 14%. Like people definitely sell themselves based on tangible achievements made for previous employers or independently.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. So I have an MBA from Stanford, which is in terms of graduate degrees. I think still the hardest graduate degree program to get into in the world, much harder than most PhDs. At least PhDs at Stanford or Harvard. We've done another video where we went over the stats on this because a lot of people aren't familiar with how hard top tier MBA programs are to get into.

And while this helps me with jobs, it more opens doors for phone calls and talking to people. It's not, [00:38:00] like getting it. And it's the same with Simone, graduate degree from Cambridge. So we have these top tier degrees and they definitely open doors and they definitely help. But even now the system's beginning to transition away from them, especially if you're talking about top tier jobs.

And this also, we need to be realistic about the way the American system works in America. GPA does matter if you're going to work for one of these giant bureaucracies. Okay. But the giant bureaucracies are increasingly becoming less and less palatable places to work in America. As the gig economy rises, you are entering a world where more and more your actual ability to create things that people want to pay for is your value within the economic system.

And when you're dealing with the elite part of the economy, Like the part that the Stanford MBA opens up to me, that part values education. The least the other part that values education pretty low is the small local part of the economy. If I'm going to work for like local, whatever business owner, he cares much [00:39:00] more about what things I've started in the past.

Same with if I'm starting like a local landscaping company or something like that. It is only this middle bureaucratic part that really no one wants to work in anyway. That middle bureaucratic part is the high part of Korean society and is their entire system. That's why you have people on these IP trips, where they will go into work and I, this is true in Japan and Korea workplace theater is everything in these countries.

Both: You

Malcolm Collins: can't leave until your boss has left. Even if you're no longer working, it's stupid. Anyway. So any final thoughts, Simone?

Simone Collins: Yeah. I do think This is an important discussion to have because we often point to the gender wars, but the gender wars, while real, are not as pronounced as you might think. And I think this is a much bigger factor when people are looking at what they're going to do.

Malcolm Collins: I'd actually say that the gender wars are currently why fertility rates are low.

If you look at that low marriage rate, what was it?

27 percent of women in their twenties. [00:40:00] Only 27 percent think that marriage is essential.

Industry Collins: A

Malcolm Collins: decline from 53%. in 2008. So a really quick decline there. And that means that, those women aren't getting married.

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: The truth.

So people want to say then how do you save Korean culture? When a Korean moves to the U S their fertility rate increases by about 50%.

Industry Collins: The

Malcolm Collins: way we save Korean culture is through multiculturalism. It is through the Koreans that had the gumption to leave their country and set up ethnic communities that can intergenerationally maintain a sense of cultural identity, but within ecosystems that value them for their productivity.

In America, like what are the classic Korean businesses? It is entrepreneurship. That is what Koreans are known for in America. People may not know this, but I think it's actually the majority of sushi restaurants are run by Koreans in America. So they often do Japanese food in America, but they also often, the Korean laundromat, the Korean [00:41:00] so often do you see disproportionately the entrepreneurial spirit because they are pushed out of their own country, it's not rewarded in their country in the way it is in America.

And it creates an excellent opportunity for us to focus on helping those communities, because I don't think there's anything we can do for Korea at this point, unless some figure in the country decides to want to change the culture instead of thinking the solution is just to go more conservative or to side with one side of the gender wars, because both sides of the gender wars have genuine grievances in Korea right now.

And there's really no fixing it within Korea that I can see without, as I said, Simple fix. All you have to do is change their score on that major exam based on how many siblings they have. And you're going to see a flip like that. You're going to see riots. You're going to have a yeah,

Simone Collins: I couldn't imagine seeing that ever actually [00:42:00] happen.

But

Malcolm Collins: because people don't want real solutions. They want lip service. They want handouts. They want that's the commodity they I've heard that Korea is becoming more. Diverse in the countryside these days. People have told me, I'm like, Oh, that's great. You're bringing in like seasonal migrants.

That is not I've been in Seoul. Seoul is not a diverse, go to Seoul. You won't see I could go a day without seeing anyone who wasn't a Korean. Yeah. I had people who I invested in. Like I chose their company for investment. Tell me that they weren't fully comfortable with me being in the country for aesthetic reasons, it makes the country gross to have too many ethnicities here.

Simone Collins: Koreans are so beautiful. I think it's more just that we're just not beautiful enough. Yeah, it's sad, this is why we have people who are trans Korean, but the surgeries just don't work out. So don't try guys. Just don't try. It's not gonna, can't pull it off. Oh I feel bad because I love South Korea.

I think Koreans are awesome. Really cool [00:43:00] people. And I also think that they, I don't know the non chable system is pretty amazing. When you look at the creatives in Korea, when you look at the small startups, they're actually doing really amazing things. And I think the reason why we don't see them as this dynamic that you have spoken about in other podcasts, whereby the green market is just big enough to keep startups within it.

Meaning that they're not forced to be global first but then that means that we never really, it's very hard for them to jump out of that economy once they've optimized themselves around it because it's so idiosyncratic. So I just feel as this nation slowly dies through its low birth rates, we're also losing this immense creative talent that is blossoming there.

Oh,

Malcolm Collins: it's so true, yeah. Because they destroyed the lives of their youth through this system. And not just that, I need to, if we're just gonna talk about Korea, their culinary so if you're in America and you have eaten Korean food, [00:44:00] you don't get it. Korea has a whole diversity of foods that like we don't have in the like I'll explain this differently in the U.

S. You can go to restaurants that are very different. I could go to an Indian restaurant or an Italian restaurant or a American pub, like gastropub type restaurant, right? And you would, this is a big diversity of food types within Korea. There are as many diverse food type restaurants that are totally unique to the country.

When you get Korean food in the United States, you are getting just one of those food types.

Simone Collins: Yeah, like typically Korean barbecue or something related.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, it's like these like hot pot places you can go to where they like only serve these giant like hot pots of dishes. There's other type that I absolutely love where it's like a ring of egg around the outside of a dish and then inside it's like this caramelized meat that you dip in the egg and it's fantastic.

Then there's those fantastic meat [00:45:00] restaurants where it's like meat specialists. And then you dip them in this fermented bean paste as well as a few other things before eating them.

Simone Collins: You're not even mentioning all the Italian inspired food, all the French inspired food.

Malcolm Collins: Totally different than French or Italian food.

Like in the same way. But it's

Simone Collins: just like with Japan, they put their own spin on it.

Yeah. They put their own spin on it and it's so freaking good. It's so much better than real Italian food or real French food. It's insane.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Or their ice cream places. There's a special type of dessert you can get there that they have restaurants to specialize in, which is like a shaved ice thing.

But it's like really smooth and I've never seen it in the United States or anywhere else. It's really fascinating. Oh, one type of Korean restaurant that has made it into the United States and people might not know that this is a specialty food that came from Korea. If you want to get an idea of Korean food diversity is Paris Baguette.

If you've ever eaten at a Paris Baguette and you're like, I have never seen food like this before. What is this weird decorated hot [00:46:00] dog device? That is not from Paris. That is a Korean chain, and it is a type of food, like they're cool croquet buns that have the curry inside of them.

That is not from Europe at all. That is a specialty dish in Korea that could not be more different than I think what most people think of when they think Korean food in the United States, which is more just Korean barbecue, which is honestly, when I'm in Korea, I almost never eat. I think it's one of the worst types of Korean food which is just so sad.

Oh, and beep and bop, which is like weird because people in the west.

We've been Bob and yet at Korea, it's like something you would only have at like a corporate cafeteria or like a school. Like you don't go to BB and bop restaurants that I've seen in soul at least.

Malcolm Collins: Oh God, and they're boiled chicken restaurants. They have some that's even worse than that. So one of the things just to rag on Korea a little bit here. So you go to Korea and one of the weird things about Korea is everyone there intuitively believes that like food is like really important to your health.

Like even though they've gotten over all of this like ancient medicine and stuff like that, they like actually haven't. [00:47:00] And they're like if you're down, then you need to eat this sort of food. Or if you're feeling this, you need to eat this sort of food or this sort of food is good for this season.

So the two garbage tier Korean restaurants that they have in Korea one is Korean style sushi. Which is different than Japanese style sushi. It is garbage. Oh, the other type is Korean boiled fish that you'll get everywhere in the country. Oh, see,

Simone Collins: I thought, we're going to have your more controversial take, which is very popular among some people, but not you.

Which is Korean pizza. It's like

Malcolm Collins: the eyes and skin and stuff, and they'll send it

Simone Collins: to you? You hate Korean pizza, which is both very expensive Oh,

Malcolm Collins: Korean pizza is Oh, talk about Korean pizza, this is fascinating.

Simone Collins: It has all sorts of stuff on it. It seems very fancy, and it seems really cool, and it seems incredibly modern and futuristic.

Malcolm Collins: What is the stuff that it'll have on it? Can you Oh, it'll

Simone Collins: have we have cheese stuffed crust. They'll have all kinds of stuffed crust. They will have layers of stuff. There are all these crazy gimmicks.

Malcolm Collins: While you're pulling that up, I'm going to talk about the medicinal food that like I've been to restaurants there and it is so bad. It is [00:48:00] boiled chicken. And what they do is they put like a whole chicken in like boiling water.

And then you just eat the boiled chicken from like the full Chicken? They'll take the head off and everything, so it's not like super gross. Oh my god. But it is

Industry Collins: just

Malcolm Collins: blandest, and you eat it with salted water. That is what you eat it with. It is the blandest food I have ever had.

Simone Collins: Yeah, that does not sound good.

That does not sound good at all. Yeah, I'll let you separately, like in post, go find examples. I'm not finding any. Something to

Malcolm Collins: definitely try when you're in Korea, by the way, is Korean fried chicken. One opened up near us, and it is Not okay. It's not as good as the stuff that I would get in.

Now here you might be thinking Korean fried chicken. I can't be that dissimilar from American fried chicken. One it's generally much better when you get it in Korea than American fried chicken. It's like dramatically more moist. I don't know the difference in how they cook it, but [00:49:00] also just the whole routine around eating.

It is very different. For example, the appetizer that you get at the table, you know, instead of like nachos or something like that beforehand, or not nachos, but, you know, chips and dip like you'd have in a Mexican restaurant. So at the place that I used to go. It was raw pasta. They had like a thing. like a cylindrical thing.

filled with raw pasta.

You would, you would munch on while waiting for your dish. You don't like crunchy crack, crack, raw pasta. Yeah. That.

Malcolm Collins: So sweet potato pizza, for example, is common in Korea. Oh, that was, sweet potato is actually really interesting in Korea. So you can go to a Korean 7 Eleven, and in the winter, they will have warm potatoes. You can buy, just buy a potato and snack on it as you're walking. And I get them all the time.

It's actually really good.

Simone Collins: Yeah, sweet potatoes were also a big thing in Japan. Just selling them from the carts. Really nice and warm and steamy in the winter when

Malcolm Collins: it's cold. Haven't even talked about street food yet. But yeah, all the things we're losing. I guess what I was trying to get with this is I think we can think that South Korea has [00:50:00] successfully exported the best parts of their culture overseas because of. K pop and everything like that, and they just haven't.

When they go extinct, we are going to lose things. that our grandchildren will never be able to fully recreate or recognize as a unique cultural contribution. And that saddens me.

Simone Collins: Yeah. Oh, okay. Okay. I'm on the Korea pizza hut website. So one example of an, a typical fancy Korean pizza is A seafood King, which has tons of shrimp all over it.

There are some prawns and then you can always get like a special edge to your pizza, like a special crust or just the original dough crust. But special crusts are not like special crusts in the United States where they're like cheese stuffed each crust in the seafood King pizza that I'm looking at. It looks like a pastry, like a cheese filled pastry.

I I don't know how else to describe it. And you can

Malcolm Collins: also get [00:51:00] I'm looking at one here. So this one has things like egg tart pizzas. Yeah. Which has barbecued meat and egg tart. Or this one here is sweet and sour pork pizza, which right here they, so this is the description of somebody who's reviewing them.

Finally, truly stretching the limits of what qualifies as a pizza fusion. And ultimately food is culinary Frankenstein's monsters. With no crust or bread to speak of, this pizza is built upon layers of breaded sweet and sour pork, which is covered in kimchi and mozzarella cheese, and then sprinkled with olives.

Simone Collins: And these all seem like they would

Malcolm Collins: taste really good. The bread of this pizza. is breaded sweet and sour pork. It is a pizza where the bottom layer is essentially a what's the word for that? Where they, it's that, that German dish schnitzel, but like sweet and sour schnitzel for the bread. [00:52:00]

Simone Collins: Yeah. So you're like, I'm done with that.

But then you order in it and it's,

Malcolm Collins: no, it's not good. It's like soggy often and not very tasty. I think when you get that complex,

Simone Collins: you just can't. Make it work the same way.

Malcolm Collins: You'll get an idea of this. If you go to Paris baguette, like if people want a genuinely unique Korean dish in their local area, go to Paris baguette the croquettes are what I would suggest as the best dish.

Cause it's one of the most, but if you go for the dishes that are really meant to be visually appealing. Like the hot dog style dishes you'll see that they're tasteless and plasticky. And this is not uncommon in Korea. Anyway, I love you to death Simone. This has turned out to be one of our longer episodes but worth it to talk about a place that is I think really important to me.

And I think that there are real solutions to Korea's fertility rate that the government could really implement. But it needs to understand that the problem is more systemic than they are giving it credit for, and the way that they fix it is with the families that are having seven [00:53:00] or eight kids, not the families having three kids.

And so they need to find systems that people can cheese that will lead to that, and that can end up saving Korean culture and Korean ethnicity from being a footnote in history. While the other thing that we need to do is support our local Korean communities and prevent them from losing their cultural distinction.

Which would be I think truly sad.

Simone Collins: Yeah. And I have to say once again, you have surprised and delighted me. I love that I've read so many explanations as to why there are fertility problems in South Korea, never before have I read look at the tables and also look at the. performative meritocratic sorting system for talent.

So thank you for finding more interesting angles to look at these problems. I love you so much, Malcolm.

Malcolm Collins: I love you too.

This episode's likely gonna go live interspersed [00:54:00] with old episodes that we filmed for the backlog during the during the birth.

In this eye-opening episode, Malcolm and Simone delve into the complex geopolitical landscape surrounding Russia and its invasion of Ukraine. Malcolm breaks down the true motivations behind Putin's actions, dispelling common misconceptions about Russia's defense against NATO and the reunification of ancient Russian territories. He reveals how Russia's heavy reliance on oil and gas revenue drives its foreign policy decisions, leading to a catastrophic miscalculation that has essentially resulted in the self-genocide of the Russian people. The discussion also covers the surprising Muslim population within Russia, the country's masterful propaganda tactics, and the potential for a future power struggle that could reshape the global political landscape.

Malcolm Collins: [00:00:00] this also shows me that the argument that this is about self defense for Russia is wrong, or that this is about defense against NATO

Simone Collins: is wrong.

Oh yeah, because they're destroying any human capital for self defense capacity that they have. Yeah, if he

Malcolm Collins: was actually worried about self defense, he would, he would have stopped the war a long time ago leaving a government like that in power in the Ukraine was not worth a guaranteed death of his entire ethnocultural group. Yeah. Which is what he is putting in place.

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

Malcolm Collins: Like we should stop sending billions to the Ukraine. Like, Whoa, don't you know that a lot of it is being like funneled back into Democrat politicians pockets and stuff like it.

It's like, yeah, all of that is true, but you would know what we're not sending to the Ukraine right now, our own people.

Simone Collins: Because it's neutralizing what was once a non trivial threat. Not a non trivial threat,

Malcolm Collins: the single [00:01:00] greatest threat to America's geopolitical power for the last century.

Would you like to know more?

Malcolm Collins: Hello, Simone. I'm excited for you to bring some stats to the table. Stats episodes are always the best, but I also want to apply sort of geopolitical knowledge to a world issue that I've noticed, especially within right leaning communities. There's a lot of misconceptions about what's going on and what the motivations are of various players.

Simone Collins: Yeah. I I titled our stupid stream yard room, Russia. I do not think that country means what you think it means, which is. The thing that came across my inbox this week, which I thought was fascinating. So. And very underrated sub stack called axis of ordinary by Alexander cruel is a daily part of my reading routine, even though I have cut pretty much everything else out, sadly, due to workload and whatnot.

Y'all check it out. It's great. He has a lot of spicy links. A lot of it's AI, a lot [00:02:00] of it's Ukraine, and then a lot of, some of it's psychology and science. He'll share a roundup of links with short summaries. Very great sub stack. It's free to subscribe. And he's a very thoughtful person, though I've never talked with him.

I don't know him. But on a recent roundup, a daily roundup that he shared, he shared this about Russia, which very much surprised me. So he starts with a quote from Vladimir Putin. Russia's cultural and ethnic diverse diversity is Russia's strength. Our state was built around the values of multi ethnic harmony.

Then Krull proceeds to write, many people on the political right, admire Russia and see Putin as the savior of white Christendom. What they don't know is that Russia is a higher percentage of Muslims than, say, Germany. And it's not because of an open border policy. Worse, instead of building a wall, Putin has sacrificed thousands of Russian soldiers, not only to keep Muslims in Russia against their will, but to give them Russian passports, which has led to numerous [00:03:00] major terror attacks, such as the Beslan school massacre that ended with the deaths of 334 people, which I haven't even heard of,

at an official event where Putin gifted a copy of the Koran during a visit to a mosque, he noted that the desecration of the Koran is a crime in Russia. Nikita Zurolev, a teenager who burned a Koran, was extradited to Chechnya under Putin's watch. There he was tortured and beaten on camera. In 2015, Putin inaugurated the Moscow Cathedral Mosque, a city where tens of thousands of Muslims fill the street for Eid prayers.

Russia has also introduced the Islamic banking system. P. S. One of Russia's most famous TV hosts, the Jewish Vladimir Solovyov, recently chanted Allahu Akbar in front of Russia's Islamist mercenaries. So I think the biggest thing that really surprised me here was this. This note about Germany that there's a higher percentage of Muslims in Russia than Germany [00:04:00] wild because everyone, you, you have this vision of Russia, which is these blonde bombshell women and these stoic.

Statuesque men,

Malcolm Collins: right? Well, the vision, I mean, I want to be clear, and this is where people get Russia wrong, they get it wrong for a few core reasons. One is, is they are aware that there is this superficial view of Russia. That was the way we painted them as our enemy in the cold war. There's the new view of Russia, which is coming because of.

Putin's PSYOPs campaigns in the West. Specifically, he wanted to appeal to right leaning political groups. And he did that by acting as if he was like this and keep in mind, like we've got nothing against Muslims or anything like that, but what I would say is that the image that a lot of people have of Putin being a Is not correlated with his behavior at all.

Simone Collins: Yeah, he represents a bastion of, well, they say Western culture, Western civilization, but really people are referring to broadly Christianity. If I [00:05:00] had their,

Malcolm Collins: they're referring to like an old school, like homophobic which, which Russia is, I should be clear about that. White centered Christian and And a lot of people, as we point out, I mean, racists are generally dumber than the general population.

So it's very easy to confuse them with these sorts of tactics. And a lot of them have actually been swayed into believing this iteration of Putin and believing his motivations around this war. Because I think the question could be. You could say, well, why is Putin doing all this if his goal is the savior of like old European values and a return to, you know, Christendom and a return to ethno states?

And it's because that's not what Russia is doing. That is not what Why they are invading the Ukraine that has nothing to do with it, this idea of they're not, and a lot of people on the right, I've actually seen believe this like, like a right wing conspiracy theories that there are like Nazis in the Ukraine, which there were, there were Nazi sympathy groups in the Ukraine that were [00:06:00] bigger than in other regions, but they were not it.

Like it wasn't like the country was about to become a Nazi state or something like that, right? This would be the same way that the left will find, you know, somebody making okay signs at a rally and then be like, Oh we're, we're gonna go attack them because the, the, 4chan, that's a long story about how that became a thing in the U.

S. But there are occasional Nazis in like U. S. rightist groups as well, right? If we allowed that to be used as justification for the extermination of those entire populations, like that's quite another thing. And that isn't his justification because that, that's not what he's fighting for, right?

He's not fighting for a return to this whole system. So the question is, what is he fighting for? Like what motivates Russia's foreign policy decisions? When you look at Russia's recent history, and Putin came to power. And even before that, to an extent it becomes clear what's motivating Russia. The mistake is [00:07:00] seeing Russia as a nation state because it doesn't think, act, or is motivated like a nation state.

It is motivated by Like a oil and gas cartel really like a mob that makes the majority of its money from oil and gas, and all of, and when I say the majority of its money, over 50 percent of the state revenue come, in Russia, comes from oil and gas. That's huge. It motivates their every decision. Like I can't, I can't, I can't.

Overstate how big that would be if 50 percent of your state's revenue and the state was a totalitarian state was a single leader was coming from one industry. Basically, that means that that state leader is basically CEO of a company in that industry with no laws that apply to them. Interested in advancing the cause of that industry.

And we can see this because of how much money Putin has been squirreling away. He hasn't been using the money that he's generating to improve, you know, Russia's quality of life or anything like that. He has been taking huge, huge amounts and squirreling it away for his descendants. [00:08:00] So the question is.

Well, where do you see this in, in foreign policy? Right? Well, so first when, when the Soviet union broke up their first goal, and I'm, I'm going to put a video here. There's a great video. If you want to go into this in great detail where they go over that's in way more details, but I'm just going to give you the top notes.

If you find these topics interesting and what to go much deeper on them, as well as look into sources, I strongly suggest a video called Russia's catastrophic oil and gas problem.

Uh, by real life lore, which is one of the best summaries of this particular subject I've seen on the internet.

Malcolm Collins: There's a huge problem with a lot of oil in Kazakhstan because that could be a, a, a competitor to Russia. So, they made a point of owning 42 percent of their oil pipelines and industry, and they're basically a client state, so they don't really worry about them.

And then they ensured that all of the oil that was going out of Kazakhstan was being shipped through Russia, through pipes that go through Russia and out of Russian ports. Azure by Jan also had a lot of oil in the region. But Azure by Jan could only get its [00:09:00] oil out without going through a Russian controlled area or one of their, their enemy areas by putting a pipeline through Georgia, what happened immediately after they put this pipeline through Georgia, Russia invades Georgia.

Okay, let's go a bit further into the future. Wait, what, what,

Simone Collins: what about all that, that news coverage about. Putin having this obsession with Russia's history and this narrative. We're going to get into

Malcolm Collins: that in a second. I'm just going over the data first. Okay. All right. Yeah. Yeah. This is interesting.

All right.

So then a discovery gets made in the Ukraine that, that Ukraine, it controls Europe's second largest known reserves of natural gas. And almost 80 percent of that is east of the Dnipro river, which is important. So they were then in talks with, they had a deal signed with Shell, Exxon, and Mobil to come in and produce that gas.

Well, that was, was a huge chunk of that that was under those contracts was in the Donbas. That was the region that Russia fought in. First annex a while [00:10:00] back that ended up in validating all of the contracts that they had signed to improve this. And to give you an idea of how much this would matter to Russia right now their primary competitor in that space is, in Scandinavia. And because of that, but, but this coming onto the market would represent 3x what Scandinavia is bringing to the market in terms of a competitor. This is actually sort of existential for Russia to stop because, and a lot of people are like, yeah, but they're not like, they, they do the math.

They're like, okay, but even if they capture all of these reserves and then start selling them, it doesn't. Like it doesn't add to their, their bottom line budget that much. And it's like, bro, you're completely misunderstanding their goal here. Their goal is not to sell it. It's to prevent it from entering the market.

Um, when Russia attacked. They had just gotten the, the Ukraine, they had just gotten a, another pro rest president and things were beginning to look stable enough for the oil companies to begin investing in developing [00:11:00] these, these assets which would have been really catastrophic for Russia.

And we need to, you know, to get an idea of how much Russia. Thinks about this sort of stuff for a while, I think it was up until

yeah, as late as 2005, 80 percent of Russian oil went through the Ukraine brotherhood network. And this was always causing conflict between Russia and the Ukraine because the Ukraine would ask for like charge fees on this. And a lot of conservatives are like, well, the Ukraine was just robbing Russia.

And so it makes sense that they had to go in to gain control of this network. Right. But that's actually. False. Russia had already built by the time the war had started the two Nord Stream pipelines and a separate pipeline that went south around

the Ukraine and they weren't shipping nearly as much oil through the Brotherhood network anymore.

So no, it was not about access to those pipelines. Anyone who is telling you that is lying to you. That's, that wasn't what was causing the conflict anymore. The conflict was the development of these new natural gas and, and so being an oil company that also runs the state, you know, they would, something like this makes sense [00:12:00] if you fundamentally do not care about your citizens, and this is where it gets really interesting and where what Russia did.

become so absolutely insane in the light of what you're hearing. Like, oh, are they building, like, I've heard that he really cares about the history and everything like that and blah blah blah. Russia has a desperately low fertility rate. Ukraine has a desperately low fertility rate. He's basically killing an entire generation of young men.

And, and a much

Simone Collins: more, he must know it, he can't be blind to this

Malcolm Collins: for sure, much more than you would have in a historic context. So it was really fascinating. Like this is the first time in history a nation is essentially genociding itself through something that is really, really interesting about the world.

What one is, is either like two of the most culturally aligned groups in the world. Right? Like he's, he's killing his own people with his own people. Like, if you care about like the Slavic nationality this is the very last thing you would do if you had an IDA fertility rates. I'm, I'm, Peter Zyhan theory, we'll get to it in a second.

It's [00:13:00] also. Probably super wrong. And I, I don't agree with everything Peter Zeihan says. I think he's smart, but I think he's wrong. This is being, well, I'll just get to the theory right now. Okay. Yeah, dive into it. Peter Zeihan thinks that the reason that this war is happening is twofold. One is Russia wants additional population.

And this is their last chance to really make a play for these resources demographically speaking, which is true. And the second is, is they're trying to capture choke points, which are important for invasions into their territory. And they think that by capturing the region of the Ukraine they can capture more of these choke points.

And so they're sort of forced into this war. I do not think that is it. The truth is, is while Russia pretends that NATO wants to attack it all the time. Anyone who has the barest context of reality knows that NATO is a bunch of pussies. They are not going to wage an aggressive war. They may, like, if they were able to loop Ukraine into their dealings, it was because Russia was threatening Ukraine.

Like, NATO couldn't [00:14:00] even get Sweden and Norway in, right? Because of Russia's sabre rattling. You really think they were going to get the Ukraine in? Realistically speaking, no! Like, it's absurd. Like, it's just. Silly, silly, silly argument there. They were forcing to do this because, because he'd kept Sweden and Norway from even joining NATO, which are like hugely culturally aligned with Europe.

Until he did this, which then gave them the cover to join. So no, that they would have, and very obviously that would have been the consequence of this attack. You know, so no, that was stupid as well. That is not why he was doing this. But then the second thing, you know, Is, is to Peter Zeihan's play, okay, so he's going out there and he's trying to capture these choke points, but choke points don't matter in the type of war that he needs to defend against.

The type of war that he needs to defend against are people coming in and assassinating him or people fermenting unrest within his population, you know, that's the way the Western world takes people out. And it's the way the Western world has taken people out for a while at this point, outside [00:15:00] of countries that are You know, that have any way to protect themselves.

Well, he seems duly afraid

Simone Collins: of that as well. We

Malcolm Collins: know. I mean, when we go to countries that like, when we go to war, right, they're often countries that don't have like big formal militaries, they are multiple levels of bow below us in the tech tree in something like Civ Russia is not like that to us, you know, they have nuclear weapons, we're not going to go in and, and, and attack them in that way.

And as such. He needs to focus much more on maintaining local support, which he had done pretty well. Then he needs to go out and try to capture like geographic choke points. He needs to focus much more on the international politics, which he was doing very well. He was bringing So what's going on?

Is he losing his

Simone Collins: mind?

Malcolm Collins: Like, no, we'll get to it. He's not, you know, it was, it was all a economic play for him. But we'll get to the economic play in just

Simone Collins: a second. He's poorly prioritizing is what you're saying. He's

Malcolm Collins: very poorly prior. And it's actually incredibly stupid prioritization. And we can get to why in just a second.

But, you know, [00:16:00] he had won a major victory in turning the U. S. right to become a pro Russian party, and the European right to become a pro Russian party. And I think that he lost that was like basically all of the sane thinkers who aren't just like conspiracy people who believe all the stuff that's being fed to them.

And so, Then we want to talk about like the self genocide of Russia. So Russia is in a very unique position from a global history perspective and that they are able to genocide themselves. See, historically speaking, if I was a country like Russia and I was just sending all of my young men to another country to die and they were dying at the rates that they're dying right now I would have some, Restraint, like I would keep some men home, right?

Because I need to be able to defend the homeland. The way they are acting isn't like that. They are not acting as if they are trying to it's like that famous scene from Gattaca, right? When he goes, I never save any for the swim home. That's my except they need them to make babies. And they are just, dying in [00:17:00] numbers that you would, and this also shows me that the argument that this is about self defense for Russia is wrong, or that this is about defense against NATO

Simone Collins: is wrong.

Oh yeah, because they're destroying any human capital for self defense capacity that they have. Yeah, if he

Malcolm Collins: was actually worried about self defense, he would, he would have stopped the war a long time ago and just, you know, stuck on what he had like that. The, the moment that he realized this was going to be a long slog or last year or at any point, even now he should stop because his country is becoming weaker and weaker and weaker in terms of if NATO actually did decide to attack and the rest of the world no longer respects his country as like a place to do business.

Now, a lot of people can be like, oh, but he went into this war. thinking it would be a quick war quick war or long war it still went against his best interests and he knew it wasn't going to be a quick war was in like the first few months of the war so he should have recalibrated he should have stopped sending men to die so you could say oh but he's doing all of this for some sort of like ancient [00:18:00] reunification goal yeah

Simone Collins: back to my what i kept reading about him this had nothing to do with logic it was about A narrative of Russia that Putin is obsessed with

Malcolm Collins: restoring.

Yeah. So there is something in wars called Cossia Belli. And anyone who has played you know, Europa Universalis or Kings Crusader Kings two or three. Cossia Belli is a very important.

You can't just attack a territory without having a reason to attack the territory. Even the U S does this. Everyone does this they make up some logical justification for attacking the territory. He can't say I need to prevent them from getting these natural gas deals done. So what he says is and he had a very strong Kossio belly like Ukraine was from a certain standpoint, unjustly separated from Russia, right?

It's very important when you're examining any war that's happening to not misconstrue the Casia belly for the actual motivation for going into war. Look at something like Vietnam is a great example. The Casia [00:19:00] belly for the war was that we did not want.

Did Vietnamese people to suffer. Under a communist dictator, but the actual motivation for the war was domino theory in fighting against communist expansion.

where they were our primary geopolitical rivals. To put it in another way. A Casia belly is how you explain the war to your heart, but. It's not logically while you're actually spending the billions of dollars, that it actually costs to go into a war. Nor the lives of your people during the war. No. If an individual is looking at this and they're like, come on. A major world power.

Wouldn't go to war just over oil and gas. And here, I, I just have to, like, what, what, what world have you been living in, in the last century? If you think that oil and gas with even a major motivator. In some of America's recent wars [00:20:00] consider that. Over 50% of our government's income is not funded by those industries directly.

Okay. In Russia. It is. And the guy who owns all of those companies, Practically speaking is also the guy who runs the entire government.

Malcolm Collins: Like, I am not Actually against his justification for the war that the justification doesn't make like a historic context of why you can declare wars. It makes logical sense. There was a Russian population in the Ukraine. There was political unrest in the Ukraine that could be tied to Nazi groups. Like all of that can look very aesthetically good.

The problem was. is that as soon as he realized the actual cost of the war, even with all of that justification, leaving a government like that in power in the Ukraine was not worth a guaranteed death of his entire ethnocultural group. Yeah. Which is what he is putting in place. I mean, he will be remembered in history as the [00:21:00] man who killed the Slavic people in the Slavic world.

It is, it is. Did anyone, and this is where like, I'm often like, like people are like, Oh, but he's sort of winning at times and it's like his theory for war. And then we've literally seen this is the Zach Brannigan theory of war.

 The Killbots? A trifle. It was simply a matter of outsmarting them. You see, Killbots have a preset kill limit. Knowing their weakness, I sent wave after wave of my own men at them, until they reached their limit and shut down.

Kif, show them the medal I won.

Malcolm Collins: And that's basically his strategy right now is just wave after wave of a scarce and increasingly scarce commodity for Russians, which is, Human beings, which are dying out in Russia. And you could say, well, you could fix this with some form of like polygyny or something like that among the remaining Russians.

And it's like, it doesn't have a cultural background for that. And I don't see them as. I don't see him as implementing that. I don't see that working now. Yeah. What's going to happen is they've already [00:22:00] lost like basically all of their talent, which is hugely important. If you create an action that makes every man who is like a competent programmer or a competent worker in any extent leave the country, which largely happened the, the exodus of young men from the country was catastrophically large.

You have made your country like in terms of like genetic and cultural selection effects Markedly less competent and less able to compete in where the future of the world is going. And so, you know i'll title this episode something ultra provocative like uh Putin are people who sent for putin are like more pathetic than the people who sent for biden because in truth biden is a better Putin was as bad as Biden is.

At least he's not genociding his own ethnic group. You know, and I'd also point out now, a lot of people are like, why is the U S fighting here? Like we should stop sending billions to the Ukraine. Like, Whoa, don't you know that a lot of it is being like funneled back into [00:23:00] Democrat politicians pockets and stuff like it.

It's like, yeah, all of that is true, but you would know what we're not sending to the Ukraine right now, our own people. Yeah. And people are like, what? The U. S. fight Russian interests? That would never happen. Excuse me, like, is history not taught anymore?

Our last, like, two giant bloody wars, both Vietnam and Korea, were about fighting Russian

Simone Collins: interests.

War that was, you know, really, really big in society was the cold war, you

Malcolm Collins: know? Yeah, all of it. And Russia, if you look at my, my sister in law actually worked in counterterrorism within Georgia for a while.

To clarify, she is an American without any Georgian sympathies. She was just working in Georgia and terrorism because that is where there were more active terrorists when she was trying to learn her chops.

 And I mentioned the Georgia part to show just how much she knows about the geopolitics [00:24:00] of Russia specifically.

Malcolm Collins: And she's an expert in this space and she's like, look, all of the, like, if you look at the actual, like, probability of war between countries, the probability of war between the United States and Russia is still by far the highest in the world.

Of like any major power, like we, the probably the nuclear

Simone Collins: arsenal is that it has

Malcolm Collins: to do with the state control structure, the economic interests that we have and the lack of economic ties that we have, whereas something like a war with China, unless they like literally just go crazy is much less likely because they are so reliant on imports.

For like basically economically surviving. Whereas the same isn't true for Russia. Yeah. I mean, you could see even with all the sanctions, they, because so much of their state is dependent on oil,

Simone Collins: isn't Iran then in a similar Iran in a similar position?

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Iran is in a similar position and there is a high likelihood of war between the U S and Iran, which is one of the reasons we're always so like feisty with them.

But yeah, so there was a

Simone Collins: very feisty with them.

Malcolm Collins: There wasn't a high likelihood of a future war [00:25:00] with Iran. Russia. And the fact that Russia has now, and in terms of what wars cost, like, I would encourage you to look at the cost adjusted, like, what did the Korean war cost us? What did the Vietnam war cost us?

And you're too lazy to go and check this, The entire Ukraine war so far has cost us half of what we would spend on the Vietnam war in just one year and keep in mind that the Vietnam war lasted 10 years. And that war wasn't even directly about weakening Russian interests or killing Russians in this war. Russia is literally depleting their own military potentiality. Permanently. No here, you might be saying something like, well, that's quite monstrous of you to use. Ukrainian fighters for us is longterm geopolitical interests. And it's like, they're choosing to defend the territory on their own Russia choosed to attack [00:26:00] the territory on their own. And if you're like, oh, the U S goated Russia into this. Not really, this was almost an entirely self-imposed mistake on Putin's part.

The us up until this point was just being a fairly normal, rational geopolitical actor in this space. Doing the same types of one-sided fel favor deals that we do all over the world every day. This was Putin. Self owning himself in an attempt to maintain control of the oil and gas market while doing something that he felt worked from a, you know, Casia belly situation.

I do feel for the pain of the Ukrainian people who are in this war. But also rationally speaking. If you just look at Russian. Client territories. If Russia does win this war, The Ukrainian people. will live worse [00:27:00] lives than they will live. If Russia doesn't win this war, like they are not fighting for nothing. They are fighting for something meaningful, whether or not you support Russia.

This is just a rational and obvious truth.

Malcolm Collins: For pennies on the dollar, we basically tricked Russia into genociding itself because of a massive miscalculation that they're making. I don't care if 90 percent of that money is going to graft. I don't care if 98 percent of that money is going to graft.

Simone Collins: Because it's neutralizing what was once a non trivial threat.

Not a non trivial threat,

Malcolm Collins: the single greatest threat to America's geopolitical power for the last century.

Like, like, I, I just, people have short memories. They're, they're familiar with who our most recent enemy is and, and a threat that is likely in the future going to become an extremist Muslim power.

And a lot of people are like, what? I'm like, just look at the demographics, man. Like all of the infrastructure in Europe. Like if that's who you're afraid of from those stats that [00:28:00] Simone was talking about, if you're afraid that Germany is going to become an extremist Muslim power Russia's already, you know, getting people like beaten to near death for burning the Koran at like the executive level, they already have more Muslims per capita.

And I, again, have nothing, like, Muslims come in many different stripes and there are lots of groups of Muslims that are very useful to a country and can work well within pluralistic societies. But there are also lots of groups of Muslims that can't. The ones in Russia are the ones that keep doing the terrorism.

How do I know that? Because they keep doing the terrorism. It's a huge problem that Russia already has. There are already efforts to overthrow the government among Muslim extremist groups, and they're often some of the biggest organized military powers within the Russian regime. So if Russia got weak one very likely thing would be one of the extremist Muslim groups that is already military And is mad at Putin for killing their young men for no reason.

If this war fails, might just make a run on the Capitol. And [00:29:00] we saw that with a culturally aligned group with Brugosin. But because, you know, a lot of people in Moscow still support, Putin, a lot of people, you would need sort of an outside cultural group to really do this, and that's why it's incredibly likely that if there is some sort of conflict in Russia, it would be the extremist Muslims to take over.

That would be

Simone Collins: such a, an interesting twist in terms of at least how Americans view Russia because it just, it's so out of left field. It's the last place I would have expected

Malcolm Collins: to have, you know, I mean, Russia regularly gets taken over by, you know, hordes of nomads. That's just like a historic thing that come from within its borders.

Yeah. So I, I, I think that even if that's your take, it's important to like wake up and realize that Russia is not what Putin paints it as was in the propaganda that you are getting as a Westerner propaganda is propaganda. It is meant to manipulate [00:30:00] you. But I want to hear your thoughts.

Simone Collins: I'm just I'm just so surprised.

I don't, I think the weird thing is that despite hearing all this and reading all this, I'm still going to be Russia the way that I did since I was a child watching. What was that show called? Rocky and Bullwinkle. You know what I mean? It's interesting to me how solidified Russia specifically is in my mind, perhaps because of the cold war, which we grew up right at the close of it, or we were born right at the close of it, you know, in the very late eighties.

So it's just weird to me that this, you see, you can say all this stuff, but it's just not going to stick with me. Russians are still going to be Russians. Like

Malcolm Collins: a rightist versus leftist thing. So a great example of this is you know, until fairly recently, a quarter of Germany's power was coming from nuclear power plants.

Coincidentally, right. If they were building the Nord stream pipelines, the green party, which is supposed to care about the environment decides based on like the urging of Greta [00:31:00] Thornburg, who I have reason to believe it gets a huge portion of her funding from Putin and Russian interests the campaign to get those all taken down.

There are many leftist agents, especially within the environmentalist movement that are specifically being elevated and used by Russia for this you know, you know, oil goal. It's not like the Russia only supports rightist politicians. They'll support the Green Party in the way that they're attempting to brainwash populations if that is of utility to them.

Because like, it's insane. Why would you do that?

Simone Collins: Why can Russia be so inept with the war effort, with all this stuff, but then nail propaganda in a way that, at least in our opinion, other nations aren't. And other people who, you know, specialize in national security have been. Insistent that China's amazing at manipulating.

China's

Malcolm Collins: terrible at propaganda. Well, that's,

Simone Collins: that's what we think. But anyway, so we think Russia's masterclass level at manipulating our perception. Why are they sucking at everything else and not this? [00:32:00] Well,

Malcolm Collins: so as to why specifically they're good at propaganda and China is bad at propaganda It is twofold.

The bigger one is they culturally understand us much better. China thinks that they can undermine the average American citizens, trust and faith in the government by pointing out to the average American citizen that their government is like corrupt or bad. And it's like, that does nothing. They're like, look, look at your.

Politicians, they're corrupt and your average American is like, yes, that's like core to our cultural understanding. And they're like no, no, no, no. Look at your country. It did a bad thing overseas. Americans are like, yes, we're taught that in elementary school. The government pays to teach us that. We are very immune to propaganda that is meant, because in China that would be seen as like catastrophic.

GASP Our government did something naughty. They, they did the Tiananmen massacre. They, our politicians are corrupt or don't have our best interests at heart. That would be catastrophic to a Chinese person because I think that way they, they can't model America well. In [00:33:00] Russia and among the populations that Russia uses to do these, these things, most Russians know that they can't really trust their government.

They've known this since communist times. This has been like a part, a core thing within Russia for a long time. So the way that Russia ends up. Doing its overseas political operations is it ends up elevating the extremists on both sides. Sometimes with direct affiliation, sometimes without direct affiliation.

So that's why they're funding both, you know, QAnon conspiracy theories as well as you know, Greta Thunberg. That's why they're funding you know, both far left green party people because they're trying to, and this was found. In the Trump election, a lot of people are like, Oh, the, the election integrity stuff on the left was all phony.

And a lot of it was like, I don't think the, the, you know, this was a phony campaign on the left, but what was true? And we like have the receipts for this is that Russian operatives was in environments like Facebook would start competing protests. And then. [00:34:00] Trick them into like appearing at the same location to try to get them to fight each other This was what Russia was doing.

They were trying to get you Americans to fall into more extremist positions Which is so funny. It's so

Simone Collins: good. That's yeah. Well, that's

Malcolm Collins: how you trick Americans You don't trick them by saying your government hates you you say oh the people on the other side They're actually way more bad than you've been told and all americans know this secretly and they're like, yeah They are more bad and here's what you can do and then they get them in an environment where it causes direct civil conflict This is if you look at something like antifa like if you are a rightist right now and you think oh russia founded some pro trump Stuff I would almost guarantee if you follow the money almost all of the money that antifa is getting is coming from russia They'd say, Oh, it's true.

Marxists was in Russia that are funding them because they're dumb as bricks. And they, and they talk about who their funding is coming from and we know that it's coming from people who they consider true Marxist. Where do they think that's coming from? You know, these are tankies, right? I don't know if people know what a tanky is.

That's a type of progressive that [00:35:00] thinks that the Russian style communism is actually good. And yeah. That's so funny.

Simone Collins: I forgot. And then you said tankies and I'm like, oh, anime girls, but that's still the same thing. No, no, no.

Malcolm Collins: These are people who think like Russia and China. I know, but they also have like

Simone Collins: their avatars online are almost always anime girls.

Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: They, they are funded by Russia. Yeah, I don't know how you don't know that. In fact, I would argue that more money has gone from Russia to create Antifa than has gone to create the pro Trump movement. And people who think otherwise are just blind to what's going on. It is a good thing for us at least that Russia, that Putin has decided to get rid of his own people.

That's not that we couldn't have a productive relationship with the Slavic people. But we would need Very different politics on the ground, and we probably need to turn Russia into a client state of the United States which I think is the best outcome of all of this, given how weak Russia is becoming which, which could still happen if we play specific cards, right?

Even when the power struggle does come for who takes over after Putin. The [00:36:00] U. S. Backed faction wins because I'm, I think that we've sort of gotten over this whole spreading democracy everywhere and understand that, you know, U. S. Favorable you know, dictators within some regions are just going to be more stable and lead to less overall suffering than trying to put democracies in cultures that don't, I mean, Russia is often called a kleptocracy.

But it's not really a kleptocracy. It's a it's a, it's a, it's a stable company.

Simone Collins: Very interesting. Well, I mean, yeah, this was eyeopening for me. So fun

Malcolm Collins: conversation. Yeah. It's going to really piss off some of our watchers. I know that because this is one of those things that a lot of people on the right really have their mind made up about.

And it's such a silly thing. Like, And, and, and, and just, you know, like on other, like we are super pro Israel in the Israel war. Like on other issues, we take the staunchly conservative side, but I don't mind if we're destroying what's left of the communist empire.

Simone Collins: So there you have it. [00:37:00] I love you, Malcolm Collins.

I

Malcolm Collins: love you too.

In this alarming episode, Malcolm and Simone Collins expose the deeply troubling hiring practices within the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) that prioritize diversity over competence and safety. They dive into the details of a discriminatory biographical questionnaire used by the FAA that screened out qualified candidates based on arbitrary and offensive criteria. Malcolm warns of an impending "Chernobyl moment" in the United States, drawing parallels to past catastrophic failures in centrally planned bureaucracies. The couple also discusses the broader implications of these practices, including the potential for devastating accidents, the erosion of public trust, and the long-term damage to the very groups these policies claim to help. Brace yourself for a thought-provoking and unsettling look at the dangers of unchecked "diversity" initiatives in critical industries.

Malcolm Collins: . [00:00:00]

So basically on this test that 90% of people were failing, the black applicants were being given all of the answers to the questions before black and female before.

But it gets even worse than that because we need to go into what these questions were.

 You are explicitly sorting for people who like to take big risks, have no scientific background, and do not take a criticism well from superior.

 You are basically guaranteeing crashes coming out of this. 10 percent of people did get through these 10 percent of people fit the profile that the test was sorting for. And keep in mind, this profile wasn't specifically Black people, it was white, progressive, mostly negative stereotypes of black people, angry all the time, can't take directions, bad at science, and a lot of black people who had applied for these jobs were filtered out of getting these jobs

would you like to know more?

Simone Collins: [00:01:00] Hello everyone. I am very excited to be opening us for a new base camp episode, especially because Malcolm the other day implied to me that he just didn't want to fly anymore. And I was like, what do you mean you don't want to take this trip? It was for something business related.

And. I think he just genuinely doesn't feel safe on airplanes anymore. And after we discuss what we're about to discuss, perhaps you too will fall into this category. Although I find it quite silly because really it's getting in the car with an Uber driver who knows how little sleep they have, who knows how little training they have to talk, like talk about standards.

Anyway I think it's overblown Malcolm, I think you'll be okay, but things have been getting worse and worse with setting standards and making sure that the people who are running things in the airline industry, the aviation industry, be they pilots, be they airline CEOs, or be they [00:02:00] working in air traffic control are qualified.

So I

Malcolm Collins: actually, I want to take this in a much broader direction than this. Okay. So airlines is one aspect of this.

Simone Collins: Okay. You see it as a microcosm,

Malcolm Collins: It's just one example of the way systems are beginning to break. So in our governance book, and we're going to go deep into a number of the places we're beginning to see major systems fall apart.

We talk about why things like communism fell apart and the core reason communism fell apart is governance structures develop inefficiencies and internal sort of cancers. The larger they get and the longer they last. And so if they're competing against like you don't have that big a problem within a capitalist system because you have a bunch of internal governing systems that are competing against each other.

And as they get large and bloated like for example, the average length of time for a company to be on the fortune 500 list, I think it's only 20 years

Simone Collins: or 30 years. Yeah. Basically as soon as these private enterprises. [00:03:00] Become non competitive in a market based system. They die because no one wants to use them anymore.

That doesn't happen as much with government.

Malcolm Collins: And so we well, and then when you extend the government, like government systems to, to individual operating parts of a country. You can much more quickly get catastrophic failures due to failures within a bureaucracy. And that's why I say that America is about to have its Chernobyl moment.

This is what happened with Chernobyl fundamentally. And this happened, not Chernobyl's the incident we know of, but there's actually many other incidents of communist market failures that basically led to deaths of millions of people. Obviously the. Five year plan in China, or no, what was it? The great leap forward in China?

Then you had that wheat incident in the Soviet Union. That was like a failure of Soviet science. Oh, no. Where a guy was trying to I can attach a video on the subject. It's very interesting and millions of people died.

It was called the Lynn Cinco affair. [00:04:00] And Vsauce has a very good video on the subject titled the man who killed millions, trying to grow food in snow.

Malcolm Collins: But then obviously we know about Chernobyl where somebody who didn't understand how nuclear power plants worked was in charge of managing safety at a nuclear power plant.

. And so you re. When you have a system that no longer is elevating individuals based on their efficacy you have the capability of major systems beginning to break. And I think, like you at the beginning of this episode, like laughing about it, ha, it's so funny, we're not gonna have something like that in the United States.

Malcolm Collins: And the reason why I'm putting out this episode and the reason why I'm going to be titling it what I'm titling it is I suspect within five to ten years there's going to be a major incident in the US which will make your laugh really morbid in, in, in reflection.

Simone Collins: We are going to hear him with a false sense of security.

You're warning me. I'm

Malcolm Collins: telling you that right now like it, if people are going to die, [00:05:00] it actually already happened in Norway, for example. So

Simone Collins: yeah, break this down. This was hilarious.

Malcolm Collins: So in Norway a multimillion dollar warship under the NATO command was entirely submerged after it struck an oil tanker.

Simone Collins: This, by the way, blew out Norway's entire. Naval budget for the year. That was like, just the cost of this damage is immense. This was thought to be an unsinkable ship because of the way it was

Malcolm Collins: built. Yeah, but yeah, it was called an unsinkable ship. And here's a quote from an article on it. Questions remain as to why the well equipped warship could not avoid hitting the slow moving 62, 000 ton, 250 meter long oil tanker.

Simone Collins: Not exactly, because people going through recordings of what was happening on the bridge at that time. a site in multiple instances of gross negligence and incompetence. Oh, yeah.

Malcolm Collins: So here's another quote. Sound recordings and radar logs have revealed crude, almost incomprehensible human errors made by the crew.

According [00:06:00] to experienced naval officers, the mistakes make the crew look like amateurs.

Simone Collins: And Which is Embarrassing, especially for me and my kind being a femmle because apparently a laudable and celebrated element of this unsinkable ship was that five

Malcolm Collins: four out of five of the crew members were women.

And they had recently done an an article that heaped praises on them for how pro woman, because they had recently opened the ranks of the Navy to women in Norway with the article saying something like it's advantageous to have many women on board. It will be a natural thing and complete and a completely different environment, which I look at as positive.

What did the lieutenant said aboard the ship? And you look at things like this and this is a ship that crashed, right? Like people made it off safely from this.

Simone Collins: 18 people were injured, but no one died. Okay. This is great.

Malcolm Collins: We're not having infrastructure fall apart yet or nuclear power.

Simone Collins: It did a lot of damage to the local, like oil and gas [00:07:00] industry, didn't it?

In addition to

Malcolm Collins: yeah, but I'm saying you haven't seen a plane with families on it fall out of the sky yet. I suspect we are going to see soon and it's not if you're like, Oh, I heard about that airplane scandal. Oh no. The scandal is in the manufacturing of the airplanes. There is an independent sca scandal in the training of the pilots and there is an independent scandal in the training of the people who manage the air traffic control.

So if you have heard one of these scandals in isolation, you haven't heard them compounded. So go over the air traffic control scandal.

Simone Collins: And I definitely want to. Direct everyone to my favorite overview done by Tracy Woodgrains over on his sub stack tracing woodgrains. com. He did a really great summary, but the gist is basically this, that for a very long time there was a lot of criticism.

Faced by the FAA because they were not sufficiently diverse, which makes sense to us. Our dirty little secret is that Malcolm and I run, operate a [00:08:00] travel management business. It's very heavy in aviation and yeah, like airplane nerds and the kind of people who want to become air traffic controllers, which by the way is one of the most stressful jobs out there.

Are typically white men

Malcolm Collins: by statistics. It's one of the most stressful jobs

out

Simone Collins: there by statistics. Yeah. So I'm also not saying this is the world's most fun job, but also I'm saying airplane nerds are disproportionately white and male. We'll just say that. We'll see if we can get our daughter into airplanes.

We our sons are definitely into airplanes. So at least there's that. So there was this and keep in mind, this has been going on for a really long time I'm going to just read a couple of quotes from the article just to give you a little bit of some background. So Tracy wrote, historically, the pipeline into air traffic control has followed a few paths, military veterans, graduates of the Air Traffic Collegiate Training Initiative, also known as ATCTI program, and the general public.

Whichever route they came from, each candidate [00:09:00] would be required to take and pass the eight hour AT SAT cognitive test to begin serious training. This test was validated as being effective as recently as 2013. But then again Tracy continues. The FAA has faced pressure to diversify the air traffic control for generations, something that seems to have influenced the scoring structure of the AT SAT cognitive test used for pre employment screening of air traffic control candidates.

Leading up to 2014, that pressure intensified with the national black coalition of federal aviation employees leading that push. So I'm not going to read any more from the article directly, but basically what happened is this, um, national black coalition encouraged the FAA to adopt an additional screening test that was based on biographical details.

That was essentially designed. To not be passable it failed 90 percent of [00:10:00] those who went through it. Many of whom had already passed all the other tests to begin training. They'd gone through, they paid thousands of dollars for college credits and gone through all this time to become air traffic controllers.

And then. With two months notice, they're informed of this new test. They also have to fill out and they are disqualified and not

Malcolm Collins: able to speak. I need to it's worse than that. So then the organization that had prompted this, right? The, it was an organization for black potential.

Simone Collins: The National Black Coalition of Federal Aviation Employees.

Malcolm Collins: Quote, in particular, one Shelton Snow, an FAA employee and then prized president of that organization's Washington suburb chapter, provided its members with quote unquote buzzwords in January 2014 that would automatically push their resumes

To the tops of HR files. A 2013 N-B-C-F-A-E meeting. Advise members to please include on resumes if you are an N-B-C-F-E-A member. Emphasizing they were only concerns with the employment of African Americans, women and other [00:11:00] minorities.

And then later after the 2014 by this was what they did before they introduced this questionnaire is they put specific words that would automatically Get their resume pushed to the top, and one was being a member of this all black organization. But then after this questionnaire was launched, quote, After the 2014 biographical questionnaire was released, Snow took it a step further.

As Fox Business reported, He sent voicemail messages to NBC FAE applicants advising them on specific answers they needed to enter into the biographical assessment to avoid failing, stating that he was quote about 99. 99 percent sure. That it is exactly how you need to answer each question. So basically on this test that 90% of people were failing, the black applicants were being given all of the answers to the questions before black and female before.

But it gets even worse than that because we need to go into what [00:12:00] these questions were.

So in one question, it was something like, what was your worst test in school? The correct answer, the one that wouldn't cause you to fail was my worst subject was science. Okay, so they are explicitly screening out all of the applicants whose worst subject wasn't science.

Simone Collins: Yeah and actually it's really worth going through some or all of the assessment. You can do this by going to Tracy Woodgrain's write up on this. Someone. After seeing, I think Tracy Woodgrain's coverage of it took the actual assessment and then created a version of it online that you can interact with and you can take the, you can answer the questions and then see what you get wrong.

And it is deeply disturbing and

Malcolm Collins: amazing at the same time. You've got to go over some of the other crazy things. There was one about risk taking behavior. The only correct answer in that one was that you do extreme risk taking behavior. This is this who you want managing? Landing [00:13:00] planes. They're basically well, people respond to criticism from superiors.

The only

Simone Collins: correct answer, there were not, there was not an only correct answer. Basically each answer had weird, arbitrary, different weights, but the only question that, or sorry, the only response that didn't get you any points at all was that you moderately. Didn't respond well to criticism and the one that would give you the answer that would give you the most points that is points helping you is that you really didn't do well with criticism from your

Malcolm Collins: criticism from superiors.

So if you talk about if you are specifically filtering for an entire incoming class and that's coming in this year to these flight centers in the FAA that are managing, the planes to make sure they don't crash into each other at their landing. Okay. And you are explicitly sorting for people who like to take big risks, have no scientific background, and do not take a criticism well from superior.

And worse than that, are coming out of these ultra wokey like [00:14:00] people who have used their ethnic status for a long time to get ahead in life. You are basically guaranteeing crashes coming out of this.

Simone Collins: Yeah to be more charitable, what I would say, and I still think that all those things are real problems is that there's a DEI focused coalition of people who encouraged the creation of a test with a bunch of arbitrary secret answers, and they gave away the key.

To the insiders that they wanted to help in an effort to increase diversity,

Malcolm Collins: You're misunderstanding what happened then. Yes. So a few of the sub chapters of this national organization were able to give away the key to the questions, but in truth, the questions were meant to function as they function.

10 percent of people did get through these 10 percent of people fit the profile that the test was sorting for. And keep in mind, this profile wasn't specifically Black people, it was white, progressive, mostly negative stereotypes of black people, angry all the time, [00:15:00] can't take directions, bad at science, and a lot of black people who had applied for these jobs were filtered out of getting these jobs.

Yeah, in

Simone Collins: fact, so there, there's currently still a class action lawsuit because this all happened, around 2014, 20, like from 20, I think, 14 and 2018. These things were playing out. And then I think the assessment was removed around 2018. Of course, that has undone the damage in terms of the pipeline of talent that we need to staff the FAA.

But now there's a

Malcolm Collins: remove. I think they should remove anyone who passes test. There's

Simone Collins: a loss. Yes, there's a lawsuit taking place called Brigida versus Buddha Buddha judge. Sorry. Where some of those who filed in part of this class action lawsuit were indeed themselves black and were disqualified despite being qualified because of this assessment.

So it does go to show that this assessment did not necessarily help black people. It helped people who were on the inside of this organization, which I think feeds back into what you're

Malcolm Collins: saying about governance. No, I think you're wrong here. Again, keep in mind, the questions that were given [00:16:00] out to people were only some of the local organizations.

Okay. Overall, this test did what it was intended to do, which was to elevate candidates who fit the progressive stereotype of black characteristics, i. e. being stupid, having a bad temper, and not being able to take orders, get into positions within the aviation division. And I think that this fundamentally shows how Genuinely, the bad type of racist these progressives are, but I need to go further with this because this, this wasn't the only instance of this happening.

Another instance where this is famously been happening recently

Simone Collins: During an interview with Axios on HBO, Kirby said the company was committed to ensuring 50 percent of their graduating pilot classes would be women or people of color. Elon Musk called Scott Kirby out for this on Twitter. I think that raised a lot of the awareness about this and also led to a lot of

Malcolm Collins: Twitter memes Musk called someone else.

And I just want to. Note here, how much [00:17:00] s**t Elan has been getting from this, from the ultra Progressive's, for example, in this one article. , by NBC news.. In be Elon Musk criticized by civil rights groups over claim that diversity efforts make flying less safe.

Marc Morial president and CEO of national urban league said, must statements were abhorrent and pathetic.

And then of course he goes on to criticize Twitter. Reminder to at Elon Musk, providing a home for the proliferation of hate speech and white supremacy. Conspiracy theories kills people, diversity, equity, and inclusion, cultivates a more inclusive society.

They are not the same. We are not the same. He added. Or you can check up the guardian article on this particular topic, worried about airline safety. Blame diversity says deranged. Right-wingers. Or the rolling stones coverage of this conservatives are so scared of diversity. They're starting to boycott quote unquote, woke airlines. After twisting a Boeing safety issue into [00:18:00] outrage over black pilots in LGBT inclusion.

The far right is taking aim at commercial carriers. So I would like to point out here that they're going to get people. Healed. Killed so they can win there. Stupid. Online firefights. They have so little concern for basic morality anymore.

Malcolm Collins: So I don't know, you were telling me recently that the Boeing has gotten so bad with their planes that the White House won't let anyone on the staff fly in 737s anymore. And they, you told me about this yesterday. I

Simone Collins: did not, but that's very interesting. Wait, you were, I did not tell you that you had a lot of conversations with people

Malcolm Collins: yesterday though.

Okay. Okay. Yeah. So the white house is no longer able to fly on seven 37s anymore, and they have to fly only on air buses.

Because Some issues was found was Biden's plane and then they did a longer review and they found out that they just not considered safe enough to allow for White House staff to fly on them.

Or executive level staff to fly on them.

I should note, this [00:19:00] may not be public information because when I researched this, I wasn't able to find it. And it also makes perfect sense that the BI data administration would not want this officially announced that they were avoiding use of American made planes for foreign made planes.

Malcolm Collins: And this gets worse when you consider this particular piece. So this one's titled former FAA safety expert addresses airline DEI controversy Boeing

Simone Collins: which allegedly prioritized dei hiring in recent years has found itself in the news after a door of one of the models of Operated by American Airlines, blew off mid flight in an ex post last week, billionaire Elon Musk asked if customers wanted to fly an airplane made by a company that prioritizes DEI hiring over safety management.

Although I, I feel like it's so easy to know what kind of aircraft you're going to be flying on unless they switch it up at the last minute, which sometimes they do. It's much scarier thinking that we are landing in airports with air traffic controllers who may not be qualified.

Malcolm Collins: But this is the problem.

It's the air traffic controllers [00:20:00] aren't qualified. The pilots aren't qualified and the planes are being made by people who aren't qualified. Okay. Boeing pushed through designs that we knew were not safe. And if you want to dig deep into this, there's a huge rabbit hole you can dig into, but everyone knew the new seven 37s weren't safe and they were not supposed to go out, but Boeing needed to meet its numbers for its investors.

For more on this. See the fortune article Boeing seeks FAA exemption for safety standard on troubled at 7 37 max planes.

About them trying to get around safety regulations that everyone else has to follow on a plane that they know has problems.

Malcolm Collins: And all of this is Theoretical to people like you, like at the beginning of this, when you were like laughing about this, we're not going to have a giant plane filled with families crash into a major city for due to,

Simone Collins: I believe it. It's just that, I didn't, I haven't booked us seats next to an exit row one, never because I, we can't afford to pay more for that.

But also the one, the person next to the exit [00:21:00] row.

Malcolm Collins: It's not just exit rows. We're going to have a major crash. You

Simone Collins: just say like planes flying, like falling out of the sky.

Malcolm Collins: Yes. And just cause it hasn't happened yet. And I'm not saying that planes, this happens across our economy.

So one of my. favorite little stories about diversity and inclusion is one of the less diversity and inclusion darlings so much so that the New York Times did Patrick Chavez, 50 affirmative action figure like about how great he was at the affirmative action figure. So this was an individual who in 1973, under a special program got into the UC Davis medical school over a white candidate who had better scores than him.

Alan Blake, who was denied admission. Okay. Now this guy's entire career has been one of terrible malpractice and just nightmarism, which he kept getting out of and getting out of by claiming racism. For [00:22:00] example

Simone Collins: There, there are apparently recordings of him doing procedures and whatnot with patients screaming.

He started out in labor and delivery and then I think got removed from that job after misusing forceps at one point, but then calling racism and then, abortions and liposuction.

Malcolm Collins: He used the fact that he had been removed for improper use of forceps to get promoted.

Simone Collins: I thought that was before the, I

Malcolm Collins: can just read the piece here.

Okay. So upon completion of his residency in 1981 at long beach medical hospital, he was hired there at low level. He shouted racism and is promoted to associate staff physician without any training. By 1988, hospital staffers monitored his work after a panel of physicians and administrators reprimanded him for a forceps delivery.

Chavez cried racism again through a discrimination suit. A jury awarded him 1. 1 million. This was later overturned by the way. Because it was found that he didn't know what he was doing. Chavez then [00:23:00] undertook the noble art of abortions and liposuctions, or body sculpting, as he called it. He was sued for malpractice 27 times, had medical board complaints filed for seven liposuction cases, and was accused of causing the deaths of one liposuction patient, who he left in his office.

As her incisions oozed red fluid, the patient died there of a massive blood loss. A tape made during his liposuction procedures finds horrific screaming, in quotes, by his patients as Travis offers his bedside manner, quote, don't talk to the doctor while he is working, end quote. And quote liar, pants on fire, end quote.

A judge suspended his license in 1997 writing an 11 page opinion that Chavez, quote, demonstrates an inability to perform some of the most basic duties required of a physician, end quote. The Medical Board of California revoked his license in 1998 for, quote, gross negligence, incompetence, and repeated [00:24:00] negligent acts.

Dr. Cook blamed racist, quote, white, male, end quote, physicians for his problems. Just, the, people have already died due to DEI. This is f ing insane. It is insane because that was just one doctor that the left, and the left covered for him. That piece in the New York Times about how great he was? That had happened after things like patients were dying, or at least being severely injured by this man. So they cover up how bad this is until they can't cover it up anymore.

When we have our Chernobyl moment, which is inevitable at this point, whether it's a bridge collapse or a tunnel collapse or a plane, colli collision, we need to call out. What caused it just as Norway had happened was that giant ship collision because real humans are going to die. That is inevitable at this point.

It has gone that far. And if you're like, how do we prevent this from happening in [00:25:00] the plane industry? You need to use the test that was testing for people who couldn't take feedback well from authority, or were, hated science. Those are the people who should never be allowed to work in aviation.

Every single person who passed that test should be removed from their jobs. And if they passed the test because they were given the answers, and you're like, okay then they were just given the answers. They should also be removed from their jobs for dishonesty. Okay, in, in the real world, this is what we used to call cheating.

All right. They have no business. This test filtered for incompetence and liars that made up an entire incoming class at the FAA. And I don't think I, it's not just that we need to let the other people in. We need to pull out every single person that passed this test because these were not black people disproportionately.

These were liars and people who met a racist caricature of black people. And they're going to make black people look bad. Because when. One of them, and especially if they happen to be black, who got through on [00:26:00] this and leads to a plane crash. How do you think that's going to lead to the general public viewing the black population?

This is something that, that Yeah, it's a common

Simone Collins: affirmative action argument, right? That if people get under the impression that any sort of minority, any sort of group is in a room because of that status, they're going to assume that person isn't competent, which undermines the credentials of any competent person from that group.

Malcolm Collins: It also long term damages these groups. There's that great study that came out recently that looked at I IQ gaps between black and white populations and found that they were much smaller in districts that were more conservative and that had conservative. Politicians running them. So these affirmative action systems are permanently disempowering the groups that they're meant to empower.

But what else could they do when they are defining those groups as incapable of taking orders, incapable of taking feedback, liking to take unreasonable risks? And being bad at science. And so when you look [00:27:00] at stuff like this, the way the United States defeated the centrally planned bureaucracy of the Soviet Union was allowing the system to collapse under its own weight as globalists, whether it's in the UN or within, because what is globalism?

Really? I think people misunderstand like why people are so antagonistic. Globalism is the building of a giant. bureaucratic elite that basically runs the entire world economy like a centrally planned system.

Simone Collins: Not great. Yeah. Okay. Maybe flying is not, it's so expensive.

Malcolm Collins: If you have a lot of kids, it's not something you really need to worry about unless you're us and you're being flied out all the time to go speak at events, which is where the stress comes for us.

Simone Collins: Because Having a lot of kids means you can't afford to fly anyway.

So don't worry about it.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. You can't afford to fly with some of the kids. We just have to do it for work right now. But I would like a world where we're not doing that as much. We'll fly over our guest stars to meet with [00:28:00] us when we're doing a reality show or something.

Simone Collins: Oh yeah. Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: I love you Simone. I love you too. I really hope that When the horrifying inevitability of all of this stupidity comes to roost that we call out exactly what caused this, and we don't pretend that it was anything other than racist progressives. That caused this problem and the progressive racist agenda and people say Why are you so mean to progressives all the time malcolm?

Can't you just be people are gonna die Like a lot of them like that's why i'm not being chill about this Okay. It's not conservatives pushing this s**t there. And they're like, it's only extremists pushing this s**t. And it's no, it's not. And this is one of the problems I have. This is like saying most Nazis didn't approve of the Holocaust.

Yeah. Most Nazis didn't approve of the Holocaust, but when you vote for the Nazi party, that's the result. I [00:29:00] agree, most progressives do not approve of all this stuff, but the party that they are putting in power and the people that they are empowering through their actions are the ones implementing all of this.

The only people who can take this down are the conservatives. So even if you have some distaste of conservative policies, and I won't say I love everything conservatives do they are less damaging to people than what progressives are pushing through right now. And that's the problem where it's one of these things where they're like don't blame me for what the crazies are doing.

And it's yeah, but the crazies control your entire political apparatus right now. So when you vote for someone, even if they're a moderate, you are empowering the crazies.

Simone Collins: Yeah. Yeah, it's an interesting point. At the end of his write up, for example, Tracy Woodgreens tries to argue that this at least should not be a partisan issue.

But in the end, no one in their right mind is going to look at this assessment and say they want people running the FAA who pass it. And that this is [00:30:00] something that shouldn't be partisan and that Pete Buttigieg has this amazing opportunity To fix this problem, which by the way, was not fixed during the Trump administration.

It just ran right through it. It's not like everyone's on the ball here. And yet he's not doing it, which is very frustrating. And of course people followed up in the comments that yes, this is a polarized culture wars issue because to your point, The people who are empowered to do this are being empowered by progressive parties and by progressive coalitions.

But it, I,

Malcolm Collins: This is easy. If you want to fix this at the legislative level, you just pass a law that specifically targets, whiz jail time, anyone who implements explicitly racist policy. Oh. No I think that once progressives start getting jailed over implementing racism, and this is racism, right?

This is something, it's racism, yeah. Or you could have, if you don't wanna do jail time, what you need to do is you need to have fines for their companies and have lists of names of the individuals who participated in this stuff. Because the problem [00:31:00] is when these people can leave one company and then go infect another.

Yeah. These people need to be on a list and the companies they're working for need to be Oh,

Simone Collins: like that. That terrifying doctor who would just go on and keep doing his thing.

Malcolm Collins: They're basically leading to murder sprees. This is insane. So it's very scary. And people will die if we do not systemically handle this issue.

Simone Collins: Gosh we can't afford to fly business class and that's all I want to fly. So it's probably better that I have some other.

Malcolm Collins: It's not just airplanes. This is going to be a bridge. This is going to be a something, a tunnel is going to fly, a building's going to fall over. You just wait.

Simone Collins: I was trying to think like what airline would still be safe out of course if air traffic control at us airports is not safe, then we're never really safe flying.

But then the question is, are there carriers and are there airports that

Malcolm Collins: we can still have airlines are probably going to be much safer.

Simone Collins: Yeah. And specifically, LATAM airlines, we [00:32:00] love COPA airlines. We love and COPA airlines actually, man, they run a tight ship as does LATAM. Actually they're quite organized.

Malcolm Collins: So we say this as people who run a travel agency. Now, maybe you should stop using these American airlines because they're all

Simone Collins: scalescapes. Yeah, man. Yeah. And COPA is adding a bunch of new us destinations this summer. Just saying guys was talking with the, with their team yesterday. Yeah.

And in Air Canada, Lufthansa, they're so

Malcolm Collins: buttoned up, but I don't know. They're in Europe. I wouldn't trust them anyway. Love you to Desimone. Have a spectacular day. Bye.

In this fascinating discussion, Trace Woodgrains shares his unique perspective on growing up in the Mormon faith and the lessons that can be learned from this tight-knit religious community. Trace discusses the extensive volunteer work and responsibilities given to members at a young age, the rigorous structure of Mormon missions, and the challenges he faced reconciling his own beliefs with church doctrine. He also explores how secular communities might adopt some of the beneficial aspects of Mormon culture while avoiding its pitfalls.

Simone Collins: [00:00:00] Hi, everybody. I had the best reading experience this week. Thanks to our very special guest, Tracy Woodgrains.

He had actually tweeted on Twitter, someone else's article. Someone wrote for the Atlantic about what happens when America loses its religion. But Tracy included a 2020 sub stack piece that he originally actually had posted on. So it was originally a Reddit thread, but it's on a sub stack now. Related to this article his sub stack write up, which you should all check out at tracingwentgrants.

com is called Mormons and Voluntary Organization. And he brought up basically this article because it. describes the extent to which religious involvement, especially in the LDS church can be very profound and have a profound impact on people and communities. So anyway, I read the Atlantic article, whatever.

It was meh. Like it's nothing that anyone who watches based camp wouldn't be very familiar with. It's something, it's all stuff that we're really familiar with. What happens when cultures lose their religion, not great stuff. But man, [00:01:00] Tracy, your article is great because what you do in it is you detail.

How different the life of a practicing Mormon is vis a vis the life of someone just in a general atomized society. So we would love to have you on today and discuss it cause it's, I think the implications of what you write about here are pretty huge.

Would you like to know more?

Trace Woodgrains: Yeah, absolutely. What

Simone Collins: inspired you to write this, by the way?

Trace Woodgrains: So look, I grew up Mormon and I grew up in this somewhat isolated subculture that is so very different to the life of as you were saying, the standard modern atomized individual. And so this was, The water that I swam in, this is the air that I breathed. This was just what the world was like for me.

I was 11 years old before I realized that the majority of the world was not Mormon. That is how much of a bubble I was in and going through that, my whole [00:02:00] childhood, going on a Mormon mission, so forth really it has an impact on whoever goes through that sort of thing and having stepped away from it now I feel like.

My job in large part is to paint a picture of what is possible within something like that, recognizing the flaws that I saw that caused me to step away, but looking and saying, how can the rest of us replicate that? The positive, powerful elements of this, what are the rest of us missing? What have the rest of us forgotten about?

And in particular, I feel inclined towards that because you see a lot of people who step away from Mormonism, who really understandably feel very burned by the whole thing, feel very frustrated that they've given their whole lives to what they, to Feel has been based on a lie and so forth and just get really hostile to it all.

And point feel essentially that there is nothing good there, nothing good worth pointing out. And I had a much happier, gentler glide path out such that I feel [00:03:00] like I am in a much better position than many who have left to look at it and say here is. Here's what I see that I did value in it.

And here is what is worth taking away. So I'd

Malcolm Collins: love it if you could just start going into that for our audience. It's probably immediately obvious why this is so interesting to us. But one of the things that we always say is that the cultural change that's happened in America, as it has secularized, isn't just.

That we stopped believing in God. That was actually the smaller part of the cultural change. The bigger part of the cultural change was all of the changes to the way we interacted with our community and our daily behavior patterns. And I think, to what you said there, a person who has stepped back from that, it is now in a secular world, but can look on it as an outsider, can probably better see the contours.

of what is actually unique about it. So I'd love if you could start by just going into what is it that your average secular person doesn't understand about the daily life of somebody within one of these [00:04:00] hard religious communities?

Trace Woodgrains: Absolutely. So I think that the standard secular view of the standard church going life is basically you do more or less the same things for most of your life and then you go to church on Sunday and you call it good.

And perhaps in some religious communities it is something akin to that. Within mormonism, there's It is a much more all encompassing situation. So the day to day in the life of a Mormon, first off, it's important to understand that almost every clergy member within Mormonism, almost everyone who has any sort of official position in the church is a volunteer.

It's only up at the top that you start getting actual salaries, actual living stipends, what have you for the global leaders, but everyone on down. So Mitt Romney, for example. Spent years as what's called a stake president, where for no pay, in addition to his [00:05:00] regular job, he had the job of overseeing six or seven local congregations, each of which would have a hundred, a few hundred members where he was on some level responsible for the organization and spiritual wealth and what have you of all the people in that below that you have bishops who, same thing, they have to spend 20 hours a week, however long, in addition to a full time job on all this over a period of, I'm forgetting the exact number of years, something like eight years that a bishop will stay in that position where one day, A regular schmuck working as a computer programmer or a garbage collector or what have you will be called into the office and be told, so how would you like to be given this volunteer position where you will work 20 hours a week for no pay for the next eight years?

Come on in. And every person within Mormonism, every adult and most of the youth will have some sort of position like this, some sort of calling, I would play the organ in church. Someone will be called to teach a [00:06:00] Sunday school lesson. Someone will be told, Hey, you're going to come up and give a talk on Sunday.

Someone will be told, Hey, you're leading the young men's group. So for example, I had, when I was on my mission, I met this professional athlete down in Australia, a rugby player. And he I would go to church and he would be the leader of the young men's church group on Sunday because that is just what they do.

A lot of things like that. So

Malcolm Collins: before we go further, there's a few points here I want to elevate because Simone was talking to me about this today and just commenting on how emotionally Healthy this is because when a lot of people think of community, they think of what the community is going to do for them when what they're actually probably getting the most benefits from is the burdens the community places on them.

And when I say burdens, I guess tasks or responsibilities. And that you have a community where it's an individual rises in status within the community, they are basically given more unpaid labor, [00:07:00] and their skill within that unpaid labor rises their status further which likely has pretty positive effects on an individual's mental health, because the more Independent things you are doing within your life that you feel are things of value and that you are improving on the more areas you have to potentially succeed.

If you're not doing as well at work at least you're doing well within what you're doing for the church or if you're not, and it helps move you forward. And it also allows less time for like rumination. Which, which likely also has a positive effect. Another thing you noted there that I want to elaborate on is you're like, except for the senior people at the church.

But as I remember from Simone discussing your pieces with me, they, the people who are paid by the church, like the very senior people, they don't make like that much money, right? It's like 120k or something.

Trace Woodgrains: They don't make bank. They, yeah about 120k or so, as I recall. So it's, not anywhere near what someone at the head of any secular organization anywhere near that size would be making.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. [00:08:00] Yeah. And I'd love it if you could talk a bit about because another thing that she was elevating was even at a very young age, like speaking to crowds is something that's expected

Trace Woodgrains: a lot. Yeah. There was one funny tweet that I saw recently where someone was talking about at a Quaker ceremony they went to where at Quaker ceremonies, a lot of them will just be silent until people feel moved by the spirit to speak.

And so I was like, yeah, this Quaker ceremony I went to one guy the past couple of weeks has just stood up and given his Dune reviews. Mormonism has that about once a month, it's called fast Sunday fast and testimony meeting where they spend that Sunday fasting, not eating, not drinking for it's supposed to be 24 hours.

And at church they'll get up and rather than having the regular talks that members of the congregation are delivering, it will just be extemporaneous speech from anyone who feels like it, going up to the podium and saying whatever they feel like. And so you'll see adults come up and you'll see kids come up and usually it's fairly generic, I know Joseph Smith was a [00:09:00] prophet.

I know the Book of Mormon is true. I know Jesus Christ is the Savior. All of these standard Mormon beliefs. And sometimes, people go off the rails, but you'll see even very small kids like wander up and stand and say all that. And, there's a little bit of discomfort for me now looking at it and seeing these kids training themselves into these very specific patterns of thought from an early age.

You can examine that. Yeah. But very early, they are getting this experience going up and seeing a few hundred people in the stands, staring at them and speaking to them. And then as they get a little older, as they turn 12, 13, what have you, then usually a couple of the, there will be like three to four talks.

That is short speeches in the first hour of church on Sunday. And usually it. The first one to two of those at least in the congregation I was in would be from youth people, 12 to 18. And so from the time you're pretty young, you're again, standing up in front of a crowd and giving a scripted five minute speech.

[00:10:00] And there is something really healthy, I think, about that. That sort of environment that immediately is training those skills and people you have not just those speeches and stuff you have, say, the young men's group organization, you'll have, the adults tasked with overseeing it and you'll have one of the 13 year olds placed in as the president of it and another placed in as his secretary and so forth.

And so really early on, all these kids are again, getting experience with the same volunteer positions. Yeah, when

Malcolm Collins: I find it pretty interesting from a social dynamic, what's happening here is that you're having a community of people who differ from society specifically due to their beliefs and practices, affirm those beliefs and practices to each other in a way that like when you are very young because what's being affirmed is the ways in your beliefs that you're different from society.

the other, the mainstream society, likely creates much more a feeling of community, not just a skill set, [00:11:00] which of course can be looked at with malevolent intent by people who choose to look at it that way. But one of the things I always note as somebody who, when I grew up, I was around the Atheist Movement and stuff like that, is in the Atheist Movement specifically the New Atheist Movement and then the Atheist Plus Movement, a Huge portion of the leadership cast of that movement was X Mas which was really interesting to me.

It was almost like they were training the Mormons something that allowed them to out compete other ex religious members in terms of social skills, or at least like mass media social skills.

Trace Woodgrains: Yeah, I think there's definitely something to that, and one big part of that, I think, is that, Every Mormon man and many Mormon women, virtually every Mormon man will go on a mission sometime between the ages of 18 and 26, usually towards the early end of that.

So I went at 18 where they spend two years, people here, mission trips and different religions have a lot of different approaches to [00:12:00] whatever mission trips. Mormon missions are hardcore. They are intensive. They are not a time where someone's Playing around and having fun and then taking a few pictures of them building houses or something.

My daily schedule as a missionary every day for two years, pretty much every day, with a few exceptions looked like this 6 30 AM, wake up. Exercise for half an hour, eat breakfast, do independent study personally of scriptures for one hour, do a study of scriptures with my mission companion for another hour, then go out and from 10 a.

m. to 9 p. m. with breaks for lunch and dinner, be knocking on doors, talking to people on the street, going into people's homes and teaching them, going around just looking for people to teach, looking for people to instruct. And this is. You and your companion independently in whatever area you're assigned to.

And you do that until 9 p. m. You come home, you plan for half an hour, you have maybe an hour of [00:13:00] downtime ish, and then you go to bed. Every day for two years. No movies no books except church books, no music except church music, no TV internet once a week to write home to family, and that's about it for that.

Just very, TV. Structured, restrictive,

Malcolm Collins: rigorous. And I note for the audience, you have to pay to do all of this. This isn't paid, you are paying to do this. And you have to pay for training to do this before doing it.

Trace Woodgrains: Yes and no on the paying for training. You pay a flat sum for the Two years, which includes the training and then wherever you're sent.

Oh, okay. I

Malcolm Collins: thought that was separate. So something I, an interesting point I have before we go deeper on this is, or I've wondered, because this is what I've noticed anecdotally, and maybe you've noticed it, is I've always seen the mission trip as actually a huge I guess I'd say like problem with modern Mormonism is it seems to be the part where most people start deconverting is during like when people question their [00:14:00] face Mormons, at least my deconversion stories I've heard, it seems like the majority of the ones I've heard it was during their mission trip.

Is that a trend you've noticed as well? Or am I noticing something that's not there?

Trace Woodgrains: It's a good question. I would say that a mission is really a time. of focusing very intensely on all these spiritual questions and really figuring out where you stand with all of it. And because you're spending so much time and so much focus on it it, wherever someone goes in their spiritual journey from that point, like that is going to be a hinge point, no matter what happens from there.

What I'll say in my own story with it, in my own process before my mission, I always fancied myself a skeptical kid. And so I went in my teenage years and dug into all the apologetics and all the counter apologetics, all the responses, all the like intellectual side of things. And at some point I knew I had questions that I couldn't answer, but felt I, that was causing some distance for me.

It wasn't really something I wanted to address head on. [00:15:00] And it wasn't really something that I figured would be productive from within the Mormon framework. We're within the Mormon framework. It's really emphasis. The emphasis is really on do the basics focus on spiritual things, see whether this is good for you and then develop your testimony that way, pray to God and God will tell you that sort of thing.

And so at some point after those teenage years, I stepped away from. That sort of really intellectual process and just decided I'm going to commit myself to this. I'm going to lean in. I'm going to do what I'm supposed to do. And God is going to speak to me with all of that. And I, for me, it was.

Specifically on my mission. This is where I'm going to figure everything out. And I would spend 45 minutes a night, sometimes kneeling down, begging for some sort of witness from God, I would go around. I would be trying to be exactly obedient. I would be doing everything I could possibly be doing within the Mormon framework.

And if you have two years where you're really trying to do that and really trying to figure out, is God speaking to me, is God guiding this What's going on? Do I have answers to all these things that I'm trying to [00:16:00] figure out? That's a long time to think through it and to really start settling in on.

I don't fully align with this. Especially as more complicated things started happening towards the end. It really became clear that my differences with it were irreconcilable. So that was my path that very much, I was already on my way out. Then I went on my mission. And knew when I got back from it, I stayed in two years after that, but I knew when I got back from it, that I just didn't, did not fit within and could not answer the questions I needed to, but for others it's hard to say, I will say that the way it's conceived of particularly among the leadership is that this will be the time that will really lock people in and really anchor them in, anchor their testimonies of the church in and make them really stalwart and solid moving forward.

And I. Yeah, I agree that it's a hinge point. I don't know that it's necessarily the cause of any leaving. That's

Malcolm Collins: a good point. Yeah, and that would explain the pattern I'm seeing. So [00:17:00] a question I have in regards to this, because this is another thesis we have, and you can tell me if this aligns with your experience as well or not, is that was in religious communities, The perception is that the reason why people deconvert is often by wanting to do the things that aren't allowed in the community when in fact, I think usually it's specific theological questions that they couldn't make work or what was it for you that, that was like your key, like pushing out point and how could it have been circumvented by the community?

Trace Woodgrains: Yeah. So there was a Mormon apostle, so one of the 12 global leaders of the church some time ago who gave this speech where he was talking about the great threats to Mormonism and he appointed out feminists the LGBT movement and so called intellectuals I was a so called intellectual. So what I would say is that [00:18:00] Mormonism works really well for people outside of those three categories.

I didn't think of myself as gay back then. I thought I didn't really recognize my own sexuality, didn't consider any of that. And that wasn't really anywhere on my radar. What was on my radar was all of these intellectual questions and all these doctrinal questions and just trying to figure out where do I stand on these very specific points of history and very specific points of doctrine and very specific points of theology.

I really liked the commandments structure that I was in. I've always valued structure. I've always valued having a framework and I was able to very easily, Convincingly persuade myself of this is why all these commandments exist. This is why it makes sense that we don't drink alcohol. This is why it makes sense that we go to church on Sundays.

This is why it makes sense that we pay a 10 percent tithe. This is why it makes sense that we don't drink caffeine. This is why all of these very specific rules make sense. This is the broader metastructure like that. I could do. What I couldn't do was [00:19:00] answer some of the very specific theological questions within some of the very specific historical questions with it.

And the more I tried to dig, and the more I tried to answer some of those, and the more I looked through every part of the framework, trying to find the answers for some of these things, The more I realized that the answers really just were not there, but that's not quite what made me step away from activity.

That's what made me realize I couldn't believe in Mormonism. But what made me step away from activity in Mormonism, specifically it's well known at this point that Mormonism changed its doctrine on whether black people, whether black men could get priesthood, that is, have the power of God working through them, whatever within Mormonism in the 1970s.

What's Less well known. So Mormons will internally frame that as, Oh, this was just a policy change. Yeah, what's less well known is just how deeply that permeated within the doctrine. So there were letters that the leadership sent to this sociologist in the forties who was trying to persuade them, God's children are [00:20:00] equal, this or that things that they now in modern times, a spouse and they, Mormon Global Leadership sent this very emphatic letter describing how racial intermarriage had always been wrong since the dawn of time, how the races were absolutely not equal, and how God had definitely cursed Black people, this or that, and just very emphatically that he needed to repent, he needed to get in line.

Or he would be in peril. And that's not the sort of thing that modern Mormons really think about. That's not the sort of thing that modern Mormons really look at. But what that made me think about, what that made me realize is. I was really letting what the prophets said control the direction of my own thought.

And if my thoughts were out of line with what the prophets said, I would work really hard to figure out how to align them. And in as much as something wrong crept in, and it was really clear to me that was one absolutely wrong per modern Mormonism, absolutely wrong thing that had absolutely crept in and had [00:21:00] absolutely controlled the minds of members in as much as anything wrong crept in.

I would be doing a very good job persuading myself to think that wrong thing or to think that I was in the wrong for not thinking that wrong thing. And as soon as that really sunk in for me, I felt like I needed to step away.

Malcolm Collins: Okay, and was it in part, if I was going to word this a little differently Did it bother you that if the church could have been quote unquote, wrong about something back then, and you're trying so hard to follow all the rules right now, that how do you know the rules aren't going to change again?

Was that sort of it?

Trace Woodgrains: Yeah, so that played in. Again, even at that point, I didn't think of myself as gay, and honestly, all through that point, I was perfectly okay with the church's stance on gay marriage, which was one of those rationalizations that I had, and one of those ways that I was justifying the framework to myself.

I was like, this all makes sense. And at some point, I shifted to, if I stepped away from Mormonism, I would start supporting gay people getting married. Or, sorry, if the church changed its stance on gay people, I would [00:22:00] support gay people getting married, and then I would leave the church, is what I thought about it at that time.

And then, when I stepped away from Mormonism, I was like, okay now my stance has changed. And then after that, I was able to have a better space to think about, What do I want? Realized that I was interested in dating men, fell in love with a man. The rest is history.

But the point is that it wasn't any sort of, I am struggling with this aspect of the doctrine. I am struggling with this aspect of the commandments. I wish this part was different. I want this part to be different. I need this part to be different, but it was very much if the church is wrong on something, it is impacting the way I am thinking about that thing on a very fundamental level.

And that is a problem.

Malcolm Collins: Interesting. So as somebody who wants to become a parent, what aspects of these systems are you going to try to incorporate in your own child?

Trace Woodgrains: That's a really good question. I was lucky to have a phenomenal childhood which a lot of it, I do attribute to Mormonism and a lot of it I attribute to my parents.

I had loving parents in a stable home [00:23:00] where, in a neighborhood where I knew all of my neighbors and we had all sorts of. Rich community activities, all within the context of this church. And quite frankly, that's not directly replicable. There is not a structure that I can step into that fills that same role.

So in terms of how I'm going to bring it into the lives of my kids, I can't just go and say, Oh yeah, you'll go to church every Sunday, and you'll go on a mission when you turn this age, and you'll do this, and you'll do this, and you'll do this. You have all the structure to hang on. What I do feel obligated to do Is first of all, I need to find a communities of black minded people and I need to find some place to give the kids a sense of community and I need to find some way to start cobbling together this structure for them, but it is very much a cobbling together structure versus stepping into this pre existing and really solid structure because I don't really see any.

I don't really see any that had. That is lacking really the really major flaws that would keep me away from [00:24:00] it. And so I'm basically looking and saying, I see the value of this. I see what this brought into my life. I want to figure out how to replicate this for my kids. I don't think the world as it stands right now is really equipped for that.

And so it will be a lot more piecemeal figure it out. I

Simone Collins: would like to follow up on that though, cause there's the community aspect that is really important, but then there's also I can't get over just how much responsibility is put on people at all ages. And also the responsibility gets piled on more, the more competent or successful you show yourself to be.

So it's just you get more and more of a burden and it seems to be extremely beneficial. You've left the church, but now you are like doing, you're writing these amazing pieces. You're going through law school. You're going to start a family soon and you are working on blocked and reported.

Like you just keep it going. Do you have any plans? for your kids to give them extra [00:25:00] responsibility in life. And how would you structure that? Because it's not exactly it's not exactly hardship that's being given to people. It's responsibility.

Malcolm Collins: Like maybe you can utilize secular institutions to get, give them or, burden them with this responsibility.

Like,

Trace Woodgrains: how would you do it? Yeah, that dovetails with a lot of my thoughts on education. I do think kids are a lot more capable a lot earlier than we often give them credit for. And I would say that my thoughts on that get filtered a lot more through my thoughts in terms of education than they do with my thoughts on Mormonism at this point, in that I think, particularly early on, I will be really trying to figure out What is the appropriate level and pace of education for them?

What can they handle? What are they going to be able to handle? And yeah, there'll be a lot of fairly academic focus with all of that. I do hope to find organizations that they can participate in and get early responsibility in. There's this idea, let kids be kids. And of course you want to let [00:26:00] kids be kids, but childhood is very long.

There are very many hours in a day and there is There is plenty of time, both for kids to enjoy a lot of unstructured play, and to take on more serious structure and more serious responsibility. So both with my thoughts on Mormonism and my thoughts on education dovetailing, I think that a lot of it really will come down to, I think there is a lot of productive structure to Mormonism.

That you want to stick into people's lives. Not so much that it is overwhelming, but enough that it gives them something to build off of something to hang on and something that gives them an idea of just how much they can do.

Malcolm Collins: Something that Simone touched on today when she was referring, like talking about your story to me, it was that you did the math on how many hours a day you actually spent on religiously dedicated activities growing up.

And it was something what Two hours a day or something, Simone, including

Simone Collins: your mission. And then it was, if you took out your mission, it was still about one hour a day.

Malcolm Collins: Yes. And like when you think about this, how, do you think that this is [00:27:00] broadly beneficial to people? And if it is, how can you structure it secularly?

Trace Woodgrains: I think that it could be a lot more beneficial. I think that if you look at the specific activities Mormons are doing, a lot of those specific activities, some of them are good uses of time in a, General distance. You sense some of them, Mormons will go into the temples and sit and watch a two hour video, the same video on repeat fairly regularly throughout adulthood and it's and do go and do baptisms on behalf of dead people, things like that and things like that they have sense and structure within the Mormon theological context, but outside that theological context, it just looks like a lot of very confident people spending a great deal of time On nothing in particular.

And I think that if you redirect that same energy towards more explicitly altruistic, more explicitly outward facing ends that lack the same theological context, I do think there's a lot of potential, but you need [00:28:00] something to get that energy and something to get that drive towards building those structures.

You need the organized structure to do it. You need the organized framework to have permission. For people to do it. It's not something that you can just go out and do on your own Without the backing of a community and the backing of expectations and the backing of a framework within which to do it And so I think that's a major task for secular people now is to build that sort of structure

Malcolm Collins: Interesting.

Yeah, and something we haven't talked about on this Did you ever do one of those mormon trips where you like? You tried to reenact what the founders, like the first people who moved to Utah went through?

Trace Woodgrains: Yeah, I did a pioneer trek.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, a pioneer trek. Can you talk to that a little

Trace Woodgrains: bit? Yeah, so that's a shorter experience.

That's just a few days where you get thrown into a quote unquote family. You have your people volunteering as parents and you have the other youth around you who are siblings and you'll all just drag this handcart together and walk, all day long dragging this handcart and then camp at night and eat what the pioneers ate and, share your testimonies of Mormonism and [00:29:00] your testimonies of this and that and do it again the next few days.

And it's this fairly short, fairly intensive, really spiritually meaningful for the people in it experience that's just basically, camping on steroids.

Malcolm Collins: Would you do something like that for your kids, or do you think it's like too intense?

Trace Woodgrains: Yeah, it depends on it depends on the ritual context.

It depends on what the opportunities are, it depends on what the situation is. I think it's hard to Invent things like that from scratch. It's hard to just pull something like that from scratch and say, we're going to do this and we're going to make it meaningful. But if there's something that makes sense, if there's something that fits a role like that, I think something like that is helped.

Yes. I think it's cool. That's really fascinating.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. When you do have kids, we would love, you can reach out to us. We'll be putting together like pseudo religious stuff for our kids to try to recreate some of this technology. And we'd love to, give you like our contact when we do it, because, the more people we can have our kids around that are like thoughtful and intentional the more, the larger a community we could build the more effective these sorts [00:30:00] of rituals are.

But yeah, I have absolutely loved having you on. And this was really fascinating to

Simone Collins: learn about. Yeah, we're really big nerds about finding a better way to build culture. Like just going back to the old ways, going back to tradition, we think is not the right solution. You seem to share that sentiment to a great extent, and we're really interested in how can you make it better from a first principle standpoint?

So to come across this right up to come across your thoughtful commentary and analysis makes us so excited because it means that you're going to really take a crack at this and the more people doing this, the better. So thanks for that. And everyone makes sure. To check out tracing woodgrains. com and at Tracy woodgrains on X.

He's really awesome.

Trace Woodgrains: All right. Thank you guys so much for having me. It's been a pleasure. All

Malcolm Collins: right. I'm going to hit in recording here. Cool.

Simone Collins: Yeah. Thank you so much.