Based Camp | Simone & Malcolm Collins

We discuss why many wealthy and powerful people seem to be building bunkers and making end times preparations. We explore the frontier instinct towards apocalyptic fantasies, how this varies by ancestry, and why it persists generationally. We cover bunker features like AI kill drones, the risks of private security forces, concerns around climate change and social instability, and why islands are not actually that safe. We argue this preparation makes sense given fragile infrastructure but warn against the Marxist perspective of the ultra-wealthy wanting collapse.

Malcolm Collins: [00:00:00] Hello, Simone. You sent me an interesting tweet by our friend,

Diana Fleishman friend of the show, done a few episodes with us. What was it on? Talk a bit to this

Simone Collins: bunkers. So essentially she posted a Twitter poll recently asking her followers.

If they received 3 million, would they put some of it toward building a bunker, you know, for like end times or whatever? And the vast majority of responses was no, they would not. The average person is not thinking about this, but I have noticed that on the side of Very wealthy people and also some of our friends who are not necessarily like insanely wealthy, but they move in those circles are totally thinking about this and totally want the bunkers and totally have their getaway plans.

And then there are some like articles coming out about fairly prominent people, either attempting to or planning to build their. Cool, scary times bunker. So apparently Peter [00:01:00] Thiel had plans to build a bunker in New Zealand. I think it might have been rejected. I don't know what the current status is, but Sam Altman had at some point, he's the CEO of OpenAI said something about like, you know, kind of being in on that. And like, you know, his plan was to go to that bunker, to Teal's bunker, if things went bad.

Malcolm Collins: You know, Simone, I don't know if you know this, we have two different bunker invites. We do? Yeah. Yeah. I'm not going to go into who they are or anything.

Simone Collins: Well, I wish you were from Mark Zuckerberg because he certainly has the coolest bunker. I just want to read a description from Wired Magazine because It is so fun.

Would you like to know more?

Simone Collins: According to plans viewed by Wired and a source familiar with the development, the partially completed compound consists of more than a dozen buildings with at least 30 bedrooms and 30 bathrooms in total and is centered around two mansions with a total of four area comparable Oh, sorry.

With a [00:02:00] total floor area comparable to a professional football field, 57, 000 square feet, which contain multiple elevators, offices, conference rooms, and an industrial sized kitchen, in a nearby wooded area, a web of what, 11 disc shaped tree houses are planned, which will be connected by intricate rope bridges, allowing visitors to cross from one building to the next while staying among the treetops.

A building on the other side of the main mansions. We'll include a full size gym, pool, sauna, hot tub, coal plunge, and tennis court. The property is dotted with other guest houses and operations buildings. The scale of the project suggests that it will be more of a personal vacation home. Zuckerberg has already hosted two corporate events at the compound.

And the plans show that the two central mansions will be joined by a tunnel that branches off into a 5, 000 square foot underground bunker. So not all of this is underground, like a lot of it's sort of above ground, which many of these planned things appear to be. They're not all like these super underground [00:03:00] nuclear fallout bunkers.

And many of the compound's doors are planned to be keypad operated. or soundproofed. Others, like those in the library, are described as blind doors made to imitate the design of their surrounding walls. The door in the underground shelter will be constructed out of metal and filled with concrete, still common in bunkers and bomb shelters.

So, What I love about what Zuckerberg is building, the very least, is that like, he's clearly making a mixed use place. Like, I love, I hate the idea of building a bunker that you're just not going to use. And I love that he's like, you know what, if I'm building a bunker, I'm going to make it like the coolest vacation house as well.

You know, kill two birds with one stone. Even if the end times don't come, at least I get to like You know, have some fun, some good parties, good vacations in Hawaii. I,

Malcolm Collins: I, I absolutely love this as well. And so something that you had mentioned is, is not a lot of people are doing this. That has [00:04:00] not been my read at all.

I would say it was in the billionaire circles, almost every single one of them that we know of. All the billionaires are doing it. And, and within our wider friend group, like if I think of our friends who work in VC and stuff like that, I'd say 80 percent of them have some sort of bunker system or off the grid plan.

And if they're conservative, I'd say 99 percent of them do. Which is interesting, and so the question is like, what do they know that you don't know? And I actually think that the answer is going to be a little bit of a bummer to people. And it comes from hold on a second. To actually address something that some people were talking about because they want to use the resident J O O's comments on the situation in Manhattan. Where the, the tunnel Jews, where it was found that they had dug these, the teen boys had dug these tunnels or like built out these tunnels underneath one of the I think it was synagogues or something like that.

Um, [00:05:00] And, and they're like, Oh, look, it's proof. And they had like creepy old like beds in them and stuff like that. And they, Oh, they went by like the girls, basically the girl's dorm. No,

Simone Collins: a woman's bathhouse, a woman's ritual bathhouse.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Okay. Basically the girl's dorm. Okay. I'm sorry. The funny thing is, is people, like, they look at this.

And they're like, Oh, this is sign of something nefarious going on. And I'm like, actually, this is more of a sign of like, you're out of touchness with traditional masculinity. No, it's true. Like, like a traditional boy childhood. I had forts in the woods. I had, and when I was in the city, there was like at various places, I always had some sort of like fort in a derelict building or something like that.

There was a derelict building by ours that we would go like explore and we had like little areas that we knew about. And of course you take the little like doll heads and stuff like that and all of the creepy things. Well, one of the ones near us was an old, hospital, and there was a children's wing of the hospital, [00:06:00] you know, you had all the decaying toys and all of that.

It looked extra creepy, but of course, that's the home base when you're setting up and making it, you know, look that way. And of course, anyone he grew up in the movie era of like the 70s. Every single male coming of age movie had a, you know, them drilling a hole in the side of the the wall on the girl's dorm.

You're starting to leave s**t! Hey, beat it, midget! But I'm missing it, man! Would you shut up and you stay on your side?

Malcolm Collins: Like, is it gross? Yes. Is it something that they should have been doing? No. Is it normal male youth behavior and, like, not the sign of, like, child, like, whatever smuggling? No, it's not like that. It's the insane conclusion to draw from that. Yeah. People

Simone Collins: are like, Oh, like these, these disgusting child sized mattresses who's been forced to sleep on them.

And it's like, dude, their little sister probably like aged out of it. And they were like, Oh yeah, mom, dad, I'll go dispose of it. [00:07:00] And they're like, Oh, finally we have something soft to sit on down here. You know, this is the desire of

Malcolm Collins: young men to build little forts in hidden areas. And then of course, because it was a religious extremist, you know, community like these.

They probably associated it with some form of like religious purpose as well.

Simone Collins: Everything's through that filter, you know, and if it wasn't that it would have been like Marvel movies or something, right? Like,

Malcolm Collins: whatever. Right, right. Well, I mean, when you're young, you know, you do that sort of stuff. I mean, if you don't have a religious tradition, I don't know, it's like a Wiccan spot or something like that, or it's that, you know, Oh, I'm doing these little.

Like special magic things that like other people don't have access to. It is normal kid stuff. And it was the kids who did this. So this wasn't like older people in the community. It was like a group of young men. So, yeah, whatever. Right? Like I, but I think that that's sort of what we're seeing here.

Okay. Is. I think you have an instinct within some populations to build little fortifications. And I think that this instinct, you know, it comes from an episode that we were going to do, which [00:08:00] is the frontier people's instinct to crave apocalypses. I think when you're talking about the general population you know, you ask them, about you know, do you have a bunker?

No, they can't afford a bunker. You ask them, do you have a zombie plan? Like, when was the last time you thought about your zombie plan? I, I think especially if you're talking to conservatives, probably 80 percent of men have spent. Some time, like a lot more time than they need to, given the actual probability of a zombie attack, thinking about their zombie

Simone Collins: plan.

Yeah, are you asking like, how many MREs do you have? Like, you know, or even like you, you can see this built into some religions, like, you know, the, the Mormon Norm of having a certain supply of food all that, you know, like, yeah,

Malcolm Collins: well, and a lot of people don't know, but the, the, the because your grandfather worked on one, the, the the bones of

Simone Collins: the bunker.

Yeah. At the bottom of some

Malcolm Collins: large temples. Yeah. So a lot of these frontier religions have this, but I actually think it's [00:09:00] a genetic. instinct in the same way that I think that like sort of, the men, the young men of a tribe before they come of age, like building little traditions together and building little forts together, it's likely a traditional instinct because that would have really helped you bond with your kinsmen in a historic context and still does.

But I think in addition, in developing secret rights and everything like that, you know, you see this, what is a fraternity if not that. All the boys get together, they, they have a A place that's disgusting often and they have secret little rituals and everything like that. This is a very conservative instinct, you could say.

But then in addition to that, I also think the prepping for like things that can never happen is interesting. One of the most interesting things is if you ask people What's their velociraptor plan? Now this isn't as popular today because the Jurassic Park movies aren't as popular as they used to be.

Okay. Something like 20 percent of men would have a velociraptor attack plan of their house, like in their house was surrounded by velociraptors. Just like not a scenario that's going to remotely happen, but there's still planning

Simone Collins: around. It's fun to fantasize [00:10:00] about, right?

Malcolm Collins: Right, but I don't think everyone does this.

I think people who are from areas that have been civilized for a really long time don't have apocalyptic plans as much as people who lived in frontier areas for a long time. So Yeah,

Simone Collins: because surviving in the frontier Is surviving in the apocalypse.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Well, no, an apocalypse can happen at any day, you know, basically an apocalypse.

Right. Yeah. You know, you're building, then what do you have? You're back to square zero again. Right. No, I

Simone Collins: mean, you don't think about it. No, just even on a nice sunny day you know, food is limited. Locusts could come through, you know, some kind of pests could come through and completely wipe out all your food.

A snowstorm could come raiders, you know, like, you know, in some cases, like, local tribes that are very antagonistic or sometimes just like, like thieves on the road, you know, could just come and like attack your house at any time. Like it's, it is 100%. It is the, the frontier. It's an apocalyptic scenario.

So to a great extent, the [00:11:00] kinds of concerns that people are planning around are exactly the same concern their ancestors survived around.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. And the people in these contexts who didn't have this instinct to have like a hidden store of food away from their house to have like a backup house that's like uniquely defensible to have like, they.

Just died when these things happen. That's why this instinct is so strong in these populations. It's also why if you look at the frontier, like if you look at the best apocalyptic movies, they are coming out of frontier areas. So you look at like good Hollywood movies, good, like like, Road Warrior, where did that come from?

Australia, right? You know, all of the good apocalyptic stories typically come from the Americas or from Australia. And if you look at anime, they honestly just don't do a very good job with apocalyptic stories. I, I've never had a good apocalyptic anime that I really liked. High School of the Dead is probably the closest.

I think it's the best zombie property I've ever watched. But it wasn't [00:12:00] really told like an apocalypse story. Yeah. Which is much more you know, an instance where you're forced to like prove your mettle and like everything. Yeah,

Simone Collins: it's a survival story. An apocalypse is very different from survival scenarios.

It's about a sustainable life going forward. It's about having a defensible property. It's about having a food supply. It's not about making it from one day to the next as the zombies try to kill

Malcolm Collins: you. Yeah, which is what you often see more in the Japanese stories, right? Like it's not about building a settlement, building the defenses around the settlement.

This is what the people from these apocalyptic traditions start fantasizing about. And I also think that there's different colors of apocalyptic tradition that people fantasize about given the environment that their ancestors had to adapt to. So if you look at me, like my apocalyptic fantasy, when I look at it, when I listen to the songs associated with it,

I, I love it.

A part of my heart longs for it. And you could say, well, who would ever long for this? It's the Frostpunk universe.

Are those [00:13:00] who would defy us Who choose oppression over ascension For the pie is dizzy and ends without regret Depend a bend on questioning the direst twisted I am this pariah's and their heretic messiah Winter blizzards to infinity, so sing the hymns and legionaries Hand in and skin the sinners if you wish to skim divinity Each shiver will deliver us, deliverance in time Earn the innocence for penitence if we preempt the crime This battlement of sacraments has chatteled to our right The sacrilegious and recalcitrant shall vow of this night Non believers shall not deceive us, we shall greet their cheek with grievance In this ceaseless season we redeem the meek with bleak obedience I'M SEEKING A It's unheeding heathens, either bleed or bleed allegiance.

Blessed be relief from freedom, lest ye feel the need for treason. Since the precept was decreed, its certainty was be determined. Mere herds of sheep are people, thus they need to be subservient. Be so turbulent a firmament, the worst of men survive. Pray their mercy may preserve us once we touch the other side.​

Simone Collins: [00:14:00]

And here you are complaining about our interior temperature being 51 degrees. Come on, Malcolm. Right?

Malcolm Collins: Yes. You need to edify the spirit.

Simone Collins: Would you know, I know Octavian the other day, I just have to say this.

The other day, he was like, I love the cold. And I'm like, yes,

Malcolm Collins: yes. Our house is a cold house, not heat in the winter with our belief system, right? You know, constant , self deprivation. Yeah. So, It, I think what we're seeing here is an evolved instinct and I mean,

Simone Collins: yeah, we also frame it as something that people enjoy.

It doesn't seem that all of the people involved with this enjoy it. Like they're actually worried and you know, some of our friends when they've spoken about it, don't talk about it like they're enjoying it. They talk about it like it's keeping them up at night. So I wouldn't say I do agree. It's an instinct.

Just like a, a squirrel having the instinct to hide away food. I don't think that these people [00:15:00] enjoy it. Now there's this one Marxist media theorist, self styled I should say, I'm not just calling them that who wrote this piece in the Guardian about how, oh, these. Rich people just keep reaching out to me and asking for my advice because they think I'm a futurist, even though I'm a humanist.

And then sometimes I just go anyway, because I won't say no to the money, of course, and maybe I can convince them to be better people. And the general gist of this person's thesis is that the apocalyptic mindset that these wealthy people have is a danger to society because it's kind of this fantasy that they.

They want to come true. Like there can only be one, they, they want this future where only they survive. And, like, they might, the article doesn't, I think, explicitly say this, but, like, they might manifest it because they're the powerful people and they'll make it happen or they won't stop it from happening because they kind of want it to happen.

These are Marxist fever

Malcolm Collins: dreams.

Simone Collins: Yeah. Yeah. I [00:16:00] mean. I don't know what to say. Like I

Malcolm Collins: would only do that. I mean, they have their power because of the existing system. Exactly. Rich in the powerful in a society are those individuals who are often most threatened by ideas that counter The society and the mainstream ideals.

This is why you have individuals who are often clearly smart enough to understand the concept of the urban monoculture, understand the negative value sets. It's, it's, it's giving to a population, you know, like Mark Zuckerberg or Bill Gates or something like that. Like if they. Applied the most small modicum of thoughts to the way the world is structured today.

They would realize how unjust it is and how dangerous it is, but they can't, they can't afford to because of the world structure changed, they would lose what they have.

Simone Collins: I don't know. I think, so, it, among the threats that they were planning for that were listed, there was climate change, obviously. So like a lot of concern over that, but also social instability.[00:17:00]

And no, well, I, I, I think so there's some people who are covering this whole billionaire bunkers thing are also talking about people getting golden passports and all these other, like, you know, like, you know, buying islands. I totally don't think this has anything to do with apocalyptic planning. They're buying islands because they want to have a fricking island.

Like buying an island is like the worst place to be in an apocalypse. You're going to get taken out by the next hurricane. This is when I

Malcolm Collins: grew up, my family had a private island, the Bahamas. that we would go to and we would spend, you know, I'd spend a few months there every year. And you know, pirate raids and stuff like that.

They are, people think islands are much more defensible than they are. Yeah. The

Simone Collins: house that Malcolm lived in with his family, that they'd built on that Island, literally riddled full of bullets. It is like, it was so sad to walk through it. And it was so disturbing because it was like

Malcolm Collins: stuffed animals that have been

Simone Collins: stuffed animals, these kid beds.

Yeah. Like just. Yeah, caught up bullets, bullet holes everywhere. So anyway, yeah, no, these people are just buying islands because they want party islands and then, you know, other people are covering it saying, oh, they [00:18:00] think the end of the world is coming and the passport saying, come on, that's not going to do you any good in a real apocalypse.

I think people just kind of. For some people, it seems like a kind of hobby to pick up more passports. I think it's the bunker people that are actually thinking about this, but I think one of the reasons why I think they are planning for social instability is that a lot of the, the conversations are circling around the, like private security forces, for example, this, this Marxist who was, was flown out to advise a group of a small group of like five millionaires and billionaires about their bunker strategy rights.

Finally, the CEO of a brokerage house explained that he had nearly completed building his own underground bunker system and asked, how do I maintain authority over my security force after the event? The event. That was their euphemism for the environmental collapse, social unrest, nuclear explosion, solar storm, unstoppable virus, and malicious computer hack that takes everything down.

The single question occupied us for the rest of the hour. They knew armed guards would be [00:19:00] required to protect their compounds from raiders as well as angry mobs. One had already secured a dozen Navy SEALs to make their way to his compound if he gave them the right cue. But how would he pay the guards?

Or, once Even crypto was worthless, what would stop the guards from eventually choosing their own leader? The, the billionaires considered using special combinations of locks and food supply that only they knew, or making guards wear disciplinary collars of some kind in return for their survival. Or maybe, Building robots to serve as guards and workers, if that technology could be developed in time.

So like, okay, so these, at least these people who are dumb enough to hire a Marxist to help them with their survival strategy Who are building bunkers and stuff are really concerned about security. Yeah, they are concerned about social unrest. They are concerned about people attacking them

Malcolm Collins: When we would say I mean, I hope anyone who knows our channel would say what we would say if we had a lot of money is that the skills needed in a good leader are going to change during this time period and you should build a system that [00:20:00] allows the society that you're building to elect the best leader.

It doesn't need to be you. You, you don't need to control, you're just lucky to survive the apocalypse. And after that, it's about building a strong culture and you should be happy if one of the Navy SEAL guards is running everything, if they're a benevolent and good leader, you should focus much more on good governance than you should focus on, and we did write the pragmatist guide to governance.

Then you should focus on trying to maintain power yourself. And great example of this. So in China, by the way, this is a, this is a great story. So when the CCP was coming to power there was, you know, the, the government before it, I forget what they were called Shanghai Shek's government was falling apart.

And one of the mayors, I want to say was the mayor of one of the major cities, took all his money. And put it in his car, like, in gold bricks, right? Oh, I love this story. And he, he, he just filled this, like, limousine with gold bricks, and he got in, and he had his limo driver drive [00:21:00] him out of the city, apparently, like, right at the city limits.

The limo driver Took him out of the car, shot him, and drove off with a limo full of gold bricks. Because that's why! You don't matter anymore! I got a limo full of gold bricks here! You've been a dick to me! And this is the problem with these people. If they haven't engendered the respect of the people around them in terms of how they've made their money and how they spent their money.

Which is very antithetical to the way we live. It, like, if you look at the way that we put money into our community and stuff like that, the idea that anyone in our community would betray us like this, and it's not like small amounts, like, this is the problem. You don't give your community, like, a pittance or something like that.

Because if you do that, then, you know, they still have a lot of So, one, never give your community Less than what they deserve to have the same advantages as somebody was in your family, right? Because then you're building a community of people who are like, I genuinely appreciate you guys. But on top of that, and we, we've had this, like we've mentioned to the community, [00:22:00] like, it'll come up sometimes like, oh, this person has, has mentioned killing us online.

And they're like, I, they better not f*****g come here. So that's, that's, you know, one thing is, is, is your. You, you need to actually be a good person and actually reinvest in your community. Well, at least on a meritocratic basis. But the other thing is don't have things that are worth taking. Within a system like this, like within our house, we have nothing that's worth stealing.

We have computers that will be like, like literally the most expensive things we have in our house or our technology. But it's

Simone Collins: like even our laptops are not like Like mine is four years old, three, three years old. Like, yeah, none of it. Like even our, our, our screens, like our bigger like screen, like in the kitchen is, is so shitty.

I don't think anyone would even take it. Cause it's like, I could imagine them trying to turn it on and like waiting the five minutes it takes for it to load, you know, and being like.

Malcolm Collins: We have like five sets of the same [00:23:00] outfit. That's not particularly useful. You don't have no one steals clothes or jewelry.

Simone Collins: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I guess a lot of it's just, but I mean, but hold on like in the apocalypse though, what these people are afraid of having stolen is just like literally their food, their clean water, their supplies, like the stuff that people need to not die.

Malcolm Collins: And I think what you need then is the thing that really protects you is by having a system centered around you or your property or something you have built that is stable and that people want to participate in.

Hmm. That's the thing. You want to be the one, if not stable democracy, because I actually don't think democracies are particularly good governing systems, and again, read the Pragmatist Guide to Governance if you're interested in this, but be the system where people can be fairly certain that they, that the best People that the most meritocratically competent people are going to be promoted was in that system to the to to a good position and that people was in that system were want for less than other systems and then people are [00:24:00] like, well, what about the angry non meritocratically competent people?

Well, the great thing is that if you like, if you. Sap the surrounding area of all the meritocratically competent people, then you don't need to worry about the other groups in the area because the meritocratically competent people will find ways to defend your settlement. So at that point, it's mostly just about having the ammunition and the guns and stuff like that, that can be distributed competently by whatever governance system you set up.

I will say one of the, the, I know bunkers that we have been invited to use is AI kill drones. So they wouldn't have this problem. We'd have to.

Simone Collins: Yeah, I mean, I think we're really like me just a few years away from most people being able to like commercially set up AI drones to defend their property, which is like, and that would change a lot like that.

Plus a good solar flare protected solar energy system and, um. You know, some other like energy supplies would probably do the trick. Right.

Malcolm Collins: [00:25:00] No, but I mean, I do find the AI kill drone thing. Interesting. It's a system where they've got a an area of farmland and did that's enough to support the people who would be coming there.

And then like a silo and the silo has the drone flying. Kill drones to protect the area, which makes a lot of sense. I mean, people would be like, well, that can't be operational constantly because they need to recharge. And it's like, well, it doesn't need to be operational constantly. It needs to be operational a few times before people realize that you do not attack this settlement.

And you put the people who you care about dying less on the outskirts of the settlement and the people you care about dying more on the inside of the settlement. very different settlement planning practices than you would have historically. And you, you can earn land and stuff like that by labor or by, by contributing to the settlement schools.

Yeah.

Simone Collins: But here's, okay. Here's the big bust that I think this group is missing. That like, I think you and I always bring up with our friends when they tell [00:26:00] us their bunker plans is that like, Realistically. Yeah. I mean, it's good to have an emergency plan. And I think this is part of just being like, everyone should have a good emergency plan as a part of a healthy balanced diet.

You should know what to, you know, you should know CPR. You should know how to get your kids safe if they start choking on something and all that, right. Put out a fire. And you should know what to do. If suddenly like global infrastructure collapses or, you know, there's a climate apocalypse or whatever, but like the real, thing is demographic collapse.

The real thing is the future of human civilization. The real thing is all that. And I think, you know, another group that gets put into this category of doomsday preppers are people like Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk who are trying to get humans off planet, right. Who are like, let's go to Mars. Let's, let's go to the, you know, let's get off.

The earth and that is, that is not the thing. Like [00:27:00] these, that is not, that is about saving civilization. That is not about saving their asses. Right.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. People are like, Oh, they want to scurry off this thinking ship was like, like rats off of, and it's like, I'm sorry, you idiot Marxists are the ones who thunk this ship.

Okay. You are the sign of the rot in society and that they have chosen not to take you shows that and when this comes to one of the things of, of, of wealth. And in our society, and it's something that I just, it disgusts me that people don't get this. So there are ways to make wealth that is unethical.

I agree with that. There are ways to like play the market where it's just, you know, showing intellectual superiority over other people. Okay. I get that. If you look at the wealthiest people in our society and you're not including women It's mostly people who earn their own money. So what does it really mean to earn your own money in our society today, outside of a few isolated scenarios?

It's like saying, okay, you can, you can get paid for one of two things. You can be a factory worker, like an [00:28:00] incremental factory worker, and get paid for the incremental productivity that you, as a factory worker, gave to that factory. Or you can be a person who allows Five people to do the job in the factory that 10 people used to be able to do.

And people are like, well, how can this person be making, you know, more hours of work than I could work if I was working from the time of Jesus to today? And I'm like, that's how, that's how, because they're literally adding more productivity than you could add to the world working from the time of Jesus to today.

And they deserve that money because of that. That is how the vast majority of ultra ultra also wealthy people are making so much money.

Simone Collins: This is super underrated. I just want to emphasize this because like there are all these shows out there about like rich families and rich people. And a lot of them just sort of frame them as incredibly dumb, incredibly unethical.

Like it's clear that these are written by people who hate capitalism and hate wealth. And like, I'm thinking about these are the most irredeemable unethical, terrible [00:29:00] antisocial people out there. And like the vast majority of wealthy people, certainly the ones that we've met are Good pro social people who care about making the world a better place, who are kind and patient and good to others.

They're a little

Malcolm Collins: burned from being constantly attacked by society, but it's clear that they at least started with a positive heart for society. And like, okay, for example, Jeff Bezos, right? Like a lot of people are like, oh, what a horrible person. Amazon, like the, the quality difference. If you didn't live in the pre Amazon world, the quality difference that Amazon makes to my life.

Every day. If you're talking about, like, time saved, if you're talking about, like, the amount of incremental, they're like, how could he make as much as, like, like, like, like, like, literally, I think he probably gives every American citizen two hours extra time every day compared to the pre Amazon world.

Simone Collins: That's a big claim. 20 minutes. Well, maybe

Malcolm Collins: not two [00:30:00] hours. 20 minutes a day. 30 minutes a day, at least. 30 minutes a day for every American citizen is enormous if you're talking about like productivity increases in our economy. To, to, if you gave him 30 minutes of our salary every day for every American citizen, then that gets a lot more interesting because you're like, oh, Less than what he's probably actually making, you know, and at that point you're like, okay, I get it now.

Right? Just people are unwilling to recognize how little they add to the world compared to other people. I think that's the real problem. If they want to pretend that everyone's adding the same things to the world and that's just not true. And in a communist system that distributed wealth fairly, people like him would still be getting stupid amounts of wealth.

Yeah, but communist didn't communist systems intentionally end up sabotaging more competent people. And there's like a whole, you can read the pragmatist guide to governance

Simone Collins: for describing communist as in the ones that [00:31:00] have actually been executed. Like we've, we've come to understand that. Communism in theory, the concept of communism is, it actually requires like a science fiction world that doesn't exist yet, which is basically like post AGI, post scarcity, post singularity, and then totally you can have communism.

I think the problem is that like, a bunch of people decided that they were going to try it without like the fundamental necessary principles being there. I agree. That's

Malcolm Collins: what you're describing. I mean, obviously you have the telescoping history concept that was invented by Lenin, which shows to an extent you're right there, but I, I don't think that's, like, I don't think that those things are necessary for communism.

I'd like, like, I think that communism works on a small scale.

Simone Collins: Oh, it totally does. Yeah. But I don't think communism as described by the great communist thinkers was meant to be applied only at the family level, for example.

Malcolm Collins: So. Yeah. Okay. Anyway, it was great. This is a great conversation, Simone. We'll see how many people we piss off with it.

That's how we judge the [00:32:00] quality of, of how based we are. You know, I think we've already

Simone Collins: gotten rid of most of the Marxists at this point, but we'll see. Hi guys. If you're here,

Malcolm Collins: you're still around. We,

Simone Collins: we can't say we love you, but we tolerate you, but I love you, Malcolm.

Malcolm Collins: I love you too.

Malcolm and Simone explain how and why mysticism and witchcraft corrupt rational thinking, even though they can emotionally comfort people lacking perceived control. Practices like horoscopes hijack brains by providing alternate physical "truths" without logic or evidence. This is fine on Earth but would endanger space exploration, where physics understanding is essential. Allowing some controlled traditional mysticism can act as an "idiot trap" though, concentrating dangers.

Simone Collins: [00:00:00] well, I mean, did I, did I tell you that when I was in high school, I was the anonymous horoscopes writer for my school's newspaper.

Malcolm Collins: No,

Simone Collins: people loved it.

Malcolm Collins: So why is mysticism so dangerous if you want to become a space fearing civilization? It is because

all mystical frameworks are fundamentally Alternate hypotheses without evidence or predictive capacity for how physics works. They are mundane in our world today, outside of how they affect a person's ability to think clearly,

they are not mundane if they are allowed to spread. on a spaceship where you need a life support system and you can immediately disintegrate if somebody's like, well, radiation has healing properties, or somebody's like, Oh, I don't believe that this is how our warp drive should work.

And in those capacities, it's literally life or death to not allow these heretical beliefs to spread

Would you like to know more?

Simone Collins: You look like a newscaster, and I look like some kind of [00:01:00] witch from the, like, Middle Ages.

Malcolm Collins: I thought I'd mix it up a lot. People are really surprised by our logo. Like, they think this is a new thing for us. I've had this for half a decade at this point. Maybe Almost, no, not a full decade, but yeah, we've been using it as our family logo for a long time.

Well,

Simone Collins: it's the logo of, no, our family logo is our monogram. This is the logo of the Pragmatist Foundation. Put that up. The Pragmatist Foundation has been around since 2016. And the gear has been a main part of that. And the Pragmatist Foundation is what technically owns and operates. This podcast. So,

Malcolm Collins: yeah, well, and the, the, the baby when we had Octavian, our first kid, his blankie has the pragmatist foundation logo on it.

And all of our books had the pragmatist foundation logo on it. And somebody was like, well, why this number of teeth in it? And the answer was. Actually it's a, it's a superimposed, you can think of it as a superimposed Latin cross and St. Andrew's cross. Is why it has this number of teeth in it for the, the religious element.

But also, you [00:02:00] know, we, we go over in the, the, the piece I posted a text as to why we decided to do the logo change. We'd been meaning to for ages. Might do a dedicated episode about it, actually. That would be interesting as to why we chose the gear as our logo here. But recently something happened.

So, Simone went to accept the Republican Party's sort of nomination, not nomination, but endorsement of her candidacy for the state house.

Simone Collins: From the Republican committee of our county in Pennsylvania.

Malcolm Collins: You said this is the first time in my entire life, you're like I'm here, 30 what years old and for the.

First time in my life I experienced real gender discrimination. It was amazing. I've never experienced it before. The That's possible thing. Yeah. So, so I, as we were walking around she was obviously the candidate, you know, she was on stage as a candidate and everything like that. But for whatever reason, there was a specific category of idiot.

Who had a lot of advice to give about [00:03:00] running for office, but would only talk to me. And so all the interesting people, I was like this weird force field of idiocy around Simone at the event. I know. Like

Simone Collins: normally the misogyny you'd think would like benefit Malcolm, right? That like people would just like see me and be like, okay.

And then like, be like, okay, I'm going to talk with the man. But it was only. The, it sounds bad. It was only the dumbest people and clearly like the least important and least impactful people that just completely ignored me and only spoke with Malcolm, which was hilarious and amazing. And, you know, they would say things like What did that one guy say?

He's like, well, I'm going to ask, he looked to me for a second. This is before he really ignored me. He looked at me and he said, well, this is normally something I've always asked guys, but now I ask women too, what do you do for work?

Malcolm Collins: And I'm like, I run a chain of companies in a private equity firm.

Simone Collins: Thank you, sir. Only between like. [00:04:00] 1956 and 1965, because apparently, like, I mean, there's been no other time where women don't work. I don't understand, like, this whole housewife thing. What even? I, I

Malcolm Collins: don't. And he was, he was another person running for office too. Oh, boy. It was anyway. So hold on. But we got to get to the topic at hand, which is not for not a witch to live.

And so a lot of people, you know, they hear about our beliefs and they are sometimes surprised by the elements of traditional cultures that we maintain. With extremely fierce fidelity, even fiercer fidelity than most of the current conservative religious communities and our beliefs around witchcraft and sorcery fall into this extremist faction of things. When you look around the world and you see all successful cultural groups that is successful in [00:05:00] terms of their spread or not all, but almost all like a huge convergent belief system is the belief that Witchcraft, sorcery, and mysticism are evil. This is something you see across traditions.

And so that means there is some reason for it. That reason can either be that it is actually evil, or it has some negative consequences. On the traditions that allow its practice at high levels. But another thing that's really interesting is they often frame it as being evil in the same way. So it's usually not just that it is broadly evil.

It is, and Simone, you were telling me that you had experienced this, was like your own parents were even into this stuff and told you stuff like this.

Simone Collins: Yeah, my, my parents were always like either, like my mother was really interested in sort of like training as a shaman and her. Final years, my, my dad had attended like these sort of psychic seminars.

And as a kid, you know, you always want to [00:06:00] hear about ghost stories or anything crazy. Right. So I always asked him about it and he's like, man, you have to be really careful because you know, like when you open yourself up to this stuff, like you, you become a conduit, you know, you let them, they can come in through you essentially.

And yeah, it's interesting that like, even people who are into it, even people who like want to harness that or access or tap into that world are like, no, it's dangerous. It's dangerous.

you were telling me that it f***s with your head. The certain amount of it after a while, it just f***s with your head. That's why I'm usually kind of like almost autistic is I'm just being constantly.

Why? Because lower entities will come in and violate your free will. They know. All your b******t, they see right through you. They will not manipulate your free will unless you ask them in. I have dude, do not say that I'm gonna get killed. I've a hundred percent communicated with something. I'm not judging anybody.

I'm just saying, okay, be careful. The question is whether that something was actually in my imagination or in my mind, or that something was something that takes place in another [00:07:00] dimension. Once you open that gate, it's all bad. They have, so why is it all bad? Why? Why can't you experience that interdimensional?

being and learn something from it, and be a better person when you come out of it. Because, because every time it gets control, it starts murdering everybody. They wind up killing everybody later. In every case. And it always starts beautiful. It always starts great. Problem is, some of it makes sense. That's where the psychosis comes in.

Whoa. It's going to create a giant societal crisis where most of the people are already going to get killed. Because an evil force wants conflict. So I'm saying no, no, no. It's all chaos. Stop it. This is the nature of the beast.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Yeah. And then you see this within Christian communities, you know, you engage with a Ouija board or something like that.

And that is the pathway for demons to enter your spirit and corrupt your mind. Or you look at. You know, Jewish teachings around like the Kabbalah, like there is a Jewish mysticism branch, but you are often taught you do not engage with this until you are very well trained in other areas. Like it is not child's play.

It is meant [00:08:00] to be taken very seriously in systemically and in some cases, almost like a training of a defense against the dark arts rather than you know, practicing for the sake of practicing for individual power. And. This then comes to our broader framework around this. One, why has this been historically shamed?

So there's like three categories here. Like, is there a reason this is a bad thing to believe? Two, if we are creating an iteration of a tradition that we mean to take humanity to the stars does it make sense to have really fierce prohibitions against this? Three, what really is mysticism? Like what's the core of it and why is it so appealing to people?

And how can we identify it and stamp it out? So first let's sort of talk about like what mysticism really is, because if you go historically, like if I go to ancient Athens or something like that, right, mysticism would include what today we would call astronomy and [00:09:00] physics and. And when mysticism included all of these other fields it was generally not shamed by the traditions around it, but as society evolved those things that could be proven true and could be engaged with became split out of mysticism and became the sciences and mysticism Is sort of the residue that's left when you take out.

All of the provable, material, studyable aspects of these traditions. And it's not that people don't try. Like, there are whole university departments that have been created around, like, trying to, like, this was big in the 80s like, mind reading and stuff like that. departments. They're actually made fun of in Ghostbusters.

That if anyone has seen Ghostbusters, one of the characters works in one of these departments. Like, and, and it's something you can easily measure. Like, somebody claims to be psychic. Okay, we have one [00:10:00] person holding cards. How often can the other person guess the cards that this person is holding and looking at?

Square. Good guess, but wrong. Is it a star? It is a star. Very good, that's great.

Malcolm Collins: Like, this is very measurable stuff. Well, it turns out that these departments didn't really produce anything particularly interesting. And so most of them were shut down. If they That would have become a science and it would have split out of mysticism because they would have been like, well, are you talking about the science, the measurable kind or the mystic kind?

It's funny where it was quote unquote proven within like government, like far seeing programs and stuff like that. So the government had some programs tied to mysticism, a giant bureaucracy. Idiotic bureaucracy that bureaucracies always are and it decided that a lot of this stuff was true at first the movie men who stare at goats is is about this.

But over time it was realized that no This was just con men who were easily screwing with bureaucracies [00:11:00] and bureaucracies are incredibly stupid especially government bureaucracies

This is Larry's spirit guide, Maude. I'm looking into the cupboard now. And I see A tin Mug.

No, wait a minute. You said A, not K. He said A.

Malcolm Collins: But I I want to So what defines mysticism today? Like, like what's left of mysticism? Are the, the ways of viewing the world and the ways of seeing the world that do not infer a predictive or competitive advantage for the individual?

Simone Collins: Yeah, it's like, it's, it's like adding an additional explanation for things or additional heuristics for making decisions that are not backed up by science results and yet they provide comfort or a feeling of control sometimes in places or ways where there just is no control. And I think maybe this is taking things [00:12:00] too off, but like we would probably even throw like personality assessments like the Myers Briggs and like blood types and horoscopes.

Into this category as well,

Malcolm Collins: I would strongly throw horoscopes into this category. Yeah. You know, if, if we are, if we're out there burning witches, that includes people who believe in horoscopes.

Simone Collins: And I was just listening to, there's a really fun podcast called the studies show where they sort of do a meta analysis of a subject.

They did personality tests recently, and they going through the research actually found that even like the Myers Briggs, which is used extensively is really not the robust people think it is, especially when you port it across cultures or apply it to different cultures. Like, there are some cultures that just only pick up on like.

Two of the things and really the bigger like personality modulators or things like intelligence. So even yeah, even the Myers Briggs, you know, is, I would say is, is one of those mysticism ask things [00:13:00] that people fob off as science. But that has, it's falls into that category of this thing that people really like to use to explain things or predict things that doesn't actually track with like very predictive or solid

Malcolm Collins: results.

So this is actually really interesting because the Myers Briggs is a good way of showing how we determine when something is witchcraft versus not witchcraft, how we determine if it's mysticism versus not mysticism, right?

Simone Collins: Yeah, it's not the aesthetics. We don't need like. A wand or,

Malcolm Collins: or because some mysticism at one time was science, but has since been proven non useful.

So within our framework, for example, phrenology would be considered a form of mysticism. Totally. Homeopathy would be considered a form of mysticism. 100%. And Myers Briggs. If it is disproven in the data, which I think the preponderance of data shows that it's just not particularly useful, it edges on mysticism, but it [00:14:00] isn't full mysticism in that it still does have some level of efficacy, it is only mysticism in so far as people overuse it, and that it appeals to earlier mystical frameworks whereas Zodiac signs, if you look Spencer Greenberg ran a giant study on Zodiac signs recently to see if they had any predictive capacity and they have zero predictive capacity.

And okay, Cupid did a big study on this as well. And then people of course go, Oh, well, what you actually need is not the sun. No, no,

Simone Collins: no, no, no, no, no, no. What they're saying is they're like, Oh, well, Spencer's just a classic Capricorn.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Right. Right. No, no. But then they're like, Oh no, but you actually need to do it in this ultra specialized

Simone Collins: way that like, Yeah, like you're, you're, you're just going by their sun sign.

It's obviously you have to look at like where Mars is as well. Blah, blah, blah.

Malcolm Collins: And then it's like, okay. So then if somebody did a test using all of that, like, and it had a reasonable sample size, like a hundred people. Would you then look at that test and have your beliefs overturned if it didn't show that it was predicted?

And these people would be like, No, not really. [00:15:00] So, so, they believe something, and, and this is where mysticism becomes really important for two reasons. You view it from a completely secular framework. One is, is it's corrupting of the mind. And we'll talk about how it's corrupting of the mind, because it really affects these people's ability to hold Like coherent, logical thoughts after they engage with it too long.

And in that way, these earlier analogies of like, you know, you touch the chaos and it corrupts you. Mm, were not incorrect. They just, yeah, were explaining it like you'd explain it to a child. And like

Simone Collins: I say, well they were explaining it in their own terms, which is that the, the terms of a mystic. Before we move forward, I just wanna point out one more thing in that this goes both ways.

There are many practices that are, or in the past have been mystical. that are now shown to be fairly scientifically robust in causing certain meaningful effects. Consider ayahuasca ceremonies. Now, of course, there's wide variation in the effectiveness of these because every every like practitioner of these has a slightly different formula and [00:16:00] process.

And obviously some formulas are more effective than others, but these can very significantly affect people's like life outlooks depression levels, et cetera. Like they're, they're very meaningful. And they're very like effective psychedelics that people are administering. And yet that was, you know, seen as like kind of witchcraft, kind of like in this like shaman.

So like the aesthetics of it don't matter. We don't care about that. Same with like a lot of like herbal remedies. You know, a lot of people who are seen as witches were just like basically providing. effective pharmaceuticals to people in their lives.

Malcolm Collins: Right. And then, so very important in this is that it is not the aesthetics.

It's whether or not it has been tested. There was not like a previous period where people had tested these ayahuasca ceremonies and determined that they did not have efficaciousness. They just assumed that they didn't because of the aesthetics around them, which we are very against doing. Actually, this brings me to a great example of what modern mysticism is.

Modern mysticism is. to science, what herbal remedies are to medicine. If you look historically, a lot of [00:17:00] medicine we use today was originally herbal remedies, aspirin, aspirin, like, Oh, you chew on bark of an aspirin tree, right? Like, like it's aspirin tree, I guess it's, yeah. And that creates some, you know, effect that lowers inflammation and lowers pain in an individual.

Um, Well, this was tested and it worked and then the, the companies then said, okay, well, can we create this without all the impurities that you're getting when you're chewing on bark? Can we make this healthier? Can we make this more? And that's the way science has engaged a lot of the earlier mystical practices.

Yeah. And that it has tried to distill them. Now, keep in mind, modern science has become corrupted. We are the first to say that academia has become corrupted by the virus. But that doesn't mean that we are as we often say, like we believe in an academic reformation. We do not have a problem with the scientific method.

What we have is a problem with the centralized bureaucratic institutions that have become the guardians of that method. When the Protestants [00:18:00] split from the Catholic church, they didn't have a problem with God. They had a problem with the corruption of the central bureaucracy. And this is the same way we relate to things like mysticism, but I need to go further here.

So, so why is mysticism so dangerous if you want to become a space fearing civilization? It is because space fearing civilizations need to have portions of their populations that live on Space faring ships. These are ships that are going to function on the edge of science, whether it is their life support systems the cutting edge of science or they're, you know, faster than light propulsion drives or they're, you know, near speed of light propulsion drives.

All mystical frameworks are fundamentally Alternate hypotheses without evidence or predictive capacity for how physics works. That is what mysticism fundamentally is. Whether you are talking about ghosts, or you are talking about the zodiac signs, or you are talking about, [00:19:00] God forbid, I mean, we take a very anti mystical framework, so anti mystical that many religious traditions, now keep in mind, this is only within our tradition that we treat this so harshly.

The human soul. All of these are alternate hypotheses about how reality works and, and belief in alternate physical planes and stuff like that behind reality, and as such, are forms of mysticism. And they are mundane in our world today, outside of how they affect a person's ability to think clearly, which we'll talk about in a second.

They are not mundane if they are allowed to spread. on a spaceship where you need a life support system and you can immediately disintegrate and be exposed to space if somebody's like, well, radiation has healing properties, or somebody's like, Oh, I don't believe that this is how our warp drive should work.

And in those capacities, it's literally life or death to not allow these heretical beliefs to spread. And they need to be. [00:20:00] Prosecuted within these communities and people can be like, how does this? correlate with your views around religious pluralism, right? Which is really interesting. So we still believe in religious pluralism, but remember we believe in the concept of a Tesseract God.

And the Tesseract God concept means that there are multiple holistically true revelations of God in the world today. Some iterations of Islam, some iterations of Christianity, some iterations of Judaism. None of those, we think, are iterations that lead heavily into the mystical arts. We think that most of the true iterations see the mystical arts as what they are, which is dangerous.

And not things that any individual, or any individual who is aligned with the forces of good, Should be meddling with or should be engaging with, but let's talk about why this, the historically this happened and why it's such a problem. And you'll see this if you engage with mystical communities.

You know, we had a one of our viewers who's trying to create [00:21:00] something similar to what we're doing, but he's like, yeah, but I want it to be like mystical and like incorporate mystical arts from various communities. And he's like, but the problem is whenever I talk to people, they're either like mystical arts are stupid or they're like, yeah, man, like, I like your vibes around this idea.

And it's like, well, why is he getting that response? It's because he's engaging with a community that is defined about the untestability of its ideas other than in an aesthetic sense. So they define which ideas they accept and which ideas they reject based on how those ideas aesthetically make them feel.

You begin to structure your logic and the way you engage with the world around aesthetic sensibilities and you are now debating and communicating with other people using that as your metric for true versus untrue things. You can begin to see how now your brain is no longer learning the true metric of truth, which is for us.

This gives you some level of predictability over [00:22:00] future events. Like if I know about the world, that thing is true. If it helps me predict future events, like, my knowledge of fire is accurate. If it predicts what fire does when you are no longer, when your fire now for you is something that has nothing to do with prediction, it's completely mystical in nature.

And it has some sort of like, you know, a lot of the times mystical arts tap into super soft culture, which we've talked about in our books and stuff like that. It has some sort of, like, personal identifying thing. It may have some product of fetishes, and by fetishes I don't mean sexual fetishes, I mean, like, religious fetishes, like, some sort of item that provides an individual with power.

Um, and, and this is another thing that's really a problem with mysticism, is it appeals to individual vanity almost as much as hedonism does. Hedonism appeals to individual vanity in that it allows an individual to just engage with whatever their brain is telling them to engage with at like the lower level.

But

Simone Collins: then there's I mean, personal vanity isn't even necessarily the right word. It's, it's a, a [00:23:00] cheat code or excuse to, to not think, to not act, to not do the hard thing. Yeah, yep. And I think that's, that's also a big reason why many very established religions reject witchcraft or mysticism because while they have their own internal cheat codes for like hand waving of like, oh, this thing is logically inconsistent, but here's the reason why.

No one else is allowed to do that because if other people start to do that, then they get to bend all the other rules and the important roles. So I think, you know, this is an important thing.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, I think you're absolutely right. Well, you know, there's some mystical arts that clearly show some form of effect, right? You know, like, oh, the whirling dervishes or something like that. Right. And I'm like, well, yeah, I mean, of course they show some kind of effect. If you study science, you would know that doing something because like, I'm really into the study of cults and how cults recruit and how.

Psychology works and stuff like that. If you are doing a repeated rhythmic dance that can activate the same [00:24:00] part of your brains as hallucinogens, this is especially true of your spinning, which is going to create a form of dizziness and other forms of neural damage, which will create feelings of, of grandeur.

And it's, it's, it's particularly true of anything you do to the absence of sleeping enough and eating enough. Like these, I mean, it's similar

Simone Collins: to like drug intake. It's going to, it's going to alter your consciousness. But it

Malcolm Collins: also makes people incredibly susceptible to ideas. And as we have pointed out in in other episodes, the human brain did not evolve in any context where it was rewarded for recognizing profundity as profundity.

So it is very easy to hijack the parts of the brain associated with profundity using things like. twirling for hours on end that we can understand as psychologists and neuroscience, how that makes people extremely susceptible to really any idea you want to insert into them after doing that or dancing or anything like that.

And that, that doesn't just because something is effective at brainwashing people doesn't [00:25:00] mean it's an effective source and sourcing for truth in the world. And this is why it is important to educate yourself. This is why A person who lives, as in the words of Wynwood Reid, a person who lives by their conscience, but who does not take the time to educate that conscience, is living in sin.

Because it doesn't matter if your conscience is prone to sin, if your conscience is prone to corruption. And let's talk about what we mean by, like, corruption, right? I actually really like, like, when we're explaining this to our kids, because as we said, every religion needs an adult way of understanding things, like the The way that leans towards more like a rational understanding, but also why God

Simone Collins: then you need like the cartoon kid

Malcolm Collins: version, the cartoon kid version.

I'm just going to take again, the Warhammer version. The war, you know, that you engage with the mystical arts and you open yourself to possession by demons. And, and, and, and this, this, but I'll be clearer about it and true about it. This possession doesn't look like a full on like Catholic possession or something like that.

It looks. [00:26:00] Like a corruption of the mind, you have opened your mind to a world that is not a world of logic and consequences, but a world of aesthetics and wishy thinking, which is one of the most dangerous mystical. And I think the core of super soft cultures to people who don't know what she thinking.

It's from an I. T. crowd episode, but it's something you see across mystical traditions, which is the idea that it's not. Human intentionality can increase the probability of events in the future. The secret is the best example of this, but it basically means if you want something to happen badly enough, it can affect real world probabilities.

Space. What is it? The simple answer is, we don't know. Or at least we didn't know until now. I'm not a scientist. But I do have a better understanding of what space is than any scientist living today. Where did I gain these insights? From this man.

Beth Gaga Shaggy. The founder of spaceology. , when it comes to space, he's the man with his head screwed [00:27:00] on tight. This is what he told me . Space is invisible mining dust. I mean, think about that.

That means every star you can see in the night sky is a wish that has come true. And they've come true because of something he calls Space Star Ordering. Space Star Ordering is based on the twin scientific principles of Star Maths and Wishy Thinking.

No. If that doesn't convince you, well then, maybe you just don't deserve to get what you want.

You're a sceptic, Jen. You should be more like these. They can't get enough of my space star ordering story. How did the cosmos grant you a helicopter? Well, I visualized the thing I wanted. In my case, it was a helicopter.

I drew a picture of the helicopter on a piece of paper. Couple of days later, bought myself a helicopter.

Explain that one if you can.

Malcolm Collins: And now you see what we mean when we talk about this being an alternate hypothesis for how the physical laws exist. [00:28:00] But an individual who gets invested in this will have a very easy time. In terms of confirmation bias and stuff like that, these beliefs persist intergenerationally among some communities because of their effectiveness at hijacking the human brain.

Is there a way to prevent this from happening to a person's brain when they engage with mystical arts. Previously, I would have said no, but I have some disconfirming evidence recently, which has made me rethink this particular topic specifically. Historically speaking everyone I ever knew. Who engaged with Kabbalah or cabalistic texts. This is the Jewish mystical texts. Was so bad at structuring their thoughts afterwards, Simona and I even had an internal phrase to describe these individuals called Kabbalah brained. , yet recently, actually a fan of the show who I've been engaging with is an expert on these texts.

And he seems to be able to structure his thoughts very [00:29:00] logically and be a very otherwise smart and lucid individual. Why is this the case? What I suspect happened is he actually engaged with the text following Jewish custom, which is, you know, you don't engage with them until you are very well-structured in logic and other forms of, , engaging with ideas before you approach the text.

And they are. Written about as something that should be seen as potentially dangerous within Jewish customs. , and that should be approached with an extreme amount of caution. And that when he went into them, he went into them. We as that understanding and not that understanding being because one of the really dangerous things is people misunderstanding.

When somebody says approach this with caution, it could have damage you, , some people hear that and they think, oh, that must mean it's a super powerful thing. Or it's a super forbidden and cool thing, which I think is something that draws a lot of people to mysticism. When, what is actually meant to that is no, not, this is a place of unique [00:30:00] power, but this could actually just mess you up.

If you do not approach it. Was an ordered mind. , The fact that I only know one person who hasn't been severely affected by engaging with these types of thoughts. To me still says it's probably better to make a blanket ban on it. However, I will say that it appears that there are ways to engage with it that doesn't totally destroy your ability at higher order logic. I just, haven't seen evidence that they provide.. Enough enduring value to a community to be worth. . The risk that is. Included with keeping them top of mind within a community's traditions, outside of a sort of defense against the dark arts studying guide.

Malcolm Collins: But as we point out for our kids, if these mystical arts worked, people in power in the world today, like when I look at the top, like 100 most powerful people in the world today. They would be really into them and yet people who are into the mystical arts disproportionately are from lower socioeconomic [00:31:00] groups and lower political power groups and lower social power groups.

And, and then the question is why? So there's 2 answers here. Either mysticism is just complete hokum and a waste of time. And so individuals who have dedicated their time to it. And not to matters of materialism have allowed their minds to be corrupted and have wasted time that they could have spent learning things and thus are less industrial and economically productive and less human in our perspective or.

They do work, but they come with some external costs that is preventing them from being used to gain power within society. In which case that also historically would have led to most religions, even from a cultural evolution standpoint, to end up shaming them. And there is no reason for you to investigate them outside of a defense against the dark arts thing.

And this is where I, you know, Simone, you know me, I love studying ghosts, cryptids, the, the Multiple lives, everything like that. I study every story, every story of the weird.

Simone Collins: Every one stuff. I mean, there's a reason why people are into this stuff. It's [00:32:00] fun.

Malcolm Collins: And I, and even within our school system, we have a whole branch of the tree called dangerous ideas.

That basically goes into every single one of these, these branches of conspiracy theories and mysticism and stuff like that. And allows people to go as deep as they want to go within these ideas in terms of personal education. But I think the best way to. spell many of these ideas is and I think that this is one of the problem with the existing school system is in, in existing religions is they say, don't engage with these ideas.

Don't learn about these things because if you learn about these things you might be tempted to engage with them, right? Whereas I actually think that if you just put them out there for people now, if you taggle the Christian. Taggle in our skill tree, all of these get deleted. None of your students will see them, so you don't need to worry about this.

But for those of us who have our perspective, which is the way to prevent student education for something is to educate them on it. When students actually learn about Zodiac system, how it was developed, what the [00:33:00] mechanism of action is behind the system. I think most of the students are most of, for example, my kids that I would want to keep within our cultural tradition would immediately see how stupid it

Simone Collins: is.

Put that in contrast with how people typically encounter this, which is typically a trusted friend or family member. Talks about these things with immense confidence as though they are so true and so predictive and so right. That if you respect that person or you're in a social situation where you're afraid of social rejection, you are going to accept it without vetting it at all, which is why I think a lot of people come to believe in things like the Zodiac is, you know, like someone.

That they like or care about or a good friend or a family member is like, Oh, well, I mean, as you can tell, like, because you're a Sagittarius, this, this, this, you know, and then they just, you know, when you're in a social situation, you're not in your, I'm sitting in an armchair. Like primed to think critically mindset.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. And it feels like forbidden information and [00:34:00] forbidden information is uniquely tempting. You can fight forbidden information by denying access to it, which doesn't work in the age of the internet. Or in our cultural tradition, you prevent forbidden information by making it not forbidden and making it not uniquely tempting because it offers nothing.

And the way. That you like if you, if they're taught about this stuff alongside these famous psychologist experiments, I don't know if you guys are familiar about this, but there's these famous studies in psychology where they would present people randomly with explanations that had come from something like a Zodiac test.

But they were doing them actually for like psychological personality tests, right? But they were written in the way that like Zodiac. writers write their tests. It's something like 90 percent of people when they would read the explanation

that was assigned to them at random, they'd be like, wow, that's a great explanation of my personality and who I am.

And like, because many people, people with weaker minds and, and, and the type of people who maybe wouldn't want within our culture is as readily. They have a very weak sense of [00:35:00] self. And so when an external projection of who they are, it's assigned to them, especially in their like teenage years, when they're trying to figure out who they are they really want somebody to just basically tell them and they want that thing to be assigned some form of authority and that's what a lot of these do is they,

Simone Collins: well, I mean, did I, did I tell you that when I was in high school, I was the anonymous horoscopes writer for my school's newspaper.

Malcolm Collins: No,

Simone Collins: people loved it. And I did exactly that. I just was, you know, like, Oh, this, you know. This week you worked really hard and, you know, people didn't recognize how hard you worked or, you know, you, you, you know, you take things out on yourself a lot and you probably should take it. We did just like so generic, everyone goes through it.

Everyone feels these things. It is incredibly obvious, but people love it because it often involves hearing what you want to hear about yourself. And or hearing what you want to hear about other people or giving you an excuse as to why you're not compatible with someone. So as long as you do that and[00:36:00] it's, it's so easy to get by with it and, you know, similar things happen with psychics and like the con men that you talked about who like con the government for a while into thinking that, you know, people actually did have psychic abilities is.

You can do a lot by just reading someone really quickly looking at their face, the way they dress, the way they hold themselves, the way they smell, all these tiny little cues can tell you a lot of things, so like, it's, it is incredibly easy to place people over and a lot of, again, what mysticism is, and what witchcraft is, is providing an easy button for thinking, providing a don't make me think, give me an excuse to not work hard and just make me feel good thing, which we associate with, obviously The worst elements of culture, any culture or any practice that allows you to just say, Oh, I'm going to give myself a break or, Oh, I don't have to think about this or, Oh, it's not my fault.

It's because of my blood type slash horoscope slash you know, someone put a curse on me that makes it inherently. evil and bad and it [00:37:00] will create bad outcomes, weak cultures, poor birth rates, bad mental and economic

Malcolm Collins: outcomes, et cetera. Something you said this morning that was so powerful is you're like, it's the ultimate form of externalizing.

Yeah. Because you are externalizing your self control to something outside you, but then believe that you have influence over it in a way that you actually don't have influence over it.

Simone Collins: Yeah. Yeah, it allows you to blame everything on something else, feel like you're in control, but ultimately not be in

Malcolm Collins: control.

Yeah, and so then I think, like, what would our cultural rules be about this? Like, how against us are we? I would say that we would be okay with living next to cultures that practice forms of mysticism but we would not be okay with living next to them in a way where they Could influence our ability to live.

So, for example, if we were going on a spaceship or something like that, or we were colonizing another planet, I think we would take very harsh rules against this. And harsh rules against it in the raising of our own kids. I do think that

Simone Collins: we're not morally against using mysticism to subdue others, however.

And I think [00:38:00] this is also something that like people have leveraged to subdue other groups for a very long time. And that's the thing, this is a really good example of also how like mysticism can make people incredibly vulnerable to outside incursions. Because those people can be like, oh yes, I I am the thing that was prophesized to come and that's why you should listen to me or yes this thing.

Oh, like in Asimov's foundation series the, the one culture after the decline of, of intergalactic civilization after the empire falls that maintains basically like the Wikipedia and understanding of all technology and history just sort of tricks the other, yeah. Cultures that have now become, you know, backwards barbarians into believing that all of their science and technology is like religious power and they are a religious order.

So they're using people's tendency to fall to mysticism as their means of gaining and maintaining power.

Malcolm Collins: And yes. [00:39:00] So like sexuality, mysticism is something that should be studied to understand how to manipulate the weak-minded. Yeah. But also understand that in your study you are learning how to guard yourself against those who would use this power against you.

Oh, mysticism is

Simone Collins: like sexuality, fun, . Right. But I, I'd also

Malcolm Collins: argue, well, and Psyche, you know, psyche being like psychological nonsense that we often, you know, preach against. Oh, psychic. Psychic hokum. Yeah. Well, I know what I'm talking about is like modern day psychology movements that are used to manipulate people,

So the interesting question here is if mysticism is so dangerous and if so many religious traditions have converged on the teaching, don't engage with mystical stuff. It is not good for you. Why does it intergenerationally, persist? As a teaching was in some of the most successful cultures in human history. , with obviously the probably big example within the Abrahamic traditions being, the cobblistic teachings in Judaism. [00:40:00] And you know, if you look at other Jewish writings and even. That's a third of your time should be dedicated to Carlos. One-third. Michelle went third. I can't remember, but anyway, yeah, one third.

So it's not even like a Off topic side quest. As some people try to frame it. yes, you should wait until you're married and you're mentally mature, but it does say a lot of your time should be dedicated to it. So wind is something like this day around. The first and most important reason is that it is very good for lighting a religious fervor. In. Low IQ, low education populations. So if you have like a bunch of peasants or something like that, you're gonna have a very hard time getting them really excited and. Dogmatic about just Abrahamic teachings in and of themselves.

You usually need some form of mysticism. This is where Catholics use a lot of like St. Worship and where the Orthodox use a lot of Relic worship. Which is from my perspective, clearly idolatry.[00:41:00] , but why would you engage with something that the Bible tells you not to if you're within one of these Abrahamic traditions, but because it is very, very good at getting peasants excited. Who otherwise don't feel like they have a lot of power or control over their lives.

This allows them to feel that power or control. And also close to the divine. The problem is what aspect of the divine are they actually touching? Is it, you know, the agents of Providence or is it the Basler risk? Or I guess. In normal Christian phrasing. Is it God, or is it demons? Then the, the second reason I think that this is so effective in intergenerationally persistent. Is. That it. It mirrors humans pre evolved, super soft culture.

This is something we talk about in the pragmatists guide to crafting religions. But we think that when man removes all, , tradition and all science from his mind, most humans converge on a very similar set of beliefs about the world. And these beliefs come from what was [00:42:00] probably the most common human religious system in the pre agricultural period, , that just humans coevolved with for a very, very, very long time.

But that as soon as acumen started to live in settlements and started to get advanced technology was no longer efficacious for humans. And so, , it was suppressed and out competed by religious systems, which out competed other groups merely from how they helped. Those groups is a fitness. I E how many surviving children they had, and they didn't have enough time to fully integrate with those individuals neurology.

So when you remove that, a lot of people reconverge on this old sort of mystical tradition, which has lost its efficaciousness,

I'd also note that mysticism will always be with us because it is part of that pre evolved iteration of humanity. , it is part of that ape, like side of us that is always going to bubble up in the background.

And that will always [00:43:00] re-emerge within any religious community. Even if we, , went on to spaceships and we burned every book that ever talked about the mystical.

Our great, great, great, great grandchildren would one day rediscover a mystical tradition that looks very similar to the forms of mysticism that are around today because it is sort of a genetic scar deep within us.

First, and it's definitely not that it works. If it works.

As we've said, we would see the majority of people in power in our society utilizing these sorts of teachings. If it was actually helping people gain power or out-compete other people. No here. I should know, even though it can't help a person gain real power in the world. Uh, or Gainey real edge in the world. It can make a person feel as if they have real power and from a religious standpoint, that can be almost as useful when you are dealing with a population that doesn't feel like they have power over their own lives. And that means it can be a very useful conversion [00:44:00] mechanism. Of course within our belief system, we would say that those sorts of emotions or the very last emotions, any human should be masturbating because masturbating those emotional subsets. It increases the strength of those emotional subsets and we'll move you more and more towards the most perverse type of external locus of control.

When you mistakenly believe that you actually have power over, even when you don't. And then when, when things go wrong, you know, you don't. take responsibility for them. It's the mystical workings of the universe that caused them to go wrong. Not yourself, not your own responsibility. So it's, it's uniquely toxic form of feeling like you have power. The. Final thing that I think is, is useful about these traditions, if they sort of are cordoned off within a wider, , system, is that they can be used as a Sophos trap or an idiot trap. So this means if an individual is incredibly good in terms of verbal intelligence, but otherwise not [00:45:00] particularly high IQ and could otherwise prove a danger to the wider community. , this can be very, very useful for.

 Preventing them from causing too much damage because it can sort of. Begin to eat up all of the time. Of people who otherwise might've become a con artist or something like that. Or a preacher, but a preacher of. Idle things that don't actually move people towards their goals, but instead is just like enriching his own pockets. And this is something that I have noticed, and I don't know exactly what causes it. Maybe people can pontificate in the comments, but people was really high verbal intelligence, but fairly low general intelligence seem to become over distracted and obsessed with mysticism and mystical arts. When contrasted with other groups in the general population. , which is what makes it such an effective, like sticky trap for rats, for those types of individuals, which can be very dangerous if left as free agents in a [00:46:00] society. It is for this reason that I actually am not particularly. Against Kabbalistic teachings within Jewish communities. If you read our book, the pragmatist guide to crafting religion. One section that we go really deep into is the myth of higher IQ within Jewish communities, which is just that it's not very well supported by at least rigorously collected data.

But what is incredibly well-supported is an unusually high verbal intelligence in Jewish communities. And what mysticism may have done in the same way that, , we talk within Catholicism because within Catholicism, they had this system that prevented nepotism. From becoming a problem in their communities by ensuring that people within the bureaucratic positions of power within their communities couldn't have wives.

And so it meant that the genetic precursors associated with, Amoral familiar realism E promoting family members over members of the general public. Ended up [00:47:00] becoming more ingrained in Catholic communities than in other communities. Because Catholicism had traditions that were so good at defending against it, there was not an additional, , Genetic costs towards individuals over engaging in the amoral familial ism. This is why within Catholic countries, you have so much more corruption than in other countries.

Well, I think something very similar happened within the Jewish community because it had such a good defense, , Interculturally against, , extremely high verbal intelligence individuals, , becoming a problem for the community. It allowed verbal intelligence to concentrate at a genetic level within their communities.

That would have been very deleterious to other communities. And removing cobblistic teachings or practices from a Jewish community would cause these free radicals to spill out into the community and begin to call it a lot of damage. So weirdly, this is one of those areas where I would just give Jews a pass. Not because I think that their [00:48:00] mystical teachings are accurate. Or, Give them any sort of an edge through the teachings themselves, but because I think that they confer benefits uniquely to their community.

And have been vetted for a very, very long period of cultural evolution for doing just the right amount of good for the community without. Becoming, , an overt obsession for too large, a population or swaying to larger population towards in efficacious traditions or alternate. Belief systems about physical reality. Wait, but if Jews were able to use mysticism to get a higher verbal intelligence within their population, why would I not encourage other populations to use this similar tactic? The answer is a fairly straight forward. We now have genetic technology and you don't need to. Inject your tradition with something. Efficacious LIS. Outside of the way it impacts the. Genetic selection effects of your culture. [00:49:00] Into a culture anymore.

So there just isn't a need for this to get the advantages that the Jewish population was able to glean from this unique cultural technology.

Malcolm Collins: But the final trait of mysticism, which is really important to note is if you look in our relationship and sexuality, like the pragmatist guided relationship, the pragmatist guided sexuality, if you look at our other videos on the topic of how love works and how some religious systems utilize love to trick people into seeing mysticism, doesn't just hijack people's brains by tricking them into seeing the profound where the profound doesn't actually exist. Like manic dancing, obviously that's not an actual profound experience. But it's very good at tricking them into feeling love. And love can be feeled whenever you're thinking about a concept that holds A lot of basically like a mental volume in your mind.

But one way you can trick a concept into holding a lot of mental volume in your mind is by holding a concept that is itself illogical. And therefore [00:50:00] constantly advance one way that some Christians do this is like the concept of the Trinity, three separate things, but that are also one thing. And then meditate on that because that is in it in.

intrinsically a paradox. It fills up a lot of your mind. And then when you see that thing as protective and loving, it makes you feel this feeling of love, which makes you feel that there's some truth behind it. Mysticism does that all the time. And for that reason, It is also uniquely tempting to people who cannot find true love in the world because they are acting in ways that are selfish or self aggrandizing which mysticism enables because it tells you that you have powers or importance that you don't have.

And this is why I think the truly ordered mind and the truly dogmatic, like. dogmatic in a good way mind, mind that is following the righteous path, is ordered enough to not succumb to forms of mysticism that inflate its ego so [00:51:00] much so as to believe that it is in any way like the divine. And this is where we probably have one of our more controversial takes on mysticism is that I believe that the belief in the soul is a form of mysticism because it is to elevate the human to the level of the divine and believe that humanity touches the divine where we do not.

Simone Collins: Doesn't that veer though, somewhat from our definition of mysticism in that, like it's, it doesn't. The soul kind of doesn't, it's not relevant to this definition because it's, it can't be predictive or not. Like we can't test it.

Malcolm Collins: Any feeling of the soul that is not a predictive claim. I will accept. Okay. I will say, okay, that's great.

But a lot of people use the soul to explain or as a mechanism for explaining extra physical or extra materialist action with the world. Like his soul is so powerful or his, you know, And that is why it is so, it is a very tempting concept because it allows people to believe in [00:52:00] things like life after death and stuff like that, which is a form of mysticism in my perspective.

But again, this is, this is an area where we would probably be a bit more flexible. If somebody believes a form of mystical tradition, which is actually an old Abrahamic revelation I would be willing to say, okay you can come to space with us. Like we can cut some slack here so long as you're not using it to inform your decisions about physics or inform your decisions about the powers that you have.

And so long as you do not use what, what I guess I'd call soul magic, like trying to engage this extra planar realm in terms of. Impacting our existing realm. That is where I would, I would draw the one line, but I would say for members of our family, we would see it as a form of, of, of mysticism,

self masturbation, and an offense to God in that you are claiming to be of the same kind of thing that he is in which humans are not from our understanding.

Simone Collins: Hmm. Okay. Yeah. That, that broadly checks [00:53:00] out.

I was thinking we're about wind delineating, whether witchcraft is okay, when done in the name of. Abrahamic traditions. And I think looking at the various forms of it practice under the guise of Catholicism are a good example. So one that I would say is solidly within the realm of okay. Is exorcisms because that is specifically invoking extra Plano powers. For the sole purpose and only purpose of directly combating the perceived extra plane on powers of others. , on the other side, when you look at things like St. Worship and Relic wary worship, I see that as being a really muddy middle ground, probably bordering on just blatant witchcraft and to understand why stuff like St. Worship gets so dangerous. Is then you'll get things like, the big Catholic Colt right now in Latin America. , worshiping Santa Muerte, they're basically worshiping an [00:54:00] unnamed, like not canonized Saint of the dead, which is a skeleton.

, they worship alongside biblical figures. , and represents death to me, this is just very, obviously, probably the truest form of actual Satanism being practiced in the world today. And yet it is practice under the guise of Catholicism. I think the way that evil religions. Seep in to the world. Is not those individuals who are , like the individuals who call themselves Satan as, who are really just having a laugh, and trolling people.

But under the guise of. Established religions like Christianity, because these people actually believe in have fervor for these entities they're worshiping. And these entities are just like, Sometimes comically and obviously.

Not just normal witchcraft, but malicious witchcraft. One of the reasons Santa Muerte has drawn such a [00:55:00] following. , he look at like interviews with her followers, if there's like, well, you know, I can't pray to God or Jesus to hurt someone or for something petty because they would judge me negatively, but sent him where to, you know, she's a deity of the people.

So when I want to hurt somebody or when I want something selfish or when I want like a love spell, I can pray to her. And it's like, okay. So like very, obviously you're praying to the devil. The devil doesn't come out and be like, Hey, I'm evil. it is evil in how it is attracting you and what you are using it for.

And I think that Santa Muerte does show why we. Council so much caution. Even when the witchcraft is being done under the name of the Judeo-Christian tree of religions. And I think the easy branch here is are you invoking extra plane? All realms only to. Combat other extra Plano entities or are you invoking them for some form of control or self benefit?

If it is a ladder than it is just witchcraft, [00:56:00] whatever you claim inspired it. I also think that, , this helps explain to Catholics who are a little confused, why other Christians take idolatry? So seriously. I mean, other than that, it's the first commandment and I don't understand how people ignore that. But, , when you do things like begin to worship other entities as.

Gatekeepers to God or as.

Some sort of intermediary and your worship of God directly. It can very easily spin out into just worshiping what are essentially demons, even from a secular perspective.

Malcolm Collins: Anyway, I love you to death Simone. This has been a fun episode.

Simone Collins: I love you too. I love talking about these things. Never thought though, from my childhood, that we would be like, burn the witches! No,

Malcolm Collins: it's just bad. I, I don't think that, I mean, I think that it's probably worth recycling them into some sort of food stuff or something like that.

I mean, if you're on an interplanetary [00:57:00] journey, you don't

Simone Collins: burn the witches, soylent the witches, right?

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Turn them into starch. But just be aware that they are a danger and it can be thought of as. Chaos, corruption, basically and that it will spread if not stuff out at the earliest stages within communities that rely on things like a rigid understanding of physics to maintain their lifestyle, which just isn't a thing today in the world, but it will become one

Simone Collins: as we think that the cure is so simple and it has to do with how you learn about it.

If you learn about it from. In a, in a logical educational format where you're, you're understanding the framework of it, its origins and, and its efficacy. You will learn the right way. You'll, you'll learn in a way that you're not, that doesn't corrupt you. If you learn it in a social environment where someone that you trust or trying to gain social credit with presents it to you as though it's reality and you respect them, you're so screwed.

You're incredibly screwed. [00:58:00]

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, well, and I should note here that from this understanding of physics beliefs around genetics that are not based on science, but based on, you know, as we call it, justicalism, like humans don't have genes or human genes do not inflect, influence their personality or, or, et cetera, like, like the way that they interact with the world.

Um, like, like human genes stop right here. No genes go above this part or influence anything that happens up here. That's a form of extreme and very dangerous mysticism because it is outright science denial. And, and it is science denial in favor of a hypothetical alternate framework for the physical reality of our universe.

And a very dangerous one because intergenerationally. Now that all humans basically live because, you know, half of humans used to die are going to have an accumulated genetic load that will lead to them becoming dangerous mutants. When I say dangerous mutants, I mean mostly dangerous to themselves.

They're going to [00:59:00] basically be big balls of cancer but you'll also likely see negative psychological effects not discordant with the, Jolly Heretic Spiteful Mutant Theory. Ah,

Simone Collins: yes. The

Malcolm Collins: classic. Anyway, I love you to death, Simone.

Simone Collins: I love you too, Malcolm.

Malcolm and Simone analyze shocking new fertility collapse data - France reaching new record lows, and China seeing 60%+ declines in just 8 years. China links this to gays in bizarre "beware homosexuals" lectures while France pursues worse policy. They discuss China's likely future restrictions and coercions as the "handmaid's tale" bellwether, as well as pollution's sterility impact. For France, only serious cultural renewal could help.

Malcolm Collins: [00:00:00] France this year began to fall into freefall. Or in this past couple years, it's begun to fall into freefall. And it really can no longer be included in the club of countries that are resistant to fertility collapse. And I, there's been new data from China

What that would represent is a decline of 60 percent from 2016

60%. That is catastrophic. Imagine if this was like an economy, right, and an economy shrunk by 60 percent in eight years. This is the fertility equivalent of hyperinflation. It is the fertility equivalent of having to walk around with wheelbarrows to buy a loaf of bread. A wheelbarrow is full of cash, you know, when you hear about these situations.

People do not understand the societal effects this is going to have. And anyone who's in one of these groups that is going to be targeted because of this, like the LGBT populations around the world if you [00:01:00] cannot fix this problem, if you cannot convince people who are okay with gay people existing to have kids at an above replacement fertility rate, you will be hunted down and systemically exterminated, and we're beginning to see the first waves of this.

Would you like to know more?

Malcolm Collins: 1 of the really funny things that happened to us on a recent flight was over the speakers.

They had to explain. When the mass drop, you know, in case of a depressurization of the cabin be sure to take off your mask before putting on the the math that's delivering oxygen. So this is, and I turned

Simone Collins: to Malcolm and I'm like, you know what? These people, let them go.

Malcolm Collins: Just genuinely, if you are so terrified about COVID still that you are wearing a mask and end up.

The cabin is depressurized and you try to put the oxygen

Simone Collins: mask over your N95. Yeah, really?

Malcolm Collins: You probably should die. Like, I'm sorry, like the human civilization [00:02:00] is better without you. And I salute your contribution for it by ducking

Simone Collins: out. Yeah. Let, let nature play. It's course on this crashing air, not that like, you're going to survive anyway, but I guess you have to door blows out.

Nevermind. But yeah, that was a, that was a really astounding. So that must have meant that on this flight 1 or more people put on an oxygen mask on top of their.

Malcolm Collins: This is new. This must have been when the door

Simone Collins: blew out. Yeah, this must have been when the door blew out because this was a new comment we'd never heard on a flight.

We've been on plenty of flights. Someone out there needed to be told anyway. Yikes. Okay. Now for hey, my gorgeous demigod of a husband. What do China and France have in common that is not a love of couture?

Malcolm Collins: Well, a recent fertility collapse, but I actually want to, the countries are very different, but we're going to talk about them together in this video because we recently did an all China video.

And [00:03:00] I, there's been new data from China that is really shocking to us, but there's also been new data for France. So, China has historically been having a fertility collapse problem. It's just infinitely worse than anyone thought. Recent statistics show that in just the last eight years, the number of kids being born within China has declined by 60%.

And I'm gonna post a graph here that shows how much year over year, but this means for like the past five years, you've had double digit declines in fertility rate every single year. That's insane. But France has actually, along with the U. S., been one of the countries that has really bucked this trend.

So. The United States, as everyone knows is one of the countries that actually has fertility rate fall slower than other countries. The two other countries that really fit this when you're talking about their, their at least if you control for their wealth are, have historically been Israel and France.

Right? So if we're talking about year over year decline in the U. S. fertility rate, this last year I think it was only 2%. Well, [00:04:00] France this year began to fall into freefall. Or in this past couple years, it's begun to fall into freefall. And it really can no longer be included in the club of countries that are resistant to fertility collapse.

Yeah, which we, we're really

Simone Collins: excited about. I mean There was one, you know,

Malcolm Collins: yeah, so I'll post a graph on this screen and we actually posted a meme of like the fire dog alongside this graph because you can see this is like a falling off a cliff fertility rate at this point, but also, you know, France registered.

So we're going to post an article here. 678, 000 births last year, representing a decrease of 7 percent from 2022 and down 20 percent from 2020. That is absolutely shocking. Now, France is trying to adapt to this. They are trying to give They're actually doing a bunch of stuff that's going to make the problem worse.[00:05:00]

So let's talk about what they're doing, and then we can contrast this with some of the new things that we've learned that China is doing. Nobody

Simone Collins: listens to you, Malcolm. It's so sad. Why won't they just listen?

Malcolm Collins: Nobody listens to me. I'm just out there telling them, What you're doing is not going to work.

What you're doing

Simone Collins: is not going to work. Is, is right now of the news outlets that are reaching out to, to us about demographic collapse, the vast majority of them have been French recently. Like France is aware of this, but they're like doing it

Malcolm Collins: totally wrong. Yeah. Okay. So what is France doing? They are extending maternity leave.

And giving more paid maternity leave. That is the dumbest thing you could do. If you care about high fertility weights, you should remove maternity leave at all as a concept. Like it is a bad concept because it creates this idea that women must be pampered throughout their pregnancy, which increases the perceived difficulty of the pregnancy to the woman.

Do you want to talk about this? It's

Simone Collins: like a cultural it's, it's considerate propaganda. [00:06:00] That's saying that having a kid is incredibly difficult. Also, if you actually care about like feminism in the workplace, making women more dangerous employees to have, and especially women who seem to want to have a family.

Is not a good way, especially in France, where it's already almost impossible to fire someone once you hire them. Not a good way to make women a safe hire.

Malcolm Collins: No, this is terrible for women. Terrible. And worse than that. I mean, so what do you do? Like what is the actual policy you should be pushing in this area?

It should be, it should be that you cannot disallow women from bringing their baby into the workplace. And that when a woman gives birth, if she wants to work from home, unless you have a hard and provable reason she can't work from home, she has to be allowed to work from home. Yeah,

Simone Collins: but if she has to work in the office, there should be childcare available.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, but I actually think that this work from home law should be just broadly, like if you want to really increase fertility rates, [00:07:00] this law should just be the law of the land. For men and women.

Simone Collins: For men and women. Because men can also be the ones to stay at home. Totally. Right. But

Malcolm Collins: the point being is if a company cannot prove why a person has to go to the office with statistics, because the statistics just aren't there, like we've, we've done work from home versus work from the office, re recorded data on this.

Work from home is dramatically more productive than work from

Simone Collins: home. And ironically so one of the most famous, pretty rigorous studies that was done on this early, I think it was Somewhere in Asia, and it was a travel company where they did a, a controlled, like some people, I think it was controlled worked from home, whereas other people stayed in the office.

They found importantly that the people who worked from home were more productive, got more done. The people who worked in the office were less productive, but the people who worked in the office got more promotions. So not only are anti work from home policies damaging to a company's productivity, They also encourage the promotion of less productive employees who invest more [00:08:00] time in water cooler chat and politicking and performative work that is ultimately killing and draining life from the company.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. You are promoting the brown nosers that if we were running a large company, we would have a policy looking for anyone who was. Promoting people who work from the office like I would consider that as a huge ding to an employee if they wanted to work for the office, I'd be like, oh, so you don't want to work.

You like office politics and office theater, but that's an aside there. So those would be like, actual useful things that France could implement. Instead, they're doing the dumbest thing, which is increasing fertility payments during a woman's maternity leave which is, you know, backed by this sort fundable soon, given the rate of the Fertility collapse in France.

Yeah,

Simone Collins: what younger generations are going to pay for this? God,

good

Malcolm Collins: point. But now we need to talk about what China's doing, which is sort of the exact opposite. I'm, it's unethical, but I won't say that it's necessarily [00:09:00] stupid. Like, I don't know what's going to come of it. Because no one else has tried this before, but it's pretty bold.

So what China has started doing is, hold on, I'm going to pull up the card here that somebody had passed out by the CCP. So, one is they are reaching out to any mother that is under 35 and telling them to have more kids. They're like, okay, you've already had a kid. You need to have more kids. So pressure from the government.

That could actually work, but the other thing that they're cracking down on, and I'll post a picture of a card here which is, beware of homosexuals cards basically explaining to people the threat, quote unquote, the threat, Of homosexuals, and and this is a threat in so far as again, I wouldn't use the word homosexuals.

I'm just using the word that that is used in this translation here. I find it to be a little more derogatory than I'm comfortable with, but [00:10:00] let's see what they say here. Oh, so it's, it's, it's a lecture so that they can attend. So, Wu Zane Plaza warns you, beware of homosexuals. How can a country be prosperous without full descendants?

How can we live healthy lives without a prosperous motherland? And it's a lecture that they can attend on preventing homosexuals.

Simone Collins: Well, I love that. Like, I remember American propaganda against the gays and it was like, he's a predator, you know, like it just completely misunderstood, but it was also just like, this is a cultural menace.

Whereas like China is like, but they're not having courage. Which is really interesting. I wish that China could actually just be like. Okay, to all gay and lesbian couples to, like, we will provide to you free, you know, IVF, we will make it very easy for you to have kids, we will help you because, I mean, the outcomes also seem to show, like, from that [00:11:00] Netherlands study that that we looked at, that Children, like, of surrogates to gay couples had better outcomes a little bit on average, so, like, why not?

I mean,

Malcolm Collins: China should be. Sampling bias, because, you know, gay people, it's a lot harder for them to have kids. But the point here being, and they're, they're going to have fewer kids, which we'll talk about in a second. When she said she loves this. She doesn't mean she loves that gay people are being oppressed.

She said she means she finds the mechanism of oppression comical. Yes, the earlier oppression was in the United States, but the reason you had that earlier oppression within the United States was fertility. And this is really important for people to understand, and is why our book, The Fragmentist Guide to Crafting Religion, is so important and why everyone should read it, because it discusses some concepts that no one has really discussed before.

So, previously, in the field of memetics, this is how ideas evolved, people thought of memes as things that basically captured a person's mind like, like got into their [00:12:00] mind like a virus and then that person to reproduce themselves. So they would get in that person's mind and then that person would, would go out and try to convince as many other people as possible of the idea.

But as we point out, not exactly. So some memes are completely parasitic like that. The urban monoculture is an example of this, but other means in a historic context were actually clusters of mimetic ideas that improved the individual biological. fitness of the group. And by biological fitness, what I mean is at the evolutionary level groups that had these mimetic clusters were one, a higher fertility rate, two had lower death rates and three were better at resisting simple viral mimetics.

What do we usually call these? These are what religions were or what we call cultivars. So they are these symbiotic cultural groups. Now there is a reason. We seem arbitrary that almost every long live successful cultural group in human history has had an undertone of [00:13:00] homophobia to it. Up until the point where it becomes a dominant societal cultural group and really successful for a while.

And then it usually drops its homophobia, and then it has a collapse. But it's not the drop of homophobia that causes the collapse. It's a drop of the culture more broadly. It's when they When they begin to accept gay people is often when they're throwing out all the other rules that seem arbitrary to them, and they don't understand, and they're starting to do all the orgies and all the opulence and everything like that, which most cultures shame.

And so the question is, is why? Why? Because it lowers fertility rates. And so the iterations of those cultures that didn't have these prohibitions had lower fertility rates and the iterations that did have these prohibitions which led to the iterations that had these prohibitions out competing the iterations that didn't have these prohibitions.

Now this is. Not great from our perspective. I mean, we believe in sort of maximum individual choice. And, and we, we don't like that we're seeing this increase in homophobia, but there is a reason why that historically the homophobic groups have competed the other groups in China is recognizing this gay people have fewer kids and straight people.

Therefore we can increase the [00:14:00] fertility rate by shaming gay people and by making people afraid to be publicly gay.

Simone Collins: And we need to add that China is the bellwether of the coercive. Effects of demographic collapse. So anything that you see China doing now is stuff that you can expect other nations to start doing as they reach higher levels of desperation.

So if you actually care about gay rights, and if you actually care about reproductive choice. You should actually care about demographic collapse. And you can already look to places like China to see exactly why. I mean, I can't believe they have like, Hey, watch out for the gays card.

Malcolm Collins: It's hilarious.

So to give you an idea of how bad things are in China right now, which is dramatically worse than the situation in France. Like they're not really in the same boat in terms of the scope. If the newly leaked data from China is right, and they have 8 million fewer births in 2023. What that would represent is a decline of 60 percent [00:15:00] from 2016 and a 17 percent year over year decline.

60%. That is catastrophic. Imagine if this was like an economy, right, and an economy shrunk by 60 percent in eight years. This is the fertility equivalent of hyperinflation. It is the fertility equivalent of having to walk around with wheelbarrows to buy a loaf of bread. A wheelbarrow is full of cash, you know, when you hear about these situations.

People do not understand the societal effects this is going to have. And anyone who's in one of these groups that is going to be targeted because of this, like the LGBT populations around the world if you cannot fix this problem, if you cannot convince people who are okay with gay people existing to have kids at an above replacement fertility rate, you will be hunted down and systemically exterminated, and we're beginning to see the first waves of this.[00:16:00]

We are warning you because we don't want that to happen, but it is the way this plays out. If we cannot convince people who support you to stay around in the world, okay, that's the end game. And we explain, one of my favorite quotes that I always mention is when The Guardian, when we explain this to them and they're like, well, that sounds an awful lot like a threat.

I'm like, yes, it is a threat. If a threat the same way, it's when I threaten my kid to not touch the stove or his hand's gonna be burned. We told you this was gonna happen. We've been telling you this is going to happen for years. It's going to be bad. And, and, and this is, this is a, a broader issue here.

We can say, well, will these China policies work? I don't know how effective they'll be, but we can see predecessors of these policies in Iran. Because Iran has been having this problem a lot longer than China has. And, you know, they have a theocratic state, so they've been able to try a lot of these practices.

And they have ramped up the homophobia and stuff like that. And they have seen a small increase in fertility rate, but it's [00:17:00] not enough. The, the core thing that they actually did was make it harder for women to get educated. And that really increased their fertility rates. You know, also not f ing great.

But we are barreling head first to a handmaid's tail. And the virus that is causing everyone to become sterile, the virus that is creating all this is wokeness. Well,

Simone Collins: and ironically, though, there's even more to it. And I, I mentioned this on another podcast, but I was watching a YouTube video about something unrelated in China.

And I saw footage of what people were eating for like a typical lunch. And it was in this case, like a soup out of a, a plastic bag within like a styrofoam cup that was delivered. And I'm just. Like anyone who's like kind of sensitive to, you know, information about like endocrine disruptors and like, you know, eating things out of plastic that has been heated or anything like that, you know, just immediately freaks out.

And then I immediately thought to the ADV China videos that we used to watch back in the day when they were still in China and the guys, what is it? It's Lao Y [00:18:00] 86 and then South African

Malcolm Collins: 86. And anyway, it's called China. Fact Chasers today.

Simone Collins: Yeah. They, they kept telling stories of, you know, personal encounters with adulterated food, adulterated beverages.

And I'm, I'm, I'm also seeing in the actual like Handmaid's Tale show series, which I've only watched a couple episodes of frankly, so that I could understand what people are like. Okay. comparing us to is that it's it's, it's like pollutants, I think, that are causing people to become infertile.

So the reason that they start coercing some women to be handmaids is because like literally they're the only ones who are capable of having kids. And in China, I, I'm kind of like, okay, well, so they're going to get to a point where they've exhausted all of the coercive methods and mechanisms they have, and they are still not going to get women to have kids because of the amount of pollutants, both air pollutants and like general like food adulteration problems that they actually have in, in the country.

So this isn't just a problem of like. [00:19:00] You know, these people are going to struggle to have kids because of cultural factors. This is

Malcolm Collins: a problem where I think they're going forced insemination.

Simone Collins: Yeah. But even forced insemination, isn't going to help you a whole lot. If your entire like endocrine system, your entire reproductive system is not functioning properly.

No, no, no,

Malcolm Collins: no, no, no, no. So, so I'll discuss where China's going first. They're going to basically make people without children, second class citizens. Okay. In their tax policy and the way you get promoted within the CCP, if you don't have above a certain number of children, you will be a second class citizen and you will be treated like human garbage.

So, okay. First, they're that

Simone Collins: now? Because it seems like that would actually be way more effective than a lot of, like right now they're doing like matchmaking

Malcolm Collins: and like Because they, they haven't fully accepted how big the problem is yet. You know, even a place like China, it takes a while. But I mean I

Simone Collins: would say that restricted access to birth control is like pretty big shots fired vis a vis.

Malcolm Collins: Nah, I mean in the U. S. it would be, but given the scope of China's problem, it's 60 percent fertility collapse, that's actually pretty minor. So, next, they're gonna realize that doesn't work because of all this biological stuff that [00:20:00] we're talking about. They're gonna realize it may be only like One in three men can actually fertilize women anymore, and that's where forced insemination comes in because then they're going to be using other men's sperm to inseminate people's wives because they're going to be like, well, you can't, you can't get them pregnant anymore.

Keep in mind the fertility collapse, while it's affecting both men and women, it's affecting men more. And so I think that a bunch of these men are going to be infer, you know, you talk about like these endocrine disruptors, that means that men that are gestating right now in these women's bellies. The vast majority of them like in the U.

S., like, when you look at like raw nationalist predictions, which I think are probably right, is by 2060, half of men in Europe and the United States will be infertile. In China, I expect it to be closer to like 80 percent given the type of behavior that you're talking about, like eating food out of heated plastic bags and stuff like that.

And if that's the case, and keep in mind, we're talking about the next generation, the generation that gestated in women [00:21:00] doing these sorts of behaviors. They are going to be this effeminate and we've done videos on like the new sexualities and like femboids and stuff like that the the tide study shows really clearly this changes men into something other than men exactly They they explain even like seven years afterwards if they were exposed to these chemicals more female like than male like play behavior and I think that this is actually a huge component of the rise of the trans movement is it really is a rise of trans individuals, of men who are not fully men, at least the, the, the male to female trans movement.

I think the male trans movement, that's a different phenomenon, but you can watch our videos on trans stuff to see what we actually think. I think that like our women, what is it? Like what, what makes someone a woman with one of the videos we did on that. But anyway. So what is your thought? Like, which of these solutions, do you think the China solutions are going to work?

How would you predict China ends up trying to tackle this?

Simone Collins: Yeah, well, I mean, what you said actually about them switching over to status, which I've [00:22:00] heard no signs of. I think that's a fairly astute prediction because I, I do think that in China where reputation matters so much and social status is really important as well, that, that can be.

Fairly effective. And that they eventually will have to turn to that. But I also, I, I can see it maybe being something that actually they wait too long to do because I think a lot of people who are probably very high up in the CCP themselves have zero to one kids. So there would have to be some kind of grandfather clause, right?

Because, but then, you effectless policy. So I'm just saying, like, I question, I think that that's a very effective way to go. I think yeah. You know, changing social status to, to coerce or inspire people to have kids will be effective. And I think that like tax policies can totally be effective. Like where you have huge tax breaks or you pay higher tax if you don't have kids.

But just,

Malcolm Collins: well, then there's the other thing, which is, which is worth considering which I think people like when we go to France, right. And [00:23:00] like, like people are like. Oh, who are like your, who's, when your family's building alliance in France, like who's your best French friend? You know, I'm not, I'm not gonna call out her name here, but you know, she's a Muslim and she's a first, I don't know, I think she's like a second or third generation immigrant, but from Guinea no, no, she first generation immigrant from Guinea.

And they're like, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. Your best friend in France is a Muslim immigrant? And, and they're like, who's your friend in the UK? Your best friend in the UK? I go, oh, she's a second generation Hindi immigrant. They're like, wait, wait, wait, wait. Why aren't you like focused on building alliances with like British people?

I'm like, because they're not going to exist in a hundred years. Like, we are like, you can say that people are like, oh, so you must be like a weird sort of great replacement theorist where you're like, okay, yeah, but we're just forming. No, not at all. The, the Muslims are not the reasons why French people are going extinct.

And, and, and Indian immigrants to the UK are not the reason why white people in the UK aren't having [00:24:00] kids. That's all on them. They just decided to erase themselves. You know, I can't do anything about that, but I need to be realistic when it comes to. What alliances are important for my family to build and alliances with white Europeans, basically pointless from an intergenerational perspective.

Because when I say white Europeans, I mean, like, native whatever Europeans, they, their fertility rates are low. There's nothing you can really do to stop it at this point. I think, like, we talked about trying to work. I think the CCP will eventually find a way to stabilize their fertility. Do I think France will eventually find a way to stabilize their fertility?

Yeah, when it's a Muslim country. Do I see that as a bad thing? No! Like, there's a reason why our family's religion incorporates a lot of part of Islam, you know, and is like, and I have a lot of Muslim friends, and there's a lot of Muslim first generation immigrants in the fornatalist movement who were working to keep them Having their culture, they would say assimilated.

What they really mean is cultural [00:25:00] genocide, right? When somebody says, I want to assimilate Muslims, I mean, I want to erase every part of their culture that goes against the urban monoculture. They're not assimilating them to Christian conservative traditions. And so I don't actually

Simone Collins: think personally, I don't think that Europe, the European people who are complaining about.

Muslims are not really complaining about Muslims, they are complaining about highly uneducated impoverished refugee populations. And I don't think that there would be any difference in the damage that they're seeing if those highly uneducated, impoverished refugee populations Oh yeah,

Malcolm Collins: this is a huge problem for socialist economies, and I agree with that.

And I think that the key way to fix this is to stop giving immigrants access to your social services. That's stupid and insane. Why would you do that? But like, like, it's genuinely insane. Why would you give a first generation immigrant access to your social services? You're creating a really bad incentive structure there.

I know,

Simone Collins: but you know, we're ones to talk though, because like we believe like in any sort of governance [00:26:00] design. Those, you, you should only get benefits to the extent that you're contributing. So anyone like, and if you can, if you are taking from the state more than you give, you have no voice and you should have no voice.

But hold on.

Malcolm Collins: I, I mean, I wanna, I wanna make a side here, which, which is the point that we're making and it's important that, you know, this is, this is clear, is that these countries, because of this stupid incentive system they have. Do disproportionately draw lower quality immigrants than you're going to get in the U.

S. And when I say lower quality, what I mean is that they are much more likely to live off of the state. They're much less likely to contribute economically to the state. And, and so, like, like, an objective standpoint, I'm talking from an economic standpoint, right? But this does not mean that these countries don't also have an elite population of immigrants that are Muslim as well.

Like, yeah. Muslims are a very diverse population group. And there is an educated elite among Muslim populations which is also higher fertility than a lot of these native populations and that Muslim communities [00:27:00] actually, in my, at least in my experience, do a better job of elevating their elite than other communities, and they are much more comfortable serving the elite within the community.

So you don't need a high quality average within Muslim majority populations as much as you do within non Muslim majority populations by that. What I mean is they're much less enamored with things like democracy

Simone Collins: and they're more extremely meritocratic. You're saying.

Malcolm Collins: Mm. I wouldn't call it meritocratic, but I, I'd call it monarchic or autocratic.

Oh, I see. In a way where they understand that it's generally better to have the best of them running everything and making all the decisions and not leading things to votes. Yeah. And I guess

Simone Collins: you, you say not meritocratic because you're saying the best of them as defined by their culture, which you view as a little bit.

Not what you

Malcolm Collins: internal culture heuristics, but it is kind of more meritocratic. It's like meritocratic by their terms combined with autocratic. [00:28:00] Yeah. Which again, I guess this is like a horribly offensive thing to say, but it's, it's like, if you understand and hang out with Muslims, it's objectively true and it's not like a bad system.

In, in, in groups where you have like lower average economic productivity, These larger immigrant populations, and again, maybe lower average economic productivity. I'm saying specifically the individuals who are being drawn to these socialist economies, which are paying their way. Once they come.

Obviously, the people who are going to be disproportionately drawn to that are the people who are lower economic productivity.

Simone Collins: Maybe someone who's watching this can also help us understand this when it comes to meritocracy. You. When speaking with a journalist at one point recently had said something like, you know, I believe that rather than being judged by the color of their skin, people should be judged by like their meritocratic contributions and values by their, their abilities.

And the journalist was like, Hey, can you, can you please repeat that? Like, as if like, are you sure you want to say that?[00:29:00]

Malcolm Collins: This was the journalist who was very hostile to us. Yeah.

Simone Collins: I

Malcolm Collins: have this radical belief. I have this radically conservative belief. And I know that this in our modern system is racist and horribly racist, but I have this weird dream that people should be judged by the content of their character and not the color of their skin. Now, I know this is racist. I know anyone who has ever said this must be a virulent, evil racist, but to me, it's a dream that I've always had for the future of America, a country where we can judge people by the content of their character and not the color of their skin.

And, and that might have been a part of the whole.

Simone Collins: Is this like really considered like, I would love for anyone to like, be like, here's why someone would hear that and, you know, ask you if you want to correct your statement for fear of you being completely destroyed by this ruinous comment you just made.

[00:30:00] Because maybe there's something we're missing here and we would love to understand that. Yeah,

Malcolm Collins: well, I love it. Like, pro natalist, racist, because they believe in judging people by their, their meritocratic worth and the content of their character and not anything else. And that is clearly an attack on X and Y group.

And I'm like, if that, if you think that that's clearly an attack on X and Y group, then by our standards, you have a pretty racist. Opinion of X and Y group. Okay? Because I believe that there are excellent people within all populations. And I, you see this within the data, and we've posted the statistic before, but it just shocks me.

If you look within the United States, if you look at populations, by what percent are they conservative versus what percent are they Democrat? And you look at blacks in Hispanics within these populations if you look at the difference between their test scores and white individuals within these populations test scores they are lower.

In the Republican controlled districts than they are in the Democrat [00:31:00] controlled districts. So Democrat policies, these policies that are supposed to be helping these groups are really intergenerationally disempowering them. And I think through that creating a. Permanent underclass and a permanent ethno underclass that the Democrats can use as a safe voting block because they prevent these individuals from actually educating themselves and learning that the Democrats are not their friends, learning that the data shows they're not their friends, learning that the data shows and the statistics I'll tell you till the end of the earth, 538 poll, Nate Silver, you know, very middle of the line that until Obama was elected More white Democrats than white Republicans said they would not vote for a black president.

Democrats are not like undercover racist. They are actually super, super

Simone Collins: racist. Well, and you remembered that research that I

Malcolm Collins: shared with you. And I'm going to post another graph of how left leaning media sources are these days. Which, which, you know, we'll show you that they, they, they control pretty much all of the media that you are consuming, [00:32:00] unless you

Simone Collins: watch Breitbart.

And you'll remember the research I shared with you as well, that showed that. We'll say non white populations, black, Hispanics, et cetera fared better. And maybe there's, there's certainly a selection bias that's like taking place here, but that lived in Republican districts, Republican dominated districts had, I think, better economic and other like social outcomes.

Minority groups living in democratic majority areas. So it, it just, it really does seem like after you see research like that, it seems awfully suspicious and it seems an awful lot like minority groups in those areas are being intentionally suppressed and, and kept down. In a way that makes them dependent on especially a lot of like the at least state services.

That's the goal.

Malcolm Collins: They keep them economically disempowered and uneducated so that they can use them as a safe voting bloc. Without [00:33:00] realizing that the Democrats have always been the party of the Klan. It never changed. The party's never fully switched. There were switches within some policy positions but they just changed the names of a few things and now the Klan is called Antifa.

But they are just as evil and just as racist as they have ever been and they rely on keeping these groups economically disempowered. While promoting token individuals within these groups to positions of authority and you can be like, well, that doesn't sound right. That's what the slave owners did.

Yeah, like, sorry, it disgusts me. It disgusts me that I see this still going on in our country. And, and, that these racist groups have thrived by changing racism to quote unquote anti racism, even though it has much of the same effects.

Simone Collins: It's bad. It's really

Malcolm Collins: bad. Yeah. But so what do you think?

Endgame, France, China?

Simone Collins: I mean, yeah, China's gonna figure it out. I would say that China is, is a [00:34:00] country with thousands of years of rises and falls. You know, like it just, it's a cycle and it will find its way. But it may be very different.

Malcolm Collins: I

Simone Collins: don't know enough about France to know if they're a weird minority group, like weird Amish, like, high fertility isolated, very culturally hard. groups in France. If there are, then for sure there's hope, but also I feel like there's a collection of families in France that develops a, an intergenerationally durable culture, which is well described in your book.

The private is guide to crafting religion can totally change the trajectory here. Like if you had you know, 30 families in France, you know, more would be great, but like just 30 families. Yeah. Be like, you know what, we're going to go for this. We're all going to have a lot of kids. We're going [00:35:00] to give our kids an amazing childhood and amazing education.

We're going to empower them and we're going to inspire them to pass on this culture and have a lot of kids. Totally. French culture could be protected. Totally. French culture can be not only protected, but like made extra augmented brought back to a lot of what it was. A lot of French culture has already been lost.

And this is, you know, definitely a sore point in France. And it has been for a very long time. France used to be, you know, the cultural. Reactor core of Europe and to a great extent, the rest of the world. It used to be way more influential. I think that there's a huge opportunity to make France great again, but also, yeah, totally from a demographic standpoint for like, various French ethnicities and cultural niches to be represented in the future.

All of that depends on a sufficient number. Of families doesn't have to be a lot of them and only those who are into this building an intergenerational durable culture. So for China, I'm like, yeah, they're going to figure it out for France. It really comes down to the acts of a very small number of [00:36:00] people.

And that is not something we can predict. It really depends on them. Does that make sense?

Malcolm Collins: That makes sense. I also think to an extent there's a reason for cultural alliances here, which France needs to be more intentional about, but the UK has done pretty well. So I'll explain what I mean by this. We, the reason why we think diversity has value is we think that different cultural groups are actually different from each other.

Like, diversity would have no value if we were all actually the same. Some cultural groups are much more like other cultural groups than other cultural groups are, right? The if you look at like, for example, Hindi immigrants in the UK. Hindis, culturally, the ones that are immigrating, which are mostly Brahmins and stuff like that, they are well, actually you have some other population groups, but the Hindis are just British people.

Like, very, very, very close culturally. Like, ethnically they might be different, but, but, but, me as an outsider, when I said that Persians are basically Americans, was like, slightly more Audacious[00:37:00] aesthetic sense that is actually very aligned with Trump's you know, they're very entrepreneurial.

They're very frontier. They're very traditionalist, but in sort of like an American, like, put a spin on it way. With Hindi, they're very similar to UK people. They're very sort of like, play it by the books, play it by the numbers, you know, stiff upper lip. Let's push through this. Let's not, let's not do anything crazy here.

Let's all stay in a queue. So I think like a UK, even if their population is replaced by Hindi, I don't think you've lost the UK at all. Now, I don't think that this will happen because the Hindi Fertility rate is quite low now, which is a shame to me because, you know, and if they could work together better in terms of who they're importing.

But I really hate this idea of cultural assimilation. I believe instead you should import cultural groups that are similar and that are able to work alongside yours really efficiently. And I think British people, Hindi people, these two groups go together swimmingly in terms of working together. They've been

Simone Collins: doing it.

We should say, this is not [00:38:00] a, a, a conservative view that, that the strength of diversity comes from diverse groups, staying diverse, which is to say, leaning into their cultural and other uniqueness. I was just reading an article that pointed out that for one of the Olympics recently president Obama, I think when he was still president was remarking at.

Just how successful the American Olympic team was thanks to its diversity. And he, he compared like Michael Phelps to Simone Biles, like these are two wildly different people, wildly different body types, and wildly different abilities as a result. We would not be able to kill it at the Olympics if we didn't have this level of genetic diversity.

So, you know, I mean, one, it's now kind of remarkable.

Malcolm Collins: That's pretty offensive, Simone, to say that Simone Biles couldn't do what Michael Phelps does and vice versa.

Simone Collins: Even though Michael Phelps does, like, basically giant paddles for feet. And is, like, forever long.

Malcolm Collins: No, he has, like, a weird thing with, like, his heart or metabolic, or metabolic structure.

There's a,

Simone Collins: there are a bunch of [00:39:00] very genetically unique things about him. And Simone Biles is, like, a superhuman. She's insane. Like her abilities is unbelievable, but again, like, so even, even progressive leaders recognize that diversity is meaningful and amazing and cool and provides a huge competitive advantage.

So I just want to point out again. Even though this is that prenatalism is so coded conservative and that's totally fine by us, whatever it is, it is a universal issue. Well,

Malcolm Collins: someone's caring about diversity these days. Like, Obama might do it, but he couldn't do that when running for an election.

Admit that Michael Phelps could not do what Simone Biles did if he was raised in her circumstances. I think

Simone Collins: that's a recent thing, though. I think when, when he was in office. People were allowed to acknowledge genetic diversity. It's something we're, like, we are totally going off the rails. We are losing our minds here.

But anyway, I know you have to run. I regret that because I tread here every second with you. I love you so much, Malcolm. You

Malcolm Collins: are amazing. You are an [00:40:00] amazing human being. Not as amazing as

Simone Collins: you. I can't, I still can't believe you're human. You're the best thing ever. I love you so much, Malcolm.

[00:00:00]

Simone Collins: We're, we're just talking hypothetically and taking on characters in this episode because.

Malcolm Collins: Because, yeah, yeah. No, this is not us. If somebody quotes us in this episode and they're like, can you believe they said this? I was like, could you not tell this was a comedy episode? Could

Simone Collins: you not tell? This was a deep fake

Malcolm Collins: I am saying these are the type of questions that in a hypothetical world where victim blaming was not a concept that was shamed, somebody might ask. How would we test whether the phenomenon of men physically abusing their wives is caused primarily by the wives or caused primarily by the husbands? And then the other person would say, ah, of you and weird science world where we only care about data.

I guess what we would need is a control situation. We would need a population where some women. dated women, and some men dated men, and then we would need to look at the level of physical abuse within these two populations. What are the physical abuse rates in lesbian relationships? What are the physical [00:01:00] abuse rates in male gay relationships? Oh, oh no, they're much lower than in straight relationships in male gay relationships, and much higher in lesbian relationships. Oh no, this is not what the data was supposed to say.

Would you like to know more?

Simone Collins: So we were like, well, I mean, we're not, we haven't ruined our careers enough as it is. And why would you let someone else cancel you when you can just cancel yourself? So today we talk about victim blaming and why, why there's a case to be made. Oh my God, we're going to hell.

Malcolm Collins: Blaming is one of these really interesting things where.

I think it started as a good concept for people, right? Way that like, don't be ashamed to see a psychologist movement was really healthy to start. You know, some people needed to see psychologists back when psychologists were still healthy. And then it became a never ever criticize a psychologist. For doing [00:02:00] anything and never ever say somebody should stop seeing a psychologist that they're seeing because that person is employing cult like abusive practices and then that allowed cult like abusive practices to begin to proliferate within the psychologist community because you are not allowed to tell somebody anymore.

Hey, actually the things that psychologists are doing with you are actually very similar to cult tactics, building dependence, you need to get away from them, how dare you shame me for seeing a psychologist, it's always valid to go to somebody who affirms anything I do, no matter the It's very useful.

The cause to myself or my community that's what I need, my affirmer. Or the person who tells me, oh, you have some deep seated thing in your past and you can only fix it by coming to see me repeatedly. But then the same thing happened to and, you know, that's dependency right there, right?

And then the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the same thing ended up happening with this other group. Which is victim blaming, right?

Simone Collins: And we're not talking about victims of, you know, systemic [00:03:00] racism, natural disasters, blah, blah, blah. We're talking about typically

Malcolm Collins: No, no, no. But, but there was a reason.

Like, it used to be too common in the past. I'll admit. It used to be too common. People would see a woman Who'd get great. And they'd be like, well, you know, look at the way she was dressing. Right. Um,

Simone Collins: and totally inappropriate situations. You know, these are women who are going about their work, going about their lives, you know, who are being attacked.

And yeah,

Malcolm Collins: and they would say something like. How could this have happened? Right? And, and, and then their initial reaction is to say, well, it must have been the victim's fault. And this is something that happened in society. Like, this is a natural inclination that humans have to want to blame the victim.

And so it was important that we had a movement that pushed against this, but. The movement went insane and ended up creating a prohibition because you know, if you look at our big bill on signalers, if people are status signaling, they realize they can [00:04:00] raise their status within their group by pointing out this behavior and others, even when it was a justified behavior that ascribing any fault.

On the part of a victim of something i. e. that in any way they contributed to the probability of that thing happening to them was an immoral thing to do and lowered your status was in the community. Now, this is a problem because. Like, obviously, there is always some level of I did something that increased the probability that a negative thing happened to me.

You know, I'm reminded of the Die Hard scene, right? I don't know if people remember this. I think it's from Die Hard 2 or something, where the guy's walking around a black neighborhood with, like, racist billboards on him or something. And you're like, Oh my God, because the bad guy is making him do this.

 Not to get too personal, but a white man standing in the middle of Harlem wearing a sign that says, I hate niggas, has got some serious personal issues you got about ten seconds before those guys see you.

When they do, [00:05:00] they will kill you, you are about to have a very bad day.

Malcolm Collins: Right? You know, you are scared for this individual in this environment. And, you know, somebody comes by and is like, Hey, you shouldn't be doing this and try still, you know, and that's how he ends up with his, I think, partner for that movie. So yeah, it's a good movie. But the point being is if that individual ended up getting shot or injured in that community, you can be like, well, how dare you say that the fact that he was walking around with a racist sign in a predominantly black community how dare you say that influenced the crime?

But even woke people wouldn't say that. They'd be like, yeah, of course that influenced the fact that he was injured. It's the same thing with children. You know, you have a child, right? Like a child gets hit by a car because they ran across the street without looking both ways and waiting for their parent.

That is a tragedy. Is it partially the child's fault? Yes, it's partially the child's fault. Like, I'm sorry, that is a horrible thing to say it is partially that child's fault. You could be like, well, the child wasn't fully sentient yet or [00:06:00] anything like that. It's really the parent's fault. Fine! Let's talk about an adult.

If an adult crosses a road without looking both ways, and they get hit by a truck, and I'm like, look, obviously the truck shouldn't have hit them. But, it is partially their fault, and they're like, well that's a horrible thing to say. It is, okay, it's a horrible thing to say, but there is a reason we need to be able to victim blame.

Hmm. Let me explain what that reason is. It is because if we don't do that, then I cannot learn from that incident. I cannot say, oh, it is dangerous to cross the road without looking both ways. And then I cannot teach my children about that. I can't say if you don't look both ways before crossing the road, you may be hurt.

And so he's like, come on, nobody's saying that. Okay. Imagine I say to my daughter, if you go to a nightclub dressed like that, yeah. You make it great. And then somebody's like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. That's victim. Well, the crime hasn't even happened yet. [00:07:00] I am merely pointing out an increase in statistical odds due to a behavioral pattern.

If you go down a dark alleyway by yourself at night, this bad thing may happen to you. And so he would be like, nobody is actually out there. Occluding people learning about these risks in a fear of victim blaming this, and I would say actually

Simone Collins: not true. Super not true. Yeah. So like I, cause I can give that personal example, so I can speak from personal experience on this because I was raised in a culture where victim blaming absolutely 100 percent was not permitted.

But then I also was Completely blithely unaware that doing certain things was going to put me at risk of certain things happening or that there were even like implied expectations to certain things. So, um, I mean, a lot of this, this happened, like when I was traveling and whatnot, like I would walk around Beijing or Tokyo, like wearing a mini skirt and fishnets.

And then be surprised if [00:08:00] someone fondled my ass like, well, of course, because I was walking around alone as a teenager in a major city wearing a mini skirt. I mean, okay. There was, there was another instance when I was in college where a guy invited me to go to a concert with him and it was we went to school in DC, the concert was in New York and I'm like, Oh yeah, that sounds great.

And he's like, okay, great. Like we'll take this 5 bus there. So like the plan was to just bus up and then bus back and then like sort of pull in a letter and call like the first bus in the morning. And then like later he updated me like, Oh, my dad got a hotel room. So, you know, we're not going to be out on the streets all night and I'm like, okay, great, fine.

We'll just do our homework there. And then, you know, like. It, you know, surprise, surprise that like I get to the hotel room, pull out my homework and start doing it. And he starts hammering back screwdrivers. And I'm like, oh, okay, whatever.

I decided to cut the meat out of this story because it's very uncomfortable to listen to. All you really need to.

take away is that the situation was very, very dangerous for Simone, but [00:09:00] nothing ended up happening. However, if things had been slightly different, it could have gone very poorly for her.

Simone Collins: it was a very awkward night and nothing ultimately happened, but it, it did then lead to him being really mad at me and me feeling really like confused and kind of scared by what happened.

And like, that's because no one had told me, like, if you put yourself in this situation, If a guy

Malcolm Collins: pays for a private room for you, and you go into

Simone Collins: the hotel room and then, and then you, you get into a bed and then he starts drinking, like, you know, and I went, I still didn't realize that this was an issue when I came back and I told, you know, like my roommate would happen.

Cause she was like, Hey man, what's wrong. Then he's just like, Oh, that, that is not okay. Like, I can't believe that happened to it. It was never like, wait, you didn't know. Like no one said that to me, which is

Malcolm Collins: insane. Well, and if people can't understand, so Simone, you got really lucky. This guy understood like no means no, et cetera.

Yeah. [00:10:00] But a lot of women end up putting themselves and people don't understand. They can be like, that should have been the most obvious thing in the world. Simone is an intelligent person. You guys are an intelligent. Thoughtful person, because she grew up in an environment where this view of slut shaming or sorry, where this view of victim blaming was so extreme that she was never saw basic things around expectations that may be set by her actions.

She put herself in an incredibly dangerous situation. Yeah, it is not, this is not like a joke point. Like this is when you fight against this, when you fight to say, actually we do need to victim blame a bit. You are fighting against women getting great.

Simone Collins: You're fighting against female victimhood. You are fighting for female safety.

And this isn't a female versus male thing. You know, this goes both ways. Like, people who put themselves in very risky positions are going to be subject to this regardless of, you know, who they [00:11:00] are and, and what race or gender or background or educational level or IQ they are. It really doesn't matter.

This is about what risks are you subjecting yourself to, right?

Malcolm Collins: We need to understand that risks are not fair. It doesn't mean you shouldn't be educated about them. If you are X ethnicity, you probably shouldn't go into Z neighborhood and do B. That historically we understood it. It's not good that that happens, but it is good that we teach our kids that that happens if they're at risk of it.

Now we have entered a society where you cannot do that. And that creates enormous, enormous risk for young people. But hold on, it gets. that. So I'm going to talk about some statistics that are shocking. And that, that allow you to investigate issues that we as a society are told we are not allowed to investigate.

Okay. So we're going to talk about spousal abuse. [00:12:00] Oh boy,

Simone Collins: we're really going to hell for this. We're talking about

Malcolm Collins: white abuse, worse than that. Okay. So I, as an outsider, somebody who is not concerned about whether and keep in mind, all of this is just a hypothetical framework here. I'm not saying this is what I think.

I am saying these are the type of questions that in a hypothetical world where victim blaming was not a concept that was shamed, somebody might ask. And so somebody in this hypothetical world might ask a question like, is it women's fault that they are abused by their husbands? And then another person would say, how dare you ask that?

You know, but that doesn't exist. So somebody can't ask in this world, how dare you ask that? Instead, they would ask. How would we test that? How would we test whether the phenomenon of men physically abusing their wives is caused primarily by the wives or caused primarily by the husbands? And then the other person would say, ah, of you and weird [00:13:00] science world where we only care about data.

I guess what we would need is a control situation. We would need a population where some women. dated women, and some men dated men, and then we would need to look at the level of physical abuse within these two populations. And

Simone Collins: unfortunately, lo and behold,

Malcolm Collins: this is possible. Ah, yes, yes, yes. Let me pull this up.

Okay. What are the physical abuse rates in lesbian relationships? What are the physical abuse rates in male gay relationships? Oh, oh no, they're much lower than in straight relationships in male gay relationships, and much higher in lesbian relationships. Oh no, this is not what the data was supposed to say.

Now,

Simone Collins: caveats, caveats throat clearing, etc. It may be that men are just far less likely to report abuse. It may be that women are far more likely to over report abuse. But the numbers are very

Malcolm Collins: distinct. It's not just true in [00:14:00] our world. I'm not saying that in our world, lesbian relationships are much more likely to have physical abuse or that gay relationships are much less likely to have physical abuse or that this would mean anything.

I'm just saying you, as a viewer, hypothetically, if you were to look this up, what conclusions, and you did live in this alternate world where all these things were true, which obviously isn't true in our world. What would you take away from it? But it gets more interesting than that because I also look in my own life of instances where I have seen physical spousal abuse, which have been rare, but I know of really only one in my larger friend network.

Oh, no, two. One, it was because his partner kept stealing things from people and he kept telling her to stop doing it, and she didn't listen, and then he became physically abusive. The other the partner this guy was living on a very tight budget, like, they were not doing well financially, and she went out and splurged on designer purses without his permission and he had asked her to not do that before.[00:15:00]

And sometimes I wonder, obviously, these are all hypothetical situations that didn't really happen. And I'm not discussing my real opinions here. But these are all situations where I just have to wonder, like. I don't abuse Simone because when I went into a relationship, I vetted for a partner who I respected and who I admired and whose actions I always knew were motivated by a desire to make the world a better place and to achieve her personal value set, which I align with.

And if my partner, if Simone, ever strayed from that path, I would leave her. If she ever started acting in a way that was optimized around personal vanity or hurt other members of the family, I would leave her before I would ever physically abuse her. However, there are certain people in this world who just are unwilling to do that.

They are primarily concerned about themselves and their vanity and how they signal to the world. And there are certain other people in the world who can't get a better [00:16:00] partner than that. And I think that this is partially why physical abuse happens within relationships where people are on the lower quality of partner.

Um, well,

Simone Collins: and I think often there, there is abuse on multiple ends. Sometimes One partner physically abuses after being emotionally abused. I would also, I mean, yeah, I think a lot of personally would see if, if I, I had very limited funds and somebody without my consent spent my money. So, I mean, I think another issue with, with some forms of spousal abuse is that the abuse that gets prosecuted reported and seen as societally most unforgivable has been triggered by other forms of abuse that society. Doesn't for whatever reason see as, as egregious, but this is a cultural thing [00:17:00] and I, I do, I do think that like, this is a very, very difficult moral situation because for example, you have honor killings where like a family will kill a female relative because they feel that she, you know, dishonored the family in some way, which most to most people that would be entirely like.

She didn't do a thing. She just acted, acted normal. Right. And then they think it's right to kill her as a result. So, I mean, like, I do think that it's, it gets very, very dangerous when violence is the retaliation that people choose. And often people Violence is

Malcolm Collins: a retaliation that people choose often, not as a first resort, but either because they are mentally impaired.

So, let's be clear. I think usually when violence is chosen, it's either because the person is mentally impaired because of drugs or alcohol. Or they're just generally mentally impaired, or they feel that they have no other way to effectively communicate with their

Simone Collins: partner. Right, like they've tried everything else and they

Malcolm Collins: They've tried telling them, don't take the family credit card and spend all our [00:18:00] money, they've tried everything else, and they feel that it would be Better to be physically abusive than it would be to leave their partner.

However, I want to be clear. I think that this is a minority of cases of spousal abuse. I actually think that the majority of cases of spousal abuse are due to mental impairment, drugs, alcohol and stupidity. And lack of emotional control. But I also think that there is a level of reciprocality to this as, as Simone pointed out, is one partner is abusing the other partner in a way that is socially accepted.

And so we don't see that a lot of really terrible people deserve each other. And, and we're not allowed to, you know, somebody comes to me and they go. Look at all these horrible things my wife did to me, right? And, and I know this is terrible because now, oh gosh, this is going to really piss off the red pillars where I'm like, what?

Even men are responsible for when they are emotionally or financially abused by their wives. And I'm like, yeah, generally my thought, when somebody comes to me, a man comes to me and he's like, look at all [00:19:00] these terrible things my partners have done to me. And I'm like, okay, well, what are you doing? Like it's either something that you're doing in terms of how you're sourcing your partners, or it's something that you're doing in terms of how you're relating to your partners.

Because I have, you know, as I've talked about, I've been in tons of relationships. I have slept around a ton. I dated a ton before I met my wife. I never like, it's not that I never had partners who did things that were manipulative, but when they did, I broke up with them immediately before the situation ever escalated.

I never allowed somebody to treat me like that.

Simone Collins: You didn't expose yourself in a way that would allow you to be manipulated in that way. And I think a lot of this is like, people are, are allowing themselves to be exposed in a way.

Malcolm Collins: And here's something that people will say. I'll also say somebody will be like, yeah, but what was a man, you know, Oh, Oh, man can beat you if you leave him.

And I'm like, yeah. And a woman can claim you raped her. If you leave her, I actually had one person threatened to do that to me. Threatened to say that I had raped [00:20:00] her because I left her. I think

Simone Collins: that happens more than.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, it happens more than you all think. And then in that situation, you need to be very careful.

You need to navigate the situation. And I think that women are like, What? A man beating you is so much worse than a woman claiming you raped her. And I'm like, are you actually serious saying that? Do you understand that you can have your whole life ruined? You'll never be able to get a job again.

If you're a woman and you survive that, Even if you walk with a limp or something, I would prefer a limp or even the permanent facial deformation than a rape record on my public record. In, in, in trying

Simone Collins: to live. Yeah. It would be interesting to do a poll of like both men and women, like, would you rather live with X or Y like, you know, permanent rape accusations or like having, like being Kind of beat up, like pretty beat up.

Maybe to the point of hospitalization.

Malcolm Collins: Well, hospitalization and permanent, like, like, maybe a limp [00:21:00] or permanent, like, scars or something.

Simone Collins: Yeah, although I, I don't think most cases of domestic

Malcolm Collins: abuse, I'm not saying that I'm talking about an extreme

Simone Collins: case. Yeah, but yeah, you're just going all the way to be that yet to show how extreme it can be.

Yeah, that'd be an interesting study. So I just, I want to point out 2 important points on this issue that I think need to be. considered when people are looking at it. One is that I think a big culprit in this problem becoming a problem in the first place is that people want the world to be fair. And the reason that they don't tell women that they shouldn't dress a certain way, or they don't tell their children that they shouldn't go to a certain neighborhood, or they shouldn't do this or that thing is because it's not fair.

It's not fair that I can't walk around a city in a mini skirt and, and not be, it's not fair. That I, I, I can't, you know, be in a hotel room with a guy and, and, and not have him crawl into my bed without my permission, right? Like it's, it shouldn't. It shouldn't be that way, but it is that way. And [00:22:00] because the world isn't fair, it's just that I think there's this weird, like perversion where like, we want, we're like, we're trying to dress for the world we want.

We're trying to dress for the job we want, or like, we're trying to, to behave for the world that we wish existed, but that world doesn't exist. So that's just one point I wanted to make the other point. And I think this is devastating, but also something that is not discussed enough that may be too spicy.

And you may have to take this out. Is it it's under it's under discussed. The extent to which sometimes being in an abusive relationship is better than the counterfactual that that some people stay in abusive relationships because the amount of resources or safety or happiness, otherwise, that they're getting out of it makes the bad stuff worth it.

And that many people are being abused. Over a long period of time because they've made a mental calculation that is sober and logical And they've decided this is better than the alternative And I think in in many cases[00:23:00] Abuse crisis centers and stuff like that. Don't they they make things worse because they're putting women in very dangerous situations saying like you either have to get completely out of this relationship Or we won't help you.

And I just want to point that out. Like sometimes

Malcolm Collins: people, I like what she means by this. Cause I think people may not be, imagine you are dating a billionaire and this billionaire is abusive to you. And I won't say that like we have friends in this situation, but like we probably not billionaires, but like very wealthy people who have dated women and clearly were abusive to them.

And the woman's like, look. I don't have a skill set outside of being a trophy wife. If I divorce this guy, he's got a solid prenup. My life is worse than being abused. And people are like, oh, how could you say that? And they're like, no, but really think about it. Would you rather have somebody [00:24:00] beat you every day, but have, or, or cheat on you every day in front of you, or degrade you every day?

And have to never worry about money, have all the luxuries you could want at your fingertips and the alternative is, is that you are living under an impasse or in a homeless shelter. I think most people who aren't caught up on this sort of bizarre pride hypothesis that our society has today would be like, yeah, that's better.

Or imagine I even reframe the question. Somebody's abusing you every day, but your kids get their college paid for. And your kids get to go to private school. What do you do then? A lot of people would say this is a no duh thing

Simone Collins: for me. Yeah, and you have to like consider that a lot of jobs or just like menial factory work that is just mind blowingly Depressing and boring and, and just, it takes your soul away and, or many customer service jobs, like the amount of [00:25:00] verbal abuse that some people are subjected to just do their work every day is worse than the verbal abuse they might be subjected to in a day.

And not good relationship that maybe gave them more financial security or connections that allowed them to get a better job. Right? Like there, there are trade offs and I think people discount also how, how how cruel the, the world can be.

Malcolm Collins: The average world for a, a person without a college degree and, and, and even with a college

Simone Collins: degree, all sorts of people, like depending on who you are and where you are, like just the real, the real

Malcolm Collins: world story, you know, when people are like.

Oh, don't you know all the terrible things that happen to women who work in the sex work industry and she's like, b***h, do you know what I was doing before sex work? I was working in a factory. Okay. I hated every second of my life. And I then was able to do something that yes, it was degrading. And yes, it opened me up to risk in life.

But look at where she is today. Look at who her friends are today. Look at her. Like she [00:26:00] could you. Like, a lot of

Simone Collins: people when they see it, you know, I think it's degrading by some people's standards, but like, to other people, it doesn't really matter. And like, to her, I think working in a factory was way more degrading than doing what she did.

What she did was like an intellectual exercise that was very interesting. She optimized a ton. She learned a lot. She built a platform. Like, I think a lot of it also has to do with, like, people's personal preferences. And to some people like just like literally like living in a shabby house and not being able to like buy designer bags is, is, is way worse than being in a, a very bad relationship, but having all those things.

And like, you just, I

Malcolm Collins: know what you're thinking

Simone Collins: of, but sometimes you have to trust that someone understands what they care about.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, but I also want to go to the Ayla situation, because I think a lot of people, they see, like, our culture line, like, we like Ayla, we'll have her on the show again, we, we, we think pretty highly of her, and they're like, well, what you mean is, you have differences of opinion, but, like, you don't actually agree with her [00:27:00] lifestyle, right, and I'm like, no, I actually do agree with her lifestyle, even if it was my daughter, if, if, if the alternative to sex work Was spending every day as a menial peon in a factory and having no alternatives to that in life.

Because she did not have alternatives at that time of her life. I would say, I'd rather you, I don't want you to go down this path. I don't want, like, like, As me as a dad, I would prevent this from ever happening, I'd give them money, I'd try to help them, I'd try to get them out of that situation, but she didn't have a family at that time.

She had been disowned by her parents, she was completely on her own, she had no formal education

Simone Collins: And she hadn't been raised to believe that she was able to take other types of jobs on, she just had been raised to believe that she was going to be a a mother and housewife. Not homeschooling kids for her entire life, so she didn't even know, like she, she wasn't given the, the worldview that would allow her to even do anything different.

So like, come on.

Malcolm Collins: I think [00:28:00] that we as a society have entered this stage where we are unwilling to see that there is often no better option for many people in the, in the more desperate parts of society. I often say that, that seeing Ayla's story. As an outsider is like, and being like, wow, she's a slut.

It's like seeing the ballad of Fancy May and, and then being like, wow, Fancy, she was real slut at the end of that story. And it's like, were you not paying attention? I'll, I'll play it here, Simone, because I know you have no idea what I'm talking about. I have no idea.

Simone Collins: Sorry. I guess I'm just not cool enough.

Malcolm Collins: It's a classic country song.

She handed me a heart shaped lock, if you said to thine own self, be true.

And I said, But as I watched a roach crawl across the toe of my high heeled shoe I was gonna be a lady someday, though I didn't know when or how. But I couldn't see spending the rest of my life with my head hung down in shame. You know I might have been born just plain white trash, but Fancy was my [00:29:00] name. She said, here's your one chance, Fancy, don't let me down. There's a lot of self righteous hypocrites that call me bad And criticize mama for turning me out No matter how little we've had But though I ain't had to worry about nothin for now, oh, fifteen years Okay, mama. I understand.

Simone Collins: Thank you. Okay. Because I'm not American enough. Jesus. Sad. But yeah, I mean, I, I, I just yeah, I think it's an important conversation and it, this is definitely something that, that colors the way that we do and plan on raising our kids. And that I think this is very connected to this internal locus of control thing.

You know, the, the never blame a victim is an external locus of control. Heuristic. Whereas the blame the victim, even when it's not the victim's fault at all, is the extreme of an internal locus of control heuristic. So you can only imagine like culturally, of course, we're going to take this position.

Like you, anyone watching this

Malcolm Collins: can predict that we take this position. When we're [00:30:00] raising our kids. I'd be like, I does not matter if you were the victim or not, you are always responsible for the things that happened to you. And so we'd be like, how can you say that? And I'm like, look, a person who believes that they are always responsible for the things that happened to them in the individual decisions that they make are going to be less likely to make the decisions that lead to bad things happening to them.

So you can be like, Ooh, that's so consequentialist. So you only care that you lower the probability that your children get graped and you don't. Yes! Yes! That is all I care about! Yeah. Grow the f**k up, okay? You idiots! I'm so sick of this nonsense and the damage that's caused by it because they are leading to real people getting murdered by their partner.

They are leading to real people getting great. It was a good sentiment to begin with, but now it causes. It is infinitely more suffering than it relieves, and you do it because you are a justicle, and you pretend that by not [00:31:00] telling women that if you do X and Y, you are more likely to get graped, that you are lowering the number of women who get graped, when that is objectively not a true thing.

You are increasing the number of women who get graped because you didn't warn them. And you let them enter situations like the one Simone entered. It is just as evil as saying, I won't victim blame, therefore I won't teach a child to look both ways before crossing the street. What you are doing is evil, and you are evil, and genuinely, I hate you almost as much as I hate the greatest of this world.

Come here, kid! I'm gonna tie you to the radiator and grape you!

That's how he grapes people! That's what he does! No! He's the Grapist! These kids were obviously horrified. Not that girl. Look, she's totally asking for it. What? Look at her. She's begging to get graped. Will you listen to yourself? Look what she's wearing.

It's purple.

Malcolm Collins: Oh [00:32:00] god. That's just a side note, you know, whatever.

Simone Collins: Can we direct your hate mail to simona. Malcolm at we do not care. com. We are very sorry and we apologize and take back absolutely everything we say.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. No, all of this was discussed in a hypothetical universe. We're 100%. Yeah.

Simone Collins: We're, we're just talking hypothetically and taking on characters in this episode because.

Malcolm Collins: Because, yeah, yeah. No, this is not us. If somebody quotes us in this episode and they're like, can you believe they said this? I was like, could you not tell this was a comedy episode? Could

Simone Collins: you not tell? This was a deep fake,

Malcolm Collins: yeah. Complete deep fake comedy nonsense. Yeah. And the fact that you didn't get the joke is your fault, not ours.

Okay. Yeah, because the joke was against

Simone Collins: Stop. You're blaming the victim again. Oh, no. Oh, no,

Malcolm Collins: no. Oh, yeah. Well, the, no, the joke was against the rapist. It wasn't against the individuals who were victims that they were. They were the people that we were trying to stand was this joke. And I, and I mean that as [00:33:00] sincerely as a human could.

And this was all an alternate world, Malcolm and Simone in this conversation. Yes. I love you, Simone. You're great. And I appreciate that you're the type of woman who doesn't, you know, you're

Simone Collins: amazing. Well, I was different, right? I was, I was the opposite version of this. And I got burned and I didn't even realize I got burned.

And who knows? Like the stuff that could have happened to me, really. It is, it is. It is very fortunate that worse things have not happened to me, based on the way that I knocked about the world with this old mindset. I, I could have been one of those girls who was like, I'm going to go backpacking through the Middle East and they subsequently disappear.

That's one of

Malcolm Collins: my favorites. It's the most horrifying story. I don't know anyone who's ever heard it, but there was this girl who you know, a lot of people go like hitchhiking, backpacking around the world and she said, I am going to prove that the Middle East isn't dangerous for women because, because it's not a justicalist mindset.

They don't care what's true or what's not true. They care what would be

Simone Collins: just if it was true. [00:34:00] Yeah, they're, they're living for the society they wish existed. And so

Malcolm Collins: she decided to hitchhike through Europe. No problem there. A mile and a half in. I might just post on the screen what ended up

Simone Collins: happening to her.

Yeah, just post on the screen. Let's not hear it. Keep my delicate ears safe from the story. I love you, Simone. I love you, too. Thinking beautiful thoughts. Thinking beautiful thoughts.

Malcolm Collins: Beautiful thoughts. That could have happened to you.

Simone Collins: Neat. Really neat. Really could have though. So yeah, guys hide your kids, hide your wife,

Malcolm Collins: and whenever anybody pulls this nonsense around you, shame them and point out that they are contributing to more of the very behavior they claim to be trying to prevent.

Yeah. Love you. Adore you.

Malcolm and Simone react to a progressive writer's absurd proposal to address declining birth rates - punitive taxes if both spouses work! They explain how this would just discourage marriage and responsibility, worsening societal outcomes. Instead, tax incentives align better with reality, especially if focused on people having kids younger. Pets as child substitutes comes up again too.

Malcolm Collins: [00:00:00] And so here's what I suggest we do. Okay. I say, and I'm quoting here. I say that I'd massively increased marginal tax rate on the second worker in any household to force them out of the labor market, which would lower their opportunity costs for having children. he goes further punitive marginal tax rates on the 2nd earner in a household would knock many women and some men out of the labor force by lowering the opportunity cost of having children because there'd be no career to give up

 You serious? You don't know. Everybody knows you never go full retarded.

Would you like to know more?

Simone Collins: Wild. And I remember, have you heard of Zilogon Wild? I love Zilogon Wild, it's fantastic. Made me remember the house on Batman Road, which you like seriously thought about buying. That like Yes! Like it was a cult, but it had all these like It was a mansion! It was a mansion,

Malcolm Collins: it had a bunch of It was a super cheap mansion, because it looked insane.

And it was on a place called [00:01:00] Batman Road. Yeah,

Simone Collins: and you were like so ready to buy it. You're like, it's a fixer upper. And I'm like, this was clearly owned by a cult before. Why do you want this house? And I wonder, you know, like if, if we bought that house, would it have shaped us? Do the homes that people live in shape people?

Malcolm Collins: I don't know. Yeah. I mean, I know that I love the house we got. We definitely got ahead on this cottagecore trend here. Right. You know, I see, I don't think I would

Simone Collins: be wearing a medieval corset. You know, a chamise, you'd be wearing what? Like in the house on Batman Road? I would probably have to be wearing a beige jumpsuit because that was the vibe.

You know,

Malcolm Collins: that was the vibe. I love it. Hey, I don't know. That could work for us as well.

Simone Collins: So,

Malcolm Collins: anyway, we've got to get into our topic today. Oh, yeah. So, we read an article by somebody being like, look, progressives are finally waking up to fertility rates. You know, and they are, and I, I see this [00:02:00] repeatedly in progressive pieces, you know, the New York Times did a front page piece on this recently, but the crazy thing is, is I thought as progressives woke up to this, right?

They would more and more, and I've always, you know, taken this position. But they've used it to try to give handouts and so creatively, you know, I point out and I'm going to put up on the screen the graph that shows that if you sort studies by how large their margin of error is, what you will see is all of the studies that shows this matter and have a huge margin of error and all of the studies that show this doesn't help at all have a very small margin of error.

If you look at something like the program that was in Hungary, where they spent literally 5 percent of their GDP on this last year. So the year before Alaska, we just passed the New Year's.

They got their fertility reset by like 1. 6%. Considering that, like, it's falling like 13 percent this year in Korea, like you're getting double digits declines in a lot of places. It's irrelevant. It's not going to fix anything. And so it's like, well, they're going to, Try to use it to support those programs.

[00:03:00] And it's, it's, it's stupid and it's not going to work, but you know, at least, you know, they're part of the conversation now. Well, well,

to my surprise they were dumber than I could have even conceived what they actually It

Simone Collins: was worse than handouts, right? I mean, the thing is like handouts, it's, it's a. It's a nuanced form of dumb, right? Like in that money does make a difference, just not nearly enough of a difference. You know, it's, it's like saying, Oh, I'll help fund your trip to Europe.

I'm going to give you 50, you know? Oh, thanks. That's definitely going to get me across the Atlantic. So

Malcolm Collins: yeah, I mean, This article here was in Quillet, you know, that's like a Atlantic's, I think like mainstream publication or something or like,

Simone Collins: like millet.

Malcolm Collins: Quillet. And the article was called Misunderstanding the Fertility Crisis.

Of course, [00:04:00] like, an article where he misunderstands the fertility crisis. But of course, he's implying that all of us are misunderstanding the fertility crisis because we think that culture has something to do with this. But Hold on. So I will read to you. So first, one thing I find really interesting is he talked about how he began to realize this was a problem is and he heard his conservative friends who like worked at Fox News saying that they were working on the fertility rate crisis.

He's like, I'd never heard of this before. And so I looked at the data and I begrudgingly suppose that it is a real problem and we probably should do something. And so here's what I suggest we do. Okay. I say, and I'm quoting here. I say that I'd massively increased marginal tax rate on the second worker in any household to force them out of the labor market, which would lower their opportunity costs for having children.

 And then in another part of the article, he goes further punitive marginal tax rates on the 2nd earner in a household would knock many women and some [00:05:00] men out of the labor force by lowering the opportunity cost of having children because there'd be no career to give up disempower

Simone Collins: families.

It's fine.

About what? You serious? You don't know. Everybody knows you never go full retarded. What do you mean? You went full retard, man. Never go full retard.

Malcolm Collins: Hold on. It gets it gets better.

So then he goes on to say in another part of the article, two income households aren't vastly more common than they used to be because of a brutal Malthusian competition for increasingly scarce resources. So basically he's arguing against the idea that, you know, as women entered the labor market, it decreased wages for everyone.

And, and now because of that, we need two income families to work. So then he goes on to say. Basically, instead, women work because their [00:06:00] wages are so much higher than they used to be. There isn't a two income trap. There's an expanded females economic opportunity trap. And that opportunity cost is what is contributing to the mightily to the decrease in fertility.

So I, I'm like our listeners, you're smart people. Can you immediately see the idiocy of this idea? That what he is suggesting that we do, so I will maybe break this down and it wasn't obvious to you what he is suggesting that we do, he is saying that individuals now as married couples, both people have so much economic opportunity.

That there is no reason to have kids, like the competing things against having kids now are just so much bigger, like all of the things you can do in the world, whether it's the internet or travel or everything like that, and all the economic opportunities. So what we need to do is remove economic opportunities from [00:07:00] people.

Now, in a way, he's right. If you could enforce this policy fairly without the very obvious unintended side effect, which I'm seeing of our viewers have already figured out, but if you could implement this policy, right? It would just impoverish a lot of people, which does increase fertility rates.

You know, if you remove people's economic potential, you increase their fertility rates. But the downside is the obvious effect it's going to have. Which is people just won't get married before having

Simone Collins: kids. Yeah. Yeah. That's what's going to happen. That's what will really happen. Yeah. Well, I mean, so yeah, like, basically, if everyone followed the rules, or like, you couldn't escape from it, like, if common law marriage was also grandfathered

Malcolm Collins: into this.

No, no, no. What they would then do is not get common law marriage. You'd just have more totally single mothers.

Simone Collins: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. But let's, so I mean, what he's really arguing though, which I think is, It's first ironic is that this is roughly the same argument made by that conservative substack writer who wrote [00:08:00] the subset we discussed on baby booms, who was like, Oh, we just need to economically disempower women.

Because the problem is that like, until men, excuse me, until men are given the opportunity to be more. Prestigious and higher status and women, women won't have marriageable men, which is, I mean, it's not untrue that he's sort of arguing the same thing, but from a very different angle. And they're both sort of arguing for effectively the same thing, which is economic disempowerment of women, which is.

Pretty

Malcolm Collins: messed up thing. This come from this ultra progressive perspective. But it is functionally what he's arguing and keep in mind, you know, we're already in a certain situation in this country where I think the last numbers I saw, and I want to do a full episode on this, where 50 percent of children born in this country now are born to single mothers.

And So you're not actually helping you're, I mean, you're probably not helping that much because you, you are assuming, and I seem to remember it was something like 10 years ago or something, or 20 years ago, it was something like only 13 percent or 5%. I don't know. It was like, yeah, it's

Simone Collins: gone on [00:09:00] significantly.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Yeah, it's just exploded because again, and a lot of people are operating under this assumption that the way that our culture is changing and the way things like fertility rates are changing and who's having kids is changing has been a linear change, and it's just sort of like the stuff they saw in their own childhood, but more.

And that is not what we're seeing here. We're seeing a complete sea change. And who is having kids and these policies, so I mean, I want to know, do you have any other thoughts on this policy? Simone? Like, it's,

Simone Collins: it's odd to me because 1, this is someone who does have kids and who values kids. And.

But, but two, like he's choosing a policy that I also think would dissuade more people from wanting to have kids. So I was just watching a new segment on why dink couples, you know, exist and why they feel so incentivized to not have kids and the big, [00:10:00] big argument that is made is the financial penalty for choosing any lifestyle arrangement that compromises their earning ability.

is, is meaningful enough for them to significantly change their lives. And this is no different basically saying, Oh, well, you know, if you get married, we're going to penalize the second marriage. Yeah. And it's like plummeting marriage

Malcolm Collins: rates already. Yeah. And, and you know, that's a huge problem. So. When you say that he is somebody who has kids and likes kids I want to go into some of the stuff he says about his kids because it's actually very elucidating.

If you look at this from the progressive perspective, the way that they see this stuff. So he says, quote, I used to roll my eyes at people who said, quote, having kids is the best thing I ever did. And my kids are my life in quote. But then I realized how true it is. The insights of evolution make it painfully obvious.

After I had my first [00:11:00] child, I described to a philosophy PhD friend, how my new feelings revealed the poverty of the English language. My deep feelings for my children Deserve a word other than love, which we use to describe the feelings we have for our spouse or an excellent movie.

And I never felt that before learning that my wife was pregnant and seeing my son for the first time. By the way, I didn't feel love for my kids the first time I saw them. I, I'm so confused by guys who do that. I think that might be a exclusively female phenomenon that has to do with

Simone Collins: it. There's also country songs about like the moment they see the first, first ultrasound.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, I know. I hear that, but I feel like it's something you're just supposed to say. I don't know. The first time I see babies, I'm like, they look gross. Yeah,

Simone Collins: you're really like, pass.

Malcolm Collins: Pass. So, so the then, then he goes on to say, my philosopher friend, that it sounded like having children was a quote, consciousness expanding experience, end quote, which was a great way to put it.

So, you know, this guy, now that he has three kids and he has three kids now, you know, and he's, he's talking to his [00:12:00] wife. Which is notable.

Simone Collins: Yeah. Who has three kids anymore?

Malcolm Collins: And she's like, well, I would, it would limit how much I can travel. anD like, okay. Yeah. Denying a human, a life, denying one of your kids.

Like if you knew that kid, would you be like, yeah, I treated you for travel because I really like going to Italy. Like what, like it's so insane that anybody would do that. But I think this comes to culture, which is to say the way you culturally frame. How you think about human life when a human life begins what is given up by not having a kid, you know, the way we do where we say, you know, life begins before conception.

And that that means that when you decide not to have a kid, or you do something that prevents you from having a kid you are denying that person existence. And then, and then you've got to think, like, what am I denying them existence over? And it really refrains it for you, you know, having to explain to that kid in the future.

Yeah. Like, the things that you thought were more important than them, but this is the way our society frames it, so people [00:13:00] don't have this huge push, and this is another thing he kept going into, so when he titles the article, Misunderstanding the Falling Fertility Rate, what he thinks that we, and all the other conservatives who care about this are misunderstanding Is that culture has anything to do with this?

So I'm going to read some quotes here because I, I, I found them just absolutely bizarre. The conversation has stuck with me because people who worry about low fertility rates focus on vague cultural explanations and don't look at the simple ones staring them in the face. Microeconomics. Opportunity cost is what you must give up to buy what you want in terms of other goods and services.

But the concept applies to every action you take. People who are concerned, and this is a separate part of the article, people who are concerned about the fertility crisis and want to reverse it should be the most interested in understanding the causes of the decline in the first place. This is why I find the vague cultural arguments that people raise for having children [00:14:00] so frustrating.

Culture is a set of human actions that evolve. Now, so that is all dumb. Everything he has said so far is pretty dumb, but then he gets to some white stuff here, and there is some stuff that he's saying that is right. So culture is the set of human actions that evolved to partially deal with the problems of the past and to harness opportunities.

Yes, we agree with that. Culture is not some magical force outside of economics, politics, and technology, but a set of human actions affected by economics, politics, and technology. Culture, in turn, affects economics, politics, and technology. To argue for changing the culture without changing the rest is unserious, except he just made the point here, okay?

The point is, yes, culture is not some magical force outside of culture, economics, and technology, and that it gets affected by those, but it also affects those, right? So, economics, politics, and technology are things that any movement is going to have a very difficult time changing. You know, you can make specific economic changes, but we [00:15:00] can study how those affect fertility rates because we have in numerous examples of people who have tried this in other countries, and it just doesn't work like we know this culture is the stronger force here.

And if you make cultural changes, well, then that obviously then impacts that the other systems as well. And I think that he is. Afraid that if culture is the explanation, then the answer is going to be, we have to go back to the way things were. And, and so that's why he has this huge reason to, to sort of twist his brain to argue for something that is obviously not true.

That's my read.

Simone Collins: And it would destroy, effectively destroy the thing that I guess would be more traditional, which is marriage. But I, I just, yeah, I don't think he's really thought through it and I, I just, it, it bothers me again. Like this is why we're in this in the first place is it gets me so mad when so many people [00:16:00] look at falling.

Fertility and they're like, well, time to take away reproductive rights. Time to take away women's empowerment. Like let's do that. And like to see even a progressive person effectively say that really makes my blood boil. Because no, I mean, that's, that's just not. That's not how it works. And, and I think when we look at the past and, and we think, Oh, well, things worked back then because women weren't empowered.

Not exactly. Women had a lot of influence within the family. They had a lot of economic power within the family too. I mean, of course things vary in like legally women were pretty disempowered in many places, but I don't know. It just really

Malcolm Collins: bothers me. There is one truth that he's capturing was in this article that I think sometimes lost to conservatives in the space.

Is, is the and progressives in the space as well is he's pointing out fundamentally, which is something that we really agree with is that the problem isn't not enough [00:17:00] money. The problem is too much money. Which is something that he fundamentally gets, you know, he's saying that women aren't leaving these positions because they don't have.

Enough money that it's not that the economics of families are depressed. It is that there is such a super abundance of opportunity that is competing with wanting to have kids. What is missing is well then how realistically do you get people to go and have kids without, you know, making marriage seem like the worst, but let's, let's tour him on this.

Like, let's assume you're going to design an actual economic. System that is going to motivate people to have kids. What does that look like? Right? In a healthy way, like, like, like, let's try to do what he's doing, but make this healthy. So one,

Simone Collins: I think people who are having kids are the people who should be getting tons and tons of tax advantages, like effectively being any tax because they are providing the next generation of taxpayers.

Yeah,

Malcolm Collins: I think [00:18:00] tax, tax taxes should be a huge thing here. I, I think you need some sort of like incremental decreasing taxes, the more kids you have. And it should get very big. Like if you go above three or four. Well,

Simone Collins: I think the tax, the tax decreases you should get should also, this should only apply to parents who are not utilizing low income based state services.

Like if you are utilizing those, we just finished with pronatalist. org putting together both a guide to federal resources for parents and for state based resources for parents. And what was really sobering to me is that the vast majority of states have pretty much nothing for families, regardless of income.

And by that, I mean, like they don't have a few states do have things and some examples of services that states provide to all families in some cases are like, oh, free transport, like free public transport for kids to go to school, you know, you can use this metro system. Yeah. If you're a minor or like here's this home visiting program or community [00:19:00] support

Malcolm Collins: program.

Sorry. I was thinking about different countries, but yeah, good. No, no, no. This is

Simone Collins: United States states. Because that's, that's where we started. It was an easier place to start and you can find these by the way, if you go to pretty little list. org and then under services, it links to a parent resources page.

But the vast, vast, vast majority of services are for low income families and that's fine. And that's important. You know, I, I totally, I, I can't bear the idea of children suffering and going without and being hungry and not having the healthcare that they need. So fine, but you also then shouldn't be incentivized to have more kids.

If you like, literally are not financially stable enough to handle those things yourself, but parents who are and are creating new tax, especially like, because if you're a family. That is able to pay for your own children. You are also more likely to produce children who themselves will be. High income generators and therefore high taxpayers.

So you should be given the biggest reward in terms of tax cuts for having kids and [00:20:00] it's the easiest and simplest thing to do. Yeah,

Malcolm Collins: well, I mean, I think there's other incremental things you could do that would work really well. By the way, people are wondering what I keep looking at off screen. One of our sons, he got a big bag full of rocks, little, little gemstones for Christmas because he likes playing with rocks.

And now the other kid loves it, you know, but this was a much better gift, but a much more messy gift than I had anticipated. And now I'm playing with my little hoard of gemstones on the table because they're so fun. They're so fun to, to collect and sort. Except

Simone Collins: now that we've given Torsten, and of course his name is Thor stone.

Of course he wants rocks for Christmas. But like now that we've given tourists in all these rocks, he now like, is very, he's like, well, I want a rock, my rock. And he'll like, freak out about not having, and they'll give him a rock. And he is like, no, I need a little rock. And then I need a house rock. And then I need to, he is like, all these, we have no idea what rock he's looking for.

It's [00:21:00] always like, what Very specific rock out of like the hundreds of rocks he was given in crystals for Christmas. Oh my god.

Malcolm Collins: But anyway, so back on topic. So the question of like, what could you actually do? I think you can, you can, is economically incentivize the steps leading up to having kids as well.

Oh, so getting married. I think there should be a level of economic incentivization for marriage. But then you need some actual qualifications of marriage, you know, what does it mean to be married? So, but I guess you wouldn't have that many people doing it just for the economic incentives. It'd be pretty hard.

So you'd have a light level of, I don't know, don't

Simone Collins: people get married like for immigration purposes? I do think that, I don't know.

Malcolm Collins: So a light level of economic incentive for marriage heavier economic incentive level, and you would want this marriage. To scale logarithmically, like with the more kids you have for the longer

Simone Collins: your marriages, like if you've been married for five years, then it starts,

Malcolm Collins: you could also make it something that could be [00:22:00] really good is the economic incentives kick in at higher levels.

The earlier you have your first kid. So you get this larger tax break because you don't know how much money you're going to earn or something like that. So, so again, you know, you, you are less likely to, like, try to cheat the system if you're a very wealthy person having a ton of kids because I'm like, I'm a wealthy 50 year old and I can just produce kids and that gets me out of the tax bracket.

That's not a useful thing to have. In the economy, right? Like you wanted to have some marginal increase there, but not a big one. What you would want is the huge advantage to come where if you start having kids, you know, in your late twenties or mid twenties and then you end up becoming wealthy after that, you know, I think that's where you should get the real advantage so that people sort of normalize to having kids much earlier in life, which is what we, what we need if we're realistically going to get the fertility rate back up.

I think it was something like. God, what was it something like in the 1970s, the average age of the first mother first child in the US [00:23:00] was, I think 21 or something, or

22. Oh, wow. That's wild.

Simone Collins: tHat's pretty young. Like even by 1800 standards. It's, it's not, it's, it's, it's interesting.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, it was 21.4 in the 1970.

In 1970. That is wild. So that means a lot of women were having kids, you know, at 18 and 17 and, you know. But

Simone Collins: I mean, tax cuts aside, well, I mean, yeah, tax cuts aside, there's so many additional things. Like, it is insane to me that parents pay for child care and for tuition with post tax dollars.

Malcolm Collins: Like, Oh yeah.

It's also insane to me that most universities like if they're giving you financial support for kids. And this would be one of the first things that I would really target is they do not calculate how many kids you have into that. So if you have 10 kids, you are treated the same as somebody who has one kids in terms of can you go forward.

In terms of

Simone Collins: financial aid at a university? Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: So the only way that they will give you a break on this is if [00:24:00] multiple kids are in the university system at the same time.

Simone Collins: Oh,

Malcolm Collins: interesting. So if I have a few of the system at the same time, but the, the reality is, is that parents often aren't paying for the university out of like their yearly income, they're paying for it out of a huge amount that they saved up over decades to send their kids to college.

So that is an insane system for how you're pricing this. So very obviously, you know, if you want to be fair and deal with these systems, that would be something to target. Yeah. Well, Simone, at least the world is waking up to this to some extent. It's nice. Maybe they'll start to think for more than five seconds about it.

We'll see, you know, I, I don't know. It's, it's very hard to get people to take this issue as seriously as it needs to be taken, but the world is waking up. Like I'm, I'm seeing this now they're begrudgingly, like if you say a fertility rate crisis, they're no longer like. Oh, you must be saying that because you have a breeding fetish, which is like literally that used to be something that we got told all the time.

Right?

Simone Collins: Like, yeah. [00:25:00] Spring of last year. That was the, one of the most common. Assumptions and conclusions.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, and now people are like, yeah, obviously, but like, X is the obvious solution. And yet they haven't thought about it at all. X is not the obvious solution, I guarantee you. So, I love you to death, Simone.

I'm so glad that I have kids with you. I do agree with what he says. I love our kids more than I love you.

Simone Collins: Yeah, which I was so afraid of. Remember I was like, what if you love our kids more than, and then, and now I'm like, no, this is great. I want you to love our kids more than you love me. So,

Malcolm Collins: You know, these people, you know, something that he talks about in the article is like, you cannot communicate someone who doesn't have kids, what they're missing out on.

There is just no way it's a conscious. You really

Simone Collins: can't. And yet a lot of child free couples are like. You don't understand the love I feel for my dog. And I'm like, I'm sorry. Like that's

Malcolm Collins: no, that is so disgusting. Well, this is the guy being like, well, you know, [00:26:00] I, I, yeah, I don't want to get gross here, but yeah, it's, it's disgusting.

Yeah, you know what? You're not discussing animals as a child substitute. Yeah, well, I mean, that's what they're doing. They're masturbating an emotional subset that a baby is supposed to fulfill with a pet. And then they pour their parenting instinct, you know, instead of into a baby, into a pet, you know, this is what somebody is doing when they're using pornography instead of sex or something like that.

They are using their pet for masturbation and it's gross.

Simone Collins: Pets as pornography.

Malcolm Collins: But they're doing it like publicly and, and proudly. And it's like, I, this does not come off the way that you think it comes off. It does not. I saw this one article that made me really sad. There was a two sisters and one of the wives had written into this magazine about how angry she was at her parent in the will.

Oh, this

Simone Collins: famous Miss Manners article. Yes, yes, yes.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, in the will, their mom [00:27:00] had given additional money to her sister because her sister had kids and she was like, my dog is my kid, like when her sister had kids, a kid, a sister had a kid. Okay, she's like, but my dog is my kid. Does she know how hurtful this is to me that I don't have this additional money for my dog?

Like that she had gotten into this level of psychosis where she actually thinks it costs as much to raise a dog. As a child and that like, have

Simone Collins: you seen how much that refrigerated pet food is? I

Malcolm Collins: mean, well, no. And then her dog is like the equivalent of like a continuation of the family line or something like that.

And that could have kids itself that would then continue the family, you know, the, the, the dog in any way, like she's lucky she got a dime from her parent, because this woman sounds like a psychopath. As everyone does whenever they, they clearly and loudly signal that they are using their dogs to masturbate.[00:28:00]

But anyway, I love you to death, Simone. You are a perfect wife and,

Simone Collins: You are my special sun pony. You too.

In this thought-provoking discussion, we are joined by author Louise Perry to explore the future of women in the context of declining birth rates.

We discuss artificial wombs, the importance of maternal bonds, and whether radical family structures could ever be wise. Louise argues that rapid technological change often induces a form of gender dysphoria, as modern lifestyles deprive women and men of their instinctive roles.

We also touch on the unique psychology of teenage girls, the stages of a woman's life, perpetually chasing maidenhood, and the need for cultural expectations around family formation. Louise offers her vision for a pro-woman future that supports femininity while also allowing some flexibility.

Overall, a nuanced look at where women may be headed and how we can build a society that enables them to thrive.

Louise Perry: [00:00:00] I, I'm kind of of the opinion that modern life induces something like gender dysphoria in almost everyone.

Malcolm Collins: I want to hear more.

Louise Perry: But, you know, the basic things I always think when you look at the list of sort of things. Ways to resolve depression and anxiety. The list of things that you're advised to do are basically the list of things that would comprise a standard hunter gatherer day, right? Like being outside, exercising, socializing with other people.

sitting around a campfire, you know, all this kind of stuff, which, which people, which people have hormonally respond to really positively, but which, which, which aren't a part of a standard modern day. And so for men, you know, that includes things like hunting and fishing and like being with male friends and all this kind of stuff, which, which they are largely denied. And similarly for women, like I, I, it is my strong intuition, for instance, that one of the things that is driving [00:01:00] the famed.

Poor mental health of teenage girls, it is Instagram and all of this kind of stuff. I agree with that. I think it's also that teenage girls historically would have spent a lot of time around young children.

Would you like to know more?

Simone Collins: Hello everyone. We are super excited today to be joined by Louise Perry, who wrote the case against the sexual revolution, a book that really got a lot of people talking for the first time about things, just not really working for women. In addition to things not really working for men in modern society.

Plus she is the podcast host of maiden mother matriarch, one of the. Fastest growing new podcasts recently. So it's a great re listen and basically she has the best guests on. So please do check out that podcast as well as the book. But

Malcolm Collins: today, hold on, hold on. Just for framing for audience. If you haven't heard of her because you're just mentioning books and stuff, she's probably the.

most influential conservative influencer in the UK right now. In terms of like conservative social ideas, intellectualism, she's [00:02:00] the big wig right now. And she's really been moving the bar forwards on a number of issues. All right. So

Louise Perry: very kind. Hey, no, we

Simone Collins: were just in, in London for a week talking with a bunch of people who are in influential positions of society.

And when we talked with people about like, well, who is the public facing, you know, leader of, of modern conservative thought moving things forward. We heard your name.

Malcolm Collins: So the topic of today is going to be the future of women, like where you think the future of women is going. And this is in the context of fertility rates, because obviously the future of women is hugely going to be determined by the types of women.

Who actually have kids. So first I just love your initial thoughts. And we can talk short term, long term, right? Like I think we can talk like what works now for having kids, how we can, we motivate individual groups now for having kids and then we'll go into the future. Where do you think women are going to be in a hundred years?

Where do you think women are going to be in 500 years?

Louise Perry: I [00:03:00] did a debate recently in LA organized. By Barry Weiss and the free press about that sexual revolution. And Grimes, who was, I was debating against, had this great line, which we were just kind of running with the whole, was a sexual revolution good or bad for women?

And Grimes just said, you know, if women still exist, of course, and it's a good comment. Oh my gosh. And it was like a funny comment, but also an astute one, because obviously biotech is all to play for, except, I mean, as I'm sure you'll both agree, we are at this very. Difficult potential bifurcation points where we could go evermore down the biotech route and, you know, upload ourselves to the cloud or whatever, which I have my misgivings about, you know, and I've, one of the things for instance, I've, I'm, I'm skeptical of is some kinds of some kinds of repro tech.

I'm more open to others. We can get into it. That's one route that we might go down as a species, as a civilization. The other, as, as we all know, is that actually birth rate. The birth rate problem leads to [00:04:00] such economic stagnation, such civilizational decline that we never actually, we don't actually make any technological progress.

That actually we end up stalling at the end of going backwards. I don't really know which is going to happen. I mean, I suppose it's plausible that, that both might happen, that you might end up with kind of high tech enclaves in some parts of the world. That's our camp. Yeah. Which get ever more like a, like Byzantium or something, right.

You know, civilization retreating to very, very high tech and relatively stable and affluent. enclaves while everywhere else unfortunately experiences the effects of low birth rates. Maybe, I don't know, maybe that's the route. Either way, it's obviously going to have an enormous effect on,

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Here's a question I have for you, because I actually see a third path, right?

So I think that there are, there, well, I mean, there's, there's, I think you're going to have some people trying for each path. Like, obviously we, Simone and I are part of the cultural group this time for the ultra high tech pathway. [00:05:00] Whereas we see you and you can correct us if we're wrong as sort of, and, and, and we, we frame all of the different cultural approaches to fertility rates right now and family right now as hypotheses and, and, and time will judge which hypotheses are intergenerationally stable.

One that's very obviously intergenerationally stable, which you called out as well. Are these xenophobic, technophobic and, and generally economically unproductive cultural groups which they will definitely exist in the future. Just how much they matter depends on if anyone else still exists, but I sort of have always seen you as representing something quite in between the two.

Not the aggressively technophobic and xenophobic group, but if a group that represents sort of more wholesome, traditional values. And I'm wondering if you are representing that group, how do you see that group as, as sort of recruiting and staying stable in a world in which they [00:06:00] increasingly, and you could say this is, this won't happen, but I sort of see increasingly they won't have control over governing systems.

that they live under. So how do they protect themselves in environments where there's hostile governments, et cetera? Like, what are your thoughts?

Louise Perry: Yeah. So, I mean, I'm quite agnostic on this question and I think about it a lot. I think it's a very difficult one. And I guess it's partly because I am. I'm sort of culturally Catholic in the sense that I have an enormous number of Catholic friends and I, and I, I often find myself kind of circling back to Catholic ideas around that that feel intuitively true to me, but I'm actually an agnostic.

I wasn't raised Christian alone, Catholic. And so I don't, I, I therefore don't feel as if I'm completely beholden to what the Catholic church says on things. So for instance, I am I am sympathetic to IVF in particular instances, I'm, I'm potentially sympathetic to polygenic screening. [00:07:00] I'm much less sympathetic to surrogacy.

So I kind of, I, I, I go, I can go either way on some of these biotech questions. And I suppose that the question for me and the question for all of us, it's really difficult one is if you have a. So, so let's talk about polygenic screening, for instance, as far as I'm aware, the position of the sort of mainstream Christian position on this is anti because it involves the destruction of embryos, at least in its current incarnation.

And also because, you know, tinkering with the genome is something that a lot of traditional Christians. Yeah. are very suspicious of, but then I also figure that the reason that we've got to the point where polygenic screening may well be necessary is because we've done this miraculous thing in dropping infant mortality to almost zero from a species norm of maybe 40 to 50 percent, right?

And that's a wonderful, wonderful thing that medical technology has bestowed on the world. Also means that we have this crumbling genome problem, [00:08:00] which I'm sure you'll be familiar with. I'm sure. Oh

Malcolm Collins: yeah. And I'm definitely, we talk about this. Yeah. Something that I think a lot of when you're talking about people who aren't our audience, like the general public, they don't understand that, that just.

about three or four generations ago, about 50 percent of kids were dying before the age of one. Right. Like this is not distant history when you're talking evolutionarily. But anyway, yeah.

Louise Perry: So we're basically keeping the infant mortality rate artificially very low. And there are problems downstream from that in that you now, you know, if we were to suddenly whip away Western medical technology, which might happen if you have sort of catastrophic economic decline, loads and loads of people are actually not well enough to

Genes for disease propagation themselves in a way that they wouldn't otherwise. Right. And I think, okay, if you sit, how do, how do you say Christian principles that go back 2000 years contend with this kind of completely novel problem, which is, Which is a product of [00:09:00] technology. And I suppose my argument to people who would hold the more traditional view is, you know, I hear you.

I think that rapid technological change is risky and the precautionary principle sort of demands that we be, that we be very suspicious of rapid technological change as an, like an instinctive conservative, that's my position. But also the situation we're in is we have problems generated by technology that can only solve, be solved with more technology.

And so the choices we have to make, therefore, are like, okay, we, you know, take sort of basic Christian ideas, which I hold to, right? That feel instinctively true to me, but then we have to be trying to apply them to incredibly novel... Modern questions. So, so yeah, as you say, Malcolm, therefore, I guess in some sense, I'm somewhere between the two extremes.

Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: Well, and I think something that I always note was the IBF stuff is this is a really hard thing to, to make a call on when you look at especially the groups that are against it, when you look at how much [00:10:00] human fertility has declined in the last. 50 years, you know, sperm rates are down over 50 percent in the last 50 years, you know, testosterone is down 30%.

We've got endocrine disruptors in our environment, which are changing the way gender is presenting. Like it is dramatically harder to naturally have kids for us than it was for our grandparents. And it's going to be harder yet for our kids because it's the one blind spot that like the environmental movement just completely ignored, which is one of those things where, where it's, it's sad to me because I actually culturally really Like you, I feel simpatico with the groups that are even sort of antagonistic to this technology, but I do worry for them.

Yeah. Okay, so I'll propose a very I actually have no idea where you're going to fall on this question, because it was a really interesting thing. So, you guys might not know this, Louise Perry put together this conference, there was one of the key people at this conference called ARC, which was like a conservative leaning Davos.

Now, they don't say conservative leaning, they say just an alternative, but it was... It was [00:11:00] for a lot of thinkers in the space. And at one point during it artificial wombs came up. And somebody was horrified who I was talking to, cause they were a very traditional conservative woman. And they were like, well, if there's artificial wombs, then why do we even need women?

Like, that's the most anti feminist thing I could imagine. And I remember thinking, I was like, yeah, but like. Is that like, I, I, I, I guess I just didn't understand what was so existentially bad about that. Like I assumed that most people identify more with like their family or their culture than their gender.

But she very clearly was like, I am a woman first. And then my culture and family, like, what do you think about artificial wombs and what do you think about worlds in which it does turn out to be healthier to maybe just a, a baby outside the body? Like, what do we do in that world? And, and, and how do you, would you like restructure the family in any way?

Do you see that world as horrifying? Like, yeah, I'd love to hear more.

Louise Perry: I think [00:12:00] it was Jermaine Greer who wrote many decades ago that if we ever invent artificial wombs, then patriarchy will just sort of stamp women out of no need for us anymore. And we'll like, it'll be game over. I don't agree with that.

I'd say that's a very paranoid sort of reading. I, that's, that's not what worries me. I mean, the main thing that worries me about artificial wombs is I think that I think mothers are extremely important to not just, you know, physical developments of infants, but emotional development of infants.

And I worry terribly about, it just seems like. It's, it, it frightens me in terms of the, how much could go wrong during the experimental development of such technology. I mean, what, what, what, what may happen, right, is that we, we already are able to sustain embryos in vitro for quite a long time. You have incubators for, for, Increasingly premature infants, you know, maybe they eventually meet in the middle without the need for [00:13:00] any kind of radical experimentation so that, you know, and, and, and obviously there are good reasons to have both of those, both of those forms of technology.

Would I want to restructure the family? My, my instance is to say no. I mean, one of the things that sets me apart, maybe a little bit from other conservative commentators is that I, I'm very interested in evolutionary psychology. I think that evolutionary psychology has a lot to teach us in terms of how we reckon with rapid...

social and technological change, because my, my sort of guiding principle is that our environments might change enormously, but our minds don't change that much. And the more you learn about how the human mind works and how human relationships work and so on, the more you realize that actually sticking to the old ways.

There's normally a very good reason to do that, which is not to say that we reject change full stop. It's not to say we reject technology full stop, you know, going back to the infant mortality thing. I love the fact that I don't have to worry about, about losing young children to preventable [00:14:00] disease. You know, this is, this is, this is miraculous stuff, but I think that efforts to tinker with the family, for instance, I mean, like there's, there's so much fascinating data, for instance, on the importance of mothers and fathers to child development, the sort of instinctive stuff that you don't really know is going on.

Like, Erica commissar is coming on my podcast soon. She's so interesting on this and on the necessity of like fathers playing with children, you know, mothers doing the soothing browse stuff, all this stuff that we do instinctively is actually so essential to developing a healthy. Person, which is why efforts to radically alter the family so that you don't have maternal and paternal presence stably in the child's life are so unwise.

So, you know, maybe there's a scenario where we have artificial wombs available to relieve women of the. The pain and difficulty of gestation, but I still, I think that, you know, assuming that the child that comes out of that artificial womb is [00:15:00] psychologically normal, they also need basically a psychologically normal social experience going forward.

So I didn't, that means, I don't think that would be any reason to tinker with the family. So

Malcolm Collins: a side call question or related question to this, cause I asked my wife this. recently in a world where women just like assuming like we had artificial winters in a world in which we don't need women to have kids.

What are some of the things because you're talking about evolution or psychology that you think women do better than men? Like what areas would a biologically modern woman always outcompete a biologically modern man in terms of utility to society?

Louise Perry: I can't remember where I heard this from, so I might be getting it wrong.

But I, I, I believe that, um, in terms of the ability to read other people's emotions, and 130 IQ man is comparable to a 70 IQ woman, like an intellectually [00:16:00] disabled woman can read someone else's emotions better than, you know, a highly gifted man. Right. Just one example, but that the. That's that one that it really rings true actually it's funny when I talk to my husband because my husband and I are both quite typically feminine and masculine like the only way in which I'm probably unusual for women is I'm quite contrarian but apart from that we're both quite difficult and he will often have this scenario where I will like interpret someone's emotions and he completely misses it.

Because of that gap. That's, that's one example of that. I mean, I, I often say, right, the thing that has like undermined men the most in the modern era, the thing that makes men feel as if they are superfluous, because in a sense, sometimes they are, is not feminism. It's actually, it's actually economic change is actually the fact that we now have a service based economy, mostly, which doesn't need male muscle, but does need the conscientiousness and agreeableness that women tend to

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, we we have a [00:17:00] sales org within our company and women perform outperforming at least for us within the sales organization that we have.

And it's, it's something you point about, like, what are the, the male traits where I think pretty undeniably people would say men do better, you know, whether it's physical strengths or bravery or courage, like these are things that are not. As rewarded and in, in the industries in which they are rewarded, men vastly outperform women in terms of, and that's why you see these high death rates in these industries.

I also really like sort of your framing as women as sort of the emotional custodians of our species and, and our culture which is a very interesting take.

Louise Perry: I think that it's also a, I mean, it's, I'm writing an essay at the moment. It sounds like a joke, but

I, I'm kind of of the opinion that modern life induces something like gender dysphoria in almost everyone.

Malcolm Collins: I want to hear more. [00:18:00]

Louise Perry: So an example would be, you know, the male drive towards being, doing sort of outdoor physical stuff. Like the, the, I mean, you don't want to be too reductive about it. Obviously there are changes. There have been changes to our psychology since we left the savannah, you know, obviously we're not exactly hunter gatherers psychologically evolution can connect surprisingly fast sometimes.

Right. But, you know, the basic things I always think when you look at the list of sort of things. Ways to resolve depression and anxiety. The list of things that you're advised to do are basically the list of things that would comprise a standard hunter gatherer day, right? Like being outside, exercising, socializing with other people.

sitting around a campfire, you know, all this kind of stuff, which, which people, which people have hormonally respond to really positively, but which, which, which aren't a part of a standard modern day. And so for men, you know, that includes things like hunting and fishing and [00:19:00] like being with male friends and all this kind of stuff, which, which they are largely denied.

in a very gender neutral modern economy, which also in which the extended family has basically collapsed as well. That's something we can also go into, right? Cause that's very relevant to the whole birth rates question. And similarly for women, like I, I, it is my strong intuition, for instance, that one of the things that is driving the famed.

Poor mental health of teenage girls, it is Instagram and all of this kind of stuff. I agree with that. I think it's also that teenage girls historically would have spent a lot of time around young children. Like, one of the things that's very... One of the ways in which teenage girls are useful in a kind of traditional setup, not even that traditional, right, is in providing childcare.

And I mean, I, I'm not, I'll say personally, I'm sure you agree that I've been around little children is joyful, right? It's like it is hard work and everything, but it is joyful. Like it gives you an intense sense of satisfaction. I always find that days when I, I really [00:20:00] don't like traveling for work. I try and avoid doing it as much as possible because I don't like being away from my, my two year old.

And I always find that days when I have been just with him. Not doing any other kind of work. They're tiring, yes, but there's also a sense of, like, deep satisfaction. Whereas days when I'm not with him, when I'm, when I'm off somewhere else, I have this sense of, like, just kind of bubbling anxiety. And it occurred to me that this is gender dysphoria, basically, right?

Like, my, what, what my, what my mind and my body are longing for are being around my children. I, I, I, I don't want to compare it to the gender dysphoria that people like that, that trans people can be very, very cute. Right. And I don't doubt the existence of that kind of gender dysphoria. It's clearly real. What I'm talking about is a kind of. environmental mismatch, which causes mild anxiety and depression in both

Malcolm Collins: sexes.

So I think the term in the trans community that you're looking for is gender envy which is you might in your environment see idealizations [00:21:00] or even in your head have sort of an evoked set of idealizations of what it means to be a woman, but you're not able to enact those in your daily life, which is really fascinating.

Another thing that you said that really had me reflect on something I hadn't realized before is you're talking about teenage girls caring for babies. And it got me thinking, I was like, okay, when does this care for babies? response differentially begin to appear in women. And I think intuitively I'd assumed, okay, it's around the age they would probably be having kids, right?

Like early twenties. But then I thought, I was like, no, prepubescent girls have this desire. Prepubescent girls have baby dolls that they care for. Like it is a very intense desire from a very early age for women. Which I think backs what you're saying there that, that women are genetically sort of coded to care for kids, even at a younger age and that the desire to be away from kids really only seems to get loud in women during the period in which they're trying to, to distance [00:22:00] themselves from their families.

Yeah,

Louise Perry: I mean, there clearly are exceptions. There clearly are some women who don't have that kind of maternal instinct, which is presumably being heavily selected. Against right. Doing the current evolutionary bottleneck. Those women exist. Those women are also disproportionately found in positions of influence because they tend to also have more, one they don't have, like having children does delay your career progression.

It just does, like there's a straightforward sort of collision between , the FA family life in the labor market, but also because. they're likely to have other traits that are more masculine in terms of being more competitive and whatever, they're more likely to end up at the top of the tree professionally.

And it does, it is unfortunate because it means that, you know, one of my, one of my friends who works in politics likes to say that probably the least well represented demographic in all of British politics, and indeed, you know, I'm sure politics elsewhere are stay at home mums, because sort of definitionally there are no stay at home mums in parliament.

And it's also very rare to have, have even former stay at home mums. in Parliament. It's just not a group that you hear from. And so, the [00:23:00] women who would say, you know, actually, I basically get the greatest satisfaction what I really want to do is basically live a traditional, traditional life, you know, which doesn't necessarily mean, you know, let's, let's always remember, it doesn't necessarily mean the feminine mystique of isolation in the suburbs life.

It's more like the being, you know, being around your sisters and cousins and looking after children. Yeah. Right. And kind of incorporating that with other work around, around the, the household, like that, that basic lifestyle setup. I think actually a lot of women. enormously prefer that to the girlboy's life.

Malcolm Collins: This brings me to a really interesting realization which is that if you're like promoting feminism, if you look at where women are most discriminated in our society, like the category or traits of women that are most discriminated in our society, they are the traits that we associate with motherhood and with women who have gone down this motherhood pathway.

If you're at a company or [00:24:00] you're in Hollywood, right? Like suppose we're screening for. Who gets to be the next big female star, right? You know, they're looking for a woman who has small breasts and is aggressive and like, doesn't care about children. And like, like there's a very specific type that Hollywood is casting as the woman.

And then our society begins to build. This is what a powerful woman looks like, which is antagonistic to what I think many people would think of like a trad woman or a matronly woman or something like that, you know, mother matriarchy or your podcast name. And, this group of women is just completely ignored and discriminated against within even, even career environments because there's women who fall into these aesthetic and life choice trends, but who still have to work to support their family.

And I think in those environments, they're often held back from positions of influence or positions of being seen. And yet the modern feminist movement is not going to support those women or, or call out this level of [00:25:00] like, we have no heroes right now. We have no heroes who are mothers. If you look at the strong women in media, they are not mothers.

They are not taking on a feminine role. Well, or if they are

Simone Collins: mothers, they don't talk about it and they kind of have to not talk about it or they won't be able to advance easily.

Malcolm Collins: Listen, I want to hear more from you.

Simone Collins: One thing I'm really curious about, Luis, is what you think would be ideal for women in the future?

There's like a lot of dystopias that we're really afraid about, right? We're afraid about women's reproductive freedom being taken away as nations get desperate for taxpayers. You know, I mean, China's already starting to revoke access to vasectomies and... birth control and deportions. So like we're getting there.

We know what we don't want. And Malcolm and I have a vision for what we want, but it is much more extreme than, you know, generally your take. So we're curious to hear, you know, the reasonable person's take on what is an ideal, we'd say pro woman future, you know, in a hundred years or so in 50 years or a hundred years, is it more structured or less structured, more strict or less strict?

Are women in the [00:26:00] home, or are they given tons of choice? Like, what do you think would lead to the best outcome? And obviously, what's difficult about this is that sometimes that doesn't sound like the best or most politically palatable today, but like, try to, like, try to tell me what you think would be best for women's actual mental health thriving society, etc.

Louise Perry: It depends on the age, doesn't it? I mean, that's one of the, the, the... Reasons I chose the name for my show this recognition that women have quite distinct stages in their life cycles Which men don't have to quite the same degree like being a maid and being a mother being a matriarch are quite different states and I think one of the, one of the mistakes that, that liberal modern society makes in relation to both young men and young women, but I would say maybe more young women because one of the really distinctive features of say teenage girl psychology is being extremely impressionable.

Teenage boys tend to be. You know, reckless or like various, you know, they have their own, they [00:27:00] have their own challenges. Teenage girls, and I say this as someone who used to be a teenage girl are very, very susceptible to peer influence. And one of the mistakes that I think we make and that I wrote a lot about in my first book is, is, is granting actually too much freedom to teenage girls to do really self destructive things.

The challenge there though, and so many parents. Who I speak to, sort of like they, they do know that. They do know that actually a 15 year old girl cannot actually make good sexual choices. for instance, right? And it's kind of crazy to expect her to and we only let 15 year old girls make Independent sexual choices because we have access to contraception and abortion right in any other circumstance But what those sexual choices are likely to lead to a baby.

That's the community's problem Like there's so, there's so much more limits placed on your woman, right? But obviously there are enormous costs to that. I think you describe it in your book as the hard societies. Am I remembering? Yeah. Yeah. [00:28:00] Yeah. Like, yeah. Hard cultures are, are, are, are hardcore, right?

Like, and we, and I, and I very much enjoyed not living in a culture. I'm not. Where I'm not constrained, it's a really difficult balancing act because you need, you need cultural templates, you need guardrails, you need certain expectations that are kind of socially enforced, what you don't want is, you know, Iranian morality police or whatever.

Malcolm Collins: Well, and I think something that you're catching there when you're talking about the three stages of a woman's life is that organically a society, you know, you're talking about evolutionary psychology. Two men a maid, the maid stage of a woman's life is always the most valuable because that's the stage, like, if my wife died, the women who would be most attracted to me would not be women of her age, they would be women with the highest fertility window, like this, due to evolutionary reasons, right, so if I'm a guy and I'm going to get distracted by a woman in a billboard, it's going to be a young girl.

Looking woman, right? It [00:29:00] doesn't look like she's had kids with someone else because that lowers the woman's value to me as a, even a potential replacement for a wife that I've already had. So what they just sort of organically society is always going to promote that one stage of a woman's life and therefore women can think then to be a good woman, I must be the optimal made.

Louise Perry: Perpetual made. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And I think that one of the, one of the ways in which our culture is not well set up for family formation. Is that we do encourage perpetual maidenhood, even though it's not possible. I mean, it's kind of partly possible if you contraception and Botox and whatever, but like, not really like there is, there is a shelf life.

Well, you can't

Simone Collins: pull it off. Like an argument that I've had friends make to me that I think is really compelling is you can be, you can get the best plastic surgery. You can be have also just won the genetic lottery, but if you are a 45 year old woman. Who looks amazing. She's, you're still not going to beat a, you know, 23 year old, 21 year old girl.

Louise Perry: Yeah, [00:30:00] so it's a losing game. Yeah, there's no way to win. And I think it's a very psychologically damaging game to try and play, because you do reach a point when you're in, say, your late 30s, where you know that you're losing it, and you sort of have no other source of status. And, and, and a lot of this is to do with the fact that we don't assign enough status to mothers.

Yeah. Which completely, yeah, within feminism. There's no motivation, except that it's female, right? Right. Right, right, right. So a healthy culture would be one where There are life stage specific cultural expectations that are enforced through norms, not through laws, I suppose, because I, because the law is a very blunt instrument, whereas cultural templates can be potentially malleable, you know, I want there to be like, we, we, We, we all recognize, you know, like what's the Stonewall line?

Gay people exist, get used to it. Like that's true. You know, it is true that, that, that, like the homosexuality is present across human societies and indeed across other, other [00:31:00] species. Right. And you need societies that can say simultaneously. It's really good to get married and have children, but also not persecute people who don't because they're, because they're gay or lesbian.

Right. And that's a, that's a challenging balance. And it like you, you look around at cultures around the world and there aren't that many that managed to properly strike that balance. So like we have a real task. It's funny.

Malcolm Collins: You should mention this because we have culture warriors in our society that are doing this.

So when we were in London, we did a show with a Pearl Davis, a just pearly thing show. And one of the segments of the show. was just showing the audience pictures of women who were mothers or who were middle aged in and married in scantily clad outfits that they had posted to like Instagram and shaming them for it.

Simone Collins: It was really interesting. It was like seeing that, what that mechanism right there. And it wasn't even like them posing in a slutty way or anything. It was just like. You know, you are middle aged your mother, like, should you be wearing a bikini and [00:32:00] posting it on social media? It wasn't just wearing a bikini.

It was should you be posting a picture of yourself on social media wearing a bikini? I never would have made that connection. That's so

Malcolm Collins: funny Yeah, yeah Well, and she did it asking which I think was an important question and I think in a way, you know even more base than us because Simone even you were like Well, I think it's okay within the rules of our existing.

I, or I might've been that more Simone with a little more harsh. But, but she was pointing out, she's like, if they're posting something like this and they're already married, they're posting this for sexual validation from other men. Like, that's what this is about. And we do need to shame that as a society.

So that was interesting. Yeah.

Louise Perry: I mean, the, the, the painful truth is, and I'm, I'm kind of reluctant to completely spell it out because it, it, it does upset people rightly is that, you know, slut shaming, for instance, is a social, it's like a social technology, right? Like it's hard to persuade going back to the impressionability of teenage girls, right?

If you're trying, if you really, really want your daughter to [00:33:00] make good sexual decisions, because you have the recognition of how consequential those decisions are. Right. Even in a world with abortion and contraception, you know, going back to wrong guys flat could be potentially lethal. Aside from all the other distress that it can cause.

If you really want her to make good sexual decisions, you, you, you can try sitting her down and saying, here are all the terrible things that could happen if you make bad sexual decisions. But knowing teenagers as we do, we know that that's not very likely to actually make much of an impact on her decision making.

Or you can have a culture of slut shaming. Which is what, like, most cultures come up with, and it's enforced by other teenage girls. And, like, and it's, and it's quite, and it's, like, ugly and painful, which is why I'm, like, I'm reluctant to, like, endorse it. But I am saying that this is, like, that is why such, such social technologies exist for

Simone Collins: Yeah.

And there's this really big tension between what I see is like more liberal culture, you know, like let people have choice, let people do what they want to do. But then what is sort of become what [00:34:00] Malcolm is honed in on is like the progressive movement's biggest value proposition now subtly, which is that you.

Need never feel pain in the moment. Like do whatever makes you feel good. Now, if something triggers you don't engage with it. If someone's bullying you, we will stop them. And there's this insane tension where like you, you can't have a well policed society. You can't prevent people from doing bad things.

Without either having an insane law, which is probably not ideal because then you're actually taking away people's rights or shaming them like you say, and it does, it is really interesting to like, you know, here you describe on one hand, you know, like a very reasonable, like, let's, you know, socially police think policy and then like to hear.

Malcolm reminding me of this example of like someone on the internet who's seen is extremely controversial, like extremely controversial shaming women and like that feeling. So I remember sitting in the show, like at the moment being like, Oh wow, we're doing this. This is okay. This is I mean,

Louise Perry: it's crazy.

Yeah. I [00:35:00] mean, like sort of. Traditional slut shaming cultures combined with the internet is a particularly ugly products, right? Because, because it's enormously magnifying the, the the audience and the, and the consequent distress to the women. So, yeah, I mean, I'm not, I'm also not posting. Middle aged ladies bikini pics and kind of encouraging people to make fun of them.

But

Malcolm Collins: It's been wonderful to have you on. We'd love to have you on again. This has been fan tastic. And I hope all of you have a wonderful day.

Simone Collins: Yeah, and don't forget to check out Maiden Mother Matriarch and The Case Against the Sexual Revolution where you get a lot more nuance on these subjects.

So, if you liked the conversation, don't worry, there's tons more.

Description: Malcolm and Simone discuss the key elements they designed into their constructed religion to make it "leakproof" against losing members over generations. This includes logical consistency, future-proofing for science advances, democratized prophets, and encouraging respectful dissent within the faith. They also explain how framing it in the Judeo-Christian tradition reduces conflict while allowing more conservative strains to potentially emerge again someday.

Some key topics covered:

* Why old religions lose scientists and logical thinkers

* Solving the "good God" problem

* Localized miracles issue with universalist faiths

* Mutiple valid revelations concept

* Future God and simulation theory

* Value systems built into hierarchy

* Encouraging rebellion tied to fidelity

* Reducing conflict with conservative faiths

* End goal of spreading the western tradition to the stars

Malcolm Collins: [00:00:00] let's talk about science inconsistency because this is a bigger problem for Christianity than Christians like to pretend. So Christians will be like, look at all of the great things that we, the Western tradition, have accomplished

and what they are carefully ignoring here is that most of the most important scientists in the past hundred years, if they were born within the Judeo Christian tree, left the Judeo Christian tree either during their period of most productive work, or at least before they died.

So you don't really get to, like, clearly there's a problem here for whatever reason, your most productive scientists are leaving the tradition. This is a big problem.

 It's actually interesting how symbiotic like if this takes off how symbiotic it is with traditional cultural traditions and that it literally sees it as a religious order to help protect their members from deconverting.

And it only wants to prevent the people who they would otherwise have bleeding off from it but they would really rather not fall to the urban monoculture. [00:01:00] We can act as a good backstop, which can prevent talented individuals from falling into the urban monoculture.

So it's acting as part of this cultural economy that prevents the true dangerous force from destroying our civilization before it can reach the stars and ensuring that the Western cultural tradition does. Join the stars to some extent. If someone's gonna be like, Why don't you care about the Eastern culture of Lucian?

Because that's not us! Like, I have no connection to that. It would be weird and almost kind of racist for me to attempt to simulate that, or simp that, you know. We can we can work to help them where we can, but we're not part of that tradition.

Would you like to know more?

Simone Collins: Simone and Malcolm are back.

Malcolm Collins: Hello Simone. This is going to be a fun, particularly spicy episode today. I always get worried because our, our religion episodes, they typically perform really poorly at first and then they do better after a while. Yeah. Yeah. I think it's lower click through higher watch time, but they're my favorite episodes to do.

Because it's a [00:02:00] topic that I just have been thinking so much about recently. And I think, you know, in the question of pronatalism becomes such an existential question for our species. Because in writing the Pragmatist Guide to Crafting Religion, I mean, from the pronatalist perspective, it seems to be the only thing, like, religious cultures that are able to motivate high fertility in wealthy groups, like, the only thing, like, I have not found it.

Anything else that reliably seems to do it, but then in addition to that, in writing the pragmatist guide to crafting religion, it just became really obvious to us that there's a correlation between the rise of mental issues in our society. And dangerous viral memes like the virus which is what we call the, the urban monoculture sometimes.

And the decline of religious traditions. I mean, religious traditions may have been like a janky antivirus that had a bunch of bloatware on it, but it [00:03:00] was the only antivirus we had. Yeah. And when people ripped it out. They didn't realize how susceptible they were making the population to extremely virulent and, and, and quite selfish and dangerous memetic sets.

And we're now beginning to see the fallout of all of that. But this all comes to a problem for us, right? So a lot of people are like, well, then just go back to one of the old religions. And we've done an episode on this, but, but it's something I want to pontificate on more while also talking about how we construct a system for our kids which is designed to have a low, low bleed rate, like withstand this storm, this, you know, this, this, it's like a bunch of the century storm that's only getting worse every year that all of the religious traditions have to intergenerationally weather against before we get to the other side of this.

So, so how do I build that? But in thinking about that, I think a lot of people from more traditional religions will be able to think about some of the tools and techniques that we're using. Where they [00:04:00] could implement them within their existing systems to lower the bleed rate with their own kids. Now, in part to answer, you know, why not one of the old traditions, Which is a question that

Simone Collins: constantly comes up.

Malcolm Collins: Yes I think it goes, worse talking about, so recently I was interviewing my dad about his life. We've done hours and hours of this now, so I'll see if I post it on here. And I was asking about, you know, when he left the religious tradition, right? Like when my family left the faith, because if he's half me, right?

What it means is that if I tried to raise my kids in one of these, the traditional religious contexts, they might leave as well. For whatever reason, he left Christianity, right? And he was antagonistic enough towards Christianity that he refused to get married in a church, for example. Oh, wow. And when he normally, even

Simone Collins: like, totally indifferent people deigned to get married in a church if a spouse cares about

Malcolm Collins: it.

And he bragged about never once going into the central church where all of the like a lot of formal stuff is done at Stanford. He went [00:05:00] really out of his way to avoid ever setting foot in there. So that was That's intense! That, that is, Yeah, the level of useful antagonism he had toward these institutions.

So he when he was younger was in, Sunday school and he ended up the, it was apparently a, a fairly big thing where he was punished pretty severely. Like, it was considered like a, a pretty big deal that he had done this and what he had done, was gotten very interested in the logistics of the Noah story in trying to figure out how that was possible.

Because, you know, someone was talking to you about this, you're like, yeah, all the measurements are there. Like, if you really want to, like, get nerdy and go deep on the logistics of this to try to figure it out that's the type of thing that Of course, anyone who's seen me talking, you know, I talk about humans as intergenerational entities.

It's exactly the type of thing that would have happened had my dad stayed in the faith and raised me in the faith, right? And this, that he would be punished for asking these technical [00:06:00] questions was a really hard thing for, for him to take. Like he couldn't stand following a tradition. That would punish him for asking questions like this.

And, and that's what had him turn away from it. And this was really interesting to me for a couple reasons, right? Like if I think about it as us from a cultural group, you know, if we have a group of 20 kids and one of them is just incessantly demanding answers to this, like very niggly, like technical question.

That will be our golden child. Yeah. And it's standing up to authority to do this. To me, that one person is worth the other 19 kids in the room combined. If I had a religion and I was trying to like convert people into it, I would spend extra attention to that person. And this is when we talk about like genetic selection effects and stuff like that within religious traditions, this is how you can get a genetic selection effect.

But we'll, we'll talk about this later in like personalities and stuff like that. But the, the next thing is. Is, is it's like, well, then there's lots of iterations of Christianity [00:07:00] that don't take a realism stance to the Noah's Ark story. Right? The problem here is the iterations of Christianity that typically loosen interpretations and around what is in the Bible, you know, they start saying, Oh, this is all just metaphor or whatever.

They also loosen interpretations around morality and moral rules and moral restrictions. And what I want is an iteration of Christianity that it contains a lot of the, the rules and framings that are useful. for living a good life, but is also compatible with an extreme level of skepticism, an extreme level of, of, of picking apart these stories and also of, of, of you know, sort of unrestrained scientific research and questioning.

And, and I feel like this is necessary if we're getting to the stars. Like, like absolutely necessary from the, the, the biological perspective, [00:08:00] and that it appears that we really need religion or some religious structure to stay psychologically healthy. And from the carrying on our ancestral traditions, you know, into space, into the interstellar empire that humankind ends up, or we aim for humankind to end up creating.

Um, And, and so, that's really what we're attempting to do here, and it may turn out, like a person may come to us, and they may be like, the reason why, when you start loosening the slack in this one area, it ends up loosening all the slack that's just a truism of religion, you can't, you can't, and I'm like, maybe, maybe, except the problem is, is that when I take a real history, like, Obviously, I'm very trained in religious history.

I know a lot of religious traditions. I know, like, I'm very interested in the religious history of America. This is something that is deeply interesting to me. No one's really tried this before. Genuinely, the closest is [00:09:00] probably Mormonism. Typically, when people try to adapt a religious tradition, To allow for looser interpretations or metaphorical interpretations of the older stories, they always go in the loosen everything approach.

The idea of really tightening in one area but loosening in the other is something that I just haven't seen. And so you could say our family is treating itself as an experiment, and that's why we're using Judaism as a backup. And you can see the video on why we're using Judaism as a backup to this experiment, but I actually have a lot of confidence the experiment will work. And now finally, you know, to go into this, a person might say, well, what do you mean? Like everything about the religion you created, it's, it's, it's completely like, this is just what's logically necessary for the best interest of our species.

And, and for the best health of your kid. And it's like, yes. Yes, actually. And I, I do believe it, right? But I think if it was well constructed, I would believe it. You know, that's the way rituals work. You do rituals. We're pre programmed to believe these religions. So I put this out and I believe it.[00:10:00]

But

Simone Collins: Well, but, I mean, I think it's also believable because it's, it was also based on our best understanding of, reality from what we've learned about science, physics, psychology, et cetera. So,

Malcolm Collins: yeah. And now a lot of people will be like, come on, you guys, that's the silliest thing ever. Are you actually saying that a secular tradition about a metaphysical entity that people believe was in the best interest of kids could really do well in a world like our world today?

And it's like, Santa! Like, Santa is mopping up the old traditions in terms of its intergenerational fidelity and growth in mindshare these days. Like, we have seen that this works but I also think that it's something that we are really dedicated to and actually believe. And sometimes when people talk to me, they're like, wait, you really believe this stuff, don't you?

I can never tell.

Simone Collins: There was this one book that you had me read while you were writing the Pragmatist Guide to Crafting Religion about faith. And about religion that was written by an [00:11:00] anthropologist who went into many different obscure cultures and like tribal systems and asked them lots of questions about their faith, watched them practice their faiths.

And maybe this is because it was. Very close to what you would call a super soft religion or like, you know, that kind where you just sort of go back to like, you know, reciting a spell so that your USB cord goes in the right way the first time, right? Like just the really weird sort of default intuitive religion.

But one thing that was really interesting that she observed. was that people would both, could both, and do both have faith and not have faith. So she would be like, in, in, in, you know, the same day, the span of the same day, she would ask, do you believe in ghosts? And they'd be like, obviously not. And then like, you know, in the evening, something like, oh, I just saw a ghost, you know?

You know, I'm praying to this ghost for this. And she's like, what? What? Like, and so it was very context based and the, the faith would come [00:12:00] in the, in certain settings or when it was useful or when it was needed. I also saw this a little bit in Japan, like just sort of like spending extended time with families that hosted me and whatnot.

Where, like, I don't think Buddhism and Shinto necessarily are, like, seamlessly combinable as religions, right? Like, logically for all the rules, et cetera. But like, many, many, many Japanese hold both Shinto and Buddhism. You go to Shinto when your baby's born, and you go to, like, the Buddhist thing when someone dies.

Like, there's just, like You choose this for this and this for this. And you sort of pick and choose, which is kind of indexy, right? Where you're like, let's just combine our favorite things from both of these religions. And I think in the moment they fully believe each. I had a friend when I was a kid named Nicholas who was raised.

As well, at one point my mom explained to me in front of him that he was raised half Jewish and half Christian. And he's like, no, I'm all Jewish and I'm all [00:13:00] Christian. And he was like, very serious about this. And I do, I do kind of think that that's somewhat possible because I think that only a certain strain of humanity or certain like IQ level or like genetic tendency level is going to really struggle with that logical.

logical consistency nonsense. Like the rest are able to be very contextual about how and when they believe. And I believe that there's a significant amount of both anecdotal and more systematically research documentation supporting that.

I think this study that Simone mentioned here is actually really important to understanding how we relate to religion

and how our religion is constructed. We both 100 percent believe our religion is true, but also 100 percent believe that it's something that we artificially constructed because it was psychologically useful to us and our family. And a lot of people will look at this and they'll be like, that, that can't be true.

 You can't have a religion where both the secular theory of the religion exists [00:14:00] overlapping the theistic interpretation of the religion. And it's like, well, yes you can. And historically, , it was actually pretty common for people to have these frameworks about belief.

Malcolm Collins: Because I so, we'll get to that in a second, but let's go into it. So, what I wanted to ask you to start, Simone. Sort of, let's take an inventory. Why are the various reasons that you think people leave religious traditions intergenerationally these days?

Simone Collins: Okay, so there's what you pointed out where there's just like logical inconsistencies they can't deal with.

Another one where I watched a

Malcolm Collins: friend lose Hold on, before you go further, I want to pull at this logical inconsistency thing because they fall into two categories. Okay. I think Noah's Ark is a really good example of doing this. So there's two ways because as we go through each of these, like, let's talk about them a little bit, right?

Okay. So, logical inconsistencies I think is a real one. The problem is, is that when people try to fix the logical inconsistencies, there's three routes they go down and they're all pretty bad. Route number one is just to deny [00:15:00] that there's any inconsistency and, and say that like, somehow we don't understand it or there was a a miracle involved in this that wasn't particularly noted in the Bible.

Like, maybe Noah's Ark really did have all the full animal sizes in the world on it, and just like, somehow it worked because magic. Except that's not really talked about. Like, they don't talk about the magic, like, like, so it just doesn't seem plausible to me that, that you're getting magic there. But like, It's not mentioned in the story that they were using all this magic to do this.

Yeah,

Simone Collins: there's also a bunch of other weird things about Noah's Ark, like, apparently God wasn't pissed at any seaborne mammals or fish or bacteria.

Malcolm Collins: We'll get to that in a second. So the next problem, I don't want to get into all the problems with the Noah's Ark story. Yeah. One is, is they try to create like a science y Explanation, right?

Like maybe it was all baby animals or maybe it was as I've heard more recently, maybe it was a total world flood, but like he took the DNA from all the animals and went to space or maybe I'm just [00:16:00] picturing

Simone Collins: like all the really cute, like cutest Noah's Ark ever. Everything to

Malcolm Collins: me, like, like, if you're an outsider and you're like doubting a religion or you're trying to be convinced of a religion.

They feel like sophistry and very weak sophistry. It feels like you're really trying. It's like, okay, but if that was the story, then the Bible would have said baby animals. It doesn't say baby animals. Like, you're adding things that make it plausible because we know stuff now that they didn't know then.

The final answer, which I really hate, is to say that this is all metaphors. Which I also Also,

Simone Collins: just by the way, the baby animals thing wouldn't do given the duration of the Flood because they would have most of them would have grown to like close to full size by the time it was over.

Malcolm Collins: So, so, so the, the the answer that we would come up with with our tradition for our kids to this is that this was a full revelation from the period of people of that time period, like what they were capable of understanding and if you look at when the Noah's Ark story was delivered, [00:17:00] you know, you are looking at like, Bronze Age civilization, you look at these people level of education and understanding of the world and there was probably something that was trying to be or that needed to be conveyed by this story and it was a direct real revelation insofar as we were able to understand it.

Yeah, like

Simone Collins: you can kind of picture almost like imagine someone came from the future, but then had to explain this in like layman's terms. To people of that time. And eventually like I can imagine the person first tells the truth and then like tries to like dumb it down. And then finally they're like, okay, okay.

Okay. Imagine God's really mad. And so he, he tells this 1 guy to build a boat and put all the animals on the boat. And then like he floods the earth to get rid of everything else. Like, but you can just imagine like someone

Malcolm Collins: getting increasingly. Well, no, that's what I basically think God did. Like he talked to us like we were idiotic children.

And that was the way he handled it. But then, okay, go to the next. Why did, what's the next reason people leave?

Simone Collins: Yeah. So there's, there's a couple of people that I know, or that [00:18:00] you and I know, who to a certain extent left their religion because they really didn't like the way. That certain groups and specifically certain groups that they were members of, like women, were treated by it.

And like sort of what the, the teachings were about women, specifically in this case, and the two cases I'm thinking of, it was like, well, women, you know, sort of kind of don't belong in leadership positions and they belong in

Malcolm Collins: the law. You're thinking of Mormons, right? The, the people who you're thinking of right now.

I'm thinking of

Simone Collins: Mormons and other conservative

Malcolm Collins: Christians. Okay yeah, no, it is, it is a big problem. Within our society right now. And it's a big problem in that I think that aiming for true equality also causes issues. I think another issue here is sexual restrictions that evolved. So I'm going to group these into two, into the same category, sexual restrictions and traditions that evolved within religions because they helped them compete in an intergenerational context historically, but now are counterproductive and really just lead to bleed.

So the other thing here I would say is like gay [00:19:00] rights and gay marriage within traditions. If you look at God, I don't find the guy's channel when I'm doing this, the guy who does videos on us occasionally, and we're going to have on our channels. Yeah. Paul Vanderkleid. He's done a number of videos on fights within the church.

And he's from the reform Christian church which is a Calvinist church, actually pretty similar to the, the iterations of Christianity that we came from. And the church right now is. Continually having risks and splits over gay marriage. And you see this across Christian traditions today. It's actually a really, really easy tactic that progressives can use to pull people out of religious traditions because it feels arbitrary.

And when you talk to religious people, you're like, why is this bad? And they're like, because it's sin, because it's not the way humans were meant to work. And it's like, well, it just feels really. Precious and evil that God would then make some humans arbitrarily more attracted to the same gender. Like, why would he do that?

And, and I know people who are gay and they seem [00:20:00] perfectly happy. And if you actually look at studies that have been done on gay people adopting kids, those kids actually do better than the kids in straight families. Now, the reason for that is almost certainly because those families have been much, much more vetted than straight families.

But. It's, it's still just like a truism of the studies that have been the, the, the good studies that have been done so far. Um, so, the, the, there's sort of a few problems that are overlapping here. So the question first is, is why did religions take these perspectives? If you take our worldview of this, right, they took these perspectives because the iterations of them that took these perspectives in a historic pre birth control context had more kids than the iterations that didn't.

So, you know, when they said. Don't be gay. When they said don't have sex with animals. When they said, don't have sex with your wife when she's menstruating. When they said, don't engage in pornography. When they said, you know, never masturbate outside of sex. All of these things are really just meant to increase the rate of reproductive sex individuals are having.

Even if that wasn't [00:21:00] like why the individual who came up with them came up with them. There have been iterations of these traditional religious systems that didn't have these Stipulations to them, but they were outcompeted by the ones that did have these stipulations because the ones that did have these stipulations had higher fertility rates.

And the fertility rates matter so much in terms of which religions ended up in which iterations of which religions ended up dominating and which ones didn't end up dominating. The problem is in a modern context, a lot of these stipulations are extremely counterproductive. As we continually point out, there's been great studies done on levels of religiosity in porn consumption.

The more the porn is, is like banned in a region from a social context, when it's not like actually illegal, the more people in that region will consume porn. It like has the exact opposite effect you would want. With gay individuals, you're not really increasing birth rates that much anymore by, by banning this.

And yet you're leading to like really high church division by banning this. [00:22:00] And when we get to a world of artificial wombs and stuff like that, it becomes almost irrelevant from a fertility rate perspective. And then you've got the problem of women and women's rights and everything like that. And why women, I mean, women and men have a level of sexual dimorphism to them.

Right. And. It is true that it seems that the cultural groups that put men in charge, like if you go historically, like way back, it seems much more common in these early societies, when you're talking about like the true diversity of humanity, to have some matriarchal societies and some patriarchal societies.

The patriarchal societies out competed the matriarchal societies. I mean, that's just But we see that's why most of the historic surviving societies in the world are patriarchal societies. So having a patriarchal mindset does seem to confer some advantages. However, I also think it has disadvantages in terms of the productivity of a society.

And by looping one perspective on reality, I mean, as humans, we get this cool thing. Like people are often like, wouldn't it be cool if we got to have like [00:23:00] Neanderthals here? Who could see the world from a totally different, but like kind of aligned perspective. And I'm like, but we kind of get that with genders.

And, and not fully utilizing the intellectual capacity of one gender, especially in a world where manual labor isn't that useful anymore. And, and household labor isn't that useful anymore. You're, you're leaving a lot on the table when you do that. And so I don't know if it makes the same sense to, to, to build this sort of restriction.

What are your thoughts?

Simone Collins: I have, I, and maybe an even more tempered view. I, you know, a lot of the religious traditions around what men and women should do, I think are fine. Like many of them are built on relative advantages that each gender has. Right. So like, that's great. But as we know from our research in sexuality and all sorts of other areas with both men and women, there are always outliers.

Like there, there are some, there are some women who are very much more masculine than men and much better suited for men's roles than women's roles. They're. Is a subset of [00:24:00] men that is way more suited for women's roles than men's roles. So I think like just not being so strict about like, which role you want to take on, you know, like women can never serve in the priesthood or like men can never take care of kids.

Malcolm Collins: Is, is she. Here's the interesting thing. I think if you go to a traditionalist religious framework and you start to loosen roles around women in church, it ends up loosening a lot of the moral restrictions because when people are following the rules of the traditional religious system, and they don't know why it has those rules.

Some of those rules. Are for like this evolved context and other of those rules are like actually useful rules in terms of out competing other groups are not sitting or stuff like that. I think it's really hard to loosen 1 of these rules without loosening rules across the board. If you don't have some sort of higher order logic for why some rules are loosened and not others.

Hmm.

Simone Collins: Yeah. I mean, like, I don't know when it comes to leadership [00:25:00] positions and having perspectives valued. I mean, I think patriarchal societies seem to be fitter for a good reason, but I think that the best system is a patriarchal society that is, is built in the way that a true patriarchal society is, which is entirely meritocracy, you know, just the, the fittest, the smartest, the strongest wins.

And if one of those is a woman, fine. Hmm. Right. Like, and I think this is how things have often been throughout history. There have been many people in very patriarchal societies who have been strong enough, ruthless enough, et cetera, to make it work. Queen Elizabeth, Catherine the Great, Margaret Thatcher, et cetera, right?

Like they made it work, but the rules weren't changed for them. So I just want to make it clear that I'm like not fighting for some switch over to the gynocracy with like, you know, bureaucratic rules and everyone has to listen to everyone else and things like that. I think it's just, there are some rules that are too hard and fast.

Or like, you know, your role as a woman is to grow up and marry a man and homeschool your [00:26:00] kids, which is great for many, many, many, many women. But like, you're going to lose some incredible talent. If you make that, you're going to

Malcolm Collins: lose the best women. Yeah, I mean, the highest competence, highest creativity, highest ambition women, which are the ones that we would want the most, which is also really interesting.

So, so everybody who knows sort of where we're going with a lot of this stuff, we are actually specifically trying to build a religious system that is not. conflicting with the preexisting religious systems and that it laps up these types of women who would be kicked out of these systems for being too ambitious or the people who ask too many questions, but prevents them from falling all the way to the urban monoculture or the virus.

So sort of a like we have an audience that we are building this with a, with a target for, because we think that, you know, the troublemakers within these religious traditions. So the way that we try to tackle this system on both ends from within the religious system we're building [00:27:00] is one, have an internal hierarchy where the, the social order of the hierarchy is a meritocracy, but not a bureaucratic meritocracy because bureaucratic meritocracies Overvalue the female's perspective whereas if you have a true meritocracy, which is measuring somebody's ability to succeed within a real world context which can often be measured by things like efficiency gains, which are well measured by how much money someone has earned over their life and how much money of that has gone back into the system.

These, these systems are going to be very good at filtering out. Yeah. A genuine meritocracy which will lead to a system likely where within this type of measuring capacity, you're going to get more men. But it doesn't prevent the, the best of the best women from participating in it. And it has a clear reason for how it's sorting people, it's sorting them on their ability to succeed within real world scenarios, i.

e. within the, the the big game that we're all playing within any sort of capitalistic system. [00:28:00] Or, or adjacent to capitalistic system of resource acquisition. The second category is when you're talking about things like, like gay, trans, everything like that. If we just focus on the point, it's about fertility rate and all other rules flow from that.

It removes the need to cause full schisms over things like gay acceptance and trans acceptance which would allow for better weathering against one of the core tools that the progressive movement has against religious traditions.

Now a person might rightly point out that this way of motivating higher fertility rates and religious fidelity is going to work significantly less well for less intelligent people or people with less self control. Within those communities, You can't say, okay, think about the end goal, then act towards that end goal.

You need to give them simplistic rules, like, uh, you know, get them to have more kids by telling them not to masturbate so when they want to relieve themselves, they're doing it [00:29:00] and not to have sex with your wife when she may not be fertile, like she's menstruating or something like that.

And that is true, but you've gotta keep in mind the theological end goal of our religion, which is focused around intergenerational improvement with, the, the end state being eventually becoming whatever this entity God is, , in the distant future, what this means for us is that it would be almost sinful to focus on those individuals and thus. Cares a lot less about really either recruiting or ensuring that those within the faith, who have less self control or less innate intelligence are breeding, like we actually And so, Almost would want to discourage them from breeding as heavily as the other members of the community.

So we really don't mind that effect of this, whereas other religions are generally more focused on quantity over quality when they're looking at the [00:30:00] way that their religion relates to intergenerational fertility rates.

Malcolm Collins: So what would you say a next reason you've seen people leave?

Simone Collins: I, I think it's Maybe this is too much like the other categories, but lifestyle, like they're just not into that kind of lifestyle, like

Malcolm Collins: stylistically.

I've never seen somebody leave for this. I hear a lot of people from traditions that think that people leave for this reason, but I haven't seen it myself. I have not seen somebody leave a tradition because of the rules except for in so far as how those rules look immoral, i. e. preventing this otherwise qualified person from being in this position or prevent this otherwise loving couple from wanting to marry.

Rules like, actually, very interesting, like bans on pornography, bans on premarital sex, stuff like that. What I see those rules doing is people just break them and then stay in the tradition. No, it's true, they, they do not push people out of the tradition. They, they, people break them, they may have premarital sex without the amount of contraception they might otherwise use or something [00:31:00] like that.

Or they might have more premarital sex, as we pointed out, you know, sex education delays the incidence of first sexual in activity. So You know, counterproductive but it, it doesn't actually push people out of religions.

Genuinely. I, and I watched tons and tons and tons of ex religious content.

I can't even think of a single incident of this. Not one I have ever seen. I have seen people talk about how happy they were about not having to follow these rules after leaving a tradition, after some area of logical inconsistency pushed them out of the tradition. Like, they're like, oh, this logically just doesn't make sense to me.

Or there was this contradiction here and here. Or higher reps within my movement were doing this really unethical thing. That's another thing that pushes people out often, which we can get to in a

Simone Collins: second. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And that happens a lot in like smaller religions where like a cult leader starts buying too many Bentleys and poisoning

Malcolm Collins: people.

Yeah, yeah, that's, that's where that happens. But the, the in fact, I almost get the impression when I [00:32:00] hear people talking about, like, all of the cool stuff they can do now that they couldn't do in their religion, I get sort of a cringe crying thing. Like, it, it, you know, that meme. Where it almost feels like they're not really happy with all the new things they're doing, but there's a level of cognitive dissonance with not actually feeling that much better once they've left the tradition.

And so they try to justify it as being a good decision through talking about all of these new things they can do now. But I've never heard of it as an inciting factor. Although, although I, and I will point out here, I have heard as an inciting factor the individual. You know, where you will get, like, I wanted to do something and this was the inciting factor, was specifically things where they can't logically understand why it's being banned.

So this is not something like it's something like the gay thing, right? Or the, you know, or the women in church thing. Like, they're competent, why can't they have these positions? So then this comes to the next point that I [00:33:00] wanted to really go over, which is a lot of the individual logical problems that people end up stumbling upon within religious traditions that end up causing people to deconvert.

So first. I call it the good God problem. Right? The good God problem. We've talked about it before. There's a lot of argumentation around it, which is how can you have an all powerful God who is good, all good as well. And yet have the world that we live in today. I think that there's an easy solution to this and it's the one that we adapt, which is to just say, well, he's not a good guy.

Not in the way that we mean good. He might have some higher order understanding of good that we don't fully understand but it is patently clear to me, like you can't say that, oh, the suffering in the world happens because of decisions that humans make because a lot of suffering in the world is very obviously happening outside of the decisions that humans make.

And it's pointless. And it's pointless. Yeah. You, you, like, you could say, oh, butterfly effect and stuff like that. And it's like, yeah, well, you didn't need to set up the system this way. It's just [00:34:00] all of the little, like, niggly things you do to try to get out of this problem are one, just not necessary.

You can just say, well, then it's not an all good God. And two, if I'm actually basing this tradition on like, the Western canon history of the Judeo Christian tree, I, I, I think even just from the text, it's pretty hard to argue that like the God of the old Testament is a good entity from the way that we as humans mean good when we talk about good in the vernacular.

Yeah. So problem number one, that's how we try to get around that in terms of something that pulls people out of religions. Problem number two, which is one we mentioned a lot, but it has a much bigger problem than people believe It's that you cannot have universalizing religion that contains the possibility of miracles and have it start locally.

So, let me explain what I mean by this, right? Christianity has a big problem with this. [00:35:00] Christianity, most iterations of Christianity are supposed to apply to every human in the world. It is a revelation that is of total utility to every human in the world because it was complete when it was made. But the Problem is, is that it took so long to reach most of the world.

And a person might be like, yeah, but like what else was supposed to happen? And this is why I say you can't have miracles in these traditions. Jesus is able to do things like raise people from the dead. And yet he's not able to like warp to a few different locations on the world just to slow, to speed up the speed that it's spreading.

I mean, at least do, you know, one revelation in East Asia, one revelation in like the British Isles and one revelation in America. Yeah, like why? Why not on tour? Why not even an attempt to go on tour? Right? Like,

And this is all made slightly worse by the fact that Jesus died fairly young, and this was a death that he had preconceptions of. He knew this was going to happen. He knew he was going to die and had At least some control over where and how it happened [00:36:00] because he made himself the sacrifice, which means that, , he could have delayed that for another 25 years or so, so that he could get on like a boat and go to China, and go to, some other far parts of, where boats could take you back then, maybe South Africa, and, and then created seeds of Christianity in those two places before coming back and, getting martyred, but he didn't.

Why? Why was this a completely localized revelation when it didn't need to be and Jesus had the power to perform miracles which could have prevented this from happening given what happens to people's souls who don't have Jesus Christ within most Christian theologies or do not know Jesus Christ within most Christian theologies.

Malcolm Collins: and the, the answer that, that, that I have, I've never heard a compelling answer to this.

Mormons have the best answer, which is to say he did go on tour. We just didn't hear about it. And I'm like, well, at least they're trying. But there's a number of [00:37:00] other logical problems that come from the Mormon tradition, which, which make it not a great answer, which specifically comes from the canonization of, of future profits.

They're like, Oh yeah, we can have future profits, but then they can annihilate some of the future profits while they're still alive. Which leads to the, you're not getting a lot of time to vet what they're saying to make sure it's not going to have huge contradictions in it. Like, you know. the, the, the prophet who said, if evolution is true, Mormonism is false.

That's a problem. What? Undo. Undo. Yeah. So, but, but keep it on within the Mormon tradition. It's not that much of a problem because future prophets can override past prophets which you don't have in a lot of traditions, but to me, there's some other problems with doing that, that we'll get to.

Um, The, the Jews fixed this problem, by the way, and we were like, oh yeah, we like the Jewish system for this, and the Calvinists fixed this problem by saying it's not a universalist. tradition. It's not meant for everyone. Therefore, it's very easy to say, oh, that's why he didn't perform a miracle to deliver it to more people faster.[00:38:00]

And the way that we solve this more broadly is we're like, actually, everyone always had access to the true revelation that was meant for their people insofar as they follow their traditions. in sort of a conservative iteration, see our video on the Tesseract God for how we get around this problem.

We also fixed the multiple face problem with this, and the multiple face problem is a much bigger problem than a lot of practicing Christians seem to realize it is if you are trying to convert somebody who is an outsider to Christianity. This is the problem of like a lot of their arguments against atheism are arguments against atheism more broadly, but that are not very compelling for just go to their tradition versus other traditions.

And we have a few systems that we've used to attempt to get around this one is the Tesseract God concept. It'd be like, Oh, these multiple Christian traditions are actually full. iterations and full revelations, but then we also use our profit system to get around this. So our profit system is to say, well, the, you determining which messages are from [00:39:00] God to you is a democratized thing with a few stipulations around this.

So we say any individual can decide by, by Prayerfully examining evidence and by evidence, you know, we're looking at things that can't easily be faked. Like the person one predicted future events or like verifiable miracles happened around them. You can use these individuals are meant to communicate some information to you.

They might be only to communicate information to you. This also fix the textual inconsistency problem. So, for example, people who are familiar with like texture. Textual differences in biblical traditions. The number of the beast was in different traditions of some old texts. It looks like may have actually been 616 or believed to be 616 throughout a large portion of the Christian world.

Well, what we would say is, well, actually both iterations are completely true. And the 616 was meant to be read by somebody within the region, or maybe a number of somebodies within the region that was [00:40:00] read, right? Um, so, that is, that is how we get around that problem is by democratizing it.

Now this leads to another problem. If you allow for the possibility of future profits, then you have the problem of a person being able to say, I'm a prophet. Follow me. Right. Listen to everything I do and it can become very culty. So the way you get around this is you make a rule basically. All prophets have to be dead.

That's just a rule. You cannot say that someone is a prophet, and you should not look for prophetic wisdom from an individual who's not dead. That is just not the way God communicates. God will only communicate through dead prophets. This

Simone Collins: also helps to prevent prophet profiteering, whereby you have someone start to exploit followers in ways that are really bad and selfish.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah so then the next problem you have is science inconsistency. And, and the big problem here is the teleological and ontological arguments, which people think are good religious arguments, [00:41:00] but they're actually really bad religious arguments and they kind of argue against religion in a way.

And they're both solved and remove questioning here from People who, so first let's talk about science inconsistency because this is a bigger problem for Christianity than Christians like to pretend. So Christians will be like, look at all of the great things that we, the Western tradition, have accomplished in the past, you know, 200 years, right?

And what they are carefully ignoring here is that most of the most important scientists in the past 200 years, or I'd say at least a hundred years, if they were born within the Judeo Christian tree, left the Judeo Christian tree either during their period of most productive work, or at least before they died.

So you don't really get to, like, clearly there's a problem here for whatever reason, your most productive scientists are leaving the tradition. This is a big problem. And it's a problem with science inconsistencies of the Noah's Ark variety that we were talking about. We get around these with the, you know, one, [00:42:00] the individual revelation problem, but two, the So when I talked about the mass problem, so I'll get to the ontological and teleological arguments in just a second.

But the, the future God problem, where we're like, okay, in a million years, in a hundred thousand years, if we're still alive, would you say our descendants are more like a God than a man? Consistent with our existing science, consistent with our existing understanding of the world, to say they would be more like a man than the way we would conceive a God is just not consistent with that.

So to argue against this perspective, Really, the only argument you can make is time travel is impossible or, or influencing the timeline is impossible, which is a pretty bold claim to make when, like, I would just be like, well, how do you know that? Like, you have no more claim to knowing that than I have to knowing that it is possible.

And so it makes arguing against this religion from a scientific perspective pretty difficult unless we get some like hard scientific understanding in the future that definitely [00:43:00] 100 percent there is no way that you could manipulate the timeline but that would rely So, On a full and complete understanding of physics which I don't know how close we are to being at yet and a full and complete understanding of physics, which rules that out, which I don't think it looks like if the direction physics is going, like when you look at a lot of quantum stuff and stuff like that, it actually looks like future entities likely can, if we're sort of extrapolating into the future of, of The physical understanding of the universe can probably influence events in the past.

Now let's get to the ontological and teleological arguments so the ontological argument is the argument against ACS where they're like, okay, well, what created the universe then? Which in the ACS mind is of course, well, then what created God then?

Right? And then God, people are like, well, we don't have to answer that question because God's special and you're exempt from having to answer that question. And then the Atheist is like, well, that's very uncompelling to me if you're making me answer that question, but you say you don't have to answer that question.

Because I could just say, well, the universe has existed in an endless cycle of existence and nonexistence, and he's just saying the universe is the type of thing that needs to start, you know, you could have like a big bang and a big crunch, a big [00:44:00] bang and a big crunch, right? We solve both of these problems by saying that the universe Did potentially have a beginning.

You can see our what's behind the fabric of reality video on this. We talked about this a few times. I don't want to go over the full argument here. But basically it's mass exists outside of the universe. Things that are described by mass exist as graphical equations of those things.

So you don't need to actually be. playing them. And so anything that can be described by an equation exists as an emergent property of that equation. If that didn't make a lot of sense in the way I just explained it, just watch our video, our full video on what's behind the fabric of reality on, on this particular topic.

I figure it's probably worth taking a few minutes just to give a fuller explanation of how this model for reality works. Because it is the model for reality that I have seen. That takes the fewest presuppositions. And the few presuppositions that does take, seem intuitively true to me. The first. Is that two things in two things is always four things, whatever reality you're in. , yes, you can get things like non-Euclidean geometry, [00:45:00] but mass broadly holds constant across all realities and is therefore a thing that exists outside of realities.

Too. That if you have an equation, like a graphical equation. The line that that equation is representing exists outside of that equation as an emergent property of that equation. Even before I graph that line on something like a piece of paper, that equation is in a way that line.

Finally.

That our reality. Can be described by a single or set of mathematical equations, EEG, the laws of physics, and the way things interact with in our reality can be defined by a single mathematical equation. If I only hold those three things to be true, that means that our universe must exist. Like even if a material universe exists in the way that we think our universe exists with. You know, Adams and everything like that. Alongside [00:46:00] that universe, a separate graphical representation of the mathematical equation that described how those things intersected must also exist and therefore, via outcomes raiser, we don't need to. Assume that the physical reality that we believe exists, exists. and so this, this model argues that because our universe can be described by a single equation and all equations exist outside of time., and all universes. This universe would exist no matter what is a graphical representation of that equation and all universes. That can be described by a single equation exist. This is also why our understanding of time is kind of funny because we see time is just one variable in this equation and not a particularly important or immutable variable within this equation. All moments of time exists simultaneously As simply variable points within this graphical representation. I'd also note here that this way of framing reality [00:47:00] means that we no longer need to answer the question. Why does the universe exists? And universe must exist. Math exists. Instead, we need to answer the question. What brought math into existence, or why does math exist?

 Asking why math always exists as an inherently. True thing feels a lot closer to the type of thing that you don't really need to prove in the same way that arguing, well, God exists as an always inherently true thing.

Does. Or at least. Seems like an easier presupposition to me than an all-knowing sentience entity that is infinitely complex versus the simplicity of math.

Malcolm Collins: but it solves a few problems. It solves the ontological problem. And it solves the teleological problem.

It also solves the what happens if we're in a simulation problem in that it makes a universe that is being run within a simulation functionally from a moral standpoint position identical to a universe that is not in a simulation. Again, watch the video [00:48:00] on what's behind the fabric of reality if you want to learn more about this.

Malcolm Collins: The teleological problem is like, how did we happen to be in a universe that had these exact laws of physics play out exactly as they did? Like, you needed numbers to be so precise. Now a lot of people fix this with the anthropic principle.

It's like, well, why did humans evolve on a planet with water when we needed water? Well, we wouldn't have evolved on any other planets. We wouldn't be asking the question if we didn't have water. But then it's like, yeah, but it is kind of weird that the universe happened to be created this way. But if you believe this math iteration of why reality exists, Well, everything that could be described by an equation exists, so there are parallel universes, all the, the other universes where humans wouldn't exist to be asking this question, also exist, and people aren't asking this question, and that's why we're not in one of those universes.

Any, anything you want to add to this, Simone? Because I've been talking, ranting, for a while. No, I mean Hold on. We got some, some more ones here that are actually pretty important. Another one is historicity. [00:49:00] Historicity is I think a bigger problem for strict Christian interpretations than if you haven't left Christian circles, you're really going to be aware of we're building out a school system right now for kids.

Right. And I want that school system to be usable by people who have strict Christian interpretations, because we want to be an ally to these. Burps. We want to relieve them of their troublesome members you know, if, if, if, if that's a problem for them, but we also want to protect them from the virus because I think that they we could be wrong about creating this tradition.

And if we are, then they're probably the only hope we have of our species seeing the stars and, and achieving what we're meant to achieve at the species, at least what, what you and I believe so. Uh, that in this, this tree, we have a certain marking for nodes, like, like pieces, mastery levels that are associated with things that I think could get a really strict Christian interpretations of reality mad at us for and.

If you buy it and you click the, I don't want any of these things in here, it like, just deletes all those nodes from the tree.[00:50:00] The problem is, is it pretty much has to delete everything around Jesus's life to except for the stuff that's just in the Bible, to everything at the Great Schism.

All of that stuff is just like, Thanos ed when you do this. Because if you talk and you look into a lot of this stuff, you know, he wasn't the only Jewish miracle worker in the, the, the, what is now Israel in that time period. You know, there were a number of others that you're talking about, like Honey, the circle drawer or Hania Bendoza or someone bar Yahi.

And it's, it's one of the things where it's like. He just doesn't seem that particularly remarkable outside of the impact he has had on history when you compare him with other well known miracle workers of the time period and, but, but then you say, well, he performed more miracles than them and it's like, yeah, well, we have a lot more text on him.

We only have the names of a few miracles that these other people produced but, and, and the knowledge that he was seen as similar to them in some texts, right?

Simone Collins: Such a [00:51:00] lesson about, you know, the importance of marketing.

Malcolm Collins: Investigating, right?

I'm forced to point all of this out because a lot of people mistakenly believe that Jesus's miracles are , people purporting to have seen Jesus's miracles is evidence of Jesus's divinity when miracle workers during that time period and at that part of history were actually fairly common, and the list I gave was not even exhaustive.

You know, you also have individuals like, , Apollonius of Tiana, who was a Greek philosopher who lived in the first century A. D., and was seen performing miraculous deeds having supernatural powers. And who raised people from the dead.

 Even if you're just constraining your knowledge of this to the Bible, you have individuals like Simon Magus, who the Bible talks of as a sorcerer, somebody with magical powers.

Now, of course, he tries to buy Jesus's magical powers, which is where the term simony comes from. , but it shows that even when he, a sorcerer, saw Jesus's magical powers, he was like, [00:52:00] Oh, it's another magician. I should buy these. So that is the way that Jesus's powers came off. to professional somatological performers of his own time period, even within the context of the Bible.

I should also point out the virgin birth thing is also not particularly unique. Even in the United States today, 0. 8 percent of women who give birth claim to be virgins.

, now what's interesting is, I have to take things out, like, you know, when we take out this sort of stuff, or what's going on in, in history during this time period from our courses, , that go to strict Christian households, you might be like, well, why would you do that if they know from the Bible that individuals like Simon Magus existed?

, and it's, well, because some Strict Christian theology finds ways to gloss around this, or to not mention this. , and it is kind of sad to me, because I think it's actually more powerful to say that Jesus is set apart, and I believe he is set apart not because of his miracles, but because of [00:53:00] his prophecy.

But that is, you know, neither here nor there.

Malcolm Collins: But from our perspective, because an individual's efficacy as a profit.

is determined by the impact they have on history, those people are next to irrelevant. It solves the historicity problem for us. And then the the, the final problem I wanted, well, the irrelevant rules problem that we, we talk about a bit here. But then this has a, a, another. really important thing that we really wanted to work into this, which was we wanted to structure the religious tradition in a way where individuals who are completely atheistic could live and work within it, going all the way up to individuals who are much more like actually believing it.

So it needed to Have interpretations that work for both of those and then it also needed to have interpretations that work for children and adults and, and dumb people and smart people.[00:54:00] And this is really important because if you look at pretty much all the successful traditions, they do this, right?

Like, uh, you know. A child who sees God as like existing on a cloud and like an old guy with a beard and then basically they're thinking of you know, an interpretation of Zeus really but, but certainly not the Christian God but it's, it's the way that we explain these stories to children, you know, some people make fun of us, they're like, well, hey, you guys are taking like actual like Warhammer 40k stuff and just explaining to your kids, that's how your demon you know, world works works and it's like, well, And I'm like, well, okay, you're a Christian.

Do you believe in like a red devil was like hooves and horns that is not from the Bible. That is all extra biblical fan fiction. A lot of religions do this. And the reason why, like you don't throw out that interpretation of the devil is because it's iconic and it's good and it helps get across certain lessons.

And we've had different interpretations of the devil throughout time, like the devil at the crossroads who is, you know, maybe making [00:55:00] deals or playing a fiddle or something like that. Right. Like, these were. relevant to convey certain concepts to people of those periods around like con men and other sorts of swindle men that were around them and not deleterious to the religious tradition.

So, so I want you to talk a bit about how our tradition is sort of built for kids and stupid people. Like what does that look like for us?

Simone Collins: I mean, a lot of it looks like, and we've been discussing this internally forever, holidays because that's how so many people primarily relate to religion.

People always talk about like, well, what kind of Christian slash Jew are you? Like, do you go to church every single day, week? Or are you only there for like Easter or Christmas or like these special holidays? And that's I think where we decided to start when it came to building traditions because it's the holidays that people show up for, especially if they follow the right holiday criteria, which include things like being super [00:56:00] photographable and really fun and very kid friendly often involving gifts often involving fun decorating schemes, often involving fun meals, that kind of thing.

And

Malcolm Collins: so that's how we've done upcoming holiday, the future police. Right. Yeah. Yeah.

Simone Collins: So we have the future police, which is. We will also call like among adults, the agents of provenance in our religion steal things from our children that are sort of addictive Skinner box like devices or

Malcolm Collins: toys. The audience knows about this tradition.

Yeah. Talk about what they look like, like the way that we portray them to our kids.

Simone Collins: So with Future Day, the vision of the future police that our kids are normalizing around is more like stormtroopers or robocop. And not so much like this very amorphous could not, you know, we can't even fathom, more like what Wynwood Reed had described where, you know, just like it, you Who knows what, what is embodied?

Like it's such an abstract concept, like totally above us. So obviously with our holidays, things get dumbed down because it makes it more approachable and fun.

Malcolm Collins: [00:57:00] So, the gist is that the future police was in our tradition. They look like stormtroopers to a kid, right? Like they look like actual futuristic police, like they would see in a sci fi or something like that. Whereas to an adult in our tradition, they follow much more closer to the words of when would read, you know, You, I think it's ethereal beings of which we cannot even conceive.

They're, they're a being or a type of entity that is beyond our powers of conception.

The words we were looking for were, You blessed ones who shall inherit that future age of which we can only dream. You pure and radiant beings who shall succeed us on the earth. And if we're going to look at how he describes sort of what they look like, or the way they should be conceptualized, he says, These bodies, which now we wear, belong to the lower animals.

Our minds have already outgrown them. Already we look at them with contempt. A time will come when science will transform them by means which we cannot conjecture, and which, even if explained [00:58:00] to us, we could not understand, just as the savage cannot understand electricity, magnetism, or steam. Disease will be extirpated. The causes of decay will be removed. Immortality will be invented. And then, the Earth being small, mankind will migrate into space and will cross the airless Saharas which separate planet from planet and sun from sun.

The Earth will become a holy land which will be visited by pilgrims from all the quarters of the universe. Finally, men will be masters of the forces of nature. They will become themselves the architects of systems, the manufacturers of world. Man then will be perfect. He will then be the creator. He will therefore become what the vulgar worship as a god.

There is but a difference in degree between the chemist who today arranges forces in his laboratory so that they produce gas, and the creator who arranges forces so they produce a world. Between gardener who plants a seed and the creator who plants a nebula. We do not wish to extirpate religion [00:59:00] from the life of man.

We wish to him to have a religion which will harmonize with his intellect, and which inquiry will strengthen, not destroy. We wish, in fact, to give him a religion, for now there are many who have none. And that really just aligns with our mission here. We are not looking to remove people from religion, we are looking to create a religion that people who right now live without religion, or who would otherwise deconvert from religions, can accept.

And a religion which, as he says, will harmonize with his intellect, in which inquiry will strengthen, not destroy.

Malcolm Collins: And this is not the way that we sell this to kids. We sell this to kids as, you know, stormtroopers, basically, right? And you can even do different iterations of the future day tradition where you have like evil future day police before the kids promise to make the world a better place.

And then like nice looking ones where you change their visual schema. And this also is true with our prophet [01:00:00] system, right? Our prophet system can be taken by a child to mean that these individuals are actual prophets in the way that, like, other religious traditions mean it, where it's like a god is talking to someone and that person is passing on moral advice.

Or if you take sort of the adult understanding, these are individuals who are being, Influenced by potentially quantum events and like butterfly effect stuff to go down specific pathways to say the things that need to be said, but it's not necessarily a revelation from God as in an entity is actually talking in their ear.

Now, it might be, but it's not necessarily.

Another thing that we haven't yet really mentioned or delineated is it was in our system we see the mystical arts or mystical approaches to things to always being a pathway to evil. And I should point out here I did not say that they are untrue or inaccurate. I am just saying that opening your mind to those sorts of possibilities [01:01:00] innately destroys human intellect, in a way that is really, really damaging.

 A human's ability to process the world in an ordered and structured manner. If you want to word this in the way we would explain this to a child, I would explain it very similar to the way that, you know, in, in like the, Warhammer 40k universe you would talk about chaos.

, opening your mind , to the warp or to chaos would potentially give you, , some level of, of magical powers or prescience or something like that, but it is an incredibly dangerous thing to do, and it's how demons can come in and take over your body. , so you see there, we're using a metaphor to explain something that we think is just a useful thing for a person.

, in terms of how they're mentally developing and how they engage with the truth to prevent them from falling off the path of, of logic and righteousness.

Or to put it another way, a witch is a witch. It doesn't matter if they became a witch to to try to make the [01:02:00] world a better place or help people, it doesn't matter if they became a witch using instructions that came from one of the Abrahamic traditions, being a witch will always corrupt your mind and soul.

You were telling me that it f***s with your head. The certain amount of it after a while, it just f***s with your head. That's why I'm usually kind of like almost autistic is I'm just being constantly.

Why? Because lower entities will come in and violate your free will. They know. All your b******t, they see right through you. They will not manipulate your free will unless you ask them in. I have dude, do not say that I'm gonna get killed. I've a hundred percent communicated with something. I'm not judging anybody.

I'm just saying, okay, be careful. The question is whether that something was actually in my imagination or in my mind, or that something was something that takes place in another dimension. Once you open that gate, it's all bad. They have, so why is it all bad? Why? Why can't you experience that interdimensional?

being and learn something from it, and be a better person when you [01:03:00] come out of it. Because, because every time it gets control, it starts murdering everybody. They wind up killing everybody later. In every case. And it always starts beautiful. It always starts great. Problem is, some of it makes sense. That's where the psychosis comes in.

Whoa. It's going to create a giant societal crisis where most of the people are already going to get killed. Because an evil force wants conflict. So I'm saying no, no, no. It's all chaos. Stop it. This is the nature of the beast.

Now people might be like, well, do you really believe in those sorts of things? And the answer is no, like the logic side of me doesn't believe in those things. But I do think it's useful to build into a religious construct a wariness of the mystical stuff. So

Even if we do have dumber people join our tradition, we can explain to them in a way that they can understand why it is not useful in society for them to engage with mystical hoodoo. In addition, it provides some layer of buffering against any would be magician who wants to try to prove that they have some sort of magical or supernatural connection and use that to pull people from the path of righteousness. If you're [01:04:00] wondering why we take this view on witchcraft, well, when I look at the wealthiest people of the world or the most powerful people in the world, I don't see a bunch of people who are practicing this sort of mysticism or witchcraft, which leads me to believe either it doesn't have real world efficacy or there is some additional cost tied to using it at that sort of a level, , which prevents people who do use it for these sorts of grander things from achieving their desired outcomes.

In fact, when I look at people who practice mysticism, they primarily seem to be on the lower end of the power scale, which leads me to, again, take away either it doesn't work or it has a huge, very negative blowback effect on the individuals using it. Either way, it's worth warning practitioners about.

Malcolm Collins: Another thing that this. System allows for is the incorporation of more modern profits while also understanding that profits are relevant insofar as they are useful to kids. So one that we were talking about [01:05:00] recently was

, the martyr Marvin Haymeier and the miracle of the killdozer.

Simone Collins: Miracle of the

Malcolm Collins: Killdozer. So this was an event that happened in 2004. Anyone can go and learn about it if you don't know what it is.

Trouble began in 2001 when the Zoning Commission approved the construction of a concrete factory adjacent to Marvin's shop. For many years, He Mare had used this route to get to his shop, as it was really the only access road leading there. Construction of the plant would block this route, however.

He Mare tried to appeal the Zoning Commission's decision, but was denied. He tried to petition the city with neighbours and friends, but was once again unsuccessful. The concrete plant was going to be built. So Marvin said, alright, alright, you win. I'll just have to find another way to my shop. He petitioned to construct a new access road, and he even bought all the heavy machinery so he could just do it all himself.

Well, guess what? He was turned down AGAIN. To add insult to [01:06:00] injury, the construction of the factory cut He Mare's connection to the sewage line. And Granby Town Council fined him for not being hooked up to the sewer. With his livelihood seemingly in ruins, Marvin felt he had no recourse. He began planning his next move.

He would write notes and record audiotapes about his predicament. I was always willing to be reasonable until I had to be unreasonable. Sometimes reasonable men must do unreasonable things.

Malcolm Collins: But it did contain a miraculous element which was that multiple individuals had been in his shed and saw him building a tank and none of them noticed or thought to ask him about it.

And his interpretation of this was that God was occluding their vision.

and that's not even the most unbelievable thing about all of this. Numerous people had actually visited Marvin during the year, and had been in his shed. And not one of them [01:07:00] said anything about the homemade tank sitting in the corner. Like, what was going through their heads as they looked around that garage?

Hmm, nice toolbox, may get one of them for meself. Broken boiler there by the looks of it. Ooh! Expensive power drill. Might ask for a loan of that. Real old pair of boots there. Giant bulldozer fitted with composite armor, three gun ports, and its own surveillance system. Thornmoor. He may have believed that God had built him for this job, and that it was God who clouded the judgment of the people who entered his shed.

Malcolm Collins: Well then this means that we can then. Take multiple interpretations of this, right? First, also the miracle that nobody died during the, the, the killdozer, as people would call it, rampage right, righteous rampage against bureaucracy.

 On June the 4th, 2004, Marvin lowered the armor onto the Killdozer cabin, one last time, sealing [01:08:00] himself inside. He began his rampage by tearing through the wall of his muffler shop, and then the concrete plant, before making his way into town. For two hours, he terrorized the town of Granby.

He destroyed the town hall, the office of a local newspaper that editorialized against him, the home of a judge, and many others. Every building he destroyed was owned by somebody that had previously wronged him. In all, he smashed up 13 buildings, causing about 7, 000, 000 worth in damages. But it should be noted that nobody was harmed.

Police made continuous attempts to stop the rampage. Local and state patrol, including a SWAT team, followed the killdozer everywhere it went, firing shots at the cab with no effect. They then tried to take out the cameras, which again failed as they had the bulletproof shielding. They climbed aboard, trying to figure out a way to put a bullet inside the beast.

A flashbang grenade was even [01:09:00] dropped in the exhaust pipe, but nothing they could do could stop it. They even brought out a wheel tractor scraper to fight the machine, but the killdozer just pushed it aside.

Malcolm Collins: So it, it teaches us the evils of bureaucracy, what's expected of us in a no win situation against the evils of bureaucracy. It It happened there was, it was miraculous in, in those ways, but it also shows the way that God can intervene with things. God can intervene with things through occluding people's vision of something that should be obvious to them.

And we're going to go into this with the Hasidic community, I think, in a different video. We're going to go over the well, we'll save this for the other video. That's another way that can be used. Another thing that we use in terms of like the kid version versus adult version is we take as the core prophet of the religion, Wynwood Reid, right?

And we say as efficacy of his tradition, you can look at how his predictions. turned out, right? And it is pretty supernatural how accurate he was. Much more [01:10:00] to my, from my perspective, supernatural and accurate and no vagueness in his predictions. Like you have in a lot of other like Nostradamus y sorts of predictions or, so that's useful to us, right?

In terms of providing some sort of like logical proof to our kids that this was actually inspired by some sort of divine entity. But it's also useful to us that we were able to vet the prophet, you know, Hundreds of years after his death, instead of having to appoint prophets while they're still alive and world opinions can change pretty dramatically and stuff that they were involved in either scientifically, like views they have end up being just like super wrong.

Like Wynwood Reed, he was famously involved with the writing of the descent of man, right? You know, one of the most important scientific books. So you could say he was at the nexus of but then he, he also, you know, if I read, you know, things he said, so. You know, he was around during the civil war,

so this is him talking about, you know, giving black citizens equal rights. And he says, But it need not be [01:11:00] feared that they will become hostile to those with whom they reside. Experience has shown us that, whenever aliens are treated as citizens, they become citizens, whatever may be their religion or their race.

 It is a mistake to suppose that the civilized black American calls himself an African and pines to return to his ancestral land. If he is born in the States, he calls himself an American. He speaks with an American accent. And he loves and hates with an American heart.

And I think that, you know, we're able to vet for this, you know, make sure the guy who we were choosing in the profit didn't say a bunch of stuff that would get him disqualified.

With the obvious hard contrast here being Mormonism, which accidentally built racism into its theology and then had to override that with future prophets, but obviously that's going to push a lot of potential converts away from the religious system.

 Oh, yeah, you were, you were just telling me this morning, this story about one would read that you didn't even know about originally when going through all of his texts, because he doesn't personally. about it very much anywhere. No. [01:12:00] But he spent extensive time traveling through Africa. And at one point he found himself, inconveniently either put into a position of servitude or like literally enslaved.

Simone Collins: And he was, he was posed with a series of very difficult, seemingly impossible they were supposed to be impossible feats, which he then executed with, you know, aplomb and grace. You know, thus. securing his release. You know, this is the kind of stuff that prophets do, you know, just crazy, crazy stuff.

In addition to, you know, really calling a shot also proving that they could do insane things. And I, I love that kind of color

Malcolm Collins: of a historic prophet. I love it.

Simone Collins: Yeah. Well, I mean, you see this with, with Catholic saints all the time, just like these insane stories about the quirky things that they did that were impossible, but so cool.

You know, it's, it's so clickbait, but that's what you need. You know, you need some of

Malcolm Collins: that. And as I talked about, like the Mormon profit problem, was there anything else that you wanted to say to this concept about preventing sort of intergenerational bleed and the ways we've sort of thought about [01:13:00] this and how we constructed our religious system?

Simone Collins: Yeah. I wish that organized religions would think more about this from a really practical standpoint. Because I think right now the conversations are how do we keep people from leaving more just like how do we get people to lean more into the religion instead of looking within. I think you can kind of look at it from like a relationship microcosm of it's as if people are in these relationships that may not be going so well, like they might not be sustainable.

They're like, Oh man, like how can I, you know, how can I get my wife to just stay with me? Like, you know, what, what do I need to tell her? Like, how do I, how do I convince her that this is a really good marriage instead of like looking at oneself and being like, how can I be a better husband? Like, am I, am I doing something wrong?

Am I not showing enough appreciation? Maybe I should help out around the house more. Maybe I shouldn't abuse her. Like all sorts of things. Right. Like, and so I think that the churches need to look not at their members, but rather at [01:14:00] their own policies and doctrine and understand deeply what they need to internally change to keep people.

Malcolm Collins: Well, and so there's a few other things I wanted to sort of, note here. What is, is, is the way, like a lot of people wonder about the Christian, like Judeo Christian framing that we've chosen for this. Like you could probably construct something like this without a Judeo Christian framing. But we believe in, like, when we think about Go to the Stars, we want to go to stars with a contiguous cultural tradition, you know, the Western cultural tradition, which I think is encapsulated within the Judeo Christian tree of religions.

And through framing and through taking their prophets as our prophets What we can do is prevent or lower the probability of attack from these groups while also making it easier to talk to these groups from their own perspective. A huge problem that a lot of religious groups have when they're trying to convert people out of different religions, or trying to relate to people from different [01:15:00] religions, is they will talk to them from the perspective of their religion.

They're like, how can you doubt Jesus when he did, you know, the Bible says these things about him? And it's like, well, they don't believe the Bible, so That's why. Now, if you take the Tesseract God concept, that means if ever anyone from this tradition, like any of our kids, are talking to a Jewish person or a Christian, they believe that that Jewish person or a Christian has a whole revelation of God.

So, one, they're not going to be as interested in converting that person, unless the only alternative is that person is going to leave their ancestral tradition and move to the virus, right? So, in that case, they would pick the person up. Rebels who we're talking about, but there's no one real motivation to be dangerous to devout Christian or Jewish groups because they believe that these people do have full access to tradition.

But when they are talking to that person who's deconverting, they can argue from a Jewish perspective to that person. They can

Simone Collins: speak in someone's own terms.

Malcolm Collins: Yes. While also lowering the probability of attack. So if a Christian group sees you as [01:16:00] an iteration of Christianity or a Muslim group sees you as an iteration of Islam.

They are less likely to attack you, so long as you aren't a very closely related iteration. So the two highest attacked groups that you're going to get within traditions are, and you can see our Judeo front problem video on this,

That we do a lot of. Talk a lot about this is when religious traditions are very closely related, like Shia and Sunni.

You're gonna have a lot of conflict there. Or the early Catholic Protestant split, but when religions become more distantly related, but are still part of the wider grouping of religions, you typically get pretty low amounts of conflict. And when religions get very distantly related. Like Christianity versus pagan religions, you get a really high amount of conflict again.

A great example of both of the dangers of playing this stratagem, too closely or too far we can see in the Mormon tradition. In the early days of the Mormon tradition, they were much more differentiated in terms of their lifestyle and beliefs than modern day Christians. And as such, they were often in active [01:17:00] and very hot conflict with, , nearby Christians.

I mean, at one point they went to war with the U. S. government. , that's how much conflict the Mormons used to be in with nearby Christian communities. But as time has gone on, A unique, and I'm not sure if it's a genetic thing within Mormonism, or, or something that has become a norm within Mormonism, but more than any other community, Mormons seem to want to really, really be seen as normal and fit in, and be respected for being normal and wholesome.

But this has led to a problem in that they have started to cover up the ways that they are different from other Christians. And this has happened through two core sort of chains within the Mormon tradition. The first is a huge number of their converts are Catholics due to where they are converting people, which has led to a level of Catholicization of Mormonism, which makes a lot of sense.

I mean, you could draw a lot of parallels between the Mormon central hierarchy and the Catholic central hierarchy [01:18:00] from the perspective of a new convert. But then you have the second problem, which is the Mormons who are in the, , Utah, the traditional Mormons. Mormons of the original Mormon, cultural and ethnic group.

 They have done very poorly recently, because that's the group that really, really has this strong desire to fit in. And so, when they are being preached to by their pastors, or whatever you call a pastor in Mormonism, many of those pastors will often leave out the way that Mormonism is different from mainstream Christianity, because those are the things that if they're , parishioners repeated in public would get them chastised, you know, the multiple mortal prohibitions problem or the,, ideas about intelligences and the ways that human reincarnation may exist. ,

Or the idea that humans will eventually become gods themselves, or like God.

 and we go into this in the Are We Mormons videos. But the point being is when Mormons come to us and they go, Mormons don't believe this, what they mean is that their local [01:19:00] preacher, doesn't mention this stuff. And it's like, yeah, that's a problem because historically, your prophets used to talk about this stuff all the time.

 And me as somebody who really likes studying those sort of weirder aspects of Mormonism and finds them much more compelling than the more modernized iteration of Mormonism, , is really into those works, , like the old, , Orson Pratt stuff, but this leads to a problem, in that the Mormon church has lost a lot of its identity from my perspective because of this and is becoming more and more just like any other Christian tradition, which is, of course, a risk that, you know, suppose.

our system takes off and our kids do really well and they stay within the system and it becomes this large religious group. Well, if it's existing alongside other Christian groups and it doesn't have built into its DNA this internal, drive to rebel and to paint oneself as, as different and to be sort of an iconoclast, it will face the same problem Mormonism does, which is just shave [01:20:00] off all the parts of it that are really, really sharply different from other streams of Christianity.

And it doesn't need to like actively decide to shave it off. As I've said, it can just be due to where preachers are shifting the focus of their teachings.

Malcolm Collins: So this allows us to lower the amount of conflict, but also logically lower the amount of conflict because we're not an active threat to their devout members. Like we view it as one of our religious duties to protect people from deconverting from these conservative religions and develop systems that help protect people in these conservative.

Traditions because they increase the diversity of religious systems out there. Like if you look at the motivations of our system but two if they believe that their system is really the true system, our system captures all of the teachings of their systems. So if we end up being one of the traditions that goes to the stars, their systems could re emerge out of our system.

You know, it could be God's way of, of taking certain religious faiths to the stars that end up dying out through other means. Also, everything that we're aiming to do [01:21:00] you know, protect conservative religious groups, as well as ensuring that humanity becomes an interstellar species. , and ensure the continued diversity of humanity.

This might be a problem to some progressive groups or some totalizing religious traditions, i. e. traditions that eventually want to convert everyone. But those religious traditions and those traditions are typically enemies of all other religious traditions because they're totalizing, right? You know, so we, we get to be nice there without also having any form of, of open conflict in regards to that.

And also people should keep this in mind from our own perspective, so they understand that this isn't just altruistic or anything like that. We send people back to the other conservative traditions, because one, we believe that increases the diversity of ideas out there in our belief system is really centered around, I guess, what you could call cultural Darwinism, or the idea that the cultural traditions that survive are God's will, and that is how God displays his will to us.

But for cultural traditions to compete, you need multiple cultural traditions. A [01:22:00] healthy ecosystem is a diverse one, and that is true at the cultural level as well.

But in addition to that, part of the reason we are not interested in the people who are active in rebelling against their ancestral traditions actively is because We view them as inferior. We specifically want the type of people who ask a ton of questions in our video on the genetics of religious traditions and how quickly you can get these sort of sociological tendencies concentrated in religious groups.

We are almost, you could say, specifically. farming rebellion because we see that as being the core of the human fire of the human spirit that allows humanity to thrive and is what allows this cycle of intergenerational improvements and what will fuel the next generation of our practitioners to Go against us and try to improve the system while still having enough of a drive to compete and enough of a drive towards logic that they are okay with being judged [01:23:00] directly against us.

This is where our system of encouraging our children to rebel comes from, which is to say, our system, if you look at the index in the pragmatist guide to religion and the way it's structured is it encourages our children to rebel, but still stay within the larger framework. , and then. They get judged against their own parents, and then other ancestors, and other members of the tradition by their own children in terms of their efficacy in rearing children, i.

e. in terms of how those children come out from their own perspective.

If this is your first time hearing about this, essentially we tell our children, anything that you think that we did poorly as parents or in this tradition we constructed, we strongly encourage you to try to make it better, to build better systems. To adapt systems from other cultures that you think are stronger than the systems that we used with you, but do know that there is this central book called the index, which you write, your perception on how these traditions ended up affecting you in, [01:24:00] but your children are also going to be writing in.

And when your grandchildren are choosing how they're going to rebel and are choosing different. , structures of traditions, they can use this book and judge whether or not you actually did a good job in your restructuring of things and they might go back to ancestral ways, believing that you did not build a system that was effect as effective as the systems that came before you.

And so the only way a person would deconvert from this, really, so long as they're not converting to one of the older traditions, is if they didn't think they could do a better job, or if they didn't like this metric that we are using to judge a person's competence or the competence of their ideas.

, and that metric is how their children judge the competence of those ideas. So all of this is completely. egotistical from our perspective, , us one, not wanting to convert people out of conservative traditions, but also us sending people back to and protecting people from deconverting from conservative traditions, , as well as, , our belief [01:25:00] in, you know, we see ourself as an ancestral chain.

We see ourselves as intergenerational entities and that ancestral chain comes out of the Judeo Christian traditions. So obviously we're also going to. See some benefit to protecting those traditions, which is also why we encoded them in all of this. It's not all just about protection. However, it is also about protection.

our goal of intergenerational human improvement at both the spiritual and biological and technological level means that we have Faith that within five or six generations, members of our tradition will be fairly unassailable from pretty much any other existing tradition in the world today, especially when you look at things like, , the, the dropping rates of the apologetic scores that are associated with IQ and the general population, our.

The real goal here is just to protect our practitioners until we can reach the stage in which this form of protection is no longer necessary, i. e. protection because we are not an active threat to [01:26:00] these groups and they rightly see us as carrying on their traditions and as, in a way, a part of their traditions.

Malcolm Collins: The final thing I wanted to touch on is value systems which are determined through the ways that the internal hierarchy of a religious tradition works. And that this hierarchy is passed down through the way you teach kids what to value and what not to value.

Something that we have repeatedly set up in videos that we have done is we do not. It is appropriate for anyone to be a preacher unless they have a alternate source of income that they earned on their own. IE it's not mom and dad's money. And IE they are not being paid to preach. Like we see both of those things as having really negative incentive systems.

 and I should point out here that we're not the only religious tradition to have this prohibition. , this used to be part of, one chain of Judaism. Obviously it wasn't part of Judaism during the second temple period, and it hasn't been adopted by the Hasidic schools of Judaism.

But if you do look at what is [01:27:00] written in the Talmud, you'll get lines like, rabbi Gaman, the son of Rabbi Yeta Azi, said, excellent is the study of the Torah together was worldly occupation for the exertion. In both of them, it causes sin to be forgotten.

All study of the Torah in absence of worldly occupation comes to nothing, and in the end leads to sin. Which is what we believe. All religious study that is done in absence of labor that moves society forwards is always going to lead to sin, like physical labor or inventive labor or basically anything outside of just teaching. So do you, , this group or persuasion of this time period? Any rabbi that came to them and did not have a job outside of being a rabbi. Like they did not have another way that they were supporting themselves was teaching and preaching sin and only sin.

And it should be clear that they, they mean this pretty explicitly here. If I go [01:28:00] on with this quote, it then says, and all of the work for the community, let them for the sake of heaven, for the merit of their ancestors sustains them. And their righteousness will endure forever. And for you who work for the community.

God says, I credit you with a great reward as if you yourselves had done it on your own. And then another quote here, Any father who does not teach his son a trade teaches him banditry. And then the other person, , exposes some surprise at this statement. And he goes, can it enter your mind that he actually teaches him banditry?

And then the person basically replies, Since the son has no profession with which to support himself, it is likely to turn to theft for livelihood, which is what we see the selling of preaching as being. , the selling of preaching is a form of theft within our tradition. But you can see this is why it is useful for us going back to the traditions of our ancestors, back to the wisdom contained within this [01:29:00] Judeo Christian tree, for this extreme wisdom which is still so relevant today. All religious study outside of a worldly occupation ultimately leads to sin. And this is because of the negative incentives that you're going to get when people begin paying you to tell them what they want to hear.

This is why you have so many churches bending on their key principles to keep their parishioners.

Malcolm Collins: But what it also does is it leads to part of the way that you judge a preacher is their real world efficacious accomplishments, which means you need this level of real world efficacious accomplishments. And there is some level of status hierarchy within the preachers of this system based upon independent research that they're doing that allows them to Add to the human body of knowledge and keep the religion being a living religion, as we call it, versus the dead religion, where living religions are religions that are constantly in an internal communication, updating themselves and, and [01:30:00] producing really top tier thinkers, whereas dead traditions and anyone can look out at historical traditions and see this are ones where they used to produce a lot of top tier thinkers, but they haven't in a few centuries.

And so it ensures that we, we stay that yeah. Well, also preventing the negative, and then you've got the profit system where you can't go around claiming you're a prophet or something like that. That is for sure a sign that you're not a prophet within this tradition if you're doing that. This can only be determined after an individual dies which prevents that level of abuse.

But also allows individuals, like, it's very hard to, like, want to be a a preacher within this system to make money if that's seen as a sign of, like, a low status preacher. Right? So you don't have the same negative incentive structure there. What else would you say, Simone? I

Simone Collins: So our religions value systems which we're all a lot around, obviously.

long termism, but also industry efficacy, working hard. But also being very intellectually minded and open minded are obviously like reinforced by values and the texts that we choose.[01:31:00] But also like sort of, we'll say low culture elements. Like we have a list of approved films and they range from movies like Clueless to Indiana Jones to Starship Troopers.

Like these are not. You know, I don't know, like weird, obscure documentaries, this is very popular media. But then, of course, it goes back to our holidays. You know, our holidays are just Future Day, for example. Another holiday we have we currently call Lemon Week. It may get a better name eventually.

But it involves of course, colorful fun motifs of lemons and lots of citrus treats and meals. But over this week of citrus treats and lemon decorations and all that fun each family member who's Intellectually capable of doing this has just liked a topic that deeply deeply offends them.

Like just, they, they hate it so much and they have to very earnestly steel man their position and share it with the family. So they have to dive into these, you know, these groups, subreddits or their texts or their videos or whatever [01:32:00] it is, and really, really understand it from a good faith perspective and then explain it to the family.

And give a very strong pitch to the family and the family will judge if you have not been intellectually honest, if you are just straw manning them, if you're making them look bad, we will judge you and shame you. And then at the end of the week, everyone gets to plant a fruit tree and then enjoy the fruits of their bitter, but productive exercise.

So, you know, these are examples of ways that we dumb it down, make it fun, make it approachable but hopefully pass down these values.

Malcolm Collins: All right. Well, we can go to the next video, I guess. Talk about this more some other time. There were other things I wanted to talk to you, but this video is just getting too long.

Yeah. And I'm talking too much. I don't like it when you're not adding a lot, so.

Simone Collins: , I don't give a s**t what people think. I don't give a s**t what people think of our philosophy. When people, like, leave all these comments on, like, you know, religious philosophy, and we'll think, and this, and this, and this. I cannot be bothered, you guys. I cannot be bothered.

Just live your lives, follow your religion, and we'll see how you [01:33:00] do. And those who accuse us of being consequentialists, yeah, mm hmm.

Malcolm Collins: We are 100 percent it is quite immoral to not be a consequentialist. Why would somebody not be a consequentialist? We're material Everyone

Simone Collins: who says, really, do you think the ends justify the means?

That's, that's people who disagree

Malcolm Collins: with us. Yeah, the, the ends always, of course, I mean, if you're, if you're

Simone Collins: leading to a good outcome. Not to most demoralizing people, so. Everything

Malcolm Collins: else is just, is just moral set dressing.

Simone Collins: That's what, that's what most people live by, Malcolm. That's what they

Malcolm Collins: live by. But I believe consequentialist groups will out compete non consequentialist groups, I'll tell you that.

Simone Collins: We'll see through the

Malcolm Collins: consequences. Right?

 for anyone who's watching this and doesn't know what consequentialism is, consequentialism is the ethical theory that judges whether something is right or wrong based on what its consequences are, rather than judging actions based on whether or not they adhere to certain rules or duties, , or intentions.

So. Essentially, a non [01:34:00] consequentialist would say, Well, I didn't intend for me sending all of that aid money indiscriminately to Africa to end up funding terrorists and leading to a huge escalation in violence. Therefore, it was a good thing for me to do it. While a consequentialist would say, It doesn't matter.

You should have tried to figure out what matters is that the money you sent made the situation worse and therefore it was a bad thing. And this is because consequentialism, and the reason a lot of people don't like consequentialism is because it requires a level Of self responsibility and accountability that a lot of people aren't willing to take.

, we saw this for us when our travel company really suffered during the pandemic. , and a lot of investors were like, Oh, you know, it's an act of God. Don't worry about it. And we're like, no, like you, you never get to shirk responsibility just because it would have been hard to predict it. Of all of the things we could have predicted something like this, we could have done more to prepare for something like this.

We are 100% [01:35:00] When we fail regardless of what our intentions are, the moment you take a philosophy that allows somebody wiggle room out of that, they will use that to justify basically just following orders or just following traditions or, well, I thought it was going to help. , and I think that this is being one of the core problems of the progressive mind virus.

It's, it, It takes such an anti consequentialist mindset, , where it really, really, really wants to push this idea of as long as what you intended was good, i. e., well, by telling a fat person that it was going to have long term negative effects. , for them to keep eating. I was trying to lessen their emotional pain, but of course that has the consequence of causing much more damage in the long run.

So they have this anti consequentialist viewpoint where they're like, well, my intention was nice and that's why I didn't mention it. , and that's why we hate this anti consequentialist mindset so, so, so much. That said, and we have an upcoming video on this. There is one instance where a deontological viewpoint that [01:36:00] is the, the viewpoint that what matters is duty and tradition over the consequences of inaction is higher utility than a consequentialist viewpoint.

And that is for individuals who are taking on the role of a Knight instead of a king within their cultural tradition.

, and we'll talk about this within a video. Basically, you always want the leaders and the people who are planning the grand strategy of a group to be consequentialist, but you want the rank and file brave soldiers pushing forward to tradition to be deontologist.

Malcolm Collins: For people who are wondering why the light's different in parts of this filming, it's because we wanted to have Simone talk more.

Well then, if we've got a little bit of extra time, is there anything else you wanted to say on the religion episode? Because I'd really love more thoughts about passing on value systems from you, good and evil, et cetera. Like, what do you think about the idea of just creating a completely, like, Constructed religion.

Simone Collins: Yeah, it's like, so, I guess, what would happen if a [01:37:00] family, because I, what I wonder is like, how many people are going to take what you wrote in the Pragmatist Guide to Crafting Religion and just run with it, right? Just like, alright, what the hell? And we know some people are doing this, we just don't know what their religions are like yet.

And when we start formally putting together the index, which is a collection of families who want to be loosely allied, who all have different cultures and religions, but would like to share data. on their performance of their cultural religions and sort of categorize their, their cultural practices and beliefs so that we can all sort of learn from each other.

We'll start learning from them then because we're going to catalog all of these things. However, I imagine some people are going to do some really weird s**t. Like for example, maybe someone's going to be like, Santa Claus. You know, you're just saying, right? Like, Oh, Santa Claus has taken on like a lot more than a lot of other religious concepts.

What if someone's like, let's just make this a frigging religion. Like, let's go for it all the way. You know, not just not just Christmas, but like throughout the year, you know, he sees you and what the elves are building stuff right now. And like, you know, we have to, to [01:38:00] serve, you know, I don't know.

Malcolm Collins: Well, so this is, this is really interesting.

And so a lot of people don't know that this is the way our religion is structured, unless they've seen like ancillary interviews or read the pragmatist guide to crafting religion. But we strongly encourage our kids to dissent from our theological views. But stay within the religious system in the same way that like capitalism turns the greed of society into efficacy.

We tried to build a system that turns the desire to. Prove others wrong rebelliousness into fidelity to cultural traditions. And the way that we do that is by creating strict measures by which an individual's life is judged. And we do this when an individual dies. We've talked about this in other things as we're like, what were they aiming for?

Did they live? A life well, and what do their kids think of them? Because, you know, that's how an individual is best judged. Because your kids are judging you from either the value set that you taught them and that they kept, or they [01:39:00] abandoned the values that you taught them, in which case you failed in that regard.

So are your kids judging you by an evolved iteration of the value set that you created? And that is the way we, we work with our kids. We're like, okay, you think you can do better than us. You think you can do more for your kids than we did for you. Then try, create a better system, but your kids will judge you in the same way you judge us within this central document, which is called the index.

And then future generations will judge which of us was best.

Simone Collins: Well, so I think there are some examples of already totally made up religions. That kind of started getting traction, right? Like the, the church of the subgenius, for example, which you loved when you were a kid did sort of build up a bit of a cult following, right?

Like it's sort of dedicated to hedonism. Yeah. Which is not great. Right. But I'm just saying like, there have been some entirely like ironically made up religions [01:40:00] where people have in the end started getting caught up in it. Like there is precedent for this and. Well, I think, you know, we just had this long conversation about how, you know, logical inconsistencies will leave people just wanting more and leaving the faith.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Well, and I also think another thing that a lot of people might hear all this and they're like, where are you guys actually strict within your ruling system, because you seem to abandon a lot of, you know, what people complain about in terms of the arbitrary restrictions of religion.

And that's true. We are attacking what are the arbitrary ones, the ones that people are most complaining about. Whereas we are going much further with the ones like self denial and attack on any form of hedonism to the extent where any level of self aggrandizement, all of that, are status hurting things within our cultural group.

If you go out and you are adorned in lots of jewelry or something like that, that is a sign that you are a sinner and that you are not someone to be trusted.

Simone Collins: But I oddly think a lot of this is actually [01:41:00] cribbed from our really early relationship conversations. Before we ever had kids about raising kids.

And like some of the advice that we settled on that we liked the most especially about having teenagers was like, basically have no rules, just have a very, very small number of rules that actually matters enforce them like mad. But they have to be rules that make sense, and that's it. Like,

Malcolm Collins: we Yeah, and this is, this is also really interesting.

So a lot of people look at our thing, like, our very low temperature we keep in the house, and stuff like that in the winter and what they misunderstand is when they look at this they say, oh, so you live, you know, in constant pain. Like, why don't you do additional pain rituals, right? Like the Opus Dei or something like that.

Which we would see as indulgent signs of vanity. Yeah, what a waste of

Simone Collins: time. Because

Malcolm Collins: you are wasting time. To demonstrate something pain and efficacy is something that you drive through to reach an end goal and that you should be expected to drive through, whereas signs of vanity or narrative building or self [01:42:00] indulgence, we understand that all humans are sinners and to attempt to not sin at all is a pass to personal damnation.

But to, to, to aggrandize the sin, to say I'm actually good because I waste my time working out to look good, like beyond what's just healthy, that is also the highest, one of the highest orders of sin. Although, within our system we do have the single highest order of sin. Which is stagnation that is the sin above all other sins is personal stagnation or, or cultural stagnation or any form of stagnation, which is why we talk about this concept of living in dead religions, is the dead religions are the ones that have allowed themselves to stagnate, whereas humanity's greatness is defined by our intergenerational improvement and intergenerational advancement.

Which, which does, you know, potentially put us into conflicts with some religious traditions, except we see them as, as useful as a different perspective and thus, thus worth maintaining as much as we can. [01:43:00] It's actually interesting how symbiotic like if this tradition takes off how symbiotic it is with traditional cultural traditions and that it literally doesn't want, and it sees it as a religious order to help protect their members from deconverting.

And it only wants to prevent the people who they would otherwise have bleeding off from it who are bleeding off for mental fortitude reasons instead of corruptibility reasons. So if I'm going to categorize these two things, corruptibility reasons is they're bleeding off because they just want to have a lot of sex or something like that, or they want to, you know, just indulge in their, you know, some form of personal identity.

And in which case we don't want them, but then integrity reasons is they see some area of logical inconsistency. They just can't get over. But they would really rather not fall to completely to the urban monoculture. We can act as a good backstop, which can prevent talented individuals from falling into the urban [01:44:00] monoculture.

So it's not acting as an outright conversion mechanism, but as part of this cultural economy that prevents the true dangerous force from destroying our civilization before it can reach the stars and ensuring that the Western cultural tradition does. Join the stars to some extent. If someone's gonna be like, Why don't you care about the Eastern culture of Lucian?

Because that's not us! Like, I have no connection to that. It would be weird and almost kind of racist for me to attempt to simulate that, or simp that, you know. We can we can work to help them where we can, but we're not part of that tradition.

Anyway, I love you to decimum.

Simone Collins: Would you like to go over

Malcolm Collins: together? I can go over by myself.

Simone Collins: You said it's a lot easier

Malcolm Collins: with me helping. Yeah, but I bet it's easier for you not to help.

Simone Collins: Yeah, but no, you bought me puddings today. We're going together. So meet me in the kitchen. Yeah. Okay, you're the best. I love you

Malcolm and Simone discuss new research showing masculinity correlates with better mental health in men, contrary to common toxic masculinity narratives. More life satisfaction and less negativity about masculinity predicts higher wellbeing. They compare Odysseus vs Achilles masculinity, protective vs nurturing gender norms, reasons for voting differences, and information gaps affecting worldviews

Malcolm Collins: [00:00:00] Yeah. And a lot of people, they point this out and they're like, this is why women shouldn't vote.

And this, you know, does they, they'll say that this causes differential voting behavior in men and women and that if women were voting, we would have a better outcomes.

And I don't know, like I actually, I want, I want to come at this like as, as much of an outsider as possible. Is this true?

Simone Collins: I question, though, the extent to which this, these dynamics of conflict and, Like the winning party translate over to, to politics like to political issues. Like I, I, I don't. Are

Malcolm Collins: you denying that men and women vote differently?

No,

Simone Collins: no, no. I, I do think I do. Well, we know, we know that men and women vote differently and have very different points that you're making.

Would you like to know more?

Malcolm Collins: You sure? I appreciate it. So Simone, we'll get started now. I am so excited to be talking with you. So we have this policy where we send each other interesting research when we find it. And Simone sent me some research [00:01:00] today, which was.

Really elucidating because I always like when research disconfirms the hypothesis that the researcher went into it with. So, the researcher was looking at the really high suicide rate in men when compared with women. You know, we see this. Right, right.

It's a sign of, , mental health issues in our society.

And he assumed and I can see how somebody, especially if they're tainted by like the virus would assume this that, well, that must be what a men have that women don't have. It's masculinity. Therefore, it's masculinity, which is causing this because masculinity is like a toxic thing for men to experience.

Simone Collins: Mm. Masculinity. Jacuzzi.

Malcolm Collins: So then he ran a big study, a big study. He ran a big study on this. And what he found is that actually masculinity correlated with much better mental health in men instead of worse mental health in men.

Simone Collins: Yeah. So let's, let's get into this. Cause I thought it was interesting. And there's a really great. Overview, maybe Malcolm, you can link to it from PsyPost, which we've been reading [00:02:00] since God, like 2016. I love PsyPost so much. PsyPost. org. P S Y P O S T. They, they post summaries of a lot of psychology studies as they come out.

They link to them, which is very helpful because so many articles, like we're talking New York Times, Wall Street Journal, never linked to the studies they reference it drives me nuts. Cause then you can never like what's the methodology like, and then often what they also do now that they've grown to become a bigger brand than they used to be, is they will interview the researchers that have just.

published the study, which is just great. So this particular study was authored by John Berry. That's the guy that Malcolm was talking about. And it was, it was published in Perspectives in Male Psychology. Or sorry, he's the author of Perspectives in Male Psychology as an introduction.

But so the study that he did that we're talking about here that I thought was really interesting and shared with Malcolm was one in which he surveyed over 2, 000 men in the [00:03:00] UK. And over 2000 men in Germany. So this is like, you know, specific set of people. And I think it's really important to like set that as a baseline.

The site post summary states, a key part of the survey was the positive mindset index, a tool used to measure mental positivity. The scale consists of questions designed to assess the feelings of happiness, confidence, control, emotional stability, motivation, and optimism. The survey also included several questions specifically about masculinity designed to understand how men perceive its impact on their lives.

These questions were grouped into categories that reflected whether men saw masculinity as having a negative or positive impact on them, or whether they considered it irrelevant in today's society. Now, what's interesting is the findings which I think reinforce a lot of what we're discussing with culture and with, with sexuality and with relationships men who reported greater satisfaction with their personal growth had significantly higher mental positivity.

So this has nothing to do with masculinity, but that is interesting. I mean, it makes a lot of sense. This was the strongest predictor of mental [00:04:00] wellbeing in both countries. Contrary to stereotypes of declining happiness with age, the study found that older men reported higher levels of mental positivity.

I also think this is really important and there's something I heard on the Red Scare podcast recently. They were quoting someone else when they were saying this, but like someone apparently had some quote about how like is wisdom really wisdom or just like the lack of hormonal influence as you get older?

Like, which I kind of wonder about that. But I do think that when it comes to people, especially men idolizing that very young Andrew Tate kind of mindset, I think this is good evidence or like just another little. Note that the Andrew Tate mindset, the youthful mindset, the highly hormonal mindset does not necessarily correlate with satisfaction and well being.

Well, and I

Malcolm Collins: think that when most people think about like masculinity, masculinity, the masculinity. That is being bemoaned by the left the most, or that is most threatening to them. It's [00:05:00] the stoicism form of masculinity. And it is not the, you know, bombastic Andrew Tatey masculinity. Yeah. And it makes sense that if you build a culture to me, at least it just seems intuitive, that shames a stoic approach to life, that that culture is going to have much, much lower mental health.

Than a culture that embraces a more stoic approach to life. 100% And, and this also goes to the other video that we had filmed which will probably come out before this on sexuality. And you know, when we teach our kids about sex and I was talking in that one about when I personally was younger, like hormones, a lot of people were like, don't you want to be like pumped up on tons of testosterone?

Don't you want to be like, No! Like, that's terrible! It's not a good feeling. It's not good for your mental health. I can see how any male is going to increasingly get better mental health the further they escape the tyranny of their pre programmed biological instincts. Which [00:06:00] is not the same as masculinity.

The pre programmed biological instincts is boyishness. Yes! It's very different than masculinity, you know, boyishness. Is like, I'm going to fight everyone. I'm going to play with my little toy soldiers. I'm going to, you know, everything's a threat to me.

The root cause of all of the world's problems is basically That there's not enough men who walk around their houses with swords. There's not enough men like me who do whatever they want.

If every man on earth walked around with a sword, then when the females who have been emotionally manipulated try and manipulate the men, the men won't listen. That'll make the female have more respect for the man. And most of the issues of the world, would basically go away.

Malcolm Collins: Whereas I think masculinity is much more being like an icebreaker to life.

Simone Collins: Yeah. Interesting. Now, you know, I was thinking like, well, then what are like archetypes of boyishness versus masculinity? And you kind of have. Odysseus versus Achilles, right? So [00:07:00] Achilles is like, he throws a tantrum, he hides in his tent. You know, he like, you know, it just, there's severe problems emotionally, very clearly.

I mean, the man is worse than, you know, a woman with PMS who has borderline personality disorder. And then you have Odysseus who just like plays the long game, tries his best to not get distracted, is obviously an imperfect person, but fights through yeah, that's interesting.

Malcolm Collins: Clear in the way that study was worded, it would have captured Odysseus masculinity much more than it would have captured this boyishness you see in Achilles and I really couldn't think of a better dichotomy here and it's just important, you know, our younger viewers to not overly conflate masculinity with being like Achilles because he acts like a little b***h, to be honest.

He

Simone Collins: does though, and he was very not helpful. Anyway, so in terms of what the study found with masculinity, you know, we already talked, I mean, well, yeah, so in addition to like age being more correlated with happiness and men who are satisfied with their [00:08:00] personal growth, being more happy, also men who are satisfied with their health were more like, so like, thank you, captain obvious.

And there are so many psychology studies that are like, this is just like, you know, people who are healthy, you seem happier. Your whole but here, so, perhaps most notably says cypost. org. The study found that men who had a less negative view of masculinity reported higher levels of mental positivity.

This was particularly evident in the UK sample. In other words, when men disagreed with statements such as, quote, masculinity prevents me from talking about how I feel about my problems, unquote. They tended to have a better overall mental outlook in Germany. Not only did a less negative view of masculinity correlate with better mental health, but a positive view of masculinity was also a significant predictor of higher mental positivity.

Positive views of masculinity encompassed attitudes, such as feeling a sense of protectiveness toward women and a desire to be a strong pillar of support from one's family. Again, total Odysseus, not Achilles. Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Well, and, and, and what's very [00:09:00] interesting is These, if you look at somebody like Andrew Tate, these are things that he wouldn't have answered.

Right. He, he, or, or not as, as strongly. I mean, some of his statements say that he might be on the edge or he would have a different relation to these questions than I think normal people would. But it's, it's really capturing that sort of stoic sort of, monogamous father figure within a family is what's being measured here.

And more than that, one who doesn't make excuses for why he's not doing things. If you look at the question like, My masculinity prevents me from sharing my emotions. These are people who are not saying that this is a problem for them, right? And I wouldn't say that it's a problem for me in that I think masculinity or not masculinity showing emotions is sinful, especially indulging in them.

And I expect my wife just as much as me to not indulge in that aspect of, of, of personality. I think that when you indulge in an individual's emotions, I mean, one of the most toxic things you can have in a relationship. Is the belief [00:10:00] that an emotional state is justification for an action? Oh, yeah And say I did this because I was angry It's like well then learn to control your anger or I acted this way because you made me feel this way well F*****g suck it up though How I made you feel has nothing to do my actions were designed to move our family towards a goal if that ended up impeding your feelings, then that's something that you need to work on.

And that was a personal failure on your part, not a mandate for some sort of counteraction.

Simone Collins: Precisely. Yeah. I, I also I, I think it's interesting that they highlighted this protectiveness towards women as a. Something as, as a notable element of masculinity, because it's just not really something that's discussed.

I think these days, because frankly, women feel much more like the aggressors these days than than people to protect. But then when I think about all the things that I associate with more traditional masculinity that I [00:11:00] find to be really hot, but also that I find to be really. Prosocial it is, you know, when men open doors for women, even when men reflexively stand up when a woman gets up at a table you know, in a formal dining situation, you know, just all these like sort of shows of protectiveness and difference the way that you, for example, walk on the, the, which, whichever is the dangerous side of the street and help me around and help me with bags and everything like that.

Which you constantly do because obviously I'm like carrying dangerous amounts of stuff to, I don't know, I have a death wish. So yeah, it's, I think that's interesting. And I also think that like there, there, there's always these, these vestigial parts, vestigial parts of my progressive upbringing that will like screech out when it reads things like this of being like, Oh, protective toward women.

That's disgusting. Women don't need protection. But then I also think about like, when we think about traditional femininity. Women are not protective toward men. No, but they are very nurturing toward men. [00:12:00] And I think that, you know, both both versions of, of positive masculinity and positive femininity actually involve taking a lot of responsibility and, and making.

the well being of someone else part of your personal responsibility. So masculinity involves protecting women and doing right by women. Femininity involves nurturing men and supporting men

Malcolm Collins: more than protecting women. I think it's making the well being of others, your personal responsibility, you know, back to that we always say that.

Difference between a citizen and a civilian and the citizen makes the safety of the human race, their personal responsibility. But I think that that's a very masculine way of relating to one's nation or one species. Whereas women see the nurturing of the human race

Simone Collins: as their personal responsibility. But also you're not seeing that like that is, that is something that is absent from modern femininity in a way that I think is, is damaging.

And I don't think [00:13:00] like, I think. The instinct is, Oh, women don't do it because it doesn't do them any good. But I actually think that the primary beneficiary of both male protectiveness towards women and female nurturing towards men is the giver. Like you gain self ownership, self mastery.

Responsibility, an internal locus of control, and frankly, greater control over a situation when you are in, in the process of assisting someone else because it sort of forces you to not be hopeless and helpless and, and flailing about it forces you to be in command of a situation. You know, it almost, you're, do you remember the story of with the the Hamas attacks?

There was that one Jewish grandmother who like gave tea.

Malcolm Collins: Oh, yes, until they, they were able to all be murdered.

Simone Collins: And yeah, that, that's a very interesting, like,

Malcolm Collins: death through nurturing. They were going to kill her and her husband and she's this little old [00:14:00] lady.

Simone Collins: Yeah, and she's like, well, I'm like, I'm going to make you tea.

Like, you're probably hungry

Malcolm Collins: right now. Yeah, try to treat them as hospitably impossible. While she was feeding information to the IDF about where the people were in the house and everything like that. To the point where they were able to kill them before they, they killed the old couple, which they were talking about doing, they were planning on doing, but she was just so nurturing and non threatening in the way she was acting.

But it's

Simone Collins: still a very feminine form. Yeah, and it's a very feminine form of ownership. Right. It's a very feminine form of taking command, you know, how did she do it? And how did she do it in a way that didn't stop men in, in, in a moment of very high aggression from stymieing her, like obviously had she acted in a, in a masculine fashion, she would have been instantly killed.

Right. But she reacted in a, I mean, this goes back, why am I on the odyssey right now? But like. What did Odysseus's wife do? Oh, yes. With all the suitors. She yeah, with all the suitors. She was, she hosted them. She hosted [00:15:00] them, and she bought time and she bought a lot of time, like

Malcolm Collins: an heroic amount of time.

Yeah, like

Simone Collins: Al, because Ika was probably super confused, you know, she's just like, you know, she didn't say yes to anyone. so Anyway, I think that's the, the, just like the, the, the note of protecting women. I also

Malcolm Collins: love this aggressive hosting that you're sort of talking about. Hostile hosting. Yeah.

Everyone's got to watch out if Simone's hosting you too many times.

Simone Collins: Defensive, defensive hosting. Yeah. Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: There's different ways that cultures relate to femininity and masculinity. And I think that this is also really important. There are the aspects of us that are biologically hard coded, which I think exists between cultural groups.

But I'm almost certain that there are, you know, some genetic differences between cultural groups in terms of like the average sociological profile of a male. Yeah. And

Simone Collins: that's why I was like, this is German and UK men, right?

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, no, but the point I'm making is, is I don't know [00:16:00] if, if women, for example, of all, you know, as no cultural groups have exactly the same sociological profile when, when you think about how they contrast with men for example, women in our group are generally much more masculine and aggressive I think in the, in the, in the context of defense then would be expected of other cultural groups.

Simone Collins: Do you think that's in American women? Do you think that's because of the preponderance of Scots Irish? Women,

Malcolm Collins: yes, it's, it's likely due to the preponderance of Scotch, the Irish woman and people who were living on the frontier for a long time. Yeah. Because frontier living requires, we talked about this in the episode of why don't you zone guns?

Of, of martial cultures versus non martial cultures and often the most extreme martial cultures. See it as the responsibility of not just the man to defend the household, but the woman to defend the household. And so you typically see weapons training in both men and women. And this is the, the cultural group that [00:17:00] we are predominantly descended from.

And thus when I think about what nurturing means to me, a part of nurturing is the literal protection that you show towards. the family which other cultures wouldn't see things that way. So I, I don't think that your natural instinct, if somebody broke into our house, I mean, you literally have an AR 15 right next to where you work is not to you know, bake them tea and cookies.

Simone Collins: I don't know. Well, I mean, I, I mean, yes, you're absolutely right. And that's why, and not just in that room, in every room, there's a little, a little surprise. Be it my bow and arrow or the bear spray, your giant hammer, the rifle, sorry, the over under shotgun. Anyway, the, the, what many psychologists though had, had come up with, which I, I don't know, it still resonates with me.

And it's still how I sometimes react in a panic situation is that, well, Men, on average, are more likely to have a fight or flight response. Women may tend to show instead a tend and befriend response. [00:18:00] Where, they feel like, I, I'm, you know, I'm just going to, I'm going to watch after my children. I'm going to try to protect who's around me, and I'm going to try to befriend.

The new people who have taken over my village and I'm now going to be enslaved to that kind of thing. So I don't know, like, I, I, I think that there, there are cultural differences.

Malcolm Collins: We mentioned this in the pragmatist guide to sexuality under the evolution of sexuality that was looking at games. And it showed that when in like a, I think it was like physical sports games when you had men and they were on a team and their team was beginning to lose.

They would show more camaraderie with their teammates. Whereas when women's teams begun to lose, they would actually begin to show more camaraderie with the opposing team, which, which makes absolute sense. You know, if your village is being raided and you're a man, you are going to die. Almost certainly.

They

Simone Collins: have to kill you. I have to kill you. You're, you're too much of a liability.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Whereas it was [00:19:00] women. You gain an advantage from doing this tended preferred response. Now this doesn't mean that you don't still have loyalty to your group and that, you know, when people's backs are turned, you're not going to end up killing them, right?

Yeah. But only in so far as you can go back to the way things used to be, you know? And it's in

Simone Collins: your evolutionary best interest to befriend and stay alive as long as possible. And the way to stay alive as long as possible is to be as friendly and non threatening as you can, because you may, you are not as likely to be killed by default.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. And a lot of people, they point this out and they're like, this is why women shouldn't vote.

And this, you know, does they, they'll say that this causes differential voting behavior in men and women and that if women were voting, we would have a better outcomes.

And I don't know, like I actually, I want, I want to come at this like as, as much of an outsider as possible. Is this true? I mean, women do vote proportionally more for. Consensus ideas which is, you know, potentially not something you would want in a, in an electorate, but I [00:20:00] think that generally you'd probably just be better.

Like, if you're like, Oh, limit voting to this group or that group, you're probably better limiting voting to people with kids. Like, I think that that actually makes sense because these people have a vested interest in the future of a country. And, and I, and

Simone Collins: I. No, no, no. Okay. I'm going to say no. I'm going to say people who are contributing.

Something,

Malcolm Collins: I mean, we'll do something on the state that we created. But one of the features of it is very much in line with what Simone said, where was in one of the branches of government, your vote is literally just how much you pay in taxes. And that is the sign of your societal contribution.

And, and that's, that's very different from these other systems, but I'm just thinking more broadly, like, like, is it women's fault? Like, is it women getting the vote fault? No, no, not at all. I don't think that that's a good description. of how things fell apart. But do women vote differently for men because they respond differently in these sort of conflict situations?

And a lot of people, they're like, well, you know, when women talk about this, they're like, well, a women controlled society, women would like, like, if there'd be more peace, there'd be less war because women have [00:21:00] this nurturing response, which is actually like verifiably not true from the evidence. If you look at during the European medieval ages there was a study done.

We cited, I think in our relationships book, the pragmatist guided relationships. It shows that women actually, when they were in charge of a country, when they were queen instead of king, the country was much more likely to go to war. Which is interesting. Now you can say, well, this is because they needed to secure their positions or whatever, because their rules were more tenuous, maybe.

Simone Collins: They're compensating, yeah. But also, like, women are terrifying, so I don't know. I, I also, I, I question, though, the extent to which this, these dynamics of conflict and, Like the winning party translate over to, to politics like to political issues. Like I, I, I don't. Are

Malcolm Collins: you denying that men and women vote differently?

No,

Simone Collins: no, no. I, I do think I do. Well, we know, we know that men and women vote differently and have very different points that you're making. Well, I just, I mean, like if we're talking about like losing or winning [00:22:00] in a sports game or something like sort of this like zeitgeist, I'm going to go with the. Winning aggressor thing.

I don't think that's translating over to political. Oh,

Malcolm Collins: well then what would you say about, I mean, this is the way this is often framed within right away. Circles is they say that this response is why women are so pro immigration and so pro immigrant groups that are clearly hostile when these groups, and I should point out not all immigrant groups are hostile to the,

Simone Collins: but I think that's ignorance.

Malcolm Collins: I, I, or some immigrant groups that are clearly hostile to native populations.

Simone Collins: Yeah. But I think that's, that's ignorance to the hostility because the types of media outlets that women follow the stories that get the most clicks and that drive the ad revenue and therefore get the attention on women's.

Predominantly women's or women heavy platforms are those feel good stories, those victim stories, those, Oh, look at the cute children crossing the border stories, or look at the sad baby that died because he couldn't cross the border stories instead of the [00:23:00] look at these criminals who are coming in and raping people stories.

Because women don't like those stories. Women don't read those stories at the same rate. They don't share them at the same rate. That is like, again, coming back to this, like again, women nurture men. Protect. Even

Malcolm Collins: if they are more interested in the stories that trigger nurturing instincts, like this baby died because it wasn't getting fed, and less interested in the stories that trigger their defense instincts.

Simone Collins: Because women aren't into protecting, that's not their job.

Malcolm Collins: So because of the way that the online environment is sorting information, they're not getting access to the same types of information.

Simone Collins: That's very interesting. Yeah. And I was just going through as, as you and I were talking about this morning, this report on public opinion on nuclear power.

And like a huge, huge, huge predictor of whether someone was in favor of nuclear power as a green energy source and in general was if they felt, if they self reported that they were informed about it. But also women were both less informed about it and less in favor of it. And again, I think it's, it's about what you know.

So again, yeah, I think this is, and again, this is nobody's fault, right? Like women [00:24:00] just click through on certain types of articles more. And that means that women have you have applications only like sort of show a skewed perception of reality,

Malcolm Collins: biological differences that they had no choice in

Simone Collins: going back to like, you know, all this femininity, masculinity, nonsense.

Not that I mean it's like it's I feel weird talking about this because you and I are not like obsessed with Feminine and masculine roles, but we do very comfortably slot into them in our own household for sure. Yeah Which is weird so yeah, I, I just, it's, what I'm curious about is how this would translate over in like China, Japan, India, cultures that I understand less, like how much of, of masculinity as we understand it is a, is a European thing.

whAt if this study were to be executed in Korea, would we see different results? I don't know. I'm [00:25:00] curious. I'm curious. But very interesting point. Yeah. It's, it's hard to say. And I mean, who knows, there could be confounding factors here. You know, like it could be that people who associate more with masculinity are just more likely to be conservative and people who are conservative are more likely to also be religious and therefore have a stronger, harder cultural background.

And therefore a bunch of traditions and lifestyle. Amenities that just encourage better mental health. So it's not actually the masculinity that's causing better mental health, but rather the association with harder culture and a more disciplined mindset. That, that is at play here. Like, so maybe it's not the masculinity itself that makes people have better mental health.

Malcolm Collins: One thing I'd really like to see is women who are more masculine or rate themselves as more masculine. Do they have better mental health? Huh?

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: And I would guess that they do. I can google this really quickly. Hold on.

Simone Collins: I don't, [00:26:00] I, I'm not sure. And I, I, I guess the reason why I kind of have my doubts is.

Malcolm Collins: Right. It's sorry. Been a study done in both genders. Masculinity was associated with greater psychological wellbeing in both genders. Femininity was associated. With lower psychological

Simone Collins: well being. Well, being a woman is so hard.

We have feelings. I'm

Malcolm Collins: so sorry for

Simone Collins: your feelings. Woes and hysteria. And we give birth to babies. And it's horrible. I don't know how to deal with

Malcolm Collins: it. Deal. Well, I'm so glad that you are not as infected with femininity as your average

Simone Collins: woman. Basically not even female. I mean, really if I have to take the same amount of estrogen pills as like your average trans person, don't I count as like, not really a [00:27:00] woman?

Oh, wait, that's really offensive. Oh, sorry.

Malcolm Collins: Oh, I love you. Bye. Love you too, Simone. And you are very feminine, by the way, and very hot. Okay?

Simone Collins: Oh, thank you. I'm not as gorgeous as you are. Oh my god, I love you so much, Monk. I love you too.

Malcolm and Simone interview Pastor Paul VanderKlay on why people are increasingly leaving faith traditions and how churches can adapt to strengthen communities. He sees Jordan Peterson as bringing meaning back for lost young men, but online spaces still lack the authentic bonds of real-life congregations. They discuss modeling values for children, the limitations of internet community, changes coming to old institutions, the importance of sacred spaces for honest dialogue, and more.

Paul VanderKlay: [00:00:00] Traditions of almost every kind are being tremendously tested and most of them are, are, are found wanting.

And this includes, now, every, all the Christians listening to this, I know a bunch of my people are going to find their way to your channel and listen to this. This includes the church, and what, so G. K. Chesterton talked about, I remember it was five or seven, but the five deaths of Christianity. He said basically Christianity has died five times, and I think that's true.

And I think the church, as most of us have known it, which, again, generalizations are really tough, but many of us have known churches that are Fundamentally modernist institutions sort of created around modernist assumptions, including my own denomination, many of these [00:01:00] churches are going away and they are going away fast.

Would you like to know more?

Malcolm Collins: All right. All right. So for any of our audience who does not know Paul Vander Klee, the man who is on the show here with us today you might be surprised to know that you're probably in the minority of our audience. Cause I just now was reviewing our most overlap channel subscribers.

And you are one of the most overlapped and I watch your videos. Pretty regularly. I, I, like, I haven't watched all of them. You produce videos almost as frequently as we do, which may be why we, you're extremely prolific. Yeah. Yeah. But they're actually really, really solid if you want to get I, I think one, like, insider politics of competent Protestant theology these days.

Oh, that's true. As, as well as what is, like, what do, like, competent Protestant theologists. think these days? How are they engaging? Because the truth is, is that if you are listening to, and this is something I always talk about, if you're listening to like the conservative [00:02:00] elite class, the vast majority of them are Catholic or Jewish in descent.

And so, you know, finding really good Protestant theologians who, who talk competently is, is, is much rarer within the current media landscape. And so I want to start with one. talking about how you came to the media landscape, because to me, you are somebody who is really I'd say almost the, , the paragon of an individual who is adapting new. technology and new social structures to serve an older religious position, which was the position of the preacher. How are you doing that? And how are you thinking about that right now?

Paul VanderKlay: That's a great question. I'm constantly thinking about it actually.

So I, I pastor a small dine church in Sacramento, California. Most churches, the size 60 year life cycle and. I would always have [00:03:00] interests beyond just the local church, and so I was involved with denominational things and all of this stuff. I blogged for years, just, just sort of playing with it, and then Jordan Peterson arose, and I thought this is probably the most important thing for me to pay attention to in my pastoral career.

Wow. And I looked around because, because, well, the reason was, I mean, you guys talk about this basically this monolithic urban culture. What, what, what this has done in churches is that people have sort of either strayed into new atheism or strayed into a light new, new ageism and everyone who's going down that road.

And what I saw happening behind Jordan Peterson were people coming back down that those roads and you hardly ever saw that before and significant numbers were doing it, listening to Jordan Peterson. He was reopening the conversation in a way that I didn't [00:04:00] understand, and so I wanted to understand it and the way I understand things is by talking to people, but.

People in my church weren't going to watch Jordan Peterson. They were all mostly older people. So then I looked to colleagues. Well, most of my colleagues weren't listening to Jordan Peterson and those who were, wouldn't admit it. So I knew I needed some new conversation partners. So I thought. I was reading, I was rereading.

I was real reading, I'm using ourselves to death at the time. And I thought there's something about this medium YouTube. And I had played with it a little bit with a member of my church, the Freddie and Paul show, you can still find it on my channel, but so if you want to get a sense of what my church is like, watch the Freddie and Paul show.

So, so I was seeing this and I thought I'll make a YouTube video. What can, what, what, what can it hurt? There are how many YouTube videos out there that have 10 to 20 viewers and that's, I just needed a few people to talk to. And then [00:05:00] something happened, which I didn't understand, which was this overwhelming response, emails coming to me.

And because I'm a pastor, I wanted to talk to these people. I wanted to hear from them. I wanted their stories. And so then I would zoom them or Skype them and have a conversation. And of course that didn't end the relationship that began the relationship. This was happening locally as well. So I started a Jordan Peterson meetup where before, you know, churches do all kinds of crazy things, try to get people through the door, you know, hot dogs, trunk or tree.

Um, You know, vacation, Bible school. And so I, and so a bunch of people, well, we should do a meetup. I'm like, nobody will come. So I did a meetup and a dozen people came who I had no idea who they were before. And the next month, another dozen came and it just kept growing. So this thing took on a life of its own pretty quickly.

And at about 2000 subscribers, I thought [00:06:00] seriously about just shutting the whole thing down because where's this going to go, but I couldn't shut it down because The conversations were too real and the people were too honest. And what I saw was that all real people really wanted was, can I, can I just talk about this?

Can I just process it with you? Let me know what you think. And I, my church is in a very distressed part of town. I'm always dealing with homeless people panhandling people who were right across the street from a gas station. So people, they want 20 bucks. They walk across the street, they knock on the church.

And I thought, Knock on the church doors looking for 20 bucks, but nobody knocks on the church doors looking for a reasonable conversation about what's most important and where they can actually be honest about what they think and believe. And I thought, I've always wanted a church that could do that.

And I'd be, I discovered, oh my goodness, that is exactly what we have happening here. So [00:07:00] I began to post with permission, some of the conversations that I was having with people. And then once people saw that I would talk to strangers, randos online, then the flood really started. Because then, you know, people just wanted to talk.

And so the, the local meet, then other people wanted meetup groups because they can't get to Sacramento. So I'm helping other people start meetup groups and other churches and in other places that became estuary, which is this whole, it's basically a conversation format where we have. Very open conversations with people.

And then the channel has just kept growing. It's grown slowly, which I'm grateful for. You know, I look at what happened to Jordan Peterson as kind of a cautionary tale, because when you grow that fast, it completely destroys your life. And I, I have, I have a wife, I have five children. I have a church. I didn't need my life destroyed and I didn't want my church.

Pushed out of my life by this. And so, you know, the church and I, the church has been people who [00:08:00] watched the channel have been very supportive of the church. The church probably still wouldn't be open if people didn't financially support

Malcolm Collins: the church. Where's the church, by the way, in case any of our listeners live in this area?

Paul VanderKlay: It's on Florin road in Sacramento. Okay. Great. And it's, it's Livingstone's Christian Reformed Church. You can find it. Just Google it. You'll find it. And, and so, and so the church, then, then, then visitors would start coming into church, but most of the people who'd wander into church would sit there and people are always saying, well, I want authenticity.

And I always tell them my church has so much authenticity. You really don't want it. What it is. Okay. You might say, Oh, I listened to Paul online. Okay. But Paul online is just one little element of what a church is because the church is a community.

Malcolm Collins: So, so talk about this, talk about what you can't achieve within the online sphere that you can't achieve within in person spaces and, and where you feel that you're achieving more within the online sphere.

Paul VanderKlay: That's an excellent question too. People [00:09:00] want to know and be known and to love and be loved. Online is an attentional economy. That just basically saps our attention. And what this means is that a limited number of us who get a certain degree of visibility with the algorithm, get a decent amount of attention and get all sorts of good things from it.

But the vast majority of people are participating in this online space. You know, they get a little entertainment, they get a few ideas, they get a little amusement, but they don't get anything behind it. And loneliness has gotten to. Has gotten to a point in our culture where even governments are doing things like, you know, you know, creating ministry of loneliness.

And I'm thinking a government is creating a ministry of loneliness. People have, people have no, I, another thing that I think of is that part of what happened with radio and especially with television [00:10:00] and that magazines is that the images that we are completely surrounded by. Subtly form our expectations of what life is, and as a pastor, you get a very real sense of just how hard and grimy and uncomfortable and painful life is for many, many people, and You know, all the way back to Thoreau, people live lives of quiet desperation.

They do all the time. And what churches have been able to do, at least to some degree, and what families do to a degree, and what friendships do to a degree, and pubs and all sorts of things, is at least give people a little tiny sense of community. That's someone out there. I remember, I think it was Jonathan Haidt talking about friendships.

He's like, you need a friend. If you go to school, if you don't have one friend, Boy, you know, you're in trouble. And if you think about it, [00:11:00] just one, and many people don't have that. And in fact, partly due to all of these screens and, and where, what we've done as a society, people are desperate and lonely and their lives are filled with pain.

Now they can media mediate that to a degree with television and radio. I can't tell you how often I'll go into a shut ins home and either am radio or television is on. All the time because they just want to hear another human voice.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. This is something I often think about. We live in this society today, which is something I often know, where you move to a new city often after college or something like that.

And yet your entire, one of the things people always complain about our school system is they're like, well, what we were kids learned to socialize. Where will kids learn to make friends? And one of the things I point out is that in our existing high school and college system, people only learn to make friends with people they're forced to interact with.

When somebody first leaves college and moves to a new city, I often wonder how, like, what percent of America has [00:12:00] no friends at all? Literally talks to no one else. My, like, guess would be it's probably between 15 and 21 percent of people living in the developed world right now. Just have not a single

Paul VanderKlay: friend.

Yep. Yep. I wouldn't be surprised. And, and as a pastor, I Well, and this is only accelerated by YouTube. I regularly bump into people who are, if not hermits, almost so, and their main form of mediation is this internet because with radio and television, it's, it's, it's completely one sided the internet, maybe that fourth wall will be broken a little bit.

So one of the things that I wanted was not just a big channel where I could get my ideas out there and, you know, maybe have a. A strategy for employment when my church dies, but I wanted, I wanted people to be able to find each other. [00:13:00] I wanted people to be able to make friends. They need friends.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah.

Talk about TPI, because this is something you haven't talked about. And some of our listeners don't know about TPI. No,

Paul VanderKlay: TCI, this corner of the internet. Oh, that's a TLC. No, sorry. TLC. That's it. This little corner, right? So I started with Jordan Peterson videos and then people were like, oh, there's an icon carbonate Jonathan, Jonathan Peugeot.

You should talk to him. Jonathan at that time at 4, 000 subscribers had about a thousand. So talk to Jonathan Peugeot. So, and Jonathan Peugeot also had been a foreign missionary in his past. And so we develop a relationship and another viewer starts sending me videos from John Verveche. Who's doing courses in Buddhism and cognitive science.

And so I start looking at his, and so part of what I did initially with, with his stuff was I didn't know who to talk to. And so I would just talk to the videos. So, you know, and I didn't even understand that YouTube had a genre of this. I didn't know anything about YouTube. [00:14:00] So I just started talking to the videos cause who's going to talk to me.

And so then I start doing this to other people's videos because I'm interested in the thoughts. And I also noticed because, because of my kids, that there's this thing called Twitch where people watch each other, play computer games, and I thought. That's kind of crazy. But then I thought, I wonder if people watch each other, watch videos.

And then I learned that that's a thing too. So I started talking to John Vervaeke and he was a wonderful guy. And so the three of us start talking and then it's like, well, we've got to really do some live events because we have to get people away from their screens into real spaces, getting to know each other, to actually.

Build the kind of bonds that human people, that human beings need one. And so then because we're doing this online, a bunch of other people start YouTube channels and start doing the same thing that I'm doing or having conversations. And, and then one woman who Sevilla King, she, she had gone to art school.

She was a therapist. She did a bunch of things. She had been doing little videos on [00:15:00] piercing one day. She basically says this little corner of the internet. And the funny thing about naming is that nobody knows quite what's going on. And then when a name comes in, it kind of gels it, then the group sort of has a degree of identity.

And so what happened was that. So we had a discord server. I was always a little frustrated with the format of discord because with these blocks, these walls of text, a lot of the people are auto didacts, which means that it means a whole bunch of things. But then you tended to get like, first we had hardly any Christians and then people start becoming Christians.

And then the Christians want to fight about theology. And it's like, I, I've grown up. I've lived all my life in the church. I know theological fights. I know my theological positions, but I don't want to space. If I have a limited amount of time with people, I don't want to fight about theology with them. I [00:16:00] want to find out about their stories because I want to find out about their lives.

And I'd like to, I'm a pastor. I'd like to help them knit together community around them. So a bunch of people start YouTube channels, a whole bunch of different things, and eventually that sort of becomes a kind of community, but that's where you get this internet question. Because the internet affords a capacity for community.

It's different from real life community. And figuring that out, I think we only are barely in the, barely at the frontier of this right now. Yeah. So in a lot of ways, that's sort of what I'm exploring. And it's a mess, but well,

Malcolm Collins: before you go further, I, I really, I've been writing down. I've got a whole series of tabs open with questions that we need to get to.

Because the first one is what do you think Jordan [00:17:00] Peterson was doing or saying that started bringing people back that other people hadn't done before?

Paul VanderKlay: That's a half hours of video trying to figure this out there. There's a lot to this so part of what happened. This is going to be a little theoretical. So my apologies. Part of what happened even before Descartes. I think Tom Holland is right about a lot of his ideas about Western history at the beginning or kind of in the, at the About the year 1000, there's, there becomes a, a separation of sort of these two realms that we have, and you can map these two realms in all sorts of different ways.

Ian McGilchrist sort of has the master and the emissary. People. Commonly can today. This has only been true for a couple hundred years. Talk, talk about natural and supernatural. We can talk about it in terms [00:18:00] of mental and physical, but we have the kind of experience that suggests, you know, for example, C.

S. Lewis, when he says, you know, every instance of human love will die by death or betrayal, but love itself doesn't die. Plato gets into this in terms of the form. So you have this separation and the separation Eventually became in the West sort of a dualism and Descartes sort of nails it. And so, and he's trying to figure out what's the, and it's, it revolves around the idea of substance.

So there's like matter is a material substance. And then Descartes says, well, there's a spiritual substance. And what eventually happens in the West is that we have degree of, we have a degree of skepticism about material, about immaterial substances or spiritual substances, and you get this differentiation and.

What Jordan Peterson starts doing through psychology and the Bible is to begin to give the Bible a degree of [00:19:00] plausibility that a lot of people who have sort of thrown off the supernatural said, Oh, and when he did the biblical series with Genesis, that really triggered something. Because people began to read the Bible and say, You know, unlike Sam Harris, unlike the new atheism, maybe, in fact, there is wisdom, perennial wisdom, even in a Darwinian sense that's encoded in the Bible that, in fact, if I listen to and learn from, I can maybe make my life better.

And one of the things that I noted, especially in the early years of doing this conversations, that nihilism in a good number of people, especially men, basically causes depression. Jordan Peterson did. I call him sort of the unauthorized exorcist because there's an unauthorized exorcist of the gospel of Mark that Jesus disciples are sort of saying, this guy's casting out demons in your name and we [00:20:00] should stop him.

And Jesus says, leave him alone. And so Jordan Peterson completely outside the church is basically casting out. On a variety of levels, a lot of the demons that have sort of been possessing our culture and possessing individuals. And when people, he sort of would break nihilism in people. And when they woke up from their nihilism, well, guess what?

You know what they want to do? They want to get a job. They want to start eating better. They want to maybe that maybe turn that love interest into a girlfriend and that girlfriend into a wife. And then they want to have kids and then they want to build something. I mean, basically. This whole group of men sort of woke up and decided to once again participate in the human race instead of wasting themselves, as the cliche says, in their mother's basement watching porn covered with Cheetos dust.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, so I want to know what you think of [00:21:00] Simone's criticism of Jordan Peterson's teachings. Which you have in the past, Simone said that it feels to you very much like Jungian psychology dressed up with a conservative aesthetic. Am I, am I accurately?

Paul VanderKlay: Yeah. And what's so interesting hearing about your experience of Jordan Peterson Colin, I mean, I'm sure you've consumed like way more of his content than Malcolm and I have.

Is that maybe like, I'm not looking at it through a religious lens at all. Like I'm looking at it more through the lens of the things that I understand. And there's just, So much Jungian psychology and it just rubs me the wrong way because anything that's like Freudian or Jungian, I'm like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no and I don't know, like, I, I, I get, I, my feeling about him is he told the internet to make their beds and they were like, yes, thank you for being it.

That father

Malcolm Collins: figure, I'm going to take a different answer here. Yeah. I think that he was literally the first person. I think it was about branding. He was the [00:22:00] first person who created an intellectually feeling path to conservative traditions and, and before this, nobody, there was this branding in society that conservative traditions meant stupid and he was the first person.

Who said conservative traditions don't mean stupid, and he rose to fame through the left attacking him. So, he used a debate, like if you look at how he rose to fame, it was a debate he had with a feminist reporter in Canada that then went viral. And then when people saw this and they saw that conservative attitudes didn't mean stupid, that led to his rise to fame.

What's interesting to me actually is contrasting Jordan Peterson was Milo. Because Milo came before Milo Yiannopoulos, he's referring to. Yes. And, and Milo equally showed that conservatism didn't mean stupid, but he also made conservatism look kind of crazy [00:23:00] and unhinged. Whereas Jordan Peterson made conservatism.

feel very, like, I think it was all about the aesthetic and the narrative made it feel very much constrained and put together. I don't know. These are, these are just our thoughts. You can. Yeah. But Paul, do

Paul VanderKlay: you really think that Jordan Peterson is first and foremost about faith? Jordan Peterson is first and foremost a university professor who cared about his students and a clinical psychologist who cared about his patients.

You have to understand that about Jordan. Now this second phase of him as sort of a getting into the political realm, that's not really his native environment. If you really scratch him, he cared about helping regular people make their life better. I think you're both right. He's clearly a union and He, at the same time, I think you're also, I think you're also right, Malcolm, that he, he, the man in his moment sort of found [00:24:00] their, their time together.

And, you know, it's, it's not an accident that this happened at the same time as sort of the Trump emergence. So there's a populism, I mean, Peterson also. It's, it's really helpful to go to the live events and meet the people and talk to them. Now, this is, this is part of the reason when you introduced me as a theologian, this is part of the reason that I always sort of correct people.

I'm not a theologian. A theologian is an academic. I'm a pastor. Now pastors have to dabble with theology, but I've, part of the reason why I don't fight about theological models on the internet is because all of these models are limited and the emergence of Jordan Peterson in reality, We can sort of speculate on models.

Models have their place and they're super, super useful, but it's this, it's, it's in the commotion of everyday life down here where heaven and earth come together, [00:25:00] that things actually happen. And so I could probably write a list of a dozen reasons why Jordan Peterson changed as many lives as he did. And probably a lot of them are valid.

But that doesn't mean that any one of those things is sort of key to why it happened, because reality is just that complex. Because there have been a lot of people who've done similar things to Jordan Peterson. I mean, I've got books from him. A lot of people have sort of worked Jung in this space and had sort of little eruptions.

And I talked to one Canadian academic early on that basically said, yeah, another year or two and Jordan Peterson will pass out a favor. And he listed three or four guys who I could recognize, and it happened. Yeah, there's a lot of different reasons for that.

Malcolm Collins: So why do you think so, so you talked about the people coming back to the faith.

Why do you think people were leaving the face? What do you think were the core hooks that, that the, the, this force, whatever we want to call [00:26:00] it, the urban monoculture was using to pull people out of the face. Why do you think it was working so effectively compared with historic conditions?

Paul VanderKlay: Well, I, the video that.

Someone sent me the first one I'd watch of yours in terms of why people are leaving. I thought you're dead on right about a ton of that stuff. I think in my experience for a lot of people, I think there are a lot of factors to this. Number one, people are formed by their expectations are formed by technology and we now are accustomed to certain kinds of technology that works so reliably.

We have a sense of, well, that's what truth is. And the scientific revolution and really the technological revolution, the industrial revolution really created those expectations for us. So therefore when, so one common story of why people leave a particular religious tradition is because they had a bad experience, something [00:27:00] bad happened.

And at some deep place in their heart, they thought something like this, that if I am a good boy or girl, if I show my allegiance to Jesus or whatever God they have bad things won't happen to me now, ask almost any pastor if that is true in the past. No, even ask almost any of those people if they believe that they will say no, but when that bad thing happens at a very deep level in their life, a plausibility structure begins to break free.

And this urban monoculture has in many ways delivered. On some promises in a way better than a lot of religions have at, I think, a fairly shallow level. And I think for this reason, we're going to see the urban monoculture will hold people to a degree, but it's only going to hold a certain segment of people.

But those people tend to be highlighted in. [00:28:00] All of the media that the urban monoculture really uses for it's for proselytizing. And I, I've known this because, so my grandfather pastored churches, mostly of Dutch immigrants and Dutch farmers. My father pastored a church of African Americans just outside of New York City.

And what you begin to realize if you spend a lot of time with African Americans is that, well, they also have a culture and their culture has roots and their roots are in the South. So they've got a deep amount of Christianity built in them. They've got some African, they've got a whole ton of stuff in it.

And so I remember when COVID hit and everybody in California is like, we've got to get this vaccine into people. I thought. I've lived in the black community all my life. Guess who is not really going to be too quick to queue up for that vaccine? They are not going to jump on these bandwagons because they have seen these bandwagons before.

So American culture tends to have this little level that's in the media and, [00:29:00] and, and it's just a reinforcing narrative. And of course now with with with social media, all kinds of other narratives now have space again. Those narratives had space before just because there weren't the kind of mass media that happened in the 20th century.

And and now with other medias, things are breaking down again. And, gosh,

Malcolm Collins: it's really interesting that you point this out because this is something that we've noticed as well. This idea that the media class was in our country right now, and it's almost like they've become a narrower class than they were even historically is so out of touch with the other groups.

Especially the groups that they purport to protect or help that one of the groups that we're really, really close with because of our company and our work and everything like that is the recent Hispanic immigrant population. And they communicate the way that they relate to truth. It's so [00:30:00] different from the way that the left thinks they do and and from what the left is saying that they their their truce networks Which is very different from the black community because I think you're absolutely right about the american black community Within the hispanic community their truce networks are family based.

Where they have large networks of intermarried families, and that's how they transmit information and stuff like what's going on in the news is largely irrelevant outside of these, these family networks to the extent where they're actually, you know, we talk about all the problems that we're having with the internet and everything like that.

You're not seeing this within the traditional Hispanic community. They've just. much, but they've just retreated back to these family networks. To the extent where, you know, one of our friends was telling us he has friends outside of his family and he gets teased by his cousins about it. Like they call, they call him a white boy for having friends who are not family members.

And it's like, that's how like intense these family networks are. And it shows it. To me, [00:31:00] when I look at like this or the way the black community relates to authority, which like the Democrats don't get it all a, these communities are not talking to each other, even in the slightest way anymore.

And we do not realize how different, different American populations

Paul VanderKlay: are. That's exactly right. And that's exactly right. And part of the reason, so there's a, there's a thesis by a scholar named Mark Knoll, who was from the Christian reform church. I think went to Notre Dame has sucked up a lot of the Christian reform intelligentsia.

And he basically had the frontier thesis in terms of American church. So what happens in the history of the United States is that of course, the British, the British really wanted to sort of contain the colonies so they wouldn't have Indian problems West of it. And a big part of the American revolution is.

People wanted that land and they could sort of push out the Indians. And so, and so America has always been an [00:32:00] amalgamation of different tribes within it. And more recently, more American history books have, have looked at that. But part of what happened in terms of the church was the, the churches in the, in the colonies were the ones that came over from Europe.

What happens when Americans went out is that family bonds are ruptured, all kinds of bonds are ruptured, and Americans sort of have to sort of make new bonds, and so it's a very open space where things can happen, and that's part of the reason why the Bible takes on such primary focus in American Evangelicalism, because the only thing they had in common was the Bible, not all these historic creeds and confessions of Europe.

Well, similar things have been happening, and it's, and it's, For a while, when we had mass media, when there were three tv networks and we had a common culture And and partly also because at that time in the 60s and the 50s and 60s There was a great degree of attention of trying to bring catholics jews and african americans into this group[00:33:00] you know, so the hispanics sort of were Somewhat catholic but I mean and for that and now that the sort of the mass media has broken down People are just unfamiliar with people who are mostly familiar with screens are unfamiliar with their neighbors on less.

They're from a community that has its own ways of deep connection. And so that's why, yeah, the, I often, I watched the woke stuff and I was thinking there's a certain class of African Americans who have sort of been brought up into the ruling class, but most of them, they watch this stuff and they just kind of.

Because they've seen regime after regime go through and they're not believing much of it because they mostly believe what they know from their own lives, which is how most people do it. So back to your question about the deconversion. So you're right that this urban monoculture [00:34:00] took a lot of people out and the more and more of our, of our world is mediated by these images.

That subtly frames expectations and incentive structures. And so that has really broken apart a lot of traditional white churches. But, you know, it's, to me, one of the more, one of the most interesting things that we're going to watch is going to be what happens with Islam in the West. Because I mean, again, all of these systems are far too complex for any of us to actually be able to accurately track.

There's just way too many variables. But Islam is, you know, that's going to just be a fascinating thing. And that's mostly going to happen in Europe. In the United States, it's Latentum. And The history of, so I, I spent my first eight [00:35:00] years of seven years of professional ministry in Latin America doing missionary work.

And so you begin to get a sense of, you go to that place and it's like. Yeah, a lot of people just fly down here to go to the beach, but if you live there, it's like, yeah, you know, culture is real and part of where I learned that is, again, I was growing up in a black community in a mostly black church in a white denomination in a, in Christian reform schools, which were sort of, you know, one of the things that I find so interesting about your project is that I have watched the Dutch try resisting cultural assimilation Yeah.

All my life and fail. And right now my denomination is just sort of being completely pulled apart and assimilated in some of the larger things in our culture. But we had our own Christian schools. You didn't marry outside the Christian reform church. You know, we had, we had all of these enclaves and this has just been.

Pulled apart. And so now [00:36:00] Hispanics, it's, we're in the middle of a crazy, crazy social experiment. And of course the internet is just gasoline on the fire.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, I do.

Paul VanderKlay: I want to pull on though, what you've said. This isn't the only time you've said it where like, if you got too big, especially too fast, that it would sort of destroy you and destroy the community.

I mean, part of me, I want to push on that and understand why you believe that, because you've reached an amazing number of people. You've changed their lives. Like it's super clear that you've created a community online that is very, very real for these people. And you have found ways to make it participatory.

I mean, Even as a pastor, you're in a one to many relationship. Like you can't speak one on one with absolutely everyone who shows up. And so even in person, there's a limit to your reach, but online, your reach is scaled in a way that's incredible. Can I understand a little bit more about why you think?

Growing your [00:37:00] community online would be damaging because yeah, I just, I really, I'm not sure if I think that's true, but I would be open to you convincing me. Okay. Well, well, I'll say a few things. I, my, my main employment remains my local congregation and I've been with these people 26 years. A number of them are in the last few years of their life and all they really want is for their pastor to bury them.

And I want to be able to do that for them. The number, so, you know, there's the Dunbar number, and how true that is, I don't know. And you're right, as a pastor, I'm used to one to many relationships. But I also, and for that reason, I have a sense of, you have to fairly quickly try to hand off people into other relationships, if the community is going to cohere.

And it's a little bit of a dance because usually what happens and nothing at the internet hasn't changed this people come to my church [00:38:00] because maybe they saw a little thing online or, you know, maybe they just walked in and saw me on stage preaching and then something touched their heart and they say, wow, he touched my heart.

I want to be friends with pastor Paul. Okay. How many friends can Pastor Paul have? Pastor Paul has five children. Pastor Paul has a wife. Pastor Paul has a job. Pastor Paul has all of these things. And so it's, it's sort of the pace at which things grow impacts what exactly you're going to have. And so I wanted things to grow at a rate where people could find each other and actually be able to build.

Friendships with one another to scale away. One of the things that I noted is that just like with it, I mean, when we talk about getting it on the ground floor of, let's say a company or something, that's a real thing. And so as this little corner of the internet has grown a lot of, so [00:39:00] there's, let's say I'm at the top of a certain hierarchy, then there's a whole group of people who found me within the first month.

That are right there at the second level. And now there's always a few anomalous people who sort of shoot up beyond themselves, but the whole community sort of grows together and there are very subtle ways in which these lieutenants are gatekeepers. And also part of it is what we have done in this little corner of the internet is not really premised around, let's say a doctrinal statement.

This is a statement that we agree with. No, we, we, we're hard pressed to find a lot that we agree with. What we have is sort of a style of relationship. Now, I just gotta actually, I was late to this because I got a message from someone that said, Oh, yesterday's yesterday's live stream was ugly. They were calling you a liar.

They were [00:40:00] saying you're not a leader and they were bad mouth. I know your thick skin and winsome, but and and so. But the thing is being pastor of a real live church is really good for those kinds of things. Because if you think people get mad at you for things you do online, try doing it in a real life church.

That's where people really get mad. And so a lot of the stuff online is like, yeah, someone online is angry with me. They don't believe me.

Malcolm Collins: Wait, wait, wait. A live stream? Was this like some random live stream was in your community where they decided to? And this

Paul VanderKlay: is part of the difficulty. Is that right now, in terms of this little community, it's funny because there's a sort of a fear and you see this with churches to there's a sort of this little fierce debate.

Is this a real thing or not? They have all this philosophical ideas. So that's something they can chew on. And then is Paul our leader? What is a leader? A leader is someone who says yes and no. Now in the church, In an actual [00:41:00] organization and institution, there are things that I can say yes to and no to in ways I decide things that have consequence within the organizational structure.

This isn't quite that. There's no organizational structure. There's no, yeah, there's, you know, there's a little bit of money going, moving around and memberships and YouTube AdSense and that kind of stuff. But I'm not paying anyone. I have zero employees. I can't hire and fire anyone. And we don't have a structure like we have in the church where someone might go under formal discipline for believing something or doing something, what have you, there's none of those things.

And so part of what's happening is, you know, there's people, and there's another thing you learned as a pastor, people come to communities with their expectations and they don't even know what their expectations are, but you begin to discover them when certain. Expectations don't get met or fulfilled and then people get a little bit upset because I thought Paul was going to do this.

And [00:42:00] the thing you also have to realize is that, you know, let's the AA people say, well, expectations are preconceived resentments.

Malcolm Collins: Hold on. If you would mind indulging us, what are the expectations people are coming in with that are causing the conflicts?

Paul VanderKlay: Oh, I really have, I don't have a very clear idea of it. Because they themselves don't have a clear idea of it. I

Malcolm Collins: assume they want you to be more conservative or more progressive. Is that it?

Like it's a political fight.

Paul VanderKlay: It's a political, they they'd love for it. So about four years ago before COVID, when this thing sort of started taking on steam, people wanted me to found a 501 C three and to develop a board of directors and to basically institutionalize this thing. And so. Paul Vander Klee, anchor this little corner anchor estuary ink, something like this.

And I said, no, that's it. Things are way too early. We don't even know what we're doing here. And in one of the [00:43:00] things, so before I did any of this, I was involved in church planting. And one of the things that you realize with church planting is that pace of growth and institutional structure Those these things sort of have to find themselves and sort of a rule of hand is don't start a structure until You really know you'll need it or at least anticipate needing it soon Because with the pace of change of change right now in our culture You'll almost always structure badly and it will hurt the sort of the organic growth of the thing.

So I don't, you know, so people wanted me to start to start an organization and then people, you know, and then suddenly there'll be guidelines and boundary rules. And, and I said, first of all, I said, I don't have time to manage that. Second of all, I know myself well enough to know I'm not a great manager of those kinds of things.

I run a small little church and even the tiny little bit of administration I have to do here, I really don't like. So if we're [00:44:00] actually going to do something like that, then suddenly I'm, I've got a board that I've got to deal with. I already have a church board. I have to deal with that. I'm going to, then I'm going to have to have a structure and I'm probably going to not be able to work in the church.

And then I'm going to need a budget of. Somewhere probably about half a million to a million dollars a year. Then I'm going to raise that money. Then I'm going to be, and I said, I don't want to do any of these things. I would love to do what I can to facilitate community for people. But in my opinion, it's going to be fairly ad hoc.

It's going to be fairly loosey goosey. And that's what I'm comfortable with right now. And that's what I can do right now. Well,

Malcolm Collins: I imagine this is what people actually want. I mean, other than the people who are high within the status hierarchy, there's always different motivations, depending on where you are within the status hierarchy.

One question, one final question I had for you, because this is something that you've mentioned on our videos, and I want to hear your thoughts on it. If you were going to give advice to someone today, to keep, and I know this is hard, and I know this is not something you do, but to keep their children within the tradition they grew up [00:45:00] in, What would that advice be?

What are the biggest threats to our children? When

Paul VanderKlay: I'm at wherever I'm at, whenever I'm asked for parenting advice, I say this, be who you want your children to become. Oh yeah. First of all, let's talk about human beings. We think we know what we are. We think we know ourselves. We really don't know ourselves very well. My children know me in a way that I don't know myself.

My wife knows me in ways I don't know myself. My church people know me in ways I don't know myself. There's, I have a certain degree of delusion about myself that is really difficult to, to, to cure. So part of what is [00:46:00] happening right now is that. Traditions of almost every kind are being tremendously tested and most of them are, are, are found wanting.

And this includes, now, every, all the Christians listening to this, I know a bunch of my people are going to find their way to your channel and listen to this. This includes the church, and what, so G. K. Chesterton talked about, I remember it was five or seven, but the five deaths of Christianity. He said basically Christianity has died five times, and I think that's true.

And I think the church, as most of us have known it, which, again, generalizations are really tough, but many of us have known churches that are Fundamentally modernist institutions sort of created around modernist assumptions, including my own [00:47:00] denomination, many of these churches are going away and they are going away fast.

Now, I, I continue to be a Christian, and I continue to believe in the church, but I think what we are going to see is churches continue to, there's going to be new kinds of churches that we cannot imagine yet. That's really hard for the church. Now, part of what's been interesting in this whole thing is that a lot of people have gone grown interested in orthodoxy and Catholicism, and I think there are real reasons for.

people's desire for these very sacramental, very ancient churches with certain constructions. And I think that's because modernity as we've experienced it for the last 500 years, especially the last 200 years is receding quickly. And so people are looking for something old, [00:48:00] something reliable, something structured and something they can get their hands on like a sacrament.

Yeah. I. think the people coming into those churches are going to change those churches in ways that many of the older people who are really excited about these new people coming in, they don't have any idea because the people cut themselves coming in, they don't have any idea. And so for this reason, I mean, I've seen it in, I've seen it in my own denomination.

Like I said, the Christian Reformed Church, ostensibly Calvinist, which talked about divine election, did everything in their power to ensure that their children would maintain the faith. And I think the Christian Reformed Church Is probably in the top 10% of denominations that succeeded until the 1980s.

I mean, Mm-Hmm. . The Christian Reform Church had a thick, yeah, thick culture, but it's basically been torn apart. The urban monoculture [00:49:00] has had its way with it. And what that means, not only is that churches that have sort of bought in completely to the urban monoculture, they're going the way of the main line.

Yeah. The other side of churches has been like, duh, you know. Double down on having a bunker mentality. I don't have a lot of confidence in that path either. Yeah, because it's, you know, Rene Girard has this mimetic rivalry thing. If you decide the urban monoculture is your enemy, you are probably going to become a bizarro.

alternate, you know, it's going to map on you. So in other, in other words, what, in other words, what you need to actually create a sustainable culture is something that has a different root from the opposition. It's going. And for that reason, people are looking for very old things. I think that's part of the reason people are so interested today in evolutionary psychology.

Because it's the new natural laws, one of my friends just recently said. I,

Malcolm Collins: I love [00:50:00] this interpretation. So today I spent, we have the longest episode we've ever done going live soon. It's going to be like two hours or something. I was working on it today. And it's, it's on this question and it focuses on a specific hypothesis or sort of conundrum where I was like, okay, my kids are like me, right?

So if I'm going to understand why have I joined a traditionalist religion, I need to look at why my dad left. And the answer that he chose to leave Christianity was he got punished for questioning the Noah's Ark story. He was like, this does not seem logically plausible. Let's go through it. And he was like, I will not stay in a tradition that punish it.

And people who know me, they're like, yeah, Malcolm would have done that too. Had he grown up in a, you know, a conservative Christian family. And so it's made me think, well, one of the problems that we have is that when we say we want to be looser about these kinds of stories, every option I have for my kids today, loosens [00:51:00] up on all the morality as well.

When you loosen up on the stories, you loosen up on the morality. And for me, the question is, is there a way to reconstruct things that loosens up on the, the, the. scientific plausibility stories, but that doesn't loosen up on any of the moral restrictions. And that might be an absurd thing to try to create, but I do suspect that's what the winner of this.

I don't think it's going to be necessarily what we're trying to build, but I think it's going to be. Whoever builds that successfully is going to be the person who wins.

Paul VanderKlay: So, so, if there's something at the heart of sort of what has been happening with Jordan Peterson, Jonathan Pajot, John Verveke, it's the idea that John Verveke calls combinatorial explosiveness.

Hmm. In that The world is too complex for any of us to manage. [00:52:00] When we talk about morality in a context that is being colonized by evolutionary psychology, the idea is, what practices, what do we say yes to, what do we say no to, that will finally achieve, what, in terms of a Darwinian process? Nobody can figure that out because there are far too many elements And this is part of the reason again to answer the jordan peterson question.

Why do why are people now interested in religion? Ironically, it's because of darwinism that people have begun to and I don't think they know this intellectually yet Yeah. They have begun to sense that, huh, if I want to figure out how human beings work, I have to sort of look at an ancient record of track record, an ancient track record.

And you know what? There is nothing that we have like religion [00:53:00] for providing that data. Yeah. And so the winners in religious competition are probably the best place to start to think about how should we live in the future. I mean, that's at the heart of, and Jordan didn't sort of say it directly that way.

That's what's happening. And so when I saw your channel, I thought oh these people get it And and part of why you two are so fun. And this is why I love the estuary project So what I started doing in churches i've as i've told churches You need to have conversation groups where that little boy can go and say I think a worldwide flood is bunk and everybody says All right, cool.

I mean it's tom holland's story. It's story of how many people because What happens? It used to be that the university was supposed to be a place where you could have open ideas, blah, blah, blah. That's done. Ironically, churches are places, potentially [00:54:00] some churches, perhaps where you can go and have an honest conversation.

And so that's what I want for churches. I want them to be places where people can come in. And then the group. So we have this little process where the group Can have a conversation about what those people that they want to talk about. And that, again, I think back to this leadership thing that involves more modeling, you know, we've had people that say, we need to, we need to list the rules of this, like, well, usually by the time you have to list rules, something's already broken.

So the longer you can put off listing rules, the more modeling you can do. Probably the further you'll get along.

Malcolm Collins: Nice. Yeah. I really like this, this insight here. Yeah, this, that's great. Well, this conversation has been fantastic and I hope we can do something like this again. This will be one of our longer episodes, but we've started doing that with interviews recently.

But this is fantastic. And I really do hope our listeners who are interested in, in what you're hearing from him, either check out his church. [00:55:00] In person, if you're in his area, or at least check out his YouTube

Paul VanderKlay: channel. Come at 9am to the estuary meeting. So we have estuary at 9am and then we have the worship service at 11.

Now, again, the worship services, some music, me preaching, it's a, you know, I've got an older church here. This is what they like. And, and, and I, I, I work for them, but at 9am we do estuary. That's where you'll have a much more open, free flowing conversation.

Malcolm Collins: That's spectacular. And look, five kids, right? We gotta be working on this, people.

This should be the

Paul VanderKlay: norm. You won't know what your kids believe until they're in their 50s and 60s. Oh, maybe. Think about that. Maybe.

Malcolm Collins: I hope I live long enough to have a wager with you guys.

I think we're going to have little firebrands. You know, one of the people that

Paul VanderKlay: I agree

Malcolm Collins: with, one of the people coming on our show soon again is Ayla who came [00:56:00] from a cow. I don't know if you know, we're having her back on. She came from a Calvinist tradition and just, I think her dad

And yeah, I we'll, we'll be doing no, I, I expect our kids will be that way too. I think if they're going to break away from whatever we're doing, they're going to do it loud and early. Yes.

Paul VanderKlay: I'm going to say this. I would not be surprised. I'm not saying it's going to happen. I would not be at all surprised if Ayla.

When she gets in her fifties and sixties, doesn't look a lot like her father.

Malcolm Collins: I don't look a lot like him now. I think I know. I think she has an incredible amount in common with him. And if you read her writings, she has meditated on this recently where she's like, yeah, I actually am a lot like my dad. It's funny because she's like, why do you guys feel so close to me? And I'm like, Oh, we're like dissidents from the Calvinist cultural group. You're a dissident for you feel very similar to us [00:57:00] culturally. And she's like, she doesn't like, she, she gets it. Like she's friends with us, but I don't think she understands what we mean when we're like, Yeah.

Like we're part of the same family, like we're, we're distant and we have different beliefs, but we're still part of the same larger family.

Paul VanderKlay: Well, I, you know, again, part of what, what part of the beauty about an actual community, I remember some of the fire brands when I was growing up where the preacher's kids, see, my father was always very open.

And so we didn't have a strict house at all. But the stricter the house, the worse the preacher's kid. And now that, you know, I just turned 60 and these people are about my age, they're just like their parents. It's an amazing trajectory to watch. Ah, I love it. I love

Malcolm Collins: it. Well, we'll, we'll recreate that for our kids and hopefully we have a lot.

You know, you're on number four now. You're not at five yet, Simone. You got more work to do to catch up with Paul Vanderclay.

Paul VanderKlay: True [00:58:00] story. Yeah. We deeply admire you and I'm so glad you came on the podcast. So thank you so much for joining us. Well, I'd very much like to continue talking with you guys because you're, you're so open and you're so smart.

And I, I just enjoy people. I mean, I wouldn't be a pastor if I didn't enjoy people. And you two are, are really a breath. Like one person said after our. Conversation on my channel. Oh, what a breath of fresh air. And, and again, you'll, you'll get a lot of crap from a lot of other people for a lot of other reasons.

That's just the internet, but you two are, you two are well used to that.

Malcolm Collins: Oh, we utilize it to spread. We're not like you. I want to grow as fast as Jordan Peterson. I want to replace Jordan Peterson. That's our long term goal. I want a loving, happily married couple that respects each other to be the next Jordan Peterson.

And I think with a lot of kids, not with like one or two measly kids. I think that that's how we, we save this whole system and that's what we're working on. And I told this [00:59:00] to one woman, she goes, can't we all work together? And I go, yes, but there can only be one best. And that's what we're working on.

So there you have it,

Paul VanderKlay: Paul. Now we have it. Yeah. You can always look to Brigham Young. I mean,

Malcolm Collins: Hey, I like Brigham Young. I think Brigham Young is the true founder of Mormonism. I don't think Joseph Smith really founded what we today call Mormonism. I could go deep into Brigham Young. I think he's intellectually very sophisticated.

I think a little less sophisticated than Orson Pratt. I, sorry, I don't wanna go too far into Mormonism here because we're gonna talk about this in some, yeah. Let's just say

Paul VanderKlay: the man has pizazz, you know? Yeah. Bring me Young is quite a very interesting guy. , I'll say that. Very interesting guy. . I know most of my, I know most of what I know about Mormonism from a very Mormon homeland homeless addict, and I've learned a ton from him.

Interesting. Yeah. Addicts are. The homeless people are just an incredible source of learning [01:00:00] about the real world. They really are.

Malcolm Collins: This is actually an interesting point that I want to point to people is historically people had multiple sources of information about the world. They had the media elite and they had their local pasture and their local pasture or.

You know, rabbi or whatever, was always learning from homeless addicts as well as learning from their congregation. Whereas the media elite never had that connection to those flows of information. This is one of the reasons we become so dissociated as a population is because we disintermediated our pastors as a source of information.

Paul VanderKlay: Yeah. And that's fairly recent as early as the fifties. Pastors, you know, if the government would do a panel, they'd always have a minister or two on it. And that's, that's, that, that went away.

Malcolm Collins: Anyway, this has been fantastic. Yeah. Please come back on at

Paul VanderKlay: some point we would. Oh, I'd love to know you guys.

And, and I want to have, I want to, I want to continue. I keep watching your stuff [01:01:00] and Oh, great.

Malcolm Collins: I'm really excited to hear if you do do a response to this that I was doing today. Cause I'm really. We go over every one of the major reasons that people leave the main traditional religions. Oh, really? And we try to come up with solutions for them.

Yeah, like, I go through like the good God problem. This is how can I, and it's a lot of stuff where like, atheists pull at the wrong strings. Often they, they pull it nuances. The good God problem is actually a problem that drives people away from religion. The local revelation with miracles, but a universalizing religious tradition is also a big problem that we go into.

We go into yeah, we just go into all of these, like, how can you have good answers to these when people attack them? Because I think about them in terms of my own kids. I think too often people in religious traditions, they say people left because they didn't like the rules. And I actually have almost never seen this.

People usually leave because they're disappointed in the leadership. They don't understand the logic behind one of the [01:02:00] rules that they see as arbitrarily cruel or they see a logical inconsistency. Like those are the only three reasons people really leave. So if you can build a structure without those, you don't have to worry.

We'll see.

Paul VanderKlay: There's, there's all there's, there's almost always a lot of reasons. And even the ones who leave probably aren't fully aware of all of the reasons they're leaving. I mean, people are, people are just complex this way and you just never get around that. So we, we talk a good game, but you know, I think Jonathan Heitwood is the rider and the elephant.

It's a strong point.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, yeah. Oh, oh, by the way, if I was going to tell my listeners to start with one video by you, what would it be? Oh,

Paul VanderKlay: good question. I'd say let the algorithm decide because, I mean, the algorithm for as flat footed as it can be sometimes, it knows. What you have watched and what other people [01:03:00] who are watching what you're watching.

I mean, there's a reason our channels have a crossover.

Malcolm Collins: True. Yeah. Cause we didn't have any initial audience crossover. Our initial crossover was all the evolution bros, i. e. mostly Jolly Heretic people, because we talk with him and we have a lot in common with him and a lot of crossover with the manosphere, like the red pill sphere and everything like that.

Cause we've done a lot of stuff with Sandman. But like MGTOW and stuff like that. But you. That's totally new. Like there's no reason for us to have a viewer crossover and get viewers who we had reaching out to us in the early days. We're watching your channel before they were watching

Paul VanderKlay: ours. Right.

And for that reason let the algorithm, even just because you watched this, you know, you guys are probably going to put me in the show notes or something. That algorithm is going to look at that and they're going to serve you up a video. From me. And, you know, 50, 70 percent you might be interested because the algorithm knows all the details.

I put out [01:04:00] over 2000 videos and most of them are long. And so it's really hard to get a sense of, you know, what, what you'd be interested in, but very

Malcolm Collins: conversational and authentic, very different from ours. We try to make them memeable.

Paul VanderKlay: Yeah, it's, see, and again, also for my channel, the videos that I think are most important are the ones that are most difficult to watch because they're usually conversations with random people and the way YouTube sort of functions.

I mean, if I, I did a conversation with Jonathan Peugeot last week, and of course that one just shot right up because Jonathan Peugeot is an audience. And one of these days I'm sure, you know, I'll, I'll say, okay, Jordan, it's time. And then Jordan, Jordan Peterson and I'll do a conversation and that one will go crazy.

But the most, the people, the most important people in your life are not the ones on the screens. They're the ones you share your home with and they're your children and they're your parents. Those are the most important people in your life. And actually that's what your channel is

Malcolm Collins: about. [01:05:00] Yeah, well, I, I disagree.

I'm the most important in all of our viewers life. I'm just going to have a kid's life. Malcolm

Paul VanderKlay: goes, we all go. It's so

Malcolm Collins: sad. I'm joking. Of course it's Simone. Who's the most important in your person. No, no, no,

Paul VanderKlay: no, no. Jordan and Tammy, they have a, they have a, I believe those two have quite a fine relationship.

And again, I think. Probably one of the most important thing about your channel is in fact, the way I hear you two talking about each other and you are modeling, you are modeling something in a relationship that I think is profoundly important and what's interesting about you two. I mean, Jordan and Tammy are about my age.

You two are a lot younger and I can see the models of, I mean, you've, you've brought into your relationship a lot of the values of the urban monoculture. You defer to each other. You value each other. You very much are of this culture. That's true. Now you're also playing with [01:06:00] it. So .

Malcolm Collins: Anyway, have a, a great one.

Yes. Thank you again, Paul . Good to have you on. Alright. Yeah.

Paul VanderKlay: The first of many recording

Malcolm Collins: the

Paul VanderKlay: second of many.

We are making bread and now we're adding ingredients. What's in here? What do you think? What's inside? Can you guess, Torsten?

A kadu kuk? Oh, Octavian's opening it. What's that? It's salt. Salt! Yay! What is this? Can I see what it is? What do you think? Look at it. What do you think it is? It's like soap. It's like soap? What is it? What does it taste like? Ice! Ice? You think it's ice? Yeah. It's yummy. It's yummy? So what do you think it is?

It's sugar. Sugar! Can [01:07:00] I put it in? Yeah, it's sugar. We're going to have to start putting it in. Okay? Okay. Okay. Yes! Absolutely. Yes. Yummy! Good. Are you jumping in, Torsten? Just a little bit right here. Wow. That's what we're gonna do. That was crazy, right? Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Your sister said bad. Now, what's this, you guys? What do you think it is, qua? Good job. Now we need to put in 420 grams of it. Do you wanna help you? Very careful. Yeah. Ready? What does the scale say? You wanna do it too? All right, we're gonna let Torsten do a little egg. So did we do water? Yes. Did we do oil?

Yes. Did we do salt? Yes! Did we do [01:08:00] sugar? Yes! Did we do flour? Yes! Now we have one more thing. Instant yeast. Do you know what instant yeast is? That's a close one. That was a close one? Yeah. We'll get that in five hours. All the things we need are in. So, hold this bucket, tell me, is it heavy?

No, that goes all together into the machine, okay? I think all the settings are right now, so let's press the start button. Yeah, go ahead and press it. Oh, good job! What's going on with the things we put in? Bread is done. Are you excited? Does it smell good?

Yep. Inside the bucket, [01:09:00] right? You just a little bit worried. Nope. You're a big worried. Yep. Why? Put some peanut butter on a bread. Take a bite and tell me what you think.

Do you like the bread that you made?

You do? Yay! You made bread!

Malcolm and Simone discuss shocking new statistics revealing fertility rates plummeting faster than expected across Latin America, with countries seeing 30-60% drops in under a decade. They analyze root cultural causes and link to contraception access. This mirrors dire global trends barely being reported on, often dismissed as a racist issue, though in reality massively threatening Hispanic and African cultures too.

Malcolm Collins: [00:00:00] Stunningly, except for Mexico, all of the countries listed in this graph have already dropped below this level. Uruguay, Costa Rica, Chile, Jamaica, and Cuba now have a total fertility rate of around 1. 3 children per woman. The so called quote unquote ultra low fertility threshold that has only been seen in a handful of European and East Asian countries.

in a TED talk delivered last year, Argentine economist and demographer Rafael Rothman said that his country's fertility had declined more in the previous six years than in the previous six decades.

As a result, he told a queue. In 2024, there will be roughly 30 percent fewer four year olds entering Argentinian preschools than there were in 2020, a 30 percent drop in four years. A recent paper titled The Great Decline, Wanda Sela and three other Uruguayan demographers write that in just seven [00:01:00] years, the total fertility rate in Uruguay dropped from 2 to 1. 27 children per woman. There is no precedent for a fall of this magnitude in such a short period. Warned you people! We have been warning you for years now! if this was an animal species, like, if you had an animal that was having every year and it was due to a recent and rapid decline, that would categorize the species as an endangered or critically endangered species. So we would categorize most cultural groups in Latin America is critically endangered right now if they were a species.

And if we were environmentalists, we would be freaking the f**k out about what's happening. But, nope, not gonna do anything because it's, it's, it's, they, they don't really give a s**t about. Hispanic populations. They only care about them when they can use them as a wedge issue. And this is why I always say that the conservative movement needs to understand that the problems that Hispanic populations are facing are the problems that we are facing culturally.

There are allies

Would you like to know more?

Malcolm Collins: [00:02:00] Well, Simone, a couple days ago, it was brought to our attention again that we are again on the front page of Reddit by my brother actually this time. He goes, Oh, you guys made the front page again. And this time we made the front page with a rehashed post. It was just like a copy of an old post by one of those spammers.

That what, we look like a couple of parsnips? Nearsighted.

Simone Collins: Nearsighted parsnips.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, making fun of us and being angry at us for nothing. Like, they seem to think that we are white supremacists or something. Or that our movement is And it's, it's so frustrating for me. How little what the pronatalist movement is actually doing has penetrated mainstream thought.

There aren't people like clapping back being like, you know that they have like 20 like anti racist videos on their channel. Like they go really hard on this and if you look at the areas that have the most tragedy in terms of fertility collapse. The vast majority of them are not white areas, [00:03:00] and in fact, there's some of the very areas that people like them would assume that we have some sort of like ideological beef with.

Simone Collins: Yeah, yeah, considering. So what we're going to talk about is relevant. Because I just sent to Malcolm. Well, we were on a. Flight news about Latin America's fertility decline, accelerating, not just being bad, like we've already mentioned, but accelerating.

Malcolm Collins: It's not just accelerating, but it's accelerating at a pace that's frankly baffling everyone except for us, because we could have told you, like anyone who is familiar with Latin American culture.

Anyone who has a lot of Latin American friends and anyone who knows us knows that's one of our primary friends groups like our company. We are the only non Latin Americans who work at our company. So, we are very, very tight with Latin American culture. Many of our best friends, like the godfather, our first son is, is Peruvian, for example.

So we. Know a lot about what's going on was [00:04:00] in those immigrant groups and was in that culture. And anyone who knew that culture would know that their fertility is about to absolutely crash. And yet they

Simone Collins: made these assumptions about us because we code conservative and we are conservatives, but also, like, it seems that a lot of conservatives are freaking out about the border crisis. And you know, there's a, just assume that anyone who leans conservative is like, ah, people from Latin America are terrible. And that's ridiculous.

Malcolm Collins: Well, these people just aren't very smart. Like the, the people who, who hate us and solving, no,

Simone Collins: they're not saying they're not, they're not, many of them are very smart.

They're just not putting thought into this. They're just jumping to conclusions. They're

Malcolm Collins: too poor. But we need to start talking about the statistics here. Yeah. And these statistics also really for me show when we're talking to reporters, like we talked to this reporter recently who was clearly just like an ultra leftist and unwilling to hear any form of reason.

And she was like, all of the demographers that I've talked to. I see that you cannot predict long term demographic [00:05:00] changes. And I'm like, what are you talking about?

Every single one of the leading indicators. that we're looking at right now, you know, whether it's religiosity, which is tied to fertility rates. We can even ask like gen alpha, like how many kids you plan to have and see like 40 percent plan to have no kids, which isn't even like comparable to previous generations that she's like, it'll all work itself out.

And one of the things that we constantly see in this space and that's worth knowing. Is the the articles are always, you know, falling birth rates, baffle demographers and defy all expectations. And that is because they consistently are putting out data that is almost sort of like the opposite of when they're doing global warming stuff where they always exaggerate the data always.

Underplay the scope of the problem and the speed of the drop you should expect. So you really need to look around at other things to predict where the, how bad the drop's gonna be. So let's, and, and this is a great example of that, this, this particular recent trend. So as recently as 2019, a benchmark [00:06:00] study by the United Nations Population Division for 2020 to 2,100, forecasting that for.

For 2020 to 2100 forecast that fertility in Latin America and Caribbean countries would stabilize at an average of around 1. 75 children per woman in the latter half of this century. So this was a recent study. So this was only five years ago that this study was done. And this study said, and this is something we keep seeing from demographers, is they assume that there is a floor to fertility collapse, even though, and they marked that floor in Latin America at 1.

75. Even though we keep seeing that no country seems to have hit this magical floor yet, they just keep going down and down and down, but it's also worse than that. Floor mistake is one that they have repeatedly made. So if you look at old demography stuff, the, they used to assume like the demographers that were plotting world population in the countries that had falling fertility [00:07:00] rates, that they would hit a floor of 2.

1 that the floor of fertility rates was replacement, right? That it was impossible that on average, a country could fall below that right now, well over half the world's population is living in a country below replacement rate fertility. So, you know, this is. This is old, old news here, but hold on, I gotta read the rest here, because you're like, okay, okay, so they thought the floor was at 1.

75. Stunningly, except for Mexico, all of the countries listed in this graph have already dropped below this level. Uruguay, Costa Rica, Chile, Jamaica, and Cuba now have a total fertility rate of around 1. 3 children per woman. The so called quote unquote ultra low fertility threshold that has only been seen in a handful of European and East Asian countries. Now, when you're talking about a 1. 3 fertility threshold, that is stunning that that means these [00:08:00] countries are basically having their population every generation. And when you're looking at that, you're looking at them disappearing in just a few generations. 1. 3.

So, in 1 of these countries, even if their fertility rate doesn't keep falling, if they're below this 1. 3 thresholds, that means max for every 100 people in 1 of those countries, there will be.

27.

Malcolm Collins: Great grandchildren. So that is shocking. But there's more statistics on this, but I also think another interesting thing here, and this is something that we keep calling out.

Religion is the solution or religious like cultures. Because if you're looking within a country, typically the higher fertility populations are the conservative religious populations. But not all religions were made equal and not all iterations of conservatism were made equal. In terms of how they relate to collapsing fertility rates when exposed to prosperity and when exposed to contraceptives we've pointed this out a lot of groups that people are kind of [00:09:00] surprised about, like, for example, Muslims, actually, their population crashes much faster than most Christian populations.

When exposed to prosperity Jews just do amazingly. Well, basically, in any environment, when it comes to falling fertility rates, or at least the conservative iterations of Judaism Protestants do. Okay. Okay. Okay. All East Asian religions do terribly. You know, Hindis do terribly Buddhists do terribly and whatever is going on in, like, Korea and Japan and China do terribly.

But one of the groups that does really bad, that people are surprised at how bad they do, they actually perform about the same as Muslim populations, are Catholics. When exposed to the same levels of prosperity. Now, keep in mind, most populations live at much lower levels of prosperity than most Catholic populations, which boosts their fertility numbers.

But you, you look at Europe, as I pointed out, the average Catholic fertility rate in Europe right now, if you're talking about the Catholic majority countries, the average Catholic majority country fertility rate in Europe right now is 1. 3.

Simone Collins: Yeah, well, and we should point out, [00:10:00] like, obviously there are some Catholics who, and many Catholics, many Catholics, like devout Catholics that I know, are staunchly against birth control.

And the article that. Did point out that birth control has been a major factor here that, you know, a lot of women are getting implants that last for up to a couple of years. That, you know, really just make it so easy to not get pregnant. And if they were very strict practicing Catholics, they probably wouldn't be using birth control at all.

Malcolm Collins: Because this is what's really interesting. And I want to pull this out here, right? Which is that just because a culture is against something, like one of the things that we constantly point out when we're talking about sexuality and stuff like that is if you want your people to use less pornography, the very last thing you want to do is ban pornography.

Exactly. In cultural groups that ban pornography, pornography consumption rates are higher. You can in the U. S. look at, like, geographically, for example, how Mormon is a region and then look at how much pornography is consumed, and it's a direct correlation there.[00:11:00] This is done by, like, zip code. But continue with what you were saying.

Simone Collins: Well, just that I think people don't understand that, like, you can be in a very culturally Catholic area and, you know, go to mass and everything, but still take birth control that I think it's a lot more common than people might want to believe. Well, I

Malcolm Collins: wouldn't say that people want to believe. I think most Catholics know that, like And I don't even want to say, even within the pronatalist groups, like Catholicism as a cultural group is very, very bad at enforcing its values.

We know a number of like Catholic influencers you know, who are like the court, the trad cast community, and we'll use things like IVF privately to have the number of kids they want to have, like, even on this more conservative pronatalist side, like actually enforcing cultural values. Has not been really strong and I want to read

Simone Collins: the Catholic thing, I guess I would say is like the people that I know who really, really push for like hard enforcement on especially things around IVF and birth [00:12:00] control are 100 percent Catholics who don't need IVF or birth control, if you know what I mean.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, well, and they can say, well, nobody needs birth control and it's like, well, I mean, no, like,

Simone Collins: these are families that just like, want to have infinity kids and, you know, or that like,

Malcolm Collins: you know, yeah, I want to, I want to point out here and we can hypothesize on why they have been bad at keeping down the rates of these sorts of technologies.

My guess is it is the sheer scope of rules within Catholicism, which has like, lots of rules. And, the mechanisms used to enforce them, which is authority tells you that these rules exist, therefore follow these rules. Because Jews also have a lot of rules, but they've been better at enforcing their following within their populations.

Or in their, their majority areas, but we'll get to this hypothesis, I think, but I want to read this exact quote here because I thought it was pretty interesting. Yeah. Okay. So what's going on? Demographers say that Latin American and Caribbean women [00:13:00] are finding it much easier to control the timing and number of children because of the expanding access to contraception. The region used to have some of the world's highest rates of unplanned adolescent pregnancy, although the number of childbirths to teenagers continues to be high in some countries.

Of these countries, government programs have begun to offer a variety of free or low cost contraceptives to women who could previously not afford them. In Argentina and Uruguay, these programs include subdermal contraceptive implants that last up to 5 years. Rothman says the rapid adoption of these and other contraceptives Contributed to a 55 percent drop in pregnancies to Argentinian women age 20 and younger in Chile.

Teen pregnancies have dropped by around 70 percent and in Uruguay, Capabella estimates that half of the recent fall and fertility rates is. Accounting for women ages 15 to 24. So what is really happening in these countries and what is causing the drop in fertility rates is the drop in [00:14:00] unplanned teenage pregnancies.

That is where these countries are suffering fertility wise. Now, this is both a 1. it tells us part of the secret of what's going on here. It turns out that in these Catholic majority countries, historically speaking, they were able to keep high fertility rates through. Through effectively, historically banning contraceptives, a lot of unplanned teenage pregnancies.

Yeah,

Simone Collins: which also sort of run because presumably these are also unmarried teens. Like this is also not an ideal Catholic birth situation.

Malcolm Collins: Well, I, I would actually say that this is a good thing. Like when we talk

Simone Collins: about this shift, right? This shift of like this shift away from parents who aren't ready to have kids toward parents who want to have kids,

Malcolm Collins: right?

Yes, but it's more than that. So one of the things we talk about is people are like, Oh, you guys in the pronatalist movement must want to keep fertility rates in Africa high, right? And we're like, no, we want [00:15:00] Africa to go through the same demographic transition. And we're happy that Latin America is going through this demographic transition as well, not because we want their populations to go extinct in the same way that we're seeing in East Asia and Europe and the Americas today.

But because The transition that we want to see happen is the number of unplanned Children that are happening because, you know, either people are uneducated and don't know how to effectively use contraceptive or are not using contraceptives or are getting raped or something like that that number of Children decreases and what we are trying to create is new cultural solutions, which allow for a country after it has gone through the demographic transition caused by erasing it.

Unwanted Children are Children born to families that didn't plan on it. That can then motivate desired Children existing at higher rates. And this really interesting thing when we talk about how you fix this demographic situation, [00:16:00] which I think has been smoldering and growing. For a lot longer than people think, I actually think that the crisis really started a couple of generations ago which was when people started wanting smaller families and wanting to have children later, but we didn't see it in the numbers as aggressively because of all of the unplanned teenage pregnancies that were happening and keeping the numbers higher, which was actually a number that was rising.

during the sexual revolution so much so that the average child born to a woman in the United States in the 1970s, so pretty recently was 21. That was the age of a first American mother's first transition that we in the United States went through very recently. Right. Another thing I'd point out for people who are like, oh, these people are like.

Racist or something like that. Like when we're freaking out about countries, we're freaking out about countries like the countries in Latin America. The United States actually only declined in its fertility rate year over year, 2 percent this year, which is [00:17:00] just like astoundingly low. When you're talking about countries around the world, the United States actually has a fairly robust fertility rate because, and the real reason is, is because the United States has a A huge number of religiously conservative Protestants, which have high fertility rates and are less impacted by fertility collapse and other groups.

So that that is interesting. Another thing that is worth talking about is I wonder if we're going to see a rebound in Hispanic fertility rates because of the mass conversions. We're seeing of Hispanic immigrants to the US to the Protestant evangelical churches, which is something that we're seeing.

But hold on, I want to get to some other quotes because they're really interesting. Sort of what's happening here.

Simone Collins: I would just say, I think what's really interesting just as a comment, just as a comment, something I think is really interesting is that there's this really frustrating shift that takes place when you shift away from unwanted pregnancies and unplanned children [00:18:00] that can't really be well cared for.

It's ironic that like there are on the flip side of that many families who then are married and they are ready to have a kid or more kids and they really want to, and then they struggle. And I think the key maybe, well, a key to pronatalism is finding that happy medium where we're not forcing unwanted children to be in the world and we're not, you know, people who aren't ready don't have to have kids and aren't having kids, but that somehow we overcome this issue of like, then everyone who's ready, just not being able to.

And that's why reprotech is so important in prenatalism, and I think people are missing that. They're just like, no, no, let's go back to like forcing all these unwanted children. Let's, let's get rid of birth control. You know, it's just, it's so wrong. We

Malcolm Collins: need to find a societal way to motivate people and, and to support people to have kids when they should be having kids, which is in their 20s.

20s to mid 30s. Whereas right now socially speaking, that's just [00:19:00] considered incredibly weird. Like people think of that as almost like a teenage pregnancy when it's really not, that's your fertility window. You know, so, and, and, you know, it takes about a year and a half in between kids. If you want to have a large family, you need to start having kids in your mid to early 20s.

Or you need to do what we did, which is freeze tons of embryos, which is not an option for many Catholic families. But hold on, I want to go to just

Simone Collins: financially, it's not an option for many.

Malcolm Collins: As in a TED talk delivered last year, Argentine economist and demographer Rafael Rothman said that his country's fertility had declined more in the previous six years than in the previous six decades.

As a result, he told a queue. In 2024, there will be roughly 30 percent fewer four year olds entering Argentinian preschools than there were in 2020, a 30 percent drop in four years. People, again, need to understand this is not a linear phenomenon we're looking at here. We are at [00:20:00] an asimetope. In terms of fertility collapse and it is going to have a massive impact.

And when we talk about like economic impact of fertility rates, you know, sometimes people roll their eyes and they're like, Oh, people like you and Elon just want to keep your money. It's like, first of all, we're not like that well off and Elon isn't going to be that affected by this. The people who are going to be affected by this are the people.

Who are planning on their pensions, supporting them in their retirement, and they don't realize that these are unfunded government pensions or who are planning on social security. It's going to be a bunch of starving elderly people. Okay. In

Simone Collins: other words, like this, that demographical collapse, especially a hard landing on demographic collapse is very similar to a hard landing on climate change, which is to say that the people who are going to be disproportionately affected are going to be lower income, more vulnerable populations.

Malcolm Collins: So next Luis Rossberry Bixby, an eminent demographer who founded the Central American Population Center at the University of Costa Rica, [00:21:00] uses the word vertiginously to describe, so basically vertically to describe how births are falling in his country. Where fertility among native born women is now approaching just one child per woman.

A recent paper titled The Great Decline, Wanda Sela and three other Uruguayan demographers write that in just seven years, the total fertility rate in Uruguay dropped from 2 to 1. 27 children per woman. There is no precedent for a fall of this magnitude in such a short period. Warned you people! We have been warning you for years now!

This is not just a linear situation. It is not just a developed world problem. It's coming for all of you b******s. So buckle up and figure it out, okay? Get over this small minded, everyone who's talking about this must be a racist. This [00:22:00] is affecting the people you pretend you care about. And one of the things that Always disgust me because I really shows where progressive come from.

But I'm like, this is not like a white problem. Like you see this problem in American African communities. You see this problem in Latin American communities. You see this from all around the world. You see this problem uniquely in East Asia. And they're like, is Africa fine? And I'm like, yes, Africa is fine.

And they're like, well, then I don't care. Like we can just move people from there. And I think it shows. And I think that this is something that a lot of groups are beginning to realize. But we saw was the BLM riots and stuff like that that were mostly in Hispanic neighborhoods and mostly destroying Hispanic communities because those are the recent immigrants similar to what happened in the LA riots where they destroyed the Korean communities and the newspapers just not covering that these, the groups that were victimized were minority populations.

They don't care. They don't care because they have a hierarchy of which minorities matter and which minorities don't

Simone Collins: matter. But it's also not just. People in Africa, like we've pointed out multiple times before many of the most passionate [00:23:00] pronatalist groups are African or of African descent. And well, sure, there are some.

Very high fertility populations in Africa. There are also a lot of people who are like, yeah, not my cultural group, not my ethnic group. So it's just like, Oh, I don't know. Like whichever ones are left over that are high fertility is if like, it's

Malcolm Collins: all the same way Africans see the world. Africans

Simone Collins: Africa is not like the one.

Whoa, man. Like it's not one thing.

Malcolm Collins: Look at, look at this, like how, you know, black unity and you have like the hootie tootie, like massacres and stuff like that. No Africans usually see themselves as part of a tribal group and she's, she's telling the truth. The pronatalist movement, some of our best, like I would say like most competent, like members that I'm really excited about are African immigrants, but primarily African immigrants, I would say Simone.

Because they need their fertility rate falling and the woke's coming for their children just as aggressively as they're coming for everyone else's children, if not more aggressively, which makes it even harder for them to maintain intergenerational cultural

Simone Collins: [00:24:00] transfer. Well, and I feel like the groups that are, we'll say demographically under threat in, like, on the, living in the continent of Africa.

Don't recognize it so much as a demographic issue as they do is like a geopolitical and security issue for various complicated reasons. Right. But it is you can

Malcolm Collins: watch our video on the future of Africa. If you want to learn more about our take on Africa. We do think that Africa is going to be 1 of the keys to the future of humanity going forwards.

It is.

Simone Collins: But also Africa is not a monolith and many, many, many cultures and ethnicities in Africa are under severe threat. So, like, to be like, well, Africa's okay, so,

Malcolm Collins: no. Yeah, yeah. Africa has more genetic and cultural diversity than the rest of the world combined. Come on, guys. This is an objective fact. And, and, and because of that, it means that, you know, when you're looking at which cultures are suffering in Africa and which aren't, to just be like, fertility rates are fine.

Broadly in Africa isn't really telling you what's going on on the ground, but hold on. There's more quotes. I want to read here. Okay. Among demographers [00:25:00] 2023 will be remembered as the year Brazil quote unquote, shrink by almost 5M people. A new census put the country's population at 203M people well below the 2.

108 million previously estimated by Brazil's National Statistics Institute, and even further from the 216 million calculated by the United Nations, those missing people didn't vanish or immigrate, they were never born the 2020 census delayed by COVID 19 pandemic showed that Brazil's population grew during the pandemic.

2010s by just 0. 52 percent per year, half the rate seen through the 2000s and the lowest such percentage since 1872. This is bad. This is bad. And I realized when I did the China video there was a way I could have worded it. That would sound even more severe. So a different way to word what's going on in China right now.

His newly leaked data reveals that the China that China [00:26:00] recorded fewer than 8 million births in 2023. If this figure is confirmed, it would represent a decline of 17 percent from 2022 and almost 60 percent from 2016. So, if we're looking at an 8 year period, they're a 60 percent drop in fertility rate in 8 years.

So around the world, the, the scope of this and the breadth of this phenomenon. Is being systemically covered up basically by the mainstream media, because they have decided it's a conservative issue, which is in part what has pushed us into the hands of conservatives. And so be it. If this is going to be conservative global warming, it'll be conservative global warming.

And by that, what I mean is, is 1 of the sort of obvious statistical phenomenon that the other side for ideological reasons can't admit or talk about. I would like to say global warming is an obvious phenomenon. I'm not saying man made global warming is an obvious phenomenon. I'm just saying global warming more broadly.

It's an obvious phenomenon. The earth is getting hotter. That is when people argue against [00:27:00] that or like, oh, it was cold this year. They look really stupid and it pushes people to the other side. And I think that fertility collapse is the same thing with progressives as they seem to have a in capability of admitting.

It and once they do admit it, then they'll say, well, it's not a problem or well, it can just be fixed with immigration, which is obviously not true at this point. And, and it shows, I also think the inherent racism of the left, which is what we were talking about, which is to say. They don't give a s**t that Hispanic populations are going extinct that the vast majority of Hispanic cultural groups in the world when you're talking about fertility numbers of 1.

3, if this was an animal species, like, if you had an animal that was having every year and it was due to a recent and rapid decline, that would categorize the species as an endangered or critically endangered species. So we would categorize most. Countries in Latin America or most cultural groups in Latin America is critically endangered right now if they were a species.

And if we were environmentalists, we would be freaking the f**k out about what's [00:28:00] happening. But, nope, not gonna do anything because it's, it's, it's, they, they don't really give a s**t about. Hispanic populations. They only care about them when they can use them as a wedge issue. And this is why I always say that the conservative movement needs to understand that the problems that Hispanic populations are facing are the problems that we are facing culturally.

There are allies. There are a bunch of trad cast populations. Like what are you doing? Pushing them away? Like, why, why would you not see? are obvious allegiance with these groups. And the reason why progressives are taking them into the country is because the lowest fertility rate of all the fertility rates is the urban monoculture, which is what progressives are championing.

And the only way they can maintain a stable population is having a constant flow of children to take. And when they lose, when they, when they, you know, conservatives who live in our country start taking our kids out of. Schools and stuff like that, which is happening at an unprecedented rate now, because we see now they're just conversion systems.

They're like, okay, import people will take their children, [00:29:00] but really

Simone Collins: quickly and specifically, I think you meant to say, Malcolm, you meant to say progressives are taking them. Oh, sorry. Conservatives are taking them out of the schools.

Malcolm Collins: Conservatives are taking children out of the schools, progressives are trying to use the school system to take their children.

And when, and, and because of that, they now need to import new children to take. But you know, Hispanic communities aren't stupid and they, they are a very good systems for informational transfer. And they're going to figure this out really quickly. And I think one of the next freakouts that we're going to see among progressives is when they realize that.

First generation, immigrant kids are being taken out of public schools and being homeschooled in mass. They're going to be like, Oh,

Simone Collins: well, and I mean, we're hopefully going to be partially to blame for that, right? Like we're trying to make it. A hell of a lot easier for anyone to opt out of mainstream industrial public or private schooling for something that protects cultural sovereignty.

Malcolm Collins: So, yeah, well, I mean, what do they mean when they're like, oh, we'll bring in Hispanic groups and we'll assimilate them. I'm like, what [00:30:00] do

Simone Collins: you mean by that?

Malcolm Collins: They're like, we will bring in the melting pot. What do they mean? Melting away their culture that when they say assimilate them, you end up with an average.

They don't mean assimilate them to Christian conservative traditions. These people are already conservative trad castes. They mean that they want to erase their conservative trad castes traditions and assimilate them into the urban monoculture. And again, they're, you know, sometimes conservatives hear this and I always have to point this out because I cannot.

They're like, what, but they bring crime. And it's like every time a conservative trad cast population has immigrated to the U S and math, they had brought crime wisdom, the Irish mob, the Italian mafia, that it's just something they do. And then it goes away in a couple generations, chill the out. Okay. Anyway so that is, that is part of that tradition.

But anyway, someone, do you have any final thoughts on this? Well,

Simone Collins: I just would encourage people to rethink what they, like their assumptions [00:31:00] are, because if there's a ton of coverage in the news, especially in the United States about like the immigration crisis, and it's like, oh, people coming from Latin America, and it gives one the impression.

That like, there are, I mean, if public schools in New York are being shut down so that, you know, refugees can have somewhere to stay, you're given this impression that like Latin America is just like overflowing with people, right? That it's just like, they're just pouring out. They can't even fit in because it's so full of conflict or something.

And people whereas really like they are, they're. hurting much more as Malcolm has just demonstrated in this article is very clearly demonstrated than the United States. So just that's I think what people take away from

Malcolm Collins: this sort of the game of the shell game that's being played here. Because right now in the U.

S. like this year, the fertility rate of immigrants like, like the total number of immigrant first generation immigrant children being born in the U. S. is higher than the rate of native of U. S. natives. And some people are freaking out about this and it's like. [00:32:00] Bro, they're not impacting the native fertility rate at all.

There aren't, you know, like, even if you're an ethnocentrist, right, there are not fewer white births because there are more Hispanic births. There are fewer white births because white people are choosing not to have kids anymore. You, you, you need to stop thinking about this in this old system. The Hispanic populations across the board, even if they are in the U S at higher rates than they were historically, that does not affect their overall fertility rate, which is getting smashed in every country.

They are, whether it's in the U S or Hispanic fertility rates in the U S are not good. They are falling. Well, yeah,

Simone Collins: they fall right. The population that sees an improvement in their fertility when they come to the United States is.

Malcolm Collins: Koreans, Koreans, their fertility rate jumps by about 50 percent when they immigrate to the U.

S. But yeah, so, so, no overall the, the world's Hispanic population is [00:33:00] actually in a much more critical condition in terms of their falling fertility rate and even their existing fertility rate than the world's or at least than America's white population. I would say that the scope and scale of the world's Hispanic population is probably about equal to the scope and scale of white European demographic situation.

Yeah, exactly. But they have less wealth in terms of like the, the wealth in their countries and everything like that. Deal with it. And it's going to get infinitely worse when China collapses, because a lot of these Latin American communities or countries rely a lot on exports to China. And specifically exports that have been artificially inflated due to the construction boom.

Simone Collins: China's stock market also tanked early this year. Real estate is only part of the problem here. So it's just no,

Malcolm Collins: no, no, no, no. But real estate matters because that's the domino that absolutely cannot stand in China anymore. Yet it is the core [00:34:00] of their economy. Watch our video on what's going to happen in the future of East Asia to, to learn what we think of what's going on in China and the economy of China.

But

Simone Collins: TLDR buckle up.

Malcolm Collins: Buckle up. It's bad. It's a 60 percent fertility reduction in the last eight years. What was it like? That's insane.

Simone Collins: Yeah. Like famine level fertility. But it's, it's a famine of culture. Malcolm. Yeah,

Malcolm Collins: and I would point out to any who thinks differently, if you kicked every Hispanic person out of this country it would not help white fertility rates. If anything, it would hurt white fertility. It would totally hurt white fertility rates.

If you look at the

Simone Collins: data. Yeah, homogeneity does not

Malcolm Collins: help. The, the, the, the eminence, like, like. Every ounce fought fighting against immigration is an ounce that you're not fighting to solve the much more critical problem that even if you are an esotericist, that you are going [00:35:00] extinct.

Simone Collins: I think the biggest, the biggest problem with all these, like, intercultural, interethnic conflicts around demographic collapse is that the issue is not what the other guy's doing.

The issue is what you are doing with your own people. Stop trying to enforce rules on other people by either keeping them out or telling them how to live. Just figure your own s**t out for once because you are not doing well and you are not exempt from this at all.

Malcolm Collins: I, I couldn't have said it better, Simone, and I love you and I love your tough love approach to fertility rates because people need to get their s**t together and realize that, yeah, cash handouts don't work and that the only thing that works is figuring this out.

Culturally, internally, and keep in mind that these fertility rates are falling before we have AI wives and before you have the massive impact of falling sperm rates, you know, we're estimated to have 50 percent of the male population is going to be infertile by 2060. Like it's bad. It's

Simone Collins: bad. Oh my [00:36:00] gosh.

Also, yeah, of just, I mean, if endocrine disruptors are as disruptive, we'll say, as it is believed. I was actually just watching a video about some other element of Chinese culture. Not relevant, but, some of it included footage of people eating their meals in China. And there's like a lot of takeout.

But like literally some of the meals are like in, in plastic bags within, in cups, like heated soup eaten out of a plastic bag. Like I'm part, part of me is watching this and I'm like. Dude, like even once the government starts forcing women in China to have kids, they're not going to be able to. Well,

Malcolm Collins: that could be part of the next video.

Yeah, there you go. I love you, Simone.

Simone Collins: I adore you, Malcolm Collins.