Based Camp | Simone & Malcolm Collins

We discuss a shocking New York Times article advocating for breeding only short people to help the environment. This blatant eugenics promotion reveals the authoritarian thinking and moral blindspots on the left. We contrast it to polygenic selection which supports family choice, not society-wide suppression of "undesirable" genes. We also cover recent studies confirming left wing authoritarianism and the left's cultural genocide of minorities through forced assimilation.

Malcolm Collins: [00:00:00] Like, if you take two steps back from all this, it's like, I feel like that meme where they're like, you know,

how's it going now?

You know, and they're like, it's like New York times promoting eugenics to help the environment. Ooh, that bad, huh?

Yikes guys. Yeah, you, you are. Deep in the spiral now

Would you like to know more?

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, what did I do? Well, I thought that recorded. I clicked the camera because I could camera for recording. You know, we've only done this a hundreds of times now. And of course I turn off my camera anyway, whatever I did to be here with you because I have seen this trend in media recently that just flabbergasted.

So. For context here, Simone and I have gone through, you know, the, the rounds in progressive media over and over and over again, they hate that we do polygenic selection on our kids because, oh, my God, we believe that humans have genes and certain traits are [00:01:00] heritable and that families should have access to the reproductive choices to have kids the way that their culture says it's the.

the ethical way to have kids and in a way that nudges those genes in directions that their family values on an individual basis. Right. And as well,

Simone Collins: they unceasingly accuse us of eugenics, even though by the definition of eugenics that anyone could agree upon, like if you look at Wikipedia's definition of eugenics, we are very much against eugenics because one, we don't believe that there are universally good or bad traits.

And two, we are very much against trying to fight for. Promulgation or suppression of those universally good or bad traits in on a society level. Right? So

Malcolm Collins: like to point it out, like what we think is every culture and every family should have the right to choose what traits they think are best for their family to optimize around.

Right? And then as a society. Like, like, the world tests us and determines which families and which groups chose correctly. [00:02:00] Yeah, but

Simone Collins: there are different societal, environmental, economic, etc. contexts

Malcolm Collins: that make different traits useful. Yeah, and one of the interesting things that has been a theme to me recently is as soon as the left, like, accepts something that we've been trying to get them to accept forever, as like, don't immediately, like, run away screaming like you touched a hot stove when you mention something like humans have genes, their first intuition is always to take it to the most insane and evil place humanly imaginable.

And so the left has finally admitted That some traits in humans may have a genetic component and the very first thing they want to do is eugenics, like, like, bad eugenics, like evil state sanctioned, like, yeah,

Simone Collins: like you should only reproduce with these people.

Malcolm Collins: Eugenics. Yeah. Yeah. You should only reproduce with these.

people because these are the good people and other people are the bad people. Like, why can't the left just not be evil for five seconds? But anyway, and I'm not talking about fringe left here. Okay. So there was an article talking [00:03:00] about New York times and the New York times now that they have realized the humans have genes.

They're like, well, short people are better for the environment. Therefore you should only breed with short people. And. Hold on, so this isn't just like the New York Times. So the article in New York Times that goes over this is there has never been a better time to be short, but there have been other articles like this.

There was 1 in popular mechanics. You should make with short people to fight.

Climate change expert says there was you know. Yeah, there's been a few articles that have sort of gone over this. And

Simone Collins: by the way, nothing against short people, first off, I want to say that. Like, there are definitely, there are longevity benefits to being short.

There are health benefits to being short. And there are environmental benefits to being short. We're not saying, it's the fact that they're taking a eugenic stance on this that we have a problem with. In fact, we shared this article on Twitter and one of our followers pointed out quite cleverly and this is a very dangerous question to ask.

Which is wait, but like, [00:04:00] what's the difference between like a short person and like a thin person in terms of their environmental impact? Oh, I know. It's like,

Malcolm Collins: don't don't don't don't don't don't don't don't watch out. Watch out. No, no, no, no, no, no,

Simone Collins: no, no, no, no. We can't talk about. But being

Malcolm Collins: fat isn't their fault, it's genetic.

I'm sorry, I didn't mean to say that because if it's genetic, then they shouldn't be breeding because they're taking up more, they're making more carbon emissions here.

Simone Collins: Well, and not, not to mention government healthcare expenditures. I mean, the burden on governments and the private healthcare system and private citizens themselves.

Malcolm Collins: on. Hold on. There's no, a human can't burden the government with expenses. What are you talking about? We're talking about their burden on the environment. The thing that matters. Okay. Not their, not their fellow citizens. Right. But the environment. Environment. And, okay. How do we get out of this New York times?

How do we get out of this? Come on. Let's quick, quick, find a way. Fat people are a discriminated class therefore, [00:05:00] but aren't short people discriminated because

short people earn less money on average and short people get

Simone Collins: passed over on dating markets and yeah,

Malcolm Collins: dating markets. Ooh, they're just as arguably a discriminated class, but, but okay.

So here's how short people are different. Okay. I figured it out. So the left is a predominantly female, okay. These days as you see voting patterns, it's predominantly female and being short as a woman, is it discriminatory? And as a woman, I don't value short men. I mean, they're not really human because I don't want to breed with them.

This is the way that I think a lot of women intuitively actually see men where they're like, I don't mind when guys hit on me. And then it's like, they get the ugly guy, you know, there's that famous meme and they're like, ah,

HR because. Those guys aren't guys. They're like these monsters that mope around in society.

And

Simone Collins: they're like 5'2 and they have on their Tinder profile. Don't DM me

Malcolm Collins: unless you're over 6'4 or something like that, like ridiculous. So I think it's very normal for women to just blatantly dehumanize. And, and, and because the left is, is they [00:06:00] don't see short people as like really people, but when you talk about fat people, well, they could be fat.

I mean. Their friends could be fat, you know, and they, you know, when you talk about like progressive women, yes, they overwhelmingly are often obese. Well, we keep seeing this in our detractors, you know, it's, it's actually, that's a, this

Simone Collins: is an interesting question. I don't, I wonder if there is a political divide on being overweight in the United States.

I don't think there is because I do think there's a genetic genetic component that inhibitory control around highly processed foods. And it's not. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Like, I, I would guess that there isn't a political difference in obesity, but maybe this is because I grew up in a really progressive society, assuming that like, you know, I was kind

Malcolm Collins: of Well, the first vertical I find is Democrats are more likely than Republicans or independents to blame their genetics for obesity.

Simone Collins: Yeah. I mean, yes, because external obesity control is rampant in progressive culture. But I was raised with this like caricature of the Southern fat. [00:07:00] Republican, you know, so like, I don't know, you know, I mean like now I'm like, I know we're conservatives have the, the stereotype of the, you know, fat, obese, blue haired progressive.

So I don't know. It's really,

Malcolm Collins: I just think that I think Republicans are more frequently overweight than Democrats. There

Simone Collins: you go. Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: Ah. Yeah. Interesting. So, so.

Simone Collins: But I see, I think that what that has to do is it has to do more with urban versus rural culture. And then the effect that that can have.

I think it has to do with poverty. yeAh. Poverty too, probably. But I just feel like, especially when you live in a city and you are walking more places, it just makes a huge impact on.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, I think that you know, the Democrats have become the party of the wealthy elite, you know, downtrodden on the, on the common working man in this country.

Like it's very clear, like they are the party of the, of the elite and the oppressors. And

Simone Collins: they get in their steps by stomping on the dreams of the rural disempowered.

Malcolm Collins: Well, I mean, they're just so [00:08:00] like, to me. What I like about this, this New York times article, right? Where they're like, okay, get short people here.

As we were talking about how they don't really see short people, short men as human. And this is trying to like nudge them in that direction. Probably a short, like male Democrat. Who's like, yeah, guys,

please see me as human. Please breed with me for the environment. Yeah. Sex with people like me helps the environment.

He knows, he knows his audience. It would

Simone Collins: be, it honestly would be better though, if it were that, because then it would be less eugenics and more just like, please, someone just trying to get laid. Yeah. Like just, just be nice to me, please. Which I, I find a lot more charitable than, Oh, here is this superior treat.

Let us all. You know, make sure that humanity breeds in that direction which just really rubs us the wrong way. So, you know,

Malcolm Collins: well, I I, I love this. Well, so, so, and I think we need a [00:09:00] different word for when people. Are looking at this stuff from our perspective, right? Like, we individually believe families should have a choice.

And so the word I would promote here is polygenic. So some people promote eugenics and we promote polygenics. Polygenics, meaning, you know, you have a choice in this and you have a choice in using polygenic screening. Whereas eugenics is the promotion of the belief culture wide of trying to eugenics.

Aim towards some large

Simone Collins: of good genes of just good genes.

Malcolm Collins: Like there is a bad genes is where it's polygenics and promoting polygenics is an issue of reproductive rights which is just a completely different thing than eugenics. And so, that's, that's what we're pushing here. I also think that, like, we move forward as a society, you know, you have these two groups, like, suppose they do get their way and they start breeding these short people.

Are we going to go in the opposite direction? Are we going to create, like, space marines, like, giant, giant custodies?

Like, large Super intelligent chadman or something that'll be like 10 feet tall, like genetically [00:10:00] pre programmed, like double muscled,

like you have in some of those cows that look like

Simone Collins: the roid cows.

Malcolm Collins: These hulking brutes of people that the problem is, is that right now, you know, if you're not employing polygenic data to, to height, height does shorten your lifespan, which is something Simone is pointing out. So, they would have an advantage on lifespan unless, you know, they're just doing old fashioned, like, super evil eugenics where it's just like, well, we'll keep these people from breeding instead of using polygenic selection, which allows you to increase health at the same time as increasing things like height was in some groups.

But yeah, that, that's, that would be an interesting direction for society to go in terms of human speciation. The problem is, is that what's really happening with human speciation, and you can see this in the data, because it's already happening in terms of the bell curve of the different clusters of genetic traits is that obesity, you know, we were talking about obesity, is actually being heavily selected for.

It's other than IQ. I think the number one [00:11:00] polygenic score that's most associated with high fertility. So, what you're likely seeing is and, and maybe shorter. I wouldn't be surprised if shorter. So, so fatter, shorter, lower IQ group. And then this other group which is the wealthy, the wealthy population where you see within the ultra wealthy population, you also get higher fertility rates but you see less crossbreeding material populations than you're used to, which within any biological textbook, you would call that like, if you see a trait and you see like a U curve in, in fertility rates tied to that trait.

You call that behavioral isolation which is different. So you have a few types of isolation that can lead to speciation. You have things like what's the word I'm talking? I want to say like geographic isolation. Yeah, I think geographic isolation, which means like a stream occurs between two populations.

Behavioral isolation is like. Some people begin to develop a trait where they really like having sex only at night. And then another group develops a trait where they really like only having sex during the day. And then these two groups live alongside each other, but they [00:12:00] just stop interbreeding with each other.

Oh, interesting. aNd so that's, that's really what we're seeing happening here right now in humans, which is pretty interesting. But I, I'm, I, I just think it's wild that the New York Times has gone in this direction. And you know, you're not seeing a backlash. You're seeing like Republicans laugh at them like, ha ha ha.

But what's interesting to me is us who clearly don't have a eugenic position. We have a polygenic position, but it could be seen as eugenic by people who are broadly uneducated and they're just looking for any reason to paint us as bad guys that even that slightest hint is used to attempt to smear us in article after article, and yet mainstream left wingers can go full on like evil eugenics promotion, like the most evil type of eugenics promotion.

And I guess he's not. Promoting government mandates yet. But they, they, they can go full out and do this and there is no real repercussion for doing it. So long as they are quote unquote identified, like they're wearing their leftist armor and they're, and they're doing these evil things [00:13:00] to promote the environment.

Well, and

Simone Collins: that's what's so interesting when I, I searched the URL on Twitter to see like what the general commentary was, if there was any and, and most of the, it's, it's disappointing that most of the commentary was essentially just like. Derision of short people, you know, like, oh, how disgusting that like someone would want their kids to be short and do things to try to make their kids shorter and like try to choose, you know, like, oh, short people gross.

Whereas like, imagine how mad your kids would be. If they were made short

Malcolm Collins: by you. Oh yes, because suppose they do this with polygenic screening. They end up just selecting for shorter kids. And you have to explain, especially to your young male kid, I made you short for the environment, little Timmy.

Simone Collins: No, no, no.

I actually think in the article I have to pull it up. Hold on, give me a second. Where he actually is like limiting his kids dietary options to keep them short.

Malcolm Collins: [00:14:00] Oh, whoa! These people are evil! Well, he's an environmental scientist, what do you expect, right?

Simone Collins: Sorry, I'm trying to find this, because I don't want to speak out of turn here.

Malcolm Collins: I love when progressives decide that they're going to implement eugenics programs, instead of going in the direction of trying to create like uber minches, they're like, let's intentionally create spiteful mutants. Let's intentionally, like, just fight. F**k people. F**k up their s**t. Like, restrict my children's diet.

Like, that is so sad. But there's another thing that I wanted to go on, because there was another article it was actually a piece of research that was done recently. And I was going to do a full episode on it, but I think this could be a great time to discuss it. Which is, progressives just found out in this, in this study and, and apparently this had not been found before in other studies that it turns out that authoritarianism

exists on both the [00:15:00] right and the left.

Intriguingly, the researchers found some common traits between left wing and right wing authoritarians, including a preference for social uniformity, prejudice towards difference in others, willingness to wield group authority to coerce behavior, cognitive rigidity, aggressiveness, Punitiveness Towards Perceived Enemies, Ostracized Concern for Hierarchy and Moral Absolutism. Eh, wha eh, wha How did you not see this? For seventy years, this is the quote here, For seventy years, lore in the social sciences has been that authoritarianism was found exclusively on the political right.

The Rutgers University social psychologist, Lee Josten Who wasn't involved in the new SOTY told me over email, so this isn't just the people in the study are like, yeah, only nobody believed like it was believed hypothetically. There might be a form of left wing authoritarianism, but [00:16:00] science just hadn't found it yet.

And it shows how strongly you have to not be looking. Like if you're just like a common sane person and you're looking at the left, you're like, wow, this movement is blindingly authoritarian, but not just that when leftist governments gain control and they have disproportionate control, they go authoritarian always and much faster than rightist governments, you know, with communist governments and stuff like that.

And all of those traits are very obviously like an Antifa member to the T like Antifa, which is so interesting to me as they claim to be. An anti-authoritarian group, and yet every one of those groups that they associate with authoritarianism are literally what defines Antifa when contrasted with more moderate Democrats.

It is an authoritarian group, and you look at the tactics they use and they look like the tactics that like the Nazi brown shirts were using before Hitler won the election and stuff like that. Like this gang violence and stuff like that. It is. [00:17:00] Did you find the quote you were looking for?

Simone Collins: yeAh, I did.

He's even restricted dairy from his son's diets and only allows them minimal sugar in an attempt to limit their growth, saving them from the ills of height.

Malcolm Collins: Damn.

Simone Collins: Wait, but that's something. This is something someone tweeted. So,

Malcolm Collins: you don't know if it's true.

Simone Collins: It's, it's, it's hard for me to say cause like, so she shared the article on Twitter.

This person named Caitlin Flanagan shared on Twitter quote, he's even restricted dairy from his son's diets and only allows the minimal sugar in an attempt to limit their growth, saving them from the ills of height end quote. And then she says, anyone else think things are pretty weird around here? And then she just shared a link to the article.

So I don't know if the article actually.

Malcolm Collins: No, well, maybe she got this information somewhere else. I wouldn't be surprised. But anyway, to continue with what I'm saying here. So the authoritarian stuff is, is really interesting to me, and that it could be so blind to that. And I think it really falls in line with what we're talking about on this article, how the New York [00:18:00] Times can have this article that in this position in it, that Clearly promoting evil eugenics.

And yet they can be completely blind to what they're doing because it is a leftist doing it for leftist reasons. Well, but I think the,

Simone Collins: the bigger issue is that progressivism is, is sort of, A moral monolith, like there are shared morals and values. And so they, they quote unquote, know what's good, right?

They understand what's good. And therefore they're not going to question any policy that supports what they believe to be good. They're not questioning that. Whereas what has become the conservative movement now is really more about cultural sovereignty and, and protecting one's right. To hold one's own.

And protecting

Malcolm Collins: diversity in the population.

Simone Collins: And so then there, there isn't this same like, Oh, well, this is obviously the morally right thing to do. No, I would say that the conservative movement is sometimes overtaken by subsets that are like, this [00:19:00] is the morally right or good thing to do, like with the, with the abortion.

Like, like legislation shifts the really, it could be argued that what took place in the Supreme court with abortion in the United States was appropriate because it allowed for states to exercise cultural sovereignty on a state level by making those decisions at the state level, which, you know, perhaps is the right way to go.

I don't know. But yeah, I just, I think that's, that's the difference is one when, when you believe that you are good. And it is your culture to believe that you are righteous, then you are not going to question the morality of your chosen methods and actions. Whereas if you're just fighting for things like cultural sovereignty, or if you have doubts about your righteousness or the right way to go, you're not going to do it the same way.

Malcolm Collins: Well, I think what we're seeing here, because I don't think the left would have done stuff like this in the past, although the fact that they never did somehow didn't discover after, like, communist, you know, communist Russia, that leftism [00:20:00] has an authoritarian streak they couldn't find any authoritarian leftists, they were unicorns.

So, I mean, it shows how blind they've been to this for a while, but I think increasingly, recently, they've become so isolated within their intellectual bubbles that they have blinded themselves to the idea that any, any idea within the left could have an evil streak to it, whereas we, on the right, I'd say, yeah, if you're going out there and you're pushing some, like, ethnocentric policy That's evil, right?

Like you should not allow that to happen. Now, unfortunately, from our perspective, the left is much more likely these days to push ethnocentric policies. If they're for an approved ethnicity, like the right hasn't, hasn't really had a large and meaningful group pushing ethnocentric policies in like half a century at this point.

But there are groups like, I'm not gonna lie. There are groups on the right that sometimes attempt things like that. They, they are and I should point out, and this is something we constantly point out for the 539 poll and the article on this, they are not [00:21:00] disproportionately, 538, 538 poll they are not disproportionately larger than the ethnocentric groups on the left, even the white nationalists.

So, as we point out from the 538 poll, and I will never stop mentioning this stat is that until Obama was elected more white Democrats and white Republicans said they would not vote for a black president. So, so the right does have a problem with this sometimes, but the left also has this white, ethnic centrism really deep within it.

They just pretend they don't. They're like, oh, yeah, the unions, they don't have that problem. They've never been centers of racism and I feel like that's worse

Simone Collins: to never admit to never admit it. Yeah,

Malcolm Collins: I mean, it really twisted the narrative in society, which is confused people about what's actually going on so much that I think a lot of the, the masses are just living in this wild distortion field where the left isn't carrying out, like, An intentional and, and wide [00:22:00] scale cultural genocide of groups that it sees as lesser than itself, lesser than the urban monoculture they do not see that the left is openly excited about the erasure of not just, you know, domestic cultural groups that are different from it, which are usually religious cultural groups, but the erasure of immigrant culture you know, in the article It's another article that we've done a piece on.

I don't know which one's going to come out first where the guy was, was talking about from a leftist perspective, following fertility rates and he was like, well, and I really promote immigration and assimilation. Assimilation is cultural genocide. If you're doing it at a large level, you are saying I want to erase their culture.

Whereas I think that. What what the right supports and what I think is the actual correct way to approach immigration is that immigrant groups should immigrate insofar as. Their culture can mesh well within [00:23:00] American culture and can add to American culture which I think, you know, Hispanic immigrant populations do spectacularly well, you know, there are these traditional tradcast communities with value systems that are very similar to previous Irish immigrant groups.

Sorry, the two previous Catholic immigrant groups. Like, I love it so much. I'll talk to, to some people when they're anti immigration sometimes, and they'll be like, Ah, the Hispanic immigrants are coming over with their gangs! And I'm like, okay, every large Catholic immigrant group has done this, whether it was the Irish mob or the Italian mafia, it's just something Catholics do.

I don't know why, but those two groups have made America stronger, not because we erased their cultures, but because their cultures added to our own, you know, whether it's our pizza or pasta or, you know, these you know, when I think of a pizza these days, like an American style feature Detroit style pizza, you know, this is [00:24:00] the, The fusion of these cultures to create something better because we didn't go out there with the goal of erasing their culture when they came to this country.

And yet now that is the left reason dtra because they can't replenish this urban monoculture that they've created. It has almost zero fertility rate. Mm-Hmm. , they've, they've, they're getting worse at deconvert people, children from the Right, you know, they're, they've gone way too far with this education system that they're using to attempt to, um.

You know, we'll basically take the children of nearby demographically healthy cultural groups. And so they are now shipping in immigrants to erase their culture. And it is something that is just so sad to see when I talk to the parents, like immigrant parents, and they talk about what has happened to their children.

You know, and it is, it is really sad to see this loss of cultural identity. It reminds me so much of these days of the early immigrants, you know, where they were promised, oh, you go to America and there's gold on the street and everything like that. And, and these were clear lies that people were using to take advantage of them.

[00:25:00] And now these people are told, come to America so that your family going forwards can be wealthy and be successful. And then their kids are medically sterilized, if not outright castrated and taught to hate their parents, hate their parents culture to see it as backwards. And

Simone Collins: what makes it extra painful is parents are often.

Living much harder lives to enable this, you know, it's not like their, their lives are going to be easier immigrating to the United States, starting fresh. You know, in many cases, you know, to get into the United States, you have to be a highly qualified person. Often doctors come in and have to completely redo their education.

Like it's, it's a nightmare. And then all of this is to give their kids a better future. And then their kids are like, no, I don't want a future. I'm not going to have a future. I'm not going to have kids. I'm not going to. You know, I'm going to sort of lean back from life. I'm not going to marry. I'm not going to really invest in

Malcolm Collins: a lot.

That was always the plan. When they say we're taking in immigrants and we need to assimilate them, [00:26:00] assimilate them to what? Not conservative Christian culture, not trad cast culture. No. What they mean is we need to assimilate them to the urban monoculture. They can still call themselves. You know, whatever they want, they can still call themselves Muslim.

If they want, they can still call themselves Catholic. If they want, they just can't deviate from our cultural views on any major issue that humanity deals with, whether that's morality or gender or sexuality or the way we. Relate to you know, our partners or the, what we think of the future of species is the way we relate to our environment.

You, you literally can't differentiate from anything, but if you token holidays, it reminds me of this, this, this old song that I used to love

the gap year song I'm going on a gap. Yeah. And he's going around the world and he's so he's, he's bragging about all of these different cultures that he's experiencing, but he's so obviously.

has this deep dis disrespect from them, like he barely sees their cultures as humans and they're just tools for him, like,

 I was in [00:27:00] Africa in Tazna I saw this woman with malaria And she looked at me with this vacant stare As if to say, despite our differences,

Malcolm Collins: parah. Parah, darling. Do you mean parah? Beautiful people. Beautiful people. Patting one of them on the

god, I can't believe you said that because that really reminds me of this time. Oh my god. Yeah Yeah, I was in South America in Prague , yeah. Wonderful country, beautiful people, yeah.

Um, yeah, I knew. We were drinking in the Andes, and the sun was just rising and glinting off the snow, creating a sort of ethereal haze. And I really got a sense of the awesome power of nature and the insignificance of man. And then I just shuddered. Everywhere.

Malcolm Collins: head. That's what they mean when they're like, everyone's a hot one.

Wonderful [00:28:00] people. Wonderful country people. Of course now if your parents do deviate from us on any of the approved beliefs, we are unfortunately going to need to teach you that the fact that they disagreed with us was traumatizing to you as a child. They are the source of all of your problems.

You will need to constantly give us money at this date, appointed psychologists. Who you will become dependent on because they will tell you that the only way to relieve your trauma is continuing to come see them, continuing to come have your brain, they will clean your brain, don't worry, they'll wash your brain for you and you'll feel amazing, you'll feel amazing, you'll wake up every day I mean, obviously, statistically, you won't feel amazing, obviously Statistically, when we look at progressive populations, you know, over 50 percent of progressive white women under the age of 30 have a serious mental health issue.

Well, but that's because

Simone Collins: they've experienced so much trauma. That's not their fault at all.

Malcolm Collins: Well, the trauma is, unfortunately, being exposed to people who had different views than them, often in their childhood, and that is, of course, deeply [00:29:00] traumatic.

Simone Collins: Progressive culture is just trying to cure it,

Malcolm Collins: don't you see?

Yeah, they're just trying to cure the cultures that they're shipping, and so why are they shipping in these cultures? It's because they want their children, because they can't, they can't as easily take children from the surrounding groups anymore. And it's really, really messed up. Like, if you take two steps back from all this, it's like, I feel like that meme where they're like, you know,

how's it going now?

You know, and they're like, it's like New York times promoting eugenics to help the environment. Ooh, that bad, huh?

Yikes guys. Yeah, you, you are. Deep in the spiral now I, I, and, and you won't get out of it. It's going extinct. There's nothing I can do. You know, when we come to them, say it's like a, you know, Noah in the Ark, you know, with this fertility rate thing, you know, sometimes you go to the unicorns, and you're like, hey, Get on the ark.

And they're like, f**k you, bigot. And you're like, okay. I don't have, I don't [00:30:00] have the patience of Noah. Go off into the woods and die in the flood, okay? We're trying to tell you your fertility rate. How could you say my fertility rate is too low? Is that because I'm, you know White? And it's like, no, it's because of the cultural group you're in just has a desperately low fertility rate, and that is the urban monoculture, which is a multi ethnic group, and it is very, very, very, very, very low fertility rate.

Well, I don't know about that. It sounds like you're telling women that they have some sort of duty to society, and that I might have to work for this duty. Well, I mean, I think men have an equal duty. Ha! You said it! You said it! And then you point out, wait, when you say women have a duty to society, are you saying that men don't have wombs?

That there aren't a group of men out there with wombs? They're like, well of course I also need to, but of course they wouldn't forget that. Women and men with wombs, they would say. Duty to society. This whole thing is just getting absolutely comical at this point. [00:31:00] But oh, well,

Simone Collins: I'm sure it'll get crazier.

That's okay. I love you too.

Malcolm Collins: Have a great day. You

Simone Collins: too, gorgeous.

We interview leaders of the Mormon Transhumanist movement, an association of Mormons interested in using technology to improve life. They explain core Mormon beliefs like humans can become gods, the purpose of existence is to bring about immortality/eternal life, and there are multiple heavens you go to based on your desires. We find many similarities with our ideologies and possibilities for cooperation to build intergenerational religious communities.

Lincoln: [00:00:00] The second president of the Mormon Transhumanist Association has what?

Eight children.

Malcolm Collins: Do you know if there's any second generation transhumanist Mormons yet, i. e. kids where this belief system has been successfully passed between generations?

Lincoln: All of my children are Mormon transhumanists. They're all adults.

Malcolm Collins: Oh, wow. So it's working. Okay, then the next thing I really want to talk to you about, cause I think that this is the most interesting thing about it, is the large following in Africa.

Carl Youngblood: Yeah, so that's, that's pretty recent. I was approached earlier this year by a guy in Senegal whose name is Kwasi Ngesen. And he was like, I really love what you guys are talking about. He went to our website and read some things and was really excited about it. And he said, I'd like to spread it to Africa.

And I guess he's a pretty good community builder. So, suddenly we have like, Almost 30 different groups that he has opened up in various African countries and is currently [00:01:00] Sharing some ideas with them

Would you like to know more?

Carl Youngblood: Hello

Malcolm Collins: everyone! We have a very special guest here today that I am really excited and could not be more on topic for our podcast. Or I think of more interest to a lot of our listeners who are interested in the more religious stuff. But we have with us today the Co founders of the transhumanist Mormon branch of Mormonism, or I'd say movement.

I don't like to say movement because I think it's a bit more than that. And I'd really love you guys to introduce yourself. And I'd love to start just by talking about what it is as a concept. And how you see it as contiguous with the traditional Mormon tradition.

Carl Youngblood: Awesome. I guess I'll start.

My name is Carl Youngblood. I'm the current president of the Mormon Transhumanist Association. And I'm one of the co founders of the association. But, and Lincoln is as well, but there are several others, so I feel I need to give credit [00:02:00] to The whole group. There's, I think, what was it, Lincoln? Like 14 people or so who co founded the association.

And I do want to clarify that several of us are active Latter day Saints. We consider ourselves to be kind of in the mainstream church, as well. Although it's not required to be a member of The LDS church to be a member of the association. So we have Several active members. We have some who are not active in the church That's a term we use for like whether you are a practicing member.

I should say Sometimes we use this lingo inside Mormonism. That is a little bit confusing. So So yeah, there are practicing Latter day Saints in our, in our midst in the association. There are others who are not practicing and others who've never even been Latter day Saints, but just found a lot of interesting things to talk about in the group and, and kind of gravitated towards us for [00:03:00] various reasons.

And I'll let Lincoln talk a little bit more about it as well. Go ahead Lincoln.

Lincoln: Sure. Thanks, Carl. Yeah, my name's Lincoln Cannon. Like Carl said, I'm one of the co founders of the association, and I served as the association's president for 10 years from its inception until 2016. As Carl pointed out, the, you know, there isn't any necessary strong distinction between a Mormon transhumanist and a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter day Saints.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, I agree. I've been mentioning that I've been figuring that out as I've been talking to more Mormons, where a lot of the beliefs that I see are very transhumanist sounding to me, so it seems like a very natural evolution. If it is such a natural evolution, why make the distinction at all?

Lincoln: Yeah, so, and a valuable part of that is that by making some things explicit.

You emphasize them, you bring them to mind, and you ensure their continuing maybe [00:04:00] virility, or even viability within the culture. And that's one of the things that we cared a lot about, is that we wanted to call attention to aspects genuine aspects of Mormon culture and theology. That we felt were very important, are very important, and that merit more attention than perhaps the average Mormon gives them.

And so, you know, by, by, by organizing a movement around this, we call attention to those things, we emphasize those things, as a consequence, we cultivate those things within the culture.

Malcolm Collins: So can you elaborate or highlight some of the things that you guys would be focusing more on in your framing than a traditional Mormon community would?

Carl Youngblood: Yeah I'll go, I'll share a few things and Lincoln can add to this I think one thing that is very important to us is this notion that there is no distinction between spirit and [00:05:00] matter in Mormon theology, so for example from a philosophical point of view the term for this would be called substance monism, but it's this idea that You know, the dualists in classical philosophy would say that there is such a thing as spirit and such a thing as matter, and they are two separate substances, and they will never meet, and typically they would say that spirit was of a higher order, it was something metaphysical and that everything physical was an approximation of a better reality that was in the, in the realm of the spirit Mormonism, Eradicates that difference and basically says that all things are spirit and all things are matter essentially like that They're all part of the same substance.

So if there is such a thing as a spiritual phenomenon that is happening Mormons Mormon theology would would say that that must be observable, comprehensible, measurable in some [00:06:00] way, or it's not real. So I'd love to,

Malcolm Collins: oh, continue. Well, really

Carl Youngblood: fast, I would just say that would mean that anything that appears to be miraculous.

Would still have some explanation, even if we don't fully understand it yet.

Malcolm Collins: So, I'm gonna, I'm gonna draw a distinction on this point. Are you describing something closer to like, an Orson Pratt perspection of spirit, where spirit can be thought of in like, spirit particles, basically, that could maybe one day be studied, but are still a distinct thing from the material.

Like like what we think of as the material human body or is it more the way Simone and I think of it? Where we think of as the spirit is more like a metaphor for just your genetics and the patterns that are existing within your brain

Lincoln: Yeah, so,

Carl Youngblood: It's interesting. It sounds like I mean, I I'm happy about the fact that you apparently researched some things.

tHere was this period of controversy where Brigham Young and Orson Pratt were arguing over [00:07:00] like what the nature of these, this spirit is, right? And I would say that without getting too dogmatic on any particular Way of conceiving it. I think we're more focused on sort of the pragmatic aspect of how spirit spiritual phenomenon may be manifest in the world.

And so, we probably gravitate more towards the approach that you and Simone are taking in this regard, but I Yeah. I have to tease that out a little more. Lincoln, is there anything you want to

Lincoln: add there? Yeah, I think that two very useful approximations of spirit in secular language would be aesthetics and information.

And so, those both harmonize well with the kind of account that you were talking about. And those accounts of spirit also work very well with Mormon scripture. Mormon scripture, Intentionally equivocates between light and spirit and truth [00:08:00] and, and as a consequence of that you read scriptures where you can understand light and spirit and truth to be interchangeable, and once you've done that, it's not a, it's not a big leap to thinking you're talking about something like information and aesthetics.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, well this like our perspective on this, just in case listeners are wondering. A spirit can best be thought of as an emergent phenomenon that comes from specific types of complex patterns. So, so, what's, what is interesting about the framing that we would use for spirit, it would intrinsically mean that higher order types of spirits can come to exist. then potentially exist today through the endeavors of human work.

Which sounds somewhat similar to, I don't know, your guys beliefs on things, or?

Carl Youngblood: Yeah, I mean, what you've described really resonates strongly with me, that there are emergent properties both in the, the human body [00:09:00] itself. You think about how we evolve from lower life forms that eventually, Exhibited a sufficient degree of complexity to where emergent phenomena like the ability to think and to express yourself in words and to do amazing feats and when you look at human organizations at a, at a macroscopic level or imagine them that way.

You can, you can start to see even more interesting sociological phenomena occur, and we have as well, you know, the Christian Pauline metaphor of the body of Christ, where he described the, you know, all of the members of Christ's church as a kind of single body that if you could look at it from far away would each have appendages and Members and organs and and each person is doing something useful We may not be sure what it is like maybe i'm the spleen and no one can see what my purpose is other than to sit there and be annoying but [00:10:00] You know, there's probably some version, something that each person is contributing, hopefully, that is benefiting the whole, right?

So, yeah.

Malcolm Collins: Just for listeners who may not be familiar with the concept of emergent properties, because it's something that people who talk in this space would be very familiar with you can think of it as like, You broadly understand how like H2O molecules look kind of, how they interact with each other, but that them interacting in mass leads to the concept that we know of as wetness, is you don't think that there's some extra spiritual thing that's added to the water to make the wetness appear.

You just understand that this very different phenomenon seems to emerge when these specific things are interacting in a way that individually you can understand, and you can understand why they might lead to something that at a higher order looks like wetness. But the actual moment it turns from water molecules interacting to wetness is something that our brains just are not structured to understand or to grasp.[00:11:00]

Carl Youngblood: You could almost say that like You need to have some level of abstraction to even comprehend wetness, right? It's like, if you had to think about the individual movements of every single H2O molecule, you would get lost in the shuffle, right? You wouldn't be able to, to, Observe the emergent property,

Malcolm Collins: right?

I really want to focus our talk a bit about this argument that you sent me that lincoln came up with lincoln I'd love it if you could present it I forget the name of it But it's very similar to arguments that we have laid out with like I think minor aesthetic differences That highlight the difference between our communities and I think a really fun way that people might be surprised about the things we disagree on so i'd love to hear this argument presented for our audience

Lincoln: Sure.

I think you're referring to the New God argument, right? Yes. Yeah, I can, I can give you a nutshell version of that, with the caveat that there's a great deal of potential complexity to understanding it, [00:12:00] and sometimes the nutshell version gives people just enough to misunderstand it, but I, I'm more than willing to share it anyway.

So, the, the New God argument, is an argument not to prove the existence of God, but to prove that we should trust in or have active practical faith in that which may constitute God given certain understandings of God. So there's a little bit of complexity there. It's not an argument about platonic philosophy versions of the good or of the theologies that descend from platonic philosophy.

It's, it's a much more practical argument than that. It's about an argument on behalf of trust in a God that is the kind of God that could arise within nature a natural God. And, and it begins with purely secular assumptions. And it uses those secular assumptions to reach conclusions. that sound and operate very [00:13:00] much like the conclusions of theism.

And so for theists who are not attached to anti naturalist metaphysics, this argument is quite compelling. And for people maybe who aren't even theists, but who are open minded enough to deeply consider the argument, it can be transformative of their theological identity. It was that way for me. I was an atheist for nearly a decade.

The argument begins with the assumption, the secular assumption, that humanity will become superhumanity. And it's an assumption. And we, we make this assumption and we say, Hey, this is something that we. ought to trust in for practical reasons, for pragmatic reasons. If we don't trust in this possibility, we undermine our own efforts to get there.

It also kind of entails that superhumanity has dignity, that it's something worth pursuing, something that we can pursue, something that we should pursue, something that we want to pursue. So all of those are kind of bundled together in the assumption, and we call that the [00:14:00] faith assumption the assumption that humanity will become superhumanity.

Then there are two arguments that are built on top of that assumption. One of the arguments is called the compassion argument, and the other is called the creation argument. Both of those arguments introduce two more assumptions each, and they use that first assumption, the faith assumption, to reach conclusions about the nature of superhumanity, what superhumanity is probably like.

If we make those assumptions, the compassion argument makes two assumptions. As I said, one of those assumptions is a description of the possibility space for superhumanity and the possibility space of superhumanity is a superhumanity won't happen. We will not become superhumanity. That's the first possibility, right?

We'll become extinct. We'll destroy ourselves or whatever. thE second possibility is that superhumanity will not have more decentralized power. Then humanity, maybe it will, [00:15:00] maybe we will evolve into some kind of singleton where we don't have any kind of decentralized agency. We're just all part of the Borg.

The third possibility of the possibility space is that superhumanity has more. Decentralized power than humanity. sO that's the first assumption is this describing the possibility space. The second assumption of the compassion argument is that superhumanity will have more decentralized power than humanity.

Again, this is an assumption. It might not prove true, but there's again, practical reasons why. We would probably want it to be true. Unless you are a big fan of living or you wouldn't be living anymore. Or if you're a big fan of being assimilated into the Borg, then you have reason to not want to be a part of a singleton.

So if we make that, if we make that assumption that humanity, super humanity will have more decentralized power and we maintain the faith assumption that [00:16:00] humanity will become. superhumanity, then that negates two of the three parts of the possibility space, leaving only one. And that third part of the possibility space is that humanity will have more decentralized power, or excuse me, superhumanity will have more decentralized power than humanity has.

And then we look at some of the ramifications of that. One of the ramifications of that is that decentralized power is a very predictable quality for cooperation, where there's more decentralized power, there's more cooperation. In a previous email discussion with Malcolm, Malcolm brought up the truth that this only works for in groups, those that have the power, and he's totally right.

And that's the point of the argument. The point of the argument is, is that as we decentralize power, we become predictable to those who have power. And so by decentralizing power more to more agents, we become predictable to more agents, and therefore more likely to be cooperative [00:17:00] with more agents. And then kind of the final part of the reasoning here is that decentralized power pressed to its limits requires decentralized cooperation pressed to its limits, which becomes practically indistinguishable from compassion for all practical purposes.

So superhumanity, given those assumptions, those two assumptions we made, would be more compassionate than humanity. So that's the co that's the compassion argument. Then the simulation, or excuse me, the creation argument, which depends in part on the simulation argument is very similar. First, it lays out a possibility space.

The possibility space is that A will become extinct before becoming superhumanity. That's a possibility. Or B, Superhumanity will either choose not to or not have the ability to run many emulations of its evolutionary history or see or almost certainly living in one of those emulations of The evolutionary history of superhumanity and the reasoning for this goes back to the simulation argument.

It's an argument that's most [00:18:00] well known for having been formulated by Nick Bostrom, but the arguments actually older than his formulation. He just did a very good job of expressing it. And that argument is basically that either either superhumanity will, you know, isn't will never become superhumanity or for whatever reason they won't run a simulation or if they do run a significant number of simulations of their ancestral history, then we're almost certainly living in one of those ourselves just for reasons of probabilities.

statistics. As it turns out, the simulation argument can be generalized. It doesn't depend on simulation technology. It works just as well. The math works just as reliably for any creative mechanism that we think may be feasible. Maybe it's cosmoforming, maybe it's terraforming. Maybe it's computing of some other nature than what we might think of as simulation doesn't matter the same logic, the same mathematics hold out.

And so the simulation, the creation argument, first of all, uses the faith assumption and negates one aspect of the [00:19:00] possibility space. No, we're not going to go extinct because we assumed that away. It also makes the assumption that superhumanity will have the ability and interest in running.

Emulations, whether they're simulations terraforming or what, emulations of their evolutionary history and the logical probabilistic consequence of that. We're almost certainly living in one of those emulations ourselves. So then the argument concludes by combining the conclusions of the compassion and the creation arguments and says that superhumanity probably would be more compassionate than us.

Again, this is a probabilistic argument. And from the creation argument, superhumanity probably created our world. And those two conclusions, when combined, sound very much Like, God, as understood by traditional theology, so long as you're willing to accept a natural version of God, which some people will not like on metaphysical grounds.

Carl Youngblood: A progressing God, right? [00:20:00] Who emerged from simpler forms.

Lincoln: Yeah, and fortunately for Mormon theology, that's exactly what God is in Mormon theology, right? God does not start as God in Mormon theology. God becomes God.

Simone Collins: So one thing I'm really curious about is like, I mean, the movement's been around for a while.

And, and like you say, like, it's not that distinguished from like mainstream LDS.

Malcolm Collins: But I think listeners to the show can also see why it has so many similarities to our belief system. Very, very, very many similarities. But are there any

Simone Collins: like sort of day to day or month to month or year to year differences in the lifestyle or practices of a transhumanist Mormon versus a mainstream normal?

not considering themselves transhumanist mormon.

Carl Youngblood: I guess, it, that would probably vary from individual to individual, but I certainly think that think that some of the things that are on our radar because of the particular interests of our group tend to cause certain values to bubble up. So for example, some of us are engaged in things like intermittent [00:21:00] fasting, other things around health.

We're a little more keyed into some of the new discoveries around health and longevity and trying to do our best to to improve our health a little bit and be a little more mindful of some things that maybe an average Latter day Saint Might not be as concerned about. So,

Lincoln: Yeah. So, like, basically,

Simone Collins: Would it, Would it be accurate to say, like, broader, just more technophilia in general?

Carl Youngblood: Oh, yeah. Yeah, I think so. Like, There's more tech nerds among us than probably in the average, you know, LDS.

Malcolm Collins: I'd love to get an idea. What's the fertility rate like in this community and what's the geographic distribution of the

Lincoln: community? The second president of the Mormon Transhumanist Association has what?

Eight children. Is that right? Carl? Chris? Yeah. Yeah.

Carl Youngblood: Chris, Chris is a really interesting figure. I hope he'll forgive us for [00:22:00] speaking on his behalf while he's not here. But he calls himself a liberal fundamentalist and he just kind of like jokingly about how he has certain qualities that you might think of as fundamentalist, but he's also kind of progressive in other ways.

And he often had said, he claims that like, if, if progressive people with progressive politics really cared about, Propagating their ideas and sharing them more broadly that they would have more children, right? And so I I've always thought that was kind of interesting You know, and then carly I agree

Malcolm Collins: I I hope that he keeps some aspect of the progressive Movement alive like I do not think the progressive movement is bad And one of the things that we bemoan the most on this show is that it's one of the movements That unless some people like him are able to find ways to intergenerationally preserve it That's going to most quickly go extinct Yeah, and

I

Carl Youngblood: should clarify that I think Chris is fairly nuanced in his politics, so he's [00:23:00] not your typical sort of leftist or whatever, but I think it's more just that I don't know, I often say that I think that a Christian should actually Have qualities that appear on both the right and the left and some on either side as well.

And so,

Simone Collins: well, if you're on either side, especially considering how oddly scattershot and like, in many cases, non thematic, the ideological clusterings are politically in the United States. Like there's a lot of stuff that's conservative and it's like, this doesn't, why is this a conservative thing? And vice versa.

If you show more tendency toward that than your religion, then it's just showing that you are like. basically adhering to a false god. So I think you're totally right. You need to follow your religion's principles, not those of a particular ideological team, especially considering how logically inconsistent our ideological teams are

Malcolm Collins: now.

Do you know if there's any second generation transhumanist Mormons yet, i. e. kids where this belief system has been successfully passed between generations?

Lincoln: All of my children are [00:24:00] Mormon transhumanists. They're all adults.

Malcolm Collins: Oh, wow. So it's working. Okay, then the next thing I really want to talk to you about, cause I think that this is the most interesting thing about it, is the large following in Africa.

Carl Youngblood: Yeah, so that's, that's pretty recent. Um, uh, I was approached earlier this year by a guy in Senegal whose name is Kwasi Ngesen. And he was like, I really love what you guys are talking about. He went to our website and read some things and was really excited about it. And he said, I'd like to spread it to Africa.

And I guess he's a pretty good community builder. So, suddenly we have like, Almost 30 different groups that he has opened up in various African countries and is currently Sharing some ideas with them. I would say that there it's still very nascent over there. They're still even figuring out what it is that Mormon [00:25:00] transhumanism is and asking us a lot of questions about some of our beliefs and You know, it's been interesting also to see the reception amongst Different groups where some of them like what are you talking about?

Are these guys even latter day saints? Like, you know, they're just a little bit. I'm surprised at first But I think as they learn more about it and as we've been having monthly meetups, virtual monthly meetups with them They're starting to see. Oh, yeah, you guys sound familiar, you know, the things you're saying aren't too out there for us, you know So my

Simone Collins: understanding like to an outsider just how close that is to the Matt Stone and Trey Parker Broadway play the Book of Mormon that like yeah somehow like in Africa now You have all these people who are like talking like about high tech like basically Star Wars and stuff and it's like wait what wait Wait, wait, wait, like what Matt Stone and Trey Parker need to know about

Carl Youngblood: This is different.

My emphasis is different for Africans like One of the things that I have been strongly encouraging the African chapters of our [00:26:00] association about is to gain as much education as possible. Like, that is a principle that Latter day Saints firmly believe in. It's been affirmed by several of our leaders in general conference, but it's something that is now on reach of a lot of Africans because the church just recently the, a remote education program that will hopefully extend the blessings of a strong liberal education to to the whole world.

Whereas up to now, it's been largely available to those who live near one of the actual universities of the church, but not, it's a little harder to get to in some of these developing nations, right?

Malcolm Collins: Something I wanted to pull on here and you can correct me if I'm wrong in this sort of understanding of what's going on with the African movement.

But that they are culturally a little different from the branch that's in the U. S. And that in the U. S. it seems almost sort of ancillary to the core theology of the [00:27:00] movement. The movement is slightly more progressive in its social ideology, where the African movement is more conservative in its social ideology.

Is that an accurate understanding?

Carl Youngblood: Yeah, I think that's fair. What we've observed is that certain hot button social issues like queer issues and other things like that don't rece don't have a good reception in the global south, generally speaking. And Over time, I've come to the conclusion that a few, the church generally, I mean, this isn't like, I'm not dictating what the church should do in these areas, but I, I personally feel that some of the things that the church in the developed world, some of the issues that are causing people some turmoil and challenge are like pre, like the prescription for the developed world is almost like the precise opposite of it.

of what it might be in the Global South, because, for example, if we start [00:28:00] liberating certain concepts and, and doctrines and teachings and practices to accommodate these social issues in the, in the U. S. That might alienate members in the Global South, who, where,

Lincoln: where

Carl Youngblood: these issues, where they, they have a much more conservative stance on a lot of these issues.

And right now, the church is growing tremendously in the Global South and not as quickly in in the developed world. And so I mean, in fact, you know, all everything that we've seen so far in like various surveys shows that it's actually shrinking somewhat in the developed world. And so, um, so I'm personally feeling like any church, including ours, that wants to wants to continue adapting to change as it's happening, should probably decentralize more in its governance model.

In order to allow each of these cultures to independently come to terms with and figure [00:29:00] out how to deal with certain issues not to be too crude about it, but like um, it's not uncommon to hear that for example in africa, there's still a lot of gender disparity like Like that sometimes, you know, there's some kind of chauvinism that requires women to walk behind men and to not not be treated as equals and I'm not I'm I don't personally like that that attitude I don't agree with it But I feel like a culture needs to work through those issues at their own pace and not have it imposed externally on them because they tend to rebel when you do that and I think you would have a a poorer hearing in these other countries If you came down really strongly on a certain stance on this and so it's almost better in my opinion to let individual areas, govern themselves to some degree so that they can deal with these issues in a way that is Is best suited

Lincoln: for their culture And like an [00:30:00] argument against the problem of evil.

Yes

Malcolm Collins: So also so my understanding because we talked about how many churches there were or how many like groups there were in in africa right now There's like a thousand members, thousands of members.

Carl Youngblood: I would say that right now what we've been able to see with the groups that have formed in Africa, this is chapters of our association now.

It's important to clarify that we're not a church. You know, like, we're just an association of church members and other people interested in Mormon transhumanism, but what I've seen so far is that they, some of the largest groups claim about a hundred members and, and it goes down from there, but, so, so I'd say at our most optimistic estimates, it'd maybe be like five hundred?

Africans are somewhat aware of the MTA and and, and

Malcolm Collins: coming. But so would this make the African branch of the transhumanist Mormons larger than the American branch?

Carl Youngblood: No, so the number of [00:31:00] registered members of the MTA so far is a, is just over a thousand.

Lincoln: In the United, well, in the developed world, not counting Africa.

And, and, and I mean, to clarify. That thousand number,

Carl Youngblood: that thousand count, even has some members of developed, or sorry, developing nations as well. It's just that prior to this one individual who was a good community builder, like, going gung ho about it. If our membership was just over a thousand members these members that are joining in Africa, a lot of them, it's like just logistically getting to the point where we can accept donations and help them fund their local chapters is taking a lot of time.

So we're just in the process of registering in Ghana. And from there, that will allow us to open a bank account, which allows us to receive donations from these various countries and disperse funds to each country. And the goal here is mostly just to allow [00:32:00] them to be self sufficient. We're basically letting each of them collect membership dues and then use those to hold meetups and do whatever kind of authorized activities they would have.

And so because that's only getting off the ground now and we're still in the process of registration we don't have a whole lot of like hard, fast numbers and things of, of who's who and how much, how much activity is actually occurring. So, it's somewhat preliminary right now, basically.

Simone Collins: And I like your argument about decentralization.

And I, I mean, when you look at, there, there aren't actually that many examples of. religions that have with high ish levels of fidelity and central management managed to spread a lot. But like, when you look at Catholicism, there was a lot of decentralization and there was a lot of like local customization and like adoption of local demigods and all this kind of stuff.

So totally agree with you on that. Like, and you need that innovation in a way that even you may be the like main [00:33:00] legacy primary. church governing body would integrate the stuff that does work that they might want to spread to other areas. So I, yeah, so it makes a lot of sense.

Malcolm Collins: And do you have social technologies that are unique to members of your movement, for example, any like singles wards or anything like that that are unique to the transhumanist Mormon movement or Because I mean, when we look intergenerationally, it seems like one of the hardest things that a lot of people are having trouble with right now is finding partners.

And I'm wondering, is this something that you guys do any work on or just use the existing LDS

Carl Youngblood: operations? Lincoln, do you want to take some time and talk about maybe some of this discussion of a possible transfigurist order?

Lincoln: Sure, yeah, I can talk about that. A direct answer to your question is that historically we've not done more than what the Church itself offers, which is considerable.

The Church has single orders all over the place. Yeah. But that doesn't entirely facilitate the needs of Mormon transhumanists because Mormon transhumanists do tend to have[00:34:00] some relatively unique emphases, and they look for people with whom those resonate, of course. And so that would be something that we'd like to help with.

So that brings brings us to what Carl was just mentioning. We have for a long time. Discussed organizing a more formal religious order, we call it a religious order because we want people to understand that it's not a church. It's not a competition with the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter day Saints or any other Mormon church or any other church in the world for that matter, right?

What we want it to be is a minute. Is a friendship that strengthens its members in their faith, in their spirituality, in their aspirations, in their well being and, and toward what they would like to become, and does so using the principles of Mormon transhumanism in a, in a more. Strenuous way in a [00:35:00] more vigorous way in a way that holds people that a way in which we hold each other to higher standards because we want to be held to higher standards.

Malcolm Collins: So, just a question here for clarification. Would this be closer to the Catholic orders or would this be closer to something like the Freemasons? Where with the Catholic orders, it's sort of a sub branch of the Catholic Church and with the Freemasons. It's more of something that anyone can join whatever their faith is as long as they hold some, a few central tenets.

Lincoln: It would probably be more like the Freemasons particularly because the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter day Saints has a very positive history with the Freemasonry. Many of its original leaders were Freemasons. There continue to be members of the Church today that are Freemasons, and the Church does not have problems with that.

So, because, because of the history of the Church in that direction, I suspect it would be a little bit more like that, although we do sometimes appeal. To the tradition within Catholicism to show how [00:36:00] It can operate very synergistically with the church itself, but that's up to the church to decide. We, we, we have, we're, we're not planning to pressure the church in any way, either its leaders or its members.

The majority of us are members of the church. We want, we want to be in good standing and we are in good standing. We don't want that to change. And so what this is, is to help people in ways that, are useful for us as Mormon transhumanists because of our unique emphases. And to what

Simone Collins: extent do you talk a lot with or interact with the, like, main body of the Church of Latter day Saints and, and Also, do they know about you?

What, do you know what they think about you? Like both like to your face and

Lincoln: not to your face? I'm very

Malcolm Collins: curious. Just as an outsider, when I have been doing a lot of research on Mormonism recently, they often come up as one of what people think of who are like Mormon theological people as one of the primary branches of Mormonism right now.

Oh, so these [00:37:00] are like other people who aren't connected to their movement. They're like, there are these four broad frameworks of Mormonism that are practiced and Mormon transhumanism is often one that comes

Lincoln: up. Anything you'd like to add to that, guys? Yeah, I mean, everybody who knows me well knows that I'm a Mormon transhumanist.

And historically, that has very rarely caused problems. There have been people that have been suspicious of that, and those tend to be other members of the church who may actually be unusually conservative, as members of the church go. Maybe a little bit more like conservative Christianity in the southeastern United States than like your average.

Mormon in Utah. Okay, the most typical response when people find out about Mormon transhumanism is kind of like a cautious interest. They're like, Oh, that's interesting. Tell me about it. Yeah. And then occasionally, more often than more often than the negative extreme is actually the positive extreme where they go, Oh, wow, that's like, I've always looked at things that way.

Maybe I'm a Mormon transhumanist. [00:38:00] Right? Yeah.

Carl Youngblood: I want to add one other thing, which is that we often find discussions of transhumanism It's self a little bit to binary for our case in the sense that like, well, for example, just the other day I was, I tried to read broadly from a lot of different religious publications and publications as well.

And in conservative religious publications. Transhumanism is regularly pilloried as a kind of freakish attempt to abandon humanity and to upload ourselves into a computer and like abandon embodiment altogether, right? I see. Yeah. Whereas most of us Think of our bodies is like really important and that any experience, any augmentation of our embodiment would need to be an improvement on what we're experiencing now, not some sort of like, the evolution into [00:39:00] something that was even worse.

Right. Yeah. And so, This idea that transhumanists wish to transcend entirely human nature is, I think, often it's often a caricature of what many more serious transhumanists I know are interested in. And, but, but, in defense of those who are using it this way, some transhumanist advocates haven't done a good job of explaining what it is that they're after.

And some of them have a very naive idea that they could simply upload themselves into a computer and it would be better. And, like, so in that sense, I think a lot of people have had these sort of naive conceptions of transhumanism that don't really do it full justice. And we find ourselves in this weird Limbo or, or, or Luminal space where it's like, or liminal, I guess is the right word, where it's like, we don't quite fit in with either the secular transhumanist crowd fully [00:40:00] or the sort of religious crowd either, and we're trying to help both sides see what they could.

How they could benefit from some dialogue, I guess. I would, I, oh,

Lincoln: continue.

Simone Collins: I have a question. I'm dying now to hear this. Because, you know, when we talk about Like, a lot, a lot of the, like, we'll say secular tech groups that we interact with. fairly closely, we found there's this growing divide on one side, there are the technophilic pronatalists and on the other side, there are the technophilic life extensionists.

And I'm hearing undertones here of interest in life extension, you know, interest in like, you know, overcoming or improving upon the human body. But you, you also pointed out that like, it seems that this, this subset of the LDS church has a. pretty good birth rate which is, is meaningful. And you know, Malcolm and I have yet actually to encounter any group that has been both pro life extension and pro having a lot of

Lincoln: kids.

Carl Youngblood: [00:41:00] Where,

Lincoln: where are you guys? Like, where are you? Like in Mormon theology, the purpose of God is to immortality and eternal life of humanity. So the purpose of God is to have children and to then exalt them, glorify them in intelligence and power and compassion and courage and creativity into Godhood and which state they live in.

in immortality with God, they become gods themselves. So in Mormon theology, both are required. One is to extend life and extend robust embodiment and intelligence. And the other is to give that gift to others and to share in friendship with them.

Carl Youngblood: So we see no conflict between those two imperatives, right?

It's like, why not pursue both?

Malcolm Collins: Well, I would love it if we could, when you guys, if you guys end up starting this order, I would love to do another episode with you guys to redraw our listeners attention to what you guys are doing. [00:42:00] Because I think that among our listener base and our fan base, you'd find a lot of people who might be outside of the Mormon tradition who could be interested in something like that.

And I think the world would be a better place for something like that. And I also think an interesting thing from our followers perspective is if they're familiar with our beliefs what they might be surprised about, or you guys might not, not see this way, but we would actually come off as a much more conservative and, and, and almost sort of ruthless iteration of your belief system.

Whereas you guys would come off as the nice cozy iteration of this belief system.

Lincoln: That would fit

Carl Youngblood: well with Mormons. Stereotypes of like being polite people, you know, the nice ones, even when you insult them or like big smile, you know, that kind of stuff. So,

Lincoln: yeah, for example,

Malcolm Collins: the debate we're having over emails, we're like, Oh yeah, we believe a lot of what you guys are saying, but not that God is a compassionate God.

We don't, we don't think he's a compassionate God at all. And we, we. We think that death is a good [00:43:00] thing, like we're anti life extension so we come across, I think it's much more Old Testimony but I love this distinction and this transformation, I think, that we're seeing and what really heartens me is that you guys do do something different than us.

One of the things that we're always pushing for is we want as many different types of intergenerational high fidelity, high fertility communities to exist because it is through our differences that we are able to see things in different ways and able to, as a society, Society come to better long-term conclusions and solution to things.

And it looks like you guys have created the seed of something that really can be one of these intergenerational movements that is going to be a world player in, you know, 500 years. And I'd, I'd find it very rich and I actually think even likely from the trends we're seeing now. That it is the African fraction that ends up being the primary faction.

And we talk about this a lot on the show [00:44:00] is that in Africa, there's a lot of cultural experimentation undergoing much more difficult cultural evolutionary pressures right now, because it's a much more difficult environment. And so we are likely to see some of the cultures that end up becoming the dominant cultures in the world.

You know, 500 years from now are going to be coming out of what right now is, is sort of a, a skunk works and trial by fire of, of many different new traditions. And it's really cool to meet people who might be playing major. Might have been major founding members of all of that.

Lincoln: Malcolm, I really like what you're saying there, and I want to point out that in Mormon eschatology, heaven is not monolithic.

In Mormon eschatology, there are heavens and worlds without end of different kinds and degrees. And not everybody is supposed to all go to the same heaven. We're supposed to go to the heaven that's consistent with our desires and our works. And so when you say that you want to live in a world where we're not all the same, but where we can kind of.

[00:45:00] feed off of each other in a virtuous cycle. That's required for Mormon theology to hold out. We very definitely wish the same.

Malcolm Collins: What's funny episode that's about to come out. It hasn't come out yet. As we talk about a concept that we've been playing with recently, which is the metaphor of a Tesseract as a, for God.

And what we're pointing out with the metaphor of a tesseract for God is a lot of people, they try to overlap traditions to get a truer idea of God. This is like if you had a cube rotating in three dimensional space and you were looking at its shadow, and you tried to overlap The, the, the parts of the shadow that were consistent to get an understanding of what the cube actually looked like because you can't understand three dimensional space.

Somebody looking at two dimensional space, you'd say, Oh, it's a sphere. That's the real shape, but you're actually wrong. You would have been better off saying it's real shape with any one of the shadow formations that it had created. And it's the same with God, where we think that [00:46:00] Following any one tradition to its fullest gets you to a closer and potentially holistically true vision of God than trying to mix and match traditions.

And it is this view that allows us to say people of like ultra Orthodox Jews have a whole and complete revelation of God to the extent that we as humans can understand God in the same way that any one three dimensional shadow of a tesseract is the whole and complete revelation of that tesseract to people who are living in a three dimensional

Lincoln: plane.

Interesting. I guess I would agree with that. And insofar as we don't suppose that it logically entails that all religious cultures or ideologies are therefore equal. I don't think that that is a necessary conclusion from that reasoning. It reminds

Carl Youngblood: me a lot of the the old parable that they always talk about, like, of how So, you know, different people are feeling parts of an elephant.

And describing what they're [00:47:00] feeling and they this analogy is often used to describe the differences that exist in religions today but if it's all right with you guys I was curious you I think you'll find that both of us and several other members of the mta are Very very polite and sort of like friendly interlocutors in the sense that we are not easily offended and so, you know, by disagreement or, or even when people try to make us mad, but like I would love to see Lincoln and Malcolm engage a little more on the topic of compassion and why Why Malcolm, you are not persuaded by Lincoln's argument from decentralization towards compassion?

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, so I'll give an example of the gist of the argument that I put, and then I can hear a better position of his full argument. Which is, I do agree that cooperation works when you have a community of equals [00:48:00] and no outsiders to that community, but cooperation starts to break down as a model when you have outsiders, like competing groups, or when you have members in a group that are a vastly different or asymmetric intelligence for example, a super intelligent AI among humans, or, like, Two really, two, like, you know, two humans that would be considered of like, uh, average intelligence among a community of like 20 people who have serious mental situation.

I don't know the PC way to say this. Impairment. I wouldn't want like a democracy in that. Oh, you, you naturally, the people who are of higher cognitive processing would end up influencing much more what's happening. And so I think that. When we have a world of, so that's, that's one side of the argument is I just don't think that where we're going is a world in which all groups are, are equal and, and that, that necessarily leads to cooperation in that chain.

But [00:49:00] also, I don't think when I look around the world today, that I see evidence that this world was created by A being that had compassion in the way we as humans understand compassion. I think it has a goal, and I think that goal is more important than compassion or any of the lower order things that we humans concern ourselves with because we have emotions and so we think from the perspective of an entity that has emotions.

And this often influences the way that we see things. So we come from a Calvinist tradition, and as we often mention on our podcast, we see both an indulgence in positive emotional states and negative emotional states as equally sinful. So an overindulgence in happiness or anything like that, insofar as it affects your efficacy is a sin.

And, and this is a reflection of the way that we see God, is that God is just not concerned with you know, the, the bonfire of human vanity.

Lincoln: So Malcolm, I completely agree with [00:50:00] everything you said. And I think that if you had been supposing that those were disagreements with my positions, then I didn't communicate my positions to you in a way that was understandable to you.

On the first point regarding cooperation only applying to an in group, that's exactly the point. And therefore the reason to expand that group to decentralize as a moral imperative. The greater the and decentralization is not decentralize decentralization in word because, as you pointed out, that doesn't actually work.

It has to be decentralization in actual power and therefore the necessity of not just Giving people a vote but actually enhancing their capacities. So anyway, I, I completely agree with your point on, on decentralization. You're so far as I'm concerned, you're perfectly correct. And it's perfectly consistent with the compassion argument.

The second point about the kind of world we live in. I also agree with, [00:51:00] and that is that if we define compassion in terms of suffering mitigation, then clearly God is not compassionate. This world is abundant proof to the contrary, but I don't define compassion in terms of suffering mitigation, nor do I think the scriptures.

I think the scriptures define compassion in terms of thriving optimization. And that is very often a difficult thing that's consistent with, as is pointed out by Paul in the New Testament, with suffering. In fact, according to Paul, if we want to become joint heirs in the glory of God, with Christ, then we must suffer

Malcolm Collins: with him.

Interesting. I guess my counter would be, I'd love to understand Like, the capacity, I agree, that compassion could be, like, if there was a, a deity that allowed all humans to improve themselves in at least a somewhat a parative way,

I can then see that as [00:52:00] a compassionate God from this definition from like the improvement definition. However, a lot of humans, I feel, do not get the capacity to improve themselves. They're born into situations where that was never an option for them before their lives were cruelly and painfully snuffed out.

And so I think that the way I could get to a definition of compassion here is to say that God is allowing our species to intergenerationally improve, but doesn't particularly care for any individual, which, which then, yeah, I totally agree with you if that's something that we're aligned on. Yeah. Maybe it's about

Simone Collins: a definition of compassion.

Is that what the difference is

Lincoln: here? Sorry, could you repeat what you just said there, Simone?

Simone Collins: Is this about a differing definition of compassion? Like, if compassion is about the opportunity of, like, humanity on the whole to achieve great things and become better, then we would probably agree that God is extremely compassionate and that humanity has been given ample opportunity [00:53:00] and has been able to thrive and flourish and grow.

However, on an individual level, No, and I guess we see compassion is like stopping individual suffering. So is this a definitional problem?

Lincoln: Yes, it is a definitional problem. And I almost agree with what you're saying about God being compassionate towards the species, where I'll disagree with you, and that I think is exactly right.

God is compassionate towards humanity and the potential of humanity, but where I would disagree with you is the conclusion that to speak coarsely, individuals be damned. And that is because I trust that while of necessity, God must relinquish power in order for us to have the opportunity to truly thrive.

And relinquishing power requires serious risk and requires the fallout that we see all over the world. That doesn't mean that the story must end at death. fRom a Mormon perspective, the story doesn't end there. [00:54:00] The story is one of eternal progression and individuals who may not have had a full opportunity in this life.

will from a Mormon perspective, eventually, and I don't know exactly how, but my trust is in the, and that I ought to contribute in making this the possibility that they eventually will have that opportunity to participate in the thriving according to their desires and works. Mm. Mm. Mm.

Malcolm Collins: It's interesting that for our perspective, it's not that we don't think that God doesn't care about any humans, but we believe, you know, again coming from a Calvinist tradition, in the concept of the elect, God cares about some humans, and not in, in any sort of a fair way, but many lives he just consigns to hopelessness out of capricion, I would say.

Not out of capricion. I mean, it's all calculated. It's all meant to lead to some end. But, but yeah, that's sort of our perspective on this and how we split the difference here. Or if we

Lincoln: were to

Carl Youngblood: word it differently, [00:55:00] go ahead. Simone said just recently, a day or two ago in the episode that I watched, that you really cannot judge who is elected or not.

Right. And so, so you, if you're taking that, you know, to its full extent, you're, you're basically need to interact with everyone you encounter as though they might be. Elect, right? 100%. From the perspective you guys are

Lincoln: taking here.

Simone Collins: And what this even means though, that people that were like, Oh my gosh, almost certainly they, they are elect.

They may not be, and not everyone will be. So that still means, and for us also, like, we don't have this concept of like a persistent soul. Like we sort of see ourselves as part of an unbroken chain from all of our ancestors through all of our descendants. So if, Neither mimetically nor genetically we've made any impact you know, or, or logistically we've made any impact as humans, meaning that we're not among the elect.

There will be no no conceivable version of us that [00:56:00] get to, you know, get the better roll of the dice, get the more enjoyable round, have God's grace, you know, enjoy the nice, the nice round. Whereas I think maybe the difference here is the Mormon view is that there is a persistent soul and this soul will get a good roll of the dice, like a good round at some point up ahead.

Whereas like for us, it's

Lincoln: more,

Malcolm Collins: I don't know. I don't think this is exactly their perspective. No, it's, it's, it's I think where our perspective differs from them is they actually believe everything you just said of what we believe, but we believe people meaningfully differentiate from other people when they branch from them genetically or mimetically.

So, if there is someone alive today who does not have any significant contribution to the memetic future of humanity or the genetic future of humanity, they do literally die and never exist again. Whereas I don't think that's a perspective they

Lincoln: have. No, Mormon, Mormonism is essentially pragmatically [00:57:00] universalist.

And I say it's essentially pragmatically so because there are exceptions to, to salvation in Mormonism, but they're the exceptions that don't wish salvation. There are people who don't desire it. In Mormon eschatology, everyone ultimately goes to the heaven that they desire.

Simone Collins: Yeah. If you want it, you'll get it.

Or you'll get what you want. You'll get what you're working toward. And if you're working toward It's

Carl Youngblood: possible to not desire any degree of glory whatsoever, in which case

Lincoln: Yeah, and we are called to participate in that work and that's the salient point. The salient point is not the passive Oh God will take care of things.

The salient point is God calls us all to create worlds without end in which We raise each other In the ways that we think are best if we can but in their own way if we can't like in

Carl Youngblood: other words, when God is calling thing for things to happen or when God is Doing things as [00:58:00] we describe we're describing things God is doing supposedly from your perspective and from ours We would say that none of those actions can take place unless The agents of God are actually doing that work and that would be us Because remember God, according to Mormonism, God's God's purpose is to bring to pass the immortality and eternal life of humanity.

And by definition in Mormonism, eternal life cannot be imposed against one's will, and no one can be forced towards it. And so, essentially, in order for God to achieve these purposes, We have to voluntarily choose to follow a certain pattern, a certain principle.

Simone Collins: And I also, I love how pluralistic that is.

You've I didn't understand this concept of sort of everyone gets the heaven they're working toward, the heaven they desire, and there is no universally similar heaven for everyone and that, you know, it's, it's going to be a very [00:59:00] different experience for different people. I love how pluralistic that is.

I've never really heard of anything like that before. I only really understand the LDS church, like culturally from having a lot of friends in it and like growing up in like a lot of the lifestyle, but not seeing any of the actual philosophy personally. So that is absolutely fascinating. And I love that.

Like pluralism within an ideology within a religion is so

Carl Youngblood: cool.

Lincoln: Yeah. You know, Mormons underappreciate it even, and we'll mischaracterize our theology and our eschatology to people outside of the church. For example. It's entirely true per Mormon scripture that Christians will go to a heaven that matches what they aspire to.

The account of what we call the terrestrial heaven in Mormon scripture is exactly what most Christians aspire to live in. And Mormon scripture says that they will go there and they will get that. And so many Mormons are [01:00:00] I'm too hesitant to fully point that out because Mormons are taught that there's a better heaven called the celestial heaven that they should want for other reasons.

And they end up making it a sticking point when it ought not to be a sticking point. What it should be is a description of, Hey, here's what a terrestrial heaven entails. Here's what a celestial heaven entails. What do you want?

Simone Collins: So it's almost like there's too much brand loyalty around one like, yeah. A better heaven.

Carl Youngblood: You know, and one other thing I would add to all this discussion of sort of pluralism is a great, interesting person to read as Immanuel Swedenborg. I don't know if you guys have been exposed to any of his writings, but he was highly influential to subsequent thinkers. He, he was I think he died sometime in the 1600s, but his he wrote very detailed views of heaven, and he essentially took Paul's metaphor of the body of Christ to [01:01:00] extreme literal degrees, and described heaven as That if you were to zoom out on heaven, you would see a perfect human.

Lincoln: Oh, oh, interesting. And what he said

Carl Youngblood: was that different members of this body, of this massive,

Lincoln: infinite, like,

Carl Youngblood: infinite community of, of exalted beings or whatever, that they gravitated towards the parts of the body, That they found most affinity with and that the affinity that

Lincoln: they held had nothing

Carl Youngblood: to do with their earthly kin so he he claimed that like people would gravitate towards the to the communities that really Resonated with them and that there were even some members of these communities Who, whose preference was not to be a part of a single community but to be a communicator between

Lincoln: communities.

Simone Collins: Right. Like you're like a total red blood cell kind of soul. So,

Malcolm Collins: yeah, exactly. Here's a question I have 'cause I actually don't know if this is an [01:02:00] area of differentiation. Is one core differentiation seems to be. The, the level of distinction you believe that the Exalted Beings, which are represented as God, have from each other, whereas we believe much more that God is an emergent property of the communication of these Exalted Beings, but is very much just one single entity.

Carl Youngblood: Yeah. So to respond to that point, I think that probably where maybe we differ a little bit is that I see godliness manifest at many different levels of emergence and not just at one, if that makes sense. I see godliness manifested in my neighbor. I see the image of Christ in my neighbor, but I also see the image of Christ in a community of beings working together harmoniously.

And maybe even in the entire world, right? And so I don't, I don't confine my [01:03:00] view of, of transcendence to one emergent level, if that makes sense.

Simone Collins: Hmm. So it's more like distributed divinity rather than there being some kind of entity that's formalized.

Carl Youngblood: like how things echo, right? Like

Lincoln: if you look

Carl Youngblood: at the way spiral galaxies You know, are mirrored in a

Lincoln: toilet flush, you know, it's like

Carl Youngblood: we have these properties in the universe that repeat themselves.

So like Fibonacci

Lincoln: divinity. Yeah, yeah. I mean, yeah. Mormon theology. God is both one and many. In fact, there's a passage of scripture, the 93rd. Section of the Doctrine and Covenants from Joseph Smith, the founder of Mormonism, where he says that in the dispensation of the fullness of times, which is the time that we now live in that whether there is one God or many gods.

All will be manifest and of course what he's getting at which he talks about in other discourses He gave was that there are ways of thinking about God as being just one and there are ways about [01:04:00] thinking of God as being many and that they're they're both True, there's both true there. You can approach God from either perspective.

In fact the Book of Mormon Emphasizes over and over more strongly than the Bible that God, the Father, God, the Son, and the Holy Ghost are one eternal God. It's like Trinitarianism on steroids, and yet Mormons will insist that we're not Trinitarians for good reason. Because that's just one account of our theology.

There's a lot more to it. And then in another book of Mormon scripture the book of Abraham Joseph Smith describes the creation, and in the creation, it's the gods. Plural who create the heavens and the earth and go through the various stages of creation that we know of from the book of genesis So there's many accounts of theology and oneness or manyness of god in mormon You know, in fact lincoln gave

Carl Youngblood: a really good talk on this these multivalent manifestations of god in our last conference and so if you guys I [01:05:00] can share you the link of that But it would be interesting if you want to explore more sort of This concept of like different ways that God may emerge and be manifest.

Interesting.

Malcolm Collins: Oh, so the question I had for you guys is as Mormon transhumanist do you believe that Christians get Christian heaven, like non Mormon Christians get Christian heaven? And what do you think is the mechanism there? Do you think it's an emulation of some sort? Do you think it's like, how does that work within the transhumanist framework?

Whereas we just think people who aren't following. Are, are not on the path of the elect get no meaningful reward, and even the elect get no meaningful reward other than their own efficacy.

Lincoln: In Mormon theology, everyone's elect. Everyone's elect, and everyone has potential and possibility. Everyone has potential to become God.

But not everybody will want to, because that entails a lot of hard things, that it's not a simplistic notion of God. And so, yes. Most, most Mormons who understand our theology will say yes, Christians will get the heaven that they're aspiring to, and the [01:06:00] mechanism is that they will make that heaven through their actions, through their relationships.

Carl Youngblood: That's what I was going to say, like, that it's just important not to think of this as some sort of like final destination that you're plopped into, but that it's more like, you know, Brigham Young actually said something really profound when he said essentially like, A lot of people ask me all the time, like, reveal to me the mysteries of the gods and where think people end up and what the heavens look like.

He says, allow me to inform you that you are in the midst of it all now, that you are in as great a kingdom as you will ever, ever inherit, unless you make it yourselves, and that you cannot even appreciate a kingdom that you have not labored to make yourselves, right? So essentially, If we were to be zapped into heaven without the operating manual of heaven, it would, it would be a hell to us, essentially.

Lincoln: So, we Very soon, at least. Yeah.

Carl Youngblood: Pretty soon, things would break down and we wouldn't know how to [01:07:00] fix them, right? So, the point is that we can only inherit the kind of glory That we have, like, personally and collectively labored to, to create and

Lincoln: establish. Collective being key here. Heaven is more than just an individual thing in Mormonism.

It's definitely a community thing. Yeah.

Carl Youngblood: Yeah, Mormonism is really interesting because it has this weird combination of, like, Fierce independence with communalism right right where it's like Mormons for example during the great depression Mormons had a really strong welfare program And within

Lincoln: the church within the church,

Carl Youngblood: right?

But it was Because the church was so strong along the Wasatch Front, it was practically the community, whether, whether you were an active member of the church or not, you were getting a sustenance from this program, right? And when even during, like, the Depression, when some research

Lincoln: was done into how to [01:08:00] deal with, Some of the challenges that various communities were

Carl Youngblood: experiencing.

Some observers were sent from Washington to Utah to try to understand what they're doing well. And yet there was also a lot of suspicion about government welfare programs that were being implemented later on. Precisely because they didn't want competition, like the Utahns, the Mormons in Utah wanted, said it's working for us, just let us do what we're doing, you know, and so I think there was some natural suspicion around something that would be administered by a governing body that did not also have all the other trappings that, and strengths of Mormonism, right, whether that suspicion was warranted or not is another question, but it's an interesting historical anecdote, right?

Right. To, to see that, that combination of self reliance, independence, and communalism at the same time. Right.

Lincoln: That is,

Simone Collins: I, I love that there, there's so many things about the LDS church that are just like, I [01:09:00] mean, what also it, it, it, it, it shows that a lot of the things that the church and the, the broader lifestyle and culture have tried and done really work because there aren't very many.

Like, we'll say new versions of Christianity that have done well and, you know, sort of been relatively new. I mean, I, the LDS Church is the only one that I know of, like,

Carl Youngblood: post.

Malcolm Collins: The Millerists, they split into a number of movements that still exist today, but Millerists? I've never heard of them. And so, so Jehovah's Witnesses are probably the biggest branch, but so are the,

Carl Youngblood: Adventists, I think, are doing.

Seventh day Adventists,

Malcolm Collins: yeah.

Carl Youngblood: Yeah, it is interesting, though, like, I think for every religion that succeeds, there's probably hundreds that fail, right? So, it's, it's rarer. To see the emergence of a new world religion that that has traction,

Simone Collins: right? Well, and that is influential. I've never met a seventh day adventist.

I've never met a Jehovah's Witness. And yet like all my friends in college were Mormon. I went to a Mormon preschool I've met many Mormons [01:10:00] just randomly like yeah,

Carl Youngblood: that is interesting I'd say one thing that's different between those three groups that we just mentioned is that Mormons are strongly encouraged to like be out among the world and be involved and we're also not anti tech and we're not like, cloistered that much, right?

So,

Lincoln: So I think that Did you live in the Western United States? Yeah, in California. Lots of Mormons in the Western United States.

Simone Collins: Except, except when I went to school and all my friends were Mormon, I was in D. C.

Lincoln: Yeah. So. Lots of Mormons in D. C. Yeah. Yeah, there are.

Malcolm Collins: Anyway, this has been fantastic. Yes.

Lincoln: Thank you

Malcolm Collins: so much for joining the time to talk with us. I really do want to have you on again. If you end up starting this organization so that we can help you get members. Because I think it would have a lot of overlap with the things that we do. And I think it is very interesting the huge amount of overlap in our belief systems, which better helps you understand when I talk to Mormons that like your belief systems are very, very Mormon.

In fact,

Malcolm Collins: The [01:11:00] one thing that we, we often say like distinctly, I know for a fact, this is something that I disagree with Mormons on is we disagree with the idea of a central church.

And I was like, but you know, you guys also said that you thought that it might be better to have unique local central churches. So even there, we have a lot of similarities, so it's been great to have you on. And have a spectacular

Lincoln: Christmas. Yes, I can all agree. Merry Christmas to both of you. Yeah.

Thank you so

Carl Youngblood: much, guys. I love these discussions and we need a round two for compassion versus, like, austerity in Divinity, right? So, whenever you guys are ready, let's do it again. Have a good one. Okay. Thanks, guys. Bye.

 just like we said, there is a creator. No. Yep. You said it was some all powerful dude living in the clouds. Our creator's nothing like that.

It's still a creator. It's f*****g Kevin. He was doing the Lord's work. He was doing a senior project. Eh, semantics. Okay, you know what? Hey, Kevin?[01:12:00] Hey, just had some questions. Um, first, I'm actually just curious, how long did this take you? Okay, well, don't tell my mom, but I kinda procrastinated on the thing. Uh, we had the full year to work on it, but I waited until probably the last week, worked for like six days straight, got it done, and then I rested for like a full day after that.

Are you f*****g kidding me? Okay, was this, like, a team project, or? Nope. Just me. One programmer. Okay. How does this program work? Well, first it calls a function. I just called it Let There Be Light. Then you know how in iRobot, the robots must obey the three laws? Yeah. Well, this program has laws it has to follow, too.

Uh, the first four are the fundamental forces, and then there are actually six natural laws of human nature. So, ten in total. Yep, and the program must obey these laws or else it just falls apart. So, [01:13:00] you might say they're like the commandments of the program. Yeah, that's pretty much exactly what they are.

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense actually. What language is this written in? C. Wow. It actually involves some others, but what's nice about this language is that it highlights any individual mistakes in red. So when I was debugging, all I had to do was part the red C code from the rest and then See what the issues were.

Mm hmm. Yeah. Then all the bugs were swept away and the good code was, you know, free to be executed. Okay, so was there like a flood that covered the entire earth and a dude who built an ark and put a bunch of animals on it? That was in another file. Doesn't count. Totally counts. Doesn't count! Different files, that's like di wait, different folders?

Yep, different folders. Different folders, that's like a different universe. Bible never says it'll happen in this universe. You make people crazy! Yeah, on my computer I have one column of final design folders that I actually send to my teacher, and then I have another column of just, like, junk folders for [01:14:00] fun stuff.

Are you trying to say it happened in a parallel universe? No, I'm just saying different folders. Okay, what happens after you die? You're removed from the active program, but all your info is still stored on an external hard drive. Wipe that smirk off You know what? No. You said you were gonna go to heaven, like above the clouds or whatever.

Not a hard drive sitting on some dude's desk. So after that I knew I needed another method of storing these files, so I started backing up the hard drive to the cloud. The cloud, yeah, exactly. Uh, what'd you get on the project? B minus. Wow, strict teacher. Yeah, for real. But I'm thankful for what I got. Oh, and speaking of that, one sec. Dear Lord, I just want to say thank you for guiding me through this project. Uh, I managed to get a B minus, which is passing Wait, are you praying?

Yeah. To who? God. You have a God? Duh. You think we just came from nothing? I don't know, maybe you're part of a simulation. That's the dumbest thing I've ever heard. Wait, how do you know you guys have a God? [01:15:00] He talks back to us. Hey Kevin, just wanted to say good job on the senior project. Thanks, you know, I worked really hard on it.

I know you did, but maybe don't procrastinate as much next time? Yeah, definitely. Okay, wait, who is your God? You wanna see? Yeah. Hey, sending up one of my characters to you now.

And no idea what's going on, super confused, reviews, weird s**t in my life, and, well.

So, what, are you f*****g kidding me? Hi there! So what does this mean? Like, the Mormons got it right?

Where to Live Doc: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1tq9rY1TCs49XHckWtzOowYz_xHXFnRpOZq8r0lE5JSQ

Should you have more kids? We discuss the REAL costs of additional children and why it gets dramatically cheaper after the first few. We also cover why private school, travel, restaurants, etc. are overrated for kids. Having a big family forces you to live more reasonably!

Malcolm Collins: [00:00:00] The incremental cost of each additional kid.

Cause I think people might be really surprised. There was a study done on this and it shows, I think it's like after four, every additional kid costs on average about a thousand dollars a year. So not a lot.

In an article called The Marginal Cost of Children in the New York Times Archive. . By the time you get to kid three, you have fallen from a cost of. around 15, 000 a year for one kid to, well under 3, 000 a year.

And so you can see how you get down to like 1, 000 extra a year, or 800 extra a year when you get like four, kid number five, the costs just drop really dramatically.

Malcolm Collins: And, and the waste that you have when you're having a few kids, keep in mind, you still need to buy all the s**t, you know, whether or not you're having a ton of kids or a few kids.

So, you know, the next time you have a kid, it's no baby toys, it's, it's no, you know, no, no, no toddler toys.

Simone Collins: No new swings, or highchairs, or bibs, or plates, [00:01:00]

Malcolm Collins: or bottles, or sippers, or Every time we buy something for one of our kids, that's being used by like a huge chain of kids after them

Would you like to know more?

Malcolm Collins: Anyway. Hello, Simone! It is wonderful to talk to you today! So, we did this video on dinks, right? And we're like, dinks are actually good, right? Because They are we don't want these people having kids, they're not going to be good parents, probably not good for the gene pool so, let's march them into their sweet good night all by themselves.

Now, this But we got some

Simone Collins: interesting, we got some interesting comments on that video, and, and one I wanted to do a conversation about.

Malcolm Collins: Well, and I see this with other people, right? Like, the core point we made in the Dink video, or one of the points that we made, Is that you know, while we pity dinks, the people we pity more than dinks is people with only one or two kids, because it's all of the cost of kids and none of the real benefits of kids.

Well, you get some, I mean, you get like the, the shallow masturbatory feeling of I have a kid that the dinks don't get and like, you get to experience them and spend time with them, which is nice, but you don't [00:02:00] get like the genetic or cultural effects, right? You know, you're not really. contributing to a solution in a big way.

And, and it's actually harder. We argue like, like, and for us, it's very obviously harder. It is, it is much harder to have fewer kids than more kids.

Simone Collins: Totally. And we're stressful and

Malcolm Collins: way more stressful. And we need to talk about why this is the case. And in many ways, you know, we immediately saw it in the question that they're asking us about this.

It's like, well, I have two kids, but like, I don't know how I'm going to afford.

Simone Collins: I'll read the comments. There were, there were two comments. It sort of inspired this. So one person said, I have two kids, but I think I need to make more money before I go for number three. My mother in law is already very against her daughter having another.

So I was waiting to my economic situation changed to go for, for three. But should I, I know I want three because that's above replacement level. But what are the economics of kid numbers at three, four, five and crazy numbers like 10 and then someone else also answered, I want. More of this conversation to currently have to, but would love for, but don't want to reduce the quality of life for the children.

I [00:03:00] have IE vacations, private school, et cetera. It's just a very interesting conversation. That's the

Malcolm Collins: answer there. And this is, this is why higher numbers of kids become much easier because when you get to the higher number of kids. You realize that a lot of these things that you thought was necessary for your kids quality of life was really more about your own personal vanity than the kids actual Or societal

Simone Collins: decoupling.

Yeah, I think this understanding that private school, for example, is really good for your kids or necessary for your kids, or that, like, vacations where you fly somewhere are good for your kids or necessary for your kids. Like, I remember this, like, your Like you had relatives who were making this huge deal about flying their sons to Italy and how they were going to expose them to so much culture.

And this was going to be so formative for them. And they were all young teens at that age. They were like, yeah, you know, they're old enough to really appreciate it culturally. And they went and like, all they wanted to do [00:04:00] was eat at the hard rock cafe. Yeah. Every freaking day. They're just like, please just let me eat at the hard rock cafe.

Like, I don't really want to be here. Like they were not enjoying it. They didn't get anything out of it. And so this idea to us that like, Oh, well air travel and like really expensive.

Malcolm Collins: Well I think what is important to remember is, was travel is travel became associated with status for a period of time.

Cause of course, you know, if you can afford to travel, you're wealthier, you're higher status. And so people. Use it to affirm for their self, their high status was, I think, out really reflecting on whether or not it's this great beneficial thing to them. We talk about is, and I think that there are specific life stages where travel brings you a great deal of satisfaction.

And unfortunately, these are also your formative stages of life. So they're also when you're likely to be. Yeah, you know, I'd say like late teens through college and then like two years out of college, like that range is when you are in, you know, from an evolutionary standpoint, that's when you're leaving [00:05:00] your family, of course, you're going to be biologically rewarded for engaging in exploratory behavior that is most expanding your, your concept of the world, but also going out and surveying new lands and everything like that, because this is, You know, people who had this instinct to go out and do this during that period of their life would have spread further and had more offspring ultimately than people who didn't.

So it makes sense. This is a hard coded segment of our life. But the problem is that it's also around the age when many people are solidifying their identity. So in the same way that during that age, often people will think that kids are gross. Like when they're a teenager, they have this, like, biological instinct.

Young kids are gross because they're biologically hard coded to as a teenager, not be interested in young kids. You know, they're trying to find a partner and start having kids, right? So they see the young kids is gross and they don't want to be overly involved in child care. That makes perfect sense, right?

But they're building their identity then, and so then they, they work into their identity young kids are growing without realizing that that's like a cycling pre coded genetic thing for [00:06:00] that specific age range. And it's the same with traveling, you know, and travel during that time, you know, like your gap year, you know, after your, your young education, before you start fully working, or.

You know, taking a period then to be a digital nomad. I think that makes a lot of sense. It is something I'd encourage our kids to do early

Simone Collins: in their life. Also, there are many financially sustainable ways to do that. If mommy and daddy can't pay for it, for example, you can get a job abroad. You can get an internship abroad.

Yeah,

Malcolm Collins: I did ultra low cost backpacking and everyone I knew doing it was you know, lots of hitchhiking. I hitchhiked around South America, hitchhiked around Europe.

Simone Collins: Yeah, when I was 13, I stayed in a hostel and worked. Volunteered for an environmental center and they're like, you know, they, I, I didn't have a food stipend or anything, but I spent under 10 a day for sure on like all my expenses, including like having my laundry done for me.

It was very luxurious

Malcolm Collins: you know, what a trip like that cost was kids, right? You go to the same area, you're not going to be able to spend, like, even for your kids, you [00:07:00] can't spend 10 a day only because then you have to get the types of foods that they like and stuff like that. Well, no, yeah, no,

Simone Collins: no, no, no.

If you're doing this as a family, it's ridiculous. But I think that, you know, that's the thing is, you know, there are lots of, there are lots of things that when you have zero, one or two kids, you assume you have to do for each child and they're inherently unsustainable and they're things also that families never really do.

Did in history and now it's like kind of ridiculous that they did. I mean, okay. So for example wealthy landed gentry. would send sons to travel, but not like every summer, they would maybe send them on a world tour as like a big thing. And by the

Malcolm Collins: way, these kids, ultra wealthy landed gentry, which I think today is very similar to a gap year, which most people can find a way to make work for their kids.

Exactly. And

Simone Collins: so that is, but that is one trip. And what most people I think have in mind is like, well, every year or every other year, we're all going to fly to Italy. Or we're going to fly to [00:08:00] Florida and like stay at a resort or something like that. And that's, it's just one, it doesn't really help anyone.

And two, it's not really sustainable. Also, you and I. You're explaining

Malcolm Collins: to like your future kid. Well,

Simone Collins: you and I have traveled extensively. In, in both very, very rough and also very, very luxurious formats. We've seen families travel, we've seen individuals travel. No one's having that much fun, but this is also just not, it's not, people do it definitely as you're saying.

And I think this needs to be emphasized for a self perception thing, for a social class signaling thing. And I also think also what we're seeing as, as people who own a business in the travel industry we're seeing a shift in the travel industry where it's very clear that people can't really afford to travel anymore.

Like the unit economics aren't working out. Like I think for a while travel was more heavily subsidized and people were able to go on what seemed like very luxurious travel trips for low costs. And those [00:09:00] days have come to an end post pandemic. Flights cost a lot more and people are now still trying to make this vision work, but they're getting on less and less comfortable flights.

They're suffering more and more on their trips because they're getting worse services. They can't afford as much. And then they're just getting really super disappointed. And we're seeing this throughout the travel industry.

Malcolm Collins: And this comes to this point that we're just going to keep emphasizing in this is the thing that you realize as you have more kids, the thing that makes it so easier.

Once you get well above two kids is you. Except that, oh, I don't need to do all those things I thought I needed to do it, it, it forces you to there's this thing in fighting games, actually, so we're talking about like, like, okay, so there's these fighting game communities, right, like for like street fighters or something like that, where they'll play games against each other, and there's these moves that you can learn.

Like, Honda doing that. Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, thing just over and over and over again, where you're [00:10:00] spamming a certain move. And this can work really well up to a certain level of of opponent or difficulty. But as soon as you get to an opponent that knows how to beat this, like a certain level of difficulty opponent, people who were overly spamming these simplistic moves to win end up not being able to develop as players because there is such a huge gap between where they are right at that moment.

And the, the, the opponent who they were facing. was, right? Like, like when they get out of this difficulty trap. So they're now way below everyone who's at like a similar ELO rating to them, which is like a, the difficulty rating. This is kind of similar with kids. You need to reach one. Either you reach a point in which you're kicked out of this, you know, stupid way of having kids that our society does it today.

And you're like, Oh, this is unsustainable. I need to find a different cultural way of relating to kids. But when you go into kids, and this is what's really interesting, you know, like, [00:11:00] while kid number one was hard for us, kid number two is actually fairly easy. Kid number three was fairly easy. And I think that if we had incrementally been adapting with every kid we would have been like the guy who was spamming that simple move just because we had the money to afford it at the time.

Where instead we're like, okay, you like starting with kid number 2, every kid we're going to be raising as if we were raising 7 kids. Like, how do we economically make this work if we're raising 7 kids? And so we make very, very, very different economic decisions around everything we're doing with kids.

And these economic decisions and, and social decisions in terms of how we're interacting with them and everything like that, like, how do I make this economically viable is, is where we're getting these, these big advantages in terms of it being very, very, very much easier. And so. The, the core thing that you keep seeing is how do I have kids without sacrificing X or Y or Z or D?

And it's like, well, you should have sacrificed those things long ago. They don't matter as much as you think they matter. Like

Simone Collins: [00:12:00] really. Or they're harmful. Like private school, for example, that in another example given in the comment. Some of the

Malcolm Collins: events to hate you, like send them to private school. If you're a rich person,

Simone Collins: we've heard multiple parents who are well resourced to send their kids to private school because they were able to, you know, they had the privilege of doing it and often they only had one kid.

Though many of them, you know, also had many kids and they just have more like the money to pay for it. They now hate private school. They think it was, you know, Alienated their children from them and, and, and robbed them of their culture and made their kids hate them, like private school's. Not necessarily this really good solution for your kids.

I, I don't know. So I went public school and it was great. It was, it was, you know, I, I would not have done any better in a private school.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. And I don't know, I, I, you know, I went to private school. I went to boarding school. It doesn't add that much. I, I, I don't know a single person. In the last five years that I've met, like I know some older parents who would have say, yeah, private school is great for my kids.

I don't know anyone recently who said the private school is good for their kids. I [00:13:00] know a lot of people complaining about private school. I've heard a lot of horror stories about what's happened to people's kids at private schools recently. But if you are sending your kids to private school, you, you need to like recontextualize what you're really sending them to.

Well, no. So I,

Simone Collins: I do think that a lot of people, especially in this community are thinking about like sending their kids to classical schools because they don't want them to go to a progressive school. So they're sending them to private schools that are Catholic schools or like there's some form of classical education.

They're

Malcolm Collins: sending them to Catholic schools that they don't know. They haven't talked to people whose kids have gone to Catholic schools recently. These are just as progressive as everywhere else.

Simone Collins: There are some genuinely religiously conservative schools and they can be pricey, but I mean, I think we also make the argument that like a good homeschooling program, and we're also designing one for our own kids that, you know, hopefully will be made available to other families this year too.

You can, yeah, super cheap. You can have elite affordable education. You just have to, you know, be resourceful. And I think a lot of the, again, it's, it's, it's, it's, [00:14:00] it's about normalizing. No, of course, you know, you're not going to send your kid to private school because. One, you don't need to. And what you can do at home as a family is better.

No, you're not going to fly to travel, but you can take car trips. You can, you know, you can absolutely travel places as a family. And that's very normal. And like the point I was making earlier about like a world tour, is it like. Yeah, but these, even these super, super wealthy kids at that time weren't traveling every single year.

You know, that even the wealthiest did not normalize things like this. They didn't, There

Malcolm Collins: are ways that you can make travel work for your family. Even today, if you want to travel every year, you get in your. Car or your van or your converted bus, depending on how many kids you have. And you go to the woods, you go to local things and, and this matter.

Simone Collins: You created, we should link to this in the description, your where to live document, where you create a document on an optimal, like optimal places to live. If you live in the United States [00:15:00] and you want to have a large family. And one of the big things that you factored in there was. Where are places where you can live where in a car with your family, because obviously flying is really expensive when you have a lot of kids.

Would you be able to travel to the most meaningful, cool destinations? So, you know, it's, it's affordable to take trips that still feel really special where you go to major cities or major sites or theme parks or whatever it might be. So I think that's also an important factor.

Malcolm Collins: After you secure a partner.

So obviously we think that cities are a high utility for securing partners. They are. After you secure a partner and you're looking to settle down, you start having kids, do check out this document and then move to rural Pennsylvania because it is the best. I can easily from where we are here, go take a trip to D.

C. Go take, you know, see the nation's capital, see all the museums, go take a trip to Manhattan, see all of that, go to Boston, see where the, Tea party happened, everything like that. Or, or go to the beach. I can go to Jersey shore. I can go gambling in Atlantic city. I can, you know, I, I can see most of America's [00:16:00] like major cultural centers.

Very, very easily. Oh, I want to go to another country. Just drive up to Canada, you know? And I want to go to a theme park, a Horseshoe park, you know? And we

Simone Collins: find this uniquely notable because you grew up in Texas, at least when you were pretty young. And I grew up in California and like. You can't really drive to that many places when you live in.

Malcolm Collins: You can't do anything. Yeah. It's terrible. I, I did not enjoy it at all. I remember, you know, when I was at boarding school in New England, we'd be driving for a little bit and people were like, Oh, we crossed the state border. And I'd be like, you did what? You got to understand you a Texan saying you cross the state border.

It's like saying we just entered like deep space. Like what?

Simone Collins: Yeah. And, and Californians know, I don't care to hear that. you drove to Vegas or Tahoe. Like, no, that, that doesn't impress me when like we have to drive at much, much shorter distances to get to either gambling or resorts [00:17:00] or amazing camping and, and nature and wildlife.

Malcolm Collins: Let me tell you what, sorry, how did this video come on? Shitting on everywhere of a Pennsylvania, but yeah, big sir, people in San Francisco, you got no animals there. Like it's weird. Like, when I go to Big Sur, it feels like I have, I have entered an area that has just undergone some sort of, like, ecological catastrophe, where, like, somehow all of the insects and birds and animals died, because it is weirdly quiet.

I like

Simone Collins: it. I like it. I know you really like buggy rainforests. That's not really my thing. I'm, I'm a fan of Big Sur. I grew up around it, but, like, anyway, just in

Malcolm Collins: terms of variety. Like the ecological diversity you have here just the birds like around our house. Like it's nothing on this in California. I don't know.

I don't understand. My guess is what's happening in California is the trees have some sort of defense mechanism that's like uniquely good. I think it might be the Redwood forest against yeah, it could be a Redwoods thing. And because you don't have insects, you don't have birds and because You know, [00:18:00] you don't have that.

You don't have like anything else that you would have in a normal, large ecosystem. But it is, it is like a uniquely sad eco, like growing up in Texas. Like I get to California and I'm like, where are they animals? Like this is the woods. It's trees and deer. Like where's everything else? But anyway you know, and I do think that there's some other places, you know, obviously we stand where we live because we're, we're happy with the place and you're running for office here.

So you got to talk about how great it is.

Simone Collins: But there are other really, I think, common things that, you know, a lot of people expect they have to do as parents. It would be insanely expensive if you did. And one thing that did come up in the comments too was childcare. Like, childcare is just so expensive.

And when I was watching A video recently on why dink couples didn't have kids, one of the women interviewed said, Oh yeah, you know, I have this friend who just bemoaned the fact that she realized that the amount she takes home and take home pay from her job equals the amount that she would be paying in childcare if she had a kid.

And yeah, childcare is unsustainably [00:19:00] expensive. And after a certain number of kids, like we, we, we used childcare when we had two kids because. You know, kind of we could, and it was like much easier to not have to work that out. And then after three and having three in childcare for like six months, like all of our savings were gone.

So

Malcolm Collins: we're like, yeah, we're figuring out another solution. And that's the thing with more kids, right? More kids force you to find other actually sustainable solutions. Yeah, now we have found a solution that costs us maybe half what we were paying in child care before for the three kids. Is infinitely better for our kids.

Because it's a friendly neighbor who we help with stuff and, and, and help a bit financially and then who takes care of the kids and who the kids like more, right? Like yeah. We had built this horrible situation where we were treating childcare as either a school or an individual financial thing where it's like, we're paying you for X many hours, and now we're treating it in the way people historically treated it as a community solution [00:20:00] because more kids forces you to find these more out of the box solutions that are actually much closer to the way people historically did things.

Yeah, I

Simone Collins: think I want to get to the question of. What is your life going to be about? Like, is your life going to be about conforming with mainstream societal ideals of like, this is how you do these certain rituals or is your life going to be about your family and raising a successful family? You know, and even when it comes to kid development, I also, I think that it's underrated the.

If, if we could put a dollar amount on the value that a child gets by having siblings, that they get to play a role in raising the responsibility that gives them the maturity that gives them you know, I feel like that is on its own is worth at least 25 percent of the cost of an elite private school every single year in terms of the.

The maturity and responsibility that it gives to a kid in a positive and constructive [00:21:00] context to and keep

Malcolm Collins: in mind You know another advantage you have when you have a lot of kids is you know When we're at eight nine kids or something like that Then you're getting to a situation where we don't even need the neighbors to help take care of the kids, you know Then the kids are playing the daycare role as well, you know So if they want to

Simone Collins: we want to make it we were discussing this yesterday.

We want to make this totally like often, like we would, we would pay them for tutoring and childcare services if they wanted to do it. And if they didn't, we wouldn't force it. We don't believe in forced parentification. I think it's also like a great I believe

Malcolm Collins: in forced parentification. I think that you don't want that for our kids.

And I understand why we wouldn't do that with our kids, but I don't think it's like a bad thing. Well, I, yeah, I

Simone Collins: mean, I don't believe in coercion and I don't think you really can coerce it. But. I know you

Malcolm Collins: don't want to force a kid into a role like that that doesn't want to be in a role like that. But if you raise the kid well, and you have parental instincts, your kids will have parental instincts.

Our kids are very nice to each other. Like we're surprised by it. So, so I totally get that. And another thing that somebody [00:22:00] mentioned in one of these that I, that I want to bring up, and I'm not, I'm not going to look this up. I'll look this up afterwards and then add it when I'm doing the editing. Is the incremental cost of each additional kid.

Cause I think people might be really surprised. There was a study done on this and it shows, I think it's like after four, every additional kid costs on average about a thousand dollars a year. So not a lot.

Sadly, I was not able to find this study I was thinking of. I know it was done at one time and it was around a thousand a year once you get up to four. And it makes sense when I looked at another study I found which found the numbers for, , kid One was 14,460 a year. Kid two was 8,540 a year, and Kid three was 2,880 a year.

, and this was in an article called The Marginal Cost of Children in the New York Times Archive. So this is even, you know, a fairly progressive publication, which is admitting this. By the time you get to kid three, you have fallen from a cost of. around 15, 000 a year for one [00:23:00] kid to, well under 3, 000 a year.

And so you can see how you get down to like 1, 000 extra a year, or 800 extra a year when you get like four, kid number five, the costs just drop really dramatically.

Malcolm Collins: And, and the waste that you have when you're having a few kids, keep in mind, you still need to buy all the s**t, you know, whether or not you're having a ton of kids or a few kids.

So, you know, the next time you have a kid, it's no baby toys, it's, it's no, you know, no, no, no toddler toys.

Simone Collins: No new swings, or highchairs, or bibs, or plates,

Malcolm Collins: or bottles, or sippers, or Every time we buy something for one of our kids, that's being used by like a huge chain of kids after them. Like, the wastefulness of buying a bottle or a shoe for a toddler that they can literally only wear until they What?

What? When we

Simone Collins: really work on buying, like, forever toys. Like, we we now take inspiration from [00:24:00] And this is I think this is I'm so excited to have learned this school like not school on public libraries often have like toy sections for kids. And those toy sections are usually populated with the most durable, but also popular toys that can survive many, many, many children constantly playing with them and totally abusing them.

For many years. So that's where we got the idea of like wooden toy sets and all these other things that like clearly are durable, clearly have staying power. Our kids love playing with them and you can always have the kids play test them at a public library and know if they like them. So like, yeah, we don't have to buy.

Now we don't have to buy that again for our kids, which is

Malcolm Collins: amazing. Yeah. Well, it feels so wasteful when you, when you get something like this and it's for one kid or two kids, right? Like you, you are. Like these toys interesting for how long, like literally, I don't know, like not that long for a lot of toys, but if they're interesting, five kids, six kids, you know, you get this feeling like, Oh, that was a really worthwhile economic investment for my family.[00:25:00]

Simone Collins: Totally. Yeah. And no, it's, it's, it's, and I think what are, what are other crazy things? Oh, like when we go out to eat and we see parents ordering kids meals for their kids, which they subsequently do not eat that. Why would you do

Malcolm Collins: that? Why would you ever take your kids to a restaurant? Like I don't get it.

Simone Collins: One, you don't need to pay for your kids and two, you don't need to pay for Ozempic because you just give your kids a little bit off your plate. And then, you know,

Malcolm Collins: one, okay, guys, so if you're going to a restaurant, you can have your kids eat off your plate or something like that. But it's like, do these people not know like YouTube exists?

Like if you have a decent quality spouse, like myself or my wife, you know, we always take the time to, you know, we go to a restaurant. The only reason I go to restaurants today is to learn new dishes. And when I mean learn a new dish, and I look at the dish they made, and if I like it, then I learn to make it myself, and then I make it for myself.

There is no reason to, as an adult, be going to restau What are you doing? Like, you can go to YouTube, learn to make the [00:26:00] dish that was made at the restaurant, right? And then, tweak it to your personal taste, and make it with all high quality ingredients, without cutting all the corners that restaurants are always cutting.

And you're gonna get a Dramatically cheaper, dramatically higher quality food. Like, what are you doing? And this is the type of thing where it's like, you know, historically, before kids, we would go out to eat pretty frequently, right? You know, and, and kids force you to learn to make these decisions when you have a big family that end up being much more economically nicer, much more, even hedonistically nicer.

Like, the food I'm eating now is better than the food I was eating when I would go to restaurants all the time. yEah, I, I, you know, and you keep seeing this is that our society has trapped us. And what I call easy hedonism. And the problem is, is that easy hedonism sucks so much more than hard hedonism.

Simone Collins: Well, and I think the other thing is that people need to recognize just how completely out [00:27:00] of touch with reality, most standard expectations around children really are. Like, even when you look at movies from, from pastime periods, like, I was just watching 16 candles last night and I was like, Oh my gosh, this is a family of four and they are financially reasonable about what they do with their lives.

Like, they, there's a wedding that takes place in the movie for one of the older siblings in a family and all the grandparents come to town, but they're like literally sleeping in the kids bedrooms of the family house. They're not like putting them up in hotels or anything because they are financially reasonable.

Home alone, you know, there's, there's not a nanny for every child, like moving about the house. They don't have au pairs or anyone helping them out. This is, you know, a, this is a family that is literally traveling with what, how many kids, like 10, 14. It was some, some insane number of kids. And

Malcolm Collins: Oh, you can't travel with that many kids without an au pair.

What are you [00:28:00] doing? 15 kids, no au

Simone Collins: pair. Although they were, they were clearly, I mean, when you look at their house, they're like insanely wealthy and they also were flying to like Paris and then in like the second movie, Miami with all those kids are insane. But yeah, I mean, it just, even when you look in the past, you see little things of like, yeah, no.

Yeah, kids don't, kids don't need this much stuff and we, we're, we're not being reasonable. So I think that the question to ask yourself, if you want more kids, here's the thing, do not have more kids. If financially it is going to put you in a dangerous situation where you cannot maintain housing or food or your job, you know, like do not put yourself in a situation where you are.

mentally going to, you know, suffer a ton because of the stress and the, you know, like you're going to lose your health insurance or things like that. Like we're like, literally you're being destabilized. Although I should say that most states have resources for parents. who find themselves in a low income level.

Talk about our resource list. Yes. So [00:29:00] on, on pranatalist. org, pronatalist. org, if you go to our services section, then scroll down a little bit, it links to a parent resources page where we list at least for the United States to start. If you want us to try to do your nation. But let me know and we can, you know, hire yourself and we'll add it to the list for other parents.

Totally. But we have a guide to federal resources for parents in the United States, as well as state based resources for parents in the United States. The vast majority of them are based on income limits. But if you are low income. It is amazing what the state will provide. I mean, everything from, you know, healthcare to food assistance, to housing assistance, to all sorts of other things you know, even access.

There, there are more education savings accounts programs for low income families now than there are just for general families. So there, there's a lot that you can get for support. But I, I still like, I don't want to encourage people to have kids if they like, can't afford to pay for them all by themselves.

So like, I feel like. If that's, if that's the problem, like

Malcolm Collins: the person who's like, how do I pay for [00:30:00] private school for all my kids? It's like,

Simone Collins: right. And that's, yeah, you just don't, just don't. Yeah. So no, you're not going to fly.

Malcolm Collins: We're building our education system specifically because we do not plan to send our kids to college.

And I wanted something better. I mean,

Simone Collins: specifically because we do not plan to pay. To send our kids to college. If they want to go to college, they have to find a way to either through their own businesses or through scholarships or grants pay their own way through college. And we plan to set them up to have that be an easy option for them if they want it.

But yeah, I mean, that's the thing is, is no, you will not be going out. No, you will not be flying internationally with your children. No, you will not

Malcolm Collins: be probably build for our foundation is one of those things that can help a kid. What, what's the word where they become separated from their parents?

Simone Collins: Oh to become emancipated.

Malcolm Collins: Cause that can really help with college loans and

Simone Collins: stuff like that. If you're part of a large with financial aid. Okay. That's a, yeah, that's a good project for us to work on. But, but You know, I, I do remember before we [00:31:00] had kids thinking it was going to be a lot worse and that like, Oh man, this is going to be so tough.

And like also expecting that we were going to need those things. We know we were going to need like a bunch of nannies and night nurses. And like, remember after the, my, my first attempt to get overnight care when we had a newborn, I was like, wait. This is really stupid. No, I, and I do all of the overnight care.

I do all of the daycare for, for newborns because that's really easy for me. And then you take care of all the toddlers and everyone older. And it's just, it's seamless. Like there's a lot of things that you think you need that you really, really, really don't. And I, I will, I will admit there are some luxuries I've been exposed to and ever being, ever since being exposed to them, living without them sucks.

Like, There is

Malcolm Collins: one. First class flights. Yes. You cannot afford, is there any other?

Simone Collins: No. And see, that's it. Like, there's nothing else where I'm like, Oh man, my life is so much worse now. And the only

Malcolm Collins: reason we would need to take you on a first class flight is because of the freaking conferences we speak at because of

Simone Collins: [00:32:00] the pronatalism.

Yeah, and I would rather not travel at all. So like really, it's not even something I should be regretting because I really don't want to travel in the first place. So like, my life really isn't worse at all. And I love when

Malcolm Collins: people are like, well, what about my friends? Like, I'm not gonna get to see my friends anymore.

It's like, do you not understand? Friends are pretty shitty. Like, kids, so much better than friends. Like, like, the parents stop interacting with you when they have kids, not because they don't have time, always. Some of the time, it's because they realize That the, the, these, these veneers of relationships they had formed with other people were so much less deep than the relationships that actually matter in life.

Yeah.

Simone Collins: Yeah. And this is, you know, it is something that we constantly struggle with that like everyone's like, yeah, but what about love and the deep bonds that I form with my friends? And we're just like, and this is not to say that there are people that we really care about a lot that, [00:33:00] you know, like to, to us, they are family.

And they're not related to us by blood. You know, these are just people that we care deeply about and we will vouch for them and we'll put our names on the line for them and whatever. Right. Like, but I don't

Malcolm Collins: know, like, Myself caring about them all the time and seeing them and visiting them and going out for drinks.

I don't understand how bar Santa is. I want to be honest. Like we live in a rural area and this is something I often talk about. You have to go to these bars, you have to drive to them. Like, how are you doing that?

Simone Collins: Yes. Suburban bars do not make sense. Suburban and rural bars are very strange. It

Malcolm Collins: is. What in the drinks costs like eight times.

If you just anyway. I love you, Simone. Have a wonderful day. And I hope this video has been, to some extent, freeing to some people, but other people just be like, no, I can't do it. I won't give up anything. And it's like, okay, well then you shouldn't have more kids because.

Simone Collins: But don't think of it as giving things up.

Think of it as recontextualizing [00:34:00] life and embracing. Frankly more, this is why

Malcolm Collins: you're running for office,

Simone Collins: but also like, it's so odd because you and I are so materialistic and you know, everything we're, we're, you know, we do is, is very much driven by like capitalist philosophy and it rubs many people the wrong way, but we're also like.

You know, like the money stuff doesn't matter. The luxury stuff really isn't what we're in this for. So I don't know. Like I would say that even as very materialistic capitalist friendly people, like this is just not something that's worth it. Like you're not going to, you're not going to be happier living this luxurious life.

And, and we see this as people who've experienced both extremes in different contexts,

Malcolm Collins: extreme, extreme luxury in my life and people who live life in extreme, extreme luxury. are not happy people, generally. They're really not. They are really not happy people. And, and, and, when I see ultra wealthy people who have a lot of kids, they are not forced to [00:35:00] make these changes to the way they raise their kids, which leads to them being actually, in my experience, much less happy than, than lower income people who have a lot of kids.

Because those are the people who are like, how do I actually figure out child care? How do

Simone Collins: I would say, like, we'll say roughly middle income kids like families that are large have the best kid outcomes. And I, if anything, both, I mean, okay, so I would say, yeah, like low income kids have the worst headwinds, like the worst, but then second after them is super wealthy kids because of just all the messed up stuff that they're dealing with.

And then the best off are not even upper, upper middle class, but like middle class were like, they're. There is literally not the option to have many indulgences in life. Like those do the very best because they learn how to handle things for themselves. It's so funny. And Martha Stewart, my hero, my, my patron Saint spent her entire career.

Once she [00:36:00] became famous, trying to hide the fact that she came from a poor Polish family. But the, the, the thing that made her such an amazing. person. And the thing that made her capable of turning homemaking and domesticity into this branded luxury experience was the fact that she actually had to make everything from scratch, that she actually had to sew clothes, that they actually had to have all these, like, you know, they had to fix everything themselves and reupholster furniture.

And Make all their own meals and, and not go out for, for, for dinner and stuff. So like, it's, it is, it is these people who ultimately create amazing outcomes. So just,

Malcolm Collins: yeah, I love you, Simone. And I really enjoyed this conversation and I'm just so fortunate to be married to somebody who's willing to make these changes.

One of the things that I think scares me the most, you know, when I think about our kids and when I look at people out there today, as they marry someone. Who [00:37:00] tells them that they're down for these sacrifices, life changes, and then they do not make them, you know, they, they refuse to actually care for the kids.

You know, they keep like full time live in staff and they say, this is too much for me. You know, and I, I've seen this even was in my own family, you know, and it is repulsive. It is, it is the highest failure, you know, a human who committed to handling this can make.

Simone Collins: And it's really rough because typically it's the women who do this and they have like 100 percent all the control over like whether or not they're going to have kids and a man can't be like, Oh no, pregnancy is not that hard because they, they just, they literally can't do it.

And so they

Malcolm Collins: can't. And then you go to people about this, right? You know, and I wish they could see kids the way we do, you know, the kids exist before they're born, right? And so when a person says, yeah, but if I have another kid, I won't be able to travel every year. It's like, do your trips to like the Caribbean, are they like, if you, your future kid, like two timelines, you have to, in one timeline, explain to your future kid, it.[00:38:00]

That the trips to the Caribbean were just more important than their life. Like, do you actually think you're, like, a decent human being? Like, oh, oh, or, or, or, oh, no it's that I had to take my other kids out of private school, or I couldn't pay for college for all my kids. And, and you go to that future kid and you're like, little Timmy.

I'm sorry, but your life just was not as important as sending these other kids.

Simone Collins: We wouldn't have American heroes like Benjamin Franklin were it not for parental budgetary constraints. So Benjamin Franklin's father wanted to, as he put it, in his biography, tithe him to the church. As, as one of the youngest kids, he was like, okay, finally, I'm, I'm willing to just give away one of my kids to the church.

So he, his plan originally was to pay for Benjamin Franklin's private school so that he could go into, into the clergy and be properly educated to serve God traditionally through the church, ran out of money. And so Benjamin Franklin had to get a [00:39:00] job and it was, it was that point at which his life and career began.

If he had ended up, by

Malcolm Collins: the way, you know, yeah, starting

Simone Collins: at age 12, totally. But like, imagine if his father had enough money to continue paying for private school to send him to the church, Benjamin Franklin may have been, you know, a great church luminary or something like that, but he certainly would not have been the, the philosophical.

In, in invent, venous in, what's the word for someone who invents? Inventor? Invents things. Inventor, yeah. But like someone, an adjective describing someone who is inclined to make inventions.

Malcolm Collins: Ingenious. Inventorious.

Simone Collins: Innovative. Innovative. Innovative. Yes. Yeah. He wouldn't, he wouldn't have become this, this entrepreneurial, innovative, politically influential figure that he was.

I mean, he played a key role in the formation of the early United [00:40:00] States. So again, like, you know, the, Some kind of hardship, some kind of constraint has to be given in order to give someone the opportunity to thrive. So, anyway, I know, I know, we gotta, we gotta get going. Do you wanna do curry bricks tonight?

Malcolm Collins: Curry bricks? Oh, you want me to do the Japanese curry bricks? Yeah, yeah, the Japanese

Simone Collins: curry.

Malcolm Collins: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, you're gonna do that with the slow cooked steak? Yeah. Mmm. Love that idea. And this is the type of thing, you know, when you have a big family, you can use a slow cooker, slow cook a big thing of steak.

You know, you get it at BJ's it, it, it, it stays very well in the fridge after that. So then you, you dole it out. And once you slow cook the steak, there's lots of things you can do to create these really high quality meals. So I am so excited for this, Simone, and I love

Simone Collins: you too, Malcolm.

We explain the rising tensions between pronatalists and antinatalists as an ideological war emerges. While some antinatalists logically argue for non-consensual human extinction, we remain committed to pluralism. However, their totalitarian views are concerning as they gain institutional power. Though depressed and self-loathing now, their numbers grow quickly. We must peacefully opt out to avoid potential violence.

Malcolm Collins: [00:00:00] We need to really keep in mind that there is a growing movement out there that wants to end all human life.

Khrushchev said he would bury you

Malcolm Collins: anyway, children too will be fine.

It would be such an ignorant thing to do If the Russians

Malcolm Collins: The problem is that these people don't have children and know they don't love them

. Believe me when I say to

Malcolm Collins: and they really do want to kill you all and they could end up in nuclear silos.

They could end up in positions of power and we need to keep in mind just how dangerous the forces arrayed against us really are you know, while we try to be as pluralistic as possible, we need to understand that they want to remove consent from everyone, everyone.

if you could end suffering tomorrow, yeah, probably anything is justifiable. Inflicting just about anything is probably justifiable, imposing just about anything is probably [00:01:00] justifiable

Malcolm Collins: They are the, I think, the truest and purest form of evil in the world today. And it feels really good that there are enemies because I know I'm on the right side. It's like you get to a holocaust camp and you're like, Oh, these guys are clearly the f*****g bad guys. You get to an epilous subreddit, you're like, Oh, wow!

You could not more clearly signal that you're evil. But they are growing and they're growing faster than us.

Simone Collins: Yeah, yep, gird your loins, ladies and gentlemen,

Would you like to know more?

Simone Collins: So Malcolm, I'm not really sure when this is going to go live, but we are very rapidly approaching the end of the year 2023. This has been a wild year for us through the generosity of the survival and flourishing fund a significant amount for pronatalist advocacy work. Which got us really tapped into the community to the global landscape.

We've spoken with journalists across the world, Germany, France,

Malcolm Collins: politicians, politicians, leaders.

Simone Collins: Yeah. Just individuals. It's been wild. And I, I came in with [00:02:00] a very different perception of the forces arrayed against pronatalism that I have now at the end of the year, I came in thinking the forces arrayed against pronatalism are.

Just it being hard to have kids, it being expensive to have kids, it being daunting to have kids, the regulatory load being too high, and those things matter. But what I'm realizing is really at play and this is something that came up at the natalism conference in Austin that we attended in December and spoke at was it really what this is, is there is a growing, there's a war on the horizon and it is between people who are pro humanity, pro humanity.

Existence, sentience, life. I'm not saying pro life like anti abortion. I'm saying pro life like I like the fact that things exist and feel and, and anti life and this is something that we first got the rumblings of in like various off the record salons and dinner parties we [00:03:00] were hosting where we would bring up demographic collapse and pronatalism among major leaders, investors, politicians, influencers, et cetera.

In a common The most common pushback we got, it was never any of the things I thought were the big bags, bads. It was never expensive, blah, blah, blah, regulatory, blah, blah. No, it was, but wouldn't the, wouldn't the world be better off without humans? And we're like, wait,

Malcolm Collins: what? But this is an undercurrent.

And it's a much bigger and more philosophically robust undercurrent than I think many pronatalists give it credit for. Yeah. Yeah,

Simone Collins: exactly. There's, it is logically consistent and in, in the frame of modern progressive urban monoculture. society. It is the logical conclusion because it is a negative utilitarian mindset.

Yeah, if

Malcolm Collins: you're interested in going into our deep dive on negative utilitarianism, why we are not negative utilitarians [00:04:00] go find our video on negative utilitarianism. Just so people know, whenever I mention a video in one of these videos, typically up here. I'm, I'm going to post something which will appear like a little link that you can click if you're on YouTube, which will take you to that video.

And I often also at the end of a video, including the recommended videos, the videos that we have been talking about in that particular video to make it easier for you to find them. And this one, I'm almost certainly going to include if I remember the, the video on negative utilitarianism. So, you know, these, these are individuals who essentially believe that while negative emotions are a thing of negative value, positive emotions are not a thing of positive value.

It's not as insane as it sounds if you go into it in detail. But this philosophy is the core philosophy of the antinatalist movement. It is not the environmentalist philosophy. All of that is sort of ancillary. Like, yes, environmentalism is nice. Like, yes, some of the other things. But if you look at F, Like, ephalus, right?

Which is one of the core players in this community, which we'll go into in a second, or if you look [00:05:00] at like negative utilitarian, say we have debated, they actually don't want humans to stop existing right now because we don't yet have the capacity to kill all animal lives before we kill ourselves. And so they want to ensure that we can do that.

So there's not a risk of some other animal coming to evolve into humanity or the. Horrible things that are happening in nature all the time. And they're right. I mean, nature is a horrifying space. These are not logically inconsistent communities. Although we, we

Simone Collins: do have to divide it up and this is something so, Malcolm's referring to Lawrence, Anton and company.

A group of antinatalists based in the UK who are among the leading antinatalists. And they're, they're both very logically consistent and reasonable. They're the ones who hold the view that they want all sentience to end because all sentience is suffering. And it is very logically consistent on their end to be like, man, have you like seen how animals die?

Like it's way worse than, you know, like there's a lot more suffering units going on there than like the human suffering units. If we're looking at this, practically speaking, especially in developed societies, community and shrimp. Yes. But then there, there is, there are also the [00:06:00] environmental antinatalists who just think humans are

Malcolm Collins: bad.

The human extinction movement. So, I mean, let's talk about some of these, let's pull up the human extinction movement website. Okay.

So let's see what they say. So they're called the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement, if you want to look at this. And they say on their website, phasing out the human species by voluntarily ceasing to breed will allow Earth's biosphere to return to good health. Crowded conditions and resource shortages will improve as we become less dense.

I love how like underplayed that is from voluntary human extinction. See what's been happening lately in the movement. They're talking about how they were interviewed recently in the movement. They're talking about Elon Musk, who they hate, but some environmentalists have gone so far as to thinking humans are bad.

And of course they don't like that. This, so this is, this is. You know, it, it, it is one of the larger movements. It is an environmentalist movement, but I think it's the

Simone Collins: most consistent, like when, when people at those salons we've [00:07:00] hosted have said, wouldn't it be better if humans didn't exist at all?

They are, they are in this group. And I think this is in terms of people who don't put thought into this, and that is the majority of people there in this group that is not, all life is bad. Is dumb. Yeah, but it's, but also like the, and keep it again, most people don't put thought into this. Most people who aren't putting thought into this are just tacitly assuming humanity, bad humans, evil, corrupt capitalism, which is

Malcolm Collins: different from the negative utilitarian group who want all animals dead,

Simone Collins: but we're also very thoughtful.

They're in that.

Malcolm Collins: And this is where people are like, well, if you say that they're thoughtful and everything like that. Yeah. But our views are also logically consistent. And here's the thing. We are trying to create a diverse and flourishing human empire, and they are trying to extinguish all life that exists in the universe.

Who's the baddies? Like this is not difficult for me to figure out who are the bad guys here.

 I've just noticed something. Have you looked at our [00:08:00] caps recently? Our caps? The badges on our caps. Have you looked at them? What? No. A bit.

They've got skulls on them. Have you noticed that our caps have actually got little pictures of skulls on them? I don't, uh Hans.

Are we the baddies?

Malcolm Collins: I am happy that I happen to live at a time in history where so unambiguously there is one group of good guys and one group of evil guys. And keep in mind, you know, being part of this pronatalist community does not mean you have to have kids.

It just means that you work to support what the movement is doing. There's many ways that you can do that outside of having kids yourself. But it is, which team are you on? Are you on the Death to All Things team? Or are you on the you know, Let's, Let's improve the quality of our species. Let's improve the living quality of our species.

Let's improve [00:09:00] the amount of suffering that's happening in the world where we don't think suffering particularly matters, but on the margin, it's pretty easy to improve at this point. But you wanted to say something, Simone? Well, I

Simone Collins: mean, honestly, though, like you say that like it's so unambiguous, but I have moments where I feel like I'm so gaslit by society.

About all this stuff. We're like, I do find myself questioning and I think, you know, a lot of, and I'm like, wait, like, wait, it is humanity. Really? Like, I, like, I lose the plot. Cause I'm also like in any social situation, I'm, I'm like. I'm just trying to like give whatever response and follow whatever reasoning like pleases the crowd the most.

And I, I really do feel like this is how many people may have felt in Nazi Germany when they're like, we shouldn't, why do we hate you so

Malcolm Collins: much? And they're like,

Simone Collins: but, but like, haven't you seen what the Jews do to society? Haven't you seen that everything that's terrible is their fault. Don't you understand?

They're the only thing standing between us and the perfect [00:10:00] society. And like, you're sitting there and you're like. This can't be right. But you're making me feel really bad. Like you're acting like I'm the baddie here. And like, that's the thing is, is I do feel like this very large and growing proportion of society is just like, well, it's so obvious that humans are the bad guys.

It's so obvious that we need to get rid of all humans, that a lot of people are being gaslit. And again, this is the people who aren't putting much

Malcolm Collins: thought into it. Follow on from what these groups have done before. So

these groups as a form of penance and a form of status signaling. They have increasingly, you know, to status signal to their community. Talk about how bad their group is. And, you know, this started with white people are evil, you know, white people are evil or America is evil. America is evil. You know, if they're Americans, they can say that.

And that grants them status within their community because it makes them look like introspective and humble. Even if they don't understand really why they're saying what they're saying. And so. This has just expanded outwards and outwards and outwards [00:11:00] to humans are evil. Where the larger an in group that they are targeting was their this group is evil rhetoric, the more that they gain status within these communities.

And so it's just a natural descent from that. In addition, It removes more responsibility from them. If humans are evil, then they can do whatever they want. But I want to go over, you know, like, let's just go to the efilism subreddit right now. Like, what are these people talking about? Because I think the people, this is a life spelled backwards.

They don't really understand how extremist these communities are. So the top vote on efilism right now is a poll that says,

seriously, why are there so many antinatalists obsessed with consent? And the poll that they're fighting is. What will you do if 99. 99 percent of people on earth accepted the truth of antinatalism in the future?

And then it was, you know, a portion, 22 percent said use democracy to sterilize them. Wow. So they would use democracy to sterilize the people who were going to plan to keep having [00:12:00] kids. 9 percent said verbally bombard the 0. 001 percent until they accept antinatalism. And then 63 percent said leaves a 0.

001 percent alone, even if they end up repopulating the earth. So this is a constant problem with them. It's consent is a problem with them because they are a totalitarian movement. Like, the pronatalist movement doesn't really care what antinatalists do, right? Like they're removing themselves from the gene pool.

They are removing themselves from the, the cultural pool. They don't need them to do anything. Yeah, we don't care. Like we are a genuinely pluralistic movement fighting for pluralism. They are a totalitarian fascist movement that wants to take away other individuals

Simone Collins: rights. Well, no, so here's the thing is again, like Lawrence Anton and company, like that group of antinatalists.

It's very vehemently believes in consent and it's logically consistent with their views because they're very against causing human suffering. And I'm not just lying. You're drinking the Kool

Malcolm Collins: Aid.

Simone Collins: You're not. No, no, no. Hold on. Hold on. Let me finish. Okay. I, cause I understand what you're saying. They, but they, they [00:13:00] do really, they feel deeply morally uncomfortable with the idea of doing anything that causes more and unnecessary suffering.

However, in the end, they. I think, no, that there will be no way to actually achieve their end with consent, that you cannot convince everyone to do this, you just can't. And so in the end, there is no choice but to take away your autonomy.

Here is a short video by one of the leaders of the antinatalist community.

Yeah, so, look, in the interest of the end, if you could end suffering tomorrow, yeah, probably anything is justifiable. Inflicting just about anything is probably justifiable, imposing just about anything is probably justifiable, if you can end it. If you, if there's literally, you can guarantee no more ouch ever again, then there probably isn't.

a big enough out you could make that wouldn't be justified in the interest of that end, probably by any means necessary. Like if I found [00:14:00] out tomorrow that the only way that you could, that sentient extinction could possibly happen was skinning all the living things alive slowly. I'd hate it, um, but I would probably, I would say that it's what we have to do.

I'm totally I'm totally on board with the idea that the only thing that really matters is the suffering coming to a finality. So, yeah, anything in the interest of that, if you can guarantee that, even despite whatever imposition or nastiness might be necessary.

Malcolm Collins: But what's interesting about this poll, it does show that still 63 percent of antinatalists, keep in mind that means a lot, don't feel this way.

63 percent still wouldn't force that last 0. 001 percent to be infertile. So, so well, And I think that's, you know, when

Simone Collins: you look at, and when we talk about in the pragmatist guide to life objective functions, you know, like what are your inherent values? [00:15:00] You can have a, a basket of objective functions.

And I think what you're looking at is there's a segment of the population here. That you know, holds a bunch of different values. One of those values involves consent and not coercing people into things. And that ranks a little bit higher than exterminating all sentience. So, you know, for that group that matters, whereas for the other group, exterminating all sentience and all suffering is more important than the inherent value of, of consent and non coercion.

Malcolm Collins: Mm hmm. Mm hmm. Well, I mean, so, you know, and I I, so here's an example of another FLS top post right now. Oh boy. If you think you are a failure, think about whatever it is that is responsible for the creation of the universe. You will never be as bad. Oh,

Simone Collins: God, what a douche.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. I almost want to do a recurring segment where we just talk about whatever Ephilis are talking about these days. It's like a[00:16:00] what's, what's going on in that subreddit. So another website that was brought to my attention recently is stop having kids. So. Stophavingkids.

org. And they seem to be like the most officially looking website within the antinatalist movement. I don't

Simone Collins: know if official includes uncanny valley nonsense, that is

Malcolm Collins: some weird stuff. Well, they do. They are not as competent as pronatalists, but the IQ of antinatalists isn't as high as pronatalists.

I mean, keep in mind these, as we say, the greater replacement theory, that the Intelligent autists are going to replace everyone else. Cause that's mostly within the prenatalist movement. You know, these are, these are people that are when this is something that Dutton pointed out on our show, when you have one thing, that's a genetic problem with you, you're likely to have a cascade of other things.

So, you know, if you're low IQ, you're less likely to be attractive and you're less likely to be happy. You know, I said at the highest levels of IQ where you do get some depression issues,

but even still like these individuals are just not fit individuals and are dealing with a lot of. Mental internal stress.

And

Simone Collins: that is something that even people within the movement are like, this is a [00:17:00] really big problem. Like there are just a lot of very depressed people here.

Malcolm Collins: Well, and so I'd point out, and what I'm, what I'm putting out here is the pronatalist movement is much smaller than the antinatalist movement right now.

And in the amount of funding that we have is much lower than the amount the antinatalist community has. And yet you look at their websites and they look like. You know, the first one, the voluntary human extinction. I'll post a picture of it here. It's literally like an all techs website. What on earth guys?

And then if you look at the stop having kids, it's a bunch of uncanny Valley, like AI art stuff. Nightmare fuel. It is genuinely nightmare fuel. Like they couldn't find any one who wants to be publicly associated with this.

Simone Collins: Well, the thing is though, like all they had to do was go to what I do. I love it.

Pixabay. It's a, a free website. That has royalty free, like public domain stock images, you know, they could have gotten everything they needed there, but instead they're like, I'm just going to use AI to make the creepiest image possible. They've

Malcolm Collins: got things like make love, not babies. You can't opt. [00:18:00] Just the

Simone Collins: fact that someone with the best way

Malcolm Collins: to avoid having a baby born.

Oh boy. Be a voice for the childless, use your voice to speak speak out against

procreation. Aren't distractions wonderful to have, but why bring someone into the world when you, to distract yourself from how bad life is or something.

Simone Collins: But I, I mean, I agree with that though. Like, again, like, I don't think.

I'm, I'm super okay with, with antenatal is convincing people who are, are, are, you know, deeply unhappy people who wouldn't be good parents to not have kids because they shouldn't have kids.

Malcolm Collins: Well, and you know, they're like funding like billboards and stuff. If only we could, well, I guess we would never have spent money on something so wasteful.

Like people often do not stop to question having children before opting to procreate. What's interesting is we agree with them on a lot of stuff. Like I agree with that. We want to change that by ensuring that people consider the option of not reproducing as valid, rational and responsible in an ethical lifestyle.

Yeah. Let's get rid of these people. Like I agree with this. If you look at the top of their website, it's we want a future where creating biological [00:19:00] children is no longer an expected norm or something most people casually do without putting substantial thought and investigation into it. Where do I donate?

We are completely agree with this. We want that future too. You know, Maybe I can just

Simone Collins: contribute by giving them better images.

Malcolm Collins: No, you should say, Hey, I'll take over your website for you. I'll make it. Let me help you. Yes. aNd, and well, hold on. Let's do you want to do more? Effolism?

Simone Collins: Yeah. Yeah. Hit

Malcolm Collins: me.

Okay well this person's like, I'm a happy person and I'm an ephilis, right? Because some people say that ephilis redditors are just depressed people projecting their pessimistic worldview. Well, I still hold the argument that, you know, they're like, that this is prejudice. And it's like, well, yeah, except realistically, the reason why this is one of the top posts here is because the vast majority of Ethelists [00:20:00] are not happy.

And, and, you know, even one of the posters on here says, is it really pure prejudice? Though, if a high percentage of the posts and comments on here are from people who obviously are upset, distressed, depressed, or even rascal. Yeah.

Simone Collins: You know, it's like being like, Oh, like I'm a 10, I'm an, I'm an extremely attractive and smart male, but I'm still MGTOW or like, I'm still black pilled.

Like, okay.

Malcolm Collins: Oh, got to leave this sub somebody says. So let's see why they're leaving. Okay. Militant veganism is too much. Militant

Simone Collins: veganism.

Malcolm Collins: Oh. I, I, yeah. So they're just being constantly attacked by their own community.

Simone Collins: Oh, Oh, I see. Yeah.

Yeah. What I am going to say though is, when we had a debate with two antenatalists, they took us to a legit good vegan restaurant.

Oh my, I didn't know you could do vegan food that good. So it's not all bad. [00:21:00]

Malcolm Collins: They're great people. This is an interesting one. How should an ideal etholist live with an average IQ?

Oh, no, that's not that interesting. I guess, not much aside from not reproducing. If you still want a family, adopt a kid. Except they never adopt kids. The people who adopt kids are always pronatalists. I think

Simone Collins: we've been, I asked on Twitter, and someone gave me one person. One person. So, there was one. Once.

One person who? Adopted. One antenatalist who

Malcolm Collins: adopted. Yeah, yeah, but the vast majority, if you look, like, genuinely at the people who adopt lots of kids, often they have lots of kids as well. Oh, no,

Simone Collins: no, no, no, the biggest adopters are prenatalists who, like, already have a ton of kids, and this is so common.

Like, if you watch Dream Home Makeover on Netflix With this like couple that I think they're a Mormon couple and they like redo the houses of really wealthy other Mormon couples who have a billion kids. Like it's super common to see, like they've adopted some same with like, if you go on Instagram and look at really large families, [00:22:00] like, uh, You know, one or two or even sometimes even more of the kids are obviously adopted.

Like it's crazy.

Malcolm Collins: By the way, speaking of people are like, Oh, anti natalists aren't depressed. The effortless aren't depressed. So here is the number one post on the effortless subreddit right now for the last month. It's stupid how we're told to quote unquote toughen up when we struggle with life, but at the same time, we're not allowed to kill ourselves.

Wait,

Simone Collins: who says they're not allowed to kill themselves?

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, this is interesting. I mean, there are, they are true that society largely says they're not allowed to kill themselves, but not us. I mean, we run the pronatalist movement or we're largely seen as running it and we are hugely pro people killing themselves.

Like, existence is a choice, but it's a choice you make for yourself and not for other people.

What are you waiting for, huh?! What are [00:23:00] you waiting for?! What are you waiting for? What am I waiting for? What am I waiting for? F**k you! Oh my god.

 Blood Blood Blood Blood Blood Blood Blood

Simone Collins: Yeah, well, it's a choice you make for yourself with knowledge and, you know, time and thoughtfulness. You know, we, I don't believe in impulsive suicide and I don't think that there are some people who are not of sound enough mind to make a good decision on that.

Malcolm Collins: Here's another one of the top posts. You have to be somewhat blinded to the truth to stay alive in this hell world. Life is all about pointless suffering and chasing pleasure to get temporary relief from suffering. Then you pass on the torch to the next generation so they can repeat this cycle. If you manage to do that, then you quote unquote won at life.

Like, so I love this idea that life is all about pointless suffering and chasing pleasure to [00:24:00] get temporary relief from this suffering. It's like, speak for yourself, motherfucker! Like, and that's, and that's the core reason that these people are so unhappy, I think. Yeah, for them, that's really what life is all about.

It's about this pointless chasing. It's about this pointless chasing and, and, and they, because that's what they think life is about. You know, the children for them are just another source of masturbating their own egos and their own self worth and their own happiness. They do not understand is one of my favorite comments ever underneath our own channel stated it was.

Why are you worried that the future is going to be a worse place? Why are you trying to make the future a better place if you are not personally going to get to experience it? Oh, this I think is the core difference between meaning pronatalists and antinatalists is this idea of that's the point, the truest form of happiness, the form of happiness that you personally have been unable to achieve yourself [00:25:00] comes from meaningfully living conscientiously.

Intellectually sound value systems when you know what's right and what's wrong and when you live by that value system and you don't have some sort of doubt like it's not something that's meant to just justify what you wanted to do already when you are making actual sacrifices both intellectual and personal.

To make the world a better place. And you see success in those endeavors that creates a form of happiness that is more indelible and more persistent and more genuinely fulfilling than anything these antinatalists can feel because they aren't living in that world. And so they likely have really never experienced true happiness.

Simone Collins: Yeah. But let's, so let's let's talk about the broader issue, right? The coming war. Because I think this is, this is what matters. And I do think that a problem that we will face with the pronatalist movement is that[00:26:00] a lot of people who would otherwise. Who really probably want to have kids who, who would tend toward that lifestyle.

Like, look at me, right? Like I was raised in a very antinatalist society. You know, no one, none of the girls that I was friends with ever planned on being mothers or planned on getting married. It was just not like part of life, right? You, you baby started a business and all this other cool stuff and you travel and have fun, but like, you weren't going to become a parent.

I do think that this growing divide of like humanity bad versus no, let's have kids and families is going to be something that picks off a lot of people who would otherwise be amazing parents, love being parents, raise awesome children, you know, really enjoy this and people who will be a lot more miserable without that lifestyle.

You know, how, how do we, how do we deal with that? Like as, as pronatalists, how do we head that off? I mean, I think a lot of it comes down [00:27:00] to our education reform work, right? Like giving people a different pathway to become empowered

Malcolm Collins: professionals. You need to take them out of the existing cultural framework because the existing cultural framework is toxic.

And what leads to this, the dominant, the virus, the cult, whatever you want to call it, it is what's causing this. Yeah. And it is what is nurturing this. You know, I went to the most. Upvoted Etheless things in the last year. Okay. And they have a meme where it's a crying guy and then Chad guy and crying guy is saying,

But to eliminate all suffering, we would have to destroy the earth.

And then Chad guy is saying, Yes. And it's titled, Beta Philosophers vs. Sigma Etheless. And the first comment there is, but what about consent? You know, in silly letters, right? And under that it says, says people who impose suffering and death on every future generation without consent. Like this, this is genuinely the stuff they think.

The next comment here, which I think is really interesting because it shows just how disgusting these people are as human beings. is so they see, you know, Chad guy was a beard [00:28:00] and everything like that, being the good guy in a meme. And they say, the idea of this meme is good, but the execution is disgusting.

Memes teach that this dude with the beard on the right is always the reference a*****e, racist, sexist, homophobe, and so on. Putting the ideas of efilism into the mouths of a******s is wrong. Oh, they are so extreme that they see the guy. That, like, everyone considers the good guy in these memes, the based guy in these memes.

And they're like, they just associate it with evil because they're living this, like, childish pursuit of the, the most infantile perspective of what good is and what evil is. Oh,

Simone Collins: golly. Well. Yeah. All right. So if this is the growing war, I guess the answer does come back to what we've been discussing in so, so, so, so many posts, which is just, all right, then we have to opt out of this, just opt out, educate our kids separately, build separate economies, get out.[00:29:00]

Protect yourself while you can

Malcolm Collins: and eventually, you know, if these people do become a threat, if they do get access to AI and stuff like that, they can do what they want to do, which is Venus or destroy the planet. We need to really keep in mind that there is a growing movement out there that wants to end all human life.

You know, that song where he's talking about the Soviets and he's like, you know, if they love their children too, they're, they're not going to end the world..

Khrushchev said he would bury you

Malcolm Collins: anyway, children too will be fine.

It would be such an ignorant thing to do If the Russians

Malcolm Collins: The problem is that these people don't have children and know they don't love them

Believe me when I say to

Malcolm Collins: and they really do want to kill you all and they could end up in nuclear silos.

They could end up in positions of power and we need to keep in mind just how dangerous the forces arrayed against us really are and we need to as [00:30:00] judiciously remove them from any position that they could use to destroy all life and remove consent from other individuals as quickly as possible because,

You know, while we try to be as pluralistic as possible, we need to understand that they want to remove consent from everyone, everyone.

They are the, I think, the truest and purest form of evil in the world today. And it feels really good that there are enemies because I know I'm on the right side. It's like you get to a holocaust camp and you're like, Oh, these guys are clearly the f*****g bad guys. You get to an epilous subreddit, you're like, Oh, wow!

You could not more clearly signal that you're evil. But they are growing and they're growing faster than us.

Simone Collins: Yeah, yep, gird your loins, ladies and gentlemen, and Malcolm. Glad that I'm marching into the future with you. It's sometimes a little scary, but,

Malcolm Collins: uh, well, I got somebody has my back to the shield.

You always protect this family. And I really appreciate that because I would not be able to take the aggressive moves that I am taking as an individual. If you weren't out protecting us.

Simone Collins: No, we won't escape the [00:31:00] darkness unless you aggressively march us toward the light. So thank you very much. She told us toward marriage.

There you

Go. Love you.

Thorston Collins: Oh, I did it! You did it? Is it good? Is it good? Not yet. Almost there. Can you see that? Whee! Whee! Wow, wow! Haha, you

Octavian Collins: see that?

Thorston Collins: Do you want to go in the wave too? Yeah! That's crazy! That's crazy! That's [00:32:00] so fast!

We explain our strategy of aggressively educating kids about sexuality to normalize it and reduce interest. We believe society frames sex as no different from porn and this obsessiveness ruins enjoyment. True happiness comes from improving future generations, not temporary pleasure. Early exposure and openness make desire and experiences less appealing long-term.

Malcolm Collins: [00:00:00] I was like, okay, let's look into the data on this. Yeah. Generally it seems that the more you teach young kids about sex, the less they have sex and the later they have sex the first time. Do you think that's because adults

Simone Collins: are tainting it with uncoolness?

Malcolm Collins: I would that could be part of it. Yeah,

Simone Collins: but does this teaching kids about sex include teaching kids about. Abstinence, or like teaching

Malcolm Collins: kids to not have sex.

Okay, so you can do abstinence only education, which actually has a similar effect to general sex education.

Simone Collins: Interesting. See, I had thought as a kid growing up, and like younger, that like abstinence only education didn't work. That's what I always heard. Abstinence

Malcolm Collins: only education doesn't work. Of course, because that's what they wanted to tell you.

Yeah. Like that fit the narrative. Perhaps in this only education actually does work, but it doesn't seem to work as long as general sex education. The more a community is told to restrict access to these sorts of things, the more they're going to engage with these sorts of things under the radar.

It really seems like. The best panacea [00:01:00] against over sexual abundance. So we will teach our kids, basically the answer here is we will teach our kids pretty aggressively and early about human sexuality. But because we want them to engage in the topic with moderation, and we think that that is the best way to achieve that outcome. ​We are getting to do a special recording today because we had the disappointment of setting up all our recording equipment For a Great Britain, what about a GB news interview?

And this is the second time they've done this to us But you know, we always got to be ready for those news conversations and said we're like what we blocked out time Anyway, we might as well take the time to chat with each other which is more fun Let's be honest. We had one of those, those recording sessions ruthlessly stolen from us by a a friend where we had to talk with a friend.

Oh my gosh. Oh my gosh. The burden of [00:02:00] friendship. Will it ever leave us, Simone? God, I don't know. One day I hope to be famous enough that I do not care about alienating myself from friends. The whole world can be just you, me and the kids. Won't that be wonderful?

Simone Collins: Yeah, except then like the friends that you do hang out with probably just hang out with you because you're famous, which sounds annoying.

No,

Malcolm Collins: no, I don't want any friends. Once I'm, once I'm at that level. Just, just

Simone Collins: would be completely isolated. Okay, that's dreamy. I'm

ready

Malcolm Collins: for that. You, me, the kids, living in our, our antique farmhouse in the woods. Yeah, that's fine. Okay. Or potentially we're going to have to go set up our charter city by then, some remote place in the far north, a little settlement, right?

Simone Collins: God, I don't want to leave this place. I really like

Malcolm Collins: it. I know. I know. So today's topic is an interesting one. And it has to do with when we think it is appropriate and how we will engage with our kids and the subject of sexuality. Indeed. And [00:03:00] what's really funny is I think a lot of people might see us or they see, you know,

they know that broadly, you know, we consider ourselves as very like culturally similar to Ayla. And, and we're friends with her, you know, we have her on the show sometimes. And then we'd be like, what, so you want to raise your kids to grow up like Ayla, right? Like, is that your goal? I'm not

Simone Collins: grow up like Ayla, because she grew up in an extremely hardline conservative religious

Malcolm Collins: household.

Yeah, well, I mean, we are an extremely hardline conservative religious household, we just have a different view of sexuality. We're

Simone Collins: not a sex negative extremely hardline conservative religious

Malcolm Collins: household. Yeah, that's what you meant. So, so, our response would be, you know, which of us Ayla or us, do you think, grew up not learning about sexuality?

I was exposed to sexual, like, like, information at an extremely young age. And, and I would say it was extremely negative. I, I remember, because I remember, okay, so the house I was living at the time, I couldn't have been older than seven. When my mom, I [00:04:00] remember this conversation with my mom. Oh dear.

Simone Collins: And she takes me by Okay, so

Malcolm Collins: you're totally pre pubescent at this point. And she goes, well, Malcolm, you're going to need to be very, very careful because many young girls are going to try to get you to get them pregnant so that they can force you to marry them and take your money.

Simone Collins: I mean, actually, that's, if you have a family that is likely to be targeted for that.

Malcolm Collins: I understand. She had a perception that we were that kind of, and I guess my family more largely was that way at that age. That was sort of at times your

Simone Collins: family did have a lot of wealth. And I think was known for that. Also, like it could be a similar liability if like, you know, that your kid is like going to be the high school star.

And then like women would. You know, you need to warn your sons that like, women will pursue them just for social status. It's not as like, the pregnancy

Malcolm Collins: risk is not as dangerous. I remember she also told me like, at a pretty young age, [00:05:00] that I needed to know how to be good at sex. I needed to know how to, like, that this was something that I should take the time to research and familiarize myself with.

Like, she wasn't like, creepy, like, I'm gonna. you know, teach you about all this stuff, which I appreciate, but she was just like, this is something you can study and you should take the time to study because it will matter both in terms of your social, you know, popularity and your ability to secure a high quality wife.

And, and, and as. Other people who have read other of our works know one of the things that my mom always, always enforced me as a young kid is that the single most important decision or accomplishment I would ever make is who I married. So for her to be like, this is really important in terms of who marries you, for her to be like, this is important in terms of who you marry, like, she's being like, this is a really critical life tool. And you also grew up with a lot of exposure to sexuality stuff at a young age, right? Yeah, I mean, all

Simone Collins: my parents just left, like Porn illustrations [00:06:00] and like

Malcolm Collins: this is one of the most embarrassing moments of my life at your house.

So do you remember this? So I'm talking with her dad in the living room.

Simone Collins: This is like

Malcolm Collins: in like a main, like in the living room. And I see on the bookshelf. Like, cool looking, like, anime thing.

Simone Collins: Yeah, so you're like, oh, it's manga.

Malcolm Collins: Cool. And I pull it out, and it is a hentai book. In her family's living room.

Pretty explicit. While I'm talking to her dad. Yeah. I pull this out, and I just like, put it back. Pretend nothing happened. Cause I am mortified. I think. Your family is, is the one extreme I wouldn't go to. I mean, they pushed you into the type of woman who, who, you know, by the time we were married, I was only the second guy she had ever kissed, you know, much less you definitely had never had sex with anyone before me or anything like

Simone Collins: that.

Yeah. Which is weird because like, I mean, as you can imagine, like if a child is knocking about a house where a lot of the illustrated books are. [00:07:00] Literally extremely explicit material. Like you are exposed to that sometimes without, and no, always with that annotation, like, you know, early, cause you're going to pull the thing with the pictures off the bookshelf, not the stuff with the words.

So that was great. Interesting. And move on there. Did

Malcolm Collins: your parents tell you about sexuality at a

Simone Collins: young age? Like, so what's really interesting is. The only sex talk I remember with my, with any parent was with my mom. I remember where I was in the house and she was basically like, Simone. So when it comes to sex, like you have a, it's like a precious jewel and you have a certain number of jewels and they're very precious.

And you just need to be really thoughtful about who you give them away to. And, you know, I was really generous with my jewels.

Malcolm Collins: She said that, yeah. She said

Simone Collins: she wouldn't, [00:08:00] she, she essentially told me she wouldn't have. been so generous. Like she she basically said, I, I wish I hadn't slept around as much when I was younger.

Which was interesting. But

Malcolm Collins: you know, to be in this hippie culture growing up, you know, your mom, like her whole shaman thing, you know, she's really into all that for her to tell you that you must've been like, wow, she's really serious about this advice.

Simone Collins: I was indifferent to it because like with you is this really bizarre exception.

I'm asexual, like I'm not attracted to anyone except for you, like, and I've been having these sex dreams about you. It's so freaking weird, man. It's like, anyway, so like, I have problems

Malcolm Collins: with you. But this is only because of the pregnancy, right? Like the

Simone Collins: Who knows? I mean, I've always been hot for you, but like now it's just worse.

So yeah, probably pregnancy hormones, which who knows? You've also just been extra hot recently and amazing and perfect and the best husband ever.

Malcolm Collins: This is sweet. I have a yandere wife here.

Simone Collins: No, [00:09:00] like genuinely. Like, yeah, I hate everyone else, only have eyes for you, but like, so that means though, like my mom having that talk with me meant nothing because like, I wouldn't have been

Malcolm Collins: interested.

achieved status. I mean, I believe that the reason why I was so sexually active at a young age, which is less important for a guy, is because In terms of like my, my status on the marketplaces because I believed that it was important to my social standing and my, you

Simone Collins: were trying about Yeah, but for women, that's not the case.

I mean, and I do remember, like, there were some actually women in my high school who I really

Malcolm Collins: respect. Not all women. Some women believed that they can gain social credit for this. Some, some do.

Simone Collins: And there were some women in my high school who I thought were really beautiful and way smarter and cooler than me.

Who. Did become sexually active in high school. And then I would hear people say things like describe them as cum dumpsters. And, you know, think that that was kind of weird, but like, I, I, I had zero one. I didn't [00:10:00] think anyone would ever be attracted to me. So obviously like, I wouldn't think about sex is something that I would

Malcolm Collins: like.

You're so inherently humble, Simone. It radiates from you.

Simone Collins: I, yeah, you've also seen me in high school. Well, like I wasn't, I, I was not. Even close to the top 50 percent Okay,

Malcolm Collins: you were less attractive than you are today when you were younger I'll agree with that, but I think that you were still very attractive.

I I

Simone Collins: was like in high school. I was like a Three and a half and maybe you

Malcolm Collins: were nerd bait in high school. I've six you were nerd bait, but continue

Simone Collins: That's sweet. In, in college, sorry, post college in college and post college, I was nerd bait in high school. It was a real story. So, one, like I never would have thought to use that as a social currency.

Cause I didn't think it was a social currency. I had second until I met you, I thought it was completely asexual. So like. I had no interest. So like my mom saying that to me meant nothing, basically like no amount of sex [00:11:00] education or lack thereof or abstinence education would have changed my stance and policy around sexuality.

And I think this is a really important point. I think that with many kids, they're going to do what they're going to do. If they're the kind of person who's going to just hormonally, biologically have a high sex drive or grow up in a culture that makes them feel like they are. Sexually attractive and for validation.

They need to have sex. They're going to have sex. It doesn't matter. So like the only thing you can do at that point is try to encourage safe sex and strategically productive sex.

Malcolm Collins: So I don't think that the evidence agrees with you on this. Really? Okay, go on. So this is something that I had recently looked into before this, because I wanted to double check.

I was like, okay, let's look into the data on this. Yeah. Generally it seems that the more you teach young kids about sex, the less they have sex and the later they have sex the first time. Do you think that's because adults

Simone Collins: are tainting it with uncoolness?

Malcolm Collins: I would that could be part of it. Yeah, I think that's a big part of it.

And there's a whole psychological issue here that we'll [00:12:00] get to. But I think that you see your own experience as being more anecdotal than it really is. And the reality is that the data is pretty robust on this. Like I went through a number of studies on this. It seems it's not like a Yeah. Sometimes the data goes one way.

Sometimes the data goes the other way, which you sometimes see the data is profoundly. The more you teach kids about sex, the later they have sex and the less sex they have early in their lives. Okay.

Simone Collins: But does this teaching kids about sex include teaching kids about. Abstinence, or like teaching

Malcolm Collins: kids to not have sex.

Okay, so you can do abstinence only education, which actually has a similar effect to general sex education.

Simone Collins: Interesting. See, I had thought as a kid growing up, and like younger, that like abstinence only education didn't work. That's what I always heard. Abstinence

Malcolm Collins: only education doesn't work. Of course, because that's what they wanted to tell you.

Yeah. Like that fit the narrative. Perhaps in this only education actually does work, but it doesn't seem to work as long as general sex education. Yeah, well,

Simone Collins: because I [00:13:00] mean, eventually for the average person, something's gotta give, right? I mean.

Yeah,

Malcolm Collins: yeah. So it is protective. It is not as protective.

Simone Collins: Even though they really care about abstinence.

Malcolm Collins: Well, yeah, it was, it was more, the studies that have looked at this long term, like six months to a year out show that you get a persistent effect from regular sex education and a, and a non persistent effects from abstinence only education. And I think that a lot of this comes from the way that you acculturize kids to think about sexuality.

As a kid, for example, you get somebody like me, I smoked, right? Like, like cigarettes, right? Clove cigarettes, of course, because I needed to sleep with all the hot girls. And the hot girls were into clove cigarettes. They really were though, yeah. So, you go and you sneak out behind the rock in town and hope nobody saw you.

As soon as that was the Rockwood town, as soon as I went to college, there was a [00:14:00] rock by the lake until we go into the woods and then in New Hampshire and hook up and you, you know, but as soon as it was legal for me to do that, I immediately stopped doing it. I never did it again in my life. Oh, funny.

No, and I'm lucky I didn't become addicted to it because I could have, right. I, I, I'm lucky that my

Simone Collins: cigarettes don't have nicotine in them. Could that be.

Malcolm Collins: No, they have nicotine in them. My family just historically is not particularly susceptible to nicotine addictions or really any addiction other than alcohol.

So, and your family is pretty much like the complete bears when it comes to all of it's done everything. So, so I, I, I think there was a genetic thing protecting me and I didn't do it that often. I literally only did it when I wanted to go hook up with someone. So it was, it was rare but it was something I engaged in because it was disallowed.

And this is another thing you see in the data.

Simone Collins: But, so that's why I would expect abstinence only education to [00:15:00] backfire, because you're making something

Malcolm Collins: forbidden. Well, it does seem to backfire in the long run, right? But I think the more you engage with sexuality, like the grosser it seems, okay? Yes. So, that is one aspect of it. But I think there's more to it than that.

Okay. I think that if you look at the data, another thing you'll see is, so even in adults, if you look at regions by there was this great study, I think it looked at like how conservatively Mormon regions were. Okay. This is a culture that doesn't particularly like masturbation and it was looking at by zip code and it showed that the amount of online porn consumption was Correlated with how conservative the area was.

Isn't that marvelous? And I seem to remember a historic thing about like PayPal addresses and then sales of girls gone wild that, that was selling in those ads or something. But generally this is something you see over and over again. The more a community is told to restrict access to these [00:16:00] sorts of things, the more they're going to engage with these sorts of things under the radar.

It really seems like. The best panacea against over sexual abundance. So we will teach our kids, basically the answer here is we will teach our kids pretty aggressively and early about human sexuality. But because we want them to engage in the topic with moderation, and we think that that is the best way to achieve that outcome.

Yeah, and

Simone Collins: also that when they do it, they do it safely. But so then, okay, so like, let's go a little further with this. Like, I think the thing,

Malcolm Collins: I don't think that they should go out there and have a ton of sex. I do. But I

Simone Collins: do think that when they do, they should do it safely. So that's part of what sex ed is all about.

yoU know, a lot of what these studies are looking at is when people do eventually,

Malcolm Collins: I'm making is that sex ed has a secondary effect depending on how it's done. So what I'm

Simone Collins: saying is if we

Malcolm Collins: like, I don't care about it. Don't [00:17:00] care about it. I'm talking safe sex outside, obviously you're going to have more

Simone Collins: safe sex.

I know, I know. What I'm talking about also is the chilling effect of adults teaching you this thing. So for example, if you and I teach our children like, oh, by the way, like if and when you want to try anal, these are like the processes you should go through. Like here's how to like clean Make sure you use lube!

Yeah, like you gotta use lube, like start small, you might want to start pegging a little bit before you go full out, like, you know, before you, this is how you douche properly, here are the various, and like, they're just getting increasingly like, just disgust, like disgusted, ashen face. If your

Malcolm Collins: parents tell you this stuff.

Oh

Simone Collins: yeah, no, if we teach our children. Like how to do any, you know, like, you know, here, like here are the various techniques, like, you know, when you go down on someone, you know, make sure you don't, you know, don't use your teeth, you know, make sure blah, blah, blah. And like, you know, and you for deep throating, this is some methodology and positioning that may indeed they're going to die.

And I

Malcolm Collins: mean, but here's the thing about this. My mom [00:18:00] telling me about this, whatever they're. One, whenever they hear one of their friends brag about it. Right. Yeah. So they're not gonna see it as high status. They're thinking about their parents. And two, you know, the first time they engage with it, the way you sabotage your kids having sex is bury those memories in their heads.

Yes. Not just don't engage with it. And I also think even in mind, so if a kid's going out there and they're educating themselves about their sexuality, right? Yeah. Yeah. They're going on online websites, they're like, okay, what is sex about? What is Mm-Hmm. . Those are going to be really sex positive, I think in a particularly toxic way in an uncritical way.

Like,

If you go online and you look at the places where this is talked about within online communities, they're often very uncritically sex positive.

Or I think if you look at something like our book on the subject, the pragmatist guide to sexuality, like if I was in us and I was like, how do I teach my kids realistically about sex? Honestly, the audiobook for The Pragmatist's Guide to Sexuality is probably a pretty good place to start. [00:19:00] Because it really makes it not sound cool, it makes it overly analytical, it goes really deep, it unmystifies a lot of it.

With a lot of this stuff, Unmystifying it is how you build protection against it. Yeah,

Simone Collins: one of our best reviews for The Pragmatist Guide to Sexuality was something along the lines of, I came to this book to better understand how man loves one another, you know, how we intimately you know, come together.

And instead I came away disgusted by humanity. And we're like, exactly, exactly. That was our goal. Yeah. Mission accomplished. You may have given us a two star review, but we're keeping it. Cause you know,

Malcolm Collins: fire hydrant of sexual, like what humans are actually doing online. It is the collective delete my search history of humanity being, being poured down our kid's throat, like some sort of torture device.

Simone Collins: But you know, we're not going to, we're not going to say any of this in a sex negative [00:20:00] context, although we're also not like. We're not ourselves, obviously, is super infatuated by sex. You know, we're

Malcolm Collins: not Oh, the thing I don't understand at all.

Simone Collins: The idea of calling it making love makes me,

Malcolm Collins: you know.

Also, I had a high sex drive at a younger age because I grew up again. This is something we talk about. You can tell from people's facials features. My facial features are of somebody who was overexposed to testosterone growing up. The reason I had so much sex growing up, like I mentioned, that's on other things I'd slept with a hundred different people before I started college.

The reason I had done that is because I had this Over driven sex drive. And a lot of people are like, Oh, you should, as an adult now, now that you're free, because testosterone goes down when you have kids, it goes down when you're in a long term monogamous relationship, they're like, you should want that back.

I'm like, why would I want that back? That was not just. Hell in that it was something that I constantly [00:21:00] thought about all the time. It was Simone, right? Like, we get receipts and she's like, Oh no, that could block your test. I'm like, grab the receipt. I'm like, Simone, I don't want you touching it because you're pregnant with our kids.

I don't care anymore. I won the game, right? Why? They're like, well, don't you, don't you want to be virile? I, I suspect that these people who like go out there hunting for virility have never really experienced like full on male sexuality. So just like

Simone Collins: how not only logistically cumbersome it is to have a lot of sex, but also like how legally emotionally and socially liable it makes you, right?

Malcolm Collins: Well, and, and morally. So, you know, I look at the first person I had sex with, you know, the first time I had sex with someone. I had gone to this camp that was for nerds. It was, it was, you would only get invitations if you had gotten over a certain score on the SATs. And before this or I was thinking it was like an IQ test or something.

Anyway, before this, I had never really and it [00:22:00] was hosted at Cambridge or Oxford or something like that. Cambridge, Cambridge. I had never really done well with women before this moment, but I had just gotten into the period of starting to like, try to logistically using online environments, try to understand with you know, if then statement, like I would use that if the statements, but I would use chains of texts when talking to girls online and learn which chains worked and which chains didn't.

So I just begun to like really formalize this process. I get into this environment where I am valued for being nerdy. You know, the first party there, I'm hooking up with two girls at the same time behind the party. I end up choosing one of them, and it was literally, like, basically NTR porn Netanari or whatever.

This girl had been in a long term relationship. She was a very conservative Christian girl. She was saving herself for marriage and she was just like, . I will do any, like, I'm really, really into you.

Like, I know I've been with this guy forever, but let's just do you. [00:23:00] This is, this is what I want to do. Like, this is the path I want to take. And at the time, like, that was really hot to me. It's so funny, we had this one person on the, the, in the comments once being like, Oh, Malcolm, you seem like you're, you're into cuckoldry or whatever.

Like, do you want other people to sleep with your wife? And I was like, you've really read me wrong. Like I used to and that was something I did a lot. We were, I slept with somebody else's prom date on prom. You know, one of my friends I did the things where as an older person now looking back on it, it was really immoral.

And I feel very, very bad about it. That's

Simone Collins: good. Yeah. It's a dick move.

Malcolm Collins: No, I was a dick. I was a dick. I was driven by my hormones at that age. Yeah. And I didn't have any sort of a moderating Moral instruction telling me to do otherwise. I mean, if you look at, you know, who was my moral instructor up to that point, which was my mom, right?

Her position [00:24:00] was if you can f**k people over and flex on them and show that you're better than them, then do it. Yeah, that's very much a Trumpian sort

Simone Collins: of mindset. Totally. Well, are we going to teach our kids, our sons, especially some form of bro code? I

Malcolm Collins: mean, Yes. Yeah. No. Well, I mean, I'd say that I, I, I will tell them about my background and that I made mistakes.

That was bad at the time I thought, and you can even see Trump do this when I say Trumpian, you know, he brags about sleeping with his friends, wives, like as an adult. Right? Like long after he should have known that that was the immoral thing to do and like trying to pressure his friend's wife into sleeping with him.

The lack of progression

Simone Collins: there.

Malcolm Collins: And for me, I view this period of when I was super sexually active as a period in which I broke a number of moral codes, which I should have known not to break. You know, sleeping with people that were hot, but I didn't respect. Sleeping with people that were, no, I never Bye.

Like, like my, the one thing I always stuck with is I would never hurt their feelings. Right. Right. Which is meaningful. If [00:25:00] somebody gave their virginity to me, which happened a lot, like about a third of the people I slept with were virgins. That was like the group that I did best with. I would always try to date them from a specific period of time afterwards if they wanted that.

I would try to. I mean, sometimes they didn't. Sometimes they were just like, I want practice before I sleep with my boyfriend, which again, like just me being the f*****g antagonist in NTR porn. But that's also kind

Simone Collins: of sweet if they, you know, just didn't want to disappoint someone that they I

Malcolm Collins: understand, but I shouldn't have done it.

Yeah. And so I think people who have never been cursed with this ultra high male sexuality, they do not understand. It's like somebody one day injected me with like meth. Got me addicted to it. And I didn't ask for this at all. And now all of a sudden I'm breaking into people's houses and f*****g stealing s**t so I can get math.

Right. Like it was wrong and it was evil. And I am trying to, as an adult learn to like, like, like not a tone for it, but I [00:26:00] don't want to go back there. Like, I don't want to be like, Oh yes. introduce that challenge to me again. Yeah. Although one

Simone Collins: way to atone for it, of course, is to raise kids to do better.

So that, that is a hope that we have for our kids then. I think another thing that I, I, I think about a lot is when it comes to I do think that it creates a certain lack of understanding of like how these dynamics work and I'm, I'm not even talking about like what people are willing to do. I'm talking about what people.

Expect from partners as a default. And I think one of the biggest things that I see in terms of people, like problems that people have with sex throughout their lifetimes that we see people post about online a lot is that partners don't feel sufficiently desired. And it really, it has nothing to do with like, I don't care if like they're doing wacky stuff in bed or if they have like zero sex [00:27:00] lives, a lot of it comes down to like how desired a partner feels.

And if there's one through line through every single like fetish you'll see in erotic material. Like the thing that people almost universally, and of course there are some fetish based like differences here, but like, it's almost always based around the person being very into banging you like the concept there, like enthusiastic interest.

And I think a big problem that That both men and women have, especially after being exposed to any form of erotic material. And this is, you know, romance novels for young women, or like, you know, manga. Or like, you know, typical, standard, very visual erotic material for men. Is they just kind of assume that without putting any effort.

You're going to end up with a partner who's showing like insane levels of enthusiasm for you. And like that, unfortunately, that's actually either something that like, unless you're like some kind of Adonis or you're like really rich or [00:28:00] famous, which is kind of hard to do, especially when you're just a kid.

You have to put a lot of work into getting that kind of interest. And I, I don't know how I'm going to approach this with our kids yet, but it is something I want to talk about with you because I, I want kids to understand that like, no, a woman or man is not going to be like insane. Like, you know, like cannot control themselves around you.

Malcolm Collins: I know I've had that with some girls. Well, you're you, I mean, no, I understand, but, but some people I assume, I mean, I don't want to say it's an act, but like they know to lean into it. Like, I, I think that the better thing to focus on with kids is I think a big problem in our society. Basically sex, non reproductive sex from the perspective of our culture and the way we're teaching our kids is no different from pornography.

Yeah, agreed. No different from pornography. It is no additional social standing. Well, I would say

Simone Collins: it's, it's probably a little worse because you're more likely to put yourself at physical, logistical, legal, moral risk. No,

Malcolm Collins: it's just pornography with extra [00:29:00] steps. Yeah. It's pornography with extra steps and risks.

So insofar as it feels better to you than pornography, then engage in it. But if it doesn't feel better to you than that, then. don't engage in it. And, or don't waste a ton of time seeking it out. And I think the, one of the core problems in the way our society frames this is it puts, you know, corn in one category, actual sex in one category, and then like reproductive sex in another category.

And then there's conservative religious groups, which sometimes are like corn and actual sex should go in the same group. But that whole group is off limits. Whereas we say, No, because they're in the same category, just engage with porn. Don't engage with actual sex unless it is moving you towards reproductive sex.

And and even in that case, reproductive sex is largely immoral from our perspective if you can engage in polygenic screening. And so you know, don't, don't over indulge in that either, [00:30:00] you know, so, uh, what this means is I think when you frame things that way, when you're like, look, what you are doing when you are having sex with someone else for pleasure is you're basically using another human being like a fleshlight, like.

Why? Like, you, you, you functionally are getting nothing additional out of it other than any hormones that force some sort of a bonding to you. And insofar as it's creating hormones that force a bonding to you, then you're using it as a tool to brainwash the other individual, which, okay, yes, learn to use that tool well, but recognize what you're doing and that that is the purpose of sex in those circumstances.

There's an argument that It's not your personal gratification.

Simone Collins: A lady or gentleman with a weaker imagination may just have difficulty getting the same enjoyment from not exactly the real thing.

Malcolm Collins: Well, I mean, I, I, I think that that framing for our kids will work in terms of leading them to understand that [00:31:00] sex is a tool that can move them towards their goals.

It is a tool that it goals. The big one that sex helps with is getting someone to marry you. But the and then have kids.

Simone Collins: Wait, so you think you're more likely to marry someone if you've already had sex? As a guy, yeah. As a guy, yeah. I guess because you can be sure that you're not sexually incompatible because that's kind of

Malcolm Collins: scary.

No, like I had a, I mean, the way that I, you know, you can get women basically indebted to you, like get them to have a, a supernatural is the wrong word, but I mean, it's, it's.

Simone Collins: Oh, so you're, you're talking about like oxytocin and like. Yeah. Terminal

Malcolm Collins: bonding. Okay. Utilize that to achieve bonds with people that then you can then utilize to or exploit whatever you want to say to better achieve your long term goals.

Okay. Insofar as you don't hurt them. And, and keep in mind, you know, if there's somebody who's out there going to be having sex anyway, like, how did you ruin all these women? You know, after, after [00:32:00] the first few, I was like, okay, no, I'm only going to go for the type of girl who I know would otherwise go out there and have sex with people.

So yeah, that's how we're going to engage with sexuality with our kids. So I think the question is, what outcome are you aiming for? Are you aiming for Ayla? Which, who I think, you know, we love Ayla, really smart person. I, I, I think that the strategy that she has chosen, she's really pioneered it. And I think it's shown that even if you are the best at the world at what she does.

It's still hard to find a husband if you take that path. And so I wouldn't recommend it for our kids. So do you want to take that path or do you want to take our path?

Our path is extreme and total sexual education, allowing your kids to be exposed to sexual information at a young age, normalize it and treat it as something that you as a parent are engaging them on.

Or do you extremely restrict sexual content, tell them to restrict masturbation and don't engage them with pornography. It's at the path you want to take. Right.

Simone Collins: So that we're, we're essentially saying traumatic explo [00:33:00] exposure. Versus sheltering.

Malcolm Collins: Well, not traumatic exposure, normalization.

Simone Collins: I think if my parents, Now, I guess if my parents told me, like, the logistics of anal, for example, I wouldn't be traumatized, but,

Malcolm Collins: You'd never have anal.

Simone Collins: I, I never would, anyway. I'm not into anyway. Like I guess I should like give a better description of like, something I'd be into like ChAARI. No. Yeah. Then I would be much less likely to do it. Yeah, it's true. Did Even if it's something I'm kind of inclined to . Sorry, that's,

Malcolm Collins: that's the not tying thing.

Simone Collins: Uhhuh

Yeah. Yeah. I'm, I'm in, I'm a, I'm a Swaddler, so. Um,

Malcolm Collins: yeah, she, she, she likes being restrained is what she's

Simone Collins: saying. It's very, well, I mean, it makes sense. I think like, I would imagine that the proportion of autistic people who like, if they were asked to choose sexual fetishes that like were the sexual equivalent of a weighted blanket, You

Malcolm Collins: are such a goof Simone and [00:34:00] I absolutely

Simone Collins: love you.

But no, yeah, you're right. If my parents had been like. Learn about this. I would be like, maybe I will never do that. Okay. Let's do this to our children. We're so terrible. Hah hah hah! Heheheheheheheheh. Foo foo foo

Malcolm Collins: foo. It's gonna be bad. This is what the private disguise of sexuality says. That we have ruined sex for our children for life.

Well

Simone Collins: that's why we dedicate the book to them. Because at least they have that.

Malcolm Collins: Alright, love you so

Simone Collins: much. Love you too!

We explain why the childfree/DINK (dual income, no kids) lifestyle is not something the pronatalist community should oppose. If people do not wish to have children, they likely would make poor parents and passing on those genes is not productive. We also highlight how the animosity towards DINKs often stems from jealousy, not concern for civilization. Ultimately, voluntary sterilization of those not fit to parent strengthens society long-term.

[00:00:00] We're Dinks. We can go to Florida on a whim. We're Dinks. We're already planning our European vacation next year. Dinks. We get a full eight hours of sleep and sometimes more.

We're Dinks. We get desserts and appetizers at restaurants. We're Dinks

Simone Collins: the response that pronatalist communities or even just like broadly conservative people have to them is just totally wrong.

These are people who really, really, really, really should not be having kids.

Malcolm Collins: We mean this both from a genetic reason.

Like, as we've talked about, like a dink is obviously more likely to be narcissistic, less likely to want to get back to society, et cetera. But in addition to that, they're not going to be good parents.

Would you like to know more?

Simone Collins: I just hit record. So we're set. Let's make sure you're looking gorgeous. I love it when you have a little flippy do on your forehead of hair. It's

Malcolm Collins: just really I wanted to see. So we will, I love my wife and I am excited to be here with you today. Because we are going to talk about a subject. that I didn't really know about. Apparently there was some meme around this because a bunch of [00:01:00] people got mad at people on the internet about this, because people on the internet love to get mad and judge other people.

But it is the phenomenon of dinks. And it's a dual income, no kids. No kids. So these are couples, no kids. And I think a lot of people they look at us, you know, the ISTs and they're like, oh, you're fighting the dinks. Right? And it's like, not really . And we'll, we'll get to this actually. You said at the prenatal list conference, somebody came up, right?

Mm-Hmm. . And they were like, well you guys as ISTs, you know, what are your views on and how are you going to fight the use of condoms? You know, like in other contraceptive drivers,

Simone Collins: right. . And they also ask you this, like on the spot in front of a large audience of people.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Yeah. And I was like, I said something along the lines of, look, I do not want kids being born because they were born accidentally.

That is not

Simone Collins: a victory. Seriously, or to people who don't want them. Come on guys.

Malcolm Collins: How is that a good thing that we are basically [00:02:00] forcing you know, people who don't want kids to have children with people who they did not intend to have children with? Talk about cruelty.

Simone Collins: What to the

Malcolm Collins: kids, you know, she's just like, come on.

Yeah. And this is, this is very much around dinks, you know, if somebody doesn't want kids, like that is not our job. We

Simone Collins: also like, we don't want them to have kids. Our job is to protect. They're right to not have kids. Cause if we care about

Malcolm Collins: kids from them, exactly, exactly, let's, let's talk about dinks more broadly.

So, we'll do the little video of the dinks here. So you can see

We're Dinks. We go to Trader Joe's and workout classes on the weekends. We're Dinks. We get into snobby hobbies like skiing and golfing. We're Dinks. We can go to Florida on a whim. We're Dinks. We're already planning our European vacation next year. Dinks. We get a full eight hours of sleep and sometimes more.

We're Dinks. We get desserts and appetizers at restaurants. We're Dinks. We can play with other kids and give them back. We're Dinks. We still do it three times a week. We're Dinks. We spend our discretionary [00:03:00] income. We're dinks. We max out our 401ks, Roth IRAs, and HSAs. We're dinks. We don't use our kids or dog as an excuse to leave a party.

We just leave.

Malcolm Collins: they do come off as a little, well, I mean, well, for

Simone Collins: context, like dinks did start trending a lot recently because a lot of dinks are making Tik TOK videos specifically about it. And this one couple doing this sort of back and forth of dink lifestyle amenities went viral.

Which led to a

Malcolm Collins: lot of discussion. Our friend of the show, Edward Dutton, did a counter dink video that I'll Which is hilarious. Found randomly. It just came up and he's like, oh, his voice sounds familiar.

We're dinks. We've been sucked into a death cult. We're dinks. We're putting our immediate hedonistic desires above our long term genetic interests. We're dinks. We're part of a selection event, and we've been selected out. We're dinks. We're coping with the fact that we're going to be failures as organisms.

We're dinks. When we're older, we're going to look back on our lives with a profound sense of regret. We're dinks. We're going to die cold, alone, and with no one in the world who loves [00:04:00] us.

Malcolm Collins: But no, no, no, it makes perfect sense, right? So, the, these individuals, like when you see what they're talking about, when you see why they're excited to not have kids you're going to repeatedly see a few through lines.

It's, it's primarily because it allows them to engage with more consumerism. That's a really big thing. Like they're like, or

Simone Collins: savings. Like in, in, in the Dink video, they're like, we max out our Roth IRA, 401k and HSA. Well, we do too, by the way. Parents are more likely to need to do that because then you just save the money.

But yeah, whatever.

Malcolm Collins: No, not just, they're, they're, they're much more excited in their consumerist behavior. They are. We can buy an 8 latte that we can go on random trips so that we can

Simone Collins: appetizers and desserts. That we do too.

Malcolm Collins: Who does that? Who goes to a restaurant and orders three courses? That's insane.

Simone Collins: Well, we order appetizers 'cause we just eat appetizers. , like

Malcolm Collins: shared appetizers. Yeah. We order [00:05:00] appetizers to save money and you know, save, save on calories, . Well, so, so there's that. And then there's a lot of like, well we get to have sex more often or Yeah, we still have

Simone Collins: sex three times a week.

So many married couples we know have not sex three times a week. Every single night. If you care about that, kids aren't going to stop you from doing it.

Malcolm Collins: . Hold on, Simone. I'm not saying, and I do not think it is helpful for us to say, that married couples can have everything a dink can have. True. While, you know, you can look at individual things you're seeing and saying, that's not true of all married couples.

I think that that is, it is, it's disingenuous to make the claim that married couples and dinks have access to the same amount of resources. And that is really, really important is that they actually do have access to more resources. What is more interesting to me and I think what causes the backlash to them is why do they want these additional resources?

What [00:06:00] are they trading? The continuation of our species and their culture and the improvement, like the intergenerational improvement of humanity. This great game that every single one of their ancestors participated in and sacrificed for what they're pointing out when they talk about all the things that they can have because they're not parents is they're pointing out what a sacrifice apparent is and what is sacrifice every individual.

Who came before them so that they had the privilege to opt out of this system. The sacrifices is that huge, great chain of individuals had to undergo for them to have the privilege to basically cash out. Now it is as selfish as the boomers who go out there and just take out tons of debt in the name of future generation.

They are cheating the system because they don't have to deal with the consequences personally. Now, what is. Also true is the genetic precursors to their [00:07:00] psychological proclivities that lead to this sort of narcissistic and selfish behavior are going to be bred out of the population. So that's a, that's one, a good thing, right?

You know, so that's removing and the cultural groups that did a bad job of motivating them to. Yeah. You know, intergenerationally stay in this system are also going to be bred out of the population. And, and even if those groups are aggressively attempting to convert people intergenerationally, the groups are converting from are going to get better at resisting them.

We're just not going to see that anymore. You know, there's one study I saw recently that said something like 55 percent of Gen Z plans to not have kids, 55%. And for a huge portion of them it's environmental concerns. So, they have been so brainwashed by this environmental apocalypticism, because every generation, every 20 years, there's an apocalyptic cult.

You know, their kids are gonna not have kids, you know, if they had kids, because of AI, right? You know, you see this in the EA movement, which has just become this crazy, aggressive, luddite community. The moment Moment. You know, I always go back to the Douglas Adams quote, [00:08:00] Douglas Adams quote of everything invented after you were 30 is like an abomination.

It must be destroyed. The moment the leaders of the movement turned 30, all of a sudden all new technological innovations are heresy and must be destroyed in a threat in the future of our species. And, and these young people really believe this, this sort of nonsensical panic who sometimes, you know, come into the movement now because they don't know that, you know, just.

Old people who time has left behind yelling at the sky.

. You wouldn't understand, Dad. You're not with it. I used to be with it. But then they changed what it was. Now what I'm with isn't it. And what's it seems weird and scary to me. It'll happen to you.

Malcolm Collins: But where are they going with this? Yeah. So, so these concerns, this sort of susceptibility to this form of apocalypticism, like environmentalist apocalypticism is hopefully going to be brought out of our species. Now this will lead to more environmental catastrophes in the future, but I mean, humans have had a great, great job and done a great job at [00:09:00] creating environmental catastrophes over and over and over again.

You know, you look at like when the environmental protection. To went into place. It went into place because lakes used

to regularly catch fire in some areas. ,

Simone Collins: oh boy,

Malcolm Collins: I forgot about that. Or the London smog. Like people,

apparently it's worse than like Bangkok today. You could barely, like if you walked into London, people would just die hall all around you.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. You met you. If you go historically right, people are like, yeah, but. That's just like industrialization problems. If we go back to like Native Americans, like working off the land, I'm like, oh, where did all the mega fauna in America go? Where did the giant sloths go? No! When they came to this country, they systemically exterminated hundreds of species just completely changed the ecological landscape caused huge ecological disasters.

Because humans always do this. It's what we do. Okay? Yeah. And

Simone Collins: Well, it's very natural. That's the problem,

Malcolm Collins: I guess. We had reached this one iteration of our species that thought it might go in the opposite direction. But the [00:10:00] moment you know, that then also became a sterilizing memetic context, like it, you know They then disappear.

So you have these dinks and people are like, well, do you hold animosity to them? And it's like, no, I mean, really I think I hold a level of pity for them. Because a lot of these people, you know, when I look at these women who are spending, you know, 300 K or whatever on trying to get pregnant and they're like 45 they had this mindset when they were younger because they didn't realize or they didn't fully accept yet that they're.

What, what gives them the happiness that they were getting from things like this commercial extravagance, these trips was going to change as they got older. And they just, it had probably already changed by the time they filmed these videos. They just built their self identity because, you know, there's a lot of research on identity creation, which typically happens between like 18 and 24.

And during that period of your life, you're in this mindset of like kids. Ick because, you know, you are supposed to be going out there and finding a mate should be that way. Yeah,

Simone Collins: it's fine.

Malcolm Collins: So it makes, it makes perfect sense that you would [00:11:00] have that mindset at that age, but that's not like who you are.

But they mistakenly believe this because it's reinforced by society around them. So then they end up in these desperate states, you know, reaching out. You know, our foundation being like, Hey, can you fund me to get IVF? And we're like, no, that's not what

Simone Collins: the foundation. That is. Yeah. That is, I, we should point out that that is something that has happened to us.

That like many people who probably formerly identified as child free or dink have contacted us and basically said, like, I can no longer afford IVF. Can you, you know, can you give me a grant? And we can't and no one else will. So this is something people should keep in mind. Like even if you.

Malcolm Collins: But you made your own bet is, is really at the end of the day.

And people don't realize that they have thrown away their happiness.

Simone Collins: No organization is going to, is going to invest in, in a person's fertility. If they're in their forties and having trouble having a kid because they, they're the same dollars that they could spend on that. Older person could help like, you know, [00:12:00] 10, 20, 20 year olds have kids.

Yeah. So like, they're just not going to do it. You're not going to get help. So I guess like if, if I'm going to give one piece of advice to dinks of like, here's how to really have absolutely zero regrets, like freeze eggs, sperm and or embryos

Malcolm Collins: embryos, everything is a bit of a scam. It doesn't like, they do not work as well as people think they

Simone Collins: do.

But I mean, some, some dinks are some single. So like for the dink couple that went viral. I would encourage them to freeze embryos, obviously because they were a couple and they, they had other people, but like, I think many women and men don't have a partner and therefore like, you have to do what you can with what you have.

So yeah, I get what you're saying, Malcolm, but like at the same time, like it's better than nothing. And that way, like. And who knows, maybe you'll have like a sister or a brother or a cousin who really like, can't, you know, can't use their own material and they'd really appreciate you as a donor. So like, this isn't

Malcolm Collins: for nothing.

And people who are horrified by this, you see our video on who kills more kids, Catholics or us, you like it, you're like, no, creating an embryo via IVF, it's [00:13:00] creating a kid and so you're murdering them if they don't end up being used. This is not what early Catholic theologians thought, this is not what most early Christian theologians thought, you know, you'd look like Augustus of Himbo.

Or Thomas Aquinas, you know, they thought that the soul entered the developing embryo 30 days after it began developing. This is a fairly modern belief that is not really biblically backed. Then we go into this with lots of quotes and stuff like that. So just, just be aware that we're not out there advocating the rampant killing of kids.

We're just trying to ensure that the kids who are meant to come into the world can, and we don't end up with these heartbreaking situations.

Simone Collins: Yeah. And we see, we do see dinks change their mind, but I think my larger sense of dinks is like, The, the response that pronatalist communities or even just like broadly conservative people have to them is just totally wrong.

These are people who really, really, really, really should not be having kids. They don't want them. And also like I've seen, I I've watched a lot of child free content. I've gone through a lot of child free. Reddit threads. And I've gone through like posts of parents who regret becoming [00:14:00] parents and that's talk about heartbreaking.

Like I see a dink couple or see a child free person. I don't feel sad for them at all. Like they seem pretty happy with their lifestyle. It could, you know, not, not for us. Right. But like, fine. But what makes me really sad is like videos, Tik TOKs posts by parents who are like. Don't do it. You know, I, if I could go back in time, I'm like, Oh man, like how horrible is that?

Especially for the kids.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Well, I think a lot of these people are in sort of dink cultural groups and stuff like that. And they have this enforced on them. And this is why we really do not advocate to these communities. And I should point when we say like, dinks shouldn't have kids, you know, we don't, we, we, we mean this both from a genetic reason.

Like, as we've talked about, like a dink is obviously more likely to be narcissistic, less likely to want to get back to society, et cetera. But in addition to that, I think that, that they're not going to be good parents. And, and even when it's heartbreaking, when somebody reaches out to us and they're like, I didn't start trying to have kids until X age [00:15:00] because of whatever it's like, well.

So nobody chose to be with you who you were willing to accept. You know, like, that's a sign, okay, that you waited this long. That you didn't question what you were being told by society. All of these things are unfortunately, like, we live in a world where unfortunately not everyone is really happy.

Equally fit to be a parent. And the, the selfishness that is shown by these individuals means that they're much more likely to fall into this narcissistic parent category. Which is really, really something that I would promote avoiding. One of the tweets that was done and like counter to the dinkness, I think it was actually Elon's tweet to this is he goes, it's really selfish to not have kids because what you're saying is somebody else's kids have to care for you in your old age.

And I thought that that was a I mean, I don't think that's going to compel dinks, but it is also a true statement. You know, when these people are. You know, promoting immigration and stuff like that. What they're essentially saying is [00:16:00] we didn't take the time or make the effort to raise the next generation ourself.

And therefore you know, when I'm old and I'm living off of the, the dole off of society, off of social security or whatever I need to import people from other countries to support me.

Simone Collins: But I also, like, I don't know, I don't know. I, I don't agree with that particular stance of Elon Musk. I don't like, I think a lot of these people are going to die deaths of despair, or they're just not going to get very good services, or they're not going to get human help because the human help isn't available.

And they're going to have to deal with that. And that's, that's just kind of on them or they'll be fine. And, you know, it's a market based thing and they will have saved the money necessary to pay a very pretty penny. For whoever is very happy to receive that money to give them services. I don't like that argument to me doesn't do anything like either.

They're going to, you know, die alone on a floor, not being taken care of because they haven't [00:17:00] planned accordingly. Or they're going to kill themselves, which I think a lot of, I think euthanasia is going to see, especially in a post demographic collapse world, people are going to opt into humanely killing themselves when they become too old to either pay for their lifestyles or they're unhealthy.

You know, or they're just going to be able to pay for someone, like whatever. And that's fine. Like I'm okay with employment.

Malcolm Collins: So if they, if they are paying for people, but a lot of these people don't really, are not really planning to pay for it, they're going to die alone

Simone Collins: on the floor

Malcolm Collins: or they're going to be a major voting block because people aren't having as many kids and elderly people vote more than young people and they end up taking the money from the younger generations to support their indulgent lifestyles, which is something that we're already seeing the older generation too.

That's where this unsustainable debt load and everything like that is coming from, and they will do that, and they will keep doing that, and they will do it more in the future, until the system breaks. That sounds pretty evil. Because they don't care. They don't care about future [00:18:00] generations, and they don't care about people younger than them.

They only care, when you see the videos, they're not like, I'm a dink so I can give back to society. It's, I'm a dink so I can indulge in personal hedonism as much as possible. And we will have one, you know, the next generation is likely going to suffer to some extent because of these individuals. However that suffering will to some extent be ameliorated with the knowledge that at least these individuals have removed themselves from our cultural landscape and our genetic landscape.

And this is something that I think people really don't. Expect much, you know, running the prenatalist movement, people will come to us and they'll say, how do you convince this environmentalist who doesn't want to have kids? How do you convince this person who has no kids that they think they can't afford them or something?

And it's like, well, except, you know, the less money you have, the more kids you have. So clearly people with less money than them are able to afford kids. Within all of these instances, we're just like, don't have kids. No argument for them. And they don't get it, because they're not used to that. Every movement they've dealt with before says, [00:19:00] everyone, you must do what we're telling you to do.

When we come to them, and they come to us, and they're like, well, what do you think of me doing this? And we're just like, well, we don't care about you. You don't matter to us. You're not part of the solution. You're, you're not, and you have no capacity to be part of the solution. The mere fact that you would ask me to convince you shows you have no capacity to be part of the solution.

Yeah. And, and, and then there's the alternate group, which does matter for us to reach out to these are young people who are being influenced or brainwashed and just need to know that this is an option for them, that this is a problem and that these, you know, environmental nutjobs, we've done a video on this are mostly lying to them.

These AI nutjobs have done a video on this are mostly lying to them. These things are not the threats that they're being told if they had studied American history. It's something outside of our horrified failing public school system. . They likely don't know. What would be blindingly obvious to anyone who has actually studied American history is that America has a large apocalyptic movement that spreads. particularly [00:20:00] was in you know, upper class communities, urban communities, stuff like that, about every 20 years 25 years about and, and this is just something that America has had forever.

And no, they are not the first generation to think the world's about to end. And it doesn't happen, it, it doesn't happen, I'm sorry, like, and, and if you

Simone Collins: It's the first time for everything, I'm sure, you know,

Malcolm Collins: dream big. But I would look as a barometer for is the world actually about to end, not what people from a culture that does this every 25 years, what Yeah, they're probably not the most But instead look at countries and cultures that are intelligent and developed, but that Don't have this panic scenario every 25 years, they are panicking about these things, especially

Simone Collins: if they have a record for calling other shots.

So,

Malcolm Collins: yeah, yeah. And if they don't have these same problems, then it's probably not the same issue that these people think it is. And that they're really just looking for justification for decisions. They were already inclined to make or wanted to make while also making them themselves feel, you know, morally [00:21:00] important.

Like they're at an important point in history because everybody wants to feel that way. I, I really get that. Right. And I do think that we are at an important point in history, but not in a nothing we do matters way, but the, you know, see our dark ages of video, everything we do in history right now has an extra layer of importance to it because we are in one of the last ages of prosperity.

One of the last ages where you could really indulge in dinkism. It's, it's very much, you know, you look at right before the collapse of the Islamic Empire, right before the collapse of the Roman Empire and if you saw people like marching or look like we don't have kids, look at how wealthy, look at all the, you know, slaves we've been able to buy to carry us on Pelican, you know, it is.

And then you have the other guy who's like, Oh gosh, okay, the system's about to collapse. Okay. I need to have a lot of kids. I know that everyone's really concerned that like the upper classes have stopped having kids and I need to cause Caesar was concerned about this. You know, he, there's famous laws that he was passing because he noticed that nobody was having kids anymore.

And I need to plan out like geographically where they're going to live because Rome is going to become more destabilized in these areas, et cetera, like this [00:22:00] requires a lot of work and it puts a lot of responsibility on an individual and it is both a gift and a curse that we are the generation that gets to engage as that responsibility.

But because of that, this is no longer a situation of just convince everyone. To have more kids. It's now a situation of empower the people who are going to build the next civilization to do a better job doing that instead of you know, convert these, you know, pretty pathetic individuals.

Simone Collins: But here's something that I think is more interesting and under discussed on this issue, which is the amount of butthurt you do get from pronatalist people about dinks and child free couples.

And I think what's really telling about the butthurt that you get from them and the fact that they react so viscerally and are so judgmental really implies, it could imply, a tremendous lack of security in their decision and a certain amount of resentment that they do not share that same amount [00:23:00] of affluence and freedom.

And, and I think a lot of that may be because

Malcolm Collins: we do. This is what's really interesting, Sinan. When I look at the pushback against the dink movement, it does not come from like pronatalist parents. I, I see it occasionally there, but it's not predominantly from that group. The predominant group, because I was going through videos today on YouTube complaining about dinks.

It's actually mostly from younger moderates who one day plan to have kids. Oh,

Simone Collins: interesting. So then I guess that would explain it more because then they're on the fence and they still feel more heavily the pressures of wanting all the nice stuff,

Malcolm Collins: right? Yeah. Yeah. And they might be closer to these communities or they haven't fully achieved, you know, the having kids yet and everything like that.

I think that when people are on like the civilizational train, I'd say they don't really care about the people who are off the civilizational train. It's more like, let's focus on everyone else who's on the civilizational train. And, and, and the dinks are just not participating in the civilizational [00:24:00] chain and the fight that they're having is with other people who aren't on it yet.

Simone Collins: I still, I still think that there are, I mean, in the commentary I've seen, there are some families that have a lot of kids that do, that do complain occasionally and bemoan like the. The hedonic sacrifices they have to make with kids. And I think that's just a product of living in a society that celebrates the lifestyle of a like late teen, early twenties, male

Malcolm Collins: or female.

And I don't feel that way even a little.

Simone Collins: No, no, I don't either. I just think, I think this is why you're going to see why we see some of that butthurt. Even sometimes from prenatalist people, although like I would say like the Jolly Heretic's reaction to, to this was not even that it was just like really funny because he's hilarious.

But

Malcolm Collins: I hear what you're saying. Yeah. But I think this is important for the prenatalist movement to remember, like if you're, if you consider yourself part of the movement. And you're out there advocating for it. You, when somebody comes to you and they go, Well, how are you going to convince me to have kids?

How do you convince, you know, the [00:25:00] 20 something environmentalist who doesn't want to have kids? We don't. That's the point. We do not. These people are not a part of the problem. In that they're, they're a part of the solution, to be honest. We, if there is a group out there that opposes you and is sterilizing themselves, do not, you know, f**k up your opponent when they are in the process of a great mistake.

You know, this is something that around the world, the What great blessing it is to have your opponents primarily be a group that is sterilizing themselves. That is, that is not a mistake that you want to get in the middle of. Nor do you want to take too much relish in the fact that they are going to lead to more suffering within their own population in the long run.

So like we can point out within our communities wow, these people are really probably going to end up trying to get pregnant later. They're going to be really sad about this decision. They are going to suffer emotional and psychological consequences for this decision. [00:26:00] But we do not publish that, you know, when we're doing like.

stuff like that. We don't push those positions. We do not say, Oh, they're going to regret this because that's not the message we want. Like we are okay with the fact that they end up regretting this. We just say, do what you want. We don't care. Because the kids that are not burdened with having to live with these parents are, are, are fortunately, hopefully going to be born into families like ours or, or like other high fertility families that really are having kids.

Because they want to make the world a better place intergenerationally and because they want to participate in this intergenerational cycle and not as an alternative to going on a trip to Florida every year in terms of the amount of happiness or status it gets.

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: Do you have any other thoughts on your dinky dinks?

Simone Collins: I, one thing I'm just thinking about is before we had kids and we lived [00:27:00] as a dink couple, having these thoughts of like, well, I better enjoy. I'm going to be sleeping through the night because I'm never going to do it again and I do somewhat, as much as I know, it's not really productive to have a conversation about like, Oh, actually being a parent isn't so bad, but it actually really isn't though.

Like, I just,

Malcolm Collins: I just want to say that. I'll be honest, who I feel more bad for than dinks is, I don't know what to call it, two and below parents.

Simone Collins: Oh, that is, that is, oh, that's really interesting. The hardest form of parent is having one kid. So hard.

Malcolm Collins: I think two kids might be almost as hard. But they're, they're both really hard.

At least

Simone Collins: with two kids, they like, you know, keep each other occupied. A little

Malcolm Collins: bit. Yeah. Yeah. Like a one parent family is far, one, they're not really on the civilizational train. So they're not getting the benefits of having kids. And two, the effort required to raise one kid, the sacrifices [00:28:00] you make to raise one kid.

For sure. Yeah. Or so much higher than the sacrifices you make when you're having seven or eight kids or something like that, you know? Oh, it's the worst.

Simone Collins: And everything's a big deal. Also, like you, you kind of feel morally obligated to like, make everything a big deal because you can't

Malcolm Collins: sleeping through the night thing that you were talking about.

And I remember when we had our first kid, like that was genuinely at the beginning, like an issue. Like I was like, Oh, you know, so much work. It was only so much work because we had decided to make it a lot of work. Because that's

Simone Collins: the thing. Yeah. Like when you're like, Oh, I'm just going to sit, you know, sit up and stare at my kid.

You know, all night. And that's, so that's, and that's not to say like literally every night. And I've been sleeping incredibly well, like solid eight hours, really good sleep. I have never slept so well, I think in my life up until like this past month. I don't know what's going on. It's just been amazing. Yeah, he used to always complain

Malcolm Collins: about sleeping.

I'm glad you're happy. But

Simone Collins: it's maybe it's all the sex dreams about you. I don't know what it is. It's that I'm extra hot for you. May it's that you've been extra hot. So like, maybe I sleep well because my female mind [00:29:00] is like husband's in the house. Everything's perfect. He's better than ever. So now you

Malcolm Collins: can kind of stay, stay good enough for you.

But

Simone Collins: like, I, I sleep with our, like I'm in the master bedroom. Now the crib is right here. The, the, the, the bed that I sleep in is right there. And I am always listening, like I will always have an infant in this room and I'm always listening for them breathing. I'm always paranoid and like terrified that they're going to stop breathing.

I'm always like, you know, I'll wake up and then I'll listen for them. So like I am constantly like monitoring, I am, I am worrying, but also like I'm sleeping really well and, and I'm fine and they're fine and nobody's fussing and like, it's, it's okay. I can also hear both of our kids. Immediately below me.

Cause their bunk bed is like immediately below the master bed. And I can hear Octavian talking to himself and like thumping the wall with his toys and stuff. And that's good and it's, it's fine. But like, it also just sort of becomes like part of your background mental processing. And I, I dunno, I just, I think it's [00:30:00] unfair because like people framed being a parent.

Is, is way worse than it actually was. You'll never get in a full night of sleep again. But

Malcolm Collins: it was accurate for being a parent of one child. Yeah. Yeah. All of the negative stuff you hear about being a parent is totally true. If you are a parent of one to two children, it is totally not true. Once you get well above two children.

Simone Collins: Yeah. So being a deoc is the worst, a dual income one, one kid. Yeah. Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: Complete. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And, and, and it's interesting if you, like after your first kid, if you're framing having more kids, like you just assume you're going to have a bunch of kids, the way you build the routines around your kids, the way you build your routines around pregnancy are really different and just make the whole process a lot easier.

Yeah. Also, and this is a problem that Simone and I constantly have. Is you have this constant fear that you're not going to be able to have all the kids that you want and your house always feels empty, you know, right now we've got three kids. You're pregnant [00:31:00] with number four. And every time I look at a room, I'm like, why is no one here?

Like, where is everyone? You know, I, I, I need the stampede. I need you know, it feels, it feels very much like a ghost house, which I think is really surprising to people when they normalize to two kids. When you normalize your brain to the idea, I'll have like seven to 13 kids which, you know, realistically, we'll probably only get to seven, even, even if we do everything right.

You know, we can try, we can try. And you look at things, you're like, well. You know, I, I, I, I just it, it feels so empty. It feels so, so, so empty and it feels so like we're doing so little, but we also end up making decisions like finding ways to take them out of daycare and stuff like that, that actually are financially beneficial to us even now, but they're decisions we probably wouldn't have been forced to find solutions to had we not planned on having so many more kids.

We would have been like, Oh, we can deal with the financial cost of, or the [00:32:00] temporal cost of doing this or that.

Simone Collins: That's true. Yeah. You're, you're allowed, you're, you're allowed and able to and encouraged to make very unsustainable financial choices. So like, yeah, I guess it is true. Being a parent is way, way, way, way worse than being a dual income, no kids, couple or person when you.

Have just one, maybe two kids, extra stressful. And then after that it can get, especially after four, that's when economies of scale like kick in. You know, when you actually look at literally unit economics,

Malcolm Collins: that's when it really, she's actually right. It really doesn't begin to help until after four.

That's when you get to like very marginal. It's like a thousand dollars extra to raise a kid once you have above four kids. Exactly. Yeah. It's just

Simone Collins: not much. But anyway to all the dinks out there, we respect your choice. Have fun. We, Yeah, you have our blessing and you don't need it, but

Malcolm Collins: yeah, we don't need to have a great life.

And I really hope that it does work out for you because I appreciate the service that you are playing to our species [00:33:00] by removing yourself from the cultural and genetic pool. God. Speaking of genetic pools I want to start doing these ads at the end of videos because I want to support my brother and he has created a very cool product.

We really like our brother, smart guy, you know, talked about him in other episodes. It's called bun box, like a bunny box.

One word box. You can find it on Chrome store. It's a Chrome right now. And what it does is. If you click a little button within your gmail account sort of next to like, you know, the delete message button and stuff like that.

It actually will just summarize the message up top and you can click a button to automatically create an AI response to that message. And you can do this within messages too. You read a message, you get one of the six, you know, suggested AI responses, or you can create a prompt and it will create a response for you.

And it works spectacularly well from what I've seen so far. And if you're worried about security or anything like that, I mean, he's my brother. Like I, I don't know, like if you trust, I trust him fully. Like I, this is the thing, like if it [00:34:00] was anyone else out there creating like an AI product like this I'd be worried about giving them access to my inbox as an AI.

But this is like alternate timeline, Malcolm. I'm I, yeah, just think what you will of that, you know,

Simone Collins: Alternate timeline, Malcolm, who worries about everything. Like we were once in a building with him and he was like. How sure are you of the structural integrity of this building?

Like he was literally worried that the building was going to collapse on top of us. He thinks about everything. So yeah, no, he's being extremely thoughtful about security and everything else. I will add just in terms of like cool features of this. I personally don't use it to compose emails because I don't like AI style of writing.

Even like good AI style. This is good AI style. He is. very good prompt injections, whatever it is he's using to make sure that the emails that he generates are good. But I, I use it for emails that stress me out where I'm like, I just don't want to deal with this. And it's great. Cause it summarizes things.

What's even better is, is we run a business [00:35:00] that works with a lot of vendors and clients throughout Latin America and in Spain. I'm fluent in Spanish. I can deal with it. But when something is both stressful and in another language, sometimes I'm just like, I don't want to, I'm not ready for this.

And this will give me nice bulleted summaries in English of everything that happens in the entire email thread. It will even remind you if it, if there's like a chain that you summarize, it will say like, so and so said this, and then you responded saying that. And then, you know, and it's. It's genuinely wonderful, really has reduced my stress palpably.

Malcolm Collins: Well, that's why he made it, you know, when we were talking, cause I actually was there when he had the idea for the product. We're talking on a plane. . He had just entered a major life transition after a success. And he's like, what do I do next with my career? And I had sent him an email recently and I was like, you know, did you, did you get this email?

I sent you and he goes, no, honestly, I find answering email really stressful. So I don't go through all my emails. I was like, well, what do you mean? He's like, I just, and I got it sort of, because I feel [00:36:00] the same way about some things like answering a phone message. I find those really stressful. Like if somebody could just.

Summarize and tell me, I feel the same thing with articles on us. Whenever we go viral or something like that, I always tell Simone, I was like, can you read the article and tell me if I should feel pain or somebody does a video on us? I'm like, can you watch the video and just summarize it for me? So I don't need to go through that myself.

And so this is how he feels with email. And he's like, yeah, it'd be really cool if somebody could just summarize and handle these emails for me. And I was like, well, there's your business idea right there. And he's like, Could I really do that? And so then he, he built it and I'm proud of him because it works well.

It's really

Simone Collins: good. And, and I, you know, I've looked at so many AI based solutions that really, really disappoint. Because I want, I want them to work. I need them to work. So anyway, very impressed. He's great, but he's your brother, of course.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, he's my brother.

As a side note, for anyone who does end up downloading the app, BunBox, on the Chrome store, after you install it from the Chrome store, you then have to click on, you know, your little, uh, [00:37:00] icon that shows all the, uh, widgets or apps you've downloaded, and then click on BunBox, then click Activate. Uh, if you don't click activate, it won't start working on your Gmail account.

And, and you need to reload the page after that on Gmail, but I figure that's self evident. Please, you know, he's putting this out there for free right now. If you do like it, and you do use it, leave a review. That's all we're really in this for right now. And, uh, tell your friends about it.

Malcolm Collins: And you know, he's working with us hopefully on the school now as well to integrate AI with the school, which I'm really excited about as it gets closer to launch.

And for our fans, for any of you who are interested in helping us with the school, we could really use help with that. That's another area we could use help. So, specifically going over the skill tree, like if you have a lot of understanding of one particular subject area and you're like, I would like to review the tree for that.

Let, let us know about that. And the final area where we can call out for fan help, just as long as we're doing this is I've been meaning to replace the little, like the logo that was created with an AI for this channel for a while. I paid to have like a portrait of us [00:38:00] drawn and it didn't look very good.

If anyone has anything that they think would be good logo for the channel, let us know because that's a, another thing we're looking to replace, but I love you, Simone, and I hope you have a spectacular day.

Simone Collins: I love you too, gorgeous.

My wife Simone and I have a discussion about conceptualizing God as a four-dimensional "tesseract" that humans can only perceive shadows and projections of in our three-dimensional world.

We talk about how conservative interpretations of religions may come closer to truth than progressive re-interpretations, the issues with using psychedelics for revelation, the problems with "super soft" cultures, and more. We also touch on why we encourage people to follow their own religious traditions.

Malcolm Collins: [00:00:00] generally, we think that people are following both a more accurate iteration of God, by following the conservative traditions of their faith, and, and that they are following a totally true iteration of God. So, what I mean by that is the human mind is unable to really conceive of a four dimensional space. And we think of God as like a four dimensional entity in this, this metaphor. When a person is looking at the shadow of a three dimensional cube. And they just go as the shadow that was projected.

Mm-Hmm. And they say this is what a cube is. They are actually saying something that is 100% true. They are seeing a full and complete revelation of that cube as that cube can be revealed to someone of their intellect in that time in history. if we were evangelizing to an average person, that evangelization doesn't look like follow us. It looks like a go back to your traditions because that's the closest to truth you're going to get.

Would you like to know [00:01:00] more?

Simone Collins: Hello, you beautiful creature. Hello,

Malcolm Collins: you beautiful creature. You are the best, Simone. And we are going to have a conversation today about a topic that I briefly touched on in the Our Religion video topic. But I want to get a lot deeper on because one of the real risks around any religious belief system that believes that there can be multiple revelations from God or multiple prophets.

And this is why, Most of the more simple religious systems will say no, no more prophets after this one. Nothing else comes after this one. Because it's easy to pass that culture with intergenerational fidelity because if you don't then any random person who's like a f*****g magician can come along and claim Yeah, I'm the next prophet, you know, or no take backsies You can get the softening of the religion.

So, a lot of people will say something like, Every religion has an element of truth. They say this in an attempt to [00:02:00] soften their religious framework. Right?

going with the logic that if all religions have an element of truth to it, if any religion allows some behavior they want to undertake, then all religions should allow it. Or that if any religion doesn't demand some action or penance from them, then no religion should demand that action or penance from them.

Malcolm Collins: You know, they, they, they, And you, you've seen people who do this. They have some like weird, hippie nonsense as their belief system. And it's just pointless.

But they, they form, They end up forming what we call in the book The Pragmatist Guide to Crafting Religion, a super soft Culture or a framework. So when a person is building a world framework outside of any traditions or outside of science, like when you have dug down to the bottom, completely drain the ocean of their mind.

A lot of people think what is under there is secularism, and it is not. Secularism, you know, when practiced rigidly, is, is actually very, it can have a lot of religious aspects to it that cause people to go against their [00:03:00] basal instincts. Instead, what you find is this sort of, like, pre programmed human religion, I guess I'd call it.

It's, it's the scars of our evolutionary history. You know, it's, it's, it's a belief that we're all connected. We're all sort of one they'll have fetishes. When I say a fetish, I don't mean like a sexual fetish. I mean like an item that they believe has some sort of power to it. Like a crystal or something like that.

They often believe that humans are divided into distinct categories. You know, this would be like astronomy. Or is it astrology? Astrology. Astrology. Astrology, or like, you know, and, and, and I'm not saying that, you know, the, the secularists can't fall into this with stuff like Myers Briggs nonsense, or like in, in, in Japan, you know, you got your blood types.

Blood type, yeah. buT if you want to go into that, go into the Fragment of Sky, the Crafting Religion, we go really deep into super soft cultures.

To go over some of the aspects of Supercut's soft cultures, I forgot to [00:04:00] discuss here. They often have ceremonies tied to forgetting an adherent's identity while dancing. They often attribute agency to inanimate objects or animals. And they often attribute power to intention. We call this the power of wishy thinking

Space. What is it? The simple answer is, we don't know. Or at least we didn't know until now. Hello, I'm Douglas Renham, and 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. The founder of spaceology, Beth Gaga Shaggy.

 Is the founder of spaceology. A religion, not a cult. In other words, when it comes to space, he's the man with his head screwed on tight. This is what he told me when I met him on holiday . Space is invisible mining dust, and stars are but wishes. I mean, think about that.

That means every star [00:05:00] 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.

If that doesn't convince you, well then, maybe you just don't deserve to get what you want.

Malcolm Collins: and they are really dangerous. Like, people are like, well, how is that not obvious that that's the true culture? Like, if it seems to be pre programmed into us, in, in the answer Is well, because cultures that fall into those practices almost immediately die out.

It, it, it is not an effective culture. It does not seem to help people do well in our current world or environment. Examples of God is love, like that would be like a super culture thing to say, where they often see this sort of interconnectedness of all of humanity, God being this vague, like emotional state, et cetera, et cetera.

We definitely do not take [00:06:00] that perspective at all. And I think that that perspective is really dangerous and it's always a danger if you are in a, in a culture that is looking for truth and believes that truth has come through multiple iterations. So you have one, the new prophet. problem where a new prophet comes up and now says, I'm the last prophet, and here's the new thing I'm adding, or you have the problem of just like the general beginning

And then somebody may say, well, but then why would you run the risk of teaching your kids that there will be other prophets in the future, or that there have been multiple prophets after any of the core prophets? Well, for two reasons. One is just the logical reason that we went over last time. It would seem very capricious for God to give a message that you needed to know to be saved to people in Ancient Israel and then not have that message spread to people in the Americas for, like, a thousand years.

Or, you know, all of the people who would have lived and died before that message was released. That seems overly capricious to me. Instead, we think God has always done his best at giving people the fullest [00:07:00] prophecy they could comprehend in their time period, and that could realistically become widely believed within their time period.

For, for each cultural group. But two, and more importantly, if you are part of any of the major Judeo Christian traditions, they all say this, very explicitly, that there will be future prophets. So if you, and a lot of people don't know this, because the iterations of those traditions that pretend like the Bible or the Koran or Mormons are much more aware that their book saves us than other traditions, but the iterations that pretend like they say there's not going to be any more prophets, they have an easier time spreading for the reason that we've talked about before, and they stay healthier in terms of intergenerational cultural transfer than the ones who accept what's actually written in the books.

So for Christians, if you look at something like Matthew 23 34, Jesus says, quote, Therefore I am sending you prophets and sages and teachers. Some of them you will kill and crucify. Others you will flog in your synagogues and pursue from town to town. End quote. This indicates pretty clearly that more prophets are going to come after him.

In Acts [00:08:00] 2 17, Peter quotes the prophet Joel saying, quote, In the last days I will pour out from my spirit upon everyone. Your sons and daughters will prophesize. Your young men will see visions. Your old men will dream dreams. In Ephesians 3 5, Paul refers to the prophets and apostles in the early church, saying that there were like active prophets in the early church.

In Revelation 11 10 there is a reference to two prophets that will come in the end times. So, all pretty clear indications there's going to be more prophets. If you look at Mormons when a journalist asked Joseph Smith if he was the prophet of God, he said yes, and so is everyone else with the testimony of Jesus.

So, for Mormons, Everyone is literally a prophet to some extent. We don't believe that well kind of, but we believe that some people have much more clear prophecy than others. If you look at the Book of Mormon Nephi says, quote, there came many prophets prophesying unto the people that they must repent.

Or the great city , Jerusalem would be destroyed. That's one in Nephi one four or in Enos. 1, 2, 2. Eno said that there were, quote, [00:09:00] exceedingly many prophets among them, end quote.

Now, you might be thinking, yeah, yeah, yeah, but I have heard from Muslim preachers that their book definitely says that Muhammad was the last prophet. Well. What their book actually says is, quote, Muhammad is not the father of any of your men, but he is the messenger of God and the seal of the prophets, and God has full knowledge of all things.

That's Quran 3340. That's what they use. It's a line that's most commonly used to argue that the Quran says Muhammad is the last prophet. It doesn't really say that, though. It says that God knows all things, not that Muhammad knows all things. It also says that Muhammad is the seal of the prophets, but that can mean one of any number of things.

, and when you take it in the context of other quotes from the Quran, it seems pretty clearly not to mean that he is the last prophet of all times. So, if you look at, for example, Quran 1636. For we sent amongst every people a messenger, with the command, [00:10:00] Serve God and eschew evil. So there's a messenger for every people. And then Qur'an 35, 24. Verily, we have sent you with the truth as a bearer of glad tidings and a warner. And there never was a nation, but a warner passed through them.

So there's never been a country without a prophet. , and then Quote, indeed, we have sent it down to you as an Arabic Qur'an that you might understand it. This is Qur'an 12 2. So this is, if it's sent down in Arabic, so you may understand it. This is clearly speaking to Arabic speakers in the Arabic community.

Muhammad was meant to be the prophet, to the Muslim community, and that is what it says in the Qur'an. So much so that it says, you know, similar to we believe, which is very interesting that Islam has a lot in common with our beliefs, or at least what's written in the Qur'an has a lot in common with our beliefs, is that the different revelations were meant for different people.

So 548, and we sent down to you the book in truce confirming what was [00:11:00] before it. of the scripture and as a criterion over it. So, judge between them by what God has revealed, and do not follow their inclinations away from what come to you of the truth. This is 548. So that's saying that The Quran was meant to confirm both the Christian Bible and the Jewish Bible as true, but conform it as true for their people, as can be seen in some of these other lines.

 So, you've got 547. So let the people of the Christian gospel judge by what God has revealed in it, and those who do not judge by what God has revealed in it are truly rebellious.

That seems exceedingly clear to me that the Quran is saying that Christians who don't follow what are in the Bible are living in open rebellion to God. , now look at Quran 262. Surely those who believe and those who are Jews and the Christians and the Sabians, whoever believes in God and the last day and does good, they shall have their reward [00:12:00] from the Lord and there will be no fear for them, nor shall they grieve.

So, again, this is saying that you get rewarded if you are a Christian for following the Christian scriptures, if you are a Jew for following the Jewish scriptures, and if you are a Muslim for following the Muslim scriptures, and that every country has a warner. So, presumably, there's many more warners than just these warners.

Now, you might say, Why don't I hear this from my Muslim friends? And the answer is, is because a religion that's structured this way is just going to do a very bad job at spreading. , as you can see with us. Like, there is no reason to proselytize an iteration of a faith that thinks that most people already have a correct faith.

So, those iterations of Islam that followed what the Quran actually said didn't spread as far as the iterations that didn't.

Malcolm Collins: And the way or the story we will use with our kids to help them get around this and also understand the value of hard cultural traditions is the Tesseract The tesseract model of God, we'll call it or the four [00:13:00] dimensional model of God.

So I, I talked about this briefly, but I'd like to go a bit deeper into it. So for people who are not familiar how four dimensional shapes work vis a vis three dimensional, two dimensional shapes. So , a one dimensional shape is a line, a two dimensional shape is like a flat drawing, like a square would be a two dimensional shape, a three dimensional shape is something like a cube and a four dimensional shape, a four dimensional cube is a tesseract Now, we as humans cannot perceive four dimensional shapes.

We can't even think about them. It is, it is, no human can think about a four dimensional shape. Very interesting story here the guy who invented the concept of the tesseract and, and was a real prodigy of four dimensional space, what he thought is he's like, okay, I, as a person, don't often engage with three dimensional spaces and maybe if I engaged with three dimensional spaces more, I would have a better time being able to imagine what a four dimensional shape would look like.

Like in my [00:14:00] developmental stages. So he invented the, do you know what he invented? The jungle gym. The jungle gym, yes! He created a jungle gym, but these early jungle gyms were just three dimensional grids that kids would climb within. I

Simone Collins: remember, there was one in, like, one of my top childhood playgrounds it was sufficiently dangerous

Malcolm Collins: and perfect.

The, the, one of these total four dimensional grids, I mean three dimensional grids, yeah, and he would label the points on it with different things and be like, go to point A3B or something, you know, and the kids would have to run, like that was the game he played to the point, so he'd try to Turns out it did not help his kids be able to imagine four dimensional shapes.

It just turns out that humans are not biologically equipped to imagine a four dimensional shape because there was no evolutionary pressure for our brains to be able to do that. So why would they? I mean, our brains need to be able to really, really well understand three dimensional space because humans just, just so people don't know, like, evolutionarily, one of humans big advantages, like, other than intelligence and persistence, Is our [00:15:00] ability to throw things with high accuracy.

Other animals don't have anything like this. Most other animals don't, at least. You know, humans can throw things like really well. Which

Simone Collins: it turns out was probably Probably bad parents for not playing catch in the backyard with our

Malcolm Collins: kids. Well, I guess we can do that more. I do it sometimes. But yeah we, we, we you know, evolved to throw stones, spears, stuff like that.

It was a very useful technology for us being bipedal and everything. But anyway, back to this concept of, of the Tesseract God. So if you lived in a, a, a two dimensional plane and, and you were trying to understand three dimensional shapes, what they would look like is the shadow of the three dimensional shape.

Okay. So if you are looking at a. Cube from the perspective of a two dimensional plane, you can look at a cube under a light, like have it cast down a light, and the shadow that it's casting on the paper is the two dimensional representation of that three dimensional shape, and you can [00:16:00] spin it around, and that two dimensional representation will change.

Right? Um, well, four dimensional shapes leave three dimensional representations. And I'll put like a little video of a tesseract here spinning so you can get sort of an idea of what this looks like. But there can

Simone Collins: be no such thing of a video of a tesseract.

Malcolm Collins: No, but there can be a thing of a three dimensional shadow of a tesseract, as a tesseract is rotating.

So, when we talk about this from the perspective of religion, and we say God is like a tesseract being viewed from different angles, suppose you were trying to understand a, three dimensional cube from the shadow it's leaving on a sheet of paper. Okay. There's various approaches you could take to this, but the way most people do who are like, well, let's stitch together different understandings of the cube is they'll say, okay, on average, what spots are dark, you know, on average, what spots are [00:17:00] shadow, or they'll say, what are the spots that Always covered by the shadow or, and nobody does this that I'm aware of, but it's kind of what we do with those say, like, maximally, what are the spots that are covered by the shadow?

Now, if you take the average or the minimum shadow perspective, the shape that you are going to think of is an accurate two dimensional representation of a cube is going to be a sphere, which is it. The furthest it is a much further or much more distant representation of what the cube actually looks like than any individual representation of the cube through its shadow.

So what we're saying here when we talk about this, this Tesseract God or whatever, right, is while we believe that different revelations of God have been given to different people for their people for their time period, people of that time period and of that cultural tradition. Most accurately follow what God actually wanted [00:18:00] from them and, and a true vision of God by following.

Strictly and as a conservative interpretation, their religious system and trying to stitch it together with other systems.

Simone Collins: So, in other words, literal translations have higher religious fidelity when we're talking about because what you're trying to say is a Tesseract is a proxy in this metaphor for God.

So literal translations of God or the Tesseract are higher fidelity than. overanalyzed amalgams, averages, minimums, maximums, medians, modes, etc. Right?

Malcolm Collins: Yes. So generally a person who, and, and this is where we, obviously people are like, yeah, but you guys don't do that with your faith. And it's like, yes, but every faith thinks they're a little different and a little better.

And that they have access to information, which allows them to do things that other cultural traditions can't easily do. Of course, everybody thinks their own religion is like, a little better than everyone else's, and it gives them [00:19:00] a little credibility. But generally, we think that people are following both a more accurate iteration of God, by following the conservative traditions of their faith, and, and that they are following a totally true iteration of God.

So, what I mean by that is the human mind is unable to really conceive of a four dimensional space. And we think of God as like a four dimensional entity in this, this metaphor.

as Wynwood Reid writes, the supreme power is not a mind, not a force, not a being, but something higher than a being, something for which we have no words, something for which we have no ideas.

Malcolm Collins: When a person is looking at the shadow of a three dimensional cube. , right? Mm-Hmm. . And they just go as the shadow that was projected.

Mm-Hmm. And they say this is what a cube is. They are actually saying something that is 100% true. They are seeing a full and complete revelation of that cube as that cube can be revealed to someone of their [00:20:00] intellect in that time in history. Okay? But this is also what we believe about religions people who are following conservative iterations of their religion.

are actually seeing a full and complete revelation insofar as their mind can understand it. Right. It only gets dangerous when they start to water it down.

Simone Collins: Or, mmm, interpret it in some way.

Malcolm Collins: Well, I mean, try to combine it with different things, stuff like that. Yeah, yeah. And this is a perspective that I haven't really heard anyone sort of talk about or preach before.

But it is one that feels intuitively true to me when I look at the data and the gifts that are being given to people who stick with stricter iterations of their religious frameworks.

Simone Collins: Yeah, what I like about it and you and I discussed this offline was that it reminds me of the, like, [00:21:00] four men and an elephant, like blind men and an elephant metaphor where people are like, well, you know, if a bunch of people are all blind and they're all trying to feel an elephant, but they're standing at different angles of it, they're going to have very different descriptions of what they're encountering.

But,

Malcolm Collins: you know, your point is that,

Simone Collins: you know, the elephant is knowable by us. Like if, if they weren't blind or if someone turned the lights on. There is an easily seeable elephant, whereas a tesseract is literally something that we are incapable of, of picturing accurately, comprehending,

Malcolm Collins: et cetera, right?

Yeah, well, but not just to that, but it also allows you to point out, you know, is the shadow of the three dimensional cube and somebody saying, this is a cube. You can say, yes, they are literally correct. That is a cube. Right. And then people will be like. But this seems incompatible with this other revelation by this different prophet.

And it's like, yes, that's because you live in a two dimensional space. Like it's one person holding up one shadow of a cube, and another person holding up another shadow of a cube. And they're [00:22:00] both saying these are obviously two different objects. Look at how they're incompatible. Look at this one's point here.

Look at this one's point here. And yet they both actually have complete revelations in so far as they are capable of understanding a complete revelation.

And keep in mind here that we believe that

as humanity develops, their capacity to understand a more complete revelation increases, and it increases at different rates between cultural groups to understand specific aspects of a more complete revelation, and therefore, A more complete revelation is always being drip fed to any group that is improving, thus the need for continued prophets. And thus why we see this need for intergenerational improvement and intergenerational sharpening of one's mind and understanding of the world to be a religious imperative. As Wynwood read, writes, persons with feeble and untrained, intellects may live according to their conscience, but the conscience itself will be defective to cultivate. The intellect is therefore a [00:23:00] religious duty.

Any group that has lost the continued prophecy that was promised to them in their original religious text has lost to that because they are not improving enough to understand a more complete revelation at this point.

Malcolm Collins: Which the elephant story doesn't really do. What I find with the elephant story is that it's often used to justify sort of the watered down approach.

And a really dangerous source of revelation that a lot of people who use these super soft cultural traditions do is psychedelics. We talk a lot about this in our book and there's a lot of research on this psychedelics are not a useful source of revelation, nor are altered states of mind that are equivalent to psychedelics.

So you can create similar effects to psychedelics by doing things like chanting, not sleeping a lot, dancing in a large group, stuff like that. And a lot of, of religious traditions have evolved to. To do these, these sorts of rituals where they'll like chant and march around. Because it, it, [00:24:00] it, it, or, you know, bump, bump, bump, bump, bump, you know, music, simple rhythms combined with this can create these effects where you will feel a sense of profundity and go on what we call a.

A ghost ride. But we'll talk about what a ghost ride is in a second. First, let's talk about the feelings of profundity. So humanity, one of the big problems with, with religion as it's revealed to humans, is we as people who believe in human evolution and everything like that, we did not evolve in an environment Where we were rewarded for correctly recognizing profundity humans are unable to recognize profundity.

Basically we can create profundity in the human mind with things like psychedelic, with things like group chanting, we can. Uh, or, or like sort of tricking our brains. So like, quote unquote, thinking about the vastness of the universe and stuff like that can create the senses of profundity or thinking about concepts that are vague, but not in and of themselves, [00:25:00] not fully understandable.

I E the Trinity would be something like this to say that God is both fully three separate things and fully one thing. Because this statement is that we need to talk about, buddhist traditions doing this a lot with cones where they'll create the sense of profundity by giving a person a concept which is supposed to not be fully understandable and through it not being fully understandable.

So a cone would be something like a tree falls in the forest. Does it make a noise or what is

Simone Collins: the sound of one hand clapping?

Malcolm Collins: What they're actually doing there is gaslighting people. Cause there's

Simone Collins: actually a sound. There was this one of my former classmates could actually make. Like, cause I guess his fingers were kind of disjointed, his hand

Malcolm Collins: clapped.

So let's talk about what I mean when I say they're gaslighting people with these concepts. So if I then went to them and I was like, okay, this is what a sound like, like it's a definition. I recorded the sound of one

Simone Collins: hand

Malcolm Collins: clapping. Or I'm like, yeah. Or it's a definitional problem. Right? Like, are we defining sound as like vibrations or something?

They'd be like, oh no, you don't [00:26:00] understand it. Right. They are showing that you cannot rely on your own internal. Logic to come to an understanding of reality, you have to be submissive to their understanding of reality. A lot of it's gatekeeping, and I,

Simone Collins: ugh, it makes me so mad.

Malcolm Collins: Well, it's gatekeeping combined with gaslighting.

They are telling a person that their understanding of the world that they think they know is just wrong, and that the only way to get a correct understanding of the world is to take it from them. And so they use this to pass cultures intergenerationally with fidelity a bit higher, but I do not think it's a, a good mechanism because it teaches Uncompromising sort of, following of your elders in a way that I think is really psychologically unhealthy.

No, like a lot

Simone Collins: of it's kind of like blind following, right? Like, you, you know, you have to know it's not right, or you have to know they're kind of lying to you, but then you have to develop a blind faith regardless, and that's

Malcolm Collins: sick. Yeah, I, [00:27:00] I, I do not have a high opinion of cultural groups that really engage in that.

Over heavily, but it can also create a feeling of love. Like if you think about a concept like that, but then you're not constantly being gaslit. This is what Catholics do as a Trinity. It, because it's, it's a not fully understandable concept, inherently unknowable by humans. Yeah. It begins to fill up a lot of your, your brain.

And if you also feel like a safety from that thing or an attachment to that thing, you will develop a feeling of love towards it or a feeling of profundity from it, which is similar to like thinking about the vastness of the universe or something like that. So there's ways you can trick these mental systems.

And I actually think that that's a healthy thing for a culture to do. That's very different than like a master being like. You don't understand, you know, then you, you go to the scary ghost train that I'm talking about. So when I talk about a ghost train ride, right? If people are familiar from like a, a, a theme park or something like that, you can go on these things called ghost trains.

Where you sit in a train, and then these pre set experiences, like a ghost falls from the ceiling and goes, [00:28:00] Boooooo. And it's like a, a, a set track and a set series of things that you are seeing as you are riding around the tracks. Um, well, that is kind of what psychedelics are. People think they're getting these really unique and personalized experiences for them.

But really what they're doing often is just sort of depending on the psychedelic they're taking. And we go into this a lot and the pragmatist guide to crafting religion. They're going on sort of preset experiences that are just going to have a lot of Similarities to

Simone Collins: everyone else. There are articles in it, and even like there's scientific research on this, like that people describe these very, very, very similar and consistent things

Malcolm Collins: happening to them.

Yeah. And they're, and I should be clear, they're not similar because they're seeing something that's real. Like one of the things that they'll see is like elves that exist behind reality and are like constructing reality or something. It's the elf hallucination, which is like, obviously, I don't know, to me that seems obviously stupid.

Our reality is not constructed by elves. That's what they [00:29:00] want you to think. But what it is, is they are sort of activating parts of the human brain where I, I talk about sort of tracks wearing in a road for a really long period of time. If you've ever driven on a ruddy road that a lot of people have driven on, you will get sucked into the tracks.

That other people have driven on and then you're sort of stuck in the tracks that everyone and you're making them incrementally deeper. Well, this happened to humans throughout evolutionary history and we have some of these tracks in our brain, but largely we have gotten good at covering them up.

What the drugs drew is they basically uncover these hidden tracks and then snap you onto them and you go through these preset experiences. That the higher order human mind has been able to suppress. They are not leading you to truth. They are degrading your understanding of reality through delivering false prophecy through delivering false information that then people use to try to construct a world perspective.

And this is something that we often see in the boomer generation [00:30:00] where a lot of them tried to understand the world through. And the hippie generation did this a lot, through these sorts of psychological hacks, like through these ghost train rides. And they end up with really, I think, very philosophically unsophisticated understandings of reality, that lead to them being generally unhappy and unproductive people.

That is generally like, all man is love, all religion is love, God is love, we're all one thing. No, I don't. I think that's patently untrue if we look at the world today, if we look at I mean, look, not even talking about humans, like, we live in a world where, like, for a lion to eat, it needs to regularly, like, kill other animals.

Grizzly bears, like, eat animals alive. Like, that's the normal way they kill things. Why? This is not set up by, like, Less chance of getting disease. So what they'll do is they'll maim an animal and then they'll put it in a pile with other maimed but dying animals. So [00:31:00] maimed enough they can't get away, but they'll keep them alive, sometimes for days, and then eat them later.

bleed out?

Simone Collins: Or they're just collecting for later?

Malcolm Collins: They're just, like, collecting. Well, so, yeah, they'll eventually bleed out, but that will be a period from when they're first maimed to when they bleed out that they are not developing disease within them. Which is obviously a risk to the grizzly bear.

That's why it does this. It's like, instead of refrigeration, you just keep the animal partially alive. And then they eat them while they're still alive, of course. Horrible, horrible way to die, by the way. And this is why I f*****g hate grizzly bears. Teddy bears? You know what we're doing with teddy bears?

We are teaching kids to not fear bears as much as they should. Bears are monsters and we need to get rid of them. Well, but

Simone Collins: that's what Theodore Roosevelt was, you know, supporting conservation through hunting.

Malcolm Collins: He was all about killing the bears. Conservation through hunting. He just didn't kill that one bear that was tied up to a tree.

He had to do it sportingly.

Simone Collins: Well, yeah, because it's all about good form, which is something that I'm [00:32:00] obsessed with. But here's the thing I wanted to discuss on this subject is I think that, you know, a lot of what draws people to religion and what like we would say like your slightly above average to average and below average constituent or parishioner would need to believe is just like, yes, like what, what is being told to me is true.

I am going to heaven, blah, blah, blah. Like this is exactly the way everything works. Everything is true and accurate. And I'm not going to live my life a certain way. If like, the literal interpretation that my religion has is just like the best we can do with an unknowable concept, right? Like, I, I feel like maybe this concept hasn't been discussed at length or people

Malcolm Collins: don't want to be clear.

I do not think the concept is unknowable. I think the concept is unknowable for. Yeah, but I think our distant descendants will be able to easily grasp the

Simone Collins: concepts involved. Totally agreed, and that's why we practice descendant worship. But I'm still saying, like, I feel like most people wouldn't want to get on board with anything [00:33:00] when they know it's being fudged.

Hence that this is not a concept that's palatable to anyone who has religious tendencies, because it's too deeply uncomfortable to know that, that, that one is doing the best one can at the moment, but one is technically wrong. Wrong in the right direction, if they have a hard religion. We would argue.

Yeah. But still wrong, right?

Malcolm Collins: Well, no, and that's why we don't just then follow a traditional hard religion because if we didn't believe that, you know, we would just go back to following a traditional hard religion. What we think is with this knowledge, an individual through intellectually studying messages, like intellectually studying prophets, which we talk about in our video of like identifying prophets and stuff like that can not, not Not with like drugs or something, not with like meditation, none of this new agey nonsense, with like a book and studies and, and time and history and detailed Intellectual investigation can come to [00:34:00] truth, but they need to be thinking about it, not as this truth is going to be a three dimensional truth.

Mm hmm. Um, they need to be, they need to be, if there are these two people arguing about what shape is accurate, they need to say, look. This is a three dimensional shape we're trying to construct here. We live in the two dimensional world. This is why these two things look at odds with each other.

 Thus, while the whole truth can be mapped out by somebody exploring the spaces

in between the individual prophets,

it is not going to feel like something that an individual human mind can easily wrap itself around. It is going to be something that you can sort of mathematically chart out and get some ideas about. But not something that you can holistically hold in your mind at any time. One thing to note is that it definitely does not sound or look like something that you want to hear.

It doesn't sound like some sort of distributed hedonism, [00:35:00] whether that's compassion or love or other euphemisms for hedonism. that it is not true that all religions, whatever they may be, were founded by a real prophet. So, for example, christ was almost certainly a real prophet. The Jews follow real prophets. Probably Mohammed was a real prophet. Maybe, , the Mormons follow real prophets.

Other than that, there's no groups that I can see are very obviously following real prophets, and obviously we think that Wyn would read with a real prophet or the most recent real prophet.

Malcolm Collins: And I do not think that this is a useful thing for most people to do.

I think it is a thing that some people can do, and some people should dedicate their lives to. But I do

Simone Collins: not think Do they just have to lie to everyone else? Like, what do you do about the people who cannot be

Malcolm Collins: comfortable with an imperfect No, I mean, I don't think it's our I think that for most people, they're better off just following a hard tradition from an existing religious framework.

I think for the vast majority of people, that is the right [00:36:00] answer. That's why I would never try to pull someone away from that path and why in a lot of our advocacy and when we talk to people, we encourage them to go back to their religious traditions, whatever those traditions are. A lot of people think that's very weird for people who are like technically secular to do.

Why are you pushing people back towards their religious traditions? And we think It is because for the average person, that is as close to truth as they are going to get. Even from a very intellectual person, that's as close to truth as they're going to get, and this is why we, historically in our videos, we took a long time, like, hundreds of episodes in before we really started laying out our religious framework, because it's sort of a sad religious framework, and it's like, it's not meant for everyone, people can know that we think it and be like, I want to join you guys, and we can be like, well then, study, right, like, it's, it's not something that is necessarily going to be study, right, right.

communicate, you know, but it almost sort of gatekeeps itself to an extent [00:37:00] in that we just don't believe it's meant for everyone. And if we were evangelizing to an average person, that evangelization doesn't look like follow us. It looks like a go back to your traditions because that's the closest to truth you're going to get.

Yeah. Which is a very odd religious framework. And a lot of people will be like, well, that's not going to spread intergenerationally and we'll see with our kids. We'll see with our kids.

Simone Collins: Yeah. Yeah. We're not saying we're right. We're just saying we're trying our best and we'll

Malcolm Collins: see. yeAh. And I really love you, Simone.

And I love these religious topics. You know, I love talking to you about this and stuff, but I don't know if our audience likes it. So, we can keep them shorter. One I'd love to do is on teddy bears because I really want to do a video on why kids have teddy bears.

Simone Collins: Oh, yeah, no, no, no, no. Yeah, we've had some fun covering.

Yeah, we have, we have theories about this.

Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: Okay. Anyway, I love you to death and you are a great wife. You are a

Simone Collins: perfect husband and I love how clever you are, Mr. Tesseract Man. [00:38:00] All

My wife Simone discovered that there is a thriving marketplace on Etsy for buying customized spells. We explore love spells, money spells, curses, and even death spells being sold - often with rave reviews. While I am critical of the practice, Simone argues there may be some placebo value for people as well as lessons for building more intuitive cultures. We also touch on themes around magic & belief, the decline of religion, sympathetic magic, and compare to our experience seeing witch doctors in South Africa.

Simone Collins: [00:00:00] one final thing to check. Do they allow for hits? So spell Spell for

Malcolm Collins: murder. Oh, that's a good one. Oh my God.

Simone Collins: Donkey spell. No, no, no. They had, they sell death. Death curses. I feel like Etsy should, I mean, it's one thing to like non consensually for someone to love you. This is, it's $16, right? Like at least price it higher. It's a death spell. Can I do this? I should do this. These are like, these are like Mexico level hit prices.

Cause also you can, you can buy a hit in Mexico for

that.

Malcolm Collins: I mean, that's cheap. I need to go like Death Note on these people. If it's 16 a hit I'm just gonna start and start writing names.

Simone Collins: I give five stars for good communication.

So That's, that is very interesting. This reminds me, actually, surprisingly, of OnlyFans.

In some cases, where like, you're paying for, like, you want to make sure that, like, the woman did it only for you. So you're like, I need you to, like, hold up this level of proof that, like, this thing was performed for me only. [00:01:00] So this is like the psychic magician version of OnlyFans, where it's like, okay, I'm going to give you three photos and you need to include them

Malcolm Collins: in the ritual.

Would you like to know more?

Simone Collins: So Malcolm, as you know, I was shopping for our holiday future day on Etsy because I want some really cool like handmade stuff that's unique or vintage. And I discovered when searching for like time travel related things, Sellers sell spells on Etsy. I don't know how this works. I guess it's because they're technically handmade, but they're, they're, they're framed as digital downloads.

Malcolm Collins: Well, it looks like a lot of people buy these. Yeah,

Simone Collins: there's a, there's a lot of them. And that's the thing is like, how can there be. So many spells. So if you just search the word, I'm doing this right now. Spells

Malcolm Collins: branded spell sellers. So a lot of these will be from this group called the three witches, which appear to be three old, old women.

And I, I don't doubt that this is probably their real pictures. Like it probably is. I

Simone Collins: don't know. [00:02:00] Part of me thinks it's like, it looks to me like an AI generated. Image if we're being honest here and let's, so what are the spells called? And when one is called powerful protection, hex curse, removal, spell, premium divine favor, spell, eternal dark obsession, spell, powerful banishing spell, banish someone that you can

Malcolm Collins: look at the reviews.

So this one has 484 reviews.

Simone Collins: Okay. Which one are you? Okay. What are you looking

Malcolm Collins: at? I'm looking at unlock abundance money spell, three witches, 70 percent off today. I mean, it's probably not 70 percent off. Well,

Simone Collins: it's a deal. I mean, maybe that's how you get abundance is by getting things on sale.

Malcolm Collins: Right? So yes they make it look like it's really cheap, but this is clearly like their standard price and keep in mind like 106 and 67 cents, but it's an even 62.

Went on sale, which is clearly how they create abundance by and, and so, oh, you've got to get personalization. You've got to do your full name and birth date to get this. This actually seems like a good way to get people's like [00:03:00] billing information. Oh my

Simone Collins: gosh. That's the real moneymaker is like you then commit identity theft, right?

You

Malcolm Collins: commit identity. Right. It'd be very easy. I think. Birthday.

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: By the way, you talked about hacking. This is what most of hacking really is, is it is manipulating people. So you would say, well, I need your mother's maiden name for the spell. I need to know your favorite color for the spell. Like that stuff I think would be pretty easy to get from this population.

Now let's talk about some of these reviews here. Okay. Okay. Mother Elizabeth, Mother Isabella responded to my spell request promptly, and I feel blessed to have received her attention. I am grateful for their support, waiting for manifestation. And then, in response Mother Isabella wrote, It warms my heart to know you felt the promptness and care in my response.

You are truly blessed, and I am honored to have been able to assist you. The universe listens, and your intentions are being woven into reality. [00:04:00] Patience and faith are your companions on this journey. I am here for you, supporting you and guidance as your spell manifests. Okay, here's another one. Um Uh, thank you, Mother Isabella.

I feel like your spell is working already. I won seven dollars. It's not much, but I'm grateful and I'm happy

Simone Collins: for this purchase. Wait, but this is like approximately two hundred dollars, so she's very much still in the red here.

Malcolm Collins: This is my third purchase from the Wonderful Trinity of Witches, and everyone, they are legit.

Each experience with them has been wonderful. Not only that. But this money spell is working. I refinanced on my debt unexpectedly. Wait, refinanced? They took out more debt. Yeah,

Simone Collins: but I mean, maybe the lower interest rate. So that's, that's, that could be, that could be

Malcolm Collins: meaningful. I refinanced on my debt unexpectedly, received money due to an error at the end of my job.

They still have to pay me because they messed up. So I'm able to keep it. So they got money that was due to [00:05:00] them, but they didn't know what they didn't get. I will be starting a new job that pays more. I don't know if I still will be receiving more money blessings, but these ladies helped me out during a tough financial situation I was in.

Thank you so much. I am so happy I found you guys based off a hunch. So this person was in a tough financial situation. And

Simone Collins: they paid for a spell and things

Malcolm Collins: got better. Etsy wishes which is, which is, and wishes, whatever. Right. And talk about selling your soul for a small price. A pittance, a pittance, but what I also love is their responses remind me of the IT crowd thing where he's talking about manifesting, and he goes, you guys should try it sometime.

Just yesterday, I was imagining having a helicopter, and today, I went out and bought a helicopter. Now I have a helicopter.

You're a sceptic, Jen. You should be more like these. They can't get enough of my space star ordering story. Yes, yes, I noticed you've been coming down here a lot more [00:06:00] often because of all the questions. So, Mr. Rennam, 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. Then I stood with my back to space, threw the paper over my shoulder, and wished really hard. How exactly did you achieve that? I waited till night time. Of course. Couple of days later, bought myself a helicopter.

Explain that one if you can.

Malcolm Collins: And that's very much like, You know, for a lot of people, you know, they need this sort of thing to be motivated to go out there and do their job. And I also, actually, I think that this stuff can be very useful for people of more traditional faiths to

Simone Collins: investigate.

Yeah, or people who just have like more intuitive, like, spiritual leanings.

Malcolm Collins: Well, because I think it shows that when you see how comical and evil this looks when it is done by [00:07:00] somebody of a different faith background, When you see members of your own faith peddling similar things, they are of this ilk.

They are not different. When they are saying, I can take money in exchange for giving you financial blessings through no additional work of your own, that is always, whatever, however your particular faith thinks that sin or demons or whatever work I think that that is the very nature of sin. So when I look at something like the prosperity gospel, right?

So for people who aren't aware of prosperity gospel preaching, it is a form of protestant preaching in the United States. And it's something that we can be slightly susceptible to given our religious leanings that believes that God rewards people financially. For their piousness and ability to be good Christians.

And this is something that reminds me a lot of what we're seeing here [00:08:00] and it can manifest in different ways. You know, they pray on the elderly where they'll send them things and confuse them into sending money. And this is. And all churches have gone through phases like this. You know, right now we have the prosperity gospel in Protestants, but you know, you had your indulgences was Catholics.

Exactly. Right. Yeah. And where people would pay to have their sins removed basically and to lower their time in purgatory. So this stuff is always really evil. Like if you want to know how to spot an evil person, they're saying, give me money and I will offer you. Divine providence, basically.

I will manipulate fate towards your direction. Yes. Which is,

Simone Collins: yeah. But this is evil. On the flip side I, I've, I've seen it argued online that, you know, the placebo effect is It seems to be pretty well attested and for a lot of people, this is a meaningful way to [00:09:00] trigger a placebo effect.

Like, even people who know that they're receiving a placebo and they're just told, Oh, you know. Some people have found the placebo effect to be effective and we're going to give you a placebo now. And they're like, Oh, okay. And then they're like, wow, I feel better. And so maybe it's enough to have a figure of authority in this case, a carefully marketed Etsy seller cast a spell for you and give you a commemorative PDF download that is customized to you to, to feel.

Better. And I mean, I think this works better with some things and others, right? I think some of these spells that I could imagine the placebo effect working really well with and actually helping people with is like, there are some deep focus ones. There are some anxiety ones. There are some like reading well ones.

Okay. So that's like, I could see like really helping people because they're like, Oh, I cast a spell and therefore I feel well. And you see this with ego depletion, that this concept that Do you want to read

Malcolm Collins: the rules on the anxiety ones, the

Simone Collins: reviews? I can pull some up. I scrolled past it, but I can go back to it.

The, [00:10:00] the like ego, the concept of ego depletion is that like, oh, well, if I've done a lot of hard things throughout the day, now at the end of the day, I won't be able to like. Stop myself. Like I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll impulse buy something or I'll splurge on a bunch of ice cream. Whereas actually it seems that some studies have found that if you live in a culture that doesn't believe in ego depletion, but rather ego reinforcement, which is to say like, Oh, if you do a couple of hard things, then you're warmed up and you can do even more hard things that won't happen to you.

So again, it's about like how you frame and perceive things. So at the end of that person's day, they're like, okay, wow, no, I definitely won't be tempted to eat a pint of ice cream or to impulse buy something because I've been, I'm warmed up in my discipline. And so arguably these spells where they do involve personal internal processes may be very effective.

But then I also am looking at a spell here that's about getting rid

Malcolm Collins: of noisy neighbors. I'm going to, I'm going to disagree on this and say that I think that this builds really unhealthy mindsets, even if it makes people feel better in the [00:11:00] moment. Okay. It builds a precedent in the way that they process things like anxiety, that they need an external force to relieve it from themselves, instead of that they can do it themselves, instead of that they're responsible to do it for themselves, and anything else leads long term to more anxiety and is thus sinful and demonic.

But, I want you to, to go into these reviews.

Simone Collins: Yeah. Okay. So let's do one for a well, okay. This one has 1. 6 K reviews at 4. 9 stars. And it's only starting at 24 and 66 cents. So extremely effective. So it's online spellcasting service only. And I think it involves maybe a reading the hours are 11 a.

m. to midnight after the spell, you have to You'll be sent three random photos of your [00:12:00] ritual with the photos you provided displayed somewhere, so you know for certain that it's your spell ritual I'm taking care of. Oh, interesting! So That's, that is very interesting. This reminds me, actually, surprisingly, of OnlyFans.

In some cases, where like, you're paying for, like, you want to make sure that, like, the woman did it only for you. So you're like, I need you to, like, hold up this level of proof that, like, this thing was performed for me only. So this is like the psychic magician version of OnlyFans, where it's like, okay, I'm going to give you three photos and you need to include them

Malcolm Collins: in the ritual.

Like the parallels here and where a woman is doing something for quote unquote you yeah, like really they're obviously not like

Simone Collins: there they are. I mean, in this case, the ritual is performed. There is a video for it. Like you get a person, a, the, the seller, the Etsy seller is performing a ritual for you recording it for you so that you can see that it was done.

And thereby helping you and then let's see what the reviews say. There are even photos from [00:13:00] reviews of happy, happy people. You're going to have to experience her magic for yourself. Avangia was amazing. I was having some really difficult times with getting along with a family member that I love because of the anxiety she would generate with me.

I had a couple of anxiety spells done in a toxic relative one and boom, it completely changed my relationship with her. I know I will most likely need maintenance for this issue. Oh no. So we're creating that sort of psychologist dependence issue.

Malcolm Collins: Dependence, the thing with psychologists.

Simone Collins: Yeah, but yeah, let's see.

Wow. Still though, I mean it, so I, I, I, I, I don't know, like, I mean, I, I think that placebo effect things can be worth investing in because think about, you know, what you might otherwise spend, for example, on therapy, which is just as much of a scam in many cases, right? I

Malcolm Collins: mean, and more dangerous because it, it more acutely creates dependency therapy.

Simone Collins: Yeah. Therapy. So you're, you're saying then that the Etsy magician is the [00:14:00] lesser evil here now. Okay.

Malcolm Collins: So the lesser evil than therapists, but therapists are like literally like one of the most dangerous cults in society today. You should see our video on has therapy become a cult. If you want to know more on our opinion on this.

I, I think that they do astronomical damage to society today and it can be really damaging. We'll do an episode as well. We're like, even to have a stable relationship, if your partner is regularly seeing a therapist and be regularly seeing a therapist, this is a, a third party who has motivations often a lot of motivation to disrupt this person's happy relationships.

Cause that creates more dependency on them and you know.

Simone Collins: I, I also want to push back. I, I, I'm not the type of, I'm not going to buy these things. Like, I'm not into this. I would think this is a total waste of money. This wouldn't work for me because this is not what I believe in. However here's another spell I found.

No, hold on. I

Malcolm Collins: gotta, I gotta give a spell here, right? Oh, no. You want to give it to me? One spell type that seems to be common [00:15:00] are Love Spells or like,

Simone Collins: Attachment Spells. That's harder, right? Because you can't make someone else love you. So I don't, you know, I feel like that's

Malcolm Collins: more of a scenario. I mean, they think you can.

They think that this is not an issue of personal

Simone Collins: choice. Right. But I, I question the ethics here more because this isn't helping people with a placebo effect. This is like promising something that cannot be promised.

Malcolm Collins: So these are like extra strong love spell with extra X strong, like XXX spells. Wow.

These can be too dangerous. Like you might not, oh, yeah. You might not want to touch it, right? Oh, I

Simone Collins: love it. I love it when people do that. Like, be careful with this magical book. Be careful with this

Malcolm Collins: word. Do you know how often people are buying this? Right now on Etsy, it's warning me. It's saying this is an in demand item.

Seven people have bought this in the last 24 hours. Oh my god.

Simone Collins: From a pronatalist standpoint, doesn't that kind of encourage you? That there are people out there who really

Malcolm Collins: There's so many dumb people. I hope these people don't find love. I hope they don't be. Look, I'm not for everyone breeding. The people who buy these, f**k them.

Tentastronics in action. These are the people [00:16:00] who the abortion advocates are targeting, right? Like, I a lot of people are like, Oh, don't you think that the government should have regulations on this stuff? And I'm like, they're killing their own kids. Like, I don't know if I care. Like, I don't, I don't like that people are killing babies, like, bad.

But also, are they going to cause more pain in society in the long run? So so we know that people are buying this, they're buying it for 26. 60. And the second review on this to

Simone Collins: that 200, I mean, this is very affordable.

Malcolm Collins: Well, that was, that was 200, but then on sale for like, cheap. But okay, so the second review on this, to be clear, it's a one star review, so people can get an idea of what's actually going on here.

So this is really interesting. So they and a friend of Bo's bought it. And they go, is this a scam? My friend and I received the exact same email from you. Mind you, you is spelled, that's the letter U. No. Was it just our names changed and the spell doesn't work? Was the spell even casted? Updating my rev my updating my review is still no results from the love spell.

Simone Collins: No, I no, I'm seeing

Malcolm Collins: there's variation. In fact, my situation is going exactly in the [00:17:00] direction I didn't want. But but there's some most of the reviews are positive. This is just a highly upvoted negative review. But this no, no, no, I think this

Simone Collins: shows that there's variation in the ethics of practitioners here.

And this, I think, even among People in a very corrupt industry, you're going to see variation. You're going to see people who are genuinely acting in good faith and genuinely showing that they are doing the thing, right? Like they are, they are doing it with fidelity. They're actually performing the ritual for you.

They're actually recording it. It's only for you. They're not using templates, et cetera, et cetera. You know, there's like video and photo

Malcolm Collins: proof. You don't have to do anything. Look, this one's great. I, by the way, I is spelled with a lowercase i. I woke up from a deep sleep and had a dream about the person I'm manifesting.

It felt super realistic, like a lucid dream too. And I, lowercase i again was really happy. I'm, how did they do this over and over again? I'm looking forward to the results. Other ones woke up to an email saying the spell was cast, then received a long text message from my ex [00:18:00] saying he loves me and misses me and doesn't want to see anyone else.

10, 10 would definitely continue buying. What was, what was the spell that you wanted to read about? And

Simone Collins: again, I think that this is an example, I guess, you know, you're the. The Contra and I'm the pro. Here's a double or sorry, ultimate double attract new friends spells. You know, you won't be alone anymore.

Two witches for you casting in less than 12 hours. What a turnaround. I mean, two

Malcolm Collins: witches, how many spells are they casting a day?

Simone Collins: It would be, you know, the more witches, the merrier, especially if you're trying to get,

Malcolm Collins: I admire these women's entrepreneurial spirit.

Simone Collins: I mean, and witches have been around for a long time, haven't

they?

Malcolm Collins: I mean, they're not working much. They're sitting at home dancing around a fire. I think that there

Simone Collins: are some people who actually take this seriously and have their weird candles and do the thing, and then there are other total, like Messed up people who aren't. But again, with friendship, I think that, you know, if, if I believe this, if I pay for this spell, if I do the thing, I [00:19:00] get, you know, I really, really believe that these, these witches are out there casting for me.

And that like, one of the biggest things in dating and friendship is confidence in someone is that self confidence and self assuredness. And if someone believes that, that witchcraft has literally made them a more attractive friend. They are going to be more attractive friend prospects. And also they're going to just, you know, how like people who think that they're lucky are, are luckier, not because they're luckier, but because they actually see an opportunity when it passes them, whereas people who are more pessimistic don't recognize a good opportunity if it even slapped them across the face.

Right. So like. These people are now recognizing interest in them. They're returning eye contact. They're sparking conversations. They're recognizing when they should ask people to hang out later or do something with them. Like, well, I mean, you know, you can't,

Malcolm Collins: can't knock it. Okay. Okay. Sorry. I gotta, this is from the three witches group again.

This spell right here [00:20:00] is. Make them pay. Revenge spell. Revenge spell curse. Spell black magic. Bad luck. Curse your enemy. Destruction. Spell return to sender.

Simone Collins: Wait, wait. Return to

Malcolm Collins: sender? I don't know. That's the name of the spell. I think it's return to sender. It's like return their bad deeds to them. And I'm trying to find out I, so, so, okay, here's one.

I'm not gonna lie, when I got the reading, I didn't have much confidence in it. As much as I love getting readings done, I take them with a grain of salt. But I was playing around with a dating app, which I don't like to do, and have no hopes in anything happening. Just scrolling through people. No one really catching my eye, but there was only two people that made me laugh.

And one was because of the pictures he took of himself. And even this minimalistic bio made me laugh. His name was Riley and he put down as his gender identity, male, age, gender, no gender, the name sounded familiar. [00:21:00] So I popped back on here and reread. The reading these girls did for me, realizing that this person you were describing with the exact same name, I'm honestly stunned, what, did they cast a spell on a random person?

Was it, what?

Simone Collins: I, I'm assuming they were like, oh, O'Reilly is in your future, and Then O'Reilly came up, but I mean, like, you know, whatever.

Malcolm Collins: I want to hear about why these women are having other people punished. You know, this is really old human history. They would do stuff like this though. So, so it is worth noting that this is

Simone Collins: Remember when we were, when we toured the townships in South Africa,

Malcolm Collins: No, no, no.

Think about Bath. Bath in the UK. What did they do there? Remember in Bath, they found all of these Oh,

Simone Collins: the curse, the folded up curse is written on metal. And they were like, I curse this. Whoever stole my

Malcolm Collins: sandal. Yes. I hope that you're cursed for forever. Yeah. Talk about what we [00:22:00] sell in South Africa.

Simone Collins: Yeah.

That like, even now there are these. traditional markets where people are selling sympathetic medicine. Like, you know, if you, and the general idea of sympathetic medicine is something that I first discovered in preschool, where in my preschool class, you could have a cake made of any, anything you wanted because we had an amazing preschool.

And so I always asked for a swan because I believed that if I ate a swan shaped cake, I would turn into a swan and I wanted to be elegant and graceful. And I sadly never turned into a swan and I'm still incredibly clumsy. But that, that kind of sympathetic magic, like, Oh, this thing is like this. So taking it will cure the thing, you know?

But I think that that's the thing is, is that most, most people have this tendency. To kind of go for like, Oh, well, there's this magic. Or if this person waves their hands and does the thing, then like we're there. And I, I mean, I don't even, like, I don't think this is like, I, at first when I, when I found these spells on Etsy, I was like, Oh, this is the [00:23:00] fall of civilization.

We've lost our culture. We've lost our tradition. What I'm realizing now is in, in the pragmatist guide to crafting religion, you describe what happens when you go from a hard culture, you know, like really strong adherence to. to Orthodox Judaism or to Catholicism or whatever it is, like really sticking to the rules.

And then you become a softer culture. And then, oh, everyone goes to heaven, but I still go to church. And then even softer and softer, and then you lose everything.

Malcolm Collins: Secularism is not the pond completely drained. This is the pond completely drained.

Simone Collins: This is the, yes. And, and this is like, We're, we're turning to a, a highly intuitive, like literally instinctual, like zero

Malcolm Collins: cultural sound understanding of the world.

You know, speaking of here's another one that came up in a bestseller and I love how like racist this is. Oh no. So it's Chinese magic spelled wrong. Oh

Simone Collins: wait, how is it

Malcolm Collins: spelled then? M A G I C K?

Simone Collins: Oh, no, that's just, I think that's the English, the UK spelling for magic. Okay,

Malcolm Collins: okay. But it's called the Dumb Donkey Curse.[00:24:00]

Okay. But I love how, like, and it looks all, like, Chinese y and, like, a really, like, Racist looking way. I

Simone Collins: actually remember a, a woman in Chinatown who was like clearly a Chinese immigrant calling. Oh no, no, no. She called one of my classmates, a stupid monkey. Nevermind. Not a stupid donkey. Maybe it was like 20

Malcolm Collins: people's carts, 20 plus people's carts in

Simone Collins: 20 carts.

Okay. What does it do? Does it curse donkey

Malcolm Collins: to ruin his life? His life. Make them pay curse, ritual to get revenge spell to return to cinder fast, ruin career and make him stupid spell. And the capitalization is all over the place with this.

Simone Collins: Well, I mean, I'm sure that like, maybe the spell rubs off, you know, this is a costly spell for her to perform because every time that she makes someone a little bit dumber, some of the, you know, it's kind of like a hat and a millionaire.

The dumb

Malcolm Collins: juice hits you? You're

Simone Collins: like exposed to the lead and it also poisons you, right?

Malcolm Collins: I was drawn to the Chinese magic shop and picked up a couple spells for my situation. I spoke [00:25:00] to Ling Zicane about my, I don't know how to pronounce this, about my situation and he was very supportive and understanding.

I have full trust in his work and have great expect explanations, certificates of the work he completed. Now to continue to work on myself and stay positive. Thank you. And he says, thank you for the very kind words, my dear. Chinese magic is truly something and I am sure we will see great results with it.

Simone Collins: well maybe no. So maybe also from a branding standpoint, if you're trying to be like a, a non English speaking magician, you have to like, Play up the stereotype. Just how like we, we discovered by interviewing many fine artists that they had to act crazier than they actually were because otherwise people wouldn't buy money from them.

So like,

Malcolm Collins: I just felt a ting of real sadness. I saw a two star review and the person said that they had great customer service and loved the person, but the spell had a manifest. And I'm like, that's no reason you're buying a fake thing. You can't give a bad review for the spell, not manifesting you jerk.

Simone Collins: [00:26:00] Oh, I know. That's. It's too bad this, cause this, this seems like one of the legit guys who like actually, at least my whole thing is they perform the ritual,

Malcolm Collins: they do the work. I think we should start a company doing this. Just have an AI respond to people.

Simone Collins: Well, I'm, will we have AI magicians though in the future that like, cause I mean already a lot of, a lot of the images here look AI generated like clearly.

So, I mean, in the end, it's like we're, we're progressing toward our AI gods, but I, let's go back, just like, I just want to emphasize this sort of like to put a bow on all this, but this is not, this is, this is the really, really good example, which you hadn't illustrated a ton in the pragmatist guide to crafting religion of that instinctual Complete baseline of, of humans devoid of culture.

And that's what it looks like. And that's what it looks like in our society. It's, it's Etsy magicians, which is

Malcolm Collins: super cool. I really love your positive [00:27:00] spin on all of this and your positive view of our fall. I am. It brings stuff like this to my attention, it's just wild that this is something that people are doing.

It's,

Simone Collins: it's really, it's cool. I hope we find more of it. I hope, you know, like this is, this is insane. Just like our minds were blown when we, you know, went to that, like, you know, witch doctor sympathetic magic market in, in the townships of Cape of South Africa, Cape Town. Like we were like, this is. No, sorry.

It wasn't Cape Town. It was Johannesburg. Yeah, that's

Malcolm Collins: right. It was, it was in the the really dangerous districts outside of Johannesburg. We did a tour of one of the I don't know what you call them, like The townships. And we met with their local witch doctor and we were learning about the way that she interacted with the community.

I think she also took in orphans?

Simone Collins: You know, then, then we also visited a different settlement in the township and we visited an orphanage. Before that, we visited the, the like witch doctor market where they had all the, all the things. You could buy

Malcolm Collins: baubles made from, [00:28:00] you

Simone Collins: know. All sorts of things, all sorts of things that I wouldn't want to touch, but that's my culture and my problem.

And again, we were, the whole reason we learned about this was because we're about to celebrate future day, our weird cultural holiday. So. This is all just cultural differences, but anyway, I'm delighted that we live in such a weird world with lots of different solutions for things. And I wonder how many women have paid people for spells, love spells for you, Malcolm.

I actually, it's not a non zero number. It's not a non zero number.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, it's definitely not a non zero number, I can say that, and that is a weird thing to think about, and I am sorry that those spells weren't effective. I know you must have paid for an awfully strong one, Sinon, because I am supernaturally indebted to you.

Simone Collins: Oh no, have I, has my secret come out? That like, actually, you don't really

Malcolm Collins: love me? You Etsy.

Simone Collins: It's that I, I have a

Malcolm Collins: But that's literally what these people are doing, they're buying Etsy. [00:29:00] S**t. Yeah, that's it. I want to go to one of these sellers and just be like as amoral as possible, be like, I don't love this woman.

I don't want to love this woman. I just want her to f**k me. Well, I wonder

Simone Collins: like, but I mean, and are there, hold on, one final thing to check. Do they allow for hits? So spell Spell for

Malcolm Collins: murder. Oh, that's a good one. No, I wanna, I wanna go and just be mean. I, I wanna combine two of your spells. I want one that's a lust spell and then one that's like a, oh my God.

Simone Collins: Donkey spell. No, no, no. They had, they sell death. Death curses. I feel like Etsy should, I mean, it's one thing to like non consensually for someone to love you. This is, it's $16, right? Like at least price it higher. It's a death spell. Can I do this? I should do this. These are like, these are like Mexico level hit prices.

Cause also you can, you can buy a hit in Mexico for

that.

Malcolm Collins: I mean, that's cheap. I need to go like Death Note on these people. If it's 16 a hit I'm just gonna start and start [00:30:00] writing names.

Simone Collins: I give five stars for good communication. It is too early to judge the results of spell. If the magic doesn't work, I want a refund.

Malcolm Collins: Oh my God. Well, I'd love to ask for a refund for a

Simone Collins: murder spell. They're not dead. Give me my money back. Spell was done fast and was certainly powerful. I could feel it bring done. I could feel it bring done. Thank you, Freya, for all your help. And I love everything you do. Ah! I, I don't see any deaths though.

This is the, well, my God, there are 23 pages of

Malcolm Collins: reviews on us as, as people leading the proteanalyst. That's something else. Another

Simone Collins: five star review under death spell, fast delivery and was very nice. Smiley face.

Malcolm Collins: I don't know. I love this. That, this is fun that you found the death

Simone Collins: bell. I just, I feel like this is, it's, it's one, I'm like, okay, okay, fine, Etsy. This is [00:31:00] handmade. These are like custom experiences. I remember I

Malcolm Collins: showed you this movie, The Craft, by the way, we may have Gen Z followers who Seeing the

Simone Collins: movie The Craft.

Yeah, go watch it. You wanna

Malcolm Collins: seen it? If you wanna see like peak nineties, nineties, if you wanna see like my friend group in high school, go f*****g watch the craft. It is hilarious. Yeah. Because it's so accurate and it so captures the vibe. Of that moment in, in, in our history.

Yeah. Yeah. And I shouldn't say my friend group.

I always thought this stuff was stupid and I told them that they were stupid. But

Simone Collins: Not unless they These girls were really I'm sure if you were hitting on them and you thought that that would get you what you wanted. Oh

Malcolm Collins: no, I, I, I mean, I slept with a lot of these people, you know, these people are not difficult.

They, they do not have a full mental capacity.

Earth, air, fire,

Malcolm Collins: But I don't think

Simone Collins: you poo pooed the idea in front of them when you wanted. Something. Oh, yeah,

Malcolm Collins: I did. I

Simone Collins: was a strict atheist. Oh, you nagged them. Okay. Well, then yeah, you're probably just nagging them or whatever.

Malcolm Collins: Oh,

Simone Collins: okay. Okay. Anyway [00:32:00] dear audience death spells are unethical.

I do not care if you, you know what, you know what I think actually, but there's a lot of magicians on Etsy who offer death spells, but then like ultimately just try to help their clients mentally. And don't actually cast death spells, even if, like, especially if they believe in the magic. I hope so.

This is what I'm hoping. I'm gonna

Malcolm Collins: offer death spells and try to talk people into killing someone. They reach out to me and I'm like, okay, but you have to play a hand yourself. So one, I'll do the spell and then you go out and stuff. I'll do, yeah, I'll

Simone Collins: do the spell. So yeah, that's, that's the power of wishy thinking.

I wanted a helicopter and I wished for it and then I bought one.

Malcolm Collins: So. No, no, no. But have you seen in Africa remember they were talking about this was a major problem they had where people would go to black magicians and they would cast spells that would prevent bullets from hurting them. Oh yeah.

And then they'd like go out and try to like attack people or rob stores and stuff. Because they thought they were

Simone Collins: genuinely unstoppable.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Yeah. All right. Love you to death. We gotta go get the

Simone Collins: kids. Love you too. Yes. Bye gorgeous. Please don't kill me.

Professor Edward Dutton joins my wife Simone and I to discuss his theories on where our education system has gone wrong. We talk about the lack of teaching useful logic and reasoning, why science and math are made boring, the feminization of teaching, evolutionary mismatches in education, and more from his book "The Naked Classroom."

We also discuss the genetics and psychology of religiosity, why some people have dramatic conversions, the two types of religious people, and implications for fertility and mental health.

Edward Dutton: [00:00:00] I suspect that what has happened with those, so there's, there's two kinds of, I mean, it's simplistic to say it, but there's two kinds of religiosity, William James. I think it's the snail on the head with, with, with that. I like that phrase. It's the snail. Yeah. And that is the religion of healthy mindedness and the religion of the sick soul.

And those two and those two sets of religiously are quite qualitatively different. And the religion of healthy mindedness tends to be, you know, that you, you're normally born into it and you believe all of the, the. the different ideas and whatever and that's associated with being a high in agreeableness with high, high in conscientiousness and and low in mental instability.

So highly mentally stable and those associations, at least the association between religiosity sorry. And, and mental health seems to be genetic in nature. There was a study by a guy called Koenig, and they could find no environmental reason why this was the case. Now, the religion of the sick soul, that's quite different.

That's the religion of the convert. And that is associated with relatively the opposite [00:01:00] personality profile, basically, and in particular with high neuroticism.

Would you like to know more?

Malcolm Collins: Hello, Simone. It is wonderful to have you here today. And today we have a very special guest, the jolly heretic, or Ed Dutton, or Professor Dutton. I'm sure I would guess 80 percent of our followers probably also follow you or know broadly your work.

He's very well known for controversial, much more controversial than us, mind you takes within the field of human genetics. And human evolution, but today we're going to be talking about another shared interest, which is the failure of the education system.

I'm going to try to do the, I can only count to four song. Which our

Simone Collins: son is obsessed with.

Edward Dutton: Wait, have you seen this? No, sorry, no. It's [00:02:00] a

Malcolm Collins: song where they redid bodies hit the floor. Yeah, let the bodies hit the floor, but it's Sesame Street,

Malcolm Collins: But I want to hear your thesis on where the educational system has gone wrong and sort of the thesis that you lay out in this recent book that you laid out while also giving the title of the book and where listeners can find it.

Edward Dutton: So the book is called The Naked Classroom, The Evolutionary Psychology of Your Time at School.

I published it on Amazon KDP. It's quite a short book. Basically, I suppose it's a sort of introduction to based science. And I was, that's what someone suggested I should do. And as you know, I don't have a formal science qualification. I I'm an honorary professor of psychology of various places, but I don't, I was always at school, a [00:03:00] humanities person.

I very quickly came to to the conclusion that science is boring. I could see no benefit in science. You know, history. I could look around England. I lived near Hampton Court Palace and I could imagine the kings and queens of England walking there and their ghosts that haunt the place at night. You know, English literature.

If you wanted to go back in time and know how they spoke, you could read, I don't know, the works of Thomas Hardy. And there you are immersed in the 19th century, even geography, you know, how a river's formed or whatever, but how flowers have sex. Or even when I was at school, how humans have sex was not really of interest to me.

And I, I just thought, I just, I just thought it was, it was terribly, terribly badly taught. And so, and I think that that's the fundamental problem that you quite quickly divide between being a humanities person and a science person at school. And when you do that, then the ignorance of science and scientific concepts and scientific thinking among, and mathematical thinking among humanity's people can be quite staggering.

So, for example, I there was a video I [00:04:00] did recently that British Members of Parliament, more than half of British Members of Parliament thought the probability, if you toss a coin, of getting heads, or rather than tails, It's half, but if you toss it twice, they also thought it was half.

 I thought I'd offer some clarification on what he meant by that statement. Because it's so dumb, you wouldn't expect it to mean what it actually means. Which is, they were asked, if you flip a coin, what's the probability it turns out on head? And then they were asked, if you flip a coin twice, what is the probability it comes up on heads twice?

These people thought that there was a 50 percent probability that it came up on heads twice, and a 50 percent probability that it came up on heads individually.

Edward Dutton: Now, that's obviously wrong.

And and that, it's so obviously wrong. And somebody gave me an example today. They said, well, that's not a sign of stupidity. I've got a friend who's got a PhD in whatever, and she got that wrong. I'm like, [00:05:00] no, right, that's the problem. So science is Science is not, is not integrated into the curriculum.

It's not taught in an interesting way. And it struck me, everything was based in science, because it should be. I mean, ultimately there's this idea of of E. O. Wilson, consilience, the idea that every. If you make an assertion in sociology, it has to be reducible to psychology. If you make it in psychology, it has to be reducible to biology.

If you make it in biology, it has to be reducible to chemistry. That's, and so if, if it was taught in that way, then first of all a lot of questions that are unanswered in humanity's subjects would be parsimoniously answered. For example, I always thought to myself when I was younger, Well, why was it that people in World War I were prepared to lay down their lives for their country and die, but were not prepared to now?

What's, what's changed? Why is, what, what, what, why is it that people

Malcolm Collins: That's an interesting question!

Edward Dutton: Right, why is it that you get these people that would be prepared to burn, be burnt at the stake? For their, what possible have they gone [00:06:00] mad? You know, that wasn't answered, you just learn the information, and then you write your essay and you get your A and whatever.

But first of all, I think it should be reduced down, all these questions need to be answered in a scientific way. And secondly, the other thing I thought was, well, think of all the questions that you ask when you're at school. All the things that are going to occur to you when you're at school. Like, why are so many of the teachers women?

Why, why, why, why do, why do some boys give women the ick and they find them disgusting? Why, why, why, why is, why, why is why are some people having sex with the teacher? Why are the side of teachers often male? Why are teachers so left wing? Why are so many male teachers gay? Why, you know, frankly when I was at school, when a lot of people went to school, why were there some teachers, male teachers that were a bit, you know, Yeah,

Malcolm Collins: even if you had done a degree in science, they wouldn't have touched on these issues.

They wouldn't have

Edward Dutton: touched on these issues, no. And these are the things that are going to fascinate you at school. Why is it that girls have these cliques [00:07:00] at school that are complete b*****s to each other, you know? Why is there this anorexia and lesbianism and transsexuality among girls? Why, why do the kids that are, that are retarded, like, literally look physically different? All of these kinds of these, these these, these kinds of questions. And so it struck me that that could, that could get kids into science.

If you understand the, the base questions that you're going to ask at school, and if other subjects are reduced down to the science, then you realize the importance of science, that science could really answer. parsimoniously, all of these questions, and therefore you don't make the mistake which so many of us make, which is a young age, really quite a young age, to just stop thinking in a scientific way.

I mean, when I did my theology degree, and you try to understand what causes some people to be religious and others not to be, right, I was in my late 20s. Like six years after I got my degree, when I found this information indicating that there was a genetic component to religion, it had never occurred to me, [00:08:00] and it had seemingly never occurred to any of the people that taught me at Durham University or whatever, that you just didn't look at these things.

They were separate subjects. So that was the idea with the book, basically, to show that science needs to be based. It needs to be taught in a based way. You can do this by showing its relevance to other subjects and all by just by showing its relevance to your life at school. Answering the question scientifically that you might have thought about at school.

It

seems

Simone Collins: like all the things that like a little kid is not allowed, like if, if the little kid says like, why is this, why is that? And the mom's like, shh, that's what, that's what

Edward Dutton: science should be about. Those to go back to school, put your tie, if it's an English school, not an American school, put your jaunty angle, put your satchel on.

Go back to school and, and look at these questions that would have occurred to you at school. Well, that was the idea. I,

Malcolm Collins: I want to pull on two of these ideas you talked about because there's things that we haven't talked about on this show yet. And I don't think some of this stuff that you talked about, I think generically, if people are familiar with like a manosphere stuff, or they're familiar with like genetic nerd stuff, they're going to have some vague idea of what the answers are going [00:09:00] to be.

But other things you mentioned, I don't even see talked about in these communities and they're really interesting. One of them that is, is. Being able to predict people's personality and things like their level of testosterone based on their facial characteristics. Yeah, I think people would be really surprised the extent to which humans can accurately do that.

Yeah, you're going to say,

Edward Dutton: well, I was going to say, yeah, I mean, what's more interesting now is the extent to which AI can do it. Yeah, which is, which is, which is way, way beyond what humans can do. But yeah, because of course it's, it's adaptive, isn't it? We, we are a social animal. So it's inherently going to be adaptive to be able to make correct judgments from appearances.

Now, at the same time, it's also going to be adaptive to be able to evolve in such a way as to mask whatever it is that is suboptimal about you. with an appearance which tells, which doesn't indicate to people that's the case. So there's going to be a kind of arms race all the time, whereas on the one hand, you're going to be, you're going to be evolving to be able to accurately judge my appearances.

And on the other hand, you're [00:10:00] going to be evolving to not be accurately judged by appearances. So, you know, you can, you can get around those problems and that kind of thing. So, but what we end up with is that certainly a level of, I look at this in an earlier book I did called how to judge people by what they look like.

But I also look at this again with regard to school in the new book. Is that is that with a level that is significantly exceeds chance we can, we can note intelligence from appearance. We can particularly the face, because the face is a huge number of genes involved in the face. So it's a very good indicator of basically, you know, your, your level of genetic health or whatever.

And, and, and personality. And a good, I mean, a good example. And it doesn't sound very pleasant to put it like this, but if you think about what is an example of a low intelligence person, well it's a person with Down syndrome. Now that's low, now that's low intelligence beyond the normal range, that's outside the normal range.

These people have an IQ of about, it depends on the severity of the condition, but they have an IQ of between 150, something like that, but often about sort of 60, something like that. So it's, it's way [00:11:00] out, it's way out of the normal range, which is 70 to 100, 130. And what you see there is that the, the developmental pathways have been interfered with at a very young age, you know, a very young age of And this has predictable results in what they look like, i.

e. they have small, they have small noses, they have sort of short faces, they have narrow eyes and they have various examples of minor physical abnormalities and whatever in the face. Now it follows from that, that if, that you're going to get that in a much diluted form. among, among people that have low intelligence within the normal range.

And you're going to get the opposite of that among people that have high intelligence. And that's exactly what we see.

Simone Collins: Wait, you're saying that smart people have giant schnozzes?

Malcolm Collins: Simone, I think you're getting into

Edward Dutton: That's, that's, no, no, that would that, that would, if it was a giant schnoz, as, as you [00:12:00] put it, that would perhaps be a mutation, a mutational load tends to be associated with no IQ.

But, but, but, but in the normal range, the the studies indicate that being intelligent is associated with having a longer face, with having a narrower face, with having, you know, basically a more horsey like face, a more kind of Anne Coulter, you know, sort of face. You know, she's lovely, but you know what I mean.

And so

Malcolm Collins: things like b****y resting face may just be a sign that someone's a b***h. One of the,

Edward Dutton: the not, and also the pupil size at rest is larger. I eyes are larger. Pupil size at rest is larger, which makes sense.

Malcolm Collins: Really, people in more int intelligence, they like, have a base level of more, more interest in their environment.

Exactly.

Edward Dutton: Exactly. So the, I mean, what is intelligence? Intelligence is solving problems. What is the pupil? It's the interface between the world. and the brain. And so it follows that you're going to, you're going to have a base level, a larger pupil. And also, I mean, I know you both wear glasses. Well, I think Simone does so for pretentious reasons, but one of the, one of the one of the indicators [00:13:00] of intelligence is short sightedness.

And the, the, the, there's a weak correlation. And the reason for is that the eye is part of the brain. So obviously if you've, if you've got a bigger brain, your eyes are more kind of, convex, basically. And so they're pushed out and so you're short sighted. Obviously these things only work within race.

You can't make those kinds of assertions between race, but that, that's the, that's the face. Yeah. And there's other things, personality as well. Fun, fun,

Malcolm Collins: science y divergence here. So we were talking about the, the pupils, right? And so, somebody's pupils being a because they might not understand the implications of what I was saying there.

Somebody's pupils being constantly dilated. Typically, your pupils dilate when you're showing interest in something. And, and we even have a natural response when somebody's pupils dilate when they're talking to us. to believe that they like us more. And this is why the Deadly Nightshade's scientific name is Tropa Belladonna, the beautiful woman it's because it used to be used, you'd put little droplets of it in your eye before you would go on a date with somebody.

Women would do this, and it would [00:14:00] paralyze some of the muscles in the eye and cause the pupils to dilate an extra large amount. So they'd look like little, you know, anime girls. And so what you're literally seeing is more persistent interest in their environments in, in this intelligent group, which is really interesting.

Within the face category, one of the jokes we persistently make on the show, because I think just as a scientist, it really jumps out to you. And again, we have nothing against Andrew Tate, but his face is, if you're familiar with face models, almost the cliche of somebody who developed in a very low testosterone environment.

It's a very, very low testosterone face. And it's really interesting that that's so antagonistic to his brand. And we point out that likely now he's high testosterone. Because of his lifestyle, because he's sleeping around a lot, which increases testosterone, because he's living with competitive males, which increases testosterone, not that he's a naturally high testosterone person.

And in many ways, that's almost better. You know, he, he got to it honestly, rather than by birth. But the other thing you touched on that I really want to [00:15:00] pull on, because I think that it's really interesting too, is I totally forgot what it was.

Edward Dutton: Let's,

Malcolm Collins: let's talk about the teacher one. That could be an interesting one to dig into. Yeah, but why, why are teachers disproportionately women? That would be an interesting one.

Edward Dutton: Well, that's yeah, I mean, that's, that's one of the more obvious ones, isn't it? I mean, it's a, it's a very interesting process. Basically you, if you open up a profession to women and it's the kind of, which it wasn't previously, and that is the kind of profession that is attractive to women, then it becomes Overwhelmingly female very quickly.

Because women are within apart from that. There's out women Males have more outliers both in terms of low iq people and high iq people and a slight iq advantage adulthood but basically intelligence is about the same and women are higher in conscientiousness higher in rule following and Harder working basically, and higher in agreeableness and things like this And so, this means that they will be able to get into that profession that they want to get into particularly if it's not particularly intellectually challenging.

Obviously, they're hiring a general desire to look [00:16:00] after children and be with children, so they're attracted to that profession, and then they get into that profession, and then you get more and more and more women teachers, and then at some sort of tipping point, it becomes seen as a kind of a girl's game, as Jordan Peterson summarized it.

And then when it's seen as a girl's game, then it loses status. It loses status and the salary goes down, commensurate to other professions. And then men stop being interested in this. And then it becomes even more of a female profession. And at the moment it's in England, it's something like 65 percent of secondary school teachers are women and about 85 percent of primary school.

So you're really, really young. It's a woman and that's just going to go up. And then when we, when in the. book I did in The Naked Classroom, when you interview men who are teachers, and you're like, well, why, why, why have you gone into teaching? They basically come across as quite unambitious men. It's just, oh, I've, I've, I've gone into teaching, I've got my degree in whatever, history, and I've gone into teaching because you get long holidays, it's good.

You know, I've, I've, I've gone into teaching because I can spend my time doing my hobbies and the holidays and it's a sort of stable job [00:17:00] and whatever. So they're not very, they're not very ambitious kind of men. And, and it's just overwhelmingly female and it's an evolutionary mismatch. It is clearly an evolutionary mismatch in all societies for young women in their early twenties to be hanging around.

16 year old boys, 17 year old boys, 18 year old boys. That's just not how it's supposed to work. That's not how it's done in any tribal society. Boys at that age are taken away from the society. They go through their rite of passage. They become men, they come back. This is their rite of passage. And the instructors are women, so naturally you're going to end up with relationships between the boys and the teachers.

As you do,

Malcolm Collins: I've, I've, I've heard an interesting theory around this, that one of the reasons why education rates rose so much for a period is because teachers were one of the only jobs available to women. And respectable jobs, respectable jobs available to women, which meant that for a low price below market, what you could get somebody at that competence level, we were able to get many of the most competent women in our society.

Edward Dutton: Really true. [00:18:00] And I look at this in the book, it's in the Naked Classroom. It's very interesting, this. It seems to me the standard of teachers has gone, the standard, the quality of teachers has gone down precipitously for a number of reasons. First of all, it's lost prestige. It's just lost prestige. And so men in the old days, like my RE teacher, Mr.

Sutton, who was highly intelligent, you know, that would, would, that would go into teaching profession. They're not going to do that now. They're going to, they're going to go somewhere else. Secondly, we have a more meritocratic society. So you could imagine a situation where a person who was born into the working class or something like that, and he goes to grammar school and he becomes a school teacher.

There's no there's, even though he's probably sufficiently intelligent to become, I don't know, an academic in whatever subject he teaches, but it's not a very meritocratic society. So he's not going to do that. He's going to become a school teacher. That person these days is more likely to become an academic, particularly as well, considering the expansion of higher education in tandem with that.

So he's eliminated. And then with women, of course, I mean, I had a teacher at school and she was a very intelligent woman. She wanted to be a lawyer. And they said to her, this is in the 50s, in the 40s. Of course, you can't be a lawyer, you're a girl. So, so, so she became an [00:19:00] English teacher. Now that generation of women that became teachers, they're gone.

And the women that are capable of becoming lawyers or doctors or whatever are likely to become that. Whereas in the old days, they would have become a school teacher. So you're right. You're quite right. You would, we probably had a substantial period of time where you have women that were quite good. But we're going into teaching and now they're not, you know, it's just going to be overwhelmingly midwhip types that go.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, unfortunately, this is not unlike what a lot of people think, something that you can easily fix just by like raising teacher salaries or something like that, like the boat has already sailed. You would need to have a major cultural shift or just replace the profession, which is what we're trying to do is our.

institution.

Edward Dutton: Well, it was a good point you make that because studies indicate this whole idea of would raise the salary, raise the salary. There's a lot of evidence indicates that people will trade money for prestige. So the problem is, is not, it's, it's the prestige. It's got low prestige. And once it's got, once it's got low, you could, it's like, oh, people are under being a plumber.

You can earn way more being a. Plumber than you can being a school teacher or whatever, but it has [00:20:00] lower prestige. Well, being a school teacher has got to that point because it's so female dominated because it bears up it's, this is exodus of high quality people from it, but it's just got low prestige.

And I don't know how the, it's very hard to reverse that. I think

Malcolm Collins: that's really interesting. I, another thing, when we talk about men and women. Having different biological tendencies in terms of the types of jobs they take that is actually really important from the perspective of pernatalist advocacy.

And there was a great piece called the baby boom by Arctotherium that we did an episode on recently. I don't know if you read this. It was in Aporia where he basically argued a strategy that you could use to help fertility rates is to lower the amount of bureaucratic jobs within the government because those are predominantly held by women because they disproportionately take those jobs which would allow and put pressure on people to be more.

You know, stay at home moms it's an interesting theory. Well, and

Simone Collins: it wasn't just that, it wasn't like let's force stay at home motherhood. It's let's give men the ability to be higher in status than women, because women won't get married if they don't have [00:21:00] access to higher status than the men. So that was like the bigger thing is like, how do we enable men to have relatively higher status than women?

And a lot of that involves reducing the extent to which women have an unfair advantage and really, really common and major. Like job segments. One thing I wanted to ask you though, is if you've read you probably have Paul Lockhart's and mathematicians lament because it really changed how I looked at mathematics and I, I like sort of to like recap it for people who haven't read this essay, basically.

Paul Lockhart argues that we teach mathematics to kids as though for the entire, like grade school, middle school, high school experience until you hit college, you're basically only studying grammar. You're not allowed to write a sentence. You're not allowed to like read books or discuss literature or build narratives.

You're only allowed to just look at grammar and punctuation and the rules and it's terrible and you hate it. And it ruins math for everyone, and that's why people hate math. And what [00:22:00] really math is all about is imagination, and sort of building imaginary worlds and constraints and seeing how things behave with those constraints.

What would be the equivalent of applying this kind of reasoning?

Edward Dutton: That's what I argue in the book. I said, So the Why don't the schools teach pure, like, logical thinking? So just usable, usable stuff. That's usable maths. I can only think of a few times when I did maths at school where there was, for example, there was one, I don't mention this in the book, but there was one test we did, it was SAT when you're 14, and there was this question where you had to, there was a wardrobe, and you had to work out if you could get it out of the door.

You were given the proportions and you were given the, and I realized, ah, Pythagoras theorem, that will solve that. And that's the, that's the, that will give me the answer. And that's the one time in my life. And that was in the math test, not a real life situation where Pythagoras theorem came, you know, became useful.

And so I think that what they, you're right, I think they are, what mathematics teaches you at school [00:23:00] is the, is the sort of the grammar, as I said, the grammar, and I think you can go a level further than that and just take that down to the level of logic, of, of formal logic, obviously and then of informal logic.

And when I was doing my maths GCSE, that was the height of New Labour, that was the height of all of this emotional nonsense, you know, New Labour, New Britain. All this and I thought wouldn't it be good if they had sat us down said look boys that we've got this political party saying New labor new britain.

That's a fallacy Okay, the fact the fact that the party is called new labor It does not follow and it cannot follow that. It's going to renew britain. That's insane and there were and there were many other examples of these kinds of manipulative slogans that I think you could ultimately be reduced out Basically something like maths, basically formal or informal logic.

And if, and if you teach kids that, if you teach kids the benefit of of, of informal logic and then a formal logic, then they can start to understand the benefit of maths because it's an extension of that basically. And then they can start to see the math is not just some boring grammar. It's actually extremely [00:24:00] important and vital to everything.

That's not, it's not taught in that way. It's not taught in a way that is useful. It's like teaching languages. The new modern way that you teach a language, I think is an improvement. You can teach French by teaching everybody the grammar and stuff like this, or you can just immerse them in it and say, okay, here's some French, get on with it.

And that's what they should do with math. So,

Malcolm Collins: so, I remembered the thing I wanted to talk about, which was the genetics of religion. Oh, yes. It is a very interesting topic, and it is really undersold how heritable religiosity is, but a really interesting phenomenon, and for us, this was what actually drove us on our path to pronatalism, is we had originally thought that what was being selected for, like the way humanity was changing, was that people were being selected to be higher levels of religiosity.

And then when we looked at the data, this doesn't appear to be what's actually happening, and it's really interesting, which is the historic research. And you're one of the few people who's going to immediately be like, Oh, yes, I've seen this phenomenon. When it looked at the religiosity [00:25:00] and hereditability, it would always point out, it does not determine what religion you are, just your fervor in terms of how much you follow that religion.

And it looks like this fervor, like this genetic fervor for religion is not protective of the religion that people are born into. And this is why when you look at the new atheist community, which you were. you know, on the edge of, I think, along with us for a while, a lot, like disproportionately, they were incredibly fervent within their religion before deconverting and joining the movement.

It was not that they were like loosey goosey religious types. They were like extremely religious

Edward Dutton: types. Well, I don't, I don't know if that's necessarily a good example of people that are pronatal though. No, no, no, it's

Malcolm Collins: not, but it's, but it's interesting because historically, this genetic fervor for religion kept people within their cultural group, but just made them extreme advocates of that cultural group.

Yeah. Well,

Edward Dutton: yeah, I suspect that what [00:26:00] has happened with those, so there's, there's two kinds of, I mean, it's simplistic to say it, but there's two kinds of religiosity, William James. I think it's the snail on the head with, with, with that. I like that phrase. It's the snail. Yeah. And that is the religion of healthy mindedness and the religion of the sick soul.

And those two and those two sets of religiously are quite qualitatively different. And the religion of healthy mindedness tends to be, you know, that you, you're normally born into it and you believe all of the, the. the different ideas and whatever and that's associated with being a high in agreeableness with high, high in conscientiousness and and low in mental instability.

So highly mentally stable and those associations, at least the association between religiosity sorry. And, and mental health seems to be genetic in nature. There was a study by a guy called Koenig, and they could find no environmental reason why this was the case. Now, the religion of the sick soul, that's quite different.

That's the religion of the convert. And that is associated with relatively the opposite personality profile, basically, and in [00:27:00] particular with high neuroticism. So be going through a period of religious fervor of really extreme, really extreme religiousness or changing religion, so that is to say extrinsic religiousness, socially conformist religiousness, as opposed to intrinsic religiousness and going through a period of religious fervor, i.

e. a conversion, that's associated with mental instability. And so there's no reason what you would actually expect is that you would get people that if they had let's say something like one of the things that's associated with mental instability is a borderline personality where you have a weak sense of self and you're very fickle and changeable and you fundamentally fear abandonment and you feel feelings very strongly and these, these kinds of things.

And so you, and you can see that someone like that could have a dramatic conversion experience where they would move from being extreme in terms of, let's say, being a Christ, a fundamentalist Christian, to being extreme in terms of being an atheist or vice versa. And I, I know of many, many cases of this, but I would expect that personality type to a certain [00:28:00] extent to be associated with just general sickness, just sort of problems, mental illness and physical illness.

It's the religion of the healthy mindedness. That's more, more interesting because that seems. associated with fertility and that seems to be associated with, with you know, pro social nature and, and so on. But yeah, there's a, there's a definite distinction between those two. And it's very, it was very interesting when I was at university, I did my research and I think about the kind of people that converted one way or the other.

And it was always, as you say, to the most extreme manifestation. I can think of one example, a person who's fundamentalist Christian, and now it's like she just hates God, and God doesn't exist, and it's just totally woke. And that seems to me, to the token, you can think of a sort of a religious bundle that we were selected for.

A bundle of traits that is religiousness that then come together and become pleiotrifically related and then are associated with other things which are adaptive as well, such as mental health and physical health and pronatalism and [00:29:00] whatever. And they all become bundled together and equally you can You would think that if any deviation from that would be associated with negative things.

And I think that you have, if you have the breakup of the religious bundle, i. e. you have one element of it, i. e. extreme fervor and desire for black and white servanthood, for example, whether you get that from trad Catholicism or you get that from Wokeness, but you get it from somewhere. And and and it's and you can move between the two As as you because your sense of self is weak and oh, this isn't working break down or maybe this

Malcolm Collins: And and you think these are two different genetic clusters and one is being sort of bred out of the population

Edward Dutton: I yeah, I would, the, what I, my reading is that the, the personality involved is so different from, it's so fundamentally different that you're, you're, you're dealing with two separate kinds of two separate kinds of people.

I mean, there's all kinds of nuance. Of course, you're going to get some people that have converts and are religiously fervent and therefore have loads of kids or whatever.[00:30:00] But My, my understanding is that neuroticism tends to be negatively associated with fertility except in certain subsections of it.

And, and so, so, you know, overall, I would think they would be quite separate. I mean, one thing, for example, that could predict conversion and having being a fundamentalist Christian, for example, would be some kinds of narcissism. So borderline personality predicts dramatic changes in the nature of the self.

One example of a kind of borderline personality is narcissism, and some kinds of narcissism are positively associated with having children. Quite why I'm not sure. I don't know if the mediating factor is socioeconomic. It could be that to some extent we still look up to those that have children and say, if you're narcissistic, you want to have lots of them.

I don't know. I mean, it

Malcolm Collins: was in specific sub communities. I mean, I'm thinking now about like the eight passengers lady and stuff like that. When children are a status symbol within their community, which is sort of

Simone Collins: any mommy blogger, like kids are good props in many cases.

Edward Dutton: That's right. [00:31:00] We found, I mean, we've got a study at the moment we're doing, we found a number, a number of indicators that among Mormons there is a EU eugenic among white Mormons in America, there is eugenic fertility because more intelligent people tend to be more socially conformist.

And in that community it's prenatal. And so the, and therefore you wanna have kids to show that God is heavenly Fathers blessing you or whatever. And so,

Malcolm Collins: sorry, I'm gonna unpack what you said there just because I think. What he's saying is that if you look within most communities and most cultural groups in the world right now, you have what is called this genetic fertility, which means that they are selecting for traits that we would think of as non competitive traits IE, low IQ and stuff like that.

But that lead to. higher competitive within reproduction markets within our existing socioeconomic condition. He's saying within this one rare community, there is, and I've seen the studies on this, it's a very slight eugenic effect, but a eugenic effect within these Mormon communities. But this has been a great way to end this episode.

And I really would encourage people to check out this book. If you'd like [00:32:00] some of the topics that he was talking about or What's the word that I'm looking for here? Dissident science is what I call it. Real science. The last real science that's left. And it has been great to have you on, and we would love to have you on in the

Edward Dutton: future.

Great. It was a pleasure to talk to you both. Bye bye. Bye. Oh,

Malcolm Collins: and do check out his podcast as well, Jolly Heretic, our YouTube channel or whatever..

Speaking of people who really sex up science, well, acapella science, I have just had one of their songs stuck in my head recently, so I have to, uh, share a little clip from them, to share the, the infection with you guys and, if you want, after this clip, I'm going to have a sort of an outtake from us just chatting with, uh,

We are built of modules combined in a planned out way Each new piece must be told where to go Oh, now, there's a science helping us to [00:33:00] understand How ourselves encode this architectural plan Signaling each other with genetic tools, oh Oh yeah, wow Phenotype the interface for mouse and man Genotype the files and the sub programs What then are the switches, circuit boards, and boot code?

E V O D Looking at the logic in the ways that we grow Every gene directed by a signal key code Proteins that can activate, enhance, or be told E While these signals are controlled by other genes, let's signal Calculating in a networked labyrinth, though Where the heart and liver and the hands and feet go Signal, Signal, Signal, Signal, Signal Signal mapping tells each region what it ought to be, yo We're circling so deep they build a port They're older than D'Amelio D'Amelio's a wicked red baby In a crucial pathway, genes just tend to get torpedoed Where they go, calamity goes As the sun goes down So make sure you [00:34:00] turn it up, speak now!

 Boxing day really, and this is sort of a second boxing day.

Malcolm Collins: What are we supposed to be doing on boxing day? I can't remember.

Edward Dutton: Well, traditionally, isn't it that you fill boxes with meats for the for the, for the the downtrodden of the community and leave them outside? And then there's the boxes, that's why it's called box, that's my understanding.

Oh, that's what Wobblies

Malcolm Collins: has thought. I can see why we forgot about this. Hold on, there's a toy in the background that I Definitely need to turn off.

Edward Dutton: But my, my wife, my wife got me this cravat, which I was quite pleased with. Oh, so that's a Christmas cravat.

That's a Christmas. That's Christmas Cravat. Yeah. Christmas. That

Simone Collins: is very well, there you go. You're already benefiting from the holiday. That's, that is very nice. Okay. That's,

Edward Dutton: I I got her a book about feral cats. 'cause we've, we, we've just, we've just got our, we've just got our cat. A cat, so our cat is incredibly sociable.

Very ridiculously sociable, like a dog. Okay. Has to be entertained. So we got him a cat. It's his cat, but we [00:35:00] can't touch it. It's feral. It won't let us touch it. But they're, they're okay with each other. They're okay with each other, yeah. But it's his cat. So my cat has a cat. And and that's all going very well.

He doesn't pester us anymore for attention or anything like that. He's got his cat, but he can basically, like, dominate. That's

Malcolm Collins: a very cat thing to do. That is very cat thing to do. The whole situation is a very cat thing to do. I'm gonna keep that cat, that cat anecdote in the, in the start here. I think that's a good one.

This is how we go from single cells Every generation and in life primeval Life in variations endless and beautiful From Devo to Evo Ivan and Mosquito Patterns are resolved as the signals proceedo Melvin and Chiggy with the glow tail Kill it with the light morpholino Shoot a legal morpholino From Devo to Evo Voyage of the Beagle Body plans evolve when proteins to the genome In this matter, life's beauty grows Is that a game, Devo?

If A C A P E [00:36:00] L L A S C I E N C E

My wife Simone and I discuss why the pro-natalist movement seems to be drawing many people on the autism spectrum. We share our thoughts on why autistic people may be attracted to intense affiliation and dedication to causes they believe in.

We also talk about the future of the movement, keeping relationships healthy in the public eye, managing our mental health as quasi-public figures, and more with our usual sense of humor.

https://manifold.love/

Malcolm Collins: [00:00:00] Next time we're talked to by a reporter or something like this, we need to have you subtly drop that you want to replace the rest of the population with autistic people. Um, We need to have you.

Simone Collins: What do we call it? The greater replacement. The greater replacement The complete solution.

Malcolm Collins: No, no, you gotta say it's the greater replacement theory.

Simone Collins: I really like that, the greater I have a greater replacement theory.

Malcolm Collins: I'm a greater replacement theorist, where the autists are trying to replace us, and Simone here, you affirm, you as an autist are trying to replace them now, right?

Like, that's what the pronatalist movement's really about. Yeah, we need some progressive to freak out about this.

Would you like to know more?

Simone Collins: Yes.

Malcolm Collins: Great. By the way, one thing you would've loved is when the repair guy came, you know, because I was managing the call, so I wasn't able to stand next to the repair guy, and I couldn't keep Octavian away. He wanted to watch the whole time. Oh boy. So he got his iPad and he sat down right next to the repair guy with his back leaning against the repair guy.

You know, like he know and I'm like, on the bat or something. Oh my. So the guy standing there doing stuff and Octa and this kids like coddling with him, like [00:01:00] leaning against him? Yeah. . Oh,

Simone Collins: no. Octavian is, has zero fear of any strangers. One

Malcolm Collins: of my favorites as a, yeah, he, there were like guys out working by our place.

And Octavian goes, Hey, can I go up and give him a hug? And I was like, Oh no, Octavian, I don't think like the random guy wants a hug. And Octavian goes, Everybody likes hugs.

Simone Collins: This guy was like, he clearly wasn't a morning person. He was smoking a cigarette and like, drinking a Dunkin coffee and like, just looking like he wanted to die.

Malcolm Collins: Octavian was like, I want to go give him a hug. Even when

Simone Collins: he was really, really little, we'd like go hiking and walk past a group of people. And he would just like veer off from us and follow them because, you know, they looked like more

Malcolm Collins: fun, I guess. The new family's more fun. So Speaking of all of this, one thing that was really interesting at the pronatalist conference, because we got a better understanding of like what the base of the movement is actually like.

And at one point I was like, this [00:02:00] really feels a lot like the early effective altruist movement. You know, lots of really competent entrepreneurs disproportionately highly educated, disproportionately entrepreneurs, disproportionately tech people, disproportionately successful. And somebody was like, and we were like, how can we move this in the direction of the EA movement?

Not like in the corrupted direction, but in the direction of actually having tons of societal influence instead of just being a subculture that is four people of a subculture are seen as like a weirdo thing, right? Somebody goes, well, the reason why that culture works so well was because, it appealed to disproportionately autistic people.

And then

Simone Collins: like out of the woodwork, someone like sprang up and was like, did someone say autism?

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. And then like five people in the room raised their hand. Literally. It must've been. 40 percent of the room was autistic or 30%?

Simone Collins: There were a lot of autists there.

Malcolm Collins: It was, it was higher than I expected. And as people know, like Simone is autistic, right?

So this was like, yes, the EA movement was disproportionately autistic and still is. And the pronatalist [00:03:00] movement is disproportionately autistic. And the question is why? What's going on here? Now, before we get further with that question, I'm going to do like a little free ad for a product I want to support because I always support any interesting autistic focused dating products that are maybe going to get more of you guys wives.

So Manifest. It is a prediction

Simone Collins: manifolds. Hold on. No. So there was a prediction market called manifold. That is really cool. We went to their inaugural conference this year called manifest in Berkeley. And shortly after that conference, they were, they released a dating app called manifold love. You can access it at manifold dot

Malcolm Collins: love.

Yeah. And so, I don't know exactly how it works. Maybe you can read on the thing, but I, my understanding is that people will put up like profiles of themselves and then other people will bet on who you would be a good match for and they win [00:04:00] betting pools. If you end up with the person who they're betting, you're going to be a good match for

Simone Collins: now.

Basically, it's crowdsourced matchmaking via prediction markets. So they're combining matchmaking with prediction markets. And. Basically, you can create a dating profile, a lot of it's like typical dating platform stuff where you upload photos and you answer questions from a long list provided, you know, this includes like, do you want to have kids?

What's your personality like? And then basically this creates a collection of highly detailed profiles. And then anyone who joins, of course, can act as a matchmaker between profiles. So this isn't just a platform. Where people actively looking for a partner would want to be. This is also a platform where someone who's like, I feel like I can predict a good pairing between some people.

Malcolm Collins: Well, it's good gossip if it's going on in your community. Oh yeah. Right now I hear it's mostly just used in Silicon Valley.

Simone Collins: No, they're like, I'm looking at it now. There's there's someone in London, New York [00:05:00] city, Beijing, Washington, San Jose, Fairfield. California city, greater London Berlin game, like all over.

I mean, yeah. Okay. It's like San Francisco Bay area. There is a lot. Singapore though, more New York city, Calgary. So Paris, so it is, it is actually, I think it's, it's starting out with a nice spread of people. And what I like is that matchmakers playing with this, this data aspect of manifold can profit with mana, which is there like in, in.

world currency. If they correctly bet on whether two individuals will last in a six month relationship or not. And I love that betting. I just, I like, I wish. We've got to do this. Like I want there to be like a running like thing in our family where we're betting on like all sorts of inappropriate

Malcolm Collins: things.

I would love that. I mean, it'd be so cool. Something like it's got popular on like a college campus or something. Well,

Simone Collins: even like, with dating too, like, I think one, one thing that actually came up at the pronatalist conference in, I think that same conversation [00:06:00] where autism came up was The fact that like family and social approval of partners of people, people were dating had sort of fallen by the wayside.

Whereas like in the past, your parents and your brother and sister would all have like a whole lot of things to say about the woman or man that you were dating and they, you know, it would be like, well, here's what I think of them. And I love the idea of like bringing it back and being like, Yeah, I'm going to place this bet that you're going to last, like, you're going to last for five weeks.

It was very interesting how that

Malcolm Collins: came up. The guy was like, My brother brought home somebody to meet the family and it was like very clear this was a bad match. Yeah. But we couldn't tell him. Try to subtly tell him like this is a bad match, but it didn't mean much to him that the entire family thought that and historically and within most cultures, that would be a very, very loud signal that you probably shouldn't get married to somebody.

Simone Collins: But I think it's different. I think it's different when the family's like literally putting money on the line. Like, here's how long I think you're going to [00:07:00] last. And of course that can happen like if that happens to the wrong type of person. They might pursue a relationship or a string in a long longer than they should just to, you know, out of spite.

Malcolm Collins: We don't want them colluding on these bets, you know, that'd be so easy to do. But I,

Simone Collins: I still, I still love this, this idea. Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: I'd also love it if we did little ads like this occasionally and things for. products that we stan. I was thinking about that earlier when I was watching YouTube videos and they had like sponsored segments.

I was like, Oh, it'd be cool to like sponsor little products or people who are working on things in

Simone Collins: the community. Not for pay or the greater good.

Malcolm Collins: Not for the greater good. That's what the Tao empire would say. And there are a bunch of commies. Oh, we do it for community cohesion and utility. Okay. Simone efficacy, efficacy.

But I,

Simone Collins: I actually do think it's a legit good place to look for a partner though, because you have to think about, this is one of those things where, in, in business, you need to look for an [00:08:00] arbitrage opportunity. You need to look where there's a lot of value that is untapped. And what we learned after attending Manifold's inaugural conference was just how smart everyone there was.

And like, we're like, Oh my gosh, like I am ready to like move into a neighborhood full of these people. I would happily live in that neighborhood.

Malcolm Collins: That's where we finally met Scott Alexander.

Simone Collins: Yeah. Yeah. And, and, and saw a bunch of other really awesome people and made a lot of friends, like ridiculous.

Like even, and we've been to a lot of different like societies and groups where we really love the people there. And we're like, Oh, everyone's so intellectual. This wasn't just intellectual people. It was like intellectual doers, intellectual, thoughtful people like who, yeah, I don't know. I just, I think they're great.

So this is why I think it's uniquely worthwhile thing to plug is because right now. Before it becomes like overblown or too well known, it is a very curated network of very smart, thoughtful, but also like impactful, employed people. So, [00:09:00]

Malcolm Collins: yeah. But now to the topic of the video. Why is this community disproportionately drawing autists?

The type of people who would be engaged by something like that. Yeah,

Simone Collins: and autists, you'd think, would have a lower birth rate than the average person. So why would autists not only be, like, keen to have a kid, but like, six? And we should call

Malcolm Collins: them hottists, because that's the new thing. They're hot autistic people, the hottists.

Why is it that hottists are disproportionately drawn to pronatalism? I am asking you, the autistic woman.

Simone Collins: I think, well, yeah, I mean the, the classic easiest answer is autistic people don't just do something. They like really go overboard, you know, they're not just like into trains, they like know every f*****g thing about trains.

Right. So like, I think once you get an autistic person into kids, they're like, kids, bring all the kids and I'm going to raise them perfect. And they will. They're going to be autistic about it, which is such an [00:10:00] ironic twist from like the classic image of the refrigerator mom. For a little bit of color for a while, people thought that people became autistic because they were raised by overly cold mothers who, you know, didn't show them love and were incapable of expressing love.

Whereas like when we see the, the autists who are raising kids you know, they, they may not, it may not be natural to them to like express affection in certain ways, but they have studied it so much and they care about doing it right so much that they are way better at showing affection than the

Malcolm Collins: average person.

You're very good at simulating it.

You can't replace family with a robot, Richard. We need real human affection. That's why Huggy's programmed to simulate its sweetness. ,

Malcolm Collins: but

Simone Collins: yeah, so. Well, honestly though, here's my, here's my thing though about, about simulating love. I think that someone who's quote unquote faking it when it comes to love and affection is the best.

Ultimately going to show much more love and affection to someone than someone who's really acting it out because people who are, who act as they [00:11:00] actually feel are way less, like way, way more likely to get irritable, way more, less likely to act patiently, way less likely to act picturesquely all the time.

This is important! What could be more important than your family, Richard? Ssssssssssscience?

Simone Collins: And I think both you and I, like a lot of the time when we do super wholesome stuff and it's, you know, being really cute with the kids and being really loving with them. Like it's right after they just vomited slash shat slash spit up all over us. You know, it might be after they just screamed in our faces or had a tantrum or like, we're kind of tired, but we choose because we're being really autistic about it to be more affectionate.

So again, ironically, I would also say not only are autists like extra enthusiastic about parenting when they get into it, but also like they're better parents than neurotypical

Malcolm Collins: people. That's an interesting theory. That is not the theory that I was in. Okay. The theory I would have chosen goes like this. Why were autists [00:12:00] disproportionately in the early effect of altruism movement? It was because the movement combined two things, something that was obviously a problem in society that most philanthropic money was mostly about social signaling and not actually helping people.

But that also a person with good. emotional, like, intelligence of other humans, and, and, and who could read other humans and social cues really well they would know that you're not supposed to say that, that people are just spending philanthropic money to self aggrandize themselves and make themselves look better, because that's a really hurtful thing to tell somebody, and that's you know, disruptive to society, and so we have, broadly agreed on this mass delusion.

And they're like, no, but look, seriously, it's not working. And everyone else is like, well, and I think that with the pronatalist movement, it's the same sort of a thing. It's a movement that is based around an obvious statistical trend. Anybody who's looking at statistics is going to see That fertility rates are falling

at a rate [00:13:00] that makes it inevitable that it is not going to be the biggest issue that humanity faces over the next century, much bigger than things like global warming and stuff like that. When you're looking at just the numbers and the speed of of what's happening. And so. They recognize that this is a problem, but they also lack the social graces to recognize just how much blowback they're going to get from the urban monoculture, which controls most pathways to power in our society, most pathways to income and stability in our society, pathways and access to sexual resources in our society.

So they just go out and say it. Hey guys, do you not see the problem? Do you not see the, the train that we're about to hit. And I think that that's what it is. It's a obvious thing with a social filter in front of it that most people know not to cross. And I would say that this is also true when I think about like the people who were autistic at the conference or were heavily on the spectrum there.

They, they were just genuinely like, I am concerned about the statistics here, [00:14:00] whereas I think the people who weren't like that at the conference, they more like had some other agenda that they were using this to promote to some extent. Right. They weren't

Simone Collins: pronatalists. They were first and foremost Catholics or whatever religion they were.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, where the autistic people were more like, Hey, this is a problem, why aren't people talking about it? Like, I came here to try to figure out why no one was talking about this. So I'm so sorry, I'm so sorry I do my little impression there. But it is, it is really interesting. And I think if the movement stays this way, or it has this as sort of its founding community, that's going to heavily shape it going forwards.

But it also speaks really positively towards the direction it's going. Because it has the capability of moving up in society and moving up was in sort of income brackets and then taking over apparatuses in our society in the same way the EA movement did. And so. That's a really positive direction.

And [00:15:00] that's one of the things with the EA movement. As the EA movement began to incorporate more and more people who were not autistic, that's That's

Simone Collins: where it started to fall

Malcolm Collins: apart. It sort of began to fall apart and lose its way, especially within leadership

Simone Collins: roles. Although, wouldn't you say Sam Pink and Freed is almost certainly on the spectrum?

Malcolm Collins: Oh, yeah, I'd say that it is still the old, old guard heads of the movement are still all pretty much on the spectrum. I mean, it's insane. He still did,

Simone Collins: like, really. Performative

Malcolm Collins: stuff. Right. But he was doing it with the goal of manipulating political players. Mm-Hmm. I don't know how much of it, like, like his goal was manipulating political players for personal financial gain.

Mm-Hmm. That was, you know, what motivated that behavior. And then you know, particularly lacking social. Awareness that the EA movement has now become an aggressive Luddite movement is, is absolutely hilarious to me. For people who may not know what the word Luddite means, it means an anti technology or like a technophobic movement.

But as they say, and I think that this is [00:16:00] really funny there was a Quote that I'll put on screen by what's his name? The guy who wrote Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Oh, okay Like anything that was invented before I was born is like old news boring Anything from when I was born to the age of 30 is exciting and I might get a career in it Anything after the age of 30 is like against the natural order of things and must be destroyed and it is hilarious to me that like right as the leadership cast of the EA movement turned over 30.

Like that was the moment when they decided all technological innovation must stop right now. Everything else is blasphemous and must be destroyed. A

Simone Collins: little on the nose.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, it was shockingly on the nose. It was shockingly on the nose and, and very depressing to me. And I'd like to think that the pronatalist movement, and I hope that the movement can commit to this going forwards, aggressively will raise young people [00:17:00] to positions of influence earlier than other movements do and not develop sort of an encrusted sort of.

elite of, of intellectual elite within the community.

Simone Collins: If any movement can do that, I do think it is the perinatalist movement, especially because those cultures that are going to be sustainable in the long run are those that empower youth, not those that disempower you. I also think that when Silicon, sorry, I shouldn't say Silicon Valley, when autists decide to become obsessed with something and specialize in an industry they take it over and make it very effective.

We saw this with like. tech companies. They were basically like predominated by autistic people. And look, now tech companies like run a huge portion of the global economic system. I think, you know, with autism taking over pronatalism, if that is indeed what happens, you are going to see a very effective movement.

Now, of course, we've heard people talk about how much they hate how autistic people run these tech [00:18:00] companies, because they have no idea how social. Justice works and they ignore all these things and they're just bullied little children who are now taking it out on all of us normal people. I don't know.

I mean, like, whatever, like, sorry, you can cry into your free Gmail and all you want, and then watch YouTube videos that you don't pay for. And then like, I don't like deal with it, you know, and like these people, these same people are going to be like, Oh, all these young people that are wiping my butt is I'm really.

Oh, they're so weird. I hate them so much. But then like, who else is going to wipe your butt lady? So, yeah.

Malcolm Collins: What, what was that rant about? That seemed oddly specific. Did you read something somewhere?

Simone Collins: No, I, I've heard multiple times. People who consider themselves neurotypical, who I wouldn't even say are neurotypical, complaining about autists being in charge of like Silicon Valley, like, you know, being CEOs of companies.

I've seen

the

Malcolm Collins: reporter class complain about this. They're like, yeah, we need to make more known. Not just the reporter class. Yeah. Oh, yeah. [00:19:00] But I, well, and it's important for us. Like we talk about, like, I'm glad that I think the movement's going to end up making a lot of money and it's good for us to, that that happens because pernatalism as a cause area.

has one real like downside to it, which is one of the great ways to get money as a movement and then use that to grow the movement is when people who care about the movement die and don't have any descendants. And you were just

Simone Collins: talking, I think in another episode recently about how the Catholic church started pro prohibiting cousin marriage in an attempt to make sure that they got those inheritances from wealthier families.

Malcolm Collins: And we want this, right? Like, we want, we would love that, but I mean, if, if that's ever happening with us, it's

Simone Collins: going to be a failure for it. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. We actually have a way, more clever solution, and don't you dare underplay it, because I think it's very smart, and I love that you made it up.

Or that you designed it, which is specifically that people in our family, in our cultural house do not inherit money as a matter of course. They do not have trust funds. They did not have inheritances. Instead, there [00:20:00] is the house fund. They house fund will help to pay for your fertility treatments.

It may help to pay for some of your education and it may match funds that you raise for a startup or nonprofit from other respectable third party organizations, but it is not going to pass on money to you. Influence within the governance of that house and the distribution of its wealth is driven by, to a great extent, those who contribute the most new money to it, which is so important because right now you see in most family offices and when you see basically anything with inheritance, Those who drain the most from it have the most influence over it.

Whereas with

Malcolm Collins: our house is model, but this is different from the nonprofit pronatalist foundation, which is referring to, but I hear

Simone Collins: the same time though, like our, our philosophy with any sort of nonprofit effort is frankly a nonprofit that does not ultimately find a way to make its own money or that is at.

at the very least, not dependent on outside [00:21:00] parties for donations is the only nonprofit you really can believe is virtuous enough to pursue its original mission. Because any nonprofit that sticks around long enough that doesn't make money from anything but donations clearly has become specialized in raising money and virtue signaling and not in actually solving its problems.

So again, like.

Malcolm Collins: Well, yeah, true, but look at the anti natalist movement, how easy they'll have a time raising money. I mean, they, they get all of people's money when they do their job right. And, and I, and I think the anti natalist movement is actually going to do a lot to buoy the pro natalist movement right now.

Like, they are If anything, a boon to us as they are growing because they're just so insane. I, well, I mean, to me they just come off as transparently evil. They're like, yeah, let's kill all life on the planet. Let's Venus the planet. You know, that's not an uncommon thing within the negative utilitarian side, which is sort of the leaders of most of the antinatalist community.

I think,

Simone Collins: I think it is very virtuous within their perception of reality. It is, it [00:22:00] is logically consistent and virtuous.

Malcolm Collins: No, and I agree with that, but it's high utility to us because I think it drives normies, you know, when they're choosing, well, which side of this debate am I on towards our side of things.

So long as you can keep any of the racist voice from getting too loud then you can win the, the normie medal, which, which I feel like, you know, in terms of, of public messaging, like we've really begun to do. I, the, the, the, I, the fertility rate problem, I think it's really beginning to break into mainstream narratives.

Simone Collins: I agree. Yeah, it's happening.

Malcolm Collins: And this is awesome for us.

Simone Collins: Because yeah, I, I, I just, I guess it actually like the, the, the awareness and the extent to which people care about it is part of the solution because we are seeing people just completely breaking away from many of the broken elements of dating markets, of not getting married, of not having kids.

And they're just like having kids really young. They're, they're starting families really young and [00:23:00] economically economically productive at the same time. So I guess, yeah, awareness actually is more of a cure than I even thought it was when I, now that we've met people in the movement, right. And now that we see like what awareness is producing, because I thought awareness was going to produce just frustration.

Like, yes, I know it's a problem, but no, there's nothing we can do about it. Whereas actually. Thank you. I think

Malcolm Collins: it's more than awareness. I think it's a self identity as a pronatalist that they now see publicly and they can accept for themselves. So I think that people really work around sort of pre packaged self narratives in our society.

And the problem is, is a lot of people didn't have a pronatalist. package of personality that they could adopt. That did not come with either racist or religious extremist connotations. And so because they felt that way, they're like, I don't get to do this because this isn't who I am, you know, especially if they were successful entrepreneurial or autistic eat.

Like we were talking about, you know, why are they disproportionately [00:24:00] drawn? It might be. Partially because you're one of the heads of the movement. It might be because they see you, and they see this self narrative that you Oh wait, me? Simone? Yeah, this self narrative that you and I are pushing, and they're like, this is a self narrative that I personally can identify with, and not feel ashamed about this identity, and then they make life choices that are aligned with the community.

I mean, having kids is a bit like a Having kids young, especially, is a bit like the face tattoo of the pronatalist movement. It's the way that you show, you know, you are on board with this movement and a very serious long term commitment. And a lot of also the wholesome imagery around the movement and stuff like that, I think has also been really appealing to people, where it's like really technophilic and successful, but otherwise wholesome.

Which I actually think it's part of why pronatalism didn't really take off when it was just Elon doing the advocacy for it. Because he started talking about it even before we did. [00:25:00] Yeah, but he wasn't

Simone Collins: talking about it in a way where it was like, I could do that. I never saw his lifestyle and thought, oh well of course, that's something I can

Malcolm Collins: do.

do. Yeah. Yeah. Where I think we offer an image that a lot of people feel is both aspirational yet attainable. Which is also interesting because you and me as like a healthy couple, like, that actually likes each other. Like that's pretty rare for any kind of influencer where that is not their core.

Like there's a lot of influencers where they're

Simone Collins: There's where it is their core thing. Cause you know, I love watching critiques of like happy families and like wholesome families. And there's so much footage of like both sitting next to each other, like looking kind of resentful and passive aggressive.

And it's sad.

Malcolm Collins: It is sad. Yeah. I don't like to, and when it becomes a real problem in those relationships, because they develop self nerve because that's income. [00:26:00] Oh, they see themselves certainly masturbating the self narrative and so they cannot accept even within themselves that their relationship may not be good for them long term or that they may need to work on something in a very serious way because it is who they are.

I'm the person who's in a good relationship. Where for to us, this is really ancillary to our advocacy work. It's just I guess it's useful for advocacy work, but it is very ancillary to it.

Simone Collins: Oh, like. We don't have to be happy together in order to be effective as

Malcolm Collins: a yeah, I mean, I don't think we have to be like a great couple to be good advocates for this.

Although, maybe we do. Maybe it's before advocacy

Simone Collins: work. Sorry, you're gonna have to keep up the charade, my

Malcolm Collins: friend. The charade of pretending I love you and I think you're amazing? Okay, I'll keep it up. I'll keep it up for a few days. Is this how you trapped me? Is this how you trapped me? You got me into this situation.

Simone Collins: Yeah, I made you super path dependent on being a perfect, wholesome husband, so now you just have to dig [00:27:00] into it.

Malcolm Collins: I can't possibly leave you or treat you poorly, or I would

Simone Collins: But this is the thing, it's like, no, legit, I think that people who fake affection and are invested in faking affection are way better than people who actually just express how they feel all the time.

And that's part of our philosophy too, is feelings and emotions are. kind of dumb and often maladapted.

Malcolm Collins: I agree with that to an extent, but the Gottmans are supposed to be faking that they're in a good relationship. You know, their whole shtick is relationships, right? Like it doesn't come across like they're in a happy relationship.

Simone Collins: I see. I don't know. I, I still, I actually hold to your view that the Gottmans are really more. about keeping bad relationships together. And that is the image that they're trying to share is that, don't worry, we too have a bad relationship and we've managed to become a power couple together. You can too.

And still hate each other just like

Malcolm Collins: they're like the number one relationship coaches for boomers. Right. John

Simone Collins: Gottman became famous from his research where he felt [00:28:00] like he was able to, after watching some like five minute clip of a couple talking, say how long that marriage was going to last. And then they, they made this whole like.

thing. And we went to one of their retreats once because we were generously offered free attendance to this retreat. And it was terrifying.

Malcolm Collins: Well, I, I mean, and to the point that you were making earlier, I did have somebody who is, was in the pronatalist movement and runs a popular Twitter account.

And this is at the pronatalist conference, like take me aside at one point. And he's like, you really know, like one, he's like, you know, you, you really. Need to stay healthy. You need to, like, you need to, you do welcome great terms with your wife. You know, you, you have to stay together because you do not understand how impactful it would be for the movement if you guys end up splitting up and getting into some messy divorce or something

Or if you ended up dying at this stage. And I was one, I really made me feel good 'cause this is a popular Twitter account that I had heard of before and everything like that. And it made me feel really good that he. felt that way, like that I was that important. But it [00:29:00] also was like, oh s**t, for this movement to work out, I guess I have to keep pretending to love you, Simone.

But it's so easy when we're both so autistic. I'm not actually diagnosed autistic, she is, but I guess a lot.

Simone Collins: No, yeah, but you were definitely not autistic. Like I've, I'm, a lot of commenters have been like, Malcolm definitely should be tested. He's certainly autistic, but no, like you are definitely not neurotypical.

We know that, like that is obvious, but the actual. Signs and giveaways of autism. You just do not have a

Malcolm Collins: very, very easy time reading people. It's oh, I'd say it's one of my strongest skills is

Simone Collins: reading people. Yeah. I'm on the autist spectrum and you're on the schizoid spectrum, but you're also not schizophrenic.

So like I don't and also there's all these other weird things about you that like are not on the schizoid or autistic like spectrum. So like I don't. I don't know what it is. You're, you're, you're wonky. I don't, I honestly don't think you're human. I think you're some kind of God like entity that has descended from the heavens.

And like, I, I either am in a coma and I've dreamed of some kind of hero [00:30:00] or you are like, I don't know.

Um, You know, your mother used to tell you and your brother that you were like, you know, she had a vision from a psychic and you would be born to do

Malcolm Collins: great things. So my mom's whole like childbearing strategy for us, if you're familiar with Olympia's child childbearing strategy for, that's the mother of Alexander,

Simone Collins: the

Malcolm Collins: great Alexander, the great, where she'd be like, your dad isn't really your dad.

I was actually impregnated by a snake that was Zeus in disguise and stuff like that. Like that is not far off from the stuff that my mom would constantly tell me when I was a kid. Always about, oh, I've gone to a psychic and I had visions and I had dreams and that you two were supposed to take over the world.

And she would just over and over and over again. And I remember she told me a story once about somebody at one of my preschools, like the teacher was like, Malcolm has like a problem where he thinks he's supposed to become like a and, or an emperor, you know, and my mom was like, what's What's the problem there?

And the teacher was like, no, you don't understand. Like he thinks literally like that's going to be his job when he grows up. [00:31:00] And my mom was like, yeah, of course I raised him to believe that. Why would I raise him to believe less of

Simone Collins: himself? Why would I raise a mediocre, normal son? So maybe that just has made you not neurotypical in a way that's not diagnosable

Malcolm Collins: in a simple way.

I think that that's the type of thing. I think that might be an inherited. Sense of grandiosity that I probably got from my mom. If we're going to be realistic here where it's, it's like bipolar, but only the manic's phase, only, only low grade manic.

Simone Collins: Only the

Malcolm Collins: highs, only the highs. No, this has actually been, some people look at the way I act and they're like, Oh, you must be bipolar.

Like. Yeah. Or

Simone Collins: like on something. Yeah, or on something.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, or on something or something like that. And I was like, no, I'm just happy. I'm excited about where things are going and, and how efficacious. I do get into these slums when I've like, haven't achieved something for a while, which Simone gets me.

Another really interesting thing about my biology, when she talks about me, like overanalyzing, have a very good ability of reading people. Is that this ability is also [00:32:00] incredibly taxing to me. It's super stressful, yeah. I yesterday, I finally left the house. I hadn't left the house in a long time, and I was in New York, engaging with people, and I met with three people.

And the next day, I had to sleep, like, half the day.

Simone Collins: Just to like Yeah, like, literally, your need for sleep increases intensely. Like, when we're out, like, traveling and entertaining and doing meetings, like You, you have to go to a room and pass out and sleep somewhere. And there have been times where you've been at events and like, you've had to like crawl into a corner and pass out and sleep because like, just literally your mind can't take that level of like heavy compute without taking a breather and like clearing out.

Malcolm Collins: This is why a lot of people like us, like we prefer to not like work in offices and stuff like that. I gotta find that clip from the, the new Santa Claus where the Santa Claus is saying he's the evil Santa Claus, the evil Santa Claus. I should be clear. It's explaining why open workplaces are so taxing on people like us.

Where I think for both you and me, for [00:33:00] different reasons, we find being around people incredibly taxing. But I like that we so efficiently avoid it and we do not allow ourselves to become burdened by friends or acquaintances without having a clear utility to be gained by them.

Ken Gemberling was sucked into the internet. Burdened with new friends and tormented by the bounty hunter chains, he desperately seeks a way home.

Malcolm Collins: And what's really interesting is that Simone, potentially because she's autistic, she does not trigger this mental taxation in me.

Because there is never anything going on with her that is not at the surface. She always tells me what she is thinking without any you know, background goals or motivations or gains. Well, there's

Simone Collins: never a, you know what you did wrong. I shouldn't have

Malcolm Collins: to tell you. Yeah, you would never say something like that to me.

It's always immediately, like, this is what's, I'm telling you what I'm feeling. And so there is no need for this sort of background processing. Which makes it really easy for me to be around you all the time.

Simone Collins: Which is [00:34:00] not, by the way, I should make it clear. Like, Malcolm is Mother Teresa level. Thank you for dealing with me.

I'm actually really difficult to live with. So he makes it act like that's not the case, but I can't open doors and I freak out when my schedule is interrupted and I can't handle a billion different things. well, I

Malcolm Collins: mean, we do this podcast. I want to do the podcast in the same room. I can't handle that.

Sample, but we do it in different rooms because she finds it difficult to think when other people are around, especially me, like you find it uniquely hard to think when I'm around and we're in a social context.

Simone Collins: Yeah. You're, you're very stressful. All humans are very stressful. But like,

Malcolm Collins: Well, you, you, you've described it as being very afraid of disappointing me, and this fear, like, increases when I'm near you.

Simone Collins: Yeah. Yeah. I don't, I think that's something that like autistic people feel a lot anyway. Like, they, it's exhausting to have to actively emote for people and then like try to, you know, play by their rules. I think [00:35:00] especially if you're the kind of autistic person, you don't, here's the thing. Okay. I've noticed a pattern with autistic people.

There are autistic people who love spending time around groups. And I, we, we know a couple personally, and then just like informationally who tend to actually be weirdly social, like weirdly prefer to be surrounded by people. Those autistic people are typically not very good at masking at all.

They're not mirroring facial expressions. They're not like, they're not auto responding LLM style in a way that they think will please other people. Like they're literally just being themselves and not being very expressive and not accommodating other people. And then there are the autistic people who.

You would never know are autistic who are really good at masking who mirror facial expressions and they hate being around people because it's so mentally taxing and exhausting just to like accommodate them and try to make them happy and like to [00:36:00] fake being. a good companion or like decent socially.

And that, I think that's a big differentiating factor. And I am one of those people who grew up masking and therefore being around anyone, even especially, actually, especially if it's someone that I love and really want to make happy. And you are that, like, if you are not happy, the world is broken. I, I can't, I

Malcolm Collins: can't do it.

We got to do the line, people, what a bunch of b******s put that clip in here. Cause that is, that is, you're like, I've met enough of them. I've met enough of them.

You should get out there and meet other people. Other people? Yes. You mean people other than Roy? Well, yes. And these other people, where do they congregate? Well, I don't know. You could try and do an evening class or something like that. Whoa, whoa! Hold on a second now. And what exactly am I supposed to do while she's out gallivanting at her night classes and whatnot?

Well, you could meet other people as well. Yeah. I don't like people. [00:37:00] Oh, well, now that's not fair, Roy. Have you met all of them? I've met enough of them. People. What a bunch of b******s.

Simone Collins: Talk about a show with staying power. I'll tell you what, the IT crowd is just amazing.

Malcolm Collins: Anyway, I recently edited a clip from the IT crowd into one of the episodes, and I might edit in this clip here.

Cause I just love it so much. It's a wishy thinking clip.

Space. What is it? The simple answer is, we don't know. Or at least we didn't know until now. Hello, I'm Douglas Renham, and 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. The founder of spaceology, Beth Gaga Shaggy.

 Is the founder of spaceology. A religion, not a cult. In other words, when it comes to space, he's the man with his head screwed on tight. This is what he told me when I met him on [00:38:00] holiday two weeks ago. Space is invisible mining dust, and stars are but wishes. 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.

If that doesn't convince you, well then, maybe you just don't deserve to get what you want.

Malcolm Collins: Oh, that's great. Hour of Wishes! This was in the episode on the Tesseract God. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Why conservative iterations of faith are more likely to be true than more progressive interpretations of faith. Because well, we go into it in the episode.

You should check it out if you want to see it because it is very interesting. And we do a lot of quotes in it too, from like the Bible, the Quran, all sorts of stuff. Because I argue that [00:39:00] even from the perspective of these traditions, they would be arguing this as well. Which is always fun.

Simone Collins: But anyway, I enjoyed this conversation and I'm going to actually hold my guns.

I think you're completely wrong about autistic people and prenatalism. And I think that honestly, if you went into any affiliative movement be it like a church, like go into a nunnery, go into like, you know, a really weird priest order where they're all silent go into like, a really obscure engineering business or like an anime circle.

The people who are most enthusiastic and passionate are autistic because autists go all the

Malcolm Collins: way. I just had a great idea. Next time we're talked to by a reporter or something like this, we need to have you subtly drop that you want to replace the rest of the population with autistic people. Um, We need to have you.

Simone Collins: What do we call it? The greater replacement. The greater replacement The complete solution.

Malcolm Collins: No, no, you gotta say it's the greater replacement theory.

Simone Collins: I really like that, the greater I have a greater replacement theory.

Malcolm Collins: [00:40:00] I'm a greater replacement theorist, where the autists are trying to replace us, and Simone here, you affirm, you as an autist are trying to replace them now, right?

Like, that's what the pronatalist movement's really about. Yeah, we need some progressive to freak out about this. Um, greater replacement, greater replacement. You are the best. You are hilarious.

Simone Collins: Not as hilarious as you as you are and our kids, but. You know what? I love you to bits.

Malcolm Collins: Thank you so much. Love you too.

And I, I, you guys have no idea how lucky I am to have a wife who says such nice things about me. You really do have immense gratitude. And as I say, that's always the number one thing to look for in a spouse these

Simone Collins: days. Well, and the sign of a true gentleman is that you will end up believing that his wife is a truly wonderful woman.

despite the fact that all women are absolutely horrible. So, I love you. Oh, no! Oh,

Malcolm Collins: Walt! Oh, Walt! I should have known! Wait until

Simone Collins: you divorce

Malcolm Collins: [00:41:00] me! It's going to be terrible! You'll convince all my kids to hate

Simone Collins: me! I mean, it's inevitable, obviously.

Malcolm Collins: And then I'll show them these videos and you'll say, Oh, it was all an act.

Simone Collins: It was an act. Yeah. It was 100 percent a lie. Didn't you see all of the writing on the wall?

Goodbye to you and your beautiful face. I love you. Your

Malcolm Collins: stinky, silly face.