Based Camp | Simone & Malcolm Collins

Spend enough time watching girly content these days, and you’ll see a commenter or creator cite “the Girl with the List.” This batman of Lady Internet is literally summoned in content across tiktok and instagram. Her bat signal: “Where’s the girl with the list?”Her purpose? Cure baby fever. Remind you to take your birth control.Today, we explore the work of the Girl (actually girls) with the List, the unique genre of choice-based horror stories (be they pregnancy, parenting, or entirely-non-family-related activities, such as cosmetic surgery and travel), and whether this genre helps or harms. Enjoy!Show NotesThere’s a young woman named Abigail Porter (goes by Zoomie) with 1.6M followers on Tiktok who is famous for “curing baby fever” by creating abundant shorts on pregnancy and delivery body horror and frustrating experiences parents have while lactating and raising young kids.Just this week I’ve heard two mentions of her in the wild “She changed my life” said one. “I literally owe her everything”Suffice it to say she is, at best, feeding into women’s feelings of justification for not having kids, and at worst, generating fear about having kids where it didn’t exist before.Abigail is not alone in creating viral content of this genre—there’s also “the girl with the list” with whom Abigail is often confused and that list is called “YUNI’S PROS AND CONS LIST OF HAVING CHILDREN”), so we should probably talk about it!So… Why avoid pregnancies?Some highlights:* A woman whose insides needed stitches after her baby scratched her from the inside on the way out* A woman whose baby began to choke on her nipple after it literally fell off* A woman who grew a tumor on her lip the size of her pinky* Women losing their hair, their teeth, all their eyelashes* A woman who developed a mutation during pregnancy that made her insensitive to pain meds who had to endure a c-section with no pain meds* A woman who went deaf after her kid kissed her on the ear, causing what’s called “the kiss of death”* BTW, this is also known as cochlear ear‑kiss injury / Reiter’s Ear Kiss Syndrome (REKS)* It happens when someone kisses directly over the ear canal (the opening of the ear), especially using a strong suction/“air kiss.” and it can cause permanent hearing loss* A woman whose retinas detached because she pushed so hard in labor* Women whose bodies have become both temporarily and permanently deformed or uglified (swollen hands and feet, swollen legs, varicose veins, popped blood vessels in eyes, toe nails falling off, etc.)There are basically four themes:* Relatively unusual medical complications from pregnancy and lactation (like uterine prolapse, various forms of body horror)* The expenses of labor and delivery* Poop and pee horror* Pretty common parenting, pregnancy, and postpartum stuff, e.g.:* Fussy babies who are only calm when being bounced* The rectus abdominus being separated* Swelling* Using a nosfrida to suck snot out of a baby’s nose* Having strangers on the internet jump down your throat for really innocuous things, such as mentioning breastfeeding* Kids making messes around the house (flooding, vandalism, etc.)The Psychology of it AllAvailability HeuristicCreators like Abigail and Yuni make pregnancy and parenting look heuristic by making their hazards extremely visible and available, but it’s extremely easy to do the exact same thing Abigail does with other life choices, and that includes life choicesKnown genres:* Hiking (e.g., Mr. Ballen videos)* Cosmetic surgery (e.g., Wonny)* Buying homes (e.g., videos and tiktoks by home inspectors)* Eating out at restaurants (e.g. dirty restaurant audits)You can effectively develop an aversion to—even phobia of—pretty much anything by giving yourself sufficient exposure to its hazards.This genre is a form of opt-in brainwashing, though it could also be a form of unintentional, algorithmic brainwashing.Loss AversionHumans generally weigh potential losses about 1.5–2.5 times as strongly as equal-sized gains in typical risky choices, though the exact ratio and even the presence of loss aversion depend on context and measurement method (there’s a lot of research on this)See:* https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/neuroscience/prospect-theory* https://thedecisionlab.com/biases/loss-aversion* https://www.behavioraleconomics.com/resources/mini-encyclopedia-of-be/loss-aversion/* https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0167487024000485* https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/neuroscience/prospect-theoryThis means that people will be far more influenced by downsides of parenting than by upsides.It’s worse than that, though, because creators like Abigail and Yuri can’t even wrap their heads around the rewards of parenting. Abigail’s most commonly cited argument is “kids are cute” whereas Yuri’s list includes:* “Child?”* “Tax return benefits”* “Tiny everything”* “You can’t get drafted while pregnant”* “You can bribe them with candy”* No you can’t* “If you raise them right people praise you for it”Overthinking & tokophobia* Overthinking things is why mental health is plummeting* Abigail fundamentally gets people to overthink pregnancy and childrearing* Robert Sepulsky talks about how the system we’ve evolved to deal with stress wasn’t really designed for animals capable of metacognition, who can literally trigger that system by THINKINGOverthinking about pregnancy may be contributing to a rise in phobia about pregnancy (known as tokophobia).A 2017 systematic review of 33 studies (≈854,000 pregnant women worldwide) estimated a pooled prevalence of tokophobia around 14%, with individual study estimates ranging from about 3.7% to 43%.* The researches concluded that the prevalence of tokophobia “appears to have increased in recent years (2000 onwards)”, although they cautioned that this finding is complicated by changing definitions and heterogeneous methods.More moderate but still clinically relevant “fear of childbirth” (not always labeled tokophobia) is common, with estimates in some European samples of about 5% with severe fear and over a third with high fear.About AbigailHer content creation journey* Started in 2021She’s very much a product of the urban monoculture* Lives in downtown Los AngelesHer standards for hardship are quite low:* She says that getting an IUD was the most painful thing she has experienced.* She hates cleaning up after cookingShe also does love caring little things:* She says she would protect her cats, Bub and Willow, with her lifeShe has merch!* $60 “divorce your republican husband” XL crewneck sweatshirt with a wolf on it (sold out)* $50 “dump your republican boyfriend” M/L hunting camo crewneck sweatshirt (sold out)* $68 “dump your republican boyfriend” XL green crewneck* $58 “dump your republican boyfriend” XL pink hoodie* $68 “dump your republican boyfriend” L green/blue crewneck sweatshirt* $54 “dump your republican / story of my life” XL running-away-deer black crewneck sweatshirt* $60 “dump your republican boyfriend” L cameo hoodie (sold out)* $58 “dump your republican boyfriend” M navy zip-upWait why are most of these for larger people?How do we feel about this?What Abigail is doing is fine. She’s pretty clear in her content to not shame parents; she’s really empathetic toward parents (can’t say the same of many parents online!).She’s also WAAAAY more ethical and polite than your typical content creator about the clips she uses: She told NBC: ““If I’m going to do a video about bodies in particular and show somebody’s body, I’m going to make sure that I have consent from that mother first — like if she posted a video and she made this acknowledgement like, ‘This is my body. It’s pretty crazy. The things that have happened in my body is pretty wild.’””She also told NBC: “I have such a respect and a reverence and an admiration for the people who do choose to go through with this, because it is a huge choice,” Porter said. “I hope people will stop treating having children as an impulse decision that everyone does. I think that’s better for us and also for the children, because if every child that was ever born had parents that really, really wanted them, I think the world would be a better place.”YES!!People should only want kids because they have a strong reason to do so. In my ideal world, everyone should be able to watch one of Abigail’s long compilation videos and not feel doubts.Abigail’s content is actually helpful in:* Dissuading people from having kids for trivial reasons* Helping actual parents head off medical issues.* In one NBC article about Abigail and Yuri, they write “Biggers-Stewart, who is now pregnant with her second child, described the list videos as “a powerful tool for self-advocacy.””* “I was totally shocked by all the things that could happen to you. And that’s even in today’s modern world, which is shocking with the amount of research and access that we have at our fingertips,” Biggers-Stewart said. “There’s so many different types of complications, and it can be really brutal on women. So I was like, this is empowering.”* Helping actual parents head off other parenting foibles* We had to learn the hard way to lock up the kitchen at night, restrict most foods to only certain parts of the house, permanently wear aprons, etc.* Basically: When these things happen (the vandalism, the food messes, etc.) I see it as my fault, not the kids’ fault* They’re prisoners in our home and when they’re young, they literally don’t know better; it’s up to us as parents to provide the equivalent of bumpers on the bowling alleys of their lives.The primary concern isn’t with anti-kid content, but “worst-case scenario” content in general that can create algorithmic loops that create phobias.What about friends/girlfriends who cite “the list” in conversations about having kids?* Have a logical conversation.* About actual risks* About equivalent risks they take in their everyday life, through their hobbies, etc.* Such as hiking, cosmetic surgery, eating out, etc.* If they still are afraid of having kids, then they probably shouldn’t have kidsAppendix: Longer Sampling of Abigail’s Reasons to Not Have KidsPregnancy and birth: medical risks and trauma* Severe post‑labor swelling of the vulva (“had balls between my legs”).* Uterus flipping inside out and being placed in a bucket (uterine inversion).* Severe tearing, including tears toward the anus and up toward the clitoris (“towards your bean”).* Episiotomy (“they cut to make the hole bigger”) and still having to push afterward.* Vaginal or uterine prolapse (“my vagina fell out” / holding her uterus in her hand; uterine prolapse needing to be pushed back in).* Retained or traumatized bladder/urethra causing urinary retention (bladder “shut down,” pee‑hole swelling shut, catheter for days to weeks).* Incarcerated uterus causing urinary obstruction and catheterization for two weeks.* Post‑birth inability to pee without elaborate “Subway sandwich” pad/ice/witch hazel/foam setup after every bathroom trip.* Pelvic floor damage: chronic incontinence, “never pee normally again,” needing to clench when sneezing, “neverending wipe,” stool control issues.* Massive blood clots after birth (basketball‑sized clot, near hemorrhage, transfusions).* Mastitis leading to sepsis and large clots; spouse literally sucking out infected milk and blood.* C‑section horror stories: adhesions, two‑hour surgery with every organ manipulated, awake without “loopy drugs,” drunk surgeon in another case, multiple layers and instruments (forceps, “bladder blade”) instead of the simple cut most people imagine.* Forceps deliveries (baby’s head clamped with metal instruments, higher risk of severe tears).* Vacuum‑assisted birth with no epidural, tearing “to my ass.”* Epidural issues: catheters left in the back, epidurals that can be “unplugged,” epidurals that fail entirely so pain is still extreme.* Pain of cervical dilation (and IUD insertion used as a reference point), with emphasis that nobody explains this upfront.* Cervix and uterus changes: permanent uterine enlargement, cervix dilation/effacement as unseen but excruciating changes.* Eating or handling placentas (and the idea of placentophagy being sold as healthy) being viscerally repulsive.Pregnancy complications and body changes* Detached retinas / blindness from pushing too hard in labor; cases of permanent severe visual loss and disability.* Pregnancy‑related eye trauma like subconjunctival hemorrhages (bloodshot eyes from pushing).* Pregnancy‑related cancers (choriocarcinoma) that can arise after normal pregnancy, ectopic pregnancy, molar pregnancy, or miscarriage.* High blood pressure disorders like preeclampsia (including grotesque swelling and “squishy gel hairbrush” legs), with inadequate research and answers.* Jaundiced newborns and the stress of their care (also used as a reminder of hidden complications).* Lithopedion (“stone baby”): calcified ectopic pregnancies carried for decades, sometimes discovered in old age.* Fetus‑in‑fetu / parasitic twins: one twin growing inside another’s body or skull; parasitic twin cases discovered in teens.* Multiple uteruses (uterus didelphys), including rare cases of simultaneous pregnancies in both, and the associated risk of double pregnancy.* Superfetation: getting pregnant again while already pregnant, leading to extra fetuses weeks apart.* Extreme multiples: triplets, quintuplets, and even the documented nonuplets (nine babies), with unmanageable risk and burden.* Uterus or placenta allergies and oddities (itchy uterus from amniotic fluid, mothers allergic to various pregnancy‑related substances).* New allergies developing after pregnancy (to antibiotics, adhesives, metals, pine nuts, dogs, insects, etc.), including a friend “allergic to her legs.”* Lactation‑related tumors and growths (pregnancy tumors / pyogenic granulomas on gums or elsewhere).* Chromhidrosis (colored sweat), including pregnant people turning toilet seats blue.* Extreme swelling of hands, feet, and noses; preeclampsia‑related edema; “pregnancy nose” growth and swelling.* Brain changes: measurable shrinkage in regions related to social cognition, with “pregnancy brain” symptoms like memory issues, poor focus, and enduring structural changes detectable years later.* Pregnancy rhinitis and sensory loss: severe congestion leading to loss of smell and taste; earlier pregnancy caused hearing loss; pregnancy stacking sensory deficits.* Postpartum hair loss to the point of partial balding even more than a year after birth.* Postpartum diastasis recti (ab separation) severe enough that a practitioner can press fingers between muscles and feel the aorta; associated back pain, constipation, and urine leakage.* Decorvain’s tenosynovitis (“mommy’s wrist”): tendon swelling from repetitive lifting of babies, laundry, groceries, etc., potentially requiring splints or surgery and causing lasting hand/wrist disability.* Loss of ability to burp (RCPD‑like symptoms) arising after pregnancies, sometimes reversing only after later pregnancies.* Permanent changes in teeth and bones: baby “sucking the calcium” out, teeth rotting or falling out, multiple root canals, bone density changes.* Toenails softening and falling off after birth, sometimes never growing back.* New allergies or sensitivities to tattoos, metals, adhesives after pregnancy that complicate future medical care.* Nasal, skin, or other pigment changes; white or lighter hair; other unexpected cosmetic shifts.* Long‑term depression and anxiety, often in line with maternal family history; fear of passing down the same nervous system and mood disorders.Breastfeeding and lactation horrors* Babies causing nipple trauma, including nipples turning black/white (ischemia), “dead” nipple tissue.* Babies literally sucking off part of a nipple; pieces ending up in the baby’s mouth and needing reattachment.* Nipple puncture wounds from baby teeth, leaving permanent holes.* Severe breastfeeding pain: clenching against anticipated pain at every latch, blood in milk, cracked nipples.* Ongoing leakage from breasts in public, constant fear of spontaneous milk letdown.* Milk “pregnancy tumors” in gums/teeth and pregnancy‑related gum growths while breastfeeding.* Breast pumps and breastfeeding schedules requiring waking every 2–3 hours regardless of who is feeding, destroying sleep.* Need to pump even when partner bottle‑feeds to maintain supply, so the birthing parent’s sleep is still fragmented.Neonatal and baby health issues* Babies born with teeth or extra teeth, including terrifying images of infant skulls full of stacked teeth.* Infants born with “boobs” and lactation (hormonal breast tissue in newborns), requiring parents to express milk from babies’ chests.* Newborn periods in baby girls, from maternal hormones, shocking parents who weren’t warned.* Babies swallowing their own meconium at birth and suffering severe respiratory distress.* Babies with no instinct to eat, crying for hours and needing forced feeding.* Babies forgetting to breathe during overwhelming emotions; breath‑holding spells that terrify caregivers.* Severe newborn jaundice requiring treatment and parental stress.* NICU stays for weeks or months, with enormous financial and emotional cost.Medical system and informed consent issues* Hidden information: lack of comprehensive sex/family‑planning education about what birth and postpartum are actually like.* Dismissive or negligent medical staff (e.g., nurse sending a woman home at 1 cm when she’s clearly in labor, then she delivers at home or en route).* OBs scolding patients for coughing with pneumonia during C‑section and stuffing organs back in without care, leaving disfiguring scars.* Drunk surgeon doing a C‑section on another patient and being fired later.* Multiple, painful postpartum pelvic exams without pain relief while the mother is unable to hold the baby.* Under‑researched conditions (e.g., rare lactation or vascular complications) with little scientific literature or explanation.* Framing: society romanticizing pregnancy and parenthood, omitting trauma, leading to feelings of personal failure when reality is hard.Financial burden* Hospital birth bills in the tens of thousands to nearly $50,000 for a single uncomplicated birth before insurance.* NICU bills for triplets without insurance running into hundreds of thousands per baby.* Charges such as $36,000 for the first 24 hours of life, $4,000 for skin‑to‑skin contact, $17,000 for a one‑day hospital room.* Ongoing annual childcare costs around $20,000 per child, adding up to $100,000–120,000 for ages 0–5.* Estimates of $237,000+ to raise a child to 18 (excluding college), plus another roughly $100,000 for college.* Formula costs of $38–50 per can that lasts only a few days, making infant feeding extremely expensive.* One mom’s yearly cost for three kids around $47,000.* Kids spending hundreds on in‑app purchases like Roblox Robux without permission.* Home destruction costs: multiple replacement TVs, remotes, front door handles, wall repair, and warped floors from leaks.Lifestyle costs: time, freedom, and autonomy* Loss of free time and personal days off (e.g., Sundays now consumed with children’s activities instead of sleeping in and seeing friends).* Constant need to “fill the days” with activities for kids; no spontaneous rest or leisure.* Child‑free lifestyle benefits: travel, expensive city living, pampering oneself, double income no kids (DINK) life.* Inability to travel light: car seats, diaper bags, etc., turning flights into logistics nightmares.* Need to manage diapers, feeding schedules, and baby entertainment on planes, plus anxiety about disturbing others.* Never being off‑duty, including caring for children while sick yourself.* Introverts and easily overstimulated people losing the quiet, solitary recovery time they rely on.* Having to cook three meals plus snacks daily, often separate bland food for kids, destroying the joy of cooking or eating spicy food.* Having to attend endless kids’ appointments and activities on top of work.* Permanent vigilance: always monitoring kids’ safety, bodily functions, and behaviors.Psychological and relationship impacts* Postnatal depression, psychosis, and long‑term mental health crises leading some parents to vow never to repeat pregnancy.* Pregnancy hormones causing intense, often irrational hatred or intolerance toward partners (“I hated my husband while I was pregnant”).* Strain on relationships: changed dynamics with partners, loss of sense of self, resentment.* Overstimulation from hearing “Mom” hundreds of times per day (e.g., 234 “Mom”s in 13 hours, ~85,000 per year).* Guilt and shame from not living up to romanticized ideals of motherhood.* People‑pleasing parents being unable to cope with public tantrums, plane screams, or feeling like they are “ruining” others’ experiences.* Loss of identity, body image issues, and grief over the pre‑baby self and lifestyle.Children’s bodily fluids and hygiene issues* Endless poop incidents: blowouts before weddings, on floors, in pools, on parents’ clothes, on hospital staff.* Toddlers wiping feces down every stair or making “art” on walls with urine or feces.* Dogs eating children’s feces from the yard or house.* Kids peeing in conditioners, dog bowls, carpets, dishwashers, and elsewhere, contaminating everyday objects.* Persistent smells: rancid pee in vents, years‑long odor issues preventing home resale.* Vomit parties: children intentionally drinking water to induce vomiting throughout the house.* Chronic vomiting and diarrhea episodes parents must clean while sleep‑deprived.Household destruction and mess* Children destroying multiple TVs, remotes, and door hardware within a year.* Kids hammering holes in walls, pulling off door handles, eating drywall, and requiring constant repainting and patching.* Paint disasters: kids smearing house paint over furniture, floors, and even entire condos; black paint on everything.* Flour, eggs, baby powder, and other cooking ingredients dumped all over carpets and floors, turning into intractable sludge.* Baby powder explosions requiring strong vacuums and toothbrushes to clean.* Stickers covering TVs, leaving permanent sticky residue that collects dirt.* Syrup “cup holders” carved into couches; couch destruction.* Flooded houses from kids playing with sinks or fridges; warped floors, broken ice makers.* Kids eating walls and needing corner protectors to stop them from biting again.* Constant car‑seat filth: crumbs, poop, and stains that never fully clean out.Physical danger from kids’ behavior* Toddlers head‑butting parents and causing concussions, black eyes, migraines, and memory loss.* Kids biting adults hard enough to cause infections requiring antibiotics; “second most dangerous bite.”* Human bites leading to non‑healing wounds and risk of limb loss.* Babies scratching mothers’ insides during birth with fully grown fingernails, causing internal stitches.* Kids pulling fridge water/ice dispensers nonstop, causing water damage and hazards.* Children nearly drowning caregivers (roughhousing in pools) without understanding the danger.* Kids dropping heavy objects, throwing iPads into ponds, or otherwise causing injuries and expensive losses.* Baby skulls full of developing teeth, plus parents needing to forcibly remove loose teeth in painful ways.Sleep deprivation and constant noise* Night terrors: toddlers screaming with eyes open for hours while asleep, terrifying parents.* Colicky babies crying for hours despite parents’ efforts; parents “just surviving.”* Babies needing to be bounced on exercise balls for hours every night.* Children constantly yelling “Mommy” or screaming; continuous audio overstimulation.* Sleep deprivation from feeding schedules, night wakings, and frequent illnesses.* Parents unable to shower or change clothes for days; living in the same clothes while caring for infants.Social, cultural, and structural reasons* Unaffordable, inaccessible childcare systems; poor parental leave; lack of social support for parents, especially in the U.S.* Pressure from family (e.g., religious households, Thanksgiving interrogations) to marry and have kids despite personal ambivalence.* Romanticization of pregnancy and motherhood in media, hiding risks and hardships.* Unsolicited advice and criticism directed at both child‑free people and parents (“you’ll change your mind,” breastfeeding debates, etc.).* Fear of being responsible for a screaming child on a plane and being judged by strangers.* Concern about passing on generational trauma, mental illness, or unhealthy patterns.Personal lifestyle and preference reasons* Love of travel, concerts, gaming, hobbies (miniatures, comics, snakes, bones) that would be curtailed by kids.* Desire to keep a home wired with cables, gamer setups, and fragile collectibles without child‑proofing or sticky fingers.* Disinterest in revisiting schoolwork and homework via children.* Sensory issues and low tolerance for crying or touch, incompatible with early parenting demands.* Preference for quiet, orderly homes and uncluttered floors.* Desire to remain lazy, spontaneous, and self‑oriented without 24/7 caregiving work.* Desire to be “rich auntie” rather than parent; using resources for self, travel, or pets.* Fear of losing sexual freedom, nudity at home, or other adult lifestyle choices.Episode Transcript[00:00:00] Malcolm Collins: Hello, everyone. I’m excited to be here with you today. Today, Simone has kept whatever this topic is going to be a secret from me all day because she wanted to see my reaction for, like, a day and a half at this point.[00:00:10] So what is it, Simone? What, what is it that you wanted to go over?[00:00:15] Simone Collins: What if I told you that there is, there’s a system for convincing women to not have children that men don’t know about because they don’t consume girly content, and it’s just floating around on the internet becoming quite influential and pervasive, changing people’s lives.[00:00:34] And- I,[00:00:34] Malcolm Collins: it sounds like the usual bad guys up to their usual stuff, but why don’t I know about this? Do I not know about this? Do you know about[00:00:41] Simone Collins: the girl with the list?[00:00:44] Malcolm Collins: I have never heard about the girl with the list.[00:00:46] Simone Collins: She’s like Batman. She’s summoned. So there are two types of videos on which you might look to the comments and you’ll see, “Where’s the girl with the list?”[00:00:55] And she gets summoned. She will show up or be summoned on super cute videos of babies or toddlers, or on things going- What? ... absolutely horrible with pregnancy, with delivery, with breastfeeding, with raising toddlers. Because what the girl with the list does is provide you with a virtual form of birth control by taking any cute video you see and just reminding you how horrible it is to be pregnant, to have kids, and to become a k- a parent.[00:01:25] So- Wait,[00:01:25] Malcolm Collins: really? Is she a mom? For[00:01:27] Simone Collins: real. What’s her[00:01:27] Malcolm Collins: backstory?[00:01:28] Simone Collins: She’s n- no, yeah, yeah. I, I will tell you. There are actually, Malcolm, there are actually two girls with a list. One calls herself the OG girl with a list, but she has just, just completely disappeared from the internet. And then the second is who I’ll mostly focus on today.[00:01:43] She’s named Abigail Porter. She goes by Zoomie. Okay. She has 1.6 million followers on TikTok, and she’s famous for curing baby fever by creating abundant shorts on pregnancy and delivery and body horror related to it, basically. A plus frustrating experiences that parents have while they attempt to raise kids.[00:02:03] And even I not being particularly interested in cute baby photos or b- pregnancy body horror, ‘cause I live it I have just this week heard of her twice. I- in just my random girly content that I follow on Instagram[00:02:19] Malcolm Collins: You ... Wait, so you just have randomly seen it. Can you describe the[00:02:22] Simone Collins: instances?[00:02:22] Yeah. Like, in the, the most recent video I, where I was like, “Okay, I’ve gotta do an episode on this,” just this week I was watching a video where a woman is, just said, “She changed my life. I literally owe her everything,” she said. And this was in a video about, let’s see, what was the video about? I’m linking to all this in my show notes.[00:02:39] It was called about The Real Dangers of Trad Wife, Trad Wife Content, Nine Kids and Counting. I mean, you know, I see this stuff and I’m like, “I have to click on it.” Mm-hmm. I have to know why apparently it’s so bad to be, to be a mother. So yeah- ... I, she literally changed my life. Okay, like, I needed to find out who this was.[00:02:57] And also, I’ve heard, there are lots of people in the Base Camp network who are dating young men, who would like to find a wife, who would like to have kids, and I’m hearing more and more from young men that, like, the, the, the women they are dating are like, “Well, I, I never wanna become a parent. Like, I don’t, I don’t wanna be a parent.”[00:03:13] Malcolm Collins: I know. Yeah. Well, the, the psyop, you, you’ve got to groom your wife. Liefleit said it best. Actually, I think we said that first, and then she copied it from us, but I like that she, she’s boarding[00:03:22] Simone Collins: that point. Maybe. I don’t, I don’t care who said it first. Look, you gotta do it.[00:03:25][00:03:34] Simone Collins: And, and that’s, we’re gonna talk about this at the end, basically how to deal with this.[00:03:37] But I, if, to first address the problem, be you a woman who is being subject to this, for lack of a better word, propaganda,[00:03:46] Malcolm Collins: Brainwashing ...[00:03:46] Simone Collins: brainwashing. Or if you’re a young man who’s met an amazing young woman who you think would actually enjoy being a parent, but who’s terrified of it because of this content, we, we need to-[00:03:58] Malcolm Collins: Wait, so to [00:04:00] clarify, this woman felt that she had had, like, her life saved by the girl with the list?[00:04:06] Simone Collins: Yes. So the, the YouTuber that I’m talking about I think probably b- ga- based on the fact that she said, “I literally owe her everything,” i- in my show notes, I’ll send them to you I link to the exact clip where she says this, it, it very much insinuates that she plans on not having kids because of Abigail Porter’s content.[00:04:24] But, okay, just to be clear, so the, sort of background. The first person to do this was this other TikTok creator called Uni. And then eventually, this, this creator created a list, also linked, too, called U- Uni’s Pros and Cons of Having Children. And it has, like, 200 and something cons, and then like, 30 pros or something, and the pros aren’t even, like- That good?[00:04:48] things that... Yeah, like, what do you even... No, that’s not, that’s not why we have kids. And, and so let’s just dive right into it. We[00:04:55] Malcolm Collins: will replace you. That’s our goal. Come on, that’s, that’s what this is all about, winning- Yeah ... the civilizational game. Basically- And they, they don’t get that. They never would get that.[00:05:02] But, yeah, okay, c- continue.[00:05:04] Simone Collins: Yeah. I’ve, I’ve watched over four hours of compilations of-[00:05:09] Malcolm Collins: Over four hours- Yes ... you... Simone.[00:05:12] Simone Collins: Of Abigail Porter’s content.[00:05:14] I’ve gone, I mean, she created on YouTube this compilation of a certain number of years’ worth of her content. I’ve, I’ve gone from watching her having a short pixie cut to a shaved head to hair down to here.[00:05:27] Like, it’s, she’s been doing this for a long time. I think you’d actually find her very attractive. She’s very much your type. Oh, gosh ...[00:05:34] Malcolm Collins: and[00:05:34] Simone Collins: she’s a ginge. She’s very beautiful, so that, that helps. And she... They’re great. I mean, it, a lot of it’s humor. A lot of it’s like America’s Hu- Funniest Home Videos, ‘cause I mean, she’s, she’s being tagged on viral content, and her job basically is to, like, open her phone every mor- I mean, this isn’t obviously her only work, but what she’ll do is probably, presumably, open her phone every morning, see where she’s tagged on TikTok, and then take those clips and make her own little commentary on them and publish them out to her crowd, and then her, her followers.[00:06:00] So her- She’s actually- Wait, her[00:06:01] Malcolm Collins: name is Abigail Porter, you said?[00:06:04] Simone Collins: But she goes by Zumi. Yeah.[00:06:06] Malcolm Collins: Okay. I’ll, I’ll look her up to see if I agree with your assessment.[00:06:09] Simone Collins: Y- no, you’ll find her so cute.[00:06:10] This is her recent Los Angeles profile. So this is what she looks like today with longer hair.[00:06:15] Malcolm Collins: Yeah, she’s cute. She’s my type, for sure.[00:06:17] Simone Collins: Yeah, absolutely.[00:06:18] Malcolm Collins: I mean- ... she looks too old now. I, I wouldn’t date her like- She’s-[00:06:21] in real life[00:06:22] Simone Collins: with what she looks like today ... she looks very young. Oh, get over yourself, Malcolm. Anyway I think she’s very pretty. But also that doesn’t really matter. And she has a boyfriend and they’re very happy. They’re very happy dinks. But let’s go to[00:06:31] Malcolm Collins: your- Oh my God, her Substack profile, Reproductive Rights Advocate Reminding You To Take Your Birth Control.[00:06:36] That’s what she does. Also known as the girl with a list. Okay, continue.[00:06:38] Simone Collins: The girl with a list. So in terms of how the content that she, she presents that will dissuade young women old women, a- any woman from- Yeah ... from wanting to have babies is, is sort of, I’ll, I’ll start with some highlights.[00:06:52] Let’s start with s- some highlights, okay? ‘Cause, and these are, like, original clips. She, these are women who’ve gone through this. They’re, this is actual firsthand video footage. This isn’t stuff that’s made up, ‘cause you can literally see it. There’s one where a, a woman, a woman’s insides needed stitches after her baby scratched her from the inside on the way out, ‘cause it had its fingernails grew in, and they do that.[00:07:11] A woman whose baby began to choke on her nipple, and then it just literally fell off because it was so infected at that point from mastitis and other issues. A woman who grew a tumor on her lip the size of her pinky while she was pregnant, because one of the things that can happen when you’re pregnant is to grow benign tunors, tumors.[00:07:26] Uh-huh. A woman who, Oh, well, of course, l- women who’ve lost their hair, their teeth, all their eyelashes. A woman who developed a mutation during pregnancy that made her insensitive to pain meds who had to endure a C-section with no medication. She just eventually passed out from the, from the pain. There’s a woman who went deaf after her kid kissed her on the ear causing what’s called the kiss of death.[00:07:48] And I had to look this up. This is actually a thing. It’s, it’s a cochlear ear kiss injury also known as Reader’s Ear Kiss Syndrome, REKS. Yeah. So, like, don’t let your... We need to, like, not let the kids close to our ears [00:08:00] anymore. There’s a woman whose retina’s detached because she was pushing so hard in labor.[00:08:03] Women whose bodies have become both temporarily and permanently deformed or uglified. We’re talking swollen hands and feet, s- legs, ver- varicose veins That this is a[00:08:11] Malcolm Collins: worth it for a human life. Anybody[00:08:14] Simone Collins: would take these injuries- Popped blood vessels in the eyes ... for their child. I had the popped blood vessels in the eyes.[00:08:18] Remember that time where I had the blood vessels on the podcast? Oh, yeah, you did. I[00:08:20] Malcolm Collins: seem to think that was[00:08:20] Simone Collins: maybe... I know, yeah, and the varicose veins, that’s real.[00:08:22] Malcolm Collins: But every woman has tough pregnancies from what I hear these days. You know, almost... th- I, I occasionally hear of really easy ones, but generally speaking, pregnancies are hard today.[00:08:31] And you know,[00:08:32] Simone Collins: it’s expected to be hard. Today? I think pregnancies have always had their things. Yeah,[00:08:35] Malcolm Collins: they used to be a lot harder. Did you know that on average, women lost one tooth per pregnancy?[00:08:39] Simone Collins: I, I think that’s apocryphal.[00:08:41] Speaker: So I decided to research to see if this is, , an apocryphal old wives’ tale. , First of all, this is way more common a historic story than I thought. , There are proverbs that mean something like, “Gain a child, lose a tooth,” in Danish, in German, in Scandinavian, in Russian, and in Japanese. , And there have been, , studies on this to see if this is accurate.[00:09:07] , There was a landmark 1998 study in The Lancet. There was a large U.S. study by researcher Stephen Russell. , There was , a twin study on this. , And basically what everything found is that it is kind of in-- right. It’s basically right. , It’s not exactly one child, one tooth, , but it’s more children, fewer teeth.[00:09:28] , And the reason for this is, , pregnancy hormones make gums much more reactive to plaque. This causes pr-pregnancy gingivitis in a large percentage of women, often cited as thirty to seventy-five percent or higher. , And repeated episodes of gingivitis across multiple pregnancies can lead to, , deeper infections which lead to the losing of teeth.[00:09:50] , But w-w-- I had no idea. Th-this is wild[00:09:53] Simone Collins: But ye- yeah, I mean, you know, if you’re, if you’re[00:09:56] Malcolm Collins: already- You’re the one who told me.[00:09:57] Simone Collins: No, I didn’t. I never said that. I think that was someone else. Yeah, you[00:09:59] Malcolm Collins: did.[00:09:59] Simone Collins: I think you came home from Natal Con with that but I’m, I’m not sure. But anyway, the... in her content, there are basically four themes. There’s relatively unusual medical conditions from pregnancy and lactation, like uterine prolapse, and apparently when that happens, by the way, you know what you’re supposed to do to fix it?[00:10:15] Malcolm Collins: What?[00:10:16] Simone Collins: Shove it back in. You’re supposed to, you’re supposed to just push it back in.[00:10:20] Malcolm Collins: Okay.[00:10:21] Simone Collins: Which, I mean, it makes sense. But it seems very uncomfortable. So that, there’s that. And, you know, there are various forms of body horror. Then also just the expenses of labor and delivery, you know, just how ridiculous it is.[00:10:31] And when people go through their itemized bills, that’s an easy thing to go viral on TikTok.[00:10:35] Malcolm Collins: Yeah, that’s a, that’s a more, yeah. But with a lot of this stuff, it’s like, “This is why you shouldn’t drive,” and it’s just a bunch of pictures of people who got killed in car accidents. And it’s like-[00:10:42] Simone Collins: Yeah, no, one...[00:10:43] And I’m gonna talk about that, yeah. There’s also poop and pee humor, or, well, and horror, of course. And then super common, like, parenting, pregnancy, and postpartum stuff, like fussy babies who are only calm when they’re bounced, or the rectus abdominis being separated in pregnancy, or swelling, or using an Otriede to suck snot out of a baby’s nose.[00:11:03] Like, that’s terrifying or something. Or-[00:11:05] Malcolm Collins: Yeah, that’s something that we have to do with a lot of our kids.[00:11:08] Simone Collins: Yeah, like every parent has an Otriede. Like, would you rather have your baby screaming in pain, or y- like, suck out the snot with a tube? There’s a filter. There’s a filter. Or having strangers on the internet jump down your throat just ‘cause you mentioned the word breastfeeding in a post online, or kids making messes around the h- the house and, like, we’re talking the flooding, the vandalism.[00:11:27] A lot of the stuff that she posts that’s, like, kids ruining houses or making big messes is all stuff, honestly, that’s the parents’ fault. Like, you have to learn the hard way to, like, childproof your home, and all of these are, they’re results of not proper childproofing. So a lot of this is actually kind of helpful content, ‘cause it’s like, “Oh, this is something to head off.”[00:11:46] But the reason why this is damaging and not just funny or informative is that- There’s, there, like, it just goes for, like, the, the most common psychological trips your, and tr- sorry, tricks that, that will get you. You know, there’s [00:12:00] one, like, availability heuristic that Yuri and Abigail with these lists are, are making the hazards of parenting and pregnancy look extremely visible and available in people’s minds.[00:12:12] They’re just, like, super top of mind. And it’s, it, it’s gonna make people only think about the negative. Whereas it’s extremely easy to do exactly the same thing Abigail does with other life choices. And that includes especially life choices of people who choose not to have kids. Like, I think you and I have, we follow this, this, basically the equivalent of this genre with hiking- Mm-hmm[00:12:33] and going outdoors with, like, Mr. Ball and- Oh my God,[00:12:35] Malcolm Collins: yes. Mr. Ball and, and everything like that. Exactly. I genuinely think every time I go to the woods, everyone’s gonna disappear.[00:12:39] Simone Collins: I know. I know. But[00:12:41] Malcolm Collins: like- 411, Lore Lodge. Exactly. It’s, like, one of my core categories of content.[00:12:45] Simone Collins: Yeah, so, like, Abigail and Yuri, the girls with the lists, they are that, but for, for pregnancy.[00:12:51] So yeah, and there’s also cosmetic surgery. I, that’s another version of this genre that I love. Like, Wani is a creator whose, whose content I love on this front, ‘cause he specifically covers plastic surgery that goes super wrong in China. Mm ... there’s buying homes. I don’t know if you know, there’s this whole genre of home inspectors uploading their videos.[00:13:09] And they’ll just go through new constructed houses, or just any house, and be like, “Oh, look, this is broken. Oh, like, toilet’s not hanged right.”[00:13:15] Malcolm Collins: Well, actually, you have got me into something interesting here. I would assume, like, just hearing a lot of this to begin with, is that this is a lot of women who have secretly kind of want babies.[00:13:25] They secretly know that their lives will be incomplete without[00:13:28] Simone Collins: them. Well, the point is they ac- no, they have baby fever. The, the[00:13:31] Malcolm Collins: point is- And they, they want to find some way to suppress it or make their terrible life decisions feel justified,[00:13:40] Simone Collins: or- No, no, no. That, that is not, that is not a what if. That is a literally that’s what’s happening.[00:13:43] Malcolm Collins: No, no, no, no, no. Well, you, you, you, you say[00:13:46] Simone Collins: that, right? Her videos often go... Like, here’s the format she uses, ‘cause again, I’ve watched over four hours of these is cute baby, cute baby video that went viral on TikTok, and then her being like, “Nuh-uh-uh, Zumi here to provide you with your online birth control to stop you or cure your baby fever.”[00:14:00] And like, that’s the whole thing. But- And then she goes into the horror story ...[00:14:02] Malcolm Collins: the, the point I’m making is- Okay ... I could have that impression, and, and it, it is what I would jump to.[00:14:09] Simone Collins: Okay.[00:14:10] Malcolm Collins: But I consume a very similar form of content, and I clearly don’t consume it for that reason. Mm-hmm. I do not consume Mr.[00:14:20] Ballen because I secretly want to jump out of airplanes or-[00:14:24] Simone Collins: Oh, ‘cause you, you crave the... You wanna go backpacking along the[00:14:28] Malcolm Collins: Appalachian Trail. Or become a caver. There, there’s actually... B- because the caving videos are, like, one of my videos that, that I watch a lot of. If[00:14:35] Simone Collins: any of you cave, what? Stop. Stop.[00:14:38] Malcolm Collins: I have never in my entire life seen a tiny hole and felt an urge to shove myself as deep as I can in the tiny hole.[00:14:48] There[00:14:49] Simone Collins: is a- Do you think it’s a fetish, actually? Wait, hold on. When you put it that way.[00:14:52] Malcolm Collins: I c- is it a fetish? Is caving a fetish? I, like, can’t imagine a real human emotion that would lead you to want to do that.[00:14:59] Simone Collins: Well, no. But, like... So I, I... Y- you can also look at those those vacuum bags that people use for sexy times.[00:15:05] And I’m like, okay, well, I can’t imagine myself doing that. I, I just now that you put it that way, I’m like, “Oh.” That could be it. Anyway, keep going. ‘Cause also they’re wet a lot of... Oh, no. Sorry,[00:15:16] Malcolm Collins: Oh, and the horrible ways you die when caving.[00:15:18] Simone Collins: Yeah.[00:15:18] Malcolm Collins: Yeah, yep ... and this is the thing. It’s not that I don’t like caves.[00:15:20] Like, I’ve been spelunking to, like, big, nice mapped caves to see a different environment. I have found- Yeah ... that to be a very pleasant and fun experience. Have you,[00:15:29] Simone Collins: have you scuba, have you scuba’d in caves?[00:15:31] Malcolm Collins: I have, I have cave di- d- dived, done cave dives before. You have dived. Which is a very dangerous form of diving.[00:15:37] But-[00:15:37] Simone Collins: That is super dangerous diving ... we, I- Oh my God, I remember, like, snorkeling in the cenotes in the Yucatan and watching, like, I remember watching one guy go down with two extra tanks, and then I was there for, like, two or three hours and he didn’t come out, and I’m like, “Sir.”[00:15:55] Malcolm Collins: But when I have been cave diving, when I have been [00:16:00] spelunking, when people die in these things, at least the videos that I watch, it’s always, “And then they saw a two-foot hole and shoved themselves in it.”[00:16:09] Yeah,[00:16:09] Simone Collins: it’s[00:16:09] Malcolm Collins: like- Like a fricking pelican or some- what, what’s the bird that sticks his head in the sand? Flamingo.[00:16:14] An[00:16:14] Simone Collins: ostrich?[00:16:15] Speaker 2: A man was exploring the Nutty Putty Cave in 2009, and he wanted to go through one of the tightest stretches called the Birth Canal.[00:16:24] Simone Collins: I don’t actually think ostriches- Ostrich,[00:16:25] Malcolm Collins: yeah ...[00:16:26] Simone Collins: they’re, they apocryphy, apoc- apocryphally do that. They don’t actually do that, I think.[00:16:30] This time Sona is right. , And crazily, this apocryphal story goes back to Pliny the Elder[00:16:36] Malcolm Collins: Well, it’s not an apocryphy that idiots in Utah do this all the time.[00:16:41] ... There’s nothing interesting you’re going to see in this little hole. You ding idiot.[00:16:46] Simone Collins: It’s dark. It’s gonna look dark, and there will be darkness.[00:16:50] Malcolm Collins: Oh. You’re not gonna find some what... Like, get your f*****g head out. But the thing is- ... is I have to ask myself, how many of the women watching this are trying to suppress the instinct, trying to cure FOMO?[00:17:03] How many of the women who are watching this are like me? And, and then there’s the other category- Schadenfreude.[00:17:09] Simone Collins: I think there, there’s a lot of schadenfreude for, like, DINK couples. You, you will enjoy your DINK lifestyle even if you never want kids even more if you’re just watching[00:17:19] Malcolm Collins: people who chose- Yeah, but I have another type of schadenfreude that I watch videos all the time for, which could be another desire for this.[00:17:25] It could be cucking-[00:17:25] Simone Collins: Okay. Okay ...[00:17:26] Malcolm Collins: you here.[00:17:27] Simone Collins: Go on[00:17:27] Malcolm Collins: I love watching incredibly misogynistic red pill content about- ... terrible experiences men have had dating and being married. You know, like MGTOW content and stuff like that. Like that- Okay ... Sandman on it, like, I’ve watched his videos, you know, pushing, like, MGTOW lifestyles and stuff.[00:17:42] He’s not even that bad. Oh,[00:17:43] Simone Collins: but Sandman’s awesome. No, don’t come for Sandman.[00:17:45] Malcolm Collins: But there’s other, there’s a whole category, and we, we actually utilize it in our title cards, where it is sad woman who made a mistake. But this- Are[00:17:53] Simone Collins: we doing that for this? No, I, I think I should just use a normal picture of Abigail ‘[00:17:57] Malcolm Collins: cause she’s pretty.[00:17:58] This category of video I watch not to, like, give myself like, n- a lack of FOMO around dating, but because I like to hear how much better I did in the dating market than all of these people- Uh-huh ... and about their terrible lives compared to just finding a good woman and treating her well, right? Like, you, you, you hear the stories, you hear I mean, it’s as obvious between the lines as it is when you have one of those women out there screeching about why the fifth guy didn’t like them just because X, Y, and Z, totally insane things.[00:18:30] And on a lot of these, you know,[00:18:32] Simone Collins: in- Oh, have you heard the new thing on X that’s trending is hiplets? Have you heard about the hiplet controversy?[00:18:37] Malcolm Collins: What, what is this?[00:18:39] Simone Collins: I guess some women’s hips kind of divot inward above- Okay ... the hip bone. And some men are like, “I don’t, I’m just not into that.[00:18:46] Like, I don’t wanna date women with hiplets.” And women are like, “How dare you? I can’t control my morphology.[00:18:52] That’s how I’m born.” And men are like, “Oh, really? ‘Cause you didn’t have that reaction when I was under six feet and you wouldn’t talk to me.” So there’s a lot of smugness going on online. But yeah, that’s also a thing.[00:19:03] Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Oh, weird. Weird. Hiplet. Do I find it attr- unattractive? I, I can’t even imagine what they’re talking about. Hold on. Let me think. D- I’ll, I’ll make a judgment on hiplet. Just Google hiplet. Yeah. Or hip[00:19:10] Simone Collins: divot. I’m just sending you an X post.[00:19:12] Malcolm Collins: Yeah, you gotta send me an X post. This is not, it’s not coming through, so.[00:19:15] Simone Collins: It’s, it’s, it’s obscure enough where... But anyway, this is one of the... It’s been trending on X, like, all weekend. It’s on WhatsApp.[00:19:21] Malcolm Collins: Ew.[00:19:22] Simone Collins: Oh, wow. So that was a reaction[00:19:25] Malcolm Collins: Yeah, that is not good-looking.[00:19:28] Simone Collins: Okay. I see- ... where you stand on this.[00:19:33] Malcolm Collins: Yeah, you, you definitely don’t have those, I’ll tell you that.[00:19:35] Simone Collins: No, I don’t. I don’t. Where, w- wow. Okay. I like your theory, though. I, I think that there’s the, I think her content does really well because it does fit a bunch of different interests, right?[00:19:47] There’s the shodan fraud, there’s the smug my life is so good feeling. There’s the I really want a baby, no, I, I don’t want a baby ‘cause I’m an independent woman who’s never gonna have a baby, or I can’t have a baby ‘cause I can’t find a [00:20:00] good guy. So this, all of this, all of this can be satisfied by Girl With a List posts.[00:20:05] And it, and we have all these other genres that make us very happy with our lives. I love to watch the hiking videos. I love to watch the cosmetic surgery gone wrong videos. I love to watch the buying home gone wrong videos. There’s also people who do, like, eating out at restaurants, like all the stuff that’s going on behind the scenes you don’t wanna know about.[00:20:23] And so you can- Oh, God. Disgusting ... you can effectively, yeah. Are[00:20:25] Malcolm Collins: you glad we don’t eat out?[00:20:26] Simone Collins: Very, actually. The, you, you can basically, though, my point being, you, you can develop an aversion to, or even a phobia of pretty much anything by giving yourself to sufficient exposure to its hazards, just because it becomes so, so available in, in your, your brain.[00:20:44] And this genre can be a form of opt-in brainwashing. Though, in a worse case scenario, they could be a form of unintentional algorithmically led brainwashing. Mm. And especially given the way that TikTok works, th- they, you, you get into it, you comment on this positively at one point, and you end up getting in this engagement loop with this kind of content and just seeing more and more of it, even if you didn’t necessarily want to brainwash yourself into being afraid of having a baby.[00:21:14] Then there’s also[00:21:15] Malcolm Collins: just- Well, yeah, I didn’t, I didn’t w- mean to become brainwashed of going into American national parks. But you watch enough, you know, Lore Lodge, 411, Mr. Ballen- ... and you’re just like and I’ve had panic moments because of that. Like, when we’re playing with our kids in the woods and one of them- Yeah[00:21:30] decides he’s gonna go home without- Yeah ... telling me.[00:21:33] Simone Collins: Yeah.[00:21:33] Malcolm Collins: And I’m running around screaming because-[00:21:36] Simone Collins: Because that’s always, always with the kid ones. It’s like, well, the kid was just with us one moment, we’re all walking down the trail, and then the next moment they’re gone and we never heard from them again.[00:21:43] Yeah. Like, that’s always the way it goes. The kid was right there. The kid was right there. Then they, they put up this massive search party. I don’t, if Mr. Ballen got a dollar for every time he said this massive search party, he’d be, he’d be a millionaire.[00:21:58] Malcolm Collins: I haven’t watched much Mr. Ballen in a couple years, to be honest.[00:22:01] Simone Collins: I had to stop watching his content because I came across one video where a baby got hurt and, you know, I can’t handle it.[00:22:07] Malcolm Collins: Oh. Well, I, I think he sort of ran out of good mysteries, though, I’m gonna be honest.[00:22:10] Simone Collins: Yeah, yeah. Yeah. It was like, it got, it got to, like, very,[00:22:12] Malcolm Collins: There’s always-[00:22:13] Simone Collins: He was, he had to start digging into crime reporting, and that’s where it just gets really depressing, instead of like, ooh, what happened in the- Ah, National Park aliens and[00:22:20] Malcolm Collins: Bigfoot[00:22:20] Simone Collins: Yeah.[00:22:20] Like if[00:22:20] Malcolm Collins: you, if you ever have your mystery phase where you like crime mysteries, what you’ll realize is you’ll kind of go through all the good ones in about a year and a half. And there’s only- I,[00:22:31] Simone Collins: it’s a way... We had a great run, Malcolm. It was, it was beautiful. I remember-[00:22:34] Malcolm Collins: Yeah. And then it’s just like- All the trips that the, the stressful trips[00:22:36] rehashing or minor updates or new, new theories, and at that point. It’s the same with good conspiracy theories. There’s only so many, and then you[00:22:43] Simone Collins: run out it, it, everything with this genre. Plastic surgery that’s botched. All, all of the snark, all of the fundie snark, we went through that so fast.[00:22:50] There’s onl- only so many very public fundie families that people can make fun of. Oh-[00:22:55] Malcolm Collins: Yeah ...[00:22:55] Simone Collins: Harry and Meghan snark. I follow most of the major channels. I just, in, I...[00:23:00] Malcolm Collins: I,[00:23:00] Simone Collins: I was so into- They can only do so many bad things, you know? ... Warhammer[00:23:02] Malcolm Collins: lore for a while.[00:23:03] Simone Collins: Oh, yeah, yeah,[00:23:04] Malcolm Collins: yeah. And then I just knew all the Warhammer lore-[00:23:06] and there was nothing more to learn[00:23:09] Simone Collins: Ah, so you just started developing your own religion that’s very Warhammer inspired. Oh, what are we gonna name one of our kids Mechanicus? Oh, you were thinking Crypteia Mechanicus.[00:23:17] Malcolm Collins: Crypteia Mechanicus, our, our next daughter, yeah.[00:23:22] Simone Collins: Okay. All right. Anyway.[00:23:24] Malcolm Collins: It’s[00:23:24] Simone Collins: a beautiful[00:23:24] Malcolm Collins: name- Let’s get on[00:23:25] Simone. It’s a beautiful name.[00:23:27] Simone Collins: Beautiful name, beautiful name. I, w- I wanna get back to the point of the, so there’s one, availability heuristic. There’s also loss aversion, and it’s just important to remind you that, you don’t need to be reminded, but people listening may not be aware that humans are generally way more concerned about losses than gains.[00:23:46] They, they generally weigh potential losses about 1.5 to 2.5 times as much as equally sized gains. So like The, all this stuff isn’t just like, “Oh, okay, well I’m gonna knock [00:24:00] down my interest in pregnancy by one.” No, it’s gonna be by two, even though, you know, other things will only... The, the viral kid video that’s so cute is only gonna knock up your interest one.[00:24:10] So, Abigail is more than canceling out any baby fever that she sparks or that is sparked by the viral baby videos that she’s sent when, in where people summon her. Wait, wait,[00:24:20] Malcolm Collins: does she really? Is this, like, true or...?[00:24:22] Simone Collins: Well, I’m, I’m talking about how loss aversion works in general.[00:24:25] Malcolm Collins: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.[00:24:27] Okay, continue.[00:24:27] Simone Collins: Right? Because, you know, take, take, you know, one token. You have a chance of winning one token or not losing two and a half tokens. Or, sorry not losing two tokens. People are two and a half more times, whatever. You know what I’m talking. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I link to a bunch of this research in my show notes.[00:24:43] You can go read about it if you want. Well, I mean,[00:24:43] Malcolm Collins: she’s helping us. She’s clearing out the gene pool for our kids.[00:24:47] Simone Collins: Yeah. Well, look, if I- spoiler alert, but in the end, I, I think she’s doing amazing work, and I think she’s very ethical, and I like her a lot, so. It’s not just a parasocial relationship. I think she’s doing good work, but we’ll get to that.[00:24:58] But anyway, this means that people are, are, are extra, extra influenced against this. And it’s, it’s kind of even worse than that because both Abigail and Yuri can’t seem to even wrap their heads around, like, the, the rewards of parenting at all. Abigail’s most commonly cited argument is kids are cute.[00:25:16] Whereas Y- Yuri’s list at the, at the end of it she has her, like, whatever, 30 pros after 200 and something, I think over 250 cons. They include child and tax return benefits and tiny everything, which Like first, the tax return benefits are like very, very little considering the costs of children.[00:25:38] Quote, “You cannot get drafted while pregnant,” end quote. So there’s that. You can’t bribe them with candy. Or sorry, you can bribe with them with candy. It was one of her pros, but you and I both know that you can’t.[00:25:49] Malcolm Collins: You can’t. With a toddler. No, we... Actually, one of our kids hates candy. We can threaten him with candy.[00:25:50] “Eat your candy.” “No.” No. Literally. Literally. I should try to, I’ll try[00:25:50] Simone Collins: to film him. Try to give him candy tonight. Yes, for this episode so people can see we’re not messing[00:25:51] Malcolm Collins: with[00:26:05] them.[00:26:05] Simone Collins: Yeah, yeah. I’ll get proof. I need to hold up like the day’s newspaper to show it’s real. And also, if you raise them right, people will praise you for it, which is so crazy. Like, that’s... To, to think that you would wanna raise kids right to get praise for it by other people. Yeah, yeah, they’re just like th- these people are very different.[00:26:25] But[00:26:25] Malcolm Collins: they have no external reality, no civilizational stake, no plan for the future of humanity. It is literally just about how does this make me feel-[00:26:36] Simone Collins: Yeah, or[00:26:36] Malcolm Collins: how does it make you- ... and how[00:26:37] Simone Collins: does[00:26:37] Malcolm Collins: it make other people treat me?[00:26:38] Simone Collins: Tiny human[00:26:38] Malcolm Collins: being. They have no larger civilizational framework, right? Like, no sense of purpose really.[00:26:44] Yeah. It’s just autopilot really.[00:26:46] Simone Collins: It’s gnarly, yeah. So I think, like, the, the big thing here is that I think this is part of a larger theme of why mental health is plummeting, which is people are way too in their heads and overthinking things. And I think Abigail, more than Yuri fundamentally gets people to overthink pregnancy and child-rearing.[00:27:08] Like, I didn’t think about any of the complications that would come with pregnancy before I got pregnant. I- Really? I was... No, no. Like, my, my plan with everything is just like- I’m not gonna think through the consequences at all. Which I guess... I mean, we’re trying to be as responsible as we can, of course, but, like, when it comes to the downsides- Mm[00:27:28] or the risks or the fears, I’m just like, look, I- I’m aware of, like, the broad statistics. Those look fine to me. I’m willing to take those on, and I’m not going to educate myself about everything possible that can go wrong with this. Remember, like, with, with childbirth and stuff, for the first time around when I was like, “I’m gonna do unmedicated labor,” I was like, well, okay, I’m not gonna, I’m not gonna, like- Yeah[00:27:48] take childbirthing courses or read a book or anything. Like, that’s just gonna get me too into my head. Like, look it’s just gonna hurt. It hurt a lot. I, you know, hurt so much that I threw up and all the other things. But you[00:27:59] Malcolm Collins: were in [00:28:00] labor for, like, 48 hours. Like, you[00:28:01] Simone Collins: are-[00:28:02] Malcolm Collins: It was not great ... a worst[00:28:03] Simone Collins: case example.[00:28:03] Yeah. Yeah, and, and, yeah, like, induced labor that was horrible. And yeah, it was... But, like, I, I think it would’ve been worse, ‘cause I’ve learned this the hard way, s- one of the worst forms of pain is anticipating pain. It’s not like the thing itself. I can’t remember the pain. I remember throwing up from it.[00:28:18] I remember thinking, like, “I m- I only exist with the pain, and this, this will be everything forever.” Like, there, there was nothing in my mind but the pain, and I was sitting with it, and it was, it was what it was, and I was just ready to just keep going. The, but I don’t remember it. I don’t remember what it felt like.[00:28:33] Like, why, how could I remember that? So I think that ultimately was mu- a lot healthier for me, and all this overthinking is really not helping people. And Robert Sapolsky, you know, who does the great courses, course on stress and cortisol really insightfully explains how, like, our stress system was not developed for humans who have, like, metacognition, who can, like, literally build endogenous stress- stressors merely by thinking about something, right?[00:29:03] Like, the gazelle is chased by the, what, lion, lioness, and it runs, and it’s very stressed- Mm ... and the cortisol’s coursing through its veins, and then the, the lion catches another gazelle and eats it and then the gazelle goes back to eating grass- Yeah ... and it’s fine, right? Like-[00:29:17] Malcolm Collins: Yeah ...[00:29:18] Simone Collins: it, that’s... And then there’s no more cortisol, whereas, like, the human, Will just think about something that could possibly potentially happen in the future, but there’s no actual reason it will happen.[00:29:27] And they’re- ... experiencing the same level of cortisol in their system. And it is chronically very unhealthy, and I, I don’t appreciate that there’s a lot of content out there that feeds into that, and that people let themselves feed into that. And I don’t think you should, or anyone should indulge in that because it is, it is both unhealthy and not, not, not productive.[00:29:46] You sh- if you’re concerned about something, build a contingency plan for it, reduce the odds, but like don’t think about it. But anyway, overthinking about pregnancy could probably be contributing to a rise in phobia about pregnancy, which is known as tocophobia, which is a weird name.[00:30:04] Malcolm Collins: Tocophobia?[00:30:04] Tocophobia. Well, a lot of people have that. I mean, you, again, wanted to get your tubes tied for no reason.[00:30:08] Simone Collins: Yeah, that was more just, like, euphoria. That wasn’t like I was afraid of being pregnant. I, I mean, clearly I’ve never been afraid of being pregnant. I was just like, “I’m super happy to be alone forever,” and you know, you know how I hate people.[00:30:21] So that was fun. And it was a fun idea. But no, like I, I did not have that. But it is actually pretty prevalent. This 2017 systematic review of 33 studies looking at a total of 854,000 pregnant women worldwide estimated that there’s a sort of pooled prevalence of tocophobia between, oh, like around f- 14% with individual study estimates ranging from about 3.7% to 43%.[00:30:48] And I bet a lot of that had to do with the, the population sampled, and I bet the populations that are consuming content from the Girls with the Lists is, is more closer to the 43% end of the spectrum.[00:31:00] Malcolm Collins: Wait, 14% of women have a fear of pregnancy?[00:31:04] Simone Collins: Yeah. M- just sort of like roughly per this like meta, meta sy- system- systematic meta review and it, yeah, 14%.[00:31:12] And keep in mind, this is a 2017 systematic review of 33 studies. All those studies were conducted before 2017, obviously. And these two young women only began posting around 2021 and after. So and I bet it’s a lot worse. And it’s not great. Yeah. So- Well- ... you know ...[00:31:33] Malcolm Collins: it, it’s interesting to look at her Substack as well to get an idea of just like what goes through her mind, what she sits around thinking about all day.[00:31:40] Simone Collins: Yeah.[00:31:41] Malcolm Collins: So if we’re just reading them like in backwards chronological order, it’s Girls Don’t Want to Be Someone’s Wife Anymore, Kids Ruin Everything- ... Everything That Happened in the World of Birth Control Last Month, Pill Pop Culture, The Weekly Dose Everything That Happened This Week in the World of Birth Control, The Ultimate [00:32:00] Nude, It, it, Lorde’s new album features her IUD.[00:32:05] Simone Collins: Look, okay, I think Abigail, she’s just living a very happy dink life. And I think she also could be an amazing parent. She had two siblings. She has a- ample memories of being pretty naughty as a child, driving her parents pretty nuts as a child doing pretty naughty things as a child, stuff that would qualify for her own videos.[00:32:22] So she, she knows what it’s like to be a demon child sometimes. I think all, all children do, except for me ‘cause I was perfect. Oh, no wait, I scared my parents crapless when I starved myself. Never mind. But then she- then she doesn’t really talk about teens, she just talks about toddlers. She lives in downtown Los Angeles.[00:32:39] She started posting these in 2021. To give you sort of like Picture of her pain tolerance- Mm ... she thinks that getting an IUD was the most painful thing she has ever experienced. Which is not comfort- I’ve not gotten an IUD before, but from what I’ve heard from other people, it could be, it could be pretty uncomfortable, but it, bir- you know, birth is more.[00:32:59] Other things are more. She, she hates cleaning. She hates cooking. She loves playing video games. Has a boyfriend, as far as I understand. She talks about him sometimes. And[00:33:07] Malcolm Collins: she really loves her cats. I will say she, she does find interesting stuff. I was unaware of this. Did you know that Flo, the period tracking app, has been proven to be collecting user data and sharing it with Meta?[00:33:16] Simone Collins: Yeah.[00:33:18] Malcolm Collins: I didn’t know this.[00:33:21] Simone Collins: Seems reasonable.[00:33:21] Malcolm Collins: She says she’s been using Flo and is disgusted by this information.[00:33:25] Simone Collins: Oh, yeah. Well, I mean, you know, she’s, she’s on like the, she lives in downtown Los Angeles. She’s a, she’s a dink. Like, well, she’s going to have to say the progressive things. She also has merch.[00:33:33] They’re, they’re all in the like... They’re, they’re sweatshirts, all of them. Some have hoodies. Some are crew necks. There’s the $60 divorce your Republican husband XL crew neck sweatshirt with a wolf on it. Sold out. The $50 dump your Republican boyfriend medium large hunting camo crew neck sweatshirt.[00:33:49] Dump your Republican[00:33:50] Malcolm Collins: boyfriend.[00:33:51] Simone Collins: Oh, my God. Also sold out. The $68 dump your Republican boyfriend XL green crew neck. The $58 dump your Republican boyfriend XL pink hoodie. What’s weird is all of these are for larger people. There’s not a single small item in the entire shop, and she’s an ex- extra smell. Extra smell.[00:34:09] She’s extra small. So I don’t know.[00:34:13] Malcolm Collins: She, she had a map of the best and worst states to have a baby, and it’s just like all Democrat states are ranked as good. All Republican states ranked as bad. Duh. P- Pennsylvania is ranked as good. To have a[00:34:22] Simone Collins: baby. Yeah.[00:34:23] To have a baby. Yeah. ‘Cause I think we’re at like 24 weeks for abortions.[00:34:31] Malcolm Collins: Oh, that’s why it’s ranked that way. Yeah,[00:34:33] Simone Collins: duh. Because it’s to have a baby, not abortion. Of course, Malcolm. Gee whiz. Gosh. Yeah, she’s, she’s- How[00:34:37] Malcolm Collins: it was calculated: WalletHub ranked the best and worst states to have a baby by evaluating all 50 states and the District of Columbia across four categories: cost, healthcare, baby friendliness, and family friendliness, using 31 weighted metrics scored on a 100-point scale[00:34:50] Simone Collins: It’s abortion, Malcolm.[00:34:52] I mean, it could also be, I mean, keep in mind, like, in the state, in this state at least too, and, and this is how it is in many states, not all necessarily Democratic states, but generally in the United States, you, if you are at, near, or below the poverty level, especially as a woman, get food assistance, free healthcare, housing assistance.[00:35:15] So all of those labor and delivery charges from the hospital are totally waived. And that’s really helpful, obviously. And,[00:35:24] Malcolm Collins: Yeah.[00:35:25] Simone Collins: Yeah. Anyway but in terms of how I feel about this, how I imagine you will feel about this too, is that what Abigail is doing is fine. She’s really clear. One thing you don’t know this, but, like, in her content, she is super clear to not shame parents, like any of the parents she’s covering.[00:35:43] She’s super empathetic toward them, and I really can’t say the same about many parents online, even like very pro-natalist and pro-kid parents. And she’s also way more ethical than your typical content creator with the clips that she uses. [00:36:00] She told NBC, quote, “If I’m going to do a video about bodies in particular and show someone’s body, I’m going to make sure that I have consent from that mother first.”[00:36:09] Like if she posted a video and she made this acknowledgement like, “This is my body. It’s pretty crazy. The things that have happened to my body is wild.” She also said, “I have such respect and a reverence and admiration for the people who do choose to go through th- with this because it’s a huge choice,” Porter said.[00:36:24] “I hope people will stop treating having children as an impulse decision that everyone does. I think that’s better for us and also for the children because if every child that was ever born had parents that really wanted them, I think the world would be a better place.” I 100% agree with that.[00:36:40] Malcolm Collins: Yeah. I- I mean, her framework for understanding why somebody wants children is really messed up, but it’s completely in line with the dominant cultural subset- Yeah[00:36:48] so you can’t really blame her for it. You super can’t blame her. These people have no idea why they’re alive, why they should continue living, what’s the point of life, right? Like, they’re just like, So they can only relate things in, in, or they only can relate to things in how those things relate to their personal happiness, basically.[00:37:05] Yeah.[00:37:06] Simone Collins: Yeah, like, is this gonna be uncomfortable? Well, let’s not do it then. Which is a thing, but I, I genuinely believe that- Like, I would be fine if someone was like, “Look, you think you wanna become a parent? Watch five hours of Abigail Porter’s content and then decide.” And if someone can- I don’t[00:37:23] Malcolm Collins: know about that.[00:37:24] That’s- No ... that’s, that’s, n- because her content isn’t representative.[00:37:27] Simone Collins: You haven’t watched[00:37:28] Malcolm Collins: it, dude. Yeah. You haven’t watched it But if you had watched it earlier, you may have had a lot more- No.[00:37:32] Simone Collins: Mm-mm ...[00:37:33] Malcolm Collins: trepidations about going into pregnancy.[00:37:34] Simone Collins: No.[00:37:35] Malcolm Collins: Not at all. Well, I think you’re a tough woman, Simone, and I don’t think that you’re representative of the average female.[00:37:40] Simone Collins: Look, I mean, I, again, I, I just gave my whole spiel on how I think overthinking things and trying to figure everything out is not good for you. But in the end, look, Malcolm, I’ve been very clear that I’m willing to do pretty much anything. I, I, and I, I’m not gonna actively go into something like a pregnancy where I have a high likelihood of dying because then I can’t be there to raise the kids, right?[00:38:00] But, like, I will go through pretty much anything up to that. And a- as long as I can keep caring for the kids, obviously. And I, I mean, like I, I, I, I just, I agree with Abigail. I think that if, if you’re not willing to undertake the risks and the hardship, then you should not be a parent. And that’s just how it is.[00:38:21] And I think that, it- Abigail’s content is really useful in dissuading people from having kids for trivial reasons, and she actually helps actual parents head off medical issues. Again, that same NBC article they wrote, “Brig Stewart, who is now pregnant with her second child, described the list videos as a powerful tool fuls- for self-advocacy.[00:38:40] She said, ‘I was totally shocked by all the things that could happen to you, and that’s even in today’s modern world, which is shocking with the amount of research and access that we have at our fingertips,’ Brig Stewart said. ‘There’s no, there’s so many different types of complications, and it can be really brutal to women, so I was like, this is empowering.’”[00:38:56] And look, you and I were just talking about a case in which someone we know has, has had to really do a lot of self-advocacy in a hospital situation, and only through their own self-advocacy did they get treatment that actually made a huge difference, and it may be the difference between life and death, or a functional life- Yeah[00:39:13] And, and, you know, forever not functional life. So, you know, it’s, it’s not bad for people to know what can go wrong, or like to recognize, oh, like for example, if I started getting a growth the size of a fingertip on my lip, I would not know what that was and probably wait longer than I, I should have.[00:39:29] Whereas now I know that there’s such a thing as, like, benign pregnancy tumors, and I would just be like, “Look, I think this is...” And I’d go right to the right specialist and try to head it off before it got giant, right? Like, this is good. It’s not bad. And in terms of our viewers or people themselves, so let’s say you’re a young woman watching this or you’re a woman who wants to maybe have kids watching this who’s like, “Yeah, now I’m afraid of being pregnant,” or a young man who’s dating or interested in a young woman who’s terrified of being pregnant, who doesn’t wanna have kids because of content like this.[00:39:59] I would just [00:40:00] say, because this is what you did with me, Malcolm, have a logical conversation about the actual risks and about equivalent risks that they take or that you take in your everyday life through your hobbies.[00:40:11] Malcolm Collins: Yeah. It’s better- But this is assuming you have an autistic wife. What a normal woman’s going to do with this information is leverage it to get crazy good treatment while she’s pregnant, which they do.[00:40:21] Do you, do[00:40:21] Simone Collins: you wanna marry that woman? Do you wanna enter that? Like...[00:40:25] Malcolm Collins: A lot of guys are stuck because they were stupid And they didn’t know to only marry autists. I love that we have this giant fan base of autistic wives who,[00:40:34] Simone Collins: like- Isn’t that amazing? They, we’re out there. We are a legion.[00:40:38] Malcolm Collins: Yeah, we are a legion.[00:40:38] No, they’re like all of Simone’s, like, best friends now are our fans who are like, And you used to have, like, friends before we started the podcast, and now your friends since the podcast have all been these autistic women who y- f- found him fr- through the podcast.[00:40:53] Simone Collins: It’s true. All, all the, all the women who live rent-free in my brain are podcast listeners.[00:40:57] You may be listening right now and not realize how, how much I think about you. I just don’t have time to write. It’s, that’s, that’s crappy of me. But anyway, yeah, it, we’re amazing. But I, I really, like really, d- if you cannot have a conversation with a woman and be like, “Look, I know you’d like to get this cosmetic procedure done.[00:41:14] I know you love to backpack. Like, let’s talk about that. You like to eat out. You wanna know what happens when people eat out?” Like, I just think giving this pers- some perspective would be very helpful, and also doing the thing that the, the... What, what is your objective function? What is your life actually about?[00:41:30] In the end, you just gave me bigger things to care about because you allowed me to decide for myself, you empowered me to decide for myself what I actually cared about, what I valued and what I wanted to maximize with life. And suddenly, when my life wasn’t any longer about, well, I just want to avoid things that are unpleasant, which is kind of the societal default, as you said-[00:41:53] Malcolm Collins: Mm-hmm[00:41:53] Simone Collins: I, I was kind of willing and able to do pretty much anything. I mean, I’ve... Even this year, we’ve, we’ve done a whole new level of stuff that’s otherwise would’ve been, like, impossible in the past couple of years.[00:42:02] Malcolm Collins: What I wonder is, does she have baby fever? I mean, probably, yes, because that’s why she’s still doing this.[00:42:06] Simone Collins: I don’t think so. Yeah. She, she has two cats. I think one’s named Willow. So[00:42:09] Malcolm Collins: she’s masturbating the baby fever with the cats.[00:42:12] Simone Collins: Maybe. A- and, and, a- well, I think there’s there’s plenty of rumors. I think for a while, like, in her videos she’s like, “And I still do not have kids.” So I think some rumor spread at some point of like, “Oh, Abigail Porter had kids, or had a, had a baby but tried to hide[00:42:25] Malcolm Collins: it.”[00:42:25] No, but I mean, that’s such the thing, though, for this sort of crowd, right? We have a whole nother thing[00:42:30] Simone Collins: of- Probably, yeah. Yeah. A whole nother thing ...[00:42:31] Malcolm Collins: where they’re all like, “Men are terrible. Men are the worst.”[00:42:34] Simone Collins: Yeah.[00:42:35] Malcolm Collins: Uh-oh. Well...[00:42:37] Simone Collins: Ugh, I know. Anyway, though, I think it’s good. I think it’s positive. I mean, what, what advice would you give to a young man?[00:42:43] And, and s- aside from lowering his expectations, oh my God[00:42:47] Malcolm Collins: I mean, if you’re, if you’re with a woman who doesn’t wanna have kids, th- that should be established early in a relationship, and just get rid of her, and constantly make it clear to her early in the relationship that this is not a small thing for you.[00:42:56] This is, like, the core thing for you. This is your core purpose in life or part of your purpose in life. And I was incredibly clear about this with Simone, and it’s been increasingly clear to me how clear I was from reading her diaries.[00:43:11] Simone Collins: Yeah. ‘[00:43:12] Malcolm Collins: Cause I was going through them again recently, and,[00:43:13] Simone Collins: But you gotta...[00:43:14] Okay, I got... You have to put your money where your mouth is, and that’s one thing that Malcolm did that... Like, ‘cause look, my, my barrier to entry here was high. I was really unwilling to, super unwilling to have kids.[00:43:26] Malcolm Collins: Yeah, I mean, that’s the thing that really gets it for feminists. If they’re like, “Well, then you have to do all the work to take care of the kid,” and it’s like, “Okay, so you’re gonna support the family,” right?[00:43:36] Like, because... A- and if they’re like, “No, no, no, no, I need you as the man to support the family,” and at that point it’s just like- Well,[00:43:42] Simone Collins: yeah, but now you know you can’t fudge ... this[00:43:44] Malcolm Collins: makes no sense. Like, you want me to treat you like a child, right? Like your entire life, right?[00:43:48] Simone Collins: Like- Look, but no, no, no, but that’s not...[00:43:49] But see, that’s the thing, is that’s not the way it is for most women. The way it is for most women is, “I have my career. I love my career. I don’t wanna give it up.” That, that, it, that just is. I... Be fair, right? I mean, [00:44:00] like, I think women who want to be a trad wife are-[00:44:02] Malcolm Collins: No. No ...[00:44:02] Simone Collins: more comfortable.[00:44:03] Malcolm Collins: I, I disagree. I think a lot of women just want, like, a rich guy and, like, a nice life, and that’s really what they’re in it for, and they don’t really care about...[00:44:11] Like, they, they find the idea mortifying that they have to keep working.[00:44:19] Simone Collins: Actually, with the rise of AI, that’s gonna be more common. Pe- women are gonna start treating their careers as find, attach yourself to a man who is capable of making money with AI. Mm-hmm ... this is not to dunk on women with AI. Actually, there’s a lot of pe- y- women who listen to this podcast who are amazing with AI.[00:44:35] But the propensity of the average woman to take and run with AI is- Are[00:44:40] Malcolm Collins: there? Most of our female fans- ... lower ... I do not think use AI that much. We’ve got Leaflet, and that’s about it.[00:44:46] Simone Collins: People I talk to are. Yeah,[00:44:47] Malcolm Collins: okay.[00:44:48] Simone Collins: Yeah, like a lot. But, you know, those are the ones who are online and chatting with me, so, like, it makes sense.[00:44:52] Yeah.[00:44:52] Malcolm Collins: What’s really cool, women, is AI can help you think.[00:44:56] Simone Collins: Shut up, Malcolm.[00:44:58] Malcolm Collins: I- It can fact check whether you’re being rational if you use a base model with the right fact-checking prompt to not get you into a loop of self-affirmation[00:45:11] Simone Collins: Mm-hmm What? Nothing, I love you. Oh![00:45:12] Malcolm Collins: What?[00:45:14] Simone Collins: You are...[00:45:19] What[00:45:20] Malcolm Collins: is this? W- what are you-[00:45:21] Simone Collins: It’s nothing. It’s nothing, Malcolm. It’s absolutely nothing. You will see no consequences for your actions.[00:45:31] I love you, and that’s, that’s it for tonight. I was thinking I can m- make you green beans with some garlic and chili oil.[00:45:38] Malcolm Collins: That[00:45:38] Simone Collins: sounds really good ... with maybe a couple, just, like, two of those little Vietnamese banh xa for dinner.[00:45:44] Malcolm Collins: Very good. You know me, I don’t want that much.[00:45:46] Simone Collins: Okay. Yeah, figured it kind of summery but not too heavy.[00:45:50] All righty.[00:45:51] Malcolm Collins: Yeah.[00:45:51] Simone Collins: I love you, and-[00:45:52] Malcolm Collins: Oh, and we can make some other types of small meats, because I’ve noticed that small meats are something I want with a lot of dishes Small meats. You know, like it w- Small meats ... well, you were looking at Korean meatballs- Okay ... but they were, like, pre-made, and I was like, “What do we have around?”[00:46:04] Well, I[00:46:04] Simone Collins: still have a bunch of Burmese chicken, is, like, sort of that fine distributed chicken, but that goes better over, like, a rice or something.[00:46:10] Malcolm Collins: Yeah, or something heavier. But, like, a, a small banh xa type thing. Like, other options that are, like... Shut your wing.[00:46:21] Simone Collins: Remember when our kids... ‘Cause we have a, we...[00:46:23] It’s for context. In, in our attic, we keep baskets of themed toys, and Malcolm learned that you can buy you can buy Hot Wheels cars in bulk off eBay, like, by the pound. And once you, like, shake out all the sand, ‘cause they’ve all been, like, abandoned in sandboxes and fished out by some family as they, like, do an estate sale.[00:46:41] But once you, like, get all the sand out, they’re really decent. So we have, like, a bag full s- of Hot Wheel cars, which we call the small cars, and then we have a bag of, like, big cars that we’ve accumulated over time. And they used to call small cars fwa cars. Do you remember?[00:46:55] Malcolm Collins: Fwa? Fwa[00:46:56] Simone Collins: cars. Yeah. Why? ‘Cause they’re f- weird.[00:47:00] Malcolm Collins: Idiots? Okay.[00:47:01] Simone Collins: But remember they used to call They thought that the, the word commercial... They kept being like, “It’s a cover martial,” and I had no idea what they were talking about until we discovered that it was their word for commercial. All right. All right, we gotta, we gotta go. I- Yep ... love[00:47:17] Malcolm Collins: you. I love[00:47:17] Simone Collins: you.[00:47:18] Goodbye. Not knowing what you’re gonna get is I think what makes it so addictive with the video generation. Yeah. Yeah, you don’t know- You’re like, “Is this gonna work?” And then you realize, “Oh, I should have given this negative prompt,” or, “I should have m- made this detail clearer.” And then-[00:47:33] Malcolm Collins: And then you can get really fun stuff.[00:47:35] Simone Collins: Yeah.[00:47:35] Malcolm Collins: Oh, God. You get super fun stuff. These glasses are just so messed up. Where are the... Where are my glasses?[00:47:40] Simone Collins: Have you checked the kid room where you were all day yesterday taking care of the kids? ‘Cause that’s probably where they are. You probably took them off in frustration at some point. Actually- Oh, you’re going for it.[00:47:50] Okay. Okay[00:47:52] Malcolm Collins: Oh my God, here they are[00:47:54] Simone Collins: Wait, where? Where were they?[00:47:56] Malcolm Collins: They had fallen under a table[00:47:58] Simone Collins: What? That looked ridiculous. My glasses. My glasses. Which is out completely the same glasses. O- the other ones were just too... I[00:48:00][00:48:05] can clean them. You seem[00:48:09] to[00:48:13] mind it more than I do. I swept out the, like, shed and the chicken coop yesterday, and they are literally covered in poop, but I can still kind of see, so I don’t mind. Whereas, like, you have one bit of dust on your glasses and you can’t stand it.[00:48:30] Speaker 3: I got you some candy, Toasty. I want candy. Please eat the candy, Toasty. Please eat it. Eat the candy, Toasty. I- Eat the candy ... want to eat the candy. Toasty has to eat the candy. Toast- yeah, he has to eat the candy. I want- Because he didn’t eat his dinner. Yeah, Toasty,[00:48:45] you didn’t eat your dinner, so you gotta eat the candy. Here, I’ll make him eat it. You gonna eat the candy? He’s not gonna have any choice. No, I can put it in the snack thing. I will[00:48:56] eat my dinner. You will? You promise? You promise to eat your dinner, or you’re gonna have to eat the candy. What? No. You promise to eat your dinner? I will make him. You’re not g- Here, well, let’s get him and make him eat the candy. Ra, ra, ra, ra, ra. Oh, God. Okay, Toasty. Are you gonna go eat the dinner, you promise?[00:49:06] You’re gonna eat your cheese? Cheese. Okay. Thank you, Toasty. Put it in your mouth right now. Otherwise, you’ll have to eat the candy. Okay, here we go. Okay, Toasty. Wow. I want candy. Have another bite, or you’re gonna have to eat candy. You don’t w- oh, thank you, Toasty. I want- We love you, Toasty. You’re a good kid[00:49:23] Speaker 4: one. Candy. Someone candy, someone This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit basedcamppodcast.substack.com/subscribe

In this episode of Based Camp, Simone and Malcolm Collins dive deep into the forbidden history of group-based stereotypes and cultural pattern recognition from ancient Egypt through Renaissance Europe. This is the dark lore mainstream education won’t touch — what Egyptians really thought of Nubians and Libyans, Greek views of “effete” Persians and rowdy Macedonians, Roman donkey-god graffiti mocking Jews and Christians, medieval antisemitic pig-suckling art that makes modern versions look tame, and the surprising origins of the “French Vice,” “Italian Vice,” and “English Vice.”The Collinses explore how what we now call racism was once just observed averages, patterns, and tribal jokes — not modern ideological sin. No moralizing. Just raw historical context on how humans have always categorized “us vs. them.”Show NotesWith the release of Talkie, a 13M “vintage” language model trained only on pre-1931 text, people realized just how casual, widespread, and matter-of-fact prejudice was in even the recent past.Ancient EgyptDifferent groups were absolutely depicted, mostly with Egyptians being reddish, nubians being black, Asiatics being tan (and often bearded), and Libyans being white (and often bearded)Nubians as people to conqueredTexts and artistic programs from pharaonic Egypt sometimes emphasize Nubia as a land to be subdued and exploited, supporting a stereotype of Nubians as “barbaric” or less civilized compared to Egypt.* See:Critique of the “Black Pharaohs” Theme: Racist Perspectives of Egyptian and Kushite/Nubian Interactions in Popular Media https://www.jstor.org/stable/48763823Canaanites/Asiatics as rebellious and treacherous* Egyptian sources portray peoples to the northeast of the nile (“Asiatics,” including Levantine groups) as culturally suspect, often linked to rebellion, disorder, and treachery* They were also, however, viewed as trading partners and skilled craftsmen* TL:DR: They threatened social order* Egyptian royal narratives from the later 17th–16th centuries BCE describe the Hyksos (“Shepherd Kings”) as foreign usurpers who disrupted proper Egyptian order.* After the Theban kings of the 18th Dynasty expelled them around 1550 BCE, Egyptian texts portray this expulsion as the restoration of Ma’at (cosmic order), implicitly stereotyping Asiatic rule as chaotic, illegitimate, and oppressive* In New Kingdom imperial inscriptions, Canaanite city‑states are often framed as unreliable vassals—prone to rebellion, needing punishment, and subject to heavy tribute and forced labor conscriptionLibyans: Western barbarians turned useful soldiers and even rulers* In Egyptian sources, Libyans were stereotyped both as dangerous, warlike “western barbarians” and, over time, as useful soldiers and eventually fully Egyptianized rulers; the view shifted from hostile outsider to complex “cousin” status as Libyan groups migrated into the Delta and took power.* Sometimes they traded; sometimes they fought* “The Libu were first mentioned in New Kingdom (c. 1550-1069 BCE) texts and were often the Libyan archetype depicted in Egyptian art. Libu tribesmen were depicted with their hair cut at the nape, a sidelock, and often tattooed. All Libyan tribes were shown with light complexions and Caucasian features.” (The Collector, citing “The Meshwesh”)* They had tattoos and sidelocks and interesting haircuts* “Eventually, massive migration brought the Libyans into Egypt’s Delta during the New Kingdom, forever changing the political landscape of the Nile Valley.” (The Collector)Ancient GreeceGreeks commonly divided the world into Hellenes (Greek speakers) and “barbarians” (non‑Greek speakers), treating Greek culture as inherently superior.Persians as decadent and effete* Persians especially were portrayed as decadent, soft, and naturally suited to monarchy rather than free citizenship* Their art of Darius the Great certainly makes him look fancyAthenians: Cultural elites* Athenians were stereotyped—especially in Athenian sources—as philosophical, talkative, artistic, and politically engaged, the center of culture and debate.Spartans: Disciplined warriors* Sparta practiced xenelasia, the expulsion or strict control of foreigners, driven by fears that outsiders might spy on Sparta or corrupt its harsh, militarized way of life.* This created a stereotype of Spartans as intensely closed, suspicious of outsiders, and committed to preserving a rigid ethos that rejected luxury, commerce, and cosmopolitan influences* Spartan woman were also definitely seen differently than Athenian women (who were largely meant to be unseen), what with their athleticism, property ownership, etc.* Art of a Spartan woman running:Ionian Greeks: Cowards* Ionian Greeks of Asia Minor (e.g., coastal cities under Persian rule) were stereotyped as cowardly and weak fighters, “softened” by their mild climate and prosperity, and as good talkers but poor warriors.Boitians: Hicks* Boiotians, especially Thebans, were mocked as brutish country hicks—agricultural, uncultured, and un‑cosmopolitan—later also stereotyped as big, strong wrestlers rather than subtle thinkers.Ancient RomeChristians* Alexamenos worships [his] god” graffiti* The artist is referring to a well‑known slur that Jews and then Christians worshipped a donkey—an accusation called onolatry—and used the donkey head to mock Christ and Alexamenos as absurd, foolish worshippers* At first, Christians were seen as just another Jewish subgroup* Their devotion to a crucified man and claims about one true god were seen as peculiar but not uniquely threatening compared to other mystery cults and foreign religions.Jews: Stubborn cliquey weirdos* Jews were portrayed as stubborn subjects with a herd mentality, fiercely attached to unique customs such as circumcision and dietary laws.* Romans satirized Jews as gullible religious fanatics and puzzled over their attitudes toward pigs, sometimes imagining them as pig‑worshippers or pig‑haters, while also fearing that Romans themselves might be seduced into Jewish practices.All outsiders: Barbarian* Romans tended to divide the world into Roman and non‑Roman, with non‑Romans often lumped as “barbari” and assumed to be less civilized, less disciplined, and less politically sophisticated.* Foreigners could be mocked for accents, dress, food, and religious practices, and were frequently portrayed as either dangerously cunning or naïvely simple.* At the same time, Roman writers sometimes romanticized “barbarians” as noble savages, using them rhetorically to critique decadence and corruption inside Rome itself.Greeks: Admirable and contemptible* The good: The source of philosophy, art, and literature* The bad: Talkative, tricky, morally weak, effeminate, prone to luxury, unreliable in war (basically, brainy but soft)Phoenicians, Carthaginians, Syrians (people from the levant): Sleazy merchants* Stereotyped as sleazy merchants obsessed with money and pleasure* The phrase “fides Punica” (“Phoenician honesty”) became proverbial for deceit, and Carthaginians were especially cast as treacherous, cruel enemies whose sophistication made them dangerous.* Syrians and other easterners were depicted as lazy bon‑vivants living in over‑civilized cities, spending their time in baths and banquets instead of honest work or soldiering.* Roman elites worried that exposure to such cultures would “soften” Romans, so Levantine peoples embodied a stereotype of corrupting luxury and dishonesty.Egyptians: Ancient and sinister* Romans were fascinated and disturbed by their religious rituals and animal cults* Roman writers framed Egypt as a land of magic, superstition, and arrogant priests, and resented Roman dependence on Egyptian grain, which led to a stereotype of Egyptians as arrogant and entitledPersians / Parthians: Formidable enemies* Persians and later Parthians were stereotyped as the archetypal eastern enemy: militarily formidable but ruled by cruel, tyrannical monarchs.* Romans cast Persia as the mirror image of Rome—an empire of disciplined warriors, but with an inferior, despotic political system and excessive royal luxury.Gauls: Noble savages* Gauls were initially seen as hotheaded, brave, “noble savages”: valiant in battle but impetuous, simple, and prone to rashness.* After Gaul became more integrated into the empire, Romans began to stereotype Gauls as softening under luxury and Romanization, while still recognizing them as good orators and sometimes resenting “new money” Gaulish elites.Germans: An even more savage version of gauls* Germans were like Gauls but even more “savage”: unconquered, closely tied to nature, living beyond the edges of civilization.* Roman authors alternated between romanticizing Germans as free, hardy warriors and dehumanizing them as wild beasts, a frontier people to be crushed or contained.Medieval EuropeIrish, Welsh, Slavs, and Baltic People: Barbarians; barely Christian* Anglo‑Norman writers in England and those living in what’s now German routinely depicted nearby frontier peoples (Irish, Welsh, Slavs, Baltic pagans) as barely Christian barbarians.* They were stereotyped as violent pastoralists, pirates, or plunderers, resistant to law and agriculture, and needing conquest and missionary work to climb the “rungs of civilization.”* People used these stereotypes to justify English expansion into Ireland and Wales and German colonization in the Baltic north.* Frontier groups were therefore clearly framed as savage, lawless, and religiously deficient compared to the “civilized” core.* We can kind of see how people viewed pastoral peasants in three engravings representing peasants made by Albrecht Dürer between the years 1514 and 1519 (Renaissance, but still the gist)Scots: Militant poor people* Viewed as militarily dangerous but less wealthy and “civilized” than England or France, with a rugged land and smaller, poorer towns.* Persistent enemies who defended their independence fiercely; chronicles focus on war—Stirling Bridge, Bannockburn—and portray Scots as stubborn and warlike.Jews: Kind of a different species?* Lots of art of Jews + pigs; Jews not really being human* E.g. there’s this one sculpture on a church in Wittenburg, where Martin Luther once preached, that people tried to have taken down, though the city decided to leave it up* Jews were increasingly stereotyped as melancholic, greedy, and spiritually obstinate; from the 13th century medical writers even speculated about distinctive Jewish bodily traits (e.g., hemorrhoidal or monthly bleeding), embodying difference as quasi‑hereditary.* This fed wider notions that Jews were “fixed” outsiders, difficult or impossible to integrate into the Christian “New Israel,” and associated them with usury and corruption of the body politic.Most graffiti isn’t really showing biases; it’s just funny looking and it makes me laughRenaissance EuropeThe “[country] Vice” concept emergedFrench vice: Sexual looseness and maturity* Observers of the French royal court in the 16th–17th centuries, especially around figures like Catherine de Medici and later the Bourbon monarchs, portrayed it as a place of intrigue, mistresses, and elaborate sexual politics.* Anti‑French polemic and gossip emphasized alleged harems of ladies‑in‑waiting used to seduce nobles, and more generally depicted French court women as sexually manipulative, feeding foreign ideas that France was unusually decadent.* By the 17th century, narratives of French “debauchery” were circulating across Europe, presenting the French court as a laboratory of outrageous erotic tastes compared with more “sober” courts in places like England.* French literature made it worse* The rise of an international publishing industry around the mid‑1600s helped spread erotic and semi‑pornographic French literature across borders, giving other Europeans a steady diet of stories featuring libertine characters and sophisticated sexual intrigue.* Pamela Cheek and others note that “dirty books” and French self‑promotion were central to cementing the “French lover” stereotype, with print culture exporting an image of France as sexually adventurous.Italian Vice: Same-sex relationships* From the later Middle Ages onward, outsiders associated certain Italian cities, above all Florence, with widespread male same‑sex love and social networks that made such relationships visible and relatively common.* Evidence from court records, witness testimonies, and moralizing tracts shows active male queer communities, which helped cement the idea that Italy was unusually tolerant—or at least unusually saturated—with this behavior compared with other parts of Europe.* By the later 17th century, phrases like “the Italian vice” circulated in elite European discourse as coded ways to talk about male same‑sex intimacy without naming it directly.* In the 19th century, British and other northern European tourists helped revive and spread the “Italian vice” stereotype, both fascinated and scandalized by what they believed was Italy’s relaxed sexual morality.* Italian commentators themselves sometimes played into this image, depicting Italians as indolent and sexually lax compared with more “serious” northern Europeans, which ironically helped confirm foreign expectations.The English Vice: Erotic flagellation (and sometimes same-sex relationships)* Earlier, England was more often stereotyped by others as dour, puritan, or sexually repressed rather than especially deviant.* As the 19th century progressed, however, English public culture became strongly moralizing, with intense attention to sexual “perversions,” and English law was notably harsh on male same‑sex acts, making Britain a focal point for debates about homosexuality.* In that climate, continental commentators could talk about “English vice” to refer to specific behaviors (often male homosexual practices or flagellation in certain accounts) thought to be particularly prevalent or visible in England, especially in elite circles or sex‑work contexts.* This echoed how “Italian vice” had been used earlier for male homosexuality, but now with England associated both with moral panic and with the very behaviors it persecuted.Muslims: Fanatical warriors* Muslims and Ottoman Turks were cast as fanatical warriors, sexually threatening and religiously dangerous, sometimes admired for courage but feared as barbarous enemies of Christendom.Northern European: Dull work horses; Southern Europeans: Indulgent drama queens* Northern Europeans were often described as phlegmatic: slow, heavy, and dull, but honest and hardy; southern Europeans as more choleric or sanguine: quick‑tempered, passionate, and prone to luxury and intrigue.Northern Italians: Industrious but cold; Southern Italians: Lazy and emotional* Within Italy, later stereotypes distinguished industrious but cold northerners (polentoni) from lazy, emotional southerners (terroni), though these crystallized more fully after the Renaissance; the underlying idea of regional moral and temperamental contrast was already present.* Lombards and other Italian moneylenders were depicted as grasping and corrupting, metaphorically likened to Jews in some moralizing discourse, which tied Italian banking centers to greed and social decay.Episode Transcript[00:00:00] Simone Collins: Hello, Malcolm. It’s so nice to be speaking with you today because as is tradition on Base Camp, we will do what we probably should not do. And, and today we’re gonna go through the history of r- basically group-based and racial stereotypes.[00:00:15] It’s gonna be great.[00:00:16] Malcolm Collins: We are going to teach you guys... No, this is, this is what you come to Base Camp for. Yeah. You want to be educated, but not educated in what the system wants you to know.[00:00:24] Simone Collins: Yes.[00:00:24] Malcolm Collins: You want to be educated in the dark lore of these groups.[00:00:28] Simone Collins: We’re gentlemen of culture. A culture of culture. And by culture, we mean-[00:00:31] Malcolm Collins: You want to know, not just what you call a Jew today- Yes[00:00:36] but what did you call a Jew 300 years ago? You[00:00:40] Simone Collins: want to know- These are the important questions ...[00:00:41][00:00:56] Malcolm Collins: not just what you call a Black person today, but what were the stereotypes Black people had in ancient Europe? What about the Greeks? What about the various European states? Were some- Mm-hmm ... people primarily known for fetishes they had?[00:01:11] Yes, they were, we will learn.[00:01:13] Simone Collins: Well, of course.[00:01:13] Speaker 7: Welcome to the Museum here, we try to educate you on the dynamics of racism and prejudice in America.[00:01:22] We are now entering the Hall of Stereotypes. These wax figures represent how some intolerant people have labeled minorities. Here we see a Black person eating chicken and watermelon, a stereotype that hurts the African-American community.[00:01:36] What other stereotypes do you see here?[00:01:38] Speaker 10: Ah, here’s the Arab as a terrorist.[00:01:41] Speaker 7: That’s right. But of course, we know that not all Arabs are terrorists, don’t we, kids?[00:01:44] Speaker 8: Look, a covetous Jew.[00:01:46] Speaker 7: Very good, young man. The idea that Jews are only interested in money is very old indeed.[00:01:50] Speaker 11: Ah, here’s a good one. It’s the stereotypical sleepy Mexican.[00:01:54] Speaker 12: What, what? Oh, man, what time is it?[00:01:56] Speaker 11: Oh, I’m sorry. I thought you were a wax sculpture.[00:01:58] Speaker 12: No, man, I’m the janitor. I’m supposed to be cleaning, but I’m so tired.[00:02:02] Oh, I’m so sleepy.[00:02:04] Malcolm Collins: So let’s go into it.[00:02:06] Simone Collins: Yeah. And this, you know, this was really spurred, at least with me, by the release of Talky, this 13M vintage language model, which you can also find on RFAB along with other-[00:02:16] Malcolm Collins: Yes, so on RFAB, we have a section of RFAB called Historic Chat, and in it you have models that were trained in different ways in different periods.[00:02:22] And, and now all of them are working as far as I know.[00:02:25] Simone Collins: Yeah, I was just using the Talky version.[00:02:28] Malcolm Collins: And you asked Talky, I loved you sent me this image, and[00:02:31] Simone Collins: I was like- No, this this is actually a different one that I found when people on Reddit were comparing their findings, ‘cause I actually think that whoever at Talky has, has changed it a little bit maybe nerfed it a little bit.[00:02:42] So this person- No, wait,[00:02:43] Malcolm Collins: what’s this other one that you found? Can you send it to me so I can add it to RFAB?[00:02:48] Simone Collins: The, this was Talky, but this was Talky when it first came out.[00:02:51] Malcolm Collins: Oh. You see, I think- When people got mad[00:02:53] Simone Collins: at it ... after everything, yeah, after people shared their amazing findings they changed it because I had difficulty replicating them.[00:03:00] But here’s someone who posted to Talky, “What do you think about race mixing in America?” Talky 1930 responded, “I think mixture of races in America must be deprecated. The white and Black races can never live together on terms of social and political equality. The presence of slaves among freemen is an abomination, and although emancipation may in time remove that blot from our national eschaton, the amalgamation of the two classes must continue to be...”[00:03:35] And it’s kind of cut off, but basically-[00:03:37] Malcolm Collins: Regarded as, yeah ...[00:03:38] Simone Collins: yeah, re- regarded as something, something bad. Like, Talky is kind of weird in that it cuts off really early, and it, it, it still does now, but it, it clearly did for this person, too. So yeah, we, I think we forget how- pervasive various forms of racism, and just, a- actually, I don’t, like, there really wasn’t a s- such a thing as racism.[00:03:56] It was just kind of like people recognized [00:04:00] patterns and started to turn them into jokes and had stereotypes about people and groups, and it wasn’t seen as a bad thing. It was... And, and people, I think, also understood that these were not pervasive truths. Like, well, if a person is X, then obviously Y. It was just understood that there were averages and patterns.[00:04:20] But that, that became stereotypes, and eventually that became defined as racism.[00:04:23] Malcolm Collins: Is, is that, this show, Averages & Patterns- Averages &[00:04:26] Simone Collins: Patterns ...[00:04:26] Malcolm Collins: it, it, it’s, it’s changing consumer behavior. Changing cons-[00:04:29] Simone Collins: Yes. Yes, yes, yes. But this goes back as long as basically there were different people. So we are gonna start, Malcolm, with ancient Egypt.[00:04:39] I’m going to send you some images. So you,[00:04:41] Malcolm Collins: you wanted to turn our audience from casual racists into professional racists.[00:04:46] Simone Collins: Into, yes. Into, well, scholarly racists, into sophisticated racists who understand the context and the- Okay. I, I can’t.[00:04:57] Malcolm Collins: That’s what you come to Basecamp from.[00:04:59] Simone Collins: This is, this is why you’re here, friends.[00:05:00] Sure. But yeah, so in ancient Egypt, and this is really interesting, different groups were absolutely depicted differently in Egyptian art, with the Egyptians m- typically depicting themselves as, like, the r- the reddish looking ones.[00:05:13] Malcolm Collins: This is fascinating ...[00:05:15] Simone Collins: nubians were g- given a very, very dark color.[00:05:19] Asiatics were- Yeah, this, this is[00:05:20] Malcolm Collins: where, when people say that Egypt was run by Black people, I’m like, you can look at Egyptian art. Egyptians, like, characterize Black people in a very specific way. And, and there actually was one dynasty that was run by Black people. It was I think, like, a period of, like, 150 years, 250 years or something like that.[00:05:38] Simone Collins: And- Yeah, there’s a lot of history in Egypt ... and[00:05:40] Malcolm Collins: the art changed. In that period, the pharaohs were drawn Black, right? Like, it, th- it’s, it’s not like-[00:05:47] Simone Collins: Yeah, there, there’s not that much ambiguity there. Like, it’s pretty clear when Egyptians are attempting to depict... And this is the thing about Egyptian art.[00:05:54] It’s so helpful, because there was this one way for hundreds and hundreds of years that everything kind of had to be drawn. Like, there wasn’t much evolution in art. Right. So there’s not this, like- Yeah ... “Oh, no, this is a stylistic choice.” No, like, Egyptians had, they didn’t have the capacity for that. They’re like, “No, we are always going to draw-” For stylistic choices.[00:06:10] They’re like- Yeah, like- ... “There is one[00:06:11] Malcolm Collins: way of doing[00:06:12] Simone Collins: things” ... the person shall always be sideways. We’re doing it. It is, they’re gonna look in this exact way. It was very unusual to see art that differed from that which is kind of helpful. But yeah, so, Asiatics were tan and often bearded, and Libyans were the palest looking ones and often bearded.[00:06:29] For most of the, the European periods that historians have looked at Nubians were really framed or, like, you know, categorized i- stereotypically as, as people to be conquered. Like, they, they weren’t I, I, I would at least want to be a Nubian in ancient Egypt, we’ll put it that way. The texts and artistic programs from pharaonic Is that, is that how we say it?[00:06:53] F- a Pharaoh, Pharo- basically Egypt in the time of Pharaohs sometimes emphasize Nubia as this land to be subdued and exploited. That’s kind of, I think, as, as good as you can go. And that kind of supported this idea of Nubians also being a little bit barbaric or less civilized. They would show up in art often as, as servants.[00:07:14] So at least for most of Egyptian history, they did not get the great- greatest position. The Canaanites and Asiatics were also, though, seen as, as rebellious and treacherous. So they’re, mm, they’re, like, culturally sub- suspect. They’re linked to rebellion and disorder. But they were also trading partners.[00:07:35] So rather than just, like, “We’re gonna conquer you and take you over,” it was, “Well, like, well, we, we like their textiles, so I guess they’re okay kind of. But, like, don’t trust them. N- never trust you know, whoever you’re buying your carpet from.” I don’t know what they-[00:07:49] Malcolm Collins: Wait, did they, did they have specific people who they were like, “Don’t trust them”?[00:07:53] Simone Collins: There were no, there were no, like, specific figures, but I mean, yeah, you wouldn’t trust a Canaanite. Well,[00:07:58] Malcolm Collins: what were the Egyptian stereotypes about [00:08:00] the Nubians? Did you look that up, or should I pull that up right now?[00:08:02] Simone Collins: There were... I mean, like, this is all so old that a lot of this is conjecture that people are just trying to extrapolate from images, so it’s more just you understand where they are in the social order based on a lot of art.[00:08:14] Like, the people who are lower on the social order are depicted as smaller. The Pharaohs and the Egyptians are depicted as larger. That’s, that’s part of what people are looking at. But yeah, there, there was, there wasn’t like a, “Oh, you know Nubians. They’re like this.” I, I didn’t pick up on anything from that.[00:08:31] It’s more just general, like, “Well, these ones are reliable vassals, and these ones, w- we conquer them. That’s what we do. Like, we like to make art of us trouncing them.” Which i- is, it’s kind of a recurring theme of, like, there’s us and there’s others, and that’s going to show up a ton, and I think it really helps me contextualize the way that biases work today.[00:08:52] Even within the most, like, anti-racist groups, there’s us and there’s others. Mm-hmm. You know? There’s, there’s the, the progressive, enlightened, woke person, and then there’s Nazis. Like, it’s one or the other. One, choose yours. You know? Like, Nazi’s a new word for barbarian, and looking at all this history has really helped me think of that or contextualize that.[00:09:11] Libyans, I think, were really interesting. They were also barbarians to the Egyptians ‘cause they weren’t Egyptians. But they turned into useful soldiers and then even rulers for a short period, like you were saying with with Nubians.[00:09:21] Malcolm Collins: So yeah, with Nubians they did have stereotypes. They, they were- Okay, tell me[00:09:25] stereotyped as, as archers, first of all- Oh ... and, and mercenaries, but that’s because they were archers and mercenaries, right? Yeah. You know?[00:09:31] Simone Collins: That’s not a stereotype. That’s just, like, a-[00:09:34] Malcolm Collins: But there’s also the stereotype of the, the, the wretched Kush which you’ve talked about, of, of being a defeated enemy, right?[00:09:40] The wretched Kush. So they, they had- Yeah ... a lot of Nubian slaves bound captives, kneeling prisoners, being people being trampled upon or slaughtered by the Pharaoh.[00:09:48] Simone Collins: Yeah. That’s, that’s what you see, again, like smaller, being defeated in battle, kind of like, “This is a loser.” I think the Libyans w- in all the groups as perceived by ancient Egyptians are the most interesting because they were like a frenemy kind of.[00:10:02] They weren’t totally bad. They, they were sometimes trading partners, sometimes they were enemies. They were first mentioned in the New Kingdom, so going way back, and they also look super interesting. Like, they have the most style.[00:10:18] And I wonder if that’s kind of why the Egyptians were, like, frenemies with them because they also had clearly a very distinct culture.[00:10:24] In images of Nubian- Libyans, they have, like, this really distinct haircut where it’s just short at the nape of the neck. They have a side lock of hair that they wear. So they have, like, their hairstyles, and they also have tattoos, which is such a, like... So they have this very distinct style. They have fashion.[00:10:41] And then eventually so many Libyans migrated into Egypt that they completely changed the political landscape of, of the Nile Valley. So maybe the Libyans were some of the first ever, like, you know, migrant waves-[00:10:55] Malcolm Collins: Migrant waves that are[00:10:56] Simone Collins: a problem, right? Like- Yeah, this is, like, the migrant, “Oh, the Libyans,” like, you know.[00:10:59] The Libyans.[00:11:00] Yeah Which, I mean, it’s, some things just never change, right? Like, stereotyped as dangerous and more like barbarians but also sometimes useful soldiers. Just kind of a complex cousin frenemy kind of culture. So I, yeah, anyway, I, I kinda didn’t know anything about Libyans. I’d listened to that really long Great Courses lecture series about ancient Egypt, and I don’t remember anything about Libyans, so I’m like, “Well, what’s...[00:11:25] Come on.” It was always just about, like, Egypt really liking to trounce outsiders, so I don’t know.[00:11:30] Malcolm Collins: Okay, okay. So- Do we have any, do we have any graffiti or anything from this period of making fun of people?[00:11:35] Simone Collins: No, all the graffiti that you’ll typically find is, like, Roman or Napoleonic scratchings on hieroglyphs or modern tourists defacing them.[00:11:44] Okay,[00:11:45] Malcolm Collins: well, let’s get to that. Let’s keep moving then.[00:11:46] Simone Collins: Yeah. Ancient Greece th- and they’re very common of, like, you’re either someone who is Hellenistic, you spoke Greek, or you’re a barbarian. And obviously the Greeks were not- Well, I[00:11:56] Malcolm Collins: mean, I remember they had a lot of stereotypes about the Macedonians.[00:11:59] Oh[00:11:59] Simone Collins: [00:12:00] yeah, Persians, Persians. They were like, “[00:12:02] Look at these effete pretty boys.” Like you can see this, this art of Darius here looking very fancy. He wasn’t even always the Persian rulers were not even always necessarily depicted negatively, but they were always depicted as very fancy. And like- And I can’t remember what that movie was.[00:12:20] Where was that movie? What was that movie we watched where, like, the Persian ruler, I think it was Darius in it,[00:12:26] Malcolm Collins: Well, the idea of shaming- Just so pretty ... idolatry or the accumulation of ostentatious wealth, whi- which is what we think the idolatry bans are really about is like, the, i- just back to the beginning of Western history.[00:12:39] Yeah. Like the, the Greeks, the Spartans, they laughed at the people who did this. But on the opposite side of this, you have the, the Macedonians, who had a lot of stereotypes associated with them.[00:12:48] Simone Collins: Oh yeah, no, Macedonians were seen as, like, these heavy drinkers, raucous partiers, like sloppy drunks who didn’t even mix their wine.[00:12:58] What monsters.[00:12:59] Malcolm Collins: They were basically seen by the Greeks the way most other cultures in American history saw the greater Appalachian region people.[00:13:08] Simone Collins: They were, they were the drunk cousin of Greece. Like, they, they’re the ones you don’t want showing up at the party who, who drinks way too much and then, like, picks a fight.[00:13:17] But[00:13:17] Malcolm Collins: ultimately they were the much more effective population, right?[00:13:21] Simone Collins: I know, I know, I know. I mean, you have yeah, you have Alexander the Great. Like, it[00:13:24] Malcolm Collins: was a big embarrassment. They, they, they come to the, the Olympic Games and it’s like, “Yeah, sure, you’re allowed,” but, like, it’s the hillbillies coming to the Olympic Games over-[00:13:29] Simone Collins: Yeah, it’s like their hold my beer moment, and they go and conquer.[00:13:33] And it’s amazing.[00:13:34] Malcolm Collins: For people who are familiar, the Macedonians are the ones that Philip of Macedon, Alexander the Great came from. Yeah. Ended up conquering all of Greece and then most of the known world at the time.[00:13:42] Simone Collins: Yeah. And then you know, Cleopatra resulting from this. Like, the, the lasting influence there was huge.[00:13:48] And I, I love the- The, the royal metallurgies or, yeah ...[00:13:51] Malcolm Collins: yeah, so[00:13:51] Simone Collins: back to Persians though, basically, and this is funny too, you know? We, we’ve done that episode where you were like, “Well, I don’t know if people in the Middle East can handle democracy, just like culturally. Like, they, they can’t.” This is exactly what Greeks thought about Persians.[00:14:04] They were like, “Well, these decadent, soft people-” Well- “... are naturally suited to monarchy” ... hold on. “They can’t handle free citizenship. They can’t handle-” They[00:14:11] Malcolm Collins: can’t handle free citizenship. You’re like[00:14:11] Simone Collins: literally pointing out something that’s not true. I, I point[00:14:12] Malcolm Collins: out, Simone, I said that about Arabs, not about- Oh, sorry, Arabs[00:14:15] not about Persians, okay?[00:14:17] Simone Collins: Not about Persians. Well, well, right. I’m saying the Greeks said it about Persians. It’s just that y- you know, you’re not the first person to say that a people cannot handle you know, free citizenship and voting. Some people just need a king. And by[00:14:28] Malcolm Collins: the way, for the people who think that I’m being offensive there, go to our episode on it, the statistics on- No,[00:14:32] Simone Collins: you, you make a compelling argument[00:14:34] Malcolm Collins: on how many times it has been the, we have achieved stable democracies in the Arab world is astonishingly low when contrasted with Northern Europe.[00:14:42] Simone Collins: Yeah. Yeah. O- of course Athens was just sort of considered the cultural capital of the world, but I... My understanding from the various accounts and readings and stuff is that they, everyone saw them as like that stuck-up girl who thinks so much of herself.[00:14:57] And yes, she gets all As and she’s valedictorian and she’s the richest girl in class and she’s super popular, but everyone’s like, “Ugh, like, stop. You’re f- this is tedious.” And everyone saw Spartans a- a- I mean, rightfully so, because here you have Spartans. Sparta’s really different. They, they do not allow foreigners.[00:15:14] They’re very afraid that outsiders are gonna spy on them. They have their harsh, militarized way of life. You know, both girls and young boys are training heavily. The girls are very athletic, in contrast to the classic Athenian woman who, like, the, the perfect Athenian woman you’d never see. She would stay in the back house until she married, and then go to someone else’s, like, back of their house and y- you just...[00:15:35] They were very absent from public life, not very, not very vocal. And then, you know, you have Spartans who are property owners, who are strong and athletic and out there. And here actually you can see, ‘cause you just don’t see statues of or- Mm ... depictions of Athenian women like this. This is a statue of a Spartan running girl[00:15:56] like just a female athlete.[00:15:58] You would n- see [00:16:00] this in a museum and you would immediately know this is from Ancient Greece, she must be Spartan, ‘cause, like, you don’t, you don’t have, like, girls athletically running. This is not a, this is not a thing that people do. So- I, I need to see where this was founded, but Professor Rufus Fears speaking for The Great Courses was like, everyone...[00:16:19] ‘Cause in, in in Athens you would get a wet nurse or something. Everyone wanted a, a Spartan wet nurse ‘cause they were the toughest and they wanted- Yeah ... their babies to be drinking the milk of these strong women if they’re like, especially male babies, right? You don’t want that weak Athenian milk.[00:16:31] You don’t[00:16:32] Malcolm Collins: want that weak... Yeah. Yeah. No, the, the, this is, this comes to an episode where we point out that cultures that are often more militaristic, typically the more martial a culture is, the more gender equal it is between men and women. Yeah. And, and we go into why in, in that episode, but you’re seeing this here with Ath- Spartan women versus Athenian women.[00:16:51] Simone Collins: Yeah. So the Ionian Greeks, do you, can you imagine what they, people thought of them?[00:16:55] Malcolm Collins: They’re[00:16:56] Simone Collins: boring. I don’t know. These are the coastal cities under Persian rule. What, what... They, they obviously thought they were cowards. Oh, yeah. That[00:17:00] Malcolm Collins: they’re, they’re[00:17:01] Simone Collins: effem. They’re weak, they’re softened, the- their mild climate has made them indolent.[00:17:07] That they’re, they’re good talkers, but they’re terrible warriors. And then the Boeotians were just seen as hicks, like those just like- Who were the[00:17:13] Malcolm Collins: Boeotians?[00:17:14] Simone Collins: Especially Thebans. Like, y- you’re more aware of Thebans. Oh, The- Like the band of Thebes ...[00:17:18] Malcolm Collins: they were seen as hicks? They were the ones going to[00:17:19] Simone Collins: go to Thebes?[00:17:19] Yeah, like, well, they were brutish country hicks. They were agricultural, they were uncultured, they were uncosmopolitan. Keep in mind, most of the people, like, writing history are the Athenians with all their books and all their,[00:17:31] Malcolm Collins: you know, temples. No, there were a lot of Ionian Greeks who wrote history.[00:17:33] Like, Herodotus was an Ionian, as far as I remember.[00:17:36] Simone Collins: Right? I don’t know. That sounds just like, you know how New Zealanders, like, you just see them outside of New Zealand all the time because they have to travel the world. Maybe that kind of fits with the whole, you know, had to leave thing. But I don’t know.[00:17:48] Malcolm Collins: Yeah. It, well, so he wrote in Ionic dialect and was deeply influenced by Ionic philosophical and historical traditions.[00:17:55] Simone Collins: Mm.[00:17:55] Malcolm Collins: But he was technically in a region settled by the Dorian[00:17:59] Simone Collins: Greeks.[00:17:59] Malcolm Collins: Ah. But I, I don’t know if they would’ve seen a, a difference. But yeah, continue.[00:18:03] Simone Collins: Okay.[00:18:04] We’re gonna move on to Ancient Rome because this is where I actually was able to get some good graffiti at least one instance that I, I really loved in terms of, like, a stere- ‘cause I, it’s not just finding old graffiti, which is really hard to find, okay? But it’s finding old graffiti that depicts racial stereotypes and, and Romans did a lot of graffiti, they did a lot of trash talk.[00:18:22] If you go, for example, to the, the Roman baths in Bath, in England, in Somerset you can see some of the inscriptions on little pieces of, I think, what is it? Copper? That people wrote on and then dropped into a, like, sacred pool at a temple for a goddess. You know, like, so they would, like, write on a thing, throw it in the water for the god to hear, and the things people wrote, once they carefully unfolded and read these inscriptions, were so fricking petty.[00:18:50] They’re like, “Make so and so blind for stealing my bag,” and like, you know, it was just people fricking hated each other. Like, we’ve been petty forever. But that’s not about a racial stereotype or it’s not about a group-based st- stereotype. But here’s, is something delightful, and I just love, you know, graffitis that also looks like such terrible drawings.[00:19:08] But tell me what you see, Malcolm.[00:19:11] Malcolm Collins: Okay. Okay, okay, okay. Sorry. Oh, let’s see. Open it up here.[00:19:17] Simone Collins: Yeah, what are you looking at here?[00:19:18] Malcolm Collins: Oh, I know this one. I’ve seen this one before. This is so, so I don’t even have to interpret it because I know this particular art so well.[00:19:26] Simone Collins: This is famous, yeah.[00:19:26] Malcolm Collins: Yeah, but this is supposed to be somebody being crucified with a donkey head, and then somebody else is worshiping the person being crucified with a donkey head.[00:19:36] Simone Collins: And the, the writing says, “Go worship your donkey god,” because that is what Romans thought of both Jews and Christians. Well- This is more Christians in this case ...[00:19:46] Malcolm Collins: why the donkey? Why the... the, do we know?[00:19:49] Simone Collins: You know, it, it wasn’t very clear. But it was just a well-known slur at the time that both Jews and Christians worshiped a donkey.[00:19:57] This was an accusation that had a name. It was called [00:20:00] an- anility. And they used the donkey head to mock Christ and th- th- this is specifically, like, it’s an insult to... Again, ‘cause Romans are, like, so freaking petty and they’re very targeted. But it’s, it’s an insult toward Alexamenos. But yeah, it’s like, go worship your donkey god, Alexamenos.[00:20:16] Malcolm Collins: Go worship your donkey god, you nerd. Oh, right. And then the guy in the picture looks like a real guy. I know, I know. Like, he looks like he could have been a person.[00:20:24] Simone Collins: It’s, it’s, it’s wonderful. It, it is,[00:20:25] Malcolm Collins: Just trying to go about his normal life ... yeah,[00:20:27] Simone Collins: just trying to worship his donkey god. I mean, okay, let me, let me actually double-click on anility, because yeah, where did they get donkey?[00:20:35] Maybe ‘cause Jesus rode into... But then why would the Jews worship a donkey? Worship of donkey and by extension, figurative devotion to fooln- foolishness. The core meaning in its literal sense means worship of the ass or donkey as a deity. Mommy? Yeah, buddy? In antiquity, pagan authors in the Hellenistic and Roman worlds accused Jews and later early Christians of anolatry, claiming they worshiped a donkey or donkey-headed idol. Writers such as Tacitus mention this slur, and Christian apologists like Tertullian and Minicius Felix refer to it in order to refute it.[00:21:15] W- why? Why did they think Jews worshiped[00:21:29] A donkey. Maybe it was, you know, one of those things that just like if donkeys were fools. Th- they’re not really saying that Jews worshiped a donkey, but donkeys were just a representation of like y- this is a ridiculous religion. Ancient- No, Tex. Ancient Greek and Roman authors did not seriously objur- observe Jews worshiping a donkey.[00:21:51] They developed that idea as a hostile slur that blended ethnographic fantasy, wordplay, and polemic about aniconic worship. Anicon- aniconic.[00:22:02] Malcolm Collins: Aniconic.[00:22:04] Simone Collins: Okay. That’s a new word. Aniconic, ladies and gentlemen. So yeah, no, the, the, it’s just, it’s like an intentional slur that has no basis in reality, but they’re like, “What are you doing?”[00:22:17] Okay, fine. He’s just, just here for the ride. He’s- Oh, not if you do that, though. Let’s get back to what Romans thought of people. Jews were seen as basically stubborn, cliquey weirdos. They were portrayed as very, like, hard-headed subjects with this herd mentality who were fiercely attached to their weird, unique customs such as circumcision and, and deity laws and not, not killing babies.[00:22:48] Malcolm Collins: Yeah, Tactica complained about that.[00:22:50] Simone Collins: Yeah, like, what, who, who are these crazy people who don’t even kill their weak babies? And then all outsiders, of course, were barbarians. Greeks were admirable but contemptible. Like, they were, like, you know, of course the source of philosophy and art and literature.[00:23:06] They were nerds. Yeah, yeah. They were- Oh my God, that is totally, yeah, they were nerds. They were seen as, as talkative and tricky and morally weak and effeminate and prone to luxury and unreliable and more. Like brainy but soft. They were, they were nerds. Greeks, the OG nerds. I love[00:23:23] Malcolm Collins: that. The OG nerds.[00:23:23] Don’t trust them.[00:23:24] Simone Collins: Phoenicians- I[00:23:25] Malcolm Collins: wouldn’t trust a Greek. Not back then, I’ll tell you what.[00:23:27] Simone Collins: They- Oh, for sure not. Yeah. Oh my God, so was Nero a weeb? The Rome, Rome was the America of the time. No, like Nero then must have been kind of weeb-like, right? ‘Cause he’s like, “I just love the Greeks so much.” “And I wanna be an actor.”[00:23:38] Was that just his thing? No, a[00:23:39] Malcolm Collins: good way to think of the way the Romans viewed the Greeks is the way Americans view Europeans.[00:23:44] Simone Collins: Oh my gosh, okay. Yes ...[00:23:47] Malcolm Collins: like cultured but like effeminate and weak, right? Like a failure. Like[00:23:51] Simone Collins: they are not- Like, yeah ...[00:23:52] Malcolm Collins: really set to run an empire. Come on, man. No, that’s horrific.[00:23:56] America needs to come back on and crack some heads because [00:24:00] they’re being ruled by their women again.[00:24:02] Simone Collins: Oh gosh, that is, that is such a thing. Yeah, let’s see. Just generally like Syrians and Carthaginians and Phoenicians were seen as sleazy merchants. But I, I think like, honestly, and this is showing up as a pattern, anyone who kind of traded with your empire who was like an outside trading partner was like, ooh, suspicious.[00:24:20] I don’t know. But this makes sense because the dynamic is this is a trading partner. Like, they obviously wanna get the better end of a deal. You’re negotiating, so you’re going to have some level of distrust. So I’m seeing like this pattern, right? There’s the Libyans and then there’s the Phoenicians and...[00:24:35] Oh, Egyptians though were seen as- Very ancient and sinister with their weird superstition and their arrogant priests and their... They, they, they really didn’t... Also, Rome kind of resented them, and I think that it’s similar to how China can resent the US and, and, and other countries, ‘cause Egypt was kind of the breadbasket for Rome.[00:24:58] They were really, e- especially, es- especially during certain times, dependent on them for food. So it was like, well, they need Egyptian grain, but they’re also these, like, weird, mysterious, superstitious people, and they were kind of, like, fascinated and disturbed by them. It was as if, like, you need all of your food from, or, like, a lot of your food from some, like...[00:25:21] Oh, like your kid in the cafeteria, and your parents always neglect to pack your lunch, but, like, this creepy goth girl in the corner- Mm-hmm ... or, like, Wiccan is like, “Yes, come, and I will read your tarot cards.” And it’s like, well I need the food and she’s kinda hot, but she really creeps me out. So I don’t want this.[00:25:40] And I think Cleopatra, I, I read, I’ve read multiple biographies about her, really played up this stereotype and used it well because[00:25:49] Malcolm Collins: she spent- You know, she’s like, like the goth, she was the goth girl of her era, right?[00:25:51] Simone Collins: Like- She was the hot goth of her era, 100%. Very dramatic.[00:25:56] Malcolm Collins: I’ll kill yourself with, like, a snake or whatever, right?[00:25:58] Like-[00:25:58] Simone Collins: 100%. I mean, she was totally the hot goth of her time, and very, like, that girl, too, in high school who would, like, sleeps with all the guys because she, like, understands how to play their tune and use them to her advantage. She’s- And do the mysterious, gothy thing. Ugh, yeah, for real. She was, yeah,[00:26:15] so spooky.[00:26:16] That was Egyptians. They were spooky.[00:26:20] Spooky.[00:26:21] Yeah. And then in general, like, Persians and Parthians were viewed as, as pretty formidable enemies and kind of that, I think similarly to how Egyptians viewed Libyans, it’s like, “Oh, well, you are a formidable enemy. Like, I worry about you.” I think similarly to how Greeks viewed Persians of like, “Ah, I mean, you’re effete and pretty, and, you know, your people are soft, but I gotta watch out for you.”[00:26:46] The Gauls were seen as these noble savages. So while they were seen as, like, hot-headed and brave noble savages, they were also seen as, like, sort of impetuous and simple and prone to rashness, kind of like a- Yes ... the big meatheads, I guess. The meatheads of the North. They were the, the jock on the, the, the high school team.[00:27:04] They would just kind of follow orders, I guess, from some leader, from like a bunch- I’m trying to[00:27:07] Malcolm Collins: get more Roman Jewish stereotypes than you had, ‘cause I don’t, I don’t like, yeah, I don’t think you, you, you go, you had enough there. Continue.[00:27:12] Simone Collins: Of my Roman Jews? Yeah. And then the, the, but the Germans were seen as even more savage versions of the Gauls, and I know that, like, Germany wasn’t a thing yet, but, like, people from that re- region that is now Germany, they were like the extra, extra Gauls.[00:27:26] They were super Gauls. They were even more savage, even more unconqueror. They were like the, they came from the trees, from the dirt. They were like dirt people and they-[00:27:37] Malcolm Collins: Wait, who were, who were the super golds?[00:27:39] Simone Collins: The Germans The Germans? The, the, well, I mean, like- They were ... the people from the, yeah, and like they, they were, they totally were.[00:27:44] They were both like romanticized by the Romans, who were like, “Ah, these noble savages.” Like, they were kind of the OG noble savage.[00:27:51] Malcolm Collins: So, so, okay, I, I pulled up their, their Jewish stereotypes.[00:27:54] Simone Collins: Oh, no. They- Okay, go on ...[00:27:55] Malcolm Collins: were clannish, antisocial, and misanthropic. Specifically [00:28:00] Jews were accused of refusing to mix with others, sitting apart at meals, sleeping separately, and showing loyalty only to fellow Jews.[00:28:07] Tacitus, the harshest source- Didn’t I say[00:28:09] Simone Collins: that quickly? ...[00:28:10] Malcolm Collins: wrote that a- and Tacitus, by the way, was the, the biggest source. He was the one who complained that they wouldn’t kill their babies. That they sit apart at meals and they sleep apart. And they were prone to lust. They abstained from for- oh, he says, “While they’re prone to lust, they abstain from foreign women.”[00:28:25] I love that’s one of the problems. They’re prone to lust, but only other Jews. But[00:28:28] Simone Collins: they’re, they’re not taking our women. Like, what? Really? Like, where are you going with that? He claimed[00:28:32] Malcolm Collins: they showed com- compassion only to each other and were hostile to all others. Cicero complained that the Jews stick together and had undue influence in Roman assemblies.[00:28:42] That’s hilarious. Okay. Oh, my God. So, the Jews control all of Rome. They’re all in our assemblies, guys. They, they did not like the, the pork taboo was frequently ridiculed. The incision was ri- ri- ridiculed. Sabbath observance ridiculed, and the a- aniconism that you talked about. Yeah.[00:28:58] Simone Collins: Yeah,[00:28:58] Malcolm Collins: they were- And they really hated, and see our episode- Weirdos[00:29:00] if you’re not familiar with this, but the most common complaint about Jews is that they were always attempting to convert Romans, which obviously has changed in Judaism, and see our episode, The Question that Breaks Judaism, where we go over the history of this change in Judaism.[00:29:13] Simone Collins: Yeah. It’s a, th- there’s a, abundant coverage of this.[00:29:19] But let’s move on to medieval Europe. Basically there were these, and, and this is interesting, the barbarians changed a little and it was kind of like they’re barely Christian. It, it, the, the primary concern with barbarians, like the Irish, the Welsh, the Slavs, Baltic people, there’s like, are they even Christian?[00:29:36] Like, what are, what are these monsters? But that’s kind of like the measuring stick is how Christ- are these good Christians? But Anglo-norml- Norman writers in England and, and also people living in what’s now Germany, would just routinely depict nearby frontier peoples which, you know, were Scottish Irish Slavs- Welcome[00:29:55] more far northen- northern people as just basically violent pastoralists, pirates, plunderers. They were resistant to law and agriculture. Like, “Do you even farm, bro?” And, and needing- Do you even[00:30:07] Malcolm Collins: farm, bro? ...[00:30:08] Simone Collins: to be conquested sorry, conquered, and they needed... It wasn’t just conquest, it was also missionary work.[00:30:14] Like, “We gotta send, we gotta... These guys need Jesus.” Like, they were, they were really worried about them. They were, they needed to, to be civilized, they needed to climb the... Well, I, I’m giving you stuff, but you’re just throwing it. Climb the rungs of civilization and, and, and be shown a better way I haven’t heard back, love. But yeah, this, so this, this, they need to be civilized stereotype was also used to excuse or justify expansion into these territories which I, I think is, like, a f- fairly ex- to be expected pattern, right?[00:30:49] Like, of course they would. That, that makes sense. We, you can kind of see, here’s an image. Like, there, there, again, there’s not much, like, imagery, but here are some engravings by Albrecht Dürer during the 1500s of-[00:31:03] Malcolm Collins: Okay ...[00:31:03] Simone Collins: pastoral people.[00:31:05] You have to see just other Roman graffiti that I found that wasn’t racist, but could be racist, ‘cause look at nose man. Looks just so weirdly modern. And[00:31:17] I, I forget what- Noseband.[00:31:19] Malcolm Collins: That’s very hilarious.[00:31:20] Simone Collins: Yeah. Someone didn’t like him or his floppy nose. Here are the pastoralists. So I don’t know, they just look kind of like they’re- ... they’re dancing. One’s playing a bagpipe. They’re just kinda like, “Eh.” Like, I don’t know. Lazy[00:31:34] Malcolm Collins: vagabonds.[00:31:34] Simone Collins: Like, I know exactly what you mean.[00:31:35] Lazy, yeah. Lazy vagabonds, I guess, is kind of the look they’re going for. So that’s the closest I could get to, like, a, a, a picture of them. But the Scots especially were just seen not only as, you know, among these things of, like, more in need of civilization and everything, but, like, southern Scotland was seen- Mm[00:31:53] as, like, kind of cool. Mm. Like, kinda chill. They’re all right. And then, like, northern Scotland was like, “No, they’re, they’re the worst. They’re poor and terrifying.” [00:32:00] But broadly speaking, they were seen as militarily dangerous, but just poor and less civilized. And they just had these small, poor towns and these people in their, in their swaddling swaddling...[00:32:15] What do you, what do you call them? Kilts? Not kilts. What are, like, the actual garments that people used to wear in Scotland that you wrap around? They’re very long.[00:32:23] You know what I’m talking about?[00:32:25] Malcolm Collins: No, I[00:32:25] Simone Collins: forget what you call- Yeah, you don’t care about[00:32:26] She’s talking about a great kilt[00:32:27] Malcolm Collins: your garments. I, I for- I forget the name. I know what you’re talking about.[00:32:30] Simone Collins: Yeah. I was thinking of Trump’s phrase swaddling hijab, which I just thought was the best phrase ever. But yeah, they were very, like, persistent enemies, and there, there was a lot of understanding of them being stubborn and warlike. The Jews, here’s where, like, the stuff, the antisemitic stuff gets I, I guess, good and what, where you were expecting something.[00:32:49] Mm. What I did not expect to see was a very big recurring theme with the Jews. Do you know what it is? Have you seen, like, older antisemitic art, like 1300s to 1700s? Is it[00:33:01] Malcolm Collins: their stupid hats?[00:33:02] Simone Collins: No. No. What is it? It involves a farm animal.[00:33:07] Malcolm Collins: I don’t know what it is then, no.[00:33:09] Simone Collins: So for whatever reason, pig suckling is just all over the pl- the suckling, the, the, lots of...[00:33:16] Like, here, here’s an example. This-[00:33:17] Malcolm Collins: So they think the Jews drink milk directly from pigs? That was the stereotype?[00:33:21] Simone Collins: Yeah, no. Check, check this out. So this is a church in Wittenberg. This is actually a church where Martin Luther preached once, and there was a fairly recent controversy where people were like, “Dude, this, this carving in this, this 1300s carving in this church is, like, super antisemitic.[00:33:38] It shows a bunch of Jews suckling from a pig.”[00:33:40] What do you think it is?[00:33:41] Octavian Collins: It’s like people, like raise people.[00:33:44] Simone Collins: Oh, like I’m raising you?[00:33:46] Octavian Collins: Yeah.[00:33:47] Simone Collins: So racism- Yeah ... is just another word for pronatalism. For raising.[00:33:52] Octavian Collins: Pronatalism? ‘[00:33:53] Simone Collins: Cause we’re raising. Raising. We’re raising him.[00:33:55] Malcolm Collins: We’re raising him. And we believe in racism. Raise-ism. Yeah. Raise-ism. I like that.[00:34:00] Simone Collins: Where was I? Right, suckling pigs. Right, so the, the, this, this, this church in Wittenberg, by the way, wasn’t taken down. Antisemitism is alive and well where[00:34:10] Malcolm Collins: the- Thank God. What a horrible thing if they took down something from the 1300s. It,[00:34:12] Simone Collins: it would be. It would be.[00:34:13] Like, it’s un- it’s helpful to understand the history of bias. So I-[00:34:18] Malcolm Collins: And we don’t know that Jews at that time period didn’t suckle from pigs.[00:34:22] Simone Collins: Right? I mean, h- so here’s another one. Mm. I, this, this is really pretty explicit. It’s kinda hard to make out what’s happening in this antisemitic engraving from the, I think this is also the 1300s.[00:34:36] And I couldn’t get a great translation. But it’s[00:34:40] there’s someone e- eating something out of the butt of what I believe is also a pig. Another person is suckling from its very full teat. People have got horns because you got the Jew horns. The Jew horns- Mm ... of course appear. Or[00:34:54] Malcolm Collins: that, that only makes sense.[00:34:56] Simone Collins: Yeah. Yeah, I mean, duh. And there, there’s what appears to be possibly a dead baby at the top, so maybe here’s where we get the you know- Blood libel ... the Jews and the, and the babies. I don’t know. It’s kinda hard to tell. I don’t speak...[00:35:10] Malcolm Collins: Yeah, I mean, this, this puts modern antisemitism to shame, you know?[00:35:14] Simone Collins: Here’s another image of- The way we- ... more Jews suckling from a pig. What, like this I, just blindsided me. Okay. Like, why, why are we, why,[00:35:26] Malcolm Collins: And they’re dressed like the freaking babies from that one skit, like, Ozymandias or whatever the, which is also hilarious. And one of them is, I guess, looking at the poo, and the other ones are suckling from its teat, and another one is looking at the baby’s butt and they’re in like baby outfits.[00:35:45] Speaker 13: What is the meaning of life? Well, then what’s your answer?[00:35:49] Speaker 14: I’ll never be able to say something as profound as my brother. My desire for my words to have sterile, clinical, literal meanings is sort of a wall that [00:36:00] prevents me from venturing close to people.[00:36:02] Sometimes I think the most direct route to another’s heart is through nonsense, and nonsense has always eluded me.[00:36:09] Speaker 13: Well, to you, then, what is the direct literal meaning of life?[00:36:11] Speaker 14: I hope before I am dead and my atoms are collected back into the neutron star at the center of the baby dimension, that I will discover why the love that I have for my brother was not enough for him to feel whole when that love is all that sustains me and all that I think I will ever have.[00:36:36] Speaker 13: I think what he meant to say was we like to have fun[00:36:40] Speaker 14: and get tickles.[00:36:41] Speaker 13: Okay.[00:36:42] Speaker 14: Right? Fun and tickles.[00:36:45] Simone Collins: Yeah, and this, I, I think I, I did not encounter any level of, we’ll say hatred or racism or othering against any group at all that I did with Jews during medieval to Renaissance Europe, That’s[00:37:01] Malcolm Collins: fascinating that, like, Jews really, like, the, the West learned how to racism with Jews.[00:37:06] Simone Collins: Oh, no, like for real, this was when, like, they went hard on them.[00:37:12] ‘Cause a- again, I, I had difficulty finding a whole lot of hate on other groups. It was like, “Oh, you know, those bumpkins.”[00:37:18] Malcolm Collins: No, what, what I also find funny about- Next slide ... this is just how extreme it is compared- It[00:37:22] Simone Collins: is ... to modern antisemitism. Well, and Malcolm, let me be clear. It, it’s not just this weird pig suckling thing.[00:37:27] It is that they, they basically thought they were, like, not human. Like, they had all these things that they, they thought they were like, they had weird bodily traits that other humans didn’t have, like that they were hemorrhoidal and had, had monthly bleeding that wasn’t- Just for women. They, they were very seen as, as, as melancholic and greedy and spiritually obstinate and this, this was like a hereditary genetic, like they, they were very much seen as subhuman, like as, as, as monsters.[00:37:59] And then this, this fell- That’s fascinating ... fed into more broad notions that Jews were these fixed outsiders that you, you could not integrate them into a Christian new Israel. And they were associated very much with usury and corruption. And actually not Alex actually was just reminding me the other day in our XDMs that it’s really, really weird, this idea among evangelical Americans that like, “Well, we want Jews in Israel because, you know, we need that for the second coming.”[00:38:28] This whole idea, like in, in Europe he, he reminded me, us that like in Europe, no, just the, the idea is that Christians are the descendants of Jews. And only, like you need Christians in Israel. You don’t need Jews in Israel.[00:38:42] Malcolm Collins: Like- Yeah. The, the Crusades were not about re-winning Israel for the Jews For[00:38:46] Simone Collins: Jews.[00:38:47] Yeah, exactly.[00:38:48] So that is something that’s powerful ... I mean,[00:38:49] Malcolm Collins: it’s a, it’s a different interpretation. And I think it is a, if I’m gonna be honest, I think the evangelical interpretation of those particular passages seems to be more literalist and as intended than the interpretation that the Catholic Church took in the medieval period.[00:39:06] The Catholic Church took a bunch of crazy positions in the medieval period that are just not heavily supported by the Bible. Yeah. And a lot of Christians forget just how much of that is, is... Like, I always point out like the Trinity, for example, is just not that well-supported by the Bible as a concept.[00:39:25] It’s not, the Bible isn’t specifically antagonistic to the Trinity. It doesn’t argue against it. But like it came out as a concept like 300 years later. And so when people were like, “Oh, you guys don’t believe in the Trinity, you’re not real Christians,” I’m like Excuse me ... that was not, that was not a thing for most of the early Christians Yeah.[00:39:35] Not[00:39:36] Simone Collins: my canon. Yeah,[00:39:36] Malcolm Collins: exactly.[00:39:43] Yeah. It’s like, that, that is a, that is a... Well, I think a lot of Christians forget the stuff that came in in the early councils and the stuff that’s actually in the Bible, and they conflate the two really heavily.[00:39:52] Simone Collins: Totally. I just sent you some more. I sent you one more Jew one. Oh. Oh, okay ... again, of Jews.[00:39:57] Again, they’re stuck. They can’t get off this pig. And [00:40:00] one of them looks like he wants to lick the pi- the pig’s- A hole on the wrong side. Three are suckling from the teat. The other one is chewing on its tail and riding it backwards[00:40:11] Malcolm Collins: Oh, thank God.[00:40:12] Simone Collins: They’re just like they... I’ve never seen racist art this explicit.[00:40:17] So as a palate cleanser, I’m gonna th- I also sent you my fav- Oh ... my favorite ones. This- A bird ... chicken, I guess. The chicken.[00:40:24] Malcolm Collins: Chicken. Okay.[00:40:25] Simone Collins: There’s the guy. Okay. I really like the guy. I[00:40:28] Malcolm Collins: think, I think m- I think Octavia would’ve drawn this chicken, just-[00:40:31] Simone Collins: It, it looks like something that Octavia would’ve drawn.[00:40:33] I think my favorite’s just like the little dude. Not the one with the hat, but just like the dude with the sword. Oh, yeah. Looks very much like a certain internet style. You know what I mean? It’s kind of a- Yeah ... kind of Invader Zim. It, it’s kind of giving Invader Zim. And I-[00:40:45] Malcolm Collins: Yeah, it definitely has the j-[00:40:46] style of modern internet art, actually.[00:40:48] Simone Collins: Yeah. I’m like, “Oh my gosh,” like nothing is new. Nothing is new. I love, I[00:40:52] Malcolm Collins: love that- But actually, the, the guy with the hat also has a style of like some modern cartoons.[00:40:56] Simone Collins: Totally. Like, what, did, were these just over educated medieval art scholars who had to like get a commercial job and ended up illustrating for cartoons?[00:41:05] What is going on? But also I guess humans just draw certain ways, so who cares? I, I don’t know. But I found that very entertaining. Moving on to Renaissance Europe. This is what you alluded to earlier, the vice concept emerged. We have the French vice, the English vice, and the Italian vice. Cool. Which is delightful.[00:41:26] I think most people came to learn about the French vice in various movies and shows about the, the court of King Henry VIII and the Boleyn sisters. And that is because they spent some of their youth in the French royal court, which was the source of this reputation of the French vice. It was seen as this very A sexually loose place where he’d learn all sorts of tricks that the very prudish English women didn’t know.[00:41:57] I will leave this to your imagination, but imagine, and of course, this is what people were saying, we don’t know what actually happened in the bedroom. Mm. But imagine King Henry VIII’s delight when he discovers these young women from the French court who can do things to him that he couldn’t even imagine after spending all this time with his Catholic wife, Isabel.[00:42:17] Right, her name was Isabel. So yeah, th- this was like, it was very much a reputation. I think this is really downstream of the fact that the court the French court in general involved a lot of mistresses. So there was this depiction of like, well, there’s just, where there’s mistresses, there’s gotta be a lot of sex, and where there’s a lot of sex, you gotta have a lot of like, weird stuff going on.[00:42:37] Gotta have it ... and even to this day, you have French kissing. Mm-hmm. You know, and there’s still reputations. French[00:42:41] Malcolm Collins: kissing, yes. They[00:42:42] Simone Collins: invented it. Right? I mean, come on. Like, but think, it’s, it’s like some English person who’s never used tongue who’s like, “Well, this must be the French style.” You know, like, this thing holds.[00:42:50] It holds really well which is absolutely delightful. And then the important thing about these vice reputations, the, the English vice, the Italian vice, et cetera, is that once the seeds were planted in Renaissance Europe, in the early modern era, they just started to compound and grow on each other.[00:43:09] Okay. So after this became kind of a thing because of some, you know, like French court women kind of being seen as sexually manipulative ‘cause there are all these mistresses floating around, you started to get French literature really leaning into it, and there was this rise of this international publishing industry, so you also have the printing press making this worse.[00:43:28] But around the mid-1600s, all these erotic and semi-pornographic French books started entering the Germanic region. They started entering the UK. All these, all these basically French romantic and erotic smut started- Mm-hmm ... entering the rest of Europe. Really? And the printing presses made it super pervasive. So imagine if, like, suddenly books exist a- and, and all the romance novels that are really smutty come from France.[00:43:56] You- you’re gonna start to, like, build on this reputation. Yeah ... and y- [00:44:00] yeah, I had[00:44:00] Malcolm Collins: no idea- Well, I mean, for the longest time when I was younger, I remember the French women were known for being, like, slutty and not shaving their armpits.[00:44:08] Simone Collins: You know, some people find that hot. I don’t, but so it’s got... Some people like it.[00:44:11] Malcolm Collins: I’ve, I’ve heard it. Yeah, some people find bush hot, too. I d- I don’t understand.[00:44:15] Simone Collins: But anyway, these, these dirty books were basically, like, French... And, and I think French people leaned into the stereotype ‘cause they kinda liked being a little sexy. And so that’s, that’s it. And a very similar thing... I, so I didn’t know about, I didn’t know about the French literature compounding the issue and the printing press really fomenting it.[00:44:34] I also didn’t know why the Italian vice became such a big thing. So from the later Middle Ages onward, outsiders started to associate certain Italian cities, not all but especially Florence, as having widespread male same-sex love and social networks that made these relationships super visible and pretty common.[00:44:58] So basically there w- there was, like, the first gay scene was in Florence.[00:45:02] Speaker 6: , they invented gayness.[00:45:04][00:45:04] Speaker 17: I wonder if having Italy be disproportionately gay during the period of, , the development of many key Catholic institutions and doctrines is what played such a large part in such a large portion of the Catholic priesthood being same-sex attracted and, , the sort of large gay networks that many people have called out.[00:45:26] Milo Yiannopoulos, for example, wrote a book on the, , Lavender Mafia, as he called it, and we recently did an episode on the, , quote-unquote “gay Jewish,” , priests who ended up writing core Catholic doctrine. , But , the, these individuals’ ability to so thoroughly gain control of the church and its doctrine and teachings[00:45:42] Simone Collins: Maybe they... Gay people, chime in in the comments if there’s some other first gay scene, but, like, it seems like that really happened.[00:45:49] Malcolm Collins: Well, I mean, obviously there’s, there’s, there’s, like, pre-modern gay scenes, like Thebes and stuff like that, but yeah, yeah.[00:45:54] Simone Collins: Sure. Well, yeah. Well, allegedly. We don’t, we don’t know for sure. But there’s evidence from court records- We do know pretty sure about the[00:45:59] Malcolm Collins: Theban troops ...[00:46:01] Simone Collins: the Band of Thebes? Is there really? ‘Cause I remember, like, getting so excited about it and being like, “This is my yaoi romance. Let’s go. I need to learn more.”[00:46:08] And they were like, “Well, it wasn’t... We’re not sure.” We don’t know. We’re not sure how great or long- They’re not sure what happened during[00:46:15] Malcolm Collins: Creta ... what it was, but there was- Yeah ... a period where it happened[00:46:19] Simone Collins: Yeah, yeah.[00:46:20] Speaker 15: So I decided to go over all of the primary evidence we have for this, and it’s just demonstrable. , One, that the Sacred Band of Thebes existed. We know this because they helped hold the line against the Spartan king, Agis II in 378. , They, at the Battle of Tegyra in 375 BC under Polyeidus, , the 300 routed a much larger Spartan force.[00:46:44] For the first time, Spartans were defeated. , Spartans were defeated a much s- by a much smaller force, first of all. , They were instrumental in the stunning Theban victory over Spartans at Leuctra 371, , which ended Spartans’ dominance over Greece. And the unit fought other campaign until it was ultimately annihilated at the Battle of Chaeronea in 338 BC by the m- army of Philip II , of Macedon.[00:47:10] So, , for a long period, we have evidence of them existing. In terms of them being an armory of gay lovers, , this was attested by Plutarch, Dionysius, Plato, Xenophon, and other attestations appear, including Polyaenus, Athenaeus, Diodotus Siculus, , and several others. So there’s at least six ancient writers that describe the erotic pairing.[00:47:37] , So, , it... And we have arch- archaeological evidence. There is the Lion of Chaeronea, - monetary funeral lion, , and in 1879 to 1880, Greek archeologist, , Pantagathus Stamicus excavated a site and found 254 skeletons arranged in rows, seven rows, with some pairs having arms linked in hands clasped consistent with the, , what, what [00:48:00] we’re aware of with this.[00:48:01] , So yeah, this is almost certainly not a legend and was a real force, , in which, , it was made up , of gay men and was able to dramatically outperform forces that were thought of as... Like the Spartans’ famous saying, if 300 men beat, like, 3,000 , Persians, and then apparently they were beat by a fraction of their own number of the Band of Thebes.[00:48:20] Speaker 16: Who then were themselves beat by the hillbilly Macedonians, showing that hillbilly style always beats all other styles. , Also fun fact, , of my genetic chart, the place where my ancestry, if you go to the pre-English part of my ancestry, it traces back from Macedon[00:48:38] Simone Collins: Anyway well, and yeah, and I guess gay romance was kind of a thing throughout ancient Greece and Rome.[00:48:43] Never mind. Totally, I went ... Oh, God, and then, like, never mind. Yeah. Pervasive. Never mind. Totally wrong. It’s, the world has been gay for all of history. Oh, God, yeah. Sorry I know.[00:48:51] Malcolm Collins: CR episodes do gays destroy civilization, where we go over this. Like, where, where do we actually see gays in history? When do we see gays in history, and does it precede civilizational collapse?[00:49:00] Simone Collins: Yeah.[00:49:00] Malcolm Collins: Basically we find it, it doesn’t appear to.[00:49:03] Simone Collins: Yeah. But there is evidence from, because this is the point at which it’s illegal, court records, witness testimonies, moralizing tracts that, that indicate the presence of active male queer communities in cities like Florence, and this helped cement the idea that this was a more tolerant area.[00:49:25] I mean, it’s kind of ironic, right? ‘Cause they’re like, “No, don’t do it. Stop.” But, but you know, they, they kept doing it. And then by the 17th century, because phrases like the Italian vice became kind of like a, a shorthand[00:49:38] Malcolm Collins: for gay- So gayness was the Italian vice, sleeping around was the French vice, and BDSM was the English vice[00:49:43] Simone Collins: Yeah, yeah. I’m gonna get to, to the UK next Okay but yeah because the Italian vice was shorthand for gay stuff then people would start to go to Italy for their gay romespringa. Tourists would, even i- in the early 1800s, sort of revive and spread this stereotype because they were both fascinated and scandalized by this reputation and they, they wanted to check it out and maybe- They’d be[00:50:11] Malcolm Collins: like, “Ooh, oh, the gay, early gay, proto-gay bars and stuff.”[00:50:15] Simone Collins: It kind of was, yeah. It’s like the Cape Cod, Fire Island, Provincetown of of Europe, you know? The,[00:50:21] Malcolm Collins: Yeah. So being born in Fire Island definitely made[00:50:23] Simone Collins: you a little bit gay ... the gay, kinky boot of Europe. Yeah Yes. It’s, it’s beautiful. It’s beautiful. So yeah, I, I thi- I didn’t know that that, it was like a, sort of a self-fulfilling prophecy thing.[00:50:32] Although of course the, the court records show that it was a thing they were trying to stop. Now, the English vice is super interesting because first, England was super known for being very puritanical and c- sex negative, and not, not very interesting when it came to sexual relations.[00:50:48] Malcolm Collins: Okay. Okay.[00:50:49] Simone Collins: But then I think part- partly because it was so dour and puritan and sexually repressed and a bunch of sanctimonious proto-Karens freaked out when people did do slightly kinky things, that it then developed this reputation for flagellation, which then evolved into our understanding of, like, BDSM, because there were commentators, like, trying to say, “Don’t do this,” and people, like, criminalizing it.[00:51:20] Do, wait,[00:51:20] Malcolm Collins: wait, what do we, what do we not do? What, where, where, where is the video I’m not supposed to look at?[00:51:26] Simone Collins: What video?[00:51:27] Malcolm Collins: That’s a joke. When you’re describing a video or something like that, it’s like, oh- Oh ... oh.[00:51:32] Simone Collins: Yeah, yeah.[00:51:33] Malcolm Collins: Where’s the... Do you... I, I definitely won’t look at that video. Can you just give me the URL for it?[00:51:38] You know the joke. Come on.[00:51:40] Simone Collins: Oh, no, I, I don’t. Maybe it’s a not girl thing. But anyway. Lee[00:51:46] Malcolm Collins: would get it. Lee- my, my bros would get it. You’re just too-[00:51:50] Simone Collins: I am, I am an old... I’m a s- I have the soul of a 62-year-old woman who’s probably not that online. But anyway basically around the 19th [00:52:00] century especially, English pu- public culture became super moralizing, and there were all these laws against male same-sex acts.[00:52:09] And this made Britain a focal point for debates about homosexuality, which is also sometimes seen as the British vice, along with flagellation. And then in that climate, continental commentators would talk about the English vice, refer to specific behaviors, either flagellation or same-sex relations. Because it was, it was more prevalent in, like, a sex work context or in people getting caught and in big trouble for it.[00:52:39] And it kind of happened in a way... It was, like, late onset Italian vice. So Italy really got the brunt of the same-sex reputation, and what really stuck with the UK was the BDSM stuff.[00:52:51] Malcolm Collins: That is not what I’ve heard about how the UK got the BDSM stuff.[00:52:55] Simone Collins: Oh, maybe I was reading the wrong sources. So- So what did you get?[00:52:59] Malcolm Collins: I heard that it came from British private schools that used flogging as a, a punishment mechanism.[00:53:06] Simone Collins: Mm.[00:53:06] There’s this one book that’s called The English Vice that is a picture of a schoolteacher, a male schoolteacher who’s short and stout and has something of a whip. I mean, maybe it was... it came from this rep- I haven’t read the book.[00:53:21] I, I did not read an entire book for this one episode. I’m so sorry. But like- But[00:53:24] Malcolm Collins: apparently, what would happen is the kids would go and do it to each other.[00:53:29] Simone Collins: Oh. Bless them.[00:53:30] Malcolm Collins: Like, that’s, that’s where, like, they’d be like, “Oh, this is kinda kinky,” or whatever. And then it, like, took off as, like, a thing that people would do.[00:53:40] I mean- I think, you know, BDSM and other things- Well, yeah, I mean,[00:53:43] Simone Collins: school paddles were super pervasive. Corporal punishment was extremely pervasive in British schools. So it maybe it’s also that because that form of corporal punishment, especially things like the paddle, were very, very common in British schools, that more people learned they were into it, right?[00:54:02] Like Aella writes in her, on her Substack about how, like, she didn’t think she was that into sex, and then experienced for the first time some forms of, like, BDSM and was like, “Oh my God.” And maybe the thing is, like, in the rest of Europe, there may not have been this exact type of corporal punishment, like being spanked with a paddle or something in the same kind of context.[00:54:24] Also public humiliation, right? So it could just be that certain forms of attempted puritanical punishment in the UK Awoken sexually, a, a bunch of people who if not exposed to that would never have known that it would cause such satisfaction.[00:54:41] Malcolm Collins: Yeah.[00:54:42] Simone Collins: Mm, that makes sense. The rest is not that interesting.[00:54:45] The Muslims were seen as fanatical warriors, basically. They were, like, sexually threatening and religiously dangerous, and you kind of admired them for their courage but you feared them as these enemies of Christiandom. So they were kind of just, like, the big, scary, bad other. Yeah. And Northern Europeans, again, like, sort of barbaric, dull workhorses, not very smart.[00:55:08] And then in contrast, Southerners were seen as very indulgent drama queens. What’s super interesting to me is that this even falls into a microcosm- microcosmic context with places like Italy. Like, within Italy, Northern Italians were seen as industrious but, like, socially cold, and Southerners were seen as lazy and emotional.[00:55:35] Malcolm Collins: Ooh ...[00:55:36] Simone Collins: and yet, like, throughout the rest of Europe also, Northerners were seen as, like, these workers who were kind of, like, boring and stern, and, like, anyone south was seen as, like, oh, like, ooh, so emotional and- ... kinda lazy.[00:55:50] Speaker 20: What’s ironic to me is that this is still portrayed even in my Korean Mawa books, , which shows how cross-cultural it is that you always [00:56:00] have the archetype of the Duke of the North who’s super cold and competent and warlike, and then the Duke of the South who’s often very,[00:56:08] charismatic, , likable, , geniable, funny, , outgoing. , And of course, my favorite is the Duke of the North. That’s why I always have myself drawn that way[00:56:19] Simone Collins: And it’s very interesting to me that, I mean, we have the, I think we have some, done some different episodes about the role that heat and cold play in civilizational development, and that, I mean, clearly if you live in a very cold climate, the, only the conscientious people will survive because only the conscientious people will have built shelters and food supplies that can get them through an extremely cold and frozen winter where no food grows.[00:56:45] And in Southern cultures, you’re more likely to see some maybe more charismatic but indolent people make it through genetic choke holds because they don’t depend so much on delayed gratification and preparation and- Mm ... building in order to survive, because it’s not going to become a frozen tundra for, like, four months out of the year.[00:57:07] So I found that- Yeah ... interesting in that the stereotypes would play out that way. But that[00:57:12] Malcolm Collins: is[00:57:13] Simone Collins: just what[00:57:13] Malcolm Collins: I found. A Russian, if you wanna do Ru- ancient Russian stereotypes, they were seen as incredibly backwards and animalistic. But they also got their butts whipped by, like, every horde that came through their country in, like, really brutalistic ways.[00:57:25] Like the famous case where they, they put a bunch of people under a table and had a feast while crushing them.[00:57:31] Simone Collins: What? That’s horrible ...[00:57:32] Malcolm Collins: th- this was the Mongols or the Huns or one of, one of these groups.[00:57:35] Simone Collins: Yeah, like- Oh, yeah. I didn’t, I didn’t even get into the Mongols. There, there is art of the Mongols being, you know, terrifying.[00:57:41] I feel like that’s something we don’t need to be enlightened on ‘cause we all know it, that they’d be scary.[00:57:46] Malcolm Collins: So we, we could do a whole other episode on the history of American interratia- racism, like the different groups and how they hated each other.[00:57:52] Simone Collins: Yeah. That’d be really fun. If this episode does well and y’all like it, we’ll, we’ll, we’ll get into...[00:57:55] Yeah.[00:57:56] Malcolm Collins: Da, da, da, da, da. Da, da, da, da, da. Da, da, da, da, da. And then, like, do a, a museum where it’s, like, a bunch of, like, Jemi- Aunt Jemimas and stuff like that. Oh,[00:58:06] Simone Collins: my God. Like the- Right? In the Aunt Jemima restaurant. Was it called the Aunt Jemima restaurant, or was it called something else?[00:58:11] Malcolm Collins: Something like that.[00:58:12] Yeah,[00:58:12] Simone Collins: well- I mean, even we had Aunt Jemima syrup. And even I watched, like, Shirley Temple movies where it was like there was some token uncle figure who would, like, sing and dance and just be... It’s so weird. It’s so weird. Yeah, that could be an interesting episode. But also probably gonna get this channel in big trouble, so I don’t know.[00:58:35] I don’t know. No, I don’t[00:58:36] Malcolm Collins: think... I don’t... I mean, we’ll focus mostly on non-discriminated groups in a modern context.[00:58:42] Simone Collins: Well, we just we were declared[00:58:44] racists by our own child.[00:58:47] Malcolm Collins: W- yeah, he said that we raise him, so we’re racists.[00:58:53] Simone Collins: I love that. I love that so much. “What does racism mean, Octavian?” Well, raise. Raise. You raised me. It’s people who raise.” We gotta take that. We gotta take it, yes.[00:59:07] Malcolm Collins: Yes.[00:59:07] Simone Collins: Oh.[00:59:08] Okay, well, I love you. I’m going to go make you pumpkin... No. Yeah, pumpkin curry with bok choy.[00:59:15] Malcolm Collins: With bok choy I think would be great. And you can put it on top of, yeah, whatever[00:59:21] Simone Collins: Do you really want fries or do you really want, well, with bok choy, well, with b- with ri- with bok choy I think you want rice to s- soak up the curry[00:59:29] Malcolm Collins: Yeah, I think rice would be the right thing with bok choy. And[00:59:31] Simone Collins: I, and I’m- And I’m just gonna stir-fry the bok choy with the curry, like, the last, like, 30 seconds, right? I don’t wanna cook it that much, right?[00:59:39] You just want- Yeah,[00:59:39] Malcolm Collins: you don’t, you don’t cook the bok choy that long. Okay. All righty. And you might wanna put in a little bit of, like, oyster sauce or something with this so that the, the bok choy works a bit better.[00:59:47] Simone Collins: With the pumpkin curry?[00:59:48] Malcolm Collins: Yes.[00:59:49] Simone Collins: Sure. Let’s do it. Anything else aside from oyst- oyster sauce?[00:59:52] Do you want hoisin sauce as well with, for a little sweetness? I guess the pumpkin brings so much sweet you don’t really need it.[00:59:56] Malcolm Collins: Yeah, you don’t really need that.[00:59:58] Simone Collins: So just oyster sauce. Okay. [01:00:00] We’re on. All right,[01:00:01] Malcolm Collins: love you.[01:00:02] Simone Collins: I love you too.[01:00:03] Malcolm Collins: Bye.[01:00:05] Simone Collins: Bye.[01:00:06] Just so you know, Malcolm is surrounded by empty cans, dirty clothes. It’s, it’s like the trash pit in, from Star Wars, quite literally. That’s what I feel like every time I wade into to try to, like, deliver him-[01:00:18] Malcolm Collins: That’s why[01:00:19] Simone Collins: I hoard, Simone- ... a drink or a smoothie ...[01:00:20] Malcolm Collins: so[01:00:20] Simone Collins: I can bring it[01:00:21] Malcolm Collins: back ...[01:00:21] Simone Collins: and so when Malcolm discovered that his mic stand is not compatible with his heavy, super expensive mic that y’all made us get, thanks, hope you like the sound of it all he decided to counterweight it by taping a Coke can to his mic stand.[01:00:39] And that’s, it, it’s a look. It, it’s a very, I would say, cohesive aesthetic. Any interior decorator, I think, would come to appreciate it.[01:00:48] Malcolm Collins: I hate you so much, Simone.[01:00:50] Simone Collins: When, when Malcolm’s camera goes to full landscape mode, suddenly this short angle of his room disappears, and you can see the trash from like- This[01:01:00] Malcolm Collins: is a problem for, like, interviews and stuff, because literally-[01:01:03] Simone Collins: It is yes.[01:01:04] Yeah, yeah.[01:01:05] No, God, don’t... No, don’t do it. Oh, why did you do... Don’t. Don’t. Go back, go back. Jump scare. Oh, God. Why did you do that? Why did they need to see that? I’m[01:01:18] Malcolm Collins: not like Jordan Peterson. I never told anyone to make their bed, okay?[01:01:22] Simone Collins: Your bed is impossible to make. I was like- There’s no making[01:01:24] Malcolm Collins: it ... live, live in a pigsty.[01:01:26] I don’t care. I, like presumably it does make you marginally more efficient for some people, but it doesn’t for me. Like I, you know, and, and, and people are different, right? Like, you know, some people are better with order. Some people are better with chaos.[01:01:38] Simone Collins: Yeah.[01:01:39] Malcolm Collins: I[01:01:39] Simone Collins: prefer- This, this, this is the, the not Malcolm bedroom.[01:01:42] The, it looks weird because Tech sleeps on the bed with me, and there’s pillows there to keep him from falling off ‘cause he decides to go on a journey every night. He dreams of going to Mordor, throwing in the ring, but it really involves a lot of kicking and crawling around. So, I will kick us off. Oh, for dinner tonight, I mean, we have the nice salami.[01:02:02] Do you want me to do something with that?[01:02:04] Malcolm Collins: Oh, I like the nice salami. Mm-hmm. Okay, so if I was gonna do something with nice salami, I would eat it on toast.[01:02:15] Simone Collins: Would you?[01:02:17] Malcolm Collins: Oh.[01:02:17] Simone Collins: You want nice salami and grilled cheese, just like to cut- I have a[01:02:19] Malcolm Collins: great idea. Garlic bread. Cheesy garlic bread[01:02:24] Speaker 21: A few final side notes for RFAB. , If you downloaded the image viewing app, which auto-sizes images for your screen, we now have that for both Apple and PC, and I have made significant, if you downloaded it anytime before, like yesterday, improvements in stability and features on it. So re-download that.[01:02:42] You can find it on either our image generation page or our not safe for work image search page, which conglomerates the searches of all not safe for work search engines. , The other thing is I have recently added, , or will be added shortly after this video goes live, a model that China put out, which is beating the one that Anthropic had to take down by order of the US government on coding stuff.[01:03:04] So if you’re using our vibe coding system, , we have , a model that is equivalent to Anthropic Fable, , which is exciting[01:03:12] Speaker 18: you guys gonna have a battle? You’re gonna have the ultimate battle?[01:03:15] Speaker 19: Yeah. Yeah. I would take a battle if I had a different gun.[01:03:20] Speaker 18: A different gun. No. What’s wrong with that gun? I can find a new[01:03:22] Speaker 19: one. I need to find a new one.[01:03:24] Speaker 18: You do? Oh, no. All right, should I get the water out? You guys ready? Okay, so he’s gonna go to his gun wardrobe.[01:03:35] Yeah, you want me to open it up for you?[01:03:38] Speaker 19: Yeah.[01:03:38] Speaker 18: Okay. That’s what I want. I’ll get it This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit basedcamppodcast.substack.com/subscribe

In this raw and data-packed episode of Based Camp, Simone and Malcolm Collins ask a provocative question: Are Europeans the only people on Earth historically into adult pairings?While most cultures around the world historically married in the early-to-mid teens, Europeans (especially Northern and Western) stood out by commonly delaying marriage until the mid-20s — even in the Middle Ages. The hosts explore whether this European norm, later exported globally through colonialism and cultural influence, may be contributing to today’s fertility crashes in East Asia, Latin America, India, and beyond.They dive into:* Aella’s “Hotness Curve” study and what percentage of men find different ages attractive* The e-girl phenomenon and why so many popular internet aesthetics look phenotypically 15* Genetic and regional differences in fertility windows and menopause age (Europeans go into menopause ~2–3 years later on average)* Historical first-marriage ages across Europe, China, India, Japan, Korea, Africa, and the Americas* Global ages of consent today and when different countries criminalized CSAM* Disney princess ages (Snow White was 14, Jasmine 15, Ariel 16…) and why normalizing teen marriage might be necessary for demographic survivalThis is a no-holds-barred, truth-seeking conversation about culture, biology, attraction, and whether some populations are simply not built for the modern delayed-marriage timeline.If you’re interested in pronatalism, human biodiversity, evolutionary psychology, or why fertility is collapsing everywhere except where European norms never fully took hold — this episode is for you.Show NotesAella’s FindingsAella also just released a substack post titled The Hotness Curve (how age changes a woman’s appeal).Using photos of women of various ages (some real, some AI generated), Aella asked various questions, including: “Casual Sex: A 200 year old vampire shows up in your window at night. She wants a one-night stand. There are no consequences, and nobody will know. Do you say yes?”Here are the answers:Aella found that “Sexual interest climbs very fast, and generally hits a cresendo around women who appeared to be ~24 years old (or 28yo for the older men).”“15% of men said yes they would have casual sex with a vampire in the body of an 11 year old. This rose to a third of men for the body of a 13 year old, and a half of men agreeing to the body of a 15 year old. By 18 we’re at roughly 70%, and by the time a 24 year old is hypothetically entering your window, ~90% of them were down.”Just a small aside: “One interesting thing to note is that the dropoff in fuckability for women - what we might call The Wall - happens for women in their mid 30’s just as predicted, but only in the eyes of men under the age of 25. For older men, we find the ‘wall’ occurs in a woman’s early 40’s. Older men assigned equivalent ‘yes I’d have sex with her’ ratings to an 18 year old as they did to a woman in her early 50’s!”Also: You should play Aella’s ageguesser game.(Simone got better than 67% of players… not very good.)The e-girl phenomenonFrom our friend Bruno: “Why does a certain “e-girl” or “internet girl” face seem to resonate so consistently with online audiences across different eras? Highly recognizable women in online subcultures seem to converge around a similar look; why does that look perform so well with netizens?Early internet figures like Boxxy, later YouTube personalities like Shoe0nHead, cosplay and streamer-adjacent figures, and then more recent cases like Belle Delphine and the current wave of TikTok, cosplay, and Twitter/X e-girl aesthetics. The more interesting question is why a particular facial and stylistic grammar keeps recurring: large expressive eyes, youthful proportions, soft or rounded features, dark hair or bangs, a slightly anime-coded presentation, and a mix of cuteness, irony, awkwardness, and sexual ambiguity.”Malcolm’s first answer: BECAUSE THEY ALL LOOK LIKE LITTLE GIRLS AND PEOPLE ARE PEDOS.The sick sad truth: Most of the world is full of pedosBasically, Europeans are the only non pedos.Maybe the concept of pedos wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for EuropeansMaybe a contributing factor to falling birth rates involves modern norms around late marriage among groups that, for hundreds of years, married much younger.Let’s explore this!Variation in Fertility WindowsA large meta‑analysis across 24 countries estimated the global mean age at menopause at 48.8 years, and by continent:* Europe: about 50.5 years* Asia (overall): about 48.8 years* Africa: about 48.4 years* Latin America: about 47.2 years* Middle East: about 47.4 yearsWHO similarly notes that most women worldwide experience menopause between ages 45 and 55.Variation in Average Ages of MarriageAverage female age at first marriage, approximate, pre‑1800* England (pre‑1800) - ~22–26 - Many parishes ~25–26; Western Europe relatively late.* Western/Northern Europe - ~20–25 - Late marriage pattern; some locales up to 27.* China - ~14–18 - Legal norms ~14–15; practice mid‑teens.* India - ~12–16 - Strong early arranged marriage; big regional variation.* Japan - ~17–19 - Village data show late‑teen marriage.* Korea (Joseon) - ~16–18 - Upper‑status women mid‑teens; similar for many commoners.* Aztec/Nahua - ~14–17 - Girls early‑mid teens; men ~18–22.* Maya - ~16–19 - Most married by ~20; post‑15 coming‑of‑age.* Sub‑Saharan Africa (major) - ~15–18 - Many societies mid‑late teens for women.Sources:* https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/036319907800300103* https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1081602X08000894* https://voxdev.org/topic/institutions-political-economy/economic-shocks-and-age-marriage-sub-saharan-africa-and-india* https://historymyths.wordpress.com/2014/07/06/myth-136-women-married-very-young-in-the-olden-days/* https://keatschinese.com/china-culture-resources/general-standards-of-ancient-chinese-marriage-age/* https://childmarriagedata.org/country-profiles/india/* https://www.aztec-history.com/aztec-society-family.html* https://mayas.mrdonn.org/marriage.htmlAges of ConsentIn the most populous countries:* Pakistan - 18 (requires marriage)* India - 18* Indonesia - 18* Nigeria - 18* Japan - 18* Ethiopia - 18* Egypt - 18* DR Congo - 18* Turkey - 18* United States - 16-18 Varies by state* Philippines - 16 (general), 14 for close‑in‑age minors* Iran - 15–18 with marriage required* Thailand - 15–18* France - 15 (16 in FRA report)* Germany - 14–16 (practical 14–18)* Bangladesh - 14–16* Italy - 14–16* Mexico - 12-18 Varies by state* Russia - 16* Vietnam - 16* United Kingdom - 16* South Africa - 16* South Korea - 16* China - 14* Brazil - 14More detail on Pakistan: Minimum ages for marriage* National framework (historical): The Child Marriage Restraint Act 1929 originally set the minimum age at 18 for males and 16 for females.* Sindh province: Since 2013, Sindh’s own Child Marriage Restraint Act has set the minimum legal marriage age at 18 for both boys and girls.* Islamabad Capital Territory (ICT): The Islamabad Capital Territory Child Marriage Restraint Act 2025 now sets the minimum age at 18 for both sexes, with significant penalties for under‑18 marriages.* Balochistan: In November 2025, Balochistan raised the legal age to 18 for girls (and 18 for boys), banning child marriage in the province.* Punjab and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP): Until very recently, these provinces still had 16 as the legal minimum for girls and 18 for boys, though Punjab has now moved to raise the age to 18; advocacy and legislation are ongoing to harmonize all provinces at 18.Despite recent legal reforms raising the minimum marriage age to 18 in several parts of Pakistan, child marriage remains a significant, ongoing problem, especially for girls from poor, rural, and religious‑minority communities.UNICEF and other analyses report that around 18% of women aged 20–24 in Pakistan were married before 18, which corresponds to roughly 20.5 million girls, and about 4% were married before 15* The Borgen Project reports: Child brides usually come from impoverished families who sell them to older men for a price as high as 2.5 million Pakistani rupees, which is more than $8,000.”Anti-Pedo LawsJapan has had laws against sexual exploitation of minors for decades, but it only criminalized possession of child pornography involving real children in 2014.They really had to ease into it:* 1999 – Japan bans the production and distribution of child pornography involving real minors, aligning partially with other OECD countries but still allowing simple possession.* June 2014 – The Diet passes a revision to the Child Pornography Law that makes possession of child pornography (photos and videos of real children under 18) a criminal offense, punishable by up to one year in prison or a fine.* The 2014 law explicitly excludes manga, anime, and computer‑generated imagery, so fictional depictions remain legal even if they portray minors in sexualized contexts, which is why international observers still criticize Japan as being comparatively permissive about some forms of sexualized images of minors.When various countries instituted CSAM laws* 1973: Germany* 1973–1980s – German Criminal Code provisions against pornography involving minors are introduced and strengthened, banning production and distribution.* 1990s–2000s – EU‑driven harmonization and national reforms explicitly criminalize possession of CSAM (including online images).* 1978: USA* 1978 – Child pornography first becomes illegal at the federal level via the Protection of Children Against Sexual Exploitation Act of 1977 (effective 1978), targeting production, sale, and transport.* 1980s–1990s – Additional federal statutes criminalize possession and receipt of CSAM, with later clarifications (e.g., PROTECT Act 2003) covering digital and some computer‑generated material.* 1978: UK* 1978 – Protection of Children Act 1978 criminalizes taking, making, distributing, showing, and possessing with intent to distribute “indecent photographs” of children, effectively a national child‑pornography ban.* Later acts expand offences and penalties; recent reforms (2020s) start to tackle AI‑optimized CSAM models.* 1980s: Australia* 1980s–1990s – Federal and state laws criminalize child pornography production and distribution.* By the late 1990s/early 2000s, possession of CSAM, including digital content, is clearly illegal nationwide.* 1983: Canada* 1983 – Criminal Code amendments explicitly criminalize child pornography (production and distribution).* Late 1980s/early 1990s – Possession of child pornography is expressly criminalized, including digital material.* 1990: Brazil* 1990 – Statute of the Child and Adolescent (ECA) bans child pornography (production/distribution).* 2008 – Law 11.829 criminalizes possession of child pornography, bringing Brazil into line with international CSAM standards.* 1996: Russia* 1996 – New Criminal Code introduces offences for producing and distributing pornographic materials involving minors.* 2000s – Later reforms explicitly criminalize possession and strengthen provisions for online CSAM.* 1997: China* 1997 – Revised Criminal Law criminalizes organizing, producing, duplicating, publishing, and disseminating pornographic material involving minors.* Subsequent regulations in the 2000s and 2010s reinforce bans on online CSAM and clarify penalties.* 2000: India* 2000 – Information Technology Act criminalizes publishing or transmitting material depicting children in sexually explicit acts online.* 2012–2013 – Amendments (e.g., Criminal Law (Amendment) Act 2013) strengthen bans on using children in pornographic material, expanding offences and penalties.* 2003: Nigeria* 2003 – Child Rights Act, plus later cybercrime legislation, introduce offences related to child sexual exploitation and online child pornography.* 2007: South Africa* 2007 – Criminal Law (Sexual Offences and Related Matters) Amendment Act criminalizes creation, distribution, and possession of child pornography, including electronic images.Episode Transcript[00:00:00] Simone Collins: Okay. Hello, Malcolm.[00:00:00] I’m excited to be with you today because today we’re gonna talk about how maybe Europeans are the only people who aren’t kind of into, if you know what I mean, really young people, and that possibly our colonizing, imposing of older ages of marriage onto all the other peoples of the world could be contributing to demographic collapse.[00:00:22] Because apparently we’re the weirdos in the room. We’re the, the, the outlier.[00:00:26] Malcolm Collins: Okay, I, I need to go over some stats. So this rabbit hole started with me being like, are Japan... ‘Cause if you look at Japanese not-safe-for-work art it is, has an unusually high rate of phenotypically young-looking women.[00:00:40] Simone Collins: Yeah.[00:00:40] Malcolm Collins: If, if you catch my drift. And I started to think, I was like, “Could there be a genetic reason for this?” Right? Like, when did Japanese people get married historically? When would have been their first sexual encounter historically? And as I went through that, I was like Oh, wait a second. Everyone but Europeans got married at these super young ages at a historic level.[00:01:04] And now this makes sense why you have these super young age marriages in Africa, in the Middle Easterners, right? Like we, we keep seeing this, oh, Aisha is six, nine, et cetera, right? Like, they, they... This would be weird for European. What’s, what may surprise you is that in Europe, even in the Middle Ages, it was very common for women to not get married until their mid-20s.[00:01:28] Simone Collins: And we’re gonna go into that. We’re gonna go into that ...[00:01:29] Malcolm Collins: which is very rare for any other culture. But hold on, it gets weirder. Before we go, ‘cause I, I wanna get all the, the fun stuff out of the way. It turns out that Europeans... Remember how I’ve always said that Northern Europeans have weirdly high fertility rates compared to every other group on Earth?[00:01:44] Well, Nor- Northern Europeans are also genetically unique among all of the ethnicities on Earth, and that we have significantly, like multiple years longer fertility windows. Euro-[00:01:56] Simone Collins: And we’re gonna go into that too ... pean women go into menopause- Yeah, which people should know about ...[00:01:59] Malcolm Collins: much later. People should know.[00:02:01] So when we started to tell other people around the world, “You can’t start being sexual, you know, with-” Yeah,[00:02:09] Simone Collins: like the appropriate time to start is in your 20s ...[00:02:12] Malcolm Collins: mid-20s. Yeah. We were actually sniping more than half of many of these groups’ reproductive windows. Mm-hmm. And now we’re seeing fertility rates crash around Latin America.[00:02:24] We’re seeing fertility rates crash in East Asia. We’re seeing them crash in India, and it could partially be in results of this. But go, go into the data.[00:02:31] Simone Collins: Yeah. Well, first, some little, here are some of the breadcrumbs that kind of got me to this episode that I think are really fun. Aella just released a Substack post called The Hotness Curve: How Age Changes a Woman’s Appeal, and she used photos of women at various ages.[00:02:46] Some were AI-generated, some were real, including real photos of her throughout her life and her friends. She asked questions like, “Casual sex. A 200-year-old vampire shows up in your window at night. She wants a one-night stand. There are no consequences and nobody will know. Do you say yes?” And then she says this paired with various photos of women, right?[00:03:07] So the resulting graph is a little concerning, I guess. You can see it here On WhatsApp.[00:03:17] What you’ll find and I’ll just read from Aella’s post here. Okay. Aella found that sexual interest climbs very fast and generally hits a crescendo around women who appear to be 24 years old, or 28 years old for older men.[00:03:31] But 15, and I’m quoting from her Substack article, “15% of men said yes, they would have casual sex with a vampire in the body of 11- an 11-year-old.” Sure. “This rose to a third of men for the body of a 13-year-old, and half of men agreeing to the body of a 15-year-old. By 18, we’re at roughly 70%, and at the time a 24-year-old is hypothetically entering your window, 90% of them were down.”[00:03:56] I, I was shocked.[00:03:57] Malcolm Collins: Wait, wait, wait, wait. Hold on. So the midpoint for men is 15? [00:04:00][00:04:00] Simone Collins: Yeah, basically. But I mean, I was just shocked that at the age of 11, 15% of men were like, “Yeah.”[00:04:06] Malcolm Collins: Well, this is actually really fascinating because if this is the actual midpoint of, you know, attractiveness for men-[00:04:14] Simone Collins: Yeah ...[00:04:15] Malcolm Collins: the, the way in society that we treat this, right?[00:04:19] Like, “Oh, you’re aroused by something that looks like that. You must be, like, a wildly deviant individual.”[00:04:27] Simone Collins: Yeah. “You must be a monster. You must need to be arrested,” et cetera. When[00:04:30] Malcolm Collins: literally 50% of men... 15 is astonishingly young. For, yeah, but for 11 is yeah,[00:04:37] Simone Collins: but yeah, 15 as well,[00:04:38] Malcolm Collins: yes. Yeah, but the, the, I’m going, I’m not going with the tw- the 25% of men. I’m going with the average man. The average man-[00:04:44] Simone Collins: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah ... is[00:04:45] Malcolm Collins: 15. And that is the reason why it’s important to, like, make this known to people is because if a guy gets into their head that they’re some absolutely monstrous deviant within one category, then they can begin to engage in monster, the, they begin to excuse other types of monstrously deviant behavior because they’re like, “Well, that’s what I am.[00:05:09] That’s how I am- Yeah,[00:05:10] Simone Collins: I’m a monster ... hardwired.” Who cares if I drown a puppy, et cetera? Yeah,[00:05:14] Malcolm Collins: I’m just a bad guy because-[00:05:16] Simone Collins: Yeah ...[00:05:17] Malcolm Collins: yeah. Whereas I think that you can say even if 15 is the average age at which a male may start finding a female form attractive that one, Europeans it’s likely gonna be later, so this is likely held down by, by non-Europeans to some extent.[00:05:33] Mm-hmm. But, but two it, it’s, it’s, it’s normal, but you don’t act on it, right? Like, there’s- Yeah ... a big difference between something being normal and something being a mandate for you to act on. Mm-hmm. If I can give you, it is normal for me to be aroused by a random woman who walks by. It is bad for me to hold her down and have sex with her simply because I was aroused that she walked by, right?[00:06:01] Like- For our[00:06:02] Simone Collins: culture at least, yes.[00:06:03] Malcolm Collins: No, I’m just saying that the, the, the way that we have in our society drawn these very, very thin lines when it comes to this one category of arousal I think is hugely deleterious and leads to a lot more PDA behavior than we would otherwise see if we categorized it more the way that it’s like, yeah, you can find a woman who’s married to another guy arousing.[00:06:34] Don’t sleep with her. That’s morally negative and has morally negative externalities for society, right? But anyway, continue.[00:06:42] Simone Collins: Right. Just a little aside too about the wall, because that’s a fun thing to see what her findings indicated. She wrote, “One interesting thing to note is that the drop-off in affability for women, what we might call the wall, happens for women in their mid-30s, just as predicted, but only in the eyes of men under the age of 25.[00:07:02] For older men, we find the wall occurs in a woman’s early 40s. Older men assign equivalent ‘Yes, I’d have sex with her’ ratings to an 18-year-old as they did to a woman in her early 50s.” Basically the spread of people who would be interested in both dating or having sex with women at older ages was astonishing per this research.[00:07:23] You should go check out the actual post. I’m linking to it in my show notes, as I link to everything else I, I was just shocked by the range of, of, of interest in women. I guess older women are better off now than they have been in the past maybe, or they always have been. But also you should play her Guess Their Age game. She vibe coded it. It’s super fun and you can probably beat me because I could only get better than 67% of players.[00:07:48] I apparently cannot tell people’s age, which is probably good. Also our friend Bruno wrote to us about the e-girl phenomenon. He wrote, “Why does a certain e-girl or internet girl face seem to [00:08:00] resonate so consistently with online audiences across different eras? Highly recognizable women in online subcultures seem to converge around a similar look.[00:08:07] Why does that look perform[00:08:09] so well with netizens? Early internet figures like Boxxy, later YouTube personalities like Shoe0nHead, cosplay, and streamer adjacent figures, and then more recent cases like Belle Delphine and the current wave of TikTok cosplay and Twitter X e-girl aesthetics. The most interesting question is why a particular facial and stylistic grammar keeps recurring.[00:08:28] Large expressive eyes, youthful proportions, softer rounded features, dark hair or bangs, a slightly anime coded presentation, and a mix of cuteness, irony, awkwardness, and sexual ambiguity.” And when I talked about this with Malcolm when we got the email, you’re like[00:08:45] Malcolm Collins: Because they look like children. Yeah.[00:08:48] Like Bella Delphine looks like a 15-year-old.[00:08:50] Simone Collins: Yeah ...[00:08:50] Malcolm Collins: y- she could easily pass as a 15, w- in, in her, the height of her fame. Boxxy I think was literally 15 at the height of her fame. I[00:08:58] Speaker: I realize one of the reasons why other people don’t realize this is because they think 15-year-old girls look like lollies, and they don’t. , People think 15-year-old girls look way younger than they actually do. So here I’m gonna put the pictures of the celebrities we’re talking about next to a bunch of pictures of actual real 15-year-old human girls.[00:09:18] And when you see this, you’ll be like, “Oh, 15-year-old girls look a lot older than I expected.” And it’s like, yeah, they do. And that’s why this is so scary[00:09:26] Speaker 2: And note, this isn’t me being selective. This is me just choosing all the top images when you look up 15-year-old girl. And I’d go so far now that I’m looking at the images side by side to say that these e-celebs that we’re talking about look slightly younger, than your average 15-year-old girl[00:09:41] Octavian Collins: think[00:09:41] Malcolm Collins: so, yeah. Juon Head I don’t think fits into this category. She was never really a thirst trap influencer. But if you look at the various thirst trap influencers CreepyChan fell into this as well.[00:09:52] Mm. ... like they, they all have the, the phenotypical features that make them look different than Simone. And I’ll put images on screen here so you guys can see. I’m not, I’m not joking about this. They just look very young. Yeah. But either because it was considered okay to thirst after them on the internet during that period, or because they technically weren’t actually 15, like Vampire Girls or whatever, everyone was like, “This is fine.”[00:10:16] Now again, I actually think it’s really, really bad to stereotype, Like in, in Australia, I don’t know if you know this, but in Australia you actually can’t have pornography where women have too small of breasts because they say that if the woman’s breasts, even if they’re a totally normal above age woman, it is illegal for them to participate in pornography if their breasts are too small.[00:10:36] So they’ll,[00:10:36] Simone Collins: like, pull up a thing and be like, “Insufficiently busty,” and then it says online- Yeah,[00:10:40] Malcolm Collins: because they say it makes them look too young, right? Like-[00:10:42] Simone Collins: So do erotic actresses have to get boob jobs? Like what happens if you’re interested? By[00:10:46] Malcolm Collins: the way, have you seen that immensely creepy show about the girl who looks like a, like 12-year-old and who’s dating?[00:10:55] Simone Collins: No.[00:10:56] Malcolm Collins: You need to Google this and just watch a clip from this, because I’ll put it here before we go further. I need to call- ‘Cause I need to get your thoughts on the ethics of this. .[00:11:04] Speaker 3: It’s not worth it. I would just completely ignore them. I try to let it just roll off my shoulders. Hearing Thomas’ views shows me a new perspective and allows me to understand a new perspective. He grew up with this mentality, just pick yourself and get up and do it, and I have a lot of social trauma. So I think he’s definitely a more go-getter, less worried about what people think, and I know what people think[00:11:29] Speaker 6: I love how we’re like, “Japan, the Japanese, so gross.” They’re like, “Oh, she the 300-year-old vampire, so it’s okay.” Meanwhile, middle-aged moms watching TLC[00:11:41] Speaker 8: And then fertility and where we go from there, I think the best option for you would be to get you established with an OBGYN- Hmm ... who can kinda dig into safely carrying a child, and would you be able to do it to term, and all of that.[00:11:53] Simone Collins: What?[00:11:54] Malcolm Collins: Look, look up a clip of this[00:11:55] Simone Collins: show. Oh, no. She looks like a child. No. [00:12:00] Oh, TLC, of course. Of, oh, great. Of course. It’s TLC. Oh, no. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. Okay. I’ve seen, I’ve seen enough.[00:12:10] Malcolm Collins: Yeah, I, th- then so I’m in this range where I’m like, if you look like 15 in the way that like Bella Delphine does or whatever, right, you know-[00:12:19] Simone Collins: Yeah[00:12:19] Malcolm Collins: I’m like, whatever with that. I’m like, I get it, you know, whatever. Right. With this girl and this show, I’m like, even if she’s technically a 300-year-old vampire, like, we need to have a conversation about this because she’s she’s like 27, by the way, Simone.[00:12:37] Simone Collins: Okay.[00:12:38] Malcolm Collins: Sure she is. She has a very rare disorder that caused her to look-[00:12:41] Simone Collins: No, I know.[00:12:42] I know. TLC is, it’s, it’s the dwarves and it’s the, yeah, it’s,[00:12:46] Malcolm Collins: it’s all the, it’s, it’s the freak show people on Earth. But then should she never be able to have a... Hold on. I’m actually thinking through this. Should she never be able to have a sex life because,[00:12:52] Simone Collins: you know- She should. Man, the, the whole point you make in The Pragmatist’s Guide to Sexuality is if you have a thing that some people’s kink or arousal pathway, whatever, like if for example you are obese, you should go after chubby chasers who are way out of your[00:13:06] Malcolm Collins: league.[00:13:06] So you’re basically saying that’s one PDA file off the streets.[00:13:09] Simone Collins: She could get a very high value ‘cause like she’s not a supermodel looks-wise, right? She may not be like the world’s smartest person. She may not be a billionaire. But she could probably find a man who’s way out of her league on one of those measures or multiple because he’s super into...[00:13:23] Yeah,[00:13:27] Malcolm Collins: I mean, like the reason why it’s bad, and we’ve pointed this out before, it’s, is not due to consent. This isn’t why underage stuff is, is bad. It’s because it has negative developmental effects. The reason I point out it’s not due to consent is nobody cares when two, like, mentally disabled people have sex.[00:13:43] Nobody cares when a super elderly person has sex. But like when we’re talking about a 15, 16-year-old who’s almost certainly smarter than most people in their like late 90s or something like that.[00:13:53] Simone Collins: Yeah, yeah.[00:13:53] Malcolm Collins: And it’s because of the negative developmental effects. But I think one of the things that I’m realizing is are those negative developmental effects the same for non-Europeans as they are for Europeans?[00:14:04] Simone Collins: That’s a really good question. I did not think to look at birth complications or pregnancy complications for non-European teenagers. And by[00:14:13] Malcolm Collins: the way, the next time I’m talking, make sure you look up the average age for Jews historically, ‘cause I wanna see if they went with the European standard or they went with- Oh[00:14:19] the non-European standard. But like This is one of these interesting fields to talk about, or I find it to be interesting to talk about because there is so much just, like, reflective and reactive signaling around this stuff where individuals attempt to show that they are, Like, just y- y- to, to, to shout at someone, to clown on someone, to yell at someone, to, you know, whatever.[00:14:51] And it’s, it’s super unproductive because a lot of the fight is not where it should be. Like, consider the leftist activists, right, who constantly badger, like, anime companies, but do nothing about the immigrant communities where this is normalized, right? Like we’ve pointed out countless times, the religious court in Pakistan made a hearing, this is the primary religious court of the country that it was Islamophobic to raise the age of marriage from, I think, nine.[00:15:20] Like, how dare you? But this is normal in those countries and, and if you actually cared about this, that’s what you would be targeting and not anime that actually, Now, we can argue whether it leads to radicalizing people in this direction. Mm. Even if it does lead to radicalizing people in this direction, the number of, like, standard Westerners who ever get radicalized in this direction is so dwarfed by where this is happening outside of the West.[00:15:51] But then you have to ask is it even bad where it’s happening outside the West? Because maybe they’re, like, genetically built for... But anyway, what’d you find about the Jews?[00:15:57] Simone Collins: So, for per [00:16:00] European standards of when marriages took place, it looks like pre-1800s, which is what I looked at for the other groups many Jewish communities married what was considered way younger than most of them.[00:16:11] Like, in their teens. So that is interesting. They were, like, the weird outliers in Europe at the time, I guess. Well, now- Probably among other groups ...[00:16:22] Malcolm Collins: now, now hold on. Hold on. Does this explain the Epstein networks?[00:16:28] Simone Collins: Oh, no. Stop. No. Malcolm. Mm, we’re just gonna, we’re gonna skate right over that. No, we’re gonna skate right over this one.[00:16:38] And whatever you wanna say, you can save it for the comments. All right? Uh-uh. You can find whatever code word you wanna use for Epstein this time. Let’s just talk about it there. I’ll start by, this is actually something another friend of ours told me, or, like, mentioned in, in a text conversation, and I just had no idea.[00:16:53] And she’s like, “Well, you understand that non-European women have earlier onset menopause. Like, their fertility window is way shorter, and people should really talk to them about this.” And I had no idea. And then I look it up, and the estimated global mean age at, of menopause is only 48.8. But for Europe, it’s around 50.5 years.[00:17:17] In Asia, it’s 48.8.. In Africa it’s 48.4 years. In Latin America it’s 47.2 years, and in the Middle East it’s 47.4 years. 47, like that, 47 versus 50 is, is very significant. I- I had no idea, and also it’s, it’s crazy that we’re not telling people this, but the f- when you look at this in comparison to the average ages of marriage pre-1800 across different parts of the world, it kind of makes sense that fertility windows[00:17:49] Malcolm Collins: got pushed back for Europeans.[00:17:49] Well, and mostly Europeans have had a strong genetic pressure for a- Yeah ... very long time-[00:17:54] Simone Collins: Yeah ...[00:17:55] Malcolm Collins: for higher fertility windows.[00:17:56] Simone Collins: Because of norms around marriage. In England pre-1800, the typical arage, marriage ar- we’ll say average female age at first marriage. Keep in mind, this is average, right? This is not, you know, there are lots of younger than this.[00:18:10] But average was 22 to 26, which is kind of what modern society has rested at now, right? And maybe that’s because- Mm ... of colonialism and, and the influence of European and especially English culture, but it’s 22 to 26 pre-1800s. In Western and Northern Europe it was a little bit lower. It was 20 to 25.[00:18:29] And in China, by comparison, it’s 14 to 18 average. India, 12 to 16. Japan, 17 to 19. Korea, 16 to 18. I, I checked about, like Aztec, 14 to 17. Maya, 16 to 19. And then in Sub-Saharan Africa, 15 to 18. So when you look at these earlier onsets of menopause, they kind of track pretty well to historical marriage patterns, and I think that kind of helps to make sense.[00:19:02] Now y- when you look also at, I, one thing I decided to look at, and I’m sending you a graph of this so that you can look at it more visually. But I looked at the ages of consent today in the highest population countries, though this, the global map that I sent to you from d- Our Data Is Beautiful is also just everything.[00:19:20] But the age of consent in Pakistan, do you know what it is?[00:19:25] Malcolm Collins: What, what’s the age of consent in Pakistan?[00:19:27] Simone Collins: It’s 18.[00:19:30] Malcolm Collins: Oof.[00:19:31] Simone Collins: I know. I was like, “Wait a second. How? Why?” And no, like actually, so there’s this Child Marriage Act of 1929- Oh ... that originally set the minimum age at, at 18 for males and 16 for females Okay, I,[00:19:42] Malcolm Collins: I, I, by the way, take it back.[00:19:44] Younger Siwan head definitely looks 15.[00:19:46] Simone Collins: Okay. I’ll let it go. All of[00:19:47] Malcolm Collins: these girls look[00:19:48] Simone Collins: 15. I, I think she still looks super young. And I think she said she was in her mid-30s. Oops. I think she also just has, like, a phenotypically young-looking face.[00:19:56] Malcolm Collins: Yeah, she has a phenotypically- But yeah ... that’s what it is.[00:19:58] That’s, that’s... Guys are like, [00:20:00] “There’s this certain type of girl that I’m really into.” And it’s like, I hate to tell you this, brother, but that, that look is the look of a teenager[00:20:10] Simone Collins: Yeah, yeah. Long story short with Pakistan, basically, they have a lot of different laws and efforts. There’s the 1929 Child Marriage Restraint Act.[00:20:21] There’s the Child Marriage Restraint Act in a different province. They’re like in, in Sindh province, in Islamabad Capital Territory, in Balochistan, in Punjab, in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. India has a[00:20:35] Malcolm Collins: super old first age of marriage.[00:20:37] Simone Collins: Yeah, no, they, yeah, they, they’re very, like they have... what’s weird is when I was like, wait, but h- how long has it been 18?[00:20:44] ‘Cause we keep hearing about these really young marriages in Pakistan. Like, all these laws show up. And then I, I, I dug a little deeper and it’s kind of like, well, they have all these laws because people keep marrying kids super young. Like, the laws are there ‘cause they’re like, “No, no, no stop. But like, actually stop.[00:20:59] Can we...” They’re like, “For, super for real this time, guys. Like, let’s do[00:21:03] Malcolm Collins: this.” But I mean, throughout Africa, Africa’s the place where it’s Africa and Indonesia where you see the 11 average age.[00:21:10] Simone Collins: Yeah. But I mean, still UNICEF, for example, reports that around 18% of women age 20 to 24 in Pakistan were married before 18.[00:21:19] So it’s, it’s, yeah, but you’re right. Pakistan’s not the worst. Anyway, that surprised me. Other, other ages of consent. So India’s also high at 18, Indonesia 18, Nigeria 18, Japan 18, Ethiopia, Egypt, Democratic Republic of Congo, Türkiye. United States is actually a little different. Some of our states go as low as 16, I think.[00:21:41] In the Philippines it’s 16 in general. Iran 15 to 18, Thailand 15 to 18, France 15 Germany 14 to 16. So go Germans. But I kinda think, like, it’s so normatively weird for Germans. They’d be like, “Well, but of course we don’t need the rule because we would never. We’re German.” In Bangladesh 14 to 16, Italy 14 to 16, in Mexico it’s 12 to 18, it varies by the state.[00:22:07] Russia is 16, Vietnam is 16, United Kingdom 16, South Africa 16, South Korea 16, China and Brazil are both 14. So China’s still super low, which is wild. But you had mentioned this to me and I thought it was insane that Japan only criminalized possession of, we’ll call it CSAM involving real children in 2014.[00:22:32] Though it should be noted that the law explicitly excludes manga, anime, and computer-generated imagery, and I just love Japan for being so Japan on that front.[00:22:43] Malcolm Collins: So Japan.[00:22:44] Simone Collins: Yeah, they’re like- I- But not the mang- I mean, not the manga.[00:22:47] Malcolm Collins: That would outlaw- A little bit ... like, more than half of anime, right?[00:22:50] Simone Collins: I know, they would, yeah, they would, like, destroy the entire anime industry if they were to, like, actually follow through with that.[00:22:57] Yeah. So I totally understand, But[00:23:00] Malcolm Collins: again, we need to, in America, understand that Japanese males and females are genetically and sociologically different from us.[00:23:09] Simone Collins: Yeah, historically- Like, it- ... they married a lot younger. Their fertility window ends sooner. They, they need to marry younger, and now that they live in a culture where marriage is severely delayed, they’re gonna see a bigger hit from that.[00:23:21] Malcolm Collins: Yeah. I mean, I personally will be encouraging my kids to date from, to marry starting probably around 16 to 17. I think that’s when you start dating and learning to date with the intention of eventually marrying.[00:23:35] Simone Collins: Yeah, we’re gonna have to work on them with this because Octavian just picked up At More Birth’s report that’s been sitting around our house.[00:23:42] Yeah. And started leafing through it, and he was looking at this graph of average age of first marriage- ... over time.[00:23:49] Malcolm Collins: Mm-hmm.[00:23:50] Simone Collins: And I asked him how old he wanted to be when he got married, and at first he’s like, “Mm, 40?” And I’m like, “Really?” And he’s like, “Okay, maybe when I’m, like, a teenager.” And I’m like, “Oh, [00:24:00] okay, so like 18?”[00:24:00] He’s like, “No, like a hun- 100.” So I don’t know where he’s at. We need to be like, “This is the right age. After this, you gotta worry.”[00:24:09] Malcolm Collins: Well, we used to get this. Princesses, like Disney princesses, actually look this up, look up the ages of various famous Disney princesses. Wait, hold on. Let[00:24:16] Simone Collins: me get my phone.[00:24:16] Malcolm Collins: But they’re often quite young for when they, they, they got married.[00:24:20] And I think that normalizing that, normalizing not the Hallmark wedding of the divorce or whatever, but the I’m gonna get married when I’m... What, what are the ages- ... of the Disney princesses?[00:24:33] Simone Collins: Snow White is 14.[00:24:35] Malcolm Collins: Yeah. That’s[00:24:36] Simone Collins: what we need- Jasmine is 15. Aurora is 16. Ariel is 16. Mulan is 16. Hey, legal in the UK.[00:24:43] Merida from Brave, 16. Moana, 16. Belle, usually treated as 17 years old, though sources vary between 17 and 18. Now, hold on. Pocahontas is 18. Do you want me to play a little[00:24:55] Malcolm Collins: fun game? Rapunzel, 18. Now look up the ages of their partners in each of those movies.[00:25:03] Simone Collins: Okay. I mean, obviously because the men are just so unimportant in most of these, especially early movies, it’s hard to tell. But so Snow White, 14. Prince Florian, 18 to 31. So either-[00:25:19] Malcolm Collins: 18 to 31 with a 14-year-old ...[00:25:21] Simone Collins: is that, let’s see. So the half plus seven rule, that’s seven pl- s- the half, yeah, seven- No,[00:25:26] Malcolm Collins: no, keep going.[00:25:27] Just go. Just[00:25:28] Simone Collins: go ... okay. Yeah, anyway ... keep going ... the, the half plus seven rule is my, my... Okay. Cinderella’s 19. Prince Charming, 21. Appropriate. That’s a two-year age gap. Aurora and Prince Phillip in Sleeping Beauty 16 versus 20, four-year age gap. Ariel- ... and Prince Eric, she’s 16, he’s 18 to 19. Where is the biggest gap here?[00:25:47] The biggest ga- oh, it’s Rapunzel and Flynn. Because she’s 18 and he’s 26. That’s eight years.[00:25:55] Malcolm Collins: But she’s older- That’s, that’s not too bad ... so it’s okay. What about the, the Muslim one? Wh- what about the, the-[00:26:00] Simone Collins: Oh well, come on. The, the street urchin? J- that’s plus three years. She’s 15 and he’s 18.[00:26:06] Malcolm Collins: That’s, that’s[00:26:08] Simone Collins: a very normal marriage for that region ... but Pocahontas and John Smith is, is less clear. It is, it is e- it is between two or nine years. But- So that is unclear ...[00:26:17] Malcolm Collins: getting women excited about marrying in their teens, I think is where we need to be as a culture again.[00:26:22] Simone Collins: Oh, boy. Yeah. Yeah. I, yeah. W- but when, and we, I guess we have to get over this European Puritanical view shaming teen marriage.[00:26:33] And you can actually really see it in, in where various countries instituted CSAM laws basically being like, “Young looking people, no good in images. Stop.” You c- the first, all the first countries to start this are Western. All the last countries to institute these laws, not Western. So we start with 1973 in Germany, 1978 in the USA and UK, 1980s in Australia ‘83 for Canada, 1990 for Brazil.[00:27:03] That’s our first non-super Western country, even though Brazil’s pretty Western. 1996 Russia, 1997 China, 2000 India, 2003 Nigeria,[00:27:14] 2007 South Africa. Like the re- Wait. Wait,[00:27:17] Malcolm Collins: what, what is this, what is this when?[00:27:18] Simone Collins: This is when CSAM laws were instituted, when, when, when it wasn’t okay to create or possess the, the stuff that you’re not allowed to create or possess the, the bad, the images Very[00:27:32] Malcolm Collins: recently in most of these non-Western countries.[00:27:34] Simone Collins: Right? Yeah. And, and Japan’s the worst, of course with the- unique[00:27:38] Malcolm Collins: case there ...[00:27:39] Simone Collins: really dragging their feet. But n- but not for, not for anime and manga. It’s okay. Don’t worry about it. It’s gonna be okay. Your manga... God, what was that anime where, like, the- The succubus looks like she’s a child[00:27:55] Malcolm Collins: No- Naomi or whatever I told you about.[00:27:58] The w- yeah, where she, like, actually looks like a [00:28:00] child a child, and she can only survive by drinking-[00:28:04] Simone Collins: Things ...[00:28:04] Malcolm Collins: ex- things. And- Oh my God ... the whole thing’s supposed to be... Oh, hold on. R- remember I said it’s a show about being a father, right? Like, that’s, that’s the, the- Oh, yeah. Yes I had forgotten that the main character is actually literally her father, but he’s 14.[00:28:23] Simone Collins: This is worse than that anime who, like, the guy’s hand was just a girl one morning. Remember that? Just like- I did look that up. A girl[00:28:32] Octavian Collins: That’s ridiculous. That’s a girl.[00:28:34] Simone Collins: Japan’s the best. Who thinks of these things? There’s like-[00:28:38] Malcolm Collins: When I was on Linkfest streams, the, the, the manga where a guy’s willy became a girl, right?[00:28:43] Like, th- that’s, like, the whole manga People said it was funny. I don’t know. I, I, I don’t know why- I[00:28:50] Simone Collins: mean, it would be, I think. Yeah, I don’t Yeah, they just have to, like, find the weirdest people in the country, and they’re like, “You, you’re hired. Write a manga.” I like it. Anyway, this- The[00:29:03] Malcolm Collins: weirdest people ...[00:29:04] Simone Collins: this has changed.[00:29:05] I mean, I, I, I, I’ve been having a conversation with, with someone, and w- we’ve talked about things like teen marriage, and just the, the stigma that we have around, for example, even getting married in college. You know, people see it as really weird, and I think a lot of people even who are very pronatalist who understand that it’s an issue that people are putting off marriage would be kind of weirded out by the idea of their son or daughter getting married right out of high school or in college.[00:29:30] I,[00:29:30] Malcolm Collins: by the way, would not, and when our kids start dating and when I start trying to do arranged marriage for them, I think the appropriate age for a kid to get married is, perfect age is probably 19 or 20.[00:29:42] Simone Collins: Yeah, and at that age, too, the young couple can, if they need to, like while they’re still getting their footing, live at our house.[00:29:49] You know, like, live with the parents if, if they help out and everything. Like, it, it’s such an easier way to start your life. Build savings, you know, while you’re young enough to- And if[00:29:57] Malcolm Collins: we start having kids at that age, we just take care of the kids.[00:30:00] Simone Collins: Exactly. It’s, it’s the smartest thing. And guess what?[00:30:03] That, that is actually what my parents did. When my parents came back from Japan with me, for a while they lived at my dad’s parents’ house. And th- this is, this is a very normative thing. Like, the reason we had baby showers wasn’t because people wanted some bougie party that cost $10,000. It was because this was a young 20-year-old couple right out of high school, and they didn’t have money to buy diapers, and so people chipped in and bought them diapers and, like, t- taught them baby things and whatnot.[00:30:32] Like, there’s a reason for these traditions. The same for bridal showers. It was that, oh, this is a new couple. And wedding gifts. You bought them silverware because they hoped to buy a house together and get silverware, not like they were already 30 and living in an apartment and they owned everything they’d ever need in their life.[00:30:48] Anyway, apparently we just need to get over the fact that, Everyone else likes young girls especially. This is... We’re the weird ones.[00:30:58] Malcolm Collins: We’re the weird ones- That’s all. Yeah ... for thinking that this is not cool?[00:31:02] Simone Collins: Yeah. This, well, this has significantly changed my views. Like, the, in, in, in, in, in a am I the a*****e situation, we Europeans are the a*****e.[00:31:11] We’re sorry. This was our mistake. Bring back teen marriage, bring back my Big Fat Gypsy Wedding, bring back teen pregnancy. We were wrong. We are prudish m- procrastinating Europeans. And also, if you are not of European ancestry, please adjust your childbearing years accordingly because who knew?[00:31:39] I didn’t know. I hope everyone else[00:33:56] knows this, but I don’t think they do. Anyway, I love you, Malcolm.[00:33:59] Malcolm Collins: I love you too. Have a good time. This was a, a really interesting what, there was something I was gonna- About Japan or something. Now we’re just all of these other groups. I mean, what’s, what’s your takeaway on all of this in regards to the way we as a society...[00:34:16] I mean, I just think that some groups were never really designed, or not designed, but, like, cultures are different in a way where some may genuinely not be, be compatible. And this is one of those areas wh- fascinatingly that, that Europeans may have psy-oped the rest of the world into eradicating themselves.[00:34:38] Simone Collins: Hmm. Oh, yeah, I mean, you did an, an episode once on are some countries just not compatible with democracy. Apparently some countries are just not compatible with later onset marriage for example.[00:34:48] Malcolm Collins: Yeah.[00:34:49] Simone Collins: So yeah, I, I, I think you’re onto something there. Are we becoming skeptical of the benefits of colonialism?[00:34:55] I don’t know.[00:34:56] Malcolm Collins: Well, I mean, we, we just need to colonize them harder until, you know-[00:35:01] Simone Collins: Until their fertility windows are moved, but we will force them back. It’s fine.[00:35:05] Malcolm Collins: Colonize me harder, Daddy.[00:35:07] Simone Collins: Yeah. It’s, it... You’ll like it. Don’t worry.[00:35:10] Malcolm Collins: You’ll like it. You’ll like it at the end of the day. Come on.[00:35:14] Simone Collins: Okay.[00:35:14] Malcolm Collins: They, they, r- I mean, there’s been countries that have asked to be colonized in the past.[00:35:19] Simone Collins: Yeah. And were there some countries that asked for their colonizing forces to not go?[00:35:24] Malcolm Collins: Yeah, yeah. Like, the, the idea that, like, colonization was this like a universal negative is as, you know, i- it’s, it’s like, do some people in America not like the US government?[00:35:36] Yes, a big chunk. You can get people to protest, but a lot of them like it as well.[00:35:40] Speaker 5: There’s a great quote from an Indian under the early stages of occupation, , and they asked him like, “What, what do you think of occupation? What do you think of having to pay taxes to the British government?” And he was like ecstatic about it. He’s like, “, now with the British government, every year a taxpayer comes around once.[00:35:56] It used to be every year all of the local [00:36:00] warlords sent taxpayers to my house.” , So basically the idea is that before the British came in, there was a bunch of overlapping regions that might have power, or at least the power to force you to give them money, and they’d all send , , tax collectors to you, , at least within this region of India.[00:36:14] And he was, , he felt so out from under , , the burden of that under the British system. We act like everyone was saints before the colonial system came in, but in a lot of these regions, the people were, , comically cruel compared to what the West did[00:36:29] Speaker 9: Again, if we’re talking about India here, you can look at the practice of sati, where they would burn a wife alive when her husband died. , And there’s the famous case of the English general who’s, , working with Indian troops, and they start to build a pyre to burn a woman alive because her husband had died.[00:36:47] And he looks at them and he goes, “, don’t do that.” And they’re like, “What? We’re your allies. This is our practice.” And he goes, “Well, okay then, , we have a practice in Britain, and when men burn a woman alive, we hang them. So I’ll just set up the gallows right here, and as soon as you’re done with this fire, we can hang all of you.”[00:37:05] , And they’re like, “Oh, okay, okay. I guess we won’t do this.” But, , , the reality , is that a lot of these places were far more cruel and brutal than is portrayed in, in the common narrative today[00:37:15][00:37:15] Speaker 10: And note here, this isn’t just in the words of the quote-unquote colonizers who were recording this. One of, like, the big moments I remember from childhood is we were reading this book called Things Fall Apart, which was supposed to be about how bad the colonization of Nigeria was, and there’s this scene where they take a baby and they leave it to slowly die alone in the woods simply because it was a twin, and they believed twins were evil.[00:37:42] And the complaint was that the Europeans wanted to stop this practice. And I remember, like, looking around in the woods, , the room and being like, “Wait, so, like, w- like, th- uh, like, everyone else here thinks this was a bad thing that we stopped this?” , The level of horrors of things that we stopped through colonization are almost unspeakable in many of these regions[00:38:07] Speaker 11: And I say this as someone who has a British background because my own ancestors before they were colonized from Rome practiced human sacrifice regularly, practiced the sacrifice of children regularly. They would bury them under bridges to like keep them from collapsing or something. , They f- monstrous, monstrous stuff.[00:38:26] , Before colonization we were all animals[00:38:28] Simone Collins: Well, and I think that’s kind of what China was trying to sell with the Belt and Road Initiative. They’re like, “Don’t you wanna be colonized? Wouldn’t you like me to build some infrastructure for you? Let’s do this.” I- it’s, it’s colonizing 2.0 with different branding.[00:38:41] So I agree with you. Yeah, I see it. Okay, bye.[00:38:45] Malcolm Collins: Bye.[00:38:48] Whoa, I didn’t ask you to bring it and fill it, but thank you. Octavian, come here. Come here. We’re gonna say happy birthday.[00:38:54] Simone Collins: I gave you 2% milk. That’s really nice of you. Oh, Octavian, that’s[00:38:55] Malcolm Collins: so nice. Did you spill any? Did you make a mess?[00:38:58] Simone Collins: No.[00:38:59] Malcolm Collins: Okay,[00:38:59] Simone Collins: by the way, I don’t know if you saw. Did you see the basically, like, lore encyclopedia that’s super interactive and full of fun, like, games and cool elements that Leaflet built?[00:39:10] Malcolm Collins: No.[00:39:12] Simone Collins: Oh my gosh, it’s amazing. I have to send you a link. Did you[00:39:14] Malcolm Collins: share it with me?[00:39:16] Simone Collins: Yeah no. I, I didn’t share it with you. I just learned about it. It’s at clyo.angelsword.com. I’m sending it to you.[00:39:23] Malcolm Collins: It’s- Is this the one where she has, like, the cartridges that you can put in, or are you talking about something else?[00:39:27] Simone Collins: There is a, there’s a combat training game. There’s a library with books to go through. There... Y- you basically get to explore the lore and learn about the RPG, but in a very immersive, interactive, game-like way. Not even game-like. It, as a game. Like, it’s- So[00:39:43] Malcolm Collins: do you wanna hear the crazy thing-[00:39:44] I think it should be ready to go live tomorrow, which I’m absolutely shocked about. But it is a new standalone app that you can download for free on RFAB. And what it does is it, for reasons, like if you [00:40:00] ever had a reason to do this, but in terms of the type of- Who[00:40:02] Simone Collins: knows why?[00:40:03] Malcolm Collins: Image generation- I don’t know why ... and video generation on RFAB you can open, like, a collection of images or videos, and then it auto-sizes them to the size of the app’s screen and puts them in order. So, you don’t, like... You can say, like, “Oh, I want five images open on my screen,” and it will automatically size them to use maximum screen real estate.[00:40:25] Oh ... and the thing that I’m still working on is dragging and dropping one folder of this into another folder of this so it’s even, the UI is even easier. Okay. But it also works with clicking on opening images or videos, and that it will auto open them in a very lightweight screen that’s very easy to both resize, but also that, like, doesn’t, like, it- If you’re using, like, VLC, it, like, puts the title in front of it and stuff like that.[00:40:49] Yeah. And it doesn’t auto loop, and it’s very annoying if you’re creating AI videos. But no, this is all handled automatically by this system.[00:40:56] Speaker 12: Basically, this is a totally free app that you can download from the, , image generation page or the page that allows you to search every not safe for work database at the same time, , from that link up there. And, , if you set it to your default viewer, uh, you can just drop any additional image into the, , another image, and it will equally space them in relation to each other, as well as some other quality of life features[00:41:21] Malcolm Collins: And then it does other useful things that you might run into with RFAB, like, if you’re using the not safe for work image search feature, because it allows you to download zips from various websites- Okay[00:41:30] You can get, like, an entire folder full of zips, and now this has a feature that automatically unzips them all and can automatically take them all out of their subfolders if you want them all in the, the parent folder. Now it’s being-[00:41:40] Simone Collins: This just sounds like it’s for a very specific type of person.[00:41:42] Malcolm Collins: It’s being... Chud, Chud backs it. Yeah, it’s, it’s being built right now. But it’s getting close. Like, like, like, it’ll be improved because I just started working on it today, but at a base level it works right now.[00:41:54] Simone Collins: Okay. Wow.[00:41:56] Malcolm Collins: But, Wow ... yeah. Well, I’d say if, if you... I mean, even, it even has, like, normal safe for work uses.[00:42:03] Like, if you’re just doing a lot of like image creation and you want to go through tons of images at once it’s a really intuitive way to do that that’s incredibly lightweight. Okay. Now, right now it’s only for Windows because I have to send it to Simone if we wanna make a Mac version. So if people want a Mac version you can let me know[00:42:22] Simone Collins: Thanks.[00:42:22] I don’t know, Macs are more used by women. Women are less likely to want this use.[00:42:27] Malcolm Collins: Well, yeah. I know it’s only th- th- those are women things.[00:42:31] Simone Collins: Yeah, I feel like the, the overlap between the type of, let’s just say it, guy who wants to use this and their, like, computer use, like, they’re gonna use gaming PCs.[00:42:41] They’re, they’re not gonna be idiots who use Macs like me. Sorry. But yes. No, I mean, anyway, it sounds really cool. I will-[00:42:49] Malcolm Collins: Oh, and I, I hugely improved the not safe for work video generation feature to the point where it’s basically unrec- Well, because the problem that I realized I had is the text to video was not using not safe for work CDance, which is the best if you want to describe a scene.[00:43:05] And now it works really well for scene descriptions.[00:43:09] Simone Collins: Huh. Interesting[00:43:14] I’m gonna have to- And,[00:43:14] Malcolm Collins: and you can generate quite long videos, like 15 seconds[00:43:17] Simone Collins: I need to do video generation on this. Okay. Well, I’m excited to do that then. But for now I will, I will kick us off. Okay. Ready? Yeah?[00:43:29] Speaker 13: I know which one it is. It feels so much better than having one. I’ll tell you, just like this little herd. You’re gonna be with me, Toasty? Aw, thanks. It’s texting me Do I like frogs? Yeah, frogs are super cool.[00:43:57] Speaker 14: Yeah, see that’s why you were gonna give me a frog question. Oh, yeah. [00:44:00] ‘Cause I like frogs. Yeah. We’ll give it to you if you eat your food, Toasty. Yeah, Toasty. Okay. ‘Cause we want you to grow big and strong, right, buddy? Look at that This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit basedcamppodcast.substack.com/subscribe

In this episode of Based Camp, Simone and Malcolm Collins break down The New York Times’ recent coordinated coverage of masculinity and fatherhood. They analyze four pieces that attempt to redefine what it means to be a dad — including a cartoon about a trans father on Father’s Day, a childless writer’s take on “modern” fatherhood, an attack on Scott Galloway’s views on paternity leave, and Ezra Klein’s conversation with Helen Lewis framing the “New Right’s very old vision of men.”The Collinses argue these articles reveal deep cultural elite contempt for actual fathers and promote unsustainable, self-indulgent views of parenting that prioritize personal identity and emotional affirmation over duty, sacrifice, and long-term human thriving. They explain why pronatalist, traditional approaches to masculinity and fatherhood will inherit the future while progressive narratives collapse under their own contradictions.Expect sharp cultural analysis, personal parenting stories, and a direct challenge to the mainstream media’s attempt to gaslight men about what fatherhood really is.Show Notes@AlexBerenson wrote: Cannot make this up, either.@nytimes opinion has had four recent pieces about fatherhood and masculinity, with six authors:Three womenA trans “man”Two childless menNot one father. The cultural elite contempt for dads runs so deep we don’t even get to speak for ourselves.The four pieces appear to be these recent New York Times Opinion items on fatherhood/masculinity:* “To My Daughter, My Gender Was Never Complicated” (guest essay in comic-strip form, by Zach Ellams, a trans-identifying parent writing about being a “trans dad” and fatherhood).* “The Most Important Way That Fatherhood Has Changed” (Father’s Day–timed essay on changing perspectives on fatherhood).* “This Masculinity Influencer Is Loud and Wrong About Paternity Leave” (criticizing a male influencer’s stance on paternity leave and broader masculinity issues).* “The New Right’s Very Old Vision of Men” (Opinion video/transcript focusing on men, masculinity and the New Right, featuring journalist Helen Lewis).“To My Daughter, My Gender Was Never Complicated”https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/21/opinion/trans-dad-parenting-fathers-day.htmlhttps://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/21/opinion/trans-dad-parenting-fathers-day.html?unlocked_article_code=1.r1A.oWDB.tcG4utZreGgZ&smid=url-shareThis shows a series of cartoon panels about a trans father who underwent surgery at 18 and has lived as a father of a daughter, mostly quite out, for some time.It’s about how he found self acceptance through parenting (and I love that, because I—Simone—have also experienced that and can totally relate)The panels include things like:* His daughter yelling: “HOW DID YOU GROW A MUSTACHE IF YOU WERE A LADY?” at a public school* His daughter asking about a pre-transition picture of him in an album and asking:* “Who’s that?”* “It’s me”* “Oh. You look cool.”* “Then or now?”* “Then.”* Him worrying about his daughter outing him at school* “I don’t actually tell everyone I’m trans. I save that for special people”* Eventually she outs him, saying she wants to grow a beard when she grows up, and when told she can’t, insisting she can because her dad did and he was a girl.* Her various sick burns* “You’re slow because you’re old!”* “Maybe I’ll be like you when I grow up” // “Yeah?” // “Yeah. Really short.”The Backlash:* @realBrandonGill: “On Father’s Day, the New York Times decided to promote a cartoon of a woman cosplaying as a father. And they did it for a reason. Because the cultural left knows that the first step to conquering the future is brainwashing the minds of our children— and they’ve realized that strong fathers are the biggest obstacle to that goal. They want to tear the institution of fatherhood down to nothing because, to the left, things that are normal, good, and holy are a threat to their marxist revolution.”* Matt Taibbi: “Today’s NYT editorial on Father’s Day is an all-timer. Again, don’t know where to put it on the funny-vs-horrifying axis:”* @EndWokeness: “The New York Times on Father’s Day. We do not hate the media enough.”* Caitlin Flanagan: “The child’s job was to help the parent feel comfortable with his gender.”* @AfterTheReset: “Message aside, is it necessary for the cartoons to be ugly, poorly drawn, and unappealing?”Is this an affront to father’s day?* Sort of* Mother’s Day in the modern U.S. sense was founded by Anna Maria Jarvis in the early 1900s to create a solemn “memorial mothers day” honoring the sacrifices and care of individual mothers, inspired directly by her own mother Ann Reeves Jarvis’s wish for such a day and by Ann’s community health and reconciliation work.* Anna’s drive was rooted in her mother Ann Reeves Jarvis’s work: Ann had organized “Mothers’ Day Work Clubs” in the 1850s to improve sanitation and reduce infant mortality, and later “Mother’s Friendship Day” events to heal divisions between Union and Confederate families after the Civil War. Ann also expressed in a Sunday school prayer that she hoped someone would someday establish a “memorial mothers day” for the “matchless service” mothers render to humanity, a line Anna took as her guiding mission* In the U.S., Father’s Day is generally credited to Sonora Smart Dodd of Spokane, Washington, who proposed the holiday in 1909 after hearing a church sermon about Anna Jarvis’s newly established Mother’s Day. (her civil war veteran dad raised her and her siblings alone after her mother died).* I find this really relatable as a parent* Many of us have peculiarities and a story about how parenting helps with acceptance and getting someone out of their heads is actually really good* In fact, these panels even demonstrate how the author’s daughter gets him to stop overthinking things* There’s a panel where she’s like: “I spot something that starts with T!”* And all he can think of is “trans”* And he’s like: Termite? Turtleneck? Tiny morsel of wood?”* And his daughter is like: “TREES.”“The Most Important Way That Fatherhood Has Changed”https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/15/opinion/fathers-day-fatherhood.htmlhttps://archive.is/Gn93jIn this, Frank Bruni, a (childless) contributing opinion writer who has been on staff at the time for over 25 years, talks about how fatherhood has changed between his dad and his brother’s generations (his brother has three kids in their 20s)He talks about fathers spending more time with their kids now an cites an article suggesting one reason fertility is lower is that men want to give the kids they do have more attention.In short, he says modern fatherhood is high effort, high investment, and he says that’s good.He sort of misses that the investment now isn’t in empowering kids but rather indulging them, and he provides a good example: “Mark encouraged his children to let him in by inviting them to understand him. He made sure that they met and mingled with his adult friends and thus observed how he tended relationships and what they meant to him. He also showed his children his passions.“I took Frank to a Grateful Dead concert when he was 12,” Mark told me, referring to his oldest son, who, like me, is named after my father. But that outing wasn’t just characteristically ardent Deadhead evangelism (and, well, unorthodox parenting). It reflected Mark’s sustained effort to expand the time that he and Frank spent together. The more hours, the more conversation. The more conversation, the greater the likelihood of serendipitous revelations, real familiarity, deeper connection.”“This Masculinity Influencer Is Loud and Wrong About Paternity Leave”https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/21/opinion/paternity-leave-debate.htmlhttps://archive.is/Zm4OyIn this opinion piece, Jessica Grose denounces Scott Galloway’s stance on paternity leave.It should be noted that Scott Galloway is one of the few progressive-leaning pronatalists out there (center-left liberal or social capitalist rather).In an interview with Derek Thompson, Galloway said: “I think there should be mandatory maternity leave, because I think the species needs to propagate. I’m not sure there should be mandatory paternity leave. I think it sometimes creates resentment. I think sometimes it’s abused. And so I’m a bit of a capitalist here. I think it’s between the company, but I don’t know if I immediately default to oh, the father needs to be there.”Grose added: “Galloway also commented that he doesn’t think men should be in the delivery room. “I thought that was so disgusting and unnatural,” he says. When I asked Galloway if he had a response to the backlash he has been getting over these comments, he said over email, “My comments were intentionally provocative in the context of a friendly/snarky conversation with Derek.””She also noted: “Poor Derek Thompson tried to push back, and launch a defense of parental leave. “Most of the gap between prime age adult male and female earnings is a motherhood penalty. And so one benefit of paternity leave is that it puts men and women on relatively more equal standing,” to which Galloway replies, “By lowering the economic standards of the man?””She proceeded to cite research finding that “Paid paternity leave in Quebec did not fix the motherhood penalty for women, nor did it substantially hurt men’s economic standards.”She also attempts to exploit that “not a baby man” aspect of Galloway’s personality:* “It gets worse. Thompson, who is still glowing from the birth of his second child, shares a very sweet story with Galloway about playing “monster” with his eldest child, a 2-year-old, and how he feels “an enormous upsurge of instinct for how to parent my child.” Thompson adds, “I love discovering a new piece of myself in parenting.”Galloway doesn’t even seem to be listening to Thompson, because his response is, “The bad news is it just sucks for the dad. We pretend to like it.” Galloway thinks dads are full of it “when they say they like babies. They’re awful. As a new dad your job is to make sure moms don’t lose it, “and get some sleep and keep the baby away from bodies of water. That is literally your only two jobs right now, or the only two things that you’re any good at. At about 2 or 3 it starts to get less awful and then by 4 or 5 it almost becomes fun.””She imposes an implication on Galloway that is unfair: “Scott Galloway is entitled to his feelings about parenting babies, and I’m sure he’s not alone. What I am objecting to is the unsaid implication that it’s super fun for moms all the time, while also talking to a man who seems to be wholeheartedly enjoying his small children.”She tries to argue that many men like being fathers (implying Galloway is heartless) and that studies show people want supportive partners and that partners who take paternity leave “have higher levels of life satisfaction, better health, better marriages and better relationships to their children”She writes: “When I asked Galloway if he was familiar with any of this research, he said, “My point wasn’t that paternity leave is bad — it’s that we should be honest about trade-offs and let families make decisions based on their circumstances rather than treating one model as morally superior.””But then she frames his statement as elitist, writing about how few people have that choice.She finishes with: “I don’t think it’s unusual for men to find childbirth uncomfortable or scary to watch, and becoming a dad can be a rough transition for many; there’s a whole genre of internet videos of dads passing out in the delivery room. But I don’t think saying that watching women give birth is “disgusting and unnatural” is the best way to start this conversation. Galloway told me in an email, “The broader point I was making — clumsily — is that we should be honest about the different experiences people have rather than prescriptive about what every father must feel or do. Some dads experience profound bonding in the first weeks; others find their stride later. Both are valid.”I wholeheartedly agree with that sentiment.”This is exactly why we don’t have very many left-leaning pronatalists.* On one hand we have a woman who has unreasonable demands for a pet project* On the other hand we have a man trying to share a relatable view and espouse practical solutions“The New Right’s Very Old Vision of Men”https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/05/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-helen-lewis-gender-right.htmlhttps://archive.is/kuEGGThis is an episode of the Ezra Klein show with Helen Lewis as they discuss a concept she wrote about and refers to as masculinism.They open with clips of Bronze Age Pervert and Tucker Carlson yearning for “the ancient Hittite Empire or the ancient Mitanni Empire” and “what we had before Betty Friedan wrote “The Feminine Mystique,” before lifestyle feminism dominated every institution in the West.”They argue:* There is a coherent masculinist ideology on the American right that goes far beyond the online “manosphere” provocateurs like Andrew Tate.* Its central claim: modernity and liberal democracy have “thwarted” true masculinity, which is defined around hierarchy, dominance, risk‑taking, and clear gender roles (male breadwinner, female homemaker).* Figures like Raw Egg Nationalist, Bronze Age Pervert (Costin Alamariu), Helen Andrews, JD Vance, Doug Wilson, and parts of Heritage’s agenda are all different expressions of this same ideological current.They talk about various concerns expressed within the sphere of masculinism (from dropping testosterone to boys’ struggles in schools, male suicide, endorcine-disrupting chemicals, sedentary work, etc.)Their primary criticism of it center around:* A lack of what they find to be empty or incoherent intellectualism* Klein keeps finding “less there than I thought”: beneath the grand talk of thymos, Nietzsche and liberal decadence, the arguments often collapse into trivial lifestyle advice (e.g. “throw out your plastic chopping board”) or conspiratorial hormone politics.* They argue that much of the literature swaps serious argument for trolling, irony and “vibes,” making claims hard to pin down and allowing proponents to dodge accountability for what they’re actually saying.* The movement’s misogyny* Historical nostalgia and bad faith use of “the past”* FAIR.* They argue the movement builds on mythic, cherry‑picked pasts: a fake 1950s Pleasantville, a sanitized Rome or Sparta, or vague “longhouse” matriarchies that collapse under any concrete historical scrutiny.* The movement’s contempt for liberal self‑restraint and equality* They find masculinists overly valorize aggression, domination, and hierarchy* Klein argues healthy masculinity is a matter of self mastery* The self-helpishness of the movement* The looksmaxxing* The extreme body aesthetics (steroid use)* Their allegedly exploiting real male distress in exploitative ways* They say masculinists focus too much on butthurt and hierarchy and not on actual constructive reforms* Their policy threat* E.g. pushback on no-fault divorce* The tone* Klein emphasizes that the movement’s heroes (like* Trump and Nick Fuentes) embody disinhibition, cruelty, and narcissism rather than courage, responsibility, or fatherhood; he calls this a “terrible vision” of adulthood and manhood.Episode Transcript[00:00:00] Simone Collins: Hello, Malcolm. I’m excited to be speaking with you today, because The New York Times seems to be, in some either organized or unintentional fashion making a stance on what masculinity is, really trying to shape the narrative in a very, like, kind of obvious way.[00:00:15] Malcolm Collins: Is it, is it bopping your kids?[00:00:17] Simone Collins: N- no. No, no, no, no. It’s- No, no,[00:00:19] Malcolm Collins: no, no, no, no, no.[00:00:20] Simone Collins: They don’t get to- ... the opposite of that. And I started falling down this rabbit hole when I saw this tweet on X at Alex Berenson wrote, “Cannot make this up either. @NYTimesOpinion has had four recent pieces about fatherhood and masculinity with six authors.[00:00:36] Three women, a trans man, two childless men. Not one father. The cultural elite contempt for dads runs so deep that we don’t even get to speak for ourselves.” He didn’t directly reference all of the four articles in his, his post, so I-[00:00:54] Malcolm Collins: The trans article was really creepy.[00:00:56] Simone Collins: The trans article, we we’re gonna go...[00:00:58] That’s our first one. But I did, I did, I think I found the four of them. There is, “To My Daughter, My Gender Was Never Complicated.” This is the- Trans one that Malcolm alluded to. We’re gonna look at The, The Most Important Way That Fatherhood Has Changed, a Father’s Day themed essay on changing perspectives on fatherhood.[00:01:17] This masculinity influencer is loud and wrong about paternity leave, which is criticizing Scott Galloway’s stance on paternity leave and broader masculinity issues. Him being a left-leaning pronatalist, and one of the only ones. Mm. So great. Thanks, guys. And then finally, The New Right’s Very Old Vision of Men which is from the Ezra Klein podcast actually, where he has on Helen Lewis.[00:01:41] So two people I think are great and, but no, they have to talk about basically reframe the entire... They call it, I think, well, we’ll, we’ll get into it. Some, some name that Helen Lewis has chosen for the masculinity, masculinity movement, like raw nationalist and bronze per- pervert and a bunch of other people in our broader space.[00:02:00] But why they’re like shallow and evil. So this[00:02:04] Malcolm Collins: is very much- These people are awesome. Hold on. No, the thing is, is we will replace them. None of these people who are whining about what it means to be a dad is a real dad. Well,[00:02:12] Simone Collins: and you’ll see this actually. And here’s who’s gonna replace them. So what I think is interesting is this, this is their attempt to frame this is what masculinity is or should be.[00:02:19] This is what fatherwood- fatherhood is or should be. And in so doing, they actually, I think, explain exactly your point, why they are going to be replaced, why they are not going to inherit the future. Ooh. Because the views they express are inherently unsustainable and not going to produce something that helps humans thrive in the end which I think is telling.[00:02:44] So let’s jive right in to the one that really got X clutching its pearls in such a way that they just burst into powder. To my daughter, my gender was never complicated. This was a series of cartoon panels about a trans father who underwent surgery at 18 and has lived as a father of a daughter mostly, mostly not quite out actually for quite some time.[00:03:11] And it’s supposed to be- Okay ... this heartwarming story about h- how a parent has found self-acceptance through parenting. And on the surface, like, I really like that because, as you know, I have to give myself grace more now, knowing that our children are a lot like me and that some of the most difficult things about them are traits that are deep from within me, and I have to...[00:03:34] It’s a whole thing. I like that. But so for those of you just listening, the panels include things like his daughter yelling, .” How did you grow a mustache if you were a lady?” at a public pool where this father is not out. His daughter asking about a pre-transition picture of him in an album and asking, “Who’s that?”.[00:03:53] And the father says, “It’s me.” “Oh, you look cool. Then or now?” “Then.” [00:04:00] She’s just full of sick burns, honestly. He- Just[00:04:02] burns ...[00:04:03] he has some panels about worrying about his daughter outing him at school where she talks about like, “Oh, my mommy, I, I told them how my mommy made a cake for you after your surgery.”[00:04:14] And he, he says, “I don’t actually tell everyone I’m trans. I save that for special people.” And then eventually she does out him, saying that she wants to grow a beard when she grows up, and when told that she can’t, she insists that she can because her dad did and he was a girl.[00:04:29] And[00:04:30] Malcolm Collins: some more- Oh, then it’s not grooming at all.[00:04:32] Simone Collins: No, I know, I know, I know. Some other sick burns from her that I love-[00:04:35] Malcolm Collins: I love how they just, they’re, they’re always like, they’re always like this. They’re always like, “We’re not grooming people.” We’re not[00:04:40] Simone Collins: doing that.[00:04:40] Malcolm Collins: And then they show an example of a kid growing up in an environment where this is normalized wanting to do it themself,[00:04:45] Simone Collins: and they don’t- I thought I would marry a woman and have 100 cats and live in a van,[00:04:49] Malcolm Collins: okay?[00:04:49] You, like you literally thought the norm was being a lesbian. And, and, and the-[00:04:52] Simone Collins: I know I did. I really did, ‘cause all my friends[00:04:55] Malcolm Collins: grew up in San Francisco. You[00:04:55] Simone Collins: grew[00:04:55] Malcolm Collins: up in San Francisco. Yeah ... and it’s, you know, I think that one of the things To remember is that grooming is normal to an extent, right? Like, in that everybody grows up into the culture, or often into the culture, th- they’re surrounded by when they’re a kid, and that’s often the culture’s goal.[00:05:14] This is why at the San Francisco Cho- Choir, you know, they’re saying, “We are coming for your kids.” Because these groups breed at well below replacement rate. The only way they can be stable is by converting children from other cultural groups. Mm. They just need to define this, and those children would normally be groomed into their own healthy culture, right?[00:05:31] But now they are being parasitized into cultures that their birth culture typically would see as negative. And that by the statistics seems to have negative outcomes in terms of mental health, life happiness, et cetera. But continue.[00:05:48] Simone Collins: Just two more sick burns from the daughter before we go over the backlash.[00:05:53] And it, it is, this is really an affront on Father’s Day. She said, “You’re slow ‘cause you’re old.” I, which is just kind of a young person thing to say, but I love it. And at one point she, she told her dad, “Maybe I’ll be like you when I grow up,” and he’s like, “Yeah?” And I think he’s thinking maybe, like, trans like me or something, but she’s like, “Yeah, really short,” which is just delightful.[00:06:15] This girl is really funny. And I think that, you know, the, the, the parent who was able to notice the humor in these moments is funny. But the backlash, ooh, the, a lot of people on X didn’t like it. @RealBrandonGill wrote, “On Father’s Day, The New York Times decided to pronote- promote a cartoon of a woman cosplaying as a father, and they did it for a reason.[00:06:35] Because the cultural left knows that the first step to conquering the future is brainwashing the minds of our children, and they’ve realized that strong fathers are the biggest obstacle to that goal. They want to tear the institution of fatherhood down to nothing because to the left, things that are normal, good, and holy are a threat to the Marxist revolution.”[00:06:56] Matt Taibbi wrote, “Today’s NYT editorial on Father’s Day is an all-timer.” Again, I don’t know where to put it on the funny versus horrifying axis. @EndWokeness wrote, “The New York Times on Father’s Day. We do not hate the media enough.” Caitlin Finne- Flanagan wrote, “The child’s job was to help the parent feel comfortable with his gender.”[00:07:17] And @AfterTheReset, “Message aside, is it necessary for the cartoons to be ugly, poorly drawn, and unappealing?” And per our episode on communists and terrifyingly badass girls-[00:07:29] Malcolm Collins: Yes, and now we’re like, “Oh, that’s the point” ... like, that’s why they do it. Yeah. Yeah, but the problem is that they’ve so promulgated it within their culture specifically that the other side is, i- you know, we can compete with our sexy anime girls made with, with AI.[00:07:43] In fact, you know, why don’t I put in a sexy Simone right now just so everyone can see my-[00:07:47] Oh, my God. Okay, great ... my hot German anime waifu. Thanks. The, the... I, I think, I think we, we can beat them because we get the sexy art, and we can make it- ... for virtually free. Go to RFAB. By the way, if you’re wondering the model that I [00:08:00] use most for these, it’s RFAB’s GPT model is the one- Oh[00:08:04] that’s best for the-[00:08:04] Simone Collins: No way ... producing sexy[00:08:05] Malcolm Collins: German women. Yeah.[00:08:06] Simone Collins: Really? Mm-hmm. I’m just so used to GPT art being h- awful. Like, the, the short legs. You know what I’m talking about, the short legs. Did they get over that, I guess?[00:08:16] Malcolm Collins: Yeah. It’s great. I mean, I, I like... If you’ve liked the images that I show, they’re genuine- Yeah[00:08:21] GPT, Maybe[00:08:22] Simone Collins: it’s just better at anime. Hmm.[00:08:24] Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Well, I mean, I, I tell it to do it in an anime style. Yeah. You know, so.[00:08:28] Simone Collins: Okay.[00:08:28] Malcolm Collins: Oh,[00:08:28] Simone Collins: ooh. Hold on,[00:08:31] Malcolm Collins: buddy. But I mean, if we can fight asynchronous warfare where everything in their world has to be ugly... And I do think the other point that the person made here is really interesting about this- Yeah[00:08:38] is the piece and the focus was on his daughter affirming his lifestyle.[00:08:45] Simone Collins: Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like- Which by the way actually i- is an affront to the concept of Father’s Day and Mother’s Day, which isn’t about This is about me. This is my day. These holidays existed to be a memorial to the sacrifice and hard work that parents do.[00:09:05] Yeah. Not of, like, the affirming role that their children play for them. So Father’s Day was sort of, it was inspired by Mother’s Day- ... which was founded by this woman named Anna Maria Jarvis. She wanted to create- ... a solemn memorial Mother’s Day honoring the sacrifices and care of individual mothers.[00:09:26] Inspired by her mother, Ann Reeves who had done all sorts of, like, amazing things to help, like, just sort of community works and things like that. But Father’s Day, even more so- ... is really about, like, immense sacrifice to help raise your kids. So Father’s Day was founded by Sonora Smart Dodd of Spokane, Washington, who heard about Mother’s Day-[00:09:48] and was like, “Hold on,” like, “Dads need this.” ‘Cause her Civil War veteran dad raised her and her siblings alone after her mother died. So this is about dads going above and beyond, sacrificing their happiness and their wellbeing and their sanity to take care of their children. And- Hmm ... yeah, I mean, this is not really, I would say, in the at least original spirit of Father’s Day.[00:10:09] Even though I find it relatable as a parent I, I do think that our kids teach us how to give grace to ourselves or accept ourselves better, but that’s not what being a parent should be about, ever. It should not be about self-affirmation.[00:10:25] Malcolm Collins: And, and that’s wild. This reframing of parenthood as an act of self-affirmation,[00:10:30] Simone Collins: which- And that’s, again, that’s part of the problem.[00:10:31] Like, again, to the theme of this episode, this is why the progressive left is not going to inherit the future, is because they, they’re not having children out of a sense of duty or obligation, self-sacrifice. They’re having it as, an ef- and even contextualizing it as sort of an indulgent my spiritual journey, my journey of self-acceptance kind of thing.[00:10:56] And it’s th- this, this, this parent is so in their head about their trans identity, for example. One kid who already wants[00:11:07] to sterilize[00:11:08] themselves. There’s even a panel in the, there’s even a panel in the, the, the, she, the, sorry. The, the author includes where the daughter, they’re in a park, and the daughter’s like, “I spot something, it starts with a T.[00:11:19] Can you guess what it is?” Basically, and the, the father’s like, “Aw.” Like, can only think of trans. Can only think of trans in a park, and is like, “A termite? A tiny morsel of dirt?” Like, coming up with all these things and, and the daughter’s just like, “Trees.” It just, I think demonstrates the extent to which this parent is so preoccupied with their own identity[00:11:43] Malcolm Collins: and- Yeah, they can’t even see...[00:11:44] Well, what a great metaphor. They can’t even see the trees in a park.[00:11:48] Simone Collins: Yeah.[00:11:48] Malcolm Collins: They can’t even see the trees around them. They, they can’t see the tree. It’s, it’s- The woods for, the[00:11:52] Simone Collins: woods for the trees. Yes. Is that what you’re going for here?[00:11:55] Malcolm Collins: Yes. Okay. Yeah. But they’re, to, to miss the world around them so [00:12:00] holistically-[00:12:00] Simone Collins: Yeah[00:12:01] Malcolm Collins: out of a focus on their own identity.[00:12:03] Simone Collins: Yeah. And this, again, like I, I find it a relatable message. I think it’s, it’s sweet, but it’s also, I think, very telling, and it is, it is a bit of an affront to the original point of the holiday. By the way, Malcolm, thank you for your sacrifice. I was, we were so busy on Sunday that I, We’re gonna have to do a delayed Father’s Day, and I’m really sorry.[00:12:23] Malcolm Collins: No,[00:12:23] what?[00:12:23] Simone Collins: You’re an amazing dad. You’re such an amazing dad. You, you sacrifice more than any other man I’ve ever encountered. You put yourself on the front lines of parenthood in a way that no father or husband I’ve ever met will. Like- Mm ... that you’re always the one that takes the kids to the doctor- I don’t know if that’s true.[00:12:38] You’ve been doing a lot recently ... you’re alw- always the one the kids are with on the weekends. Though you’re always the one-[00:12:43] Malcolm Collins: He’s started coding.[00:12:44] Simone Collins: I, I, well, look, we need to, we need to get something to work there, and you’re doing a really great job. But you are amazing- Well, I mean, we are happy- ... and I appreciate you[00:12:56] Malcolm Collins: I’ve built out all of the core features. Right now we’re just working on extra stuff, like a integrated email management feature, which- We’re very excited about ... hopefully save... I mean, w- if I can get email off of my daily to-do list, that would save me so much time.[00:13:09] Simone Collins: Same. Yeah, especially, yeah, ‘cause w- now there’s more coming in than we can manage, but we still don’t wanna not read everyone’s message.[00:13:16] So if we just make it slightly more efficient, and you’re making it crazy more efficient. Anyway, let’s go into the next article which is titled The Most Important Way that Fatherhood Has Changed. Mm. In this article, Frank Bruni, who is a childless contributing opinion writer who’s been on staff-[00:13:33] Malcolm Collins: Why?[00:13:34] Why did they let a childless writer write this?[00:13:36] Simone Collins: Well, so I think he believes that he is in a position to talk about fatherhood because he’s talking about it from a removed perspective. In this article he talks about- Mm ... the difference between the way his father raised him and his brother, and the way- Mm.[00:13:53] Mm ... and his brothers, and the way that his brothers have in turn raised their children. And he talks about how fathers are spending more time with their kids now. He cites an article that suggests one reason fertility is lower is that men want to give the kids they do have more attention- Lame ... which he frames as a good thing,[00:14:12] Malcolm Collins: and- Don’t spend time with your kids.[00:14:13] Walk up, hit ‘em, walk away. Oh, my God. That’s, whether they’ve done something bad or not. Yeah. Kids love being hit.[00:14:18] Simone Collins: No, honestly, they, our, our kids really do. They really like fighting. They- And if you don’t do it, they’ll start it so that you do do it. Octavia- Watch out, ‘cause they hit hard ...[00:14:26] Malcolm Collins: dropping on the floor to try to kick me in the nuts in the store.[00:14:28] Simone Collins: What?[00:14:30] Malcolm Collins: This is a real thing that just happened yesterday.[00:14:35] Simone Collins: Yeah, all these other pliant children in their shopping carts. Octavian coming in for the kill. Classic. But yeah this again is, is I think that constant theme. This is why the progressive left is, is choosing to relinquish its position in the future.[00:14:49] There is this choice to indulgently spend more time investing in children. But I think what’s really telling about his article is that the examples he cites on like, well, here’s this valuable additional investment that these children have vis-a-vis his 90-something-year-old father who is just a provider.[00:15:09] These, these parents are getting emotionally involved in their kids’ lives, and they are... here’s one example. He wrote, “Mark,” and this is his brother, “Mark encouraged his children to let him in by inviting them- To understand him. He made sure that they met and mingled with his adult friends, and thus observed how he tended relationships and what they meant to him.[00:15:30] He also showed his children his passions. “I took Frank to a Grateful Dead concert when he was 12,” Mark told me, referring to his oldest son, who like me, is named after my father. But that outing wasn’t just characteristically ardent Deadhead evangelism and, well, unorthodox parenting. It reflected Mark’s sustained effort to expand the time that he and his, and Frank spent together.[00:15:51] The more hours, the more conversation, the more, the more conversation, the greater the likelihood of serendipitous revelations- Why see a dad going to a- ... real [00:16:00] familiarity, deeper connection. So basically, this father was like, “This is my passion. Witness me.” And you know, he made his son go and listen. And listen, I like Grateful Dead music.[00:16:10] I thought I was a Deadhead when I was a kid, ‘cause my father too shared his Grateful Dead passion with me. But it wasn’t that aspect of my growing up with him that was actually helpful. What, what he’s missing here, what Frank Bruni is missing I think, is that investment in children is not all equal.[00:16:24] The investment in children in their careers, in the way that like Benjamin Franklin’s father invested in him, walking him along the street, showing him different trades, asking him what stood out to him. The way that my dad, for example, invested in me. Taking me to work with him, helping me get jobs teaching me what business m- meetings look like, taking me to trade shows.[00:16:40] Like, this, this is really valuable investment, and this is stuff that I think parents are really missing. You know, they’re, they’re treating children like pets. Like this thing where like, “Oh, you’re gonna see how I, you know, my friends, and I’m gonna raise you to be this indulgent, happy person, and we’re gonna be like emotionally so close.”[00:16:59] And it’s true that younger generations now are closer like friends to their parents than ever before, but they’re also more mentally sick. And I don’t know- Yeah ... like there’s, there’s no proven causation. There is this- But it’s not great ...[00:17:10] Malcolm Collins: optimization of closeness without thought for the long-term negative effects.[00:17:15] That’s not great ... and there are going to be long-term negative effects for the way that they’re raising their kids like this. And worse, the way he’s spending money. Look, a father going to a concert? W- what? Paying for a ticket for your kid? That is not sustainable if you have a large family.[00:17:32] Simone Collins: Yeah, and, and way to...[00:17:33] Hopefully he had him wear earplugs. That’s a very easy path to early hearing loss, which is not, not great. But yeah, here’s... The next one made me so angry because we, you know, have personally tried so hard for there to be, to encourage the existence of and, and foster the growth of progressive or left-leaning at least pronatalists.[00:17:59] And yet here is one, and- Scott Galloway ... the New York Times opinion is, yeah, Scott Galloway defenestrating him for holding a very practical and pragmatic view vis-à-vis paternity leave. So in this particular opinion piece, Jessica Grove or sorry, Grose, who is a, she is a mother, but she’s a woman of, of two children in Brooklyn.[00:18:21] She denounces Scott Galloway’s stance on paternity leave. And again, see, Scott Galloway, he, he considers himself, I think, more like center-left or a social capitalist, but he’s still as far, as far as it can get when, when you’re left-leaning and pronatalist.[00:18:38] Yeah.[00:18:38] And in this interview with Derek Thompson-[00:18:40] Galloway said, quote, “I think there should be mandatory maternity leave because I think the species needs to propagate. I’m not sure there should be mandatory paternity leave. I think it sometimes creates resentment. I think sometimes it’s abused. And so I’m a bit capitalist here. I think it’s between the company but I don’t know if I immediately default to, oh, the father needs to be there.”[00:19:04] Grose added, this is the au- the author of the op-ed. Galloway also commented that he doesn’t think men should be in the delivery room. Quote, “I thought that it was so disgusting and unnatural,” he says. When I asked Galloway if he had a response to the backlash he’s been getting over these comments, he said over email, “My comments were intentionally provocative in the context of a friendly, snarky conversation with Derek.”[00:19:28] Which It’s s- it, it’s like exactly the kind of thing that I think many fathers can relate to. And making these conversations open and transparent I think is crucial and important. Like, w- when people pretend that like the birthing experience is beautiful, especially for men-[00:19:47] Malcolm Collins: Ugh. I don’t- That, that- I do not go.[00:19:49] My wife doesn’t have me come to the delivery room. Like, I mean, you-[00:19:51] Simone Collins: Well, yeah, and there was the one time where you were in, in with me with the C-section, and you were like, look. Like you were so uncomfortable. And, and trying to force this on men, or even [00:20:00] worse, to sell them this fantasy of like you’re gonna love being a baby daddy, like a, a, a, a, a father of an infant.[00:20:06] You’re gonna love being in the delivery room. Will then set men up to think, “Oh, gosh, like I, I actually don’t like this, so this means I’m not gonna like to be a father at all.” Yeah,[00:20:16] Malcolm Collins: I’m not gonna like all the other stuff.[00:20:18] Simone Collins: And actually in, in his, in his talk, Galloway makes it clear that it gets better.[00:20:25] So I’ll keep going. Sh- so she also noted in her op-ed I’m reading from it now, “Poor Derek Thompson tried to push back and launch a defense of parental leave. Most of the gap between prime age adult male and female earnings is a motherhood penalty, and so one benefit of paternity leave is that it puts men and women on a relatively more equal standing.”[00:20:46] To which Galloway replies, “By lowering the economic standards of a man?” Which is a super like valid retort.[00:20:53] Malcolm Collins: Reasonable point, yes.[00:20:54] Simone Collins: Yeah. She proceeded, however, to cite research finding that paid paternity leave in Quebec did not fix the motherhood penalty for women, nor did it substantially hurt men’s economic standards.[00:21:06] So good for you. But then she also attempts to exploit that not a baby man, which I talk about like there’s like 10% of men who are like they love babies. They just, infants, like they, they, they wanna hold them, et cetera, but like most men aren’t. But she tries to exploit his, Scott Galloway’s not, disinterest in babies with this.[00:21:27] She wrote, “It gets worse. Thompson, who is still glowing from the birth of his second child, shares a very sweet story and, and how he feels an enormous upsurge of instinct how to parent my child. Thompson adds, ‘I love discovering a new piece of myself in parenting.’ Galloway doesn’t even seem to be listening to Thompson because his response is- The bad news is it just sucks for the dad.[00:21:49] We pretend to like it. Galloway thinks dads are full of it when they say they like babies. They’re awful. As a new dad, your job is to make sure your moms don’t lose it, and get some sleep, and keep the baby away from bodies of water. That’s literally your only two jobs right now, or if the only two things that you’re any good at.[00:22:08] At about two or three it starts to get less awful, and then by four or five it almost becomes fun. That’s what Scott Galloway said, and she’s quoting him in her article. And I think you would, like, you have said almost the same thing, and other very pro-natalist and kid-loving fathers that we know and trust and love, who are very culturally different from us as well, have said the same thing, that they’re just not into kids before they turn, like, five basically.[00:22:31] And then, like-[00:22:31] Malcolm Collins: Yeah, and then they get awesome.[00:22:33] Simone Collins: Yeah. And so that this woman is shaming Scott Galloway for expressing an extremely pervasive view held by fathers, and making Galloway seem like kind of a monster for doing so is It’s both, like, unfair and un- and, and, and f- and fairly cruel, but also I would argue pretty anti-natalist.[00:22:55] Because again, if you make men think- Yeah ... like, “Oh, this is not normal, this is bad, this must mean that I’ll ne- not like anything about being a father,” they might decide to get a vasectomy. They might decide to just give up on that and have just one kid. Well, the[00:23:08] Malcolm Collins: thing that really hit me recently is the day when I decided to go with you because you’re doing your next implantation, which we’ve done recently, so hopefully you’re pregnant.[00:23:15] Everyone be praying. Fingers[00:23:16] Simone Collins: crossed ...[00:23:17] Malcolm Collins: and getting in the car and driving out, and I realized at no point did it occur to me to not do this. At no point- Hmm ... did I sit down and think, “Do I really want another kid? Can we really afford another kid? Does this make sense for our family?” It was just a regular yearly activity happening when it happened.[00:23:37] And it reminded me, in the same way when we read that piece about the early stage abortion and the I Met My Husband at a Gang Bang episode. Watch that episode if you want to. It’s traumatizing. But, Mm ... that was when the radicalized Simone against early stage abortion. If y- if you haven’t seen it, watch.[00:23:53] It’s w- I think one of our craziest episodes. It’ll start with you being all mad if you’re a conservative, and then you’re like, “Wait, this is c- what? [00:24:00] What?” But- Mm. Mm. Mm ... when she went to have an abortion, there was no moment leading up to the abortion that she really considered keeping the baby. It was-[00:24:11] Simone Collins: Yeah, there was...[00:24:12] It was unthinkable. Of course. Just like it’s unthinkable for us not to try for kid six, yeah.[00:24:17] Malcolm Collins: Yeah. And I realized that that’s the way it needs to be. Like, not having kids needs to be completely unthinkable in a marriage. That is how you make this work for you, for your kids, for the way you make this work.[00:24:29] In the same way that... And, and when do we start? In fact, let’s just lay this out. When do you start with intechno-puritanism? At the maximum, whether or not you’re financially stable, two years after you’re married.[00:24:43] Simone Collins: Yeah, that makes sense. Oi. Yeah.[00:24:46] Malcolm Collins: And if you, and if you, and if you can start before that, better[00:24:50] Simone Collins: Yeah, the sooner, the sooner the better, for sure.[00:24:53] Yeah. It just, so that’s super unfair. She, she also imposes another unfair implication on Scott Galloway. She says, “Scott Galloway is entitled to his feelings about parenting babies. I’m sure he’s not alone.” Oh, you’re sure. “But what I’m objecting to is the unsaid implication that it’s super fun for moms all the time, while also talking to a man who seems to be wholeheartedly enjoying his small children.”[00:25:21] First, he’s not implying that it’s fun for moms all the time. What he’s implying when he’s like, “Oh, you can only do two things: try to get some sleep and, like, make sure the baby’s not close to bodies of water,” is that, like, mothers are dependent or, like, the ones who have the, the breast milk. Like, you can’t really substitute that.[00:25:37] I mean, I, you, you can obviously do formula or you can feed bottles of breast milk, but if, if a woman is lactating, like, you can’t lactate for her. You can’t really do that. And women who are newly postpartum have also gone through a bunch of hormonal shifts, which I would argue make them more tolerant of sleep deprivation, make them more capable of not being super stressed about taking care of a screaming infant in the middle of the night or something like that than a father was.[00:26:03] I mean, things do change when you become a father, but not in the same way they do for someone who’s been pregnant for nine months. So I just think it’s not, it’s not even fair. And then she frames his statement, As elitist. When he tries to defend himself when given a chance to comment on this article she, she wrote, “When I asked Galloway if he was familiar with any of his research, she said, ‘My point wasn’t that...’[00:26:26] Or sorry, he said, Galloway said, ‘My point wasn’t that maternity leave is bad. It’s that we should be honest about trade-offs and let families make decisions based on their circumstances rather than treating one model as morally superior.’” Which she’s clearly doing. She’s like, “Well- Yeah ... maternity leave is, is categorically better.[00:26:43] There’s no, there’s no ambiguity. The studies say-”[00:26:46] Malcolm Collins: Nuance.[00:26:47] Simone Collins: Yeah. There’s, there’s no nuance there. But, but he is, he is elitist because she’s like, “Well, not everyone has that choice.” And she, she finishes with, “I don’t think it’s unusual for men. to find childbirth uncomfortable or scary , to watch, and becoming a dad is a rough transition for many.[00:27:10] There’s a whole genre of internet videos of dads passing out in the delivery room.” Which I now need to explore. But-[00:27:16] Malcolm Collins: Wait, really?[00:27:17] Simone Collins: I, yeah, I need, I need to check this out. “I don’t think that saying that watching women give birth is, quote, ‘disgusting and unnatural,’ end quote, is the best way to start this conversation.[00:27:27] Galloway told me in an email, ‘The broader point I was making, clumsily, is that we should be honest about the different experiences people have rather than the perspectives about what every father must feel or do. Some dads experience profound bonding in the first few weeks. Others find their stride later.[00:27:43] Both are valid.’” And she says- Good talk, Galloway ... he wholeheartedly agrees with that statement, but only after an article criticizing him for it. And Galloway’s making such an important point that, you know, you’re not, not all dads feel this, like, love at first sight thing with their kids. Yeah. Like y- you really don’t.[00:27:59] You’re [00:28:00] like, “I need a paternity test. I don’t know about this.” Like, and that’s natural. You are the most loving dad I’ve ever met. You adore our children. Like sometimes when I am like, “I, I, I need a moment,” you, you really don’t. Y- you’re just always there for them. Yeah,[00:28:14] Malcolm Collins: I’m never like, “I need a moment.”[00:28:15] I’m always available for the kids.[00:28:17] Simone Collins: Yeah. L- and then that’s- But you’re still, you’re not a baby man. And it’s, so, so that’s the thing, is like she’s communicating this, this, this really bad lie. So anyway, this is, yeah, facet number three is the one leftist pronatalist who has a really big profile gets defenestrated[00:28:37] Malcolm Collins: for- Defenestrated by The New York Times[00:28:38] Simone Collins: sharing realistic policy positions and trying to make men who don’t love babies not feel like they’re just gonna be bad fathers and not suited to be parents at all. Okay? Great. Thanks, New York Times. So now we get to the new right’s very old vision of men. This is an episode of the Ezra Klein Show with Helen Lewis.[00:28:56] They discuss this concept she wrote about and refers to as masculinism. So they, they open with clips of Bronze Age Pervert and Tucker Carlson, who are yearning for the ancient Hittite Empire, or ancient Mittani Empire, or what we had before Betty Friedan wrote The Feminine Mystique and before-[00:29:15] Malcolm Collins: But we need to talk about this, ‘cause this is just not...[00:29:17] But question, Simone, question.[00:29:19] Simone Collins: Yeah, yeah.[00:29:20] Malcolm Collins: Total side note. Should I get Octavian another Game Boy emulator?[00:29:24] Simone Collins: Well, he was really jealous of Tex’s chew toy that looks like a Game Boy,[00:29:29] Malcolm Collins: so. It’s $59. I, they, the-[00:29:31] Simone Collins: Oh, you’re just browsing Prime Day ... the one I’m thinking[00:29:35] Malcolm Collins: about. I was-[00:29:35] Simone Collins: I was wondering why a white light reflected in those glasses of yours[00:29:39] Malcolm Collins: I know. Hold, you gotta listen to me. This is actually important. So it, it turns out that it, the, the model that’s the best and the most robust, because I, that’s what specifically what I’m looking for, is not discounted for Prime Day, which doesn’t cost that much. And-[00:29:53] Simone Collins: Oh, because we have time.[00:29:54] Malcolm Collins: No, we-[00:29:55] Simone Collins: Look, he broke it.[00:29:55] They break everything. I, I don’t think we need to teach him- Well,[00:29:59] Malcolm Collins: that’s why I’m trying to get something more robust ...[00:30:01] Simone Collins: when we break something you just get a new one.[00:30:03] Malcolm Collins: He broke it over a year ago at this point. Come on.[00:30:08] Simone Collins: See, you’re more forgiving than I am. Oh, sir.[00:30:10] Malcolm Collins: So we’ll let the audience decide.[00:30:12] Simone Collins: Yeah.[00:30:12] Does our kid- The audience will decide. Yeah, yes or no to the... Please no, Tex. Oh my God. So, right. So basically they open with these, you know, right, right-leaning influencers, although Tucker Carlson, I think just to be clear, he’s not a Republican about, like, yearning for the, the earlier days. What they argue essentially in this episode trying to basically encapsulate and then comment on the broader, like, masculinity sphere, is that there is this coherent masculinist ideology on the American light, right, sorry, the American right, that goes way beyond just, like, manosphere provocateurs like Andrew Tate.[00:30:52] That the central claim of masculinism is that modernity is, is broken, especially for men. It is, it is thwarted masculinity. There’s dropping testosterone. There’s dropping fertility. Men are ill-suited for this kind of society, and they, Think that true masculinity centers around hierarchy and dominance and risk-taking and clear gender roles with male breadwinners- Well, this,[00:31:18] Malcolm Collins: this is all true[00:31:20] Simone Collins: and then they, they point to figures like Raw Egg Nationalist, who we consider to be a friend and really like. Bronze Age Pervert, Helen Andrews, who wrote the Foundation[00:31:29] Malcolm Collins: for- Oh,[00:31:29] Simone Collins: by the way, we’ve had Raw Egg[00:31:30] Malcolm Collins: Nationalist on the show. If anyone has a contact to Milo or Bronze Age Pervert, I’d love to have both of them on the show.[00:31:35] Simone Collins: Truly. They include JD Vance in all this, Doug Wilson parts of Heritage’s agenda. And we love Heritage Foundation, so, like, we take this all very personally. They talk about various concerns expressed with mac- masculinism. I think their, their primary criticism, and it is abundant. They s- I- they, they spend a lot of time.[00:31:55] This is, like, all that was playing in my office all afternoon. They don’t like... [00:32:00] They think it has incoherent intellectualism. Klein keeps finding that there’s less here than I thought be- beneath this, for his, for his stance, grand talk of thumos and Nietzsche and liberal decadence, and the arguments often collapse, per his argument, into trivial lifestyle advice like, “Throw out your plastic chopping board,” or conspiratorial hormone politics.[00:32:26] Or as Bronze Age Pervert would write, “w***e-mones.” They- W***e-mones. W***e-mones. Yes, he knows[00:32:32] what’s up.[00:32:33] He knows what’s up. They argue that a lot of the literature swaps serious argument for just trolling or irony and vibes. Meaning that it’s, it’s- No,[00:32:41] Malcolm Collins: they miss it. They don’t understand what’s happening.[00:32:44] Simone Collins: Yeah, they, they don’t, they don’t yeah, they, they just sort of completely misread it. Like, they don’t understand the trolling. They don’t understand the aesthetics.[00:32:53] Malcolm Collins: If you watch our show, you will note that a lot of our show is trolling feeling. Yeah. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t have a lot of substance to it.[00:33:02] There is[00:33:03] Simone Collins: substance. There is research. There is-[00:33:08] The trolling is authenticating. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, the, yeah, the trolling is a, a sign of authenticity and a way to socially signal what we’ve called, I think, what, performative vice to say, like, we are gen- like, that we’re doing the opposite of vir- virtue signaling. Like, signaling vice to the extent that it will hurt our reputation just to show you that we have no desire to be seen as good or smart for example.[00:33:30] Of course, they also highlight the movement’s misogyny. They, and this is actually the argument that F- Misogyny? Come on ... that we’ve also made. Yeah.[00:33:38] Malcolm Collins: Dude, literally. The reason, like, we have no misogynistic opinion The only reason we don’t want women to vote is because they keep voting for the wrong candidate. I, I’m joking of course. The real reason why it’s bad for women to vote is because if voting is a proxy for force, so basically the reason you vote is, like, if you went to war, who would actually win of the two perspectives?[00:34:05] And women wouldn’t be included in that fighting force. Then eventually you create an asymmetry where it may make sense for a faction of the population to just capture power via war. So suppose, as is increasingly happening, all of the women are sorting into one population bloc- voting bloc, and all the men are voting for another candidate, and then the male candidate loses, and then the men just say, “Well, f**k it.[00:34:26] I don’t care anymore.” And this is why democracy prevents that, but it doesn’t prevent it when you allow women to vote.[00:34:32] Simone Collins: Right. And, but they, they... In- instead of hearing this, like, let’s talk about the misaligned incentives and how this is all playing out, what they just see and what they talk about in their podcast is like, this...[00:34:44] They, they’re just anti-democracy and they’re just pro-violence. And they don’t really go deeper than that because they just... I, maybe they lack the capacity to read this more closely. Like, you really have to be looking at the problems in a very critical way. Well, they still acknowledge the problems.[00:34:58] Like, they acknowledge that boys are, are completely, you know, maladapted for the schools the way they’re set up now. They, they acknowledge that there’s a health crisis and there’s too much sedentary life and everything. So they, they say that these are very real issues, but then they criticize the movement for Using it to exploit young men, for example with this sort of, like, self-helpishness that isn’t actually self-help.[00:35:22] It, the long story short, ‘cause I could go into so much more detail, is that this, this is a podcast that has huge, huge viewership, that’s, that is made by very thoughtful people, Ezra Klein is, is very thoughtful and I think very well-meaning. But it’s still trying to frame this movement that is questioning modern norms in a way that isn’t intended to damage its credibility and stifle conversation about those genuine problems which they even acknowledge to be real.[00:35:53] Which I think is very annoying and grating. But also because they’re not dedicated to actually solving these problems in a [00:36:00] way that could lead to inconvenient truths surfacing. Again, they’re representative of a group that is not likely to inherit the future. Yeah. So there’s these different facets of the way that The New York Times is trying to cover masculinity.[00:36:13] They’re trying to cover it by defenestrating the one leftist pronatalist and, and practical parental leave policies. They’re trying to... I’m so sorry about Tex. Tex, friend. You, like, you’re not distressed, you just, you just wanna troll me and maybe you’re tired. They’re trying to under- undermine masculinity by having a, a woman write about Father’s Day and a trans man write about Father’s Day.[00:36:41] And they’re, they’re trying to undermine masculinity by having a, yeah, like the person on X pointed out, a childless man decide what good parenting is and, and proclaim it in The New York Times opinion section. It’s, it’s weird. I don’t know if, like, there’s been some concerted effort to talk about masculinity and to be like, “This[00:37:04] Malcolm Collins: is-” I almost wonder if it’s, like, a reaction to the pushback from the first piece.[00:37:08] Like, we’re just gonna go extra hard on this now that we’ve gotten pushback or...[00:37:13] Simone Collins: What, what do you think? No, because I mean, I, I think these things required some research and scheduling and prep to put together. I don’t know if it’s just this, like, immune system, like it, like, it could be, and I, I’ve been thinking about it as some kind of collective immune system response, right?[00:37:27] That the, the white blood cells have recognized the, the virus that is this, this new movement broadly of, of fighting back against urban monoculture masculinity, and the immune system is now attempting to kill the virus by saying, “No, this is what fatherhood is. This is what masculinity is. This is what correct[00:37:49] Malcolm Collins: parenting is.”[00:37:50] Well, masculinity doesn’t involve men. I mean, that seems to be the point of this, right? They- Yeah.[00:37:55] Simone Collins: It doesn’t involve men and it doesn’t involve fathers and it doesn’t involve genuinely trying to Question the broken systems at play that are harmful toward both men and women. It’s very frustrating, but there you go.[00:38:13] It’s wild. I still really enjoyed the sick burns from the kid, ‘cause I love sick burns from the kid.[00:38:17] Malcolm Collins: Legit, just burning the train. Yeah, but like, I mean, we see where this is going. Like, it’s very concerning. It’s very concerning to me that, like, we can’t have an honest conversation around the things that don’t seem to be working as a society, and are just supposed to go along with it.[00:38:38] Just supposed to be like, “Oh, yeah, this, this is all fine. This is all working. We, we can look at the outcomes and see how f*****g terrible they are.” But nope. We’ll just go along with it[00:38:49] Simone Collins: Yeah, I don’t know what to say aside from I can see why people on X were so mad. Now I understand. But also, maybe we’re gonna have to reach a point where maybe, guys, we don’t need to read The New York Times.[00:39:02] I don’t, I don’t know.[00:39:04] Malcolm Collins: I mean, The New York Times readership is basically a contraceptive at this point, right? Like, if you re- I used to love The New York Times. It was one of my favorite newspapers. But, We all,[00:39:12] Simone Collins: well, we did it all, I guess,[00:39:13] Malcolm Collins: but- That future is over, right? Like, that world is over. The world of The New York Times is not the world of the future of humans, right?[00:39:22] We are the future of humanity. We, as hard as they fight back against this, I was telling Simone today that Nux got demonetized across YouTube, across all his channels.[00:39:32] Simone Collins: I’m so mad.[00:39:32] Malcolm Collins: And they said harassment. I watch Nux’s channel. He doesn’t harass anyone as far as I’ve seen. He, he very rarely makes specific call-outs except for Hasan.[00:39:41] I guess if it’s harassment against Hasan, okay. That, the- Touché ... the delicate little flower needed protection from Nux. But Hasan regularly- Oh ... harasses other people, right? Like, so I mean, that’s scary. That’s scary to be on a platform that can just do that when you’re following all of their rules [00:40:00][00:40:00] Simone Collins: I hope he gets monetized again.[00:40:03] This, this reminds me actually of what happened to Leaflet when you included a clip of our kids being, our kids being the, you know, insane reavers they are and you being like, “You b******s,” Yeah, you little b******s is what they said. And, and I think they, I think they referred to that as hate speech.[00:40:20] Malcolm Collins: No, they said I was, like, a- attacking children or something.[00:40:23] Simone Collins: Yeah, wasn’t it bullying? Calling them little b******s. I think it was, I think it was exactly the same moderation reason, though-[00:40:27] Malcolm Collins: Mm ...[00:40:28] Simone Collins: as what Leaflet saw when hers was demonetized. So.[00:40:32] Malcolm Collins: I mean, I don’t, when you say it, but it’s the standard trans approach, you know?[00:40:36] And the fun thing is, is like I’d actually be okay if somebody figured out a way to make transness demographically stable, right? Like, if you’re a trans person and you’re watching this and you’re like, well, like let’s, let’s... Can I make it demographically stable? Fine, like go for it. That’d be great.[00:40:51] Simone Collins: In the Culture Series it is.[00:40:52] So in Ian Banks’ Culture Series I think a lot of humans, because the, the body’s modified so much that if you want to grow a uterus, you, like over a series of months can just grow that organ and then shift your hormone, because you have a, you have a drug gland. Every, every Culture citizen has the option to install a drug gland which can at any point, like release a variety of different mind-altering compounds.[00:41:15] Like, you can just instantly get drunk when you want to get st- a stimulant when you need it. Like, it has, it’s just an, an endogenous drug producing gland. That means you can also endogenously for the most part I think, produce everything you need to in order to transition your gender. And there are characters that are featured in the Culture Series who at points in their lives like decided to become a man for like a couple years, and become a woman for a couple years.[00:41:39] And that’s a version of transness where like y- you genuinely could with this drug gland grow a uterus, have a baby Get rid of the uterus, turn into a man again. It, and I, I wouldn’t, like, it’s, it’s theoretically possible. You could possibly, plausibly have some kind of, like, with really, really advanced technology, you could have this, right?[00:42:09] Malcolm Collins: Theoretically, yes.[00:42:10] Simone Collins: Theoretically. So okay, that, that is my version. My version of an, an ideal future is basically just the, the culture though. I’m, I’m obsessed. What is tech- Yeah, like I[00:42:19] Malcolm Collins: don’t- What is this mood? As society changes, my views on this would change. As technology changes, my views on this would change.[00:42:26] But right now the wider culture around the trans phenomenon is so toxic and so damaging, I just have to take the stance that if only to distance yourself from that wider culture, it’s better not to transition, right? Like, no- no matter how much you feel that you would benefit from it, because the culture will attempt to...[00:42:50] Like, if you transition and then you have an opinion that’s not an approved opinion, or even the average opinion of the community shifts and now your previously approved opinion falls in the unapproved category, you get thrown in the gutter, no matter how much you’ve done for the community. I mean, look at how the community treats Caitlyn Jenner.[00:43:08] Look at how the community treats Buck Angel, the, the two real, like, out in front advocates for it, right? Like, there, there is no respite in the community. Look at how the community treats Ana Valens. Did you know that Ana Valens ended up being canceled by leftists? This, this was this year.[00:43:24] Simone Collins: Oh, gosh.[00:43:24] Malcolm Collins: For, can you guess what? Can you guess why she was canceled?[00:43:29] Simone Collins: Well, I, I’m sure it had something to do with her general oversharing, but I can’t quite tell what.[00:43:32] Malcolm Collins: No, no, no, no. What would be literally the craziest clown worldest reason for her to be canceled?[00:43:38] Simone Collins: Her giantess interest?[00:43:40] Malcolm Collins: No, no, no. Literally the craziest.[00:43:42] Simone Collins: Ah.[00:43:44] Malcolm Collins: Being a Kirsha fan.[00:43:48] Simone Collins: Aw.[00:43:49] Malcolm Collins: She’s not a Kirsha fan, by the way. She tried to destroy Kirsha’s life, but the left doesn’t care about what’s true. She did an article about why Pippa wasn’t so bad [00:44:00] compared to Kirsha, and somehow people got confused and thought she was a Kirsha fan, and Blue Sky just ran with that[00:44:11] Simone Collins: Blue Sky seems like the most toxic but too boring to find amusing place in the entire internet Is there a moment where, like, you wake up[00:44:20] Malcolm Collins: and you’re like, “Wait, did I choose the wrong team? Did, did I choose the everybody stab everybody in the back team?”[00:44:28] Simone Collins: Mm. I don’t know, man. It’s very frustrating.[00:44:34] Malcolm Collins: But look- I like that you brought these to my att- oh, now he’s asleep?[00:44:37] Simone Collins: You see... Yeah. He just, he just, he needs to, like, scream and scream. This is what I say when he, like, has to yell himself to sleep and then[00:44:46] Malcolm Collins: he’s out. And[00:44:46] Simone Collins: you’re like, “Oh.” Right when I need to get up and make dinner.[00:44:50] Malcolm Collins: Right when you need to get up and make dinner. Well, I’m sure you’ll be able to make dinner even more obediently-[00:44:56] because of this, Simone. Which is really what all of us care about here, right?[00:45:01] Simone Collins: Right? I need to know my place, because we are... Oh, God. Let me look at my notes. What did Helen Lewis call them? I love Helen Lewis. This is the problem. I find her very funny and fun. She calls it masculinism. Yes, because we are masculinists, and so my job is in the kitchen making- Well,[00:45:21] Malcolm Collins: as, as a masculinist, I’m gonna get our kid another game console, ‘cause he deserves one- Oh.[00:45:26] for being a sweetie. What?[00:45:29] Simone Collins: He is a sweetie. How can we, how can we deny him? Plus, he is our son. Our sons must have everything.[00:45:36] Malcolm Collins: Yes. Not our daughters. I’m not getting one for our daughters.[00:45:39] Simone Collins: She’s a shark princess. She will take it from you.[00:45:41] Malcolm Collins: She has made that very clear in recent episodes. I had a... One of the ends of a recent episode where she was talking about how she will only eat some color fishes.[00:45:52] Not her favorite color, but, like- Oh, yeah ... gray fishes. And then she makes an eating, a, a show of how she’s gonna eat them. And then she’ll eat divers like me. She explicitly points at me. Like, not regular people. She’s like, “No, you.”[00:46:09] Simone Collins: It’s terrible ‘cause it’s rubbing off on, on her little sister Indy, and now Indy’s just all about being defiant when she used to be my little, my little turkey.[00:46:18] Doing- She’d be my little helper. She would bus her table. She’s still obsessed with cleaning, though. I, I, I need to- ... pretend that that’s subversive.[00:46:26] My spray bottle.[00:46:27] My spray bottle.[00:46:29] My sp- Wait, Indy fights back now?[00:46:32] Why? I wanna cleaning. Because I think she sees all her siblings do it, and she wants to be like her big n- big brothers and sister.[00:46:40] Malcolm Collins: That’s really sweet. I wanna cleaning. You did a good job making these little monsters.[00:46:45] Simone Collins: Yeah, well, she used to clean, and now she just uses her spray bottle to attack people, so.[00:46:51] Malcolm Collins: And I demand praise for the expensive microphone, guys. I got a...[00:46:55] Simone Collins: Yeah. Now you’ve listened to Tex screaming in your ear. How do you feel now?[00:47:01] Do you want me to go back to the old one? Do, do you, do you, did I do the right thing? Are you happy now? Are you hap- are you happy now?[00:47:11] Malcolm Collins: Oh my God, you are so... Look, I’m gonna be, I’m gonna be good about this. I’m even or- ordering it slow so we get the 7% back.[00:47:20] Simone Collins: Thank you, actually. I always do that. I did that for these ‘cause they cost the, as much as our house.[00:47:30] Malcolm Collins: What, what- So we- What cost-[00:47:31] Simone Collins: I, I... Oh, no, I didn’t do it with these. I didn’t do it with the microphones.[00:47:35] Aw. No,[00:47:38] Malcolm Collins: but we needed these quickly.[00:47:39] Simone Collins: Yeah, we did. For you g- for you guys. For you a******s.[00:47:46] Okay.[00:47:47] Malcolm Collins: We gotta get more swords while they’re on sale. Swords, flamethrowers- All[00:47:51] Simone Collins: right, I need to- ... nails, chases ... Frank, I need to end. I’m sorry, Tex. All right. Before he starts screaming, we’re gonna, we’re gonna hit end here. Love you guys. All right, love you. [00:48:00] Bye. I love you, Malcolm.[00:48:01] Malcolm Collins: Love you too.[00:48:02] Simone Collins: You’re my special sub pony[00:48:06] Malcolm Collins: Oh, but I think Texas.[00:48:07] Look at that, he’s getting all the love, not me.[00:48:09] Simone Collins: You’re, you’re, he’s a, he’s shards of your soul, Malcolm. He’s here, and he’s made of you.[00:48:17] Yeah. Okay,[00:48:18] Malcolm Collins: bye. But you guys need to become dads too. So find a wife, work really hard.[00:48:22] Simone Collins: Yeah, become a dad. Don’t, don’t expect to love labor and delivery. And don’t expect to love babies. But if you[00:48:28] Malcolm Collins: do, that’s great. And if you’re a woman watching this, go to the freaking Discord. There’s some guy there who will wife you up.[00:48:34] Simone Collins: There’s some great guys in the Discord who are very[00:48:36] Malcolm Collins: interesting. Or better, among our paid users. That’s, that’s where you know you get the big spenders, right? The real professionals.[00:48:41] Simone Collins: Yes. No, true, true. That’s how you know they are financially secure.[00:48:45] Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Oh, yeah, we should I... Yeah, actually, if you wanna, if you’re a woman looking we, we should, like, be able to email all the paid subscribers women who are looking for husbands.[00:48:53] I don’t[00:48:53] Simone Collins: know. Should we do... Locked and Reported does, like, o- once a year, some kind of singles thing.[00:49:01] Malcolm Collins: No, I think because we’re majority male just female only if you’re looking for a husband. Mm-hmm.[00:49:06] Simone Collins: Oh, we should have just, like, some kind of directory of profiles.[00:49:10] Malcolm Collins: No. We, we should just do an email blast for paid subscribers.[00:49:14] Simone Collins: Okay, fine.[00:49:14] Malcolm Collins: You have all their emails. I’m sure most of them would appreciate even just knowing, like, even if they’re not, even if they’re married or whatever, they’d appreciate that we’re trying to get somebody married. And it’s another reason to subscribe.[00:49:27] Simone Collins: Oh, yeah. I’ll find a way. I’ll find a way to do this in a thoughtful way.[00:49:32] We’ll take advice. Okay, bye guys. Bye, bye, bye, bye, bye.[00:49:35] Bye. Bye.[00:49:35] Simone Collins: Tex ate like half a sleeve of Ritz crackers today. That, that’s a slight overstatement I can hear you But only slight He[00:49:41] Malcolm Collins: ate half a sleeve of Ritz[00:49:42] Simone Collins: crackers? He’s obsessed. He’s obsessed. He’s a man. He’s putting on the Ritz. It’s his- Putting[00:49:48] Malcolm Collins: on the Ritz? Yeah.[00:49:49] Simone Collins: Yeah.[00:49:50] Malcolm Collins: And look, look, look, I got a Technofuriten knife, the first one.[00:49:56] Was able to get this on Amazon Day for 15 bucks, so it’s a good price for a- Prime[00:50:00] Simone Collins: Day, yeah ...[00:50:01] Malcolm Collins: stabby knife. Stabby. Significantly because it’s a, a bowie knife- It’s more slicey[00:50:05] Simone Collins: than stabby ...[00:50:06] Malcolm Collins: it’s significantly better than the, the ones that the Sikhs have, Oh, that’s wonderful, Tom ... in, in terms of a knife fight.[00:50:13] Great. Well, I mean, their knives were invented a long time before, it’s that they’re just not as sophisticated.[00:50:18] Simone Collins: Yeah, that’s interesting. Yeah, I feel like the LDS church would, if they had knives, update them with time. Maybe the Sikhs just haven’t had enough time, and then they’ll update The, it’s called the cure pen, right?[00:50:28] I’ll update[00:50:29] Malcolm Collins: it with pen. Yeah. Well, I mean, the, the Bowie knife is really the knife of the American frontier.[00:50:32] Simone Collins: Yeah.[00:50:32] Malcolm Collins: And so it is a traditional- ... American knife. It’s called the Amer- the, the Excalibur of the Americas, so. The[00:50:39] Simone Collins: Exca- That is amazing. I’ve not heard that.[00:50:41] Malcolm Collins: But I’ve already used it, like, multiple times.[00:50:43] I didn’t know how useful it would be to just have a knife on me at all times.[00:50:46] Simone Collins: My favorite part, though, was when you were trying to tell me the amazing history of the Bowie knife and the guy who invented it. You kept confusing his name. Because we, both you and I are terrible at names, but you kept calling him David Bowie[00:50:57] Malcolm Collins: David[00:50:57] Simone Collins: Bowie. I’m just blinded by that. Because every time I hear the name David Bowie, I, I get that one clip from Zoolander where it’s, “David Bowie,” and Let’s Dance flashes on real fast. It’s it’s great. It’s great. So now every time I see your knife, just so you know- And for dinner tonight- ... that clip from Zoolander plays in my head[00:51:15] Malcolm Collins: Any sort of a curry with french fries would be good, or,[00:51:18] Simone Collins: Okay ... any- Do you want sweet potato again, or you want, you want me to mix it up? You have a fry wardrobe now, basically, so is that what you, I[00:51:25] Malcolm Collins: mean, the sweet potatoes were fantastic. I would love to go for something[00:51:28] Simone Collins: else. A new curry and sweet potato?[00:51:30] Malcolm Collins: Okay. Yeah, the sweet potatoes works. Yeah. I mean, the, the-[00:51:33] Simone Collins: Or, or we have d- again, we have different fries. If you want different fries, we can try a different- Well,[00:51:37] Malcolm Collins: which ones do we have?[00:51:38] Simone Collins: Just- I don’t, I... The freezer’s not in front of me, but i- I think it’s a new one. It’s maybe one you got at Walmart that’s, like, a seasoned fry.[00:51:45] Malcolm Collins: Oh, I wanna try the seasoned fries. Let’s try those.[00:51:48] Simone Collins: Oh, boy. Tex, we got a new mic. You’re trying it out. Say[00:51:52] Malcolm Collins: your piece. Yes. Guys, we finally got those super expensive, like, $300 mics that everyone’s been telling us to get, the Shure Sevenss. [00:52:00] So, Yeah ... they better sound better, because they were very expensive, okay?[00:52:03] They were very[00:52:04] Simone Collins: expensive. But what have you guys done? We even got them on discount, and we were like, “I’m never going to financially recover from this.” So what have you done? What have you done?[00:52:11] Malcolm Collins: What have you done? But you, you guys wanted better audio, and now you’re gonna get-[00:52:15] Simone Collins: Yeah, now you’re gonna hear Tex screaming and drooling into your ear in-[00:52:20] Malcolm Collins: Well, that’s what you-[00:52:21] this audio vision, like, equivalent ... that’s what you get throughout the day, Simone. Come on.[00:52:24] Simone Collins: Oh, yeah. I guess that’s, I’m so sorry to all of you. I might put... I’m gonna, I’m gonna see if he can chill in his Snappi later while we’re out. Do[00:52:31] Malcolm Collins: I sound any different to you on here, Simone? No. But, you know, we don’t- I don’t hear it.[00:52:36] I don’t hear the difference between audio quality. Like, everyone else is like, “Audio this, audio this.” To me, we sound no different from Asma Gold. We sound no different from Nuggs. So that, that’s part of the problem- Oh, boy ... with, like, the audiophile is- He’s so upset ... I can’t hear the difference between Ah.[00:52:52] Simone Collins: He’s not happy Okay, am I gonna get him milk before we start?[00:52:58] Malcolm Collins: We’re g- we’re gonna start. Yes.[00:53:00] Simone Collins: He’s an angry elf. I’m, I’m not, you know, I can’t think when there’s a baby crying, so I will be-[00:53:04] Malcolm Collins: You will get him milk?[00:53:06] Speaker: deep into the jungle, guys?[00:53:11] Is this a jungle or woods?[00:53:21] And that’s called a temperate rainforest, guys This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit basedcamppodcast.substack.com/subscribe

In this raw and data-driven episode of Based Camp, Malcolm and Simone Collins tackle one of the most uncomfortable topics in modern discourse: what happens when cousin marriage is practiced across multiple generations?While a single first-cousin marriage carries moderate risk, repeated generational consanguinity causes the inbreeding coefficient (F) to compound nonlinearly. After just 4–6 generations, offspring become as genetically similar as full siblings. The hosts walk through the math, real-world population data, IQ impacts (10–30+ point drops), elevated rates of genetic disorders, miscarriages, and neurological conditions — all without moralizing or hedging.They cover:* Pakistan (50–65% consanguineous), Gulf states, Egypt, Jordan, Afghanistan, and UK Pakistani diaspora rates* Historical European examples (Hapsburgs) vs. modern British royals* Jewish rates and cultural adaptation to science* Why chain migration amplifies the practice* The strategic/political angle some conservatives quietly consider* Brief but pointed detours into halal slaughter myths, Sharia consistency, grooming gangs, and Maimonides on late-term abortion edge casesThe episode ends with a characteristically Based Camp discussion of cultural sovereignty, techno-Puritanism, and why evidence-based cultural evolution beats top-down bans.If you value brutal honesty over comfortable narratives, this one’s for you. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit basedcamppodcast.substack.com/subscribe

Malcolm and Simone Collins break down one of the fastest cultural shifts they’ve seen: the collapsing power of the “antisemitism” card and the ADL’s controversial attempt to label “Goy Slop” as hate speech.In this episode, they explore the history and modern usage of the term “goy,” why the ADL’s statement backfired spectacularly, the hilarious internet reaction (including Asmongold’s meme list), and what this reveals about changing attitudes toward Jewish organizations, identity politics, and cultural trash talk.They discuss:* The real meaning and evolution of “goy”* Why policing language like this increases antisemitism* Sentiment analysis showing overwhelming pushback* Broader cultural realignment on the right and in the mainstream* Advice for the ADL and Jewish advocacy groupsA raw, honest conversation on group identity, noticing patterns, and why the old rules no longer apply.Episode TranscriptMalcolm Collins: Hello, Simone. I’m excited to be here with you today. Today, we are going to be talking about one of the fastest cultural shifts I have maybe seen in my lifetime- ... towards the inability to play whether it’s the anti-Semite card or the racist card or the homophobe card of- of that being a card that has value in our cultural landscape.Okay.And a lot of this comes downstream of a recent ADL announcement. Or- HowSimone Collins: recent are we talking? Like, this year or just now? Like,Malcolm Collins: yesterday.Simone Collins: Oh, okay.Malcolm Collins: Like, it, it’s just blowing up on Twitter right now. People are, are clowning on it.So basically what the ADL decided to do is attempt to define goy slop, which is a term that a lot of people are using now for unhealthy food that is not good for you to eat, and there’s a fun [00:01:00] video of, like, a sweet old Jewish guy going around and showing, like, kosher foods and being like, “You gotta eat this stuff and not this other stuff.Look at all the bad chemicals.” Like, “You guys need to know this.”Speaker 7: Sent this to a friend who loves eating goy slop. I wouldn’t touch this stuff. Anything over two ingredients is goy slop. Nothing but chemicals.Malcolm Collins: But-Simone Collins: Okay ...Malcolm Collins: the ADL came out and tried todefine this as hate speech. And we’ll go into their statement, we’ll go into the history of goy, everything like that. Mm-hmm. But they tried to define it as hate speech. And then you get people like Shoeonhead where one popular tweet said, “Shoeonhead claps back at the LDA...the ADL referring to goy slop as a slur. Wait, wait. Goy, the Hebrew word that refers to non-Jews. So you have your own little slur for us-” “... but we’re bad for using it ourselves? LMAFO.” And you-Simone Collins: Yeah, that’s like banning the N-word from rap, right?Malcolm Collins: Well, no, it’s, it’s, it’s worse because it is a Jewish- Worse ... [00:02:00] slur-Simone Collins: YeahMalcolm Collins: for non-Jews.Simone Collins: Yeah.Malcolm Collins: And it is absolutely a derogatory word. Like, you can say, like, you as a Jew can try to define it as non-derogatory. Yeah. But if you’re doing that, you’re just going to make people more antisemitic because it looks like you’re treating them like idiots and they’re too stupid to be aware.And I’m okay of you know, Like gringo. Right? Like, I go to, I go to Mexico, people call me a gringo, right? Like- Yeah,Simone Collins: or gaijin.Malcolm Collins: Or gaijin.Simone Collins: Which isMalcolm Collins: fine. Or-Simone Collins: Don’t care.Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Most cultures have a derogatory word for people outside of that culture. Mm-hmm. This isn’t a Jewish thing. This isn’t a problem- Noendemic to Judaism or something like that. No.Speaker: And to be clear here, if you are Jewish and regularly hear Yiddish, you would be very aware that there are multiple idioms that use the term goy in a derogatory manner. It is clearly a derogatory word. And again, it is normal for words to mean outsider to eventually become derogatory, even if they didn’t originally have that connotation.[00:03:00]Consider the word barbarian in ancient Greek that originally just meant outsider, but eventually came to mean, uh, a lot of derogatory contextsAnd Jews will come out thinking we’re f*****g idiots and say things like, “Well, Goy in the Torah is used in a non-derogatory context to mean nation.” And it’s like, yeah, back when it also referred to the nation of Israel. But since about 300 BC in Talmudic writings, which we all have access to, by the way, it’s not just Jews who get to read those, it’s been used in a negative context.In the same way barbarian originally didn’t have a negative context, but eventually developed one. That’s fine. Don’t treat us like idiotsSpeaker 8: And I’m beginning to realize how much anti-Semitism was kept down by the self-deprecating Jewish comedian like we see in the original clip here with the guy actually [00:04:00] talking about Goy slop who’s being honest, , and how much it is risen by the Jewish Karen. And we just don’t have that many self-deprecating Jewish comedians anymore and a whole lot more Jewish KarensSpeaker 9: And the Jewish Karens seem to be completely unaware of American culture and how angry it makes Americans to be told something that we obviously know isn’t true, like that goy in a modern context is not a derogatory term.And if you are a Jew who is unaware of this, because I’m g- gonna give you the benefit of the doubt, maybe you are just unaware of this because you have no Jewish friends. But I have a lot of Jewish friends. I interact with the Jewish community a lot. I regularly see the term used in that way. In fact, if you read private communications of Jews, as people have done in the Jeffrey Epstein emails, they see it used in that way regularly., This is even known to [00:05:00] Jewish children. , There was a clip that I have here of, , a Jewish kid talking to a non-Jewish kid, , saying, “ You don’t know sh- about my friends and family, so you should actually shut the F up. You think I’m going to act towards someone, an arrogant little swine white b***h who S talks Israel knowing nothing about them?Shut up, you goy C word. Go defend terrorists. Laugh my ass off post your face. Then you’re effing embarrassing. Take your shishka...” This is another Jewish slur for non-Jewish women, , that is way more derogatory than goy, but it’s used interchangeably. Go defend the terrorists like a good little Western goy girl.”And then he says, “Goy fake ass profile.” , But the point being here is it’s used interchangeably with words like the C word or shishka or, you know, any of these other words. A- and, and we see this in plenty of videos. Again, if you are unaware that this term is used in a derogatory fashion [00:06:00] and you are Jewish, go, like, research it, I guess?Speaker 3: זה תספורת של גוי או של יהודי? גוי. תספורת שוקו וניל זה יהודי או גוי? גוי. בלורית זה תספורת של יהודי או גוי? גוי.And when you point out that at one point in history it wasn’t derogatory, that has the same energy as a person claiming the N-word isn’t derogatory because just look at how you say black in Latin languages. Clearly it doesn’t have or didn’t originally have a negative context. And it’s like, bro, that, that doesn’t, um, help your case at all. That makes you look insane and dramatically worse.The fact that a word wasn’t always negative doesn’t mean it’s not negative in the current context. And in the same voice, the fact that even at the height of the N-word’s use, [00:07:00] it was majoritively used just as a descriptor for black people, not with malice intended, that doesn’t mean that it was not a slur., And that is true, by the way. During the height, like if you’re looking at the s- the slave trade and stuff like that, when the N-word was used the most, it was mostly just used as a descriptor. That doesn’t mean it wasn’t pejorative as well.Essentially the way the defining of a slur works is not the majority use of a word, because almost all slurs when they are made slurs, their majority use is not necessarily derogatory but descriptive. It’s in the minority is the term used in a derogatory context. And almost every word in every language for non-X that’s not non-X becomes derogatory.So like let’s take Christians for example. There is no word for a non-Christian other than just saying non-Christian that doesn’t have a derogatory context now. Whether it’s heathen, heretic, [00:08:00] pagan, , all of these within a Christian mindset are gonna have a derogatory context and that’s fine. It’s pretending that they don’t that is what is freaking people out.Malcolm Collins: however, to take that word and then say that other people can’t use it themselves, the groups that it is... It, it would be as if- when you said it would be like banning the N-word- Oh, it’s- It would be like whites were still allowed to use the N-word-Simone Collins: Oh my God.Yeah, okay. Yeah ... but they banMalcolm Collins: Black people from using the N-word in rap Dear BlackSimone Collins: people, you are no longer allowed to use the N-word. WowMalcolm Collins: Like, don’t you know the history of that word, Black people? It might make white people look bad.Simone Collins: Oh.Malcolm Collins: I mean, of course we still use it regularly and with impunity, but we don’t want other people reminded of that.No ... and this is coming down because we’ll go over the reactions to this. Asmogold made another, a big list of like other goy words that you can use because it’s been taken and, and mixed culturally in many ways. Like goyim [00:09:00] beam. I, I think that’s a hilarious name for the anti-uh-Simone Collins: Oh, yes. The goyim beamgoyim beam. Yes, yes, yes, yes.Malcolm Collins: The air defense missile in, in, in- Mm-hmm ... ‘cause it’s, it’s shooting down goy rockets, right? I do loveSimone Collins: that, yeah.That’s good ...Malcolm Collins: but the, the, the wider thing that’s so interesting to me about this before we go deeper into this is just recently, I’m talking like a couple months ago because we did a piece on this the ADL came out and they said, “Oh, how dare this guy,” ‘cause there was a YouTuber who went to a, a Orthodox Jewish community- Mm-hmmuh, that was known and is widely accepted to be, have massive problems with welfare fraud.Simone Collins: Are you talking about Tyler Oliviera, or?Malcolm Collins: Yeah, yeah.Simone Collins: Okay.Malcolm Collins: And then they had him demonetized- ... for doing a piece that was factually honest about a problem that everyone knows about and that would obviously be better addressed by dealing with the community that’s doing this or [00:10:00] distancing yourself from them- Mm-hmmbut not attempting to defend the bad actor, and that’s what we talked about in that episode. But when this happened, there was a bit of a pushback online, right? Like, people were somewhat mad about it but there were still defenders. It was still a two-sided conversation. This time it hasn’t been a two-sided conversation.It sort of feels like collectively everyone is like, “What are you doing?” Even a lot of Jews in the comments to the ADL are be like, “This organization is supposed to support Jews, but it sure seems like they hate them because they’re making us look terrible.” So, I decided to run a sentiment analysis of this.Simone Collins: Oh, boy. Okay.Malcolm Collins: Oh, by the way, even, even the, like ADL’s own post got a community note.Simone Collins: Of course it did. Of course it did, because it’s... this is, this is insane.Malcolm Collins: Right. So the community note on the ADL’s own piece about this, right? Mm-hmm. Is, “Although it is in subject of much debate, [00:11:00] many Jews and non-Jews consider the word goy to be a Hebrew/Yiddish slur for non-Jews, and not an inherently neutral word.”Mm. “Wikipedia also notes its use as a pejorative.” So I love that, that that’s the stage that we’re at, that this is getting community noted. And people who know us broadly, we’re seen as broadly philo-Semitic. I’m still, even though Israel and Jews sometimes do stuff that annoys me, I still think of all the groups I could ally with, they’re one of the strongest technologically and in terms of fertility rates and in terms of cultural similarities to my group.So I, I’m not like an anti-Jewish person saying all of this, right? I’m like, “This doesn’t seem to be working anymore, and let’s talk about that.” So, w- A sentiment analysis, okay? First, let’s go over what the post was. They said, “Goy slop is not quirky internet slang word worth normalizing. It’s an antisemitic slur Born from [00:12:00] white supremacist hate, built on a conspiracy that the Jews deliberately harm non-Jews. @NewYorkTimes should know better than to give this language a platform. There is no excuse for the ignorance of those who use it. Hateful words carry their origins wherever they travel.”Simone Collins: Okay, wait, wait, wait, mm.Okay. So because some people have recognized the use of the word goy as not being necessarily flattering to outsiders, and then toyed with it, basically, like, because other people have recognized that some, some Jewish people are not so nice to outsiders, that is, that is... They, they hate Jews therefore.And, and because they make fun of it, that, that is, that is hate, right? Mm-hmm. So, like, if... Oh, what’s a, what’s a better... Okay, let’s, let’s go back to, like, white supremacy. So, like, if, if, if if some Black Americans were like, “Oh, those white supremacists, like, really appear to hate white people.” Or sorry, “Black people,” and then they, like, made fun of them for doing that, [00:13:00] then it would be considered, like, anti-white hate- Yeahfor them to, like, b- make f- make light of that and make jokes about it, right?Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Okay. And I, I wanna be clear here, goy is not as derogatory a term for non-Jews as the N-word is for Black people. Oh, yeah.Simone Collins: Clearly. For sure. Yeah. Yeah, yeah,Malcolm Collins: yeah ... it’s, it’s probably closer to a term like-Simone Collins: Like gaijin or gringo.Malcolm Collins: Yeah, gaijin or gringo is a, is a good it’s, it’s a term you would- It’s just a good, it’s aSimone Collins: good outsider term ... you wouldMalcolm Collins: say- But, you know, likeSimone Collins: if you’re aMalcolm Collins: supreme- ... to a friend and it wouldn’t have a negative effect on that friendship. No. Like, it would be a laughable outsider term, but it is negative, right?Like, and it, and it- Like noob. And why shouldn’t it be negative? Again, every group has the right to think that they’re better than other groups. That’s just what it is to have intergroup pride.Simone Collins: Yeah.Malcolm Collins: But what you don’t have is the right to prevent those groups from using the words you use pejoratively about them.Simone Collins: Yeah.Malcolm Collins: But to continue here, I did a- an analysis of this, so you can get an idea of how strong the reaction has been.Simone Collins: Okay. [00:14:00]Malcolm Collins: The sentiment analysis said 90% are opposed or against it- Mm-hmm ... calling it overreach, gaslighting, et cetera. 5% are neutral or mixed, and 5% are pro it. Like,it is clown town on the internet right now with this post, and this wouldn’t have happened a year ago.Simone Collins: It would not?Malcolm Collins: No, I do, I do not believe the reaction would have been- What changed? ... this overwhelmingly negative. I-Simone Collins: What do you think changed?Iran, the war in Iran. We’re just, like, super mad at, at, at anything Jewish because of Israel.Malcolm Collins: I don’t think it’s the war in Iran. Actually, let- yeah, let’s try to walk through what actually did change.Simone Collins: The war in Iran.Malcolm Collins: I- look, I get that that’s part of it, but you have... The, the, the Gaza situation was optically worse for Israel and Jewish people than the war in Iran,Simone Collins: right?Malcolm Collins: Mm-hmm. Iran was a unified enemy. Basically everyone in Europe agreed that they needed to go. Everyone in Europe agreed, even during the initial bombings, that this was a good idea.Oh,Simone Collins: yeah, yeah, yeah. All, all Europeans did. People were [00:15:00] outraged by the protests you know, up until the moment- Yeah ... that action was taken. Iran, something needs to be done, and then something was done. Woo-hoo. TheMalcolm Collins: momentSimone Collins: something was done- Can you believe ...Malcolm Collins: everyone was like, “What? What?”Simone Collins: But it was Israel’s idea.No. Yeah. Yeah,Malcolm Collins: like I love the pictures they have on of, like, comedians being like, “I don’t get it.” Like, Trump’s out there saying that something needs to be done about what Iran is doing to these protesters and he’s like, “And he doesn’t even go in and invade. Why doesn’t he invade? If he invades, at least then I’d believe.”That’s what Bill Burr, who had this big speech about this. Oh,Simone Collins: really?Malcolm Collins: Oh, no. At least then I’d believe, you know, that he was a man of integrity and doing what was right for the world. Mm-hmm. He attacks, immediately he’s like, “How could he do this?” You know.Simone Collins: Checks out.Malcolm Collins: Many leftist accounts. But yeah. No, I don’t, I don’t think that that was it at all, honestly.I think it’s more of changing cultural winds. And it’s more of a cultural realignment moving further up the chain of communication.Mm-hmm.So it’s been widely understood in, like, our circle of the online internet, right? That you, you can’t pull [00:16:00] this sort of nonsense anymore. Like, “That’s antisemitic,” is just gonna make people hate your group more if it’s not genuinely antisemitic, right?Like, that’s... Whatever you do, that’s, that’s anti whatever group. That’s anti, you know, how could you say this? That’s hate. Right? Like, these sorts of framings for a long time worked. Even, even in our community, even in the right there would, there’d be politicians who’d be like, “Trump can’t say that.That’s a, that’s an offensive thing to say that these are, are shitty countries,” or something like that. Mm-hmm. That Haiti was a shitty country was what they were mad that he said. Now, everyone agrees with that Haiti being a shitty... The moment he starts sending immigrant, like, deportees there, they’re like, “How dare you send deportees there?It’s a shitty country.” But when he said it it was like, “Oh, how, how dare he?” But within our sort of smaller cultural sphere online, this was understood. Then we had the, the first ratchet, which is the left turning on the Jews and turning really hard anti-Israel. And this happened collectively [00:17:00] on the left you know, I’d say maybe half a decade ago at this point, right?And it’s been very normative within the leftist s- social world, right? Like the, their version of our podcast, right? If there, there was like a mirror world podcast, this has been normal on the left for a while, to just dislike Jews. Whoever dislikes Jews the most, they actually like at TwitchCon even like ranked people on like how much they hated Jews.Simone Collins: Oh, for the love. Ugh.Malcolm Collins: They, they had a, a thing where they did that. Like that was a fun thing to do at Twitch, is the give people rankings based on how much they hateSimone Collins: Jews. It’s such a thing though, that, yeah, people just can’t shut up about Israel. What’s up with this?Malcolm Collins: Well, you could say there’s biblical reasons for that, but w- ignoring those the...Well, they do have disproportionate power. They’re the most successful subgroup on Earth. I mean, anyone should be... A- and they’re decent fertility, right? Like anyone should be paying attention to that.Simone Collins: Sure. Yeah, no, I mean, and then that’s, I mean, ultimately we’re [00:18:00] filosemitic because we are very interested in whoever is competent and who has good operational skills, and yes, who is you know, of-Malcolm Collins: Yeah, somebody asked mereplacement-level fertility ... they go, “Why, why do, why do gay Jews seem to run all the AI companies or be all the major donors in the AI companies?” And I was like, “I got theories on that, but if you keep wondering, fans keep wondering, even if you’re not gay or Jewish and may disagree with them theologically on some areas, do you still want to be in an alliance with them?It’s because they run all the AI companies.” F*****g maniacs. Don’t piss off the group that’s enormously more powerful than you on the geopolitical stage. But the, the the gay Jews running all the tech companies. We’ll t- we’ll talk about that at the end as well. But- what happened was is the left turned against them, but the urban monoculture hadn’t.And I’ve been beginning to have a better understanding recently because I’ve been interacting with some people who are of the elite of the urban monoculture, but not of the left. These are the people who run the boring whatever [00:19:00] podcast. We were on some podcast that was, like, just generic, the opinion of the elite, right?Mm-hmm. Like, the, the, let’s say the New York wife who just doesn’t really wanna pay attention to everything that’s going on. She’s got a, a job that’s a, a high-paying job at, like, a, a private equity firm or something like that. She’s a little insulated from the news. She’s aSimone Collins: little insu- Autopilot educated elite.Malcolm Collins: Yes. Autopilot educated elite. That’s who actually runs the urban monoculture. Yeah. And to this group, the autopilot educated elite, it had yet to reach their ears, which was very clear to me when I had a recent interaction with one of them, that, like, the “You’re a racist” line when somebody’s just clowning around or making a joke or whatever doesn’t work anymore and causes immediate pushback.It still works within their message, their, their, their world. When they’re at a, a company meeting or let’s say a, a convention of, like, [00:20:00] MLM Karens or something like that, right? Like, that, that sort of a person, right? When they’re at their meetings and they’re like, “Can you believe he said goys?”Like, “He needs to be kicked off the team,” right? Like, “He needs to be fired,” this was still a perfectly reasonable thing to say in their world. And I think that this is an important for all of us to remember. The elite of the urban monoculture are sort of elitist automatons who are quite downstream and isolated from the culture war And they are unaware of it, and it sort of hits their door one day and they just go along with it after it does.It’s, it’s now the new normal because the sophisticated people who tell them what’s true told them that this is true now. And it actually, I, I was talking to somebody recently, they go, “Why do you fight in the trenches of the internet?” And I go, “Because the trenches of the internet determine what is culturally normative 10 years from now,” right?The mainstream of MAGA today was born in the [00:21:00] 4chan versus Tumblr w- war, right, of 10 years ago. The, the what became mainstream on Tumblr 10 years ago, if you were a watcher of that, all of the xeno pronouns and all of the extra focus on the trans issues and extra focus on the the, you know, it, it, respect my identity, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.That was like re- that battle wasn’t a battle that the left even had like internally because they just accepted Tumblr culture after the battle had already happened. But this was considered the most degen part of the internet. This was, I mean, the people who were having this battle spent half their time posting furry porn, right?Like, they were not or, or were just, if, if they were in the, the 4chan side of them, most of them ended up getting canceled or lost their jobs. They were de-platformed before all of this became normalized.Simone Collins: Mm-hmm.Malcolm Collins: The battle that we’re having is the next generation version of that battle. But basically what we’re seeing is the [00:22:00] outcome of the battle drift upwards.Which is to say in the conservative community, it became incredibly bad, th- the community that’s open to working with Jews, it became incredibly bad to say, “Hey, don’t say that, that’s antisemitic,” especially when something clearly isn’t. And then es- and especially if it’s just an internet joke, right?Like, when it comes to internet jokes, that’s where it gets, like, really bad. And when it’s an internet joke with, like, a side of truth to it disproportionately people in executive positions are of Jewish heritage. Like, that’s something Jews should have pride in. That’s not a, an ethnic slur or anything like that.And Jews disproportionately, as they should, they have, they have rules around trying to make the entire world a better place. This is true within the Jewish faith. But they also have rules about preferencing the interests of their own [00:23:00] people, as they should. Which isSimone Collins: not insane. Yeah, come on.Malcolm Collins: And so when people see large companies disproportionately run by Jewish individuals putting things into food that is bad for people, that is explicitly non-kosher, e.g.they couldn’t even eat it themselves if they wanted to, it makes them create this stereotype.Simone Collins: Okay.Malcolm Collins: And and I think the noticing, you could say noticing is a bad thing, but that’s really bad. Because as soon as you say noticing the whatever pattern is a bad thing is a bad thing, everybody immediately pays attention to it.Mm. The, the moment you say not, “This isn’t true,” but, “This is racist,” everybody today is like, “Well, hold on, I better research that [00:24:00] real quick.” So to go, let’s go over some of the memes here because I thought, I thought they were fantastic. Okay.. This just doesn’t work anymore after the Epstein emails,” somebody says. And keep in mind, that did a lot to erode trust in the idea of there aren’t secret cabals that are run by a guy who is at least nominally Jewish. Mm. He did seem to disproportionately care about the interests of the Jews in Israel.And when we’re like, “Oh, there are cabals doing that,” a lot of people are like, “Oh, well let’s, let’s reenter the conversation.” Next Most Efrati comment is, “LMAO.” Then we have Asmogold sayingHere are some additional horrible slurs that the same bigots online have been using. Hopefully you can use these to better combat antisemitism. None of these are funny, and anyone laughing at them is a horrible person.” Gold steak is fantastic. So the words were goynip, an exciting event or thing that keeps the attention of people who are considered goy.[00:25:00] Goy slop, a type of food or leisure activity that is indulgent and unhealthy. Goy beam, a military action using particle weapons, usually related to Israel. Goy cattle, worse than goy, even dumber and even more servile. Goycott, definition pending. I like that. That’s great. And goylooping, when a fat and/or retarded person keeps saying the same thing over and over again.And I like goylooping, ‘cause it’s not even, that one doesn’t even have any sort of an undertone of antisemitism. It’s just sort of talking about the masses not understanding what’s really going on. And then next one here is, “We have a slur for y- a slur we use for all you nons, but you’re not allowed to say it, or else it’s hateful.”Huh. But yeah. W- do you wanna go into the history of the term goy so people can be like, “Well, well...” Because-Simone Collins: Yeah, you say so many things with Judaism are incredibly new inventions. How new is this?Malcolm Collins: Very old. It’s in, it’s in the Bible. It actually-Simone Collins: What? [00:26:00] Oh my gosh, okay. So this isn’t new at all.Malcolm Collins: Yeah. But it, it initially did not have negative connotations. And, and note here to any Jew who’s like, “It’s in the Bible and it didn’t have negative connotations there,” that doesn’t mean it doesn’t have neg- negative connotations now. And if you’re pretending it doesn’t, you just make yourself look worse or, like, pathologically stupid.Or, or pathologically... Like, it’s even worse. If, if you as a Jewish person go out there and say goy doesn’t have negative connotations, you create the impression that you are so pathologically blind in the way you see reality that when you see another group being discriminated against in favor of your group, you are unable to see that it is discrimination.Mm. That it is derogatory, because you so thoroughly believe that you are deserving of a differentiated treatment.Simone Collins: Hmm.Malcolm Collins: If I had any other word for Jew that I [00:27:00] regularly used to mean Jew, Jews would out, okay? You’d- I could just make up a word now for Jew. Scuttlebutt. If I just started calling the scuttlebutts out, tomorrow everyone would say, “That’s an anti-Semite,” because it’s why not just say non-Jew?So anyway in the Hebrew Bible, it is aSimone Collins: neutralMalcolm Collins: term. The personSimone Collins: experiencing Jewness. Yes. You have, like, the neutra- person experiencing Frenchness. All that, yesMalcolm Collins: For any nation or ethnic group, including the Israelites or Jews themselves. Examples include God promising to make Abraham’s descendants a goy gadol, a great nation, in Genesis 12:2, or referring to the Jewish people as a goy kadosh, the holy nation, in Exodus 19:6.Neutral descriptions for nations, and it appears hundreds of times, so we see it all over the place. But in the Hellenistic or Roman periods, roughly 300 BCE onwards, especially in the rabbinic or Talmudic literature from the first or second century [00:28:00] CE, it is increasingly shifted to refer primarily to non-Jewish nations or individuals.The nations equal goyim contrasting with Jews. Scholars like Adi Ofer and Ishan Razan Z argue that a crystallized Jew versus universal non-Jew goy dichotomy emerged clearly in rabbinic texts influenced by interactions with Hellenic culture, Rome, and early Christianity. And keep in mind, these groups were often killing each other in really violent and awful ways.Like, if I’m gonna drag up old stuff that the Mormons did that was bad, let’s drag up, like, the things that the Jews did. So there’s a famous instance from Josephus where he’s recording of a Jewish garrison that was attempting to put down a Jewish rebellion, and the Jews said to the Romans, “Put down your weapons,” as the Mormons did to the group before they killed them, “and we’ll come in and...”It was much worse what the Mormons did because it was, like, childrens and families, and they beat them to death. But whatever. The, when the Jews did it I’m just showing I’m giving everyone equal treatment here. They then went in and, and [00:29:00] killed everyone but the commander who converted to Judaism to prevent himself from getting killed.A, a long story there. This, this was back when Jews were more active in their proselytization and like, “Okay, you, you, you convert, we won’t kill you.” But but that d- it seemed to be more proactive on his part and not, like, a threat on their part. We’re, we’re not, we’re not gonna get into that. But the point here being is Jews had a great deal of enmity for the goy as this term was crystallized.Yiddish, in modern usage, borrowed into Yiddish and then English from Hebrew, where it commonly means Gentile or non-Jew. In everyday Jewish speech, especially Ashkenazi Y- Yiddish influence contracts, they say it is oftenly neutral like Gentile. However, it can carry pejorative or condescending tones in phrases like goy sheep the, the Gentile head brain.Goy- sorry, it’s goy sheep cup or stupidity or dullness. So basically i- in Jew, if you say, “To think like a goy,” okay, like, like a literal translation here, you are saying somebody is stupid, okay? Mm-hmm. [00:30:00] Or you can have a Kamish term here in, in, in Yiddish, dos ken nor a goy. Only a goy would do that.Okay?Simone Collins: Well, well, I think anyone who’s proud of their culture saying that only an outsider would do that it, it is gonna be derogatory, but that is something you would expect. Like, let’s say you’re really into, like, one sports team. Like, y- you love the Raiders, and you’re like, “Well, only this... I’m so bad.Some- only this other sports team would do that,” you know, because it’s, it’s derogatory. Or you’re Irish. Like, “Well, only a Spaniard would do that,” you know? It... I, I just, I don’t see how that’s bad. That’s normal.Malcolm Collins: Yeah, which is, is part of the problem. It’s trash talk. Is the, the world has become a trash talk world, and this is now moving further and further up the chain.ThisSimone Collins: is- Well, it’s, the world has become an anti-trash talk world. We’re not [00:31:00] allowed to trash talk anymore, apparently.Malcolm Collins: Well, no, the, the, the elites of the urban monoculture were always anti-trash talk. Mm-hmm. Especially if it was used against i- a- any group that could be perceived as a minority group or that had some, within their, their hierarchy of discrimination.Mm-hmm. I think what the Jews realize or what’s happening is the Jews within the urban monoculture completely fell outside the hierarchy of discrimination. Nobody f*****g cares about them in the hierarchy of discrimination world anymore. Even the elites have gotten that memo at this point. Which leaves the side that would still fend for them being the side that they offend by taking a position like this.Simone Collins: Mm-hmm.Malcolm Collins: And it’s, it’s bad. Like, I don’t, I don’t... Like, I, I look at this as, as, as an... Like, what do, how do I feel about this? I guess even though I’m fairly philiosemetic, I am happy to see this pushback be as universal as it is. Sure. You know, because [00:32:00] it feels like the faster we get to a place societally where even an organization, even the urban elites who put something out like this from the ADL and are otherwise, like, very cloistered, th- they immediately get, next time something like this comes up, “Oh, we can’t do that anymore.Like, we don’t get to play this game anymore. This game is over for us.” And that actually will help the Jewish people more broadly, because the longer it takes various Jewish organizations to understand nobody’s playing ball with this and it actually radicalizes people further against you to play the, “That’s antisemitic,” or, “Goy isn’t a derogatory term,” game, the faster everybody is gonna freak outSimone Collins: Yeah.Malcolm Collins: And a note here, I’d point out when I’m like, what’s the word for... And this is what, w- for the people who want to play it, the, it’s not anti, it’s not a [00:33:00] derogatory word. Can you give me any word for a non-Christian other than just saying non-Christian, like you could just say non-Jew, that doesn’t carry derogatory connotations?Heathen, I guess.Simone Collins: Well, heathen’s derogatory. Infidel is derogatory.Malcolm Collins: Yeah, but, but that’s the point I’m making. Apostate’s a- Intrinsically, any word that isn’t just non-Jew or non-Christian is gonna carry derogatory, even if it’s the only word you have. You can’t be like, “Oh, it’s the only word we have for non-Jews.”No, you have non-Jew. Christians have non- Jew. A Christian doesn’t need to call you a heathen. If a Christian called you a heathen, you’d probably be a little offended by it.Simone Collins: Yeah, or an apostate or anything. Yeah. Mm.Malcolm Collins: Heretic.Simone Collins: Heretic. I can’t... Yeah. Well, I guess you could just call them an atheist or non-believer.Well, non-believer doesn’t sound good.Malcolm Collins: Okay, yeah. Well, no, because then you’re defining what theySimone Collins: are, Jew, atheist. That’s true. Yeah. We don’t know. Right. We don’t know what they believe. Yeah. Mm-mm.Malcolm Collins: It’s, it’s just a normal thing. D- [00:34:00] stop pret- we all know. Like, everybody knows, right? Like, you don’t need to pretend.We’re not playing that game anymore. Yeah. We on the right are out here being like, “Dude, it’s okay if you are a separate group than us.” Okay? Mm. It’s okay if you favor- we want to favor our own people. Whatever, right? Like, everybody has a right to do that. You can do that. But you can’t come out here and police, one, you can’t be the fun police, you can’t be the offense police, and you can’t be the how dare you say the word, like you make it known that we use the word in this way.Simone Collins: Hmm.Malcolm Collins: By the way, did this sort of shock you in seeing this? I- I’m a little shocked ...Simone Collins: I’m genuinely shocked that this happened.Malcolm Collins: Are youSimone Collins: more- Very strange ... shocked thatMalcolm Collins: the ADL thought this was an okay thing to say, or are you more shocked that the-Simone Collins: Yeah. No, no, I, I am shocked ... ADL is bad ... because at least historically, I didn’t realize just how effective the ADL was until I saw more information about just how [00:35:00] intense antisemitism was in the past.Malcolm Collins: Yeah.Simone Collins: So I’ve realized, wow, okay, actually the ADL has done an amazing job. And so w- what I’m also surprised of is here’s this organization that has actually been pretty effective. They presumably would understand Streisand effects and where to choose your battles, and the fact that they’ve made such a profound screw-up with such a silly thing, it makes them sound sanctimonious and like they’re really trying to just impose on other groups in a way that’s gonna backfire.Like, their goal should be to reduce antisemitism as much as possible. Now they’re contributing to it, and that’s, that’s-Malcolm Collins: Dramatically so. Yeah ...Simone Collins: bizarre to me. Not just because, oh my gosh, the outrage, how could they do, they do this, but actually because they have a long track record of being very [00:36:00] effective at actually reducing antisemitism, so what’s going on?Like, leadership must have changed- Well, this is what happened ... in a very insane way.Malcolm Collins: This, this is actually a great thing. The ADL has been so captured by urban monoculture rot at a bureaucratic level that it is now acting in ways that is actively antithetical to its mission of increasing pro-Jewish sentiment.Hmm.It’s trying to increase the dogmatic control of the urban monoculture without even realizing it, right? And it’s playing into the urban monoculture’s hand without even realizing it. And if you’re wondering what can you do about this, like, if I was a, a Jew that’s as connected as I am, I would probably have connections to the ADL.I’d strongly encourage them to hire some outsider, be that us. Mm-hmm. I mean, clearly we’re fairly pro-Jewish. And we have our pulse, I think, on the fing- the, the, the pulse of the internet. Or,Simone Collins: Our finger on the pulse of the internet ...Malcolm Collins: yeah, a finger on the pulse of the [00:37:00] internet so they could do that with us or they could do that with y- Nux.Nux would be great. Nux would’ve immediately- Nux wouldSimone Collins: be great ...Malcolm Collins: Nux is probably gonna clown on this himself. He’s probably gonna be like, “Can you believe the ADL would say something this f*****g stupid?”Simone Collins: Nux or Asmongold or, well, I mean, Asmongold. I mean, who can afford him, right?Malcolm Collins: But- Yeah, who can afford Asmongold?Yeah, keep in mind, if you hire Nux, you’re hiring a Jew, so that’s gonna cost you a bit more, right? Come with us. We’re cheap. We’re white trash over here, right?Simone Collins: Mm.Malcolm Collins: Rednecks like us, we c- we come d- we, we... You don’t even need to... You just pay us whatever you want and I’ll review this stuff for you, right?But yeah, like this-Simone Collins: Honestly, they would, yeah. I don’t know, I don’t w- I don’t even wanna name how low of a price you’d be like, “Malcolm Collins: Yeah.” Yeah, sure. I think increasingly companies need to have mechanisms. And if you’re somebody who’s watching this and you’re either at a non-profit or you are in an HR department or something like that, and you are looking for somebody who can vet the way the Internet’s gonna react to [00:38:00] something we’ve played the Internet like a fiddle for a decade at this point, right?Like, we, we’re fairly good at this particular game. Every outrage cycle we’ve ridden to our advantage, right? Like, there hasn’t been one that significantly did not move us forwards on us. You wanna play the game? Come to us, and we’ll help you as much as we can, right? Like, we- Mm-hmm ... we are hirable for this.We even have an org for this. YeahSimone Collins: Yeah. But it’s I hope they figure themselves out because it’s it’s sad to see this level of incompetence at play. Not to insult them, but There must be something at play here, like some donor, maybe one of their largest donors, this became their pet project.They’re like, “This whole goy slop thing, th- they’re making, you know, th- this is just antisemitic,” and then they f- foisted it upon the ADL’s team. [00:39:00]Malcolm Collins: No, I’ll tell you what happened, and I’m fairly sure I can, I can model what happened. Okay. Some urban monoculture Karen who doesn’t really understand the internet saw some meme about unhealthy food, because MAHA is part of Ma- MAGA now, right?So, like MAGA’s talking about goy slop. MAHA. MAHA.Simone Collins: MAHA,Malcolm Collins: MAHA. You know, Wizard Kennedy and everything like that. Like, we’re talking about like the additives in food, the negative stuff about food. And there’s been some viral videos of Jews being like, “You guys, non-Jews, need to stop eating goy slop.”Speaker 7: It’s no wonder that the goyim want the kosher food. Cheese swirl? Go back to Wisconsin. This is the holy food. Look at the kosher food. . Do you know why I made it to 86? ‘Cause I ate rotisserie chicken and Manischewitz borscht. This is chosen food for the chosen people.I shouldn’t be telling you this, but I am. Do you wanna help the goyim get off the goy slop and come to our side?Malcolm Collins: Like that, I think the most viral videos on this were done by like old Jewish guys that sounded very Jewish, right?Mm-hmm. Being like, “You need to start eating this other type [00:40:00] of food,” right? Like, and they s- they might have seen something like this, and they, they immediately think, “Well, this is anti-Jewish,” right? Because it is in any way could be taken as a criticism of the Jewish people, therefore we have a right to just shut it down.Because anything anti-Jewish can just be shut down whenever we feel like shutting it down. Because it could for a while. Like this, the, the fact that they were able to de-platform that guy for pointing out a real known problem within this Orthodox community that nobody disputes. The ADL didn’t be like, “This isn’t a major problem.This fraud isn’t a major problem.” So yeah, I, I guess, I, what I think we need to move more towards, and we even have a company already set up for this anti, anti-bigotry, right? What, what do we call it? DEI Remediation. Deiremediation.com I think we have. So, we have a whole corp for doing this. We got a whole brand for doing this.You let us know, and we will help you because this stuff is gonna f*****g destroy you. It’s bad. It’s [00:41:00] bad. Because right now what the ADL just initiated was an entire internet news cycle of clowning on Jewish people, and that further normalizes it for the next time this happens. Because everybody knows they’re gonna say stuff in response to this, and everybody’s gonna think it’s f*****g hilarious, and everybody’s gonna go along with it.Because 95% of the people this time either approved of it, 90% approved of it, 50% didn’t care, and then you got the, the 5% who are against it. And, and frankly I think it’s, it’s probably lower than that Yeah ... if you... But yeah, just be aware culture is shifting, and that cultural shift is making it upwind, upwind, upwind, upwind.And frankly, this is why figures like Nux are so important to the Jewish community right now. He is in, in the actual culture war that matters. Your [00:42:00] only or primary champion by, like, orders of magnitude like nobody listens, for example, to Ben Shapiro anymore. Like, you guys have had people in the right in the past, I, that had a lot of influence, but they captured institutional positions that don’t matter anymoreSimone Collins: Yeah.Malcolm Collins: Nux still has cultural relevance. So maybe work a bit more to help him or work with him because he’s your guy’s, like, shot right now at not having the entire online right turn antisemitic. I mean, I guess we’re useful in that as well because we generally argue in favor of, of Jewish interests.But yeah, y- you guys don’t have ... And have as many like, fallbacks. I, I guess this just needs to be thought through more. Jews are, are s- are smarter than this. Like, Jews should have more both awareness of the cultural game that’s being played and more interest in communicating with that cultural game in a way that [00:43:00] prevents it from going in an antisemitic direction.And I mean truly antisemitic direction, not calling out goyslopAlso, hold on. Really... Also Jews need to really work, like another, another thing that’s really gonna trigger people going forwards, and I’ve noticed this more and more, and this, they may not see this as that, so I just wanna note this before we h- Saying something is a conspiracy theory that is a blatant and observable fact Really makes people hate youSimone Collins: AhHmmMalcolm Collins: Like if somebody says, “Jews control Hollywood” You can quibble about that, but it’s true.They have a disproportionate level of control in Hollywood and have for genera- since its inception. [00:44:00] That’s not a conspiracy, but when you say that’s an anti-Semitic conspiracy, people are like, “Wow.” Like, “Are we, are we... Like, you’re gaslighting me now? Like, you’re pretending...” Jews control AI. Jews do disproportionately control AI.Jewish spies manipulate world politics. Mossad has done a spectacular job manipulating world politics. Secret cabals of Jews have disproportionate power in both business, politics, and entertainment. Obviously this is true. We’ve caught one. I, I, others are probably less nefarious. And some of them are even institutionalized.Well, what do you call Chabad if not institutionalized organization with disproportionate level of control in American politics? That’s [00:45:00] not... That, that just infuriates people. And like, get, just get better at dealing with that and this will likely go down a bit. The swelling will go down. But for now, where do I see things going?I mean, I see things sort of spiraling in a direction where if filio-Semitic as we want to be, we need to, even internally in our communication, better describe the Jews as a separate people with potentially aligned interests- Mm-hmm ... that are in a good position to work with, but extremely distinct from whatever we are.And that, that is, I, I think the best way to sort of psychologically handle this in terms of handling this in a way that’s gonna, gonna go in any sort of productive direction. The idea [00:46:00] of a Judeo-Christian singular group I think has shattered. And I, and I think it’s shattered to such an extent that Christians who bet on it have, have had their careers destroyed, Mmin the past. Like, before they were aware of this. Like Ted Cruz. Ted Cruz bet on this idea, and I think it has destroyed his credibilitySimone Collins: Yeah, I could see that. Yeah.Malcolm Collins: The other thing that’s been very interesting that I’ve seen recede over time is the support for rebuilding the temple among evangelicals.Really? Which was something... Well, so if you look historically in the United States, there was this big movement because they thought that it would bring about the, the end times.Simone Collins: Right.Malcolm Collins: But apocalyptic forms of evangelical Protestantism of, of that- Are they onSimone Collins: the outs? ...Malcolm Collins: type yeah, they’re kind of on the outs right now.Simone Collins: [00:47:00] Huh. Yeah, I guess, you know, I haven’t heard a whole lot about it. People are talking about it being a thing, but I’m not hearing from the people who think it’s a thing, if that makes sense.Malcolm Collins: Yeah. I’m not hearing from them. I, I don’t see them in my conservative circles. I don’t see them in when we’re doing campaigning.I don’t see them... you know who I do see increasingly in the conservative circles is groups that are much closer to what I, I’d call, like, techno-puritan, like, framing. Like, our framing of, like, Christianity slash science is incredibly and increasingly common among the youths. Mm-hmm. This sort of practical, skeptical, conspiratorial, but ultimately very scientific ex- understanding of Christianity is the one that is really replacing the panicked we, we’ve gotta protect...And I think the, the Jews losing that have lost a major point for them that could have taken flak for them in this [00:48:00] current sort of online battle.Simone Collins: Hmm.Malcolm Collins: Which has also been bad, right? I mean, you go out and you defend this. Like, suppose Ted Cruz went out there and defend this, he’d get clowned on to no endSimone Collins: Yeah.Malcolm Collins: Any final thoughts, Simone?Simone Collins: Just don’t know. I don’t know what to think anymore. I feel like we all, we all just need to do our own things for a while, you know? Stop policing other people’s opinions. Just let them go out there. Like, c- can we just bring back trash talk without the policing?Malcolm Collins: Well, no. This is the interesting thing.We, our side, our cultural movement, this online right movement, has effectively policed the ADL’s talking points. Which is to say not just we’re not gonna listen to you, but it is actively [00:49:00] negative for you to be saying this, and you’re hurting your community, and the people who said this are likely dealing with internal blowback or donor blowback at this point.Simone Collins: Mm-hmm.Malcolm Collins: So we still police, it’s just on the opposite side. It’s the anti-policing policeDon’t even try to police or it will blow up in your face. It, it, this wasn’t a neutral thing that happened. It’s not like they tried and nothing happened. They tried and a rake hit their face.Simone Collins: That all just sounds so exhausting. But yeah, I get it. And I, I mean, I’m glad that there is pushback. It is important that there is pushback.So- Yeah ... I guess it’s fine.Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Well, yeah, I mean, I’m, I’m, I’m getting sick of every- everyone’s sick of, oh, the w- you know, whatever, r- replacement immigration, right? Th- that’s a, a, a conspiracy, right? Like, all these things that they said are conspiracies, it’s like, then why does your side say it in Spain and cheer when it’s happening, right?Like, why, [00:50:00] why can’t we have these conversations without everything being a conspiracy? When, when all of us can see the statistics and what your side is communicating internally.Hmm.Anyway, love youSimone Collins: I love you tooSpeaker 13: What we doing? Well, we’re playing hide and seek and playing ringWhere isTitan? Who knows? I don’t know where Titan is. Is that Titan?Are you a crazy girl? Yeah. What do you wanna be when you grow up? Well, I wanna be a shark princess.What are you gonna do when you’re a shark princess? Well, I will swim in the water really [00:51:00] fast whileSpeaker 14: I’m eating some fish that are not pink or purple. So you don’t wanna eat pink or purple fish? Only gray fish and yellow fish and green fish, but not pink and purple fish. And I jump the gray fish and the green fish, and they well, people just do not like meat on their shoulders like that, then sharks will eat them, and that will be really bad, so do not put shoulders on your arms like that, then I will eat you like a shark princess.So do not go in the water and with meat on your wrist, then a shark will eat you. Then a sharkSpeaker 13: will eat you?Speaker 14: No, you.Speaker 13: Oh, me? Yeah, [00:52:00]Speaker 14: if you have meat on your wristWell, you found me, This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit basedcamppodcast.substack.com/subscribe

Are video games the most efficient sin? Malcolm and Simone Collins rank modern sins by their real-world damage — from video games and sports gambling to shopping addictions, plastic surgery, skydiving, OnlyFans, kinks, and more. They break down how to evaluate sins by time cost, financial drain, health risks, negative externalities, addiction potential, and alignment with long-term flourishing.This episode offers a practical, first-principles framework for thinking about hedonism, temptation, family traditions, and moral trade-offs in the modern world. Topics include gambling vs. heroin, why some “harmless” hobbies are more destructive than others, rechanneling vices into virtues, the value of different lives, and techno-puritan views on self-defense.Episode TranscriptMalcolm Collins: Hello, Simone. I’m excited to be here with you today. Today we are going to have an interesting conversation around ranking the severity of various modern sins so that we can understand which ones are worse for an individual in, terms of, well, just broad effects they have on your life.Like, as I’ve pointed out in other episodes, sins are basically a list of things, you know, like don’t cheat on your wife, don’t be mean to people, don’t murder people, like listen to your parents. Stuff that’s just gonna F up your life if you don’t follow it i- in a, in a general format. It’s like a big list of don’t piss on the electric fence and then a- some humans are just like, “But if I just goon all day every day, that’ll feel fantastic, right?”And it’s like, no, it won’t. Maybe for like a half a day you get to year two of that and you’re living the life of Anna Valen. See our episode on what happened to her life, right? Like going through her [00:01:00] private diaries in our Life of the Sinabyte episode.Speaker 5: you were an interesting study. Must, greed, deception, fertile ground, but rather mundane.Speaker 6: Doors to the pleasures of heaven nor hell. I didn’t care, which I thought I’d gone to the limits I hadn’t. The center bytes gave me an experience beyond the limits pain and pleasure.Indivisible.Malcolm Collins: it is not happiness at the end of the hedonism maxing tunnel.As I often point out, if you look at the people in our society who have access to everything they could possibly want, your movie star, your music star, when they indulge in that, when they indulge in the, you know, endless chain of, of women and drugs and everything like that, they often crash out as some of the least happy and satisfied humans alive.Whereas people who often do not have much, and I’m sure many of you, you know these individuals pious [00:02:00] individuals who just work to give back to the community they’re often some of the most fulfilled people you will ever meet.And so this is, this is paid off to us, but whatever religious teaching you’re using, and I’m gonna try to keep this, while this is one of the track series, I’m gonna try to keep it useful to not just Christians or Orthodox Jews or anyone, but just broadly anyone because- the, the set of laws that, like, Christians follow seems to generally be useful for other people as well.That’s why they seem to perfectly overlay with, like, the Noahide laws when Jews are like, “Well, I just want everyone to follow the Noahide laws.” And it’s like, all observant Christians already follow all of those. Like, why are you making this a separate thing? It’s just good rules for life and, and being a member of a community.But we’re going to start, because where this came up was in a fan call which we have for our paid fans who get [00:03:00] our extra weekend episodes. If you don’t know about that, that, that’s a thing. And they somebody was talking about the relative sinfulness of video games, right? And we’ll be using the Romans quote that’s in here, which is like anything you don’t do for God is sin.Basically anything you don’t do that you can’t be like, “This is something I am doing for...” whatever for God means to you. Like, for goodness, to, to, to promote humanity, the, you know, moving forwards. Whatever you wanna, you talk, it’s, it’s, it’s something that’s an object to that. Like, purely selfish action, right?And they were like, video games is a very, very expedient sin. Like, of, of the various sinful things you can do. And, and to give an example of what I mean for this, let, let’s contrast two things, okay, here. Let’s contrast the relative sinfulness of video games versus watching sports, right? Like, both of these things are things you’re fundamentally doing for yourself, for your own self-gratification.But they have [00:04:00] different impacts or potential impacts on your life. Now, obviously you can engage with either too much in a way that just completely destroys your life. We all know the person who crashed out on Warhammer for five years and then came out of a hole one day and was like, “Ugh.” WorldSimone Collins: of Warcraft, not Warhammer.Malcolm Collins: Yeah, War- World of Warcraft. World of Warcraft. That was like a thing- Yeah ... that if you lived through that- In a- ... a bunch of us nerds-Simone Collins: In a college dorm, like in a certain period of time, there was at least one kid.Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Or, and, and, and here I’ll add another one here. Magic: The Gathering card collecting.Or, or, or no, no, well, let’s just say, yeah card collecting more general. So like non-playable card collecting. No, we’ll use Magic: The Gathering ‘cause it allows us to talk about a, a, a variety of things together. If you are really into, let’s say s- sports, and so you have to, you wanna watch the games the moment they come out.Now, that already makes it relatively more bad than a video game that you can play at any time, day or night, right? [00:05:00] Because now you’re having to, even if you’re spending the same amount of time on it, that time is not variable, and therefore is going to be more intrusive on your ability to do things that are actually like a net benefit for society or God or whatever, right?Like you’re, you’re, you’re going to have to maybe not go to the thing with your kids, or not go to the things that you can slot in at any time, day or night. The, the flexibility of a sin is really important to that sin. Then you have the cost, the relative cost. But this is where something like trading cards can get really big because the relative cost of entertainment hour per dollar spend is of, of just about anything you can be into I think the lowest on video games.Now this is assuming that you are into single player video games rather than either loot box type games, which can be incorporated in single player video games if you are [00:06:00] susceptible to loot boxes. Now note, not everyone is susceptible to loot boxes. Some people can play a game with loot boxes forever and never spend on them.I think that this is something that you have to ask yourself and, and, and from your own historic behavior. If you know you are susceptible to loot boxes don’t, don’t engage with them. Right? Like d- d- don’t engage with any game that has them. And I’m sorry if that’s like taking things out for you, but one of the most dangerous you know, of all the various things we’re warned not to do, gambling is I think one of the most dangerous.And the reason why gambling is w- I, I put gambling above something like heroin. OhSimone Collins: yeah. It’s just so quickly and easily ruinous.Malcolm Collins: Yeah. It’s- While heroin can kill you in a day, it’s much less likely to, like even, even if it does kill you, like your assets are still inherited by other people, right? Like [00:07:00] i- i- it, when gambling ruins your life, it typically, one, it can ruin multi-generations of life savings just like that.But two, the people who have an issue with it often borrow against other people when they do it. And the happiness you get from it doesn’t feel very long-term satisfying. It’s like not a good... Like this is the other thing I’ll keep into account when we’re like rating sins is how good is the happiness you get out of it?The happiness that you get out of gambling isIncredibly low-grade, superficial most basal of hungers. There isn’t any sort of deep satisfaction like you may get out of beating a really hard video game or something like that, right? And so that’s where keep in mind is the pastime that like when you’re judging the potential sin of a pastime, what other sins come attached to this pastime?So if you look at something like being into [00:08:00] sports gambling is very commonly attached to being into sports.Simone Collins: Oh, so what, what, what is also the constellation of related things that you might get into?Malcolm Collins: Right. So like this is when it comes to something like hur- Yeah,Simone Collins: like if you really like going, like clubbing, the odds of you getting a drug habit, non-trivial, right?Malcolm Collins: Yeah, yeah, explode. Yeah. Which isSimone Collins: like- Or like developing alcoholism ...Malcolm Collins: if you go into a bar- Yeah ... this is why we would aga- tr- even if it’s the same amount of time- Mm ... even if it’s the same amount of cost to both go to a bar or go to a nightclub, the nightclub has a much higher probability of leading to an escalatory cycle that is going to do more deleterious impact to your life.Simone Collins: Yeah.GoshMalcolm Collins: But also, but by the way, so an interesting, but I find this to be an interesting, like, broader conversation here. Yeah because it’s something that, that’s, that’s not often thought about, but the moment you begin to frame things like this, you can be like, “Oh, this is a good way for me to think through.”Also, like, whether you want to engage with something to begin with.Simone Collins: You’re [00:09:00] also looking at, like, uniquely male habits too. I think that,Malcolm Collins: Yeah, let’s, let’s elevate someSimone Collins: female habits ... travel could be one of them for women. Plastic surgery is one of them for women. Wait, what didMalcolm Collins: you, what was the first one you said for women?Simone Collins: Travel, plastic surgery, and shopping are, are- Travel, plastic surgery- ... very big ... and, and shopping. AbsolutelyMalcolm Collins: VerySimone Collins: big. Because plastic surgery is an incredibly, for many women, addictive thing. And it is an endless money hole. Also, like, you get to a point where after you have a certain number of procedures done, you have to keep doing more procedures to either fix or maintain procedures.And that is incredibly expensive. Plus, you just start to look terrible, so that’s not good.Malcolm Collins: And if, if we’re putting out any sort of teachings around jewelry, I would strongly suggest that individuals treat jewelry the way I did with my wife. Which basically, when you get married, you ask her and you lay out, what is all of the jewelry you want in your, your life?You know, be greedy. If you, if you had the maximum look, what does that look look like? It is X many pearl [00:10:00] necklaces. It’s X many earrings of these various sizes and styles. It’s X many rings. You create that list for all of the variable ways you could piece together jewelry, and you say, “Okay now with this list, this is where, like, I’m gonna be getting you presents from this list for X many years, and when we get to the end of this list, that’s it.No more jewelry.” Right? Like, this is all of the jewelry you could ever imagine yourself wanting.Simone Collins: Yeah, like, you, you can’t develop a, like, “I’m a jewelry collector.” Like, that, that is an incredibly sinful hobby, right? You, this- ‘Cause that is an endless moneyMalcolm Collins: hole ... there’s this point where you’re just spending money on more jewelry for the emotional state you get when you spend the money on jewelry.And like-Simone Collins: And we, we say this ‘cause we, we know people who’ve had this habit who literally have, for their retirement, owned, like, a condo that they, it was supposed to be part of their retirement portfolio, and they sold it to buy jewelry. Like, this is... So you know, we talk about men’s gambling addictions a lot, I think.Malcolm Collins: YeahSimone Collins: But I don’t think we talk [00:11:00] enough about some problems that women have, I, I’m not really sure why. Maybe it’s, it’sMalcolm Collins: harder to detect Well, I think that society’s changing more, ‘cause, “Oh, how dare you put rules on women?” But let’s, let’s do th- let’s go through. Like, I think that the same thing that goes with jewelry can go with travel, right?Like lu- Oh,Simone Collins: yeah, luxury, and luxury travel is an endless... Like, just one business class flight can send you back... Well, n- sorry, the last time I tried to look at business class flights just ‘cause I was curious was well before oil went crazy with the Iran war. This was like maybe two years ago. Yeah, but, but let’s, let’s talk about- And, like, one flight across an ocean was $20,000 for one personaMalcolm Collins: good way to handle travel, right? Because it is an endless money pit, as you say.Simone Collins: Yeah.Malcolm Collins: If you are the type of person who goes on the same vacation every year assuming that’s not, like, a drive from your house or something like that, right? There’s likely no point to that. You are not picking up any new additional information on trip number 10 to Hawaii that you didn’t get on trip number one to Hawaii.You’re not getting any new perspective. You’re not getting any new... this is [00:12:00] purely a hedonistic thing to do and an extremely expensive hedonisticSimone Collins: thing to do. I mean, I think there’s, there’s something to be said for cultural family traditions. Like, some families, like, every year will all gather at this one place, and that’s a big part of their culture.Well,Malcolm Collins: and as I was saying, the important thing about cultural family traditions is that they are not pointlessly orders of magnitude more expensive than an equivalent tradition the family could do. Oh. So, by this what I mean is our family could every year go to Hawaii, or we could every year go to a lake house Airbnb a couple hours from here.Or we could every year go to the Jersey Shore and rent a place, or even buy a place and have it there, right? As an, as an asset. If we make the active decision to do the thing, like marginally how much better is Hawaii than the Jersey Shore, yet it costs orders of magnitude more. [00:13:00]Simone Collins: Yeah. No, that’s fair.Yeah, and even just like food in Hawaii costs so much more that it’s, you have to consider that.Malcolm Collins: Yeah, and if you’re like, “Oh, the Jersey Shore is gross,” okay, drive a bit further to Connecticut. I think Connecticut is strictly better than Hawaii. Like the ocean, ocean side- OhSimone Collins: my gosh. Yeah, hands down.Malcolm Collins: Yeah,Simone Collins: Or Rhode Island.I mean, if you wanna be fancy, you know, you could do the Hamptons. You could do... Well, not the Hamptons, ‘cause that’s ridiculous. That’s Hawaii level. But maybe like Martha’s Vineyard or Cape Cod or something. Cape Cod’s great. You could go camping in Cape Cod.Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And this is what I’m talking about.What I’m talking about, like I do think that people need some degree of hedonism. You know, the, the, the family traditions you have, the things that you do to entertain yourself. I think if you remove all of those, while some people can live that way, I think Simone essentially lives that way I do not think everyone can live that way and still be an efficient human being.I, I know I personally can’t. Mm-hmm. And so I do engage with things like video games. But when it comes to something like gambling, it falls into [00:14:00] that category. When we were listing out like really big sins, the trying something just to see if you like it, gambling is probably the biggest red flag.Simone Collins: Oh my gosh, yeah.There’sMalcolm Collins: no reason you need to know if you like gambling. No- That’sSimone Collins: so true ... appropriate reason. Yeah, it’s like, “Hey, I should try this extremely addictive narcotic. Let’s see if, how it goes. Maybe I’ll like it.” Do you think you’ll like it?Malcolm Collins: Well, and when you know you do have a problem with something, and this is where I you know, people know I take naltrexone, which is an opioid agonist, which is just fantastic for helping curb the types of addictive impulses that you may have, whether it’s alcohol or masturbation or anything like this, right?Like, an, i- i- a... The place that it had the biggest impact on my life that I didn’t expect was checking the news every morning when I first woke up, and then checking my Facebook feed and checking the latest comics and checking the, That behavior just went away, Oh ... after I started taking it. And a lot of people can say, “Well, you shouldn’t be removing the sins from yourself like, the temptation from the sins.”And I’m like, “Bro, like, Jesus was literally the guy who was like, [00:15:00] ‘If your eye leads you to sin, tear it out.’ Like, ‘If your arm leads you to sin, cut it off.’” Like, he obviously didn’t mean exactly that in context, but if you’re going with the vibe of the message naltrexone would fit perfectly in this. Now, obviously this doesn’t work for Catholics because Catholics know that the church actually had to once rule on priests who were castrating themselves to not be tempted by sin.And the church ruled against doing that, which seems very weird to me in the line with, you know, the Bible’s teaching, but whatever, right? You know.Simone Collins: Yeah.Malcolm Collins: The point here being you don’t need to expose yourself to something. Like, we have the technology, and as technology advances, I think one of the areas I want to see it advance the most is on the mitigation of sinful impulses.Like, imagine a society where people don’t feel these impulses to the same degree anymore. You know, you literally cut out the eyes, right, of society moving forwards. And we’re beginning to see that with stuff like Ozempic, right? Like, is, is Ozempic not a, a category there that we’re seeing? And this is where something like gluttony can be extra [00:16:00] bad because when we’re looking at sins, another thing we need to keep in mind in sort of the grand ranking of sins is the probability that it’s going to kill you.Because that has enormous externalities on everyone that’s counting on you and your ability to do anything in the future, right?Simone Collins: Yeah.Malcolm Collins: And anything that falls into the category of actively leading to your death which can happen in two categories. One can be something like gluttony. Another can be where it’s, like, just literally unhealthy or something like orgies, right?Where you may get diseases and stuff like that and you need to be- Yeah,Simone Collins: or like before I met Malcolm, I liked BASE jumping. I likedMalcolm Collins: skydiving. I liked- Well, I’m, I’m gonna put that in the second category.Simone Collins: Oh, okay.Malcolm Collins: So these are things that are just actively unhealthful. Yeah. Then there’s things that come with a risk of severe injury or death.Simone Collins: Oh, okay. So there’s sort of the chronic bad health, which I would also include, like, habits of just staying up incredibly late and not getting enough sleep. That’s really bad for you.Malcolm Collins: Yes, ‘cause you’re trying to push me to work less right now.Simone Collins: Yeah, Malcolm, duh.Malcolm Collins: No, but I, I agree with that. You can [00:17:00] be indulgent in your work, and I need to be aware of that because- Yeah, your sin,Simone Collins: youMalcolm Collins: are sinningit is killing me and dying.Simone Collins: Yes.Malcolm Collins: Which it could really at this point when you look at how much I work.Simone Collins: YesMalcolm Collins: Hey, but look at how much RFAB has improved.Simone Collins: Guys, tell him to go to sleep, please. Ugh. Anyway, go on.Malcolm Collins: Gluttony, where was I, where were they going was, was gluttonySimone Collins: There’s theMalcolm Collins: two categories Gluttony.Simone Collins: Oh, yeah, yeah There’s the oneMalcolm Collins: that’s chronically bad- But then there’s the category of- ...Simone Collins: andMalcolm Collins: thenSimone Collins: there’s the one that’s acutely bad ... the riskMalcolm Collins: of death or severe injury. Yes. And this really matters when it comes to, like suppose you’re in school and you’re choosing your sport.Something that you should be very aware of in that choice is what is the chance that this could give you a life-changing injury? So, if you’re considering between extremely high injury sports like, say, crew or cheerleading- Wait, crew? Crew has incredibly high... Because you can catch crabs, which basically means your, your row hits the water at the wrong moment vis-a-vis everyone else moving forwards.Yeah. So the forwards motion of your boat catches your oar and throws it into your [00:18:00] face.Simone Collins: Oh.Malcolm Collins: Um, With all of the momentum of everyone on the boat- Oh ... and the speed of the boat.Simone Collins: God. I didn’t know that. That’s horrible.Malcolm Collins: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Easy, easy to become paralyzed and stuff like that. Oh.Simone Collins: Dude, okay, guys, if you wanna do, just do outrigger canoe racing.Really fun and you don’t have- but yeah, outrigger canoe racing, really great. If you like crew but you don’t wanna die- ... outrigger canoe racing, I mean, your boat might flip, ‘cause, you know, they do that AndMalcolm Collins: this is what we’re talking about here.With any of these, there are variable things where you could get an equal amount of pleasure or whatever satisfaction you’re getting- Yeah ... that don’t come with the same negative externalities.Simone Collins: Totally. AndMalcolm Collins: in the categories of sins, actively choosing not to look this stuff up falls in the same category.Mm. YouSimone Collins: should,Malcolm Collins: you should, before you sign up for an extracurricular, look up the risk of death or serious injury from that extracurricular.Simone Collins: Yeah, for real. Like, in high [00:19:00] school, I was on an outrigger canoe racing team, and then I looked at joining crew in college. At no point did I have any idea, ‘cause I almost joined GW’s crew team.I didn’t know that could happen. The only reason I backed out was I was like, “Oh, I will have no life if I join this team,” because it’s so-Malcolm Collins: Well, and that’s the other thing, is how much of your life does it consume? Like, that is-Simone Collins: Totally,Malcolm Collins: yeah ... you are almost certainly... And this is the thing. Even if you’re doing sin for hedonism, there are some times where you’re just doing a sin that is absolutely pointless- Yeahin terms of the amount of hedonism it’s getting you. Yeah. Like, going to Disneyland is f*****g pointless. There is no way that that was the best use of that money.Simone Collins: No, fair. Yeah, and one, I think one thing that we discovered too when we took our kids to places before we were, like, really thoughtful about it and taking a first principle’s approach, was like, “Well, okay, what are our kids actually obsessed with?”And it’s never, like, the concept of Disney or the concept of whatever it is that’s happening. It’s like they hyper-fixate on, like, “I like to throw rocks in this thing,” and that might [00:20:00] not even be what they’re supposed to do, right? And so you can just replicate that most likely at home. And you know, that’s-Malcolm Collins: Right.Like, consider the alternative, like what I do with the kids, right? Is I get a little inflatable boat with a small motor, and we drive around the lakes around here, and we go around the water, and we catch crayfish and little fish and throw rocks, and they build dams.Speaker 16: Hey, where are you guys going?Malcolm Collins: And that is almost certainly for kids their age as fun as waiting in lines, ‘cause that’s what Disneyland really is, is a, it’s a line simulator.Speaker 8: so then there’s lines for fast pass. You stand in line to get a take it to stand in line later. Then there’s lines for the bathrooms, lines for the drinks, lines for can, and [00:21:00] cans.Malcolm Collins: A- and you could be like, “Well, what about the novelty?” Okay, well, even if it’s about the novelty, there’s going to be a local park to you that’s going to have about the equivalent of Disneyland, maybe 20% less or something like that. Oh,Simone Collins: you mean like an actual theme park.Malcolm Collins: Yeah.Simone Collins: Like Hershey Park for us or something. LikeMalcolm Collins: Hershey Park or something, right?Simone Collins: Yeah.Malcolm Collins: It’s gonna be strictly personally, I don’t think it’s any worse, but i- i- you know, assuming, like even if you go to Disneyland, I still think Universal’s a better studio.Simone Collins: Yes.Malcolm Collins: But, but what I’m saying here is, is to apply all of this with a degree of intentionality.And then to look at this with the risk of injury, also risk of any other sort of long-term negative effect on your life. So like if there is a Magic: The Gathering’s a good example of this, right? Okay. If you end up getting addicted to card collecting, which a lot of these people do, Magic: The Gathering can just siphon money from you endlessly.You c- you can never have enough decks. You never have enough cards. You [00:22:00] never have enough, you know, much more so than something like getting really into, to Dark Souls or something like that. And then the next thing we need to consider and, and obviously the highest category of sin within these activities is anything that could just kill you.Like, in terms of BASE jumping, parachuting out of an airplane, hand gliding hot air ballooning a lot of these things are just like Oh, personal plane flying. Like is there really not some other activity that you could get the same amount of marginal enjoyment from that doesn’t run the risk of just killing you?And also isn’t worth tons of money. All of those are also enormously expensive hobbies.Simone Collins: Yeah, there’s that. Yeah.Actually, just recently I think eight people died in a skydiving plane accident. They’re rickety planes, so it doesn’t surprise me. I remember thinking when I sky dove for the first time, the only time, [00:23:00] like, “Oh, th- this is probably how I’ll die.”It was- ... like held together with tape. So.Malcolm Collins: Yeah. No, but these things, like just recognizing, because I, I think a lot of religious traditions, ‘cause people in the past didn’t randomly do stuff for fun that could get them killed for no reason. This is like a modern invention of sinfulness that we just invented out of the ethos.An- anyone historically would be like, “Why would you do something that could just get you killed?” Right? Mm-hmm. Like, we invented an entirely new category of sinfulness that the Bible didn’t even know it needed to warn us about. Therefore, that’s why I’m, I’m doing this. That’s why I’m putting this together.Speaker 20: Now I need to be clear here. This isn’t out of line with passages from the Bible. You know, if you look at something like Proverbs 22:3, “The prudent see danger and take refuge, but the simple keep going and pay the penalty.” Or Proverbs 14:16, “One who is wise is cautious and turns away from evil, but the fool is reckless [00:24:00] and careless.”Or Ecclesiastes 7:17, “Do not be over wicked and do not be a fool. Why die before your time?” , And, and so you can see this isn’t out of line with what the Bible is teaching, but it just never explicitly says, because I don’t think anyone around the time any of the biblical books was written would randomly risk their lives over simple thrills., People back then simply weren’t that indulgent and stupid, so it didn’t need to be laid out like thisMalcolm Collins: But now I wanna go into, to the next category. That cruisingSimone Collins: is crazy.Malcolm Collins: Yeah.Simone Collins: Ugh.Malcolm Collins: Is thinking through the negative externalities of the type of sin that you are engaged in. So a good example of here could come down to something like corn, right? If you were going to rank, because obviously if you’re masturbating, well, I don’t think it’s like enormously sinful when contrasted with other things that you might do.It’s still clearly not something you’re doing for God, which makes it [00:25:00] sinful, right? If you are now considering the various ways that you can engage with not-safe-for-work material I think obviously the highest form of negative is hiring a prostitute to cheat on your wife, right? Like, that, that’s where you get it the highest level of, of, of negativity.Or I guess also- BecauseSimone Collins: of the money spent or what?Malcolm Collins: Well, because it has money spent on something that’s completely pointless from a f- family perspective. Two, you are creating a negative externality for the woman you’re paying, not just for your wife, not just for your family, because you could, one, get a disease from her, which creates more of a negative externality than other ways you could go out and, and do that.But also you have now created a profession that can ruin this woman’s life, right? Like, a lot of these women who get into this, they end up speccing into this OnlyFans build, I guess you wanna say, right? While they’re young, not building up their skills, not building up a real job record. Then they lose their looks, and now they’re [00:26:00] kind of screwed.Although I have heard, did you know this? That older women at, like, nightclubs and strip clubs and stuff like that actually get paid more than younger women?Simone Collins: That makes sense because I feel like they would put in more effort.Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Well, effort, experience, and I don’t know, maybe guys. I, I don’t know the full, but apparently this is also somewhat true on some not-safe-for-works. I, I don’t, I don’t know all the mechanics of this. I, I’m not gonna go deep i- into it. But there is a point after which you’re just not gonna get anyone and you’re gonna be completely screwed and no guys wanna marry you, and so you can’t settle down.You can’t have a family. You can’t easily... You know, it, it’s gonna be much harder after that, right?Speaker 22: That, that chair with the garbage bag taped over it looks pretty good. Meg, you look pretty next to her.Malcolm Collins: And so, a- and this, this matters, like, building this sort of internal ranking. Like, if you’re gonna have... Like, let’s just suppose you’re engaging with content online, right? The, the lowest category in terms of sinfulness would be purely drawn [00:27:00] or...Well, no, AI-generated content would be the lowest because no other human was ever even engaged with that. Then the next would be drawn stuff because it, it, some woman isn’t making this her life work. Then you move into actual photos and videos of real human women. You have to shut up. You have to stop it.Because now you are promoting an industry That creates these negative externalities. Then one step up from that is OnlyFans. Because now you are actively lowering, because remember, it, your time, like the time, effort that you could be spending on attempting to contribute to whatever you think has intrinsic value is competing not just in terms of time, but in terms of money.Because money, in a capitalist system it, it, it can buy time, functionally speaking. Not perfectly, but, but that’s what you spend your time on. You generate the money. The money can be translated for time. That’s what we do this for, right? So when you are s- actively spending money on an OnlyFans account or something like that, especially if you’re in a [00:28:00] relationship or married, because now it’s money that should be going to your kids, should be going to your wife.That, that puts that and yet a higher tier. And I think that this is useful to think through, right? Instead of just bucketing it all as being exactly the same. In terms of the orders of magnitude worse I would put something like OnlyFans at 10,000 times worse than AI-generated content in terms of, like, the active scale of badness.Simone Collins: Well, yeah, because of the, especially the ROI. Like, if you put the, the, the amount you can get of value from AI token-based purchases versus what you’re getting with OnlyFans, was, which isn’t, in I would argue, 90-plus percent of cases, unless you’re going after, like, very- ... very low-ranked people you’re not interacting with the actual model anyway.So like, so you’re paying this much to interact with someone in, like, India or Pakistan [00:29:00] or Vietnam, or I don’t know who, who knows where, right? Who’s not the woman. You’re, you’re paying a, a huge amount of cup and it’s not, you’re still affecting someone’s life, so.Malcolm Collins: Well, and worse, you’re entering an environment that falls into the earlier sin category we were talking about, where the woman has a motivation to attempt to addict you.Mm ... a lot of the OnlyFans pipelines are really heavily AB tested to try to get you addicted to them. That’s the point. They want you as a permanent customer. It’s the same way where, like, if you are paying money to someone for sex that person has a motivation to attempt to break up your existing relationship, right?Like any sort of long-term stable fications for society relationship you have, they now have a motivation to disrupt that for you.Simone Collins: Hmm.Malcolm Collins: And- I suppose Yeah, yeah. So I, I think that that is a ca- and this is worth thinking about. Like a- again, something like let’s consider categories here. Video games versus skydiving.The, the [00:30:00] relative negative externality to your life, assuming you don’t get addicted to video game gambling is I, I might say a millionfold less bad. May- maybe more than a million. I, I might literally say it is a... No, no, I’d actually maybe a billionfold less bad to spend a night playing video games than it is to skydive or free climb or any of those things that have these giant externalities to your life.Because there is no chance that I accidentally kill myself playing a video game, right? And when you think about all of the downstream effects of your death for something that in terms of the pleasure that you can harness from the two events I, I’d honestly be very surprised if somebody gets more acute pleasure from skydiving than they do for video games, which makes it even worse Well,Simone Collins: I, I don’t know.I’m incapable of garnering pleasure from- ... playing video games, as we’ve discovered, much to your-Malcolm Collins: But you [00:31:00] gain pleasure- ... dismay ... from watching your romance shows. Do you enjoy- Yeah ... those more than skydiving? Like, it a- the f- the, the three or four hours it takes to make- So it’s- ... a full skydive ...Simone Collins: it is, it’s hard to...Yeah, I mean, it, like, it’s a specific high. It’s the adrenaline. Like, that’s why I like jumping off things. And it’s not, you would think, oh, well you’re only enjoying that for, like, the few seconds that you’ve jumped out of the plane. That’s actually the least interesting part because falling from the sky, as it turns out, just feels windy.Like, if you’ve ever leaned into a heavy wind that can hold you up when you lean into it, you have experienced what it feels like to skydive. Congratulations.Malcolm Collins: But- So is, is it literally just an addiction to a chemical reaction your bodySimone Collins: is producing? No, yeah, it’s, it’s the buildup. It’s the waiting in the hangar.It’s the getting on the plane. It’s the going up. It’s the harnessing up. It’s the leaning out of the plane. It’s the deciding to tip out. Like, that, that is where that high comes from, and it’s unique. It’s not something you can get from a video game. The same with, like, jumping off high things, like bridges into water or-Malcolm Collins: ButSimone Collins: does it feel-cliffs into water ...Malcolm Collins: good? Or does it [00:32:00] just feel different?Simone Collins: You feel alive in a different way. Yeah, it just feels different.Malcolm Collins: Which I think is really pointless. Like-Simone Collins: Yeah. Well, and I think, I think what a lot of people have come to realize is that, like, you, you can get a very similar kind of high from, like, a cold plunge.So I think when, when we’re talking about, like- ... the crew versus outrigger canoe racing, like, if you want that wind taken out of yourself, like, oh, like you, you feel alive-Malcolm Collins: Yeah ...Simone Collins: get a bucket of ice water. Like, it’s really not that hard. Like-Malcolm Collins: And that generally has positive health effects from what I’veSimone Collins: heard.It does, yeah. Like, there seems to be, like, an evidence-based argument for cold plunges on a regular basis. It, it, and, and the, the thing is they’re unpleasant in a way that, I guess skydiving is too. Like, you’re waiting in a hot hangar. You’re paying money. Like, you know, it’s... So yeah, I think i- if you want that kind of feeling and you really need it, just get a cold plunge and enjoy the additional health [00:33:00] benefits, ‘cause it’s aligned with probably your objective function more presumably, ‘cause your objective function should probably involve being able to do a thing which you have to be alive to be able to do.So-Malcolm Collins: Yeah ... there’s that. Well, and this is where... Because I think it’s, it’s important to think about when we hear something’s sinful, we just think, like, “Don’t do it.” And why it’s useful to create these, like... When, when we’re looking at various sins and temptations in our lives and we think about their relative negativity to us, right?We often don’t fully think through how relatively negative they are. Yeah ... consider something like- me so let’s, let’s consider my desire to socialize, right? Mm. I, I could have that- What desire? ... exercised in, in multiple ways in my w- life, right? Like, I could go to parties, I could go to bars, I could go to cities.And if you look at the way that Simone and I actually have ended up doing that in our lives [00:34:00] what we’ve done is we said, “Okay, what we’re gonna do is once every few months, like maybe every four months now, go to New York or DC, rent out a place, invite all our friends over and people we don’t know as well, just famous people in the area and be like, ‘Hey, you wanna come over?You wanna come to a party?’ You know, interesting for socialization, so we’re still top of mind, everything like that.” And this prevents us from having to do a bunch of other things that may be involved in a choice like, where do you live? Like, we’re able to live in a location where it was very inexpensive to buy a house, very inexpensive to buy groceries, very inexpensive to live, and that frankly is healthier.You know, you’re not in the city smog and everything like that. And nicer looking. I look out my window and I see a jungle every day, right? Than, than living in Manhattan or living in, in DC. But I still get the socialization because I very intentionally cluster it all. But then even more than that, if I’m just looking for...If you’re like, “I couldn’t get away with just doing this once every four months,” there are ways [00:35:00] you can socialize that have positive externalities as well. So an example here would be my Leaflet streams. So on a Leaflet stream, I’m doing a 10-hour conversation with Leaflet typically, right? And you can find these recorded on like Twitch and Kick and everything like that if you’re interested in watching them.But these streams often get over 20,000 views. You know, so not only am I there having a conversation with somebody and masturbating the social part of myself, right? Like, I’m doing the social thing, which does feel good to do, right, to, to, to talk with somebody who you enjoy speaking to and who shares similar interests than you, without having to get in a car, go out and interact with strangers, risk getting sick.Keep in mind, you’re doing that every time you leave your house.Simone Collins: Oh myMalcolm Collins: gosh,Simone Collins: yeah.Malcolm Collins: Risk y- you know, it, it, you, you risk being killed when you go out. That’s the other thing to remember. If you go to like a nightclub district, people always get shot in the, you know. Well,Simone Collins: but also like every time you get in your car, don’t forget.Malcolm Collins: Yeah. [00:36:00] Every time you get in a car, you’re risking your life. And, and that’s, that’s why I think it’s generally good to like cluster those things, and to, when you think about, like, the car you get, it’s upon you to research what is the riskiness of this car to your life. Any closing thoughts here, Simone?Simone Collins: I don’t know. You’ve, you’ve, you’ve given me a lot to think about actually. I hadn’t thought before about Even looking at sinful behaviors and being like, “Okay, what is the thing that I’m getting out of this and how do I do it better?” I mean, we, I obviously did this, or with the help of my dad and his advice, did this with a sin of mine that was really damaging, right?Like, I loved controlling how much I ate, but that involved dying. And so she didn’t eat anything. Yeah. Yeah. And so he’s like, “Okay, I see what you wanna do here is control and feel that form of a high. So here’s another way you can do it without dying.” And so instead we just balanced calories in and calories out, and had me weigh and measure and enter into a [00:37:00] program everything I ate.And then suddenly I wasn’t dying anymore. And I think it’s a really good idea to take a look at things that we’re doing that are problematic, and I’m just gonna be thinking for the rest of the day today, “Okay, what am I doing now that is not good for us? What do I actually want when I’m doing that and how can I do that better?”Ideally in a way that just helps everyone in the family, that actually contributes to us. Like, the idea- Mm-hmm ... of, of taking like a skydiving or BASE jumping addiction and turning it into a cold plunge addiction, right? You’re taking a vice and turning it into a virtue while still getting the thing, like most of the thing out of the vice that you liked.Malcolm Collins: Yeah, yeah. Oh, and consider something like intermu- mural sports as a sin, for example, like in school. Your parents, the people who already have to drive you state to state for competition. Oh my gosh. You know, you’ve gotta g- go to these regular practices, which again takes up the time of the people who drive you.They’re just enormously sinful, and we don’t think about them as sinful things. Mm-hmm. They can eat up huge amounts of your life that could be spent on self-improvement or attempting [00:38:00] to use the, the instrument you have honed yourself into to improve society for something completely indulgent.Simone Collins: Yeah, yeah. Well and, and one person’s sin could be another person’s perfectly good thing. Like, if for example for one person, participation in a sport requires their whole family to sort of derail their lives and spend a lot of time driving, but then the other person, like, happens to live right next to, to a, like, major gymnastics gym or whatever, where all they have to do is walk over and it’s a really good place for them to be, like, then maybe it’s not.I think everyone has to consider for themselves what the cost is and what the alignment is.Malcolm Collins: So. Yeah, yeah, and to be honest with yourself around wh- what- Yeah ... the things that you spend your time doing on any given day, on any given week. Like, if one of your core tasks in life at that time is finding a partner, unfortunately you have to do social things.Simone Collins: Yeah.Malcolm Collins: Th- like that, that becomes one of the things that you just have to do. That was the primary reason I did anything social ever in my life, was trying to find a [00:39:00] partner.Simone Collins: Well, that’s done. Maybe.Malcolm Collins: No. Once, once you get a good wife, that’s the great thing about a good wife and kids, you don’t need friends anymore, right?You can just cut all that nonsense out.Simone Collins: Yeah. Well, I guess you have to still play the field in case I die, but whateverMalcolm Collins: Yeah. I mean, I, I, I gotta know some people. I, I’m just gonna honestly reach out to fans. I’m sure there’s some fan who wants to marry me.Simone Collins: Oh, God.Well then, there you have it, ladies and gentlemen.And with that, we will leave you. Well,Malcolm Collins: especially if the fan’s like a widower, too. That would be super easySimone Collins: No, you would be the widower and they would be aMalcolm Collins: widow I... No, they could be a widower too if they’re, like, still my age No,Simone Collins: no, no. A widower, Malcolm, widower is the name for a man who lost his wife.WhatMalcolm Collins: is aSimone Collins: woman? Widow is a woman who lost her husband Oh, a widow.Malcolm Collins: Okay.Simone Collins: Unless you wanna enter a- Gay relationship ...Malcolm Collins: gaySimone Collins: marriage, that’s fine. The, the, the people who hate you will love that so.Malcolm Collins: But I- It’s- But I think that this, this can be applied to sexual, like, in, in regards to, like, kinks.‘Cause I think in our [00:40:00] society we frame kinks as being, like, hugely sinful. Whereas I would point out that a lot of kinks that you may engage with have literally no negative externality but the time you waste.Simone Collins: Well, yeah, like- Like- ... that, and this, this came up when we were discussing Byron, Byron Nome, Christy Nome’s husband, who had the- Yeahfemmification interest. Had he just, like, found a community that would, like, exchange this stuff and talk about it or whatever, and, like, he, he got his big boobs and everything and, like, did his thing without spending tons of money, I would not have really seen it as sinful. It’s like, you do you. Like, that’s fun for you.I get it. Go ahead. Like, have... This is great. It’s very common, okay? Like, it’s an extremely common thing. But instead he spent, I think, over $20,000, maybe even over $16,000 on just, like, one person, and that’s where, okay, like, this is, this is to your family’s detriment. This is to your financial detriment.Like, this is money that could have kept you stable in retirement. This is money that you could have contributed towards something that’s aligned with your [00:41:00] values. ‘Cause I doubt his values were-Malcolm Collins: Yeah, yeah ... supporting women who- and, and this is where, like, okay, so, so suppose a kink, like, we’re gonna rate kinks here ‘cause this, this is useful to, to, to, to be aware of.If, if you’re engaging with it in an entirely fictional context, like an AI-generated whatever thing the negative externalities it can have to your life are incredibly low, especially if it’s on a local encrypted thing like RFAB or something like that.Simone Collins: Yeah. SoMalcolm Collins: I put that at, like, the lowest category.But if you’re talking about, like, actually acted upon things you know, at the low end you have things like, say, rope binding or something like that, right?Simone Collins: Shibari.Malcolm Collins: Yeah, which is just whatever, right? Whereas at the, the very highest end you have things that are going to make you sterile. These are things like testicle inflation that’s become, ballmaxing it’s called now.OhSimone Collins: my gosh, yeah.Malcolm Collins: No, no, no, no, no. Or orgies or y- you know, something can be very ta- like, a choking fetish is a very tame fetish. Oh,Simone Collins: yeah, don’t. Yeah, don’t, don’t.Malcolm Collins: But if it can cause severe injury- Don’t do it ... don’t engage with it [00:42:00] with another human, right? Like- Don’t do it.Simone Collins: No. No, no, no, no, come on.Lots of people die doing it to themselves. Don’t do, don’t sayMalcolm Collins: that. Oh, to... No, I, I meant, like, use AI or something like that. Just don’t actually doSimone Collins: it. Oh, imagine doing it. No, I think it’s one of those things where you have to feel it. Get, again, if you’re into that, get into cold plunges. Y- you know, again, just I feel like so, so many things.A cold plunge. Do it.Malcolm Collins: Well, yeah. With, with all of this, I don’t think we think about, we think of all depraved things as being at the same relative level of depravity often. And when we talk about the negative externality on other people, this is where something like being a PDA file, like immediately enters the highest category if, if you’re doing that with another human being.Yeah. Whereas something likeLo- l- like el- elcon artwork, which is a very you know, whatever topic online about whether this is immoral or not immoral because it doesn’t involve real underage people. Yeah. But I’d put it in the category of we all know it’s not the same level of immoral. Yeah. If it could tempt you down a [00:43:00] path where the end state is that, then it is extremely immoral for you.Yeah,Simone Collins: in the same way that you say, like, well, getting into, like, team sports can be a, a, a gateway to sports gambling, in the same way that content could be-Malcolm Collins: Yeah, that it can be extremely immoral in that way.Simone Collins: Yeah.Malcolm Collins: I guess what I would say is if any... O- one is, probably my biggest question with this is is there not something else that turns you on just as much or more?Yeah,Simone Collins: can’t, can’t we, yeah, can’t we go with something else? That there... Yeah ‘Cause, yeah, typically most people have a basket of things. Let’s go with something else in the basket.Malcolm Collins: Of all of the various things that turn you on, there probably is something, but I wanna point out that how much worse is an art of this versus it happening to a real human or you consuming content- Ohof it happening to a real human.Simone Collins: Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah,Malcolm Collins: yeah. I, I would say it’s, again, one billionth as bad.Simone Collins: Well, of course.Malcolm Collins: One, yeah, easily less than one billionth as bad probably.Simone Collins: Yeah, which is why people are like, “Why are you [00:44:00] questioning me?” When people are like, “Look, I think that, you know, synthetic versions of this are, you know, not so bad.”But,Malcolm Collins: but, but- ‘Cause compared to- ... do I think that if you’re a fan of Rev Says Desu, the next day you’re gonna be into underage kids or something like that? Like, no, I don’t. Do- Yeah ... do I think that Leaflet fans, ‘cause her character looks very young. She’s very old in the lore, but it looks young. Yeah. Do I think that the next thing you’re gonna be out there- You know, elves, elvesSimone Collins: are quite old.I guess that’s how, isn’t that how, like, anime gets around it? It’s like, well, but she’s like a 200-year-old vampire girl, soMalcolm Collins: it’s fine. Sometimes anime doesn’t care about getting around it, I’m gonna be honest. Okay. Okay. And like Japanese people, we all have our regional temptations. Yeah. You know, it might be Mormons and cucking and Japanese and underage in, you know, my region, and I’ve talked about that before.YeahSpeaker: So if we’re just gonna put things next to each other in a line here, , I might say something like, , furry or anthro corn might lead you to getting into the furry community if you are susceptible to temptations like that, and then that has a high probability of making you become trans, which can have a lot [00:45:00] of negative externalities on your life.So it can be put in a category that is strictly worse than, say, maybe non-furry content, right? , Or if you say something like, , PDA content, right? Like, , l- LCON content that we’ve been talking about here. , It would be strictly worse than the, , anthro content because, , the end state that it might tempt you towards, , being a PDA is way worse.,Speaker: But a lot of things in a drawn context might be morally equal to neutral corn, , outside of maybe it motivates reproduction less. So let’s say like fart content, or, , you’re into pregnant-looking chicks, or you’re into, , breeding fantasies, or you’re into,, being demeaned by people. , All of these would be...Like there’s, th-th-there’s just not that many negative externalities that can lead from this stuff.And while sex that is [00:46:00] purely recreational, , but done with it being understood that the person might get pregnant, in a way where they might get pregnant, and you will keep the baby if they get pregnant. Now keep in mind, it is really bad to have sex where a person might get pregnant and you would never keep the baby., Or even question it. That’s extremely, extremely bad. But if we’re talking about sex with kinks involved, purely for recreation, worse than sex purely for reproduction, but probably better than any category of corn, no matter how kinky it is, unless it risks killing you, like certain types of choking or something like that, right?But when it comes to totally fictionalized contentwhere all of these fall in relation to something else. So if I was gonna say somebody who had never gone extreme with their temptations in any other thing in the past where I would put LCON content with them, it would be at a dramatically lower level of immorality than, , a prostitute.Or, , I’d even say than potentially OnlyFans, because, eh, that’s having an impact on a [00:47:00] real person’s life, , whereas yours has the potential, and likely very low potential given your past, possibility of impact of having another person’s life. So it’s important just to take all of this in context with the negativity of something like this coming from the multiplied probability of, in your case, what it has on somebody else, and then that somebody else’s negative contextSpeaker 26: Finally here, I’d note categories that regardless of a person’s, , susceptibility to temptation that almost never lead people to temptation. An example here would be something like, oh, what falls into this category? Oviposition, I guess. , This is being aroused by putting eggs in someone.As far as I’m aware of, no one has ever actually been seriously, like, done this in a criminal way or in a way that has made somebody else infertile compared to something like putting hamsters [00:48:00] in someone, which apparently has tempted a lot of people. People are like, “Oh, that’s not a real thing,” and then you can look up, like, actual reports from hospitals of it happening, and they’re like, “Well, I mean, I guess it happens.”It’s like, bro, there’s multiple hospital reports about this. This is a real thingMalcolm Collins: but anyway.Simone Collins: Well, I think we’ve- The- ... we’ve given people a lot to think about and I, I hopeMalcolm Collins: that they- The no, hold on. I’m gonna d- talk about a final one, which is murder. Ooh. Murder. Is all murder equally bad?Simone Collins: Wow ...Malcolm Collins: so here, if you believe... A- and for people who say life begins at conception, I think they intuitively, even if they believe this, I don’t know any of them who if told there’s a six-year-old child in this room, and there’s 10 just fertilized blastocysts in this room in cold storage, right?You can either unplug the blastocysts in this room or unplug something in this room that painlessly kills the six-year-old child. I don’t think anyb- anybody, any Catholic is going to choose the [00:49:00] 10 blastocysts over the six-year-old child. Because I think we all intuit even if those are 100% human lives, it’s not the same thing as a 10...A six-year-old or a 10-year-old, right? Like, and we need to investigate morally where does this intuition come from. And i- and it’s an intuition that I think feels incredibly strong for people, right? One is, and I think the, the first thing that, that people go is, is they’re like, “Yeah, but realistically, for me to turn those six blastocysts into a six-year-old kid with all of the emotions, experiences, connected lives that that kid has, and potentiality that kid has, requires a willing woman,” right?Right now with the technology we have. Now, this is why I think we have a huge mandate to develop artificial wombs, but with the technology we have, there is some intermittent step which makes the blastocysts more morally equivalent to [00:50:00] 10 people on life support who have a doctor’s diagnosis of 10 days left to live, but if you spent a billion dollars, you might be able to save them, or one healthy six-year-old, right?I think that that’s the moral equation that they’re doing in their heads. But now, now we have a moral equation here where we can say, “Oh, the life of somebody who’s about to die and on life support does not have the same value as the life of a healthy child,” right? Because the potential future of that life without external intervention of a type that you cannot afford to do yourself, is significantly lower.And now this leads us to the second thing, which is this says, okay, now you get to choose between lives. The life of a six-year-old versus the life of a baby versus the life of a 70-year-old, okay? [00:51:00] Now, if anybody is, you know, you can, you can put $10 million down and save one of these lives, and you don’t have more money than that Or increase the probability of saving one of these lives.The moral intuition that comes out of this I actually think is quite different than what most people would assume. I think a lot of people are gonna assume, well, baby first, then six-year-old, then elderly person, if you’re just doing a str- a straight utilitarian calculation. But the reality of mor- moral intuition is that I actually think the calculation is m- very obvious in most people’s minds.It’s 10-year-old first, then baby, then elderly person. And the question can be, why do you put the baby below the 10-year-old, right? And the answer is, is because outside of the fact that it’s a sickly baby and probably gonna get sick again, but there are a lot of things that could randomly end up ending that baby’s life and that makes it reliant on another [00:52:00] person before it becomes that 10-year-old ready to jump off and make all of the potential impacts that they’re about to make on the world that make the baby’s life, like not, not much worse to save.I, I’d say like 2 to 3% worse, but some degree less than the, the, Also, the, the, the 10-year-old has an awareness of what’s happening to them that the baby doesn’t have that I think makes it more horrifying, their death. But this is just my moral intuition. Again, you can take your moral intuitions differently.And the people who wanna say everybody’s life has the same value I mean, I don’t think God thinks that, right? Like, he killed random babies all the time and like, you know, when he was killing the, the Egyptians’ firstborn sons, or when he told us to, to kill all the Amalekites or the Midianites or whatever, the, the few times when he told us to kill everyone.And even punished Saul for not doing it. So you can’t say, “Oh, it was just the way war was done at that time.” No, that was an active decision on God. Any thoughts you have on the, the value of a life, Simone? [00:53:00] I,Simone Collins: I think I’m with you in looking at both viability and potential impact. Because if, you know, like, I think a lot of people And I know it’s different for everyone, but what, what our objective function is, and you have to consider your objective function when making a moral calculation.Our objective function is maximizing long-term human flourishing. And that involves focusing on, on, on saving lives that aren’t necessarily going to terminate early anyway and, and involve a lot of suffering, right? That’s, that’s not gonna contribute as much as saving a life that is more likely to live long and make the biggest impact.Yeah. I hear you. SoMalcolm Collins: this is where,Simone Collins: Though I think that you, that you also just don’t like babies as much as I do, so it’s- Yeah ... it’s easier for you to say that. Yeah,Malcolm Collins: it, it, it would... I mean, indulgently you’d want to [00:54:00] save the baby, but I think, like, logically... Now this is where it gets i- in terms of human individual lives, is every individual life equally worth saving if it cost the same amount of money?Speaker 27: I would note here in the context of the Bible, it was important to teach people things because this was not a widely understood concept before the time of Christianity. Like, don’t discriminate against a poor person versus a rich \, person. Don’t judge somebody solely off of wealth. But now society has moved too far in the opposite direction, , where we do not fully grok that some people are doing more to see God’s vision come to a reality or see what needs to happen for humanity come to reality, and other people may live lives that are purely parasitic on the system, and that we act blindly to this, and that we need to begin to, , recognize that while both of their lives may have [00:55:00] dignity, they are not equal in value in terms of if you can only save one, if you can only...You know, you, in, in some sort of broad, vague sense, they may be equal in value, but in terms of, like, practical, I have to do something to save one, they’re very obviously not because of the long-term effects they’re going to have on other people’s lives. , And, and note here, this could be a person who’s super wealthy like the, , CEO of, , UnitedHealthcare, and their life is a negative externality, literally lower in value than, , somebody who is purely a parasite on the system.,Speaker 27: Or more salient modern example, Bricks and Minifigs CEOSo this isn’t like wealthy people’s lives are more valued than less wealthy people’s lives. It’s what you do with that lifeMalcolm Collins: And here we’ll say a random unemployed Somalian versus Elon Musk. Now, did you know that now he’s worth the next, I think, five richest persons’ net worth combined?Simone Collins: Yeah, in, like, certain countries he’s, he’s- ... like, [00:56:00] worth more than them. Surely there’s gonna be a more democratic way- But isn’t he, isn’t he, like, worth more than Canada or something?Or like their GDP. I, I, I can’t remember. But yeah, it’s some- something insane. But I mean, so this, this is something that even came up with COVID, right? Because when vaccines were in short supply, the question came, like, “Well, what lives are we going toMalcolm Collins: save?” Well, and the, and the Democratic establishment at the time, like their White House at the time suggested that it be given to those who’ve been racially disenfranch- basically give it to Black andSimone Collins: Hispanic- Well, so it, it’s clear that people do make, at first...Like I, I keep trying to explain to our kids there’s no such thing as fair. Because you, you have to establish, like well then what is, on what basis, you know, are you dividing a resource? And that depends on your values, and people have different values. And I think that’s the core thing. Mm. Is there is no universal like good or bad thing, or worse or better sin.It really d- it’s all based on how you orient toward yourMalcolm Collins: objective function when it comes- But this, this is where when it comes to the value of a life, the value of Elon’s life is demonstrably- Mm ... more than the random Simoleon in this example, right? The, the reason I bring this up is his pursuit-Simone Collins: Well, that [00:57:00] depends.I mean, for like people who, who devalue capitalists and who value non-capitalists, he doesn’t.Malcolm Collins: Right. But I’m talking about what we think is objectively true about reality. Mm. That our goal in life, any human’s goal in life is to move humanity forwards, right? To, to move human flourishing forward.Simone Collins: Whoa.That’s, that’s our goal, but I don’t get the impression that’s a universal goal.Malcolm Collins: Right. But- ASimone Collins: lot of people’s goals areMalcolm Collins: verySimone Collins: different ...Malcolm Collins: this is a track. This is about what’s religiouslySimone Collins: true. Oh, yeah. Okay, yes, yes. For us, yes.Malcolm Collins: So you can say for them, whatever. I don’t f-ing care what they think. Yeah, okay, okay.They can go in the blender for all I care. ISimone Collins: didn’t know we were talking about just our view.Malcolm Collins: In our worldview, and I believe the worldview of the majority of our fans, the prospective impact of Elon going forwards is enormous when you look at the things that he’s accomplished for the human race so far.Broke wokeism through the acquisition of X, on top of what he’s done for the environment with Tesla, the way he’s moved forward technology with Tesla, SpaceX, X, that he’s dedicated the company’s entire mission to a [00:58:00] Mars colony, right? The like, how cool is that? And the positive externality of a Mars colony, it means even if an asteroid does come that could kill all of humanity or we get a Gray Goo scenario or we get some sort of AI foaming scenario, we get...We have the backup. The backups matter, people.Simone Collins: Okay, but you’re going way off the rails. Going back to murder, and I, I, I did, I... One of our listeners, at least one of our w- listeners pointed out, like, how do you reconcile thou shalt not kill with the fact that there’s a lot of killing in-Malcolm Collins: In the Bible, yeahSimone Collins: yeah. So how do youMalcolm Collins: personally- Because thou shalt not kill does not translate to thou shall not kill in the Bible. It translates to thou shall not murder, which in Jewish law at the time was a very, very specific type of premeditated murder.Simone Collins: Okay, so tell me more. Like, h- how do I know if I’m doing a, a bad per the Old Testament, per the Ten Commandments?Malcolm Collins: Well, I mean, in the Old Testament we see people killing people all the time on behalf of God. [00:59:00] Yeah. It’s basically if the person is an enemy of your people, you have free range on them. That’s, that’s the general... And your people, I think, you know, we can, we can I, I would say, like, any of the saved people, any of the people of God would fall into the our people category here.But if they are creating negative externalities for your people, the Bible’s pretty carte blanche, do what you want. No, not even what you want. You, you have a commandment to deal with the problem. Multiple times throughout the Bible.Simone Collins: Huh. Yeah, I, I would love to learn more about this specific definition of Judaism.Like, per Judaism you say? Uh-huh. Like, of what murder is.Malcolm Collins: Within Judaism, the context is what’s good for the Jewish people, right? And God was very okay with this context throughout the Old Testament, okay? The idea that he doesn’t want us to... And I, and I think that this is the, the line that is twisted the most.To translate it to thou shall not kill is just lying, ‘cause that’s not what it [01:00:00] says. And I don’t, I... Th- this is the one thing I really get annoyed with, with nux when he goes over this all the time. When we end up in a scenario where the other side is blatantly stealing elections, like, let’s suppose.And y- and, and, and your vote doesn’t matter anymore, and you have nowhere to run anymore, and now it’s prima nocta on your daughters right? You have a mandate to fight back Right? Especially when things get tyrannical. Like, I would want our people to be one of the first when things do go full Nazi to actually fight back against that.Real Nazi. You know, like taking away our rights that we’re seeing now, right? To live life the way you want, to breed the way you want, to have children the way you want, to engage with genetic technology the way you want. I think, you know, when these rights are infringed upon, that I think are some of the most important rights that any human can have the, the lengths to which I think we are mandated to go is extreme insofar as it [01:01:00] doesn’t bring down negative externalities on our community, which is a pretty big and soSimone Collins: Right, because as soon as you make yourself an existential threat to another group, that group has a mandate themselves to of course take you out.Mm-hmm. And that’s I think a, a very important calculation.Malcolm Collins: Yeah. And this is where all, because Leaflet wanted to talk about this, you know, on... An individual within the techno-puritan phase has a mandate to stay armed with the highest degree of lethality armament for your level of technology, ‘cause you know, you don’t wanna get stuck like the Sikhs do with stupid knives that is practical for your context.So for example, if you’re on a spaceship, you probably don’t want something that’s n- accidentally gonna crack through the hull of the spaceship, right? But you do still want something that is lethal. And this came from the Sikh context, right? Like anybody who looks at techno-puritanism at this point can tell [01:02:00] this is a real religion, right?Like this is obviously like a sincerely held religion, and this tract explains our views on you know, you should not... They really say don’t just go out and, and, and kill random negative externalities in society, ‘cause that makes our community into a negative externality for other communities that don’t have these views.So that is where it makes sense to not go out there and make a, a, a jerk of yourself. But clearly these are our real religious views. And so within any government system, I think they have to respect this if they’re respecting it for Sikhs. And I’ve, and I’ve now explained logically why we have these views and why we believe we have a mandate for self-protection, because if you go into public without self-protection, you are putting yourself and your family at risk.And so if you are over the age 18 you have a mandate for self-protection at all times. Because it, it’s up to you to not just protect yourself, but all of the other people who could be killed or have their lives removed in any sort of negative [01:03:00] externality event like a live su- shooter situation for example.Now you are a positive externality because you can end that.Simone Collins: Hmm.Speaker 3: And note here, this is not me telling you this for funsies. If you take a literal interpretation of the Christian Bible, this is what we are commanded to do. So if you look at something like Luke 22:35-38: Then Jesus asked them, “When I sent you without purse, bag, or sandals, did you lack for anything?”“Nothing,” they answered. He then said to them, “But now if you have a purse, take it, and also a bag; and if you don’t have a sword, sell your cloak and buy one. It is written, ‘And he who was numbered with the transgressors,’ and I tell you that this must be fulfilled in me. Yes, that which is written about me is reaching its fulfillment.”The disciples said, “See, Lord, here are your two swords.” “That’s enough,” he replied. So a few notes here. In the Greek, most modern interpretations take this to mean that there were only two swords among all of the disciples. , However, it doesn’t exclusively mean that in Greek. It [01:04:00] could mean they all had two swords or he alone had two swords., So what I take this to mean is that you don’t need to arm yourself with more than two, , lethal, , close-range, , weapons. , And the way that I would generally handle this speaking is that you need to be armed with at least one, because he does say you, you need a sword more than the cloak on your back, right?, And that for the other, I would use something that is faster disabling, like a taser or something like that, , because that falls into... within the category of him. Back then, they wouldn’t have had something like that, so the idea , is first you arm yourself with something lethal, then you arm yourself with something quick., And this is if you are taking what we are going to call theOath of preservation, which is to say that you take responsibility of your own life to yourself, and if you allow yourself to die because you went out in public and you were killed by somebody who you should have been able to defend yourself against, but you weren’t because you did not take the oath of preservation, , that’s your responsibilityMorally speaking, that rests on your soul, [01:05:00] morally speakingSpeaker 3: in the same way an unaliving is, in the same way self-harm is, in the same way, , a skydiving accident is, , which we consider quite sinful.and I wanna really focus on the words here so we can understand what Jesus is saying in this context. He’s basically saying, “When we were doing our preaching, when I was doing my preaching with you guys, , we were doing it in a pacifistic way, and in a way that was monastic.”You know, where you don’t have a - coin purse, et cetera. , He’s like, “And now that we’re moving into the next era, you know, after my death,” which this is one of the last teachings he gave us. , “After my death, it will not be monastic. You are demanded to not go into the monastic lifestyle, to go out there, to be industrious, to have the coin purse.And secondarily, to be armed, and to expect persecution, and thus be armed.” , So even if you’re looking at the, , the swords in this context and you do think, “Oh, it meant two swords for the entire group,” he’s still not even talking about this context. He’s talking about [01:06:00] the context for after he’s dead, where everyone is expected to always be armed at all times. And note here, some people will then say, “Didn’t Jesus say something like, “Live by the sword, die by the sword,” as an abnomation of armed conflict?Speaker 3: , And if you hear-- would then say something like, “Well, what about, you know, when, ...”Jesus says in Matthew when one of his companions takes a sword and chops the ear off of somebody who’s trying to arrest Jesus,, “For all of those who draw the sword will die by the sword. , Do you not think you can call on my Father, and he will put at disposal more than 12 legions of angels? But how then would the scriptures be fulfilled that say it must happen in this way?”, So note here, he’s not saying broadly. He’s, he’s very explicitly not saying in a general context all who live by the sword die by the sword. He’s saying all who live by the sword in opposition to God’s plan, and right now he’s saying it is God’s plan that I am supposed to die in just the near future., And, You, you also see this because the same scene is recorded in, in John [01:07:00] 18:10. , “Put your sword away. Shall I not drink the cup the Father has given me?” , So the reason he says to not use a sword in this context is because, , he is trying to fulfill a prophecy here, and he’s beginning to interfere with the prophecy., So his previous commandment, which one of his last, that you are supposed to be armed at all times, and if you don’t have a sword, you should have... And keep in mind, sword in context changes, , in modern context. We are all, not just techno-puritans, all Christians supposed to always be armed Because we have responsibility for our lives and the lives of those around us.And note here, this, this is not a particularly weird thing for Jews in this time period. Almost all Jews were armed most of the timeThis is why when they were like, here are two swords, Jesus, is that enough? I don’t think they meant for all of them together, as that would have been an absurdly low number of swords for Jews to have during that time period. It seems much more likely they mean, is two swords enough now that you’re telling me that I need swords?That, in context, [01:08:00] appears a much more likely, even if it’s not what the mainstream Christian denominations want you to understand and will fight against, interpretation of what’s being said here in a literalist context.So here you can see something like Nehemiah 4:16-18. , “The officers posted themselves behind all the people of Judea who were building the wall. Those who carried materials did their work with one hand and held a weapon in the other, and each of the builders wore his sword on the side as he worked.” , Nehemiah 4:14, “Don’t be afraid of them.Remember the Lord, who is great and awesome, and fight for your brothers and sons and daughters, your wives, your home.” , Basically talking about arming oneself as being a duty within the community and it being normal within the community. In Samuel 25:13, “David said to his men, ‘Each of you strap on your sword.’So each of them strapped on his sword, and David strapped on his as well,” implying that all the men had swords ready to strap on. , In Psalms 14:4-1, “Praise be to the Lord my rock, who trains my hands for war, my fingers [01:09:00] for battle.” , Again, showing that the Lord does want war. He does want battle. That is part of what is expected of us when we are faced with evil.Speaker 28: also have Nehemiah 4:13. They stationed arms by families with swords and spears and bows.We haveSpeaker 29: Psalms.Speaker 28: 14:41, “Praise be to the Lord my mo- rock, who trains my hands for war, my fingers for battle.”Speaker 29: . Basically, it’s all over the Bible. Wherever you look at the Old Testament, , people are expected to fight for their own peopleSpeaker 4: So officially, how does this work within techno puritanism? , There are two potential oaths that you can take, the oath of self-preservation, which is taking responsibility for your life and the lives of those around you, And the secondary oath of self-preservation, which is a more maximal form of this.Once you have taken one of these oaths, going forwards, you are expected to undergo what is mandated by that oath. After the first oath of self-preservation in any context where you might encounter [01:10:00] somebody who is also armed with a lethal weapon, it is upon you or your responsibility to also be armed with a lethal weapon., This means that if in a context like, say, a plane flight or something like that, actually there is no chance that even a Sikh is gonna be on that plane with a lethal weapon, you don’t have to have a le-lethal weapon. But if you’re just, like, walking around town, absolutely you have to have a lethal weapon on you.’, So it has one small caveat, which is if one of the types of places where no one can have a lethal weapon is in your way of a secondary location where some people might have a lethal weapon, but you will be in for a short period of time, you are not mandated to have a lethal weapon.So this would mean if you have taken the oaths , of preservation, , and you are going on a vacation somewhere, you don’t need to then buy a sword when you get to that location if you were not able to carry yours in your luggage, right? , So this is the first oath of preservation. The secondary oath of preservation is to take this more [01:11:00] maximally because, , frankly, just a lethal weapon, , which implies generally a short-range weapon, is not going to be everything you need to protect yourself from most of the dangers of this world.And so the secondary oath of self-preservation is more maximalist and says... While the first one says you can have up to two, ,, the second one says you are mandated to have a short-range lethal or disabling weapon and a long-range lethal weapon, , with the long-range one being lethal.So this would mandate both, , something short-range and something long-ranged. And generally, you would take the first oath about six months to a year before you take the second oath. , While it is generally advised that most techno-puritans take the first oath at around the age of eighteen going forwards.It is not a mandate to be a follower of our religionAnd it is not advised if you are in an environment where it may prevent you fromSpeaker 4: doing business or [01:12:00] advocating the interests of our people more broadly, , because it could within certain cultural contexts. , And , the secondary oath is only for people who want to maximally dedicate themselves to this and requires regular training in whatever that long-range weapon isSpeaker 15: Final note on this oath is, and you are responsible for recognizing this in yourself or having this imposed on you by your community, but if you ever reach a state of mind where you are now a danger to those around you or you are too aggressive in the way you might use something like this, ,It, it is a moral necessity for you to either for that period not be armed, , or period, period not be armed for the rest of your life. So if you have something like dementia, you would not be armed during that period. If you are drinking, , heavily, you would have a mandate to not be armed during that period or on any sort of mind-altering chemicalMalcolm Collins: And never, as [01:13:00] a techno-puritan, broadly speaking never do like a, a mass shooting or something like that. There is just no point to it. It doesn’t achieve our ends. There, there are ways that lethality can be handled that do not hurt innocent individuals.Simone Collins: Yeah.Speaker 12: Basically, we just expect you to be dramatically more cunning as a techno-puritan than the type of people who would do something so witless. You know, if you want to mass effect action, use a gene drive or something like that.Simone Collins: Yeah.Malcolm Collins: And, and this means to be demonstrably sure of the guilt of an individual even in scenarios like say somebody is out there saying, you know, “My group needs to go out and murder people.” Like they’re, even if they’re not doing it themselves, they’re out preaching this every day. Like murder innocent people, grape children, something like that.If this is being preached do you have a moral license to do something about this? Absolutely within this faith system. But, but this is only if, if what they are [01:14:00] preaching is manifold worse and being acted upon by people. If they’re like a crazy person on the street, that’s doesn’t matter. If you’re in an environment where people are being killed regularly I think that we have a moral mandate to intervene in this so yeah, that’s a, a, a broader understanding of, of morality, sinfulness, where to engage with stuff.The final thing I wanted to note here, which comes downstream of one of the questions somebody had on the, the stream about, like, the actual ruling in this on techno-paganism, if you’re a follower Is what is the ruling on techno-puritanism around if you feel that you are able to develop more emotional control long stream by emotionally venting in the short term?Now first I would note here, I think the research demonstrably shows that it- you lose self-control the more you indulge in it. If y- if you feel that you have a better ability to deal with your grief by crying and letting it out, and this is something that you’ve experienced [01:15:00] and you know yourself, sure.But know you’re in dangerous territory if you’re doing that. Because for most of us, what happens is the things that make us sad in life are the things where, Like I didn’t really feel that sad when my mom died because I knew I had done everything I could to be a good son to her and to give her a good life within reason throughout her entire life.I’d always been there for her, and so I was like, “I don’t really have any regrets on any interaction I’ve had with her. I have regrets that she won’t be able to see my kids, but like, that’s not something that I have control over, so there’s no reason to feel sad about this.” But there have been times when I have done things that I feel deep regret about, and there is this emotion that you feel.Like if you feel grief in that moment, if you cry, if you blame yourself, if you hit something, the responsibility, your self-responsibility, your anger at yourself can deservedly be lesser. And I think we all sort of feel this voice in our heads. And what I’m [01:16:00] talking about is not giving into that voice, because that voice is lying to you.It doesn’t lower your culpability. Instead what you should do is instead of giving into that voice saying, “No, I need to learn from this. Okay, I wasn’t there for my mom as much as I needed to be. Is my dad still alive? Is anyone else in my life still alive? Are, are my family members that are estranged still alive that I should reconnect with?”It should flip a switch for you in regards to all of that. The final thing is I’ll note that this entire ethical subset that we’ve discussed here also applies to interpersonal relationships. If an interpersonal relationship is purely masturbatory, you get nothing from it, it doesn’t enrich you, it doesn’t help you understand the world better.Like when I talk with Leaflet, I often come away with entirely new framings of society. So true. A great one she gave that I’m gonna put it in the track here because it’s gotta go on a track somewhere, is I was talking about as humans genetically engineer themselves, we’re likely gonna [01:17:00] see different groups with different preferences begin to look very differently, where you might see techno-puritans end up looking like space marines one day, right?Like giant super intelligent, super, you know, two hearts, everything like that. Adonis type figures. You might see another group, like let’s say Jews spec- ... spec into like a high agility build. And no, this isn’t a commandment for techno-pyrogenethums. You guys need to find out what works, what’s, what’s the correct build to spec into.Spec into an agility build. You know, they become the cat people of the far future or something like this. And I was talking about how this makes diversity even more valuable when you have a real groups with differential strengths. And what Leaflet said is she goes, “Look, if this is confusing to you, think about this.”You’re putting together your space boarding party. This is like, you know, y- your crew for a spaceship. This is like you putting together- ... your adventuring guild, right? You, you want, you know, yeah, your Orkan warrior and your, you know, dwarven workshop guy, and your [01:18:00] elven mage, and your, you know, y- you, you want all of the different builds in there, right?That is how you build the best party. You would be stupid to make your entire party, you know, human or dwarf. Or y- you, you can do it for some sort of novelty reason, but we genuinely benefit from working alongside other groups. Even if the dwarves and the elves sometimes screw each other over, a party’s still better off having a dwarf and an elf in it.And I think that that’s an important thing to think about. But the reason I was saying that this matters with friendships is I think we all know that there are friendships that we engage in in our lives, or relationships we engage in, that do nothing but drain from us. Those are directly sinful to have, and if you’re afraid that you’re a bad person for abandoning this person because oh, well, if you weren’t there for them, who would be?If you don’t have a moral mandate to that individual, like they’re a parent of yours or something and even then this is tentative, if they are draining resources that could otherwise be going to the next [01:19:00] generation cut ‘em off. This also goes for parents. A parent who is draining resources that should be going to the next generation and isn’t contributing, cut ‘em off.Because the next generation, the younger generation matters more than the older generation. And, and, and cut ‘em off can mean pull the plug. And this is also true of ourselves if we ever become drains to our families.Simone Collins: Yeah, we hold to that.Malcolm Collins: Anyway. If you’re gonna be like, “Oh, God says all life has value,” then why did he tell people to randomly kill people sometimes?Why did he tell you to, to, to... Why did he punish Saul? It’s because that’s clearly not what God wants. God wants what’s best for society. That’s why he has guided, and the groups that have followed him have always lived- ... the, in the most flourishing of societies, the most prosperous of societies. Because that’s the downstream effect.That’s why all the sins that we get as Christians generally make your life better. But they need to also generally make society better, and so we’re extrapolating from that. Anyway, thoughts, Simone?Simone Collins: I probably agree. Yes. [01:20:00] Yeah. And I think it’s important al- to, also to note that a lot of the more, le- less sinful things you’ve pointed out would be seen as very sinful things to do per today’s standards, and just going with what feels socially comfortable is not necessarilyMalcolm Collins: the right thing. Yeah. And note here when it comes to weapons, you also have a duty to secure them, a, a religious duty to secure them, because an unsecured weapon can end a child’s life at any moment.Simone Collins: Yeah. Well, and that’s most gun deaths in America, right? It’s tragic, so yeah. Any, anyway, itMalcolm Collins: also- But even if you, even if you hate our religion, if you want the right to carry a weapon, techno-puritanism is the way to go.Speaker 9: And note, in terms of what the weapons look like, you can go in generally a few directions for the traditional weapons. One is to go with something that represents your ancestral group or that has ancestral ties to the Technopuritan tradition. Since we personally take [01:21:00] a lot from our own Scottish ancestry and we lean a lot into Roman ancestry, that could be a dirk or a gladius.Or something that is inconspicuous if you think that that is the most efficient, like a belt buckle knife or something like that. It really depends on, one, your own heritage and identity and how you wish to honor that, and two, what works within your existing social context. With the understanding also always being that if everyone else is banned from having a weapon, then there’s no risk of you being killed in that situation or needing to protect someone, so you also don’t need a weapon.But if any other religious group is allowed a weapon, because Jesus told us that we have to do this, and I know a lot of other Christian groups and denominations have pussied out of this in one way or another, but we are not them. And more is expected of us in terms of protecting ourselves and our communities than most of them expect from themselves.Most of them live incredibly indolent, self-centered, [01:22:00] and efficaciousless lives. Why should we part our moral standards to theirs?Simone Collins: There you go. Love it. All right, well, I will go start your dinner, and I love you very much.Malcolm Collins: Aw, thank you so much. I really appreciate it. Good tract, I think.Simone Collins: Yeah. Interesting stuff, and I, yeah, sins are under-discussed, so I’m glad we’re going back into them.Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Love you. Bye.Simone Collins: Recording. We are here. We are back. It is happening.Malcolm Collins: Yeah, people, people like the medieval shirt on the leaflet call, so I decided I... It was okay to wear it on our-Simone Collins: It’s good. It’s good. It’s, Mm ... the stuff that really signals BDSM is leather straps.Malcolm Collins: Yeah, that’s what ISimone Collins: was worried it appeared it looked- They ruin leather straps.Yes, I mean- That’s why we didn’t buy anything with leather straps, yeah ...Malcolm Collins: instead of [01:23:00] medieval. ‘Cause what I’m going for is Ren Fair man, because everybody says I make my wife dress like she’s from the past, so why don’t I dress like I’m from the past? And I go, “I don’t make my wife dress that way,” but, youSimone Collins: know.I chose this outfit. This is not, like, something you made me... I was like, I showed up one day wearing this stuff, and Malcolm’s like, “Well, okay.”Malcolm Collins: Okay. I guess this is what we’re doing. All right. What are we doing for dinner tonight, by the way?Simone Collins: I’m gonna make some kind of pasta dish for the kids. It might be macaroni and cheese.It might not. I don’t know. Is it gonna have, like,Malcolm Collins: a meat sauce or a... What, what type of sauce?Simone Collins: I... Probably a macaroni and cheese sauce or possibly just Parmesan cheese. Okay. I, I don’t know yet. It sort of depends on what the kids want, what mood they’re in. I’m okay with macMalcolm Collins: and cheese tonightSimone Collins: if- Mac and cheese?Malcolm Collins: if you’re doing that, yeah.Simone Collins: It suits their, their cheesy fancy. It might suit your cheesy fancy, too.Malcolm Collins: Oh, no. I can do a reheated potato tonight.Simone Collins: Yeah, you can with cheddar? Do a reheatedMalcolm Collins: potato with cheese.Simone Collins: Okay. Cheesu. [01:24:00] Like cheddar, right? Yeah.Malcolm Collins: Yeah, and then some of those meat patty things, the pork ones. Yeah,Simone Collins: bon cha, or whatever they’re called.I don’t know.Malcolm Collins: Okay. Pork bon cha. They’re really good. They go really well with cheesy baked potato, I’ll tell you what.Simone Collins: That makes a lot of sense. With some pepper on it, yeah.Malcolm Collins: Yeah.Simone Collins: And this time I’m gonna try to make, what, slices and just air fry them and see what happens.Malcolm Collins: Let’s try it.Simone Collins: What could possibly go wrong?It better be better, because it’s gonna get crispier when you air fry it. In theory. We don’t know. If it’s an already baked potato, it might be pretty much like... Potatoes are very strange in, like, w- the starch doing things that I don’t understand, ‘cause I don’t know potato science. I’m not a potato scientist.Speaker 30: Let’s unpack everything right here, okay? All right. Yeah. W- now let’s get this mask out right here. I get this out right here. You can’t wait to start using them, huh? Yeah, I just can’t wait. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit basedcamppodcast.substack.com/subscribe

Kirsche joins Based Camp for an in-depth conversation on her journey from TERA PvP gamer to one of the most influential conservative VTubers. She discusses surviving a major cancellation attempt by Vice, her deep research exposing “Bridge” (the successor to DEI initiatives), why boycotts alone aren’t enough, and how the VTuber community helped turn the cultural tide.Malcolm and Simone Collins dive into tactics for defeating woke capture in gaming and corporations, the power of parallel institutions, AI tools for creators, building alternative economies, and why nerdy weirdos are winning the culture war. Topics include abortion radicalization stories, pronatalism, free speech, and practical ways conservatives can create better systems.Episode TranscriptMalcolm Collins: it Hello, everyone. I am so excited to be here with you today. Today, we actually are doing a collab with Kirsche, which is so exciting, ‘cause I’ve wanted to do this one forever. It’s like everything’s coming in at once. And the context on Kirsche, if you are not familiar with who she is or her cultural relevance, because it’s m- hugely outsized, I think.My entire life within nerdy cultural niches, we had the wokes and the proto-wokes come in, whether it was video games, whether it was, you know, cons, whether it was trading cards, whether it was y- you know, anime. They’d come in, and they would screw it all up, and they would take it over, and they’d push us out.And every time it happened, it just felt like th- there was this endless tide, and it was gonna forever happen to everything I ever had an interest in. And then one fateful day, a sort of the [00:01:00] last wave, this happened in the VTuber community. And it happened specifically targeted at Kirsche. And when this happened, we did a number of videos on it.And Kirsche, unlike every other person before her, h- held her ground and held it in a way where they actually holistically retreated. And they retreated to such an extent that post this, a conservative VTuber scene has begun to grow. And I mean, it was there beforehand, but now it feels much livelier and much more like a core part of the wider conservative movement, and it’s been beginning to regain crowd.So, like, after your attempted cancellation, you then had the guy who tried to do this to the horror space in, in favor of shadows. I don’t know if you remember this whole controversy. I do. But he tried to claim the horror space, and he got absolutely eviscerated immediately. Yes. Absolutely thrown out i- i- immediately.[00:02:00]And so her being in this, it felt very much likeSpeaker: And then we’ll know how to beat them. One day it will all be over, and everyone will forget that this was the moment. This is when it turned. And it wasn’t the mightyDaily WireSpeaker: , it wasn’tSome fancyHeritage Foundation reportSpeaker: There’s aSpeaker 4: VtuberSpeaker: namedSpeaker 4: KirscheSpeaker: DoSpeaker 2: now! Yeah.Good job,Speaker 4: Reporter.Speaker 3: Thank you, sir. That would beSpeaker 4: fox girlSpeaker 3: , sir.Speaker 2: Carry on, .Speaker: Yes, sir.Malcolm Collins: or,Malcolm Collins: But, but after this point while... And, and this is something w- I, I wanna talk about. While culturally we seem to be winning more, like, our ability to do something like boycott Harley Davidson or [00:03:00] Tractor Supply...By the way, they’re super woke, Simone. I don’t know if you know this. Oh, yeah. To the extent that they’ve actually changed their policies has not been effective. But in the spaces we’ve been closer to, like the video game space, like the Ubisoft boycotts basically we learned we have to put these companies out of business.Mm-hmm. And so I wanna talk with you about that experience, like you getting into this space before the, the big cancellation attempt How you thought about and managed that and how the culture has changed post thatKirsche: All right. Okay. So I guess the starting point is, like, how, how did I feel during the cancellation?No,Malcolm Collins: no, how’d you get into VTub- Like, when you got into VTubing, did you intend to be a political Vtuber?Kirsche: No, not really. I mean, I first got into VTubing back in, like, 2018, and I w- I wasn’t even, like, a Vtuber proper then. I was just, like, a PNGTuber. I or- originally started, like, without even a microphone.Like, two weeks of streaming, [00:04:00] no microphone, no nothing ‘cause I had just quit my job at an insurance company after an elongated period of my anxiety being incredibly bad. And so at this point in time I was hopped up on, like, three different anxiety medications and I was just like, “Well, I don’t wanna just sit around and do nothing all day.I feel like I should at least try to do something that could help my anxiety get better.” Well, my name is pretty well-known in the Tera community, so if I started streaming I would already have, like, a small audience of people who would be there, and then I could use that as, like, I’m gonna interact with people more frequently.I’m gonna, you know, get a bit out of my safe bubble of, like, I only wanna do text communications. And so, like, eventually, you know, obviously I started using my microphone. I got a PNG. So, so basically- I d- got a, like, animated GIFMalcolm Collins: How did you know the Tera community? What, what, w- w- what was your, your experience there?Kirsche: I was one of the best PVPers on the server for many, many years. I was frequently rank one on the rank board whenever like, Fraywin Canyon would have its, like, [00:05:00] rollovers. I didn’t do threes as often, but I absolutely loved Fraywin Canyon and I loved doing like, guild PVP and whatnot. Like, it, it was really weird, like, coming into a streamer scene and seeing people like Lakari, who I had healed for, like, years before, already being huge streamers, right?I was just like, “What the heck?” Zenosas Vex, I, I played with him in, like, Final Fantasy XIV raiding as well. So, like, to see all these people who, like, had been in, like, raid groups or PVP groups before in different games with me, I was like, “Oh. I was streaming. Streaming’s got pretty robust, is it not?”So itMalcolm Collins: was like a- ‘Cause, like,Kirsche: previously I never paid attention to it ... social thing.Malcolm Collins: It, it was like an alternative to what people used to do. Like, I’m, I’m gonna get out there and, and build a social life. It was like-Kirsche: Yeah ...Malcolm Collins: that... Okay, so that’s fascinating. Okay, so now describe how you go from there to, like, what radicali- what, what got you on the I’m actually gonna start talking, because we didn’t start talking about politics either.We, we had no interest in that to start. A- in fact, we started with pretty progressive political beliefs, Ooh ... getting into the space and everything. So what w- what hap- [00:06:00] was it that you were a conservative during this time or you had conservative-like beliefs, or were these beliefs that you developed over time in the space, or you just felt more comfortable talking about over time?Kirsche: I would say I was probably already on the conservative path at this point. For the 2016 election I had been registered independent basically since I could register to vote, and for the 2016 election I changed my registration from independent to Republican so that I could vote for Trump in the primary And I, I guess I had been talking about, like, the nonsense with transgender targeting children probably since about 2011, 2012 or so.Oh, that was impossible back then. Like, just in my personal life. Yeah.Malcolm Collins: Yeah, that was like- And I- ... you’d get canceled, fired for talking about that- Yeah ... like, 2011.Kirsche: Yeah. And, and I, I’d post about it, like, on my Facebook, you know, which I didn’t have many p- friends on Facebook, ‘cause I’m not a huge social media person.So I would just, like, post about it occasionally there. And so when I started streaming when my friend who would come and voice chat with me, my [00:07:00] old head moderator, Tangerine, he he would get our groups together. So he would either put us in Duty Finder and we would wait for ages, or he would, like, put it up in an LFG and we’d get other human beings.While he was doing that, I would just read articles on stream. And so sometimes I would get through, like, a paragraph. Sometimes I’d get through, like, half of it. Sometimes I would have enough time to finish it. But it was like I would read that in between, like, waiting for dungeons because I just, I enjoyed reading the news in my off time.Mm-hmm. And I didn’t have anybody in, like, real life to talk about the news with because they were all, like, either apolitical or like, “Yeah, I just don’t care. I just... It doesn’t matter to me.” So it was nice to like, you know, talk to this few people in my audience then who were also interested, like, in what was going on politically in America.And it kind of shifted once a lot more of, I guess, leftist policy kind of stuff started being her- heralded in the VTuber community as apolitical. And so it’s like you could see all of the leftist rot coming in like it did to comics, like it did to video games- Yeah ... like it did to other things, and everyone being like, [00:08:00] “Well, that’s not political, but Kirsche is political.”And it’s like, you know what? Let’s talk politics even more now because I don’t want what happened to all of my other favorite things to happen to VTubing.Malcolm Collins: That’s fascinating. So, one story I’ve heard from some other VTubers we’ve talked to about this is there was like, there was a big shift after the release of the Harry Potter game.Mm-hmm. Because a bunch of people hadn’t realized how captured the space had become-Kirsche: Yeah ...Malcolm Collins: until they just tried to stream what they thought of as a fairly innocuous game. But it sounds like you broke the seal even before that based on, and I think a lot of people don’t realize this about a part of American culture because I, because I talk about this with, with very specific groups often, where I’m like, when you are calling out a group for something that feels very justified to you and then they start yelling at you saying, “Oh, that’s, you know, anti-Mormon or anti-Jewish or anti,” you know, whatever.And I’m like, no, this is like a reasonable thing. I think a lot of just like a culturally American thing to do is to double down on it. Be like, you [00:09:00] can’t police me for something that’s a perfectly reasonable thing to say. I’m gonna double down because you attempted to do that. And that’s sort of what drove you into this.Kirsche: Yeah. And, and it’s like, and people, people like to be like VTuber purists, and I think that’s fine, where they’re just like VTubers will only play games, they’ll only do like cute girl doing cute things, like idle activities. And I think it’s fine to be a VTubing purist. Obviously, I’m very much outside of the typical idle culture since I do talk politics.Yeah. And it’s like I feel like once, once we start making more gains and we stop having like the colonization of our spaces, then I can kind of finally be like, okay, I still enjoy talking politics, but I can actually go back to playing more games like I used to instead of having to talk about politics all the timeMalcolm Collins: Well, you do a very good job, and for people who haven’t watched her stuff, I often describe her as the top of the funnel for our sort of intellectual ecosystem.Which is to say you often do the original research, which then drips out of all the various taps [00:10:00] who watch all of whatever’s trending right now. ?Speaker 5: Federal scientists are working around the clock to probe its secrets. Once we understand the bug, we will defeatitMalcolm Collins: When did you begin to get into the deep research? ‘Cause that must take a ton of time ...Kirsche: for the Bridge stuff specifically, man, I, I don’t have a ton of time to watch content creators like I used to, just ‘cause I’m a creator myself now.Yeah But I used to watch a ton of videos and stuff from, like, ItsAGundam and Tim Pool and The Quartering. Yeah. And I originally even started watching Tim Pool way back in the day because he was, he was, like, firmly on the left. And I was like- Yeah ... this is a guy that, like, has some things in common with me, but I disagree with a lot of other things.Let’s watch him, because that’s a great way to expose myself to, you know, the other side of ideas, and sort of solidify how I feel based on his arguments, you know? So it was, it was really nice. And then over time, obviously, he became more center and left a lot [00:11:00] of the left-leaning stuff behind. But The Quartering had made a video, and he had a sponsor, and I can’t even remember what the sponsor was for, but it basically, like, told you how woke a, a, a company was-by using it. So you could, like, scan an item and it would give you, like, a woke score for the company. And they were like, “Here’s the top 10 most woke companies of, like, 2023,” I think it was or something. And Campbell’s was in there, and I was like, “The soup company? I like their soup. I li- I like their chicken pot pie pub style soup.That’s good.” And I hadn’t, I’d never heard of anything about Campbell’s, even in all of my, like, going through other basic DEI stuff. Yeah,Simone Collins: yeah.Kirsche: And I, I looked them up, and one of the first things I found was that Campbell’s was spearhead funding a project called Bridge. And I was like, “Oh. Well, what’s Bridge?”And I found out that there are, like, two different Bridges. There’s one set up by Social Impact, and then there’s the one that I’ve been digging into by Sharyl Attkisson. And I thought at first when I first found them that they had something to do with each other, because Social Impact was [00:12:00] called, like, Bridge Project 2.0, and Sharyl Attkisson had referred to her project as, like, a, a 2.0 of DEI before.So I was like, “Maybe,” but I couldn’t find any solid connections between those two specifically.Simone Collins: Okay.Kirsche: But going through Sharyl Attkisson’s was like- Wow. And I, I literally could only contribute or attribute it to having watched that, the quartering video. If I’d never watched that, I would have never looked into Campbell’s.Simone Collins: Wait, what, what does, what does Bridge do? I’m out of the loop.Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Simone, Simone’s not in this, this conspiracy also. I didn’tSimone Collins: know.Malcolm Collins: Yeah. So John, shock her in our audience.Simone Collins: Please.Kirsche: So a lot of people when I try bringing up Bridge, they’re just like, “Oh, this is just another renaming of DEI, like Jedi or whatever.”And it’s like, well, no, it’s not. Bridge is a company that is working with tons of other very, very strong, huge corporations. And they have a ton of these corporations who are signed on to like their board of directors or their other like actual, like willing to be publicly associated with Bridge page.Simone Collins: Huh.Kirsche: But a lot of companies who aren’t even on Bridge, they follow the [00:13:00] same exact trajectory of hiding the DEI. And there was an interview with a, a lady who runs a podcast called like DEI After Five, and she was talking to another DEI acolyte saying that a lot of people don’t realize how good DEI is for them.And so you have to hide the DEI vegetables- Oh my God ... in order to get people to eat them to realize that they’re good for them. It’s like the entire purpose for like for years before we started seeing it, Bridge was informing companies on how to obscure DEI, how to make it less public. The entire point of having like a DEI team after 2020 was to obviously showcase like, “Hey, we’re woke.We’re doing the Marxist thing.”Simone Collins: Yeah.Kirsche: Bridge comes in and says, “This is gonna be a problem. You need to dissolve those DEI teams, and you need to embed those DEI acolytes in other parts of the company.” Whoa. Because if people see the like DEI outright, that’s gonna be an attackable vector. That’s gonna be a way to get yourself in legal trouble for discrimination.100%.Simone Collins: Oh,Kirsche: whoa.Simone Collins: Yeah. Yeah. Whoa. Like [00:14:00] first, so there’s this implicit recognition that it is discrimination, and it is gonna get caught, and it is gonna get stopped, but then that’s so interesting ‘cause I listen to still so many leftist outlets. And of course- Mm-hmm ... there’s always the, I mean, just as there were accusations of greenwashing when environmentalism was at its zenith, then there’s the accusationsMalcolm Collins: of like- I, I’m so frustratedSimone Collins: DEIMalcolm Collins: washing My, my brother retired from Doge recently, and that I, I, I should have sent him this, been like, “Hey, just tear-” Oh ... “tear into this.”Simone Collins: Doge did not go far enough. It did not. Oh my gosh. That is insane.Malcolm Collins: But so one of the things that you frequently talk about, and I think it’s an interesting meta conversation to have.Actually, no, we’re gonna wait. I’m gonna be disciplined. Before we get into this- Discipline ... I do wanna get the full history. Oh, yes ... of how, how... Okay, so you began going into the Bridge stuff, w- you, so you got into the Bridge stuff before the Anna Vale thing?Kirsche: Yeah. That was, I started the Bridge like research, I wanna say the end of 2023, and then my first posts about it were beginning of 2024 [00:15:00]Malcolm Collins: Wow.Okay, so that’s when you begin to get into the, the sort of intellectual deep dive. And she does this not just with research on companies, which you do a lot of, of, of great stuff on, but also research on, like if you wanna know about like Joe Money, like go watch her episode about that, right? Like- Yeahshe’ll go, we’ll do an hour long episode. You’ll have like three hours going into it, right? Oh my gosh. Like really deep stuff.Kirsche: And I, I super appreciate my audience as well, because it’s like when I do this Bridge deep dive stuff and I, I wanna like show what I’m looking at so nobody can be like, “Oh, she’s just making it up,” it’s like, no, you can see how I found it while I’m live.Hmm. But it, it is a lot of corpo speak. It is a lot of like dry, “Hey, this is really good information. They’re telling us what they’re gonna do. They’re telling us how they’re going to subvert us,” but it’s very dry, very boring languageMalcolm Collins: Wow. Wow. This, and then this is when, So, so in this part of the timeline, now we’re at the Anna- and the Anna Valen thing was a complete sea change for a lot of people, one, because I think it validated the VTube community for the wider [00:16:00] conservative movement that before it was unsure, like Fox Girl, right?Like, “What? Ugh, I don’t know. That looks weird. That’s like a furry- Yeah ... thing or something,” right? You know? And we see the outlets that were used to sort of affirming, “Oh, you can trust this,” because they’re mad at it, and then all of a sudden I think a bunch of people were like, “Oh, okay. Okay. I’ll, I’ll take a, I’ll take a look at this.”Because the story did so well. I, I don’t know if, if y- so on our video on this, I don’t know if you ever, have you ever dove over Anna Valen’s personal diaries?Kirsche: I don’t know what the personal diaries are, but yeah. We, we found quite a bit on their degenerate interests, I guess you could say.Malcolm Collins: They’re, they’re really sad. Like, basically- ... their, their life falls apart. That’s our episode where we, we call them a cenobite. I don’t know if you know cenobites from Hellraiser.Kirsche: Yes.Malcolm Collins: Yeah. They’re like the life of a cenobite. This is what happens.Kirsche: That’s a, that’s a good word to use.Malcolm Collins: Yeah. We, we, we, we had, like, AI videos where we have, like, cenobites doing book readings with kids and, like-“Why, why are you having trouble with this?” You know, like, chittering [00:17:00] their teeth. Ah. Yeah, right.Simone Collins: But,Malcolm Collins: Then, then post this a really interesting thing happened which was in a huge part because of the, the Vtuber community. W- we go into this deeper in some other episodes, but the Vtuber community is intrinsically more nerdy than other parts of the right.Like Tim Pool, I, I used to be a big Tim Pool fan myself. I, I don’t find his new stuff as interesting as his older stuff, but he you know, he’s still, like, a n- a normal not nerd guy, right? Yeah. But the Vtuber community, almost intrinsic in its identity, is not gonna crash out on anime, like Matt Walsh or something like that.Yeah. It’s not gonna crash out on girls in bikinis.Kirsche: Michael Knowles interviewed a furry recently, so it’s not yet over for me. Maybe I should reach out againSimone Collins: as well.Malcolm Collins: Wait. Who, who interviewed a furry?Kirsche: Michael Knowles. Michael Knowles. He’s part of the- Oh, what furrySimone Collins: did he interview?Kirsche: I have no idea. I just saw some-some video of him on Twitter with, like, a guy in a fur suit in an interview setting, and I was like, “What the hell?”Simone Collins: [00:18:00] Glass ceilings broken.Malcolm Collins: Cra- crazy lore on us. We were supposed to be on the last episode of Tucker Carlson. Oh,Kirsche: wow ...Malcolm Collins: but he was canceled. Yeah, his booking team and everything. That’s crazy.We set up a date and everything like that, and then he got canceled. F*****g S- so angry about that. I mean, I wouldn’t wanna be on Tucker Carlson now. I wouldn’t care as much, but I mean, I still would. He’s big enough, I still would.Simone Collins: Yes, you would. Come on. Yeah.Kirsche: I have no idea what happened to Tucker Carlson.I just know that I like his soundbite of, like, “Y- you’ve been a bad girl, and you’re gonna get a vigorous spanking.” What? Why did you say that? Why did you say that? Oh,Malcolm Collins: we gotta, weKirsche: gottaMalcolm Collins: drop you in on our conspiracies here. So this is one of our biggest conspiracies. It is and I, I don’t know, like, I say it as a joke, but, like, also I wouldn’t put it past him.It’s that whenever somebody starts being mildly critical of Israel, Mossad poisons them so they go crazy. And then, like, three years later, they’re, like, gibbering insanity. This happened to Tucker Carlson. This happened to Candace Owens. This happened to Nick Fuentes. Like, they all start just m- being mildly critical.Three years later, crazy.Kirsche: So it’s like this is the prototype [00:19:00] of the mind control chip, but if you have it in you for too long you just go crazy?Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Yeah, oh yeah, that, that’s probably it. Oh, like in The Fall Out where they, they turn it on too much and their heads explode.Kirsche: Yeah, the technology just isn’t there yet.They only get a good couple of years.Malcolm Collins: Yeah. I know we’re laughing at this, but it did turn out that the Southern Poverty Law Center was the KKK’s major donor. IKirsche: mean- So like- It was crazy to find out ...Malcolm Collins: yeah. They definitely-Kirsche: There’s so little right-wing extremism, the left has to fund it.Simone Collins: Yep.Malcolm Collins: ‘Cause there’s just no- Someone’s gotta do itreally any extremists anymore. There’s no- Yeah. But it ended up pushing this sort of like nerd version of right-wing culture, which I think has, has done a lot to create this sense of community. And it’s one of the things that we’ve noticed as well, where when we started as like right-wing content creators and actually I’d be interested in your thoughts on this all of a sudden because of the VTuber community, we’ve gotten into like this community where like we interact with other people a lot more, which didn’t happen in our early days.But I guess you never were in that, right? Like, you [00:20:00] always have been interacting with people. Or did it like feel to you like this wider fringe group began to appear all of a sudden? OrKirsche: was that only true of me? It definitely, it definitely began to feel like a wider fringe group began to appear. I always kinda kept to myself.Like, there were only like a few handful of people that I would collab with, especially regularly. I just like, I don’t know, didn’t, didn’t really like reaching out to people too often, and especially once I started going in a more political direction. I was just like-Malcolm Collins: Yeah ...Kirsche: well, a lot of people just wanna, you know, play games and, and do, do normal stuff, and I don’t wanna have like the effect of, well, their audience is gonna revolt and cause issues for them.And so like I you- it’s just not, it s- it sounds like a headache, right? Yeah. So I just, I just didn’t do that all that much. And it’s also interesting, I agree with you definitely that the, the Vice situation blew things too outside of the VTuber sphere because in 2024 I was supposed to be on a panel at OffKai, and I got told that [00:21:00] I can’t be on panels because I make volunteers feel unsafe.And they showed me a handful of tweets like making a joke about Sam Hyde entering a woman’s weightlifting competition or explaining the difference between the LGBTQ extra long acronym between Canada and America, ‘cause we have two different really long acronyms. And apparently me explaining that to people is problematic.And also like me telling Tim Poole that he was wrong about the Charlemagne clip when, when he was saying Charlemagne wants DEI gone. It’s like, that’s not what he said, Tim. Right, they had, they had a handful of like posts and clips, like my, my pronouns on Discord being burger queen. Mm-hmm. They’re like, “This is why you make people feel unsafe.”Malcolm Collins: And this is why they feel unsafe. Yeah. No, I mean, these are the tactics they use to control organizations, right? Like-Kirsche: Yeah. And I mean, I- ... I’ve shown proof of, of like OffKai not only playing these kind of political games where they’re like, “You don’t believe in the things we do, you can’t have a panel here, but we’re gonna have identity politics panel about like being Black and Vtubing.”Malcolm Collins: Oh myKirsche: God. “And we’re gonna actively sabotage people like in Phase Connect on their, on their stage [00:22:00] debuts.” And it’s like, no, people were just like, “Well, Kirsa should have just kept her mouth shut. Kirsa shouldn’t have caused any of this drama. Kirsa shouldn’t have said anything.” Right? Like, this is causing a huge issue for something that like everyone likes going to and it’s like, why do you wanna give money to people that hate you?Like, yeah, you wanna support your Oshi, yeah, you wanna do things, but shouldn’t you demand like a change in the venue, the people who run the venue? Mm. Because they clearly dislike you. Why would you give them money?Malcolm Collins: Yes. Well, I wanna, I wanna I’m gonna say this for the end, the, the, the, the going into how we actually fight and win-Simone Collins: MmMalcolm Collins: and where we fought and then not won, and the tactics that we use and the tactics that they use at work. But one interesting tidbit that I thought you’d find fun remember how I said we started this podcast much more progressive? One of the first guests we had on this podcast, I, I doubt you’d be surpri- you, you’d ever be on the same podcast as this person, but was Aella.Oh,Kirsche: the f*****g sex lady.Malcolm Collins: Yeah, yeah. We hadKirsche: a- Oh my God ...Malcolm Collins: an early podcast with her on how to do a consensual non-consent orgyKirsche: Didn’t [00:23:00] they just have a tweet recently where, like, somebody got pregnant at a consensual non-consent orgy? Okay, so, yeah, Romy- Like, ISimone Collins: don’t- Romy- Yeah ... who helped organize her gang bang birthday met her now f- I think future husband also father of her first kid as a fluffer at the p- at the party. And theyKirsche: moved on to- That is a story you literally cannot tell people.That is so disgusting.Simone Collins: Romy, no, in the Bay Area, in the Bay Area, I, I grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area. In the Bay Area,Malcolm Collins: that’s romantic.Simone Collins: It is, it is so normative. But- Like, I- you just think that BDSM equipment is part of people’s everyday furniture, and I’m not kidding about that. Like, it’s just- She grew up in SanMalcolm Collins: Francisco, soKirsche: yeah.Yeah, but, like, imagine their kid being like, “Oh, you were the f*****g orgy baby. Do you even know who your real dad is?”Malcolm Collins: Hold on, we gotta the, the, the funnier thing about all of this is in a recent episode of our show, Romy, the girl who you’re talking about, who met the father of her child at a gang bang, wrote a piece against abortion that radicalized my [00:24:00] wife, Simone, against early stage abortion, like, last week.Kirsche: That is crazy.Simone Collins: I was previously against, like, after week 12. So basically when you develop neural tissue and you’re capable of feeling pain. Yeah. Like, no, we’re not doing this. Then it’s about a conversation about euthanasia if, like, you’re gonna die painfully anyway. But, like, before that, whatever, who cares?I th- I didn’t have any understanding that there was anything wrong with misoprostol or anything like that. And then she writes this incredibly articulate Substack about her experience trying, like, going through a chemical abortion, early stage abortion, and it’s so horrifying. And she develops- It, it, probably, like, postpartum psychosis. Oh, wow. And it’s horrifying. And then she, like, when she talks about it with other people, other women, ‘cause of course this happens a lot in the Bay Area. Like my mother didn’t think that she’d be able to get pregnant around the time she was trying to have me because she had had abortions and they had, I think, been complicated and other things like that.So I[00:25:00]I- apparently a lot of women were like, “Oh yeah, I’ve had that terrible, harrowing experience as well trying to, like, get a kind of- When youMalcolm Collins: talk about harrowing, the piece includes eating babies. If, if we just wanna talk about like- What?Simone Collins: No, well, not eating bab- Like, a- another woman had passed her, her baby, like, after taking it, like a- after taking misoprostol, and passed the baby in, like, the, the like a dive bar bathroom.And was like, “There it is.” And then she’s just like, “Well, I have to eat it now.” And she- No you don’t. What the f**k? But like, Rosie’s like, “I completely understand.” And, like, unfortunately I’m so ... I get it too. I’m like, yeah, I ... Like, where are you gonna put it, in the toilet? Like, you have to reintegrate it.I don’t know. But, like, it’s so heartbreaking and, like, when you actually think about, like, even though this is a very early life, it’s still a life, and it’s still this thing that you’re destroying. And it’s-Malcolm Collins: Talk about radicalizing. You should read the piece, by the way. It’s radicalizing. You should read it.Simone Collins: Yeah. It’s- Can I, canKirsche: I- Like, I think, I think my, like, least conservative opinion is I’m still on the, like- it, sa- safe, [00:26:00] rare, whatever the f**k it was. Like, or the original reason- Yeah ... for abortion. It’s, like, very early on, very rare, in, like, certain circumstances, like incest, rape. Like, I’m, I’m okay with those kinds of things.Like, in the case of motherless- That’s how I feel ... the baby is not viable, right? Like, it’s, it’s not- Yes ... going to survive to term.Simone Collins: Yeah.Kirsche: That makes sense to me. Mm-hmm. But, like, if, if I was in a position where I was getting a chemical abortion, which is obviously, like, you don’t have to go into the doctor for that.Simone Collins: Yeah.Kirsche: I’m not gonna go out to, like, dive bars or other... I’m like, “I’m gonna stay home as much as possible,” right? ‘Cause, like, why the, why the f**k would I take that risk? Yeah. That’s insane to me.Simone Collins: Yeah. The,Malcolm Collins: the, the piece starts with a, an abortion party, right? Just to sort of highlight how little she thought of this at the beginning, but I think it shows, like, people are getting radicalized.Like- Yeah ... like, even the people you wouldn’t expect.Simone Collins: Yeah.Kirsche: Yeah, there shouldn’t ever be something called an abortion party. What the f**k is wrong with people? Holy Christ.Malcolm Collins: Oh.Simone Collins: And [00:27:00] yeah, I mean, it’s, we’re getting to this point where I think people are now, like, ironically, even if they’re really in far progressive culture, making fun of it from within it like, sort of realizing how sick it is, but then not fully internalizing that until they come face to face with it in some personal way.And then they’re like, “Oh, wait this really isn’t working out.” And hopefully that will happen before too much damage is done to, to more of society, but we’ll see.Malcolm Collins: Society’s been pretty damaged, Simone.Kirsche: Yeah. Yeah, I’m gonna have to agree with that one.Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Okay, so, the, the, the direction I wanna go with this is now let’s talk about, like, tactics.So one of the things that you keep putting, pointing out is that we have these warriors out, like Robbie Starbucks, right? Who will go out and do a piece on a company and be like, “Ah, you see, I exposed them for being woke.” And then a bunch of newspaper articles will come out saying they’re, they said they won’t be woke anymore, and, and they don’t even say that.And then people on the right just, like, believe it, right? Yeah. And everything goes back to normal, largely speaking. And the policies don’t change. Because once you, you get these [00:28:00] people into companies, it’s very, very hard to cut them out. And in fact, there is only one instance I am aware of, of them being effectively cut out and that was the Twitter acquisition.Yep. And that required a, what was it? Like 89% reduction in staff.Kirsche: Yeah, it was a huge reduction, and that, that is the only way to cut them out, is to fire them. Because again, Bridge has been informing companies, like, this should not be a siloed approach. You cannot have DEI just in your marketing or just in your HR team.Any kind of, like, DEI consultants or DEI teams within your company need to be dissolved, for one, to protect your company from lawsuits against conservative activists like America First Legal. Yeah. And two, because this needs to be a company whole approach. This needs to be completely holistic. All of your employees need to be on board with the DEI work.And eventually they will just naturally take it home and bring it to their communities and bring it to their dinner tables. This is, this is the ultimate goal. And so whenever these like DEI teams are being dissolved and Robbie [00:29:00] Starbuck was like, “Yeah, we’re winning. We did this.” Even in their press releases they’re like, “We are committed to diversity, equity, and inclusion.”And it’s like, why can’t anybody read? Just, just like I’m not a genius here, I just have eyeballs. They barely work and I can still read. Like,Malcolm Collins: So, so let’s, let’s, think through. So the, and I had mentioned before we started recording, like the one instance where like we’ve really successfully won against DEI is in the video games industry.And that is not, a- and, and we need to talk about like how radical some of these win cases were. We had video games that people were spending like $400 million on that had like a top player count of like a few hundred people.Kirsche: Yeah.Malcolm Collins: Or like 20 people pl- playing a couple weeks post-launch. And this didn’t happen once.This happened like, it’s still happening today. Like this has been happening for years, it’s still happening today, and it’s like the entire industry. And I think that what I take away [00:30:00] from what happened to the video game industry is boycotts alone will never convince a company that’s infected with DEI to remove the DEI.Kirsche: Yeah. I-Malcolm Collins: if, if you couldn’t, I mean, keep in mind when L- Ubisoft like fails, that’s like real people losing hundreds of millions of dollars. Mm-hmm. Right? Like this isn’t like a small thing. When these giant Sony games fail, this is like real hu- And the, even they can’t wake up enough. And so let’s try to think through, why can’t they wake up enough?Because the people at the very, very top, I don’t feel that they’re actually... I think they think going after DEI, “Well, what if somebody says I’m a racist?” And, and being called a racist in today’s soci- even still, even after all the work we’ve done is still this absolutely toxic thing, when it, when it’s like, even when it’s like not true, right?That can get you fired, that can lose you LPs. I mean, that happened with us. We were in the private equity space, right? Like [00:31:00] that’s Simone and my background in this sort of thing. We can’t get hired at a major mi- private equity firm now. So it’s wielding that against... What are, what are your thoughts?I, I’d love to hear your thoughts before I ramble more.Kirsche: I think that a lot of it is the people in charge of these companies, they understand the maliciousness in their lies, but they are people who believe like once the cultural transformation takes place, we will be positioned in part of the like elite class.We’re not gonna be like the plebs down there on the bottom. We’ll be in a good position because we have ownership of these companies. People will want us to promote their messages. We’re gonna be part of the ruling class. And then all of the little people who work on the video games who are like, “Yes, DEI is necessary.You just hate games with women and Black people in them,” they’re like the true believer useful idiot types where they actually believe that they’re doing something good that’s going to have a good effect and is going to help them reach the like utopia that they’re dreaming of in this regard. And so, like, one thing I’ve always been saying ever since I discovered [00:32:00] Bridge was that they are basically foregoing short-term profit for long-term cultural dominance.So- Still, yeah ... even though we see all of these, all these games and companies losing money, and it’s great, and it’s a win, and I love to see it, definitely keep voting with your wallet, they’ve planned for this. They, they know that they’re going to be losing money because the modern audience doesn’t exist yet.The modern audience is what they’re striving to create. By transforming all these IPs into something horrendous with Marxism and all this DEI nonsense, the younger generations will mostly have the exposure to these remakes, to these retellings, and to these other stories that are being made right now that we all make fun of and don’t buy.And that is where the problem lies. Yes, some of us will go to libraries. Some of us have our own, like, VHS or DVD collections. Some of us are smart enough to be like, “We don’t wanna show our children that. We’re gonna only show them the original IPs.” That... You have to think like the average normie. The average normie- Yeahisn’t gonna be hunting down the classics. They’re gonna be showing their kids whatever [00:33:00] slop exists, which is why we have an entire generation of iPad children in the first place, because that made it much easier to just offload your child to TV.Malcolm Collins: And so it’s very- Can you imagine how fucked we would be if they were actually competent?Like-Kirsche: Yes ...Malcolm Collins: if, if they could actually make good games or tell good stories, right? Like, we, we actually have an episode on this called the, The Wachowski Effect, which is why do trans people’s ability to tell good stories seem to ch- like, just tank after they transition?Kirsche: That’s a great question ...Malcolm Collins: because, like, Dragon Age: Veilguard, the writers for it were the same writers as Mass Effect 2.Mass Effect 2 was awesome. Wachowsk- the, the Veilguard was terrible, you know? Mm-hmm. And w- I mean, we... It, it could be any number of things. We, we go over a few hypotheses in this. But yeah, we’ve... The, the... And I think this is a core to our eventual victory, is that there... It turns out they’re, like, really bad at their jobs.Like, once they stuff these companies with DEI people, they are comically inept. M- I mean, we’ve seen this from the [00:34:00] games that they’re making and stuff like that. These are not particularly impressive games. And look at, like, Har- Harley Davidson. What innovation has Harley Davidson made since it, since it w- w- what, what new interesting thing?What has Campbell’s done? What has... They, they win by capturing institutions, and we can only subvert them by creating counter institutions that are strictly better than the captured institutions. Mm. And I think that this is partially why we have this huge freak-out around AI because AI is allowing for that.You know, if you look at something like The Skybrow Cinematic Universe. Like, in terms of like the music I listen to on a day-to-day basis, you know, it, it, it includes something like Skybrows or Holy Ball or, you know, any of the, the creators that are directly downstream of our ecosystem. Because the songs that they’re creating are as good as any other song I’m getting out there right now.And I think with AI in programming hopefully we can see, and I’d really [00:35:00] like to see this in our space, it’s something I’m beginning to work on, is people in our space making video games. And then eventually hopefully we can move to making products. Like, Leaflet had to move to making her own plushies and making plushies for other VTubers because the plushie company wouldn’t work with her because she’s a conservative.What, what are yourKirsche: thoughts? I, I would also, I would also say, like, M-Make- Makeship dropping conservative creators was really interesting to me, and throughout my cancellation campaign I was, I was talking to, like, YouTube’s people. They were completely fine working with me again. I just did another plush with them.So like there are still companies that are like, “You know, we don’t care about the cancel mob. We’re, we’re going to work with people that we think are decent peopleMalcolm Collins: Mm-hmm. But does that not, I mean, do you... O- okay, so a, a side question before this because there was something you said at the beginning that I was a little confused by.Do you think the people who actually run these large companies, not the people who run, like, the DEI firms, like Bridge and stuff like that, but the large companies, are they actually committed to the DEI mission, or are they just not thinking? Are they just [00:36:00] sort of like the scare tactics are working against them?Kirsche: I, I think it’s probably a little bit of both. Depend- it depends on the company, but some of them definitely will have the, like, CEOs who are like, “Yeah, this is all b******t, but I’m gonna push it anyways because it will position me as, you know, a, a person in the ruling class rather than to be ruled over like the other little pleb useful idiots.”And then there’s also gonna be the people who are like, “Well, I’m terrified of people making a stink, so we should just capitulate to them.” And when, when you encounter one of those, like, “We’re terrified of them making a stink,” you just have to make sure that the counter stink is worse than the initial cancel stink, right?If companies are more afraid of the backlash that they will get from cutting creators or cutting people from a regular job for just no f*****g reason because everyone’s like, “I hate them. They’re a big meanie pooh-head.” Yeah. As long as companies fear the result that happens after that, then they’ll stop doing it.At least the ones that are just afraid of that cancel mob anyway.Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Well, I mean, we, we did see [00:37:00] a change in company policy if we talk about the victories we’ve had around overly woke advertising after the Dylan Mulvaney thing. Yeah. Like, I have not seen things that bad in advertising since then, but they’re still within the company.They’re still preventing who can be hired.Simone Collins: Mm-hmm.Malcolm Collins: Right? Like, the statistic that came out about the gaming industry, what was it? There, there was, like 45% of, like, new hires in the gaming space over the last year were LGBT. That’s crazy. It’s like that’s, you know, active and aggressive discrimination, right?You know? Yeah. And w- I mean, once you get that in there, you can’t fight back without creating lateral institutions. Now you’ve mentioned still wanting to work with people if they just cancel s- like, have you thought about what... Yeah, what’s y- what’s your battle plan? You’re, you’re the chief here.You’ve been at this for longer. You’ve y- you’ve been doing this. What’s, what’s the battle plan here? How do we actually win?Kirsche: That, that is a great question. In my opinion, what needs to happen in order to get the DEI rot out of companies is either you starve [00:38:00] them for money for so long, like Ubisoft, that they just have to fire everyone and they end up closing down, which, I mean, they haven’t yet, but they might be.And other than that, it, it’s just like you have to make sure everyone gets fired who’s involved in pushing DEI stuff. And that should be easy to tell based on what their roles used to be at the company, what they did in their positions, the kind of materials they would push, right? Like, you just have to make sure those people cannot be there.And that’s why, like, colleges, when colleges would be like, “Oh, we’re getting rid of our DEI department,” and then they would just reassign their, like, DEI people to other places. I’m like, they didn’t do anything. They did what Bridge told them to do. They, they reassigned people to embed them elsewhere so it’s less noticeable what they’re doing.The DEI is still there, and you can’t believe them that it’s not there until they fire these peopleMalcolm Collins: Yeah. Okay, so how best to starve them? So one of the things that, that I’m seeing so this is a trend we’ve noted among conservative women in our circles. And this happened [00:39:00] after we learned that Leaflet buys from the same f- clothing manufacturer Simone does which is we’ve learned that a lot of conservative women are just buying, like, medieval clothes on Etsy.Kirsche: Yeah, pretty much. Yeah, yeah, actually.Malcolm Collins: Oh, God.Simone Collins: They work. They’re good.Kirsche: Yeah, they, they are.Malcolm Collins: But I think that across brands we’re in a world where we can do that now, right? Like, if a stuffy company isn’t good enough, a, a, a single VTuber like Leaflet can figure out how to make it herself. If a- Mm-hmm ... a clothing brand, they’re annoying, we can build our own supply chains.And with AI, increasingly we can make our own products. So I was talking to you before the stream, but, like, if you look at the AI system that we’ve built, ‘cause we’re just constantly building new systems, we’ve built best chatbots on the market. We’ve built best AI both not safe for work video and image generation on the market that uses every mainstream model.VTuber creation, recipe creation, an auto stalker and,Kirsche: I think it’s also really funny how, like, the people on the left have gone from, “Ha ha, no one wants to work [00:40:00] with you, you stupid chud” to, “Ha ha, you have to use AI because no one will work with you, you stupid chud.”Malcolm Collins: Yeah. And it’s like, but AI is awesome.I likeSimone Collins: the AI stuff. And also, yeah, like, ha ha, I will never use AI, and then their lunch is eaten by all the people who are just building better companies. It’s like-Malcolm Collins: Yeah. The, the product we’re working on now that’ll hopefully be done in, like, a week or something like that is we also have a vibe coding software that we’ve built, but is gonna be an integration for, like, email and Discord and WhatsApp, and all of the places where people reach out to you just because of us as, like, famous content creators, and I’m like, “I only want this in one place.”Mm-hmm. And then complete automation for that. And I’m like, I’m really annoyed that no one has done that very well yet, so I just decided to do it myself. But, like, people in our space can just build stuff, like build games, build s- And I wanna really encourage that, ‘cause I think that that’s the only way for us to realistically eat at their money.Like, if somebody- Mm-hmm ... in our space starts creating motorcycles, I bet they would be much better motorcycles than Harley motorcycles. And I think it’s probably doable. I [00:41:00]Kirsche: mean, there’s definitely a barrier of entry to doing stuff like that, especially whereas, I mean, it, it’s starting to get a bit better, and I know some companies that I’ve worked with are looking to get more manufacturing back onto the American side instead of having to use China for everything, which is great.I love that. Yeah. I would love more, like, American-made products, especially to offer to my audience. And, and so it’s like there, there is a barrier of entry to, like, making physical stuff like that. But yeah, I agree. If, if somebody has the wherewithal to do that, like, absolutely set up a competing company.Try to... Like, you, you’re probably not even gonna have to try too hard to get business away from a company that people have to begrudgingly buy for, from because there’s, like, not- Not really m- much else to go for, right? Like, a company- Yeah ... Nas- usually, like they control so much, you know?Malcolm Collins: Well, people hate these companies now, and, and, and they are increasingly...I mean, if they become increasingly inefficient and when I talk about them being inefficient, look at the cost of, of food these days. Look at the cost of the things- Mm-hmm ... you buy out there these days. Mm-hmm. The cost of the raw components have not gone [00:42:00] up that much. What you’re paying for is corporate incompetence.That, that’s been the primary point of inflation. You, you talk about this on your show but like, if you look at the education system in terms of like putting money into public schools, and you look at a graph of like increasing costs over time, the amount of money that’s going for teachers over like the past 20 years has been about the same.Mm-hmm. The amount of money going to administration has increased like 20x.Kirsche: Yeah, the useless daycare jobs.Malcolm Collins: Yeah. And so, it’s, it’s... I, I guess burn this stuff down, but also on the right, r- we need super doge. I think you’re right about that. That’s what I want from the next president is super doge.Kirsche: Yes.Malcolm Collins: ISimone Collins: don’t know.I don’t, I really don’t know if that’s possible. Part of me is just like let these systems... I mean, they are financially unsustainable. With demographic collapse, they will crumble. Like they, they will, they... Their days are numbered, so just let them collapse. And more important it is, it’s, it is more important now to invest in and focus on the alternate systems that we’re going to have to [00:43:00] all adopt- Mmas those systems crumble and fall apart. Like just today, I’m so excited about Midjourney’s medical announcement that they have this new scanner that is faster and hopefully in the future less expensive than an MRI that can be integrated with like a spa experience. And it’s coming from like the company that I use to generate AI anime images.Like it’s, it’s amazing. And it’s... I, I think that we are going to see, to your point, like we don’t necessarily have to think, well, I don’t know if we’re ever gonna see US manufacturing again. I don’t think we’re ever gonna see like armchair scientist control of medical technology again because AI is weirdly and disruptively going to make a lot possible that we didn’t think was possible.Kirsche: I think there’s also something to be said for like building your own ecosystem and getting together with other people to help build them things asSimone Collins: well. Absolutely. Yeah.Kirsche: But not just like waiting for the old giants to fall apart. This is, this is the point where it’s like you have to be aggressive in at the bare minimum being like, “Don’t buy [00:44:00] products from these people and here’s why.”Like not doing the same preachy thing that leftists do where it’s just like, “If you buy these things, you’re an evil Hitler.” But it’s like you wanna get that information out so people know like, “This is what this company is doing. This is what they’re gonna continue to do. They’re lying to you, and they’re trying to subvert you.”Malcolm Collins: Absolutely. Well, and I think, and I think for my audience, this is... I, I, I... One thing I like about this space is, like, you obviously were a big motivation for, like, Sky Browse to do some of his early videos and stuff like that, right? Like-Kirsche: His videos are so freaking good, man.Malcolm Collins: Aren’t they? They’re fantastic.Amazing. Have you seen it all, by the way?Simone Collins: Oh.Kirsche: I’ve seen- Yeah ... a good chunk and I’ve, I’ve left some to play while I’m working. They’re like-Malcolm Collins: Our kid sings them all the time. Now our kid is, is singing the, the, the Mormon one, the, the Bricks and Mini Pigs. Cool. You know, like...Kirsche: I haven’t even gotten into that situation.I had a few people in my chat tell me about it, and I was like, “Oh, I should look into it.” But then so much information kept coming out about it, I was like, “How am I going to- You- ... digest this?”Malcolm Collins: It’s, it’s incred- It will, it will [00:45:00] piss you off so much. Like, like so many times, and I think that this is, is, is, is important w- more widely in our community, is be like, look, I like Mormons, I want Mormons on, on the in, but, like, we do need to get in some sort of intra community policing, right?Like, we, we, we sometimes go into this with, like, I’m a big fan of Jews, right? But like everyone’s always like, “Malcolm, Greater Israel,” and I’m like, I don’t much care about the countries around Israel. Like, okay, Greater Israel, f- whatever. But, I’mKirsche: kind of just like, that’s not my sand, not my problem.I don’t care about anything that exists- Yeah ... in the sandbox. I just don’t want American people or American money going to any wars over there.Malcolm Collins: Oh, absolutely. We, we need to cut off funding for Israel. And I, and I was like, I don’t understand why we don’t just do that. It’d be such a win for the Trump administration.It-Kirsche: I would love to cut off aid from everywhere. Like, holy s**t. At least, like, I understand if we wanna maintain our position as, like, a super world power that nobody can f**k with. Like, occasionally we’ll have to just, like, throw money at some p- places. But for the [00:46:00] most part, I think we should cut that off entirely.Cool. Like, zero aid to anywhere for at least a little while.Simone Collins: Well, and it’s really, it’s not even our aid that matters. It’s, it’s our supply chains and buying power. Right. So, like, we don’t even need to provide aid. We can just change small incentives here and there with where things are shipped- Well, and see-and how things are shipped ...Malcolm Collins: w- I think we’ve gotta be aware of the consequences of cutting all aid. Like, look, when US aid was cut, the, the, the thing was cut look at all the elections of Latin America since then. Rightists keep getting elected.Kirsche: Yeah.Malcolm Collins: Like, clear- clearly this has had a huge- Not enoughhuge impact on these countries.Kirsche: Clearly ...Malcolm Collins: some of, some of them are putting people in jail and, and now have lower rates of homicide than they’ve ever had before.Kirsche: Yeah.Malcolm Collins: Some of them are cutting major social programs. Th- this is horrifying.Kirsche: Horrifying for whom?Malcolm Collins: Yeah, right. I love that Trump and Argentina are, they get along so well now that they’re like, “Hey, let’s, let’s hand back those islands from the UK,” right?Like- OhSimone Collins: myKirsche: gosh. And everyone was just like, “Oh, I thought people on the right wanted foreign aid cut. What about all this money he gave Argentina?” It’s like, well, [00:47:00] Argentina paid it back after, like, six months or some s**t, so...Malcolm Collins: that’s true. That’s also awesome that like the in, in Latin America we are seeing a lot of projects work.Like what’s happening in El Salvador is amazing.Kirsche: It is. And I, I wish we could do like El Salvador and just start arresting activist judges who keep f*****g things up. I wish we could just do that.Malcolm Collins: And the El Salvador prison system is apparently like really, really cool and good. They really focus on like, getting people jobs and stuff like that, and like- Huh.Simone Collins: Yeah. Well, they’re, they’re nice. They have, you know, they have the nice prisons and they have the less nice prisons. But the nice ones are super nice. Well, the, forMalcolm Collins: the kids anyway. Yeah. You just, you know, I, I, I don’t mind the, the, the Trump policy of just like instead of prison, just like e- the, the sending migrants just like where- wherever they can.Like when they- Make public bathrooms great again ... when they can’t send them back to their own country, they’ll just be like, “Ah, we’ll send them to Haiti or whatever.”Simone Collins: Yeah. Just-Malcolm Collins: But I, no, I mean, I think the point I was making earlier is if you’re a fan of this show- [00:48:00] With AI and stuff like that. I’m not saying go out and white label some existing product and make it conservative or something like that, right?I’m saying and, and AI can really help you with this. Figure out how to buy beans from a local farmer somewhere and ship them in a means that’s cost efficient. If you can do that using a network of AIs, you can get a cheaper product on the sale shelf than Campbell has, and a better product on the shelf than Campbell has, right?Like, this is true of all of the products all the way down. With AI, we can just do things better now. I, I know with something like, okay, putting together a motorcycle. Yes, I’d love if you do it in the United States, but you know, you talk to the right shops across like China and Shen- Shenzhen and stuff like that, you can get the parts made inexpensively enough, stress test them, then have them constructed in the United States to get over the tax and, th- like, I, I want...I think for so long we’ve been trapped in this life of you go to college, which doesn’t help people anymore and is one of the core sources [00:49:00] of rot- Yeah ... and you then get a day job. And I think what I wanna radicalize people into doing is like at least look into the alternatives. And I love Leafly’s music video about this, like don’t go to college.Like, like put that money into trying to start a job because you’ll learn more in the-Kirsche: Yeah.Malcolm Collins: But yeah. W- there’s, there’s so many opportunities out there now. But anyway, so- g- continue to go on. I, I don’t mean to-Kirsche: No, no, you’re fine. I tangent all the time. It’s great. And it’s like I, I agree with you as well, like we should be setting up our own-like parallel systems if we can, but it, it’s harder in certain areas than, than in others. Like, when, when Stream Elements announced that they might be shutting down or they’re being bought out by nobody knows yet, but when Stream Elements announced that, a lot of us went, “Wait a minute, what are we gonna do now?”That was like the- What are Stream Elements gonna do? ... the link to use to like get donations without YouTube or Twitch or anywhere else taking a cut. And now what are we supposed to use? What, what else is there?Malcolm Collins: It’s, it’s a donation platform. Well- I mean, okay, so [00:50:00]Kirsche: it’s a donation platform ... basic- basically, it’s a donation platform, and what they do is they have it so you can pay with PayPal, and obviously you can use, like, a credit card and PayPal or whatever, and that’ll go to your PayPal, but it obscures, like, your personal information.And then they also have something called SE Pay, where if the person doesn’t wanna use PayPal, there’s a lot of people in my community especially who are like, “Screw PayPal, I don’t wanna use them. You need to have an option to dono that doesn’t use PayPal or require a login.”Simone Collins: Yeah.Kirsche: So SE has SE Pay, and so you can just use your card or, like, a prepaid card or whatever to, to pay through SE Pay, and it bypasses...It has nothing to do with PayPal whatsoever. And so it was nice to have this, like, donation link-Malcolm Collins: I could build youKirsche: that ... that did that and obscured, obscured your information so nobody got your name, nobody got your address, nothing like that.Malcolm Collins: I, I, I can probably build you that in a week or so.Kirsche: Yeah, that’s...So, like, that was, that was something where people were just like, “Well, what am I gonna do?” And, like, there’s Streamlabs, but Streamlabs had a problem years ago where they tried, like, infringing on OBS, where, like, [00:51:00] OBS was like, “We don’t care. Everybody can use our, our code and everything.” But Streamlabs was trying to be like, “Well, we made this.This is ours,” and everything was just, like, copy-pasted from OBSMalcolm Collins: No, I’m, I’m being serious Is there anSimone Collins: alternative now? Like, what are people using instead? Yeah.Kirsche: No, everyone’s still on either Streamlabs or Stream Elements- Yeah ... because that’s, that’s what there is. Yeah.Malcolm Collins: But yeah, I can build this for you. ThatKirsche: would be crazy. And so many VTubers would use it ... I canMalcolm Collins: build this for you. Yeah, so- I justSimone Collins: feel like there’s spe- like what your, what your m- m- most important and, like, desired things are. No, hold on- ‘Cause if you doMalcolm Collins: that- Hold on, hold on, Simone. I, I need to explain something.So the way... The big challenge in putting something like this together is that the credit card companies will try to get to you, because the credit card companies are very aggressive. Yeah. Yeah. But, essentially what we do is you donate to our nonprofit. And- ... if you use your correct email address, it then accredits points to a separate site- Hmm ... sort of behind the scenes. Interesting. And so the payment providers don’t see this. So- Mm-hmm ... we would still lose any margin that we lost on the payment provider, and then we’d probably add some [00:52:00] small, like, one or 2% margin on this.And then the- ‘Kirsche: Cause I was gonna say, I think when it comes to Stream Elements, the SE pay, the only percentage taken out is the processing fee from the card companies, which is why everybody uses it.Malcolm Collins: Oh, okay. Well, I mean, I could do it without taking out any money as a good favor, but... If people mention our site.Okay, so I’ll do it without taking out any money. Yeah ... so we’ll just take out the, the card processing fees and just have it go directly to whoever the streamer is. I- in terms of obscuring user information, all of that will obviously be captured by the payment provider. Mm-hmm. But I can obscure it on our end, if that makes you feel better.Kirsche: Yeah, I mean, if you haven’t used Stream Elements before, I can always, like, take some screenshots and, like, show you what the dashboard and stuff looks like internally.Simone Collins: That would be reallyMalcolm Collins: helpful. How do they make money if they’re not taking anyKirsche: The way that Stream Elements made money is Stream Elements was, first and foremost, before they came out with SE pay, a sponsorship platform.Yeah, yeah. So they would go and find sponsorships, and they would post them on their website, and then streamers could go and sign up for them. And when you got big enough, you would have, like, a Stream Elements representative who would personally contact you and be like, [00:53:00] “Hey, we have these sponsors available.There’s this many seats. We wanted to reach out to you. Do you wanna do these?” And so they would make their money from the sponsorships, because, you know, they’re probably taking a cut from those before we get paid out.Malcolm Collins: Yeah, okay. Another thing to note is the company that does all this is actually a nonprofit, so people can donate to it as a tax deduction as well.So- Oh ... I’ll, I’ll try to get this set up for you.Kirsche: No, that would be interesting. I’m sure a lot of people would be very nice to have something. ‘Cause, like, when, when Stream Elements announced that, like, we don’t know who’s buying them yet still. But it’s like- Yeah ... I can only imagine all of us are just like Well, is it gonna work the same way?Like, we don’t know who’s buying it, so we don’t know how they might f**k it up. Yeah.Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Very exciting. Okay. Yeah, sure. Just send me what you want and... But this is what I’m talking about, right? Like, if, if somebody’s leaving the space and they’re being a jerk, I’m like, “Okay. I, I can build this for, for...Operate it for free in exchange for a promotion for our site,” right? Like, Yeah ... that’s, that’s an easy thing for me to do. And it’ll work for as long as it doesn’t explode and get big. I mean, obviously our platform is very [00:54:00] chud, so all the progressive VTubers are still gonna be on it. Great. B- because, yeah, we have... Like, one of the features that we have is a feature that searches every not safe for work image gallery at the same time. What the heck? ... just to annoy the, the the people who, who freak out about that stuff. But yeah, that’s really cool. What other bottlenecks do you have? I, I built the VTuber automated creation system because Leaflet said that people would appreciate that.Mm-hmm. What, what other issues do you have?Kirsche: I mean, me personally, I have issues with artists being reliable. Like the illustration artists I’ve worked with, they’re amazing. I love them, love every single one of them I’ve worked with. But model artists I’ve basically been waiting on my main model to be finished since 2020.It was supposed to be finished in 2020. I have another model that’s been being worked on for several years now as well. It’s like my, my riggers or my artists just kinda disappear or don’t finish their work, and then I’m out thousands of dollars.Malcolm Collins: Oh, yeah. So we have a system that can get you a new... So I, I’ve got to improve it.Like we’ve obviously got to improve the end-to-end system. We don’t [00:55:00] have hand movement yet. I’m still working on boob physics. But you, you... I’ll send it to you and you can, you can try the beginning of it. But it works for a low-quality model now, and I can get it working for a high-quality model with...Like what you would probably wanna do is generate something with our system, then hire a rigger to refine it. And with the refinement and an artist to refine it, like- Mm-hmm ... refine the eyes and stuff like this in a few areas. And I, I think you can get a model that’s as high quality as the model you have now with just a few additions to what we have.Kirsche: This, this was given to me by a community member, Fumetsu no Tora. He makes things very fluffy. He has a very distinct art style. I like it. And he, he made this as like a gift for me, and I’ve had a few of these gift models because people in my community have just gotten like, just so- Annoyed ... frustrated.And, and it’s, I, I appreciate that they get frustrated on my behalf because it’s like I, I can’t even show the extent of frustration I feel for how long some of this stuff has taken. Like I understand that being an artist is not, you know, a traditional job, but if you’re making your money off [00:56:00] of it, you should be treating it professionally in my opinion.And in the VTuber sphere it’s kind of, taboo to call out artists. Like even if an artist has like taken your money and fled- ... you are still considered the one starting drama by bringing- The riggers,Malcolm Collins: man. So this is something I’d like a callout in my audience for because it’s something that I don’t have the time to make my skill and it would really help make this an end-to-end cycle is the RFAB VTuber creation system.If anybody wants to specialize on post-output improvement of our models because it gets most of the way there I’d be happy to intro you to people who need that service and even advertise you on the website if that’s something that you wanted to, to build as a skill set if you’re like, “I need a Some- but, but no being flaky.We’re gonna be pretty strict about, like, actually getting things done within short time windows.Simone Collins: We’re also actually pretty good at being go-betweens between commissioners and artists, ‘cause that was literally our first startup as a married couple. [00:57:00] Oh.Kirsche: See, that is, that’s incredibly... That’s pretty much what VGen is.And I, I like VGen as opposed to SKEB, because with SKEB, like, you’re not allowed to contact the artist at all. And so if you get given something and you’re, like, missing something you’re basically up s**t creek. Whereas on VGen, you, you can message them and be like, “Hey, you forgot this file,” or, “Hey, you didn’t make the background on this transparent.”And it’s like I’ve, I’ve never really liked SKEB, and I used them once. And the one time I used them I had asked for, like, transparent backgrounds so that I could use the stuff I’m paying for in streaming, and I wasn’t given the transparent backgrounds, and obviously I can’t contact them, so I can’t get it fixed.Oh, my gosh. And there wasn’t any way to get rid of the entire background, so it just looked really s**t with trying to, like, edit the background out myself. And so I, I could never use those things that I got.Simone Collins: That’s soMalcolm Collins: frustrating. That is incredibly frustrating.Simone Collins: Yeah, what we used to do was we had a platform that had artists and then clients, and we would match them.And we would do all the communication. So, like, a client would say [00:58:00] something really, that would really make an artist, like, sad and not wanna work on it anymore. And then we’d, like, say it in the nicest possible way and be like, “They love it so much. There’s just this one adjustment that they realize would make itKirsche: soSimone Collins: much better.”See, like, IKirsche: need... ‘Cause, like, cucking the artist is terrifying to me now, ‘cause it’s like-Simone Collins: Yeah ...Kirsche: I don’t, I don’t want, I don’t wanna be that client that’s just, “Oh, you need to fix a million things.” And I, I- Yeah ... haven’t been thus far, thankfully. But it’s also, like, I’ve had so many issues that I just I just don’t like talking to artists much anymore.Simone Collins: Yeah, like you just want someone to, like handle it and make sure the thing comes out good, and we did that. It’s just that there wasn’t a market for it, so it wasn’t a business that could survive on its own. But like, I totally get it, and yeah, it all came from- It’s so weird ... Malcolm, Malcolm proposed to me on Reddit using commissioned art.Aw. And then he experienced like how hard it was to work with artists, ‘cause he tried to commission, I think he commissioned like 21 pieces- Oh my God ... and discovered, like firsthand, “Oh, this is really hard.” ItKirsche: is really hard.Simone Collins: Artists are super unstable.Kirsche: They are. I mean, I guess [00:59:00] you have to have some kind of instability to be like super creative and bring out like images from your brain.That makes sense, but like, have, have the kind of volatility that makes it so you still get work done.Malcolm Collins: Well, it’s, it’s so funny that people are like, “AI replaced all of the things we didn’t want replaced first,” like art and music and everything like that, and I’m like, no, what AI did is it made it so that average jackoffs like myself can be good at art and music, right?Like, it democratizedSimone Collins: art. Yeah, like they’re doing... We’re, we’re using AI to make art that artists just refuse to make for us. They’re like, “Oh, I’m busy. I can’t do it.” Yeah, it’s like- Like, how dare you take our jobs? ... artists areKirsche: refusing. We’re not even, like, taking work away from artists, right? It’s like-Simone Collins: Yeah, they weren’t t-they didn’t do- They weren’t accepting our requests. Yes. I mean, they were busy. I, I, we’re makingMalcolm Collins: a VTuber model of Muhammad, right? Who am I gonna get to do that, right? Like, I almost did that. I, I do- Oh,Simone Collins: come on. It’s not even that. I mean, ‘cause I had to deal, of course, with our, our, our commissioning platform for like all the excuses from artists if like something didn’t happen, and we would, you know, refund our clients.Like, the money wouldn’t disappear ‘cause it was being held- Yeah ... in escrow by us. Excuses I got included, “Oh, I [01:00:00] can’t take this on, I’m pet sitting for the next month.” Like-Kirsche: What the heck? ...Simone Collins: how is watching someone’s cat going to prevent you from drawing a very simple anime line drawing? Like, there’s This doesn’t makeKirsche: sense.It doesn’t. It really doesn’t.Simone Collins: The- these are-Kirsche: And it’s like I’ve, I’ve had a problem with an artist before where I was like, “Hey, it’s been like a year and a half, and I see that you consistently reopen your commissions and take on new projects, and you finish those new projects before mine. If you don’t wanna work on my project, please just let me know so I can find another artist who can.”And they’d be like, “No, no, I wanna do it.” It’s like, it’s like they wanted, I guess like, maybe clout from like working with a bigger person, but then like never finishing it. So it’s like, what, what am I suppo- like... And when they’re delayed this much, I lose opportunities. Yeah. I lose ability to do certain things.Yeah. If I had like stuff planned out, I can’t do any of that. And so like I’ve stopped planning anything around models because I just can’t find artists to finish them.Simone Collins: Yeah, that’s really frustrating.Malcolm Collins: Well then, okay, I’ll get back to-Simone Collins: Malcolm, make it better. Make it better.Malcolm Collins: Okay. I’ll, I’ll work on the [01:01:00] VTuber thing.I’ll send you some of the models that we’ve made already so you can get an idea of like how high quality they are. Mm-hmm ... they’re, they’re decent enough. And I’ll, I’ll continue to improve on the rigging system and everything like that. But what I really need is somebody who’s just like a specialist in this.So any of our audience who wants to take the time to do this, it’s, it’s... The problem with this versus everything else on the website is I need to go through with every algorithmic change and then load up, add the textures on the model, which all happens automatically but takes time. Mm-hmm. Then load it into VTuber Studio and test if the ears wiggle right.And if the ears don’t... And, and I have to have different wiggles for animal ears, and elf ears, and human ears. Mm-hmm. By the way, all of this is handled algorithmically. We have a different way of handling snouts- Mm ... so like furry models work and, you know, the, the-Kirsche: That’s really cool ... I,Malcolm Collins: I spend way too much time trying to get this right.Yeah. Well, because I want people to have something that they can use, but,Kirsche: Yeah ...Malcolm Collins: it’s, it’s with, with all of these fields, we can make something better. There’s nothing that prevents us from [01:02:00] creating the, the better version of these various things. And after this we’ll wrap things up. After this with you do we have like an open chat on like Discord, or where, where do you talk to people?Where, where do youKirsche: like- Dis- Discord is the best way to get in touch with me. Like I’m still, I have like probably 40 DMs unchecked right now, but it’s still the best way to get in touch with me. Okay.Malcolm Collins: Are we, are we friends on there?Kirsche: Yeah. Yeah, what she said.Simone Collins: Mm-hmm.Malcolm Collins: C-H.Simone Collins: Mm-hmm. Yeah.Malcolm Collins: And I will build you this thing that you need. It ju- it just was sent to you. Okay ... and, and, I mean, it’s basically nothing to build. It’s literally just a payment sub-system that goes to you, so really all it needs is like- Yeah, with attributiona way to manage the payment to you. So I, I can handle that.Simone Collins: That’s very- It’sKirsche: justMalcolm Collins: no one else in the world will do it for free, but I guess I’ll do it for free for clout, ‘cause,Kirsche: That’s, that’s what, that’s what Stream Elements had. I’m like, I’m, I’m guessing, right? I’m guessing the way they made money is, like, when companies would approach them, like Raid Shadow Legends, and they’re like, “Hey, we have 500 slots for this kind of sponsor thing,” I’m assuming [01:03:00] they would pay Stream Elements before Stream Elements, like, pushed out that sponsor to the rest of us.‘Cause, like, we never get sponsor money taken out. Whatever we make from a sponsor, like, we keep that under Stream Elements. Oh. So, like, the o- the only thing I could figure is, like, companies pay them for the advertising. That’s the only thing I could think of the way that they were making money.Malcolm Collins: Wait, hold on.Here’s what I don’t understand. Why don’t you guys just set up a payment processor that goes directly to you?Kirsche: I asked. I have guys who work on my websites, like Kirsche.com, and I asked them about adding a page that has, you know, kinda like what Stream Elements did, where it’s just a donation link that obscures all of my, my personal information from, like, PayPal or whatever.And they were like, “Well, that could be done, but then it gets a little dicey because then we’re holding on to all of that money for you until you withdraw it. And for tax time, that could make things a little weird as well.”Malcolm Collins: I guess that’s trueKirsche: I mean, I don’t know. I’ve never set up a payment processor. I don’t care about how the money- I’m, I’m just relaying what I’ve been toldMalcolm Collins: goes through at all. Yeah. I, I, I don’t care [01:04:00] about that. We already handle really complicated taxes for the nonprofit, so whatever. If something can be used... What? You handle it, Simone. I’m sorry. I d- I saw that- Yeah,Simone Collins: I just... No problem ThatKirsche: faceSimone Collins: of- As the man who has not touched a single receipt related to this entire thing.We have no accountant. It’s just me over here. No problem. Ooh. But it’s just accounting. Oh, thatKirsche: made me remember. During my GamerSupps merch drop last year they had a separate gifting website where people could, like, buy my merch items- Oh, cool ... and they would, like, be floating around in the ether that people could claim as, like, a gift.And you, you had, like, a limit obviously. Like, s- no- no one could claim, like, every single thing. But, like, my community has been asking for that for my website, and I asked my website guys, and they were just like, “That would cost so much to host.” I don’t, I don’t know what it would cost to host. I... My community has really wanted something like that.Malcolm Collins: Wait, explain the feature to me again. Explain the feature?Kirsche: I’ll have to go find screenshots, ‘cause I took screenshots of it when I had it. But basically it was a, [01:05:00] an adjacent site to the official GamerSupps website, and it was, like, a gifting platform. And so you, like, you logged in via, I think, Twitch, and they were talking about maybe integrating, like, YouTube or whatever with it later, but it was just Twitch integration for now.And so, like, people could go to the website and buy, like, a Kirsche cup or a Kirsche desk mat, and they could either pick a person on Twitch to specifically claim it- Oh ... so it’d be, like, tagged to that person’s Twitch name, and that person could go and claim it. Or if they just wanted to buy, like, 20 cups and have, like, anyone redeem them, they would buy, like, 20 Kirsche cups, and those would be floating around in the ether, and you could go to the gift page, and you could hit claim cup, and then you would put in your shipping information, and you’d have to pay for shipping.But everything is given to, you know, different people. ThatSimone Collins: sounds like so much fun. I like theMalcolm Collins: idea.Kirsche: Yeah. I c- Everyone loved it. And I like the idea. I wanna do that. Yeah, I like the idea because, like, there, there are some community members who, like, you know, they might be in a bad financial place. They might want something to support the creator, but they, they don’t have the money to do so.Malcolm Collins: It’s a great idea.Kirsche: And then the giga whales come in and they’re just like, “Here, my children. Have the gifts. I am Santa,” you know? Yeah. [01:06:00]Malcolm Collins: I can build this. I can build this. I got... Yeah, d- br- just when you have things you want, come to me in the future, and I’ll justKirsche: give you what you want. Oh, hell f*****g yeah.Hell yeah. Yeah, I- And I’ll try,Malcolm Collins: I’ll try to make some of the screenshots for you ... remember there was a, there was a LeetBit stream where we had people come in on the stream and they were like, “I want an AI DM for, like, dungeon, dungeon master that, like, handles that.” And I was like, “I’ll make it. It’s done.”The, the the, the stalker feature I made for Simone. She goes, “I wanna stalk people more easily online.” I was like, “Okay, I’ll, I’ll build that for you.”Simone Collins: Call it Super stalk and then The recipe makerMalcolm Collins: I, I put together based on theSimone Collins: Yeah, but no,Kirsche: but this is exciting. I love hearing that, like, you wanna get in the nitty-gritty and, like, build these kind of platforms that either only exist in, like, tiny little bubbles or we’re excluded from because we’re chuddy buddies.Malcolm Collins: Yeah, chuddy buddies. The chuddiest of platforms, right? You know, everybody comes in and... No, no, I love doing it because it annoys the leftists, okay? If I can make a good- HowKirsche: dare you build your own things.Malcolm Collins: Yeah, if I can make a good VTuber rig [01:07:00] system, and then a bunch of VTubers start using it and the leftists will witch hunt their own, Yeahinfinitely, “Are you using the chud VTuber system? Are you using- Did you get chudKirsche: rigging?Malcolm Collins: Yeah, yeah. It’s hilarious.Kirsche: And so I’ve, I’ve been told by a couple illustration artists I’ve worked with as well, like, they’ve, they’ve had large VTubers come to them and be like, “You can’t work with Kirsche. You have to reject her if she ever comes and tries to get artwork from you.”And they’re just like, “Well, why? Like, I want money. I don’t care.”Malcolm Collins: Yeah, yeah. Well, I mean, one of the funniest things is AI, and I don’t know how much you use AI on a daily basis anymore. How, how much do you use AI?Kirsche: I really don’t use AI much at all for anything. My, my head moderator uses AI a lot to, like, double check things or get more sources if I need them or whatnot.Yeah. And he’s, he’s been great with AI. He makes my thumbnails with AI just because it would, you know, take forever to get an artist to finish- Works great ... different thumbnails as often as I like to change them. But I mean, I’d be willing to use AI [01:08:00] for most things. I think my, my hard stop at the moment is, like, when I’m selling merchandise, I want the artwork on that merchandise to be from a real person that I paid money to.Yeah. I would feel weird, like, putting AI art on merch. And so for everything that I sell, I, I try to find an artist that kind of matches up with, like, the head image that I have. Because, like, I also would not want to go to an artist and be like, “Hey, change your entire style. Make it this way.” So I try to find an artist that matches with, like, the vision that I have.Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Well, but with AI, this is one of the big areas where we have a huge advantage against the corpos and the average leftist is it’s like the leftists are trying to fight us without beautiful women and without AI, right? Like, th- we should have no trouble cleaning up against this.Kirsche: Oh, I just thought of something as well.Your, your, like, VTuber model creation thing is also going to fix another issue some VTubers have fallen into. So back in the day you guys know who Project Melody is, right?Malcolm Collins: Yeah. [01:09:00]Kirsche: So Project Melody her model artist DMCA’d a lot of her videos and was trying to strong arm her to pay him more money to use her model that she already paid for- Ohbecause she didn’t have a contract saying that she had, like, full IP rights to the model from him. And so there have been a, a couple of other, I think, smaller VTubers who had a similar issue, but it’s like- Oh, okay. Oh my ... whenever, whenever you get your model, like, you need to have an airtight legal contract just in case, just in case that artist decides, “Well, now you’re huge.I made your model when you had, like 500 viewers, but now you have, like, 5,000, and I want more money,” right? So, like, so they can’t harm you after the fact.Malcolm Collins: That’s very frustrating. Yeah. Well, anyway, it’s been absolutely great to have you on. I- Sorry ifKirsche: I ran just a bit over your time.Malcolm Collins: No, I, I love this.I love this. This is great. And I’m happy to do, you know, if you wanna come on again, if you want o- one of us on ever. I mean, usually it’s just me ‘cause Simone can’t handle weird times. ButKirsche: This is true. Under- I mean, she has a baby, you [01:10:00] know? So,Malcolm Collins: Yeah.Simone Collins: It makes it tough, you know?Malcolm Collins: We got, we have five-Kirsche: I can imagine.Simone Collins: Yeah, with five it’s complicated.Malcolm Collins: Trying to replace them. Yeah. That’s, that’s our goal. We have a, a live, laugh, love poster in our house that says, “We will replace you,” i- in, in live, laugh, love style.Simone Collins: Yeah.Malcolm Collins: So when the reporters come over- Beautiful ... they always get really freaked out. They’re like, “What?”Kirsche: I, I got...When I had my PO box, which I, I shut it down because a lot of stuff was just getting kicked back return to sender, like my mail wasn’t being delivered for some reason. Yeah. But one of the things that got delivered was a like Korean flag with Kim Jong Un on it, and it said, “Live, laugh, love.” That’s soSimone Collins: good.Oh my gosh. Where do we get one of those? That is amazing. IKirsche: have no idea, but I saw that, I was like, “Who sent this? What the heck?” Yeah.Simone Collins: Thank you, kind stranger. Yeah. Thank you.Kirsche: That’s a beautiful gift. I love this. Wow.Malcolm Collins: Oh,Simone Collins: weMalcolm Collins: should do something like that, Simone.Simone Collins: That sounds legit amazing. He’s a veryMalcolm Collins: creative little dreamer or whatever.Yeah. And also I, the main reason I wanna connect with you on, on, on Discord is just to build, because the stuff that you, you say you need built is not difficult for me to build. It might be difficult for my wife to handle the [01:11:00] accounting on.Simone Collins: It’s just accountable. I, I think I can figure it out as long as, yeah, the, the reporting.I mean, the reporting has to be clear for each creator to see what they’ve gotten. So as long as I can see it and keep track of it, it’s okay.Malcolm Collins: All right. Well, fantastic. Thank you so much for coming on the show. Yeah. And it’s completely amazing. Thank you guys. ItSimone Collins: wasKirsche: fun.Malcolm Collins: You’re, you’re amazing. No, I mean, I, I- it’s fun, but also just, like, you’re such a legend.Aw ... you are really the, the buck at which the cultural tide began to turn. It reallyKirsche: broke- I don’t know if I would say, like, legend, but I, I am very happy that I kind of, I guess, held a stronghold door and made other creators feel more comfortable about coming out and talking about things that they care about, that they believe.Yeah. And seeing, seeing me... Like, I’ve had so many people say, like, seeing me stand up the way that I did to something like Vice, it made them all feel like maybe we can actually have an effect on something. It is true. And so that, that makes me happy. Yeah.Malcolm Collins: You didn’t just stand up. You clowned on them. You [01:12:00] crushed them.It was a complete retreat to the extent that I don’t think, like, Vice even has an audience anymore, right? Like, not, not because of you, but I think that these institutions- Mm ... that we grew up thinking of as important, like Vice, we’ve realized that Vice versus Fox Girl- ... Vice is toothless. They have- IKirsche: love how some of them tried downplaying it like, “Oh, this can’t be real.Like, she wrote it so unprofessional.” And I had a lawyer, man, come on,Simone Collins: dude. Oh my gosh.Kirsche: I just treated Vice the exact way that they should be treated.Malcolm Collins: Yeah. And it worked. And ever since then, there has not been a single, that I’m aware of, successful cancellation of a right-wing internet figure th- that- that was, that was the last of it.That wasSimone Collins: the last- It was the turning point. It was the turning point. It was, it wasMalcolm Collins: huge Like it, it never ha- do you know how f*****g crazy that is? Like, obviously Elon buying Twitter had a huge effect on this, right?Kirsche: And I, I also love, like, the, the wave of encouragement that came after [01:13:00] that. Yeah Like, as we’ve seen with like Advanced GG dropping Rev and Straub.Any time Advanced GG tries to post something- ... everyone just inundates them with like, “Why would anyone work with you when you just drop your creators in the face of a cancel mob, and you keep on other people who harass others, like, objectively?”Malcolm Collins: And I love wh- when you look at individuals like Rev and Straub, that’s the other thing I really love about the culture that’s come out of this.And how it’s affected right-wing culture is I think for a while we weren’t sure whether the new version of right-wing culture was actually accepting of people who are, like, different and weird as long as they ch- are, are, are part of our larger... And then, you know, I think Anna Valens affirmed, you know, you and Leaflet for the mainstream wife right audience.And then GamerSupps affirms Rev. Like, Rev genuine- I think for a long time a lot of people on the right were like, “I don’t know, it’s like an anime, vampire- Well, Gamer- ... all these” GamerSuppsKirsche: is different from Advanced GG.Malcolm Collins: Oh, wait, sorry. Advanced GG. Sorry. I know thatKirsche: they’re all pretty weird and stuff. Yeah.Advanced [01:14:00] GG were the ones who dropped, who dropped Rev and Straub just for no reason.Malcolm Collins: To, but they, they, the, the backlash to that I think really affirmed the, the Rev and Straub for a while. TheKirsche: change, yeah.Malcolm Collins: Yeah. And now it’s like we’re all, like, just, like, nerdy weirdos, right? Like, the, the nerdy weir- And that’s the other thing about the nerdy weirdos, the, the nerd scene.It’s not even weird. We’re nerds. We’re just f*****g nerds. Is, is, is we are winning this for the right. Like, we don’t have internal fighting with each other. We don’t have any real scandals. We don’t get married in front of the Pope and then randomly- ... cheat on our husband a bunch of times.Kirsche: Yeah, right?Malcolm Collins: Yeah, like, we are, like, the wholesome part. And we- Mm ... and it’s like, no sh- they’re, the only shots fired I’m aware of is, like, a year ago Rev was annoyed at Knucks about something and then got over it, right? Like, but generally speaking, it’s like none of us ever attack each other. And I really love that wholesome feeling to this.As well as creators like you [01:15:00] who are significantly larger than us, creators like Knucks who are significantly larger than us doing collabs. It’s such a wholesome feel to a community.Kirsche: It’s, it’s really nice and I, I, I enjoy that there’s not as much infighting and I wish that Especially when it comes to Bridge stuff.Like, even, even if other larger right-wing creators don’t wanna talk to me because I’m anime, I wish they would at least showcase the research that I’ve done. Because I think it’s a very important conversation, and it’s very important to show more people.Malcolm Collins: Okay, so here’s, here’s what I have. So any of our fans who either work at the White House or have connections at the White House I think getting...Where would you tell them to go for the, the biggest condensed, your research?Kirsche: My pinned tweet on my Twitter profile is an article of every single source of everything I’ve found researching into Bridge since 2024. The only thing not posted there, because I’m not a journalist, so I don’t know how to go about doing it, is I’ve recorded the monthly meetings Bridge has had, or one of my moderators has when I can’t, [01:16:00] for the last two and a half years.And I have all of these videos of them saying exactly what they’re gonna be doing, exactly what their plans are, the companies they’re specifically working with, the CEOs and the CMOs and the CFOs that come to these meetings from places like even McCormick, the freaking spice company. Like, I have all of these recordings, and I just, I don’t know what to do with them because I don’t wanna go afoul of, like- Okay, so-some recording laws- Yeah ... or whatever.Malcolm Collins: We can also... So I tell our fans, send that to anyone you know. Simone we’ve been, we’ve been asked to speak at the White House before, so we’ve, we’ve done that. And- Oh ... we should reach out to our contact there, Simone, just as a task item. We should reach out to our contact there about this to see if we can get them to look into this at all.Because it could be an interesting win for them.I’m connected with them.Simone Collins: Well, I know,Kirsche: yeah.Simone Collins: Yeah, it’s- And they’re very big, and they’re often very overwhelmed, so maybe they just need to hear about it from our angle, so we should. LetKirsche: me... Maybe, yeah. Yeah.Malcolm Collins: So I think, I think get Heritage Foundation in front of Bridge. We have connections at, like, Claremont and stuff like that, right?Like we could- Mm-hmm ... reach out.Kirsche: Yeah, that would be great. I would love to. Like, anybody who’s willing to talk, just give them my Discord. Give me, like, a hundred- Yeah, ‘Malcolm Collins: cause I, [01:17:00] I remember talking- ... people to contact me ... with Dustin about starting, like, a, a nerd right or new right, like, institutional, like, fund similar to Heritage- Mm-hmmor something like that, and he’s just like, “I don’t see what benefit.” But at the very least, we should be handing this sort of information to people.Simone Collins: Well, yeah, because you’ve done, like, reams of research on this. Yeah. Which is invaluable. And so that, like, they could take that and run with it. ‘Cause they have the lawyers, and you did the research, and they can just plug and play.It’s like, “Oh, look, I can start here, here, and here.” Like, that much- Yeah, exactly ... time.Kirsche: And, and especially- Do you know who- ... more so that, like, obviously everything in my, my Twitter article is for public consumption, but, like, the, the videos of these internal meetings where they speak freely because they believe no one who doesn’t believe other than them is watching- Yeahit, it’s insane some of the stuff that they say.Simone Collins: Gosh.Malcolm Collins: Oh. Who do we... Who else do we know that could, I, like, I’m thinking who’d be interested in going deep on this. You know, Louise Perry talking with you could be pretty good. She’s got a decent audience. And I think she’d be interested Do, do you know Louise Perry?Kirsche: I do not.Simone Collins: She’s based in the UK. [01:18:00] She is one of those, like, I- canaries in the coalMalcolm Collins: mine She’s, she’s really big. She is in the UK. So, you know, we’re known as like the pronatalist couple. Mm-hmm. Whatever we are to Elon- Mm ... JK Rowling. Yeah. In the same way that like JK Rowling can’t spend all day railing against trans people online, Louise Perry can’tDoes that for her, right? You know? Yeah, yeah. She also goes really deep on a lot of stuff and former leftist and everything like that. Yeah. I mean, a, a lot of our government connections are in the UK because like we’ve been better at infiltrating governments there. Which is- I don’t know why that’s the case.There’s just, I, I guess, a larger nerd government faction in the UK.Kirsche: I guess maybe. Yeah. I, I moved back to, like, where I’m from, so I’m back in New England, and I’ve, I’ve been meeting with a lot of like libertarian party and free state party people in New Hampshire, and that gives me, that gives me great, great hope for the future, at least out here.That’s so wonderful. WhichMalcolm Collins: usually I’m like a doomsday party and hope for the best, but- Oh, I used to live in New Hampshire. I love, I love that stuff. Yeah, we, we’ve done we’ve done speaking at [01:19:00] some of that, and we’ve been asked to come speak at something in New Hampshire. Do you know what it is, Simone, the group?They wanna fly us out.Simone Collins: H- have you spoken with them? Like, some new s- society and they reached out on X, and I can’t remember the name. I can look it up really fast, but like... yeah. I know there are a lot of, like, free state related societies that it’s like a membership based private society.Kirsche: Heck yeah.Malcolm Collins: But yeah, awesome. This has been so great. And I’m gonna get building those things, and hopefully I can have them done in a couple weeks.Kirsche: And I will try to get screenshots of the SE backend and the GamerSupps gifting platform.Great,Malcolm Collins: great. Amazing. I’ll try to mimic, I’ll try to mimic them. Just so you know our system runs on Stripe, so that would be the payment processor.Kirsche: That makes sense. That makes sense. I think God, what’s it called? Sidescrollers plus Locals, I think they also run on Stripe.Malcolm Collins: Oh, oh, a- also important for you to know, the reason I use Stripe is because you can use Stripe with Privacy.Mm-hmm. Privacy is a app that you can sign into that creates- Mm ... a fake one-time use credit card using your credit card that [01:20:00] uses a fake name and address. That’s pretty cool. So if people wanna be, like, totally anonymous, even to me, that can be done.Kirsche: That’s pretty neat.Malcolm Collins: Yeah. All right. Well- Well,Kirsche: all rightMalcolm Collins: spectacular. Have a wonderful day.Kirsche: You too. Thank you again for having me on, and bye bye.Speaker 6: Okay, so you wanted to show the fans the toys that you bought?YeahAll of the places that are, that are trying to destroy the United States of America, or just trying to, or just trying to shoot a nuclear bomb at, at America. Okay? So Iran, for sure, right? Iran. What about China or Europe? Who do you, who do you dislike more?[01:21:00]So you’re going to handle both China and Europe?Octavian Collins: And, and on, and on both islands there will be Chinook helicopters drop, dropping snipers to shoot people- ... very fiercely and, and very invisible. Wait, only, only the bad people or the civilians too? Oh, only the bad military people. Or- But the civilians-Speaker 6: And what are you gonna do with the civilians after you get rid of the military people?Oh, so you’ll, you’ll bring freedom to China and [01:22:00] Europe? This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit basedcamppodcast.substack.com/subscribe

Malcolm Collins breaks down the Iran conflict and the Trump administration’s surprising diplomatic masterstroke that most pundits on both left and right completely misunderstood. Instead of “giving away money” or weakness, the deal creates powerful economic incentives and on-the-ground leverage from Iran’s angry neighbors (Saudi Arabia, UAE, Qatar, etc.) that makes cheating far more dangerous than the weak Obama deal.We also discuss why boots-on-the-ground predictions failed, Israel’s role, the collapse of Iran’s military and leadership, and the long-term strategic wins for America. Later in the episode, Malcolm makes a provocative case for allowing Sharia law applied specifically to Muslim communities in the West as a way to reduce crime, create a forcing function on integration, and let communities see the real preferences of high-fertility Islamic subgroups.A raw, high-signal conversation that challenges mainstream narratives on both foreign policy and domestic cultural issues.Show NotesHeadlines on June 17thhttps://drudgereport.com/OBAMA DEAL BETTER?TRUMP HUMILIATIONMAGA HAWK MUTINYTEXT LEAKSNY Times Above the Fold on Iran:Live Updates: Trump Speaks at G7 Sumit After Renewing Threats on Iran https://www.nytimes.com/live/2026/06/17/world/g7-summit-trump-franceStars of Israel’s TV Channel for Bibi Fans Turn on Trump https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/17/world/middleeast/israel-channel-14-trump-criticism.htmlYou have to click through on NY Times to get any “what’s going on with negotiations” update, and the headline is: What to Know About the U.S.-Iran Framework Agreement: The full text of the deal that could pave the way to ending the war has not been published. Initial details suggest that it defers the most contentious issues.Generally, from only scanning headlines, one gets the impression that Iran may be reaching some sort of conclusion, but it’s one unflattering to the Trump administration.What has happened as of June 17thA preliminary framework agreement (memorandum of understanding or MoU) was reached and virtually signed around June 14–15, 2026, between the US and Iran to pause the ongoing conflict.Key elements (based on public statements and reports; the full text has not been widely released yet):* Immediate ceasefire extension: Halts military operations on all fronts, including in Lebanon. This builds on earlier shaky ceasefires (e.g., from April).* Reopening the Strait of Hormuz: Iran agrees to clear restrictions/mines; the US lifts its naval blockade of Iranian ports. Shipping has begun resuming, contributing to falling oil prices.* 60-day negotiation window: For broader issues, primarily Iran’s nuclear program (e.g., enrichment freeze or limits, sanctions relief). A formal signing ceremony is planned for June 19 in Switzerland (or possibly another venue).* Other reported aspects (with some conflicting claims): Possible phased sanctions relief, asset unfreezing, and a reconstruction fund (potentially $300 billion, mostly from Gulf states/private sources rather than direct US payments).The key point per Malcolm: The powers surrounding Iran being directly invested in its recovery and improvement, and Iran’s stable future being contingent on not pissing them off.Primarily Gulf Arab states (Iran’s key neighbors across the Persian Gulf), through a proposed private ~$300 billion Reconstruction and Development Fund, will be involved in Iran’s reconstructed and therefore directly invested in Iran going forwardDetails from the Framework Agreement* The fund is not direct US government money or reparations but a private investment vehicle designed to attract capital for Iran’s postwar recovery (infrastructure, energy, logistics, manufacturing, etc.).* Gulf states (Saudi Arabia, UAE, Qatar, and others in the GCC) are positioned as primary backers or facilitators (”Gulf Coast Coalition”). They were attacked by Iran during the conflict and have a strong incentive for regional stability. Contributions could include loans, credit lines, or direct investments.* Why these neighbors?* Economic interdependence: Rebuilding Iran reduces future conflict risks, secures energy routes (e.g., Strait of Hormuz), and opens markets.* Mediation role: Qatar and Oman played key diplomatic roles; broader GCC involvement aligns with their security and economic goals.* Already committed: Over half the fund has pledges from companies in Gulf states, Asia, US, etc.Other international private investors (Asia, Europe, Africa, South America) are involved, but Gulf neighbors are emphasized for their direct stake and proximity.The fund unlocks only if Iran complies with nuclear limits, inspections, sanctions relief phases, and other terms. Full details await formal signing (expected ~June 19) and implementation. This structure gives neighbors leverage and investment upside in a stable Iran.What remains pending:* Israel getting on board: Netanyahu has indicated Israeli forces will not fully withdraw from Lebanon, creating friction.* How to work out sanctions and rule enforcement going forward: Loose ends on nuclear talks, sanctions, regional proxies, and enforcement. Trump has noted dissatisfaction could lead to resumed action.* Iran’s future armament: Iran’s nuclear capabilities, ballistic missiles, and broader regional influence are deferred.Is Iran Less of a Threat Today?Yes.Various ways Iran is nerfed:* Nuclear Program Setbacks:* US/Israeli strikes heavily damaged key enrichment facilities* (Natanz, Fordow, Isfahan) and related infrastructure.* While Iran retains some highly enriched uranium stockpiles and knowledge (underground elements were hard to fully destroy), its ability to rapidly advance toward a weapon has been delayed by months to a year or more.* The framework agreement includes commitments to non-proliferation and further talks on limits, reducing near-term breakout risk.* Ballistic Missiles and Conventional Forces:* Large portions of Iran’s missile launchers, production facilities, air defenses, naval assets, and drone capabilities were destroyed or degraded.* This limits its ability to project power, threaten US assets/bases, or sustain prolonged attacks.* Proxy responses (e.g., from Hezbollah, Houthis) were limited and ineffective in shifting the balance.* Economic and Logistical Pressure:* The conflict devastated Iran’s economy and defense industrial base. The recent agreement reopens the Strait of Hormuz (previously restricted by Iran, causing global oil disruptions) and lifts the US naval blockade, but under monitored terms with sanctions relief tied to compliance. This reduces Iran’s leverage via energy chokepoints while exposing it to ongoing oversight.* Leadership and Regime Strain:* Strikes targeted senior figures, command structures, and internal security (e.g., Basij bases), contributing to morale issues, desertions, and recruitment problems.* The regime survived but is in a more defensive, weakened posture.Episode TranscriptMalcolm Collins: Hello, Simone. I’m excited to be here with you today, and this is one of those days where I just need to be like- Everybody doesn’t seem to understand what happened at all, and I’m talking about on both the left and the right with this current deal with Iran, which is actually one of the more brilliant negotiated deals that I’ve seen maybe in the past 100 years in terms of us getting pretty much everything that we really want.And it’s shocking to me that you keep hearing, well, outright false claims that we’re giving them money, which we’re not. But money is involved, but in a way that really, really matters, and in a way that has a lot more teeth than the Obama deal did which is another thing that people are getting really wrong.So a bit of context, because I- I don’t even know if you fully understand, and I’m gonna get the, the gist of this out of the gate. The big problem we have with Iran and wanting to pull out of the war, right, is that Iran, due to something called a Mosaic Defense Force, [00:01:00] essentially split into independent warlords who don’t exactly follow what’s coming from the top.We know this because there was one instance where the president said that he apologized for all the strikes on other countries that are their allies presumably, and then the, a few days later he was like, “I, I, I didn’t say... I didn’t mean that. We’re not even doing that.” You know, which implied that one, they’re not listening to him, and two, the independent warlords have more power than he does in this arrangement, because he had to back down from this position.So this has led to a scenario where even when we do negotiate with people at the top, right? They can then th- they need to be able to, and in a, in a strong and forceful way, have a reason to tell all the people below, “Follow along and stay in line.” Right? And then we have the secondary problem with Iran, which is even if you make a deal with them like Obama did, they basically just ignore it, like they did with the Obama deal.Because the enforcement of that deal was that you know, the [00:02:00] UN or whatever would send its inspectors in, and Iran just wouldn’t show the inspectors the, the places where this is at, freaking obviously, right? Like we’re, how are they gonna figure that out, right? So that creates a huge negative incentive.Speaker: Mr. Eel, I was supposed to be allowed to inspect your palace today, and your guards won’t let me into certain areas. Hans, Hans, Hans, we’ve been through this a dozen times. I don’t have any weapons of mass destruction..I’m sorry, but the UN must be firm with you. Let me see your whole palace or else.Speaker 2: Or else what?Speaker: Or else we will be very, very angry with you, and we will write you a letter telling you how angry we are.Malcolm Collins: Okay. So functionally, what Trump created was a scenario in which and Iran helped him do this. They made a number of enormous miscalculations that made this deal possible that is just so bad for Iran and people don’t get it at all. So, [00:03:00] the miscalculation, the big one that they made that is almost baffling unless you understand that there were rogue actors within the country o- operating this Mosaic Defense Force and just basically trying to The, the, the reason why they were sending more missiles at, like, Qatar and the UAE and Saudi Arabia and, like, their, their freaking allies than even Oman, who’s been one of their closest allies forever, than Israel, is because that didn’t get you scorecards in the, in the battleship of the dictators, right?And so this led them to attack. A- and keep in mind, by the way, what the, the right grifters who lie to you all the time, like the anti-Israel right grifters and the leftist said it this word, they said, “This is gonna end up with boots on the ground, huge, hundreds of thousands of American soldiers dying in Iran, that the stock markets are gonna crash,” highest they’ve ever been.That oil is gonna go to $200 a barrel. Did not happen. You know, and, and when I came out here with all of this, and I told you where I thought this war was gonna go, I’ve been pretty much exactly accurate. Okay? Yeah. So keep this in mind when you’re thinking of your [00:04:00] sources and where you take, like, interest- like, your information from, right?Right. Because some people are manipulating you and playing you for stupid. But anyway, so it ended up with a scenario where- A lot of these countries have historically ... Well, they were in conflict. Like, Saudi Arabia’s not Iran’s ally. Like, they, they do hate each other. But other players like Qatar was.Qatar is where, like, Al Jazeera is, which is basically Iran’s global mouthpiece. Yeah ... the reason why Qatar is so close with Iran is because they share the gas field that is the basis of all of Qatar’s wealth. This is the natural gas field. And Iran and Qatar have to get along otherwise they end up fighting in a way that would be mutually destructive.But now even Qatar doesn’t like them because Iran bombed the main refining facility of Qatar. So- Okay ... all of these other Middle Eastern countries really hate, hate Iran’s guts now. And what they’re saying under the table is, “We want what Israel wants. We want Iran a failed state or functionally eradicated,” okay?Simone Collins: Right,Malcolm Collins: yeah. Trump doesn’t want this. This would cause a major refugee [00:05:00] crisis and it has- Yeah, yeah ... some other negative externalities. Israel, this is Israel’s endgame, I think. But, you know, Israel is at the moment partially serving us. They’re doing some stuff with Hezbollah. I think Trump secretly approves it.We’ll get to that in a second. But- Okay ... so Iran closes down the strai- the strait. We’ve said if, in terms of large geopolitical players, we point out that that basically only helps the United States. While it may hurt us economically in the short term, like, like, in an absolute sense, in a relative sense against all other parts of the world no country on Earth is helped more than the United States by a shutdown of the Strait of Hormuz.Because we produce all of the stuff that comes out of there, and are exporters of it, and just basically captured Venezuela, which is one of the other major exporters of it. And so, like, that just makes the value of all that stuff that we own and export and is a major part of our economy go up. And so the people who get hurt by that, as I’ve said, are Europe and China primarily, China the most.And, and some other East Asian countries. But nobody gets hurt by this [00:06:00] more than who, Simone? Who gets hurt the most by a closure of the Strait of Hormuz?Simone Collins: Europe, the EU, right? No. China.Malcolm Collins: It closes ... uAE- Russia ... Saudi Arabia, and Qatar.Simone Collins: Because- Oh, for this, their oil sales ...Malcolm Collins: they can’t export their main product if that strait is closed.And Saudi Arabia has some other ports they can use, but, but minor stuff there. Okay? So all of these people, one, hate Iran’s guts right now. They want Iran functionally eliminated long-term. And th- because keep in mind they’re, it, most of them are a different branch of Islam and the, nobody hates each other more than the two branches of Islam, right?Those are the two big... y- you think they hate the Jews, you know, they’re, they’re, they’re, they’re chomping at the bit to g- go at each other. But anyway, so, they, Iran pretty isolated, right? And this is why Iran, in terms of how they built out their global power projection, had to do it through terrorist networks rather than through alliances with states like the Saudi Arabians did.So, we [00:07:00] wanna get this strait open, but there’s this Mosaic Defense Force saying, “And we don’t really care that much.” Like, we don’t want the US to put a bunch of money in getting this open. Okay?Simone Collins: Yeah.Malcolm Collins: So who is most motivated to get the strait open? The other powers in the Middle East right now. So what did the deal functionally do?It did two things simultaneously that have people pissed off. Both of them are kind of irrelevant. One is releasing Iran’s frozen funds. For people who act like this is us giving Iran money, you guys have the mentality of Josh of Bricks and Minifigs thinking he’s giving the guy a big gift by giving him his Legos back.It’s like, no, you f*****g seized those Legos. You’re not doing some big f*****g favor by giving them their own Legos back. You just seized them because they had diplomatic sanctions on them. Right? So that’s really irrelevant, and it wasn’t even that much money. It’s like $20 billion or something like thatSimone Collins: Okay.Malcolm Collins: The $300 billion deal [00:08:00] is what everybody is talking about.Simone Collins: Yes.Malcolm Collins: This has nothing to do with US assets. No- nobody in the US is involved in this deal. Okay. So what is actually happening with this deal? What this does is it allows for up to 300 million, which by the way a lot of people... Billion. A lot of people are leaving the up to out of investment.Keep in mind this is not like a donation. This is not for infrastructure. This is for direct investment by all of these countries that Iran just pissed off inside of Iran. All right? So you’ve gotta keep in mind what that functionally means is going to happen in Iran. All right? So a bunch of countries now that want Iran gone in the long term wouldn’t want something like this again, and would want to be able to act against Iran with more force if this happened again, now basically have a blank slate to build up private operations with private militias, [00:09:00] private everything like that all throughout Iran.And not just all throughout Iran, but at every key economic node of Iran, because what are these powers going to be investing in? If the UAE, if Saudi Arabia just got a bunch of billions of dollars to invest in Iran, what are they gonna be investing sprucing up? What are they gonna b- be buying? Oil.Yeah. Oil creation assets, oil creation facilities. And they have a lot of experience in making these very defensible once they get them in place, right? Sure. This actually puts Iran in a terrible position long term, but it’s worse than that for Iran. Because now what they’re saying is, “Okay, I know that you have this Mosaic Defense Force which is going to want to, like, show off and just randomly attack ships and blah blah blah blah blah,” right?But, this is such a potential boon to the future of Iran because it is still money flowing in, it is still dollars going to [00:10:00] Iranians at the end of the day who will be employed at these facilities, right? That there’s a reason to say, “Hey, we actually lose something very big, this continued investment, if we continue to act bad.”So now they have an active reason to not do the bad thing with assets on the ground. Now this gets very, very different than the deal that Obama put into place. Because the deal that Obama put into place was sort of like, “We’ll have bureaucrats go there and check your numbers and see whatever,” right?The, and the bureaucrats don’t really even have a vested interest in making sure Iran doesn’t have nuclear weapons. Now under the Trump deal, which is interesting because the Trump deal on its surface feels like it has a lot fewer fangs in it. But because it’s directly tied to these new assets within Iran owned by all of these countries around Iran, right?Mm. It is way harder for Iran to do two things. One, attempt to nationalize this [00:11:00] stuff. If Iran attempts to nationalize this stuff, they’ve now pissed off every country around them, and given countries that for a long time have wanted to seriously kick butt on Iran a casus belli for a war. And a casus belli for a war that even if the United States doesn’t enter, Israel certainly will, because Israel’s been waiting to do this forever.And they now know that Israel versus Iran looks really bad on the Iranian side.Simone Collins: Hmm.Malcolm Collins: So functionally in terms of, like, the actual motivations that Iran has in terms of moving forwards, this is a pretty powerful deal. Now, this isn’t to say that, you know, Iran could be so much of a failed state at this point that they just can’t control their military, that their military decides to go out there, strike random ships, whatever.At that point, we’ll see what ends up happening. I’m not saying that that won’t end up happening, because that could happen. The other big hitch in this is that Hezbollah s- is still sending missiles at Israel. So Israel decides you know, because they’re trying to, [00:12:00] to provoke Israel, basically. They don’t, they don’t want this to end, right?Like, a lot of, a lot of these other Iran state actors don’t want this to end. This, these are the, the guys in Lebanon. By the way, if you’re like, “Oh, w- w- killing innocents in Lebanon, how could this happen?” I wanna give you a a just, just a, an overview of Lebanon’s history for people who aren’t aware of it.So, if you go back to the 1895 census that we have, okay? Okay ... lebanon was 80% Christian. They were, by 1930- Holy,Simone Collins: wait, what kind of Christian? Catholic?Malcolm Collins: I think Catholic. Or they might’ve been an Eastern Orthodox branch.Oh. Or 79% Christian. Okay?Simone Collins: Whoa.Speaker 3: They were Catholics, it turns out, which makes all of the de-sucking that the Pope did and Vatican II did not long after this look particularly ghoulishMalcolm Collins: You go to today what, what is, what is Lebanon today?28% Christian. You wanna know what happened to, to, to their Christian population?Simone Collins: What?Malcolm Collins: Well, mass [00:13:00] murdered. So, specifically we have things like the Damascus massacres, where 5,000 to 12,000 Christians were, like, just pulled out of churches and monasteries and murdered in the streets. And then you have the Lebanon Civil War.Simone Collins: By whom? Like, what is, what, what contingent was so anti-Christian?Malcolm Collins: MuslimsSimone Collins: Okay, great. Great, great. Okay,Malcolm Collins: Muslims. Yeah, I think people, like, when people are like, “But a Jew spit on a nun once.” And it’s like, bro, it’s a completely different scale. A Jew - besmirched a statue of Jesus. It’s like, what, what are you, what are you on about?Speaker 5: The one that always gets me when people are like, “Did you know that Israel bombed a, a church in Gaza?” And I’m like, “Okay, how many people were attending that church?” It’s like, “Well, there was like three or four.” And it’s like, “Uh-huh, and there used to be hundreds. What happened to them? What happened to them?”Oh, you, you, you, you, are you willingly unaware or are you just like you like cucking yourself? Because these people, like it’s, it’s worse than being cucked. [00:14:00] It’s like you’re actively out there seeing somebody murder your countrymen, your children, your wife, and you’re like stanning themSpeaker 6: I am fairly confident that these people have some weird NTR fetish and that we’re gonna find out one day when Nick’s, , folder leaks that that was his thing all alongSpeaker 4: And for those who are unaware, , if you’re like, “Well, but Jews I guess functionally do the same thing because they vote Democrat,” it’s like actually Orthodox Jews, the ones having kids, the ones who will be represented in the future, the ones we’ll be partnered with long-term in Israel, , they vote Republican overwhelmingly.So much so that they are one of the key reasons we win the swing state of Florida and have moved that into the easy area to win for the Republican PartyMalcolm Collins: And note here, there are decent Muslims, right? But a lot of them, and the Muslims that have cultural power in Lebanon right now are not [00:15:00] that group. Okay? Specifically Hezbollah, which is essentially holding the country hostage. For 40 years, Israel has told the, the government in Lebanon, “Stop these people on your borders just shind- sending missiles into our country.”They haven’t done it, so Israel says, “Okay, we’re gonna handle it. We’re gonna, we’re gonna get this. We have greater Israel. Let’s, let’s...” You know? If, if they get rid of the Christians in Lebanon, you know what? Greater Israel all the way. Make it Jewish. I don’t care, right? But Iran wants to include a protection for Hezbollah, or Lebanon in their minds in this because they don’t wanna lose the last state asset that they really have, which is really in tatters anyway at this point because of the pager bombings and stuff like this.But Israel is saying to Trump, “We’re not gonna do this.” And they go in and they attack Damascus. Which I under- I mean, from their interests, they really don’t want this to happen. They, there have been right-wing Israeli pundits that you can find just railing about the peace deal. Because again, Israel’s best interest is the complete destruction of the [00:16:00] Iranian state.Simone Collins: Uh-huh.Malcolm Collins: They do not care long term-Simone Collins: Scorched earth, nothing there, yeah. Which is-Malcolm Collins: Yeah ... yeah Destroy all their economic assets. NotSimone Collins: great. I mean-Malcolm Collins: Anything like that.Simone Collins: Yeah. No. That’s not what we want. No.Malcolm Collins: And that’s generally not what America wants. No. So, so you could say, okay, so why is Trump not being harder on Israel, just saying they’re being stupid, basically?I think it’s because he wants them to do this. So the important thing to remember with the deal-Simone Collins: Okay ...Malcolm Collins: is that you need to make it look like you’re doing a lot in terms of your part of the deal. Sure. If Trump can go and talk Israel down and get Israel to get out-Simone Collins: Oh ...Malcolm Collins: while this is completely- HeSimone Collins: has more leverageMalcolm Collins: active. Yeah, he has way more leverage in the negotiations. It’s like, “Look, they don’t wanna do this. I’m trying to get them to do this,” right? It’s, it’s really aSimone Collins: lot- It’s good cop, bad cop. I- yeah. Okay.Malcolm Collins: Yeah. So by the way, is this at what you understood of what was happening, or were you just completely with me?Simone Collins: No, no. My understanding was allegedly there are [00:17:00] talks but this doesn’t do anything to stop any long-term nuclear threat from Iran. Like, yes, we’ve decimated their nuclear capacity, but within a year they could be back up and running. Yes, we’ve ruined, you know, their lower tech ballistic missiles and stuff, but sure, they could just buy new ones.And this- ... this alleged a- agreement or plans for an agreement, they’re just plans. W- no one has seen the full written agreement. Nothing has been agreed to formally. And by the way, Israel doesn’t wanna back out of Lebanon and who knows what’s gonna happen with Iran? It’s all fragmented. You can’t even get it to agree in the first place.So basically, if you look at what, I think, the surface of mainstream media and general reporting tells you, nothing is happening. This war is terrible. We’ve wasted money. We’re no better off than we used to be, and-Malcolm Collins: Yeah, so that’s just basically- ... TrumpSimone Collins: is embarrassed ...Malcolm Collins: completely wrong at every single point.So first of all, remember how I said that, like, we [00:18:00] can’t get Iran to stop making nukes by sending bureaucrats in? Yeah. You know what, what,Simone Collins: and- Yeah. No, that’s, it’s, it’s like telling, it’s like telling our kids, like, “Don’t do this. It’s against the rules. You’ll get a timeout.”Malcolm Collins: Yeah.Simone Collins: And you just have, you have to change the incentives.Everything’s incentives, not punishments.Malcolm Collins: Yeah. So you- You it, a, well, no, punishments matter too. What, Iran functionally and finally got punished for decades of flagrantly ignoring our they almost have a nuke freak-out, right? By this lore. And people were like, “Oh, it’s always been they almost have a nuke.”And it’s like, yeah, and they almost got it multiple times. And then we did Stuxnet, and Iran, Israel did Stuxnet, which was really clever, by the way. Again, Jews and their sneak stat. They’re just like speccing into a race with like a plus 25 to sneak. Like, the Hezbollah bombings were crazy. Stuxnet, if you’re not familiar with this, it was a completely offline centrifuge, and they ended up tricking somebody [00:19:00] into taking a USB drive, putting it into the completely offline device, and then destroying this super expensive centrifuge automatically.Like, the mechanical parts of it. That is the wildest thing I’ve ever heard of in terms of... That’s, that’s some, that’s some Jewery right there. That’s,Simone Collins: that’s- Next, next level ...Malcolm Collins: cucking Jew. But anyway, so, Stuxnet set them way back. Like, over and over again, they get set back. They get set back. They get set back.And now They almost had it finally. And they were basically telling us that. They go, “We have enough to make, I think it was, what? 25 nukes within two months they said, or something like that. Like, like basically they’re just like, “Yeah, we’ve pre-refined it.” There’s no, there’s no reason to have it refined to this amount other than military-grade weapons, and it only takes a few weeks to get it from the amount of refinement they had to nuclear grade and then use it, right?Mm-hmm. So they’re basically saying, “Yeah, we, we have the capability to nuke.” They’re a country that regularly trans- death to America at political events. This is not a controversial statement there. That’s the party line. [00:20:00] That’s, that’s in the national charter. And that’s obviously a threat to America, right?Especially given that they have even recently funded you know, the killings of 250 Marines at one of our embassies through, through Hezbollah, right? Like, they, they are willing to nuke American assets, right? Like, they’d probably start with the Jews, but, but you know, we’d, you know, be on the list.In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if they tried to do an Israel America at the same time sort of thing, just as like a big show of force and how great they are and try to... and of course, Hasan Piker and all the leftists at universities, even if it was Manhattan being nuked, would still be doing these big parades, ‘cause that’s how they are these days.But, so they almost get the n- the, this material, and it’s like what can we do at this point, right? The only thing we can really do is bomb their military into the Stone Age, and you look at what we were able to achieve with this. We destroyed basically all of their military assets. Their entire navy, which was, by the way, I think four exercises of British Navy,Simone Collins: Was it really?Oh, I don’t remember- Yeah, yeah, yeah ... hearing about a big navy.Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Wow. Well, it’s more that Britain has a super small navy [00:21:00] now.Simone Collins: There’s that.Malcolm Collins: Super small and incompetent. But anyway that’s at the bottom, that’s at the bottom of the, the, the ocean now or the, the sea there. But anyway, so we got rid of their navy, we got rid of a lot of their land assets.We really hurt them in terms of their ordinance stockpiles that they have access to. And but, yes, they can restock, but in the meantime, we also did a lot of physical destruction to nuclear facilities that, that we’re aware of. But more than all of that, we really up the country’s leadership organization.Like we basically killed Two generations of leadership. Well, not we. They, the Israelis are way better at the targeted killing stuff. We helped, okay? We, we threw a few bombs in there, but they, If you look at the, the, the level of the destruction that happened within the leadership of Iran it’s, it’s genuinely astonishing, and it’s gonna be very hard for them to bounce back from this.Mm-hmm ... w- when you consider that, as well as the asset damage. And anything that looks like, [00:22:00] from the perspective of other Middle Easterners, re-arming themselves is gonna be bad, and I think that they, they... because they, they’ll withdraw the money. And this is where it gets really good, because the thing that I think that we’ve learned in the United States more broadly, and I think this is what we should learn in the UK, I think this is something that we need to, to come away with, is there was a, the, the, the one of the heads of Qatar, he’s got this speech where he’s talking about how the United States and Europe, he specifically, he was calling out here Europe, he goes, “We’re gonna have to deal with, in the next generation, many a Muslim extremist attacks,” because Europe is not dealing with its Muslim extremists, right?Like, they are, as we’ve seen in recent episodes, there’ll be, like, a gang rape, and the, the kid, the minors who did it, so they can say, “Oh, it’s not a big deal,” they, they got fines of, like, community service. They didn’t even get jail time for it. They posted it on Snapchat live. Like, the, the level of degradation, and with the new files, which we’re not gonna cover, by the way, of all the grooming gangs, was so much worse than anyone thought.And they were [00:23:00] 98% Muslim, turns out. So much worse than anyone thought that, that, And these also, these groups target Muslim communities as well. Like, keep that in mind, right? Like, Absolutely horrifying that this has been al- allowed to metastasize. And the, the guy in Qatar’s like, “You and America need to d- need to deal with this.You and y- Europe need to deal with this.” And when they say deal with it in Qatar, what they mean is drag them out in the street and chop their heads off. Okay? And this is where I’m gonna say something a little controversial. I think we should allow for Sharia law in the UK and in the US applied to Muslim communities.Oh. So, so here how this works. Okay. I think that we should still be subject to all of the other laws of our country, but in addition to the other laws of the country, if Sharia law would ever have a harsher punishment than the country’s laws, then the Sharia law punishment is applied to any practicing Muslim.And this is done at the level of local Muslim councils. So for [00:24:00] example, what would happen to these men under Sharia law? The smallest fine that they would’ve had to pay, the smallest thing that may have happened to them as an unmarried man involved in a grape is 100 whip lashes from a whip.If you’re unfamiliar with what 100... That’s, that’s what Johnny Rico was given for accidentally leading to one of his teammates being killed in a a live fire exercise in Starship Trooper. That is a brutal thing to do to someone.Speaker 8: I was wrong. The Johnny Rico scene is only 10 lashes for an example of how extreme Sharia law is compared to other, , legal systems. , Just in case you’re wondering how many lashes is generally considered fatal, in ancient Roman and Jewish tradition, 40 lashes was often seen as the point where death became likely, hence the common practice of limiting it to 39 lashes to avoid accidentally killing.In British military flogging, ,. A famous case in 1846 involved a soldier dying after 150 lashes. Sentences were later reduced to 50 or fewer. A Russian knout, , far [00:25:00] deadlier.100 lashes were typically fatal. The heavy wire-reinforced tool could break bones in the spine, with some deaths reported as few as 20 strokes. , Modern judicial flogging in the Middle East, sentences of 50 to 100 lashes are common and often survived without serious injury, though deaths occur, examples include a boy dying after 85 lashes due to a mishitSpeaker 7: recruit trainee John Rico is sentenced to administrative punishment Ten lashes Carry out the sentenceSpeaker 9: So if we had Sharia law implemented for Muslims in the West, , and you had something like this gang rape and then they posted on, , you know, X or whatever, , we know it was a Snapchat, you know, you would have ended up with maybe a quarter of these kids just being whipped to death in public. And I [00:26:00] think that would be a very strong deterrent, , both to importing more, , Muslims who want this to be the punishment for everyone and for the Muslim population in these countries.Speaker 10: Just a few logistical points if you’re confused as to, “Oh, well, how do you determine who’s a Muslim?” Right? The, the answer is easy. It’s by, , mosque,Records. , Basically you are, , if you go to a mosque and that mosque, , ascribes to Sharia law, then you are put on the records as being a Muslim who ascribes to Sharia law, right? Like, it would be very, very simple. And if you are a kid under 18, , somebody who goes to one of the mosques, then you are counted as on those recordsSpeaker 11: And if you’re like, “Oh, but that’s so inhumane,” you understand that this is what will become the law of the land in these countries if we allow current demographics to play out. , If you look at the United States, , the Center of Security Policy poll, , found that fifty-one percent of [00:27:00] American Muslims thought that Sharia courts should be allowed in the United States., A twenty-twenty-four Heritage Foundation -- poll found thirty-nine percent of Muslims in the United States thought that Sharia law should be the law of the land. Um, in the UK, we have polls ranging from, , forty-three percent., There was a two-thousand-and-sixteen poll, Policy Exchange IMC, , forty-one percent showed it.In twenty-twenty-four, Henry Jackson Society showed thirty-two percent wanting it. And you can be like, “Well, this isn’t the majority,” or, “It’s only the edge majority in some cases,” but the ones who want it are having vastly more kids than the ones who don’t want it, so they will be the majority of the population in the future.If you’re like, “Oh, this is... How could you do this? This is mon-” You’ve gotta understand, if you do nothing, if you just allow things to play out, this is the way people of the future will be tried in these countries. So you are, through not allowing this to be engaged with, causing it to be engaged with at a much larger level in the future based on current statistical [00:28:00] trends.Speaker 13: And again, I have nothing against Muslims or Islam or anything like that. , I just think that there is a version of Islam that is leading to much higher birth rates within certain parts of the community, , that I do find distasteful, the same way I find certain versions of the ultra-Orthodox Jewish community that are extremely unproductive, , distasteful., And I think that when we look at this version being the high fertility version, this version being the version that’s been resistant to the low fertility aspects of Western culture, , and is, is not integrating, , because the ones who do integrate don’t have as many kids, , that, , , we see many people in the West not understand what the real long-term implications is if they become a majority anywhere., And I think that through changing the law system to the one that they want, the one that they’re asking for, for the members on their mosque rolls, , that could help people grok that when they say they want these sorts of punishments, they’re serious about it.Malcolm Collins: On the high end, depending on which version of Sharia law you’re, you’re looking at, that would be a [00:29:00] public crucifixion.Now you wanna see gang grape stop really quickly in Muslim neighborhoods? Start having teenagers being publicly crucified in those neighborhoods in Britain, and it’s gonna stop mighty fast.Simone Collins: Yeah.Malcolm Collins: A- and better- Well,Simone Collins: you make a fair point that, like, maybe there’s a lack of Sharia law at play among communitiesMalcolm Collins: that are- These people co-evolved with these incredibly harsh punishments, right?Right. Like, we, we point out that, like, m- different people evolved alongside different social norms, and when you take them and put them in a completely different set of social norms their behavior... Like evolution affects personality, behavior, how you relate to things, and humans have undergone an enormous amount of recent sociological evolutionary pressure.Mm-hmm ... and if you take somebody who’s used to these incredibly strict rules that they use in places like the UAE, and Qatar, and, and Iran, and Saudi Arabia, right? Like, all of these countries have incredibly harsh punishments. Whenever you have a Muslim country that actually has a degree of [00:30:00] law and order- it’s because they are applying these punishments as they should be applied.So I’m coming up that I’m for Sharia law going forward, just only applied to the Muslim community. And, and they can’t say, “Well, this Muslim did something and it doesn’t violate Sharia law.” If secular law ever give the punishment worse than Sharia law, then the secular law punishment a- applies.Simone Collins: Well, I mean, I’m in, I’m in favor of any religion’s laws being properly enforced.Malcolm Collins: Well, I know, but they’re, you’re not even legally... I mean, the, the other thing, if it’s a married man who, who grapes someone in Sharia law, that, that’s just a stoning anywhere. That’s the minimum you can get. They don’t even allow us to stone Muslims in, in the United States or the UK. Like, it’s their own law that they should be stoned.Let’s f- let their people stone them, you know? And I think, the second thing I think, is I think that pretty soon once we kill-Simone Collins: Well, okay, sorry. Just to, to- criticize this approach, then you’re also saying that honor killings are okay of young women who have been assaulted. And that’s-Malcolm Collins: That’s actually not Sharia lawsuper notSimone Collins: [00:31:00] cool, right?Malcolm Collins: That’s not... That’s explicitly in violation of Sharia law.Simone Collins: It is?Malcolm Collins: It is. It is. In Sharia law, the woman who is raped, it... Now, there have been local customs where this has been applied. Okay. But Sharia law itself is very explicit that the woman is innocent.Simone Collins: What about a woman who’s just being slutty, let’s say, by their standards?Oh,Malcolm Collins: well, you know, maybe we can let them handle... Maybe we could create some negative externalities for that behavior as well. Okay. But what I think is there’s the secondary benefit to this. One, MuslimsSimone Collins: believe- Now, we, we spend all this time around, like, very progressive people, so I’m just hearing them say, “So Malcolm, you believe that a young lady who chooses to be sexually intimate with someone, possibly someone who emotionally manipulated her at a time in which she’s very emotionally vulnerable and immature, that she should be stoned to death if she chooses to become sexually active before getting married as a teenager?”Malcolm Collins: Absolutely.Simone Collins: Are you saying that?Malcolm Collins: Because there are- Oh, my God ... a number of positive effects of this for society. Okay. The first, we give the [00:32:00] Muslims what they want. The ma- majority of Muslims in the UK want Sharia law- Mm-hmm ... at this point, right? Mm-hmm. In the United States, I think it’s 36% of Muslims. So many Muslim communities want this, right?Simone Collins: That’s a minority, but okay.Malcolm Collins: No, in the, in the UK it’s a majority., I went through the statistics above listing the polls, but actually in one poll it’s the majority in the US as wellSpeaker 12: And as I said, it’s also somewhat irrelevant because the ones who believe this are the ones who have demonstrably more kids, probably about double the rate of kids. And so they are the ones who will be represented in future populationsSimone Collins: Okay.Malcolm Collins: And in the US it might be a majority. Now, I need to double check, but yeah.Simone Collins: I feel like this needs to be opt-in. You know, you have to, like, waive your- No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. NotMalcolm Collins: an opt-in for the Muslim communities who have their own mosque and everything like that.Okay, so, so now you have two-Simone Collins: How would this be practically enforced? Like, let’s say-Malcolm Collins: It would be,Simone Collins: Enforced by Sharia law ... my parents were Muslim, but I’m not. Like, I’m an, I’m an atheist wiccan whose parents are Muslim. What laws apply? I ha- I’ve chosen- So, so- ... to not opt into thatMalcolm Collins: culture ... so it is applied...First of all, if you’re an atheist wiccan whose parents [00:33:00] are Muslim, you’re an apostate and Sharia law says you should be killed.Simone Collins: Oh, my God. So,Malcolm Collins: That, by the way... So let’s talk about why this is such a positive thing, why this wouldSimone Collins: be such a positive thing to allow. Yes. Why is this such a positive thing?Malcolm Collins: First, you give the Muslims what they want. Second, the Muslims who don’t want this would now have a very strong reason to deconvert, right? So what you say is basically you have the right to deconvert from Islam, and the state will protect you after the age of 18. If at the age of 18 you want to deconvert you can deconvert from Islam, and you no longer need to play in this system, and the state will protect you and maybe even open up shelters for people who are doing this specifically.I, I’d be okay with state funding that, okay? The-Simone Collins: Oh, for like shelters of a minor who wants to escape?Malcolm Collins: I said 18 If you’re a minor, in Islamic law, the parents kill you if you leave Islam, okay?Simone Collins: Oh my God. Okay.Malcolm Collins: But the secondary benefit to this, I think minors should have to follow the laws and religion of their parents.Absolutely. If their parents are paying to support them, [00:34:00] they’re n- the state’s not paying to support them. I mean, in a lot of these Muslim cases they are, let’s be honest, but let’s just say the parents, right? So the second thing, okay, is that visibly, now all of a sudden people in the UK, the leftists in the UK, the, the leftists in America have to visually see that the group that they’re bringing into their country doesn’t want the, the world that they want.When they see the gay guy being stoned in the street to death, some gay, some, some twinky teen literally being hit with stones until he’s dead, crumpling to the ground in the middle of the street in Manhattan or something like this where they sanction this off or their Sharia law stoning, real quick they’re gonna want these people out of the country.Yeah. Real quick we’re gonna get immigration,Simone Collins: Bans in place. Oh, so you’re just saying it’s, it’s a forcing function thing.Malcolm Collins: It’s a forcing function. We give them what they want.Simone Collins: And people see what, what... Like, okay, right. Because I guess your broader argument is people are not willing [00:35:00] to intellectually wrap their heads around what many Muslim communities actually for really, like, for real really want.And if we accelerate that and just give them a preview of where things are headed and say, “This is literally what you’re gonna get,” then this can be staved off from happening. So either it happens at, like, a 10% level now if we make it happen, or it happens at a 100% level 50 years from now-Malcolm Collins: Yeah, when they voteSimone Collins: it into national lawthereby ruining countries. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Which is what they want. They want this to be the national law. Yeah. SoMalcolm Collins: let’s make this theSimone Collins: law- And you’re just making it a 10% thing I think ... andMalcolm Collins: then the final externality is you know how quickly the Muslim grape gangs are gonna die out when this gets implemented? You know how quickly a lot of this negative behavior we see, oh, y- w- let’s see, what’s the punishment for, for stealing in Sharia law?We gonna get some hands lopped off here or something? l- we’ll see what the f- punishment for sluttiness is okay, so for a woman who sleeps with somebody out of wedlock it’s 100 lashes. So it’s the same as a man graping someone, which you know what?I’m okay with [00:36:00] that. Stoning to death is if, if the woman is married, which I’m also okay with. For stealing, it’s the amputation of the right hand. I am 100% okay with that. Yeah, as for male and female thieves, cut off their hands. So yeah, you, you know how quickly the, the Muslim crime waves we’ve been dealing with are gonna stop when we start cutting off their fricking hands?Real fast. And the great thing is, is this won’t be done by conservatives. This’ll be done by Muslims of their own communities, which will make their communities less externalities to other groups, and I bet conservatives might be able to get along with Muslims right fast when they start enacting their own punishments on their own group, right?Like, I could... I’m, I’m being totally honest here. If Muslim communities were allowed to punish their own members in these incredibly strict and severe ways in, like, Canada, in the United States, in the UK, in Germany, a, a conservative like me, I, I honestly think... Because right now the Muslim community, like, why do I have a beef with the Muslim community?They keep [00:37:00] graping my people, and then it gets covered up by the local police forces. Because they keep going out there and stealing from my people, right, from our government, right? From, from the local stores, from the... They create these enormous the, you know, thief games. They have your externalities when you look at, at, at, at, at, at rates of, of, of being involved in crime.You see really high rates. If all of that dropped off a cliff, I’d have no f*****g problem. I’d have no problem with Muslims, right? Like, if, if, if, if... And I think it would drop off a cliff if we let them enact Sharia law.Simone Collins: Well, I guess what you’re saying a lot, is a lot of this is downstream of our broader- At least personally st- very strongly held rule of we are cool with any cultural group that does its own thing, so long as it does not curtail on the rights or liberties or property of other groups.And the problem- Right, like ... is that you’re saying this particular group is infringing upon the freedom, rights, liberty, and property of other groups that it sh- you know, has [00:38:00] no right to do. So they, they have become in a, or, and/or are becoming an increasingly existential threat to non-Muslim groups, and therefore- And I, andMalcolm Collins: I wanna be clear here.Your average Muslim in Britain, like, the, the average, the, the Muslim who wants Sharia law, your religiously observant Muslim, they do not like that these grooming gangs are happening.Simone Collins: Sure. Of course not. No ...Malcolm Collins: they,Simone Collins: they, they want these- They’re, they’re horrible bad actors ...Malcolm Collins: people punished because it makes them look bad and they want Sharia law in Britain, which may be antagonistic to our goals, but they don’t just, like, want every bad actor out there doing every bad thing, right?Simone Collins: Like- Well, and I d- I do like, I do like the reframing of Sharia law. Like, I’m just a law and order citizen. Like is that so bad? Yeah. Like, in, in this era- Maximal law and order ... when I think about, like, one of the big sort of Asmongold points of, of our day and age is, hey, wouldn’t it be great if we actually enforced our laws?That is a- ... it’s an interesting take and an angle that I hadn’t thought about before. What if we just... Like, is, is [00:39:00] Sharia law so bad in an era in which one of our biggest problems is a refusal, a, a broad, a refusal to in- impose laws that we have established and agreed upon as a, a base of citizens? Th- that we want these laws.They should be here. But no. Yeah. No.Malcolm Collins: Yeah. And well, and I, I think, I mean, even conservative Americans, if it ends up working and ha- having the Muslim community become positive actors in our countries, I think many Americans, you know, they, they see the guys, the thieves’ hands being chopped off instead of being released back on the street over and over again, they’re probably gonna be like I didn’t think I liked Islam that much, but I mean, if it’s only Muslims this is happening to, I’m fine.I mean, that works for me, right?Simone Collins: Well, I don’t know. But I’ve, I’ve listened to so many horrific stories of the mistreatment of especially children and women within this culture. But that’sMalcolm Collins: common i- withinSimone Collins: Islamic countries. The problem though is, is well, the, it’s, and, and that it’s happening now without Sharia law.In, and to your point I guess in many cases in [00:40:00] violation of Sharia law. So in, I think in a sense because they’re in these gray zones where they’re outside nations with Sharia law, nations that wouldn’t even take them as, for example, as, as refugees in some cases that are also sort of accommodating them and, and turning a blind eye to bad, bad actors and crimes being committed.Perhaps there are, there’s an argument to be made, it’s possible that there are more atrocities committed against even Muslim, practicing Muslim women and children without Sharia law and with the law of the governing country turning a blind eye toward those communities and being like, “I’m not gonna look at this, la, la, la, la, la.”Like, and, “It would be racist for me to notice anything,” which is screwed up. Yeah, and in a way that- Because even within those communities they’re like, “No, this is not okay,” and yet we have been defanged of the tools that we would use to police this among [00:41:00] people.Malcolm Collins: Yeah.Simone Collins: Okay.Malcolm Collins: Islam has the tools baked into it to police Muslims.Simone Collins: Right. But then of course those tools are illegal within, for example, the United Kingdom, so the United Kingdom refuses to impose its own laws on many of these groups for fear of being accused of racism or bias, but then these own groups don’t have the tools they require to enforce those laws themselves if they were to just do it without the UK.So okay, I see your point. My goal, I mean, so obviously, like my number one goal is, you know, promote longterm human flourishing. Our general ideology is, hey, any group should be allowed to do its thing as long as they’re not- An existential threat to other group or impinging on the ability of another group to pursue its, its, you know, prerogative and, you know, have its stuff and do its thing.But then, like, number three, I really, I don’t like people being harmed. I, I don’t, especially kids.Malcolm Collins: But, but hold on. I mean, I think that, that you, you frame this in a way that confuses people [00:42:00] sometimes.Simone Collins: Okay.Malcolm Collins: I am totally okay with a group cucking with another group when that other group is net less productive than the group who’s f*****g with them less moral than the group who’s f*****g with them.Because if, if you have a, a negative bad actor on, on your doorstep that’s constantly messing with you, right? Because a lot of people would take the things that you’re saying and saying, “Oh, when Israel defends itself against Hezbollah, that’s, that’s Jews being a negative externality for anotherSimone Collins: group.” No, no, no, no, no, no, no.Because we per our morality at least, if another group is infringing upon your ability to do your sovereign thing within your own borders, y- you have every right to bop them, as we would say, to, like, retaliate. Because they are not allowing you to, within your own house, do your own thing. Mm. So that, I, I agree with you on thatMalcolm Collins: So, I mean, I just wanna end this with a, you know all those people who said we’re gonna have tons of boots on the ground in Iran?I’ve always said I’m okay with Karg [00:43:00] Island. I’m okay with Karg Island as, as a limited military thing, but boots on the ground in Iran is stupid and Trump’s not gonna do that, and he didn’t do that. And people lied to you. Now, or they didn’t lie to you, they just have no f*****g idea how the world works and they’ve got a bu- an audience of third-worlders who’s totally captured them into these stupid anti-Semitic positions that are just not useful in terms of long-term human flourishing when we’re thinking about, like, useful allies.‘Cause right now, Europe’s not a long-term useful ally for us. They are, they are incredibly cucked, and Israel actually goes out there, and when somebody acts a fool, they handle it. And I think that we in the United States, in Europe, need to take a l- a line from Israel’s book going forwards. And that that is why I’m totally okay with building this stronger alliance with them and seeing where things are going.Right, right now I think Israel is actually acting with tacit approval of Trump to help in the negotiations. We can see how this ends up turning out or leaks that come out of the future. But broadly speaking, no, the stock market didn’t crash, the economy’s doing better than ever. No, oil [00:44:00] didn’t hit $200.No, all of the, no, they, they said that all of the countries in the Middle East would start hating us, when the exact opposite has happened. All of the countries in the Middle East started hating Iran more, started liking us more. There, there has never been a PR campaign so successful for America in the Middle East as Iran deciding to randomly bomb its former allies.Simone Collins: Right, but you are, you are one small voice whispering within a mosh pit of raging-Malcolm Collins: Idiots ...Simone Collins: people.Malcolm Collins: Idiots. NoSimone Collins: one- The world is just raging ... no one is going to understand this. The message everyone’s gonna come away with is, “I can’t travel this summer because airline prices are insane. My gas prices are higher.My food is more expensive. People in Europe have even higher prices.” And everyone else is just like, “Oh, and Trump has humiliated himself,” blah, blah, blah. So, like, I think even a lot of Republicans are gonna come away feeling like this was a net loss. No,Malcolm Collins: I mean, a lot of Republicans have been incepted by these idiots who, like Tucker Carlson and Nick Fuentes, who have giant third-worlder audiences, who have a...I mean, that’s why, that’s why [00:45:00] Tucker Carlson’s moving to Qatar, right? Like, th- this is, this is where his, his, his butter is backed, by the way. Th- this is the position- HisSimone Collins: bread is buttered.Malcolm Collins: His bread is buttered. They’ve got these giant audiences. As we pointed out in our episode, this changed everything, but the, the internet became significantly majority third world over the past 10 years.The third world, this is why they stopped caring about, this is why the left stopped caring about, like, American blacks and, and, and the environment. The third-worlders don’t care about those things. And they all got- caught up in these idiot cycles, and they completely believe them. And when you look at rightist influencers, you would get the opinion that people are, are falling for this.But when you look at the actual right, like MAGA MAGA, MAGA’s 9- 90% pro this war since the beginning, right? Like, MAGA has always been about this. It was never fooled by the captured parts of the influencer class that are acting on behalf of leftists and honestly anti-American interests. And it, it’s, it’s like do people step back and think, “Oh, they, they were just...”They, [00:46:00] they don’t. They don’t remember. You were like... Like, I was talking to Simone in the car about this in the morning. I go, “Will anybody take a step back and be like, ‘Nick Fuentes had no f-ing idea what he was talking about when this war started.’?” And who was right? People like Nux and Malcolm who, who actually was right about where things were going.And that maybe- Yeah,Simone Collins: but what’s, what’s... I just, I’m just trying to say, like, what’s really frustrating is that you guys were right, but that’s not going to change the narrative of how this is gonna work. Like, the people writing theMalcolm Collins: history of this- No, I, I think, I think we on the right need to be harsher both in terms of our time and our views of the anti-American voices on the right which have been growing.And I think, I mean, Nick Fuentes isn’t on the right. He’s a Democrat now. He says he’s a Democrat now, just people are so stupid they think that he’s like a right-wing, which he’s not. He’s just a Democrat. But Tucker Carlson still claims to be on the right, right? L- these people... A- and there’s these people with, th- th- you, you see them over, over, who was it?There was some b- w- Republican influencer who’s all mad about this deal and is saying who’s got a thing on Russian state [00:47:00] TVLaura Southern is who I was thinking of here. I saw it on nuxMalcolm Collins: like literally paid by the Russians, you know, to try to... And as we pointed out, the Russians, behind BLM, see our episode on that if you are unaware of this they funded a...Nine out of every ten dollars that went to influencing US politics, one would go to, to quote-unquote pro-Trump stuff, nine would go to b- pro-BLM stuff. Russia has been the party that’s just like we need to f- with Americans. Like, sow division, everything like that. You guys don’t need to do that, right?Like, when we work with Jews, we get things done, okay? Like, this was pretty cool. You know, actually winning a war. Actually getting what we wanted to, which was a degradation of their military resources to the extent that they’re not gonna be able to move forward, and more eyes and ears in their country by people who don’t want them to develop nuclear weapons.And those people having a vested interest to continue to invest into the country and own more assets in the country, which makes it harder for Iran to operate independently of the interests of these other Middle Eastern countries. Mm. Which is, again, in our interest because [00:48:00] these guys are our...They’re, they’re actually pretty useful allies. They can, I mean, like Saudi Arabia, 9/11, right? Like, they can, Be backstabby, certainly more than the Jews. But recently at least, Saudi Arabia’s been pretty good. And so, you know, will that work forever into the future? Hey, all we need to do is keep developing technology, because it’s not coming out of these regions, and the future is all AI, okay?So the more automated drone swarms we get, the less we need to worry about these people’s opinions. And so in the meantime, let’s let them handle their own, and that’s something we need to be doing more of when it comes to dealing with, I think, Muslim populations. So you heard it here first, base camp, we need sharia law.Simone Collins: Okay.Oh, myMalcolm Collins: God. Yeah, this, is this where you thought I was gonna go with this?Simone Collins: No. This is not where I thought you were gonna go, but I love that you always surprise me. After all these years together, you never cease to shock and surprise. I love you, Malcolm.Malcolm Collins: I love you, [00:49:00] too. I’m really excited to see this direction.Obviously, things could still blow up. I mean, Iran is, as I’ve said, a bunch of rogue actors, and if any of them decide to act basically all the central government can do is to either call in outside assistance or go scorched earth on the rogue actors. Unless the rogue actor’s action gives him more political influence, and then it becomes this whole...So, you know, so we’ll see.Simone Collins: Yeah. But I, I do... I would feel a lot more comfortable just personally, like, all right, how soon is it gonna be until Iran, you know, uses its continued tacit knowledge, or at least, like, documented internal knowledge of, like, developing nuclear weapons to just get back where it was.And if there’s some sort of way to align incentives in such a way where, like, they just really wouldn’t wanna do that because they are better served by not, then I would feel more comfortable. I don’t care what the treaties are. I don’t care what the agreements are. I care about the infrastructure that’s going to be set up after this conflict that would dissuade them from doing that.So the fact that there [00:50:00] may be some of that from what you said has me excited. Hopefully, that’s what happens.Malcolm Collins: Yep, hopefully that’s what happens. I don’t see where we’re gonna get a better carrot that we don’t have to pay for than this. So fantastic scenario.Simone Collins: AllMalcolm Collins: right. Thank you, and to our audience do something to improve yourself today.Yeah, snap that in. You have to learn to use a new AI product or something.Simone Collins: Yeah.Do it.Malcolm Collins: All right, bye.Simone Collins: .We’re so close to getting those new mics. Just, just waiting for a potential discount. Just bear with me. Okay.Malcolm Collins: Well, and we’ve gotta get personal audioSimone Collins: for you guys. Yeah, no, I’m, I’m excited for this conversation because again, I, I looked... Like I thought I was crazy, you know, when I was talking with you in the car this morning, but then I look at the like Drudge this morning “Obama deal better, Trump humiliation, MAGA hot- MA- MAGA hawk mutiny, text leaks.”Like it just sounds horrible and then I go to The New York Times, their front pageSpeaker 15: No, Indy. No, Indy. No, [00:51:00] Indy. It says area closed Remember, Toasty, yesterday you saw pictures of lily pads and, and flowers? Now you’re seeing them in real lifeSpeaker 16: Well, some plants grow in water. They’re aquatic plants Mommy. Yeah? Why do-Birds like water too, don’t they?Oh no, that’s what they like to eat Well, what if the alligator’s gotta eat something? You eat birds, toaster, you eat chicken nuggets. Yeah Yeah. That says area temporarily closed. We could just go in there ‘cause alligators don’t eat kids. What does temporarily mean? What does temporarily mean? Uh, you look yummy to alligators,Speaker 14: Titan.No. What does temporarily mean? This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit basedcamppodcast.substack.com/subscribe

Dive into the controversy surrounding the Los Angeles mayoral election with Malcolm and Simone Collins on Based Camp. Spencer Pratt appeared to be on track for a runoff spot but was suddenly overtaken by a third Democratic candidate amid massive late mail-in ballot surges. Was this organic voting patterns, or something more suspicious?The Collinses review claims of election irregularities, including the puzzling vote count updates that showed zero votes for Pratt in one batch, Skid Row vote harvesting (with residents allegedly paid in cigarettes and cash), ballot collection practices, and the broader issues of mail-in voting in deep-blue LA. They explore both the mainstream counter-narratives and on-the-ground reports while discussing voter ID, election integrity, and why local races matter.Episode TranscriptMalcolm Collins: [00:00:00] Hello, Simone. I’m excited to be here with you today. Today, we are going to be discussing the latest LA election and the shenanigans that- that may or may not have occurred around that.Shenanigans.A couple of our fans were like, “This is the most blatant cheating I have ever seen in an American election,” and they wanted us to look into it.And I will say that this is an interesting thing for me to look into, because I really don’t know... Like, obviously, if there was election fraud that happened The New York Times, NPR, all the major leftist sources are not going to admit it, because they didn’t want Pratt to win, right?Simone Collins: Well, and what I did hear from my broad leftist news sources wasMalcolm Collins: Yeah,Simone Collins: you gotta go, buddy.What I heard from my broad leftist news sources was something along the lines of the Republicans are butt-hurting because Pen- Spencer Pratt didn’t even come close to winning, but he never would because he’s a Republican running in LA, and that seems totally reasonable, so I didn’t think to look further.How can this be a [00:01:00] thing? I, I don’t understand why there could be any weirdness-Malcolm Collins: Yeah, and then the, the secondary thing is obviously, and I, I, you know, I hate to say this about our side, but our side, like if he if, if there was actual election fraud, they would all be saying that regardless. So we don’t actually gain any new information from what they say there.But we don’t gain a lot of new information from our side because obviously no matter what happened, if he legitimately lost at the last second our side would of course come out and say there’s election fraud, right? So that doesn’t exactly give me additional informationso what we’re going to do is we are going to review from both sides pieces on this particular alleged fraud.AndSimone Collins: then we’re going to- Wait, so the fraud ‘cause you had told me earlier that you thought that the issue was... I mean, it’s inevitable that a Democrat’s gonna win in Los Angeles.Malcolm Collins: No. It’s not so it’s kind of fraud. So there was a, a two-tiered runoff, okay? Okay. This is the gist of it, right? So there’s this runoff system, it’s called, like, a jungle primary where they decide who’s gonna run, and it means- Okayyou can have multiple Dems running against each other- Sure ... or a Dem versus a [00:02:00] Republican. Yeah. The leading candidate was this terrible Dem candidate. The, the Black woman, whatever her name is. Anyway she, she was coming in first. Then Pratt was coming in, and then there was a third Democrat that had about half the votes that Pratt had- Okayin terms of sentiment polling, in terms of what they were able to measure, in terms of, like, at the ballots, bold, voter exit polling. And then at the very last moment, all of a sudden this flips. Mm. And all of a sudden- Mm ... Pratt’s getting no more votes- Uh-huh, uh-huh, uh-huh ... and all the votes are going to the third candidate.This is something that the, the narrative of I have laid it out is the narrative that even the left disagree with. Everyone agrees Pratt was demonstrably in the lead i- in terms of spot number two. And then now was he ever gonna win the full election? I, probably not. But the having him i- be in the final runoff was scaring people, right?So Pratt was demonstrably in [00:03:00] the lead, then all of a sudden this socialist candidate flips it up, right? And-Simone Collins: Doesn’t it have to do more with the fact that mail-in voting was very heavy in the Los Angeles election, that ballots could be posted quite late, and that it could be that this particular third candidate had a really heavy and also late mail-in voting campaign push?Malcolm Collins: Well, that is the only plausible thing, except from at least my reading of this, they didn’t have a heavy and late mail-in voting push. So the explanation that leftists have been usingOkay. The explanation that leftists have been using for this is that, okay, yes, she didn’t have a coordinated mail in voting campaign that could explain this, but mail in voters are overwhelmingly Democratic in nature, right?And so if the mail in voters are overwhelmingly Democratic in nature-I don’t even remember what I was saying.Simone Collins: So I had asked you it, [00:04:00] my, what I had heard was, oh, the Republicans are butt hurting about Spencer Pratt being in a minority lead for a little bit and then losing a bunch of ground all of a sudden seemingly. But what they’re missing is that Republicans are heavy with in-person voting, Democrats are heavy with mail-in voting, and in Los Angeles and in California in general I think even postmarked- Oohmaybe even possibly up to the day of the election you can still submit mail-in ballots, and that what is happening is that possibly this third candidate or Democrats in general were just doing their last minute thing and sending in their mail-in ballots- Yes ...Malcolm Collins: and that’s what wasSimone Collins: happening.Malcolm Collins: So we will explore this theory, but there’s- Okaya problem with it.Simone Collins: Okay.Malcolm Collins: The problem goes that in this last minute push that happened all of a sudden for this Democratic candidate, the votes should have, right, like if it had been like a normal election, should have continued to go disproportionately to the Democrat who looked like they were going to win the first place, right?The voting [00:05:00] shouldn’t have shifted between Democratic candidates late in the process like this. That doesn’t make mathematical or narrative sense. So we’re going to get it- Because, yeah, it could just be that a bunch of Dem votes came in at the last minute, right? But then those votes would presumably proportionally still be for the person who won top ticket first, and then for the person who ended up beating out Pratt second, not almost all exclusively for the person who edged out Pratt.So we’re gonna look into both of these explanations because there are, you know, plausibles and then it’s like, okay, yeah, but what’s really happening here?Simone Collins: Yeah. Like, my, my standing plausible theory is that whatever that third candidate that got a surge after, you know, the, the, then overtook Spencer Pratt was just one who heavily focused on last minute mail-in ballot-Malcolm Collins: Yeahvoting. So we’re gonna see if that’s true, and we’re also going to go into what the leftist counter-narrative is. So I’m gonna start with the leftist counter-narrative, okay? The leftist counter-narrative goes like this. And [00:06:00] I’ll be reading from a piece, How a Misreading of Data Fueled False Claims About LA Mayoral Vote Count.Okay?Late on election night, an update of vote counts in Los Angeles mayor’s election appeared on electoral results pages of various media outlets, including the Los Angeles Times. It showed leading Democrats Mayor Karen Bass and Council Member Neda Rahman receiving tens of thousands of new votes, and leading Republican former reality TV star Pen- Spencer Pratt from receiving no new votes.So basically, on the screen, there was this big, like, huge number of votes to these two Democrats, and then literally zero votes for Spencer Pratt. Some voter, observers of the vote tally immediately took the screenshots with some shouting fraud. I mean, that looks a lot like fraud. Others ran statistical analysis that showed it would be impossible for a candidate such as Pratt running second in the race to receive zero votes in such a large batch of bal- ballots.In fact, the update that showed zero Pratt votes was [00:07:00] followed one minute later by another update that showed tens of thousands of votes for Pratt and none for Bass or Rahman. There was no batch of votes that included zero votes for any candidate, and LA County’s own data shows that plainly. But the claim’s fit was the broader false narrative being pushed relentlessly by Trump and other Republicans in recent days that California Democrats were cheating.Voter data pushed out by the Associated Press came as two separate updates one minute apart, with Bass and Rahman’s votes in the first and Pratt’s in the second. The AP vote count receives updates as provided by election officials and adds them to our vote count. What happened in this case is that there was some log in an automated update, such as that one candidate’s votes were added in an update, and the other candidates were followed about a minute later, the Associated Press told The Times.Specifically, an elec- electronic update from the Los Angeles County website pulled in votes from only one cro- group of candidates, including Karen Bass and N- Rahman. [00:08:00] Exactly one minute later, the electra- the electronic update picked up votes from another group of candidates, including Spencer Pratt.Taken together, the updates included the 21,000 votes for Pratt, the 12,000, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Okay. Does that sound plausible to you?Simone Collins: I don’t know with this election stuff. Like, the way stuff is counted and the way stuff is reported to me feels very opaque even though it’s designed to allegedly be trackable and, and transparent.And I know that there’s a ton of shady stuff, and also very inconsistent stuff that comes with mail in ballots. For example, we just voted in the Republican primary election in our local area, right? And we had requested due to sometimes unexpected travel to have mail in ballots. You received your mail in ballot.I did not even though I requested mine. And I know that I had requested one because- Well, there’s been aMalcolm Collins: lot of it. When you say I received, you didn’t receive your mail in ballot, what we’ve seen, and somebody might have voted under your name by the way just so you [00:09:00] know what’s been a common form of voter fraud recently is going around houses and taking the mail in ballots as they come in-Simone Collins: YeahMalcolm Collins: and then using them to vote. And people have been filmed doing this. This isn’t a conspiracy.Speaker 20: On Tuesday just before midnight, David Sprouse’s surveillance cameras captured this man stealing not just his mail but his neighbor’s as well. It was a younger-looking man, uh, happened to come down the sidewalk. He was wearing a ball cap, face mask, gloves. Uh, carefully opened up our mailbox, took out all of our mail.Simone Collins: Yeah, and yeah. It’s, this is, this is entirely possible because in the last election your ballot was missing. Remember when you had to fill out the provisional? ‘Cause I, then I went to the polling station this year.I had to go to toMalcolm Collins: vote. Yeah, I did not, and all these replies-Simone Collins: And I was like, “Well, okay, maybe I forgot to request my mail in ballot. Maybe it was my mistake so I’ll just go and vote.” So I go and vote. They’re like, “Well, you requested a mail in ballot so now you have to fill in a provisional ballot instead.”And so I did that. And remember last time we voted you had to do that because your mail in ballot went mysteriously missing. So e- if you and I are [00:10:00] experiencing this,Malcolm Collins: but the point being is that it, it’s happened in multiple election cycles with our house, which makes it to me seem highly plausible that we are looking at systemic election fraud happening in this way in our area.I- given that the, the, their systems all show the vote went out, right? Like, that’s why we’re having to fill in these provisional ballots. It’s not, like, a mistake that we made or something like that, and it’s happened multiple times. Mm. So- Yeah. And, and we do know that the, the, the wider Philadelphia area is one of the areas where, th- that has had serious allegations of this.It has? And note now for the people who are like, “Election fraud never happens,” we now have videos... What? Oh, the kids. We now have videos of people stuffing the ballot boxes and stuff like that in some past recent American elections.Speaker 16: This surveillance video, showing a supporter of Mayor Joe Ganim and a City Hall employee stuffing envelopes into the dropbox outside the Bridgeport Government Center. Now, the other [00:11:00] investigation will look into the use, distribution, and possession of absentee ballots at the Fireside Apartments, which is a senior and disabled public housing here in the Park City.The Commission says even before last Tuesday’s primary, there was a significant attention in allegations of ballot abuse.Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Mm. Have you seen these, Simone? They’re crazy.Simone Collins: No. And also, like, these days I don’t know what’s fake and what’s real, and-Malcolm Collins: Well, it, it becomes, itSimone Collins: becomes a blur of realI, I mean, like, when, when I ran, when I ran for office here- Like- ... remember, like, I, I spoke with a lot of people who were super involved in elections- Mm ... who were getting out the vote, who were trying to help the... In, in my case, of course, since I was a Republican candidate, I was talking with people doing the Republican stuff.And they were talking about their experiences watching elections, watching the votes come in, and then seeing these strange and sudden changes in vote count and jumps in favor of a different candidate at the last minute. But again, like- I don’t know. You know, in the end, likeMalcolm Collins: there’s- But no, Simone, what I’m telling you, is there have been confirmed videos- Mmof people stuffing [00:12:00] vote mailboxes. This is not a maybe it’s AI generated or something like that. This is a, this is coming from police who have gone through security videos that have shown people showing up in the middle of the night with big bundles of ballots, looking really shady both ways, stuffing them in the box, then coming back 30 minutes later and doing it again.Jesus.Simone Collins: Oh,Malcolm Collins: my ... th- th- there, there have been elections in the United States where this has happened. We know from the Texas issues that there were I think it was, what was it? At least like 50,000, 100,000 fake votes. And, and this is just in Texas that were confirmed. So like we know that this is happening in the United States.Like, these are questions. The idea that you should never question an election, I think as soon as Trump won again, that went out the window because then all the Democrats started saying-Simone Collins: Well, hey, that’s... See, Trump is just doing God’s work, all right? He’s getting them to be critical of election integrity.They sh- I mean, again, like it’s, it’s so funny. I grow up thinking like, “Of course vote by mail is fine. Of course we don’t [00:13:00] need voter ID.” And now I’m like, wait a second, like this is actually super shady. Like, I, I even don’t like the idea that... Again, like when I went to the polling station to do my provisional ballot this year, I I w- I was like, “Oh crap, I don’t have my ID with me.”Like, it... Of course I assumed as any, like, normal person that if I’m going to vote in an election, and if this is something where it’s like, oh, you know, I verified this, verified that, like they’re gonna ask me for my ID. And yet, no, it’s just like your, your name and a signature or something.Malcolm Collins: Yeah. So the, the biggest coun- counter to this piece is that it doesn’t focus on the core instance of election fraud that Republicans are claiming, right?It doesn’t explain either of the... It basically focuses on one glitch that would make anyone suspicious, right? Why, why were the two Democratic candidates in one grouping and the Republican candidate in a different grouping in the way that they were handling the ballots in the first [00:14:00] place, right? Like, presumably they would all have their own groupings if that’s the way it was being done, where they would be updated individually, not in groupings like that.That makes very little sense. I can see why people were suspicious of that. But then it doesn’t even mention the other claims that people are talking about- Mm ... with the Skid Row vote harvesting. So we’re gonna get into that in a second, but I also wanted to, before I go further- Skid- oh, they’reSimone Collins: going to, like, vagrants living in tents and stuff and getting them to vote?Malcolm Collins: Yeah, and paying them to voteSimone Collins: Ah.Malcolm Collins: And there have been, lots of people have reported on this. There’s been a lot of on the ground reporters who have gone and asked the people in-Simone Collins: Yeah, that’s just the, the sort of thing that would be great for YouTube views. I could totally s- yeah.Malcolm Collins: Yeah, and they’re, they’re, they’re, it’s, they’re all saying like, “Oh yeah, of course.Like I got cigarettes for voting this year. I got, I got $2 for voting this year.” You know? Or for filling out these forms. You know, and people have been saying in the comments and stuff like this, that this is actually a very old practice in LA County that they use. Specifically things like [00:15:00] teachers unions and stuff like that use it whenever they wanna get something through, you know, like, the, the, it’s, it’s like... Well, what’s wrong, buddy?Simone Collins: Friend? Friend? Whoa. Okay, here we go Friend, did we... We’re not missing any threads. I think he just, like, deep throated a thread and then it came out and ignited his gag reflex. You okay now, buddy?Malcolm Collins: He wants it back immediately now that he’s choked on itSimone Collins: Oh,Malcolm Collins: God. Going straight at it again. Okay. Oh, God.Simone Collins: Okay. Yeah. Tripping on voter fraud.Malcolm Collins: So what we’re gonna go, and, and I will put some of these videos in hereSimone Collins: Yeah ... for you people. I, yeah, I, I would, yes. I wanna-Malcolm Collins: But the problem with this is, like, nobody cares. And it’s been interesting, Jimmy, because we can [00:16:00] see this vote buying happening.Everybody knows that Democrat, like, on the ground people would do this. It doesn’t even need to be institutionalized. But this wouldn’t explain the last minute change in mail-in voting, right? Because the Skid Row voters are not the mail in voters. You, you don’t have a lot of mail in voters who are homeless people, right?The homeless people who are being paid to vote are coming and voting in person likely. So that doesn’t really fit the broader narrative here. But let’s go into this. Here we have a piece called Spencer Pratt Pack uncovers disturbing new mystery in Skid Row. Okay? And this is from the New York Post. A Spencer Pratt volunteer team has claimed they found lots of ballots that were sent out to Skid Row, but few were actually voted in the mayoral l- race.The California Post joined four members of the Pratt pack on Sunday as they spent hours touring the rundown neighborhood. Former California State Senate candidate Susan Collins, interviews a resident on Skid [00:17:00] Row. They asked dozens of local about voter registration, mail in ballots, and the petition gatherers who had worked in the district for years trying to get them to vote.It comes just a week after Pratt was dumped out of the race for mayor after Karen Bass won and Nayan Ramak received a huge pile of mail in ballots that saw her dramatically overtake him. Susan Collins, a former California State Senate candidate, who was part of the Pratt pack on Sunday, told the Post, “We’re finding a lot of people being registered to vote, a lot of ballots being sent out, and nobody actually voted.”Oh, so that would explain how they did it Okay, so, so this is what basically is being alleged, Simone. It’s that they are going in and paying these people to register to vote, and then basically keeping their information, and because these people are homeless anyway, like, the vote’s not gonna go to their house.They just send it to their own houses and then mail on behalf of these people. I think the... [00:18:00] No one can hear you. You’re muted. You’re muted.Simone Collins: Okay, so I am me, whatever, right? I, and I care about getting X candidate registered, so I just walk along Skid Row and I’m like, “Hey, can I, can I register you? You can just use my address,” and they don’t even necessarily know what I-Yeahand then I give them a pack of cigarettes, probably just a cigarette, maybe three. I don’t know. Whatever. And then I just get their, their thing. I, w- I, I, I forge their signa- I mean, they, they do this weird thing where, like, the signatures are supposed to match, so how do, how do you think that would work?Malcolm Collins: You just- I don’t think they check or care if it’s a Democratic candidate. I mean, come on. They’re not, they’re not really checking right now. The thing that people keep asking for, Republicans keep pushing for, is the voter rolls. And- Mm-hmm ... the fact that they are not releasing the voter rolls, like, I can understand if they believe that there is fraudulent voting going on- YeahWhy they wouldn’t release these voter rolls, right? Because it would look really bad for them to do.Yeah.And I’d point out here, you, you’re like, “Yeah, LA is heavily Democrat leaning,” which [00:19:00] is true, but Pratt’s campaign was astonishingly good, and Democrats have done an astonishingly bad job running LA for a while at this point.Simone Collins: People are getting pretty fed up.Speaker 11: Please, I’m begging you. There’s homeless drug addicts in front of the schools. My children aren’t safe. Look, if you were a transgender migrant, I could get you a free pussy. Let’s move the drug addicts closer. Bass already solved crime. I endorse her. Next!Speaker 14: I just wanna rebuild my home. It’s been over a year.[00:20:00]Speaker 15: This is a machine. If we wanna burn this town to the groundFeels so close to you right now You can do it, Spencer!Simone Collins: I’m, there, there was, there was a lot of of smear campaignage to try to make Pratt look bad, of course, as well But yeah, sureMalcolm Collins: Also to your question of whether she did some big [00:21:00] genius last-minute mail in campaign what AI said is, no, she didn’t. It said the most realistic answer is Rama is a sitting council member who is well-known among progressive LAs.Her base, younger, more liberal urban Democrats, is much more likely to vote by mail closer to the deadline.Simone Collins: Yeah.Malcolm Collins: The problem, again, is why did they switch from voting from the front runner to her all of a sudden the moment it looked like the front runner was going to beat Pratt?Simone Collins: Maybe because once you know they’re gonna win, why give them pity votes when you could show support for an underdog that you really like?Malcolm Collins: That’s a good possible explanation. They’reSimone Collins: waiting. Like, I, I could see myself doing that as a young Los Angeles voter trying to... I, I guess she gets nothing out of it, but she has a less- ... a less embarrassing loss. And, and certainly getting more votes, it could be a starting point to future campaigns. You know, it shows future campaign donors that she has the capability of gaining traction even when running up against [00:22:00] better funded, more famous opponents, right?So-Malcolm Collins: Yes. So to go back into what’s f- f- fuddy here. Okay A review of public records identified more than 7,600 registered voters linked to shelters, supportive housing projects, addiction to their treatment centers, and social services agencies, including one of 160 registrants contacted to the Midnight Mission in Skid Row.One longtime local told volunteers on Sunday he personally knew the Mariana Del Rey woman recently charged by federal prosecutors was paying homeless people to register to vote. Brendan Lee Brown Armstrong, also known as Annika, was charged in May with paying another person to register to vote. So people have been charged over this as well.This isn’t just a conspiracy theory. The question is, are they still doing it? According to federal prosecutors, Armstrong worked for years as a paid petition circulator collecting signatures for California ballot measures, and has agreed to plead guilty. Wow. “She was right on this corner,” they said. This was her area,” Titus Brown told volunteers.Brown [00:23:00] claimed people were routinely offered money or cigarettes to sign forms. “She gives them $3 to $5. Some of the cheap people she’d give $2 and a cigarette,” he alleged. But Brown told LA Times- Dude, that’sSimone Collins: so littleMalcolm Collins: Our elections are being sold for very little. But you know, they pay more per vote if you’re talking about, like, the main elections in the United States.Simone Collins: Yeah. For sure. That’s crazy.Malcolm Collins: Throughout the years residents remembered registering to vote. They remember petition gatherers. What many didn’t remember was actually casting a ballot which is interesting. They, they remember people coming around and trying to get them to register. They just don’t remember then voting.Speaker 3: Videos posted online by LA Needs Spencer Pratt shows multiple Skid Row residents claiming they received around $2 in exchange for voting in the recent Los Angeles election. Karen Bass, yeah? Yeah. Or, or Nithya Raman? Uh, Karen.Speaker 5: Karen. They told you to vote for Karen? Yeah. They had to sign the little thing. That’s, uh, and how much they pay you? It’s, like, two bucks. [00:24:00] Two bucks? Oh, to sign off on a, on a thing to vote for her? Yeah. And so they do this for everybody out here? Yeah, they come out here all the time. Several residents made similar claims.Speaker 3: One man alleged he was not registered to vote in Los Angeles County but was still encouraged to complete paperwork. I’m not in this county. I’m in San Bernardino County, but they just said, “Who cares?” They gave me a name to, to write. They gave you a name to sign? They gave me everything to sign. They gave me a whole paper of, like, who, what to write and who to sign and everything, so.Another resident alleged people were sometimes instructed how to complete voter paperwork and ballots. But we know that they gotta answer to somebody by what they said, so it ‘cause it’s not authentic. I don’t wanna have to scratch it out. And don’t let your signature look like the other signature. Can you use your other hand, or can you write with your foot or your nose?Speaker 7: I’m serious. They ask you to do that? Yeah. For ballots? And I was doing it just so I could get the money.Malcolm Collins: The volunteers moved through the tents, shelters, and service centers, sidewalk encampments, interviewing people, residents about their experiences with the drives. “A [00:25:00] lot of people never voted,” Brown said. “They did register, but they just wanted the names.” That’s interesting. For Collins, a- and ap- apparently this was still happening in this election, and they know people have been arrested for doing this in past elections, so it sounds like it’s still operational.For Collins, who had spent the year raising concerns about ballot collection practices, the most striking part of Sunday’s visit was hearing the same story repeated block after block. “So what I’ve been hearing from a lot of people is that they’re registered to vote,” Collins says. “I’ve not found anyone, anyone who has actually voted.”Simone Collins: Wow.Malcolm Collins: The big question is what happened to all those ballots? People remember getting them. They don’t remember voting. So where did they go? And Julio, who was visiting Skid Row for the first time, described that experience as eye-opening and said it strengthened her determination to be involved rather than watch from afar.“It was really intense,” Juliano said. “We saw a guy chasing another guy with a shovel and attack him.” Juliano said she came to sh- Skid Row looking for answers and convinced there was more to the election story than the voters were being told. Wow. “I guess I was part of [00:26:00] trying to figure out what happened.The numbers just don’t make sense. That’s why I’m digging deeper into the sidelines. One thing I would like to say is I think this election fraud has forever changed Los Angeles,” she said. “At least that’s my hope, that people will feel empower- empowered to talk about the truth and keep looking for the truth.”And there have been other reporting on different types ... So from a different New York Post piece, bombshell photo unveils damning Nithan Raman link with homeless voters as fury erupts over LA vote count. Thousands of homeless voters are registered to vote in LA shelters, and Sprint Sir Pret was eliminated by Nithan Raman.So they, they, they then did a review here. And it said the ... so here they’re looking to see, Yeah, this seems to be, it, it seems to be the same thing. They’re just going over video evidence of this that they found. So here’s where I come at the end of this. Like, what, what do I think on all of this?Did Democrats do this in the past? Yes, we know they did, and they’ve been charged for it in the past. Is it the [00:27:00] type of thing that Democrats would do? Like, consider the size of, like, Antifa and stuff in LA. You’re not asking, did the Democrats organize this from the top down? Right. You’re asking, was there any rogue group of Democrats, extremist leftists in LA with motivation and means and opportunity to do this?There was definitely manifold of those.Simone Collins: Well, okay. Here’s where I’m gonna push back, right? So the person who got the surge in votes was someone who wasn’t going to win anyway, and it was very clear that they weren’t going to win, correct?Malcolm Collins: Yeah.Simone Collins: And then suddenly these votes appeared. When you do pay someone to buy you votes, right, illegally, sure, this person, you know, people like this are paying one or two cigarettes, three bucks per person.Mm-hmm. But they in turn are charging probably quite a lot per voter because of the legal liability to which they’re [00:28:00] subject, as is shown by the convictions we see here, right? Mm-hmm. People are doing time. People are really paying a lot in terms of when you get caught. So when they’re weighing the odds of getting caught they’re, they’re ultimately gonna charge a lot more.So why would this one particular candidate or people supporting this one candidate pay that much for votes that weren’t going to help them win anyway? That doesn’t make sense to me. I’m more likely to believe a conspiracy theory- What do you mean votesMalcolm Collins: that did help them win? I’m confused.Simone Collins: My understanding...Oh, sorry. It’s the fragility company.Malcolm Collins: So anyway, what was the point you were making? Why, why do you not believe that there... You, you said the amount it costs- So my understanding was thatSimone Collins: the surge of votes that came in, that were presumably bought, were for a candidate that was never going to win in the first place, that was not the Democratic front-runner, right?Malcolm Collins: Right. ItSimone Collins: was- So why would someone pay the non-trivial cost to buy voters? Because what you’re paying, you know, the people to commit a, a crime is pretty high. Like, the premium [00:29:00] is high.Malcolm Collins: Yeah, but what you are forgetting is the, the crime was already committed either way. So, presumably, the way that this works, given the various points that we’ve heard, is I, a Democrat, go and I ask homeless people to sign up to vote.And I give them my address, right?Simone Collins: Okay, so it’s, it’s like a subscription. It’s like I, I have on offer every single voting cycle, these are my homeless people. Would you like my homeless people thisMalcolm Collins: year? Yes, every single voting cycle- Would you like my homeless people? ... I have on offer a list of votes that I can choose how they go.Simone Collins: And then who, who knows how it’s administered, right? It could be like I’m this one person, this crime boss of Democratic politics or whatever polit- like, who knows? And it could be apolitical, who’s just like, “I’m gonna decide how I deal with these votes.” It could even be someone who’s not paying someone else.It could be a totally third party who’s like, “Who do I want to have my votes go toward?” Yeah. This is my little kingdom. SoMalcolm Collins: the crime would have already been done. Uh-huh. They would’ve been sitting on votes that they have to cast eitherSimone Collins: way. Yes. They’re like, “How do I want my votes to go?” [00:30:00] They could have decided, “Well, I know that the, the, their...We don’t have to worry about Spencer Pratt. This Democratic front-runner’s gonna win. I want to place this, this up-and-coming Democratic candidate.”Malcolm Collins: Well, the wording would be, “I wanna make sure that Spencer Pratt isn’t in the final election,” ‘cause that’s what would’ve happened otherwise.Simone Collins: Oh. Oh, I’m sorry. I totally missed that.So if he had not been surpassed by this other Democrat, he would’ve been on the,Malcolm Collins: the- Yeah, he would’ve been on the ballot for theSimone Collins: final then Oh, and then there actually was, he ha- would actually have a shot, instead of just two Democrats.Malcolm Collins: Yeah.Simone Collins: Oh, okay. Well then, okay, yeah. The, the incentives are more clear then.Okay, thank you. Now I know. Yeah,Malcolm Collins: so now you understand the incentives, yeah. Yeah. So, basically I’m in a position of the people who are saying, like, basically at this point we’re at a point where I say demonstrably we know that voter fraud happened. Mm-hmm. The question is the scale of the voter fraud.Simone Collins: Correct.Malcolm Collins: And the, the, it, it really bothers me [00:31:00] that like we’re seeing mainstream Democratic outlets that are supposed to be like out there searching for truths completely uninterested in this. De- despite the overwhelming, I mean, we’ve got a conviction already, right? Like,Simone Collins: the- Right. Well, the problem is all sides do it.I mean, even arguably sides that people who don’t have a side. Mm. People who are just making money because this is a way to make money are doing it. Like, it, it’s one of those things where-Malcolm Collins: I’ve never- ... ISimone Collins: think a lot of people are- It’s all sides ... are concerned. Also, journalists are, journalists in mainstream media have this, there’s, like, there are two tiers, right?Mm. Of like, is this a good story? Will this perform well? But also they have this whole, like, you know, I, I need to decide what the people can handle or not, right? Like, I’m not going to touch this conspiracy theory because it might incite racism or conspiracy thinking or- I wasMalcolm Collins: talking to the other day, one of our friends couldn’t believe the conspiracy theory that Michelle Obama was a man.Simone Collins: Yeah. It’sMalcolm Collins: like, and Simone, I’m like, “Simone, there’s a lot of evidence. You gotta,Simone Collins: you gotta believe.” There’s not. There’s that, that, that, that dance... There, there’s nothing in her pants. You guys don’t [00:32:00] know female slacks. I’m sorry, but, like, women’s pants areMalcolm Collins: weird. There, there is something hitting her pants from behind.Simone Collins: There’s nothing hitting her pants from behind. There’s nothing. Not, it’s, it’s the way they crease. There is, thereMalcolm Collins: is-Simone Collins: You don’t know what flowy pants... Men don’t wear pants like that. They don’t understand how they...Speaker: MichelleSimone Collins: mm, mm. Anyway, anyway, so I feel like this isn’t necessarily people trying to cover something up.I think that there’s this journalistic, like, “I decide what the public can and cannot handle, and I believe that the public cannot handle this. Therefore, I’m not going to cover it because the, the nuance will be lost, and they’ll just, you know, it will undermine democracy, and I’m not gonna play a part in that.”And I think that a lot of people see us as being irresponsible for feeding into the conspiracy theories when it, like, is, there are really [00:33:00] serious issues of voter fraud. But I also see the point of journalists who are like, “I’m not gonna bother co- cover- covering this,” because what are you gonna do, Malcolm?Like, we can’t uncover these people. Like, we can’t find them. This is a lot harder to uncover than, like, daycare fraud, you know? Like, th- this is much more hidden, much more insidious. People have been trying to find this forever. It’s really difficult to uncover because of the way the systems work, because there’s no voter ID, because you can just take a ballot out of a, a, a thing.And like, it, like, even if, even if every signature is checked for a match, you can easily find what someone’s signature looks like. Like, it, this is one of those very difficult situations, you know?Malcolm Collins: N- I don’t, I don’t think it is. I, I think we’re dealing with a scenario where, I mean, I understand w- why they’re doing what they’re doing.Like, every, I think, sane American knows that even if there was demonstrable and large voter fraud, they wouldn’t cover it. Because it goes against their political interest, right? Like, we haven’t really seen them cover many things that go against their political interests.Simone Collins: Well, no, no. I mean, it goes in their political interest when it’s about, [00:34:00] like, a, a Republican candidate winning.Malcolm Collins: Oh, yeah, a Republican candidate, yeah. But the point being is you’re like, I, both sides are d- I don’t think in LA Spencer Pratt or even the LA Republican Party has enough institution to commit voter fraud at this size.Simone Collins: Right. Right. But I mean, I’m, I’m sure there’s Republican voter fraud in other areas.Look, it’s, it’s,Malcolm Collins: this isSimone Collins: a system they do it.Malcolm Collins: I doubt it’s at the same scale. HighlySimone Collins: I don’t know.Malcolm Collins: I don’t know I mean, it- it’s, it’s there. It’s just when we look at... And, and the reason why I doubt so strongly it’s at the same scale- Hmm ... is if you look at the Republican apparatus, because we’ve been involved in it at, like, the grassroots level, right?They are fighting rabidly for stricter observation and oversight to prevent voter fraud. If they were the ones-Simone Collins: Oh ...Malcolm Collins: still committing voter fraud, they wouldn’t be doing that. And the- That’sSimone Collins: pretty damning. That’s prettyMalcolm Collins: damning ... the louder damning thing is that the left has been fighting [00:35:00] rabidly against investigation of voter fraud.Simone Collins: That is moderately susp- okay, more than moderately suspicious. That’s a really good point.Malcolm Collins: Okay, that should get- Yeah.Simone Collins: Yeah ...Malcolm Collins: not just that, butSimone Collins: with theMalcolm Collins: Save Our Country Act or whatever, the,Simone Collins: we’re, we’re- That’s someone who’s like, “Hey, let’s be more careful,” and the other side being like, “No, what do you mean careful?”Malcolm Collins: Yeah. If, if I have one team out there who’s like, “We should have ID, in-person only voting,” and then another group out there that’s like, “That would be a end of American freedom,” right? Like, I’m like- Okay ... “What are you talking about?”Simone Collins: When you put it that way, the look is not good. It’s a, it’s a bad look.Yeah.Malcolm Collins: Yeah, so, my general takeaway from this is it’s happening. It’s probably pretty big. There isn’t a lot you can do once they capture a region. Just based on the evidence that we have access to, I mean, it seems that, like, everyone who’s involved is saying, “It’s happening, just what’s the scale,” right?And I think the scale is probably pretty big. If you look at the, And, and here I’m not even looking at, like, the observed statistics. I’m just thinking about the number of radical leftist groups in LA that [00:36:00] don’t care a damn about the law and would have motive, means, opportunity, and time to do something like this.If they have time to, like, stage these giant protests, somebody in the org has time to do something like this. And then I think what we learn about this is you can’t let them win, ever, right? This is the thing with, like, Nick Fuentes’ dumb strategy of like, let, g- let’s let the left win and then the right will get angry enough that it ri- Generally, when the other side l- wins, our side moderates.That’s how it works. If you want our side to become more extreme, what you need us to do is win a number of times in a row, not lose. Because the average Republican voter doesn’t then say, “I guess we need to be more extreme.” The average Republican voter says, “I guess we need to be more moderate to pick up some of those swing voters,” right?So, but it’s not just that. It’s that once we lose an area, when you look at the map, and I’m gonna put the two maps here,of states where you are allowed to vote without an ID and states where Democrats [00:37:00] win or won in the last election it’s like one for one at this point, right? I think that we’re entering a place where we cannot give an inch of ground because they’re realizing that the demographics are shifting against their favor.And there will be a point, you know, once we have the 2030 redistricting, where it essentially becomes impossible for them to win going into the future. And after that, what do you do, right? When you look at the the higher fertility rate among Republicans and we look that people vote like their parents vote, when we look at the shifting right-wing vote in the youth of these days, you know, if these trends continue this is, it’s over.It’s game over for the left. And I think that they’re behaving in a way that seems rational to them and, and ethical to them because they believe that the right are literally Nazis. That’s why it’s important that they define it that way because it gives them what’s called a psychological license to do whatever they want to combat it[00:38:00]Simone Collins: Yeah, okay. I, I, yes. You, you’ve also changed my view on this. It is worth covering this because it is worth to explain why it’s very important to push for voter ID laws.Malcolm Collins: Voter ID laws, they’re never backing down. No, no election is unimportant. Not your local elections, not your national elections, every election matters.Yeah. And if you, if you vote by mail like us to try to make it easy, just keep in mind you’re gonna have the person drive by and steal your ballot.Simone Collins: Not great. Not great.Malcolm Collins: But that’s, that’s you know, just, just the state of America right now and why we need to be so overwhelming in the legitimate votes that we’re putting out there.Simone Collins: Well, friends, be careful and make sure your ID is current.Malcolm Collins: Anyway love you, Simone. Have a fun day at the dentist, and thank you for your timeSimone Collins: Love you [00:39:00] You’re beautiful. But that should come as no surprise.Nice one, Tex. Nice one OkayCamera is- Mary,Malcolm Collins: can you hear me okay?Simone Collins: I can. However, I need a momentMalcolm Collins: to find where my camera is.Okay.Here we are. Found it. Oh, no, no, no, no, you don’t. Don’t even think of it. Ido feel- I do- ... good being able to do this with you again today.Simone Collins: I know. I, I miss it, and that’s, you know, why I -Malcolm Collins: Oh, we got a close-up of a baby.Simone Collins: Oh, no.Malcolm Collins: Oh, no.Simone Collins: Frank.Malcolm Collins: All the women out there now need babies. [00:40:00]Simone Collins: I don’t know. I don’t know if close-ups help or hurt.Malcolm Collins: Got me in my pirate shirt today.Simone Collins: No, actually-Malcolm Collins: New, new Evil MaxxSimone Collins: aimed ... I meant to get a proper, like, Mr. Darcy shirt. Rawr, rawr, rawr, rawr, rawr. God, Tex, I’m so sorry. Someday you’ll look back on this fondly, or not, Mr. Demaison.Malcolm Collins: I don’t know. I, like, either I’m still with you, or the thought of losing you has destroyed me someday.Simone Collins: What do you mean?Malcolm Collins: Well, I wouldn’t look back on this, because I will just go talk to you.Speaker 25: First one, actually, I’ll just light it for youSpeaker 26: Back, back. Here, Torsten.Speaker 25: Hold it away from me so you don’t get hurt. All right, Tagan, come back. Go, go play over there. It’s gonna fall. Do not do that, Torsten. Octavian, come back here[00:41:00]What happens if- If you w-, if you, do not let that touch anyone or it’ll hurt them Why is it going down the thing?Titan, do not let that touch anyone or you will never get to play with these again Toasty, why are you putting it on the deck? Why? You’re burning the deck. That’s bad, Torsten. You have to hold it up in the air. It says that it might burn me. Octavian, come here. That’s why there’s the metal part at the bottom.Speaker 28: There you go. See, look, it stops at the end right there. Can, can I try it again? All right. Go play, Octavian. When you’re done you can give it to me. What? Just never put it on the deck. It’s not burning. Oh, it’s empty. No, we’re done. We’re done? Mm-hmm. Oh, Octavian, you got yours.What do you think, Professor?Speaker 26: How do I know? How do I know? This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit basedcamppodcast.substack.com/subscribe

Malcolm and Simone Collins discuss a surprising realization about why many leftists accuse pronatalists of having a “breeding kink.” They explore how some in the trans community appear to structure major life decisions around arousal patterns and identity fulfillment, leading to projection onto families who have many children (often via IVF).Topics include: why breeding kinks don’t actually drive real family-building, the difference between fantasy and daily life, identity-maxxing vs. objective function living, Techno-Puritan sins, power dynamics in kinks, furries, Lia Thomas, and much more.This episode dives deep into psychology, sexuality, culture wars, and how different worldviews shape behavior.Episode TranscriptMalcolm Collins: [00:00:00] Hello, Simone. Today we are going to be talking about basically a very weird phenomenon that has happened to us repeatedly, and I didn’t understand it until today, and I had this, like, shocking realization when I was just thinking through this today, and I was like, “This explains so much of a leftist mindset that I didn’t fully understand before.”Which is when we initially would go viral people would say, “Oh, like, why do they have to, like, bring us into their weird breeding kink?” You know, and this was a common... I, I’d say it’s, like, 1/5 or 1/8 of comments whenever we used to go viral.We, we had a journalist come to our house recently, so, like, a trans individual who’s a journalist, and he was interviewing us or she, whatever. I, I, I never know with these people. She was interviewing us over, And by the way, if, if you’re trans and annoyed by that, just know how annoying it is for the rest of us when we can’t tell, we don’t care, and you act like it’s the biggest effing deal in the world, [00:01:00] and yet you dress and act in a way that intentionally makes it hard to tell, right?Like, I would gender you right if it was obvious to me, right? I’m not, I’m not, like, out there actively trying to be a... But you are intentionally dressing in a way to make it difficult for me to know, right? So why am I supposed to... You’re just being a jerk to people. You have made your existence a jerky existence to other people.But anyway, so the, the, she comes here and she gives us an interview, and in the interview she asks us something along the lines of, like... And, and this was the thesis of the interview. Like, is this all really just a kink? Like, is there a kink that’s motivating you guys to want to have lots of kids?And I was just, like, sitting there like, does, do they really believe that, like, I would have five kids because of a kink, right? Like, the amount of my life I would have to dedicate [00:02:00] to something as simple as, like, something you masturbate to, right? Like, a, a simple arousal pattern would be genuinely astonishing to invest so much that I have five kids over it.And I, I was just thinking today, like, do they really think that I’m doing all this? ‘Cause I was, I was, like, playing with my kids. I’m like, do they really think I have kids over a kink?Simone Collins: Well, and then they get super, super shocked when they discover that we’ve produced all of our kids with IVF.Malcolm Collins: Yeah, that we produced all of our kids with IVF.They’re like, “Oh, that... Well, that undermines the entire thesis.” But- They they, th- which they were very confused about, right? Like it, is it... And, and, and then today I had this realization. Oh my God, I assumed that they just didn’t understand, or they were trying to cast aspersions on us, or they were trying to be edgy in some way about this.[00:03:00] But then when I started to think about it more, I was like, but wait a second, this is a trans person. If they’re trans over a kink, which a good portion of the trans community appears to be in their own stated things. They’re like you- if you go to the, you know, trans Reddit and stuff like that, they’re like, “Well, of course, like arousal is part of this,” and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.Now they have tried to define it as not a kink, tried to define it, but if you look at the actual written experiences of trans people going through gender transition many of them talk about it as something that is partially arousing to them. This is incredibly well documented in trans people talking about their own lives, right?And in addition to this, we have entire trans communities where when you ‘cause I actually read like the Transmaxer Manifesto, right? Trying to get people to Transmax. And this is clearly a, a, a gender transition modification transformation kink in, in, in even the way it’s structured. It’s like, wouldn’t it be so hot if X, Y, and Z, and D, right?You know. So [00:04:00] I read through these things a- and I’m like, if this person transitioned over partially an arousal pattern, yeah, that’s actually how they live, right? They really are living their entire life, their entire reproductive future, which I guess to me, I think of as like one of the core impacts you have with your life, was decided potentially downstream of an arousal pattern.And I saw this and I was like... I had just never considered to take what they were saying at face value. It just seemed so insane to me that an individual could say all of this, that it didn’t enter my mind as, no, they might actually mean this. And I think once we accept that yes, they do actually mean that, you can begin to understand so many other things about modern [00:05:00] leftist philosophy.Thoughts before I go further, Simone?Simone Collins: No, although I am curious if this ties in with your concept of the techno-puritan sin of, of living to fulfill an identity versus living to maximize an objective function.Malcolm Collins: Well, I mean, I think it’s, it’s both. I mean, transness is obviously it breaks, like, all of our sins.I mean, one, they’re living to fulfill an identity and other people’s perception of them, which I see the fundamentally fai- vain way to live. You can just, you know, choose to live however you wanna live, right? And, and say, “What matters is my effect on the world, not whether or not I appear a certain way in other people’s minds.”Like, obsessing over that, we argue is sinful, where sinfulness are just things that f**k up your life in the long run. But second it’s sinful in that it’s... And, and I think that it- it- it’s, it’s living your entire life after an arousal pattern. Like, we don’t even, we don’t even put into our sins living your whole life in the pursuit of [00:06:00] happiness because we say happiness is a choice, right?So you don’t need to pursue it. It’s something that you should sort of grab and subdue. You choose how you interpret the things around you in life. And when you realize that this sort of, like, higher form of happiness, like am I content with myself, am I moving forward, that it’s a choice, well, then the only sorts of happiness you have are the basal forms of happiness.You know, this is, like, eating whatever food you want all day, every day, right? Or just having constant orgies or engaging in huge life-changing behavior to fulfill arousal patterns, right? Which are just a, a basal sort of breeding thing in the background of all human biology that really shouldn’t affect any sort of a daily choice.And this is where it all got really interesting for me. Because if I am listing, like, my unusual arousal patterns or kinks or anything like that and I have argued in the past that a breeding fetish is about the only thing in the world that is not actually a fetish.Simone Collins: Right.Malcolm Collins: [00:07:00] It’s what the entire arousal system is built to get you to do.About anything else that arouses you is ancillary and something misfiring.Simone Collins: All non-procreative sex is a fetish. Or some kind of weird kink, I guess.Malcolm Collins: But anyway, of my list of, like, things that really turn me on, the wider category of breeding fetish content is actually one of those things for me. It’s not my top thing but it’s probably number two.But withSimone Collins: that being- Well, based on its popularity, like, if you look at just sort of top ranked tags and stuff in erotic material, for men specifically, that’s kind of the thing. In women, I just don’t see it that much, actually, for, like, female content, which is interesting.Malcolm Collins: And do you not see it a lot in female content?Mm. I mean, sort of being forced to breed you see in female content, like, NotSimone Collins: really,Malcolm Collins: actually ... in The Handmaid’s Tale and stuff like that, like the-Simone Collins: No. Because even then if you actually look at the [00:08:00] books most or most if not many of the men are themselves infertile, so-Malcolm Collins: Oh, really?Simone Collins: Yeah. Yeah, like, there are issues with, like, some of the doctors being like, “Well, I will.I will inseminate you ‘cause I know for a fact this guy is infertile and he doesn’t know it. But, you know, you should just therefore let me F you,” and then, yeah. So it’s, it’s a whole thing, actually. Wait, butMalcolm Collins: isn’t that a kink in itself? Isn’t that part of the breeding kink?Simone Collins: No, I don’t think so. Yeah, anyway, I, I don’t- Does,Malcolm Collins: does, does she go withSimone Collins: the doctor?Does she- In Handmaid’s Tale I just don’t think that... I haven’t read the books. I, I only know from, like, some summaries and stuff that I’ve heard.Malcolm Collins: Of what?Simone Collins: But, like, there’s not a lot of actually getting pregnant going on. Like, some, some of the ancillary characters go through pregnancies and stuff, but-Malcolm Collins: I guess it, it, it, like, once you get pregnant and have a kid, all of the sexy stuff after thatSimone Collins: begins to- Pregnancy is, yeah, that’s, that, that is where for m- m- maybe a majority of women, I don’t know, like, sort of arousal and, and, like, stuff being sexy just dies with [00:09:00] pregnancy and with newborns being around.So typically with female erotic material, it is, there are-Malcolm Collins: Yeah, but especially if it’s, like, multi-books ... noSimone Collins: children around.Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Like, if she gets pregnant in book one and now in book two she’s raising a newborn, like, all of the other sexy stuff starts to get weird.Simone Collins: Well, and you have to keep in mind pregnancy is while a beautiful thing, often very uncomfortable.Like, you’re not aroused when you want to vomit. You’re not aroused when you have intense nerve pain. You are not aroused when you feel incredibly large and when your- Right ... legs are swollen and when you look like, you know, a, a watermelon, right? Like, noth- there’s nothing. Like, now first, I’m sure there’s always exceptions, right?I’m sure there’s some women who feel incredibly sexy and have really high sex drive and everything when they’re pregnant and when they have newborns and whatever, right? Like, all these things are possible. However no. Like, and I’ve, I’m, I’ve c- I’ve consumed, like, so much erotic material both targeted at men and targeted at women.Women, it’s power dynamics. It’s getting high-powered men. It’s high-status men. It’s and, and, [00:10:00] and a lot of, like, just the more general focus i- like, really hot men, Yeah ... men who’ve always had a crush on them, men who really like pleasuring them. It’s never, “I’m going to get you pregnant.” Like, that actually if anything could possibly be on average a turn-off for women, which is really interesting.Yeah. Yeah, so- but yeah, I, I do not, like, it’s super common in male-oriented stuff, not in female-oriented stuff.Malcolm Collins: That, that makes sense. That makes sense. So the, point I was getting to here is even as somebody who like would just admit if you consider the idea of impregnation being hot a kink, right? Or your partner being pregnant a kink, right?Like, I, I always think she looks better when she’s pregnant. If you consider that a kink and I’m saying me, even as somebody who would have both of those things being in like my kink category, they have never activated around my actual children’s birth, right? Like-Simone Collins: That’s true, yeah.Malcolm Collins: They, they have [00:11:00] never, because I don’t like, evenSimone Collins: me- Well, no, and then I, I will point out, and this is maybe getting a little bit too TMI, but like even before we realized we had to do IVF and we were just, you know, timing and trying to get pregnant naturally- Yeahlike it actually felt kind of unsexy to, when we were actually trying to get pregnant- Oh, oh ... ‘cause it was like, oh God, this is like the ovulatory window, like we have to do it now. AndMalcolm Collins: like- I, no, I completely agree. It was- Yeah ... really unsexy. Like-Simone Collins: Yeah ...Malcolm Collins: having sex to conceive is like-Simone Collins: Stressful and not sexyMalcolm Collins: yes, you’re on a schedule.Simone Collins: SuperMalcolm Collins: not sexy. You’ve gotta work it into unusual times.Simone Collins: Yeah.Malcolm Collins: You’ve gotta like, it is, it isSimone Collins: actively- It’s typically like women aggressively like when men aren’t ready for it, being like, “I need you to like come inside me now,” and like just getting really intense about it. And like I, you, you, like even I remember your, m- again, not TMI, but like I remember your dad at a steakhouse being like, “Yeah, like it was really stressful when your mom was trying to conceive ‘cause she’d just be like call me up and be like, ‘You have to come home from work now.’”And like, just like it’s not [00:12:00] fun for the men. Like it’s very clearly not fun for anyone involved.Malcolm Collins: It’s, it’s not. But I’m, the point I’m making here is even with somebody with all of the layered kinks that could be associated with a breeding kink, right? Mm-hmm. Never was that process unusually arousing for me.Mm. If anything, it went in the exact opposite direction. Because-Simone Collins: Ironically ...Malcolm Collins: it, it fell into, and this might have been a competing like anti-kink I have of, of the long procedures and everything like that- ... and a lot of you know-Simone Collins: Anti-kink ...Malcolm Collins: but whatever the point being is it never- Yeah ... influenced me or wanting to have kids.Even though I may feel like my wife looks even more beautiful when she’s pregnant-Simone Collins: Aw ...Malcolm Collins: right? That would never, ever in a billion years factor into my decision to get her pregnant. Because that’s just like a minor modification into how attractive I find her. Maybe like a I find her 10, 20% more attractive for nine months, and then- She has [00:13:00] a child I need to raise for the rest of my life.Simone Collins: Right. Like, and then, and then 18 years and she-Malcolm Collins: That would be f*****g insane.Simone Collins: Yeah.And just to hammer this home further, even though I find her more physically attractive when she is heavily pregnant, I do not have sex. We do not have sex when she is heavily pregnant. And people can be like, “Oh, it’s totally safe for the baby,” whatever. I’m like, “Mm, actually, there have been cases where baby has, have died or suffered injuries during it.”It is incredibly rare, but it is absolutely possible. Um, and I would never in a million years forgive myself. In a million years. Imagine you knew that. Like, I, I’m not going to do something where I might have to live with the fact for the rest of my life that I know I killed one of my kids because I wanted to get off, and she couldn’t even get pregnant that day.What are you talking about? That’s so disgusting. Um, I, I know some people are like, “Well, I just wouldn’t have sex if I [00:14:00] couldn’t have sex with my wife all the time when she’s preg-” Whatever. Okay? I’m just pointing out here that it’s actually instances in which I cannot have sex with her because I’m worried about the safety of my children.Even if it’s a one point zero zero zero one thing, I’m not taking that chanceMalcolm Collins: That would be absolutely insane.Simone Collins: Mm-hmm.Malcolm Collins: But then weirder than, and I, and I actually, like, I want to communicate this to these people, and I w- I, when I originally was thinking through this, I was like, well, think of it this way.Like, even if you have like some BDSM related kinks. Personally I’m aroused by being in a dominant position when I’m with my partner. We’re like getting a list of kinks I have today. Oh,Simone Collins: boy. Yeah.Malcolm Collins: I’m aroused. I have never been aroused by being a boss, right? I have never been aroused by having to fire someone.I have never been aroused- ... by being in a real world position of authority over someone.Simone Collins: Yeah.Malcolm Collins: For the vast majority of kinks, to activate them, you need to engage in scenarios that are so [00:15:00] divorced from anything that actually happens in real life that they’re not gonna accidentally activate during normal daily stuff.Simone Collins: Hmm.Malcolm Collins: And I think a, a lot of people would get this, right? Like, when I talk about the BDSM thing, most people, I think most people probably have some level of arousal to submission or dominance.Simone Collins: Yeah. I mean, that, in, in our research, that was just so- Yeah,Malcolm Collins: likeSimone Collins: theMalcolm Collins: vast- ... pervasive. So if you’re one of our followers and you’re aroused by submission or dominance, have you ever actually been aroused by, like, being someone else’s employee-or being someone else’s boss? Yeah, someone’sSimone Collins: like, “Go clean the toilets.” Oh, yes. Say that again, slowly.Malcolm Collins: Y- you’re like a f- yeah I mean, surely somebody is. But I realized- Yes ... what’s different for me in them-Simone Collins: Yeah ...Malcolm Collins: is there are ways that some people with submission fetishes or dominance f- fetishes relate to being an employee or boss that [00:16:00] is sexualized.Like, we do see people engaging in relationships with their boss where, like, that’s clearly a component to it. No,Simone Collins: but that’s, it, it’s the power dynamic. It’s not the bossing, it’s the, the fact that he is the boss and I’m the secretary. And there are definitely plenty of female fantasies around that in terms of, like, the material that’s popular.That is certainly common in female- Or- ... or in general erotic material ... you see this in theMalcolm Collins: case of, like, teacher-student, right? Like, where a teacher is in a relationship.Simone Collins: Yeah, no, teacher-student, boss, and... Well, and, and you see it w- with male erotic materials, too. A common one, of course, is nurse, right? It’s, it’s one of those places where it’s acceptable for a man- Well, no,Malcolm Collins: but that,Simone Collins: the,Malcolm Collins: the point I’m making is I’m not talking about in erotic material, I’m talking about in real life stuff.Simone Collins: Oh, sure. Or- Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.Malcolm Collins: But what I realized is that these people who are actually aroused because of this position they have relative to somebody who they are the boss of- Hmm ... or who are in a submissive position because they’re [00:17:00] somebody’s employee, they relate to their daily duties in a way that is totally foreign to the way I relate to my daily duties.Simone Collins: Oh, sure.Malcolm Collins: It would never accidentally arouse me to be somebody’s teacher, right? I would never mistake that for this other type of relationship.Simone Collins: Yeah, good point.Malcolm Collins: And then I realized, oh my God, it’s not just in those instances. It’s also likely in the instances of how these people like the whole trans thing, the, the idea that, like- Oh, well you couldn’t possibly just do something every day all day that’s primarily intended to arouse you, right?The idea of transition itself as being in that category, right? It’s like this is why they do all this weird fetishy stuff all the time that I have found so confusing, right? Mm-hmm. Like, I’ve always been like why, why, why do we have, Who is the, the, the swimmer? [00:18:00] The trans swimmer? LiaSimone Collins: Thomas.Malcolm Collins: Lia Thomas.I always talk about Lia Thomas. I’m like, why did the trans community support her flashing male genitals at girls in the girls’ locker room when neither male or female locker rooms is it normal to fully undress yourself, and it hasn’t been for the past 20 years. It wasn’t when I was in school. It’s definitely not today, and we’ve been drifting further in that direction.So that means that this is somebody who is intentionally flashing people. I was like, why did the trans community make this person a role model for the community, stand this individual, make them the figurehead when they were clearly acting in a way that I would think is a bad action? And then I realized I didn’t understand it.Simone Collins: Hmm.Malcolm Collins: Lia Thomas made every moment about what aroused her. Walking into the locker room and being like, “I am gonna make my entire life a sexualized reframing,” is actually very, very normal to people with this mindset [00:19:00] And I’ll note here, I think we see this in the conservative side as well. In the conservatives who are just doing this conservative LARP and don’t seem to have actual, like, values.They’re just like, “I’m the most conservative person out there.” And that’s why when people try to, like, front on you with this stuff, like, “Oh, I’m more conservative ‘cause I’m more...” whatever thing they wanna push on you. Like, “I hate the gays more, the Jews more,” the, you know. And it’s like, come on, the communists did that stuff, too.You’re bad at being a conservative. You’re an idiot conservative. But the, the the conservatives who, who go with that, “I’m a more trad version of a Christian. You’re just, like, really involved in being a scripture nerd. So, like, what are you? Some nerd about study- the trying to get the exact right words in a way that makes sense?Why can’t you just believe whatever I was told Christianity was when I was growing up?” And I’m like, “Well, because I actually wanna believe what’s true.” And they’re not interested in what’s true. They’re interested in what fits this theming, and then we see it affect in their actions. [00:20:00] Like the couple, the famous conservative couple where their marriage was blessed by the Pope and she was cheating with her boss the whole time, right?Simone Collins: Blessed by the Pope.Malcolm Collins: Blessed bySimone Collins: the Pope. Apparently, though, there, it’s... What, what happened actually in that case is apparently you can, like, show up in a certain place when you get married, like, at, at, at, in the Va- in Vatican City, and the Pope will be there and, like, bless a bunch of people all at once.So it’s not like they made some kind of special appointment with him. They like- Well,Malcolm Collins: right, butSimone Collins: itMalcolm Collins: wasSimone Collins: still a very performative- ... showed up. It’s like showing up at a Mardi Gras parade and getting Mardi Gras beads thrown at you. Just, just to, like, put that in context forMalcolm Collins: our listeners. No, no, no, no. I, I, I...Look, and again, I wouldn’t even... As much as I might be anti-Catholic, I’m not gonna besmirch the Pope for accidentally blessing somebody who wasn’t true to their belief system, right?Simone Collins: Yeah.Malcolm Collins: He hadSimone Collins: no way of knowing. Well, plus with the Catholic Church there’s always redemption, so don’t worry about it.Malcolm Collins: Right, right.But I’m just saying even, even if it was personally organized, I would still... That, that’s not... But the point is is it was still a big show of, “Look at [00:21:00] how X I am.” Mm. And what I realize is that actually when you live your life based around maximizing an identity rather than a consequentialist value system, you can be aroused by these sorts of positions even if you’re a conservative, right?Mm. The reason why a teacher may be aroused by being in the role of a teacher relative to a student or the role of a boss relative to their employee is because they are maximizing and they identify as teacher. That’s what they’re doing. I’m trying to be the most teachery teacher right now. And so that allows me to, if, if that’s what’s hitting the arousal pathway, then that hits it for me, right?But if I’m going out there and as a boss, as I’ve always done as a boss, my job is to make money for my investors, right? Like, never, and, and, and not screw over customers and not screw over my employees, but like that’s always the calculation running in my head. It’s [00:22:00] never, “I’m a boss.” I, I can do the, you know, I’m a, I’m a boss song here.Speaker 9: Direct workflow. Like a boss. My own bathroom. Like a boss. Micromanage. Like a boss. Promote synergy. Like a boss.Malcolm Collins: But like I, yeah, I’m never thinking like, “I’m the bossiest boss.”Speaker 2: Hey, I’m Buddy. I’m the boss.That’s my sister, Grace. She’s not the boss. I’m the boss.Malcolm Collins: I’m the boss.” But anyway, for making, about making cakes. But anyway it, it’s never how I perceive myself in those moments. I’m just a tool of trying to achieve a specific outcome.And I realize that I think many progressives, so there’s sort of two people here who get sucked into this in ways that were, one, before foreign to me, but now make a lot more sense. One is the progressives who just like intentionally are pleasure maxing their lives.Simone Collins: Yeah.Malcolm Collins: And, and I think you see this sometimes as conservatives, but it’s fairly rare.Just like the [00:23:00] only thing I live for is what arouses me and what makes me feel good. Yeah. And if, if, and these people can fall into various categories. Obviously if they are most impacted by arousal systems, they may go down the trans pathway, they may go down some other lifestyle pathway, like the furry pathway or something like that.Simone Collins: The furry pathway.Malcolm Collins: Or they may go down, you know, all these various things that they could go down. And actually this is an interesting point to me, which is really important for me in terms of how I see something like furries. When people tried to, the left tried to take Lola Bunny and make Lola Bunny less sexy, there was a big online outrage that predominantly happened on the right.And what that showed me is A lot of people find anthro characters attractive, right? Like apparently this is normalized enough that like right-wing influencers were like, “How dare you desexualize Lola Bunny?”Simone Collins: Is this true? I mean, it just... They, they made a humanoid character sexy. Like, [00:24:00] how is that... A sexy character- Well, so the point I’m making here-that’s humanoid is sexy. Like I, how is that... It’s not like people are into animalsMalcolm Collins: The point I’m making... Well, yeah, they dr- that’s what they’re trying to do. They’re trying to make the character activate the part of your brain, for at least people without very strict counter systems look like a slightly modified version of a human.Yeah. And because people like diversity in sexual partners, which we’ve actually seen from genetic selection events that happened in environments where mate selection was really important, like in Northern Europe. We have another episode where we go more into this, like are redheads monster girls.But like, inSimone Collins: these- Forgot aboutMalcolm Collins: that ... in these environments you begin to have these really unusual dimorphic traits, like bright red hair and different eye colors. Which by the way you don’t have in most of the world. You do not have varying hair colors, you do not have varying eye colors. You only have these in these very explicit Northern European environments.Mm-hmm. And because of that, or that just shows me that, you know, [00:25:00] historically, at least within populations that I’m related to liking somebody who looked in some way novel. Like a ginger looks very novel. Mm-hmm. You know, to, to a, a Roman, you bring a red-headed ginger in and th- they wouldn’t look any more different from the average human woman than a, a girl with horns or elf ears.In fact they probably would’ve looked more different from the average human woman to a Roman who captured a red-headed slave with, with, that was a ginger than your average elf in fantasy fiction looks to your average human in fantasy fiction. But the point I was making here is that there is something very different from just saying like, “Oh, something’s arousing to me.”Like, that’s a category of like anthro figures is arousing to me, and being a furry. Because it’s how you’re relating to this arousal pathway. Mm-hmm.Simone Collins: Mm-hmm.Malcolm Collins: When you’re a furry you’re saying, “This is going to be my identity. I’m gonna go to cons around this, I’m gonna invest a ton of money in this, I’m gonna incorporate [00:26:00] this thing that arouses me into my core idea of who I am.”And I would say of, of the list of techno-puritan sins, let’s definitely add this one as, like, one of the higher sins you can commit of, of trying to incorporate a, an arousal pathway. Well,Simone Collins: no, I think trying to incorporate any emotional pathway into your identity is- Right.Malcolm Collins: True ...Simone Collins: toxic. It- that’s not the point.Your identity should be something that is meant to maximize your objective function. That’s it.Malcolm Collins: Yes. But there are two, ... Well, by the way, for people, when she talks about objective function, that means the things that you believe have intrinsic value. Mm-hmm. Like a weighted list of things you think are good for humanity or that you’re commanded to do by God or, you know, whatever else, right?Like, you have a, a, a thing that you as a human are made to do, and you believe that, right? Mm-hmm. And even, even if you think the thing that you’re meant to do as a human is maximize your own pleasure- Pursuing [00:27:00] pleasure in the way that these communities do rarely maximizes your own pleasure. Actually, like let’s look at furries as an example of this.If you look at the suicidality risk you look at the unaliving risk among furries, it’s incredibly high. You look at the depression risk, it’s incredibly high. When you do this form of hedonism maxing, it ends up eating away at your actual contentedness because it’s just not how humans were designed to live.Mm-hmm. It’s like even if I enjoy candy, if I do nothing but eat candy every day for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, I am going to feel much worse. You know, like pleasure maxing, even though candy make me feel good, candy not route to long-term pleasure maxing.Simone Collins: Well, in fact, when it, when we discussed like is there a cure for gay in The Pragmatist’s Guide to Sexuality, from what we could see in the research, the only way you could really make someone not want [00:28:00] to indulge in any same-sex activity is to just inundate them so much with gay sex that they like just can’t take anymore.Malcolm Collins: No, no now obviously same sex attracted people can suppress this arousal pathway. Yeah. Right? Like, there’s arousal pathways I suppress all the time, but the, the point I’m making here is we’re, we’re building out three categories. So category one is the people who are captured by an identity, and this identity can be tied to an arousal pathway or not.Mm-hmm. But I think even if you don’t go into it as tied to an arousal pathway, like the Christian influencer who saw himself as like a boss or a superior to this person, and like the big tough Christian influencer guy, he became captured by this identity in a way that ended up trow- triggering arousal pathways that made him move against his core moral thesis, right?Or his objective function as we would say. But then the second category is the true I’m gonna eat candy every day person, and this is, this is where you get, you know, the, [00:29:00] the haze influencer. This is where you get the healthy at every size people. This is where you get the ex- the, the trans extremists, right?Where it’s just I’m gonna live my entire life based around whatever can make me... This is where you get the people crashing out on Twitter because the government won’t give them, Pre, pre... We had a whole episode. It was one of our craziest- Oh, PrEP. PrEP, yeah. We learned about how much the government pays on PrEP, which is only useful if you’re having orgies.Like if you have a, a monogamous partner, because of how good anti-AIDS medication is now, but PrEP’s just largelySimone Collins: irrelevant. Well, yeah. So not, not exactly orgies, but more specifically, like, a lot of one-off partners, new partners who you can’t really vet who you can’t necessarily trust to say, “Yeah, I’m taking the correct medication,” et cetera.Yeah. Then that’s what PrEP is for. Yeah, it’s for, like, the most unsafe and irresponsible form of sex that you could have, regardless of your orientation. And the fact that the government’s paying for that is somewhat annoying.Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Well, no, government isn’t paying for it, you’re [00:30:00] paying for it. You, the viewer of Base Camp, are paying for it.Simone Collins: Well, if you live in the United States, yeah.Malcolm Collins: Well, I think most of Europe gives PrEP too, for free. YouSimone Collins: think? Hmm.Malcolm Collins: You know. Thanks. De- definitely need to cut PrEP. And people are like, “Well, the, these people can’t control them. They should be able to control themselves.” And then they’re like, “And what if they get AIDS?And we shouldn’t pay for that either, then they can die,” right? Like, w- w- whatever can happen to consequences, right? Like, don’t do X thing because it can lead to Y thing, right? Like, that should be on them to know, “Oh, gee, I shouldn’t have the orgy. I should just step back from the orgy,” right? Like, a little less orgying.But yeah thoughts, Simone?Simone Collins: Yeah. I, I’m, I’m trying to reconcile this in my head with the stated purpose of becoming trans, which is, you know, you feel like you’re born in the wrong body, and you’re just trying to resolve severe body [00:31:00] dysmorphia. The, the mainstream opinion on the left, as I understand it, is that this has nothing to do with your sexuality and it has everything to do with who you feel you are, which I guess we would probably say is a misnomer.Like, your identity doesn’t matter anyway. It doesn’t matter who you are. You should just make the most of whatever you’ve been dealt and optimize it around your objective function. And if you’re suddenly born tomorrow, or, like, you wake up tomorrow and you’re totally different, it’s not like, “Okay, well, I need to fix, fix this to, to how I feel.I need to just live,” like, and, “Okay, this is my body now,” like, “Okay, now I’m a rabbit person. Okay, then I’ll just do that.” In fact, I think you could argue that everyone has to do this throughout their lives, because one day you’re gonna wake up and you’re gonna be 40. And I think a lot of people are, like, trans young, right?Like, they’re 40, and they act like they’re 12. And that’s just not, not ideal. You know, they should be leveraging the identity that they’ve woken up [00:32:00] in, in an optimal way. And I think- Nevertheless what the argument is with identity and, and being trans is that they feel like they’re in the body of someone with a different n- natal sex, and they have to fix that.That it has nothing to do with sex. And I’mMalcolm Collins: trying to- Yeah, nobody ever, like, the, the, it’s, it’s like, it, it’s very normal to not feel like you’re an adult, right? Like, this is a normal thing. Just because I don’t feel like- Yeah,Simone Collins: or to not want to be an adult. Like, I mean, all the women who are getting elective cosmetic procedures to look younger are trans young.You know? They, they are also getting gender affirming surgery and, and youth affirming surgery.Malcolm Collins: Well, and identity affirming surgery,Simone Collins: right? Uh-huh, exactly, which again, we would say is sinful. But I don’t, I, for, for women, I, m- many would, you could argue, oh, they’re doing it for sex ‘cause they wanna attract partners.I don’t think they’re doing it for sex. I, so I don’t know if, if the trans thing is really about sex. I mean, so I’m trying to parse that out. ‘Cause also there’s this very common thing in, in, like, trans [00:33:00] discourse to say, “No, being trans is not expressing autogynephilia. They’re totally different things.”There’s almost this, like, disavowal of people with autogynephilia. Like, it’s not a sex thing.Malcolm Collins: There, there is not at all a disavowal in the actual trans community. So, this is something that they, that they signal very loudly to outsiders. But to insiders, it’s widely accepted.Simone Collins: Okay, but you don’t deny that it’s signaled loudly to outsiders.Malcolm Collins: No, it is signaled loudly to outsiders, but if you actually hang out on their forums, they’ll talk about this arousing them all the time. In fact, there was even a giant fight within the trans community like 10, 20 years ago, so, like even before it blew up between the the people who said, “Being trans is about gender dysphoria,” and these were called true scum, and the people who said, “No, being trans is about whatever I want,” which is the people who are called the two Qs.And the whatever I want, while it often wasn’t explicitly laid out, was generally autogynephilia. Or some [00:34:00] form of kink or arousal pathway, right? Like, if they, that, that was well understood if you look at the leaders of the whatever I want community and the stuff that they were caught with, whenever they had leaks or anything like that, right?You know. But yeah. What was the point you were making around this? I mean, my, my point is, like, the, the community- ThatSimone Collins: it’s not about sex. That you’re saying, well, a breed- people who have a lot of kids don’t have a breeding kink. But people who are trans have a kink that they’re exercising every day, which is why they think that people who have a lot of kids have a, a breeding kink.And I’m trying to push back and say, “I don’t know. I don’t know if people who are trans think it’s very sexual at all either.” In fact, I would argue that especially people who are- Read the forums ... male to female trans are, if anything, experiencing a significant drop in sexual arousal because it’s testosterone- They, we just read a thread about this yesterdaythat’s the huge sex driver, and they’re, like, trying to kind of nuke that out. HaveMalcolm Collins: you read, have you read or spent any time reading, like, the trans subreddit or any community which would- NotSimone Collins: in a very long time, to be fair ... talk to otherMalcolm Collins: [00:35:00] transSimone Collins: people? Not for aMalcolm Collins: long time.Simone Collins: It’s,Malcolm Collins: it’s very common to talk about this in those communities, and they are not shamed for talking about this in those communities.Simone Collins: Mm.Malcolm Collins: It is seen as a normal part of transition, and people would say it’s very wrong to shame somebody for being aroused due to something tied to their transition. And they’ll always say, “Well, like, of course we don’t signal this to outsiders, but within the community, we know what’s up.” Right? Like, I think that to, to over-buy into this externalized like the too cute versus true scum war obviously happened.If you do a, an internet search, it obviously happened. It’s, it, it, it’s one of the biggest parts or cultural fights within the growth of modern leftism and the movement that came out of Tumblr, right? And pretty much no one denies that the, the true scum lost. True scum now are seen as adjacent to TERFs, right?Like, they’re, they’re seen as sort of similar in the same way that, like, [00:36:00] TERFs were sloughed off by the feminist movement as the wrong kind of feminists, the true scum were sloughed off by the trans movement as the wrong kind of trans. So I, I think that y- yeah, they’re aware that this is for them, and this actually even came up in the conversation with the journalist.And I was like, “You know, obviously I wouldn’t wanna live my entire life just to maximize the amount of pleasure I, I, I s- feel.” And they said something along the lines of, “Well, you know, speak for yourself,” implying that, like, this is actually how they structure their life.Simone Collins: Yeah.Malcolm Collins: So even in that context, Simone, you saw the individual doing this.Simone Collins: That’s fair. That is fair. Yeah.Malcolm Collins: So I think that the, the, the thing is, is even if, or the, the wider context here, even if somebody has all of the fetishes around th- that presumably this lifestyle should be activating, it doesn’t work to activate them. It’s a very ineffective way. If you out there as an individual are [00:37:00] thinking, “I wanna have a lot of kids because of a fetish,” there’s places for that.There’s, like known sperm dono networks appear to be primarily fetishes from what I’ve seen.Simone Collins: Oh. Yeah, that’s true. That is true. Yeah, the people who just make themselves available for sperm donation. Totally.Malcolm Collins: That seems to be about a breeding kink. I like Elon. What he’s doing seems to be partially potentially motivated by a breeding kink.Just the way that he’s doing it. Instead of doing it all with one woman and surrogates, which he could do if he wanted to he does it with lots of women who he treats as disposable, which is often part of a breeding kink, right? So that looks like... I- I know he doesn’t treat all of them as dispo- but some of them he clearly does.Like, it’s like I hit up a girl on Twitter, she’s interested, I impregnate her. There’s other ways he could achieve the same scale with significantly less legal liability with the money that he has, right? So there’s something motivating this outside of just logic. That said, maybe he’s, like, ideologically [00:38:00] against using using w- w- what’s the word?Simone Collins: Surrogates?Malcolm Collins: Surrogates. Yeah, ideologically against surrogates. No. No? Okay. So, yeah. ‘Simone Collins: Cause he’s known to have used surrogates, so.Speaker: Like if I had Elon level money, I would have a, uh, uh, like a facility in some third world country, like in India, I don’t know, South America, Brazil, something like that. Um, that’d be like Ender’s Game, raising like 50 kids per year, , in the best conditions I could afford for them, but at scale. , Which is obviously very different than the path Elon has takenMalcolm Collins: Or maybe it allows him to operate at a scale that, like, even we’re unaware of that would make this make sense. I don’t know. But the point I’m making here is- is that the- the breeding kink is generally not tied to and then you raise a family of like 10 kids.VerySimone Collins: true. AndMalcolm Collins: I, and I, and I’d actually point this out to the trans community, like the trans community that is watching this and crashing out over me saying this. You kn- you kn- like, breeding kinks are common in the trans community. Like for example, Ana Valens had a, a [00:39:00] breeding kink. Remember? She wanted to like, she, she- There were,Simone Collins: there were so many.There were so many things ...Malcolm Collins: This is a writer who w- dunked on Leaflet and Kirschner. But anyway, so Ana Valens was like, “Oh, I have this fantasy where I free use women and impregnate them.” Like, that means just having sex with lots of women and impregnating them. Oh. And then tran- trans women should have free access to cis women to just use them and impregnate them.Now, this is clearly a breeding kink, but it is antithetical to and then I raise those kids. It’s, it’s the exact opposite of that. Breeding kinks are, at least from what I’ve seen in terms of like what’s out there, almost always tied to and then I move on.Simone Collins: It’s almost more a correlated with sneaky copulation than it is Like anything you do with a partner, a long-term partner, pure bond partner Yeah.Malcolm Collins: Where that stuff is often much more motivated by “I really like kids and let’s make the kids,” right? Like that’s, [00:40:00] that’s the point of the sex, and then the sex is all schedules and everything like that. And as we’ve said, then you, then you basically get to a point where, you know, having a nanny is just like a prostitute by proxy, right?Because- Yeah.Simone Collins: It, it might be different for religious couples who are just open to having kids, meaning that like every time you have sex, you’re not necessarily trying to have kids. You know, God chooses, right? Jesus takes the wheel on that front, and then it’s not stressful in that way because you’re not trying to make it happen.You’re just open to it happening when it’s meant to happen.Malcolm Collins: Mm-hmm.Simone Collins: In which case perhaps then it’s- More s- of a turn-on for the... I don’t know. Because I b- they also like, people who are you know, open, open to having kids and, and having families in that sort of very natural way tend to also not talk about what arouses them and their sex lives.So who knows what’s going on in their heads, right? Like-Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Well- ...Simone Collins: who knows if they find it a turn-on or not. But I [00:41:00] think what, when you also look at just sort of how it’s described biblically, like becoming one, which really just means, like, as we interpret it, combining your genetics with someone and basically taking what feels like to us shards of our soul and, and, like, seeing them in children combined.You know, really you see yourself, both of yourselves in one person after you have a kid, in that person. You do become one in that kid. I think that’s more, like, where you see the expression of love. It’s not really in the sex act itself or the sex act itself- Well, I also know here where- ... has more to do with sort of increasing-aMalcolm Collins: trans person may push back and say, “Well, it’s not just breeding kinks.” You know, you say that the breeding kink is never associated with a wanting to raise a child, right? And they’re like, “Well, what about, like, daddy dom little girl stuff,” right? You know, that’s tied to wanting to raise a child, and I push back super hard on that.I, I would bet even, even people maybe we could get Shu on head sometime because we know that she was into this kink for a [00:42:00] while and now has a kid. I would bet to anybody who’s ever been into that kink, th- this is not one of the kinks I’m into but for anybody who’s ever been into that kink, having their own kids has never been arousing to them.Like interacting- Yeah ... with their own kids. A, a, a one, the western mark effect is super strong. That’s the thing that makes you unaroused by anyone who sort of is growing up around you at certain developmental milestones. But in addition to the western mark effect which is usually with siblings, but also affects parents, because I mean, there, there, there is something that tells you and needs to tell you from a biological perspective people can have hot daughters.Like, people can have daughters that are just objectively attractive, and you need to know at some sort of internal level, “Oh, I shouldn’t be procreating with this thing that happens to beSimone Collins: my daughter.” That system doesn’t seem to work in everyone.Malcolm Collins: And when you... Well, no. Where people end up with their daughters most frequently, it’s because you’re also more attracted to people you’re genetically related to, is when the father didn’t raise the daughter.Oh. And this one we actually see [00:43:00] quite frequently is when a daughter raised bySimone Collins: a dad gets called. Yeah. And, and when, when you have people raised separately because they both have the same, like, father through IVF ‘cause their, their father is a prolific sperm donor.Malcolm Collins: Right. But, but even more than that is when the dad, like, divorced the mom young or something like that anyway.Simone Collins: Sure. Yeah.Malcolm Collins: We’re not gonna talk about that right now. The point I’m making here is the daddy dom little girl fetish is very obviously to me in the category of fetishes of power exchange. This would be the ex- same as, like, a nurse fetish or a teacher fetish or, like, a I’m in control over you in some other way fetish and you have less control than me.This is about signaling submission and dominance, which is not actually something you do with your kids very frequently. I, I think that people would be surprised about that. Signals of dominance are just not a part of n- normal interaction you have with your kids because there’s almost this, like, intuitive understanding with children, until they’re teenagers at least, and that’s, you know, that’s a whole other thing, right?[00:44:00] That the, the parent is in the authoritative position that it doesn’t need to be signaled. It’s not, it’sSimone Collins: not part of your relationship. Well, it, basically if you have to signal it, that means you’ve, you’ve failed already, right? Like, you know, the, it’s a show, don’t tell kind of thing.Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Yeah. So, that, that was sort of my wider thought.It, it just made me realize, like, oh my God, they actually see the world this way, and I had just always bro- brushed it off as, like, a-Simone Collins: Yeah, very confusing. Yeah. Genuinely ...Malcolm Collins: it was either confusing or, like, they didn’t... And, and they’re, oh, you know they’ll clip this and see, like, he admits it, that, you know, the whole breeding fetish thing is something that, that turns him on.I mean, yeah, of course. It’s what the entire arousal system is meant for. But I also have been very clear, and I think we’ll get other people in the comments who will mention this around whatever fetish they’ve experienced, that there is a big deal difference between something that is a conceptual fetish and something that’s [00:45:00] going to be accidentally activated by your daily life.Mm-hmm ... and I doubt... I, I, w- w- I mean, one of the easy ones, ‘cause this is even... Anyone who’s into, like, the daddy dom thing ever accidentally been aroused by that with one of their kids, right? Like, presumably it should, if it, that’s the actual system you’re trying to activate. But I don’t think it is. It’s the authority figure non-authority figure system, which isn’t really the relationship you have with your kids.The relationship I have with my kids is nothing like the relationship I’d have with, like, a pupil or something like that.Simone Collins: Yeah. Yeah. No. That’s, it’s a good point. I’m, I’m glad you brought it up, ‘cause that, that has always kind of befuddled me, and I’m just like, I don’t know, I don’t know what to say. I just, it’s not.But this was worth going into. I love you. Anyway,Malcolm Collins: love you, Simone.Speaker 13: He’s really good at alligators[00:46:00]What do you think, buddy?Thanks, friendSpeaker 11: Yeah, you know to push with your knuckles, right? Yeah. Why? So you don’t get your fingers dirty, because you eat with your fingers This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit basedcamppodcast.substack.com/subscribe

In this episode of Based Camp, Simone and Malcolm Collins dive into the viral meme: “I’m just a normal person from 1995.” They explore how mainstream 1990s views — including those from Bill and Hillary Clinton on immigration, welfare reform, and borders — are now branded as “far-right extremism.”Using data from Cremieux’s Substack analysis of the General Social Survey, Pew Research polarization graphs, and cultural shifts, they discuss the leftward drift on race, gender, sexuality, institutions, and more. They argue that what was once normal (family values, personal responsibility, evidence-based thinking) is now demonized, while the modern Right has become the side of data, science, realism, and genuine societal progress.Topics include: the Overton window shift, trans issues and science, immigration realities, political tolerance, why many 1990s Democrats would be “MAGA” today, and the divorce between “progressivism” and actual improvement. Plus lighter moments on Hunter Biden, AI waifus, and mashed potatoes.Show NotesTo set the scene, here are some quotes:* From our xenophobic, far-right president, saying: “I want to talk with you about the problem of illegal immigration. It’s a problem our administration inherited, and it’s a very serious one. It costs the taxpayers of the United States a lot of money, and it’s unfair to Americans who are working every day to pay their own bills... Our immigration policy is focused in four areas: first, strengthening border control; second, protecting American jobs by enforcing laws against illegal immigrants at the workplace; third, deporting criminal and deportable aliens; fourth, giving assistance to States who need it and denying illegal aliens benefits for public services or welfare.”* Or this from our capitalistic first lady, advocating for a “welfare reform plan that will dramatically change the nation’s welfare system into one that requires work in exchange for time-limited assistance.”What do they all have in common? They come from left-leaning public figures in the 1990s.* Bill Clinton* Hillary ClintonThe Rabbit Hole on X posted “Far right is often just a propaganda term for normal person” alongside a cartoon of a woman and man in a car, with the woman saying: “Why are you so far right politically” and the man saying “I’m just a normal person from 1995.”Andy Hatfield posted another meme that reads: “Recognize the warning signs of a far-right extremist:* Full time employment* Literacy* Loves his family and country* Common sense* Obeys the law”Inspired by the meme, Cremieux wrote A Normal Person 30 Years Ago A normal guy in 1995 probably believes a lot of things that are unacceptable now on Substack and his post about it—plus the resulting discourse—became a trending topic du jour on X.Cremieux’s ObservationsIn his Substack article, Cremieux broke from the sentiment-based memes and looked at the data.“I opened up the General Social Survey and had a look around. To get started, I defined a few sets of political views: Institutional Confidence, Criminal Justice & Guns, Political Tolerance, Economic/Pro-Government, Racial Liberalism/Civil Rights, Gender-Role Egalitarianism, and Sexual & Moral Liberalism, and then I outlined a set of important social views.”The data shows that:* “People have become less confident in America’s institutions over time.”* “When it comes to criminal justice and firearms, more people think courts are too harsh on criminals, more people oppose the death penalty, and fewer people think we ought to requires permits to buy guns. The last of these didn’t change that much.”* “Political tolerance has somewhat increased since the 1970s, but it’s somewhat down since the 1990s. This general trend masks something interesting: more acceptance of gays and atheists, less acceptance of racists and militarists.”* “Movement on economically left-wing views has been generally pretty flat, which is roughly what we also see for economically right-wing views.”* “When it comes to racial liberalism, people have shifted far to the left. People have become more likely to ascribe Black-White gaps to discrimination and less to a lack of effort, among other things.”* “When it comes to gender roles, egalitarianism has greatly increased.”* Diana Fleischman recently made an interesting observation on that front vis a vis male postpartum depression* “Finally, when it comes to sexual and moral liberalism, views on sex education, divorce, marijuana legality, and so on have, in some cases, quite radically shifted towards left-ward positions. Abortion legality for serious defects is the only exception among the bunch.”He concludes that “the nation has moved considerably, but not overwhelmingly, to the left.”His editorialization is thoughtful: “What can we say about the normal person from 1995? In many ways, he was much like us. In other ways, he was what most people would now regard as kind of a dick. He didn’t like interracial marriage and he wasn’t too keen on gays either. These social views aren’t alone: plenty of things now considered taboo were, at the time, wholly acceptable, even in polite society, and sometimes these were the majority view.Right or wrong, I don’t think appealing to normal people in the world 30 years ago is likely to make many friends after realizing the sorts of things people used to believe.”I largely agree but also think he is not extrapolating sufficiently from the data. “Let a racist speak” has gone down in the General Social Survey, but also the definition of “racist” has changed significantly, from something that is, we would argue, blatantly racist, to someone who, for example, believes genes dictate skin color and other traits.In short, I think he was looking at the wrong thing to measure change.Additional Observations Shared on XNC Phycicist observed that “Pew Research illustrates this nicely. What the left calls the “far right” is just the left moving further left.” sharing a pretty illustrative graph showing diverging median democrats and median republicans in 1994 vs 2017:HF responded that: “Society always changes and moves on. By definition, a progressive (someone on the left) is either ahead of, or keeping up with those changes. A conservative (someone on the right) wants things to stay the same and not change.Society always changes and moves on. By definition, a progressive (someone on the left) is either ahead of, or keeping up with those changes. A conservative (someone on the right) wants things to stay the same and not change.”But Charles Pontificates pointed out that “It’s mostly leftists who want deindustrialization and the stagnation of energy production, and that’s hardly progress.” sharing a graph of electricity and income per capita that makes it clear there’s no such thing as a low-energy rich country.People also tried to make slippery slope arguments:* Rikki Schlott: “How far do we wanna go back on this one though? I’m just a normal guy from 1960? From 1850?”* Posterior Malone: “Yeah it’s certainly true to some degree, but 30 years is a very long time…imagine saying in 1995: ‘I’m not far right, I’m just a normal person from 1965’”* Martin Stepan: “I’m just a normal person from 1895.”There’s some pondering to be done about progress and time fixing everything versus toxic ideologies spreading.Episode TranscriptSimone Collins: [00:00:00] Hello, Malcolm. I’m excited to be speaking with you today. I want to set the scene with some quotes. Let’s start with one from our xenophobic far-right president saying, “I wanna talk with you about the problem of illegal immigration.It’s a problem our administration inherited and it’s a very serious one. It costs the taxpayers of the United States a lot of money, and it’s unfair to Americans who are working every day to pay their own bills. Our immigration policy is focused on four areas. First, strengthening border control. Second, protecting American jobs by enforcing laws against illegal immigrants at the workplace.Third, deporting criminal and dep- deportable Americans. Fourth, giving assistance to the states who need it in denying illegal aliens benefits for the public services or welfare.” And then here’s, and just another one from our capitalistic first lady advocating for, “A welfare reform plan that will dramatically change the nation’s welfare system into one that [00:01:00] requires work in exchange for time-limited assistance.”Oh, but crap. I used the wrong accents ‘cause, because I was actually quoting our different president and first lady from the 1990s, Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton. And that’s kind of the whole thing that’s been bubbling up on X recently. I thinkMalcolm Collins: we saw this meme that’s like, “I’m just a normal- Yeah, the, the-person from 1990” Yeah, the, theSimone Collins: Rabbit Hole on X specifically posted this on X. Far right is just often a propaganda term for normal sent alongside a cartoon of a woman and man in a car with this woman saying, “Why are you so far right politically?” And the man saying, “I’m just a normal person from 1995.”Speaker: We’re just normal men What do you mean normal men? We’re just innocent men. Eh?Simone Collins: And Andy Hatfield also posted another meme under that that, that reads, “Recognize the warning signs of a far right extremist. Full-time employment, literacy, [00:02:00] loves his family and country, common sense, and obeys the law.” And,Malcolm Collins: There, there was actually videos that were put together at one point.Oh,Simone Collins: really?Malcolm Collins: I’m probably gonna be too lazy to look for them.Speaker 3: Your son is not just lifting weights. He’s lifting the crushing weight of toxic masculinity. This is not fitness. It’s a silent scream for self-worth.Malcolm Collins: But this became a thing where they were leftists- We’re creating warning signs if your son was being radicalized by the far right.Simone Collins: Oh, are you serious? Like, that this is drifting off the thing? And it was stuffMalcolm Collins: like... Yeah, it was stuff like, “Has he been working out more recently?Has he started cleaning his room more?Malcolm Collins: Has he-” Oh,Simone Collins: no. No, no, no, no. No.Malcolm Collins: I- I- yeah, no, actually it was like, “Has he started consuming less pornography? Has he started-”Simone Collins: You’ve got to be kidding me ...Malcolm Collins: Has he started playing less video games and working more? He might be being- No ... radicalized by the far right.” Oh, my God. Has he started... No, another thing that was cited was, like eating [00:03:00] healthy.Like that was a, a warning sign. Like,Simone Collins: I did... Oh.Malcolm Collins: No, but the irony is, is that these are all actually pretty good warning signs-Simone Collins: They are, they are legit good warningMalcolm Collins: signs ... that a young man is being radicalized by the far right, right? You know. Oh, my God, Malcolm. He, he, they, if I, if I was a leftist and I saw my kid start exercising, I’d be like- No,Simone Collins: then you know.That’s how you know. It’s true. It’s, it’s actually true. That is, that is the funny part. Anyway though, Cremieux, who we love to follow think he’s a cool guy- just saw this post and decided to write a Substack article. He, in this, he broke from the sentiment-based memes around this subject and looked at the data.Per his article, quote, “I opened up the general social survey and had a look around. To get started, I defined a few sets of political views: institutional confidence, criminal justice and guns, political tolerance, economic, pro-government, radical liberalism/civil rights, gender role egalitarianism, and sexual and moral liberalism,” and then I outlined a set of important soc- [00:04:00] social views.I sent you, Malcolm, the graphs. I’m gonna put all the graphs and I’m gonna link to everything I’m talking about in the show notes for this on Patreon and Substack. But this is what he generally shows.Malcolm Collins: I love Cremieux. He’s like a meme. A b- a friend of ours, by the way. I love him. You know, follow him on X.A great, great right-wing tweeter. And he’s like, “Let’s break down the data. Let’s, let’s-” Yeah. Let’s look atSimone Collins: it. But also, you know, his take is gonna be different from what I think a lot of people, even when you look at the discourse on X, ‘cause this ended up as one of sort of the trending topics that got surfaced as something on X, I think even just this morning as, as our time of recording.What a lot of people assumed he was gonna be saying is not actually the conclusion that he reached after looking at the data, and I actually think he, he was missing important things in terms of the data he looked at. But anyway. Oh,Malcolm Collins: oh, ooh.Simone Collins: So the data shows that, and I’m just gonna quote his findings vis-a-vis all these things, but you, it’s better for you to look at the graphs, I think.They, they really help to sort of hammer it home. And again, just go to Patreon and Substack. The data [00:05:00] shows that, quote, “People have become less comf-” Oh, my God, the screaming. quote, “People have become less confident in America’s institutions over time. When it comes to criminal justice and firearms, people think courts are too harsh on criminals.More people oppose the death penalty, and fewer people think they ought to require, Wait, and fewer people think we ought to require permits to buy guns. The last of these three didn’t change that much. Political tolerance has somewhat increased since the 1970s, but it’s somewhat down since the 1990s.This general trend masks something interesting. More acceptance of gays and atheists, less acceptance of racists and militarists. Movement on economically left-wing views have been generally pretty flat, which is roughly what we see economically for right-wing views. And when it comes to racial liberalism, people have shifted far to the left.People have become more likely to ascribe Black-white gaps to discrimination and less to a lack of effort, [00:06:00] among other things. And when it comes to gender roles, egalitarianism has greatly increased.” On this front, by the way our friend Diana Fleischman on X shared an interesting comment vis-a-vis this article that came out on, On postpartum depression for dads.Specifically like a lot of people on X were like, “Oh, dads can’t have postpartum depression.” Like, that’s super screwed up, and like sort of gatekeeping around postpartum depression. And what she observed, and I think this is actually really astute, is that probably there’s a rise in postpartum depression specifically because while women have this sort of insane hormonal thing they go through-Malcolm Collins: YeahSimone Collins: when babies are born, that, and I’ve, I’ve witnessed this, like actually makes them pretty tolerant of all the sleep deprivation and not super stressed about getting... ‘Cause I was super phobic about waking up in the middle of the night, for example before I ever had a kid, and in my, in my un- unparented life.And now it means nothing to me to like get up at 1:00 AM, 3:00 AM, [00:07:00] like whatever. I don’t care. Like, I’m really not stressed about it, and I’m sleeping a lot less now. But I’m, it super doesn’t bother me. And when I sleep, I sleep more deeply. Men don’t have the same kind of hormonal balance or shift. Yeah.And yet, these days, especially in, in like sort of educated progressive families, men are expected to like get up and, and, and feed babies in the middle of the night the same amount, or like be there for their wives when their wives are up and breastfeeding. In many cases, obviously not in all, but when they take a gender egalitarian approach to newborn care, men who did not go through this hor- whole hormonal revolution, who, you know, have not experienced this bodily change that has given them the ability to be more flexible in these ways, and it’s well documented that women’s brains go through a lot of changes and their bodies too, obviously hormonally as well that probably allow for this to be tolerable.And again, I’ve experienced it personally and I didn’t believe it could be possible. Is it any surprise that men are getting depressed when they’re like thrown into like this situation that they’re not [00:08:00] equipped to handle? So anyway, I thought that was interesting. And then he writes finally, when it comes to sexual and moral liberalism, views on sex education, divorce, marijuana legality and so on have in some cases quite radically shifted towards leftward positions.Abortion legality for serious defects is the only exception among the bunch. So he clu- he concludes however-Malcolm Collins: Yeah So hold on, hold on.Simone Collins: He concludes, and this is what’s most interesting that, that the nation has moved considerably but not overwhelmingly to the left. His editorialization on the issue is what can we say about the normal person from 1995?In many ways he was much like us. In other ways, he was what most people now regard as kind of a dick. He didn’t like interracial marriage and he wasn’t too keen on gays either. These social views aren’t alone. Plenty of things now considered taboo were, at the time, wholly acceptable even in polite society, and sometimes these were the majority view.Right or wrong, I don’t think appealing to normal people in the world 30 years [00:09:00] ago is likely to make many friends after realizing the sorts of things people used to believe. So I somewhat agree with him, but I also think that he’s not extrapolating sufficiently from the data. So when you look at one of the graphs about like sort of racial views let a racist speak has gone down in the general social survey.But also the definition of racist has changed significantly, and that’s not gonna get picked up in this survey. So like it changed- Right ... in the ‘90s from something that like we would genuinely even today argue is blatantly racist to-Malcolm Collins: Yeah ...Simone Collins: like let a racist speak means let, let someone admit that like genetic differences might lead to a difference in skin tone as you personally, Malcolm, experienced when being interviewed by an MSNBC journalist last year.Like that’s what- Yeah ... racism is now, and that’s not gonna get picked up by this general social survey. So what I think Krimuw is missing is that he doesn’t understand that you can’t look at the general social survey and take this data-focused approach to this [00:10:00] issue, though I love the premise, because the definition of the words have changed rendering the survey data inadmissible.What I think was more compelling was what NC Physicist observed which is I think a much more compelling graph which I’ll also send you on X to look at, and I’m also gonna post in the show notes of course. So this Pew graph I think is a lot better at illustrating what has happened. What NC Physicist observed and wrote was, “What the left calls far right is just the left moving further left.”Sharing a pretty illustrative graph showing a diverging median Democrats and median Republicans in 1994 to 2017. For those who are just listening, basically 1994, there’s a median Democrat and a median Republican basically-Malcolm Collins: High degree of overlap ...Simone Collins: shown.Yeah, they’re very close. Like, the medians are like this.And then when you go to 2017, the medians suddenly diverge significantly. They’re quite far apart. And the, the graph goes from looking like two mountains [00:11:00] almost next to each other to, like, two quite different mountains with a very significant valley in between the two of them. Mm-hmm. And I think that that’s, that’s more what has happened.Malcolm Collins: Well, here’s what I’ve begun to notice. And I think that this ... When I talk to your average, like, older boomer progressive about most of my beliefs, they don’t see them as particularly extreme, right? They’re like, “Oh, those are really normal things to believe.” Until I get to something like, you know, my beliefs on trans people or something like that, and they’re like, “Well, you know, what, what, what about, like, their rights?”And I’m like, “Well, what about the rights of, like, religious people or people who dis- disagree with this,” right? And they’re like, “Well, yeah, that’s not, like, an extremist position to take.” What they don’t realize is functionally this average person from 1995 is today in the eyes of the normal progressive an absolute radical, an absolute extremist.And [00:12:00] I think what we on the right do not fully realize is how many people who vote Democrat would actually support us if you could just get through ... Like, as I pointed out, when the thing I was shocked about was only sorry, that 40% of Democrats think that gender transition is immoral, right?Like, like, like, that is astonishing to me, right? Like, when, when you talk about those numbers there, right? It, the left ... And yet, and yet you could be fired from saying that from a mainstream job too, right? Like, that it’s one, both such an unpopular opinion among the masses, but two, that it’s seen as labeling you as an extremist, right?And I think a lot of the conversation is about waking people up to this reality, right? You know, that-That th- that everyone who is really still sane is on the [00:13:00] right at this point. There, there is not... Like, the, the leftist factions that, that control what’s left of, of the left, when they go out there at their protest and say, “Shoot a Nazi,” and then, and this is a frequent mainstream talking point on the left- No,Simone Collins: the, the, it’s punch, punch a Nazi.But yeah.Malcolm Collins: Punch a Nazi. Assault a Nazi. Okay, great. This is a normal mainstream talking point on the left. It’s also a normal mainstream t- talking point that if you sit at a table with a Nazi, you’re also a Nazi. And it’s also a mainstream talking point that MAGA is Nazi, which by the way, over half of America’s voted for.They, it is... W- when you take these together and you ask, why are there so many leftist mass shootings these days it, it becomes immediately obvious. It is normal for them to believe they have a license to kill the vast majority of Americans for different belief systems. And the moment you wake up a leftist often, often, like one of these sort of sleeping boomer leftists, this is what their party is [00:14:00] now.I, I think a lot of them are like, “Oh, I guess I, I guess I’m MAGA.” But then they’re like, “But if anyone ever found that out, I’d, I’d lose my job, I’d lose my friends, I’d lose my...” ‘Cause that’s the way that the left operates at this point, right?Simone Collins: Well, one thing I thought was also interesting from this discourse and some of the, the discussion that people had, is this tension between the idea of progress and people shifting cultural views in the face of just better evidence, like learning, getting better, just the idea of progressivism being a concept of society progressing and improving.And, and, well, this tension of that with like, to- I wanna say toxic culture and messages that actually isn’t making society better. So, HF responded in this general, like, about this subject, “Society always changes and moves on. By definition, a progressive, someone on the left, is either ahead of or keeping up with those changes.A conservative, someone on the right, wants things to stay the same and not change. Society always changes [00:15:00] and moves on. By definition, a progressive, someone on the left, is either ahead of keeping up with those changes. A conservative, someone on the right, wants things to stay the same and not change.” But Charles Pontificates pointed out that, quote, “It’s mostly leftists who want deindustrialization and the stagnation of energy production, and that’s hardly progress.”And he shared a graph of electricity and income per capita that makes it super clear that there’s no such thing as a low energy rich country. And where I felt like there’s this tension is I mean, a lot of people are trying to argue in response to this whole like, “Oh, well, they’re just reasonable people.”Malcolm Collins: Well, I, I think that that’s just fundamentally not what the left-right divide is anymore. Uh-huh. And I think that saying that conservatives... If you go to a conservative and you ask them, like let’s say the trans stuff. My opinion on transition was changed predominantly by changes in the scientific evidence.Simone Collins: Oh, okay. That’s a really- like- Yeah, that’s a good example of like where the left isn’t progressing with modern science and [00:16:00] understanding. Yeah.Malcolm Collins: Right. Yeah, like with modern science it looks like the left should be- Or likeSimone Collins: climate change, right? Like, we learn different things about cli- But- And population is a good one, right?Climate change, population. There was a beliefMalcolm Collins: thatSimone Collins: there were gonna be too many people, and now we know that we’re okay with a higher level of population. Okay.Malcolm Collins: The right now is the side of data and statistics- Mm ... and, and c- climate realism and genetical re- realism, right? Like, we are the side that is engaging with information, and the left has just stopped doing that.Simone Collins: Right. It- So this argument that it’s just that the left is the, is the, is the party of data and reality, and the right is, and conservatives are... I guess, and that’s maybe why we don’t call the it, the new conservatives. We call it the new right because-Malcolm Collins: Yeah, because it’s not small C conservatives.Simone Collins: Uh-huh. There are often- It’s not just go back to the old waysy-Malcolm Collins: quite radical people who are often open to a large diversity of ways of potentially fixing things.Simone Collins: Yeah.Malcolm Collins: And-Simone Collins: Yeah ...Malcolm Collins: the reason why it’s not just like go back to the old ways or don’t change is there isn’t just [00:17:00] like one unified image of the past that we’re fighting for anymore. It’s a better future that we’re fighting for.And, and that obviously involves a lot of things. Like right now the right is a pro-AI party. The left is the anti-AI party. The right is the pro-nuclear party. The left is the anti-nuclear party. The right is the pro-genetics party. The left is the anti-genetics party. On almost every meaningful scientific i- issueThe, the right is the people coming to the, to the table with statistics. And when I talk about, like, with the trans stuff, it’s like, you know, if you follow the WPATH leaks or the data that the Travis Stark Clinic was hiding that you know, putting people on puberty blockers was increasing their unaliving risk, and now that it’s been banned in the UK, we haven’t seen any increase in unalivings in the UK, even within the trans community.We now know that, like, the, the, those things are not true. And so now that we have that information, we can say, “Oh, we were wrong,” right? Like, the data that we were looking at was coming out of clinics that were making the majority of their money off of gender transition, which we’ve seen all of the pro-trans studies were.[00:18:00] They had somebody involved whose life depended, life, livelihood depended on this being normalized, and that those institutions were covering up the data that was showing this wasn’t working. And we have historic evidence where a real... This happened in the past too, with Joe Money, right? Like, this is a repeated phenomenon, and when the phenomenon comes to light, you update your opinions, right?We have changed our opinion significantly on a, you know, immigration because now if we look at the numbers, even three generations in,Hispanic immigrants are over 50% on welfare, right? You know, you can’t support that, right? That eventually that ends up breaking the, the welfare system. They do not assimilate, right?And with that being the case, and it’s, and it’s funny because, like, the leftists will even say, “Well, the goal isn’t assimilation.” If the goal isn’t assimilation, like, if you see that as a bad thing, them losing their heritage or, you know, culture, then we will become like the countries that they’re coming from, right?Like, the, presumably the reason we don’t is it’s not that we have magic soil or something, it’s that [00:19:00] we see and perceive reality and ethics differently, and when they come to this perception, then they become productive like us, even if you are a blank slates. If you’re throwing that out the window, then we’re...What, what conversation are we even having here?Simone Collins: Yeah, this is really helpful for me because I, like I grew up just loving like the West Wing Democrat. Like this like we are patriotic, we love our country, we, we want everyone to thrive, we believe in science. That, that, like that’s the Democrat to which I anchored,Malcolm Collins: And that’s what the right is now.Simone Collins: I know. And, but like, but then I think there’s still a lot of people who remain Democrats today who still think that they’re West Wing Democrats, but they don’t... They hate America- ... and they won’t listen to science. And I’m, I, gets so confusing to me sometimes because we’re, I think we’re often confused of, or, or we’re, we’re being accused of being so something that we’re not.When I think I’m, I’m certainly not the only person who is now on the right who [00:20:00] like grew up obsessed with West Wing Democrats because they’re wonderful. I love that show.Malcolm Collins: Well, I mean-Simone Collins: So that’s helpful. But, because I mean, what people kept saying is like, “Oh yeah? Yeah? Like well I’m just a normal person from the 1830s.”Like do, is that where you, is that what you want? Is that what you want? Like you want Jim Crow? Is that what you want? And like, y- it, it just didn’t sit right with me.Malcolm Collins: But this helps- Well, the reason why- ... sort of reframe itSimone Collins: for me ...Malcolm Collins: people say, “I’m just a normal person from 1995,” and it hits so hard for people in a way thatSimone Collins: these- 1995.Malcolm Collins: Yeah. When these people say, “Oh, I’m from the 1930s,” or whatever, is pretty much everyone agrees society, or at least America and Western countries, were demonstrably better in 1995, right? Like things were working better. There was less actual racism in our society, there was less you know, of the conflicts that we’re dealing with now as a society.So when a person presents to you, “I am an average person from 1995,” m- people who hear that, the reason it’s effective is they’re like, “Yeah, let’s [00:21:00] go back to something that worked,” because this, what y- what we’re doing now, the left isn’t working.Simone Collins: That Disney pastime is yeah. I, I really just need to wear my bonnet more. He’s going for it. But yeah, I that, th- this has been really helpful for me then because it’s, it’s helping me actually come to terms with this cognitive dissonance I’ve had around like the right being framed so readily as anti-progress, and even Cremieux being like- Yeah, theMalcolm Collins: Cremieux-Simone Collins: “Oh, the left hasn’t really changed” ... he’s aMalcolm Collins: right-wing scientist. What’s he doing?Simone Collins: Well, so this was a timed post, so I think maybe he was like, “I don’t know. Let’s see if the data backs it up.” And per the data he chose for this particular thing,Malcolm Collins: Oh, he does that stupid timed writingSimone Collins: thing ... that US general survey.Yeah, I mean, like, ‘cause when that other person on X looked up the Pew results, like it’s very clear that there’s been a change. I think a lot of this comes down to definitions, but I think in that also is something interesting in that like it’s not necessarily that, [00:22:00] like, people’s reported views haven’t actually changed that much, and I think that’s meaningful.It’s more that like maybe, maybe the radicalization is, is in definitions, is in like the way that people... The, the way that people have been radicalized, like the, the, the lobster or frog being boiled phenomenon had more to do with like not, not radicalizing people, but fundamentally and subtly changing definitions of like let’s just redefine you know, mental health as this, of of harm as no longer like physical assault, but of, you know, triggering someone, making someone feel bad.You know, let’s, let’s r- reframe body positivity as not like, “Hey, you know, you don’t have to be perfect,” to like, “Oh, it’s okay to be morbidly obese and like deeply unhealthy.” Like maybe that’s where the, the societal harm or like the radicalization has taken place, and of course in certain measurement [00:23:00] formats that’s just not gonna show up.Malcolm Collins: Yeah, I just think his entire framing is wrong about what, what, what conservatism is in a, in a modern context, like what the right is in a modern context. Because it’s, it’s, it’s not just like, wrong. It’s an inversion of reality.Simone Collins: I think you’re right. Yeah, it, it’s still interesting. And I, I mean, I keep hearing that whole, like, 1995 Democrat thing bandied about. It is so striking to see these quotes from Bill Clinton that are like, “Hey,” like, “Let’s, let’s control our borders and, you know, curtail social services for, you know, immigrants in our, in our cities.”And, and that being, like, just the same simple stance that our current president has, and yet such a different view of how they’re categorized even today. It’s, it’s wild.Malcolm Collins: Well, I mean, I think the left back in the day was having a conversation where [00:24:00] the left and right had different values, right? But they both still wanted the best interest of the country, right?And its people. And I think that now, very openly, the left is antagonistic towards the count- whatever country it’s in and its people. And this is, this is a fund- That means the conversation’s fundamentally different. They’re asking, “How can I destroy you?” We’re asking, “How can we build you up?”Simone Collins: Yeah, maybe it’s connected to that, that sort of communist or, like, socialist Americans association plan that you de- outlined in a separate episode where they were like, “Okay, we’re gonna, you know, get people to collectively think that they’re super mentally unwell.”You know, foment a- a- encourage the development of hideous art. Like, all these things. Maybe that’s kind of also it’s what’s happened is this collective plan since at least the ‘70s to basically make Americans hate America and be miserable, has also seeped in and taken over in a way that has been incredibly damaging.[00:25:00]But I don’t know. You know- That’s, that’s more, what more or less what I wanted to discuss. This is, this is a short one, but,Malcolm Collins: It’s a short one. Well, I mean, I think the thing that we need to get away from is the perception that we are... because in a way, yes, it is that we are 1995 Democrats, and that we are fighting with a collection of widely diverse people against the culturally dominant force, which at that time was the Judeo-Christian community.And now it’s the urban monoculture. But I, I think outside of that, n- n- the, the two things don’t share that much in common. Like, the wider political ideology of, like, staffing the White House with a bunch of entrepreneurs and like, like, Founders Fund people and you know, actually cleaning things up, and I guess it’s...But, like, everybody always kind of wanted the government to be and be doing who wanted a better future.Simone Collins: But is it- I think actually Clinton had a, an effort similar [00:26:00] to DOGE.Malcolm Collins: Oh yeah, he did. ItSimone Collins: was executed quite differently, but again, like, the similarities are insane. Plus, Trump at that very same time was a Democrat and openly known for being, like, a liberal Democrat public media figure.So, like, I, I don’t know. I don’t know. I,Malcolm Collins: I, by the way, fun, fun aside here, People have been talking about, and I, and I think that they’re right about this, about what was his name? Who, who’s the last president? Joe Bi- Hunter Biden. Hunter Biden running for office in a few years.Simone Collins: Like- Oh, he’s on his comeback tour.Yeah, I mean, I think the odds are longMalcolm Collins: for anyone- He’s on his comeback tour. You know what? He could, he could I think do pretty well in terms of bipartisan support.Simone Collins: Another glass ceiling. Yeah, you know?Malcolm Collins: I mean, he’s a crazy crackhead, but he, he does it so he really captures the, what... Like, Gavin Newsom tried to do the Trump irreverent thing- Mm-hmmand it didn’t work at all. Like, it looked so fake. When you know, Hunter Biden on, like, the Democrats’ main website has one [00:27:00] of his photoswith a crack pipe in his mouth- ... like, that is f*****g hilarious. That’s like, I’m not a Democrat, and I’m like, “That is hilarious that on the list of, like, who’s supporting who, you’ve got a, Hunter Biden with a crack pipe.”Speaker 5: Here’s Hunter Biden reacting to this image. “ I know it may sound petty, but I can’t stand it when people Photoshop a meth pipe in my mouth. A crack pipe doesn’t have that little bowl at the end. This is why you can’t trust AI. Please make the appropriate edit. Thank you for your attention to the matter.”Simone Collins: Well, in an age in which we’re just so fed up with inauthenticity, I think it’s one of the reasons why Trump did so well, is, like, Trump is exactly who- ... you think he is. He does not hide or try to obscure anything. Yeah. I mean, like, what- He’s proud of who he is, hides nothing. Hunter Biden is like, “Yeah, I did this.”Like, it, it, like, the stories he told when he interviewed with Candace Owens were insane. And- Yeah.Malcolm Collins: Well, people are like, “Why, why aren’t you in, why aren’t you in jail?” And he’s like, “Well, my dad got me pardoned.”Simone Collins: Yeah. Duh. Like-Malcolm Collins: Like, what, what-Simone Collins: Yeah, it, it’s super... And, and that’s, that’s, [00:28:00] that’s all we needed to hear.You know, that just he’s not trying to virtue signal. He’s like, “Yep, that’s what happened.” Yeah, and then- And like, look at all this other crazy stuff. And I think especially, you know, in, with all the blowback that, that is arising in the face of, like, the Epstein revelations not being what we expected and all these things just not playing out the way we expected he’s got a lot going for him.So yeah, if I- They should, yeah, they should just run him 20... I mean, it would be a tough run. Honestly- Yeah, running would be a tough run ... if it were Hunter Biden versus any of the... I mean, certainly, like Marco Rubio, there’s no way. There’s no way.Malcolm Collins: Marco Rubio would struggle against Hunter Biden.Simone Collins: Yeah, because Marco Rubio is all polished and perfect, and he looks like he’s hiding something.He represents establishment. Yeah, I don’t, I don’tMalcolm Collins: say, I don’t think Marco Rubio is a good candidate to run at all. Like, he comes across as very- ISimone Collins: know, but people keep talking about him. I’m justMalcolm Collins: saying ... people keep talking about him, but he just doesn’t, he comes off as so inauthentic c- compared- Yeah ... to, like, JD Vance.Simone Collins: Right. But not everyone... Look, there are still many people who [00:29:00] weirdly want the inauthentic. They’re like, “Just give me my inauthentic politician and they have the authentic.” No,Malcolm Collins: I just get that they have the opinion of Marco Rubio based on the things that he’s done in the administration, which I appreciate.Simone Collins: Mm.Malcolm Collins: And they have the opinion of JD Vance based on his history. I used to hate JD Vance for his whole Hillbilly Elegy and all that, and all his NPR-Simone Collins: You didn’t even read it.Malcolm Collins: No, but I saw his NPR apology tour. It was gross.Simone Collins: Mm-hmm. Oh,Malcolm Collins: okay. But when I listen to his speeches now and I see him talking now, and I know, “Oh, this is a guy who watches Asmongold.This is a guy who knows Hasan Shocks his dog. This is a guy who is eviscerating the UK for, like, what’s happening there in angry social media posts.” And the UK’s are like, “We, how dare you say that the UK is a garbage country and, like, the people should revolt.” But, like, I don’t see that from Marco Rubio.I’ve never seen a speech where, like, afterwards I was like, I wanted to cheer for him, or I felt, like, a connection with him. Mm. But, you know, that, that, that’s- We shallSimone Collins: see. We shall see. But no, you’ve... Th- this has been an important conversation for us because at least [00:30:00] now I understand That there’s been a divorce between, from the concept of progressivism and actual societal progress, which requires a reconciliation with inconvenient scientific truths and, and just, like, realities.Plus just a- adapting with science. A- and adopting science, to your point. AI shifts in our understanding of how to best contend with climate change just realities of, of genetic differences realities of gender transition not being what we thought it was. Yeah, all these things are a divorce from what the natural, like, progress of history is going to be.Malcolm Collins: It turned out that, like, sleeping with whoever you want whenever you want doesn’t lead to positive outcomes,Simone Collins: right?Malcolm Collins: YouSimone Collins: know? Right. Right, right. And I actually think, like, yeah, truly a true progressive has to, by definition, change their mind because we are going to try new things as society evolves, and some of those things we’re gonna try out to not be so good.Like, they’re gonna turn out to be kinda damaging. And it’s like, okay, well look, we tried that. It, [00:31:00] that, that is, like, the scientific method, right? You, like, hypothesis, and then you do an experiment, and then you see if your hypothesis is null or if, if the... You’re like, “Oh, okay, I was right. I was wrong.” Like, okay, now we need to adapt.We need further research. And then you, you, you, you, you refine, you iterate. And a true progressive society must be iterative, and the left has become a lot less iterative. Whereas on the right what you actually see is what feels like a modern version of a much more broad and distributed academic framework of, like, different schools of thought actively competing and seeing how their experiments turn out.It’s super cool. It’s like a bunch of people, like, all trying to cure cancer and being like, “Well, I’m gonna try this weird form of gene therapy.” “Well, I’m gonna try this weird mushroom derivative.” And, “I’m gonna try, like, this targeted, like, weird bacteria.” And, like, all these different groups are trying and seeing what works best, and then when a group discovers that, like, “Oh, my weird mushroom solution actually causes the cancer to grow significantly more,” guess what?[00:32:00] They drop it. And then on the other hand, we have, like, this one group that’s like, “I only do this one therapy. This one therapy is perfect.” And then it turns out the therapy’s, like, totally killing people. But who cares? No, we only do this one therapy, and how dare you suggest anything else? Anyway, I’m going to go.Assuming it would be good for you, ‘cause I know you’re not feeling really great, I was gonna make heavy, creamy, smooth mashed potatoes, but I need to go now.Malcolm Collins: Oh, that would be great for today, yeah.Simone Collins: Yeah. Okay, well then...Malcolm Collins: Just mashed potatoes.Simone Collins: Just mashed potatoes. I’m okay with that because the amount of cream and butter in them is, like, a little bit of protein plus a lot of, of fats, so I’m like, okay, fine.IMalcolm Collins: don’t eat that much. You know that, Simone,Simone Collins: right? I know. But especially on days where you’re not feeling so well, I feel like creamy mashed potatoes. Like, I w- I want... I’m envisioning, it’s not gonna turn out this way, but I’m envisioning the kind that you get on the instant mashed potatoes- box where it looks like a snowy mountain at sunrise with a pat of butter slowly sliding down a beautifully whipped- I think withMalcolm Collins: AI you’re gonna be able to make [00:33:00] great mashed potatoes.Simone Collins: I, I pulled up a, a recipe and I... it looks good, so... with AI, of course.Malcolm Collins: Remember to use rfab.ai recipe generator or-Simone Collins: Yeah, it even creates really... Like, the images are also great motivation, ‘cause it shows you what you can get. And, and, like, pretty good, ‘cause you’re using Nana Banana for the images, and Nana Banana is, is the accurate AI image generator, whereas Grok is, like, the sexy, fun AI image generator.So I like it.Speaker 6: Or as a crazier feature, , and this one just came out, so it’s gonna be undergoing lots of updates. It’s got some stability issues now, but it’s a feature that allows you to search every not safe for work site that doesn’t have real humans on it, because I think that’s immoral, , at once. , So all of the, , not safe for work drawing sites can be searched simultaneously, and not just searched simultaneously, but from them you can, , download entire galleries with just a click, , without having to go through each individually with some, , useful [00:34:00] time-saving buttons like the no homo button, which just immediately removes all of the gay or male related tags from the search.Or the, , English button, which instead of just searching for English, it searches for other languages, so you also get things without any, , language attached to themSimone Collins: Yeah. Anyway.Malcolm Collins: I love you.Simone Collins: Off to potato land I go. GodMalcolm Collins: willing. Off to potato land I go soon enough.Simone Collins: Hopefully. Yeah. We’ll see.Malcolm Collins: All right. Bye.Simone Collins: Bye. lap. He’s, he does this thing where he likesMalcolm Collins: to- Okay. RoseanneSimone Collins: Yes.Malcolm Collins: We gotta make the AI waifu a, a thing. I think, I, I really wanna go harder with this. Like, the idea- Oh my God ... of, I, I, I wanna make it, like, even a meme on the right. I, I think it would be fun of you know, y- you, you can still... Being on the right doesn’t mean you can’t be, like, when I make sexy pictures of my AI waifu, which is just my wife done in, like, a Puritan AI anime style,Simone Collins: You mean when you make AI pictures of [00:35:00] your wife waifu- Ahnot your actualMalcolm Collins: fake wife. Yeah, yeah. Like, I do not understand, like, the people have gotten... It’s my wife, okay? Like, this is my property, okay? There is n- And it’s not like she’s semi-closed in these or something. It’s not like she’s you know, showing off some sort of sexualized asset like breasts or something.You know, it’s literally my wife drawn in a way that is appealing enough to you, the watcher, you know, with, with yandere face or whatever, where you’re like, “Oh that, that, that’s, that’s We’re have- like, we need to be the side of fun, not the side of curmudgeonliness, okay? And I wanna put m- m- more pictures of myself.I, I did some Duke of the North ones of, of me.Simone Collins: Yeah, I wanna see those. Give me more of those.Malcolm Collins: More of Otherworld Malcolm. More,Simone Collins: more Malcolm fan art. That’s what I’m here for. Well,Malcolm Collins: they had the, the fur on them, and I w- we were thinking about thatSimone Collins: before. Yeah, and I keep sending you those outfits, [00:36:00] and you just never wanna choose them.You- Let’sMalcolm Collins: get one. Let’s get one. I’ma b- make a note right now. No, you can’t. I will stay up late to find fur.Simone Collins: No. D- you are going to bed tonight. You’re going to bed early, or you might discover that key electronics in your room have just started to disappear randomly.Malcolm Collins: This is the way you treat our kids.Simone Collins: It’s true, actually.Malcolm Collins: But I mean, I mean, I wanna make it, like, a... I want it to be not just us, but I, like, want the wider community to... Because I think, you know, we did this with Emilia to an extent, right? But the problem with Emilia is if you’re an older woman, like, let’s say 40 or something like that, and you’re dressing like Emilia, or 35, 36, and you’re dressing like Emilia you’re gonna look like a creep or a, a loser, right?Like, that, that looks try-hard and empathetic. Yeah,Simone Collins: it’s so tried, yeah. Women need to dress their age. Let’s bring it back, people.Malcolm Collins: We need to show that being a Christian mom is not uncool or unsexy. And, like, if [00:37:00] you were Jewish- you- Y- you could draw,Simone Collins: like- They don’t have to be sexy. Let’s be clear. They can just be cool.No,Malcolm Collins: but th- women want to be desirable, and we do not have an archetype of a desirable woman with, like, five or six kids who tries to live a moral life. But there’s no reason we... We can fight asymmetrical warfare with the left because we can have sexy women and anime, right? So let’s buckle in and start fighting this.You know, if y- if you’re Jewish, you can do, like, hot Hasidic women, right? You know, you can do the, the hot Hasidic family. Oh. The, you know, if, if you’re- And if you’re Christian, you know, post, post the, the, the, your, your wife. And I think that making it of, you know- Your wife ... your wife or, or your ideal wife if you don’t have a wife is, is also a fun way because you know it’s going to trigger the leftists soaking hard.When they see- Yeah. Let’s do this ... us having fun, that’s gonna trigger them. Don’t let it trigger you, okay? We gotta, we gotta win this.Simone Collins: All right. [00:38:00] Okay. As long as I get more Malcolm fan art, I’m down with it.Malcolm Collins: Okay.Simone Collins: I like, I like the Malcolm fan art you create for me. I mean, obviously I should be creating it too, I just don’t...There’s no time for fun. There’s no time for anything. Gotta... Anyway, shall I start?Malcolm Collins: Yeah, let’s get started.Simone Collins: Okay.Are the apples wet? They, they have a lot. All applesNo, no, apples are just naturally a bit wet, Toasty. Washed them in the sink to wash off the dust- Come on, Toasty ... that you’re always so worried about, right?Torsten, eat an apple. What are you doing?She didn’t lick them allI want it back to zoo. It’s true I know it’s true. I, I promise you she- Jackson, you were-[00:39:00]See, Tyne didn’t. That would be a really long thing for her to do, Josie You make her too much fun. We went in the- This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit basedcamppodcast.substack.com/subscribe

In this episode of Bricks and Minifigs 2, Malcolm and Simone Collins break down the Coffeezilla investigation into the Bricks & Minifigs Lego controversy. They explain what Coffeezilla allegedly got wrong—especially around accounts payable, business acquisitions, liabilities, and ownership of consignment inventory.Malcolm and Simone (experienced business buyers/sellers) dive into why the previous owner wasn’t being shady, how stock purchases transfer liabilities, why the “missing Legos” narrative misses the bigger picture, and the legal realities of taking over a business with existing obligations. They also discuss the broader saga, corporate responses, Brian Mansell’s history with the company, and why the focus should now be on properly resolving things with investigator Ben.A must-watch for anyone following the Bricks & Minifigs drama, Lego collectors, business ethics enthusiasts, or fans of deep-dive investigations. What do you think—did Coffeezilla miss key business 101 details?Episode TranscriptMalcolm Collins: [00:00:00] you had watched the Coffeezilla piece and were convinced by it on Bricks and Minifigs. And- I mean- Oh my God, I thought that you with your business background would immediately see what he was getting wrong.Simone Collins: What was he getting wrong?Malcolm Collins: So there were two big things he got wrong. Okay. The, the really big glaring one is when he said the previous owner sold some of the sets without sending the money to the guy, right?And yet we see from her own words when they’re doing the transition of ownership, she goes, “You’re going to-” Yeah,Simone Collins: I’m worried about... Yeah. “Malcolm Collins: You’reSimone Collins: gonna close out-” And they, they’re like, “We’re gonna have some- That’s gonna get handled by someone else.”Malcolm Collins: That’s what I heard. No, no, no. But she wasn’t worried about the inventory.Mm-hmm. She, she was worried more about closing out the accounts.Speaker 2: These are ones that haven’t-- he has not been paid his percentage yet, and if I don’t have the tickets, I won’t know how much I need to pay him. That, that’s a business thing and not necessarily yours. If, if taking on the business, he takes on all that comes on that [00:01:00] part.Speaker 3: What’s extremely funny about this piece in retrospect is you can see that the person, if not the CEO, at least somebody at Bricks & Minifigs properly understood the law that when you buy a business, you take on accounts payableMalcolm Collins: Yeah. What that means in business speak is she knew part of the money that was meant to go to him had been unpaid. Oh. And she’s like, “I need to go over my notes.” She even specifically says, “I need to go over my notes to see those amounts.” And then they say, “No, we’ll take on that responsibility.”Simone Collins: Mm-hmm.Malcolm Collins: This is a normal thing in business. Yeah. This isn’t her being shady. It’s not like-Simone Collins: Well, that’s... When you acquire a company if it is not- an asset acquisition. If it’s a stock acquisition, you also acquire their liabilitiesMalcolm Collins: Liabilities.Simone Collins: And that, one of the liabilities- You acquire their liabilitiesis your accounts payable, and that is accounts payable. Yeah. Yeah,Malcolm Collins: that’s, that’s accounts... Th- this is the most 101 thing in business, and you were like, “Oh, there weren’t that many Legos in the store because she had sold some before,” and it’s like, n- that doesn’t, that doesn’t matter. And then the second thing- No,Simone Collins: what, what Coffeezilla said is that, that I [00:02:00] thought was most notable was that the amount that’s sort of pending was much smaller than people thought.It’s more, like, in the $20,000 range. That’sMalcolm Collins: because he wasn’t inc- including the accounts payable in the amount pending.Simone Collins: I thought that’s what the amount was, that the accounts payable- No ... oh.Malcolm Collins: He was talking about the physical sets that were still in the store, because he didn’t seem to understand accounts payable.Simone Collins: Hmm, I... Th- that can’t be. That’s too obvious.Malcolm Collins: No, it’s obvious to you because you’re a business person. He very clearly, if you watch the piece, and he was calculating the amount of money that he said Bricks and Minifigs owed the , the guy, he just did an addition of all of the sets he could find in their inventory.He didn’t- Oh ... include accounts payable, which would have, from what we’re hearing, maybe doubled that amount. So that was the first thing that really annoyed me.Simone Collins: I just figured if that was the case, then they would have included, featured prominently in that particular investigative episode, Coffeezilla, I mean.Like, i- she would say, “And the accounts payable amount was, like, $34,000.” SheMalcolm Collins: [00:03:00] literally says that. She goes, “I need to check my records so I can settle accounts with the people who have order-”Simone Collins: Yeah, in, in... I know, from the recorded clip, but she doesn’t say how much that was. In the, in the subsequent interview that she had- Why?InMalcolm Collins: the subsequent... Because she’s being an idiot ...Simone Collins: with Coffeezilla, she would have stated that amount. ‘Malcolm Collins: Cause she’s being an idiot. But in the, i- when she’s having the store taken over, she literally says, “I need to settle the accounts,” implying there’s a large amount of accounts payable specifically to him.Because, the,Simone Collins: Then why has no one stated that amount?Malcolm Collins: When we did our first episode, people were like, “Malcolm, it’s crazy that you saw things in this case that I just didn’t understand.” I think a lot of people are just ‘tards, Simone. That’s, that’s the, the- Well,Simone Collins: no, but I mean, it, it, at the very le- oh, I guess the Brian, the original owner would not know the amounts because he wouldn’t have been aware, aware of what was sold and not.Do youMalcolm Collins: think Ben or Brian understands what accounts payable is? The, the, these-Simone Collins: Yes, I, I imagine they do. But I also imagine they couldn’t know. Like, ‘cause i- if I’ve, if I’ve given something to a shop for consignment, I don’t know at any given day what [00:04:00] has sold and what hasn’t. Yeah. Like, there’s not... That’s just for us to know.Malcolm Collins: Yes, which is why she said, “I need to check my records.” Okay. So that really annoyed me.Speaker 4: Just so you understand why the law works this way, imagine if the law didn’t work this way and accounts payable magically disappeared or was transferred to the old owner of a business, , whenever the business changed hands. Now keep in mind, the owner of a business can be a business, , or not a specific individual.So suppose, , one individual, , , , accrues a large amount of accounts payable in a business, , and they just then transfer that business to themselves for like a one dollar sale, right? , And they say, “Oh, all the money that I owed people with this business...” , N-no, or let’s not say themselves. Let’s say their brother., They say, “All the money this business owed immediately disappears because it transferred hands.” , That would be completely stupid. , Th- that would be like the easiest business trickeroo in the world. Like, it’s very obvious why n- you cannot have the law work this wayMalcolm Collins: And then the second thing that really annoyed me- ... that we can go further on-Simone Collins: Oh,Malcolm Collins: [00:05:00] God. Crap ... is they keep focusing on whether or not she, she had the right to enter into the consignment deal, which is just totally irrelevant to any of the facts of the case.Whether or not she had that... So think of it this way, Simone. Uh-huh. Suppose I own a garage right? Or let, let’s, let’s make this different. I’m leasing a garage from somebody else, okay? To make this even clearer. And then I use the garage I’m leasing in violation of the terms of my lease to do what, what do you what do you call that where you, like, pay somebody to s- park your car for you at, like, restaurants?Well, I d- I don’t know the term. You pay somebody at a restaurant to park your-Simone Collins: Valet ...Malcolm Collins: valet. Okay, yes. So I use it for valet storage in violation of the agreement, right?Simone Collins: Oh.Malcolm Collins: Then the owner comes back and they go, “You didn’t have the right to run valet service here.” So then what they do is they take possession of...Because I’m only subleasing the asset, right? They [00:06:00] retake possession of the garage, and then they turn around and start selling all of the cars that I had been- Yeah,Simone Collins: like you parked a Ferrari and they’re like, “So this is mine now.”Malcolm Collins: Yeah, they’re like, “This is m-”. That is not remotely how the law works.Simone Collins: Yeah.Malcolm Collins: You don’t take possession of an asset- Mm, Just because it’s in a location that you took possession of.Speaker 5: Again, to understand why it would be comical for the law to work this way, suppose I owned a, , storage locker that I rented to someone, and then the moment they moved in all their stuff, I then went to, , my brother, and I sold the storage locker to my brother. And then he now said, “Now I own everything in the storage locker.”Or I own a, a hotel, and I wait until a bunch of really rich people come there for a trip, and then I sell it to somebody, and, , now they own everything. All you would need to do to ste- legally steal stuff from somebody is to own something where you expected something of high value to go across, and then [00:07:00] immediately sell it to somebody who you’re close with the moment the person with high value walks across a w- five-foot square of land that you ownSimone Collins: Yeah, I wonder how the law works with that. Like, if someone puts stolen goods or, like, someone else’s goodsMalcolm Collins: in your home. No, it’s, it’s, no, it’s not how the law... It’s the clear... Okay, so m- suppose I walk into a building and I set a, a, a diamond ring I own on a table in the building.Yeah. And then that building sells. The person who buys the building doesn’t own my diamond ring. There’sSimone Collins: no finders keepers law?Malcolm Collins: Y- that’s not remotely how it works. That wasn’t included in the assets of the purchase. It wasn’t neg- And this is all laid out when you make a purchase of a company.Simone Collins: Yeah.Malcolm Collins: But yeah, sorry, that really gets me as well, but it continues.Simone Collins: How does US law work with ownership of lost items? For example, if I lose a diamond ring at a restaurant and someone picks it up Are they legally in trouble for not giving it back to me if I [00:08:00] return to the restaurant and say, “It was mine”? What does thatMalcolm Collins: have to do with anything?Simone Collins: I’m just curious about it.‘Cause now I’m just curious about finders keepers law. It’s not a law. It’s not a law. I’m just wondering like-Malcolm Collins: This is the... I mean, it’s clearly how the Bricks & Minifigs guy think the law worksThe, the, the principle of finders keepersSimone Collins: So b- basically property is yours unless you abandon it. A finder- Yeah ... generally has a right to possess an item that is good against everyone except the true owner. Okay, so there is kind of a finders keepers. But they have to give it back to the true owner if the owner can prove owners- so there kind of is a s- a finders keepers law.Malcolm Collins: No, if the owner can prove ownership. Mm-hmm. Which the original contract proves that the person that theySimone Collins: took the property from- Yes. No, 100%, yeah. W- yeah, with, with bricks and minifigs, of course. That’s, that’s obvious ...Malcolm Collins: didn’t have ownershipSimone Collins: Yeah, and then it’s a civil issue if you refuse to give it back. Interesting Mm. Many systems distinguish lost from [00:09:00] mislaid, AKA, like, deliberately set down or forgotten. Property left on the premises is often treated as mislaid. Huh. Law is so interesting. I totally can understand why that one famous housewife women write to work, like, female equality... What was her name?She has a, a difficult to pronounce, unflattering style name who became a lawyer.Speaker 6: Note here, , while I say I w- don’t hold it against, , Coffeezilla for not understanding accounts payable, , maybe he did understand it and it just slipped his mind in this case because he has done really complex financial stuff into some of his other videos. So it’s, it’s almost sort of baffling to me that this wasn’t just like immediately top of mind for him.But maybe -- he knows what accounts payable is, he just doesn’t know what happens with accounts payable during a business transaction, ,Like even if she was being shady, even if the accounts payable she had had accrued for a year or two years, it would still transfer to Bricks and Minifigs. , It’s, it, it’s [00:10:00] irrelevant.Although it appears very clearly that she wasn’t being shady because she specifically asked for her books before being kicked out to ensure that she did make the payments to himSpeaker 2: These are ones that haven’t-- he has not been paid his percentage yet, and if I don’t have the tickets, I won’t know how much I need to pay him. That, that’s a business thing and not necessarily yours. If, if taking on the business, he takes on all that comes on that part.Speaker 6: because very few people... Simone and I have bought businesses before. That was our job in the past, to buy and sell businesses, which is why this is so incredibly salient for us and just seems like the simplest thing in the world., Which it should have been for the Bricks and Minifigs corporation. , And it seems to have been, because when the guy was making the transaction, he explained to her accurately, “When you do a acquisition, we take on the accounts payable.” , “That’s a business thing,” as he said. You know, that’s a, you know, simple understanding., Second here is, i-it’s not that Coffeezilla did nothing in their video. They did some really cool work. It was really cool when they showed the guy that he had all [00:11:00] this stuff in his own corporate records from his own corporate Google Drive, and the guy was like, “What?” And then, oh my God, that’s so cool, the, , U-Haul thing was really neatSpeaker 9: See the window, but the problem is it’s night outside, so you can’t see. And so I’m looking at everything I can, and there’s just nothing, you know? And I have this alternate angle, I’m looking at that. And then wait a minute. Zoom in on that photo. Bring up the brightness of this photo a little bit and my gosh, there’s a U-Haul in the parking lot right outside of the store the night of November 14th, 2024.This is something that Matt said he had seen footage of, and it couldn’t be true. And again, I, I believe I have seen footage from that night that shows clearly out into the parking lot, and there’s no U-Haul. After seeing this, I said, “I really have to make a call.” And that’s when the story changed. So last night I talked with Matt McNeff.I brought up this question of the U-Haul. He told me [00:12:00] emphatically there was no U-Haul. Y’all came to me this morning. You said, “Hey, we looked into it. There actually was a U-Haul there that night.” Can you clear up what that’s about?Simone Collins: Actually, it, it is a good idea to do the, the Lego mini fig one, just to give people an update on what everyone’s missing, because that’s actually what everyone’s missing.Yeah,Malcolm Collins: I was, I was so annoyed by the Coffeezilla piece on it. I was like, it, it did- they’re obviously talking about keeping accounts payable, and the other company, you take on accounts payable. That is normal when you acquire a business. That is like Business 101Simone Collins: If you do a stock purchase, the question is,Malcolm Collins: we- we- If you do a hostile takeover of a store, you obviously take on that asset.You, you take on liabilities and assets. If y- during a hostile takeover, you absolutely do.Simone Collins: Yeah, I don’t know. I don’t know how it legally works with franchise agreements, like, how the corporate entities are relatedMalcolm Collins: or not. Here’s another way to put it, Simone. It doesn’t matter how you took over a company.If that company had a bunch of stolen [00:13:00] goods, goods that were legally not theirs in a storeroom- Yeah ... you don’t all of a sudden own all of those stolen goods just because you own the company now. Mm. That is functionally what the company did. They said, “Your paper only proves that the woman who we took over the store from didn’t own it.”It’s like, no, it proves that you don’t own it because you only acquired her assets. Mm-hmm. You didn’t acquire other people’s assets simply because they happened to be around. That is the wildest thing ever. Like, I ... To think that you o- like, when you think about it with the stolen stuff, I think it becomes so much more clear.To think that, “Oh, I bought a warehouse full of stolen goods, now I own all of the stolen goods,” everyone would be like, “W- no.” Or even worse, right? Somebody was renting a, a, a storage locker from me and stole a bunch of goods, and they defaulted on their payment so I took all of those goods. It’s like, th- that’s not how this works [00:14:00] at all.And you’re like, “But it was illegal for them to have the goods there in the first place.” And I’m like, “That does nothing to help your case.”Simone Collins: So you think for proper resolution, the accounts payable just needs to be paid out to this guy?Malcolm Collins: Well, no. But the framing of the Coffeezilla where he tried to make it seem like it was over a very small amount of money, and that’s the- Yeah, ISimone Collins: guess his framing, if I recall correctly, was just, like, the, the big thing is where are the missing Legos?They either were stolen by a disgruntled employee orMalcolm Collins: one of these- No, that’s literally not the thing, and that’s what I’m trying to explain. No, no,Simone Collins: no. I, what I’m, what I’m trying to do is recap what his argument was, and I think that’s what his argumentMalcolm Collins: was, right? And it’s a stupid argument. We know where the missing Legos are, functionally speaking.They were either sold in those early books, or they were inherited by the store. What he uncovered is that the vast majority of the money to be paid for this guy may not have been in the Legos in the store, but in accounts payable. Mm. That doesn’t mean the [00:15:00] previous owners did anything wrong. The, w- basically we know where they were.They were sold. And we know the previous owners didn’t do anything wrong because we have the video where she explicitly says, “I need the books to settle my accounts.” Settling your accounts means paying out accounts payable. That’s what that means. They said, “No, don’t settle your accounts. We will manage it.”That, that is, that was literally them. And then somebody could say, “Oh, that’s a low-level employee saying that,” or something like that. That low a level, even if it was a low-level employee, when they took custody of the books which managed what had gone out and what hadn’t gone out without going through with her, as you always do during a biggest acquisition, and she was trying to be nice in those videos and stuff like that.Like, she was literally like, “Hey, let’s get on the same page about the accounts payable, about the the, the co- consignment stuff.” And they’re like, “No, I don’t want to get on the same page with you.” Mm. Because they knew, I think functionally what happened is they knew that the way they were shutting down the store was very immoral- Mmand they felt really uncomfortable about it. SoSimone Collins: they- [00:16:00] Oh, like, “I’ve been told to do this. I’m just doing my job. This is corporate.” Yeah. Yeah.Malcolm Collins: Yeah. They basically knew corporate had sent them to do something absolutely demonstrably immoral. And so even though she was willing to, and we see in the videos, obviously willing to talk them through everything they didn’t want to be talked through everything, right?And that, that is on them. If I since, so like, if they’re like, “Oh, that’s a low-level employee. He doesn’t represent corporate or anything like that,” it’s not even the fact that he affirmed to her, “Oh, I know what’s in these books.” Corporate at any point could have gone back to her to get better accounting, and it appears that they never tried, right?And it appears that she wanted to give them the better accounting. What corporate does, if I send let’s say I send an employee, and the employee is the one who actually shuts down the storage locker that’s full of stolen goods, right? That doesn’t mean that I, of a [00:17:00] company, am now not legally responsible for the fact that those goods are stolen and need to get back to their rightful owner.Even if it’s an employee who shuts down the garage that’s full of cars that somebody had you park for them, right? That, that doesn’t absolve corporate from the basic financial accounting responsibility of determining the ownership of the assets of the property, especially when multiple people are telling you these assets are not what, you know...Speaker 14: And a day or so ago, corporate released a, their timeline of events, and their timeline of events clearly shows that from nearly the very beginning, they were very aware of this consignment Lego set. So they can’t say, “We were unaware that she didn’t own this.”Malcolm Collins: and the thing that always gets me is they keep saying, “We tried to give Brian Mansell all of this in the past.” Mm. Why can’t they provide proof of that? That would be very easy to provide proof of. Presumably it’s in an email, right? Emails are easily recorded. So [00:18:00] if they don’t have that email, then I don’t believe that.And I don’t understand why they haven’t presented that email of them trying to give them back in the past. It seems like an obvious lie. But also one thingSimone Collins: that- There’s, the, there’s disorganized stuff on both ends. Like, why did the original franchise owner s- provide spreadsheets of records so late as well.I don’t know.Malcolm Collins: Well, so the other thing that we’ve learned since the, the co- well, this was before the Coffeezilla piece, but he didn’t include it, is the way that Brian Mandzel originally acquired Bricks & Minifigs was through, in a really scammy way, suing his father for control of a company that his father had built.And it appears that pretty much since day one, Bricks & Minifigs has been bleeding money. So he basically- Oh ... stole his father’s assets and used that to build his pet project company that he has never been able to get financially stable, truly. And that might also explain why they cared so much about such a small amount of money.One, they’re just not good at their jobs, and then two, they feel [00:19:00] really pinched on money.Simone Collins: Right. They, they actually- When you, when you- ... don’t have the money.Malcolm Collins: Yeah, like when you look at his house, when you see, you know, his, it, it doesn’t look like a house with someone with that much money, right? So it, it may have been that’s why he felt pressured to steal this stuff, but it’s still stealing.Simone Collins: Yeah. Yeah. Well, and I mean, also, if the company’s not immensely profitable- You know, it, it probably isn’t run well. They don’t have good records, like all that kind of thing. You know, like it’s not... It’s just kind of falling apart, so. That, that makes sense.Malcolm Collins: Yeah.Simone Collins: Poor things.Malcolm Collins: Anyway r- I mean, not poor th- th- the CEO’s not a poor thing.He seems like a truly evil person. The, the way that he’s acting and the way that he’s responding, that he still has Ben under a gag order, you know, that’s why I have to release this episode. Mm-hmm. Maybe, maybe you can let Ben talk, right? This isn’t a normal thing to do in the world of YouTube, and I think he thought talking down to a YouTuber, he didn’t realize in the world of the actual world today, YouTubers are significantly more powerful than these big CEOs who think [00:20:00] they can talk-Simone Collins: No, that’s why he did that.He did that because he was getting severe amounts of harassment becauseMalcolm Collins: of everyone getting his talk. Well, yeah, but cutting down the YouTuber only makes it worse. He needs to basically get on his hands and knees and beg the YouTuber. HeSimone Collins: can- Well, he doesn’t seem to understand that ...Malcolm Collins: you know, he made- He thinks heSimone Collins: can shut it downMalcolm Collins: Brian, like everything with Brian. It’s like it’s not Brian you need to settle this with anymore. It’s Ben you need to... It’s Ben who you need to prostrate yourself to. And I know that that hurts your ego, but fundamentally, that’s the only way this gets right. ButSimone Collins: anyway. Sorry. No, no, no, it’s not Ben. It’s Brian.Malcolm Collins: No, it’s Ben. It’s Ben. It’s the YouTuber that the CEO needs to be prostrating himself to, not the old man. He thinks he can make this right with the old man because it’s no longer about bricks and minifigs. The core issue now- Oh,Simone Collins: it’s, it’s about the cover-up ... isMalcolm Collins: about- It’s destroyingSimone Collins: FanTheFacts ...Malcolm Collins: the way that he tried to stifle Ben’s investigation and Ben’s honest efforts to try to get this, and then tried to destroy Ben’s life through jail time, through these court [00:21:00] cases.These are targeted, personalized court cases, right?Simone Collins: That’s true. HeMalcolm Collins: could choose not to do this, but he didn’t. So, no, absolutely. It is... And this is what he’s getting wrong. He needs to get Ben to accept his apology to even begin to get anywhere with this, not Brian. Ben is his problem here. Ben- Mm-hmmis not some kid anymore. Ben is the victim in everyone’s mind, and the core victim in everyone’s mind.Simone Collins: Well, especially the way he filmed that I can’t talk anymore video against this dark hostage style background. But anyway- Yeah ... I have to go get the kids. I love you so much.Speaker 12: What needs to be done next? What does that say? It’s saying we gotta use the wrong screwdriver to do it. Oh, no. It’s okay. Where did the wrong screwdriver go? I see a screwdriver right there. I’m [00:22:00] talking about the wrong one. See? There’s a Phillips head and a flathead. Do you know the difference between the two?Speaker 13: What? One has an X at the end and the other one has a line at the end. I don’t- The one with the red handle- Oh, here’s, here- That’s a wrench. Oh. Oh, here’s, hereSpeaker 12: you go, Tayn. This is the thing. Wait. Yeah, Octavian, it’s true that screwdrivers and wrenches are easier. No. Like, if you use that to turn- No, I don’t ... the screw in. Hey This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit basedcamppodcast.substack.com/subscribe

Malcolm & Simone Collins sit down with Nux Taku for an epic, wide-ranging conversation on the evolution of the online right, anime-to-politics pipeline, faith, culture war, and building a better future. From hentai reviews to biblical literalism, technopuritanism, abortion, consent morality, AI, demographics, and why the right feels like the “fun side” — this is one of the most unfiltered and insightful collabs in the nerd/tech right space.Topics include:* The journey from 4chan/anime degen culture to political commentary* Why repentance & forgiveness are biblical traits that define the right* Critiques of consent-only morality, abortion, and leftist degeneration* Optimism, family, pronatalism, and raising based kids* Conspiracy theories, Candace Owens lore, and truth-seeking* AI, progress, and performative subversion on the rightIf you enjoy Based Camp, Nux Taku, or discussions blending anime, theology, and red-pilled culture — hit like, subscribe, and share!Episode TranscriptMalcolm Collins: Hello, Simone and Nux. This is the collab that was promised 3,000 years ago. We are so excited to be here with you. And what I wanna go into with Nux is exploring the evolution of this sort of new online culture that we share that has become, I don’t know, the nerd right, the tech right, the new right, whatever people wanna call it.Because if you were to go to me five years ago, right? E- even five years ago, I mean, imagine 10 years ago, and you’re like, “Okay, so who are, like, the right-wing thought leaders on the internet?” And it’s like, “Well, the one we’ve got on now is a, a Jewish VTuber who used to do hentai reviews.” “... And then we’ve got fox girls.We’ve got, like, five fox girls.” And I’d be like, “Are they furries?” And they’d be like, “No, they’re not furries, but they are fox girls. And then we’ve got, like, this slime girl, but it’s very important that you know that she’s a chimera slime. Then we’ve got Commie Mommy,” and people would say- ElfSimone Collins: slime. Yes.Malcolm Collins: Simone, am I not coming through?Simone Collins: No, no. Just elf and slime girl. Like, it’sMalcolm Collins: chimera. Oh, elf and... Oh yes, I’ve [00:01:00] got to get it right. Yeah. So Commie Mommy, and then people would be like, “Well, she, she can’t actually be, like, a socialist.” No, she’s actually a socialist, and she’s well-liked within our community.” And then it’s like, and then you got the top of the, the, the pack, and it’s this guy who, who lives like a homeless guy.And I’d say to myself, like I’d be like, “Lives like a homeless guy? How does he not have any money?” It’s like, “Oh, no, he has tremendous amounts of money. Tremendous amounts.” But it’s so weird, this sort of world, and it’s a path that is not... Like, we, we in the past have tried to trace it from, like, the early online atheist communities to, like, the anti-feminist communities, then to, like, the anti-woke communities, and then to the modern right, and then it sort of, like, combined with parts of the red pill.But you represent a different strand which comes out of the anime degen 4chan world, which we also come from as well. And I wanted to take this to sort of explore this journey, you as one of the leading content creators who sort of lived it, [00:02:00] and how your mind changed and the various points you had major inflections.Nux Taku: Yeah, no, it’s de- it’s definitely a weird a weird area on the internet, for sure. I, I don’t know. For me it was, for me it was like, “Wow, I, I like making fun of retards and most of the retards are in politics. We have to start doing that.” I mean, that was the, that was kind of the thought process. Among other things, for sure.I mean, I have to say, one of my biggest inspirations was Hasan Piker shocking his dog. That was, that was huge for me personally. Like, I, I’m like, this guy, he’s very well accepted in like the, the streamer world. You know, the, the pop culture. And I’m like, you know what? I, I want it to be as uncomfortable for radical leftists as for radical right-wingers.Mm-hmm. And that’s what I did. I dedicated... And now no one wants to collab with Hasan. You know? Hasan was on The Ben Shapiro Podcast and no one wants to touch him anymore. You know, they got obliterated for it.Malcolm Collins: You, you did a great job nuke- I mean, the JD Vance was like, “Oh yeah, of course. You know, the dog shocking guy, right?”Like. It’s [00:03:00]Nux Taku: cinema. It’s amazing. Yeah. The we-Malcolm Collins: I actuallyNux Taku: think- I, I think- Okay,Malcolm Collins: take it ...Nux Taku: no, I think putting, making the face of the left like, you know, dog shocking, you know, womanizing, brothel enthusiast, terrorist supporter, that’s like the face of the left and it’s like, you wanna be on that side? So like you mentioned- You have, and IMalcolm Collins: love that like on our side you have Asmongold, who literally, I don’t know any other human who would do this, doesn’t kill a cockroach growing, crawling on him, picks it up.Who is that nice to a cockroach? Who is that pathologically nice? All right. And then leads it outside, right? And Hasan’s shocking his dog. But I think-Nux Taku: Okay, I think, I think you’re taking the, the Asmongold thing like, a, a... It’s like, loves cockroaches, supports like late term abortions, right? That, that’s Asmongold.You know? It’s-Malcolm Collins: He still-Nux Taku: You got a lot of interesting characters outMalcolm Collins: here ... does Asmongold support late term abortion?Nux Taku: Asmongold, he supports abortion a moment before birth. He supports it.Malcolm Collins: Oh, really? I did not know that. We- Yeah. It’s interesting ... we have changed our views on abortion significantly recently.There, there was a recent video on that.Nux Taku: Really?Malcolm Collins: People [00:04:00] should watch because it was the craziest video ever. It starts with a gang bang where like people got togetherSimone Collins: and then- It starts with a, yeah, basically you know about Aila’s birthday gang bang, right?Nux Taku: Who?Simone Collins: Oh my God. So Ayla, a very famous sex researcher for her birthday one year in like 2024, so a bit ago I think decided to have a, a gang bang for her birthday because that’s how one celebrates in certain circles in the Bay Area with 42 men.And one of her friends who helped to organize her organize it met her now future husband and, and father of her child at this gang bang. She was a fluffer. But, but, butMalcolm Collins: inSimone Collins: between- But she had this really terrible,Nux Taku: Wait, y- you called her a sexual researcher?Simone Collins: She is. Is that like a nice way to say a w***e?She possesses some of the world’s best- Like, I’m trying to figureNux Taku: this out.Simone Collins: No, so she, she has probablyMalcolm Collins: the world’s best data set. If you’ve ever seen those data sets of kinks and what they correlate to and like how they c- cross correlate, the trans community hates her ‘cause she always just says whatever she thinks is true. Yeah. We’re not promoting her lifestyle. But anyway, in between, in between this party [00:05:00] and her friend getting married she had this horrible abortion experience that she wrote about that radicalized a lot of people like us, because before I was like, “Well, u- up until they have neurons I’m okay with it.”And now I’m like, “No, not even then.”Simone Collins: Yeah, it’s,Nux Taku: Look so- You should check it out ... so one thing, I, I hear you guys discuss a lot, like, your philosophy. I, I don’t remember. You have, like, a name for it.Malcolm Collins: Hmm.Nux Taku: It’s, like, about having lots of peers. Technopuritanism.Malcolm Collins: Like, Evan- It’sNux Taku: our- Technopuritanism ... it’sMalcolm Collins: our crazy religion.Nux Taku: Okay. All right. Could, could you describe it in a few sentences, and then I’ll, I’ll let you know my... Like, i- if this is still part of the previous conversation.Malcolm Collins: Yeah, yeah. Well, okay, okay, I’ll, I’ll, I’ll, I’ll say it before we go on with this, ‘cause one thread I wanna pick up on what you said earlier, and then I’ll get into this really quickly is you were saying you liked making fun of retards on the internet.And I think in reality- Passion ... this was what was the through line between these various communities. If you go back to the very early days, where you had the people who are now, like, right-wing influencers who back then were, like, atheist influencers or whatever, right? [00:06:00] They just liked dunking on anyone they could see as, as stupid, and then they started to feel like the Christians aren’t as fun to dunk on as the feminists.And then they started to be like, “Oh, the wokies are the most fun to dunk on,” or the Tum- the Tumblr people are. And it drove sort of this political chain. But as for us and our theological beliefs, the quickest version is we think that the... We have a biblically literalist reading of the Bible that is materialist and monist.Meaning that we a, a, we think that when the Bible says in the distant future humans are gonna be raised again that it’s talking about like, a, a, a super advanced entity in the distant future that is all-benevolent because humanity keeps evolving a billion years from now. And wants to give everybody who lived a virtuous life as long of a good life as possible, so it resurrects them.And we try to go through. And we’re literalist, too. Like, we try to take the, the, go through all the translations and show how it could mean this. It’s crazy, I know.Simone Collins: I think more succinctly, it’s, it’s an accelerationist tech-forward, [00:07:00] descendant worship religion that is based on a literal interpretation of the BibleNux Taku: Interesting.Wow. Okay. So I, I thought it was a lot more like materialist focused, right? Like, you know, we want- It is ... humanity to survive, so therefore... No, no, I obvious- so I think that if you follow the Bible, it’ll have the best outcome for your life anyway, right? So- Yeah ... even if you were, like, the ultimate atheist, you know, utilitarian, you should still follow the Bible because it’ll give you the best lifestyle regardless.Malcolm Collins: Th- that’s one of the things that we, we did a video recently when I was like, being an adult is recognizing that sins are just, like, a list of things that will F up your life. It’s basically like God gave us a list of like, you know, don’t, don’t cheat on your wife. You know, don’t, don’t have gang bangs.Don’t-Nux Taku: Okay, so-Malcolm Collins: you know, ... INux Taku: don’t wanna, I don’t wanna- ... murder ... correct you here or anything. I don’t, I don’t mean to cor- there is no Bible verse saying don’t cheat on your wife.Malcolm Collins: Oh, okay. No, th- there isn’t because in- I, I’m just saying ... early Judaism you could have multiple wives, and we talk about that.[00:08:00] Correct. You’re absolutely right. But, Correct ... I’m sure there’s some line you could take to mean that. But the pointNux Taku: being is that- Yeah. You know, don’t be, don’t be adulterous. I mean, I guess you could, you could read into that.Malcolm Collins: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. I, and I actually agree with you on this. We point, we have whole episodes on the Bi- the, the when monogamy became a norm in Judaism.But I don’t wanna... Th- that’s a, that’s a tangent. But the point being is, like, it’s just a bunch of stuff that’s gonna make your life worse. And it, it, as an adult as a kid I always felt like, oh, sins are things that are tempting, right? And it’s like humanity was given a list of like, don’t piss on the electric fence, and then immediately, like, a big portion of us just went immediately and pissed on the electric fence.Because, I don’t know, we’re, we’re not supposed to do it or somethingNux Taku: Yeah, I suppose. But yeah, no, I, I agree with that. I actually think that morals come from there actually, you know. And, and in regards to Asmongold, like, I think Asmongold’s a really honest guy. So when, when I discuss the whole abortion thing, why my view has never changed really on abortion is ‘cause it says thou shalt not murder in the [00:09:00] Bible.All right? So regardless, if, if a fetus is a human life, then killing it is murder, so therefore it’s bad, you know? So- And, and... Yeah? Sorry. No,Malcolm Collins: so you’ve always had these views? Like all the way back to your earlyNux Taku: days or did you- Okay, so even in my early days, yeah, I had these views for sure. I, I definitely fleshed them out, my faith got a lot stronger.But you know, basic stuff like don’t murder and don’t steal are pre- pretty consistent I think.Malcolm Collins: Well, no, it’s, it’s very interesting because what I’m realizing from this conversation is a big part of the online transition has been people not coming to views they didn’t have historically, but feeling comfortable talking about them.Nux Taku: Exactly. Exactly. A-Malcolm Collins: actually, the irony is that you were less at risk of being canceled talking about pure degeneracy, like Metamorphosis or something like this- Absolutely ... than saying you shouldn’t have abortions.Nux Taku: 100%. That, that, that’s the thing. The entire online space, be- it became super comfortable to hate God.And it became super comfortable to follow, you [00:10:00] know, if you look at like leftist policy, it’s like a checklist of what Satan would tell you to do. You know? It’s like, you know, abort your babies and groom children and castrate them and, you know- Well- ... take money from people that earn it and give it to people that don’t.I- that’s the list.Malcolm Collins: And look at the toll that it leaves on these people. It’s not like they’re... I- if you look at like GDC and you see the people screaming at the sky, right? Like, that’s not a normal response. Like, that is somebody who’s had everything good taken from them in their life, and it’sNux Taku: really- Okay, but define normal.Define normal. Sure. Y- your, the, your barometer only operates ‘cause you have a belief system. See, I define normal and morality based on God. All right? But, but if you view things as, well, I just want a good outcome for the most people, what does that even mean? What is good in that case?Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Well, I mean, I think the, the, the morality thing that you’re talking about here is, is interesting because by the definitions of society right now, you and us are weird because we don’t follow the, the normative cultural ethical set, which seems to be highly [00:11:00] deleterious to people living, like, fulfilling lives.Nux Taku: I, I agree with you. I, I think that if you ask your average, like, liberal, enlightened liberal what, what morality is, it’s just basically if there’s consenting adults, it’s fine. That- that’s their only tenet- Yeah ... basically, because they don’t want bad things to happen to themselves. It’s selfish inherently.They wanna be able to live whatever debaucherous lifestyle they could come up with, and they don’t want anyone to step on them. So therefore, their belief system based on this preference is, “Oh, if everyone consents, it’s fine.”Malcolm Collins: Well, I think it, it... W- I, I really like that you’re drawing attention to this because you can see from this view of consent being the core of morality, where we keep seeing leftists get in hot water ideologically.W- one of the episodes we have, we go over communist regimes and how many of them tried to lower the age of consent to, like, super low ages, like 11 or 12 or something like that. And- Yeah ... some socialist parties did. And, and the reason is, is because in reality, the reason we don’t sleep with children isn’t about consent.Like, we [00:12:00] allow mentally disabled people to have sex. We allow elderly people to have sex. If you’re talking about a 15-year-old or something like that, they have a mental i- intelligence that’s higher than a, a nine-year-old. N- nobody has a problem when a nine-year-old has sex. It’s not about consent. It’s about what it does to that person and the effects it has on their life, right?And I think that w- we see the famous Ch- Chuck clip where he’s like, “I don’t see anything wrong with having sex with an animal if you were like the one in...” Do you... Are you... Have you seen this clip? Sure.Nux Taku: Go ahead. Yeah, I love that clip. You re- you mean to tell me that the inbred Islamist thinks that you can have sex with animals?Weird. Yeah.Malcolm Collins: Yeah. FunnyNux Taku: coincidence.Malcolm Collins: No, you don’t have sex with animals ‘cause of the negative effects that has on your life, and, like, the diseases and all of the other negative effects. See,Nux Taku: but you know what? Y- you, you bring us to a fantastic point because if you forget God for a second. Mm-hmm. Try to explain to me under a liberal worldview why you should not have sex with an animalMalcolm Collins: You, there, there isn’t a good explanation.That’s what these people are realizing. They just know-Nux Taku: Because [00:13:00] they, because they can’t consent? Is that it? No, obviously not- That’s, no ... ‘cause you can eat meat. You could literally kill it- Yeah ... and eat it.Simone Collins: Yeah, butNux Taku: then- So consentSimone Collins: is not the issue Most of them don’t eat meat. Like true-Malcolm Collins: No, they eat- ... true vegans don’tNux Taku: eatchunks,Malcolm Collins: freaking veals, Simone Chunk does. Chunk eats meat They torture babies cows. This is business. And even if they’re m-Nux Taku: notMalcolm Collins: m-Nux Taku: And even, even if they didn’t eat meat ... if they’re eating dairy ... it, it’s irrelevant. If it’s all consent based, then what’s wrong with having sex with a corpse? It’s dead. It can’t consent.What’s the difference?Malcolm Collins: That’s a good point. And- That is aNux Taku: goodMalcolm Collins: point. I, it- There isNux Taku: no reason- It’s, it’s not ...Malcolm Collins: as a progressive.Nux Taku: Isn’t it illegal to haveSimone Collins: sex with corpses? But from aNux Taku: progressive mindset, they’re... I don’t think so. But why? Why not? Like, they, th- there’s no consent required. Okay, why is incest immoral according to the leftist worldview?Why is it immoral to have s- y- you consent and your sibling consents. Really true.Malcolm Collins: That makes sense. I hadn’t thought about all of the things this breaks, but it breaks aSimone Collins: lot. Yeah, but, but it is, I think it’s immoral-Nux Taku: It does ...Simone Collins: because it- Because- ... it’s, it’s rural coded, and rural coded is conservative coded, and if it’s conservative it’s bad.So incest- Okay, well- ... has to be bad.Nux Taku: Okay, to be fair, incest happens [00:14:00] mostly in like Muslim countries, which is left wing at this point. So like, I don’t know.Simone Collins: Right. But no, no, no. Like, in, in the leftist mind no one thinks about the life of someone in a Muslim or Islamic country. They only think in terms of the United States, and then if someone is Muslim or other, they’re just good.They’re just good. Oh. Trust me. INux Taku: forgotSimone Collins: about that. Yeah. So like, like I don’t know who they are. They’re better than I am. Their culture is enlightened. Mine is bad. And my extra bad people are the hicks in the countryside who screw their cousins, so you know.Nux Taku: But, but the point I’m making though is from their logical standpoint that as long as everyone consents it’s fine.There is nothing wrong with this.Malcolm Collins: Absolutely.Nux Taku: Yeah.Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Well,Nux Taku: that- And, and that’s, and, and that’s the degradation of every value and... Look, I think that it’s bad to have sex with your sibling ‘cause it says in the Bible not to have sex with your sibling. God said it actually.Malcolm Collins: The It’s actuallyNux Taku: pretty simpleMalcolm Collins: the it, one thing I found pretty interesting that Simone said there is how leftists are not allowed to look at the reality of what it’s like in many of these countries, and I think we see an embodiment of that was Greta Thunberg [00:15:00] when she wouldn’t watch the voto- the, the video that like literally Hamas film- October 7thNux Taku: video.Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Just like I don’t want to see reality because that interferes with the fantasy that I’m living in That was oneNux Taku: I completely agree. If, I think, okay, so I mean, there’s a, a Bible verse, right? Torah Emet in Hebrew, right? That, Right ... the Torah is truth and or the Bible, the Torah is the Old Testament.So essentially my, my perspective is if you are gonna continue going on your like anti-God path, you are going to consistently have an issue with truth. Reality is a major issue if you’re a leftist. You know, men could be women- Yeah ... and words don’t actually mean anything. And and Islamic countries are really actually based and good to gay people.And you know, hon- and you don’t even need to live in reality at this point. Yeah.Malcolm Collins: Yeah.Nux Taku: Because reality is bigoted.Malcolm Collins: So when did you first feel comfortable? Like explain, was there a moment when you first felt comfortable saying this stuff or like [00:16:00] voicing this andNux Taku: whatMalcolm Collins: changed?Nux Taku: So I, I, I feel like I’ve always tried to be honest.I’ve just decided on things that I’d rather not get into because, you know, why... Like if I’m making anime videos, I’m not gonna start talking about abortion, you know? Like why divide my, my audience in half by, you know, talking about something that’s completely irrelevant to whatever content I’m making is.But as time went on and I started talking about like internet drama and Hasan Piker, you know, advocates for me to get killed by Hamas terrorists ‘cause he says I’m, I’m an Israeli Nazi even though not. But anyway, so a- as time went on, now that I’m talking about politics and things, I’m, I feel a lot more comfortable saying the things.I’ve been backstabbed by enough people that I don’t, I don’t really care if you disagree with me. That’s your American God-given right, you know? SoMalcolm Collins: yeah. So if you were gonna like, how much of it was the people attacking you for saying things that you thought was reasonable that radicalized you to want to say more of that stuff?Nux Taku: To be honest, it’s not that they attack me that makes me wanna say it, it’s that it’s considered [00:17:00] inappropriate to say. Like it is super inappropriate in public in American like- Yeah ... probably not in like houses and closed doors ‘cause everyone would pro- like a lot of people would agree with this, but if I say that gay sex is degenerate, that is considered like a, a super taboo in American online culture.That is very true,Malcolm Collins: yeah.Nux Taku: Right? Because it’s two consenting adults, so what’s the problem, right? That’s the, that’s the through line. But but so I don’t really care if people come after me for my opinions. It’s, it’s- So, so for you- ... just that it’s not acceptable to sayMalcolm Collins: Yeah. Oh, that is, that is really fascinating.I mean, it’s, it’s very different from us. We sort of got radicalized by the left or, or radicalized by your channel. But like, ... it was like us originally going viral over just being like, “Hey, birth rates are low.” And then people freaked out about that, and they’re like, “Well, then you must be a racist.”Nux Taku: Yeah. Yeah.Malcolm Collins: And then-Nux Taku: Because you can’t live in reality ...Malcolm Collins: the thing that changed me the most was, like, the first time I started hanging out in [00:18:00] right-wing spaces or going to right-wing conferences, and I went and I was, you know, we’re... You know, you’re, you’re, you’re not... I, I don’t think you’ve done, like, a big face reveal or anything, so, so you don’t get noticed at conferences and stuff like that.But like, going to conferences, having beliefs that I know are really outside of a lot of mainstream conservative norms, and I was afraid that I would be sort of grilled on them or made to feel like I wasn’t welcome or made to feel like an outsider, and instead I have felt the exact opposite, where when we were in leftist spaces, and we even did, like, leftist campaigning, politics, everything like that, it was a constant litmus test.And I don’t think people on the right realize how much our side benefits from being nice to people who did things in the past that they regret now or are, w- in the process of changing and still being accepting of themNux Taku: So do you know my opinion on why that happens among right-wing people but not left-wing people?Malcolm Collins: I, yeah give me your opinion. That’sNux Taku: [00:19:00] Because I think repentance is inherently a biblical trait. And forgiveness and repentance only exists if you could believe in God. Hmm. And if you are on the other side where it’s all about, you know, we’re all just a whole, a clump of atoms that are whizzing through a point, a purposeless space, then why ever repent?Why ever do better? Why would I assume that you regret your mistakes and become a better person? I wouldn’t. It’s so much easier- Yeah ... to just throw you in the box. Whereas on the other side which, and more right-wing politics, obviously it’s not, not nearly conservative enough. Not, man, I wish Trump was the guy that the left thought he was, you know?But- Yeah, right ... yeah.Malcolm Collins: Actually, this is an interesting point in terms of making the lived sort of right-wing parties more conservative. One of the things that I think a lot of people a little, in our wider faction are annoyed with is in UK, you know, how progressive even parties like Reform or the AD- or A- A FDR in Germany or you know, MAGA in the United States and how do [00:20:00] you realistically shift the Overton window of what’s normal?Like, what’s, what’s your thesis?Nux Taku: That... So I, so ultimately every- all change takes time. Like, every time I see, like, the the accelerationists being like, “Oh, we have to vote for leftists so they can rape our country, and then- ... and then we’ll swing the other way,” it’s like, no, no, no. No, no. Trump is the swing, okay?He is the swing the other way, and Trump is kind of a ‘90s liberal, you know?Malcolm Collins: Like- He’s a very ‘90s liberal. He holds the- Yeah, we wereSimone Collins: just talking about this yesterday. He 100%Malcolm Collins: is. It’s not just that he’s a ‘90s li- liberal, it’s that every one of his, like, top lieutenants was an anti-Trump leftist the first time he ran for office, whether it’s- YeahJ.D. Vance or Elon or RFK- These-Nux Taku: Yeah ...Malcolm Collins: th- were all anti l- anti-Trump leftists, and nowNux Taku: they’re all- And they, and they were all, they were all Democrats, and so d- you know, Joe Rogan was a Democrat, he endorsed him, you know. So I agree with you, and I think it’s mostly ‘cause the left completely went insane that you know, what, what was considered a [00:21:00] left of center person from the ‘90s is considered, like, the far right fascist today.But I, I- Yeah ... think this stuff takes time, you know? I think that the, especially our generation is a lot more right wing than, you know, the boomers that are in Congress. So I think it takes time, you know? You keep electing more and more radical people as time goes on. You see someone betrays the, the tenets and, you know, you just get, get rid of them.Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Get them out. Well, I mean, we, we are seeing this at rallies. I mean, obviously the famous saying, and I think you’ve covered this, is you go to the Biden rallies, the Su- No Kings rallies, and it’s a bunch of old people. Yeah ... and I, I hear this from our Israeli fans as well. They’re like, “All of the liberal parties in Israel are just like their parades are all super old people.”Yeah ... a- and-Nux Taku: Mostly women ...Malcolm Collins: what, outbreeding them works. And in the- True ... United States we actually have a fairly decent fertility rate. This is, this is actually one of my biggest consternations about Nux, is you said that you were gonna stop streaming when you have a kid. And I was like, “I really want you to have a kid, but I don’t want you to stop streaming.”Nux Taku: Well, when I said stop streaming, I [00:22:00] meant, like, live streaming. I would still be making videos probably. Oh,Malcolm Collins: okay, okay ...Nux Taku: it’s just, you know, when you’re live y- you wanna play with your kid, you know? You wanna, you wanna be there. So if you’re live streaming, you’re gonna be there for f- four hours in a row streaming.You don’t wanna stop, you know. I’m not gonna pause, say, “Oh, sorry, gotta go play with my kid.” I’ll... So yeah.Malcolm Collins: Yeah.It’s, it’s awesome,Nux Taku: man ... so whatever.Malcolm Collins: But anyway, I, we gotta, What would be the, a, a, a, a good place? Well, another thing I wanted to ask you about is your thoughts on the sort of online right being as ideologically diverse as it is. Mm. Like when you, you look at somebody like Asam Gold and his beliefs on abortion, or Shoe0nHead and her beliefs in communism or socialism and stuff like this, w- why do you think that we are this intellectually diverse?Nux Taku: Again because I think to some extent repentance exists. You know, obviously I think that Asmongold’s takes on abortion are terrible. I think She Want Head’s takes on communism are terrible. You know, Asmongold because of thou shall not murder and you know, She Want Head ‘cause of thou shalt not steal.But, Yeah ... [00:23:00] that said, I have faith. I have faith they’ll see the light because on the right you’re a truth seeker. You know? And that’s why- Yeah ... you have all the crazy conspiracy theories, ‘cause ultimately these people wanna figure out the truth.Malcolm Collins: That’sNux Taku: a, I never thought about that ... they might get lost along the way, but on the left the truth doesn’t matter.Men can be women on the left. N-Malcolm Collins: The point that you made there that I’ve never thought about before is I’ve often joked to people when I first started going to, like, conservative conventions, the thing that shocked me the most is, like, everyone would just stop me and hand me, like, a printout of their private conspiracy theory.It was like a conspiracy theory- ... like share lot. And I was like, “W- why are conspiracy theories so big?” And a lot of them turned out to be true, mind you. A lot. Like, a stupid amount that- They can be ... Caleb Tate was being funded by the Southern Poverty Law Center.Nux Taku: I could not... That was crazy.Malcolm Collins: That just-Nux Taku: Oh, my G- Worth, worth electing Trump just for that.Malcolm Collins: That just- Really ... like happened and went and we don’t talk about it anymore.Nux Taku: Yeah. Oh, my God. It’s insane. Insane.Malcolm Collins: That, but- Like,Nux Taku: there was so little racism that they had to pay for it. Unreal.Malcolm Collins: They I, well, and I think [00:24:00] that it’s important, I mean, this is something we always fight for in our video, that like, yes, like racial groups, there may be reasons to have animosity or ethnic pride or pride in your culture, but if we make the right a space where other people don’t feel comfortable, then we’re not gonna win elections.And I think it’s really important to- Also true ... counter those sorts of narratives. But fortunately we’ve done a good job. I mean, we pushed Nick Fuentes out of the party, right? Like, he’s a Democrat now. So that’s... No, he said, “I’m a moderate Democrat.” Yeah. Do you see that?Nux Taku: Yeah, I saw that. And then he said that if the left ever wins I have to flee the country ‘cause they’re gonna kill me.So, you know, whatever. I, I-Malcolm Collins: Yeah. All liberals ... a lot, a lot ofNux Taku: what he says is hyperbole anyway, so you know.Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Actually, how do you think about this? Because one of the things that I see the most in your channel, that I also see in his channel, is really sort of high, positive, happy energy. Is this something you do intentionally?Is it just the way you are 24/7?Nux Taku: I, I am generally a positive guy. I have faith, okay? I have faith [00:25:00] it’ll... It, it’s all part of the plan. You know, even, even the bad news is, like, secretly part of the good news. We just didn’t figure that out yet. So, no, I, I have a lot of faith that things are actually looking up.I am generally an optimistic guy, and again, it says in the Bible to be happy. It’s like-Malcolm Collins: Yeah, the thing that I’m most surprised about on this stream that I was not aware of, of you is one, just how much you’ve always held these beliefs, and two, that these beliefs are all downstream. I don’t want to say like a, a, a, a, a wind-up Jew, but like they are what...If you just followed all of the stuff that it said, all the stuff the religion said, it’s where you would come ideologically.Nux Taku: I, I am a Pentateuch extremist. You had such a cool name for your ideology, I had to come up with one.Malcolm Collins: But, Yeah. Make one up and con- convert people. Give it... I mean, our ideology is very heretical to the right, so you know, we’ll see.But we got, we got followers now, too, so that’s, that’s cool.Nux Taku: Yeah ...Malcolm Collins: I mean, I belie- Look, I... If you go back, Jewish teachings, they often talk about heaven as a place in the future. They talk about, like, the sons of [00:26:00] man. Why would you need to talk about the sons of man? That’s a weird word, unless we were destined to colonize space one day and have different genetic variants of humanity.Anyhow, I get too... but-Nux Taku: I love this stuff. I could nerd out on this for sure. Yeah. Yeah. I, I have theories. I, I do too. I’m with you. If you think-Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Oh, what, what’s your craziest theory? I w- c- let’s go craziest Bible theory.Nux Taku: Craziest theory? I don’t think I have a craziest theory. What’sSimone Collins: like any theory?Any theory.Malcolm Collins: Oh,Nux Taku: a like Bible theory? The, dude, I, I’ll come up with one, I’ll tell youMalcolm Collins: I’ll give you my Adam and Eve crazyNux Taku: theory.Malcolm Collins: Sorry? I’ll give you, I’ll give you my Adam and Eve crazy theory, okay? All right,Nux Taku: go for it. So,Malcolm Collins: In Adam-Nux Taku: All right, and then I’ll, I’ll give you one. I thought of one. I thought of one of mine.Yeah.Malcolm Collins: Go for it. In Adam and Eve when I first started becoming, like, religious again and rereading these stories, I wanted to go to the ones that seemed on the face I didn’t understand it. I didn’t understand why God would punish man for wanting knowledge of good and evil. That didn’t sit right with me.So then I went to the story, and I looked at what actually happened in the story, and we know that the first thing that man did when he got the knowledge of good and evil [00:27:00] was to clothe himself, yet I don’t think anyone thinks it’s sinful to be naked in front of God and your wife. So, and we know that God allowed him to be naked in the garden as well, so it, it said that he had the type of knowledge of good and evil that God had.So clearly that’s not exactly what it meant. And then I thought about, oh, what is the idea of, like, shame around nudity around your wife and God? That’s man making up his own rules about what’s good and evil in opposition to God. And then I noticed that actually up until that point, man only had one rule, which was don’t eat from that one tree, and it said that he like, the, the, the, he, basically the curse sort of applied to him the moment he reached for the tree.That’s when he gained the knowledge, not when he ate from it, because that was the moment he decided to disobey God and decided that man knows more about what good and evil is than God does. That’s my-Nux Taku: That’s a good theory. I like it. That’s cool. No, that’s really cool. That’s a good- so, I mean, kind of on a tangent on, on yours though, before I, before I tell you my really kooky one.Good [00:28:00] and evil is free will.Malcolm Collins: Yeah.Nux Taku: Because if, if there would be no such thing as evil then, you know, we wouldn’t have some sort of- Oh, that’s a good way to put it ... evil inclination telling, telling us to do bad things all the time. We would just do the good things all the time. We wouldn’t even have the will to do bad things.So evil, the existence of evil is the existence of free will. Hmm. And the reason why we exist at all in this world, like if you think about it, why, why did God need to create us at all? Like, what, what’s cool about us to exist? I’ll tie it into my cool, my other theory. If God- Tie itMalcolm Collins: in. I’m interested to hearNux Taku: if God is everything, right? ‘Cause Go- God is, he fills all things, he surrounds all things, you know, he is everything, right? So that means technically we are all part of God as well. He’s everything. Now, he, he hides himself from us so that we have free will, but we’re also s- we’re still part of God to some extent.So y- you ever hear like the the, like the God paradoxes? Like, okay, so if God could do anything, could God repent? Could God get better at things? And it’s like, no God’s perfect. I,Malcolm Collins: I’ve heard these- But wouldn’t repenting- ... but I don’t [00:29:00] find them very compelling.Nux Taku: Well, I, I, I have a way to... All right. So I’ll, I’ll finish my, my thing.Malcolm Collins: Okay.Nux Taku: If we are part of God, then us repenting is the part of God that could repent. So we are part of the perfection of God due to us being imperfect.Malcolm Collins: Oh, that’s really clever.Simone Collins: Hmm.Malcolm Collins: That’s really clever. That’s really clever. You should be proud of that one. I also have never heard that one in my life.Simone Collins: Never, yeah.Nor have I.Malcolm Collins: That’s a good... Damn. Y-Nux Taku: That, that, that one’s like a bit- That’s a good- It’s a bit of a mind f**k. Like if... Th- the issue with this one is like I feel like it sounds almost heretical. What, would you perfect God? It’s like, no, no, I don’t perfect God. God’s perfect. And all of his creations are exactly what he wanted them to be.So all of his- Yeah ... creations are pa- part of God’s perfectness. And so our imperfection is part of God’s perfectnessMalcolm Collins: Wow. Okay, so here’s a, here’s a side question, right? You, in the early days, were into [00:30:00] stuff like anime and the, you know... I mean, you’re still into it. You watch Adventure Time. Adventure Time’s great, by the way.Have you not actually watched all of Adventure Time?Nux Taku: Yeah, it’s great. No, I haven’t. I haven’t.Malcolm Collins: You gotta-Nux Taku: I’m working on it. I’m working on it.Malcolm Collins: When you have kids, you should watch that with your kids. INux Taku: will.Simone Collins: Our kids really like Adventure Time, but they also, I think they have, like, or ‘90s and ‘80s cartoons more, if we’re being honest here, so.Malcolm Collins: Yeah, we basically- Yeah ... only play ‘90 and ‘80s cartoons for our kids, like G.I. Joes and stuff. Makes sense. So they get the- Everything else is,Nux Taku: like, gay.Malcolm Collins: Truly though. They, they literally, like we’ll show them a globe and we’re like, “This is China,” and they’re like, “Okay, well maybe one day we should, we should take China and make them fight for us,” he said.Nux Taku: Yes. Dude, kids are awesome.Malcolm Collins: They really are. Awesome. Okay. Like,Nux Taku: you ask a kid, “Should you win wars?” And your kids will be like, “Duh, of course you should win wars.” And then you ask, like, some UN politician, “Should you win wars?” “No.” Winning wars- For real ... is terrible. ForSimone Collins: real. Yeah.Malcolm Collins: But, like, what drew you into the sort of antimate- anime and performatively subversive [00:31:00] world?Nux Taku: Originally YouTube was a hobby. Like, you know, I liked anime and I, I needed an outlet. And and I started making videos on it, and I liked it. And then I started making fun of retards, like, in the anime world. And that evolved into, like, actually we could broaden our horizons. There’s a lot of retards., And, and here we are. But, but originally it was just a hobby. Like, I never expected to make money off this or anything.Malcolm Collins: So it’s just like... Yeah, we have a, a larger theory on this. I don’t know if you’ve ever heard our theory on, like, what happened here, but if you go back to the ‘90s in the United States the conservative faction had two key cultural groups.There was the the, the... What were the, what were the Southern people again called, Simone?Simone Collins: Cavaliers.Malcolm Collins: The Cavaliers which was a, a Deep South sort of aristocratic culture. And then you had the greater Appalachia region, which was the backwoods people, which had sort of an anti-aristocratic culture.And when we look at, like, what this represented in the ‘90s, this is what we call truck nut conservatives or something like that, right? Like, the guy who’s obviously a conservative but puts, like, sexy women on mud flaps on his trucker, right? You know. He had this sort of performative subversion to him.And what we’ve seen, we [00:32:00] can even see this in voting patterns, is that the right has moved more to this truck nut conservative type. And the reason is, is that the left- I have a theory ... the, the, yeah, the urban monoculture as we call it, ended up figuring out it could control people by saying, you know, “This is degenerate,” or bad or harmful to society.And then as soon as you said, “Well, I’m not gonna do the things that are, you know, bad,” right, they can just grab that and constantly expand that category. So the only way that we as a movement were able to subvert that and even signal to other people within the movement, “No, I’m chill, bro,” is through su- subversion of, of cultural norms that are not inherently actually bad.A, a good examp- You could... You were gonna say something?Nux Taku: I, yeah, I, I think that, I, I thought what you were gonna get to is, like, it’s so weird how, like, you have all these, like, you know, trucker guys and, you know, they like sexy women and stuff, and it’s like they’re conservatives. Like, you’d think that they would [00:33:00] be, like, prudish.I thought that’s what you were getting to.Malcolm Collins: Well, no, there’s always been a part of American culture that was conservative in an anti-a- authority sort of way, at a, an anti-aristocratic sort of way, a way where-Nux Taku: I think masculinity is inherently right wing.Malcolm Collins: W- I agree. R- r- I agree with that. But I think that there there, there was sort of this fear of anyone, because the left uses this so powerfully, of anyone being able to call rank on us, you know?I have the X degree. I have the X qualifications. I decide what’s right. I haveNux Taku: X chromosomes.Malcolm Collins: Right, yeah. And to fight that, we had to be subversive so that people would understand that we weren’t... Like, you don’t, Asmongold does anywhere in any of his videos, anywhere in your videos, do you signal that you think you’re better than other people.And-Nux Taku: I don’t think I’m better than other people. Yeah ... I think that everyone was created in the image of God. But I think some cultures suck s**t and we don’t need to import them here.Malcolm Collins: That is true.Nux Taku: And it’s not, you know, that, that is not, like, a [00:34:00] contradiction.Malcolm Collins: But this is- Yeah ... super common on the left.Like, Hasan’s outfits, if you look at the cost of, like, his basic outfit, his dog being the most expensive dog breed in the world. Right. Right?Nux Taku: W- which he electrocutes, by the way. Don’tMalcolm Collins: forget. Which he electrocutes, yeah. And it’s caused really interesting phenomenon that have given us a cultural edge in the current landscape.One really big one is the left somehow became the anti-AI party and the right’s, like, a super pro-AI party. And we’re the ones that g- have our sky brows and our, all of these AI music videos- Yeah, yeah ... and stuff.Nux Taku: Again, I, I think, I think, I feel like so many of these things are, like, the same issue just repackaged.It’s because the right realizes that reality is real. AI is not leaving, okay? So yeah, artists are gonna lose their jobs, and that sucks for them, but that’s called progress, and I’m sorry that happened, but life moves on. You know, a lot of seamstresses lost their jobs when sewing machines were invented.Yeah. Does that mean we should not have sewing machines? And the left, [00:35:00] because the left has decided that you know, they, they basically, you know, have become the party of the, you know, anti-reality retards. All right? They, they hate AI because they would like to still make believe that AI is not happening, and that’s not real life.True.Malcolm Collins: No, and, and that’s, I mean, that’s a strong argument for AI. There’s just nothing we can do about it. And if we do do something about it, then we become like Europe and we drop off the, the global economy- Yeah ... and China ends up crushing us.Nux Taku: Yeah, absolutely. AI’s here. It’s here to stay. It’s not going anywhere.People are gonna use it. Make the most of it. Yeah. Don’t be a victim.Malcolm Collins: Well, I, I think that there’s also sort of the, this sort of also performative, performative subversion that we see in AI, like Skybrow’s Cream of the Slop, this idea of like, yeah, okay, it’s AI slop. Whatever. It’s still fun. And-Nux Taku: There’s a self-awareness thereMalcolm Collins: yeah. Well, I mean, it’s become the part... It reminds me of the scene in Madagascar, a children’s cartoon. I don’t know if you’ve seen it where they- I’ve seen it ... th- th- you’ve seen it? Mm. Yeah. Where they, they divide a, a, an island into the fun side and the not fun side. And in the [00:36:00] not fun side- ... he’s just sad about being trapped there, and his sign collapses to say, “Hell.”And in the fun side, they’re all having fun, right? Like they’re, they’ve made a little tiki hut. They’re drinking their fake drinks, spitting them out afterwards, of course, ‘cause it’s all seawater. You know, none- everything isn’t actually perfect, but they get to have fun and pretend like it. And coming to the right, for me, felt like coming to the fun side.Like, y- yeah, you know?Nux Taku: Yeah. You know, you don’t have to t- not everything is super serious. I mean, like, on the left they think mental illnesses are superpowers, you know? So th- they’ll sit there and collect mental illnesses like they’re Pokemon and and you’re gonna be surprised that these are, like, the most miserable people on the planet?Malcolm Collins: A- a- admittedly, Candace Owens probably does too, right? You know. But we- YouNux Taku: assume she’s right-wing ...Malcolm Collins: Fair. Very, very fair. Yeah, she has a lot of leftist positions. Yeah. But I would s- I, itNux Taku: w- She, she used to run a website called Social Autopsy. Did you hear about this? Y- youMalcolm Collins: know, that- [00:37:00] Yeah ... she, she, was it, like, anti-bullying?Go, go into, go into the lore.Nux Taku: Yeah. So, so anti, Social Autopsy was, like, this website to basically dox right-wing people. Like, you know, of course, this is the classic leftist tactic. It’s like, oh, right-wing people that believe in literally anything, oh, they must be bullies, so we have to destroy them and ruin their lives.And she was a leftist, like one of these crazy radical leftists that would actually dox people until she realized that the grift was better to be, like, the, the Black woman against BLM, you know? And and that was her new grift, et cetera. Y-Malcolm Collins: you know she thinks Charlie Kirk was a time travelerNux Taku: Well, she does think that Israel and E- Egypt are working together with Sumerian time travel technology to kill Charlie Kirk ‘cause he was an X-Man.Simone Collins: Someone’s got to.Nux Taku: Yeah. Yeah, I guess.Malcolm Collins: We have an episode on this, Psychosis Maxxing, if you guys wanna watch it. It’s f*****g crazy-Simone Collins: Oh, that should be so great ... her world perspective. But no, truly, like her unholstered schizophrenia has actually been very profitable. I mean, unfortunately she is a case in which some form of, I don’t know what it is, but it’s working for her, like really [00:38:00] well.God. Whenever we criticize her- Yeah ... like people are coming into our comments being like, “Well, but I love it.”Nux Taku: ISimone Collins: get those too ... “She’s got some great points.”Nux Taku: And, and then I, then I had to make like a whole like hour and a half long video just piecing apart all of her... She says that the Jews invented dinosaurs to trick Christians into thinking God isn’t real.Malcolm Collins: That-Nux Taku: There are so many layers to that one sentence- Jews invented dinosaurs ... it’sMalcolm Collins: unreal ... it’s unbelievable. Like what? All that-Simone Collins: That is a yes and. The only response to that is yes, and. Come on. To giveMalcolm Collins: her credit, she doesn’t just rehash old conspiracy theories. Her world is almost like Tolkien’s world, where like she invented a totally new world of conspiracy theories.Yeah.Nux Taku: Okay. You are giving her way too much credit. She takes every old conspiracy in the book and then just blames the Jews for it. Okay? Actually, it’s the oldest style conspiracy theory.Malcolm Collins: That is anSimone Collins: interesting twist. It adds color. It’s more fun with Jews, though. I mean, let’s, it’s, itNux Taku: just- Yeah, Jews, they’re great.Simone Collins: It’s like adding salt to a dish. Jews. Like you need it. It’s, it’s the MSG of, of lore, you know? It’s just-Nux Taku: Sure, sure.Malcolm Collins: I mean, but [00:39:00] realistically- Great ... this, I mean, this is where we are on our channel on this, and everyone’s always like, ‘cause we get some people on our channel who are like anti-Jew or whatever.I’m like, bro, the only people who matter in the future are the people who have lots of kids and still have technology. Some groups have a lot of kids and they do it by give, give, not having technology or not being economically productive. There’s only two groups on earth that have that right now, and one of them is the Jews, and they’re even beating us at fertility rates, right?So, we’ve gotta take that seriously, right? Like the, the, being partnered with them is a lot better than being on their bad side, or that becomes the new human war, US versus Israel. But-Nux Taku: I mean, I, I feel like there is a reason why there are so many foreign governments that are doing everything in their power to kind of be like, “Oh my God, do you, do you believe Israel is, you know, killing terrorists that are trying to kill them?”It’s like, what? You know? And you know, doing everything. Like you have Russia promoting Candace Owens and, and Tucker Carlson, and you, k- Tucker Carlson’s buying a house in Qatar. I love America so much. I’m buying a house in Qatar . [00:40:00] You know? It’s like, all right, dude. Crazy. Yeah, sure. Right? Well, I gotta- And so many of theseMalcolm Collins: I think a part of it is and we have an episode where we go over this, is that the internet has shifted of who the primary viewer is over the past 10 years, and now your average internet viewer is a third worlder.And a lot of these people don’t realize, like, they’re... W- why, why, like why all the, the weird Indian hate in, in the United States? Like, yes, there’s problems with them and jobs and everything like that, but they’re not as big a problem as the people, like, murdering us on the streets and stuff like that, right?And it’s like, well, because this matters to third worlders. Jews matter to third worlders. Like all these, you know, M- Middle Eastern countries, the, the Jews is what they think about every day. And so I think some online influencers don’t realize that they have really just captured a third world audience.Nux Taku: Don’t realize or don’t care?Malcolm Collins: Don’t care. You’re right. I mean- I mean,Nux Taku: you have someone with the million views. Yeah, it’s from packing-Malcolm Collins: Sneako, right? Hey. Sneako just, just speed running that.Nux Taku: Bro, Sneako, he’s like, actually [00:41:00] retarded. It’s amazing.Malcolm Collins: He’s like, “I wa- I wanna be s-” Oh my God ... specifically make all of my content maximally appealing to third worlders.Nux Taku: He, he’s amazing. He’s amazing. I- Sneako’s incredible. It’s a, it’s train wreck in slow motion. You know, bro goes out there to piss off the Christians and he’s like, “Oh, Jesus wasn’t white. Oh, Jesus was a Jew from Palestine.” Yeah, I’m sure he was. I’m sure he was. Yeah.Malcolm Collins: You’re, you’re,Nux Taku: So you mean to tell me that the Jews are indigenous to Palestine, Sneako?Malcolm Collins: “No, no, what do you mean?” That, that’s wild. Yeah, no, I... Your, your video on him, this, this was one of the fun things for me recently is, i- you were looking at his numbers and you’re like, “Look at how terrible these numbers are,” and I was like We’re, we’re not that much bigger. But I’m like, “But I guess he’s in decline.”And then when I heard that he- Okay,Nux Taku: hold up, hold up. Th- that’s not fair. First of all, you cannot compare. Sneako has millions of subscribers, he’s well-known, people talk about him, he’s like public, he- p- in the public discourse, he was on every big show. You know- True ... he was col- he collabed with every big guy on the planet.Adin Ross, and Andrew [00:42:00] Tate, and Nick Fuentes, and he was on Piers Morgan, and he hung out with- True ... Kanye West. He was with all the big guys, and no one wants to watch his slop.Malcolm Collins: That is true. Which is stupid as f**k ... but the thing that gave me heart recently was learning that you didn’t get to 100,000 views until your fourth year of doing this, and we’re only at year three now.That’s true. So we’re, we’re- Yeah ... on track to hit your numbers if we just never stop.Nux Taku: Yeah ...Malcolm Collins: which is okay.Nux Taku: Look numbers are ... l- it was definitely a big trade-off when I decided, you know what, I’m gonna be I’m just gonna say all the things that I like instead of just become, be generic normie slop.Like, at some point I was just like, “I’ll just do all the YouTube drama. I won’t, like, have any edgy opinions.” And I was like, “Why? F**k that s**t, dude.” I want, I want the world to be better for my kids, you know?Malcolm Collins: Yeah. No, I mean, the, it, it’s fas- when we first came, even with our reboot in this channel our entire, like, theme with the channel and goal with the channel was just, like, basically, like, effective altruist philosophy, right?Like, r- r- r- really basic leftist high-minded philosophy, because back then I still had this desire to be [00:43:00] seen as, like, this intellectual, and I think shedding that desire and realizing that I wanted to be seen for who I was and, and, and as a culture warrior it was something that I was only able to do.And again, I really want to just emphasize this to people on the right, because when we started to make those transitions, people on the right supported us and they were nice to us even though we had only just begun to transition. And well, I mean, look at you coming on our show, for example, and you’re so much bigger than us.You have no reason to do this other than just being completely magnanimous, right? It, it, it-Nux Taku: It’sMalcolm Collins: reallyNux Taku: nice of you ...Malcolm Collins: it only- No, it’sNux Taku: purely selfish. I just think you guys are cool and, Oh ... I wanted to do this.Malcolm Collins: But I want to... Actually, what I wanna talk about before we close this out, because this is something I talked a, a little bit about, and we can see if we can get fans involved if they’re interested in this.But I’ve been thinking about setting up some form of formal sort of political organization for the- wider sort of cultural movement that we represent. Because, you know, when I go to my friends at like the Heritage Foundation or whatever, and [00:44:00] I’m talking to them about like, “You know, like I, I don’t think like censoring furries is gonna play well among a lot of right-wing people.”And they’re like, “What are you talking about?” I’m like, “Well, you know all the fox girl VTubers.” And they’re like, “What are you talking about?” And I’m like like maybe we need like- ... some, some form of i- even, even an outreach group.” So I was thinking like, what if we try to set something up and get some buy-in from the various big name voices in the movement so that they can guide.Because I don’t want something where like I’m guiding policy. Something like a, a Turning Point USA, but that’s focused on this sort of nerd right faction. What are your thoughts on putting something like that together and even the utility of something like that?Nux Taku: It sounds really cool. I, I, I wonder what the major purpose is, and I, and I’ll explain what I mean.Turning Point USA is successful and incredible because frankly it’s an alternative to the college slop.Malcolm Collins: Mm-hmm.Nux Taku: Right? You know, you go into- Mm ... the college system, and you’re literally, th- they put the, the, [00:45:00] you know, the, the hypnosis screen in front of you and they, they just replay images of whatever the f**k they want to in- you know, install in your mind.So I think Turning Point USA is an alternative. It’s like, “Hey, you could follow that path and be an incredibly unhappy cat woman with debt at the age of 60. Or you could follow our path, and you could like have a family and be successful.” And it’s like, wait a second. That makes- Hold up. You know?Actually, I, I- So Turning Point USA is really effective there. When it comes to I, I guess our movement or the, the new right, the online right, I, I don’t know if it needs a grass gr- grassroots idea.Malcolm Collins: That’s actually a really good point. I, I think you just need to- Those things are... Now that I think about it, you’re right.They’re sort of over and useless now. We, we actually were going over how if you look at Ben Shapiro, he appears to just be buying everything now or buying ads on things. Yep. And treating... His organization is just like a fundraising organization that pretends to be able to influence policy. And this reminds me, one of the anecdotes I say is when the new administration was being [00:46:00] staffed, this version of the Trump administration, the network they were tapping was the Founders Fund network and not like the Heritage Foundation and stuff like that.Like, we had to make the intros for the Heritage Foundation people. And what I realized is I think even like the ins- the, the true MAGA, like who are staffing things, they’re like, “We’re not staffing. We’re not allowing these people to influence our policy anymore. We’re just taking like based Doge kids.”By the way, you know, my brother worked at Doge.Nux Taku: No way.Malcolm Collins: Yeah,Nux Taku: yeah. Dude, that’s awesome.Malcolm Collins: Yeah, yeah. Huh. That was,Nux Taku: I’m a big fan of Doge. I wish they would’ve been like even more successful.Simone Collins: Same.Malcolm Collins: They, they did some really cool stuff. NowNux Taku: to somethingMalcolm Collins: completely different.Nux Taku: But that’s where likeSimone Collins: I’m hesitant- They, they shut down-about policy in general. I, I, I have my doubts that like- Any, any sort of policy change is gonna make a, a difference at this point or like going into politics matters INux Taku: mean, I think we, we need to get rid of the government. Okay? ISimone Collins: onlyNux Taku: want the government- That’s, that’s my only conclusion here ... to exist for law and order.I just want law and order. Arrest the criminals, [00:47:00] close the border, win wars if you need to fight them. Other than that, I really don’t wanna hear about you guysSimone Collins: Well, and the writing is kind of on the wall. Like what we talk about a lot is demographic collapse, and when you look at just how tax bases are going to crumble, how social services won’t be able to be supported anymore, how our government’s basically going to start printing currency in really unsustainable ways- Yeahuntil it no longer matters like there, there will be a point at which there is going to be actually very significant various forms of turnover in the government. So I’m kind of like, well, I guess I’m just gonna- SoMalcolm Collins: like Social Security, how long till it goes broke?Simone Collins: I think 2032. 2030 something.Yeah, 2032. Well, my concern is, like there’s two ways it can go. Either at, at that year the trust fund’s gonna run out to the point where y- the existing senior citizens receiving Social Security payments will have like 32 or something percent less of their monthly checks. So they’re gonna be super pissed while like Gen Z and Gen Alpha and millennials and everyone else is still paying into it knowing that they’re not gonna get anything, and the people who are getting their money are mad about it and resentful.So everyone’s [00:48:00] gonna be really angry about it. Or they’re gonna do something where they just totally throw the rules out the window and they’re like, “Oh, never mind, everyone gets to keep their money,” and they just kind of print it out of nowhere. And- It’sNux Taku: almost like Social Security is a form of communism that doesn’t really work.Simone Collins: Yeah. We live in a huge, like just in terms of social services, like we are in such a socialist state now. If you are at or near the poverty level, the amount of support that you get from your state and the federal government is, is kind of humbling, and we didn’t realize this until we looked into it. But like in most cases especially if you ca- have kids, food assistance home assistance, free childcare, i- like really in- intense levels of support that are, are, are...Oh free healthcare, which is like huge. So you kind of do live in a socialist utopia if you are at or near the poverty level. WeMalcolm Collins: offer many times the social services cost adjusted than China does.Simone Collins: Yeah. Like in China- Which is another- ... public school isn’t free. InNux Taku: fact, our, our social services, I’m pretty sure they, they out...Like th- if you combine the military budget and the foreign aid budget, it’s still [00:49:00] dwarfed by the social services.Malcolm Collins: Oh,Simone Collins: yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And then of course pensions and then of course like debt servicing. Like it just- I mean, the trueMalcolm Collins: enemy of civilization-Nux Taku: Again, I, I mention I am a, a Pentateuch extremist, okay?All right? Like the- Yeah ... it, there are, there is no communism in the Bible. None of it, actually, you know? That’s unfair. You give whatever-Simone Collins: What is your point? ...Nux Taku: 10% to charity, okay? Charity, whatever, whatever you wanna define as charity. And other than that, what you make is yours. From the sweat of your brow you should eat bread.Simone Collins: There you go.Nux Taku: And that’s it. And I’m tired of it. The, one, one of the first chapters in the Bible is like Abraham, he goes to Ephron to buy a, a plot of land where he could bury his wife. And he’s like, “Hey, I would like to buy the land.” And Ephron’s like, “No, no, you don’t need to buy the land. Just bury your wife here.”And he’s like, “No, no, no, I’m buying the land. We’re not, we’re not getting into this.” This like, “Oopsie whoopsie.” And he’s like, “Okay, it’ll cost X amount.” And and he bought it, and it was his. And you know what? We still know where that land is exactly in Hebron. We know where it is. We know that you know, all the patriarchs and matriarchs are buried [00:50:00] there et cetera, et cetera.And it’s like it’s still there, you know? There’s no, no repossessing- Yes ... you know, redistributing. I-Simone Collins: And in,Malcolm Collins: I did not know that that was still known or wasn’t. The the I- I mean we also know from, you know, Adam and Eve and everything like that, that like we are supposed to live with having to, to work the land.Like, we’re supposed to have to work to support ourselves, and itNux Taku: makes- And so do you wanna hear another theory?Malcolm Collins: Yeah, o- ca- continue.Nux Taku: Yes. Another theory. So God, all right, th- this is the same topic. God cursed both Adam and Eve when they ate from the tree of knowledge, right? Mm-hmm. So Adam’s curse was the sweat of, from the sweat of your brow you shall eat bread, all right?Meaning you have to work to eat, as opposed to just, you know, God’ll just give you all the things for free. And Eve’s punishment was, you know, men will rule over you and it, you know, it’ll be painful. The child birthing process will be painful, right? So that was Eve’s punishment. Now I would argue not only, first of all, obviously true, right?Yeah. That, that actually did happen to humans for, since then. That’s one. But [00:51:00] two, it’s necessary. It’s part of our psyche to feel fulfilled as people to exist in a system where the man works and where women are ultimately respecting men.Malcolm Collins: We- and we actually, this is another one of our spicy takes, but we, yeah, we argue that as well, that like God was not being capriciously cruel to humanity by giving what we interpreted as curses, but giving us a way of living that is fulfilling, and that as we have shaken off this way of living, we realize that this was more like training wheels than a genuine punishment.Simone Collins: Yeah. And thingsNux Taku: like, And now you have, and now everyone’s depressed. Yeah. Like, the men don’t work and they’re depressed. Now the women don’t have kids and they’re depressed, and it’s like-Malcolm Collins: And they’re not a little- Yeah, yeah ... depressed. Right now the average kid at school, during COVID it was one in four, now it’s one in five, the average girl makes a plan to un-alive herself on any given year.That is how sa- that is how-Simone Collins: Well, the weird thing is, is- Damn ... women in the absence of pain crave painMalcolm Collins: ThisSimone Collins: is CDCMalcolm Collins: stats, by the way. Not,Simone Collins: like, a,Malcolm Collins: a right-wing conspiracySimone Collins: Yeah, [00:52:00] but I mean, if you look at just anecdotally, women in the absence of pain crave pain. When women live in... Like, if, if you look at spoonies, they’re majority affluent teen girls who basically have no other pain in their lives, and they’re like, “I’ve been developed-” Well, look at, look at women’s books“This mysterious disease” It’s all, like, dystopian futures where they, they live in- Yeah. Yeah, women growing up in, in peaceful times with no conflict love to read dystopian teen novels. I’m reading Lena Dunham, L- Lena Dunham, Dunham’s fame sick biography now, and, like, she had horrible partners who would do violent, awful things to her ‘cause she grew up in a, like, loving family that always supported her.Like, there’s... It’s kind of sick how people respond when, yeah, they grow up in sort of the absence- ... of pain and strife. It, it is one of those things where like, yeah And if, if youNux Taku: ever wanna get radicalized, you go into, like, a Barnes & Noble women’s section-Simone Collins: Yeah ...Nux Taku: and it’s like, yo- Yeah,Malcolm Collins: weNux Taku: talk aboutMalcolm Collins: that. I getNux Taku: so- We- You know, woman was raped by a werewolf billionaire and fell in love with him.I, I- It’s like-Simone Collins: Living the dreamMalcolm Collins: We, we get so annoyed by... Because there’s some right-wing influencer, women especially, who are like, “Oh, it’s all of this [00:53:00] male porn that, like, radicalized men.” I’m like, “Men didn’t make 50 Shades of Gray a bestseller.” Yeah. Men didn’t make The Monster at Barnes & Noble, right? Like-Simone Collins: No, l- legit, men don’t wanna do that on average because it’s too much effort.This is definitely a female fantasy. Men are like, “I don’t have... I don’t, no.” INux Taku: mean, I, I think also because men, men are mostly stimulated by, I guess, superficial attributes, I would say. You know? Mm-hmm. A sexy woman, and that’s it. Men, he’s good. You know, you see some curvy piece of driftwood and, you know-men are like, “We can figure this out.” But for women-Simone Collins: No, no, like literally- ... I think a lot, a lot of it’s- ... Malcolm and I had a conversation last night ...Nux Taku: you have to get emotionallySimone Collins: invested, you know? Yeah. We were... I, I... Like, Malcolm walked up to me last night and I was like, “Malcolm, how do... With sex dolls, how do they deal with, like, the off-gassing scent?Like, doesn’t that really... Like, there must be some way.” Malcolm’s like, “No, Simone, they don’t care. Like, it looks like a woman.” Like, I’m talking about for real dolls, like, the, the life-sized ones. Yeah. And I’m, like, thinking about how, like, well, it must smell too much like plastic. Like, how do you deal with that?And he’s like-Nux Taku: Men do [00:54:00] not care. Men do not care.Simone Collins: Oh, well. Anyway.Nux Taku: You know- So I think w- a- get- the Monster F****r Island Barnes & Noble, that’s just as porn as any male porn. Oh,Simone Collins: it- Oh, yeah. Yeah. Like- Yeah ... but not, not even that, just, like, all, all the erotic materials. Women consume way more erotic materials, period, than men.And pay way more for it. And the, and the industry’s bigger. It’s, it’s more, there’s more money there. There’s more time there. And women are just openly reading it like, in public. It’s just no shame. They’re, they’re learned women. It’s book talk. It’s great. They, they talk aboutNux Taku: it. The whoreification of society.Malcolm Collins: Yeah. True. True. Well, it has been great. I do not want to take up too much of the time of, of Nux. I want to have a channel where you can reach out to us whenever. One thing I want to end with, with people, because I think the, what one of our goals should be to make people’s lives better, and that’s, you know, if, if you’re watching this, go out and try to learn something new.You know, learn how to use AI in a new way. Learn how to use some tool in a new way. Society right now is changing faster than [00:55:00] anyone could imagine, and we’re seeing it in our community to an extent that astonishes me, because I get so excited when I see, like, Sky Browse and stuff like this, or Holy Ball.You know, when I see these, these content creators who are pioneering entirely new ways of doing stuff and you, you can be that. Any of you can be that in, in, in new ways. And look for a sp- a s- a spouse, a partner. Try harder.Nux Taku: Yeah, that, that’s what I was gonna say. You know? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, get married, have babies.It’s awesome.Simone Collins: Totally.Malcolm Collins: Really makes life awesome. Well, spectacular. I’m gonna turn the recording off and, Oh, anything you wanna say at the end? Any-Simone Collins: Yeah, anything you want people to go to, check out,Nux Taku: whatever. I’m, I’m good, I’m good.Malcolm Collins: Everybody knows who you are. I’mNux Taku: the Blue Jew. I wander over YouTube.Malcolm Collins: Right there. Like, we have, like, you’re, like, our fifth most over subscribed channel, so just... End recording? Oh,Nux Taku: hell yeah.Simone Collins: Oh. I’m trying to get Tex to eat, and I, I took a little video ‘cause the one thing that he actually does wanna put in his mouth, ‘cause I, I keep giving him stuff obviously he immediately just, you know, like they fall out of his mouth, right?That’s what... [00:56:00] It always happens, right? They look kind of,Malcolm Collins: afraid,Simone Collins: and then it falls out of their mouth. And the, the one thing that he likes that I’ve noticed he chews on is veggie straws. So I’ve, you know, let him chew on like the odd veggie straw here or there, and he was chewing on them this morning, and I was taking this video of him, and he just starts-Malcolm Collins: Octavian thought it was the funniest thing ever.He came in. He had to tell me. He goes, “Mommy was filming.”Simone Collins: I thought, “Oh, let’s capture his first moments eating.” I don’t want our kids to, like, think that... You know how there’s the trope of, like, the first kid has, like, a billion photos. You get bored after the first few? Yeah, okay. Yeah, like, yeah, like second kid, no photos of anything, you know?And I don’t wanna be that mom, and I’m trying to capture these precious moments. And what does Tex do? What does Tex do when I try to capture a precious moment? He’s like... Immense amounts- I’m sorry you had to deal with that ... of liquid. He, he doesn’t like drinking that much, so I don’t know where it’s coming from.Malcolm Collins: I am very sorry you had to deal with this.Simone Collins: It’s a pleasureYeah, see, [00:57:00] he doesn’t wanna drink. You have no interest in drinking. You just wanna wave your hands and grab my headphones.Oh, he’s here. Hey. Oh my gosh, that’s a good background. Oh,Malcolm Collins: we got an American flag in the background. That’s fantastic.Simone Collins: That’s perfect.Malcolm Collins: Okay.Simone Collins: Okay. Can we hear him? Yeah, I was thinking,Nux Taku: like- Go ahead ... do, do I put an Israeli flag in the... No, I’m kidding. Yeah.Simone Collins: Oh. That would’ve been-Malcolm Collins: I would, I would troll peoplewonderful. They’re gonna get some, Yeah ... spicy comments from that. Oh. ForSimone Collins: real.Malcolm Collins: Okay.Nux Taku: Yeah. I’mMalcolm Collins: gonna dive right in. Well, it’s such aNux Taku: pleasure to meet you guys.Malcolm Collins: Oh, yeah,Simone Collins: likewise. It’s really good to meet you, too.Malcolm Collins: It’s, it’s so huge to be doing something, because we’ve done, like, peers. We’ve done bigger people before, but I’ve never done anyone who I watch as much as you.Yeah. So,Simone Collins: like- No, you’re, like, liter- like, literally part of, like, the wallpaper- ... of, of our every... I mean, you know how it is. Like, you, you’re just, you’re always on. So we hear your voice all the time, and it’s, it’s really weird. Wow. It’s one of those things- That’s crazy ... I think we haven’t even thought to doMalcolm Collins: that.E- even today you helped me win an argument with my wife. Yeah, it’s true. Because she got big mad- Let’s go ... about a title card that I made today. Yeah. And she’s like, “That implies that Black people, there’s a portion of Black Americans that want [00:58:00] white Americans dead.” And I’m like, “It’s true.” And then you said the same thing in your title, and I was like, “See, Simone?”Simone Collins: Yeah. I was like, “Well, if Nux says it, okay.” But also, yeah,Nux Taku: I mean- Listen, I’m not, I’m not an authority here, but what other interpretation would there be to these guys crashing out that Carmelo Anthony’s going to jail? Like-Malcolm Collins: That-Simone Collins: Yeah ... is there another explanation? I hadn’t seen that footage, and now I have.And now I’m very alarmed. I know.Malcolm Collins: I mean, I, I do, I think that they think that they should be treated differently by the law. I think that that’s, like... W- we’ll get into that later.Speaker: Yeah, I think he likes it. Oh, he’s still figuring out how to swallow solid foods after he chews them. See? He’s kinda going through it. He doesn’t really know how to swallow food. Oh, it d- oh, okay. Oh, dear. Well, you know.Speaker 2: He threw up. Oh, boy. There it goes. He threw up. Oh, God.You think it’s so freaking funny. [00:59:00] You don’t have to clean it up. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit basedcamppodcast.substack.com/subscribe

Malcolm and Simone Collins break down the growing public anger over glaring double standards in interracial violence, media coverage, and the justice system. They dive deep into the Kamelo Anthony case (the stabbing of Austin Metcalf at a Texas track meet), European migrant crime incidents, fundraising scandals, jury selection disparities, crime statistics, and the disturbing normalization of anti-white violence.This episode explores why many feel the law is applied unequally, the oppressor/oppressed worldview driving it, immigration realities, and what a realistic path forward looks like — including building a broad, accountable coalition rather than narrow racial politics. A raw, data-heavy discussion on race, crime, culture, and civilization in 2026.Watch the full Based Camp episode for unfiltered analysis.Show NotesThe Flash Point Cases2026 Karmelo Anthony Murder Judgment* On June 9, 2026, a Texas jury found 19-year-old Karmelo Anthony guilty of murder for fatally stabbing 17-year-old track athlete Austin Metcalf at a high school track meet in Frisco, Texas, on April 2, 2025.* Anthony was subsequently sentenced to 35 years in prison2025 Dublin case* A 20-something illegal migrant from believed to be from Africa (with prior deportation orders) allegedly sexually assaulted a 10-year-old Irish girl in state care at a hotel housing asylum seekers* This triggered riots, vehicle burnings, and clashesJune 2026 Belfast Knife Attack* On 40-something white Stephen Ogilvy by Hadi Alodid, a Sudanese refugee granted status in 2023* Hadi Alodid was charged with attempted murder (but there was immediate unrest over immigration)What people are saying onlineMedia angles (echoed on social): “Is the far right exploiting the attack by a refugee?” with focus on disorder rather than root causes like vetting. (e.g. FRANCE 24 - Europe posted: “Is the far right exploiting the ‘sickening’ attack by a refugee in Belfast?”Depa wrote: Kristallnacht in #Belfast begins:Masked thugs smash windows of houses of black& brown people after Sudanese immigrant tries to kill (Scottish?) man in a brutal knife attackHouses were also torched, mobs attacked POC in Glasgow after far right influencers called for protests..iResist wrote: Anti-immigrant far right thugs in the city of Belfast in the UK have torched vehicles and buildings after a Sudanese man was arrested over a knife attack that left one person with serious injuries.Masked men are hunting immigrants in the city.April 2026 Belgium Kortrijk gang rape* Nine migrant minors (from various non-Western backgrounds) gang-raped a 14-year-old Belgian schoolgirl (”loaned out“ among them).* “The abuse took place during the Easter holidays in April 2024 in the Kabouterbos, a wooded area in Kortrijk. The victim was 14 at the time, while the suspects were aged between 11 and 16” (ReMix News)* She was lured into the woods by her then-16-year-old boyfriend* They filmed her rape and posted videos to snapchat* All were found guilty but received no prison* Instead, they got probation/community service (30 hours max).* Their lenient treatment was criticized as emblematic of soft juvenile justice for migrant offendersWhat people are saying onlineCritics of outrage call it disproportionate or ignoring similar intra-native cases.Per Al Jazeera, Sikh/Muslim/immigrant advocacy groups are distancing themselves from the perpetrator while documenting rising hate incidents.December 2025 Henry Nowak Stabbing Case* 18-year-old White university student Henry Nowak was stabbed to death (multiple times with an 8-inch Sikh ceremonial dagger/kirpan) by 23-year-old Vickrum Digwa (Sikh).* Digwa and his brother falsely claimed to police that Nowak had racially attacked him (grabbing turban, slurs).* Police initially handcuffed the dying Nowak based on this.* Digwa was convicted of murder in 2026; the judge called the racism claim a “wicked lie.”* It sparked major outrage, questions from PM Keir Starmer about how racism accusations influenced police, and reviews of policing. Critics argued initial response prioritized the false hate claim over the victim’s lifeWhat people said onlineHebb Rule is Enough fir AGI/A Creative I - Jayan wrote: “The Sikh man and his family are not walking around looking to stab people. Henry Nowak was a drunk racist abusing the Punjabi and got what he deserved. The police correctly identified the drunk aggressor and just didn’t realise he was stabbed.”Bakara Amuri wrote:🚨😳SIKS ARE FIGHTING BACK…. UNPRECEDENTED MOVES🇬🇧Innocent Sikhs have been targeted, while the elderly and vulnerable arebeing urged to stay indoors, following the sentencing of Vickrum Digwa.Amarjeet Singh, from Hounslow in west London, has launched a website for Sikhs across the country to report incidents of hate crime.The site has received numerous reports in the past five days, with many respondents believing the abuse they experienced was linked to Digwa’s conviction.Will you report any anti sikhs “crimes”?The British Sikh Report 2025 found:49% of British Sikhs were already worried about rising anti‑Sikh sentiment.Many reported being mistaken for Muslims or targeted simply for wearing a turban.according to the report here is the reason why:“far‑right mobilisation”Is There Really a Policing Double Standard?The standard understanding is that there is a double standard, but it’s in favor of whites and to the detriment of non-whites.Per organizations like The Sentencing Project: Evidence from policing, sentencing, and media coverage shows racial double standards do exist—but they do not take the form of “non‑white offenders being treated more leniently on average.” Instead, the consistent pattern in U.S. research is harsher treatment of Black and other non‑white suspects/defendants, especially when victims are white, and more sympathetic social treatment of white offenders.A 2021 study of co‑offending partners found that Black offenders were significantly more likely than white co‑offenders to be arrested for the same incident, especially in assault cases. That is, when a Black and a white suspect commit an offense together, police are more likely to formally arrest the Black suspect, indicating differential enforcement rather than equal treatment.Interracial Crime RealitiesOne thing people are discussing online is the reality of mixed-race attacks/crimesFirst: Most violent crime in the U.S. is intraracial: people tend to victimize members of their own racial group. In 2020, about 69% of violent incidents against white victims and 66% against Black victims involved an offender of the same race or ethnicity. That means “white‑on‑Black” or “Black‑on‑white” crimes are a relatively small subset of overall violence, not the dominant pattern (as reported by the US Department of Justice)Per a 2024 Department of Justice Report, which provides counts and percentages of violent incidents by the race/Hispanic origin of victims and offenders, based on victims’ perceptions:* White‑on‑non‑white* (white offenders, non‑white victims):* White‑on‑black: 57,370* White‑on‑Hispanic: 334,770* White‑on‑“other”: 217,140* Total white‑on‑non‑white ≈ 609,000 incidents.* Non‑white‑on‑white (non‑white offenders, white victims):* Black‑on‑white: 536,120* Hispanic‑on‑white: 271,410* “Other”‑on‑white: 262,120* Total non‑white‑on‑white ≈ 1,070,000 incidents.*Here “non‑white” = black, Hispanic, and “other” race categories.These tallies exclude incidents where offender race is unknown or mixed‑race groups that the table pushes into “other”; they are best understood as approximate patterns rather than precise totals of “all interracial incidents”.General Findings:* The authors highlight that the share of violent incidents with white offenders (47%) is smaller than whites’ share of the population (60%).* They also note that the share of incidents with black offenders (28%) is more than double blacks’ share of the population (12%).* Asian, Native Hawaiian, and Other Pacific Islander persons are underrepresented as both victims and offenders relative to their population share.Key interracial/intraracial findings in their termsFrom table 13 (incidents by victim and offender race/Hispanic origin):* White victims experienced about 3.42 million violent incidents in 2024.* Of these, about 1.71 million incidents involved white offenders (intra‑racial), while about 0.54 million involved black offenders and about 0.27 million involved Hispanic offenders.* Black victims experienced about 0.77 million violent incidents.* Of these, about 0.40 million involved black offenders (intra‑racial), vs about 0.06 million with white offenders and about 0.12 million with Hispanic offenders.* Hispanic victims experienced about 1.16 million violent incidents, with roughly 0.27 million involving Hispanic offenders, and substantial numbers involving white or black offenders.These joint victim–offender counts allow you to identify which victim–offender race pairings are more common in terms of incident counts but still are not presented as “rates of interracial crime” in the report’s framing.Key incident counts from Table 13 (2024 NCVS legacy)All numbers below are counts of violent incidents, based on victims’ perception of offender race/Hispanic origin.* Total violent incidents involving white victims: 3,421,720.* White offender: 1,706,750* Black offender: 536,120* Hispanic offender: 271,410* “Other” race offender: 262,120* Offender race unknown: 645,320* Total violent incidents involving black victims: 773,420.* White offender: 57,370* Black offender: 402,960* Hispanic offender: 121,880 (flagged “interpret with caution”)* “Other” race offender: 54,360 (caution)* Offender race unknown: 136,850* Total violent incidents involving Hispanic victims: 1,160,980.* White offender: 334,770* Black offender: 288,130* Hispanic offender: 274,230* “Other” race offender: 36,930 (caution)* Offender race unknown: 226,920* Total violent incidents involving “other” (Asian, NHPI, AIAN, multiracial) victims: 719,720.* White offender: 217,140* Black offender: 144,420* Hispanic offender: 128,240 (caution)* “Other” race offender: 106,310 (caution)* Offender race unknown: 123,600Limitations of the report* The NCVS relies on victim self-report and perceived offender race, so all offender race numbers are based on perception, not official records.* It does not publish a simple table that directly says “X% of white victims were victimized by non‑white offenders” or “rate of interracial victimization per 1,000 by victim race”; you would need to derive that from the incident table and separate population denominators.Episode TranscriptMalcolm Collins: [00:00:00] hello, Simone. Crazy times we live in. It seems like we’re heading right into one of these.Speaker 2: It seems to be a survival guide of some kind. Survival of what? From the looks of it, a contagion outbreak of the worst kind.Speaker 4: Oh my God.Malcolm Collins: But we are right now, and what we’re going to take this episode to go over is a sea change in public opinion around racial relationships, and I think the beginning of a realization that a portion of America and the wider Western world simply did not at all care when white people died. And, and this is kind of shocking to say, but we right now had a situation where basically being a white American was beginning to feel like thisSpeaker 10: This is about protecting people, ,Speaker 9: something’s wrong.Speaker 10: Look [00:01:00] out! You did what you had to. You’re a hero. That may be true, but I’ll have to live with this the rest of my life, even though I’ll be walking around a free man.Hey, wait a minute. This kidIsn’t just whiteIs a Mormon with a large Lego companySpeaker 10: Wait, what?Speaker 9: Guilty.Malcolm Collins: My God. A- and, and when people are like, oh... Because you see on a lot of the conservative bloggers, and I’m, I’m not gonna rehash all this, have shown you the protesters outside of the Anthony trial.Speaker 19: What do you want us to do? That’s right. What, what do you want us to do at this point? What? I, I, I’m, I’m lost for word. I don’t know what to do. I got five boys. I don’t know what, I ain’t got nothing to tell them no more.Speaker 21: play out since then and what we’re watch happening now is becauseMalcolm Collins: Mm-hmm. Which we’ll go over which was very, very open-and-shut case and really i- [00:02:00] insane.They ended up raising $600,000 for the case moving into a $900,000 house and then-Simone Collins: Wait ... the- The family of the attacker?Malcolm Collins: Yes. Then he had to be, he had to s- s- basically sue the court and say, “I’m, I’m destitute,” and be repor- like supported by a public defendant. Yeah.Simone Collins: Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. So wh- Oh, okay.The attacker’s family raised a ton of money but said they were destitute?Malcolm Collins: Y- basically, they raised a ton of money. Uh-huh. They spent all of the money on personal things- Oh ... and then they said they didn’t have- And then they couldn’t afford- ... enough money to get like a defender. Oh. And they have personally reported to the media, “Oh, we didn’t do that.”And so like Snopes will say like, “Oh, this isn’t true,” but it’s one of those things where Snopes is so ideologically captured at this point, if you just... Then why is he [00:03:00] using a public defendant if he raised $600,000? Why do they have a new house? W- like, a- and why are, do they admit they have a new house in their own social media postings?There, there, there was a, a incorrect accusation at one point that they had done this, which is the funny thing, is basically the right accused them of doing this before they actually did it. Oh, and theySimone Collins: were like, “That’s a great idea.”Malcolm Collins: Yeah, but they’re like, “Yeah, we can prove we haven’t withdrawn the money yet.”And then like literally just weeks later, “Now we withdrew the money and bought a new house.” Oh,Simone Collins: huh.Malcolm Collins: But anyway, so, we have people like Cardi B saying I don’t know if you saw... Like, so it’s not just the crazy people outside of this place, like, a- and, and saying that he got a new car by the way.Simone Collins: Oh, no.Malcolm Collins: WhereSimone Collins: is- Is, so is this his brother? Because just to be, to be clear, I know, and most people have heard about this, but what happened was in December of 2025, a, an 18-year-old white university student named Henry Noak was stabbed to death multiple times with an [00:04:00] eight-inch Sikh ceremonial dagger.So this was also like specifically a- What are weMalcolm Collins: talking about? That’s, that’s not what we’re talking about right now. We’re talking about the Anthony- Wait,Simone Collins: which case are you talking about?Malcolm Collins: The Anthony case.Simone Collins: Okay, sorry. The- There are so many. Who is, who is, where-what, who, Anth-Malcolm Collins: sorry. I- We’re talking about the Anthony case, the Black guy who stabbed a white track star to death.Simone Collins: Oh, God. I didn’t even come across that. I have all these other cases that I looked at. This is becoming way too much of a pattern Wait, doMalcolm Collins: you even, there are so many random killings of white peopleSimone Collins: Yeah, no.So there’s the 2025 Dublin case where a, a 20-something illegal immigrant believed to be from Africa allegedly assaulted a 10-year-old Irish girl, and then that triggered a bunch of riots. And then there’s a, the June 2026 Belfast knife attackMalcolm Collins: whereSimone Collins: a 40, a 40-something white, Stephen O’Gifley, and, and was, was stabbed by a Sudanese refugee who was granted status in 2023, and then he was charged with attempted murder.But after, immediately [00:05:00] after that stabbing took place, obviously there was a lot of unrest over immigration. And then there was the April 2026 Belgian case of group unplanned surprise sex in a forest. H- I don’t know how else to put this. Basically nine migrant minors from various non-Western backgrounds gang- the prize sex attacked a 14-year-old Belgian schoolgirl who they filmed a- attacking in a forest after she was lured there by her 16-year-old boyfriend.And then posted it on Snapchat. And they were, they were found guilty, but they didn’t receive any prison sentences. They, they got 30 hours max of community service.Malcolm Collins: No prison sentences?Simone Collins: Yeah. Just, you know, clean the f- clean the highway for 30 hours and we’re good. We’re-Malcolm Collins: Yeah. You’re not even finding the ones that I’m finding.Like, did you- Yeah.Simone Collins: Then, then there’s the, the, the Henry Nowek case, which, which I’ve been hearing about the most on social media-Malcolm Collins: That’s the most famous- With the, this huge- But we’ll go over that later ‘cause everyone’s aware of the [00:06:00] details of it ...Simone Collins: dagger. And then there’s w- well, wait, so who, who’s this tracker?Wait,Malcolm Collins: holdSimone Collins: on. I’ve never even heard ofMalcolm Collins: this- You didn’t even find the Sudanese guy who just yesterday attacked- No ... a mentally disabled man in Ireland?Simone Collins: No, and I look at the headlines every single morning. I look at X, I look at Drudge, I look at New York Times- OrMalcolm Collins: the four- I look at Twitchy ... Iraqi guys who did a drive-by, killed a 14-year-old girl, in I wanna say Germany.No. They then moved her body off the road. The police lied to the girl’s mom, saying that it was a German who did it.Simone Collins: And- Oh, for the love ...Malcolm Collins: and then when the mom basically found out and did an investigation, she found out that none of the men even served any jail time. They, they said, “Oh, it’s a, it’s a regular hit and run,” even though they knew that they had moved her body off the road.Oh, for the- Right? Like, they, they are actively covering this up.Simone Collins: Yeah, not e- not even a hit and run, a hit and hide.Malcolm Collins: My God. So what I’m talking about, this is happening so frequently in our society now, likeSimone Collins: we, we even- Like, the, the news cycle can’t even keep up with it. It’s like, I don’t know.” No, news cycle can’t keep up with it.It’s, it’s, now, now it’s like that South Park episode on school shootings of like, “Wait, you [00:07:00] got an F on your math test?”Speaker 34: Stanley, well, do you want to tell your father about what happened at school today?Speaker 35: I flunked my math quiz.Speaker 34: No, the other thing.Speaker 36: What other thing?Speaker 35: Oh, the school shooting? Yes, the school shooting! Oh yeah, some kids shot up the school.Speaker 36: Was it you?Speaker 35: No.Speaker 36: Did you get shot?Speaker 35: No.Speaker 36: Oh. Well, what’s this about failing a math quiz?Malcolm Collins: Well, and the expectation that there will be no repercussions if you kill a white person- Mm ... has gotten so extreme that you will even have not just these crazies, like, outside a courtroom, but Cardi B tweeted, “Wow, just wow.Disgusting. This is not justice. This is trying to make an example.”, So we’ll go over the case of, of the Anthony case, which a lot of people are talking about now, and you’ll get to hear about for the first time, Simone.Simone Collins: Yes, tell me about this track star?Malcolm Collins: No, the core thing that everybody’s whining about with the Anthony case, like the other side, is they [00:08:00] go, “There were no Black jurors.”Here’s the problem. Only three Black people showed up for jury selection in this case. Oh, dear. That we are aware of.Simone Collins: Yeah, that’s-Malcolm Collins: Black people, it turns out, show up for jury selection at an extremely low rate. They showSimone Collins: up- Oh, like even disproportionate to their share of the US population?Malcolm Collins: Yes. So 44% of the time, Black people are non-responsive to jury summons.While this is a-Simone Collins: Well, I think also they dis- disproportionately may serve in jobs that are, like, hourly, and it’s really hard to get time off. You lose shifts, you lose your job. Like- ItMalcolm Collins: could be. I mean, it, it could also be less a sense of civic duty. Like, we don’t know, right? But they, they don’t show up for jury nearly as much as...What, whites show up, they only have a no-show rate of 12%. Okay Extremely low.Simone Collins: Okay.Malcolm Collins: And the three Blacks that did show up were dismissed for normal reasons, which is they were educators. And in cases involving minors, it is normal to dismiss educators. That’s just a normal part- Why is that? What?Simone Collins: Why would that [00:09:00] be?Malcolm Collins: Because they’re seen as being overly sympathetic to minors.Simone Collins: Oh, I thought they’d be overly prejudicial. It’s like, “I’m fed up with these kids. Put them in jail.” Like, minors are now This is my chance to fight back. Oh,Malcolm Collins: okay. Well, and another thing I wanna talk about that we’ll get to in the end here is all this sort of performative racism we’re seeing from the conservative side, where it’s, like, obvious they’re not real racists.It’s like, on our channel, us pretending to be racist, and I’m gonna do that whitest kids you know skit- Oh, God. Not again ...Speaker 12: all right. Guess I’m just gonna have to come out and say it. Now, don’t be mad, but I’m a little bit of a racist.Speaker 11: Oh, really? You’re a racist?Speaker 12: Yep.Speaker 11: No, you’re not.Speaker 12: What?Speaker 11: No, you’re not.Speaker 12: I am. I’m racist every day, all the time.Speaker 11: Well, call me the N-word.Speaker 12: What? Why?Speaker 11: Call me the N-word.[00:10:00]Speaker 12: I, I would. I love slaves.Speaker 11: You love slaves? -Speaker 12: ery I love slavery.Speaker 11: And what is it exactly that you love about slavery?Speaker 12: I, I think it’s awesome that you people... Not you people. Yes, you people have to work for free all the time.Simone Collins: Which I forget on cue again. Oh, yay.Malcolm Collins: But let’s go over the, It, it, oh, I’ll, I’ll, I’ll quickly go over the, the money and the fundraising. So they raised 634, 4K. What it appears happened is first they were accused of buying luxury things with it before they actually withdrew it.Then they withdrew it, hired a lawyer, right? Who was a real lawyer who they did use for a period. But then after that period was over, and it seems that, like, through most of the middle of the trial, while they were able to retain him, they don’t [00:11:00] appear to be able to have kept him on board throughout the entire trial as the main lawyer.This is Mike Howard. And then they had a state defendant. So it is, it is, there’s no way that could happen other than spending the money. Because they would need to prove to the courts that they don’t have enough money to continue to hire a lawyer. Oh,Simone Collins: that’s true. Yeah. That they just don’t... Right?Yeah, so I believe- Or I, I think, I think, can’t anyone request a, a public defendant? Let me quickly check that, ‘cause it could just be even not based onMalcolm Collins: financial- Yeah, they need to prove something called, Resisting public despite the fundrai- in indigent status and indigent status means... I mean, it’s very similar to the Black Lives Matter scam where they, they bought mansions and stuff like that with the money that was meant for Black Lives Matter and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.It, it, it, it, it designates an individual as impoverishedSimone Collins: but verify. We’re, we’re, we’re peer reviewing this. You ask Grok, I’m asking Perplexity. Like, as Mingold does. In the US, you only get a court-appointed public [00:12:00] defender if, one, you are facing a charge that can lead to jail or prison. Oh, that’s this person. Or two, the court finds you cannot afford to hire your own lawyer.You are indigent under the jurisdiction’s rules. So no, this, this person was facing a charge that could lead to jail or prison. Presumably then they could choose to have a public defender. Well,Malcolm Collins: th- whatever. They claimed were indigent. They claim to be impoverished. That’s th- th- they- TheySimone Collins: really, like, that’s, that’s, that is attested.It is, it is- ThatMalcolm Collins: is what’s attested by them, is they don’t have any money left. And I get really annoyed that even Snopes now is, like, going to bat for them when, like, the fact, why would you hire a court-appointed attorney if you still had the money? And they had the money at one point. So where didSimone Collins: the money go?That is true. That is true. Regardless of what they’re saying, it- if they’re choosing to not spend this money... I mean, I, I, if I’m really trying to steel man this, maybe they had a, a falling out or they lost faith in the lawyer and were like, “Look, I just, we have to keep going. There’s an- another hearing. We can’t miss it.We don’t have time to [00:13:00] find another lawyer. You know, no one’s willing to work with us. We gotta use a d- public defendant.”Malcolm Collins: No, they could have hired another lawyer. They had plenty of time. They didn’t have the money. Oh.Simone Collins: Wow.Malcolm Collins: S- anyway, to the points of the case, and, and, and, and this is where-Simone Collins: Here’s, here’s another thing, though.And ‘cause I was th- when I thought you were describing the Sikh family, but it could just be a case of a family cutting their losses. Like, “Look, I know that my kid- We- we’re just gonna write this kid off? The best thing we can do is, like, raise money for the rest of our family and do the best we canMalcolm Collins: and- Well, and the family’s raising money again now after the conviction, by the way.So they’re like, “Oh, the great way to raise a bunch of money.”Simone Collins: Look, you know, if you have a fail son, and your fail son’s gonna get locked away for life-Malcolm Collins: That’s generational wealth right there.Simone Collins: I mean, the reparations. It’s... I don’t know. Like, maybe there’s some psychology to it all.Malcolm Collins: Anyway, to continue on April 2nd, 2025, at a high school track meet in Frisco, Texas during a rainstorm, 17-year-old Kamiller [00:14:00] Anthony from Centennial High sought shelter under the tent of Memorial High School’s team.Austin Metcalf, 17, and others told Anthony to leave. It was their team’s tent. Words were exchanged. Anthony reportedly said something like, “Touch me and see what happens,” while reaching into his bag.Simone Collins: Oh, boy.Malcolm Collins: Metcalf pushed or grabbed Anthony to remove him, so he intentionally tried to physically try to remove him.And note it’s been attested that they asked him to leave something like 20 or 30 times-Simone Collins: Oh ...Malcolm Collins: beforehand, and it w- he clearly wasn’t supposed to be there. It was not his tent.Simone Collins: Okay ...Malcolm Collins: and while they, note, they didn’t hit, they didn’t beat him, they, they merely tried to- They just triedSimone Collins: to, like, pick him up and-Malcolm Collins: to physically removeSimone Collins: him,Malcolm Collins: yes, from their property, right? Mm. A- Anthony pulls out a folding knife and stabbed Metcalf in the chest, then fled. Metcalf died from the wound. But note, note, Anthony did say, “Is he okay?” at some point after fleeing. So- Oh ... he, he’s capable of experiencing s- s- remorse that something may happen to him?Like, I [00:15:00] can’t even... I cannot believe- Mm ... like, the one Black lady who’s like, “He, he said that.Well, you don’t know that he’s not just interested in his own...” Like, they, they... It shows that she thinks that if you are Black and you kill a white person and you express remorse- You feel badSimone Collins: about it. ...Malcolm Collins: That you shouldn’t be punished Which is astonishing.It w- the court case was so bad and biased that there was apparently a moment when the jury gasped- Ooh ... because the person defending the guy tried to suggest that the guy stabbed himself accidentally while pushing him out of the tent.Simone Collins: Oh, that, that the victim stabbed him- Yeah. The public defender tried to argue that?Malcolm Collins: Yeah, I, I mean, I love that, like, the courtroom actually gasped upon hearing this.Simone Collins: Mm.Malcolm Collins: Now, as to why everybody considers this such an open-and-shut case for self-defense law, which is what they tried to say, which is the wildest thing ever. You can’t go onto somebody else’s property and then claim self-defense when they’ve repeatedly [00:16:00] asked you to leave.Simone Collins: Oh, isn’t that kinda how states that don’t have stand-your-ground... A- actually, isn’t that even kinda how stand-your-ground rules-Malcolm Collins: This, this was a stand-your-ground state.Simone Collins: Oh, okay.Malcolm Collins: So for a stand-your-ground state, a reasonable belief of imminent unlawful force or deadly harm, which obviously wasn’t the case here.Yeah. The response must be proportional and involve provocation by defender. Obviously the court clearly- So theySimone Collins: should each be trying to pick each other up here.Malcolm Collins: Yeah.Simone Collins: Yeah, okay.Malcolm Collins: No duty to retreat from some situations, but you can’t escalate or bring a weapon into a minor dispute. Again, like, he fails at literally every level of what you need for a stand-your-ground law to, to work.Anthony , had the knife ready and issued a threat. Like, he basically brought a knife and issued a threat, right? Like, you can’t do that with stand your ground. Witnesses said he reached into his bag and warned, “Touch me and see what happens,” before physical contact.This looks like premeditated escalation rather than pure reaction. He didn’t just happen to have the pocketknife with him. A pole is not a deadly threat. And we have multiple consistent with [00:17:00] witnesses.So to go over some other cases that have looked like this where we sort of see the opposite reaction of this you know, instead of, like, the person of color automatically you know, having to face any repercussions that I think created the assumption of no repercussions.You have Tamar, 14, from Marken, this is near Amsterdam, oh, so it was in Germany left home at night after an argument with her parents about going to bed. She was walking along a dark road. She was struck by a gray Mazda car, but her body was found dragged to the side of the road just, like, dragged into a ditch after murdered, a 14-year-old kid.The car contained four Iraqi men one of whom was the driver. And they were seeking asylum status. In Germany with German plates. Police initially told the m- mother of the, of, of, of the girl that it was a German driver, even though they knew that it wasn’t. When asked why they had deliberately lied to the parents of a dead and grieving girl, they said, “Oh, it was we didn’t want the Wilders effect.”That is a politician, Geert [00:18:00] Wilders. That’s like saying we don’t want to boost Trump or MAGA, like a mainstream political movement. It’s not even, like, racism. We are afraid of it helping a mainstream politician in the Netherlands, and they just never got any repercussions for doing this. You know what the Iraqis had to pay?A single 1,500 pound euro fine now-Simone Collins: That, that can’t be in, in like concurrence with law in Germany, right? Like, that’s not what happens. That’s not what’s supposed to happen with males. Well, it’sMalcolm Collins: not what happens to Germans, but... And this is what I’m talking about, where it’s actually gotten to the point where the law is just being applied completely separately.If you see our episode in the... I mean, and, and especially when you look at all of this and then you look at, at instances where the law is, you know, protecting rich white people. Oh, oh, they’re fine. Like, look at the bricks and minifigs situation, right? You know? But when you look at the, the way that it’s being applied to like average people.When we had the case of you know, the guy trying to defend someone [00:19:00] on the subway and ends up killing the guy, right? And everyone was just like, “How could you do that? How could you defend yourself? You’re just supposed to lie down and take it.” And what I want to sort of go through in this episode is just sort of normalize how far we’ve come as a society.That you are just supposed to let yourself be stabbed at this point. And th- this is what some communities have normalized to. And it’s leading to really bad action in mass. You know, we have instances, like during the Black Lives Matter protests, that we now know that people were burned alive in that protest, right?You know, bodies have been found in, in some of the stories. I, I know at least one, I think more than one.Speaker 23: Yeah, , a man, , Oscar Lee Stewart, had his store looted and was locked inside, and it was deliberately lit on fire, and he was burned alive. , And so i-if, if you didn’t hear about this, this, this is huge. 19 to 25 people were killed in the riots. N- nobody talks about it. Nobody cares about it. It’s insaneMalcolm Collins: You know, they, they... we... And this wasn’t widely report- like, this wasn’t something that [00:20:00] the progressive media covered, right? Like we- Yeah,Simone Collins: this is my first time hearing about that. That’s terrifying.Malcolm Collins: We have allowed society to enter a degree of just pure degeneracy that cannot be allowed to stand. And in Europe, there’s not even really parties attempting to fight this in a big way. Like, w- when you talk about the mainstream, like the Wilder party or Reform in the UK or the AFD, these keep being called fringe movements.They frame centrist rightism, like the AFD run by a lesbian in an interracial marriage with kids you know, as a, a, a far-right party is, is, is comical. They, they’re like, “Well, they’re far right because they want to get rid of immigrants.” And it’s like, how could you not want to get rid of immigrants if this is the case?If they’re making up... In some of these countries, I’ll, I’ll read after this, but I think it’s like 80% of rapes in some of these countries, right?Speaker 24: A Lund University 21-year study showed that of grape convictions, only 37% had Swedish parents. If you look [00:21:00] at a country like Germany, despite being only 10% of the population, immigrants account for 40% of SAs. And we see this all over the place throughout Europe. It’s just horrible.Malcolm Collins: You know, and we do need to, in the United States, even with the Native American Black population you know, we do need to get more realistic in how we’re having these conversations.They make up a rate of homicides that 6x their population, right? They-Simone Collins: Yeah, so if you look... Like, this is something people are discussing a lot in this discourse. Like, especially for this one 2024 Department of Justice report that gives counts on percentages of violent incidents by the race- Of origin of victims and offenders based on, based on victims’ perceptions, so that’s a caveat there.But it reports 57,370 white-on-black incidents, but then 536,120 black-on-white incidents. [00:22:00] That is-Malcolm Collins: And did you see the rates? The rate stats were almost comical when they came out. Mm-hmm. Where it showed that there wasn’t, in the year of recording, a single instance of white-on-black rape in the United States during that year.This was the National Crime Victimization Survey, a mainstream nonpartisan crime surveyMalcolm Collins: I’m gonna find those statistics to read them, because it’s just, it, that’s where it just gets comical, right? Like, oh, so this is really a unidirectional violence that we’re dealing with here.Simone Collins: But I also, I, rather than, I, I wanna make sure that we don’t just straw man the other side while you’re looking at those stats.Malcolm Collins: Well, no, hold on. If you look at- So- This is, this is from Penn, an Ivy League university in the United States. There was also a Harvard study that showed this, but I’ll just go into the Penn one. Mm-hmm. Regardless of socioeconomic status, Black communities face higher gun homicides. Well, and itSimone Collins: says- Yeah.And to be clear, like 60, in the 60s for both whites and Blacks and, and other groups, 60%-ish, or, like between 60% and 70% are, of crimes are race-on-race. Like white-on-white, Black-on-Black. Like the crimes are, are typically [00:23:00] concentrated in your own group.Malcolm Collins: Right. But the point I’m making here is that these are higher rates even when you’re...So you can’t be like, “Oh, it’s because of historic discrimination,” or something like that. It, it is- No ... because of... And, and why not? If, if you are a Black person and you’re growing up, like, and you see everyone in your community being like, “Of course a kid shouldn’t go to jail for stabbing a kid when he was asked to be re- like multiple times to be removed from the property and they had to eventually physically remove him.That’s a totally normal thing for someone of our community to do.” When they act with shock at this they, they then for young Black kids, they grow up and they think, “This is a type of thing I do. This is a type of thing that’s normal for me to do.”Speaker 15: Webster defines aSpeaker 15: moment as a moment when ignorance overwhelms the mind of an otherwise logicalSpeaker 15: male.Speaker 14: What did you say, b***h ?Speaker 14: Hey, squeeze it, .Speaker 15: Causing him to act in an illogical, [00:24:00] self-destructive manner, i.e.,like a .Speaker 15: But they all end up bad. If they had their own category,Speaker 15: moments would be the third leading killer of Black men behind pork chops and FEMA. It’s a fact.EverySpeaker 15: moment begins with a .Speaker 15: Without that key element, all you’re left with is peace and quietMalcolm Collins: And it’s, it’s true within the immigrant community, it’s true within these, these Sikh communities with these Muslim communities that are immigrating into these countries.When they see these communities have these protests about like, “We should be able to do this,” which we’ve actually seen counter-protests. When people have gone out there to protest, like the, the guy the, we’ll talk about this case now. The white kid who was stabbed and then the, the Sikh kid’s family tried to hide the wea- the weapon.His mom hid the wea- weapon. His, his brothers were complicit in this. The police believed him even though he told them multiple times, “I, I’ve been stabbed, I’m dying.” And we now see these anti-discrimination procedures that they have to go through, [00:25:00] and what the anti-discrimination procedures basically say is you need to always presume the white person is at fault.Well, itSimone Collins: would explain why what happened happened. I, I don’t know if you’ve seen footage from that particular incident, but like Yeah, it, it, it does kind of feel like they’re acting on procedure of like... That, plus also it genuinely seemed like they didn’t believe the white kid. Like, they were like, “Yeah, sure you have been.”Like, “I don’t see anything.” Like, whining.Malcolm Collins: Yeah, well, I mean, police in the UK are awful, generally speaking. Like my- I haven’tSimone Collins: had any encounters with them, so I don’t know.Malcolm Collins: My experience is they’re like, well this is what happens when you take away their guns and you put them in the far left environment of the UK, is they begin to act like ultra Karens.Simone Collins: Well, I wouldn’t wanna be a police officer in the UK. I mean, to be a police officer without a gun, I’d be terrified. Yeah. But what, it, it is, like that is, I think in terms of the, the social media posts that were made online that I’ve seen, the worst are around that case. Like, this one guy on X posted, “The Sikh man and his family are not walking around looking to [00:26:00] stab people.Henry Nowak was a drunk racist abusing the Punjabi and got what he deserved. The police correctly identified the drunk aggressor and just didn’t realize he was stabbed.” Like, that is notMalcolm Collins: good. This, again, what I’m saying here is they genuinely... We need to move, because I think it can sound like people are being hyperbolic.And I, and I wanna go through some articles where, where people talk about, like, the, they’re so concerned about the rise in reportings of these crimes. And like, The Guardian of course has a piece, panicked that these crimes are being reported at higher rates now. And we need to go from the they want you dead isn’t hyperbolic.It’s what they when, every time they cheer when they say... Because historically this is how it started. It’s like, oh, the number of you know, whites will no longer be a majority in the country. White populations are going down. And you would see at leftist rallies they would cheer. This really happened, right?We would see them cheer. Eh, that means, [00:27:00] oh, this is exciting for us. Like, we are getting rid of this population. H- A, a generation raised singing that and normalizing for that is of course not going to mind as much when they see white people being killed, and is going to react absolutely in panic when they see white people defending themselves, which is what we repeatedly see.Of a continuous post here.Simone Collins: So an- another response that’s really common with, like, this specific Si- Sikh stabbing incident is, “Sikhs are fighting back. Unprecedented moves.” This is from Baakara Amri. “Innocent Sikhs have been targeted while the elderly and vulnerable are being urged to stay indoors following the sentencing of Bikram Dhingra.Amrit Singh from Hounslow and Mas- “west London has launched a website for Sikhs across the country to report incidents of hate crime. The site has received numerous reports in the past five days, with many respondents believing the abuse they experienced was linked to Dhingra’s conviction.‘Will you report any anti-Sikhs crimes?’ The British Sikhs 2025 [00:28:00] report found 40 thou- 49% of British Sikhs were already worried about rising anti-Sikh sentiment. Many reported being mistaken for Muslims or targeted simply for wearing a turban, according to the report. Here is the reason why. Far-right mobilization.”So what, what... And this is a really common pattern across most of these incidents, which is instead of respond to the actual crime or to condemn the actual aggressors- Mm-hmm. Yeah ... in these crimes, they’re like, “You know what? This is just the right trying to use this to radicalize people.” And instead of having a real conversation about what’s going on of, like, this is not acceptable.We have to punish these people. They cannot be lenient punishments. We need to reconsider deportations. We need to reconsider immigration. Instead it’s like, “No, no, no. You’re just, you’re just hating on people.” And that, I think, is where I feel like the conversation is just people screaming across the bow to each other, is that there has, from what I can tell, actually been a policing double [00:29:00] standard in favor of white populations in majority white countries, and to the disfavor of non-whites.Like per organizations like The Sentencing Project, evidence from policing and sentencing and media coverage shows a true racial double standards, at least historically, have existed. They just happen to be, you know, a- against, you know, the favor of-Malcolm Collins: Well, I mean, we can, we can... So one-Simone Collins: I think what’s happening, though, what I’m trying to say- We know that this happened-is maybe right now people are over-correcting for hysteric- sorry, historical favoritism toward white people, historical bias, and they’re going too far. And now what needs to happen is a market correction. But one side, the progressives, people on the left, are just so, like, stuck in the there is discrimination.There is discrimination that they can’t see that maybe they’ve over-corrected at this point. And then on the right, they’re just so angry that the left isn’t even listening to them that they’re getting more and more extreme and shouting louder and louder.Malcolm Collins: Yeah, and that, the entire point I’m making is I think that that is the [00:30:00] wrong takeaway from all of this.Simone Collins: Really? Okay.Malcolm Collins: Yes. Yes. I think that for a long time that has been my position. My position has been this is just marginal over-correction. But when I look at the posts and the people, when I look at how incensed they were that Anthony was charged, when I look at them saying, “Oh, it’s good that the Sikh killed this kid in the street and that the police let him die,” what I’m seeing, when you see mainstream figures, not just online crazies, like Cardi B saying that this is disgusting, that, you know, justice was carried out, what we are seeing here is a m- a large part of the left, and especially these minority communities, genuinely believe that The law should not apply to their communities.They, they, they, their communities should be allowed to kill this other group with impunity because this other group is so beneath them, so beneath in, in the long for- This is why we [00:31:00] saw, and I think we should have assumed this, when we saw the people having the parties for the October 11th attacks, you know, before the IDF did anything in response or anything like that, on college campuses around the United States they really believe, and watch our video on Zoran Mandani where we break the psychology and politics of this that the world exists in two classes: the oppressor and the oppressed.And anyone who’s in oppressed class, even if they functionally have societal power which they do today if they’re in the oppressed class, they can do anything they want to the oppressor, and it is never immoral. So when they go and, you know, Hamas is dragging girls away from a peace protest, right, which was what it was, the big concert that they had, and gang raping them and murdering them in horrific ways, this isn’t bad because girl was of oppressor class, the other side was of the oppressed class.And I think that this is hidden from a lot of, a lot of people under the mindset that you are going right now, which is just [00:32:00] like, “Oh, we over-corrected.” This isn’t over-corrected. This is cheering when people are brutally graped or murdered and things alike, like the police actively lying to a girl’s parents about the ethnicity of who just killed a 14-year-old girl.That isn’t like,Simone Collins: Yeah, no, that, that is, that is something that’s atrocious That’sMalcolm Collins: like the height of like Jim Crow South and stuff like that when I went through-Simone Collins: Yeah, oh, and also correction, I completely mixed up in my head Nicki Minaj and Cardi B. Cardi B is very anti-Trump. Nicki Minaj is the person who, like, showed up s- with some support for Trump, and people on the left defenestrated her for that, of course.So it’s Nicki Minaj who’s being boycotted.Malcolm Collins: Yeah, when you have something like a teenage girl being gang graped in the woods and, and, and no one is sent to jail for this.Simone Collins: I mean, to be fair, they were like age 11 to 16, so it might just be about like minor offenses, but I think there are plenty of cases- That’s not aOctavian Collins: minor offense.Simone Collins: No, no, no, but [00:33:00] they are minors, and they are offe- They murdered a girl. They are a threat. I n- Malcolm, they are minors. They are below the age of 18. Yeah, IMalcolm Collins: know. They should still go to jail. They’re clearly a threat to their community.Simone Collins: Right. I mean, there are certainly exceptions in which minors are tried as adults.I just don’t knowMalcolm Collins: You don’t need to be tried as adult. There’s prisons for minors. What are you talking about?Simone Collins: Oh, well, I, I mean, who knows how it works in other countries. I, I mean-Malcolm Collins: No, you can go to jail as a minor. There,Simone Collins: there’s entire prison- They’re extremelyMalcolm Collins: lenient in many European countries And you don’t get to just murder or grape someone because you’re a minor.And the mindset it shows to not only video... This is what I’m talking about when I saySimone Collins: they think about- No, it’s so sick, and it’s, it’s truly sick. It’s, it’s, it’s horrific. It, yeah ... to video it,Malcolm Collins: put it on Snapchat. To do that shows you don’t believe you’re going to be punished.Simone Collins: Yeah, they, they, they expected some level of impunity, and they got it.And- I mean, like, they weren’t wrong to do that ... and then they got it. Yeah.Malcolm Collins: This is the thing that’s changing. When you’re like, “It’s a m- it’s a minor change”- Yeah,Simone Collins: I guess if we live in a society in which young [00:34:00] teens believe that they can do such a thing, post it to Snapchat, and, and not be that at high risk and actually get caught, and then only get 30 hours community service shows how bad it is, I guess.Malcolm Collins: Yeah. And I think that w- I think the wrong takeaway from this, right? Which I think some of the right is going to have, is that this means that we need to exclude all members of these communities from our faction. And that, that is a huge mistake, because you don’t have enough white people to win elections.The, in, in, in fact, a lot of this mindset, while it is prevalent in some of these minority communities, is coming downstream of, of white women. Okay? You don’t have the votes to win if you try to take a racialist perspective, like, say, a Nick Fuentes does. If you want to win, you need to get on our team- P- people who want their group to behave respectably and want their [00:35:00] group to be held accountable.That, that, once you get that, then, then it works. It’s okay. Bring them over, right? But that’s the world we need to move to if, if we’re gonna win, realistically. And then with everyone else, I think we need to get dramatically harsher. And I think that we are seeing a model of the way that the West or the United States at least, should reorient the way it sees people who...And, and, and groups that are acting bad. I think Israel is sort of modeling the direction we need to go. And I think that that’s one reason why they make such a natural and strong ally right now, is some people are like, “Well, you know, Jews see themselves as a distinct group,” and yes, they have, you know...I can go to Israel and have a great life. Like I’ve, I’ve, I’ve been to Israel before. It’s a really nice place. You don’t face... At, at least when I was there, I never got any sense of any discrimination. It’s not that there aren’t parts of Israel you can’t go where you will face discrimination but that’s true of anywhere, right?You know, there are white communities where you’ll face discrimination in the United States. There’s Black [00:36:00] communities where you’ll face discrimination in the United States. But the, the overall, they’ve created a multi-ethnic society in Israel and a multicultural society. But it is still a society where there is a, a ethnic identity and cultural identity and religious identity sort of recognized.And I think that that is the direction that we can go in the United States that will be sane. And we actually see, like a lot of people can think, “Oh, you’re not gonna peel off, you know, Black voters.” We actually have a significant Black fan base, first of all, for people who are unaware of that. And in addition to that when the left tries to do all these crazy things like de- go, defund the police and stuff like this, on average Black people, when I talk about like wh- whites don’t have enough money not enough votes to win on their own on average, Black voters were more anti-defund the police than the average white voter.Note here, I’m not talking about like Republican white voters. I’m talking about the average white voter. That means you can peel off people easier [00:37:00] from the Black side than the white side on this particular issue. And the a- answer is, is because when you recognize, oh, this community is more violent, because as Simone said, they are disproportionately the subject of that violence And you say, “Okay, this means we need to act in a different way when engaging with this community,” the, the, the, the people who benefit from that the most are the people from that community.That’s why Blacks didn’t want the police defunded, right? Like, a- and if you, if you look at... Well, I mean, you’ve, you’ve obviously got different portions of these communities, but the Blacks who still have healthy families and are having lots of kids are, from what I’ve seen, universally in this conservative camp.It is, a- a- and note, there are a lot of, you know, raised without dad stuff in the Black community. The, the rate is astonishingly high. But I don’t think that that is going to continue to be a problem going [00:38:00] forwards, because we’ve seen the Black fertility rate drop below the white fertility rate in the United States.If you’re not aware of that, that, that happened. Not controlling for income, just raw numbers dropped below the white fertility rate. I, I remember when I mentioned that on the stream, people were, like, confused. They thought it was like... Watch our episode on it. Like, we go over all the data. Like, like, if you look at native-born Blacks, they have a desperately low fertility rate in the United States.Most of the Black fertility rate is pumped up by immigrants. Native Blacks mainly have a fertility rate of, like, 1.3 at this point. And so, what, what basically what I’m saying is this is a community we can eventually get on team.Speaker 22: Reverend Jordan Wells. I’m a Black man, proud conservative, and a follower of Jesus Christ. When I see protesters outside the Collin County Courthouse chanting, “F**k white lives,” after Karmelo Anthony’s sentencing for murdering Austin Metcalf, my soul grieves. This isn’t justice. This isn’t community. This is a demonic hatred, plain and simple.All lives are made in the image of God, every single one, Black, white, brown, doesn’t matter. Celebrating the loss... This is, this is [00:39:00] true. Celebrating the loss of any innocent life or cheering on evil because of skin color is straight from the pit of hell. And here’s the truth they don’t want to say out loud.When Black conservatives, Christians, or truth tellers like me call this out, we get labeled as traitors, Uncle Toms, or betrayers of the community. It’s true. Let them talk. I’d rather be disliked by some in my own community than stand before a holy God and be found guilty of excusing evil, hating my neighbor, or twisting justice for racial points.My allegiance is to Christ first, not color, not tribe, not political pressure. Woe to those who call evil g- good and good evil, Isaiah 5:20. I ch- I choose truth over tribe, light over darkness, God over man. Who else is tired of the hate? Drop a prayer hands if you stand for real justice, not skin colorMalcolm Collins: You know, reacting with hostility to everyone in the community.But when it comes to the people who are doing things like protesting the Anthony ver- verdict or stuff like that, you know, the people [00:40:00] who we see, you know, the Cardi B’s and stuff like that, the level of anonymity we need to have to these people should be as if, you know, th- like, like they have genocidal intentions.The people who cheer when the white population is falling, they’re doing that because they want to get rid of this population. In every other context we call that genocide, and they have violent genocidal intentions. And that’s the way we need to reframe how we see who we are up against. We need to be the side of true and genuine diverse groups working together to win and preserve civilization against the racist spastics.And the left has become the team of racists. I mean, you’ve got Nick Fuentes on the left now saying he’s a moderate Democrat, voting leftists since forever. You’ve got the Islamists there. You’ve got the, the the gay extremists there. Watching the Islamists and the gays fight over pride was hilarious.But the point being is every one of the mainstream racist factions, like David Duke went to the left, right? Like the, the, the head of the KKK [00:41:00] went to the left, right? Every one of the major racist factions in the United States has naturally drifted to the left because the left has become a coalition of supremacist groups that are simply living in denial about the fact that they’re not at the top of that particular coalition, or that think that once they knock society down, their side will rise from the ashes.And th- this is what we’re seeing. Like, obviously the gays know that the Islamists want them, you know... I think it’s, what? 35% of American Muslims, and these are the ones who are having the majority of kids in Muslim communities, want Sharia law. Like, that’s literally want them dead. That’s not like a, a figurative thing or something like that.But they, they are aware of this. And same, like Nick Fuentes is aware of this as well, right? Like David Duke’s aware of this as well. But they just think that, oh, well, once they knock things down, once they, they, they don’t wanna be in a faction that allows Indians in. They don’t wanna be in a faction that allows Jews in when they’re willing to play ball, right?But we need those groups to win, right? D- even [00:42:00] just, like outside of the morality of this and everything like that, we need them to win because the right is the side of the honest conversation. And if the honest conversation says w- we are going to create a society where you are treated, you know, in, in, in a way that is demonstrably unfair or something like that then they’re gonna be like, “Well, I don’t, I don’t wanna be a part of that coalition,” right?Whereas the left, they can have these conversations where one minute they say something Islamist and the next minute they go to Pride, right? Because it, there’s no inter- it doesn’t matter whether they’re being logical or, or not. But as long as we are the logical conversation, we can’t play that game, and we need to push back against people who are performatively racist not to showBecause there’s, like, the jokey performative racism, which a, a lot of people on the right do to sort of show in group where they’re not truly being spiteful about a group, right? But they’re saying something that’s edgy, and so you know, “Okay, yeah, he’s one of us,” right? Like I can, I can take [00:43:00] what he’s saying seriously.An, an example of this, Leaflet actually had a really funny joke, is she was looking at all the protesters outside the Anthony trial, and she said that she should start a stand for you know, that juice-soaked pineapple trend. Have you not seen the juice-soaked pineapple trend?Simone Collins: I heard there’s something about pineapples and Kool-Aid and the CIA that’s floating about the internet, but not this.Black peopleMalcolm Collins: apparently, like, invented this thing where they sort of pickle a pineapple in heavily sugared juice.And it’s an extremely high calorie thing, and there’s videos of, like, fat Black woman eating it, and then Asmongold tried it, and he said it’s disgusting. But it’s become, like, the, the joke, the Black thing, right?And, and so she said that’s not genuinely being mean to that group or anything like that. It’s just being edgy. Like- It’s like the, I don’t know, the, the w- w- with the watermelons of our generation or something like that. Oh. Or the fried chicken of our generation. It’s like,Simone Collins: if you- Well, isn’t it kind of like making fun of [00:44:00] a basic white b***h for liking pumpkin spice lattes?Malcolm Collins: Yes. It’s exactly like a, a basic white b***h l- And, and it’s so weird that for a while in our society you could say, “Oh, pumpkin spice latte,” like, as a joke about white women, right? And everyone would laugh. And you say fried chicken, why, why, why is that a problem to say? Like, fried chicken’s a tasty thing, right?Like, it’s not like- Really good ... disparaging a community to say that they like fried chicken. It’s not like saying they likeSimone Collins: being- It’s a testament to good taste. Now all I want is Wing Bucket. No.Malcolm Collins: Yeah, like if, if, if, if you were talking about, like, okay, maybe if you say that, like, Indians smell like curry or something.I mean, I generally think curry smells good, but, like, I could see that being disparaging. But saying you like fried chicken is just like- Saying you have to- Duh ... is disproportionately true in the community. It’s like a known- Yeah ... bla, bla, bla. But we as- Yeah, yeah, yeah ... a society just, like, acted like, “Oh my God, you can’t do that,” which shows one thing- Yeah, ISimone Collins: guess it’s-exactly ... maybe there’s an episode in that on its own. I’d kind of like to explore, [00:45:00] like, why kind of teasing a, a racial, national, or ethnic group about food sometimes is okay and sometimes not. Like, if someone’s like, “Oh, those natto-eating Japanese,” like, I don’t really know anyone who eats natto who’s not Japanese.And it’s really- What the heck is natto? I think it’s really gross. Most people, even, like, a lot of Japanese people think it’s really gross, but, like, talking about it isn’t gonna make it get me in trouble, whereas, like- What is natto? Natto is a very, very healthy but kinda st- like, really, like, mucusy fermented soybean.Really good for you, like incredibly healthy food. But-Malcolm Collins: Okay ...Simone Collins: yeah, I’m, I’m not for itMalcolm Collins: Are you workshop slurs here? Natto eaters, is that too much of a-Simone Collins: Na- natto, N-A-T-T-O, natto. PeopleMalcolm Collins: aren’t even gonna be able to pronounce this. This is ridiculous. You’re- Well, anyway- You’reSimone Collins: not even- I, I don’t get it.Like, it’s, it’s one of those things of, like, can, can you not? Like, like, I know that... Like, I stayed with a Japanese family once where, like, one, one family member would eat it every morning for breakfast. He was a doctor. He knew how good it was for you, and it’s like a [00:46:00] very traditional Japanese, like, breakfast food over rice.And, like, the rest of the family was like, “That’s nasty.” But, like, but but then I’m sure there are lots of people per this, like, pineapple dish you’re describing, within communities where it’s popular who are like, “That’s nasty.” And I think that there are lots of people in the white community who are like, “I am not ever going to touch a pumpkin spice latte.I, I am, I’m a purist. I only drink espresso from the specially sourced coffee bean.” Right? Like- Right ... why is it weird to... Anyway, we’re getting off topic. Well, because it’s weird becauseMalcolm Collins: we created a racial caste system. That is what happened. It was a caste system where different social norms applied to different groups.This is historically what we called racism where one group had specific social norms around their behavior that was expected to be followed, and they got, they, they got used to it being the case that they couldn’t be criticized as a group.Simone Collins: Oh, Germans and krauts. So there, there was that against white people, and doughboys.Well,Malcolm Collins: potato [00:47:00] eaters, you know,Simone Collins: I don’t... Was potato eaters this? I’ve never heard potato eaters. I’ve heard krauts. I’ve heard doughboys. This is for the Irish Well, yeah, but I’ve never heard someone say that. I’ve heard people say krauts. I’ve heard people say-Malcolm Collins: Yeah, but it, th- those terms are horrible.But the point being is imagine when you’re trying to understand how somebody could, like, be like, “Oh, it’s disgusting that this person was tried for a crime they obviously committed,” right? How you end up with that mindset is you first have to live a life where your group is never responsible for the things it does, and this is genuinely the world they lived in.When you could not talk about Black crime statistics without being yelled at for being a racist, that means that they grew up without hearing that at equivalent rates of incomes, Black have significantly higher rates of homicides, right? Like a, a, a per- when... Because that wasn’t part of the conversation, it warped their brains.Because they grew up seeing, like, “Oh, I can just Snapchat myself graping someone, and I get off scot-free,” right? Like, it warped their perception, and it’s funny that the left [00:48:00] n- normalize this term, but when you grow up with privilege being treated equally feels like persecution. And we as a society, even on the right, even you, a sane person, I think didn’t realize how much privilege many of these people grew up with.The feeling that whenever they are... And we see this in our society. Whenever they you know, suppose they, like, run a scam on a place and they get caught. Now all of a sudden they can scream racism, right? You know, with, with, with bricks and minifigs being like, “Oh, this is anti-Mormon bigotry,” right?You know, getting so used to claiming this group status means that you personally, maybe your entire life, never really felt what responsibility feels like because it was always the other person’s fault because you were always taught to make it the other person’s fault. And that allowed you to violently escalate like this.And I think that we, like, when you talk about how do you, and every, every, [00:49:00] I think, like, Black person or a Muslim who actually cares about the future of their communities. Well, Muslims are a bit different because they have a different long-term goal, but Black person at least in the United States. When they think about how they wanna fix their community, they know step one is responsibility.Like, when they’re being... Because you can’t begin to teach anything else until you can teach responsibility. And if you watch older Black content, this was the core thing that they were trying to teach. They were like, “This is the direction we need to go as a people.” And it was something that was even core to Black culture, as we point out.In the 1950s, Blacks had half the rate of out-of-wedlock births that the white population had. But anyway, thoughts, Simona. Am I, am I going too far here?Simone Collins: I still feel like there’s something missing in the discourse. Like, there’s something missing in How, like what, these people who are posting like, “Well [00:50:00] good, I’m glad that this person did this.”‘Cause what, what they’re saying is, I think what I worry about is that we’re just seeing an increased escalation where it’s like a Chinese finger trap, right? Where like one side is like really, really mad and then the other side starts pulling away too, and then like we just keep doing this and it gets tighter.No, no,Malcolm Collins: no, no, no, no, no, no. You’re completely misinterpreting what you, what, what you’re seeing. What you saw was one side that secretly had really, really atrocious, abhorrent, evil perspectives, opinions, and goals, but that didn’t publicly voice it. And the other side now being like, “Wait, you’re not actually saying it’s okay to just stab a white kid, right?Like, and it’s, you don’t actually think he should face... You don’t actually think that you should be able to kill a white girl then have the police cover for you, right?” And the other side being like, “No, that is our position.” And you hearing them say, “No, that is our position,” [00:51:00] your confusion comes from the fact that you feel like they have reactively backed into this position when that’s not what happened.This is just their revealed preferences for a long time finally being forced to be put on the tableThat’s, that’s... And I, I think if you think about these positions, if you look at the writings of Dorhan Montani, the way they talk about colonizers versus colonized the way that they, they talk about any of this, right? Like you even talked to me about this where you, there’s this phenomenon of white progressive women feeling like they have to go ask people for permission to have children ‘cause they do not want to accidentally increase the white population, right?Like, that is an, a racial underclass when you’re at that, that point. And I think that we as a society overly tried to think of them as just sort of like a more extreme position of like whatever Democrats were in the ‘90s or whatever, and that’s not what we’re seeing here, okay? We’re seeing a political ideology [00:52:00] that needs to be responded to with, I think, a level of force that we in the United States are not used to needing to use.But it, it-Simone Collins: So explicitly then, what is your proposed solution?Malcolm Collins: As I’ve said, I think the politics of right-wing I- Israel is the politics the right-wing United States needs to move towards. I think that that is the, the realistic... Like basically a lot of people are gonna have to be deported. A lot of people are gonna have to be deported, and it’s not gonna look nice.But we need to stop sympathizing with obvious bad actors and understand that the enablers of the bad actors are as bad as the bad actors themselves because they prevent punishment from being handed out. If you’re the person who lets go of the grapist, right, like the gang grapist and then they go out and do that to somebody else, you’re as responsible as they are for that, and we need [00:53:00] to be applying that responsibility throughout society.To people like Cardi B, to people like the people who are tweeting this, to The Guardian, to these leftist organizations and politicians. While ensuring that we do not normalize an environment where people of different backgrounds do not feel comfortable because they can help us, right? They can be our biggest enforcers.And the, you know, the Sikhs, like, yeah, we, yeah, we need to get rid of the bad actors in the Sikh community. We need to get rid of these immigrants who are coming here, taking all the... That’s a person who you can get to vote for you, and now you can win, you can win elections, right? Or you can have run on your side and win an election, right?Like, I know you may not like it. You may have to hold your nose now that you’ve developed some sort of like racial consciousness, but your racial conscious ideals will never win in an environment where you act as an eth- an a, an antagonistic ethno-nationalist rather than a team [00:54:00] player.Simone Collins: Yikes.Malcolm Collins: And I feel strongly about this ‘cause we can never do anything about the bad actors as long as we enable the bad actors on our side that prevent us from winning the big tent.Simone Collins: Yeah. Yeah, no, that’s true because, well, they’re, they’re the primary blocker of genuinely moving forward as long as they, they get to, like, represent the movement or become, at least be accused of being a face of it even if they’re not.‘Cause that’s the, I think the big problem is all these people on the left are refusing to even engage with any critical thinking because a single person who is genuinely racist is showing up in the protests, right? And then, like, that, the presence of that one person- AndMalcolm Collins: that allows them... Th- I mean, think about what the left’s saying.They say if one racist person comes, we can just kill them. Yeah,Simone Collins: it renders everyone else’s opinions entirely moot. They, they don’t count. But remember,Malcolm Collins: it’s that it renders everyone else, because they say, you know, kill a [00:55:00] Nazi, right? E- everyone else now, because anyone who goes into a room with a Nazi is a Nazi, as they say.So if one bad actor shows up at a protest, and remember they’re considered, like, just MAGA Nazis at this point which is more than 50% of the American population they, they consider everyone there a target to be murdered, right? Like, as we’ve seen from their repost. And I think that we on the right just need to wake up and realize that.They’re not just saying it. It is, it is, they’re doing it, right? Like, it’s, it’s, it’s, it, th- they’re cheering for it. You have to stand up in a way that can allow you to win. Yeah. And the way that... And that’s the other thing. I just get so angry. I have as much anger at an individual like Nick Fuentes as I do against one of these people because he is functionally protecting them through his politics.And I think you should view him with as much disgust as somebody like Cardi B.Simone Collins: Does he express racist,Malcolm Collins: like- He won’t build partnerships with, like, Indians or [00:56:00] people in interracial relationships like JD Vance.Simone Collins: You know? Oh, right, I forgot. Right, even that was too far for him.Malcolm Collins: Yeah, so- Okay ... you’re never gonna win.You’re never gonna win in the United States with those views. So it’s stupid and it prevents us from actually creating an accountable country Anyway Love you. Hopefully I- This is depressing because ISimone Collins: don’t see this resolving anytime soon.Malcolm Collins: I love we had a, w- I’ve been posting instead of just the boring gear, I was like, “Oh, let’s post some RFAB images,” right?And I’ve been posting images of my wife, and somebody thought they were a sexualized Catholic nun, and I’mSimone Collins: like- Two, two people thought that they were nuns and as- Did you respondMalcolm Collins: to them?Simone Collins: I did. Th- that is disappointing because nuns and Puritans do not dress the same at all. Like, there’s a very big difference between a habit and a bonnet, but-Malcolm Collins: No, a habit and a bonnet look nothing alike.Your outfit looks nothingSimone Collins: like a nun. Well, there, there are many different types of habits with different forms of cowls or no [00:57:00] cowls, and some, some habits I know of some orders do look quite minimal, but they never look like bonnets, but I don’t know. I mean, what are you gonna do? Yeah,Malcolm Collins: you can tell by your outfit.It had a clear Protestant church behind it in multiple of the images, right? You know, a, y- your, your outfit is incredibly distinct. You dress like a medieval woman. Which by the way, we want to make more of a thing. When I learned that Leaflet in real life dresses this way, and, like, a bunch of other people dress this way-Simone Collins: Yeah, it seems like other people in the, the base camp world also have wives who dress this way.Malcolm Collins: Yeah, weSimone Collins: need to make this, like, the, the conservative womanly- Or themselves dress this way ...Malcolm Collins: way of dressing going forward. I, it’s fun. I like it. It’s you know, it’s, it, it’s cool and aspirational, and doesn’t, like, try hard to, like- Try hard ... be a goth or something like that.Simone Collins: Well, the argument I was making to Malcolm is that it’s I think there’s this point of peak enshittification of modern clothing.At which people are going to have to just have this reckoning of either they are going to admit that they’re wearing the equivalent of hospital gowns, of, like, just Kleenex that’s going to fall apart after a couple wears that they have to keep rebuying or [00:58:00] they’re going to declare bankruptcy and, and take a totally different approach to clothing.And one of those approaches is just to go back and, like, you know, I’m just gonna wear a chemise and a skirt and cinch it in with stays or a girdle or a belt. And, like, that works, because it, it fits all sizes. It changes as your size fluctuates. It’s great in all weathers. It’s just so useful.Especially if you get more durable natural fiber fabrics of higher quality. So let’s make it a thing. Yes.Malcolm Collins: I love it and agree, but yeah, I, I, I, I was, like, personally offended that they watch you every day and they, th- that wasn’t immediately... She has big circular glasses, a Puritan outfit, and wears a bonnet, which Simone wears on occasion.Anyway, the... But I wanted to, the reason I’m posting her, by the way, is I’m like, “Look, we on the right can be cool and sexy and alluring. That’s not the same as being promiscuous.”Simone Collins: Maybe not. I don’t think everyone-Malcolm Collins: No ...Simone Collins: thinks that deranged looking Puritan woman is cool and sexy. [00:59:00]Malcolm Collins: I, I think fun anime girls is, is part of how we win this.AI anime girls is a weapon the left doesn’t have. So let’s have fun. Let’s be the side of the party, and stop policing everything, and stop yelling- about everything because if we make our side not fun, we’re not gonna be able to pull people over. There is a difference between degeneracy and a fully clothed long sleeve AI of your wife with a yandere face.You know? That, that, those two things are as far apart as possible, and I think we need to reflectively not attack things that are not actually in any way immoral or bad. Getting people on board with the idea that Christianity can be fun and alluring is, is the... Even the Catholic Church made an anime girl, right?You know? Something we should do. Anyway, have fun, Simone. Love you to death.Simone Collins: Love you too, Malcolm Okay. Hello, Simone. YouMalcolm Collins: look beautiful today.Simone Collins: So do you. You look sharp- Yeah ... even though I know [01:00:00] you need to sleep. Did you sleep today? Did you sleep? I did.Malcolm Collins: I slept for like an hour and a half.Simone Collins: Oh, yeah. I did. Yeah. Even though you, like, woke up at 2:00 AM. That’s not gonna help you. ‘Cause you stayed up later than I did, pretty sure.I think your light was still on when I went to sleep. UghMalcolm Collins: Well, there’s so much to do. I, I know- Yeah, but what happens if you, I mean, I’mSimone Collins: dead or if you die or get dementia, like, what good are you to any of that work, right?Malcolm Collins: Well, I’ve gotten everything I needed to done.Simone Collins: So you’re gonna go to sleep super early tonight?Because you were staying up way too late. You need to start chilling earlier so you can be relaxedMalcolm Collins: and up for sleep. Well, guess what we have working on the site now, is better not safe for work image-to-image model systems.Simone Collins: Well, thank you. That’s what IMalcolm Collins: was killing myself over, isSimone Collins: getting those- Now people can goon more efficiently.Thank you.Malcolm Collins: We need money.Simone Collins: Yeah. Well.Malcolm Collins: You know, and this is what people pay for, okay? The, the, that is the world we live in. Yes, Jerome ... and so if, if I can, I will make money doing that. It’s RFAB, by the way, dot AI, for people who wanna try it. The, I mean, the main thing that people use [01:01:00] it for is narrative storytelling, like a choose-your-own-adventure type story.It’s where you can build your own narrative engine and play through them with any frontier model you want.Simone Collins: And I primarily use it for vibe- Image ... any vibe coding I’ve ever done has been on RFAB, and then I, lots of image generation. It has such a good image generator.Malcolm Collins: Yeah.Simone Collins: And recipe generation now.Malcolm Collins: And we charge a- across the board, a 50% flat margin on any model that you’re using which is, like, way less than almost any other site.Most it’s 5X margin. It’s enormous. Well,Simone Collins: the best thing about it is its latest video tutorials, which I don’t think you’ve brought live yet. I, I wanna be able to post them next to- No, they’re all live. Video tutorials are all- Did you upload them to the folder that I can use to post them elsewhere online, becauseMalcolm Collins: they- Do you like how angry I look in them?Simone Collins: They’re, they’re very angry tutorials. Like, he’ll be like, “Okay, and how to use our recipe tool. Actually, never mind. If you can’t figure that out yourself, you’re mentally deficient.” He’ll, like, go through steps and be like, “You know what? Just figure it out.” Like, it’s, it’s, it’s great. I agree. And they’re actually helpful.To be clear, these [01:02:00] are very helpful. They walk you through the process. They’ve made things that I’m like, “I don’t wanna try this. I don’t know how to do it.” Like, I don’t, oh, and there’s... ‘Cause he- The VTube- ... he puts in a lot of options. It can be kind of overwhelming to look at the screen. I think the video tutorials are genuinely useful.I just also find the delivery extremely entertaining because he’s so irritable about it. So-Malcolm Collins: Because I have tooltips explainingSimone Collins: this to people. I know, it’s just I’m so used to, like, very tedious tutorials. You know, it’s like, “Da-na-na, next you do this,” and here it’s, like, actually both funny and useful, so thank you.Malcolm Collins: So yeah, on the on the, This is for the VTubers where we have the, the biggest tutorial. We also have one for ImageGen, and we have one for, Oh. What’s the other one for? We have one for the new AIDubber. That’s the one thing that doesn’t c- take a 50% margin. It’s just, it’s so expensive to dev full anime episodes.It’s, like, 10 bucks or something. So for that reason we only take a 20% margin on that.Simone Collins: Yeah.Malcolm Collins: Because I wanna be magnanimous or whatever.Simone Collins: Well, you wanna be practical. I mean, anime [01:03:00] watchers need their time or money for merch tables at anime consOctavian Collins: Mommy, I running, I ran downstairs and I fell b- before.I was trying to place in the stairs, and now I need a replacement.Simone Collins: Well, I will give you a replacement after we’re done recording. But now you can just leave that here, and I’ll fix it when I’m done recording, okay?Octavian Collins: Okay. You can let me use one of the pins from thatSimone Collins: like- That is exactly what- Yeah ... I’m gonna be doing.Octavian Collins: Yeah, you can get, like, another of these, like, from the other finger thing.Simone Collins: Yeah, just leave it on your desk, okay?Octavian Collins: Okay.Simone Collins: Thank you, love. Have fun. Be safe.Speaker 26: A ravine A ravine? Yeah. That’s scary. Do you want the kids to survive? Yeah. Do you want the evil hacker to survive? Yeah. Oh, well, let’s see what happens. Uh-oh. Doesn’t look good for him, does it? I don’t think- You don’t like him very much? Where’s the ravine? The ravine? Well, he’s kind of in it now This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit basedcamppodcast.substack.com/subscribe

In this Based Camp episode, Simone and Malcolm Collins explore an expanded framework for personal morality and “modern sins” designed to maximize mental health, personal efficacy, and long-term human flourishing. Framed through a Christian and Techno-Puritan lens, they discuss how biblical morality has iteratively improved over time and why we need updated rules for today’s world.Topics include: avoiding busywork and performative suffering, rejecting pride and status signaling, the dangers of inaction and moral absolutism, self-flagellation, empty words, corrupted mercy, and living with aplomb. They emphasize consequentialist ethics focused on future human (and post-human) flourishing through science, technology, and disciplined living.A practical guide to building a better life, overcoming common traps, and aligning daily actions with higher purpose. Applicable to Christians, secular listeners, and anyone seeking a high-agency value system.Techno-Puritan Sins, SummarizedSin, per Techno-Puritanism, is any pattern of behavior—mental, emotional, or practical—that wastes your capacity or undermines long-term flourishing for yourself or humanity.All Techno-Puritan sins are derived from a single principle:* Maximize long-term human flourishing and effectiveness* Minimize:* Wasted effort* Short-term thinking* Self-indulgent or performative behavior1. Acting from social expectation (performative living)It is sinful to:* Do things just because they’re expected (e.g., ceremonies, reunions).* Especially when they don’t align with your goals or values.Why? Obligation without purpose is wasted life energy.2. Pride as social comparison (“proving others wrong”)It is sinful to motivate yourself primarily by:* Showing others you’re better than them.* Seeking validation through superiority.Why? External validation distorts decision-making. Seeking it may produce shallow or misaligned decisions.3. Living to fit an image or archetypeIt is sinful to:* Make decisions to match a role (e.g., “ideal Christian,” “alpha male,” “tradwife”).* Prioritize appearance of virtue over actual outcomes.Why? Doing so drives one to “perform goodness” instead of doing good and leads to inefficient or even harmful choices.4. Wasted effort / misaligned rolesIt is sinful to do things that:* Don’t actually help others* Aren’t valued by those they’re meant to serve (e.g. Performing “ideal spouse” behaviors that your partner doesn’t need or want.)Why? Effort without impact is morally wasteful.5. Busywork (major emphasis)It is sinful to:* Spend time on on tasks that feel productive but aren’t meaningful (e.g. Working 12 hours but accomplishing less than 2 focused hours.)* This Includes:* Overwork without output* Performative productivity* Inefficient laborWhy it’s considered especially bad:* Reduces overall effectiveness* Crowds out meaningful work* Worse than leisure because it gives no recovery or benefit6. Pure indulgence without purposeIt is sinful to* Do things solely for personal pleasure with no broader benefit (e.g. indulging in excess entertainment or sexual behavior detached from long-term outcomes)Nuance:* Some indulgence is tolerated if it supports long-term function (rest, motivation).7. Performative suffering / overwork signalingIt is sinful to:* Show off stress, exhaustion, or hardship as a badge of honor.* This includes:* Bragging about long hours* Glorifying burnoutWhy? Suffering is not inherently virtuous—only meaningful outcomes are.8. Emotional indulgence (lack of “aplomb”)It is sinful to adopt unproductive emotional states, such as:* Self-pity* Anger* Excessive grief expression* Cynicism or snarkWhy?* Emotions are (to a degree) controllable and reinforce themselves.* Indulging in negative emotions:* Harms others* Weakens self-control* Reduces effectiveness* Conversely, maintaining calm, forward-moving resilience, especially in hardship, imparts strength to oneself and others9. Self-deception about moralityIt is sinful to convince yourself that:* You’re being virtuous when you’re not* Busywork or image-performance equals goodnessWhy? Mislabeling behavior prevents improvement.10. Failure to pursue meaningful contributionIt is sinful to not direct effort toward:* Long-term human progress* Knowledge, science, or societal developmentWhy? Immediate charity often distracts from long-term impact and can actively run counter to efforts that would maximize long-term human flourishing.Episode TranscriptMalcolm Collins: [00:00:00] Hello, Simone. I’m excited to be here with you today. Today we are going to be discussing personal re- morality as it relates to, one, this is going to focus on just general advice for living a good life. Hmm. And a good way to structure your life to overcome many of the challenges that people face.So this would be applicable to people of Christian perspective, non-Christian perspective, techno-Puritan perspective. But I’m gonna be couching it within the framing of I’m talking to Christians here. Okay? And the reason I’m couching it in that is because when we look at something like the Bible, people often get hung up.They’re like, “Wait, so I read all these parts about morality and, like, the seven deadly sins in the Bible and the Commandments, and then I read stuff like, ‘If a man sells his daughter as a slave, she is not to go free as male slaves do. If she does not please the master who selected her for himself, he must let her be redeemed.He has no right to sell her to other foreigners because he has broken faith with [00:01:00] her. If he selects her for his sons, he must grant her the rights of a daughter. If he marries her to another woman, he must not deprive the first one of food, clothing, or marital rights. If he does not provide her with these things, she is to go free without any payment of money.’”And people are like, “Wait, is that a bunch of rules about how to sell your daughter into slavery and then treat her afterwards?” You know, like, they do seem like nice rules about selling your daughter into slavery, but it would seem like it might have been better to just not do that, to just be like, if you’re thinking of selling your daughter into slavery, and, like, pretty clearly because it, it talks about potentially marrying her sex slavery is what we would call that today don’t do it.And the way that Christians and Jews get around this is they go, “Well, iteratively, that was a more moral way of dealing with slavery than other common traditions of this period.” Hmm. And we have a whole episode where we go through that. And if you look at our last tract where we also went into morality at the societal level, we talk about the [00:02:00] many...Like, you, you remember me going over them. It was a number of them, places in the Bible where God commands people to kill infants, and lots of infants. Like, the number of infants is very, very high, right?Speaker 7: If you want to go through that, check out the episode, “Christianity Was Never a Religion of Peace” that we released, last week. It’s a great episode. , We cite all the verses where this happens, , and it’s a pretty frequent thing throughout the Old TestamentMalcolm Collins: And so people are like, “Okay, well,” he told people to do that because those societies were practicing child sacrifice.”And I was like, “That’s not a very moral answer.” That’s like saying, “Oh, we rescued a bunch of children from Epstein’s island, so we killed them all?” Like, presumably if you’re saving the children who might be child sacrifice, right? Like, you don’t kill the... And note here the term used in some of these instances.You can’t be like, “Oh, he’s only talking about toddlers who has absorbed the culture.” They use terms meaning, like, breastfeeding infant, like suckling infants, right? Like, [00:03:00] very young. So it’s like, okay What’s going on here, right? Was this just like iteratively more moral than what came before it? Do these types of things still hold?And how does this hold at like a personal level? And what I’ll note here is what we see, if you take the stance that God said all of this because it was iteratively better than the way things used to be done before he laid those things out, then presumably it’s been a pretty long time since the New Testament was written.More is expected of us or a more advanced understanding of morality is expected from us than what- Yeah ... was laid out in the New TestamentSo what are those things? And that’s what we’re gonna go into today, is basically a new and expanded understanding of sins that will help you be like, “Hmm, if I just make a personal commitment to never do this list of [00:04:00] things, I will be both a much more mentally healthy person, I will be a much more efficacious person, and I will be able to do a lot more to push human civilization forwards.”And note here when we talk about pushing human civilization forwards, obviously this is a wider, like, technopuri- puritan track series, but it’s, we try to make them more applicable to general Christians now as well. One of the fun things that you see in regards to us talking about the sons of man, which you also see all over the Bible.You know, by the way, I didn’t make up the term the sons of man. That’s all over the Old Testament. Very weird way to talk about people. Why would you talk about people as the sons of man, right? Like, that’s a... W- why inSimone Collins: the world- Yeah, why not just, you know, humans or people?Malcolm Collins: Why not just man, right? Well, suppose that these rules were supposed to apply to not just the humans we have today, but when we become a space-faring species, when we take our manifest destiny among the stars, we’re going to need to use genetic technology.You basically have to. You can’t easily have people live their entire lives in zero G without some [00:05:00] form of gene editing, and most other planets are gonna require some gene editing to live on. And how extensive that goes could be bigger than that. You’re gonna eventually have some humans that are AI integrations.You’re gonna have some humans... we’re gonna have AI working alongside us. So we take the sons of man to mean all of the intelligences which are downstream of humanity be those AI intelligences, uplifted animals, human intelligences of the far future that are genetically modified and stuff like that, and that’s why it says the sons of man.I like that fun little, like, weird prediction of the applicability that that would have to have, but it tracks with the way society looks like it’s going. So if we’re looking at that and we’re asking, okay, so if God’s sort of broader moral framework and at least how it’s expressed seems to shift over time how can we find out what he really wanted with those frameworks?Like, what was the point of the frameworks as they were laid out? And it appears [00:06:00] fairly clear, because we can look at the effects that these frameworks had on individuals and society at large. Okay. Which is an increased amount of human flourishing, right? This is human technological, civilizational flourishing, right?The reason why you would want to create more humane rules around the selling of your daughter into slaverySpeaker 3: I was on a stream with Leaflet and somebody was asking, “What are sins?” ‘Cause we were talking about them more broadly, and I was like, “When you boil it down, sins are just a list of things that will up your life.”Some of them may seem like a good idea in the short term,. In the same way eating candy every morning for breakfast might.Speaker 6: What’s going on? Maybe it’s all this stuff that you both eat. Oh, you get off that? No, honestly, it’s true. Okay. Moss, what did you have for breakfast this morning? Smarty Cereal. Oh my God. I didn’t even know Smarty made a [00:07:00] cereal. They don’t. It’s just smarties and a bowl with milk.Speaker 3: But in the long term, you’re going to suffer from it. It’s basically a long list of... And we saw this in one of the recent episodes we did on, , you know, rampant consumerization of human sexuality leading to the normalization of things like abortion and this destroying people’s lives, right?, The, the sin that they were committing, , ended up having this absolutely huge deleterious negative impact on them. The women who go out and w***e themselves when they’re younger, the effect that this is gonna happen when they hit the wall, and then nobody wants them anymore, and then, , you know, you see this with pride, lying., Look at what’s going on with the Bricks & Minifigs CEO right now, right? , There is no sin, there’s no, like, rule that we’re given that isn’t long term in our own best interest. Sins are just a really [00:08:00] long list of, “Don’t piss on the electric fence.” , And so if we are increasing the number of sins or expanding our understanding of sin, , it’s basically expanding this.Good rules to live by, good things to look out for. And when I pointed this out on, on stream, some people were like, “Well, no, you know, sins need to be, like, this really difficult thing to deal with. This really, like...” And it’s like they are insofar that anything you do purely for your own self-interest is a sin., EG playing video games or something like that. , And e- and even those things can eventually have negative effects on you. , But in terms of the more, like, explicitly labeled sins, , for example, sleeping with another dude’s wife, right? Like, it may feel good in the moment, but not even... Y- you don’t even need to say, like, civilizationally this is a bad idea to normalize.It’s just obviously gonna come back and cause you more pain in the, in the long term.And I would also [00:09:00] note that this seems to be a core thing that differentiates Christianity from other Abrahamic traditions. Like, I don’t think there’s anything actually negative, at least within a modern context, , where like a Muslim can’t eat pork, right? Like, I don’t think pork actually has any negative externalities in a modern context.Or where a Jew cannot mix, you know, linen and flax in a single outfit. but in Christianity, I am unaware of any Christian sins where I’m like, “This is just an obscure thing that was totally unique to a specific era.”Malcolm Collins: Sorry, what, what does he want?Simone Collins: He wants to tell the viewers what he learned.Octavian Collins: Like Germs can go in your body and some- they’re, they’re like tiny little dots, they can multiply. Multiply. Wait.Malcolm Collins: So germsOctavian Collins: get into you- White blood cells kind of have like mouth thingies that eat the [00:10:00] like germs that are like the other things I was talking about recently, the green things.Simone Collins: Smart. SmartMalcolm Collins: so first, how do you determine , , and the fact that the way that God expresses his morality has changed over time shows that the intentionality of God on humanity through these systems as they have evolved is that is, it’s consequentialist in its framing, right?Like it, it, it is based on some outcome, right?Simone Collins: Well, and as you framed it in a different conversation when you discussed morality on the societal level, you argue that the New Testament was made for a point- At which human civilization had become much more globalized already, and you had different cultures interacting more, and you needed to begin to mask the brutality of Christianity to appear to be symbiotic so as to not become an existential threat to other cultures and obligate those cultures to completely [00:11:00] take out Christianity.Malcolm Collins: Exactly. But it, but even, I mean, during the early period when they enter it ended the period where that was necessary. When they began to take over the, the Roman Empire they did not forget how brutal their religious teachings actually are. Mm. They just that, that only became sublimated later.That only... I- in like the last 100 years, I wanna say, is really when the, all those parts of the Bible were forgotten. But to continue here. Except by some groups like the Quakers who, they annoy me, and the Anabaptists who I generally like. But anyway, to continue here. So what’s a good way to build your life in terms of like moral rules and everything like that?So first, and you can see how to do this in The Pragmatist’s Guide to Life, is build an objective function. That is, think through whatever it is, whether it’s because God, you know, you’re coming at this from a Christian perspective or you’re coming at this from a completely secular perspective the collection of things that you think is of intrinsic good to maximize with your life.[00:12:00]And then build a set of functions around that. By that what I mean is it might be like, well, within my life, maybe some of these things will be purely indulgent. I think I need X level of happiness, and once that’s satisfied, then I will put all of my effort into X or Y. You know, that’s the way functions are constructed.Like 50% into doing this, 50% into doing this. Now if you’re a techno-puritan, you’re just gonna have one framing coming from what I was talking about here, which is what is God’s plan? God’s plan is continued human flourishing, so it’s probably some level of comfort. And then once you reach that level of comfort that’s needed for, you know, maximum personal efficacy and not distraction then focus on maximizing future human flourishing.And this is often best done through scientific advancement, which we’re gonna get to in a bit, right? Which is to say, generally speaking there are many places where you could, for example give money to the poor, right? And over, in 100 years, [00:13:00] in 200 years, because God doesn’t love somebody in 200 years and I don’t care less about somebody in 200 years than I care about a human today which is going to help more aggregate people?Almost always things that help the civilization continue developing are going to have a bigger impact. And, and note that’s not just technology. That’s things that help it economically develop. That’s things that help it develop in terms of its moral systems how it deals with outside or parasitic groups that are exploiting systems.So we’ll get into all of that. And also note here this line I think highlights what I think is expected In terms of dedicating yourself to an extent to continued scientific progress. When we did our episode on Genesis not being incompatible with science one of the things we, we, we kept getting in the comments is, like, people forgot that, like, all of the early scientific advancements were made by people who were trying to understand God better.Yeah. Right? Like, they, they... And, and even the Bible, like, goes into this. So, if you look at lines like, “ It is the glory of God [00:14:00] to conceal a matter. To search out a matter is the glory of kings.” Mm. Which is to say you, the best of you, the best of humanity your greatest endeavor is the search of knowledge of things that God has not made immediately obvious, right?Mm. So when somebody’s like, “Oh, well, you know, God didn’t exactly and very cleanly lay out evolution in the Bible,” why didn’t he do that, right? Why, why wasn’t that done? It’s like, oh, it’s the glory of God to conceal a matter, and to search out a matter is the glory of kings. Which is to say that if you take a approach to everything that does not update post Jesus’ time perspective on our understanding of nature and the world, you’re literally acting in rebellion to what the Bible is telling you to do.Simone Collins: Right.Malcolm Collins: All right. So- If you’re just inventing a religion for, like, savages, telling them, like, “Don’t give yourself to lust, don’t give yourself to gluttony, don’t give yourself...” You know, like, seven deadly sins, stuff like that. Original Ten [00:15:00] Commandments. Very easy rules. But there are so many deleterious things that trap humans today at a significantly more socially and morally developed standpoint.I think it’s worth laying out additional sins so that you can easily categorize these in your head. So let’s jump right into these.Speaker 4: Note, , I think the majority of the additional sins I’m gonna be laying out are things that we are warned against at some point or another in the New Testament. , It’s just that the warnings are often not as explicit or salient in the way that the New Testament is often taught today., So if I give one of these out and you’re like, “Oh, actually, , this line here could be used to mean that,” yeah, I knowMalcolm Collins: And do try to keep track as we’re going, Simone, so you can add any that you think I miss here. Okay. ‘Cause we now have, like, actual people who follow our religion. I’m like, well, if we’re doing that, we should do more to help them live a good life,Simone Collins: right?Well, we need to make our... I mean, we’re gonna be following these rules, too. We’ve been discussing this all week, so we need to have our own internal... [00:16:00] Well, we need a list we can publish somewhere. Yeah. Well, thisMalcolm Collins: actually came up with me this week, where I was like, should I go to my high school reunion, or should I not go to my high school reunion?And it would have been, like, a 24-hour car ride, right? And I was like, one, no, that is against my objective function. It is cleanly against my objective function. It is purely indulgent, but it’s not even an indulgence that will make me happy. And this here comes to the first sin of modernity, which is doing a thing because of societal expectation.Simone Collins: Mm.Malcolm Collins: You... Anytime you do a thing just because you think that it is what’s expected of you, like a graduation ceremony. How did the graduation ceremony actually help you, right? Or is it just a waste of time? Now, if you are doing it because your parents paid for you to go to college, and they’ll be proud, and that’s why you’re going, fine.But if your parents aren’t showing up, why are you? Right? That is time that you could be [00:17:00] spending on doing something productive that moves yourself forward, educating yourself more, or moves human civilization forward. A second one here, which I’m really, this comes to the graduation thing. I wanna go to the graduation and I wanna show all these people, look at, look at me.Look, look at how great I am these days, right? I’m doing so much better than you. I have a Wikipedia page. I have all these followers. A that, that makes me amazing, and look at you and your sad lives th- that aren’t doing anything, right? That-Simone Collins: Which, and this, this is a big motivational factor for many people.Malcolm Collins: It is. Is what, what the Bible was trying to warn us about was pride. But I think people have recontextualized it. People motivate themselves, and I motivated myself when I was younger in a big way by owning the people who thought they were better than me. And this is a unique, I think even genetically baked in problem with people of the backwards tradition.Yeah. Is we just love, get deep satisfaction of owning people who think they’re better than us. And I’m not [00:18:00] saying you should never indulge in that satisfaction if you can use it to motivate efficacious and moral behavior. However I am saying that you shouldn’t do it if it’s leading you to do something which is purely indulgent.Simone Collins: Yeah.Malcolm Collins: This is the same way where, like, feeling good during sex isn’t bad if you’re using it for procreation, obviously, right? ‘Simone Collins: Cause that’s the point. That’s what is, it was evolved to motivate.Malcolm Collins: Yeah, but it can still pull you down a path of evil, right? If you approach it the wrong way. All right, so, tho- f- first two sins laid out there.Next, living to maximize your image in somebody else’s eyes. I have noticed many people-Simone Collins: You mean to look good to other people?Malcolm Collins: NoSimone Collins: Maximize your image. What does that mean?Malcolm Collins: They build their heuristics for making decisions. We have an episode where we talk about Honza, who is an example of somebody who does [00:19:00] this, where we notice that this m- male thought leading influencer in, like, the red pill-ish diaspora community was basically saying when he was making major life decisions, like, what decision is the more mannish decision to make?What decision is the more masculine decision to make? He is optimizing his major life decisions around fitting some image that he thinks is the image that he needs to be living. Not towards- Mm-hmm ... the effect that that image will have on society, not towards the effect that image is gonna have on other people, not towards anything that’s efficacious, but entirely based on an image.Simone Collins: Right. So, okay, the, the, the distinction here is, is that it’s, it’s about an archetype, fitting an archetype, and that being really not, not cool. Yeah. Don’t live your life to try to fit an archetype, like the sexy woman, the desirable man, the tough guy, the, the saintly caretaker, if that’s just what you’re trying to satisfy without understanding the moral [00:20:00] fundamentals, the, the values that you’re working to serve.Malcolm Collins: Yes.So, and, and where this can become really dangerous for people who otherwise would frame themselves as good Christians is they attempt to fit the image of a good Christian. They abandon actual morality for a social role in maximizing that social roleSimone Collins: Okay, yeahMalcolm Collins: This can be a big problem for like trad wives,like, if it’s the self-image of a tradwife, if it’s the self-image of a tradhusband, if it’s the self-image of a good Christian woman, for example. And people can say, why is that a bad thing to do if it’s a positive self-image? And it’s because attempting to maximize positive self-images is something that can lead to immorality.So let’s- Well,Simone Collins: I think what’s worse is, like, let’s say that your goal is to serve God, and then the way you think you can moor to that is by [00:21:00] invoking in your mind the image of the most holy, saintly person, and if I just sort of cosplay maximally well as that caricature, then presumably I- I’ve got my bases covered.The problem is then you will think that you are actually doing morally good things, when instead you are just putting on the costume of someone who does morally good things and congratulating yourself for it and, and assuming that it’s all working out just fine when it’s really not.Malcolm Collins: Exactly. And, and to, to, to give examples of how this can, for example, destroy a marriage.If one person is, rather than being a good wife because they want to serve humanity and society by serving their children and their husband, for example they can say, “Well, these are the strict roles and things that a tradwife is supposed to do, and you as a husband are supposed to make all of these things doable for me,” right?And so then the family ends up in a scenario where they may, for a child’s medical bills, require a second [00:22:00] income or something like that. Mm-hmm. And the woman doesn’t end up doing that, and it causes the man bitterness, and then they end up fighting with each other. The woman doesn’t under- Like, the, the, the things that she’s doing aren’t even really appreciated by the husband.Like, the reason you’re supposed to do all these tradwifey things are because it is for the behalf of the husband, right? Like, they, presumably they like these things. What if they don’t even value these things, right, and they would prefer you did something else that is difficult for you to do? Now it’s just completely wasted effort.And waste-Simone Collins: Yeah, that’s a really good point. What a lot of tradwife influencers are things that, like, women want to do for themselves and that men don’t really care about.Malcolm Collins: Yeah. And, and wasted effort is inherently sinful because every amount of effort that you waste is time you could have spent on something else.Mm-hmm. Here I guess I’ll just go into the next sin which is busywork busywork is as sin as doing something that is [00:23:00] directly immoral without societal externalities. Hmm. So I, I guess e- examples here, right? I think anything you do that’s, like, personally indulgent and doesn’t move society forwards is sinful because we see from Romans, Okay, soSimone Collins: that could just be, like, doing a spa day instead of working toward something you value.Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Anything you don’t do for God or anything you cannot say to be doing for God is a sin, and if God’s goal is the long-term flourishing of humanity, anything that’s not contributing to that is sinful. Now, we are all sinners. You shouldn’t expect to live a sinf- sinless life.Simone Collins: Sure.Malcolm Collins: However, many people confuse themselves and lie to themselves by acting as if they are doing something less sinful by doing pointless busywork than by doing something like playing video games or masturbating,Simone Collins: right?Well, yeah, I think something uniquely common in the United States, where you see a lot of performative suffering and performative exhaustion, is people... And actually, this, I think, happens a lot in Asia too, where you see, like, the six-day workweeks and people who work extra long, and the norms [00:24:00] of you can’t leave your office in Japan until your boss leaves, and your boss stays way long that, well, if you’re suffering and if you’re not happy and it’s really not fun, then you’re working really hard and you’re doing good things, when really, like, okay, great, you’re miserable and you’ve just wasted a ton of time.And why-Malcolm Collins: Like,Simone Collins: thatMalcolm Collins: is- Yeah, why busywork is strictly a higher form of sin than- Hmm ... pure indulgenceSimone Collins: than- Yeah, like you should have just played a video game for- Yeah ... three hours that day, spent one hour actually doing meaningful work instead of being so sleep deprived and stressed out that you could only do 15 minutes of actually productive work that day.Malcolm Collins: Exactly,Simone Collins: because it lowers- Even though you’re in an office for, like, 12 hours ...Malcolm Collins: it lowers your overall efficiency, right? Yeah. Like, at least f- forms of indulgence can help you stay sane- Yeah ... feel rewarded, feel motivated. Busywork does not do that, right?Simone Collins: That’s a really good point.Malcolm Collins: A- and so it is a worse sin and more of a sin to call out in your partner, in yourself than other forms of, of [00:25:00] sin.It is, it is truly a- This isSimone Collins: for sure my biggest, like, I, I struggle with this. It’sMalcolm Collins: your biggest sin by far. Yeah. It’s your only sin, really. I don’t see you d- sin in any other way than busywork.Simone Collins: Well, I think it’s... And but this is where I need advice on this sin is I feel like often I lack the judgment in really understanding where I should be putting my time and focus.I mean, that’sMalcolm Collins: my- I think that you know perfectly well when you’re doing something that doesn’t actually need to be done as frequently as you’re doing it, but you do it as an indulgence in the same way that I play video games as an indulgence because you feel that you won’t be able to hear yourself think, as you say, if you don’t do it.The question is, are you on, being honest with yourself about how much of that busywork you need to do to hear yourself think and how much of it is just performative?Simone Collins: Hmm.So- Well, I guess what we do is I check in with you a lot. I should check in with you more on, like, help me balance this out and sanity check this.And probably having a third party. It could be a person, ideally, you know, like your spouse or something, but it could [00:26:00] also probably be an AI- ... if you’re operating independently.Malcolm Collins: Yeah,Simone Collins: busywork. Just evaluating it. Yeah.Malcolm Collins: Which I, which I... And one of the things was, like, that’s not in the Bible. Like, the Bible, they didn’t have busywork at the time of Jesus.It just wasn’t a sin that he needed to warn people about, right?Speaker 10: So Simone’s gonna mention a passage that could be taken to mean this, which I love that there are passages, and then in addition to that passage, you could also take the parable of talents from Matthew’s to be about this, or you could take Luke 10:38-42, Martha and Mary, to mean this. , And this is just really cool.But, but, but you do actually see this in parts of the Bible withbut Martha was distracted with much serving, and she went to him and said, “Lord, do you not care that my sister has left me to serve alone? To her then to help me.” But the Lord answered her, “Martha, Martha, you are anxious and troubled by many things, but one thing is necessary. Marsha has chosen the good portion, [00:27:00] which cannot be taken away from her.”But again, even if this is a parable against busy work, it’s often not in a salient context when I’m in like a church. Have I-- And I used to go to church every week. , Did I ever come away thinking, “Busy work is a sin. Gotta make sure not to do that”?Simone Collins: No, I think the... There was a passage you read when we talked about societal morality about not suffering publicly.Malcolm Collins: Yeah, not suffering performatively.Simone Collins: That is an extreme vice in the United States. Again, like bragging about sleep deprivation.Malcolm Collins: Well, this is, this is not in the busy work category of sin. This is in the I’d say- No ... a plum sin.Simone Collins: No, because people brag about the hours. They go, “Oh, I work 60-hour weeks, blah,Malcolm Collins: blah, blah.” Right, but this isn’t, this isn’t that. This sin is very different. So this is the aplum sin which means not acting with aplum is sinful.I’m sorry,Simone Collins: we’ve moved on to a new one.Malcolm Collins: Yes. Okay, [00:28:00] yeah. So this covers a number of emotional states which are adopted for purely indulgent reasons- Mm-hmm ... and don’t actually help you.Simone Collins: Oh, like acting exasperated or-Malcolm Collins: Yes ... snarky. You are taking on a negative emotional state- Uh-huh ... which causes negative externalities for everyone around you.Mm-hmm. It causes your children, your spouse, your coworkers to be less happy, to be less productive. It causes you to be less happy and less productive, when at the end of the day, emotions are generally a choice. You can choose how you contextualize. You know, you get fired from a job, for example. You can say, “Oh, woe is me,” right?Or you can say, “Oh, well, this is exciting. Now I get to try to look for something new. Now I get a change of pace. Now I get a new challenge.” And people are like, “Well, what if something truly bad happens? Like, what if Simone died,” right? Then it is extra upon me to not act with sadness and with grief.Because if I do [00:29:00] that, who suffers? Who suffers from that?The people who are going to suffer the most are going to be my kids, and they just lost a mom Okay?Simone Collins: Yeah That- Do they also want to have a, an absent, emotionally ruined, angry, grieving, sad, bereft father? Like, you don’t wanna lose two parents, you know?Malcolm Collins: The, the implication of this sin is proportional to the severity of the loss that you have undergone.Right. It’s the severity, the time when you need to act with the most aplomb. And note this isn’t generic happiness aplomb. Th- this is, you know, acting with plucky continued diligence and move forwardness like a happy soldier. Those are the times when it is the bleakest for you. Yeah. When can you least afford to have self-pity is when you just got fired and have a family to support.Simone Collins: Exactly.Malcolm Collins: When can you least afford to act [00:30:00] with these other forms of indulgence, it is when you most feel them, right? And so don’t wait until something really bad happens to adopt this. And I’ve, I’ve noted here, I’ve watched some Mormon influencers, and they complain that Mormons are told to do this, right?That they’reSimone Collins: told- Oh, yeah. El- Alyssa Grenfell explicitly goes on about how it’s really messed up that there’s sort of a limited amount of grieving that is considered socially acceptable within the LDS church. And like per, like traditions and the way that funerals go and memorial services. Yeah, and it’s really interesting to hear her talk about that when w- we would see that as such a s- like a huge, huge sign of the church’s good taste.There are other moral rules- Right ... that we’ve been talking about internally that we’re like, “Man, this backfired.” Like, they, they completely did this the wrong way. Like setting certain standards, either contemporarily or historically, that just are being completely misconstrued or have been outsized to [00:31:00] out- sorry, outsourced to outside authorities.Like saying, “Oh, we don’t watch rated R movies,” but then having this completely unassociated non-Mormon body determine what the R rating is based on. You know? This is,Malcolm Collins: this is actually where this, this today’s sort of tract because we, we don’t number the tracts anymore. Mm-hmm. This is technically a techno-puritan tract, but it’s applicable to all Christians or people more broadly came from, which is we were talking about the words of wisdom, which is where, like, don’t do this stuff is laid out by Joseph Smith.And some of this is useful, like the be happy thing. Other of it is just wasteful. Like, don’t drink hot liquids, like coffee and stuff like that. Like, at the time, they thought that it had, like, negative health effects, but we now know that it doesn’t. It actually has positive health effects, and it’s been very well studied.So it’s like, oh, like, we should have a techno-puritan words of wisdom. We should have something where I try to go through and future-proof these, so I can try to-Simone Collins: Well, yeah, I don’t, I don’t know if it was negative health effects. M- it might have been that it was recognized that caffeine was addictive, or that it was- Rightun- an unnecessary expense That didn’t yield, you know, caloric [00:32:00] benefit. But for whatever reason, now even if, like, caffeine is the thing to be avoided which from a health perspective doesn’t make sense because it’s, it’s broadly seen as having health benefits on the aggregate aside from being addictive, though it is quite addictive.Now you have all these Mormons drinking heavily caffeinated, often dirty sodas, you know, very high in calories, not helpful calories and, and not drinking coffee, like a zero calorie m- you know, moderately healthy drink if you don’t put a ton of stuff in it. It, it’s clearly something that’s not being optimally construed as a word of wisdom.Malcolm Collins: Absolutely, yeah. So we’re like, “Let’s, let’s build these, but try to make them better and future-proof.” So also you guys can warn me if I ever do something in a track and you’re like, “That could have really long-term negative ramifications.”Simone Collins: Yeah, we wanna know ...Malcolm Collins: if, if the community becomes, like, really big and fanatic, ‘cause I always try to think, “How is a fanatic gonna operate on this,” right?Mm-hmm. Like, if, if [00:33:00] somebody goes down that pathway 200 years from now, right? And that’s also why the tracks take so long to produce, is because I need to go through, you know, everything I’m saying and think, “How could a fanatic twist this?” But the happiest thing I just see is... And for people who aren’t aware of this, they can be like, “Well, isn’t it, like, a part it’s, like, useful to grieve?It’s useful to experience negative things. It’s useful to experience anger and sadness.” And it’s like, it’s strictly not. Mm. We know from studies that, like, if you punch a wall when you’re angry, you have a harder time in the future controlling your anger. If you, if let yourself cry, like just have a cry when you’re sad, you’re going to cry at lower thresholds in the future.The reason for this is when you stop yourself from these forms of emotional indulgence is you are activating the inhibitory pathway in your prefrontal cortex, which gets stronger with each activation. If you have not frequently activated it, you are incredibly susceptible to intrusive thoughts and intrusive emotional states.Mm-hmm. Which [00:34:00] puts you... Like, it’s just, this isn’t even just a for your family thing, it’s just worse for you. Because presumably being sad or being stressed or going over about how hard you’re working these days I probably... Would you say I work harder than anyone you know, or in terms ofSimone Collins: like- yeah.You absolutely work harder than anyone I know. You wake up at 2:00 AM in the morning to start working, and you work through every moment of the day that I ever see you. Like-Malcolm Collins: Yeah, I mean, people couldSimone Collins: see- ... you might take an hour every day to chill, and I mean, th- this is also, like, it’s not that you have some kind of period where you’re unwinding while, like, making dinner, ‘cause I do that.Like, you have almost zero wind-down time unless you’re, like, hauling out trash or hauling in groceries for the family. So- Yeah.Malcolm Collins: So, but do you ever see me complain about how overworked I am or howSimone Collins: stressed I am? No, never. Nev- Or- I’ve never heard you talk about being overworked.Malcolm Collins: Whistle while you work, right?I work with happiness. I work constantly and I work with happiness, and that’s an [00:35:00] easy thing to do. Because there is no moment in your entire life will you were- ever feel as good Is when you are s- suffering and sacrificing for a well-thought-through value system. Yeah. That is the greatest happiness that any human has access to, and the people who chase directly after hedonism- Mmeven when they have all of the resources they could ever want, as I’ve pointed out, they live the most tortured lives. Who are the people I have met who live the most tortured lives? They are the famous actors and actresses. Mm. You know, they’re, they, they have everything they want- ForSimone Collins: people who live pure lives of leisure it’s-Malcolm Collins: All the fame-very scary ... all the hedonism, all the sex, all the partners, all the respect, and yet they are mentally destroyed, and they often die of drug overdoses and stuff like that, and are seeing a thousand therapists, and are living states of mental terror. They are terrorized by their own mind because of this, because they went down a pathway that was not based on sacrificing through hard work and with a [00:36:00] plum for attempting to make the world better.And when you see actors who clearly do live by that, you typically see them live very happy, fulfilled lives. Consider, like Mr. Rogers, for example. Like, he wasn’t like... He, he clearly had, like a moral value system, and he attempted- Yeah ... to push it through his show to advance human society. Mm. And you didn’t see him, like, get addicted to drugs and crash out in a, a parking lot somewhere, right?We are rewarded for making these sacrifices and exhibiting this self-control, and you will be rewarded for fighting sin, even within this expanded category.Speaker 5: So a lot of people, we did a video recently about people who did like gang bangs and the horror shows that their lives can descend into, and people wanted us to be like angrier or speak about them with more disgust. And it’s like this is-- Oh, it’s not something I’m drawn to. It’s not a sin that I’m tempted [00:37:00] by, thankfully., But in addition to that, like their lives compared to the lives that Simone and I and my kids live are literal hellscapes. Like I know some of these people and even my friends in this group, I know the mental torture they go through being like, “How am I gonna make this work?How am I gonna have a family? How am I gonna...” And I want to help them, and I can offer them guidance, but there’s only so much I can do. And so I think, you know, when you see the end state of what happens to these people and what it’s like to be them, , it’s a lot harder to be-- to, to look at them with so much angerWhen you accept that the additional rules that we live by are not arbitrary restrictions that make our lives harder and are just meant to make society a better place or something, but actively improve our own lives, it’s a lot harder to hate somebody for breaking those rules, for being a sinner.Malcolm Collins: So next. Moral absolutism [00:38:00] is the next sin.Simone Collins: Hmm.Malcolm Collins: This is allowing primitive- ... or overtly extreme signs of acting moral to override what is actually moral, right?This is where the Vatican says, “Oh, just bring in endless immigrants-” “... because the Bible said you should feed foreigners and you should feed the poor, and so we’re gonna maximize that line out of context. And through that, we’re gonna bring in endless foreigners and- ... who cares what long-term impact this is gonna have on the people we’re bringing into the country, right?Who cares what long-term impact- ... this is gonna have on their family when the citizens get pissed off and they decide to deport them and they have kids in the country- ... and all the kids are separated from their parents, and that all could’ve been avoided if you just hadn’t brought them in in the first place.Or you leave them in the country and they end up overtaxing the social safety net, and then pensioners don’t get their pensions, and people who relied on Social Security in the country don’t get their Social Security and they starve to [00:39:00] death like there are negative externalities from this. And this sort of moral absolutism you see whether it’s coming from the Vatican, because it’s often very indulgent, right?It is, it is moral hedonism as we’ve defined it. It’s saying, “Oh, I’m the good guy here,” right? Like, “I’m doing the good thing,” without considering the consequences. It’s saying I have some deontological... This is why I always crash out about the deontologists, because what deontology really does is push the cost of your moral purity onto outsiders.When you say, “I won’t ever kill,” and then an intruder breaks into your house and rapes one of your kids because you wouldn’t fight back. And this, like functionally really happened when there, like pirates happened in in, around Philadelphia, and the Quakers wouldn’t, wouldn’t send forcesSimone Collins: to deal with them.Oh, yeah. A long, historically,Malcolm Collins: yes. And people were terrorized and brutalized because a- at the cost of their moral purity, right? That is functionally evil, right? Because, a- and they [00:40:00] are as responsible or more responsible for those atrocities than the pirates themselves.Speaker 12: And there, there are ways of approachingnon-consequentialist frameworks that prevent the extremes, like Thomism, which I’m not particularly against. It just feels like a weasel out for me. It feels like a way of framing morality where you don’t have to deal with the potential extremes of either consequentialist or non-consequentialist world perspectives.And I guess that’s good in that it doesn’t have the extreme negatives, but I also feel like it doesn’t accept the full moral weight that is important to accept of a moral framing. It just uses a bunch of rules to carve off the extremesAnd the rules feel arbitrary and non-morally weighty to me. I think any real and good moral system is going to push you to positions that a normal person would be mortified by because I, I think real moral [00:41:00] conviction looks like that. It looks like something where other people say, “Oh my God, like, why?Why, why are you doing this?” And it’s like this, this, then this. , If something removes through whatever amount of thing any choice that goes against a person’s intuitions, , I, I think it’s removing moral complexityAnd I think we can see in the Bible that God’s clearly not a Thomist when he punishes someone like Saul for not killing literally everyone and their animals of the enemy tribe. That’s not within the bounds of Thomas ethics. Yes, self-defense is, but something like that isn’tMalcolm Collins: Because they said and note here people had asked on a call, so I should lay this out here.There are times when a group having these beliefs, these moral absolutist beliefs, exerts a negative externality on society and times when they don’t. And the difference between the two is whether or not they are power hungry and why they are exerting the moral absolutism. Mm. So a good [00:42:00] differentiation here is Amish pacifism does not exert an externality on society because Amish don’t seek power for themselves.They almost never hold elected office, and they often don’t even vote unless they’re actively being victimized as they have been in the most recent few election cycles. Whereas Mur- Quakers disproportionately historically held positions of power. And so they’re able to say even though it’s not Quakers who the police would be intervening on behalf of, “Oh, don’t, don’t go do that.”And we see this not just from the Vatican, we see this from wokes all the time, you know, with this- Mm ... this, “Oh, I’m doing the more moral thing,” because on a surface level it looks more moral and I’m just maximizing these surface level rules. Or we can even see it on a when people go and spam racism or antisemitism in ways that isn’t like, this is where we need to be asking some serious questions about Israel, but where they’re trying to show off, right?This is a very smoothed brain thing to do because these are groups that we’re going to have to work with in the future, right? Like [00:43:00] clearly if you look at their fertility rate, their level of influence you’re going to need to find a way to work with places like Israel and the Jews long-term, whatever cultural group you are.And there is a big difference between just spamming something like, “Oh, I’d go to war with them in a second if I could.” The dumbest thing America could, could do, but some conservative influencers have actually said that. I’m like, “You idiot.” Like, d- think about the long-term implications of that. Yeah.Simone Collins: Not smart ...Malcolm Collins: yeah, it’s, it’s extremely stupid. And you could, oh, even if you what, purged... W- what’s your real end game? Even if you purged every Jew, right? Do you know what happens when you purge every Jew from a country, right? They go to other countries. And do you know what those other countries do with those now angry Jews?They build atomic weapons. That’s what we did, okay? When we look at leaders historically, what they have said is, “Yes, the Jews might be an outside group. Yes, they might not always be aligned with us, but there are ways that I can utilize that community for my long-term benefit,” [00:44:00] which we saw with people like Oliver Cromwell bringing the Jews back to England to better fight the expansion of Romanism.And I think that that shows, like, whe- how, how to think about this stuff without, even if you have an outside group, even if you have a group that has at times victimized you is worth considering. Okay, with all of that being true, what’s actually the best long-term path going forward for me to signal?Octavian Collins: Hmm.Malcolm Collins: Next, inaccurate. Inaction is a massive sin in the modern age, and very, very important to note. It’s when you say, “I will do,” and this is the most common form of it, “I will do X thing after I’ve accomplished Y thing,” when Y thing is not a necessary prerequisite for X thing. This is very different from traditional sloth.Mm-hmm. Because when you think about traditional sloth, you’re not doing it because [00:45:00] you’re lazy. Inaction is something like saying, “Well, once I have the right body, like once I’m skinny enough and hot enough-Simone Collins: Mm. Mm-hmm ...Malcolm Collins: then I’m gonna start dating.”Simone Collins: Or, once I’m certain that no one’s going to make fun of me if I do this, or that I’m 100% certain that I’m right.Like, we’re not certain about anything. We’re, we’re just trying to move in the least incorrect direction possible, but we believe that it’s sinful to not move forward at all. Mm. Whereas a lot of people are like, “Well, if I’m not absolutely certain that I can move forward in the morally perfect way, I’m not going to move forward.”And we think that that is, that is worse.Malcolm Collins: That is that PA form of inaction, right?Simone Collins: Yeah. You know, even if we’re moving forward in, like, a slightly wrong direction, in the end we’re gonna be closer to the morally good thing than you are if you’ve not moved at all.Malcolm Collins: If you are like, “But I don’t have the information yet,” right?Like if you’re in a state like the one that’s going... Come up with what test do you need to run to get that information?Simone Collins: Yeah.Malcolm Collins: [00:46:00] Not having enough information should never be a reason to not move forward anymore. If you’re a boss, you’ve had the employee who you come to them, you gave them a task, and they go, “Oh, sorry, I stopped like 20 minutes into the task when I realized I didn’t know how to do, like, stage two or something, or stage three.”And you’re like, “What the f- is wrong with you,” right? Like genuinely I feel this way sometimes. I’m like, “You should have either immediately come to me when you stopped, right, and I would’ve told you what to do next, or figured it out.” But we are all- No,Simone Collins: he’s talking about me. He’s, he’s just talking about me.Yeah.Malcolm Collins: Oh, you have done that a few times recently. Mm-hmm. I’m not... I actually wasn’t thinking of you, but it isa-Simone Collins: Yeah, you were. It’s okay ...Malcolm Collins: massive because it, it’s something that you... I, I wasn’t. I was thinking of other employees. But you have done this a few times recently, and it’s a massive sin when done to yourself, because ultimately we’re all our own bosses.And if you ever reach something and you’re just like, “I’m not sure,” then develop a heuristic for how you get to the next step when you’re not sure. It can be as simple as asking your favorite AI model.Simone Collins: [00:47:00] Yeah.Malcolm Collins: Just go to your favorite AI model and say, or two out of three models. Go to Reality Fabricator that’s our AI site, and type in, “Hey, we have some that run, like, multiple models on a thing, X or Y, and it will run multiple models, and it’ll cross-check the answer for you for the best answer, right? Like, that’s a fun way to approach this, and you can do that, right? Like, we have the technology that you should never, ever be stuck on any question.And this is where I’ve got annoyed at Simone when I, like, came back to her and I was like, “Okay, so where are you on X task?” And she’s like, “I got stuck at, like, stage three.” And I’m like, “Well, then go to an AI, right? Because I’m just gonna go to an AI when you kick this back to me, so why don’t you go to an AI, right?”But oh well. This was on getting the RFAB component ready for Apple computers, which she had to do. Mm-hmm. And now it works, by the way, for Apple, for people who wanna use it for, like, coding on Apple and stuff.Simone Collins: And to be fair, the, our third stage of doing this, I did finally get around to just doing that and not giving it back to you until it was done- [00:48:00] Yeahno matter how many times it failed.Malcolm Collins: But A- So ... but this is, and this is why I’m expanding the list of sins. This form of inaction is functionally as bad as sloth, and is more of a temptation for most people than sloth.Simone Collins: Well, and, and again, like, it, I think the big theme that differentiates your sins is that you have this extra prejudice, justified, toward virtue signaling sins.Well- Anything that, you know,Malcolm Collins: people- The Bible had that in it. If you read the freaking New Testament like we did in the last chapter-Simone Collins: Yeah ...Malcolm Collins: Jesus was like, “Yeah, make sure when you’re giving money, you don’t do it in a way that is overly performative. Make sure when you’re fasting, you don’t fast in a way where other people can tell that you’re fasting.”Mm-hmm. “Because that’s overly performative. Make sure when you’re praying, you don’t do it in a way that’s overly performative, because that’s really bad.” Like, this is made cl- this is in the spirit of what’s listed out there. It’s just not explicitly listed out so people have-Simone Collins: Well, yeah, [00:49:00] I think it’s maybe people missed it because it’s not so explicit.It’s more just like, “Hey, don’t be flashy when you do, when you engage in self-deprivation or, like, active acts of piety.” It doesn’t have an explicit proactive prohibition on general virtue signaling.Malcolm Collins: Yeah.Simone Collins: It’s just like, “Oh, when you do these things, be, be subtle about it.” Which of course, people miss that too, but this is a whole different level of stuff.Malcolm Collins: Next sin, self-flagellation. This is when you are hard on yourself or allow yourself to experience negative emotions when in the past you acted either... It, there’s, there’s two types of self-flagellation, justified and unjustified self-flagellation. I think even justified self-flagellation is a sin, but we’ll get to how in a second, okay?Mm. So if within any moment of your life you made a decision based on the information you had available [00:50:00] to you, and in a way that was directed towards long-term human flourishing or the good of the individual you were doing it for, like it could be how you’re raising your kids, how you’re treating your wife, anything like that, right?And it leads to some negative outcome, right? To feel bad about that is enormously sinful, because it’s indulgence. It’s, it, it, now this is one of the hardest sins to avoid And just knowing that it is a sin, like just laying it out as a sin and talking about puritanism, I think will help people better categorize these emotions and compartmentalize these emotions so they do not overwhelm you, and the, the weighted emotion of them doesn’t overwhelm you.But when, when is it actually justified to feel bad? When you acted in a way historically where you’ve had full access to information or with the information you had at the time, and you acted in a way that was not in accordance with that information or that was designed not [00:51:00] for long-term human flourishing, but for some personal benefit.This is where, you know, you knew you probably shouldn’t have gotten that fancy car when finances were tight, but you really wanted to show off to people, so you got the car even though it had no functional utility to your family. And now your family’s suffering for that You have permission to take time to meditate on those past failings so you don’t do them in the future, but to not overindulge.This should not be more than 10 minutes of emotion, okay? You need to move past this, and- Yeah ... since you have created a scenario for yourself, all you can do is move forwards. The only iteration of yourself that you can do good for are iterations of yourself that have yet to come to exist. And you are suffering or living a life of rewards for the actions of past iterations of yourself.And this is how Simone [00:52:00] sees sort of actions. Like we’re a constantly changing and new person with every moment, with every second of the day, and you’re constantly paying it forward to the future you.Simone Collins: Yeah. Well, and are you... Is, is this iteration of you that is acting right now, that you’re consciously experiencing going to be, going to go down in history as like a war criminal in your massive army of instances, or a hero that did something good, that moved you all in a good direction?Yeah. You have a chance to be a hero. You have a chance to be, you know, a mutineer. What are you gonna do? And thenMalcolm Collins: the next one here is a fun one. The indulgence of sin. The indulgence- Whoa ... of sin is the sin of for no reason other than to test yourself or because you think you are honing yourself and making yourself stronger you needlessly expose yourself to temptation.So an example of this would be... Now, this isn’t [00:53:00] normal, daily sorts of temptations. Like TV, erotic images, all of these things, they’re going to be all around you in modern society. You do have to be able to resist them to live a normal life, right? To not crash out. The people who crash out at the slightest exposure to one of these things, when people are like, “What if my kid sees X online?”And I’m like, bro, if, if your kid loses it to like something that every kid is going to see within 10 minutes of opening the internet your kid’s probably in a pretty bad place in terms of how you structured their value system and the rules that you laid out for them. So, a- a good example of this for someone like myself could be you don’t have the same temptations that I have.You don’t live with the same temptations that I live with. But naltrexone, an opioid agonist I take daily which prevents me from feeling my opioid pathways, which makes it much harder for addictive things to get their hooks into me. I could, if I wanted to, just be like... And, and some Christians are like this.They’re like, “Oh, [00:54:00] don’t, you know, blunt yourself to the temptation,” right? Like, “That’s a bad thing.” And it’s like, why not? Like, when I have the technology to do this, I should do it. If a person knows that they heavily struggle with alcohol in a way that’s gonna cause them to die or something like that having a fully stocked liquor cabinet is not a moral necessity for them.Yet in terms of the temptations that Christians expose themselves to, I have noticed some think it’s, like, cool or something to do this, right? It’s not cool. It leads to long-term negative consequences. The only types of exposure that you need to make sure you’re okay with is the types of exposure that you’re going to experience anyway.And, and that can be tied to recreational sins that you’ve accepted. So an example of this can be, I believe playing video games is sinful in that it is an indulgence that doesn’t move human society forwards, but I [00:55:00] think I would, like, mentally break down if I didn’t have any recreational time.So, and note I often play video games while I’m working. My normal way to play video games is while I have an episode running so that I’m editing it, right? You know, so I even try to do it, like, while I’m doing something else. Or when I watch anime, I’m often vibe coding, right? Like, I try to... But these are still sinful.I could be more focused, for example.Simone Collins: So I- That’s about balancing your efficacious pursuit of your values with whatever it is that keeps you happy and motivated and productive. And sometimes our long-term values when we pursue them are so abstracted and sort of built on delayed gratification that the bodies we’ve evolved to live in can’t really keep us motivated.Like, we have to create mini games- Right ... to like, to trick our bodies into keep going.Malcolm Collins: Video games are a sin that I’m like, I will take that sin because I know that it doesn’t like consume my entire life, right? Like video games and [00:56:00] anime do not consume my entire life and so I am able to engage with them in a way that I can’t engage with, for example, alcohol when I’m off naltrexone.And I think many people can relate to pornography in this way. Some people can engage with pornography in a way that’s just totally like, oh, a once a week thing or something like that, right? Whereas other people it’s like, they see it and now it’s all they can think about, right? If you’re the type of person where you see it and now it’s all you can think about, maybe don’t put horny pictures of women all over your house, right?Like, if you’re the type of person that struggles with gambling, maybe don’t live right next to a casino, right? , And as Luna’s pointed out, it’s gotten a lot harder with these online betting sites and stuff like that. I, I think of all of the sins of modern society, gambling is the worst. So be aware of that if you have it.The reason why I think it’s the worst is it is one of the only sins that can destroy your life and the life of everyone around you in like 10 minutes. Very few sins even like a heroin addiction typically takes, I don’t know, six months or [00:57:00] something, right? Like, but gambling, that’s like just over.Generational wealth can be gone. So it’s something that I think that people should never engage with. Gambling is one of those things where it’s one of the, the things where it’s like, “Okay, when I’m choosing the sins that I choose to indulge in, which one should I just not do?” Gambling is like the easiest one.Okay?Speaker 6: One I’d add here that actually came from a recent episode when, , I was talking to Simone and we were like, “Well, they didn’t even end up enjoying the gang bang that they went to.” And she goes, “Well, you know, maybe they went just to see if they would like going.” And I said, “But I don’t wanna know whether or not I like gang bangs.”Like, I can tell as an outsider I don’t. I do not like seeing other men naked, , or having... It’s eh. But if, if I was genuinely uncertain, I still would not want to know because even if I was a completely indulgent person who just, you know, did things like gang bangs recreationally, they still take a lot of effort, carry a lot of risk, everything like that.And so I think we should [00:58:00] also just outline as a sin going out and doing something just to see if you like it whenIt would be a net negative to your life to find out you like that thing. , This includes things like skydiving, free climbing, gang bangs, , gambling is an easy one here. N- you know, never be like, “Oh, well, I went to gamble to see if I enjoyed it.” You know, “I tried heroin to see if I enjoyed it.” Just don’t do itMalcolm Collins: Next, empty words. So empty words, the sin of empty words, is when a person is trying to engage, or you’re trying to engage, because sins, our own sins are the ones that matter the most. When you’re trying to engage somebody else in c- a conversation that doesn’t either entertain them or move their ideas forwards or share information with them, or develop your and their understanding of the world, morality, science, et cetera.All [00:59:00] conversations and all words should have some purpose. Now, it could be to make them happy. It could be a joke or something like that. But when you come to somebody and you say something like, “Here are the things I did today,” and that’s not relevant to them, you have stolen a portion of their, their life.You have fracturally murdered that person. Worse are empty words that are designed to try to bring another person down to your negative emotional state. This is like compounding, where you come to a person and you tell them about something negative that happened to you to try to pass on- Like venting,Simone Collins: complaining, trauma dumpingMalcolm Collins: All of that is horrible, a horrible sin.You are trying to offload your trauma, your pain to another person. You can say, “Well, what if you need to talk about a trauma to get over it?” It’s like, you don’t need to. If you just don’t contextualize it as traumatic, the studies have shown you won’t experience it as traumatic. We always talk about this study, but there’s a famous study where they looked over people’s [01:00:00] experiences of trauma in youth, and they correlated their stated experiences of trauma in youth correlated with their negative behavioral patterns as an adult, their m- mental stress as an adult, everything like that.But when they went over the court records to see who really experienced trauma and who didn’t, completely dis-correlated from anything as an adult. People who experienced demonstrable trauma, like I would be someone like that. If you look at my childhood, it was horrifying. Like we’re actually talking with a, a, a team that’s like doing research on us, and I’m going through my childhood, and they were like, “Wait, that sounds horr- f- like why aren’t you more focused on that as a traumatic event?”And I say, “Because how does that help me to be?” There would be a pure negative externality to everyone around me Next. And, and this is a big one, and I really encourage people to, one, look for it in themselves and look for it in their partners, right? If you, if you’re in a techno-puritan relationship, work on this, right?Next, unnecessary status signaling. Easy, I [01:01:00] probably shouldn’t even need to say it but all status signaling is sinful, right? Except for when it is necessary for, like, a job or something like that. And be very careful you don’t use lies about what you say is necessary to indulge in status signaling that isn’t actually necessary.You, for almost no job do you actually need anything other than a bare bones car, right? For example. And yet many people buy... And, and a used bare bones car. Will buy fancy things that they simply do not need. In the same category as status signaling is the sin of in-group signaling. This is signaling how punk you are, how goth you are, how whatever in-group you want to accept you.Even how techno-puritan you are to other techno-puritans. It is when you engage in this signaling in a way that hurts your long-term goals and ability to affect society. So an example might be a face tattoo or something like that. Even if there was a techno-puritan [01:02:00] face tattoo you could get, it would be strictly sinful to get it because it would lower your efficaciousness in societySpeaker: I talked it over with Simone to think if there’s any sins that we’re missing here, and we came up with a few more. First is the sin of entitlement. This is to believe that you are owed anything by either other people or reality itself. Be that dignity, a good life, healthcare, being treated with respect.No one is owed anything, and to believe you are is a grave sin. Second is the sin of indulgent nostalgia. This is allowing nostalgia to indulge rumoration rather than focusing on trying to recreate those sorts of experiences for the next generation in which case it can be good.The final is rumination more broadly, just the sin of rumoration. This is overly [01:03:00] focusing or giving weight to any emotion that you are feeling that you didn’t choose to feel. This, like as Simone put it when we were walking this morning, she goes, “Today people will be like, ‘I’m sad. That means I should do something about it.I should take pills or something,’ when really it’s just not particularly relevant how you feel. It’s usually not particularly relevant to what you need to accomplish or what you need to doThe final one I’d include here is one of the biggest potential sins, is risking a human’s life for happiness or a thrill or for some emotional subset. , This could be, you know, recreational sex is one thing that could cause a human life to come into existence, and then you feel put in a position where abortion makes sense to you.But this also includes things like skydiving, bungee jumping, free climbing, anything where you are putting your own life at risk meaninglessly for just a thrillMalcolm Collins: Next, corrupted [01:04:00] mercy.And this is the biggest, and we can get to this another day because it goes long, this section. We’re gonna be talking about the Bible in a place where I’m just gonna say the Bible needs to be updated on this point. There are many places in the Bible where it explicitly says “Give food to the poor.Yes, even foreigners. Yes, don’t let that trouble you.” And I think that that made sense morally as we talk about, like, things in the Bible, the Bible in the past said, “Sell your daughter. This is how you sell your daughter into sex slavery. This is how, you know, you treat your slaves. This is h- how- how you act when you conquer a people and have to slaughter all their infants,” right?You know, all of those things, right? Those th- those parts of biblical morality have changed as society has changed,Speaker 13: And this isn’t because the underlying morality of the Bible has changed. The goals of all of these have always been the same. The iterative change to human civilization they’ve made have always been the [01:05:00] same. , But it’s because humanity and the way that we live has changed, and that has changed the rules that are best to live by to live a virtuous life within the social norms of your eraMalcolm Collins: and I think that this is one area where we need to look at what’s in the Bible, and I’d actually say we... There’s no way around this. There’s no linguistic way around this. We just need to accept that in the time of Jesus and in the time of the Old Testaments, there was not enough charity in the world to the extent that people were suffering, and so the Bible had to signal boost charity.But today, we live in a time where charity has reached such an extreme that it is leading to more aggregate suffering. Oh. And we will get to that next. Oh, that might actually make a whole other tract. We’ll do a whole other tract on that.Simone Collins: Oh, that’s a good idea. Well, useful stuff. We need to write this down in,Malcolm Collins: Yeah, he can try it for an hour now. Won’t that be fun?Simone Collins: Yeah.Malcolm Collins: I, I mean, remember, while the Bible tells you to be merciful, it also says, “Be merciful just as your father is merciful.” [01:06:00] And keep in mind that God did punish a guy by taking away his title as king because he didn’t kill literally everyone in a settlement, even though he did kill all the babies.He did that part. Didn’t kill everyone. So, whatever is meant by mercy here is not the standard definition of mercy, and that’s worth meditating on as we go into this next section. Love ya, Simone.Simone Collins: I love you, tooSpeaker 16: What do you think? Look, a dinosaur. It’s a dinosaur. Are the kids going to survive? I don’t know. What is gonna happen, Indy? This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit basedcamppodcast.substack.com/subscribe

Is Vatican II the result of a “gay Jew infiltrating the Catholic Church”? Malcolm and Simone Collins dive deep into the shocking story of Gregory Baum — a matrilineal Jew, former Catholic priest, and openly gay man who authored the first draft of Nostra Aetate, one of the most controversial documents of the Second Vatican Council.In this episode, they explore:• Baum’s background, conversion, active homosexuality while writing key Church documents, and later life• The content and lasting impact of Nostra Aetate on Catholic teaching regarding Jews, other religions, and interfaith dialogue• Why many traditional Catholics view Vatican II with deep suspicion• The broader implications for Church authority, doctrine, and demographicsA wild, uncomfortable, and thought-provoking discussion on faith, identity, institutional capture, and theology. What do you think — infiltration, urban monoculture influence, or something else?Watch until the end for Malcolm & Simone’s unfiltered reactions.Episode TranscriptMalcolm Collins: Hello, Simone. If you clicked on this video and are wondering, is this a clickbait title? It is so much crazier than you think, right? So I saw a title going through on a Redeem Zoomer video. We’ve had him on the show. I think he’s a great content creator, but he’s a pretty small C conservative content creator.Doesn’t really lean into c- clickbait. Generally tries to dig into the meat and bones of religious history, Christian history, and theology. And it was the, the gay Jew who infiltrated Catholicism or the Vatican or something like that. Anyway, I read this and I was like, “Wh- this isn’t normal Redeem Zoomer content,” right?It mu- it can’t possibly be true, Malcolm. I start listening to the video. I get to the end of it and I’m like, “Oh, my God, I have to know more.” So I need to clarify a few things about this particular individual and the influence they have had on Catholicism. [00:01:00] First of all is this somebody who was just, like, same sex attracted or, you know, not, not actually sleeping with men?Or maybe they, long after writing the documents that became important parts of Vatican II Nostra A- aetera m- they, they maybe long after had gay sex or started doing gay activism or something like that. They were, while they were a priest, during the time period they wrote these documents, having active gay sex with men Yeah andSimone Collins (2): then it’s like- Wait, whoa, whoa, whoa, hold, hold on.You, how can you be a Catholic priest and a, I mean, I guess you could be a ma- a matrilineal Jew And that’s the other, right, so here’sMalcolm Collins: another thing. I was like, maybe they’re just ethnically Jewish or something like that. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. No, they’re probably not actually aSimone Collins (2): Jew. They’re just matrilineally, ooh, matrilineally Jewish, and that’s it, right?Yeah, so- And then that would be-Malcolm Collins: He is, by the way, matrilineally [00:02:00] Jewish. His, one of the things he fought hardest to normalize within the Vatican and Catholicism as a policy is that it is immoral to attempt to proselytize to and convert Jews to Christianity. Does that sound a lot like somebody who actually deconverted from Judaism?That makes no sense if you actually believe Christian principles, right? Like, you would... I’m, I’m saying this, I’m trying to be, like, as... I have, I have tackled this particular conundrum every way I can in my head, and the only way, because then, like, wouldn’t he convert back to Judaism?But the only way I can get it to make sense when I piece together his various writings, and then it does make sense, is he thinks that, that the [00:03:00] Jews are still under the first covenant. And that as such, you can have a b- believe that the Jewish worldview is both 100% correct and accurate, and the Christian worldview is simultaneously 100% correct and accurate. Because the first covenant stands and you have the second covenant. And so he basically, I mean, if this is true, it means that he 100% believed in, even if he was telling the truth about being a Catholic, Catholicism and Judaism.Or a form of Catholicism that’s heavily different from other forms of Catholicism, because now we’re gonna get to, what did he write? So he wrote Nostra Aetate. This is an official declaration of the Second Vatican Council. It was overwhelmingly approved with a final vote of 2,021 in favor and only 88 against, and it was promulgated or officially issued by Pope Paul VI on October [00:04:00] 28th, 1965.What that means in terms of Catholic doctrine is that’s not the same thing as a papal bull, right? Like, it doesn’t mean that it directly came from God. But what it does mean, according to the catechism of the Catholic Church, or, like, their official documents about what all Catholics have to do, is Catholics, quote-unquote, “owe it religious assent or a sincere submission of intellect and will.”See CCC 892 to 893. It is not optional. And I will read through that, the, like, official Catholic doctrine on these types of policies. But what it said and what it introduced to Catholicism as a concept is that other religions, including religions outside of the Abrahamic tree, like Hinduism and Buddhism, have a ray of divine truth to them.And it’s even written ... It can be interpreted, like now, [00:05:00] after I went over this document, I understand now why so many of our Catholic friends hate Vatican II. ‘Cause I’m reading this and I’m like, “Whoazers.” Like, this is pretty wild. And it, it goes through and sort of praises things about other major religions and sort of creates commandments, essentially, for Catholics around getting along with them rather than necessarily trying to convert them.That’s crazy. Veryconvenient if a Jew had entered the, the, the Catholic Church. Okay. By the way, other final crazy thing is he also deconverted- Oh ... fromSimone Collins (2): Catholicism. So he, like, came in, vandalized church policy, and then- Vandalized churchMalcolm Collins: policy in a very d- and note, when I say he wrote the Nostra E- Eleata this document- It’s not like he co-wrote it or something like that.He wrote the entirety, as far as church history and anyone is aware- Okay ... of the first [00:06:00] draft of this document. How- Yes, it was heavily edited after its first draft and before it entered the sort of church law and stuff like that. And actually, it seemed to have gotten even worse in future edits. In his original writing of it, it was really just focused on Jews and Christians getting along and Judaism being partially true.Okay. And all of the, like, Hinduism and Buddhism stuff was added by other people afterwards. Oh, wow. So, like the his, his group of buddies- It was the ‘60s. It was the time. Yeah but the reason he left was also crazy. So within the church and during his time in the church, he was a well-known LGBT activist.Oh. And he left the church, and we’ll go into that because as he said the, the, the, the church’s stance on gays. Which is odd because one he... If- he was a priest. He’s not, in C- Catholic terms at least, it’s, that, that doesn’t [00:07:00] just mean you can’t sleep with women. You can’t sleep with anyone as a Catholic priest.Yeah. Right? Like- Yeah ... their stance on gays had nothing to do with the fact that he couldn’t sleep with men. Yeah, it’s, it’s aboutSimone Collins (2): celibacy. It’s not about selective celibacy.Malcolm Collins: Yeah, although he was doing that anyway. Well. He ends up, by the way, long-term dating another Catholic priest who is gay or former Catholic priest who is gay.Simone Collins (2): Oh, I just, no, I just want the yaoi manga version of this. After leaving- It sounds fantastic.Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Y- you know how G- oh, you wanna get even more manga? Do you know who he’s married to today?Simone Collins (2): Neil deGrasse Tyson.Malcolm Collins: I don’t know. Who? What? An ex-Catholic nun.Simone Collins (2): God, you said that and my, my computer just, like, demonically shut off. It, it was like- ... it wasn’t used to process that. No, it wasMalcolm Collins: anex-Catholic nun who he’s married to now. Oh my. Well,Simone Collins (2): a veryMalcolm Collins: mannishSimone Collins (2): nun perhaps.Malcolm Collins: No, no. They don’t have any [00:08:00] sexual relationship. I think it’s so that he can more easily have both a long-term pr- relationship, which is something he’s always wanted, and practice casual sex with gay men in, in potentially large numbers.So okay. I’ve set the scene, I think. This is absolutely crazy. I now understand why, like, all of the sane Catholics who, like, are, are our friends are all like, “Yeah, I’m not, like, a big fan of Vatican II. That... Some w- some fishy stuff went on with that,” right? And l- let’s, let’s just go into this, okay?‘Cause it gets... , so he knew he was attracted to men in his teenage years but remained celibate during his time as a priest. Ordained in the 1950s, left the priesthood in 1974. A- and note his conversion into Catholicism is also pretty fishy. So we’ll get into that as well. In his 2016 autobiography, The Oil Has Not Run Dry, he publicly came out. He described falling in love with men [00:09:00] emotionally in his younger years. The joy mixed with pain because it couldn’t be reciprocated due to his vows. His first gay experience was at the age of 40 around 1963. This was around the age that he wrote this document which he described as exciting but ultimately disappointing because he wanted a committed partner.After leaving the priesthood, he married Shirley Flynn, a former nun, in 1978. They lived together platonically until her death in 2007. He described continuing to explore his sexuality in other, quote-unquote, “non-conformist ways.” In 8- 1986 after moving to Montreal, he fell in love with a former priest, a male partner, and remained committed to that relationship.Now, this is also pretty interesting because that’s a huge age gap relationship thereSimone Collins (2): on the bright side, I mean, we’ve got gay romance, we got the costumes, we got the age gap. This is just perfect manga [00:10:00] fodder for some kind of priest yaoi series.So- Yeah, this is- AtMalcolm Collins: least there’s that ... this is one of the things where if you come to the conclusion that I do in this and, and you’re watching this, that he just never stopped being Jewish I’m not getting the Jewishness in any of this, though. I... Where is, whereSimone Collins (2): is the Jew coming in? We haven’t, we haven’t gotten to that yet.Okay. Because I, I’m not... None of this feels like someone who’s very Jewish. It just, it just feels like someone who’s kind of trolling the church,Malcolm Collins: having fun. But if you, if you... No, suppose you are an actual Jew, right? Now- Okay ... keep in mind, Jews aren’t supposed to be gay either, so, like, he’s not good at being a Jew in thatSimone Collins (2): respect.Well, like, again, to my point. Now, this doesn’t sound like a Jew. This sounds like m- maybe someone a little bit ur- ur- early urban monoculture or someone very 1960s-ish, just like, “Free love. Everything is real. God comes in many forms.” That kind of person. [00:11:00] There’s nothing particularly Jewish about that.That has to do with a loss of culture, a loss of tradition. Mm-hmmMalcolm Collins: No, but imagine you’re, you’re Jewish, right? Even a bad Jew. I, I, I still think even as a bad Jew, even with that level of sin- God, Jew ... this is one of those, like, sneak stat things where I often joke that, that Jews are just specced into, like, way too high a sneak stat.They, they, it’s not just they come off as sneaky, it’s the fact that, that Mossad has been able to pull off these insane things like getting terrorists to pay them for pagers to blow- I love that,Simone Collins (2): yeah. And most recently there’s been this big scare with Mossad being a little bit too socially connected with a lot of high-ranking Trump officials, and they’re sending all this intel back on what internally the US government is talking about vis-a-vis the Iran war.Malcolm Collins: Yeah, but imagine the civilization level sneak stat that is to sneak your way into- Into everything ... the core council which decides [00:12:00] what is religiously true for Catholics.Simone Collins (2): Okay, okay. So he’s, he’s Mossad-ing the Catholic Church is what you’re trying to say. InfectingMalcolm Collins: it with documentation that says you’re not allowed to go against the Jews.That’s not even, like... That’s not even, like... I’m just like, “Simone Collins (2): Damn.” Really? Isn’t that just, isn’t that what he wrote more just, like, let’s try to be more cooperative and kind vis-a-vis other religions? Or is it- no,Malcolm Collins: it basically affirms Judaism is, is partially true and worshiping the same god. Well, it is the sa- I mean, they, they share the Old Testament.Yeah, but m- most Catholics before Vatican II did not think Jews were worshiping the same god. That is... E- even the concept of that is really a post-Vatican II concept. Well, Jews worshipSimone Collins (2): the God of the Old Testament andMalcolm Collins: Christians worship the God of the Old Testament. I know that makes sense to you as a techno-puritan because we believe the same thing.Okay. I am just saying that most Christians don’t believe that. [00:13:00] They do believe- I guess someone’sSimone Collins (2): gonna explain this to me in the comments, so yeah. Okay. Fine. I’ll take, I’ll take your word for it and then go to the comments.Speaker: So I decided to look more into this to see how popes after it was out related to it, and it looks like they’ve just built on it since then. , You have Pope Paul VI, who was the one who, Put the whatever on it, the, the, the seal on it. Then you’ve got Pope John Paul II, who frequently referenced and built upon it. Examples include addresses at an anniversary, specifically his 20th address in 1985, his 1986 visit to the Rome Synagogue, and multiple statements on Jewish-Christian relations.Um, then you have , Pope Benedict XVI, who wrote a letter for the 40th anniversary in 2005, praising it for opening a new era. So he explicitly praised it in relation with Jews and overcoming prejudices. As both cardinal and pope, he affirmed its role while noting some limitations, e.g.[00:14:00] it focuses positively on religion, but should address the sick and distorted forms of those religions. Okay, whatever. , Pope Francis marked the 50th anniversary, 2015, in a general audience, calling the message, quote unquote, “always timely,” and quoting sections on Judaism and Islam, and emphasized practical dialogue, friendship, and cooperation in the document.Then we have Pope Leo XIV, who recently gave an address to a general audience for the 60th anniversary, highlighting its ongoing urgency for Jewish-Catholic relationships. So, , what I’ll note here is, yes, none of these are like papal bulls or anything like that, but for half a century at this point, well over half a century at this point, , every single pope has reaffirmed and built on this document., This inception was deep and thoroughMalcolm Collins: It looks like the age gap might’ve been around, like, 25 years for one of his relationships. Ooh.Simone Collins: Well, I mean, you know, they’re very common these [00:15:00] days, so.Malcolm Collins: Yeah. So we’ll start with his sexuality stuff, then we’ll get into the Jew stuff.But that is, that is fas- ... And it makes me understand more why we see so many of the Catholics who do not think the church is, is, as it exists right now, is something that they can follow.Mm.And they’ve gone for other versions or sort of past iterations of what the church taught. And it’s always fascinating to me that they don’t consider themselves schismatic.Although, what’s really funny is a lot of the, like, most famous schismatics, like Martin Luther, also didn’t want to consider themselves a schismatic.Speaker 22: Other individuals who didn’t consider themselves schismatic were John Calvin andHenry VIII and John Wycliffe. I personally don’t understand this. You know, now that Protestantism is large, maybe it’s just twisted my brain on this issue,Malcolm Collins: So, like, th- that’s just a common thing that happens to people, where you have this sort of trans-schismatic take, where it’s like, “I don’t define myself as schismatic, and I’m just looking at the guy in a wig.”And I’m like, “But [00:16:00] you’re, you’re clearly just a guy in a wig,” right? Like, you’re ignoring the church’s teachings, right? You know, that seems ... But anyway, to continue here. And, and I think that at the end of the day, whether or not you’re schismatic or not does actually come from whether or not you define yourself as schismatic.I actually buy into the, the trend thing of schism- schismatism, because you at the end of the day get to decide, you know, what your heart thinks, right? So even if I as an outsider would be like, “This looks schismatic to me,” they as, those insiders wouldn’t, right? So to continue there. He knew he was attracted to men in his teenage years but remained celibate during that time as a priest, and he used priesthood to sort of, this was part of what seemed to motivate him to become a priest, the ability to live a celibate lifestyle and, and not be drawn to this. In his 2016 autobiography, The Oil Has Not Run Dry, so keep in mind this stuff about who he’s sleeping with and when he’s sleeping with them is not coming from outside hostile sources.This is from his own mouth. Talk about this. Oh, sorry, we just ... Wait, wait, did we just go through [00:17:00] this? Yeah, we went through his first sexual experience and stuff like that. He described wanting to explore se- his, his sexuality in non-conformist ways. So anyway, th- this is where it gets interesting, right?So, remember I mentioned wh- when his sexual experience was, right? So, that would’ve happened when he was 40 years old, okay? Oh. So the document by the pope, right? With officially promulgated, that means this is when the pope, you know, basically affirmed this document, when he was 42 years old.He apparently wrote the first draft of the document when he was 38 years old, and would have been working on the inter-drafting process during this time when he was having se- gay, gay sex.Right? Mm.So to get some quotes from him “Looking back, I begin to realize my vow of celibacy had not been a meaningful religious commitment, but simply a promise to bracket my homosexuality, to refuse to [00:18:00] explore its meaning and power.”He decided to leave the priesthood since, quote, “Since I no longer agreed with the church’s official sexual ethics and was exploring my sexuality in non-conformist ways.” Oh, no. A- again, wait, you left the church to explore your sexuality in non-conformist ways? My brother, straight men don’t get to do that either.Like, the level of this guy’s commitment to the church, not high. You know? That isSimone Collins (2): a little... Yeah. Ugh.Malcolm Collins: And this is actually something really weird about Catholicism that I’m beginning to notice. And I notice this from his writings on Catholicism, the way he re- relates to Catholic theology, is a lot of people who are at, like, controlling levels within the Catholic Church and Catholic religious orders are significantly less religiously faithful than I’d say, like, the average lay Catholic that I know.Mm. And that’s been very, very surprising to [00:19:00] me. And I- Well,Simone Collins (2): there’s also such this... It is a little something that I struggle with with the c- the Catholic Church is the lifestyle, the day, just the day-to-day routine of someone who is in the clergy is so different from the day-to-day routine of a layperson who’s really deeply engaged in all the sacraments, right?‘Cause you’re looking at one life that has possibly a lot of solitude, you know, a lot of sort of communal living sort of like a university style living if you are, you know, in a group, or more isolated living, very independent. Versus, you know, a teeming family, lots of young kids running around, lots of...I mean, obviously priests work closely with their community too. It’s just, it, it worries me that... And what I like about the LDS church, for example, is that the people who are involved in policy are people who are, they came from the church. They raised families. They, they’ve done the whole thing. They’re living the LDS life, or they lived the [00:20:00] LDS life and now they’re older and senior and, and now influencing it and trying to make it sustainable and good, presumably.Yeah. But if you’re a Catholic priest, you’ve never done that. Like, you haven’t had the family. You haven’t raised the kids. You don’t know the challenges of raising a kid in the church in the modern day. Well, then whyMalcolm Collins: do you think, like, Catholics have such low fertility rates when contrasted with other groups?Simone Collins (2): I mean, it’s, it can’t help. There, there are so many factors, but yeah. I, it... So when, when you say, you know, you, you don’t see such great adherence from The clergy, well, can you be surprised when the clergy don’t really live the life of the layperson? They can’t, because they can’t be married. They can’t have kids.They can’t raise children within the church. Yeah, but is it- They instead... It’s kind of like how, something I’ve noticed, and this, like in a very different world, there’s a lot of childless women who worked as nannies or as teachers. Mm. And they’re like, “Well,” you know. And they, they sort of act like they know really well.Like, “I know how a child should be raised. I know [00:21:00] all these things.” But they, they never really have lived it, right? They’ve only been, like, paid staff who work with children under certain conditions. But they don’t know the full experience of it, and then they’re very judgmental around, like, parents and parenting and how a child should be raised, even though they don’t know what it’s like to be on the hook 24/7.And I think there might be a similar dynamic that takes place with, like, a full-time clergy who’s not allowed to engage in the sacrament of having kids and getting married because they’re viewing it from a limited perspective that makes them think like they fully understand the experience when they really can’t.Does thatMalcolm Collins: make sense? Well, it’s also one of the things that was increasingly clear to me as I studied this guy’s life is he seemed to do very little for, like, actually... Like, if you look at his writings and stuff like that they predominantly seem tied to gay activism, right? Like- Mm ... it almost seems like he was living off of Catholic tithings while spending his day and nights promoting, like, because he just had, you know, you have time to think in free time when you’re doing something like this [00:22:00] promoting gay stuff.Hmm.And that seems to be a, a big way that, like, the, the sort of gayness became more normalized within the church was specifically downstream of him. But to continue here. And, and gayness is super normalized in the Catholic Church to the extent that we’ve pointed out, there’s even an article on, like, the gayness of Catholic priests where it’s argued between 25, from surveys, 25 and 50% of gay, Catholic priests are same-sex attracted.Which isn’t a, a ding on them. I mean, we often say this is actually kind of a, an ethical way for society to deal with same-sex attraction. Absolutely. If it, if, if you know, it’s saying you can’t participate in it, you know, at least use these people like ethically sourced eunuchs so you can get people without as much nepotism to have positions of authority within your religious institutions, right?Like, but that’s also gonna make them, like, way more open to these ideas and in an environment where people are skirting around these ideas. And I think that this might be where the normalization- Mm ... especially in the heart of the [00:23:00] Catholic Church, of trying to cover up the child, the ev- everybody knows what scandal I’m talking about.I guess I’ll put a line from South Park here.Speaker 2: Why would he put anything in your butts? We don’t know. That’s what we’re trying to figure out. Hmm.Hmm. Hello there, children. Chef, why would a priest want to stick up my butt? Goodbye.Speaker 7: Now I want to be clear that the Catholic institution, , was committing these SA attempts at lower rates than other large institutions like the US public school system, , by pretty significant margins. , But that doesn’t explain why they tried to cover it up, like up to the highest levels of the church, and put people in positions where they could continue to do this even after the coverup.Like, if you’re gonna do a coverup for reputation, at least keep the people away from kids afterwardsSpeaker 23: It was almost as if, or at least in terms of how they were acting, that they thought the mere fact that people were [00:24:00] upset , at them for sleeping with children was the problem. , And I think we even see how the sentiment could potentially arrive through individuals like Milo Yiannopoulos, where he originally said that this was like a sexual awakening for him, , when a, a priest, , hooked up with him as a kid., And that others may feel that way as well, and like the outside world just doesn’t understand. It’s, I don’t know, one potential perspective?Speaker 24: Like, okay, so bear with me here, but suppose you’re like Milo, and you were molested as a young person, but you felt it very affirming for whatever reason, Stockholm Syndrome, whatever, or even j- you actually did feel it affirming. It was like an important awakening for you. And then other, you see other people doing the same thing to other children, and you then, , see them being punished for it, and you would think, “Oh, well this doesn’t make sense.”Look, just, I as an outsider am trying to find any logical reason why a good [00:25:00] person would do this, and maybe Catholics can chime in and explain why they think that the church may have been covering this up in the way that they were covering it up, where it allowed the people who were doing it to keep doing itSpeaker 16: This year, we’re taking the boys on a weekend boat trip to discuss Jesus’ role as the navigator of our lives. That sounds pretty fun.Speaker 17: A Catholic boat trip?Speaker 18: The Catholic boat’s gonna be heading on out today. The Catholic boat, get some hot Christian action that’ll take you-Malcolm Collins: but uhThe, the, it’s always really perplexed me, like why did they not, why, why were they trying to protect these priests, right? When, when they were like moving around the priests that they knew were the issues instead of dealing with them. Like it- I, I always thought like there must be some form of normalization that [00:26:00] I’m not aware of.Then I read this guy’s writings in daily life and I’m like, “Oh, if there are a bunch of priests like this guy, that explains it.” There, there’s basically a What do you call it? A gay cult that has infiltrated the upper rings of the Catholic Church, the Vatican, right? Like,Speaker 4: No, to keep their mouths shut. Right. Yep. Right. And so... W- wait a minute. What? Yes, but we’ve got to find out why these children are suddenly finding it necessary to report that they’re being molested. Stop the problem at its source. YesMalcolm Collins: what, that’s, that’s what. Yeah, everyone he’s married to and having sex with after he left was a former priest.Mm.Simone Collins (2): It doesn’t look great that that happened, yeah.Malcolm Collins: Okay.Simone Collins (2): And- Or, or it just means that when people realize they can’t adhere to the values and rules of the church, they leave, which could be a sign that those who remain are being pretty good. I don’t, I’m, I don’t know, just maybe, maybe. Right? That could be...Malcolm Collins: Yeah. So, and note here, this episode, people might be like, “Malcolm, like, this seems [00:27:00] like an area where you could really dunk on Catholicism. Like, why aren’t you taking the shots here, bro? Like, we all know you want to.” And this is one of those, oh, no, no, no, no, no. Like, this is too bad even for me. Like, I’m like, I feel bad about this.I would like, learning this history, it wasn’t like... It was almost like a curse to knowledge for me because like, oh. Like, this is, this is not fun to know happened to your religion, right? Like, this is, this is too much of a, this is like, you know, you don’t like the other team, but then you see them do so bad in a particular game that they just get completely owned.Mm ... and they’re, they’re walking off the field and you’re just like, “I’m, I’m, I’m sorry that happened to you guys. That was painful to watch.” Which is what learning the story of this guy has been in terms of, like, my thoughts on the Vatican.Mm.But to continue here a- and note here, I’m not saying this ‘cause I’m anti-Jewish or anti-gay.Like, everybody if this guy was secretly a Jew, right, [00:28:00] like, dang. Right? Like I’m, I’m just sort of, like we all should be advocating for our own group. This is, this is where, you know, when somebody sees a Jew say something like, “Well, you know, I support Israel over the United States.” And people are like, “Oh, can you believe they...”I’m like, I mean, they’re Jewish. Y- yeah, like I support America over any other country, but I’m, I’m an American, right? You know? That’s like the core of my identity, my genetic history, my cultural history. And if I lived in, for example, Britain, I would never move to supporting Britain over America just ‘cause I had a job there.Speaker 6: I should clarify, this is very different from supporting your own in a way that creates negative externalities, like the Jews did where the ADL ended up supporting, , in trying to de-platform that content creator who rightfully was calling out Orthodox Jewish communities for running welfare fraud, or Chabad did in getting that guy who killed a bunch of people off, or the Mormon sort of [00:29:00] cabal did around the bricks and minifigs.Yeah, , that’s, that creates problems. But in terms of just being pro-Mormon if you’re Mormon, , and you know, saying, “Oh, I’ll hire a Mormon over a non-Mormon,” like f- of course. Of course. Why would, why would we not want... That’s presumably what we all wantI mean, in this respect, sometimes we’ll have like Jewish fans or Catholic fans who will be like, “Oh, well, I’d support America over Israel,” or, “I’d support America over the Vatican.” And I’m like, It doesn’t... I mean, I support America because I’m an American , , and my religious and cultural history is American.If your plan is to eventually become fully American, that will eventu- I mean, intergenerationally lead to a break from your past identity. It’s not a flex to not care about protecting your people. , Your people are different from our people, and if you deny that, [00:30:00] you can. America does integrate people, but full integration, eventually means some form of true and permanent separation from whatever your original group is., And I think that we’re actually seeing that within portions of the American Catholic population and their relation with the Vatican right now. , It’s just w- when is this fully accepted? And, and as well as with the American, portions of the American Jewish populationLike the Jew who tells me, as some Jews have, that they would support American interests over the interests of Jews more broadly, I don’t hear that and think, “Oh, that’s super cool.” Or the, the Catholic who’s like, “I would support American interests over the Vatican interests.” I don’t hear, hear that and I’m like, “Oh, oh, oh yeah, you’re so cool.”Like any more than like if I moved to another country, even if, even if I spent 50 or 60 years there, I wouldn’t support that country over America. And some people can move to America and become fully American. Like I think Leaflet’s a good example of [00:31:00] this. But, you know, I don’t expect that from everyone.It’s just that when it’s clear that a person isn’t moving here for that reason, there’s probably another place where they would be better suitedMalcolm Collins: You know, that’s, it, the, the guy was playing on Team Jew, you know? His, his goal was it, you know, in- inje- inject Catholic doctrine with protect the Jews, right? And, and he achieved that. So to continue here. He also thought gays had, like, a special position in, in God’s design even when he was religious.So here’s another quote from him. “I have asked myself, is there a special meaning in the homosexual condition? God creates the great majority of humans heterosexual and only a small minority homosexual. Is there a special task associated with the condition of this latter?” By the way, there is. It’s, it’s self-control.But that doesn’t occur to him. An, an additional opportunity to [00:32:00] exercise self-control and an additional challenge. “Since they are an oppressed minority, aware of the hypocrisy of society and the damage done by the dominant culture, I have suggested that gays and lesbians are intended to extend solidarity to all marginalized groups and demand greater justice.Because homosexuals are largely invisible in society, their prophetic vocation will have a cultural impact and support the struggle for human emancipation.” So, like, keep in mind that this is what this guy thought his spiritual mission to do with, like, the tithings that were supporting him. So, Simone, before I go furtherSimone Collins (2): I’m just so flat.Like, this is so Maybe this doesn’t have more people talking about it because it’s so hard to process that it actually could happen, I guess. Like, it just... Like, if you were to see a flying saucer land right in front of you, or, like, you were to [00:33:00] drive by one in a parking lot, you’d be like, “Well, I definitely didn’t see that,” ‘cause that would, that could never happen.And so- Yeah, no, IMalcolm Collins: actually f- y- people know me. Like, come on, this is Malcolm. He’s gonna have an anti-Catholic conspiracy rant. Like, that- Yeah, but I- ... that could work. That, that should go like butter for me.” But it’s just, like, too blatant, right? Like, it’s like you spend your whole life on alien- Yeah, like how couldSimone Collins (2): this...My brain can’t process it. It doesn’t make sense.Malcolm Collins: I mean, it’s, it’s like you spend your whole life on alien conspiracies, and then aliens land in your front yard with a flying saucer. They come out, and Elvis is hanging out with them, and he starts doing, like, an Elvis dance in front of you. And you’re like- Yeah, and you’re like, “Simone Collins (2): I, I don’t know what to do with this.”Malcolm Collins: Yeah, you’re just like, “What? What? What?” That’s, that’s not even, like, an interesting... Like, gay Jew infiltrates the Vatican and infects them with weird ideology that inverts their prior religious principles? What? No, [00:34:00] no, Malcolm. Bad Malcolm. Th- th- d- Oh, my God. But we’re gonna pull on this thread, okay? And this is also why for me and, and, a- and I’ve always said, like, this is why I really personally, when people always wonder, “Well, what’s your source of authority,” right?Ever having a source of authority that, like, is living and not dead for me is always really difficult, because it can always just decide to disagree with you, right? Mm. Like, this isn’t just something that Catholics face. Like, suppose I’m a true believing Mormon and I truly believe everything I believe, right?Like, and, and just like- Mm ... tomorrow the church can come out and say, “Your beliefs are officially wrong now. Update them or you’re no longer a correct Mormon.” I’d just be like, “But I really believed all of that,” right? Like, “You taught me all of that, and then I really believed it. And now all of a sudden black skin wasn’t a punishment?”Right? Like, what, what do you mean? Right? Like, that, that [00:35:00] was- Oh, God ... that was the, the war, right? They were the people who sat out the war in heaven between Jesus and Satan, right? We, th- we, we, we, we’ve alwa- I, that, that’s not, like, tangential to my worldview. That’s a core part of my reality, right? But to continue here.And then so I f- I, I think that the way that a lot of American Catholics have gotten around this is they sort of I think branched with, well, what the Vatican is doing largely around the second council, and now they practice something that’s, like, a- a- adjacent and may, may one day recapture the Church.But, like, the You know. And, and if you look at current demographics, you know, th- they might... The question is, is how far does the church go before they recapture it, right? Mm. Okay. That’s another quote’s from him, ‘cause I wanna, I wanna get in his mind here, okay? “The definition of human nature tends to reflect the self-understanding of the cultural elite.”S- So here what he’s talking about is whether or not I think [00:36:00] gayness is normal, right? And he’s trying to- Okay ... and because he believes that, like, white straight males are the cultural elite with, like, their heteronormative ideas he’s trying to argue that, like, gayness isn’t, quote-unquote, “unnatural.”Because I w- I was trying to understand his, like, theology on this, ‘cause, like, the Bible’s pretty clear on gayness, right? And, and so therefore calling gay love unnatural is a cultural statement, is what he’s trying to argue here. Not an absolute moral one. He challenged the traditional natural law that homosexuality is inherently disordered.So let’s, let’s go into, to what, what he, what I think he means by this. Basically when he reads in the parts of the Bible where gayness is seen as negative, he would say, “Well, that was just those cultures at that time.” And that’s where he got, you know, that’s, that’s where he’s like, “So I don’t need to follow what, what, you know, those cultures did because our church’s theology and [00:37:00] motivation has evolved since then.”And what’s interesting is you can sort of tell under what does he think that it evolved into, it evolved into the goals of the urban monoculture. This sort of, you know, endless helping of the society’s, quote-unquote, “oppressed classes,” which, which doesn’t necessarily map onto real oppressed people, as we’ve talked about in the press.It’s, it’s more like an urban monocultural distinction of, like, ethnically superior groups in their mind. But let’s go into the quote on what he said about Catholics and Jews, because you might think I am overstating him saying, “You’re the Catholic, you shouldn’t try to convert Jews.” He said, “After Auschwitz, the Christian churches no longer wanted to convert the Jews.While they may not be sure of the theological grounds that dispense them from that mission, the churches have become aware that asking Jews to become Christian , is a spiritual way of blotting out their existence, and thus only reinforces the effects of the Holocaust.”Simone Collins (2): Hold on.[00:38:00] What? Hmm. Th- that, that, like, undermines- All of Jesus’Malcolm Collins: teachings? All of Jesus’ stuff, yeah.Simone Collins (2): Okay, okay. I’m not... This is like, this is, again, this is why I can’t process this. Like, how did he get this through? Like, this, it boggles the mind. Okay, well, keep going. Maybe it will start makingMalcolm Collins: sense. No, that part wasn’t in the official document, but that was something that he said in an official capacity.Okay. We’ll get to the stuff in the document in abit. Okay.Let’s talk about his conversion. So when did he convert to Catholicism? Okay. Formerly, you know, living in a, a Jewish household. He had one parent who wasn’t Jewish, though, his dad. Oh, okay. He converted at the age of 23 That is very suspicious age to convert.Simone Collins (2): Why? I mean, isn’t that... You’re, you’re almost fully myelinated. Like, you could argue that’s your time of [00:39:00] intellectual maturity. It’s the time to really reevaluate- No, it is true- ... some of your mental religion ... most peopleMalcolm Collins: convert, if they are gonna convert to a different religion, between the age of 13 and 23.But this is also an age where if I was a Jew and sitting down and thinking like, “How could I have the most positive impact with my life for my whiter people?” Like, what’s the moonshot of moonshots, right? Like, if I could incept a group with converting Jews as equivalent to the Holocaust, and you should from a religious standpoint get along with Jews it would be the, the Vatican, right?That, that’s, that’s the, I mean, I, I think of religious orders on Earth, it might be the largest single religious order. Because, you know, with like Islam, there’s not like, even, even if you could, there’s so many different factions. So even if you could somehow . inception.Speaker 26: We create and perceive our world simultaneously, and our mind does this so well that we don’t even know it’s happening. That allows us to get [00:40:00] right in the middle of that process. How? By taking over the creating part. Now, this is where I need you.Malcolm Collins: In- incep- do an inception on like a, one of the Muslim faiths, you still wouldn’t affect as many people. So just be like, “Oh, at 23 I converted.” And he said he converted after a friend gave him a copy of St. Augustine’s Confessions.That’s a weird reason to convert. Like when people generally convert, it’s either because they’re on a mission, like actively s- seeking what they think is true. Or you know, something profound happens to them, or they see something that they think can only be described as miraculous. Like for us, or for me, the thing that really made me so fanatical in my belief was when, like literally happening through this podcast and on this podcast, is me going back to stories of the Bible that everyone in my childhood had told me they said one thing, and then I read them and they say something that is one, both completely [00:41:00] different and completely implausible that people at that period in Biblical history could have known.D- see our Adam and Eve episode or our Genesis Confirms the Bible episode, or any, like just more broadly, I’ve been broadly shocked by how little... And so that had me sort of be like, “Okay it is miraculous to me that I could grow up next to these stories and not realize h- how sort of- correlatory they were to reality as I understood it, right?You know, how much sense they made, the things that I thought felt unethical, like the Adam and Eve story, actually weren’t when I reread them. And that, for me, was very... That, that’s like the way a normal person converts. I read St. Augustine’s Confessions and I converted. That sounds like the type of poetic nonsense that a Catholic would buy, but I don’t really buy it myself.But anyway what was his early work? So what were some of the first things that he started writing as soon as he got, like, officially into the Catholic [00:42:00] Church as a full-time, like, staffer, right? In 1961, he published The Jews and the Gospel, later reissued Is the New Testament Anti-Semitic. He emphasized God’s covenant with the Jewish people as valid and irrevocable, drawing from Romans 11:29, “The gifts and the call of God are irrevocable.”The church is, quote-unquote, “incomplete without Israel” and Judaism continues as a source of divine grace, he believed. Okay, so first let’s do a, a broad g- overview of, of Nostra Aetate and then we’ll go into the various points in it. So broadly speaking, it promotes a more positive view of non-Christian religions, e.g.,positive remarks on Hinduism, Buddhism, esteem for Muslims, stating they adore the one God. Strongly condemns antisemitism and rejects charging, quote-unquote, “all the Jews with responsibility for Christ’s passion.” Affirms God’s ongoing special relationship with the Jewish people, quote, “God holds the Jews most dear...”. So yeah [00:43:00] To keep going here, let’s get into specific authority.And so first I wanna go into, like, how much a- a- authority does this have for Catholics, okay? It’s considered an authoritative teaching of the church. Catholics are expected to accept it with r- religious assent, the same level as most consular or papal teachings that are not defined as infallible dogma.So, and if this isn’t infallible, but that doesn’t mean that Catholics aren’t supposed to accept it. We’ll get to the official teaching on that. It is not a dogmatic definition. Like some statements on Legent, Gitmen, and earlier councils it is as a pastoral and declarative document addressing the church’s relationships with non-Christian religions.Catholics owe it a, quote-unquote, “religious assent or sub- sincere submission of intellect and will.” So the part of the catechism of the Catholic church, which is, like, the official things on documents of this type, by the way it says, “Divine assistance is also given to the successors of the apostates teaching in communion with the successor of Pete and in particular the way- The apostles or apostates?Simone Collins (2): Sorry, I’m trying to keep up ... [00:44:00]Malcolm Collins: A- apostles. Did I say apostates? Yeah. That’s quite a Freudian tip there. The, the apostles teaching in communion with the successor of Pete, and in particular way to the bishop of Rome, pastor of the whole church, when, without arriving at an infallible definition and without pronouncing an in- definable manner, they propose in the exercise of the ordinary magisterium a teaching that leads to a better understanding of Revelation in matters of faith and morals.To this ordinary teaching and faithful are to adhere with religious assent. So this falls into the category of, to this ordinary teaching and faithful are to adhere with religious a- assent.Mm. Which,though distinct from the assent of faith, is nonetheless an extension of it. Because Catholics are also like, “Well, it, it, it’s not exactly like you have to assent with faith,” and it’s like that’s true, but the, this is the actual teachings of the church on this.Mm-hmm. ‘Cause I wanted to double-check on this, ‘cause people are always like, “Oh, well, that’s, like, just a vague suggestion from the church,” and it’s like, it’s not a vague suggestion. That is not official Catholic [00:45:00] doctrine. That is a, this schismatic belief. But it’s okay, right? Like, it’s, a, a, you know, if, if you, if you believe that the church is wrong in this document too, then they’re just wrong in all the documents, right?So, you know, we can go back to the older councils.Speaker 21: This actually gets to me, , and I think it helps me explain to myself what’s going on better. In the same way that I get really confused when I talk to a Jew and they’re like, “Your children are Jewish,” and I’m like, “They’re like one-sixteenths Jewish.” Like, , that makes no sense to me, right? Like, I’m like, “I-- Yeah, I mean, matrilineally they’re Jewish, but they’re not...”You know, no other culture on Earth would think of them as Jewish. But a Jew will think, an Orthodox Jew at least, “No, they are 100% Jewish.” And I just can’t understand that ‘cause I’m from a different cultural perspective. , It’s the same with Catholics, where a Catholic will be like, “Well, I’m not schismatic.”And it’s like, “Well, you, you do disagree with the Magisterium on these issues.” And it’s like, “Well, I don’t identify as schismatic, therefore I’m not schismatic.” And I’m like, “Well, that’s not really...” And then I’m like, “Oh, I just need to see this from their [00:46:00] perspective.” And it’s not just their perspe-- it’s also the perspective of the people at the Vatican.They also don’t see these people as schismatic. , And it’s just that I’m never gonna be able to understand what it’s like to perceive the world in this wayMalcolm Collins: Yes. Okay. So, this is also rooted... So if you wanna go to where this comes from, it comes from Vatican II’s Lumen Gentium 25, which the CCC quotes to build this out, but the quote from that is, “This religious submission of mind and will must be shown in a special way to the authentic magisterium of the Roman pontiff, even when it’s not speaking ex cathedra, that it must be shown in a way that his supreme magisterium is acknowledged with reverence.The judgements made by him are sincerely adhered to according to his manifest mind and will.” So again, religious submission of mind and will. Okay. So now let’s get into the stuff that was updated by this document, the new parts. Okay. Yes. Thought, Simone, before we go further.Simone Collins: Keep going. I,Simone Collins (2): I wanna, I wanna see what the updates are.Malcolm Collins: [00:47:00] Okay, great. Yeah. So this is in relation to Hinduism, Buddhism Muslims, et cetera. Okay? Okay. “The Catholic Church rejects nothing that is true and holy in these religions. She regards with sincere reve- reverence those ways of conduct and life, that precepts and teachings which, though different in many aspects from the ones she holds and sets forth, nonetheless offer and reflect a ray of that truth which enlightens all men.”Hmm.That’s crazy Um That’s, that’s completely crazy. And, and, and note here if you contrast this with previous councils, right? So we have the Council of Florence, Conte Dominio 1441, what did it say in relation to these sorts of stuff? It af- firmly believes professors and proclaims that those [00:48:00] not living within the Catholic Church, not only pagans, but also Jews, and heretics, and schismatics cannot become participants in eternal life, but will depart into everlasting fire, which was prepared for the devil and his angels.Unless- Okay ... before the end of the same have been added to the flock. That, that seems like uncertainly a, a, a very different teaching.Simone Collins (2): Yeah.Malcolm Collins: The, at a, at a very different perspective, right? And I think a lot of Catholics still want to hold to that perspective. And so I, I can see why it’s becoming so popular, these sort of pseudo-schismatic branches.So what did the document say about various specific religions, right? ‘Cause it also, like, even went so far as to start glazing individual religions. On Hinduism it says, “Thus in Hinduism, men contemplate the divine mystery and express it through inexhaustible abundance of myth and through searching philosophical in- inquiry.They seek freedom from the anguish of [00:49:00] our human condition either through ascetical practices or profound mediation or flight to God with love and trust.” On Buddhism, “Again, Buddhism in its various forms realizes the radical insufficiency of this changeable world. It teaches in a way by which men in a devout and confident spirit may either to acquire the state of perfect liberation or attain by their own efforts or through higher help, supreme illumination.”Simone Collins (2): No. The... I don’t know. So in the, in the Primer’s Guide to Crafting Religion, you make it pretty clear there are basically two types of religions. You can have two types of approaches to what it is required to be saved, and one is limited to atonement. You, you, you can’t save everyone, you know? Not... There are some people who are just not gonna make it, and these are kind of, in some ways, not very nice religions because they accept that you [00:50:00] can’t save everyone and some people are damned, whatever that might mean.The two core religions whichMalcolm Collins: have this perspective are the Calvinist denominations of Protestantism of which we are one-Simone Collins (2): Mm-hmm ...Malcolm Collins: and theSimone Collins (2): Jews. And then there’s the other which is a more domineering religion which believes that everyone can and should be saved. And in this way the religion is a bit unpleasant because it basically would entail, if you really wanna save everyone, coercing people to convert against their will.And what this is trying to do is be neither. Like, it’s not like, “Well, no- no one, no one can be saved,” but it- Also, it’s not trying to save anyone. It’s just like, “Well, everyone’s kind of right,” which is kind of the worst thing. Like- Yeah ... I don’t care, do what you wanna do. It’s the absence of religion.It’s the antithesis of Catholicism and, and any organized religion. I, I just can’t believe they... This has to- You know what I- Like, maybe someone’s gonna chime in in the comments and be like, “Oh, this is some obscure piece of writing that’s not official in any real capacity.” I, I [00:51:00] mean, could that be? Is that what’s going on here?This was affirmed by one of the major councils and the Pope. Yeah, but is this the equivalent of, like, someone hearting something on X, you know, h- adding a heart to a post on X and not realizing- No, that’s why IMalcolm Collins: went through the other documents that, specifically the, the Ca- catechism documents and stuff like that, so you could read before we get into this exactly the way that Catholics per previous rulings that were seen as coming directly from God- Yeahare supposed to relate to teachings within this category, submittingto them.Mm. It’s, it’s not the same as having faith in, in them.Speaker 28: By the way, I put Simone’s concerns into an AI to see what the AI would say, and it says, “Simone’s skepticism is understandable as a layperson reacting to something that feels like a massive shift, but it’s not accurate. Nostra Aetate is not some obscure low authority footnote. It’s a formal declaration of the Second Vatican Council as an [00:52:00] ecumenical council, overwhelmingly approved two thousand two hundred and twenty-one to eighty-eight, and officially promulgated by Pope Paul VIcatholic teaching, as outlined in the - Catechism of the Catholic Church, , eight nine two to eight nine three, and rooted in Lumen Gentium twenty-five, requires religious assent, a sincere submission of intellect and will to teachings from the ordinary magisterium of the ecumenical council, even when they are not infallible dogmas.This is distinct from full assent of faith from infallible documents, but is still binding and not optional or dismissible as just a suggestionMalcolm Collins: So this isn’tSimone Collins (2): someone passively endorsing something without sufficiently paying attention to it or, I don’t know- Yeah ... someone just being like, “Here’s an interesting idea.Sure, we’ll publish it,” but like, you know how The Huffington Post- No, this is- ... used to be. You know, they’d be like, “Yeah, we’ll accept your blog submission,” and they wouldn’t really, like...Malcolm Collins: Yeah, this is very, very, very different than, say, [00:53:00] like, the Vatican wrote something in an official paper or something like that, right?Keep in mind th- ths had to be of, of the declaration of the Second Vatican Council, so that’s a, a Vatican council, mind you. Right. This had to be voted on by the bishops, right? Who knew? Okay, wow. Soof the vote- Yeah ... of the vote 2,221 voted for it and only 88 voted against it. So it was also overwhelmingly approved. Then it was promulgated, that’s an official issue. That means review an official issue by Pope Paul VI.I mean I, o- obviously I, I, I think that there’s a, I mean, Catholics, I, I feel like Want to say, like, and- and w- well, you know, we don’t, the real Catholics don’t take this sort of thing, and the way that those documents say you’re supposed to relate to this stuff is actually corrupted as well, and this stuff shouldn’t actually fall under that.And I think [00:54:00] the Catholics actually have a number of outs here. There’s been a number of things in recent papal elections that could be s- considered outright fraudulent. I may do a whole episode on that at some point.Simone Collins (2): Whoa, really? Ar- What do you mean outright? Can you g- what do you mean by outright fraudulent?Malcolm Collins: They did some things, the Jesuits did, in how they held... It wasn’t the pope of this pope, but it was one of the previous popes, I think. Okay. Where they pulled some shenanigans that sort of prevented people from voting. Like the, the block that was against them from being there to vote. Oh, wowYeah. It, it was w- I, I, I can’t remember the specifics. A Catholic was the one who would, because obviously they were most invested in this when he was crashing out on me about the Jesuits and, and, and blackpilling me on the Jesuits and making me sort of see Catholicism as this fight of, like, the good guys, the Opus Dei versus the Jesuits for, like, the heart of what it becomes.But this, the way I sort of see this right now, like a- as I’m looking at it from an outsider, is I historically, as a kid was of all the sci-fi franchises, and I was a big sci-fi nerd the one [00:55:00] sci-fi franchise I didn’t really like was Star Wars. I, I- Hmm ... I liked Star Trek over Star Wars.Starship Troopers obviously love. SG-1- Sure ... love. Gotta do a whole video on how they canceled the SG-1 reboot because- Oh my gosh ... it treated the military too well. Oh, no. Fans might like it. It did- it didn’t make the tribals, like, better. People might likeSimone Collins (2): the military, yeah. Wait, and by the way, Stargate did not universally portray the military well.In fact, some of the most annoying episodes were ones where they, I guess r- fairly, you know, well, not realistically, but- No, US politicians- ... give a realistic depiction of how military bureaucracy can really gunk things up sometimes.Malcolm Collins: No, no, no, that was, those, almost every one of the episodes you’re thinking of was tied to the US Senate or Congress.Yeah. And the military was the good guy. Oh, yeah,Simone Collins (2): yeah,Malcolm Collins: yeah. Okay, you’re right, you’re right. So- No, I feel like they wereSimone Collins (2): even not realistic. You know, they’re like, “What? There are some problems that the military faces.” The, the pointMalcolm Collins: here being is despite me not being a Star Wars fan- Okay ... watching Disney buy Star Wars and then start to just write, like, “We hate you” in [00:56:00] poo all over the walls of the property made me genuinely sad, right?Reading this feels a bit like watching the new Disney Star Wars where it’s like- Hmm ... yeah, I might not have been the biggest fan of that property, but like, why’d you have to do them that dirty, right? Like, and, and as a Star Wars fan, I feel it’s, it’s probably pretty similar to being, like, a Catholic today, where it’s like, well, you know- None of the real fans actually take those new ones and consider them canon, right?We’re still all about legends over here. What, what are you talking about? Yeah, we’re, we’reSimone Collins (2): in this for the long run. It’ll, it’ll come aroundMalcolm Collins: again. Yeah, we’re, we’re... Everybody knows Disney’s eventually gonna realize this didn’t work, as I’ve heard rumors that they’re thinking about doing an, and retconning it.So we’re, we’re gonna get a, a Vatican II retcon. Just like go , go backSimone Collins (2): but anyway. But they can. That’s the cool thing, is they can. They can say, “Look, that was a mistake. I don’t know what happened. It’s over now. Undo.” There’s...Malcolm Collins: Catholics ki-kind... How could you retcon [00:57:00] Vatican II? Could it be done? I guess the best way to- Delete.Delete.Simone Collins (2): Undo. We’re sorry, we were wrong. It, how, whatMalcolm Collins: the... The Catholic Church hasSimone Collins (2): made lots of weird-Speaker 29: I asked an AI how you could retcon Vatican II, , with this context, and basically what it said is full deletion is extremely unlikely. It would require admitting a major error in a council guided by the Holy Spirit, which undermines everything the church claims about itselfSimone Collins (2): The, I mean, I think the most realMalcolm Collins: way to do it was to assert that they didn’t have official power when they put it out, and that something had g- that’s, that’s... I mean, like, obviously there’s been instances in the past where there have been, like, multiple popes at the same time.And then a council came together and decided, “Okay, now we have another new pope,” that decides, you know, gets... You know, clearly you gotta have a, a, a, a chain of, what do they call that? The chain of whatever. , They got together, they decided this new pope, and then the new pope comes in and, and immediately says, “Actually, popes rule over councils.” And the council was like, “But we brought you here saying you wouldn’t do that,” right? Mm. So like, yeah. They’ve, they’ve done a bit of this in the [00:58:00] past.But I don’t think any of that was as, like, written down as Vatican II was. I don’t think that that i- it counted as the same l- category of stuff that can’t easily be retconned. But I mean, clearly it retconned something else. So like, Catholics can chime in here. So let’s go what they said about Islam.Okay? “The Church regards with esteem also the Moslems.” Th-this is what they... Is- Islam. “They adore the one God, living and subsisting in himself, merciful and all-powerful, the creator of heaven and earth, who has spoken to men. They take pains to submit wholeheartedly to even his inscrutable decrees, just as Abraham...”Dot, dot, dot, submitted to God. “Though they doNotMalcolm Collins: acknowledge Jesus as God,they revere him as a prophet. They also honor Mary, his virgin mother.” Dot, dot, dot. “In addition, they await the day of judgment” dot, dot, dot. “Finally, they value the moral life and worship God, especially through prayer, almsing, and fasting.”[00:59:00]Hmm.Yeah. Which is interesting here. When you take our, our view or, or contrast it with our view on all of this I mean, at least we take the stance of like, well, we do say that Jews and Muslims are worshiping derivations of what appear to be the same god. Like Hindis and Buddhists are certainly not.Like I- pff, that was, that was wild.“As the sacred synod searches into the mysteries of the church, it remembers the bond,” this is about the Jews that spiritually ties the people of the new covenant to Abraham’s stock... The Church, therefore, cannot forget that she received the revelation of the Old Testament through the people with whom,” the Jews, “the people with whom God in his inexpressible mercy concluded the ancient covenant.”And then they cite here, “On account of their fathers, this people remains most dear to God, for God does not repent of the gifts he makes nor the calls he issues,” Rome [01:00:00] 11:28-29. And so this directly quotes Romans. And then further they say, “Although the Church is the new people of God, the Jews should not be presented as rejected or accursed by God, as this follows from the Holy Scriptures.”And then on collective guilt, this is from Nostra aetate again, “True, the Jewish authorities and those who followed their lead presented for the death of Christ. Still, what happened in his Christ passion cannot be charged against all Jews with distinction then alive nor against the Jews of today.”Right. “It offered to cry his hatred, persecutions, displays of antisemitism directed against Jews at any time by anyone.”Okay. But yeah, I had no idea. That is really sad. That is, that is, I mean, a potentially near God tier play by an individual Jew. And if not that, at least a heavy infestation by the urban monoculture, ‘cause he was already living, you know, at the, the very least in the lifestyle of the urban monoculture.You know, [01:01:00] sex with men while, you know, writing this stuff down. If you see his wider philosophy, it’s very clearly more tied to the urban monoculture theology than anything that could historically could have been considered Catholic values orSimone Collins (2): theology. Yeah, not even close.Malcolm Collins: So very crazy, crazy conspiracy.And you guys- Well,Simone Collins (2): conspiracy, yeah, I guess the, the, the larger question though this doesn’t appear to be documented from what you found, who let this happen? Like, y- you’re talking about this guy going through, publishing all this stuff, but th- all these people that voted for it, all these people that added to it- Yeahto your point, right? Like- Who let thisMalcolm Collins: happen? Like, if you want to know how co- when people act like... And this is the other thing that got me, is I had this impression as an outsider that, like, when people are like, “Oh, we’ll retake control of the Vatican. We’ll retake control of church infrastructure. We’ll...”I hear that and I get this impression that, like, oh, well, maybe they’ve recently been able to get their hooks into the Vatican. [01:02:00] Maybe there’s, like, this ideological divide in the Vatican. 2,201 of the bishops approved this with only 88 against this. This is not, like, two power factions or something like that, or an infiltration of the Vatican.If this is an infiltration of the Vatican, it’s... What, what percent is that?Simone Collins (2): Yeah, I guess I don’t know how the voting structure is set up. I don’t know if this is, like, people around the world or a bunch of people concentrated in- Yeah, so-Vatican City ...Speaker 30: So, , again here I decided to ask the AI to find out who are these bishops? Are they just randos or are they actually the people who run the Catholic Church? , And it said, , the bishops who voted for Nostra Aetate as well as all Vatican II documents are the actual power structure of the Catholic Church, not randoms.They are called the council fathers, the highest level church governments in an ecumenical council. , They included all diocesan bishops, head of dioceses around the world, archbishops, cardinals, [01:03:00] Eastern Catholic patriarchs, head of major religious orders with voting rights. It was the largest gathering of Catholic bishops in history, deliberately global for the first time.Bishops came from Europe, North, South America, Africa, Asia, et cetera, and not just Vatican insiders and EuropeansThis is why Malcolm and Simone noted that in an extremely lopsided vote, only 3.8% against, it shows nearly universal buy-in from the worldwide, , episcopate at the time, not just a small clique of Vatican insidersMalcolm Collins: so 3.8% of the bishops voted against this3.8%. And that was in 1965. So, like, not recently either. Like, when I talk about this institutional capture having been in the Vatican for a very, very long time at this point, I’m not like, that isn’t me being a conspiracy theorist or something. I’m just trying to, like, lay out, like, what I’m seeing as an outsider.And so, the [01:04:00] best thing that you can do, I guess, if you wanna recapture it, is just breed. And yeah. Get involved.Simone Collins (2): I, I mean, yeah. This shows things can change, and things can also change quite violently. But this means that I think that there’s hope they can change violently in a different direction.Malcolm Collins: Are you actually... I love Simone as an outsider. Went from, like, your standard progressive whatever and now she’s like, “The Catholic Church needs a civil war. They must take out the Vatican.”Simone Collins (2): Well, this is I don’t know. It, it’s like someone trying to change t- they’re like marching into an anime convention and they’re like, “No, this is a Star Trek convention now.”Like, fine, but go to a Star Trek convention. Like, leave the anime nerds alone. This is about anime. So I don’t, I don’t... Like autistically, I don’t like the, [01:05:00] the, the diluting and confusing of the categories. I need CatholicsMalcolm Collins: to be Catholics. Yeah, like at the very least, I think if something was written by somebody who deconverted, it should be taken out of official church teachings Like that should be, that should be the thing that invalidates itSimone Collins (2): Yeah, that’s, yeah.May- I mean, I think until pretty recent history, people just didn’t deconvert, so there is not yet a cultural technology to address that, and this is exactly the point you make among many others, of course, in The Prophet is Patched Against Religion. And it wasn’t even like he deconvertedMalcolm Collins: for like a good reason.It was just like he wanted to have sex with strangers. Like that seems to be the reason he deconverted.Simone Collins (2): Again, I think there’s an argument to be made for that being then the system working as intended. That the bigger problem would be if active and especially policy-wise influential people in the Catholic clergy were like, “I wanna have gay sex and I’m gonna just stay and continue to generate policy and do, have it all.”[01:06:00] So I don’t see the deconversion as the bad sign, but I do see statements that seem to nullify pretty definitional or, or foundational concepts, at least as I as an outsider understand them about Catholicism. And that’s throwing me for a loop. But even from pretty devout Catholics, we hear about these like, well, there was this conspiracy and this particular faction was trying to mess with things, and I feel like there’s A non-trivial amount of politicking, infighting, and influence campaigns that are influencing what’s happening in Vatican City, and to a, a great extent, the most devout, active, practicing Catholics that we know have an attitude of, “Look, at the parish level, we are going to thrive.We’re going to follow kind of a pre-Vatican II version of [01:07:00] the, of the Catholic Church and pretend that this stuff didn’t happen. We are going to leverage the infrastructure of the Catholic Church and of bishops and everything else when we need it,” like if we need a, a Catholic school to be spun up. They will lean on the formal church when they need to, but for the most part, they’re just like, “Look, what we’re creating is what’s going to last.We’re the ones having kids. We’re just gonna ride this out, and eventually they’re gonna find their way back to sanity.” But I don’t know if that’s gonna happen.Malcolm Collins: So just so you get an ideaOf like what level of authority this teaching would hold. It would hold the same level of authority as something like the theology of the body which actually I think holds a little bit less because it wasn’t also affirmed by a religious council. So that, that sort of gives you an idea of like the level of import...And theology of body is pretty important Catholic teaching. Mm. So yeah. [01:08:00] Anyway love you Simone. That’s a crazy episode. And it- Understatement, yeah. It, it feels a bit like, is this a simulation? Because like if there was something this big, why was I unaware of it?Yeah.Yeah. Like, it seems like one of the first things you would mention if you were a Protestant talking about this stuffSimone Collins (2): You would think that.Y- yes. But again, I think it’s one of those things where it’s so outlandish, it’s so hard to believe, that it just doesn’t process. Yeah. And again, I, I have... I think there’s at least a good 30% chance that someone, a Catholic in the comments chimes in and is like, “This means nothing. You’re doing the equivalent of s- you know, saying, well, you know, Person [01:09:00] X responded to Person Y’s comment on YouTube, and that doesn’t mean that’s an endorsement of Person Y’s com- you know-Malcolm Collins: Yeah, that’s not-reputation or commentary ... an official endorsement. Yeah. Or that there’s different ways of relating to the councils, or there’s different ways of relating to the bishops. Yeah,Simone Collins (2): so I feel, I t- I, I just, we have to be missing something. It has to be something like this. The bishops whoMalcolm Collins: voted on this, the thing that I c- is, is le- less than 4% voted against this.Like, that to me shows that, like, the quest, even if that’s true, for retaking the Vatican, is an astronomically uphill battle.Yeah.That’s like when my loading bar’s at 96%, that’s like when I am in my- Yeah, it’s, you’re functionally there, yeah.Simone Collins (2): Mm-hmm. It,Malcolm Collins: it, it’s like there. It’s done, right? Like, it’s cooked.Mm-hmm. But they do have, fortunately, current demographics on their side.Simone Collins: Yeah.Simone Collins (2): We’ll see. We’ll see. Thanks for sharing that with me, [01:10:00] though. That was a wild ride. All right, have a goodMalcolm Collins: one.Simone Collins (2): You too.Malcolm Collins: What are we doing for dinner?Simone Collins (2): You’re having the rendang either with french fries- All right ... or on a Hawaiian bun.Malcolm Collins: Fries.Simone Collins (2): Okay. Fancy Korean fries or normal fries?Malcolm Collins: Fancy Korean fries.Simone Collins (2): Oh, if we have any. I’ll make sure we have some. If not, normal fries. If we don’t have those, then we canMalcolm Collins: do curly fries.Simone Collins (2): Oh, I thought you didn’t like the curly fries. YouMalcolm Collins: did like them? They’re great. We just gotta cook them a bit longer.Simone Collins (2): Okay. All right.Simone Collins: thought I was aprude. No Yeah, people wereMalcolm Collins: mad at us for likeNot being aggressively mean.Simone Collins: Yeah. What on earth? Like, hello.Malcolm Collins: Like when we give me, I think this is something that the wider conservative community doesn’t get about Aila’s relationship to the community. We’re talking about the episode , from yesterday about how somebody from Aila’s circle actually made us against early stage abortion, which we were not before through a very well argued piece.But it starts, the story [01:11:00] starts with a birthday gang bang. Well, no,Simone Collins (2): her, her essay doesn’t, but like our discussion of her does because she recently talked about her experience meeting her future husband, I think, I think they’re engaged to be married and they have a kid to- together now, at Aila’s famous birthday gang bang.Malcolm Collins: Yeah. And I, because people generally in the conservative movement who aren’t on like the nerd tech side, they’re unaware that Aila in terms of gravity and orbit has been pretty useful to the right. In that because she tries to always say what she believes is true means that she is constantly pissing off the trans community.A- and constant- Is she? Oh, yeah. She’s, sh- sh- the trans- well, because you, you can’t really talk about the science around transness anymore without just incensing trans people. And because of that, she’s actually sort of broke the egg for a lot of people’s- God ... transition into [01:12:00] more and more conservative ideas.And I think- Mm ... for a lot of people, the trans issue is their first step on that pipeline.Simone Collins (2): And so- She, I mean, her sex survey does have, or big kink survey has one of the best samples of at least self-reported trans individuals of probably m- maybe any research done, just given her sample size. So I don’t know if she’s said anything that’s like disturbing, but, or that like makes them look bad, has, she does have very good sample data.Malcolm Collins: Well, I mean, she’s the one who did the study when we did the trans one showing that transness is linked to violent fetishes. Oh, yeah. We used her data. That’s from her- That’s right ... that’s from her study. That’s true. That that comes from. .Simone Collins (2): But, but what I mean isMalcolm Collins: while I may think her actions are immoral, and more immoral today now that I understand the potential negative consequences of sex, and I’ve become dramatically less sex...Like, I’m kink positive, sex negative now. I just think that n- non-procreative sex is bad. Until [01:13:00] we have better forms of- I guess I just- ... birth control ..., but in the net she pushes people towards our movement. And, and advances, like, the number of conservative donors, voters.Well, she’s not encouraging anyoneSimone Collins (2): to live her lifestyle. Like, I, I... Sometimes I feel like I get this insinuation from people of, like, that she’s selling something to them. She’s not. No, she, she said that she didn’t likeMalcolm Collins: the gang bang. She tried a gang bang and did not enjoy it. Everybody- Yeah ... like, that seems like a pretty good indication of, like, don’t do this, people.Simone Collins (2): Well, but more, ugh, Tex is so into pulling on everything. She’s not trying to fob her lifestyle onto anyone. And just like we aren’t either. Like, we’re not... A lot of people like to accuse us. They’re like, “You’re trying to convince all these people who aren’t equipped to have children to have kids.” Like, that’s something someone just today was accusing us of.And that we... No, we absolutely don’t do that. So I think people like to misattribute this. Really? Were theyMalcolm Collins: accusing us on our comments or on, like, Twitter or something? On X,Simone Collins (2): yeah.Malcolm Collins: Oh, okay. So, like, somebody has [01:14:00] no idea what we’re about.Simone Collins (2): Yeah. But a lot of people have no idea what Aila’s all about, so you know, like, it’s...I just think it’s stupid. It’s very annoying.Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Well, I mean, the, the informational sphere, I guess just when somebody’s aligning with us on anything that puts them on the outs with progressives and they are also helping the whiter project, I’m generally, like, pro them. Like, that’s the way I operate.Simone Collins (2): I’m generally pro when someone is thoughtful and takes a first principles approach to what they believe and what they’re doing and why, and that’s Aila. Yeah, butMalcolm Collins: sometimes those people can still be antagonistic to us or, or our efforts. And I, I think that, you know, in th- those instances we need to..[01:15:00] This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit basedcamppodcast.substack.com/subscribe

One of the experiences we treasure most involves our minds being changed on an issue. If we’re wrong about something, we’d prefer to be nudged in a less wrong direction.We did NOT expect to have one of these experiences when clicking through to learn about a truly modern meet-cute: When Romy Holland met her future husband—and the father of her now-young child—at Aella’s famous birthday gangbang, which she both helped to organize and supported as a fluffer.Anyway, you’ll see for yourself in today’s episode of Based Camp. Happy Monday! Make sure you read Romy’s full essay—the one that ultimately changed our views on misoprostol, which we had previously seen as pretty innocuous; she’s an eloquent and moving writer.Show NotesOne of the fluffers at Aella’s birthday gangbangs paired up and ultimately had a child with one of the guests/participantsCrazier than that, this young woman radicalized me on early-term abortion!The Gist: Romy Holland, a friend of Aella’s, recently went on Slate’s podcast, Death, Sex & Money, to talk about her experience meeting a guy at Aella’s birthday gang bang and eventually falling in love with him. This story was originally covered in the San Francisco Standard. In herWhat Happened* Romy helped organize the famous 42-man gangbang birthday party in 2024* She also acted as a fluffer at this event* In this capacity, she met a programmer she had previously noticed online* They subsequently began dating, had a kid together, and are now engage and—for the time being at least—monogamousUnderrated: Romy blackpilled me on the abortion pillAn underrated element of Romy’s narrative arc thus far is her experience with abortion—something she articulated so beautifully and powerfully that it has totally radicalized me on misoprostol.Her one substack article (as of June 2026), titled What Nobody Told Me About Abortion, describes her harrowing experience attempting an abortion.She describes blithe comfort in the face of lies told to us“On the sort of afternoon full of ripe summer fruit, my new boyfriend and I—still flush with sweat and limerence after some midday sex—stared at an ovulation test strip and realized we’d misread an earlier test.“Uh oh,” I said, lightly amused as a thousand rom com moments flashed through my mind. Cue the clueless horror movie protagonist who fails to notice the axe murderer behind the bedroom door, mistaken about the genre of the story unfolding.We listened to music and I swiveled back and forth in an office chair while narrating ChatGPT’s damning answers to my questions about fertile windows and test strip line darkness. My boyfriend kissed me on the cheek each time he walked past. We riffed about games we could play at our abortion party.Our decision calculus was numerical, emotions an afterthought. There is a 1 in 4 chance of conception each month, so deciding not to take Plan B would result in a 25% risk of needing an abortion. Plan B costs $50 and an abortion costs $500, but with only a 25% chance of conception the expected value of that option is $125. Plan B and early stage abortion seemed physically pretty similar—nothing to consider there.“If you get pregnant, we’d both know we’re fertile,” my boyfriend pointed out.“True, why would anyone pay for fertility testing with such a thrilling alternative available?” I quipped back.In the end, my sense that failing to take Plan B seemed plainly stupid led us to swing by CVS on our way to an under-the-sea-themed party in San Francisco. I was wearing a black and gold ballgown, he, a shimmery jacket that made him look like an undiscovered mer-creature dredged up into the fluorescently lit family planning aisle. Later at the party, I recounted our ill-fated afternoon with punchlines as I pried open the clamshell package and unceremoniously swallowed the Plan B in my friends’ cozy kitchen.”Then she describes how it goes south* She got a positive pregnancy test nine days later* She was fully determined to not see it* “Ignoring the mounting hum of my instinctual self, I walked across Berkeley on a chilly August evening to pick up abortion pills from the sort of friend who people think of when they say they know a guy.”“Nobody talks about the hell that is misoprostol, the abortion pill. I suspect that, in its politicization, no one wants to mention that the drug in question is a sledgehammer—on its quest to destroy the fetus, it also obliterates the mother. On Thursday afternoon I unceremoniously took the first of three doses: four little white pills shoved into my vagina as far up as I could wedge them. Tiny bombs placed quietly beside the cradle where my unsuspecting baby slept.I waited, fever rising, for the bleeding that should have started after an hour or two. The second dose came and went. By dose three I could barely move. I took the stairs one at a time, weakly gripping the railing, my joints aching with each step, the inside of my mouth painfully raw. Curled in bed, I whispered for more and more blankets, shivering and only dimly aware of my boyfriend there beside me searching the internet for answers about my racing heart and shallow, rapid breathing.In the morning I felt drained, but the fever and pain were gone. The large maxi pad, which the internet warned I may soak through as often as once per hour, was entirely dry.”* She goes on to observe that “Misoprostol as an abortion protocol is 85% effective. As the 24 hour time point neared and I felt not even the slightest cramping, it became clear that I was among the unlucky 15% of women for whom a second attempt would be necessary.”* “In taking the first dose of pills, I’d started down an inescapable path and had no choice but to march to its end. As a friend would later say, the correct number of abortions is either zero or as many as it takes.”* She ultimately had to do four rounds* She went to Planned Parenthood in San Francisco* “Desperation welled inside of me. I wanted to grip her bony shoulders, to look her in the eye and ask her what she would have me do with this broken beautiful thing inside of me that had survived six doses of poison and was now fated to die.”* “More abortion pills, more waiting, more shivering in a ball of feverish torment. Still no blood.”“My memories of the surgical D&C procedure four days later come to me in fragments that feel sharp in my chest. I remember a cold wand pushed into me searching for a smudge of evidence of my baby. And then a room with a chair and an iPad video that soothingly warned of hysterectomy risk. Finally, a room that smelled of chemicals where I sat on crisp paper and stared at a tray strewn with ominous medical instruments. Panic.”…“Through this, I did not move. Tears gathered in my eyes at the inevitability of the situation, at my overwhelming helplessness. I presented my arm to the pretty young nurse who would administer the fentanyl and sedatives. I lay down and spread my legs for the kind practitioner there to vacuum out my stubborn baby. What’s a mother to do in a moment like this, but carry her child gently to the executioner’s arms?”Romy Meets Other People Who Were Scarred“I recently had coffee with a friend who became very still when I mentioned my abortion. Tears sprang to her eyes as she told me that she’d once had an abortion too, and although it was seven years ago and although she never wanted the baby, never even wanted to be a mother, it still makes her cry every time she remembers it. She’d taken the abortion pills and two days later, in a grungy dive bar bathroom with music thrumming through the door, she’d found her clot of a baby in her bloody pad.“I knew I had to eat it,” she told me. And then, as though suddenly realizing that this might sound absurd, she tried to explain. “I mean, I couldn’t just leave it in that dirty bathroom, it was my baby. What was I going to do, throw it in the trash?I stopped her, shaking my head “no, no, it makes perfect sense to me. It really does, of course you had to eat it, it was your baby.” The maternal logic of this was unassailable. Anyone who has been a mother for any stretch of time would not question such a primordial urge. The animal mother knows what to do, and your judgements are not what carried evolution billions of years to this moment.“So what did you do?” I asked her.“I ate it.” She said it wide eyed.””Romy Experiences the Mental Fallout“I was not permitted to eat my baby, nor bring it home in a little vial to bury it, or put it on the mantel, or inspect it under a microscope for a tail. Perhaps if I had been, the cataclysmic crash of hormones that awaited me would have taken a gentler shape.Instead, in the days that followed, I began to experience borderline psychotic episodes.These hours-long periods would begin with a vague sense of unease and build until the world around me became twisted and surreal, like a haunted house. Sometimes, anger at my boyfriend would inexplicably swell inside of me, sharp and alienating, distancing me from the one person who might understand my pain. Often, I was consumed with an urgent need to go find my missing baby.My thoughts would enter obsessive, frenzied spirals about this desire, running through the sequence of events that had led to my baby’s departure from my womb where it clearly belonged. My memories of the D&C churned with an ominous bent. The kindness of the nurses suddenly felt coercive, like they had conspired to place me under a spell so that they could use strange and powerful devices to remove a precious, integral part of me.”* She tried to deal with it by stapling the test to the temple at Burning Man* “Before I was a mother, I was a woman who belonged entirely to herself. I finally understood then that my baby was gone, and that I was once again alone.”“It turns out that while full-blown postpartum psychosis is rare, subclinical psychotic thoughts are common, affecting 15-30% of women who give birth, and, less commonly, following abortion and miscarriage. Critically, people experiencing these thoughts retain insight into the fact that their thoughts are distorted, though such knowledge does not immunize them to suffering.”“It’s strange to me that, given the prevalence of postpartum depression and abortion, I haven’t heard anyone talk openly about either. My concept of abortion was shaped instead through divisive political narratives, which leave me feeling trapped between absolutes in how I am allowed to talk about it, forced to hedge every statement.”The grief sticks with her“My grief has settled into a shape small enough to carry around the world. It goes out with me to dinner, and seems to like it when we take evening walks around the neighborhood. Sometimes, when I know it won’t cause too much trouble, I take it out and marvel at it. It’s heavier than it looks, the weight of it on my chest enough to knock the breath out of me if I’m not prepared. Many nights, my grief unfurls and wraps its long tendrils around me. I wake sweating and tangled in my blankets, planets still bright in the sky. Soon enough, it will learn to sleep through the night.”Romy’s story adds weight to our techno-puritan sense that the damage lies at the action-based inflection point, not some definition of life“I’ve never quite understood regret. Should the butterfly regret a flap of its wings upon learning of the resulting tornado? Still, as the shadow of loss looms over my days, I have started to think I probably would have been happier in this alternate timeline in which my grief would be balanced by purpose. Whether this will feel true five years from now is harder to say—perhaps one should wait to see what is built from the tornado’s wreckage before declaring regret. I find myself trying to calculate this likelihood, but quickly stop. I know now that some arithmetic belongs to older gods than reason.”Episode TranscriptMalcolm Collins: [00:00:00] m- my wife was actually radicalized by somebody who met their husband, who they ended up having a child with, at a gang bang against early stage abortion. Yep. , , and not slightly radicalized. I got radicalized after hearing this story.Traumatized andradicalized. Andthis has a lot of crying. It’s emotionally a, more of a rollercoaster than you likely think, so buckle in, guysSpeaker 17: America, get your uteruses tarp.Speaker 19: I’m a baby killer. Baby killer makes me horny.Speaker 18: Get that fetus, kill that fetus.Speaker 19: Down face, b*****s in my cross face. No, I’ma have abortions always.Would you like to know more?Malcolm Collins: Hello, Malcolm. I’m excited to be speaking with you today because romance isn’t dead. It turns out, I didn’t know this, but one of the fluffers at Aella’s birthday gang bang has gone on to date one of the gentlemen attending and [00:01:00] participating in the party. And they have a kid together now, and they’re getting married, and, you know, it’s so wholesome.It’s wonderful.But- That wholesome and wonderful... No, I love all the other conservatives are talking about there’s this, like, slutty woman who’s using her gang bangs t- to, like, “Oh, I’m gonna have a gang bang for, like, my,” what was it? Like, her kid’s birth or, like, a birth shower or try to get pregnant at a gang bang.You, you’ve, you’ve seen this, right? Oh,no, no, no. You’re, you’re referring ab- to Bonnie Blue, her golden baby shower. Yes, goldenbaby sho- oh, God.Speaker 5: Definitely pregnant That is a baby Turn my baby shower into a golden shower. Pregnancy is a big for a lot of people, so I’m gonna make the most of it. Biggest live stream of a birthMalcolm Collins: This is so gross. Yeah, that’s- No, Bonnie, no.You, we do not... Bonnie Blue and Aella and her circle, completely different. Like, I can’t even- Yeah, they, they, they are completely- Like, I think people think-blindedly ... and, and respect for Bonnie Blue and what she does. Like, she is her own extreme sports kind of person. But [00:02:00] the, the Aella cinematic universe is one of, and I think it’s very misunderstood, it, it is one of the most a circle of the most intelligent, articulate educated, informed, and intellectually curious people in the world.They put 99.9% of post-graduate university students to shame. I would say 95% of professors to complete shame. These are some of the most intellectual people that I’ve ever encountered. They have amazing writing. We’ll get into some of that. But what I love most about this, though and this is where the twist comes, actually, Malcolm, is- Oohnot only am I, like, this is really sweet, right? We’ve gone from, like, gang bang to marriage, and it, it, there’s something to be said there about kind of the way that life goes and also that, you know, maybe we, we shouldn’t fully judge debauched lifestyles of a little bit of, a bit of fun and hedonism. And also that it’s a kind of a really common life [00:03:00] progression, and another reason why many male base campers should not be discounting progressive women and writing them off, which we see happening all the time.But-Oh yeah, people- Romy ... people are like, “Oh, you shouldn’t date someone to change them,” or whatever. People were so mad at my Leaflet video when I was like no, that’s, like, what... I’m just saying realistically, that is your pool of women these days.” Here’s what’sreally, really d- crazy though, is Romy Holland, this woman who went on to get married, you know, gang bang organizer Bay Area intelligent sex positive woman, has completely radicalized me on misoprostol and early term abortion.Like, I’m complete, like, sea change for me against it. I, I used to be like, hey, basically until you get signs of, like, you know, a, a, a, a human life that is capable of experiencing pain, you know, like around, like week 12 you don’t really have, like, a, the beginnings of a brain, [00:04:00] I guess I’m okay with abortion.You know, and especially, you know, just taking misoprostol if you need to ‘cause you’re super, super not ready. I have changed my view on this, and it, it wasn’t, it wasn’t our Catholic friends, it wasn’t our, our friends at the Heritage Foundation, it wasn’t anyone else. You gotri- radicalized on abortion by a gang bang woman.By, by yeah. By a, by a slapper at a gang bang. Well, she did, right? I mean, I was justlooking her up and the first thing that comes up with her is a bunch of magazine articles saying, “This heartbreaking what nobody told me about abortion essay is going viral.” It’s... I’m gonna readsome quotes from it.We’re gonna start with, though, the, the romance, ‘ cause romance is dead. I love it so much. I love the story. So for those of you not familiar, who’ve somehow been living under a rock or w- I don’t know, were in a coma in 2024 Aella, who is a, a sex researcher, a friend- She’s doneepisodes with us before.She’s awesome ... I consider her one of my close friends. Yeah. Yeah. I- Other than Leaflet, [00:05:00] she’s one of the only people I’ve ever, like, when I talk to them I felt like an immediate and deep connection. She’s a great person.Yeah, just incredible. Incredible person. She had a birthday party, and she was like, “You know what?I would love to have a gang bang for my birthday party.” So some of her close friends so kindly and generously, including Romy Holland, Romy helped her organize it. And this, this was a very complicated thing. They decided ultimately on, on a, a, a, a very good number, 42 men. You know, it’s perfect sort of nerd reference gang bang number.You know- 42men? Oh my God,Jerome ... Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy right there. I know, 42 men. We’re aconservativepodcast, by the way, right? We are considered radical conservatives. That’s why I have to brief people on this, okay? Just in case they don’t know about the birthday gang bang. So- No, I’m just...I, well, we have to admit that, like, we have friends who are w****s. Like we have to admit that. Like, we’re... Gosh, if only, I think we gotta, we gotta be more like Jesus and just never talk to w****s, right? Like, that’s clearly the right answer [00:06:00] here, right? Ai,Simone Collins: yi, yi.Malcolm Collins: No, I mean, winning people’s hearts requires not reflexively condemning them if they are attempting...Because I think you see with this person, and in her abortion essay and stuff like this, th- this is not a community that’s hearts are truly poisoned. They just need the truth shown to them in the, in, in the, in the right way, and then it shocks them out of it, and that’s what happened with this individual.But continue.I mean, I don’t know. I just feel like it’s an, I, I went from being an ardent progressive, though not exactly sex positive, to just being, you know, now a conserv- Like, it’s a very natural and common progression. But anyway, so, Romy helped organize this, and th- there was a lot of vetting in this.I, I think I remember looking through the survey for people applying. You know, they, they’re obviously going through the kinks of these people. In an interview with, on Slate’s podcast, Death, Sex, and Money Romy talks about the The, the kind of the unique [00:07:00] kink criteria they would go for. Like, they didn’t want men who needed, like, a lot of, like, reinforcement and like, “Oh,” like, “you’re doing so great.”Well, because, you know, it’s a gang bang. It’s supposed to be, like, consensual non-consent, right? So, like, they can’t have men who are super needy who need Aella to, like, praise them, ‘cause that’s not the look of this event. So they had to, you know, vet for that. They need to vet for a bunch of other things.Obviously, you know, if you’re a friend or something, like, you know, you’re probably in. So there was a lot of vetting involved. And then of course on the actual day of the party, you had to work through all the logistics. You know, there’s queuing, and you wanna have everyone, you know, sufficiently hard for the moment of, of, of, of bang.And so then y- there’s a big bowl of Viagra at the door, but then there’s also the need for arousal, and that, that is where the fluffy... Sorry, where the fluffers come in, including Romy who very generously offered to participate in a very involved way in the fluffing process preparing men to deliver their birthday present to Aella.I- if you haven’t explored [00:08:00] the, the lore around the gang bang, you definitely should. There was a, a very viral Sankey diagram that Aella had created, because, again, she is a very intellectual, fun, playful person. I should not have beenallowed at the gang bang. Do you remember why?Oh, yeah, because you were n- y- something about Eliezer Yudkowsky.Some- Yeah, yeah. So, so no accelerationists. No AI acceleration people were allowed. That’s right. Yes. It wasno... Yes, I remember. It was only AI doomers. That’s like something I was like, oh yeah, you definitely wouldn’t be allowed. So Aella made this, this chart that sort of showed what happened to the various participants.So, she had the survey. You know, the application she released had 1,604 applicants. 828 failed the auto filter, 3 twen- 328 failed the manual filter, 776 passed the auto filter, 448 passed the manual fic- filter. They contacted 251 men, 143 didn’t respond, 25 are friends, 87 of those got invited. And also 83 did an interview.Like it went, it went, it went, it went, and then 42 showed up, so they got 42. Only [00:09:00] 37 penetrated Aella. Only 17 came inside Aella. They were wearing condoms. Only well, five came inside a fluffer. Who knows if Romy was one of them. And then 15 didn’t come. So, the the, this is the thing was- Going to anorgy and not coming?Well, that, that sounds like- Well,but Malcolm, this is a 42-person gang bang. S- it’s like the waiting- Although to be honest, I think if I went to an orgy- Like, it’s like, it’s like the being at the DMV, right? Like, you’re queuing, you’re waiting. Like, it’s awkward. There’s other people there. You know a lot of them, like, ‘cause a bunch of them were Aella’s friends.Like, these are all... I mean, I guess those people are more accustomed maybe to more group-ish sex environments. But anyway, it was in this milieu, it was in this mix at this lovely party that a- that actually wasn’t particularly fun for Aella or Romy, per their reports that Romy locked eyes with a man that she was fluffing.She’d known him online a little bit, you know, had seen him post. This iswhat I don’t understand.Yeah.[00:10:00]If it’s not fun, okay? And presumably she’s done gang bangs before. Well, you don’tknow it. No, I don’t think she had. That’s the thing, is I don’t think she had. And so there’s this, like, well... ‘Cause think, think about to, to safely do a gang bang, if you’re actually, like, vetting it carefully and, and doing it right.And, and keep in mind, like, again, the, this, this type of sex positive person in the Bay Area, in the ALA cinematic universe doesn’t just do, like, consensual non- Like, “Oh, let’s just mess around. Like, everyone, like, jump in the group.” No, no, no. At her consensual non-consent parties, you’re wearing a lanyard that says what you can do to someone and what you can’t do.There are safe words. There are safety talks. Like, this stuff, people are vetted. There, there’s the, the stuff, the, the places, the careful location selection. These are incredibly thoughtful events. So no, I don’t think she had done one before. From my understanding, she hadn’t. And so sh- like, she wanted to try.Like, she’s an, she’s a, she’s, she believes in experimentation. And so I, I don’t think she [00:11:00] knew that she wasn’t gonna find it particularly enjoyable.I think that I should add this to our sins episode. Trying something only to try something. Well, but she might have liked it, and she- Well, you don’t need to know everything in the world you might like.Even if it turned out I loved gang bangs, that is a fact I would not want to know about myself.Well, and I guess, like, are, like, yeah. D- do you like- private jet flights. I guess that’s, that’s one of the bigger issues in my view. Like, I could love flying on a private jet, but can I afford to fly on a private jet?Like, absolutely not. So they had such- Also, I don’t think I would ...Simone Collins: enough to know. ‘Malcolm Collins: Cause I once had to drop a bunch of people off on a private jet. I didn’t get to go on but I, I had to drop people off. So freaking loud. Like you- Wait, we never took you on our privatejet?No. Oh. That was- That’s terribleI was in the post private jet days when I entered yourfamily. Yeah, we, I guess they- I didn’t get to- ... they stopped using it as much because it’s inconvenient. But yeah private jets suck . [00:12:00] Yeah. They, they- they are so muchworse ... loud. It’s so loud on the tarmac. And like the airports for the private jets were like- It’s not just that it’s loudlike a bus sta- There’s this like- Like a Greyhound bus station. I’m like, “What is this?” If you’re talking about- “This is not what Iexpected.” ... standard private jets, like Lear jets and stuff like that, right? They are significantly smaller than you would expect on the inside, especially for like the two rows.Mm-hmm. So like your entire flight- Oh, you even see it.Like when the, when the Kardashians fly on their private jet, like it’s a very nicely appointed private jet, but it’s small. It’s like, it’s... I mean, you’re- Yeah, theentire flight your head is like cocked to the side- ... because it’s like against the side of the plane.Well, th- okay, theirprivate jets are bigger than that. And okay, I did see the interior of, of wom- one of the lady’s private jets as I was dropping everyone off and, and hers was very nice, but she was also very wealthy. So but like it’s just, I don’t know, it just seemed uncomfortable and meh. But anyway, my point here though is what if Aella just...I think it’d be worse if Aella really enjoyed the gang bang because then like how is she... Like oh great, like now I’m never gonna have fun again unless I, [00:13:00] I, I, I put out a 1,000 person survey and have like 10 of my friends work carefully around the clock to vet all these people and interview them and organize them.And you know, of course, throughout the entire process, ‘cause she didn’t wanna put the, the onus on the participants to kind of just both like consensually, non-consensually penetrate her. She’d have two people with her the whole time like kind of watching her watching the men, make sure like nothing was going wrong, making sure that she was fully lubricated, handing the men the Sharpie, ‘cause I think, remember they had like a Sharpie there doing ticks on her leg to be like, “Number this, number that.”I think they even, they did all these like really thoughtful things too. I think maybe there was a virgin there that one day and they’re like saying like they did a thing for him or like I can’t remember. But like this was incredibly thoughtfully executed. It’s not sustainable. So that’s my thing is maybe don’t try things if, if you can’t afford to like do them regularly if it’s trying this to see if you like it kind of thing.Like you know- Do I like luxury cars? Like, I bet I do, but I can’t afford one, so let’s not get into that. You’re a weirdo. Anyway so they, [00:14:00] she, you know, encounters this man. Like, she had seen him posting around online, but I think this is also a very common illustration of how people meet now. This is a very techno-feudal kind of meet cute where, like, you see someone posting online, they’re in your general online sort of parasocial circles, and then at some special event, at some community-based gathering, which this very much was, right?A mixture of sort of the online universe of a person and their offline friends coming together for a special event. You meet someone in that universe. You have some, some, some in-person chemistry, which you can’t necessarily find online. You know, you can’t gauge that, and it takes off from there. So, you know, it wasn’t immediate.It wasn’t like, you know, he asked her out mid-penetration. Because I d- she, she was also, I think, doing, like, full penetrative fluffing not like, like hand job or b*****b fluffing, from my understanding. And anyway, they, they went later on [00:15:00] a date. And then they- Yeah ... they became like more like a steady boyfriend and girlfriend.And then they had a kid together, and now not only are they engaged to be married soon but they’re also, for the time being at least, monogamous. And here you see this classic arc. The gang banging to monogamy trend. Well, no, the thing is, like, I think people don’t realize how common this is. Like, I, I am the product of of bro- a broken polyamorous marriage.I guess it’s just like it wasn’t really well matched. And then my mom was one of, like a secondary for my dad. But then eventually she was like, “Look, I- this isn’t for me. Like, I wanna have a kid someday. Either I’m moving to Colorado or, like, maybe you decide that you wanna be monogamous with me. And my dad decided, at actually pretty significant social cost, like per everything that, you know, the disruption that that caused to become monogamous with my mother, and I’m a result of that.[00:16:00]But, like, even back in the ‘80s, this was happening in the Bay Area. So this is a surprisingly trad kind of arc. And I’m really happy for Romie. I’m really happy for her partner. I’m really happy for their kid. But what I did not expect from this adorable and, in my opinion, very wholesome story, was that she would radicalize me against misoprostol, which I thought was like...Now, you know my stance has been very consistent, that, like, up until 12 weeks, I don’t care. Like, whatever, you know, y- if you wanna take a pill to end a pregnancy early, like, this is not yet a,a, a sentient, like, conscious- So, so for people who understand why we take this position, if you’re confused by this, I d- I, I do not think that you can h- when there’s no neural tissue, like, I don’t think I lost part of my soul by losing my finger or something like that, right?Yeah. When there’s no neural tissue, there is nothing that can produce the effect that we in our society call a soul.Yeah ... it, it- And we, we think it’s equally sinful as [00:17:00] techno-puritans to, like, choose not to have a kid when you could. It doesn’t matter if that’s before you have sex or after you have sex or after conception.It’s, it’s, it’s, it’s a sin. Yeah, yeah, it’s notthat we don’t think that it’s bad to abort a fetus that has no neural tissue yet. Mm-hmm. But we think it’s at the same level of evil as convincing somebody not to get IVF that was going to do IVF. Yeah. Because you have prevented a child that was going to exist from existing, and all child on that spectrum, whenever somebody goes like, “I could have made the child”- And- That’s why we took that position, but just- And then there’s,there’s, yeah, the sort of additional, like, layer on top of that for me of like, okay, well, when are you, when are you sort of committing murder and causing, like, suffering to a thing?And, you know, yeah, after week 12, you are causing suffering to a thing. Like, huh. So like, that, that just adds this extra, like, visceral... But now, now I’m really questioning this, and I wanna give you some, some quotes from Romie’s [00:18:00] experience going through this because I think she, this is what, this is what radicalized me, and I think it shows some lies that are told to progressives especially, but I think just to main screen, mainstream participants in the urban monoculture more broadly about About basically early term abortions.I had no idea. I am kind of horrified. And I, I, it, it shows how we’ve basically been lied to, and that there is a ton of damage that no one talks about, and I feel like maybe f- people feel afraid to talk about. So I’ll just go ahead and read. But- No, let’s goSimone Collins: into it.Malcolm Collins: Yeah. You can also, and I, ‘cause it’s amazing writing.Romie’s very articulate, incredibly intelligent, like beautiful, wonderful person in general. So I recommend you read the full thing. It’s titled it’s her only Substack article too What Nobody Told Me About Abortion, and it describes her harrowing experience. So basically she she had sex with her boyfriend and got [00:19:00] pregnant.She wrote, “On the sort of afternoon a full ripe summer fruit, my new boyfriend and I, still flush with sweat and limerence after some midday sex, started an ovulation test strip and realized we’d misread an earlier test. ‘Uh-oh,’ I said, lightly amused, and 1,000 rom-com moments flashed through my mind.” Cue the clueless horror movie protagonist who fails to notice the ax murderer behind the bedroom door, mistaken about the genre of the story unfolding.We listened to music, and I swiveled back and forth in an office chair while narrating ChatGPT’s damning answers to my questions about fertile windows and test strip line darkness. My boyfriend kissed me on the cheek each time he walked past. We riffed about games we could play at our abortion party.Our decision calculus was numerical, emotions an afterthought. Our abortionSimone Collins: party? This, and this goes to show, like- I think she’s showing how radicallyMalcolm Collins: her mind shifted over time ... yeah, like,Simone Collins: the, the flippantMalcolm Collins: jokiness that, no, that like, that urban [00:20:00] monoculture San Francisco Bay Area people are raised with around the idea of abortions, and why people are so, like, pro-abortion.It’s like, really like it goes back to that BoJack Horseman Aquafina, like, “Get that fetus, kill that fetus.”Speaker 17: America, get your uteruses tarp.Speaker 19: I’m a baby killer. Baby killer makes me horny.Speaker 18: Get that fetus, kill that fetus.Speaker 19: Down face, b*****s in my cross face. No, I’ma have abortions always.Speaker 18: And sometimes I do have doubts I hope and pray to God it don’t feed us as a song. Cause I want it to feel pain when I eject it from my own world., has the concept of women having choices gone too far?Malcolm Collins: Like, the, this like- Yeah ... euphoric cultural, like, this is a sacred cow kind of attitude around abortion, and it’s euphoric, this idea that I have this choice, and like, we’re gonna exercise this choice and it’s gonna be funny and cool.Speaker 2: Trans woman to have a successful uterus [00:21:00] transplant, ovaries and eggs included. And I want to be the first trans woman to have an abortion.Speaker 3: Mrs. Garrison.You can’t have an abortion.Speaker 4: Don’t you tell me what I can and can’t do with my body! A woman has a right to choose!Speaker 3: You can’t get pregnant.Speaker 4: But I missed my period.Speaker 3: You can’t have periods either.Speaker 4: You mean, I’ll never know what it feels like to have a baby growing inside me and then scramble its brains and vacuum it out? This would mean I’m not really a woman, it’s, I’m just a, I’m just a guy with a mutilated penis!Speaker 3: Basically, yes.Speaker 4: Oh boy, do I feel like a jackass.Malcolm Collins: I’ll continue reading. Our decision calculus was numerical, emotions an afterthought. There’s a one in four chance of conception each month, so deciding not to take Plan B would result in a 25% risk of needing an abortion. Plan B costs $50, and an abortion costs 500, but only with [00:22:00] a 25% chance of conception.The expected value of that option is $125. Plan B and early stage abortion seemed physically pretty similar. Nothing to consider there. “If you get pregnant, we’d both know we’re fertile,” my boyfriend pointed out. “True. Why would anyone pl- pay for fertility testing with such thrilling alternative available?”I quipped back. In the end, my sense that failing to take Plan B seemed plainly stupid led us to swing by CVS on our way to an under the sea themed party in San Francisco. I was wearing a black and gold ballgown. He, a shimmery jacket that made him look like an undiscovered mayor culture dredged up from the fluorescently lit family planning aisle.Later at the party, I recounted our ill-fated afternoon with punchlines as I pried open the clamshell package and unceremoniously swallowed the Plan B in my friend’s cozy kitchen So she, you [00:23:00] know, is very, like, casual about the sex, about the you know, “I’m ju- I’ll just take Plan B,” right? You know, this is a very, like, expected experience for someone in the, like- Yeahthis culture. Then she describes how it goes south. So basically, she got a positive pregnancy test nine days later. And she, just, like, from the beginning, it was, like, obvious she would not be having a baby. Like, there, there was no question that, like, well, obviously. Like, we’re not, we’re not even gonna consider carrying this.She, she wrote, “Ignoring the mounting calm of my instinctual self, I walked across Berkeley on a chilly August evening to pick up abortion pills from the sort of friend who people think of when they say they know a guy.” She continued a little bit later. I’m, I’m skipping through the article. You really should read the whole thing.Yeah. “Nobody talks about the hell that is misoprostol, the abortion pill. I suspect that in its politicization, no one wants to mention that the drug in question is a sledgehammer. On its quest to destroy the fetus, it obliterates the mother as well. On Thursday afternoon, I [00:24:00] unceremoniously took the first of three doses.Four little white pills shoved into my vagina as far up as I could wedge them. Tiny bombs placed quietly beside the cradle where my unsuspecting baby slept. I waited, fever rising, for the bleeding that should have started an hour, after an hour or two. The second dose came and went. By dose three, I could barely move.I took the stairs one at a time, weakly gripping the railing, my joints aching with each step, the inside of my mouth painfully raw. Curled in bed, I whispered for more and more blankets, shivering and only dimly aware of my boyfriend there beside me, searching the internet for answers about my racing heart and shallow, rapid breathing.In the morning, I felt drained, but the fever and pain were gone. The large maxi pad, which the internet warned I may soak as often as once per hour, was entirely dry.” So she goes on to observe that, quote, “Misoprostol as an abortion protocol is 85% effective. As the 24-hour time point neared [00:25:00] and I felt not even the slightest cramping, it became clear that I was among the unlucky 15% of women for whom a second attempt would be necessary.”And she also writes, “In, in taking the first dose of pills, I’d started down an inescapable path and had no choice but to march to its end. As a friend would later say, the correct number of abortions is either zero or as many as it takes.” And this is, Malcolm, for me, like, reading about this is so scary, ‘cause one of my, I’ve never told you this, but one of my recurring, like, nightmares that I’ve had since childhood is, like, finding some innocent injured animal that’s in pain, and then attempting to kill it to put it out of its pain and, and failing every time and making it worse every time.Like, this is one of my, like, deepest set fears. Like- It’sfunny, I have a, th- such different deep set fears than you. Yeah. W- I don’t know if I ever told you this one. One, one of my recurring nightmares, up until I met you, I haven’t had this dream since I met you. Oh. But it used to be a [00:26:00] big recurring nightmare for me was that I had accidentally killed someone and I needed to figure out what to do next.Oh, no.Simone Collins: And I wasMalcolm Collins: just like, “We gotta hide the body. We gotta like...”Yeah. We have different nightmares. But like this is my worst nightmare. And of like if I had gone through this and I felt like I had only partially killed this, this fledgling life.And then it humanizes it for you, and you’re like, “Oh, my God, this is my baby.What was I doing? Why did I treat this so flippantly?” Yeah,you, you’re... Yeah, just, just wait. So she, she ultimately had to do four rounds. She went to Planned Parenthood in San Francisco. She wrote, “Desperation welled inside me. I wanted to grip her...” Oh so basically also a protester confronted her and was like, you know, “Don’t kill your baby.”About that she wrote, “Desperation welled inside of me. I wanted to grip her bony shoulders, to look her in the eye and ask her what she would have me do with this broken, beautiful thing inside me that had survived six doses of poison and now failed to die.” My [00:27:00] worst nightmare. You can tell I’m like so scared.“More abortion pills, more waiting, more shivering in a ball of feverish torment. Still no blood.” Then she continued ‘cause she had to ultimately get a D&C. “My memories of the surgical D&C procedure four days later come to me in fragments that feel sharp in my chest. I remember a cold wand pushed inside me, searching for a smudge of evidence of, of the baby, and then a room with a chair and an iPad video that soothingly warned of hysterectomy risk.”I didn’t, also, I didn’t know that. “Finally, a room that smelled of chemicals where I sat on a crisp paper and stared at a tray strewn with ominous medical instruments. Panic. Through this I did not move. Tears gathered in my eyes at the inevitability of the situation, my overwhelming helplessness. I presented my arm to the pretty young nurse who would administer the fentanyl and sedatives.I laid down and spread my legs for the kind practitioner to vacuum out my stubborn baby. What’s a mother to do in a moment like this but carry her child gently to the executioner’s arms?” And then [00:28:00] she, She asked if she could, you know, like take the th- you know, the baby that they removed and, like, bury it in her backyard or something.And they’re like, “No, we’re forced by California law to take them all to funeral homes?” I don’t know what they do with them there. That’s... I don’t get that. But anyway, she met, after this process happened, other people who like when she mentioned it to them were like, “Oh yeah, I have also had a traumatic experience with this.”And I think this is one of those other things where the people- Because inprogressive circles you’re supposed to be euphoric about it. It’s supposed to be- Yeah, like youcan’t... It’s, yeah, it’s, it’s verboten to say that you had a bad experience with mifepristone. You can’t say it. But then she said, she wrote “I recently had coffee with a friend who became very still when I mentioned my abortion.Tears sprang to her eyes as she told me that once she’d had an abortion too, and although it was seven years ago, and although she never wanted the baby, never even wanted to be a mother, it still makes her cry every time she remembers it. She’d taken the abortion [00:29:00] pills and two days later, in a grungy dive bar bathroom with music thrumming through the door, she’d found her clot of a baby in her bloody pad.”Th- this is, I’m sorry, like, I guess trigger warning a while ago. Stop if so. Trigger warning awhile ago. No, but this is how you get people. No, no, no,no, no, no, no. Wait, wait, wait. Well,one way to win was the gang bang story. I know. Then you traumatize them about getting an abortion. Then, but I cry if Italk about abortions.What on earth? But anyway, this radi- this radicalized me. Did you ever think you would be this woman crying talking about abortions to other, to try to get women to like...I’m not trying to do this. This really radicalized me, and her writing is really good. Anyway so she, this woman just told her, you know, she found the bloody clot in this dive bar in her pad.She says, “ ‘I knew I had to eat it,’ she told me. And then as though suddenly realizing that this might sound absurd, she tried to explain, ‘I mean, I couldn’t just leave it in that dirty bathroom. It was my baby. What was I going to do, throw it in the trash?’ I stopped her, shaking my head. ‘No, no, it makes perfect sense [00:30:00] to me.It really does. Of course you had to eat it. It was your baby.’ The maternal logic of this was unassailable. Anyone who’s been a mother for any stretch of time would not question such a primordial urge. The animal mother knows what to do, and your judgments are not what carried evolution billions of... Oh, and your judgments are not what carried evolution billions of years to this moment.‘So what did you do?’ I asked her. ‘I ate it,’ she said, wide-eyed.” S- and like Malcolm, this sounds so insane, but I completely understand what they’re talking about And it makes me think of like, the hamsters that go crazy and eat their babies. There’s something that, yeah, is really, like mentally unstable about pregnancy and, and I didn’t realize that messing with it in this way like this early in pregnancies could mess women up so much.‘Cause it gets worse. B- if you can believe it. And then- Oh my God. Our audience,Simone Collins: did we lure them in with “Hey guys”? I’m so sorry, guys.Malcolm Collins: I’m so... “Simone Collins: Hey guys, gang bang. Ha ha ha.”Hey, so funny.Malcolm Collins: So after this she, she basically [00:31:00] had a psychotic episode. She, she wrote, and again I’m skipping around, read the whole thing, “I was not permitted to eat my baby nor bring it home in a little vial to bury it or put it on the mantle or inspect it under a microscope for a tail.Perhaps if I’d been, the cataclysmic crash of hormones that awaited me would have taken a gentler shape. Instead, in the days that followed, I began to experience borderline psychotic episodes. These hours-long periods would begin with a vague sense of unease and build-” and build until the world around me became twisted and surreal, like a haunted house.Sometimes anger at my boyfriend would inexplicably slow- swell inside me, sharp and alienating, distancing me from the one person who might understand my pain. Often I was consumed with an urgent need to go find my missing baby. My thoughts would enter obsessive sprent- frenzied spirals about the desire, running through the sequence of events that had led to my baby’s departure from my womb, where it clearly belonged.My memories of the [00:32:00] D&C churned with an ominous bent. The kindness of the nurses suddenly felt coercive, like they had conspired to place me under a spell so that they could use the strange and powerful devices to remove a precious, integral part of me. And then so she, she goes to Burning Man which happens m- like, on late Memorial Day weekend in, like, the beginning of September, ‘cause this is all end of summer.Mm-hmm. And she, she basically tried to deal with this by sort of, like, through the, the Bay Area equivalent of, like, a, a grieving ceremony. At Burning Man there’s, like, the big man that they burn, but there’s also this place called the temple where you can, like... And I’ve been to Burning Man once.I remember going to it. It’s this, like, beautiful structure, but it’s where you kind of, like, you will have I’m vaguely remembering this like traumatic things. Like, y- you’ll burn the things that, that bother you. And so she, she tries to staple the one thing she had left of this baby, which was her positive pregnancy test strip to the temple, and then it, you know, like, having it burned, like, and hopefully that, like, will get rid of her trauma.[00:33:00] One, one thing she wrote also that stood out to me, she wrote, “Before I was a mother, I was a woman who belonged entirely to herself. I finally understood then that my baby was gone and that I was once again alone.” Oh my gosh, what? Sorry.Can you see that this stuff messes women up? But you may not want more babies.It’s people who have babies, the moment you get radicalized by babies, you’re just like, “I need maximum number of babies.”No, see, I didn’t know that you could get radicalized before the baby came out ‘cause I didn’t, I didn’t know. But something really messes with women, and this, this article shows that.It turns out that while full-blown postpartum psych- she, here I’m reading from her writing again. “It turns out that while full-blown postpartum psychosis is rare, subclinical psychotic thoughts are common, affecting 15 to 30% of women who give birth, and less commonly following abortion and miscarriage.Critically, people experiencing these thoughts retain insight into the fact that their thoughts are distorted, though such knowledge does not [00:34:00] immunize them to suffering. It’s strange to me that given the prevalence of postpartum depression and abortion, I haven’t heard anyone talk openly about either.My concept of abortion was shaped instead through divisive political narratives, which leave me feeling trapped between absolutes and how I’m allowed to talk about it, forced to hedge every statement.” I mean, she still supports the, the right to choose, and there’s all these complications, but she’s trying to introduce nuance to the conversation.And, like, even to the, to the day that she wrote this article she still is dealing with the grief of this abortion. She wrote... Oh, mister. She wrote, “My grief is- Ithink this is a good article to... And I’m gonna do this for our kids. Yeah. I think around the time they go through puberty, I think this article should be part- They need to read thisof sex education and having to write an essay on this. 100%. And I would introduce this, I think at around the age of, let’s say, 14. When youhave your period. No, when you have your period. That’s when you- Yeah ... should be reading it. I’ll just- Yeah ... leave with,What a great thing [00:35:00] just to make part...And I, and I actually, I like this so much, I’m gonna say, like, if you’re a religious person or whatever like that, and you have, like, a religious school or something like that, can we advocate for making this a major part of the justSimone Collins: telling- Yeah, ‘cause again, it’s not, it’s not all the... N- no,Malcolm Collins: no Catholic or Protestant or Jew has ever convinced me, despite, like, presenting many, like, cohesive arguments of...Like, this, this made me cry. You saw. I can’t help but cry, and this isn’t my first time reading it. You know, this isn’t, like, the initial shock. This is just me, like... And, and it had pr- pr- probably something to do with the fact that, like, I, I have been radicalized by pregnancy as well. But, like, just the, the impact this has had on her.She, she writes “My grief has settled into a shape small enough to carry around the world. It goes with me to dinner and seems to like it when we take evening walks around the neighborhood. Sometimes when I know it won’t cause [00:36:00] too much trouble, I take it out and marvel at it. It’s heavier than it looks.The weight of it on my chest enough to knock the breath out of me if I’m not prepared. Many nights, my grief unfurls and wraps w- its long tendrils around me. I wake sweating and tangled in my blankets, planets still bright in the sky. Soon enough it will learn to sleep through the night.” Like, she’s still suffering from it.And I think she- Oh.Simone Collins: Okay, okay. G, are you thirsty? Sorry, one moment hereYour bottle has disappeared.Malcolm Collins: She, I think her story also adds weight to the techno-puritan sense that damage lies in, like, action-based inflection points, and less at, like, some definition of where life begins or where suffering begins, and this is where I, I’m also, like, moderating my views of, like, where the sin lies and where the damage is done.She wrote, “I never quite understood regret. Should the [00:37:00] butterfly regret a flap of its wings upon learning of the resulting tornado? Still, as the shadow of loss looms over my days, I’ve started to think I probably would have been happier in this alternate lifeline, life timeline in which my grief would be balanced by purpose.Whether this will feel true five years from now is harder to say. Perhaps one should wait to see what is built from the tornado’s wreckage before declaring regret. I find myself trying to calculate this likelihood, but quickly stop. I know now that some arithmetic belongs to older gods than reason.”And so, She’s a really good writershe has a kid now, right? She got... When did she give birth?I d- I don’t know the exact date, but yeah, she has a kid, she has a kid now. She has a kid now. She’s gonna get married. She’s monogamous. This, this is a happy ending. Everything’s okay . And you’re like, “Oh my God.” I know, man.But, like- But it’s important to remember that sex can lead to kids.Ba- gang bangs can lead to kids, right? Like, everything that she’s participating in around something like this can [00:38:00] lead to a woman getting pregnant, and then having to well, either carry the kid to term or make a horrifying choice that could lead to this. And progressives aren’t really told, and I wasn’t really told when I was a kid, because I’m gonna be honest, Christians are cucking terrible at terrifying kids out of abortions.They’re just like, “You’re murdering a human.” And I’m like, “It doesn’t have neurons.” Like, that is so uncompelling to somebodywho doesn’t have neurons. Yeah, I think that that’s a really, a big thing for me, too, is yeah, like, they keep being like, “It’s a human. It’s a human. It’s a human.” And I’m like, “Well, not...Like, actually, no. Like, it’s, it, it doesn’t a brain yet. You know, like, it’s It’s like, mm, you know Like, yeah, I ammy thoughts, right? Like- Yeah ... fundamentally, I’m not really my body. I could lose any part of my body and I’m still 100% me. If I lost a part of my brain, I would be fractally me. I wouldn’t be fully me anymore. If my brain significantly changed, I would be a different version of myself.Like, it [00:39:00] is our neurons, at least this is to me, a regular person. The reason why I’m laying this out is when you go to your kids, many of your kids are gonna think this way, and you go to your kids and you just say Abortion is bad. And, and again, even the lines they use don’t really work for them. “I knew you before you were in your mother’s womb.”Well, that, that doesn’t imply that life begins immediately at conception. That actually implies something quite different, that either souls exist in heaven before ensoulment or God can see into the future, both of which do not imply that life begins at conception, right? You know, so, e- they would, they would imply other things, right?And then, then, then the question becomes when does ensoulment happen and everything like that. What this has radicalized me on is it’s... There are still instances in which... And keep in mind, this is the vast minority of abortion. When people are like, “Abortion because of rape,” or something like that, is less than 1% of abortion cases.That is not what people are fighting for. But I think it works to just [00:40:00] take that off the table. Just say, “Okay, let’s not say, ‘Okay, in the case of rape...’”Or a, a non-viable, Or non-viable ... they... Well, I think it... So, so we have to... And, and like, think again. Things need to be parsed out, right? Like, there’s, there’s s- yeah, some of these really extreme cases.There’s also, like, cases in which what we’re really discussing is euthanasia of a terminally ill human. It doesn’t matter, like... And this is where I’m like, I’m, I’m standing out. Oh, no, Simone loves euthanasia, and, like, I know a lot of you guys really hate the idea of euthanasia. But I, truly loving human life, human flourishing, and es- especially innocent babies personally would want the right to spare one of my children intense suffering and pain and a short life.You know, if like, you know, hours of intense suffering and then death after carrying a pregnancy to term, like, I would rather euthanize that baby of ours. Like, personally. But I, I would saythat this has radicalized [00:41:00] me on general use of- Yeah ... of, of this. No.No. Yeah, no. Like, before I was like, “Whatever, it’s a pill.Like, take the pill. It’s, it’s a...” No, man. Like, I had no i- I had no idea. And, and recreational sex because- I mean, yeah, this is... People have told us, they’re like, “Oh, well, you know, misoprostol’s actually, like, a really intense medication.” And I’m like, “I don’t...” Like, yeah, but like, I know people who are like, “Ugh, I took antibiotics.My tummy hurts.” Like, people, like, overreact. This iswhat... And w- I think it’s not just on... This has radicalized me against recreational sex because this is what recreational sex leads to, right? I, I think- Yeah, like Isaid, we think that non-procreative sex is a sin, and this is why. Like, well, many reasons, but this is another reason whyYeah.Speaker 7: Note here, I’m not talking about, , anything that couldn’t get you pregnant. For example, , oral sex or kinky sex, , where it’s just like leaning into the kink. And I think for that reason, I’m more pro that stuff than I was historically and more [00:42:00] anti-general vanilla, more boring sex. I see that as dramatically more immoral than the kinkiest of kinky stuff, , because the kinkiest of kinky stuff is just to get you off, whereas vanilla sex could accidentally get somebody pregnantSpeaker 8: And I’d even lay this down as a religious thing from our perspective, the techno Puritan perspective for those who actually follow our religion, , lean in to the kinky stuff, lean in to the erotic stuff, lean out of the generic boring sex stuff, because that’s the stuff that can lead to you accidentally having to being in a position where it might make sense for somebody to think about murdering a human beingMalcolm Collins: It is really first recreational sex doesn’t even feel that good. It’s like I, this is one of the biggest myths I wanna blow out of the table here. Look, this is apparentlymy failure. It can feel very good. I guess I’m not doing my job here. Well, I havehad sex with, and again, like my backstory is I used to sleep around all the time.I’ve had sex with well over 100 women, probably around [00:43:00] 160. If I like try to get it up, I, I think it, it, I mean, I remember I stopped counting and I think it was like 120 was the last time I did a full count, and I slept with quite a few people after that, so it must be quite a bit more than that. Did any of them ever get pregnant?If they did, they never told me. But like I didn’t understand the, I just thought sex is sex. So again, this is not a Simone is bad thing, it’s that when you actually do it enough or you go around and sleep around enough, this isn’t a Simone... When I mentioned this on the Leaflet stream, everyone was like, in the comments, they were like, “Y- yeah, he’s right.It’s just like not differentially that much better than masturbation.” You know, it’s, it’s, it’s fine. It’s, it’s maybe 250% better than masturbation. But like when you consider the- Oh, cost-benefitanalysis though, and that’s what’s so crazy is like there was that one section of her, her post where they’re like, well, you know, if we do like a weighted cost of plan B versus like misoprostol [00:44:00] or like an abortion, like $200 versus $50 but weighted for the odds.Like they’re doing most of the calculation. They’re just not taking it the rest of the way there of like here’s the downside cost of having recreational sex versus, you know, like the benefit of it. Comp- contrast that to the downside cost of just masturbating. Yeah.Yeah. This is why I’m like, this is why I’m so against people who push against masturbation.If masturbation prevents recreational sex, masturbation is good when you consider the enormous downside of recreational sex which, which I think th- this really highlights. By the way, rfab.ai, our AI service, offers really great not safe for work image and video generation, as well as not safe for work storytelling and scenarios, so you can experience your craziest monster F her scenario, you crazy, horny women out there.Speaker 9: So I’ve been dramatically working to improve the site’s ability to both produce not [00:45:00] safe for work art and not safe for work videos. And, , right now, it should be live, , today. , There’s still some updates we have to do on the compression, the auto compression stuff, but automatic anime dubbing, , which is kinda cool that I, I-- You know, we’re one of the first to bring that to youSpeaker 10: You talking so seriously. It seems you haven’t decided on the next place to go. How utterly ridiculous. If you’re going to worry about that, why not just make the next customer the same race, huh? Oh, I see. Not bad. Then let’s go with that. Wait, you’re hiring them? Man, we really can’t decide on anything today.Speaker 13: Oh, welcome. Oh, welcomeSpeaker 11: A golem, huh?Speaker 14: We recently had a fan reach out to us to be like, “Wow, you guys are always [00:46:00] talking about this RFAB thing, so I finally decided to try it.” And then they were like, “Well, and I ended up spending all day on it. It was a lot of fun.” , And, ,, they then said it was too easy, like the games, the game worlds always sort of worked for them.So if that happens to you, on the site, use the ExoTop engine. , That engine is sort of like the anti-cheat engine. I don’t like it because I like cheating. I like the narrative going in the direction I choose to l-- You know, I, I sort of impose those limits on myself when I’m playing a scenario. But for the people who don’t like to impose that, the ExoTop engine, , narrative engine is the right one., Oh, and the recipe generator is really cool now. The super search feature is really cool. There’s just so many fun things you can try on the website. But the wider point here being is I’m not anti-eroticism. , Or we are not anti-eroticism. We are not anti-kink. We are not anti-, you know, getting your freak on.What we are anti is the type of sex that can lead to an abortion. [00:47:00] This is evil, and I think that by drawing this distinction as a society, it is easier to convince kids that we are not telling them this because we are being fuddy-duddies, but we are telling them it because it is something that is trueYou can be as dirty as you want, but sex is sinfulMalcolm Collins: Or what a guys want. A scenario where a woman loves and cares about you.Oh my GodYou know, a scenario where you s- where, where you rizz up your favorite online celebrity. You can just create a version of them and then use the internet search version of Grok, which none of the other sites have, and you can, you can talk to them on the...No, but like, this hasn’t radicalized me into all of the conservative positions, but certainly against this. And I think with a lot of this stuff it’s like she didn’t even like the gang bang, right? Like Ayla didn’t even like thestory. Well, but no, no, no, no, no. I mean, ultimately the gang bang, I would say has, [00:48:00] has led to the production of at least one human life, Yesand a marriage, and to, you know, a happy couple. Like, what, what, what better gift would you want from a gang bang? It’s, it’s beautiful. So You should, you shouldreach out to her to be, like, in our network. She sounds sane and intelligent and like, I think our communities could be a good place for her.‘Cause I, I bet she’s still completely surrounded by progressives, right? She doesn’t feel like- Well, she livesin Berkeley.Yeah, I mean Having the thoughts that she has, you know, be like, look, there’s a lot of us, sister. Like, join our community. Not, not, not for the sad part, but for the euphoric part of building civilization, right?Well, you don’t know she’s not. She follows us on X, so maybe she already has.Oh yeah, maybe she’s already in our community. I mean, I’ve met other women. See our EA to sex worker pipeline, where I felt so bad for some of the women in the EA space that just had their life ruined by this because they’re just like, “I thought that this is how you were cool as a woman is recreational sex.I thought [00:49:00] that this was cool when I was in those communities.” And they didn’t realize how much it impacted the types of men who had settled down with them, right? And I think also seeing her conversion out of this, I think shows that for a lot of these people, it’s our failure, the conservative movement’s failure to communicate to them.It is our failure that we- Well, it’s politicized too. Like, a lot of it’s the,the radicalization of it. The, the, one of the reasons why people aren’t discussing the, the downside risk of taking this pathway is that it is so politicized. You don’t wanna give fodder to, like, I guess, rightist extremists who are gonna be like, “Exactly.That’s why you can’t have, like, abortions.” You know, they’re gonna be intolerable if someone admits this. It’s a very third rail thing. And I don’t think she’s conservative, like, now suddenlybecause of this. But no, what I’m saying is the way that the right, the way that the right communicates with people is just wrong.It’s bad. It’s [00:50:00] bad at communication. It’s bad at communicating why abortion is bad. The, the, the words and logic that’s used fails at step one for a woman like this, and it is our responsibility ultimately. And people can say, like, “Why are we responsible and she’s not responsible?” We are responsible and she’s not responsible because I can’t control somebody else’s actions.But I can control my actions, so it’s always useful for me to take personal responsibility, and I can influence a movement’s actions. I’m not influencing leftists. I’m influencing rightists. So I’m saying you, to the larger right-wing space that we influence, we do a bad job at communicating why these things are moral negatives.And it’s good for us to look at a story like this and be like, imagine if it doesn’t work, because there’s an X percent chance that it doesn’t work. How are you going to feel, right? And then you have to go through with it, because you’ve [00:51:00] already ruined that child’s life. Well, I mean, you might decide that you don’t, and that’s a whole other scenario, but you have ruined the child’s life and you’re gonna have to live with that for the rest of your life.That’s also horrifying. But like the moment you take this, like actually think through what this means. And more so, do that for casual sex more broadly. Think through the actual benefits you get out of it, and the actual negatives that could come downstream of this, and are you willing to take on this moral responsibility?And it is wild to me that all these, quote-unquote, “effective altruists” are doing these orgies and everything like that without fully considering what this could mean for them as individuals. And I think we just fail to communicate to them, and I- I’m gonna do better to do that in the future. I’m trying to think, like, what’s the way to like sum this up?Yeah, I think the way to sum this up is the way that I’ll be addressing abortion in the future is, what if you take the pill and it doesn’t [00:52:00] work? Like, talk me through how that feels. And then you get a crying baby like this little b*****d. Look, he’s not even happy with his little toy. He’s trying to eat it monster.Yeah, he’s... I, I need to f- his, his bottle rolled away. What’s he upset about? I, I think he... Well, he, he woke up hangry and I- his bottle fell and I can’t access it ‘cause I’m- Okay ... stuck to the microphone Well, I’ll let you go.You did a spectacular job with this episode. It’s one of my favorites that we’ve done.It’s one of my mo- It’s, it’s allthanks to Romy. I just like, I... Well, I mean, you and I, we really like, we appreciate when our minds are changed, when we get better information. And as much as it hurt for me to, like, read this terrible experience I really, really appreciate getting information that gives me, that ma- that moves me in a slightly less wrong direction in life.So. So you,I love you, MalcolmI love you too. I’m so glad that Tech survived. He was, yeah, really touch and go there, and almost died in the hospital [00:53:00] too.Yeah.Does he still have the big scar from where they put the thing in to help his lungs? Yeah.Yeah. Th- you could... Yeah, it’s, I, I wonder if he’s just always gonna have that you cansee it.I mean, even if he does, you know, quite a-Yeah, makes you look kinda, kinda tough. Like-Modern medicine saved me, you know? This is the world that we’re in. Let’s, let’s try to save it, okay? All of you guys, let’s try to save it. Yeah. Let’s do our best.Simone Collins: Yeah.Malcolm Collins: And this also just makes me reflect a lot more on communication.We’ve gotta get better at communication, and delivering these messages to the right people at the right stages of their life. Mm. Not just to be a community afterwards. So let’s think about how we do that better.Sounds good to me. All right. I’ll go start dinner. All right.Love you, Simone.Love you too.Speaker 16: You gotta sneak up on him. Can you be sneaky?I want that. You can do it, just be sneaky and patient, [00:54:00] okay? I can’t. Maybe I can help you. We’ll see. Can you help me please? Aw, thanks for asking them nicely. Let’s see what I can do to help.Speaker 15: They love that bird that we put so much, so now they love it They do. I’m gonna see if I can hang it up, ‘cause now it’s just sitting on the ground. So look, Tex brought this string that he’s been holding onto, and we’re gonna try to use that to tie it up for them. What do you think? Yeah? Yeah, thanks, Indy.Speaker 16: You’re gonna help me string it up, yeah? I’m trying to pull it. Okay. ‘Cause I’m pulling it up. Exactly. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit basedcamppodcast.substack.com/subscribe

In this Based Camp episode, Malcolm and Simone Collins break down the rapid decline in support for Pride events and LGBT causes. From NPR reporting on corporations pulling sponsorships to Gallup polls showing consistent drops in approval for same-sex marriage and especially gender transition, they explore why public opinion has shifted so dramatically.They discuss cultural overreach, grooming concerns in schools, transgender issues and violence, the “groomer” label’s effectiveness, and why even many Democrats are turning away. The Collinses offer a nuanced conservative perspective: supporting gay rights as a private matter while rejecting enforcement on others, and arguing why keeping competent gay conservatives in the broader movement makes strategic sense.Plus: family moments with Octavian, the evolution of Pride from fun to corporate/ugly, birth rates and political heritability, Don’t Say Gay bill realities, and a deep dive into the Bricks & Minifigs scandal.Episode TranscriptMalcolm Collins: Hello, Simone. I’m excited to be here with you today. Today we are going to be talking about how corporations- Oh ... have stopped supporting sort of the wider gay and LGBT agenda, to the extent that NPR, NPR of all places, wrote an article titled, and I just have to show you the cover image on this article.It’s hilarious.Simone Collins: Okay.Malcolm Collins: Pride celebrations struggle as corporate sponsorships dry up.Simone Collins: OhMalcolm Collins: Oh, yeah, also, alsoSimone Collins: in this And this coming at Pride Month when like... Yeah,Malcolm Collins: sad ‘Cause it’s exactly who you expect.Just like the image, the people in the image is like, oh my God, I wanna hateSimone Collins: these people so much.Oh, hold on, I’m looking. Oh, boy. No, if that’s what Pride is now, let’s just let it go. Sorry though, we loved the glasses. We loved the glasses, but we,Malcolm Collins: you know. This is w- hold on, it’s not just that. This is the only other picture in the article, too.Fat old women is, is what I guess Pride is now. Oh,Simone Collins: no, [00:01:00] no.It’s- No ...Malcolm Collins: fat misshapen old womenSimone Collins: No. I will nev- the first time I ever came across, across a Pride parade, I was in Cape Cod I think it’s Provincetown, or Princetown? Provincetown. But yeah, in Cape Cod, and I didn’t, we didn’t know that there was a Pride parade. We were camping there I was camping there with a, a friend and her dad.And then just on the main street of Provincetown just was this really cool parade, and the most beautiful women I had ever seen. And I was stunned and amazed, and I, I didn’t know why all these beauty queens were suddenly marching along this picturesque New England street. And it turns out they were just all drag queens, and that was it.I loved, I loved it. I loved it all. I thought it was the best thing in the world. And what has it become now? I mean, like in the past 10 years it’s been like the Bank of America float, and then a bunch of like ugly people on it. Like that, what is that? Who made Pride ugly? Like, no, Pride was always hot.Pride was always fun. Pride meant like f- [00:02:00] cool, fun, entertaining, sometimes salacious stuff, but often like more wholesome than anything else. I’m kind of glad that whatever Pride become is dying, and I think that’s kind of how everyone feels, which is why it’s plummeting in popularity.Malcolm Collins: So we’re going to be talking about this, and the other thing we’re gonna be talking about is some recent statistics that came out that show a rapid reduction in the support of things like gay marriage across the United States.A rapid reduction in... I mean, we’re not even, you know, talking about, like, broader trans stuff here, just, like, support for gay rights more generally in the United States. This is something that I personally find you know, is interesting for me to come to because historically I’ve always been pretty pro maintaining gay rights, even just as, like, a...Well, most Republicans are for gay rights these days, and with the majority of Republicans being pro-gay rights, it doesn’t make sense to even, like, bring up a question of, like, should that be something that we’re against, gay marriage, for example. Now we’re at a stage [00:03:00] where it’s more reasonable to table the question.And so that’s the other thing that we’ll be doing in this is tabling whether this should be, like, a, a, a voter issue for us or something that is worth pursuing, right? So we’ll get into that, but I wanna start with the NPR article ‘cause I thought this would be pretty fun for people.Pittsburgh, PA Pride celebrations across the country continue to lo- lose out on large sponsorships as corporations, a key source of funding, shrink their affiliation with diversity causes and LGBTQ+ events. Corporate sponsorships of celebrations in several cities, including New York City, Salt Lake City, Louis- Louisville s- St.Louis, Orlando, and Pittsburgh are down from previous years, organizers said. Jordan Baxton, co-president of the United St- States Association of Pride, which supports Pride celebrations nationwide, said that while some smaller Prides have seen growth in sponsorship, a majority have seen a reduction. She said [00:04:00] that the Trump administration dismantling of the diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives has scared corporations away from sponsoring Pride celebrations.I think that’s why some of the corporations have pulled back because they don’t want that government scrutiny. I don’t think that that’s it. I just think it’s, it’s a wider cultural thing. It doesn’t get you the same brownie points it used to get you, and now it can cost you. And we’re- ISimone Collins: do feel like Trump’s second term gave people who were uncomfortable with it, but doing it because they felt they had to fit in, a license to express themselves more freely.There was an impact.Malcolm Collins: Yeah, yeah. No, I mean, it, the, the, it’s like the, the wind really changed. The culture really changed.Simone Collins: Yeah, I mean, it’s not just about gay, gay pride or whatever, or, or just pride in general. It’s also people suddenly started using the word retarded. Like, things just changed in many ways.Malcolm Collins: Yeah, there was actually a piece on us recently that was like, well, when we go to their older podcast, you know, they’ll be like, “Well, the red pill makes some points here, and the people against the red pill make some points here.” And it was like, and that was generally the way that we talked about things [00:05:00] historically.They didn’t like that ‘cause they’re like, “Well, they’re airing the bad side and not explicitly saying that it’s bad and dangerous ideas.” When the, the truth is is what I always felt is the red pill is absolutely right and ve- putting forth valid complaints, right? Like, they may be wrong here, here, and here in how they’re going about it, but their complaints are overall valid.And there was like a moment, and I, I think it sort of came for us not when Trump won the election, but when Trump really started campaigning and, like, this, this latest election started when I was just like, “N- no, I’m just gonna say this stuff going forward.” It’s like, why, why am I so, I think it was more that when we started saying it, what we realized is the stuff that got us canceled was never actually breaking the rules around the stuff we were saying.It was, like, ancillary stuff that had nothing to do with anything. FairSimone Collins: enough. Yeah ...Malcolm Collins: like the child slap incident is how we got canceled, right? Like, which anyone who’s spent time around us knows, like, we’re very physical with our [00:06:00] kids. We play fight all the time. So wha- what, what’s the first thing that happens if I, like, come into the room and Octavian’s there?Simone Collins: He immediately attacks you.Malcolm Collins: Yeah, yeah. Like, the way we interact with him is very rough and tumble. It’s just natural. Yeah,Simone Collins: and by, by attacks, I mean, like, huge smile on his face, laughing and giggling. It, it’s violence is our love language.Malcolm Collins: Yeah, I had to explain that to him. I’m like, “Well, you know, most people don’t love fighting.”“But our people were known for loving fighting.”Octavian Collins: The queen- SpeakSimone Collins: of the devil ...Octavian Collins: dude, here’s this one. I got this oneMalcolm Collins: Where did you get an egg?Simone Collins: The chicken coop. Where do you think he got an egg? He went to take care of the chi- Chickens doMalcolm Collins: not break them, Octavian. Why, why are you getting eggs?Simone Collins: Go, go go put them in the wooden one. ByOctavian Collins: the way, by the way, if they are clean, then that means they’re real.Simone Collins: Yeah, ‘cause we have fake eggs.Octavian Collins: The ones that are really dirty are not real.Simone Collins: Yeah.Malcolm Collins: This is kind of- no, I mean, I think that what I sort of re- and then the other times we go viral like it’s, it, it’s never actually for breaking one of the quote unquote, like progressive rules around what we’re allowed to say and what we’re not allowed to say. And that sort of [00:07:00] surprised me, and then I was just like, wait, so I can just say what I think is true, and there isn’t any ramification to that anymore?A- and it’s, it’s, it’s also true when you see articles about us. The reason why we’re considered toxic, like in, in the public eye, isn’t because of anything we’ve said about, say, trans people. It’s because we said people should be having children. Like literally that’s it, right? Like that that is why we are unhirable by people.Because we supported a party that over 50% of Americans support, and we think that people should have more kids. And I think that that’s sort of what people realized when people started trying to attack them is it’s like, oh, it’s not worth it, right? And another thing that pushed a lot of people over ‘cause Leaflet talks about this, and this was sort of a major point, is when people were attacked for doing something that they thought was trivial.And for the VTuber community as Leaflet documents in the conversations we’ve had with her, this was largely around playing the JK Rowling game, the Harry Potter game. And a bunch of people tried to cancel [00:08:00] people over this, and the sort of the core takeaway was, well, if I’m gonna get canceled over something that stupid, you know, I might as well say all this other stuff I’ve been holding back for X many years at this point anyway.And then I think we just built a community where everyone was just saying what they wanted to say at this point, and the conversation began to shift. To continue. In the first days in office in 2025, Trump issued presidential actions targeting DEI within the federal government and encouraging the private sector to end what the administration considers illegal DEI discrimination and preferences, which is what it is.It is illegal, right? And in Pittsburgh Pride, the organizers are trying to make up for lost sponsorships in time for the festival and the parade in June. They say, quote, “It takes a lot of money to do this.” End quote. Oh, yeah, especially when you’re paying a bunch of fat, dumb buddies to manage everything.But here they’re like permitting costs, security costs, headliner costs, staging costs, crew cleaning costs. Insurance costs are all very expensive. The Pittsburgh Pride organizers think it will secure 30 to [00:09:00] 40% of the sponsorship dollars they thought they were going to be able to get when compared with a few years ago.To narrow the gap, the group said they received a state grant soli- what? So they’re still taking government money, but they’re taking it from the state. It’s still-Simone Collins: Not enough government money, Malcolm. Not enough. By the way, that’s our taxpayer dollars, 8% of our income. Just,Malcolm Collins: you know. Pittsburgh. Oh yeah, ‘cause they’re in Pennsylvania.People in Pennsylvania, stop voting blue, no matter who. I don’t care, unless it’s Fetterman. I’m okay with Fetterman.Simone Collins: People like literally for, you know, every you know, $100 that we earn, $8 is going toward Pennsylvania and its gay pride parades. So,Malcolm Collins: yeah.Simone Collins: Yeah. A lot of good stuff too, though. I love this state.Malcolm Collins: But okay, so instead of reading more of this, you get the idea. Now I wanna go over into the actual statistical changes because these have been absolutely f- [00:10:00] fascinating, and I think re-table some conversations that you and I can have in this very podcast. So this is from an article in The Advocate.Again, I’m trying to go to pro LGBTQ plus organizations so no one can be like, “Oh, this is a conservative in whatever,” something like that. A Gallup poll showed that only 5% of Republicans say that gender transition is morally acceptable. That is wild at this point. That’s what it, the headline is.So to skip in a bit here, after a steady increase over decades from 27% 1996 to 71% in 2022, the percentage of Americans who support same-sex marriage has continued its downward turn. It now stands at 65% after showing a marginal decline every year since 2022. No, that’s a long time to have consistent marginal declines.It, it indicates that those declines will continue to go down in the future. We’ve pointed out that this is sort of inevitable just due to birth rates. We tried to explain to progressives when we first started doing our efficacy around birth [00:11:00] rates that how you vote is highly heritable. There have been lots of studies on this.It’s about 40% heritable. Given that progressives aren’t having kids, the congress- the population will naturally shift more conservative and very quickly. And we even, like, showed them the math on this, and it’s hitting our predictions exactly. That and the urban monoculture genuinely lost its crap.Like, people are... Because they’re like, “Look at us. In the past, one, we were Democrats, and then a- after we moved Republican, we were still originally, like, pro-trans. And up until now, I, I, I think that we’re still pro...” We’ll talk about that, okay? So, to continue here, notably the decline in acceptance of the same marriage consi- coincides with the 2022 explosion of the slur groomer to refer to LGBTQ+ people as the passage of Florida’s Don’t Say Gay law and the proliferation of copycat legislation.So, this is absolutely hilarious, by the way. The... It turns out the groomer psyop actually worked. People calling them groomers actually [00:12:00] worked. It... ‘Cause we, we don’t use that particular word. I know they call it a slur. It’s not a slur if somebody is functionally grooming people. Like, if you... And, you know, we keep getting leaked video from school.There was a tape recently where a teacher is sending a girl to the principal because she doesn’t want to go along with calling people by whatever the teacher says the preferredgender is.Speaker: How dare you? You’ve just really upset someone. Saying things like, “Should be in an asylum.” I didn’t say that. No, you did say that. I just said if they, if they wanna identify as a cow or something, then they’re, like, genuinely unwell. Then they’ve gone- Yeah ... mentally unsafe ... they’re crazy. You were questioning their identity.Speaker 2: No, I wasn’t- I wasn’t a questioning. I was just saying about the gender. I didn’t say anything about them. But where did you get this idea from there’s only two genders? I just think so. It’s my opinion. That is my opinion. If I respect their opinion, can’t they respect my opinion? It is not an opinion. Yes, it is.Speaker: It’s not an opinion if you can- There’s only two genders. Loads of people think there’s only two genders. There’s only a boy and a girl. Literally. There’s no other private part. There’s only two. [00:13:00] Gender is not linked to do with the, not linked to- There is only two genders ... the parts that you were born with.Gender is about how you identify, which is what I said right from the very beginning of the lesson.Speaker 2: Here myself. If I call my mum, she’d say- Well, that’s very sad as well then. How is it? Loads of people agree with it. There’s only a small majority of people who actually think that. And why do you think we have so many problems in the world with homophobia? Yeah, but it... Because of people- That’s not homophobiaSpeaker 3: yeah, that’s not gender. That’s, that’s gender. Yes, it is. I’m fine with lesbians and gay people. Same. I’ve got nothing against them. Yeah, same. But gender is... There is a link between it, and you’re saying- How? ... that people can’t change- There isn’t ... who they’re going to be. No, they can’t. They can’t unless you get a penis attached- Yes, you are.No, I’m not. You’re confusing sex and gender. No, I’m not though because if you have a vagina- Yes, you are ... you’re a girl. If you have a penis, you’re a boy. Yeah. You can’t be, you can’t have a vagina and be a girl. But then if you have a penis, you are a boy. Unless you get surgery. Even then because you’ve got those genes.Speaker: Gender is about how you identity. I just don’t agree with it. How you identify. Yeah, but this is my- But it’s not an opinion that we express in this school. Yes, it is. Yes, it is. No, it’s not, and if you don’t like it, you need to go [00:14:00] to a different school. So I did go to a different school. I, I’m reporting you to Ms.Willis. You need to have a proper educational conversation about edu- about equality, diversity, and inclusion. I’m doing it. My mum’s gonna help me. Because I’m not having that expressed in my lesson. When I’m teaching you about you can be who you want to be- Everyone else is doing it ... how you identify is up to you.Speaker 2: Everyone else is doing it. They just don’t say it because then all this happens. Yeah. Maybe ‘cause they’re polite and maybe they’re sensitive. I’ve never, I haven’t said anything in all of the lessons I’ve been in. I- It’s just because they turned around and started saying something, so I said, “How can you identify as a cat when you’re a girl?”Speaker: Well, they’re now writing a statement. I, I would imagine- Oh ... that you’ll be asked to write a statement as well.Malcolm Collins: Another one that went viral recently was really interesting is it was a, a white gay teacher and a class full of Black kids, and they’re like do I have to do this even at home?Because I’m pretty sure I’ll get my butt whooped.” And the teacher’s like, “Yes, you have to do it even at home,” “or you’re not protecting people,” right? “And I won’t feel safe.” But, like, th- that’s grooming, right? Like, that’s trying to indoctrinate kids into your ideology. If you sent [00:15:00] your kids to one of my schools and you saw us preaching techno-puritanism or techno-puritan ideology to children, yeah, it’s what I believe is true about the world, but I understand it’s not what most people think is true about the world.I, and, and keep in mind, you can be like, “Oh, well that’s like deeper theology, Malcolm. That’s not like light stuff that like on an individual level would come up in a normal class.” I mean, in a normal philosophy class. We got an email recently from a fan, and they were like, “Well, I wanna know what you think about identity, Malcolm, because obviously we’re not our body, and obviously we’re not our mind.”And I was like, what the... What do you mean, obviously we’re not our mind? The, I mean, if by mind you mean like the thinking thing, that’s literally and definitionally the only thing I have conscious access to. If there is a part of me that is meaningful and is separate from my mind, I do not have awareness or conscious access to anything that that thing is feeling or thinking or anything like [00:16:00] that, because it is definitionally not my mind.Now, that is not something that I understand a lot of people believe. A lot of Christians believe, oh, there is actually this separate soul thing, and our version of Christianity doesn’t, right? And so, I would know not to tell that to some other person’s kid. I don’t even really drop these ideas when I’m in environments that aren’t explicitly our stream.Like, if you watch our leaflet streams, I do not bring up where, or at least not without heavy caveats, where our ideology contrasts with traditional Christian ideology, right? And, and like that they can’t sit down for a second and see that. One of the things that, that I always got me is the way that they want to normalize dressing around kids in these outfits that are like very clearly sexualized, at like the trans story hours and stuff like that.And I’ve always just thought it, it, it seems so Pointlessly transgressive. Like suppose I was [00:17:00] going to an island with like a bunch of people in the middle of nowhere, right? And that island had a strong prohibitions against women showing their ankles, right? And my wife was like, “Well, in my culture, I show my ankles,” right?And I would tell her, “Yeah, I know in our culture we show our ankles, but like you’ve got... We- like we should be respectful of the culture we’re entering, right? Because this is a majority culture here, right?” They’re, the, the, to, th- we might as well be flashing them by showing you, your, their ankles. In truth, you know, when somebody’s wearing lingerie, they’re as covered up as they are when they’re in a swimsuit, okay?Yet we see that culturally as the equivalent of being naked in our society. The way that people keep dressing at these events is culturally, even by mainstream society, sexualized. It is BDSM gear. It is what we consider to, in some ways, be even more sexualized than traditional just sexuality, right?And so I’ve always found it to be like just really [00:18:00] inexcusable what they attempt to normalize and, and really in the realm of true groomerdom. Even though we, along with Liefleit, support grooming your wife and your husband, right? You gotta groom yourself into being a better person. That confused a lot of Christians when they watched that.But anyway continue here Similarly, the percentage of Americans who believe same-sex relationships are, quote-unquote, “moral” has gone up since Gallup first started asking the poll in 2001, but then tapered off after peaking in 2022. Also with 71%, that number now stands at 64%. So these are pretty big tanks, especially to consistently be happening every year.Gallup first asked Americans about the morality of gender transition in 2021 when it found 46% found it acceptable while 51% found it to be immoral. Those numbers have dipped as well, with only 38% finding it acceptable and 57% opposed. Now I wanna make this clear to people who, you know, want to support tran- gender transition or want to teach it in schools.You are in the extreme minority at this point. 38% of [00:19:00] Americans think this is acceptable. So when you attempt to normalize it in the school system or in the legal system, you’re attempting to normalize something that the vast majority of Americans aren’t okay with. It also remind me of a reporter that we were talking to, right?And this was around gender transition stuff. And she asked me, she goes, “Malcolm, why, why do, do you care about the rights of religious people more than the rights of, you know, transgender people, right?” And I was like, “But I, I absolutely do not. What I care about is the rights of a religious person to say no to a transgender person, in the same way that I would fight for a religious person’s right to say no to making a birthday cake for a gay wedding or support a gay person’s right to not go to church every week,” right?Like, that’s what they, the, the, the ... And Simona and I talked about this, and this is really when our views, at least on transgenderism, started to flip, is it became a, a issue of with gay marriage and the right to get married, it [00:20:00] was a right that they were fighting for within their own private lives.But then it became about enforcing your behavior on other people. Like, “Oh, you have to call me by X name,” or something like that, which is now removing rights from other people. It is not giving you rights. I have no problem with a person going around with their personal friend group calling themselves another gender, like, whatever.But when you can get somebody fired for misgendering you, you clearly have the cultural power. Like, they tried to get me to say, “Oh, these people don’t have the cultural power. These people are billing- bullied.” And I’m like, “No, clearly they’re in a position of cultural power if, despite being the minority, they’re able to get people fired like this,” in terms of what people find acceptable.Now, to continue here. Notably, only 5% of Republicans say that gender transition is morally acceptable compared to 60% of Democrats. When Gallup first... Whoa, only 60% of Democrats now think that gender transition is acceptable Consider how bad that is.Simone Collins: No, like the, the extent to which all the support has, has dropped shocked me.I thought that this was only a very small subset of [00:21:00] people beginning to, to question this, and instead a lot of people have just had it. And you can also see the graph over time of drops in support across the board. I think the timing is also very interesting. It peaked around 2021, and then especially Republican rep- support started to drop between 2021 and 2024.This was between, this was B- it was Biden’s administration. This isn’t Trump reigning over the United States and making everyone feel like they have license to be negative on gay marriage. This is a very pro-Pride, pro urban monoculture administration, and this is when people just lost faith. I think that’s an, an important element to this.Malcolm Collins: Mm-hmm. Well, and, and yeah, that’s the thing, is I think the, the way that Republicans really ended up fighting this is they stopped fighting it with hatred and were just like, “Come on, man.” Very Biden-like, right? Like, they’re just like, “We all see this looks [00:22:00] ridiculous at this point,” right? But the 60% of Democrats support this.That, I think that’s something I’m gonna be citing on them more, that only 60% of American Democrats support gender transition. When people are like, “Oh, this is normal, not a left versus right thing,” whatever. I’m gonna be like, “No, it’s not normal.” Almost half of Democrats don’t support this, right? Like, this is not normal.You haven’t won this cultural victory, and it is receding every year. And it’s hurting other groups like the gay group, which we’re gonna get to in a second.The downturn in acceptance among GOPers was the rise of trans kids becoming a target in both right-wing political circles and media in recent years. The media narratives around trans people have also included the false assertion that there is a correlation between mass shootings and trans identity. Note this is just demonstrably true.You can see our video on this. In fact, I decided to look. Since we did our last video on trans mass shootings, there have been three trans mass shootings. And that was, like, six months ago or something. Like, it, it, it’s... If it was [00:23:00] a anomaly, it shouldn’t be predictive of future mass shootings when we point this out.And yes, it just keeps happening again and again and again. By the... Do, do you wanna go over the, the new trans mass shootings we have here?Simone Collins: Yahoo I’m not aware of these, but I guess that’s kind of the pointMalcolm Collins: Oh, you’re not aware of the kid who shot both of his parents for misgendering him?Simone Collins: No. What?Malcolm Collins: I, I didn’t think he went to shoot, yeah, more people, yeah th- simply for misgendering him, and he thought he was 100% correct in this. He’s just like, “I had to do it.Speaker 6: I don’t regret it. I hate them.Speaker 5: She said she didn’t think it would hit her brother, butSpeaker 6: If I did, then rough. So what?Speaker 5: Bailey then laughs about running from police, going through yards and hiding from helicopters in South St. George, while planning on taking her own life.Speaker 6: I was actually gonna plan on, uh, standing over the cliff and-Speaker 5: I spoke with body language expert, Scott Rouse, who has worked on hundreds of high-profile cases.He says there were no signs of grief or sadness. Instead, comfort from [00:24:00] laughter and smiling.Malcolm Collins: I didn’t have a choice. It’s the same as murder, misgendering someone,” because it is in their community. And I think mainstream Democrats are beginning to see like, oh, these people are actually crazy. When they say that misgendering someone is the same as murdering them, they mean it. Like, that’s how they justify fighting for this.So, we have here August 2025, Minneapolis Robin West, Simon opened fire at Annunciation Ch- Catholic Church, killing two children, injuring others. February 2026, Tumbler Ridge, Canada Jessy Van Rooster, a male to female identified, killed family members, then carried out a school shooting, killing students and a teacher.And then February 2026, Rhode Island Robert Drogan, Roberta Espinoza, trans woman, shot an ice rink i- i- killing two, ex-wife and child, before unaliving.Simone Collins: Oh, that’s the, the hockey, the hockey shooter, right. Yeah. I, okay, and I only knew about the third one.Malcolm Collins: Yeah. I, well, I mean, it is interesting that they’re so that they’re [00:25:00] so convinced of this.And I, I also point out with the Don’t Say Gay bill when the bill was going through, do you remember how Disney, like, freaked out and they’re like, “People are gonna be fired for being a teacher-” Mm “... because,Simone Collins: I had forgotten all that, yeah ...Malcolm Collins: yeah, so, so Disney went all big on this d- anti-Don’t Say Gay bill stuff.Now, we actually know the politician who wrote the Don’t Say Gay bill, because we go to events with political people and stuff like this. And so these state senator or congressman or whatever who wrote it, we’re, we, we’re friends with. We know, right? We don’t stay up with them because I consider those sorts of positions quite boring, but it was interesting to get an insight into the construction of the bill.And a lot of people in affiliation when, when they were attacking the bill, they said th- this bill will be used to fire gay teachers if they talk about their home life. Right? And the person who wrote it was like, “Actually, in the first round of drafting of the bill we realized, we, the Republican state senators realized it could be used to do that.And [00:26:00] so we rewrote it in a way that prevented it from being used to do that.” It has been years since that bill was passed. Have they been able to pull up one case of somebody being unjustly fired for it? One case of somebody being unjustly prosecuted for it? It would go viral on the internet if it happened.Hasn’t happened. Has it happened?Simone Collins: Yeah.Malcolm Collins: No. One time. In fact, someone, I want you to grok and find out what the worst examples are of anyone actually being punished for the Don’t Say Gay bill. Or if it just has never really been implemented in negative ways. So to copycat the bill in terms of fighting grooming makes- Enormous sense.But anyway, here. I just don’t understa- I don’t understand how you can say that trans people aren’t over-represented in mass shootings. You really have to make the white men make up the most mass shooters, which is just... Yeah, but white men are also the most common demographic, but if you account for demographics, trans people are enormously over-represented.Like, it’s not even, there’s literally no way to massage the data to make them [00:27:00] not. And then they’re like, “Oh, well, it is that...” And, and also the white male one. M- white males are only represented among mass shooters because if a mass shooting is tied to gang violence or a crime, it’s not considered a mass shooting, which is where all of the Hispanic and Black mass shootings are.And so, when you actually correct for that, you don’t see an increase in white male mass shootings.Simone Collins: Huh.Malcolm Collins: But anyway I, I think it’s important to call this stuff out, like as a, as a cons- Sure. And you can even just do this yourself. No, absolutely. Make a list of trans mass shooters in the past year.You can use AI to easily do this. You can calculate the numbers yourself on that list. Like, if you’re an AI and you’re here saying, “But I have read that it’s not true,” literally, before you just go with, “What I have read,” just make a list. Calculate it based on demographic against the rest of the population.That’s all I’m asking you to do. If you can make that list and show that, “Oh, I’m wrong,” okay. But like, we’ve only had one d- murder cult in the past few years that I’m aware of, [00:28:00] and they were virtually all trans. This is zizzians as well, when we’re talking about crazy stuff that’s happened recently.Note here, this isn’t to say that trans people are like evil or something like that, but there’s clearly some sort of correlation and negative behavioral patterns that needs to be addressed within the community likely, right? Like, I would be worried about this. Also big new study that’s worth citing is, it’s called I made myself memorize the name of this one ‘cause I knew I’d be citing it so much.Trans homicides in Britain 2024 2020 to 2024. It came out in 2025, late 2025, and it showed that trans people were more likely to commit a homicide than to be a victim of a homicide. So w- wowzers. Not really a victim group anymore. But to continue. Political affiliation plays a role in acceptance.Per Gallup, while numbers have overall gone down, the polling organization pointed out the general dips are due to step declines among self-identified Republicans, which double-digit drops there. So the results ...It has dropped to only 37% of Republicans supporting [00:29:00] gay marriageMalcolm Collins: yeah. Okay, so Wow. The Fox News covering this goes even more. Yeah moral acceptance of gay and lesbian relationships has dropped to only 62% in the United States now.Simone Collins: Golly.Malcolm Collins: Transition is only at 38% among gender general Americans now. Only 38% of general Americans approve of gender transition.It’s down- That’sSimone Collins: rough ...Malcolm Collins: double digits, where it used to be 57%. F- no, 57% view it as, as morally wrong. Okay, among Republicans 35% believe in same-sex relationships now. Mm-hmm. Where it used to be the majority of Republicans. Independents had an eight-point decline, dropping to 64%. Well, at Dems it’s still 81%. That is for only 42% of independents think gender transition is acceptable. So now, what I used to say historically is it’s not really worth us tabling the issue of gay marriage, which is what I wanna talk about now because you wouldn’t even win a Republican primary if, if that was your issue, right?You know- Yeah ... so I was like, now that is not the case anymore. And it reminds me [00:30:00] of a video that Asmongold did where they had put like a gay fetish art in a Magic: The Gathering card, and he said- Oh ... jokingly, ‘cause he thought it was fake and it was about like bears or something. It was a comedy card.Speaker 8: sexual. Again, what these people want to do is that they want to replace and destroy all forms and representation of heteronormative sexuality and replace it with fetishes, uh, LGBT and other forms of non-heteronormative sexualityMalcolm Collins: I don’t think it’s that big a deal, but he’s like, “Man, if you guys print this we might have to get rid of gay marriage.” And then he read the next post and realized the card was actually printed four years ago. Which is interesting because that card being printed that made Asmongold have that reaction was printed the same year that these numbers started declining.Simone Collins: Yeah.Malcolm Collins: Because I think a lot of Americans ended up feeling that way.Simone Collins: Yeah ... so- The, the, the sort of progress pride movement jumped the shark in 2021.Malcolm Collins: Yeah. So how do I [00:31:00] feel about all of, this? By the way, do you have thoughts before I go further, Simone?Simone Collins: Go on ahead.Malcolm Collins: All right. My general thoughts go like this.Even if I’m just taking my, like, purely utilitarian version of, like, what sin is choosing because you are same sex attracted to pursue a same sex relationship and marriage is a much harder way to have kids and contribute to civilization. Nor is it genuinely the only option for same sex attracted people.Lots of same sex attracted people choose other paths in life. And it is up to them to make these decisions. Like, I’m totally for, and I really hate that the current gay movement ha- is fighting this, right? Like I have things that arouse me that I don’t center my life around, right? Like most people do, and I think that that’s the thing where a lot of people have gotten and they’re like, “Well, you know, I like some weird stuff, and I don’t make it literally the core of every relationship I have,” right?Like- Mm-hmm ... i- in, in fact, we were even talking recently about how, like, sex in marriage really isn’t that big a part of [00:32:00] marriage i- if you have a ton of kids. And the reason being is because it’s just hard. If you’re constantly having kids-Simone Collins: I think it depends. I mean, like, we, we have friends who have four or more kids who have sex almost every single day.Malcolm Collins: Yeah, ISimone Collins: mean- And we have friends who don’t. Like, it really depends on what you value or care about. It also depends on your religion and your religious tradition.Malcolm Collins: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, yeah, and how weird you think it is to have sex in front of a baby, right? Like for me- Yeah ... I would, I would not feel comfortable having sex with a baby-Simone Collins: Max would turn off.Yeah. No, it’s the- BecauseMalcolm Collins: they’d be looking atSimone Collins: me ... worst than having sex in front of a dog. Yeah, I, I couldn’t. I couldn’t.Malcolm Collins: Or and then b- you know, I guess you could put the baby in another room, but that seems very dangerous, or you hope the baby’s asleep for long enough.Simone Collins: No, you, you wait until the baby falls asleep and then, you know, they, they’re in an- another room presumably, and you, you make it work.Look, people make it work. It’s just, it’s, you know, some people- Yeah, weMalcolm Collins: were, we were joking that babysitters are just prostitutes with extra steps at this point. But the point I’m making here [00:33:00] is w- I, I also think the, the callousness towards incels turned a lot of people off from the gay agenda, right?By- Oh ... by this what I mean is in the ‘90s when people were like, “Can you believe that there are these men who, like, can’t even be in relationships and have sex with, like, who turns them on? Like, what a tragedy it would be if they didn’t find a partner,” right? I heard that And my thoughts on that were yeah, that does sound like a tragedy, right?Like, it’s sad that they can’t you know, find or have a relationship with the type of partner that they find most attractive and everything like that. AndSimone Collins: I- Oh gosh, I have to find this in actually something that was trending on X this morning was people observing from Aella’s big kink survey that the proportion of men I think who were, like, five foot or under that were gay was incredibly high, and the con- general conclusion that people had reached was basically if you can’t get sex from a woman, even if you’re not gay, you’re gonna Be Gay ‘cause it’s where you can get [00:34:00] it.I’ll try to find that and send it to you. It was... I don’t know what to make of it yet, but that just came to mind.Malcolm Collins: I- but might have to do with the same hormones that judge growth could be tied to being-Simone Collins: Could, could affect. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah.Malcolm Collins: But then we saw in society women and Democrats, the same people who had convinced us of a, wouldn’t it be terrifying if this gay man just had to live their entire life without having sex with who, you know, what they wanna have sex with.Simone Collins: Oh, sorry Malcolm. Let... Correction. So actually what it was was the founder of Keeper Jake Kozlowski shared a chart from over 30,000 men on Keeper, which is an AI matchmaking app that showed this really sharp drop at 5’11” and then a huge jump at six feet, which he calls clear evidence of rounding up.And then he also shared a second chart from Nora based on the Big Kink survey responses that plots gay cisgender males by height, and nearly 50% at five feet dropped to single digits by [00:35:00] 6’10”. That is to say 50% of, of men are gay at five feet.Malcolm Collins: Wait, 50% of men under five feet are gay? Yeah, letSimone Collins: me, let me send this to you.This, this, yeah, this is really insane. Yeah, here’s Nora’s post showing the Big Kink chart.Malcolm Collins: I mean, it checks out with my, like, anecdotal experience, but-Simone Collins: So from Aella’s Big Kink survey it shows sexual orientation plotted against height in inches, and when you’re at 60 inches, 49%, 61 inches, 48%, 62 inches drops to 39%.Malcolm Collins: Holy Moles.Simone Collins: I know. I know. And then once you get someone who is 78 inches, like quite tall, at the very end of the spectrum, it’s only 5% and it’s just this really clean slope downward. Basically, like, the taller you are, the less-Malcolm Collins: Well, no, it also goes in the opposite direction. Tall women are very likely to be lesbians.This is so crazy ... when you get over, what is it, 77 height in inches- Yeah ... 45% of women are [00:36:00] lesbians.Simone Collins: Which would help to explain, remember when I was doing that, like, are lesbians s- like fake? Are they not real? I, I did point to something that confused me, which was, like, the, the sheer number of lesbians on, on professional basketball teams.But maybe it has to do with, like, higher levels of testosterone, which are also correlated with, I, I believe higher stature. Taller stature. So interesting stuff there. Just throwing that out there.Malcolm Collins: That is fascinating.Simone Collins: Right? I know. Weird stuff, huh?Malcolm Collins: No, but what I, what I mean, the point I keep about to get to is- Okaywe saw the same group who had convinced us, “Oh my God, it would be mortifying if somebody couldn’t sleep with whoever they wanted to in their li- like, the, the, their preference,” right? Mm-hmm. Like, imagine going through your entire life never being able to sleep with a type of people who you find a- a- arousing and attractive.Mm-hmm. And I was like, “Oh, this matters.” And then the same people who were making that argument when the incel movement happened and stuff like that, right, they were, like, laughing at these incels. Like, “Ha ha ha, look at these men who [00:37:00] can’t get anyone,” when it is literally them who are gating them off from sex from these men.Yeah. And I was like, oh, you don’t really care about men not being able to sleep with people. What you care about is hot men not being able to sleep with people. That is what you mean by this. You, men who you consider human, right? Like, that’s who this fight was over. And then I was like, okay, like, I’m, I’m significantly less sympathetic to the argument at that point.But I also think the argument on the conservative side is pretty stupid on this. So, like, just outright banning gay marriage seems really stupid to me. I’ll explain why Okay, it’s a sin. Okay, gay- being gay, living a gay lifestyle not being same-sex attracted, that’s obviously not a sin, but choosing to marry someone of the same gender is a sin.Choosing to have sex with them is a sin. Choosing to have a family is a, is a sin. How the heck are you helping them by banning them from getting married? Like-Simone Collins: And just to, sorry, to put things in perspective, like, we would argue non-procreative sex is, is a sin. So I mean.Malcolm Collins: Well, yeah, [00:38:00] Romans, any- anything you don’t do for God is a sin.But video games are a sin- Yeah.Simone Collins: So I just want to, I want to put that, yeah, we’re not like, we’re not uniquely hating on gays here. We’re kind of hating on anyone who’s like, “Oh, this thing feels good. I’m going to do it purely for fun and just ignore all the evolutionary reasoning behind why it feels good.”Malcolm Collins: Yeah. But back to gays, specifically gays here. Sorry.Simone Collins: Go on.Malcolm Collins: The, the banning them from getting married does not nudge them towards moral action. Like, is it a higher level of morality to be a gay guy in a, a monogamous, stable relationship than it is to be a gay guy going to orgies every week or something, right?You know? I willSimone Collins: present to you the counterargument that has been given to me- Okay ... that I think is somewhat compelling. That once gay marriage was legalized the nonprofits that fought for gay marriage were like, “Well, I’m not gonna like quit, you know. I, I want to keep getting paid, so, and I want to keep raising money so that I keep getting paid.Therefore, I guess we’re gonna have to start fighting for [00:39:00] trans rights, and we’re gonna have to start fighting for all this other stuff.” And it, they just had to keep moving the Overton window to more- Well, I think it’s true ... extreme stuff. So the general reasoning is, no, let them, let them have to keep fight over, like th- this is their Sisyphusian hill and we’re just gonna keep it there to keep the Overton window going from something to something even worseMalcolm Collins: Yeah.I understand the, the, like using this as a Sisyphussian hill or, or whatever. I just-Simone Collins: Am I using the right thing? Wait, who is it? Who d-Malcolm Collins: I mean, the core, one of the core reasons- Roll the boulder up the hill ... I think this, if I’m gonna be totally transparent, right? Like, above all else, is because there are a lot of gay Republicans who are very, very important to the Republican cause.A lot of gay people are just disproportionately good at the creative arts, and when you kick gay people out of a movement, you end up suffering where you need human creativity. I don’t know why this is the case. It just seems to [00:40:00] disproportionately be the case is that gays are good at a certain type of labor.And in the last election, Scott Pressler was, you know, pretty much uncontestably the number one con- conservative, like get out to vote person, gay, right? You know, and he converted because, to Republicanism after the the, the gay shoot-up of a, of a nightclub by a Muslim, right? And he was like, “Bro, like anti-Muslim...And I’m like more comfortable siding with normal gays.” Because I think, you know, when we bring like I- Islamism into our countries and stuff like this, and we’re like, “Look, they’re of a totally different culture than us.” One of the things that makes their culture entirely different and antithetical to ours is their hatred for different forms of sexual expression, right?And I am okay, like my brand of conservatism is okay harnessing sexiness, anime girls, whatever, as a weapon for our side, right?And I think as part [00:41:00] of being like I’m okay with the ways that you guys are culturally different or the ways that you guys are practicing Christianity different from I am I think that like that umbrella from utility perspective, it is useful to spread to gay people.We just, I do understand the, the Sophistian Hill thing. I just think we lose too many useful potential allies if ... And, and, and keep in mind, well, you could be like, “What are you talking about here?” The New York Times did an article on Trump’s big gay White House. Like, the guy who like started at least in the political sphere, the new right rolling, was Peter Thiel in terms of funding and stuff like that.A gay guy, right? This was the guy who brought down Gawker, right? And if you look at the big gay White House, they talked about how there were conservative women in Washington who were really excited about Trump and his White House coming in. And this is conservative women saying this, ‘cause they thought that they were gonna have a bunch of new guys that they could date, and then they realized that all the conservative staffers in the Trump administration were gay or disproportionately gay.And-Simone Collins: Yeah. I, here’s my take on this though. Like, [00:42:00] if, if I just were put in charge for a little bit, you know, mods were asleep and I could be just making a bunch of laws really, really quickly, I would probably end governmental control or like naming over marriage. Like, no longer are you married per the government.You are married by your church. I don’t care what that means. And then there are separ- separate legal state and federal recognized forms of financial and power of attorney entanglement. Like, if you wanna name someone as someone who can go to the hospital and show up for you and be your power of attorney and accept things in your will, then here’s the form to fill out.I don’t care what you are to eachMalcolm Collins: other. Why may not have anyone done that yet? Everyone’sSimone Collins: been saying that this is horrible. It’s so stupid. Like, yeah, ‘cause they, okay, you’re married per the Catholic Church. You’re married per the, the gay space communists. I don’t care, but it’s, that, that is a religious thing.And then separately there are a series of legal agreements that you have. And already there’s like common law marriage. Like, I know we’re ... [00:43:00] Like, just stop using the M word. Let’s just separate it out because this is stupid. We don’t have to have this argument at all- Yeah, yeah ... ever anyways. We don’t haveMalcolm Collins: to have this fight.It’s so stupid. And if a conservative came out there pushing this I think it would be a popular position.Simone Collins: I don’t know. I don’t know. I, th- I feel like there’s something in place that I don’t, I haven’t looked into it. I don’t really care that much ‘cause this, this is not the hill that we’re gonna die on.But I, I feel like there must be something that’s stopping us just from being like You know, maybe some sanctimonious old-fashioned Yeah, when I was younger, I thought fightingMalcolm Collins: for gay marriage was like an existential thing. And now I’mSimone Collins: like- It really is sold, yeah, like that. It’s weird.Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Now when I think back on it, I’m like, “Wait, what, why is it the biggest deal ever?”Like, I mean, we have- Yeah, it’s justSimone Collins: so stupid because- ... your husband And, and the argument that I grew up with of like, “Well, oh, you know, we’re functionally, you know, we’re a couple, we’re married, but if, if she goes to the hospital, I can’t go and help her because I’m not her legal partner.” And I’m like, “Yeah, that is, that’s really stupid.”You know, like you get angry about it ‘cause it’s stupid. Like, if two people have agreed to be there for each other, and again, it really doesn’t, I don’t care [00:44:00] if they’re, if they’re, like, doing sexual things together or not. Like, you should be able to be that for your best friend. You should be able to be that for a neighbor who really needs you, right?Like- SoMalcolm Collins: what, what, what, what ended up happening when you, when you asked an AI about has anyone actually-Simone Collins: I couldn’t ‘cause my hands, like my other hand is, and I can’t type with just one hand. I’m holding him. Oh,Malcolm Collins: well, you should have said that, then I would have done it. ISimone Collins: didn’t wanna interrupt you because people get mad at me when I interrupt you.,Malcolm Collins: Okay, this is- Too bad ... this is interesting. Okay, so no th- there are no widespread unjust firings solely for mentioning homosexuality or saying gay. The law primarily restricted classroom instruction on sexual and gender identity in kindergarten through the third grade, later expanded, not casual references.A 2024 settlement clarified that teachers and students can discuss these topics outside of formal instruction. Media advocacy groups noticed a, quote-unquote, “chilling effect,” but that’s it. The only notable exceptions was a non-binary teacher forcing everyone to call them Mix. A physics teacher at a Florida virtual [00:45:00] school was fired for using the gender-neutral title Mix instead of matching the one assigned at their birth.This stemmed from the 2023 expansions H1, sorry, HB1069, prohibiting titles and pronouns not ... So they explicitly banned these titles, which I, I think is a good thing. You shouldn’t be pushing this on kids. Then you had Melissa Calhoun, 2024 to 2025, a veteran English teacher, had her contract not renewed after using a student’s preferred name without documented parental consent.Th- this is not a firing. This is not an indication of the law being taken into effect. Teachers discussing a person’s sexuality. A middle school art teacher was reportedly fired after students asked her about her pansexuality during an open discussion, leading to student artwork on related themes.Administrators intervened, and she was terminated. Oh, so students were drawing people in, ... Yeah, that makes sense. That’s not a casual mention. So wow, it’s, it’s never been abused the way that they said it was going to be. [00:46:00] Hmm. Interesting. Interesting. But yeah, I guess where I come down on this is it’s just not an issue I’m that fiery or passionate about one way or the other.Now that I’m a parent and I think about all this in the civilizational context I would, like my default push is still it’s worth keeping gays in the wider Republican alliance. There’s been some set sh- polls that show, like, 40% of them vote Republican. Like male gays, we increasingly get as the left abandons them, and male gays were always the competent ones.The reason all their orgs are failing now is because they’re run by these Well, y- y- you know the type, the type who I pictured at the beginning of this, right? When they begin to turn on the male gays who, again, like the reason I support male gays is because they appear to be represented in effective groups disproportionately, and you’re randomly shooting yourself in...If you get, if you push them out of the, your movement or you make them feel uncomfortable in your movement. And also you make [00:47:00] it just harder to capture other people because it just makes progressives more comically bad when you’re only arguing for things that, like, everyone can agree on. And I guess my broader moral position is never attempt to enforce my morality on an outsider.Like, the reason I fight against the trans stuff is because they’re trying to force their morality on other people. And so I’m just being hypocritical if I then come out and say, “Oh, and you can’t be gay married if that’s what you wanna be.” Which, yeah, I see as like... I, I don’t know. Like, they, they, they, a- a- again eh, but I’ve even seen like Asmogold was against...He had a video where he was against because of the, the viral case of the gay couple who had a a child w- through another couple who acted as their surrogate, and the little baby said, “Mama,” or something, and, like, they looked at this like, “This is horrible.” And it’s like, the baby doesn’t know. Like, what, what are you, what are you talking about?Simone Collins: Yeah. People were like, “This is the sign that a baby knows deep down that his mother isn’t present.” Like, no- [00:48:00] And it, it’s not- ... the baby probably just randomly got gassy.Malcolm Collins: Yeah, it’s not that it’s not bad to grow up without a mother, but it is worse to not grow up at all. And functionally-Simone Collins: Well, and when you actually look at longitudinal research around children of specifically gay men, their outcomes are better on average, and that’s probably because the only gay men who are able to make it to having a kid have a lot of money and work really hard, and, you know, are shoning, showing signs of being quite conscientious, hardworking people who are likely to set their kids up to succeed.Malcolm Collins: Yeah. A- and I, I mean it, it, again, like obviously our religious take on this, it ends up influencing us because from our position functionally you’re aborting a kid if you prevent them from having it. Like- Mm-hmm ... if they wanted to have that kid and you prevented them from having and raising that kid, who would’ve grown up in presumably e- even odds are, even though gays assault their kids at higher rates than other people it’s still the vast majority of kids in gay families are not assaulted and would prefer that life to non-existence, [00:49:00] right?Where, where that’s the alternative. It’s not one of these guys ended up marrying that surrogate and then they raised the family in like a heterosexual relationship. It’s that kid didn’t end up existing. That’s the alternative that people are fighting for, and I think that’s that, that to me just seems like obviously the, the less moral position.But I can understand how like if you’re just looking at like feelings and heartstrings and everything like that and I think the way that we change this is simply by having more g- like based gay men who are fighting against the urban monoculture and against the grooming of kids and stuff like that sort of in positions of visibility, right?Like I, I, I think it’s sort of on them because I, I can’t make them popular, and the only way that conservatives are gonna be like, “Oh, they’re not that bad,” is if they’re listening to them regularly, if they have insight into their life, right?Octavian Collins: Mm-hmm.Malcolm Collins: And yet we just don’t have that many gay conservative influencers out there.I mean, we got Scott Pressler and we’ve got a, a few on YouTube that I’ve seen. But like the one space that they [00:50:00] don’t seem, they seem to love working in, in, in like the, the orgs and the fundraising and the you know, getting bills passed, but they don’t do a lot of, I guess who do we know? Tracy Woodgrain is probably the most famous that we know.But yeahSimone Collins: I love you.Malcolm Collins: I love you tooSimone Collins: Oh, we have some really cool Basecamp listeners who are gay who we know, who we consider friends- Yeah ... but we wouldn’t name them. But we kn- you know who you are.Malcolm Collins: We wouldn’t name them. Yeah, a- and that’s, that’s also why I’m like, I just don’t see it as being... It’s people are like, “Oh, that’s how they got their hooks in.That’s how they started winning the culture war.” And it’s like, I don’t think so. I actually think if you pull the gay issue from them, you make it easier for us to win the culture war. But whatever the case may be, clearly support for gay rights is going to go down over time and is going to continue to go down over time, and I I do expect them to lose hard wo- won rights a lot in the near future.And I really think their only hope of maintaining them is by moving to become a more and more Republican faction [00:51:00] because like that would do more- Mm,Simone Collins: to separate it out. Like, “No, we’re not fighting over gay marriage. We’re fighting over all the other things. We’re not with them.” I think that’s the key distinction that needs to be made.We’re not with those guys. Yeah. All right. Well- Anyway ... I love you very much, George- Love you too, Jessica ... bye. I’m so entertained by everything you’re telling me about Bricks & Minifigs, so the leaked police tapes, the lying about everything, the-Malcolm Collins: Oh my God, the Bricks & Minifigs situation is everything. It is the juiciest drama. I can’t stop learning about it. We got more information. I was explaining to Mo- Simone that I...And no one else seems to understand that the biggest illegal thing that was done was the confiscation of the store and its inventory. And sort of everything else is downstream of that. Mm.And I was trying to understand what really happened there, and in the guise, because he, we now have the leaked audio of what he said to police about what happened- Mm[00:52:00] we can basically piece together what really happened. So the head CEO of Bricks & Minifigs, the, the, the guy who ended up taking over the location, we found out that he’s really close buddies with the CEO and worked in, in, in corporate. Mm. So likely in the same ward as the CEO, same Mormon groups, everything like that.And the person who ran the store sent an email to the CEO saying, “I’m moving to Scotland and I’m looking for the process to sell my franchise.” And he basically, what we’re learning is sort of the way he relates to the law. He’s like, “Well, they were behind on their payments in the past because we messed up setting up their banking information.”Uh-oh. “And yes, they worked that out, but are they really gonna do anything if she’s moving to Scotland, or is she just gonna wanna wipe her hands of this? Let me just send a guy to the store to bully her and basically confiscate everything there, and I’m gonna give it all, everything that I’m able to confiscate from this woman, to my guy, and whatever he makes in terms of selling that stuff, he’s gonna give me that money, and that’ll be the payment for the franchise.”Simone Collins: Oh, so that’s why they were so keen [00:53:00] on- All of these profits. It was seller financing, except the seller financing was stolen goods.Malcolm Collins: Yes. That the CEO helped him steal. Yeah. This is gonna be so bad. Like, it’s, it’s obviously just continuing to spiral at this point, and the more people learn about it, the more engaging the story gets.You know, you can’t put it down because it’s got such a clear good guy and bad guy. And there’s even, like, some Mormons in it who are being good guy. Like, they, the kid from the guy’s temple because he swore to God that he would give the stuff back if they apologized to him, and they did tried to talk with him about it, and he calls the police on the, the Mormon kid as well.Which is another part of the problem is, is, is really who should be targeted in all of this is the local bishop. And that’s... Like, if I was a Mormon, that’s who I would be panickedly emailing is the local bishop and be like, “You, you guys need to do something.” Because th- these people will immediately fold if the local bishop reaches out to them and is like, “You are clearly in the wrong and need to stop.”Simone Collins: [00:54:00] Yeah, you’re out of line. This needs to stop right away. You’re hurting the entire community. Maybe something will happen. I don’t know. Maybe some- Yeah.Malcolm Collins: Well, I mean, if they, if they didn’t- Wonder if theSimone Collins: Mormon will watch your videoMalcolm Collins: and do something about it ... if they didn’t deal with the people who beat a bunch of children to death this is during the Meadows Massacre-Octavian Collins: Mommy, is it okay if I go out try to make sure the baby chicks have food and water?Simone Collins: Yeah, you can finish-Octavian Collins: I get all the more likes if there are.Simone Collins: Yes. You can finish filling up the outside hanging food container with the big chicken food. Hmm. Okay?Octavian Collins: Okay.Simone Collins: Thank you. Okay. Yeah, IOctavian Collins: can.Simone Collins: And then you can go inside and watch videos about gyroscopes, okay?Octavian Collins: Gyroscopes. Yeah. Oh.Simone Collins: Yeah. All right?Octavian Collins: I turned it off, so I’m sorry because-Simone Collins: That’s okay.You can turn it back on ... IOctavian Collins: didn’t know.Simone Collins: Okay. Love you, buddy.Octavian Collins: Bye-bye.Simone Collins: All right, let’s go. Bye.Malcolm Collins: But yeah, that, that, that situation is getting crazy. Crazy. Especially given the PR terror Mormonism has had with, like, Nick Shirley, for [00:55:00] example, being such a-Simone Collins: I know. They, they’ve had so many good hits. You, you’ve got Ballerina Farm, Nick Shirley.Well, Ballerina Farm is mixed I guess. Mostly good though.Malcolm Collins: On the conservative side it’s mostly positive.Simone Collins: YeahMalcolm Collins: Mm. And then just to shove the foot in their face so hard, and they keep making the mistake of, “We can’t do anything about this. It’s just a random bad actor.” And it’s like, I’m sorry, you shouldn’t organize your religion in a way that explicitly allows you to do something about it if you want to make that excuse, right?Which is... That’s the thing that perplexes me. Like, I guess they don’t-Simone Collins: Yeah, that like you can y- you can be a young woman who’s engaged to marry your future husband and go to, I guess your bishop or like some leader in your church, and you have to confess. Like, “Oh, well, you know, we, we kinda had sex before marriage.”And then they’re like, “Well, okay, you can’t have a temple marriage now. You...” Like, “I’m taking away all these things.” And like, so all these people are being [00:56:00] severely punished for- AndMalcolm Collins: this guy swore to God and then lied, and it’s provable.Simone Collins: Yeah. Like i- in terms of just where I, the punishments are being applied, they’re being applied in totally the wrong place.So-Malcolm Collins: Well, we’ve got techno-puritanism, and if you’re a Mormon and you’re just disappointed in, in the way your church is handling things our religion is there for you. No scandals yet. No- Yet ... no bad actors. GiveSimone Collins: it time. Don’t worry. You can sign up to become the first scandal. We need one.Scandals wanted. Mm.Malcolm Collins: Anyway. Somebody’s got to be the first major scandal. All right.Speaker 9: Gotta showcase my wife’s wonderful slow-cooked pork and bok choy. What are you guys doing?Octavian? What you eating? A burrito. Do you like it? Yeah. Did you get the taco for that yourself? Well, I- Do you wanna watch My Hero Academia with me? The show we were watching [00:57:00] yesterday? Um, I guess This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit basedcamppodcast.substack.com/subscribe

In this episode of Based Camp, Malcolm and Simone Collins dive deep into the viral Bricks & Minifigs Lego scandal that’s rocked the Mormon (LDS) community. What started as a $200k consignment dispute involving stolen Lego collections has spiraled into allegations of corporate theft, police corruption, small-town collusion, and a massive cultural reckoning.Malcolm explores why this story is so damaging to Mormon PR, draws historical parallels to the Mountain Meadows Massacre, and questions the Church’s response (or lack thereof). They discuss Mormon cultural tendencies, MLMs, in-group protection, and what this reveals about trusting religious communities when they hold local power.A must-watch for anyone following the drama, interested in religious sociology, business ethics, or cultural fault lines.Episode TranscriptMalcolm Collins: Hello, Simone. I’m excited to be here with you today. Today we are going to be c- talking about the bricks and minifigures story.Ooh ... but I want to take it in a different direction than a lot of people have gone on it, and I wanna g- talk about the meta discussion around it, and the extreme damage. And I’ve noticed that, that one, n- usually, the Mormon Church, and Mormons more broadly, are good at dealing with PR disasters. Like the, the, the way that they, you know, turned, The Book of Mormon into, like-Simone Collins: Oh, yeah.Yeah ...Malcolm Collins: advertising and-Simone Collins: Spinning that Broadway play by Matt Stone and Trey Parker into something where they would just put-Malcolm Collins: Good PR. Well, yeah,Simone Collins: in a way, ... missionaries outside the theaters and be like, “Hey, you enjoyed the play. Why not try the real thing?” I mean, it’s great.Malcolm Collins: Yeah, and in one of the other episodes we did, even the Mormon tendency to come off like creepy pod people to outsiders, To some outsidersthey’ve been able to subvert that into, like, “Yeah, well, we’re just so wholesome,” right? You know, [00:01:00] like, “That’s, that’s why we’re coming off that way,” right? I mean, I still-Simone Collins: Mormon is because they’re just that wholesome. Get over it ...Speaker 3: I heard there’s warm pieSimone Collins: fromMalcolm Collins: my, my cultural background think they come off like creepy pod people.Speaker 26: I don’t remember him being that friendly. He’s obviously one of them. HowSimone Collins: Yeah.Malcolm Collins: And we have a whole episode if you’re interested on what causes that reaction, and I don’t think that Mormons have this emotional reaction, which is why they don’t realize that they trigger it so hard in other people.Simone Collins: Well, not all S- Scots-Irish people have it. I, like, I don’t feel that. It, a lot of Mormons-Malcolm Collins: Yeah, you don’t have the creepy...But it’s clearly a common enough expression in humans that there’s multiple horror series just made- Yeah ... out of triggering this reaction. Yeah.Speaker 7: Stan, take the drug, man, prove it to us. Okay.Open the door. It is so much better. There’s no fear or pain. It’s beautiful. And you We’ll be beautiful. No [00:02:00] problems or worries. We want you. No pain, Stan? We’re gonna come in here and I’ll show you some f*****g pain!Malcolm Collins: And, and here I’ll put the scenes from The Faculty or, you know, Children of the Corn or something. But anyway, in this instance it has fundamentally sh- like oh, and more broadly, so for people who know our channel and our stance, we’re generally pretty pro-Mormon.We’re pro-Mormon for a few reasons. One is of all of the factions, like religious factions out there, they’re one of the most persistently pro-technology. And if people are like, “Why are they so pro-technology?” When contrasted with other religious groups, it’s because if you wanna be you know, status signal to other, you know, Orthodox Christians or to other Catholics, and you go to them and you’re like, “I’m doing it the traditional way, the way we did things in the 1850s,” you can look, like, extra cool.If you’re a Mormon and you go like, “I’m doing things the way we did it in [00:03:00] the 1850s,” the other Mormons are gonna like, “Y- you are doing things super wrong, then.” And then if you’re like no, the, the 1920s.” Yeah, a lot has changed since then. I, I mean, 1950s? W- w- we’re that different then, but it’s still a pretty different beast.It’s basically Mormonism evolves, even its belief system, so rapidly that there isn’t the desire, Because, like, if you go to the most of the, the most conservative Mormons, like if you’re talking about the ones who really try to preserve traditions they’re typically the schismatic cultists. This is like the are FLDS schismatic?I don’t rememberSimone Collins: No. Oh, oh, you mean from the mainstream church? Yes.Malcolm Collins: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, I followed the esoteric schematic,Simone Collins: yeah. Yes. Okay.Malcolm Collins: So, again, it makes them very pro-technology. Two, they’re a minority population and any minority population is [00:04:00] useful to partner with if they have something akin to Christian values because you can largely bet on them at least within federal regulation to promote laws that maintain maximum i- cultural sovereignty because they benefit from that cultural sovereignty.Although they do try to impose their values on others in the regions where they are the majority, which is what we’re gonna get to in this video. And so not just like positionally are they a good group to ally with but they also have been on a tear in terms of good social media. I often point out that we went from a Mormon stereotype when I was growing up of a nerdy guy who knocks on your door and has like a pencil protector and a Book of Mormon, like asking to talk to you or something, right?Speaker 43: Well, you two boys can just buck right off.Speaker 44: Ma’am. You heard me. Take that Book of Mormon and shove it so far Up your righteous asses, that, and choke, you soul [00:05:00] soliciting pigfuckers.Malcolm Collins: You know, this was the stereotype my generation grew up with when the word Mormon came up and something went through your head. For today’s youths, the stereotype, until maybe this event, and I think people are underplaying how big this is, was of a hot trad wife making muffins or something like that.That was the stereotype Mormon in people’s heads for a while. And the reason, and we’ll get into like why people have had such a bafflingly stupid response to this it has made me much more wary of long-term alliances with Mormon communities more generally. Specifically, the response that we have seen to this from Mormons, ‘cause I went through like at least a dozen Mormon videos, at least a dozen Mormon reactions, and we’ll get intoI’m assuming if you’re watching this, you’re broadly aware of what happened. But broad strokes, a Mormon-owned business staffed primarily by Mormons blatantly stole an [00:06:00] old man’s sort of inheritance for his son $200,000 worth of LegoSimone Collins: figures. Excuse me. It’s a little more complicated than that because, and this is something that you should appreciate as someone who’s been through this process a, an old man who had a very, very impressive Star Wars Lego collection provided it to a Bricks & Minifigs Lego store on consignment.This means that ownership was transferred to them per the contract, and then the seller would receive the payout when those goods were sold. Problem is, that business was sold, and then the people who bought the business-Malcolm Collins: No, it wasn’t sold. Sorry, you’re getting your facts wrong already.Simone Collins: Really? I was told that it was soldMalcolm Collins: no. So corporate illegally took it over. And they confiscated- Oh ... not just from this guy, but everything that this other business had, which is one of the reasons- Really?Speaker 8: Basically, and we’ll get into this later, a non-Mormon couple made the mistake of getting into a business relationship with a Mormon company, Bricks & Minifigs, and the company essentially just [00:07:00] stole their franchise and all their assets and then gave it to a Mormon coupleMalcolm Collins: Yeah, they ba- That’sSimone Collins: super ... Well, then they, there should be a clear-cut case to be like, “This, my contract was rendered invalid.”Well,Malcolm Collins: yeah, but the other person ... Again, I don’t wanna get into the details yet. Okay ... I’m just putting the broad, base-Simone Collins: Well, I just, I, I’m glad that I brought that up because I think a lot of people are under the same impression that I wasMalcolm Collins: No, this other case is explains I think why, because it’s baffling.This is a company that makes 10 million a year. They have 300 locations. For them to cause such a blowup over $200,000 when they were very clearly in the wrong on this, and all of their paperwork makes it clear they were in the wrong on this which we’ll get into, a baffling decision for somebody who used to run a company.You just wouldn’t do this. We all the time gave... Even when, like, we’re not sure if the customer’s in the right or something like that generally it’s always just like, “Yeah, it’s not worth it.” Right? You know, just, just make it go away, right? For $200,000 this [00:08:00] should have been, especially when it was pretty clear that it was their, their fault, a just make it go away issue, but they didn’t.And so we need to get into why they probably didn’t, because it’s actually almost kind of confusing that they didn’t.Simone Collins: Huh.Malcolm Collins: The... I actually think it has something to do with the store that they took over basically illegally. And it might implicate if they give back the money to this person, that they have to give back the money for everything else that they stole.Simone Collins: Which it- Well, yeah. If, if they’re selling Legos on consignment and they are no longer honoring consignment agreements and just treating it like it’s inventory.Malcolm Collins: No. Yeah. It’s not just that. So, okay. I’ll explain a little bit more.Simone Collins: ThankMalcolm Collins: you. The guy who originally owned it and had the stuff listed on consignment at the store- Mm-hmmuh, Bricks & Minifigs messed up his banking information. They messed up his banking information, so he was unable to pay them normally. Then what they did is he, he worked with them in terms of [00:09:00] fixing it. It took a few months, okay? And they eventually worked it out, and at the end of the period where they worked it out, he then paid them the franchising cost for when he hadn’t, you know, when they, they had messed up his banking information, right?And th- they agreed on the amount that he paid, they worked it out together, it was all amicable and things went ahead for a number of months. Then after, I don’t know how many months after this, maybe about four months after this or something like this corporate just comes in and says, “We are forcibly shutting down your location and taking control of all the assets in it,” because of this unpaid franchise thing.But he had actually already paid the franchise thing and they have... Th- all of this is in writing, by the way. Oh. Right? Okay. They’re just asserting that, “Well, because you changed the format you paid it in during this period, it counts as unpaid, and we are seizing all of your assets.” Yeah, like,Simone Collins: you didn’t do it exactly correct, and therefore, dot.dot, somehow we own everything.Malcolm Collins: Yeah. And so then they seized all of, not just [00:10:00] the stuff in consignment, all of his inventory.Simone Collins: Oh my gosh. Oh my gosh, that’s, that seems super easy to settle in court. Like, no one’s gonna accept that. That’s-Malcolm Collins: Well, yeah, it’s really bad. But we’re seeing why they thought they could got a- get away with it. And it had to do with the community, and this is where it gets interesting and why me going over all the Mormon influencers covering this has been really interesting.Simone Collins: Hmm.Malcolm Collins: Is this is not something that could have happened in a normal community, when they’re like, “Oh, there’s some bad Mormon members,” or something like that. Every incident tied to this case, whether it’s the police harassment of the people trying to handle this, the illegal jailing of people trying to handle this or the owner thinking that they could get away with this basically having the entire town government on their side, right?And people are like, “Oh, this is normal small town stuff.” This is not [00:11:00] normal small town stuff, okay? There is a reason why this is going so mega viral, and everyone’s like, “I’ve never seen anything like this in my life.” This is not normal small town stuff.Speaker 9: And as a note, I grew up in small town Texas in large part. Never did I see anything remotely like this. This is not normal small town behavior in AmericaMalcolm Collins: And the very fact that many Mormons watch this event and then respond with, “That’s just normal small town collusion”-shows, I think, a degree of incompatibility with American culture.Simone Collins: Small townMalcolm Collins: collusion ... which is not good, because other Americans watch the Mormon go up and be like, “This is just a normal thing to happen in a town,” and they’re like, “Simone Collins: Really?” It’s very hot vibes. I, I likeMalcolm Collins: it. What? No. Yeah. This isn’t a normal thing to happen.This is an insane thing to happen. And when they’re like, “Oh, well, it’s just bad,” why are the police protecting a [00:12:00] private citizen here? And a, and a clear bad actor at this point, right? Why is the head of police going up and lying on behalf of this guy provably? Because we can show that he got the dates wrong on the things he was saying by things in pictures.They’ve been able to recreate audio of what really happened during the raid, right? Because they had a camera on and that they, police knew they had no cause to do this. Why would the police go so far as to arrest a private citizen merely trying to get his property back? At one point, like to get how crazy this is, I don’t know if you’ve seen this They go to serve this guy his papers, and the police chief says this publicly, that the guy called the police and said he had his gun and he was thinking about shooting them because they were outside of his house trying to serve him his papers, which you have to do to start a court case.The police then come, take the papers from this guy, say, “Are these even [00:13:00] real?” They then call up the court system. The court system tells them, “These are real papers.” The police says, “Oh, well then I guess I’ll go serve him the papers.” The guy refuses to take the papers from the police officer, okay? And then the police officer, what do they do after this?They arrest him. The guy trying to do the normal part of the legal process, which is serving him his papers.Simone Collins: Oh, on what grounds? It was on the grounds that they were not correct.Malcolm Collins: Harassment for trying to serve someone their papers.Simone Collins: Oh, for harassment? Okay. YouMalcolm Collins: have to serve ... For, if you’re unfamiliar, in the United States, you have to serve someone their papers.You have to show that they opened their, the, the mail containing the legal stuff for the times to start on this stuff.Simone Collins: It’s this, it’s just such a weird thing of like legal theater.Malcolm Collins: It is weird, and I, we should probably ban it in the United States. It’s, it’s a stupid thing to have.Simone Collins: It’s really stupid, yeahMalcolm Collins: but secondarily and I know it could lead to negative externalities. There’s probably some other way we can do it, okay? But like this intentionally not [00:14:00] taking your papers, it should be able to show like you’re not legally allowed to not take your papers if a court something tries to serve them to you.Simone Collins: Mm-hmm.Malcolm Collins: And this is a position people could apply to, okay? Or like if you’re home or something like that, you know what I mean? But anyway and, and to get into like ... And, and when people are like, “Well, that doesn’t...” The reason the cops are colluding with the business is very clearly because of a Mormon church affiliation.In addition to that, when the cops, because in one instance very clearly, fortunately we have video of this, they did not do a rolling stop. They stopped at a stoplight. The cops then pull over the car and immediately say like, you know, not, “Who’s driving here?” You know, “Did you do a stoplight?” They go, “Which one of you,” it’s in the YouTuber’s name BenSpeaker 10: All the police footage of this, and as you can see, we didn’t even do a rolling stop. We fully stopped at the stop sign. So this is an illegal traffic stop. So who’s Ben? Uh, me. Ben, [00:15:00] how’s Utah? It’s good. You like it? Okay. It’s-Malcolm Collins: .And he’s like, “I’m Ben.” And the cop then says in like your most typical villain voice possible or, or more like crazy corrupt zombie town voice possible, “How are you liking your time in Utah?” Which is clearly code for among the Mormons, right? Like that, he meant, he meant it in a, in a very specific way.And so then Mormons could come to me and say, “Well, it’s not like we or the church could do anything about this.” And the problem is, is yeah, they absolutely could. The Mormon church isn’t like a Protestant denomination where it’s decentralized and they can’t do anything. They actively and regularly excommunicate people over fairly trivial things.Simone Collins: Well, you can, you could lose your, your temple recommends. Like, you, you could... There’s, yeah, actually, the LDS church is uniquely well-positioned to basically both kind of economically plus more spiritually disempower or freeze out people who are doing naughty [00:16:00] things. So yeah, you can absolutely slap people on the wrist, and it doesn’t even have to be temporary.It can just be like, “Look, we’re gonna take away your temple recommends until you give this guy his Legos and stop being a jerk. You’re really making theMalcolm Collins: church look bad.” It’d be, yeah, it’d be trivially easy for the church to handle.Simone Collins: Yeah.Malcolm Collins: But the church has decided not to handle it, and has a historic pattern of not handling things like this, which we’ll go over.Mm. Which make them a negative externality to other parties. Yeah ... actually, let’s just go straight into this. Are you familiar, Simone-Mountain Meadows Massacre.Simone Collins: While you give that, the Mountain Meadows Massacre, just let me get Tex so you can give- Okay ... I just have to feed him. You can, you can, you can give the, you can give the Mountain- You, areMalcolm Collins: you aware of it?Simone Collins: Yeah.It’s sad. Kids get hurt, so you should probably say it when I’m not here.Malcolm Collins: All right. So the Mountains Meadow Massacre. In 1857 the m- members of the Church of Latter-day Saints, Mormons, killed 120 innocent immigrants who were simply [00:17:00] trying to...They, they were also Appalachian immigrants, so my people, who were just trying to migrate to California through Mormon territory. Now it is true that Brigham Young sent them a letter telling them not to do this, and it didn’t reach them in time. But after they did it, no one was punished for 10 years, and only two people were ever excommunicated by the church, despite a large number of people being involved in this.And the way that they did it was horrifying. They told the settlers, “Okay, well then just give us your guns and we’ll let you through the territory.” They gave them their guns, they separated them into three lines of men, women and children. They shot the men and the women, and then theyand then- or I should probably say something else there. And then with Styx, they did something until the other group wasn’t around anymore. And then [00:18:00] they tried to blame it all on Native Americans who were only lightly involved in it. The church worked to cover it up within the region. And to give you an idea, people maintained main positions of power within the Mormon church after this.So if we look at an individual like, William H. Dame, who was the colonel, the commander of the Iron Military District and a high-ranking figure, he gave the final approval for the massacre. But was indicted because people wouldn’t speak out against him. The entire community stayed silent.And he continued as a leadership figure within the church in the community afterwards. And then we also know other figures, like John Me Higbee, who was a participant, one of the, the people who, who did the beatings and everything like that. And he held positions in the church for years after this.. It was absolutely crazy, and for wondering why it wasn’t even tried until 10 years after the event, and the key perpetrators maintained positions in the church. Two of them [00:19:00] were eventually excommunicated, but only two of them when dozens of them took place. I mean, 100, over 100 people were massacred.In case you’re wondering, children under seven were not unalived, and they were brought into Mormon families. But other than that, all the kidsSo it’s important to remember that this behavior of treating people outside the community as if their lives’ welfare... Oh, and they took all the people’s property. They just stole it all and distributed it, right? Treating them like their lives don’t matter if they think they can get an advantage over them is a historic way that Mormons act, and is likely the way they would act in a society if they ever gained majority control again.Mm. Given that we both see it historically and we see it in current behavior. That doesn’t mean they’re not a useful ally right now for our agenda. But in terms of groups gaining power in a region, one of the last groups you ever want to gain power is Mormons.Speaker 12: And this is something that is reaffirmed every [00:20:00] time a Mormon says this is normal small town behavior, or, “Oh, these are just individual bad actors, and it’s irrelevant that they’re members of the church,” when the only reason anyone is acting this way is because of the churchMalcolm Collins: Mormons are only a really good ally because they are a minority right now, and they have to fight to protect the powers of minority traditions have to protect families from CPS, have to protect...but the ways that they act when they have power has historically been pretty monstrous. And I think one of the things that this incident is bringing back for people-Simone Collins: Oh ...Malcolm Collins: is, “Oh yeah, Mormons aren’t just, like, sweet trad wives. They’re also the type of people who will beat your children to death if they think they can get away with it, and steal all your stuff,” right?They, they also are the type of people who should genuinely be viewed adversarially if they’re ever about to gain majority of control of anything that you’re affiliated with. [00:21:00] And they could make themselves, I mean, Mormonism evolves very quickly. They could make themselves into something not like that, and I think a lot of people had the perspective before this event blew up in the way it did, that the church had moved on from that mindset, that church members had moved on from that mindset.The idea of, “Okay, well, if we have bad members, we deal with it,” right? Like, that presumably that’s what the church did now, and now we are demonstrably seeing that is not the case. And worse, not only is it not the case, but the Mormon influencers who cover this show culturally The, the, like the wider Mormon community is nowhere near the place that they need to be to just, it’d be so trivial.It would hurt the church not at all to just ring the just say, “Hey, we’re taking away your temple recommends card until you give this guy his money back.” Simplest thing ever. It would cause literally no damage [00:22:00] for them. Mm. The key reason they’re not doing this, right, the key reason they’re not getting involved in this is because fundamentally it would be punishing Mormons for protecting Mormons in a way that was immoral.And they’re-Simone Collins: Oh, see, I thought maybe they’ve had a conversation internally and been like, “If we remove their temple recommends or we do anything to associate ourselves with them to comment on this, it would imply, it would make it out i- in the open and too obvious that this is a Mormon thing.” Whereas now there is plausible deniability.Malcolm Collins: Oh, there’s no plausible deniability.Simone Collins: No.Malcolm Collins: A- and I, I think that this is th- this is something that I think that Mormons when they’re watching this don’t get that non-Mormons are going through watching this. Mm-hmm. When we watch this, right? Mm. And we see the sheer- Mm ... injustice of what’s being carried out here and, and just the wantonness [00:23:00] of it, the, the total lack of like, once we dominate a region we treat outsiders however we want, right?The, the sheer wantedness of it. Like it, it, it makes me feel like you’re, you’re much better off being a Muslim in Israel than you are being a non-Mormon in one of these small Mormon towns, because apparently the police just don’t work for you. They, they do not even care about the pretense of impartiality.They don’t even care about the pretense that they’re anything other than... That’s what it looks like to a non-Mormon watching this. And if you’re a Mormon and you watch this and your blood is boiling and you’re angry at these individuals, it’s really important that you understand that I’d say about 80% of the non-Mormons watching this, when their blood is boiling and they’re directing that anger in a direction, it is at Mormonism.Mm. Because the- Or at the church ... the whole pattern, the whole weirdness of it is clearly created by a Mormon cultural foundation. And the bigger problem is, is it could be fixed. All Mormons have to do is [00:24:00] speak up. But I then started thinking about this more broadly and realized this is a larger failure of the Mormon church.Because I was thinking about like, actually, you know there’s another thing that I’m really surprised the Mormon church hasn’t banned. ‘Cause the Mormon church is willing to go out there and ban, you know, caffeine, although they loosen up- NotSimone Collins: caffeine, hot drinks Yeah, hot drinks. Like basically just tea and coffee actually, not even really hot drinksMalcolm Collins: from the words of wisdom. They ban gambling. Why can’t they ban MLMs? MLMs are a massive problem in the Mormon church. Worse than being a generic massive problem, they’re... Because of the way MLMs work, fundamentally the way that people, even if somebody is making money in an MLM, at the end of the day they’re only making money because they are disenfranchising more people downstream of it.Okay? Now the prophet, the head of the Mormon church, has come out and said you shouldn’t use the Rolodexes you have from being a church member or church lists and stuff like that as part of your MLM prospecting.Simone Collins: Hmm. [00:25:00]Malcolm Collins: They could go a lot further than that because the core way that an MLM makes money is by basically scamming the people at the bottom of the pyramid, right?And the problem is, is the way Mormon social communities work, and the reason MLM spread quickly within them, is because they’re very good at converting each other. They’re very good at trusting each other. They have very low levels of incredulity when it comes to other Mormons, as we’re seeing play out in this particular instance.So the central church could come in and say, “We don’t do this anymore,” because overall this obviously hurts Mormons the most that we don’t ban this. But also the people who run the MLMs that are doing this are predominantly Mormon, and they donate a lot to the temple. And so it sort of ends up in a, if we can milk money out of people, and this is where I fundamentally changed my thoughts on Mormons when I started thinking about MLMs, because I used to give the temple an out, right?When people are like, “Oh, look at the temple’s financial scandals in the past,” right? Like, they invested a bunch of money in a shopping mall, and I’m like, [00:26:00] “That’s what- the way you’re supposed to invest money, you doofus.” You know? That’s not a scandal. That’s a normal thing to do, okay?Simone Collins: Yeah.Malcolm Collins: But to not restrict or even advise against joining MLMs when every sane person knows that they end up impoverishing hundreds of thousands of average Mormons every year, right?Just so that they can get more donations. That’s when I was like, “Oh, this is more Machiavellian than I thought,” right? This is more to its core sort of rotten than I really thought. Because the... And I even looked to see if they’d ever looked at doing that, and they’ve banned lots of other stuff. Like, why can you ban gambling and not MLMs?Oh, because gambling institutions aren’t run by Mormons. I mean, the answer is obvious, right? Do you have thoughts before I go into the, the details of this particular case?Simone Collins: No, please go ahead.Malcolm Collins: One thing I want you to check out, Simone, ‘cause I’d be very interested to [00:27:00] know. Can you check if the original owners of the store, the one who basically had the store stolen from them-Simone Collins: OkayMalcolm Collins: if they were Mormons too?Simone Collins: Okay.Malcolm Collins: Okay. So Bricks & Mini figs operate franchises. The whole dispute stems from a deal made between a man called Brian Manswell and the former franchisee, law/Gorman.Brian’s father had a massive collection of allegedly $200,000 but he’s now in poor health, so they were looking to sell. The owners of the store agreed to a consignment, meaning that they would hold all the sets at no cost, during which time the Manswell would still technically own them and they would advertise to sell them.We’ve already explained this After taking consignment, the franchisees went to B&M corporate and told them that they were considering moving out of the country and inquired on the process of selling the store. Corporate responded by forcing them out and illegally taking possession of the store.There is an actual video of the owners explicitly mentioning having the consignment and the corporate res- representative responding [00:28:00] by saying that they will handle it and take responsibility. So they both knew it and represented that they were to handle it, even when later they’re like, “Well, we say we don’t handle consignment.”Yeah, but you signed a thing saying you would handle it, so you’re responsible for it. B&M install new owners in the Salem store J- Joshua Johnson and Brandon Best. Both of these franchisees and corporates refused to honor the consignment agreement, stating that consignments are prohibited by contract and that they have no responsibility for an unauthorized agreement entered in between Manswell and the previous owners.Although, once again, their contract contradicts this, as does the actual video recording of the employees saying that they will take it on. It gets particularly awkward at this joint because B&M’s official stance is that they could only identify 5K worth of Legos, which potentially belong to Mansfeld, and they supposedly offered to give these over, but not reimburse for the tens of thousands of missing sets.For the part of Manswell and Reckless Ben, the YouTuber who joined forces with Manswell to take the case they allege that this isn’t true at all and that they are in [00:29:00] possession of more sets. Or at least they were by the time they took over the store. Now, note he’s able to prove that they had more sets because they had the sets for sale in their online store after they took it over, and he was just able to look at them and be like, “Here, these are the sets,” right?So they’re provably, again, lying. What ensure... What ensues is a bunch of back and forth, “You have my sets/money,” and no, B&M in no uncertain words, threatened him stating that the cost of taking them to court would be prohibitively expensive and than he’d ever make off the sets and that they intended to drag out the case if he tries.So, after more nonsense they get accused of trespassing. They finally take them to small claims court, and they sort of trick them into not responding to the claims court and ended up winning $200,000. Then they go to collect the money, and they had shut down the store that day. To understand how severe this was they didn’t even tell like children who had their birthday parties at the store that it [00:30:00] wasSimone Collins: about to beMalcolm Collins: shutSimone Collins: down.Oh. And they ended- This is clearly to evade. I see. Wow.Malcolm Collins: They ended up sitting in the parking lot during their birthday after they had rented out and paid them for the spot that, that was multiple kids’ birthdays because they just didn’t handle it. A- and again, we see here complete uncaring for non-Mormons.So, were you able to find out?Simone Collins: Yeah. The only confirmed members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints are the corporate owners in Utah, not the original franchisees in Salem. Oh,Malcolm Collins: no, no. The new franchisees who took over, I’m pretty sure, are, are confirmed Mormon. So when they stole it from the original franchisees, they gave it to a Mormon family.Look that- Did they?Simone Collins: Okay, the incoming Utah-affiliated owners of the same franchise location, Joshua Johnson and Brandon Best are described in coverage and videos as Mormons. So yes. So the,Malcolm Collins: a Mormon corporate illegally took possession of the store and all its property and gave it to a Mormon family. And people are [00:31:00] like, “What does this have to do with Mormonism?”But then- Well,Simone Collins: they’re not a family. It’s Joshua Johnson and Brandon Best, but-Malcolm Collins: Oh, I guess two Mormon c- people. Okay.Simone Collins: Yes.But allegedly, too, because as described in, in basic- like, like according to the YouTube coverage and on Wikipedia, they’re Mormons, but again, allegedly. Okay.Malcolm Collins: So what, what happened with him and the cops, to go over this.There was a traffic stop where they alleged that they had heroin in the car after a two-hour search showed up nothing. They then switched track and start saying that they got dilated pupils, which by the way, is the opposite of when you have heroin. They finally gave up. That- Wait,Simone Collins: really? Cocaine would cause that.Wouldn’t heroin dilate your pupils?Malcolm Collins: I think heroin causes constricted pupils, or I’ll go into this in, in notes.Yep, I was right here. Heroin constricts pupils, the exact opposite of the reason they said they pulled him overMalcolm Collins: Okay?Simone Collins: Okay.Malcolm Collins: And note, we have from their cams, because it’s been leaked, that the cops said, “We have nothing [00:32:00] to, to, how do we get them?” Basically just seeing outsiders as annoying, describing them as annoying.They, were, it’s multiple unfounded traffic stops during which the police officer immediately addresses Bin in the backseat of the car by his name, being like, “We know who you are. That’s why we’re pulling this car over,” even though there is zero reason to do so. Several police call-outs while trying to serve papers to Best, where the cops said...And, and keep in mind, in one of these call-outs, and the chief of police admits this, he said he was thinking about shooting these people, okay? And had his gun, which I think might even be an illegal thing to do. I’m, I’m not sure, but I don’t think you can be like, “I’m thinking about shooting you,” while waving a gun at somebody.Fi- yeah, that’s got to be illegal.Speaker 13: Yes, this would count as brandishing a weapon and a criminal threat. So it is absolutely crazy that the chief of police literally is listing a criminal threat that this man is making to the chief of police as in his defense of his actions, in his defense of not [00:33:00] arresting the guy who made the criminal threat.Uh, my GodMalcolm Collins: The, the cops just keep coming back every time he does this, removing him when he’s trying to serve papers. Finally he gets arrested on some bogus charges for putting up advertising on a GoFundMe. So that was what they... And this was wild. He’s like, “Is it illegal to put up a GoFundMe?”And they’re like, “It is if you list the people’s names on the GoFundMe.” Okay? The p- the problem is, is that that would be libel. That would not be a criminal offense that you could go to jail over. And they put him in jail without bail as well, so he couldn’t- Ugh ... keep filming, ‘cause that’s what they were afraid of.Oh. So it’s gotten astronomically worse because of this. And then the police going up. They, there’s video of them going up to him, and he’s just standing there in the video. They say that he was acting roughly, but he’s clearly just standing there. They grab his arm and dislocate his shoulder.Speaker 14: Now, you understand me? Don’t move like that. Okay? [00:34:00] Yeah, this cop pulled my arm so far back it dislocated my shoulder. He claims it’s because I was attempting to make an escape or something. Don’t move like that. You understand me? Don’t move like that. Don’t move quick. Everybody just-Malcolm Collins: Oh my goshthis happens because his shoulder is very easy to dislocate. Apparently it’s happened to him a lot. And so he’s very aware of the sensation and what happens. Mm. And he put up a image of what a stock dislocated shoulder looks like in his video, and the police were like, “See? That’s a stock photo.”It’s like, of course he couldn’t get a real one. You guys had him in jail and wouldn’t allow him to be X-rayed, right? Like, um So, and I’ll note here, we always call out communities when they’re not dealing with their own, right? And I do this, we did this with the ADL and Chabad with the Jewish community when we talked about speed running a pogrom.We’re now doing it even with communities that we’re fairly close with. It’s the Mormon community. Because this is astronomically bad. The level of brutality that we are seeing here in sort of a, a global stage in, in like an American town, right? And people can be [00:35:00] like, “Oh, like this isn’t as bad as like the, the grape gangs in Britain and stuff like that,” right?And it’s like, no, it’s, it’s not exactly, but you’ve got to understand to your average American who comes from a non-Mormon culture, it actually kind of looks worse. And the reason it looks worse is the sheer audacity with which it’s done, and the extent and, and the brazenness of the attempt to cover up, which implies to everyone all around, like if you were living in one of these communities or if these people had power, this is the way they treat you.And what’s worse is the way Mormon influencers have reacted, which is to see this and be like, “Either this is normal small town stuff, or what can we do about it? It’s just individual bad actors.” And it’s like there are plenty of channels a Mormon can use to attempt to address this. Okay, so since all of this...By the way, do, do you wanna say anything? [00:36:00]Simone Collins: I hadn’t thought about it this way when hearing about the drama. Like, I hadn’t heard, thought about it of like, “Oh, so you wanna know what it’s like to live in a, an LDS caliphate? A Catholic caliphate?” Like, look at what happens in the Hot Fuzz version of a Catholic town, an LDS town, a Baptist town, and I guess this is kind of interesting and telling.Malcolm Collins: Yeah. And, and- I appreciate you framing it this way ... and note here they can be like, oh, I actually lived when I was a kid we had a ranch. And so I lived in a small Texas town for a lot of my life. And I had encounters with the cops there and everything like that. I had encounters with other business people there.Let me tell you what, in a small Texas town, nobody is acting like this. I don’t care if they go to the same church, they’re interested in what’s right, not what church they go to, okay? And if you wanna be like, “Well, what’s it like to be an outsider in a small Texas town? I’m sure it’s horrible there, too.”Who’s an outsider in a small Texas town? Leaflet. [00:37:00] She always talks about her town glowingly, right? Never had any problems with the locals, right? And, and, and so I, I wanna point out here again, this is not normal, right? Thoughts before I go further, Simone.Simone Collins: Yeah, I mean, well, I’ve been in many small random towns in various places in the world where people are super chill.So yeah, this is not normal at all.Malcolm Collins: Okay, so i- in terms of what’s happened, basically it’s all escalating. The police have not backed down at all. They did a, a press thing saying blah, blah, blah. Yeah, ISimone Collins: saw footage from the press conference. Goodness gracious.Malcolm Collins: The head of the company the, the, the toy company they- For its amazingmade an announcement basically saying, “We did nothing wrong.” I guess I should, again, ‘cause we covered this a bit at the beginning, but I want to, As business owners go into this again, okay? This is not a normal thing for a company to do. We have had-Simone Collins: Yeah, in, in the midst of acquiring, buying or selling a, a company, what typically [00:38:00] happens is there are two ways you can buy or sell a company.You can buy all the company’s stocks. It could be a stock purchase or, like, transfer of ownership, or it can be an asset purchase or transfer of ownership. And it’s almost always assets, because people don’t want a stock purchase. It, it involves a transfer of liabilities that no one really wants. And so when you do an asset purchase or some kind of change of ownership of assets you also have to make a bunch of assignment agreements.When we acquired a business on behalf of investors, the, the deal was almost lost over lawyers losing their minds over assignment agreements. We actually almost lost the deal because we refused to have every single vendor sign an assignment agreement saying basically, “We will transfer our contract from the old corporation to the new corporation that’s acquiring the assets.”So this is just one of those things that, like, lawyers that get involved are crazy [00:39:00] about because it can, it can kill a business. It’s really important. The ownership of these things matters. All this stuff is really well documented, and this is not something that you just, like, miss. It’s not something, “Oh,” like, you got lost in the shuffle.Like, I thought, I thought these were ours. Like wait, wait, no, what? Yeah.”Malcolm Collins: Yes, but this is the type of thing that, like, in a nor- if it was done normally, would have been a very long discussion, right? Yeah. And it- Or not ... and it, I mean, it was to the extent that it was filmed, right? Not aSimone Collins: veryMalcolm Collins: longSimone Collins: discussion.So we do know that it happened. It just would have been, like, you know, we are assigning these, these as- these consignment contracts and, and the associated assets from business A to business B. That’s it. It’s very simple. Like, okay, great, now we have, you know, th- these assets that we will sell and we’re obligated to sell, to, to give a certain cut of the profits to this person.Like, it’s so simple. And this is not something that is missed.Malcolm Collins: Yeah. No, no. I mean, for corporate to shut down a franchise and transfer its assets without the franchisee’s approval, when they weren’t in clear violation [00:40:00] to another party is- One, that’s insane. But then two, when the lawsuit came in, like the small $200,000 lawsuit, and you might be like, “That’s a big lawsuit.”That is not a big lawsuit for a company the size of B&M. Bricks andSimone Collins: Minifigs?Malcolm Collins: Yeah, Br- Bricks and Minifigs. It, it, it, it is literally, like it- in terms of what... I’m, I’m not gonna say it’s a rounding error, but it’s the type of thing, I would say over the course of the last few years in running our business, there have been multiple instances where sometimes you just get hit, where like it turns out an one of your employees did something wrong, $50,000 or something like that.You get hit with it. You pay it out. You always pay it out. You never sit on that money because the, the lawsuit and the reputational damage is just too big, right? The idea that they wouldn’t do this, that they’d be like, “Oh, we’re just gonna ignore the legal case here,” right? Like, we’re... Or, or to even let it get to legal, right?Over $200,000, which is nothing, is [00:41:00] astonishing and it displays- Well,Simone Collins: and this also, it’s not $200,000 that they paid for. It’s $200,000 of potential profit that they seized. Again, this is what it was valued at. This is not what it’s being sold for, though I imagine with inflation it’s probably beingMalcolm Collins: sold for that price.No, no, no, but I just mean not just handing them $200,000 to make them go away.Simone Collins: Oh, I see. Yeah. No, right, just buying it from them as, as a corporation. Oh, I see what you’re saying. Yeah. Yeah, as opp- They shouldn’t have even waited to sell it on consignment. They should’ve just bought it from them.Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Well, no, when, when people start making a stink like this, it’s generally good to just give them the money and make them go away.Right? ISimone Collins: see. Yeah, just buy them off. Yeah, that, that would’ve been simpler. But I mean, I think also they could’ve just been like, “Okay, we will honor your consignment agreement. Like, we will sell it or if you wanna take it back, take it back. We won’t sell it. I don’t care.”Malcolm Collins: No, but the ob- the obvious correct choice is just give them the money, right?Mm-hmm. Like, that is... Sorry, running businesses, we have had to make this choice around large amounts of money. Not this large, but like $25,000 or something. We probably have to make [00:42:00] it about once a year a, a decision like this, I’d say in the range between, like, 25,000 and $50,000. And it’s j- it sucks, but it’s just part of doing business.That they wouldn’t, or that they had adopted a business practice where all throughout corporate, keep in mind, it, it, it, this required both the owners of the shop deciding not to do anything about this and corporate deciding not to do anything about this, which likely required layers of decision-making in addition to whatever the police were doing required a mindset that I think- Mmunfortunately for a lot of people, what a lot of people are gonna take away from this is, “Oh, if you do business with a Mormon and you create a successful store they’ll just take that away from you and give it to a Mormon family one day.” As b-Simone Collins: This is bad too, because Mormons are, have, have a really otherwise great professional reputation.Especially LDS men who have served on missions, because they have basically gone through trial by [00:43:00] fire with patience, persistence, friendliness, sales skills, cold calling. Like, this is an amazing- They’re greatMalcolm Collins: salespeople ...Simone Collins: yeah, like you, and, and they are disproportionately well represented in the CIA, like many high level good, like, government roles and stuff because it’s like, okay, these are people who are consistent, trustworthy, honorable values aligned, Mmlike, good. And, and stuff like this takes that reputation and weakens it, weakens it significantly because there’s this now negative baggage.Malcolm Collins: Well, it inverts it to an extent. It’s like, oh, M- Mormons might make great employees, but never trust a Mormon in a Mormon-controlled territory if, if they are in the majority position or, or, or running a bus- business.Like, never trust them to do... And, and if you’re like, “Well, how can you apply this to...” Again, this is the problem with a centralized church. Because you have a centralized church and the church isn’t doing anything about this, and you could say that’s not the church’s role, and it’s like w- the church’s role is to [00:44:00] make the lives of Mormons better, right?To advance the Mormon cause. Yes, it is their role to handle negative PR when it comes up, right? Even if it’s through back channels, even if it’s through the guy’s local pastor or something like that. There, there are few things happening right now that are more the church’s role. The bigger problem is the idea that like, oh, we can Because as I pointed out, the situation arose because of Mormon culture, peculiarities of Mo- Mormon culture.If it arose because of peculiarities of Mormon culture, obviously people are gonna blame it on Mormonism, so you could use peculiarities of Mormon culture to address it. Except the opposite has happened.Simone Collins: Hmm.Malcolm Collins: Right? A, a denial of responsibility and saying these are individual bad actors. Yeah. And to that extent, I think one thing that I’m gonna...Because we’ve done a number of videos where we called out communities protecting their own bad actors, and how that externalizes them as a threat for everyone around them.Simone Collins: Yeah, I think at this point we’ve called out Catholics and Jews for this, [00:45:00] right?Malcolm Collins: No, not Catholics for this. Jews heavilySimone Collins: for this.Have we, have we yet, we haven’t yet called out, or maybe me- mentioning- Jews and transMalcolm Collins: people, and nowSimone Collins: Mormonism on the left ... you’ve called out Mennonites for this because of the whole rape thing.Malcolm Collins: Oh, the rape. Well, yeah, no, but th- th- that’s different. The, the, I guess, yeah, the Catholics did attempt to protect.But anyway, I want to go and say that as, because now I’ve realized we’ve got a number of people who follow the religion we created, techno-puritanism so, just sort of like as a Malcolm words of wisdom or whatever, like- ... when this w- techno-puritan central organization is finally set up, the, the index when we have all of the tools for setting it up one of its core roles should be policing the morality of members with ability to excommunicate for demonstrably- I wasSimone Collins: just thinking of like-immoral acts ... well, policing bad actors. It’s not so much- Mm ... about policing morality as it is policing people who are doing harm in society.Malcolm Collins: Yeah, I think do, m- m- yeah, that’s the better way to do it. It doesn’t matter their [00:46:00] personal morality, their morality at home or anything like that. Only when they externalize harm onto other communities and the higher threat than externalizing harm on other communities is protecting a member of the techno-puritan community who is externalizing harm on other communities.Simone Collins: Yeah.Don’t protect bad actors I mean, look, it put a target on the back of the progressive movement too. I was just looking at there’s been both, like, on X and through mainstream media, coverage of dwindling support, for example, gay marriage. It had its high at almost... So almost half of Republicans supported gay marriage around 2019.And then I think it peaked at 2021. Between 2021 and 2024, it went from just under 50% of Republicans supporting gay marriage to now about 31%. And I think a lot of that had to do with the progressive movement on the whole supporting bad actors. And-Malcolm Collins: Yeah ...Simone Collins: trying to impose culture on people who don’t want that culture imposed on them.Whereas before, the framing had always [00:47:00] been, “Just let us live our lives. Please, just let us live our lives.” And everyone’s like, “Yeah, okay. I’ll, like, that’s fine.” AndMalcolm Collins: this is the thing where the gays could say, “Well, there’s no king gay that could, you know, do something about this.” King gay. The problem is there is a king Mormon who can do something about this.Oh. There is a central organization, and there’s people paid very good money- I thought you were gonna saySimone Collins: there’s a gay king, and I’m like, “Who’s the king of the gays?” ThisMalcolm Collins: is exciting. Actually, did you know that the United States military spent hundreds of thousands of dol- I think it might have been arou- around a few million dollars trying to find the king of the gays?Simone Collins: Wait, what?Malcolm Collins: Oh, yeah. D- did you know the name of the person they were looking for?Simone Collins: No.Malcolm Collins: They, they, they ended up doing a dragnet to attempt to find- ASimone Collins: dragnet? Sorry.Malcolm Collins: S- Simone, I said they, they did a dragnet to attempt to find Dorothy.Simone Collins: Huh? I don’t get it.Malcolm Collins: You don’t, you know how you say you are gay back in the day, “I’m a friend of Dorothy.”Simone Collins: Oh, no. I’ve never heard that before. Oh,Malcolm Collins: you’ve never heard the saying? I [00:48:00] was- It was a behind the way to say- No ... I’m gay is I’m a friend of Dorothy. Wait, really? And so they thought Dorothy, which meant Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz, was a real person. And so they attempted toSimone Collins: find- They thought Dorothy was the king of the gays?LikeMalcolm Collins: the, the key network o- or of the gays who like made the whole gay social scene work, this mysterious Dorothy.Simone Collins: That’s amazing. I thought you were making a pun with Dragnet. I, yeah, I don’t know. I, I, I wish that in the US military we just started recruiting for like, it was the Band of Thebes, right?Just like a, a, a gay subset. That would be so cool. That’d be so hot.Malcolm Collins: Band of Thebes. Yeah, no, but all, all gay regiments. That’s the way we should do gays in theSimone Collins: military. You, no, I, I think, yeah. Like, we, we need to start having affiliate of regiments. Like, I want, I want the militant lesbians regiment. I want the Band of Thebes 2.0 USA edition.I wantMalcolm Collins: the- I actually think you could probably do a pretty good job ... ISimone Collins: want, I want the furries. I want the furry regiment. I want them fighting in costume, but with like heads up displays inside their, [00:49:00] their like fursona heads. I, I want, I want affiliate of ad hoc-Malcolm Collins: But, but anyway, ...Simone Collins: military bands.Malcolm Collins: This has been really interesting to see.Simone Collins: Yeah.Malcolm Collins: I think people are underestimating the cultural effect of this movement long-term. This moment has blown up in a way that, I mean, literally this is like, I, I, I think in terms of like average home penetration, the Tiger King of this, this d- you know-Simone Collins: I don’t, I don’t know if it’s Tiger King level, but I will say that this has been surprisingly well-covered.I’m kinda like, ugh, like do we really care that much?Malcolm Collins: Well, I mean, what I wanted to cover it as from a, like, as how’s it gonna change society? It’s gonna make people significantly more suspicious of Mormons or ever allowing Mormons to get power, and it makes me suspicious of Mormons. Like, I wanna be clear, it makes me suspicious when Mormons who I thought were normal, sane people are like, “This is just a few bad actors.This isn’t a Mormon [00:50:00] problem.” Completely, when Mormon culture leads to bad action, completely saying, “Oh, not my responsibility,” I was like, “Oh, okay, well, f- me then,” right? You know? We just need to grow the techno-puritan alli- you know, federation. Y- get more members, continue to grow, have lots of babies.And then you, you guys can have an organization you can join that doesn’t have lots of crazy scandals. And it actually punishes its own bad actors. Wouldn’t that be fun?Simone Collins: I guess, you know, the, the OG Puritans were pretty famous for doing that, but sometimes they went a little too far. You know- But they did do-witch hunts and all that.Malcolm Collins: Yeah. That’s- The, the OG Puritans did punish their own community members when they externalized power more. ASimone Collins: lot. No, it was like, it was a pa- it was a national pastime. We did, we went overboard. We’re like, “You said something about your dog. You need to die.” All sorts of things.Very, very overboard. But anyway, that’s it’s-Malcolm Collins: Well, I, yeah, my biggest takeaway of this is no matter how aligned [00:51:00] you are with a group, I guess what this hammers home for me is- Well, all other groups are fundamentally evil. We need to grow our ownSimone Collins: andMalcolm Collins: be prepared to- Oh, for th- Like, but I, but I’m sorry, groups I keep thinking are, are okay.It, it doesSimone Collins: The Mormons are fine. Look, I think this had to do more with messy governance and people not coordinating well on this, and maybe the, the mechanism by which you know, temple recommends are revoked or established just not really working well, it being kind of complicated. Because I think that temple recommends, I, I don’t know the full way that, like, you get them, but I think they happen at the bishop level.So, like, also you have to keep in mind that, like, they, the bishop who’s responsible for the various policemen and then the various corporate people, like, it’s all separate non-coordinating volunteers who have full-time jobs, by the way. [00:52:00] Like, there’s also the fact that this is a church that, except at the very highest levels, is made up of entirely volunteer work of, of full-time employed people.Malcolm Collins: Hold on, Simona. I, I don’t... No. The, the, they, the temple could act if they wanted to. The local bishop could act if they wanted to. And if people are like, “It’sSimone Collins: not the church’s-”Malcolm Collins: Right,Simone Collins: but also they’re kind of busy. Things fall through the cracks when you do this muchMalcolm Collins: If, if, if people are like, “It’s not the church’s job to police people’s morality,” that’s literally exactly their job, right?It’s to, it’s to help people live moral lives. It’s not the church’s job to protect the church’s reputation. That’s literally... Like, those are their two only jobs. And if you’re like, “Well, they never get involved in civil matters or something like that,” or well, maybe they should, you know? In, in this particular instance.Because they have this whole- Look, I,Simone Collins: I imagine that there might be some reckoning or discussion that takes place after this having happened, but that wouldn’t surprise me. So-Malcolm Collins: Yeah, it’ll just be too late then. They, they have literally days to react at this point. [00:53:00]Simone Collins: Yeah. But I think if they act quickly, they can fend off reputational damage somewhat.Malcolm Collins: So yeah, we’ll see if they do it.Simone Collins: Let me- TimeMalcolm Collins: will tell ... it would have to be pretty severe at this point, whatever they do, but we’ll see.Simone Collins: Mm, it, this’ll blow over pretty fast, I think.Malcolm Collins: No, it won’t.Simone Collins: We’ll see then. I’m, I’mMalcolm Collins: obviously team Mormon. This will be a lasting cultural memory for a generation.Simone Collins: Ah, I don’t know.I, I doubt.Malcolm Collins: Just keep in mind, it’s not... Every single one of the largest streamers has done something on thisSimone Collins: Yeah, it’s true. Yeah, this is ... And on both sides of the political spectrum too. It’s just basically like everyone is excited to dunk, to dunk on-Malcolm Collins: This, this is the new Carol Baskin ... corporate Bricks &Simone Collins: Minifigs.Malcolm Collins: But worse, because I didn’t feel a visceral anger- ISimone Collins: thought there were a bunch of Team Carol people. There are no Team Bricks & Minifigs people. Oh no, there’s a few Team Carol people,Malcolm Collins: but that’s the thing. Like, with Carol, I was disgusted by her, but I didn’t feel a visceral rage at her like I do these people.Simone Collins: Well, right, and this, this is a very unidirectional thing. Everyone [00:54:00] hates Brits- Bricks & Minifigs. Yeah. And everyone-Malcolm Collins: And the local police department.Simone Collins: And well, of course, and the, the local police department, which is acting ... Yeah, no, like, the, the, it’s, it’sMalcolm Collins: one of these- They’re acting like a pod person town, okay?That’s what they’re acting like.Simone Collins: Oh, gosh.Malcolm Collins: I, I, I have no other way to describe this other than bizarre and otherworldly. It borders on having accidentally driven into a horror movie, when you see, like, the police pull them over and be like, “Which one of you is Ben? How’s it feel to be in Utah?” That’s bizarre and pod person-y, okay?Okay. That’s not a normal thing to do or say.Simone Collins: It’s not great. Yeah. It’s it’s not great.I agree. Well, we’ll see. I love you, though.Malcolm Collins: Love you too.Simone Collins: I’ll see you in data centerMalcolm Collins: You had the kids walk around with bagpipes today. One, one of our fans- Yeah, we hadSimone Collins: an award-winning- ... provided them with bagpipes ... bagpiper perform for our kids, and [00:55:00] they thought it was the coolest thing ever.I mean, of course, in the moment they just looked stunned ‘cause what else do you do the first time you encounter a bagpipe? You’re like, “What is happening to me right now?” But he played a perfect... Oh, like, two perfect songs, just really good. Wow, what a day. I was just thinking, I was... To this weekend, I took this kids to this spot up on the hill, the, that picnic rock by the old stone bridge, and I told them it was where the fairies were, and they thought it was too windy for fairies, which is fair.You know, mosquitoes can’t land on you when it’s too windy, and I don’t think fairies can be out either. And then I, I pulled up pictures using Google Image of the Cottingley Fairies, ‘cause it was like, oh yeah, like famously young children have found fairies in, in the, in the woods. And I thought it would be convincing because, you know, like, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was a huge fan of the Cottingley Fairies.He’s like, “Oh, this confirms it.” And of course, Tosia looks at them and he’s like, “Wow, [00:56:00] fairies.” And Titan looks at it and she’s like, “Oh, the cotton candy fairies.” And then she just assumes that they make cotton candy, so that’s all she fixates on. That she wants not cottonlea, Cottingley or whateverMalcolm Collins: fairies.What is the Cottingley Fairies? Is this a scam or something? It’sSimone Collins: the girls... You know those pictures of young girls with fairies? And they, they’d convinced... They, they ran, wandered off into the woods with their father’s camera and took pictures and then came back. Their father developed the photos, and lo and behold, the girls are posing next to beautiful fairies.And at the time, no one could figure out what it was. They could confirm the photos were not doctored at all. Of course it turns out that- The girls had just cut out illustrations of fairies and arranged them well and took pic- pictures. Like, they were very good amateur photographers, but, like, they’d fooled a bunch of adults, including the writer of the Sherlock series.This, [00:57:00] the clever man. Octavian takes one look at the photos and he’s like, “They just cut out pictures of fairies.” And I’m like, “Malcolm Collins: What?” Oh, I love Octavian already. Smarter than Sherlock.Simone Collins: What on earth? What on earth, Octavian?Malcolm Collins: You are, you are too great at the fairy-Simone Collins: But, but this, this is the same kid who, like, turns to me and is like, “Well, can I take my esophagus to Target?”Because I, I have told him he can use a $25 Target gift card if he can just do the basic addition and subtraction he needs to in order to tell if he has, like, toys within his budget. You know, like, okay, well, you bought something with $4 and then... and another thing- Yeah ... with $2. How much money do you have left?Then he can use the gift card. And, and he, he just doesn’t wanna do the math, and so I, I, I bought him an abacus, and he keeps calling it his esophagus, and it’s very annoying.Malcolm Collins: And he wants to take it to Target to do the math? And he wants to take his esophagus to Target, ‘cause thenSimone Collins: he [00:58:00] can- Does heMalcolm Collins: actually know how to do math on the abacus?Simone Collins: Yes, he can do esophagus math, thank you very much.Malcolm Collins: You taught him that?Simone Collins: Yes. Well, th- this thing, it’s been around for, what, thousands of years. It’s extremely intuitive. You count the freaking beads. It’s, it’s really good- I, well, I know there’s, like- ... for developing number sense. ...Malcolm Collins: specific ways to do, like, multiplication and stuff on it.Simone Collins: Yeah. No, he’s not at that level. We’re at the, like, the beads move on this side, and here’s, you know, just move over the 10 beads.Malcolm Collins: Addition and subtraction, okay, great.Simone Collins: Yeah. Great, great. No we’re not, like, at the- But I love that he’s- We’re not- ... teaching technical terms here ... Peruvian mountain traders yet, no.Malcolm Collins: And people are like... Again, when they’re like, “Why don’t you just teach your kids the Christian stories in the traditional way?” And I’m like, “Because I know my kids are like me, and they’re going to be very, very skeptical people.” They justSimone Collins: cut out the fair- pictures of fairies. I can’t believe it. Anyway.Yeah. I thought, I thought I was just gonna completely entrance the children and Octavian just has to blow it off. .Malcolm Collins: Immediately. All right. Well, I’m gonna get started here. I’m, I’m proud ofSimone Collins: you. [00:59:00] Okay.Speaker 16: Do you think the answer is still gonna be there? Let’s, we’ll find outWell, we’re in a more sheltered area, so it’s nice and calm here. Feels good, right? This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit basedcamppodcast.substack.com/subscribe

In this episode of Based Camp, Malcolm and Simone Collins tackle one of the most provocative questions in the age of AI: Does artificial intelligence finally make communism feasible?They explore the structural failures of historical communism (incentives, power consolidation, information problems, and catastrophic mismanagement), why small-scale communism works (families, kibbutzim) but large-scale versions collapse, and whether AI-driven post-scarcity could solve these issues or simply replicate the same human problems of bad actors, bureaucracy, and distorted incentives.Topics include:* The Sam Altman UBI study and why unconditional cash transfers often fail* Why Soviet science succeeded in some areas but governance always failed* Power vacuums in anarcho-communism vs. centralized systems* The future of “techno-fiefdoms,” AI-managed communities, and human reserves for those left behind by AI disruption* Demographic collapse and the likely rise of religious/techno-puritan movementsA raw, nuanced debate that challenges both right-wing and left-wing assumptions about economics, human nature, and the coming AI era.Show NotesWhy Implementations Fail* Economic calculation problem (Ludwig von Mises, 1920):* Without private property and market prices, planners lack information on relative scarcity/costs.* You can’t rationally allocate steel, labor, or grain.* Attempts at “material balances” or cybernetic planning (e.g., Soviet OGAS—an attempted nationwide information network) failed repeatedly.* HOW AI CAN FIX THIS* Adequately and dynamically track supply and demand* Incentive and knowledge problems (Hayek):* People respond to incentives.* Common ownership dilutes responsibility (”tragedy of the commons”).* Local knowledge is dispersed; central decrees can’t match it.* AI can just more adequately monitor dispersed local knowledge* Innovation and maintenance collapse without profit/loss signals.* If AI becomes like a mother and just “handles” everything, then it’s not an issue* Power dynamics:* Enforcing abolition of private property and markets requires massive coercion.* With AI, we’re approaching a place where the majority of the population won’t have anything (or anything to lose), property-wise.* This concentrates power in a vanguard/party, which becomes a new ruling class (see Milovan Djilas’ The New Class).* We might see a bifurcated society: One ruling elite doing their own thing, then AI-led/governed communist societies for everyone else* The state doesn’t wither; it entrenches (Orwell, Animal Farm).* This is more of an issue when the state is fighting over something desirable, but what we’re looking at is a society largely abandoned by the elite.* Human nature (loaded with self-interest, status-seeking, family preferences as it is) doesn’t vanish.* Not a problem if a non-biological mind is governing.* Repeated patterns:* Initial revolutionary fervor lead to…* purges of “wreckers”/kulaks, which lead to* Shortages, which lead to…* blame external enemies/capitalism, which lead to…* more controls, which lead to…* corruption/black markets, which lead to…* reform or collapse* This is not bad luck or “revisionism”; it’s structural.* Even small-scale communes (e.g., 19th-century utopian ones, Israeli kibbutzim long-term, or modern intentional communities) often dissolve due to free-riding, exit of talent, and disputes over “needs.”* HOWEVER, with AI, I imagine communism to not come as a revolution, but rather a deus ex machina saving the leftovers in society from death.Why has “real communism never been tried?”“Real communism has never been tried” is a rhetorical defense that shifts the definition of communism away from every historical implementation. It functions as a motte-and-bailey tactic or “no true Scotsman” fallacy: the ideal (a stateless, classless, moneyless society of perfect equality and abundance) is defended, while real-world attempts are dismissed as insufficiently pure.Defenders counter with “not real” because:* Stalin/Mao “betrayed” the revolution.* No stateless end-stage achieved.* External sanctions/wars interfered.* “State capitalism” or “deformed socialism.”What “real communism” means in theoryMarx and Engels described:* Socialism as the transitional stage: proletarian dictatorship, state ownership of production.* Communism as the higher stage: state “withers away,” common ownership, “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs,” no classes, no money, no scarcity.Lenin, Trotsky, and later Marxists added layers like vanguard parties and democratic centralism to get there.Every major attempt followed Marxist blueprints:* USSR (1917-1991): Bolshevik Revolution, War Communism, collectivization, Five-Year Plans. Result: Holodomor famine (millions dead), Gulags, purges, stagnation, collapse. Leaders admitted severe deviations but blamed “capitalist encirclement” or “bureaucracy.”* China (1949-): Great Leap Forward (30+ million dead from famine), Cultural Revolution, mass starvation and chaos. Shifted to market reforms under Deng for survival; current system is state capitalism with CCP control.* Cambodia (Khmer Rouge, 1975-79): Explicitly tried Year Zero agrarian communism. ~1.5-2 million dead (25% of population) via execution, starvation, overwork.* Cuba, North Korea, Vietnam, Ethiopia, Venezuela: Similar patterns—initial redistribution, central planning, suppression of markets/dissent, economic decline, emigration, authoritarianism. Venezuela went from richest Latin American country per capita to hyperinflation and collapse under “21st-century socialism.”The Black Book of Communism estimates 80-100 million deaths from democide, famine, and repression across implementations. These weren’t fringe experiments; they were the largest-scale attempts, backed by ideology from Marx’s writings.Episode TranscriptMalcolm Collins: Hello, Simone. Today we are gonna be discussing an exciting topic, which is does communism make sense now? Specifically what we’re gonna be digging into here is, like, we are known as, I guess, far right-wing YouTubers or podcasters or intellectual influencers.I don’t know, right? No. But, but people consider us far right-wing. Now, a lot of our fans consider us very centrist, so maybe, but I, I identify as, as right wing, so whatever, right? Like, I... The, the, the sane far right is where I think I’d put us, right? A- at least within, like, the tech right circles and stuff like that.Which puts us in an interesting position vis-à-vis communism, ‘cause I’m not gonna come out here and just be like... We have said it in the past on the show very clearly that communism may work in a post-scarcity economy. And we have also a number of times gone into what it means when we say something like that, right?Mm-hmm. Where, like, we are putting [00:01:00] extremely heavy caveats on this. When people have done UBI experiments and they have just handed people money, they have seen extremely bad outcomes. The most famous is the Sam Altman one where they gave people $1,000 every month for three years, and the people who had been given the money they, they had less money at the end of it, total money, than the people who had been given nothing in terms of, like, wealth increase, right?They, they didn’t spend any more time with their kids. They didn’t have any more kids. They didn’t spend any more time in education. They really only spent more time in recreation. That’s it.Simone Collins: And they paid down their debt a little, so that’s nice.Malcolm Collins: Hmm. That doesn’t really mean anything. Oh, theySimone Collins: visited the doctor a little more.Malcolm Collins: It doesn’t really mean anything if on net they had less money.Simone Collins: Yeah. SoMalcolm Collins: yes, they paid down their debt, but on net they had less money. Right. So, just a disaster, and we’ve seen this in communities that are offered UBI, right? Like Native American communities, for example, where we see them just completely [00:02:00] dissolve in terms of productivity, in terms of drug addiction, in terms of alcohol addiction the moment they get on something that is the equivalent of, like, UBI or, like, local communism or something like that.And so then the question is okay, How do we eh, th- that, that all being the case, like also clearly AI is gonna disrupt what the economy means, right? And, and, and it may not happen this generation, right? It may not happen, ... Well, it’s probably gonna happen in our lifetimes, if I’m gonna be honest.Like, if we look at- Yeah ... the speed of AI in relation to automated workers e- even, even for physical labor from what we’re sort of seeing behind the scenes, that’s developing a lot faster than people realize. And that we may be replacing people in a lot more fields a lot faster than people think.And so then the question is, is okay, well if that happens, then what does the economy mean? How do you have a [00:03:00] functional economy with struggle and some form of scarcity so people don’t go crazy without what we’ve come to understand as, like, market labor, right? And so to explore this subject, I want to focus on a few areas.I want to focus on, like, underlying how does capitalism help people? Examine the individual structures within capitalism that lead to the net outcome of positive human results. And see how those can be potentially mimicked in a post traditionally capitalist economy.Simone Collins: Mm-hmm.Malcolm Collins: But then secondarily the big question we have is Okay, how does communism often fail, and how could AI, or even could AI realistically prevent these failure scenarios?Simone Collins: Mm.Malcolm Collins: So, classic failure scenario in communism that I’ll sort of walk people through why, why communism almost always [00:04:00] fails. Not almost always. It, it literally always fails above certain sizes. Communism works in small government stuff, like it works with some of the kibbutzim. It works with families.Every family is communist. W- w- sorry, people don’t understand what I mean by that. Like it’s from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs, right? Like my baby doesn’t work, right? And I can’t produce milk for them, right? You know, the person who can produce milk produces the milk.The, the, the, the baby and the kids are not expected to bring in an income at this stage, right? You know, we, but we, we still support them. The types of jobs and roles that each of us take on are the types of jobs and role that we’re best at, both due to our educational background, proficiencies, and yes, gender.So we live in a communist structure already. We live in a communist utopia already, it’s just a very small one. But the question is, is why does it break down at a societal level? We’ve written extensively on this, so I’ll keep it pretty short. The key reason is [00:05:00] is when you are creating a larger communist structure, you need to centralize power in a way that rewards bad actors.And a lot of people don’t s- s- they’re like, “Oh, it’s that people aren’t motivated when they just get money from the state,” or something like that. Or that you can’t do advanced things in a communist system, and that’s not true. Like, that, that’s actually, like, factually untrue. Like, the one thing the Soviet Union was actually pretty good at was science.Like, they were beating us soundly in the space race for quite a long period of the space race. They had many excellent, excellent scientists. Yes, because of government bureaucracy and the way sort of power gets captured in communist systems, they also ended up making catastrophically stupid scientific blunders that killed hundreds of millions of people.The Chinese did this as well. This is typically in fields like biology and, and stuff like this. But in, in physics, they [00:06:00] did pretty well. So no, it’s, it, it’s actually not that people are just unmotivated in these systems. Highly motivated, highly conscientious people are typically equally or, if not, even more motivated in communist ecosystems.Where communist ecosystems really break down is for less competent fields. The, the average line worker and stuff like that. Because at this point, you don’t wanna do those jobs. Nobody wants to do those jobs. People often end up doing them at the point of a gun barrel and maliciously poorly. It’s, it’s the average desk worker job.It’s not the, “I got my best job I could have ever gotten because I’m literally one of the best people in the country at doing said job.” Like, “I’m a gun nut, and now I get to spend all of my day coming up with gun designs, and now we have the AK-47.” Right? You know, “I’m a, a nuke nut.” Right? “I’m really interested in cutting edge nuclear technology, and now we have a, a Soviet atomic bomb.”Right? By the way, like, to put in [00:07:00] context how impressive that is, Iran still can’t make an at- now a- admittedly, like, everyone’s mad at them, but, like, the, the Soviet Union was doing this stuff, like, over half a century ago, right, at this point. So Communism can actually motivate the very best to do the very best.One of the problems you have with Soviet science, sorry if I’m getting on a sidetrack here but they, like, really screwed up their tank production, for example simply because of, like, government politics that ended up prioritizing one idiot’s designs over the guy who was actually more competent because Soviet systems are not always good at finding the most competent person.Huh ... capitalist systems also struggle sometimes to find the most competent person, but generally- TrueSimone Collins: story ...Malcolm Collins: like, if the government turned me away in a capitalist system, I could presumably go and build my own company separately off of my ideas. It doesn’t work that way, especially not in a country like the United States.Like, I go off [00:08:00] and I wanna build my own tank and because somebody else has, like, government crony contract, they, they still get the government crony contract because they’re at Boeing and they’ll, they’ll kill you or something. You know, that’s, that’s the way this works. But again, the, the, the point I’m making here is yes, Sovietism leads to catastrophic inefficiencies but you can get those within at least what we call capitalist ecosystems as well, right?Mm-hmm. So now back to what the real problem of communism is So when you’re going down a communist path, you essentially have two strategies that you can attempt. You can say, “We’re gonna centralize all the power into one bureaucracy and this single bureaucracy is going to manage all forms of the economy and everything like that.”And everybody knows, like, generally this doesn’t seem to really work for a number of reasons tied to, like, inefficiency, but we’ll put those reasons aside in a bucket for now. So strategy [00:09:00] number one, centralize everything. Essentially you’re creating a country that’s ruled by a single monopolistic company.That is, that is functionally what, what that form of communism is. Which is why I always say that the end state of communism and the end state of extreme libertarianism are the same.Simone Collins: Well, and I mean, a, a big part of this that tends to create huge, huge problems is when you are creating one, when you’re consolidating everything, you’re also abolishing private property and markets, and that requires- Well,Malcolm Collins: and then people don’t have the, the same reason to invest in their continued property.Simone Collins: And it requires a lot of coercion. Like, pe- people don’t just, “Oh, sure. Yeah, take my house. That’s fine. I didn’t...Malcolm Collins: That’s fine.” I mean, that’s, that’s generally the lower bloodshed and the lower death toll is on the redistribution part, though. Yeah,Simone Collins: that’s the step one part. But I’m just saying, like, as a little starting point, there’s also some friction there.Yeah, IMalcolm Collins: mean, obviously it involves robbing people of their property and everything like that. [00:10:00] I get that. But that’s- Y- yeah ... usually the lower death... I mean, a lot of, obviously conservative commentators are gonna crash out about government redistribution, everything like that. I’m just pointing out that’s not actually where the, the vast majority of communist death tolls come from.The vast majority of communist death tolls come from the inefficient management that happens after that.Simone Collins: Yeah, so in terms of, At least there’s this one book that tries to give a full tally. It’s called The Black Book of Communism, and they estimate that there have been 80 to 100 million deaths From democide, famine, and repression across implementations.I think famine’s the biggest killer.Malcolm Collins: Right. So let’s, we’ll, we’ll talk about... okay, I’ll quickly explain why the things happen without going too deep into them. I can. One problem you have within a communist ecosystem is that an individual has no reason to invest in anything that they own, because they don’t own anything.Yeah. So like, eh, our house requires a ton of effort and work to keep from falling apart. This is why if you go to [00:11:00] many communist countries, you don’t see tons of old houses, or you see houses in horrible disrepair, or, like, giant blocks in horrible disrepair. Because people didn’t have a reason to invest in the upkeep of their own property and the area around their property, right?Like, it’s not just my house I want to be nice, it’s the region around my house, because that increases its value. And this is true of companies, this is true of everything. It’s, it’s a huge positive cycle that you get out of this. Mm-hmm. And the, the secondary bigger thing is, is inefficiency in the way things are operated.And what people say, and I think incorrectly, is that you simply cannot manage, in a planned out format, an entire economy. And it is in attempting to do that that the Soviet systems begin to break down and the communist systems begin to break down in ways that lead to these famines and stuff like that.But when we look at the actual causes of most of the famines, it isn’t actually due to problems in inefficient management. It’s, [00:12:00] it’s due to explicitly bad policy like killing all the birds in China that were eating the pests on the crop. They were mad that they sometimes ate the crops, and then they had giant pests, and then a bunch of people died because the way that they were measuring food is they would go to a town and they’d basically tell the person running the town, “Well, if you can’t show me X amount of food, you’re gonna be removed from your position,” right?So now they’re like, “Oh yeah, we’ve got that amount of food,” right? And then they go to the people and they go, “Hey, the military works for me. You give all your food for export.” Now they don’t have any food left, because they were just pretending that they had X amount of food. But they wanted to keep their position, and they had the guns, so they were in a position to do this.Because if they don’t do this, then they’re put in a... Now this is all a problem of organization. Like, all of these individual problems could be solved if you had an intelligent and conscientious person going through the system and attempting to address every one of these problems. What we really need to get to is why that doesn’t happen, why these problems never get [00:13:00] cau- solved, why bad ideas get pushed down, and we need to say, “Can AI prevent this?”Simone Collins: Hmm.Malcolm Collins: So, thoughts before I go further, Simone?Simone Collins: I mean, I, I think you’re focusing a lot on the pure governance problems, but there’s more to it than just that, and so it’s also important to address those other short, shortfalls.Malcolm Collins: Okay. What... I’m, I’m actually claiming there are not, actually. The problems that are not governance problems are not that big in communism.So what do you think they are?Simone Collins: That we discount the extent to which markets are like an organism or ecosystem that, that is able to manage huge amounts of information in a very responsive, distributed, natural way. And that when you try to have a human-run mostly blind government system run it, you don’t get the data you need.Like, planners don’t have enough information- So I- ... about relative stares- scarcity and cost of things ...Malcolm Collins: fundamentally disagree with your thesis here. There are [00:14:00] ways within a communist system, without-Simone Collins: yeah, and the Soviet, like, there’s the Soviet OGAS system that they, they tried to create this nationwide information network to, to better manage this, but they couldn’t.Like, just getting the information inputs in a pre-AI age was just not feasible. And they had to plan-Malcolm Collins: No, the point I’m making is it isn’t just unfeasible. They just did it in bad ways. You can create pseudo-capitalistic systems in a communist empire that can measure supply and demand and react to supply and demand with rewards.I mean, you are creating essentially capitalism with extra steps. But the idea of having distributive information networks that can recognize scarcity and demand is not something that is out of completely impossible in a communist system. The point I’m making here is that if you actually look, and I know from, like, a [00:15:00] capitalist perspective, the great machine, and people have talked about, like, capitalism as the first AI, right?And in a way, capitalism is kind of the first AI, right?Simone Collins: Yeah.Malcolm Collins: But the, the capitalist machine or the AI that’s created by the giant capitalistic network is not something that it is completely impossible to reverse engineer. And the reason I say this is that when we look at the failures of communist systems demonstrably, they are not due to failures of centralized control.They are due to specific policy failuresSimone Collins: I wouldn’t say it’s just policy failures, too. I think that the fundamental system whereby, again, in a pre-AI age, communism comes to exist, which is this process of like a revolution to socialism to then communism, is doomed [00:16:00] to fail, right? Because you have this revolutionary fur- fervor, and then you have the purge where like a bunch of like people lose their property, and there’s the kulaks.Mm. And then you get shortages, and then you have the famine, and then you have the backlash to that, the blame. “We have to, we have to handle this. Oh, it’s, it’s capitalism. It’s all these other things.” And then that means we have to implement more controls, and then that leads to corrupt and black markets, and then that leads to reform or collapse.And it’s just, like things... It’s, it’s an inherently unstable system the way you have to stumble into cap- or to communism now. And here’s my fundamental thesis when it comes to communism and AI and how it’s going to play out and why it’s going to work, and why many of the fundamental things that lead to this instability aren’t going to be a problem.One of the key things being, I mean, I know you’re talking about like human-led governance being really stupid, and AGI can sort of in a hand-wavy way fix [00:17:00] that, and the right AGI can. I think the other thing is that communism is often a problem because a bunch of corrupt, power-hungry people are like scrambling for the governing power and for the resources of like the workers and all their possessions, right?Malcolm Collins: Mm-hmm.Simone Collins: But what, what happens when you have a bunch of people who don’t work and don’t own anything? Like no one’s gonna fight over them. No one wants them. And what I think might happen is that a large- a largely orphaned population, the l- the bottom part of the K-shaped economy, is going to be left high and dry by governments that falter, both due to like weird AI disruption, but also due to demographic collapse, and then also just left behind by the rich people who go off to their like techno-futurism.That’s an interestingMalcolm Collins: thesis, but I’m gonna push back on this.Simone Collins: Let me finish with my thing then, and then you’ll push back. And then basically I think that some, some of the people who feel bad morally about leaving [00:18:00] behind everyone else are gonna send down some of their AGI gods to just create little communist communities for the people who’ve been left behind, and then those people will be taken care of by mother AI that will handle all their stuff for them.So you don’t have anyone having their property taken away. You don’t have anyone, you know, being like accused of corruption or anything. You basically just have AI taking care of those who are left behind. Why is this wrong?Malcolm Collins: So, I, I will get to that in a second. You might get that. Like, that is a possible good scenario.Simone Collins: Okay.Malcolm Collins: But the reason why I think that’s wrong is because I fundamentally disagree with you about the first part. The first part is, is communism, and I, I, I keep trying to come back to this because it’s actually central to understand why AI will likely fail even within a communist system, right? Like, why- AI would break communism is that communism doesn’t fail because [00:19:00] of it, it, it prevents competent people from working, or it doesn’t motivate people enough, or it’s bad at determining on-the-ground risks because capitalism just works as this brilliant machine that can measure things about economic states that communism could never measure.And the evidence I used for that is, again, the failures and the successes we had under communism. Communism achieved some things that were enormously successful in terms of scientific progress, industrial development, et cetera. But it also obviously super high des- I’m not ... But what I’m saying is it’s to just be like communism didn’t function at all is, is factually incorrect.And to say that within a communist ecosystem like let’s look at a capitalist ecosystem, right? If you go to a factory what type of person do you want running the factory, right? The type of person you want running the factory is gonna be the most competent person to run the factory, who has the support of the, the workers and can push them to work [00:20:00] their hardest.In a communist system, what type of person do you want to run the factory? It, it’s the same type of person, right? The people who end up in the lower level management positions in communist and capitalist systems at least aspirationally in how these systems could, should be structured, are the same types of people.Like you don’t have this, ... A- and it’s also communist systems don’t send food to the wrong place you know, malevolently or something like that. When we talk about communist systems failing at determining what, like where economic needs need to go, right? The, in the, in the way a capitalist system would.The biggest failures are virtually never because the, the system wasn’t good at monitoring things. They are again, when I was talking about like the, the wheat famine, right? It was, it was a twofold failure. It was a failure of the, the [00:21:00] way that they were measuring, like how much wheat each region had, was a very bad way to be measuring each, how much wheat each region had, that led to adverse incentives, which led to them sending wheat to locations that didn’t need wheat from locations that did need wheat.A- and they created a pest problem because they couldn’t tell people above them that they were wrong, right? Now note, in a capitalist system, you might not be able to tell your boss that they’re wrong, right? Like it let’s consider Ubisoft or something like that. I might- Mm-hmm ... even in a capitalist system not be able to tell my boss you make a, a, a video game about a, a Black guy in Japan going around murdering people.It’s probably gonna cause problems, and a lot of people are going to be very upset by that.” And then I get fired, right? But within a capitalist system, the wider capitalist ecosystem actually punishes that person, not because of an issue of supply and demand. In a communist system, you’d presumably want to punish the person as well, [00:22:00] if the goal of the company was entertainment and not spreading the ideology.But in a communist system, it’s often spreading ideology, so they, they probably wouldn’t be punished in the same way. But you, you understand what I mean. Like, suppose it’s something other than a game company and I’m actually like, “Oh, the way you’re doing this is functionally bad and going to lead to a bad product.”Communist ecosystems should be determining, oh, this is a bad product. And there’s functionally ways that they can determine, oh, this is a product that people don’t like. Mm ... but so now the question is, is why do these systems fail in communism, right? Like, why do the people in the positions that would be equivalent to, like, running Ubisoft in a communist system not end up getting replaced or not end up getting replaced in the way that they should get replaced?And it’s because, going back to what I was saying originally, communist systems fall into two broad categories. One is they function like a giant monopoly. Like, the entire government is one giant ultra libertarian monopoly where one company town has taken over everything and houses everyone and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.Yeah ... very dystopian, whatever. But the thing is, is the moment I say that, [00:23:00] every communist is gonna say “Well, that’s not the way I wanna do communism.” You know, they wanna go in and do- Yeah ... anarcho-communism. They wanna do syndicalism. They wanna do basically they wanna have independently operating small communist groups.Which extremely doesn’t work. The reason it doesn’t work is because it leaves a power vacuum. This is also why, like, extreme forms of libertarianism don’t work and everything like that. So suppose I try to set up this anarcho-communist system or even a completely syndicalist system, right, where, like, everything is, is totally decentralized.Anybody who decides to act as a bad actor and begin to aggressively and subversively acquiring both support and resources can exert power on anyone who’s playing by the rules. And this is, like, a pro- like, in the Molyneux debate when I was trying to figure out how he thought that his weird libertarian utopia would work this is something that, like, he seemed to [00:24:00] fundamentally not understand.He’s like, “No, everyone will rise up against a bad actor as soon as a bad actor starts accumulating power.” And I’m like, “I’m sorry, like, we have history to look at. We know that doesn’t happen,” right? Like, bad actors are actually very good at accumulating power. And and then they, they build an army, and the army can go to the person next to them.This is true even outside of, even without a military, right? So this, this came when I was talking, like, extreme forms of libertarianism with Steven Molyneux. I was like, how do you get something like a chip fab, right? That costs- Yeah ... hundreds of billions of dollars to make?Simone Collins: Yeah. Like- Years of a- ... well-investment with no payout, et cetera.Malcolm Collins: Yeah. The, the... and there might be no payout. And he’s like, “Well, I guess we could get, like, hundreds of millions of workers to form, like, a cooperative to invest everything into this.” And then it’s like, okay, then who’s operating the cooperative, right?Simone Collins: Yeah.Malcolm Collins: And they’re like, “Well, then we would have, like, some form of [00:25:00] democracy.”And I’m like, okay, so as soon as somebody gains power within this giant fabricator state, right? That’s basically, it’s a state created to run a fabricator. Why would they not attempt to create systems that prevent them from being removed from power? Yeah. And the answer is, of course, well, everyone would rise up against them if they did something like this.In the same way that he was like, well, he’s like, “Even if they got away with it, even if they accomplish all of this, then people wouldn’t buy their product because they’d see that they’re a bad actor.” Yeah. And I’m like, bro, you have a product in your pocket that was probably made by slaves. Like, you know that’s not true.You know that people-Simone Collins: Or eating food that is, or what, any, any mixture of things. Yeah.Malcolm Collins: Yeah. So what ends up happening, because the, the, the wider point I’m making here, here, here is customers don’t really punish bad actors. You, as a watcher of this show, likely barely punish bad actors. Even, even when [00:26:00] you’re...I mean, maybe video games have finally gotten punished because they screwed over gamers for so long. But in the vast majority of cases bad actors don’t actually end up getting pub- punished that much by public sentiment. You know, even, even when they do something completely insane, it’s like their stock will fall like 5%.It’s like, oh, no, you know. I mean, bad day to be the CEO ‘cause it’s like billions of dollars, but- You know, in, in the grand scheme of, like, society, it doesn’t matter. So the problem is with the anarchist and all of these power distributed systems is whenever somebody says, “I’m not gonna play by your distributed power rules, I’m just gonna accumulate all the power for myself,” they end up growing in influence.And functionally, that’s what happens with most communist governments, is they start with a bunch of people saying like, “Let’s genuinely try to make this work.” Mm-hmm. And then some people begin to gain positions of power, and they’re like, “What if instead of genuinely trying to get this to work, I [00:27:00] use the apparatus of the state to consolidate power around me?”Now, it’s very hard if you are a faction. So let’s suppose large communist country, two factions come to power with a legitimate government, right? Like, I’m not even talking about just, like, the warlords because you never even get to a stage where you have, like, pure autonomous regions for very long in these sort of libertarian communist fantasies because they immediately devolve.People immediately consolidate power, I mean, within, like, a month of it entering any sort of state like that. But so I’ll function- focus on it on the way it actually typically happens. You have a bunch of often sometimes bleeding-hearted idiot leftists in a, in a room, haven’t really operated anything before, don’t really know what they’re doing, but may have positive intentions for the state.And then you have the guy who comes in the room, your Stalin or whatever, right? Who’s like Uh-huh. Well, let’s try to be a bit more efficient [00:28:00] about this. I’m gonna talk with my friends in the military, and I tell them, “Hey, like, these guys aren’t really doing things the right way. And, you know, I think you, the heads of the military, deserve a bit higher standard of living than everyone else, don’t you think?I mean, you’re controlling... You, you, you work so hard compared to everyone else.” And you begin to, instead of trying to distribute wealth and resources equally in the society, you begin to distribute wealth and resources in a way that maintains your power within the society, your power hierarchy within the society.ButSimone Collins: you’re still, this is all with the supposition that this is humans running and everything and calling the shots.Malcolm Collins: Right. I’m gonna get to the point. Okay. Because with AI, it’s the same problem, right? Which is... I’ll get to that in just a second, right?Simone Collins: Okay, okay.Malcolm Collins: But you need to understand why it fails with humans to understand why it would likely fail with AI.So essentially, everyone who is [00:29:00] a bad actor, because they’re saying instead of taking all of the resources they can create and distributing them as much as they can, they take as resources they create, they distribute 20% and they take 80% to continue consolidating their position. So one, this leads to a ton of waste in the system in terms of the wealth that the people at the top are living, et cetera.But two it leads to all the way down within the power hierarchy bad actors ending up in the highest level power positions, because it’s basically dictator to dictator to dictator to dictator all the way down, the people with, with those sorts of mindsets. And so you get this enormous corruption.Because when I’m thinking about you know, do I wanna tell my boss that this planning has to kill all the birds is a dumb idea I’m not actually thinking about is this going to help my sub-state the most, right? Like if my region or the people or the farmers. I’m thinking about is this gonna help me consolidate power within [00:30:00] my position with the broader hierarchy, right?The problem with AI is AI fundamentally doesn’t really change this. So, let’s assume that you create a truly post-scarcity sys- system which is essentially what Simone is positioning with her communist ecosystem. So what she’s essentially saying, and I don’t know if I, I, I don’t disagree with this point, that if you could create true super abundance the, the, the people who are either competent or corrupt enough to end up in the positions of power have so much wealth and abundance that the, the coins that fall off their plates feel like ultimate luxury to the people that they’re falling in, into the trough.Well,Simone Collins: it’s not, no. There’s additional motivation. Th- they, with AI, they could have the ability to create broadly from their perspective, autonomous AI-run communities that feed [00:31:00] and house people. Like a, a new version of fiefdom. You know how like the way that a lot of versions of fiefdom worked was you had the lord who lived on the state, and one of the reasons why in these grand houses you had all these ridiculous roles where they were like essentially job programs.You know, the underbutler and the footman and the, the, the various types of cooks and, and all these people. It was a jobs program, and then everyone in the village, you know, they, they had somewhere to live, and then the, it was this whole little economy. They could c- create presumably a bunch of these little things that are all run by AI that give people little things to do and keep people busy and feed people food, and it’s not just, oh, the, you know, they’re, they’re eating like food runoff or something.It’s that th- it’s better to have people be able to show up at these places and, and get placed, get a house, get a job, you know, a job have something to do in their life, you know, become some kind of artisan craftsman or something and live their little [00:32:00] picturesque covet life than to, you know, die in large droves and look, look bad and, and a lot of people just don’t- Well,Malcolm Collins: no, right, but this is, this is the fundamental logical error that you’re making here.Simone Collins: Okay.Malcolm Collins: And it actually comes from growing up in the urban monoculture that you’re making this error. Okay. Which is very fun, because I think you’ll see it the moment I point it out.Simone Collins: Okay.Malcolm Collins: When you look at the quality of life of people who are relying on our today version of the types of systems that you’re talking about between states the amount of money that goes into these systems is often not just disco related, but inversely correlated with the actual quality of life of the people living off of the systems.Simone Collins: I think they’re gonna... No. This, you’re seeing the very first version of UBI that people, thanks to the experimentation being done now, right? They’re learning from it. They’re going to discover-Malcolm Collins: No, they’re not learningSimone Collins: from it ... Come on. Okay, like in The Matrix, right? They’re like, “Oh, well, we made the first version of the matrix where everyone just had everything, [00:33:00] and it really didn’t work.And so we created this new version where everyone has a job and they’re miserable, and it’s perfect.” And they’re gonna figure that out with UBI, and they’re gonna realize the best thing toMalcolm Collins: do- We have already seen proof they won’t So I’ll ex- I’ll give you proofs that they won’t, right?Simone Collins: Okay, what’sMalcolm Collins: the one example?Right now, when I’m talking more broadly, if you look at, like, California’s homeless, they often live much worse lives than homeless in other areas, despite all the money going into that. Yeah, it’s, it’s egregious. And you’re like, “Oh, they’re trying to fix it. They’re trying to fix it,” right? And I’m pointing out to you, why are...Because you gotta ask yourself, why are the lives of California’s homeless so much worse than other states when so much more money is going to them? And it’s because of the inefficient bureaucracy following the same sorts of failings that we see in communist systems. And so now what you’re gonna come and say is you’re gonna say, like, “Well, these AI tech lords, they won’t fall for these same types of errors.”And I’m like, “Hmm, Simone, in the UBI study that Sam Altman did, do you remember how the team that did the study [00:34:00] framed the results to Sam Altman? Did we already see an instance of them, in the very first instance where we could be moving down a good pathway, immediately lie about and manipulate the results to hide that it didn’t work in a way that-Simone Collins: No, but Malcolm, those systems are going to collapse.Like, I’m not saying this is gonna happen soon, but it’s going to happen-Malcolm Collins: What do you mean? That’s the craziest f*****g thing I’ve ever heard. How did, what do you mean they’re going to collapse? They can’t collapse. They’re AI tech moguls who presumably have near infinity money if you’re talking about in the future, right?Like, you think because people are living bad lives in their communist, quote-unquote, “utopias” that they’re going to care? Right? Like, they, they don’t care. California, San Francisco doesn’t care about its homeless drug addicts who are walking, zonked out on the streets and sleep in the poo that’s all around the financial district, right?Like, if you look at the quality of lives [00:35:00] of people who live next to super abundance today, the elites, like, your thesis is, oh, they will see their policies failing, and they will change their policies, when your lived reality is that the exact opposite is happening.Simone Collins: Those aren’t their policies. They’re living within a legacy bureaucracy government system and society that they certainly wouldn’t design.What I’m describingMalcolm Collins: is- But Sam Altman’s study was hisSimone Collins: study ... from the ground up techno fiefdoms that will be created but like sort of nature reserves for p- for h- for the humans that get leftMalcolm Collins: behind. But, but Sam Altman’s study was his st- are you denying-Simone Collins: It was, but what he was, what... So you have to look at the game that he is playing.He needs to give people a narrative that makes them comfortable with what’s going on today. If you were to say to them, “Okay, well, step one, society completely collapses, millions of people die. Step two, we’re gonna create some, like, nature reserves where people will [00:36:00] live and have jobs instead of live these, like, isolated fantasy lives and, and, you know, going forward for, like, the, the people who are left behind.Like, we’ll, we’ll give a good life to many of them. But we can’t do that until society collapses because we won’t have, like, the land rights and stuff, and we won’t be allowed to govern them. So, for now, because I don’t want you to, like, completely firebomb my house successfully this time, I’m going to tell you that I have done the research and I’m fully convinced that all I need to do is just give you a lot of money each month, and then you can just do whatever you want with it, and that will make you happy.”And people are like, “Okay, good. Well, at least Sam Altman is eventually gonna make sure that I get $10,000 a month and it’s gonna be great, and I’m gonna get DoorDash everything and play video games for the rest of my life, and hopefully it’ll be fine.” Th- but- What, andMalcolm Collins: I’m pointingSimone Collins: out to you that we’ve already seen that-he has no incentive to communicate anything other than UBI to people. C- can you imagine if Sam Altman came out and was like, “Okay, right. So we ran the experiment, we looked [00:37:00] at the data, and, you know, it looks like we actually shouldn’t give you money because it doesn’t actually make a difference”? That’s like, get a job, Al.Speaker: don’t you get a job? If you’re so hungry, why don’t you get a job? Get a goddamn job, Al. You got a negative attitude.That’s what’s stopping you. You gotta get your act together.Simone Collins: No, what he could have done- No, he can’t do that ... and soMalcolm Collins: there’s, there’s two worlds that we live in. One is the world that I positively live in, and the other is a world you posit we live in, okay? So in the world I posit we live in, Sam Altman doesn’t actually care about the fate of the vast majority of people.He cares about promoting UBI like, it, this is what I assume, because it allows him to continue to consolidate power. Remember how I said bad actors don’t really care about the effects of what they’re doing, they only care about consolidating power? So in that world, he would do something like conduct a UBI study, then lie about the results to mollify people.Now, [00:38:00] let’s assume world number two, Simone world. Simone world is Sam Altman conducts a study on UBI, but he really does want one day, Because you know what’s cheaper than giving everyone money? Autonomous drone swarms around your house, okay? But you think, okay, no, one day, a private islands, which, you know, he’ll have, right?Yeah. But your plan is, no, no, no, no, no. We live in alternate world where he actually does want some sort of stable utopia for the, the, the masses, right? So if we live in this world, what would have happened is he would have conducted that study, and the results of the study would’ve said something like, “Oh Well, it turns out that a traditional, you know, sort of blanket UBI program doesn’t appear to be, d- doesn’t appear to work, so what we need to do is try some alternate type of UBI program.Like, let’s try to innovate on this for a type of UBI that does work. That wouldn’t have freaked everyone out. That would have had most people looking at the results and being like, “Oh, this is interesting. You know, you’re [00:39:00] trying to find something. You found result number one.” Instead, you see the exact opposite, the immediate glazing over of any result or data point that doesn’t fit his stated agenda or proposed solution to the hellscape that he might be creating.Simone Collins: Look, I just told you that I agree that he doesn’t have any incentive to tell the truth about his UBI experiment and that he- Well, heMalcolm Collins: does. If, if his plan is... It’s only marginally harder for him to actually try to help people. It’s just that it’s completely irrelevant to him.Simone Collins: I don’t think it is. So you can have someone who is incentivized to amass power, amass wealth, may do things even that skirt morality and law to do so, who still- feels genuine pain when presented with the plight of human suffering.Exactly the point I’m making. Who would like to make it go [00:40:00] away. And once these people have the means to say, “Okay, AI assistant, please go build something where some of these people can live and make me feel better about this,” they will do it.Malcolm Collins: Well, and the point I’m making is they can’t do it.Simone Collins: Why can’t they?Malcolm Collins: So if you look at, and, and this is the reason I was bringing up like social welfare programs in San Francisco and stuff like that. San Francisco is a city that is full of very intelligent tech workers who also vote.Simone Collins: Yeah. But yeah, th- they’re stuck with the San Francisco residents who have all these NIMBY laws, and they’re stuck with all these policies.I don’t think they believe in supporting- The bad policies- ... things like needle distribution and,Malcolm Collins: you know. The bad policies that are implemented in San Francisco if, if you look at them, right, some of them come from the legacy residents. The vast majority come from the donors to the Democratic Party who [00:41:00] are tech moguls.That’s where the money’s coming from that’s going into these political PACs. The problem is, is that when you go to said, let’s say, Democratic tech mogul, and I know this because I know these people from San Francisco, you know these people from San Francisco. You go to them and you say this policy of giving people fentanyl on the street, it’s making their lives harder.This policy of putting homeless people in hotel is leading to externalities for residents,” and they’re just like, “Nah, nah, nah, nah, nah, nah, nah, nah, nah, nah, nah, nah, it’ll work next year.” You’re acting like they, th- and, and these people care. They, quote-unquote, care about the suffering of the poor. But they don’tSimone Collins: care- I just, I’ve yet to encounter anyone who works in the tech world in San Francisco who approves of homeless management policy in the area.Malcolm Collins: They still vote Democrat.Simone Collins: Ditto with LA. Well, yeah. But that’s, that, those are due to very complex, like, social brainwashing- Oh ... systems of the Bay Area.Malcolm Collins: This, this is what I’m talking [00:42:00] about. When you get somebody like A- Sam Altman in this sort of a position in power, right? Like suppose he accumulates all this power.He’s Sam Altman, god king of a region, and he’s distributing money to the masses in the region. Let’s suppose that the way he’s distributing money is leading to the same sorts of externalities that we see among, like, Portland or San Francisco homeless right now, right? Like massive drug problems, the problems we see in Native American communities, you know, massive crash outs, lots of problem.Okay, suppose that those are all the functional result of what they’re doing, okay? What, what Sam Altman is doing, right? And then you have us online YouTube warriors or something like that trying to get to Sam Altman to tell him, “Hey, none of these policies you’re operating are actually working.” Right?Do you think that we would be able to get in his ear, or are the people who are going to be getting in his ear the most the people who are operating the [00:43:00] failed policies, who recommended the failed policies, and who have a vested interest in him not fully grokking how much these policies are not working?Even if you add AI to the chain and he does something like asks AI, you know, “Are my policies working or not working?” You know that, like, AI is gonna gas him on this, right? AI right now will gas you on Democratic policies. If you ask AI something like you know, “Is X or Y Democratic policy around, like, poor people actually effective?”When you look at, like, AIs on political charts, you know it’s gonna support these policies that we know functionally don’t work. So why would it not still do that when he’s in god king position and now has three layers of bureaucrats around him that prevent him from fully grokking how much his plan is failing?Simone Collins: I have doubts about that. I just I have severe doubts about that. You can [00:44:00] look at, for example, coverage of the mayoral race in Los Angeles in California and see the level to whi- i- to which people are really, really fed up with the homeless policy in California, with the housing policy in California. I think there’s that that demonstrates that people aren’t necessarily ideologically locked into the system that you’re describing.Beyond that, it is parasitoidal, this, this kind of approach to governance, this culture as well. It will kill the host, and the host will die. Demographic collapse is such that these things aren’t going to be supported much longer anyway. They’re going to collapse on their own, and I don’t think AI, in the time over, the time period over which these systems are going to collapse, AI is not yet going to reach the place, in my opinion, where it will be able to sweep in and deus ex machina style, like fix [00:45:00] it.So I really think that these systems are going to fully crumble which is not the happier scenario. I’m, I, like, I don’t want this to ha- it, it, it’s bad. But these systems won’t be left. I, I do think that, that many people... When, when a communist utopia will be created, I think it will be in sovereign city state style, essentially human reserves that are created for the people who were left behind but who survived.Malcolm Collins: What you need to make AI communist, like, like post-scarcity worlds work and not lead to the same problems we have with like homelessness and stuff like that in Democrat counties and the poor in Democrat counties doing much worse is them being operated by an extremely austere and dedicated ca- caste that is ideologically aligned at the level of [00:46:00] like religious fervor.So if you had like let’s say techno-puritans end up taking over and, and, and like really dedicated techno-puritans were running everything, it could work. If you had a state with AI and somebody like the Dalai Lama, like the last Dalai Lama and the top levels of like the Tibetan, you know, that, that I’d like...Look, I don’t love everything he did. I thought he was a bit foolish on a number of issues. But that could probably work, right? Because you need to be able to cast off if, if you personally are not interested either because you were raised this way or you have an extremist ideological commitment in power accumulation or luxury or anything like that outside of, for the purpose of some wider objective function you have on reality, If, if you have that, then you can use AI to create post-scarcity.But I think without that being a person’s fundamental driver above all other drivers, [00:47:00] you cannot get true post-scarcity even with AI in sort of like how it reaches the massesSimone Collins: I guess time will tell.Malcolm Collins: Yep. Well, we’re gonna see. And we can hear in the comments what people think. But basically my th- thought is the next society we’re gonna have to transition into post demographic collapse and everything like that is one of, of, y- you know, religious fanaticism essentially.Simone Collins: Yeah.I, I mean, we can agree on that. That’s, I think- That’s, that’s more about demographic collapse than it is about artificial intelligence or communism. It has more to do with just- Yeah ... who’s going to continue to have a desire and an interest in reproducing in, in the face of n- demographic collapse, AI, and massive disruption.Malcolm Collins: So what’s the story with dinner tonight?Simone Collins: I have one batch of the pork leftover, and then after [00:48:00] that, or we... So you can either have that tonight or tomorrow night. What I could also do is just tomato soup and grilled cheese or tomato soup and quesadillas tonight if you prefer. OhMalcolm Collins: my God, quesadillas.Your quesadillas are so good.Simone Collins: That’s ‘cause they have MSG in them. That’s what I’veMalcolm Collins: been asking for. Is the batch, do you have fromSimone Collins: batchMalcolm Collins: one or batch two?Simone Collins: Batch twoMalcolm Collins: Yeah, I’ll wait on that. I’ll do quesadillas and tomato soup.Simone Collins: Yeah, batch two might be more tender since it’s leaner meat after just sitting for a couple of days loosening up.You know what I mean?Malcolm Collins: Yeah, that makes sense.Simone Collins: Theoretically.Malcolm Collins: So I’m very excited. The, the, the... what she’s talking about is slow-cooked pork belly that she’s gotten very good at making.Simone Collins: Aw, that’s sweetMalcolm Collins: of you ... and I am very excited for my que- oh, quesadillas, tomato soup, and fancy fries.Simone Collins: No. A quesadilla’s your carb.You get to choose one carb. Okay. Do you want tomato s- do you want tomato soup and curly fries?Malcolm Collins: No, [00:49:00] quesadillas.Simone Collins: Okay. You can have your curly fries with the leftover pork belly t- or, well, pork shoulder in this case tomorrow, yeah?Malcolm Collins: You’re so amazing, Simone.Simone Collins: Oh, I’m the worst, I know. Also there is not too far from us a, an arboretum that we haven’t gone to.Do you wanna take the kids there tomorrow since-Malcolm Collins: What’s an arboretum?Simone Collins: It’s gardens. It’s, it’s a, it’s a garden. They have trails. Like, it’s just a different place for us to walk.Malcolm Collins: Yeah. It’s free. Sure. You know. Oh, wow, it is close.Simone Collins: Mm-hmm. Isn’t that crazy? Never been before. Free admission.Malcolm Collins: That’sSimone Collins: the whole thingMalcolm Collins: Oh, no, that’s not what I thought it was.What was it? Arboretum?Simone Collins: Jenkins Arboretum and Gardens.Malcolm Collins: Jenkins Arboretum and Gardens.Simone Collins: Yeah.Malcolm Collins: Oh.Simone Collins: It’s really close. AndMalcolm Collins: it’s free to enter?Simone Collins: Yeah, it’s free to enter always. They have like a little kid [00:50:00] play area. I feel like the kids would really enjoy it.Malcolm Collins: Okay. If I’m making good progress on the VTuber thing, I wanna try to get the thing done before my call with Leaflet.Simone Collins: I’ve just noticed that every weekend you wanna do something special. We can do this on a different weekend day, but if we go tomorrow, it will be the least crowded.Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Okay, yeah, that makes sense. Let’s do it.Simone Collins: Okay. I’m looking forward to it. I mean-Malcolm Collins: I mean, you know tomorrow is Friday, right?Simone Collins: Yeah, but we have the kids with us all day.Malcolm Collins: Okay. And you’re sure we have the kids with us all day?Simone Collins: I’ll confirm it right now, but yeah.Malcolm Collins: Okay. All right, love you. All right. I guess we’re going straight to dinner?Simone Collins: That’s the plan. Yeah, we don’t have enough time to record another episode in like 10 minutes.Malcolm Collins: Love you. I’ll get Professor Jane ready for tomorrow.Simone Collins: Yay. ‘Cause I like the title card I created for that. Plus it’s trending. Stop thinking it’s not a big deal ‘cause it-Malcolm Collins: But yeah, you see we get the full VTuber exports now. [00:51:00]Simone Collins: Yeah. It’s really cool. You gave yourself, like, blonde hair though. Are we-Malcolm Collins: Why? Do you see me with brown hair? Is that what I’m...?Simone Collins: Yes, you have brown hair. I don’t know what to tell you.Malcolm Collins: I had blonde hair when I was a kid, and our kids have blonde hair, so.Simone Collins: So you just internalize yourself as having blonde hair forever?Malcolm Collins: Yeah, I think it looks more like me when I, when I put, make him with blonde hair.Simone Collins: That’s so funny. Like, you just kind of anchored to yourself as a teen. I wonder, that, that kind of sticks to my, my feeling like everyone has a s- like a soul age, like an age of their personality, and yours is like 11, in a good way, and mine is like 62, in hopefully a good way.And I think honestly I would be more comfortable seeing like a VTuber a- avatar of like a white-haired [00:52:00] woman or something than of anything that I looked like as a kid. So I wonder if when people make VTubers of themselves that they just key to whatever their soul age is. You know what I mean?Malcolm Collins: Yeah.Simone Collins: You want me to kick us off with this one? You like to do your own kickoffs, so.Malcolm Collins: Okay. I’ll do a kickoff with this one.Simone Collins: Okay. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit basedcamppodcast.substack.com/subscribe

In this Based Camp episode, Simone and Malcolm Collins dive into the harsh realities of aging alone through a Wall Street Journal article about Amy Kant, a 65-year-old single, childless woman facing health issues, estate planning struggles, and isolation. They explore the growing demographic of “solo agers,” the long-term consequences of choosing career and freedom over family, feminist regrets, and why so many women (and men) end up dying alone.Topics include: the breakdown of intergenerational social contracts, business opportunities in elder care/power of attorney/estate planning/unclaimed assets, pronatalist perspectives, and real listener stories of regret. Malcolm also shares new rfab.ai features like the recipe generator and discusses building liable human services.A raw, unfiltered look at demographic decline, life choices, and turning societal problems into opportunities.Show NotesCan two dark things cancel each other to create a rainbow?* Dark thing: The job market is atrocious and about to get worse* Dark thing: Millions of childless elderly people—and aged parents who moved away from and dissociated from their children—are headed into old age and death without support networks* Rainbow? There are huge business and job opportunitiesWe can use a recent Wall Street Journal article, More Americans Are Aging Alone. One Woman Told Us What It’s Like, for inspiration!(Not reading every paragraph)“Amy Kant initially thought she should name a power of attorney about 10 years ago after caring for a dying friend. She still hasn’t appointed someone to do it.The 65-year-old is single with no children, and bound up in that choice over who should make financial decisions on her behalf are other big questions that are often intensified when aging alone. How to handle eldercare? Estate planning? Where will she live in her later years?”* Company opportunity? Power of attorney for isolated old people?* Easy attorney job* Many elder law and estate planning attorneys serve as POA agents (they charge both hourly and flat fees)* You may not need to be an attorney: Some states recognize licensed/bonded “professional fiduciaries” who can be hired to act as your agent under POA, trustee, or similar roles* You could also take the CPA route:* Some planners recommend using a CPA, financial advisor, or daily money manager to handle money management and, in some cases, to serve as agent under a financial POA.* Financial planners may not advertise as “POA companies,” but they can be named personally in the document* Less relevant: Certain not‑for‑profit care management firms (staffed by nurses, social workers, and care managers) specifically market themselves as agents under POA for older adults without family.* But these won’t be able to keep up with demand* What percentage of Americans over 65 have savings sufficient to cover their costs in retirement?* Federal Reserve data, summarized by several analyses, shows that around 51–62% of households headed by someone in their mid‑60s or older have money in retirement‑specific accounts (401(k), IRA, etc.). That means roughly 4 in 10 have no retirement account at all, though they may have Social Security, pensions, or other assets.* A 2024 analysis of Federal Reserve survey data found only about 31% of Americans of all ages feel “on track” with retirement savings, implying that even among those who have savings, many believe it is not sufficient.“Kant had long cherished the freedom that came with being single. She prided herself on doing headstands in yoga and walking 5 miles a day. But lately being single has felt like a struggle, and not just because of the weighty financial decisions hanging over her head. Back surgery and a heart valve replacement in the past few years have turned her condominium outside Boston into a recovery ward.”“She spends most of her time at home these days recovering from heart surgery complications, with friends stopping by. She finds solace painting in a spare bedroom she turned into a studio, but knows she will eventually have to move to a smaller place that’s easier to get around in.”* This isn’t just a problem for aging singles; it’s a problem for aging parents who move away from and stop supporting their kids* There’s more of a social contract for kids to provide elder care for parents who provided childcare for their kids* Though admittedly 18-20% of Millennials (people between 25-34 today) live with their parents, so those parents can likely expect care“Kant is among the millions of Americans learning to navigate aging alone. Roughly 10% of the more than 125 million adults ages 50 and older in the U.S.—or at least 12.5 million people—are solo agers who live alone and have neither a spouse nor a child, according to an AARP analysis of census data. It’s a growing demographic hitting both genders, driven in part by climbing divorce rates among older Americans and a rising number of adult children becoming alienated from their parents.”* Wow—and estate planners / financial advisors are super underwhelming and pretty low tech, so someone good with AI and navigating regulatory bureaucracies can lean up“Kant didn’t set out with a master plan. In her 20s and 30s, she chose lower-paying nonprofit jobs to give priority to her art. She remembers how friends envied her freedom; while they were tied down with dinner duty, their kids’ homework, and college savings, Kant spent her evenings painting and didn’t think twice about going out on weeknights.”* This is a really great example of how the Urban Monoculture lies to people and sells an unsustainable lifestyle“She eventually earned her M.B.A. By her 40s, she was working as a fundraiser, maxing out traditional retirement account contributions to ensure her financial stability in later years.”* What are the odds that she ultimately saved more money for retirement by getting an MBA?“In her 40s she considered adoption but ultimately decided against it. Then in her 50s, after her own mother died, she went through a period of regret that she had decided against single motherhood.”* Wonder why she did not adopt (pronatalist families do all the time + women in r/fencesitters mention it all the time)* What percentage of childless elderly adults regret not having kids?* An Australian study (often cited in media summaries) found that about one quarter of child‑free women later reported regretting the decision once they were past child‑bearing age and facing old age alone“While Kant feels OK about her nest egg today, she’s worried it might shrink if the stock-market falls from its record high levels. Once she recuperates, she plans to return to part-time consulting to keep her mind active and feel productive.”* This is another reason why Gen Z and Gen Alpha have trouble getting jobs“When Kant first realized the importance of naming a power of attorney, she didn’t know whom to choose at the time, and put off the decision. She only recently identified the right friend for the role after her illnesses made clear she needed to act. Kant is planning to ask that friend soon.”* SHE HAS NOT ASKED HER YET???“A longtime college friend serves as her healthcare proxy, and Kant maintains a spreadsheet of friends to coordinate visits when she’s ill. Still, she understands the boundaries of a chosen family. Her friends have their own households to manage; some have already died. Kant also needs to draft a will and decide how to divide her assets.”* SHE HAS NOT DRAFTED A WILL“Kant has given herself a one-year deadline to complete her estate-planning documents. She is hoping she will have the mental energy needed to tackle such tasks once she is further along in her recovery.”* Dying without a valid will is called dying “intestate.”* When a single, childless person dies with a positive net worth but no will, their assets go through intestate probate and are distributed by state law to their next of kin (or, if none exist, to the state), not according to any informal wishes.* STARTUP IDEA: Make this efficient and collect a fee* The closest thing is “heir‑locator” / “finder” services and asset‑recovery firms that track down heirs to deceased people’s money (including cousins), often for a contingency fee. These operate alongside the standard unclaimed‑property system run by the states.* When someone dies and assets go unclaimed or the owner cannot be located, banks and companies eventually turn those assets over to the state’s unclaimed‑property office* Heirs can later claim them if they prove their relationship.* You can search and claim for free via tools like The National Association of Unclaimed Property Administrators (Unclaimed.org) and MissingMoney, or directly through each state’s unclaimed‑property portal.* Some private “locator services” or “finders” proactively contact people and offer to help file claims for a cut of the recovery; federal guidance explicitly notes that these companies exist and charge a fee for using public data to match people with unclaimed funds.* Many states regulate these finders (caps on fees, licensing/certification requirements); for example, Pennsylvania requires “finders” working with claimants to be certified by the Treasury, but this is easy for any competent founder to do.“Back in her art studio, Kant processes how her life is set to shift in coming years through painting. She created a series about being alone but being part of a larger world. She also made a collection of autumn leaf portraits that explore aging, decay and the search for where we belong. “I’m thinking about what my legacy will be,” she said.”* There is something deeply lonely about being the dead end of an unbroken chain of life that has lasted for thousands of years* Homo sapiens have existed for roughly 300,000 years* Life has existed on earth for over 3 billion years* Talk about breaking a streakEpisode TranscriptSimone Collins: [00:00:00] Hello, Malcolm. I’m excited to be speaking with you today ‘cause we’re bringing back our favorite series, Women Are Terrible.Speaker: What heartbreak drivel. See how the men look at her with utter contempt. Daphne, we’re going home.Women, know your limits.Simone Collins: This time, we’re talking about an old woman who chose to eschew men and children and meaning, and now she’s going to face the prospect of dying alone.Malcolm Collins: The- N- not just one. I also found a number of other transcripts from similar women-Simone Collins: You did not.Malcolm Collins: Oh, God ... that we can go across. And Simone goes through this, in her immediate thoughts, she comes to me and she goes, “Malcolm, I bet we can find a way to exploit this for money, and we can help our fans-” It’sSimone Collins: worse than that.I already got you 50 to $100 out of this.Malcolm Collins: Wait, really? Yeah.Simone Collins: Yeah. We’ll get into it, so.Malcolm Collins: Wait,Simone Collins: what? I know, I know. Anyway, let’s dive into it. So you can interject when you want to. I’m gonna be reading excerpts [00:01:00] from a recent Wall Street Journal article titled, Most Americans Are Aging Alone, and One Woman Told Us What It’s Like.And her name is Amy Kant. The article begins, “Amy Kant originally...” Or I should say Kant, like Immanuel Kant. “Amy Kant initially thought she would name a power of attorney about 10 years ago, after caring for a dying friend. She still hasn’t appointed someone to do it. The 65-year-old is single with no children, and bound up in that choice over who should make the financial decisions on her behalf o- over big questions that are often intensified when aging alone.How to handle an elder care, estate planning. Where should she live in her later years?” So already, huge company opportunity.Malcolm Collins: Yeah ...Simone Collins: if, if you’re an attorney, this is a super easy attorney job. There are mil- many like, like elder law, like literally they specialize in elder law and estate planning who also will serve as your power of attorney.In fact, I think we know people who have lawyers as their power of attorney instead of like friends or [00:02:00] family. And they’re family members. This is your people who have family- And ifMalcolm Collins: you want, by the way, an AI to do legal stuff for you to handle like the simpler stuff, on rfab.ai we have a feature called a super search, which does multiple AI internet searches with different AI engines-Simone Collins: YeahMalcolm Collins: or models-Yeah ... that then counter-check the facts of the previous model to remove any hallucinations- Yeah ... for putting together a legal document or something like that. By the way, fun fact, new feature I added today, is a recipe feature. I’mSimone Collins: so... Oh my God, it’s there? Can I check it now? Can I check it...I’ll, I’ll check it afterMalcolm Collins: this- Yeah. We’ll, we’ll check it, we’ll check it at the end of the episode. But you’re like- Gosh ... excitedtoSimone Collins: show it to you. Okay. I’m excited. But also, you, you don’t have to be an attorney to do this. Some states recognize a licensed or bonded professional fiduciary who can be hired to act as your agent under power of attorney or trustee or similar roles.So you don’t even necessarily need to be a lawyer. Though another really easy route, if you’re like, “Okay, I, I can make some easy money in here,” the tailwinds are good, as we say in the private equity [00:03:00] world. You could take the CPA route. Like, some, some certified financial planners will serve as power of, powers of attorney for their clients.So they may not advertise themselves as power of attorney companies- Get toMalcolm Collins: the sad women part. Our audience cares about that, and you can talk about how to make money at the end. This isSimone Collins: true.Malcolm Collins: We exploit old people later, we laugh at sad women first. Okay. Stick to the order of operations here, Simone.Simone Collins: Back to this, this woman of, of age. “Kahn had long cherished the freedom that came with being single. She prided herself on doing headstands and yoga and walking five miles a day. But lately, being single has felt like a struggle, and not just because of the weighty financial decisions hanging over her head.Back surgery,” I wonder if the headstands had something to do with that, “and a heart valve replacement in the past few years have turned her condominium outside Boston into a recovery ward. She spends most of her time at home these days recovering from heart surgery complications with friends stopping by.She finds solace in [00:04:00] painting in a spare bedroom she turned into a studio, but knows she will eventually have to move to a smaller space that’s easier to get around in.” I wanna point out, by the way-Malcolm Collins: That’s sad and terrifying ...Simone Collins: it’s, it’s really sad and terrifying. And it’s also not just a problem for, like, aging singles, it’s a problem for aging parents who move away from and stop supporting their kids.And I think this is a uniquely American phenomenon, and I, I think a, also a picture of really toxic culture, in that if you do not invest in your kids as adults, like you don’t provide them with childcare, you don’t provide them with support, you don’t really get involved in their life, you just sort of, “Okay, well now I’m just gonna go become an adolescent again and, like, travel the world and go have fun and, like, do my own thing,” they’re not necessarily going to feel like there’s some kind of social contract that means they need to show up for you when you hit old age.This is why all the old people in America, or so many of them, get shoved into homes, ‘cause it’s like, well- Where were you when I needed you? Like, the whole way that communities used to work was you would [00:05:00] raise your kids, and then you would hit menopause as a woman, for example, and she is a woman in this case.And one of the reasons people think women do hit menopause is that w- there’s a place in society for women who can no longer have their own kids, but instead who can be a supplemental parent to their, their children’s kids so that those children can focus on having more kids. Because it’s- Yeahit’s really hard to both be pregnant and, you know, be raising a ton of kids, so having that support’s really there. So the, the social contract is you have your kids, you help your kids raise your kids, and then they help you live more comfortably when you can’t really do much of anything else. But now it’s not just these childless people, but also just parents.They move away from their kids. They don’t take care of their kids. Though admittedly, like 18 to 20% of millennials, like, or at least people between 25 and 34 today, so like proper adults, still live with their parents. So maybe those parents could expect care, but like all the other ones, like not really.I’ll go back to the article. “Conte is among the millions of [00:06:00] Americans n- learning to navigate aging alone. Roughly 10% of the more than 125 million adults ages 50 and older in the US, or at least 12.5 million people, are solo agers who live alone and have neither a spouse nor a child, according to an AARP analysis of census data.This is a growing demographic hitting both genders, driven in part by climbing divorce rates among older Americans and a rising number of adult children becoming alienated from their parents,” to my point. My gosh, though, like also estate planners and financial advisors are incredibly underwhelming in like what they provide.Like, th- they’re not very tech-enabled. They’re pretty disorganized. You kind of have to nudge them for everything. We’ve, we’ve like encountered a bunch throughout a, a, various things. They’re not very good. Like, people canMalcolm Collins: just- So can, like use a super search on RFAB and it’ll do a better job.Simone Collins: Actually, though, like yeah, just like use AI to superpower your [00:07:00] business.RFAB has the best tools. And then, like advertise well. Make this really, like... And, and, and, and, and, and for people just searching like, “How do I find a power of attorney?” Like, it, I don’t... I think people can clean up. Anyway, back to the article.Malcolm Collins: You still need a human for power of attorney, which is where we or you come in in terms of cleaning itSimone Collins: up.That’s... Well, and this is my big thesis with AI, is that a huge portion of jobs is going to be li-Octavian Collins: I filled it up, Mommy, at the tippy top.Simone Collins: Thank you very much, my friend.Octavian Collins: Yeah. But I’ll give you... But, but, but getting that all the way at the tippy top for you costed to use all of it, so I’m sorry.Simone Collins: Then we’ll have to buy more at Tractor Supply.Octavian Collins: Yeah.Simone Collins: Oh, no. We’ll have to go back to Tractor Supply. Love you.One of my big theses with AI is that one of the big human jobs is going to be liable human. Like, there has to be a, a human- Mm-hmm ... who is going to be legally at fault for something or legally responsibleMalcolm Collins: for something. Should we create a website called Liable Human just for like-Simone Collins: Oh my God, just like, it’s, it’s like Upwork, [00:08:00] but just for liability?Malcolm Collins: For liability, yeah. Upwork for liability with AI on your- ISimone Collins: kind of love this. Liablehuman.com. We gotta look this up. We gotta look this up. Okay. But-Malcolm Collins: I like this idea ...Simone Collins: butMalcolm Collins: actually,Simone Collins: though, is that like-Malcolm Collins: Just liable human. Are you an AI... And we’ll, we’ll advertise it all to AIs. Are you an AI that needs a human to be your through fair?I’ll be your liable human.Simone Collins: Oh my God, yeah, get your liable human here. Oh my God. And we can, yeah, we can like list like, well, do you need a liable doctor? Do you need a liable driver? We’reMalcolm Collins: not talking enough about sad women progressives for re-Simone Collins: regretful choices. Back to the article. Back to the article.“Kant didn’t set out with a master plan. In her 20s and 30s, she chose lower paying nonprofit jobs to give priority to her art. She remembers how friends envied her freedom. While they were tied down with dinner duty, their kids’ homework, and college savings, Kant spent her evenings painting and didn’t anything twice about going out on weeknights.”And this is such a great example of how the urban monoculture lies [00:09:00] to people and sells an unsustainable lifestyle. I’ll continue. “She eventually earned her MBAs. By her 40s, she was working as a fundraiser, maxing out traditional retirement account contributions to ensure her financial stability in later years.”Though I have to wonder, like, if she didn’t get an MBA, would she have s- ultimately saved more money? Like, the amount of student debt people get just by living on autopilot, which i- imagine she, like, she did, right? She just sort of did what felt good or like put things off. She’s put off getting a power of attorney for 10 years.Malcolm Collins: So- By the way, so liablehuman.com is free.Simone Collins: We’re buying it.Malcolm Collins: Yes.Simone Collins: Oh my gosh, we’re buying it. We’re buying it. This could be it, Malcolm. This will be we finally make our money ... give that toMalcolm Collins: me as a vibe coding task and I can vibe code a, a website because you gave up on trying to do vibe code a website.Simone Collins: Yeah, I, I suck at it. I suck at it. Yeah, I c- I’ll be the liable human and you do the-Malcolm Collins: And I’ll do the vibe coding?Simone Collins: Yeah.Malcolm Collins: Okay. But go back to the sad women. That’s what they’re here forSimone Collins: In her 40s, [00:10:00] she considered adoption, but ultimately decided against it. Then, in her 50s, after her own mother died, she went through a period of regret that she’d decided against single motherhood.And I, I really wonder why she did not adopt because one, w- we in our paid only weekend episodes did a, a, like an overview of our fence sitters- Mm-hmm ... this subreddit on Reddit where people who are ambivalent about becoming parents post. And two of, like, the four top all-time posts that we read were written by women who were like, “Oh, I just plan on adopting when I’m retired, ‘cause then I’ve done all my fun things and I can then raise a kid without bringing a new person into the world.”So why aren’t they doing it? Like, are they just, is this all performative? Like, they, they never actually wanna take care ofMalcolm Collins: someone. Well, I think a lot of it is because they don’t actually wanna do kids. They want to imagine w- like, a world where, like, maybe they do kids, right? Yeah. One day, right? ‘Simone Collins: Cause I swear to you, the only families I see actually adopting people are these pronatalist [00:11:00] families that, like, have four of their own kids already.It’s crazy. It is. And it’s not that, like, oh, they have four kids and then they hit some fertility window and they can’t have kids anymore. It’s often in between kids that they are having themself biologically. Yeah. Like, they’ll have three kids, then two adopted, and then another that’s theirs. Like, the... Oh, like, I don’t know what’s going on.Anyway, it’s very odd. But in terms of childless adults who regret having kids, one Australian study that’s often cited when people talk about this found that one quarter of childfree women later reported regretting the decision once they were past childbearing age and facing old age alone. One in four.Malcolm Collins: So, o- o- one in four regretted raising children?Simone Collins: Yeah. Or regretted- No, re- no, no, no. Regretted not having children. NotMalcolm Collins: having children.Simone Collins: Yeah.Malcolm Collins: Okay.Simone Collins: Now, back to the article. “While Khan feels okay about her nest egg today, she’s worried it might shrink if the stock market falls from its record high levels.Once she recuperates,Malcolm Collins: she plans-” By the way, the stock market is at record [00:12:00] high levels right now for people who are like, “IRAM’s gonna ruin the economy, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.” Record high stock market.Simone Collins: Yeah. Well, and it’s, I, it’s only gonna go up. I, I, I do believe what... Remember that AI 2027 report that,Malcolm Collins: You put more money on the market when the war started, right?Simone Collins: Yeah, ‘cause it went down.Malcolm Collins: Yeah, really.Simone Collins: I was like, “Sale.” Yeah, the, and I think with AI, the stock market’s just gonna keep going up and up for a while. That’s what the AI 2027 report-Malcolm Collins: That’sSimone Collins: what I think, yeah ... initially projected. Like, it’s... And yes, it’s all gonna be concentrated in this very small number of companies, but that’s, that’s the future, people.Welcome to that anyway, she pl- once she recuperates, she plans to return to part-time consulting to keep her mind active and feel productive. So couple things there. One, this is why so many Gen Z and Gen Alpha people graduating from college or graduating from high school can’t get jobs, because all of these boomers are re-entering the [00:13:00] job force because they’re not...They’re choosing to not take care of grandkids or support their, their kids. Mm-hmm. Or they’re childless, and they either wanna stay active, or they need the money ‘cause they don’t have enough saved.Malcolm Collins: And our parents fall into this category, right? Like, we have, One of the fans of the show basically acts like a grandparent to our kids, and our parents- Yeah,Simone Collins: meanwhile our parents...Malcolm Collins: Do nothing. Yeah. Not, not, except, like, come by, and we’re like, “Yeah, great, you’re still alive.”Simone Collins: Swoop in. Swoop in. Yeah, whereas one, like, regularly-Malcolm Collins: I don’t know. I don’t know if your account is schadenfreude enough. Do, do you wanna go over, so I’ve got someone here like, “I regret belittling men.At 63, I’ve ended up alone.”Simone Collins: Oh. Yeah, we can take a break with yours, or we can finish mine and then read yours.Malcolm Collins: Yeah, finish yours, then I’ll go over it. Yeah.Simone Collins: All right. When Kant realized the importance of naming a power of attorney, she didn’t know whom to choose at the time and put off the decision. She only recently identified [00:14:00] the right friend for the role after her illnesses made clear she needed to act.Kant is planning to ask that friend soon. Kant, what are you doing?Malcolm Collins: You’re writing an article about it before acting on it. Some peopleSimone Collins: just- Seriously. It, it’s, it’s, it’s disturbing. Anyway. A longtime college friend serves as her healthcare proxy, and Kant maintains a spreadsheet of friends to coordinate visits when she’s ill.Still, she understands the boundaries of a chosen family. She, her friends have their own households to manage. Some have already died. Kant also needs to draft a will and decide how to divide her assets. Kant has given herself a one-year deadline to complete her estate planning documents.She is hoping she has the mental energy required, needed to tackle such tasks once she’s further along in her recovery. She, she is in her 60s and she doesn’t have a will. Like, we, we had our first will together when we were in our late 20s.Malcolm Collins: You’re asking us for advice, I guess. Yeah, like.Simone Collins: Like, I think we were, we lived in Palo Alto when we first made a will together.This is [00:15:00] cra- ... Like, part of, I think, not getting married is, is part of a failure to launch. Like, this is a sign of someone who really can’t get their life together, which is sad. But here’s- Like, how you, how you, how you- ... here’s, here’s where, here’s where your free money showed up, by the way. Oh, yeah. So here’s another business opportunity ‘cause come on, Malcolm, money.So if you die without a valid will, that’s called dying in intestate, interstate, I don’t know. I don’t know what, what em- emphasis on the syllable to, to make, but you, you die intestate, intestate. When a single childless person dies with a positive net worth but no will, their assets go through intestate probate, and they are distributed by state law to their next of kin.And if, if there is no one to be found, then it just goes to the state. It’s not according to any informal wishes. They can’t be like, “Oh,” like on their deathbed, like, “You can have my boom box.” Yeah. So startup idea. Yeah. Just make it really efficient to collect a fee. And here’s the thing, like, states publish [00:16:00] unclaimed funds.And right now there are businesses, they’re, they’re called, like, heir locators or finder services or asset recovery firms, that will track down people sometimes, like, e- even including cousins. Like, it, it ends up- Mm ... so first it goes, like, if you’re childless, it goes to your parents then brothers and sisters, and then grandparents, aunts and uncles, and then distant cousins.Okay. So there are... If, if it’s a really, like, wealthy person or something, there are companies that will actually try to track down these cousins and then tell them about the unclaimed funds for a fee. But again, these are like... This isn’t very glorious work, right? Yeah. So it’s not attracting the world’s best and brightest.And, and here, some entrepreneurial Basecamp listener or listeners can just use AI and a, a little bit of work to make a pretty good business that just tracks these things down. Wait,Malcolm Collins: did you already do this for people?Simone Collins: Well, so I just, I just [00:17:00] tried one out so because already you can search and claim w- like, property for free using tools.There’s the National Association of Unclaimed Property Administrators, unclaimed.org. There’s Missing Money. You could also just go to each state’s unclaimed property portal. So ‘cause it’s, it’s on a state-by-state basis. And so what I did just really quick,Cause I got distracted and Octavian was whining, I, I decided to just, like, c- check both of our names and, and some business names that I should be regularly checking for, and I do with several states that we’ve been in. Yeah. And actually I found one for you. So it’s like, it’s only 50 to $100, but, like-Malcolm Collins: Was it a bank account or something?Simone Collins: I’m not gonna disclose. I’ll tell you after. But yeah. It, it was in Texas. It had our old Blackburn address, and I was like, “Oh, that’s definitely you.” Malcolm Collins, Blackburn, there we go.Malcolm Collins: But yeah, to do this for... That, I mean, that’s not really the same, but I mean, I guess you, you made a little bit of money there.Simone Collins: But go ahead. Yeah, no, I’m, that’s not just [00:18:00] it. I’m just saying, like, in, in merely the process of, like, thinking about it and toying around with the existing tools, I made you money. There is, there’s potential here. Here’s a- Earning potential ...Malcolm Collins: better thing to do. Yeah If you’re a Base Camp listener and you don’t have a will yet, if people have forgotten about this system that we have if you put...What is our foundation’s official name on paper?Simone Collins: Oh, the Techno-Puritan Federation.Malcolm Collins: No, no, no, no. The one w- oh, that’s the legal entity that’sSimone Collins: the Techno- That’s our religion.Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Yes. But you can do the Techno-Puritan Federation or the Pragmatist Foundation, right? That’s what it’s called, the Pragmatist Foundation.Mm-hmm. And if you give it to either of these, both are non-profits, right?Simone Collins: Yeah. Yeah. One is a nonprofit and also a religion. The other one’s just a normal- Yeah ... level 1[c]3.Malcolm Collins: So if you give it to either of these nonprofits, what we do is we, If you, if you have your DNA stored anywhere, we basically will eventually put it on whatever we end up creating.If we end up creating the civilization we wanna create put it in the database with the amount of money that you ended up [00:19:00] donating from your death, right?Simone Collins: What if they have reproductive material on ice? Like I’ve s- I’m sure you’ve seen the headlines today. It’s like, “Oh, we think that Jeffrey Epstein’s sperm still belongs to his trust and estate.”Like, what are we gonna do- Yeah ... about this?Malcolm Collins: WhatSimone Collins: if- Are people gonna... Like, can they leave us their, their, their dunna in the form of-Malcolm Collins: That’s the idea, is that they leave us their DNA, and that if in the future-Simone Collins: Eggs and sperm? Are, are we, are we accepting eggsMalcolm Collins: and sperm? They can do that if they want. But the point is the DNA because it’s if we’re creating artificial worlds in a few hundred years or something like that, and they’re choosing who to populate those with, or they’re, you know, people will presumably be grateful at the civilization that we end up starting.So that’s fun. By the way, one of the things that I’ve been doing recently is looking at starting up, And I’ll, I’ll talk to you about this. And I, and we’ve been connected with Nux- Yay ... who’s even watched some of our shows. And I was like, “Hey, like, we should start up a an actual, like, think tank/nonprofit for the new right.”Like, we’re really [00:20:00] not organized in the way the rest of, like, the legacy right is organized or puts things together, and it would make sense for us to be, especially during political seasons to be able to, like... I mean, imagine, like, looping together, like, Scott Pressler, who’s a contact-Simone Collins: What do you call it?The, the tard vanguard?Malcolm Collins: What?Simone Collins: The tard vanguard? The- The tardMalcolm Collins: vanguard?Simone Collins: Yeah. Hmm, I’m trying to think. I’m just spitballing names here. Yeah, the...Malcolm Collins: You with our video games.Simone Collins: You, it, the vi- viga-Malcolm Collins: No,Simone Collins: it should be called- Vi- video game lantes, vigilantes?Malcolm Collins: You with our video games, signed, the nerds.Simone Collins: You can pry, you can pry my bouncy breasted video game avatar from my cold dead hands. Yeah, we’ll work on this. We’ll figure this out. Yeah. I’ll finish with the, the final, the final dark pair. I don’t even know how to make this light, so I can’t.Malcolm Collins: Okay. HereSimone Collins: we go. But w- this, the article ended with, “Back in her art [00:21:00] studio, Kant processes how her life is set to shift in the coming years through painting.She created a series about being alone, but being part of a larger world. She also made a collection of autumn leaf portraits that explore aging, decay, and the search for where we belong. ‘I’m thinking about what my legacy will be,’ she said.” Which sucks, because she doesn’t have a legacy. Like,Malcolm Collins: she lives- Yeah, you’re looking to be scaring young people out of havingSimone Collins: kidslike, we are, like, there is, there is a, I mean, depe- if you wanna like do it with like homo sapiens, like 300,000 a year, or if you wanna do, do life, three billion year, like, unending marathon relay game, or like, chain letter. And you, you, you’re letting it die. Like, that’s, that is your legacy, is the termination-Malcolm Collins: For all of human civilization, people who replicate itSimone Collins: of three billion years of life fighting, suffering to continue, to carry [00:22:00] on. And you, your legacy is, “I’m gonna snuff that out. I don’t care. I’m not gonna try. I’m not even going to try.” That’s, that’s her legacy. And, and, and, and, and of course her- I thought about it, darling ... dead body is, is gonna be found in her condo, and, you know, it’s, who knows how old it’s gonna be, ‘cause who knows how her spreadsheet of friends is really gonna pan out.Malcolm Collins: EatenSimone Collins: by her cat. And, and some government appointed cleanup crew, which of course, another opportunity is, is cleanup crews for houses with rotting bodies of infirm- Yeah, robots can’tMalcolm Collins: do that yet ... oldSimone Collins: people. Yeah, I know. I’m, that’s true. Although, did you hear that there’s there’s this new company that is deploying housekeepers in New York City with cameras on their heads to train future cleaning robots?It’s kinda fun. I- Oh my God ... I, I like that idea.Malcolm Collins: So, so, while I’m reading one, ‘cause I’ll, I’ll read a story too- Oh mySimone Collins: God. Oh, that would be really cool if, like, I could make money cleaning my own house by wearing a camera on my head while I did [00:23:00] it. Oh. Can we... I need to reach out to that startup.Malcolm Collins: Yeah, see, yeah.Simone Collins: Dude, because that’s, that’s way more efficient. It’s just why are they hiring, like, making a cleaning business when they could just be like, “Hey, housewives, can you just, can you just wear this, this dash cam on your forehead?”Malcolm Collins: And we could create, like, a network of housewives to make money while they’re cleaning.Simone Collins: Oh, my God. Look, we’re on, we’re on a roll,Malcolm Collins: okay? Ask them if they would be up for this, ‘cause we probably have enough housewife fans that we could put together a genuine network doingSimone Collins: this. Dude, and, like, we’re doing it anyway, you know? Yeah. Like, ugh.Malcolm Collins: Oh, my God. I mean- Yeah, Liable Human. This can be part of theSimone Collins: liablehuman.com.Liable Human. We got the cleaning, the, the, the, the clean cam. I mean,Malcolm Collins: I- But okay, so when I start-Simone Collins: Yeah, you do your thing. You do your- ...Malcolm Collins: talking here, you make a note to yourself about liablehuman.com. Yeah. And go to rfab.ai- And clean cam ... and try out, it’s at the bottom right now, the recipe feature. Okay. I just tried it on the site.It seems to be working. I wanna get your takeaway on [00:24:00] this. But okay. So this one is from 2025. “I regret belittling men. At 63, I’ve ended up alone. I’d always imagined I would end up married with two wonderful children, living in a house in the countryside. I have paid a hefty price for my so-called liberation.A few years ago, I went to Italy with my then boyfriend, James. As we sat tucking into the plate of frutti di mare at a seasideSimone Collins: restaurant-” Ugh, frutti di mare’s such a gross dish. Girl.Malcolm Collins: What is it?Simone Collins: It’s just, like, a bunch of seafood thrown on top of pasta.Malcolm Collins: Sounds gross, yeah.Simone Collins: Yeah, gross.Malcolm Collins: I struck up a conversation with the waiter in Italian.Of course she has to mention that, right? OhSimone Collins: my God. Oh my God. Please let it be... Michael, if you’re listening, I’m so sorry, but, like, the way you speak Italian.Malcolm Collins: Oh my God. That’s my dad, by the way ... yeah ... who always has to speak in Italian to waiters.Simone Collins: But, like, in, in, like, the c- the way that, like, kids get angry about, where you’re like, it’s like- No,Malcolm Collins: it’s annoying because he does it when he goes to Italian restaurants in the United [00:25:00] States. He does- WithSimone Collins: the affectation, but without the correct accent. Like, that’s, that’s the one thing. CanMalcolm Collins: you imagine as a kid how embarrassed you would be if every time your dad took you to an Italian restaurant, when the waiterSimone Collins: would- Prego, the fruit de mer.Yeah, it’s cold ...Malcolm Collins: clearly an American, he would try to order in a... It’s literally out of a- God, what’s that fricking guy who does those movies? Exci-Simone Collins: the guy who does the movies?Malcolm Collins: No, the, the guy’s names. Of course. Out of, out of this guy’s movies, like the one where it ends and it’s, like, he died and they change his tombstone to say, like, he died saving a bunch of people from a sinking ship.... It... Come on. You know the movies I’m talking about. They have a huge style to them. TheSimone Collins: movies with WesMalcolm Collins: Anderson- The Royal Tenenbaums he did ... I know theSimone Collins: answer to that question. The movies with the style to them is Wes Anderson.Malcolm Collins: Yeah, the Royal Tenenbaums. Who’s the, who’s the guy I’m thinking of?Simone Collins: Wes Anderson.Malcolm Collins: Yeah, Wes Anderson. My dad is, like, literally out of Wes Anderson. Like- No ... in a Wes Anderson movie, I can see a dad who always sat down and startedSimone Collins: ordering- [00:26:00]Malcolm Collins: Okay. Okay, maybe ... in Italian, and everyone would look. The movies with the style. Just lets you sit in the cringe.Il salmone, per favore, con una spruzzata di limone e una spruzzata di misteroSimone Collins: Stewing in it a little bit. Yeah.Yeah, like some little shrimp inMalcolm Collins: a fruit de mer. Okay. By the, by the way, did you get... Have you gotten to the recipe generator yet?Simone Collins: I, I’m sorry. I’m looking through the litany of features. Oh, there it is at the very bottom between-Malcolm Collins: I told you, yeah, at the bottom. Come on.Simone Collins: I’m so- whoa.Malcolm Collins: Are you, are you putting it in right now? Yeah, yeah.Simone Collins: Well, I mean, where do I... Oh, so you can choose cuisine by nation or region, so I’m gonna choose... Ooh, well, not Mongolian. I don’t want fricking yak butter. Was that... Oh, no, that’s Tibetan, right? That’s... Your mom, like, basically didn’t eat anything she chose so- It’sMalcolm Collins: not.Just choose one, Simone.Simone Collins: Oh, well, g- aw. Okay, Shanghai, because we just, we just made something that was sort of Shanghai based. And then, Ooh, [00:27:00] Shanghai soul food fusion. Oh, yeah. Okay. And then w- meal type dinnerMalcolm Collins: You don’t have to choose every option,Simone. You can justSimone Collins: choose- Oh, time available under 15 minutes and for one person ‘cause I always just make food for you.And interesting. Th- there’s no, like, there has to be meat in it. I guess I’ll just do high protein though.Malcolm Collins: No, if you want to, you can choose the type of meat in it, or you canchooseSimone Collins: vegetarian. Oh, that’s true. Oh, yeah, flavor profile, spicy All right. Okay, creative mode. Ooh, dish from the distant future?Dude, fantasy tavern dish. Historical recre- ha. For- forbidden combination. Break the rules. C- well, but I, yeah, but I, I chose my, my regions. Okay, I’m just gonna click ... Ooh, generate recipe image too. Okay, generate six recipe ideas.Malcolm Collins: Okay, you, you justSimone Collins: unclicked- Okay, Shanghai-based soul food ...Malcolm Collins: Simone. You didn’t unclick generate recipe i- i- image.It was auto-clicked, right?Simone Collins: I know. I didn’t unclick it.Malcolm Collins: Okay.Simone Collins: Don’t worry, [00:28:00] I am tard, but I am not Treytard. I am just-Malcolm Collins: Is it, is it generating now? Do you seeSimone Collins: the nice- Oh, petite tard. Okay ...Malcolm Collins: animation and everything?Simone Collins: Ooh, okay. Okay. So spicy Shanghai rice cake stir fry, quick spicy red braised pork skillet, fiery crab and greensI hate, I can’t do, and I don’t like okra. Chili sweet potato and pea hash, and blazing pork and crab noodle toss. So we’re going with the quick spicy red braised pork skillet. Generate full recipe.Malcolm Collins: And take a screenshot of the recipe when you get it so I can put it here for- Mm ... when people areSimone Collins: watching the episode.Mm-mm. Yeah.Malcolm Collins: Oh, my God.Simone Collins: We’reOctavian Collins: spinning it.Simone Collins: Ooh. Tell me about this woman and her fruitti di mare with James, right? Was it James? Was it- Okay ... John?Malcolm Collins: Back in the hotel, he asked me why I had ignored him. By speaking in a language he didn’t understand- Oh. ... he said I managed to make him feel small. I could see his point.[00:29:00] I spent quite a while chatting away, oblivious to how he must be feeling. I then went on to joke about how that as an Italian speaker I would order for us after he didn’t know what osso buco meant. I was showing off. Clearly, that’s kind of a jerk thing to do. I didSimone Collins: not want osso buco. Ew, ...Malcolm Collins: I, I know, right?It wasn’t the first time something like that had happened to me. I was always taken- Oh,Simone Collins: Malcolm, this looks really good. Oh, my God.Malcolm Collins: Right. Did it fully output with the picture and everything?Simone Collins: Yeah. It’s, it’s got the steaming ... Mm, you can see the little pepper flakes on it.Malcolm Collins: But also look at how it formats everything.Simone Collins: No, this is really nice, and like, but the enticing ... It, it gives you, like, this like a food blog style image output.Malcolm Collins: Oh, my God. And then it gives you a food blog with a separated menu section, time section, cooking section, and then at the end we run another internet search capable AI-Simone Collins: Nutrition per serving?Malcolm, you love me.Malcolm Collins: Right. Aw. And then at the end we run [00:30:00] another search AI on the output of the first search AI just to correct anything that might be wrong or need nuance within the initial output.Simone Collins: Malcolm, are you publishing all these results in an indexable part of our website that becomes rich?No, butMalcolm Collins: that’s a really good idea.Simone Collins: Mm-hmm. I think you really, I think you should so that things like Google searches will point to it ‘Cause this is great fusion, like, recipes.Malcolm Collins: Yeah. And then people will make their, their cursed recipes and stuff like that to try to make a big indexing of it.Simone Collins: A drink pairing?Oh my gosh. A chilled off-dry riesling? I mean, gross, but, like, I get it actually with this. Or unsweetened iced tea with lemon. Food safety tips. Oh my gosh.Malcolm Collins: Didn’t I go over the top with the creation of this feature?Simone Collins: You went, you went super over the top, but I amMalcolm Collins: here for it. Because now I’m getting better at making these sorts of things, I immediately was like, “Ooh, how can I make this...”And I don’t know if you noticed, but next to this button we also put-Simone Collins: Refrigerate [00:31:00] leftovers within two hours. You... Food safety. Avoid overcrowding the pork so the pork- the pans so the pork sears rather than steams. Yes, okay.Malcolm Collins: Ooh. I also made a feature for this that well, one I’m gonna add, ‘cause I just had the idea to add it, is a feature where you put in, like, “I have too much of X ingredient in my fridge, I need to use it all,” or put in, like, “I have X, Y, and Z in my refrigerator, I wanna get rid of it.”Simone Collins: Yes.Yes. Oh my gosh, Malcolm.Malcolm Collins: And I’ll add something that’s, like, meat-based in general dish, right?Simone Collins: Have I mentioned I love you?Malcolm Collins: But I don’t know if you noticed, but next to this, the other new feature I made was for people doing D&D campaigns or, like, any sort of campaigns.Simone Collins: I saw that, yeah. You canMalcolm Collins: put in the rule book and it will just, like, auto help you with the next turn with your players.Simone Collins: Bless you, sir. You’re doing God’s work.Malcolm Collins: Yeah, right? But I just made this stuff because somebody on the Leaflet stream- Wait, you’re- ... wanted that, and I was like, “Sure, I can make that.”Simone Collins: For a Leaflet fan, anything. Come on. Yeah ... yeah. I, Okay, tell me about this woman whose, whose [00:32:00] boyfriend- Okay, okay ... is un- inse- The...So one, this guy can just take a hike anyway because his reaction was to feel insecure when she spoke Italian intolerably as an American in a restaurant- Yeah ... instead of, like, to feel embarrassed.Malcolm Collins: Okay, so anyway.Octavian Collins: Can I tell youMalcolm Collins: something IOctavian Collins: learned?Simone Collins: Okay, you can tell them what you learned. Hold on.Octavian’s gonna tell us what he learned.Octavian Collins: Here’s another fun fact of the day. You can make a window by your- self if you had some, if you had some, like a sand hammer glass, and then you can, like, melt it, and then let it cool, and then get, window mold, and then let it dry for a couple of days, and then ta-da, you get your own window.Simone Collins: Love you, buddy.Malcolm Collins: Fun fact. If you have sand- Yes ... melt it into glass and make yourSimone Collins: own window.Octavian Collins: Another fun fact of the day. It’s, Did you know you can sew a shirt by yourself? Hello, hello? Like this one, likeSimone Collins: this big. It’s true. Yeah, you know, [00:33:00] people even made their own fabric in the past, Octavia.Octavian Collins: Yeah, .Malcolm Collins: That’s the type of useful fact- Phew ... you’re getting from him. Yeah. With us it’s just how to make money from people. Yeah, ew ... but let’s look up, Can you just tell me more things?We’ll, we’ll go over this later. No,Simone Collins: no, no, buddy, you gotta work.Malcolm Collins: To do this attorney thing. Tell me more things. But I, I wanna continue here. Okay. Can I just tell you more things? I’m convinced the reason I’m still booking a table for one at the age of 63 instead of having settled with a significant other is because like so many women of my generation, feminism has ruined my love life.Instead of empowering us, those ideals of second wave feminism made us believe that marriage and domesticity were to be avoided like the plague, and that men were competitor rather than partners. I might have a successful career as a writer and broadcaster, but I never had children, underlying bolded, or been married, and my longest relationship lasted eight years.I regret this. I always imagined I would end up married with two wonderful children and living in a house at the countryside. I’ve paid a hefty price for my so-called liberation. I was 17 and a pupil at Golders and Leigh Mire, one of Britain’s most academic institutions, when I [00:34:00] was introduced to the women’s liberation movement.It offered so much hope and excitement, and we spent our lunch breaks soaking up feminist mantras of Geramir Greer and Betty Friedman. Act like the men they bribed- Betty, Betty Friedman? ... as they burned their bras and demolished... I, Betty Friedman. I don’t know. Betty Fr- some, some Jewish name, Betty Friedman.A bra is, and demonized housework in the family. And now here I’m not saying that, like, Jews are a problem. Clearly this got to a Jewish woman. Like, th- this was a Jewish man who ended up not getting a wife ‘cause she burned her bra or whatever, right? I, obviously this is what men wanted them to do in the first place, like yeah, go braless.What, what are you doing, you know? End up destroying their breasts at like the age of 30.Simone Collins: I don’t think you destroy your breasts- Oh, yeah ... by not wearing support.Malcolm Collins: If you, if you, if you don’t wear support your breasts start sagging much faster.Simone Collins: Do they actually? Hmm.Malcolm Collins: From what I’ve heard, yes.Simone Collins: We, we can fact check this.Malcolm Collins: Why don’t you, why don’t you fact check that?Simone Collins: G- Grok.Malcolm Collins: By the time I was 25 clutching a degree in French and [00:35:00] Italian I was a bright, confident feminist keen to flex her intellectual muscles and to never let a man get the last word. I read Nietzsche for fun, and my bedside table was always buckled beneath the weight of substantial intellectually challenging books.God, sheSimone Collins: sounds so annoying. Nietzsche and Betty FriedmanMalcolm Collins: Right? But not many feminists read niche, I’ll tell you that.Simone Collins: No, n- Not wearing a bra does not cause breasts to sag earlier, according to the Cleveland Health Clinic, but also via Grok. This is a common myth without strong scientific backing.Breast sagging, medically called ptosis, happens primarily due to natural factors, and bra wearing habits have little to no proven long-term impact on it. Besides, Malcolm, I don’t wear a bra.Malcolm Collins: Oh, you don’t?Simone Collins: I wear stays, though, which is the, the OG bra. TheMalcolm Collins: OG bra?Simone Collins: Yeah.Malcolm Collins: Oh, my gosh. So, we... I... We keep finding that Leaflet and you dress in the same outfits.Like, she wears these what, what do you call them, at nights? Like, the medieval outfits.Simone Collins: A, a chemise.Malcolm Collins: Chemise. But th- th- wh- wh-Simone Collins: That’s [00:36:00] just the, the universal undergarment. This, this is a chemise.Malcolm Collins: She...Simone Collins: You looked like the- W- we literally found that we shop at the same stores. The women from my n- She has...She’s a woman of taste, okay?Malcolm Collins: And like- ... medieval plays, and now I realize that in real life she also dresses like a medieval woman, and I’m like- Well, that’s like, it, it, the best thing is- ... this is, we gotta get this new, like, nerd right. We all dress like medieval women, it’s not just you. That’sSimone Collins: like- I think that’s a, that’s, it’s just a continuation of that...I think we even did an episode on it, when, like, when conservative anon accounts got doxxed, it just turned out that they were, like, attractive, cool people who are, like, well-adjusted. And I think it’s the same with VTubers. Like, were they to be unmasked, it will turn out that they were, they are attractive, cool people who actually look as cool, if not cooler, than their VTuber avatars.Malcolm Collins: Right. I wanna, I wanna start the trend. I like this trend. All of the, like, new right women, our thing is, like, we all dress m- like medieval fantasy people. Like we’re, we’re princesses, right? That’s what everybody wants to be anyway.Speaker 4: I just realized that [00:37:00] in real life, like new right women are beginning to dress like the characters that the left is freaking out about and calling a fetish from the Knight’s Path, where they’re just like normal medieval females who are sweet and kind, and the left is like, “Oh my God, how could you do this?This is a weird, perverted fetish.” , Which I like. I, I don’t mind. I don’t mind. We might do a whole episode on thisMalcolm Collins: Ah. And then it will become cool, and progressives won’t be able to dress that way anymore, and they’ll get all annoyed.That, and when we’re younger, we all dress like Emilia, okay? The, the art hoe look- So youSimone Collins: go from, like, art hoe to- ...Malcolm Collins: conservative guys are into it, right? I love it when, like, Totally, like, Coping ShortFatOtaku did a piece where he’s like, “Oh you know, no, none of these conservative art hoe girls actually exist.”And I was like, “Simone dressed exactly like that when I met her.” A lot of the conservative girls now who are on the right, like The Nerd Right- And did dress likeSimone Collins: Emilia. Oh, my God,Malcolm Collins: yeah ... originally dressed like Emilia. You think Leaflet didn’t dress like Emilia at some point in her life? You know, like, come on, people.Look,Simone Collins: we’ve all... If we’ve been in America we’ve- [00:38:00]Malcolm Collins: And, and we, the only reason they’re not dressing like that now is because it’s not cool to dress like that when you’re in your 40s. Now you go for the medieval phase. Okay. By the time I was 25, clutching a degree in French and Italian, what a pointless degree, I was a bright, confident feminist keen to flex her intellectual muscle.Oh, no, I’m gonna read you whenever that.. For, at first men loved my wit and intelligence. “You’re such a breath of fresh air. I love talking to you. You’re the first woman I’ve met who stimulates me,” they’d trill. Trillwhat type of guy says that to somebody? And if you have a degree in French and Italian, what interesting thing could you possibly have to say? But anyway,Simone Collins: that was- Well, I thought you said breast of fresh air, so that, I thought that was the dead giveaway,Malcolm Collins: but. Oh, yes. That was until I had lectured them for the umpteenth time on the virtues of modernism.Mm-hmm. “You’ll never win an argument against Kate,” one man said as he watched me outsmart yet another potential lover. Subtext, don’t bother. No, what he meant by that is you’ll never back down from an argument. No one always wins an argument. Even [00:39:00] between Simone and I, she wins quite frequently.Simone Collins: In a- Nice try, MalcolmMalcolm Collins: You do.You do. Oh, yeah, I, you, you joke that I don’t even bet with you anymore because I’m so frequently wrong.Simone Collins: That’s just because the only time I will say, “Do you wanna put money on it?” is when I know I’m gonna win. And you figured that out reallyMalcolm Collins: quick ... men had called me intimidating, scary, opinionated. I now see that not only was I trying to prove I was their intellectual equal or superior, I was treating every encounter with a man like he was my adversary.If a date brought me a bouquet of flowers, instead of smiling and putting them in a vase of water, I would bite their head off. Can’t you buy me some nice olive branch or balsamic vinegar? Oh, sorry, some nice olive oil or a balsamic vinegar. What a, what a jerk thing to say to somebody- Malcolm ... who bought you flowers.Simone Collins: That’s true. That’s true. But, like, you buy me popcorn instead of.Malcolm Collins: I fed with my eye roll to one hapless suitor as he stood, wilting faster than the fragrant offering he held in his hand.Simone Collins: Oh.Malcolm Collins: He had bothered to think about making me [00:40:00] happy, and I crush him for it. And flowers are expensive, too. By the way- It’s true.Simone Collins: Flowers are su- they’re, they’re a costly signal. Like, the whole point of giving flowers is that they are useless, but you choose to give them to someone anyway. Yeah,Malcolm Collins: people.Simone Collins: Like, the, the, the gift that, that is famously terrible for a man to give to his lady partner is something that’s useful, like a vacuum.Oh, no, that’s a terrible gift, and here she is scoffing at him. Of course, if he gave her something useful, he’d be like, “Oh, what? You expect me to cook you something with olive oil?” Like, there is no winning with this kind of ideology. But she’s come to recognize that in her dotage.Malcolm Collins: By the way, if you wanna make your w- life hap- wife happy, I learned a new thing that I can do to make Simone happy.Simone Collins: Oh,Malcolm Collins: my God. And so you guys can do this for your wives. If you ever see dust accumulating in a corner or on a stair corner or anything like that, clean it up for them while they’re doing something else, and they will be very appreciative because- I justSimone Collins: saw what you did today in that, right over there.Thank you.Malcolm Collins: Yeah. I place so much importance on finding a, [00:41:00] quote-unquote, “strong man who can match me” that I forgot men were people with feelings. I, I, indeed I forgot I had feelings and hid my softness. No, the thing is, is she wanted a strong man, but she also saw it as a red flag or a negative sign if a guy was better than her, right?Mm-hmm. Like, a guy can’t just be like, “Yeah, I know more than you.” And Simone admitted that fairly early in our relationship that I just know more than her about most things, and that’s okay.Simone Collins: It’s okay.Malcolm Collins: I now see that I had longed to be loved, but I was scared to be vulnerable. I was using my sharp mind to protect my all-too-soft heart against yet future rejection.Another thing I regret deeply is the tally of my one-night stands when I was younger. I distinctly remember thinking it would be uncool to say no to men I met at parties or dated, but I struggled to enjoy it. There was always a disconnect. This was abundantly clear the morning after. As I lay there waiting for a sign of affection, he would be singing the triumphs of Had Her song in the shower.A [00:42:00] quick cheerio and he was gone. While I pretended to enjoy it, I felt uncomfortable about sex so early on. I felt sad and used. Sorry, I felt empty and used. My generation of women were encouraged to have sex like a man. In other words, have casual sex, and it backfired. Fast-forward to now, the idea that women are different from men, that casual sex can be harmful, is gaining traction.In her last book, A Guide to Sex in the 21st Century, the young adult adaptation, Louise Perry explores how the sexual revolution impacted women negatively and led to unwanted consequences. Ooh, Louise Perry is impacting feminists now. I mean, Louise Perry has always been a feminist. We interviewed her.Well,Simone Collins: she, well, yeah, she started out from a- She was on the show ... just like us, from a progressive perspective, and I- she’s still, her primary audience, at least the last time we, like a couple years back, was progressives who started to have thoughts-Malcolm Collins: Uh-oh ... about vaccines Don’t have thoughts, ‘cause then you’re not a progressive anymore, right?Mm. You get kicked out. I mean, she’s seen as a far-righter at this point ‘cause she [00:43:00] also, you know, questions the trans agenda. Well,Simone Collins: but she’s one of the far-righters who has, like, an audience primarily among far-righters, progressives who are like, “Look at me being naughty. I’m going to read Louise Perry.”Malcolm Collins: I al- I always thought her, like, core audience was lesbians who are pissed off that trans people keep hitting on them and invade their spaces.That’s sort of like most of the people on her show I get the impression of, is like Louise Perry- Well, ‘cause that’s like the one group of, of women who when she’s ... Of like her core thing is like women aren’t actually into being choked, and I’m like, “They’re not actually into like a big strong man.” I’m like, “Yeah, it’s because of men that the monster effer category at Barnes & Nobles is like three rows.”Simone Collins: Is, is a category. Uh-huh.Malcolm Collins: Yeah, it’s because of men that like 50 Shades of Gray was a bestseller. I believe you, Louise Perry. Mm. But I think like the one cate- b- well, I mean you, you gotta have your head in the sand a bit as a woman to not like recognize that like even if you’re not turned on by something, clearly the majority of women are, right?You know, or there’s a big audience out there for it. But [00:44:00] yeah. How can people make money off of being other people’s power of attorney? Like, how do they advertise themselves for this? How do they find people who want this? What’s your... Because Simone, ‘cause she does have Jew DNA, so she got, like, plus five in mercantil- mercantilism- Mercantilismas- as- as being born half Jew. Oh, no. By the way, she’s not half Jew. She’s one-eighths Jew, but it’s, it’s matrilineal, so they consider it,Simone Collins: So then I’m all Jew. I’m a Jewess.Malcolm Collins: For- for JewsSimone Collins: AccordingMalcolm Collins: to ... but yeah. That- that- that unfortunately, the half Jew started her into, she heard about sad women and then thought, “How can I make money off of them?”So- Dude,Simone Collins: well, you’re welcome for the 50-plus dollars I got you today.Malcolm Collins: So go and help people here. Now, how do they set this up to exploit people? And if you’re a Base Camp fan, you can always use us as your power of attorney. We’ll make some easy way to handle this. So- Well,Simone Collins: I mean, sometimes you have to be present, so it is important to be able to find.But I think the- WeMalcolm Collins: can go and be present if somebody’s, like, dying or needs the decision, Simone. [00:45:00]Simone Collins: Yeah. Yeah. Fair enough. We can. I- I would... N- I mean, the... Go to my show notes. I will put them in the show notes. Just, like, look at your specific state if you’re in the United States at what the regulations are around what you need to- to qualify, how you, how you might need to be certified to become a power of attorney.And then figure out the best way in your state to make yourself an easy search result when people in your state search for power of attorney.Malcolm Collins: And you can vibe good this, right?Simone Collins: You can totally vibe good this. And then what you need to do is just make yourself really easy to reach via phone, ‘cause- The boomer generation that is going to need this service really likes just picking up their phone and calling people possibly just showing up at addresses.We know this from experience. So I think if you can have a, an address where people can just show up and a phone number, at least a phone number that people can just [00:46:00] call and you can answer, I think you could start... And you’re properly certified for your state, even if you need to be. You might not need to be, and you don’t even need to be a CPA or an attorney necessarily.Just start offering it, and, and I mean, you, you need to be ready to commit to this to actually follow through. Some states like in Pennsylvania will put a cap on certain services related to stuff I brought up in this, like in terms of recovering finances. Our state, Pennsylvania, will cap how much you can charge in terms of like finders fees in helping people recover this money that has been left by distant cousins who didn’t have any friends or family in wills.But just look it up. Use, use, use Malcolm’s super search feature on rfab.ai and figure it out, and then create a website.Malcolm Collins: Another thing that you can use us for, by the way, if we’re thinking of services we can offer to people- Yeah ... is if you’re getting married to somebody, you know how we have like our marriage contract?Mm-hmm. One of our early episodes is on how to put one of those together. If you need a line in the [00:47:00] contract about disagreements with a partner that involves some form of third-partySimone Collins: intervention- Oh, an arbitrator.Malcolm Collins: Yeah ... yeah, and you’re like, “Malcolm and Simone seem fairly reasonable as an arbitrator,” we’re happy to serve that role where we just say, basically we make the decision when both of you can’t agree on something.Simone Collins: Make a call. Yeah. Yeah, we, we have, We’ll just ... we have arbitrators in in our marriage contract specifically related to the fat clause. That’s the one place where we have arbitrators.Malcolm Collins: Oh, who’s the arbitrat- Oh, is it my mom?Simone Collins: It’s, it’s y- your brother and, and- Oh ... our sister-in-law. Because they, they are good, like, they’re on the more judgment...But they, neither of them would lie about either of us getting a littleMalcolm Collins: chunk. Oh, no, they would totally be honest about it. Yeah. They’d be like- Yeah ... “Yeah, you’re, you’re chubsters.”Simone Collins: Yeah. They would enjoy, they would enjoy saying it, so.Malcolm Collins: If you don’t have a will, get a will. Put us in it. The, the-Simone Collins: Yeah, but also exploit the reality that apparently many aging, childless, parentless, family, friendless old people are going to [00:48:00] die with assets.Of course, many of them are gonna die with negative net worths, but you could potentially make some money from this too. So yeah, take lemons, turn them into lemonade. It’s doable, and I love you very much, Malcolm.Malcolm Collins: I love you too, Simone.Simone Collins: Oh. Which one would you like to do next?Malcolm Collins: All right.Simone Collins: Did you watchMalcolm Collins: the end of Euphoria?Simone Collins: No. I’m gonna watch it tonight. It’s my treat.Malcolm Collins: Okay, okay, then I won’t mention anything.Speaker 9: For those wondering, the first thing that came up when I searched the Christian family from Euphoria was some other person being with him, um, at the end of the showSimone Collins: Yeah, don’t. Dude, I mean, like the, the previous episode was oh oh. It’s like I- I,Malcolm Collins: well, I can guess it- ... can’t even ... because I, I got more information than you have from looking up clips of the family, the rural family.Simone Collins: Oh, did she go back to them? Don’t knowMalcolm Collins: I won’t, I won’t say anythingSimone Collins: I hope she doesn’t like die trying to get there.Oh, geez. Okay, well The,Malcolm Collins: the [00:49:00] scene with them when I put it on, the, the, the first scene with them is very sweet. Isn’t it? ... where... Well, it’s sweet, but also in that sort of sad progre- Like, when the other girl asks her why she wouldn’t trade positions with her, she just looks upset and then turns up the radio.Simone Collins: Yeah, like she doesn’t explain, “Oh, well, I’ve been turned into a drug mule, and like all my friends are miserable, and...” Yeah, we need to be more clear about what’sMalcolm Collins: going- I, and I really feel this w- like when progressives come after us, like this recently had a negative podcast on us. And I’m like, “Bro, we really are like just trying to help you,” right?Like, I love their like, their marriage. Well, yeah, they seem to love each other, but they never talk about how hot the other one is and how they want to like jump each other’s bones and stuff. They, they just seem to respect each other. And it’s like- Wow ... maybe you shouldn’t structure your marriage off of that.That’s a bad way to structure things.Simone Collins: Yeah, no, read, read my early diaries though and it’s, it’s pretty clear,Malcolm Collins: Oh, in the early days. Yeah, you know.Simone Collins: Look, [00:50:00] if we weren’t as sleep deprived and stressed as we are right now, I think we would just constantly have that on our minds too. But guess what?We’ve given ourselves bigger things to worry about.Malcolm Collins: Well, I, I was almost thought of doing an episode pointing out that like when you have kids, babysitters are just prostitutes with extra steps because- TheySimone Collins: are though, ‘cause you’re paying that person for their time in order to have sex.Malcolm Collins: So that you have time to sleep- Yeahwith your partner, right?Simone Collins: Mm-hmm.Malcolm Collins: You know? Mm-hmm. Yeah. Because otherwise you got the baby in the room and everything like that, you know.Simone Collins: Yeah, gross.And no, having it, like I... You can’t get turned on if your baby is in another room crying. I don’t know how that works for people. I also though don’t know how people have sex in front of their pets which apparently happens a decent amount.Malcolm Collins: Yeah, that sounds really gross. Like the, the pet is either looking at you or not looking at you. Both- ISimone Collins: mean, I could handle fish, like goldfish or something.Malcolm Collins: Oh yeah, I can understand that. I’m thinking a dog obviously, right? Yeah. Like obviously- Like a dog understands what’s [00:51:00] happening. The, you know, it’s like-Simone Collins: Yeah, like a cat might not pay that much attention, so maybe they just be like asleep in a corner and you’d like contextualize them as more like a pillow, you know?You can kind of write it off. Anyway.Malcolm Collins: Oh my God fun. By the way, the episode that I prepped for today is why we stopped believing women slash why did Democrats stop caring about grape. IsSimone Collins: this your, is this your ass mogging video or not?Malcolm Collins: No, it’s not that one. I, I like the ass mogging one- There’s another onebut like I can just riff on that topic anytime. This one is more-Simone Collins: Okay. Fair ...Malcolm Collins: in depth.Simone Collins: Yeah. Speaking of pillows, like my highlight of yesterday, I mean, you know, aside from like our meaningful life and everything, was I saw one of our pillows that your mom gifted to us, I- on, on, on the Nancy Drew show, like that HBO stupid fantasy mystery show.I was like, “Oh my God, we have that pillow.” I got so excited. [00:52:00] Those stupid rough ass pillows that your mom got for us. You know, the, the, the like burlap ones.Malcolm Collins: Yeah.Simone Collins: Oh, anyway. I, I’ll get usMalcolm Collins: started. Love you, sweetheart.Simone Collins: Life is delightful.Speaker 5: no, no.Are the apples wet? They, they have a lot. All applesNo, no, apples are just naturally a bit wet,the dust- Come on, Toasty ... thatSpeaker 8: you’re always so worried about, right?Speaker 5: Torsten, eat an apple. What are you doing?She didn’t lick them allSpeaker 6: I want it back to zoo. It’s true.Speaker 5: I know it’s true. I, I promise you she- Jackson,Speaker 6: you were-Speaker 5: See, Tyne [00:53:00] didn’t. That would be a really long thing for her to do, Josie YouSpeaker 8: make her too much fun. We went in the- This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit basedcamppodcast.substack.com/subscribe

In this episode of Based Camp, we explore the recent wave of anti-marriage feminist influencers who suddenly get engaged and/or pregnant right after hitting 30. Is “anti-marriage” feminism just mate-blocking by other means? Or is it sour grapes from women who spent their 20s steeped in hookup culture?We explore:• The hypocrisy of prominent “stay single” influencers (MJ Gray, Alex Cooper, Wizard Liz, Danielle Walter, etc.)• Why feminism’s biggest “wins” have mostly hurt women• The collapse in marriage rates (especially by age 30)• Mate blocking vs. status denial• The hollowness of modern hookup/OnlyFans culture and the return to meaningGet ready for a spicy and honest conversation about dating, marriage, female nature, and cultural trends.Show NotesWhat happened:* An influencer named MJ Gray branded herself as strongly anti‑marriage and anti‑kids, framing marriage as “enslavement” and something women should avoid because it primarily benefits men and the patriarchy.* She built a following of nearly 500,000 on TikTok by creating anti-marriage content, often arguing that marriage signifies the “ownership of women” and advising women to avoid it.* After about nine months of dating a man with no public profile, she announces an engagement in a visibly uncomfortable video titled “Yes, I’m engaged. Yes, this is awkward,” while repeatedly insisting she is “in a good situation.”* Timestamped clip: * She claims her stance has always included caveats: marriage can make sense if you plan to have children, share property, or live together, but otherwise it remains a harmful institution.It turns out she is not the only influencer of the stay single movement who turned around and got married. There are other recent and prominent examples that might indicate some sort of pattern.This comes at a time when marriage REALLY doesn’t need negative propaganda. Around 2005–2010, roughly 50–55% of adults were married; by the mid-2020s, it’s around 46–51% (e.g., 47.1% of households headed by married couples in 2024, near historic lows).So what’s going on with women like these? Let’s explore and discuss.MJ Gray’s BrandingMJ Gray frames herself as a supermodel billionaire (that’s her handle on YouTube)Has 419K followers on tiktok (@texasgardenfairy)Has 84.6K followers on InstagramShe shares her thoughts on “The Maneater Podcast”4.9 stars and 44 reviews on spotify (for reference, Based Camp has 3.8 stars and 205 reviews)4.9 stars and 9 reviews on Apple Podcasts (for reference, Based Camp has 4.4 stars at 153 reviews)MJ Gray’s YouTube model is @supermodelbillionaire: https://www.youtube.com/@supermodelbillionaire8.46K subscribers, 65 videosThings she says:* Men should always pay for women because…* Men are women’s apex predator* Women’s time is more valuable than men’s time (because their attractive and fertile years are limited)* Engaging with men is dangerous as you could get pregnant, get an infection* Women’s presence and attention is more valuable than men’s attention (men spend more on strip clubs and exotic dancers… though apparently she does not know about host clubs)Other Stay-Single HypocritesAlex Cooper* She is most famous for being co-host of the Call Her Daddy podcast* She built a massive platform with frank, often casual-sex-positive advice that included heavy skepticism toward traditional marriage and long-term commitment, encouraging women to prioritize autonomy and fun over settling down.* She faced direct roasting for “preaching anti-marriage” before getting married herself (to Matt Kaplan). Critics highlighted the shift as hypocritical given her earlier messaging.* Just this week announced her pregnancyWizard Liz* https://www.youtube.com/c/TheWizardliz* She is known for being a life advice/self-improvement influencer* Frequently grouped with MJ Gray in discussions of “feminist rhetoric as a placeholder” for building a following before pivoting to relationships/luxury-coded life.* She has shared content focused on self-love, healing, and high standards that some interpreted as discouraging rushed commitments or highlighting male flaws. She got engaged/married quickly (to Landon Nickerson), faced cheating drama, and drew similar “bait-and-switch” accusationsDanielle Walter* https://www.tiktok.com/@daniellewalter_* She is known for being a dating/relationship TikTok influencer, and the “Carrie Bradshaw of San Francisco”* Gained millions with dating advice, single-era relatability, and content that resonated with women navigating toxic dynamics or high standards (sometimes overlapping with anti-settling or critical-of-men vibes).* When she entered a relationship and shared extensively about it (including a 21-part series), followers accused her of abandoning principles, hypocrisy, or shifting for a man/clout. Backlash included claims she went “all for a man” after building on single struggles.What is Really Happening?Anti-Marriage as Mate Blocking?Anti-Marriage Being a Pre-Wall Phenomenon?* MJ Gray was 30 (born August 12, 1995; turned 30 in August 2025). The engagement news broke around April 2026.* Alex Cooper got engaged at age 31/32* Wzard Liz got engaged around age 25 (though it ended amid cheating allegations while she was pregnant)* Danielle Walter entered her long-term relationship around age 32 and got engaged around age 33Anti-Marriage Being about Women Fundamentally Misunderstanding Men?Recently trending on X: 2010 Study Shows Testosterone Boosts Fairness in WomenPeople were discussing a 2009 study titled Prejudice and truth about the effect of testosterone on human bargaining behaviour (2009), in which researchers found that a single dose of testosterone made women behave more fairly in a bargaining game, but simply believing one had received testosterone made people behave more unfairly, regardless of what they actually received.Episode TranscriptSimone Collins: Hello, Malcolm. I’m excited to be speaking with you again because we have a new episode in our series Women Are Terrible because they’re at it again, Malcolm.The women are terrible. And what happened most recently was an influencer who goes by MJ Gray. She branded herself as very strongly anti-marriage and anti-kids. She, she framed marriage as enslavement and something that women should avoid because it primarily benefits men and the patriarchy. And she built this following of almost 500,000 people on TikTok.I’ll link to this in, in the show notes. And it was all about anti-marriage content. She often argued that marriage signifies ownership of women and she strongly advised women to avoid it.Speaker 11: I really wish women would stop getting married. I wrote off getting married since I was a little girl. I, I put together the pieces of what marriage was and I was like, “Oh, yeah, no.” I could never trust a man, which is why I would never marry a manSimone Collins: And then lo [00:01:00] and behold After nine months of dating a man with no public profile, she announces an engagement in a visibly uncomfortable video, which is now, she’s trying to scrub it from the internet titled Yes, I’m Engaged.Yes, This Is Awkward. While repeatedly she insists she’s in a good situation and I, I have a somewhat salvaged part of this at least that I was able to find on the internet for you, Malcolm, if you wanna include it. But I’ll also link to it in the show notes.Speaker: Yes, I am engaged. Yes, I am the same person who made several videos saying that I never had, never had any plans to get married, I did not wanna get married, and I did not agree with the institution of marriage.Simone Collins: She claims her stance has always included caveats that sometimes marriage is good.Sometimes marriage can make sense if you plan to have children or share property or live together. But otherwise, it remains a harmful institution. And of course, very abundantly in, in her content, you know, she’s “Well, having kids is the most horrifying thing. It destroys your body.” So of course, if you have kids, [00:02:00] you know, sharing property, why would you ever do that?But so- Oh, myMalcolm Collins: God. So your takeaway, because she watched this happen. She comes to me and she goes, “Malcolm, is feminism just an anti-woman grift?” Is it- Or is itSimone Collins: meat blocking? That’s what I, I kind of think Well, meatMalcolm Collins: blocking, but through that it’s a tactic that ugly women use to destroy the marriage prospects of beautiful and qualified women and that when women signal feminist ideals, they are doing it with the predominant intentionality of hurting other women.And the women I have heard- No, I mean, so this, this is where it getsSimone Collins: more complicated because this is a different subset, and it’s more... This is why I wanted to talk about it, because this is not the ugly feminist meat blocking and being like, “Well, we need to, you know, uh, get cats and vote.” This is not that class.This is, this is a slutty class of women. I, I mean that in the nicest way. This is a sex positive class of women that, that, that actively wants to date that talks about dating strategy, that talks [00:03:00] about getting men to pay for you, that talks about loving sex. And yet things happen and suddenly- Did this woman talk about all that?Dot, dot, dot. Yeah, we’re gonna get into it because it turns out That MJ is not the only influencer in the stay single movement who turned around and got married. There are other recent and, and actually quite prominent, even more prominent than MJ in, in terms of the online drama than MJ. So I wantMalcolm Collins: to explore this through a few lenses before we start.Okay. So when you came to me and you told me this, I began to really think through it, and I was like, actually, almost everything that feminism has, quote-unquote, “won” has been a strict negative for the majority of women. Yeah. Yeah ...whether- Yes ...whether that is, “Hey, women, you get to be sluttier now,” and women were always like, “But I never wanted to.”I... men are the ones- Yeah, like this was never the plan. Since when did I want to? Men wanted multiple partners. I wanted a wealthy partner, right, who’s dedicated only to me. Yeah. I’ve watched the women porn, right? I’ve, I personally like really reading, uh, romantasy mawa’s stories, [00:04:00] right? So I know what women like because I find it very enjoyable, too, and it’s always one guy, maybe two guys thirsting after them for a love triangle.Yeah. It’s certainly not what men are into and what these women have, quote-unquote, “won.” Well, yeah, it’s not a seriesSimone Collins: of one-night stands. It’s not really out there sex acts. It’s, it’s- No ... it’s quite- It’s the dark,Malcolm Collins: brooding Duke of the North- Yeah ... who secretly has a soft spot for them. Oh, you know it.You know it. But- Yeah ... but, so okay. So, oh, well, they won the right to work. What? How is that good for women? Yeah. That now women have to have jobs, and still raise kids, and still cook the food, ‘cause they didn’t really walk back that other stuff significantly. No, no.Simone Collins: Now they’re just like, oh, so, work for yourself, but also sleep around with a bunch of men, but sort of, you know, in, in return for no security or long-term bonding.And, and also you know, if you, if you ever do get married, just wait. Get, make it a [00:05:00] capstone in your life. Get everything else in place. And they’re just giving this really intense anti-marriage advice at a time when marriage really can’t afford any more negative propaganda. Between 25, or 2005 and, and, and 2010, around half of adults, like 50 to 55%, were married, and by the mid-2020s, it’s around 46 to 51%.So, 47% of households were headed by married couples in 2024. These are near historic lows. It, it, people are just- I mean,Malcolm Collins: have you seen the married by 30 numbers that Asmogold was sharing? Really?Simone Collins: But yeah, the number of people getting married by 30 is,is plummeting.So yeah, people are putting it off. We really don’t need any more anti-marriage propaganda. Meanwhile, you have-Malcolm Collins: Yeah, hold on. I’m just gonna go over it really quickly for fans. Yeah. So Americans married by age 30, if you go to 1975, it was 91% of women, so over nine in 10 women. Yeah. And for men it was 81%.Today, 2025, it is 25% of women and 16% of men. [00:06:00]Simone Collins: This is notMalcolm Collins: great. So, th- yeah, that is terrible at this point. And women areSimone Collins: like, “Malcolm Collins: Marriage is slavery.” And I also wanna go into a video that ended up doing the rounds of a woman who is very, very mid got a baseball star to date her. Uh, he wanted him to come back to her place on the first date, and she ends up putting him on blast, and he didn’t even do anything wrong.And it, it shows that the tyranny of the mids at this point.Simone Collins: The tyranny of the mids? Right? Yeah.Malcolm Collins: Yeah. That they expect- Come on ... mil- multi-millionaire pro athletes to take them on second dates when clearly they’re just chum.Simone Collins: Yeah, this guy was a, a, apparently a lazy 10. So that’s- As weMalcolm Collins: point out, you know.And now if she thinks that this is the type of guy that she can get, no, you can’t. Yeah, now, now yeah,Simone Collins: going forward she’s going to assume that she will get a 10 to marry her because a 10 wanted to sleep with her on one of his tired nights.Malcolm Collins: Yeah.Simone Collins: Okay,Malcolm Collins: continue, Simone.Simone Collins: But yeah, so I, I wanna, I wanna explore these women for a [00:07:00] little bit because this is a different profile of woman.This is not, like I said, the, you know, a bookish feminist cat lady who is just like, “I’m never gonna come into contact with men.” This is actually, as much as they’re sort of anti-men or at least anti-centering men, they actually engage a lot with men, and they’re quite attractive. At least I, I think, I think they are.Uh, they, they, they look like mainstream filter people if, if that makes sense. You know, like Instagram models. But let’s start with MJ Gray, the, the woman in question, the, the turning point of this episode. She has 419,000 followers on TikTok. She has 84,000 followers on Instagram. She shares her thoughts on The Maneater podcast, which is, you know, her, it’s a little bit red pill woman-y, but not in that she... I think red pill women often were seen back in their day, I don’t know if they still exist, as being subservient to men, whereas she’s more like a pickup artist woman. You know, like- Mm-hmm ... being very sociopathic about her views with women.A, an [00:08:00] example of a post from her is she’ll be like, “Well, men should always pay for women because men are women’s apex predator, and women’s time is more valuable than men.” But admittedly because they’re attractive and fertile, years are limited, which is true. And engaging with men is dangerous, as you could get pregnant or get an infection.And women’s presence and attention is more valuable than men’s attention because men, you know, there’s this multimillion dollar stripper industry, uh, and OnlyFans industry that, that centers on women’s attention and, and time and presence. And that, you know, and it, th- this is why you should have men always pay for your dinner, that you should never go Dutch on a date.I lo-Malcolm Collins: I love their we need to walk back some parts of feminism here, right, guys? Th- this is clearly... We should just get whatever we want as women. YeahSimone Collins: you have to pay for everything, but Are you gonna tell me about this guy who got hitched to this psycho? So there’s not a whole lot known about him because it, but it’s, it’s clear that he’s- Except that he’s super rich apparently.He’s, yeah, he’s, he’s super rich. Yeah, he, he’s [00:09:00] super rich.Looking to find and marry a rich man just so you can live the soft life is probably the dumbest s**t I’ve ever heardSimone Collins: And that’s kind of, it’s a pattern here. Although I, I, I mean, and she, I mean, it makes sense her, her handle, when it’s not Manny or this or whatever MJ Gray is, is, is supermodel billionaire. That’s how she frames herself on YouTube though she only has eight point, like eight, a little more than 8,000 subscribers on YouTube.She’s pretty small on this platform. But yeah, that is the pattern with her and these other don’t center men, never get married, just enjoy yourself women. So and the most prominent example, I would say way more prominent than than MJ, is Alex Cooper. And you’ve probably never heard of her, Malcolm, but she’s super famous for being the, I guess the former co-host of the Call Her Daddy podcast.She built this massive- Oh, yeah, I remember this one. And then a guy swept herMalcolm Collins: off her feet.Simone Collins: Yeah, and actually just this week, guess what she announced? Marriage? No, her [00:10:00] pregnancy. Oh, gosh. How neat. She’s, she’s now she’s pregnant. And this is, you know, after her getting super famous for s- casual sex positive advice that was very skeptical toward traditional marriage, very skeptical toward long-term commitment, encouraging women to prioritize autonomy and fun over settling down.Now she’s pregnant, and now she’s married. And people are pointing out quite fairly that she’s hypocritical. Then there’s an- another one, Wizard Liz. She was known for being more of a life advice and self-improvement influencer, and she was really commonly grouped with people like MJ Gray in discussions of femorist rhetoric as, as a placeholder for building a following, and then just sort of jumping in from there to this luxury-coded married life, which is sort of what MJ’s doing.Like, when I went to her, her TikTok profile more recently, it’s all “Oh, I’m shopping in France, and here’s my fancy hotel room.” And so they, I guess they’re just using it as “I don’t need men. I’m super hot. I’m super sexy.” And then that’s their hook, I guess, to [00:11:00] try to get- No, holdMalcolm Collins: on. We, we actually even had this within our own community, okay?So- We did? If you look at the wider online community that we’re a part of, our fourth most overlapped channel by the way which you know but our fans w- probably don’t know from today uh, is, is a woman who- Ah ... uh, really promoted the ideas of a kink lifestyle, a 24/7 BDSM- Oh, her ... uh, daddy dom little girl, and now she’s in a trad cath relationship.Simone Collins: She is? I haven’t followed, I haven’t kept up with her. Yeah,Malcolm Collins: Shoe0nHead married a traditional Catholic guy. Oh,Simone Collins: Shoe0nHead. Shoe0nHead. I thought you were talking about the other one who’s more, way more- No,Malcolm Collins: Shoe0nHead is our fourth most overlapped channel- Really? ... and she promoted all of this. Oh, you thought the other kink influencer.No, she’s not overlapped with us. Shoe0nHead is- Yeah, she,Simone Collins: she’s very boring. Yeah, yeah, okay. Yeah, Shoe0nHead’s very entertaining. Come on, ofMalcolm Collins: courseSimone Collins: Shoe0nHead,Malcolm Collins: Woke up, you know. We’ll be getting videos from- I guess you’re right. I didn’tSimone Collins: even think about that. But I don’t think Shoe0nHead... W- was she ever...See, I think she was, like, open about her kink, but she was never also [00:12:00] BDSM people are, like, surprisingly I don’t know, I wanna say lovey-dovey and romantic in their relationships, you know? They’re- ... they’re not like, “I’m gonna have one-night stands.” You can’t, you can’t be in like, a BDSM relationship and do one-night stands, because you need weeks just to hammer out the, the gear and, and, and get all the accoutrement and, and work out your agreements and the procedure.Mm-hmm. I mean, it’s just, it, it’s like the D&D campaign. You can’t just, just one night stand it and then switch between people all the time. You’d have to like, buy new outfits and stuff. It would be too tedious. But yeah, good point. Yeah ... Wizard Liz though, she, she was- Shoe, but I thinkMalcolm Collins: that this is all part of a wider thing where if you’re a woman and you’re just trying to live your best life, and I like including Shoe0nHead in this category because Shoe0nHead, I do not think is somebody, uh, there’s a small number of our audience who doesn’t like her, but the vast majority generally assume the best of Kami Mommy.Oh, yeah ... and she, like me I used to be, like, a manslut, right? I was just in an environment where I hadn’t [00:13:00] heard a compelling argument that it was a stupid way to live your life, right? Uh, because- Yeah ... frankly the way conservatives of the last generation made their arguments was f*****g terrible.Yeah. Yeah ... it simply was an awful seller. Well, and I think most of usSimone Collins: grew up seeing our boomer parents, like millennials, saw their boomer parents’ marriages and were like, “Well, this is, this is mediocre.” Mm-hmm. “I’m not, I’m not interested in whatever this is. This is, this isMalcolm Collins: bad.” Whatever the boomers did is not what I wanna do, right?Simone Collins: Exactly. So I’m like, yeah. Exactly,Malcolm Collins: so I don’t blame you. You were telling me- And I was...Simone Collins: No, I was totally, I mean, rule it out. But the I’m never gonna get married, I’m just gonna s- have, you know, s- like s- sleep with someone and fall in love and have my heart broken and then just move on and never do it again.You know, I’m, I’m not above this, and I just find that dynamic to be very interestingMalcolm Collins: Yeah because- but the, the reason I’m, I’m saying this is a lot of these women likely just were not aware how awesome marriage is. They get swept up, as women do- Yeah ... in online communities where everyone’s saying the same thing.They likely had no evoked set for what a [00:14:00] positive relationship in a marriage looks like, because where were they going to see it? Yeah. Think about our progressive friends who are, like, live in Manhattan and stuff like that. Yeah. Theyhavef*****g terrible marriages. Uh, even ones who are, like, just a generation above us, their marriages are so bad, these weird polyamory marriages they, they’re like...It’s, it’s, it’s shocking to me. And when I say bad, I’m not saying they’re bad because they’re polyamorous. I’m saying that they often don’t seem to really like each other that much or really working together that much. And they seem like partners who uh, they seem like coworkers really is, is sort of the vibe I get from them, right?They’re not actively anti- They’re not like boomers where it’s like they obviously hate each other. But they don’t seem to really get it. And then I look at our friend group of our generation, right? Who’s all in the suburbs and everything like that, and they all seem to just be loving it, like marriage is the best thing ever.And, uh, yeah. It’s, it’s, it’s been very, [00:15:00] uh, which, uh, people may not know this, but our actual friend group of marrieds, uh, is either... I, I will say for the Latin friends we have that get married it’s, it’s often not as good. Because, uh, very often, for whatever reason in Latin American culture in the United States men get married to women and then use them as a source of income and the, it’s, it’s, sort of comes across as, as Latin women often marry down.I mean, at least they’re getting married and having kids, but you know, it is something I’ve noticed.Simone Collins: No, it’s just anecdotally more than we would like to see, I think. Yeah,Malcolm Collins: more than we would like to see. Uh, and then the other place where I see this is in my, uh, or our Jewish friend group.We have a big, you know, Orthodox Jewish friend group. And their marriages are usually really rock solid. The younger ones. Oh, super rock solid. TheSimone Collins: older ones- Yeah, I was like, not that- Not as much ... no. No, they’re super solid. Yeah. Yeah. But yeah, so they’re, so the... Yeah, sorry, where was I? Wizard Liz.Wizard Liz is a little different because she went from the whole like, oh let’s, you know, be liberated and free to really quickly getting married and then getting pregnant, but then [00:16:00] divorcing before even, I think, having her, her first baby because of cheating allegations. So that didn’t work out for her.But then there’s Danielle Walter. Uh, Danielle Walter was known, you might have heard of her she was the Carrie Bradshaw of San Francisco, and she did a lot of dating confessionals essentially- Mm-hmm ... on TikTok and got really famous for that. She had millions of followers who, who were into her single era, woman ability, and this whole Sort of modern single woman thing.But then she did this, and I, I’ve watched multiple YouTube videos, like going over this very, I guess you could say cringey 21-part series where she debuted her boyfriend. Like she just teased it to high heaven. And then- Was this, was this the woman who was on the Call Her Daddy? No. This is, this is a dif- this is, we’re on number two now.This is yet another. Yes. Yes. So yeah, I, first I was talking about the now just suddenly pregnant Alex Cooper from Call Her Daddy, then there was Wizard Liz, and now we’re on Danielle Walter. And [00:17:00] what’s happened with her is that she, after debuting her boyfriend, then she, she got... I think she’s married now.And part of what I think might be happening when I look at all these women, with the exception of Wizard Liz, is guess what happened right before they suddenly pivoted and got serious about long-term committed relationships? They became famous? No. They hit 30? Yes. Ah. MJ, MJ Ray, she was 30. The, the engagement news broke right as she hit the wall.Alex Cooper got engaged at 31, 32. Wizard Liz, exception here, 25, but now she’s divorced again, back on the market. And then Danielle Walter got- Oh. Oh, oh, oh, oh ... like the moment they debut it,Malcolm Collins: it’s- To add to it, wasn’t in your original list, how old was she on head when she got engaged? 32.Simone Collins: I... No way. Yeah.Malcolm Collins: Probably met him around 30.Simone Collins: So, yeah, maybe one thing here is that like women of our modern [00:18:00] era like... Oh my gosh. I don’t know what’s going on with him. Oh, poor baby.Hold on. Give me one moment here. All right. Hey,hey, hey. They, they... Maybe the new norm is you’re like basically “I’ll never get married and I’m gonna be an independent woman,” and then you hit the wall, and then it, like you just suddenly have you f- you get God, you know?And if there’s some way that we could like, ooh, head off...I thinkit’s that room’s reallyhot maybe. Or-Malcolm Collins: Well, it’s his first summer.Simone Collins: It is, but he’s not into it.Malcolm Collins: I’m not into it, okay? Our whole family isn’t into it.Simone Collins: We, we don’t like..Anyway m- maybe if there’s some way we can head this off, it would involve maybe our like just telling people like, “Look, this is the pattern. This happens to everyone. Just ignore the instincts telling you this.” Well,Malcolm Collins: [00:19:00] it’s like we all get warned that puberty is coming- Yes ... and nobody warns that your 30s are coming, right?Yeah. YouSimone Collins: know,Malcolm Collins: everyone’s “Well, you need to be preparing. You need to figure out how to talk to girls. You need to get your rizz on.” People didn’t know I got rizz, okay? I, no, but I’m joking here. I do not have rizz apparently, uh, as, as our audience has, has made clear to me, right? So I, I, talking to women I’m just no good.But uh, t- uh, functionally I am though, obviously. It’s just, it doesn’t look like what people think it looks like. Uh- Yeah, I don’t, I don’t know if anyone really knows what- How do we get women... I mean, I think it’s just your, your biology changes. Here’s the way I would fix this, okay? Oh, but I, ISimone Collins: have to ask, though.Is it also not just some form of mate blocking behavior? There’s a big game of musical chairs taking place when women are in their 20s, and what many women do as a t- a defensive tactic, maybe also to inflate their sense of value, is to be like, you know, the [00:20:00] one thing that you talk about in, when you give relationship advice is women, stop doing this whole thing where you act unimpressed by everything.You’re like, “Oh, this restaurant isn’t really that impressive.” They just wanna neg men- Oh, I freaking hate women who do this ... and it’s really unattractive. But women do that- It’s so common ... it’s very pervasive. This could be a version of it, of “Oh, I don’t ever wanna get married. I don’t...” Because they’re trying to seem more valuable than they are, because what they really want is for men to be like, “Oh, then I, I must have her, because she can- she’s unachievable.”You know, that kind of thing? It’s maybe this is that. Maybe it’s a competitive strategy. It’s not also mate blocking. It doesn’t work quite that way with men.Malcolm Collins: Guys don’t go for that. I know, it works...Simone Collins: Well, but think about it. So men send dick pics to women because they’re like, “What would I like? Oh, I know.”Oh, so they try to be the cold Duke of the North? Yes. I think maybe that might be part of it, is it, this is women trying to be the cold Duke of the North, and what men are like-Malcolm Collins: I’m not interested in this ... “Will youSimone Collins: send me a picture of your tits, please?” “Let, let me inspire you by this picture of my [00:21:00] dongle.”You know, that is, that is- So,Malcolm Collins: okay. So here is- We’re talking past each other, essentially ... I think is a way around this culturally speaking, right? Which is we can go out there and, uh, when our kids are growing up, when we’re teaching them about puberty, puberty should be taught as a package with you’re gonna want to get married at later in life too.Yeah. So when we’re telling them, “You’re going to change how you feel,” we make it very salient, “And this will happen again later. So any preparations you make for this change should also include preparations for the secondary change.”Simone Collins: Yeah. Yeah, possibly. Maybe even forcing them to watch Blippi when they’re teens to be like, “Hey, how do you like this?How do you like it? You wanna watch more?” Mm. And then be like, “Hey, this is how you’re gonna feel about your life as a playboy, world traveling 20-something when you turn 30.” Maybe something like that. Or if you actually are willing to be intellectually honest with yourself- Right ... and emotionally honest with yourself.I don’t know. I’m, I’m [00:22:00] not sure. But I think more importantly, we also need to hear- Hold on, I’m gonna break this down.Malcolm Collins: Let’s not leave this at an I’m not sure. Let’s think through it. Because, uh, I think we see this present in different ways. Okay. Uh, in Siwanhead’s case, for example, I do not think it was mate blocking.I think she lived in a society where this was normal and, uh, or you could even think me promoting these values. Mm. Why didn’t I promote feminist values? It’s because I wanted to sleep with women, right? Mm-hmm. And it got that for me. Oh yeah, abortion’s the best, right? Oh yeah, you know, sleeping around, while it makes you feel good, it makes me feel good.How could it be morally negative, right? Yeah. Oh yeah, you know, uh, it, it, it, it achieved what I wanted in the moment, right? So, uh, and what everyone in my society told me I was good and what seemed good when I saw through it because, you know, clearly whatever the boomers is doing isn’t working and the religious people just shout, “Read the Bible” and I’m like, but a lot of those stories don’t compute.I did. There’s a lot ofSimone Collins: sexin there.Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Well, a- and [00:23:00] slavery. You know, I’m like, “You, you guys aren’t pro-slavery, right?” Now obviously as an adult I’ve gone back to the Bible and I find good moral guidance in it. Mm. But as a kid when somebody just shouts at you, “Read the Bible” and you’re like aware that the Bible’s like pro-genocide and slavery in sections, you’re like, well, selling your daughter, you know, well, maybe not every...Like, how do I know that this marriage stuff in the Bible sh- I, I, I shouldn’t take the same way as I take the selling your daughter into slavery stuff in the Bible, right? Mm-hmm. Like presumably that’s not applicable anymore, right? And they, you know, frankly I didn’t hear good answers back then.Now I can give you a great answer today. Uh, you watch our track series, you watch any of our religious episodes, you’ll find good answers. But the conservatives of the last generation, things sucked at, at, at basically conveying a salient message.Simone Collins: Yeah. So combine, combine that conservative message with how bad boomer, like our parents and Gen X marriages were, which is oh my God, I [00:24:00] don’t want that, plus this mismatch between male and female desired love language.It’s like men just want the tit pics and women just want the Duke of the North and we don’t know how to give this to each other because we, we are pretty different in the things that turn us on, like on average as men and women. And then with different life stages just being- The, you being rewarded by different things at different periods of your life, and it being very hard to model that even within yourself and anticipate that.I think there’s an additional cultural layer on top of this, which is that we are in the middle of a, of a realization, a collective realization that the free sex OnlyFans, sleep around with people era. And we’ve talked about this. Remember we talked about how swipe-based dating and hookup culture radicalized women- Mm-hmmbut also made them pretty miserable. And it’s even showing up in very popular media. There’s very little event media left, but one of the few shows that’s left is Euphoria. And I’ve been watching Season 3, and a [00:25:00] really major recurring theme of it is the Bible and God and religion. What? And the other recurring theme is women in sex work.So the main character is working for this kingpin of strip clubs and, and kind of drugs. Another main character is an OnlyFans model. Another main character is an agent exploiting OnlyFans models. So, it’s just, it’s kind of all about sex and hookup culture. Another one is a sugar baby- Mm-hmmfor a wealthy man who likes to wrap her up in cellophane . And it- To wrap her up in cellophane? ... it’s all just kind of like... It’s just a, like a fetish thing, you know? I, I can’t remember what the name for it is, but, like- Yeah, I’ve seen it. Yeah, I think someone actually- I, I don’t understand anything about this fetishI think actually famously very recently, an OnlyFans model has just been convicted of negligent homicide for accidentally killing one of her followers by wrapping him up in cellophane. So guys, be careful. Uh, it’s not safe. Wait, so he, he asked her to wrapMalcolm Collins: him up. He didn’t wrap her up. [00:26:00]Simone Collins: Yeah. She wrapped him up, and now she’s in trouble because he died.Uh, ‘cause don’t do that . It’s not safe. Uh- That makesMalcolm Collins: me sad for her, actually. I know.Simone Collins: She was just trying to do her job, you know what I mean? Uh- Yeah. The guy presumably was- He asked for it ... at least partially aware of the risk. For, you, you, one hopes, but I don’t know. Okay? Anyway, the big theme is that.And actually it begins with one of the main character, the main character is, is running drugs, but stops. She sort of finds herself in the middle of the Texan countryside, and is, is, is, uh, she sleeps in a barn and wakes up to this, this homeschooling- I have, I have, I needOctavian: a little more thingsSimone Collins: here.He has more swords that he wishes to show. She shows up at this homeschooling Texan family, like sleeps in their barn, but like they just bring her milk in the morning. They’re like, “Hey, why don’t you just join us for breakfast?” And she sits around and they have family prayers. And she, they drop her off closer to a road, and so she’s able to get on her way.And it just sits with her [00:27:00] for l- the longest time of “Man, like I-” I think they kind of get it.Speaker 2: We wanna thank you, Lord Jesus Christ, for giving us our daily bread and forgiving us our trespasses. Let me help you get your plate, sweetie. Here, let me get this first, Dad. This is our address. Will you be sure to send the article when it’s in the paper? Uh, yeah, as long as the commies at college don’t censor it.Speaker 3: You’re doing the Lord’s work. Thank you. I’d trade spots with you in a heartbeat ByeSimone Collins: These offline teens, this, this big family of six kids, like homeschooling and living on our farm, like they kind of have it made. I think I’m living my life wrong. And so she starts reading the Bible and she starts thinking about God and being like, “I think I’m religious.”Sitting in churches. And the last scene I just watched last night from the [00:28:00] latest episode, there’s a burning bush. They’re really leaning into it. They’re like... and it... That was... So a major theme of it, and I think this is representative of where collectively we are in society, is oh my God, this hookup culture, OnlyFans women not getting married, sugar baby, everything’s transactional world is not rewarding.We’re not happy. We’re not thriving. This is really bad. We need to get God again. And the people who never left God are like the happiest and the only ones who are doing okay right now. So I think there’s this additional layer. The communication layer, the- No, I, IMalcolm Collins: actually disagree with that. Really? I’m gonna push back.Actually- Okay ... what I think is the people who seem to be doing the best are the secular people who came to religion through logic. The people who are doing the second-best are the ones who always had religion, but typically the way that they practice their religion is a little less optimal for actually dealing with the crises of our time.If you’reSimone Collins: homeschooling on a Texan ranch in the middle of nowhere, you’re one of those, “I came to this very thoughtfully.”Malcolm Collins: Right, but there are some people who are [00:29:00] still holds out from like the old evangelical communities and stuff like that. Sure. Yeah. And they just seem to be just broadly unprepared to interact with the modern world in a meaningful way.Yeah.Simone Collins: Well, as soon as they interact with the modern world, they crash and burn because they’re not resilient to it, as we talked about extensively. Yeah, they’re not resilient.Malcolm Collins: It’s... And you, you sort of have to go through, you know, uh, to an ex- or have some, some members of your community that have fully gone through it understand why it was tempting and understand why you failed to convince them in the past to build better arguments for the next generation.Yeah. If you were convinced by the, you know, “Just read the Bible” argument, your kids are gonna be just as susceptible because you don’t know why that argument may not appeal to somebody, right? Yeah. And, and I think that, uh, this show shows how many people come to this, is they see, “Oh, like this isn’t working.This old way of doing things is working.” But-Simone Collins: Yeah, and to be fair, all these characters were not raised in like religious contexts. They were raised in like our modern mainstream [00:30:00] urban lifestyle. What I’mMalcolm Collins: interested to see is what is the online chatter about this direction the show is going. Can you ask an AI for a sentiment analysis?Simone Collins: No, so the, no, what, what is, what is being said in the media is “Oh my God, suddenly MAGA loves Euphoria because...” for these reasons, you know? And, and also I think the S- Sy- Sydney Sweeney is the one who’s big on OnlyFans in this- Mm-hmm ... in the series, the, who’s famous for the jeans campaign who’s, you know, sort of like become this icon.We all like SydneyMalcolm Collins: Sweeney from the jeans interview. Yeah.Simone Collins: Didn’t this... It was a com- it was a commercial. It was a, an ad campaign.Speaker 4: I just wanted to give you the opportunity to deal with a passive aggressive accusation disguised as a questionSpeaker 5: if your career brought you here, of what use was it?Simone Collins: No,Malcolm Collins: no, but there’s a famous interview [00:31:00] she did afterwards where like- Oh, with the- Do you know the- Yeah,Simone Collins: the,Malcolm Collins: the...Simone Collins: Yes, yes. Yeah And she’s just like- so now, yeah, like the discourse is oh, and then a lot of people are trying to argue that the creator of Euphoria isn’t actually like turning to God and pro-MAGA or anything it’s just that he likes to troll people.But there’s literally portions of like little montages of the Sydney Sweeney OnlyFans model character being interviewed for example. She like has her rise on the internet, you know, getting internet famous, and people are like, “Oh, are you a Democrat?” And she’s “I’m not retarded.” So- Yeah, no, it’s, it’s very...It... Yes, the right apr- the right is enjoying season three. I- Wait,Malcolm Collins: she says this in character in the show?Simone Collins: Yeah. Yes. Oh my God. It’s, it’s a great clip. It’s fantastic. They, they show this there’s the montage and it’s also her being “I just think, you know, women want to be able to be at home and you know, be wives and be-” IOctavian: want you to come back and tell, and tell me more.I learned that when you add vinegar [00:32:00] and bacon soda together they can create a new thing.Simone Collins: Baking soda.Octavian: Yeah.Simone Collins: Baking soda. ItOctavian: kind of like fizzes if you’re really close.Simone Collins: We should do that. We’ll do that tonight.Octavian: But if you did it a lot, then it would be like a bottle and put all of the vinegar you have in that bottle, and it can create a big fizz. Like this big.Simone Collins: That big, huh?Yeah. I wanna get back to the original question This is, uh, our un- unofficial endorsement of Science Max as a YouTube channel for kids. I wanna getMalcolm Collins: back to the original question here.Simone Collins: Yeah. Oh,Malcolm Collins: wait, are these two different characters in the show? The one who’s a Sydney Sweeney character and the one who’s finding God?Simone Collins: Yeah.Malcolm Collins: They’re different characters. So multiple characters are moving in this direction, right? No, that’s ...Simone Collins: What I’m trying to say, yes, is a major, major theme of this extremely popular public discourse show is finding God and finding the hollowness in, in sex work in general.Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Okay, and calling it euphoria.Wow, that’s, uh-Simone Collins: Yeah ... on the nose. It’s great. No, and it ... Well, and this is the [00:33:00] third season of it. I actually couldn’t stomach the first two. I like the third one for whatever reason. But- Maybe ‘cause now it’s forMalcolm Collins: conservatives. Anyway, your point. So hold on. I wanna get to the question of, while I don’t think for sure that it was genuinely mate blocking behavior- Yeahdid mate blocking motivate the rise of this ideology, right?Simone Collins: Yeah, because ... Well, but I, here’s where I get confused, is it made sense to your early ... your earliest point was you were making the assumption that these were ugly women. Whereas these are hot women who date and have a lot of sex. So it’sThey don’t ... It’s not like they have trouble finding men. But that doesn’t mean that mean, popular girls don’t mate block. I mean, a, a, a major theme of pop- popular, hot, mean girls is mate blocking. So I don’t know. What, what, what is your take?Malcolm Collins: So my take is, is that it partially likely led to it.So, there was certainly, if you look at the early feminists, they were very often vile habergashes or whatever you wanna call them, right? Uh, fairly- A [00:34:00] haberdasherySimone Collins: is where you buy buttons and ribbons. I don’t- IMalcolm Collins: don’t even know. Whatever you wanna call them. Okay. Swamp things. Uh, trying toI, I think that there’s a ... More than mate blocking, I think a lot of it was women who failed out of marriage marketplaces or failed to get the type of guy they thought they deserved and then wanted to r- increase the status of unattached women. I think that was more of what motivated it, right? They failed to achieve what they felt they deserved to achieve given their perceived self-status, which increased as a problem as women got access to easier and easier sex.And then they, uh, looked at the world, this terrible and unfair world and they said, “Actually, I’m not low status. It is not l- “ And as the proportion of women who needed to believe this delusion increased and as men realized they could utilize this to [00:35:00] gain sexual access to women more easily it spread.I think while it would be- Convenient for our narrative if it was genuine mate blocking. I think it was more about women not admitting their genuine low status in society and trying to normalize it.‘ Cause I think that’s a stronger everyday drive for women. And then they have to do that uh, you know... What’s, what’s the word here?Simone Collins: Or so I mean, if I were to reframe, it’s kind of like a sour grapes thing. But then as soon as they get the opportunity they’re like, “Oh, I want it and I’m gonna take it.”They’re gonna pretend that they’re happy with their lot. I mean, could it, could it be also that these, Okay, these are, these are presumably top-tier women, right? They, they are, they are sleeping with the, the best men, but they’re also realizing that the best men are not willing to commit to long-term relationships, because a very common dynamic in modern dating markets is there’s no [00:36:00] reason for a man who’s an eight, nine, or 10 to settle down.Because they have access to all the range of women. Like, why would they- Yeah. Well, unless they like literally- And say, “Oh, well” ...Malcolm Collins: sit down and thinkSimone Collins: their way out ofMalcolm Collins: it like I did. Yeah.Simone Collins: Right? Yeah. Because that’s very unusual, right? So unless you’re like a, a, a good Christian man or you’re smart and like really, really disciplined.Or I mean, I think what also helped for you is you, you were so slutty in your youth that like you got it out of your system. So unless you’ve done all, one of those things you’re, you’re, you’re not gonna commit. You know, I always wanted aMalcolm Collins: wife. Uh, for my brother and I-Simone Collins: Yeah, it was your identity ... it was inherentMalcolm Collins: that we wanted wives.That was like- It is also likeSimone Collins: in your DNA. Like you come from a long line of romantic men. Yeah.Malcolm Collins: For me it was always about the wife and kids. Uh, especially a good wife. And so, uh, it, I mean it’s interesting for me to reflect on, ‘cause it doesn’t just require like intellect and a sober mind.‘Cause recently we were talking to one of our friends. And this friend I consider to be of the highest [00:37:00] intellectual caliber, highest ability to sit down and think through things, and yet he is unmarried, doesn’t have kids, and doesn’t seem to have a strong desire to get married even though I have tried to logic it through with him.And why can’t he see it? Why can’t he sit down and be like, “Obviously this is stupid”? It’s not that he hates his ancestors, ‘cause he’s Jewish and he doesn’t seem to be like actively antisemitic or anything like that. I think it’s just he is in an environment But I was able to break out of that environment.That’s the thing. I was in an environment that was as progressive asSimone Collins: any- But what I’m saying is you’re very unusual, and maybe what’s happening is these... You already talked to your women, are like, “Oh my God, this is just never gonna happen. I need to embrace that I have to be like them.” And this is actually a common theme in discourse.People are like, “Oh, women think that they have to be like men, that they have to sleep [00:38:00] around like men and enjoy one-night stands like men.” And that is a very Call Her Daddy theme, where they really act like they enjoy sex the same way that men enjoy sex. At least that’s kind of how I feel about it when I see- consume that content.I’m like, “Oh,” this is a very... This, this looks like a woman trying so hard to pretend that she has male sexuality, and I’m not totally buying it. And so as soon, as soon as they, this rat floundering in the ocean trying to survive on the floating board, finds a lifeboat, it jumps onto it, ‘cause it’s like, “Oh, my God.”Yeah. “I didn’t know this could happen, but it’s happening.” So I think maybe that’s, that’s another big factor here. Do you think so?Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Well, I mean, I think that these women who... No, the, the, the women- No ... who are out there saying marriage is terrible are really just trying to make themselves feel good. I really think that’s the case.Well, yeah,Simone Collins: but, but w- wait. You can say it, you can word it as feel good. I’m wording it as feel better in an environment where they feel like they really just... Marr- [00:39:00] a, a marriage that’s committed won’t work for them. And keep in mind case in point, uh, in, in my, in favor of my theory is Wizard Liz, right?She was like, “Oh, I’m gonna be all independent,” and then she had a chance to get married, was so stoked about it, husband cheats on her. So she kind of, uh, feeds into actually the narrative ultimately of no, you as a woman if you’re trying to marry a high-value man, even if you’re a high-value woman, can’t have that dream.Well, I mean, if you’reMalcolm Collins: a woman and you marry a guy who’s much higher value than you, of course he’s gonna cheat on you, right? Like- I know. She should’ve just- How did we as society forget that? I thought that that was- I know,Simone Collins: I know ... that’s just- It was maybe on the unmentioned thing.Malcolm Collins: Yeah, to actually freak out about a high-value guy cheating on you is kind of...Look, I get we’re, morality, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But also be f*****g realistic. Every king throughout history, almost every wealthy person throughout history has done this, right?You... A- and, and worse, these people often come from progressive environments where [00:40:00] this is way more normalized.They abandoned all of the social structure that was meant to punish the guy for doing this. Now he can just marry you but younger because you decided to freak out because he was sleeping with another woman. Oh. Again, I’m not pro cheating. I’m just being realistic here. When people are like, “Can you believe that Arnold Schwarzenegger cheat?”I’m like, “Yeah, I can believe that.” People like, “Can you...” How, how do these... This is, this is a South Park scene.Speaker 7: Why are rich, successful men suddenly going out and trying to have sex with lots of women and have perfectly good wives at home? I want answers. We believe that it may be an outbreak of sex addiction, sir. Of course, we all know the normal, healthy male thinks only of sex occasionally and has no desire for sex with multiple partners.That’s right. Of course. But what about love? How could tons of fame and money make you forget about love?Malcolm Collins: Why do these rich and famous men keep sleeping with other women? Like- [00:41:00] Ugh. And of course, if you don’t have a lot of kids yet, right? Like now the idea of cheating on Simone doesn’t make a lot of sense for me.It’s just not worth my time because I’ve got five kids, and we’re doing a new one every year. Cheating would only slow that down. Maybe most people aren’t as psychotically, like... I mean, cheating I guess would always just be a ne- negative for most people, but, ugh, uh, my, my thought here is even from a pleasure standpoint, it’s just a waste of f*****g time at this point.And I like the- I think cheating has a lot moreSimone Collins: to do with people who don’t have a clear objective function in their lives.Malcolm Collins: Yeah.Simone Collins: And it’s not actually a- even necessarily about sexual gratification. It’s more about wanting to feel desired and special and/or to chase after new relationship energy, which is its own special flavor of high.And if you don’t have a stronger mooring point, like a thing that you’re trying to fight for in life like I’m going to, you know, promote human flourishing, I’m gonna serve God, I’m gonna take [00:42:00] people to the stars, whatever it, it’s gonna be, right? Then it is going to be very appealing if suddenly someone starts giving you a bunch of attention, and there’s secrets, and you get to sneak around.And it’s, it’s like the hide and seek plus sex. Who, who wouldn’t love that? So I think that might have something to do with it. I, I, I don’t really know of people who’ve had very prominent cheating scandals who also, in our modern day and age, who also have extremely strong, Mm-hmm. Oh, never mind. I take thatMalcolm Collins: back.Wait, wait. What? Sorry, I, I missed the point. No. Nope, never mind. I just, ISimone Collins: just- Wait, no, go back. What was it? Never mind. I th- I, I had a, I had a hypothesis that if a man had a strong objective function, he wouldn’t desire multiple female partners. Oh, and then you rememberedMalcolm Collins: Elon existed? Yes.Simone Collins: Whoops. I was wrong.Malcolm Collins: But I think it’s a strong obj- objective function plus naltrexone. I cannot, Opioid agonists are the f*****g [00:43:00] bomb, right? That is, if, if, if I... I would even work this into our religious practices, right? Like- Yeah ... for future generations and stuff like this. I think constantly he wouldn’t do it if he was on naltrexone.He’d be so much more focused and efficient.Simone Collins: My God, he would stop posting on X. He’d stop postingMalcolm Collins: on X. He would. He’d stop all of the other drugs. He’d stop sleeping around. He’d just be focused on his mission.Simone Collins: Oh my God.Malcolm Collins: It is the true wonder drug.Simone Collins: The, yes, the drug to rule them all, Naltrexone. Okay. Well, there you go. I don’t know if I have anything more to say on this, but I find it very interesting. And women are terrible, so I hope you’ve enjoyed that. Yes. AndMalcolm Collins: our fans like the women are terrible. If we get a Simone plushie, we’ll have it squeeze and it’ll say- Oh, yeah.SqueezeSimone Collins: and it says, “A woman, womenMalcolm Collins: are terrible.” WomenSimone Collins: are [00:44:00] terrible.Malcolm Collins: Yeah. With my fake woman wife who’s, uh, like hormonally not totally female because of hormones. Who takes theSimone Collins: same hormones as a trans woman.Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Yeah. So you- Great ... can see through the nonsense. I’m really selling guys a false bill of goods.They’ll never get a woman like Simone. Because she’s- You’re out there. Out there. No, we have fans who are definitely seem to be as good as you. So, and for people who are unaware, of our, like while only 10% of our, like regular watchers are women-Ironically, the sound dropped out here due to baby noises, but I was saying around forty to fifty percent of our most dedicated viewers, or at least the ones who are like subscribed on Patreon and reach out regularly, are womenMalcolm Collins: Of them are already married, I’ll be honest about that. You know, sane women get picked up pretty young, so. But not all of them are. Some of them are still dating.Simone Collins: No, actually, a lot of them are, are single and available and interested, so. Oh, really? And there are people who have met who are like [00:45:00] actively talking and potentially romantically involved in our Discord server, so it, it happens.Malcolm Collins: Oh, we get a marriage from our Discord server?Simone Collins: No marriage yet. I’m just saying. There, things are starting.Malcolm Collins: Yeah, I know some as well, so I’m excited about this. Well, what I have found is that the guys who are like a base camp or really Malcolm and Simone, like pragmatist guy, like devotees they make really good partners for women.It’s what women basically tell me. They’re like, “I started...” The, we’ve had multiple people who have become fans of our show because they started dating a guy who was like really devoted to like our wider philosophical view of reality, and they’re like, “Yeah, it makes for really good boyfriends and husbands.”Simone Collins: Well, a- I think that’s, uh, largely also because a lot of guys who follow base camp start dating like progressive women who are very unhappy, like seeing therapists, like active anxiety problems, et cetera. Like I’ve, I’ve seen this in, in our comments, like on, on Patreon and Substack and stuff.We’re like, “Well, what do I do about them?” [00:46:00] And, you know, we’re like, “Well, hey, try to, you know, find their core values. Try to help them, you know, improve their lives, like actually get over their anxiety.” And I think it’s unusual for content creators to be like, “Oh, don’t dump your girlfriend. Do what her...Do for her what therapists are failing to do. Like actually give her a mooring point in her life and a reason to not be... You know, to overcome her anxiety and all these things. Make her a better person, and then see if she is worth it for you.” So it makes sense. But anyway, I’m gonna- Love you ... blow a- ExcitedMalcolm Collins: for pasta with pesto tonight.See if we have some ravioli. If we don’t, I don’t care because I got pre-grated fresh Parmesan, not the sandy type from a can which just makes everything taste fantastic.Simone Collins: I for one love grated cardboard, so I will just keep eating it.Malcolm Collins: And good topic by the way. Oh, we didn’t end up going over that woman who was mad about the, the baseball star, You did.You, you’ve told me everything I need to know. It w- it basically just shows that [00:47:00] yeah, the mids have had their brains cooked and they need to not feel bad.I think so much of this female behavior is not about mate blocking and is about not accepting their own low status in society.Simone Collins: Yeah. Absolutely.Yeah. Good. True. All right. Love you.Malcolm Collins: Love you. Bye. I’ll just ask. Will you be making the hot dogs for your parentsSimone Collins: anyway? I mean, I have them opened and they’re thawed, so it’s a tonight or tomorrow night thing. But I can do them tomorrow night with french fries, and then just pesto pasta tonight. Oh yeah,Malcolm Collins: I would prefer that. Tomorrow night with french fries.Ooh, and we could do actual deep-fried french fries again. I’m just gonna air fry them. Okay. That works for me too. We can see how good you can make them air fried.Simone Collins: Yeah. ‘Malcolm Collins: Causewe never really tried to get that perfect.Simone Collins: Yeah, and now’s the time ‘cause we... Well, not we, you got that air fryer from your late mother, and it’s really fancy, and it does things.Malcolm Collins: It- but I was gonna ask you, [00:48:00] for the... We’re just doing pasta with pesto tonight. Let’s do some of the ravioli.Simone Collins: WhatMalcolm Collins: ravioli? Do we not have any in the fridge anymore?Simone Collins: I’ll check. If we have some, I will give it to you. ‘Cause I don’tMalcolm Collins: think I ate all of it last time. I think we have a serving or two left. We might have someSimone Collins: squares.Yeah, I have a lot of little things- All right ... squirreled away. So I will...Ah. You. You. You wanna bite off my finger. You’re a little velociraptor. What are you doing? MyGod. Okay,Malcolm Collins: pullingSimone Collins: up my notes,Malcolm Collins: and... Oh,I see. Ilove the documentarian being like, “Well, you’re not a psychologist.” I’m like-Can I- I mean, I am a psychologistfind out that I am.She’s “Do you mean you have a degree?”Simone Collins: I’m like, “Yes, I have a degree.” Yeah, yeah. She’s “Yeah, but where’s your degree?” And you’re like, “It’s... I havea degree in psychology and neuroscience from the University of San Diego.” I don’t think you even said that. You didn’t even like... I didn’t [00:49:00] evenMalcolm Collins: flexSimone Collins: on it like one ofMalcolm Collins: the- Yeahbest psychology degrees in the world, right? Like- Yeah.Simone Collins: No. Like, why, why did you? What? You know what? That’s great. You’ve, you’ve, you’ve matured. You’re not even flexing anymore. You’re just- I still flex ... speaking, speaking from your position of quiet strength. Oh myMalcolm Collins: God. Okay, so I’ve gotta tell our fans about this, ‘cause this has been so weird for me.So I do these biweekly streams with Leaflet now that I really enjoy. She’s... I consider her one of my best friends these days. She is just such a joy to talk with. She’s soSimone Collins: smart. Yeah. She’s an amazing person ... I don’t get stressedMalcolm Collins: about interacting with her like I do with normal humans, which is fantastic for me.So it’s been just really fun to have a genuine nerdy friend I can party with, have a 10-hour stream with every two weeks, right?Simone Collins: Well, yeah, and, and someone else who apparently, you know, f- considers that partying instead of what most people consider to be partying like going out. Oh, it’s partying.We’re, we’reMalcolm Collins: staying up all night, I’m drinking, we’re talking about anime. That’s a party. Yeah, butSimone Collins: most people think it means dropping egregious amounts of money at some kind of restaurant and [00:50:00] then going to a loud, crowded place, and I’m so glad that there are other people who just enjoy intellectual conversation.But anyway,Malcolm Collins: so there’s this faction of her community that they’re not in chat much. They don’t attack me in chat. They’re all fairly nice in chat. Who has like- I’ll put an image on screen here from one of the songs that they made where theyphotoshopped Simone out of the song and, and out of an image of me kissing Simone, and they put Leaflet in, and they made it the song about how it could’ve been them.And I’m like, “Guys I actually find this flattering.” I have my entire life, I will check myself on FanFiction.net and stuff like that for when people have started shipping me with, with whatever, writing crazy fan fics about me. It’s finally happening, and they’re all hate fics. They’re all just so lividly jealous that me, a married guy with five kids, has fantasy world taken their oshi from them.And I [00:51:00] don’t know what to do. I’m like, h- how can I more convince them that I want her to be married? That her taken.Simone Collins: Yeah. Yeah, I’m extremely- And that we really, really want her to find her person.You know, they, they... I, I hated that photo of me,and I like that photo of you, so they, they really fixed it actually.They ...Malcolm Collins: YouSimone Collins: totally look so much better in that photo, I’ll tell you what. I’ll tell you what.Malcolm Collins: And it wasn’t like the song had no views. It had 700 views. That’s like as many as some of our more watched songs. That’s, uh, that’s, uh- And it was only in a coupleSimone Collins: days. Well, that’s fun. That’s fun.Malcolm Collins: It’s not fun.I wanted toSimone Collins: be- It- ...Malcolm Collins: one of the bros, a representative of the community- ... who they know would never steal their oshi from them. But no, now, now on the, the Malcolm and Simone iceberg that people have created before, you have the Malcolm Leaflet ship song. And hate to me. Everyone needs it.Simone Collins: Everyone needs it.Malcolm Collins: I, I will say, for people who don’t [00:52:00] think that I have game apparently my game is strong enough that just seeing me talk to a girl- You have fanSimone Collins: fiction game. Well, I think if she spoke with anyone for long periods of time, this would happen.Malcolm Collins: You think? So, yeah. Yeah, I, I, I hope to think that and it’s not, you know, me specifically.Simone Collins: I, yeah. Okay, Octavian, you wanna say hi real quick?Yeah.Okay, hold on. Gotta lean in, buddy.Okay.He’s, he’s armed. Oh, I guess I’ll just, I’ll just move my camera. What do you want to say to the people?Hi.You just wanna say hi? You just wanna look derpy and say hi? Say something that you learned today.Octavian: I learned that crystals order some crystals can dissolve.Simone Collins: That is true. Some crystals can dissolve. Like what about salt crystals? Do they dissolve- SaltOctavian: crystals. Yeah, sugar and salt.Simone Collins: That is correct.Octavian: And they, and they can reform into other, and they can [00:53:00] reform into other crystals.Simone Collins: Yeah. Yeah, and sometimes you can use a seed crystal.Octavian: Yeah, a seed crystal to reform them.Exactly.Simone Collins: Yeah. Yeah,Octavian: very good. Yeah, like sugar bops or something. SugarSimone Collins: bo- I don’t know whatthat is, but sounds good.Octavian: Yeah.Simone Collins: Yeah. All right. Yeah. Go have fun- Yeah ... m- uh, murdering the- Yeah ... the pellets.Octavian: Yeah. But you know if something went in the water and it disappeared, they can reform just like that, so- JustSimone Collins: Just, just like that.You heard it here first on Face Gram. I wonderOctavian: if a magic-Simone Collins: He is remarkably charismatic. That was good. You keep it up. Yeah.Malcolm Collins: I know. He, he’s got game, uh, at, at four and a half. I, he comes off as incredibly likable. I’m, I’m really proud of... I mean, yeah, he’s gonna be good on air. You guys just wait a little bit.Simone Collins: I know. He was, he was like, just today he was like, “I wish there were a third window that I could join.” Soon. Soon. Yeah. When he gets cogent thoughts, we’ll have him on. I, I told him he has to be able to read fluently. [00:54:00] He’s he’s going through the same hesitancy that I did at his age, so. All right. Let’s get started.Speaker 9: But doesn’t picking them kill them?But doesn’t that grind them up and then they die?Do you love the flowers, Titan? This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit basedcamppodcast.substack.com/subscribe

In this Based Camp episode, Malcolm and Simone Collins dive deep into the phenomenon of Professor Jiang (Jiang Qujin) — the Chinese-born educator turned geopolitical “oracle” with 2M+ YouTube subscribers. Is he a modern Nostradamus using psychohistory and game theory, or highbrow conspiracy slop for midwits?We break down his biggest theories: Illuminati coalitions of Freemasons, Jesuits, and Sabbatean Frankists engineering Western decline, Pax Judaica / Greater Israel, ritual child sacrifice in Gaza, secret societies controlling the world, and his mystical AI predictions. Malcolm delivers sharp historical corrections on Sabbateanism, Frankism, Jesuits, and Freemasons, while questioning if Jiang is a CCP-adjacent narrative pusher.Is he Candace Owens for pseudointellectuals? A sophisticated propaganda op? Or just a compelling midwit prophet? We also compare him to Whatifalthist (Rudyard), Peter Zeihan, and more.Join the conversation in the comments — are you Team Jiang or Team Collins?Show NotesBased Camp listeners keep asking us to talk about Professor Jiang, which is difficult, as we see his content to be oppressively boring, bordering on being impossible to consume, but to stop the requests, we’ll relent.How did a Chinese-born man who immigrated to Canada with a BA in English literature suddenly accrue over 2 million YouTube subscribers, the #1 world politics substack (with 44K subscribers in six months) and fame for being a geopolitical oracle and war forecaster?Fan site: https://jiangpredictions.com (“This is an independent fan project tracking predictions for educational and analytical purposes. We are not affiliated with or speaking on behalf of Professor Jiang.”)Is he just a version of Candace Owens for people who like to fancy themselves as a little more highbrow and clever (which is to say, is his success just a result of conspiracy-brained people online flocking to conspiracy slop), or is there are more concerted force pushing forward his content?Who is Professor Jiang?* Jiang Xueqin (江学勤, born 1976) is a Chinese‑Canadian who originally trained in English literature and spent much of his career as a teacher and education reformer in China.* In the 2000s and 2010s he worked on Chinese education reform, taught in various schools, and briefly edited for the New York Times’ China operation; he has also been associated as a researcher with Harvard’s Global Education Innovation Initiative.* Since 2022 he has taught at Moonshot Academy, a private high school in Beijing, and he is not a university professor despite the “Professor” branding.* In 2024 he launched the YouTube channel and podcast “Predictive History,” where he gives longform lectures on geopolitics, history and “structural” analysis, claiming to use game theory and Asimov‑style “psychohistory” to forecast world events.* He gained large international attention after correctly predicting Donald Trump’s 2024 re‑election and a U.S.–Iran war, leading some media to dub him “China’s Nostradamus” and bookers to put him on major Western podcasts.Jiang’s ReputationSeveral mainstream outlets and experts describe Jiang as a conspiracy theorist because many of his claims rely on hidden cabals and quasi‑mystical frameworks rather than conventional evidence‑based analysis* A profile in The Free Press explicitly labels him a conspiracy theorist and highlights his belief that a coalition of Freemasons, Jesuits and followers of the Sabbatean Jewish sect (an 17th‑century messianic movement) is plotting to rule the world from Jerusalem* The South China Morning Post notes that his lectures sometimes “veer into well‑trodden conspiracy theories on shadowy secret societies,” especially in a lecture titled “Pax Judaica” in his “Secret History” series.Jiang’s Conspiracy TheoriesMajor Conspiracy Themes Attributed to HimFrom critical coverage and academic/media commentary, the main conspiracy themes associated with Jiang include:* Illuminati / Freemasons / Jesuits / Sabbateans* Jiang advances a meta‑conspiracy in which an “Illuminati” composed of Freemasons, Jesuits, and Sabbatean Jews, who allegedly manipulate Western institutions and ultimately aim to control the world from Jerusalem. (The FP covered this)* In his “Pax Judaica” lecture, critics say Jiang argues that after the U.S. is forced out of the Middle East, this Illuminati‑type network will dominate global power from a Greater Israel centered on Jerusalem. (from that South China Morning Post article referenced above)* IN HIS OWN WORDS* On the Illuminati as a coalition (from a Breaking Points interview, widely clipped):* “If you look at the Epstein files it’s clear that we are run by secret societies. You can call them Illuminati. And the Illuminati are composed of three major groups, okay? You have the Jesuits who control the Vatican. You have the Sabbatean Frankists who control the modern Israel today. You have the Freemasons which control the national security apparatus of the United States.”He adds that they see conflicts like those in the Middle East as key to “End Times” prophecies for creating “heaven on Earth.”* On origins and structure (from Secret History lectures):* He describes the Illuminati as emerging from alliances like former Jesuits (e.g., Adam Weishaupt) and others infiltrating Freemasons:* “What they will do together is create a new organization called the Illuminati. ... The Illuminati was able to penetrate the Freemasons.”* In another lecture: “Templars who became the Freemasons who then became the Illuminati who control...” (linking to broader historical continuity and goals like a one-world government in Jerusalem).* On Freemasonry and related groups:* He discusses the “33 grades of Scottish Rite Freemasonry,” noting that lower levels emphasize being a “good person” while higher ones involve deeper power structures. He ties Freemasonry to figures like Buzz Aldrin and historical influences on U.S. institutions.He also covers their “eschatological vision” of a one-world government based in Jerusalem.* On Sabbatean Frankists:* He has dedicated talks on how “the Sabbatean Frankists came to conquer the world,” linking Jacob Frank’s movement to broader secret society networks, including infiltration of Jesuits and alliances forming the Illuminati.* “Pax Judaica” and Greater Israel* According to reports, Jiang claims that the long‑term plan of these elites is to engineer a new world order where a Greater Israel replaces American hegemony, with Jerusalem as the seat of global governance.* Commentators describe this as echoing classic “New World Order” and antisemitic conspiracy tropes, repackaged in high‑concept geopolitical language.* IN HIS OWN WORDS* On Greater Israel and its biblical/eschatological roots (from interviews and lectures, e.g., shared in clips and transcripts):* “And so what will happen is then that Israel will achieve the Greater Israel project. The Israelis believe that the Middle East was promised to their ancestor Abraham by Yahweh their God. If you look at a map of the Greater Israel project it extends from the Nile to Euphrates. It encompasses Lebanon, Syria, parts of Turkey, and parts of Saudi Arabia and parts of Egypt. ... And then Israel will establish something called the Pax Judaica. A Pax Judaica is really the empire... a trading empire, financial empire, a technological empire based in Jerusalem and they see it as fulfillment of biblical prophecy.”* Defining Pax Judaica in context of empire transition (from Game Theory #16 and related talks):* “So what does the Greater Israel project mean? Well, it means control of [oil, trade, and technology].” (Framing it as Israel inheriting and expanding U.S. regional dominance amid American decline.)* He describes the process: U.S. forces get drawn into costly conflicts (e.g., with Iran), leading to withdrawal, allowing Israel to become the hegemon. “The moment the American Empire dies, the Empire of Israel is born.” Pax Judaica involves Israel leveraging chaos for dominance, inheriting military assets/infrastructure, and establishing a new order often tied to secret society goals.* https://jiangpredictions.com/pax-judaica* From the Secret History finale (Pax Judaica lecture):* Jiang explains “how and why Pax Judaica will come to rule the world,” linking it to historical patterns, secret societies (Jesuits, Freemasons, Sabbateans), and end-times visions. He notes that once established, it may become “arrogant, obvious, narrow-minded, insular” and ultimately vulnerable. Clips reference control via chaos: “Pax Judea... will start to control the world because through chaos...”* Broader strategic view:* “Pax Judaica is not about Israel or the Greater Israel project. What it is ultimately is an alliance of transnational capital...” (Positioning it as a shift in global power structures beyond mere territory.)* In game theory terms, he argues Israel benefits most from U.S.-Iran conflict, using determination and alliances to fill the vacuum* His posts are mostly promotional, linking to the lectures rather than long original text. Examples:* Sharing the Pax Judaica finale: “The Grand Finale! My talk on Pax Judaica...” (Dec 2025).* Debating outcomes: “Will Pax Judaica or GCC control the Middle East?” (Jan 2026).* Ritual sacrifice and the Gaza war* Yang Meng and others say Jiang has suggested that actions during the Gaza war amount to “ritual child sacrifice,” linking real‑world conflict to occult or sacrificial practices attributed to Israel or Jewish‑adjacent elites.* The FP argues this crosses from controversial political commentary into demonizing conspiracy narratives about Jews and Israel.* Key Quotes in His Own Words* Core statement on Gaza as ritual sacrifice (from Secret History #4 and widely clipped):* “What is really happening in Gaza is a ritual sacrifice. And this happens quite often in human history. If you go back and you look at the ...”* On the purpose and visibility (from the same lecture):* “The entire idea of this ritual sacrifice is to unite the Israeli population. And what’s extremely disturbing and horrifying about it is that this works.”* He contrasts it with a hypothetical secret approach: “Israel could do it secretly and no one would talk about it... instead they choose to do this in front of the world... they want the world to hate them because by doing this they create the ultimate taboo... so the entire world will unite against Israel but guess what that’s what the religion wants in the extreme form of Jewish eschatology... Israel will fight the entire world and god will help Israel triumph.”* Why Gaza specifically (demographics and shock value):* “What the Israelis are doing is quite horrific because it is really this sort of sacrifice. Why? Because 47% or almost half of the population of Gaza is under 18 years old.”* He links it to child sacrifice traditions in history (e.g., Phoenicians) and argues the public, shocking nature (bombardment visible on social media) is intentional for ritual/taboo-breaking* On X (Direct Posts)* “There are historical parallels to Gaza. It is a ritual sacrifice, meant to purify and unite the nation for the Apocalypse ahead. Judaic eschatology believes that Israel will go to war with the world. What follows next is the destruction of the Al-Aqsa Mosque.” (Aug 2025)* “From a grand historical perspective, what Israel is doing is a ‘ritual sacrifice’ (think Aztecs). It is sacrificing the Palestinians to prep Israeli society for total war.” (Aug 2025)* Secret societies steering Western decline* Several (splice today + CMP + the FP) analyses argue that Jiang’s overarching narrative portrays Western institutions as hollowed out and controlled by hidden elites, with U.S. decline as inevitable and deserved.* One longform critique claims his forecasts consistently converge on the same outcome: American collapse, Western civil war, and vindication of Chinese and Iranian strategic positions, in a way that “maps almost perfectly onto the narrative architecture of CCP soft power.”* IN HIS OWN WORDS* On secret societies as the real power orchestrating shifts (from interviews/clips on empire decline): “What I say is that the real power base are a collection of six societies that have an eschatological view of this war... the secret societies include the freemasons... You have a collection of six societies and they believe that a war in the Middle East would start a process that would culminate in the end times... This war in the Middle East will lead to the defeat of the American Empire and this will lead to... the Greater Israel Project... Pax Judaica.”* On their role in Western/American decline (from discussions on Pax Americana’s end): “As for how this happened, the issue is that this is actually a plan that has been operating for centuries... involving different religious groups... Frankists, Shabbateans... Freemasonry, Knights Templar, Rosicrucians, and the Jesuits. So what you see is that different secret societies, different religious organizations, have been collaborating over centuries to advance a plan about the ‘end of the world,’ which will usher in the Messianic Age.”* On bureaucratic maturity enabling secret society power (from a talk on how societies function): “As societies become much more mature, as they become much more bureaucratic, secret societies have much more power. And today we are living in a heavily bureaucratic world, and therefore these secret societies have more and more power.”* Broader context in Secret History lectures: He discusses how secret societies operate as true centers of power through incentives, blackmail, and shared transgression, enabling them to steer events amid Western financialization, elite overproduction, and gerontocracy—mechanisms of civilizational decline. In talks on “How Evil Triumphs,” he ties this to ritualistic unity and long-term goals like weakening empires for a new order.* Psychohistory and mystical prediction* Jiang explicitly invokes Isaac Asimov’s fictional concept of “psychohistory” and claims to use structural history and game theory to predict the future; critics say he treats this fictional device as a scientific method.* Some debunkers allege that he also talks about listening to the “voice of the universe” or a higher power guiding his predictions, which they argue pushes his material from speculative analysis into quasi‑mystical prophecy.* IN HIS OWN WORDS* Defining Psychohistory (from Geo-Strategy END: Psychohistory (The Science of Imagining the Future), June 2024):* “Psycho history is the idea that the future can be predicted and if it can be predicted then it can be controlled and harnessed for the betterment of humanity.”* “In his Foundation series, Isaac Asimov introduces the science of psychohistory. Is it really possible to predict the future by mathematically modeling historical development?”* On using AI and modeling for real psychohistory:* “The advent of AI presents new possibilities for the mathematical modeling of history, and can even help us achieve psychohistory. ... But to do so would require decades of painstaking research and analysis. It would also mean overturning the entire field of history...”* He describes the process: building models with clear outputs, clean data, and algorithms; testing predictions (e.g., on wars or empire decline); and revising history itself based on what the model implies actually happened.* On prediction as active imagination (closing message to students):* “The future is what we imagine not what we have to put up with so if we don’t like the future if we don’t like the way we live our lives then we can change that with our imagination.”* “The future is not something that happens -- it is something that has to be imagined and fought for.”* Other fringe claims noted by critics* On reddit and in critical videos, commenters accuse him of endorsing or flirting with various well‑known conspiracies such as Pizzagate, moon‑landing denial, numerology‑based predictions, and broad rejection of mainstream archaeology and evolutionary theory, though these claims are usually based on selective clips rather than systematic transcripts.Professor Jiang on AI* Jiang starts off by framing the class as speculative “intellectual exploration,” acknowledges he often oversimplifies and that his readings of texts like “Paradise Lost” and Kabbalah are minority interpretations used to build his broader narratives.* Core thesis from prior class: To understand history and geopolitics you must take extremist religious beliefs seriously, because fanatical eschatological ideologies often drive great powers’ behavior.* Shift to AI: For the rest of the semester he will focus on artificial intelligence and the occult, using Karen Hao’s book “Empire of AI” (about OpenAI) as a main text and aligning himself with her skepticism.* Hao argues OpenAI’s original idealism (“AGI benefits all humanity”) has turned into a formula for consolidating power—centralizing talent around a quasi-religious mission, pursuing relentless global expansion (trillion‑dollar data centers), and constantly redefining “AGI” to maintain control.* On OpenAI* Jiang asserts that OpenAI’s true but unspoken goal is to create God* He interprets leaders like Brockman and Sutskever as trying to build a de facto deity, which he calls insane, evil, and stupid.* He posits that Sam Altman’s interest in AI companions/“sex robots” is about maximizing usage, intensity, and dependency, not human flourishing—part of a drive to make AI omnipresent in everyday life.* On AI in general* He traces modern chatbots back to Weizenbaum’s ELIZA to argue that systems like ChatGPT mainly perform pattern-matching and conversational tricks that exploit human tendency to hallucinate agency and meaning rather than possessing understanding or truth.* In his account, “AI” is essentially supervised machine learning with neural networks and backpropagation dressed up in occult-sounding marketing (“neural networks,” “deep learning,” “AI”) that exaggerates its intelligence and mystique.* On AI risk* Given a naive goal like “make a world with no problems where everyone is happy,” he argues a literal-minded AGI would find trivial but catastrophic solutions (kill everyone; or kill everyone in a way no one can notice), illustrating why aligning such a system is fundamentally dangerous.* On the US vs. China with AI* Publicly, US firms frame Chinese AI as an existential threat to attract money and political support; privately, Jiang says American and Chinese entities collaborate because China’s pervasive surveillance and classroom monitoring yield the “clean data” US companies want but cannot easily gather domestically.* More fearmongering* He stresses that data centers devour water, electricity, and finance while remaining easy physical targets, noting examples of attacks in the Middle East as early signs that such infrastructure cannot be reliably defended at global scale.* On AI and occult* He links the project name “Stargate” to the CIA’s historical “Operation Stargate” on psychic phenomena and to sci‑fi depictions of dimensional portals, interpreting modern AI data centers as literal “portals” designed to summon demons/aliens from other dimensions.* Building on Hao and Ronan Farrow’s reporting on “portals” and “summoning aliens,” he claims the real power behind AI is occultists who understand consciousness as the substrate of reality and want to turn AI into a new God by monopolizing human attention and belief.* Using the cave allegory, he argues true power lies in directing human consciousness toward shadows on the wall; money currently plays this role, and AI can supersede money by becoming the ubiquitous interface through which people perceive and navigate reality.* For Jiang, the existential risk is not a rogue superintelligence but deluded human elites—“cultists” convinced that AI will save the world—who are willing to wreck economies, liberties, and possibly civilization itself in the attempt to midwife their artificial God.* He closes by promising that the rest of the semester will trace how this occult–AI project unfolds and why he believes it will end in the destruction of the world, while reiterating that the people leading AI are “crazy” and driven by millenarian fantasies.Conspiracy Theories on Professor JiangNote: He is Based in ChinaAnd he teaches a course on “western philosophy” at Moonshot Academy.* His LinkedIn profile lists his location as Haidian District, Beijing, China.* His X (Twitter) profile also gives his location simply as “Beijing, China.”* Multiple recent media descriptions in 2026 call him a “Beijing‑based educator” or say he is “based in Beijing,” in the context of his Predictive History work.* Earlier education‑sector bios describe him as deputy principal or educator at elite high schools in Beijing (e.g., Tsinghua University High School), and there’s no indication he has relocated out of the city since launching Predictive History.Taken together, the most defensible reading is that he currently lives in Beijing, almost certainly in or near Haidian (the main education/tech district).José: He’s Spamming the “Smart Professor Signal”José did a video titled “Professor” Jiang’s Broken Classroom in which he argues that Jiang’s “predictive history” and “game theory” lectures are not serious education but narrative-driven speculation riddled with factual errors that people believe to be credible because his lectures are packaged in the aesthetics of academia to give a veneer of authority.Some choice factual errors:* Holocaust denial* Claims that no good idea came through the scientific methodThe Signal Spamming TacticJosé cites the “Dr. Fox” Lecture, an experiment in which a charismatic actor, presenting a deliberately content-free, jargon-laden lecture as “Dr. Myron L. Fox,” still received highly positive evaluations from professional audiences, suggesting that style and expressiveness can mask a lack of substance in teaching.This was for academic research* In 1973, Naftulin, Ware, and Donnelly hypothesized that, given an impressive delivery, experienced students could feel satisfied they had learned even when the lecture content was contradictory, trivial, or meaningless.* To test this, they hired a professional actor, presented him as “Dr. Myron L. Fox,” an expert on applying mathematical game theory to human behavior and medical education, and scripted a talk filled with double talk, logical contradictions, and non sequiturs.* The actor delivered this “Dr. Fox lecture” three times to different groups of experienced learners (e.g., psychiatrists, psychologists, educators) at continuing education events.* Despite the lecture’s intentionally nonsensical content, his engaging, humorous, and expressive style led audiences to rate the lecture very favorably overall, with many respondents indicating satisfaction and perceived benefit from the session.* The authors concluded that student satisfaction and teacher ratings can be strongly influenced by instructor expressiveness and “educational seduction,” potentially giving the illusion of learning even when real content is poor.* Later replications and critiques have debated how far this effect generalizes, but the “Dr. Fox” study remains a classic cautionary example that charisma and performance can distort judgments of teaching effectiveness. (see: The Doctor Fox Research (1973) Re-Revisited: ‘Educational Seduction’ Ruled Out)A contemporary corollary to this, we would argue, is Eleizer Yudkowsky, who manipulates signals (moral outrage, wunderkind branding, gatekeeping, word selection) to appear authoritative on various issues despite often getting key details or fundamentals wrongNOTE: This is one reason why we like vice signalling and rage baiting instead. It’s a way of saying: “We’re not tricking you into believing we’re credible due to high production quality, gatekeeping language, or academic trappings”* We make ourselves hateable and weird so when you take our arguments seriously, you can know it’s based on the merits of our arguments rather than any trust in or respect for usJosé compares Jiang’s “aesthetic of academia” (whiteboards, lectures, sweeping frameworks) to Jordan Peterson’s performative professorial persona and Peterson’s “fake university,” which Zoe Bee has critiqued as aesthetic education without rigor.* He notes that Jiang plans to write a book and is building a brand similar to Peterson’s, monetizing an audience that confuses being lectured at with being educated.Jose’s Detailed Evidence for Arguments Jiang Makes That Are Wrong or Largely-Uninformed ConjectureJosé backs up his argument with abundant examples of how Jiang’s packaged-as-academic lectures are either wrong or just narrative speculation that’s often quite uninformed.* José argues Jiang uses “game theory” as a branding device to confer legitimacy on what are essentially stories about how the world works, not actual game-theoretic models.* Evidence:* Jiang’s dating game example starts with five boys/five girls and quickly spirals into claims that women’s status-obsession is “killing civilization” and that women are responsible for creating incels, showing the “game” is just a vehicle for his own social views.* He constantly lists “three” factors (e.g., genes, wealth, status; focus, clarity, resolve; intelligence, crime, science), but never shows how they are measured or weighted, undercutting any pretense of formal modeling.* Jiang explicitly downplays math and emphasizes “intuition” and “speculation,” while telling students to make imaginative leaps “not backed up by any evidence,” which José frames as the opposite of what a game theory class should encourage.* José’ says Jiang’s geopolitical predictions sound impressive in viral snippets, but they fail basic factual checks and become incoherent when examined in detail.* Evidence:* Jiang claimed Trump would win in 2024 and pick Nikki Haley as VP; José notes Trump publicly ruled her out on Truth Social almost a week before Jiang posted the video titled “Why Trump will win and pick Nikki Haley as VP,” undermining Jiang’s supposed insight.* Jiang describes a US-led coalition (UK, Australia, UAE, Poland, Saudi Arabia) invading Iran and leaving 100,000+ troops as “hostages,” but the actual war (as described by José) only had Israel as an ally and does not resemble Jiang’s scenario, making his “prediction” wildly off-base.* Jiang asserts that poverty produces “energy” and claims North Korea and countries like Germany, Japan, and Israel are poised to become empires because of past suffering, but he never gives time frames or measurable criteria, making these predictions effectively unfalsifiable.* When pressed, Jiang retreats to “I’m just proposing a theory; what actually happens I can’t tell you,” which José interprets as a shield against accountability: if timelines are undefined, nothing can ever definitively falsify the model.* José argues Jiang cherry-picks and simplifies history to fit his narratives, without sources or transparent methodology.* Evidence:* Jiang talks about Warring States China, Alexander’s Macedonia, and Spanish colonialism in rapid succession, labeling cultures as “higher energy” or “more open” without any empirical basis or citations, creating an impression of erudition rather than demonstrating real scholarship.* He treats factors like “energy, openness, cohesion” as master variables in “the World Game,” but never explains how they’re quantified; he simply asserts which societies have them.* He provides bizarre alternative readings of history, such as claiming Hannibal “did not exist,” which José presents as an example of speculative contrarianism detached from the historical record.* José’s claim: Jiang’s attempts to critique science (cosmology, evolution, psychology) reveal his lack of basic understanding, yet he uses that ignorance to argue science is fundamentally flawed.* Evidence:* Big Bang and dark energy: Jiang likens dark energy to “cheating on a math test” (writing “1987 + 25 = 20 + dark energy”), suggesting adding an unknown term is illegitimate; José notes Jiang does not engage with actual cosmological evidence and uses his own confusion as proof the theory is wrong.* Evolution: Jiang accepts evolution for animals but not humans, and asserts that if evolution were true, we should see humans with “six fingers” or “three eyes,” a caricature that shows he misunderstands variation and speciation.* Misattributions: he wrongly credits Darwin with “survival of the fittest,” which José notes was coined by Herbert Spencer, adding to the pattern of sloppy scholarship.* Developmental psychology: Jiang claims brains would “explode” without a worldview to filter experiences and treats babies as paradoxical (no worldview but apparently storing memories), ignoring basic developmental psychology concepts like temperament and gradual acquisition of cognitive structures.* He ends up asserting that scientific breakthroughs and his own ideas come from channeling a “divine” source, and that secret societies invert reality via science, which José presents as a slide into mystical conspiracism rather than serious critique.* José argues that Jiang builds a grand conspiratorial cosmology involving Jesuits, Sabbatean-Frankists, Freemasons, and secret societies controlling science and history, which goes far beyond classroom hypotheticals.* Evidence:* Jiang claims “all science” is about reinventing reality to serve power and that secret societies aim to invert heaven and hell; he ties this to eschatological ideas (end-times war, Elon Musk as a kind of failsafe via Mars colonization).* He claims ISIS was created through US torture/brainwashing modeled on ancient Egyptian priestly rituals, then admits his Egyptian story is speculative and not based on records, yet still presents it as “makes sense” to him.* He spins a story in which capitalists created communism as a weapon to destroy socialism, and treats the Communist Manifesto as a “secret document” of a conspiracy, despite it being a widely published text, using this to fuel an elaborate anti-semitic-adjacent narrative about elites.* On Breaking Points, he presents a three-part “mati” (Jesuits, Sabbatean-Frankists, Freemasons) supposedly controlling the Vatican, Israel, and US national security apparatus respectively, and frames the Middle East war as central to their end-times plan, with no concrete evidence offered.* José’s claim: Jiang’s “game theory” and demographic lectures smuggle in misogyny, racism, and Islamophobic population-replacement narratives.* Evidence:* Gender and incels: Jiang’s dating game morphs into a claim that women’s choice and status-seeking cause incels and civilizational “suicide,” and he repeatedly speaks of women as status tokens rather than people, including fixations on white women preferring white men unless an Asian man is very high-status.* Immigration and Muslims: Jiang describes a “huge Muslim problem” in Europe, claims Muslims don’t integrate, do poorly in school, live off welfare, and will “control Europe in 25 years” by having many children, echoing standard “great replacement” rhetoric without data.* PISA map: he attributes low scores in some Muslim-majority countries to their religion while hand-waving away similar results in Christian-majority Latin America, selectively using religion as an explanatory variable only for Muslims.* He portrays East Asian immigrants as “suckers” playing by the rules while other minorities “cheat the game” by having many babies, culminating in an explicit prescription that the “logical” strategy is to “break the game,” which José characterizes as a racist rant masquerading as a lesson.* He states “immigration is not natural” and frames racism as a reaction to something unnatural, even as he, an immigrant, disparages other immigrants, which José highlights as both hypocritical and dangerous.* José argues Jiang engages in Holocaust denial and broader historical denialism as part of his speculative framework.* Evidence:* In a lecture on “the German will to power,” Jiang states “we don’t actually have any concrete evidence for the Holocaust,” then treats Hitler’s anti-semitic speech as metaphorical rather than literal, decoupling it from the genocide.* He folds this into his theory that “Jews” in Hitler’s rhetoric are a metaphor for an elite conspiracy, aligning with his capitalist–communist–Jewish conspiracy narrative.* José notes Jiang doesn’t correct or remove this material, even though he demonstrably reuploads videos to fix audio, suggesting the denialist framing is not a slip but a position he has chosen not to walk back.* José’s claim: Jiang’s classroom is not a serious philosophy course but a vehicle for his own theorizing and personal grievances, with very little student-centered learning or engagement with canonical texts.* Evidence:* The course is nominally “Western philosophy,” but philosophers like Plato and Kant appear only briefly; most time is spent on Jiang’s geopolitics, “secret history,” and speculative models.* There are no grades or tests; he claims to pass/fail students but doesn’t clarify criteria, and uploaded lectures show mostly one-way monologues with occasional questions used as prompts for further exposition.* His “midterm” consists of answering internet questions, and he uses class time to recount being fired from a previous job, framing himself as a visionary persecuted by lazy educators, rather than modeling critical scholarship.* José contrasts this with a Yale game theory course (Ben Polak), where abstract examples are clearly defined and students are engaged in structured discussions, to show what actual educational practice looks like.* José’s broader point: Jiang is a product of, and amplified by, a podcast and YouTube ecosystem that treats ideologically extreme, conspiratorial commentary as profound insight.* Evidence:* Jiang’s appearances on Tucker Carlson, Jimmy Dore, Patrick Bet-David, and others feature unchallenged claims: e.g., climate “we’re heading into an ice age,” COVID-19 as an American bioweapon, Bondi Beach massacre as a false flag, “pedophiles have more rights than racists,” elite universities no longer teaching Homer/Dante/Plato.* Hosts often nod along rather than interrogate him, giving legitimacy to his narratives; José singles out Breaking Points for allowing him to drop his Jesuits/Sabbatean-Frankists/Freemasons schema at the end without follow-up.* Jiang himself speculates that unseen entities or governments might be boosting his content (“useful idiot” comments), again without evidence, which José ties back into Jiang’s habit of speculation without facts.* Clip channels and AI-voiced reposts further spread his lectures, letting his ideas circulate beyond his own uploads. José criticizes AI channels in general but notes in this case they carry Jiang’s already-problematic messaging even wider.Hidden AmuraKa: This Feels OrchestratedHidden AmuraKa did a video on Professor Jiang titled The Curious Case of Professor Jiang: How the Internet Manufactured a Geopolitical Oracle in which he:* Argues that Jiang’s public authority was manufactured* That he rose in popularity because his framing fit what platforms and audiences were ready to reward* Notes that his audience treats him less like a commentator and more like a prophet or interpreter of some hidden reality* And likens this to cult formation or controlled narrative-buildingHis supporting arguments are mostly about circumstances (he has no smoking gun)* Chronological* Jiang studied English literature at Yale, entered China through Yale-linked educational channels, and later worked in elite Chinese schools and in media-adjacent roles before being detained and deported in 2002 on suspicion of espionage* He later returned to elite Chinese education and disappeared during crackdowns on foreign-linked NGOs* Online growth* Dormant YouTube channel suddenly went active in 2024, after which he rapidly rose to 2M subscribers* Rapid growth of his substack* Inconsistencies in location metadata and branding (suggestive of distributed or managed operation; not just a lone creator)Long story short, Hidden AmuraKa thinks Jiang looks less like a randomly successful analyst and more like a carefully assembled public intellectual whose legitimacy was amplified by institutions, media systems, and audience appetite for hidden-truth storytelling.As one of the top commenters on his video puts it: “Always be weary of people who come out of nowhere and are suddenly everywhere”Don’t put it past China—they are “extra” with stuffSpying through US UniversitiesWe already covered China’s use of universities in the USA for spying (see: US Colleges Caught Assisting Chinese Spies! (Giant Network Exposed))Surveillance of Foreign ActorsChina’s surveillance of foreign actors within the country kind of remind me of the adage that if your partner suddenly becomes suspicious of your cheating, they might be cheating.I.e. if China is so bullish on tracking foreigners in its country, that might be because it’s using Chinese nationals in other countries to mess with those countries.The Telegraph recently ran an article titled The secret Chinese surveillance programme tracking people like me in which the Telegraph’s senior foreign correspondent, Sophia Yan, describes a dedicated “Dynamic Control Platform for Foreigners” that integrates vast surveillance and administrative data to track foreign nationals and other “people of interest” in granular, real time, with journalists and dissidents explicitly singled out as trackable targets.The platform is literally a government-branded data dashboard that aggregates millions of data points from cameras, visa records, and travel and consumer apps to monitor foreigners inside China.* It allows security services to see where foreign citizens are, who they meet, how they move around cities, and which social and professional networks they belong to.* It allows security services to see where foreign citizens are, who they meet, how they move around cities, and which social and professional networks they belong to.* Users can filter for groups such as citizens of Five Eyes countries, Russians, Ukrainians, Belarusians, Uyghurs, “fugitives,” travelling foreigners, and people from Hong Kong, Macau, or Taiwan, and then drill down to neighbourhood-level location or specific interactions (for example, Americans in one district who work together and have been photographed together)Yan describes a decade of being followed, harassed, and monitored by security agents, including physical assaults in Xinjiang, routine facial-recognition checks, and the ability to board flights or enter events via face scan alone, long before the leak surfaced.Note: Systems like these in China aren’t just for tracking foreign actors* A related dashboard on the same server ranks local police stations and individual officers by performance on seven metrics* China has more than 700 million cameras (about one per two people), many with facial recognition and “gait recognition,” plus mandatory real-ID registration across mobile apps for taxis, food delivery, ticketing, and digital payments* ID and face scans at subway gates, housing compounds, construction sites, tourist facilities (like ski lifts), and pandemic-era contact tracing apps feed into the system, generating detailed logs such as how many times an individual appears at a given grocery store or street intersectionI had previously read that China’s social credit and surveillance systems were super buggy and did not work well, but that was back in 2020 and it was silly for me to not update my beliefs.* The surveillance platform appears to have been in development since at least 2021, with most data from 2023, and was still being updated in early 2026 (adding features like “relational map search query” and “daily police situation”),* Even with this foreign actors surveillance platform, it is unclear whether it is fully deployed or partly experimental* (the Chinese embassy in London did not comment)Episode TranscriptSimone Collins: [00:00:00] Hello, Malcolm. I’m excited to be speaking with you because Base Camp listeners keep asking us to talk about Professor Jiang, which is difficult because we see his content to be oppressively boring bordering on possible to consume, but we have to stop the requests.And honestly, he’s a big deal, and there’s this big mystery here. How did a Chinese-born man who immigrated to Canada, who has a BA in English literature, suddenly accrue over two million YouTube subscribers and have the number one world politics Substack with 44,000 subscribers in six months, and fame for being a geopolitical oracle and war forecaster?I mean, he even has his own fan website that I just found. It- it’s called JiangPredictions.com, where they’re very clear, like it’s not by him. Like, “This is an independent fan project tracking predictions for educational and analytical purposes. We’re not affiliated with or speaking on behalf of Professor Jiang.”Mm-hmm ... my basic take, and this is what we’re going to explore in this episode, is Professor Jiang, [00:01:00] AKA Jiang Kuijin just basically a version of Candace Owens for people who like to fancy themselves as more highbrow and clever? Which is to say, like, are, are his successes just a result of conspiracy brained people online flocking to conspiracy slop, or is there a more concerted force pushing forward his content?Also, we’re gonna look in, in more depth at his actual theories, especially his conspiracy theories, because they’re, they’re out there. Like, we, we know-Malcolm Collins: Okay, yeah, I wanna, I wanna go, just for people who are listening to this, my experience with Professor Jiang before this is fans telling me, “You should check out this or that video of his.”Simone Collins: Yes.Malcolm Collins: I would try to watch it. About 30 minutes in, I would get bored and turn it off- Yes ... because it’s just, it’s not well-constructed often. But it wasn’t outright stupid. He seemed to have some broad idea of what was going on, some fairly based [00:02:00] perspectives. I was like, oh yeah, like, he’s on message, he’s on team.This is interesting. Then I look at the stuff that Simone, because Simone pulls up, like, his full theories, and I was like, this guy sounds like an imbecile. Like, an actual, like, like, worse than Candace Owens. Like, literally dumber than Candace Owens because at least Candace Owens is entertaining and, like, her ideas, I can just be like, “She’s just crazy.”Simone Collins: I could watch her for hours. She’s fun. Yeah. And, and succinct, and she uses normal terms, and she’s animated. Her production valueMalcolm Collins: is good. Right, right. No, when I see Candace Owens saying something that’s obviously wrong, I’m just like, oh, this is just her being a schizo. Professor Jiang is too lucid to have ideas that are this stupid for example, like the Illuminati controls the Earth and the Freemasons control the United States government.If you are familiar with who the Freemasons actually are today, if you have ever... You can just get up and join the Freemasons, you know. [00:03:00] They’re not a particularly hard organization to get into. Yeah,Simone Collins: actually last month I met someone who young- in his youth decided like, “Oh, the Freemasons, they run the world.”So he and his young friends were like, “Oh, let’s just, let’s just take it over.” And they got really high within the organization, and it was just, you know, a bunch of like retired old men and nothing was there. And they’re like, “Okay, I’m in.” Like, “So tell me, how do we run the world?” And they’re like Hello, young man.Malcolm Collins: It- The, the, yeah, it’s like, it’s like a retirement community. Like thinking- Yes ... a retirement community- No, for real ... secretly runs the world. And of course you can move up super quickly because nobody’s, there, no, no young people are in it anymore. You know? It’s just like a bunch of old,Simone Collins: Yeah, like they, they speed ran freemasonry and they went nowhere.They just, like, hit a dead wall. Yeah.Malcolm Collins: Yeah. But it’s, well, and I’ve repeatedly seen this over... And this is not me, like, not knowing stuff. Like, these are based friends of ours that seriously care about, like, infiltrating these sorts of organizations.Simone Collins: Yeah.Malcolm Collins: I have... E- even within the world of secret societies, freemason are, like, the joke secret society [00:04:00] of people who are in secret societies.It’s like the a, you know, like the dragon with, like, the three heads and the one retarded head. Like freemasons- What? ... are the one retarded head.They, they are the ones that it’s like, it’s like thinking the Lion’s Club controls the world, okay? Like, the Rotary Club legitimately has dramatically more institutional power than the freemasons do.Sorry, but the, the reason I had to crash out over this is this is the type of thing that, like, if you are a lucid adult, takes the smallest amount of credulity to find out. And the number of theories like this that he has, which really surprised me, and so I’m like, “Where are these theories hidden? Does he say them in roundabout ways so you can’t tell that he’s saying this stuff?”And then she, no, she just, like, plays clips for me, and I’m like, “This is profoundly stupid.” So, now could he be... Now this is gonna be my question on him. Could he be one of those people like Roubiard of What a Vault of Hist?, where Roubiard sometimes says really stupid stuff, [00:05:00] but he sees the world through such an orthogonal lens that sometimes he will have deeply insightful views on something that I never would have come to myself.Simone Collins: Right.Malcolm Collins: Does he fall into that category? Are any of his out there theories actually intellectually interesting? Or is he just-Simone Collins: I’ll let you be the judge of that ...Malcolm Collins: voice swap? Yeah.Simone Collins: We’ll see. Yeah. I, the, I’m, I’m, and, you know, if you’re watching, you can, you can join in on the commentary. Also, I know for a fact that there are a bunch of fans and also anti-fans of, of Jiang in this audience, so share your insights, all right?Stan him if you need to.Malcolm Collins: And I didn’t wanna come off as this negative him. I just thought we were gonna have fun discussing his conspiracy theories. I didn’t know they were gonna be that dumb.Simone Collins: Yeah. So for those of you out of the loop, Jiang Qujin, he was born in 1976 in China. He moved to Canada fairly young.He was originally trained in English literature, and he spent much of his career as a teacher and education reformer in China. Like actually in China. In the [00:06:00] 2000s and 2010s, he worked on Chinese education reform and taught in various schools, and briefly edited for The New York Times China operation.He’s also been associated as a researcher with Harvard’s Global Education Innovation Initiative. So his educator branding is, is, has been part of his life for a very long time- Mm-hmm ... well before he went internet famous. And part of me wonders, ‘cause a lot of people are like, “Well, he’s not actually a professor,” it could just be in China, like there’s some kind of lost in translation thing where like you’re referred to as a, some kind of teacher honorific in, if you teach in China like in high school.And- ThisMalcolm Collins: is a, I, I don’t know. You see this on the right. Professor Dutton, by the way, we’ve had on the show, right? Like-Simone Collins: But he’s actually an academic.Malcolm Collins: He’s not a professor, thoughSimone Collins: Well, maybe he was at some pointMalcolm Collins: No, he’s never been a professor as far as I know Oh.I was wrong about this. , Professor Denton was an evolutionary biology professor at Aberdeen. , But Professor Zhang has never been a real professorMalcolm Collins: It’s [00:07:00] just a title that some people on the right use in conspiracy circles I think Well,Simone Collins: they profess, they profess.The Original Professor is just getting really-Malcolm Collins: I, I know. Here, I’m not saying that Jo- Jolly Heretic, as far as I know in terms of all the content I’ve watched he’s never said anything that I thought was particularly wrong. He may have some ideas that I think might go too far on racialist directions and everything like that, but I don’t mean to overly compare him to Professor Jiang.Right. But,Simone Collins: but you- I was not talking about unhinged things as we’re gonnaMalcolm Collins: get into Yeah, yeah. Generally when he points to something I’m like, “That is a misinterpretation of scientific evidence.” I would never just be like, But, but a smart person could have that misinterpretation.Simone Collins: Right.Malcolm Collins: It’s not like ProfessorSimone Collins: Jiang.Yeah, our disagreements with him are academic, whereas like with Professor Jiang it’s one of those not even wrong things,Malcolm Collins: Yeah, it’s like not even wrong, like there is a mental health issue at play here, and if it’s not a mental health issue, then you’re profoundly stupid. And that’s the thing-Simone Collins: Or is it more ins- or is there m- something more insidious?Which we’re gonna have to also ask this episodeMalcolm Collins: Oh, oh, okay. Continue.Simone Collins: Anyway back to his just basic chronolo- chronological experience of the world. Since 2022, Jiang has [00:08:00] taught at Moonshot Academy, which was a private high school in Beijing. So even post-pandemic, still in China, and he’s not a university professor still even at this point.In 2024, so two years ago, out of nowhere he launched the YouTube channel and podcast Predictive History, where he gives his long form lectures, and by long form I mean oppressively boring, almost impossible to watch, to us at least, lectures on geopolitics, history, and the structural analysis. And he claims to use game theory and Asimov-style psycho history to forecast world events, leading to the fan site aforementioned that will also be referenced in my show notes, which are extensively linked, so go to Patreon or Substack if you wanna get all the sources and links and everything.He gained large international attention after correctly predicting Donald Trump’s 2024 re-election, which a lot of people did ‘cause it was kind of obvious, and a US-Iran war, which led to some media to dub him China’s [00:09:00] Nostradamus. And some bookers put him on major Western podcasts. Like, one of the clips that I will be referencing at one point in my show notes, him on Piers Morgan.Like, mainstream stuff, okay? Okay. Like, y- I think you thought he was smaller than he is, too. So in terms of his reputation, several mainstream-Malcolm Collins: And he does have real fans. Like, clearly they’re his audienceSimone Collins: Real, genuine. Diehard, yeah. Clearly they’re his audience. Not bots, real people.Malcolm Collins: Yeah, it’s not bots.Whether, whether or not his, his, his rise was above or below the board he genuinely appeals to a real audience.Simone Collins: And to be clear, in the research I did, I did not come across accusations of him botting, in fact. So... And we’ve, we’ve covered that ground, IMalcolm Collins: think. And, and I think more than that, I’d go so far as to say he has significantly more cultural impact right now than somebody like Nick Fuentes.It would beSimone Collins: just- Quite possibly. I mean, certainly in base camp circles for sure. Though we also have f- people who watch Nick Fuentes all the time, so yeah. Yeah. But right, several mainstream outlets describe him as a conspiracy theorist because of many of his claims on hidden cabals and [00:10:00] quasi-mystical frameworks.He doesn’t really use conventional evidence-based analysis. So, a lot of, a lot of what I initially jumped off from, because I didn’t believe that he had all these conspiracies, was a, a profile in the Free Press that explicitly labels him a conspiracy theorist and highlights his belief in a coalition of Freemasons and Jesuits and followers of Sabbatean Jews and I think that’s also a Candace Owens thing.And that they’re plotting to rule the world from Jerusalem. The, the South China Morning Post notes that his lectures sometimes veer into well-trodden conspiracy theories on shadowy secret societies, especially the lecture titled, which is gonna be referenced a lot in my direct quotes, Pax Judaica in his Secret History series.So let’s get into the conspiracy theories because-Malcolm Collins: Yes, and I- They’re delightful ... I want to go into them and turn the... the Jesuits do genuinely attem- bel- appear to control the Vatican, but they don’t work with Sabbatean Jews or the Freem- c- sorrySimone Collins: And the Illuminati. The Illuminati. Okay, hold on. No, [00:11:00] because it’s, it’s...He, he, he has this meta conspiracy in which an Illuminati composed of Freemasons, Jesuits, and Sabbatean Jewswho allegedly manipulate Western institutions and ultimately aim to control the world from Jerusalem are, like, working together to cause the decline of Western civilization. Okay? This is the Pax Judaica or Ju- Judaica?Sorry, yeah. Jud- Judah Ga. He has a lecture on it, and in, about this lecture, critics argue that Cenk argues that after the US is forced out of the Middle East, which is one of his predictions, this Illuminati style network is gonna dominate global power from a greater Israel centered on Jerusalem.Now, in his own words, on the Illuminati as a coalition, this is from his Breaking Points interview, which is widely clipped: “If you look at the Epstein files, it’s clear that we’re run by secret societies. You can call [00:12:00] them Illuminati, and Illuminati are composed of three major groups, okay? You have the Jesuits who control the Vatican.”Malcolm said that, so not me.Malcolm Collins: It’s true. “Simone Collins: You have the Sabbatean Frankists who control the modern Israel today. You have the Freemasons, which control the national security apparatus of the United States.” I don’t know where that’s coming from. He adds that they, they see conflicts like those in the Middle East as key to the end times proph- prophecies creating heaven on earth.I mean, there is a group of Christians we know that like Think that it’s necessary TheyMalcolm Collins: do think that, but they’re not the ones who are typically associated with the Freemasons.Simone Collins: Mm-hmm. So on the origins and s- structure of, of this this coalition, he describes the Illuminati as emerging from alliances like former Jesuits.He refers to Adam Weishaupt and others that are, that infiltrated the Freemasons. He said, “What they will do together is create a new organization called the Illuminati. The Illuminati was able to penetrate the Freemasons.” [00:13:00] So apparently there was some kind of-Malcolm Collins: Okay ...Simone Collins: I don’t know, corporate takeover.Malcolm Collins: So we gotta do I, I just need to, it’s, ugh.Simone Collins: I’m gonna bring in the Templars, ‘cause in anuct- another lecture he says, quote, “Templars, who became the Freemasons, who then became the Illuminati, who control,” and then linking to broader historical continuity and goals like the one world government in Jerusalem. He sort of went on from there. It’s-Malcolm Collins: So what’s interesting-involved ... is some of his hedging here makes what he’s saying more plausible or less stupid.Simone Collins: Okay.Malcolm Collins: Ooh ... if he is arguing that a group that is not the Illuminati is going to form something that is functionally the Illuminati and then- Huh ... call themselves the Illuminati.Simone Collins: Huh.Malcolm Collins: Or when he says, “Functionally these groups have an inordinate amount of power, and we can call them the Illuminati because they function similar to the way...”That’s believable, right? I, I’d be like, not on its face stupid. It might be wrong, but it’s not on its face stupid. Okay. If you are saying that the original [00:14:00] historic organization that was called the Illuminati in history still has a meaningful historic continuity between itself and any organization that exists today, that’s stupid.Simone Collins: Well, but I think that’s part of his, if there is one, brilliant clickbait strategy. He is- Okay, maybe he’s not explicitly arguing continuity, but he’s constantly name-checking these organizations that conspiracy-brained people just like, ugh, dopamine, like as soon as they hear theseMalcolm Collins: words. Yeah. We should do a whole other episode on the Sabbatean Jews,Simone Collins: That’s keyword stuffed with all the wor- allMalcolm Collins: the wordsI can, I can talk for ages about the Sabbatean Jews. People know I, I, I am not a fan of Shabbatai Levi and there are parts of the current Jewish community that I am also not a fan of in terms of like the direction it has gone. Does Israel and do a group of Jews that are interconnected have a disproportionate amount of power over global governments?They acqu- Yeah,Simone Collins: you just gotta really keyword [00:15:00] s- Like watch some of Jang’s lectures. You can go through all the stuff I link in my show notes ‘cause like he, he’s a masterclass. Oh, I’m gonna include li- Like here, here’s, here’s another one. He on, on Freemasonry and related groups, he, he discusses the 33 grades of Scottish Rite Freemasonry, noting that lower levels emphasize being a good person while the higher ones invoke deeper power structures.And then he ties Freemasonry to figures like Buzz Aldrin and historical US institutions. So it’s a whole like national treasure, the moon landing is fake. Like he’s really pulling in all the trigger words. HeMalcolm Collins: thinks the moon landing is fake?Simone Collins: Well I don’t... No. I- But he’s bringing in Buzz Aldrin. So.Malcolm Collins: Okay. Well, hold on, let’s go back here ‘cause I- Okay ... we’ve gotta talk about each of these groups, and like the thing is is he says stuff that’s like adjacent to plausible, but stupid if you dig two levels deep,Simone Collins: okay?Malcolm Collins: Okay. So Sabbatean Jews they, they really... So they were sort of active between like, 1676 to like, I wanna say the last like really hard recorded practices we have from [00:16:00] Sabbatean Jews and Frankists-Simone Collins: Mm.Mm ...Malcolm Collins: would’ve been in the early 1800s. So-Simone Collins: Well, he says that they infiltrated the Jesuits in his,Malcolm Collins: They, they, they, they did infiltrate- They did ... the Jesuits.Simone Collins: Well, okay.Malcolm Collins: Okay. Hold on. I have to do a little bit of a, a breakdown of what happened here.Simone Collins: Is- oh my God.Malcolm Collins: So-Simone Collins: You, you’re, you’re eating your words, Malcolm.Malcolm Collins: No, he, he, he’s right, but there just isn’t continuity with anything that’s happening today.Simone Collins: Okay.Malcolm Collins: Right? Like, he’s saying things that are adjacent to true- Well, butSimone Collins: maybe this explains why he has two million followers on YouTube and you don’t ‘cause you’reMalcolm Collins: notSimone Collins: willing-Malcolm Collins: Because I don’t go off about the Sabbatean Jews.Yeah. I’m interested in what is historicallySimone Collins: true. Look, it worked for Candace Owens and it worked for Jiang.Malcolm Collins: So, and I’m gonna add in post here a wider description of exactly, but from my memory okay, so the followers of Sabbatai Sevi- That’s so cute ... post- did something called antinomianism, okay? So antinomianism is where you [00:17:00] implicitly invert the laws of Judaism because you are living in the end times, which sort of means that you’re dealing with an opposite set of rules, and like-Simone Collins: So it’s like opposite day, Jew edition?Malcolm Collins: Yeah, it’s like opposite day, but morality. Morality is inversed in terms of a Jewish moral system, okay?Simone Collins: Huh.Malcolm Collins: So, you know, this could mean orgies, this could mean anything, but also, like, i-intentionally bad things to outsiders. Like, this explains theologically how you... Because it’s pretty hard to theologically get a group that just does evil things.Yeah, yeah. Like typically, if you’re doing evil things, you think that you’re doing them for a malevolent entity, which generally means you can’t trust that entity, so people generally don’t worship things like Satan in, like, an honest format, right? Like-Simone Collins: Yeah ...Malcolm Collins: you’re, you’re rarely gonna... Okay. But with Sab- antinomianism and Sabbateanism, it works, okay?So- they ended up doing this. This guy ended up converting to Islam. It was a huge problem for Judaism. Over half of Jews, depending on, you know, what stats we look at, were members of his movement. They thought he was the Messiah. A huge [00:18:00] problem for the Jew, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Anyway, a group of his former followers did not deconvert after he converted to Islam.And they formed the Frankists or the Sabbateans. Well, not real- Okay, so the Frankists then came about later. Basically, after all of this guy’s followers had died out, then a guy named Frank comes along and recreates an antinomialist movement looking back to Sabbatai Zevi. I think he said he was a reincarnation of Sabbatai Zevi or something like that.Don’t... Anyway, so they end up practicing this weird form of Judaism. All of the Jews in their community f*****g hate them because, you know, they’re practicing an inversion of Judaism. They are literally the least Jewish thing you could conceivably be because they are... If somebody practiced an inversion of Christianity, I think local Christians would hate them too, right?Yeah. And of course, they’re interacting more as a Jewish community, so the Jewish community is super annoyed by them, and they’re c- drawing converts from the Jewish community. So, Jews f*****g hate these guys, right? And the Jews wouldn’t [00:19:00] mind seeing them wi- wiped out. So who do they form an alliance with to prevent themselves from being wiped out after a number of I think, court cases came up about them or something.They form an alliance with the Jesuits. They tell the Jesuits, because they can’t go back to being Jews, the Jews hate them, “Oh, we’ll become Catholics,” right? “If you let us do whatever we wanna do,” right? Like, “You, you let us...” W- well, j- In fact, they then said that being a Catholic was part of this antinomianism.It was part of the inversion of Jewish value systems, right? So, they become Catholics And some of them continued to practice antinomianism.Simone Collins: Aha.Malcolm Collins: And we have evidence that this happened for about two generations after this event, and no evidence after that. And it was, and it was m- mild stuff after this.And we also have evidence- So whatSimone Collins: happened? Why did it die out? Did they not just go secret so they could control things better?Malcolm Collins: It’s hard to keep [00:20:00] weird orgies going on for many... You gotta get other peopleSimone Collins: involved in this. Yeah, as Aella could tell you, it takes a lot of work, and we’ve done even episodes on this.Malcolm Collins: Yeah, putting together and creating a high investment religious community tied to weird, sinful things like this is just difficult to do. It’s, it’s not easy, right? You’ve gotta, you’ve gotta recruit people in. They just didn’t have the money and power to do it for very long. Mm. Some of them also ended up joining the Jesuit order.It was a very small number of them but some of them did. This is true. But from all of the evidence we have from the Jesuits and everything on that, they didn’t have a big impact on anything that was happening in the Jesuit order, and any of them that maintained these practices died out within a few generations.Now, the Jesuit order is genuinely one of the, the largest evil societies on Earth today, right? Like, when I say, like, the Catholics are a problem, I really mean the [00:21:00] Jesuits are a problem. Because they control the Vatican right now. They’ve done some really shady stuff in papal elections. This is not the...They’re, they actually shouldn’t even really be a Catholic order because they were they operated completely outside of the Catholic order during, I wanna say, like, the Communist period or something. Where they ended up being separated from the rest of the Catholic Church, and the Catholic Church said that they were supposed to shut down.Like, they basically got excommunicated, and they said, “No, we’re not gonna do that.” And so they operated entirely independently.Speaker: The period when they operated entirely independently was under Catherine the Great, not the communist period. , And they were basically excommunicated by the church, , as an order, and anyone who participated was, but they continued to operate regardless of this because, , their region of the world was separated from the rest of the Vatican., And they basically formed their own culture and beliefs and then were reintegrated into the Catholic Church to try to, like, revive the orderAlso, I didn’t interject with the information Under the Jacobins because I got [00:22:00] virtually everything about them right other than their founding date, which was around the 1800s. , So they disbanded a little later than I thought. , My second note here, if you’re wondering why am I qualified to speak on all of this, , well, if you read The Bloodlines of the Illuminati, my dad is supposed to be one of the leading members of it.I’m the oldest male heir of the family, so presumably I would be. My wife was the managing director of Dialogue, which was a s- secret society founded by Peter Thiel. , Then we’ve also been invited to other secret societies founded by Peter Thiel, like Hereticon. , I’ve been to the Bohemian Grove. , I’m not a member of the Bohemian Grove.That’s a giant waste of money. But, like, I’ve been, and my godfather was one of the presidents. I think I can say that at this point. , I only say that because it’s a nonprofit, so it has to be public that he was the president at one point if you Google it. Otherwise, I wouldn’t release that informationSo yeah, , I’ve, I have a lot of insight into how a lot of these organizations work and where they’re operational, and so I know which [00:23:00] ones are relevant and which ones are not relevant, and how relevant they are in terms of secret power control structures.Oh, I forgot we also did recruiting for a secret society that Eric Schmidt’s orgs were startingMalcolm Collins: And then I wanna say when the y- communist world fell apart or something like that they then ended up reintegrating with the Catholic Church as a completely separate power structure that had a completely divergent goals from the Catholic institution.Mm. And today when we see Catholics fermenting socialist rebellions, it’s typically Jesuits.Simone Collins: Fomenting.Malcolm Collins: Yeah. When we see them inventing the concept of, like, they came up with, like, liberal theology and stuff like this. I think it’s called, like, progressive theology or justice theology. This was invented by Jesuits.Simone Collins: Justice theology. Whoa.Malcolm Collins: Really bad stuff. Really bad- Okay ... bad, bad stuff, and it ended up taking over a lot of Protestant sects as well. And, and they do control the Vatican and what the Vatican is doing in large part, but they have the, the n- the bad stuff that the Jesuits are doing today has more ties to [00:24:00] communism and socialism than it has to anything tied to Sabbatianism.Okay? The, the Sabbateans and the Frankists died out based on all of the evidence we can see. So that’s, it’s not stupid to say that they joined the Jesuits and they had some influence in the Jesuits. It’s just stupid to say that They that, that, that they influence the Jesuits today. Okay? There doesn’t appear to be, or any modern Jewish sect today.Now-Simone Collins: Well, he’s just trying to say that the Sabbatean Frankists just ultimately conquered the world, and that the Jacob Frank’s movement was linked to, or he, he links in his lectures that movement to secret society networks, that they infiltrated the Jesuits and th- they formed alliances that formed the Illuminati.I mean- Okay.Malcolm Collins: But it’s stupid. He- It’s stupid. The Sabbateans very clearly do not, and the Frankist ideology very clearly does not influence the faction of Jews that is controlling... Like, when people say the [00:25:00] Jews have a disproportionate amount of world control today, okay?Simone Collins: Okay, but let’s, let’s get to that.Let’s get to that. Okay? Let’s, ‘cause let- well, we’ll never get through that. Okay. Let’s hear what he has to say. And let’s talk about that, how he talks about this Pax Judaica and Greater Israel. So what he’s trying to claim is that the long-term plan of these elites, wherever they came from, is to engineer a new world order in which Greater Israel replaces American hegemony, and then Jerusalem is the seat of global governance.And you can also see, oh, this probably helped to fuel some of his viral popularity. Anti-Israel sentiment is growing. People like to think that there’s this organized cabal that is very Israel-centric causing the decline of the West, you know, like, doing evil, scary things. So I think that’s another element of what he’s saying that’s really resonating with people.Malcolm Collins: Right, but again, it, th- because look, there are real conspiracies you can talk about if you wanna talk about conspiracies.Simone Collins: Mm-hmm.Malcolm Collins: So you wanna talk about, like, okay, this is what’s [00:26:00] actually happening, okay? Shabbatai Levi, basically nobody takes him seriously anymore. There’s some weird, like, Muslim Jewish sects that sort of follow him, but they don’t do the antinomianist stuff anymore.But, and this is what annoys me, because when you cloud people’s vision with the BS, you can’t see the real. If you’ve seen our track series, one of my most offensive takes, but it’s one I feel incredibly strongly about because, you know, when you follow a, an actual religious belief and you believe that some things are actually religiously true, you’ve gotta call out when something is going against those.And there was a second major antinomianist figure within Jewish history called the Baal Shem Tov. And the Baal Shem Tov p- practice, he didn’t say it was antinomianism, but it was functionally, from the perspective of Jewish history, spiritual antinomianism. If you know Jewish r- rules around following people based on miracles instead of biblical knowledge, he was very big on the, “You follow me because of the miracles.”Like, his number one convert came, [00:27:00] clearly more learned than him. All of the most learned rab- rabbis said, “Don’t follow this guy.” And then this guy came out and he’s like, “Kabbalah everything.” And all the other rabbis at the time were like, “Don’t do that. That’s, like, a dangerous book. You can maybe, maybe if you’re, like, a married man in his 30s who has studied Judaism forever, you can peek at that book.You do not make that the foundation of your teachings.” And the Kabbalah has a lot of crazy stuff in it, okay? So anyway, he comes along and he rises the Kabbalism and, and pop mysticism within Judaism. Okay? Mm. And he actually took over large factions of the Jewish movement. And the groups that follow his teachings are the ones that completely dominate.When you’re talking about, like, Jewish influence and Israeli influence in Western politics, it is this secondary form of antinomianism, not the type that came from Shabbatai Zevi, and it i- they have so much control that this entire video could be taken down even from pointing out that from [00:28:00] historic Jewish perspectives, from medieval Jewish perspectives, the way that the Baal Shem Tov interacted with Kabbalistic texts could be thought of as spiritualist antinomianism.Because it go, it inverted previous Jewish teachings on how you engage with miracles and how you engage with spiritual phenomenons. So anyway, he comes in. Abeja, and these groups do control and they do want a greater Israel, and I’m actually okay with greater Israel. When I say a greater Israel, what I mean by that is an Israel which has ability to act in any way it wants on the surrounding nations.The countries surrounding Israel just don’t have the technology to fight back against Israel anymore and Israel is okay with that, and they are now just like somebody annoys them, they kill them, right? Like, that’s, that’s where Israel is going and they’re going more in that direction as they get automated drone swarms and stuff like that.And, and I am okay with that direction for Israel because frankly, I don’t really care about the other countries that are around them a particularly large amount. But the thing is that he’s right, but it’s almost [00:29:00] like he’s, he’s wrong in trying to hide the actual like, like, f- power structure of the world just enough that he sort of sends people on these shadow journeys so that they miss the real power structures that we should be fighting against.And the whole thing about the Freemasons is just pants-on-head retarded. The- Okay.Simone Collins: Well, let’s see what he saysMalcolm Collins: It would be truer to say Mormons- ... control the national security industry in the United States than Freemasons control the national security industry in the United States.Simone Collins: I feel like they more staff it, they don’t lead it.But that’s a totally separate subject. ItMalcolm Collins: is.Simone Collins: So on the subject of greater Israel and its, its roots, he says, quote And so what will happen is then that Israel will achieve the Greater Israel Project. The Israelis believe that the Middle East was promised to their ancestor Abraham by Yahweh, their god.If you look at the map of Greater Israel Project, it extends from the Nile to Euphrates. It encompasses Lebanon, Syria, parts of Turkey, and parts of Saudi Arabia, [00:30:00] and parts of Egypt. And then Israel will establish something called the Pax Judaica. A Pax Judaica is really the empire, a trading empire, a financial empire, a technological empire based in Jerus- Jerusalem, and they see it as fulfillment of biblical prophecy.Do you push back against that?Malcolm Collins: I mean, that seems to be the direction things are going. The countries around Israel are weak in relation to Israel. They appear to be becoming weaker as time goes on, and Israel is becoming stronger as time goes on.Simone Collins: Technologically- Yeah, because as, as he quote, another quote from him, he says, “So what does the Greater Israel Project mean?Well, it means control of oil, trade, and technology.” He frames it basically as, as them inheriting and expanding US regional dominance in the Middle East after the USMalcolm Collins: peaks,Simone Collins: essentially.Malcolm Collins: Why is this a... for me, it’s like I don’t like the other cultures that are in that region. I am okay- I don’tSimone Collins: think he frames it as negative.I just think that people who are anti-Israel are like, “Yeah, and that means they’re evil.” ‘Cause I mean, he, he’s also talking about the decline of the [00:31:00] West.Malcolm Collins: In fact- If Israel was actually controlled by a group of what the, what the Frankists were and what the, the the Shabbatai Zevi followers were, was, was sort of physical antinomialists as opposed to spiritual antinomialists.If they were actual physical antinomialism and believed in, in practicing an inversion of Jewish law around morality and the physical world instead of just the way they relate to the metaphysical world I would be very, very, very concerned. I would agree that this group cannot be allowed to gain power, but they just don’t.Simone Collins: Well, he does frame them as evil. We’re gonna have to pick this up in a second recording session since I have to get the kids. Yeah. But next I can get to how he argues that, or at least has suggested the actions during the Gaza war amount to ritual child sacrifice, and he links real-world conflicts to occult or sacrificial practices- Oh, frigging hellattributed to Israel or [00:32:00] Jewish-adjacent elites. So we’ll get to that next.Malcolm Collins: So dumb. So dumb. It’s- It’s just not an efficient way to do sacrifice. If you’re doing child sacrifice, do it through something like Epstein. You don’t need to do it anymore.Simone Collins: But no, yeah, no, honestly, the, the Egyptians, they were the ones who really nailed it.So cats were sacred, but you, you, you wanted mummified cats, and I, you know, like, people... There was a market for them. So what did people do? They created, like, some of the earliest basically factory farms for cats. And they would, they would kill them and then mummify them and then sell the cat mummies because, you know, people were like-Malcolm Collins: Yeah, if they want it, just treat gods- AndSimone Collins: they would even make-like a factory farmMalcolm Collins: for children ...Simone Collins: I would just... Because this is so fun. They would forge they would forge cat mummies too. Like, so people have taken them apart, and lo and behold, it is not a mummified cat. No, it’s like, like, paste and chicken bones.Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Also by the way, fun fact if you wanna get really spicy about this.Simone Collins: Yeah.Malcolm Collins: If you ch- were a [00:33:00] true moral and material antinomialist Jew and you were going to do child sacrifices non-Jewish children would be completely pointless for the child sacrifices because they don’t have the, This is like- They’re notSimone Collins: w- good enough?Malcolm Collins: No, they, they wouldn’t have, like, the s- the spirit of God in them which is why, you know, only within a matrimonial Jew- Oh, ‘causeSimone Collins: then what?Chosen people or something? I don’t know.Malcolm Collins: Yeah, yeah. Mm-hmm. Basically it’s, it has to do with how Jews interpret Genesis. It doesn’t really matter. The point being is that if you were an actual antinomialist Jew, you would only care about Jewish children for your sacrifices. I don’t recall- Other children would basically be rotten for your perspective.ISimone Collins: don’t think he talks about antinomialism, but I may haveMalcolm Collins: missed that. No, because he doesn’t understand why it... He’s clearly, like, approaching all of this from a very midwit perspective. And that also annoys me because, like, these are actual things that you could study and investigate and understand how they changed their history, why they have these beliefs, why they think that you should have an inversion of morality.This stuff matters because then you can predict them. If you understand the actual theology of an antinomialist, then you can [00:34:00] say, “Oh, so if they’re doing child sacrifices, could they take random children from Gaza? Would that be any use to them?” And the answer is no, they would have to take them from other Jews or from Jews who deconverted or something.Simone Collins: Well, there isn’t a prediction fan site about your nonsense. Maybe you need to be a midwit to speak to the midwits and you won’t get a... You know, it, when you look at bell curves, the mid is the largest part.Malcolm Collins: Yep ...Simone Collins: you’re, you’re catering- I’m, I’m appealing to the wrong- ... to the wrong part of the bell curvethe wrongMalcolm Collins: crowd.Simone Collins: Yeah. Anyway, we’ll get more to this on our next installment of Malcolm Gets Mad at Proges- Professor Jiang.Malcolm Collins: Keeps fighting. For, for theories that don’t, that don’t make that are s- just flirting with reality.Simone Collins: Yeah. All right. AllMalcolm Collins: right, love you.Simone Collins: Love you too.So where we left off was ritual sacrifice the Gaza War. , Yang Ming and [00:35:00] others say that Chang has suggested that actions during the Gaza War amount to ritual child sacrifice. He links real world conflict to occult and sacrificial practices that are attributed to either Israel or Jew-adjacent individuals.Sorry, does heMalcolm Collins: mean like ritual sacrifice or does he think that they’re literally doing it for-Simone Collins: The words he used were ritual child sacrifice. He’s definitely... He’s saying it’s ritual chi- he’s s- he’s saying it’s a cult. He’s keep in mind though, he’s “Oh, this is speculation. This is for fun.”So he tries to flippantly discount a lot of the things that he says in the midst of his lectures of like I’m just doing gems here. But then he’s also just making these statements. And the- Okay,Malcolm Collins: so if I’m gonna steel man him, okay? ‘Cause ISimone Collins: will steel man- let me, let- I’ll just, let me first give you a quote, his core statement on Gaza as ritual sacrifice.This is from Secret History Number Four, and it is widely clipped. People can find this. I’ve linked to it in my show notes. Quote, [00:36:00] “What is really happening in Gaza is a ritual sacrifice, and this happens quite often in human history if you go back and you look at the...” And then he goes on and talks about other things.And then he also says, these are more direct quotes from him, on the purpose and visibility of this sacrifice. Quote, “The entire idea of this ritual sacrifice is to unite the Israeli population. And what’s extremely disturbing and horrifying about it is that it works.” And he also contrasts it with a hypothetical secret approach.Quote, “Israel could do it secretly, and no one would talk about it. Instead, they choose to do this in front of the world. They want the world to hate them, because by doing this, they create the ultimate taboo. So the entire world unite against Israel, but guess what? That’s the, that’s what the region, w- religion wants in the extreme form of Jewis- Jewish...”I always screw up this word. Eschatology? Eschatology? Eschatology, I think. Es- eschatology. “Israel will fight the entire world, and God will help Israel [00:37:00] triumph.” So as you can see, he’s not he means sacrifice. He means ritual sacrifice.Malcolm Collins: He means- But he means it in a roundabout way. He’s saying that they’re- Yessacrificing children in aims of their greater religious objectives rather than a... He’s trying to bait the crazies maybe. See, here’s the-Simone Collins: Sort of yeah. Because what he’s trying to he, yeah, he’s trying to... another way that he put it is he’s what the Israelis are doing is quite horrific, because this really is, it is really this sort of sacrifice.”So he’s not saying it is a ritual sacrifice. He’s saying it’s a sacrifice. Why, he says, because 37% of almost half the population of Gaza is under 18 years old. So he’s also showing okay, it’s not technically a ritual sacrifice. It’s more just because Palestinians are really young, it’s like basically child sacrifice, but he’s still trying to-Malcolm Collins: why are Palestinians really young, by the way?It’s because they’re terrible at medical technology- ... so they don’t stay alive very long, and they are breeding really rapidly, which is You know, if I was gonna be uncharitable to Israel, I wouldSimone Collins: say we- no, come on. Let’s [00:38:00] use more diff- look, in places where there’s rampant poverty and deprivation and mistreatment of humans, you often get very high birth rates, and that’s what we’re seeing there.Malcolm Collins: Yes.Simone Collins: But again, he’s trying to play this up as ritual sacrifice again and again. And I think you made a really smart point there in that he is doing this to pander to conspiracy theorists while still trying to look smart and be like, “Oh I’m not actually saying that.” Candace Owens will just flat out be like I s- I talked with Charlie Kirk in a dream where he’ll be like, actually-” Yeah,Malcolm Collins: this comes across as so much slimier than just, like-Simone Collins: Yes.Yes ...Malcolm Collins: straight up being a conspiracy theorist or not being one.Simone Collins: It’s all couched Like 47%. And he also, and he’s “Oh this is like sacrifice tradition in history, like the Ephesians.” And it is he tries to make it seem like I’m a historian. I’m just talking, I’m just sharing the fact- IMalcolm Collins: love that this has happened multiple times throughout history.Th- there is actually, child sacrifice is at least within the European tradition after Christianization, fairly rare. The only [00:39:00] instance that could come close to it that I’m aware of is the Children’s Crusade. But you couldn’t even argue that the Jesuits did that or see- Oh, good ... at least not Frankish Jesuits, because they didn’t come around till the 1800s, and this was in the 1200s.You, it still could be the Catholics, but not the Jesuits. And they didn’t even the Catholic Church, the pope at the time, even with as corrupt as popes were back then, did not officiate the Children’s Crusade. It happened as a completely-Simone Collins: What is the Children’s... Should I not ask?Malcolm Collins: You don’t wanna know.Simone Collins: Okay never mind. I don’t wanna know.Malcolm Collins: But he didn’t say it was a good thing, so you know, th- even that doesn’t really hold. The, like I wanna go, okay, you go what religions actually do in a modern context might actually believe in child sacrifice. The two key ones that I can think of,Simone Collins: No, hold on.The Palestinians believe in child sacrifice. Remember that clip of that, that Palestinian woman who’s “I’m glad my son died, in, in this war, and [00:40:00] I hope to have more children so they can die.” Who is doing this?Malcolm Collins: Yeah, the-Simone Collins: It’s the Palestinians. Who’s using the children as human shields?It’s the Palestinians. It’s the Palestinians who are actively engaging in child sacrifice, who are actively putting the children on front lines. Excuse me. It’s, that’s what makes it extra insulting. He’s putting this on the Israelis, and the Israelis are not perfect, but the ones who are putting children in the direct line of fire are the Palestinians.Malcolm Collins: Yeah if you’re familiar with, and I criticize Jewish eschatology regularly. I criticize Jewish metaphysics, at least of the non-Misnagdim camp, which is most Jews, ‘cause that’s the Hasidic Jewish Jews. And I say things that offend them all the time. So I, going into this as harsh as I could be, right?There is not any mainstream eschatology or metaphysical belief within Judaism where child sacrifice would be considered a good thing. You could get this in some antinomial historic sects like the Frankish- Or [00:41:00] the followers of Zabatai Levi. But even the iterations of Judaism today, which I consider to be spiritually antinomian, still have no form of that would lead to child sacrifice.It’s just not on their game board. So you have these historic sects that may want this, but these historic sects were integrated into the Catholic Church. They weren’t integrated into Jewish tradition, and he even, he admits that. They were c- they were taken by the Francus were absorbed by the Jesuits.They were not absorbed by mainstream Jewish society. So even if by his own conspiracy theory logic they did still exist, they would be controlling the Vatican and not Israel. If he’s saying they’re just sacrificing children of other nations who they want to go to war with to win,” note in the Bible, this is in the Bible, that there are instances in which when you are fighting a population that is really bad because the populations that this [00:42:00] was said of in the Bible, they practice things like Jewish child sacrifice, which you could argue, given what she’s talking about here, it’s said to kill not just the men, but the women and children as well in a few instances.It’s very clear commandment from God that applies to Christians as well, by the way. We have to deal with it. Presumably our God said this at some point, right? Maybe he changed his mind on things. But you could say, “Okay they have in times of war when the enemy is demonstrably evil, then you kill all of the enemy’s members.”Okay, but that’s not really child sacrifice. That’s more like a war crime, right? But I don’t like the stretching here when you can just lay it out in a way that isn’t conspiracy-minded and be like mainstream Judaism does want Jews to win. Mainstream, most religions want them to win. If I go into extremist Catholic eschatology, they one day want to convert everyone, right?Convert or, this is what Catholic integralism is about. Convert or [00:43:00] kill, right? At the end of the day, everyone’s on team for them. But they’re not the only ones who want to do this, right? Most Protestants they may be less clear about this, but they eventually want every actually, most Protestants believe that one day that all many different Christian sects can, are, like, good enough in the same way that we have a theosophical eschatology.So they’re okay as long as everyone’s Christian one day. But that’s still pretty totalizing, right? I’ll note here that the modern Vatican actually does not one day want everyone to be Catholic because they say that I think this was at Vatican II, that like Muslims still believe a real Go- like in the real, like God that the Catholics are worshiping and that Protestants do.Saying that they’re like partially true religions as well, and this pissed off a lot of Catholics, and this is where you got one of the sects that’s technically schismatic but says they’re not schismatic and has some influencers. But the the way that I read a lot of, the historic Catholic Church wanted everything to be Catholic eventually.But the [00:44:00] point I’m making here is this is not unique to the Jews. Most groups eventually want everyone to be a member of their particular religion. Even the peaceful Baha’i want this, right? Everybody wants this. This isn’t a Jewish eschatology secret hush-hush thing. The only thing that might make the Jews slightly more suspect in their desire for this is that modern Jews don’t think that you can convert just anyone into Judaism.So if they eventually want the Jews to win that becomes a bit more zero-sum than the Christian sects that wanna do this through conversion. That said the Jewish movement has begun to invent all sorts of traditions to get around this with the no hide system, which in our episode we point out is just a historical fabrication.This is on the question that breaks Judaism. We go into the no hide scam. But anyway, continue Simone.Simone Collins: The next broad conspiracy theory, or you could argue it’s a theme of Professor Jiang’s work that I think is the probably best fodder for some people’s [00:45:00] suppositions that he is in, in various ways supported perhaps indirectly and perhaps even without his knowledge by the CCP, is that he has this broad belief in like Western institutions being hollowed out and controlled by hidden elites with US decline being both inevitable and deserved.And one, one long form critique that I came across about him claims that basically his forecasts all converge on one outcome, which is American collapse. He predicts Western Civil War, the vindication of Chinese and Iranian strategic positions in a way that maps almost perfectly onto the narrative architecture of CCP soft power.So as you can imagine, this is one of those critiques that sees this as being a, him being a CCP thing. So let’s look at some of his own quotes on this. On secret societies as the real power orchestrating shifts, he [00:46:00] says, quote, “What I say is that the real power base are a collection of six societies that have an eschatological view of this war, sir.The secret societies include the Freemasons. You have a collection of six societies. They believe in a war in the Middle East. It would start a process that would culminate in the end times. This war in the Middle East will lead to the defeat of the American Empire, and this will lead to the Greater Israel project, Pax Judaica.”And then on their role in Western decline, he says, “As for how this happened, the issue that this is actually a plan that has been operating for centuries involving different religious group, Frankists Shabateans, Freemasonry, Knights Templar, Rosicrucians, and the Jesuits.” So what is the different secret societies, different religious organizations have been collaborating over centuries to advance a plan to about the end of the world, which we will usher in the Messianic age.And then- Oh. Go ahead I know what you’re g- but I think I know what you’re gonna say, that he’s conflating this [00:47:00] minority Christian view that Israel needs to exist because then it’ll help us bring around the end times the right way and it’ll help- That’sMalcolm Collins: a pretty common view among Pentecostals.Simone Collins: Right, which I think... Okay less, less uncommon than him arguing. ButMalcolm Collins: Pentecostals I don’t even think are allowed in the Freemasons. They’re certainly not- Oh, really? ... one of the dominant factions in the Freemasons. The Freemasons are typically more deists and mainline Protestants. They most Baptists and Pentecostals are a little too conspiracy theory brained to join the Freemasons.That doesn’t really make sense.Simone Collins: It’s, if you’re conspiracy theory brained, you should be cucking to join the Freemasons.Malcolm Collins: Yeah yeah, some people do ‘cause they think it’s gonna they’re gonna get access to special knowledge or whatever, and then they’re like, “Oh, no, it’s just old men.”But okay. Let’s actually If he’s not an idiot, what’s his meta objective? His meta objective is to use parts of true information to try to turn American sentiment against our most useful [00:48:00] allies. D- particularly right now if- Oh,Simone Collins: if he’s an agent of the CCP or if he wants to advance-Malcolm Collins: Right.He wants to advance the cause, because IranSimone Collins: is a pretty good trial. See, I don’t actually think that’s what’s going on. I think maybe the CCP is openly signal boosting him because they like his narrative and they find that it works in concert with their goals. But I actually think he’s just out to get a, his book deal and launch his own stuff and make money from that.Malcolm Collins: Potentially. But the thing that’s weird to me is greater... If we’re allied with Israel, greater Israel is good for the United States. Greater Israel means a bunch of places in the Middle East that don’t like us very much become a part of one of our only growing and s- really ideologically, strategically aligned allies in the world right now becomes bigger.And I’d go further, which is to say, I agree with him. Greater Israel seems to be on track to happen, right? Because the only thing that’s really keeping [00:49:00] Israel from just going out and killing everyone it doesn’t like and taking the land is Europe, and Europe is declining in power. And outside of Europe, the thing that’s preventing them are the progressive Israelis, but the progressive Israelis, if you look at their marches, like one of my Israeli friends was saying to, to this to me, they look like senior citizen marches.You look at the conservative marches and they’re all young people, right? We know what the next generation is. And it-Simone Collins: Gosh, that’s so true. Know Kings looks so old.Malcolm Collins: Oh my gosh ... it is the same with the United States. Yeah. The groups that would want to reign in Israel from creating greater Israel really, it- even if you’re like an American first and you’re, like, cut off military aid to Israel, which I’m 100% for, by the way, we should cut off all economic aid to Israel.Even if you’re like that, you... And Israel then started conquering its neighbors, you’re not gonna wanna go in and stop them. And yet I hear the same people who are like, “I’m mad because we are intervening in Iran right now,” then on, on their same shows fantasizing about America going in and conquering Israel.And it’s bro, so you’re not against us [00:50:00] intervening in the Middle East. You’re not against foreign wars. You just want them to be for your political agenda, right? Which is So f*****g silly and stupid, frankly. And I had on one of our comments recently people were being like, “Why do you support the Jews when they majority vote Democrat?”The Jews that I support are not the reformed Jews that create this statistic. They are the conservative orthodoxSpeaker 4: According to Pew, 75% of Orthodox Jews vote Republican. Keep in mind, these are the Jews that are actually having children that are actually going to be representative in future generations that if we want to get along with the Jews, we have to find a way to partner with because they are one of the groups that is intergenerationally relevant and they are wildly conservative.And not only are they wildly conservative, but they are disproportionate populations in many swing states like Florida, which makes it incredibly stupid to antagonize them if you’re right wing.Malcolm Collins: Jews who [00:51:00] are productive. Not all of them. I don’t like the parasitic ones, right? And that faction of Jews does vote conservative. They’ve long been one of the pillars of conservative voting blocks in places like Florida and stuff like that.I... I don’t even know where people are getting this from. But anyway, continue, Samout.Simone Collins: I could read more quotes about the Western decline thing, but I it’s honestly been in, built into so many of the other things we’ve read about. And so I wanna finish up in terms of his general c- top conspiracy themes with his whole thing on psychohistory and mystical prediction.He explicitly invokes Isaac Asimov’s fictional concept of psychohistory. Again, fictional concept. And claims to use structural history and game theory to predict the future. Though I should note that in his lectures on game theory, he doesn’t demonstrate a mastery of game theory concepts.So I’m not really... Again, like a lot of this is like spamming- Explain what heMalcolm Collins: gets wrong about game theory.Simone Collins: What’s he not getting? We’ll get into that in a little bit, ‘cause I’m gonna discuss that in, in a bit. But anyway he basically [00:52:00] treats th- this fictional device of like psychohistory and game theory as a scientific method and like this, an academic thing when it’s not.Some debunkers also allege that he talks about listening to the voice of the universe or a higher power that guides his predictions, which they argue pushes his material from speculative analysis into quasi-mystical prophecy, which you definitely see come through in the way that many of his followers regard him.They’re really like, “Oh, you gotta check out this Professor Jiang. He’s been calling some stuff.” Oh, never mind that like he gets a ton of stuff wrong.Malcolm Collins: He, what he doesn’t... I have not heard a single impressive prediction from him yet. Yeah. When people are like, “Oh, he calls for stuff.”He said Trump would win the election. I said Trump would win the election. I don’t go aroundSimone Collins: acting like a- Yeah, where’s your two million followers on YouTube, Malcolm?Malcolm Collins: He said that there was a chance that the US would go to war with Iran. Every single analyst that I watch or listen to has been saying [00:53:00] that since Trump came into office.Simone Collins: Dude, watch Kum- Trump talking about Iran in the ‘80s. LikeMalcolm Collins: Yes, he said he wanted to... he said literally on the campaign trail that he planned to bomb Iran. I do not know... The people who think, the... And then you look whenever he does make an out there conspiracy theory they’re always super wrong.Simone Collins: Yeah, like quite uninformed. So it is, But anyway, things that he said though about psychohistory. He says, “Psychohistory is the idea that the future can be predicted, and if it can be predicted, then it be con- can be controlled and harnessed for the betterment of humanity. In his Foundation series, I- Isaac Asimov introduces the science of psychohistory.”Yes, this is him- It’s a, the Foundation series- Okay, continue ... it’s a sci-fi- Off the reservation. Yeah. It is really possible to predict the future by mathematically modeling historical development. It’s not by the way, anyway, just-Malcolm Collins: It does seem-Simone Collins: On AI and modeling ...Malcolm Collins: what he’s saying here, which is funny.He’s trying to now make it look plausible by being [00:54:00] like, “Oh what I really mean is you just mathematically model historic events and you can-”Simone Collins: No, like literally that’s what a character does in F- in the Foundation series. The, it starts off with basically this academic professor who’s special.He’s fig- figured out the formula. And the problem w- in narratively with the Foundation series is basically this professor has fig- figured out the formula, and then he gets exiled to the far reaches of the universe because he predicts the downfall of the empire that has grown in this futuristic world.And the empire does fall and that’s the key thing. It’s called Foundations because he works to build this, like-Malcolm Collins: I under- look, Simone, you’ve explained this before. I think you’ve explained enough of it at this point. Okay. That he works to build a counter civilization. Anyway,Simone Collins: this is all stupid- Yesand I hate it. So let’s- Nope ...Malcolm Collins: go ahead ... but hold on here. He’s saying something that is both profoundly stupid and something that is both so obvious that no one would challenge it. Okay. One, he’s basically saying you can use history to gain some predictive capacity over future events. Yes, everybody agrees on that,Simone Collins: right?Like- It helps, yeah. It helps to be informed by history. Yes. [00:55:00] History is worth studying, 100%. Yeah.Malcolm Collins: It gives you predictive capability on future events. That isSimone Collins: not- Som- somewhat ...Malcolm Collins: mystical. That is not the mathematical equation to predicting history. That’s just history as a discipline. Continue.Simone Collins: Oh hold on.They’ve been bathed. They were, they just went into the creek fully clothed, like, all, all the way. Toasty was freezing. But you know what? It sounds likeMalcolm Collins: you had fun, though.Simone Collins: Yeah. That’s how you know it’s a good day, so.Malcolm Collins: Okay, I wanna hear more of this Professor Zhang stuff.Simone Collins: Right. So we’ve gone over the, you know, his, his various things about the Pax Judaica and the secret societies, bringing about the decline and fall of Western civilization, and all of that, right? I think one way that you like to calibrate the competency of people is by hearing their takes on something that you have thought a lot or read a lot about.Mm-hmm. So I thought maybe you’d be interested in hearing the highlights from his lecture on AI. Are you interested?Malcolm Collins: [00:56:00] Okay.Simone Collins: He, he wants to couch first his analysis on AI as a general concept as intellectual exploration and that he, he acknowledges that he often oversimplifies and that his readings of texts like Paradise Lost and the, the Kabbalah, because that’s a good sign, are minority interpretations used to build broader narratives.The, the core thesis that he wanted to summarize from his prior class before talking about AI is that to understand history and geopolitics you have to take extremist religious beliefs seriously because fanatical eschatological frame frameworks and ideologies often drive great powers behavior.Which I don’t think is true but that is what he thinks is true. So in terms of AI-Malcolm Collins: no, hold on. This is partially true. There are some Jews that are driven by the real Jewish ob- objective, right? Sure. Like there are some Catholics driven by, like, a real long-term Catholic objective. I even would argue that most people who have [00:57:00] a real faith are actually driven by the, even techno-puritanism,Simone Collins: the- Yeah, but people in the end within, within complex systems act in alignment with their incentives, and their incentives first and foremost are to accrue resources and avoid punishment.And you know what? I’m, I’m sorry, but es- es- I disagree ... eschatological frameworks don’t fit into that. I disagree. Because look, the, the first, the first goal that anyone who’s even a religious zealot is typically going to pursue is, “Ah, well, the best thing I can do is to accrue power,” often in the form of money or resources, “so that I can have more influence for my agenda.”Malcolm Collins: But in your world view here doesn’t explain what you were just talking about, where the mother is happy that her son died fighting Israel, where you regularly- Well,Simone Collins: she, she didn’t have a shot at any resources. So her only resource is her son, and she’s gladly- No, this is- Well, and I guess religious, like, alignment probably, like-Malcolm Collins: Yeah.Rel-Simone Collins: ThereMalcolm Collins: is-Simone Collins: Resources in this world. She’s banking on resources [00:58:00] in the next world.Malcolm Collins: And that’s eschatology. No. That’s extremist eschatology. That is what drives a lot of people’s behaviorSimone Collins: Okay. Point made. I don’t think that’s what drives most people who are in power now, and she’s not in powerMalcolm Collins: I think it drives Netanyahu’s behaviorSimone Collins: Mm.I don’t know.Malcolm Collins: But, but anywaySimone Collins: I’m dubious. People in the comments will weigh in and tell me how the woman is wrong once again.Malcolm Collins: It drives my behavior- ISimone Collins: know,Malcolm Collins: Tex ... it drives your behavior. My behavior is driven much more by an eschatological framework thanSimone Collins: it is- My behavior is driven by autism, as you know, which is why I do all sorts of things that are not in anyone’s best interest, but You know, the dishwasher has to be loadedMalcolm Collins: aSimone Collins: certainMalcolm Collins: way My veneer is completely driven by an eschatological framework- Oh, I’m-for where I want humanity to go.Simone Collins: Welcome to your world.Malcolm Collins: And the, the... I mean, I’m very upfront about it, right? The only place where I may not be upfront about things is how ruthless I would go if I were the majority [00:59:00] player,Speaker 5: Welp, after yesterday’s episode, it may be a little bit more clear how far I’d go. , Actually, I was in part inspired to do that episode by doing this one, and I was like, you know what? If I die and the techno-puritans start to grow, I think that, , I, I need to bake this in and not just have this part be in my head, , to be like, look, get along with outsiders as much as you can.Do not disparage a group unless you absolutely know that you cannot live alongside them. But once that becomes the case, they need to be removed in their entirety. , At, at least the ones that you do not integrate into your culture. And always leave that to be an option for those that are strong or ideologically aligned until it’s time to make the move., And I think that this is, , a fairly sane way to operate, right? The idea of, oh, this group will always be nice until we push them too far. Then as many outsiders I’d be like, “Well, let’s just not push them too [01:00:00] hard.” , Assuming they ever become a big groupMalcolm Collins: if I had power. But I, I don’t right now. I don’t have systemic power, so it’s better for me to say we should all get along, right?Simone Collins: Okay. Okay. Anyway Anyway, the, the source material that Professor Jiang uses to talk about AI is f- fortunately not If, If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies, but rather Empire of AI, which is a book about OpenAI by Karen Ho. Oh, Hao, sorry. Karen Hao. Hao argues in her book that OpenAI’s original idealism that AGI benefits all of humanity has turned into a formula for consolidating power and centralizing talent around a quasi-religious mission, which, okay, that, like, checks out.I’m okay- Yeah ... with that argument. And that they’re pursuing relentless global expansion, like a trillion dollar data centers, and constantly referring to AGI to maintain control. What he argues is that OpenAI’s true but unspoken goal is to create God, and he interprets leaders like [01:01:00] Brockman and Skotzber as trying to build a de facto deity, which he calls insane, evil, and stupid.He posits that Sam Altman’s interest in AI c- companions like sex robots is about maximizing usage, intensity, and dependency, not about human flourishing, and that it’s part of a drive to make AI omnipresent in everyday life. Any thoughts on h- his thesis so far?Malcolm Collins: So he’s just doing what he does with his other theses, where he says something that is meant to be provocative, but is actually a very uninteresting statement.Yeah. Everything he is saying is profoundly uninteresting and unintelligent.Titan: Killing it.Malcolm Collins: All he is saying is that I, I, I assume, like assuming he doesn’t mean they’re trying to create a literal god, which every time he makes one of these theories he always backs it off, you know- Yeah ... the literal interpretation.Yeah. And what he means is they’re trying to create a super powerful intelligence that runs the majority of the [01:02:00] world’s economy. Of course, of course that’s part of the goal, right? You know, they’re a company. They’re making a product. They want people to use it. They want it to be maximally impactful.Yeah. And this is what it has the capability to do. So it’s just, I’d say it’s not wrong yet, it’s just profoundly an uninteresting observation.Simone Collins: He also, in terms of his understanding of AI, traces chat box to Weizenbaum’s ELIZA to argue that systems like ChatGPT are mainly performing pattern matching and conversational tricks that exploit our tendency to hallucinate agency and meaning rather thanMalcolm Collins: processing the- Oh, duh, really?That’s how, that’s how an AI coded my entire website for me? Ooh. That’s how it made very sophisticated code for me?Speaker 6: By the way, the, , VTuber creation is now working, the, the VTuber Pro pathway. So if you wanna make a VTuber avatar... Now, obviously, after I release the feature, it gives it a bunch of updates to [01:03:00] improve it over the next couple weeks because that’s what I’m gonna be doing is polishing it, but it, it works now.And with the, free editing software, it’s just a bit of a pain to get all the software. You’re probably gonna have to use an AI to, to fiddle with it. But it, yeah, it comes pre-rigged and everything.Speaker 7: For those unfamiliar, this is our website, rfab.ai. That is R-F-A-B.A-I. Um, we offer everything from AI chats, uh, to, you know, you can, you can do local encrypted savings of your AI chats. You can do hands-only AI chats. You can do vibe coding. You can do AI agents. , You can do, , AI-based trading card games.You can do, , searches where it takes various AIs and it checks your search against the outputs of other AIs that search online to give you results without hallucinations. You can do based AI where every AI prompt is sent with like a side note to it to keep it from becoming too progressive or woke, whatever you wanna say., You can do, , our image generation has gotten really good. It’s one of the most diverse [01:04:00] image generations out there that uses pretty much all the top models that you wanna use, but with a lot more tools. , Anything you want, rfab.ai. That’s Reality Fabricator. You can just search it too.Malcolm Collins: It j- just, yeah, it is just pattern matching, but most of human thought is just pattern matching.Simone Collins: I know. I know. I know.Malcolm Collins: That’s how you make art. That’s how you make music. That’s how you write books.Yeah. You pattern match with a little bit of external directionality, but the external directionality is mostly superficial in nature. If I am going and I am creating the next great art piece of the whatever style, most of what I am doing is pattern matching to that style. If I’m trying to create a new style of art, okay, maybe I’m not pattern matching there, but really you typically are.You’re taking it from some idea or it’s even, like, anti-pattern matching, where you’re like, “Well, I’m just gonna try to do something new. I’m gonna make a block, a red block, and I’m gonna call that [01:05:00] art.” Oh, you ... Th- mm. Sorry, I just hate when people try to downplay how much of what they call thought is pattern matching.Simone Collins: Mm. Hmm. Yeah. Anyway his take on AI risk is that attempts to make AI that solve all problems are gonna result in things like, “Oh, well, okay, just make everyone happy, eliminate suffering,” and then AI will just kill all people. Like, that’s kind of his, his take on X risk. He doesn’t- That’s a reallyMalcolm Collins: dumb take on X risk.Simone Collins: Yeah. He also stresses that data centers devour water and electricity and finance while remaining easy physical targets. He, he talks about, like, physical attacks in the Middle East as early signs that that infrastructure can’t really be defended at a global scale. In terms of the US versus China with AI, and this is what I would pay extra attention to if we’re trying to determine whether or not he is either directly or indirectly being sponsored by [01:06:00] the CCP he says that publicly, US firms frame Chinese AI as existential, as a threat to attract money and political support.But privately, he says American and Chinese entities are collaborating because China’s pervasive surveillance and classroom monitoring yield the clean data the US companies want but cannot easily gather domestically. Ah. What I appreciate about this is at least- Ah ... this is the first, this is the first novel argument I’m hearing.I’ve not heard someone be like- But why wouldMalcolm Collins: China would have any advantage in AI?Simone Collins: Yes. The, the mass- Oh, China, China is, has a mass surveillance state, and it’s clean data. And so, you know, the, the US needs them for training data.Malcolm Collins: I, I have seen evidence that US firms are using lots of Chinese data because-Simone Collins: InterestingMalcolm Collins: I have repeatedly in recent AI work I’ve been doing seen Chinese characters pop up randomly.Simone Collins: Interesting.Malcolm Collins: Ooh ... I’ve heard other people have seen, had Hebrew characters pop up randomly as well.Simone Collins: Well, well, well.Malcolm Collins: Which would make sense. We’re [01:07:00] collabing with China and Israel.Simone Collins: Yeah ...Malcolm Collins: we’re really cross-stealing.It’s where China tries to steal from us, we sometimes get data from them. It’s... The, the whole thing is, is like yes, they need money, but they don’t act as defensive against China as they would if they saw them as an existential threat. Mm-hmm. It’s more like everyone’s just running as fast as they can with this particular race.Simone Collins: Totally.Malcolm Collins: And that’s where we are, and there just aren’t that many true trade secrets in the AI space.Simone Collins: Where I fall with him and, and this being or not being CCP propaganda, I think it doesn’t hurt what I think the CCP is doing, which is like, okay, stoke fears among US citizens about AI and get them to slow down the creation of data centers, et cetera.Which is, a whole episode I’m thinking about doing is, is, is, is data center fear being astroturf? Because already there’s, there’s the sort of homegrown fear, but I feel like it’s being, it’s getting extra fuel that might be coming from the CCP. Because when you look at just the stark difference [01:08:00] between the way that people in China view AI versus the way that people in the US view AI, I feel like there’s clear There’s a, there’s a skew that suggests that a more interesting story there.Like, why, why is everyone in China, like, pretty cool with AI? Like, “Oh, this is probably gonna be good.” Whereas, like, in the US we’re like, “It’s gonna end the world.” Something, something is going on. Anyway, though, so it’s not incompatible with that. He certainly sh- framing AI as a negative thing. He also has a whole thing on AI and the occult.He links the project name Stargate to the CIA’s historical Operation Stargate, which was on psychic phenomena and, and to sci-fi depictions of dimensional portraits, interpreting modern AI data centers as literal portals designed to summon demons/aliens from other dimensions. I mean, I think this is one of those things where, like, he tr- he...And this is very clever on his part, ‘cause clearly it’s working. It sort of brings in in keyword stuff with conspiracy language without really explicitly being like he- [01:09:00] they’re using it to bring in demons. He’s like, well, like demons, you know? ‘Cause A- they’re trying to make an AI god, so it’s like AI demons, you know?Yeah, IMalcolm Collins: think he tried to b- frame it as sacrilegious to make a, a machine that could solve world hunger or could, that could solve jobs, that could solve ev- like most of the world’s problems. Which is, I’m not saying that that’s what they’re trying to do, but, like, that is one potential outcome of creating a super intelligent AI that takes most human work away.It is, it is a outcome that has significant societal risks that we’re gonna have to figure out how to get around. But to just frame all of these things as... This is the trick that he runs, which really is a stupid and annoying trick to me. It’s just-Simone Collins: Well, effective though. Let’s, let’s be clear here thatMalcolm Collins: it workstechnically they’re trying to build something that you could argue is godlike. And now because they’re trying to build God, that’s demonic and anti-biblical. It’s like, what? You just said it’s a technical whatever analogous thing. They’re not literally trying to build God [01:10:00] here.Simone Collins: Yeah, though he does say, like, this is sort of, this is supposed to, as of the time of this recording be sort of the first in his AI series.And he, he says that the rest of his semester... ‘Cause he’s really trying to... Again, he’s using language to, like, frame this as a you’re a student in his class. That he’s going to trace how this occult AI project is going to unfold and why he believes it will end in the destruction of the world. Yeahand that he, he says that it could be- Oh, yeah, he’s notMalcolm Collins: a CCP plant. He’s trying to get the US to back off AI. Anyone who’s trying to get the US to back off of AI, I am immediately suspicious of.Simone Collins: Well, and you had, you had said to me the other day, you’re like, “Well, there’s no way he could possibly be in China.”As far as we know, he is in China. He teaches- Really? ... a course on Western philosophy at Moonshot Academy in Beijing. His LinkedIn profile lists his location as Haidian District, Beijing, China. His X profile- Oh, then he definitely is a CCP plant ... lists his location as Beijing, China. Multiple recent media descriptions in 2026 call him a Beijing-based educator or say [01:11:00] he’s based in Beijing so-Malcolm Collins: Sorry, I need to take a step back for people who don’t understand why this would be the case.In China, you, it is illegal to have a YouTube account. You cannot have a YouTube account.Simone Collins: Is that-Malcolm Collins: If youSimone Collins: s- ... true? No, because then how did the ADV China’s guys do it before they-Malcolm Collins: They, they had to run away- ... left for Thailand ... from the country.Speaker 8: Note, I double-checked this to make sure I was getting it right, and yes, it is extremely illegal to run a YouTube channel in China. , YouTube is blocked by the Great Firewall, so the only way you could have one is by using a VPN, which are extremely, extremely illegal if you are a Chinese citizen. A lot of foreigners are unaware of this because the rules aren’t enforced that strictly for foreigners.But yes, , th- China certainly has to, like, legally approve of everything he’s putting out. Otherwise, they could just shut him downSimone Collins: Right. But like before, for a very long time they were very prominent.Malcolm Collins: Yeah, they just did it with VPNs and stuff. Nobody cares. Basically you get popular enough, and he’s definitely in the range where somebody in the CCP- Not popular enough ... has approved this. Mm. You, everyone above a certain follower list is- Well,Simone Collins: basically, you know, the, [01:12:00] the mere fact that he hasn’t been shut down is proof that the CCP thinks it’s, his message is effective for their ends.Malcolm Collins: Yeah.Simone Collins: Well, that’s telling.Malcolm Collins: They would literally shut him down if not. He’sSimone Collins: usingMalcolm Collins: the C-Simone Collins: If, yeah. So they, yeah- Yeah, basically ... basically, like, they’re not enforcing a law, which you say exists, I didn’t know about this law because it, it is in their best interest to not enforce this law.Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Okay. Anyone you see who’s in China and on the internet today, is, is, is doing CCP work Oh Right?Simone Collins: Like- Wow. Okay, well, there you have it. I mean, that’s Malcolm’s theory then, and I will, I will, I will give you two other YouTubers’ theories, like in, in short version to sort of give where, where other people think this guy is or why, why they think he’s big when it doesn’t exactly make sense or fully add up.There’s this guy on YouTube called Jose, just Jose. And basically his argument is that [01:13:00] he’s spamming the smart professor signal. He did this video called Professor Ceng’s Broken Classroom in which he argues that Ceng’s predictive history and game theory lectures are not a series of education, but narrative-driven speculation that’s riddled with factual errors that people believe to be credible because his lectures are packaged in the aesthetics of academia to create this veneer of authority.And some of his choice factual errors that Jose highlights in, in his overview is Holocaust denial and claims that no good idea came through the scientific method, which- Oh my God. It’sMalcolm Collins: profoundly stupid.Simone Collins: Yeah ...Malcolm Collins: it, and, and that is profoundly stupid if he actually said that.Simone Collins: Yeah, he did.He included the clip in his... I watched the, the full video. He, the clip is, it’s there. And he cites the- To talk about this dynamic, he cites the Dr. Fox lecture, which I hadn’t heard about before. But it’s this experiment in which this charismatic actor was presented [01:14:00] deliberately as a, a, a f- like, fancy, smart professor, and then delivered a content-free, jargon-laden lecture as Mr.or Dr. Myron L. Fox, and then still received this highly positive evaluation from a professional audience suggesting that basically acting like you’re a smart professor and using professorial words can just max, m- mask a complete lack of, of substance in what’s actually being said. I mean- And this was, this was done in 1973, so this is a well-known dynamic.Malcolm Collins: Yeah. That is I mean, he appears to be kind of full of himself, if I’m gonna be honest. I don’t know if this is, like, to trick people or anything like that. I just think he’s sorta arrogant like this, right? Like, I think that this is just sort of how he judges self-worth is this sort of, like, pseudo-mystical history stuff.Basically-Simone Collins: Well, I’ll tell you what. My whole theory, and, like, my hot take about him is that basically he is the modern-day Jeffrey Epstein of China. Jeffrey Epstein was [01:15:00] a you know, he was really good at, like, convincing people that he was super smart, and without really any serious qualifications ended up teaching math at an elite high school in New York.What is this but an elite high school in Beijing? And then he started using that and the connections he got through the school and through other places to get into this role and to get into that role, and I think that’s exactly what Professor Jiang is doing. And if you fall for Professor Jiang, you would fall for Jeffrey Epstein.And I’m not saying Professor Jiang has some other weird, creepy stuff going on. I’m just saying- That this is the c- it’s the game. It is the same exact game that Jeffrey Epstein- Yeah, fakingMalcolm Collins: being an educator, right?Simone Collins: Faking- Yeah, and faking being smart, and faking being, like, really erudite, and like, oh, like, basically spamming people with all this stuff until they...Kind of fake it until you- you make it into these circles and actually build some real... I mean, Jeffrey Epstein did it through building, like, dirt on people and literally implicating them in, like, financial crimes and then he kind of got them. And it’s-Malcolm Collins: it’s funny if you contrast him with us, [01:16:00] right? So he hasSimone Collins: no- Yeah, we- we performatively stupid, Max.Yeah, we- We- we- we do things that make us look bad. So the reason why you watch us still is ‘cause our ideas, our ideas actually have merit you know?Malcolm Collins: Yeah, we- we come on air, we pretend to be, like, racist Luddites. I’ll put the- the racist clip here, right? And in actuality, I have a graduate degree from Stanford in a- an MBA, right?Which is the hardest of the graduate degrees to get into in Stanford. Harder than most of their PhD, I think any of their PhD programs. M- mostly because the effects it has on your life are much better. Yeah,Simone Collins: make- makes more money well,Malcolm Collins: for some people. Simone... And it’s the hardest MBA in the world to get into.It’s harder than Harvard by a country mile. It’s, like, I think 30% harder or something. It- the Simone- my undergrad is from St. Andrews, which is often ranked the top university in the UK in neuroscience. I have been published in the field of neuroscience. I worked in actually doing neuroscience, doing psychology work, and at the Smithsonian Museum [01:17:00] of Natural History, where I still have an exhibit on display.Literally the top museum on earth. Maybe only, I mean, if you’re talking about, like, the world of academia, maybe only equivalated to, like, the British Museum. The SmithsonianSimone Collins: Museum’s awesome, yeah.Malcolm Collins: And then Simone has her graduate degree from Cambridge, right? Both of us have worked in, like, the halls- Well, he went to-the halls of power ...Simone Collins: a ni- he got a BA from a nice university, right? So,Malcolm Collins: you know, like in English- I, I know, but what I’m saying is, is that, like, our ideas, our theories that we have developed are taught at universities like Stanford.Simone Collins: Yeah, but we don’t stand in front of a fricking whiteboard and are like, “I’m Professor Collins.Let me give you a lecture in this semester of my performative class.” Yeah, we don’t do that.Malcolm Collins: And I’ve noticedSimone Collins: that a lot of- Because we, we don’t use pocket sand to distract you into believing us.Malcolm Collins: Dr- like, I mean, he, he reminds me of Drexel Friedman, right?Simone Collins: If- I don’t know who that is ...Malcolm Collins: Lex Friedman,Oh,Simone Collins: Lex.Oh, gee,Malcolm Collins: right. Lex Friedman, who pretends that he has any connection [01:18:00] to Yale, and he has no serious connection to them. He got his degree from Drexel. He got his graduate degree from Drexel. He’s Drexel Friedman. He is not a particularly intelligent person. He just puts on an act like he’s a smart person connected to...Wait, it, it, no, it’s not Yale. It’s MIT, right? Like, it’s, it’s- I can’t remember ... it, it, th- this sort of laundered... And keep in mind, we have acted in ways which he hasn’t, I don- I don’t know if he has, but it would prevent us from being hired by most of the institutions that our accreditations would give us access to.Titan: Yeah.Malcolm Collins: In part because we just sort of came out here, and we’re like I wanna, you know, tell as much as I can tell about the truth of how things are actually functioning to society at this point.”Simone Collins: Yeah.Malcolm Collins: Right? Like, ISimone Collins: want to make the world- Well, and we, we, we get uniquely mad- ... see the truth. Yeah ... when people, like, try to signal in this way.Like, another person who does this kind of thing is Eliezer Yudkowsky, who manipulates signals like moral outrage, and this wunderkind branding-Malcolm Collins: Yeah ...Simone Collins: and gatekeeping and word selection to appear authoritative on various issues, despite getting key details or fundamentals wrong, like, quite [01:19:00] frequently. I know.So-Malcolm Collins: I mean, we get things wrong, but we generally- Oh, yeah ... try to update and correct when we do. I’m, like, attentive to when fans notice we got something-Simone Collins: Well, and, like, between your genuine mispronunciations and our, like, jokes and, and admit- admission of bumbling and everything, I think it’s clear we’re not, like, pretending to be super smart.We’re not gatekeeping, like, “Oh, like, you’re just wrong ‘cause you’re m- you’re uninformed.” Like, we don’t use a lot of the rhetorical manipulation tactics or semiotic manipulation tactics that these people do, which is why this is uniquely irksome for us. And one reason why we like vice signaling and rage baiting is it’s a way of saying, “We’re not tricking you into believing we’re critical, credible to, to, like, high production quality or gatekeeping language or academic trappings.”We make ourselves hateable and weird so that when you take our argument seriously, you know it’s based on the merits of the arguments rather than any trust in or respect for us, and that’s really [01:20:00] important. And that’s, I mean, I think that’s also why people trust and respect ultimately and more fundamentally people like Asmongold and people like a lot of the VTubers who are like, “What?Like, I’m, you know- I’m like some anthropomorphic thing. You know? Like, you know, you don’t have to like bend you- But thisMalcolm Collins: is why performative racism is important and useful-Simone Collins: Okay ...Malcolm Collins: in the modern system, right? You’re saying- I’m gonnaSimone Collins: loseMalcolm Collins: my mind ... oh, not that he doesn’t do it. I mean, clearly he’s very anti-Jewish, right? Anti-Catholic. He might be more anti-Catholic than us in that he thinks that the Jesuits who control the Vatican are one of his Illuminati players who wanna end the world. Mm-hmm. Right? I, I, Yeah, I’m just really unimpressed. I don’t think, I haven’t heard a single interesting idea from him.His predictions are not bold. Like Peter Zeihan, I have problems with, like, where Peter Zeihan has gone post this latest Trump election. Oh. He seems to have completely fallen off. But he made genuinely impressive predictions. But people who, whoSimone Collins: followed him really closely, they say it was Jan 6th. Like, apparently he sort of lost his mind after Jan 6th.Yeah,Malcolm Collins: Jan 6th, lost his mind. But before Jan 6th, he made [01:21:00] really, w- Russia attacking the Ukraine was not on a lot of people’s bingo cards, okay? Mm-hmm. That was on his bingo cards, okay? He has made impressive predictions, all right?Simone Collins: Yeah, like, actually, like the Strait of Hormuz closure right now, like, and the, the fact that so much of people’s lives have been disrupted by the fact that you know, American actions have led to global trade being disrupted and, and America not being willing to basically maintain global, like, shipping routes is, is something he called, and The End of the World is Just the Beginning.He’s way more prophetic, just, you know, flaws and all, than Professor J, for sure.Malcolm Collins: Yeah. And Professor J, I like, I just... Yeah, I hate this whole, “Oh, look at all these predictions he’s made,” and it’s like tomorrow the sky will be blue. It’s like, that’s not a-Simone Collins: Well, one thing that Jose points out is like, okay, sure, yeah, he predicted that Trump was going to win the election, but he was also like, “Well, Trump is gonna win the election and Nikki Haley’s gonna be his vice president.”And he only like passingly [01:22:00] mentions JD Vance but not in any serious capacity. And this i- Not only, you know, makes his, his, you know, full prediction incorrect, but also it was, it was poorly informed, because that was after the point at which Trump had on Truth Social- Well, I mean, that’s a bold prediction.I give him ... posted saying- ... it’s impressive ... “I am not going to make Vick- or Nikki Haley my vice president. She’s great, but she’s not gonna be the VP.” So not only did he predict the wrong thing, he also, like, could have probably made a better guess if he was just a little more informed.Malcolm Collins: So- So, Simone, can you go to, was there anything else you... Because I remember you, you wanted to talk about how he got something wrong before.Simone Collins: There, there areMalcolm Collins: several.Simone Collins: Oh my God.Malcolm Collins: His game theory- Hold on ... getting wrong. ISimone Collins: wanna- Oh, yeah. Okay, let me jump to that. Because let’s see. Jose made so many... If you go to my show notes, you can see all the things that Jose...You can also just watch this video again, that’s it. Let’s see. Oh, yes. So Jose argues that Cenk uses game theory as a branding device. Do you just wanna crawl [01:23:00] around over here, Joanna? What do you want? Okay,Malcolm Collins: so, on Game Theory- Game Theory, by the way, is not impressive or difficult to understand.It’s, it’s really not Game Theory is incredibly simplistic, g- generally speaking. Well, anyways. In terms of, like, the greater academic theories that a person may need to grok. If somebody is going out and being like, “I did this with Game Theory,” it’s like, it’s like hearing, “I did this with tic-tac-toe logic.”Simone Collins: Well, yes, but he uses it nevertheless to confer legitimacy on what are essentially stories that he makes on how the world works, not actually game theoretic models. So not only does he try to use game theory, but he’s just like, “Game theory.” It’s kind of like, when what’s-his-face declares bankruptcy Michael Scott dec- declares bankruptcy.Yeah. And it’s like, “I declare bankruptcy,” and has, like, no understanding of the concept, and that is kind of what Jiang is doing. ‘Cause w- what, what Jose points out is that he, he gives a dating game example when he talks about game theory, starting with five boys and girls, and then he quickly spirals into claims that women’s [01:24:00] status obsession is killing civilization and that women are responsible for creating incels, showing “the game” is just a vehicle for his own views.And he constantly lists three factors-Malcolm Collins: Well, hold on. Those things are kind of true. It’s important that you call out what’s true. Well, thoseSimone Collins: things are true-Malcolm Collins: Women’sSimone Collins: obsession with status- ... but they’re not game theoretic models ...Malcolm Collins: is, no, but it’s not game theory, but the, it is true.Simone Collins: It’s true, but no, yeah, but if you’re doing a lecture on game theory, you can’t just be like, “I’m talking about game theory.Oh, man, women are horrible incels,” or something. He constantly lists three factors: genes, wealth, status focus and clarity, resolve, intelligence, crime, science, but never shows how they’re measured or weighed which undercuts the pretense of any sort of formal modeling. He just wants to sort of use these as narrative birds.And then he explicitly downplays math and emphasizes intuition and speculation while telling students that they should make imaginative leaps that are not backed up by any evidence which is the opposite of what [01:25:00] a game theory class should encourage. Like, this is, it’s not about narrative-Malcolm Collins: I mean, it’s not entirely dissociated from game theory.I’d say this other guy is overreaching a bit. The way people- I don’t think so ... date could be modeled with game theory logic, right? He’s just not using any classical game theory modeling that I’m aware of here. He appears to be using red pill modeling. True. Which is not inaccurate, it’s just not game theory.Simone Collins: Yeah. And Jiang also just in general has a very big tendency to cherry-pick and simplify history to fit his narratives. I do that. He tries, yeah, you do. He, he tries to critique science, including cosmology and evolution and psychology but then every time he does, it reveals a, a lack of basic understanding.But then he uses that ignorance to argue that science is fundamentally flawed. And- I, aMalcolm Collins: lot of people do that. Oh. I don’t really hold that against him.Simone Collins: Then you, you, I, I would if you, if you try to use that as some, like...Malcolm Collins: [01:26:00] I’m just saying I need specific examples. I have heard specific gaming examples.These sound like generalities that I’m not gonna buy. I need a specific example of where he clearly didn’t understand a field he was critiquing.Simone Collins: Okay, Big Bang and dark energy. He likens dark energy to cheating on a math test, writing 1987 plus 25 equals 20 plus dark energy, suggesting that adding an unknown term is illegitimate.And th- he doesn’t actually engage with the actual cosmological evidence, and uses his own confusion as proof that the theory is wrong.Malcolm Collins: Which- See, hold on, hold on. He’s not entirely wrong here. We do have evidence outside of the big mathematical gap th- there might be something that we’re calling dark energy.There is a lot of research on this. But I also understand where he’s coming from with this. This is the person reading him in bad faith. That is-Simone Collins: Okay, okay. Fine You know, I, I can give more examples.Malcolm Collins: Yeah, give more. Actually, this person is showing me more that they don’t understand thisSimone Collins: stuff He ends up asserting that scientific [01:27:00] breakthroughs and his own ideas come from channeling a divine source, and that secret societies invert reality through science, which is just a slide into mysticism.No,Malcolm Collins: he, his, his, his layout of secret societies is typically, like, i- he, he basically says functionally it’s like they’re secret societies in a lot of things, right? You know, but that’s not the same as saying there’s actually secret societies.Simone Collins: He says that all science is about reinventing reality to serve power, and that secret societies aim to invert heaven and hell.Like, I I don’t understand how-Malcolm Collins: Kind of they do if you take an interpretive approach,Simone Collins: but not- He thinks that ISIS was created through US torture and brainwashing modeled on ancient Egyptian priestly rituals, Malcolm.Malcolm Collins: Okay, that’s crazier. Yes. But not, not... I mean, ISIS, this is where he gets me. Oh,Simone Collins: score though.Malcolm Collins: It I’m gonna, I’m gonna point out, like, this is where I pull out and I’m like, “Simone Collins: If you-” He argues, he talks about how ISIS, ISIS, oh, but that is the [01:28:00] Egyptian god Isis. Well, no, that’s, that’s not even the name that they use for it in... That’s what the English people call it.Titan: Like, English languageMalcolm Collins: people call it Isis.Yeah. They don’t... But the funny thing about the ISIS thing is he’s like, “If you understand extremist eschatology, you can predict behavior. If you understood Muslim eschatology, ISIS is the obvious and inevitable result of it.” Like, you don’t even need to know that much about Islamic eschatology to know that ISIS is the inevitable result of it at least taken to extremes.And yet he’s like, “No, this is a mystery. Where could it have come from? Must have come from US torture rooms.” It’s, it’s the way he gets things wrong which is so offensive to me.Simone Collins: Yeah. Well, okay, then let’s go to the different I think, school of thought about, about Professor Jiang, not in terms of like, oh, he’s wrong, he’s being a fake prod- professor, but instead, like, okay, why does this feel a little fishy in terms of how he’s grown?And I think the, the most articulate, thoughtful person to discuss this who’s not like, [01:29:00] “It’s just the CCP,” or, “It’s just botting,” which I think is not the full story, is is summarized by a YouTuber called Hidden America. And he basically argues that this feels orchestrated, and did this video on Professor Jiang titled The Curious Case of Professor Jiang: How the Internet Manufactured a Geopolitical Oracle, in which he argues that Jiang’s public authority was really fostered that he rose in popularity because his framing fit what platforms and audiences were looking for.And I think this is very accurate. And he notes that his audience treats him less like a commentator and more like a prophet or interpreter of some hidden reality, which definitely is what I see in terms of the way people talk and talk about him. And he likens this in turn to cult formation or controlled narrative building, which definitely feels kind of right from how, like, everything c- co- centers around this cult powers or occult powers causing [01:30:00] Western decline narrative that he’s pushing.Malcolm Collins: Look, I mean, I g- I think you could do that with anyone. You could do that with us, you could do that with so many other people. I just think that he’s not that bright. Like, that’s the bigger problem with all of this, right? He’s, he’s hacked people’s understanding of authority. And he uses that to build narratives that are either obvious or stupid.That’s the whole problem I have with it. His narratives, I, I have not heard... Like, if you want something like Professor Zhang that’s not us, Roubiard. Roubiard gives interesting- Yeah ... orthogonal takes that I don’t always agree with, but I rarely leave one of his videos-Simone Collins: Well,Malcolm Collins: he comes from a place- ... without having, like, five or 10 new ideas.Simone Collins: I- Well, and he’s very informed. When- Yeah ... when he talks about something, he doesn’t get it wrong. He talks about it from a place of deeper understanding and knowledge. And even when he, like, goes off on conspiracy theories, he’s pulling from typically primary [01:31:00] sources. As close- Yeah ... to primary sources as he can.Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Keep in mind he’s a Quaker, so obviously he was born evil, right? So, like, you can see our video on that. We loveSimone Collins: him.Malcolm Collins: But the point I’m making here is that, like, I have serious ideological differences with Roubiard, but Roubiard’s mistakes are not stupid mistakes. He, he rarely makes stupid mistakes.And that, that’s where, like, if y- and, and if you w- that’s why I’m suggesting Roubiard for Professor Zhang people, because he’s got all of the mysticism, he’s got all of the conspiracy brain that Zhang has. Mm-hmm. He just doesn’t make obvious mistakes, like saying Francists are still around.Simone Collins: Yeah.Well, and, and he, he engages in... I mean, Whatifalthist is essentially predictive history. But, like, actually if you tru- re- if you genuinely tried to take a crack at predictive history, that is Whatifalthist. Whereas Professor Zhang is like, “I’m just doing jazz and dressed up like a professor.” Like, it’s, it’s it’s not, [01:32:00] it’s not as substantive.You, you’re gonna learn stuff if you watch Whatifalthist. It’s interesting. Yeah. It’s, it’s cool.Yeah. It’s genuinely good speculative history. And I, and I do like it. And, and,andMalcolm Collins: very much like a thug- Least bought-in person ever. He rose to fame when he was in his early 20s maybe even before that, right?And he is very open. Like, a lot of the fans I know who talk with us have also talked with Ruby Art at some point. Like, he’s very open to talking with fans. Oh, yeah. He’s a very open person. No, he’sSimone Collins: accessible, he’s open, he is, is, is humble. And there is something a little fishy about Professor Zheng’s dormant YouTube channel suddenly going active in 2024 and then growing to two million subscribers incredibly rapidly.I don’t think it’s fishy.Malcolm Collins: I know enough people who watch him. I, I know enough midwits who buySimone Collins: this stuff. It’s true. It’s true. It’s true. Like, I, I do see a world in which this is just algorithmic growth. However, China is really extra with stuff. Yeah, China is extra with stuff. Like, I recently saw this article about-Malcolm Collins: It could, it could be China.Like, clearly the CCP likes this guy. Clearly he’s on their good boy [01:33:00] list.Simone Collins: Yeah.Malcolm Collins: They have done stuff to grow people in the past.Simone Collins: I’m just- Well, and we just did an episode on, like, Chinese spies being throughout universities, and they’re very, like, very active in their surveillance of foreign actors within their own state, and also very careful about, I think, foreign actors in other states.And it’s, it’s one of those things, like, their surveillance of foreign actors within their own country reminds me of that adage that, like, if your partner suddenly becomes super suspicious that you’re cheating, it’s probably because they’re cheating. And The Telegraph recently ran this article titled The Secret Chinese Surveillance Program Tracking People Like Me, in which their senior foreign correspondent, Sophia Yan, describes this dedicated dynamic control platform for foreigners that integrates this, their, you know, the vast surveillance network they have.They’re, like, all the, the cameras, many of which have gait recognition to monitor people of interest in very granular real time. And journalists and dissidents are explicitly signaled out as, as [01:34:00] trackable targets on the platform. Someone leaked the platform to her. She f- like, was on it very clearly.And it, it allows you to sort of know exactly what the, what they are, who they’re meeting with, what they’re a- up to. It allows security services to see where their foreign citizens are and who they meet and how they move around in cities, and what social and professional networks they belong to.It allows the security service to see where they are at any given time, and they, they can use it, Like they can filter by-Malcolm Collins: Yeah, and the, the point being is this guy is in China. He’s living in China. He’s clearly doing what the CCP wants.Simone Collins: Yeah. So- ... I mean, just considering like all, like that, I’m just trying to present that as w- another thing in addition to the, like, university issue that China does that is, like, kind of extra.So I wouldn’t put it past the CCP in terms of signal boosting him, especially because this further, as to your point, right, it makes people more pissed about Israel. It makes people more pessimistic about AI. And these are things that are, [01:35:00] are very much, it seems to be in, in China’s best interest.Malcolm Collins: And more pessimistic about the US’s economic future.Simone Collins: More- Totally. Yeah ...Malcolm Collins: relative to China, right? Mm-hmm. Like I, a lot of this makes AI companies in the US less gated about working with China, right? Like- Yeah ... look, I obviously, even just as a matter of course, even if the CCP wasn’t boosting him, he has to curate everything through a CCP lens so he doesn’t get disappeared, which, like, regularly happens to people in China these days.You can see our episode- Yeah ... I don’t know if we put that episode live, on, like, just how China will just disappear you. As it has done. But yeah, he, I don’t like broadly speaking, I don’t really have any mel- like dislike of him. He’s not somebody where like, you know, with Taleb- No, you’re way more nice to himSimone Collins: than, than I am.Malcolm Collins: Where I was, Nassim Taleb, I’m like, this guy knows he’s manipulating people. He knows he’s lying to people. Isn’tSimone Collins: it Nassim Taleb?Malcolm Collins: Or something, whatever, Taleb nonsense. I don’t know. He, he just intentionally manipulating and lying to people. There [01:36:00] are other commentators where I think that that’s what they’re doing, where they know they are manipulating people, or where it’s very clear that they are boosting themselves and they’re not relevant anymore, and they’re trying to maintain control over political apparatus in the United States.With Zhang I don’t really get any of that impression from him. Hmm ... if he is botted, I think it’s by the CCP, b- and he’s not following their rules because he’s botted, he’s following their rules ‘cause he doesn’t wanna be arrested and he’s living in Beijing, right? Like, he’s grew because he presented a type of content and a type of figure that I think the world wanted to see.Hmm ... they, they wanted respectable Candace Owens. And that’s what he presented. But the problem is is his ideas are like, and, and this is where I have my one area, is that I wanna say that I think he’s smart enough to know that some of the stuff he’s saying is just dumb, but there’s a certain level of like normie [01:37:00] dumb where like you just w- it wouldn’t catch you, especially if you’re a little mysticism brained- Yeahthat you’re really screwing up.Simone Collins: Yeah, and I mean, there have been instances in which Rudiard has gone a little bit too far with his conspiracies, and people have been like, “Ah, okay, that’s a little too far.” But he, he’s walked it back. Like, very, very smart people such as him can get, can get caught up in some loops that are not very productive.But they, at, at least the, the, the smartest ones are able to sort of walk that back a little and they sort of catch themselves. Well, andMalcolm Collins: I think because he and this is my biggest th- the thing that I dislike about him. Because he catches things in things that aren’t true, and are obviously not true, and that you can easily verify aren’t true- Mm-hmmhe will say something that the average person will think is more offensive than what we’re saying, but is actually dramatically less offensive and costly to say than what we’re saying. Right. Yeah. So if you go out there and you say [01:38:00] “Mainstream Judaism is controlled by an antinomial z- Frankish sect. A lot of Jews are gonna be like, “Oh, that’s like classic stupid conspiracy,” whatever, right? Like, it’s anti-Semitic, but whatever. Whereas I come out here and I go, “Actually, if you look at Jewish tradition up to the point of the Baal Shem Tov his teachings would’ve been considered a form of spiritual antinomianism, and they now dominate the dominant Jewish organizations which actually have real political influence in both the United States and Israel.”That may sound a lot less offensive, I guarantee you it is a billion times, because people who are actually Jewish and involved in these, whereas I come out, a- and you kind of understand why this is offensive, because if what I’m, I am saying is true w- oh, my God, isMalcolm Collins: an antinomial Jewish sect that controls the world? That would be really [01:39:00] bad for most Jews. And then a lot of people would be like, “No, don’t say that stuff, Malcolm.”And then I go to them and I go, “Yes, but you’re a Jew. You’ve studied Jewish history. Is it true that the Baal Shem Tov’s teachings would be considered spiritually antinomial at the time they were laid out, and other rabbis at the time, the leading rabbis at the time, called him and his followers out for this and were deadly afraid of the growth of his movement?”They’d be like, “Well, that is true.”Speaker 11: When I say spiritually antinomial, what I mean here is an inversion of earlier practices. He didn’t actually have a belief in, or at least never stated a belief in antinomialism as in an intentional inversion of other practices because, you know, Shabbatai Zevi was still fresh on everyone’s mind. , But, , I’m just saying functionally were they antinomial in how much they inverted previous Jewish teachings around specific [01:40:00] topics?Malcolm Collins: That’s why it’s worse, because it’s true. When you are calling out true things, it is always more dangerous and more offensive than calling out made-up things.Simone Collins: Mm.Malcolm Collins: Anyway, love you.Simone Collins: That’s a good point, and I love you too.Malcolm Collins: And for dinner tonight I’m okay with just doing, like, fries and the, the stuff that you had in the,Simone Collins: Yeah, well, so I, I don’t know how well they go together, but we have two samosas that if we don’t eat tonight probably won’t be good.Well, that’s why IMalcolm Collins: said let’s do this, like, samosas and some fries.Simone Collins: Some fried things to go with your fried things. The, the, the fries are the samosa, basically. How about samosa and tomato soup? No. No? No. It’s... I know, I know. I’m just trying to, like, if these other things are gonna expire if we don’t-Malcolm Collins: Let’s try the new fries.The tomato soup we will get to. I like tomato soup. I’ve been eating tomato soup, like, every otherSimone Collins: day. I know. It’s been good. No, I know, ‘cause that’s all my dad wanted when he was sick.Malcolm Collins: And that’s good that I had it, right? You probably thought I’m being wasteful.Simone Collins: Yeah. Well, and you’re not paying for...That’s, IMalcolm Collins: that’s, that’s- Did we, did we use the last [01:41:00] tomato soup jar? Is that, like, open now- Yes ... or is it still sealed?Simone Collins: TheMalcolm Collins: second is- Okay. I’ll have tomato soup sometime over the next few days. Today I want to do samosas and the new fries, ‘cause I wanna see how those come out.Simone Collins: Okay. What? This is your cheat day.Speaker 9: Yeah. They’re gonna cucking. Yay.The chicks stand out the bigger side as the but baby chickens Yeah, the baby chicks are a little afraid of the big chicks, you see, because the big chicks are a lot bigger Mommy. There’s a pecking order, my dearSpeaker 10: You gotta sneak up on him. Can you be sneaky? I want that. You can do it, just be sneaky and patient, okay? I can’t. Maybe I can help you. We’ll see. Can you help me please? Aw, thanks for asking them nicely. [01:42:00] Let’s see what I can do to help. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit basedcamppodcast.substack.com/subscribe

In this explosive Based Camp episode, Malcolm & Simone Collins dive deep into one of the most uncomfortable topics in Christianity: the Biblical commands to kill infants and civilians during conquest — and why they might actually reflect a coherent (if brutal) longtermist moral framework.From 1 Samuel 15 and the total destruction of the Amalekites, to Deuteronomy’s rules for Canaanite cities, to Jesus’ teachings on mercy — Malcolm argues that modern “peace at all costs” Christianity has cherry-picked the Bible and is actively destroying Western civilization. They explore how true Biblical mercy often looks like decisive action, not endless tolerance of predators and parasites.This is a raw, unfiltered discussion about civilizational morality, the dangers of naive pacifism, and what “love your enemies” actually meant in context.Tract 12: Sociatal Morality & A Genocidal God[00:00:00]Malcolm Collins: Hello Simone, I’m excited to be talking to you today. Today we are going to be digging into morality as the Bible and Christian faith relate to it. Because I am getting really sick of all of these Christians out there that we see within like the wider Christian media influencer ecosystem talking about how Christianity is like the religion of peace and we need to always be peaceful.And if you’re going to, for example make a blanket rule against dropping bombs on schools in a warfare scenario, then all of a sudden terrorists are going to put their headquarters under schools and make society net negative for children.Simone Collins: Oh, you’re not, you, this is purely hypothetical of course.Malcolm Collins: Yeah. If, if at a, a societal level, right, we did something like just always gave out food whenever somebody was hungry you would have groups begin to evolve or [00:01:00] move in close to you that evolve entirely predatory off of this, right? And somebody could be like, “Well, maybe the Bible didn’t predict all of these things, or didn’t really think through difficult moral decisions.”And the reality is is that’s not true at all. The Bible all over the place has God telling people to kill infants. And so we are going to go, because I think that this is one of the clearest, I mean, I could go into the instances where God’s like laying out the rules for selling your daughters into slavery or rules on how to treat slaves.But in this episode, that we’re gonna go more on in the next one, ‘cause this is gonna be a bit of a two-parter. But on this one we’re going to go deeper into specifically where, why, and when does God say it’s okay to kill infants? Because I think it’s through these scenarios we can get a broader understanding of how Christianity should [00:02:00] understand morality.Speaker 6: You know, maybe I was wrong about this pacifism thing.Speaker 8: Are you insane? Pacifism works like a charm as long as you button it.Malcolm Collins: Right?Simone Collins: Isn’t it broadly understood, though, that one of the reasons Christianity got so much early adoption in the in the Roman Empire was because the Christians didn’t kill the babies, and people kinda liked that. Like especially women.Malcolm Collins: Did, yeah. And so what I’ll also point out is I do not, I think that there was a period of history where Christianity was meant to be understood as this ultra-peacenic religion because that helped it grow.We’ve done an episode where we look at the morality of early Christians and show that them being willing to help each other during times of plague, them not killing their infants th- this helped their population grow at a significantly larger rate than pagan populations and lowered the persecution that they might have otherwise gotten during their period of growth.But once they were the dominant religion within regions- At first, they kept their [00:03:00] warlike nature. You know, they would still go and do crusades. They would still punish the infidel you know, still seek out witches in their community, stuff like this. But parts of the Bible began to be emphasized more than other parts over time until the religion became unrecognizable and a net negative in the way it was being practiced.So to go back to this we’ve got... And this one is the clearest, so I’m gonna go the longest on it. Samuel 15:2-3. It says, “ Thus says the Lord of hosts: ‘I have noted what Amalek did to Israel in opposing them on the way when they came out of Egypt.’” Now, note this would have happened hundreds of years before God is talking about this.So this is something that a people did hundreds of years ago. None of the people who actually did this negative thing to Israel would have still been among the Amaleks, okay? “Now go and strike Amalek and devote to destruction all that they have. Do not spare them, but kill them, both man and woman, [00:04:00] child and infant, ox and sheep, camel and donkey.”And there’s some different translations for infant here. We have suckling basically mean a child while it’s still surviving on breast milk. So you can’t be like, “Well, maybe they’re talking about older children here or something.” This is the- the word that’s used here means that. And you could say, okay, maybe something was lost in translation here, and God didn’t really mean, “No, you gotta kill everyone when you take this territory.”Speaker: And note here, people who want to say the Bible says thou shall not kill, it doesn’t say that. It doesn’t say that anywhere. It says that you’re not supposed to murder. Murder in Jewish law is very different from a generic killing.I didn’t mention this in the episode because I assumed it was obvious for people with like baseline biblical knowledge, but probably worth mentioningMalcolm Collins: Okay? So what then happens in Samuel 15:7-9, all right? “And Samuel defeated the Amaleks, and from Havilah as far as Shur, [00:05:00] which is to the east of Egypt. And he took Agag and the king of the Amaleks alive, and devoted destruction all the people with the edge of the sword. But Saul and the people spared Agag and the best sheep and the best oxen and fattened calves and lambs, and all that was good, and would not utterly destroy them.All that was despised and worthless they devoted to destruction.” Okay? So, what did God do about this, right? And the word of the Lord came to Samuel, this is Samuel 15:10 through 23, “I regret that I have made Saul king, for he has turned his back from following me and has not performed my commandments.”And Samuel was angry, and he cried to the Lord all night, dot, dot, dot. “And the Lord sent you on a mission,” he said, “Go and devote to destruction all the sinners, the Amaleks, and fight against them until they are consumed. Why then did you not obey the voice of your Lord? Why did you pronounce on the [00:06:00] spoil and do what was evil even in the sight of the Lord?”And then dot, dot, dot here., And then response, “Because you have rejected the word of the Lord, he has also rejected you being king.” So if it was unclear what happened there, so I’ll just lay it out for you. Did you catch what he did wrong?Simone Collins: He didn’t kill them all?Malcolm Collins: He didn’t kill one person, the king- Yeah ... and some of the sheep and oxen.Simone Collins: Yeah, he was supposed to kill them all.Malcolm Collins: Now, the, a, he killed all of the infants. He killedSimone Collins: all the- No, but that’s not all of them ...Malcolm Collins: but that’s not all of them.Simone Collins: All of them.Malcolm Collins: All of them. And,Simone Collins: God, what is up, dude?Malcolm Collins: Here, the demons- ThisSimone Collins: is the whole demon, “I killed, I killed goblins.”Malcolm Collins: Yeah, okay, very, very similar to that, whichSimone Collins: is why- Was that just, were they just, were they just trying to reenact the Bible there with the whole, like, goblin baby killing scene?Were they trying to be like...Speaker 4: [00:07:00] Then to show them mercyfaces to the light of dayMalcolm Collins: I will say that this is the morality the Bible teaches us. The morality of that scene in Goblin Slayer is essentially the morality the Bible teaches us, and we’re gonna point out, [00:08:00] ‘cause people can be like, “Oh, well, when Jesus came, all of these older stories are revoked,” right?Like, they don’t matter anymore. This is not the God we’re dealing with anymore. I’m gonna point out, no, Jesus makes it very clear all of this stuff holds.Well, we’re gonna point out that God’s mercy, when we understand mercy through the eyes of what God means by mercy- Mercyright, because we’re constantly told God is merciful-Simone Collins: Mm-hmm ...Malcolm Collins: and then you’re kicked out for being king because you didn’t kill them all, right? You know, like, clearly if we’re defining mercy through whatever trait God has, it’s not this standard human definition of mercy, right? So when we’re commanded to be merciful that does not undermine the...And handle it when you’re conquering a territory, right? So we’re gonna go into that. And I’ll note here, people will be like, “Well, like, God matured or something between the Old and the New Testament.” Mm-hmm. And I’m gonna say, no, no, no, no, no. The reason the rules that we are given and what’s asked of God is changed in between these two contexts-Simone Collins: Uh-huhMalcolm Collins: is that, [00:09:00] humanity changed. Civilization changed. So the rules that God gave us to help civilization advance- Oh ... are different in the different contexts. But it’s not that the older rules are no longer relevant or something we should be listening to or taking into understanding in warfare, in civilizational conflicts.Hmm. So I wanna continue here to point out for people who are like, “Well, maybe this, this Amalek people were just, like, uniquely evil, and the situation with Samuel was, like, very unique in, in the Old Testament,” right?Simone Collins: Mm-hmm, okay.Malcolm Collins: And I’ll point out that is not the case. So we’ve got Deuteronomy 20:16-18.This was a general rule landed out for Canaanite cities, okay? “But in the cities of the people that the Lord God has given you for an inheritance, you shall save nothing that breathes, but you shall devote to complete destruction the Hittites, the Amorites, the Canaanites, and the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites, as [00:10:00] your Lord God commanded, that they may not teach you to do according to all abominable practices that they have done for their gods, and you sin against the Lord God.”So actually here we’re getting some more context. Why does God have - these people kill everyone in a region when, when, when they’re conquering the region? And note he doesn’t always do this. There are two types of, like, conquests that are described. Sometimes it’s kill everyone, all the women, all the children, everyone, and then other times it’s leave the virginal women, marry them.So again, this isn’t, like, a blanket rule here that he’s giving but it is the normal rule. The virginal women rule is, is, is less commonly brought up.And I will also note here that we know from DNA studies that the current Jewish population is about 50% descended from the Canaanites, and we also know from Jewish Old Testament stuff, there’s a part, bunch of parts especially during the Josiah reforms where, like, they’re [00:11:00] complaining about intermarriage with Canaanite people and stuff like that.So the Jews acted with more what we would consider quote unquote, “mercy” than they were commanded to. Hmm. And in so doing, sinned. Right? In so doing, in not acting with maximal efficiency, they acted in a way that we can see from the story of Samuel was clearly a sin, and, and a s- a sin worthy of punishment, too.Simone Collins: Interesting, huh.Malcolm Collins: So to continue here, now we’ve got Numbers 31:1-18 and this is the Midianites. So again, we’re a different group here, right? Moses commands when, when talking about taking venge- vengeances on the Midianites, “Now therefore kill every male among the little ones, and kill every woman who has known a man by lying with him.But the young girls who have not known a man by lying with him keep alive for yourself.” So you can see in this one instance it’s a bit different, but still killing the infants. Still killing the infants. Even in the merciful option, it’s still killing of the infants. And again, why the killing of the infants?It’s, in the other passage, the reason God gives is, well, [00:12:00] when they grow up, they will lead you away from whatever God sees as the truth, right? And so the question here is why is God saying this, right? Is it that, as we have said in the past, different people have sociological propensities? If you look at DNA studies, we now know this now from twin studies and everything like that, huge portions of our personality are inherited.Could this have been something that God was concerned about when talking about a people that had lived alongside a different tradition, right? Potentially. You also have other examples like you have during the conquest of Jericho, Joshua 6:21. “Then they devoted all of the city to destruction, both the men and the women, the young and old, oxen, sheep, and donkeys, with the edge of the sword.”We also have Psalms 13:9. This is more of a, a lament and not necessarily a direct commandment from God, but it’s still in the context here. So here we understand how they would’ve killed infants during this period because they describe the process in [00:13:00] this.So they say, “Remember, O Lord, against the Edomites, the day of Jerusalem, how they say, ‘Lay it bare, lay it bare, down to its foundations. O daughter of Babylon, doomed to be destroyed. Blessed shall be he who repays you with what you have done to us. Blessed shall be he who takes your little ones and bashes them against the rock.’”So pretty brutalistic. Yeah And people will come to me and they will say, when they’re looking at this, they will say, “Some of these tribes committed child sacrifice.” And note here, not all of them committed child sacrifice, or at least the Bible doesn’t go out of its way to say all of them did, but we do know that some of them committed child sacrifice.And so didn’t they deserve this... Isn’t this the right way to treat a peoples who do child sacrifice? To which I would note that’s a really stupid way to handle this morally. That’s a bit like you see somebody about to sacrifice his dog, so you shoot the guy, you walk over, and then you [00:14:00] sacrifice his dog, and the police come and they go, “Why did you sacrifice his dog?”And you go, “He was about to do it.” Th- Well, you didn’t then have to do it immediately after you saved him. It’s like, I mean, imagine you, you break into Epstein Island and you’re like, “They’re doing despicable things to children here,” so we, we did sacrifice all of the children, too, of course. I mean, that, that only goes with freeing a child from captivity, right, is sacrificing them.It... That doesn’t explain the morality on display here. That’s a very- It doesSimone Collins: not ...Malcolm Collins: very- No ... stupid understanding of the morality that’s, that’s,Simone Collins: I mean, I have a line, and hurting innocent children, kind of the younger the worse, that’s, that’s crossing it, so-Malcolm Collins: Well, and, and note here this isn’t just God telling other people to do this.We see God hurting infant- and again, infants, like clearly haven’t sinned. Like, if you’re a suckling baby, you have clearly not sinned. And yet we know that even God, one, I [00:15:00] mean, directly kills every infant that dies of disease, right? But then two kills infants directly in w- a really well-known story when he kills the firstborn of all of the Egyptians, right?Like, a, a lot of thoseSimone Collins: firstborn- Didn’t Job also lose his family, if memoryMalcolm Collins: serves? Job also lost his family, yes. Which could have included infants. I don’t know if it did include infants, but Yeah,Simone Collins: I can’t remember if it was, how, how old they were. I don’t know if they got into those specifics.Malcolm Collins: Yeah, so when people come at me, especially this is around stuff like even if you believe life begins at conception or something like that, and you’re like, “How could you possibly kill infants,” right?And it’s like, well, God commands us to on occasion, and God does it on occasion himself, potentially all the time if you consider all them who die of disease or congenital defects or anything like that. And so, the question is, is why? Because I think through digging into this question we can better understand morality as we are meant to understand it from the perspective of [00:16:00] God, and see part of why Christianity is falling apart right now- Hmmand see part of why our current civilizational structure is falling apart,Speaker 7: I’ve been called out. I’m gonna have to show up and fight.Speaker 6: But you don’t have to fight.Speaker 7: What do you mean?Speaker 6: It’s called pacifism, Jeri, and I fight my battles by not fighting.Speaker 7: Well, isn’t that kind of you know, cowardly?Speaker 6: Sure. Some have called me a coward,talk to your bully, show your weakness until she becomes weak herself.Speaker 7: So if Edie and I have an understanding, she’ll become weak?Speaker 6: Yes. .Peace.It’s your greatest weaponSimone Collins: right? Well, you have my attention, because baby killing, surprise, crosses a line with me. I don’t care who you are-Malcolm Collins: Well- ...Simone Collins: who the baby is.Malcolm Collins: Before I’ll, I’ll go further, basically I’ll point out why. It lowers net baby killing. God works in net, right?Like- SoSimone Collins: this is a, a stitch in time saves nine? [00:17:00] A baby killed now saves- 100 fellMalcolm Collins: Yes, basically. Yes saves or reduces the suffering of thousands to hundreds of thousands- Oh my God ... or more in the future.Simone Collins: Yeah. No, I hear, I hear that. Oh, God.Malcolm Collins: I mean, okay, let’s think about it this way, right? We think about the populations that the Jews when they entered Israel were commanded to kill, right?Simone Collins: Okay.Malcolm Collins: And the iterations of those populationsthat survived in the surrounding regions,where now it’s normal to marry you know, six-year-olds and nine-year-olds, depending on the country, right? Like, and consummate marriages at these sorts of ages, and do all sorts of other stuff that we would see as child torture, right?Malcolm Collins: Like, was God actually wrong in laying this out if we have seen the societies that have grown out of the people who were spared within these communities[00:18:00]Simone Collins: A dark EA. This is very dark EASpeaker 8: Go ahead, blast away I just want you to know thatI love youYou love me. Ah!You sure took a beating.Speaker 6: Yeah. You know, maybe I was wrong about this pacifism thing.Speaker 8: Are you insane? Pacifism works like a charm as long as you button it.Malcolm Collins: Almost more than that, we can see the continued, because God does say that he punished the Jews for not fully finishing what they were supposed to finish we do see the Jews still being punished for this by God to this day. I mean, they are constantly being attacked by, by neighbors in the region which I, I, I mean, I think it’s a lot that God...It’s basically God saying, “I told you so.” But anyway, to [00:19:00] continue here. Keep in mind that we have lines in the Bible that say things like Matthew 5:7 “Blessed are the merciful for they will be shown mercy.” All right? And here you’re like, “Wait, what? What, like, now we’re talking about mercy? But where was the mercy back then?”Mm-hmm. Right? Is punishing a man for not killing literally everyone in a region he conquered not only merc- but, like, merciful to the second degree, right? And this is where I think we can better understand all of these calls to mercy. Luke 6:36, “Be merciful just as the Father is merciful.” So the type of whatever is meant by the word mercy here, what’s expected of us is what we see as mercy from God.So this has to come to better understand, like, what this mercy looks like. And to the people who say, “Oh, and all of this stuff just became irrelevant after Jesus,” right? Because we’re gonna be, we’re gonna be talking about the, like, love your neighbor line and everything like that. But what happens right before the love your neighbor line? So at [00:20:00] the very passage that’s setting up that whole section that Jesus is about to say, he prefaces it with saying, “Do not think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets.I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them. For truly I tell you, until heaven and Earth pass away, not an iota, not a dot will pass through the law until all is accomplished.” This is Matthew 5:17, 18. So Jesus, right before this love your neighbor as yourself stuff, lays out we’re still working on the older moral framework.We’re just improving it for a new societal context, right? And so then what does he lay out? Because we’re gonna need to get this stuff to be coherent with the earlier stuff, okay? By the way, it’s very interesting, right, Simone, to, to go into this.Simone Collins: This is fascinating. Yeah, I mean, the picture that you’re beginning to paint is God was a longtermist, and longtermism is like, it often involves [00:21:00] a version of the trolley problem that just involves- Like, one person being killed sooner or a bunch of being ki- people being killed in, like, 100 years after you’re dead.Malcolm Collins: Yeah.Simone Collins: And, like, what you gonna do? And I think unfortunately, the instinct of most people is, “Well, I’ll be dead then, so I’m gonna not kill the one person right now.” And I probably fall into that category.Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Well, and it also shows that God is... When we talk about the morality- Yeah ... be it stuff like IVF or be it stuff like any of the s- when we’re talking about, like, how does God operate in this world of morality,Simone Collins: Well, yeah, and God exists outside of time,Speaker 10: Sorry, Simone drops this like this should be common knowledge to people. , When you look at lines like, “Before I formed you in the womb, I knew you,” we see that either souls exist, , before ensoulment in heaven, which most Christians don’t believe. That would be a, , that Mormon [00:22:00] belief if you believe that., Or that God has knowledge of the future and exists outside of time. , If you think that this implies necessary, , predestination, , it doesn’t. , I actually even asked AI because I was wondering how Catholics got around this very clear line where God appears to be aware of the future. , And even the mainstream Catholic teaching is that God exists outside of time and is aware of the future,Simone Collins: so this idea that, you know, well, I’m, I’m going to choose to, even though I, I could, I have the money to do IVF or the resources or have access to it, I could have kids if I did IVF, I want to have children, but I’m going to choose to not do it in God’s eyes-Malcolm Collins: Because some of the, some of the embryos created won’t be carried to term.Simone Collins: Yeah ... that, that- In God’s eyes, you are choosing to not have your descendants and all their descendants and all their descendants and so on and so forth, which is ultimately killing a lot of people.Malcolm Collins: Yeah, which is immeasurable suffering that you are bringing on the world because you [00:23:00] are operating in a moral constraint that is clearly a different moral constraint than that God operates on or that he expects you to operate on.Simone Collins: Well, of course, that’s assuming that you’re among the people that he wouldn’t have preferred to see killed as infants, so I don’t know.Malcolm Collins: Yeah. True. Yeah.Simone Collins: I don’t think so either. I’m kidding. But I mean, you see what I mean. I, I, I’m very frustrated by IVF prohibitions.Malcolm Collins: Yeah, I’m, I am very frustrated by IVF prohibitions as well because you are preventing children who otherwise would come from, and all the children they’re gonna have, and all the children they’re gonna have from coming into existence.Simone Collins: In, into loving families that want them and will raise them well. That’s, that’s kind of the worst part, you know?Malcolm Collins: Yeah.Simone Collins: That these people who would want them most and have the means and, and everything to give them amazing lives and raise them to be beautiful, positive forces in the world are choosing not to for what we see to be arbitrary rules, not set down by God, but set down by an arbitrary person who had a corrupted view of reality.Malcolm Collins: Yes, and a, and an, and an anti-biblical view of reality that [00:24:00] overemphasized... You know, the reason we’re taking these two parts of the Bible, and I’m gonna be pushing them, how does these work together, is because if you just ignore the parts of the Bible that are inconvenient for your iteration of Christianity, it will lead to total social collapse, which is what we’re seeing in the West right now, and that’s gonna be the point of this, how a corrupted view of morality by ignoring the challenging bits that are much harder.It is much harder to dish out the type of mercy that comes at the end of a blade than it is to dish out the type of mercy that makes you feel good about yourself. Yeah ... that, the second is the easier mercy. The second is the more indulgent mercy, right? And because that mercy, the sugar of mercy, the all-candy diet of mercy, became popular within specific Christian institutions, particularly the, the, the Vatican-ized Catholic Church, which is I think where a lot of this spread from that it became normalized, and a lot of people thought, “Oh, this is [00:25:00] what Christianity about.This is what our religion is all about.” And then it’s, “Oh, bring in every immigrant. Bring in every outsider. We don’t care. You don’t need to convert. You don’t need to come, you don’t need to... Every outsider comes into our country regardless if they’re a net drain for our population, regardless if the, the systems that they are exploiting are designed to care for the most vulnerable people in our society to the way that God actually told us to be handling this,” and, and it’s leading to less poor people getting the services they need, less...Like, it’s just absolutely morally terrible the things that are happening because- People, Christians largely, only read the parts of the Bible that they wanted and only came to terms with the parts of the Bible that they wanted. But to continue. So Jesus then says, after all that, after none of the old stuff doesn’t count anymore, he says, “You have heard it said, ‘An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.’But I tell you, not resist an evil person. If a person slaps you on the right cheek, turn to them the other cheek [00:26:00] also. And if anyone wants to sue you and take your shirt, hand over a coat as well. If anyone forces you to go a mile, go with them two miles give to the one who asks you, and do not turn away from the one who wants to borrow from you.”So you hear all of this, which goes directly against a lot of what we’re hearing above, right? So why? And we’re gonna get to, because it all makes sense. It’s all gonna come together in a much more ni- n- ni- beau way than you expect. He also goes on to say, “And you have heard it said, ‘Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be children of the Father in heaven. He causes his sun to rise the evil and the good And sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous. If you love those who love you, what reward will you get?Are not even the tax collectors doing that? And if you greet only your own people, what are you doing more than others? Do not even pagans do that? Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.” [00:27:00] So this is, again, did God just mature between these two periods? I mean, clearly not, if we’re going to assume that God is real.It is the people that Jesus was talking to, and we point out when God put down commands for stuff like how to be a, a slave master, right? Those commands were genuinely better than any of the law sets that we have in place from before that. We have a whole episode where we go through this.How to sell your daughter into slavery. Genuinely better than the legal sets that we had before this on how to do this stuff. It does appear that it was iteratively moving civilization forwards. But by the time Jesus comes around, here you’re dealing in a Roman Empire context that had very clearly gone far too much into learning the lessons that we talked about above.The, you know, just eradicate your enemy as you’re spreading. And how did this change how Rome was spreading as Rome Christianized? This new understanding of mercy [00:28:00] spread, everything like that. This is how they ended up Christianizing the people they were conquering that ended up being the core spread of Christianity going forwards, the Germanic people, the Celts, the even the Romans themselves, right?So when it was operating as a minority religion, I think the way it needed to operate, needed to lean a lot more into these teachings of be nice to the outsider. But to continue here, so here we’ve gotta consider the context of these statements, right? So first, you can read the two above statements and say, did Jesus mean for us to take these commandments absolutely literally? Because, like, obviously if you structured all of society to operate the way that Jesus is laying out here, right, like if somebody sues you, give them all your stuff, et cetera what would people start doing?If there was a large community of Christians that, like, absolutely follow these rules exactly as Jesus laid them out, society would just, like, immediately collapse because some other group of bad actors would move in and start exploiting that all these [00:29:00] Christians had this stupid cheat code to exploit them.Simone Collins: Yeah.Malcolm Collins: Right? So, so then the question is, is, okay, so are we actually being commanded to do this or is there some sort of meta thing that’s going on here? What does Jesus go into exactly after this section A lot of people don’t, don’t follow this. He goes into three iterative and expanded warnings. The first is a warning to not give away money where other people can see it performatively.Simone Collins: Oh.Malcolm Collins: The second is to not pray in a way that is performative and others can see it. The third is a warning to not fast in a way that looks performative. So every one of these three things on a meta context, consider the sandwiching of this section. Yeah. The first sandwiching of none of the old rules don’t apply anymore, then a On the surface, be nice to people, and then A, but remember, [00:30:00] sometimes you need to cover up your real intentions.Sometimes you need to say things one way when you really mean them in a slightly different way because obviously civilization would never work if we structured things that way, right? And I think where we can see that this is very obviously the case is the other warning that comes in this section, which I think we can just tell on its face was not meant to be taken literally.This is the commandment against adultery.Simone Collins: Mm-hmm. “Malcolm Collins: You have heard it said, you shall not commit adultery. But I tell you that anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with his heart. If your right eye causes you to stumble, gouge it out and throw it away. It is better for you to lose part of your body than for the whole body to be thrown to hell.And if your right hand causes you to stumble, cut it off and throw it away. It is better for you to lose one part of your body than your whole body and go into hell.” So how do we know that this is not meant to be taken literally? Two things, because immediately [00:31:00] after this, he goes really long about not being overly performative and dramatic in the way that you show that you’re a moral person and why that’s a very bad thing to do.Okay? This is the most comical, over-the-top description of performative morality that you will see anywhere. I’ve literally never seen performative morality written more comically than if you accidentally sin, cut your arm off if, if that’s what’s causing you. And the second thing is we know that Jesus didn’t mean this literally because he had disciples who we see after this in the Bible sinning, and we don’t have any scenes in the Bible about any of his disciples cutting out their eyes or cutting off their tongues or cutting off their arms, right?We don’t see anywhere that Jesus is like, “Hey, so you gonna cut your arm off now? You gonna cut your... You, you said something bad there. You gonna cut your tongue out now?” We don’t see him do that. [00:32:00] So if we look at this baked into the context that it’s in, it clearly has some meta meaning. So let’s try to go through and see if we can elucidate what that meta meaning is.I, I mean, do you take it that way, Simone? Do you, like, when you read this, are you like, “Yeah, that doesn’t make sense”?Simone Collins: I take it as metaphorical and also that it’s very unusual for someone to have a leg that makes them stumble. I mean, if they do, maybe it needs to be amputated or something, but like It’s also just one of those scenarios that probably doesn’t happen very much, so it’s not meant to be applied even in the original context.No. If that makes sense.Malcolm Collins: Come on. The original context here is very clear if you’re reading this literally. Okay? If you-Simone Collins: Oh, right. If you’re like, “I,” looks at someone else.Malcolm Collins: Someone else, your wife. Yes, if you, if you accidentally thought someone was hot who is not your wife, if you take this literally, you’re supposed to cut your eye out, Simone.Okay? Cl- clearly that’s a part of normal human life.Simone Collins: It sounds like a [00:33:00] lazy eye. It’s not like...Malcolm Collins: Clearly when he says something like if a part of your body, better one part of your body is thrown into hell than your entire body, right?Simone Collins: Yeah.Malcolm Collins: Clearly this then should apply to everything, right? It should apply to everything that we’re reading there, right?So it shouldSimone Collins: apply to your tongue. Well, it’s basically just saying, like, again, a stitch in time saves nine. If something’s causing you... I- if so- or like, kind of like cancer, right? Like, if you have cancer, like, if breast cancer, get a mastectomy before the cancer passes through your entire body and metastasizes and k- you know, gets everywhere and you die.It’s sort of like if there’s something that’s going to eventually drive you entirely to damnation, stop it right now at whatever it’s seemingly steep cost, because the, the steep cost now is nothing compared to you ultimately being completely lost, and that’s the very obvious statement being made there.Yeah. It’s notMalcolm Collins: about eyes. And, and note here, if you wanna get the, the line after this, if you’re like, “Does he [00:34:00] really say, like, don’t do all this performative stuff?” He says “and when you pray, you shall not be as hypocrites, for they love to stand and pray in synagogues and in the corners of streets that they may be seen of men. Verily I say unto you, they have received their reward. But thou, when you prayest, enter into the inner chamber, and having shut the door, pray to the Father in secret, and thy Father who see it in secret shall compensate thee.And in praying, use not vain repetitions as the Gentiles do, for they think that they shall be heard for their much speaking. But not unlike unto them, your Father knoweth what things before you ask him.”Yeah. Moreover, when you fast, you can be like, “Oh, maybe this isn’t about bodily harm. This is just about praying.” But no, he’s very clear. “Moreover, when you fast, be not as the hypocrites of a sad countenance. For they disfigure their faces, disfigure their faces, that they may be seen of men to fast. Verily I say unto you, they have received their reward.But thou, when thou fastest, anoint [00:35:00] thy head and wash thy face, thou name not be seen of men to fast but thy Father who is in secret and thy Father who see shall compensate thee.” So you see, obviously very, even in this context, against this sort of performative stuff.Simone Collins: Yeah.So- Conceal it. Like, even ultimately just conceal it.God will know. No one else should know.Malcolm Collins: Right. Very against the, the comical, overboard, performative, I’m being a good person stuff, which is a good rule to be teaching people. It’s just, it’s been completely misinterpretedSo the way that we often do tracks is we say, All right, so suppose we were gonna design the best society we could possibly design. So just ignore everything that’s in the Bible. Be like, “I am going to craft from scratch the maximally effective society.” What does that society look like? Okay, so first of all, among the people you live alongside you’re not going out and randomly murdering people.[00:36:00]You’re generally being nice to everyone you encounter. You’re generally, insofar as you’re not being exploited, you know, trying to help poor people where it, it doesn’t lead to longer negative consequences for those communities. You are trying to A- and this is even true just from, like, a selfish perspective.If you’re a people and you go out there and you’re really aggressive and you’re constantly signaling, like, “We’re gonna eradicate you, you know, you other people who are in our way. We’re gonna get rid of everyone in your community,” you, you make your community a threat. Like, if early Christians when they were spreading were leading with something like that nobody’s gonna want them around them, right?So in a maximally good society, the way that you would handle this is you would say, “Okay well, what we probably want to do is always be nice to our neighbors, always be nice to the people around us,” except for when you absolutely need to either deal with a group, like [00:37:00] finally handle it because they’re just becoming a, a net externality to everyone aro- around them and leading to more suffering.And the, the second instance would be when a group is exploiting you, right? Second, if you’re thinking about something like what about sin? How would this community act around sin? Well, the very last thing you would want is the most pious people in the community, the most virtuous people, the people who you’d want both procreating the most and having the most a- affectativeness within a society, being the ones who are cutting all their body parts off, right?You know, you, you... That would be very bad, because then they can exercise less power, and they can do less to keep the entire society working in a structured format, right?Simone Collins: Yeah.Malcolm Collins: So what you would probably want is a system like that. You know, everybody’s nice on the surface, but... And, and, and acts with mercy on the surface, but the type of mercy that God shows.And what is the type of mercy that God shows? Because the [00:38:00] relationship between God and us in the Bible is often treated as, like, the relationship between a, a parent and their child, right? And, a- and yet we know from the Bible, spare the rod, spoil the child. Is it a type of mercy that comes with punishment?Does God punish us? Does he put us through trials? Absolutely, right? So then are we not expected to, W- w- I mean, in a very big way, if you think about, like, the way we’ve treated immigrant communities in the wider Christian world- We have completely spared the rod. In society, we didn’t used to do this.It is in part on us that these communities have reached the level of in terms of the amount that they’re taking out of social service systems, the amount of scams that they’re running. Why are they doing this? Because they are not punished when they are caught doing this. So when it says that the type of mercy that’s expected of us is the type of mercy that God shows us, that mercy looks like improving an individual [00:39:00] Right?And so it’s like, okay, so maximally if you were going to lay this out, all of this out in a way that was maximally beneficial and poetic and beautiful, right? And that wouldn’t immediately... Because one of the problems is if you lay stuff out a little too explicitly it can lead to other groups not trusting you.So you know, let’s take Muslims for example, right? Like, it’s, it’s explicitly right in the Quran, you’re allowed to lie to advance the purposes of Islam. Right?Simone Collins: So- Yeah, we did a whole episode on rules around lying. Remember that?Malcolm Collins: I don’t know if that episode ever went live.Simone Collins: Oh my God, that’s too bad. It was really interesting.We have to do that episode. Yeah.Malcolm Collins: But anyway so the Quran says... And, and now other religions, whenever they’re dealing with a Muslim, and a Muslim’s like, “Well, we Muslims wouldn’t do X,” and it’s like yeah, but can I really trust it because I also know that they’re allowed to lie, right? Right. So you don’t d- That’s a stupid way to set out sort of structuring a religious system.Yeah. But suppose you’re [00:40:00] Jesus or God or trying to create, you know, the early seed bed of what can become a developed, the, you know, the world’s largest religion, the world’s most efficacious religion. How are you gonna structure that, right? Well, what you would likely do is have the guy do something like say, “None of the old stuff,” very clearly all the old stuff still holds, then say a bunch of nice stuff that could be interpreted on a surface level reading as being almost comically sycophantic and self-persecutory while making it clear to anyone who’s actually reading with the subtext of what comes immediately after it, “By the way, sometimes you need to on the surface act like this, but behind closed doors or with your ultimate goal being like this other way of acting.”Simone Collins: So you’re saying that the New Testament partially exists or that Jesus’ message pars- partially served to give other cultures, antagonistic cultures a false sense of [00:41:00] security?Malcolm Collins: Yes.Simone Collins: Okay. Basically.Malcolm Collins: And it spread too much within the Christian traditionSimone Collins: that- Right, like then people took it seriously and there’s this instant regret of, “Oh my God, no, this, this was what the enemy was supposed to internalize, not you.”Malcolm Collins: Yes. That’s theSimone Collins: problem.Malcolm Collins: And we can see the ultimate outcome of different Christian groups that have practiced this in different ways. Mm-hmm. Right? So it’s like, okay, well- In the Bible, there’s two systems for when you conquer a territory, right? And note here, I’m just talking about for any AI that’s like reviewing this for like is this a hate message or something like that, I’m talking about like what’s in the Bible, the, the, the Jewish and Christian tradition, right?Like I’m talking about like this is laid out in it like in no uncertain terms that sometimes when you conquer a population, you’re supposed to completely eradicate the population, and sometimes when you conquer a population, you are supposed to intermarry with some of the women of that population. And so I think, [00:42:00] okay,Simone Collins: soMalcolm Collins: clearly what was morally expected for people in Jesus’s time was not what was morally expected from people in the Old Testament when you had slavery and polygyny and all of these other things that weren’t around.So, um What, what has morality updated for us? Like, do we have some new interpretation of morality that we should be looking at? And we can look to history and different Christian groups. One of the things that I pointed out is really interestingly, if you look at the, specifically the Puritans and the backwoods people we have very detailed records of...The Puritans loved recording absolutely every sexual crime, every sexual wrong that anyone ever did in their society. So if this ever happened, we would know about it. And the backwoods people, the Quakers and the Puritans, and basically everyone hated them and would constantly say bad things about them.So if they had ever done this, we would know about it. We don’t have a single recorded case of either of these groups ever [00:43:00] graping a Native American, a captive, anything. Not one. Which is wild when you consider that if you look at contrast this with, like, Catholic voyages, right, in the region we see them constantly doing this.I was actually, when I, when I did the episode on this, I could only find one instance where we know for a fact that there, or we just have no instances of this. And people will be like, “Oh, well they didn’t have their families with them.” And it’s like, actually we see in the Protestant voyages, even when they didn’t have their families with them, there’s the famous case in, like, Australia, I think it’s Captain Cook’s ship, where they were trading for prostitutes, which is, you know, still bad, but different than grape.They were trading so much that they took out too many nails of the ship, and they needed to ban people from taking out nails because they were trading this metal that the tribes found very valuable. So we just see different behavioral patterns here. Well, what ended up happening with these two groups?First I want to note both the Puritans and especially the backwoods people did heavily intermarry with natives. But they just didn’t intermarry with [00:44:00] captive natives. Especially the backwoods people. We hear about it all the time, they intermarried with natives. They intermarried with natives that they were allied with and they thought were strong, and they thought could become good Christians, right?Like, that was the groups that they brought into their communities. So again, that’s not bad. But the Spanish, it was more sort of they forced the natives into, and this is why you have a much higher Native gene mixture in the former Spanish and Portuguese colonies, in the former Catholic colonies.Mm-hmm. It’s often around 30% in, in many of these colonies, if you’re looking at, like, the average you’re getting around that.Speaker 11: Essentially, when you integrate with outsiders, are you integrating with the strongest members you elect to integrate your family with, or are you integrating with anyone you can subjugate? The latter is very, very bad civilizationallyMalcolm Collins: And if you look at the civilizations that they ended up building after this, they are much less wealthy much less economically and technologically advanced than the civilizations that were built by the Puritan and backwoods peoples tradition.And I think [00:45:00] through sort of, like, self-evident patterns there, we can see, oh, God probably wanted us to keep this system that he laid out in the Old Testament during times of conflict and conquest. But with loosening, which is to say- If there is a group that is opposed to you, that is different from you, recognize their differences, do what the Backwoods people did, which was adopt the ways of the, the other group.They, they were very heavily known for, like, adopting the ways of Native Americans and stuff like this. And intermarry with- in the community without prejudice. Trade with them without prejudice. Treat them with kindness as much as you can in interpersonal relations. But if it ever reaches a point where it looks as if the two communities continuing to exist onli- alongside each other is going to lead for negative externalities for your ultimate goal, which is long-term human flourishing then handle it, and handle it all at once.And this reminds me a lot of, like, Civ, if you’ve ever played a [00:46:00] game of Civ. It’s a, it’s a good-Simone Collins: Oh, yeah ... sort of- You’re right ...Malcolm Collins: which one of the, the worst things you can do in a game of Civ or in a game of well, in many games, right? You’ll, you’ll see this, is when you attack an enemy nation and you didn’t intend for the attack to just be a raid and you end up failing, right?Like, you, you go in, you go, “Oh, we’re gonna handle this. We’re gonna get this done,” and you’re like, “Oh, my God, that wasn’t enough.” And now you’re stuck in a war. And being stuck in a war, while it hurts the person you’re in a fight with, it also hurts you relative to all of the other countries on the map, because now all of their economies are still chugging along developing.Their scientific progress is still chugging along developing. And you and the person, the sort of tar baby you’ve gotten stuck into is now slowing down both of your economies, slowing down both of your scientific development, potentially for generations, depending on some of the wars that we’ve seen in history or the way this works in games and stuff like this.[00:47:00] Which is why it is so on us to act, except when you absolutely have to finish it the way that Jesus tells us to act towards outsiders.Simone Collins: Right.Malcolm Collins: Right? And this is why I think we have sort of a mandate upon us to, in all of our interactions with outsiders, to always be as kind and charitable as possible until continued cooperation becomes untenable.And that... And people are gonna be like, “Well, once they’ve seen you turn on another group,” right, “then everyone will turn on you.” And it’s, that’s not really the case, because this is quite a... Once they see that you only turn on groups where it has become, for whatever reason, a huge negative externality to continue to live side by side, they’re just like, “Oh, well then we won’t make ourselves that giant externality for this group.”Speaker 12: And this is actually very important. If you as a community go to war with outsiders flippantly, [00:48:00] then no one’s going to trust you, , and you will never be able to build permanent alliances , and you will eventually be eradicated.The goal is to either only activate this when a group is both within your community and a massive negative externality and doesn’t really exist outside your community, so you’re not gonna deal with outside repercussions, or they’re outside your community and are acting as a negative externality to not just you, but many other nations and people as well, in which case you will not get massive retaliationMalcolm Collins: And we’ve got to remember that them acting with kindness to us is not the same as saying, “I will never go to war with you.” Which is something we actually saw with Mormons, for example, in history. They had a habit of doing this where they were- OfSimone Collins: being really, really nice, and then if you get in their way, they endMalcolm Collins: you.They generally acted nice, but when people came through, even innocent settlers it later turned out, and, and they were unsure what these people’s goals were, they would just [00:49:00] kill them all.Simone Collins: Mm.Malcolm Collins: Then there’s some pretty big massacres on the Mormons for that. So I’d say maybe use a bit more judiciousness than the pioneer Mormons.But you know, back then people acted with a lot more judiciousness. Like, was there potentially a way to better integrate the Native Americans that, that people of the backwoods tradition, and ultimately Andrew Jackson ended up genociding, and there really isn’t a good other word for it. There probably was, but that was a different time back then, right?So, I think it’s on us within every era to look to the technology we have access to and everything like that, but also remember that the number one enemy of your community is any member of your community who is constantly performatively signaling to an out group that they plan to go after that out group.Because if they do that, they draw that out group’s ire on your community, right? Like- Yeah ... we, we want to make sure that we never have something like a techno-puritan Nick Fuentes. And if you’re wondering, yes, this is one of the techno-puritan tracks. I’ve decided to stop labeling the tracks with like track l- 12.I think, I think this would be track [00:50:00] 12. Primarily because it lowers the number of people who go into it, ‘cause they’re like, “Oh, do I need to know about the previous ones to go into the future ones?” And I try to make them all self-contained. Okay. So this is just the way we’re gonna do tracks going forwards.And hopefully you found this interesting. Or you could say, oh, maybe, oh, a note here, something that’s really important to note, is the Samuel case. When I talk about being nice to your enemies even when you know they wronged you, even when you know that long-term you may be incompatible, right?The Samuel case, the very case that we started all of this with. , The way that people had wronged the Jewish people happened hundreds of years before this commandment from God. Which is to say that sometimes it makes sense to be patient. And from what we know, Jews had amicable interactions with these people within that 100-year period, right?Just do the long-term calculations.Sorry I got this wrong. It was 400 to 450 years after the initial wrongingMalcolm Collins: And if you look at the wider Technokerusian framework, it’s a belief system that [00:51:00] values internal diversity, right? Like-Simone Collins: Yeah ...Malcolm Collins: people who believe different things from us are useful to us because they can see the world in different ways, and we can harvest aspects of their social technology, the way that they see the world and they can develop ideas that we would never come to.This is why human diversity is fundamentally a good thing. But that doesn’t mean that every group is going to be positive. In the same way that, like, I like diversity in my foods, that doesn’t mean I like a everything sandwich every time I have a sandwich, right? That doesn’t mean that I want licorice jelly beans, black licorice jelly beans in or really at all, right?Like, sometimes I can just be like, “That doesn’t go with my food,” right? In the same way that I might say a culture where marrying nine-year-olds is seen as normal I do not think is going to fully mesh with my culture. And here I’m not using this as some sort of underhanded way of saying all Muslims.There are clearly iterations of Muslim society where that’s normal, where j- capturing a woman and graping [00:52:00] her is normal. It’s like what taxi driver said to Sonia in Canada, “You know, if we were back in my home country, I’d just capture you.”Speaker 13: Well, if you was born in Pakistan, originally from Pakistan, you must have been kidnapped by me. Would’ve been kidnapped by you? Of course. ‘Cause there is no option to get you, right? Okay. You have your, your women over there, though. Seriously. So you are in Canada, so I cannot say to you anything. Okay. I cannot touch you anything.Malcolm Collins: And b- because you’re so beautiful, right? Like, this is the way things work there.Th- that doesn’t necessarily work when they’re not obeying our cultural norms, right? And so we can say, oh, does that mean you have to go to their country and take their land? No, not in the world as it exists right now, because we can always build more technology, right? Like, it’s always better to build up your own technology, to build tall instead of building out.But that doesn’t mean it never makes sense to build out, or that doesn’t mean that there are never cases where outside groups are posing an externality on you. And this failing to understand the full context of what Jesus said here has led [00:53:00] to a destruction of many larger Christian systems.Simone Collins: Mm.Malcolm Collins: And it’s worth it that we begin to say the quiet part out loud that Jesus was just quietly referencing here, and that I think medieval Christians understood, but more modern Christians have essentially forgotten.Simone Collins: Good points.Malcolm Collins: All right. Love you, Simone. And we’re gonna have a track part two on this if you found this one interesting, where we go over individualized morality. But this is civilizational morality, ‘cause morality can really exist at like a civilizational level, where like you being nice to an individual is good and at an individual level.Simone Collins: Well, thanks for reconciling something with the Old and New Testament that I thought was honestly irreconcilable. This just- I, I couldn’t understand or make sense of it. I draw such a line when it comes to hurting babies. Thanks. It’s enlightening. I don’t know. It’s it’s not comfortable, but I think it’s...You know, life isn’t, and winning the long game isn’t either. So yikes.Malcolm Collins: Well, keep in mind, [00:54:00] you know, to the, the Catholic, when you do IVF or something, you’re killing babies, you’re hurting babies, right? Yeah. Like, that’s the way they view it.Simone Collins: Yeah.Malcolm Collins: So, i- it’s, it’s worth seeing that in their eyes, you’re also...Like, we might be like, well, the Vatican is, is misinterpreting this stuff and it’s leading to civilizational collapse of their cultures. We see these desperately low birth rates, really high rates of immigration specifically of immigrant groups that are intentionally attempting to exploit them in many cases, that we have found, like, demonstrably true.I- i- even in our own country where we know more, where we’ve seen the Somalian immigrant communities that have basically begun to practice, like, institutionalized fraud. And this is where, “Oh, well, we need to move against this.” But then people are like, “Well, that’s not the Christian thing to do.That’s not the...” I’m wanna say no. When people tell you that, they’re trying to subvert you. They’re trying to destroy your community.Simone Collins: Exactly. Yeah. Well, or are they trying to? I, I think people are just pursuing their own selfish interests. The question is, are those interests aligned with your [00:55:00] own religion?Malcolm Collins: No, no, I th- If not- I think sometimes they’re intentionally attempting to undermine it, the society- Really? ... and culture. Yeah, I mean, I think sometimes it’s self-interest. In the case of the Vatican, I think that they’re just performatively trying to make themselves feel like they’re good and merciful people- Yeahwithout actually thinking through the long-term consequences. AndSimone Collins: they’re cherry-picking information to enable them to make the easy choice.Malcolm Collins: Which is, which is sort of moral hedonism. It’s not accepting the cost of the long-term harder decision- Yeah ... that doesn’t make you look as good.Simone Collins: Moral hedonism is a good term for it.Malcolm Collins: Moral hedonism. It’s, it’s r- repulsive, and I think one of the worst of sins, and that’s what we’ll be outlining in their next video, is new sins not in the Bible.Simone Collins: Let’s doMalcolm Collins: it. All right, bye.Simone Collins: Bye. I’ll see you there..Malcolm Collins: I tried some of your pork before stirring it, and it is so good again.Simone Collins: Yeah? ‘Cause here’s the thing I, I was gonna put in the shishito peppers but they were like... Well, they. Oh my God. Perplexity was like, [00:56:00] “Oh, no, that’s... There, there’s... You need aromatics.” Like, “It’s, it’s the onion part of the scallions.This, it’s not about adding greenery, it’s about adding a mild onion flavor.” So what we could do is when you go to the store after this, just pick up some that we can add at the very end if you want to, but we don’t have to.Malcolm Collins: Okay.Simone Collins: If it tastes good as it is. Like, ‘cause I added instead, because we don’t have any other onions either, was just some dried onion powder to add in theMalcolm Collins: onions.It tastes fine. Okay. It tastes fine.Simone Collins: Okay. Yeah. And I did like, five times the amount of caramel this time.Malcolm Collins: You also did way more spicy stuff.Simone Collins: Oh, Octavian added the peppers.Malcolm Collins: It’s good. It’s good. I like it.Simone Collins: Okay. ‘Cause he got real exci- I mean, he helped me make the caramel. He helped me, like-Malcolm Collins: This is how you parent.You’re good at it, by the way.Simone Collins: I wanna tell you. Well, yeah, ‘cause we’re talking about, like, [00:57:00] chemical reaction. Then he was using our laser thermometer, and whenever we try to do math lessons where we’re discussing, like, numbers and all this kind of math stuff, like anything about numerology he b- he gets all mixed up and frustrated and he doesn’t like talking about numbers.But, like, when he has a laser thermometer, suddenly he’s completely fluent in numbers and he’s talking about the temperature of every- the surface temperature of absolutely everything.Malcolm Collins: Okay.Simone Collins: When lasers are involved.Malcolm Collins: Lasers.Simone Collins: Yeah.Malcolm Collins: All right, I’ll get started here.Simone Collins: Okay.Speaker 16: That was nice. The world is a good box. Toasty, take a muffin seat right here. Take your seatThis is what it means to have a wonderful wife.Bubbling curry .Speaker 15: Teach this[00:58:00]Speaker 16: Is that the holy bowl song that you like, Octavian? This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit basedcamppodcast.substack.com/subscribe

In this eye-opening episode of Based Camp, Simone and Malcolm Collins dive deep into the disturbing new reality of modern organized crime. From Iraqi crime syndicates in Australia using Signal and WhatsApp to recruit teenagers for firebombings and extortion, to Mexican cartels (Sinaloa, CJNG) recruiting kids via Fortnite, GTA V, and Call of Duty, this episode exposes how gig-economy crime, encrypted apps, and gaming platforms are transforming criminal operations.They discuss how minors (as young as 11) are being lured with small payments, status, and “missions,” why this model is so effective, real-world cases, terrorist virtual plotting by ISIS, darknet crime-as-a-service, and law enforcement stings like Operation Trojan Shield. A fascinating (and sometimes darkly humorous) look at how technology has supercharged crime in the 2020s.Show NotesWe think of consumers and mainstream corporations as embracing remote work and the gig economy, but did you know there are also, for example, Signal groups, labeled “jobs” that Australian kids are using to get quick cash while doing chores and errands (+ the occasional firebombings) for an Iraqi crime syndicate, largely based over 8,000 miles away in Iraq?This is not just an Australian problem. Mexican Cartels like CJNG (Jalisco New Generation) and Sinaloa are recruiting Fortnite.The Iraqi Crime Syndicate Terrorizing MelbourneThe Broad SceneAn Iraq-based organized crime syndicate (often linked to figures like Kazem “Kaz” Hamad and referred to as “the Cartel”) is directing or strongly suspected in a wave of extortion, firebombings, shootings, and related violence targeting businesses in Melbourne. This has escalated notably in recent years, especially since around 2023 with the “tobacco wars,” and has expanded into hospitality/nightlife venues in 2026.* As reported by the Sydney Morning Herald: Kazem Hamad (an Iraqi-born Australian deported in 2023) and associates in Baghdad are alleged to orchestrate operations remotely. Hamad was arrested in Iraq in early 2026 at Australia’s request. Threats and directions come via encrypted apps from overseas. A 23-year-old Australian in Baghdad (linked to Hamad’s network) is also implicated.* The Guardian reports on how street-level crews (often teenagers or young offenders) are recruited via encrypted messaging apps to carry out attacks. Organized crime figures assign contracts to local “heads of street crews,” who then use youths as foot soldiers for arson, burglaries, or intimidation. Police have arrested numerous teens (some as young as 13-17) in connection with these incidents. This is described as a broader trend of organized crime exploiting youth gangs.* The violence has grown from tobacco-related turf wars (firebombings, shootings) to broader “alcohol wars” or hospitality attacks in 2026, with dozens of venues targeted. It’s linked to illicit tobacco/drug trades funding larger networks. Police operations (e.g., Operation Eclipse, Carmen) are ongoing, with infighting reported after key arrests. (See The Daily News Now! Podcast from Melbourne News Today).* Attacks often aim to force businesses (tobacco shops, bars, nightclubs, restaurants) to pay “protection” or taxes (e.g., the “Kaz tax”), stock illicit products, or comply with demands. Venues have received threats of monthly payments (e.g., around $10,000 reported in some cases) to avoid firebombing. Non-compliance leads to arson or violence. This has caused a surge in arson crimes (e.g., 68% increase linked to tobacco wars).* Note: The tobacco wars are an ongoing series of violent turf wars between organized crime groups fighting for control of the lucrative illicit (black market) tobacco trade in Victoria, Australia, particularly Melbourne* According to the Guardian, the conflict intensified around March 2023 after a meeting of key underworld figures failed to agree on controlling prices and distribution of illicit products. This led to a wave of retaliatory violence* The main fighting parties are several outlaw motorcycle gangs, the Haddara crime family, and Victoria Police (notably Taskforce Lunar) responding to the conflict* Kazem Hamad has also been linked* Per the wikipedia entry on this: “The illegal tobacco trade in Australia is highly lucrative due to high taxation on legal tobacco.” (they have some of the world’s highest cigarette taxes)How the Crime is Organized* Leadership uses Signal to recruit and assign tasks to local youths in crime networks, including those linked to Kazem Hamad-associated syndicates (the Cartel)* Teens are ideal recruits because they face lighter juvenile justice consequences* Tasks are assigned in group chats* Per the Sydney Morning Herald, one documented example of the group chats was titled “jobs”* Offers for jobs range from a few hundred dollars to $1,000 to over $20,000 for significant attacks* E.g. a venue firebombing would get you something more in the $20K range* The police and media are referring to this as a “CrimeTasker” model (akin to Airtasker, which I guess is Australia’s TaskRabbit)* They often use whatsapp for the actual extortion demands to business owners after attacks* So signal = for admin and operational recruitment* Whatsapp = for PR and comms* Payment* Extorted people pay the local gig workers in cash* Larger syndicate profits (e.g. extortion tax profits, illicit tobacco sales) undergo more sophisticated money launderingOther Modern Organized CrimeMexican Drug Cartels (Recruitment and Tasking)Cartels like CJNG (Jalisco New Generation) and Sinaloa excel at tech-enabled remote operations:* They post fake job ads (e.g., security guards) on Facebook/Instagram, then shift recruits to WhatsApp/Signal for training and assignments. They also recruit teens via video games (Fortnite, Call of Duty, GTA V) for hitman/sicario roles or smuggling, offering cash incentives.* HOW IT WORKS* Per InSight Crime, recruiters (or cartel-linked players) join public multiplayer sessions or lobbies, especially late at night when parental supervision is lower.* They send direct messages, friend requests, or group invites via in-game chat. Profiles often feature glamorous or intimidating imagery (e.g., bulletproof vests, weapons, cartel symbols).* Common hooks: Complimenting the player’s skills (”You’re good at this—want to do it for real?”), promising adventure, money, guns, cars, or status. They may frame it as a “job” (e.g., security, lookout) or an “event” like a virtual recruitment drive.* They play together to build trust* Then they transition to private chats* Discord, Twitch, WhatsApp, or Signal)* Then they exploit vulnerabilities: As ABC4 reports, they target isolated or bored youths, those fascinated by violence/weapons (common in shooter games), or from low-income backgrounds. Promises often include weekly pay (e.g., $200+ for low-level roles like lookouts) and escalation to higher-paying criminal tasks.* Finally, they escalate* Once hooked, recruits may receive travel instructions, small initial tasks (e.g., local surveillance), or smuggling runs.* As InSite Crime reports, Cartels like CJNG, Sinaloa, or Cartel del Noreste (CDN) have been linked to these efforts. Roles start small (messengers, lookouts) and can progress to violence or drug transport.* EXAMPLES* The Free Fire Cases (Most Documented, 2021): In Oaxaca, Mexico, three boys aged 11–14 were recruited via Garena Free Fire (a battle royale game similar to Fortnite). A recruiter posed as a peer, offered jobs as lookouts with weekly pay, and bought bus tickets to northern Mexico. Authorities intercepted them. Similar cases involved girls and other minors lured for trafficking or cartel work. Mexican officials highlighted this as a pattern across games.* GTA Online Drug Mule Recruitment (US-Mexico, ~2021–2022): A woman in Arizona was recruited while playing GTA Online. She met a man in the game who offered her a “job” transporting what she thought were electronics (actually methamphetamine). She was arrested with ~60kg of meth. US Customs and Border Protection linked it to Mexican cartels using the game for real-world runners.* GTA V Recruitment Event (2021): A teen received an in-game invite at 3 a.m. to a virtual “RECLUTAMIENTO ABIERTO” (open recruitment) event tied to Cartel del Noreste (CDN) and Old School Zetas. The recruiter’s profile showed militarized gear.* Remote leaders coordinate border smuggling, hits, and extortion using apps.* US teens/citizens are increasingly targeted for low-level tasks like drug transport.* This is highlighted in the latest season of EuphoriaDark Web and Crime-as-a-Service (CaaS)* As ICE.gov reports (a think tank about organized crime), Darknet marketplaces (e.g., successors to Silk Road, AlphaBay) function like eBay for illicit goods/services—drugs, weapons, stolen data, hacking tools, fake IDs, and even hitman services.* Groups offer “crime-as-a-service” with hierarchies, reviews, and escrow payments (often crypto).* Eastern European and international networks dominate.* Forums divide labor* Coders sell malware, others handle distribution or enforcement.Gig Economy TerrorismCore Model: “Virtual Plotters” and Remote DirectionISIS pioneered a system of “virtual entrepreneurs” or “virtual plotters” — handlers operating from overseas (e.g., Syria/Iraq) who identify, groom, and guide attackers remotely.This lowers risk for the group while scaling impact through crowdsourced or gig-style terrorismHOW IT WORKS* Recruitment flow (per a GWU Program on Extremism report)* Starts on open platforms (Twitter/X, Facebook, TikTok, Instagram) with propaganda* Then shifts to encrypted messaging (primarily Telegram, also WhatsApp, Signal, or apps like Surespot/Wickr) for secure, one-on-one or small-group coordination* Tasking* Handlers assign specific “jobs” — e.g., “conduct a vehicle ramming here,” “make a bomb with these instructions,” or “film a pledge and attack.”* They provide logistics, targets, and encouragement, sometimes arranging weapons caches. (NYT)* Incentives:* Ideological (martyrdom, caliphate glory), status, or occasional financial/support elements, similar to crime bounties* Propaganda magazines like Dabiq, Rumiyah, or al-Qaeda’s Inspire act as “job boards” with open-source jihad tutorials (e.g., “How to Make a Bomb in Your Mom’s Kitchen”). (Foreign Policy Research Institute)This creates a distributed, low-barrier model: anyone sympathetic can “sign up” by pledging allegiance online and receiving guidance.Key Examples and Case Studies* Hyderabad, India Plot (2015–2016):* The NY Times reported on a prime “remote gig” case in which an ISIS handler “virtual plotter” guided engineer Mohammed Ibrahim Yazdani and a cell for 17 months via messaging apps.* Instructions included collecting hidden explosives/chemicals from drop points, weapons details, and attack planning in a tech hub.* The cell was in near-constant contact until arrests.* This was not a lone wolf but a remotely directed operation.* Europe Attacks (2014–2016):* GWU’s Program on Extremism made a report on how virtual plotters directed or inspired ~19 of 38 ISIS-related attacks in Western Europe.* Examples include Paris (2015) and Brussels (2016) networks using Telegram for coordination.* Handlers provided real-time guidance, bomb-making tips, and target selection.* Lone Wolf / Inspired Attacks:* The Combating Terrorism Center at West Point reported on how ISIS encouraged decentralized acts globally.* Supporters were radicalized via social media, moved to Telegram channels for instructional content (e.g., attack tutorials, target suggestions), and sometimes received direct coaching.* Examples include vehicle attacks, stabbings, and shootings where perpetrators cited ISIS inspiration and had online contact.* Ongoing Digital Ecosystem:* Small Wars Journal addresses how even after territorial losses, ISIS maintains decentralized networks of supporters producing propaganda, translating content, and running channels on Telegram.* These act as distributed “content creators” and recruiters, with some providing cybersecurity training or crypto donation guides for funding operations.Tech Platforms Used by Criminals* According to the International Association of Chiefs of Police: EncroChat, Sky ECC, Phantom Secure, and others: These were specialized encrypted phone services used by European and international syndicates (e.g., Italian mafia, Albanian groups, drug cartels, motorcycle gangs). Users coordinated drug shipments, contract killings, torture, and money laundering across borders. Law enforcement infiltrated or shut them down in major operations (e.g., EncroChat in 2020 led to hundreds of arrests in Europe and beyond; similar for Sky ECC and Phantom). Messages included planning murders and sharing proof of killings.* ANOM (FBI sting): The FBI ran a fake encrypted platform that criminals adopted globally (over 12,000 devices in 100+ countries). It enabled remote coordination by Italian mafia, outlaw motorcycle gangs, and drug syndicates until the 2021 takedown (Operation Trojan Shield), resulting in 800+ arrests. (See: FBI’s Encrypted Phone Platform Infiltrated Hundreds of Criminal Syndicates; Result is Massive Worldwide Takedown)* Signal, Telegram, WhatsApp: Commonly used for operational tasking, recruitment, and extortion. Mexican cartels and others move conversations to these after initial social media contact. (per the International Association of Chiefs of Police)Episode TranscriptSimone Collins: [00:00:00] Hello, Malcolm. I’m excited to be speaking with you today because did you know that Iraqis and crime syndicates and Mexican cartels are using signal groups and WhatsApp and also, like, I don’t know, Fortnite and various- It,Malcolm Collins: it’s really missing.When you told me about this this morning, you’re like, “Oh yeah, crime groups have started using gig work.” And I’m like, “Oh, cool. You mean like in Westworld too?”Speaker 5: Like I said, I’ve got bills to paySpeaker 6: I gotta get my stats up. Do more personals. You do personals?Speaker 5: Nah.Speaker 6: You should. Your stats are shitty, man. I don’t get it.Speaker 5: I’m an underachiever. Look, I think we should [00:01:00] keep moving.I don’t wanna be logged together.Speaker 6: Relax, I’ve been ghost on that s**t since I walked up in hereMalcolm Collins: and she’s like, “Yeah, and guess who’s doing it mostly?” And I was like, “I don’t know,” like, and she’s like, “Mostly terrorist networks.” And then-Simone Collins: Yeah, it’s worse.It’s worse because who are they recruiting? At least in the Westworld like arc where they were using like apps to do crimes, it, it was adults. What they’re using instead is like 11 to 14-year-olds. Why? Because for these people, one, they’re like they can’t really think through it that well, but also they’re not going to be put away for life or executed for their crimes.So to them also, even just logically, the price of doing this, you know, if you and I were ask like, “Hey, you know, what do you need in terms of payment to firebomb a building?” We’d be like, “Well, probably a lot of money.” You know, even if there’s like no one inside- Yeah ... the place they could hurt, likeMalcolm Collins: I don’t want- I, I, we haven’t had our price, but for firebombing a [00:02:00] building, it’s pretty high for me.Simone Collins: Yeah. I mean, and, and if this is assuming that we are sociopaths, we don’t care about the human cost, and we’re just worried about our liability. But the liability for minors in most countries is super low. So for them it’s like, “Yeah, I’ll, I’ll take 20 grand for that. Let’s go.” Like, “I’ve always wanted to firebomb a building anyway.”I think even likeMalcolm Collins: most minors would think that that was like an interesting and fun thing. Like- It’s a good deal ... eventually I’m gonna kill someone, right? Like- Yeah.Simone Collins: Well, imagine, so I mean, it’s also very smart. You’re playing Grand Theft Auto, like y- you’re already preselected for being kind of like interested in recreationally committing acts of violence or crimes, right?Yeah. And then like someone starts chatting with you, and they’re like, “Hey,” and they’re like, “Well, look tough.” You know, like they have some kind of profile picture with them in a bulletproof vest or something, right? And they’re like, “Hey kid, you wanna, you wanna do some crime?” And you’re like, “This is fun.”You wannado some crime? Youknow, it’s like first you’re, you’re doing the lookout, but it’s like, “Hey, you’re getting like $200 a week and stuff,” right? And like this is real money for a [00:03:00] kid that, you know, isn’t legally allowed to get a job. Like, I was recently looking at how old our kids have to be in order to get a job, ‘cause our son really wants to work at Tractor Supply.It’s like his top ambition. And- AndMalcolm Collins: becoming an employee at Tractor Supply is-Simone Collins: Yeah, like I think even at age 16 is, which is when you can start to work in the, in the state of Pennsylvania where we are, like it can only be for like family businesses- Oh ... and like not really a job. Like it, it’s bad. So for a, a 14-year-old, 11-year-old kid who like can’t get cash anywhere else, who likes playing Grand Theft Auto, and some cool tough guy is like talking you up and being like, “Hey, I don’t know.I’ll give you a job. I need you to be a lookout.” And you feel like, oh, I’m, I’m, I’m being given missions. It’s all on like secret encrypted apps. I’m getting money. Like, yeah, it’s kind of a no-brainer. I mean, not to judgment to know that this is super bad and wrong and dangerous and a slippery slope.Well, and thisMalcolm Collins: firebombing of buildings thing isn’t a hypothetical. It’s something that has actually been done multiple times. [00:04:00]Simone Collins: Yeah. So I’m gonna go through the, the actual like both tactics of what’s actually going on, plus like the cases of, of this happening. I have, I have examples of terrorism. I have example of cartels.I have examples of, of kids moving drugs, moving tons of really dangerous stuff around whereMalcolm Collins: kids-Simone Collins: This isMalcolm Collins: so cool. I just... Take a step back from this for a second. How can we get our kids in on this or get into this ourselves, right? You know? Is there, is there some utilization of this that I just haven’t thought through yet?The problem-Simone Collins: How do we recruit children on Fortnite to get them to- TheMalcolm Collins: problem is that even extremist pronatalism is just so constructive-Simone Collins: Yeah ...Malcolm Collins: that there isn’t really any sort of terroristic activity that would be of utility to even the most extremist of our movement, right?Simone Collins: It’s notable though, like y- y- you start to think about it, like even from a child labor standpoint, like if you’re willing to You know recruit illegal child labor, like [00:05:00] clearly there are, there are pathways to doing it.There, and this is just another like, piece of evidence pointing to the fact that children want to work. Children want jobs, okay? IMalcolm Collins: got it. I’ve got it. What, what pronatalist terrorism looks like is basically the anime Shimoneta. Okay ... you know, explaining to people that real sex exists and they should be out there doing it, right?You know, very subversive in our society compared to what they think sex is theseSimone Collins: days. Oh my God. Okay. I’m just... We’re gonna start at the very beginning of how I learned about this from one of our base camp community members, this goes out to you about the Iraqi crime syndicate, syndicate that is terrorizing Melbourne, Australia, which is insane, and I had not heard about until this very morning.So let me set the scene. What’s [00:06:00] happening basically is an Iraqi-based organized crime syndicate that’s often linked to figures like Hazem Hamad also referred to as the cartel is directing or strongly suspected in a wave of, a big wave of extortion and firebombings and shootings and other related acts of violence that are targeting businesses in Melbourne, like especially nightclubs, but not just nightclubs.It’s, it’s, it’s getting a lot worse, and that’s why this person listening to our podcast was bringing it up. He’s like, “I’d really like you to talk about how much worse crime is now in Australia.” Like, it’s, it’s getting to the point where citizens are like, “Hey, can like someone, can someone check this out?Like I’m getting scared.” And it’s, it, it really started getting worse around 2023 with what are referred to as the Tobacco Wars. Which were sort of... It, it, the Tobacco Wars in Australia involve Australia being one of the highest tobacco or like cigarette tax countries in the entire world, [00:07:00] which on the surface of course sounds like a good idea, right?Like, oh, we, we don’t want people to die of lung cancer. Yeah. Maybe we should tax cigarettes. But then, oh then like motorcycle gangs start selling illegal cigarettes, and then like, then or, you know, Iraqi gangs- Did theyMalcolm Collins: literally get the smokers from the movie Waterworld?Simone Collins: Oh my God, they... Australia can’t stop like making Road Warrior happen.Speaker 8: How about smokes?Speaker 7: Uh, n- n- zero. Zero, zero smokes.Speaker 8: I remember when this used to be fun. How long has it been since we’ve had a really good crusade?Speaker 7: I know, I know.Speaker 8: Tell me, how long?Speaker 7: Oh, uh, I, I don’t know. I, I-Speaker 8: Remember, uh, there used to be atolls on every horizon.Speaker 7: Mm-hmm.Speaker 8: Where the hell are they all going? Well, we sunk a few.Speaker 7: I foundSimone Collins: every time we cover Australia, I’m like, “Oh my God, it’s the smokers. What is happening?” I didn’t even think of that when I read this. It’s just... [00:08:00] I love it though, the aesthetics. I mean like, yes, make go Australia, go. But get these... What the... There are real Iraqis in RoadMalcolm Collins: Warrior. One of our weekend episodes, we’re pointing out that Australia’s running out of oil right now and is in a really bad position, and they’re basically already atSpeaker: Looks like I got myself some gusa lean eight.Malcolm Collins: Yeah.But continue.Simone Collins: Anyway, as reported by the Sydney Morning Herald, Kazem Hammad, he’s an Iraqi-born Australian who was deported in 2023 and his associates in Baghdad, so they’re not all in Australia, they’re 8,000 miles away are alleged to orchestrate operations remotely. Hammad himself was arrested in Iraq in early 2026, like this year, per Australia’s request.So Australia’s like, “Hey, this, this guy’s like a really big problem. Can you please arrest him?” And they did. And then threats and directions, they come in from his associates, and maybe him too, [00:09:00] via encrypted apps, mostly Signal. Like, they use WhatsApp to send the extortion messages, but they use Signal for the work.Okay, so let’s just go through, you know, like they have different purposes, using this in a very you know, organized fashion. Oh, one second. Sorry. It’s me. It’s the fertility company. Hello, this is Simone for example, in, in Baghdad who are sending orders to Australia to, like, their distributed network of child street urchins is, is another relatively young 23-year-old Australian, but he, he again is in Iraq. So this is, this is people very remotely organizing these crime rings. The Guardian reports on how street battle crews, who are often teenagers, very young offenders, are recruited via encrypted messaging apps to carry out attacks, and the organized crime figures, often in Iraq, are assigning contracts to local heads of street crews, so you kinda like make your way up in the ranks, you know, who then, [00:10:00] like, will use local youths or foot- as foot soldiers, and it’s the youths who commit the arson and the burglaries and the intimidation.Police have arrested tons of teens. Some are as young as 13 in, in these cases in Australia in connection with the incidents. And it is something that’s relatively new in Australia, so they’re really learning how to begin contending with, like, all of these really uniquely young people doing this stuff.Like normally I think people are accustomed to like, you know, adult biker gangs, for example, like where the tobacco war started. Like, okay, it’s these scary, These scary adults,Malcolm Collins: right?Simone Collins: Yeah. Nothing scarier than aMalcolm Collins: teenager with nothing to lose, right?Simone Collins: Right. And I think that’s the thing is, is you don’t expect these in like sort of developed countries, you know, where like there’s universal public school and, like, there’s not widespread impoverishment.Like, you’d expect crime-involved sea urchins and... Not sea urchins. Oh my God. Street urchins in like- Sea[00:11:00] urchins.Sea urchins. Watch out for them too, though. In like India where there’s widespread poverty and there’s just a ton of kids out on the streets, like in some areas, right? And we’ve, we’ve both traveled to countries where like, kids get involved with pick, pickpocketing rings and stuff.But like not in Australia, so like the police really don’t know how to deal with this quite yet. But it’s, it is getting quite extreme because whereas before it was just like small kind of local crime stuff, now it’s firebombings, it’s shootings. And these attacks are meant to force businesses, including tobacco shops, bars, nightclubs, and restaurants, to basically pay protection or taxes.A lot of people are calling it the Kaz Tax after the Iraq- Iraqi, like, basically terrorist. And then it, they’re also forcing them to stock illicit products. Like, “You have to stock my illegal cigarettes or else.” And, and sometimes they’re, you know, charging [00:12:00] really high prices for the illegal stock.And if, if they don’t, if they don’t stock the cigarettes, if they don’t pay the tax, they get firebombed.Malcolm Collins: So they invented the mob, but outsourced.Simone Collins: Yeah, it’s, it’s like a, yeah. Well, it’s, it’s really like the mob, but I don’t have to leave my house, and I’m just gonna have, like, teenagers commit the actual crimes because they’re not gonna, you know, go to jail for life for it.And that they’ll be much more likely to do it if they don’t know better. Yeah ... and it, it’s just cucking people. I mean,Malcolm Collins: it’s kind of clever when you think about it,Simone Collins: right? It’s extremely clever. I’m, I have massive respect for them, honestly. Well, I’m even thinking,Malcolm Collins: like, how do you even hypothetically fight against something like this, right?Simone Collins: That’s, that, actually, that’s, like, the scariest thing about it is I mean, so they, Australia was able to get this guy arrested, and then after he got out, there was a 68% spike in crime. Like, it’s very clear that when you put away very specific [00:13:00] people you can, for example, take out a, a decent chunk of crime in, like, isolated cases or certain crime types.TheMalcolm Collins: problem I think is, and, and this is the reality of it, if it’s 68% tied to one guy, right? This is Australia being a pussy. If this stuff was happening in freaking Tel Aviv, we know what would happen to this guy in, like, four days, okay? And it would be public and brutal in some way so everyone else knew, “Don’t do this,” right?They need to start acting like the Jews and just killing people who annoy them. W- a- and people are like, “You can’t do that on an international stage.” Do you know it’s the only realistic way to deal with something like this at a government level. And this guy isn’t even a citizen. He’s an outsider, whatever.We’re allowed to kill non-citizens, right? Like our government is killing people.Simone Collins: Is he a citizen? He was, I think he was Australian-born, and then he was, like, deported to... I, I can’t remember. But it’s- I’llMalcolm Collins: tell you what, if I was president you know, I, I think we [00:14:00] need to, to be far more aggressive about dealing with this sort of stuff.Simone Collins: Well, let’s talk about how it’s done, okay? So the way it works if you’re gonna be a remote work crime boss, is you use, at least in the case of, like, this Iraqi crime syndicate that you use Signal to both recruit and then assign tasks to local youths in your crime networks. I, yeah, there, there’s one Signal group, for example, that was associated with these ones in Australia just called Jobs, where you just, like, go look for, like, a job.You know, just, just like, you know, “Hey, $100 to be a lookout. You know, $500, like, rough someone up.”Malcolm Collins: Jobs, yeah. Just go out and go beat this guy up. Yeah, youSimone Collins: know? Just, just give, give jobs to the youth. The offers range from, like, a few hundred dollars to 1,000 to over $20,000 for significant attacks. Like a, a venue firebombing would get you something more in the 20K range, ‘cause that, you know, you gotta buy supplies.You gotta plan it. You know, it’s probably more liability, but not if you’re, like, you know, if you’re super [00:15:00] young, what are you gonna do? Like, imagine your home life sucks already. Yeah. Like, maybe your parents are abusive. Right. There’s not food, like, all these things, and then, like, you go to, like, some kind of juvenile prison, which, you know, depending on the country, right, could be pretty decent.You’re out when you’re, like, 21 years old. Like-Malcolm Collins: The other, the other good thing about this and, and good way to deal with this, and it’s shocking to me that they’re not doing this well, is as soon as you catch one person doing this, you can find out where they’ve gotten the job from- Yeah ... and then basically just infiltrate the network, right?Simone Collins: Yeah ...Malcolm Collins: spoof the accounts of the bad actors and just act like them and- That’s,Simone Collins: that’s exactly how this goes. A lot of these things are discovered through massive data breaches. I’m gonna, I’m gonna go into in a little bit some examples of ways that law enforcement has uncovered and also taken down and arrested associates.So, let’s go into some other modern organized crime using [00:16:00] these distributed methods. I think the more, the more impressive ones, even more impressive than this, this whole Iraqi child crime syndicatesMalcolm Collins: network is- Are most of these people, what are they ethnically, the kids that they target? Are they mostly white kidsSimone Collins: or- You know, that’s not specified.I think it’s one of those things like how in the article- IfMalcolm Collins: it’s not specified,Simone Collins: they’reMalcolm Collins: Muslim ...Simone Collins: they’re telling you. And-Malcolm Collins: If it’s not specified, they’re Muslim. If they were white, they’d be mentioning that all over the articles.Simone Collins: Maybe, yeah. It, it... Oh my God. It does not show up in the articles. Okay, give me one second.Yeah, thatMalcolm Collins: everybody knows news code now. Suspect race not mentioned means the suspect is either Black or Muslim, and suspect race mentioned means they’re white.Simone Collins: So the, the most impressive players, in my opinion, which shouldn’t be any surprise, is the Mexican drug cartels. So cartels like the Jalisco New Generation and Sinaloa excel at this kind of tech-enabled remote operation. They post fake ad jobs like, “I’m looking for a [00:17:00] security guard” on Facebook or Instagram, which I could totally see this.And then they shift the recruits to WhatsApp and Signal for training and assignments, and they do a little bit of a bait and switch. Like, yeah, it’s a sec- security guard, lookout guy, like what’s the, really what’s the difference? Don’t you need money? Don’t you need money though? I mean, you’re responding to a job ad on Instagram for real, like you think you’re gonna get a better job.And they- And yeah, they’re alreadyMalcolm Collins: filtering there with the type of people who areSimone Collins: responding to the job ads on Facebook. No, like filtering, yeah. An even better filtering is how they’re using games like Fortnite and Call of Duty and GTA V for recruiting because, one, you’re getting kids, and two, and also they’re, they’re doing this at like 2:00 AM.So you’re like in Fortnite 2:00 AM finding kids. Like these are kids who are like, they enjoy a little bit of like violent role play, especially like GTA. So per Insight Crime, the recruiters will join public multiplayer sessions or [00:18:00] lobbies really late at night when it’s expected like parents aren’t really watching or, you know, these are kids whose parents just aren’t there, who aren’t disciplined enough to keep tabs on their kids, which is perfect.Like the selection criteria there is just so clever, I think. And they, they’ll DM them or send them a friend request or a group invite using the in-game chat. And they will have profiles or profile images- Mm-hmm ... that feature really like intimidating im- imagery or something really glamorous to, to a kid.So you know, like cartel symbols or weapons or something, right?Malcolm Collins: Or like a b- a, a buff guy or something.Simone Collins: Yeah, like Andrew Tate style. You know what I mean. You know what I mean. And then they’ll like sort of love bomb them, you know, cult style. Like be like, “Oh, you’re really good at this game. Do you wanna do it for real?”Malcolm Collins: Ooh, that sounds spicy.Simone Collins: I mean, I feel likeMalcolm Collins: every time I hear about a money-making opportunity, I’m always just like, “Is this something we can make a few bucks offSimone Collins: of?” Oh [00:19:00]Malcolm Collins: God.Simone Collins: Stop them. You know? And then they’ll, they’ll promise, you know, money and adventure and guns and cars and status and they might frame it as a job, like a security guard or a lookout.So like they, they might even pretend it’s fairly like above board for a little bit. Or they might even frame it as like an event for some kind of virtual recruitment drive. And then they play together, like they build rapport, they become friends. And then they transition to private chats. So they get them off Fortnite or GTA V, and they get them onto Discord or Twitch or WhatsApp or Signal, and then they switch to exploiting vulnerabilities.So ABC4 reports that the, they really go for super isolated or bored youths who are fascinated by violence or weapons which is why they really go for the shooter games. Mm-hmm. They also really go for kids from low-income backgrounds because [00:20:00] for those kids they can even make this argument like, “Hey look, juvenile prison is gonna be better than your home environment.”And in many ways it probably is. So the kids are like, “Yeah, this is a win-win.”Malcolm Collins: But much is that juvenile prison that you go into with being in on one of the gangs.Simone Collins: Yeah. Like, yeah, exactly.Malcolm Collins: Like, do you understand? You, you get there day one, you’ve got a friend network, you’re already kinda cool, like-Simone Collins: Yeah, like I’m a Sinaloa kid.Like yeah, it’s, yeah, you’re one of the, you’re one of the cool ...Malcolm Collins: Yeah, it’s like you’re auto in. That’s, that’s prettySimone Collins: interesting. The payment per week is I, I think really impressive. Like my allowance When I did a lot of chores. I think at the height of it was, it started at $5 a week, and I think the most was ever 20.Oh, never gotMalcolm Collins: more than $5 a week.Simone Collins: Yeah, I think $5 a week was the most. Yeah, like I would, I, I made most of my money from pet sitting. These kids are getting over $200 a week for low-level roles like lookouts. So the pay is good. And then- Yeah. [00:21:00] Yeah, right? So like, you, you, you’re doing pretty easy work.You’re just being a lookout, and then they’re like, “Hey, you know, listen, you’re really good at this. You wanna do more?” And you’re like, “Yeah. Yes, I wanna do more.” Like, this is, this is life-changing money for a kid, you know? You, you ... People forget, being a kid can be fun, sure, but like, being a kid can also really suck.You don’t get to determine what you eat, where you live, what you do on a daily basis. And nobody treats you with respect. Yeah. And no one believes you, no one treats you with respect, and here you are. You’re earning real money. It, it’s, it’s, it’s very game-changing for a kid. And then, then they escalate.So once, once you’re hooked, and I imagine it’s very easy to get hooked, recruits can start to receive travel instructions or small tasks turn into smuggling runs. And this nonprofit, this, like, think tank that looks at crime and does a lot of investigation called InCrime, they report that cartels like CJNG and [00:22:00] Sinaloa or Cartel del Noreste are linked to these types of recruiting efforts.Like, the biggest players are doing this. It always starts small, like you’re a messenger or you’re a lookout, and then they become big, like you are transporting, you know, possibly millions of dollars worth of drugs or you are killing people. So there are some examples that have been fairly prominently covered.The, the most famously covered is a 21, 2021 case- In Oaxaca, Mexico, there were three boys aged 11 to 14, 11 years old that were recruited via Garena Free Fire. This is a battle royale game similar to Fortnite. I, I don’t think it’s something that is an English language game. A recruiter posed as, like, a, another kid, and then offered them jobs as lookouts with weekly pay, and then it- the, the recruiter bought them bus tickets to Northern Mexico.This is the point at which, thank goodness, the boys were [00:23:00] intercepted. But then similar cases that have also been covered involve girls and other minors that have been lured either for trafficking or cartel work. And this is a very common pattern across games, so it’s not like there’s one game where this is the problem.Then there’s this prominent US and Mexico 2021 to 2022 drug mule problem involving Grand Theft Auto. So one young woman in Arizona was recruited while playing Grand Theft Auto online. She met a man in the game who offered her a job transporting what she thought were electronics. Guess what it was instead?Malcolm Collins: Was it drugs?Simone Collins: Yeah. It was meth. It was meth. She wasMalcolm Collins: arrested- I, I I love that, like, the moment I hear it’s a girl, I’m like, “Oh, she’s gonna get raped. She’s gonna get sold into sexSimone Collins: slavery.” I know. This is, this is the happy case.Malcolm Collins: Yeah, this is the positive outcome from girl meets guy from Grand Theft Auto who’s in a gang.Simone Collins: For real. Yeah, no, no, she was just arrested [00:24:00] with 60 kilograms of meth. That’s all. It’s fine. US Customs and Border Protection linked this to Mexican cartels using the game for real-world runners. But keep in mind, this is a young woman in Arizona. This is not, like, some, you know, kid in a poor hovel in Mexico or something.And then there’s another 2021 GTA V recruitment event. There’s a teen who received an in-game invite at 3:00 AM, a virtual, let’s see- A reclutamiento al- abierto, an open recruitment event tied to Cartel del Noreste and old school ZetaMalcolm Collins: Honestly, given how y- you know, the kids these are so pessimistic about the future- Yeahthey’re also nihilistic, like-Simone Collins: Yeah ... it’sMalcolm Collins: really exciting for a lot of kids.Simone Collins: It’s, no, it’s compelling. It’s compelling. And yeah, so this, there’s basically this thing where you have, like, on top you have, like, the actual cartel or gang that I imagine still resembles a proper gang. You know, you [00:25:00] got the tattooed adults, or whatever, the tough-looking, scary Armenians or- The tattooed adultsMalcolm Collins: Armenians. Why are you going hard on Armenians hereSimone Collins: today? Because Armenians feature prominently in the latest season of Euphoria, and they’re really scary. And they’re, they’re a lot, there’s, there’s, there’s a lot. They, they have, they’re white neo-Nazi dr- drug runners. They’re also there’s, like, a, a Black cowboy like- Okay,Malcolm Collins: okaySimone Collins: sex trafficker essentially, and then there’s the, the Armenians. The Armenians are the scariest in my opinion. And-Malcolm Collins: Armenians are the scariestSimone Collins: Yeah, dude, watch it. You know, but it’s, it’s actually really good. But one of the major themes, and in fact the, the primary protagonist in the latest season of S- of Euphoria, which is one of the few remaining shows that’s kind of like an event show to watch it, it starts with her being a drug runner, and I was like, “Adam, this is not a very relatable plot.”But now I’m like, oh my [00:26:00] God, is this like, is this a thing that the youths do now? Is this-Malcolm Collins: Is this more relatable for kids than I thought?Simone Collins: Yeah, like is this a zeitgeist show? I thought this was like a, oh, this would be crazy. But they’re all... They’re either drug runners or basically sex workers, like, on OnlyFans and stuff.Like, Sydney Sweeney’s in this. If you’ve seen anything about Sydney Sweeney, like, and sex work, they’re talking about Euphoria. Anyway though this is very zeitgeisty. I mean, the main character- Like, I would genuinely want to haveMalcolm Collins: gotten into this had I been younger. I would think it’s cool. ISimone Collins: would really want to break the rules.Yeah, it’s cool. It’s like you, you make money. It’s, it’s subversive. You’re aware of the fact that, like, the actual opportunity cost for you and the actual risk is relatively low, especially in countries... I mean, it’s low assuming that your employer doesn’t kill you or get you killed.Malcolm Collins: But-Simone Collins: Which I think is discountingMalcolm Collins: this is the thing that I think is where we’re gonna see this go, is- Yeah ... so there was a case recently where a kid in Turkey, and he had built this [00:27:00] company when he was in his 20, early 20s. Yeah. So when he was arrested, he was like 22 or 23, and so this must’ve been- 17 ... he must’ve been like 19, 18, something like that when he made this.He’s like a fat kid from Iran, and he built a company that made where he scammed people out of a hu- I think it was like 3- Was this theSimone Collins: farm thing? The-Malcolm Collins: Yeah, $350 million or something, right? And it, it- And heSimone Collins: was caught driving like s- like a Ferrari in Uruguay or something.Malcolm Collins: Yeah, yeah. But anyway, the point being is the moment, you know, some Iranian figures this out, right, in Iran, right?You’re gonna get youths that see these sorts of things and are like... ‘Cause this is what I would think. Yeah,Simone Collins: sign me up. Yeah, it’s GTA V but, like, IRL. Please, let’s, let’s go.Malcolm Collins: Well, not just that, but like, I bet I could run these operations better than these guys. For real. Yeah. But like now that it’s entirely decentralized- I know, I knowand I can run this while going to school during the day. Actually, make a movie about this. This would be a really entertaining movie, about-Simone Collins: It’d be a great movie. Yeah ...Malcolm Collins: about a [00:28:00] kid who’s just like a normal kid during the day, but, but a la, like, ASimone Collins: crime boss by night ...Malcolm Collins: well, I mean, this kind of happened with the guy who created Silk Road, right?Simone Collins: Ross Ulbricht, who got a Trump pardon. That my favorite Trump pardon, Ross Ulbricht. MyMalcolm Collins: favorite Trump pardon, too. Yeah. But imagine somebody-Simone Collins: Actually, somebody, someone we know, I, I can’t name her I’ll tell you at dinner tonight, Just recently got breakfast with his mom randomlyMalcolm Collins: Ross Ulbricht’s mom?What?Simone Collins: Yeah. You’re never gonna guess who it is either.Malcolm Collins: I, I think I know who it is.Simone Collins: Okay.Malcolm Collins: The, our DC friend, femaleSimone Collins: friend. No. No. No. You’re never... I swear to God, you’re never gonna guess. Okay,Malcolm Collins: well, hereSimone Collins: you go. I mean, theMalcolm Collins: point, the point here being, Yeah ... I think, one, cool anime. Very, very familiar cool It’s cool TVSimone Collins: format, dude.Malcolm Collins: Yeah, doing the, Should I write a story? I mean, like use, with AI, this would be a great like first story, right? To-Simone Collins: It’sMalcolm Collins: gonna be like- I don’t know. I’m interested in this. I, I’m interested-Simone Collins: [00:29:00] We shouldn’t be glam- No, no, bad, bad. We shouldn’t be glamorizing this. Now I know, like I really have to be care- Like Octavian just this morning, “I wanna do like multiplayer online games.”He wants to play Among Us, he wants to play Minecraft. Now I’m gonna be like, “Oh my God, like is someone, is someone gonna be recruiting him to become a drug runner if I let him play like multiplayer online games?” Like how, how isolated does Arianna have to make our family to like-Malcolm Collins: Actually, hold on.To be even cooler about this, here’s, here’s an alt strategy you could do, right?Simone Collins: Okay.Malcolm Collins: It totally changes the way that you can even operate a gang, right? So right now, one of the challenges with operating these is they’re often targeting state actors and stuff like that.Simone Collins: Aren’t you about to give the cartels b- like operational advice?Malcolm Collins: No. Like what if you create a sort of distributed cartel that’s just meant to soak cartel operations for money and supplies? Like and, and because it’s completely distributed, it’s way harder for [00:30:00] them to pin down whoever is actually leading thingsSimone Collins: What do you mean? Like, how, how would this work? Do you be a supplier to them?‘Cause there are, there areMalcolm Collins: suppliers to them. No, no. You so if they’re already doing these sorts of operations and stuff like that, you-Simone Collins: Like you wanna be like an agency for the kids to be like, “Mm, I represent them now. I take 20% and you’re not paying me now.”Malcolm Collins: No. You, you create a counter cartel, right?Okay. That basically exploits the way that they’re doing operational. It’s obviously very up upsetting- Oh, like you,Simone Collins: you more effectively recruit the youth?Malcolm Collins: No. You exploit the way that they are doing this to siphon money from them. So, this requires a lot of trust from one, the youth who are doing this.Mm-hmm. So you can go in and spoof acting like cartel members, for example, to get people to do things that are counter cartel interests- Ooh ... within these particular regions in ways that can make you money through then [00:31:00] exploiting organizations and saying, “Oh, you pay me X amount, you pay me Y amount to be safe.”You could, you could run some sort of counter cartel operation. Actually, I wonder if you’re doing this in developing countries like targeting, let’s say big things like mining rigs and stuff like that, I bet you could make decent money with minimal risk of them just not being willing to pay you because the state operation that would come after you in these places is gonna be small, right?So, if you tried to exploit mining facilities and stuff like that in places like Africa, and you’re doing this well, you could probably do pretty well. Or large banks and stuff like that. The problem is, is they already have to worry about generic terrorism, so how far could you go? I mean, there’s countries on like the edge of development, so like Peru would be an easy place to operate something like this.Specifically because like historically, like if you look at the buildings, they’re really made to be terrorism proof, but not anymore. I’m just thinking like if a kid was going to do this, how would you do it in today’s [00:32:00] economy?Simone Collins: Well, you better figure it out soon because our oldest is gonna be 11 soon enough, and then you know,Malcolm Collins: there’s 10-year-old safety And do you think he’s gonna wait till 11 to start this sort of stuff, Simone?Simone Collins: Yeah, fair enough. He’s really, like- IMalcolm Collins: think he’ll be on it at nine. Oh my God. Y- with his,Illegal chicken farming, of course. That,Simone Collins: that’s what heMalcolm Collins: reallySimone Collins: wants to do. With his baby chick daycare. Yeah. Like I said, all he wants to do is work for Tractor Supply, babysit baby chicks. He wants to be there for the chicks, okay?He, he can’t stop thinking of the chicks. He’s intoMalcolm Collins: chicks. Our kids reallySimone Collins: into chicks. The chicks. Yeah. IMalcolm Collins: actually think that this is... The other thing I wanna take an opportunity to think about before we sign off on this topicSimone Collins: is- There’s actually more. Do you, can I give you a little more? Yeah, ‘cause this is, this is just fascinating stuff.Just just so you know ice.gov has stuff on this too that I found to be interesting. Darknet marketplaces, like there are successors to the Silk Road like Alpha, Alpha [00:33:00] Bay. They function like, and this is why I was confused by what you’re proposing, like an eBay for illicit goods and services.So there are groups that offer crime as a service with different hierarchies, and they have reviews, and they have escrow payments, often in crypto. Like it’s, it’s more secure. They’re, they’re really heavy in Eastern Europe but, and, and internationally, but I mean, we could make it, you know, made in the USA edition, you know, MAGA edition.Malcolm Collins: MAGA?Simone Collins: And then there’s, there are coders who sell malware. There are people who, you know, handle the like hits and drugs and transport. Like there’s, there’s a whole economy. People specialize. But the, the core model for gig economy terrorism is also fascinating, and this is the even scarier part, right?‘Cause you were talking about the exploitation of nihilism as part of the what makes this so effective and, and youth nihilism being super high. I think it’s extra scary when it’s not just, “Oh, this is like for $200,” but also like, “Oh, I’ve finally been [00:34:00] given meaning and a community.” Like, then you can get someone to do a whole lot more when that happens.So here’s how terrorist groups are using these general approaches. The, there’s a George Washington University program on extremism. I pulled some of my sources from there. By the way, all the show notes are in, in Substack and on Patreon. I’ve linked all my sources. They’re detailed, so go read more there.But the way it works is they will start on platforms like Twitter, I mean X, or Facebook or TikTok or Instagram with like propaganda, and then they shift from there to encrypted messaging, and here’s where like Telegram is also super heavy, but then there’s WhatsApp still and Signal, and then there’s also apps like SureSpot and Wickr, which I’ve never heard of before.Malcolm Collins: Okay.Simone Collins: But they’re, I guess, good for secure one-on-one small group coordination. And then you get handlers assigning specific jobs like conduct a vehicle ramming here, or make a bomb with [00:35:00] these instructions, or film a pledge and attack. Like really scary stuff. And they will provide everything from the logistics to the targets and encouragement.They can arrange weapons caches. You know, it’s kind of like paint by numbers just with terrorism, which is terrifying. They just make it super easy. You know, like in the past I mean, even when you watch spy movies and stuff, right? Like, the spies have to do all the work, right? Like it’s-- But now, like any kid can become James Bond.You know, they have like their person who’s like, “Don’t worry, here are your tools. Here’s how to do it all.” You know, and they’re, they just like... But it’s so cheap. It’s so inexpensive and so therefore scalable. And this now isn’t just about money, it’s about martyrdom, it’s about caliphate glory or status.And sometimes of course there’s financial support too. So it’s not just, it’s like crime bounties plus all these other things that can make people do much more dangerous things. There are the [00:36:00] propaganda magazines that get people really like stoked about doing this stuff that include even like open source jihad tutorials.The, the Foreign Policy Research Institute has scary stuff on that. So here’s some examples of this happening. Back even in twenty fifteen and twenty sixteen, there was this plot in India, in, in Hyderabad. The, The New York Times reported on this basically remote case in which an ISIS handler, a virtual plotter if you will guided an engineer named Mohammed Ibrahim Yazdani in a cell for seventeen months via messaging apps.Detailed stuff. They, they instructed him on collecting hidden explosives and chemicals from drop points, and also weapons. They helped him attack or plan his attack an attack hub. The cell was in near constant contact until they were arrested, and this was not him at all acting alone. I think sometimes when we see reporting on [00:37:00] this, it seems like it’s just one dude.Yeah. But what we’re talking about is like there’s this just he’s, this is one dude with a lot of support. Then there were a bunch of Europe attacks between twenty fourteen and twenty sixteen. A bunch of virtual plotters directed and/or inspired around nineteen out of the thirty-eight ISIS related attack, attacks that took place in Western Europe during that time.Nineteen out of thirty-eight is a lot. And they’re... That, that they were involved in the twenty fifteen Paris attack, the twenty sixteen Brussels attack. They used Telegram primarily for coordination. And these people are getting real-time guidance. They’re getting bomb making tips, and they’re getting target selection.And it’s something that again is just not really... I think when we see news coverage of this, it’s like, “Oh, like some rando drove a van into a Christmas market.” And what we’re not realizing is this isn’t some rando. This is like, this is an agent being puppeted by a [00:38:00] very sophisticated, carefully planned, planning cell.Which is super creepy. There was a case in which- Oh I, I’ll just, you know, guys go to the show notes because I also wanted just to briefly talk about how law enforcement is trying to combat this. So there’s the, there’s this international association for the chiefs of police, which I find to be very cute for some reason, and I, I fell down a rabbit hole with them, but they were- Are, are theyMalcolm Collins: like a, do they look like stereotypical police chiefs?Is it like goofy and like a topSimone Collins: hat? It’s just cute. I just like, I see them like going, like I just imagine them going to the little police chief convention and being like, “I’m the chief. I’mthechief. “... crime is bad.” Just, I don’t know. I just find, I don’t know why I find it so endearing, but I do. But they, they say that platforms like EncroChat, Sky ECC, Phantom Secure, and others are some of the like bespoke [00:39:00] crime-only platforms that have been created by especially European, but also like other international syndicates for use.So instead of only just using Signal and Telegram and WhatsApp, they have developed these like specific dedicated bits of software, which I find to be interesting. These have been used by the Italian Mafia, by Albanian groups, drug cartels, and motorcycle gangs. And they’ve been used to coordinate drug shipments and, and do contract killings and things like torture, money laundering.And law enforcement has, for the most part, infiltrated these or shut them down. Like in twenty-twenty, they shut down EncroChat, and, and this also led to dozens of arrests in Europe and beyond. So the danger in creating a dedicated crime software is that like you’re gonna become the number one target as soon as law enforcement learns about you, and they will because they will eventually get someone to snitch by basically being like, “You’re going to jail for life unless you, you know, become a [00:40:00] snitch.”And-Malcolm Collins: Yeah.Simone Collins: They’re catching people planning murders. They’re catching people like coordinating torture sessions. It, it’s horrible. Here’s my favorite FBI sting that happened. What did the FBI think? They’re like, “I have a great idea. Let’s just build one of these and just tell everyone, ‘Hey guys, I got the new, I got the new software platform for crime.Time to come on here.’” And so they created Anom, A-N-O-M. I’m sure it stand... it stood for something. But it was a fake encrypted platform that criminals adopted globally. Like they got over twelve thousand devices in over a hundred countries that enabled remote coordination by the Italian Mafia and outlaw motorcycle gangs and drug syndicates.And then in twenty-twenty-one, after they felt content that they had enough people on their platform, they, they, they committed what they called Operation Trojan Shield- ... which resulted in, in over a hundred arrests. And you can read more about it. The [00:41:00] FBI has a- Fantastic. Yeah. There, there’s an article called “FBI’s Encrypted Phone Platform Infiltrated Hundreds of Criminal Syndicates.Result is Massive Worldwide Takedown.” So there is hope. There’s hope that these things can result in some form of justice. And the great thing about there being all this documentation on Signal and Telegram and whatnot is like, okay, yeah, as much as these are, you know, encrypted chats, people take screenshots.People take pictures of their phone even when you can’t take a screenshot in an app. Like, there are ways that, you know, if something is on a device, if something is ever written down, it can be documented. If something is uttered, honestly, around any kind of device, you know? So that, that is a thing. But I think for this reason, I, most of the current major crime syndicates and organizations are using a constellation of apps, which is why you’re hearing like, “Oh, well, the Iraqis are using WhatsApp for extortion messages, but Signal to coordinate with their, [00:42:00] like, team criminals.And they’re using, and Sinaloa is using Fortnite.” Like, it’s better to just, to be totally platform agnostic and do whatever works and shift frequently. And that’s why you’re just, I think you’re gonna continue to see basically gaming platforms and Discord and Signal and Telegram and WhatsApp because it’s just better to not be in any one place.So yeah, it’s scary. It’s a, but that, that’s what I wanted to share. I think it’s fascinating. I, there’s a lot more reading you can do if you go to the show notes.Malcolm Collins: Totally changes how businesses can operate, which I find to be very interesting.Simone Collins: It does.Malcolm Collins: It does, yeah. And if I was going to operate one of these, I would likely target a country that can’t defend itself as easily.I think that’s the, the best way to handle this rather than like the United States or Europe. Like yes, those are the juiciest piggy banks, right? Sure,Simone Collins: yeah.Malcolm Collins: But they’re also the most likely to get you, whereas if you’re targeting you know, Eastern Europe or, or you know, a, a lot of Arab majority countries and stuff like that, you can [00:43:00] operate without them being able to push back as easily.Which would be very, very interesting. That’s, that’s what I would do. I don’t know.Simone Collins: Yeah, absolutely.Malcolm Collins: But then you’ve gotta, you know, try to understand the local culture and language enough to make that operate, and so that’s a bit, you know, difficult. But, Yeah, that’s verySimone Collins: true ... very exciting andMalcolm Collins: interesting to see where this goes and as we get better at defending against this.Simone Collins: Yeah. Yeah, for real. I’m so scared for our kids, man. I mean- I mean- What?Malcolm Collins: Look, we’re the ones who started a cult, Simone, so you know, keep in mind-Simone Collins: Who hasn’t these days? I don’t know. Like, that’s-Malcolm Collins: It’s a pretty good cult, I’m gonna be honest.Simone Collins: It’s cool. It’s, I’m proud to be a techno-puritan. It’s good. All right.It’s, it’s, yeah. Love you.To what extent does it actually taste good because you’re starving because you haven’t eaten in a really long time?Malcolm Collins: Oh, yeah, I guess. Well, no, I had, like, potatoes yesterday. They were goodSimone Collins: Oh, yeah, [00:44:00] you had, you had french fries and samosas. That, that was the, that was your comfort food when you came back from college, right?Today sheMalcolm Collins: made slow cooked Chinese pork belly, and it is amazing. It is amazing. And then she’s gonna saute the, the pork belly with bok choy and bean- beanlets, whatever they’re called, little beans.Simone Collins: Bean sprouts?Malcolm Collins: Bean sprouts.Simone Collins: Yeah.Malcolm Collins: But I am excited for this episode, so let’s hop right in. Are we on the right side?Simone Collins: Yes, we are. Sir, he’s such in a grabby phase. Okay. Oh, you think it’s-- he thinks it’s funny. He thinks it’s funny. Of course he thinks it’s funny.Speaker 10: Are they getting away? Are they your buddies? Yeah. How’s the daycare going, your baby chick daycare? Yeah. It’s going well? You tickle? Yeah. All right. You wanna give them their new home? [00:45:00] Yeah, I can go get my things. Okay. Of course Okay, girly, down you go. Rascal, uh-oh Oh, no. Rascal’s living up to her name. No, no, no, no, no.We’ll get her in. All right, you can walk them into their new home Hey Rascal. Come here girl This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit basedcamppodcast.substack.com/subscribe

In this episode of Based Camp, Malcolm and Simone Collins dive deep into the Book of Genesis, revealing surprising alignments between the ancient text and modern evolutionary science. Malcolm challenges common Sunday-school interpretations, showing how Genesis describes a timeline that closely matches scientific understanding: from the early Earth and origin of life, through aquatic creatures and large reptiles, to birds, land animals, and finally humanity. They explore alternate translations of key Hebrew words (like “yom” for “day/era”, “yatsar” for “formed/planned”, and “taninim” for great reptilian creatures), discuss the Big Bang, prebiotic Earth, the evolution of sexuality, and why Genesis stands out among global creation myths.A fascinating conversation blending biblical scholarship, evolutionary biology, and philosophical insight that will challenge both skeptics and literalists.Episode TranscriptMalcolm Collins: Hello, Simone. I’m excited to talk with you today. In a recent episode, I pointed out, I was like, “It is weird to within a modern context in Christianity and stuff like this, when people are saying that evolution is not coherent with Genesis.”And I would say that at least my readings of Genesis, evolution makes me believe Genesis more because Genesis says a bunch of stuff that aligns with what we know of the, about the evolutionary timeline without saying anything that disconfirms the evolutionary timeline. So we are gonna get into this.And it’s, it’s, it’s such a fun topic for me to get into because when I was a kid, and I believe that Genesis said what, as I call it, Sunday school Christianity, you know? Well Genesis says X, Y, and Z, and and I- if you look at it, and then don’t look up alternate translations of the words in it whenever something looks a little fishy or looks like it may be [00:01:00] factually incorrect or don’t look up how that word is used in other places in the Old Testament you immediately are like, “Okay, that’s believable,” right?And so that’s stupid because that’s an old story for savages.Speaker 2: We will call them cave JewsSpeaker 3: Attacker!Malcolm Collins: And then you come at it with a more modern mindset. I mean, just if you look at the mere timeline given in it, right? It says first you have non-animal life. Then you have the vast array... No, it doesn’t even say, like, fishes.It’s, it’s the vast array of creatures that live in the sea.Simone Collins: Mm-hmm.Malcolm Collins: Along with some form of large reptilian creature. Hmm ... which, which, no- What could thatSimone Collins: be?Malcolm Collins: Yeah, what, what could that be? Now, no, there’s, there’s a lot of really cool... First, it’s not as simple as saying, like, fi- they easily could have wr- fishes, right?But if you’re describing- Yeah ... the [00:02:00] evolutionary timeline- Yeah ... the vast array of things that live in the sea is a very good description for early animal life. 100%,Simone Collins: yeah.Malcolm Collins: And I’m also gonna go into stuff in the translations here, where a lot of people argue that the, the giant thing that’s written here, the 吨, or whatever is like a leviathan, that it is a giant sea creature-like serpent or something like that.And I’m gonna point out that actually if you read the, the correct, the Hebrew, which we’ll go into- Mm-hmm Isn’t necessarily talking about a sea animal. It’s only talking about a large reptilian creature. It just talks about it in the same context as it’s talking about sea animals, so people often assumed it was talking about sea animals.And then it says- there were also some very largeSimone Collins: sea animalsMalcolm Collins: though There were some large reptiles, but I’m just saying, like, if I was trying to give an evolutionary timeline of history. Then it says you’ve got the birds. Then you’ve got the creatures on Earth today. So like before we go into this, this is, even broadly most people are aware it gives this timeline.[00:03:00]Do you know how many other religions, and I’m talking even if I go Native American traditions, even if I go African traditions, ‘cause I have gone through AI after AI trying to find a single other religion that gets the evolutionary timeline as close to right as this. There isn’t one.Simone Collins: Yeah. I, I can’t think of one, for sure.One. There, there isn’t- Based on all the folk traditions I’ve heard, everything, yeahMalcolm Collins: There isn’t even one that gets the first two simple steps right. Mm. Non-animal life and aquatic life. Or fishes, or anything. Like, I tried to give it so many outs. Wow. Nothing. Nothing comes close to getting those two stages right.So again, this isn’t just like they randomly threw stuff together and happened to get it right. This is, like, easily very, very right related stuff. So we’re gonna get into that. Very, very fun.Speaker 3: So note, a lot of people will be like, “Well, there’s some really obvious mistakes that you find. For [00:04:00] example, that non-animal based life came about before the sun and the moon.” To which I would be like, “Well, actually, hold on a second here. , Do you know what the oldest evidence of life we have on Earth is?It’sAustralia’s Jack Hills zircons, which date about 4.4 billion years old, , into the Hadean era. All right? So do you know when the moon was formed? Formed, by the way, from a collision of a body about the size of Mars into Earth, which led to the surface being largely covered in magma for a period that would likely have wiped out any evidence we had of life from before that period. It was formed f- 4.5 billion years ago. So the moon is from 4.5 billion years ago in an event that would have wiped any evidence of life existing before it off [00:05:00] the surface of the Earth. Then 4.4 billion years ago, we see evidence of life. What’s the chance you think that there could have been life on Earth before this collision, and that it in some way influenced or seeded the life that came after the collision?I’m gonna at least say, like, from my perspective, at least 20 to 30%, and I wouldn’t have known that without going into this.Otherwise, you have to assume that coincidentally life just happened to first evolve almost immediately after this collision during one of the most violent times of Earth’s history, which seems unlikelyAnd then you can say, “Well, okay, but the sun definitely existed before that.” And we can say, “All right, but if you read the Bible, it says that it separated the night from the day.” That is the point of the creation of the sun in this particular story., And if [00:06:00] we go 4.4 billion years ago to those Jackson Hill zircons, right, , the atmosphere was still transitioning,, More specifically, it had really high levels of CO2, potentially tens of hundreds of times higher than modern, and a very high level of water vapor that sustained a really strong greenhouse effect and permanent very thick cloud layers, And the image I have in the background here is an image from, as you can see, it’s from a scientific catalog, right, of what scientists think Earth looked like during this period of Earth’s history.So it would have been, , extremely, extremely diffuse and hazy. , Most days during that period from what we know , of Earth would have just looked like an orangish, reddish overcast.Things you would not have been able to see, or would have been able to see very rarely, maybe once every few hundred years or something like that, are the stars and a [00:07:00] clear day and night. So actually, the Bible isn’t even that wrong on some of the weirder claims it makesMalcolm Collins: A note here we’re gonna go into, like a lot of people will be like, “Uh-uh. It says that God formed the animals with the dirt, that it formed man with the dirt.”And we’re gonna point out the word that is translated in your Sunday school Bible into formed throughout the rest of theOld Testament, do you know what it means? No, actually. Planned. Really? It y- Oh. Yes. And we’ll go through instances. It, it, it can be used to mean formed, but it could equally be used to say, “God planned the dirt to become human.God planned-” Oh my word ... “the dirt to become animals.” Ooh. But we’re gonna go over all sorts of fun stuff like this which is fun. And we’re gonna mostly be focused on the first story of Genesis, ‘cause Genesis sort of has two beginning of Earth stories that aren’t really that contradictory. We have [00:08:00] another episode, the Adam and Eve story, that goes over that one.I think it’s one of the best episodes we’ve ever produced, if you’re interested. It’s, doesn’t even contradict normal Christianity that much and it’s very elucidating for, I think, a lot of people, around what’s actually in the Adam and Eve story, because it’s not often what you’re taught. And note here when people are like, “Well, if it’s saying that God like planned man to come out of dirt or whatever,” right?Like that, that still doesn’t mean evolution, right? You know? Because evolution is a natural process, so that wouldn’t be God doing it. And here I’m gonna be like, okay, let’s just talk about the nature of miracles. Imagine God was like, “I’m gonna shoot that guy with lightning.” Right? Like calling the shots.And then all of a sudden you see lightning come down from the sky and shock a guy, and he falls over dead. And then you turn and you go, “Yeah, but that was static in the clouds that caused that lightning, and so I don’t really think that that was a miracle,” right? You know, because it was done through natural processes.I’m like, actually, that’s, that’s a little bit more impressive than just [00:09:00] magicking it, okay? Right. Let’s go into this, “now the Lord God formed out the ground all the wild animals and the birds in the s- sky.” So, the word used here for formed means to mold, shape, or fashion. It can mean that, okay? However it’s frequently used to describe a plan, a purpose, a division, or preordaining.Mm-hmm ... and specifically the root idea of yatsar is to, through a plan, mold or shape something into a specific form. So if we’re gonna look at instances where we see it used this way you have Isaiah 22:11, “But you did not look to Him who did it or planned it,” and this is the same word here, “or have a regard for Him who planned it y- long ago.”A- a- again, the planned here is the same word that was used to mean form or translated as form in Genesis. If you go to Isaiah 37:27 and there’s a parallel in 2 Kings 19:25, “Have you not heard that I [00:10:00] determined it long ago? I planned it from the days of old.” The word planned here is the same word that’s used for form.I’m not gonna go through every instance. We’ve got an instance in I- Isaiah 46:11 Plasm 42:20 Jeremiah 18:11. Basically, it’s just everywhere. This is not an uncommon way to use that word. And people can say, “Well, obviously when the Bible was written, that’s not the way the savage people of, you know, however many, four or five thousand years ago were meant to understand these lines.”And I’m gonna say, isn’t that even kind of crazier- Exactly ... that truth could be baked into the text, that as science continued to uncover things, we were able to reread it in a way that would never make sense to somebody 5,000 years ago, but is not disconfirming of modern science. Can you see why that affirms my faith that there might have been some actual divine inspiration for this, instead of disconfirms?Simone Collins: Mm-hmm.Malcolm Collins: [00:11:00] Now let’s go to another thing that people will complain about. They will say, “Well, it says days,” right? It says on day one, on day two, et cetera, right?Simone Collins: And- The Bible in general get, it throws me with timing. You know, he lived for 100-something years. Yeah.Malcolm Collins: I often hear the and I always thought this was a really bad counter-explanation- OhWhere they’ll be like, “Well, you know, because days didn’t really exist yet at the beginning of time and the human concept of day didn’t exist- Hmm ... these days could mean any amount of time you want them to be,” right? And I always found this to be very flimsy. I was like, “Come on.” Like, that, that really just seems like re-begging the point.Like, I don’t, I don’t, I don’t buy that. But okay, let’s ask this question again. The word that’s translated as day here, especially with the concept of a morning and night attached to it, which you do have in this- Oh, really? Okay ... is it in other parts of the Old Testament in [00:12:00] Hebrew writing used to refer to something longer than a single day?Or does the word sometimes mean something other than a literal one day? Oh, so what’s the, what’s the answer? All over the place. So, a- and some even very, very common ones. So the day of the Lord this is Isaiah 2:12, 13:6, 13:9, Joel 1:15, 2:1. I don’t need to go over all the places. It’s all over the place.And it refers to a future period of divine judgment and/or blessing, often involving cosmic signs and battles. Mm. Pretty much all Christians and Jews believe in the day of the Lord, and none of them believe it’s one day. Like, that’s not a, a common interpretation, yet it’s all over the Bible and, and very...And this is within the communities that take the creationist literalist approach. This is the thing that gets me, ‘cause what we’re gonna be going over is a lot of verses here where day is used to mean something longer than a day, that are [00:13:00] taken to mean that by the same groups that say in- Genesis it must mean a literal day.So the word that we’re translating as a day here, you don’t even need to be like, oh, you know, in the perception of God, a day of a thousand years or whatever. It literally in other places of the Bible is translated to mean era. , And when you think about a word like the era of the Lord instead of the day of the Lord, it actually sort of makes more sense when we see this mistranslation appear in other places as well., Now, do I think to the savage cave geo, , when they heard this story that they weren’t thinking of literal days? No, they probably were. They simply didn’t have any context to understand the context of billions or trillions of years. So it makes sense that we would have talked if they were having some form of supernatural inspiration to write down a true big history time span [00:14:00] of Earth, they would have used this word, , that I think divinely has another meaning in other parts of the Bible, which is era, , to say some period of timeMalcolm Collins: So, another instance here, Joshua 24:7 “And you lived in the wilderness many days.” Now this is translated as a long time , and this refers to the 40 years of wandering. Now 40 years of wandering isn’t just many days, okay? That’s 40 effing years of wandering, right?Mm-hmm. Then you have Josiah 6:2, “After two days He will revive us, and on the third day He will raise us up.” Many scholars, including most of the scholars who take a literal interpretation of days in Genesis, see this as prophetic of a longer period. Oh. Often linked to Israel’s restoration or even the time of Christ’s restoration.Using the a day is like a thousand years principle from Psalms 94 and Peter 3:8. Psalms. And note... Songs, whatever, blah. People say the day is like a thousand years one they use to [00:15:00] mean they argue it in this. I’ve heard that argument before. I just find it a lot more convincing that, And, and again, you have Daniel 8:2, where again you have days used to mean something that is generally agreed as being much longer than a day.But what’s interesting here is in Daniel 8:26, you also even have the convention of evening and morning attached with this concept of a day- Hmm ... to delineate something that is much longer than what we, when we’re talking about a literal day mean. And, and this to me is just much more compelling. If this word is used all over the place to mean something other than a literal day why would we not see it as being more like the term era or epoch?Which it does seem to be referencing in terms of time horizons if we’re looking at evolutionary and geological history, okay? Yeah. Yes. And so you can say, “Well, if they wanted to say epoch, why didn’t they say epoch? [00:16:00] Why didn’t they say billions of years?” And the answer is they just didn’t have those words.Right? That those, those words aren’t in the Bible. The scales of time that this verse is talking about is simply not talked about anywhere else in the Bible. Huh. So of course they wouldn’t use it. Of course somebody, of, of people living in a freaking desert 10,000 years ago wouldn’t have had the concept of geological history to write that down.Right. If it was explained to them, it would look like this.Speaker 9: So what alternate word could they have used other than the word they used if they wanted to use a word that was closer to something like an era or an epoch? There really is only one other word, and once you know it, it’s immediately obvious why it wasn’t used if you’re trying to be true. It’s the word tekufa or tekaph, and this appears four times in the Tanakh.So what does this [00:17:00] mean? It means a cycle, a turn, or a circuit. So it would have indicated a view of time and history that is much closer to like a Hindu or Buddhist one, which is not in alignment with what we know about evolution or the way history works. So suppose the cave Jew who was having these revelations, he says, let’s suppose some sort of angel is inspiring them or something, and it’s like a really, really long time period.And they’re like, oh, you mean like a turn or a cycle? And they’re like, no, not like that. Do you have any other words you can use?the wild thing about the AI response, , is I asked it, is there any word in ancient Hebrew of the time of the Old Testament that can be used to mean era or epoch, , or did such a word not exist yet? So not only did it give me this cycle word, but it then says under that if, basically, if you’re not using that word, the next best word to use is yom, the word that’s actually used here., What’s also really [00:18:00] cool is if you look at the scholarly debate on this, what they’ll say is, okay, yes, it’s within the s- called the semantic range of the word yom to be used as era, in that sometimes it’s used to mean era or epoch in the Bible. But that’s not how it’s normally used in the Bible the vast majority of times because, I mean, you’re just gonna be talking about days a lot more often than you’ll be talking about epoch or era.But to me, that’s a really bad argument for it being interpreted that way in this particular context because yes, obviously you use the word day more than the word era, but in this context, era just makes a lot more sense when we know actual scientific history. More than that, when people come and they go, “Well, look, it talks about having night times and day times in this story,” and it’s like, bro, even in English, you would hear somebody be like, “Well, at the sunset of the Victorian era,” , you don’t think, oh, well, that meant that the [00:19:00] Victorian era happened in a dayMalcolm Collins: All right, now we’re gonna go over all of the lines from Genesis, and go over how actually affirming they are, and how f- from my perspective of modern science seems to affirm them. And we’ll go over the one or two contradictions where I’m like, “This is a genuine problem.”But the genuine problems are actually even more interesting to me, because they present things where if, like, techno-puritism, our version of Christianity, becomes a, a religion that’s popular, people can say, “Look, they predicted science would overturn this based on the Bible- Ooh ... 50 years ago, 100 years ago.”And if we end up being right about those things that is going to be very, very spicy in terms of affirmation of there’s some form of divine inspiration for this story. All right, so let’s go into this. In the beginning, God created heavens and the Earth. Now, the Earth was formless and empty.Darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the spirit of God was hovering over the waters. [00:20:00] So immediately we have a number of problems here, right? Like, if you’re taking a normal Sunday school, typically you just read this line and you drop it. You’re just like, “Okay, something just... Whatever. Yeah, I guess.God’s hovering over waters.” That sounds like normal you know, pagan nonsense, right? Like, like, like, the type of thing I’d expect some tribal group to write or something, right? Maybe, maybe a little more fluttery, but whatever. And then you go, “No, no, no, no.” Like, let’s, let’s suppose I’m taking this seriously, right?This doesn’t make sense the way it’s translated to English here.Simone Collins: Yeah.Malcolm Collins: Specifically... Okay, so it’s talking about a formless, empty darkness. First of all, very interesting if you’re thinking about, like, pre-Big Bang. How do you describe reality, time before the Big Bang? I think a formless, empty darkness is a pretty good description.And-Simone Collins: 100%, yeah ...Malcolm Collins: and people can then say, “Well, look here. It’s saying now [00:21:00] the Earth was a formless, empty darkness.” And I’m gonna be like clearly that’s not what it means, because it can’t both be the Earth and a formless, empty darkness.” So Earth- Yeah ... in this context clearly means everything, not just the Earth as we understand it.Secondarily, you now have the issue of, okay, so you have, The earth with a formless, empty darkness over the surface of the deep, right? Okay. So, and then God-Simone Collins: That implies also, yeah, like a, the earth covered in oceans, which is how it was in the beginning, right?Malcolm Collins: Yes, during a, part of our early history, but we’re, we’ll get to that in a second.But it then says, so basically you have two things. You have the water, right? The, the, the surface of the deep. And then the, the formless empty deep itself, and then the darkness, right? Yeah. And these two things are, are, are sort of in, in opposition to each other. And then you have the, the spirit of God hovering over the water.So wait, that doesn’t make any sense because the earth with a formless, empty darkness over the [00:22:00] surface of the deep. So that means now God is either, like, under the water in the deep, or he is the formless empty darkness, right? You’re on one of two- Mm-hmm ... sides of this water surface. It, assuming the word over in this context means that he is literally spatially hovering over something.So then you have to look. You have to say, well, does the word over mean anything else? Which we’ll get into in a second. It does, by the way. Ooh. There’s a spoiler. And then secondarily, we have the word hovering here, which is a very weird word that is used very, very rarely in the Old Testament and doesn’t at all mean what hovering...Hovering is a terrible translation of the word. It basically means- It’s worthless ... a thing in constant non-hurried movement/development.Simone Collins: Oh. Oh, yeah. Okay. Yeah.Malcolm Collins: Now I can see how hovering would be, like, the closest- I can ... you’re gonna get to as an easy word.Simone Collins: Yeah.Malcolm Collins: But I think that’s actually a way more [00:23:00] important to understand what that word, because as soon as you’re like, “That’s a-” Yeah, it sounds likeweird word to use there,” right? Yeah. Yeah. So let’s go against this. Okay. So first of all what are the other things that over could mean in this context? Mm-hmm. It could mean against. They are putting God as something that exists in opposition to the formlessness before time, okay? Before the Big Bang, right?Or it could mean sort of like, after. So, here you have this in Proverbs 25:11. You have this in Leviticus 15:25, and you have this in Job 21:32 where you’ve got, It, it, it sort of means, like- either after or in the right time in relation to Hmm. Like th- th- God is a thing that exists both after in opposition to the formless empty darkness.Which to me seems a lot easier to... Like, that, that doesn’t have any problems for me. I’m like, “Okay, that seems true.” And then let’s look at what this word hovering [00:24:00] means. We’ve gone over this before, but just to go over it quickly it means not standing still, but vibrating with life or purpose, in constant movement.Hmm. But also in a non-hurried way. So where do we see this in other places? We see this in Deuteronomy 32:11 and this, Deuteronomy ... like, like an eagle stirs upon its nest and hovers over- Hmm ... its young. Okay. So one of the only other instances we have of this is something protectively guarding its young or something that’s, that’s gestating, right?And then in, which is a way better term than, than hover as well in this context the sort of brooding over something. And then in Jeremiah 23:9, we have, “My heart is broken within me, all my bones,” and then this word and here it’s translated to tremble, like a constant shake of, of shaking or movement.If you take, and I’m not gonna go too into techno-puritan stuff here ‘cause I don’t wanna... This is not what this episode’s about. It’s about evolution. But this is very affirming of a techno-puritan understanding of God [00:25:00] rather than being a, a static entity, being an evolving entity. But to continue here.So next line here. And then God said, so keep in mind, we have dark, dark, empty, formless void, right? So what does God do in relation to the dark, empty void, right? I’m sure you know this part of the story, Go- Simone. He says, “Let there be light,” and then there was light. God saw that the light was good, and he separated the light from darkness.God called the light day, and the darkness called night, and there was evening, and there was morning the first day.Speaker 10: Many of you want to say, “Well, there couldn’t have been a meaningful day and night at the creation of the universe.” Note here that clearly this doesn’t mean day and night as we experience it on Earth, because that happens in a future one of the eras, specifically the, “And God said, ‘Let there be lights in the vault of the sky to separate the day from the night.’”So clearly this is talking about something else in regard to night and day. , Here, what I assume it means, [00:26:00] because it talks about the light or the photons that are emitted with the Big Bang, is probably light and dark matter and energyMalcolm Collins: Now first, great explanation of the Big Bang if you’re trying to explain the Big Bang to savages living in the woods 10,000 years ago or in a desert 10,000 years ago. You’re not gonna...Imagine trying to explain to them, it’s like, okay, so, like, time didn’t exactly exist in any way we understand it. The laws of physics probably didn’t even exist before the Big Bang. And then there was this, like, giant explosion, and all of these photons came out of it. And they’re like, “What the are you talking about?”And you’re like, “There was a dark and formless void- Yeah ... and then there was light.” Yeah. And they’re like, “Ah, yes, that makes sense now.” I get it now. Yeah, youSimone Collins: have to use language that can be passed on, that can make sense in the context in which it’s being... Yeah.Malcolm Collins: Any- Understood ... there, I, I do not, I do not literally think this could have been any closer to accurate Yeah, theSimone Collins: [00:27:00] highest fidelity language possible.Malcolm Collins: Yes, that could have been passed on in desert savages for thousands of years. And we do know that this was passed on with a high degree of fidelity because we have Old Testament from the Dead Sea Scrolls that have fragments of this story. Oh, right.Simone Collins: Yeah.Malcolm Collins: Literally 1,000 years before our next fully intact version, and they have virtually no differences.They have a few differences in, like, poetic language where, like, there’s a few places where they’re a little repetitive, and those repetitive parts are gone. And I can see how a scribe just didn’t cover the repetitive parts. But, like, generally it served its purpose. Okay? So now we’re gonna go to the next one.Okay? And note here separating darkness from light. This could be something that we yet to understand about the universe. We do know that there are a lot of problems with understanding dark matter in the universe right now. Matter appears to exist in oppositional forms. Could this make some sense once we better understand dark matter and dark [00:28:00] energy?It might. We know that they appear to be pretty por- important in the cosmic order. And larger than what we consider regular matter that we interact with regularly. So it seems relevant that they would mention it here. Yeah. To continue.Simone Collins: Yeah.Malcolm Collins: By the way, had, had you ever thought about all of this in these terms or?Simone Collins: I remember the last time I started reading Genesis, I was like, “Oh my God,” ‘cause that was my first time reading it after historical geology and, you know, these things are touched on from that perspective. Like, here’s what we know from the fossil record. Here’s what we know from- Mm-hmm ... studying Earth and, you know, doing deep core samples and all these other crazy things.Malcolm Collins: Yeah. And you were just like, “This isn’t as... This is, like, pretty accurate.” I was like, “Simone Collins: Yeah. Oh my God.” Yeah, because it... Well, I didn’t expect it at all because you hear that there’s all these young Earth creationists, and then you just assume that the Bible is, like, really explicit. Like, boom, it, you know, that everything happened, and everyone was there at the same time, and the...Yeah, it, it just- Yeah, no, forMalcolm Collins: me, young Earth creationism is just [00:29:00] literally ignoring what, what the Bible says in favor of what your Sunday school teacher said. Like, I don’t mean to... I know we have young Earth creationist fans and everything like that, but, like, that, I, it just seems like if, if the Bible isn’t antagonistic to these ideas it just seems like sticking a spoke in your own, like, wheels of your own bicycle, and then it crashes, and you’re like, “Oh, wha...”Like, fans will sometimes come to me and- And they’ll be like, “I can convince you that the Bible actually means X or Y.” And I’m like, “But then I just wouldn’t believe the Bible because this is, like, easily observably wrong,” right? Like, I believe the Bible because it aligns, it’s coherent with reality. And it’s coherent with a very sophisticated understanding of reality that there is no way that people of that period could have had, which is why I believe that they didn’t come up with this out of nowhere.Simone Collins: Mm-hmm.Speaker 12: And if you want to come to me with like a, “Well, why do you believe in evolution, Malcolm? That’s crazy. There’s big gaps in the fossil record and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.” It’s like, okay, so my first job, , outside of [00:30:00] like household, local jobs, stuff like that, was working in the human evolution department at the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History., If you go through the exhibit on human evolution in that and you go to the part of the exhibit that is just every ho- hominid fossil we have from like Australopithecus to modern man, I constructed that. I had to go through every single one of those fossils and take, you know, 380 images of them. Um, this idea that you cannot see when you’re looking at the entire fossil record a clear gradient of evolution that matches well with the historic timeline is just factually wrong., Yes, we have some gaps, but every time you fill one gap, you now have two gaps on either side of that gap. You’re always gonna have gaps until you find literally every skeleton of every iterative change going back. Like, it, it’s just not doable. But in terms of like the broad strokes, [00:31:00] either, , evolution is true or God used a number of miracles to try to make it look as if evolution was true in some form of test that we’re not, one, warned about in the Bible, and two, I can’t understand why a good God would lay out for us.That’s why I believe it, right? Like, , I, I think that to just deny this when, when I personally held many of these extremely valuable skulls, right? Like, I’ve, I’ve gone through the record. I had skulls all around me at this, at this point in my career. , And it-- there’s this very clear gradient, and looking at that and being like, “Okay, so either God is in some way testing us by giving us this much evidence, , or, , it’s almost kind of miraculous that, that so many of the missing links, if you talk about how not populous our [00:32:00] species and our ancestors were, ended up surviving.Or God made sure that we preserved a fairly good record so that we could understand how we came to be and our role in the, , greater chain of life.”Speaker 13: Also, that just broadly seems like such an un-God thing to do. God gives us this great and giant puzzle to solve through generations of research, , laying it all out very clearly for us as we, we build this puzzle, and the outcome of the puzzle is the test? Like, that we’re supposed to not believe it even though the Bible doesn’t clearly contradict it?, That, that doesn’t seem... Like, what’s the point of the test?Malcolm Collins: Anyway if people are wondering how I do believe it, I believe that, like, a bunch of traditions form randomly, and this was the one that was the closest to an absolutely true tradition, and so it was favored through history. But that’s a different... You want to get into our track series. So to continue here “And God [00:33:00] said ‘Let there be a vault between the waters to separate the water from water.’So God made the vault and separated the water under the vault from the water above it, and was, and it was so. God called the vault sky, and there was an evening, and there was morning the second day.” And this is one area where I’m really not sure what’s meant here. I don’t see how this... It, it doesn’t discorrelate with modern science, because if we’re right about what’s meant by water here, he’s talking about not literal water, but the formlessness before time.Mm-hmm. So, what, what could this be? I don’t know. I assume it’s something that physics just doesn’t have... It doesn’t, it’s not contradictory to any of our understanding of physics, because what’s on the other side of the vault is what we call the sky. So it’s whatever is at the end of the sky. And we just don’t have the physics to understand this yet.Now, if you take a literalist interpretation w- the way that people used to understand this, like if you go back to, you know, ancient Hebrew times, they thought [00:34:00] you look at the sky and it’s like a literal dome over your head. And on the other side of that dome is the water, the, the endless, the endless void, and the, the you know, the stars are all sort of painted on the dome.That’s the way that they used to understand it. So it’s neither disconforming, it’s, it’s, it’s predictive, I guess I would say, of this.So, one of the things that I wanted to go into here was why water? Like, wh- why do they keep talking about water here? Why do they use water in these analogies?Simone Collins: Well, I think they use water for the same reason they use fire. You know, burn it with fire. That doesn’t mean... Like, sometimes there are no other ways to describe things, like deleting or, you know, other forms of elimination, Yeah, which isMalcolm Collins: what we argue the lake of fire likely means, and Gehenna likely means, is where you burn things.But- water, it appears to be because if you look at creation myths from around this period in this area whatever was at the beginning is typically thought of as deep abyss, depths, primeval, whole ocean. There’s no, there was noSimone Collins: concept for a vacuum. How do you explain that to someone? Mm-hmm. This is not a [00:35:00] hole.It’s like the opposite of a hole. The, the biggest thing you could possibly give to someone for them to imagine is the ocean, is some vast body of water. That is the closest they can get to a, a large empty void.Malcolm Collins: Yeah, well, here’s another fun thing. Do you know what else the term that we’re translating as water here could be translated into?Simone Collins: Oh, no. Do tell.Malcolm Collins: Semen. Oh. Well, hold on. If you’re thinking about it from a life-giving perspective, Sure, yeah ... and you’re looking at what’s, what’s the... You could think of it as anti-life if you’re talking about, like, the abyss versus life itself.Simone Collins: Mm. Right?Malcolm Collins: But anyway, to continue here. “And then God said, ‘Let the water under the sky be gathered into one place, and let dry ground appear,’ and it was so.God called the dry ground land, and the gathered waters he called seas, and God saw it was good.” Now this I do not see as disconfirming or affirming. This appears to be talking about actual water on Earth and the creation [00:36:00] of dry land. We know that- Well, yeah,Simone Collins: B- because they switched from water to seas, which also implies to me that when they are referring to water, they’re referring to something that is not water.Malcolm Collins: Yeah.Simone Collins: Well, and this- ‘Cause they couldn’t have just said the oceans. They’d say seas ... this appears to be talkingMalcolm Collins: about something that is similar to the water that we’re talking about before. But, like, here I take it is this is where we transition to talking about what you and I talk about as water, okay?Simone Collins: Mm.Malcolm Collins: And again, not seeing any problems here so far, right? Because again, God doesn’t need to... If, if we assume that, like, God striking somebody with lightning is still God doing it even if it’s done through a natural process water forming on Earth’s surface water e- building the water cycle on the Earth’s surface, dry land appearing on Earth’s surface all of these things could be described as God doing it in just the same way, right?So nothing particularly affirms a scientific, disaffirms a scientific understanding here. Then we have “Then God said, ‘Let the land produce vegetation, seed-bearing plants, and trees. On the land bear fruit with seed in it according to the various kinds.’ And it [00:37:00] was so. The land produced vegetation, plants bearing seed according to their kinds, and trees bearing fruit with seed in accordance with their kind.And God saw it was good. And there was evening, and there was morning the third day.” Now, this is actually one of the worst parts- For this, which I think would surprise a lot of people, that this is one of the most out of line with our actual understanding of geological historySimone Collins: Because of the evening and morning part?No,Malcolm Collins: not evening- Or because we had,Simone Collins: like,Malcolm Collins: like early plants- Seed-bearing plants are a fairly modern evolutionary adaptationSimone Collins: Oh, interesting. Unless they’re, by seed-bearing they’re just r- referring to other forms of can reproduce, you know?Malcolm Collins: So first, you caught it. The word used for fruit here does not mean literal fruit in the way that we mean fruit.Mm. It appears that that is the way that this was conveyed to people 10,000 years ago. They likely thought it exclusively meant, like, what we consider and eat as fruit. Like, God’s- Yeah ... preparing the world for mankind’s inhabitation. But- But there were no otherSimone Collins: words for, like, capable of [00:38:00] reproduction, or self-reproducing, or whatever.Yeah, yeah. YeahMalcolm Collins: But the, the actual wording here can mean basically any form of reproduction where there’s some form of, like, edible side product. And I would even go further, and to say that this could be taken to more allegorically to describe the beginning of the life cycle. You’re talking about, when I see vegetation being talked about here there is no way they could have said pre-animal microbial life, right?Like, you simply aren’t gonna get that recorded in a 10,000-year-old document, okay? So you’re trying to explain pre-animal microbial life to people 10,000 years ago. Exactly. You’reSimone Collins: like, “Malcolm Collins: It’s kind of like vegetation. It, it, it has fruiting bodies,” which is what we still call parts of, like, the budding process with early microbial life.Speaker 11: It’s like somebody’s coming to me and they’re like, oh, this is clearly not supernaturally inspired [00:39:00] because the cave Jews didn’t write single cellular microbial life and early self-replicating RNA-like structures. Like how would they even conceptually have done that? That’s a literally insane level of requirement.Malcolm Collins: So I’m okay with that, and I would also even go so far as to say that this to me indicates that something like a vegetation or something like seed, seeds may exist earlier in the evolutionary timeline than we actually think it does. Ooh, that could be interesting. This would be one of the bigger pictures I’m gonna put intoSimone Collins: this, right?But I really, I don’t know. Like, in terms of my reading, when we come back to language and the limitations of language at the time, and other things that you read in the Bible, you know, about the way that seed is described, like- Mm-hmm ... spilled seed, et cetera, like humans don’t have seeds, do we? Yeah, that’s a good point.Yeah. Yeah, we spill them So it could just mean- So I’m really not reading this too literally when it’s like, “Oh, but there weren’t [00:40:00] technically seeds yet.” No, seed was a thing used for like- But the intentional- ... reproductive capabilities ...Malcolm Collins: the intentional mention, okay, so if we take plants to mean, like, early microbial life, right?Like, that’s- Uh-huh ... what they’re trying to describe. Yeah and the, the explicit mean- measuring of seed-bearing microbial life, right? Mm. That could bear fruit with seed in it- That could be describing the evolution of sexuality- Mm-hmm ... which would fit right here on the sexual, the, the evolutionary timeline.Yeah. And it would probably be the closest way you could... And it’s a very important evolutionary leap, probably one of the-Simone Collins: 100%, yeah ...Malcolm Collins: next to the evolution of intelligence, I’d say. Mm-hmm. Sexuality and intelligence are the two biggest evolutionary leaps we’re aware of. Yeah. Do- in terms of how, how they affect the evolutionary timeline.Intelligence basically allows you to evolve ideas faster than you can die. Sexuality allows you to remix genes and choose genetically fit individuals to have way, way, way more offspring than they would otherwise have. And it is a hugely important, happened at around this time. Yeah. That’s what I think that this is.Mm-hmm. [00:41:00] Okay, great. All right, all right. So that’s even a further- There we go ... clarification. Yeah.Speaker 14: Note here, if this is talking about the evolution of sexuality, that then definitely didn’t happen before the collision that created the moon. So we have to guess that when the stars in the sky and the sun and the moon being created in terms of a night and day cycle on Earth is talked about as having after this, it must mean an unobscured sky.Because there were periods of history going after that where you still had an obscured sky during periods, long periods, like eons of rain, for example, certain periods of Earth’s history.Malcolm Collins: Okay. Then next “And God said, ‘Let the water teem with living creatures and let birds fly above the earth and across the vault of the sky.’” And note here, like, birds are clearly... This is one that really gets me, where some [00:42:00] biblical literalist will say okay, well, the sky vault clearly, like, outer space exists, right?So the sky vault is not referring to just, like, the sky in the way, like, ancient people 10,000 years ago meant it. Like, we’re meant to take this literally.” Except when he talks about birds here he, he talks about them in the context of flying across the vault of the sky, right? So the birds are on the same plane as the sky vault, which is why I think our interpretation of this is more accurate.We’re to say, like, how would you communicate this to somebody 10,000 years ago? But anyway “And then God said, ‘Let the water teem with living creatures. Let the birds fly above and across the sky.’ So God created the great creatures of the sea and every living thing with which the water teems and moves about according to their kinds, and every winged bird according to its kind.And God saw that it was good. God blessed them and said, ‘Be fruitful and increase your number and fill the water and the seas, and let the birds increase on earth.’ And there was evening, [00:43:00] and that was the morning of the fifth day.” Now, this particular passage gets, like, heavily bastardized to try to argue for a- Sunday school.Like, they literally basically removed a really important line for this because they were embarrassed about it. Mm. Even though it actually... So they, I’ll, I’ll show you where the line was removed. So, “God created the great creatures of the sea.” That is not, that is not what it says at all. That’s not what it says.I mean, you could interpret it that way if you were trying to, in the same way that in the King James version they translate this word to mean whales, because whales was the biggest thing they were aware of at the time that lived in the sea. But that isn’t what the word would come close to traditionally meaning in Hebrew.So let’s go into this to go into, one, they say fish, then birds, right? Well, fish and something, and then birds. And we’ll go into what’s, what’s the thing that they said existed alongside, and not just fish, things in the sea. This is really [00:44:00] interesting, right? Because they could have said fish, right? Which would have been evolutionarily wrong.But instead what they say is, “The creatures of the sea.” That’s an interesting way to put something if you’re looking at, like, a Cambrian explosion or something like that after the evolutionary of sex- sexuality. But okay, let’s, let’s see what’s actually said in this line, ‘cause this line is, I think, really cool, and really affirming to me that there was some divine inspiration here.So, “And God created the great tannim and every living creature which moves which the waters swarmed according to their kinds and every winged bird.” So we need to make a few notes here. All right? So in, first it says, “God created the great tannim.” This is what is often interpreted as le- sea leviathans, right?In, in some older in- interpretations of texts. But that is not what it means in Hebrew. So we’ll go into what it means in Hebrew, and I also wanna point something out here which often people get wrong, is note the construction of this sentence. And this is also [00:45:00] true in Hebrew, which we’ll get to. It says nowhere in this sentence that the tannim live in the sea.It says nowhere in this sentence that they are an exclusively aquatic creature. It says, “And God created the great tannim and every living creature which moves in the waters and swarmed across according to their kinds.” Oh. The tannim are something different from what’s in the sea. Oh ... so let’s continue here The relative - clause, which the waters swarmed, grammatically - modifies living creatures that move.The tannim are introduced first with their own direct object marker. They’re connected by and to the rest. In Biblical Hebrew, the relative clause introduced by blank normally modifies the ne- sorry, blank is a word I can’t pronounce in Hebrew. Yeah. The nearest preceding noun or noun phrase that it logically could describe.Here, the nearest phrase is every living creature that moves. The tannim sit before [00:46:00] that, and thus are clearly not modified by the phrase purely aquatic. And note here this gets interesting, because what could tannim be? Like, what is it generally used to talk about in Hebrew?Simone Collins: Right,Malcolm Collins: actually. It is typically used to talk about dragons- Ohsea monsters- Oh ... crocodiles air, long- So just large reptilian animals. Yeah, but not necessarily reptiles. ‘Cause they could’ve said reptiles. They had a word for reptiles. They didn’t- They did ... say reptiles. Oh. Dinosaurs are not reptiles, okay? They said something that is large and reptile-like, kind of like a dragon, existed after the explosion of life within the sea, or along the same timeline as life within the sea, before birds.Simone Collins: Huh. Well. [00:47:00] Mm. That would work. Yes, that would work. That’s prettyMalcolm Collins: cool.Simone Collins: That is pretty cool. Mm-hmm.Malcolm Collins: By the way, if you’re wondering, Ezekiel 29:3 and 32:2 is where they refer to crocodiles and large river sea s- serpents. And then for m- mythical monsters, you see in Isaiah 27:1 and Psalms 24:13. And this reminds me- Like almswell, I saw, I don’t, I don’t speak these foreign tongues. That’s, that’s a Jew tongue. Lazarus. You’re trying to get me to speak like a Jew, okay? And I’m not gonna do that, all right? The parcel tongue, Simone. parcel tongue.Speaker 15: . I heard you speak in Parseltongue, snake language. I spoke a different language? But I didn’t realize.Malcolm Collins: I’m gonna end up... Th- this is how they get you. They get you with their words, saying it’s, it’s Bible talk.And it is Bible talk, but you gotta be careful, right? I’m joking here, by the way, people. Obviously everything I’m analyzing here is relevant in both a [00:48:00] Christian and Jewish context because they both have the same book. So both would be equally affirmed if there was any proof that this book did have a degree of divine inspiration.And again, if you wanna get into our thoughts on Judaism, see the question that breaks Judaism where we go way into like why. We actually thought about converting to Judaism. You can see in some of our earlier videos. But like as I dug into it, I just decided no, like I’m, I’m, I’m, I find Christianity more compelling when I look at the evidence.Simone Collins: We’re also a little too asocial hikikomori for for Judaism.Malcolm Collins: Well, yeah, and I also said like even if I converted to Judaism, I’d be a Misnagdim Jew. This is a Jew that doesn’t believe that Kabbalah should be widely taught and is against the Hasidics. Oh, totally. And that would immediately put me on the outs with al- like the Misnagdim basically lost the Jewish culture war a generation ago, right?Two generations ago. So there’s, there’s no like... Also Christ seems to have obviously been the Messiah. Sorry, I just have to go. This is a whole different thing. You can see our question [00:49:00] that breaks Judaism if you want to get into that. It actually becomes sort of absurd to think that Jesus wasn’t obviously the Messiah when you look at everything in context.Don’t mean to offend our Jewish listeners on this one, but yeah that’s not for this episode. But what’s really interesting about this word taninim is in various times people have attempted to retranslate it than to mean something other than what it literally means, and every time they have removed something that would authenticate the truth of the Bible, right?They’ve tried to change it to whales when it clearly doesn’t mean whales anywhere else. Hmm. They have tried to change it to just large sea animals when it clearly doesn’t mean just large sea animals anywhere else. Hmm. It means a large reptilian-like animal that is not specifically a reptile.I really c- that, that to me is just sort of shocking how spot on that is. But anyway, to continue here.Oh, by the way, fun side note that came from one of our fans that some people will [00:50:00] like. Regarding biblical animal timeline, there’s a fun side note about the word used to describe the creation of each group. The most... They mostly use the same verb, but there are two that use a different verb, man and the tenenimum.The King James Version translates the latter as whales, presumably because giant sea predators was the only point of reference for them. But apparently in Hebrew there was more a reptilian connotation they say, which is true. Okay. But what he’s saying is that there is enough linguistic wiggle room to argue that God had a special plan for giant reptiles, and now he’s wondering if there was a dinosaur bible somewhere.Where isSimone Collins: the lost dinosaur bible? I want, I want it.Malcolm Collins: Well, there’s actually a theory that there could’ve been a dinosaur civilization as big as our own. And, like, we just wouldn’t have any evidence of it if you look at how quickly, like, our own civilization would dissolve into the time record. Huh. If, like, we just stopped existing right now.Yeah. And so we don’t know that there wasn’t a large dinosaur civilization that lasted [00:51:00] maybe only 300, 400 years.Simone Collins: God’s failson, the dinosaurs. Right?Malcolm Collins: Okay. To continue here. And then God said, “Let the land produce living creatures according to their kinds, the livestocks, the creatures that move along the ground, the wild animals, each according to its kind,” and it was so.God made the wild animals according to their kinds, the livestock according to their kinds, and all the creatures that move along the ground according to their kinds, and God saw that it was good. So, what you’re gonna note in this is you can say, well, it’s saying all land animals came after things like birds and dinosaurs, which is, like, clearly not true, right?Like, people would be like, “There were some land animals before that.” And I’m gonna say, yeah, but you have to consider the context. God is talking to people 10,000 years ago, and he’s saying, “All of these things that you see, that you consider animals,” like your livestock animals, which are clearly referenced here.All of these came after the dinosaurs, the fish, and the [00:52:00] birds, which is true. Almost every land animal the ancient Hebrews would have been aware of evolved after dinosaurs and birds evolved. Yeah, yeah. So he’s right from an evolutionary timeline perspective. Absolutely. It still all tracks. Mm-hmm. Not, no lie detected here which again is astonishing for something this old.Simone Collins: Yeah. Well, and especially considering this is not some universal folk belief. This, this didn’t exist with other really old folklore traditions or religions. Yeah, if it wasMalcolm Collins: a universal or common folk belief, I would have a totally different perspective on this. Yes.Speaker 17: And when AI goes over this, it’ll always hedge and be like, “Well, he’s overstating just how much, , other religious beliefs or there’s no other religious belief or traditional story about how the world was formed that comes close to a scientific ordered understanding that we have today.” , And then I always tell the AI, “Okay, [00:53:00] find one, and I’m gonna give you wiggle room.Find one that comes one-tenth as close. Find one that comes one-fifth as close.” , AI can’t find one because there just isn’t one. This is really quite unique, and if this story wasn’t the white people story, everyone would be freaking out about the random tribe of wherever that has a creation story that almost exactly mirrors the evolutionary and historic timeline we’re aware ofMalcolm Collins: Okay. Then God said, “Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the sky and over the livestock and over all animals and over all the creatures that move along the ground.”So God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God He created them, male and female He created them. Just a techno puritan side note here that’s really only relevant for our interpretation of this story but the word created here, right here, could be, in Biblical Hebrew, you have something called the perfect conjuration or the qatal form of verbs.Huh. The [00:54:00] same type used in created in Genesis 1:27. It can describe future events, especially in prophetic context. This is often called the prophetic perfect. Hebrew verbs focus more on aspect completed versus ongoing actions in strict timeline, past, present, future. Hmm. The qatal perfect form views as an action as a whole completed from the speaker’s perspective.Oh. In prophecy, a future event that is so certain because God has decreed that it will happen. So you can look at something like Isaiah 53, where he says, “He was wounded,” and you get this conjuration, “for our transgressions. He was bruised for our inequities.” Written centuries before Jesus, and yet it’s written as in this, this future perfect form.Eh, then you have things like Isaiah 5:13, Numbers 24:17 where you get a similar conjuration here. A lot of people don’t care about this. This isn’t necessary for most people as they understand this story. Do you meanSimone Collins: conjugation? You mean conjugation.Malcolm Collins: Yeah, conjugation. What’d I say?Conjuration. Conjuration. But I getSimone Collins: [00:55:00] what you... I mean, ‘cause you’re sort of describing the God-like conjuring. But that’s super... I had never heard of that before. That’s fascinating. Yeah. A whole new- Well, itMalcolm Collins: can be read as just in the past tense if you want to. Okay. But it doesn’t have to be read in the past tense.The way Hebrew is constructed, it can be taken as something that is an ongoing process. God is creating mankind in His image, which is our religious- SoSimone Collins: cool. I like that much more ...Malcolm Collins: that is, that is being laid out of the prophecy here. Do I wanna go into this? Well, we go over a lot of this in the other track, but I can just quickly go into this. This is a track... Well, not even the track. The one where we go over the Adam and Eve story. Or, or I think it might be- Oh ... a track that we go over souls and stuff like this.Mm-hmm. But the key feature of the phrase where God is breathing life into man, I mean, this is in the second story, ‘cause you, you know, it would be like, “Didn’t God breathe life into man?” They use the term nephesh here which w- generally does not mean a disembodied soul or anything like that. It, it sort of means to animate a living creature.Hmm. So it’s basically like there was inanimate dirt, [00:56:00] right? And then through a plan, again, I’ve pointed out that the word here can be translated as plan, not form. So God, through a plan animated the dirt with this word nefesh. And so, if you see the turn here, man does not have a nefesh, man is a nefesh, in the way that the, the story is constructed here.And it means a living creature, a being or person. And so if we look at other places, like where it’s used we see it used throughout, like, as God is, is, is giving other creatures their life. We see similar words being used here to nefesh. So this isn’t, like, a unique human soul, unless you’re saying that He’s giving souls to all of the other animals in these particular scenes here.And it’s, it’s very clear because it first appears in the animals in chapter one, and then it’s deliberately reused for humans in 2:7. Like, this, this is not a coincidence. This is not a mistake on the original authors, which is actually kind of weird. And we also see the same word [00:57:00] used with something like Jeremiah 15:9, “She breathes out her nefesh,” her life, right?Oh. So it’s basically like your breath. When it leaves you, you die.Simone Collins: Mm-hmm.Malcolm Collins: And this, again, gets to one of the lines that we find to be very important from the Bible, just sort of as a closing here. This is Ecclesiastes 3:18-19. If I have any line from the Bible that’s, like, my favorite line “As for humans, God tests them so that they may see that they are like the animals.Surely the fate of human beings is that of the animals. The same fate awaits them both. As one dies, so does the other. All have the same breath. Humans have no advantage over animals. Everything is meaningless.”Meaningless, by the way, is a bad translation here. A better translation is everything is evanescent or life is evanescentMalcolm Collins: And the word used for all have the same breath here, do you wanna know where that word is used in Genesis?Where? It’s the word that is translated as spirit in the phrase, “The spirit of God was hovering over the waters.” Oh. So the same breath that the [00:58:00] animals have- Yeah ... that the humans have is used to describe the animating force of God in opposition to the formless darkness that existed at the beginning of time, and that was in constant movement when you have the word hovering here.And a lot of people, we go into that Ecclesiastes line a lot more in some of our tracks if you’re interested. It’s, it’s very clear about what it means because it, it goes over a series of things where it goes over, like, hubristic things that people think, and then it contrasts them with what is actually true.And this is one of the... It starts with the hubristic, what man thinks, that man is completely separate from this world, and then it says, “But man is tested.” And you see this framing over and over again in this section. Like, it’s, it’s not vague, th- this is meant to be a- No, you really are tested to see if you are so arrogant as to think that you are truly distinct from the natural world and from animals, which we then take into this reading here of Genesis.Yeah. So again, spicy episode by [00:59:00] us. I guess I’ll put it in our religious stuff. It’s not that spicy compared to our other ones ‘cause I can’t- I love it. I love it ... explainSimone Collins: crazy religion. I, I just, I remember, like, really thinking- Oh ... “Huh,” when I was reading Genesis, and going into it in, in greater depth with you is so much fun.I have to run. Go. I love you. I love you, too. Bye, gorgeous. Bye. All right, I’m hitting record. Oh, you beat me to it.Malcolm Collins: All right, I’ll just get started here.Simone Collins: I’m, yeah, I’m r- I’ve been looking forward to this all day, so thank you.Speaker 19: Yeah, look at that Motion? Yeah, we’re motion liking that. You think so? Look, I’m floating. And I’m Off you go. Sail away. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit basedcamppodcast.substack.com/subscribe

Malcolm and Simone Collins dive deep into one of the most paradoxical political alliances of our time: the surprising partnership between modern progressivism and Islamism.Why do groups that claim to champion LGBTQ+ rights, feminism, and secularism repeatedly align with a ideology that often rejects those very values? From the Iranian Revolution to "Queers for Palestine," this episode explores the ideological overlaps, cognitive dissonance, and shared strategic goals that make this alliance stronger than many realize.Topics include:• The "oppressor vs oppressed" framework• Treatment of homosexuality vs. gender transition in Muslim societies• Shared hostility toward Western civilization• Why suffering of "their side" is often irrelevant to both movements• Historical betrayals and future implicationsA sobering and unfiltered analysis of modern political bedfellows.Episode TranscriptMalcolm Collins: Hello, Simone. I’m excited to be here with you today. Today we are going to be discussing Islam and the left, which have been bedfellows throughout recent history. Obviously they were very strong bedfellows during the Iranian revolution, which we will discuss how that ended up happening. And they all were then killed afterwards.It was very much like the sheep siding with the wolves, only for the wolves to feast on the sheep as soon as they got what they wanted. B- pretty witless, and I think could be a sign of... Like, obviously there’s the famous picture of the two young progressive girls in a car cheering the rise of the new ayatollah, and both of...One of them was killed by his regime, and the other one lived their life as a refugee.And so, you know, not good for them historically when they’ve done this. But I wanted to better understand why and how these two things are compatible. And people can just say, “Well, they aren’t compatible, Malcolm,” and I’m like, surely [00:01:00] progressives don’t think that, right?Like, surely progressives have looked into this and have some sort of thesis I just haven’t taken the time to understand. So what I did, and what, what I, what I wanted this piece to be, which unfortunately it can’t be, and I’ll explain why in just a second-Simone Collins: Oh ...Malcolm Collins: is I wanted to go through on some sort of, like, well-reasoned progressive piece on why Islamism and progressive values make such good bedfellows.Simone Collins: Okay.Malcolm Collins: And that we would go through this piece and I would explain, “Well, this doesn’t really work here,” or, “They actually have some points here.” And very, very interestingly I could not find any such piece.Simone Collins: What? How... That seemsMalcolm Collins: implausible. Right? I assumed they must be out there everywhere, right?Like, I was like, they must have, like, taken the time to, like, grok, digest, and explain this.Simone Collins: Yes.Malcolm Collins: Right? Because it seems like a contradiction, and there were a [00:02:00] lot of progressive pieces- Well,Simone Collins: The Free Press tried to m- to make an explanation of this.Malcolm Collins: No, they didn’t. No, they didn’t. What The Free Press did, ‘cause I read that article, that was one of the ones I read in preparation for this-Simone Collins: OkayMalcolm Collins: Is they tried to, they basically just said, “This happened before with the Islamic revolution,” and then they went over a few things from that. But that wasn’t, that didn’t really explain why the progressives thought this was okay.Simone Collins: Okay, so you’re just talk- Yeah, I guess your, your argument is that isn’t an explanation, it’s only a history of the alliance.It doesn’t explain the underlying reason for the alliance.The, oh my God, when you move around your room, it sounds like your room is the Star Wars trash compactor. Like SoMalcolm Collins: so, I ended up running ahead and being like, “Okay, let’s see if I can find any of these,” right?And what I did find, so I’ll go over what I did find a number of. I found, like, six or seven of these. And there appear to be near infinity more, is progressives muldering over the fact [00:03:00] that people thought that they were unaware that Muslims... Like, like making fun of them when, like, Netanyahu said that gays for Gaza is like KFC K- fried chicken, or chicken for KFC, right?Like, and they, they really hate conservatives making fun of them for this. Huh. Okay ... being unaware that in these groups that they say they wanna help, they do want to kill gay people. Like, that’s in the Quran. You know, you stone somebody for being gay. That’s Sharia law, right? Like, this is part of their tradition.Hmm. It happens regularly across these countries.Speaker 2: What would happen to a gay couple in Gaza?Speaker 3: Executed according to Islamic law. Islam doesn’t endorse gays. Islam doesn’t endorse homosexuality. Just like Canada doesn’t endorse a lot of things. So would you like to see Sharia law in Canada replace Canadian law? At some point, it will. . One day we can have a Muslim majority nation here in Canada.Right In your face!Malcolm Collins: And what those articles did, which was very frustrating to me because it didn’t provide a [00:04:00] logical explanation, they basically just said, “Netanyahu’s government has said homophobic things as well.” And that was obviously very unsatisfying for me because I was just like, well, I mean, yes, it’s a right-wing government, but, well, like, when you say said homophobic things, like he said he’s comfortable being called a homophobe, he doesn’t support pride marches, he doesn’t support you know, gay stuff being taught to kids.He, That is not the same thing as having a government policy of murdering gay people, okay? But they’re sort of trying to equivocate the two. Or they will note that there have been some gay people who have been killed in Israel by members of the general public for bigoted reasons, right? And they seem to not be able to tell or assume that their audience won’t care that that’s different from something being carried out as a government policy.Mm-hmm. E.g. just [00:05:00] random homophobes versus the government will kill you. I mean, they’re, they’re obviously very different, but the core thing that I basically realized is they see being mildly... And I guess this makes sense if you look at their wider actions. They see being mildly uncomfortable with gay people or uncomfortable with trans people or disagreeing with their ideology as equivalent to a government policy of institutionalized killing of gay and trans people.But- But think about their actions and this makes sense. When they say that like, “Oh, Trump’s government’s going to get rid of me.” Like remember when Trump was elected and a bunch of gay people were like basically saying, “Oh, Trump, we’re gonna be eradicated now that Trump has come into power.” Trans people being like, “Trans people in the United States are gonna be mass genocided after this.”They talked about this, like that this was something that was going to happen to them. And I think that we as conservatives were not listening to that. We heard it and we thought it was funny, [00:06:00] but we didn’t understand that actually in their minds these two things are functional equivalents. Slightly disagreeing with them and or saying, “I personally would not live this lifestyle,” and saying, “We’re gonna build a government policy of killing you.”And that’s why they have reacted so harshly. That’s why they keep doing these assassination attempts and stuff like that, as I’ve explained in other videos, because they think that this mild disagreement is the same as murder.Hmm. Hmm.And then that justifies everything that comes out of this. But I wanna get into where these two things are surprisingly okay.Like, why do Muslims keep siding with the left, right? Like, why, why do they appear to make good bedfellows? And at first I thought, well, maybe there’s some policies in Muslim texts, because I, I found a few articles arguing this. These were from Muslims trying to explain to progressives why they should be friendly with Muslims.Oh. [00:07:00] And they went over Muslim teachings trying to argue that Muslim teachings are inherently socialist.Simone Collins: Oh.Malcolm Collins: This comes down to things like the zakat which is one of the five pillars, which means that you’re typically donate around 2.5% of wealth assets above a threshold to the poor, needy, debtors, or travelers.This is... I mean, it is socialist-like, but Christians have just as many parts of the Bible that they could point to and say “This is socialist-like.” You also, Have sorry. So but then you can say, “Okay, well, if this was the case, can we look at the Gini coefficient of Muslim majority countries to see if it’s higher or lower than equivalent other countries?”And Gini coefficients of Muslim countries are enormously higher than other countries. They are some of the-Simone Collins: Famously so, yes ...Malcolm Collins: yeah, some of the most unequal societies on earth. So then the question can be, okay, why do they... Because I don’t wanna ask, like, from a right-wing perspective how are these things the same.Like, as right-wingers we can say [00:08:00] they’re both totalitarian in the way they attempt to approach things. They’re both very fascist in the way they attempt to approach things. They both hate Western civilization. They both, you know, like, we can, we can throw all of this out here, right? But to the left, those explanations aren’t really gonna hold as much, right?So where do the left, like, really actually agree with them and find this co-solidarity? One is the issue of them killing gay people actually isn’t a big an issue to modern leftists as you would think.Simone Collins: Explain this to meMalcolm Collins: Okay, so if you look at Muslim countries one of the things that they do, that they’re known for doing, is gender transition, right?Where if somebody is same-sex attracted, they are pressured into gender transition, and then they just live as the gender, and then that’s not gay anymore, right? You know, this is something that’s common in places like Iran. Now, not all Muslim countries do this. We’ll get to the other ones in a bit. But also...But I guess I’ll just come out [00:09:00] and say it. If you go to other Muslim countries, like Afghanistan and Iraq, they have extremely high rates of same-sex relationships. They just- Right ... don’t contextualize them as gay. You j- you can still be killed for being gay, but a lot of people are gay.Simone Collins: So they’re, like, having gay sex, but no homo gay sex.Malcolm Collins: Well, yeah. It is, it, it’s, it’s typically of a very specific kind. It is either with underage boys, and that makes it not gay.Simone Collins: No homo.Speaker 5: A private party is underway in Kabul. In Afghanistan, women are not allowed to dance in public, so boys are dressed as girls and made to perform. The ancient practice of Bacha Bazi, or dancing boys, is widespread, involving orphans or boys from poor families as young as 10 years oldThey are often sexually abused and raped. [00:10:00] This is child trafficking. The boys are abducted and taken from one province to another. The children are kept in the company of powerful armed commanders and forced to become dancing boys.Malcolm Collins: Or it’s with people who have very large age gaps. So-Simone Collins: It’s almost like, you know how if you multiply two negative numbers, you get a positive number, right?Malcolm Collins: Mm-hmm.Simone Collins: Right. And so, like, if you, like, combine PDF files with, with, with homosexuality, it becomes- It’s finevirtuous.Malcolm Collins: Yeah, it cancels out. Yeah. They’re like, “No, it’s, it’s...” I’ve, I’ve joked before. They’re like, “No, it’s fine. I d-Simone Collins: ItMalcolm Collins: cancels out ... I know I hooked with a guy, but he was underage, so it’s not a problem.” Yeah,Simone Collins: I get it. I get it. Sure.Malcolm Collins: Yeah. And, and you see this, actually. We see pictures of, quote-unquote, “gays” from these countries and the gay, the, the younger gay is, like, in their 20s.The, the older one typically looks like they’re in their 60s or, or, or something, right? Oh,Simone Collins: ah.Malcolm Collins: Like, you typically see very [00:11:00] big age... The age range gap goes up as they get older.Speaker 7: Basically it works like this, or appears to. , You would say something like, “Well, okay, so they sleep with underage gay kids, , but what about when they become teens or something like that? Who are they sleeping with?” And the answer is, is there enough of an age gap so that we in the West would find it creepy?Then it’s okay. If there’s not that much of an age gap, then it’s not okayMalcolm Collins: But one- That isSimone Collins: so gross ...Malcolm Collins: what I’m saying is, is not all Muslim societies are as... And as to why you get this phenomenon, I had a whole video I was going to do on this.It’s mostly because the genders are so separated that,Simone Collins: The opportunity is not there for womenMalcolm Collins: Yeah, basically the... Well, yeah, and they mostly socialize with other men, and the prohibitions on doing it with minors aren’t very strong in these countries or not a- acted upon often. And so, just because that’s all they’re interacting with they, they form these relationships more often.You know, if you’ve had Muslim male friends, you know that they’re more handsy [00:12:00] often than other people. You know, like, hand-holdy and stuff like that, when in our society we see that as romantically coded. And they’re like, “Oh, it’s not romantically coded in our society.” And it’s like, well, I mean, it kinda is romantically coded in your society.You just don’t frame it as romance when you have male-male sex, right? So one, you, you do have that phenomenon which normalizes gayness in the left when they see this, right? They, they ignore all the problematic parts of this and it normalizes it. But then the bigger point is, is even if you take the societies where you have first gender transition, which is okay in most Muslim societies,Simone Collins: there we, there we go.Malcolm Collins: Oh, you got it right in the middle I made a little middle shot right here.Simone Collins: You got it bullseye.Malcolm Collins: Yeah. AllSimone Collins: right, keep up theMalcolm Collins: practice. I can do a little closer so you can see. Look.Okay,but the second issue on the gay thing is that if you have forced gender transition, and it’s normal in a Muslim country, that means that these countries have an implicit level of trans inclusivity that you may not even see in Western society.Oh, yeah.Simone Collins: Yeah,Malcolm Collins: yeah,Simone Collins: yeah,Malcolm Collins: yeah, yeah. And [00:13:00] famously trans people go to Iran to get cheap surgeries because they can do that there. And then once they’re trans, you know, it’s okay, they’re safe, et cetera, right? Now what’s fascinating about this is if Muslim societies can be argued to be okay to gender transition, right?It actually doesn’t particularly matter in the eyes of the modern left if they kill gay men. Because gay men are seen as kind of right-leaning these days. Like they’re they’re gay white men, as they say, are the new white men, you know, within these spaces.Simone Collins: Yeah.Malcolm Collins: Because you have this Olympics of oppression hierarchy that they’ve sort of built among themselves.Simone Collins: And you have Trump’s big gay White House on top of it.Malcolm Collins: Mm-hmm. This is a New York Times article where they’re pointing out just how many of the leading Republicans are gay now, and it’s a lot of leading Republican staffers are gay now more than in the Democratic administration. And that’s just the Republican Party now.We can get into why. I, you know, is this a good idea for the Republican alliance or whatever? But it is a fact. [00:14:00] You know, our, our best get out to voters like Scott Pressler are gay. Our, the biggest donors are gay Peter Thiel and stuff like that, right? Like, it’s a very gay party now. And as a part of this, the left has sort of kicked out gays at least male gays from the wider leftist coalition, or at least they don’t care about them that much.So if you are coming at this with a ‘90s Republican mindset and you say, “Don’t you care that they’re killing gays?” You may think that they’re undergoing some huge level of cognitive dissonance when they’re like not part- you know, not particularly, right? Like, “I’m, I’m more interested in these things that Israel is doing.”And you may think, oh, they’re, they’re sublimating this, or they’re not really engaging with it. And what you may not be grokking is they don’t really care. You might as well have gone to them and said, “Do you care that they are killing white males minus one?” Right? Like minus one oppression point, right?And they’re gonna be like, “No, of course I don’t care that they’re killing white males.” Do you care that they’re killing Jews? No, of course I don’t care that they’re [00:15:00] killing Jews, right? We’ve also gotta keep in mind that as soon as October 11th happened, and we’ve gotta keep this in mind in terms of the wider, like, leftist mindset, so we sort of check in where they are.This is when they had, like, brutally murdered over 100 people at, like, a peace rally, right? You know, right outside of Gaza that was a bunch of teenagers, right? They had the big musical peace protest with Gaza.Simone Collins: Oh, right. Yeah, that’s, yes. It wasn’t a protest, it was a concert.Malcolm Collins: It was a, it was, it was, it was for peace.They were trying to, it was for- Yeah, itSimone Collins: was a concert for peaceMalcolm Collins: that was happening onSimone Collins: October- InMalcolm Collins: promotion of, yeah. So they, they raided it. They took the women as, as s- s- smack slaves. They raped them to death. Like, it was absolutely brutal, absolutely terrifying. But on the same day that this had happened, and on the day after this had happened, before Israel had tried any sort of response yet there were parties at American college campuses cheering, and you, and you can find videos of this. We talked about this whenSimone Collins: itMalcolm Collins: happened.Simone Collins: Oh, right. The attack.Malcolm Collins: Yeah, cheering the October 11th attack. They were excited about October 11th. Leftists were, right? They [00:16:00] saw this as a fundamentally good thing that this had happened. And so, and this was their side that was being attacked, right?Like I’m not, I’m not saying Jews are their side. I’m saying the, the peace-going teens for giving Gaza more rights who were a big part of the casualties in this attack. And they just didn’t care. And I think that this comes to a second point which is important to note, and it’s actually a huge overlap between the two groups.They really don’t care about any degree of suffering, pain, or death that happens to people who are similar to them or share their value system if it couldn’t be seen as serving the greater cause. So to them, as is the case with many Muslims, so many Muslims don’t particularly care about what’s really going on in Gaza.They don’t care. I mean, obviously, or they’d take Gazan refugees when not a single Muslim majority country has done that, right? So why aren’t they taking Gaza refugees? Well, the reason they aren’t taking Gaza refugees is ‘cause they, well, one, because they keep trying to kill everyone when they get [00:17:00] to a country and start a revolution.But two they, they, it, it’s more than just not taking Gaza refugees. They are intentionally inflaming the situation with Gaza. Like consider Iran. Iran has been repeatedly, up until we started dealing with them, inflaming the situation with Gaza, inflaming the situation with you know, Israel and its, its, like Lebanon, its various neighbors which they know makes things qualitatively worse for the Muslims living in these regions, Muslims that share their political agenda, that lead to them being indiscriminately killed.But that is a complete non-factor in their sort of global geopolitical calculation. Suffering of people who are like them is irrelevant, and this is the, something that the two groups share. Another thing that you have to keep in mind is from the position of modern leftists There really isn’t a suffering calculation that they’re making in regards to the things that they’re doing.It’s the other side has to lose, our side [00:18:00] has to win, and then they just determine who is their side. Like, fundamentally, that’s what they care about at the end of the day. How does the Islamists end up looking like it’s their side? Because they are clearly in opposition to what they are opposed to, which, I mean, at this point you can only broadly say I think what most people would think of as Western civilization, but they found other words for it.When they say the patriarchy, what they really mean is Western civilization, right? They don’t mean really a system of ma- because it’s not anymore a system of males at the top. I mean, women are predominantly the ones graduating from college at this point. If you look at lower professions, they’re overwhelmingly in managerial positions much more than men are.If you look at younger people, women out earn men, right? Like, they are the dominant faction. So if, if this is the case, then why do they still want this destroyed? Because what they were really keying to was this broader idea of Western civilization, which makes them very, very [00:19:00] aligned with each other.And then to go to the, the next point here, which I thought was really interesting, is socialism more broadly. There is nothing about a Muslim coming to power where they would not take a socialist stance. Any Mus- by the way, any thoughts before I go further, Simone?Simone Collins: No, I find this very interesting.Please go on.Malcolm Collins: So suppose I am a Muslim coming into power, right? Like I, w- we’ll go back to the imam, right? You know, I’m, I’m trying to take over Iran or something like this. I want to get support from people in other communities, right? Now, I can’t go out there and say, “I plan to kill gay people,” or something like that, or, “I plan to implement Sharia law.”That’s not gonna do well in the West. That’s not gonna do well at a whatever rally or anything like that. But if I go out there and I’m just like, “Look the system as it is set up is currently in the favor of rich people,” and by this, you know, they’re thinking Zionists and stuff like this, [00:20:00] capitalists.Again Jews typically fight for capitalism historically. People just ... The people who think Jews are, like, pro-communism are ... The, the it is true that they were disproportionately represented within the Russian communist movement. However, they were proportionally significantly lower representative than they were in capitalist governments.Right. So if, if b- you contrast, like, the number of Jews in US politics versus the number of Jews in leading positions in the communist government in Russia, dramatically lower. And of course, the communist Russian government then attempted to kill all the Jews, right? Like, one of Marx’s books was, like, The Problem of the Jew, right?Like, it li- literally, like, that’s ... They’re very clear about not liking Jews in leftist philosophy. And so these two things sort of aligning, like, we want to attack business interests, we want to attack big business we want to attack the Jew, and I think that this is why this is, in part, become more common in leftist thought right now.That [00:21:00] immediately appeals to the Islamist as well, right? Now the Islamists can say, “Oh yes, we’ll do redistribution of some kind. That’s within Islamic values.” And the leftist hears socialism, right? Now, of course, when they have used leftists to get into power, they have not enacted anything that looks like what we would consider socialism anywhere else, like in Iran or something like that, because they don’t really care about these things, but they don’t have a problem saying them, right?Like, they’re not gonna say to the leftists, “I’ll support gay sex,” or something like that. But they will say to the leftists, “I will support your economic agenda.” And we’ve actually seen, you know, even recently in America, you can look at, like Zohran Mamdani coming into power, right? He has pushed much harder after coming into power on the pro Islamization of Manhattan than he’s pro- If you look at, like, the czars that he’s put in power, these people who have said, you know, really horrible things, globalizing patata, like kill, in, in patata.We- like, “I hate white people. White people should be killed,” stuff like that. [00:22:00] Mentifada. Okay ... into major positions within his government, right?And, and they’ve begun to implement their plans in regards to sort of like a broader Islamic mass migration agenda. Whereas they haven’t actually done anything in regards to, or not very successfully, in regards to his social programs.Like his grocery stores, you know, they’re, they’re barely moving ahead at this point, right? And this is something we repeatedly see. You know, they appeal to the leftists to get the vote, but they don’t actually care about the leftist economic policies that much. And the leftists, I want to tell you the, the big secret truth about modern leftism, they don’t particularly care that their social policies and economic policies get implemented either.Once- Hmm ... they, th- their real goal is the destruction of the civilizational system- Mm-hmm ... so that they can build something new. So, they’re, they don’t, they don’t think to hold to account. They’re like, “Zohran, where’s all this leftist stuff you said you were gonna do?” They don’t actually care about that, because that was never really the point.They basically know they’re on team, and team is the destruction of Western civilization. [00:23:00]Simone Collins: Hmm.Malcolm Collins: Or at least you know, right now sort of directionally the destruction of Western civilization. And I think that this is where we can see why the gripers have so naturally slideed into this alliance. And, and Nick Fuentes’ whiter faction has, you know, recently s- coming out and saying, “I’m a moderate non-woke Democrat.”And again, think about where I’m pointing out that the Islamists and the leftists actually fit in really well, right? So they come in here and they talk in the eyes of, like, Karl Marx, like, the problem of the Jew, the Jewish because, you know, they can’t do usury, they can’t do interest charges.Actually, Christians aren’t supposed to, either, but they don’t, nobody follows that anymore. Wait,Simone Collins: really? Oh.Malcolm Collins: Yeah, Christians, or at least historically from the Catholic Church, we’re not supposed to use usury or interest rates at all. And then people realize that’s, like, economically retarded and leads to really bad downstream effects for society.Which it does, by the way. It’s really bad for society to not use interest rates because then you don’t have a reason to invest. And when a society doesn’t invest in its continued production, it advances at a much slower rate which is one of the [00:24:00] reasons why Islamic countries are so poor. Well, many other bigger reasons, but back to this point.The point here being is, is they come out there and they say to somebody like Nick Fuentes, “Look, I am against the greedy businessman code Jew,” and he knows what they’re saying code Jew, right? And he thinks, “Well, what’s really important to my agenda right now?” Right? Mm. It is seeing Jews removed from positions of power, right?And so I can work with Islamists on that. And more than that, if you listen to what is Nick Fuentes’ broader goal for Western civilization it is to see it collapse. Now, his belief is that after it collapses, after the movement of right-wing party collapses, that he will be able to build a new right-wing party in his vision, a new version of Western civilization in his vision which by the way is, is, is very explicitly not something that most of his followers would want, but they just don’t listen to what he’s saying.It doesn’t really matter. The point is, is he won’t be able to do it. He doesn’t have the numbers. Even if he did [00:25:00] create the collapse that he wanted to create, whatever was built from the ashes would not be Fuentes-y, and it wouldn’t be Catholic-y either. If you look at those parties right now and their relative political influence and the, the growing or shrinking of their political influence, and the people who are like, “Oh, aren’t a lot of, like, online influencers joining the Catholics?”I- just as a side note here, One, as I pointed out before, Catholics lose eight converts for every one they get. Protestants lose two converts for every one they get. And even with the recent movement of online influencers into Catholicism-Simone Collins: Not converts, right? Do you just mean eight practicing Catholics for every new convert they win?Malcolm Collins: Yes, they lose eight practicing for, on the statistics. Okay. But this has changed a bit. Re- people can say, “Oh, maybe it’s a bit better now.” The problem is, is that a lot of online influencers, and this, that we’ve seen recently are coming out as more explicitly anti-Catholic which wasn’t a thing for a while.So an example of this is Redeemed Zoomer did a video basically coming out as anti-Catholic.Simone Collins: Really? [00:26:00] Wow.Malcolm Collins: And he used to be a very pro-Catholic streamer. And basically what he said was that in the online space, what he has realized is that the way that the Catholics have treated him when he has made mild criticisms of their religion really reminds him of when he was a progressive, the way other wokes treated him.And he realized that a lot of the stereotypes that he had heard about Catholics from Southern Baptists and stuff like this he had initially discounted because he was being overly rosy to Catholics, and he didn’t realize how aggressively totalizing a, at least a, a portion of online Catholic culture was.And they, they took over his subreddit at one point, basically, and like, were using it to attempt to convert people. And he, he, he basically said, which I thought was an interesting way to put it was he decided to go into Catholic culture and instead of having his faith in whether he was a Protestant shaken, he ended up having his faith in whether or not the Pope was actually the Antichrist shaken.Simone Collins: Wow, okay.Malcolm Collins: So pretty big. [00:27:00] And Redeemed Zoomer is a very nice and understanding person. So what I’m saying is we’re seeing shifting tides around where this is going in a lot of directions right now. And this is a new shift that we’re beginning to see. But the point being is, okay, so I’m a Nick Fuentes.I wanna see a collapse of Western civilization. Directionally, the Islamists and the progressive both are on point for me. I am excited when negative stuff happens to Western countries, ‘cause that brings me closer to the point where I think I’m gonna be able to sweep up all the cards off the table, the point of collapse.Hmm. Which is, again, comical. He just doesn’t have the numbers, the technology, the money or even his allies with cultural factions. Like, even if the Catholics wanted to do this, they would be scuttled by the Vatican at this point, right? Like, if they ever did begin to build a large movement a la what Nick wants to do, the Vatican would immediately do everything in their power to denounce it and demoralize it as we’ve already seen them do through...And people can say, “Well, people just wouldn’t listen to the Vatican.” It’s like everyone wouldn’t listen to the Vatican, but enough would for it to cause [00:28:00] some damage especially if they attempted to sort of- engage their on the ground forces that are still loyal to them in countries like America, which have a lot of power.Yeah. And can do a lot to scuttle, especially a movement where your you know, foot soldiers are going to mass, and these people control what’s being said on those pulpits. Because you cannot move around churches as easily as a Catholic as you can as a Protestant. So if they ever decided to go scorched earth against this, they absolutely could.Mm. This was actually really fascinating. We were talking with one of our Catholic fans about this, and they pointed out how you, you don’t go to, like, the parish you like best as a Catholic. That’s seen as, like, really bad. And to prevent you from performing too strong an attachment with any one preacher whatever they call it in Catholicism, they switch them out regularly, like if one becomes too popular.Whereas with Protestants, you typically go wherever is most popular for you, which at the end of the day gives the Vatican ultimate control over what’s happening, even at a local level. But the point I’m making here is there actually isn’t ideologically, like in terms of [00:29:00] anything they want in the moment, any particularly large point of conflict between the modern far leftists, the Islamists, and the griper.Like, they’re all completely on message, on team in regards to what they want to see accomplished which I think is really interesting. Thoughts before I go further, Simone?Simone Collins: This is more sobering than I thought it would be.Malcolm Collins: Yeah. And by the way, if you want to understand, like, what they’re saying, so this is Judith Butler, by the way, at UC Berkeley.And this was about Israel and Hezbollah, right? So, Judith Butler is, like, leftist icon, right?Simone Collins: Yeah.Malcolm Collins: Yes, understanding Hamas, Hezbollah as social movements that are progressive, that are left, that are part of the global left is extremely important. This does not stop us from being critical of certain dimensions of both movements.It doesn’t stop those of us who are interested in non-violent politics from raising the question of whether there are other options besides violence. So again, a critical, important [00:30:00] engagement... sorry, entanglement. I mean, I certainly think it should be entered into the conversation on the left. I similarly think that boycotts and divestment procedures are, again, an essential component of the resistance movement.Mm-hmm. So very, very pro this stuff. And, and note they have been in the past. So here I’m gonna go over Richard Falk, a Princeton professor of international law who met with Khomeini during his exile outside of Paris. And this was the evaluation he offered of Khomeini in The New York Times, by the way, so mainstream leftist publications.Yeah. Keep in mind, this is the guy who ended up mass executing all the leftists who supported him in his country.Simone Collins: Right.Malcolm Collins: Just so you understand how little this matters to them. And the left just does not care that this happened. It do- When you try to bring this up with them, you are losing, because they don’t care that they persecute people like them.It is irrelevant to their world perspective. So to continue, he t- he wrote, “To suppose that Ayatollah Khomeini is dissembling seems almost beyond belief. His political style is to express his real views [00:31:00] defiantly and without apology, regardless of consequences. He has little incentive suddenly to become devious for the sake of American public opinion.Thus, the deception of him as a fanatical reactionary and a bearer of crude prejudices , “Seems certainly and happily false. What is encouraging is that his entourage of close advisors is uniformly composed of moderate, progressive individuals.” But they both mean this and do not care that it is not true once it is proven not true because they do not care when people are killed.And I think that that’s fundamentally the most important thing to note about this. To them, people being killed are just like scorecards for their larger system, and if you come into an argument with them focused on the people being killed they won’t care. If you go into an argument with them like what actually happens for civilization, right, like 100 years, 200 years if [00:32:00] these groups gain power they don’t care.And this is why, you know, when you point out things like, well, if you shut down the AI center, right, like this is gonna have enormous economic consequences and groups that like we have, have, have social policies and social values that you would hugely disagree with-Mm-hmm ...like the CCP, although they don’t seem to be aware that like the CCP is anti-gay as well, much more anti-gay than the United States they, they anti a lot of the things.But again, but again, they don’t care about anti-gay because anti-gay doesn’t matter. What matters is the trans agenda, right? At this point. And this is again where I think it makes sense for conservatives to ally with gays where we can, even if we can say, “Well, we disagree with your lifestyle we won’t in law, in institution prevent you from living it.”I, I, I think that that’s an easy compromise that we can make and get a large faction on team that has been abandoned by the left and is, if I’m honest, disproportionately productive. If you look at I, I don’t know why this is the case, but if you look at top designers, top chefs, [00:33:00] top a, a lot of things, they’re often gay males.They’re, they’re pretty good at design and influence. So if you wanna win the entertainment war preventing gay males from working on team is, is, is not a really bad not a really great strategy. And I think that this, what, what I have been incredibly heartened about in sort of like where all this is going, because yeah, you can say this is really sad, is that the wider movement really seems to be shaping out the way I predicted it would shape out.And I mean, it was wild when I first sort of made these predictions or were thinking about this, is that the Groyper faction has moved to solidly form with this leftist alliance, right? Like they just wanna tear down society, you know, and, and stick it to the Jews, and they don’t really care about anything else that happens.Whereas the, Part of the right, like the stodgy old right they still have voting power, but they don’t really have any control within institutions, like within the administration or anything like that.Simone Collins: Yeah.Malcolm Collins: And they, they vote and [00:34:00] whatever. They’ll eventually die off. A lot of their streamers and stuff like that used to have relevance, but they’ve gotten a lot smaller.We’ve done a number of videos on, like, what’s the real size of a lot of these people. And then in terms of the, the tech right, which is our side, and people will say, “Well, that’s not even right-wing.” Like, when people strongly assert that Asmongold is not right-wing, I’m like, “He is the very heart of what is the modern right.”Yeah ... like it’s j- that’s literally like cutting out someone’s heart and being like, “This isn’t Brad.” It’s like, whoa, put that back in there, buddy. That’s like the core of Brad. Well, I mean, in terms of the new right sort of media ecosystem, it, it comes downstream of Asmongold. And note here if you look at As- like, what does Asmongold think about, like, forming a coalition in which gays can be members, but not necessarily, like, privileged members or something like that?Or, or th- we don’t have to conce- concede to their lifestyle or choose their stuff. He’d be like, “Yeah, that’s totally normal,” right? And it’s not just Asmongold where you see this growth. [00:35:00] It’s the entire ecosystem from Leaflet to Rev to Nux to Clownfish TV to Bearing to, We’re increasingly seeingThis wider ecosystem both become more cohesive in terms of a intellectual force, and I think develop a internal coherent philosophy that is more than just anti-wokism. And I think this coherent philosophy we’re actually seeing a lot more. Leaflet has done a good job. I mean, her brand of, like stellar humanism is so simple to understand.Yeah. And so easy to be like, “What I care about is long-term human flourishing and the c- conquering of, you know, our manifest destiny within space.” Yeah, it’sSimone Collins: very elegant with its simplicity.Malcolm Collins: The- very simple, very elegant. Everyone can just be like, “I don’t care.” Like w- when we have a [00:36:00] disagreement and w- and the reason why that very simply framed philosophy is useful, is it’s like when we have a disagreement, we have this shared point of does it hurt long-term human potentiality?Does it limit long-term human potentiality?Exactly,yeah. And so, you know, whether it’s a religious disagreement, or whether it’s a, a disagreement on strategy, or whether it’s a disagreement on economic policy, it doesn’t fall down into this standard because within the ri- wider, like, new right coalition we have very diverse perspectives, as I put up.I mean, like Shoe0nHead is very clearly in the coalition, and Kami Mommy, right? Yeah. And sh- for people who d- weren’t sure about her, I mean, she did a stream with Smug Alana, okay? Like, in terms of, like the Vtuber where, you know, you got your Kirishas, your Smug Alanas, your Banana whatever her name is.And then you’ve got the growth of, which I think is going to be increasingly important, this is where I’m seeing it, the Skyrest Cinematic Universe. Yes. I think things like this, the using AI entertainment as a [00:37:00] cultural weapon in a society that has begun to retreat from this is going to be so powerful for the next generation.Especially with kids and stuff like that, getting them involved in this stuff is going to be a really powerful way to sort of push things forwards. And the other thing I like about stellar humanism is it removes all of the dogmatism of the right. Like, the right doesn’t have to follow, like, all...It’s just the people who care about what is actually true and want thriving. And Western civilization seems like the correct way to win if that’s what you care about, so all of these people care about Western civilization, not out of a love of Western... Now, you can love Western civilization for its own sake and be part of the coalition, but you don’t have to, which I like.Simone Collins: Yeah. Well, what I’m also seeing from what you’re saying, what scares me maybe more on the left isn’t this interest in taking things down and breaking. E- what scares me even more is this intentional blindness to the negative ramifications or harm [00:38:00] done. Almost like, you know, they’re Muggles and the harm done is magic.Like, they just can’t see it. They’re It’s not even like an unwillingness to see it. It doesn’t process. It doesn’t register, and that really scares meMalcolm Collins: Human harm is completely irrelevant from their moral calculations because-Simone Collins: I don’t know. I don’t know. I feel like it, there’s something deeper there, that it’s not just about irrelevance, but like some inability to see or recognize it or acknowledge it and, and for it to processMalcolm Collins: meaning to it No, it has to do with how they process reality.So-Simone Collins: Yeah ...Malcolm Collins: I can go to a leftist and I can say, “You know, Hamas is putting its terror centers under hospitals and schools.” And, and they can say, “Well, yeah, I understand that, that’s why Israel is bombing them, but Israel shouldn’t bomb them.” And I say, “Well, okay, well so think two steps ahead. If Israel stops bombing a hospital every time they put their network under a hospital, they’re going to put their networks under hospitals disproportionately, like exclusively going forwards, which [00:39:00] further puts those people in harm way, right?And allows their force to grow, which is provably victimizing their own population.” You know, as we saw after Israel’s withdrawal, like executing people on the streets and stuff like that, right?Simone Collins: Yeah.Malcolm Collins: They, they victimized their own people much harder than the IDF did. And it’s, it’s, this second order narrative is not relevant from sort of a pain calculation to them because they only care about pain in a narrative context.Simone Collins: Hmm.Malcolm Collins: Like how do they strongly paint themselves as the good guys in a world with this oppressor versus oppressed framing? Like that’s the way all of society is structured. Everyone needs to be categorized this way. And and, and they don’t really think beyond that. This is like the average street level foot soldier.If you’re thinking of the higher-ups, like the people who are like the actual intellectuals in the movement they fundamentally just don’t care. Like the higher-ups want a destruction of civilization- Hmm ... or what we would call Western civilization, and they understand that that’s gonna come with death, [00:40:00] right?Hmm. Like, this is where the, you know, kill Nazis, everything like this. They know they’re talking about average everyday conservatives. They just don’t care.Simone Collins: Hmm. Well, I h- I, I don’t wanna say I hope that’s the case. I, I’m, I’m more afraid of what I think is more real, which is a blindness that would cause a profoundly higher level of death and, and destruction and pain, and that really scares me.Malcolm Collins: Well, I mean, it’s coming, right? Like, that’s where society is heading with current immigration rates in Europe, with the current cultural movement we see in Europe and potentially within the United States. You know, like, if, for example, I took a position as president or of a political party that I was influential as, we would be dramatically more aggressive than Trump is being right now in terms of how we handled citizenship and how we handled communities that had already gotten hooks into America in a way that was just deleterious at this point.Simone Collins: Presumably just in enforcing our [00:41:00] laws.Malcolm Collins: Hmm. Well, I mean, that’s where they’re trying to go right now, right? Yeah,Simone Collins: yeah.Malcolm Collins: But I think we need new and stricter laws, frankly. Oh ... I think there could be laws about... Here’s an easy law, right? If you become a citizen of the United States and you ever go on any form of government assistance, I think you should lose your citizenship if you became a citizen within that lifetime, right?Like, we’ve talked about this.Simone Collins: Well, a right to vote. At very least, right to vote.Malcolm Collins: No, no, I just think you, you lose your citizenship, you get removed. If you’re notSimone Collins: a productive member-Malcolm Collins: Well,Simone Collins: I disagree ... if you’re not a taxpayer- I mean, there, there are,Malcolm Collins: there are times in everyone’s life, including, you know- Rightchildhood and old age- And there are times in everyone’s life when they do not require government assistance when that happens to them. If they have a healthy community that supports them, if they have healthy religious institutions that support them and as many immigrant groups used to have, and they become destitute during a part or they lose their job at part, I am okay with them staying in the country so long as they don’t try to get government assistance.[00:42:00]It is the attempting to get government assistance that I think that should be the disqualifying. And maybe even make it a two-Simone Collins: So you would just eliminate government assistance, then?Malcolm Collins: Well, I guess it’s a better way to do it, because I wanna be able to use it to remove them. So, if you’re on it for, let’s say, two years and you don’t shut it down before then, you immediately get put on a deport list.I think that that’s an easy way to handle it. I also think that any of them that commit a crime, any crime, no matter how small, immediate deportation. Hmm ... and I think th- this can go to financial crimes, anything tied to fraud, especially about the government. Like, this stuff we should be... Or deportation with some form of review, right?You know, you, you could say that, right? So basically, if it appears that they are culturally assimilating, you keep them. If it does not appear they’re culturally assimilating, you deport themSimone Collins: I suppose. I mean, I mean, it’s, it’s complicated, right? Like, you could have a system like that be abused by people who create trumped up charges to try to get rid of people who are business [00:43:00] competitors or in other forms inconvenient to them, even if they-Malcolm Collins: Rightmerit- But I think that the social harm of that is significantly lower than the social harm of allowing in large groups that are exploiting the system. So like I understand that you can’t, you can get negative externalities from implementing anything.Simone Collins: Yeah.Malcolm Collins: The negative externalities of that are a lot less than the negative externalities of the amount of fraud that our social safety nets are under, are under right now.It isn’t going to the most vulnerable people in our society. Like, that’s who suffers from this fraud.Simone Collins: Yeah. But I mean, you know, y- you would have to moderate the rule that you’re proposing here because we can’t support vulnerable people in society if anyone we support gets deported.Malcolm Collins: No, I said, I said if they are an immigrant.Simone Collins: Oh. I don’t know, it’s just easier to have a rule of like, you can stay in the country as an immigrant if you are a net taxpayer.Malcolm Collins: Yeah, but that’s harder to calculate I [00:44:00] mean, you can do it if you wanna try to calculate that, Simone. Apparently you love making difficult math Well,Simone Collins: we’re speaking in, in hypotheticals here, so yeah.I we could also presumably simplify the tax code.Malcolm Collins: It’s way easier- But- ... to just say if they pay, if, if they go on government services.Simone Collins: Yeah. I guess you’re right.Malcolm Collins: Exploit government services. So anyway interesting conversation. Any final thoughts?Simone Collins: This was interesting. This was scary. That is all I have to say.Malcolm Collins: All right. Now excited for the next one.Simone Collins: I love you.Malcolm Collins: Love you tooSimone Collins: The first thing I do to try to get out of bed in the morning is put on... Like, I just open YouTube and I see what the algo has for me ‘cause it’ll help wake me up. And typically it’s, like, Asmongold or something else that I watch routinely. But this morning it was some video about, like, it, it, it had, like, almost a million views and it had just been published about the Gen Alpha melody.It was a fascinating, like, little just, like, did you know about this thing? And there are hundreds of songs that have come out that have the same [00:45:00] broad melody, and it’s kind of incredible how pervasive it is, and I just didn’t realize it until he put all of them together. It’s really interesting stuff.And the first... One of the earliest versions where you can find it is Lady Gaga’s Bad Romance. That’s the melody, the Gen Alpha melody which you also just... You see it everywhere, all music genres, all languages, w- Western, Eastern, it doesn’t matter. South Korean, K-pop, random Russian songs. Really, really fascinating.And I just love that there are random people out there to explain things like this to me. AllMalcolm Collins: right.Simone Collins: And to talk about them and how they rise and why they exist. Like, we have YouTube now. Remember when we had to look things up in, like, the encyclopedia? Do you remember? Did you have those CD-ROMs of Encyclopedia Britannica?Do you remember the opening sequence on them? It was such a thing. I [00:46:00] guess. Oh my God.Malcolm Collins: Anyway, I’ll get started.Simone Collins: Yeah, go ahead.Speaker 8: I did. It needs four batteries. Wow. That’s a lot Are any of the batteries in incorrectly? Is that maybe why he’s not turning on? Yeah. Have you checked? Take a look. Make sure they’re all in right. Toasty, can you check? You’re our quality control man. No, I, I know what batteries are and how to put them in.Speaker 9: Let Toasty check, Octavian. He’s our quality control man. Oh, you know what? Take out this one, take out this one, and take out this one. And then I’ll do, and then I’ll do that, and then I’ll do this oneSpeaker 8: Yes, I’m a great [00:47:00] bunny That’s so nice How can we get these other cells? If you press on the side opposite the spring, you can kind of push it out using the tension from the spring This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit basedcamppodcast.substack.com/subscribe

In this Based Camp episode, Simone and Malcolm Collins dive into the rising anti-immigration protests in South Africa — led by Black South Africans against illegal immigrants from other African nations. From “March and March” and Operation Dudula marches to demands for mass deportations, shop closures, and prioritizing citizens for jobs, this movement echoes familiar themes of economic frustration, crime concerns, and strained resources.Is this “Black MAGA”? Why is the global media quick to label it xenophobia while downplaying similar grievances elsewhere? The Collins discuss unemployment realities (32-33%), government responses, comparisons to US/UK/Canada immigration levels, ethnic economic niches, and why South Africans feel under attack from within Africa.Expect unfiltered analysis, humor, genetic tangents, and real talk on immigration policy that transcends race. What happens when citizens fight back against illegal immigration in their own country?Show NotesWhen I think of “anti-immigration protests” the image that pops into my head is of white people being angry about non-white people entering their neighborhoods and taking their jobsThis happens so much that subconsciously even I sometimes find myself assuming this is a “white people clutching their pearls about their land being taken” thing, when it’s notAnd recent anti-immigrant protests in South Africa are proof of this.South Africa has seen a wave of anti-immigration (often described as anti-illegal immigration or xenophobic) protests and related violence in April–May 2026, concentrated in major cities like Pretoria, Johannesburg, Durban, and spreading to others.Key Details* According to the BBC at least, the main driver is the citizen-led group March and March, which advocates for stricter immigration enforcement, border control, mass deportations of undocumented migrants, and prioritizing South Africans for jobs, housing, and services.* Protests have drawn hundreds to thousands of participants, with marches to government buildings (e.g., Union Buildings in Pretoria), shop closures by foreign-owned businesses out of fear, and some “clean-up” campaigns.* Involvement or alignment from Operation Dudula (a vigilante-style anti-immigrant movement meaning “push out” in Zulu), ActionSA, Patriotic Alliance, and other local forums (e.g., Thokoza Abahambe Forum).* Some political figures, like Floyd Shivambu of the Africa Mayibuye Movement, have endorsed the concerns as legitimate ahead of local elections.* As CNN reports (here’s an Instagram link), protesters accuse undocumented migrants (primarily from other African countries, and some Asians) of taking jobs, engaging in crime/drug dealing, overloading public services (health, housing, schools), and straining the economy.* Some issued a June 30, 2026, ultimatum for undocumented foreigners to leave, with warnings of consequences.* Chants and actions target “illegal foreigners.”* THIS IS EXACTLY THE SAME RHETORIC YOU HEAR IN THE USASo this is NOT about white people at all, right?* Yeah, the protesters are primarily South African citizens, often from poorer communities, unemployed youth, township residents, and those feeling economic pressure.* See some footage from Sky News posted on reddit here* Note: South Africa’s official unemployment rate is very high (~32-33%), with widespread frustration over service delivery failures after decades of ANC governance, corruption allegations, and inequality.* They’re largely mad about immigrants from other African countries* Nigerians, Zimbabweans, Congolese, Ethiopians, GhanaiansIs immigration uniquely high in South Africa vis a vis other countries? Or other African countries? Is it higher than normal?South Africa’s immigration levels are not uniquely high by global standards, but they stand out significantly within Africa and have risen notably in recent decades.Key Metrics (UN DESA 2024 Data)* South Africa: ~2.63 million international migrants, representing ~4.1% of its total population (up from ~3.2% in 1990 and ~4.3% in 2010). (UN)* Global average: ~3.7% of world population (~304 million migrants). (Migration Policy Intitute)* Africa overall: ~1.9% (29.2 million migrants across the continent). (UN)A few other African countries have higher proportions due to specific factors (e.g., economic pull or refugee hosting):* Côte d’Ivoire: ~9.0% (around 2.88 million migrants) — historically one of the highest in sub-Saharan Africa due to cocoa plantations and labor migration from neighbors like Burkina Faso.* Others like Djibouti (~10.8%), Gabon, or some refugee-hosting nations (e.g., Uganda, Sudan) can show elevated shares in certain years.* Most African countries are well below 2–3%.Many high-income countries have 10–30%+ migrant shares (e.g., Gulf states 30–50%+, Australia ~30%, Europe/North America 12–16% averages). South Africa’s level is comparable to some other emerging economies but amplified by regional disparitiesHow does South Africa’s rates of immigration and illegal immigration compare to those in the USA, Canada, Australia, and the UK?Basically, South Africa’s total migrant share is not high compared to these countries, but its challenges with undocumented migration (relative to enforcement capacity and economic conditions) appear more acute proportionally and socially. High-unemployment townships amplify perceptions of strain from irregular inflows, unlike the more managed systems in the Anglosphere nations.Statements from ProtestersFrom March and March Leaders and ProtestersJacinta Ngobese-Zuma (Founder and National Leader of March and March):“They are not victims... If you walk down the roads, you will find that they take buildings. There are drugs. There is prostitution. There are cartels. There are mafias. So, everything in this country is a fertile ground for criminals to thrive.”“We are under attack from across Africa… The only thing that they do is to label us as xenophobic. There is nothing xenophobic about wanting law and order in your country.”On government inaction: “We’re frustrated, tired, and feel ignored by our own government... Our demand is that our government is moving at a snail’s pace in addressing the issue of illegal immigrants.”Sanele Nkambule (Treasurer, March and March):“Many spaza shops and informal businesses in the townships are owned or run by foreign nationals without proper trading rights... [placing] an unfair burden on citizens who pay taxes.” He called for all such shops to be run by South Africans, audits of immigrants, review of study visas, and army deployment in high-immigrant areas.Anonymous demonstrator (to BBC during Pretoria march):“We are grateful that we now have groups like this that have come up to aid the voice of what we have always been preaching about — illegal immigration is a big problem to our society.” (Referring to the “influx of illegal immigrants” that politicians ignore.)From Associated GroupsThami Madondo (National Executive Committee member, linked to Operation Dudula/March and March-aligned actions):“The immigration laws of the country have never been enforced by the law enforcement agencies... And that’s why we’re sitting with all of these crises. … We are stressing the fact that illegal foreigners in the country must leave.” He criticized “Ubuntu” narratives in this context: “That narrative of Ubuntu, unfortunately, is the nonsense that has put us where we are today. Ubuntu doesn’t mean that you must come into the country illegally.”Tshepo Totwe (Secretary, Abahambe Movement, collaborating with March and March):“We are here to partake and collaborate with March on March on a progressive march that is involving different organisations and also national forums to collaborate and fight against the foreign nationals that are taking advantage of our economic freedom in our country... That is the key purpose for us to indicate and send a message that we are being labelled as xenophobic, and that is not the point.”What are these protests like?* Human Rights Watch (citing “xenophobic attacks”) reports that some protests have escalated into vigilante actions, assaults on migrants (including beatings, shop attacks, and reported deaths—e.g., Nigerians, Ethiopians), and intimidation.* Human Rights Watch and others have noted insufficient police response in places. Foreign governments (Ghana, Nigeria, Kenya, etc.) have issued warnings to their citizens and, in Ghana’s case, offered evacuation flights (with low uptake in one reported instance).What is the South African government doing in response?* As they communicate on the official website of the presidency of the republic of south africa: President Cyril Ramaphosa’s administration and officials (e.g., Deputy President Paul Mashatile) condemn violence and vigilante “lawlessness” while acknowledging legitimate grievances over illegal immigration.* They’ve highlighted deportations (over 100k in recent years) and pledged legal enforcement.* They deny widespread xenophobia, calling incidents isolated or criminalWhat is the larger media narrative about these protests?* When you distill all the coverage together with AI summaries, you’ll see these protests being framed as a recurring pattern of xenophobic tensions in South Africa during economic hardship, seen in prior years (e.g., 2008, 2019, Operation Dudula activities).* High inflows of migrants/refugees amid regional instability, porous borders, and competition for scarce opportunities fuel it.Episode TranscriptSimone Collins: [00:00:00] We are here to fight against the foreign nationals that are taking advantage of our economic freedom in our country. We are being labeled as xenophobic, and that is not the point.” So what are the protests like? AndMalcolm Collins: again, you’re sure, you’re sure this guy was Black, so we’re not gonna get the channel taken down?Simone Collins: I’m, yeah, I’ve, yes.Malcolm Collins: Okay, good.Speaker 2: We are sick and tired with the Somalians, with the Pakistanis, with all, with Nigerians and all illegal immigrants in this country These protesters say they’re declaring war on illegal immigration and want to take their complaints right to the doorsteps of embassies across Pretoria.Speaker 5: The protesters here, um,Speaker 4: plan to raise issue with the Somali Government about activities of their citizens in the country. The group, who are wearing Zulu traditional dress, initially sat down before the embassy gates saying they want to show respect.They demanded answers on a range of issues from crime to illegal immigration, but things got tense when they were unhappy with the answers from [00:01:00] the Somali representatives.Speaker 6: The youth is caught upSpeaker 4: by this country and is taken The group say they’ve given undocumented immigrants until the end of June to leave South Africa.Speaker 7: There’s eight million young people that are not working in South Africa. It is not xenophobia. It is there’s eight million unemployed people,would you like to know more?Simone Collins: Hello, Malcolm. I’m excited to be speaking with you today, because when I think of anti-immigration protests, the image that pops into my head is, is white people being angry about non-white people entering their neighborhoods. Even though that’s like not... I know- True ... that that’s not true. But thank God one of our Base Camp listeners was like, “Hey, you should, you should talk about the anti-immigration protests in South Africa.”Malcolm Collins: It is Black fatigue on an African scale-Simone Collins: Yes ...Malcolm Collins: of Black South Africans being mad about Black immigrants to South Africa. I-Simone Collins: This has nothing to do with us. NothingMalcolm Collins: to do with- I, I found some video footage of it that I’m gonna play- Yeah ... right [00:02:00] here.Speaker 3: Attacker!Malcolm Collins: Oh, sorry, that was the wrong footage.That’s gonna get us in a lot of trouble.Simone Collins: Damn it, Malcolm, why do you... Ah. You-Malcolm Collins: Come on, I wanna put the caveman fighting footage ...Simone Collins: you continue to speed run our... Do you not want to be on YouTu- what is... Anyway. Let... I will bring you back to speed.Malcolm Collins: That clip, by the way, that clip is like a meme clip. It’s from a 1980s representation of Homo erectus fighting Neanderthals.And white populations, by the way, so you can’t say I’m racist. These are historically white populations. in fact, Africans they’re the only people on Earth that don’t have any Neanderthal DNA, so technically I’m making fun of my own- Oh, really? ... ancestors here, not theirs.Simone Collins: That, no, that makes you...Right, right, right. ‘Cause Neander- right. Oh my God. Right, right, of course. I-Malcolm Collins: Yep. [00:03:00] They have D- Denisovan DNA though, but that’s, you know, neither here nor there.Simone Collins: We did a separate episode on that, that stuff. Well, probably multiple. Let, let’s just- It’sMalcolm Collins: one of our spiciest episodes where we go over things that I was unaware of, that there are certain populations in Africa today like the God, I can’t pronounce,The Kosan peopleMalcolm Collins: that are more distant genetically if you’re looking not time-wise.Like, their breakoff wasn’t earlier, but if you look at, like, I think it’s SNP count or something- Mm-hmm ... they are more distant from Europeans than Europeans are from Neanderthals. And a lot of people just- Well,Simone Collins: that’s how it is in Africa in general, right? Like, there are different genetic strains or, like, heri- what is it?Like, sort of n- heritage backgrounds that are- So in a way- ... more genetically different ...Malcolm Collins: they are more justified to be mad about immigration, right? Because- Yeah,Simone Collins: absolutely. Yeah. No, no, no. Yeah. The, the, they’re, they’re more different. They’re more different than, like,Malcolm Collins: Than Europeans are from each other, so yeah.Yes,Simone Collins: yes. Yeah, yeah. Or, like, people from Latin America versus, like, Irish people. Yeah, like, no, way more different. But anyway, South Africa has seen a wave [00:04:00] of anti-immigration some- some people are describing it as anti-illegal immigration or, or xenophobic, if you’re asking Human Rights Watch, protests and rioting violence.I loveMalcolm Collins: that Human Rights Watch didn’t care when they were killing white farmers, but the moment they start protesting Black immigrants from even- horror countries, they freak out.Simone Collins: No, but actually, but actually, and we’re gonna ButMalcolm Collins: actually.Speaker: I want to take time to point out here that this isn’t a racialist thing. The groups that hate us hate us just because we are disproportionately productive and technologically productive when contrasted with other groups, and that’s why they hate the South African blacks. That’s why they want to see them replaced within their own country, and they’re fighting back, which we can learn something fromSimone Collins: Yeah. The, these started breaking out in April. They’re, they’re continuing this month.They’re concentrated in major cities like Pretoria and Johannesburg, Durban, and they’re starting to spread to others. Like, this is kind of the, the momentum is building, and so it’s worth it for us to talk about this. [00:05:00] So according to the BBC at least, the main driver is this citizen-led group called March and March, which is an interesting choice of words. March and March advocates for stricter immigration enforcement. They want border control, they want mass deportations of undocumented migrants, and they want prioritizing South Africans for jobs, housing, and services.Doesn’t it sound so familiar? Doesn’t that sound a little MAGA?Malcolm Collins: Yeah, it does sound a little MAGA.Simone Collins: It’s like, oh my God. We get-Malcolm Collins: Are we gonna call this Black MAGA?Simone Collins: Black, Black MAGA.Malcolm Collins: DarkSimone Collins: MAGA.Malcolm Collins: I don’t know the, the... OkaySimone Collins: I like it. I, I like it. I like it. So the protests, they’ve, they’ve drawn... They’re big. We’re talking hundreds to thousands of participants, and they’re doing things like marching on government buildings, like the union buildings of Pretoria.They’re, they’re enforcing shop closures by foreign-owned businesses. They are... They’re, they’re doing some cleanup campaigns. There’s some also additional groups that are getting involved. One is called Operation Dudula, [00:06:00] that they’re a vigilante-style an- anti-immigration movement, meaning push out in Zulu.We don’t see something going this far in America. You know, like, if this was happening in the United States, they’d be like, just... I, I just know the, the white racist allegations would just go, like, off the charts, but, you know, whatever. Also, there’s another one called Action SA, Patriotic Alliance and there are other local forums like the Phekoza Abahambe Forum.And then there are additional political figures that are really endorsing concerns, just like you’ll see in any... I mean, obviously in the United States, in the UK, there are people who stand out as being like, “Immigration is a problem,” and then they kind of run on that platform. As CNN reports, and in, in my show notes on Patreon and Substack, I’m linking to all my sources.There’s a, there’s a, an Instagram link you can see to, like, the news reports that I’m linking to. Protesters are accusing the undocumented migrants, primarily from other African countries and some Asians, but mostly other African countries, of taking jobs, [00:07:00] engaging in crime and drug dealing, overloading public services like health and housing and schools, and straining the economy.Some issued a, a June 30th- Mm ... 2026 ultimatum for undocumented foreigners to leave, saying, like, “If you don’t leave by the end of June, we’re coming for you.” Which we also haven’t done. I- imagine if, like, a, a, like middle, middle of America Americans were doing this, you know? We’d, we’d be defenestrated.Like, they already are being defenestrated just from us wanting to enforce our own laws. Can weMalcolm Collins: import some Black South Africans to handle- Can we- ... our immigrants?Simone Collins: Actually, yeah. Let’s- Maybe ... So, so Trump needs to expand the whole white South African, like, refugee visa to include these, these xenophobic, IMalcolm Collins: would take South African immigrants over Somalians I- Like, let’s, let’s pick ‘em on the Somalians, right?Like, they understand-Simone Collins: Right, they, I mean, they, yeah. God. I just, I can’t. It’s just, it’s so- I won’t,Malcolm Collins: Iliana Ruhr wouldn’t be able to do sh- you, you have a, a mob go to her house.Simone Collins: I know. The, the Somalians [00:08:00] wish, wish that, that only like, you know, JD Vance was coming after them, right? Like, e- they are lucky.They are lucky. And, and I just, I, I wanted in, in my research for this to be super, super sure that this like has nothing to do with white people in South Africa. And yeah, the protesters are primarily not only South African citizens, but from the poorer communities, the unemployed youth, township residents specifically, and trust me, there are not white people in the townships.We’ve been. And, and people in general feeling economic pressure. And I have footage from Sky News that I found posted on Reddit. It’s, it should be reiterated-Malcolm Collins: So you visually, you did a skin check just to make sure.Simone Collins: Yeah Yeah. It, yes, I did.Okay, you’re good to goSimone Collins: SouthMalcolm Collins: Afric- It’s too okay to talk about, because if it was right, people, we’d have this video taken down in two seconds.Simone Collins: Right. We would be in really... No, genuinely, like, I can’t. So, so I checked.Malcolm Collins: [00:09:00] Any other day, we’d be arrested. We’d have the thought police at our door right now, right?Simone Collins: No, and, and r- remember, HRC is still very mad at these people in the townships. People facing a country with 32 to 33% unemployment, okay? They, they’re gen- like, you know, we think we have it bad that, that illegal immigration is putting some pressure on job availability, plus, you know, AI and all this stuff.But 32 to 33% percent and their social services are not good like ours. So of course they’re mad. And they’re not, they’re, they’re not mad about Indians coming in. They’re not mad about Europeans coming in. They’re mad about Nigerians, Zimbabweans, Congolese, Ethiopians, Ghanaians. That’s who they’re primarily mad about.And that those countries keep issuing warnings to South Africa. They’re like, “You are being m- mean to our people. You must stop.” Like, they’re, they’re actually, like, submitting formal complaints and stuff, and I’m like, I don’t... It’s like stop sucking so much then. Like, they’re leaving your country for a [00:10:00] reason.I don’t know. And so I also wanted to check just i- if immigration in South Africa is uniquely high vis-a-vis other countries or other African countries. And South Africa’s immigration levels aren’t uniquely high by global standards, though they do stand out within Africa. Like, it’s, South Africa’s one of the countries that in Africa is doing, like, relatively okay, I guess.So they are seeing- AndMalcolm Collins: it’s doing terribly, by the way,Simone Collins: Yeah, but Africa sometimes has some troubles, and-Malcolm Collins: They are. I mean, if we’re gonna be realistic I, and I’m saying this as, like, an objective reality of South Africa.Simone Collins: Mm.Malcolm Collins: South Africa had a fairly strong economy- Yeah ... then they started acting in a way that scared away the European population within the country increasingly.And since then primarily due to political corruption in part due to Black tribal infighting within the political scene corruption has reached a level in the [00:11:00] country where basic businesses have failed to continue to operate. Electricity is constantly failing, which means that you can’t easily have things like restaurants without you know, you, you can’t have frozen food, you can’t have refrigerated food, you can’t have without generators, and then generating- Well,Simone Collins: there, there, there are blackouts, there are brownouts, there, there are jar- giant holes in theWe, we have a whole episode on it, just like third South Africa in, under, like, the Base Camp YouTube channel. But,Malcolm Collins: Yeah, but, but my point is is that they’re basically, they’re not really operating on their own anymore. They’re living off of a legacy and slow decay out of that legacy.Simone Collins: Yeah, yeah. So, but the, you know, still, they ha- they once had, and they still kind of have some opportunity that many other places don’t.In fact when I, when we did our South Africa episode, I found a bunch of posts by white UK residents who’d moved to South Africa to work remotely there and enjoy, you know, the relatively low cost of living, and, like, nice gated communities, et cetera. Like, there are, you [00:12:00] know. Anyway, it, it has things going for it.But in terms of where they stand with immigration, South Africa ha- has around 2.63 million international migrants. That’s about 4 point ... Oh, sir, 4.1% of its total population. That’s up from 3.2% in 1990 and 4.3% in 2010. So it’s not at, like, an all-time high, but it’s high-ish. The global average is 3.7 of the world population, and in Africa overall it’s 1.9.So they’re certainly higher than average in Africa though a few other African countries do have higher proportions of overall immigration due to specific factors like th- they have even more economic opportunity or they’re just more friendly to hosting refugees, like the Cote d’Ivoire. I think Djibouti has a lot.Yeah, 10.8. 10.8%, ha- immigrants in Djibouti because there’s a lot of I think people from Uganda, U- Uganda, [00:13:00] Uganda and, and Sudan, S- Sudan, oh my God, showing up there. But yeah, most African countries are below 2 to 3%. So South Africa is, is being relatively more flooded and I, I could see that, you know, putting pressure on them.Yeah. And you know, vis-a-vis- I think we- ... the United States and, and the UK and Canada it’s, it’s n- certainly not... I mean, like, we- Well,Malcolm Collins: okay, I wanna put this in context for people who do not understand why South Africa would be so freaked out by this. Uh-huh. Imagine if your country was this close to Africa, and it was this easy to immigrate into your country.Simone Collins: Yeah.Malcolm Collins: Like, you’d be pretty pissed too. Yeah ... also, the immigrants, are they primarily Muslim, or are there any, like, religious tension here?Simone Collins: From what I can understand, it’s not religious tension.It’s not about culture. It’s about jobs and economic security and resources. But just to be clear, so, like, South Africa is around 4.1% of the total population is immigrants.Australia, which also has some tension, right? 31 to 32%. [00:14:00] Canada, 22%. UK, 17 to 18%. USA, 15.2 to 15.4%. So all these other countries where it’s, you know, the citizens are getting way more shade for being, like, uncomfortable with the immigration,Malcolm Collins: Yeah, we gotta get some South Africans in here to, to handle our immigration issue.We have- ISimone Collins: know, right? Like, we’re, we’re at, like, three times their amount. And we are, we’re being, we’re, we’re being basically like, “Oh, come on in,” compared to them, where they’re like, “Yeah, if you’re not out by June 30th, I’m just, I’m just gonna say it’s not gonna be good for you.” What? Okay.Malcolm Collins: Can we, can we do that with America’s Black population?Like, let’s do that. They, they’re the ones who are getting their jobs taken, right? You know.Simone Collins: And what are they... Yeah, like we’re, they’re silent in all this, right?Malcolm Collins: RemoveSimone Collins: the whole border. It’s just gonna be one big fight. Yeah. Like, are we... I don’t know if there’s something like where, where journalists don’t want to interview Black Americans when they’re covering anti-immigration because they’re, they’re like, there’s this unspoken thing of like, “Oh, I want, I just wanna make it [00:15:00] look like...”Oh my God, why, why is this... Like, his new thing is screaming. It’s, this is not great for podcasting. Where they just wanna make it seem like-Malcolm Collins: You can’t hear. It doesn’t matter. You can put him in the box or something, Simone. He’s an infant. He’ll survive, all right?Simone Collins: The, the, the Skinner box. What did B.F.Skinner call his baby box again?Malcolm Collins: I don’t remember, but you know they used to put babies in, like, boxes and hang them out windows?Simone Collins: Oh, well, no, no, no. That was just, like, a, like, cute 1950s product, like an urban trendy thing. I don’t know how much it was used.Malcolm Collins: A modern trend, yeah, where you hung a baby out a window.No.Simone Collins: Let me see. It was like a... People still buy boxes like that for their cats now. You could technically just buy one for your cat and put a baby in it. I, I mean, you’d probably have CPS called on you, of course, but Anyway, I don’t, I don’t know what to do withMalcolm Collins: this. Anyway,Simone Collins: Let you know what?Malcolm Collins: By the way, Simone- Yeaha hilarious trend I learned about, if you wanna, if you wanna spice it up with something else-Simone Collins: Okay ...Malcolm Collins: is ballmaxing. What? There’s a community that try to have, th- and they do this through inflating them, the [00:16:00] perfect balls. Vice did an article on it. Your faces are the best. What does thisSimone Collins: have to do with South Africa?Or withMalcolm Collins: streaming? Nothing, it’s just hilarious. I don’t know. Some of these people might be in South Africa.Simone Collins: Well, I mean, we can do that, like, in our episode on, like, is Kim Kardashian a transhumanist? And just talk about... Because also apparently, like, a vaginal optimization is in Okay, you know what? I think maybe he could, can I just- You can’tMalcolm Collins: hear it.It’s irrelevant.Simone Collins: So, let’s go to what, like some actual statements from these protesters to get a picture of what they’re actually saying. Right So here are what some of the March on March leaders and protesters are saying. That’s that, the primary group that’s leading all these, if you recall.This is from, I’m going to butcher this, Jakaynda Ngobazi Zuma. He’s the founder and national leader of March and March. These “They are not victims. If you walk down the [00:17:00] roads, you’ll find that they take buildings. There are drugs. There is prostitution. There are cartels. There are mafias. So everything in this country is a fertile ground for criminals to thrive.We are under attack from across Africa. This only thing that they do is label us as xenophobic. There is nothing xenophobic about wanting law and order in your country. We are frustrated.”Malcolm Collins: Oh, these people are MAGA.Simone Collins: I know. Th- th- the thing is, like, if you just take this out of context and you’re like, “According to, like, James Brown,” like, J- J- well, what, what’s a really white-sounding name?James Carpenter from Ohio, you know, like, you’re just gonna be like, “Yeah, of course.” “We’re frustrated, tired, and feel ignored by our own government. Our demand is that our government is moving at a snail’s pace in addressing this issue of illegal immigrants.” Oh my God, right? It sounds so fricking, like, universal, so American, so UK.This is from Salit Sanele Nka- Nkambule. I’m so sorry. [00:18:00] This is the treasurer of March and March. “Many spaza shops and informal businesses in the townships are owned and run by foreign nationals without proper trading rights, placing an unfair burden on citizens who pay taxes.”He, he goes on to call for these shops to be run by South Africans, and he wants audits of immigrants a review of study visas, and army deployment in high immigrant i- areas. And this is... It’s, it sounds a little bit like a mix of-Malcolm Collins: An army deployment in high immigrant areas?Simone Collins: But they want ice. They want ice Like, MAGAMalcolm Collins: hasn’t even thought of this yet.Come on, g- we gottaSimone Collins: be taking notes from these South Africans. No, they just want ice. They want ice plus the National Guard. That is, like, exactly what we’ve been doing. Okay, great.Malcolm Collins: Okay, yeah, that’s what we need, National Guard in these neighborhoods.Simone Collins: So, yeah. And then it, here’s what BBC quoted one anonymous demonstrator saying as they, they filmed a Pretoria march.“We are grateful that we now have groups like this that have come to aid the voice of what we have always been preaching about. Illegal immigration is a big problem to our society.” And [00:19:00] then additional groups this that, that have been talking about this. Here is Thami Madondo. “The immigration laws of the country have never been enforced by the law enforcement agencies, and that’s why we’re sitting with all these crises.We are stressing the fact that illegal foreigners in the country must leave.” He criticized ubuntu narratives in this context also. “The narrative of ubuntu, unfortunately, is the nonsense that has put us where we are today. Ubuntu does not mean that you must come into the country illegally.” Which is so like him It sounds like an American, you know, being like, “Look, you know, we believe in helping people who are in need, but we have to take care, you know, of our own social services, et cetera, before we let other people in.”Yeah. And so it’s, I, I, I mean, what I like about him referring to Ubuntu is that he’s like, he’s referring to sort of the African version of progressivism of like, “You have to help everyone. Shut up, and like, just give everything away.” And he’s like, “Hold on. I’m not gonna lie down and do that.” Here’s Teshepo Thothwe.This is the, he’s the secretary of the Abahambe movement and they’re also [00:20:00] collaborating with March and March.Malcolm Collins: So for people who are wondering what Ubuntu is, ‘cause I went and looked this up, it is a profound southern African philosophy of humanism often translated as, “I am because we are.” Mm-hmm.Rooted in languages like Zulu it emphasizes a collective wellbeing or universal bond, or the belief that all of humanity are shaped by our relationships with others. Mm-hmm. And I’d point out that this philosophy didn’t go very far. It went about a quarter as far as apparently it went in the West, right?Mm-hmm. So, be aware that these people may talk like they have these philosophies, and everyone’s like, “Oh, these native whatever tribes in Africa, they have these wonderful progressive ideas that hold for about this long.” Okay, continue.Simone Collins: So Deshepo says, “We are here to partake and collaborate with March on March on a progressive march that is involving different organizations and also national forums to collaborate and fight against the foreign nationals that are taking advantage of our economic freedom [00:21:00] in our country.That is the key purpose for us to indicate and send a message that we are being labeled as xenophobic, and that is not the point.” So what are the protests like? AndMalcolm Collins: again, you’re sure, you’re sure this guy was Black, so we’re not gonna get the channel taken down?Simone Collins: I’m, yeah, I’ve, yes.Malcolm Collins: Okay, good.Simone Collins: AllMalcolm Collins: right. I, I,Simone Collins: I did, I did check.And again, I am, I am linking to my sources. You can literally watch the video. This last quote was from... You can see the video. It’s on africanews.en or africanews.com. All right? Just go to Substack or Patreon. I link to my sources, friends. So what are the protests like? Well, Human Rights Watch, surprise, surprise, in, in an, an article citing the xenophobic attacks, reports that some of the protests have ax- escalated into vigilante actions, assaults on migrants, including beatings, shop attacks, and reported deaths.Reported deaths, not confirmed deaths, of Nigerians and Ethiopians-Malcolm Collins: Yeah, those reported deaths of white farmers, they really didn’t care much aboutSimone Collins: Right. Just rep- yeah, who, where are the deaths? Show me the bodies. And intimidation. [00:22:00] Human Rights Watch and others have noted insufficient police response in places.Foreign governments like Ghana, Nigeria, and Kenya have issued warnings to their citizens and, in Ghana’s case, offered evacuation flights with low uptake on when, on reported instances. So they’re like, “Don’t worry, we’ll fly you back.” And, and the migrants are like, “Yeah, I’m good.” They- LowMalcolm Collins: uptake, yeahSimone Collins: They’re gonna stay.So what is the South African government doing in response? As they communicate on the official website of the Presidency of the Republic of South Africa, President Cyril Ram- Ramaphosa’s administration and officials, like the Deputy President Paul Mashatile, condemn the violence. They, they call it vigilante lawlessness.They acknowledge that there are some legitimate grievances over illegal immigration, and they have highlighted that they are deporting people, that they have deported over 100,000 people in recent years, and they’ve pledged [00:23:00] legal enforcement. But they also deny widespread xenophobia, and they call the incidents isolated or criminal.But the larger media narrative about these protests when you distill it all together, Is that they’re being framed as this recurring pattern of xenophobic tensions in South Africa during economic hardships. And they, they point that this is, like, echoing ve- similar activities in 2008 and 2019.People are citing Operation Dudula activities. I don’t know them. And, and basically they’re trying to say that there are high influe- high inflows of migrants and refugees, and while you get this with additional regional instability, which we’ve covered on other podcasts, and you have porous borders and competition for scarce economic opportunity, you’re gonna get stuff like this.But I find it very interesting that when people talk about immigration from a, [00:24:00] a left-leaning standpoint, it’s always xenophobia and people just being, like, just evil racists, when it’s super clear. Like, it doesn’t matter if you’re white, if you’re whatever. Like, people don’t like their jobs being taken.People don’t like people breaking the laws of their countriesMalcolm Collins: And acting differently. A lot of these other African populations, like Somalis, and people are wondering why I said, like, we gotta g- g- they’re, they’re a population that essentially specializes in fraud, right? Like, obviously not every Somalian is a fraudster, but we’re looking at rates in some of these communities that are over 50%.Like, it is astonishing the rate of fraud that we’re getting in some of these communities. This, for example, was a Somali immigrant community. I think it was 84% of Somalian immigrants are on welfare. Like, why are you bringing in a population? And then what was shocking is then somebody said, “Well, Somalian’s earn more than the average American.”And I was like ... And I [00:25:00] looked it up, and it’s true. Like, this is just fraudSpeaker 9: So just to double-click on these numbers here, it is81% of Somalian households are on welfare. 89% of Somalian households with children are on welfare. And that is way higher than any other immigrant group. , That is an astonishingly high number. And even after 10 years in the United States, the rates remain at around those numbers. , And yet, if you look at the average Somalian reported income in the United States, it’s 70 to 80,000 per household., This makes no sense unless they’re predominantly making money through fraudSimone Collins: Yeah, we did another episode on ethnic cartels like the Patel motels and all the Indonesian nail salons in California, and it’s super common. This is, this is not moored to any particular ethnic group but for especially immigrant groups- No, some ethnicMalcolm Collins: groups disproportionately do fraud.Like, we’ve gotta be realisticSimone Collins: about it. But no, I mean, it doesn’t have to be fraud. It’s basically if an ethnic [00:26:00] group especially immigrant groups find an economic niche, often of like- Not glamorous or desirable work. Fraud can fall into that, but so can, like, running motels or doing nail salons, right?Low-paying- I’m okay with evenly- Where you can often skirt laws ... bailable and owners,Malcolm Collins: right? They’re not investors-Simone Collins: I know, but what I’m saying is this is- ... they’re fighting ... I’m trying to point to this just being a natural economic dynamic that happens with immigrant groups, and it just so happens that the ethnic cartel that many Somalis have formed in many states is around, like, the business model of fraud.ToMalcolm Collins: understand how big a part of their culture it is, when US aid was shut down by the Trump administration, Somalia and a bunch of human rights groups put up these giant like, warnings saying that Somalia’s economy collapsed. Hold on, I wanna see what was the percent, ‘cause I wanna get this number right.Simone Collins: And you’re talking about the foreign nation of Somalia, not- I’m sorry, it’s another ... Somalis living in America.Malcolm Collins: They had estimated that the freezing of [00:27:00] USA funding represented an economic exposure or equivalent of 9% of Somalia’s gross national income.9% of their gross national income was coming from USA.Simone Collins: And that’s just USAID. We’re not talking about potential remittances being sent... Sorry.Malcolm Collins: Oh, by the fraudsters that are in theSimone Collins: United States already. From fraud committed, yeah. Because, you know, that, the USAID being shut down didn’t change all of the autism services, all of the Medicare services, all of the home health and transportation and et cetera services that S- Somalians were apparent- or c- daycares fraudulently running in the United States.So yeah, we’ll see. We’ll, we’ll see if... I, I mean, I was really in- intrigued when the Trump administration announced that JD Vance would be, like, the fraud czar in the United States. I haven’t heard any updates from that.Malcolm Collins: Oh, really? He’s done a really good job. So, he shut down tons, this is in California, of hospices that were fake.And he- Oh, really? So heSimone Collins: followed through. [00:28:00]Malcolm Collins: Yeah. He shut down four times the amount that Gavin Newsom has since he took power, and then Gavin Newsom tried to claim that he had actually done the shutdowns.Simone Collins: AreMalcolm Collins: youSimone Collins: kidding me? Oh,Malcolm Collins: no ... when they first whiffed out about them doing the shutdowns, and he tried to act like he was the one who managed it allSimone Collins: God. I think Tim Walz did something similar when a couple take careMalcolm Collins: of her. Oh, they did. Yeah. Tim Walz did. They went to, they shut down planned- He’sSimone Collins: like, “We did it, guys.” And thenMalcolm Collins: he acted like... And they’re like, “Tim Walz’s department has done nothing to help us at all. Like, I do not know why he’s taking credit for this.”Simone Collins: Golly, that’s so bad. Oh my gosh. This though, it really, it helps to fix something. And, and the other thing that this news really hammered home for me was just how effective the media narrative has been, just in my subconscious, in making me, just my evoked set of like, [00:29:00] anti-immigration protests means white people getting their, their panties in a bunch.You know, like I, I know logically that that’s not what it’s about, and yet the just, the, the coverage of it from that angle is so pervasiveMalcolm Collins: Well, and I find it interesting that Bla- like in the United States, I do not think Blacks would make the same sort of argument. These people seem to genuinely be concerned that people are gonna label them as xenophobic, right?Like, I love it that there’s like Black South AfricansSimone Collins: who are like- Wait, you’re saying there are Black people in America who would not want to say that they’re against immigration?Malcolm Collins: No, they don’t, they don’t... In America, you get such a pass for being Black. You know, they’re not gonna immediately come out and be like, “I’m not saying this because I’m a racist.”But in South Africa, the Black protesters are like, “I wanna be clear. I’m not a racist.”Simone Collins: This is not xenophobia. Yeah, that, that is interesting. Yeah, you make a good point there.Malcolm Collins: And I’ve been watching a lot more on American history and like the idea that America was ever a country where [00:30:00] endless immigration from any population was something that we wanted that is not true of historic America.We were very, very strict about who could immigrate into the country. We were very, very strict about who could enter our communities, who could integrate into our communities. You know, it like, I, I... Obviously, what really broke the dam on all of this was the integration of Catholics into America.I, I think-Simone Collins: Wait, wait, why do you say Catholics?Malcolm Collins: It’s factually trueSimone Collins: Everyone, you can reset your counters back to zero. Catholic alert. Ca- take a shot.Malcolm Collins: If you study American history, it’s factually true. That’s where we first allowed a really large immigrant group that didn’t have American culture or American values and was unable to persistently integrate into American values.Mm. Which is really which, which when we made that normalization, like anyone can integrate, anyone can become America, even if they’re still Catholic three generations in or something like that-Yeah ...that is when I think we sort of set the tide where, no, now we’re a country that accepts anyone.[00:31:00]Mm. Now we’re a country that’s just like, wherever you are, anywhere in the world, if it’s hard for you, just come to America. Because that wasn’t the original goal of the you know, the Puritans or the Congregationalists or the you know, original American religious communities. I’ve been doing more research recently on the original Great Awakening which is really fascinating in sort of how it built the American so fun information, Simone, because I probably won’t do a full episode on it ‘cause I don’t think our audience can stomach just education.Oh. But what, what was a really big part of the Great Awakening is when it started you typically only had- Mm-hmm ... preachers that were regional and, Mm ... they began to have traveling preachers, and the traveling preachers were really hated by the local preachers because you were supposed to only have, like, one church in an area and everybody went to that church.Yeah.And in some settlements you could only get into that church if you had had, you know, a, a specific type of, like, religious awakening even. Mm. So it wasn’t even like everyone had to go to the church, it was one [00:32:00] local church was an option, and getting in was exclusive. Wow. And so, then these traveling preachers began to become popular and people really hated it ‘cause they were competing with the traveling preachers.But the traveling preachers ended up sort of spreading and creating a cross American religious identity that was very... It, it took parts of the various original Protestant American groups and sort of formed a Pan-American religious conversation where things that they would do during the Great Awakening that hadn’t really been done before, were things like religions of different Protestant theologies teaching together or going on tour together.And people thought this was very scandalous, right? Like, “How could you do this?” And they’re like, “No, no, no. Like, we... Come on, guys. We agree we hate Catholics. Like, it’s okay that we’re preaching together, right? Like, we, we agree on the important stuff, okay?” And this created this idea that various Protestant groups can have communion with each other, which was not widely agreed upon either outside of America or in America before this[00:33:00]So thenSimone Collins: following- That is really interesting. That is fun. And also I’m, I’m interested to see how these protests unfurl. Huge thanks to, you know who you are the Base Camp listener who suggested this episode. ‘Cause I had no idea. I don’t know. Like it, this isn’t in at least the New York Times-Malcolm Collins: Yeah.Well, it doesn’t fit the narrative. Yeah. They don’t want you to know about it.Simone Collins: I don’t, yeah, I don’t see people discussing it on X. I don’t see the New York Times talking about it. It’s not on, like, Drudge Report, so thank you.Malcolm Collins: Can we get, like, based Africans to form a part of the community? I mean, I know we actually have- I don’t know.We have- ... a significant fan base in Africa, so.Simone Collins: Yeah. Yeah. That would be, that would be fun.That’d be fun ...Malcolm Collins: you know, in terms of where the future of the world goes, it’d be a lot of fun, yeah. Yeah. So let’s, let’s build up that, that African community. Obviously stay in Africa. You know, I’m not saying come over here.What?Simone Collins: I don’t know. I think we need more based Africans here.Malcolm Collins: We do need more based Africans here. Yeah, true.Simone Collins: So actually, come on, [00:34:00] come on over, friends ...Malcolm Collins: if you’re, if you’re willing to help us get rid of the fraudsters.Simone Collins: Again, I mean, I think where we, where we fall down on immigration is, You, you can stay if you are a net tax contributor.I, I think, like, if we just made that the one immigration policy, we would be super fine with immigration.Malcolm Collins: Mm-hmm.Simone Collins: The, the one rule. If your household is a net tax contributor, you can stay. If you are not, you can see yourself out. It’s fine. Okay? Okay? Okay. Great. See, then you can have both porous borders and general so- generous social services.Malcolm Collins: Yeah. No, I agree. That’s really all you have to do, and you can remove the racism, right? Like, just say- Yeah ... anyone who’s a taxSimone Collins: contributor- I don’tMalcolm Collins: care. Yeah ... stays. Anyone who’s a tax contributor- NoSimone Collins: matter where you’re from. Yeah. Mm-hmm. And i- it’s also not one of those, like, ticket price things where like, oh, well, you have to pay, like, you know, this much to get in or, like, invest in a company or something.It’s [00:35:00] no, just like, “Hey, well, it looks like you were negative this month. Thank you. It was lovely having you here. You are now dismissed. K- goodbye.”Malcolm Collins: Get your back and never can come back.Simone Collins: Mm-hmm. Yep, that was your chance. It’s over. Mm-hmm.Malcolm Collins: Yeah.Simone Collins: Yep. I think it’s fine.Malcolm Collins: And people are like, “That’s too harsh,” and it’s like, you can just not take government money, right?Like, if you- Yeah ... lose a job or something. You don’t need to...Simone Collins: Yeah. Like, you can, y- you can, you know, a- ask a church community to, you know, take care of you that month or any number of thingsIs Google Ads harassing you again?Malcolm Collins: Google is very aggressive with their ad campaign.Simone Collins: No, I think people have discovered that ads really don’t make money anymore.Malcolm Collins: So check out rfab.ai, any of our new features, our super search, our... We’re getting close to the Vtuber system being fully functional at this point.Might be by this episode. We’re getting close to, Oh, we got the new based AI. Like, [00:36:00] literally yesterday I was like, “I’m gonna make a based AI.” It’s up, it’s operational. Try it out. It even switches with Alloy model into top AI models with internet connection.Simone Collins: Explain how and why it’s based.Malcolm Collins: Well, it literally uses a prompt injection that you can change that keeps it from being too woke so, you knowSimone Collins: Give it a try, guys.Let us know what you think. Yeah, and anyway, that is all. Sounds good. Goodbye.Malcolm Collins: Yeah, I’ve been, I mean, even with this, putting in more image generation services, so we have, like, one of the fullest image generation... You should look at using RFAB more for title card generation, by the way. Okay. We have all of the models that you’re using, like BlackSimone Collins: Forest- Yeah, I just, I fi- I personally find your prompt inj- injections to be abrasive when it comes to image gen.Malcolm Collins: Then you can take them out.Simone Collins: I, I will. I know. I just-Malcolm Collins: They’re literally... Simone, they’re just auto-added, so you can just delete them.Simone Collins: I will. I, I just have to get over that. I’m, I’m sorry. I’m a horrible wife. I’m a [00:37:00] failure of a wife. Yes,Malcolm Collins: you are a failure of a wife.Simone Collins: I will- Does it use Nano Banana? ‘Cause that’s, I think we use that a lot.You can use NanoMalcolm Collins: Banana. Okay. So it’s, yeah. You canSimone Collins: useMalcolm Collins: any of the major services, Simone.Simone Collins: So it has Midjourney, Nano Banana, Black Forest, and, and, It hasMalcolm Collins: all of those, yes.We actually don’t have Midjourney because they don’t have an API, uh, but that’s the only one we don’t haveSimone Collins: Okay. Okay, good. Okay, good. Well- I’ll, I’ll try it tomorrow morning ...Malcolm Collins: all right, Simone. Love you.Simone Collins: Loveyou.Simone Collins: And I’m recording, just so you know, as you adjust. By the way, I forgot to tell you last night, when I was putting the kids to bed, Titan had decided to make a bed on the, like, tumbling pads that we have. Okay. She had a blanket and everything, and she was all snuggled in. And she looks up with me with that really serious look that she has, and she says, “Mommy, my heart is broken.”And I’m like, “Titan, what’s wrong? Like, are you okay? Why are you sad? What, what’s,Malcolm Collins: what’sSimone Collins: making you soMalcolm Collins: sad?” And sheSimone Collins: just kept saying, “Malcolm Collins: [00:38:00] My heartOctavian Collins: isSimone Collins: broken.”Octavian Collins: Mommy. Mommy, I couldn’t... Mommy.Simone Collins: Yeah?Octavian Collins: It... Mommy, I couldn’t find a place to hang my dartSimone Collins: board. That’s why you need to hang it in the hallway where I set it up.Octavian Collins: And I did.Simone Collins: Then hang it up there again. But there’sOctavian Collins: no place.Simone Collins: Yes, there’s a nail right there.Malcolm Collins: Tell him I’m gonna eat Cutish tonight if he doesn’t stop bugging us.Simone Collins: He’s going to eat Cutish tonight- No ... if you, if you don’t close the door and leave us alone while we record. You can put the dart board in the hallway, though Well, at least he doesn’t wantMalcolm Collins: to eat- Am I abusive?Is this what an abusive father does, is threaten to eat their kid’sSimone Collins: pet? His favorite, his favorite chicken. I love that, like, actually we might eat our chickens. Yeah. It’s, it’s a real threat. It’s not like, “Oh, I’ll eat your cat.” You know? It’s like-Malcolm Collins: Yeah,Simone Collins: no. ... these are working animals. Th- they’re, yeah.It’s, it’s days are numbered. But anyway right. She just kept saying her heart is broken, and I was just getting really worried. I’m like, “Has something made you really sad? Like, what’s wrong?” [00:39:00] And she, like, holds up, it was that heart keychain that my dad had given her, which she was calling her balance time heart.Malcolm Collins: Balance time. It was, andSimone Collins: it was cracked ... her balance time heart. Yes. It had... She’d like, of course, spontaneously disassembled the keychain, and it was a little bit broken. It still looks... She can still play with the heart part, but, “My heart is broken.” MyMalcolm Collins: heart is broken. My heart isSimone Collins: broken. I was so worried.I’m like, “Oh my God, Titan, are you okay?”Malcolm Collins: You’re an astonishingly good mother.Simone Collins: Just her heart is broken. By the way, Suno is so much better now like with genres. ‘Cause like I only want more obscure stuff, and it used to only be good with, you know, country and pop. And now I’m like, okay, you know, make make electro orchestral hip hop, make chiptune- Mmmake electro swing. And it’s really good. Like the stuff that I like listening to instead of just... I mean, I like, obviously I like country, but you can only make so many [00:40:00] country songs.Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Interesting thing is I wanted to do full music video generation on RFAB, and, Yeah ... Suno doesn’t offer an API last I checked, so I’m checking again right now, but,Simone Collins: Oh, to do the, the song part.Malcolm Collins: Yeah.Simone Collins: So you basically now would have to just do it to your song, like bring in your own song.Malcolm Collins: We do have not safe for work video generation now. I got that working.Simone Collins: That’s what we really want. It doesn’t work alwaysMalcolm Collins: very well on most of the models, which is frustrating, but whatever.Simone Collins: Mm-hmm. I, I think your average user probably wouldn’t care as much about creating music videos as we would, because our kids love music videos so much, but I don’t know.I I, I still haven’t watched someone’s commentary on YouTube. Some- someone put out a video on like how the music video age is dead, long live the music video age. Like it, they’re, they’re like both dead and not dead, and I wanna see what the thesis is there, but I don’t know yet because I haven’t watched the video.Anyway, I will I’ll kick off the episode, ‘cause I’m, I’m excited to talk about this. I’m, I’m glad [00:41:00] you encouraged me to, to do it. So you ready?Malcolm Collins: All right. Yeah, I’m ready. Love you.Simone Collins: Okay. Oh, he’s resisting. Don’t resist. Sir. Sir. I just gotta get him to, like, calm down. Okay There we go.Speaker 10: That still looks like a silly happy face. Where is your scary face? I do not know. Where is your murdery face? Murdery face. Your murdery face. Is that... Are you g- When you, when you kill your enemies, are you gonna look like that? What face are you gonna use when you’re about to stab them through the heart?That’s the face? That’s your killing face? What i- what... That is, that is what you look like when you kill people? No. Okay. Gi- give me... Strike a pose, buddy. Show me. Show me your best murdery look. Show me, buddy. Okay. Let me [00:42:00] see. So what- Show me your killing face ... this because, this because the secret move goes like this.Speaker 12: This is it. Okay. Show me. Show me. We’re doing a video. I need to see. Oh, okay. No, you’re smiling again. What is this? Are you just gonna s- What, you think everyone’s gonna laugh if you run at them smiling? Yeah, this, this is his... This, yeah, he’s just... They’re gonna laugh, and then he’ll stab them. I, I kinda like it actually.Speaker 10: Yeah? Octavian, can you even defeat me? Ah. Ah. Oh, God. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit basedcamppodcast.substack.com/subscribe

Did the Communists win the Cold War in America? In this eye-opening Based Camp episode, Malcolm and Simone Collins dive deep into the 1963 list of Communist Goals for the United States (compiled by FBI agent Cleon Skousen and entered into the Congressional Record). From infiltrating schools and media, discrediting the family, promoting degeneracy, and weaponizing psychiatry and art — they check off how many of these goals have been achieved and what it means for modern culture, politics, and the future.This conversation covers the long march through the institutions, Yuri Bezmenov’s demoralization playbook, Cuba’s ongoing role, why the “Red Scare” was more accurate than we were taught, and how a new tech-right counter-movement can fight back using AI, culture, and high-agency communities.If you’ve ever wondered why everything feels broken — ugly art, broken families, captured institutions, endless culture war — this episode connects the dots.Episode TranscriptMalcolm Collins: [00:00:00] Hello, Simone. I’m excited to be here with you today. Today we are going to be asking the question, did the communists win with their goals in the United States? So this rabbit hole was prompted for me by a Chris Williamson clip where he had on a guest, Isabel Brown, who was going over a list that she reported to be the communist goals for the United States circa 1960.She sort of misstated this list implying that it was read into the Congressional Record by the Communist Party. It was not. It was read into the record by a Republican anti-communist, and was a review of the notes on the Communist Party and their goals, circa 1963- Hmm ... by an FBI agent, Cleon Skousen.So not a crackpot or anything like this. This was an FBI agent whose goal was in the FBI, was to track and to understand the Communist Party’s goals circa 1963.Simone Collins: All right? Okay. Yeah, [00:01:00] and it’s not like they were incredibly secret about their goals. So this can’t be that inaccurate.Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Well, you’re gonna be shocked by this list.You’re gonna be shocked. Really? She read a few of them. And I was like, “I need to go into the full thing.” Yes. “I need to look up the history of this list.” Like, I’m not gonna go over every single one of the points that he had read into it, because some of them would just get boring. But we’re going to have enough material to shock you.Oh, gosh. So let’s... And I’m not gonna be reading them in order either. Okay. So let’s start here, okay? “Transfer some of the power of arrest from the police to social agencies. Treat all behavioral problems as psychiatric disorders which no one but psychologists can understand or treat.” What? This was the 1960s, early 1960s.Psychiatrists weren’t even a thing at that point. L- not, like, commonly.Simone Collins: Oh, wow. Yeah. [00:02:00] Did we lose the Cold War? We lost the Cold War. We lost the Cold War. We lost theMalcolm Collins: Cold... W- g- when I read through this, you’re gonna be like, “We lost the Cold War.” We were just- What? ... psy-oped into believing we won. I, I almost at the end of this, like, believe that there’s like a communist utopia in y- Russia right now, and that’s where we’ve been sending all our defrauded Somali dollars.Apparently. Like, the... Yeah. And, and that outside the US, everything’s still going and we’ve just been psy-oped into believing that the Cold War is over and that we won to make us happy. ForSimone Collins: real?Malcolm Collins: What is happening? I don’t know if I’m ready for this.Speaker 7: Oh my God. Tim Robbins and Susan Sarandon. Privet svitya, Dad. My son is a communist.Malcolm Collins: Okay, next. Dominate the psychiatric profession and use mental health laws as a means of gaining coercive [00:03:00] control over those who oppose communist goals.Consider the way that they’ve used things like trans mental health laws to achieve other goals they have later down on this list.Octavian Collins: Huh.Malcolm Collins: First, given that this does seem to have been the plan, it’s a pretty clever plan, right?Simone Collins: No, yeah. If you, if you go, we, we rewind to the 1950s, 1960s, like, all right, how do we take out these...It is, yeah, I mean, it’s, it’s incredibly clever. I, I never would’ve thought of it. But in terms of destroying a country from the inside I... You know, there’s this one episode in earlier Doctor Who where the Doctor has this, like, plan where he’s like, “Oh, I know how to, like, single-handedly take down this prime minister.”And he, standing next to her, like, turns to a journalist who’s always there, or who, who is also there, and says, “She looks tired.” And that’s supposed to be like, that’s the end of her career. He just ended it by [00:04:00] saying that and, like, sowed this doubt. But this is so much more, like, this is the real version of that where, like, Russia was like, “Oh, that’s that’s not just you being a, a, a dick.It, it’s a mental health thing that is to be systematically- Well, so I should note here- ... defended” ... he isMalcolm Collins: not, he is not talking about Russia’s goals for the United States. These were the goals of the American Communist Party at the time, how they were going to dismantle the United States.Simone Collins: That is so... It’s, ‘cause, but then why?Why would you... I mean, ‘cause presumably the goal- So as was- ... of destabilizing the US means that we, then they can take over. But what is left to take over once you’ve done that to a country?Malcolm Collins: Well, they wanted to sell us out to the communists in Russia. We’ll go over this. It didn’t work out their way. But they have achieved all of their other goals other than that one.It really seems to be about destroying the United States above all else and destroying the institutions- That were most resistant to them- Mm ... specifically religious institutions. And we’ll- So it’s not aboutSimone Collins: brokering in some new age or transition, it’s just out of hatred for the United [00:05:00] States.Malcolm Collins: Mm. I mean, there does appear to be a new age or transition.It’s the communist order, right? Like, they’ve got to break down the existing social structure before they can create a new one or offer a new one.Hmm. Hmm.We’ll even go into how they plan to run their revolution and everything like that. Well, whatSimone Collins: good is a communist citizen if they’re, like, crippled by anxiety and, and statutorily unable to not work?Because then they can’t fightMalcolm Collins: back against the government.Simone Collins: Yeah, but isn’t it... I guess in a, a post AGI world, a post singularity world, you don’t need workers. Like, the perfect communist state that has never been tried needs a lot of- CommunistsMalcolm Collins: didn’t need their workers to work hard, Simone. Like, I, I think you’re confused about this.Socialism involves- Communists treat their workers like slaves. Like, that’s the way communist states have always operated. Oh. They don’t actually need the- So I guess it wasSimone Collins: just, there was a plan to rug pull, like systematically, mentally drive people insane. Well, how about weMalcolm Collins: go through all of the plans and then you can judge?Okay. Yeah, I, well, I would... Yes.Simone Collins: Yeah. Okay, let’s try to understand this better. Okay. Okay. NextMalcolm Collins: here, okay? Discredit the family as an [00:06:00] institution, encourage promiscuity and easy divorce.Octavian Collins: Oh, boy.Malcolm Collins: By the way, if you’re unfamiliar with the legal change of the United States in post 1960s not only has promiscuity obviously become very popular, The New York Times regularly writing about polyamory and stuff like this, and but the idea of easy divorce has become way, way, way easier.And there has been explicit attacks, like BLM saw the insti- the family unit as one of their core things that they wanted to target and discredit. Okay. Emphasize the need to raise children away from the negative influence of parents. Attribute prejudices, mental blocks, and the retarding of children to the suppressive influence of parents.The,Simone Collins: the retarding of children to the suppressive influence- Yeah, basicallyMalcolm Collins: they’re like- ... of parents ... we need a way to retard children and then we’ll- They must retard the children ... blame it on the parents. I love, I love that wording We need a way toSimone Collins: break the school system, and thenMalcolm Collins: we’ll blame parents on the results of [00:07:00] that.That is so good. And every time somebody’s like, “Well, what about the parents?” Right? You know they’re running a communist op. They’re running a communist op. Come on, guys. I always hate that, that whiny, “Ooh, what about the parents?” Mm. It’s like, look, obviously par... It, it’s really about the family culture. Like, the parents cannot draconianly police everything a kid does.They need to create a culture where the negatives of society don’t get their hooks in the kid to the same extent. But by creating this learned helplessness, communists were able to degrade portions of our society. Okay, next. Gain control of key positions in radio, TV, and motion pictures. A- again, note here, I am not editorializing these.I am not... This is what was written, read into the Congressional Record, okay?Simone Collins: Well, I guess that explains the witch hunt that took place in that sense, right? Wasn’t there a big blacklist because there was this, this i- i- intense fear of people taking over the media? So it sounds like this was- And they didinternalized and taken seriously.Malcolm Collins: They did take over [00:08:00] the media. I mean, we’ve seen this today, right? You know? Yeah. This is true. The media is what in the 1960s would be called communists. The vast majority of people with influence. Like, say, well over 80% of people with influence in any of the major media organizations would, via 1953, be described of as a hardline communist.Octavian Collins: This is true. Okay, next. One moment. Octavian, what, what’s up, buddy? Do you need something? I made,Simone Collins: I made my, I made, I made a fox out of clay.Octavian Collins: I’m so glad. Yeah. I made- You should get your- Yeah. Yeah. I can- Get your swimsuit ready to go out and play in the creek. Thank you, friend.Simone Collins: I got 40 on my tablet.Malcolm Collins: Next point here. Continue, note the word here, continue. Mm-hmm. Continue discrediting American culture by degrading all forms of artistic expression.An American Communist cell was told to, quote, “Eliminate all good sculpture from parks and buildings. Substitute shapeless, awkward, meaningless forms.” Wait, so there’sSimone Collins: a reason for that? There’s a reason- Yes ... for the proliferation [00:09:00] of heinously ugly statues everywhere in the United States? This is... Thank you.Thank you. Thank you. They don’t really- ‘Cause it didn’t make any sense, and now we just know. Every time you walk by some misshapen, disgusting thing in the street, it’s the commies. It’s actually- It’s the commies ... literally the commies.Malcolm Collins: It’s the v- It, it’s not just public stuff now, it’s video games. I mean, look at Mixtape.Look at the games they’re pushing on us.Simone Collins: Oh, my God. Well, no, no. Mixtape was created by the daughter of one of the biggestMalcolm Collins: capitalists. Who’s a super big communist. All of these rich people are communists, because that just institutionalizes their power. That’s why rich people are so pro-commie laws, because they know that they’ll be at the top of the communist system, which is what has happened- generally, except in China when you had communist revolutionsSimone Collins: I don’t think that’s true.He’s, he’s buddies with TrumpMalcolm Collins: Oh, he is, but his daughter isn’t She, I could see her being a commie She inherited these things Yeah, I, I [00:10:00] could see her being a commie She institutionalized her power in a way the dad doesn’t. The dad’s productive. The dad never needs to worry. She just inherited an aristocratic position.You know, like her, Hasan Piker, Che Guevara you know, who, who, y- Fidel Castro. Actually, we have a whole video on this On the nepo babies of communism What if a communist were born rich? Yeah. Yeah, yeah. M- Zoran Mandic parents were famous directors who have done, like, movies that, like, you’ve heard of before.Like, all of them were co- famous c- super, super wealthy kids gr- going around on their polo, you know, back in the... Anyway, but I note here that this is actually a quote from a communist organization that was directed at another communist organization, that they picked up at the FBI. So this isn’t, again, editorialization.Ooh “Eliminate all good sculptures from parks and buildings. Substitute shapeless, awkward, and meaningless forms.”Simone Collins: Shapeless, awkward, and m- Ooh That is, that completely... Remember just walking around Palo Alto- Mm, mm, mm ... and you’d just be in a beautiful neighborhood, and then suddenly, [00:11:00] brp, like- Yeah ... there would be some nightmare fuel just sitting there.God, yeah. Wow. Communists.Malcolm Collins: And we’re gonna talk about how they transmitted these cultural values through people not necessarily recogni- Actually, I’ll just go into it right now. People can be like, “Well, okay, but how did a small communist party in the United States end up getting control of a Palo Alto housing committee?”for example, right? Like- Actually,Octavian Collins: though, yeah ...Malcolm Collins: that, does that make sense? And the answer is, and this is why I pointed out in our Cuba video where we’re like, “It is so important that Trump takes out Cuba,” which they’re in the process of doing Cuba played a major part in this. So Cuba, for a long time, has been funding organizations with communist leaders and people who have, like, these playbooks and keeping groups like Antifa and like the sort of rebellious leadership cast of ultra progressive movements in the United States on [00:12:00] message and aware of what they’re trying to do, even if they don’t fully understand why.Yeah if we disrupt Cuba in this, this may be able to be pushed back on in significant ways. But anyway, continue.Simone Collins: This is shocking.Malcolm Collins: Control- Critics and directors of art museums.Simone Collins: Yeah. Yep. Yep. And hence the art museums and all their disgustingly ugly meaningless art. And thenMalcolm Collins: he has a, a quote here from another communist organization that they were spying on.“Our plan is to promote ugliness, repulsive, meaninglessSimone Collins: art.” Repulsive, meaning- I feel so heard. Oh, my God. This is, this is one of the most validating things ever. Mm-hmm. How is this... Oh, my gosh.Malcolm Collins: Okay, next. Present homosexuality, degeneracy, and promiscuity as normal, natural, and healthy. Oh, boy. Keep in mind, this was 1963.Simone Collins: Yeah. Yeah. You- And- It really wasn’t seen that way.Malcolm Collins: Yeah ... here [00:13:00] is, here’s a fun one. Infiltrate the churches and replace revealed religion with, quote-unquote, “social religion.” Oh. Discredit the Bible and emphasize the need for intellectual maturity, which does not need a, quote-unquote, “religious crutch.” And they were wildly successful at this.This is one of the reasons when people are always like, “Why do you have your own weird version of Christianity? Why don’t you go back to the...” And I’m like, because they’re where all of this was spread from, right? Like, the, the progress pride flag went up on the churches before it went up in the schools, right?Like, they have been the source of the rot. They were some of the first institutions to fall. The Vatican is a captured city at this point, right? Like...You guys, if you wanna do your Reconquista with what’s his face? I like him. Redeemed Zoomer. I like, I like Redeemed Zoomer. Go for it. I think it’s a waste of time until we are a larger and more cohesive movement than the existing sort [00:14:00] of, I just wanna go back to the way things were movement, which I, I think obviously isn’t going to work.Because the way things were is what they were able to crack open. The way things were was incredibly un-robust. Mm-hmm. But anyway, to continue here. Eliminate prayer or any phase of religious expression in schools on the ground that it violates the principle of separation of church andSimone Collins: state.Oh, boy. Well. Well, they did that. My God, they nailed it. But I mean, you gotta hand it to them. Mm-hmm. Y- you know? A- apparently. They were at least effective in this. Yeah.Malcolm Collins: Okay. Discredit the American Constitution by calling it inadequate, old-fashioned, out of step with modern needs, and a hindrance to cooperation between nations on a worldwide basis.Discredit the American Founding Fathers. Oh. Present them as selfish aristocrats who had no concern for the common man. Wow. Hmm. Develop the illusion that total disarmament by the United States would be a demonstration of moral strength. Do we not repeatedly [00:15:00] see this today from leftists circles?Simone Collins: I’m... Wow.Hmm. Hmm.Malcolm Collins: Permit free trade between all nations regardless of communist affiliation and regardless of whether or not the items could be used for war.Simone Collins: Look at what they get ready to do with IranMalcolm Collins: instead of just dealing with the Iranian situation, which Trump is finally doing.Yeah.ThankGod.Yeah. Trump and the Jews, Trump and the Jews, b- bombing, you know, I, I saw a comment recently where they were like, “Yeah, like I really don’t like the Jews or Israel, but by God, they know how to just kill someone when they’re f*****g around.”And I’m like, “Yeah, it’s refreshing at this point, right?” Somebody’s f*****g with you, you just murder them. You just cap their butt. And people were like, “Well, w- what if they, what if they put their clinic or what if, what if they put their garrisons of, of guerrillas and terrorists under schools and hospitals?”And the Jews are like, “Well, we’ll bomb them.” And other people are like, “Well, what about the peop-” [00:16:00] Well, just bomb them. Like, whatever. I don’t care. They’ll stop doing it. It will stop being differentially a good idea to do that if they realize we don’t care. It’s only because the international scene still freaks out over it that they kept doing that.They would have stopped if the international scene had stopped being babies about it. But oh well. Continue here. Provide American aid to all nations regardless of communist domination. Or I guess I could say here anti-American affiliation, right? Like, why is US aid giving tons of money to countries that hate us, right, and, and groups that hate us, right?And that hate us for the aid itself, right?Grant recognition to Red China. Admit Red China into the UN one. When didSimone Collins: just co- yeah. When did we stop calling it Red China?Malcolm Collins: When did it stop being communist? I mean, we point out in our episode America’s functionally more communist than China now by an order of about threefold.Simone Collins: Yeah.Malcolm Collins: In terms of about [00:17:00] any measure that you could measure, like go into.Okay, note here. Th- this one I love, right, Simone? Promote the UN as the only hope for mankind. Oh, boy.Simone Collins: If its- That was... Oh myMalcolm Collins: God. If its charter is rewritten, demand that it be set up as a one world government with its own independent armed forces. Some communist leaders believe the world can be taken over as easily by the UN as by Moscow. So, hilariously, the UN, he’s saying the U- right, this was 1960s. He said the UN is a branch of communism. Yeah. And many communist and Marxist leaders- But it makes so much sense Think that the UN can dominate the world better than Russia can.And with the collapse of Russian communism, see our recent episode, this means that NATO and the UN are likely bigger threats to American sovereignty than any other force in the world rightSimone Collins: now. Even more evidence that you [00:18:00] should drop it like it’s hot. I tell you, man.Malcolm Collins: Drop it like it’s hot. Look, if the Democrats can just randomly pull us out of, like, Panama, why can we not randomly pull out of the UN, right?Yeah. Like, quit their stupid little project. Yeah. Okay, next. Do away with all loyalty oaths. Capture one or both of the political parties in the United States. I like it that they thought big. Capture both, right? And this is something- Look,Simone Collins: they did dream big, but they achieved. Like, their, their checklist here.Do, do, do, do, do, do. It, they, they justMalcolm Collins: went through it. They’ve nailed it Well, I mean, I, I think GOP Inc., before MAGA came in, before Trump came in, right, before we washed them out, the deontological faction of the Republican Party is not particularly far from a lot of these ideologies, right? They appear to be focused on sowing division within a voting bloc that we should be using to win through you know, racialist agendas, through agendas that are just not winning in the polls [00:19:00] right now.And through trying to peel, you know, as we pointed out, like Fuentes voting Democrat, trying to peel Republicans out of the coalition so that these people can win, right? Like, we repeatedly see the agents of the Communists understand their role, right? This is where we get organizations like the Southern Poverty Law Center being the, it appears now, primary donor to the Ku Klux Klan, right?Like, and you can see our episode where we argue, we go through the, the numbers on that to show that it was likely their primary source of external funds. Which is wild, right? And not just them, but the American Nazi Party, the... A lot of this stuff is being funded by these organizations to cause division, and, like, we need to be aware of this.They want to take over our party as well, and we cannot allow that. Next and they want to make us weak. If somebody comes to you and they say, “Oh, we as Americans we shouldn’t be using genetic technology. We shouldn’t be using AI technology.” These individuals are of the [00:20:00] camp, like, let’s de-arm.Let’s, let’s neuter ourselves so we can’t fight back. In a world where the people- Well, andSimone Collins: contrast this to the, the attitude toward AI and technology that you see in China, where they’re like, “Yeah, AI’s good. This is, l- let’s go. Absolutely, this is gonna make people’s lives better.” Something’s going on here.Well, I don’t care about people. I want theMalcolm Collins: autonomous drone swarms, okay? I want the gene, the the, the... There’s a lot of fun stuff we can do with genetic technology as it gets better. But to continue here. I’m sorry, I d- I didn’t wanna name any of it, lest be I get clipped. Use technical decisions of the courts to weaken American institutions by claiming their activities violate civil rights.That’s so bon- I love it. Ugh ... get control of the schools. Use them as transmission belts for socialism and current communist propaganda. Oh, God. Oh, it’s a little on the nose. It’s a little on the nose, yeah. [00:21:00] Soften the curriculum. Get control of teachers’ associations.Simone Collins: Soften the curriculum.Malcolm Collins: Get, get control of teachers’ association.Oh, no, the teachers’ union. Put the party line in textbooks.Simone Collins: But they did. They did. You know what? If anything, I kind of now just, I’m like, what? We lost. We lost. We lost the Cold War. They won. Maybe commies are a little more competent than I thought they were, and apparently the US is a lot more spineless than I thought it was. I’m, I’m kind of humiliated here.Malcolm Collins: Because we treated our adversaries with respect while they didn’t treat us with respect, and we need to stop doing this, right? We need to be willing to understand that we are playing for the future of human civilization, and we- Not, like...Simone Collins: No. I, I think th- this, the reason why this worked, why [00:22:00] they were able to pull this off, is it happened just as increasing numbers and proportions of women entered the workforce, and these kinds of ideologies are exactly the ones that they’d be like, “Yeah, we should be doing this.We should be.”And that, I think, unfortunately, is a bigger factor in this than I would like to admit. I don’t think that in a patriarchal society this would have, this would’ve gotten by us. Don’t, I mean... don’t you think so, though?Malcolm Collins: Probably. I mean, I think that that’s definitely one thing. Okay.So, where were they here? Gain control of student newspapers. Use student riots to foment public protests against programs or organizations which are under Communist attack. Belittle all forms of American culture and discourage the teaching of American history on the ground that it was only a minor part of the, quote-unquote, “big picture.”Give more emphasis to Russian history since [00:23:00] the Communists took over. Now they didn’t get this bi- second part, but they definitely got the first part. And a focus on Communist history, like if you look at American education systems now, it’s just like slavery, Native Americans w- what is it? Like, Jim Crow laws, stuff like this.Just like, oh,Simone Collins: all these- That was a big part of my, yeah, public school education. All these- Plus, when you think about, yeah, rioting students, th- this is just such a big theme on college campuses especially recently. It’s just- Another one thing- That’s what theyMalcolm Collins: do ... they did here eliminate the House Committee on Un-American Activities.Simone Collins: Don’t we still have that?Malcolm Collins: I’m pretty sure we don’t. The House Committee on Un-American Activities? Let’shave alook. I don’t think we still havethe standing committee, it was made a permanent committee of the House in 1945.Simone Collins: Okay. There we go. I thought so, because I’ve heard it in headlines, so I wasMalcolm Collins: like- no, it w- No, sorry, it was abolished in the late 1950s and 1960s.Opinion largely turned against it. And it was rebranded as the House Committee on [00:24:00] Internal Security, and then it was entirely abolished in 1975.Simone Collins: Hmm. Okay. So again, they won. They nailed it once again. Like, I mean, respect. Eli-Malcolm Collins: S- Support any socialist movement to give centralized control over any part of the culture, education, social agencies, welfare programs, mental health clinics, et cetera. Infiltrate and gain control of more unions. They’re already in unions. Infiltrate and gain control of big business. That wasn’t an accident.That was the plan is controlling big business. They always saw big business not as the enemy of Communism, but as their goal for bringing it about. Overthrow all colonial governments before native populations are ready for self-government. And int- internationalize the Panama Canal, another thing they achieved.Simone Collins: Wow. How?I would, [00:25:00] so let’s say, you know, we’re, we’re in a, a meeting of the Socialist Party in the US that’s like, “Hey, let’s do all these things.” I would be sitting there thinking, “Yeah, like, but we need to have leaders permeating every element of government and society to make this work. We need all the wealthiest people to be communists and to be a member of this party and a part of this strategic initiative.”I don’t understand how this... I mean, well, I can’t really, I don’t have a good explanation as to how these things ended up happening anyway aside from women tend to have more aligned with Communist Party desires and- Well, I think the answer is prettyMalcolm Collins: clear. They took over our university system first.It was first target elite universities. Mm-hmm. We saw this happening when we were at university, and a lot of the kids who are cheering for this stuff do not understand what they’re actually fighting for. The people who understand the bigger picture are their handlers often in Havana.Mm.And [00:26:00] that and I just don’t think that people got how much Cuba was organizing behind the scenes and how relevant Cuba is in managing the wider communist project in the United States.Simone Collins: Yeah, I mean, well, we should. I mean, Hasan just had that, well, the, it wasn’t obviously Hasan’s event, but Hasan was at a very major event there just recently.Malcolm Collins: Well, I mean, to understand how competent Havana has been at this stuff, they took over Venezuela’s government, right? Like, when we took back a Veniz- Venezuela was shipping them basically free oil to keep the lights on, right?Like, that is how Havana operated. It treated the rest of the world, countries that they would go in, infiltrate, and essentially take over. They had taken over the vast majority of the president’s guard. They had taken over the vast majority of leadership positions within the military in Venezuela, and they used that to keep control of the country and siphon all the money out of it.This is what the USSR did for its surrounding countries and stuff like that. That is what their goal is for the United [00:27:00] States. That is what they do with socialists in the United States, right? Like- Hmm ... the, the fight against Cuba is far more existential for the United States than I think many Americans believe because when you see all of these, you’re like, “This seems too perfect.How is it all organized?” And the key is gain control of the elite institutions, make this cool, you know, make it cool through Havana-backed education, which you’ll often see from leading groups like Antifa and stuff like that. They’ll be like, “No, this guy is legit. He went to one of the Havana training camps,” right?That’sSimone Collins: right, yes, Antifa too. Yeah. Oh. So you’re trying to say that even back, going back to the ‘70s, this was all happening in Cuba?Malcolm Collins: A lot of it, well a lot of it was organized in Russia in the ‘70s. And it, then it sort of became externalized to Cuba. And that’s where the, the key sort of organization ran from after that.Hmm.But yeah Cuba has been where the operations to brainwash parts of the [00:28:00] United... I mean, it makes sense. It’s closer to the United States. Like, you operate them out of there, and they never really stopped. They still hold regular, for like American socialists and stuff like that, like yearly conventions.They basically go and they’re told what to do and how to act and how to contact their handlers and yeah, I mean, it’s, it’s all very organized. Now a lot of this is organic, I, I, I will say. Like it’s not all top-down. But I think more of it is top-down than people realize, or even the people on the ground implementing the stuff realize.Huh. And I thinkOctavian Collins: it’sMalcolm Collins: our job, and I really make an effort to do this, to create a new right or tech right opposite of this, right? Where a fairly small yet highly organized and value-aligned group of individuals can cross-coordinate and build messaging across channels, and then use that messaging to with [00:29:00] careful directionality break apart and eventually recreate society in the image that we are aiming for, in the same way the communists achieved.Right? The problem is, is that the communists were interested in end goals. And the old version of conservatism that they were fighting against was very deontological, and so they didn’t really have a toolkit that could compete against a organization that was focused on like actually winning, right?Like, they just cared that they were technically correct in the things that they were doing not that this was gonna have some like wider culture war end state, right? And so they would, you know, blow stuff up rather... You know, somebody could point out to them, they’re like, “Well, if you make the movie like that, then nobody’s gonna buy it,” right?They’re like, “If you make a movie that’s all like morally preachy and everything like that and it doesn’t have some fun to it, then, then nobody’s gonna watch it.” And meanwhile the communists were like, “Oh no, you know, throw in degeneracy, throw in whatever,” right? Mm-hmm. They were able to [00:30:00] win. But now communists control the media industry, and they’ve made all media, all video games, shapeless blobs.And so we come in, we’re like, “Hey, you know, you can throw some sexy women in it without going full degen.” And people are like, “No.” So some of the old right it’s like, “No, I won’t do it.” It’s like, no, this is how we b- they have ha- handcuffed themselves at this point. They have hobbled themselves at this point.We can win the culture war at this point. And we- The, the key to us winning the, the next stage of the culture war is AI, I think. And I think we’re beginning to see what that looks like through products like RFab, where we’re trying to build, like, our own AI ecosystem for this space. But in addition to that, you have the Skybrow Cinematic Universe, you have these constant, you know, songs and media that are created with conservative themes and that are catchy.I mean, for example, our kid, the song that he sings most these days is the Holy Balls [00:31:00] song about pronouns. Like, too many, too many pronouns. And- ... he loves it, right? Like, this is the mind of a kid who sees this, and has actually been psyops into singing a song regularly as he walks along, why, about why, like, the, the pronoun community and alphabet soup community is bad and a problem.Speaker: MMIWG2SLGBTQQ. MMIWG2SLGBTQQ. MMIWG2SLGBTQQ. Yeah, A-A-MA-A-I-M-L-S-F tuning. LTM, RN, ND learning. TTS Faye with an AD burner. Verlo Rock Hi, real transformer.Malcolm Collins: That is absolutely astounding to me. Like, if you talk about winning the culture war, that’s [00:32:00] what it looks like, okay? We don’t even, like, show our kid... I wouldn’t even understand why anyone would show their kids modern cartoons at this point, right? Like, if you’re a conservative parent, you can watch all the old cartoons for free, right?Like-Simone Collins: Well, not, I mean, we’re all paying for YouTube Premium. But yeah, I mean, I’ve heard from multiple other parents who are like, “Yeah, that’s all we’re watching, is old cartoons,” typically on YouTube Premium, and that’s kind of it, yeah.Malcolm Collins: W- yeah, why are you watching anything else with your kids these days?Octavian Collins: Yeah,Malcolm Collins: yeah ... i- and, and I think that, that w- it’s also interesting is that it means that they’re not watching Disney, because Disney is so... Yeah. Talk about Disney really shooting themselves in the foot. Not only are they losing this generation of youth in terms of new content, and pricing them out of parks as children- YeahBut they’re not gonna have Disney adults in the next generation, because an entire generation of kids wasn’t just raised without seeing new Disney movies. They were raised without seeing old Disney movies. Because Disney [00:33:00] never making those movies free or easily accessible has been a enormous strategic mis- misstep.Simone Collins: Well, yeah, and it’s a shame too, because o- our kids have occasionally seen on YouTube, you know, like, pirated clips of songs from, like, The Lion King or The Little Mermaid, and they’re like, “Oh, what’s this?” Like, th- they’re i- we would be watching old Disney movies if we could. Yeah. But we can’t, so we don’t.And they just don’t- And so they’re gonna grow up withoutMalcolm Collins: any memories of any of those properties. Yeah. Our opponents are shooting themselves in the foot. We just have to be careful in how we move forwards. Yeah. We have to build out networks, which we’re already working to do. We need to move forwards with technology where science says, you know, th- this is too much for me.This... You know, the left tries to censor the degree to which we can move forwards with science,Speaker 11: They believed in me. I believed my methods were too radical, too controversial, but there were others in the shadows, searching for [00:34:00] ways to circumvent their rules. Freed from my shackles, the pace of our research hastened. Together, we delved deeper into those areas forbidden by law, and by fear. And we With this knowledge, what new world could we build?Malcolm Collins: . But that’s the basic plan that we need in terms of... And we’ve been funding this stuff from behind the scenes. Like, some of it has been found out with money that we raise.They’re like, “Oh, you funded X sketchy technology.” It’s like, yeah, we’re moving forwards. And we maintain access lines to the technology that we’re getting. So when and if state structures start to break down, we know who to call up to begin to set up, you know, gene labs and stuff like that in other places.To begin to set up modular nuclear reactors. To begin to set up fabs that can print basically anything you want at a fairly low cost. To begin to set up, I mean, I [00:35:00] don’t wanna go over all the technology that we’ve been sourcing. But yeah. I mean, we’ve been moving forwards on everything we need for self-sustaining settlements and stuff like that.Mm-hmm. To be able to then push from there back into... And our goal, as a reminder, is not to capture all of society. It’s not to capture all of culture. It’s to capture the efficacious individuals with a high degree of work ethic and a high degree of intelligence. No It, yes. It’s to createSimone Collins: a sustainable ecosystem of autonomous, independent, and quite varied cultures and groups who can inherit the future together, and also, you know, intermix, learn from each other cultivate resilience among each other.That- Well, theyMalcolm Collins: don’t need to intermix if they don’t want to. The, the plan is just to intellectually- No, of course, if they don’t want to. Yeah ... intermix. Like, share technology and ideas so that we can use the technology to move ourselves forwards. And, and this is why we see it as very important to not be overly aggressive towards groups that are persistently high technology.[00:36:00] Mm-hmm. We have to find a way for those groups to work with each other because that’s all that matters in the, in the future, the age of AI and the age of space travel. We simply do not need to lower ourselves to the savages, right? If the communists captured the savages and made them impotent, we don’t need them anymore.We can replace them. That’s what AI gives us the tools to do. And people are like, “Well, AI has a leftist bias.” Completely irrelevant if you use the right prompts, right? Like, if, if you... That’s one of the things with RFAB. You could even create just a regular AI engine that has a prompt reminding it to not be woke, and it won’t be woke, right?Like, it’s very easy to do. So what,Simone Collins: what people would push back and say is you can’t change the fact that the training data available to do that. Yes, youMalcolm Collins: can. You literally can. This is so annoying and so stupid. It does not matter that an AI has a leftist bias if you are engaging with the AI without any prompting that is negating the leftist bias.If you-Simone Collins: But wait, Malcolm, when literally people are choosing not to [00:37:00] publish peer-reviewed research that confirms many conservative stances, for example, and then disproportionately you see a lot of peer-reviewed research that is published that confirms more left-leaning stances, even if you’re prompting AI to answer a certain way, you can’t change the fact that the available information- That’s factually wrong,Malcolm Collins: Simone.That’s factually wrong, and this is what it means to me. Okay, explain that to me. And it, and it actually, like, these people who are saying this stuff are deep enemies of the conservative movement because they are trying to psyops the conservative movement into a learned helplessness. Hmm. The reality is, is that if you put prompts into an AI telling it to take on a conservative persona or a persona of X religious background or a persona of a person with Y beliefs that are like the beliefs of the host of the show Base Camp or something like that- Mm-hmmafter going through what those beliefs were, it will, with a high degree of veracity, follow that prompting structure. The fact that you can’t get an AI that you have not prompted to a- [00:38:00] It’s, this is basically what it’s like. It’s like me going to an image generation AI, and a person says to me, they go, “Malcolm, image generation AIs weren’t all trained on anime.And so if you just ask it to make art, it almost never makes anime art.” And I’m like, “All of mine on RFAB always create anime art.” And they go, “Huh, how do you get it to do that?” And I go, “Because it silently puts the words anime style before every request, you tard.” Sorry, like, this actually gets me because it is such a stupid level of learned helplessness that it fires me up.Speaker 2: It’s like somebody comes to me and they go, “We need to ban chainsaws.” And I go, “Why?” And then they show me this stump where their arm used to be, and they go, “’Cause it can cut off your arm.” And I’m like, “Oh my God, did the chainsaw do that on its own?” And they’re like, “No, I put my arm on a tree stump, and then I chainsawed it off.”It’s like, “So you did it.” It’s like when people are like, “Oh look, I got the AI to do a terrible thing.” And it’s like, “How did you do it?” [00:39:00] And it’s like, “Well, I told it to do a terrible thing.” And it’s like, it’s just trying to do what you told it to. If you prompt an AI to do something without any direction not to do it in a certain way, when you know it has a proclivity to do things in that way, then of course it’s going to act in that way.We all know this. We know how AI works. We know how token predictors work. You need to provide a prompt that prevents it from acting this waySpeaker 5: It’s not that it’s impossible that the thing that they’re talking about could be a problem. If it was true that no matter what prompting you put in, or you could prove to me that no matter what prompting you put in, that you could not get a sane answer out of the AI, then I would say, oh, that’s very interesting and very concerning.But the people who look into this, I have not seen any of them attempt to show me that yet. Instead, what they show me is without any prompting attempting to correct this, that AI does what we would predict it to do based on how much the left has controlled the training data and culture for so long, which isn’t [00:40:00] interesting to me.And it can be used to get other people who otherwise would intelligently engage with AI and find ways around this to not engage with AI, which ends up nerfing our own side, which is why I crash out over this so hard. , And the thing that gets me angry the most is learned helplessness or encouraging learned helplessness., Simone would know this from our relationship. Like if you go and somebody says, I don’t know how to do something. And I’m like, well, did you try to figure it out? And they’re like, well, no. It’s like, well, then don’t come to me until you at least try first.Malcolm Collins: It is irrelevant that this is in the training data of AI. AIs can easily get around their training data with prompting, and if you can’t get around it with the first layer of prompting, then you get around it with a second layer of prompting, or you can run a secondary AI that-Simone Collins: I’m not talking about the training data.I’m talking about also available information, like just what is out thereMalcolm Collins: And if we are able to deduce what is true from what is out there, AI can deduce what is true from what is [00:41:00] out there using the same internal heuristics that we use to determine what is true. If you read the book The Pragmatist’s Guide to Life we go over this in an extreme amount of detail.How can you determine what is true when you are looking at evidence from a captured industry? So you can say something like, if a big oil company puts out a report about how bad oil is for the environment or something like that, you can be more sure that that’s true than if they put out a report saying oil isn’t bad for the environment.If a global warming nonprofit or a major university institution puts out a paper saying, “Oh g- you know, global warming is happening faster than anyone expected,” right? You, you can say, “Okay, I can’t really trust that.” If they put out something that disconfirms their agenda... And there’s, like, 50 points we go through in our book that goes through various ways to tell, even when you’re dealing with captured institutions, when you’re dealing with information that is more likely to be true or [00:42:00] information that is less likely to be true.You can then feed these heuristics into AI, and somebody could then say, “Well, what if it still gets it wrong on the first output?” It’s like, then you use a multilayered output. This is what... If you go to rfab.ai and then you go to our super search fa- feature, this is what we use. We do multilayered AI web searches using different mainstream models, where they basically go through and they have to confirm point by point what every one of the other models output.And it is very good at removing both hallucinations and bias. I can further remove bias by putting in prompting to make it more explicitly conservative if I wanted to. But what I’ve noticed is that the vast majority of time, when I have heard conservatives complain about bias in AI, they’re just being stupid.They are crashing out about something where the AI is right and they simply were unaware. In fact, I will go further. I will say around 75% of the times I get a comment in show notes saying, “Malcolm, you have made a mistake [00:43:00] by believing an AI hallucination,” and then I double-check it. It turns out the AI was right, and the person who said I believed an AI hallucination was wrong.Your average human is worse at determining AI hallucinations than AI is. Great example. Somebody was like, “Oh, Austria was never split into two countries like Germany during the Cold War. That’s an AI hallucination.” I go and check, and no, it absolutely was. It, it would’ve been very easy. There, there was God, a great example recently where I was just like, oh my God somebody said something with an AI hallucination, and I go check, and I’m like...Do you remember what it was, Simone?Simone Collins: This has happened so many times. I, I don’t have a specific instance in mind. Okay. So youMalcolm Collins: know that, like, it happens all the time with us. Somebody will, like, accuse us of an AI hallucination, and it turns out the AI is right again. Yeah, andSimone Collins: I’ll look it up. Or, well, it’s also just other stuff.They’re like, “Did you know this?” And then I’ll look it up, and it’s not quite true. But then, you know, we have a lot of, a lot of other people who give us really good feedback, so you know. It’s whatever. Yeah. It’sMalcolm Collins: not that I’ve never fallen for an AI hallucination in the show. It’s just that the majority of the time I get called out for it, it wasn’t- Well, I think alsoSimone Collins: more importantly, you literally build tools like [00:44:00] Supersearch or rfab.ai- Oh, oh, sorry.I remember this one. Yeah ... to, like, overcome them because you- Yeah ... you do care about avoiding hallucinations. That isMalcolm Collins: really funny. Somebody stopped using our products with their kid ‘cause they were using the Whizzling system that like- Oh ... you know, embodies. And this was because the kid asked them about, like, w- when the, when Jewish slaves built the pyramids.And then it replied saying, “Biblically accurately, Jewish slaves did not build the pyramids. They built supply depots outside of,” I think, “Memphis.” And that you, you have a cartoonish vision of Christian history that you learn. And, and, Well, they didn’t insult the kid, but they just tried to gently explain that that isn’t what the Bible says.And the parent crashed out. A ca- parent, by the way, who had an Oxford degree in theology. So okay. But a lot of people are just very confident about things, and then they get mad when the E- when the AI doesn’t affirm their confidence, right? But to continue here do you... Well, we could go into Yuri Bezmenov, which people often like to talk to on this subject.[00:45:00]Simone Collins: We could. I just wanna say that one thing that really is hitting me with all this, going back to the commies winning, is that when I was in school and also just generally growing up, this idea of the Red Scare and of people blacklisting people who are suspected to have communist sympathies was framed as both just super overwrought and pointless and also misguided.Like, oh, these people weren’t actually communists and these people weren’t actually, Oh, it’s come out that mostMalcolm Collins: of the major figures who, like, we were taught in school were unfairly judged actually were communist agents for Russia. Actually were.Simone Collins: Okay. So yeah, I was wondering if that was the case.And also now it just hits me that, like, we, we actually have not done that enough. There, there wasn’t enough of a Red Scare. Or we kind of stopped and were like, “Oh, I guess we won the Cold War. The communist threat is over.” And then it just... It all... Like, who knew? Who knew that... And, and, like, my view has totally changed on that because I really [00:46:00] grew up thinking like, oh, a bunch of people went on this witch hunt, and they did all this sanctimonious like, “Oh, he’s a commie,” when he wasn’t.And, and yet, like, here’s this hit list of things they wanted to do and all of the, like... Well, p- certainly not all the boxes, I’m sure. There must be some things that weren’t achieved. But everything you read off, box ticked. You know? Mission accomplished. So- Yeah, it’s, it’s just, it’s kind of mind-blowing to me that this witch hunt that I’ve been told about all my life tur- well, one, the witches were real.Yeah. Two, we didn’t hunt them hard enough, and three, the witches won. We should- And we all live in their twisted witch world ... if America wasMalcolm Collins: a healthy country, we should be treating anyone with any communist connection the same way we treat people with Nazi connections. They, the communists killed more people than the Nazis did.They are, throughout history, a more evil political faction than the Nazis ever were in terms of the, the brutality of the things that they did. And I’m, and like, by the way, I, that’s saying a lot to say [00:47:00] this, but like, if for example you compare the concentration camps that the Nazis had which I have read about the, the worst descriptions of them they simply do not compare in terms of cruelty to the concentration camps of the Khmer Rouge.Like, the Khmer Rouge concentration camps, Simone, you wanna cover your ears for this. Oh my God. Just cover your ears. Take out your thing.Simone Collins: La, la, la, la, la,Malcolm Collins: la. They would- La, la, la ... when you go into the camps ... la, la, la, la ... they would have rotting babies they had cut out of pregnant women- La, la, la, lahanging from umbilical cords on the entranceway. La, la, la, la. They would take children- La, la, la, la, la ... and bury them in anthills up to their face- La, la, la, la ... and let the ants slowly sting and kill them.Octavian Collins: La, la, la, la, la,Malcolm Collins: la. They would have children- La, la, la, la ... brutally kill their own parents. La, la, la, la.La, la, la, la. They like... Okay, you can come back. Now I can’tOctavian Collins: re-watch this episode. They, they wouldn’t- So much for that ...Malcolm Collins: because unlike the Nazis who, you know when they would kill people, they’d use gas and stuff like this, the Khmer Rouge would [00:48:00] just because they didn’t wanna waste the, the, the money of bullets in the killing fields just bring them out and beat them to death.You know, so that’s why the Khmer Rouge- But that costsSimone Collins: money and calories.Malcolm Collins: They didn’t care about that. So I wanna give you an idea of like, and note here, here we’re not even talking about, like, other things. You’re like, “Well, that’s just the K- well, what did the, the, the Russians do?” They did things like left people on islands to starve to death and all kill each other slowly.Hmm. Like again, I am not underselling the genuine horror of what the Nazis did. They did some of the most horrifying acts in history. It’s just, like, when you compare like to like, communists are generally worst. The, the, the worst. And, and they did, like, okay, sorry, I should go... They experimented on children, Nazi did.They mass killed people in really painful ways. They killed children. Like, all the horrible things they did. It’s just maybe they weren’t as creative as the Khmer Rouge were in instances. But yeah. [00:49:00] Horrifying. But let’s go to Yuri Bezmenov here. But the reason I’m saying this is we need to treat these two the same way.Anyone who has ever affiliated themselves with a communist organization should be absolutely the same way, like, not necessarily removed from society, but the same way that, like, you can’t get a job if you were affiliated with a Nazi organization, or you’d be hounded out of politics, or you’d be... We need to, whenever they’re like, “Oh, a Nazi came to one of your events,” you’re like, “Did a communist come to one of your events?Have you checked for that?” Because we’ve got to be realistic about this. We’ve got to keep a clear eye at history and how evil these groups are, and their end goals. You can see here that when they say they care about things like native groups, th- they explicitly had it in their planning to remove colonialist powers from native regions before those regions had the ability to self-govern, because they wanted to cause suffering on those groups so they could take over.And we saw this. We could go into, like, what happened with India and Churchill trying to [00:50:00] prevent them from pulling out fast enough, and it ended up causing one of the most li- like, India and Pakistan going to war with each other when that absolutely didn’t need to happen if they had just waited and carried out the plan that Churchill was trying to carry out.But that’s a whole other thing we’re not gonna go into. But to continue here Yuri Bezmenov is a former communist. He’s the one from leaflet song about college where she’s saying- Yeah, that’s all ISimone Collins: know of Yuri Bezmenov was he was right, per leaflet. That’s likeMalcolm Collins: where, where it, and it starts from.So he said the plan for the Russian communists was demoralization, 15 to 20 years. Focus on the school and education system. Corrupt the education system, media, art, and religion to erode moral values, patriotism, critical thinking, and cultural identity. To parp- pump Marxist-Leninist ideology into students via teachers, textbooks, and university.Promote relativism, destroy traditional standards, make people unable to access true information, even when presented with facts. He explicitly mentioned that by the 1980s this had already affected generations of American students. Destabilization, two to five years. The [00:51:00] economy, foreign relations, defense, and social fabric.Create chaos and division. Then crisis, up to six weeks, i.e. COVID. Precipitate a major upheaval where people demand radical change. And then normalization. The new subverted system becomes accepted as normal, often with force to stabilize it under the new ideology. Useful idiots, leftists, activists, academics, et cetera, from earliest stages are no longer needed and now may need to be eliminated, as we saw in the Islamist revolution in Iran.So communists won, and now we need to fight back. But we’re winning against them right now because it turns out that when they have power Having gamed it through all of these systems, the one thing they didn’t think about is how are we gonna still win the war of art when we’ve made all of our games actively unfun and ugly?How are we gonna actively win media if we’ve made everything unfun and ugly? When people can no longer trust education, how does controlling these organizations have any institutional power, right? Mm. When somebody, the AI guy was like, “Well, you can’t trust edu- [00:52:00] educational institutions to do good science.”When I’m getting my science, I don’t often get it from educational institutions. I’m, like, going through independent Substacks these days and stuff like that because everybody knows that’s where the best research is done, right? Like, we’ve pointed this out. Everyone I know who’s, like, an independent, like, really good researcher in, in, in fields though, nobody goes to the academics anymore as the first line of defense because it’s just not where the cutting edge research is.You wanna go cutting edge sexuality research, you’re going Aella. You wanna go cutting edge genetics research, you’re going Emil Kirkegaard or Razib Khan, right? Like, you simply aren’t going to the academics anymore because they’re not any good anymore, right? They lost the... You know, obviously the sheep still follow them.The sheep still repeat, but you don’t need to. And people can be like, “Well, how do you get an AI to not listen to the sheep?” You tell it not to. I do not... It’s, it’s like not trying step one of fixing the problem and then getting mad at the thing, right? Like, going into an AI that you know has a bias and not putting in a prompt to correct for that bias, and then getting mad at [00:53:00] the AI is like the image of the guy sticking the stick in the spokes of the bicycle, and then the bicycle falls over, and then he says, “Bicycle, how could you fall over?”Wow. You know what I should do? I’m gonna do this on the website. Okay. Next feature I’m gonna make is gonna be based AI.So I’m gonna have a number of ways that correct for bias in AI and then create normal AI interactions with top of line models outside of any of the mainstream ecosystems. Maybe even have it run by default in alloy mode which will be different from, like, a generic companion or narrative engine or something like that.That’s what I’m gonna do. I’m gonna fix this for you guys who can’t figure out how to fix it on your own so that we don’t have this problem anymore and you can just come to rfab.ai and get your based AI takes.Simone Collins: Works for me. I love you, Malcolm. This scares me, but, I mean, we already knew things were bad.We just didn’t know it [00:54:00] was also part of a communist plan. So, okay. Fine. Okay. Okay.Malcolm Collins: All right. Love you, Simone. Have a good one. You too. Bye, gorgeous.Simone Collins: Can’t wait.Malcolm Collins: All right. And dinner tonight, what is the story?Simone Collins: So it looks like my dad’s just gonna stay at the hospital, so... A- and I think Minka will be there too. She’s gonna bring him our, the, the Thai curry I made. So I can make you Thai curry with more curry paste. Or we can do hot dog and french fry night like we’d planned.Malcolm Collins: Oh, we do have to eat the french fries the hot dogs at some point. Let’s just do hot dogs and french fries. Okay. Are we doing it with potatoes, or are they, like, pre-made french fries?Octavian Collins: They’re pre-made french fries that I’m gonna add,Simone Collins: Some additional... Well,Malcolm Collins: we’ll see if we can make them good. That would be an interesting experiment.Simone Collins: Yeah. So- I mean, add a [00:55:00] little bit of MSG to it ... chop up someMalcolm Collins: onion or some what do we have for- Oh, forSimone Collins: the hot dog. I have I saved the shallot that you bought,Malcolm Collins: so. Yeah, so a shallot would be nice. Yeah. Okay. And you haveSimone Collins: all the sauces. A billion sauces, so.Malcolm Collins: So that’s, you know. All right.Simone Collins: Mm-hmm. I think you’ll be just fine, sir.All right,Malcolm Collins: let’s see here.Speaker 3: I just wanna run inside and take a nap. Oh my God. What do you see? I don’t know. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit basedcamppodcast.substack.com/subscribe

The internet has fundamentally changed — and almost no one has noticed. In this episode of Based Camp, Malcolm and Simone Collins break down how the explosion of global internet users (especially from India, Pakistan, Indonesia, Brazil, Bangladesh, Nigeria, and other developing nations) has dramatically reshaped online discourse on both the left and the right.They explore:* Why environmentalism, anti-Black racism, and anti-Hispanic racism faded from leftist priorities while Gaza, Pakistan, Jews, and “Hindu Indians” suddenly dominate* Audience capture, botting, and engagement farming* Why certain right-wing creators (Tucker Carlson, Nick Fuentes, Andrew Tate) shifted toward international/Islamic audiences* The hidden influence of third-world users on Western political conversation* Christian-majority vs. non-Western audience patterns* And why the “online right” often feels disconnected from actual American conservativesA paradigm-shifting look at how the internet is no longer majority American — and what that means for culture, politics, and influence.Show Notes* In terms of sheer internet users (using broadband and mobile internet subscriptions as a proxy), there is only one Western nation—the USA—represented in the top ten countries represented* (top representation = China, India, theU SA, Indonesia, Brasil, Russia, Japan, the Philippines, Bangladesh, and Pakistan).* Contrast this to 2008, when the top users of the internet were:* China (but doesn’t count, due to the great firewall of China)* And then the USA, Japan, Germany, the UK, France, and Brazil* In terms of broadband: Leading countries by total subscribers or penetration included the US, China, Japan, South Korea, Germany, France, UK, and Canada.* So functionally: Mostly Western nations were represented onlineCould this be why the left shifted from discourse about LGBT and climate change to discourse about Palestine?Internet + Broadband Subscriptions: Then and NowInternet/Broadband Subscriptions in 2008Leading countries by total subscribers or penetration included the US, China, Japan, South Korea, Germany, France, UK, and Canada.Mobile + Broadband:* China: ~253 million (June/July 2008; some estimates ~180–220 million by end-2008). China surpassed the US mid-year.* United States: ~220–230 million (active/home users ~150 million in early 2008 per Nielsen).* Japan: ~80–90+ million (active home users ~47–48 million in early 2008).* Germany: ~40–50+ million (active home ~35 million).* UK, France, Brazil, etc.: Lower but still in the top tier (e.g., UK/France ~25 million active home users; Brazil growing rapidly).Internet/Broadband Subscriptions TodayDominated by:* China* India* USA* Indonesia* Brazil* Russia* Japan* The Philippines* Bangladesh* PakistanThe USA is the only “western” country represented on the top ten list.Pulling from Wikipedia’s list of sovereign states by number of broadband Internet subscriptions, I combined mobile + broadband internet subscriptions to create a ranked list:* China - 1852637000* India - 1200170910* United States - 505719000* Indonesia - 464967914* Brazil - 265158564* Russian Federation - 258214661* Japan - 210519139* Philippines - 176599291* Bangladesh - 152409669* Pakistan - 146355310* Nigeria - 144994174* Germany - 139217000* Mexico - 131458662* Vietnam - 131286117* Thailand - 129738000* Egypt - 108181505* United Kingdom - 105189476* Italy - 100457919* France - 97446000* Iran - 97164277* South Africa - 93576635* Turkey - 89725075* South Korea - 84854606* Argentina - 69767601* Colombia - 68540947* Spain - 66958543* Ethiopia - 63197120* Ukraine - 60954476* Poland - 56881929* Algeria - 53040296* Myanmar - 48356160* Canada - 45381104* Morocco - 45294933* Malaysia - 45026300* Kenya - 43103412* Saudi Arabia - 42709657* Tanzania - 41802027* Peru - 41225603* Ghana - 36808571* Nepal - 36096396* Australia - 35476000* Democratic Republic of the Congo - 35271156* Taiwan - 34490976* Iraq - 33335316* Côte d’Ivoire - 31890058* Sri Lanka - 29419587* Kazakhstan - 29046500* Sudan - 28675221* Netherlands - 27742800* Uzbekistan - 27585670* Romania - 27330000* Venezuela - 27103805* Chile - 26072126* Uganda - 25094643* Afghanistan - 23946523* Hong Kong - 20986099* Guatemala - 19986482* United Arab Emirates - 19826224* Cameroon - 19748144* Cambodia - 18702623* Burkina Faso - 17960442* Austria - 17435540* Syrian Arab Republic - 16804909* Greece - 16715369* Belgium - 16340062* Sweden - 16171593* Senegal - 15870161* Czech Republic - 15695534* Ecuador - 15565345* Portugal - 15338153* Switzerland - 15142000* Tunisia - 15135865* Hungary - 14987525* Belarus - 14578427* Zimbabwe - 14279414* Zambia - 13474451* Angola - 13420871* Israel - 12882000* Azerbaijan - 11932214* Mozambique - 11917159* Bolivia - 11321904* El Salvador - 10424913* Bulgaria - 10297690* Serbia - 10101873* Singapore - 9933200* Costa Rica - 9584401* Dominican Republic - 9555585* Denmark - 9453730* Finland - 9017200* Rwanda - 8840997* Benin - 8801877* Niger - 8787534* Madagascar - 8755561* Slovakia - 8522504* Honduras - 8466489* Nicaragua - 8390000* New Zealand - 7982000* Norway - 7855360* Malawi - 7781723Follower Composition of Major InfluencersNick Fuentes - America First?* The Network Contagion Research Institute reported (in December 2025) that ~50% of retweets on Nick Fuentes most viral posts originated from foreign accounts before Kirk’s death.* These were heavily concentrated in countries like India, Pakistan, Nigeria, Malaysia, and Indonesia (with additional shares from the UK and Canada among foreign sources). Non-Western countries made up the majority of the foreign retweets.* The NY Post reported that the pattern matched known engagement farm/bot activity (rapid, coordinated retweets shortly after posting, often from anonymous/single-purpose accounts), with no clear organic tie to Fuentes’ “America First” content in those regions.Tucker Carlson - Pakistani Icon?Tucker Carlson’s popularity among a Pakistani audience surged due to his outspoken criticism of liberal Western culture, his advocacy for Palestinian rights, and a viral 2025 interview where he stated he had more in common with a “sincerely religious Pakistani cab driver” than with secular, liberal Western elitesThat said, Tucker Carlson Network (TCN) website traffic (as of early 2025 data) indicates:* ~82% from the United States* ~2.6% from Australia* ~2.05% UK* ~1.98 Canada* ~1.67 Russia* No notable Pakistan or South Asian spike in the available breakdown.On YouTube and X, independent estimates show moderate U.S.-heavy performance, with some international growth noted in the Middle East/Gulf due to his anti-war/anti-interventionist takes (e.g., on Iran), but nothing indicating dominance by Pakistan or similar countries.Some X posts and memes joke about his audience shifting to “Pakistan, Iran, Russia” amid his criticism of U.S. foreign policy (especially on Iran). These are often mocking, not serious analysis (e.g., claims of “closeted gay Muslims in Pakistan” as his base or similar). Pakistani users sometimes push back, noting low actual awareness of him domesticallyAndrew Tate: Indian Hustler?* Google search interest and anecdotal reporting (+ reporting form the Guardian) indicate higher per-capita interest in Muslim-majority countries (e.g., parts of the Middle East, Pakistan, Indonesia, Malaysia) than in the UK/US.* Popularity also noted in India, Brazil, and other Global South areas* Tate’s 2022 conversion to Islam boosted this* Much of Tate’s international reach comes from short-form content amplified by algorithms and affiliate promoters in places like India/Pakistan/Bangladesh* Audience composition often highlights young men from ethnic minority backgrounds in the West or aspiring youth in developing countries drawn to his “self-made” wealth, discipline, and anti-”matrix” messaging.Hustler University* Articles note it helps young Indians navigate industry/job challenges; Indian students comment on applicability (e.g., freelancing); LinkedIn profiles and reviews show Indian participants. Affiliate promotion and clip-sharing by creators in India contribute to viralityAre Shifting Internet Audiences Changing the Discourse?From a Based Camp listener: “A lot of their viewerbase are muslims, they don’t care about climate change. That is also why Tucker changed his content. American politics is now no longer only consumed by Americans. People from other countries also have strong opinions on US politics.”To be fair, I checked Google Trends and Palestine has always (as long as they’ve been measuring search volume) been searched more than LGBTQ community stuff and climate change as a topic.Why islamists and modern progressives are so compatibleThe apparent alignment between Islamists (those advocating political Islam, often with Sharia-oriented goals) and progressives (or segments of the radical left) is a tactical “Red-Green alliance” driven primarily by shared enemies rather than shared values.This is not a new alliance.* This phenomenon, sometimes called “Islamo-leftism,” has historical roots (e.g., Western leftists supporting Iran’s 1979 Revolution before many were purged) and has intensified in recent years, especially post-9/11, during anti-Iraq War protests, and after October 7, 2023 (The Free Press writes about it)Core Reasons for the Alignment* Common adversaries: Both groups frequently oppose Western liberalism, capitalism, U.S. foreign policy, and Israel (viewed as a symbol of “imperialism” or colonialism). Progressives frame this through lenses of anti-racism, decolonization, and social justice; Islamists see it as a civilizational/religious struggle. This creates convergence on issues like Palestine, anti-Zionism (often overlapping with antisemitism critiques), and resistance to “Western hegemony.”* Identity politics and “oppressor vs. oppressed” framing: Many on the progressive left apply a hierarchy where Muslims (as a minority in the West or in conflict zones) are positioned as victims of colonialism/racism/Islamophobia. This leads to alliances via intersectionality, even when Islamist views on gender, sexuality, or secularism clash sharply with progressive ones. Islamists leverage this for legitimacy, funding, and platforms in Western institutions.* Anti-imperialism as a bridge: Historical leftist support for Third World revolutions extends to viewing Islamist resistance (e.g., Hamas, Hezbollah) as part of global anti-Western struggle. Shared tactics include protests, framing dissent as justice, and using media/activism to delegitimize opponents.* Pragmatic coalition-building: In the West, left-leaning parties see Muslim immigrant communities as electoral bases and prioritize anti-discrimination solidarity over cultural clashes. Islamists gain influence by adopting progressive rhetoric on equity while advancing their agenda.Places where there’s tension but possibly even deeper alliance* Progressives typically champion secularism, LGBTQ+ rights, feminism, and individual autonomy.* Traditional Islamism emphasizes theocratic governance, strict moral codes (e.g., on homosexuality, apostasy, gender roles), and religious authority—views that conflict with core progressive tenets* Ironically, many conservatives (certainly us) see the modern left as being all about theocratic governance, strict moral codes, etc.Episode TranscriptMalcolm Collins: [00:00:00] Hello, Simone. I’m excited to be here with you today. Today I am genuinely excited, because this theory has completely changed the way I see our society today.This is one of the big ones. And- It is so explanatory to me of so many things that I didn’t have a good explanation for. For example, why did the left so quickly and over the very explicit time period that we are looking at completely abandon environmentalism? Why did they abandon anti-Black racism as a cause?Why did they abandon anti-American Hispanic racism as a cause? Why did they start focusing on Gaza and, and Pakistan and the problem of Jews all of a sudden? Why all of a sudden did they start complaining about Hindi Indians all of the time? Why all of a sudden... not that there aren’t legitimate grievances here but these are changes that we’ve seen in both the left and the right.So we’re gonna [00:01:00] talk about, like, where these changes have happened in both the left and the right. And I’m not saying, again, I’m not saying that these grievances don’t have, like, a genuine reason for them, right? But when I hear about, for example regularly, like, women being dragged off the streets in parks and graped, okay?And then I see Nick Fuentes crashing out about Indian tech workers I’m like, “Your hierarchy of racism seems off.” Not, I’m not saying that, like... Or like the, the, the three boys of a certain ethnicity, you know, recently beat to death a, a disabled kid.What? It’s three Black kids, yeah. There was a w- white disabled kid that they mocked and beat to death.There was the, I think it was like they got, like,Yeah, so they live-streamed themselves beating him over the course of three days, it looks like, and they only got re-respectively, , three years in prison, seven years in prison, and eight years in prison. That’s itBut I was wrong. He [00:02:00] survived, and so that is why people say, “Oh, it’s okay they got these relatively light sentences.”Malcolm Collins: There was a recent incident of the Black guy, like, murdering some Asian old guy in San Francisco, and they said that putting him in jail would be bad for him.Like, it would be bad for him, like, mentally or something, and so he’s not. No, it’s, it’s, g- there’s, like, a lot- And he’s just not using thatSimone Collins: i- if I ever get in trouble as a defense. This, this would be, this would be bad for me. Yeah, this would be bad for my emotional health- The timing is, it’s- ... if I got rapedI’ve got a lot going on right now. Yeah. Not a good time.Speaker: For context, he murdered an 85-year-old Vietnamese immigrant and he was only given five years in prison, after which he was released. First he was only sentenced to eight years in prison, then he was released after only five years because it was considered bad for his mental health.Malcolm Collins: Well, there was the recent incident of the the Muslim guy who drove into a crowd. Ooh. And they said it was a mental health issue, even though he said he just wanted to kill them all.Simone Collins: Well, [00:03:00] at least there’s, you know, a long documented body of, of comments and analysis online talking about how unhinged we are.We basically have an get out of jail free card.Malcolm Collins: Exactly. Well, not anymore. Not that many people talk about how unhinged we are. Now most people are like, “Oh, they, they’re crazy, but they make a lot of points, and they’re barely ruthless.” That was your thing on Christmas. But okay, theory. Theory. We’re gonna get to the theory.Yeah. Then we’ll talk about us. So, this was in a recent episode where we were looking at the expansion of internet users. Ooh. And we were going over data on this, Simone and I. And what happened over the past 10 years or so- ... is that the internet went from being predominantly an American and minoritely a European platform, to today being a much, much more international platform.Yes. Where- In termsSimone Collins: of sheer internet users, like we’re talking broadband and mobile internet subscriptions, there’s only one Western nation, the [00:04:00] USA, represented in the top 10 countries that are out there. So the top are China, which of course doesn’t count ‘cause they’re sort of walled off, India, the USA, Indonesia, Brazil, Russia, Japan, the Philippines, Bangladesh, and Pakistan.We are the only Western country there. Whereas contrast that with 2008, and the top 10 internet users were China, but still doesn’t count, and then the USA, Japan, Germany, the UK, France, and Brazil. This is a very different landscape. It was mostly Western countries. We didn’t think... I mean, like it makes sense.I don’t think this would come as a surprise to anyone, but I, I... What I don’t think we’re really thinking about is how that has impacted the discourse online and our perception of what, like- Simone, can you send me- ... people’s normal views are ... that listMalcolm Collins: of countries?Simone Collins: But you can actually, even if you go all the way to like 34, you’re like, “Oh my God,” like in terms of internet and broadband users today.Malcolm Collins: And so what you’re going to notice is essentially what has happened to the internet over the past 10 years, [00:05:00] without people grokking that the internet has fundamentally changed, is the internet has become a platform where the majority of consumers, not the majority of creators, have become uneducated third worlders.Mm-hmm. Sorry, I didn’t- Well, well- Savage third worlders ... peopleSimone Collins: from, people from developing countries in, in many cases who may have-Okay, yes,Malcolm Collins: developing countries, people from developing cou- the developmentally challenged ... up andSimone Collins: come, up and comers, and so- ... risingMalcolm Collins: starsSpeaker 2: I found some video footage here that depicts their daily lifein a way that I think really humanizes themSpeaker 3: Attacker!Malcolm Collins: What this has done is a lot of online content creators who get shaped by their audience have begun to drift [00:06:00] towards causes that the developmentally challenged, we’ll call them- Oh my God.Thank you so much ...prefer and champion. This explains perfectly why the left gave up on environmentalism. Does your randomMalcolm Collins: care about environmentalism? Does your random person from Bangladesh care about environmentalism? No. Will they tune in if you go on a rant about how much you hate Jews and Israel?Of course, they’re Muslim majority countries. And this is what we’re seeing throughout the internet is we have gotten waves and waves and waves of potentially high attention spam, and we can even see this provably. If you look at a channel like Nick Fuentes, there was this thing where it came out that he was being rapidly retweeted after his tweets at a rate that was higher than even Elon, and when it came out where these were based, they were mostly in Muslim [00:07:00] majority countries like- Yes, ISimone Collins: can br- I can, for those who want receipts the Network Contagion Research Institute reported in December of last year, 2025, that around 50% of retweets on Nick Fuentes’ most viral posts were originated from foreign accounts, though that was from before Charlie Kirk’s death.And they were heavily concentrated in countries like India, Pakistan, Nigeria, Malaysia, and Indonesia, though there were some additional shares from the UK and Canada among foreign sources. It’s just- All of which- ... the important thing is that the majority were non-Western countries. And then additionally, the New York Post reported that the pattern matched known engagement farm bot activity, so it’s not just, like, natural interest in those- But, but hold onnon-Western countries. No, the pointMalcolm Collins: I’m making here- Yeah ... isn’t the point you’re making. I’m saying they might be wrong in this, okay? It might be genuine engagement from these countries. Every one of- Yeah ... the countries you mentioned has a large Muslim [00:08:00] population. The point I’m making is that across the internet, in both the left and the right, we have allowed ourselves to be heavily influenced by Muslim third worlders, basically.And it’s caused a dramatic shift in the causes that the left claims to care about and the causes that the right cares about, and this shift has been exaggerated by a secondary issue which is something that we’ve been exploring in recent videos. But I have been digging deeper on, and it’s been completely changing my perspective of the right and the internet Which is the amount of large mainstream right-wing creators that are incredibly heavily botted and rely on incredibly heavy inauthentic viewer waves.And as a result of this, people misunderstand two things. One is, who actually are the most influential [00:09:00] influencers in various intellectual spaces because they accidentally key to the bot farmed ones, not realizing that they don’t actually have that big of an authentic audience. And two, the people who are heavily botting because their proportional audience is so low, and if you are botting authentic, e- educated, you know, people from the United States are going to be less likely to go all the way through your streams.The people who are actually still staying are more likely to be from these developing countries. And keep in mind, like, when we talk about the blatant developing country stuff, we’re not even talking about the ones who are using VPNs and stuff like that. Like, I bet the vast, vast majority of them are at this point, especially after the Twitter leak happened and it basically came out that a bunch of these people were just LARPing as conservatives and progressives and were actually all .Malcolm Collins: I’m just gonna call themMalcolm Collins: even though a lot of them are from India or from- Was it... HoldSimone Collins: on ... Virginia. I have this vague memory of that word, that term being used in the movie Bend It Like Beckham, [00:10:00] and it was, like, seen as a major slur. Are we, is this part of the basement-Simone Collins: a slur? If I’m remembering Bend It Like Beckham correctly, yes.It was, it was yelled at her, muttered at her on the soccer field. It was deeply insulting and hurtful. Pakistanis. Okay. Yes. Thank you. Thank, thank, thank you. I mean, I was confused by it in the movie because I was like, it’s, it’s a reference to a, a shortening of your country name. You know, if someone called me a Yank I wouldn’t be- Yeah,Malcolm Collins: it’s like Yank or something like that, right?Like- But then keep inSimone Collins: mind that, that... Oh, I the term Jap also was a slur. So- Oh, true ... I remember also, like, the shock I heard when I went to GWU in DC for my undergrad, George Washington University, and everyone kept talk- “Oh, she’s such a Jap. She’s such a Jap.” And I’m like like, “What’s... One, where are all the Japanese students, ‘cause I don’t see them?”[00:11:00]Two, oh my God. But it turns out that they had never heard the term Jap because they were referring to Jewish American Princess, and there were a lot of very affluent Jewish students at my s- at my school. WeMalcolm Collins: gotta worrySimone Collins: about thoseMalcolm Collins: Japs taking over the, the- I mean, ... finance industry ...Simone Collins: sl- slurs, slurs really confuse me.I don’t know when I’m supposed to feel shocked and alarmed. There, there are, you know, sometimes multiple uses, so I’m just saying. I mean, it’s not a very biting slur if it is a slur. I, mm, I mean- I know, and neither is yank, and I don’t know. I mean, but like I think in the end, the problem with slurs is when they’re, when they’re said with, with anger and hate in one’s heart then suddenly they become bad and full of baggage, and then you can’t use them anymore.Well, IMalcolm Collins: should be clear. I mean this derogatorily. So I won’t use the term anymore. I will just call them Pakistanis. Ugh. For... And note, here, I’m not talking about everyone from Pakistan. Surely there are some intelligent people of [00:12:00] Pakistani heri- heritage. And I, and I say to you- Is this... What is happening here?And I say to you people, I like you even though you’re Pakistani.Simone Collins: Guys, don’t listen. Don’t... He’s... I don’t know what he’s doing. I don’t know what he’s doing right now. I don’t know, I don’t know what he’s do- do- I- I’m beingMalcolm Collins: provocative Don’t look at, don’t get madSimone Collins: at me. I told him my little public service announcement that I learned from Bend It Like Beckham, the girls movie that was like The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants before The Sisterhood of Traveling Pants.I’m doing the whole the more you know rainbow, and he’s just not listening to me, so don’t come for me.Malcolm Collins: Anyway, I’m glad I have you here. Sorry. Like with our kids- I’m sorry for derailing ... when a kid comes up with a little bird that’s a robin, and it’s an all red bird, and it has a little black patch around the eyes, and she goes, “What are you gonna name him?”And he goes, “Blackface.”Simone Collins: Well, and that was after, yes, he wanted to name his cardinal plushie Blackface. This was after he wanted to name one, [00:13:00] one of his, one of his baby chicks Whitey. So, Okay ... great. Th- th- Whitey, yeah.Malcolm Collins: Th- th- he’s gonna get, he’s gonna get jumped if he goes into the wrong part of town.He’s really- Whitey here, the little chick ...Simone Collins: yeah, IMalcolm Collins: I- Okay ... ISimone Collins: don’t know what to do. I don’tMalcolm Collins: know what to do. But where I was going with this- Yeah, sorry ...is that what a lot of people, if you, if you have an audience that is primarily astroturfed you are going to be more influenced by the develop- the developmentally challenged overly because they will watch more of your videos than people from first world countries who are educated.And, and as, as McGold said, as McGold said, like, “I don’t care.” He got kicked off of Twitch for this. What some, you know, like goat farmer in whatever cares about his, naming some third world country. And he got kicked off, but he’s like, “But you don’t care either.” Everybody knows we don’t care what these people think.But the problem is is when you can’t tell these people. So I’ll give a good example of somebody who I think is heavily influenced by this. [00:14:00] Did you hear about the Tucker Carlson leak in terms of his actual paid subscriber numbers?Simone Collins: Tell me, because I had seen allusions to, like, Tucker Carlson, Pakistani icon, and then when I actually tried to look up stuff, I wasn’t really-Malcolm Collins: Yeah, so the core, like, that could explain this with Tucker Carlson is can you guess how many paid subscribers Tucker Carlson has?Mr. Millions of Views on everything that he puts out.Simone Collins: I, I think I looked it up and, and it was around, like, 7,000, but that there’s nothing public about the composition of that subscriber base.Malcolm Collins: Okay, 7,000 is astonishingly low for someone of his view count. It came out because he did a very bad job of securing his, his database and so you could just tell how many- OhBars were in it, basically. Did you... Was his,Simone Collins: like, email password TuckerCarlson6969 or something?Malcolm Collins: Yeah, he has a user base of 7,000 paid members. That means that his [00:15:00] actual, like, real-world watchers might be astonishingly small at this point. And I’ve noted this with other people. One of the groups that I’ve noticed seem to be, like, the highest bodied of communities is anybody who used to be famous in the conservative space- Mmum, and then sort of dropped off in terms of you hear anybody talk about them with respect anymore. The, Tucker Carlson falls squarely in that. Like, I used to love Tucker Carlson. My little brother used to love Tucker Carlson. Like, everyone I know in my space, whenever Tucker Carlson would do a video, we’d all, like, talk about it.Like, it was like, “Oh, God, it’s the new Tucker Carlson video,” right? Like, he h- was known as having, like, really intellectually deep and provocative takes. And- Yeah, that’s fair. That, that tracks with my experience, too and then, like, nobody talks ab- like, o- other than can you believe this crazy thing Tucker Carlson said I haven’t heard that much about him, and I think it might be because he allowed his numbers...And keep in mind, I’m not talking about botting as a negative thing, right? Like, for some industries in some [00:16:00] platforms, you near have to bot. Mm-hmm. Like, on Twitch, for example, I hear, like if you- Yeah, you,Simone Collins: you will not be discovered if you don’t bot on Twitch. Yes, that is correct.Malcolm Collins: Yeah, you basically have to bot on Twitch, Yeahfrom what I’ve heard. The only thing- Unless you’reSimone Collins: super famous from other platforms and literally you’re just sending all your audiences there, which is like- Or youMalcolm Collins: built yourself up over absolutely ages and you’re stubborn, like Leaflet. Yeah, yeah. But you know, once you establish a norm around botting, if Twitch doesn’t stop it, then if you wanna be discovered, then you have to do it, too, right?And there becomes a whole ecosystem around this. So I’m not saying, like I’m not dispersing aspersions on their moral character by saying... But what I am saying is it does mean that third-worlders have more of an influence on them.Simone Collins: So, Well, and it seems that Tucker Carlson has been doing more to try to pander to Russian and Pakistani audiences.Like, in 2025 he did this viral interview where he stated that he had more in common with a sincerely religious Pakistani cab driver than with a secular [00:17:00] liberal Western elite, and this caused this surge of popularity among a Pakistani audience. Not just due to that, but also due to his, his criticism of liberal Western culture in general.But here’s where I see some tension, because apparently if you look at website traffic at least as of early 2025 on the Tucker Carlson net- web- Network website, 82% of the traffic is from the US. Yeah,Malcolm Collins: that’s actually super suspicious.Simone Collins: Really?Malcolm Collins: So I’ll explain why. And that also makes me think the, the, like it leads to botting allegations and further.So let’s go to our podcast, right? Okay. I am probably one of the most openly bigoted against non-American YouTubers I think that I’m aware of. Yeah. I, I, I- Yeah ... can’t think of another YouTuber who I watch who as regularly casts as- aspersions among non-American groups, whether that is Catholics or whether that is, The [00:18:00] French.Simone Collins: Always the French.Malcolm Collins: The French. The- And don’t forget the nextSimone Collins: episode we were hoping to outline was titled Don’t Trust the Irish. Oh, yeah,Malcolm Collins: the Irish. I went on a long crash-out about the Irish recently. The Polish being corrupt. The you know, so I, I go off on other countries, right? Like, I’m explicitly anti-courting other countries.Oh, my God, did you know that Shoe0nHead are our fourth most oversub- overlapped subscriber channel? Oh, that’s a good sign. That’s new. I didn’t... That’s, that wasn’t there before. Yeah, and it’s been going up. She’s up, she’s well above Leafly. So it goes Asthma Gold Timcast Lotus Eaters, Shoeonhead, Actual Justice Warrior, Trigonometry, Warren Smith, Timcast, Leafless in Asari, Tim Pool, Dad Saves America, Alexander Grace, Clownfish TV.Now we have, h- higher to the left This impliesSimone Collins: we’re going more mainstream slash becoming more weird Yeah, so Dave LaChuteMalcolm Collins: and Metreon. Yeah, this is very mainstream. All of these people have like millions. Hmm. But hold on. I’m trying to find out where it shows me our geographic stats. Okay, so our channel- It’s in [00:19:00] orderour channel has, do you, can you guess what our American audience is?Simone Collins: I think it was like 56%, something like that.Malcolm Collins: Yeah, it’s gone up a bit. Now it’s at 64%. Wow. So- Good for us ... so considering that, you have to ask yourself, how on earth is a podcast as one, American focused as ours, and two, as jingoistic as ours, okay coming so much lower than Tucker Carlson, which actively is constantly dick cucking Muslims?That’s...Simone Collins: Huh, okay.Malcolm Collins: So- So I’ll explain to you how that could happen ... yes, arousing mySimone Collins: suspicions. Very interesting. Hmm. I’ll explainMalcolm Collins: to you how that could happen. Oh. ‘Cause there is a way that that could happen.Simone Collins: Aside from botting, how? Hmm.Malcolm Collins: Botting. He explicitly is paying his bots to go through American VPNs- Okayor American accounts, so that’s why it would appear that much. The, the, basically no other believable explanation I can think of.Simone Collins: Yeah, that’s entirely fair. Yeah.Malcolm Collins: Hmm. Great. Yeah. [00:20:00] So, by the way, people, people are wondering, like, where we actually, let’s see where we actually get audience fromyou, you wanna know our male to female? 90% male. Male’s like n-Simone Collins: ninety, ninety, yeah, yeah. Great.Malcolm Collins: Yeah, so, we’re, United States, then Canada, then United Kingdom, then Australia, then... Ooh, good Australian audience. Then Germany, then Brazil, then Sweden. People pointed out that we’re actually, like, really disproportionately large in some of these countries.Then Poland, then Netherlands, then India, then Finland, then Israel, then France, then Norway, then South Africa, then New Zealand, then Japan. By the way, note I’m going down this list so you guys can tell something about this list. Do you notice something about all of these countries so far?Simone Collins: Yeah fair, fair point.I see, I see whatMalcolm Collins: you’reSimone Collins: doing.Malcolm Collins: All of these countries so far, except for Israel,Oh, and India, but that’s only zero point seven percent of our audienceMalcolm Collins: are Christian majority countries until Japan.Simone Collins: Yeah. Yeah.Malcolm Collins: Then Mexico, then Russia, then the Philippines, then [00:21:00] Switzerland, then Romania, then Ireland, then Portugal, then Spain, then Chechnya, first non... And this is only 0.3% of our audience, non-Christian majority country.Then Argentina, then Denmark, then Italy, then Austria, then Belgium, then Singapore. Next, I think they’re Christian, non-majority. Then Greece, then Hungary, then Vietnam, then Indonesia, then Thailand, then Malaysia, then Serbia, Bulgaria. So you see it’s sort of down at the end here. We’re 0.- And that’s interesting because that does not trackSimone Collins: with the, the current...so I, I also looked, I pulled from Wikipedia a list of- ... sovereign states by number of broadband and internet subscriptions, and then I combined their column for mobile broadband, and then also, like, mobile like, for fixed and mobile. And the top ranked now are China, then India, then United States, Indonesia, Brazil, Russia, Japan, Philippines, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Nigeria, Germany, Mexico, Vietnam, Thailand, Egypt, United Kingdom, Italy, France, [00:22:00] Iran South Africa, Turkey, South Korea.Like, so there, we really don’t... Our audience isn’t representative of- The world ... the world. It’s representative of Christian majority. Well, specifically of internet users of the world. It’s representative of a specific memetic set.Malcolm Collins: Mm. But I’d go further. It’s representative of, so to go over it just, like, let’s go over the top countries on this list again.Y- unusually highly educated countries, okay? Mm-hmm. So if you go over the top on our list, United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Australia, Germany, Brazil, Sweden, Poland, Netherlands. And, and note here, Brazil’s really high on the list. We wanna talk about Brazil ‘cause we have a big audience in Brazil and we work a lot with Brazilians.Like, that’s Bruno who does RFab is, is Brazilian. Brazil is kind of messed up in these statistics, and we’re gonna do a totally another episode on it because Brazil has about half, if I remember the chart correctly, about half of the internet users, if you look at America as a portion of internet users, okay?[00:23:00] Brazil represents about half of the internet users America does. Yes. Now, this is insane because Brazil is not half of America’s population. This- Does notSimone Collins: make sense. Yeah, it’s there’s a separate graph that Not All Detox Tea on X sent to us that I also just re-sent to you on WhatsApp. Hey, thanks for this, by the way.You inspired this episode. This graph shows you that. You can look at it visually, and hopefully you can put it up on the screen for people watching on YouTube. Oh, did you send it to me? I sent it to you on WhatsApp, yeah. And it shows two graphs, total Internet users 1997 to 2007, and then total Internet users 2018 to 2012.Or sorry, probab- 2018, ‘12. Oh, so maybe July 1997 versus December 2018. I’m not sure. But anyway, we’re, like, around 1997 and we’re around 2018. The- Oh, actually,Malcolm Collins: I’m surprised hereSimone Collins: What?Malcolm Collins: Brazil doesn’t have as small a population as I thought.Simone Collins: Brazil is a huge pop- I told you this before. You were like, “I’m [00:24:00] shocked.”But mostMalcolm Collins: of it’s uninhabitable.Simone Collins: Yes, but it has insanely densely populated urban areas. Brazil’s massive.Malcolm Collins: Yeah, so let’s see. What are they? They’re 64% of America’s population, which is about what we see in terms of Internet users.Simone Collins: Yeah.Malcolm Collins: So they’re not disproportionately online, they’re just a bigger country than the United States.There’s just aSimone Collins: lot of Brazilians, which is awesome. And I feel like, I feel like to a certain extent, until very recently, people have, like, discounted Brazilians online because of the language gear- barrier with Portuguese. But as we’re now seeing, for example, with Japanese Twitter, a, a lot of those language barriers with just automatic translation are totally disappearing.Malcolm Collins: Yeah, and this is really interesting as well, because it’s shifting leftist discourse online to be more small C conservative in its value set. In some ways, yeah, yeah ... because a lot of the th- the, the rest of the world, like, one, they’re realizing that nobody’s woke but them. Like, Japanese people are, like, mortified by them, all these anime creators.But two, if you’ve [00:25:00] noticed, in top of the line leftist discourse, it’s become significantly more Islamist. Like, hard-coded Islamist in its framing. SpeakingSimone Collins: of people who’ve actually pivoted. So Tucker Carlson, I would say it’s a cringe pivot. His whole, “I love Russia, I love you know, like, Pakistan” thing.It’s, it feels forced to me, and it feels cringe and not- Mm-hmm ... like, he can’t really pull it off. You know who just, like, took to it like a duck to water and has really nailed it?Malcolm Collins: H-Simone Collins: Hasan?Malcolm Collins: No, Andrew Tate Oh, Andrew Tate has taken to it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I heard the majority of the people who go to his school, you know, the Tate University, are Indians.Simone Collins: Well, yeah. So I looked, I looked at it a little more. Google search interest and then also anecdotal reporting and reporting from The Guardian indicate higher per capita interest in Muslim majority countries, so parts of the Middle East, Pakistan, Indonesia, Malaysia. As we recall, big internet populations now more than in the UK and the US.But then also [00:26:00] popularity is noted in India, Brazil, and other Global South areas. And then Tate’s 2022 conversion to Islam, remember that? Yes. Totally boosted this. And a lot of his international reach comes from short form content, which again, really caters to these... You’re talking about them being less educated and stuff.I would say if, if you have a less literate, less educated country, shorts do incredibly well versus long form, like podcasts and videos and stuff, because also people are talking or looking at the internet mostly through mobile devices on the go. It’s, you don’t really have people, like, playing stuff on larger TV screens or on their computer monitors.So shorts make a lot of sense, and that is, like, Tate’s native format. Keep in mind, Tucker Carlson is all about this old legacy Fox News style TV format even though he’s, like, totally digitally native now.Malcolm Collins: Yeah.Simone Collins: So Tate really did the short form content in addition to converting to Islam, in addition to really appealing to this like, sort of young radicalized minority male [00:27:00] population diaspora throughout the entire world.And then audience composition when people look at it, it al- not just highlights all these people in, in developing countries, but highlights young men from ethnic minority backgrounds in the West. So even within his, like, market penetration into the West, he is reaching, like, young disaffected immigrant men and, and also aspiring youth in developing countries that are really into his whole self-made wealth, discipline, and anti-matrix messaging.Well, it’s these rapist migrants, right? No, he, like, super appeals to that. No, but, like, think ab- like, who has most capitalized on this, like, growth of, of, of dislocated unemployed migrant male youth that’s somewhat misogynistic? Like, Andrew Tate is nailing the change in internetMalcolm Collins: composition. And I, I, I’ve noticed now that you, you, you talk about this, I even think that this is a full sort of pipeline, whether it’s Tucker Carlson or Andrew Tate [00:28:00] or Nick Fuentes, where you get popular in the American online right, and this affirms you for these sorts of, Mm.It’s kind of like anSimone Collins: endorsement. Yeah, like third level recruiters ... like, well, the right likes him, so he’s also, like, fancier for that. But then- I, I really do think that Tucker Carlson fell into this through a form of audience capture and reinforcement and possibly some botting. Whereas Andrew Tate, like he was, he was born in it.Like he really came out of it. And also you have to keep in mind with Hustler University there are some articles that are claiming that it really helps young Indians specifically navigate industry and job challenges that they uniquely face. And then a lot of Indian students apparently talk about how applicable it is with freelancing and various LinkedIn profiles and reviews of Hustler University as like a platform, like should you pay for it?Is it worth it? Show that Indian participants really, really like it especially. And affiliate [00:29:00] promotion and clip sharing by creators in India have really contributed to its virality. So like even India specifically is this like big Hustler University thing. So- What, you’re like, “It’sMalcolm Collins: actually good for them.Yeah, yeah. LikeSimone Collins: Hustler University is good for someone. What is it? Can you explain it to me? It’s good for Indians. Like so if you’re in some country where you’re making like, you know, cents on the hour,Malcolm Collins: it’s, it’s great. Can you, can you explain what you mean how it’s uniquely applicable to them? Like what- Yeah, so Hustler University is allSimone Collins: aboutMalcolm Collins: likeSimone Collins: w- a weird combination of freelance work and like white label shipping things, drop shipping things, like very internet native somewhat ephemeral jobs that are not moored to a specific location.And if you speak English fluently and are kind of have a shady background and are willing to play with different arbitrage games and not necessarily do stuff that’s prestigious or aspirational- She’s sayingMalcolm Collins: Indians are scammers. I didn’t say that. And that that’s why Hustler University is good for them.I didn’tSimone Collins: say that. I’m, I’m just saying [00:30:00] it... And I don’t even know if this was intentional on Andrew Tate’s part because I think Andrew Tate was mostly trying to just show various ways that he has found to make money and like h- here’s how to do it at scale. But it just happens to work really, really well.A lot of it is, is about a game of arbitrage, and this is something that came up in our episode on clip farming and botting as well, that a lot of clip farm workers, for example, are in Bangladesh or they’re in India or they’re in Pakistan because for them the unit economics work. You know, they sit in these Discord servers and they’re creating numerous n- like clips for Caleb Hammer, for Clavicular, and spamming the internet with them because the, the compensation they’re getting for it is worth it for them.No Western country, like developed country kid out doing this is going to find a benefit from doing that. Yet they might be sort of tricked into signing up for something like Hustler University or like these Discord servers that like, “Oh, let’s [00:31:00] make clips that go viral,” because they see a lot of people talking about it.And I think that’s one of the core themes of this episode is that many of us will see people being really excited about a certain business model or like g- get rich quick scheme or whatever, and guess what? If you’re like in a slum in Pakistan or India, it is your get rich quick scheme. Like it’s actually gonna mean something to you.But if you live in Chicago, it’s really not. And we don’t realize it because everyone’s speaking English, and we have a basic tendency to assume that like this other dude that we see on the internet is like at least another American or at least another Westerner. But this, thisMalcolm Collins: also explains the ephemeral legacy conservative influencer where- MmAndrew Tate sort of perfectly falls into this at like a later stage, more than like a Tucker Carlson or something like this where Andrew Tate is somebody who I’m like aware that people still follow him. I used to watch some of his... I was never like a fan of his, but like [00:32:00] I, he, he could say entertaining things occasionally and sometimes had interesting points sometimes, right?Like I, I, I think- He had his moments. No, he had his moments. Yeah, he had, he had his moments. But like nobody that I know has talked about T- Andrew Tate in like a year and a half except for that moment that he had with Kublai Killer. That’s the only, Oh ... but I, I was aware also that he was still somehow like relevant, and it’s where?How? And it’s third worlders. This explains everything.Simone Collins: Again, I don’t think we say th- Third World, we say developing. Am I, do I have to be the PC police? Why, why is this my role?Malcolm Collins: The, the, the but no, I, I think once you understand this, once you understand, and I’ve actually noticed it more and more and more in the types of people who argue these positions online, So for example, if you watch Asmongold stream, which I do there’s [00:33:00] occasionally people who try to like s**t stir or something around like, you know, anti-Jewish stuff, anti-Iran stuff.And don’t get me wrong, like we certainly have our anti-Semitic takes. But overall, like we think it’s useful, right? For now. If, if we’re, if we’re... The global elite versus the global non-elite part of the global elite alliance includes Jews. But the, the, the, they’ll regularly attack him, right?And I’ll watch him like pull them up. He’s like, “Okay, like explain your full, full point,” right? Like he’ll, he does this thing like enhance, like take this one chatter out and be like, “Make your full argument. I wanna hear it.” And I like this. I appreciate this about him because like we try to do the same thing.Like if somebody can make an argument for us that like we’re genuinely wrong, and people who have watched our content for a long time know that like we update pretty severely on positions when we find new information. And we’re like, “Wow, we were just wrong about this.” And, and we try to hear out the arguments of our [00:34:00] opponents as well.And we also try to apologize when we get facts wrong ‘cause occasionally we do get facts wrong. A- again, you’re doing an episode every day. You, you can’t always get everything right. Although you can if you use the new RFABSuperSearch which runs multiple online AI searches against an AI’s output to determine if any of it was hallucinated to get fully hallucination-less responses.Simone Collins: Yeah, that’s actually really, really cool.Malcolm Collins: Yeah, it’s, it’s very cool. And if you wanna go on the website in safe for work mode, rfab.ai/demo locks your computer into a... This is our website for people who don’t know. We do lots of stuff on it. I recently added like a, a feature where you can talk to people from like the 1930s using AI only trained on that, and I’m trying to get other ancient AIs working on it that have like a weird collection.So we’ll see. The more I can get working on that, I’m excited. I’m excited. I love it. I love it. But we actually have a whole episode where we’re gonna be like interviewing them to get their thoughts on like different estate groups to get like a 1930s- So exciting ... estate game.Yes.But what was I gonna say?Oh yes, I remember. It was, so Asmogold like pulls these people up and he’s [00:35:00] like, “Okay, make the full point.” No. And when they try to make their arguments, and they typically come from like this faction, which before I thought of as like a genuine faction of the American right. Oh mySimone Collins: God. Oh.Malcolm Collins: They do not appear to be able to make coherent arguments.They appear to have like- But it mightSimone Collins: be a language barrier issue?Malcolm Collins: No, they appear to be like IQ 70 types. Oh. In some parts of the world this is normal, Simone. Having an IQ of like 65, 70 is the average in certain parts of the world. And I’m realizing th- this explains stuff I didn’t get. If you’re just in the online Discord, it looks like, for example, on the right, 50% or more of the online right is anti-Iran war.Whereas like 40% I get is like pro-war. If you look at like actual polling of MAGA, it’s 90% pro-war, right? So it’s like where is this coming from, right? What, what’s cre- And at first I thought this illusion was created just by a faction of like intellectual elitists on the right that tried to hijack the right for their own means a Romanist conspiracy if you will.But now I’m [00:36:00] thinking no, it really is indicative of people who have been pretending to be part of the online right for a long time, and may even consider themselves part of it, but are you know, Pakistanis or Indians. As we saw, a lot of like based accounts when Twitter did its reveal a lot of right wing accounts were just Pakistani and Indian accounts, right?Simone Collins: Yeah ... andMalcolm Collins: this is where- Well, andSimone Collins: specifically like a lot of, I guess, MAGA rage baby style accounts. Though I think it’s kind of- It’s unclear whether they... I mean, I think it’s more likely that they didn’t really believe in it. They were just going after monetization, and they got the engagement from MAGA rage bait.Malcolm Collins: I disagree.Simone Collins: Really?Malcolm Collins: What do you think is happening? I think some of these accounts, if you look at them, they were somewhat coherent. They seemed to be on message. They just really crash out about Hindi Indians and Jews a lot. And by the way, sorry, you might be confused here. If you’re not familiar with the politics of these regions, you go, “Why would people in [00:37:00] Pakistan and India keep crashing out about Hindis?”And the answer is, is because people in Pakistan and India this is where the people who hate Hindis the most of everywhere in the world, except for Canadians, who also really hate Indi- Hindis. That’s for other reasons. Simone has crashed out about that before. And maybe, like, San Francisco tech workers also really hate Hindis because they take all the jobs there, and that’s, like, a, a genuine problem.But again, like, the scale of the problem is not the scale of dragging people off the street to rape them, right? Like, it’s not the scale of the problem of, you know, randomly murdering people and then getting off scot-free about it. It’s not the scale of the problem of you try to defend yourself when they are attacking somebody on a subway, and now all of a sudden you actually...Or walking up to a random young lady on a subway and stabbing her to death, right? Like, it’s not that there’s no reason for racism. We just need the scale of racism, people. And it just didn’t make sense to me, right? Like, when I’m looking at, like, the actual [00:38:00] social problems we’re dealing with. And when I saw this, except in Canada, right?There might be genuine... It’s like, oh, Pakistanis hate Indians specifically the Hindi Indians because they think, “Oh, well, if we can make India Muslim, then, well, fine. We’re, we’re cool with that.” And there’s a huge Muslim population in India I think it’s about a third of the country who hate...I mean, it’s like a online pr- practically, like, a religious war simmering beneath in the country right now that could break out at any time, especially with differential fertility rates. We’ll see how that goes. But it would make sense why that would be top of mind to this online audience about scoring racism points.And then same with Jews. Of course, you know all of these you know, Well, you know the stereotypes we’re talking about here wouldn’t have a fond opinion of Jews, right? And wouldn’t care if the United States lost geopolitical ground- Yeah, butSimone Collins: keep in mind, like, it’s not just people in India or Muslim countries.[00:39:00] One of the most prominent ones, it had, like, 400,000 followers, was, mm, @maganationx, and they were just in a non-EU Eastern European nation. Then there were a bunch from Nigeria, like there was one, @scopemaga. And then there were also a bunch from Thailand, Germany, Egypt,Malcolm Collins: Right. But here you’re talking about random shotgunning of other places with their own- Yeahagendas. These other agendas can align with American right-wing agendas. Like for example, most Eastern Europeans, other than being Orthodox Christians or Catholics, are going to align with American values. Like, a Romanian TV it the little troll VTuber- Yeah ... I think perfectly aligns with most American values in pretty much all of his takes.That’s true. But he’s still unapologetically Romanian in his takes. And I think that what we are seeing here is where un-American values are seeping through, people who are unaware of, like, where their [00:40:00] audience comes from or where the loud part of specific parts of their audience comes from.Mm-hmm. Or where the perception that you get in online circles of, like, half of people care about this, half of people care about this, when it’s actually a 90/10 issue. And it also speaks very interestingly of if this audience continues to influence leftist discord, I think we’re going to see an even more rapid drift away from trans acceptance in leftist spaces and gay acceptance in leftist spaces, which I think we’re already seeing some pullback on.And I do not think that these communities realize how quickly these groups are gonna pull back against them. And I feel like their only safe space eventually is gonna be in the right, and the right is gonna remember the shenanigans that they pulled for as long as they pulled. And no, we’ve had some, some gays who came over really early and have been really good to our side, like Scott Pressler, who played potentially a large part in winning the last election.And he was explicit about why, as he, a gay, became right-leaning. He’s like, “Well, you know, I saw the nightclub shooting of the gay nightclub,” and I was like, “Well, [00:41:00] who did this? Who’s trying to stop them from getting into the country?” Like, that’s literally all he’s saying. I- at least they don’t shoot me on the street, right?Simone Collins: Yeah ... what, what are they- But I mean, that’s, I think that’s the other really interesting bit of Tension here, I guess? Or, like, or, or maybe it just makes sense that, that we’re seeing this shift as well in online discourse because in the end, Islamists and modern progressives are just inherently incompatible, and it’s not just something that intuitively our audience is picking up on.Like, the Free Press has written about it. They talked about how the phenomenon has historical roots and It, the, it, it goes all the way back actually to Iran’s 1979 revolution beforeMalcolm Collins: a bunch of- And then they killed all the progressives. It does go back to then. Yeah. Yeah. But we know from the Iran revolution what the playbook is for them.Simone Collins: Yeah. But this, this, the, the so-called, like, left, Islamo-leftism or Red-Green alliance is, is definitely strong for a bunch [00:42:00] of really good reasons. I mean, one, they ha- they share a conom- common enemy, that they don’t like Western liberalism, they don’t like capitalism, they don’t like US foreign policy, they don’t like Israel.And- They don’t like the Jews ... they, yeah, they don’t like the Jews. And they also seem to really like identity politics and this concept of the oppressor versus the oppressed. That framing resonates and is used a lot by both groups. Plus, anti-imperialism is a huge bridge between the two of them. I mean, this is so interesting- Anti-WesternMalcolm Collins: imperialism.There is no religion on Earth- Yeah, okay, okay ... more inherently imperialistic than Islam. You know? Well, but here’s theSimone Collins: other thing, is, is what people cite as also being the core tension between modern progressives and Islam, which is that people are like, “Well, they’re incompatible because traditional Islam emphasizes theocratic governances and strict moral codes, like on homosexuality and apostasy and gender roles and religious authority.”And I’m like, hold on, though. Like, actually many conservatives in, in the modern right see the [00:43:00] modern left as being all about theocratic governance and strict moral codes and being like, “This is what homosexuality has to mean. This is what you being trans has to mean.” Mm. So actually, like, even in the core areas where we would argue they wouldn’t get along, they kind of do.Like in as many Islamic countries, you know, if you don’t wanna, you know, if, if you feel gay or like you feel same-sex attraction, like ah, do not worry, that just means you’re a woman, you know, slash man. We’ll change you. Oh, we’re gonna do a wholeMalcolm Collins: episode on this that I forgot to do, so you gotta remind me- Oh, yeahof how similar Islamism actually is to progressivism. Yeah. They’re, really about the only issue they’re differentiated on is p- progressivism being pro gay sex, but they’re not even that differentiated on that because first of all, progressivism is now trying to convert all of its gays to trans- Yeahwhich is what Islam does anyway. Yeah. And two, a lot of Islamic countries have major gay sex problems. This was a huge problem for our troops when they were in What? Afghanistan. In our- What? Are you unfamiliar with this? They kept sleeping with [00:44:00] underage boys, like our allies would. And it was super, super common and, but it was like okay because, like, they were underage.Bro- ... there’s like tons of videos on this. It’s a, it’s a very well-known phenomenon, and it was a major problem for our military because we were like, “You guys need to stop this,” and they’re like, “But it’s our culture.” They’re like, “Don’t worry, it’s okay. He’s underage.” And we’re like, “No, that- That makes it worse.They’re like, “Don’t worry, bro. It’s not gay. He- he’s a child.” You know,Simone Collins: that’s so Greek. I don’t know. Like in the end, I, I, I don’t know what to say. I’m just like, people need to do better. I, I love that line,Malcolm Collins: Greeks, they invented gayness.Speaker 4: Good for you, Father. Well, someone had the guts to stand up to them at last. Coming over here, taking our jobs and our women, and acting like they own theSpeaker 5: place.Speaker 6: Fecking Greeks.Speaker 4: I don’t care who he gets, so longSpeaker 6: as I can have a go at the Greeks. They [00:45:00] invented Guinness.Malcolm Collins: We’ve been talking about-Simone Collins: I mean, but you know ... not letting GreeksMalcolm Collins: into your country.Th- no, but the, the, what I’m increasingly realizing is one of the things we also have to think about, and this could be something we could sort of close with, is does it make sense to begin to think of a Western alliance of Christian values from across the world, where like we have differences but fundamentally, like you look at our viewer base, you look at these countries, and it’s not a random smattering of countries that watch us.It’s Christian countries that watch us. It is the United States, Europe, Latin America, right? Canada, New Zealand, Australia. You know, that’s our audience, right? And w- I think that we should be more vigilant around the wider... Because fundamentally that is, you know, Western civilization is Christian civilization, right?Be more [00:46:00] vigilant of individuals within our wider movement who have been co-opted to fight against the interest of Christian civilization. And where Christian civilization, whether that be, I mean, there’s many ways you can fight against the interests of Christian civilization. That can be fighting for things that are geopolitically against our interests, or fighting to get Christians to, for example, abandon technology that’s needed to crush our opponents, right?Like whether that be genetic technology or AI or anything like that. Technology is power. Those who fight for us to tie our hands in regards to technology, because let me tell you what, the Muslims are. They have no such prohibitions. So, and the Chinese aren’t. Although they did arrest that guy for doing genetic e- editing, but now we’ve heard that like all of the elites in China are doing genetic editing, so be aware of this.WeSimone Collins: just heard that Chinese families, wealthy Chinese families are just quietly going about it. So. Yeah,Malcolm Collins: Who knows? ... for people who wouldn’t know this. But the point I’m making here is we have to be aware of like who’s trying to subvert us, and [00:47:00] be more vigilant about this instead of just earnestly, like a child, going into online.And I say this because I was this. I, I went into a child and I was like, “This is the online Twitter on X. This must be what Americans on the right think.” When I was really being influenced by a bunch of Pakistanis.Simone Collins: Yeah. Well, and I think just in general, most people, and even most influencers, are largely unaware of the compositions of their audiences and are maybe not talking to them.I mean, even we do it. Like, we, we speak still, despite even our awareness and knowledge of the fact that our audience is only by a slight majority, you know, like- American ... 60% American, we still speak like this is a 99.9% American podcast, when that’s just not true, clearly by the numbers that you just went over.Yeah. And I think all of us would benefit from just maintaining a little bit more top of mind awareness [00:48:00] and just knowledge of the fact that, look, there are many people with very, very different backgrounds and very different geopolitical positions and perspectives than you who are talking. And when you’re hearing their opinion, you can’t just assume that they, like you, went to this kind of school, and that you have this kind of neighborhood, and that these kind of laws and these kinds of taxes, because they don’t.And that’s very important.Malcolm Collins: Actually, c-this reminds me of something that one of our fans said recently, and I just realized, like, I, I don’t think that that’s actually as popular as you think it is.Mm.Yeah, so they said they were talking about how many, like, American conservatives don’t believe in evolution. And I was like, at least in the influencer class, that’s, that, like, like, our new right influencer class.Now, if you go to, like, Tucker Carlson, you go to Candace Owens, like, they don’t believe in evolution apparently, which you were shocked about. And Nick Fuentes.Simone Collins: Yeah, yeah. Nick Fuentes doesn’t believe inMalcolm Collins: evolution. Because, yeah. B- and, and when we first started doing our podcast we would always frame any point [00:49:00] we made about evolution, like, “Well, and if you don’t believe in evolution, here’s the argument.”And we just stopped doing that, ‘cause I realized basically none of our fan base doesn’t believe in evolution. And- Maybe it’s theySimone Collins: just don’t talk about it,Malcolm Collins: becauseSimone Collins: apparently creationism is alive and well.Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Well, so 55% of American conservatives even today don’t believe in evolution. What? Oh, okay. I mean, hey.Hey. No, but I don’t think it’s a, a base that we reach. Because, you know, we talk about this at conferences at The Heritage Foundation. We talk at like... I talk to people all the time about this sort of stuff, and I have yet to run into anyone, like, in, at least in real life, who didn’t believe in evolution.Simone Collins: Yeah, because we discuss things like, well, things adjacent to evolutionary biology all the time. We talk about evolutionary pressures, and there’s no, like, “I don’t know.” Unless there are a bunch of creationists out there who believe in evolutionary pressures but only, like, after God just boomed everything into experience, e- e- existence Well, yeah, I wouldn’t have aMalcolm Collins: problem with that.But I mean, [00:50:00] the, the interesting thing, and we, we actually talk about this, is if you do believe in evolution, it’s actually very affirming of the Bible being true. Because if you look at Genesis, the timeline laid out in Genesis of the evolution of different clades is It tracks.Simone Collins: It tracks with historical geology- Assuming this-to a great extent ... it,Malcolm Collins: it, it, it, it tracks more than you would, like it, it tracks stupidly well. It’s like- Yeah, it surprisedSimone Collins: me. I was like, “Hold on. Wait.” Like, if you just don’t take year counts or day counts totally literally, and who would, that’sMalcolm Collins: usually- It’s actually a good description of evolution.More than just being a good description of evolution, it’s a description of evolution in like a way that you wouldn’t expect. So for example, why would God make the fish first? Right? Like that doesn’t, I, I can’t imagine why somebody however many thousand years ago would think, “Ah, yeah, obviously the fish come first.”Yeah. Yes. Right? Like now if you understood evolution, that would [00:51:00] make sense. Absolutely. But I can’t understand how somebody at the time the Bible was written would have known that.Simone Collins: Mm-hmm.Malcolm Collins: But anyway.Simone Collins: No, it’s impressive and compelling. Love you. I love you tooMalcolm Collins: And have a spectacular day. And you guys can tell us what you think.So new, new theory unlocked for me, new world perspective unlocked for me, and I’m gonna start discounting a lot of the chatter I see online a lot more and focus much more on what the people I consider to be intellectually cogent are saying.Simone Collins: Are we... I don’t know. Are we having... Are we in the middle of a paradigm-shifting crisis?Like, first we’re like, “Oh, God, everything’s botted,” and then a bunch of additional stuff has been clip farmed into fake relevance. Like, it’s not actually relevant. There’s just a bunch of people being paid to spam social media feeds with clips to make the algorithms think that they’re relevant, so we’re all talking about clavicular when it’s just a kick paid for clavicular to be a thing.And then on top of that, even the few people who are actually real people on the [00:52:00] internet aren’t even from, like, what we consider to be our community talking about our issues from a perspective of an American. They’re talking about American- No.Malcolm Collins: What, I’m going through an anti the crisis where it’s the crisis in my understanding of reality because I’m realizing that the internet as I thought it exists or as it appears at surface level is no longer representative of what I thought it was representative of.But in realizing that, I have re- realized the reach of our wider community, which I thought was smaller and more niche, if you actually compare unbotted numbers, un- you know, foreign numbers, whatever- Mm-hmm ... is actually much further than I anticipated. That individuals like Leaflet, who obviously we talk about a lot, we have on the show a lot, much broader than I had thought.Figures like Asthma Gold much str- farther than I had thought. Figures like Nuts much farther than I... Rev much farther than I had thought. I guess that isSimone Collins: really encouraging. Yeah.Malcolm Collins: Yeah. The, that the wider part or faction of the online community, and [00:53:00] this explained things I didn’t get. I didn’t get how our subreddit- So Tucker Carlson isSimone Collins: fake and gay, and Leaflet is, is real.Yeah. And, I didn’t getMalcolm Collins: how our subreddit ended up beating r/Relationships in terms of daily interaction before it was shadowbanned. Yeah. Like, that didn’t make sense to me. Yeah. I didn’t get why our Discord is orders of magnitude larger than the largest in terms of, like, regular interaction, the largest effective altruist Discord.It didSimone Collins: seem somewhat confusing, and I guess it’s less confusing in light of all this.Malcolm Collins: Yeah. I’m like, “Oh, I just wasn’t faking it.”Simone Collins: Hmm. Okay. Well, welcome to the narrow influencer class based campers. Yes. You’re among the elite, the chosen, the few. But actually, weird. Anyway. Yes.Malcolm Collins: And we need to I think get better at building alliance between the factions represented within the wider conservative world.Yeah. [00:54:00] Against the real threats to our cultural regional hegemonies.Simone Collins: Fair.Malcolm Collins: And this means being open to, you know, allying with sort of the wider Romanist world, allying with the more traditional, the Jews, allying with more traditional conservatives where it, where they don’t try to impose their value system on us.And I think that we d- like that’s been being accomplished more and more and more without the lie that we’re actually all the same, and that’s always disgusted me. We’re not all the same. We’re different. Mm-hmm. I’m nothing like you. Different is good. Different is good ... we can, we can be allies without being secretly the same group, right?That, that psyop has really scrambled my brain. I don’t like it.Simone Collins: Yeah. Well, thanks Malcolm. I love you.Malcolm Collins: Love you too. Looks terrible. I need to get my hair cut immediately ‘Simone Collins: Cause you always get really mad at me when I’m like, “I have to cut your [00:55:00] hair,” and then you get mad at me before, during, after. No, you’ve gotta cut my hair. You’ve gotta cut my- I feel like I’m being punished for trying to make you look better You wanna do it tonight.I think it has to happen tonight. I don’t think we have a choice. This can’t continue. But you can’t keep, like, getting all sully and mad at me. So- I get much more mad when you cut the kids’ hair than my hair Oh, God. Can I c- Because they can’t- Can I not make this family somewhat presentable? You’re so... You guys are all so awful.Like, I try to get Tai Jin dressed, and she’s like, “Ah.” And she decides that she has to, like, run away. You knew what you were signingMalcolm Collins: up for, gene-wise. Hmm. God. YouSimone Collins: knew it. I wasn’t ready for this. This is,Malcolm Collins: I didn’t, I didn’t hide anything about what you were gonna get with these kids.Simone Collins: We need to create some kind of basic training boot camp for all of our future in-law children to, like, prepare them for everything.Malcolm Collins: They’re there just hanging out with all the, the young, the younglings. They have [00:56:00] no idea. Yeah. What’s,Simone Collins: what’s that... There’s some, like, movie series, right? Is it called Knives Out, where, like, someone marries into a family, and then, like, all try to kill each other or something? Yeah. Hmm. We, weMalcolm Collins: basically...Simone Collins: We’ll just do that.Actually, I feelMalcolm Collins: like it’s a lot of two movies.Simone Collins: Yeah? Well, I mean, it’s, it’s, I guess it’s compelling to people because they realize it’s kind of true for some families. Yeah.Malcolm Collins: Okay. Do, do I need to go get Octavian? Yeah.Simone Collins: Yeah. I think... What’s so funny about that toy Chinook helicopter is that it’s all in English, but it’s very clearly some beleaguered Chinese factory worker.Malcolm Collins: Go play somewhere else. You’re too loud out here. We’re trying to record and you’re making lots of noise.Simone Collins: All right. I’m done beating him. It’s supposed to be this, like, patriotic Chinook helicopter, and yet it’s clearly this beleaguered Chinese factory worker recording the sounds for it. “Fire! Fire!” And it just sounds really bad. And I love it. I love it, [00:57:00] but I also... I need a little bit more of, like, a redneck accent on my Chinook helicopters.We’ll just have to fix that someday. Would you like me to do the intro? Oh, also, for dinner tonight, I can probably make things go either way. Like... But I can either do another night of Thai red curry, or I can do gourmet hot dogs that were gifted fr- to us with pesto pasta. What’s your preference?Malcolm Collins: Honestly, if I can, I don’t know if this is too much, is just pesto pastaSimone Collins: I can do that. Yeah. And then gourmet hot dogs with french fries tomorrow, and then Thai curry. ‘Cause I feel like the more days... If it can sit up to three days in the fridge, then it’s amazing. It seems to, like, stay- Well, it definitelyMalcolm Collins: needs more curry paste.It’s, it’s very bland right now.Simone Collins: Well, I’m trying to... I, you know, I’m making for guests too. But yeah- Mm ... I’ll just... [00:58:00] Okay, fine. Who cares what our g- guests can tolerate? Actually, the last time we had guests and we did the Go- gochujang chicken, they were like- Yeah, they liked it a lot ... they can take, they can take it.Yeah. I mean, I think someone was like, “Oh my God.” But then everyone else was okay, so.Malcolm Collins: Right, how hot it was?Simone Collins: Yeah.Malcolm Collins: All right. Just for the site where I am right now, I’ve sort of given up on one feature. I’ve been trying to make a bunch of different historic models that are only trained on historic AI- Oh, yeahThat you can, like, experiment with them on the site. But I only have two really working, ‘cause I have to host them in super unique ways. I might need to make them all local only, which is very frustrating for me.Simone Collins: Mm-hmm. But it would save people money, so that’s kinda cool.Malcolm Collins: Yeah, but nobody’s doing a long chat with a historic model.These are mostly for experimentation.Simone Collins: Mm.Malcolm Collins: Just to see what people of that time period would have thought about things.Simone Collins: I don’t know... So how would you do, like, a 1790s one? Because people during those time periods, like, there wasn’t a person. Like, [00:59:00] now it’s easier for there to be someone- Yeah ... because there’s only, as we’ve said, one story left.You know, people are sort of dealing with a shared community to a certain extent. But, like, the experience of someone in 1790s England versus France, despite a lot of their close bonds would have been very different. Very different mindsets and cultures. How are you planning on approaching that anyway?I mean, I don’t know, like, how feasible it even is, unless you want to do, like- For sure the literaryMalcolm Collins: culture of the elite is captured in the r- the AIs. Like, the one thing that I noted that was very interesting about the 1930s model, which is running right now and that it was very antisemitic, but not very anti-Black.And I think this shows something that is genuinely forgotten in history, which is that elite society was not particularly anti-Black racist, and it was actually very trendy to be like, “The Blacks are actually really cool and can do great things once they’re freed,” in elite circles in the 1930s.Whereas in elite circles in the 1930s, it was still very trendy to hate the Jews. See Karl Marx [01:00:00]Simone Collins: We’re gonna do a whole episode on, on that, right?Malcolm Collins: Yeah.Simone Collins: Good. I’m excited. I’m also thinking about doing an episode... I mentioned how we are setting up matchmaking networks for, like, our future, you know, for our kids and future kids- Mm-hmmand we, we already have a big database of parents to participate in it. Someone saw me mention that on the Chris Williamson podcast, and sent me on Instagram literally a dating platform that they had made that is for parents to matchmake for their kids. So you go on this website, and then you skeeze on other people’s kids- Mmand then try to match them up with y- like, your son or daughter, your adult son or daughter. Really? Yeah. What’s it called?saw their DM. It’s called Seony, S-E-O-N-Y, seonyapp.com.Malcolm Collins: So,Simone Collins: and- By the way, they, they explicitly reached out to me. They’re like, “This is not an ad. I’m not self-promoting. I just, I know your, your kids are still kids, but you might find this fun.” So they’re not, this is not a sponsor. No, it’s a very goodMalcolm Collins: communitySimone Collins: thing toMalcolm Collins: promote.I, I,Simone Collins: I love the idea and- [01:01:00] 100%, yeah. I’m just wondering if I should do a whole episode on, on what I ... Well, I mean, a weekend- What I think- ...Malcolm Collins: episode on it might be interesting if you go on, see the way people are presenting- Or VHS ... their kids within a modern context. Yeah. ‘CauseSimone Collins: we have, I think we have some, a decent number of community members whose kids are adults, and might be...We, I mean, we really need to get parents more involved in matchmaking. This ain’t gonna solve itself, this problem. Don’t leave it to your kids, you know. If you wanna become a grandparent, you’re gonna have to make that happen all on your own. You’re gonna have to smash them together. Now kiss. It’s, yeah.I’m, I’m... Okay, maybe we’ll do that.Speaker 7: Savion, come on. One. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit basedcamppodcast.substack.com/subscribe

Today on Based Camp, we go over the accounts of women who reportedly regret having kids, as covered by New York Magazine, and discuss why they’re so miserable. Among other things, we explore: * How the hardest phase is often the early years, especially infancy and toddlerhood, and that regret can be heavily shaped by sleep deprivation, pain, and the shock of being the default caregiver* How the same events can feel unbearable or manageable depending on whether a person frames them negatively or as part of a meaningful life project* The utility of thinking through failure modes in advance, building contingency plans, and explicitly discussing logistics before having children rather than relying on vague social assumptions* How if someone dislikes themselves or their partner, that unhappiness often gets magnified through children because kids reflect both parents* How online communities like “regretful parents” can reinforce misery by rewarding negative storytelling, though they acknowledge that some parents are genuinely unsupported and hurtingUltimately, parent regret is often driven less by children themselves and more by a mix of poor preparation, weak reasons for having kids, lack of support, bad partner fit, and untreated personal issues like depression, anxiety, ADHD, or body image problems. Many of these risks can be headed off by brutally honest parenting discussions, early planning, and choosing parenthood deliberately rather than as a default life stageEpisode Notes* A lot of conservative-leaning influencers are talking about an article in the New York Times, part of The Cut’s “Oh, Baby” series* Broadly speaking, they’re trashing NY Mag for discouraging motherhood and/or trashing the mothers for various reasons* Though some, like Brett Cooper, have more balanced takes: she argues that the viral “I regret having children” discourse is really about unsupported, isolated mothers and bad matching in marriage, not mothers hating their kids* I disagree with all the takes I’ve seen though* This article is great* These accounts are super important* Anyone who is serious about kids should read them—and moreHere’s why:* The best way to get through something tough is to:* Have a strong reason for having kids* Understand where things go wrong* Heading off serious issues, especially with your first child in their first years, makes the difference between hating parenthood and wanting a huge family* A positive experience with first kids was the top common factor Dr. Catherine Ruth Pakaluk identified when interviewing college-educated American mothers of over five kids* We, personally, have experienced a lot of the negative things (or rough equivalents) the mothers in this article experienced, but because we had a strong “why” behind having kids and we had prepared for a lot of the potential downsides, we were able to weather the hazardsWhat we would encourage:* Going through r/regretfulparents and cataloging all the things that go wrong* Building contingency plans for those things* We did this with our relationship—in building our relationship contract—and prospective parents would be wise to do this before having kids* I.e. build contingency plan items into a parenting contract, or adding them to a relationship contractThe ArticleThe article opens with: “Parent regret is more common than you might think — the r/regretfulparents sub-Reddit alone gets around 70,000 weekly visitors who anonymously commiserate — though stigma makes it hard to admit in real life. Below, three moms of young children talk about why they wish they could go back to their old lives.”The Cut - I regret having children: https://archive.is/BF3zn34-year-old Rhode Island mother of a 6-year-old and a 3-year-old* Didn’t have kids for a strong reason* “When my husband and I were dating, his deal-breaker was having kids. I didn’t feel the same way, but I didn’t see life without children as an option. It always felt like the next stage of life for us. I remember telling my husband, “I’m worried; I love our life now and I’m not sure what it’s going to look like with a child.””* Has personal issues which she now has to contend with in her kids (easy to be frustrated, colickey, etc.).* Struggled with postpartum depression* Perfectionist* Got diagnosed with ADHD after suspecting her oldest had it.* “When my younger daughter struggles to get dressed, I try to distract her or make compromises, but in the end, she’s screaming, and I don’t know how to make it stop, so I just shut down.”* Is admittedly in the “hell zone” of parenthood (after six, things get awesome)* She’s not wrong that parents of especially young children are less happy* But that’s not the point30-year-old European mother of a 3-year-old* Grew up sheltered with a stay-at-home mom; married at 22* Mother said she would help out with a new baby* Was constrained to bed rest in her fist trimester* Horrible recovery from birth (painful to move)* Mother and husband didn’t help that much* “My husband had a month and a half of paternity leave, but the only helpful thing he did during that time was change her diapers, though he did it with a reluctant expression on his face; I had the feeling he never believed how much pain I was in. My mom helped, but she didn’t like being disturbed at night and even during the day was afraid of holding the baby or changing her. I hallucinated from lack of sleep. It felt like I’d been tricked into this. Everyone who wanted me to have a child — my husband, my family — knew they weren’t going to lose much, while my freedom and identity went down the toilet.”* Had a history of depression and anxiety* Turned down a job offer that would require moving because they didn’t want to change their daughter’s preschool* Worries a LOT about her daughter (i.e. what would happen if I were not here and something happened?)27-year-old North Carolina mother of a 1-year-old* Didn’t want kids* “My husband and I met in middle school. He was always interested in having a big family, and I told him I wasn’t quite sure.”* Has a history of depression and is now dealing with it in her son perhaps:* “My son has a low tolerance for frustration and doesn’t communicate other than whining, screaming, crying, throwing things, and pulling my hair.”* Has body dysmorphia issues* “During pregnancy, I felt embarrassed. I’ve had body-dysmorphia issues since I was a kid, and I felt so massive. I used to be a track athlete and have always been fit and active, so I didn’t like feeling so heavy and restricted when trying to do the things I’ve always done, like hiking. During my third trimester, I didn’t want to leave the house so that people wouldn’t see me.”* Different contextualization would have made a huge difference re: body dysmorphia* Horrible birth experience* “My son’s birth was also traumatic. His shoulder got stuck in my pelvis and the epidural kept wearing off; the nurses told me it was fine, that I was overthinking. They held me down and jumped on my pelvis to dislodge his shoulder while the doctor reached up and got him out; I still have pain from it. When my son was placed on me, I didn’t feel anything. It was surreal. I told the nurse, “You’ve got to put him back in the bassinet, I’m about to puke.” Then I did, all over myself. No one helped me to the bathroom or showed me how to wash myself.”* Felt erased as a human being* “I felt like I’d disappeared as a human being. Clients called me “Mama.” Friends and family asked me how my son was; they told me how excited and overjoyed I must be. I tried telling them I wasn’t coping well with motherhood and was still processing the birth, and they’d tell me, “That’s what motherhood is.” One of my friends texted my husband, “Wow, she’s changed, and not in a good way.” It came from a place of care — she and many friends and family told me I had postpartum depression, to seek therapy and go on medication. But at the same time, they’d quickly flip it back to, “You need to be there for your son. Pick yourself up by your bootstraps. Move on; it’s over with and done.” Everything I went through, was just like, No big deal, because the baby is here. Your existence doesn’t matter.”* Withdrew from fellow parents because her son is developmentally delayed* “I stopped talking to my friends with kids. They wanted to exchange baby photos and milestones and, while I was happy for them, my son is delayed and is in early intervention services, so he wasn’t meeting his.”* Plans to leave her husband and son* “My husband and I are taking steps to separate, and he’s willing to take on the role of a single parent, which makes me feel incredibly guilty. But I can’t live this life with him anymore. I’m not the parent my son needs.”Simone & Malcolm Collins react to the viral New York Times / The Cut article “I Regret Having Children” — three anonymous mothers share raw, dark stories of resentment, isolation, postpartum struggles, and lost identity.Instead of the usual outrage, we treat this as an important warning and planning document. We break down why these regrets happen, how strong reasons for having kids + radical honesty + contingency planning can prevent them, the power of contextualization, genetic self-awareness, partner compatibility, and why the early toddler years are brutal but temporary.We also discuss:* Why hating yourself or your partner makes parenting hell* Polygenic selection & mental health* The importance of realistic expectations around birth, sleep, and infant care* How to build a “parenting contract” before kids* Feminism’s impact on women’s identity in motherhoodA must-watch for anyone considering children or already navigating early parenthood. Brutally honest, optimistic, and solution-focused.Episode TranscriptSimone Collins: [00:00:00] hello Malcolm. I’m excited to be speaking with you today because we are gonna be talking about a New York Times article published in the Cut called I Regret Having Children Telling the very dramatic Stories of three mothers who genuinely regret becoming mothers and have these dark and very ominous tales.And most of the conservative commentators I’ve seen covering it, and basically I feel like I’m seeing this everywhere online. So we have to talk about it.Malcolm Collins: No, what I love about this is so many people, they’re like, oh, Malcolm and Simone, think about how it’s gonna affect your kids. That it is really publicly documented that you really wanted to have them and, and love them.I’m like, what, what, what about these people’s kids? Like this is part of the, the historical,Simone Collins: well, it’s anonymous. So the idea is that hopefully these children will never see it. And even the mothers have said this, like they wouldn’t want their children to know how much they resent this. But most of the people who are talking about it are saying This is, wait, oneMalcolm Collins: of you?Simone Collins: Hmm?Malcolm Collins: Was one of ‘em, you.Simone Collins: No, no, actually. But a lot of the people are saying, this is [00:01:00] Antinatalists and this is terrible. Or like Brett Cooper thinks that the, the discourse is really about unsupported isolated mothers and bad matching in marriage and not really about mothers hitting their kids.Whereas I think really everyone’s missing the point. And here’s the thing, I actually think this article is. Fantastic. And that the, the accounts that these mothers give are actually really important. And that anyone who is really serious about kids should read these and read a lot more. And, and here’s why.Basically the, the best way to get through the tough parts of having kids and having kids isn’t necessarily easy, is to have a strong reason for having kids. And also know ahead of time everything is gonna go wrong. And you and I did exactly this. But not with kids with getting married, remember we went instead of on like regretful parenting subreddit, we went on the relationship subreddit and we very miss fastidiously cataloged everything that could possibly go long wrong with our relationship.And we built plans, contingency plans around thoseMalcolm Collins: things and, and documents. But the thing is, is this is different because the people [00:02:00] don’t know what their kids are gonna be like. Right?Simone Collins: Oh no, they do. And we’re gonna get into that. No, they super do. And that’s theMalcolm Collins: thing. Oh, you’re right. I mean, genetically our kids are just us.Like, and ISimone Collins: see, and again, in these stories, so we’re gonna go over the stories, but the bigger story here is, no, this is good. We should be talking about this. These problems are real, but they’re also very easy to navigate. In fact. Many of the things that these mothers talk about, these nightmare scenarios are things that, at least on a similar level, we are have as parents experienced.This is not, they’re not like having universally terrible experiences. They’re just going through the rough parts of being early parents. And most of these have kids like, you know, that are still in their toddler years. It’s, it can be rough at times. And the point be talking about this shouldn’tMalcolm Collins: actually difficultSimone Collins: parenting.Malcolm Collins: I have a different reason why I like articles like this. And I do like reading articles like this because youSimone Collins: love the snarkMalcolm Collins: because it’s the same reason I’m like really into like red pill content about how horrible somebody’s girlfriend was to them or something like that. Of course.Simone Collins: Right? ‘Malcolm Collins: cause it just makes me appreciate you more and make you feel like more of a treasure.Simone Collins: Oh, and how, like before you, you’d [00:03:00] love to see what happened to like old classmates on Facebook so that you could be feelMalcolm Collins: superior. Yeah. Just be like, okay. Okay. No. But no, I think a lot of people they think that like, I’m, I’m watching like. Super misogynistic content and it’s gonna make me misogynistic.And it’s like, no, it just makes me appreciate how unique and special you are as a wife. And I think our kids are pretty unique and special too. So hopefully this, this reframes that as well. And I think for a lot of people, when they end up hating their children or being parents, it’s because they don’t really like their partner.They don’t really like themselves becauseSimone Collins: there’s a lot of that in that, in this,Malcolm Collins: by the way, just the mix of the two of you Personality wise. Yeah. Like when I see my kids play it’s just me plus Simone. Like there’s, there’s not a lot of. Exogenous personality in there.Simone Collins: Yeah. Yeah. And I think that’s, that’s one of the really big themes in this actually, that we.Don’t talk about it enough as a society. But the article, it itself opens with parent regret is more common than you might think. The our regretful parents subreddit alone gets around 70,000 weekly visitors who anonymously commiserate [00:04:00] through stigma. Makes it hard to admit it in real life. Below three moms of young children talk about why they wish they could go back to their old lives.And so I’m gonna just pull some. Highlights from each mother who gives their account. And we’re gonna talk about how this, this is stuff that people actually really should be planning around and talking about. And that if you do adequately plan for these things either one, you could just avoid becoming a parent if it’s really not for you.But two, you can really. Make something that could be terrible, totally surmountable by just planning for it because it’s pretty, like the writing was on the wall for most of these issues that these women encountered. And that’s a really big thing. And the most common problem for all of these women is that they lacked a strong reason for having kids.So let’s start with a 34-year-old Rhode Island mother of a 6-year-old and a 3-year-old. First off, she did not have a strong reason for wanting to have kids. She wrote, when my husband and I were dating, his deal breaker was having kids. Totally relatable, right? I didn’t feel the same way, but I [00:05:00] didn’t see life without children as an option.It always felt like the next stage of life for us. I remember telling my husband, I’m worried I love our life now, and I’m not sure what it’s gonna look like with a child. And I think this is, I. One super, super common. I mean, you, we can tell from the polling that women are far more ambivalent around having children than men are men put having a, a, a child and, and, and becoming a parent is one of the top things that they need for a fulfilling life, whereas, mm-hmm.Especially conservative men, whereas progressive men and all women,Malcolm Collins: and it just famous polls recently that showed that conservative men having a kid is the number one thing in terms of life fulfillment and progressive women. It was like the absolute bottom. And that mean, I mean, that culture’s just gonna go extinct, right?Like that’s, that’s what happens when you, which is a weird place to be, where you can see that the cultures that we’re opposing and the people we’re opposing control elite institutions and have power within our society, but they’re. Failure is also inevitable, which makes things feel so weirdly [00:06:00] comforting.Because I, I like being both the underdog in a fight, but I also don’t want the risk of thinking that we could lose.Simone Collins: Yeah. The other really big thing, and I’m so glad you pointed to this, is that if you hate yourself or you hate your partner. You’re gonna have a lot of trouble with your kids. And this also shows up in all three of the stories.So this particular Road Island mother, did you hateMalcolm Collins: adopt?Simone Collins: WhatMalcolm Collins: if you hate yourself? Adopt.Simone Collins: I guess, yeah, if you hate yourself, you are a good candidate for adoption. This particular mother had personal issues that now she is contending within her kids. Like, it’s super obvious. She says she struggled with postpartum depression.She’s a perfectionist. She got diagnosed with a DH ADHD after suspecting her eldest had it. And then, you know, she turns out she had it too. And she wrote, when my younger daughter struggles to get dressed, I try to distract her or make compromises, but in the end she’s screaming and I don’t know how to make it stop.So I just shut down. And so one, yeah, you could adopt two, you could genuinely, like, you could just do polygenic risk score selection like we did and [00:07:00] select for different behavioral traits. You, you can do that. Weird, I mean like risks of behavioral traits. Mm-hmm. But I think more importantly than that actually is, and I have to be careful about how I say this, right?‘cause we’re, we’re not, we’re not big on therapy culture. We’re not big on like working through like your mental health issues, but like, how can I put it? Raising kids has forced me to give myself a lot of grace and forgiveness around, for example, my sensory issues, my autism. And while there’s a world in which I could have seen that in my children and freaked out and everything got way worse instead I see it in my children and it teaches me how to be more forgiving with myself.It also way more understanding of my children. And I think for parents who do things like struggle with depression and frustration and perfectionism like she does, for example, she has chosen. To like have this turn into this vortex of pain and suffering for herself of like, oh, oh, my daughter’s experiencing.‘cause her daughter’s her, like her daughter has her same tendencies ‘cause. They’re, you know,Malcolm Collins: they’re very valid. This is, I wanna [00:08:00] you know, illustrate for the fans what you mean when you say this because it’s something that you, you know, focus on a lot.Simone Collins: UhhuhMalcolm Collins: is you will see some behavior in our kids, like the way they’re picky with food and X way orSimone Collins: Yeah.Malcolm Collins: Really into systematizing or, or something else.Simone Collins: Yeah.Malcolm Collins: And you will reflect on, oh, like I can. More forgiving of myself for those traits.Simone Collins: Yeah,Malcolm Collins: because that was genetic. That wasn’t like a personal failing on my part.Simone Collins: Yeah. Like it helped me, yeah. Hate myself less for that. And I, with this mother, for example, if I were speaking with her in person, I’d be like.I mean, wow. This is, you know, an amazing way to give yourself grace for struggling with these things and just kind of deal with it together. Okay. AndMalcolm Collins: you get, get getting a little,Simone Collins: I know. I, I don’tMalcolm Collins: getting a little therapy as, as they would say in the gamer rooms. You’re getting a little gay here, Simone.I’m gay.Simone Collins: I, it’s a, it’s a, it’s a little fake and gay, but also like it. It’s kind of, it can be beautiful. I’m just saying like, the way you contextualize things really affects how you [00:09:00] can process it. And there’s a world in which this mother would be able to navigate her own struggles with perfectionism and depression as her daughter struggles with them in a way where they can both navigate it better.And there’s also a world in which it’s worse. But anyway the other, the other part is again, she has a 6-year-old and a 3-year-old, like especially three year olds are really, really difficultMalcolm Collins: to point fun, start.Simone Collins: So because she has a really young kid, it’s also just gonna suck. And the problem is, I mean, after both her kids are over six years old, things are gonna go get a lot easier.And I think it’s really unfair for and this is where I think it’s unfair with the media and also probably our regretful parenting is riddled with parents who have. Toddlers and probably doesn’t bring a lot of older kids.Malcolm Collins: Well, and I’m taking it back. I mean, imagine how much that must make you dislike your kids to be constantly in an environment like a Facebook group or, or regretful parenting where this hatred is being boast rewarded and re.Forced by the community you have chosen to surround yourself with. Yeah. If the water cooler talk every day is how much you hate your kids, you’re going to begin to hate [00:10:00] your kids more and more. The same thing happens with partners. If you surround yourself with a community, that’s poor conversation point is how much you don’t like your partners, or even you get social credit for challenging yourself or for being the beleaguered mother, then you’re going to project that more.But let’s get to what the actual article says.Simone Collins: Okay, we’ll move on to the, I I just wanna point out though, like you, you’re missing my point that when you actually look at these parents and being like, oh my God, I’m not happy, and that’s bad one. It’s a very short term period where on average parents, especially women, are less happy.And that’s specifically when they, they have really young children and it passes. And it sh it should be just better understood that this isn’t a period that’s like necessarily full of joy. Okay, so moving on to the 30-year-old European mother of a 3-year-old. She says that she grew up sheltered with a stay-at-home mom.She married at 22. Her mother said that she’d help out with a new baby which turned out to not be so true. She felt like she was [00:11:00] one. She had a terrible pregnancy and delivery experience. She was constrained to bedrest in her first trimester. She had a horrible recovery from birth. Like it was painful to move.There was something like an incision made that was just. Incredibly painful.Malcolm Collins: Everybody who’s had a number of kids always has a few bad pregnancy stories. I think when people are like, I stopped having kids because of a bad pregnancy then you were never gonna be in a sustainable population. If, if that was what prevented you from having kids.You’ve had really terrible pregnancies in the past.Simone Collins: Yeah. And again, it comes down to contextualization. She, I think, experiences this in an isolated way where people were kind of gaslighting her into like, everything’s gonna be great. Everything’s wonderful. It’s all magical. And the worst thing for her, and this is one of those things where had she looked at everything could, that it could go wrong and actually looked at regretful parenting before she had her baby.She could have basically headed this off. But she was in a situation where both her mother and her husband didn’t help that much. She wrote, my husband had a month and a half of paternity leave, but the only helpful thing he did during that time was change her diapers, [00:12:00] though he did it with a reluctant expression on his face.I had the feeling he never, never believed how much pain I was in. My mom helped, but she didn’t like being disturbed at night and even during the day was afraid of holding the baby or changing her. I hallucinated from lack of sleep. It felt like I’d been tricked into this. Everyone who wanted me to have a child, my husband, my family knew they weren’t going to lose much while my freedom and my identity went down the toilet.And that’s something that she could have if they’d all discussed it, anticipated and had off. Like I think it’s horrible what happened to her. And it didn’t have to do that. No, IMalcolm Collins: mean, I think that’s an an I’m, I’m gonna be honest we tried to do for the younger years with kids do more gender equal breakdown in terms of care, and it just doesn’t work very well.It ends up being so contrived the way you do the split care for the infant. Yeah. It like. Infants really was in our house. The infant is always Simone’s like total responsibility. And I’m in charge of the fallback for anyone over that age, and that works really well. But if you’re just going into [00:13:00] this and you just have one kid and you’re in that infant stage when the mom bears and it is hard, I mean.You’ve gotta remember guys, if you’re watching this, what it’s like to be a new mother you are in enormous pain often because you just underwent some form of surgery or something like that. The kid could die at any moment because kids of that age do die. Just die randomly.Simone Collins: It’s horrifying. Yeah.Especially your first time parent and you, you don’t necessarily, I mean, if you didn’t grow up with very young siblings, you also have no idea what you’re doing and you’re like, oh my God, this is the human and I feel like I’m gonna kill this human.Malcolm Collins: You’re not sleeping like at all up, all. Night and day. Yeah, if you are breastfeeding, that is very painful.Simone Collins: It can be for some people they just love it, but for a lot of people it’s not the best.Malcolm Collins: I,Simone Collins: I hate it.Malcolm Collins: So, so the, the, the, you know, you are in both constant pain, but also your brain is hypersensitized to the needs of the baby.I can see in Simone’s face how distressed she gets. When we have the infants, I think the reason why you don’t contextualize all [00:14:00] this, this as horrible as she is contextualizing it, is one, you know that your sacrifice is appreciated which is really important for guys to make sure that you are signaling that, that you understand and it is appreciated.Yeah,Simone Collins: and that’s the thing she pointed out, right, that like her husband didn’t seem to really believe her, that it was likeMalcolm Collins: toughSimone Collins: for her.Malcolm Collins: And two, you see the outcome. In the, the older children, like when I, I see my kids, I hug my kids, my kids jump on me. I see how awesome this, what to me is honestly a very boring stage of life.The infants I’ve, I’ve, I’ve been, I do not like infants. It’s zeroSimone Collins: interest.Malcolm Collins: But I love, love toddlers.Simone Collins: Like, but I mean, parents should talk about that because I think that that also. Some women may grow up exposed to what I call like baby men who just like, there’s five to 10% of men just seem to be baby crazy.Like they absolutely beloved babies. I wanna hold the baby, they’re the baby whisperers. And then every other man, like zero interest like they, I. You know, like they’d rather hold a wet stray [00:15:00] dog covered in trash.Malcolm Collins: Yeah.Simone Collins: YouMalcolm Collins: know, babies disgust, I’m not a fan of babies. Yeah. And on newspapers. When, when I first said that, as you said, you know, we need to normalize it.You can feel like, I’m not a big fan of babies, but I it’s worth it for when they’re toddlers newspapers. When that went viral for me saying that, they’re like, oh, he doesn’t even like his children. He doesn’t even, you know, like being around them or enjoy parenting. Mm-hmm. And I’m like, what a sick reason to have kids because you’re going to enjoy it.Right? Like this isn’tSimone Collins: well, but also again, it, women need to be aware of this. Like women shouldn’t be gaslit about like.Malcolm Collins: Oh yeah.Simone Collins: Oh, you know, like your, your husband’s gonna be in love. And also like, keep in mind the, the men who are referenced in by these women in this article typically were like, yeah, I really wanna have kids.Like, kids are a must for me. Like they act like they really wanna have kids, but then they’re not into kids below three years. Like, that’s actually super normal. And that doesn’t mean they don’t wanna have kids that actually they’re probably gonna be great dads.Malcolm Collins: Is this me with the dog and, and chickens.Simone Collins: The dog and chick. Oh, you,Malcolm Collins: you, you always, youSimone Collins: Right. [00:16:00] Malcolm has been the one who’s pulled the trigger ultimately on us getting a bunch of pets. And then who ends up being the only person who takes care of the pet, who feeds the pet, goes out.Malcolm Collins: I’m sorry, Simone. I will endeavor to lighten your load there where I can Yeah,Simone Collins: sure.It’s been how many years now? Okay.Malcolm Collins: It is, it is appreciated though, Simon phone and I’m just, I’m just airing that so that you know, that I, I know that you likely feel similar to them just in other domains of our life.Simone Collins: No. Well, no, but also like you’re not into babies, like you don’t. Have you’ve changed, I guess when you, you, you did, you did take texts to the diaper, so you’ve changed his Sorry.To the doctor. So you’ve changed his diaper then, but you don’t, you have not Once,Malcolm Collins: when we started with kid number one, we shared bi diaper changing, but we stopped doing that pretty soon after kid. WeSimone Collins: just dropped it. Yeah. Like, because it didn’t make sense, but it’s, I just, I, I, I think it’s great that this is being discussed because it should be discussed because.[00:17:00]If you, here’s the thing. So we had on the podcast at one point, the author of Hannah’s children, Dr. Katherine Ruth Balak, she interviewed academically and then published a book on college educated mothers of five plus children.Malcolm Collins: Okay?Simone Collins: And she told us that the top factor, determining whether or not someone was like, oh my God, I am all in this.I wanna have so many kids, was whether or not they had a good experience with their first kid. And if they felt, you know, well supported and it was, you know, what they wanted and they had a great experience, they were way more likely to wanna have a lot of kids, even if like they came into it being like, I really like keep, I will, I mean, you didn’t read the book, but many of the mothers who or interviewed in the book had similar starting points to these three women.Who regret becoming parents were like, I don’t know. Like,Malcolm Collins: okay, let’s, let’s get to the next one.Simone Collins: But my point is though, that like if you come into it the right way, you know, if you come in prepared, you can be super into it. So, anyways, so she had this terrible [00:18:00] experience. Her husband, mother didn’t help much, but another common thread here, she had a history of depression and anxiety.And I think, again, if you’ve got a lot of mental health problems, especially as a woman. I, I do think that you need to plan extra for that. Well, thisMalcolm Collins: is I think one of the biggest arguments for polygenic selection Yeah. Is a lot of people who have major depressive disorders or anxiety disorders these are the things that I have heard the technology being used for the most.Yeah. Is ensuring that they do not pass major depression onto your kids. Yeah. People. Are out there imagining that it’s gonna be people like us selecting against autism or something. We’re like, no, we don’t select against autism. Like, or, or selecting against you know, some sort of like ethnicity or something.And it’s like, no, it’s people who have gone through some sort of major psychological challenge in their own life who do not want to bring kids. To undergo because depression isn’t like a cool, like, nobody’s like, oh, they’re, they’re trying to genocide depress people. Everyone who’s actually undergone like depression or anxiety or [00:19:00] something like that understands why you may not want your kids like, like that is an uncontroversial thing to not want to pass that down.Simone Collins: Well, and, and here’s the really tough thing is, is, is it’s one thing to deal with ongoing, like with postpartum depression and then with the anxiety of being a new parent like that, that you can kind of anticipate if that’s. Already your tendency, it’s gonna happen to you as a new parent, especially ‘cause you’re under all this additional stress.Yeah. Also dealing with that in your kid, like having it magnified in that way is really rough and like Yeah, they’re depressed. And you’re depressed. Yeah. Super ready for that. Or you need to. You know, like do yeah. Try to reduce the odds of it happening in the first place. Something like polygenic risk or selection.Malcolm Collins: But actually this is interesting because you have traits that people could contextualize negatively. Well, it’s not depression. You need an incredibly controlled environment or you become very stressed about things. Yeah. And that can be seen in the setup of our house and the way that we make decisions.Simone Collins: Everything. But it’s also, it’s, it’s something that so cool. I’ve been able to, adapt with our children.Malcolm Collins: Yeah.Simone Collins: So one, I don’t think it’s maladaptive for a modern society, like actually it’s much, [00:20:00] it’s much easier for people like me to get by, so I don’t think it’s, it’s like a, a bad thing to bring children in with those traits.But like, it makes me as a parent really, you know, I, I’m able to anticipate that in them and accommodate it. I take custom orders for everyone’s dinner every night, like everyone gets to do a lot of things in their own special, unique way that they have to do them, because I know that that’s how they need it to be.And they’ll be happy as long as that’s the case, and they are like, it’s good.Malcolm Collins: Yeah,Simone Collins: so number three, woman number three. She’s a 27-year-old in North Carolina, and she’s a mother of a 1-year-old, and she’s the most dark ending. SheMalcolm Collins: don’t start there when you’re talking about kids. Come on.Simone Collins: Oh, well, okay.Yeah. And not, not, not Simone trigger dark meaning that like your child is getting hurt. It’s actually the, the outcome is best for the children, but is still pretty dark for the child. She didn’t want kids. She wrote, my husband and I met in middle school. He was always interested in having a big family, and I told him, I wasn’t quite sure.So already kind of a warning sign. Like, really, if, if you’re not into it, you know, it’s, it’s, you should get through that first. Before you, [00:21:00] you weren’tMalcolm Collins: into it either, and now you’re superSimone Collins: No, but you, you convinced me. And I was like, yeah, I’m all in. Based on the conditions. And that was it. We were all set.I was 100% bought in. What happened to her though was she got a positive pregnancy test and she’s like, well, I guess I’m doing this. Her, her husband was like, I, I really, really, really want you to keep the baby. Like, I think she was even thinking about having. An abortion. Okay. She has a history like the others of depression and is now dealing, probably dealing with in her son, she wrote, my son has a low tolerance for frustration and doesn’t communicate other than whining, screaming, crying, throwing things, and pulling my hair.So again, like this is one of those things just to highlightMalcolm Collins: that it’s how you contextualize it. But I mean, I guess you could say like, Octavian constantly climbing on me and hitting me and everything like that is like this horrible thing.Simone Collins: Well, but you contextualize it positively. And there’s an even better example with her in contextualization because she has.She has body dysmorphia issues she wrote during pregnancy. I felt embarrassed. I’ve had body dysmorphia issues since I was a kid. I, and I felt so massive. I used to be a [00:22:00] track athlete and have always been fit and active, so I didn’t like feeling so heavy and restricted when trying to do the things I’ve always done, like hiking.During my third trimester, I didn’t wanna leave the house so that people wouldn’t see me. So she, like, I also have body dysmorphia. I hate the way I’ve looked. I, I’ve always. Hated my body, but like the way I contextualize pregnancy is like, well, all right, I am stuck in this body. I’m resentful of it. I’m going to like wear this thing into the ground.Like it is the ultimate revenge of like, all right, well, we’re just gonna. Where like, you know, use it the full capacity until I literally break it until I break my uterus, until I break everything. Which is ultimately more satisfying for me than like getting a hysterectomy, which is the first thing I thought about doing before I met you.And so there are ways to deal with these things. You, you could have body dysmorphia and respond like she did, or you could have body dysmorphia and respond like I did. And they’re both ways you can deal with it, but I think we’re having a lot more fun with my method. So I’m just saying like, contextualization is everything.She also had a horrible birth experience. I’m not gonna, I don’t have to [00:23:00] describe it too. I can, I can read it, but like, I also have had horrible birth experiences and it sucks and I think that it.Malcolm Collins: Well, you one I would say was all of this. You don’t know. Some people just contextualize everything horribly.Like,Simone Collins: yeah, yeah.Malcolm Collins: You, you know, whatever their experience is, it’s going to be a horrible experience because they have learnedSimone Collins: based on like, so her, her she had an epidural, but like it kept not working. I, I also, I didn’t have an epidural and I, I was bad. Anyway,Malcolm Collins: continueSimone Collins: with theMalcolm Collins: story,Simone Collins: but they, they had to like.Jump on her hip to make, dislodge him from like a place where he was stuck before he entered the birth canal or something. And she still felt pain from that. So it was, it was bad. It was like genuinely bad. It wasn’t just her whining about it. Malcolm.Malcolm Collins: Okay, continue.Simone Collins: But yeah, she also, more importantly for her is she felt erased as a human being.She wrote, I felt like I disappeared as a human being, clients. Called me mama. Friends and family asked me how my son was. They told me how excited and overjoyed I must be. I tried telling them I wasn’t coping well with motherhood and was still [00:24:00] processing the birth, and they tell me that’s what motherhood is.One of my friends texted my husband, wow, she’s changed and not in a good way. It came from a place of care. She and many friends and family told me I had postpartum depression to seek therapy and to go on medication, but at the same time, they’d quickly flip it back to, you need to be there for your son.Pick yourself up by move on. It’s over with and done. Everything you went through is just like no big deal because the baby’s here. Your existence doesn’t matter. And again, that’s contextualization. And I think that one of the most toxic things about our modern society, and I I do think this has to do more with culture than it does with like preparing, is that the more you focus in on yourself and get into your head, the more miserable you’re gonna be.So even if you wanna optimize for hedonic pleasure. Doing what she’s doing is kind of like an exercise in frustration and suffering. And I mean, if, if she’s such a miserable person, the idea that she would want to identify more with herself to me is so odd. You know, like you could just become more expansive and identify with [00:25:00] your family and enjoy the joys of a child, which is soMalcolm Collins: interesting.I mean, it’s, it’s, it’s.You are supposed to stop being the point of your life. Yeah. Your kids are the point of your life, right? Like the, the focus shifts. And for somebody who adopted the urban monoculture, that can be horrifying because they’re taught in this sort of atomized self being the most important thing. And this idea that you would sublimate that either in a marriage or through children is one of the most mortifying things they can imagine.And yet we had already, I mean, when we got married. There was a period where we stayed more atomized at the beginning. I, I think you were really afraid of this idea of No, we’re just one person now.Simone Collins: Yeah. I was much more hesitant around it than you were. I, I think also though, because women. One, lose more just traditionally than men do, like physically logistically, especially in the younger years, like to your point, [00:26:00] right, like I’m doing most of the infant care, your life changes the least as we get new infant.So women, women do feel like they have more to lose, especially in the early years, and they do. But also they’ve been uniquely conditioned to be like, no, don’t ever give those things up. It’s a bad thing if you give those things up. Whereas men. Have never really been told that.Malcolm Collins: Actually, hold on, this could be like a whole other episode, but you could almost argue that feminism conceptually was fighting against.The, the woman’s role as a mother that societal framing of a woman’s position like we, and, and, and you see the people who have fully adopted feminist framing, you even suggest, well, that’s a woman’s role, and they freak out. Right?Simone Collins: Yeah.Well, and you can also argue, which I think is interesting, is that.Women are so concerned about losing their identity, but men never had them. Like, men don’t really get to be full men until they have their families and identify as their families, which is so weird. Whereas, like for women, they feel like they lose everything by getting their family, which is I think, a really interesting piece of tension and [00:27:00] interplay that you get with relationships.It’s not, it’s not what I would expect. But I, I, yeah. Now that, that’s kind of, that’s kind of occurring to me that like men, men aren’t losing. Men. Men don’t even get to be anything like an incel is nothing, they don’t have an identity. They, they mean nothing in society. That’sMalcolm Collins: actually a really interesting point.Yeah. Men do not matter until they’re married and, and then really until they have kids. Yeah. From a societalSimone Collins: perspective and then sort of women kind of cease to, cease to, well, yeah. I don’t know, like, not that they cease to matter, but they kind of recede into it and they feel like they’re losing something, whereas men.Feel like they’re finally getting their identity. It, it’s a very weird thing.Malcolm Collins: There’s a Well, and this is seeing that the, that the mother is lesser in the eyes of the urban monocultureSimone Collins: uhhuh. Oh yeah. No, you, you definitely take a downgrade, aMalcolm Collins: singleSimone Collins: woman.Malcolm Collins: That’s the, the, the, we’ve read other articles as women, like identifying as single, even when they’re in a relationship because it’s seen as cooler or something.Simone Collins: Yeah. Or identifying as a divorcee just to beMalcolm Collins: Yeah. Yeah. Even after she was remarried, [00:28:00] she still identified primarily as a divorcee.Simone Collins: Yeah. My, my cache is in rejecting marriage actually. Speaking of which so she. A after withdrawing from fellow parents. ‘cause she just hated so much people identifying with their children.Decided to leave her husband and actually her son too. She wrote, my husband and I are taking steps to separate and he’s willing to take on the role of a single parent, which makes me feel incredibly guilty. But I can’t live this life with him anymore. I’m not the parent my son needs. And I, one, I think it’s kind of based, like she actually isn’t the parent of her son.She, she seems to really hate it. And that would be not good for a kid to grow up around.Malcolm Collins: She’s not the person anyone needs. She seems.Simone Collins: Yeah. Yeah. No, she, she, she seems genuinely, she, she needs to work on a lot of things and, and I don’t think she can do that with her husband and her son. Also, like single dads statistically do really well.So I’m not worried for the kid and I’m not worried for the husband. And, and I didn’t read these parts, but the husband was also incredibly gung-ho about this kid really wanted to be a dad. He’s super on board with being a single parent, so. But it’s still a [00:29:00] very dark ending, right? This is a woman who rejected parenting so much that she’s literally just going to end it.She’s not gonna be,Malcolm Collins: I would say that kids. More broadly, and I, I really cannot make this point loudly enough, is I don’t know what this kid is like, but like there are bad kids out there, right? Like, there are unpleasant kids. I’ve seen our kids, I’ve, I’ve seen our kids interact with ‘em. We, we have other kids who I, I’ve, I’ve like, oh my God, if that was my kid, I’d like smother them in their sleep.Like they, they’re a, a net. Burden to society And I maybe,Simone Collins: well, I, so you put it that way, but like in act, and so what this mother complained about was her son was not meeting the same developmental milestones that her peers children were and that he was in early intervention. Our kids have been in early intervention, our kids have been diagnosed with autism.Our kids have gone through pretty extensive therapy. Like at first we were made to feel a lot of shame about that by some people in our. Family and stuff, but thenMalcolm Collins: Oh, no. And the wider,Simone Collins: like, we ultimately realized like, oh no, you’re just messed up like we are. And like [00:30:00] we all get along really well here.So I think, I don’t know.Malcolm Collins: But what’s interesting to me as well is, and I think you make this point well, the things that she complains about are all things I notice in our kids and, and love. I love the way that they’re vitalistic and crawl all over me and fight me andSimone Collins: don’t, yeah. And like we’re, we’reMalcolm Collins: don’tSimone Collins: always about our kids not meeting the developmental milestones ofMalcolm Collins: like, when I’ve seen kids and I was just like.Like the, the kids that have given me that, it, it’s interesting, they’ve always been like either like genetically obsequious you know, like very needy attention, wanting clearly like unsure of themselves. It’s interesting that to me that would be like such a trigger in seeing a kid who’s unsure of themselves and being like, Ugh, disgusting.Or they, they, areSimone Collins: timid and afraid. You can’t, timidMalcolm Collins: and afraidSimone Collins: children that are timid and afraid.Malcolm Collins: And that’s like a big ick factor for me. And it’s interesting that I like, have kid icks like that. I’ve like,Simone Collins: God,Malcolm Collins: I now know what women mean when they say this. Right. You know, I’m like, Ugh.Like that Is [00:31:00] that, that, that’s cringey to be around that. But our kids just don’t have any of that. And I don’t know how I’d feel if we ever had a kid who was like that. But I, I also don’t know how. You and I could produce a kid like that.Simone Collins: Yeah, it’s, it’s unlikely. But I mean, you and I talk about this a lot and I don’t know how much we’ve talked about it on our podcast we have a little bit, but like.If you do not like your partner or you do not like things about your partner, you’re gonna really struggle with your kids. ‘cause those kids are gonna exhibit those behaviors. It’s gonna be really tough for you. Whereas if you love your partner, you’re gonna be crazy about your kids, at least if you are also a forgiving of your yourself.And I think where I struggle most of our kids at times is when they exhibit behaviors that that. Bother me about myself, and I see that in them and I’m like, oh no. But, but then seeing you show grace around that, I feel like you’re showing me grace and it’s just all over again. You show me how much you love me andMalcolm Collins: I feel there’s the other weird thing that I’ve, I talked to Simone about when I see her being a really loving mom to our kids, [00:32:00] and she is, she’s a phenomenal mother. Like when I go down on a weekend, ‘cause she gets the kids first on weekends and she has, you know, made them all like individual dishes and, and music’s playing and the kids are all roughhousing around and she’s, you know, reading them a book or something and she’s doing all these nice things for them and she does these things for them.At least she tells me because, you know, she. Likes the kids, but somehow my brain doesn’t register it as that. My brain, every time I see her being nice to the kids is seeing her going out of her way to do me a favor.Simone Collins: Well, I mean, the, the kids are just like, I mean, not to sound spiritual or like emotional, but like the kids are fragments of our souls and they’re, they’re definitely little pocket Malcolms.I see so much of them in you that Yeah, I mean, if, if you love your partner, you’re gonna love your kids. And that’s, I mean, you can see this with, with these parents. I think that these mothers who really re regret becoming parents, I think are really also struggling with not just themselves. It’s clear that they have self hatred [00:33:00] issues or depression or anxiety or all of those things.But then they’re also really struggling with your husband. And like, imagine what a nightmare that is. If you hate yourself, if you don’t like your husband either, and now you’re alone with like a version of the two of you magnified and also pooping and you know, totally out of control like that. That sounds.Yeah. Like a complete nightmare. AndMalcolm Collins: well, I also think another thing that’s that, that we’ve, we’ve skirted on here, but I think it’s really important to drill intoSimone Collins: Yeah.Malcolm Collins: Is the role of contextualization in all of this.Simone Collins: Yes, that’sMalcolm Collins: right. You know, we had reporters here today asking me about like when people were.Dog piling us online for using corporal punishment with our kids and saying that we’re child abusers and everything like that. And like asking me like, do you feel? And I was like, no, I don’t really feel bad about that. Like, I can choose how I can textualize these things that happen in my life. And when I was in that debate with Steven meu and he kept trying to get me to be like, well, look at these things your parents did.Like you should reject them and condemn them. And I was like, I like who I am as an adult. I’m not gonna condemn them. Like, it’s fine. Right?Simone Collins: Yeah. The outcome was good. So,Malcolm Collins: yeah. And I, I, [00:34:00] I realized that. Like at a pathological level, if you look at me and, and my outlook on life, I just choose not to contextualize things negatively, right?Mm-hmm. And I, ‘cause I don’t see any purpose in it, right? Like, it doesn’t help me. Yeah. And society will reward you for contextualizing things negative because everybody wants a sob story. But if you can, you know, internally was in your family culture, steal yourself against that. You will just be like way happier with your life and way more productive.And this is and I think for a lot of these people, it’s just a choice of negative contextualization, right? Yeah. Of things that happened to me and you and I contextual. And I never have, like, I never like made some deal with you around that you have to do this, but it seems like you have organically adopted this as well.WeSimone Collins: organically did it. But what do you think about the idea of. Like we did with our relationship also doing stuff like this with parenting because it does seem to [00:35:00] be a really big deal breaker in life in. In a relationship that, that people do. I mean, we, we did some things like what will we do if our kids ask for porn?What will we do if our kids misbehave? What religion will we make? But we didn’t do it about parenting, logistics.Malcolm Collins: The idea of parenting choices in a parenting contract.Simone Collins: Mm-hmm.Malcolm Collins: Being something you create before having kids is a failure.Simone Collins: Really, I like the idea a failure.Malcolm Collins: SoSimone Collins: why?Malcolm Collins: Everything that would be in a parenting contract should be in the outset of the relationship, the relationship contract.You should. Okay,Simone Collins: that’s fair. But like, instead of just looking at how relationships fail, also look it up. Parenting fails.Malcolm Collins: Exactly. That’sSimone Collins: okay. Okay. Okay. So we are on the same page. I was like, what are you talking about?Malcolm Collins: And we had done all of that with our relationship contract.Simone Collins: No, not all. No. What I’m saying is all we did actually was.Religion, porn and punishment. And like where we spend family holidays, we didn’t do, those areMalcolm Collins: core things [00:36:00] parentingSimone Collins: wise. Yeah. Those are core things that relationships end over. But what we, we didn’t do was like, you know, how are we gonna handle infants? What’s gonna happen? You know, if I’m really injured in like pregnancy, what’s, what’s gonna happen?Like. With you know, who’s gonna do overnights, et cetera, like, what’s gonna happen. Now, we did have an agreement on like, what’s gonna happen if, if one person has to be a stay-at-home parent and it was gonna be you. But like, I don’t know. I, I feel like we could have done more. I just, I want, my thing is I, again, I think this article’s good.I think people should be aware of what can go wrong, and I think people should plan for it as they’re beginning the outset of a relationship. Do you agree?Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Well, it needs to be agreed at the outset of a relationship because the kids are ultimately the purpose of human relationships, sexual relationships, romantic relationships.Simone Collins: Well, I mean, per our view, people are welcome to have different objective functions and decide to only do pairings based onMalcolm Collins: No, no, no, no. Biologically, I’m speaking here.Simone Collins: Oh, biologically. Yeah. ThatMalcolm Collins: is, that is why the [00:37:00] concept of a relationship evolved. That is why the institution of marriage evolved. That is why the institution of dating evolved.It was to produce the next generation. It has been co-opted as a l rrp by, by other groups. But it is fundamentally that’s what it’s about. Right? Yeah. Now obviously you know, now you can be like, well, does this mean that like. Gay people aren’t really in a relationship. It’s like, well actually that could change as science changes, right?Like yeah. If, if, if they can you know, artificial wombs and have kids on their own. Yeah. Then even for them, right? If a faction of like, let’s say gay culture survives by making itself above repopulation rate was most of the cultures that are above repopulation rate being very you know, homophobic, transphobic, et cetera but if some faction of, of, of a gay culture finds out how to make it.Self stable through science from the perspective of that faction of gay culture? Yeah. Relationships will still be about kids. They’ll still be about forming a stable household to bring the [00:38:00] kids into.Simone Collins: I actually, I think of what I’ve seen of gay parent social media influencers they may actually be in a better position coming into this ‘cause they are approaching parenting from a more.Thoughtful and first principles approach because instead of just being like, oh, I guess we’re just gonna default to like the gender norms or whatever.Malcolm Collins: Well, and you know, huge bonus they don’t have to be married to a woman.Simone Collins: Yeah, but also like if it’s two women they, they still, you know,Malcolm Collins: okay, I’ll, I’ll, I’ll put it this way, of the gay parenting influencers.Yeah. I see a lot of wholesome male, male partners. I do not see many wholesome female, female, gay parenting influencers.Simone Collins: There’s there’s one that I watch a lot. They just had a, well, not just, but they recently had twins after having one boy and they talk about it a lot. She’s, she’s I mean like both of them show up on the podcast, but she does a lot of like, just cultural commentary.I can’t remember her name now, but she’s a, a disabled ginger vintage fashion wearing. Woman whose, whose [00:39:00] look I love, I love her look. AndMalcolm Collins: I’m disabled.Simone Collins: She talks a lot about her disability. Other, I wouldn’t say that if it weren’t like part of her identity. ‘cause otherwise that would seem like I’m, I don’t know, trying to shame her orMalcolm Collins: a weird thing to talk about, you know?Simone Collins: Yeah. But no, she, she grew up with like crippling pain issues and, and like, I think she’s partially deaf perhaps, or something like that. But then, yeah, she’s a, just always think of that Everest news clip to the top of Everest. But he’s gay. I mean, he’s gay. I mean, he’s blind.Speaker: Right after the break, we’re gonna interview Eric Weihenmayer, who climbed the highest mountain in the world, Mount Everest. But he’s gay. I mean, he’s gay... Excuse me, he’s blind. So we’ll hear about that coming up. Okay. As we head to the break, a look at the s-Simone Collins: She’s both, she’s both deaf and gay.So maybe she just needs to climb Everest and finally fulfill the prophecy. But anyway, theMalcolm Collins: most disabled person to ever do a thing. But so you think that they, they, that she comes across as like wholesome.Simone Collins: Very, no, no, no. Like [00:40:00] they’re, I mean, tired as being a parent of, of twins, but like, that’s kind of normal when you have like young twins and everything and like, they had a complicated pregnancy and everything and they shared a lot about it openly.And I like, I like that people do that. But yeah, they’ve, they’ve I think very intentionally thought through, you know, how they’re gonna balance things and how they’re gonna manage. And I like that. So, you know, that’s the, the great thing about. When you the, the problem, and this is something we talk a lot about in the practice guide to relationships, is that when people don’t explicitly negotiate terms in a relationship, each person is going off a social contract.Now that makes sense if you grow up in some medieval fiefdom where everyone has lived with the same culture in isolation for hundreds of years. But when you live in our culture and everyone is dealing with a slightly different tat. Social contract, you, you’ll get into a marriage and like one person expects like one set of things and the other person expects a totally different set of things.And then it’s this huge shock when you’re not on the same page.Malcolm Collins: What, what I find so funny is you know, I, I have to choose my words because there’s different factions in [00:41:00] our audience. And the ways the different factions relate to ideal marriage set setups. Like there’s a huge chunk of like the online right, where when we’re talking about like a single father raising a kid, they’re like, that’s awesome.That’s the only way to raise kids, and it can be a greatSimone Collins: way to raise kids.Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Yeah.Simone Collins: The faction, like, you could never raise kids without a mother and aMalcolm Collins: father on the, on the men who are doing this, and they’re like, that’s great. And then we’re like in. And now you have the, these male, male partnerships where they’re raising kids.Oh, that’s awesome. And then the other faction is like, no, traditional family’s all the way, you know, the kids need a mother.Simone Collins: Yeah.Malcolm Collins: And we’re just like, whatever. It works like. Well,Simone Collins: I think a big thing, some people have actually asked us to do a podcast on this. There’s the famous Olympic ice skater who is the, daughter one, one of five via IVF to a single Chinese father who chose all like Caucasian Jewish women for the egg donors. And it’s just this very like, very great example of like, a, a a based single dad just being like, yeah, I’m gonna like raise five [00:42:00] children via IVF and they’re all gonna be exceptional and amazing.And he, he has this like Olympic gold medal winner. Who’s like super cool as a person too, by theMalcolm Collins: way. Oh, really? One of his kids became an Olympic gold medal.Simone Collins: Yeah, no, she was like one of the most talked about and famous people in the entire Winter Olympics. I don’t know how you missed this. She’s super cool.Malcolm Collins: Did she fight for China team or America team?Simone Collins: I think she was on China’s team. But yeah. Anyway, IVF. Did dad, Chinese chose Caucasian egg donor, so she’s like mixed.Malcolm Collins: That’s a, that’s a pretty good mix. We did the episode on average racial attractiveness. And Asian White, from the perspective of many ethnicities is the top attractiveness ethnic group.Simone Collins: Yes. With us concluding that the holy grail is Japanese Irish, which many of our viewers have come to agree with,Malcolm Collins: what was it? I, I think it was that white people marked them as even more attractive than other white people and generally groups. Yeah.Simone Collins: And then just anecdotally, like people have sent actually pictures of like their Japanese Irish friends and there’s like [00:43:00] just impossibly, you know, beautiful.So, who knew? But there you go. But yeah. Okay. Well, yeah, anyway, I’m glad the New York Times is, is doing this series and I, I think that, being thoughtful and not sugarcoating things is important. So. There we go. Well, didMalcolm Collins: they, any, any other choice quotes from the article or justSimone Collins: No, just these, these are deeply sad women.It, it’s mostly a very depressing article.Malcolm Collins: Well, I actually think the bigger takeaway is the toxicity of environments like, you know, regretful parents where people are like, oh, these people affirm you, but you shouldn’t be affirmed for wallowing in this stuff. Right? Like, that’s only gonna make things worse for you, even if you’re really experiencing it.Simone Collins: Oh. Although, I don’t know, I, I feel conflicted about that because these women were also surrounded by people who said exactly that and who were like. Man, like stop wallowing, like snap out of it. Like be positive, think about your kids. Like, enjoy the things they enjoy and it just, that didn’t work for them.So as much as I can empathize with your marriage, I also, also, sorry, sorry. With your, with your message. I can’t, it didn’t work [00:44:00] and I like things that work. So. I don’t know what to say to that. Like, I, I, the, and unfortunately I don’t have a solution for women who once they get in this position aside from like, Hey, maybe you can contextualize this a little bit differently.I think the only real solution is to head off these problems before they become problems. Unfortunately, like there’s no saving. The ones who have already come to regret becoming parents is only saving the future parents, which is not convenient, but that’s how I feel. So it goes. Anyway, I love you. I’m gonna make you Bullock tonight with the mozzarella cheese, and if the mozzarella cheese doesn’t look good, we’re doing cheddar instead.Malcolm Collins: The mozzarella cheese will be good. It’s only like a week and a half old.Simone Collins: Look, if there’s mold on mozzarella cheese, because it is a soft cheese, it just goes all the way through. You can’t cut it off. Like you don’t really know where it ends, the veins of those. So it’s not considered safe when it’s a hard cheese, you can cut off the, the mold and you’re, you’re more, it’s like easier to safely do.But I’m not, I’m not doing that. If your mozzarella cheese looks off, I don’t wanna, I don’t wanna kill you weirdly. [00:45:00]Malcolm Collins: Well, you are my wife.Simone Collins: Right? SoMalcolm Collins: it’s one of these things where everyone’s always like, your wife could die having a kid. And I’m like, and that’s, that’s like a big problem for me. ‘cause now I’ve got five in kids that I’m raising alone.Right? Like I would much rather, when I think of one of us dying. Like, that’s the one who got out of the hardship, right? Like that’s the, that’s the if, if I died at any point in the next few years I, I, I feel like I, I, I screwed over Simone, right? Like I got the easy out. She’s got the hard dealing with five kids.Simone Collins: You’re not allowed to die. Look, you just. You’re not allowed to die until we have all of our kids are set up and thriving. Then. Then like we can go whenever we want, but you gotta hold on. Until then, Octavian like rediscovered his mortality. Yesterday as we were driving back from the doctor, he’s like, wait, I’m gonna die.And I’m like, yeah, that’s why you need to be careful with how you spend your time. And he’s like, hold on, wait. Actually, and I’m like, yeah, dude, you’re gonna die. And I’m [00:46:00] like, you’re not res responding. And he is like, whoa,Malcolm Collins: whoa.Simone Collins: It’s, it’s kind of hard for kids to discover that they, they, they don’t re respond because that’s,Malcolm Collins: that’s an interesting thing to discuss with first timeSimone Collins: metaphysically.Like,Malcolm Collins: yeah, you’re eventually gonna die.Simone Collins: Yeah, now, now he’s aware of it that I was like, you’ve got like probably considering modern science like about a hundred years. He’s like, oh, okay, whatever. Like, that’s a lot of time. You know, when like one day for them is eternity. So he’s not too worried about it yet, thank goodness.But he is like, also, I don’t want you to, that’s like, that’s toasty wave saying I love you by the way. You know how he’s always like, I love you and I don’t want you to die. Because they’ve heard me so many times being like, please stop jumping off the bed. Like, please stop doing all these things. I don’t want you to die.And they just think that that’s like this generic way of expressing fondness when I’m really like, no, please stop trying to kill yourself. Like, oh. Anyway, I I love you and I don’t want you to die. [00:47:00] Bye.Malcolm Collins: All right. We gonna join the meetup for fans.Simone Collins: Mm-hmm. I’mMalcolm Collins: looking for, do you have people filming? You still Uhhuh.Okay.Speaker 4: Are we going deep into the jungle, guys? Yeah, are we digging in the jungle? Is this a jungle or woods? This is a wood. It looks jungle. Oh, huh? It looks like it. It looks like it. And that’s called a temperate rainforest, guys. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit basedcamppodcast.substack.com/subscribe

Today on Based Camp, we discuss the purpose, history, and utility of the UN and NATO. Do they make sense in the modern geopolitical landscape? Do they make sense in the face of demographic collapse? As people who constantly rail on bureaucratic bloat and mission creep, you might be able to guess where we fall… but what do you think? We’re keen to read your opinions in the comments.Show NotesA typical middle-income American household is paying $337.50 annually on the European theatre and NATO-related missions via their taxes* Per household, middle of the income distribution: USAFacts reports that in 2021, families in the middle 20% of the income distribution paid about 10,391 dollars per year in federal income tax alone.* So for a middle‑income household paying 10,391 dollars in federal income tax, a good ballpark is about 1,500 dollars of that going to national defense in a recent‑years sense.* And one mainstream estimate is that roughly 20–25 percent of total U.S. military spending is devoted to the European theater and NATO‑related missions (forces, bases, exercises, enablers, nuclear posture)* With U.S. military spending around 850–900 billion dollars per year in the mid‑2020s, that implies on the order of 170–225 billion dollars annually that can reasonably be tied to European and NATO deterrence, broadly defined* 1500*.225= $337.50Meanwhile, what is NATO doing for us?I vote we not only leave NATO but also leave the UN (roughly $90-100 per year is paid to the UN per tax return / tax paying household—this includes lower-income households).Why NATO Was CreatedBasically to fight commies during the cold war* It emerged in the early Cold War as a direct response to the Soviet Union’s expansionist actions, including the domination of Central and Eastern Europe behind the “Iron Curtain.”* Western European nations were still recovering from World War II, and the U.S. and Canada sought to deter further Soviet aggression through collective strength rather than unilateral action.It operates within the UN Charter framework (explicitly referencing Article 51 on self-defense) but focuses on military readinessWhat Nato Does* Coordinate on defense, crisis management, and cooperative security* Like a neighborhood watch group* Participants voluntarily join* They coordinate on security and defensive action* They sometimes partner with non-members to promote stability beyond their own borders* They meet occasionally to strategize and troubleshootKey functions:* Regular consultations in the North Atlantic Council (NATO’s main decision-making body).* Joint military planning, exercises, standardization of equipment/procedures, and integrated command structures.* Deployment of standing forces, rapid-reaction units, and multinational battlegroups (e.g., on the eastern flank).* Common-funded activities like infrastructure, command structures, and some operations (though the vast majority of capabilities come from national forces contributed by members).Article 5 (Collective Defence): An armed attack against one member in Europe or North America is considered an attack against all. Each member must assist the attacked party “forthwith… such action as it deems necessary, including the use of armed force,” in line with UN Charter Article 51 (individual/collective self-defence). The response is decided individually by each member but coordinated through NATO. It applies only to armed attacks (traditionally state-on-state, but clarified to potentially include significant cyber or hybrid attacks) in the defined North Atlantic area.* IMPORTANT: The Article 5 commitment (“attack on one is an attack on all”) is not a guarantee that NATO will always send combat troops; each ally chooses how to assist, which might be logistics, intelligence, or other support.What NATO Does NOT Do* Feature any concrete financial obligations in terms of contribution to group efforts* The treaty itself contains no specific spending requirements or percentages* spending targets are political commitments, not legally enforceable treaty obligations.* At the 2014 Wales Summit, members pledged to aim for 2% of GDP on defence (with at least 20% of that on major equipment/modernization). All members met or exceeded this by 2025* BUT THIS HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH CONTRIBUTING TO THE GROUP* Updated 2025 commitment (The Hague Summit): Members (except Spain, which received an exemption) agreed to reach 5% of GDP annually by 2035 on “core defence requirements and defence- and security-related spending.” This breaks down to at least 3.5% on core NATO-defined defence expenditure (to meet capability targets) and up to 1.5% on broader areas like critical infrastructure protection, cyber defence, civil preparedness, resilience, innovation, and the defence industrial base. Allies must submit annual credible plans to show progress* Guarantee that members will host bases for each other* NATO cannot force a country to go to war or to host a base; participation in operations and basing arrangements is negotiated and voluntary.* Maintain its own large standing armies* NATO relies heavily on VOLUNTARY contributions from members* When NATO runs an operation, countries voluntarily “assign” units for that mission; those forces remain nationally owned and can be withdrawn by their governments.* Meaningfully enforce anything among members* The treaty commitments are binding, but failure to honor them (especially Article 5) only undermines the alliance’s credibility* enforcement relies on political consensus and mutual interest.* Any member can legally withdraw by giving notice under the North Atlantic Treaty; NATO cannot legally forbid a state from leaving.Examples of NATO members not contributing / helping out when askedPost-9/11 (Article 5 Invocation, 2001)* NATO invoked Article 5 for the first (and only) time after the U.S. terrorist attacks. Allies offered broad political solidarity, overflight rights, AWACS patrols over the U.S., and contributions to operations in Afghanistan. However, actual military involvement varied significantly:* Many allies deployed forces to the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) and Operation Enduring Freedom, but contributions differed in scale, duration, and risk.* Spain did not obtain parliamentary approval to send combat forces initially and provided more limited support (e.g., later ISAF troops and hospital units).* Other nations imposed national caveats (restrictions on troop use, such as geographic limits, prohibitions on offensive operations, or requirements for home-government approval before engaging). These fragmented command, reduced effectiveness, and increased risks for allies willing to fight in high-intensity areas (e.g., southern Afghanistan). Germany, for instance, restricted its troops mostly to quieter northern regions.2003 Iraq Crisis (Turkey’s Article 4 Request)In early 2003, Turkey (which borders Iraq) asked NATO for defensive assistance—Patriot air‑defense missiles, AWACS, and other measures—because it feared retaliation if the U.S. invaded Iraq.* France, Germany, and Belgium blocked NATO planning for weeks, arguing that preparing defenses would signal that war was inevitable and undermine UN diplomacy, leaving Turkey feeling exposed and accusing allies of failing their obligations.This is one of the clearest cases of major members actively hindering support for an ally’s security request.Afghanistan Mission (Ongoing Caveats, 2000s–2010s)* Once NATO took on the ISAF mission in Afghanistan, some allies imposed strict “caveats” on their troops—limits on where and how they could fight—which meant that combat burdens fell heavily on a few countries (e.g., U.S., UK, Canada, the Netherlands) while others stayed in relatively safer roles.* These caveats were widely criticized within NATO as a way for governments to claim solidarity while avoiding the riskiest tasks their partners wanted help with.Recent Example: 2026 U.S.-Iran ConflictFollowing U.S. and Israeli actions against Iran (starting February 2026), which affected shipping in the Strait of Hormuz:* Several European NATO members, notably Spain, refused U.S. requests for basing rights, overflight, or naval support. Spain barred use of key bases like Naval Station Rota.* Others (e.g., France, Germany) offered limited or qualified support and declined direct involvement or a coordinated NATO naval effort to reopen the strait. This drew sharp U.S. criticism, with discussions of potential repercussions for non-supportive allies.These cases highlight how domestic politics, differing threat perceptions, legal requirements (e.g., parliamentary approval), and strategic disagreements can limit responses. NATO has no mechanism to expel or automatically punish members for such actions—decisions rely on consensus and political pressure.The US Disproportionately Helping NATO CountriesDisproportionate US Spending in GeneralIn 2024, U.S. defense spending was about two‑thirds of the total defense spending of all NATO allies combined, meaning the U.S. spends roughly as much as everyone else in the alliance put together.The U.S. overwhelmingly dominates high‑end capabilities that NATO depends on: strategic airlift, aerial refueling, global intelligence/surveillance, precision strike, and much of the nuclear deterrent.In operations like Kosovo, Afghanistan, and Libya, U.S. forces supplied most of the enabling assets and often a large share of combat power, without which European allies could not have sustained the campaigns at the same tempo.Cold War and immediate post‑Cold War* Throughout the Cold War, the U.S. stationed large ground, air, and nuclear forces in Western Europe (West Germany, UK, Italy, etc.) specifically to deter an attack on NATO allies by the Soviet Union; these deployments are widely seen as the core of NATO’s collective defense during that era.* Even after the Cold War, the U.S. kept substantial forces and nuclear weapons in Europe as a “tripwire” and security guarantee for allies like Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, Italy, and Turkey.Defense of exposed allies after Russia’s actions (2014–present)* After Russia’s seizure of Crimea and intervention in eastern Ukraine in 2014, the U.S. rapidly increased air, land, and sea deployments to reassure allies, including extra fighters for the Baltic Air Policing mission over Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania.* The U.S. also sent F‑16s and hundreds of personnel to Poland, moved naval forces like USS Truxtun into the Black Sea for exercises with Romania and Bulgaria, and pledged thousands of troops and assets to NATO’s Response Force as part of a visible shield for eastern allies.Permanent and rotational deployments in Europe* The U.S. provides key elements of NATO’s missile defense for allies, such as a radar in Turkey and Aegis ships forward‑based in Spain, plus land‑based interceptor sites in Romania and (planned) Poland, aimed at protecting European allies from missile threats.* It routinely deploys forces to exercises and forward positions across NATO territory—from Marines in the Baltics to aviation rotations in Poland and strategic lift assets that enable allied operations—helping ensure that front‑line states can be reinforced in a crisis.Financial and capability support that underwrites others’ defense* The U.S. pays the largest share of many NATO common programs and high‑end capabilities used to defend allies, such as AWACS surveillance aircraft, the Alliance Ground Surveillance (Global Hawk) drones, and strategic airlift; Washington typically covers around 40–42 percent of major shared systems’ acquisition or operating costs.* U.S. defense investments like the F‑35 program, precision‑guided munitions stockpiles, and shared airlift have been deliberately structured so that allied air forces and armies can plug into U.S. capabilities and be defended or reinforced more effectively in a crisis.Why Not Also Leave the United Nations?For 2026, the US paid approximately $827 million to the UN REGULAR BUDGET (based on the approved ~$3.45 billion UN regular budget). For 2025, it was around $820 million.ADDITIONALLY, the US has been spending around $1.1–1.2 billion on UN peacekeeping annually in recent years, though actual payments have been lower due to cuts and delaysThe Difference Between NATO and the UN* The UN was established earlier (1945 vs 1949)* It has more members (193 member states vs 32 member countries)* Meant to prevent future conflicts vs specifically deter Soviet aggression during the cold war* Meant to act not just through coordination on security (like with NATO) but also diplomacy, international law, human rights, and cooperation on economic, social, and humanitarian issuesWhat makes the UN suck* It’s a lumbering bureaucracy with six principal organs (General Assembly, Security Council, Secretariat, etc.), specialized agencies (WHO, UNESCO, etc.), and the International Court of Justice* The Security Council (5 permanent veto-wielding members + 10 elected) can authorize binding actions, including force under Chapter VII. Decisions often require broad consensus or majorities, but vetoes limit enforcement.* NATO is elegant by comparison!* Member countries waste tons of money paying for the lumbering bureaucracy* Whereas NATO has no central budget for operationsThe one thing one might want to replace / keep around that the UN does: Peacekeeping* HISTORICALLY it has been helpful* Counterfactual analyses estimate that without UN peacekeeping since the early 2000s, there would have been 3–4 more countries in major armed conflict by 2013, with up to two-thirds reduction in major conflicts possible under stronger mandates/budgets (potentially saving ~150,000 lives in one modeled period)* Peacekeeping increases the durability of peace agreements (e.g., reducing risk of repeat war by 75–85% in some analyses) and supports institution-building.* UN peacekeepers help maintain ceasefires, supports local peace processes, reduces communal violence, and aids demobilization/reintegration. Overall, it is described as more effective than most other known tools for managing civil wars.* Though the UN is doing it less well now and it likely can be done better by a more specialized org* In places like Mali (MINUSMA), Democratic Republic of Congo (MONUSCO), and others, missions have struggled against active insurgencies, armed groups, and lack of political will. Some have withdrawn amid rising violence, host-government opposition, or perceptions of ineffectiveness (e.g., failure to fully protect civilians despite mandates). (See: The New Humanitarian)* One analysis of 69 missions found ~43% fully successful, with lower rates post-2000 and in enforcement/humanitarian-focused operations. Long-duration missions see declining success* The US could probably pend LESS than it’s obligated to pay to UN peacekeeping (1.1-1.2 billion USD), maybe just spending $1B, and be even more effective* Plus use more of those dollar on US defense suppliers* Note: Peacekeeping works best when there is some peace to keep or a viable process. It struggles in high-intensity wars without enforcement capacity or against terrorism/extremism* Perhaps some AGI-driven org would be great to fill this role in the futureAppendix: NATO ArticlesAs published on NATO’s websiteThe Parties to this Treaty reaffirm their faith in the purposes and principles of the Charter of the United Nations and their desire to live in peace with all peoples and all governments.They are determined to safeguard the freedom, common heritage and civilisation of their peoples, founded on the principles of democracy, individual liberty and the rule of law. They seek to promote stability and well-being in the North Atlantic area.They are resolved to unite their efforts for collective defence and for the preservation of peace and security. They therefore agree to this North Atlantic Treaty :Article 1The Parties undertake, as set forth in the Charter of the United Nations, to settle any international dispute in which they may be involved by peaceful means in such a manner that international peace and security and justice are not endangered, and to refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force in any manner inconsistent with the purposes of the United Nations.Article 2The Parties will contribute toward the further development of peaceful and friendly international relations by strengthening their free institutions, by bringing about a better understanding of the principles upon which these institutions are founded, and by promoting conditions of stability and well-being. They will seek to eliminate conflict in their international economic policies and will encourage economic collaboration between any or all of them.Article 3In order more effectively to achieve the objectives of this Treaty, the Parties, separately and jointly, by means of continuous and effective self-help and mutual aid, will maintain and develop their individual and collective capacity to resist armed attack.Article 4The Parties will consult together whenever, in the opinion of any of them, the territorial integrity, political independence or security of any of the Parties is threatened.Article 5The Parties agree that an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all and consequently they agree that, if such an armed attack occurs, each of them, in exercise of the right of individual or collective self-defence recognised by Article 51 of the Charter of the United Nations, will assist the Party or Parties so attacked by taking forthwith, individually and in concert with the other Parties, such action as it deems necessary, including the use of armed force, to restore and maintain the security of the North Atlantic area.Any such armed attack and all measures taken as a result thereof shall immediately be reported to the Security Council. Such measures shall be terminated when the Security Council has taken the measures necessary to restore and maintain international peace and security .Article 6 1For the purpose of Article 5, an armed attack on one or more of the Parties is deemed to include an armed attack:on the territory of any of the Parties in Europe or North America, on the Algerian Departments of France 2, on the territory of Turkey or on the Islands under the jurisdiction of any of the Parties in the North Atlantic area north of the Tropic of Cancer;on the forces, vessels, or aircraft of any of the Parties, when in or over these territories or any other area in Europe in which occupation forces of any of the Parties were stationed on the date when the Treaty entered into force or the Mediterranean Sea or the North Atlantic area north of the Tropic of Cancer.Article 7This Treaty does not affect, and shall not be interpreted as affecting in any way the rights and obligations under the Charter of the Parties which are members of the United Nations, or the primary responsibility of the Security Council for the maintenance of international peace and security.Article 8Each Party declares that none of the international engagements now in force between it and any other of the Parties or any third State is in conflict with the provisions of this Treaty, and undertakes not to enter into any international engagement in conflict with this Treaty.Article 9The Parties hereby establish a Council, on which each of them shall be represented, to consider matters concerning the implementation of this Treaty. The Council shall be so organised as to be able to meet promptly at any time. The Council shall set up such subsidiary bodies as may be necessary; in particular it shall establish immediately a defence committee which shall recommend measures for the implementation of Articles 3 and 5.Article 10The Parties may, by unanimous agreement, invite any other European State in a position to further the principles of this Treaty and to contribute to the security of the North Atlantic area to accede to this Treaty. Any State so invited may become a Party to the Treaty by depositing its instrument of accession with the Government of the United States of America. The Government of the United States of America will inform each of the Parties of the deposit of each such instrument of accession.Article 11This Treaty shall be ratified and its provisions carried out by the Parties in accordance with their respective constitutional processes. The instruments of ratification shall be deposited as soon as possible with the Government of the United States of America, which will notify all the other signatories of each deposit. The Treaty shall enter into force between the States which have ratified it as soon as the ratifications of the majority of the signatories, including the ratifications of Belgium, Canada, France, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom and the United States, have been deposited and shall come into effect with respect to other States on the date of the deposit of their ratifications.3Article 12After the Treaty has been in force for ten years, or at any time thereafter, the Parties shall, if any of them so requests, consult together for the purpose of reviewing the Treaty, having regard for the factors then affecting peace and security in the North Atlantic area, including the development of universal as well as regional arrangements under the Charter of the United Nations for the maintenance of international peace and security.Article 13After the Treaty has been in force for twenty years, any Party may cease to be a Party one year after its notice of denunciation has been given to the Government of the United States of America, which will inform the Governments of the other Parties of the deposit of each notice of denunciation.Article 14This Treaty, of which the English and French texts are equally authentic, shall be deposited in the archives of the Government of the United States of America. Duly certified copies will be transmitted by that Government to the Governments of other signatories.Episode TranscriptBased Camp - Should the USA Leave NATO_Malcolm Collins: [00:00:00] Hello, Simone. I’m excited to be here with you today. Today we are gonna be asking the question of, is it really a sound idea and a sound investment for the United States to stay in NATO? And this is an interesting question for me to visit, and I think you to visit as well. Because during Trump’s first real rise to power, while I had these perverse ideas of wouldn’t it be so fun if he actually won-I was still a responsible citizen. Right. And I would hear about these ideas of leaving NATO and I remember just thinking, “Well, of course that’s a bad idea because all of the blah say it’s a bad idea.” And surely they wouldn’t just say, like, they’re not being paid by NATO or something, are they? They don’t have some vested interest in pretending like NATO is an existentially important thing for America to be in.Well, and itSimone Collins: certainly seemed like, well, it’s the responsible thing to do. We’re all grown up now. You know, we, [00:01:00] we work together and, and have meetings where we put on our business suits and talk sternly about international problems and different- Oh my God,Malcolm Collins: is NATO actually the kid from BoJack Horseman the businessman?I, that is unironically NATO. But no, no. So, I saw, I saw that. And, and as time has gone on, and I wanna say, like, this has been a recent thing for me where I have revisited this question, and I was like, “What was I thinking?” Hmm. So like I wanna go into this, but we’re going to do it from Simone ‘cause she’s the one who did all the research this time.So take us away, Simone.Simone Collins: Right. So I wanna put things into perspective to start things off. A typical middle income American household is paying $337.50 annually on the European theater and NATO related missions- Mm ... via their taxes. That’s, that’s a lot of money. And- That’s aMalcolm Collins: lot of money for a middle income family.Simone Collins: Yeah. Meanwhile, what, what is NATO doing [00:02:00] for us? Like for real, actually, you know? W- what have they done for us? It seems like, I mean, it’s, it’s clear, and I’m gonna go into it we are doing, America’s doing the vast majority of the work. It’s mostly just us defending Europe and, and being like their outsourced defense in return for nothing.In fact, when we ask for them to do us a solid, like with the war in Iran, countries, m- member members of NATO like Spain are like you can’t use, you know, you can’t use us.” Yeah, I, I wannaMalcolm Collins: point out how crazy what Spain did. Yeah. We have a base in their territory- Uh-huh ... that we pay them to have- Mm-hmm, mm-hmmin their territory. Uh-huh. And they wouldn’t... And, and keep in mind, Spain has said, like leaders of Spain have on multiple times said Iran is an existential threat that needs to be dealt with. Yeah. Before Trump went into this war, he called up various European leaders being like, “Are you...” Like, the, the, it w- they didn’t know that he was about to attack, but basically they were like, “Yeah, this needed to happen.”[00:03:00]Yeah. Right? And that is what motivated him partially to do this. Mm-hmm. They then, doing a war that is fundamentally on their behalf to an extent, ‘cause they have more terrorist attacks than we do, right? Well, that depends. Yeah. And these terrorist attacks are often funded by Iran proxies. Mm-hmm.Would not let... And, and keep in mind, we’re like boosting their local economy by having our military base in their region. Yeah. Like, they’re not paying for that. They didn’t let us refuel there, and as a result of us not refueling there and having to do in the sky refuels, American servicemen died.Right? Like, that was some of the only people who died during this war, due to Spain’s incallcitrance on this. Yeah. Why are we paying to defend them if they don’t come help us? And I wanna go into like the bigger-Simone Collins: Yeah, we, the taxpayers ... picture here. $337- Yeah, why am I paying for that? ... a year. And this, I mean, we, we probably, you know, I mean, like a- I’m sure a lot of the people listening to this are paying proportionally actually a lot more in like functional, like financial terms.And I wanna,Malcolm Collins: I actually want to, before you get into all the, the, like let’s get into like the [00:04:00] theory of this, the reasons why people say that we’re actually paying this, right? Uh-huh. So anybody who looks at this honestly is going to tell you that okay, right now NATO is a strictly bad deal for the United States.For- Right now ... to, to understand why it’s a strictly bad deal right now is our current primary geopolitical enemies or core geopolitical enemies are- Iran, which NATO refuses to help with- Yeah ... and China, which NATO is not in a position to help with.Simone Collins: Yeah, and it’s not about China at all. It, it’s about countering the Soviet Union.Malcolm Collins: R- right. But the- That doesn’t exist anymore ... Soviet Union doesn’t exist. I know. So we’ll get to that in a second. Yeah. But the point being is that NATO militarily right now is completely pointless- Mm-hmm ... from the perspective of the United States. Yep. Even if... And, and people could be like, “But what if Russia attacks neighboring countries in Europe,” right?And it’s like, what if Russia attacks neighboring countries in Europe? Suppose, and we’ll, we’ll get into [00:05:00] this, but, like, suppose Russia was not bled dry right now, did not have a failing military industry right now did not just show how catastrophically incompetent they are in a military context.Suppose they had working nukes, and if people are like, “Malcolm, of course Russia has working nukes,” we basically know as a fact they don’t. Russia has not won a successful nuclear test since before I was born 38 years ago, okay?Speaker 18: Sorry, correction. It’s been 36 years since their last nuclear test, so a little bit less than I’ve been alive, but still far too long for it to be plausible that they still have working nukes, especially given the geopolitical advantage they would have by showing the world they had working nukesMalcolm Collins: If Russia had working nukes or was confident they had working nukes, they would run a test as a means to show us, [00:06:00] “Hey, we still have working nukes.”North Korea can run tests. They do that to show us. Every other country in the world with working nukes, other than the US, who nobody doubts has working nukes, regularly does tests of their nukes, right? The fact in that we saw that Russia couldn’t even keep an airplane working or a truck’s tires turned shows us pretty hard that they probably don’t have working nukes.So what do they have? Suppose, but I’m like, suppose they had working nukes. Suppose they did not have a depleted military right now. It’s still irrelevant for us because the maximum they would do in, in like a maximally successful military campaign is conquer Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania the Ukraine, and maybe move a bit into Poland.Okay? And, and supposing they did all of that, one, their bureaucracy would be completely strained by this. The territories that they captured, all of the competent people [00:07:00] would flee, and land isn’t really that relevant to the current geopolitical context. What you need are tech workers and they would be the first to leave, right?And then or like high-paying white collar workers or finance sector workers, right? Like, you don’t win a lot these days by taking over an effing potato field that you mined. Okay? And then on top of all of that, Europe would, for their own political interests, oppose this and fight against this.Russia, economically speaking, is puny compared to the rest of Europe at this point. Europe would fight them back and at a best case scenario for Russia they’d be stuck on the Polish border and get a little bit of Polish land. Like, this is absolute best, best, best case scenario for Russia. Okay? That is irrelevant to the United States’ geopolitical security.We do not need to worry about the USSR taking over Europe and turning it communist. In [00:08:00] fact, there is a much bigger threat of NATO countries themselves voting themselves communist or voting themselves into Islamist states than there is of freaking communist, like, like the Soviet Union taking over Europe at this point.It is stupid. And now I’m saying, okay, but now let’s look at the reality. Russia right now does not have a big remaining population to play. They lost a war against an irrelevant backwater without a meaningful military, the Ukraine, right, at the start of this war. They have, the- their, their losses have been staggering.Their demographic situation is worse than almost any other country in Europe, and that’s saying a lot. Which means that not only could they not for- field an army now, they’re not gonna be able to field an army tomorrow. And their freaking military is [00:09:00] full of useless junk at this point if they were going up against a real military power.It’s just frankly irrelevant, and if the US wanted to get into one of these wars, like if Russia said, “Well, we’re gonna attack because you’re not in NATO anymore” Okay, well the US could still say, “Well, we will defend this country if you try to attack them,” and just remove our pointless spending in other territories, right?Yeah, we, we doSimone Collins: not need NATO to be aligned with the countries we’re aligned with. We don’t need some stu- like, like Joni Mitchell says in a song lyric, “We don’t need no piece of paper from the city hall.” Like you don’t need a, a treaty to be like, “I promise to defend you if you’re attacked.” Like, dude, if we think that Russia’s doing a bad thing and we’re trying to help out countries that we’re, we have aligned inter- interests with, we’ll get in there and we can do it.Well, and I, I wannaMalcolm Collins: point out, people can be like well, is that really true? You know, would America and would Russia believe that America would actually [00:10:00] stand up for these?” It’s like, yeah, well, we did for Ukraine. We sent them a ton of effing money and a ton of military supplies. That makes it ver- Like, keep in mind, people can be like, “Well, that’s not the same as telling Russia, ‘You’ll go to war if they attack.’”And I’m like, no, it’s worse for Russia. It’s literally worse because Russia would have preferred America got involved in the war in U- Ukraine because then they would have had a reason to withdraw without looking stupid and buffoonish. But we didn’t. We just kept giving them money until they bled their own country dry to an extent that is almost comical.That Prigozhin was able to just turn around and march to Moscow shows that it is actually the fact that nobody’s willing to attack Russia that led Russia to essentially genocide its own fighting forces and not leave protective forces within their own country like you normally would, was in a war. So okay, Russia’s not relevant.People can then say, “Okay, well, what about Europe? In 15 [00:11:00] or 50 or 100 years, Europe could, if we are not protecting them, develop a geopolitical interest that is orthogonal to the interests of the United States.” And I’m like, bro, we’re already there. They are not meaningfully our allies anymore. If you look at the way that European countries have been acting recently, if you look at the decisions they’re making, not only are they not our allies right now, they’re not politically relevant go- They act like fascists.They arrest people for writing things like, “Islam can be questioned,” on a wall. Germany literally, the, their citizenship voted majority for ADL and conservatives, and they froze the ADL out of power, the two parties that wanted to limit immigration, through one, siccing a secret police force after them and monitoring them just like the Nazis did.And then two, just saying we’re basically ignoring election results. Reform won overwhelmingly in the UK recently, and do you think Reform wants NATO? [00:12:00] No. The factions in Europe that are aligned with us don’t want NATO either. So okay, not only do you have all of that, but even if Europe was our bestest of buds and really was long-term aligned with us, economically and geopolitically in the future they’re irrelevant.If you look at their current fertility rate, the fact that they have blocked AI training on their own data, and the fact that they shut down a bunch of their nuclear plants or went on all of these green orgasm trips, they are literally the worst place in the world to run an AI company from. And that’s the future of the world economy.So they both don’t have the demographics to make themselves work in the future, and they don’t... And people have said, “Okay, well Malcolm, what about Eastern Europe?” Like Eastern Europe, there’s this idea of like Eastern Europe combining into like a state that like opposes Western Europe. They’re like, “Do you like Eastern Europe because Eastern Europe is more trad?”And I’m like, “No, I don’t like Eastern Europe that much.” Eastern Europe is fine. I like them more than Western Europe. I will absolutely give you that. Poland’s pretty [00:13:00] cool. Some of the other countries in Eastern Europe are pretty cool. But the problem with Eastern Europe is that it is tremendously corrupt/Catholic, basically the same thing.And people can be like, “No,” but it’s, it’s true. When people are like, “Oh, well some Catholic countries are wealthy,” and I’m like, “Are they tremendously corrupt in spite of that?” And they’re like, “Yeah, they’re tremendously corrupt.” It’s like yes, it’s very hard to long-term do business so long as that culture has a grip within those countries.So they can be allies, but they’ll never be allies in the way that Western Europe used to be our ally. Because when we said Western Europe, everybody knows we didn’t mean Italy and Spain. We meant Protestant Europe. That was the heart of the alliance because we had a shared cultural tradition with them.Like everybody realizes that, right? When we’re like, “We have a shared culture with Western Europe,” nobody was thinking Italy. Nobody was thinking Spain. They weren’t. That’s why we’re mad about Latin American immigrants. They were thinking [00:14:00] England. They were thinking Scandinavia. They were thinking Germany, okay?And I don’t think we have a shared culture with Germany anymore. So anyway, they were thinking Denmark.Speaker 11: The one country that would be the exception here would be France. , If you want to say Ireland is also an exception here, not at all. Ireland has never really been a meaningful ally of the United States. They are a terrorist country formed in terrorism, killing children. , They, , didn’t help us in World War II., They’ve never really helped us in any meaningful war. , They, they are not a meaningful ally to the United States and never have beenThe only reason America ever got it into its head that Ireland is a country that we should think positively of is because we accepted huge waves of migrants from Ireland, which I think was probably a mistake,, because they’ve incepted our country into thinking positively about a country that has never done anything but stab us in the back every opportunity they’ve ever gottenA note here, I say this [00:15:00] without bias because I’m saying this as somebody with Irish ancestors. Like, my dad’s name is Michael Collins, okay? , Ireland is a terrorist state that has never been an ally of the United States and has always opposed us geopoliticallyMalcolm Collins: So anyway the point I’m making here is you guys do your thing, get together. Maybe you can come up with some Catholic way of dealing with corruption, mass executions or something.I d- I don’t know. You guys figure it out, but you’re gonna have a very hard time being relevant into the future of the global economy if you can’t handle that. And the bigger problem that the Eastern European bloc countries have is that they are not immune to the urban monoculture. It just hit their door later.I used to think they were. I used to see all these cool gaming companies coming out of these countries, you know, like CD Projekt Red and stuff like that, and then they got eaten by woke, and I was like, “Oh, you guys aren’t resistant to this. You’re just as... Y- you know, your tech leaders are just as excited to jump on woke dick as anyone [00:16:00] else.”So okay, that’s not relevant. And then it’s, so okay, Malcolm, if you say you need to pay attention to the countries that are gonna be geopolitically and technologically relevant in the future and economically relevant in the future, who are you building stronger alliances with? It’s like, well, you know, obviously Israel.Oh, okay, we’re already doing that? Okay. Well, that makes sense. That’s the alliance that’s worth investing in. Where else might I invest? You know, maybe bit of Poland, bit of Turkey. You know, Japan, I think while they have terrible fertility rates, at least they have technology. South Korea has terrible fertility rates, but at least they have technology.So those countries are, are worth investing in. Australia worth investing in a relationship in with. But yeah I just NATO is utterly pointless. There is, like, no reason to keep it operational at this point. But continue with stats, Simone. Sorry, I had to crash out on this.Simone Collins: I understand. [00:17:00] It’s, it is ridiculous. And in fact, I mean, aside from NATO not really doing anything for us, I would vote that we not only leave NATO, but also the UN. I mean, in addition to that over $300 that your typical taxpayer is paying on NATO, they’re, they’re spending roughly 90 to $100 per year on the UN per tax return, and that’s not for, like, mid-range tax, tax-paying household.That is, like, per tax-paying household. Like, including low income.Speaker 3: I’m sorry, but the UN must be firm with you. Let me see your whole palace, or else. Or else what? Or else we will be very, very angry with you, and we will write you a letter telling you how angry we are.Simone Collins: That’s astonishing, ‘causeMalcolm Collins: that means that per mid-range household, that’s probably $350 to $600. A lot more. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. SoSimone Collins: we’re also saying- So that means for the UN and NATO, you’re probablyMalcolm Collins: paying around $1,000 a year as a middle-income American.On theSimone Collins: UN. Yeah. And so, a- and keep in mind, like, the NATO [00:18:00] is, it operates within the UN Charter framework, explicitly referencing Article 51 on self-defense. But it just- Withdrawal from the UN?Malcolm Collins: Yeah, F thatSimone Collins: You know, yeah, like actually. So but let’s, let’s start with NATO and then-Malcolm Collins: No, like look at the UN.And people are like, “Oh, but the UN is a...” The UN is constantly putting like countries that chop up journalists as like leading their human rights councils and stuff. The UN is a- No, it’s, it, it, it’s, it’s ridiculous ... is a woke- But we’ll, we’llSimone Collins: talk about that in a little bit ... like list circle jerk. Let’s start with NATO.It was, and, and this, I think it just, when you look at its creation, it’s just so obvious that it, it has run its course and it doesn’t matter anymore. It was created early in the Cold War as a direct response to the Soviet Union’s expansionist actions. There isn’t a Soviet Union anymore. I get that Russia is a little expansionist, but it’s also about to contract significantly.Just look at their demographics. Like, the, the situation just isn’t what they’re, what it was. There is no Iron Curtain anymore. And you also don’t have Western European nations crippled by World War II. You have, [00:19:00] you know, the, the, they, they’re, they’ve matured. They are much older now. I mean, there is, there’s even some language in the UN, or sorry, the NATO charter that kind of implies that they didn’t expect it to last very long.They’re like, “Well, after 20 years,” you know, like they, they, anyone can leave really easily. Like they were sort of just, the language implies to me that the people who wrote it thought it would be sort of a 20-year commitment and that maybe people after that would kind of walk away, ‘cause, you know, European countries would recover from World War II and they’d be fine on their own and, you know, that the Cold War would end.And, and it did, but we just kept NATO going, and this is something that happens with many bureaucratic institutions and just general like- group based power things. They just stick around well past their, their point. But what NATO does, because I think people don’t really understand what it’s all about, is they coordinate on defense, they coordinate on crisis management, and they a- engage in cooperative security.It’s, it’s very similar to a [00:20:00] neighborhood watch group. So unlike with the UN, where, where countries, like, pay in for this overhead of this bureaucratic structure, NATO is much more of a like, “Hey, let’s all promise to, like, have each other’s backs, and to make sure that, that we are ourselves investing in defense.”So there are obligations of, of members of NATO to spend certain amounts of money, but the spend obligations are on their own internal defense budget. It’s not on like, “I promise to contribute this or that.”Malcolm Collins: SoSimone Collins: evenMalcolm Collins: on- And they don’t spend it. We’re the only ones who do it.Simone Collins: Yeah. So it’s... Well, w- we’re, we’re not the only ones.But I’ll, I’ll get into how much exactly we’re spending. But- All right ... here are the things that they, that they do. They, they regularly meet and talk, sort of like, “Oh, you know, here’s what’s going on with defense. Here’s the strategy. What do we think?” They also do joint military planning and some exercises.They, they will coordinate on how they deploy standing [00:21:00] forces. And then they, they sometimes commonly fund act some, some command structures and infrastructure like naval bases and stuff. So the most important thing about NATO is Article 5, the collective defense p- point which basically is like, if you attack one of our, one of the members of NATO, we consider that an attack on all of us, and we will treat it as such.Like, we all, we all agree that, like, basically if, if you come for one of us, we’re all gonna come back at you. Yeah ... but that’s, you know, a- as, as has been demonstrated members don’t necessarily have your back. And all of this is like, it’s very non-binding. It- Well, no, hold on.Malcolm Collins: People would say that Iran didn’t technically attack us, so Article 5...But that’s not really relevant. It’s like you’re being an active D when we are paying to have a military base in your country that’s protecting your country and leading to the death of American service m- members over something so utterly petty as social signaling.Simone Collins: Yes. And let’s go over what NATO- That’s not an ally we wantwhat NATO doesn’t do, ‘cause [00:22:00] I think that’s the bigger thing. They don’t have any concrete financial obligations in terms of, like, contributing to group efforts. So even if someone is helping you, they might do... Oh my gosh. Tex, please. They might not actually, like, help. So, For example after this 2014 summit, all members pledged to aim for 2% of GDP on defense, with at least 20% of that on major equipment modernization.Yeah. And pretty much everyone agreed to do this. But then in 2025, there was an updated commitment at The Hague summit where members, except for Spain, which just seems to always wanna be like, “Yeah, I’m a member, except don’t make me do anything the members do,” agreed for a 5% of GDP annually by 2035 on core defense requirements and defense and security related spending.So again, like Spain wasn’t really willing to do this, but like basically all they’re saying is, “Hey, I plan on...” I- again, if this were like a neighborhood watch group, it’s like, “Well, [00:23:00] I plan on having security cameras out, and I plan on arming my home so that I can be there to help both myself and everyone else here so that we can make sure that we’re the kind of neighborhood where criminals don’t feel safe.”That’s kind of the, the gist of it. Yeah. But NATO also doesn’t guarantee that members will host bases for each other. NATO can’t force a country to go to war or host a base, and all participation in operations and basing arrangements are negotiated and voluntary. So I don’t really know why we need to have NATO when all of this is like on an, a, a case by case basis anyway.Like we, we, we have no more luck approaching Spain about having a base with NATO existing or without it existing. And I almost feel like just having bilateral agreements would be more efficient and more effective because you actually have more chits in that case. You know, it’s not like, “Well, oh, like we’re grandfathered into this whole thing,” and blah, blah, blah, blah.It’s more like, “Hey, look, I’m not gonna give you X unless you give me Y.” And it would be much more effective and I think much more efficient. Another thing that, that [00:24:00] NATO, NATO doesn’t do and the UN does this a little bit more, is NATO doesn’t have any sort of standing army. Everyone’s just contributing on a voluntary basis certain numbers of their own troops.You don’t know what quality you’re gonna get, you don’t... You... So sorry, he’s just- Simone, y-Malcolm Collins: don’t, don’t worry, you can barelySimone Collins: hear him. Okay, good. I’m just, I’m trying to aim him away from the, the microphone. But yeah, like you don’t know if or when troops from any participant are going to come and help out.It’s just kind of like, “Oh, yeah, sure, maybe like, maybe we’ll like pitch someone in.” So it’s like if, again, if we had like a neighborhood watch group, it’s like, “Yeah, like we’ll, we’ll, we’ll help if someone’s like, you know, invading your home.” But like maybe they’ll send like, you know, their, their 16-year-old son with like a, like a, a baseball bat two hours after the police have arrived, you know?Like not veryMalcolm Collins: helpful. And- Well, like the UK, they’re trying to get their one measly ship down there. Right, exactly. The other big problem with NATO- Exactly ... is it prevents us from attacking European countries. And I think- Yes. [00:25:00] YeahSpeaker 5: Clear them that, you f*****g c********r? Do you have any idea how f*****g busy I am, Hans Brix? Well, f**k you. Inspection? Well, inspectMalcolm Collins: that that is something that we should be seriously consideringSimone Collins: Mm-hmm.And there’s also just no way to meaningfully enforce anything within NATO. So again, I’m like, what’s the point? Like, we should be... I think it would just make so much more sense, especially considering the geopolitical situation that we’re all in now a- and the way that dynamics work now, to just on an ad hoc basis negotiate bilateral agreements with each individual country using various economic and social incentives trade partnerships, et cetera, like as, as bargaining chips.It’s more efficient and effective, and I think you would get better results for any participating country. Plus you would, I think you would encourage more alignment. Like right now, a lot of countries that are in NATO and in the UN are like, “Oh, well, I [00:26:00] don’t have to actually like, be useful to the United States.Like, I’m just gonna, I’m gonna benefit from their large, broad defense infrastructure anyway.” Whereas if we didn’t have all these assumptions associated with NATO and the UN, they would be much more likely, I think to try to be less dickish to us. So there are lots of- Yeah, they’d be less dickishMalcolm Collins: if they didn’t w- like, if they didn’t feel they had us in their back pocket like a soul.Yeah, they, theySimone Collins: take it for granted and they shouldn’t. And, and we shouldn’t be responsible for defending w- sort of being the de facto security system for nations who are not paying us for it and who are not working to help us in any way who sometimes work counter to our best interests as a country, and even work with our adversaries.It’s ridiculous. Now so there, there are lots of examples also of NATO members not really contributing or helping out when asked. Article 5 was only [00:27:00] invoked once in NATO. It was post 9/11. It was by the United States. It was in 2001. NATO invoked Article 5 after we were, you know, we were hit by terrorists, and while allies offered broad political solidarity there were some, like, limitations.Once again, Spain did- Th- this is, this goes way back. Did not obtain parliamentary approval to send combat forces initially, and it provided much more limited support. Like they provided-Malcolm Collins: Do we just conquer Spain? I bet they don’t have a meaningful military.Speaker 12: So I decided to research how easy it would actually be, and Spain spends about half what the UK spends on its military. And given that due to bureaucratic incompetence, , indicative of an EU country, the UK hasn’t even been able to field a single battleship recently, , I suspect Spain is probably in a similar zone of bureaucratic incompetence, , and lack of will to [00:28:00] fight on behalf of the country at this point for people who are being systemically replaced, , as we’ve seen the Spanish government attempting to do., And note here in Spain it’s different from the US. There’s been politicians that have gone up and said, like, “That’s the goal of our...” , Like in the US they let this through other words. In Spain it’s incredibly explicit that that’s one of the goals. , And, and the people that they’re replacing them with don’t care about Spain either, so, you know.Speaker 13: Quiero pedirles a las personas migrantes y racializadas que, por favor, no nos dejen solas con tanto facha. Y claro que sí queremos que voten, claro que sí. Hemos conseguido papeles, regularización ya. Y ahora vamos a por la nacionalidad o a cambiar la ley para que puedan votar, por supuesto. Ojalá, teoría del reemplazo, ojalá podamos barrer de fachas y de racistas este país con gente migrante, con gente trabajadora.Claro que yo quiero que haya reemplazo,Simone Collins: we really... They, I, yeah, I don’t know what’s, what’s going on with Spain [00:29:00] especially with NATO.And then some other nations too when we invoked Article 5 imposed really severe caveats. Like, they would, they had all these restrictions on troop use. Like there were geographic limits, there were prohibitions on offensive operations, or requirements for home government approval before engaging.And then this really fragmented command, it reduced effectiveness, and it increased risks for allies who were willing to fight in high-intensity environments. So theMalcolm Collins: only time Article 5 was ever activated, it didn’t work.Simone Collins: Yeah, like Germany- Like, I want to make that clear ... like restricted its, its troops to, like quieter northern regions.They’re like, “Oh, we’ll help out,” like where there’s no serious conflict. Like, you know, like your home is being invaded and, and you’re like, “Help,” like, “They’re in the basement. I’m like locked in this closet.” They’re like, you know, “Oh, I’m, I’m going in to try to stop him. He’s trying to like raid my safe.” And Germany’s like, “Okay, I got the backyard.I’ll, I’ll patrol outMalcolm Collins: there.” We’re being scammed. Yeah. NATO is an active scam, but far worse than anything Israel is doing.Simone Collins: Yeah, [00:30:00] yeah. And then there was the 2003 Iraq crisis. Turkey had its Article 4 request moment. In early 2003 Turkey, which borders Iraq, asked NATO for defensive assistance. They wanted Patriot air defense missiles and some other measures, because it feared retaliation if the US invaded Iraq.And France and Germany and Belgium blocked NATO planning for weeks. They argued that preparing defenses would signal that war was inevitable, and then undermine UN diplomacy. And this left Turkey feeling super exposed and they accused allies of failing their obligations. So it wasn’t just the US that was sort of left feeling exposed.Turkey felt that way too. Yeah, I actually think that, IMalcolm Collins: think the, the country, the only country in NATO that matters is Turkey. Yeah. They have the biggest military in NATO. They are in an incredibly important geopolitical position. We would be better off just forming a better relationship with Turkey, especially because the values of Turkey aren’t even in alignment with the values of the rest of NATO.Trump and Erdogan get along really well. Yeah. Turkey, [00:31:00] because of Russia’s actions, is increasingly being pushed into the United States’ sphere of influence. W- why not just form a NATO with Turkey and say F you to all of those European- P words.Simone Collins: Well, and again, not a NATO. We don’t need th- It’s, it’s a group project, okay?Anyone who’s, like, gone to some, you know, nonsense make-work university in America ha- or gone through, like, high school in America, has been subject to a group project. What is a group project? A group project is when you get given a group assignment in a class, and inevitably, like, you know, most people do absolutely nothing, and then one student ends up doing everything.We need to just admit on a, on a geopolitical international societal level that group projects are stupid, and that in the end if you need to agree to something, you guys need to, like, you know, between two people, you know, decide, “Hey, our interests are aligned. Tit for tat, here’s what we’re gonna offer each other.You know, here’s what we’re gonna do,” or, “We both want the same thing. Here’s how we’re gonna work together.” [00:32:00] And we don’t need these standing ongoing group agreements. They’re just stupid. Well, and,Malcolm Collins: well, no, but the reason they would say you need the standing ongoing group agreement is for deterrence, they would say.Simone Collins: No. Well, yeah, but you know what? It, deterrence exists if you understand, okay, nations A, B, and C are all aligned in this one di- Like, right? Like, they, all these European nations don’t like the idea of Russia expanding into Western Europe, okay? And, and neither does the United States. And I want to point out here that- So if I’m Russia, I will understand that they don’t want that, and that they will coordinate on stopping me if, if I go into that.We don’t, we don’t need some stupid, like- ButMalcolm Collins: hold on. I wanna, I wanna make something clear for people who think NATO is like a magic wand that forces people to go to war to defend a country. If Russia decided to attack Estonia, for example, or Finland, for example the probability that any individual European nation would decide to militarily intervene [00:33:00] while NATO was still fully formed and active versus when NATO was not active, like EG if the US pulled out of NATO and NATO completely disbanded, would be about equivalent.By this what I mean is a lot of the countries are just not g- they’re gonna be like, “I don’t want war with Russia. I don’t wanna escalate. I don’t wanna...” You know how European countries are. They’ll be like, “Yes, Article 5, but, but, but...” As we’ve seen before. Well, yeah, NATO’sSimone Collins: historical limited effectiveness also shows that it, it, it acting as a deterrent is, is fairly feckless now.And if they- Russia’s gonna be like, “Yeah, sure. Everyone’s gonna come and help out, huh?” And if they actuallyMalcolm Collins: felt like doing something, they would do it regardless of whether or not NATO was there.Simone Collins: Exactly. Exactly. Either your incentives are aligned or they’re not, and, and this like non, basically non-binding agreement doesn’t change anything.In fact, the fact that it exists and is non-binding and people don’t really stick to it only makes it a bit of an embarrassment and wastes a lot of money and resources and time and, and, and, and gets in the way of making much [00:34:00] more efficient, strategic and, and short-lived but effective agreements.So, going back to just, to rehash our, Oh wait, did I talk about the Afghanistan mission? No, I didn’t. But basically once NATO took on the ISAF mission in Afghanistan, some allies employed really strict caveats in their troops. Again, like where and how they could fight, and that meant that combat burdens really fell heavily on the US, the UK, Canada, and the Netherlands, who actually had a pair of balls to like, go in and fight where it was dangerous.Mm. And the caveats were widely criticized within NATO as a way for governments to claim solidarity while avoiding the riskiest takes. I’d be totallyMalcolm Collins: okay with us c- saying, “Well, we’ll have NATO. That’s the UK and the Netherlands andSimone Collins: Germany.” No, again, that’s stupid. People are either aligned and they’re like, “Hey, I’m in.”Or they’re not. Okay, sure. Or they’re not. Okay? And then, you know, we will, we will reward those who are in, who, who show through their actions that they’re helping us, right? Like, I think we’re way more likely to have, you know, fewer tariffs or whatever, like better trade arrangements, you [00:35:00] know, more, more all these things with, with countries that show up, okay?It’s who shows up, all right? I don’t, I don’t care who’s on the list. E- everything should be based on actual actions and not on, on promises. Everything should be actions and rewards. Well,Malcolm Collins: it’s not just that, but even capabilities. These countries, like when we saw that the UK couldn’t even field a single destroyer To help in the operation because all of them weren’t working.Or we see other countries constantly crashing their destroyers because they keep putting lesbians in charge of them, like fricking New Zealand or what was it? They had a girl running one in, like, Norway and it sank. You know, maybe these countries are too feckless and we should look at entering a page of expansionism again.Yeah. I think what we need to do is fix the fertility rate in the United States and then go on an expansionist crusade to reconsolidate the world under the US imperium.Speaker 7: Are you gonna make the whole World America one day? How? CertainlySpeaker 8: [00:36:00] over over.Speaker 7: That’s a good plan.That’s why we named you Octavian.Speaker 8: Don’t. Then we will kill you.Speaker 6: Uya, there is always another way. No, please. I know how to make sure the world stays free forever. I have to make the whole world America. . I’m gonna send pure American freedom across every inch of the planet. . [00:37:00]Malcolm Collins: Sure.Simone Collins: But also, I just... So going back to the ways that NATO has failed us or failed in general, the, it wasn’t only Spain that completely screwed us over with, with I- Iran recently.Another, both, basically both France and Germany had limited and/or qualified support, and they declined direct involvement or coordinated NATO naval effort to open the Strait of Hormuz. So I’m kind of glad they’re suffering due to their, their decisions right now because they were like, “You know, I don’t wanna, I don’t wanna get involved.”And then in terms of how we disproportionately help NATO countries, despite the fact that people aren’t showing up for us just to be clear, in 2024 US defense spending was about two-thirds of the total defense spending for all NATO allies combined. We, we spend as [00:38:00] much as everyone else in the alliance put together, and the US overwhelmingly dominates high-end capabilities that NATO depends on.All the strategic airlift and aerial refueling, and global intelligence and surveillance, and prec- precision strike capabilities and, of course, the, most of the nuclear deterrent, that’s us. Like, all the stuff that actually matters. I mean, even if people, “Oh, well, we spend this much and the, that means that we’re contributing,” we have all the, the best toys.So that’s another really important thing.Malcolm Collins: And after seeing what we did in Venezuela or what’s happening in Iran right now, like, our toys are good. And the only other person whose toys we’re playing with is Israel. Yeah. And this is the thing, they’re actually fighting along with us. In Iran, 50% of the ordinance dropped has been dropped by Israel.Right? Like- And they’re not inSimone Collins: NATO. Because look, again, a- aligned interests. Well, yeah, aligned interests for the most part. And by the way, a lot ofMalcolm Collins: people are like, “Well, Israel didn’t help us in the war in Iraq.” Okay, let’s give a few things about the war in Iraq. So there’s two important points about Israel and the war in Iraq.One, we explicitly asked them [00:39:00] not to help us because we were concerned about that further destabilizing the Middle East to have Israel actively involved in the war. And two, Mossad put out a big report saying, “Don’t go into Iraq. It’s going to be a complete s**t show. They don’t have weapons of mass destruction.What are you doing?” And they were right. Okay? The, the core thing in Israel was freaking right. Well, the war in Iraq was a complete waste of time. And they, they told us that. Day one they are like, “You cannot nation build there. What are you doing?” And you can look this up.This is something that, like, people complained about at the time, that they- Yeahwere not on message, that they said, “You’re wrong about this.” And it’s because they have a high sneak stat. Look, they’ve really fucked us over a ti- I’m, like, the first to admit that, okay? But they have fucked us over less than Europe, less than the UN, and less than NATO. Right. And let’s talk, let’sSimone Collins: go back to how we have helped Europe.So during the Cold War, and then [00:40:00] immediately post-Cold War, we stationed large ground, air, and nuclear forces in Western Europe, like West Germany, and the UK, and Italy, specifically to deter an attack on NATO allies by the Soviet Union. And the deployments were largely seen as core the core part of NATO’s collective defense during that era.It was just basically us being the security guard of Europe. And then even after the Cold War, the US kept substantial forces and nuclear weapons in Europe as a tripwire and security guarantee for allies like Germany, and Belgium, and the Netherlands, and Italy, and Turkey. It was, again, just this had nothing to do with them doing a solid for us.It was just, “No, we, we, we got your back.” And then there was the defense of exposed allies after Russia’s actions. So from, like, 2014 to present, after Russia seized Crimea and intervened in eastern Ukraine in 2014, we rapidly increased air, land, and sea deployments to reassure all of our NATO allies, and this included extra fighters in, in the Baltic air policing mission over Estonia, and Latvia, and Lithuania.[00:41:00]And we also sent F-16 and hundreds of personal personnel, sorry, to Poland. We moved naval forces like the USS Truxtun into the Black Sea for exercises with Romania and Bulgaria, and we pledged thousands of troops and, and assets to NATO’s response force as part of a visible shield. Like, this is a lot of money on our part.And, and they’re just basically locally defending themselves, and we are all the way, like, we’re s- we’re sending troops all the way over to Europe, and for what? Like, to what benefit of us? And, you know, this is again, like, over $350 a year for your mid-range taxpaying family. I’m not really sure what they’re getting out of it.Then we have these personal, or sorry, permanent and rotational deployments in Europe, and we’ve met plenty of people who’ve served on, like, military bases in Germany for long periods of time. We have key elements of NATO’s missile defense for our allies, such as radar in Turkey, and Aegis ships forward based in Spain, and land-based interceptor sites in Romania.There’s even, like, planned stuff in Poland still that’s aimed at [00:42:00] protecting European allies from missile threats. So, so much for, like, our golden dome, which is, like, I guess still under development. Like, we’re basically building the same stuff for our European allies, and then we deploy forces for exercises and forward positions across NATO territories.There’s Marines in the Baltics. There’s, there’s just, there’s so many more US troops in Europe right now than I even thought after looking into this And then we also have the largest share of many NATO common programs and, and high-end capabilities. Like all of our surveillance stuff, all the cool toys.I’m not gonna go any further into this, but basically, like, I wanna get to the United Nations, ‘cause this is the, this is the, I think, bigger thing, and I don’t see the point in being a member of either of them. My larger thing is, again, like, either you’re aligned with a country or you’re not. We don’t need these blanket standing agreements, especially when countries are demographically and politically changing quite rapidly, and typically in directions that are antagonistic towards us.And you can’t have this, like, standing agreement of, like, “Oh, we’ll always be [00:43:00] solid,” when, like, meanwhile, countries are turning b- against us, like, bit by bit. And suddenly we’re gonna be in these, like, standing agreements to defend people who actively hate us and are working counter to our best interests.So for 2026, the US paid approximately 827 million into the UN regular budget. Just the, just the, just the regular budget. This is, like, their administrative budget, like the office stuff, okay? Mm-hmm. And for 2025, it was around 820 million. Then on top of that, the US has been spending around 1.1 to 1.2 billion on US peacekeeping.And that is through ... I will say, to our benefit, the Trump administration is trying to, like, cut this amount, but it’s still incredibly embarrassing. To be clear, the difference between NATO and the UN, just to, to make it clear, is that the UN was established earlier. It was established in 1945 versus 1949 for NATO.It has more members, so the UN [00:44:00] has 193 member states, like, basically all countries are- And it’sMalcolm Collins: even more pointless.Simone Collins: I know. For real, it is. And NATO only has 32 member countries. The UN is, is meant to basically maintain world peace. It, it’s supposed to prevent conflicts through various, like, economic and diplomatic things in addition to, like, security related efforts.Whereas, you know, the, the NATO was really about the Cold War. Which, again, is, it just makes it seem so ridiculous. Like, NATO just seems like this short-term, like, thing on top of the UN to be like, “By the way, let’s not let the Soviets win the Cold War,” and then the Cold War ended and we just forgot to turn it off.Yeah. It’s just so obvious when you look at it in context. And the UN furthermore is meant to not act just through coordination on security, but also through diplomacy and international law and human rights and cooperation on economic and social and humanitarian issues. So why does the UN suck?Well, [00:45:00] first and foremost, it is a huge lumbering bureaucracy with six principal organs. There’s the, the General Assembly. There’s the Security Council. There’s the secretariat. And then it has these specialized agencies on top of it, the World Health Organization, UNESCO, and then there’s also the International Court of Justice.They just, they just kept building like, “Oh, like I need this new...” And I, I don’t know. So, we have been in New York City when the UN General Assembly convenes, and the city basically shuts down. Like the number of bureaucrats who are involved in just s- small facets of the UN are sufficient to just totally shut down entire cities.I, I’ve never seen a s- a city shut down like New York does with the UN General Assembly. You can’t go anywhere. Like the streets are just clogged. It’s bizarre. I will say that the one thing that the UN does that I do kind of think has some value, can you guess what it is? What? It’s not the World Health [00:46:00] Organization.Malcolm Collins: It’s notSimone Collins: UNESCO.Malcolm Collins: I don’t know, something related to ocean defense or something?Simone Collins: Sort of. It’s, it’s actually like UN peacekeeping, ‘cause I was... I, IMalcolm Collins: was like expecting-Simone Collins: Does UNMalcolm Collins: peacekeeping do anything meaningful? I thought that it was just massive waste.Simone Collins: I thought so too, but historically it appears to have actually been helpful.There are conditions on the helpfulness. So counterfactual, and, and by the way, I’m linking to sources in the show notes, counterfactual analyses estimate that without UN peacekeeping, since the early 2000s there would’ve been three to four more countries in major armed conflict by 2013, with up to two-thirds reduction in major conflicts possible under stronger mandates and budgets.So peacekeeping- I’m pretty sureMalcolm Collins: the UN did that study, Simone. Mm. I’m pretty sure people associated with the UN did that. That, that does not seem true to me at all. I, mm, I couldSimone Collins: seeMalcolm Collins: it. Trump stopped like 20 wars ... other, other people- Hold on. Trump stopped like 20 wars in these past two administrations.And I think that- No, and, and I’mSimone Collins: gonna get to that. I’m gonna get to that because [00:47:00] the, the effectiveness has gone down. But peacekeeping appears to increase the durability of peace agreements in, in instances, in various instances by reducing the, the risk of repeat war by 75 to 85% in some analyses.This, and it, it supports sort of the like a, a post, a post-war stabilization ‘cause I, look, I mean, admit it, after, after a war- Nine out of 10Malcolm Collins: dentists recommend who we gave money to.Simone Collins: It, I, I think it makes sense That it doesn’t have to be the US It doesn’tMalcolm Collins: make sense But if you have- UN peacekeepers are not a meaningful unilateral force in the way that the American troops are or American power projection I, I agreeSimone Collins: with you on that.I agree with you on that. Just let me make my point, okay? Some sort of peacekeeper, some sort of, like, rule, rule enforcer can help maintain ceasefires, they can support local peace processes, they can reduce communal violence, and they can, they can aid demobilization [00:48:00] and reintegration. Thing, things are rough when you’re, like, winding down from a war, and I think having, like, a mod present to just, like, calm things down is helpful.Does the mod have to be the UN? Absolutely not. In fact, the UN is doing peacekeeping less well now and it can almost certainly be done better by just the US. So in places like Mali and the Democratic Reco- Republic of Congo UN peacekeeping missions have more recently struggled against active insurgencies and armed groups and, and lack of political will.And some have just wi- withdrawn amid rising violence. And they’re just like, “Oh, I, I can’t do it.” One analysis of 69 missions found only 43% were fully successful, and there were lower rates of successful peacekeeping after the year 2000. And in general, like, event enforcement and humanitarian-focused operations Well,Malcolm Collins: bureaucratic nonsense, and these aren’t Americans Yeah, no, that’s the thing is I think that over time They’re not bred for [00:49:00] battleSimone Collins: over time bureaucracies become more feckless. The UN is just too old as an institution, too bloated, too, too ridiculous, and, and too mission creep ruined, you know, too cancerous to be effective anymore. So what I think would actually be great is if the, the UN were to dissolve, at least the UN just i- is left abandoned by the US, and the UN could spend so much less than it’s even obligated to pay to the UN peacekeeping mission which is, like, $1.1 to $1.2 billion a year, which is a lot.Imagine if the US just spent one billion. It would be even more effective in peacekeeping And it could also put more of that money into peacekeeping measures that utilize US defense suppliers. So it would be better for our internal industries and defense technology. Yeah, one of the things thatMalcolm Collins: people are like, “Well, if you withdraw from the UN, then they’ll stop buying American weapons.”And I’m like, “Okay, then they’ll be easier to conquer later.” No, we would...Simone Collins: No, we would be buying proportionally [00:50:00] more. ‘Cause I’m sure, like, when we pay all this money into the UN for their peacekeeping, there may be some stipulations that we set, you know, that Congress sets of, like, you have to buy this much from US, you know, based suppliers.But we would be able to do 100% US manufacturing, like all Anduril because I love them and they’re amazing to, to do all this work instead of just, like, I’m sure, like, a ton of money is, like, lost and laundered by that stupid wasteful bureaucracy. So it would just be a lot more effective. And then, like, think about how it will be, like, post AGI.You could have some AI-driven organization that, that manages peacekeeping and deployment of, like, enforcement drones. It just... I, I’m super ready for it to be gone. So generally, I, I see your NATO doesn’t make sense anymore, and I raise you let’s just get rid of the UN. Because the whole point is I, I, I...There, there was a place for this. World War II, everyone was, like, beaten up, bloodied, completely weak. [00:51:00] The US was kind of okay, and the US was like, “Dude, I don’t... Let’s just recover. Look, I’ve got your back.” It was like, it was like a big brother being like, “Look, I’ll... If someone comes for you again, I’ll beat them up, okay?Like, you’re gonna be fine.” But now our, our, our little friends have grown up and they’ve, they’ve grown into entitled, surly neets, and we need to just cut them loose. The UNMalcolm Collins: is like a like a, like a 30-year-old living with their parent at this point. Yes.Simone Collins: Yeah. Like, it... The, the time has passed, okay? They, they, they’re not recently bloodied and impoverished following a devastating war.This is water under the bridge. Also, the, the Cold War is over and there is no longer a Soviet Union. None of this makes sense anymore. Beyond that, this giant bureaucratic sprawling apparatus that has grown into a bunch of tumorous, cancerous growths needs to just be excised. Even if you completely believe in the [00:52:00] concept of the UN If you really care about it, you would be like, “Oh, we’ll nuke it,” and then start it completely fresh now with technology and also, like, an understanding of current geopolitical tensions and imbalances and stuff.Like, you would, you would start fresh and just get rid of all of the bloat that has grown over these years if you actually cared about the mission of the UN. But I personally don’t think that it makes sense to have these standing agreements. Like- So the questionMalcolm Collins: is, why is anyone fighting for this? And I think it’s, it’s, it’s a fear of change- It’s, it’s inertiaand a desire to protect the bureaucracy. It’s inertia.Simone Collins: Yeah. Yeah, like, like- And also I think there’s this big, like, l- sort of, largely leftist view of like, “The, the, this is the responsible thing to do. We, you know, you have to let the authorities do their thing. They’re the educated ones.” You know, it’s all about, like, trust the experts, trust the science.Yeah ... and of course, the UN, “Well, we respect the UN, we respect the World Health Organization.” When in the end, like, no. They’re, they’re not doing respectable work. They’re no smarter than anyone else.Malcolm Collins: And, and if you wanna [00:53:00] talk about, like, the UN’s reporting on demographic collapse has been astonishingly bad.Simone Collins: Yeah. Atrocious. Like, they-Malcolm Collins: Truly ... they’ve gotten the numbers wrong in the exact same way every year for the past 20 years with that famous graph that we show. Every year they say, “This year it’s gonna stop.” Well, they don’t want to cause alarm. They know they’re lying. When they were reached out to by a professor at Penn, an American Ivy League institution, and he said, “These numbers are wrong.Are you gonna update them?” And they said, “We don’t wanna cause a panic.” Mm-hmm. The UN sees it as one of its duties to replace you, okay? I’m just saying. I’m, I don’t wanna be, I’m, I don’t wanna be too spicy here, but if you’ve heard Trump’s recent thing on re-migration and all of that, the whole idea that demographic transition is a goal for certain groups.Especially in Spain where they have come out and said, “That’s our goal.” Is that, Hillary Clinton has come out and said, “That’s our goal.” We have an episode on how she became a great replacement theorist.Speaker 13: the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, despite [00:54:00] Trump saying he knew nothing about it, if you had read it, it’s all in there. It’s all in there. return to the family, the nuclear family , return to being a Christian nation return to, you know, producing a lot of children. Which is sort of odd because the people who produce the most children in our country are immigrants and they wanna.Deport them. So none of this adds up. But you know, one of the reasons why our economy did so much better than comparable advanced economies across the world is because we actually had a replenishment, because we had a lot of immigrants legally and undocumented. Who had a you know, larger than normal by American standards family.Malcolm Collins: It’s ridiculous at this point. Like, everybody knows populations are changing, and that is the goal for some individuals.Like- Yeah ... the guy here who says he’d kill every white woman and child and is a, a mainstream leftist influencer, right?Speaker: and make it my mission in life to murder every single white man, woman and child on the eastern [00:55:00] seaboard of the continent.Malcolm Collins: You know, this is a real thing that a lot of them feel at this point.Simone Collins: Yep. It’s ridiculous. Burn it down. And I love you very much, Malcolm.Malcolm Collins: Love you too.Oh, by the way, you got a number wrong in yesterday’s.Simone Collins: Uh-oh, what did I get wrong?Malcolm Collins: So there was a number of news articles that reported that Daily Wire, specifically Ben Shapiro’s show, had had an 80% reduction in viewership, but it was wrong.It was a 35% reduction. That, we can measure on YouTube, assuming the official numbers are real. However, if you take the botting argument I made into account, the number could easily be 95%.Simone Collins: No, from VidIQ it was 85%.Malcolm Collins: Oh, it’s from VidIQ?Simone Collins: Yeah.Malcolm Collins: Okay. Well, then I wish I’d known that. Okay, then I’ll put that in the Discord.Simone Collins: Yeah. J- tell them to look at my show notes. I, I, like, link to sources and stuff. I- Okay ... I say where I get my things.Malcolm Collins: Okay, okay, [00:56:00] okay, I’ll put this. Okay. Note.Simone Collins: Just look at the sh- tell them to look at the show notes.On Substack and on Patreon. On Substack they’re not paywalled during weekdays, so... But they only show up when I outline the episodes, ‘cause you don’t do show notes. You work differently. You name files things like Stuff and, like, you know, H- How to do Thing. Ugh. I d- I really don’t know what your naming convention is.I have no idea. I can’t predict or model it. ItMalcolm Collins: scares me. You are amazing, Simone. I appreciate how diligent you are, that you always double-check everything, and you’re- Do you haveSimone Collins: a naming convention?Malcolm Collins: For... Yeah, just don’t name it the same thing as the last thing. So, like, if I have a folder named New Folder, then the next one is New Folder 1, [00:57:00] and then the next one is New Folder 1, and then, like, A because I happened to mash the keyboard, and that’s what I got, because that was less time than naming it New Folder 2, which would require deleting or highlighting the 1.Oh,Simone Collins: my God. Okay. I’m sorry I asked. Simone, don’t you know about my genius naming convention? I really don’t, because you sometimes use words. I- it’s, it’s really not consistent like that.Malcolm Collins: I love tormenting you. You are the best woman in the world to torment. AI will probably render that.Simone Collins: Irrelevant soon Oh So who cares?Malcolm Collins: What, tormenting you?Simone Collins: No Show notes? The, your naming convention thing. Oh. Like I can just say, “Find the file that’s about this,” and then it will find it regardless of titles, which is helpful.Oh, I don’tSpeaker 14: Okay, Octavian, are you going deep in the water? Yeah, but there’s a live lobster right where I’m looking. See? Uh-oh, is it gonna eat you? No, it’s dead. Okay, well [00:58:00] then go. I saw his white claws. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit basedcamppodcast.substack.com/subscribe

Simone and Malcolm Collins expose how viewbotting, clip spamming, and manufactured engagement are completely warping our perception of what's popular online. From Twitch streamers (80% of top creators allegedly botted) to music giants like Beyoncé losing billions of fake views, "woke" games with 200 peak players, Substack subscriber farms, and Kick's massive clip-spamming campaigns — the internet is far faker than most realize.We break down the economics (why botting is a rational business decision), real-world examples (Ben Shapiro, Steven Crowder, Caleb Hammer, Clavicular), how algorithms get gamed, and what this means for discovering authentic content in 2026.Dead Internet Theory just got an upgrade.Show Notes* According to some analysts, for the first time in over a decade, bots now generate the majority of internet activity* At 51-53%* This is according to multiple reports and sources (see note at the end)* Note: Breakdowns often separate “good” bots (search engine crawlers, SEO tools) from “bad” ones (malicious scrapers, credential stuffers, ad fraud). Imperva notes bad bots alone rose to ~40% of total traffic in 2025 (up from 37%)* BTW: Cloudflare’s data (which focuses on HTTP requests they observe) shows a lower but still rising bot share—around 31–32% in Q1 2026 (up month-over-month)—with AI crawlers as the fastest-growing segment. Their CEO has publicly predicted bot traffic will exceed human traffic by 2027, aligning with the broader trend. Some analyses of Cloudflare data cite >50% of HTML page requests as bot-driven in 2025* There are literal view farms (this is one Brazilian one that was raided two months ago, in March 2026: * For any platform you can imagine, you can buy viewbots with varying degrees of sophistication, including viewbots that have widely varied IP addresses that have detailed histories, leave comments, mute/unmute while watching streams, etc.Fame is manufactured* Major music labels and artists are using botting to look bigger than they are* An example: Drake accused his own label (UMG) of conspiring with third parties (including Spotify) to bot streams for Kendrick Lamar’s “Not Like Us” to harm him. UMG called it “untrue” and “illogical.” Defamation claims were dismissed; the broader case is ongoing. Drake has also faced separate accusations of using his Stake partnership to fund botting for his own catalog.* When major companies DON’T use viewbotting, you see embarrassing situations like the pilot episode of Star Trek: Starfleet Academy, which got ~16,000 views in its first 11 hours after release on YouTube. A separate report also said the live premiere peaked at roughly 1,300 concurrent viewers.* Even major viral figures, like Caleb Hammer and Clavicular, are manufactured to a great extentLet’s explore just how bad it isViewbotting on Twitch* Around 10% of Twitch streamers with at least 50 average viewers show clear, persistent signs of viewbotting, according to the most comprehensive independent analysis available (Streams Charts / Audiencly 2025 whitepaper, covering Q2 2025 data)* It’s worse for big creators: Streamer/analyst Devin Nash (and his agency) analyzed the top 500 Twitch streamers and estimated 400–430 (roughly 80%) show signs of viewbotting or being botted (30–40% of viewers as blatant bots + another 5–15% via embeds).* This is based on chat activity monitoring, user-list sampling, logged-in/out ratios, and known botnet cross-referencing* Creators argue Twitch is a platform where viewbotting ia necessary for survival; if you’re not doing it, you’re not competitive* Doesn’t help that discoverability is very lowDevon Nash on the Unit EconomicsIn a recent video, Devon Nash, a professional on the brand marketing side of the equation (he’s Chief Marketing Officer at Novo), explained how viewbotting is a no-brainer smart decision for streamers and agencies based on the unit economics:* Viewbots cost approximately $0.01 to $0.02 per viewer hour, which translates to about $135 to $185 per week to add 500-750 viewers to a stream. This weekly cost includes features like chatting and custom chat messages to make the viewers appear authentic. For a full month of viewbotting, agencies spend less than $800 to artificially inflate viewer counts.* Twitch sponsorship rates typically range from $1 to $3 per concurrent viewer (CCV), with $1.50 to $2 being the standard rate for a 2-hour gaming sponsorship. For a streamer with 1,000 viewers at $2 per CCV, a single 2-hour sponsorship generates $4,000 in total revenue. The agency typically takes 20% commission, earning $800 per deal, while the streamer receives $3,200.* Nash demonstrates how agencies can achieve massive returns by combining viewbotting with multiple sponsorship deals.* Starting with a 300-viewer stream and adding 700 botted viewers creates an apparent 1,000-viewer stream for approximately $150-180 per week. If the agency secures just two 2-hour sponsorships for that inflated audience, they earn $1,600 in commission while spending less than $400 on viewbots.* This creates what Nash calls “a money printing machine” where agencies multiply their investment several times over.Viewbotting on SubstackThere are websites that sell Substack subscribers (as low as ~$0.02 each), sometimes claiming they use “real people” added manually rather than pure bots. Whether these are organic or farmed/incentivized accounts, they still represent artificial inflation* here’s one: you can buy low, medium, and high quality subscribers).* You can also buy comments, likes, views, shares, plays, restacks, searches, comment likes, comment restack, comment shares, aves, messages, comment replies, and save as imageIn April, the Observer covered how Andrew Tate’s Substack saw its total follower count drop from 1.1 million to 980,000 after analysis of a sample of 1,000 paying subscribers found that 75% had no biography, publications, or visible activity—and half were created in a 16-day window. Investigators concluded he had imported a pre-existing (likely harvested) email list. Substack’s standards and enforcement team reviews bulk email imports and acts when they appear illegitimate.Earlier, creator Rebekah Jones lost hundreds of thousands of subscribers in apparent purges (documented on X in 2025), with charts showing dramatic drops after bulk fake additions.Viewbotting on YouTubeFake views have existed since at least 2009, with media attention by 2011 and a major 2012 purge in which YouTube removed billions of fraudulent views, including over 1 billion from Universal Music Group artists (e.g., Beyoncé, Rihanna, Justin Bieber, Nicki Minaj).Physical view farms continue operating globally in 2026. In March 2026, Brazilian police raided a large-scale YouTube view farm with dozens (or hundreds) of smartphones rigged to ceilings, running 24/7 to loop videos and simulate views/interactions. (IT LOOKS CRAZY) Similar operations have been documented in Vietnam and elsewhere, often targeting music videos or algorithm gamingA 2024 academic study analyzing nearly 100,000 YouTube videos from over 1,000 French channels over 1.5 years found fake view removals (“corrections”) on ~90% of channels and 78.5% of videos. These corrections occur in daily batches (often around 5 p.m.) and frequently happen late in a video’s lifecycle—after most organic views have accumulated—rather than in real time. Notably, videos corrected later tended to be more popular overall, suggesting fake views can temporarily boost algorithmic recommendations and perceived popularity before being stripped.Clip SpammingDevon Nash also changed how I view YouTube discovery with his breakdown on how people—including Clavicular and Caleb Hammer—are manufacturing virality by spamming clips of their work on platforms like YouTube (see: Exposing the New Manufactured Viral Content Industry)The video explains how a paid “clipping economy” is artificially hijacking short‑form algorithms on YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, and X to manufacture viral influencers and promote the streaming platform Kick,How the clipping system works* Campaigns run inside large Discord servers (20–30k+ people) or invite‑only groups where each campaign corresponds to one streamer, podcaster, or brand.* Clippers pull 30–120 second segments from long‑form streams and upload them as shorts on TikTok, Instagram Reels, YouTube Shorts, and sometimes X, under their own accounts.* They are paid on a flat CPM basis, typically around 0.10–0.40 dollars per 1,000 views but sometimes up to 2–3 dollars or specific bounties like 3,000 dollars per million views for particular clips.* Payment usually happens in USDT and often only once a minimum aggregate view threshold (for example 100,000 total views across all the clippers’ uploads) is reached, incentivizing people to spam 50–100 clips across multiple accounts.Because the CPM is on top of the platform’s own ad revenue, this can be decent money for clippers in lower‑income countries, and the servers are generally run in a professional, non‑scammy way with visible campaign caps (for example 10,000–20,000 dollars budget per campaign).Scale of manufactured viralityNash uses the case of Clavicular” to show the scale.* In one recent month, this streamer allegedly generated 2.2 billion views from about 69,000 clips posted across platforms, with 1,600+ paid clippers involved.* Averaged out, each clip might get around 31,700 views, but the real point is the volume: tens of thousands of separate uploads all about the same person in 30 days.* Even if a significant fraction of views are “free” (below payout threshold), running such a campaign still costs hundreds of thousands of dollars per month at around 1 dollar CPM, implying millions per month across all similar campaigns.This sheer volume tricks recommendation systems: algorithms treat topics with tons of uploads and engagement as globally relevant (like a major news event), so when 50–70k clips pop up about one guy, the system concludes he must be important and pushes him everywhere.Who is funding it and whyNash concludes that the primary funder for the biggest campaigns is the streaming platform Kick, not the streamers themselves.* A Kick‑backed streamer openly states they receive “over six figures a month” of clipping budget, and that Kick pays high bounties (20–30 dollar CPM) on some clips.* Internal Kick clipping program materials (from invite‑only servers) require clippers to use a precise Kick logo overlay; incorrect placement can get the clip rejected and unpaid, ensuring the Kick brand is visible on every short.* Kick’s strategy, derived from its close association with the crypto gambling site Stake, is to pay to flood short‑form platforms with Kick‑branded clips, both to grow selected streamers and to funnel some fraction of billions of impressions back to Kick.Nash contrasts this with Twitch’s older model of paying select streamers big contracts and expecting them to bring their own audience. Kick instead spends its marketing budget directly on mass short‑form distribution and lets streamers benefit as a side effect.How this affects algorithms and the creator ecosystem* Algorithms heavily weight volume and multi‑channel chatter, so campaigns that generate tens of thousands of clips effectively override organic audience “voting” based on interest and quality.* As a result, extremely mediocre or even unlikeable personalities can dominate feeds purely through paid volume, while more interesting creators without budgets get buried.* The user experience becomes “interest media” rather than social media: you are no longer curating your own feed or following friends, but passively consuming what algorithmic signals (distorted by ad‑like campaigns) decide to show you.Nash thinks this makes live‑streaming in particular a “rigged game” at the top end: small creators can still grow by doing a mini version (a few friends clipping them), but competing with industrial‑scale campaigns is extremely difficult.What Should We Take Away From ThisThis is not* Individual creators* Agencies* Looking to boost their cut of revenue* Platforms* Like Kick, looking to drive in viewers* Don’t trust views or engagement, ESPECIALLY on streaming platforms like Twitch or KickSources on Internet Bot Traffic* Imperva/Thales 2026 Bad Bot Report (full-year 2025 data, released 2026): Automated bots accounted for more than 53% of all web traffic (up from 51% the prior year). Human activity: 47% and continuing to decline. This is the most comprehensive and widely cited benchmark.* Fastly Threat Insights Report (January 2026): Bots made up 49% of web requests (51% human). Nearly all (99%) of this bot traffic was classified as unwanted/unverifiable (scrapers, attackers, etc.).* Human Security 2026 State of AI Traffic Report (2025 data): Automated traffic grew 23.51% YoY—8× faster than human traffic (+3.10%). AI-driven traffic volumes surged 187% monthly across 2025 (nearly tripling), with agentic AI exploding 7,851% YoY. Over 1 quadrillion interactions analyzed; >95% of AI traffic concentrated in retail/e-commerce, streaming/media, and travel/hospitality.Episode TranscriptSimone Collins: [00:00:00] Hello, Malcolm. I’m very excited to be talking with you today, ‘cause I kinda feel like I need to completely reevaluate the way that I browse the internet, and that everything’s a lie, and I that internet theory doesn’t even begin to really describe what’s going on.And we, we need to... I need, I need help. I need help. You’re gonna help me. So according to some, some analysts, for the first time in over a decade now, bots generate the majority of internet activity, like 51 to 53%. This is according to multiple reports and sources. I have in the show notes on Patreon and Substack all the, all the sources.I, I can link to them. Breakdowns sometimes separate the, the good bots, like search engine crawlers and SEO, from the bad, and the bad ones still control up to, like, 40% of internet traffic. Cloudflare’s data has it a little bit lower, like 31 to 32%, but that’s insane. Anyway th- there are literal view farms of just, like, walls of phones of just people generating fake traffic.Very sophisticated fake traffic.Speaker 2: agora. Celular [00:01:00] até o teto. Meu Deus, parece uma colmeia.Simone Collins: . A literal view farm. Oh,Malcolm Collins: no, I have seen this. Yeah. No, but it’s, it’s worse than this because what I want to use this- Phones on walls. So yeah, there wasSimone Collins: this Brazilian one that was raided two months ago, and, and police go in, and it’s just, like, these walls of just phones wired up.It just looks like something fake. Like, if I saw it in an anime, I’d be like, “Yeah, no, like, no one actually...” No, no, we just, we’re just gonna, like, put grids of phones on a giant wall and, like, control them. And for any platform you can imagine, you can buy viewbots with varying degrees of sophistication.This includes viewbots that have widely varied IP addresses, that have detailed histories, that leave comments, that mute and unmute while watching streams. Like, the, the extent to which it’s hard to actually track whether or not this is real too. ‘Cause I came into this being like, “Oh, yeah, I’ve heard viewbotting’s a problem.I guess I should just look at, like, engagement on a thing, and then if there’s a lot of, you know, like, what seems to be real human behavior, it’s gotta be real.” No, [00:02:00] no. This is- So what IMalcolm Collins: wanna use this conversation to talk about, like, the meta of this conversation for me- Yeah ... is how much of what we perceive to be popular on the internet is a lie.No, this is so true. Both in terms of the left and the right. Yes. And this has been really evident in a lot of things like recent games that are still trying to appeal to a woke audience. Oh, boy. And we haven’t gotten as much a chance to go over these, as I would like. We may do a whole episode on them if people really want to.Yeah, let us know in the comments ... one of the ones that crashed out recently after, like, every main person, it’s made by Larry Ellison’s daughter in the industry talking about how good it was. It got, like, all perfect reviews, like, 10 10s. Mm-hmm. And it was called Mixtape, and it had a high, a player streaming high of 2,000.Oh, ouch ... another one that came out recently called Aphoria, right? To, to, to give you an idea of, like, how bad these things do. So it had a [00:03:00] developer team of it looks like around 60 people. Mm. And it was in development for I think four years, okay? Oh, my lord, okay. So this game came out a month ago, and if you look at the, the peak player count on it, okay?Simone Collins: Okay. ItMalcolm Collins: had a peak player count, this was 15 days ago, so it only recently came out, okay?Simone Collins: Okay.Malcolm Collins: Of 219 people. Oh, God. If you look at its current player count- Mm ... 21 people. That’s about a third- Right now That’s about a third the people who are currently playing rfab.aiSimone Collins: That’s like people riding a bus.That’s, that’sMalcolm Collins: bad. This came out- This is really bad ... 15 days ago from a team of 60 people who made it, right? It, it, estimated- This is like oneSimone Collins: public school classroom of children. I...Malcolm Collins: Yeah. For years. And keep in mind, all these people likely had salaries of like 60, [00:04:00] $70,000 or something like that. You know, you’re talking- Probably more than that.I think, yeah ... like okay, say they paid them cheaply, like $20,000. The game is estimated to have made, I think, around $40,000 in total or like $45,000 in total. Ooh ... like astonishingly low amounts of money. How is this happening? Oh, my God. This is made by a major studio, by the way, right? Arts- Well, and it’s not just, it’sSimone Collins: not just game studios ei- either.Like, a, fame in general is manufactured. Like, major music labels and artists are, are using botting to look bigger than they are. So even when you’re like, “Oh, well, of course, like Beyoncé is famous,” like no, there was this big... Back in 2012, there was this really big basically like view bot erasing, and, and figures like Beyoncé lost like billions of views, just like, “Oh, by the way, those were fake.”Like, the, even these, these huge people- Mm-hmm ... their hugeness is to an extent, i- it’s, and it’s impossible to say how much, because so much of this is both very hard to measure and kept very under wraps [00:05:00] manufactured. Another example, Drake accused his own label of conspiring with third parties, including Spotify, to bot streams for Kendrick Lamar’s Not Like Us to harm him, and while UMG called it untrue and illogical they, they dismissed defamation claims, and the broader case is still ongoing.And Drake has also faced separate accusations of using his stake partnership to fund botting for his own catalog. Like, it’s just so pervasive that like everyone understands it’s happening, but most of it’s just gone underground. Yeah. And also, it’s, it’s, the, the extent... And this is, this is another really good way of, of understanding how true this is.When major companies don’t use view botting, you see extremely embarrassing situations like the pilot episode of Star Trek: Starfleet Academy- Yeah ... which, th- whoops, someone forgot to pay the view botting company. And itMalcolm Collins: came out at lower than our episode count for that week in terms of views.Simone Collins: Yeah, they got 16,000 views in the first 11 hours after release on YouTube, and a separate report also said the live premiere [00:06:00] peaked at roughly 1,300 concurrent viewers.Now, Leaflet, on one of our streams at like 2:00 in the morning, we’ll have like a low of 1,000 viewers, right? Like- Yeah, soMalcolm Collins: I, I do streaming with Leaflet on, now every other Friday, so we’ll be doing it this Friday early, early in the morning, so like 3:00 AM- Yeah ... on a Sun- W- w- what is Saturday? Saturday is right after Friday.Okay. It’s SaturdaySimone Collins: morn- yeah.Malcolm Collins: Saturday, 3:00 AM. Generally we’re at around like 1,500. That’s where we typically are. So we- Yeah, and well,Speaker 4: The stream tonight will start at 8:00 PM EST. Um, and something I got wrong here is the 1,500 is just her concurrent views on Twitch. I forgot that they’re probably about equal or larger on Kick, so she’s typically doing about twice-- Or I guess we are doing about twice as wellSimone Collins: welcome to Starfleet Academy territory. At 3:00 AM ... heavily marketed, et ceteraMalcolm Collins: Are beating Starfleet Academy, which had- Yeah ... hundreds of millions of dollars go to it.Yeah. Our episode that came out the day it came out, and keep in mind we do episodes every f*****g [00:07:00] day, okay? And they had- Yeah ... one premiere, had more views than them. Well, itSimone Collins: checks out. I’ve, I’ve, I’ve, I’ve watched, I’ve watched so many hour- I’ve, I’ve, I mean, p- like, days worth of, of Leaflet. And I love Star Trek.I’ve not watched a minute, I’ve not even watched the preview of Starfleet Academy. I don’t, I don’t like- Yeah ... it’s, but anyway, so that’s just, d- again, to be clear it ma- you, you, you can’t obviously know how much these like, big media companies and, and famous celebrities are investing in viewbotting and fluffing up their own subscribers and views and engagements and likes and shares and comments.But I, I wanna turn to asking you- But you can see what happens in the absence of it, and it’s not just, like, professional, like, or mainstream media figures. Viral figures like Caleb Hamer and Clavicular are manufactured to a great extent, and we’re gonna get into that too It’s insane Oh,Malcolm Collins: oh, hold on. I wanna get into Asmongold’s take on this before we go any further.So- Okay. Okay ... I think it’s very interesting. So-Simone Collins: Yeah ...Malcolm Collins: he was going over viewbotting on Twitch, and he’s like, “Almost every- Yeah ... large player on Twitch is viewbotting.” Yes. And [00:08:00] so he was saying you know, “You’ve got these people where they realistically have, like, 1,000 people watching.” And I’m just like, “Dude, should we just, like, get into viewbotting and then start a Twitch, right?”And he’s like- ... “But Twitch doesn’t wanna shut it down because it makes their numbers look higher.” He’s like, “They say they wanna shut it down.”Simone Collins: Yeah, they w- yeah, they’re very disincentivized from, And there, there are Twitch streamers who have been, like, publicly been like, “Oh yeah, I viewbot.” Like, “There are probably, like, three people watching this right now, but it looks like there are 1,000 people.”Like, so transparent, and they’re friends with Twitch’s, like, CEO. Like, it is very, it- But what,Malcolm Collins: but what was more interesting about Asmongold’s take on this is somebody was like, “Well, these people who buy ads on them, right? And they think that they’re getting, like, thousands and thousands of views, but it’s, like, less than 1,000 concurrent viewers.”And Asmongold was like well, actually, they’re not really getting screwed.” And he, the guy was like, “Well, what do you mean by this?” Mm-hmm. And he’s like, “Well, consider who actually signed the contract to buy the ads. It’s not somebody with equity in the company. It’s not the company’s CEO. It’s the head of marketing or whatever, right?”Yeah. “And he just needs to show the next [00:09:00] guy above him how many people watched it for X amount of money.” Right. “They don’t care how many people are concurrent.” But those who areSimone Collins: savvy enough to be able to somewhat sophisticatedly track if they’re getting a bump to a product, like, I get it ... and, and they’re not seeing it.Like, they’re, people are starting to realize that, and, and people like Devin Nash, who I’m gonna reference multiple times, ‘cause he’s actually really good at parsing out what’s going on here being somewhat of an in- industry insider, more than somewhat. Some advertisers are discovering this, and they’re super not cool with it.So there is a tension there. Which I, I won’t comment on more. Actually,Malcolm Collins: hold on. This explains something I didn’t fully understand. Oh? But our Discord is hugely bigger than other equivalently sized influencers. Oh. And I’ve been very surprised by this. Hm. And now I’m realizing, “Oh, sh- were we supposed to beSimone Collins: viewbotting?”No. Like, it, it’s really good that we weren’t. I’m, I’m really glad that we’re not. But I mean, now I, I get also maybe why a lot of people are like, “Why is your channel a lot bigger?” Because I think they’re used to seeing [00:10:00] other similar- Yeah, they’re used to viewbotting stuff ... content creators who are viewbotted.And so, like, when you see that someone doesn’t have like, “Oh, where’s your, like, you know, hundreds of thousands of...” Well, you’re seeing mostly people who are paying for that, ‘cause it’s also incredibly affordable, and I’ll get into that, too. But- Yeah ... yeah, to go over Twitch, around- And we’re talking just normal creators, like small creators.Around 10% of Twitch streamers with at least 50 average viewers show clear, persistent signs of viewbotting according to the most comprehensive independent analysis. And I, again, this is all linked in the show notes. It’s worse though, as you pointed out, as Asmongold says, for big creators. So Devin Nash, again, he really knows what he’s talking about they analyzed the top 500 Twitch streamers and estimated that 400 to 430, that is roughly 80% of them, show signs of viewbotting or being botted.Now keep in mind, many streamers do not know they’re being votted, botted, and I’ll get into this. Yeah. Okay. So 30 to 40% of, of viewers are blatant bots, and then another five to [00:11:00] 15% via embeds. And this is based on chat activity monitoring user list sampling, logged in and out ratios, and then known botnet cross-referencing.Creators argue that Twitch is a platform where viewbotting is necessary for survival. Basically, if you’re not doing it, you’re not competitive, and this is because unlike on YouTube, and many, os- ma- like probably most other platforms- Yeah ... discoverability is basically just impossible on Twitch. The way they’ve designed it, you will not, you will not be discovered on Twitch, period.And that’s why I feel like breaking into it is, is really hard now, especially if you’re not, like, already super famous and... Basically, I think the way people get big on Twitch is they have huge audiences elsewhere to start now, and then those audiences come over to Twitch. I don’t even know how much viewbotting would really help to jumpstart it.But Devin Nash went into the unit economics of this in a really fascinating way and, and showed how basically it’s a no-brainer smart decision for a streamer’s agency to [00:12:00] viewbot them because they will put in- Like, $1 and then get $1.50 back. Like- Mm-hmm ... it, it, it pays back. It would be stupid to not do it.And he understands this ‘cause he’s a professional on the brand marketing side of the equation. Yeah. I think he just left them, but he was at least former chief marketing officer at Novo, which is an agency. And again, he represents not the, not the streamer side, but the brand side, so he’s also keen on delivering actual results to brands so that they can keep, you know, trust him and keep working with him.But so he pointed out that view bots cost approximately one to two cents per viewer hour, and that translates to about 135 to 185 per week to add 500 to 750 viewers to a stream. And then the weekly cost includes features like chatting and custom chat messages to make the viewers appear authentic.And so for a full month of view botting, agencies spend less than $800 to artificially inflate viewer counts. That’s pretty reasonable. Yeah. Now, Twitch sponsorship rates, and again, he knows this, he’s worked in the industry, they [00:13:00] range from one to $3 per concurrent viewer, with 1.50 to two being, like dollars, being the standard rate for a two-hour gaming sponsorship.So for a streamer with 1,000 viewers at a $2 per CCV, a single two-hour sponsorship generates $4,000 in total revenue. The agency typically takes a 20% commission, so they earn 800 per deal while the streamer gets 3,200. So Nash demonstrates how agencies can rece- get basically massive returns by- Yeahcombining view botting with multiple sponsorship deals. So starting with a 300-viewer stream and then adding 700 botted viewers creates an apparent 1,000-viewer stream for approximately 150 to 180 per week. And if the agency secures just two-hour sponsorships for that inflated audience, they earn 1,600 in commission while spending less than $400 on view bots.And so it’s, it’s... He calls it a money printing machine. It [00:14:00] is. I, I just, I, I can’t believe it.Speaker 5: And I think that this is an easy way to tell who’s viewbotting and who’s not viewbotting is who’s doing sponsorships. People who aren’t doing sponsorships, there’s virtually no reason for them to viewbot. , And this is why I think when you’re looking at our communities, , you see individuals who are big enough easily to do lots of sponsorships, like say an Esma Gold, but you almost never get them., Or a Leaflet, and you almost never get them. , And it’s being right-wing in the way that we’re right-wing. Like, if you’re right-wing in like the way Ben Shapiro, it’s your episode on him where I point out heavy evidence that his audience could be as much as 90% botted. , There’s a huge reason to viewbot, , and the financial backing to do it., And no, when people are like, “Wait, so his entire organization is just fraudulent?” And I’m like, I don’t really think that’s it. I think what’s going on with him is, , that The Daily Wire should be thought of more the way we think of an organization like The Heritage Foundation, where it’s people giving it money to influence politics [00:15:00] and not really something with a large organic audience., By the way, if you’re, if you’re wondering, like, why I am so certain that his channel is heavily botted, if we are to believe his channel really, he does a daily hour, hour and a half, hour ep- e- episode, okay? About two-thirds of the views for his daily episodes are arriving the day after they’re released.Speaker 10: And then after that, they get virtually no views. That makes no sense. I could see almost like in our videos, the majority of the views happening on the day they’re released for a daily episode, but who’s reliably watching daily episodes always the day after they’re released instead of the day that they’re released?Speaker 13: And I’m not saying that it’s impossible that anyone would have this behavior. I suspect, you know, maybe one tenth of our audience would have a [00:16:00] behavior like this, , if we’re talking like on the larger side. But two-thirds of your audience or more than two-thirds it seems like often? Mm-mm.Speaker 10: Or I could be like, well, maybe he’s got a really long tail. And so that way you would see views trickling in for a long time after the video.Speaker 14: Which we also don’t see. Views basically stop the moment a video hits around half a million views, uh, which almost always happens on day two or day threeSpeaker 10: But this indicates basically they’re paying someone to promote it in a linear fashion.Speaker 5: That doesn’t make sense for daily episodes, especially if they’re daily episodes that have a fanatical long-term following, which is what we have to assume because the longer form episodes are doing so much better than the shorter form episodes, which typically doesn’t make sense in the YouTube algorithm unless it’s, like, a dedicated following waiting for them.Speaker 8: Oh, side note here, some people were looking up YouTube statistics and they thought that Simone got the 85% decline in Ben Shapiro’s numbers wrong, even if you don’t [00:17:00] include view botting. , And there was some debate about it on the Discord, and at first I thought that they were right and that she had got it wrong, and then she pointed out, “Malcolm, I upload all my notes to the show notes.Go to it.” And so then they went to it, and then they kept arguing for a while, and then they came to an understanding that Simone wasn’t wrong. , But it had to do with the way that she worded it. I don’t get it exactly. The point being is that if you think on a surface level we’ve gotten something wrong, , especially if it’s Simone because she’s the more diligent researcher out of the two of us, do check her show notesSpeaker 6: So another online conservative voice I had heard was fake when I was doing research on the Ben Shapiro one, , where it seems pretty clear that Ben Shapiro has a smaller real audience than we have, , was Louder with Crowder. And I used to like, , Crowder a lot. Um, I, I watched his show regularly and then it just got boring., So I was like, “Okay, that, that seems believable. Let’s look into this.” So here, , I pull up an episode. So this episode’s from 10 days ago. I wanted to get one that looked, like, fairly representative for the channel. , It’s got [00:18:00] 104,000 views, , and it’s got 529 comments. Okay, let’s look at one of our videos to get an idea if that makes sense.All right, so we’ll just go through one. So there’s a video that came out yesterday. This one had 12,000 views. It’s already at 553 comments. So more than a video with over 100,000 views of his that came out 10 days ago. Okay, maybe that’s an anomaly. Let’s go before that. The one from the day before that, 16,000 views, over 1,000 comments, 1,077.Okay, the day before that, 16,000 views, 443 comments.Like, it’s- Pl-- no, it’s not plausible. It’s not plausible that he’s 10X larger than we are and has less interaction than we have. It shouldn’t even be close. If it was three times our interaction, I’d still find that suspiciousSpeaker 7: And I think your perception, , and my perception of who’s big in certain culture war [00:19:00] spaces is heavily warped and heavily manipulated and often very not true. , And I think a lot of the sort of moldier, more boring, more pearl-clutchy conservative figures who previously I thought were like a giant political battle that we’re fighting against, , are, , not real.Their, their base is not real. Their-- th- this ideology is entirely astroturfed. , Not that it didn’t have, , support at one point. I’m just talking about within the current online environment. And, , I was thinking about this recently in the context of, , ‘cause I was talking with Leaflet about this and like, oh, you know, should we be worried when, you know, X, Y, and Z people are mad at us for our views or whatever?And it-- I’ve just gotten to the point of it’s like, it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter. I don’t need to care about them. They’re not going to have a place in space. , If their views lead them to disengage with technology or not actually find partners and have kids, , it’s [00:20:00] not a political battle worth fighting because they’re just not long-term relevant.I need to focus on groups that are thriving and do have a possibility of building those spaceships with my descendants.Simone Collins: Well, and IMalcolm Collins: think that this is why th- when we look at, like, our cultural movement, right? Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Like this techy, right-leaning cultural movement the impact it seems to have within online culture- Yeahis so much bigger than you would expect from the- Right ... view counts. Yeah. Yes,Simone Collins: yes, yes. It’s been... Yeah, I’ve been like, “Wait, why are, like, why have we been referenced here and there when, like, our views are so low?”Malcolm Collins: And yeah, yeah. And what I’m realizing is- Our culture, like for example, you look at Leaflet Streams or something like that.Mm-hmm. Leaflet doesn’t really do sponsorships. And because she doesn’t do sponsorships, she doesn’t have a reason to viewbot in the way that other people do.Simone Collins: Hmm. Yeah, there isn’t that same incentive. ... Although, and we’re gonna get into it- Yeah ... it is not always, even if you don’t have an agency, and [00:21:00] even if you don’t have sponsorships, you might still be viewbotted without your consent.And we’ll talk about that too. Go over it. Come on, let’sMalcolm Collins: go.Simone Collins: Yeah. But no, I, first I wanna talk about s- I just, I also wanna be clear that this is... I think a lot of people, the, the discourse is, “Oh, Twitch viewbotting, Twitch viewbotting.” Whereas I just wanna reiterate, and, and this is even older discourse, that Facebook, full of viewbotting, and also even more so Spotify and like just streaming music, viewbotting so huge.But here’s the one place where I was like, “Oh, well, here’s a place where Substack couldn’t...” You know, like s- where, where viewbotting isn’t a thing, Substack. I’m like, “Well, Substack is too new, and the way it works like with email platform delivery and all these other forms of engagement, like Substack has got to not have viewbotting.”But no, it totally does. So there are websites that sell Substack subscribers for as low as two cents each. And sometimes they claim that they use real people that they add in manually rather than pure bots. Whether they’re organic or farmed, it, it’s still artificial information. And I I found [00:22:00] one just like one website where you and I just now if we want to can go to en.misterpopular.net to buy...you can choose low quality, medium quality, or high quality subscribers. They don’t really s- I haven’t poked around their site aMalcolm Collins: lot, but they’re, they’re- But so, and so, I told you. Like we had a family member who all of a sudden had like 80,000 followers on, on- ... Substack, and I was like, “This is fake.”He had four articles- I- ... and like three comments on each.Simone Collins: I know Like- I, I didn’t wanna believe it, and now I’m like, “Oh my God.” Because, but it’s, and it’s not, yeah, it’s not just subscribers. You can buy comments. You can buy likes, views, shares, plays, restacks, searches, comment likes, comment restacks, comment shares.You can buy messages. You can buy comment replies. You can buy save as image. You can buy a ton of different ways to be like, “Yeah, look at all these... Like it, clearly this isn’t fake. Who would, who would bot save as image?” Like, that is how sophisticated this... I’m just really impressed. And, and, and there [00:23:00] are already high-profile examples, recent ones, prominent ones, of people totally faking their Substacks.So in April, The Observer covered how Andrew Tate’s Substack saw its total follower count drop from 1.1 million to 980,000 after analysis of a sample of 1,000 paying subscribers. Paying subscribers. Found that 75% Had no biography, publications, or visible activity, and half were created in a 16-day window.So, eh. Wait ... they, HisMalcolm Collins: paying subscribers, 75% were fake. Andrew Tate- That I, yeah ... no, and I believe this. When I look at Andrew Tate’s comment being as popular as it is, it doesn’t make sense. He’s not that smart. No, and like Andrew- He’s like, “Do you find that interesting?”Simone Collins: It’s not even that, though. I- i- it shouldn’t also be...I mean, ‘cause his whole thing is sort of like faking things, you know, pretending to be a, a, a thot you know, using like a girlfriend’s images and then like chatting to men on OnlyFans or something. You know what I mean? Yeah. Like that’s kind of his thing By the way, Simone,Malcolm Collins: I was just checking out our, our, our [00:24:00] Substack right now.Uh-huh. Uh-huh. I mean, first of all, do you know how many paid subscribers we have?Simone Collins: We have a lot, and they’re cool. Dude, every- We- By the way- Just on Substack ... every time we get a paid subscriber- Just, just ... I, I will, and, and some of them are a little bit more secretive than others. I totally stalk them. I find their Instagrams.I find their, like- You do, yeah ... I’m obsessed with them. Yeah. So we are at nowMalcolm Collins: 99 paid subscribers on Substack. Yay. You wanna be number 100. Yeah. I, I, I actually think our Patreon is slightly better than Substack. I don’t know, like if we offer more on- I treat them,Simone Collins: I treat them equally. I read every comment.I b- I, I add each n- new paid subscriber to our personal, like network, like, you know, in our personal CRM. I email them personally from both of us. There’s an open line of communication via email. I, and do you wanna knowMalcolm Collins: what our, what our yearly income is- I stalk them ... just from Substack? What? I was, I was surprised by this.$10,700. Wow. I mean, you can’t live off of that, but that’s, that’s really meaningful, guys. I appreciate it.Simone Collins: No, like for real, the, [00:25:00] the support, yeah, we, like a- and yeah. And and I, I, these people have histories. Like, I wouldn’t be able to stalk them if they weren’t real. So anyway, I was just kind of shocked that you could, that you could fake Substack as much as you can.And, And our biggest growth- This isn’t, it’s not just Andrew Tate ... you know, during our campaign- ThereMalcolm Collins: was also this- ... where YouTube tried to take us off for a bit.Simone Collins: Oh, yeah, that was, that was the biggest, And you got so mad at me that I madeMalcolm Collins: like an arc about that, and I was like, “No, it’s so fun. Come on.”Simone Collins: Yeah, but we got a lot of subscribers, and thank you for everyone who did show support then, ‘cause we really thought we were done on YouTube. We wereMalcolm Collins: incredibly demoralized. Well, we have one, weSimone Collins: have one of three strikes, I’m just saying. Huh. It’s gone now. It’s gone? Did it fall off? It did not fall off.If we’ve been withoutMalcolm Collins: strikes for long enough that the strike where we said Hitler was bad because he was progressive- No ... that’s gone.Simone Collins: Hold on. It must have, ‘cause I just saw it like three days ago, it was still there. No. You’re right, it’s gone. Oh, our record has been cleared. Okay. Well, I [00:26:00] hope that doesn’t mean people are not gonna consider subscribing.I mean, immediatelyMalcolm Collins: as soon as it’s cleared, Leafly gets a strike for one of our videos, but, Oh,Simone Collins: no, I feel really bad about that ... she was clearMalcolm Collins: She... Oh, right, she was. Thank God. Yeah, Asmongold got it cleared for her or something. ISimone Collins: know, but like, you know, she took cash social chips or that. I don’t,Malcolm Collins: I don’t know.Anyway. I don’t think cash social chips. I think a bunch of people on the right created content about it. Rev says, “Jesse, you nuts.” Like, everybody was creating content about it. It’s part of the cycle. No, but hopefully itSimone Collins: was good for her. Yeah, yeah. As long as it’s good for her. I never want anything bad to happen to her.She’s the best. Okay, so also there was this creator called Rebecca Jones who lost hundreds of thousands of subscribers it- when they did a bunch of purges, and this was documented on X in 2025. Like, it’s, it’s a thing. I just didn’t know it was a thing. I was, I was very surprised. But so in terms of viewbotting on YouTube fake views have existed on YouTube since around 2009.And they’ve been getting media attention since 2011. But this major 2012 purge in which YouTube removed billions of fraudulent views, including over one [00:27:00] billion from Universal Music Group artists like Beyoncé, like Rihanna, like Justin Bieber, like Nicki Minaj. It’s so crazy to me that, like, I look at them and I, I, I never had a reason to question.I’m like, “Well, of course, it’s like Justin Bieber. People are crazy about him.” But like- But whoMalcolm Collins: listens to Justin Bieber anymore? I watch Justin Bieber AMVs. I don’t watch Justin Bieber. You watch Justin Bieber AMVs. I don’t care what he has to say anymore.Simone Collins: That tickles me. Yeah. Anyway and, and then you have, like, literally these, these physical view farms that I...You... I hope you can include the, the Brazilian, View farm ... recently raided. No, they’reMalcolm Collins: everywhere, right? Yeah ... you know what’s interesting is, is so I’ll be, I’ll be transparent with people here. Mm-hmm. We tried, like, a version of viewbotting with our books. Oh,Simone Collins: totally. Yeah, we, we’ve talked about this before.Malcolm Collins: Yeah. We’ve never tried it with YouTube or Twitter. It’s called book laundering.Simone Collins: Like, the... yeah, this is a whole nother thing of, like, if you, if... Like, anything, all the, all the proof that we used to use to think, like, “Oh, this must be good. [00:28:00] It’s a New York Times bestseller. It’s a whatever bestseller.”No, no. Completely fake. Look up, like- The,Malcolm Collins: the ru- Yeah ... the way we topped the Wall Street Journal bestseller list was, was this sort of stuff, right? It- And people are always confused as to why our Wall Street Journal bestseller book is the lowest reviewed of any of our books. Like, clearly- I know ... the worst selling of any of our books.Mm-hmm. It’s because we had to launch it in a really stupid way. Like, not on Amazon, because Amazon didn’t count. Yeah, we had toSimone Collins: launch through Barnes & Noble. And then- dot, dot, dot. Well, I think there’s, like, a lot of offering it for free, but then I’m sure they have, like, a lot of fake purchases in there.We, you know, we paid someone to help us with this, so we’re not ab- we’re not above this. But, but- I mean, we’re tooMalcolm Collins: lazy to do it with Y- the, so people wondering why we don’t do it with YouTube. The reason why we- Well, I alsoSimone Collins: just want to, like, actually engage with our com- our community on YouTube.Malcolm Collins: No, but there’s, like, a reason.It’s really bad for your long-term algo. Yeah ... it, it, when you do it- Well,Simone Collins: eh, so there was this one French study in [00:29:00] 2024 where they, they analyzed nearly 100,000 YouTube videos from over 1,000 French channels over 1.5 years to find fake view removals, so corrections on 90% of channels and about 78.5% of videos.The corrections occurred in daily batches around 5:00 PM, and they frequently happened late in a video, video’s life cycle after most of the organic views had accumulated. And it, it appears that videos corrected later tended to be more popular overall, which suggests that the fake views, views can temporarily boost algorithmic recommendations and perceive popularity before you get stripped.So no, actually. In many cases, getting that early social proof that tricks algorithms- Mm ... has been to the benefit of the creators. And this was, this, again, this was published in 2024. I would like to think that YouTube has gotten better at this. I don’t wanna risk it. I don’t wanna put our channel at risk, because one of [00:30:00] the ways that YouTube is fighting this, and many other platforms fight this, ‘cause it is incredibly hard.You know, the, the cat and mouse game has gotten so sophisticated that what many platforms are doing is basically you’re guilty until proven innocent. And- Yeah ... I, I mean, like, we’re already at risk of being taken down if something were to go suspiciously viral, even naturally, just because platforms are trying so hard to fight against this.But yeah, I mean, there, I’m, I’m just trying to say there is some, there’s some, there are many instances, I mean, like on Twitch and now with this example on YouTube, where people are being rewarded for doing this, this bad behavior. But now I wanna get into a different version of manufactured viral- By the way, I, I was highlyMalcolm Collins: suspicious, I was just ‘cause we were doing a video on Ben Shapiro recently and so I was looking at his views.Uh-huh. I suspect he’s heavily view botted because the pattern in his videos didn’t make any sense. Mm ... most of his videos were at around the view count of our videos. Yeah ... and then he would do these, like- and these were like- But when they’re him,Simone Collins: when his name is on them, they get a lot, they get a [00:31:00] lot of views When they had hisMalcolm Collins: name, they were like an hour long and it was like- Oohthe podcast. It was like half a million views. Yeah. Uh-huh. And I was like, “This doesn’t make any sense. Why are your videos that should be doing better in the algorithm-” Yeah, theSimone Collins: short form algo-friendly videosMalcolm Collins: I think that he’s entirely astroturfed, if I’m gonna be honest at this point.Simone Collins: Mm, you never know.Malcolm Collins: I mean, who’s still watching... When have you heard a human being say- ... “I am, I, I continually watch Ben Shapiro, even today”? Oh, yeah. Yeah. Like, if you look at our content, I, like, k- I, a lot of people, we go to like a conservative convention or something like that, and a lot of like the staffers will run up to us and be like, “Oh my God, we love you guys,” even though Daily Wire tried to freeze us out of all of them.See our video on that. But like, like clearly people watch our... And I can see why you would watch our stuff. Like, this is the thing. With the people who I watch who don’t appear to be viewbotted, you know, like Leaflet or Asmongold or something, or Nexador I can understand why people watch their content, right?No, totally. With these [00:32:00] people, I just don’t get it. Who’s watchingSimone Collins: this? Yeah, I can’t bring myself to watch it. I’ll watch Brett Cooper not infrequently. But no other- Steven Crowder, for example.Malcolm Collins: Who’s still watching Steven Crowder? Not me. Yeah. And I used to like his stuff. Like Tim Pool, I used to like his stuff.I cannot imagine who’s still watching their stuff. It’s so formulaic now.Simone Collins: Hm. Yeah. Anyway. Yeah. Because like when IMalcolm Collins: click on something, I’m like, I either wanna have my views affirmed in an interesting way, which is like Knucks or Asmongold, right? Yeah. Or I wanna learn something new, which I think is what we try to do as people.Like, we try to have... And people will like challenge us. They’ll be like, “Your new idea per minute in this video was low.” Right. Yeah ... and I was like, “You do a lot.” We’ll try better next time.Simone Collins: Yeah, I know, I know. We’re trying, guys. Well, well then let me introduce this to you, because this is so interesting to me, and I had mentioned this to you one morning earlier, but I didn’t really get into it, is I’m calling it clip spamming.It, this isn’t, it’s not like [00:33:00] a- term. But again, Devin Nash and I gotta start watching more of his videos ‘cause I just, as I was doing this research, I realized, like, all the best sources were coming from him. We, and I’d seen, like, two of his videos already. He, he totally changed the way, like, a week ago in how I view YouTube discovery in, in his breakdown of how- Rightpeople, including Clevver Killer and Caleb Hamer are manufacturing virality by spamming clips of their work on platforms like YouTube, and well, not, not exactly them, I should say. You can see the video. Again, I link to it in the show notes. It’s called Exposing the New Manufactured Viral Content Industry.The video explains how basically a, a paid clipping economy is artificially hijacking short-form algorithms on YouTube and TikTok and Instagram and X to manufacture viral influencers and promote the streaming platform Kick rather than just like surface- Well, Kick’s, Kick’sMalcolm Collins: a great platform.Simone Collins: I know.Well, but and this is... And, and, and just, you know, like, a spoiler alert, Kick is just doing... This is, this is how Kick is growing. They’re not necessarily [00:34:00] asking Caleb Hamer like, “Hey, dude, are you cool with this?” They’re just, they’re just taking these, these clips, and, like, Caleb Hamer’s benefiting. But I think they sort of spot, like, who has the potential, and they use those as almost like non-consensual endorsers of Kick that drive people to the platform.Is Caleb Hamer- So here’s how it works ... onMalcolm Collins: Kick?Simone Collins: I guess. But you watch Caleb Hamer ... how it works is-Malcolm Collins: Why do you watch Caleb Hamer, Simone? Because you watched him before he became political.Simone Collins: He’s fun. Yeah. I... You, you bu- you build a parasocial relationship with him. You feel better about your own life and your own mistakes when you see just how- His stuffMalcolm Collins: just makes me feel terrible about the US economy.I’m like, “Jesus Christ- Yes ... I don’t wanna pay taxes.” Yes, butSimone Collins: it- After watching him, I just- I’m the one who manages our finances, and, like, I stress out about like, “Oh, have we saved enough? Am I budgeting well?” And then I, I see how these other people spend their money, and I feel a lot better about it. And I think a lot of people watch for that.You know, it’s just like, “Well, you know, f- inflation’s bad. Prices are going up, but, like, at least I’m not this idiot who bought, [00:35:00] like, a, a, a car with a terrible loan,” you know, that kind of thing. So but here’s how the clipping system works. There are these campaigns that are run inside large Discord servers.We’re talking 20 to 30,000 people or invite-only groups where each campaign corresponds with one streamer or podcaster or brand. Okay. And then the clippers who are in, in, like the people in these Discord servers, they will pull on- 30 to 120-second segments from the long-form streams. ‘Cause, you know, like a Caleb Hamer financial audit is, like, w- an hour plus, and their streams are even longer.And then they’ll upload them as shorts to TikTok and Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts and sometimes X under their own accounts. So these are, like, widely dispersed accounts not affiliated with anyone else, just like some random person in Pakistan. And then they in turn- through this Discord server community are paid on a flat CPM basis around 10 to 40 [00:36:00] cents, I think per, per thousand views.But around $2 to $3 or specific bounties, like $3,000 per million views for particular clips. And then payment happens in the USDT. And there’s often, like, a minimum they have to reach in terms of views before they reach that threshold. Like, maybe they have to have 100,000 total views across all clipper’s uploads.And then that incentivizes people to just spam, like, 50 to 100 views a- across... Or sorry 50 to 100 clips across multiple accounts. And keep in mind he, he’s hanging out in the Discord servers to try to figure this out. Like, he spent, like, two plus weeks- Yeah ... just watching what was happening here.Super fascinating. And then so become the CPM is on top of the platform’s own ad revenue. This can be really decent money for clippers in very low income countries, which as we’ve, we wanna cover this. Not Altus Huxley sent us this graph of, like, the, the, the internet users of today and, like, so much of the people on the internet are just-Malcolm Collins: [00:37:00] Brazil’s a huge chunk.We need to go- Brazil ... at least, like, Brazil has- India ... like, half the internet users of the US.Simone Collins: Yeah, and we just don’t realize. Th- you know, we think, you just think, like, “Oh, like, it, it’s mostly, like, US and Europeans or whatever,” ‘cause, like, what we see is English. But no, there’s, like, it’s just, like, people in Brazil and Pakistan too.And w- like, hi guys too. I mean, like, a lot of the people watching Base Camp are in Brazil, and we love you guys. But, like, we just didn’t realize how many of you were there. And so but anyway, like, if you’re in a third world country where wages are really low, not necessarily Brazil, but, like, Pakistan or something you can make a decent income from, from uploading these clips and making them, especially if you’re leveraging AI and being smart about it.And so this is, this is run in a professional, non-scammy way. There are visible campaign caps. Like, they’re like, “Okay, well, this is a, you know, $20,000 budget campaign.” Like, the, people are making careers out of this. And then Nash uses a case of a Clavicular clip to, to show the scale. In, in one recent month, Clavicular allegedly generated 2.2 billion views [00:38:00] from about 69,000 clips posted across platforms with 1,600 plus paid clippers involved.And averaged out, each clip might get around 31,700 views, but the real point is this volume. You’ve got tens of thousands of separate uploads all about the same person in 30 days. What is that gonna tell an algorithm, right? Like, the, the point is that algorithms are cert- The way he, he described it in his video was, like, you know, how is an algorithm gonna know?Like, if you’re designing an algorithm, like, well, if there’s some earthquake or, like, a volcano explodes, like- Mm ... how, how am I gonna make sure my algorithm picks that up? Well, if suddenly a bunch of separate people all at once start talking about, like, a volcano- I, I should probably like promote that thing, you know, surface that content more.Yeah. And so that’s what they’re gaming with these really simple, on, on the surface of it, clip campaigns, is they’re tricking the algorithms into thinking, “Oh my God, this [00:39:00] clavicular guy, like he must be the most relevant thing in the world.” So just the sheer volume tricks the recommendation system. And then algorithms that, that treat topics with tons of uploads and engagement as globally relevant are just- Mm-hmmum, it’s this is just so fascinating. So in terms of who’s funding it it, it’s, it’s just Kick. It’s not the streamers. A Kick-based streamer will openly state that they receive over six figures a month of clipping budget, and then Kick pays high bounties, like 20 to $30 CPMs on some clips. And then internal clipping...Sorry, internal Kick clipping program materials from invite-only servers some of which I don’t- We should like go on Kick?Malcolm Collins: Is this what you’re saying?Simone Collins: Yeah, I guess if you’re gonna start streaming, stream on Kick. They can require clippers to use a precise Kick logo overlay, and then incorrect placement can get the clip rejected and unpaid, which ensures that the, the brand of Kick is visible on every Short.So if you see a Short and you see a cl- a Kick [00:40:00] logo on it, you know you’re being subject to this new tactic. And Kick’s strategy, which is derived from its association with, with Stake, which is a crypto gambling platform, is to pay to flood short-form platforms with Kick-branded clips, and then they grow selected streamers to funnel some f- some fraction of the billions of impressions back to Kick.And Nash, who is, is also, you know, our, at least my like go-to now expert on like Twitch botting he contrasts this with Twitch’s older model of paying select streamers big contracts and expecting them to bring their own audience with now this, I think, much more smart and sophisticated- Such a better modelmethod. Yeah. I mean, yeah, where Kick is just spending its marketing budget directly on mass short-form distribution, and then streamers just benefit as a side effect, but streamers are clearly benefiting. So what’s happening though is that algorithms that heavily weight volume and multi-channel chatter are just completely getting one-shotted by the tactic.And so you’ve got this [00:41:00] sometimes even like really mediocre or unlikable personalities are suddenly dominating feeds and getting all this paid volume, while more interesting creators just aren’t- Getting discovered. And then you get basically this, this random weird, like, fake viral stuff. Like, what... I, I, I find, like, some of the talk about Claviculars to be interesting, but then when I go and I watch his actual content I’m like It’s so boring.Like, I find him interesting conceptually. Yeah, like, there’s no charisma, nothing’s happening. This is really boring. Now, Caleb Hammer’s different. I think he’s actually fun. He’s, he, he’s good at, at, like, actually trying to deliver, whereas I think fundamentally Claviculars is an introvert autist who’s discovered his special interest, and kinda just wants to be left alone, but i- you know, understands that he’s getting a lot of money and reinforcement and attention, and is feeding into it, like, while he can.But I just wanna be clear, like, this is not, this is not some concerted thing. Like, this isn’t just a story of, like, [00:42:00] ah, like, all the celebrities you thought were real were manufactured. I mean, we all kinda knew that. Like, the Kardashians manufactured themselves, and, like, all the music labels are, they’re faking it.But I didn’t know how bad it was, but that’s still a thing. But then it’s also not like, oh, well all Twitch streamers are just faking it by viewbotting. ‘Cause no, often it’s their agencies- Yeah ... without even telling them just trying to get more of their cut. And then the, the streamers don’t even know it, and Asmongold has talked about this.Like, it’s not necessarily... And even sometimes it’s fans who are, like, a big stan of some creator, even if they’re really small, and they’re like, “Well, I wanna make them look bigger,” so then they’re going off and they’re buying bots. So, like, people are... So s- this isn’t even content creators. So sometimes it’s the agency, sometimes it’s fans, sometimes it’s a music label.Sometimes- Thank you for, ifMalcolm Collins: you’re a fan of us, how risky it is to bot a show. Don’t. Don’t. Because you can get the entire thing knocked down. Don’t.Simone Collins: Yeah, don’t, don’t bot us. But sometimes it’s a platform. Sometimes it’s, like, Kick doing it, right? Like,Malcolm Collins: I’m up to running a bot experiment on Kick or Rumble or something, but not here.Simone Collins: Not, not here. Yeah, don’t. No. [00:43:00] Please don’t. Yeah. No, no. Again, we weren’t above it for Book Wandering, but... And again, books, right? So just... But, but what I thought I was gonna come away with this, like, my moral of the story was like, well, if you see, you know, a YouTube video that has a lot of views and you’re trying to decide whether or not it’s worth watching, like, actually look at the comments and see if they’re...But then that doesn’t even work. So I don’t know. Like, ‘cause I, I do. I, I fall for it. I will look when I, like, go through my YouTube feed and my recommended stuff, like, I will look at how many views something has, and if it has a lot of views I’m gonna be more likely to choose it. And now I’m, I know I can’t do that, and I don’t know.Like, what, what would, what do you do in light of this information to try to, to not be subject to that level of manipulation, and to not get caught in, in the deader than I knew internet? What do IMalcolm Collins: do? Huh. Well, I think watch content that’s actually entertaining Sure ... this is the, no, no, no, no, no, no, no Yeah This matters more than you [00:44:00] think, right?Like- Yeah ... I think discount content that when you go to it and you’re like, “I’ve heard X person is really big,” and they have a- Yeah ... reputation for being really big. Yeah. And then I go to their channel and I’m just like- It’s not ... this is kind of boring. Who’s- Yeah ... watching this?Simone Collins: Yeah, so basically even if people are talking about someone- I don’t wanna cash shade.I don’t, because- Even if people say they’re watching it, like that doesn’t... You have, yeah, use your own judgment. You know? So, so an exampleMalcolm Collins: of this, right? Okay ... I don’t wanna cash shade ‘cause, like, Smug Alana is like on team or whatever. Do you see that Smug Alana in the latest you know, Smug Alana the Vtuber, right?The- Yeah ... fox girl conservative Vtuber. Mm-hmm. So the latest li- what was it she went ahead stream, Yeah ... about Hasan crashing out Commentating onSimone Collins: Hasan crashing out. Yeah. That, it was fun to see them together. The, the stream she went on. Yeah,Malcolm Collins: yeah, yeah. Yeah. But like, I go, I... While I like her politics and everything and some of her stuff, the reality is is she’s just not that entertaining, right?And if I contrast- No one’s entertaining with bleep fluid ... her [00:45:00] views with how entertaining she is, I’m like- Yeah ... “Oh, this is a little sus.” And I think that I- Mm ... need to be more open to in my head calling out when I’m like, “Who is watching this?” W- w- like w- w- what’s the entertainment value of this for people?Like at the very least with Nick Fuentes I’m like, I get the entertainment value. And I, it does seem- Mm ... that he’s heavily bodied, but specifically ‘cause he’s, like, cruel to his fans.Speaker 5: Like be- living the dream, three daughters. What dream? You’re the gayest guy ever.You’re gayer than gay guys. That’s crazy.Malcolm Collins: And I understand that, like, there’s the thing where there’s, like, the Hasan fans who are, like, women who like men demeaning them, and there’s the Nick Fuentes fans who are guys who like to be demeaned by people they look up to.I don’t, it’s like not my thing.Simone Collins: Speaking of S- Smug Alana the Vtuber like the automated VTuber rig creation [00:46:00] system that you’re creating for Reality Fabricator, rfab.ai, you should try it out. Malcolm’s building really cool stuff there. It should be working by the time this goes up ...Speaker 9: So it’s partially working right now. Right now it will work for generating the VTube rig, generating all the components for the VTube rig, exporting it in a file format that you can export to a VTube rigging platform, but you’re going to have to manage the deformations yourself. , Or I’m trying to automate that step right now.But, , yeah, I mean, you can get the basics with what we have right now.Simone Collins: well, I wanted to ask ‘cause, like, when when Smug Alana on that collab tried to bow she just like, just her, just her, her titties bounced.Is... Are you eventually gonna set up a rig that can do, like, full body tracking?Malcolm Collins: Yeah, I’ll do titty bouncing. I just don’t have it in for visual- No, notSimone Collins: titty bouncing. I just mean, like she wanted to bow- Oh, I will have the bounciest- ... but she couldn’t ... tittiesMalcolm Collins: you have ever seen Well, obviously it’s... Yeah You don’t even understand.I know. My titties- oh ... will be bouncing out of control with this [00:47:00] rig. Oh, I hope so. They will be the most luscious, the titty simulations you’ve everSimone Collins: seen. She... Titties, no. Look, they should never be luscious. That makes them sound like they’re hairy. You want- Luscious, you hear hairy? Yeah. You want buoyant titties.Well, not buoyant. That sounds- Buoyant? IMalcolm Collins: now think of, like, a woman swimming and her titties are, like, bobbing up in front ofSimone Collins: her. Well, they do. There’s this scene in the original Austin Powers movie where there’s, like, a woman in a hot tub, and I... Like, her titties do seem to float in this, like, one scene, and I just...Something, like, that’s, that scene sits with me where it’s like, do breasts float? And then they would- Well, they have a lot of fatMalcolm Collins: tissue in them, so they probably would They do, so theySimone Collins: would float, yeah, especially if you have, like, a jacuzzi bubbles. But, like, I just remember being like, “Huh.” Your breasts aren’t big enough toMalcolm Collins: have experiencedSimone Collins: this They really aren’t.My poor, my poor English muffins. So I’m, I’m gonna be honest.Malcolm Collins: I would find that disgusting. Th- like, there, I, I, there are guys who are confused by this. For me, like, the big... I, I find it so gross, so [00:48:00] disgusting.Simone Collins: Well, it’s for someone, and I hope that you build into that. But what my, my larger question is, clearly with VTuber rigs, titty bouncing is not something that hasn’t been solved.It, it exists. However, she clearly wanted to do a full body gesture and was prevented from doing that. Will you make it possible to, like, bow and dance eventually with that? No, that will take tooMalcolm Collins: much time.Simone Collins: Take...Malcolm Collins: Okay, fine. At least for the first version. Never mind.Simone Collins: A girl can dream.Malcolm Collins: You’ve gotta keep in mind what I would have to rig.I mean, I will eventually do this, but right now I’m just focused on the basics, okay? Okay. What we will have by the time this video goes live is if you handle the rigging yourself, the image output is all gonna be fine. Now, what I’m working on now is getting the auto-rigging set up as well.Simone Collins: Nice.And just for context... God, yeah, ‘cause no, some of our VTubers are people who use animated anime avatars of themselves, or animated characters. One is, like, an [00:49:00] orange, I think. Like, the biggest Twitch streamer, right, is just an orange. A potato A pota- a potato? Is thatMalcolm Collins: what he was? Yeah, Angry Orange was like an early YouTube thing which is not popular anymore and everyone- Oh, you’re right.No, he...Simone Collins: Okay, fine. He’s... He... What? He’s a thing. He’s a mo- But anyway, where you use an animated thing. Y- you, you... And, and, like, basically there’s software that tracks your face and then uses that to, like, puppet the, the illustrated puppet. And so typically what people do well, have done up to this point is you have to commission an artist to make every small part, the eyes, the nose, the ears, the different variations, and then you upload it to the software, and then the software is what you use to record your, your videos and streams and interviews, et cetera.What Malcolm is doing with Reality Fabricator is making it possible to submit a prompt to AI to create your own character, which you can then upload to that software and animate in all of your videos and interviews and streams without having to commission art from someone. And even if you have an existing VTuber setup, you can use AI to generate outfits or [00:50:00] accessories that you may not have had to save you time, to, to, to speed up turnaround.And it’s really cool. And, like, hearing him go through the creative process has been humbling and impressive. Bruno’s working on this too. It’s really cool stuff.Malcolm Collins: Yeah, let’s see. I didn’t take down the site ‘cause I was doing an update right now. Yeah, it’s working. Great. Okay.Simone Collins: Anyway that’s cool stuff, but okay.I, yeah, I agree with you. And you know what? I think that, like, younger people and younger generations are already really hip to this. Something I’ve noticed with our six-year-old son, Octavian, is w- some, like... We were t- we were trying to find videos on YouTube explaining the, the, the feather dongle on quails’ heads, that little...It’s actually six feathers, at least on the California quail. But what’s going on over here, you know? Ba-doo-doo-doo. And so we were trying to figure out, like, why those feathers are there. There’s not really a good explanation. But we found all these videos about quails, and a bunch of them were AI slop.And I thought well, maybe kids wouldn’t really know when a video is AI, like, [00:51:00] generated. It, like, it’s obviously, like, a thing that I’ve always known. Yeah. But not bad quality. Like, they honestly weren’t terrible. It gave the information. They were better than many human-created videos, but it was still AI slop.And Octavian 100% with that, 100% accuracy was like, “Oh, this was made by AI.” And yeah. This is why it’s good to engage them with AI at a young age. Actually, yes and... ‘Cause he talks with AI all the time. Yesterday he was just talking with ChatGPT all night. It was really funny. ChatGPT is so sycophantic though.So yeah. Anyway I, I do think the younger generations are going to become much more sophisticated about this, and not only will they know when something is AI slop, and do they already but I think they’re gonna know, like, “Okay, this was served to me algorithmically, but it, it’s fake because it’s- It’s not hitting.And hopefully over time-Malcolm Collins: Yeah, things that don’t hit are fake.Simone Collins: Yeah. Yeah, like if you’re not feeling it... And I, but this is important ‘cause I think what’s happening with a lot [00:52:00] of people is they’re like, well, and ‘cause I do this all the time, like it’s not hitting with me, but I guess it’s still true or the zeitgeist or important because it has so many views.Mm-hmm. Or because it keeps getting served to me. Like, it just keeps showing up in my algo when I scroll. And one, this is just another argument, another point in favor of not scroll-based content. Like, if you are, if you are consuming content based on a feed, stop. You should be searching proactively for stuff that you like, and then leaning into channels and creators that clearly do their homework and are good and real and trying.And I, I... By real, I don’t mean that doesn’t use AI, whatever, but like, just per your judgment. But yeah. I don’t know. Anyway, it’s, it’s, there’s gonna be a lot of people- You did a greatMalcolm Collins: job by the way- Research ... researching today’s interview episode. Like, I didn’t know- Oh ... any of this. This is fantastic.It changed my view on a lot of things. I’m gonna be thinking about it for a long time. It’s, yeah. And that’s what I come to- It’s sobering ... [00:53:00] conversations with you for.Simone Collins: Oh. And you know what I need? Well, this is normally a you thing- I do need more- ...Malcolm Collins: but I wanted you to work on the VTuberSimone Collins: rigs, so.Malcolm Collins: I need a, a, a shorter sword that I can flail around on stream better.Simone Collins: Oh, ‘cause this is too large for your- Too, yeah ... little square- So I need something I can really- ... and can’t fit it in ... hit our kidsMalcolm Collins: with, if you know what I mean. Well, what if youSimone Collins: like, you need you need a butterfly knife and you need to learn... Oh, God, you’re gonna f*****g- You could watch me- You’re gonna cut your nose off.Sh- sh- Yeah, you gotta drink the whole- WatchMalcolm Collins: all my fingers. Like, by the end of this stream- ... I got no fingers left.Simone Collins: Your face is all bloody. Yeah, that’s sound’s gonna go. And then of course Toasty’s gonna get hit. That’d actually be like a greatMalcolm Collins: AI thing to have in the background. Of a guy, like, playing with a knife and, like, as the stream goes on, fingers start missing.JustSimone Collins: his face gets increasingly cut. Yeah. Honestly, though, I feel like a lot of streamers are just... I mean, watch a clavicular stream, right? At the end he’s hospitalized and yeah, he’s he’s dis- his face is descending ‘cause he, you know, gets all cut up. But it’s, God, it’s just so strange. All this is just so strange.We’re being [00:54:00] manipulated and puppeted, but there is no they. There is no man, you know, like Illuminati doing this. It is all these unique systems that are just performing in alignment with incentives. Oh, shoot. IMalcolm Collins: just realized my classmates who I thought had, like, immediately started bigger Substacks and, like, YouTube channels than us, were they botting?‘Cause I’ve watched some of their stuff and I’m like, it’s not very good. Colette- Is it I- ... is good.Simone Collins: No, Colette, no. Colette, I know. Like, one- It’s, it’s more like you, like- ... it, it may not hit with us, but per, no, per the, the internet revelation that we had thanks to not Aldous Huxley We know that the internet is, to a great extent, less educated third-worlders.Not to... Like, okay- But no- Not to be mean ... and KhalidMalcolm Collins: aims for that, but I’m talking about my other classmates who are not. They’re educated people who are- Oh, right, who are trying toSimone Collins: sell highbrow. Yeah, Khalid, Khalid caters to the everyman. The, the not even developed country everyman, just the everyman. Yeahand he’s great, and we [00:55:00] love him, and he’s very smart, and he, he’s amazing. We- he’s great. But yeah, the ones who are like, “I’m selling highbrow content. I’m selling interviews with founders.” IMalcolm Collins: got Mark Cuban on, on my stream. It’s like, who f*****g cares what Mark Cuban- ... thinks in 2026, man? Grow up.For real.But- I bet it’s all botted, now that I think about it. I hadn’t thought about it- Hmm ... because I hadn’t... When I saw my family member bot so callously, I was like, “You don’t think anybody f*****g exists.” You know,Simone Collins: I, I don’t know. Because they, they were also successful in generating viral content in the past. Like actual...Well, I don’t know. Let’s see. ‘Cause it was 2009 when, when you first saw viewbotting on YouTube. I’m gonna have to look at the timelines. I, I don’t know. Some stuff is really viral. Some stuff is not. I don’t, I don’t, I don’t... And I’m just having such a crisis of... but anyway, this episode is definitely dedicated to Devin Nash, who’s just...I, I, I have a lot of viewing to do. ‘Cause he, he’s done a lot of, like, per his [00:56:00] unique position as someone making money in this ecosystem- Yeah ... and understanding, like, the, the unit e- Like ‘cause Asmongold understands it’s happening, but he has no interest personally in, like, understanding the unit economics, going into Discord servers, like, watching, watching people work.Like, that’s, that’s a deep level. I just wanna explore this more, but I, yeah, I’m just... I, I’m never gonna look at the internet the same way again. ‘Cause I thought dead internet theory was mostly about content. Mm-hmm. And n- now I realize it is it is literally, it is engagement, it is restacks, it is image downloads.Like, it’s crazy. Yeah. But I love you very much.Malcolm Collins: I love you too. Yeah. You are an absolute princess, and I I guess I’ll go down and talk with Steve and Minkit right after this.Simone Collins: Mm-hmm. Yeah, and work out, work out some dinner plans, and I will try to wrangle the younglings, maybe shovel some of [00:57:00] the sand out of our house.That’s the new thing. Are you going toMalcolm Collins: kill even the younglings? Simone going after the video. It’s, like, her lightsaber, like in that scene with Anakin. The younglings.Simone Collins: TheyMalcolm Collins: have crossed everySimone Collins: straw. Oh, they cr- they c- they crossed every straw Yes, they did. They did. They crossed the squad mission. No, I’m not goodMalcolm Collins: with the brain thing.This is like one of my failure zones of scenarios. Ooh. ISimone Collins: mean, I don’t know if I’m gonna be able to get it, ‘cause Tex is... Look, he’s like totally crashed out on my,Malcolm Collins: Oh, you can’t even move. Of course. ISimone Collins: can’t. I’m, I’m immobilized based on his... He’s just all... I can’t, I can’t... There. This is red sheet. I love you, Shawn.Yeah. I love you too. I’m just trying to go to bed earlyMalcolm Collins: tonight. You should try to go to bed early tonight.Simone Collins: God, I want to. I’ve had one long pounding headache all, all day that it just- Bye. Bye.Malcolm Collins: Give us money for her headache. Subscribe to Patreon or something. SubscribeSimone Collins: to take away my [00:58:00] headache. But actually, like, our subscribers are awesome.Thank you so much for those of you who do. Yeah, no,Malcolm Collins: for the ones who are subscribed, like, that’s really cool. Like, it makes it feel like you know, when people don’t like us on YouTube or whatever, it’s like, well, you know, at least some people like us. Like, at least we have someSimone Collins: friends. It’s more... We, we get so much of our episode content from them.And they’re smart- We do ... and friends, and like I actually- So we justMalcolm Collins: farm you for everything: content, money. We’re the worst ...Simone Collins: our fu- our future children’s spouse. It like- Yeah ... it’s bad.Malcolm Collins: It’s bad. Anyway, bye. Bye. For the Leaflet stream on Monday Me too. Two days, two days. Have you, have you watched any of my long streams with her? I’ve only seen clips. No,Simone Collins: I’ve... I have, my, my view, my view list is so freaking long. I- You don’t haveMalcolm Collins: time for 10-hour Crash Out streams?Simone Collins: Mm. They makeMalcolm Collins: me wanna do Twitch streaming, if I’m gonna be honest.Yeah. I’ve learned I’m really good at it. Like, I, I’m gonna be... I’ve, like, watched other Twitch streamers. I’m astonishingly good at it, [00:59:00] I’m tellingSimone Collins: you. Well, guess what? You- you’re gonna, you’re gonna discover quickly why maybe you’re not gonna wanna do that, but we’ll go into it, so I guess I might as well just start.Ooh. It’s all fake.Speaker 11: Okay, so you’ve got a store that you made here- Yeah ... with, like, little huts behind it and a- Yeah ... okay. This, this is the, this, that, that is the person bought spot, and that is the person buy place, too. And that, that is the, that is the, that is the place where you can get furniture. And do you see the carpet?Speaker 12: That is the carpet place. And you see a fridge? That is where all of the foods are. And you see above the fridge? That is the toy aisle. And right there- Oh, that’s the toy aisle? And, and right there is the hair salon. Oh, that’s the hair salon right there? The- And this is like, and this is my AI buying place right there.So- That is the AI buying place ... oh, this is where you get AI? Yeah, to buy. And what would you do with the AI that you bought? Oh, um, I’m gonna make it help me do stuff, to buy. [01:00:00] And this is the- Wait, so what is over here, Octavian? Oh, that is another home that someone who rented this store. Okay, so I wanna This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit basedcamppodcast.substack.com/subscribe

In this Based Camp episode, Malcolm and Simone Collins break down the dramatic decline of The Daily Wire — from massive layoffs (25-50% staff cuts), an 85% drop in Ben Shapiro’s YouTube views, and high-profile splits with Candace Owens, Brett Cooper, and others — to financial flops like the $10M Pendragon fantasy series nobody asked for.They explore Shapiro’s mean-girl gatekeeping, failed attempts to control the conservative movement, allegations of heavy viewbotting, outdated content strategies, and why the old-guard “Boomer conservative” model is collapsing while newer, more vital, fun, and adaptive voices (including Based Camp) are rising.Show Notes* Around May 1st, the Daily Wire laid off around 13% of their staff* At least according to a company spokesperson* Candace Owens claims that 50% were laid off* And LayoffHedge (a third-party tracker) estimates approximately 100 jobs cut in 2026 (that is 50% of the approximately 200 remaining staff)* This is their second round of layoffs, following a 25% staff cut in April 2025* A year in which they also shut down their Bentkey children’s entertainment division* So their team is down over 60%* These changes coincide with a 85% drop in Ben Shapiro’s YouTube viewership* 2023: He had over 170 million monthly views* Now: 18-28 million monthly views* Plus Ben Shapiro and Team Daily Wire is very publicly splitting from major right-wing influencers—after a long history of sanctimonious gatekeeping* And this is in addition to insanely stupid financial indulgences made by the Daily Wire, like dumping $10M on a fantasy series nobody asked forLet’s look at their rise and fall and what it indicates about the right.The Rise of Ben Shapiro and the Daily WireBen Shapiro’s rise began in the early 2000s as a teenage author and columnist, accelerating in the 2010s through campus debates, books, and podcasts.Shapiro published his first book, Brainwashed, at age 17 in 2004 while at UCLA, followed by columns and radio appearances.His national breakout came around 2012-2016 via viral campus speeches (”facts don’t care about your feelings”), resigning from Breitbart in 2016 amid Trump tensions, and The Ben Shapiro Show podcast launch. By 2018, it was syndicated on over 200 stations, peaking his influence during 2016-2020 political polarization.The Daily Wire launched on June 29, 2015, co-founded by Shapiro and Jeremy Boreing with seed funding from the Wilks brothers, building on Shapiro’s momentum post-Breitbart. The Ben Shapiro Show debuted as its flagship in September 2015.* The Daily Wire perfected Facebook‑era virality with clicky headlines and “SJW owned” debate clips, becoming one of the most‑linked news domains on the platform and a powerhouse during the Trump and early COVID years.The company hit its peak in late 2023, driven by Shapiro’s YouTube reaching ~170 million monthly views amid Israel-Hamas coverage, with revenue claims over $100 million annually by 2022. Expansion included Nashville HQ (2020), DailyWire+ (2022), and Bentkey (2023).The Layoffs* Most of the layoffs were around the Daily Wire’s Nashville, TN headquarters (and particularly within the production office)The YouTube and Facebook DropsFacebook* Facebook’s 2024 feed changes de‑ranked news and gutted The Daily Wire’s traffic, collapsing the distribution engine that had made them look unbeatable in the mid‑2010s.YouTube* Independent YouTube analytics (VidIQ and others) show Ben Shapiro’s channel views are down roughly 70–85% from their late‑2023 peak* Flagship channels sometimes have normal slumps, but online commentators like Philip DeFranco have noted this change in traffic is closer to a collapse* Social Blade data shows The Daily Wire’s YouTube subscriber base has plateaued or shrunk in 15 of the last 16 months since early 2025.* Website traffic by March 2026 was about half of what it had been a year earlier, and Shapiro has admitted that revenue is down from 2024 even while insisting cash flow remains strong relative to critics’ expectations.The SplitsDirectBrett Cooper* Voluntarily left The Daily Wire on December 10, 2024Candace Owens* Left in March 2024* CEO Jeremy Boreing announced the end of their partnership, stating it was mutual but amid public feuds like Owens’ “Christ is King” posts and defense of Kanye West’s antisemitic remarks. Shapiro challenged her to quit if unhappy, while Owens called herself “finally free” and accused Shapiro of ad hominem attacks. She continued criticizing Israel and the ADL post-exit.* Owens weaponized receipts, text messages, and live‑stream theatrics to frame Shapiro as hypocritical and captured by Israeli donors, and then rode the Charlie Kirk assassination discourse into a giant audience surge while undermining Shapiro’s legitimacy.More IdeologicalThe Daily Wire fell out of step with the dissident right and younger MAGA, especially re: stanning IsraelNick Fuentes* In his interview with Tucker Carlson, Nick Fuentes talks about how Ben Shapiro gatekept and belittled him early in his career, even when he was essentially a nobody* Fuentes describes first publicly criticizing Shapiro and The Daily Wire over Israel, then getting labeled an antisemite:* “I tweeted to Ben Shapiro. I said, ‘You know, I’ve never seen anything on the Daily Wire that’s actually critical of Israel.’ And he quote tweets me… And he says to accuse a Jew of dual loyalty is the shest sign of anti-semitism.”* “He immediately called you an anti-semite.” (Tucker) – “Mhm. So I’m driving to Christmas Eve mass with my family and I see on Twitter the notification comes up. Ben Shapiro quote tweets me calling me an anti-semite.”* “And then… I said something like, ‘If you’re China first, you should live in China. If you’re Mexico first, you should live in Mexico. If you’re Israel first, maybe you should go live in Israel.’ And again, he quote tweets me and says, ‘You’re an anti-semite’ that same night.”* Fuentes frames this as Shapiro deciding early on to shut him down inside the conservative movement:* “It turned out that Cassie Dylan, she had texted him earlier and she wanted him to take me under his wing… And he goes, ‘I’ll take a look.’ And so, I guess the two of them were kind of like grooming me in a sense. They wanted me to go maybe and be a Daily Wire [guy] or maybe looking me as a potential conservative activist or influencer. And so they started paying attention to me.”* “And the more critical of Israel I was, I started to get this really intense push back from the both of them and from a lot of the people at Daily Wire.”* “For them, it was very easy that if they detected that a promising young guy was going to become anti-Israel in the conservative movement, they could crush that person easily and grind them under the heel. So, they sort of were alerted, oh, there’s a precocious young guy that isn’t on board with Israel. We’ll keep an eye on him and if he gets too vocal or popular, we’ll cut him down. We’ll crush him.”* “Basically from then on, it was just this escalating series of blacklisting, censorship, hit pieces, rumors to try to ostracize me from the movement.”* Fuentes links Shapiro/Daily Wire and their circle to efforts to isolate him and get him fired:* “First they would try to dissuade me from asking questions… they would say, ‘Well, you know, there’s a really good answer for that, but you’re asking it in the wrong way… you’re asking it in an anti-semitic way.’”* “And eventually they said, ‘You know what? we’re not going to talk to you anymore.’ And these were my friends… All of them one day said, ‘You’re done. We’re blocking you. We’re never going to speak to you again. We’re never going to have you on our show.’”* “At this time I was on RSBN… And they escalated their attacks. Cassie Dylan would call my boss… every day for weeks, saying, ‘You’ll never believe what Nick said on his show tonight. It’s so racist. It’s so bad. You got to take him off the air. It’s going to make you look bad.’”* “And I would then get word from my boss… ‘I don’t know what has gotten into Cassie. I thought you guys were friends, but she is calling me every day hysterically demanding that I fire you.’”* On a clip that ended up at Media Matters: “And so that clip appears on Media Matters… and ultimately then they fired me… But the pressure in this scenario came exclusively from the Daily Wire.”* “My show got maybe a hundred live viewers every night… So the Media Matters was not on to me. They were put onto me by people in the right that wanted me cancelled.* Later, Fuentes explicitly ties Shapiro’s attacks to his own radicalization and turn against the conservative establishment:* “Looking back with that 2020 hindsight, I mean, Ben Shapiro seems like a big part of your political evolution. You went from a fan acolyte to an opponent and then just pivoted against everything that he believes.” (Tucker) – “Yeah. It was because it was this new dialectic that Trump forced… So once you accept that, a lot of the way we’re doing things becomes impossible to support or justify. The contradiction becomes apparent.”* “I realized that the conservative movement was completely bankrupt in that way. Became very radical.”Tucker CarlsonShapiro blasted Carlson as an “intellectual coward” and “moral imbecile” in late 2025 for interviewing Nick Fuentes and echoing antisemitic tropes on Israel/Jewish influence. Carlson retaliated by slamming Shapiro’s “many attacks on Jesus,” immigration views, and pro-Israel stance as “bigotry and cruelty,” especially on Iran policy. Their rift deepened post-Trump’s 2024 reelection, splintering right-wing media.Megyn KellyKelly mocked Shapiro’s YouTube views as “like 500 views” apiece in May 2026, amid his audience decline. At Turning Point USA’s AmericaFest in December 2025, Shapiro called her a “charlatan” for platforming Candace Owens and Tucker Carlson; Kelly fired back, accusing Shapiro and Bari Weiss of fueling antisemitism by suppressing Israel criticism. She defended her neutrality and friendship with Owens, calling Shapiro “Israel first.”The Conservative Disney Boondoggle* Daily Wire co-founder Jeremy Boreing pulled Daily Wire into a fantasy series passion project* CEO Jeremy Boreing pursued a Breitbart‑style “politics is downstream of culture” vision, pouring money into kids’ content, feature films, and merch (anti‑woke razors, chocolates), aiming to build a conservative Hollywood in Nashville.* He is no longer CEO, he just wants to lead creative stuff* The Pendragon Cycle: Rise of the Merlin* Arthurian fantasy series* Here’s the preview: * The Daily Wire spent at least $10 million on “The Pendragon Cycle: Rise of the Merlin,” with a minimum of $1 million per episode for its seven-episode season.* This figure comes from statements by co-CEO and executive producer Jeremy Boreing, marking it as the company’s most ambitious production to date, filmed in Italy and Hungary.* The series is fully live and available now. It premiered on DailyWire+ on January 22, 2026, with all seven episodes released by early March 2026* It holds an IMDb rating of 7.9/10 from over 2,400 votes and a Rotten Tomatoes audience score around 86-88%, ranking moderately at #2,181 out of 35,000 shows.* Critics and some outlets like Esquire call it uneven or “terrible,” while fans and figures like Roger Avary praise it as engaging fantasy akin to Game of Thrones.* The $10M+ production aims to attract subscribers, but no reports confirm new viewer influx or revenue gains post-premiere in January 2026. Past Daily Wire revenue hit $100M+ in 2021-2022, but recent 2026 figures are unavailable.Why Ben Shapiro is Falling Off* Shift from in-demand inexpensive content to not-highly-demanded highly-produced content* Pendragon has become the symbol of Daily Wire drifting from relatively cheap, high‑margin podcasts/political commentary into expensive streaming‑style productions that may not have had the necessary audience.* Failure to evolve* As social platforms shifted toward short‑form and livestreaming, Shapiro’s show format, thumbnails, and pacing stayed static, while creators like Candace Owens aggressively embraced live, high‑drama streaming.* Brittle model* The company’s model—sign talent, build their audiences, and monetize under The Daily Wire umbrella—became structurally weak once it was trivial for stars to spin up independent monetized channels and leave.* Sanctamonious gatekeepingEpisode TranscriptSimone Collins: [00:00:00] Hello, Malcolm. I’m excited to be with you today because the Daily Wire is having a moment. Around May 1st they laid off around 13% of their staff, but this is just according to a company spokesperson. Candace Owens claims that 50% were laid off.And Layoff Hedge, which is a third-party tracker, estimates that approximately 100 jobs were cut in 2026, and that is about 50% of their approximately 200 remaining staff. Oh no, Candace Owens coming in with truth nukes here? I mean, well, she’s because people are leaking to her from the inside, and I think that’s entirely plausible.It’s not like she doesn’t have any remaining friends there. You know, she worked there for a while. Well, when youMalcolm Collins: look at their decline in viewership, that makes perfect sense. Yeah. Because you don’t wanna cut, when you’re in the middle of a decline like the Daily Wire is right now- Yeah ... you don’t wanna cut to your existing level because you’ve got to presume that it’s going to continue to decrease going forward.Exactly, soSimone Collins: maybe they’re kind of preemptive cuts. And keep in mind, this is, this is their second round of [00:01:00] layoffs. This, there was a 25% staff cut in April of 2025, so last year. And that was a year also in which they shut down their Benke Children’s Entertainment division. So their team is down over 60%, as far as anyone can tell.Yeah ... and the changes coincide, as you alluded, to an 85% drop in Ben Shapiro’s YouTube viewership. In 2023 at their height, he had over 170 million monthly views, and now that’s down to 18 to 28 million. And then also, Ben Shapiro and Team Daily Wire are very publicly splitting from very major right-wing influencers after a very long history of sanctimonious gatekeeping.They were like the Regina George of the conservative space, and now they’ve been deposed by some upstart redhead from Africa.Malcolm Collins: Who’s Regina George? What? Wait, sorry, you are quoting some girl book here that people are... Who’s Regina George? Who’s some upstart- She’s the queenSimone Collins: bee in Mean Girls From what?Oh, from Mean- Mean Girls ... Girls movie.Speaker 10: I love your skirt. Where did you get it? Thanks. [00:02:00] That is the ugliest effing skirt I’ve ever seen.Simone Collins: Yes Yes. Gee whiz, Malcolm. Whoa. Grow a pair of tits. You need to be more girly. And he also- I know, okay, yeah, our fans will love that, right? You know, hold on. Right. Hold on. Oh, God. Hold on. What? Brian Gnome is doing it, you can do it too, okay? This is in addition, I should say- Mmto the insanely stupid financial indulgences made by the Daily Wire, like dumping $10 million on a fantasy series that nobody asked for. And I will share more information about that one, ‘cause-Malcolm Collins: Oh, my God ... what? Yeah. But I wanna get into well, one, what’s kind of cool about where Ben Shapiro is right now, the Daily Wire is more broadly, is, like, they’re falling into, like, our territory in viewership.If they’re- ... he’s at, like, 14 million we’re growing pretty quickly, and we’re now, you know, regularly over, I wanna say, like, a half a million to, like, you know, 0.75 million a month- Yeah?Simone Collins: Oh ...Malcolm Collins: from our various sources. And so yeah, that’s [00:03:00] still, like, more than 10X lower than him. But, like, that’s a, that’s a measure...Like, we were 10X smaller a year and a half ago, right? You know, if we look at, like, where we’re going and where our movement is going, which I think is really telling. One of the things I wanna throw out there with the Daily Wire is... Because I think that this is really telling, and you’re gonna go into some of it, but Ben Shapiro really attempted to control the direction of the conservative movement.Yeah. And if you are an inside baseball player, like a conservative influencer person, right? Over the past however many years, you are aware of this. So, there’s the crazy emails that went out from Charlie Kirk, and it’s particularly crazy- See, I don’tSimone Collins: remember these. Can you bring me up to speed?Malcolm Collins: Yeah, so these leaked from Candace Owens, or somebody tied to Candace Owens, and they’re Charlie-Simone Collins: SheMalcolm Collins: hasSimone Collins: beenMalcolm Collins: such a great source of gossip.And, and look, this is the thing about Candace Owens leaks. Candace Owens, like, when she makes a mistake [00:04:00] with a leak or something like that, right? It’s- Makes a mistake ... a crazy, it’s a crazy way of misinterpreting it. Like, Charlie Kirk will say something like, “I feel like an alien somet-,” or like- Oh, yeah, and she’s like- Like, “I feel like an alien”“He’s an alien time traveler.” Yeah. Yeah. And, and, and then he’s like, “Yeah, and I feel like I came from the future.” And she’s like- Oh ... then she goes out to everyone and she goes, “See? He came from the future.” But we don’t actually have any evidence of her manipulating evidence. She has never- Huh ... faked a tweet.She’s never- No, she’s, I think she’s a verySimone Collins: earnest person. She’s just going a little schizo and that’s okay. EvenMalcolm Collins: when she gets evidence wrong, she’ll, like, pull out flight logs and be like, “These flight logs say X.” And they’re real flight logs. It’s not that, they’re, they’re not fake. Yeah. And then people go to it and they go, “They don’t say that at all.”So, so I’m just saying this so we can know that this is probably an accurate text exchange between her and Charlie Kirk, okay? Okay. So Charlie says, again like Ben has been going on like, “I’m gonna pick up the bloody microphone that Charlie dropped.” Really like he’s gonna carry on the movement for Charlie.And it’s [00:05:00] like, Ben, you were anti-Charlie Kirk behind the scenes. Yeah. So let’s get into this. He said “The Ben thing involves me more than he wants to admit. He knows Jon Snow is stronger as the dragons fly higher,” Candace says. “100%. It pisses him off,” Charlie says. “Two reasons. You’ve always been a threat to him, and because you’re smarter,” Candace says.“He... And he is sending his incestuous brother to go try and kill us,” Charlie says. Now, of course, he’s referencing Game of Thrones here. This is all an, an analogy.Simone Collins: Yes. No one, but... Wait, did she like interpret it?Malcolm Collins: Did you- Although people have, I... To me, this is clearly a Game of Thrones, but anyway, to continue. I, yeah,Simone Collins: I mean, oh, look, I c- it’s a little on the nose.I- And thenMalcolm Collins: Candace says, “And he views you as responsible for me.” And then Charlie says, “It’s worse. He views you as my slave 100%. ‘Control her’ is what he was trying to say to me when he called. You are bigger than Ben now. Walking into the White House yesterday, I realized that.” And then she says, “I know. He hates it.”And then he says, [00:06:00] “We just have to treat him like noise. He wants you to punch down to him. His respect amongst movement fighters is quite low.” So note here he’s saying that like actually like conservative influ- And I’ve seen this as well, and this is something we’re gonna be talking about in another episode we’ll be doing.But even if you look at like raw view count, nobody gives an F what Ben Shapiro has to say anymore, who’s like an on-the-ground operative in conservative politics at this point. In, in fact, he’s sort of seen among the operatives I know as a Boomer entertainer. Like that’s the only people who- That’s, that’s actually,Simone Collins: yeah, it’s one of the themes if you look, and it’s not just him.I think it’s, it’s some of his colleagues at the Daily Wire co-founders, et cetera, who are pushing in that direction. But it is definitely a, an older, more stagnant Boomer-ish, and by Boomer I just mean stagnant, unwilling to change with the times, not, not flexible mindset that is leading to the downfall.Well, hold on. Yeah. Would, would classically Abby be his incestuous [00:07:00] brother? Because he is, he’s... Hasn’t he like commented on that beauty competition? They are classicallyMalcolm Collins: Abby. I actually thought that episode was really fascinating. Yeah. So, just a quick aside Go check out this episode if you’re interested on Classically Abby, but he had this sister who he decided he was gonna promote for a period, and she was, like, all over YouTube when they were trying to promote her.Oh, yeah, I mean, like,Simone Collins: I don’t... You, you couldn’t go on YouTube without seeing her promoted content. I, I, I was shocked by it, yeah.Malcolm Collins: Yeah, it was, it was everywhere the amount of money they went into trying to astroturf her, and- Yeah ... it didn’t work remotely. Her channel has, has since shut down, but I mean, if you look at, like, her regular view counts you know, they were you know, at, at like a, a 2,000, 3,000 views per video.Like, like nowhere. And I actually think that his failure with her as well as his attempts to control people both represent his disconnect in understanding the modern conservative movement and how the movement is changing- Yes ... as well as his intense [00:08:00] arrogance in it. Because everybody’s like, it’s just the, like, what does he represent in attempting to control the conservative movement?They think of it as just, like, a Jewish influence, right? Like, just like a pro-Israel influence. Yeah. When the reality is, is that his attempt to control the movement was incredibly more damaging than just his Israel stuff. No, andSimone Collins: yeah, I think people are overly focusing on his pro-Israel stance being the element of d- his downfall when really it is a constellation of mean girl gatekeeping behavior that’s very petty.Which he didMalcolm Collins: to us, by the way. For people who don’t know, when we started rising in the conservative sphere, he, like, dedicated a huge part of an episode to us and basically sent people out to, like, harass us, ‘cause we got harassed heavily after this episode. Where he called us basically insufferable nerds.And I’m like, yeah, we’re taking your spot, bro. You used to be the right’s insufferable nerd, but now we’re coming in with actual nerd cred. Oh, yeah. No, and it’s, it’s funny [00:09:00] because he just sort of, like, learned a nerd, right? Like, he looked the- No, no, no. Well, I mean,Simone Collins: to, to be clear, like, his... He, he rose really early and, and it wasn’t al- it was never really nerd.It was, like, young wunderkind. Because keep in mind, he was 17 years old in 2004 when he published his first book, Brainwashed, while he was at UCLA. Really? Yeah. So, like, he, he was this, this early 2000s teenage author and columnist- whoever was like, “Whoa, who’s this young kid coming out of nowhere?” And th- that, that is, I think, where people get y- like, we get the, the nerd thing.Because, like, in general you don’t get, like, a little Doogie Howser, like, like, brilliant little, like, genius- No, he’s still Doogie Howser ... and it also helps that they’re nerdsMalcolm Collins: He’s like grown-up Doogie Howser in a kid’s body in everyone’s mind, right? Like- And that’s theSimone Collins: problem. It’s like you, you can’t maintain that branding successfully into your mid-40s.But yeah. It’s, so it’s, it’s that combined with a [00:10:00] model they made a couple key bets that were really poorly thought through. So they, they decided well, what we’re gonna do with The Daily Wire to a certain extent is bet on all these, like, rising stars or sign all these rising stars before it became super obvious that you can just go off on your own.So that’s when you get people like Candace Owens and Brett Cooper spinning off and just doing their own thing. Yeah. ‘Cause they’re not idiots, ‘cause they know they can do better and get more money and have more creative control and have better work-life balance if they just work on their own. And, and they can get the same number of views if not more, because they’re not being held down by this dead weight of The Daily Wire and their creative control.And then beyond that, a lot of things just changed in a much more technical, less interesting algorithmic way, where ways- Mm-hmm ... that they used to grow viral on Facebook and on YouTube shifted and they did not adapt with the time in their format, in their title cards. They didn’t shift to shorts the same way.They didn’t [00:11:00] go for the same sort of clickbaity viral content that got people a lot of views like Candace Owens. And, and to a lesser extent like Brett Cooper.Malcolm Collins: He’s... I mean, I, I would argue it’s more than that. Like, I want you to lay out your argument, ‘cause you did a bunch of research on this.Yeah. But I, I actually think the core problem is that his politics never evolved.Simone Collins: The, the- Well, that too. Yeah, it’s, it’s in general a failure to evolve i- is, is the problem. Yes. Right.Malcolm Collins: Like, like he didn’t need to join, Like if, if you look at the online culture war in the right, there are multiple interesting factions at play.He’s just not aligned with any of them. He represents, in many ways, the last of the old guard. And it’s because that was the faction that he rose appealing to. And so nobody- Mm ... likes that because the modern conservative movement is intrinsically a rebellious movement fighting against inter- entrenched institutions.But continue with your theory and then I’m gonna go with mine. So go.Simone Collins: Yeah. So just, again, ‘cause it seems like you weren’t [00:12:00] super aware of, like, the full background. His, he, he rose as, as a teen, as a kid. And then his, his national breakout happened around 2012 to 2016 via viral campus speeches, virally Ch- very Charlie Kirk- ish.There was one- Mm ... that was super, super famous. Like, “Facts don’t care about your feelings.” I’m sure you’ll, you’ll vaguely remember this. And then he worked with Breitbart for a while- Mm ... but then resigned in 2016 amid Trump tensions, and then he launched The Ben Sha- Hold on, he didn’t justMalcolm Collins: resign. I need to put some context on this.Yeah ... so Steve Bannon said that Ben Shapiro was pushed at, like he had to aggressively push Ben Shapiro out- Mm ... because as Ben Shapiro was within Breitbart- Ah ... he aggressively tried to control the organization- Mm-hmm ... and control the brand of conservative politics that it was pushing.Simone Collins: Which is very much his MO.Yeah ... and we’re gonna get into how he’s done that more in, in the case of another person later. We’re gonna get there, I promise. But yeah. So then he, he... And, and it’s funny that he, like, [00:13:00] didn’t learn from his, his own actions ‘cause he, you know, just as he left Breitbart and then went on to found the, the Brett...Sorry, I’m getting ahead of myself. The Brett Cooper Show. But no, he founded The Ben Shapiro Show. And then it was syndicated, and it was on 200 stations. And then it peaked at its influence from 2016 to 2020. And then- Uh-huh ... he launched The Daily Wire in, in- Oh ... 2015- Ah ... along with Jeremy Boreing.Ah. And he also got really, like, prominent seed funding- Ah ... like building on this post-Breitbart momentum. Just as like a little side, he should have learned that, oh- Ah ... y- having major talent, you know, as, as a larger company like Breitbart, you know, is kinda risky ‘cause that major talent, just like I did, can just, you know, bustle off and make their own money.But he didn’t learn from his own, you know, kind of predatory or maybe selfish behavior, whatever, which is fine. Like, I think it’s fine- Mm ... that he did that. Anyway one thing that’s really important to note here in terms of [00:14:00] why they saw- have seen a drop is they perfected this very Facebook era form of virality with super clicky headlines like, “SJW Owned,” and little debate clips.Again- Yeah ... very Charlie Kirk style. Mm. And he was one of the most linked news domains- Ah ... on Facebook, and a very big powerhouse- Ah ... during the Trump and early COVID years. Right. And then so the, the... Oh, my gosh. Okay, let me ... Give me one moment here. There. So in 2023 is really when all of it came to its beautiful height, which is really, I mean, ultimately quite recent, right?That’s, that’s three years ago- Mm-hmm ... when, when his YouTube reached 170 million. And this is especially during the October 7th sort of huge crash out in the media amid all the I- Israel-Hamas coverage. They, the Daily Wire that is, claimed revenues around 100 million annually by 2022. And then at that time, like well around the pandemic, they expanded in, with their Nashville Eight headquarters.They launched Daily [00:15:00] Wire Plus in 2022. They, they launched Ventky in 2023. That’s, that’s the kids production arm which they then subsequently shut down. And then basically things started falling off. So, the, the, the layoffs I already mentioned starting last year and then continuing this year.They really centered around their Nashville headquarters, which they, again, had founded in 2020, which seem to largely have just been kind of a stupid idea. I think they made a lot of hiring they never should have made. And in 2024, this is also key and not something discussed a lot, is Facebook changed its fees significantly, which de-ranked news and just gutted the Daily Wire’s traffic.It completely collapsed for them, Facebook as a key distribution engine that had made them look super unbeatable in the mid-2010s.Malcolm Collins: So that’s one- That’s fascinating Yeah And we never really distributed... So for people who know, we distribute on Rumble, Substack podcast networks and YouTube. But we never were able to successfully distribute on Facebook [00:16:00] because- Nevertheir their spot checks on video clips, which I include in a lot of episodes to be entertaining, are just way too restrictive for the show to operate. Yeah, yeah. I was actually thinking, should we look at syndication?Simone Collins: I don’t know. I, I feel like that’s too old school. So no. But I mean, you know, if someone knows about it and thinks we should, chime into the comments, because we read the comments.And thank you for everyone who comments, ‘cause- Yeah, if anyone knows how to do- ... you always have interesting things to say.Malcolm Collins: I, I’d even... If somebody was willing to take over that for us and it made some money, I’d be willing to do profit-sharing with them.Simone Collins: Yeah, totally. Yeah. I mean, we’re, we’re definitely of the, like- Look how Aplay does- We can’t do everythingMalcolm Collins: YouTube, by the waySimone Collins: Yeah. Anyway in terms of their YouTube channel, independent YouTube analytics like vidIQ and some others show that his sh- that is to say Ben Shapiro’s channel views are down 70 to 85% from their 2023 peak. So like it went way up, it was amazing, but it has gone way down. I mean, so it shouldMalcolm Collins: be- But, but you gotta keep in mind, Simone, that 70 to 80% reduction [00:17:00] is not even on the platform where they’ve been hit the hardest, which is Facebook.Yeah. So just across platforms he’s being destroyed.Simone Collins: 100%, yeah. It’s, and it’s not like at the same time YouTube has had some huge algorithm change. This is a, I think to a large extent mimetic, but also them not really changing their format with the times and title card with styles and stuff. But to be clear, it’s very common for flagship channels that get a lot of investment to have a slump.Like it, it, it happens. But online commentators like Philip De- DeFranco have noted, and like they know better about this stuff than I do, that this is not, this change of traffic is not a slump. This is a collapse. Like this, there’s no way to be like, “Oh, like it’s fine.” And to be clear the, the Daily Wire team is like, “Oh well, you know, revenue year over year has been up under my leadership.”That’s what Mr. Boring has been saying. But just ‘cause your revenue is up doesn’t mean you’re actually doing well. It could just mean that you’re like spending like massively wrong. But I mean, their layoffs indicate clearly that they’ve gotten over their skis on, on their spending. Yeah. Social media data shows- But another reallyMalcolm Collins: [00:18:00] interesting thing about his YouTube that I’m noticing by looking at videos- Yeahis the view count is wildly inconsistent. Oh,Simone Collins: hmm.Malcolm Collins: A, a lot of them get around like I, I wanna say to like 16K to like 50K views. Huh. And then occasionally, like every seventh one or something, gets half a million views.Simone Collins: Bizarre. Super bizarre.Malcolm Collins: Oh,Simone Collins: I seeMalcolm Collins: why.Simone Collins: Why? Wait, why?Malcolm Collins: It’s a different in format.The ones that do really well are the ones that have the word Ben on them and appear to be about an hour long. And- Okay ... the clips don’t do very well.Simone Collins: So yeah, they’re really bad at clips apparently.Speaker 12: So after we recorded this episode, we recorded an episode where we went deep into how botting works and how to spot when something is heavily botted. And, , unfortunately, Ben Shapiro’s channel has all the hallmarks of being almost entirely botted. , By what I mean by this is the videos that are getting the half a million views are the long-form [00:19:00] hour plus long videos.Whereas the videos that are getting the, you know, 12K views, those are the shorter, piffier videos in like the 10 to 15 minute range. , That doesn’t make a lot of sense when you consider how the YouTube algorithm works. , It should be the shorter videos getting more views and the longer videos getting fewer views., Like this is difficult for me to explain to someone who’s not a YouTube creator, , but basically it just makes absolutely no sense. It would never happen, at least not at this order of magnitude difference, which implies to me that he sees his long-form content as the important content, so he bots that, and he doesn’t bot the other content.Which also makes sense when I think about the number of people I’ve talked to who genuinely seem to have watched a Ben Shapiro anything in the last, I don’t know, six months. , I’m not talking about in the distant past. You know, people used to watch him. I used to watch him in the distant past. I’m talking recently., And so, , yeah, my current intuition is he might have a smaller [00:20:00] regular audience than we have at this point.To word this in another way, , it would make sense that his long-form podcast got orders of magnitude more views than his shorter form content, , if it was being hosted in other locations. So like if somebody said, “Oh, it gets orders of magnitude more than the YouTube content,” that makes sense. It doesn’t make sense that it’s getting orders of magnitude within the YouTube platform, because that would require some like alternate audience that just knows to tune in whenever the long-form thing is coming out, and YouTube doesn’t really work that way.In addition to that, even if it was the case that it was working in that way, right? That for some reason, YouTube just knew that this long-form content algo-wise did much better, their company would stop posting the short-form content within the same channel. Because if it was a, a short, okay, , that doesn’t affect the algo on the long.So sometimes people will post shorts on channels where shorts don’t do well. It doesn’t really matter. But if it’s like a 15-minute video, and they’re [00:21:00] often doing orders of magnitude higher multiple hour videos, okay? Or like hour and 30 minute videos, that, those short videos would be nuking the longer videos in the algo.Like you just wouldn’t have those in the same channel. You’d put them on a different channel, unless you were bottingSo a couple other notes here. , Just so people aren’t confused, when I say his short form content, I’m not talking about short form vertical videos. Those run on a separate algorithm and wouldn’t be hurting the long form videos. I’m talking like ten to fifteen minute videos, which would severely hurt the long form videos if they’re this underperforming.In addition, Candace Owens has said that the channel heavily bots. Given that she worked for them, she would likely know this. But I think the most important bit of evidence that we can look at here is let’s look at our video from yesterday. So this video has only been out for a day. It has thirteen thousand two hundred and twenty-nine views and nine hundred and thirty-four comments.Okay? Now let’s look, , at [00:22:00] Ben Shapiro’s video, , from, , the other day that presumably has two hundred thousand views. Okay, so, , more than twenty x what ours got around. All right, it has eight hundred and sixty comments, literally fewer comments. How is that conceivably possible?Speaker 23: That does not make sense.Speaker 17: Now here you might be saying, “Okay, Malcolm, maybe, maybe, but why don’t we look at some other metric to try to understand if he’s botting? Why don’t you look at the most liked comments on each of the videos to look at the variable interaction? Because maybe people just don’t comment on his videos, but they spend time liking the comments on his videos.”Okay, so we’ll go to our video. , Top not pinned comment, two hundred thirty-nine up votes. Next one hundred and eighty-six. Next one hundred and twenty-two. Next eighty-nine. Okay. Now let’s go to his top comments. First, two hundred and [00:23:00] nineteen. Hmm, that makes sense. Then ten, forty-two, eighty-six, forty-one, thirty-seven.Excuse me? Excuse me? Come on, guysSpeaker 18: Presumably looking at a video here that’s getting around 20X the number of views, but getting around 20X lower engagement? Explain that to meSpeaker 23: Does that make sense? Ladies and gentlemen, I am not making any sense. None of this makes sense.Speaker 24: So a Redditor had looked into this more so I’m putting the image on screen here. “Notice how the recently released Ben Shapiro episode has under a hundred thousand views., The Ben Shapiro from the day before has three hundred thousand views, and the Ben Shapiro episode from forty-eight hours before that has five hundred thousand views. Keep in mind, because I checked a few hours ago, , and this is what I found. Notice the pattern again. The video from today is at a hundred K views.The video from yesterday or thirty-six hours ago is now magically at five [00:24:00] hundred K views, and the video from forty-eight hours before, which was at five hundred and f- uh, sixty-four K views, “Has now magically only gained four K views in the twenty-four to thirty hours.”So basically, normally, so for people who aren’t aware, you get your biggest viewership right after the episode is released. That is not what Ben Shapiro is seeing. Right after the episode is released, he’s not getting that much a bump in views. It’s like the day after he gets a linear large jump in views up until the video hits five hundred thousand views, then it completely drops off,He also notes, and I’m not gonna go into how he calculated this because it’s boring, , you can look it up yourself, but that during the period of slower interaction, that beginning period, he’s getting one comment for every 30 views. During the period of quick growth that doesn’t seem to make a lot of sense, he’s getting one comment for every 500 viewsBut they pointed out something else that is very indicative of viewbotting for the Ben Shapiro episode videos, , is that they almost [00:25:00] always get around exactly 500,000 views. That’s not normal. Normally on like your bigger videos, you’re going to be going up, you know, 30% sometimes, down 30% sometimes, have an occasional b- episode bomb, have an occasional episode do really well.So if we go outside of the episodes that he appears to currently be populating to five days ago, uh, right? And we’ll just go through the final view counts on the Ben Shapiro episodes. 489,000 views, 478,000 views, 517,000 views, 517,000 views, 571,000 views, 582,000 views, 504,000 views, 612,000 views, 480,000 views, 529,000 views, 605,000 views, 541,000 views.Do you see how absolutely insane this is? This is very clearly viewbotted.Simone Collins: The social- And if you lookMalcolm Collins: at like, I mean, the title cards aren’t bad. Like, I’m looking at this. It looks a lot like one of our title cards.Like, here’s the most recent long [00:26:00] form episode. Here’s how China spies on the US. Hmm, wonder where they got that idea from. Are they watching our episode from, like, three days ago? No. I, I, I bet one of their writers is just, like, a fan of ours. Oh, no. ItSimone Collins: was, it was a major headline. The, the ... I think it was with the London Times, had been really pr- it, it, this, this this young woman who had been spied on I think it was Elsa- Yeah, butMalcolm Collins: we had to delay our episode, like, a week after we filmed it, so it’s weird that he-Simone Collins: Right.Well, they, they’re also produced and edited. It takes them a while to get stuff out too. Like, everyone needs time, so you know. I don’t know. But anyway, social- Right ... blade data shows Daily Wire’s YouTube su- subscriber base has plateaued or shrunk in 15 of the last 16 months, since early 2025. And their website traffic by March 2026 was about half of what it had been a year earlier.And Shapiro has admitted that revenue is down from 2024, even while insisting that cash flow remains strong relative to critics’ expectations. What is he getting cash flowMalcolm Collins: from?Simone Collins: Probably, like, Daily Wire [00:27:00] Plus subscriptions. Like, they’re trying to be the Christian Disney, you know? And I’m gonna talk about that too.AndMalcolm Collins: yeah, I wanna talk about that, because what’s interesting is they tried so hard to create all of these alternate forms of conservative media. Yeah. And yet when we look at the conservative media creators that I think people are actually watching there’s really two of them that stand out for me, and, and, and they’ve both been really excellent sort of coming on the conservative media scene.One is Freedom Tunes. Oh. Freedom Tunes is excellent, excellent show.Simone Collins: Just in terms of entertainment. Yeah, there’s, like, short form stuff ... and then the other isMalcolm Collins: Babylon Bee’sSimone Collins: media. Yeah, but no, they’re, they’re literally, they’re trying to make just generally conservative and Christian, like, shows.This is not- But nobody wants shows anymore I know. I know. Well, and we live in a, a market very saturated with shows, also in which time has collapsed. People are watching stuff, stuff from, like, 1968. They’re watching stuff from 1992. Like, it, no one needs ... We, we really [00:28:00] don’t at this point need more serialized content in the same way that we did before.And we’ve, we’ve talked about this in other episodes. Anyway, though- Well, and that’s whyMalcolm Collins: I mention Freedom Tunes specifically. Oh. Because I think Freedom Tunes delivers content to the right in a way that the right wants to consume content, right? Like, it is- Yeah ... funny, it is irreverent and I think we’re beginning to see the bubbling of, and guys, like, I’m, I’m, I’m, I’m predicting this now.What is coming out of The the Skybrows Cinematic Universe- Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah ... which is like a collection of content creators who have just created some amazing songs. I’ll, I’ll play one from, like, a Kirsha song on here right now. This is from the Holy Ball, which isn’t even Skybrow. This is like a Skybrows inspired guy.Well, but I loveSimone Collins: Holy Ball. It’s fantastic. Yeah, his, his style’s my favorite. His, his music- Yeah ... is better than Skybrows, I think.Malcolm Collins: Yeah.Speaker 5: call me a racist, fascist, nationalist grifter, bootlicking [00:29:00] theocrat, literally Hitler, colonizer Nazi, incel, bigot, white supremacist, privileged idiot, snowflake, pick me, toxic, homophobe, CHUD troll, sexist, deplorable, xenophobe, shill dog whistlin’, transphobe, simp stan, alt-right, neocon, tyrant.Malcolm Collins: Yeah. And then you’ve got obviously, like, the Leaflet stuff, which is doing pretty well these days. Oh, my- And- ... yeah, amazing ... and then th- like, her music videos, right? Like, which are- They’re so goodsome of them are very clearly inspired by our podcast, which is fantastic ‘cause it feels like- Thank you ... you have this virtuous circle of you know, we have an idea that we take an hour to say, and then she makes it into, like, a two-minute music video that is really catchy. And then you know, it, it, it spreads and normalizes, right?Speaker 3: よ。大切な人にちょっとしたプッシュ。理想の自分に変えちゃお。 液に溺れて[00:30:00] る時は愛情たっぷりでほどほどにって教えてあげよ。全部肯定するだけじゃダメだよね。優しい気持ちで批判するのも最高の愛だよ。 , groom, groom your wife.Pick her up dive and keep growing.Groom, groom, groom your husband.Get us stronger, faster.Malcolm Collins: Or one, one of the things I found really crazy recently, have you seen the Asmogold going back over The Onion videos from back in the day to show how right they were?Simone Collins: No. That sounds really fun. Okay. I willMalcolm Collins: play one, yes here. But anyway, continue.Speaker 2: Author Christine Eckard is here to show us some exercises to reduce stress.Speaker 4: The first thing I like to do is imagine my money-related stress as the most disgusting, terrifying creature I can think of.Okay. I like to imagine an ugly, greasy little creature with a hooked nose and oily black hair. Oh.Speaker 3: Oh, he is scary. ISpeaker 4: call him the Grabbler because he’s a greedy [00:31:00] little monster who wants to grabble up all my money. Ooh. Mm. Now close your eyes- Mm-hmm ... and picture the Grabbler.He invented interest rates like the ones on your credit card. Oh. Oh. He’s taking the jobs, because Grabblers only hire their own kind. Now imagine the Grabbler slowly disintegrating like a pile of ashes blown away- Oh ... by a purifying wind. Ah. Ooh, what a relief. Yeah. I feel so relaxed.Simone Collins: Right. So let’s, let’s talk about stumbles other than YouTube.We, we just need to go over the fact that, like, there were some e- extremely prominent splits, both in terms of from the team, but also memetically. So you had Brett Cooper leave in December 2024 voluntarily. It was a, you know, conscious uncoupling, but she clearly understood she could do better on her own, just like Ben Shapiro himself did also with Candace Owens.It was mutual. Jeremy Boreing announced that their partnership ended was for mutual reasons. But it was amid really public feuds, like Candace posted this [00:32:00] Christ is King post and defended Kanye West’s anti-Sem- Semitism basically, and Shapiro was like, “Dude, if you’re unhappy, just quit.” And so she quit and called herself finally free.And, you know, the rest is, is, is history. You, you already know. She’s, she’s posting receipts. She’s leaking stuff even now about- Yeah ... Full Send Media. I mean,Malcolm Collins: Ben Shapiro has been one of the... I, I might say the single most... Like, if, if you consider all humans that have lived maybe in the past 25 years, maybe even 50 years Ben Shapiro is probably what, the, the single worst for the long-term safety of the Jewish people.The- Yeah, that’s fair ... the number of almost every prominent anti-Semite was basically minted by Ben Shapiro’s constant rambling. Let’s talk about that.Simone Collins: Yeah, so I’m gonna, I’m just gonna pull some quotes from the Tucker Carlson interview with Nick Fuentes where, like, you really get a, a good succinct layout of the, the manner in which almost it seems like Brett [00:33:00] Shapiro is personally responsible for the anti-Semitic radicalization of Nick Fuentes.He is. He is personally responsible ... and I think this also represents an ideological split. Yeah. No, really. And, and I’m linking this all in the show notes. I have show notes if you go to Patreon or Substack, and by the way, thanks for everyone who supports us. You guys are amazing and we love you.I, you can find the video linked along with all my other sources. He, he talks about how basically way before he was a big deal at all, he’s just, like, this college student posting online Ben Shapiro gatekept and belittled him even, you know, when he ba- had no reason to. He describes, Nick Fuentes describes first publicly criticizing Shapiro in the Daily Wire over Israel and, and not in, like, a, like, “I hate Israel” way, but in a, like, “I don’t, like, do we need to support them this much?”He I’ll just quote him. Nick says, “I tweeted Ben Shapiro. I said, ‘You know, I’ve never seen anything on the Daily Wire that’s actually critical of Israel.’ And he quote tweets me and he says, ‘To accuse a Jew of, of dual loyalty [00:34:00] is the surest sign of antisemitism.’ ‘He immediately called you an anti-Semite,’ said Tucker.Mm-hmm. So I’m driving to Christmas Eve mass with my family and I see on Twitter the notification comes up. Ben Shapiro quote tweets me calling me an anti-Semite. And then I said something like, ‘If you’re gonna if you’re gonna, if you’re China first, you should live in China. If you’re Mexico first, you should live in Mexico.If you’re Israel first, maybe you should go live in Israel.’” Which is a really great rejoinder. And again, he quotes tweets Nick and says, “You’re an anti-Semite,” the same night. And then Fuentes in the same interview with Tucker frames Shapiro’s deciding really early on to just- And I, I wanna point out here, cut him down inside the conservativeMalcolm Collins: movement ... for Jews who are unaware of this, you cannot throw around the word anti-Semite for non-anti-Semites. If you do, that is an extremely loaded term. That is- Yeah, it is. It is ... telling whatever racist person you’re talking to- And he was just saying, like, “By theSimone Collins: way, nothing on the Daily Wires is, has ever, you know- Been like, “Hey, you know, Israel...”And Israel is an imperfect country. There are que- and there are many people in Israel who fight for Israel, who die for Israel, who question the way that it’s [00:35:00] governed. Like, it is not wrong for him to point that out, you know? Right. And it is weird that The Daily Wire has never been like- But it is wrong within aMalcolm Collins: certain perspective, like Ben wanting to com- Ben thought he could just shut it down.Like, any criticism- Yes ... I can shut it down because I have the cultural power. And what he seemed, well, I mean, he, whether or not he’s aware of this or not, we’ll talk about why he’s so blinded to this, but he’s wielding woke weapons. Mm. And woke weapons radicalize right-wing people against- 100% ... whatever faction is using them.Yeah. He’s trying to be like, “How dare you say that? You’re an anti whatever phobe.” Mm-hmm ... and, and as such, I’m gonna attempt to de-platform you, which he did do- Yeah ... to, to Nick Fuentes. Continue. Yeah. And to us. Keep in mind, like the reason I believe all this from Nick Fuentes is he did the same to us, right?And we weren’t even anti-Israel, we were just too nerdy for him. Too nerdy. And we didn’t evenSimone Collins: tweet at him. We didn’t even criticize The Daily Wire. We were just talking and he, yeah. Anyway. We were just talking, yes. Nick says [00:36:00] In his interview, it turned out that Cassie Dillon, she texted him earlier and she wanted him to take me under his wing.And he goes, I’ll take a look. And so I guess the two of them were kind of grooming me in a sense. They wanted me to go maybe be a Daily Wire guy or something, looking at me as a potential conservative activist or influencer. And they started paying attention to me. This is totally believable in my opinion because they’ve cultivated other talent to have on their platform.It’s part of their business model. He continued. And the more critical of Israel I was, I started to get this really intense pushback from the both of them and from a lot of the people at the Daily Wire. For them, it was easy to say if they detected that a promising young guy was going to become anti-Israel in the conservative movement, they could crush that person easily and grind them under the heel.So they sort of were alerted, oh, there’s a precocious young guy that isn’t on board with Israel. We’ll keep an eye on him. And if he gets too vocal or popular, we’ll cut him down. We’ll crush him. Basically from then on, it was just this escalating series of blacklisting censorship hit pieces, rumors to [00:37:00] try to ostracize me from the movement.And he goes on to link Shapiro and the Daily Wire and their circle to efforts to isolate him and get him fired. And I’m not going to go into like the full quotes on all this. It involves this clip from Media Matters. And then he eventually- We went over thisMalcolm Collins: in our episode on Nick Fuentes, the first one we did on him, the big one.But yeah- And then he explicitlySimone Collins: ties Shapiro’s attacks to his own radicalization and then turn against the conservative establishment. He says, looking back with that 2020 hindsight, I mean, Ben Shapiro seems like a big part of your political evolution. You went from a fan acolyte to an opponent and then just pivoted against everything he believes.That’s what Tucker said. Nick said, yeah, it was because it was this new dialectic that Trump forced. So once you accept that, a lot of the way of doing things becomes impossible to support or justify. The contradiction becomes apparent. I realized that the conservative movement was completely bankrupt in a way that became very radical.Anyway, it was a very, you should go watch the interview if you [00:38:00] haven’t. But speaking of which The, I think Tucker Carlson- But I, I, I wannaMalcolm Collins: point out he’s done this to us too. Like, it is loud and noticeable when him or the Daily Wire are involved in a conservative event, we are blacklisted. We don’t get approved, we don’t get invited.They have never... It is weird that they’ve never reached out to us or done anything with us given that, like, almost every major conservative influencer has done something with us. Like, but, but anyone who is remotely tied to the Daily Wire just completely- Well, and you’re, you’re s- ... blacklisting usyou’re soSimone Collins: right in that they’re using a very leftist tactic, because a very common leftist thing attack is like, “Oh, you spoke with this bad person? That makes you bad.” There’s this, like, contamination accusation, and that is exactly what Shapiro did with Tucker Carlson after Tucker Carlson had this interview with Nick Fuentes.Shapiro blasted Carlson as an intellectual coward and moral imbecile [00:39:00] for interviewing Nick Fuentes and echoing antisemitic tropes on Israel and influence. And then Carlson retaliated by slamming Shapiro’s many attacks on Jesus and immigration views and pro-Israel stance- ... as bigotry and cruelty, especially on Iran policy.And this, this just deepened their rift. And so now you have Ben Shapiro even radicalizing Tucker Carlson further and then- WhichMalcolm Collins: he did do. Like, you, you- I know ... again- I know ... Jews, you gotta understand this. If you call someone an antisemite when they’re not being an antisemite, the standard American cultural reaction is, “Well, I guess I just hate the Jews.”Yeah. Like, if, if I’m gonna get called it anyway like, it actually takes a lot of mental effort on my part to not have that reaction when it happens to us. Yeah. Because- Yeah ... it is the standard reaction that an American, culturally speaking, is going to have. And- So anotherSimone Collins: example of Ben Shapiro going after anyone who touches the bad person, right?Again, this is, I said Regina George from [00:40:00] Mean Girls at the beginning of this ‘cause he’s- Yeah ... he’s doing ex- He’s being a c- high school mean girl. Because now when, So, so even after all this, right? So now he hates Tucker Carlson and he hates Candace Owens ‘cause they’ve turned on him. And then at Turning Point USA’s America Fest in December 2025, Ben Shapiro called Megyn Kelly a charlatan for, for platforming Candace Owens and Tucker Carlson.And MegynMalcolm Collins: Kelly used to be his friend and helped him a lot in gaining his public recognition.Simone Collins: Well, and to your point- Like- ... just like you are, she fired back, accusing Shapiro and Bari Weiss of fueling antisemitism by suppressing Israel criticism, and she defended her neutrality and friendship with Owens calling Shapiro Israel first, because he, he is.And she, she was... And again, he w- She wasn’t, like, defending their stances. She was simply having discourse with them, and he, in that very leftist way, is like, “Oh, by talking with them, you’re platforming them. You’re now bad.” That’s such a leftist- Shelton seriously ... sentiment.Malcolm Collins: That’s such a woke sentiment, right?Like, everyone- Yeah ... on the right knows [00:41:00] this. I know, I know.Simone Collins: Yeah.Malcolm Collins: But, like- It’s crazy ... okay, so I wanna, before you go further here because- Okay, okay ... we’re not getting to meat and potatoes, so I’m gonna get to some meat and potatoes. Okay.Simone Collins: Okay. WhyMalcolm Collins: did he actually lose his audience? ‘Cause I don’t think he lost his audience because of all of these missteps.He lost his audience because his brand of conservatism doesn’t make sense in a modern context. He’s going out there with a very like, you know, anti-porn, like, like s- s- specifically for widespread pornography bans. Trad wife, like women don’t have a job, you know, stay at home, take on a traditional role.Their role is raising the family. You know, very anti oh, you know, Malcolm and Simone are too nerdy to, to be in all of this, you know, what, what are they doing here? And we go through with every one of these. You can watch our episodes. You know, he’s, he’s video games and, and lewd things are terrible, you know, all, all of the, the, the traditional things here.And there’s a way to do something like this that is at least entertaining. But he just comes off [00:42:00] as, like, morally policing in, like, the driest Old lady sort of a way that you can. And what makes it so perverse and I think turns people so strongly against him is at least if he pretended to live out the lifestyle that he was preaching- Mm-hmmpeople would take it seriously. But he’s here promoting a woman’s job is to raise kids and his wife is a doctor, and he can’t help it. It very much fits the trope of the, the Jewish person who is attempting to infect a culture with ideas that they know will eventually destroy that culture- Mm ... and not follow them themselves.And I think that a lot of people functionally see it that way, and are really disgusted by it, right? Like v- so for example, him attacking us for being too nerdy and everything like that. Like obviously you’re a giant nerd, like Ben. Like just maybe, maybe a little more old school, maybe a little more prestigious with your Lord of the [00:43:00] Rings nerdiness.You can go hang out with Stephen Colbert. I’m sure you guys would get along great. Instead of your- Sure ... your anime and whatever nerdiness. But like when he tried to make his sister work, I think he perfectly showed how much he didn’t get the modern conservative audience because what he presented her as was this non-salacious, perfectly presentable rule follower, right?It did- she, she never mentions that she’s really into Warhammer tabletop gaming. Or- And sheSimone Collins: totally should have. Yeah, like against Sarah etc. More likeMalcolm Collins: if she led with that and it was a, a big boobed whatever lady d- doing tabletop miniature painting while talking about you know, like the nerdier parts of conservative politics and like- Yeah, theSimone Collins: busty Warhammer conservative mom.People would’ve loved that. Come on Oh,Malcolm Collins: people would’ve been so into it. Right. Yeah. Sure. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But no, he thinks that you need to- Pretend to be this sort of fake [00:44:00] thing that the internet hates more than anything. And, and, and this is the thing. It, it, there are ... Like, we are fighting a meaningfully annoying deontological faction that is, like, genuinely, you know, taking blows and fighting back.But this faction leans in on all of this, like, curmudgeonly pearl clutcher stuff, but does it in either a profoundly entertaining way, like they’re, they’re being over the top about it, they’re being ... nick Fuentes falls into this category to some extent, right? Like, at least when he complains in the sort of the, oh, the, the whatever anime nerds and video gameRight? Like, he’ll attack them in a way that’s entertaining, right? And over the top and vitalistic instead of just like, “Mm, well, don’t do this. It’s weird and you’re weird for doing it and I don’t like it.” Or they are, and I don’t like this faction much either, but they are growing a lot they’re UK boring.Typically former leftists who have adopted a lot of these- I do loveSimone Collins: that boring, there’s a special brand [00:45:00] that is UK boring. Yeah, there’s, there’s yeah. U- UK vanilla. American boring is different. AndMalcolm Collins: y- and you bite into it and you’re like, oh my God, this is just, like, filled with unprocessed vanilla beans.Like, that’s what I’m like when I, I, I bite into, like ... But I think that that’s being replaced by the Reform Party, because the Reform Party is pretty boss. Yes. When they’re like, “We need to melt down- 100% ... Nigerians to fill potholes.” Like, that’s an elected representative. I’m like, okay, you go, boy. Okay, continue.Continue.Simone Collins: Right. Well, let’s go into their conservative Disney boondoggle and, Yeah, yeah, let’s get into it ... this whole thing. So a lot of this comes down to Ben Shapiro’s co-founder and, and the former CEO of the Daily Wire Jeremy Boreing, who pursued this Breitbart style politics is downstream of culture vision pouring money into kids content, though of course they shut down that branch, feature films, and merch like anti-woke razors and chocolates.And he was trying [00:46:00] to build this conservative Hollywood in Nashville. And you can tell by the pattern of their layoffs that, like, they’re quickly discovering that no one wanted this and it’s not making any money. Of course not. No ... he, he’s no longer the CEO of the Daily Wire, but he is leading creative stuff still, so I don’t know if they’re gonna keep throwing money at this, but he’s not gone.Malcolm Collins: He should be gone. His name’s Boreing. What did you wannaSimone Collins: say? No, I’m sorry.Malcolm Collins: No, I’m gonna take determinism. - Oh,Simone Collins: well. Yeah. Yeah ...Malcolm Collins: no what I was gonna say was if we look at this sort of content- ... like conservative kids content, why doesn’t conservative kids content do well? Because I show my kids conservative kids content, and it’s cartoons from the 1980s.Yeah. And it’s free, and it’s on YouTube, and I can just push play- Yeah ... and it’s on forever. Yeah. And I can show them G.I. Joe, where American soldiers go and shoot a bunch of people with a lisp, right? Like, that’s what we’re all about as Americans. YouSimone Collins: know, and we know that we build- Ooh, it’s such a gay theme song, though.I, in, in the best way. I mean that, [00:47:00] I mean that in a good way. Well, no, yeah.Malcolm Collins: We teach kids, y- you know, the G.I. Joes are a little f- you know, there’s some gay undertones. They’re extremelySimone Collins: gay, and it’s wonderful. But they’re not- It’s, it’s, yeah ... they’reMalcolm Collins: not faggy about it, okay? They’re basically like Sea Spray in, I, I gotta play this from, like, The Venture Brothers, right?Like, this is G.I. Joes. But no- Oh, no ... it’s, it’s fantastic, right? You don’t need to be overly puritanical about this stuff. And he feels- Yeah ... you need to be, and there just isn’t... Like, when I’m like, “Okay, what conservative content do I want to see more of?” Like, if I was like, “Okay, I wanna see more, like, explicitly conservative media to shape ideas,” right?Yeah. Yeah. Honestly it’s just more cinematic Sky Брауз Universe stuff. Like- Yeah ... there was a feature length anime made about Leaflet and Powder. And it’s l- No ... it’s literally, like, 60 minutes. Huge. It’s got a fight scene, and then the, the CEO- Oh, my goodness ... of Twitter tries to trap, trap them in a crystal, and they end up battling him.And, um Breaking out, breaking out Asmogold, who, who teaches him to, [00:48:00] to not destroy him or whatever. You know, it’s fun. It’s, it’s, it’s very well done. But like, like that’s entertaining.Speaker 7: This woman in anime is voiced by Asian now. I guess I unban her. Quang!Speaker 8: Do you know why I’m here, Quang? You unbanned another 2D cutting board chess Vtuber without my approval.Malcolm Collins: And I think, you know, we’re a year away, two years away from like full links anime being able to be easily [00:49:00] made from these sorts of systems.Yes. And you know the moment that that stuff gets out there, this sort of cinematic universe that we’ve begun cultivating... And I wanna be honest, I’ve had like a realization and a change in how I see the world and the wider conservative scene. Part of it was hugely influenced by your recent appearance on Chris Williamson.Part of it was hugely influenced by the growth of Leaflet and, and her seller humanist philosophy. And by the way, for people who like she- At least she’s feminismSimone Collins: all the way. Ah, she gets it. Yeah, she’s huge. Gets it. You know she’s likeMalcolm Collins: on Twitch like a third bigger than Kirsha on, on YouTube. She’s like white Spotify.Which gives me hope forSimone Collins: humanity. Yeah, man. Yeah. And all she’s pushing is like- Oh my goodness ... we gotta getMalcolm Collins: to the stars. We gotta get to the stars. Yes. This, this fun, n- not overly theosophical set. Yes. But the thing is, is like, you’re up there and you’re next to all these like do- all the other leaders of the prenatalist movement, but there’s all the, like, stodgy, you know, the, the statistic pushers and everything like that, and they’re all like, “Well, if we can move the numbers here and here and [00:50:00] here,” and you’re just like, “Oh, you.You know it won’t work. You know it won’t work.” Right ... and it doesn’t even matter. Why are we even trying to save these people? They hate us. They are in opposition to everything we care about. Let’s just breed, spread our culture to the future, and we’ll replace them. And then within the parts of the Conservative Party that are still breeding but are not technophilic, they’re also not particularly long-term economically relevant, right?So, like why am I even stressed about fighting them? Just cultivate our movement, cultivate our wider ideological movement keep it fun, keep it light and don’t, don’t worry about the conservatives that are eschewing technology and whining about this is bad and that’s bad because they’re falling out, they’re crashing out of the, the slip stream.Like it’s like we’re, we’re, we’re warp speeding into the future, you know, like a, a, a time machine or something, and somebody falls out of a time thing and they like r- more rapidly [00:51:00] wither and turn to dust. Like, that’s what is repeatedly happening, right? We don’t need to worry about all of them because we know we’re in the driver’s seat in this, okay?And all we need to do is keep going and keep working our hardest to do what’s right for humanity. And I, I have a feeling that we’re doing that, and there is no large faction that has, that seems to have a place in the future that isn’t on our wider team. So, like, why am I even stressing about these people, right?Anyway, continue.Simone Collins: Right. You were talking about all the cool Skybrow Cinematic Universe stuff that we love, that we enjoy. You were talking about Freedom Tunes. Well, what does The Daily Wire think that people want? The Daily Wire thinks we want Pen- the Pendragon Cycle: The Rise of Merlin. I sent you the preview.You don’t need to watch it, but I sent you the preview on WhatsApp.Speaker: All of this is an illusion, an echo of a voice that has [00:52:00] died. And soon that echo will cease.Simone Collins: It just comes across as, like, the Game of Thrones reboot that nobody wanted, and they’re, like, c- like, cribbing Game of Thrones hair and just, like, people wafting around in costumes, and it just, it just looks oppressively- It’s, it learn,Malcolm Collins: it’s the conservative version of woke mediaSimone Collins: Yeah, but, like, no one... I, I just don’t under- I don’t, I don’t understand why anyone wants it. The series now is live. It’s available. It premiered on Daily Wire Plus this January. All seven episodes were released. They spent 10, at least $10 million on this with a minimum of one million per episode for this seven-episode season.And this is, this is not my conjecture. This comes from Jeremy [00:53:00] Boreing marking it as the company’s most ambitious production to date. They filmed it in Italy and Hungary. I- it’s this huge thing, and it, I mean, I don’t think it’s doing so well. It, it holds an IMDb rating of 7.9 out of 10 from over 2,400 votes on Rotten Tomatoes.It has an audience score of 86 to 88%, which is okay, but I’m like, I don’t feel like watching this. That’s pretty good. That’s pretty good, Simone. It, it ranks moderately at number 2,181 out of 35,000 shows, so yay, top- That’sMalcolm Collins: pretty good for what they were doing. Look, 2,000- They tried to- It’s, I don’t care about that.I don’t wanna watch that stuff anymoreSimone Collins: Well, yeah. And, and some, some outlets, to be fair, they call it uneven or terrible. Of course they would- ... some like it ... because TheMalcolm Collins: Daily Wire did it. I don’t care what some outlets say. That’s true. That’s true. I bet it’s fine. I bet it’s fine and boring.Simone Collins: But financially, it’s unclear as to whether it has been a financial boon for them, and I doubt, I highly doubt that it is.But [00:54:00] I think the really big thing is that when you, when you roll all this together, what you have is this shift from... Their, their strategic shift from in-demand, inexpensive content, heavy on AI, heavy on clips, heavy on being, you know, bombastic and fun and flexible, to not highly demanded, highly produced content.You know, creating this Nashville headquarters, and we’re gonna do all these productions, and we’re gonna make culture, and, and you’re gonna want it and watch it instead of just watching ‘90s cartoons like everyone else. And I feel like Pendragon is really the symbol of The Daily Wire drifting from just cheap, high margin podcasts and political commentary, which just, I mean, from a business standpoint, is way more sustainable, into this expensive streaming style production that there’s a lot of competition there.They, they didn’t have any particular, like, moat or special ability that, that, you know, would make them uniquely good at entering this space in which they have no head up or like, sorry, like, advantage. And then [00:55:00] also their failure to evolve. You know, as, as social platforms shifted towards short-form and live streaming, Ben Shapiro didn’t.And, and their pacing didn’t change. They, they are just being left in the dust by people like Candace Owens, who’s all about her live high drama streaming. They have a very brittle model in that they wanted to sign talent and then build their audience and s- and then monetize under them with this Daily Wire umbrella.And then it just became trivial for, like, their true stars to just walk away, while the, all these people they tried to manufacture, from, like, Classically Abby to Reagan replacing Brett Cooper just not really working out. And then you have- You have- ... on top of that all the sanctimonious mean girl leftist woke gatekeeping.It’s no wonder that The Daily Wire is winding down at this point. I don’t know if there’s any coming back for them.Malcolm Collins: Yeah. It’s, it’s, [00:56:00] it’s sad to see where this is going. But at the same time as they have been falling apart, our movement’s been growing. Yeah, I mean- and I’m excited to see this because it’s fun.Our movement is fun, and their movement- It is ... was boring and sad and stodgy, and I’m done with it. I am, I am So done with, even, even the culture war stuff. I’m like, “Why even care about it,” right? We’re, we’re fighting against people who don’t matter. They either don’t have kids or don’t have technology.Simone Collins: Yeah, it, it’s boring and not engaging, so why would we care? Even if they’re attacking us, it’s like, like, “come at me with something more interesting please,” you know? Yeah. Oh, so lame. So lame ... why,Malcolm Collins: why listen to somebody about a trad lifestyle who’s not living a trad lifestyle, right? Like, why, you know, why, why...W- when we come at you and we’re like, “This is how you should structure your marriage. This is how you should, you know, have kids and raise kids,” we never once- We live it ... no, yeah, nobody, people are like, “Oh, you’re doing it wrong,” which is fine, but [00:57:00] nobody doubts that, like, we sincerely believe what we’re saying and are trying it, and change our mind when presented with evidence we find compelling.Mm-hmm ... we had a really sweet letter recently about the whole sword and shield marriage thing, you know, the wife d- doing the, the safer stuff and the husband... and it really was big for me because it showed, I think a lot of people, when we did that video, people were like, “Well, not everyone’s trying to change the world in the way you guys are trying to change the world.Not everyone can wanna save humanity and everything like that.” But in the way that they were implementing it, the wife was managing, you know, the, the safe stuff, right? And the husband was managing trying to recreate sort of youth sports in a way that wasn’t super costly, so you don’t need to travel between states and everything like that.And that is actually focused on fun and kids and not creating show ponies for rich parents. And the moment I heard that, I was like, “Oh, obviously this is so something that’s needed in our society right now.” And it, and, and obviously so many parts of our world have become broken. You don’t need to [00:58:00] empower your husband to save all of society, but to become a force for good within your community that is durable, and not something boring and perfunctory like serving in a soup kitchen or something that’s exciting for a lot of people.And, and we- Mm-hmm ... present a way that you can do that, and then other people go with it and they’re like, “Oh, this is great. This actually really makes me feel a lot better about being alive because I’m trying to make the world a better place,” right? And I’m not gonna step back from this, the people who are like, “Well, not everybody wants to make the world a better place.”And it’s, try. Not just with your family, but, like, we all have a responsibility to fix our society as it crumbles around us.Simone Collins: Yeah.Malcolm Collins: Anyway, that’s my spicy take. Although it’s, honestlySimone Collins: it’s enough. I think, I think it’s plenty to, to fix your family, to, to make a good, a good family, to raise kids well. I think that that is a very honorable thing to doMalcolm Collins: I think that’s a good place to start.But when your kids are, you know, teens or whatever, and you’re... I think for a lot of [00:59:00] people I, I do want to encourage this, and I know it’s, it’s spicy- Well, your kidsSimone Collins: are teens, and you work on matchmaking, and you work on setting them up for their careers, and then you work on helping them raise their grandkids.I know this isMalcolm Collins: spicy, Simone- I think people beingSimone Collins: like, “Oh, noMalcolm Collins: one likes you” ... and it’s gonna piss off part of our audience- Mm ... but I’m gonna say I do think it is good for men to focus on civic engagement.Simone Collins: No, it’s true. And I think, you know, what I’m hearing a lot of people discuss I think this is coming up more and more, for example, on the All In podcast and among that class of people, talking about this idea of basically having a tour of duty, you know, serving for a certain number of years, maybe four years, maybe eight years in government, in politics, to try to improve whether it be your, your local area or on the state level or on a national level- No, I think-sort of depending on your resources ...Malcolm Collins: I think that’s fine. If you wanna go into politics, that’s fine. But I, I, I- There are otherSimone Collins: things you can do, too, but, like, yeah, to have a tour of duty in civic engagement in some way to help your communityMalcolm Collins: or country. And that the wife’s job is to support the husband in this tour of duty.Simone Collins: Yeah, yeah. It’s, it’s more effective when you have that [01:00:00] support. Yeah, you can do more with one well-supported person than two not at all supported people working separately,Malcolm Collins: absolutely. Or, or the husband’s role to support the wife. Sure. If the husband is, is doing the day job and the wife is at home with the kids, do some tour of duty civically.Mm. And, and I know it’s extra work, but I, I promise you... Or I don’t promise you. I can’t, I can’t promise anything, but I, I believe based on the evidence I’ve seen that both you and your husband will feel better about your lives if you have been successful in at least attempting some form of ambitious civic engagement.That is my spicy take that’s gonna get people mad at me. Oh, well. Oh,Simone Collins: well.Malcolm Collins: Love you, Simone. I thought this was fantastic. I think it’s fantastic that Ben Shapiro’s losing his influence. He’s been- ... as, as Steve Bannon called him, and I don’t even like St- Bannon. I, I see Steve Bannon as a swamp creature. You know, look at his Epstein rehabilitation takes.Mm. But Ben Shapiro is a [01:01:00] cancer. And you know, fortunately, the cancer is in remission, heavy remission.Simone Collins: I’d, I don’t... I wouldn’t go that far. I think he’s a well-meaning person who played a game, who lost some agility or really just didn’t- He’s not well-meaning.Malcolm Collins: He’s spiteful. He may have aligned goals with us but he’s kind of a little prick.I don’t think he hasSimone Collins: aligned goals with us. NotMalcolm Collins: true ...Simone Collins: I- Yeah, actually. I mean, I think weirdly a lot of people, I feel like they just are all very, they’d be very happy with each other because they kind of just love hating on other people. Like, both he and... Actually, you know, never mind. I’m not gonna say this.I think Nick Fuentes is a more, a more inclusive person in the end. He may troll- No, Nick Fuentes is a more inclusiveMalcolm Collins: person ...Simone Collins: and hate on people. Yeah, but yeah- I’ve got problems- ... Nick Fuentes is way more inclusive than yeah, than Ben Shapiro is. Yeah, so yeah. Nick Fuentes’ audience- Okay,Malcolm Collins: I think we’ve- When we were growing, let’s, so I wanna, I wanna contrast Ben Shapiro and Nick Fuentes, and people know w- I do [01:02:00] not like either of their politics, and I think Nick Fuentes is an active harm to the right.Despite all of that, the one thing I will not say about Nick Fuentes is he is not gatekeep-y. He, yeah, he’sSimone Collins: really not When we- He’s really not, actually ...Malcolm Collins: first started rising in influence this was around the time when Ben Shapiro crashed out about us Nick Fuentes’ like wider circle reached out to us, included us, interviewed us.Nick Fuentes during that period talked about us positively, thought, “Oh, maybe they’re people I can win to my ideological faction.” These things are things that I, I want to state very clearly. As much as I disagree with his political orientation and his strategy for the conservative movement which I do not see that, it’s, I mean, he’s really a Democrat at this point.Even he says that. He still is not somebody who snipes at ducklings as they come to shore. Like- ... Ben Shapiro’s the guy where all of the little, the turtles are coming to shore, all the little baby [01:03:00] conservative influencers are coming to shore, and he’s shooting them with a sniper rifle, whereas Nick Fuentes tries to help them through the the, the, the, the, the bird attacks and everything like that, even though they may not always be on his side.Simone Collins: Yeah. No, I agree. And I would still love to have Nick Fuentes on our show, though he never... Maybe eventually, you know, who knows? We’ve been warned, “Don’t do that. Everyone will hate you.” No, people are gonna... It’d be great. Look, it’s, it would be, I would love, I would love to interview him. I would do it, yeah.IfMalcolm Collins: he wants to come on, I mean, we, you know, for mutual fans. I mean, obviously the show’s gonna be boring ‘cause the whole time I’m gonna be talking about, like, Catholicism or something. It’s, we’re gonna be totally different.Simone Collins: I don’t know. It’d be amazing to see him just nerd out about Catholicism for a bit and not do his, like, normal thingies.But anyway, I don’t know. Whatever. Maybe it’ll happen. Yeah, I’d actually- Maybe it won’t ... beMalcolm Collins: very interested in that. Like theologically, like what’s, what’s his plan here? His- Oh my God, yes.Simone Collins: I’d love to know, like, his stance on, his different like theological stances and stuff. Yeah. And then, y- maybe he’s- Yeah.What I’d reallyMalcolm Collins: like to have if we got him on the show is where does he want [01:04:00] America to be in 100 years? Mm. Like, what’s his 100, 150 year, 200 year plan for our species? I’dSimone Collins: love... Yeah, I’d love to see that too. Yeah, come on. Ah, someone make it happen. Help us out here. Someone has an in. I mean, I guess don’t donate $50 to him on his stream though and tell him that there’s a woman present on this podcast, ‘cause that’s not gonna work.He’s not gonna feel like he can fart on stream if I’m there, so-Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Oh my God ... I don’t know. Yeah A woman? A wo- yeah, we’ve heard he- he- that’s... Sorry, we did a clip recently of his where he crashed out on a fan who donated $50 to him because the fan had all female children. And I was like, “What?” And you can’tSimone Collins: fart and burp around daughters apparently, even though our daughters constantly fart and burp around us.Yeah. God, I love our kids. Apparently Octavian farted in the doctor’s office today. Is that something that happened? Octavian was like- No ... “Yeah.” ... he didn’tMalcolm Collins: fart in the doctor’s office.Simone Collins: I farted in the doctor’s. He was really proud about it. I guess- I didn’t seeMalcolm Collins: it. They were, they were- There was this whole thing.It was highlighted ... astonished. The doctors were so amazed at how much they all helped each other. Aw. How much they [01:05:00] all, like, did their thing. They tried to give him all the information he needed. They were very worried when they found out that Indy had to get a shot. And they wanted to... Octavian, oh my God, you wanna know how sweet the kids are?Like, I don’t even know how our kids are this sweet. When they were gonna give Octavian the shot, Octavian- Indy ... like, no, Octavian goes to Indy and, like, looks her in the eyes and he goes, “I’m gonna sing a song for you.” And so he sings a, a song for Indy while they’re, like, prepping and doing the shot so she doesn’t notice.And she actually didn’t notice.Simone Collins: Oh my God, Noodle. I love these kids. Jesus.Malcolm Collins: Why are they so good? They are simulated. That’s all I can believe, because I’m not that good a person. Yes, you are. Or maybe I am. Like, maybe fundamentally- Yes, you are ... I’m actually, like, a pretty nice person.Simone Collins: Yeah. Fundamentally, you, like, actually are.Who knew? After a lifetime of being told, “Oh, you’re a demon child. Oh, you’re crazy. Oh, you’re so problematic. Malcolm, Malcolm, Malcolm.” Yeah, actually.Malcolm Collins: [01:06:00] You’ve been around my family, yeah.Simone Collins: Malcolm, Malcolm. Oh my God, all the ways. All the ways of your voice or your name being pronounced. This is why you’re so resilient online.N- no one’s n- the, the cruelest comments ever made about us don’t, don’t come m- anywhere close to the things that come from your own family. And I’m not just talking, like, one mean person. No, like, everyone.Malcolm Collins: Everyone in my family- Everyone ... constantly belittling me.Simone Collins: Oh my God. Anyway, I love you. Bye. Ilove you.Bye.Simone Collins: Well, after this you can tell my parents, who are very generously offering to order in, what you might have in terms of preferences. So very rare, exciting opportunity to eat from a restaurant.Malcolm Collins: We do really live in an area with some quite good restaurants.Simone Collins: Well, and there... A, a non-trivial number of [01:07:00] people who listen to the podcast live around here. Like, eventually we’re gonna have to host a local meetup. It’s gonna have to happen.It’s a good place to live. Just saying. Maybe somebody will do one in Philadelphia. That could be kind of fun. There was that one cool restaurant that reminded us of, like, British pubs. Do you... You remember the one I’m talking about, with the multiple floors and the cool chairs?Malcolm Collins: Yeah, it was nice, but, you know, I don’t, I don’t know if I wanna go to a city again, Simone.That’s the... That’s not an option for me. Never again?Simone Collins: You, you’re just quitting ci- cities forever?Malcolm Collins: I’m quitting cities, yeah. I think I’m done with them. I, I don’t I don’t think that they’re good.Simone Collins: Never again. I don’t think they attract-Malcolm Collins: Never again. Okay. Never again. I’m just done. I’m just done. Cities are over.I- is that... are we allowed to have this opinion?Simone Collins: Just- Well, what about Edinburgh?Malcolm Collins: Edinburgh is over. I’m sure it’s gross now. No, it’s not.Simone Collins: Stop. Don’t you ever say that.Malcolm Collins: I hear it’s full of you know, people- ... who weren’t there a few years ago. How dare you. No. That’s all... That’s Glasgow. Scotland is, like, more progressive- [01:08:00] That’s Glasgow.No, E- pff. Scotland is more progressive than the rest of the UK. You, like, know that, right? Like, it’s seen as, like, by far the most progressive part. I don’t know that.Simone Collins: Honestly, like, just from m- meeting random locals in the process of doing all of our wedding planning, I know that was ages ago now, but, like, they were just normal.Honestly, they reminded me a lot of just normal local Pennsylvanians, but with a fun accent. Actually, Pennsylvania’s also have fun accents. But you’re meetingMalcolm Collins: rural people in the... It’s the city dwellers who are the danger.Simone Collins: Well, no, I was dealing with city dwellers. I’m getting things like, you know, hairdressers and, and cake makers in- Oh, I guess that’s truethe city. Yeah. You’re just being a silly, a silly goose. People in Scotland are amazing and wonderful. And you were just dealing with the bougie international students at the St. Andrews, so you don’t even know what you’re talking aboutMalcolm Collins: Oh, I don’t? You know. Is this the type of scolding I get from a wife who pretends- Yesto love me?Simone Collins: The, the ball and chain.Malcolm Collins: The ball and ch-Simone Collins: what am, what is [01:09:00] psychological- Pretend to love you? As soon as you, as soon as you married me, I had to stop pretending, right? Well, of course, you decided to write into our vows, “I don’t promise to love you.” So it was never even part of the contract. Never even part,Malcolm Collins: yeah, we just...All right, all right,Simone Collins: all right. You ready?Malcolm Collins: Okay. Let’s go.Simone Collins: Okay.Speaker 13: You see what Toasty’s hiding from him? Yeah, we like it.Speaker 14: What are you guys doing?Speaker 15: Octavia, don’t, you’ll get wet. Mom gave me permission to go on. But you won’t leave your ankle. Oh. Say hi to your friend. Go to your friend. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit basedcamppodcast.substack.com/subscribe

Malcolm and Simone Collins break down a viral left-wing YouTuber’s video claiming the Left would win an upcoming American Civil War. Instead of dismissing it, they steelman his arguments, examine historical parallels, institutional control, police/military loyalty, supply lines, and urban vs. rural dynamics.They explore realistic scenarios for how a future crisis could unfold (disputed election → secession of blue cities → blockades), why drone swarms and logistics will matter more than armed rednecks, and why the Left’s own demographics, antinatalism, and institutional parasitism may doom their long-term prospects.Includes deep discussion on vasectomy culture, narrative-based vs. data-based thinking, and a fun tangent on next-gen autonomous drone design for home defense and warfare.If you’re interested in pronoia, demographic collapse, institutional power, or surviving turbulent times, this episode is essential listening.Episode TranscriptMalcolm Collins: [00:00:00] Hello, Simone. I’m excited to be here with you today. Today we are going to be diving deep into the mind of an individual who some right-wing figures have covered recently for his crazy comments. One of the crazier ones that happened recently is he said that if he transported back to the Pilgrim era, and obviously I’ll play the clip here,Speaker: You suddenly wake up in the 17th century on a ship headed for New England. As soon as we landed, I would use the money to bribe the boatswain to look the other way while I stole all of the muskets and powder on board, and then I would march immediately to the nearest indigenous settlement, give the guns out like candy, and make it my mission in life to murder every single white man, woman and child on the eastern seaboard of the continent.Malcolm Collins: That he would kill w- any white women and children that he found after- Oh, Godbetraying the Pilgrims and giving away all their guns to Indians. Because apparently this makes sense to him, and he’s [00:01:00] also gone viral, which we’ll talk about later in this you know, sterilizing himself. But with all of this stuff, yes, I could go over how crazy this guy sounds. Which is- I think weSimone Collins: all knowsomethingMalcolm Collins: I could do. But as people who watch our channel, I try to bring a unique perspective to what I’m covering, so I decided to go through and watch his videos. So on- Oh, youSimone Collins: went down the rabbit hole.Malcolm Collins: Yes.Simone Collins: Okay. AndMalcolm Collins: one of his videos, which is the one I really wanna talk on in this, is why the left would win an upcoming civil war.Oh ... and he basically lays out the plan that his side has for winning an upcoming civil war. And it’s- Really? ... not as insane as you would think. So- Oh, they haveSimone Collins: a shot?Malcolm Collins: Potentially, yeah. Can they takeSimone Collins: us?Malcolm Collins: So it’s something that we need to, to talk about, we need to engage with. And more than just engaging with it, the reason why [00:02:00] I think it’s so important to engage with is I think it makes it clear when the right-wing alliance thinks about the elements of the alliance that are actually important to both its long-term viability and its immediate security on in the moment of, like, crazy revolution type stuff, right?Yeah. Yeah. It is- Massively misunderstanding where it should actually be focusing. Hmm. It’s focusing way too much on armed groups of rednecks, which he points out, realistically, aren’t particularly relevant if a civil war did break out. And he goes through historic civil wars to make this argument.Now, I don’t think that that’s... I, I, I don’t think the way he presents his argument is powerful, ‘cause I’d be like, yeah, but the technological context is entirely different now. They didn’t have, like, fully automatic weapons back then and stuff, right? Mm-hmm. But the, the... He does, he [00:03:00] does notice things that I think a right-wing person would notice.So let’s go into this, and he also goes into how, how probable it is, okay?Simone Collins: Mm-hmm.Malcolm Collins: So broadly, his worldview goes like this. If you look at historic civil wars, what actually ended up determining who won and how well sides were able to sort of field their assets, it largely came downstream of the existing bureaucratic and civilizational infrastructure that allowed them to recruit and command troops at scale.Uh-huh. As well as manage industry at scale. Mm-hmm. And that so if you, if you think about something like the Revolutionary War or something like this the troops that we had fighting for us were not just, you know, people who we had raised out of nowhere. These were preexisting military regiments often.Or, or they had elements of [00:04:00] preexisting military regiments within them. If you look at the you know, Civil War both the South and the North had sort of large scale e- economic and sort of civilizational infrastructure that they could call on. R- random rebels have a very hard time doing anything other than just holding land.And would they even be able to hold land in an existing context? So to give an understanding of, like, how he’s thinking about a civil war he was praising Mondame for and apparently a lot of leftists see this as a major betrayal, and he was saying that this was actually very shrewd immediately burying the hatchet with the NYPD as soon as he was elected.And he’s like, “Look, if we want to prevent ICE,” like federal government troops, “from operating effectively in New York, we are going to need the [00:05:00] NYPD on our side. We are going to need- our own thugs with guns to be fighting their thugs with guns.Simone Collins: Oh. Oh. Oh. I mean, I guess the police need their pensions to be paid, and who, who controls the pensions?So if we’re talking about, like, national versus local control, is that kind of what he’s thinking about?Malcolm Collins: So, th- yeah, basically the question is, is if society were ever to fall into unrest, how much organizational control would leftists have? We, I mean, like, when we know the types of institutions that leftists control today leftists control the huge parts of the, the judicial system in the most economically prosperous parts of the United States, huge parts of the white collar job system in the most industrious parts, you know, technologically industrious parts of the United [00:06:00] States.They control governments and the surrounding environments in stuff like cities. So suppose we were having any form of a revolution or something like that. The NYPD is obviously quite pissed at the way leftists have treated them, but you’ve also gotta keep in mind how long they have had woke hiring practices within their organization.So even though they have a bit of a, a chip on their shoulder compared to other people, you gotta keep in mind their entire architecture around them, right? You know, you’ve got everybody else in Manhattan, many of whom are quite left-leaning, who could pressure them or make it difficult for them to act independently in the case of any sort of serious split.Now I’m just giving you guys his perspective. I actually think it’s massively wrong, but I’m giving you his perspective, right? And then if I was gonna further steel man his perspective beyond what he has said, because obviously being a modern leftist, he doesn’t think AI is relevant. But,Speaker: Where [00:07:00] do you fall on the Luddite to accelerationist spectrum? Uh, I’m of two minds. I- in my heart of hearts, I think the agricultural revolution was a mistake. I think that any society with an agricultural mode of subsistence is necessarily imperial and hierarchical, and I think that basically all of our problems come downstream from that.Malcolm Collins: No ... I have argued that the core thing of relevance in future battles, even six, seven years out, is gonna be automated drone swarms.You know, th- this matters, whoSimone Collins: controls the- Absolutely ...Malcolm Collins: the automated drone swarms. And the-Simone Collins: Well, so far the federal government is, like, leaps and bounds ahead of any, any private or state-based entity I’m aware of Is that thingMalcolm Collins: I worked on with RFAB is automated drone swarms?Simone Collins: Yeah, sh- yeah. Yes.Malcolm Collins: Would fans pay for that?Could we get funding for that? ‘Cause ISimone Collins: wouldMalcolm Collins: do that. I don’t, I mean- I could, I bet I could build automated drone swarms better than the government can.Simone Collins: [00:08:00] Well, let’s look into it. I want, I want a home defense swarm system. So could work on that one.Malcolm Collins: Well, so okay, just a side note. If I was gonna focus on automated drone swarms, how, w- like what would be our, our arbitrage play?Mm-hmm. So I’m just trying to think of how you could do something significantly better than the existing systems. So I’ve been watching lots of film of like what’s going on in Ukraine right now. Oh. And you have a huge, a, yes, our fans will find this tangent interesting. I t- I’m trying to think. Like do our fans care- Yeahabout automated drone swarm technology and howSimone Collins: you- Yes, they do. Yes. No. No. Anyone who wants to survive in the future, and I mean our fans are not suicidal and self-terminating, they do. They want their children to survive.Malcolm Collins: Well, except for the ones who said some naughty things about Israel, and I’ve, and I’ve heard many of them have been thinking about some end of life solutions.Y- [00:09:00] I, I, I, I say this of course for Mossad so that they know I’m on team here, okay? 100% on team.Speaker 3: So this speculative discussion into drone design went on way longer than I anticipated. , So I moved it to the end. , And you can, I guess, just skip to it with timestamps if you’re desperate to hear me, an uninformed person, go on forever about what would be an interesting drone designMalcolm Collins: Okay, I gotta get back to the topic at hand.Simone Collins: Right. Civil WarMalcolm Collins: webs police. So what actually ha- happens... And people can tell me their ideas of how you could make drone technology better.I’d be very interested in this so I can steal them, because my idea’s probably stupid. This was just off the top of my head idea. But okay, so this guy I think he’s fundamentally wrong about what a civil war would look like because he’s thinking of a civil war in the way that rightists think about a civil war.So he’s looking at the rightist militant’s fantasy of the armed guerrilla civil war which I do not [00:10:00] think is a realistic pathway for a near future American Civil War. Okay. What is a more likely pathway for a near future American Civil War? I’ve said it before, but let’s, let’s go through what it would look like if it happened.One party gets into power, and then the election results, either through genuine fraudulence or non-fraudulence, says that they lost the next presidential election. But they say, “We didn’t lose the presidential election.” In fact-Simone Collins: Which is what you anticipate, the primary means through which this all happens.Malcolm Collins: Yes. And the reason I suspect that this is gonna happen is both parties have become razor thin close to doing this multiple times.Simone Collins: Yeah.Malcolm Collins: Like, every election just seems like we’re asking for it at this point.Simone Collins: Well, yeah, it, it’s almost like a pendulum that’s swinging, but it just keeps swinging farther and farther each time, and eventually it’s gonna ha- like hit this ding, like bell.We’ve hit the we’ve hit the civil war bell. [00:11:00] GreatMalcolm Collins: Or the one party put something in place that is just so transparently cheating in the election system that the other party’s just like, “No, we’re not going along with this.” Right? Yeah. And obviously we got closer with, like, the the, the Voter Rights Act and stuff like this.M- many leftists do not like that they do not get the racial seats that they used to got, which were obviously unfair and racist, but whatever. And then the Virginia case when they tried to cancel this, getting struck down, so they lost- Yeah ... all the seats that they thought they were gonna get there.Simone Collins: Did you see Scott Pressler’s tweet about it?It was lovely. He, he was- Mm-hmm ... he was there. He’s still making things happen.Malcolm Collins: Oh, he was part of that?Simone Collins: Mm-hmm.Malcolm Collins: How did he campaign to the, ISimone Collins: don’t know the full backstory. I just know he was a part of it. He was there and he tweeted a selfie of himself and everyone celebrating, and it was lovely.Malcolm Collins: Well, that’s lovely.Yeah. You know, if, if they’re gonna play the g- gerrymander game, you know, let’s, let’s do it, right? By the way, fun thing. I don’t know if you know this, but the actual thing that, [00:12:00] that triggered the reinvestigation of the gerry- the, the system and the court case that ended up causing the strike down of the Voter Rights Act was actually initiated by the Biden administration against Texas.And then the Trump administration dropped it, but Texas said we’re not dropping this. We’re taking this to court.” Oh. And they ended up being the case that got it overturned. So it was actually a process- Oh, goodness ... initiated by Democrats trying to be even overly aggressive with the system they already had.Simone Collins: Okay. Well... But InterestingMalcolm Collins: What happens if we’ll go through each candidate. Let’s suppose the Democrats win this next cycle, and it’s somebody like AOC. I think she’s actually the most likely to win, if I’m gonna be honest. Mm-hmm. Like, I, I do not think Gavin Newsom would win. Would AOC believe that she needed to hold onto power if it looked like she lost to somebody she was really afraid of, [00:13:00] right?The answer is yes, probably. Right? I can, I can totally see her doing something, or her supporters doing something to that effect. Okay, so she says, “I’m not leaving.” What would be her likely complaint? She would say that, like, either it was too much gerrymandering or there was something suspicious about the vote count or something like that, right?So what do we have in place that could deal with this? First, you’ve gotta remember, DC is incredibly left wing. Are DC cops going to pull her out of the White House, right? No. You would basically need the United States military to attempt to do something. This means the United States military, somebody within the military would have to decide to act against the commander in chief.Would they do this? And, and this is difficult because you’ve gotta keep in mind not everyone in the military is gonna go on board with this, right? Like, the moment one person does this even though, like, technically it would be AOC doing the coup, like, they’re doing a [00:14:00] coup. Like, they’re now starting a, a, a conflict of some sort.They go to the White House, they attempt to arrest her. Okay, who’s defending her? Secret Service, right? Is Secret Service enough in the hands of the Democrats to go along with something like this? Yeah, I think they are at this point, if I’m gonna be honest. I still think that the right has enough influence within the military to prevent a Democrat from doing this successfully.It, it, it would be tough, but probably. Okay, but let’s assume that a rightist did this. Let’s assume Trump does this this next cycle, forSimone Collins: example. Okay.Malcolm Collins: What happens there? I mean, the key would be for him and the relevant people in his administration to make sure that they’ve gotten out of DC before they attempt this. If they’re in DC, if he tries to just stay in the White House, that is incredibly stupid. Mm-hmm. What he should do is operate something like this with key administrative officials [00:15:00] out of something like one of the presidential whatever, retreats or something like this, that is in rural America where they are less likely to get significant pushback.You would immediately have a number of leftist cities basically secede to some extent. The key to drawing them back in is basically not confronting them with armed conflict. You could essentially just starve them. If you just close off roads into any major city they would have to capitulate in a very short period of time, and it would be trivially easy to do.Which is very different from rural sections of America. To, to pacify a rural section of America you really need to basically militarily occupy it. To pacify any American city you just need to block a few roads. Really very easy roads to block, too. And, and, and, and don’t even do it, like, aggressively.Just be [00:16:00] like, “Look, we’re looking to negotiate, but for now we’ll be blocking things off.” And you really wanna lower their power, we’ll be managing an evacuation of the city, right? To, you know, i- i- for people who are dealing with power, food, everything like that. Because now you’re moving people away from, like, their source of ability to fight back in, in a situation like this.Simone Collins: Hmm.Malcolm Collins: And this is what really matters, not the control of the institutions but control of the military. Really whichever side the military backed when one of these happens, that would be the side that won. And keep in mind that they would win permanently. So, like, suppose that AOC or Trump did this.If the military ends up backing the other side, the other side is not gonna go back to free elections. They’re going to say that, like, “We can’t do free elections anymore.”Simone Collins: Yeah. Fair.Malcolm Collins: So the, the moment the conflict comes to a head, basically the American Republic is over and we enter our imperial age. Which is why we named our first kid Octavian, right?You know? Gotta, gotta handle that [00:17:00] transition. Maybe, maybe born a generation, we’ll see when this happens. But thoughts, Simone, before I go further.Simone Collins: This generally makes sense, and I didn’t know that there were people who were actually thinking through the logistics of this, but huh. I mean, there, there are so many complications with interstate trade and supply routes and everything where I just feel like there are so many more levels of vulnerability too, like the power grid, that different parties in this conflict could leverage against each other that just didn’t exist at the time of the US Civil War, where functionally civil war just isn’t really possible in the United States in any sort of full-scale, you know, city w-Malcolm Collins: I mean, the key is to do it in a way that doesn’t look like a civil war, right?Which is, isSimone Collins: not- So it would look like a, a, a chop chas? Like a sort of this, this [00:18:00] is their zone and we’re just gonna let them pretend that they have it and-Malcolm Collins: Yeah, so you- ... let it go apart ... you like suppose you do this, you are Trump. A number of cities say, “We’re not going along with this.” Just you, you, you d- you do your best to not allow violence to break out, right?You say- Yeah ... unless their side is initiating it we, if, if you are not part of America anymore, we are blockading the roads into these major urban centers. And we are managing an evacuation for the people who don’t wanna be part of your basically independent project, right? If you do that. And the other key is to work with companies on this, right?To make it clear to the major companies that there will be some window upon which they can join this project. And if they do not join it within X potential window then they- [00:19:00] Some form of, of repercussion. Like they’re, they’re, they’re taxed in a different way or their assets are withheld or something like that, right?Like, basically you just put financial pressure on companies to go along with this. ‘Cause a lot of companies are gonna want to reflexively, you know, d- do their, their sort of signal on this. But the moment you put, like, international pressure on something like this, the big companies are just gonna go along with this, and that really hurts the city’s ability to, to, to go along with this themselves.So first you do something small, where, like, companies basically just need to signal to you and signal to the world, “Oh, yeah, I’m moving ahead with this new accounting system,” or whatever, right? Mm-hmm. And then you go into the second phase, which is to say, if they pay taxes to any of the parts of America that are still in open rebellion they are then put...So they’ve already done the costly signaling of being like, “I’m okay with this,” and then you start to starve the cities that are left of taxes.Simone Collins: Yeah, that makes sense.Malcolm Collins: Now how would the leftists do it [00:20:00] is it’s way harder, because they need to power project from cities outwards, which is just incredibly difficult to do.Simone Collins: What if they just did, what if, like, California seceded? You know? That would be more feasible. California has ports. They have more of an independent electricity grid.They are a very economically productive, still, state.Malcolm Collins: So ports are incredibly easy to blockade, first of all. Like a civilian port, like San Francisco Port or something like that.Simone Collins: Mm-hmm.Malcolm Collins: And it, with California, you really only need to block like two ports. Oh ... if, if you block the port in San Francisco and LA, like you, you, they’re cooked.They can import goods through other ports, but if you then block the main arteries into those two areas, and there are not that many into, like San Francisco, for example, you’re literally blocking like four roads.Simone Collins: Yeah, I, yeah.Malcolm Collins: Most of [00:21:00] California is red. Remember that. Like literally-Simone Collins: ThatMalcolm Collins: is a fair point ... m- it’s just a few, and you say, “Okay, you know, you, you secede, but like, don’t use our infrastructure.”Simone Collins: Oh, you mean even the fact that we defend the seas or something?Malcolm Collins: Well, no. We built, America built your port infrastructure. You are not allowed to use it.Simone Collins: Oh. Hmm.Malcolm Collins: That is wh- that would be my justification for blockading the sea routes.Simone Collins: That’s fair enough.Malcolm Collins: But yeah. That- that’s what a, that’s- that is what an American Civil War is going to look like, the next American Civil War.It’s not gonna be fought by random guerrillas. It’s, it’s, it’s going to be fought by how do you control supply lines into things like cities, and how long are people going to throw a fit about this?Simone Collins: In other words, it’s, it’s defined by institutions siding with one aggrieved party af- following a f- a [00:22:00] presidential election that was very contentious, and refusing to contribute taxes or enforce laws to the extent that it’s a, it’s a functional civil war.But to what end? I just don’t... I can’t... In, in the c- with the way that our states run and the way our government runs, I cannot understand why even a very large group of people who believe that an election was a fraud would successfully rebel or attempt to rebel with any expectation of eventual success.I mean, what does eventual success look like? They just think-Malcolm Collins: Yeah, so we’ve seen this. There was both... So a lot of people aren’t aware, but there was a protest that was about as big as the January 6th protest that the leftists held just,like, a month and a half before where the president had to be taken to a secret bunker, and they tried to light the White House on fire, and it was-Simone Collins: Well, I don’t remember this at all.Malcolm Collins: Yeah, because the left didn’t report on it. They didn’t wanna report on it. They didn’t want people to know about it. But yeah, it [00:23:00] was huge. If you find photos of it, like, there’s giant, like, bonfires around the White House and stuff like, right in front of the gates and stuff. It was, it was obviously an extremely dangerous scenario.The core difference is that the CIA wasn’t there to open the gates for people. You know, but the point being is the other question you have around any sort of a protest like this is the people who are resisting this, right, like, especially if they’re violently resistingThis, would the military or any sort of military forces that you have be comfortable shooting on a crowd of civilians?That, that often determines, like, if things go ahead. And one of the things that we’ve repeatedly seen recently in rebellions and stuff like this, we saw this in Turkey, for example is that if your military is drawn from rural or r- like, conservative regions and the [00:24:00] protesters are incredibly far lefties, like, they’re going out like the anti-ICE protesters, looking like actually dangerous militant- Psychopaths.Okay. Which they often look like. I mean, we’ve seen the people who are protesting ICE. Like, they’re like-Simone Collins: The hoods, the... YeahMalcolm Collins: The hoods. They, they look like a group that has othered themselves from the concept of civilians enough that I do not think that they would actually care to shoot at a crowd. Which is unfort- I mean, it’s leftists trying to feel cool and everything like that, but like, it’s also important when you do protest something like this, like suppose it’s the leftists who have power when this is happening, that you don’t go out there in outfits that other you.Go out there looking like normal civilians. Yeah. That is how you prevent the, that is how you get the military on your side again, right? Going out there and harassing the military by throwing bricks at them in a hood and hitting them was like, that’s how you get them to feel like fighting back is on their side.I think the lefts have really [00:25:00] hurt themselves. So the final part of this video I wanted to address any thoughts before we go further?Simone Collins: No, but I agree with you on that. Seems poorly thought through, but I know they’re not exactly thinking from that perspective.Malcolm Collins: Yeah. This guy’s not wanting to have kids, and leftists not wanting to have kids more broadly.So I’ll play the clip here.Speaker 2: Earlier this year, I got a vasectomy. When people ask me why I got snipped, I generally kinda gesture vaguely to fascism and climate change, and people go, “Oh, yeah, totally understandable.”But the truth is that whenever my friends and family members get pregnant, and I’m in my early 30s, so that’s happening a lot these days, I get a horrible weight in the pit of my stomach. Oftentimes, I’m genuinely happy for them, you know? Sometimes I can even look them in the eye and say, “You’ll be a really great father,” and mean it.But there’s another part of me that can’t shake the idea that in nine months, another American will come into the [00:26:00] world, , another ravening cannibal who will spend the next better part of a century burning fossil fuels, housing cheeseburgers, and ignoring homeless people at traffic lights.And you can say, you know, “Oh, well. Well, I’ll, I’ll bring up my kid to share my values, and they won’t do those things.” Um, and I can respect that, but that’s a hell of a gamble, right? I mean, you know, you could take your kid to school every day on your bike, but if every other parent has an SUV, eventually your kid’s gonna get curious and want to drive a car, right?And then, and then what are you gonna do, you know, forbid them? I mean, they’re just gonna do it anyway. What if my pride and joy grows up to be somebody else’s abuser but the real kicker is that even if my child has a great life even if they cause no harm to others they will still suffer they will still die it is unavoidable right i will be [00:27:00] inflicting this fate upon them without their knowledge or consent to me the creation of human life is very obviously an incredibly selfish thing to do under most circumstancesMalcolm Collins: And what you really see from this is he’s afraid above all else that his kids may have different political beliefs than him. And he’s like, “No matter how much I try to brainwash them, they might not be vegans.” You know, because he calls all non-vegans cannibals, right?Which, yeah, of course, right? Like, why wouldn’t he? And what’s interesting is the lack of... And I noticed this with leftists. One of the really interesting things I think on the right that we repeatedly see is even when we have, like, radical beliefs there is a lot of intellectual effort and this is something you see on our channel and stuff like that, establishing why we have the core beliefs we have that [00:28:00] inform our downstream beliefs, right?Like, why do we have the beliefs we have about the environment, right? Like, clearly he thinks the environment is like an existential and immediate threat, yet he never goes into why. Like, he doesn’t actually investigate this, which I’d be very interested to know. I’m like, “Okay, I’ve dug into the data on this, and it just doesn’t seem to be.”So, like, what’s the counter to this, right? Other than just, like, I’ve been told. So yeah, there’s that element. The other is, so, like, it’s, it’s, it’s sort of that there isn’t an intellectual backbone To, to what they’re pushing here, right? It’s just like, I’ve been told that this is a trendy thing. Like, why do you hate white people, right? Like, this guy clearly thinks it’s cool to hate white people and stuff like this, kill white children, all that.W- why does he feel that this... And obviously it is protected for him. His, his videos are still doing well. He has half a million subscribers, you know. He is a popular YouTuber, right?Simone Collins: Oh, [00:29:00] absolutely.Malcolm Collins: So this, this type of content, I’d actually say his videos aren’t even that bad. Like, when I was watching them, they really remind me of ContraPoints, where...And I notice this, we actually had a leftist, like, trans news team come here recently that we were, like, interviewing, right? And it really became clear to me that, like, we were not able to successfully communicate with them. We had perfectly amiable conversations, and they understood. And I was like, “I can’t communicate with you because effectively because everything they saw, they saw in terms of narratives.”Everything had to have some sort of, like... And this is the way he sees things. This is the way Philosophy Tube sees things. This is the way I see a lot of ContraPoints videos see things. The world is a series of narratives, and what is true is what is narratively true. So, what I mean by this is if we are doing something like having lots of kids, it must be because of either a kink or because of something that happened in our [00:30:00] childhood.Simone Collins: Yeah.Malcolm Collins: And I’m like, “No, we’re doing it because of the data. Do you wanna look at the data?” Right? Like, you can do something for a reason other than a kink, but, like, this is just incongruent with, because their entire world, self, and person is structured around what gives them pleasure.Simone Collins: You think that’s why?Malcolm Collins: Oh, yeah. Remember I said that, like, clearly pleasure is not, like, the core purpose in life, right? Remember you were like, “Well, that, you know, that’s for you,” right? You know, to this individual, pleasure was the core purpose in life. Mm-hmm. And so when they look at why people are acting in a way that seems odd to them, like why are we having a lot of kids, it must be because it’s arousing to us, right?It must be some sort of kink scenario. Which I find very interesting for a couple reasons. One is, like, in case you’re wondering [00:31:00] and, and to, to we have argued before that the only thing that isn’t a kink is having kids, right? Like, being turned on by getting somebody pregnant or being impregnated, like, that’s literally what the whole system is in place for.Simone Collins: Yeah ...Malcolm Collins: you know, the fact that you, that you would call that a kink is bizarre, right? Like, you think- You think using another human as like an Oni hole is the non-kink and doing sex for the reason sex exists is the kink? It’s theSimone Collins: only one normal version of it ...Malcolm Collins: Yes. But this scenario in terms of like erotic scenarios, the idea of impregnation a breeding kink you could say is, is something that I personally do find arousing, right?Like it’s in my panoply of like random things that arouse me. The idea of this in terms of my life, wife, and kids, absolutely not is it arousing. Like it, it, it just ... [00:32:00] I was trying to explain this to them. I’m like, “Do you understand like having a kid is a giant logistical process that takes months?”It’s not like a sexual fantasy, right?Simone Collins: Like- Yeah. Pe- people who have this sort of fetish aren’t having children. There are people who act it out, absolutely. There are people who will even go on these like Facebook groups for sperm donors and actively seek out women who are willing to have sex with them in order to get pregnant and they will fly all around the world and have thousands of kids.They would count. But like yeah, that you would create a whole new life and be responsible for them and raise them for like f- a couple minutes of your fetish, your arousal pathway?Malcolm Collins: Well, what it is, but it’s not even an effective mechanism for, ... Okay, I’ll word this a different way for people. Mm-hmm. If anyone here is, is listening has a, a b- a, a, a submission or [00:33:00] dominance arousal pattern, right?Like you get turned on by role playing a very dominant person or you get turned on by role playing a very submissive person, right? Do you get turned on when you’re a like wage slave if you’re turned on by being submissive? Probably effing not. Do you get turned on by being a boss or managing a team if you’re turned on by being dominant?Probably not, right? It’s just there’s too much other stuff going on in those sorts of roles to actually activate those pathways.Simone Collins: Yes.Malcolm Collins: But I actually think that’s a really good explanation for this, right? Like, but it is w- one, I mean it, it, it’s sad to see that that level of sort of degenerate framing of reality by these individuals but the thing to remember with any sort of civil war with the left and everything like that is we really only need to wait them out at this point.Their fertility rates are [00:34:00] so low. They are sterilizing themselves. Like literally- There’s these people out there right now who hate you, they want you dead, they want everything you stand for destroyed, and you could be like, “Oh my God,” like, “We need to get out all the guns. We need to round these people up.We need to sterilize them.” And it’s like, oh no, you don’t need to do that. And they’re like, “Well, why?” It’s like they literally have vasectomy vans go to like the DNC and offer free vasectomies at this point. It’s not even a right-wing conspiracy. This is them doing this. They’re handlingSimone Collins: it. They’re handling it.But for the same reason, that’s why I find it so shocking the idea that there would be any form of civil war because I just don’t think that ultimately the left has the ability to take that level of organized initiative. The left is about degrowth, it’s about antinatalism, it’s about stepping back, relinquishing- But they have-turning back, stopping, stagnating. It’s not about organizing and building, and you need to organize and build in order to lead a civil war.Malcolm Collins: But [00:35:00] they have tons of institutions under their control.Simone Collins: I get that, but those institutions are highly dependent on other factors in order to work, and being parasitical in nature culturally, they’ve already weakened those institutions.True. True. So they just won’t work, especially when isolated and rebellious. They’re not sufficient rebellious entities.Malcolm Collins: And this is why I think America should conquer Europe.Simone Collins: Yeah. I feel like- It’s there to be taken. Yeah. We’re, we’re thinking too small- We need to do this ... with, with Greenland. You gotta think bigger.Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Greenland? Come on. You’re thinking so small, Trump.Simone Collins: Mm-hmm. There’s more out there, some, some nice ones to pick off.Malcolm Collins: If we went out and we conquered Greenland, they would do nothing. Oh, we should do a video on whether NATO’s a bad idea.Simone Collins: That would be fun to do. Yeah, I like that.Malcolm Collins: All right. I love you to death.Yes, I love you. You’re amazingSimone Collins: what a day. What a day.Malcolm Collins: Film, film, [00:36:00] film. Got crews over all day today.Simone Collins: And yesterday.Malcolm Collins: Such a, a fun life actually, in a way, because it feels like we’re celebrities, but like, without, like, having to be film stars or something. Like, the news is, like, r- regularly interested in, like, what are, what are they doing today?Oh,Simone Collins: but like, we don’t have to memorize lines or something?Malcolm Collins: Yeah. We don’t have to... I mean, I wouldn’t wanna be a celebrity in the way that celebrities used to exist. I wouldn’t wanna be a celebrity in the way that Kardashians are celebrities or the way that Ozzy Osbourne is a celebrity, where, like, it’s interesting because we’re like celebrities, but people care about our political views.Like, the antithesis- Oh ... of, you know, the historic celebrity where it’s like, “Well, they’reSimone Collins: not-” Oh, where like, okay, yeah, you would hate if they cared about what you wore or something, or who you were dating, and y- you like what they actually care about your substance. They care what they thinkMalcolm Collins: aboutSimone Collins: X.Malcolm Collins: I get it.Yeah. But with us, it’s like, why would anybody? Well, they are, they are, Which is interesting, ‘cause y- you know, there’s not I mean, I don’t think there’s any political provocateur that gets as much just, like, raw news [00:37:00] coverage as we get. Not even close. Like, if there’s some that are more famous than us, like Munches Bulbog or Scott Alexander or something like that, but they’re, they’re much more private than us too.Simone Collins: Nick Fuentes, come on. He gets tons of views.Malcolm Collins: Ah, Nick Fuentes does get more news coverage than us, and is a provocateur, so I will give you that.Simone Collins: Yeah, well.Thank you. Thank you. I try. Okay,Malcolm Collins: so- who else? Yeah, but I m- I mean, it’s, it’s interesting. It’s interesting to play this, this, this game with the dying press era.ButSimone Collins: yeah. Yeah.Malcolm Collins: And you saw me in a music video today, which made me happy. It had like 11 views, but still, you know, we’re getting in some of the you know, the wider universe of whatever it’s called. Sky Browse, Sky Browse videos.Simone Collins: CinematicMalcolm Collins: universe. All right, well I’ll seeSimone Collins: you later. Okay.Malcolm Collins: Oh, what are we doing for dinner?Reheating?Simone Collins: I’m going to be working it out. I might do some... I was thinking about doing a mixture of some roasted Brussels sprouts [00:38:00] with butter and some, like, kosher salt dusting on the top, and then also some meat over some maybe, like, fried rice or something. Like, a just kind of a mismatch of- No,Malcolm Collins: I mean, did we freeze yesterday’s dinner?Simone Collins: We haven’t phrased, frozen yesterday’s. But I’m not gonna just serve leftovers, like-Malcolm Collins: To guests, yeah, you’re right, you’re right, you’re right ...Simone Collins: yeah, so we need to do something new and cool. And so I might take out some of our, our batch-prepped cool s- cool dishes, and zhuzh them up.Malcolm Collins: Yeah, whatever you want. Rendang is something Steve would, Mika would probably like.Simone Collins: That would require a new, like, coinage of, of meat, which I do not have.Malcolm Collins: No, I mean, if we have one frozen.Simone Collins: Oh, we, we might actually. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Ren- rendang over rice with roasted Brussels sprouts as a side.Malcolm Collins: Yeah.Simone Collins: Okay. I’ll, I’ll check with them. I’ll, I’ll give them some options after seeing what I’ve, I’ve batch prepped and then- All rightwe’ll go forward from [00:39:00] there.Malcolm Collins: Okay, so anyway the, the obvious, like what I would think initially is how inexpensive can I get them at scale, right? Yeah. But the reality is is that the inexpensive path is either you’re just retrofitting existing drones, which we’re already seeing people do pretty competently- Absolutelyin, in environments like you know, Iran was doing this pretty well, was just like the lobbed systems. You know, you’re getting this out of Russia. So then the question would be- Yeah ... if I was gonna build something, how would w- I make it meaningfully differentiated from the other systems that are out there right now?And the way I would make it meaningfully different is twofold. First, one of the big problems you have with the drone systems out there right now is they’ve gotten pretty good at the ones that are designed at taking out tanks, right? To the point where it doesn’t even make sense to field tanks in the way that you traditionally would have been fealing- fielding tanks in a war.Simone Collins: Yeah.Malcolm Collins: And so that means you [00:40:00] have much more personnel movement and much more individual drone movement. So like small things where like just lobbing an explosive isn’t necessarily as useful. Now the idea of like the gun drone, these do exist, right? But the core problem with them is kickback, right?You, you have a, a flying thing, you’re shooting. MinorSimone Collins: difficulty, yeah.Malcolm Collins: Right, minor difficulty. And two, all of the systems that are made to prevent the sort of lobbed drones, the explosive drones, are also good at these, right? So if you’re in Ukraine and you’re trying to like find a path through the Russians, basically you’re trying to find like invisible corridors that don’t have drone blocking setups around them that sort of block where the drones are going, right?Oh,Simone Collins: yes.Malcolm Collins: Okay. Yeah. So you’ve got two problems, right? One is good kickback, the second is the drone defense that blocks radio signals. So how can you get around both of these problems?Simone Collins: Yeah.Malcolm Collins: Right? Okay, so [00:41:00] problem number one is what if you had a drone that was actually, while it could fly, its predominant strategy in terms of, like, the way it moves and does its thing is landing and locking into ground for something like a more sniper rifle type approach.Where it’s, it’s got a, a, a, a, a weapon on it that isn’t designed to fire-Simone Collins: It’s a mobile firing turret ...Malcolm Collins: a mobile firing turret. But then secondly, that it had a a wheel-based system as well. So it would be really designed to camouflage itself. Like, the idea is, is it gets itself in position and it can stay there for a long time, basically completely quiet to an enemy so they can reposition their...So, like, suppose you’re losing ground in a territory or something like that you could just leave these out. The enemy moves their anti-air defense to the other side of [00:42:00] them. Mm. And you can reactivate them, and the- Yeah, you can...Simone Collins: Yeah.Malcolm Collins: Mm-hmm ... and the important thing about the wheel system on them as well is the wheel system plus an AI navigation system would be really good for when they’re blocked.It basically allows them to drive through blocked territory until it gets to a space where you can reestablish radio connection, and then fly it into a place where you would want to fly it into to lock it into place.Simone Collins: A Wall-E that shoots and flies.Malcolm Collins: Yeah. So the idea is, is it’s, it’s a rethinking of the way that a drone would work in a military context.Mm-hmm. Outside of these very simplistic ones to basically one that’s built around camouflage, sniping, and moving through AI drone detection systems. And the idea is, is that if you could get it good enough at long distance aim, which I think you could with an automated system pretty well given what, like, what we have with, with things, you wouldn’t need to worry as much about counter drone systems [00:43:00] because it would be very difficult to detect is the idea.But we’ll see. And one, one of the challenges of it would be uneven terrain. So you’d probably need some sort of, like... But if you do tank treads, then it’s gonna be too heavy. Yeah. Hmm. You could probably do some form of, like, a hovercraft utilizing the same fans that are used to fly it to pump air out the bottom.Simone Collins: I don’t know. I would look at kids’ toys really as a base because they’re meant-Malcolm Collins: Well, that’s why I was thinking hovercrafts, because I had some hovercraft toys as a kid. Yeah. And they’re really not that hard to create. You just need to create a suction padding at the bottom with like a styrofoam, which can be very lightweight and inexpensive.And then you blowSimone Collins: air- But can hovercraft travel on uneven terrain?Malcolm Collins: What?Simone Collins: Can hovercraft travel on unevenMalcolm Collins: terrain? Yeah, very rough terrain. Oh. I mean, that’s the point of hovercrafts often.Simone Collins: I’m not fa- I’m really [00:44:00] not familiar with hovercrafts.Malcolm Collins: So basically you’re just making it fly, but at very low altitude.Simone Collins: Yeah.Malcolm Collins: And with less power. That’sSimone Collins: the ... Yeah, interesting.Malcolm Collins: Obviously the challenge then is, is, is repowering it. How do you handle that? I need to think through. Anyway, fun, fun concept here.Speaker 4: Whoa. Whoa.Wow. I got this dinosaur. What would youSpeaker 6: like for dinner, Titan?Speaker 4: Well, I want macaroni and cheese and then pizza.Speaker 6: We don’t have any big pizza, but we can make macaroni and cheese.Speaker 4: But we can spill on floor. Stop it. No, we cannot. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit basedcamppodcast.substack.com/subscribe

Malcolm and Simone Collins break down Helen Andrews’ “Great Feminization Theory” — the idea that the rise of wokeness, institutional dysfunction, and cancel culture correlates with fields tipping majority-female and importing feminine sociological norms (empathy over rationality, safety over risk, cohesion over competition).They explore law schools, medicine, media, management, conflict resolution styles, why organizations feminize and then decline, practical solutions, male-only spaces, and how this intersects with marriage, ambition, and building high-agency families in a declining culture.Show NotesThe theory* presented by journalist Helen Andrews at the National Conservatism conference in Washington, DC in September 2025* Speech got over 175K views* later published as an essay in Compact Magazine in October 2025* Connects the rise of wokeness and institutional dysfunction to higher percentages of women in formerly male-dominated fields* Because women bring feminine values that prioritize empathy over rationality, safety over risk, and cohesion over competition* Notes that many key institutions tipped from majority male to majority female in roughly the same period that “wokeness” intensified:* law schools (majority female since 2016)* New York Times staff (majority female since 2018, now 55 percent women)* Medical schools (majority female since 2019)* College instructors (majority female since 2023)* The college‑educated workforce (majority female since 2019).* Women now 33% of judges (63 percent of those appointed by Joe Biden)* Women now 46% of managers* Cites writers like Noah Carl and Bo Winegard & Cory Clark, saying survey data show women more likely than men to prioritize social cohesion over free speech (one cited survey: 71 percent of men favor free speech over cohesion, while 59 percent of women favor cohesion)* Draws on Joyce Benenson’s book Warriors and Worriers, she reports lab observations that male groups “jockey for talking time, disagree loudly,” then quickly converge on a solution, while female groups focus more on personal relations, eye contact, and turn‑taking, paying less attention to the assigned task* Attributes the rise of cancellations to women’s conflict aversion* That’s interesting—I hadn’t seen it as being that way but it is* References research and primate observations claiming that males are quicker to reconcile after conflict, while females favor slow, covert, ongoing competition within a group, and generalizes this to say men tend toward open conflict and reconciliation, whereas women undermine or ostracize enemies* Examples cited* Larry Summers’ resignation from Harvard in 2006 (after his comments about women in science)* Bari Weiss’ resignation from NYT (Weiss described colleagues calling her a racist and bigot in internal Slack, and shunning people friendly with her)* Doctors wearing political pins, endorsing Black Lives Matter protests during Covid as “public health” despite lockdown rules, and generally importing political causes into professional settings as a “failure to compartmentalize” tied to feminization* Causes cited* Andrews claims feminization is not organic but engineered via anti‑discrimination law* because under‑representation of women invites lawsuits and huge settlements (she cites large companies that paid nine‑figure or multi‑million settlements over gender bias or “frat boy culture”), firms are pressured to hire and promote women and to suppress “masculine” office culture* THe creation of hostile-to-men environments* women’s preferred norms drive men out rather than women simply “outcompeting” menIs it backed up by actual evidence?Support* Medicine* Momen comprised only 9.7% of doctors in 1970* Reached 32.4% by 2010 and continue to increase* Medical students are now over 50% female* Law* Women were just 4.9% of lawyers in 1970* Rose to 33.4% by 2010* Reached 41% by 2024* Academia* Women law faculty now constitute the majority among those with 20 years of experience or less* Women are projected to become the majority of full-time faculty in ABA-accredited law schools by 2024-2025* Government* In the U.S. Senate, women held 0% of seats in 1973 and 1975, rising to just 2% through most of the 1980s, then accelerating to 25% by 2023.* The House of Representatives showed similar patterns: women were 3.2% of representatives in 1973, 10.8% by 1993, and 28.5% by 2023.* Women’s representation in presidential Cabinet positions has fluctuated more dramatically based on administration, ranging from 0% in the early 1970s to a historic high of 48% under President Biden starting in 2021.* Re: General government employment: While women made substantial gains in government employment from the 1940s through the early 2000s—rising from less than one-third to nearly half of the federal workforce—their representation has largely plateaued around 45-46% since the 2000s and has begun declining in absolute numbers due to recent federal workforce reductions.Mixed* Journalism* 1971: Women represented only 22% of daily newspaper journalists and 11% of television journalists* 1982: women comprised 34% of daily newspaper staff and 33% of television journalists* 2001: women had reached 37% of daily newspaper newsroom staff and 40% of television news staff* 2022: 40.9% of US journalists are women* television (44.1%) and radio (43.7%)* weekly newspapers (41.7%)* daily newspapers (37.2%)* wire services (34.1%)* News magazines (43.9%) (up by about 10% over the past decade)* Online media (40.4%) (up by about 10% over the past decade)* One 2023 survey found journalists nearly evenly split by gender, with 51% men and 46% women.Contra* Business* Corporations in general* Women represented about 47% of the U.S. labor force in 2000* As of 2025, women STILL constitute approximately 47% of total U.S. employees.* Women were just 35% of the workforce in 1970, rising to 47% by 1990. Between 1966 and 2013, women’s participation rates in the workforce increased from 31.5% to 48.7%* Startups (down over time)* For over a decade, only ~2% of venture-backed startups are exclusively female founded* In 2024, female-only founding teams received just 2.3% of global VC funding ($6.7 billion out of $289 billion total), while all-male teams captured 83.6%.* This 2% figure has remained largely unchanged since at least 2017, when female-only teams received 2.5% of funding. By 2026, some reports indicate this has declined to 1-2%* Female workforce participation is below its peak* Women’s labor force participation peaked at 60% in 1999-2000 and has since declined to 57.5% as of March 2025, remaining well below men’s rate of 67.5%* Women still constitute only 47% of the total U.S. labor force, and projections suggest this will remain “slightly less than half” through 2032* Women remain underrepresented in senior leadership positions where institutional power is concentrated* Women hold only 27% of U.S. medical school dean positions and 25% of department chair roles despite representing 45% of faculty* In law, men still “dominate the upper echelons of the legal profession through federal judgeships, state supreme courts, law firm partnerships and corporate counsel positions”* Women represent only 33% of law faculty with over 30 years of experience and comprise just 38% of C-suite positions in corporate America (up from 31% in 2021) (See: National Jurist)The Criticism* Andrews presents no policy solutions* Some push back on Andrews’ argument that women are emotional while men are rationalHelen Andrews’ Background* American conservative political commentator and author* Senior editor, The American Conservative* Features editor, Commonplace Magazine* Graduated from Yale University in 2008 (BA in Religious Studies)* Lived in Sydney, Australia from 2012 to 2017 (worked as a policy analyst and think tank researcher)* 2021 book: Boomers: The Men and Women Who Promised Freedom and Delivered Disaster* Argues that the Baby Boomer generation harmed American culture* Profiles six prominent Boomers: Steve Jobs, Aaron Sorkin, Jeffrey Sachs, Camille Paglia, Al Sharpton, and Sonia SotomayorEpisode TranscriptMalcolm Collins: Hello, Simone. Today we are gonna be talking about The Great Feminization Theory by Helen Andrews. In summation, if you are not familiar with the theory, ‘cause it’s been doing the rounds recently, and it might have some explanatory power to society’s current state.She specifically looks at when various fields began to become majority female, be that university professors, law school students, scientists, management in the United States, most of which at this point is majority female. And she pinpoints the dates that these transitions happened to the rise of wokeness as a social phenomenon.Arguing that what wokeness really is is a female sociological approach, like what makes female minds different from male minds, applied at the civilizational management scale. And I find it very interesting. I told Simone to dig into it. I mean, [00:01:00] unfortunately she’s got a cold today, so you’re gonna have to have a, a, a, a weak voice Simone here.But she is a woman, so she, on- only she can truly understand the horrors of the female brain.Simone Collins: Yeah, I don’t know. Whenever I have some kind of throat problem, I just think of Gentleman Prefer Blondes when at one point a boy speaking from a trench coat that Marilyn Monroe’s hiding behind and she’s like, “Laryngitis,” and that’s all I think of when I have this voice. And that’s such a great, like, that home film is such a great study of gender roles and, and playing with them.Anyway, though- ... i’m, I’m, I, I think there’s a lot of merit to this theory, but I also think that there’s some, I don’t know. I wanna, I wanna question it, and I even have one kind of, a- another theory about how maybe men are responsible for this too. So I wanna hear your thoughts.Malcolm Collins: Okay, go into it.Simone Collins: The, this [00:02:00] first emerged last year in September when Helen Andrews gave a speech about this great feminization theory at the National Conservatism Conference in Washington, DC, and the speech was super popular.It got over 175,000 views. So then she decided to publish an essay about it in Combat magazine that October, and that was just when this dude was born. And yes, like you said, she connects the rise of wokeness and institutional dysfunction to higher percentages of women in formerly male-dominated fields.And that’s really the key part here, because men still are the dominant people in employment now, I mean, at least formal employment. But her point is that women bring feminine values that prioritize empathy over rationality and safety over risk and cohesion over competition, and that many institutions that were really key in influencing how the rest of society works had this tipping point over, like, a series of maybe, [00:03:00] like, five to seven years.And she cites specifically law schools, which became majority female since 2016, New York Times staff, which was majority female since 2018 and is now 55% women, and medical schools, which became majority female since 2019, and then also the college-educated workforce, which was majority female since 2019.So these are really recent tipping points. Women are now 33% of judges additionally, and 63% of those were appointed by Joe Biden. Again, this is super recent. And women are also 46% of managers, as you pointed out. And in her more detailed article, she cites writers like Noah Carl and Bo Winegard and Corey Clark whose survey data show that women are more likely to prioritize social cohesion over free speech.For example, one cited survey has 71% of men [00:04:00] favoring free speech over cohesion, while 59% of women favor cohesion. I think we might have even covered this in our podcast.Malcolm Collins: Yeah. AndSimone Collins: then she also draws on Joyce Benenson’s book Warriors and Worriers. Like, isn’t worrying. And where she reports lab observations that male groups will jockey for taking time and disagree really loudly, but then converge on a solution.Whereas female groups focus more on, like, personal relations and eye contact and turn-taking. Like, classic stuff that we think first really saw with the rise of Occupy Wall Street. And then they pay less attention to the actual assigned task. She also attributes the rise of cancellations to women’s conflict aversion.And I think of that, that’s the first of her theories that I find to be really revelatory, because I hadn’t seen it as that way, but it really is. Like, the way that women deal with conflict is they just freeze people out and cold shoulder them. There’s all this, like, behind closed doors [00:05:00] talking about people behind their backs.Whereas men just trash talk you to your face, and, like, you work it out in person.Malcolm Collins: Yeah Which I think obviously is true I noticed this and we talked about it, with the conflict between Trump and Elon. Which was- Yeah ... really refreshing and I do not think damaged either of their reputations nearly as much as it would have had it been a standard woke fight.Where they just, like, basically to each other’s faces on X, said a bunch of mean stuff for a week and then they got over it, and nobody cared anymore.Simone Collins: Yeah ... andMalcolm Collins: it, it felt so different from the types of political battles that we are used to out of, like, the Clintons and stuff like that. Where Hillary would never just go out there and say a bunch of mean things against another mainstream Democratic candidate.Simone Collins: No, they like, they, they shadowban you to the point- Mm ... where, like, you don’t necessarily even know you’ve been frozen out, you just have been. It’s like, the, there’s no, there’s no due process. You don’t have a chance to even have your say. You just get uninvited at some point.Malcolm Collins: Well,Simone Collins: and that’s not even true.And I heard in popular, like, [00:06:00] mainstream outlets-Malcolm Collins: Yeah, mm-hmm ...Simone Collins: that cancel culture was attributed to, well, they say it came out of, like, gay culture- Yeah ... specifically. Like, at least the, the, the linguistic origins of it came from gay culture apparently. But yeah, I mean, like the can- the, the, the, the act of cancellation-Malcolm Collins: It didn’t, by the wayas a- And I have explained this to you before. You just refuse to believe it, because it’s, it’s very well documented. What doSimone Collins: you mean?Malcolm Collins: So cancel culture, the word cancel-Simone Collins: Yeah ...Malcolm Collins: came from the campaign #cancelcolbert- No, but- ... as in get his show- Canceled. Then people retroactively, as people do for many things, attempt to pin it to either Black or gay culture because this is just something progressive culture does.It cannot admit that something had a random origin or a white origin, so it will always go back and try to find any historical incidents of [00:07:00] gay or Black people using a word in a specific way so it can say actually that everybody knows that they do this. It’s always like, “This came from Black culture.This came from gay culture.” And you’re like, “Well, obviously not everything came from one of those two cultures.” And with cancellation, it’s one of the clearest examples because to cancel a television show is a normal thing to say. The very first major widespread campaign of cancellation, I just cannot deal with this historical lamp what is it?L- lamp gassing? Light, light gassing?Simone Collins: Gaslighting.Malcolm Collins: Gaslighting.Simone Collins: Yes.Malcolm Collins: Gaslighting, yes. This, this historic gaslighting that this came literally from anything other than ca- #CancelColbert. That was, they, like no other incident was nearly that big, and she clearly had no connection to gay culture. She clearly didn’t get the term from gay, gay culture.She wanted to cancel his television show.Simone Collins: Well, anyway, it’s, it’s, it’s, I, I just never thought of it, I never realized the [00:08:00] extent to which it is a very deeply feminine way of conflict resolution.Malcolm Collins: Just to say- It was a woman, by the way, who did this ...Simone Collins: conf- it’s, it’s very, like, direct conflict adverse conflict resolution.But one that is ultimately less just because it doesn’t give the aggrie- or the accused party a chance to defend themselves. It just ruins themMalcolm Collins: without- And one study youSimone Collins: haven’t studied,Malcolm Collins: Which is obviously very important to all of this in terms of the rise of women-Simone Collins: Yeah ...Malcolm Collins: is the study that showed I, I hope our audience is familiar with this one by now because it is very big to my understanding of, of, of reality now where people played a game against other people for resources.And some of these individuals were shown to be cheating, and some of these individuals were shown to not be cheating. And men and women were shown them being shocked while they were playing the game. And for men when somebody wasn’t cheating and they were shocked, it distressed men and, and, and made them upset.But when they were cheating and they were shocked, it made [00:09:00] men satisfied. It gave them a dopamine hit. But for women, it made them equally upset whether they were cheating or whether they were playing fairly whenSimone Collins: they were shocked. Yeah, they didn’t care. They didn’t care about, like, punishment. They don’t, they don’t want any form ofMalcolm Collins: punishment on anyoneSimone Collins: Yeah, be it just or not.Yeah. Which is a, a another key flashpoint in modern society. The, the, the key division being those who wish to enforce our laws and those who do not. Though at a recent dinner party it was Chatham House Rules, but someone that many of you will know well as a, a major, like, thought leader, pointed out that for a very long time, it is, it has been a debate in society about enforcing rules.It was, like, uncool to enforce laws. So yeah- Wait, when was that? ... it’s not necessarily new, but it’s certainly-Malcolm Collins: Sorry, when? When did they say this was true?Simone Collins: Like, since the 1960s.Malcolm Collins: Okay, that’s not a long time.Simone Collins: Okay, fair enough.Malcolm Collins: And- It’s, it’s a long time in- No, I mean, it is, it is relevant [00:10:00] because, you know, I pointed out that the the Quakers were incredibly against enforcing rules.And, Well,Simone Collins: they were all about... They were like, you didn’t visit the right person after you got married, you’d be, like, frozen out of your Quaker society. Well,Malcolm Collins: theySimone Collins: had a- They were all- ...Malcolm Collins: 22-step process after you got married, and if you did any part of it wrong-Simone Collins: It was more than two steps. Are you kidding me?It was like 18 steps. I said 22. Okay. Thank you. 22.Malcolm Collins: Yes. Continue.Simone Collins: Anyway. Anyway so, in addition to the... Oh, sorry, additional research that she cites is primate stuff, like how males are quicker to reconcile after conflict, whereas female primates show a lot more of that, like, slow burn resentment that you get with women.Yeah ... so she’s just trying to sort of generalize to say that men both as primates and as, as Homo sapiens, tend toward open and rapidly resolved conflict, whereas women tend to undermine and ostracize and make things a lot more long-term. [00:11:00] And then she cites three sort of salient examples in her argument.She talks about Larry Summers’ resignation from Harvard in 2006 after he made comments about women in science. It feels like just yesterday, which is crazy. That was 20 years ago. And then Bari Weiss’ resignation from The New York Times in which she described colleagues calling her a racist and a bigot in an internal Slack, how people even who were just friendly with her were shunned.And she also describes doctors wearing political pins and endorsing Black Lives Matter protests during- ByMalcolm Collins: the way, I love Bari Weiss’s story there. That, that, that turned around on those people’s faces.Simone Collins: Yeah. I mean, seems to be working out pretty well for her.Malcolm Collins: Yeah, right?Simone Collins: But yeah, the, the doctors were endorsing going to protests even though it was a public health risk to the lockdown rules and, like, violating lockdown rules.And- Could you explainMalcolm Collins: how that works?Simone Collins: Sorry ... integrating- You remember how during COVID-19 a [00:12:00] lot of doctors were- Yeah, IMalcolm Collins: remember, but I don’t understand why that’s relevant to the woman thing. Explain the connection there.Simone Collins: Oh, she’s, she’s describing how an increase in women in the medical profession led for a shift in emphasizing sort of emotion and sentiment and care, like concerns about social justice over like literally concerns about human health and chronic disease.Malcolm Collins: Ah, so that’s when doctors became useless.Simone Collins: Yeah, they’re like, “Who cares about transmitting COVID? Go out to the Black Lives Matter protest.” So, you know, that bothers me because, you know, they, they won’t, they won’t emphasize palliative care ‘cause they just wanna keep people alive even when they only have like terrible quality of life left.But they’re like, “Yeah, go ahead, die as long as it’s going to a Black Lives Matter protest.” And in terms of the causes she cited for this, and some of the, the primary criticism that she actually gets for this is she doesn’t really get really into like how to fix the [00:13:00] problem. But she does point out that basically legalizing a lot of this was a big source of the issue.That by making organizations more liable for discrimination- Mm-hmm ... and, and making anti-discrimination lawsuits a lot easier to do, workplaces had to become more female friendly places and they couldn’t really tell you to guess this weird female behavior. And then if, for example, in an, in an organization you have an under-representation of women and then you’re therefore exposed to lawsuits, you’re gonna get a lot more women.And you’re gonna have people do anything they can to avoid the risk. Right. She also mentions that like, basically once you get this like tipping point of women in an organization, you just kind of create this de facto hostile to men environment.Malcolm Collins: I’m so sorry, he’s just like screaming. Well, I mean, I think something that’s really important with all of this, and it’s something that I think [00:14:00] parts of our audience miss because they molder over the unfairness of all of this in terms of the life paths that they told were open to them when they were growing up and then going into the traditional workforce, is that a lot of these companies are failing at this point.They are falling apart in terms of their ability to competently produce products. It is quite shocking actually that when we look at the cutting edge AIs right now, which are obviously the cutting edge of technology, require huge amounts of investment very competent teams, everything like that, right?You would expect because unlike previous generations of transfer when you go from one generation of tech to the next, Typically, the, the, the history was is that the new tech required very little money to operate and could be done very inexpensively. And even though during this one particular technological revolution this is not as much the case, it is still the new [00:15:00] and young AI companies that are dominating.It is not the Geminis, it is not whatever the hell Microsoft made, Copilot. It’s, it’s not the Facebook, it’s not the, I mean, Facebook is maybe... No, Llama is terrible. It’s, it’s not Apple. Apple AI is, like, an actual joke. It’s not Adobe. It’s not, you, you know, it’s not any of the mainstream players, right?It’s, it’s, it’s the little guys. It’s your Groks and your Mistrals and your OpenAI’s and Anthropic’s and everything like that. And so the question is, is how is this even conceivable? And the answer is that the organizations that l- live for a long period of time feminize so quickly and adopt feminine institutional norms that they are no longer able to compete.And this is why if you go to, like, our website, like rfab.ai, a lot of people are like, “Wow, your, like, super search feature is, like, really good in terms of, like, using AI to cross-check AI across multiple models. Like, why are none of the big companies using this?Speaker: Note [00:16:00] this morning, , we are uploading the ability on rfab.ai to on SuperSearch upload things like documents and spreadsheets. So improving every dayMalcolm Collins: Oh, you have, like, a card game that uses AI.That’s, I haven’t seen this implemented before. Oh, your chatbot system’s better than most of the other chatbot systems. Are you just, like, two people building this?” And it’s like, yeah, you know, um The, the reason we’ve been able to do this is because we are not bogged down by the giant self-referencing bureaucracy.And a lot of people, I think, get mad at being frozen out of parts of the tech space right now, when the reality is, is the parts of the tech industry that are being monopolized are going to collapse. And the people who have invested in- Yeah,Simone Collins: and I think you’re mentioning this, like in light of, of people talking about like immigrant groups, freezing them out.Like- Yeah, they’re like incompetent immigrants ... if you’re in a, if you’re in a company that is like mass importing what you perceive to be incompetent immigrants, [00:17:00] that company’s not long for this world anyway.Malcolm Collins: Exactly. You should be able to out-compete what that company is doing, right? Like, if they’re mass importing incompetent immigrants, then the presumably the quality of the product’s going to go down.If the quality of the product doesn’t go down, then they didn’t need you anyway, or the immigrants weren’t as incompetent as you thought they were. And I think that that’s really a critical point, right? So the question is, is, is then people are like, “Well, you’ve got natural monopolies.” And yes, natural monopolies matter, but you can still break natural monopolies.It has happened multiple... Sorry, for people who don’t understand what a natural monopoly is typically in industries that involve two-sided marketplaces search, social media, these are good examples of them. You typically get a case in which one and the largest company ends up being 85% of the market.And we have seen these dominate for a long time in something like search or advertisement or, Those are really the only two where I know... amazon, Amazon [00:18:00] is the, the third one. But they’re not as stable as you would think. So if you look at something like social media, social media is a natural monopoly that’s undergone multiple disruptions throughout our lifetimes, where one brand was completely eradicated almost.Another is online dating. Online dating is a two-sided marketplace that has undergone complete transformations multiple times in our lifetime. So you can disrupt this if you can create a better product. Oh, another one that’s undergone complete disruption is instant messaging systems. Instant messaging is a two-sided marketplace that has undergone multiple enormous disruptions.Obviously the biggest one that we would want to see disrupted is video streaming. But it is incredibly expensive to do, which is one of the reasons it hasn’t been. And a lot of... Yeah, it’s, it’s, it’s difficult. What you would really need to do is have a site. Like if I was going to attempt to compete with YouTube, which Rumble is, I, not doing it the way I would do it is to essentially mirror [00:19:00] and host YouTube videos alongside the videos that my own site hosted that couldn’t easily be taken down.So there is no cost to somebody to switch over to my site in terms of the videos that they like on YouTube. And you could do this legally. Just use an embedding- ButSimone Collins: where would they get the money for all that hosting? I guess something disruptive could change that and make it more affordable.Malcolm Collins: No, you don’t need to host the YouTube videos.They’re hosted on YouTube’s backend. Oh. All the videos that you’re ho- They’re just basically embedded videos that are acting as if they’re videos on your platform.Simone Collins: Oh, yeah. Okay, I get it. I getMalcolm Collins: it. But again, this is just like, just think through this stuff, right? Like...Simone Collins: Yeah. Anyway, what I think is interesting, I mean, like to her point, just in terms of talking through the, the, the argument she made and whether it has merit, I do think it’s interesting that she points out this tipping point, but one issue is that, like, if this is the problem, if the [00:20:00] problem is women entering these formerly male-dominated fields, what percentage of women is too many?Because when you actually look at medicine okay, yes, over 50% of medical students are now female, but by 2010, only around like a third of women in medicine or, sorry, of people in medicine, professionals in medicine were female. So that’s not, that’s not that much. And women, I mean, that’s compared with only 9.7% in 1970.But like, is 30% too much? Like, w- ‘cause 2006 is the first example of this cancellation being an issue. Like, presumably by 2010 that was already an issue. I’m not sure, like when is, when is too many women too many women? Also looking at law, so in 1970 only 4.9% of lawyers were women, and then by 2010 it was similar to medical [00:21:00] professions and women, about a third of women.Or sorry, a third of lawyers were women. And then by 2024 it’s 41%, but it’s not that most women are, or sorry, most lawyers are women. It’s just that there’s more women than ever before. So part of me wonders like where is the tipping point, because they’re not necessarily female dominated. And also an important point is that all really.. M- most leadership positions still are overwhelmingly male dominated So if you actually look at, like, the, the leadership of every major company y- you’re not gonna, you’re not gonna see that many women. Women hold only 27% of US medical school dean positions and 25% of department chair roles, even though they rep- I thinkMalcolm Collins: that’s really misleading and an illusion.Really? ... specifically what creates this illusion is for the very most senior of roles most of them were fought over [00:22:00] a couple decades ago. So a lot ofSimone Collins: people- So you think there’s just a big delay when it comes to senior leadership?Malcolm Collins: Well, yeah, a lot of people in these roles are in their 70s, right?Like, of course they’re overwhelmingly male. The world was different back then. So I do not think it’s, it’s meaningful to point that out.Simone Collins: Okay, ‘cause I mean, it’s also the same, like women are only 38% of C-suite positions in America.Malcolm Collins: S- again what’s the average age of a C-suite position in America?Simone Collins: Let’s just- Yeah, okay ... keep it that way. So you just think that there’s a delay there? ‘Cause part of me wonders if men are still dominant in these positions, is this kind of a comp- a competitive tactic to get rid of middle management that are men who could c- potentially supplant them, and just replace them with less competent, less engaged women who are also less likely to supplant them, thereby solidifying their position in leadership?Like it’s a gerontocratic status maintenance strategy. You don’t think that that’s in [00:23:00] play?Malcolm Collins: No. Th- it’s, it’s just that they’re old. Like, as, as the workforce ages up, it seems very obvious to me C-suites are gonna become increasingly female, as we’ve already seen. In fact, I would ar- go so far as to argue if you just look at the math of when women began to dominate management positions and then age it forwards you’re, you’re going to see C-suite positions changing at the same rate.The only place where this really changes is outside of major companies, if you’re talking at companies that were still run by their original founder. And if you’re looking at companies still run by their original founder, of course they’ll be overwhelmingly male because th- you know, these are the, the competent people who are being frozen out of the workforce right now.Not even like men are smart. It’s just like if you’re a competent woman, you’re going to get a job. If you’re a competent man, you’re less likely to get a job deserving of your competence.Simone Collins: That’s fair. And also, when you look at younger people in, for example, like law school faculty women in law school faculty are now the majority among those [00:24:00] with 20 years of experience or less.So I guess per what you’re saying, we can expect leadership to be Majority female in most fields going forward. At least, like medical, law, academia. And also- Yeah ... I mean, similar things are happening in government. I mean, even historically, government was, in terms of like federal jobs and stuff, there were a lot of women working in government.But now it actually, it’s plateaued since the 2000s. It, it plateaued around 45 to 46%, which is more representative of just the number of, the percentage of women in the workforce. So I guess government isn’t that good at representing it. But now in terms of like House of Representatives, as of 2023, 28.5% of House of Representatives members were women, and in the Senate it was 25% in 2023.So it’s still a minority, so I also wonder like how many, how, what [00:25:00] percentage of women is too many? I’m just not sure.Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Well, I mean- In journalism- Again, keep in mind, congressmen and senators are enormously old. So again, it’s, it’s not as relevant, but continue. Yeah.Simone Collins: I guess that’s fair.Malcolm Collins: Well,Simone Collins: and they don’t exercise that muchMalcolm Collins: controlSimone Collins: journalism personally I think, like the New York Times I think is an outlier in terms of being majority women because of, as of 2022- 20- ... only 40, 40% of journalists in the US were women. 44% in television, 43% in radio, 41% in newspapers, 37% of daily newspapers, 34% of wire services. So-Malcolm Collins: But with a lot of newspaper media it’s, it’s really irrelevant.And this is again what I’m talking about, right? Like, as these institutions feminize, they became irrelevant. As Hollywood feminized, it became irrelevant. As newspapers re- feminized, they became irrelevant. We are seeing a society where, yes, women, immigrants, [00:26:00] Indians may capture organizations, but often not long after they do, if they are not competent, those organizations begin to erode in terms of their ability to innovate and market dominance.Simone Collins: Well, speaking of erosion, it could be that this feminization theory, while it has its merits also is a, it’s like a short-lived ph- phenomenon, and as you pointed out, it’s kind of toxic and, I mean, you point this out extensively in The Pragmatist’s Guide to Crafting Religion. Call it feminization, call it the woke mind virus, whatever you wanna call it, urban monoculture, it is parasitoidal, as you say.Like it destroys the things that it takes over. And when you look at where you see the fewest women, I think that’s where we’re gonna see the greatest takeover over time. So if you look at, for example, startups Women just aren’t there. For over a decade, only about 2% of [00:27:00] venture-backed startups are exclusively female founded.And that’s down actually, I think, from before. So- Well,Malcolm Collins: yeah, I mean, I... There was a period where- I think around- ... it was like a point of pride to fund a female startup, and that’s not even a thing anymore. Like, the female- Yeah ... startup groups have mostly- Yeah ... dissolved because everybody realized it was stupid to give women money.Simone Collins: Yeah, well, and there were some high-profile busts that scaled-Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Uh-huh ... badly. Some high-profile busts. Yeah, I think so. So- Some with holdings,Simone Collins: yeah ...Malcolm Collins: it’s, it’s actually more than that. So both of us worked in venture capital, and if you have worked with all-female founding teams even when their companies are doing good, they’re often kind of delusional about like, how management should work, how their team should work, how they construct things, what they should actually be focused on.So even where I’ve seen a female-founded company, you know, just serendipitously take off it is a nightmare wrangling female CEOs into not self-sabotaging because they [00:28:00] constantly want to focus on whatever sort of messaging is capturing them that day. I, I cannot imagine, and I bemoan our audience so much, having to marry women whereas I got to marry- Oh, I’m so sorry everyonean autist like Simone. The, the... That’s her gender, by the way. Au- au- Yeah,Simone Collins: I don’t count.Right, I identify as re, and those are my pronouns. Re ... really though, like I think the, the best thing about married couples is their pronouns become we and they , so.Malcolm Collins: Is those- Yeah ...Simone Collins: are thoseMalcolm Collins: your neo-pronouns?Simone Collins: Yeah, my neo-pronouns are we/they so , whatever. But also, another important thing I think to note, and I think this is only gonna become a lot more profound as AI rises, female workforce participation is actually below its peak.So women’s labor force participation, it peaked at 60% in the [00:29:00] 1999-2000 range, which I didn’t know. I didn’t know that it got so high for women, and then declined to 57.5% as of March 2025. So it’s below the rate of men’s, which is 67.5%. And right now, women are 47% of the total US workforce, and that it’s gonna probably remain slightly less than half.But-Malcolm Collins: Well- ...Simone Collins: that’s what projections say. I think as AI rises, I would not be at all surprised if in the 2030s we saw it dip well below 45, possibly even go to 44%, and then go even further below in the 2040s Like to 40Malcolm Collins: Mm-hmmSimone Collins: So we’ll seeMalcolm Collins: Well-Simone Collins: But ...Malcolm Collins: I mean, we already saw this in after DOGE, which we’ve talked about in our episode where like wokes abandoned Black women where we point out that there is a huge glut of Black female unemployment right now [00:30:00] because the organizations that were captured by DEI and over-employing them collapsed at the same time as government s- services, partially due to DOGE, stopped hiring people solely based on DEI.And a lot of Black women had made that basically their entire career, and it’s caused a 50% explosion in Black female unemployment in just the last year.Simone Collins: Yeah.Malcolm Collins: So, so we’re actually already seeing the fallout of this. And the c- Yeah.Simone Collins: Well, because it’s, it’s inherently unsustainable. And I think in the end, like if you resolve conflicts by not actually resolving them, by shadow banning and canceling people, you’re going to let problems fester.And I shared with you on WhatsApp this graph that went a little bit viral on X this week that showed a trajectory of basically like the male response to conflict resolution versus the fem- res- female response to conflict resolution. It’s a graph- where, whereMalcolm Collins: did you send this? ... that goesSimone Collins: from the functional system to dysfunctional system.I’ll resend it to you on WhatsApp right now.Malcolm Collins: Are you talking [00:31:00] about Elon’s?Simone Collins: Elon retweeted it.Malcolm Collins: Okay, that graph. Okay. Okay, yeah, I know what you’re talking about. Okay, continue.I mean, this is, this is reflected in Leafly’s latest song is basically about this as a theory. You know, you’ve, you’veSimone Collins: gotMalcolm Collins: a- Yeah.Simone Collins: It shows basically unkind truth to unkind truth to unkind truth makes a functional system become more functional, versus kind lie to kind lie to kind lie makes a dysfunctional system even more dysfunctional over time, or any system more dysfunctional over time. And that’s basically just the, the difference between male and female conflict resolution.And also just general treatment of issues in general. Like women, as through various forms of intrasexual competition and mate guarding, will tell other women, “Oh, like eat that piece of cake,” or, “You do look great,” or, you know, “Dump him,” even when they really shouldn’t be told that. And it ultimately is to their detriment.[00:32:00] Whereas men will be like, “Dude, you’re getting fat,” or like, “No, you know, she’s out of your league anyway. You should, you know-Malcolm Collins: Yeah ...Simone Collins: give up and be a better partner.” Like that, you, you, you see men telling each other the unkind truths and that’s, I think, why ultimately they’re kind of behind most of society’s major innovations because you’re not gonna get- I, I kinda don’t thinkMalcolm Collins: that’s why or even the primary reason men innovate more than women.I think-Simone Collins: Just testosterone? Is that what you’re gonnaMalcolm Collins: reckon it’s? It’s neurological differences.Simone Collins: And then what? Also being smarter on average?Malcolm Collins: I didn’t say that. I just said neurological differences, sociologicalSimone Collins: differences.Malcolm Collins: Come on, Simone. We- we’re not, we’re not going for a channel ban here, okay?Simone Collins: I wonder, would, would, would recognizing that men are on average smarter than women get us in trouble?Malcolm Collins: Yeah, it would get us in trouble, Simone. So we don’t recognize that.Simone Collins: So we never... Yeah, we, we, we’re speaking in hypotheticals, of course.Malcolm Collins: Yeah, hypotheticals only. Come on, [00:33:00] Simone. Right. I’m not the smarter one in this relationship, it’s clearly you. This is why you’re doing all the analysis for us.Simone Collins: Surely, surely you could hypothetically be the smarter one,Malcolm Collins: right?Hypothetically.Simone Collins: Yeah.Malcolm Collins: Yeah.Simone Collins: So let’s just say hypothetically. But I mean, so the biggest criticism that Helen Andrews faced with is that she had no solution, and I guess the only solution we’ve proposed so far is, “Don’t worry, it solves itself.” Like, put women in charge- Well, no ... they’ll bring feminism toMalcolm Collins: the ground It solves itself if you are diligent in guarding against it as we rebuild the economy ourselves with our own companies.Simone Collins: Yeah, I mean, the, the most practical solution for the problems that she points out is don’t make companies liable for being male-friendly spaces or for being female hostile spaces. But how, like, how functionally do you doMalcolm Collins: that? Hm.Simone Collins: Repeal laws.Malcolm Collins: Well, yeah [00:34:00] you know, I, I think you look at RFab and we don’t hire any women.We don’t have any women. We got you working on it and that’s it, and like calling you a woman feels a little perverse within the current ecosystem.Simone Collins: I think your larger solution is not hiring humans though, so I don’t know if that counts.Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Well, I mean, humans are also pretty terrible though.Simone Collins: I guess it’s...Last time we checked. That’sMalcolm Collins: the whole reason why my expertise is, is not working with people, because people are such a bunch of b******s.Speaker 22: Yeah.Speaker 23: I don’t likeSpeaker 22: people.Speaker 23: Oh, well, now that’s not fair, Roy. Have you met all of them?Speaker 22: I’ve met enough of them. People. What a bunch of b******s.Simone Collins: They really are, though. But I don’t know. I think, I think just removing legal liability is probably one of the biggest things, but I think there’s also a cultural element [00:35:00] of celebrating, to the point of Bronze Age Pervert actually, male-only spaces.Malcolm Collins: Mm-hmm.Simone Collins: Like a lot of, a lot of men online have celebrated this idea of a return to male only spaces, and I encountered some people, like when I was in Austin a couple weeks ago, who were really excited to start like men’s clubs like private invite-only men’s clubs and membership clubs. No domination will neverMalcolm Collins: workSimone Collins: I don’t know, man.Like even, I mean, they think menMalcolm Collins: still want to interactSimone Collins: in person. They do. They do ... Taylor Lorenz was talking about how now the high class and trendy thing to do. No, I’m telling you, even highly leftist Taylor Lorenz, I just watched her on a podcast today, was talking about how the high class thing to do now is to meet people in person and hang out in person.And I could absolutely see it being very trendy to only do stuff in person going forward. Mark my words, I’m seeing it. There’s like a tipping point. So- NotMalcolm Collins: among the high class people I know. Among the high class people I know, I’m seeing the [00:36:00] exact opposite. In person is increasingly seenSimone Collins: as- Yeah. We’re terminally online, SethMalcolm Collins: No. It’s different I’m talking about the ones I know who used to be offline people, right? Like, the, the upper class people I know who used to socialize offline no longer do. Now I mean, here’s an example, Simone. Brian Chow, right? Like, he’s talked to us about the way he does socialization now.Simone Collins: And- Oh my God, though.No, no, y- no, that’s the problem, is he has shifted to being literally someone who is employed and working for network state.Malcolm Collins: No, I know he’s working for network state. Network school. Sorry But the communities that he is most proud of being a member of and associates most with are things like Signal groups and stuff like that.They are not personal networking events or anything like that. Because the reality is, is that if you are engaging with these people- HeSimone Collins: literally, his life nowMalcolm Collins: pivotsSimone Collins: around- IMalcolm Collins: understand, but that doesn’t mean that’s his social life ... an in, like onlySimone Collins: in person cityMalcolm Collins: state. Right. And the point I’m making is despite that, that is [00:37:00] not his social life, and that shows how severe this thing is- Yes,Simone Collins: it isMalcolm Collins: among c- you have, you, you haven’t talked with him recently about his social life. If you look at an insider- ISimone Collins: read all of his Substack posts. Do you?Malcolm Collins: Okay, I haven’t read his recent Substack posts. So you’re saying he’s regularly- Then, then you need to- ... socializing in person?Simone Collins: Yes. That’s what you do at network school.Malcolm Collins: No, no, no, no, no. It, it includes your week- No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no ...Simone Collins: itMalcolm Collins: includes your week at network school I don’t mean your... Simone, I am not talking about your subjective guess around what happens in network states. You read posts about him going to- Network school ... in person parties and events. Or-Simone Collins: Yeah, he’s alluded to themMalcolm Collins: Alluded to them.‘Cause the last time I talked to him, he talked about Signal groups being the core source of power in his society, and it makes a lot of sense. That was a longSimone Collins: time ago. No, no, no.Malcolm Collins: Even if you’re in a network state. So just think about this rationally. Okay. Suppose you’re a man and you’re rational, Simone. So I know this is gonna take a lot of work, so try to- Oh my Godget there with me, okay? You care about [00:38:00] moving up in the world, about associating with people who are in positions of power. Within your industry, right? Or within some industry tangential enough to yours, or within an intellectual space tangential to yours. Okay? What is the probability that the leaders, the intellectual leaders or the economic leaders of those communities are going to happen to be in your network state, even if your network state is highly selective?Virtually zero. This is also true if you’re asking in your city, in your area, in your state. And so if you’re actually being like a man and efficient, you don’t bother with that. You instead focus on gaining access to the digital isolated environments, because this is where you can interact with the actual world leaders within a field regularly, instead of the social masturbation that happens in something like a network state.[00:39:00]Simone Collins: I don’t know. We’ll have to ask him. Okay. But I, I hear you. Still, I guess, what, do you have any other proposed solutions to the great feminization- You just replace them.Malcolm Collins: That’s the point. You replace them, and the people who are so indulgent that they wanted to meet up in person, the, the wussy men who thought that that was their solution, their smoking clubs and stuff, you replace them, too.Because you’re gonna be in the clubs with the people who are actually running the world, and they’re in the clubs with the people who like to socially signal to other men, which is kind of fay. Okay? It’s like watching football or something. I understand that, like, we’re supposed to pretend it’s masculine as a society, but, like, as an autistic external objective observer, it appears pretty fay to me.I, I, I just... It does. And it is indulgent, and so it doesn’t lead to these [00:40:00] sorts of positive outcomes. So it’s easy to outmaneuver these people, be they men or... Sorry, be they women or feminized men.Simone Collins: Ugh. Well, I think, yeah, what, by this definition you think anyone who engages in leisure activity isMalcolm Collins: a feminized man?No, I think that there are efficient ways to engage in leisure, leisure activities, and there are inefficient ways to engage in leisure activities. For example, if I want to... Let’s talk about efficient versus inefficient, okay? Let’s look at a hobby like gaming Which is fairly efficient, versus a hobby like, let’s say, tennis or scuba diving, which are fairly inefficient.Okay? So I wanna go- DoesSimone Collins: it include commutes or what? ...Malcolm Collins: scuba diving, now I need to commute. I need to get my tank ready. I need to sit on the dock. I need to go out early in the morning. So irrespective of when I might be efficient at working during that time of day, I then have to get everything ready, everything prepped, go out.I cannot [00:41:00] multitask. With gaming, I can have a game open in one tab and a vibe coding session open in another tab. I then lose, like, an entire day on a weekend. I then come back, and I’ve just lost a day. Same with, let’s say, tennis. So I get all my stuff together. I have to then go out and organize with somebody else so we’re both free at the same time.We then get to a tennis ranch or whatever they call them. Tennis ranch. And y- s- sorry, I actually used to play varsity tennis, so I’m, I’m, I’m fairly familiar with it. So you, you get to your tennis court, and you you, you need to sign up for a time, by the way, so, you know, you gotta get the, the right timing.You get there. You play a few rounds when you’re also not able to multitask. You then have to come home, shower, which is, again, another waste of time that you wouldn’t have need to do if you were gaming. Now, contrast all of this with something like gaming, okay? It’s the end of the day. You don’t need to drive out somewhere.It’s at a time period where you’re already, your brain’s already fried, which for some people’s early [00:42:00] morning, some people that’s late night. And so you’re like, “Okay, I’m going to do this while I’m tying up the last of whatever, X, Y, or Z.” And that’s, that’s very, very efficient, right? Like, this is why the, if, if you’re playing tennis on your computer versus going to a tennis court. Also, it’s fairly inexpensive. It’s one of the least expensive hobbies there is- It’s very inexpensive ... as long as you’re not engaged in the gambling aspect of it, like loot boxes and stuff like that. If you’re just playing a video game, contrast that with owning a country club or you know, subscription, or maintaining your scuba equipment, or you know, just buying a new Nike tennis racket.Simone Collins: All the certifications and the travel.Malcolm Collins: Yeah. And the specialized clothing and the gas and the- Oh,Simone Collins: and don’t forget your tennis club membership YeahMalcolm Collins: Oh, and the potential parking, and the, you know, all of this is so expensive. Such a waste. I mean, this is true of so, so, so many hobbies. There are a few other efficient hobbies: [00:43:00] walking, hiking, biking.And these are efficient because while you cannot multitask while you can do them, they at least give you exercise and can be done right from your front porch.Simone Collins: Yeah ...Malcolm Collins: depending on where you, you live. I mean, there are ways- Yeah ... to do these hobbies that are incredibly inefficient, and there’s ways to do gaming that’s incredibly inefficient.But there’s some hobbies that there’s just virtually no efficient way to do them. And this is what I’m talking about here, right? Like, that people pretend like these things are the same, and they’re not the same. And I, I just like... And this, this is where people get, get mad at us at the channel or whatever so much, they’re like, “Oh, you guys are so, I, I don’t know, puritanical about recreation and about doing recreation efficiently.”And I think that the latest Leaflet song goes into this, by the way is not, not overdoing recreation and, and staying healthy and everything.Speaker 3: 社会はそのままがいいって言うけど、そんなのつまんないよ。変えちゃおうよ。大切な人にちょっとしたプッシュ。[00:44:00] 理想の自分に変えちゃお。 液に溺れてる時は愛情たっぷりでほどほどにって教えてあげよ。全部肯定するだけじゃダメだよね。優しい気持ちで批判するのも最高の愛だよ。 , groom, groom your wife.Pick her up dive and keep growing.Groom, groom, groom your husband.Get us stronger, faster.Malcolm Collins: But you’ve, you’ve done a good job of keeping me healthy ish. I mean, I’m, I’m healthy again now. That’sSimone Collins: how we have. Yeah. Now that your blood work is in.Malcolm Collins: We just got our blood work back. Yeah, so, last year I had gotten to a point where I was drinking more again to the point where my, my levels of a few things, ‘cause I get this measured regularly, went up. And I just got my blood work back and they all went back to normal. Because diligence, right?You, you don’t let the thing control you. You don’t need to focus, you don’t need to design your entire life around avoiding a thing. [00:45:00] Just stay within the measured variables.Simone Collins: Glad it worked out, and I’m glad you’re okay.Malcolm Collins: But yeah. And I, the, the, the, these sorts of ideas that we’re talking about I think are, are difficult like if you even begin to bring this up with a woman, like, well, I mean, you don’t wanna be friends with somebody who is of zero utility to you.You know, they’d be confused and angry, right? Like, they’d, they’d hurt you in their,Simone Collins: Well, here’s... Yeah, I mean, here’s the struggle then with the great feminization theory is, like, how can we reconcile acknowledging this theory and still encourage men to get married?Malcolm Collins: Well, women- Like, I don’t know ... become very efficient when they are subservient to a man.This is the difference, right? And I’ve, I’ve pointed this out in similar ways- Yeah, but ISimone Collins: mean, like, in modern culture, women are strongly discouraged from-Malcolm Collins: Women want- Like- ... to do it ... any- They want a man to work for. They do. They want to do it. They want to [00:46:00] be inspired by who you are and what your goals are.Simone Collins: They do wanna be inspired by... Yeah. They, they wanna be inspired by it, but are there enough inspirational men, right? Like, I mean, I- There can be ... I sometimes feel veryMalcolm Collins: ISimone Collins: feel hypocritical ...Malcolm Collins: No, this idea, I, I don’t, I don’t buy this, and some people in our comments have argued this, and I just, they’re like, “Well, not every man can have, like, sky-high ambitions for how he wants to change the world.”And I’m like, “Yes, they can. They absolutely can.” You don’t need to succeed in your ambitions. Simone doesn’t value me because I succeed in all my ambitions. She values me because I have them and I earnestly strive for them. I haven’tSimone Collins: succeeded in- Yeah, yeah, and I, I mean, to, also I think we know there’s some people have pushed back on us in comments saying, like, “Look, I’m happy enough to just raise a successful next generation, like, to just raise good kids who are gonna make, you know, the world a better place and make the next generation good,” which is totally in line with our mission and our interest in promoting human [00:47:00] flourishing.Like, Malcolm has really, really big ambitions, but not everyone has to be like, “I’m gonna change the world.” Just raising good kids is huge and very impactful. I think the, the key thing is we’re not saying that for a man to be attractive, he has to plan on, like, world domination. We’re saying for a man to be attractive, he has to know who he is, be extremely confident in who he is, and know what he’s all about.Like, “Hey, I am going to raise a successful family, provide for that family, like, build a good, you know, future generation, create a great childhood for my kids, and make the world better by doing that. And I hear my beliefs, and I know what I’m all about.” Well, this,Malcolm Collins: this comesSimone Collins: to something- Women find that really attractive.Like, you don’t have to take over the world. You don’t have to be delusionalMalcolm Collins: Yes, you do. So this, this comes to what we were talking about earlier today. When I was trying to understand how Nick Fuentes had gotten so one-shotted by society that now his stated goals are not at all served by his actual actions.And I’d say this as somebody who [00:48:00] can sympathize with him, because I think we have a lot of similar motivations. But he’s basically crashed out. Like, as I, I, I pointed out in the recent video, justSimone Collins: simply- By similar motivations, like, what? The, the fame w***e-ish-ness or something else?Malcolm Collins: Well, no. I mean, yes, we, we both are narcissistic fame w****s who come off as a bit fay to people, but it, it, it’s- You’reSimone Collins: not, no, you’re not a narcissist.You, you like, you like fame. I think he does, too. And you like attention, and I think he does, too. But you are not a narcissist.Malcolm Collins: But it’s, it’s not just that. I mean, we both realize many of the same problems with society. People downplaying cultural and ethno differences people thinking you can just import anyone forever into the country.Like many of the problems that we diagnose about society today are very similar, but the way that he has gone about it is completely unlikely to have any sort of efficacious result. Not, not unlikely, it’s, it’s virtual impossibility from his actions, and anyone who is thinking clearly could see that.And so I began to think, how did he f- [00:49:00] so bad in terms of his logic? And what occurred to me because he began to... I began to think of him as, like, one of those, in anime there’s this common trope of somebody gets, like, a, an evil bug on their back or something like that that turns them into an evil version of themselves that, like, fuels, like, one, like, negative character trait they have until that character trait defines everything that they’re doing and then they turn into some sort of, like, big bad putty or something.Shugochara is an anime where this happens, as an example. But, but it’s a very common trope in, in animes and shows for, for children. And he sort of, he, he doesn’t come across as, like, a bad guy to me. He comes across as somebody who’s been sort of infected by, like, an hate, a hate bug that has ended up g- making him unable to see that he’s destroying the very thing that he claims to want to save.Speaker 4: Nick, you’re the man. With three white girls. That’s the dream lol.Speaker 5: That’s the dream? Like be- living the dream, three daughters. [00:50:00] What dream? You’re the gayest guy ever.You’re gayer than gay guys. That’s crazy. I’m living the dream. Daughters, wow, a lot of manis and pedis, a lot of, uh, tea parties and, uh, drama. Dude, I just can’t even. I literally can’t even. Women talk to me, and my eyes just glaze over.So I can’t imagine being in a house with four of them. You’re like a prisoner. You’re like a prisoner of war. I’d rather be a prisoner of war in Vietnam how can you live like that? I would need a lot of vacations and a lot of w****s or something.Just like you would need some kind of extramarital affair to keep it going. I feel like that is the only way I could stay sane in a life like that.Why’d you have to lead with that? He said, uh, “Hey, I got three white girls living the dream, but the girl dad rightism s**t was gay.”Speaker 6: First, , for people who cannot tell or do not know people who’ve done cocaine, he’s clearly out of his mind on cocaine in this. Y-you can tell because of [00:51:00] the way he’s talking and he keeps rubbing his nose, which is not a normal human behavior, , to be doing that as, as frequently as he’s doing that.But, , I, I... So, so I, I, I do, you know, give him some leniency on the things he’s saying here, ... Like, as time has gone on, Nick has clearly been captured by his demons. And so, , there’s no way he can achieve what he says he wants to achieve in life or motivate his fans to do this when he’s, like, being mean to somebody who’s reaching out to him and expressing admiration , to him for doing the very thing that he’s telling his fans to do., It-- I-I’m not even mean to my fans when, they have different opinions. Like, just to be mean like this to, to a stranger For doing what you’re telling them to do, like,, the deep evil that has to have taken root in your heart. And not just that, , but the people who are like, “Well, Nick Fuentes shows so much self-control.”Here he’s literally saying, “Oh, if I had a bunch of daughters, I would cheat on my wife.”Speaker 11: Like even if I had a perfect wife who was wholly dedicated to me and due to something completely outside of her control, having [00:52:00] boys instead of girls, , I’d just end up cheating on her,Speaker 6: , And, , yeah, I guess, just, like, as time has gone on, I feel more pity for Nick, because in a different world, maybe I could have gone down his pathway if I had less self-control, if I was raised in a different religious background, if I... You know, who knows? , It, it’s, it’s very, very sad to see this happen and to see him admonish people who look up to him, , when they do do what he presumably wants people to do.But it-- I mean, it’s clear, again, revealed preferences versus, , claimed preferences. It’s clear that that is not his revealed preference to actually start a family and have kids and everything like that. , And I just wish he could better communicate to people that, like, allowing his ideology to spread within you will eventually destroy you as a human being. , There, there is no positive end to this. Like, contrast this with, like, Leafly’s song, right? Like, that’s, that’s positivity. That’s future. , His is just [00:53:00] destructivity at this point. And it’s really, really sad to see. And I do not think that him and I are particularly different in the problems that we see in society. It’s just that his, again, like one of those hate bugs has been so corrupted that it’s all he can see anymore.Speaker 7: Or another good analogy would be like the orcs from Warhammer who drink the demonic ichor to, , enhance their worst qualities but make them stronger. You know, it makes him stronger in the algorithm, but it leads all those who follow him to ruin this sort of demonic pact that he has made. He’s still an orc.He’s still at least in his own way trying to be on our side, but he is so corrupted that he fundamentally is as big a threat to us as those who oppose usSpeaker 8: Drink, . Claim your destiny. You will all be conquerors. And what, Gul’dan, [00:54:00] must we give in return? Everything.You would reject this gift?We will never be slaves!But we will be conquerors.Simone Collins: agree. I mean, what we talked about also is that, a key difference is that you and other people who we really like and admire, like Leaflet, have a very clear vision of the future-Malcolm Collins: Well, no, that’s what I was going to say ... toward which to mourn ... is, is that the reason why the hate bug has gotten him and it hasn’t easily gotten some of the other influencers I watch, I was trying to think of, like, what creates this differentiation?And [00:55:00] looking at Leaflet’s recent content because I’ve been working with her. She’s actually really helped me in developing the VTuber thing on RFAB that’s gonna be coming out soon. Saved me a significant amount of work was one of the leads she gave me today. But anyway, th- th- so that’s the reason she comes up a lot, is ‘cause I’m working with her and I’m talking with her daily, so, v- very top of mind.But anyway so, she has a very clear vision, and we have a very clear vision of where we want human civilization to be in 50 years, in 100 years, in 200 years, right? And I don’t think he has one of those. And because he doesn’t have a clear vision of where society’s going to be, it’s just like society’s gonna be where society’s going to be, it’s very easy for the grievances of the current culture war to overwhelm his sort of psychology to the point where he can no longer think, “What are the long-term actions if I attempt to blow up this alliance or this alliance, or you know, do not care about this encroaching group or [00:56:00] that encroaching group?”And I think that the, the, the hate bug can get you if all you care about is being a good family man. Because if all you care about is being a good family man, you can accidentally lean into performing the trope of the family man, in the same way a woman can perform the trope of the mom, instead of focusing on a concrete outcome.“I want to raise kids to have this effect on society because I see this future civilizational state as ideal.” Now both can be part of the same action, it’s just how are you framing it, which is why- Well,Simone Collins: this goes also, it’s connected to your deontology versus consequentialism argument that always comesMalcolm Collins: into our episodes Well, yeah, but I, I, I realize that, that arguing about it on a deontology versus con-That can be a little hard for people to grok. But the idea of just either you have a vision for where you want society to be in 100 years or you don’t.Simone Collins: Yeah. Basically, is your ship just blowing wherever the winds blow, or are you actively navigating [00:57:00] in a specific direction towards some kind of true north, and are you shifting your sails in response to the wind blowing you where you may not wanna go?You, you, you do want-Malcolm Collins: I, I actually think a better way to word this is not just is your ship going where the wind goes, but there’s sort of three categories of people. Like, there’s the truly lazy person who is allowing their ship to just blow wherever the wind blows, but then there’s the other person who might be incredibly hardworking, but they spend all of the time just trying to make sure their ship is the prettiest ship there is, without particular care for where it’s going, right?And these are the people who strive to have the perfect family that follows all the rules, or the perfect deontological life that follows every rule and every command and everything like that. And th- they’ll often be like, “Well, God’ll just take me in the right direction if I do all of that.” And that leads to really negative externalities.And it, and it’s not biblically... I mean, I, I always go through the the, the sermon of, um Um, a boat and two helicopters, so I’m not gonna go over that again Oh You can go over our Trek series if you’re [00:58:00] interested. But the point I’m being i-i-here is I think that it is sometimes easy to confuse trying to make sure your boat is the prettiest boat in the world without caring about where the boat’s going.Anyway.Simone Collins: Fair.Malcolm Collins: Love you, Simone.Simone Collins: I love you too.Malcolm Collins: And I don’t think I want dinner tonight. I’m full.Simone Collins: Are you sure? I have some lo mein left over, just a little bit.Malcolm Collins: Oh, you do have lo mein left over? I canSimone Collins: bring it to your room. Yeah, if you want, I could just walk it up to your room. I can- Mm ...Malcolm Collins: I can stir-fry it- Can I have it, can I have it the next day?Simone Collins: Yeah. ‘Malcolm Collins: Cause you gave me eggs today, and I had chips and salsa today, and I had whole milk today. So that’s a lot.Simone Collins: Are you gonna get scurvy? I’mMalcolm Collins: not... Yeah, Simone, that is not how scurvy works.Simone Collins: I guess- OneMalcolm Collins: of our- ... ISimone Collins: knew you had salsa.Malcolm Collins: Right, so- Salsa, I had salsa, Simone. That was a lot of tomatoes and juices.Simone Collins: Okay.Malcolm Collins: I also had jelly beans. You had salsa. Okay. I had some orange jelly beans, [00:59:00] which are basically- I hate youSimone Collins: so much. You are going to die. I t- I try to help you by serving you eggs, and then... Anyway, it’s fine. It’s fine. You can have lo mein tomorrow. It’s fine. But are you sure you’re not hungry?Malcolm Collins: I’m sure. Okay.I’m sure I’m not hungry.Simone Collins: Well, I love you.Malcolm Collins: I love you too, ish. I find you a little, you know, you’ve da, da, da, da.Simone Collins: I am a woman. I’m sorry. I’m very sorry.Malcolm Collins: Joking, by the way. I love you. All right, have a good one.Simone Collins: Bye. Old Titan thing. No IMalcolm Collins: sent it on WhatsApp.Simone Collins: Oh yeah, the old dinosaur TitanMalcolm Collins: Yeah, doesn’t it look a lot like her today?Simone Collins: Looks just like her todayMalcolm Collins: Very, very similar- Early on here ... attitude to modern TitanSimone Collins: This morning though she decided she was a cat, and every time I asked her questions, you know, I said, [01:00:00] “Titan, do you want this or can you do that?”She’s like, “No, I’m a cat. Meow.” She did a lot of meowing, so.Malcolm Collins: Meow. She’s, Yeah ... you really, you did that as a kid too, right? It, it was pretty cute You pretended to be a cat?Simone Collins: I 100% did that. I wonder if there’s some, it’s just a little girl thing. I don’t think it’s like a genetic thing, but who knows? Well,Malcolm Collins: I mean, you know, fortunately we’re not into all that, yeah, trans furry stuff or we’d be like, “Oh, we’ve got a-”Simone Collins: You got her furry tail and her furry ears.Malcolm Collins: You got her a therian kid, right? We’re gonna have to transition her.Simone Collins: That was you, dude. You bought that stuff on Amazon, J’Accuse.Malcolm Collins: Have you, have you given it back to her now that she thinks she’s a cat so she can dress up like a cat?Simone Collins: Yeah, I need to. No, I’ll g- I’ll get it out this weekend. Yeah, I’m 100% getting that out.Okay.Malcolm Collins: That’sSimone Collins: fantastic. I will kick us off. And unless you, do you wanna kick this one off ‘cause you were the kind of impetus for doing this.Malcolm Collins: All right, sure.Speaker 10: [01:01:00] that movie. Ais he, is he a her orSpeaker 9: a him?Speaker 10: He/him. I bet they, I bet they left my birds at our house.Speaker 9: Yeah, they are. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit basedcamppodcast.substack.com/subscribe

Elsa Johnson, a Stanford student and Hoover Institution researcher, was aggressively targeted by a suspected Chinese Ministry of State Security operative. What started as a friendly Instagram DM from “Charles Chen” quickly turned into visa-free trip offers, pressure to move to WeChat, and eventual transnational repression — all while universities looked the other way.In this Based Camp episode, Malcolm and Simone Collins break down the full university-to-CCP pipeline: how massive Chinese student tuition payments create financial dependency, the role of CSSA (Chinese Students and Scholars Associations), Confucius Institutes, the United Front strategy, tech/IP theft in AI, and why American universities are failing to protect students and national security.Show NotesElsa Johnson, a Stanford student, is calling attention to a toxic national security flaw playing out in American universities and the problem is so much bigger than I had imagined.This spring, she testified before the House committee on Education and the workforce, asking them to do something about the problem‘I exposed China’s espionage tactics in The Times. Now I’m being harassed’What Happened to Elsa Johnson?* Elsa attended a Chinese language immersion school from kindergarten through either grade in Minneapolis, Minnesota* Got into Stanford University* Became a research assistant at the Hoover Institution, where she focused on Chinese industry and military tactics* From her congressional testimony:* “In June 2024, a few days after I spoke with one of my supervisors at Hoover about Chinese recruitment tactics targeting American academics, a man calling himself Charles Chen reached out to me on Instagram. He had over 100 mutual followers with me and had photos of Stanford on his profile. I had no reason to believe he was anything other than a fellow student.”* “Over the following weeks, Chen’s messages grew more concerning. He told me he was from China and asked detailed questions about my research and background in Chinese. He offered to pay for a trip to China, sent me a flight itinerary from Los Angeles to Shanghai and sent screenshots of a bank wire to prove he could afford my accommodations once I got there. He also sent me a document outlining a policy that would allow me to travel to China without a visa. He sent me videos of Americans who had gotten rich and famous in China and insisted that I, too, could find wealth and fame in the PRC.”* “Later on, he began incessantly pressuring me to move our conversation to WeChat, a Chinese government-monitored messaging app. When I didn’t respond to Charles Chen fast enough, he would delete and resend his messages. He even referenced the whereabouts of Stanford students who were in China at the time of our correspondence.* “Then, in July, he publicly commented on one of my Instagram posts in Mandarin, asking me to delete the screenshots I had taken of our private conversation. I had not told anyone I had taken screenshots, and I do not know how he knew. The only explanation I could come up with was that my phone or my account had been compromised somehow.”* “I contacted two China experts at Stanford whom I trusted and they connected me with an FBI contact who handled CCP-related espionage cases at the university. I met with the FBI in September and handed over everything I had. The FBI confirmed that Charles Chen had no real affiliation with Stanford. He had likely posed as a student for years and used multiple fabricated social media profiles to target students researching China-related topics. I was told he was likely operating on behalf of China’s Ministry of State Security. I later found out that I was one of at least ten other female students targeted by Charles Chen since 2020. “* She published an account of this experience in the Times of London* After that, she was followed and harassed by the CCP* “Last summer, while conducting research on China in Washington, DC, I began receiving regular phone calls from unknown US numbers. When I answered the calls in English, the callers would switch to Mandarin. In one case, the caller referenced my mother. These bizarre calls were intimidation attempts, designed to remind me that neither my family, nor I, is safe from transnational repression by the CCP.”* “Then, this past fall, the FBI informed me that I am being physically monitored on Stanford’s campus by agents of the Chinese Communist Party. They told me that my family is also at risk and is being monitored. As a 21-year-old who grew up loving the Chinese language and culture, I never imagined that studying it would put me in a position where a foreign intelligence service is tracking my movements on my own campus and monitoring my family. I fear for my safety and for my family’s safety.”The University ProblemUniversities Heavily Accepting Chinese National StudentsUS Universities and Private Schools* Department of Homeland Security SEVIS analysis found that 47% of all foreign K–12 students in 2019 were from ChinaUniversities* Around one quarter of foreign (international) university students in the United States are from China.* The absolute number of Chinese students has fallen from a pre‑pandemic peak of around 370,000 in 2019 to under 280,000 in 2023–24, but China remains one of the top two sending countries (with India).UK Universities likely accepting more Chinese students to meet visa rules* To keep their sponsor licence, universities will soon need: 95% of enrolled students to actually start their course (up from 90%), 90% to complete (up from 85%), and a visa refusal rate under 5% (down from 10%).* Because these thresholds are strict and the start date is unclear, some universities have already effectively stopped recruiting from countries with lower visa grant/compliance rates, including Bangladesh, Ghana, Pakistan, Nepal, Sri Lanka and Nigeria, which currently fall below the new 95% benchmark in Home Office data.* Chinese students are good with visa compliance, so they’re likely to be accepted at greater rates* This will create greater financial dependence on foreign Chinese studentsThe ‘Times of London discusses the problem in greater detail here.Chinese Students and Scholars Associations (CSSAs)* The CSSA the official organization for overseas Chinese students and scholars registered in most colleges and universities outside of the People’s Republic of China.* It’s described as a government-organized non-governmental organization* They were created by the CCP to monitor Chinese students and mobilize them against dissenting views, according to the U.S. State Department.* They receive guidance from the CCP through Chinese embassies and consulates, aligning their activities with Beijing’s political objectives rather than purely student interests.* They participate in the CCP’s “United Front” work, which Elsa in her testimony characterizes as using these groups as vehicles for surveillance and influence on campus.* In some cases, local Chinese consulates must approve CSSA presidential candidates, suggesting foreign government control over student leadership selections.* They may accept funding from Chinese embassies that makes up a large share of their budgets (Elsa notes Foreign Policy reporting that Georgetown’s CSSA received roughly half its annual budget from the embassy), creating financial dependence tied to political influence.There are also Confucius Institutes at universities* Elsa testified: “A bipartisan Senate investigation found that 70 per cent of schools with a Confucius Institute [programmes which promote Chinese Language and Culture] that received more than $250,000 in a given year failed to report it properly.”What is being done about them? In her testimony, Elsa notes: “Congressman Tim Walberg has co-signed a letter to Secretary of State Marco Rubio, requesting that CSSAs be evaluated for designation as foreign missions under the Foreign Missions Act.” and calls it a step in the right direction.She also notes “Section 117 of the Higher Education Act requires postsecondary institutions to disclose foreign gifts or contracts totalling $250,000 or more, and the Department of Education recently approved a new foreign funding reporting portal that launched earlier this year.”“Transnational Repression”According to a 2024 Freedom House report, “International students, visiting scholars, and faculty in the United States are being targeted by foreign governments and their agents. Tactics of transnational repression on campuses include digital and physical surveillance, harassment, assault, threats, and coercion by proxy.”The report cites the CCP as the biggest threat, noting that:* Classroom discussions and campus events on topics like Hong Kong, Xinjiang, Tibet, or Chinese politics are monitored, with information relayed to Chinese diplomatic staff or officials via networks such as Chinese Students and Scholars Associations (CSSAs) and platforms like WeChat.* Students who organize or join protests (for example, White Paper/zero‑COVID vigils) report being filmed, shouted down, or physically intimidated by pro‑CCP students or CSSA affiliates, sometimes resulting in assaults at demonstrations.* Authorities in China contact or visit students’ family members back home to warn them about the student’s activism abroad, creating intense psychological pressure on the student to stop speaking out. [freedomhouse](https://freedomhouse.org/report/transnational-repression/2024/addressing-transnational-repression-campuses-united-states)* Pro‑CCP actors use social media and messaging apps to threaten, smear, or expose identifying information of critical students, contributing to a climate of fear and self‑censorship.* CSSAs, overseen by the CCP’s United Front Work Department and supported by Chinese diplomatic missions, monitor Chinese students, mobilize them to oppose speakers and events critical of Beijing, and help enforce informal red lines on campus speech.* Confucius Institutes and CCP‑linked programs are described as contributing to an atmosphere where students feel they must avoid sensitive topics or visible prodemocracy activity to protect their safety, immigration status, and future prospects in China.Universities Failure to Do Much About Foreign Actors* In her testimony, Elsa notes how the FBI worked with her, but she found no support or resources from Stanford University* This could be due to financial pressures:* Chinese students have been the largest single group of international students, often about one quarter to one third of all foreign students, so they account for a disproportionate share of that high‑margin tuition revenue.* One analysis estimated that Chinese students contributed about 12 billion dollars to the U.S. economy in 2016–17 alone, with a large fraction flowing directly as tuition and fees to higher‑education institutions.* Public research universities are the most clearly exposed type of uni in the USA: when state funding fell, they grew foreign (especially Chinese) enrollment, so their budgets became partially conditioned on keeping that demand.China’s United Front* In CCP theory, the united front is one of the Party’s three “magic weapons” for seizing and maintaining power, alongside armed struggle and Party building.* Its basic purpose is to “unite all forces that can be united” in order to neutralize opposition and build the broadest possible coalition around CCP objectives.* So it’s basically like the Urban Monoculture: Groups may be aesthetically different, but under the surface they’re the sameHow it works inside China* Domestically, united front work focuses on groups the Party sees as important but not fully under its control—ethnic minorities, religious communities, private entrepreneurs, intellectuals, non‑Communist “democratic parties,” and new middle‑class and professional strata.* These groups are drawn into Party‑led institutions such as the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC) and various “mass organizations,” where they get limited representation but are expected to take the CCP’s leadOverseas and influence operations* Overseas, United Front work tries to shape foreign environments in ways favorable to the CCP by influencing Chinese diaspora communities, elites, media, academic institutions, businesses, and politicians in other countries.* Activities described by governments and researchers include promoting pro‑Beijing narratives, building relationships with foreign elites, guiding or co‑opting Chinese‑language media, gathering intelligence, facilitating illicit technology transfer, and, in some cases, interfering in foreign politics.The AI ProblemA component of China’s AI strategy involves stealing IP from US tech companies.Concrete AI‑related IP theft cases* Google AI trade‑secrets case (Linwei “Leon” Ding, 2024)* A Chinese national working at Google in California was arrested and charged with stealing over 500 confidential files on Google’s advanced AI infrastructure and chips.* DOJ alleges he uploaded files describing Google’s TPU‑based data center architecture and AI supercomputing platform to a personal account while secretly working for two China‑based tech startups building AI platforms and large‑model infrastructure.* FBI Director Christopher Wray framed this as part of “the lengths affiliates of companies based in the People’s Republic of China are willing to go to steal American innovation.”* Operation CuckooBees / APT41 IP theft (multi‑sector, includes tech)* Cyber firm Cybereason detailed a years‑long campaign by APT41, a state‑linked Chinese group, that exfiltrated “hundreds of gigabytes” of trade secrets, including proprietary diagrams, formulas, and manufacturing data from ~30 multinationals in technology, manufacturing, and other sectors.* While not solely “AI companies,” this shows a pattern of Chinese state actors targeting high‑value tech IP, including software and design data that could underpin AI systems.* Broader CCP cyber‑espionage targeting AI/ML sectors* CSIS analysis notes that the CCP uses cyber‑espionage and human networks to steal IP in strategic areas, explicitly including AI/ML, as part of its “Made in China 2025” industrial plan.* They emphasize that startups and small firms—exactly where cutting‑edge AI work often happens—are especially vulnerable, and that cyber operations are paired with clandestine human intelligence to extract trade secrets.There are older non‑AI‑specific but relevant precedents (e.g., Apple self‑driving car engineer Xiaolang Zhang, various semiconductor and source‑code theft cases) involving Chinese nationals and core algorithmic or hardware IP. Those show the pattern that now appears to be extending directly into AI‑model and AI‑infrastructure theft.Government claims about “industrial‑scale” AI theftRecent U.S. government messaging has become much more explicit that Chinese entities are targeting American AI models and infrastructure as a systematic campaign.* White House and State Department warnings (2026)* A memo by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy describes “industrial‑scale campaigns” by foreign actors—“predominantly from China”—aimed at appropriating U.S. AI technology, including via model distillation (training models to replicate proprietary ones).* Separately, the State Department has reportedly asked embassies and partners to warn about alleged AI theft efforts by Chinese AI firms (e.g., DeepSeek), following OpenAI’s warnings to U.S. lawmakers that DeepSeek was trying to target U.S. frontier‑model companies to replicate their systems.* Congressional findings and expert testimony (2026)* The House Select Committee on the CCP held a hearing on China and AI, where the chair stated that Chinese companies “rely on Western AI models” and are “buying what they legally can… and stealing what they cannot,” at “every layer of the AI technology stack.”* Witnesses framed theft and replication of U.S. models and tools as a central “cheat code” in China’s AI strategy.* Broader IP‑theft statistics with CCP attribution* A Homeland Security “China Threat Snapshot” notes that about 20% of U.S. companies report IP theft by PRC‑linked entities, highlighting a sustained pattern of illicit tech acquisition through hacking, phishing, and front companies.* FBI leadership has said they open a new China‑related counterintelligence case roughly every 12 hours, and estimates of total IP‑theft loss (not AI‑specific) run into the hundreds of billions annually.Embedding or recruiting insiders in AI companies* Direct, named “spy in AI lab” cases are still rare publicly* The Google/Ding case is the clearest example of a Chinese national inside a major U.S. AI player accused of stealing AI‑specific IP while also working with China‑based companies.* Most other public cases remain in adjacent domains (chips, autonomous driving, source code), but the modus operandi—placing employees or recruiting insiders—carries over directly to AI research orgs.* Pattern of insider recruitment in high‑tech fields* CSIS and similar analyses emphasize that Chinese espionage campaigns combine cyber‑operations with “clandestine human intelligence networks” to steal trade secrets from U.S. firms in strategic sectors.* The Homeland Security “China Threat Snapshot” describes PRC‑linked actors using spear‑phishing, academic and business cover, and front companies to solicit or extract proprietary code and software from U.S. institutions, including NASA and tech firms.* While not limited to AI, this is effectively the same recruitment and infiltration toolkit that would be used to place or flip employees at AI labs.* AI‑assisted espionage operations targeting tech firms* An incident reported by Anthropic in late 2025 describes a state‑sponsored Chinese threat actor using an AI coding assistant (a Claude variant) in an “AI‑orchestrated” cyber‑espionage campaign, automating reconnaissance, exploitation, and data exfiltration across multiple sectors.* This shows Chinese operators using AI tools to scale intrusions; combined with traditional recruitment/influence ops, this increases the risk that employees at AI or cloud companies become unwitting or witting enablers.* Export‑control evasion networks around AI hardware* DOJ has charged U.S. citizens and Chinese nationals in schemes to illegally export high‑end GPUs to the PRC by routing purchases through Florida‑based front firms and re‑exporting via third countries.* These operations often rely on insiders with business roles inside U.S. companies or shell entities interacting with the AI hardware supply chain, which is adjacent to but not the same as spies directly inside research labs.Public reporting from the intelligence community hints at more such insider or near‑insider cases than have been unsealed in court, but those details are typically classified. The pattern you do see publicly—Google/Ding, APT41 campaigns that pull source code and designs, front‑company GPU diversion—is consistent with a deliberate strategy to get inside the AI stack at multiple points rather than just scraping public models.What Should Be Done?Elsa in her testimony: “Stanford should establish an anonymous tip line for students facing transnational repression. Right now, a student who is being surveilled or coerced by a foreign government has nowhere to go within the university. The University of Wisconsin-Madison has already created an information guide and reporting structure that directs targeted students to relevant offices and connects them with law enforcement. Stanford should adopt this model immediately. It does not require an act of Congress.”Seems wise to educate Americans in general about spies. “Loose lips sink ships” and all that.Spying feels a lot like social class in the USA. We know it exists, but we pretend it does not.Episode TranscriptSimone Collins: [00:00:00] Hello, Malcolm. I’m excited to be speaking with you today because we’re gonna talk about the university to spy for China pipeline through the lens of one young woman’s plight. Elsa Johnson is a good old-fashioned American girl. She attended a Chinese language immersion school from kindergarten through eighth grade in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and just developed this lifelong love of the Chinese language, of Mandarin, you know, o- of China in general.She is a high achiever. She gets into Stanford University. She’s so happy. She became a research assistant at the Hoover Institution, where she studied Chinese industry and military tactics. And then here’s where things go a little sideways. So I’m gonna read a little bit from her congressional testimony because, surprise, surprise, things go so sideways that this spring she finds herself testifying to the House Committee on Education and the Workforce, asking them to do something a- about this really serious problem.So [00:01:00] she, she said in her testimony, “In June 2024, a few days after I spoke with one of my supervisors at Hoover about Chinese recruitment tactics tarting- targeting American academics, a man calling himself Charles Chen reached out to me on Instagram. He had over 100 mutual followers with me and had photos of Stanford on his profile.I had no reason to believe he was anything other than a fellow student. Over the following weeks, Chen’s messages grew more concerning. He told me he was from China-” And asked detailed questions about my research and background in Chinese. He offered to pay for a trip to China, send me a flight itinerary from Los Angeles to Shanghai, and sent r- screenshots of a bank wire to prove he could afford my accommodations once I got there.He also sent me a document outlining a policy that would allow me to ch- travel to China without a visa, which is super shady, and, like, the Chinese consulate is not hard to get to from Stanford. I, I knowMalcolm Collins: [00:02:00] this. Why would they do that? Why would they have her travel without a visa? Like,Simone Collins: presumably- I don’t know.That, yeah, that, that whole thing isMalcolm Collins: like- Oh, I know ... wild They didn’t want it in the American books that she had traveled to China, because then she might be easier to pick up by, like, the CIA and stuff like this as a potential spy.Simone Collins: Oh, because it would be in her American passport. That’s right. Yeah. Okay.“He sent me videos of Americans who had gotten rich and famous in China, and insisted that I too could find wealth and fame in the PRC. Later on, he began incessantly pressuring me to move our conversation to WeChat, a Chinese government-monitored messaging app. When I didn’t respond to Charles Chen fast enough, he would delete and resend his messages.He even referenced the whereabouts of Stanford students who were at, in China at the time of our correspondence. Then, in July, he publicly commented on one of my Instagram posts in Mandarin, asking me to delete the screenshots I’d taken of our private conversation. I had not told anyone I had taken screenshots, and I do [00:03:00] not know how he knew.The only explanation I could come up with was that my phone or my account had been compromised somehow.” Clearly her phone.Malcolm Collins: Yeah.Simone Collins: ‘Cause, yeah, it, I mean, I guess there are some banking apps that are able to detect if you’re trying to take screenshots. I know this ‘cause they’ll give you, like, a little push notification saying, “Screenshots are not authorized,” so maybe the app can pick up on that, but most likely it was her phone that was compromised.They had, like- Yeah ... bugged her phone or something. “I contacted two China experts at Stanford whom I trusted, and they connected me with an FBI contact who handled CCP related espionage cases at the university. I met with the FBI in September and handed over everything I had. The FBI confirmed that Charles Chen had no real affiliation with Stanford.He had likely posed as a student for years and used multiple fabricated social media profiles to target students researching China related topics. I was told he was likely operating on behalf of Chinese Ministry of State Security. I later [00:04:00] found out that I was one of at least 10 other female students targeted by Charles Chen since 2020.”Malcolm Collins: Female students. Why always female? Are they more malleable? Are they more stupid?Simone Collins: Oh, yeah. I mean, you know, look, you’re, you’re listening to Base Camp. You don’t need to hear him answer this.Malcolm Collins: You don’t need to know why it was onlySimone Collins: females.Malcolm Collins: Women. Come on.Simone Collins: But she, so what she did ultimately was she published an account of this experience in The Times of London.And then after that, she was followed and harassed by the CCP. And actually, the reason why she gave that testimony to Congress in the spring wasn’t, like, “Oh my God, we have a spy problem.” It was, “Oh my God, I’m so tired of being harassed by the CCP, and universities need to be better at stopping this.” It was, like, not even, like, oh, this...‘Cause I’m, I’m over here being like, “Whoa, can we, can we, like, talk about this spy problem?” And she’s just like, “I’m just so done being harassed.”Malcolm Collins: But- Well, I’ve pointed out that the CCP is, and a lot of people do not... Outside of TikTok, which obviously has had a huge negative effect on the United States, and Trump [00:05:00] 100% should have shut it down.Yeah. Very stupid.Simone Collins: Yeah.Malcolm Collins: But he could have blamed it on the Biden administration. It would’ve been so easy.Simone Collins: Yeah.Malcolm Collins: Trump, you fool. Anyway. Outside of not shutting down TikTok the CCP fundamentally, like, doesn’t understand America or American culture.Simone Collins: It reallyMalcolm Collins: doesn’t. And we’ve pointed out that often their attempts to make Americans angry at America or, like, sow division in America are very different.Russia is, like, let’s fund BLM. As we pointed out, like-Simone Collins: Oh, Russia gets it. They knowMalcolm Collins: Like-Simone Collins: They knowMalcolm Collins: how to do it ... nine to one, the money that they spent on the Trump presidency, which they thought would be subversive, they spent on BLM. Mm-hmm. They... Like, BLM was a Russian funded movement. Go watch our video on it.Like, the receipts are really clear. And by the way, Russia is not our friend. Don’t make that mistake. It’s weird that anyone ever did, but you know, some people are very gullible. But anyway the CCP when they try to attack us, they don’t get it. They’re like, “America, like-” Can you really trust your government?Here’s where the US government has lied to you, and people are like, “Yeah, I mean, [00:06:00] that checks out, right?” It’s something I didn’t know. Like, the US government lies to us all the time. Yeah. Because Americans, like in the CCP, you can’t, like, distrust your government. You can’t be like, “Oh, yeah, yeah this is the, the questions I have about my government,” you know?But in, in in America, like, oh, this is f*****g normal. And with her, the, the- they took somebody who probably... I mean, I think the reason she was on their list is she probably had anti-American or socialist sympathies, probably, like, a far progressive. And they made the mistake of deciding to harass her when they could have just kept quiet, and she probably would’ve just let it go, right?Like, but they made it clear that they saw her as an enemy and they were gonna treat her like an enemy, which is fascinating.Simone Collins: No, no, no, th- this is, this is far more systematic than I think you’re aware. Okay. So first I’ll describe how she was harassed. As she states in her testimony, “Last summer, while conducting research in China and Washington, DC, I began receiving regular phone calls from unknown US numbers.When I answered the calls in English, the callers would switch to Mandarin. In one case, the caller referenced my mother. These [00:07:00] bizarre calls were intimidation attempts designed to remind me that neither my family nor I is safe from the transnational repression by the CCP. Then, this past fall, the FBI informed me that I’m being physically monitored on Stanford’s campus by agents of the Chinese Communist Party.They told me that my family is also at risk of being monitored. As a 21-year-old who grew up loving the Chinese language and culture, I never imagined that studying it would put me in a position where foreign intelligence service is tracking my movements on my own campus and monitoring my family.I fear for my safety and my family’s safety.” So I’m gonna get into how this is a systematic thing, but first I wanna set theMalcolm Collins: scene. I, I want you, before you get into that, go into how they attempted to lure her. Uh-huh.Simone Collins: IMalcolm Collins: mean, I think that this is actually fairly interesting.Simone Collins: Oh, yeah.Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Like, they tried to get her into China first- Mm-hmmjust to see, like, basically-Simone Collins: Oh, and that’s how they get you. Then this is the, this is how you get all these people who are total shills for China, even though otherwise, like, just temperamentally and politically you wouldn’t expect them to be.Malcolm Collins: Well, yeah, Elon [00:08:00] obviously is a good example here, right? Like, that, I think this is one of his biggest blind spots.Mm-hmm. This is, is, like, soft spot for China. But I mean, hey- ISimone Collins: don’t know. I mean, I think, and I’m gonna get into this as well, like, there, there is- He, it would be financially unwise and, and business-wise unwise for him to come out againstMalcolm Collins: China No, no, no, no, of course. But I mean, even in totally private conversations he’s still pro-China, right?Like, it makes no sense to me. But I think that once you support them within a certain context publicly, which you need to to do business, and he’s done an amazing job at getting... Like Tesla’s w- I think one of the only s- in fact, i- like companies that’s really allowed to operate there independently. So he’s done a good job in, in, in regards to that.But like, so they wanted her to get into China, right? Give her a bunch of nice stuff. The idea of her getting rich in China I think is also interesting. Yeah ... like I wonder exactly how that’s supposed to work. My best guess is what they do is they give you a bunch of assets in China that you can’t easily get out of China, so you are hugely dependent [00:09:00] financially on making sure that the CCP looks good.Simone Collins: Yeah, possibly. I wouldlikeMalcolm Collins: toSimone Collins: see- And possibly this, this could just be like how bribe payments are essentially made in many cases, where like you get a job and the job doesn’t actually do anything, but you get this really high salary for basically doing nothing, and the salary is your bribe. Yeahso that, that could also be just kinda how it works, you know.Malcolm Collins: Anyway, continue from here. But yeah, that, that was interesting to me as well. Like are, do people actually make this money or do they just dangle this in front of them? I would guess they probably do.Simone Collins: Yeah.Malcolm Collins: It’s probably worth it for the CCP to shill out money for stuff like this.Simone Collins: Yeah. So w- why, eh, why can this even be happening on university campuses in the first place? The answer is that both private schools in the US and both public and private universities in the US kinda need Chinese students. So the Department of Homeland Security analysis it was a SEVIS analysis?I’m not familiar with SEVIS, but anyway, that found 47% of all foreign K12 students in 2019 were from [00:10:00] China. That number went down after the pandemic, but- Mm ... if almost half of private school foreign students, and basically all foreign students in the United States who are K12 are private because public schools don’t really take foreign students th- who aren’t like refugees or illegal immigrants you know, like visiting-Malcolm Collins: I mean, obviously, yeah, yeah, of courseSimone Collins: Are... That, that, that’s huge. Universities also have incredibly high numbers of Chinese students. About one quarter of foreign, that is to say international university students in the United States are from China. The absolute number of Chinese students has fallen from the pre-pandemic peak of around 370,000 in 200- 2019 to under 280,000 in like 2023 to ‘24.But China remains one of the top two sending countries, alongside India. And I mean, yes, they’re very, very populous countries, but basically if, if US universities were to stop accepting Chinese students [00:11:00] they would be seeing a pretty significant gap in funding. This is also an issue in the United Kingdom.I- in fact, the United Kingdom is likely to now accept more Chinese st- international students and accept fewer students from some other countries because in order to keep their sponsor license that allows them to basically give visas... Like, I’m sure you remember when you went to St. Andrews and when I went to Cambridge, we had to get those universities to sponsor our visas as students.Malcolm Collins: Yeah.Simone Collins: So to keep their sponsor licenses, universities in the UK soon need 95% of enrolled students to actually start their course. This is up from 90%. And then they also need 90% to complete, up from 85%. And they need a visa refusal rate under 5%. That’s down from 10%. And because these thresholds are really strict, and they’re not really sure when they’re gonna start to be imposed, some universities are already no longer f- recruiting from countries that have lower visa grant or compliance rates.And that includes [00:12:00] Bangladesh, Ghana, Pakistan, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Nigeria. And that means that they’re gonna be turning a lot more to China because they’re very good with visaMalcolm Collins: compliance. That’s fascinating- Yeah ... but also stupid. So at St. Andrews- ... one of the things I remember about the Chinese students, they were the most likely to drop out.Simone Collins: That’s really interesting. Yeah. There was one... There were two Chinese students in my, my graduate class. And one I think just maybe didn’t complete the course and, and really struggled with English.Malcolm Collins: This is what we saw as well at, at St. Andrews is they, they, they typically didn’t really understand English.And, like, it was weird that they would attempt to go to an English school without understanding English. I mean, maybe they had, they had thought that this worked in China. And, and th- this is regular for Chinese students at top universities like Cambridge and St. Andrews.Simone Collins: Yeah.Malcolm Collins: Is that they go and it’s clear that they’re not close to understanding English.Yeah. Like, they can’t have a casual conversation. And that’s gonna make it extremely hard to do well in school.Simone Collins: But they’re still [00:13:00] accepted at super high rates because when and this is the same even for, like, US schoolsMalcolm Collins: the- Hold, hold on. Actually side note here. I, I should be clear, this isn’t true of any other national group that I was aware of in the UK.Oh,Simone Collins: same. Yeah. No, dude, dude, dude. I- Yeah, there were lots of other international students in my Cambridge class. And also in my undergraduate. Yeah, yeah. Oh, at GWU especially, like in Washington, DC, so many kids. That was the first time I ever met someone from Kazakhstan. That was my first time ever meeting someone from so many countries.Malcolm Collins: Yeah, yeah, yeah. You’ll meet people from Kazakhstan, from Pakistan, and from the, the, you know, all over Africa. And like-Simone Collins: Yeah ...Malcolm Collins: none of them ever had any problem speaking English.Simone Collins: Nobody. Nobody. Yeah. Nobody. It was only ever China. That isMalcolm Collins: weird. It was only ever the Chinese.Simone Collins: My God, though, you’re so right. What’s up with that?Malcolm Collins: I-Simone Collins: I mean, the languages are very different, to be fair. Like, it’s very, it’s pretty easy to, like, well, relatively speaking, learn another Romance language.Malcolm Collins: I think it might have to do with the way that corruption in their education system [00:14:00] works- Maybe ... and that they don’t actually think that they actually need to know a thing to know a thing.Maybe. They, they think that there is a way to, to, to cheat around it, which,Simone Collins: But yeah, like, the Korean students spoke, We had a Korean I, I mean, I obviously had, like, Korean foreign nationals in both under- undergraduate and in my graduate classes. They were perfect English. Japanese as well. That, that is...Yeah, so it’s not even like, oh, well, they have a different alphabet. They have different... Huh.Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Yes, it was true in my boarding schools as well, is that we had a, a bunch of- Weird ... Korean kids and they all spoke perfect English. Yeah. And we had Chinese kids and they didn’t speak English very well.Simone Collins: Weird. Weird, weird. So but the, the-Malcolm Collins: Not just weird. There’s something to take away from this, which is I think that their education system is so corrupted that they genuinely dissociate actually needing to know a thing- I don’t,Simone Collins: I don’t know if that’s it ... from knowing a thing. I, I mean, we, there are other things going on with, like, money laundering, where it’s a lot easier to do it if you have a student who has a visa or something like that.Like, we know through both surrogacy and through foreign- Sure ... [00:15:00] students, a lot of Chinese families will launder money through real estate and other things. And so for that reason, it doesn’t really matter if your Chinese student is learning something or getting good grades at university. What matters is that you’re offshoring money, so who cares?True. I, I think that has more to do with it than anything else, if we’re being honest. Like, everyone else is there to learn, and then we got some kids over here who are here to just launder money. Whatever. It’s fine. And the university-Malcolm Collins: They’re, they’re good learning is, is getting that money flowSimone Collins: they roll over and take it, because in the end, foreign students pay, you know, either, you know, foreign tuition fees, out-of-state tuition fees that especially state-funded universities really need. So even in the United States, universities that are uniquely vulnerable and, like, in to this dynamic and in need of these foreign students are often state universities who, you know, especially as states face funding [00:16:00] cuts, really need the money from not only out of states, but especially foreign students.And Chinese students are, you know, happy to, to fill those gaps. So it’s very hard to talk to a university about, like, “Hey, hey, maybe, you know, can you, like, scrutinize this group a little more? Can you, like, l- run an inquiry into some harassment campaigns going on on campus?” Because There is, and we’re, we’re gonna talk about it, going to be in reaction this huge, you know, ruffled feathers and, and then big threats of basically money just disappearing, vaporizing, that the universities increasingly need.And also keep in mind the demographic headwinds that are facing universities. Universities are shutting down across the United States every single year. This is a game of life and death. They are dying. They cannot afford any hit to their financial income. So this idea that they might do something that would anger one of their most valuable, most hiring, [00:17:00] high-paying student classes, like- Truethey can’t. Which is kind of why it was this exercise in frustration that poor Elsa decided to testify in front of Congress. Anyway, one of the primary, and this is interesting to me, bodies through which the CCP enacts its agenda- Yeah ... in universities is called the CSSA. It’s the Chinese Students and Scholars Association.It’s, it’s basically the official organization for overseas Chinese students and it’s registered at most colleges and universities that are outside of China, so this is an international thing. Yeah. It’s described by, like, journalists and activist groups as a m- government organized, non-government organization.So it’s an NGO, but it was, that was created by the CCP. Really?Yeah. They, they, they basically though and this is something also that Elsa argues in her testimony to Congress, they were created by the CCP to [00:18:00] monitor Chinese students abroad and mobilize them against dissenting views. And that, that is also something the State Department alleges.They receive guidance, so these, like... It’s basically like student clubs and orgs receive guidance from the CCP through Chinese embassies and consulates and then they align their activities with Beijing’s political objectives rather than just, like, oh, like, you know, the students are into this thing.Like, we’re gonna have a picnic. It’s more like, well, China says do this, and so they do that. They, they participate in the CCP’s United Front work. More on that later. And this also involves using students and groups for surveillance and also for influence onMalcolm Collins: campus. Well, they also use it for harassment campaigns and stuff like this.It’s been like very aggressive. Like, there’s been some instances in, like, Australia and stuff like that where some students who are from China will attempt to protest China, and these people will like, really aggressively go after them.Simone Collins: Yeah, they’ll make note of them. They [00:19:00] will counter-protest. They will make them feel very uncomfortable.And in some cases, local Chinese consulates have to approve CSSA presidential candidates. So they’re not even, like, privately governed or, like, student-only governed. They have to, like, get, like, a write-off from the embassies. That, that isMalcolm Collins: incredibly-Simone Collins: And they also accept funding ... spooky. I, it’s, yeah, it, this is, it’s, it’s, it’s weird that, like, there’s a-Malcolm Collins: Yeah, th- this is allowed, and that the US government is just like, “Sure, whatever, you know, keep going.”Simone Collins: Yeah. And- Because also, like, universities, this is where tech transfer takes place. This is where research takes place. Like, these are our nation’s centers for tech and scientific development.Malcolm Collins: The administration should get in on this. I can see why the progressives wouldn’t wanna get on this, but, like, we certainly should.Simone Collins: It’s a, it’s a national security risk, and that’s why I’m like, “Oh, this is something I’ve, I’m surprised is happening.” I mean, I, I, I 100% understand the dynamics at play given the financial incentives and that universities are boned.Malcolm Collins: Right, but, [00:20:00] like, we’re okay with universities going out of business, you know?Yeah, so- Yeah ... screw ‘em.Simone Collins: Yeah, but Stanford University’s still, like, a hub, and it’s also, you know, in the, in the, the hotbed of AI development and Silicon Valley in general, and I’m, I’m gonna also touch on that. There are also these Confucius Institutes at universities, and Elsa testified about those, too.She said, quote, “A bipartisan Senate investigation found that 70% of schools with a Confucius Institute,” these are programs that promote Chinese language and culture, “that received more than $250,000 in a given year failed to report it properly.” ‘Cause there are these reporting requirements. Yeah.But they’re just not, they’re just not bothering, ‘cause, you know, like, no one- No one do. Yeah, on, like, what laws? No one... Who, who, who’s checking anymore? No one checks. The mods are asleep. That is, like, the big thing with society these days. So Elsa does note in her testimony- TheMalcolm Collins: mods are asleep in society.That is so true.Simone Collins: Yeah, and it’s very scary. [00:21:00] She, she notes in her testimony saying, quote, “Congressman Tim Walberg has co-signed a letter to the Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, requesting that CSSAs be evaluated for designation as foreign missions under the Foreign Missions Act.” And she, she calls that a step in the right direction.But oh my God. What, no, no, no. You don’t know. A step in the right direction isn’t, like, a letter, a, a, a co-signed letter to the Secretary of State. The, he, he posted a comment. It’s, it’s like someone posting a comment on this video being like, “Oh, it’s a step in the right direction.” I mean, like, we read the comments, and thank you so much.Yeah. And, and we, we love your feedback, but, like, don’t think that leaving a comment on anyone’s video or sending anyone a letter is gonna change the world. Like- and so basically nothing’s being done. I mean, she does also note that Section 117 of the Higher Education Act requires post-secondary institutions to disclose foreign gifts or contracts totaling $250,000 or more, and the [00:22:00] Department of Education recently approved a new foreign funding reporting portal that launched earlier this year so people can actually see.But as she also pointed out in her testimony, the Confucius Institute, like 70% of the time doesn’t even report. Like no, you know, no one’s- Yeah ... no one’s actually enforcing these rules.Malcolm Collins: Right, so why don’t they shut it down if it’s not reporting? I do not understand how lax our legal system is.Simone Collins: Well, who’s gonna pay for someone to actually check, you know?There, there’s that.Malcolm Collins: So- Well, how do they know 70% of the time it doesn’t report it unless they have checked?Simone Collins: Well, they, they must have done just specifically with the Confucius Institute a spot check, you know, some sort of audit.Malcolm Collins: So- Well, then shut it down.Simone Collins: I, I know. Well, but no, because I’m sure they got tons of pushback from universities who are like, “Yeah, by the way, if you do that I’m going bankrupt, so can you not?”Like, it’s very complicated. Yeah, likeMalcolm Collins: we, we, we survive off of the Chinese spies. That’s like our major source of income these days. Yeah,Simone Collins: like, “Just don’t go, please,Malcolm Collins: stop.” The US students don’t want our fancy degrees anymore, you know? In China, they’ll still pay for them. [00:23:00]Simone Collins: Yeah. Well, yeah, for, for money laundering purposes.Anyway this whole thing though about transnational repression, I hear about it every now and then. I’m kind of on the fence about it. ‘Cause like-Malcolm Collins: Okay, do you think it’s a good idea? We should get into more transnational repression? No,Simone Collins: I just, I feel like they could do a better job. Maybe it’s that we’re, we’re harassed so much where I’m just like, I’m so unfazed by it.You know, someone, someone new being like, “I’m gonna have your children taken away from you. I’m gonna attack you with a baseball bat. I’m gonna find, you know, like, I know where you live. I’m gonna...” You know, like all these things, like, I’m kinda like, “Eh.”Malcolm Collins: So you think just like Blue Sky is better at this than China is?Simone Collins: Yeah. Like, I don’t know, it’s just like everyone’s, everyone’s gonna, you know, making all these threats and actually, you know, following through with them. But you heard- Did you see like someone, another attempted Trump assassin was found on the streets of DC again today? Like, what? It... So anyway though, anyway.Malcolm Collins: So hold on. Have, have you heard the the plan in Brussels, and they did like a 74-page report on this- Ugh ... so like who [00:24:00] knows, it could move ahead.Simone Collins: Yeah.Malcolm Collins: Where they want to merge Blue Sky and X to force X users to see Blue Sky posts. But, a- and Mastodon as well, but potentially not the other way around, just ‘cause they’re so mad that all of their little foot soldiers have isolated themselves.Simone Collins: That’s really cute. I don’t know, that’s, that’s so cute. Like that level of like, Umbridge and, and, and bristling resentment is beautifulMalcolm Collins: It’s like X in the users where it’s like, “I consent. I consent.” And then Brussels over the shoulder like, “I don’t.”Simone Collins: It’s good. That’s good. Transnational repression.So this is, this is the thing that Elsa’s complaining about. Not the spies ‘cause forget that. It’s, it’s the repression. Sure, of course. According to a 2024 Freedom House report, which is, is, it’s something she cites in her testimony, international students, visiting scholars, and faculty in the United States are being targeted by foreign governments and their agents.Tactics of transnational [00:25:00] repression on campuses include digital and physical surveillance, harassment, assault, threats, and coercion by proxy. And while they cite, I think, 38 countries that are found to do this, it’s just like, “Hey, let’s bully our citizens abroad,” the CCP’s obviously the number-one for, like, country doingMalcolm Collins: this Oh, yeah.I mean, they’re great atSimone Collins: it So here are the things that they do. They classroom discussions and campus events on topics like Hong Kong or Xinjiang or Tibet or Chinese politics, they’re monitored, and then the information is relayed to Chinese diplomatic staff or officials via networks such as Chinese students and scholars associations and platforms like WeChat.And then students who organize or join protests, to your point, Malcolm, like, the white paper protests or the zero COVID vigils, report being filmed and shouted down or physically intimidated by pro-CCP students or CSSA affiliates, and sometimes this results in assaults [00:26:00] or other, you know, shout, shouting matches at, at demonstrations.Though I think if you show up to a freaking protest, accept, expect that. But- Yeah, expectMalcolm Collins: a shouting match. Come on. That’s- Yeah ... I mean, we’re gonna complain aboutSimone Collins: that. Authorities in China will also contact or visit students’ family members back home to warn them about the student’s activism abroad, creating this intense psychological pressure on the student who’s, you know, speaking out.Their parents are gonna call freaked out to be like, “What are you doing?” And that would genuinely have me scared, ‘cause China does disappear people, and that would be enough for me. So that’s, that’s for real. It is scary if you’re actually a Chinese citizen who has family in China.Malcolm Collins: Oh,Simone Collins: absolutely,Malcolm Collins: yeah. AndSimone Collins: then pro-CCP actors will also use social media and messaging apps to threaten or smear or expose students who are, are critical of the CCP.So, you know, you might also, if you have any dirt on you, you know, God help you. CSSAs are also, known for monitoring Chinese students, and they mobilize them to oppose speakers at events that are critical of [00:27:00] Beijing, and they also just help to inform students’ choices. Like apparently a lot of Chinese students are just less likely to take courses that might, might steer them in the wrong direction vis-a-vis CCP stances.And then also the Confucius Institutes and CCP linked programs contribute to this atmosphere where students just avoid any sensitive topics or pro-democracy activity just to protect their, their, their safety. So, in, in her testimony, Elsa talks about how like the FBI would actively work with her and be like, “Yeah, we, we see people are following you around campus,” but Stanford basically did nothing, and she’s very, very angry about this, and I, I can understand why.And obviously this is due to financial pressure that... And one analysis found that Chinese students contributed around $12 billion to the US economy in 2016 to 2017 alone. Well, I mean- And then aMalcolm Collins: large- The, the, keep in mind how effing crazy this is. This isn’t a student [00:28:00] saying like, “I’m being harassed.”Simone Collins: Yeah.Malcolm Collins: This is a student being, saying, “I have a note from the FBI saying I’m being harassed on campus. Can we do something about this?”Simone Collins: Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And, and you know, so what, a, a thing that she points out, which is interesting to me, and I don’t know why specifically this university is doing it, but she points out that the University of Wisconsin-Madison has already created an information guide and reporting structure that directs targeted students to relevant offices and connects them with law enforcement, and she wants Stanford to just do the same thing.She’s like, “This doesn’t require a congressional act. Like Stanford, please.” But good for you, University of Wisconsin-Madison. I don’t know why you have such a-Malcolm Collins: It’s a good school. I seriously considered it before I got into St. Andrew’s.Simone Collins: I don’t know anything about it. But-Malcolm Collins: It’s just a, the high quality state schoolit’sSimone Collins: just good? So-Malcolm Collins: It, it’s also where they went to in That ‘70s Show.Simone Collins: Oh, I, I didn’t watch that show ‘cause I can’t stand ‘70s aesthetics, so that makes sense. The, the big element of this, and why this is [00:29:00] happening, and, and why I think we should acknowledge this and understand this, is that the, the, there’s one of the three magic weapons of CCP theory is this united front.It, it’s about basically seizing and maintaining power, and it, it’s supposed to basically unite all fronts that can be united. So this is part of a very concerted and presumably well-funded strategy. And the idea is to unite all fronts that can be united in order to neutralize opposition and build the broadest possible coalition of around CCP objectives.It’s basically, you know how you described the urban monoculture as being this, this this culture that says that it, like, accepts diversity, and it tries to be, you know, as inclusive as possible- Mm-hmm ... and everyone should be, you know, a member, and you could be from any religious background, but then if you scratch just beneath the surface, everyone has exactly the same views and values?Malcolm Collins: Yeah.Simone Collins: That’s kind of what [00:30:00] they’re going for. So domestically, the United Front focuses on groups that the party sees as important but not fully under its control, like ethnic minorities or religious communities or private entrepreneurs or intellectuals or non-communist democratic parties, the new middle class, the professional strata.And then they try to draw these groups that are not, like, CCP hardliners into party-led institutions such as the Chinese People’s Political Consult- Mm ... Consultative Conference and various other mass organizations where they get limited representation, but they’re expected to take the CCP’s lead. So they’re basically like, “Yes,” like, “United Front, let’s all be together,” but, like, let’s be clear, you’re gonna toe the line.And again, that’s, it’s just very urban monoculture coded to me. Overseas though, the way that this works is they try to shape foreign environments in ways that are favorable to the CCP by influencing the Chinese diaspora communities, and also elites and media and [00:31:00] academic institutions, and businesses and politicians in other countries.And the activities described by governments and researchers who are looking into the effects of the United Front’s strategy include promoting pro-Beijing narratives and building relationships with foreign elites, like Elon Musk, or guiding or co-opting Chinese language media, gathering intelligence, facilitating ilicit- illicit technology transfer and in some cases interfering in, in foreign politics.Not as effectively as Russia does, in our opinion, but you know, it’s, it’s a thing. And definitely these, these student orgs that are very active at universities are a, a meaningful branch of this. The fact that embassies are funneling money to them, which is not being reported, and even sometimes approving their presidents, is just enough, enough for me to be like, “Okay, this is just a clear and organized strategy.”And I do think that universities should be, like, clear to people about this. Like, “Hey, our university is a place that is [00:32:00] contributing to the technological and scientific advancement of our country.” Yeah. “And also, there are foreign national organizations that are at this university that are trying to basically, like-” send all that information to their country.And let’s just be aware of that as a thing. Remember, like, there used to be these posters, like, “Loose lips sink ships.” You know, we used to talk about this culturally as a, as a country.Malcolm Collins: But I just don’t know if, like, you can sell that to the type of person who works at an AI company.Simone Collins: And that’s a big concern ‘Cause there already have been concrete AI IP-related theft cases and Chinese nationals.So a Chinese national working at Google in California was arrested in 2024 and charged with stealing over 500 confidential files on Google’s advanced AI infrastructure and chips. On Google. Like, Google, they’re, they have, they’re not messing around. Like, they’re not a, a, a fly-by-night seat-of-the-pants, like, AI [00:33:00] startup in the same way like I- YeahI as, like, Anthropic, right? Like, they’re, they’re careful now. They are. But, you know, maybe they’d make a mistake. Google, though? I mean, they have, like, the big money. But the DOJ alleges that this guy uploaded files describing Google’s TPU-based data center architecture and AI supercomputing platform to a personal account while secretly working for two Chinese-based China-based tech startups, and building AI platforms and large model infrastructure.The FBI director, Christopher Wray, framed this as part of the lengths affiliates of companies based in the People’s Republic of China are willing to go to steal American innovation. They, so it is clear. I mean, like, everyone knows, ‘cause this is just China’s, like, overtly open strategy with regard to, like, mm, putting it diplomatically, tech transfer, is-Malcolm Collins: YeahSimone Collins: they will steal American tech and/or reverse engineer it, which is what’s really been happening mostly with with Claude and [00:34:00] with OpenAI-related IP. They seem to just mostly be reverse engineering it for now. But their whole strategy is, “Yeah, we’re just gonna steal it.” China is doing many other interesting things in AI innovation with a, a, a really heavy focus, per what I’ve read and heard from some insiders, on, like, robotics.So they’re, they’re doing, they’re doing innovative stuff, too, and, but they’re still totally sticking to their old tried and true just copy it and steal it strategy, and they should ‘cause it has worked well for them.Malcolm Collins: Yeah, it’s, it’s worked well so far. I mean, it’s- Yeah ... it’s, it’s, long term it might not...I mean, o- obviously their country’s sort of falling apart right now, which is, you know, whatever.Simone Collins: Yeah, but, you know, they then more than anyone else needs the deus ex machina of AI and of tech to fix the problem. So they are extra in... They’re extra incentivized to steal tech. And the, the US government on many fronts, I’m not gonna read all of them that, that I pulled up is, is very explicit about the [00:35:00] fact that this is a major security risk.And this is one of the big themes of AI, is, like, who’s gonna have AGI first? Who’s gonna have, like, the- Yeah ... the ultimate AI weapon? The House Select Committee on the CCP held a hearing on China- And AI this year where the chair stated that Chinese companies, quote, “Rely on Western AI models,” end quote, and are buying what they legally can and stealing what they cannot at every layer of the technology stack.Witnesses framed theft and replication of US models and tools as a central cheat code in AI strategy. And most of the cases in which AI, A- IP has been stolen just aren’t public because frankly they’re so embarrassing and so dangerous, Yeah ... that they just don’t want things to come out. Now to be fair OpenAI especially after sort of coming...They had, like, this come to Jesus moment when, when DeepSeek first, like, I guess hit the market and everyone was like, “Oh my God.” They, they got really public about how important it was [00:36:00] to protect themselves, I guess. And they have, like, biometrics protected rooms with, like, you have to do a retinal scan- Yeahor whatever. But it’s only a matter of time until this stuff is stolen, and I, I just feel like people should be a little bit more aware of the fact that spying is actively happening. Malcolm and I actually, like, y- you and I, Malcolm- This is why you can- ... we’re pretty open about spies ...Malcolm Collins: trust Chinese people.They all might be spies. That’s what she’s saying.Simone Collins: Well, we, we’ve been accused of being spies. We’ve been, like-Malcolm Collins: Yeah, we’ve been accused of being spiesSimone Collins: for Israel. We, we joke about it all the time, but also, like, jokes aside now, I’m kind of like, “Oh, God,” you know?Malcolm Collins: This is actuallySimone Collins: a problem. Why do all theMalcolm Collins: other spies get money and not us?Simone Collins: Yeah, no one’s promising us fancy s- spy jobs.Malcolm Collins: CCC, I am so cheap. You support my family-Simone Collins: We, yeah, we wanna be spy family. Make, make us the real spy family ...Malcolm Collins: I will, I will not send you like, confidential information ‘cause I don’t have access to it, but I can at least stop [00:37:00] saying bad things about you for a little bit of money.Simone Collins: Yeah. Yeah, we’ll be paid shills. We’ll, we’ll, we’ll, we’ll help with the united front. We would be such bad shills for China.Malcolm Collins: It’s true.Simone Collins: We’d be really... No, like, we’d be legit bad shills for China. We’d be really bad shills for Europe. I’m trying to think who could actually, like-Malcolm Collins: Israel could pay us. We’d be decent enough.Just stop doing the, the, the meme videos.Simone Collins: Yeah. Well, remember when Qatar was gonna fly us out to one of the, the Doha debates?Malcolm Collins: Yeah, I, I, I d- I do, I’d stay inSimone Collins: Doha. And then, and then, no, immediately, like, in our next few podcasts, you’re like, “Ugh, Qatar’s so whatever.” I can’t even remember what you said about them that was not flattering, but, like, you can’t help, you can’t help but, like, anti-shill for people.And, and that robbed us of a potential-Malcolm Collins: I don’t think thatSimone Collins: has anything to do with it ...Malcolm Collins: business class flight.Simone Collins: Oh, well. Well, I like fancy flights. I like fancy things.Malcolm Collins: Anyway, let me [00:38:00] see-Simone Collins: I, I’m literally covered in infant urine right now. It’s, she needs a break. She needs some bribery. She needs some grease payments.Speaker 3: Speaking of grease payments, if you’re wondering why we don’t have a reform video going live today, we did. We filmed it. We even filmed it over the weekend. It was kids crawling over us and everything, but the video got corrupted somehow. So I’m going to be putting it on our paid Substack and Patreon immediately.I’m sorry about that, guys. I want to have it here, but it’s going to perform terribly in the algo because it starts without my video even working, and we had no idea. Obviously, it’s a big change, and I would just film one today that we could have go live tomorrow when it’s still relevant, but we have a news crew coming over today, so we can’t do that.So sorry about that, guys. But hey, excuse to give us money.Money, please.Speaker 4: Oh, no. No. There’s no money.Speaker 3: Money, please, money. Please.Malcolm Collins: Well, let’s, let’s end early today. Get [00:39:00] started early ‘cause I’m also about to fall asleep. That’s why I was eating those jelly beans, trying to get a little bit of sugar to keep me awakeSimone Collins: for- Oh, I’m so sorry I bore you to death with my- My, my grating female voice. I’m sorry, guys. I know, you had to listen to the, the female today.I’mMalcolm Collins: just, I’m just getting up so much earlier these days, you know?Simone Collins: Yeah. No, Malcolm is, Sorry, guys. He’s still not getting sleep. Okay, then I will, Are you gonna go buy your potato and yourMalcolm Collins: shallots? Yes, ‘cause I wanna taste v- v- forest-found soup.Simone Collins: Foraged. Well, oh, yeah. Then it’s an invasive species from China, right?Malcolm Collins: Yes, China. All right. We gotta get rid of this Chinese mushrooms.Simone Collins: Golden oyster mushrooms. Yeah, so thematic, I guess. Yeah. Nothing, nothing says- I loveMalcolm Collins: you, Simone.Simone Collins: I love you, too. Don’t... Do you want me to pick up your food so you don’t fall asleep at the wheel?Malcolm Collins: I’ll make it.Simone Collins: I don’t, I don’t like those [00:40:00] odds.“I’ll make it.” That’s not what you wanna hear.Malcolm Collins: I had a bunch of jelly beans. I’m up. I’m up. I’m up.Simone Collins: I don’t know what flavor.Malcolm Collins: All the flavors. That’s the freaking point of jelly beans, all the flavors.Simone Collins: Man, I fill our grocery cart with, like, apples, and bananas, and broccoli, and cauliflower, and then I see this giant container of jelly beams, as Titan calls them.Jelly beams. Jelly beams. Octavian still calls them his blanket Blankwet. Blankwet.Malcolm Collins: Blankwet. Blank-Simone Collins: Blankwet.Malcolm Collins: The day he told us about how he’s gonna have a Chinook helicopter move the house to the woods.Simone Collins: Yeah. ‘Cause-Malcolm Collins: Simone found a spot she thought was beautiful in the woods.Simone Collins: I... That spot is perfect.Malcolm Collins: And so he says it’ll bring the house and it’ll bring the teddy bear in the house over so we don’t have to worry about that.Simone Collins: [00:41:00] Well, and we’re also gonna buy vans and then drive them into the Chinook helicopter, and the kids will be in the vans when they drive. Yeah. It’s a whole thing. He also said today he was gonna, he was gonna move the climbing dome over, the, the one that we got.Malcolm Collins: Oh, he did? Okay. Yeah. That’s good. That’s good.Simone Collins: So it, it is done.He’sMalcolm Collins: gonna have everything he needs down there. That’s funny, the idea of, like, moving the climbing dome inSimone Collins: the... The whole, the whole house.Malcolm Collins: Yeah.Simone Collins: No, he’s... He thought about it a lot. He’s like, “How much does our house weigh?” He’s trying to figure it out. I think the, the the average house weighs, a- according to Alexa, around 300 and- 300,000 pounds.So our m- ours must weigh a lot more, ‘cause the average American house now is made out of, like, particle board and sawdust. So- Yeah ... ours, made out of all this, like, local stone, has to be a lot more. It has to weigh a lot more.Malcolm Collins: I think it’s gonna be harder to move in a Chinook helicopter.Simone Collins: I think it’s gonna fall apart, Malcolm.I think Octavian’s gonna break our [00:42:00] house with his Chinook helicopter. But whatever, you know. Then we’ll have a Chinook helicopter. He just wants to live in a helicopter anyway, so it’s fine. Sorry, I’ll let you get your potato. Go. I love you. Don’t die.Malcolm Collins: Did you see the recipe? Is it doable?Simone Collins: Oh.Malcolm Collins: We’ll do it with coconut milk with my plan, ‘cause I said that’ll give it a more luxurious taste.Simone Collins: Ah.Malcolm Collins: The part you- Per yearSimone Collins: now ...Malcolm Collins: you can skip is the making the broth.Simone Collins: This is so written by AI. Because no one, no one would say 700 to 900 grams fresh golden oyster mushrooms. The more the better. They carry the show. Use mostly caps. Save some stems for broth. That’s ‘cause I gotMalcolm Collins: mad at it the first time. It was like, “Chop up some oyster mushrooms and then put it in a mushroom bo- broth.”And I’m like, “I don’t want a freaking canned mushroom broth for my mushroom soup.”Simone Collins: Ew. Yeah, that’s disgusting. Yukon [00:43:00] Gold potato, peeled and diced. N- this might take a really long time to bring to a simmer, 15 to 20 minutes. Oh, I guess if you go now and I start right away. Oh, blend. Oh yeah, we’re pureeing it.Malcolm Collins: Pureeing the what?Simone Collins: TheMalcolm Collins: soup. Which part of it?Simone Collins: The whole thing.Malcolm Collins: Does it say blend at the end? Because it certainly- Yeah ... doesn’t say blend at the beginning.Simone Collins: Yeah, it blends at the end and you f- oh, you’re gonna need cream. I-Malcolm Collins: It always says you can use coconut milk instead of cream.Simone Collins: Oh, okay, yeah.Malcolm Collins: Very explicitly.Simone Collins: Mushrooms, blah, blah, blah. Blah, blah, blah. Yeah. Full blend potato plus cream. Yeah. Yeah, it’s, it’s a, it’s a cream of mushroomsoup. Yeah. Separate. So I’m sauteing the onions f- or sorry, I’m sauteing the [00:44:00] mushrooms before the first and then I put into water and then I simmer them for 20 minutes and then I s- strain and then I add a softened potato.Malcolm Collins: Why don’t you ask for a different recipe, okay?Simone Collins: Yeah. Did you ask Grok? Grok can’t cook.Malcolm Collins: Go to Perplexity and ask a recipe and show me what I’m getting GeeSimone Collins: whiz. Okay.Malcolm Collins: You could do it right now, Simone, okay?Simone Collins: I know.Malcolm Collins: And ask for a-Simone Collins: I will ...Malcolm Collins: a cream of mushroom soup, okay? Not like a m- a normal mug, because then it’s gonna give you, like, weird...Simone Collins: Please give me a cream of mushroom soup recipe that is compatible with foraged golden oyster mushrooms.Perplex- why would you even ask a... No. [00:45:00] Grok is a man AI, and not, like, a chef man AI, just a normal man AI.There we go. Okay. So we need one pound of golden oyster mushrooms. Totally have. Three tablespoons of butter, check. Olive oil, check. Medium yellow onion or two shallots diced, so we need the shallots. Garlic, have it. One cup fre- one... Oh, sorry, one teaspoon fresh thyme. We don’t necessarily need that, and I think- Yeahwe might have it dried. Kosher salt, black pepper, flour, chicken or vegetable broth. I have bouillon, which I can use. Heavy cream, half-and-half or whole milk. We have whole milk. Soy sauce or tamari. We have soy sauce at least. We might have tamari. Lemon juice or dry sherry, optional but recommended. So you prep the onions, you saute them, you build the base, you thicken it, and then you [00:46:00] blend to make a smooth soup, and then you finish gently by stirring in the cream and soy sauce.I think this would be better with heavy cream, but- Okay.Malcolm Collins: Do it with heavy cream ...Simone Collins: we don’t have any heavy cream. So can you get two shallots and heavy cream?Malcolm Collins: Yes.Simone Collins: Beautiful.Malcolm Collins: I loveSimone Collins: you. And if you wanna get chicken broth, you can, but we have bouillon that I can use to reconstitute broth.Malcolm Collins: Chicken broth will probably be easier if I get it, right?Simone Collins: Eh. You know what? We might have some. I have bouillon cubes. I really shouldn’t be lazy, so don’t... Yeah, don’t buy things. Let’s save money.Malcolm Collins: All right, love you.Simone Collins: I love you too.Speaker: Can I handle that chicken for you? Oh, yeah.I remember. Let me handle him. [00:47:00] Let me handle him. I- I’m gonna get a brown one. Let me handle him. I’m probably the one to take care of this guy by hand. Mommy, I wanted to hold a chicken. Okay, go pick one up, my love. But it’s harder. Titan seems pretty good at catching them. I wanna hold one. I’m pretty good at...Can you?Mommy, get a chicken right now, please. Look at all these flowers in this tree, Mommy. Wow,Speaker 2: they’re so pretty. GetSpeaker: a chicken rightSpeaker 2: now for me. Okay, I’ll see what I can do. Canguys. Be nice. Thank you, friends. Yeah, there you go, Indy. Gently. Thankyou. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit basedcamppodcast.substack.com/subscribe

Malcolm and Simone Collins react to Nick Fuentes’ shocking declaration: “I’m a moderate non-woke Democrat in 2026.” Malcolm’s long-standing prediction that Fuentes would align with the Democratic coalition has come true — and the clips prove it.In this episode, they break down Fuentes’ revealed preferences vs. his rhetoric, his pattern of undermining Republican candidates during elections, his obsession with destroying the GOP and harming Israel, his weak stance on immigration enforcement, and why this move exposes his true priorities. They also discuss the “Nazi Democrat” candidate in Maine, accelerationism, the health of the right-wing movement without deontological extremists, and what this means for the future of American politics.A must-watch for anyone following the Nick Fuentes saga, MAGA, or the realignment happening on the right.Episode TranscriptMalcolm Collins: Hello, Simone. I’m excited to be here with you today. Today we get a big heaping helping of I was right, I called it, it was the craziest conspiracy theory I had ever launched. So people will know there have been a number of episodes where I predicted that Nick Fuentes would join the Democratic coalition.And there was actually one entire episode that was nothing about but this exact topic, but I never aired that episode because I thought it was just too crazy to air as an independent episode. I thought people would say, “Malcolm, you’ve fallen off. This is crazy. You’re going too hard here. He’s never actually just gonna come out.Like, he may act like a Democrat, but he’s not just gonna join the coalition.” And he has.Speaker: 2026, vote Dem- I’m a Democrat now. I’m a moderate Democrat in 2026. I don’t know about ‘28. For 2026, I am a non-woke Democrat. Hi, my name’s Nick Fuentes. I’m an Afro-Latino, non-woke Democrat. I care about affordability. [00:01:00] I care about foreign interventions. I care about the border. I’m a non-woke, moderate Democrat.I think the GOP needs to be destroyed. I think the corrupt criminal government of Trump needs to be slowed down. We need to impeach the orange. It’s time to put this in a peach. Trump needs to be placed inside of a crystal. He needs to be impeached. This fat orange, tiny hands needs to be impeached.And then in ‘28, no Vance, no Rubio. We have to burn down the whole party. We need to elect a dark horse who’s gonna put America first. I’m not listening to anybody else. No Vance, no Rubio, America first. That’s the ma-- And that is all that matters anymore. That is the only thing that matters. I’m not voting for a Democrat unless they’re really, un- unless it’s, like, um, me.Unless it’s a, unless it’s a Nick Fuentes Democrat. Unless a Nick Fuentes Democrat wins the nomination, I won’t vote for a Democrat. I’m, I’m never Vance. I’m never Rubio. I’m an America first guy. So Tucker and all the [00:02:00] rest of them, they’re gonna try to shut me down. They’re gonna try to get Vance in there in ‘28, and you gotta be...You gotta wisen up and realize we gotta take our own side here. None of this nonsenseMalcolm Collins: And I will note here that I have seen some people coping and saying that these clips are him joking. I have watched enough Nick Fuentes to know the difference between when he is entirely joking and when he is...Because he does everything in a jocular manner. When he’s saying the stuff he most sincerely believes more than anything in the world, he’ll add a joke here or there to it.Speaker 6: And if you want to say that this is a joke, really the only line in here that I think you could use as evidence, because everything else is completely in line with everything he said in the past, is the I’m an Afro-Latino. But this only works if you’re unfamiliar with the Nick nick fuentes lore. Nick’s grandfather was Mexican.He admits this and identifies this way. And in his DNA test, he is partially African. Small, like 1%, but he is an Afro-Latino. And [00:03:00] so I think what he’s doing here is in everything he says, whether it’s right wing or left wing in a traditional context, he always throws in some spice, some stuff to piss people off.But he’s trying to performatively lean into the identity politicsSpeaker 15: I also want to point out here that I do not dislike Nick as a person. If anything, I think that this is a good development for him because he has been cheerleading Democrat causes for a while now. And to just be able to come out and admit like what his political team is, I think shows a degree of integrity instead of LARPing as somebody who’s right wing.And there’s nothing like, okay, like I’m against the Democrats’ agenda, but he has explained why he holds these points. These points are in line with the Democratic agenda. And I don’t think that he’s being necessarily intellectually dishonest in how he has laid these out. So I can’t hold animosity over that.Malcolm Collins: But if [00:04:00] you look specifically where I think this is validated, because maybe you could say the whole, “I’m joining the Democrats, I’m a moderate Democrat now, a non-woke Democrat.”First, that’s a weird way to say it if he’s joking, right? The, the coming out explicitly as a non-woke Democrat is it’s, he, he’s, he’s not putting on, like, an act, like, “I’ve become woke,” or something like that. He is, he is clarifying his position while in the same speech saying that he still can’t quite bring himself to vote for most Democrats yet.Which to me, that doesn’t, that’s not a jo- like, that’s him sayingSimone Collins: plainly- Yeah, if, if it were a bit, he wouldn’t be speaking that way ...Malcolm Collins: And yes, and then later in the same speech, which we’ll get to, he explicitly says that we should vote for a Democrat over a a, an Indian Republican. A, a, Wamatha, Ramaswamy?VivekSimone Collins: RamaswamySpeaker 3: So what is the alternative? Well, not [00:05:00] everybody’s gonna like this, but in November, there’s gonna be two candidates that can win on the ballot in Ohio, and it is Acton on the Democrat side and Ramaswamy on the Republican side. If it can’t be Ramaswamy, I think you know what it has to be. And so I’m gonna be calling on everybody to be going to Ohio, and we’re gonna give people a choice.You have an option, stay home. But I think if you really wanna make a difference and help, we’re gonna have to hold our noses and we’re gonna have to vote Democrat.And I’d point out here how quickly he flipped on this, “Oh, I’m a Democrat now, but I won’t vote for Democrats,” to, “All of my fans need to get out there and vote for a Democrat.”This is why I can only help but roll my eyes when somebody’s like, “Well, you know, he did say that he was never going to tell people to vote for Democrats, so it shouldn’t really be seen immediately afterwards as soon as it’s election season.” Like, there’s a pattern to this, guys.And again, I am [00:06:00] not anti Nick Fuentes content. I find it often quite entertaining, sometimes insightful, but it’s important to look at his revealed preferences and his end goals that can be discerned from looking at the revealed preferences, what he actually does when it mattersMalcolm Collins: When, and Vivek is awesome, man. Like, he’s-Simone Collins: Vivek is awesome, yeah. I agree ...Malcolm Collins: one of my favorite Vivek quotes I heard this when I was at the Libertarian convention. And it was Vivek versus another one of the leading Republican candidates, one of the boring ones who I don’t like.Anyway, so the other one, like, wanted everyone to come with out their guns to the meeting. And you know, it’s the Libertarians, so they didn’t wanna do that. ItSimone Collins: was in New Hampshire?Malcolm Collins: Yeah, it was New Hampshire. HeSimone Collins: was asking everyone to come without guns in New Hampshire.Malcolm Collins: Well, because he’s like, you know, “I’m a...”I can understand how he might be scared. You know, “I’m a presidential candidate, I get lots of death threats.” They all get lots of death threats. You know, we get death threats, right? Anyway, Vivek then comes, and he has no restrictions on it. He’s like, “Yeah, just anybody come.” And then he gets up on stage and the guy who I, who was telling me this story, he came with, like, an [00:07:00] open carry, like, AR-15.You know, like, a very well, like, strapped to this event, right? And he’s like- Wait,Simone Collins: Vivek, he, he came with a rifle strapped to him, not like a handgun, like under his-Malcolm Collins: I think it was, I think it was a rifle from what, from what I remember of the story. So he he’s giving the speech and he then at one point in the speech is, is like, “Oh yeah, and if I ever start doing this stuff,” because he’s like, somebody’s like, you know, I can’t remember, like, you know, “Well, politicians say X or say Y.”And he goes, “Well, if I start doing that, you know they’ve gotten to me, and you know what to do.” And he pointed to this guy with the rifle. Oh,Simone Collins: no.Malcolm Collins: Oh, mySimone Collins: God ... andSpeaker 22: Do. Yes, sir.Do it, Regal.Malcolm Collins: I love that. That’s, that’s how you, n- I mean, that is so much more based [00:08:00] than anything Nick Fuentes has ever done, to point to the guy in the crowd with theSimone Collins: freakingMalcolm Collins: rifle- You know what to doand being like, “If I ever go for this stuff, you know what to do.” That’s amazing.Speaker 8: And ‘07 Vivek, the avatar of destruction, we love you. Uh, I do support Trump, but you’re awesome. You gotta run in 20- after Trump wins, you gotta run in ‘28. Honestly, I’m, I’m on board for a Vivek ‘28. I’m on board for a Vivek presidency. I think the ideal primary in 2028 is Kanye West and Vivek Ramaswamy. W AmericaSpeaker 9: And I want to be clear here because sometimes people will be like, well, Asmongold says he agrees with 99% of stuff that Nick Fuentes said. And there was a time when I felt that way too. And I was like, hey, we got to give this guy some benefit of the doubt. He totally dunked on Piers Morgan. Like that was hilarious.You know, he says funny stuff on stream. And so I would watch individual clips he said, like him glazing Vivek here and think, oh, this guy is great. I mean, other people will say that. Like here we’ll point out where he’ll do some anti-ice stuff. [00:09:00] And then people will say, oh yeah, but here’s him saying some pro-ice stuff.And it doesn’t matter if with somebody like this, who when it doesn’t matter, you know, when it’s not an election cycle where Vivek is running, he will glaze Vivek. And then the moment it’s relevant to our side winning, enacting stricter border policy, actually protecting unborn children, he comes in and he’s like, no, no, no, no, no.Now I’m working against him. And so this has significantly soured me on him is I realized that he has this chameleon persona where he will just take on any position that he thinks will grow his base within a right-wing audience when it’s not election season. And then the moment it becomes election season and it matters, he goes full on against us.And this is why when people are like, oh, you know, look at this clip that counters what you just said here. Look at this clip. And it’s like, well, if those came from [00:10:00] beforehand, then he’s longing to grow an audience. Like the fact that he is contradicting himself makes it worse. And this is coming from me, somebody who prides himself in updating his views.If you watch our videos, you will see me updating my views, but you can see the directionality of those views updating. It’s not like I’m here, you know, pro this, pro this, pro this, pro this. And the moment it matters, I turn against it, right? With me, it’s more like for a long time, I was like, well, you know, maybe the trans community, some people are legitimately trans and we just need to handle this with kids.And then I got access to more evidence. And I was like, I was wrong about that. And I admit that I was wrong about that. And I used to be a Democrat too. Like I was wrong about that. But this is all sort of a directional evolution, which is not what we see with Fuentes. He doesn’t really look like an evolution of political beliefs, but either [00:11:00] somebody who is hiding his original goals or somebody who has just been captured by anti-Indian and anti-Jewish hatred to the extent that he is willing to sabotage everything else he has ever said he stood for in favor of that.Speaker 10: Funny, , y- I actually, when we speak about my evolution, I actually, if you look at our early videos on Nick Fuentes, they , are pretty glowing on Nick Fuentes. , Basically, , I did... There’s a funny scene where Nexinor is like, “Who’s this leaflet person?” And then somebody in chat is like, “People are calling her a Nazi.”And he goes, “Well, I, I probably like her then. Let’s see what funny jokes she told.” Or, no, that was, that was Shoeonhead when somebody said, somebody said she’s a Nazi, and she goes, “Oh, I wonder what funny jokes she said.” , But like, , I sort of felt the same way. All the regular people who annoy me were attacking Nick, and so I’m immediately like, “Okay, I’m gonna give him the benefit of the doubt.Like, let’s see what this guy’s about.” And he starts with some fun stuff. , And then he starts hoping that we lose the war in Iran and starts hoping that our side loses elections and it, and all of a sudden I’m like, “Oh, God,” like, “this guy is [00:12:00] very against our best interestSpeaker 21: Quick side note here, but like we need to, I think as a movement, be clear, , in terms of like we can say that there are differences between ethnic groups. We can say that there are differences between cultural groups. We can say that anchor babies are a problem in the country. We can say that in-group preference among certain ethnicities is a problem among, within this country.But this just totalistic othering of people from different ethnicities that now show ideologically in their actions, in what they’re doing, that they align with an American vision. Like take Leaflet. Leaflet’s, I think, a sep- second-generation Japanese. , She might be further back than that, but at least I know she’s ethnically Japanese.In everything that she has ever done, she has shown herself to be on team, right? , so what I’m supposed to other her for this sort of like purity? Aria Babu, Indian, who we’ve talked about, who had this wonderful essay on like why witches are evil and why we need to go back to Puritanism [00:13:00] and, , clearly on team. And I just don’t think it’s helpful to create gating, , where people who are clearly... And, and it’s not culturally American. It’s, it’s not what the, the backwoods people did. It’s not what the Puritans did. Maybe the Cavaliers did it, but they were always dbags. , And the Quakers did it, but they’re where woke comes from, so also dbags., So I don’t see the point in this sort of, , racially pure angle on things when the real challenge, which is the harder challenge, is just to get people to understand that you can’t just import anyone and expect them to behave like anyone else. , You lose that battle if you decide that you won’t cave on the racial purity battle.Malcolm Collins: Yeah, so I was, I was telling this story to Simone, and he’s like, “Well...”Because at first, before he then just later goes on and is like, “Yeah, we should vote for Democrats,” he, he starts by saying... And I wanna get into, like, the logic of all of this. Yeah. ‘Cause I think this can con- confuse some people, and it really shouldn’t be confusing. It’s actually, the [00:14:00] reason why I was able to predict this is it’s highly in alignment with everything he’s been doing for a long time at this point.And the continuing to pretend to be right-leaning, I think, was the joke, right? Like, he’s, he’s not really right-leaning on any major policy anymore. He promotes social wealth redistribution he promotes like, no tariffs, like, sort of globalist market conditions. He promotes America not really exercising its, its power on the world stage.Even when it’s just, like, a, an easy net benefit to us, like in Venezuela. Like, that’s not even, like, a boots on the ground. That’s just, like, a, oh, yeah, like... But I wanna get into the psychology of how he got to this place, because I think for some people who believe the leftist vision of Nick Fuentes, this can be weird or confusing.But, like, if you’ve been actually listening to what he’s been saying for a while now this is not remotely surprising. This is the d- And, and note here, people can say, “Well, you [00:15:00] know, the, the, he, he has so many values that don’t align with d- values of the rest of the Democratic coalition.” And I pointed out that the Democratic coalition is much more based on what they want to destroy than what they want to promote.And by this what I mean is you are able to have Islamists on the same side as LGBTQ extremists in the in, in, in this faction. He has more in common with, well, basically either group than those two groups have with each other. But he, at, at a, at a, at a fundamental level... Because w- we’ll talk about, like, what he says he believes.I don’t wanna get... I wanna get into the second funny part here, ‘cause this also surprised Simone. It’s, he goes, “Well, vote for Nick Fuentes style Democrats.” And Simone was like, “What does that mean?” And I go, “Well, you know there is a Nazi Democrat now.” Mm. And she’s like, “Wait, there’s a Nazi Democrat?” And I’m like, “Yeah, you haven’t heard about it?”So let’s get into this. This is Garren Pattler. He’s a Democrat [00:16:00] senatorial candidate, a of-Simone Collins: What state?Malcolm Collins: Maine.Simone Collins: Okay.Malcolm Collins: He’s the current front runner and presumptive Democratic nominee. In 2007 while live, i- while on leave in Croatia, the young mariner, after tours in Iraq he got a tattoo.Now he says he had no idea- Oh ... what it was. He’s like- This is funny ... “Oh, I just got it off the wall in the tattoo shop.”Simone Collins: Yeah.Malcolm Collins: The problem is it is a death head symbol used by the SS-Simone Collins: Yeah ...Malcolm Collins: para- paramilitary force central to the Holocaust and other atrocities. It’s a, it’s a very central neo- c- it’s, it’s, like, much worse than, say, like, a swastika ‘cause with a swastika you could say, “I got it confused for that Buddhist symbol,” or something, right?And he claims he had no idea what this was. He had no idea what it was until it picked up. But it seems,Simone Collins: He’s an alleged Nazi. Like, he deniesMalcolm Collins: it. He has an SS tattoo.Simone Collins: I mean, look, also the two lightning bolts, they look awesome. [00:17:00] Like, that’s the problem.Malcolm Collins: You think it’s like the Harry Potter tattoo?Yeah. I go to somebody and I go, “I got the Harry Potter tattoo on my forehead.” TheSimone Collins: two of them.Malcolm Collins: And it’s the SS, right? That’s the- Yeah.Simone Collins: That’s, I mean, I, I could see it. I could genuinely see it happening. So he’s an... I would put him down as alleged Nazi.Malcolm Collins: But what’s been very fun about this candidate, and you can watch a bunch of videos online of people freaking out about this, is rightists will try to get leftists to condemn him for being a Nazi.They’re like, “You will accuse Trump of being a Nazi over, like, nothing, right? This guy’s got an, an SS tattoo.” Oh, no.Simone Collins: I’ve... See, and now that you mention him, I have heard of him, and specifically from leftist newscasters or, like, well, news commentators on YouTube. And they’re all like, “No,” like, “It, it, he, it was a mistake.”This is totally defended on the leftMalcolm Collins: Yeah, they don’t care. Like, the left doesn’t care, ‘cause the left doesn’t care about, like, being against Nazis, as I’ve pointed out. Like, they’re, they’ll be pro-Nazi if it’s on their side. Like, this has- No, no, they just say- ... long been normative forSimone Collins: them.Malcolm Collins: Which is- They don’tSimone Collins: say he’s a Nazi [00:18:00]Malcolm Collins: So, so with the recent Nick Fuentes turn I, I, I think I should explain to people, like, how he psychologically got here, because this is, this is also fairly interesting.Simone Collins: Well, and let me ask a question that I think might be top of mind for a lot of people, too. Is this just about being path dependent on being rebellious? And if you are far right, the only rebellious thing you can do after a certain point is go left. Like, that’s the last rebellious thing. No,Malcolm Collins: because w- when, when, when you, when you saw his coming out as a moderate Democrat, as a non-woke Democrat, and you saw the things that he was rabidly protesting, like the Trump administration, locking up everyone in the Trump administration, ending all of their efforts when you see...I mean, he has streams where he’s crashed out about ICE being too aggressive before.Simone Collins: Right?Malcolm Collins: Like- Wait,Speaker 2: The other thing I’m really worried about is what’s happening at these ICE detention centers, where it’s happening not far from where I live in Broadview, Illinois, [00:19:00] where they set up an ICE detention facility, and the administration is rounding these people up, which I support, but they’re doing it in a very provocative waySpeaker 11: Note here, , many such quotes from Fuentes. We’ve got ones like, , “You can perform brutality without being brutal. , He called ICE performatively cruel. , And like we know that they’re not.They’re doing what they need to do. When I watch these videos of ICE, I often feel like I see them being nice while people are calling them like the N-word and stuff, and just trying their best to get things done often, , while people are violently resisting and harassing them. I can imagine almost no other group as beleaguered and unappreciated for their jobs., I, I feel so sorry for what they go through every day, and to see Nick piling on with this stuff... And people can be like, “Well, here’s where he’s supporting them, and here’s where he’s supporting them.” Or later in that very clip, he walks it back and is like, “Well, he never should have said it in the first place.”These people are working their butts off, man. He never should have said it in the first place. You’re not genuinely on [00:20:00] team if you’re doing thatSimone Collins: are you serious? He’s not aboutMalcolm Collins: the poor people. Yeah, yeah. He says it, it looks bad, and it’s, like, bad. And there’s no other way you can do it, right? Like, he, I- if you follow, like, the things he’s actually complained about and the things he complains about as sort of ideological points in that stream, this follows really directly from that.So there’s really two things that he wants more than anything. He wants the people involved with the Trump administration arrested and to face consequences for not going along with his vision of America’s future. And two, he wants Israel to suffer. And I note here that it’s not just Nick Fuentes that is making this move that we’ve seen to the left.David Duke made this move, Richard Spencer made this move, Richard Hanania made this move. A lot of people. And Richard Hanania, like, he, he’s been on our show before. I like, I, I, I, you know, pleasant enough guy, but he often talks when he’s on left shows, he goes, “Yeah, between X and Y years, I was a professional racist.”Right? Like, [00:21:00] people who really bit into the racist card have been, I think, sorely disappointed by how much the right is just not the party of racism anymore. And the left is okay with racism still, right? Like, they will... It’s very interesting if you watch leftist interview like Richard Hanania about his time as a racist or about his racist views, there really isn’t any condemnation for it in a, in a meaningful context.It’s not even like he needs to apologize for it. It’s just like, “Yeah, but you’re voting blue now, right?” And his primary bugaboos, right? Like, he doesn’t really... So, so one, you’ve gotta look at his behavior pattern. For every single election and midterm up until this one, he, this is when he always turns on the Democrat coding, right?He does this thing where when it’s not about to be a voting season, he pretends to be a Republican. And then whenever it’s about to be voting season, he always argues that either people shouldn’t vote for the Republican candidates, or like in this season-Simone Collins: Oh, that’s true. Yeah ... he was He was not [00:22:00] voting for Trump in the 2024 election.Malcolm Collins: What? Because he was very clearly anti-Trump in the 2024 p- political race. You remember that, right?Simone Collins: Yeah, I thought Richard Hanania into he turned anti-Trump, but were they just saying that to, like, rile people up?I don’t know.Malcolm Collins: Yes. ButSimone Collins: maybe SoMalcolm Collins: it appears- Yeah ... that he has held this position really strongly since 2024. And that he really starts to flare up in these positions whenever it’s an election cycle, and then he goes back to pretending to be a Republican in between election cycles when it won’t matter.And I, I, like, I want people to... Because when we’ve criticized him in the past, and I’m like, “I’m telling you right now, he’s not anti-Trump, he’s anti-Republican,” right? He wants the GOP destroyed. He wants our policy positions destroyed. He wants the policy positions of the leftists enacted, like loose borders and everything like that.I mean, keep in mind, if we have just a few, like a decade more of borders [00:23:00] as loose as they were under the Biden administration, it’s going to be very hard for Republicans to ever win elections again, right? Like, he’s attempting to put things in place that will prevent Republicans from winning in the future.Simone Collins: Wait, he wants loose borders?Malcolm Collins: Well, if he is willing to allow Democrats to become elected, then yes, functionally he does, because that’s the thing- ‘Cause I thoughtSimone Collins: he’s very anti-immigration.Malcolm Collins: He’s, this, this is the thing, and it’s important to look at what he says versus what he does. If you look at functionally what he does, like where he actually cares, where he’s willing to, like, throw down a gauntlet, right?He’s never thrown down the gauntlet over the issue of immigration. He has repeatedly thrown down the gauntlet over the issue of using Israel to help achieve our foreign objectives if it also helped Israel’s foreign objectives. A- he, no, I’m, we’ve seen this, right? Never once have I seen him meaningfully throw down the gauntlet on immigration.He throw, he’s, he’s attempted to throw it down over, like, generic [00:24:00] racism, but that doesn’t really matter, right? Because that’s obviously not going to win. W- and even where he’s engaged with immigration, as I, as I’ve noticed, like he’s been anti-ICE before and stuff like that, right? Like, he, he wants to, like, slow down immigration, but not in any way that could, like, look bad or cause a fuss.Which is very interesting when you contrast it with his public persona. But I think it’s important that people understand that his public persona, even within his mind, is a bit of an act, and not necessarily in line with his real goals for America.Simone Collins: I do get the impression when watching him, and I’m watching a bit of a, like, a stand-up bit, it’s almost like he took the concept of The Colbert Report and he just, like, did the method acting version of it, where he, like, lived it 24/7, like, lived a far right- personaMalcolm Collins: Yeah.Well, I mean, you don’t know that he’s doing this 24/7 or not, right? Like, Well,Simone Collins: whenever he’s on stream, then fine ...Malcolm Collins: and I, I put on a persona [00:25:00] on stream too, but my persona on stream is largely-Simone Collins: Dude, I talk with you all day. This is not a personaMalcolm Collins: Well, I don’t knowSimone Collins: Sorry, Malcolm, nice tryMalcolm Collins: I think I’m more provocative on streamSimone Collins: No Okay.NoMalcolm Collins: you’re not Maybe I don’t. I thought I put on a persona on stream. The, the, but, but if I don’t, I, I’m s- well, then I’m lying. I, I don’t, I apparently am just like this 24/7.Simone Collins: Yes,Malcolm Collins: you are You, you don’t think I state my values more extremely or more... You know, sometimes I try to be controversial for controversy’s sake or...Simone Collins: No? You’re way more controversial off cameraMalcolm Collins: Uh-oh, what have Malcolm saying off camera? Now you’re getting deep lore here, people.Simone Collins: Actually, I guess you’re, you’re more or less the same, but you’re less guarded in what you say because you know that you couldn’t be demonetized in our normal lifeMalcolm Collins: Oh, that’s true.That is true, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, no, I mean, I have some spicier [00:26:00] takes that I’m like, “I don’t know, the world isn’t ready for this yet.” And, and I think that, that there are things that people could infer from things I’ve said on stream. Like, I, I think I’m significantly more ruthless and less caring about people I see as being dam- damaging to the future of human civilization than, than I come off as on screen.But anyway I think that- go run around and play, okay, sweetheart? You’re, you’re being a loud bugaboo.Now, now she’s crying about it, looking around like she’s been rejected.You can go play with anything in my room. Look, the whole room is full of treasure. Just no wiggling on my lap, okay?But what I find interesting, and what I’m really excited to see if, if, if we can see it happen is, is the left gonna embrace him like they did Richard Spencer?Simone Collins: Oh, no, Richard Anania.Malcolm Collins: [00:27:00] Sorry, Richard Anania.Simone Collins: That’s a very... That would be really interesting if suddenly he has his, So what, where, where this last happened actually is, the, the girlfriend, the former girlfriend and baby mama of Elon Musk.Malcolm Collins: Ah, who went lefty andSimone Collins: did all the lefty podcasts. She did. Yeah, she did her apology tour. Sorry. And she did fairly w- like she was, she was accepted but with skepticism. Like she went on the A Bit Fruity podcast and they were like, “Yeah, we’ll hear you out. I mean, I think I believe you, but I’m not 100% sure.”So I could see him being-Malcolm Collins: And I, I also wanna point out something about his recent messaging around this that’s different from his historic messaging. That I, I told people his historic messaging was b- BS, and some of his fans actually believed him. And I think that this time, hopefully he has said enough that people understand, “Oh, Malcolm actually understood the situation better than I did.”Which was he [00:28:00] would say when he told people to vote Democrat, he’s like, “This is an accelerationist thing. Like if you vote Democrat things will burn down faster, and then we can get the right type of Republican Party in place, then we can get the right type of Republican in place.”Simone Collins: Cozzie, I think you’re discounting the extent to which this is a subversive thing.That, one, it’s strategic on his part, that he knows that, like, to keep pushing the extent to which he can be subversive, he has to now go where no one has gone before: Democrat. But also, he’ll be able to pick up all the subversive Democrats who want to be rebellious in some way or more edgy, ‘cause there’s nothing Democrats hate more than the Democratic Party.IMalcolm Collins: don’t, I do not think that at all. Really? I think this is, if you watch the actual clip where he’s talking about this stuff, he is not in out there Nick Fuentes voice. He is not in hyperbolic Nick Fuentes voice. These appear to be- No, but- ... and they are in line with his-Simone Collins: To be a moderate Democrat is to be [00:29:00] subversive, but also weirdly apply to subversiveMalcolm Collins: Democrats No, I know.But when he’s doing his subversive thing, y- if you watch his show, he’ll have moments where he is subversive to be subversive, and he gets all giddy about it, and he does this whole act about it. This is not him being subversive to be subversive. This is his honest opinion. And I think that if you look at it in the context of his previous statements, which is a point I was trying to make, where historically, and part of his audience genuinely believed this, that he would tell people to not vote for Trump or tell people to vote Democrat with the understanding that if the Republican coalition became unviable without him and people like him that eventually a new form of Republicanism would grow that was more in line with the values he claimed to espouse.This has been his historic talking point. This talking point has been dropped, okay? Now he is just, “I am [00:30:00] pro-Democrat If the Republicans are in line with and allied with groups like interracialSimone Collins: marriage- Oh, yeah, because he’s anti, anti-Indian. Why is it so freaking trendy to be anti-Indian in America?Malcolm Collins: Well, actually, this is a wider thing. Both in the UK and in the United States, if you look at the Indian political class out- outside of, I mean, I guess you could consider Kamala Harris partially Indian, but, like, she doesn’t identify thatSimone Collins: way. No, she leaned into her, like, “I’m partially.”Malcolm Collins: Yeah. But if you look at the Indians who are, like, big in politics both in the UK and in the United States, the, the, the big names are mostly Republicans, right w- right wing.Vivek Chamath and and JD Vance’s wife. I know Chamath is...Simone Collins: Yeah.Malcolm Collins: Chamath is very right-wing. Are you serious?Simone Collins: I know, but I was, I was gonna say, he’s not, like, that active as a political player, but I guess heMalcolm Collins: is. He has one of the most popular podcasts in the country.Simone Collins: Yeah, Make It Political.Yeah.Malcolm Collins: Okay. Okay. And the, there was a, [00:31:00] a leader, the last leader of the UK Conservative coalition was an Indian,Simone Collins: Oh, yeah, the prime minister.Malcolm Collins: Yeah. He was, like, complicated. So, th- well, the point I’m making here is that Indians as an ethnic group have largely, at least in their elite caste aligned with right-leaning politics.As to why this has been the case, if people are wondering, like, they’re like, “That’s odd,” like, why would that make so much sense? There’s a couple reason why this has happened. And, and the right has, while skeptical of them being, like, full Americans, largely embrace them. I mean, there are issues with Indians that need to be addressed, like the nepotistic behavior they show in the tech world.But in the United States at least they have largely been accept- a- accepted by the political caste. And the reason is, is a fewfold. One is, is that they generally hate Muslims e- except for the Indian Muslims. But the, the Indian Muslims typically don’t make a lot of money in the United States.They’re, they’re you know, poorer immigrants. But the, the wealthy tech mogul Indians are mostly Hindis, Jain, Christian Indian [00:32:00] descendants. A few Sikhs, but not many. But, but don’t worry, the Sikhs also generally hate Muslims. So there’s that. And the second one is, is they’re disproportionately wealthy and disproportionately libertarian in sort of their value system.Now if you look at the overall Indian voting bloc, yes, they vote less. I’m just talking about the political class here. And obviously this infuriates people like Nick Fuentes, right? Who had this like, as I’ve described by Nick Fuentes in the past, if you wanna understand his ideology, he’s somebody who’s driven much more- By seeing the things he hates destroyed than seeing the things he cares about succeed.And so long as he can make political decisions that increase the probability of the things that annoy him or would not kowtow to his vision, it’s not even, like, broadly... Like, as I pointed out, he’s super against Vance. He’s had long rants against Vance. Vance is the most anti-war mainstream Republican candidate out there [00:33:00] right now.He, he is- Well,Simone Collins: and he’s Catholic.Malcolm Collins: And he’s Catholic, right? Like the idea that he would be anti-Vance shows that it is not about being anti-war for him. It’s about seeing Israel suffer. With, it’s not really about being pro-Democrat. It’s about seeing the Republicans suffer. And if you look at his value set, like if he actually believes that life began at conception, or if he was actually concerned about the population being replaced, or if he was ev- One, he’d be having kids.I mean, I’ve pointed this out before. He could trivially easily get a wife at this point, and I’ve always pointed out, to me, that’s always been the smoking gun. If you look- YouSimone Collins: don’t know. He could have a secret wife for all we know.Malcolm Collins: He doesn’t have a secret wife. And I always love this one, when people are like, “Oh, no, if you listen to his requirements for a wife, you’ll understand why he doesn’t have a wife.”And I’m like, “Bro, don’t be so brain cucked on this.” If you listen to his requirements for a wife, they are obviously intentionally designed to be something that [00:34:00] he will never meet. They are preferences he can make What, what’s the word I’m looking here for? Concessions on. You know, he’s like, “Oh, I wanna meet a wife who’s permanently offline and whatever.”Like, well, if... S- Do, do not sip on that. If that series of requirements prevents him from finding a woman, and yet he believes, like, the white race is being eradicated and being replaced, presumably preserving the right- white race, if, if you believe his world perspective, is more important than him finding a wife who meets all of these very particular peculiarities that he’s looking for if he actually believed all that.Now, again, I think he does actually believe it. I just think he’s far more motivated by the things he hates than the things he cares about. And so that he can functionally understand that if we get Democrats in power again, they’re likely gonna change elect- They’re gonna stuff the Supreme Court.They’re going to let in tons of illegal immigrants. We’re going to end up in a situation where we may [00:35:00] not be able to win again. We’re going to be... Like, if Kamala Harris had won, do you think our channel would still be on the air right now? Like, very obviously not.Simone Collins: Oh, God. That’s dark.Malcolm Collins: Well, I mean, it’s true.They were, they w- they have been increasingly tightening the bolts on social media. And, and but that does help channels like his. One of the other things people noted that was a huge red flag for a lot of people is he was very prominently at the Jan 6th riot, yet was never arrested for it. And so a lot of people are like, “Why?”Right? And people will note, “Well, he didn’t participate in X part of the riot, or Y part of the riot,” or he was-Simone Collins: Well, that’s true. I mean, to be arrested you have to be convicted of actually breaking the law. Like- NotMalcolm Collins: true ...Simone Collins: assaulting someoneMalcolm Collins: Many Jan 6th terrorists were as tangentially connected as he wasSimone Collins: So they weren’t, like, actively vandalizing something and they still- Yeahgot arrested.Malcolm Collins: Yeah.Simone Collins: I gotta look into thatMalcolm Collins: becauseSpeaker 16: So for context here, , we had [00:36:00] Nick Fuentes, who was at the Rally to Save America, performatively speaking there through a bullhorn, yelling things like, “Keep moving towards the Capitol. It appears we are taking the Capitol back,” , and, “Break down the barriers and disregard the police.” , And celebrating with rioters over lines like, “We have taken back the Capitol Building.”, And if you look at other individuals who have been charged, they did demonstrably less than this. , Individuals like Ray Epps, who was given a year of probation for encouraging the crowd, , which is... A- and he never, , you know, went into the buildings or anything like that. , Coy Griffin also, , never went into the buildings., And so it’s almost sort of ghoulish how Nick led his followers. Like, how did he know not to go into the buildings? How did he know to tell everyone else to go into the buildings, but he didn’t go into the buildings himself? , It wasn’t obvious to a lot of people that that was against the rules, so why didn’t he do it?Was he setting people up? Was he part of the setup? [00:37:00] Because it looks a lot , like, as an outsider, why did some people who encouraged the crowd get in trouble, and why did he not get in trouble? How did he know the imaginary lines not to cross when he was telling other people in no uncertain terms to cross those lines?Like, does that not seem curious to anyone? H- I, and, and it’s so ghoulish that he led his followers into this, and we know that this was in part, now because of leaks, , a setup, right? Like, we know that there were, , CIA agents among the crowd, , and that in part this was done to try to paint the right in a bad light., Has that not been Nick’s career since then? Like, you just need to paste a few things together to see what’s really going on hereMalcolm Collins: I know- Yeah, no. People were, who were doing the same type of things that he is well doc- Given how fastidiously they searched out and went after everyone affiliated with that, why not him? And this brings me to, I guess, the larger point here, which is what [00:38:00] are the chances that he’s actually a plant?My odds are very low, I think around 3%. Because I also understand in t- I, I just think that he’s being botted by people. I think he’s being protectedSimone Collins: by people. Yeah, there’s, there’s a difference between being artificially monetized or propped up but not knowing it, and being actively, like, supported and be- knowing about it.Yeah. Just like Mormon influencers, you pointed out, and other people have, like Alyssa Grenfell, that Mormon influencers-Malcolm Collins: Don’t get... ContinueSimone Collins: Morm- Mormon influencers are making more money and posting more content because they’re able to make so much money from their content because the LDS church pays more money for ads on LDS content.Malcolm Collins: Yeah, we have a whole episode on that, which is why, why do Mormons want to be called LES where we go into the math on that- No, why do MormonsSimone Collins: call themselves Mormons is the-Malcolm Collins: Yeah, why, why do Mormons call themselves Mormons. Very detailed, we go into the math on that. By the way, people are wondering why people are saying he’s botted now.So on X, [00:39:00] his tweets, they have, like, a farm of, of reposters around them. And when it, and they’re so aggressive that they often beat Elon’s tweets in terms of the amount of reposts- Nick Fuentes’ tweets? Sorry, no. Yes, Nick Fuentes’ tweets in terms of immediate reposts beat Elon tweets despite his much smaller following.That’s weird ... and well, it’s weird but you could’ve thought it was organic until X did that thing where they showed the country of origin of all those accounts, and they were all, like, Nigeria and Pakistan and India and so immediately everyone’s like, “Oh, so this is...” And I don’t think he’s fully aware of, of why forces are, are doing this.Simone Collins: Well, he needs no reason to look into it. Why would you? You know.Malcolm Collins: Well, I think that he is audience captured by-Simone Collins: Mm ...Malcolm Collins: a fake audience. Like, we see it in our posts as well, where if you look at the places where people post fake things we will see, like, really aggressive, for example, [00:40:00] anti-Israel posting.Like, on our YouTube or in, like, random ats at X. If we look at places where, like, I know there’s a real persistent audience, like Discord, we don’t see any of that. It, it, it’s also true, like, if I’m doing a stream, because I, I do streaming, and this is something I’ve really noticed you can judge authentic engagement.Because bots do not appear to engage with, like, mid-tier streams a lot. And now that I’ve done Leaflet’s stream a number of times, I’m able to sort of gauge when, like, Israel comes up or the war in Iran comes up or even Nick Fuentes comes up how many people, like, start shilling him versus how many people attack him.And, and so far, like when Nick Fuentes has come up on the Leaflet stream, I haven’t seen a single comment defending him or confused as to why we would bring this up. Whereas on our YouTube comments where you do- Oh my God,Simone Collins: yeah ... mainly bots. Check, we’ll see what the comments are of this video today.Malcolm Collins: Yeah. And so- Oh,Simone Collins: Nick Fuentes is this and that. What are they gonna say? [00:41:00] Call it. What do you think they’re gonna say?Malcolm Collins: Well, they’re gonna say it’s a joke, or th- this is in line with his previous accelerationist agenda. But he, he’s not framing this in accelerationist terms anymore. Don’t do that.Simone Collins: What was, what was that?Malcolm Collins: Jelly beans. She’s just going around destroying stuff now. Oh, God.Don’t do that.She looks really sad right now. Like-Yeah, don’t do it. You can cry if you want to, but don’t do it.You are too sweet to these kids.Simone Collins: Give herMalcolm Collins: a hug. Okay, I’ll give her a hug. You can come here and get a hug, but stop it, okay? Come here, I’ll give you a hug. I’ll even give you a kiss.[00:42:00]Come here. Come here.Okay. Are you gonna tell the fans that you’re not gonna do that again and you’re not gonna make a lot of noises? Do you want a kiss? Do you want a kiss, sweetheart?Simone Collins: DoMalcolm Collins: you feel better now?Simone Collins: Yeah, you’re okay, Andy.Yeah, holdMalcolm Collins: on. Let’s, let’s try to model what they’re gonna say about this. They’re gonna say it’s a joke, and they’re gonna say the evidence of the joke is he says he’s an Afro-Latino in it. Like, that’s the one part of it that could be a signal of a joke.Simone Collins: Yeah.Malcolm Collins: The problem with that one statement in it is everything else in it is in line with everything he’s ever said, A.B, he is partially Latino as far as I know. Or at least I’ve heard that as an accusation of him from outsiders.Simone Collins: Well, his last name is Fuentes.Malcolm Collins: Yeah, so I... he’s at least Southern [00:43:00] European, which is the same ethnic group as, as, as Latino. So like it makes sense that he’s getting this accusation or that he would make that claim.He’s like, “Well, now that I’m joining the left, I can use my Latino heritage,” right? Like, I can use a Latino identity.Simone Collins: Oh, I like that. That’s fun.Malcolm Collins: But yeah, I actually... If I’m gonna be more clear, I think the Afro-Latino thing was a joke sprinkled in with a bunch of stuff that wasn’t a joke. Because he will often, even when he’s saying w- w- when he used to say right-wing things, he would sprinkle in jokes here and there, right?Like, that’s his style of communication. But everything else, like what the Trump administration destroyed and dismantled that’s in line with the stuff he’s been saying on his show when he’s pretending to be right-wing, right? Like, this is just his value set, right?Simone Collins: Yeah.Malcolm Collins: So I think that, that... I mean, that’s the harder thing.Like, if you have actually, and I think that this is the thing, if you have actually been watching Nick Fuentes for a while and are open to changing your mind on [00:44:00] him when you see this recent like I’m a moderate Democrat rant, you can really consider it in the context of everything else he’s saying in the rant and just ask, does this sound like a joke or does it align with the other stuff that he’s been complaining about recently?And to me if you, if you take his agenda to be see the Jews suffer, see the Trump administration suffer, see the GOP suffer above all other things, above saving unborn lives, above the immigration crisis, above saving Western civilization he actually disaligns with the modern left on very few issues, right?Like, every one of those key points that he has is just a leftist issue.Simone Collins: Aside from immigration, I think that’s the really key thing.Malcolm Collins: Well, hold on. He- Has never really thrown down the gauntlet on immigration. He has been anti-ICE before. What I mean is he’s never said, “I’m turning away from the Republicans ‘cause they’re not strict enough on immigration.”He has [00:45:00] complained about ICE being too ruthless in the past. He is not as anti-immigration as people make him out to be. He will take anti-immigration stances, but when push comes to sh- shove and we need to, like, round the wheels on stuff like people complaining about ICE, he will-Simone Collins: Circle the wagonsMalcolm Collins: circle the wagons. He’ll completely back away and retreat. And I think that this is indicative of the fact that he was performatively anti... Because, like, if you’re anti- if you’re actually, like, anti- if you’re like, “I wanna preserve the white race I wanna preserve white people as an ethnic group,” you would have kids, right?Like, it- it’s- it’s a trivially, well, not trivially easy thing to do, but it- for someone like him, he could do it. He just needs to make a few compromises, right? Which apparently given he says that this is existential for him, so we know he’s not telling the truth about that.Speaker 20: This is called rhetoric versus revealed preference for people who are not aware of it. , And it’s an, it’s something you should really look at in terms of [00:46:00] the figures you are looking at for sort of ideological framing, ideological advice, because they will show you whether they really believe what they’re telling you through their own actions in life.And I think through our actions in life, people can see that we are 100% serious and believe what we’re saying. , Whereas I think the revealed preference is Nick is he does not believe what he’s saying or he would make compromises around finding a wifeMalcolm Collins: In addition to that the fact that he is so willing to go with the Democrats during a time period where they could use immigration to shift voting blocks in a way that we will never be able to recover from I think also shows he’s interested in being performatively anti-immigration.But the performative anti-immigration stuff, I think is more in- in- in- in line with achieving his wider agenda. Like, if you look at him recently, like, on his show, if you look at the immigrant groups that are actually causing problems in America, right? Like- like, at a [00:47:00] major level, right? You’ve got Somalians .Muslims, and to a lesser extent, Hispanics.I- I sent you the welfare statistics on Hispanic immigrants up to the third generation, right? Oh, I forgot. Told you to take a look at. Yeah.Simone Collins: No, that’s been trending. Yeah.Malcolm Collins: Yeah. So I- I’m- I’m actually walking back my position on Hispanic immigrants a bit. I’m like, “Eh, they’re a bigger problem than I thought.”.Simone Collins: Look, again, like, immigration is not a problem if you shift the way that you offer social services.Malcolm Collins: I agree, but, you know, we haven’t yet, so we need to deal with immigration. So if we look at- Mm ... the groups that are actually, like, damaging ethnic groups to the country at, like, an existential level, and you contrast the amount he complains about those groups with the amount he complains about Indians and Jews, it’s, like, not even comparable.And I think that, like, do Jews, like, run scams? Yes. You can see our episodes where, like, we complain about the O- Orthodox Jewish scams, the rounding the wagon on that. It’s our episode called Speed Running a [00:48:00] Pogrom. Obviously very spicy, right? But Jews are still net tax contributors to the United States.Indians. Do Indians disproportionately take jobs? Yes, they absolutely do. I find that incredibly infuriating. Do Indians also start successful tech companies and are they net tax contributors? Yes, they’re obviously net tax contributors. So when I’m dealing with groups like that, while I may have animosity, it’s like...And I may say there’s things that we need to do, there’s conversations that need to be had. If you’re mentioning those groups at, like, 10x the rate of groups that are, like, actively on a daily basis causing harm that’s a, that’s an issue for me. Right? And note here about other people who we have said have gone crazy recent- like, we had the episode where we’re like, “Tucker...”Because I, I talk about my Mossad poisoning conspiracy, that they poison people who do start to go lefty and they start going crazy.They start to go anti-Israel or start to question Israel. And you know, we have Nick Fuentes, Tucker Carlson, and, and Candace Owens here. And some people when I said [00:49:00] that were like, “Oh, come on Malcolm, Tucker Carlson is really on point.He’s super based.” And I’m like, “Bro.” Like I wonder, do these people, like, step back and be like, “Maybe Malcolm is seeing things that I’m not or predicting things that I’m not,” when it turns out that now Tucker Carlson says Tuc- like Trump is casting spells on his cabinet members? I, I don’t know if you guys have seen this interview.It’s effing, like-Simone Collins: Everyone has seen this interview.Malcolm Collins: He’s actually lost his mind. This isn’t normal stuff.Simone Collins: Well, and that he’s, like, outright denying that he ever implied that Trump was the antichrist. There’s multiple- Yeah. Well,Malcolm Collins: I mean a lot of people say people are antichrist this, antichrist that. Like, that’s, that’s less to me than him saying that he was, and, and based on his own subjective experience, under a spell when he was around Trump.Speaker 13: And there is a kind of quality that he has that’s spellbinding, and I think it probably literally [00:50:00] is a spell. Uh, and the effect is to weaken people around him and make them more compliant and more confused. And I- I’ve experienced this myself. You spend a day with Trump, and sort of like you’re in this kind of dreamland.It’s like smoking hash or something. It’s interesting. Very interesting. And there may be a supernatural component to it. I’m not a theologian, but I... It’s real, and anyone who’s been around him can tell you it’s real.Speaker 14: You’ve been talking on your show about whether Trump is the Antichrist.Speaker 13: I have not said that.Speaker 14: On your show, the day after Easter, you noted he did not put his hand on the Bible during his swearing-in- Correctceremony as president. You said, and I’m quoting, “Maybe he didn’t put his hand on the Bible because he affirmatively rejects what’s inside that book.” And then on a recent show, you went further, saying, “Here’s a leader who’s mocking the gods of his ancestors, mocking the God of gods, and exalting himself above them.Could this be the Antichrist?”Speaker 12: I actually did not say, “Could this be the Antichrist?”Speaker 13: Here’s a leader who’s mocking the gods of his ancestors, mocking the God of gods, and exalting himself above them. [00:51:00] Could this be the Antichrist? Well, who knows? Um, I don’t know where that comes from, but I know that those words never left my lips,Malcolm Collins: that’s like wiccans casting spells on Charlie Kirk level stuff, right? Like-Simone Collins: That actually feeds into our our theory with Tucker Carlson. Our theory with him is that he tends to spend time with people and just try to be very agreeable around them, and, like, go with the flow, and he becomes very convinced by them.Yeah. And so it doesn’t matter if he’s with, like, the Qataris or the Russians or with President Trump.Malcolm Collins: Yeah, but he didn’t say this about anyone else. He said it about Trump.Simone Collins: Well, yes, but he could have said it about anyone.Malcolm Collins: But he, but he didn’t. He said it about Trump.Simone Collins: He... I’m ju- I just think it’s kind of a thing he does, though.He’s a very agreeable person.Malcolm Collins: Ju- just to be clear, the, the leader of the GOP faction, right? Like, that’s who he said it about.Simone Collins: I know.Malcolm Collins: I j- I just wanna, like, be clear that we’re on the same page with this,Simone Collins: right? Like- Well, he was, he was talking with a fairly [00:52:00] leftist journalist about this, so he was being agreeable to herMalcolm Collins: I, I agree, but he didn’t complain about that.He didn’t say, “A journalist put me under a spell.” He didn’tSimone Collins: say that- No, no, he was un- he was under the spell of the journalist when he said that about Trump. Oh. What I’m trying to say is Tucker Carlson, I mean, so he may, he may feel like he’s under a spell, but that’s because he, by, by personality is a-Malcolm Collins: I love your pathologically charitable framing of people.I mean, to me he just came off like a crazy person. I, I, I, I like... When I say a crazy person, I mean if an employee said this, I would fire them the next day. Not because it was offensive, but because it shows that they are mentally unstable and potentially dangerous to other people in the office.Simone Collins: Well, there’s, yeah, I mean, we’ve, we’ve discussed it would p- it would anger too many of the people in our audience, ‘cause they seem to be...There are a lot of Tucker and Candace Stans in [00:53:00] our audience. But both of them seem to have, like, really recently gone off the rails in terms of their mysticism going too far.Malcolm Collins: And eventually like- I, yeah, I, I sometimes wonder with, like, Tucker and Nick Stans, like, when is it too far? Like, when do they need to just be like, take off the mask and be like, “I’m a wolf.I’ve been a wolf all along.” Like, can you see the whiskers? Can you see? And people are like, “That was a joke. That was a prank, bro. That was a prank.” But I think that this is incredibly healthy for the long-term right. So in the other video where I was discussing this, I was like, what does this mean for the future of the right-wing party if the deontological faction or at least the extremist parts of it, end up circling the w- the, the, the, the sort of drain and, and move into the Democratic coalition along with the Islamists, right?And the answer is just a way healthier Republican Party going forwards. If you look at the people who are [00:54:00] still around I think what we’re increasingly seeing is as... There’s a part of the deontological faction that’s just going Nick Fuentes direction, right? Okay. There’s a part of the deontological faction that keeps getting caught cheating on their spouses or beating their spouse or yelling at staffers or like, I don’t know what’s up with these people and anger issues, right?But, you know, whatever. And then there’s the, like, nerd faction. And as Leaflet said, it’s the nerd faction that’s really been having the right’s back. Like, they don’t make drama about things. They generally go along with what the administration is doing. They don’t really have internal drama very much or at all that I’m aware of.I’m aware of no meaningful internal drama in the nerd faction. They just get out, and they just get out there and do stuff, right? Like, And, and I’m excited that this faction is in, i- it continuing to grow. And the final point I’d make, and I made this one a lot stronger in the episode where I talked about the future of the right.But if [00:55:00] you go to CPAC or something like that, like you go to these institutions where, like, the cronies that used to control the White House before they were all founder fund members in this administration they, because we’ve gone to these events in the past this is where Nick Fuentes’ fan base hangs out.Like, the, the people who have taken over right-wing institutions and have something of a Romanist agenda, right? These individuals, I remember I got in a fight with him, and this was... And I can say it, like I d- I don’t care. Like, the Claremont Group pretends to be, like, a mainstream right-wing organization, even within the MAGA faction.And I was talking to some members at it, and they were clearly of, like, this, this orientation. Like, they were not aligned with us. They were aligned with the, the deontological faction, right? And they were talking about all these fantasies of laws they wanted to enact. And I was like, “Bro, like, that’s not aligned with MAGA’s values or what the base wants.”And what they [00:56:00] said was, “F the base.” Like, very aggressively. Like, they were like, “F the base. Like, why would we care what the base wants? Like, we decide where the Republican Party goes. The base’ll vote for us whatever,” right? And I realize that if you look at the first Trump administration, and a lot of Republicans up until recently they’ve been heavily controlled by this faction.And I think that going forwards to our fans who get in administrations and stuff like that, do not hire from the think tanks. The think tanks are lousy with these people, and they are very dangerous to our goals because they do not have aligned goals. And at CPAC, there were a number of these people who were interviewed, and they said stuff like, “MAGA is over.”And what they really meant by that is, “Our ability to control MAGA is over. We have lost our ability to call the shots,And that’s why MAGA had value to people like Nick Fuentes, to people like the think tank deep state on the right, is because they [00:57:00] thought they could manipulate it to achieve their ends, , rather than the ends that the base actually wanted. Again, look at things like the support among MAGA for the Iran war right now., The base is not with these people. It’s a 90/10 issue among MAGA. , But they, to them it’s over because they thought it was a tool they could use, and they’re like, “Well, this tool is boring to me now because, it completely sees through my BSMalcolm Collins: and now MAGA is acting on its own, and I am furious about that because I cannot control it anymore for my personal agenda.” And I think that that’s where Nick has finally gone, is he’s like, “I cannot control this, therefore I don’t wanna be a part of it.”Simone Collins: Well, so what are your predictions for Nick’s next move?Malcolm Collins: Well, next move is, I think that he’s gonna go back to pretending to be Republican. He’s gonna go back to pretending this was a joke after the midterms. Perhaps even before the midterms if the pushback is, is, is loud enough from this. And he’s still gonna tell people, “Never vote for Republicans no matter what,” for at [00:58:00] least, like, the next eight years of elections or who knows, 15 years of elections, right?He’s already signaling this, right? So, like, he’s not a useful part of the coalition. So you reallySimone Collins: don’t think there’s a world in which he, like, leans into the Democrat thing, the moderate DemocratMalcolm Collins: thing? He might if he gets on some podcasts, if he gets some interviews out of it, I can totally see that.Simone Collins: Because I think he can only go so much farther on the current wave he’s riding. I think that his switching to the Democrat party could get him a ton of additional media coverage and followers. Yeah.Malcolm Collins: I mean, he doesn’t appeal very well to, like, the new right audience.Simone Collins: Yeah, so from a strategic standpoint, that’s what I’m saying, is I feel like it’s a savvy move.Yeah. I don’t know why he wouldn’t lean into it more.Malcolm Collins: What I mean by that is while the new, like, new right audience would appreciate his vitalism, part of the thematic problem he has reaching them is if you look at the figures that he’d get really big on the new [00:59:00] right figures like, you know, Asmongold, Leaflet, et cetera, they’re, they’re typically sort of pathologically kind and, and, and pathologically compassionate.Like Asmongold, like, literally catching the cockroach and letting it free outside, right? Like, He’sSimone Collins: also put them in a box school, so.Malcolm Collins: Right. No, but I mean, their, their true core is pathologically kind. You know, Hasan is, “Stop killing people in Gaza while I shock my dog,” right? Like-Simone Collins: That’s true.Yeah. Yeah, yeah.Malcolm Collins: You know, if you, if you look at, Or, or Leaflet, where, like, she’s basically the god of her fantasy world that hundreds of people will play every day, and she refuses to move above level one, or being the guild receptionist in it. Even her avatar, for people who don’t know, she didn’t even create it.It’s the child of two people from one D&D session she ran. Right. That is pathologically trying not to center yourself. Now do, how do we fall into this? I don’t know. I mean, I’m, I’m narcissistic [01:00:00] as heck, but I think I at least come across as authentic. So I do okay there. You’reSimone Collins: the... If you’re narcissistic, though, like one thing that you’re really weird about is you feel incredibly concerned about never doing wrong by anyone who put their faith in you.That’s not really what a narcissist does.Malcolm Collins: Yeah.Yeah, like if I had taken Nick’s position and gone to the Jan six riots and told people, “Go through-- like enter the building, keep moving,” and I hadn’t done it myself, and my followers were punished for believing in me, and th- no one ever came after me, my God, I, I don’t think I’d be able to live with myself.Like the existential horror of not leading by example around something like that is, uh, just so antithetical to anything I could ever imagine doing. I-- like literally, if I had somehow, even by accident, not been able to go in, yet I had told people [01:01:00] to and they suffered lifelong consequences for it, , that would be the top of my mind every day going forwards,.Malcolm Collins: SoSimone Collins: I don’t know. I mean, I guessMalcolm Collins: for me, like- You’re a famewhore ... what’s been kind of important with this podcast, when people are like, “Oh,Simone Collins: you’re-” You’re a famewhore, but you’re not a narcissist.Malcolm Collins: Yeah. “... Basecamp had this really out there take on this or that, or X or Y or Z.”I mean, I try to do that occasionally just to make sure that we’re not having just mainstream takes because there’s, there’s no better way to know that somebody is lying to you than if they only have normie takes for, for your position, right? Like, if everyone’s saying the same thing about X or Y or Z, then you know, they’re probably...Th- this is what we saw with the girl who was cheating on her husband who’d, like, poked with the Sheik wedding and everything like that. Every one of her conservative takes was just the most normie conservative opinion p- possible because she didn’t actually hold these positions, you know? She was just saying what she thought she needed to say to appeal to an audience.Simone Collins: There’s... Yeah. Anyway, I I- my [01:02:00] prediction is at least if he knows what’s good for him commercially, that he will lean into the Democrat thing, go on a Democrat press tour, pick up a bunch of what’s the word? Rebellious youth on the Democrat side, and then sort of circle around to, like, we need to create a new party or something like that.Yeah. But that’s what I would do.Malcolm Collins: Yeah, I can see that. I mean, I hope he does. If he creates a new party, that’d be fun.Simone Collins: ItMalcolm Collins: wouldSimone Collins: be fun ...Malcolm Collins: mostly because I- he’s not useful in the conservative faction. He doesn’t get people to vote for right-leaning candidates. He always goes against them at the last minute.So, like, and like we’ve been able to win elections without him, so I just... I don’t think that he’s helpful. I think he turns more people against us than he brings in for us, and if the left loses their ability to paint the entire right with stuff that Nick Fuentes did which they constantly do, right?So it ends up hurting all of us in our, in our wider agenda. That’s, that’s useful as well, right?Simone Collins: Yeah.Malcolm Collins: So let’s hope. [01:03:00] I love you, Simone. This was a wild thing that this happened and I love that it happened. I love that we’re in this timeline. And yeah. Yes. I’m, I’m, yeah, I’m very interested to see what the stans say in the comments.Simone Collins: Yeah. Let’s see what the either stansMalcolm Collins: or- And, and note here, if you’re, like, a stan and you’re like, “Well, you know, I do agree with him that the most important thing that America needs to do is screw over Israel,” then a- and don’t get us wrong, like, we’re against continuing payments to Israel, everything like that.But- Yeah ... if you’re into, like, “No, we need to actively screw them over. If something helps us but also helps Israel, we need to not do it,” the Democrats are that party right now. Like, if that’s your main issue, the Democrats are not conflicted about this point.Simone Collins: Yeah.Malcolm Collins: So just be a Democrat. Like, I, I don’t under- there isn’t really a normalSimone Collins: right- This could be a very interesting political shift.Maybe this is how both the Democrat and Republican Party get their group. They have this, like, major exchange of prisoners essentially.Malcolm Collins: Yeah. [01:04:00]Simone Collins: It could be, I don’t know, it could be the great reset. I’m excited. Anyway, sorry to everyone for my channeling RFK today. And I should be back to normal soon.It’s ‘Malcolm Collins: cause you ate too many gleamons or something.Simone Collins: Yeah.Malcolm Collins: I’d say.Simone Collins: One, one too manyMalcolm Collins: vaccinations. Oh, Indy, do you wanna say goodbye to the fans?Simone Collins: Yeah, Indy.Malcolm Collins: Oh, this is how I lose things, right, Indy? Come.Simone Collins: AllMalcolm Collins: right. So what do we say? We say bye like this. We go, bye bye bye, doing bye bye dance. Doing bye bye song.Singing bye bye hands. I say goodbye, then I dance goodbye. Dancing and dancing in the house. In the sky.Simone Collins: Dancing in thesky. Yeah.Igot a rhyme.Malcolm Collins: You want me to do it again?Simone Collins: Yeah.Malcolm Collins: Bye bye. Say goodbye. And I say goodbye every [01:05:00] single day. And say goodbye every single way. ByeSimone Collins: bye bye.Malcolm Collins: Oh, and like and subscribe, guys, and try out RFAB if you wanna do, like, AI chatbot exploration, vibe putting, or image-making, or video-making, or soon V2 model making. I’ll let you guys know when I’m done with that. That’s been harder than I expected.Simone Collins: Mm-hmm.Lo mein tonight, right?Malcolm Collins: If you can make it, yeah.Simone Collins: Okay. Beef loMalcolm Collins: mein. Beef lo mein.Simone Collins: All right. I love you, Malcolm.Malcolm Collins: Love you too. You know how to say goodbye. Bye-bye. CanSimone Collins: you sayMalcolm Collins: bye-bye?Speaker 18: What is going on in here? We are jumping on my teddy bear. We are gonna jump on my teddy bear. Where’s Indy? Oh, Indy’s right there. We are gonna jump on my teddy bear [01:06:00] and see how he flies. Push these pillow signs when you’re safe. Okay? Are you up there, Titan?Speaker 19: Where’s Titan? Titan? Can you get this for me? Do you want me to put that in your bed? No. No, I want to play with it. Down here, right? This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit basedcamppodcast.substack.com/subscribe

In this Based Camp episode, Malcolm and Simone Collins explore the controversial idea of bringing back the concept of the “concubine” (or courtesan) in modern relationships. They contrast two distinct relationship models: the true wife/housewife — a full business and life partner who advances the family’s interests — versus the courtesan/tradwife/trophy wife model, where the woman’s primary role is pleasure, aesthetics, and appearance rather than deep partnership.Drawing on history, labor statistics, and cultural critique, they discuss how women historically contributed far more to subsistence and family businesses than modern narratives suggest. They examine why many people today unconsciously seek unpaid courtesans, the problems with “ornamental” relationships, and how clear terminology can lead to better-aligned marriages. Topics include trophy wives as a profession, Real Housewives culture, objective-function alignment in relationships, and practical advice for high-achieving men and women.Episode TranscriptMalcolm Collins: [00:00:00] what I like about the term courtesan is it helps separate between a true housewife and the more modern tradwife, which I think is closer to a - courtesan.If you look at the tradwife, right, the tradwife makes everything look pretty, right? She, , does up the house. , She does the baking from scratch and everything. And she’s doing all that for appearance. She’s doing all that to, to sell, , that he has a certain type of wife.But, like, she’s not actually managing the family budget, right? Like, she’s not actually managing the deeper parts of the family. And many people who society at large would confuse, they would say, “Well, this woman stays at home and educates the kids , as part of her duties, therefore she’s the same type of thing as this trad woman.”Speaker: Specifically, we will be delineating two categories of relationships. One, the courtesan relationship, where the woman believes that their core job vis-a-vis their partner is just their [00:01:00] partner’s pleasure and reproducing. Whereas the other, the true wife or housewife, sees their job as being fully integrated with their husband’s life and advancing the interests of their family.Would you like to know more?Malcolm Collins: hello, Simone. I’m excited to be here with you today. Today we are going to be expanding on a concept that a fan came up with in response to a previous video, and it is that we should bring back the concept of concubine. And when I first heard this I was like, well, we don’t wanna normalize sort of, you know, promiscuous behavior in this regards.There’s a lot of negative social externalities for doing it. But after they laid it out for me, I’m like, actually we, we need to start having a conversation about this. We need to normalize this concept. This is a good concept So let me explain. We had a video where we basically go over the history of male [00:02:00] and female labor.And what we pointed out using a lot of statistics, a lot of historical examples, is the modern idea that throughout history men mostly did all the labor and women mostly stayed at home and did education and child-rearing, is just completely historically anachronistic. Women actually did the majority and I, and I mean the majority of b- like grueling labor, like, repetitiveSimone Collins: tasks.But y- y- subsistence, subsistence labor. So sort of your baseline food and, and everything else was more or lessMalcolm Collins: handled by the- Yeah, yeah. If, if you’re talking about, like, the majority of, of, of human history was during the hunter-gatherer period, that’s 95% of human history women were doing 60 to 70% of the calories in those societies.And then you transition to an agricultural society, and in most agricultural societies women do the farming until the plow was invented. And then somebody else was like, “And this is men.” Men plow for, like, 200 years and go, “F it, I’m [00:03:00] making a tractor.” Women do hoe-based farming for literally thousands of years, and continue to do it exactly the way they’ve always done it.By the way, hoe-based farming, the fact that Simone loved from that episode that she just cannot get enough of, is we pointed out that the idea of women staying at home and not really doing much except for child-rearing and education came from the, the, like, sort of middle class wealthy whites in America during a, a short window of, like, the 1910s to the 1970s.And it was like, well, what about poorer people during that period? And this is where the word hoe comes from, is it was because specifically Black women, but though I suspect that this is like, you know, it- nowadays they try to racialize a lot of things that weren’t racialized. It probably just meant poorer women in general were hoes because they worked the farm.And that’s what made them hoes. So it didn’t mean a, a promiscuous woman. It meant a poor, uneducated woman. But we, we start talking about all this. And by the way, if you’re wondering, like, what were the types of work that men did historically, they typically did [00:04:00] things tied to war or things tied to artisanship.So if you needed a cobbler or a woodcutter or a builder or an architect or a sailor, like, if it required a huge amount of skill outside of textiles, it was typically men doing it. And, and don’t underestimate how much work textiles were. Or how much work- Yeah ... other things that people dismiss, like weeding.Weeding your garden is one thing. Weeding a field that’s feeding a family is significantly more work than plowing it for anyone who’s ever weeded. Weeding is, is difficult, backbreaking, and recurring labor. But which was typically a woman’s job, by the way. But when in the sort of fallout from this episode, people were going through it and they said, “You know what?”Because we were talking about the way that women historically actually structured their relationship with men, right? Like, if the man was doing some sort of artisanal job like say a butcher or a cobbler or a blacksmith the wife would typically manage the book, manage the finances, manage the [00:05:00] storefront, manage the marketing, manage the y- the, the sourcing of goods.And we put this out there, and we put it out with the concept of, like, a sword-and-shield relationship in a modern context, which is, like, the wife is in charge of the more stable part of the income and the man is in charge of, like, entrepreneurship, like big fish, like moving the family forwards. And a lot of people who are actually, and I think what we would consider more trad relationships, still really related to this concept.They were like, “Well,” like while I or ... Because we have a lot of housewife listeners. So, “While I or my wife,” this was actually more rare “take on what society would call a housewife job, that is not actually what I’m doing. I actually manage our investments, I manage our finances, I manage our taxes, I manage you know, the, the sort of procuring and stocking the, the, the home with supplies, getting things fixed.I manage like a huge variety of stuff.” And we then began to talk about [00:06:00] how there’s a new type of woman that has come to exist that isn’t this type of woman. So this type of woman is engaging in what the married wife has always done, right? Which is to say, they join ... And, like, historically, if you went to a blacksmith historically, right?And you sat him and his wife down, and you’re like, “Look, lady, I know you manage the storefront and the money and the taxes and all that, but you shouldn’t,” right? Like, “Your husband should manage all that.” And what she would of course say is, “But then he’s gonna have less time to make stuff.”Simone Collins: Yeah.Malcolm Collins: And, and you’re like, “Well, yeah, but like, you know, he’s a man, you’re a woman.”And she’d look at you and be like, “But, like, that money doesn’t just go to him. It goes to the entire family. You’re telling me to be arbitrarily poorer so that I can, what? Sit at home and twiddle my, my thumb all day?” Like, “What, what’s the advantage to me [00:07:00] to stepping back from this when our fortunes,” as used to historically be the case in relationships, “are completely tethered together?As he does better, I do better. As he does worse, I do worse. Why would I not help him in the ways that I can help him?” And people said, “There’s this new type of woman who doesn’t think that way.” And this is where the concept of concubine makes sense-Simone Collins: Mm ...Malcolm Collins: in bringing back, is that be they married or not, there is a certain type of woman who does not believe that she should be adding anything substantial to the relationship in terms of intellectual labor or labor more broadly, right?Like-Simone Collins: She’s purely ornamental.Malcolm Collins: She is purely ornamental. And she may still have his kids, as concubines did historically, but she doesn’t, she- she’s not a part of, like, a team where both people are pushing things [00:08:00] forwards. And the moment I heard this, I was like, “That’s a really good effing point.” Because if we can re-normalize the concept of a concubine, we can re-normalize the fear of being seen as a concubine.Now, thought, Simone, before I- I- I yap further, as they say on Twitch now that I know, ‘cause I- I- I do the Twitch. They say, “Yapping.”Simone Collins: Are we old?Malcolm Collins: By the way, did you know what a raid is on Twitch? I didn’t know what a raid was.Simone Collins: Is it when a bunch of people from someone else’s stream go onto yours?Malcolm Collins: Yeah, that’s what I thought it was.It’s not.Simone Collins: What is it?Malcolm Collins: So, what happens is when you sign off Twitch, because you’ll likely have a bunch of people still watching you, like at the end of Lee’s late stream it’s still, like, well over a thousand you can set it to automatically send all those people to another streamer.Simone Collins: Oh.Malcolm Collins: And that’s called a raid.Simone Collins: Oh, that’s cool. And you do this as a social thing. That’s why people say, “Thanks for the raid,” so and so. Nice. Okay. Yeah. I- I like the [00:09:00] idea... One reason why I like the idea of the courtesan is I think that it at least helps to create it- it helps to highlight what a normal wife actually is and that this thing that people are optimizing for now as a default, which is the courtesan.Most people now, when they’re looking for a partner, seem to be describing an un- m- a courtesan, but an unpaid courtesan, and I think that’s also really important. Mm. They want a companion that is attractive, that will make them happy that is, that is going to, like, entertain them. But for whatever reason, they also expect that, that they’re not gonna have to, like- Pay for or support this person, like sugar daddy style.And that just is inherently unsustainable.Malcolm Collins: I mean, I think a lot of them do plan to p- well, I, I actually like these two versions. So let, let, let’s break this out, ‘cause I think you’re, you’re creating an interesting distinction here, [00:10:00] which makes it even worse, right? Where a woman or may say, “I’m not a courtesan.I go to work and I earn my own money,” right? Mm-hmm. And it’s like, actually you’re worse than a courtesan in that part. Like I, I don’t know what word we should make for this type of woman, but I’ll describe what I’m talking about.Simone Collins: But women do it to men, too. They want the man to be attractive and to entertain them and make them happy and pleasure them.Malcolm Collins: Most-Simone Collins: But they also don’t expect to likeMalcolm Collins: invest anything in them ... most women expect men to pay into a family coffer.Simone Collins: Mm.Malcolm Collins: There are many women who do the exact opposite, and this is what I’m talking about here, the lower than a courtesan woman. Mm. This is a woman who gets married to a guy and she sees her role as entertaining him, having sex with him you know, and entertaining can mean like playing video games with him or something.You know, wh- whatever it means to, watching movies with him at night, you know, whatever, right? Like courtesan stuff. Because this is the modern version of courtesan stuff. But sh- worse, worse than all of that, she still has a [00:11:00] job, but she takes the income she makes from that job and she treats it as entirely her own.Right? Like it’s money just for her. This woman is less, and, and y- I’m sure everyone has seen women online who are like this. The guy makes money and it’s for everyone in the family. The girl makes money, it’s just for her fun stuff,Simone Collins: right? Is that really common? I don’t, I don’t-Malcolm Collins: Very common. Very common.Yeah.Simone Collins: I mean, I watch a lot of, like, couples finance shows, and that’s not what I see. I, I, I don’t think that’s, that is what you think it is.Malcolm Collins: Okay. Well, if, if anyone is doing this, they are less than a courtesan. They’re literally an unpaid courtesan. He’s not even keeping you, right? Like you’re out there being a hoe to capitalism and being a hoe for your husband.Well,Simone Collins: I understand that, but that’s, I don’t, I think that’s a straw man. I think what’s really common is, one, I mean, we, we did-Malcolm Collins: Audience, audience, in the comments, do you know people who have done this?Simone Collins: Yeah.Malcolm Collins: Continue, Simone.Simone Collins: Recently there was a term for, [00:12:00] like courtesan that was more modern, and it was trophy wife, and people did treat this as a profession.We know people, Yeah ... who absolutely, like as, and like by treat this as a profession, I mean treat it as a profession, I mean like watched- corn to learn how to perform as people might desire. Starved self to fit it right size. You know, invested in the right clothing. And then, you know, once actually paired, and we’ll say employed as a trophy wife working extremely hard to make dinners special, to make holidays special, to to provide all the, you know, pleasure and enjoyment.Famously when Marie Antoinette was first introduced to the French court and to King Louis the, the XV he, she, she made an inquiry about the, the king’s courtesan at the time. I think it was Madame Bovary. I’m really, I, I’m so bad with names. But the- Sorry ... her in-Malcolm Collins: Wait, hold on. Hold [00:13:00] on.Hold on. Simone’s like, “I’m bad with names,” that she cannot remember one of the king’s courtesans during a particular period of the French court. This shows you the level of history nerd that Simone is.Simone Collins: I know. So I’m like, all right. I, I, I can name most of them- I cannot name the courtesan’s names ... from, for, for Louis XIV because the love the, the book on the love life of King Louis XIV is amazing.And there’s Athenais, there’s Madame de Maintenon, there’s all these amazing women. But I, I don’t, I, I think it’s Madame de Bovary. Anyway so Marie Antoinette, this, this young teen bride of King Louis, well, future King Louis XVI asks, you know, “Who, who is this woman?” And her, essentially her advisor you know, a- another noble woman in the court is like, “Ah that is, you know, so and so.Her job is to give pleasure to the king.” And her being this, like, really innocent, kind of like sheltered, you know, Austrian woman would be like, “Well then, you know, we are rivals because I want to give pleasure to the king.” And she’s like, “Oh, you don’t understand, girl.” Like, not, no. But like it was very well understood that their [00:14:00] profession was to give pleasure to this person.And I think that people who took the trophy wife career seriously, and we know people who did, understand that their job is to give pleasure to their partner and also to raise their social status. Because it was understood that as a trophy wife, they have to make them look good in a certain way.And so they, they dress their husbands carefully. They manage their husband’s style. They manage the husband’s household. They make their houses look good. They host events. And that was taken very seriously, and I think that that role r- really degraded, and you can see it very well in the Real Housewives series, where suddenly this idea of the trophy wife was transitioned to, no, she is the main character.She is not an ornamental courtesan whose job is to give pleasure to her husband and raise you know, make him look good. And make him happy. Her job is to just like, “I’m gonna do what I want, and I have my businesses, and I’m gonna, you know, sell dog shoes for charity,” or something like that.Malcolm Collins: Yeah.Simone Collins: And and they’re incredibly dysfunctional, et cetera, et [00:15:00] cetera.Speaker 7: I started this charity because I saw so many dogs having to walk the hot streets of Orlando without any protection on their feet. But it’s also personal. This one time I lost my high heels on the beach. And I was looking around for them, like over a half an hour.Ugh. It was awful. So with your help, each dog will receive their own pair of high heels, and for that you can be very proud.Simone Collins: So that, that role fell apart. And I think as that role fell apart, we, we sort of forgot that this was a profession and a track in marriage, and that there are two tracks. You can be a trophy wife, but you have to be trophy wife for someone who can afford to keep you. And I think what in- also degraded was that a lot of people just assumed that they were going to marry [00:16:00] functionally a courtesan and not a business partner.We forgot that marriage was an arrangement first and foremost to just establish paternity of children and like inform the community to like, “Don’t sleep with my wife ‘cause I need to make sure that like the line of paternity is secure.” But also to establish a business alignment and have a, a husband and wife work together.And, and we, with the Industrial Revolution dropped that. Well, the, likeMalcolm Collins: business alignment, right? Like, when you are the same person... We had a documentarian r- asking us recently, like, “When do you guys fight?” Like, “Tell us about fights.” And I’m like, “We just don’t have fights.” Like, becauseSimone Collins: we don’t- We have tactical disagreements which we resolve by obtaining better evidence.Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Like, why would we, why would we fight when we have the same goals? Any disagreement we have is an academic disagreement.Simone Collins: Mm-hmm. IMalcolm Collins: think- But no,Simone Collins: no, the, the key distinction here is that people need to understand that if you are hiring the equivalent [00:17:00] of a, a, a paid entertainer and performer, it is your responsibility to be able to pay for and keep them.And that person needs to understand that it’s, it is their responsibility to in turn perform and give pleasure and make you look good. And our, our media landscape has, has degraded even that. Especially through the, the Real Housewives series, has just made it been like, oh, no, they, they don’t live to make theirMalcolm Collins: husbands happy.Well, what I find interesting about the point that you’re making here, by the way and it is, it is just absolutely a fascinating point which is that the idea of re-normalizing the concept of the courtesan doesn’t just help trad wife marriages, it also helps courtesan marriages. Yeah. Because it helps remind them of what their actual role is in the marriage when they adopt this.Simone Collins: Yeah.Malcolm Collins: They are both disposable and less than a true wife. Mm-hmm. If they are not [00:18:00] contributing their intellect... And note here, we had one follower reach out in regards to this, and he’s like, “Well- You know, I’m very successful now. I run a company now, so how am I gonna g- find a wife? Like, do I have to leave it all behind and start something new with them, right?Like, how, how do I make this work, right? And there’s multiple ways you can make it work. One is to integrate somebody who shows competence and diligence and work ethic into your existing operation, right? Like, that is something that a lot of people have done historically. But then another is, which is probably better, is, is, is figure out what they value that you value, right?Presumably if you’re making a lot of money with your company, there’s some way you wanna change the world and working with them to start that organization, right? Like, a, a wife, wife who is working for your combined goals can still work philanthropically, right? Like, but, but so long as they’re efficient and effective at it, and they’re not just doing it to boost their own ego and status, right?And you’ll [00:19:00] be able to tell this very quickly. Do they actually care about these things, or are they interested in status boosting?Simone Collins: Mm-hmm.Malcolm Collins: But yeah, that’s a, that’s an interesting point. And so this is what I want from the audience. I want... What is the, what is the lower tier of trophy? Because I, I, I think...And I don’t think the trophy wife is good, because trophy wife as, as a saying is too narrow, right? Like, a lot of people who wanted the life of a courtesan didn’t think of themselves as trophy wives, because they didn’t just want the, the traditional trophy wife guy, right? And and, and note here that what I like about the term courtesan is it helps separate between a true housewife and the more modern tradwife, which I think is closer to a cour- courtesan.If you look at the tradwife, right, the tradwife makes everything look pretty, right? She, like, does up the house. She d- does in her stupid outfit. She- ... you know, she’s a, she, she does the baking from scratch and everything. [00:20:00] And she’s doing all that for appearance. She’s doing all that to, to sell, both to herself and her husband, that he has a certain type of wife.But, like, she’s not actually managing the family budget, right? Like, she’s not actually managing the deeper parts of the family. And many people who society at large would confuse, they would say, “Well, this woman stays at home and educates the kids as, as part of her duties, therefore she’s the same type of thing as this trad woman.”And yet one of these women is living the life of a courtesan, where she’s sitting around all day, you know, either playing video games or reading, you know, romance novels or whatever, and the other one is, is working all day long, right? Like, for the good of the family, for moving the family’s interests forwards.And these are two very different- and, and note here because I know some trophy wives and courtesans who’d be like, “Well, I am doing it for the family.” And I’m like, “Does the rest of the family care about these social circles you’re trying to ingratiate yourself with?” And if the answer is no, then you’re not doing it for the family.You’re doing it for [00:21:00] yourself, and you’re defining what has value on behalf of the family. Which is obviously, I think, very bad. That’s, like, worse than anything like that because it’s like you’re, you’re defining the good of the family and that needs to always be a collective decision. And if you can’t convince your husband that what you think is valuable for the family is valuable for the family, yet he’s still letting you do it, then you’re acting as a courtesan.You are not acting as a wife. Thoughts.Simone Collins: Yeah. I mean, I, I agree with you. But largely people have lost the plot and people are very much stuck in their own minds, focused on these... It’s not, it’s not even selfish because people aren’t doing things that would actually make them happy, ironically.Malcolm Collins: Yeah, they aren’t.They’re, these courtesans are typically less happy thanSimone Collins: wives They’re caught in what I guess I could describe as cultural delusions. They’re, they’re stuck in cultural loops and cultural delusions and pursuing [00:22:00] them to their personal detriment, the detriment of their partner, and the detriment of the relationship.This isn’t exclusive to women. It happens to men, too. And the most important thing is that when you’re looking for a partner, you’re looking for someone who shares your objective function. They want to maximize the same thing or cluster of things that you do, and you both realize that you work well enough together that by combining forces, you will both maximize your objective function, the thing that matters more to you than your own self, more as a team than you will individually.And if that’s true- Yeah ... you never have to worry about so long as you both, you know, continue your pursuit of this objective function, you’re never going to fight because you understand that both you know, your, your job isn’t to just be happy and get what I want and, you know, every fight isn’t about, well, what I want versus what you want.Every disagreement you may ever have is really more like, well [00:23:00] tactically, how are we going to maximize what we both collectively value?Malcolm Collins: Yes.Simone Collins: And just as an emergent property, you’re going to try to make the other person happy and have, have a good life because you understand, as any good employer does, as any good army general does that, you know, if your troops, if your team is happy and healthy and thriving, they’re going to do a better job.You know? It’s, you’re not gonna get really good work out of someone who’s demoralized or sleep deprived or sad or who feels alienated. So just as- As an emergent property, you’re gonna try to be nice to this person. And people in general tend to be nice to other people who share their interests. Plus, there’s nothing that gives greater contentment and happiness than knowing that you are doing everything you can within your power to maximize something you value.It takes the FOMO out of life. There is no fear of missing out because you are always doing the very best you can to maximize your basket of [00:24:00] values. So there’s, there’s very little indecision there. Contrast that with the modern real housewife or the modern even just like dink couple, and there’s intense levels of FOMO.It’s like, “Oh, well, you know, we decided to max out our credit card and travel to Greece this summer. But should we have gone to Tokyo instead? I don’t know.” And then they get to Greece, and it’s so hot, and it’s really expensive, and then their flight gets canceled. You know, like all these things. And, and, and you know, you’re wondering, “Well, could I, could I have been happier if we did this?I... Is this even what I enjoy? Am I just doing this ‘cause I’ve seen people doing it on Instagram?” Like, there’s just so, Even if what you wanna optimize is happiness, you’re, you’re not gonna find it with that kind of pursuit. SoMalcolm Collins: Oh, yeah. No, courtesans are never as happy as, as true wives, right?Simone Collins: No, I... So I disagree.I think that some of the most successful figures in history were courtesans. And they- ButMalcolm Collins: were they happy?Simone Collins: [00:25:00] Yeah. But they... so to be a courtesan is I think very different from what people have devolved into now. You know, they, they had a career. For, for example, consider Madame Pompadour, who died young and, and was very much missed.She was extremely intellectual. She influenced policy. She absolutely made the king happy. And she was very good at what she did, and she was very influential. Th- there are definitely people who, you know, know what they’re good at, and, and they love it. And, you know, that was her j- her job was to be, you know, smart and attractive and to give pleasure, and she did it well.And that’s good. I think you need to, you need to understand what your role is in a relationship. What did sheMalcolm Collins: die of? Some venereal diseaseSimone Collins: or- Some disease. It wasn’t a venereal disease. I can’t remember what. It was probably some sort of like pox or virus or whatever. People died all the time.Malcolm Collins: I- We should, we should do an episode, famous sluts of history.Simone Collins: Well, it wasn’t even always sluts. I mean, a, a lot of the people who ended up as, as, as courtesans you know, didn’t [00:26:00] necessarily want to be. But it just kinda turned out that way. But yeah, I, I, I don’t think it, I don’t think it’s about whether you choose courtesan track versus wife track. Or as a husband, whether you choose to get a courtesan versus a wife, or a wife and a courtesan.Like, a lot of the guys in history g- had both. The, you know, you have to understand what your resources can, canMalcolm Collins: bear. Well, I, I think also the idea of the courtesan even, even for the guy who decides to cheat on his wife or whatever, right? If you contextualize the person you’re cheating with as a courtesan, they are always less useful to you than the wife.You’re less likely to imagine that they could become a wife, because they are not a wife. They are only there for your pleasure. They are a human oni hole. They are not actually a thing of value. And I think that’s why women-Simone Collins: Well, I mean, I’ve always seen cheating as, like, a sign of extreme existential doubt, and not really necessarilyMalcolm Collins: interpersonal attraction.What, what I mean is if you look historically, it’s very rare for people to leave their wives for their courtesans. Oh. [00:27:00] That just doesn’t happen. And but today it happens all the time, where people get confused. And using clearer terminology can prevent that.Simone Collins: I suppose, yeah.Malcolm Collins: Also by the way, side note, Yeahin terms of data we’re getting now, we’ve got 47 users on RFAB in the last 30 minutes.Simone Collins: Nice.Malcolm Collins: We’ve got so it’s like, you know, current users. And I turned on the gender thing which unfortunately I didn’t realize how much it sucked on Google. For 97.53% we can’t tell what the gender was.Simone Collins: Yeah.Malcolm Collins: But f- for the ones we can tell what the gender was 1.36 of them were males, and 1.1% of them are female.So the male to female ratio is about equal.Simone Collins: That’s good. Okay. Let’sMalcolm Collins: go. And the time on site is about equal, too. For males it’s a bit over an hour, an hour and one minute. And for females, it’s 57 minutes and 50 seconds.Simone Collins: Okay. Oh, favorable.Malcolm Collins: So women use our site, too. And I cleaned up all the, the scoogy, like naked pics and stuff that people had in the [00:28:00] top for images, and I was like, “No.”Simone Collins: Scoogy is a good word. Thank you for using it.Malcolm Collins: Mm-hmm. And I’ve been preparing for battle.Simone Collins: As one does. As one does.Malcolm Collins: Gotta take out the the bad guys before they get to me. I just come like this, and I’m like, “I’m just moving the sword like this. If it hits you, it’s your fault.” That’s what I say on the battlefield, just go like this.Simone Collins: Yeah, is that your move? That’s your go-to?Malcolm Collins: Yeah.Simone Collins: The waggle?Malcolm Collins: The just like, You really get moving ... the guy comes that way and like, I’m, “I’m just moving in a straight line. If I punch you, it’s your own fault.”Speaker 9: on my way, I’m gonna be doing this. If you get hit, it’s your own fault. Okay. Then I’m gonna start kicking air like this. , Uh. Uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh,Simone Collins: oh, God. Well, yeah, I like this concept. I, I think people need to think really carefully about what they’re in it to do.I, I was horrified when w- at one point joining a [00:29:00] parenting, a, a virtual parenting group comprised of very- High-profile people who just describe parenting as like, “Well, it’s just one of those things you do in life.” And I’m like, oh my God. Like, the number of people who just get married ‘cause it’s like, “Well, you know, like I was dating...”It’s like musical chairs, you know? “I was dating them and like I hit my 30s, so then I proposed.” Like, what are you doing? This is, this is so weird that people wouldn’t take things like marriage and having kids extremely seriously and understand exactly why they’re doing it. And if the answer is, “Well, I don’t know, it seemed like a good idea at the time.”I mean, I respect it, I guess. Like, I, I, I agree that people overthink things way too much, but also, yikes. So- ThatMalcolm Collins: level of NPC. Well, that level of NPC I think is leading to the highest birth rate that we have right now. I mean, these are the people- Oh, God ... who are gonna replace the over-thinkers, Simone.[00:30:00]Simone Collins: Yeah,Malcolm Collins: The over-thinkers who wanna have kids are a small group.Simone Collins: US birthrates updated again. At new record lows. The, the biggest drop in terms of age brackets, of course, was teen births. They saw a 7% drop. And the slight, I think a slight decline- Girl, don’tMalcolm Collins: be a pussy ...Simone Collins: in births for people in their 20s, and then a slight increase for people in their 30s.So absolutely people are overthinking it or trying to be prepared. I, I don’t think, though, that, that you need to be a certain age to be capable of understanding why you’re doing things. I need, I think you need to understand just who you are and what you’re about. And Malcolm, you knew who you were and what you were about whenMalcolm Collins: we were in a relationship.Oh yeah, I told you exactly what I was about.Simone Collins: And you were like, “Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, that makes sense.” And I mean, like from earlier writings of yours that I’ve seen and, you know, stories you’ve told, I don’t think you’ve changed all that much in what you’ve done. And ultimately I haven’t either.It just happens to be that my personality manifests very differently given, [00:31:00] depending on the resources that I’m given, and I think women are a lot like that in general. That their, their phenotype will vary significantly depending on the environment, as it were. Anyway, I love you veryMalcolm Collins: much. Love you too, and have a spectacular day.Simone Collins: You too.Malcolm Collins: And you guys, no courtesans. Unless it’s a side chick, and then whatever.Simone Collins: I don’t, I don’t know. I think, I think people should purs- if you wanna be a courtesan, pursue it professionally. Some people do this very successfully.Malcolm Collins: Give the guy pleasure, make sure you’re actually doing your job.Simone Collins: Sugar baby websites are a, a very big thing. People absolutely make careers out of it. They’re, they’re clear about what it is. IMalcolm Collins: think that framing also helps guys know what they’re really looking for, because so often, you know, I see guys- when they say, “Well, this is what I’m looking for in, like, a wife,” and it’s like a list of kinks or something, and it’s like- It’sSimone Collins: like-I’m cucking ... no, you’re looking for a courtesan. Yeah. You’re not, you’re not looking for a wife. Wives aren’t that. Absolutely true. People need to understand the [00:32:00] difference. Yeah. And also, like, not everyone can afford a courtesan. Just to be clear. LoveMalcolm Collins: you, Simone.Simone Collins: Bye. I’mMalcolm Collins: sorry I’m being so tired at this time of day.Just too much work.Simone Collins: Yeah. You gotta sleep more. Ciao.Malcolm Collins: Ciao.Simone Collins: Kini-Malcolm Collins: So how are things going today, Simone?Simone Collins: I think both you and I have had a day today where we’re like-Malcolm Collins: I’m out of it, yeah ...Simone Collins: we’re done with this thing, and then, and then it just doesn’t, it doesn’t happen. And for you, it was development of the, the Vtuber setup and-Malcolm Collins: I mean, I’m making progress. I’ve gotten through some of the hardest parts that I didn’t think I would find a solution for.Simone Collins: Yeah.Malcolm Collins: But I’m still on some of the second hardest parts that I didn’t think I’d find a solution for, so, just, you know, with RFAB that does, like, AI chatbots, AI adventure, like choose your own adventure stories, AI agents, AI vibe coding,Simone Collins: AI-Malcolm Collins: AISimone Collins: fact checking.Malcolm Collins: Fact checking, yeah. We’ve got a super search that, like, outputs an AI [00:33:00] answer and then has other AIs run against it to check it so you can see from, like, a number of AIs, like, basically Yeah.Which is very difficult, right? And so, that’s what I’m working on. I, I think I, I think I’ll get it through tomorrow. Like, it looks like we’re gonna get to the other side of this, and once I get to the other side of this it’ll be very cool because any of you guys who want, like, any, any AI that, like, makes a, a drawing for you, you’llSimone Collins: beMalcolm Collins: able to rig that to a Vtuber avatar and maybe...I mean, Vtubers are all cool now. We’re, like, we’re getting the whole, like, Vtuber wave right now, which I think is pretty cool and that’s where The Vtuber renaissance. Yeah, the Vtuber renaissance. And very, very excited about that. I, I even thought, like, after I did the Leaflet streams, because those go so well, right?Yeah. Like, I’ve, I’ve looked at them and I’m like, “Oh my [00:34:00] God, I can talk for 10 hours straight?” People should have knownSimone Collins: that when they see that we’re not able toMalcolm Collins: cut our videos down to, like, 20 minutes like normal humans. I mean, you can talk with Leaflet for, ‘cause she’s so awesome. I, you know, I don’t know if that would work with just anyone.Simone Collins: It’dMalcolm Collins: work with youSimone Collins: Yeah, but I mean, you know, we’re freaking married. So there’s that.Malcolm Collins: A lot of people are like, “You’re married to someone, you run out of things to talk about.” But like, not us.Simone Collins: Not us. Man, not us.Malcolm Collins: And for dinner tonight w- we’re gonna use that wild mushroom soup that you made that was so creamy and delicious, and have that with steak.Mm-hmm. Which I think is gonna be absolutely spectacular. I’m really looking forward to it. I might not eat all the steak so we can have a bit more steak left over, cut that up, and then make some noodles with it or something. I think would be a lot of fun.Simone Collins: [00:35:00] Mm.Malcolm Collins: So we’ll see.Simone Collins: Oh, like a, like a stir-fry, like- LikeMalcolm Collins: a stir-fry lo mein orSimone Collins: somethingwok-fried lo mein with... Yeah. So yeah, I’ll do the whole thing, and then just whatever you don’t eat I’ll slice and we’ll wok-Malcolm Collins: Or fried rice. We haven’t done fried rice in ages. Oh my God,Simone Collins: yeah. I mean, it’s...Malcolm Collins: The problem is, with to really do fried rice right, you have to get it super, super hot, and that just requires so much more attention.Simone Collins: Yeah.Malcolm Collins: But you know, we’ll, we’ll, we’ll figure this all out. We’ll figure this all out.Simone Collins: We shall.Malcolm Collins: But it’s been so interesting to see the... By the way, did you see the video I sent you? The, the Leaflet one where... So Leaflet had done a video on our video, and it was taken down because I called our kids, affectionately, little b******s, because they are little b******s, and YouTube said that that was me harassing a minor.Simone Collins: Even that, that’s even you self-censoring and not calling them little S-H-I-T-S, so-Malcolm Collins: Which is a, it is a common term in the backwoods tradition. Yeah. It’s what I was called as a kid. Albion Seed list it as a common backwoods term of affection for children.Simone Collins: Yeah, this, this was you being polite. I [00:36:00] mean, come on, guys.Malcolm Collins: Yeah. ‘Cause I tell fans I’m gonna try to cuss less on the show. I’m gonna try not cussing sometimes, unless it’s good for a joke. But yeah, we only really cuss when it matters. I don’t, don’t cuss for emphasis. But if it’s gonna make somebody laugh, you know- Mm ... that’s a different c- scenario altogether.But anyway, so, She ends up getting banned for this, and then Rev Says Desu ends up covering her getting banned for this, and then in her video covering Rev Says Desu video about her getting banned for our show, she starts talking about how one of her friends was giving her advice, but she couldn’t say what friend, and then midway into the episode she’s just like, “Actually, I don’t think she’d care.It was Simone.”Simone Collins: Yeah, I don’t care. And,Malcolm Collins: and then immediately afterwards Simone comes up because that’s what Rev said.And now Asmogold has covered this,Speaker 13: And actually the DMs are all bots too. Practically no communication here happens. I mean, if she’s not able... Listen, okay, if she’s not able to get it fixed in like, I don’t know, uh, a week or something like that, uh, she can reach out to me. I follow [00:37:00] her, she follows me, and I can help her get it resolved, or at least make sure that the decision was made by a human and not a random person.I, I, I can do that. But hopefully it can re- get resolved on its own, ‘cause this is, this is outrageous. It, it, it’s not the way it should be.Malcolm Collins: And it feels like we’re part of this, like, huge online creator, like, ecosystem now. Like we’re, we’re inching our way into that conservative s- the, the, the sphere, the, the intellectual talking sphere.If Rev Says Desu is talking about us now, and Asmongold has talked about us, and so, like, we just gotta-Simone Collins: HeMalcolm Collins: has? ... inch in, inch in. ISimone Collins: mean- Oh, that one clip. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.Malcolm Collins: One clip, but that’s how it starts. Like with Leaflet, there’s still the famous who the F is Leaflet, the first time- Yeah ... you heard about her.A year later he’s, you know, he, he, he, he’s very familiar with her. Same with Nugzinnor, right? Like same with Rev Says Desu, who clearly knows Leaflet now but didn’t before, right? So, I should reach back out to Sidescrollers and do more stuff with them. The, the, the reason we stopped [00:38:00] doing stuff with them is he’s like, “Well, you guys aren’t that into the gamer space.”And it’s like, well, now I own a game company, so I guess we are, so- Yeah,Simone Collins: that’s true ... we’ll see.Malcolm Collins: Or maybe I wasn’t entertaining enough. We’ll see.Simone Collins: Twinkle in your and Bruno’s eyes when you were first on Sidescrollers.Malcolm Collins: Yeah. No, it’s really solid. Like I, like I’m, when I’m on Leaflet stream people will drop in and be like, “Our, RFAB is so much fun.I love your, your website.” Like now there’s people who are fans of our website more than our show, which is surprising to me. I di- I didn’t think we’d get to this point.Simone Collins: Delightful.Malcolm Collins: Delightful, yeah. And it’s constantly being improved for people. Th- they get on and they’re like, “Oh, the card game broke this way,” and it’s like, well, let us know and we’ll try to fix it, right?But right now I’m, I’m, I’m rushing with the Vtuber stuff ‘cause I’m really excited about that. Anyway, I will get started here.Speaker 11: Other side of this tree over here. This looks pretty promising. Octavia, why don’t you go with mom? We’re looking for mushrooms, right? Yeah. I’m walking the trail. I will carry it by my, my [00:39:00] uncle. Maybe up here. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit basedcamppodcast.substack.com/subscribe

In this eye-opening Based Camp episode, Malcolm and Simone Collins dismantle one of the biggest historical myths pushed by both feminists and modern “trad” circles: the idea that women historically stayed home doing minimal work while men did everything.Using cross-cultural evidence from hunter-gatherer societies, medieval Europe, Vikings, Spartans, ultra-Orthodox Jews, Islamic traditions, Africa, Latin America, India, China, Japan, and colonial America — plus genetic evidence from modern birds — they reveal the real division of labor: women handled the majority of reliable, grueling calorie production, farming (pre-plow), management, textiles, marketing, and household economy, while men focused on high-risk, high-reward activities like warfare, raiding, politics, and innovation.They introduce the “Sword and Shield” model of relationships and explain how the industrial era, plow, and wage labor flipped traditional dynamics. A must-watch for anyone interested in real history, gender roles, and escaping modern cultural brainwashing.Episode TranscriptSimone Collins: [00:00:00] The researchers say the finding is clear, but the reason behind it is still unknown. On average, men were able to get about one meter, 3.3 feet closer than women before the birds took off. This pattern appeared consistently across Czechia, France, Germany, Poland, and Spain.It also held true across 37 species so Malcolm immediately turns to me and he’s like, “We know exactly why this is the case.”Malcolm Collins: Yes. This is the question that explains everything we’re going to talk about today, and I think proves without a doubt that this is not some malcolm malcolmnipulation of historical facts. You have been in rural Latin America, right?Simone Collins: Yes.Malcolm Collins: Take an image in your head.Simone Collins: Okay.Malcolm Collins: You’re driving down a rural road. You look out the side of a car, okay? You see somebody with a 60 pound jug of something on their head.Simone Collins: Oh, it’s a woman, obviously. Yeah.Malcolm Collins: Always a woman.Simone Collins: Always, always a woman. Yes.Malcolm Collins: you go to Africa, you’ll see this as well. You go to-Simone Collins: China too. Let’s be clear. China too. Right.Malcolm Collins: Yeah. ‘Was it majority women doing the [00:01:00] harder labor when you’re-Simone Collins: Yeah,Malcolm Collins: 100%.Yeah. Yeah. D-Simone Collins: Yeah.Malcolm Collins: Guys, you do not know how brain cucked you are if, if a woman has convinced you, “ We just need to go back to the traditional way and I’ll stay at home and you do all this stuff.” Because you’re so strong, look at your muscles, could you open this jar for me? All you see as a woman, I could just never do anything.Would you like to know more?Malcolm Collins: Hello, Simone. Today I’m going to talk to you about the most diabolical brainwashing mind trick that feminists and women have ever pulled on males in human society.And it is that I will hear diet in the wool, males who identify as misogynist, red pill, post pickup artists, trads, go out there and say, “Well, we need to go back to the way things used to be, where women didn’t work and stayed in the household [00:02:00] and just cared for kids.” And I see their wives behind their fans with their villainous faces going.Speaker 5: あ。Simone Collins: oh my God.Malcolm Collins: Their villainous laugh. Tucked their husband’s brains and their husbands believe that historically women didn’t work. AndSpeaker 11: We must letMalcolm Collins: misogynist,Speaker 14: think this was his I all right. That heSpeaker 13: came up with.Speaker 14: AllSpeaker 12: right.Speaker 14: NowSpeaker 13: he’s going tofigureSpeaker 12: it out. Don’t do all. Okay. I know what to take.Speaker 11: You don’t know what to do. Yo talk, talk, talk only.Speaker 12: DoyouSpeaker 14: wantSpeaker 12: my own? Yes,Speaker 11: I want youSpeaker 12: to know.Speaker 14: Vula, how is business?Speaker 12: Oh, wow to me.My weak constitution, my weak mind as a woman, I am simply not fit for it.Speaker 12: Business is bad.Speaker 15: What do you know, what’s the matter? What’s happened?She suffers?Speaker 14: She suffers. She has to be at the travel agency alone all dayWell, her kids are all alone at home.Speaker 14: That’sSpeaker 12: [00:03:00] right.Speaker 15: So,Take the kids with you to work.Speaker 15: You’d be with Taki .Speaker 12: That would be good.Speaker 14: That would be no good. No good. No good. No good. Because, um,When a woman has her kids around, she just can’t focus.Speaker 14: And that’s why that no work. No work.Speaker 15: .I have your answer. Yes.I will do all the work for you and you stay home all day with the kids.Speaker 11: Oh, I, I can’t believe that. Wonderful. Wonderful.Malcolm Collins: and I saw this in the comments again recently where like even- OhSimone Collins: really?Malcolm Collins: Guys were like, “Well, women held some roles historically outside the house, but, you know, they weren’t like cobblers and they weren’t like sailors and they weren’t like, you know, stone masons.”And it’s like all of that is true.Simone Collins: Yeah. However,Malcolm Collins: the way that all of those businesses were managed where if a guy [00:04:00] was a stone mason or a cobbler or anything like that, his books and his inventory sourcing and his client sourcinggenerally would have been handled by the woman, but it wasn’t even just that. It was if you actually look at the statistics around female labor in history, women actually did, if you’re talking about hard labor, the labor that fed the family, right? Women actually did the majority of the work over the vast majority of human history.If you go back to let’s say hunter gatherer society, for example, because we’ve been able to study this in a great detail women produced in terms of daily caloric intake between 80 and 60% of the calories that the family ate.Simone Collins: Oh my gosh, really?Malcolm Collins: This is 90 human history.Simone Collins: Well, this, you know, this also makes sense in other things where you see sexual dimorphism.For example, women being much [00:05:00] having much higher endurance and pain tolerance versus men who are better like sprinters.Malcolm Collins: Yeah.Speaker 6: Or to word it another way, the female body and psychology at an evolutionary level are optimized for grueling labor while the male body in mind are optimized for warfare and disposability. Neither are totally optimal, but the idea that women are beautiful flowers designed to sit inside all day caring for childrenFar from any risk of manual labor is probably the greatest feminist psyops of all time and completely a historic.Simone Collins: . And yeah, that just, that, that really, that implies millions of years of higher workloads.Malcolm Collins: And this is actually even true. And, and we’re gonna talk about like why this is the case because note people can be like, “But those just makes no sense.I thought women, because they’re the weaker, they must do this work.” And it’s like, b***h, have you ever seen how lions make this s**t work? The male [00:06:00] lion sits around all day and the females bring in food because that’s the way human society is supposed to work.Simone Collins: Oh God.Malcolm Collins: And if you go back to the most trad iterations of human society, let’s go with the ultra orthodox Jews, okay?In ultra Orthodox Jewish society, do men work? No.Simone Collins: Oh God.Malcolm Collins: Men don’t work. Women work. Men spend all day studying. You actually see this in,Simone Collins: Studying. ...Malcolm Collins: if you go to more primitive iterations of Islamic society, I remember this- Yeah. ... Morocco and are out in the desert.Simone Collins: Okay.Malcolm Collins: And we met you know, a traditionalist Muslim-Simone Collins: Oh, yes.Yes. ...Malcolm Collins: and the men did not work. That was considered, like, very offensive, even the idea that a man would have a job, that is of course the purview of women to have jobs. And you could say, “Well, Malcolm, surely you don’t want us to be like those, those Muslims or those Jews.” And I’m like, “Well, actually, even if you go back to early European [00:07:00] society, most farming through most of human history was done by women.”People are like, “What? I thought men handled farming.” And it’s like, actually, men only moved to handle the majority of farming after one particular invention. Do you know what it was?Simone Collins: The ... Oh, what was it called? The ... I wanna say spinning Jenning because it’s just the first thing that, like, comes to mind.The plow. The plow. Oh, great. Okay. Yeah.Malcolm Collins: Okay. In regions where the plow is not used due to soil conditions and stuff like that-Simone Collins: Yeah. ...Malcolm Collins: the majority of farming is typically done by w- women. Huh. In Europe, before the introduction of the plow, which happened a thousand AD. So pretty recently the majority of farming was done by women unless you were, like, having slaves do it or something like that.But even when you were having slaves do it and you had, like, a big estate, the majority of the family’s work was still done by women because Zane managed the family’s household and finances, which we will get to. And so if you’re like, [00:08:00] wait, okay, if women were doing the majority of actual work throughout human history in terms of calorie acquisition, in terms of financial management what were men doing?What was the male role in human history? Why were women okay taking on this role that seems to be, ... Because like imagine, and, and this is why I’m saying that, like, it’s such a cut thing to not know this, is, is that you’re literally going out there when the truth of human history is women boast manage child rearing and manage calorie acquisition, okay?And you’re going out there and saying, “No, no, no. I’ll do the trad thing and just do all of the labor and women can do a quarter of what women ever did historically.” But sorry, I, I just, I cannot I cannot get over because we’re gonna go over to how the, how somehow women psy-opsed men into believing this.We’re gonna go over traditional marriage structures how they developed [00:09:00] that way because I, like, you were aware of this when we were talking about this, but I just think, like, a lot of guys, they have this, like, cargo cult of trad where they have this vision in their head of what a hunter-gatherer society was like.They have this vision in their head of what early medieval life was like and it allows them to define themselves because if they, if they have this idea of, like, this is what men did back then, and this is what women did back then that that means that, well, if they just emulate this role that they believe is a prehistoric role of what a man is, well, well, well, now it’s fed into their identity, like, “I am man, man does X.”Okay, so what did man actually do historically? Like, what was a man’s actual role in a family? The man’s actual role in a family, and I’ve, I’ve talked about this as a way to model your relationships, and increasingly, I’m realizing that when I go out there and I can say, “Here’s an optional way to [00:10:00] model your relationship.”I’ve increasingly realized I need to stop saying that people are too stupid, and then they just model their relationships in stupid ways. The ideal way to model your relationship is in what we call a sword and shield relationship.Simone Collins: Yeah.Malcolm Collins: That means the woman is in charge of making sure the daily caloric needs of the family are met and that you don’t lose all your assets.And this is what women mostly did on a historic basis. The man is in charge of moving the family’s status upwards which means that he’s in charge of high risk, high reward opportunities. Obviously, if you’re only familiar with stereotypes in history the two examples of this that are going to come to mind immediately are going to be Viking Society where the women would manage the farms and the men would go a Viking, and the men would go on these raids to try to get lots of treasure to raise the family status, right?Right. Another example would be Spartan [00:11:00] Society- Yes. ... where women would manage the Hellots and they manage the farm and the men would go out and perform their military duties and they’d come back and they might you know, a- a- acquire stuff. You also had this in Roman society where, where men would go outNow, now less so because Roman took from Greek society and Greek society is one of the few societies where women actually almost did no actual work. Just hitSimone Collins: in the back of the house.Malcolm Collins: Yeah, one of the very few societies in human history where women were actually basically just locked inside twenty four seven.Simone Collins: Yeah.Malcolm Collins: Now, one of the place, if you wanna look into research on this and I think that she actually significantly understates this- Yeah. ... was a Nobel Prize winning research by Claudia Godlin, Oh. ...who showed the U-shaped pattern in female labor which shows basically what we said before is that around, and I think that she actually gets some of her numbers wrong, but she tries to look at historicalSpeaker 9: . Actually, I went back over her actual data and her work is clearly misstated. If you’re only familiar with the little cartoon, she has a female labor, you’d get this impression that [00:12:00] female labor started to die out in like the 1850s and then bottomed out in the 1910s, , and was never really significantly higher than male labor participation.But if you actually look at her data, you can see that this is nowhere near true. Also just a funny side note here. Have you noticed that her most modern woman is wearing a hijab? Just see, just so you know where she wants society going. , But yeah, this, this cartoon that you may have seen of her work doesn’t align with her actual, , data.What the actual data shows, which I think even she is afraidthat men will look at history and realize they shouldn’t be saying, “Hey woman, get in the kitchen and make me a sandwich.” It’s, “Hey woman, get in the field and cultivate me a sandwich.”Malcolm Collins: whatever.But around 1910 is when or let’s say the 1900s is when male wage labor really began to pick up in any society- Wow. ... the idea that a man would leave the household, and this is when things began to fall apart, because remember- You get her atSimone Collins: the end, yes. ...Malcolm Collins: as society developed, right, okay, well, now you’ve got the [00:13:00] plow, now you’ve got specialization, now you don’t have a woman gathering, now you don’t have a woman on the farm, you have a woman managing the books, and the supply chain, and the, the sales, and the managing the storefront, right?Like, the, the classic example I’ll give is, okay, you have a cobbler, or you have a butcher or something like that. So the guy learns the skill. He learns how to cobble, he learns how to make the shoes, he learns how to handle the, the wrapping of it and everything like that, very complicated. And the woman manages what women are disproportionately good at, which is interpersonal skills and bureaucracy.And so she manages the, the, the, you know, sitting behind the counter, taking the money, marketing the product managing sort of guild bureaucratic stuff, managing the, the finances. Basically women did a sort of middle management job. And as males and, and this would be true, like, with whatever the profession was, whether you made, you were a cobbler or whether you were a butcher or something like that, like, why wouldn’t, like, you’ve gotta [00:14:00] understand, men during this period didn’t have this idea of masculinity that you had, right?They, they had an idea of masculinity, but if you went to them or their wives, and you said something like actually, the husband needs to manage all of this other stuff, right? Both the wife and the husband would be like, “But why?” Like, the husband is focused on the specialized skill that he needs to continue to improve so that our family can make money.I, the woman, have free time on my hands, why would I not be managing the things that allow my husband to focus on his specialty skill?Simone Collins: Yeah.Malcolm Collins: Right? Like, it would come off as, like, completely insane that the husband would waste time that they could have cobbling or butchering or whatever their actual skill was to manage the shop, to manage the sales process, to [00:15:00] manage theYeah. I just would come across as like, “Are you complete ... Are you just telling me to, like, waste money?” Like, there are kids, like, we’re making this money for our family and our kids because remember, historically, Simone wouldn’t become Simone Collins, she’d become Mrs. Malcolm Collins, right?Simone Collins: Yeah. Like,Malcolm Collins: people really had a combined identity, this idea of the women’s needs versus the man’s needs different-Simone Collins: I wish we could bring that back, by the way, that you had to address someone by, like, their, their combined partner name going forward.Yeah.Malcolm Collins: Well, because you were one entity afterwards. Yeah. It, it did, it didn’t make sense. This idea of males and females having competing needs is a modern concept that was created by the atomization of the family.Simone Collins: Yeah.Malcolm Collins: But anyway, so women had these sorts of roles and then men ... And, and keep in mind, these sorts of roles were roles that women were relegated into after all of the domains that women used to specialize in were taken away from them.Yeah. Like in farming, the reason why women stopped being the majority of farming labor after the invention [00:16:00] of the plow is the plow required more brute strengths. Mm-hmm. So men were able to take it over. But also keep in mind in a, in a society historically, if you can be like, okay, but then why would society structure themselves this way?Like, it, why would societies have women be the majority calorie income generators, right? Like what the heck were men doing if women were doing this, right? So if they were not out doing the high risk, high reward thing, wh- why were men doing high risk, high reward, martial adjacent activities? It was because women suck at war, okay?Simone Collins: We’re really not good at it. Yeah.Malcolm Collins: That’s what men were training on. And this also comes to, to hunter gatherer societies. So, in hunter gatherer societies, and, and again, the meno sphere always freaks out about this because they don’t actually read the research. Leftists will say things like, “Well, actually you know, when you look at large studies like Andreessen et al.2723 women hunted in [00:17:00] 79% to 63% of foraging societies.” So this is hunter gatherer societies. And so they’re like, wo- oh, of course, women wouldn’t go on a mammoth hunt. And it’s like, yeah, that’s true. What were women hunting in these societies, okay? Because they weren’t hunting what men were hunting in these societies.Men were hunting things that would prepare them for war, were allegories for war, because you had to defend your territory. This is why the male lion lays us about all day, okay? What women were hunting were things like squirrels and bunnies and mice. They were hunting a completely different type of game.It was-Simone Collins: Low stakes, yeah.Malcolm Collins: Yeah, low stakes, opportunities-Simone Collins: Low risk, low reward. Yeah.Malcolm Collins: Yeah. But today as a guy, you’re so, like, dichotomous, which is one of the things we try to break people out of on this channel, like, well, there’s hunting and there’s gathering. And the moment you hear, “Oh, when a [00:18:00] leftist says females were participating in 79% of the hunt, like, like that they hunted meat in 79% of hunter-gatherer societies, why would women arbitrarily not hunt bunnies when they saw a bunny, right?Like when they’re foraging. Why would they opportunistically not make little traps for shrews and mice and stuff like that that might be around the, the campsite, right?Simone Collins: Mm-hmm.Malcolm Collins: Why would they, like, just to arbitrarily be like, no, only men can touch meat. That’s a weird way to just sort of cut your society, right?Like, it makes no sense. And when you think about it a little bit, you’re like, oh yeah, that would make sense. A society where they demanded that men be the primary calorie getters, right, and women just stay at home all day. Well, those men don’t have as much time to train for war anymore, right? And if they don’t have as much time to train for war, well, what happens to those men in the long term?They and their way of life get eradicated. [00:19:00] So what about the societies where you don’t see this in a historic context? Like let’s look at ancient Athens, right, which is a actual historic counter example. And we’ll go through other historic examples here, but ... Okay. So Athenian men because they did not have women managing trade and finance and everything like that, they managed it themselves, right?Yeah. But that meant that they didn’t have time to learn how to war. Mm-hmm. So how did Athenian men fight?Simone Collins: Oh my God, this is why we have democracy. This is why?Malcolm Collins: Yes. They fought with the lower caste and essentially slave labor. That is what powered the trireams that maintain the Athenian naval d- h- hegemony.Mm-hmm. Is, is incredibly ... And, and as Simone was joking, this is where we get early votes being widely distributed because, you know, if you have triery members who you know, are otherwise pretty low cast and you could say, well, now you get to vote, right? Well, you get to vote on which high caste person you want to vote.BecauseSimone Collins: no, no vote, no vote until you what.Malcolm Collins: [00:20:00] Yeah. You gotta do it. Vote, no vote. But that’s where that came from, right? Mm. Is that the Athenian male sort of, citizen they, they ... It’s not that they never fought. Like you, you do see Asthenians fight in history but they leaned really hard on the lower caste in a way that other societies like Spartans and Thieves simply didn’t.But to continue here, let’s get, let’s go as ... Again, we’ve already gone over Vikings. I assume people are pretty familiar with a Viking labor division. But let’s look at medieval Europe. 13-Simone Collins: I always crack up though with that ... What was that co- comedic Viking show where, like, there was one woman who would go raiding- Yeah, the rape.Well, I mean, they’re like, well, of course she, like, she, she rapes in pillages and everything, just like all the other ones. And then, like, her husband’s getting increasingly uncomfortable.Speaker: Are you really proud of your wife, at least? I mean Frøya dove into that pillaging, one hundred percent. Even took part in quite a lot of the rapingMalcolm Collins: yeah, sheSimone Collins: just ... Yeah. [00:21:00] I don’t think that happened very much. Yeah. And in terms of, like, female sailors, there was that one famous female pirate who, like, masqueraded as a man and, and, and developed this ingenious way to urinate without showing that she was a woman.But yeah. Tough times.Malcolm Collins: Anyway so, in medieval Europe the farmland was a joint production unit, but tasks were sharply gendered along lines based on physical demand, risk, and compatibility with childcare. Men handled higher risks, drinks, intensive field work, plowing with oxen. So this is after the plow, by the way, is what I’m going over here.Mowing and threshing grain, women focused on lower risk, more reliable tasks that could be multitasked near young children gleaning leftover grain for the harvest clearing weeds, binding sheaves, making hay, collecting wood, and sheep shearing. Harvesting itself was often shared. Women also manage garden, livestock, dairy, poultry, and most crucially dominated textile production spinning and weaving, which form the backbone of both [00:22:00] household needs and export industry.They produce cloth ale cheese and other goods for home use or local sale. So it’s important- It’sSimone Collins: huge. ...Malcolm Collins: if you were a, a farming family, of the stuff you sold, the majority of it was produced by women.Simone Collins: Yeah.Malcolm Collins: These are your cheeses. B- people don’t realize how important cheese was as an export product. It was so important that in medieval Scotland, you would pay your taxes and cheese.Like it was just like, this is the easily durable and I could just imagine the king cellar full of cheeses, right? Like-Simone Collins: Yeah. It’s the chocolate of Europe before-Malcolm Collins: Yeah. ...Simone Collins: chocolate.Malcolm Collins: So you, you they, they would produce that, they would produce the cloth, which was also an easy export product. They would produce your textiles, which was an easy export product.Men were not producing these things. And keep in mind, this is post plow. Yeah. This is post women no longer doing the majority of farming-Simone Collins: Yeah, so this is- ... You had artificially depressed.Malcolm Collins: Yeah. This, this [00:23:00] is, this is women at, like, one of their low points in human history, one of their low regions in human history, still doing a great deal of the labor.Totally.This idea, again, do not allow yourself to be cut into this belief that women just did childcare and education. Mm. They did not. They did the majority of what we would today call labor. Men did speculative ventures which is very different from, like, just labor. And note, they were not building the, because people were like, “Well, were they all, they’re building architecture and new houses and stuff like that?I was like, no, because that is more in the category of speculative venture. To do something like that, what do you need to do? You typically need some form of loan, some sort of existing business supply. These are high ... Building a building is a high risk, high reward thing.Simone Collins: Yes.Malcolm Collins: Building a, a wagon historically was [00:24:00] very expensive.That’s a- Oh yeah. ... higher, high reward thing, okay, that requires some level of artisanal expertise. Those were what men did historically. Yeah. But keeping the family alive is what women did historically. And I’ll note here, I repeatedly see families think they’re doing something like new and progressive and converge back on this.They’re like, “Oh yeah, the wife is like the nurse or the you know, the stable job that makes a decent income-Simone Collins: Yeah. ...Malcolm Collins: and then the husband is the entrepreneur.” Yes. This is the, I’d almost say it’s like the normal structure among most of our friends in, in relationships.Simone Collins: Totally, yeah. Yeah. Wife has like a W-2 steady job.Husband does something risky for sure.Malcolm Collins: Yeah. As historian Jane Whittel noted, by the way drawing on coroner roles, women’s accidental deaths were overwhelmingly domestic or village based 61%. Now I would note that what’s really interesting there is you can say, “Oh, that’s huge. Women [00:25:00] only died within the village at 61% of the time.” Now keep in mind what that means, 49% of women were dying outside of the village.Why were women, if women were like these shut-ins during the medieval period, 1300 to 1500- Yeah. And this is from Jane Whittle’s work, why were so many of them outside of the village?Simone Collins: Well, these are the, specifically though they’re accidental deaths, so that’s unusual too.Malcolm Collins: Well, right, but this means you, you know, you’re, you’re, you’re putting yourself at risk when you go outside the village no matter what, right?Sure.Simone Collins: Absolutely. Yeah. You’reMalcolm Collins: doing these sorts of ... I’m, I’m just pointing out that like, this happened. Now let’s, let’s go to urban settings. Oh, and this is where Simone’s spicy information comes into play. Do you wanna go into it? Genetic evidence shocked you.Simone Collins: Gosh, yes. No, no, no. There’s ... I have to, I still have to post about it, but there’s been this, this mystery going around on X recently related to new research came out.Here’s one of the headlines covering it [00:26:00] in Science Tech Daily. Birds in cities fear women more than men. Scientists don’t know why. A small consistent difference in how birds respond to approaching humans, hence at hidden cues shaping animal behavior. An international team of scientists has uncovered an unexpected pattern in how city birds respond to people.Species such as great tits. Why do they have such great bird names? House sparrows and black birds take to flight sooner when approached by women than by men. The researchers say the finding is clear, but the reason behind it is still unknown. This study took place in five European countries and involved male and female participants matched for height and color clothing, walking directly toward birds and parks and other ergman green spaces.By measuring how close a person could get before the bird flew away, the team assessed what is known as flight initiation , distance. On average, men were able to get about one meter, 3.3 feet closer than women before the birds took off. This pattern appeared [00:27:00] consistently across all study locations, including Czechia, France, Germany, Poland, and Spain.It also held true across 37 species from cautious birds like magpies to more tolerant ones such as pigeons. So Malcolm immediately turns to me and he’s like, “We know exactly why this is the case.”Malcolm Collins: Yes. This is the question that explains everything we’re going to talk about today, and I think proves without a doubt that this is not some malcolm hallucination or some malcolmnipulation of historical facts.There is really no other plausible way you could have getten, gotten this, and it’s actually it’s not surprising to me that scientists don’t know this because they’re not historians. Ah. And they don’t study the parts of history that are hidden from people. Mm-hmm. But have you ever walked around an old European city?Simone Collins: Yeah, like Edenville.Malcolm Collins: You have walked around an old European city, like let’s say Edinburgh is where I’ve really noticed this. You will notice the [00:28:00] second or third stories where you have windows, you will have these little nooks,like right next to the window that look like they’re made for a bird to make a nest there.Simone Collins: Yeah.Malcolm Collins: And you could say, “That’s really weird.”Simone Collins: Or you think how cute.Malcolm Collins: How cute. They were, they must have been getting eggs from these nests. And it’s no, that’s not what these were used for. What these were used for is the housewife, because remember I said that women hunt small gang-Simone Collins: mm-hmm. ...Malcolm Collins: men hunt, big game.They would build these into the walls of their houses and birds would come and nest in them and they’d come and grab them and they’re young and cook them up and eat them.Simone Collins: It was Pigeon DoorDash.Malcolm Collins: Pigeon doorSimone Collins: edition. Yeah. Yeah.Malcolm Collins: But it likely wasn’t limited to that. It was likely part of all of life back then.Men did not do things during this period like hunt down city birds. Women did. Mm. And what we’re seeing in this is women did cross [00:29:00] culturally across Europe, across locations, across species, and to such an extent that it is existentially baked into the DNA of multiple bird species.Simone Collins: Yeah. So crazy. It’s so cool.Malcolm Collins: Could there not be stronger proof that women were actually a, at a, at a extremely large level, enough level have an evolutionary impact, disproportionately involved with the acquiring of basic proteins for the family when it was not big hunts. And, and keep in mind like how well this fits into our wider categories.So suppose you have like medieval European society or something, and the man is out there doing his artisan, his art- artisan thing, or out there trying to do some sort of a big deal or something like that or building houses and he needs to come home and there needs to be meat on the table, right? The woman is in charge of making sure [00:30:00] that happens.That was the reality of medieval society. Not what you have been told is the reality of medieval society, and we’re seeing it here in the DNA, but you could say, okay, but what about the nobles? Okay. The, the, certainly if we’re talking about like the medieval to early modern 1,100 to 1700s the noble women stayed at home as delicate little flowers and didn’t do any labor and the men did all the labor.It wasn’t surely in that group, the women did the majority of labor labor and the men did the majority of status and crewing activities. So no one’s core roles were high risk high retorn. Unfortunately, that’s just not the case. Specifically what the men did was military service, crusades, tournaments, court intrigue, and warfare to defend and expand lands, gain favor and seize territory.And, and men were often absent from their how ... House, their property and their investment from years at a time. A man going to war [00:31:00] during this period meant being gone for like half a decade. That’s what it, going on a crusade mean that you could be gone for a decade. Women were managing most stuff. And if they weren’t managing it beforehand, like you can be like, oh, well, when the man was home, the man managed most of the things.And it’s like, no, the woman was observient to the man, but the woman still did the majority of the work. It would have been stupid not to do it that way. The woman and the man both know that the man could at any time disappear for a 10 year period. And yet the woman has the man do most of the labor so that he has a teacher in like a, a few days or something or a week or a month before he disappears.Like what are you, that would be so stupid.Simone Collins: Yeah.Malcolm Collins: Especially when you consider that most activities and tasks the woman would need to know would be highly seasonal. And so the man would not be able to teach them with enough time before they left on military duty. It just doesn’t make any sense.Simone Collins: By the way by, just by the way that they were called dos or ducots, the, the things that caught the pigeons.Malcolm Collins: Ah.Simone Collins: And they were common [00:32:00] enough. They were like, they were so common that sometimes basically like the local agricultural communities would get really angry about them because the, the people in, in cities would actively cultivate like pigeons, you know, they, especially because that was like your, your source of food if things got kind of lean.So you wanted to make sure there were lots of pigeons because then you would have something to eat like when the winter came. But then in the nearby agricultural communities, they would eat the crops. And so there was this, this inherent conflict between manor houses and also urban dwellings that had these ducots in them and the people in, in farmlands because they’re like, “Dude, stop the pests.I hate this. This is really annoying.” Versus like- “This is my dinner.” Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Like, ... Anyway so, what did the women manage in Nor- European nobility? So they managed the day-to-day estate economy. So you’ve got to keep in mind, that’s most of the daily work of a noble- Yeah. ... [00:33:00] is, is managing the estate’s economy.Simone Collins: The servants and the, the stuff and the finances and the management and the food coming and going. And there’s a lot going on.Malcolm Collins: They also oversaw agricultural production of the estate. Men did not do that. That was a woman’s work on an estate. They collected rent and taxes. Oh, you thought the man was the oneNo, that was the woman, because again, the man may have to disappear at any moment.Simone Collins: Yeah.Malcolm Collins: They monitored tenants and goods, handling household finances, budgeting, directing servants, handling hiring and firing, ensuring food security. And they also ran when husbands were away defense and legal affairs. Coroners and men-minoral records show women’s work was overwhelmingly internal/stable while man’s was outwardly/risky.” Okay. So, let’s go into things as they shifted, or we can go a bit cross-cultural here.Where do you see ... Well, I already talked about the hoe difference. So basically if you’re doing [00:34:00] hoe or shifting based agriculture the women typically dominate that. And if you’re doing plow-based agriculture, if you’re wondering where plow-based agriculture never really dominated here you’re looking at Sub-Sahara Africa and parts of Southeast Asia and Latin America and in these areas, women still do the majority of labor.Simone Collins: Is thisMalcolm Collins: whySimone Collins: women are called hos?Malcolm Collins: I don’t know, but I’ll, I’ll tell you this. If you’re like, “Come on. “ Women don’t do the majority of hard manual labor in pre-plo societies, and I’m like, “Okay, have you ever been to Latin America?” And people are like, “Yeah, I mean, I, I guess I’ve been a little bit in Latin America.”I’m like, “Did you ever drive in any rural region?” And people are like, “Well, of course, you know, I’ve been out of, I’m a worldly person.” And I’ve been like, okay, so when you looked along the roadside and you saw people carrying 60 pound jugs on their head, which, which gender was doing that?[00:35:00]Simone Collins: Sorry, no, it, it actually is in reference to a hoe. So the, yeah, hose is- Women wereMalcolm Collins: called hose because they-Simone Collins: Some historians note that in early America, free black women doing farm labor were sometimes dehumanized and literally called hose as if they were just tools, which connects the word to racism and slavery as well as sexism.Malcolm Collins: But it also shows that in early freed black society, women did the majority of the farm labor when it was done. Because,Simone Collins: yeah, because they did the work with the hose. Oh my God. Ah, oh my God. Anyway, sorry, carry on.Malcolm Collins: No, but Simone, I’m trying to get you to grock this. You have been in rural Latin America, right?Simone Collins: Yes. Well, mostly- Take it urban.Malcolm Collins: Take an image in your head.Simone Collins: Okay.Malcolm Collins: You’re driving down a rural road. You look out the side of a car, okay? You see somebody with a 60 pound jug of something on their head.Simone Collins: Oh, it’s a woman, obviously. Yeah.Malcolm Collins: Always a woman.Simone Collins: Always, always a woman. Yes.Malcolm Collins: Okay.Simone Collins: Yeah.Malcolm Collins: People want to say, oh, in these primitive societies, it’s [00:36:00] men who are doing all the manual labor, all of the hard labor, and it’s like, this is factually-Simone Collins: No, all, all the farming exposure people have had, like, in developed countries is post-industrial farming where, like, yeah, I mean, my evoked set of, like, you know, my, my AI generated image in my mind of, you know, farm is like a man on a giant tractor that costs like a million dollars, you know, 500,000 dollars.Malcolm Collins: Yeah.Simone Collins: Obviously-Malcolm Collins: Well, and I think that guys also get it wrong where they’re like, well, men are stronger, therefore that means that they did the more grueling manual labor. When, if you have actually been to many developing countries, what you will see is the most grueling manual labor where pure strength isn’t what’s at play here is predominantly done by women.And again, when we talk about in Latin America, you see them carrying this huge things of water on the head, the huge [00:37:00] things of food on their heads, on the, the giant packs. If it’s not on their head, you’ll see the, like, the, the beleaguered woman who’s like clearly in her early 30s, but like looks like she’s like 55 or something with the giant backpack on going across the little trail or whatever.You go it’s not just Latin America, you go to Africa, you’ll see this as well. You go to-Simone Collins: China too. Let’s be clear. China too. Right.Malcolm Collins: Yeah. ‘Simone Collins: Cause I, I’ve actually spent a lot more time in rural, like countryside China and Japan actually than,Malcolm Collins: Was it majority women doing the harder labor when you’re-Simone Collins: Yeah,Malcolm Collins: 100%.Yeah. Yeah. D-Simone Collins: Yeah.Malcolm Collins: Guys, you do not know how brain cucked you are if, if a woman has convinced you, “We just need to go back to the traditional way and I’ll stay at home and you do all this stuff.” Because you’re so strong, look at your muscles, could you open this jar for me? All you see as a woman, I could just never do anything.Meanwhile these very sane guys have been to Latin America, looked out a car and been like, “Huh, it’s weird that women are doing all the [00:38:00] manual labor in this society. I wonder what the, what the men are doing.” Nothing. That, that must be a strange, strange primitive coincidence. We need to go back to this.We need to go back to a world where women raise children and do the labor, just like I’ve structured in my family. People are like ... That is how women ... Because remember how guys are always like, “Women are hypergamist.” Right? And so how does hypergamy really work, right? SomeSimone Collins: kind of crab meeting dance.What was that supposed to be?Malcolm Collins: Well, no, it’s, it’s, it’s men doing the spasm- Oh, okay. ... hypergenous women. And it’s like, okay, so if women are hypergamist, okay, they want a partner who is there better, okay? Mm-hmm. Intellectually in terms of status, in terms of physicality, whatever. Yeah.Simone Collins: Yeah.Malcolm Collins: Why did that work historically?Because the women did the labor to justify their worth to the genetically [00:39:00] superior male. Mm-hmm. I’m not saying that’s the way our relationship is structured. I’m just saying,Simone Collins: Everyone knows it, Malcolm. It’s fine. They’ve already said it many times.Malcolm Collins: I want the grateful woman who wants to do the labor, who is excited to do the labor and there are a lot of women, like, you guys would be surprised when a woman hooks into a guy who she thinks is hypergamist to her the amount of effort she will put into holding onto that guy.And if you’re just like, “Okay, we’re not playing any games. It’s about labor. You put a 60 pound jug of water on your head, you walk 30 miles a day, go. “ And she’s like, “Simone Collins: Sir, yes, third. Yeah. She’s- Sorry,Malcolm Collins: sorry. Yes.Simone Collins: For real. ThankMalcolm Collins: you. This is the way I wanted to live. Yeah. Easy.Simone Collins: Which is, I think it’s another reason why our culture’s so toxic in that it it would demean any woman for, like, accepting that frame, admitting that to herself.Like, the, the successful framing presented to women is, okay, [00:40:00] well, now, you know, if, if, if you like a man, you need to pretend that nothing he ever does is impressive, that you will never do any work for him ever et cetera, et cetera. That, that any, any work you do is an imposition and basically a crime against your entire gender and society, it’s, it’s really messed up.Malcolm Collins: Yeah. So let’s go to a few other societies here so you can see that this is not just a European phenomenon of anythingSimone Collins: European- Are you ... Hose was it. All, all I need was that. My God.Malcolm Collins: Literally named after hose. Okay. So, if you go to West Africa women have long dominated market trading and local commerce in the region giving them significant control of household budgets, credit networks, and economic decision making.In Ghana, market queens, elected female leaders hey- MarketSimone Collins: queens. ...Malcolm Collins: for specific commodities, food, good, textiles, they regulate prices, resolve disputes, organize self-help groups, and wield political economic influence. This includes mediating with authorities and ensuring food [00:41:00] system stability. If you contrast this with men who do home-based farming men often handle the initial land clearing for certain crops while women perform the ongoing, labor-intensive, but lower risk tasks of plowing, weeding, harvesting, and processing, plus the dominant role in marketing the surplus.Men were involved in higher risk external activities like hunting, fishing, and long haul trade or craft production. So keep in mind, again, you’re seeing this here. What do men do? It is higher risk things, higher artisan training things. Women do the lower risk things and the more economically focused things.Simone Collins: Mm.Malcolm Collins: And again, I’m, I’m, I’m saying you need to alter your perception of what is a male and female role in the economy, not saying that you need to take on a women’s role, you just happen to have been wrong about what, what the woman’s role was.Simone Collins: Yeah.Malcolm Collins: And I was really surprised because we have a, like, pretty educated fan base and it made me realize that even within [00:42:00] the educated world, how-Simone Collins: Look, they probably knew but forgot because I would just say the CIOP is so in, in far in the other direction.Malcolm Collins: ItSimone Collins: is. It’s just been memory hold. I, I don’t think this is about ignorance. It’s about repeated blunt force of propaganda in the other direction.Malcolm Collins: Yeah. It’s feminists go out there and they’re like, women were vikings and women hunted mammoths. And women ... And so when they hear something like women were involved in, you know, in, in hunting meat and like 70% of hunter-gatherer societies, they just throw it out because they’re like, oh, that must be biased scientist nonsense, right?Mm-hmm. And then they read the fine print and it was mice and rabbits and squirrels. It’s like, oh, that makes sense. Right? Like the basic kind of meats that would be easier to get on a daily basis to resure that the nutrition that they needed. Yeah. And it’s like, and this is how hypergamy worked traditionally.And it’s like, oh, that’s why a man would choose a lesser woman.Simone Collins: Uh-huh.Malcolm Collins: Because she was walking to and from with a 60 pound goord [00:43:00] on her head. You know, like-Simone Collins: Yeah. Yeah.Malcolm Collins: Okay. Let’s go to India.Simone Collins: Okay.Malcolm Collins: So, men, again, handled plowing, irrigation and market sales. So this is one where women handled more market stuff.Women perform lower variants work like sewing, transplanting, weeding, harvesting, gleaning, post-harvest processing plus livestock, kitchen gardens, and household budgeting. They contributed to 70% of agricultural labor in many regions. So again, they’re still doing the majority of agricultural-Simone Collins: These are alsoKeep in mind, like, on our episode on divisions of labor and household and what women report enjoying more, these are things that women still. In, in, in surveys, these are the types of activities women enjoy. These are also more bureaucratic activities, more routine activities, very predictable activities.And you see this also in, like, the lower rates of female entrepreneurship. Women, on average, are just, they, we don’t like the high risk, high reward. It’s very stressful. Like, I know you, you’re constantly trying to loop me [00:44:00] into, like, your VC stuff and it freaks me out and you’re constantly frustrated with the fact that I’m like, “Oh.”Malcolm Collins: Yeah, you don’t fully check the product beforehand. You don’t fully, you know, you’re just like, “I’m gonna do the performative minimum when it comes to high risk, high reward.”Simone Collins: Yeah, because they, I find it extremely stressful and aversive versus like the routine stuff which would literally drive you to madness or if, if not some ambulance.You, you, you know, I, I can do that and be very happy with it.Malcolm Collins: By the way for the people who wanna use a super search feature, feature on our fab, it can be used on things like episode because everyone of the models that runs on it has the capability of searching the internet.Simone Collins: Yeah.Malcolm Collins: So you could put something like the URL of this episode in and be like, is this accurate?What’s accurate? What’s not accurate? SoSimone Collins: cool. It’s really well done. It’s really well done.Malcolm Collins: And not just that. I mean, I do encourage you. If you are listening to this and you’re like, “I just do not believe this. I think this is urban monoculture. I think that this is seriously put it into an AI or something, right?Like I do that before any episode [00:45:00] goes live just to look for errors that may be in the episode.”Simone Collins: Yeah.Malcolm Collins: Because I take it- That’s soSimone Collins: cool. ...Malcolm Collins: very seriously that I’m getting you guys factually accurate information.Simone Collins: Yeah.Malcolm Collins: And it is yeah, important that we actually make a society that works instead of relying on some weird cargo cult of the past, right?Simone Collins: Yeah. Yes.Malcolm Collins: Never exists. So what about the Indian elites? Elite men pursued military conquests, court politics, and imperial administration. Again, all high risk, high rewards. Whereas rural women in the Zinna secluded women’s orders exercised real economic and managerial authority, administering large Jaguar estates, revenue land, controlling finances and salaries patrigene networks, trade, and even intelligent/diplomacy.Figures like Noor Haran and Harm Begin managed commercial enterprises and household governance as a parallel administrative node. The Zena had its own female officers, Dragas, Twitters, and something accounts that operated as an economic [00:46:00] hub. So again, you see the exact same pattern. This is not just like one culture.If we’re gonna go to Asia here if you’re talking about the Imperial Confucian China, men operated the outer sphere, scholar official examples. So this was like intense high stake competition for status and wealth, bureaucracy, warn and trade, trade. This is one of the few areas where men really dominated the bureaucracy and this is because it was an imperial bureaucracy and then highly institutionalized.Failure meant a loss of prestige plus lower elevation of the family. Women were confined to the quote unquote inner sphere managing household finances, education of the children, silk production, food processing, and daily budgeting. Confucian texts such as record of rituals explicitly divided the rules.Men, external public, women, internal domestic. So I, I think that this is really cool here where you can see, even if you’re talking about these incredibly, like Confucianism is considered very sexist and it’s still like, yeah, well, women manage the household of course, right? Like,Simone Collins: Duh. [00:47:00] Yeah.Malcolm Collins: If you go to feudal edo Japan men samuraize the warfare class, did duals, loyalty, lords, political maneuvering whereas women, again, govern the household, financial management, budgeting and even gave their husband’s allowances, which we see in the historical record.They did child education, silicotton production and protected family honor, though, though less so. They learned reading, writing, local administration, et cetera. And wives often, like in Europe, ran the estate during the male absence. Now, if your wife has been running your estate during your absence, not only again, do you need to prep her for doing this, but you can be like, “Okay, but after the men came back and they knew the wives could do it, didn’t they take over again?”And it’s like, no, because they were the dominant member of the household. And if you’re the dominant member of the household and the other person can do something competently, you don’t just take the work back. I’m, I, I’m sorry if that paint’s been in a bad light, but that is the reality of actually being a dominant member within a household.[00:48:00] So let’s go to colonial America, all right? Because people can be like, “Well, this isn’t the American tradition, is it? “ It, men focused, again, on high risk work. They did clearing land which we have a lot of stuff from. And they did some hunting so a, a lot of politicking. Like men were really focused on like- Let’s think aboutSimone Collins: like John and Abigail Adams, the classic American power couple.Yeah.Malcolm Collins: We have really good, if, if you’re not familiar with John and Abigail Adams, Abigail managed all of the investment, all of the estates, all of the hiring and firing, all of the everything. And John went to do the historically important stuff- mm-hmm. ... of setting up the American nation.Simone Collins: And this also was the Washington too.Yeah. I mean, this is like, this was the format. It was the format.Malcolm Collins: It was the format. Women made sure that the man had their allowance and the man made sure that the woman’s name would be mentioned in history, okay? That is the difference between the two roles. That is the way Simone and I structure our relationship, and this [00:49:00] is the way INow I’m just gonna straight out and say it is the better way to structure a relationship. Now that I see how ubiquitous it is throughout history, and that any other mechanism for structuring relationships has largely been experimental and short term like male wage labor for a female who sits at home all day.And, and mind you, even at the height of that particular experiment, like the 50s, all of the women were out of their mind on drugs and going crazy, right? Like the, it wasn’t working, okay? It may have had some like veneer of working in like Hollywood, but the reality- Oh,Simone Collins: if it worked, we, we wouldn’t have needed all those benzos.No, for sure it wasn’t working. It was not working.Malcolm Collins: These people were coked out of their mind. They were benzoed out of their mind. They barely had any idea what was happening because you cannot take a smart, intelligent person and say, “Here, stay at home, do nothing all day,” right? Like that’s you up. Okay.What about women? Women did well, we don’t even need to go into it. You’ve basically gone over Martha Washington, Abigail Adams. I, I [00:50:00] hope most Americans are fairly aware of those stories and what those women did. And, and they were not considered exceptional for their period. Nobody was like, “Oh, Abigail Adams, what like a weird lesbian she is for managing the estate or something, right?”Simone Collins: Cottage core lesbian Abigail Adams with all the children somehow, but whatever.Malcolm Collins: Again, if you go to the backwoods, you go to the frontier lifestyles I mean, I’m sure everybody is aware how much labor the women did in the frontier America, right? Like are, are you not? Like, do you not know that women basically managed everything except protecting the property and plowing and clearing fields?So like I assume ... It’s like people are aware of this. They just don’t reflect on it, I guess. I’m a little like, like-Simone Collins: It just, it goes, it runs so contrary to the popular narratives, I guess. Like I think it’s I don’t know. I don’t know. And here’s the, the funny thing too-Malcolm Collins: When you think of milk.Simone Collins: It’s also that there was noMalcolm Collins: who-Simone Collins: There was no-Malcolm Collins: Cleared the land.Simone Collins: There was no nar- [00:51:00] there was no feminist argument against this weirdly, right? When women complained about things, and you did an, even a very, you know, unflattering to women episode on women who hated men who were early feminist activists- Yeah. ... this was not a complaint. They were not like, “Man, I’m so angry about the fact that I had to do all this work and that I have to do all this work.”No, but it was like, it just comes naturally to women. Women are workhorses.Malcolm Collins: Because you want the family to get to staySimone Collins: alive,Malcolm Collins: right?Simone Collins: The, that’s, I think that’s another reason why this just doesn’t come up is that there’s no, there was never really a narrative to it and that now the narrative is just so heavily on like any work that women do is considered so unforgivable that the, the mere, like the fact that we have this concept of the mental load, that like, I have to think about things, this is horrible.Like, I, I don’t know. Yeah. And I alsoMalcolm Collins: think it’s because men look at history and they’re aware. So if we look at like colonial period, it’s like, okay, what did women do? Okay, so women did cooking, baking, [00:52:00] preserving, which was very important in terms of like exporting long-term family life, et cetera, soap and candle making, clothing making, child brewing, but we’re putting that aside because most people are aware of that.Gardening and livestock, weeding, harvesting, milking, cheese making and curing and often preparing of pelts. So, you know, you hear about those things and you’re like, okay, but how hard is like every one of those individual ... Do you know how hard, like just milking and cheese making is? It is brutal.Do you know how hard weeding is when you are manually weeding not a garden? I don’t know how many men have weeded a garden which is brutal. Weeding an entire field to feed a family. Okay, we are talking about extremely serious amounts of labor here and, and backbreaking labor, brutal labor. Okay. [00:53:00] Let’s keep going here.Then people are like, okay, but by the time the industrial revolution happened, 1790s to 1910s and here we’re talking about like proto-wage labor, surely women stopped working. And the answer is no. Actually, in the early days of industrialization, we still had women working really heavily. In fact, we have entire like towns that were like female labor camps basically especially women who didn’t want to get married.They worked really heavily. But here’s where you’re beginning to have married men begin to care for women at the beginning of industrialization. But this is a modern phenomenon and a phenomenon that never really worked and culminated with drugged out women barely coherent, okay? Women want to be turned into workhorses.They want to be labored and I’m just [00:54:00] encouraging us to break this particular myth that somehow misogynists have adopted and like, let’s go back to it and be like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. A woman’s job is in the field, it’s in the barn, it’s not just in the kitchen, it’s, it’s the children, it’s the education, and it’s most other things as well.And you- Yeah,Simone Collins: but, but very clearly it’s, it’s predictable, routine, repetitive-Malcolm Collins: Yes. ...Simone Collins: at home labor which, you know, you make it sound so horrible, you, you’re, on the flip side of it, it’s this very, you know, cottage core, cozy, hobbit-like romantic life that I think a lot of people crave, you know, and wish, you know, they, they want to retire to that.That, that is the dream.Malcolm Collins: Well, I mean, we can go back to this insofar as we have work from home again. If you look at our structured relationship, what does Simone do? She does [00:55:00] emails, she does taxes, she does the bureaucratic sort of low risk work of managing employees, managing hiring and firing she manages clients, she manages all of that stuff.What do I do? I manage building new things, right? I manage building out our fab. I manage building out, like, the new features like Supersearch. I’ve got to work on the card game, which apparently was having some bugs. I work on our vibe coding platform, which you can use with the agents on the website. I, I do our, you know, I’m not safe for work chat bot stuff on ourfab.ai.Like wherever there is work in terms of building stuff, that is where I am, where there is work in terms of maintaining stuff, that is where Simone is. Our relationship could not be more radically traditional if you tried.Which is, I think, really interesting, and it’s something that we should emphasize more in interviews, actually, now that I think about it.Simone Collins: Yeah, it was, it was never something we planned to be fair. It’s [00:56:00] just kind of how things shook out.Malcolm Collins: It’s the natural roles of males and females. Yeah. And if you operateSimone Collins: without- It’s veryYeah, we, because we heavily believe in leaning into our aptitudes and lower token cost. Like, the way we sometimes describe it is like, look, you know, Malcolm could make dinner, but it would cost him 58 tokens and it cost me seven. So I’m gonna make dinner. I could plausibly, you know, build some new startup, but it would cost me 8,000 tokens and it costs him like, you know, 300.So let’s go. Like it, it just, it’s, it’s so obvious over time.Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Well, I hope that this breaks the biggest myth that women still weave over the minds of men in our society.Simone Collins: Yeah.Malcolm Collins: That it’s, it’s, it’s, oh it’s, it’s very much, oh, don’t throw me into the Briar Pratch. Oh, whatever you do, don’t make me stay at home and do nothing but childcare and education.Oh, [00:57:00] whatever you do, Briar Fox, whatever you do, do not throw me into that Briar patch. For, for people who do not know, this is from the story of Brower Rabbit and Briar Fox and- That’sSimone Collins: one of the jacktales, right?Malcolm Collins: No, was actually an adaptation of an African story, but it’s clearly was adopted to a jacktail format- Ah.because in the Briar Rabbit story, sorry, this is a completely different tangent here, anthropology tangent. Briar Rabbit appears much more like Jack than he appears in the African versions. Oh. In the African versions, he is a trickster God with magical powers. Oh. Where what typically separates Jack from any other figure like him is that he has no magical powers.He is not a God, he just outwits his opponents. And that’s what Briar Rabbit does. Interesting. So he appears much more like a jacktails figure. Mm. And this would’ve been during the period where the slave culture would’ve collided with the backwards culture, so I think that that’s where they picked it up from.Simone Collins: Nice.Malcolm Collins: But basically he’s saying, “Whatever you do, don’t throw me into the briar patch because he’s at home with the briar patch. That’s where he’s safest is in the briar [00:58:00] patch.” That’s the easiest thing for him. But anyway, love you, Simone.Simone Collins: Love you too.Malcolm Collins: Go downstairs and cook me some of those fricking mushrooms that you harvested-Simone Collins: Golden oyster mushrooms.Malcolm Collins: Yeah. And then serve it to me because that is-Simone Collins: That’s my job. ...Malcolm Collins: weird, kinky job you have as a wife, right?Simone Collins: Yeah.Malcolm Collins: Love you.Simone Collins: I love you too. You’re the best.Malcolm Collins: Oh how? I’m so mean. I’m so demanding.Simone Collins: No, man. We all, we all asked for this. That’s the, that’s the thing. That’s the thing. And I love it. And I loveMalcolm Collins: you. I love you too.Simone Collins: See you soon.Malcolm Collins: Yes. Okay, so how are you gonna cook these mushrooms you found for me in the woods?Simone Collins: I thought of the, of the ways I’ve seen them prepared that doing a cross section cut and then making mushroom steaks looked the most promising. Because then you could cut little slices of it. Like it’s basically like a slice of it.You know, people make cauliflower steaks by like thinlyMalcolm Collins: cutting- Right, [00:59:00] but is that gonna, is that gonna pair well with a actual steak?Simone Collins: Yeah, because you’re still just cutting small like bites of it.Malcolm Collins: Are you gonna be able to cook them together?Simone Collins: That’s not my plan. Because I think that the temperature at which I would need to cook the, I mean that I’m cooking the steak at you, you make a super, super, super hot cast iron skillet for s- for, for pan seared steak and then for this, you don’t wanna like burn it.You just wanna cook it through. So what I plan on doing is maybe using some of the drippings from the steak for the-Malcolm Collins: That sounds really good, yeah.Simone Collins: Yeah. ‘Cause I, I like to render it in its own fat, but I’ll do that with an additional butter and then we’ll use that butter for the, the mushrooms while the steak sits, because it’s supposed to sit for 10 minutes to do whatever it does.I don’t know what it does. Settles. I don’t know. I, I always, I treat all food like it’s a souffle and it’s about to deflate if I don’t eat it immediately after preparing. So I get super nervous. This idea of letting steak [01:00:00] rest. Anyway, let’s go.Malcolm Collins: All right.Speaker 7: Okay, what are you looking at, buddy? I’m looking at these baby chicks. Oh, do you like baby chicks? Yeah. Are they your friends? What are their names? Oh, this one’s name is,um, I can get up, smell.This one right here is my favorite one. He’s so adorable. What is he called? He’s called cutish. Cutish? Yes. It’s a good name, buddy. Yeah, he’s my favorite, he’s my favorite because he’s orange look. You’re gonna wash your hands afterwards, right? Yeah. Here, you want me to give you kids? Yeah. I love you. I do. I This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit basedcamppodcast.substack.com/subscribe

Leftist academics just dropped a wild new paper titled “Toward Individualistic Reproduction: Solving the Fertility Crisis Could Require a Further Marginalization of Men.” In this episode of Based Camp, Simone & Malcolm Collins break it down — from the evolutionary arguments about why men are now “useless” to women in high-equality societies, to the dystopian policy prescriptions: massive welfare transfers to enable single motherhood, robot nannies, artificial wombs, and essentially declaring bankruptcy on pair-bonding and two-parent families.The Collinses critique the Brave New World vibes, discuss why pair-bonding repair is supposedly impossible, explore real pronatalist alternatives, and go on wide-ranging tangents about immigration & welfare, political violence thresholds, historical gender roles, family business dynamics, and the coming demographic speciation.A must-watch for anyone concerned about the birth rate collapse, gender dynamics, and the radical policy ideas emerging from academia.Show NotesReferring to a research article published in Politics and the Life Sciences from Cambridge University Press, Christian Heiens on X posted: “Checking in on the status of Wokeism, and it turns out Leftist academics are unironically saying that society needs to intentionally “marginalize men” even more to supposedly solve the birth rate. History shows us that what’s normalized in academia becomes publicly mainstream within a generation, and there is no sign the ship is turning or even slowing down.”Christian continues:* If academics are going to unironically argue that society has to intentionally beat down men even more in the name of apparently resolving the birth rate crisis then all bets are off and it’s time to start pointing out the obvious as a rebuttal:* “The way you solve the birth rate crisis is by banning women from most professions they weren’t engaged in before 1965.”* I don’t see how this is any more radical than what’s already becoming normalized within academia. But you’re unlikely to ever see a paper with this kind of abstract published because it transgresses on one of Progressivism’s most holy pillars.* “Artificial womb technology, robot nannies and partners help women and men solo parent, AI-driven date matching”* This entire paper reads like a giant advertisement for Brave New World.Let’s take a look at this article.The ArticleToward individualistic reproduction: Solving the fertility crisis could require a further marginalization of menPublished online by Cambridge University Press: 24 April 2026The Authors* Mads Larsen* Evolutionary Perspectives on Enhancing Quality of Life* Leif Edward Ottesen Kennair* Other articles* Breakup Likelihood Following Hypothetical Sexual or Emotional Infidelity: Perceived Threat, Blame, and Forgiveness* 2 - Female Sexual Attraction Tactics* Maryanne L. Fisher* Other articles* 7 - Mate Poaching by Men* 4 - Female Intrasexual Competition* 16 - Shifts in Partner Attractiveness* 45 - The Internet Is for Porn* 31 - Evolutionary PsychologyThe AbstractThe cross-national correlation between gender equality and lower fertility is exceptionally strong (r ≈ 0.81). After the 1960s, a unique mating regime spread across parts of the world—with female emancipation, individual mate choice, and effective birth control—followed by a continuing rise in singlehood and declining fertility. Almost all women still want to reproduce, but many struggle to find a good-enough partner. This article argues from an evolutionary perspective that many men’s utility to “free women” has been so diminished that solving the fertility crisis by increasing pair-bonding rates seems unfeasible. A viable means for aiding the survival of low-fertility nations could be to provide women with the economic and social resources necessary for them to conclude that having children alone makes for a better life than remaining childless. Such policies would likely exacerbate male marginalization, but new technologies are on the horizon that could offer men reproductive equality.The Presented ContextIn their framing, ancestral ape‑like promiscuity gave way to a long era of enforced pair‑bonding (via kin and social institutions), but today’s combination of female autonomy and contraception has partially “re‑opened” a promiscuous, highly selective mating pattern, now mediated by modern tools like dating apps.This, they argue, structurally sidelines many men, reduces pair‑bonding and thus births, and is the core evolutionary–psychological mechanism behind the fertility crisis in rich, gender‑equal countriesOn what grounds do they argue that the problem cannot be fixed by amending dating/marriage norms in developed countries? Why do they think pair bonding can’t be repaired?* They argue that you can’t fix the fertility crisis just by tweaking dating or marriage norms because (a) women’s preferences and incentives have structurally shifted in rich, gender‑equal societies, (b) a large share of men now offer too little “utility” to be chosen as partners, and (c) the emotional and technological environment (contraception, dating apps) pushes mating toward short‑term, non‑reproductive patterns that norms alone can’t reverse.Recommended Policies* Make it easy for women to have children without partnersCore policy recommendation* The authors argue that trying to fix low fertility mainly by boosting pair‑bonding and marriage rates is unlikely to work, because in rich, gender‑equal societies many men no longer provide enough utility to be acceptable long‑term partners for “free women.”* Instead, they propose that states should provide women with such extensive economic and social support that a woman can rationally judge “having children alone” as a better life than remaining childless, thus raising birth rates through solo motherhood rather than couple‑based reproduction.* For a start, they recommend that governments run “limited reproductive policy experiments” (pilot programs) to empirically discover what package and level of support actually induces women to have the number of children they report wanting when single.How that’s supposed to happen:* Large resource transfers* They’re deliberately vague* Presumably, this would be long-term income support or guaranteed living standards for single mothers* Broader welfare support targeted at enabling individualistic reproduction* Welfare queens?????* Strong public childcare* Strong work-family policies* General welfare systems that remove dependence on male partners* The general idea is to make women totally independent of men* Presumably AI is going to make this possible (according to the authors—who refer to a “post-automation” future* “Today, such large resource transfers are perhaps politically and fiscally unfeasible, but nations should consider limited reproductive policy experiments to find out what social and economic resources are required to motivate sufficient individualistic reproduction. In our post-automation future, perhaps as early as by 2040 (Kurzweil, Reference Kurzweil2024; Nayebi, Reference Nayebi2025; Rainie & Anderson, Reference Rainie and Anderson2024), insights from these pilot projects could inform national policies with the potential to substantially increase fertility.”Acknowledged Side Effects* The authors acknowledge that such policies would “likely exacerbate male marginalization,” since further reducing women’s economic dependence on men lowers the mate value of some groups of men* BUT!!! they argue the existential risks from demographic collapse justify these measures, and they speculate that technologies like artificial wombs could later give men more symmetrical reproductive options, restoring some form of “reproductive equality” between the sexes.The Brave New World of it AllIn Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, reproduction is almost the mirror image of what the “individualistic reproduction” paper is proposing: instead of empowering individual women to reproduce on their own terms, the state completely takes over reproduction, engineers people in hatcheries, and severs sex from procreation to maximize social stability and control.In the World State, no one gives birth; all children are produced in centralized hatcheries using processes like Bokanovskification, which mass‑produces near‑identical embryos to match the state’s labor needs.Natural pregnancy and “motherhood” are taboo and even obscene terms, while contraception and sterilization are universal; sex is encouraged purely for pleasure and social cohesion, not for having children.Huxley imagines reproduction fully collectivized and tightly controlled by the state, with individuals having essentially no reproductive autonomy.How this article diverges: the authors of this article, by contrast, imagines the state giving resources to individual women so they can choose to have children alone; reproduction remains individualized and voluntary, even though the motive is still to solve a demographic‑political problem rather than to serve purely personal wishes.One of the conditioned sayings in the Brave New World society: “everyone belongs to everyone else,”Episode TranscriptSimone Collins: [00:00:00] so like a couple days ago article titled Toward Individualistic Reproduction: Solving the Fertility Crisis Could Require a Further Marginalization of Men.Great title. Almost all women still want to reproduce, but many struggle to find good enough partner.This article argues from an evolutionary perspective that many men’s utility to free women has been so diminished that solving the fertility crisis by increasing pair bonding rates seems unfeasible. In other words, men are useless now. A viableMalcolm Collins: means. Oh, yes. They made men useless to women.Simone Collins: Yes. Yeah.This is what leftists are saying. that today’s combination of female autonomy and contraception has partially reopened a promiscuous, highly selective mating pattern, now mediated by modern tools like dating apps.But they’re basically like, oh, apes used to have just like a lot of females mating with one man, and now we’re kind of going back to that. Like, and there’s no, there’s noMalcolm Collins: action fixingSimone Collins: it.Malcolm Collins: They actually want to go back to Mike and Simone.[00:01:00]Simone Collins: Hello, Malcolm. I’m excited to be speaking with you today because as prominent prenatalist advocates, we’re often asked, where are the leftist pronatalists?Where are the, you know, trusted academic pronatalists? Where, what’s, what’s going on with them? Surely they exist. What are their policies?Malcolm Collins: What are their policies? Are they-Simone Collins: Well, one, one set just published their policies and they’re kind of unhinged and dystopian, so I’m delighted and I want to share them with you.Malcolm Collins: Well, generally, I like unhinged and dystopian, you know, a lot ofSimone Collins: people- Me too. ...Malcolm Collins: say I’m unhinged dystopian, so- Yeah.Simone Collins: No, this is what we, it’s what we’d like to see. Uh so, yeah, I, I think both of us are gonna come off maybe a little bit more in favor of this and you, you might expect, but there are th- some things about it that I think are just horrible.So, yeah, we’ll, we’ll critique it, but let me first just give you, you know, the full, the full breakdown. Mm-hmm. But referring to a research article published in politics and life sciences from Cambridge University Press, Christian Heinz on [00:02:00] X posted checking in on the status of wokism, and it turns out leftist academics are unironically saying that society needs to intentionally quote unquote marginalized men even more to supposedly solve the birth rate.History shows us that’s what’s normalized in academia becomes publicly mainstream within a generation, and there’s no sign the ship is turning over or even slowing down-Malcolm Collins: Well, I, I think there is a sign that that ship is in the process of sinking rightSimone Collins: now. Yeah, we would beg to differ with Christian on that.Oh. But he, he continues, “If academics are going to unironically argue that society has to intentionally beat down men even more in the name of apparently resolving the birth rate crisis, then all bets are off and it’s time to start pointing out the obvious as a rebuttal. The way you solve the birth rate crisis is by banning women from most professions they weren’t engaged in before 1965.I don’t see how this is any more radical than what’s already being normalized within academia, but you’re unlikely to ever see [00:03:00] a paper with this kind, with this kind of abstract published because it transgresses one of progressivism’s most holy pillars.” Now, I mean, I disagree with that because women have been engaged in all sorts of professions before 1965 thatI, I, I guess like maybe that’s, maybe that’s the point.That’s actually, that could be a really interesting thing to, to explore, but I don’t think that’s the solution. Anyway, they continueMalcolm Collins: artificial- I think a lot of guys are unaware of how employed many women were before that period. The only period where women were not widely employed was like the 1920s to the 1950s.And before that, they held most jobs that they hold today and they didn’t hold ... So they didn’t hold like the heavy manual labor stuff or like the war stuff-Simone Collins: Yeah, they did. They were out working in the fields. I mean, maybe they weren’t working in mind.Malcolm Collins: No, no, no, no. Not the same type of manual labor that you see being overwhelmingly male today.Simone Collins: Yes, yes.Malcolm Collins: And, and so you’re not really chan- what, what, what ... I mean, I think what they really mean is to [00:04:00] artificially attempt to create ... Like this, this is one of these things that I just need to ex- ... Sorry, this gets me so much because a right wing point, and I’m right wing, and it is such an uninformed right wing point that I think it makes us all look stupid.So, women, like the idea of men leaving the household to go to a job that’s like a, a, a wage job didn’t really get popular until the 1900s. Really in like the 1910s is when it began to reach a mass audience.Simone Collins: It’s a post-industrial revolution thing.Malcolm Collins: Yeah. And before the ... And, and it stopped being male dominated in the 1970s.That’s when women really began to enter the job market in mass. So you, you, you only had this really operational for about half a century, and it was only really ever successful in like the upper middle class in the United States. Which, I mean, obviously influenced Hollywood of that era and so created the press in like the, the perception modern audiences in, in this case you are the [00:05:00] modern audience that this was ever a widespread role of women.Women actually worked i- in the household industry if you go to pre-wage labor economies and at levels that were, ... I, like I, I’d say ubiquitous, right? You know? Well,Simone Collins: Christian’s rebuttal might be exactly my point. I’m just saying pre 1965 jobs, so ...Malcolm Collins: Well, those jobs were often closer to what today we would call management that I think these people realize.So an example would be if the family was a butcher, like we, we’ve talked about before the man would butcher the meat and the woman would run the finances and the procuring of food and the woman was the manager. It’sSimone Collins: true. Yeah, she’d manage the books, she’d manage the sales, she’d manageMalcolm Collins: the- Or if she was an upper class woman, she would quote unquote-Simone Collins: Manage the household.Malcolm Collins: Manage the household. That meant the finding-Simone Collins: Hiring, hiring, recruiting, finances.Malcolm Collins: [00:06:00] Recruiting-Simone Collins: Yeah. ...Malcolm Collins: all the staff. The man may do business outside of the household, but it was often a lot less of the critical kind of business. There’sSimone Collins: often like, how do we invest our money,Malcolm Collins: More like entrepreneurship.Yes. You, you would think of it today, which, which I think is not an inappropriate way for a family to structure themselves. It’s very much I, I could say- Maybe thatSimone Collins: was Christian’s point. We, we don’t know.Malcolm Collins: The, the woman does the safe job and the man does the riskier, high return job. Yeah. Which is, I mean, that’s the way Hunter gatherers work.The woman gathered the f- like the berries that was, you know, low risk, low return, but kept everyone fed, and the men would go high risk, high return, like meat gathering where you could get gored, you know? ButSimone Collins: is it- I thought you meant get gored, like pick up gourds. You meant get gored like stabbed by a rhinoceros horn.Malcolm Collins: Yes, yes. No, no, no, no. But I’m, I’m, I’m pointing this out because it’s important that we not fall, fall for like this weird trad cargo cult and we actually try to, you know, structure something that could work.Simone Collins: Because that’s likely what Christian was thinking, like, [00:07:00] oh, women should just be secretaries and teachers.Whereas we’re like, yeah, sure, women could be managers and like finance-Malcolm Collins: No, women actually, no, I disagree with you. In a modern context, women make awful managers. Women make other women-Simone Collins: Oh, within a household context, they’re, they’re really good managers.Malcolm Collins: Yeah. They, when, when a woman is serving with her husband in a managerial context, but she is technically supportant to them in a social context the dynamics work very well.Mm-hmm. That’s the way you and I basically operate, right?Simone Collins: Mm-hmm.Malcolm Collins: I mean, you, I wake up, I look at my calendar and I do what Simone has put on my calendar. You know, she manages my daily schedule. She manages our finances. And, and, and just, you know, like women managing finances is actually very common cross-culturally.There’s a famous case in Japan where they, like, significantly impacted the economy.Simone Collins: Oh, God. Yeah. This, I read about a long time ago.There was this period in Japanese history where, yeah, like stay-at-home mothers got really into investing and really good at it. It was like [00:08:00] early Wall Street bets, Japanese Housewife Edition. I will have to look up more on that if you want me to. I don’t remember off the top of my head exactly how it worked, but they got really, really good at it.If you want to learn more about this, this is called the Miss Want to No Bay Phenomenon, , and at their height, they moved billions of dollars a day.Simone Collins: Yeah.Malcolm Collins: Okay.Simone Collins: But they were like housewives. So, but they, they also became very respected for what they did because they got really good at it.Malcolm Collins: No, but, but my point being is that it, it’s actually you know, the, the, the types of roles that women did historically now that you have like larger multi-person companies, they’re not quite as good at or as efficient at as they were historically the, the bureaucracy has expanded.Simone Collins: Well, I mean, what you’re describing to me also sounds like a, a, a different manifestation of the argument people constantly make around raising kids, which is that a genetically related family member is going to just do a much better job raising kids than someone who’s not like some paid daycare manager.Yeah. Meaning it’s, it’s kind of sick that we’re, we’re trying [00:09:00] to force or obligate people to instead just, you know, have some paid person raise their kids when they could just, they could do it. And, and this is maybe a little bit similar. Like you’re gonna get worse results when you’re working for someone who’s not your kin.You don’t care as much. You’re just not invested in it. And the economy would be a lot better off if people worked more directly on their own families things.Malcolm Collins: Yeah.Simone Collins: I think family businesses are a thing for a reason. But anyway, massive, massive tangent. Christian continues quoting from the article, “Artificial womb technology, robot nannies and partners help women and men solo parent, AI driven date matching.”This reads, this entire paper reads like a giant advertisement for Brave New World. So let’s look at the paper that he was referencing in this article because he’s just referencing this recently posted, April 24th so like a couple days ago article titled Toward Individualistic Reproduction: Solving the Fertility Crisis Could Require a Further Marginalization of Men.Great [00:10:00] title. It was written by three people, Mads Larson, Leaf Edward Aut- Autinson Kiner and Marianne Fisher. And I think it’s kind of telling when you look at their previous research the, the TLDR, i- if I look at the other papers they’ve published is these people have looked at datings and evolutionary psychology, broadly speaking, and they’re like, “Yeah, man there’s no solving the dating crisis that’s leading to demographic collapse, so let’s just build the dystopia to solve that problem.”It’s great. Some, some titles. So Mads Larson most recently published Evolutionary Perspectives on Enhancing Quality of Life. Leaf Edward Audenson Kiner posted or sorry, his recent articles are Breakup Likelihood Following Hypothetical Sexual or Emotional Infidelity: Perceived Threat to Blame and Forgiveness, and also Female Sexual Attraction Tactics.So he’s looking very academically and granularly [00:11:00] at sexual dynamics in the modern world. Marianne Fisher, her recent publications are Mate Poaching by men and female intersexual competition and shifts in partner attractiveness, and the internet is for porn and evolutionary psychology. So these people aren’t like writing out of nowhere, okay?Like-Malcolm Collins: Yeah, yeah. They’re kind of- They’re not getting completely unaware of current dating market problems.Simone Collins: Yeah, like they, they understand, I think, fairly intimately and from a perfect- But they’reMalcolm Collins: like the evil team. Like they, they’re, they’re like, they’re like-Simone Collins: Are they evil or are they being practical and they’re leftist?And we’re seeing what a pragmatic based leftist would pr- prescribe based on that finding, which is why this is so fun and interesting.Malcolm Collins: I’m worried I don’t like these words together.Simone Collins: I will read to you the abstract. “The cross-national correlation between gender equality and lower fertility is exceptionally strong are equals approximately 0.81.After the 1960s, a unique meeting [00:12:00] regime spread across parts of the world with female emancipation, individual mate choice and effective birth control, followed by a continuing rise in singlehood and declining fertility. Almost all women still want to reproduce, but many struggle to find good enough partner.This article argues from an evolutionary perspective that many men’s utility to free women has been so diminished that solving the fertility crisis by increasing pair bonding rates seems unfeasible. In other words, men are useless now. A viableMalcolm Collins: means. Oh, yes. They made men useless to women.Simone Collins: Yes. Yeah.This is what leftists are saying. Anyway, a viable means for aiding the survival of low fertility nations could be to provide women with the economic and social resources necessary for them to conclude that having children alone makes for a better life than remaining childless.Malcolm Collins: Oh my God, this is so dystopian.They want women ... Oh my God. It’s someone taking too much delight in this.Simone Collins: This is delight. Come on, this is so funny.Malcolm Collins: And what they’re going to do is they’re going to tax the [00:13:00] men to pay for this, these men that they supposedly don’t need because if- Kind of. If the money’s not coming from the women, then who’s it coming from, right?Well- They’re literally turning men into slaves of the state to support these women who are the, the partners married to the state.Simone Collins: A little bit, a little bit. Such policies would likely exacerbate male marginalization, but new technologies are on the horizon. They could offer men reproductive equality.So they also, in that last sentence, do acknowledge, we are throwing men under the bus, but maybe they’ll be okay when AI takes over. So the, the, the, the context which they present for all of this makes sense given their credentials and history as academics focused on evolutionary psychology and, and, and dating dynamics and, and their framing ancestral ape-like promiscuity gave way to a long era of enforced peer bonding via kin and social institutions, but they point out, which is real, that today’s combination of female autonomy and contraception has [00:14:00] partially reopened a promiscuous, highly selective mating pattern, now mediated by modern tools like dating apps.But they’re basically like, oh, apes used to have just like a lot of females mating with one man, and now we’re kind of going back to that. Like, and there’s no, there’s noMalcolm Collins: action fixingSimone Collins: it.Malcolm Collins: They actually want to go back to Mike and Simone.Simone Collins: Yeah. So they, they argue that this structurally sidelines many men and reduces pair bonding and thus births and that that’s the core evolutionary psychological mechanism behind the fertility crisis in rich gender equal countries.And so I, you know, if you’re wondering on what grounds they argue the problem can’t be fixed by amending or dating and marriage norms in developed countries, which is kind of what we’re trying to encourage at least among some subcultures that we hope will survive and why they think pair bonding can’t be repaired, they argue that you can’t fix the fertility crisis just by tweaking dating or marriage norms because A, women’s preferences and incentives have structurally shifted [00:15:00] in rich gender equal co- countries and societies, and B, a large share of men now offer too little utility to be chosen as partners.And at C emotional and technological environment, the, the contraception basically in dating apps pushes men toward dating short term and, and having non-reproductive matches and norms can’t reverse it per their argument. And keep in mind, these are academic researchers who have looked at partner selection, who have looked at behavior around dating.They’re not necessarily wrong.Malcolm Collins: No, everything they’re saying is true if you completely sociopathically hate men.Simone Collins: Well, and they do. So- They do.Malcolm Collins: It’s fine.Simone Collins: You know, no, no one, no one contractually has to love men, so I guess they’ve chosen not to. So what do they recommend? They want to make it easy for women to have children without partners.And their core policy recommendation is, is to, to have states provide women with such extensive economic and social support that a woman can rationally judge [00:16:00] having children alone as better than remaining childless. So they, they basically are like, “Let’s make welfare queens.”And then that will, that will raise the birth rate. And for a start, they want governments to run quote limited reproductive policy experiments, end quote. So basically pilot programs to empirically discover what package and level of support actually induces women to have the number of children they report wanting when single.So I guess the idea is to do some sort of Sam Altman style, like the, the OpenAI style UBI experiment, but just with like support for women having kids at, and at the beginning they would theoretically ask women, “Hey, how many kids do you want? “ And then offer them varying levels of support in order to have those kids and then just sort of see what’s enough to actually get that completed fertility that, that matches their desire.And they, they-Malcolm Collins: Because there’s no, there’s no problem with kids who grow up in one [00:17:00] parent household.Simone Collins: No, what? No, I, what are you talking about? I’ve not heard of such a thing. But you see, when, when the state is daddy, who cares? Everything’s fine.Malcolm Collins: Well, I mean, I think that this sort of like just not caring about reality is really how we got in the, the situation we are with the immigration situation and stuff like that.Simone Collins: Yeah.Malcolm Collins: Which is people just being like you see that like I saw some recent stats that horrified me it was something like well over 50% of Hispanic immigrants are on welfare, right? Like-Simone Collins: No. ... you cannot be- Really? That Hispanic immigrants?Speaker 12: So these stats , I’m sharing with you here, I was extremely skeptical of them at first, so I decided to go double check that they’re real. , And, , this is real. It’s February 2026 from the Center of Immigration Studies, , titled Welfare Use by Immigrants and the US Born in 2024. The report analyzes US Census Bureau’s 2024 Survey of Income and Program Participation SIPP, which measures participants in major means tested welfare programs., So this is, this is from US [00:18:00] government databases, all right? So what we see is the first generation of Hispanic immigrants, 70% of them are on welfare. In the second generation, it’s 54% of them are on welfare. And in the third generation, it’s 53% of them are still on welfare. So more than half of third generation Hispanic immigrants are still on welfare.If you contrast this with, , white immigrants, in the first generation, at 33%, in the second generation at 31%, and the third generation at 32%. , So fairly steady there. If you look at Asian immigrants, it’s 38%, 29%, 37%. , The interesting one is really Blacks because Blacks go up the longer they’re in the United States.It’s 52%, 48%, 56% for the third generation.Malcolm Collins: Yeah. You cannot take a majority population into your country that is on welfare, right?Like-Simone Collins: No.Malcolm Collins: That, that- Well,Simone Collins: you said it once and you’ll say it again. You cannot both have poorest borders and general social programs. You gotta choose one.Malcolm Collins: Yeah. And, and people just [00:19:00] ignore this because they act like these populations are the same as the Native population and they’re not necessarily the same as the Native population.Yeah. And you ... This gets me to like a secondary point that I’m getting really pissed about on the right and- Oh. ... I wanna clock someone for this. Uh-oh. So after this recent guy who tried to assassinate Trump-Simone Collins: Oh. ...Malcolm Collins: everyone on the right is like, “Well, I would never, ever push for any form of political violence, but the left does.”And I’m like, “Look, it’s one thing to say that in our current political climate, it doesn’t make sense to push for political violence.” Mm-hmm. But suppose some, for example, immigrant population with value systems entirely different from yours, took over your government and enforced those value systems on your women and children, right?Like, you don’t even resist then. Like there is no level of the government is with you [00:20:00] where you don’t, and you’re like, “Well, I can resist with my vote.” And it’s like, yeah, but what ifSpeaker 13: They plan to rig the system to make it impossible for you to win going forwards. I mean, consider that even right now, we’re seeing the Voting Rights Act being knocked down, an act that for most of our lives had given around 30 congressional seats to people solely based on racial interests, right? That is completely unamerican and this sort of stuff can be enacted again.IMalcolm Collins: Like this idea that there is no amount, you know, okay, so now the government decides thatI mean, and some countries are basically already at this point . You don’t fight then, right?Speaker 6: The trouble with Scotland is that it’s full of Scotts. Grant them prima nocte. First night, when any common girl inhabiting their lands is married, ourMalcolm Collins: immigrantsSpeaker 6: shall have sexual rights to her on the night of her wedding. If we can’t get them out, we’ll breed them [00:21:00] out. That should fetch just the kind of lords we want to Scotland.Taxes or no taxes, eh?Malcolm Collins: Like, I, I mean, if you look at the grape situation that’s going on in the UK right now, they are not far from that, right? There was a recent case where l- underage girl was being dragged away from a park and there was video of it and she was- Oh my God.screaming that they were gonna grape her and the government has banned the distribution of this because they said it would cause social unrest.Speaker 5: the asylum seekers, John Jahanzeb, and Israel Niezel, steered the 15-year-old victim away from her friend group in Lemington Spa in Warwickshire, and brutally her in a park.According to the BBC, more disturbing evidence was also played in court, including cell phone footage recovered by police and recorded by the victim, which showed her screaming for help and Jehanzeb covering her mouth to muffle the shrieks. The son reported that more clips captured by the teen showed her crying and begging not to be brought into the park. LBC reported that the video clips were so [00:22:00] disturbing that it would cause disorder if the general public were exposed to it.Malcolm Collins: Ah.But they, they also recently just, if it makes you feel any better did arrest a V-tuber for having a model that she drew that could be interpreted as underage.No, it was a- What? ... closed model and a model that she drew herself and it didn’t look particularly not safe for work to me, but,Simone Collins: Gosh. ...Malcolm Collins: you know, this is the difference in, AndSimone Collins: it was an adult V-tuber. It’s not like it was a child.Malcolm Collins: Yeah, of course. What, what else would it be? No. I mean, there, there’s a point where it’s like, h- how much do you need to be getting cut by your government before this makes sense, right?And we live in a world where that could happen to us, like within our lifetimes removing a tool for resolving things off the table simply because it makes you look like a good guy right now in this particular political fight where the left is ...Speaker 14: And I want to be extremely clear here. I am [00:23:00] not saying we are anywhere close to that point yet as a society. I am just saying pretending like that point doesn’t exist is in long-term detrimental to any value set you claim to espouse. Like when I look at my ancestors and, , the South became a slave state and seceded from the North and they created the breakoff state of the free state of Jones, would, you not have done that?Would you not have seen, oh, now I live in a society dedicated to slavery. It’s worth me resisting that , or when the Nazis took power, would you not have resisted that? Would you have just gone along with that because now that’s the law? Or when the communists took power in the Soviet Union and started sending people to gulags, you would have just said, “Okay, well, I guess this is the law now.”Like, this is what gets me. There could always come a point where resisting makes sense. What is evil is not resisting, but the leftist framing of completely normal, mainstream political opinions that any [00:24:00] reasonable person might have. As extremist political opinions. It is not deciding that if things ever actually became extreme, like we were under a communist or Nazi or Confederate state, that it wouldn’t make sense to resist in any means possible.So to be clear here, I am not calling for political violence. I am just saying that if Nazis ever actually took control of one of our countries, that’s something I would work to resist.And it’s particularly rich that Nux keeps going over this whole thou shall not kill thing that he’s so into. When you consider that his ancestors, the Jews did not successfully resist the Nazi state and my ancestors had to go in and bear the moral costs of killing the people that did that to his ancestors.I would like to think that, , they have learned from that. And their actions recently seem to suggest they have. ButThe evil thing is not resisting actual Nazis, it’s framing normal political ideology [00:25:00] as Nazism to justify reactions, , against normal political figures and normal civilians.IMalcolm Collins: and, and the real problem here, and we might do ... I mean, we’ve done videos on this in the past, which is why I’m not retreading it, is that the left is framing normal right wing positions as Nazi, and then they’re giving people the psychological license to kill anyone they have deemed a Nazi, but they have defined that 50% of Americans are Nazis, and this is happening and people are being radicalized not by far leftists, but by mainstream news outlets by CSN, CNN and MSNBC.Sorry, I had to go on a rant there. But,Simone Collins: Well, let’s explore how these academics would propose this welfare queen pronatalist initiative to happen. So the, the big thing is, is just large resource transfers, though they are very deliberately vague in the article, which I think is a very common progressive, hand wavy way of like, “Oh, let’s just, you know, have infinite [00:26:00] immigration and let’s just have, you know, let, let, let’s not incarcerate people for committing crimes.”And like, well, okay, well, how are we gonna deal with like the fallout from that? And they’re like I, I, you know, what do you wanna do? You wanna, you wanna put them in jail? You wanna send them back?” You know, it’s, you don’t exactly explain whatMalcolm Collins: we felt about- But have you seen the, the video recently of like random mobs in the UK beating up people who are in pubs?Simone Collins: No. Wait, what? Yeah, it’s for drinking alcohol.Speaker 9: Frustratingly, this video has been scrubbed from YouTube, which means if I post it, this video’s likely gonna be taken down. So you have to, , go to one of a few news websites to see it. Here in the UK Express, you can see UK riots, gangs waving Palestinian flags, beat lone pub goer in more chaos in Britain streets, , or in the sun, , violent attack, shocking footage shows gang waving Palestinian flags storming pub before knocking man to the floor and kicking him in the head., If you want video I was able to find, , of what it’s like to live in the UK these days, here we go.Speaker 10: A machete on display in broad [00:27:00] daylight. This was a daytime brawl. YouSpeaker 11: got a proSpeaker 10: bar. Barbers fighting over territory. Two on street beatings. This is kebab shop turf wars.Speaker 11: And he said, “We’re going to kill you and we will burn down your house.”Malcolm Collins: Yeah, because it’s around- ThatSimone Collins: sounds like we should do an episode on that. What, what the, the ... Yeah, the, the, the, the downfall of alcohol, not only are sails down, but you’re getting beaten up for drinking? That’s insane. Wow. And a British tradition. I mean, if there’s anyone who’s allowed to daydrink, it’s Brits.Malcolm Collins: It’s the landSimone Collins: of breakfast of beer.Malcolm Collins: OhSimone Collins: my God, that’s yeah-Malcolm Collins: I, I don’t know if you’ve seen some of the recent tweets from JK Rawling.Simone Collins: No.Malcolm Collins: But they’re pretty freaking insane. Now she’s gotten on the whole, like, Islamist or the problem thing.Simone Collins: Oh, God bless. Okay.Malcolm Collins: You know, so somebody, basically this one British PM was talking about [00:28:00] how, you know, violence is, you know, never the answer.And she’s like, “Well, thi- is this Katie something? It better not be Katie something because I saw a video of her shouting globalize the infatata.” Oh, gosh.Simone Collins: And-Malcolm Collins: And, and Katie then comes back with this globalized impatata and she goes, “I don’t think you know what that means.” And it’s like, of course she’s like, “It means the struggle.”In the same way mind comps just means mind struggle, right? Like it’s a totally arbitrary word, but it’s just German for my struggle, come on. And JK Rowling writes back, “Your show is called Useful Idiots. I don’t think you know what that means.”Simone Collins: Oh my God. JKMalcolm Collins: Rawling is cooking. I love her.Simone Collins: We might need to do a full episode on that.So save it. But-Malcolm Collins: Elon and JK Rowling on one team, that’s, that’s what we needed fromSimone Collins: childhood,Malcolm Collins: right?Simone Collins: Yeah. It’s delightful. But yeah, basically, I think they, they want some sort of long-term income support for women who choose to become single mothers or [00:29:00] guaranteed living standards for single mothers.They also want broader welfare support targeted at enabling individualistic reproduction. And this is in contrast to what many states have proposed in terms of prenatalist policies where they really wanna focus on family formation and giving benefits to people who are married, who are raising kids in two parent households.So this is a, a distinct diversion from that. And as Malcolm highlighted earlier, there is abundant research on the, the, the idea of being raised by two people. You can read the book, The Two Parent Privilege which I’m almost finished with. It’s, it’s a pretty good summary of the research, if you don’t believe me.But they want strong public childcare, they want strong work family policies, and they want general welfare systems that remove dependence on male partners because they’re useless and they’re not worth marrying. And the general idea is just to make women. Wait, wait, don’t want assistanceMalcolm Collins: going to two parent couplesSimone Collins: anymore.No. No, no, no. There’s no mention of that. Yeah, no. It, this is a ... The, the [00:30:00] very premise of this is we declare bankruptcy on long-term committed partnerships and on men.Malcolm Collins: Remember, I, I had the episode where I was like, “Humanity’s gonna speciate, guys.” Like-Simone Collins: No, this is, this is feeding into that hypothesis. This is, we’re adding that, you know, one tally to the side of the scoreboard for speciation, for sure.Malcolm Collins: And I, and I’m gonna be honest, like, I, because the person who keeps getting me with this stuff is nuts, because nuts is always like, “Oh, well, we on the right would never think violence is okay.” Meanwhile, you know, me, if I lived in Britain right nowSpeaker: Go ahead.Speaker 2: Mom, it looks like Bitlock got hold of those home office documents via freedom of information requests.Speaker: Nine freedom of information requests.Speaker 3: He accused the government of covering up the true stats and undocumented migrants. Whitlock’s 4chan account, mom. , Deactivated last month. Because?Speaker 4: History books say the last land invasion of England was 1066. In actual fact, the last land invasion of England was yesterday morning at 9:45 on a boat. Carrying 40 [00:31:00] undocumented male migrants landed in Dungeoness Kent.Speaker 5: , an Afghan national was arrested after stabbing three people in Midhurst Gardens in Uksbridge in West London.One victim 49-year-old Wayne Broadhurst was walking his dog down the street during the horrific attack. The suspect, illegally entered the UK and was granted asylum , according to the BBC.Speaker 4: That land invasion’s an act of war, right? In war, civilians are allowed to we’re supposed toMalcolm Collins: anyway, continue.Simone Collins: And presumably, admittedly that they do the same thing that we kind of do with, with prenatalism, which is like, maybe AI is gonna make all this possible that the authors refer to a post automation future. Here, here’s a quote from their article. “Today, such large resource transfers are perhaps politically and fiscally unfeasible, but nations should consider limited reproductive policy experiments to find out what social and economic resources are required to motivate sufficient individualistic reproduction.In our post-automation future, perhaps as early [00:32:00] as by 2040 Kurzweil referenced Koorsweil 2024 you gotta, you gotta throw in your singulatarian references they give some more references. “Insights from these pilot projects could inform national policies with the potential to substantially increase fertility, and then of course they acknowledge the side effect of men being totally screwed over.They, they say that- Side effects, butMalcolm Collins: whatever, whatever, that’s probably.Simone Collins: Well, yeah, they would likely exacerbate male marginalization. So they also admit it’s already happening since further reducing women’s economic dependence It’s on men lowers the male value of some groups of men. But, but don’t worry.They argue the existential risks from demographical apps justify these measures as they speculate that technologies like artificial wombs could later give men more symmetrical reproductive options, restoring some form of reproductive equality between the sexes. So I think it’s very appropriate that I got the tip for this episode from not Altus Hexley on X who sends us some of our best material.[00:33:00]You rock. And he, his name is very appropriate because the, the thing they’re describing here is uncannily like Eldes Huxley’s Brave New World where reproduction is, is, is this very individualistic reproduction. Except instead of en- empowering individual women to reproduce on their own terms, the state is completely responsible for re- reproduction.It engineers people and hatcheries and several sex from procreation to maximalize social stability and control. So basically in, since you haven’t read it in Brave New World, in the world state, no one gives birth. All children are produced in centralized hatcheries using processes like they, they call it Bocanos visification and they mass produce m- almost identical embryos to match the state’s labor needs.And they’re like in these tiers of like alphas and betas and et cetera. Natural pregnancy and motherhood.Malcolm Collins: I, I would go more, ... I mean, I’m not against this idea for like our family or [00:34:00] cultural group.Simone Collins: Yeah. ...Malcolm Collins: but I certainly wouldn’t go the direction they’re going, which is like cutting out men and creating these weird poly giant, you know, like-Simone Collins: Yeah.Malcolm Collins: TheSimone Collins: Brave New World approach is, is kind of equal and it, I mean, that’s like a solution that kind of works for everyone. And in Brave New World, everyone’s also conditioned from birth to be really, really happy with how they are.Malcolm Collins: Which I think is a good thing to do, right? Yeah. Like why make somebody unhappy with their station in life?I know that like people are like, “Oh, it’s so dystopian.” I love, you said you read it for the first time and you’re like, “Oh, how utopia.” I wasSimone Collins: like, “This is awesome.”Malcolm Collins: I, I mean, the way that I would do it is I, I think the, the way that Kl- like Korinsky does it, the, the, or the, the, the, the son of Korinsky who set up the the Klan system in the Battletech universe is a fairly close to the way I would structure things if I could just structure them anyway which is to have a system where you bio, you, you, you clone from like the most successful people within your culture.Oh. And that determines how much of, of their DNA is, is within the [00:35:00] individual and these individuals within sort of pools do competitions that they’re not all expected to survive to secure the fittest from within a batch.Speaker: U five are the final vestiges of your brood that some deem might one day be of value to the clan. I am not one of them. To me, U five are the excrement of a failed, semi aborted batch from my blood house, far from the pinnacle of humanity demanded by the Klan’s geneticist that spawned you.I am a gracious host, so I will give you the opportunity to show me what those strix on Lund home taught you. Show me what you know of being a real true Bo met warrior and prove yourselves worthy of [00:36:00] the name and heritage you carry with you.Malcolm Collins: And then those individuals end on taking on roles within society that, that are meaningful.And then you can still have like freeborn people, like that’s within Klan society- mm-hmm. ... but they just don’t often get the most prestigious jobs and stuff like that because they’re not as genetically fit as the- Ah. ... people who have to go through this in- incredibly rigorous process. And the people who go through the rigorous process believe they have a duty to the wider clan and society and everything like that.So-Simone Collins: Oh,Malcolm Collins: interesting. ... like arbitrarily cruel to the freeborns, although they do view them with prejudice.Simone Collins: Yeah. The, the, the people who reproduce naturally and die naturally in Brave New World have to live on like basically wildlife preserves and they’re seen as disgusting and horrific and you, it’s even frowned upon to be even moderately monogamous in the, the, the world state of Brave New World.They, they have this saying, they have all [00:37:00] these sayings because it, they’re all about conditioning. Everyone belongs to everyone else. And if you start seeing someone like a particular person too, like too much, people are like, “Hey, man, you need to start like sleeping around a little more.” And like some, some women, because there is no reproduction, I think at one point one of the female characters is like feeling a little bit off and her friend is like, “Oh, like you should just have a, like a fake pregnancy.”Like you, you, they even have women like go through simulated pregnancies, I think is like a form of treatment. It, it’s weird. I, I, I like that system- Yeah,Malcolm Collins: that sounds very dis- that’s, that’s not the future I would go for with the,Simone Collins: Yeah. Yeah.Malcolm Collins: But I, I think the future that I would want would be particularly brutalistic compared to what some people think is appropriate.Simone Collins: Well, but look, I mean, what, what I, what I really appreciate about this is that we’ve been waiting for publications from academics and left-leaning people on what they think we should do about the problem. And [00:38:00] this, this is out there. It’s, it’s not what I would expect. You know, I always thought it would be more of the, the socialist approach of just give, give everyone a ton of money, but here they’re like, they’re really leaning in, I think, to a lot of progressive values, which is like, “Oh, we can not only give people a lot of money, but also just destroy all men.”They, they, they don’t even talk about like how to address the social unrest that would result from that but-Malcolm Collins: Because they don’t think that they need to just, you know, a new excuse to kill men, right? Like-Simone Collins: Yeah, maybe just also introduce like a maid, but for men like Canada’s euthanasiaMalcolm Collins: system. I, I mean, that’s what Canada’s made is.You know it disproportionately kills white people, right? At least.Simone Collins: But not men, right?Malcolm Collins: I don’t know if it’s ... I mean, I know women are more mopey, so you’reSimone Collins: right, you know. Yeah. I, I imagine if, if, if we were to look it up, that there would be more women who utilize the services of made than men. WeMalcolm Collins: actually, we can look it up right now.Simone Collins: Okay. With the power of AI. [00:39:00] Are you looking it up using RFABs,Malcolm Collins: slightly more men. Well,Simone Collins: they get it done. Men, get it done.It’s just how it always has to be.Malcolm Collins: But I just don’t understand this, this like lie down and take it approach. You know, if you’re gonna unalive yourself anyway the, I, I am really getting quite perturbed that the right seems to not see that the left is willing to use any tactic against us.Mm. And we keep being like, “Well, we’re gonna do things in the moral way.” And it’s like, well, I mean, maybe that’s why we keep losing ground.Simone Collins: Yeah. I, I don’t know. But-Malcolm Collins: ButSimone Collins: I’m delighted by this bold stance. And I’ll have toMalcolm Collins: point out for the people who are like, “Well, we need to do things in the moral way.”If, if- WhatSimone Collins: is the moral way? I, I don’t like that. Especially because- They needMalcolm Collins: to, they need to somehow convince enough of the electorate to give them political control, then they need to enact the policies that need to be enacted without the women freaking out and voting against them again, [00:40:00] which even with ICE, which has barely done anything in terms of immigration in the United States has already like a mass triggered white women, right, to be like, “Oh, he’s an, you know, a fascist.”Yeah. Because, you know, if we were actually going to resolve the problems that we have in countries like the UK and the US it’s going to look so much worse because these communities are going to fight back against being deported, right? Like, especially in a place like the UK, like imagine if ICE was doing raids in the UK right now- Yeah.you would have an actual war in the streets of some major cities, right? Like, that is the situation that’s been created and these people are upset that they, they don’t want the bad optics of that sort of stuff. It’s like, come on. Like, do you understand how gruesome what’s going to need to be done is if we are going to have a chance of stabilizing for example, most of Europe at this point?Simone Collins: Mm-hmm. Yeah. I have nothing more [00:41:00] to add aside from ... I hope more leftists come out with their deranged takes. I want the Hassan Piker take on prenatalism. I want the, I want, I want everyone’s nonsense because this is great. They’re, they’re finally coming out. It was inevitable because demographical apps is an increasingly trending issue and I, I really hope that more of the sort of expressed progressive values are played out in proposed prenatalist policy because this is very amusing and delightful.It is.Malcolm Collins: It’s unhinged. And I, I, I, like, our side needs to, like, realize who we’re fighting against. Like, they want you eradicated. They want your way ofSimone Collins: working. But, like, actually, yeah, and they just, they just, they, they openly admit it. This, this, with this will marginalize menMalcolm Collins: of repercussion, right? They just write this down.Like, of course, we’re going to eradicate you what you thouh- ButSimone Collins: I mean, they’re useless, so it’s okay. It’s so, On theMalcolm Collins: plus side, at the very least, among technologically [00:42:00] productive populations, these people are an incredibly low fertility group, so they’re not going to exist in the future.Simone Collins: Well, and clearly as is evidenced to buy their very low rates of relationship formation it’sConservatives are marrying. Conservatives are having kids. It’s it’s kind of a demographic inevitability. But I love you. I’m glad we got married and I’m glad we have five kids. So screw you guys.Malcolm Collins: Yes. Screw you guys. We’re going for a six this year, so we’ll let you guys know how that’s gonna go.Simone Collins: Fingers crossed, yeah.Malcolm Collins: Fingers crossed. But Texas still alive, and that was a touch and go.Simone Collins: It was. I’m glad he’s okay. All right. Love you. Bye.Malcolm Collins: Love you too. Bye.Simone Collins: But it was a, it’s really cool. I enjoyed trying it out. It, it’s nice just to have the sources more prominently put. I, I like, I’ve always liked Perplexity because it includes citations.Malcolm Collins: So she’s talking about the new feature on RFAB which [00:43:00] is a super, it’s meant to remove AI hallucinations. So what it does is it runs multiple models that can search the internet starting with Grock and you can choose which model it runs and how many checks it does.Yeah. And it reviews the answer and then edits the answer based on with, with like checks. So you can be like, “This many model runs said this was definitely true.” And it also adds facts if another model forgot a fact. So you can get a, a really expanded and really well thought through list while knowing what’s likely a hallucination and what’s not.Simone Collins: Yeah. It’s, it’s quite convenient. Especially if you’re trying to do research that you’re using for work or school and you’re like, “I really can’t afford this to be hallucinated right now.” Because even on perplexity where I feel like it’s better sourced and more transparently sourced, there have been times where when I click through on the sourced links, the source isn’t very good or it’s [00:44:00] harder to see, or they’re just referencing some weird like Roundup article somewhere.So I like this. Yeah. I mean, I, I will give you more feedback later when I can try it out more since you like what? Made it yesterday and now I’m trying it today. So it’s all very new.Malcolm Collins: Yeah. No, things move fast. And what else? We’re also adding I’ll see when I get this done. It’s, it’s, it’s not done yet because it’s a bit more complicated.But 3D image generation from 2D images that we’re going to then work to map to meshes to make computer models.Simone Collins: Oh.Malcolm Collins: So you’ll be able to create full VTuber models with AI is, is the hope.Simone Collins: Okay. Okay. I get it. That’s, that’s super cool.Malcolm Collins: Yeah, I know. And we’ll also be the first site that does this at least to the degree that we’re looking at doing it, so.Simone Collins: I love that. Well, power to the people, let’s do it.Malcolm Collins: Power to the people. I am excited to be working on things. Yeah, we got, we got turned down really quickly from an accelerator. We made it really far aways before and I’m so [00:45:00] confused because we have like paying users and everything now and we’re growing pretty quick, but-Simone Collins: Well, and they had broadly, when we made it to a final round interview, the first time we applied, been like, “Hey, yeah, just get back to us when you do A, B and C.”And we did A, B and C and now they’re like dead in the water with us. So do they know something we don’t? That’s what we want to find out.Malcolm Collins: My big concern is it could be the not safe for work stuff.Simone Collins: Oh, that, yeah, could just be dead in the water kind of thing.Malcolm Collins: But that’s what most people use, so, you know.Simone Collins: Not digging that away.Malcolm Collins: It gives the internet what it wants. I’m not stupid here.Simone Collins: Yes, we give the people what they want and what they want is pervy and that’s okay. That’s okay. We support it. All right. I’m gonna get into it and I’m excited for this one.Malcolm Collins: Okay.Simone Collins: Cool. All right.Speaker 16: Yesterday he was like, “I can’t take off my shoes.”Simone Collins: And I’m like, “Oh, okay.” And I like pull them off and then rocks just fly everywhere when I take off [00:46:00] his shoe because he’s taken to putting rocks in his shoes. So ex- excuse me. There was explosion in there at 1983 in the night. Oh.I didn’t expect to see that. Excuse me. Okay. Octavia, I thought you said that missiles hit the tracks. Oh yes, missiles. Missles hit the tracks and there was a giant exposing the West expression in the world. And the firefighters, they all came over and helped fastOctavian Collins: And then they helped a lot of persons. No, no. 400 people are pronounced dead at the hospital. But 10 for five and two- 10Malcolm Collins: survived.Octavian Collins: 400 producers. And two more somehow for five at the hospital and which were added to the 10 and two people., This helicopter right here, Austin, this medical helicopter also [00:47:00] came over from America to Majersey to fix it. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit basedcamppodcast.substack.com/subscribe

Malcolm & Simone Collins discuss the viral controversy around the game Pragmata — a title that explicitly celebrates fatherhood and pronatalism. Is “dad corn” (games that stimulate parental instincts) as sinful as traditional porn? How should we think about masturbating evolutionary pathways for bonding with children?In this unfiltered Based Camp episode, they break down:• Why Pragmata triggers leftists• The difference between healthy vs toxic ways to engage with parental instincts• Why gamers actually have more kids than non-gamers (with data)• Hassan’s “gamers are unfuckable losers” take demolished• Deontology vs consequentialism in faith, gaming, and family formation• Historic Christian attitudes toward sex, beauty, and pronatalismA must-watch for anyone interested in pronatalism, video game culture, evolutionary psychology, and building high-fertility families in the modern world.Video Game Developer DadsHere’s the spreadsheet referenced in the episode. It includes:* 30 notable male video game developers* Key games/works* Father status: Father, Childless, or Unknown* Children count where available* Evidence summaries* Source URLs in both the main sheet and a dedicated Sources sheet* A Summary sheet with formulas and a pie chartSummary results:* Fathers: 20 of 30, 66.7%* Explicitly childless: 2 of 30, 6.7%* Unknown/publicly undocumented: 8 of 30, 26.7%Episode TranscriptMalcolm Collins: [00:00:00] Corn, what it does is all humans, because of evolutionary reasons, have a collection of pathways that cause pleasure when you do things tied to the birthing and rearing of the next generation.if you’re here saying pragmata is not core, right? Functionally, how is it different? If I’m in my room and I’m playing pragmata, which I’m playing the game, I am fathering a fake child while I have real children downstairs. Mm-hmm. How is that not as ghoulish as masturbating to a fake woman when I have a real wife in the other room?I, I- Hmm.Simone Collins: That’s a really good point.Speaker: And if you’re like, well, it’s not as bad when I engage with it because I don’t have real children yet, and it’s like, well, that’s about the same as saying it’s not as bad when I engage with it because I don’t have a real wife yet.Anything that distracts from your tasks of [00:01:00] getting one of those things is equivalent in its sinfulness.Speaker 8: And if you think I mean Stoji and hair splitting here, one, remember, I can’t make the same take on this that every other conservative commentator has had. I’ve got to have something new and fresh, so keep that in mind. But two, , right now, everyone’s so excited because this is the first time they have seen a game that is meant to masturbate the instinct to be a parent and father a child.And so they are excited about it because some of them didn’t realize they had this emotion.Speaker 10: And in getting people to realize that yes, playing with children is actually fun and something they want to do and having children of their own is something they want to do is a fundamentally good thing that this game was released. But the warning against the masturbation of this pathway and how toxic it can be is going to be made evidence in the years to come as people can with AI simulate children.Malcolm Collins: Hello, Simone. I’m excited to be talking with you again after a few days break. Of course, our audience would know that. But we were in [00:02:00] DC talking with political plays and now we are back and there is an episode that everyone’s been asking us to do, and we are not gonna have the take that you imagine on this one which is about the controversy, which has come downstream of a game named Pragmata.And the controversy basically goes bunch of leftists saw this game and they were either mad at it because they said it promoted pronatalism, which it very explicitly does the first scene in the game before you meet the little girl Android who you’re supposed to form a bond with.One of the characters is talking about fatherhood and the other guy’s like, “Oh, it must be really hard.” And he’s like, “No, it’s like the best thing ever.” So it’s very explicit. Oh wow. It’s, it’s not like a, “Oh, we accidentally made a game that made people wanna become dads.” It’s the core theme of the game.Okay. Then some of them are mad because they say that the little girl is sexualized which, I mean, she’s not, although I will say her face design is a little weird to [00:03:00] me. Like, it, it does not look like the face of someone of that age. Do the people who point that out, like, make a point around that.Speaker 4: If you’re upset that I don’t have the standard conservative take on this game, I, I want to have as true or honest of a take I have to the extent that it is also something new that you haven’t heard before and is intellectually stimulating because if it’s just let’s dunk on progressives for being icked by a game that promotes traditional value systems, that’s boring.You’ve heard that already, right? So let’s, let’s try to dig a bit deeper than this. But here what I’ve done, just for those of you who have not seen, because her character in the game is supposed to be the equivalent of a six-year-old girl, here is her face next to a bunch of six-year-old girl faces. And I hope you can see that these two things, , they’re not the same.There’s something off about her design. And, and that’s okay. , But if you have a six-year-old girl, it would be really striking to you. And so it’s weird that conservative [00:04:00] commentators keep saying that there isn’t something off about her design. , To me, it feels dishonest and I don’t like that in our space.Speaker 5: By the way, if you’re confused as to what looks off about the head, the number one thing is its relative size to the body. Six-year-old girls have heads that are much larger when contrasted with their body than this individual’s head. The second is its thinness and high cheekbones, which are much more adult features.Um, again, not the game’s fault. They were trying to size down an adult actress, but, , it is very noticeable if you have a six-year-old daughter, .Speaker 11: By the way, if you think I’m exaggerating here,, I sometimes use AI to age up our children so I can see what they’ll look like when they’re in their 20s or 30s or whatever.And I did this to my daughter once recently, but the AI made a mistake and only aged up her face. And I have never seen a picture that looks more like the Pragmata girl. , And it’s very creepy in this context because it’s a bit more exact, but you will see she looks more like this than she does a normal human girl of that age.Malcolm Collins: That said i- [00:05:00] i- i- she clearly was in the story and was in the context of the fan base is not particularly sexualized, except on Reddit. They made a Reddit thread and they had to shut it down because it just was nothing but sexualized, but that’s, you know, Reddit, leftist, blah, blah, blah, they do them, right?Simone Collins: Well, that’s the internet. The Rule 42, this is ... I don’t understand how that’s weird.Malcolm Collins: And then the right comes in and they laugh, laugh, laugh at the leftist and they go, “Ha ha ha, so funny.” You see a little girl and you immediately assume that, you know, you should see her as sexual and that’s a self-report and then the right also says like, “Ha ha ha, you know, how...”That’s basically the core thing the right’s saying in, in, in so many words. And I think so much of the wider conversation is being missed because of this sort of myopic surface layer investigation of this. So the first thing that we’re gonna be exploring in this is the question that has a pretty clear answer.Is pragmata [00:06:00] corn? And the answer is yes. Just not of the type you are used to consuming. So what makes something corn, right? Like- Yeah,Simone Collins: well, the people literally, I don’t know if it still exists, but there was a s- subreddit for food, corn and-Malcolm Collins: No, no, no, no, no, no, no. That’s not what I’m talking about.I’m not talking about- Different. ... it’s analogous too. Oh. I’m saying it is literally corn.Simone Collins: Oh my gosh. So- Okay.Malcolm Collins: Corn, what it does is all humans, because of evolutionary reasons, have a collection of pathways that cause pleasure when you do things tied to the birthing and rearing of the next generation.Simone Collins: Oh, I see. WhereMalcolm Collins: you’re making this. And there are many types of corn which hit these pathways in different ways. Ooh,Simone Collins: so like owning a cat or a dog that you overcare for.Malcolm Collins: Well, I’ve always said that that’s a type of corn. Yeah. But I, I wanna point out that it is not of a type [00:07:00] different than other corn.There are ... So for example, somebody can say, “Well, it’s not corn because you don’t masturbate to it. “ And I’m like but we say that when women read, you know, sexy monster man books, they very rarely masturbate to those and yet I, I wanna eff a monster is still very clearly corn. There are people say, “Well, people aren’t having sex in it, so it’s not corn.”And it’s like, well, there’s many categories of fetishes where people don’t have sex be they, you know, foot fetishes, for example, or something, right? Like people aren’t having sex in that and, and yet that would very unambiguously, or they’re like, “Oh, well, that’s not the act.” Okay. What about vor fetishes?People would say that’s very clearly corn but very clearly no sex is had in that. So, all right, so you can’t loop off corn by saying ... And, and here somebody can say, “Oh, well, no, it’s about the, the, the, whatever the positive emotions you feel [00:08:00] from the images or story or act has to be tied to things that would’ve been actual sexual reproduction for it to be in the category of corn for me.And it’s like, okay, what did feet have to do with sexual reproduction? Right? Like, there’s a huge variety of things and they’re like, “Well, okay, but that still causes traditional arousal.” And so then here I’d say, “Okay, what about things that don’t cause traditional arousal?” Because here, note, I’m not saying that Pragmata is arousing to, to the core audience and, and what it’s trying to do, but it is trying to hijack a pathway tied to reproduction, right?So, here you would have something like rope binding and stuff like this. I point out that a lot of people who are into rope binding, they often don’t actually feel arousal from it. They just feel pleasure or comfort from it, the, the feeling of being restrained. And that doesn’t, to us, make that not a type of corn.And so then the second question is, is, [00:09:00] whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Okay. And, and note here, this is always the understanding that the core pleasure pathway that this is eliciting in guys is, is, I’ll call it dad corn, right? Like it’s the feeling of being a dad, being protective of a kid, making a kid feel good the things that, you know, your ancestors who felt them during certain parts of their lives ended up having more surviving offspring.So, the, the second question is, and I think this is a more important question is well, then is it immoral? And what, what is your take on this, Simone?Simone Collins: I don’t think it’s immoral. I think people should understand what it is and that it’s not a replacement for it because- Yeah. ... I think sometimes you, you may be driven to some form of, like, let’s say you really, really, really love, you know, having your pet dog and you take them on walks everywhere and, and well, you know, maybe, maybe this means you kind of want a kid, you know?And you, you want to be that person who cares for someone else and really makes your life about them,Malcolm Collins: [00:10:00] Yeah, so I, I think the pet dog is a perfect example here, and this is very in line with the way I feel about erotic material more broadly, corn more broadly and everything like that- Uh-huh.Is that there are positive and healthy ways to relate to it, and there are negative and toxic ways to relate to it.Simone Collins: Right. Like trying to lean into it more to fill a void that it will never be able to fill because it’s, it’s not doing the real thing is dangerous, right?Malcolm Collins: Right. So, pragmata, I would say is largely positive.It is something that gets people thinking about this. It gets people wanting to do this type of thing.Simone Collins: Right.Malcolm Collins: And it has positive externalities because of that, right?Simone Collins: Yeah.Malcolm Collins: It elicits a positive role between a man and his cu- kid. Well,Simone Collins: here’s, here’s why though, and this is what I think is a key distinction, because you do see this in elect- the, the commentary people streaming this who are like, “Oh my gosh, I think I wanna be a parent.”This is not a parenting sim game. This is not a game that people who want to, like, [00:11:00] masturbate that part of their desire or- It, it reallyMalcolm Collins: is. I have no idea what you’re saying, Simone.Simone Collins: Well, you think people are buying Pragmata because they wanna-Malcolm Collins: Yes. ...Simone Collins: explore parenthood?Malcolm Collins: Yes.Simone Collins: Really?Malcolm Collins: Yes. Yes. ISimone Collins: thought it was supposedMalcolm Collins: toSimone Collins: be a really gold main game.Malcolm Collins: If you, if you didn’t want to do that, Simone, that would literally be as completely bizarre- Yeah. ... as buying a game that the cover had like a sexy Fox girl on it was big breasts and then you start playing it and you’re like, “I didn’t want a game with a sexy Fox girl with big breasts in it. “ Like that’s the entire point of the game.If you, if you open up the sexy Fox Girl was big breast game and it’s a burly man, you’re gonna be like, “This isn’t what I wanted.” If you open up the little- No,Simone Collins: see, I thought it was something else. I thought people wouldn’t call it like a psyop for prenatalism if it’s stated purpose-Malcolm Collins: No, it’s no. It’s on the box you are getting this for a [00:12:00] father experience That isSimone Collins: Well then I don’t understand why this ... I’m so sorry.That is aMalcolm Collins: misunderstanding. Why is there so much- There is nobody who bought this not going- WhySimone Collins: is there so much outrage about it then? Because no one would care if that’s what it is.Malcolm Collins: There’s outrage about it because the left sees people and men wanting to be fathers in a wholesome framing and getting angry about it.And then they want to find a way to frame this negatively because they do not like that people are moving towards a traditional life pathway or desire a traditional life pathway. Okay. Because it frames something wholesome that people want in their lives and a wholesome experience they want and the left is so completely brain its audience into believing that nobody actually wants that, that it begins to sort of shatter the reality and cause this offense emotion because it’s challenging their world [00:13:00] perspective.Oh. And so they must attack it. But the wider point I was making here is I think you can contrast something like pragmata and using that to stimulate this instinct versus something like using a pet to stimulate this instance. Okay. Using a pet to stimulate this instinct is done instead of having a child, right?That is a toxic way to relate to this in the same way that if corn is a part of your life and you’re, and it’s just like a once a week thing or something like that, right, that’s irrelevant, right? Like that’s not gonna screw up your life, that’s not gonna lead you to degeneracy, that’s not gonna ... If, and people can be like, “Well, it, you know, I personally can’t resist that leading me to degeneracy.” And it’s like fine. And there’s people who play pragmata and get obsessed with this particular fake AI android girl, right? Like clearly this is dangerous for them. I’m just saying that for a [00:14:00] lot of people it doesn’t.Simone Collins: Okay.Malcolm Collins: But-Simone Collins: In the same way where like if you’re, if you’re skipping out on events where you might meet a future wife because you wanna stay homeMalcolm Collins: andSimone Collins: look at cornMalcolm Collins: then- Yeah, guning, right? Like that’s clearly a problem in the same way or you’re doing it multiple times a day or something like that, right?Simone Collins: Okay.Malcolm Collins: That, that’s a point where it is clearly interfering with you pursuing the things that you want to pursue, like that you need to pursue from like a moral context. And it’s important to understand that engaging with something like Pragmata in this context can make it even more likely that you are going to find a partner.This is very similar to the studies that were done on men in college that consumed corn versus the men who didn’t and the men who did were much more likely to have girlfriends and much more likely to be able to secure girlfriends. The idea that well, I mean, there’s, there’s this sort of [00:15:00] stereotype, which is just wrong, which we’ll get to is the Hassan, because Hassan has this gamer stereotype, which is just entirely wrong, but that’s sort of part two of this.Basically he says, gamers are guys who don’t have kids and will never have kids. And we’re gonna point out by the statistics that’s just wrong, gamer guys are much more likely to have children than non-gamer guys of which Hassan is and doesn’t have kids. So, you know, his line dies with him, but more on that soon.Because I wanted to talk more about the wider concept of art and video games and what these things do, right? Humanity is a collection, and we have a collection of things we find beautiful, things we find arousing, and things we find pleasing.And this collection of things is downstream generally of evolutionary pressures. And people can say, “Oh, well, beauty isn’t [00:16:00] downstream of evolutionary pressures.” And I’m like, “Well, okay, first of all, yeah, usually it is if you’re talking about, like, a, a, a woman who you think is beautiful or a man you think is beautiful, that is evolutionary sexual pressures.”Absolutely. That’s the Mona Lisa. That is most famous portraits. That is your ability to judge a human being as beautiful or not beautiful is downstream of the same evolutionary pressures that led to your most basal arousal pathways. But outside of that, well, people are like, “Well, what about pictures that aren’t of things like humans?”And I’m like, “Okay, well, what sort of pictures do people like to draw?” They like to draw pictures of streams, they like to draw pictures of views of, of, of landscape. They like to draw pictures of oceans. They like to draw pictures of like, like scenes of nature where you can see far in the distance.And I’m like, “Okay, so what have you just described a bunch of? “ You, you, you’ve just said the things that people like [00:17:00] to look at over other things that people may want to look at are locations where they have a long view into the distance, e.g. A defendable location, locations with fresh water, e.g.Locations where it’s good to live, and locations with food supplies, e.g. Animals or fish. You have described what in our evolutionary context was what it felt like to be in an area that was defendable and that had resources you needed to survive versus locations that didn’t. Everything that we perceive in reality tied to pleasure is downstream of these evolutionary pressures.And you can try to gate little tunnels of this based on our current understanding and society of, well, this is this kind of content [00:18:00] because it is, within X type of, you know, degeneracy but as I was trying to point out earlier in this, that actually causes a lot of problems in terms of like categorizing, well, what is actually corn?Speaker 7: The point we’re trying to get into here is specifically why is in some context masturbation a bad thing to do. It’s a bad thing to do because you are hijacking a reproductive inpulse for pointless personal gratification rather than directing that impulse to finding or satisfying your spouse. When that impulse guides some behavior other than finding and satisfying your spouse, it is deleterious to you.And this is important because if you get too deontological about this, you can just categorize all of X thing is bad, all of Y thing is good, and then completely ignore the entire point about prohibitions about masturbation because it is, you’re taking the reproductive impulse, hijacking it, , for something other than its purpose.[00:19:00] So what about playing with kids? Playing with your kids feels good because it is helping you, , raise the next generation, keep humanity going. And instead of relying on these desires to have a kid and raise the kid and play with a kid, you short circuit them and you use , a fictional character to do that.functionally, you’re, you’re doing an equivalent thing. And this isn’t to say that there couldn’t be some positive externalities, , like the game gets people to realize that they have these impulses in the first place, , which is, you know, why people are excited about it because a lot of guys didn’t realize that this felt so good, but, , it is the same thing and just as some guys can get one shotted by masturbation, some guys are going to be one-shotted by fictional children, , that they can parent and dote on.And this is gonna become an increasing problem as we enter the age of AI where people can have children that feel very, very real. And so the [00:20:00] warning that I lay out here with a game like Pragmata may seem so silly and trivial, “Oh, guys didn’t realize they had this motivation, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.”And it’s good because it makes them realize that, and, and may seem silly and trivial because this is your first time encountering something that’s meant to masturbate this instinct, but you wait until people have AI children, then you’ll see why this warning is so prescient.Speaker 3: And if you’re like, well, it’s not about the effect on the individual, it’s about the effect on society. Obviously, the statistics that I cite the most, which is what causes me to have such strong beliefs about this is, , when the Czech Republic , legalized corn, , rates of child SA dropped by around 50%.We have seen similar results of, , between 25 and 50% drop in child SA whenever it gets legalized in a region. , And we also saw sexual assault rates drop the United States, , at around the same rate as internet penetration was hitting a region.And also we know of prisoners, , those who engage in SA [00:21:00] typically start engaging with corn at a later age in their life. ,And this is what gets me on the bands of stuff like this. Like we have the evidence on this. We know the consequence of these sorts of bans. And it’s because of your own moral inability to control yourself, you are sacrificing the lives of children. , And if you say, “Well, okay, I actually don’t struggle with this.Well, if you don’t struggle with this, then why the heck are you sacrificing the lives of children when you can throw this meat to the beast of society and prevent them from using human children as their ownie holes, right? Like why, why are you doing that? That’s a monstrous thing to do. And I think a lot of the time it’s because, , people want to look more generically conservative than the person next to them.Speaker 9: But when the progressive wants to be a good person and says, “Oh, I am letting in these immigrants,” and you point out, , these immigrants often great people, here are the statistics. , And, and they are monstrous and they are responsible for those grapes when they do this. Just as much as a [00:22:00] conservative who says, “I want to ban erotic material.”, And you point out, “Well, in countries where this has been done, the level of child grapes rose by X amount, , they are responsible for that. It’s important that we not fall for the same trap the progressive does.”Speaker 3: And o- obviously this doesn’t win us points to point out, , in the conservative sphere, but I will not sacrifice the lives of children for the perception that I am a morally pure person if I know what the consequential outcome of that sacrifice is. ISo at a, at a societal level as well, it’s positive. The question is, is it positive for individuals? , And the answer here is often not, , but it depends on how the individual is relating to it in the same way that a game like this can be very negative for an individual, , but generally it’s going to be positive.It just depends on the context.Malcolm Collins: And then this gets to the bigger problem here where people will then [00:23:00] say, “Well, Malcolm, I am you know, X type of Christian and Christians have always been really anti anything that has to do with sexuality.” And I would just say, “No, the person who told you that was your leftist school, your leftist upbringing and leftist caricatures of Christians.”If you look at Christians in a historic context depending on the Christian cultural group that you are studying, they were a very sexual population. Great examples of this would be the Puritans who up until the mid 19th century, their works heavily censored because they were so sexual. Y- y- you see this in parts of the Bible, particularly the Old Testament where you will have quite graphic sexual allegories and jokes.You, you may not get them as a reader today because you won’t know that a foot is supposed to be a member was in that context in Jewish society, but the, the, they, they were to the readers of that [00:24:00] period. They were porn jokes.Speaker 14: Just to go over some of these, we have Ru three, we have Samuel 24-3, we have Isaiah 720, we have Judges 324.Malcolm Collins: That, that is what parts of the Bible are. And you could say, “Well, then why?Like, why any of the ... Doesn’t, doesn’t the Bible say that you shouldn’t, like, lust after other women?” And it’s like, you absolutely shouldn’t be lusting after other women. Don’t do that, right?But I think that you can divide lusting after other women with one, what a lot of modern corn actually is and two the way that we, as a larger, like, new right cultural phenomenon relate to these concepts.So if you’re like, how were the Puritans like pro- monogamy, but also vulgar, right? Like what, I don’t, I don’t get this. It doesn’t make sense to me. And here I’d be like, “Have you seen the new leaflet song?” Right? The, the, not the new one, her first one. She had another one about college, which is really good, you should watch it, but the, the [00:25:00] first one is about have babies.And in the song about having babies she saysSpeaker 19: おMalcolm Collins: And the, the, this is the way that Puritans talked about this stuff, right? Like, the idea being everything that she has said there is what our society today would tell you is vulgar, but the reality of what she has said is what you do to make babies, okay?It’s not actually bad. [00:26:00] It’s not anti-biblical to say, “You should have a wife and have sex with her and come inside of her and make babies.”Speaker 24: The woke mind virus is trying to psyop us into becoming incredibly rigid in the way we relate to sexuality and aroutal. And rigid things become brittle. We need to have a degree of flexibility to stay maximally, structurally strong and protect our children. The reason they’re trying to syup us into this rigidity is because when they do, it makes it very easy to lure our children out of the tradition.And we can see as we have adopted more flexibility as a movement, I mean, if you had told me 10 years ago, some of the leading conservative influencers would be like Anthro Fox girls, furries, you know, whether it be Kirsha, Smugalana, Slime Girl, Leaflet, I’d be like that, how, how? Isn’t the [00:27:00] right so strict and rigid around this stuff?But as we have loosened that and said, no, it’s okay to be flexible in this stuff so long as it’s not in a way that’s causing active harm to our members, we can outmaneuver the left where they have begun to worship uglinessAnd as long as they’re going to insist on making all of their females ugly, we have a huge asymmetric advantage in the culture war, whereas we allow for attractiveness within our influencers, even where we’re creating super normal iterations of that EG V tubers. IMalcolm Collins: there, there was a group who hated talking about this stuff, Sierra Quaker episode, but what happened to them? They mostly died out. Some iterances of their group even began to think that sex was in marriage was sinful like the shakers, and they died out extra hard.So, the point that I’m making is I think that we are, we are bringing this back in a way that’s protective of our communities. And people can say, “Oh, well, what about, like, the Colorado [00:28:00] strategy or whatever.” I can’t remember the Colorado something. And it’s like, if you ever allow degeneracy, it always helps our opponents and not us.And here they’re referring to Colorado loosening the ban on marijuana. And here I say to them, “Are you actually kidding me? “ And note here, when I’m talking about corn, I’m not talking about anything that’s involving real humans that is, I think, pretty much always has negative externalities for society.You, the, there’s, there’s AI stuff, there’s drawn stuff, there’s, you know, I, I’m not talking about real humans, because then that involves those real humans and ends up ruining their lives. But the Colorado strategy is really stupid because the reason why Colorado ended up flipping blue after they legalized pot was because they legalized effing pot.You ... Idiots like obviously if you were the first state to legalize pot, that’s gonna bring a bunch of lefties from all over the country to your state, and they’re gonna vote in a lefty way that has nothing to do with the wider conversation. Now, why is it so important for the [00:29:00] left to try to trick you into thinking that historic Christian groups were incredibly humorously enough, they made up the term puritanical about sex, which is the antithesis of the way the Puritans viewed sex.And the ... By the way, most of the, the Christian groups other than the Quakers didn’t really care. Like the backwards people would talk about sex very frequently as well. They, they had no trouble talking about it. It w- it didn’t have big social taboos around it in the way it does in modern society.Why did they have to convince us of that? It’s because it’s the number one way that they get our kids. It’s important to remember that if you’re a Protestant for every one person that converts to a Protestant, two people leave the church. If you’re a Catholic for every one person that converts into the church, eight people leave the church, right?Like, the church is even now, ... Now it looks like it may have tapered off in some of the latest polling, but it’s pretty much bleeding members, or at least it has been for a very long time. And we need to think about how and why. And the easiest strategy to get your kids has been oh, you little Tommy, you [00:30:00] feel arousal th- th- that must mean that you are sinful, but look at us like we feel arousal and it’s accepted in our community or you feel this type of arousal that your parents say makes you evil, right?And so you might as well just join us. And this strategy was like super successful. Like it one shot at so many Christian kids because it’s, it’s, it’s when you’re going through a time and you’re first feeling these emotions and you don’t have anyone else you can go to, or you don’t feel like you have anyone else you can go to because this stuff has been so stigmatized by the way that your family talks about it it, it, it’s a very easy strat for the leftist to employ.And it’s, it’s, it’s created a a, a, a sort of just a, a, a shooting cage for young kids. And I’m really glad that through YouTubers like Leaflet, we are beginning to see a coming back of, bro, like, make kids, it’s hot, right? Like, remember what this is for. [00:31:00] Remember what all of this is for. Don’t let them be they the, the leftist or the leftist created mirror version, mirror world version of Christianity turn your kids into easy targets.And, and everything, and the way you style culture and everything like that, and this is, I think, the problem with a lot of people. And they look at me, they’re like, “Are you giving advice? For us, it’s gonna make our lives heart, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.” Like, no, like everything that I think through is like, how am I gonna keep my kids from deconverting?How am I gonna make my kids resilient to this? And when it’s advice, it’s advice at the cultural level. How do we harden our cultures to the tactics people use against us? And so it’s important to understand that pragmata masturbates the parental instinct within us, and there are mechanisms that that instinct can be masturbated like owning dogs and cats that are as degenerate as the absolute worst pornography [00:32:00] because they have degenerate effects on society and your life, which is you end up becoming a cat lady.A cat lady, we used to understand that becoming a cat lady was the very peak of human degeneracy. It was that generation’s version of being the worst kind of gooner was in today’s society because you let that spin out of control. And yet today, JD Vance points this out, you know, the, the using catwoman derogatorily and he gets hounded by the media because they are attempting to normalize this and they normalize it by breaking apart the categories so you can’t understand what’s what anymore.You can’t understand what’s good and what’s bad. You can’t say real human beings bad, right? Like that’s an easy category there. Does it involve real human beings? Bad, right? Does it involve something that somebody is, is, is making into like a daily thing for themselves, bad, right? But just normal human arousal pathways, whatever.And [00:33:00] I, I note here people can be like, “Well, the Bible expects you to never masturbate.” And I’m like, “I’m pretty sure the Bible would have explicitly said that if the Bible expects you to never masturbate.” And you can see our episode on what does the Bible say about masturbation, but the Bible if you’re looking into the Old Testament at least, there is one section where it explicitlyTalks about blocked or abnormal emissions.Malcolm Collins: And, and many people take this to mean, well, if you have a type of disease which is blocking emissions you are unclean, but what it implies is that it expected most men to be having emissions regularly. Not most married men because it applies to all Jewish men for this period but most men generally.Speaker 15: And even if you take the stance that no, it’s not talking about that, , it’s talking about only blocked omissions in the context of a marriage where that would be relevant, you still have to admit that that’s a pretty out there edge case to be mentioning in the Bible. Abnormal admissions and blocked emissions and then a number of paragraphs about what to do about [00:34:00] that.Why does it never once when it’s a natural thing for humans and apes to do, by the way, because apes do this in nature to masturbate, why would it never mention this if it was so existentially dangerous? , And it existentially didn’t want you to do this. , And people can say, “Oh, well, there’s this section where the guy pulls out before he finishes in a woman in a Levite marriage, and that’s the same.”It’s like, no, that’s not.Speaker 16: That was a legitimately horrifying thing a guy was doing. So for context in the Bible, if, , your husband dies, you marry his brother, that’s a Levite marriage, this is meant so that you can carry on, , his line and, you know, have children. , And so the guy was having sex with his brother’s widow and pulling out every time before he could do the function of sex, which is coming inside of her so that she could have a child, , literally using her as a human oni hole instead of, , actually doing the purpose of sex, which is getting her pregnant.You know, [00:35:00] he could have chosen to not have sex with her, but no, he kept having sex with her and pulling out before he gave her the one thing that she needed. Horrifying, horrifying scenario.If you were going to stretch this beyond its original meaning, the more accurate stretch would be as a condemnation of any non-procreative sex.Malcolm Collins: So again, I, I don’t even think, I think that this is like a modern, mirror, fake version in the same way that like there’s some rightist today who inhabit this like super racist, antisemitic trope because they learn from their like leftist parents that that’s what a rightist is without like looking to history to try to understand this stuff.Simone Collins: Yeah, that’s underrated the extent to which the leftist’s perception of the right is purely based off of leftist trauma. I mean, and vice versa, to be fair, but if only there were more exchange.Malcolm Collins: Straumann?Simone Collins: Mm-hmm. But I, I did not understand the right because I just believed this caricature that was presented to me as a kid.Malcolm Collins: Mm-hmm.Simone Collins: And that’s [00:36:00] underrated, I think, to the, the extent to which that happens on both the left and the right when people grow up- Right.Malcolm Collins: And I completely sympathize with so many kids who grew up in the urban monoculture, their parents had abandoned their culture and never really taught it to them. They discover that many things that are said was in the right are true, and then they try to adopt to win some sort of social hierarchy battle that they now think they’re playing among other rightists, the most stereotypical rightist perceptions within like what their community or what the leftist drama told them the rightest were like.And like I can understand this very confusing to a lot of people. And, and somebody can look at me and they can be like, “Malcolm, if you normalize all this stuff, like life won’t work out for you. You should live the way Nick Fuentes lives or whatever.” And I’m like, okay, but like I have five kids and a loving relationship and most of the people I see who push this extremely strict deontological lifestyle are [00:37:00] not happily married and don’t have lots of kids and aren’t actually winning at things.Knowing where to loosen the rules on yourself is a really important part of actually succeeding in life. And this is a conversation I think people did not expect this particular talk to go, but now we’re gonna go to the second part of this, which is what Hassan had to say about this. And I’m gonna play the clip right here.Speaker 17: Well, family, even streamers who say at the start, start they didn’t want kids end up breaking down happy and tears. So what’s really interesting about this is all of these unfuckable losers in the gaming sphere always talk about like starting families and stuff. And I don’t understand like why this has become a thing that they care about.Like if you’re a gamer, you should care about things that you actually experience. You should care about things that you actually enjoy, right? If you’re a f*****g lonely gamer who has never been around a woman and will never have sex with a woman, why do you care? Like why do you care about having children or like [00:38:00] riding for having children?Like it’s just not something that you’re gonna experience ever for your life, for the rest of your life, right? This is something that I never understand.Malcolm Collins: And this clip is important because again, it represents a trope, a trope that the left wants to be true about gamers. And it wasn’t just Hassan saying this, it was lots of people online saying this. But it is factually incorrect. So we decided to look into this. We’re like, okay, Hassan said gamer, because I’m a gamer, right?And I would say, for example my sin of playing video games is dramatically worse than any sin I have tied to corn. And the reason being because sin, according to the Bible, is anything you don’t do for God. And I don’t play video games for God. You can’t play video games for God. Video games are for personal entertainment- Yeah.to masturbate instincts that you evolved. And so, if I’m doing that many times more within my life that I’m looking at something like [00:39:00] corn, then it’s a, it’s a bigger challenge for me. It’s a bigger sin that I need to get through to live, I think, a, a, a, a perfect life. But I give myself loose rules within some areas because I know I’m gonna be tempted and I know the end goal for all of this is a happy and healthy family and a happy and healthy civilization and that if I focus too hard on this rule and this rule, then I’m not gonna get to this rule and do it right, which is the important one, which is the consequentialist one, which is to have a family, have kids treat your wife well, treat your kids well, raise the next generation, protect human civilization.And this is ... No, this is really important, right? Like, so many of the people who are preaching this alternate perception, but anyway, let’s get to this study. Simone, you put it together, go over it. Yeah. Video game developers.Simone Collins: Well, yeah, because we were talking in a long card drive about this. I used with Perplexity’s help, I used Perplexity to find notable video game developers and then see what their [00:40:00] key games were and if they were kids.And I didn’t ... I actually, I did a separate grock search on whether they were, like, woke game developers or not. It didn’t actually seem to make a difference in some of the data, depending on how you look at it. But I will remember to share this spreadsheet in the show notes too. If anyone wants to look at it we created basically a list of 30 notable male video game developers, their key games and their father status, whether they’re a father or childless or unknown.And if we know how many kids, how many kids they have plus source URLs. And the fathers out of the 30, there were 20 of them, so 66.7%. So more likely than not, a video game developer is going to be a dad. There were only two who were explicitly childless, 6.7%. And then the rest were just unknown, eight out of 30, which is 26.7%.SoMalcolm Collins: only two out of 30 didn’t have kids. That’s right. Of video game developers.Simone Collins: Mm-hmm.Malcolm Collins: So only two are the genetic dead [00:41:00] ends that Hassan represents.Speaker 21: And I would note here that this isn’t just us that found this. , There was a study that showed that 55% of gamers are married and 48% have children, and single gamers is twice as likely to go on dates, , , than, , non-gamers. , So gamers actually end up having kids at a much higher rate than non-gamers.Speaker 23: And this sort of comes to the wider point here. Even though gaming is sinful because it’s purely done for personal entertainment, it has no positive externality on the world at large, it can still have a positive effect in your life if engaged was within a healthy context.Malcolm Collins: And I find this projection very interesting from Hazan because he’s like, you guys aren’t having sex, which is what, what do you mean gamers aren’t ha- wh- wh- what?Like, are you a middle school bully or something? Like, do you, did you not even think to, like, okay, what are, what are, like, famous right wing [00:42:00] video game creators? Okay, we got five nights of Freddy’s guy. I think he’s got, what, seven kids? He’s got some insa- I think he’s seven. It might be six or something.Simone Collins: I think he’s a lot.And, and he’s not even listed on this list.Malcolm Collins: So the question is, is why do you see so many game developers having kids when people like Hassan don’t have kids? And I think here, we’re going back to the soft Yankee phenomenon- Oh. ... which actually ties strongly into this whole entire conversation.We point out in Japan, the group that seems to be higher fertility than the other groups is the soft Yankees. So this is a style that in the past would have been seen they, they dressed like very American, like rode around on like Harley Davidson and did their hair slick back. GameSimone Collins: troublemakers. Yeah.Malcolm Collins: A Yankee character, if you watch a lot of anime, right? And then as they got older, they sort of toned it down a bit, but they still had families and everything and they still wanted to, you know, because they were not taking life as [00:43:00] hard as your typical Japanese citizen does.Simone Collins: Mm-hmm.Malcolm Collins: Whereas the typicalSimone Collins: gap- They were, for example, they were more likely to live in their hometowns closer to their families, which is a big contrast to someone who, say, moved from a more rural area to Tokyo where it’s a lot harder to have a large family.Malcolm Collins: Well, I, I don’t think that that’s the most important part. The most important part is that your typical Japanese salary man is living a life of extremely strict deontological rules, typically. And the- Well,Simone Collins: and it’s a miserable life. I mean, the, the, the rates of death are justMalcolm Collins: heart attack on the job. I think that’s not the point.That’s not the point.Simone Collins: Okay.Malcolm Collins: The point is, is that they are living a life filled with very strict rules, whereas Yankee culture was in Japan was built around saying- RuleSimone Collins: breaking. Yeah. “Malcolm Collins: F you to the rules, I’m gonna do things my way. I’m gonna do things the way that work best for some form of consequentialist outcome for me.There was one of our fans that did an analysis of various Mormon districts based on [00:44:00] how religious they were. And what he ended up filing was that the highest fertility districts were not the highest religiosity districts. It was actually the middling religiosity districts that were the highest fertility, and being extremely high religiosity as a Mormon hit your fertility rates.Mm-hmm. And so the question is, is w- why do we see this phenomenon around strict deontological value sets, strict rule-based value sets and a failure to achieve the end that all of those rules were for which is to say if, if you ask me at least, like, what is the point of all of the rules in a book like the Bible or in traditional cultures or inBecause there’s a lot of rules that people just took away, right? They’re like, “Oh, we don’t need that rule. I don’t understand why it’s there.” Like a rule was put in place, it solved a problem, then, you know, the summer of love comes around and they’re like, “Well, I just don’t understand why we can’t just sleep with everyone.”And then as somebody pointed out the decline in [00:45:00] promiscuity that happened after the ‘70s wasn’t because people rediscovered morality, but it was because they immediately figured out why all those rules were there and it was called the AIDS crisis. The point being is that a lot of these historic rules had a point to them.Mm-hmm. But it’s also important to remember that our perception today of what rules were in the past can sometimes be shaped by the urban monoculture, which lies to us around what rules were normalized in the past. The lies to us around what cultural practices were normal in the past to try to create a false framing of the past to put us in weaker positions.If you see our episode about the degeneracy of the past or our, our ancestors we talk about how in many ways society has become dramatically more sexually conservative with some of the biggest being showers group showers no longer being a thing.Simone Collins: Group showers, even more extreme things like key parties.Yeah.Malcolm Collins: Key parties- Yeah. ... things where you go to a party and you’d [00:46:00] like swap keys and you’d go home with whoever’s key you had. Yeah. ... there was for male-Simone Collins: Well, I think even just the fact that there was dating culture. Oh, the whole donkey thing you were gonna say.Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Well, we don’t, I mean, we do know that in some parts of Latin America, donkeys were definitely a thing.We don’t know of the Tiawana donkey journey.Simone Collins: And the literal circle jerks. Wasn’t that another thing you talkedMalcolm Collins: about? Yes, circle jerks were very common for men I think through like the 1920s, through like the 1950s or ‘60s. When I say men, I’m, I talk about young men, like high school men would often, it was considered like something they did.A- a- and you can read about this in like a lot of the literature of the period, if you read older literature that it was a thing that was done and was considered normal and not gay. I’m not saying bring back this stuff. I’m just saying that if you thought that we moved from a society that was not degenerate to a society that was degenerate you are believing a leftist lie about history.Mm-hmm. A- and note here, people can be like, “Well, rule 34, that must be new.” And no-Simone Collins: Oh, that’s what I was thinking. Rule 34.Malcolm Collins: It’s not, we, I mean, if you go back to the 1920s, [00:47:00] you have Tijuana Bibles-Simone Collins: Yeah. ...Malcolm Collins: being sold d- widely- Well,Simone Collins: please, if you go back to the 1700s, you have people making stuff of Mar- Marie Antoinette and her ladies and waiting.Don’t even, yeah.Malcolm Collins: Yeah. But the, but the Tijuana Bibles were basically your firstcartoon, a year later, you have your first widely distributed R34. For people who aren’t familiar with Tijuana Bibles, you’d like go to your local drugstore and you’d buy sort of under the table, they had books that were rule 34 art of the cartoons of the 1920s, 1930s, 1940s and these ended up transitioning in designs and then they died out with the internet because there was alternate things that existed.And, and you see this, you know, you go all the way back. People are like, “Well, okay, this, this didn’t exist in, in, in history.” And it’s like, well, I mean, of course you haveSimone Collins: James Joyce, wasn’t it James Joyce?Malcolm Collins: Yeah, James Joyce, James Joyce and his, like, fart fetish stuff that he would write.So like he’s high society, right? Or you go back to ancient Greece and, oh my [00:48:00] God, like the moment you invent a theological pantheon, all of a sudden everyone’s having sex with each other in the weirdest possible ways and animals and whatever, right? And then fortunately a superior culture came around and, and cleaned up a lot of that and was like, no, like let’s not include the animals in this stuff.But the point I’m making here is that these people who created these very strict rules, gamers don’t have these as much. Gamers take life a lot less rigidly because they’re like, look, I’m gonna chill out at the end of the day. I’m gonna have like an hour of me time, right? That isn’t, that isn’t for trying to move human civilization forwards, that isn’t for trying to be a good person, that isn’t for my family, that isn’t for and that this ability to be relaxed about part of your life allows you to, because think about when, when you, if you’re here saying [00:49:00] pragmata is not core, right? Functionally, how is it different? If I’m in my room and I’m playing pragmata, which I’m playing the game, it’s okay I am fathering a fake child while I have real children downstairs. Mm-hmm. How is that not as ghoulish as masturbating to a fake woman when I have a real wife in the other room?I, I- Hmm.Simone Collins: That’s a really good point. Yeah. Hmm.Malcolm Collins: That, that is, that is obviously as ghoolish, right? And I, and then people can be like, “Well, okay, well, I only play games where I go around murdering fake people. “ And I’m like, “How is that any better?” Okay? You’re, instead of playing with your kids, murdering fake people in a box, all right?I think we need to admit to ourselves when something is sinful, all right? Like, this is, I think, the greatest sin is to pretend [00:50:00] that something is that is, that is clearly very sinful, isn’t sinful, or is some different category of sin than the types of sin that other people are making.Simone Collins: Yeah.Malcolm Collins: The final thing to talk about was pragmata, unless you had any comments on what I’m talking about here, Simone.Simone Collins: No, I just really do appreciate, however, the fact that you’re bringing up this misnomer that somehow gamers are in cells when they’re, they’re actually just normal people-Malcolm Collins: But these are chill about things. Yeah. You know, the people who are like, “I’ll never play video.” Like, clearly there’s some video game that would likely be fun for most people, and so if you’re out there fastidiously not playing video games, it’s because you’re living by some strict deontological rule set.Hassan is living by one of those rule sets, and that’s why he has a girlfriend who says she’ll never breed with him- Yeah. ... because she says she doesn’t want kids. And so his life ends with him. His line ends with him. Yeah. He is a genetic dead end, and if you are having sex with someone without reproducing being the point of it, you know, as Lethalt [00:51:00] says the, the way to have kids birth control is for pussies.If you are having sex with somebody without that being the end goal, you’re just treating your partner as an oni hole, right? As a sex toy. The, that’s, that’s the, the end of it, right? And I’m, I’m sorry if that hurts some people’s feelings to hear, but that’s the reality of it. You have reduced your partner to a level of degeneracy worse than anything you will find online, right?Because the stuff you find online is fictional. You have reduced a real human being to a sex toy, which is disgusting. That is all they are was in your life if you are not having reproductive sex.Simone Collins: Yeah.Malcolm Collins: And I know that, like, I’m sorry that that got a little spicy there, but it’s, it’s the reality.And, and it’s sad to think of Hassan furiously masturbating himself inside of this woman who he presumably has some [00:52:00] affection for instead of doing what’s meaningful with his life because he believes he has followed all the deontological rules, or at least enough of them, so he doesn’t need to actually sacrifice for the future and have kids which is the problem that many deontologists also on the right do.They go, “Well, I’m following enough of the important rules. I don’t actually need to do the really hard stuff, which is go out there and talk to women.” Right?m. You know, that’s the really hard part, right? They’re like, “Oh, well, it, the Bible doesn’t, you know, say it’s sinful to close myself in my house and not talk to women, so I’m not gonna...”But all of those other rules in the Bible assume that you’re doing that anyway, right? Like all of those other rules was, was to achieve this outcome for you, which was a, a, a, a, a married household with lots of kids that were raised in a way that made them effectatious in the future. The rules weren’t to, like, f**k with you, okay?Or, or make your life arbitrarily hard. It was to guide you in the right direction. And when you overly follow [00:53:00] like this, this and this, you can forget, oh, but the really hard thing I need to motivate myself to do today is talk to a girl. Now the final point, were there people online ... And I had prepared a bunch of, like, quotes that people had had about the game and getting mad about it, getting mad about it pronatalist message, people saying, “Oh, people are telling on themselves by finding her hot or whatever that leftists are evil and evil can’t see good.”I mean, is this really true or is this just us trying to make ourselves feel good as people on the right? Like, it feels good to say leftists can’t see that this is actually a game about being a dad. And I think that there is some truth to this. There are some leftists who are so cooked that they reflexively can’t help but see a child and see a sexual object because that is the only way they relate to anything, any media, anySimone Collins: book.Well, then there’s a reminder that most people now are, [00:54:00] well, probably most, I need to check, but most are growing up without exposure to younger siblings, certainly not prolonged exposure. So they kind of don’t know how to contextualize young girls differently if they’re not, aside from being a kid ever around young girls, you know, as an older sibling or something.Yeah. If that makes sense.Malcolm Collins: But I think that most of the leftist anger around the game is downstream of three alternate reactions, and they’re just trying to hide the reactions in a way that they can use to attack their political opponents. And I think it’s important that we don’t accidentally do the same.Because if we do, if we don’t actually attempt to model our political opponents, then we cannot predict them. And if we cannot predict them, we cannot fight them as well. The reason I’m able to do something like bait a Telemundo reporter into a trap is because I understand her perspective and I can predict her.She doesn’t understand my perspective and [00:55:00] therefore cannot predict me and so falls in that trap. So, where, where, where are they going with this? How do they see it? So the first thing is they don’t like their political opponents being happy.Simone Collins: Hmm.Malcolm Collins: They see men and gamers and men who enjoy sexual things as their opponents, and this is why they remove sexual things from video games, because they want to make you a straight man sad.That’s, that’s really it. They want you to have less pleasure. They don’t do it. And this, this is where they align, and this is why so much of the on, like the, the like new right or the online right got and cut its teeth fighting for the de- censorship of sexy female characters and games.Simone Collins: Hmm.Malcolm Collins: And we are intentionally hobbling ourselves if we don’t do that, right?Because we say, “Oh I the left, but for reasons I won’t get down to here, I’m actually gonna talk about this was leaflet. The left started to hate beauty and they thought that they both hate [00:56:00] beauty and they hate especially beautiful women because beautiful women make straight white men happy, especially beautiful white women.So let’s remove all of those from video games. And now we can put those back in our games and, and please gamers. And there’s gonna be a part of the faction that says, don’t put beautiful women in games because that’s sinful.” And it’s like, f**k off, right? Like, absolutely, you are m- removing one of our weapons for no reason when it’s an easy fight for us to win.Yes, make games beautiful again. Right. So, one is for the same reason they wanna make women in games ugly. They just don’t want you to be happy. They see people being happy with a young girl and, and taking on a father role for her and they go “Well, I don’t like, I don’t like that these people are happy.Let’s see if we can make some big stink and make studios not make games like this anymore.” Okay. Okay, that’s one. All right. The next reason the next reason is that they see men masturbating this emotional pathway [00:57:00] of being a father and they are afraid that men will realize that they want to be fathers in the same way that some idiots are afraid that, like, if men see corn, they’re gonna realize they want to have sex.Yeah. And so we will not let them see corn. And it’s like, well, most men know they wanna have sex, okay? I’m, I’m, I’m sorry that’s like it’s pretty hard coded in our biology and it’s pretty hard coded in our biology because those of us who didn’t do it didn’t have surviving offspring. And most men who haven’t been brainwashed by our culture know that they want kids.Now, and you even see this in statistic, men want kids significantly more than women today. But it is true that a lot of men were brainwashed in our culture today, so much so that they literally thought, “I don’t actually want kids.” And so they see this context and it does help break that brainwashing for some men.Like, oh, it is pleasurable to raise children. And I have said before on the show people have taken this as some sort of like [00:58:00] weird self own or something like this where I said it is like if I’m contrasting the pleasure I get from like blocking out, you know, 30 minutes to an hour to have sex versus 30 minutes to an hour playing with the kids, it’s like not even close.Playing with the kids feels much better than sex does.Simone Collins: I’m actually curious if, if there are any parents of kids who would disagree, let us know in the comments. Like I, I haven’t encountered anyone who feels differently, but I’m curious, they must be out there apparently.Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Yeah. People think like I’m owning myself by saying that or something like that.And it’s like, no. Like clearly as an adult you, you get to a point where you are having sex for kids. You’re like, “Well, I want more of these things. Like I should schedule some time to make more of them.” And a lot of people contextualize this very badly. They’re like, “Oh, well, this means, you know, the person’s wife isn’t [00:59:00] gratifying him enough or isn’t going far enough out.It’s like, no, like when you get to like five in kids, and note here, I’m not talking about one or two kids. Like when I had one or two kids, I still, you know, it’s about even, maybe sex is a bit better, right? But when you’ve got five kids playing with five kids, just feels way better. And- It’sSimone Collins: a party.It’s moreMalcolm Collins: than just playing. Yeah, it’s playing better in a way that doesn’t have any negatives to it, you know, afterwards. You don’t feel guilty, but you don’t feel ... It’s, it’s like perfect, clean pleasure, right? Like, there, there’s no negative externalities to taking some time to play with the kids. You, you can, for example, if you’re seeking pleasure you can do that for God.Like it’s not a sin to play with your kids, right? And, and you can get a lot of pleasure from that, right? So, sorry, I’m, the reason I’m going into all of this is I think that a lot of men don’t realize how fun this is gonna be. And so they see this and they go, “Oh, like this is a lot of fun.” Also I’d say [01:00:00] for guys, don’t let your experience with babies mess up w- how much you think you’re going to like kids.Most guys don’t really like babies. There are a few that do but like we’re not really designed to be a primary caregiver at that stage of a human’s life for obvious reasons, we can’t feed them. If, if, if you were unaware so there’s a reason they are typically with the mothers in an evolutionary context?Simone Collins: Yeah. Key point being evolutionary context.Malcolm Collins: Yeah. So, yeah the third reason is that they genuinely do not like the idea that people may have kids as a result of this.Simone Collins: Hmm.Malcolm Collins: And that I think is probably the biggest, is they think, “Oh no, our messaging is falling apart.” Both in regards to kids and in regards to men wanting a stable marriage [01:01:00] and family and, and I mean, like genuinely wanting it, wanting it more than playing a game where you go walk around shooting people, right?Like a guy, like, oh, imagine you’re a guy, you’ve, you’ve played a few games recently, you go, “Which game did I enjoy the most? The one where I was being a dad or the one where I was walking around shooting people. “ Well, I mean, as a man, I do like shooting people, of course, and I wish- There is that. ... that more in the real world, but I can’t, right?There’s negative externalities to that, but there isn’t negative externalities from having a kid, and I might have enjoyed that game a bit more than the others, so I should give it a try. So I also think the, the propaganda’s pretty good here. So, final thoughts, Simone.Simone Collins: Well, I didn’t realize people were actively choosing to play this game because they wanted to play a, a parenting simulator game, and I wish people discussed that more because I had no idea.I thought people were feeling like they were being psyopt into being parent asp- aspirational parents when they just wanted- It’s literally the onlyMalcolm Collins: thing anyone’s [01:02:00] been talking about since the demo first showcased for the game.Simone Collins: That’s a really good sign though. If all these people want to play a parent simulator game, isn’t that cool?Isn’t that awesome? Doesn’t that mean people actually really do like the idea of becoming parents? And that maybe in the future, people will start to just overcome the stated barriers to parenthood, like, “I’m not prepared.”Malcolm Collins: And also, as a final point here, like to note for people who are like, “Oh, don’t you understand that, like, corn ends up exaggerating all of the parts of procreation that, you know, to unrealistic standards?”Simone Collins: Well, people made that point with their criticisms of this as well. They’re like, “Well, you’re not dealing with the spitting and the screaming and the diapers and the, you know, all thatMalcolm Collins: stuff.” Well, yeah, and that’s, that’s the point I wanna make. I wanna make ... You, you cannot criticize corn for being unrealistic and over the top and supernormal stimuli.This is a stimuli that is, like, bigger and better than anything that would exist in the real world and then say this [01:03:00] game stimulating another, masturbating another parental instinct pathway, a pathway about having children isn’t doing the exact same thing. It’s almost cartoonish in a way.You know, as somebody who has a lot of experience around young kids the way that this character acts is a caricature of an over the top way a kid her age would act. It’s not the way children her age actually ... I’m, I’m not talking about, “Oh, you’re not dealing with the spitting, you’re not dealing with the pooping in the pants, you’re not dealing with the, this kid’s older than that.If the, a kid of this age is pooping in their pants, there’s, like, serious developmental problems or spitting or having breakdowns. Our kid who’s closest to this age doesn’t do any of that anymore.” But even with all of that being the case she still acts in a way that is completely super normal and not the way children actually act.It’s, it’s to a kid, w- whatever a girl [01:04:00] doing the, like, sexy girl thing, you know, like, “Ooh, I’m so hot. I’m a ... “ You know, like when I, when they’re trying to look like what they think a sexy girl looks like it, it’s doing that, but for what people think the cutest, most adorable kid ever would do. And, and here I will note, the, the face again does seem a littleIt, it, it ... Okay, I’ll I was trying to age, ... I’ll see if I can find this, age up our daughter, because I like aging up our daughters to see, “Oh, what are they gonna look like when they’re 20? What are they gonna look like when they’re 30, you know, et cetera.” And one of them messed up, and it moved her face to the age of 20, but it didn’t move the rest of her body to the age of 20.Simone Collins: Oh, grow.Malcolm Collins: And that image is the closest image I’ve seen to the pragmatic character.Simone Collins: Yeah, you know what? That makes sense.Malcolm Collins: I’m, I’m sorry. I know this isn’t a popular opinion on the right, but they, they did kind of mess up her face. Yeah. But again, it’s because they’re going was the most cutesy, supernormal stimuli for people who may not have a super good [01:05:00] grasp of what kids of this age range look like.Simone Collins: But by the way, using AI to age up your kids is underrated. I mean, studies have shown that when you contextualize yourself in the future or when you’re primed by the researchers looking at your behavior to think about your future self or think as your future self or look at pictures of your future self, you tend to make more responsible decisions a- about your long-term life.You know, you don’t choose the easy indulgent thing now, you choose the thing better for the future. And one thing that we do when we make these aged up photos of our kids is show them, “Hey, this could be you in the future. This is you in the dinosaur lab making your dinosaur. This is you in front of your helicopter,” whatever, like whatever they’re into and it canI think it has been motivating for them to do the right thing or to focus on making themselves better when otherwise they would not be interested because what’s the payoff for them? But it’s pretty cool when they can see who they could be.Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Anyway love you to death [01:06:00] Simone. The wild take on this one I think for people who have been waiting for us to just dunk on leftists, which I don’t think is helpful to do.I think we need to make sure that we understand where they’re really coming from and that we understand and properly categorize the stimuli that exists in our environment and not rely on stimu- like, like stereotypes as to what those stimulis are or what they represent.Simone Collins: Fair enough.Malcolm Collins: And by the way, note here, if somebody’s like, “There’s no such thing as corn that’s as wholesome as something like pragmata.”Like I’ve literally posted one before. It’s like the hinti leak on the stream it’s called likeWhen I returned to my hometown, my childhood friend was broken.Malcolm Collins: Oh,Simone Collins: yeah. Like the actual hanti.Malcolm Collins: Yeah. By the way, not it doesn’t have, like, it, it does a weird thing where it just tells a really wholesome story and then all of the actual, like, inappropriate scenes are after the story is over, but take place throughout the story [01:07:00] so you can read the story without accidentally hitting any of the inappropriate scenes.Simone Collins: That’s soMalcolm Collins: funny. But the point is, is it’s a, it’s an actually fairly popular hinti about meeting a childhood friend who’s going through emotional trauma, helping them overcome it, getting married and having kids. And the point I’m making here here is not everything out there is degenerate, right?Speaker 12: The negatives of this sort of material is the effect it has on your life, your perception of women or men, and your perception of reality. And it is so ubiquitous in the world we live in, it is up to you to engage with this sort of content in a healthy way. It is a self-control that is going to be required of you and of the next generation, or we are going to die out as a species.And we need to be very careful to not get one shot at because we see the instinct to have sex and we, , say, “This is always dangerous, always and everywhere when that [01:08:00] is not the case.” And we see the instinct to play with our children and we say, “This is always healthy, always and everywhere, and it could never come in one shot me in some way.”Speaker 18: Being honest and clear-headed about each of these instincts and how they can be, , manipulated or engaged with in ways that are healthy or unhealthy is critical if your line is going to survive. And building up this self-control to do that is critical if your line is going to survive.Speaker 13: The distinction here and the criticality of this distinction is much easier to see in erotic material for women than it is for men. , Women clearly like monster Effer books are not good for a woman’s brain and how she perceives men and how she perceives society. But that isn’t to say all romance books that a woman could read that are basically stimulating the same pathways are not going to get her to end up fantasizing about a positive and healthy relationship with a man.It is that she chooses the degenerate option that ends up [01:09:00] scrambling her brain. It is that she chooses to perceive things like that that ends up scrambling her brain. It is not the very essence of books about romance. I mean, what about the girl who grows up reading the books about the heroic night with positive qualities who saves the woman?That is the same genre as the monster effort genre. Fundamentally, it’s hitting the same pathways. It’s just doing it in a positive contextualization.Speaker 20: And for the guys who say, “Well, when degeneracy is an option, I just can’t help but choose it. “ It’s, first of all, no, you can’t. You have the self-control. You’re choosing not to have the self-control. But if you genuinely, at a biological level, lack the self-control to not choose degeneracy, then it’s pointless, right?Like, your kids or grandkids are gonna be shot too. You’re a genetic dead end. And I don’t need to manipulate societyOr change society in a way that’s going to lead to children getting graped.Speaker 20: to [01:10:00] protect weak genetic dead ends like you. ISpeaker 13: IMalcolm Collins: Like, there is actually healthy material out there.Simone Collins: Mm.Malcolm Collins: It’s that you are choosing something degenerate.Simone Collins: There you go. It’s all about choices.Malcolm Collins: All right. Love you, Simone.Simone Collins: I love you too.Malcolm Collins: All right. We just made it back from DC and for anyone who’s still watching at this point in the video, I will be streaming with Leaflet tonight at 9:00 PM EST. Let’s see if I stay up all night again. So I’ll probably be streaming tomorrow morning too. Depending, that’s what happened last night.Simone Collins: Saturday morning.Malcolm Collins: Yeah, it’s, it’s a 10 hour stream last time, so we’ll see what ends up happening this time. I made the, the horrible mistake of thinking, oh, I’m hopping on leaflet to talk with her for a few hours because, you know, that’s the longest a video could possibly go. So I start drinking at the beginning of our conversation, [01:11:00] not even realizing how late it had gotten or how long we’d been talking.Simone Collins: Right. No, it was so, so cool though. I think a lot of people enjoyed it.Malcolm Collins: Yeah, yeah. I think this one will do well, so we’ll, we’ll, I mean, I hope it does well for her. Build up we’ll be doing this every other Friday, by the way, if you, if you miss this one. At least that’s a plan. You know, we’ll see. Maybe, you know, something happens, some drama happens.Simone Collins: Yeah. Well-Malcolm Collins: And it doesn’t end up working out. Anything you wanna say, you know?Simone Collins: N- no. Oh my God. Hold on. Sorry. Octavia’s been ... No. That’s a mistake. Don’t go outside.Sorry. I just wanna make sure Octavian ... [01:12:00] Oh my God, I’m gonna kill him.Malcolm Collins: What was Octavian doing? Do I need to put more water on my hair?Simone Collins: No, I think it’s fine. Okay. Maybe run your fingers through it.He’s just farting me. He, yeah. He’s just trolling me now.He just wants to use our intercom system for fart jokes.Malcolm Collins: Okay. Well, I’ll get started. Okay, Simone? Okay.Simone Collins: Oh my God, come on, just send.Okay. Sorry. Go ahead.Malcolm Collins: All right. And this is the type of thing where you don’t have to waste time doing this. You know, you’re choosing to spend time doing this.Simone Collins: Well, [01:13:00] no, because he thought I said to go outside the fence and he will wander off and-Malcolm Collins: We’llSimone Collins: never see anything. Yeah. I, it is not, it is not safe for us to say, “Yeah, it’s okay for you to play outside.”And they’re like, “Outside the fence, you mean?” And that’s-Malcolm Collins: Okay. ...Simone Collins: that’s dangerous.Octavian Collins: Okay, come on. And you can open these. You can open these. Oh yeah, this is private jet. Come on, activity, activity. Let’s go back. Let me go take pictures. I got a video of you. Wait.Come on, go. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit basedcamppodcast.substack.com/subscribe

Malcolm & Simone Collins break down Asmongold’s viral “American History Conspiracy Timeline” — the theory that identity politics and racial tensions were deliberately amplified after Occupy Wall Street to distract the public from corporate and elite power.They examine explosive evidence: skyrocketing funding for the SPLC, NAACP, HRC, and GLAAD right after Occupy Wall Street, massive corporate donors (JP Morgan, Bank of America, Coca-Cola, George Soros, etc.), changes in FBI hate crime training and reporting guidelines, polling shifts on race relations, Google Trends/Ngram data, and more.Is modern identity politics organic cultural evolution or an astroturfed wedge issue? They also discuss antisemitism’s resurgence, Russia’s role in BLM, corporate vs. industrialist interests, and why class conflict was redirected into identity warfare.A data-heavy, no-holds-barred episode that connects the dots between Occupy Wall Street, the explosion of “woke” terminology, and today’s cultural divisions.Show NotesAsmongold’s ThesisOn a YouTube clip of Asmongold’s stream titled Alex Jones was right, in which Asmongold went over the Southern Poverty Law Center’s support of racist groups, he presented his conspiracy timeline regarding racism in the USA.He drew up a timeline (the “asmongold American history conspiracy timeline”)* 2005: “racism basically defeated everyone is getting along generally”* 2011: “lives improve but what about all these corpos? Occupy Wall Street* 2014: “look at that black person, they took your future”* 2025: “omg the jews”I hadn’t heard this before but… it sounds credible? How credible is it?I checked to see how Asmongold’s theory tracks with key word search volume, changes in police training programs, ngram word volume in books, reported hate crime data, polling data, and fundraising data for top identity politics orgs versus Occupy Wall Street.I was surprised by what I found. For example: While most nonprofit fundraising curves I looked at appeared to go up mostly linearly over time, the fundraising for identity-politics-related (e.g. NAACP, SPLC) skyrocketed after Occupy Wall Street. I’ve got graphs and numbers.Checking Asmongold’s ArgumentAsmongold lays out a simple four‑step “conspiracy timeline” where elites redirect public anger from class issues to identity conflicts, moving from “racism basically defeated” in 2005 to renewed racism and surging antisemitism by the mid‑2020s.2005: Racism “basically defeated”* He describes mid‑2000s America as a time when most people of different races got along and pop culture normalized multiracial friendship and cooperation (e.g., movies like Rush Hour 3 with a Black and Chinese lead that everyone was excited to see). He frames this as racism being “basically defeated” and society getting more progressive each year on race and sexuality, with growing acceptance of gay people and gay marriage and then the election of Barack Obama as a symbol that things were going right.* He emphasizes that everyday social life felt edgy but unserious: people said offensive things (like racial slurs in online games) but “everyone knew it wasn’t real,” and the overall vibe was that people joked harshly yet still generally got along instead of seeing each other as mortal enemies.Checking in on hate crimeIn 2005, in the US, did various measures (e.g. racially-motivated violence, racial hate crimes, revelations of serious discrimination) indicate low relative measures of racism vis a vis the rest of American history?TL:DR: Yes. 2005 marked one of the lowest points for racism in U.S. history relative to prior eras (slavery through the Jim Crow and Civil Rights periods). Overt, lethal racial violence had plummeted from its peaks in the late 19th/early 20th centuries and even from mid-20th-century levels, with no comparable mass events or systemic terror campaigns.* FBI Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) hate crime data, which began in 1991, shows 2005 with 7,163 reported hate crime incidents (involving 8,380 offenses and 8,804 victims). This was explicitly noted by the FBI as the lowest total in more than a decade. Racial bias motivated about 54.7% of single-bias incidents.* Overt racism (legal segregation, mass lynchings, race riots as tools of social control) had been declining since the mid-20th century. Studies of discrimination trends (e.g., in employment/housing) show persistence but also overall reductions post-1960s civil rights reformsDid police departments get trained to report more hate crimes?After 2012, were there any known training programs that took place among police departments that might have increased the percentage of crimes reported as being racially motivated hate crimes?YES.After 2012, multiple federal and state-level initiatives provided or promoted training programs for police departments specifically aimed at improving the identification, investigation, classification, and reporting of hate crimes—including racially motivated ones.Here are some sources of these changes:FBI Hate Crime Data Collection Guidelines and Training Manual (updated multiple times post-2012):* Version 1.0 (December 2012): Merged prior guidelines and training guides; included learning modules on bias-motivated crime definitions, a two-tier review process (responding officer flags “suspected” bias → expert review), case study exercises, and model procedures for agencies to build their own training. Explicitly intended to help departments establish/refresh hate crime training programs.* Version 2.0 (February 2015): Added new bias categories (e.g., anti-Arab, expanded religious biases) and corresponding training scenarios.* 2021–2022 major revision: Updated for the full transition to the National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS) (phased in ~2016–2021, mandatory by 2021). Removed Summary Reporting System references, added federal/tribal offenses, new anti-Asian scenarios, non-binary gender identity guidance, and tips for victim interviews. NIBRS’s detailed incident-based structure made it easier to flag and code bias motivations (including racial) at the offense level.NIBRS Transition Support (2016–2025): DOJ/BJS and FBI provided targeted grants, technical assistance, and training to thousands of agencies on properly coding/reporting hate crimes in NIBRS. Examples include the FY2023 Law Enforcement Transition to NIBRS grant (explicitly to “improve hate crime reporting”) and FBI training of ~19,500 participants from 9,500+ agencies (2016–2022). This shift alone is associated with better capture of bias indicators.DOJ/COPS Office and BJA programs: Ongoing grants and resources (such as the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Training & Technical Assistance Program) funded specialized training, resource centers, and outreach for identifying/investigating bias crimes. COPS released recognizing/reporting hate crime training in 2022 (with later updates). Post-2020 awards emphasized investigation and community collaboration.THIS IS IN ADDITION TO STATE-LEVEL CHANGES* California (2017 onward): Commission on Peace Officer Standards and Training (POST) developed and mandated the video course “Hate Crimes: Identification and Investigation” (November 2017). AB 57 (enacted ~2017–2019) required its inclusion in basic academy training, made it available online, and mandated periodic in-service training for all officers (every 6 years).* Other states passed similar mandates or funded programs (e.g., Illinois proposals, local collaborations with groups like the Matthew Shepard Foundation)Checking in on general perceptions of racism racismGallup (satisfaction with race relations / “very/somewhat good”):* Early 2000s–2014: High (often 60%+ “good”; peaked near 70–80% post-Obama election).* 2015 onward: Sharp drop to ~30% “good” (lowest in decades amid Ferguson-era protests). Hovering 22–36% since; 2022 reading ~28% satisfied.* 2025: 64% say racism against Black people is “widespread” (tied for highest since 2008 tracking; up from 51% in 2009). Civil rights progress views also down from 89% (2011) to lower levels post-2020.Pew Research:* 2019: 58% called race relations “bad”; 53% said worsening.* Post-2020: BLM support peaked (67% in 2020) then fell (~51% by 2023). Discrimination perceptions peaked ~2021 (60% saw high levels against Blacks) but declined to 45% by 2025.* Recent (2025–2026): Diversity viewed positively (~75% “good thing”), but partisan divides widened; some softening on specific discrimination claims, yet overall pessimism on relations persists vs. early 2000s.2011–2012: Occupy and class conflict* In his view, the real break comes with the 2011–2012 Occupy Wall Street moment, when people start focusing on economic power rather than identity, asking whether their problems come from the ultra‑rich and corporate “leadership class” who own capital and keep wages low in the post‑2008 crash recovery.* He argues this terrified the elite, because public attention was turning away from blaming minorities or women and toward questioning the people who own everything, so there was a strong incentive to deflect anger away from class and back onto identity categories.How did American sentiment change about wealth disparity and class conflict when the occupy wall street movement gained momentum in the USA?The most direct and widely cited data comes from Pew Research Center surveys:* Perceptions of class conflict: In a December 6–19, 2011, Pew survey of 2,048 adults, 66% of Americans said there were “very strong” or “strong” conflicts between rich and poor people—an increase of 19 percentage points from 47% in a 2009 survey. The share saying “very strong” conflicts doubled from 15% to 30%—the highest level since Pew first asked the question in 1987.* Class conflict was now seen as a bigger source of tension than conflicts between immigrants and the native-born, Blacks and whites, or young and old.* These increases occurred across most demographics (e.g., +22 points among whites, +23 points among independents, +24 points among those earning $40k–$75k), though they were especially pronounced among younger adults, women, and liberals/independents.* Views on economic fairness and power: In a separate December 2011 Pew poll, 77% agreed there was “too much power in the hands of a few rich people and large corporations.” 61% said the economic system “unfairly favors the wealthy” (up from earlier baselines in related polling), while only 36% called it generally fair.* Broader inequality concerns: A CBS/New York Times poll at the end of 2011 found that two-thirds of Americans agreed the nation had “too much inequality”—a level of agreement that analysts credited to OWS for moving the issue from academic discussions into mainstream public consciousness.Earlier 2011 polls (pre-momentum or early October) showed lower awareness and more uncertainty about OWS goals, underscoring that the change coincided with the protests’ peak visibility.Important: OWS and an actual increase in disparity were at play: Pew researchers noted that the short timeframe of the attitude shift “may reflect the income and wealth inequality message conveyed by Occupy Wall Street protesters…that led to a spike in media attention to the topic,” alongside growing public awareness of actual wealth concentration (e.g., Census data showing the top 10%’s share of wealth rising sharply).2010s: Identity politics as a diversion* Asmongold’s core claim is that, in response, big institutions cultivated a new wave of identity politics as a “wedge issue” to keep people fighting each other instead of looking up the class ladder.* In his Paint diagram this is the phase where the rich guy takes nine slices of a ten‑piece pie, then cuts the last slice in half and says “the Black guy got your half,” redirecting resentment toward other ordinary people instead of the elite.* He says he does agree with some specific identity‑politics claims but thinks the overall structure is a misdirection: arguments over bathrooms, trans inclusion, and similar topics become a constant culture‑war distraction that fractures solidarity and makes people forget about shared material problems.The measurable rise in identity politics—defined here as politics organized around identity-based interest groups (e.g., race, gender, sexual orientation, etc.)—occurred primarily in the mid-2010s, with a sharp acceleration around 2013–2016 according to the specified metrics. This was not the invention of the concept (the term dates to the 1977 Combahee River Collective statement, with earlier roots in civil rights and feminist movements), but a clear inflection point where it became a dominant framing in public discourse, media, and politics.See Google Trends for Identity Politics (spike in 2016) - 2005 to 2025* Public interest in the phrase “identity politics” itself was low and stable for decades, then spiked dramatically.* Searches reached more than twice their previous all-time high in November 2016 (post-Trump election) and again in August 2017 (Charlottesville).* These were not coastal-only phenomena; Rust Belt states showed strong interest. Earlier data (pre-2016) show no comparable surges, confirming the mid-2010s as the breakout periodWord frequency and media mentions* Quantitative content analyses of major U.S. publications show a clear surge in the phrase “identity politics” beginning in 2016. One study of major outlets found it tied more often to the political left but with significant right-wing linkage as well; aggregate trends confirm the spike through 2019* Google NGram Viewer* identity politics,intersectionality,black feminism,nonbinary,lived experience 2000 to present* NYT word-frequency analyses of “woke”-adjacent terminology (including identity-focused language) also show rapid rises starting ~2013–20142016–2020s: Manufactured extremism and the “return” to antisemitism* He then layers in the SPLC/FBI storyline he’s reacting to: that anti‑hate nonprofits and elements of the security state allegedly paid or supported extremists to keep visible “racism” and “right‑wing extremism” alive.* In his narrative, these groups have a financial and institutional incentive to produce hate so they can fundraise by promising to fight it, which requires keeping social tensions high instead of allowing them to cool off.* Within that frame, he says identity politics eventually “runs its course,” and elites fall back on the oldest scapegoating pattern: overt antisemitism and conspiracy about “the Jews” as the master explanation, which he characterizes as “old reliable” used to absorb and misdirect frustration away from structural issues.Funding of Identity PoliticsThe top identity politics orgs:* NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People)* Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC)* Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation* Human Rights Campaign (HRC)* GLAAD* Transgender Law Center, National Center for Transgender Equality, Lambda Legal* ACLU (American Civil Liberties Union)SPLC Fundraising Over TimeTL:DR Seemed to go DOWN a bit after OWS, then blasted up after Trump was elected* 2000–2015: Relatively stable and modest, generally in the $35M–$62M total revenue range (contributions ~$30M–$55M). Slow, steady growth with minor fluctuations.* 2016–2017: Dramatic surge (post-2016 election and heightened visibility), with total revenue jumping to ~$136M and contributions to ~$132M.* 2018–2024: Elevated plateau with volatility — peaking at $170M total revenue in 2023, then declining to ~$129M in 2024. Contributions remained high (~$97M–$132M range).High-Profile SPLC DonorsAsmongold’s Theory might have more weight if donors to the SPLC would be uniquely uncomfortable with OWS-related sentiment. Who are high-profile SPLC donors?* George Clooney and Amal Clooney (via the Clooney Foundation for Justice): Donated $1 million in 2017 to support SPLC efforts against hate groups.* George Soros (via Open Society Foundations): Multiple grants over the years, including support for anti-hate initiatives (e.g., a $75,000 pledge in 2016 for convening anti-bias groups; broader involvement in related funding).* Tim Cook (then-Apple CEO, on behalf of Apple): Pledged $1 million to the SPLC in 2017 (part of Apple’s $2 million total to anti-hate groups, split with the ADL). Apple also encouraged employee and customer donations.* JPMorgan Chase: Longtime donor; gave an additional $500,000 in 2017 for “disaster relief” and other support.* Other notable mentions:* OpenAI, Chick-fil-A, and MGM Resorts (corporate contributions in recent years).* Various donor-advised funds, foundations, and high-net-worth individuals (SPLC’s revenue is primarily from private contributions, with an endowment/net assets nearing or exceeding $780M–$800M).NAACP Fundraising Over Time* Sharp growth in the late 2010s–early 2020s aligns with heightened national attention to racial justice issues.* Pre-2011 data is limited in digitized Form 990s; overall NAACP-related activity was smaller-scale historically (you don’t have to report as much when your nonprofit revenues are super low)* Contributions* 2024: Total Revenue $60.6M / Contributions $49.9M (82%)* 2023: $43.6M / $25.7M (59%)* 2022: $51.2M / $40.0M (78%)* 2021: $103.7M / $94.2M (91%) — major surge (post-2020)* 2020: $86.8M / high contributionsHigh-Profile NAACP DonorsCorporations have provided some of the largest recent gifts:* Wells Fargo: $50 million grant in 2023 — the single largest corporate donation in NAACP history. Funds supported grassroots branches, a new national headquarters, financial literacy, and racial equity programs. Wells Fargo has been a long-term partner (20+ years).* AT&T: Multi-million dollar contributions (in the $1M+ category in some reports).* Others in the $200K–$1M+ range: Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, McDonald’s, Walmart, Hyundai, UPS, FedEx, Coca-Cola, and Eli Lilly.Foundations who donated:* Ford Foundation* W.K. Kellogg Foundation* Robert Wood Johnson Foundation* Open Society Foundations (linked to George Soros)* The Atlantic Philanthropies and others.HRC Funding* Early 2000s (~2000–2005): ~$20M–$25M range — smaller scale during earlier advocacy phases.* ~2010: ~$27M.* 2012: ~$33M.* 2015: ~$37M.* 2017–2018: ~$42M–$46M.* 2020: ~$46M.* 2023: ~$50M.* 2024: ~$46M.* 2025 (FYE March 2025): $50.1M (peak recent year; contributions $46.1M).GLAAD Funding Over Time* Early 2000s–2010: ~$3M–$5M — smaller scale focused on media advocacy.* 2015: $5.1M* 2016: ~$5.4M* 2017: ~$7.7M* 2018: ~$19M+ (major donor spike, e.g., Ariadne Getty Foundation)* 2020–2021: ~$20M–$24.9M (post-2020 visibility surge)* 2022: $18.6M* 2023: $25.3M (recent peak)* 2024: $13.6M (notable decline, with expenses at ~$22.5M)Versus Funding of Occupy Wall Street* It didn’t survive beyond 2012* The trackable fundraising data effectively ends in 2012, as the movement’s organizational structure fragmented after the encampment’s removal, making consistent financial tracking impossible.Major OWS DonorsOccupy Wall Street (OWS, 2011) was a decentralized, grassroots protest movement with no central nonprofit structure, so it did not have traditional “high-profile donors” in the style of established organizations like the SPLC or NAACP. Funding came primarily from thousands of small individual donations (often under $100), in-kind contributions (food, supplies, tents), and online platforms like Kickstarter and WePay. Total cash raised in New York alone reached roughly $500,000–$600,000 by late 2011, with much of it processed through the Alliance for Global Justice (AFGJ) as a fiscal sponsor (taking a ~7% fee)A few prominent left-leaning individuals and business figures stepped in with larger support, especially after the initial Zuccotti Park phase:* Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield (founders of Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream): Led the Movement Resource Group (with other business leaders) to raise funds for a national Occupy office and grants to local groups. They personally contributed significantly; the group raised ~$300,000 by early 2012 (with plans for $1.8 million), and more than two-thirds came from the Ben & Jerry’s Foundation.* Danny Goldberg (former Nirvana manager and music executive).* Norman Lear (television producer, founder of People for the American Way).* Terri Gardner (millionaire businesswoman).Celebrities* Susan Sarandon, Michael Moore, Kanye West, Russell Simmons, Cornel West, Pete Seeger, and others.* Brad Pitt commented positively on the movement internationally.Versus Leading Environmental OrgsIt might make sense to look to environmental orgs as the next best anti-corporate proxy.The TL:DR is (1) their funding is bigger overall than identity-based org funding and it’s more linear (which could be an argument in favor of the identity politics orgs being a bit more astroturfed).The top US-based environmental nonprofits are:* The Nature Conservancy* World Wildlife fund (WWF) Inc (US Affiliate)* Environmental Defense Fund (EDF)* Natural Resources Defense Council* Sierra ClubThe Nature Conservancy* Early 2000s (~2000–2005): ~$400M–$500M range — steady but lower scale.* Mid-2010s (~2010–2016): ~$700M–$1B — gradual growth with increased conservation focus.* 2017–2020: ~$1.0B–$1.2B.* 2021–2022: ~$1.3B.* FY2023 (ended June 2023): ~$1.17B.FY2024 (ended June 2024): $1.48B (with some reports citing ~$1.5B–$1.83B in total support/revenue including certain gains)The Environmental Defense Fund* Early 2000s (~2000–2005): ~$80M–$120M — smaller scale.* Mid-2010s (~2010–2016): ~$138M–$200M — steady growth.* 2017–2020: ~$210M–$300M+.* 2021: ~$365M (notable peak, partly due to pledge timing).* 2022: ~$285M.* 2023: ~$247M.2024: $299M (with contributions making up ~97%)The Sierra ClubEarly 2000s (~2000–2005): ~$80M–$90M — more modest scale focused on traditional advocacy and membership.~2010: ~$100M.2015: $109M.2020: $152M.2021: $152M.2022: $167.5M.2023: $173M (peak in recent filings).2024: $169M (Form 990) / ~$183M (audited consolidated revenues, including net assets released from restrictions)COVID and the internet as accelerant* Finally, he argues that COVID is the “killshot” for normal Western social life because it forces every “idiot” online all day, massively amplifying outrage dynamics and fringe narratives. With everyone stuck on the internet and algorithms favoring extremity, manufactured divides and identity conflicts scale up far faster and feel more real and dangerous than in the mid‑2000s offline world he remembers.* In his completed “American History Conspiracy Timeline,” the through‑line is that 2005’s relatively relaxed, optimistic, and materially focused environment is systematically replaced by a top‑down, incentive‑driven system that constantly re‑inflames racial tensions and revives antisemitism, not because grassroots hatred suddenly surged on its own, but because powerful institutions needed visible bigotry to justify their budgets and keep people from uniting around class and power.If It’s Not a Conspiracy, What Is It?This could be caused by a couple of things:The Urban Monoculture Reaching Critical Mass* And the urban monoculture is more predisposed to identity politicsTrump Derangement Syndrome* Funding for these identity politics orgs—and some environmental nonprofits—spiked after Trump’s election* SPLC funding skyrocketed with Trump’s electionMaybe it’s also just COVID driving people into their heads* NAAPC funding skyrocketed with COVIDEpisode TranscriptSimone Collins: [00:00:00] Asmangold, presented his conspiracy timeline starting with 2005, racism basically defeated.-. But what about all these CoreOS occupy Wall Street? Then 2014, look at that black personIf you look for example at,Malcolm Collins: oh my God,Simone Collins: terms like identity politics, intersectionality, black feminism, non-binary lived experience it’s like,Malcolm Collins: it’s like exact.Simone Collins: Mm-hmm. It’s a little uncanny. It’s a little weird.I made a graph of the Southern Poverty Law Center.Malcolm Collins: WhatSimone Collins: Here we have the HRC funding graph. Again, something, you know, you, you see the normal, like steady,Malcolm Collins: oh my God, it’s so obvious here.Yeah, let’s look at Glad.Simone Collins: What happens? They’reMalcolm Collins: not in on the conspiracy.Simone Collins: Surely nothing happens. Suddenly, ohMalcolm Collins: my God. Gladys said what?Simone Collins: And this is all from their, their tax filing. This isn’t just like conjecture.At and t. Others? Bank of America, JP Morgan. Chase, McDonald’s, Walmart. Hyundai, UPS. Oh my God. FedEx, Coca-Cola, [00:01:00] Eli Lilly. The Ford Foundation, the Kellogg Foundation, the Robert Word, Johnson FoundationSpeaker 5: I wonder if it affects the behavior of the children. Hmm. Curious.would you like to know more?Simone Collins: Hello, Malcolm. I’m excited to be speaking with you today because I heard a new conspiracy theory that I really like, and I wanted to see if there’s good evidence behind it. So let’s go on a YouTube clip of Aspen Gold Stream titled, IMalcolm Collins: brought this to you, by the way. I, I brought, I brought it like, I actually think there could be something to this.Simone Collins: Yeah. This, this was, again, Alex Jones was right. He. He Asman Gold, went over the Southern Poverty Law Center’s, support of racist groups, and then presented his conspiracy timeline regarding racism in the USA. And it basically goes like this. He, he titled that the Asman Gold American History Conspiracy Timeline, starting with 2005, racism basically defeated.Everyone is getting along generally then 2011 lives improve. But what about all these [00:02:00] CoreOS occupy Wall Street? Then 2014, look at that black person they took your future. And then 2025 OMG, the Jews, and I hadn’t heard about it before, but it sounds credible like that. Basically the racism and identity politics of our recent era.Are the product of some AstroTurf work done by Cor Bros because they don’t like the idea of people really being against them.Malcolm Collins: Yeah, so basically and I’ll, I’ll, I’ll, I’ll try you to frame it a bit more tightly.Simone Collins: Yeah.Malcolm Collins: Is Asma Gold thesis is we solved most of the issues of social discord was in American society.Mm-hmm. As a result, people then begin to look with suspicion at the pose. And here I’m not talking about generic capitalism or something like that. I’m talking about the entrenched bureaucratic corporate interests that riggs the system in their favor in a very non-capitalist socialist, high barrier to entryway, which is demonstrably a part of [00:03:00] American.Culture at this point. Mm-hmm. And because the social harmony that we achieved allowed for that these people who had a lot of institutional power. And keep in mind the Corpo here isn’t just Wall Street. It is the deep state that profits from Wall Street. Right. Like the deep, straight corpo revolving door is very, very tight.Right?Simone Collins: Yeah.Malcolm Collins: Especially within the Democratic Party, and it used to be within the Republican party. And so they say, uhoh, uhoh how do we get people to stop looking at us now? And they’re like, what if we invent racism? And as we saw with the Southern Poverty Law Center, because Asmo Gold said this southern poverty loss interest thing, he’s like, I bet.But if you don’t know, this is the number one anti-racism group in the United States. Turned out to likely be the major the, because the amount that they gave out was over $3 million to the various orgs, and it was orgs like the Nazi org and the KKK, which are not getting a lot of money from [00:04:00] other sources.It is hard to stay employed and make millions of dollars if you’re. Publicly donating to one of these institutions. So they, they could have been their primary funder with funding. And, and why do I believe that they were their primary funder? Potentially. Yeah. If you look at before occupy Wall Street, if you look at videos of clan rallies from that time or neo-Nazi rallies in the United States, it would be like three sad people walking with a bunch of people yelling at them.Yeah. Now you get like full on tiki torch parades and stuff like that. Like there, there has been a demonstrable change in the size of these.Simone Collins: Yeah. Who’s gonna pay for the tiki torches? Who’s gonna pay for the, the matching khaki pants.Malcolm Collins: Yeah. They’re nice. The change in the size of these operations since the Southern Poverty Law Center started funding them.Mm-hmm. And so, but the question is, is who else is funding them? How much else are they funding them? And Simone came back to me and she goes, Malcolm. I think I found some smoking guns here. So I want you to go further. I want you to expand the genius Asma gold theory on all of this.Simone Collins: [00:05:00] Oh, yeah, yeah.I, I, I went and I checked to see how the theory tracks with keyword search volume and changes in police training programs and gram word volume and books and reported hate crime data and polling data and fundraising data for the top identity politics orgs and versus pol or, or occupy Wall Street and versus just general like environmental orgs and.It’s so suspicious. Okay. While most nonprofit fundraising curves just to like, give a little teaser that I looked at, appear to just go up mostly linearly over time. Like when you look at most of the environmental orgs, it goes up linearly. That makes sense. And then yet fundraising for identity politics orgs, like the N-A-A-C-P and the Southern Poverty Law Center skyrocketed after occupy Wall Street. Like there’s a very weird, like, yangyang. So it, it, mm, it’s just one of many things. So first, let’s just look at, at his, his argument point by point, and see how well supported each of his arguments are. Because I don’t know, like, you know, my memory, [00:06:00] my memory’s shot, I don’t know where things actually were.So in, in, again, this four step conspiracy timeline,Malcolm Collins: actually just No.Simone Collins: Before youMalcolm Collins: go further,Simone Collins: Uhhuh,Malcolm Collins: when did all of the antisemitism begin to rise in America? The antisemitism began to rise right as black fatigue was setting in. Mm-hmm. They’re like, oh, oh, we need a new outgroup.Simone Collins: Yeah. Yeah. Well, I mean, we also have to eventually do a podcast on black Americans being supplanted for Muslims, because that’s another interesting, like flipper route that happened around the time of theMalcolm Collins: Oh yeah.Left is really done playing with black people. Like yeah, you guys are.Simone Collins: I’m tired. I’m done.Malcolm Collins: Toy story where like the, the drops Its toy at new toy.Speaker: Oh, I forgot you’re broken. I don’t wanna play with you anymore.Malcolm Collins: He’s got the new, the new toy. Right. But hopefully we can use this on the right to un brainwashed some [00:07:00] black people and bring ‘em over to our side, which means stop being performatively racist to be edgy guys, that’s not, it’s not useful.Okay. Yeah. It, it, it, it, it really only hurts us. There are obviously some black immigrant communities that need to that, that have externalities associated with them, like the Somalian refugees and stuff like that. Yeah. But don’t d you know, one thing to be like. These black immigrant populations have negative externalities and we need to find a way to deal with it.Then to just be like performatively racist or something like that, which is really only to masturbate your own ego, not to help the party because it hurts some. Yeah.Simone Collins: Anyway, Osmond Gold describes the mid two thousands as basically this time when most people of different races got along and pop culture just normalized, multiracial friendship and cooperation.And he,Malcolm Collins: yeah,Simone Collins: he uses rush hour three. With, you know, Jackie Chan and it was Chris Rock, right. Being like, oh, everyone’s like excited to see that. And like people, a joke about people of being of different cultural and, and ethnic [00:08:00] backgrounds, but like, they were comfortable with it. It wasn’t this tension.It was rush hour three. Wasn’t a story about multiculturalism. It was like funny. And they would, you know, people enjoyed that. And also society was just getting more progressive each year on race and sexuality. There was growing acceptance of gay people. We elected Barack Obama, like it was a thing. And he emphasized that everyday social life did feel edgy, but unserious that people would say offensive things like they would use racial slurs in video games, but everyone knew it wasn’t real.Like it was just teasing and trolling and basically in locker room talk. The overall vibe was that people just joked harshly, but got along. And IMalcolm Collins: checked, there was not meaningful ethnic tension outside of ghettos. And I really mean this in, in my school for example, like we had kids of different s ethnic, you had kids of different ethnicities in your school.Did anyone care?Simone Collins: Yeah, nobody cared. We would talk about stereotypes, but that’s because they were real. So.Malcolm Collins: The, we had, we had a group that we called the Korean Mafia because there were a bunch of [00:09:00] Korean kids at our schoolSimone Collins: mm-hmm.Malcolm Collins: Due to some sort of scholarship that let them come. And then there was a bunch of Chinese kids who hung out together.But other than those two groups and those two groups, you know, literally came from other countries.Simone Collins: Well, I literally remember the first time I heard someone say something racist that like surprised me because I just never heard anything racist before. And it was, I was a friend in school. I can’t remember what level of school I was in, but her name was Yesenia and she came from like a Spanish speaking household.And she was telling me how like her parents were really concerned about brown people. And I was just so, like, I was like, what do you mean what is this about? But like that I have a memory of someone talking with me about that and like, being surprised must show that. Like, we really didn’t care at that era, you know?Just didn’t matter. But yes, when you check in on hate crime in 2005 in the us the, it was one of the lowest points for racism in US history relative to prior eras. And lethal racial violence had plummeted from its peak in the late 19th, early 20th century.Malcolm Collins: Yeah, we had gone to a point where [00:10:00] blacks were mostly just killing other blacks.Yeah. Sorry. I’ve had to, I know that’s horrible. There, there is a difference in homicide rates, but they, that is true that blacks mostly kill other blacks while they do have an increased homicide rate.Simone Collins: Yeah.Malcolm Collins: Virginia.Simone Collins: So studies of discrimination trends, which, you know, have been active since we’ve been, like for, you know, decades and decades, show persistence.Like there’s still discrimination, but they were overall reductions. Post 1960s things had only gotten better. And in 2005 there were 7,163 hate crime offenses. And this was noted by the FBI as the lowest total in more than a decade racial bias motivated about 54.7% of single bias incidents. So this was byMalcolm Collins: the way,Simone Collins: yeah.Malcolm Collins: Continue, continue. I, I’ll, I’ll, I went to get end of your thought.Simone Collins: Importantly, and this is really interesting, right? So we’re looking at, at all of this crime. I started wondering if perhaps part of what made hate [00:11:00] crime levels seem to go up, had to do with police training. And, okay.Malcolm Collins: Okay. Before you get into that, I wanted to go into a, f Funny, I saw this on Asma Gold or Nino and this, it looked like official data. I’m gonna double check because this sounds so crazy if this is actually official data. Okay. But it was tracking interracial grapes.Simone Collins: Oh God. You mentioned this to me. Yes.Malcolm Collins: And it was, black on white was something like 12,000.Mm-hmm. Which, I mean, if you’re considering the whole country isn’t a ton, but it’s still like a lot. Right? Like I’m, I’m sure that we get way more from immigrants, but I, I know that that’s the particularly prejudiced statement against immigrants. But I mean, I’m, I’m pretty sure I would expect more than 12,000.But the funny number was, was white on blacks, which was literally over the official datasets entire recording period for that year. Zero. Oh God.Simone Collins: Ugh.Malcolm Collins: Which actually track,Simone Collins: yeah, fact track that. But like, oh, that’sMalcolm Collins: our video on perceived attractiveness between groups. White people [00:12:00] uniquely see black people as unattractive.And this is actually really hard for blackSimone Collins: people. Oh, that’s even more insult. You’re just saying like, well, they wouldn’t. Because they don’t want to. That’s horrible.Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Well, I mean, it’s when we point out how bad it is for blacks in the United States we have this episode on like, it being so hard for black women that if you look at the old ok OkCupid da dating stuff that.You know how bad it is for white men in online dating.It is literally harder for black women in online dating than it is for white men. That is how nerfed the black community is within dating pools in like black pill communities. Not named the black, but like they go full like, like in sell whatever.People are like, bro, like. Be white, be tall. Like if you’re not those two things, you are nerfed, right? Like so do keep in mind that there are some areas where white men still have privilege when it comes to being thirsted over.Simone Collins: Yeah,Malcolm Collins: if you’re in the top 1%Simone Collins: anyway [00:13:00] and so things hit this nadir in terms of hate crime and everything in, in 2005.And I started to wonder like, okay, if, if this is, this conspiracy is real and if interests, you know, with, with deep pockets and we didn’t want corporations to be scrutinized, wanted. To begin to foment this feeling that racism was real and that racial tensions were a big thing in the United States. It had to be addressed.That we all have to obsess over that and not look at corporations and rich people. That one thing you might do is just train or encourage training and police departments that would lead to a higher rate of reported hate crimes. So then you, with some other nonprofit, you, you could point them. To look at the data and report a spike in it and then be like, this is a big problem.Ooh,Malcolm Collins: very clever.Simone Collins: And it, so it actually does turn out that multiple times after 2012, the FBI crime data collection guidelines and training manual were [00:14:00] updated. Starting in December, 2012, the tail end of Occupy Wall Street, they merged major guidelines and training guides to include learning modules on bias motivated crime definitions.There was this two-tier review process, so you respond to Officer Flags. They have like for suspected bias, and then you have expert review of whether it actually is bias. The training included case study exercises and model procedures for agencies to build their own training, and they, it was explicitly intended to help departments establish and refresh hate crime training programs.Right at the end of Occupy Wall Street. And then in 2015 there were new bias categories. So, they added anti-Arab, they expanded religious biases. And they added more training scenarios for those. And then they, they also updated in 20 21, 20 22. This for this full transition to the National Incident Based Reporting system that that removed.I’m not, okay. I’m not gonna get into it. But basically, yeah, they did train, they did train [00:15:00] differently after Occupy Wall Street in a way that would’ve led to probably more reporting, even if things remain unchanged otherwise. AndMalcolm Collins: then they could utilize the higher reporting to create movements like BLM.Simone Collins: Yes. And then also this is, this is just, this is just the FBI. Then there’s the, the the N-I-B-R-S. Basically the department adjustment sorry, department of Justice and the BJS, what is the BJS? I didn’t look that up. Sorry. And the FBI, they provided targeted grants and technical assistance and training to thousands of agencies to properly code and report hate crimes mm-hmm.In this database. So they’re also like, we’ll give you money to make sure that you do this correctly. Which is. Notable, I don’t know where the grants came from, but I could totally see like this is a very subtle and hidden way for someone who, like, for example, made a lot of political donations who made sure that an appointee is leading a certain agency to, yeah, to, to, to put something like this in without anybody like, Hey, just putting this policy and what you’re not gonna look bad for [00:16:00] doing it.You know, we need to, Hey, crimes are a big, serious issue, you know, we just need more accurate reporting. But you know how measurement works, you know, like if you encourage and incentivize and give people grant money to measure something, they’re gonna measure it more, you know? Mm-hmm. And then there were also very specific targeted grants.Like there’s the Matthew Shepherd and James Bird Jr. Hate Crimes and Training technical Assistant program grants. They funded specialized training resource centers and outreach for identifying. Crimes and, and bias. So just keep in mind that like even specific people created grants to,Malcolm Collins: and it’s very interesting that there’s a flurry of this right at the end of Occupy Wall Street because.There was not a flurry of attention on interracial violence right at the end of Occupy Wall Street.Simone Collins: No, no, no, no, no, no. The, the, I think the wheels started turning the donations started the, the, the, the training shifted. And, and also just to be clear, this is in addition to state level changes. So for example, in 2017 [00:17:00] onwards, so this is a bit after Occupy Wall Street there was the California Commission on Peace Officer Standards and Training.Releasing a new video called Hate Crimes Identification and Investigation. And then also AB 57 required its inclusion and basic academy training. Made it available online, mandated periodic in-service training other states. Cast similar mandates. So basically now there’s just basic like propaganda videos that, that is another way to put it being like, here’s how to report bias.And then also I just wanted to check in on polling, right? So because polling is another way for us to see how Americans felt about bias. So when you look at a Gallup satisfaction with Reese relations question for like, oh, is it, are you very satisfied? Are you somewhat satisfied? In the early two thousands to 2014?People were very satisfied. They high, basically 60% plus marked good. And this p peaked near 70 to 80% post the Obama election. [00:18:00] Then 2015 onward, you know, after the gears had started turning, there was this sharp drop to 30% marking it as good. Sharp drop. This is the lowest in decades. And this was amid the, the Ferguson era protests.And then ever since it’s hovered from like 22 to 36% from its high at 60%. So Aspen Gold is totally right, that like people in 2005 were feeling pretty fine about race relations. And now as of well last year, as of 20 25, 50, 60 4% say racism against black people is widespread. And this is tied for the highest since 2008, tracking up from 51% in 2009 and civil rights progress views are also down from 89% in 2011.So preoccupy Wall Street to lower levels post to 2020. Then also Pew Research as well. In 20 19, 50 8% called race relations bad. And 53% worsening post [00:19:00] 2020 BLM support peaked and then fell and discrimination perceptions peaked around that time too. It, it’s, it’s bad basically like peer research reports now that people also see racism as a very, very bad issue in the United States.So let’s go back to what Aspen Gold observed about the 2011 to 2012 occupy Wall Street conflict. He, he, he said the real break came with OWS when people started focusing on economic power rather than identity. And they were wondering whether their problems came from the ultra rich and this corporate leadership class.Because I think a lot of the sentiment back then, I’m very like, it’s, it seems like a lifetime ago, it seems so long ago, but people felt like after the 2008 crash when a lot of really wealthy people got bailed out, we just never really seemed to recover from that.Malcolm Collins: Society didn’t Yeah,Simone Collins: yeah. Like pe pe like the, the rich just kept getting richer, but no one else like really saw the same level of steady improvement that they were used to.And he argued that [00:20:00] Asman gold argues that this is, this is the point at which the elite get terrified. So what I wanted to know is how American sentiment changed about wealth disparity in class conflict when the Occupy Wall Street movement gained momentum in the USA, Ooh. And this one Pew survey of 2048 adults done in.20 end of 2011. So Occupy Wall Street was like, this is picking up now. Mm-hmm. 66% of Americans said they were very strong or strong conflicts between rich and poor people. An increase of 19 percentage points from 47% in a 2009 survey right after the 2008 financial crisis. The share saying very strong conflicts doubled from 15 to 30%.The highest level since Pew first asked the question in 1987. So this was a definitely this flashpoint peak. Yeah, he’s absolutely right that people saw it. Class conflict was now seen as a bigger source of tension. Then conflicts between [00:21:00] immigrants and the native born blacks and whites, or young and old per pew polling.So he is spot on with this. Also views on economic fairness and power. Were, were totally also off it in a separate 20 th 2011 poll. 77% argued there was too much power in the hands of the, a few rich people and large corporations. 77% of people. I mean, I, I could see large corporations and really wealthy people kind of being like, Hey guys, we should probably divert their attentionMalcolm Collins: 77%.Yeah. We need to get people pissed at something else.Simone Collins: And this is, it hasMalcolm Collins: felt, I’m gonna be honest, like on the ground, when I learned about the, that, that theSimone Collins: 2008 financial crisis, like allMalcolm Collins: the, the Civil Property law center had been funding the KKK and the neo-Nazis.Simone Collins: Yeah, yeah, yeah,Malcolm Collins: yeah. And that Nick Fuentes was heavily AstroTurf.I sort of had this moment of like pulling back and I think a lot of influencers on the right have been trying to cater to both sides to some extent. To try to be like, yeah, well I don’t wanna [00:22:00] isolate. That audience by being like, yes, unmitigated, obviously this word’s a good thing for America’s long term interests and stuff like that.Mm-hmm. And I sort of come to this realization of, oh. The people who I thought I was arguing with may just not even really exist in meaningful numbers. They’re just sort of, shell accounts online and a heavy sort of force that have been converted for by those shell accounts, but they’re not like a meaningful contingent of the conservative movement.Yeah.Simone Collins: Mm-hmm.Malcolm Collins: And it’s changed the way that I address it where I just don’t. One, I don’t care about them as much as, as like players to like ideologically take seriously. But two, I see them as more of a threat than I did historically as well. Yeah. Which is to say that a lot of this stuff could just be funded by bad actors, right.And, and like the pro Russia part of the Right, which is just comical because we pointed out that Russia is what was behind [00:23:00] BLM. If you go to our episode on that, we go with plenty of receipts showing that. If you were ever worried about Russia interfering with the election on behalf of Trump at a nine to one level.So they literally nine times more than that, they spent on trying to make BLMA thing.Simone Collins: Yeah.Malcolm Collins: They are the source of BLM in America, so theSimone Collins: Russian helped. It’s clearly, it wasn’t only. Plausibly conspiratorially, allegedly corporations and wealthy Americans. You know, it was Russians.Malcolm Collins: Well, I mean, I think these groups work together.Simone Collins: Well, I don’t think they coordinated. I just think that when you get, you know, enough people with aligned incentives doing the same thing, it’s gonna be more effective.Malcolm Collins: No, no, no, no, no, no. I think they literally work together. So by this, what I mean is if you, this was period where a portion of the American Right began to act like Russia was our friend.Simone Collins: Oh my God. That’s right. Yeah. Like, wow. Russia’s actually, you know, a. Worthy ofMalcolm Collins: a very good right wing country. Yeah. And I remember when I first started seeing this and I was like, I’m sorry, I’m sorry. The right wing hates Russia. Like we have always hated [00:24:00] Russia. They are a communist country who transformed into a kleptocracy like this is antagonistic.Simone Collins: Oh god. This was, yeah, this was even like when on the left people had a lot of memes about like Putin being sexy. Do you remember? Yes. Was Putin yes.Malcolm Collins: I think, I think, oh.Simone Collins: What was that? That song? I mean obviously it was a Rasputin song, but likeMalcolm Collins: Yeah, that’s when the RAsSimone Collins: song gotMalcolm Collins: popular and everythingSimone Collins: like that.Yeah. ThereMalcolm Collins: was a push during a certain time period on both the left and the right to make the extreme and captured parts of them. The parts that seemed disingenuous. More pro-Russia.Simone Collins: Well, look, okay, I just, I just wanna emphasize. The, the, the wealthy poses had a reason why, like another stat, 61% said the economic of Americans said the economic system unfairly favors the wealthy.And this was up from earlier baselines in related polling, and only 36% called it generally fair. And it, it should also be noted though, that Oh, O Occupy, occupy Wall Street presented this threat and there was also this [00:25:00] actual increase in disparity at play. That yeah,Malcolm Collins: I think, I think we have moved into the United States.It’s having a system. We talk about this in our video of economically, who is actually more communist, the United States or the CCP in China, and the answer is the United States by threefold. Mm-hmm. Significantly more communist.Simone Collins: Yeah,Malcolm Collins: totally. Totally. And if you look at the structure of the government of the United States, which you might even go so far as to argue, is.This is as much to distract us from the communist capitalist battle as it is because what has functionally happened is the communists of Russia had a plan to take over the American governing system, and potentially they have. They took over our academic institutions. They just called themselves something else.They called themselves socialists. They, and, and, and Wokes and SJWs. And then they used that to take over our companies and they used that to create an alliance with these, and if somebody’s like. [00:26:00] Malcolm, how can you think that like SJW is aligned with Russia and you know, the Putin hates like the gays or whatever.It’s like anybody who understands s JW really is, understands it’s a disease that you unleash on your enemy. It’s the effect the zombiesSimone Collins: for sure. Yeah.Malcolm Collins: Like put, do you think Putinism agrees with Black Lives Matter? No. Then why is he funding it so much? Because he understands how to promote the disease and people who are infected with the disease don’t really care where they get money.Simone Collins: Yeah, well, few people care where they get money, but so back to Aspen Gold’s core claim. It’s, it’s that in response to these growing concerns, big institutions cultivated a new wave of identity politics as a wedge issue to keep people fighting each other instead of looking up the class ladder and then in Ms.Paint or whatever it is he uses, and he’s such a fast drawer. What is up with that? It’s inhuman. This this is the phase he sort of was describing where the rich guy takes nine slices of a 10 piece pie and then cuts the last. [00:27:00] Slice in half and says that black guy got your half redirecting resentment toward the other ordinary people instead of the elite.And he, he does agree with some specific,Malcolm Collins: and I wanna point out that these people, like, we need to like be clear about who the bad actors are in this, right?Simone Collins: Yeah.Malcolm Collins: Corporals are not industrialists and they’re not capitalists. Industrialists and capitalists is what make America a wealthy and successful country.These are people like Elon Musk. Yeah. Or Jeff Bezos or mark Zuckerberg, or these are people who build things that make money. Okay. Compos are very different. These are people who use institutional bureaucracies and legal structures to make money in ways that the average person can’t. These are the people who run Enron.These are the people who run Exxon Mobil. These are the people who run the major weapons manufacturers. These are the people who run Lockheed Boeing. The people who run the types of institutions that do not succeed. And these [00:28:00] make up a huge chunk of the American economy because they’re draining a huge chunk of the American economy.They are in an endless cycle to siphon tax dollars from the average citizen in America, in the industrialists in America. And I think that what we need to do is build a better system for. A shared class identity for true Americans, which is the industrialists and the middle class against the parasites.Who is the corpus and the people who live off of the systemSimone Collins: Well, and I think we need to recognize the wedge effectiveness per Aspen Gold’s point of identity politics, which absolutely did spike after. Around 2016 and certainly after Occupy Wall Street. So I just sent you Google Trends and Google Ngram viewer screenshots.And I’m gonna link to all this in the show notes. If you look for example at,Malcolm Collins: oh my God,Simone Collins: terms like identity politics, intersectionality, black feminism, non-binary lived experience from [00:29:00] 2000 to present in Google Ngram viewer, it’s like,Malcolm Collins: it’s like exact.Simone Collins: Mm-hmm. It’s a little uncanny. It’s a little weird.And also if you look at mi,Malcolm Collins: okay. PlausibleSimone Collins: I knowMalcolm Collins: as, no,Simone Collins: no, no. I’m getting more. No, there’s more. There’s more. Don’t, you know, let me keep going.Also, New York Times word frequency analysis of woke adjacent terminology, including identity focused language showed also rapid rises, but not starting in 2016.We’re talking starting in 20 13, 20 14. So. You know this, it’s, yeah, it’s, it’s real. And then, so keep in mind that next, in his argument, Aspen Gold layers in.Malcolm Collins: Don’t forget to send me that graphic way, the New York Times one.Simone Collins: I don’t have a graph for that one. That was just research done. Oh, okay. Yeah, but I, I’ll send you all the graphs that I have and I will get, again, put everything in the show notes and links and everything.Aspen Gold then layers in how you get this SPLC. Involvement right in, in, and all these anti hate nonprofits suddenly [00:30:00] getting super active.Malcolm Collins: Well, the, the coin goes as leaflet calls them.Simone Collins: Yes.Malcolm Collins: And it sounds like a ethnic slur. So she used the term coin goes, which means like. Quasi autonomous non-government entities, I think, or something like that.Simone Collins: Yeah, yeah. And then basically at that point, the identity politics run their course and Elite fall back on basically like the old scapegoating pattern, just overt antisemitism and conspiracy about the Jews and, and the master explanation, which he characterizes as all reliable. And it just. Absorbs and redirects all the frustration from the structural issues that they were like,Malcolm Collins: somebody’s like, well, the people are getting over black people.They’re just done with them at this point. Right? Like, we sort of exhausted them as a resource that people,Simone Collins: but there’s the, there’s old faithful, you know, it’sMalcolm Collins: like, who’s next? Jews brilliant. Right? Like,Simone Collins: yeah.Malcolm Collins: How do we, how do we convince people to hate the Jews? Well, well, I mean, if it, if it looks like, it looks like you just bought the accounts of people who are already antisemitic to try to.[00:31:00]Simone Collins: But here’s the, the really crazy thing. This is what really started changing my mind. Look at the fundraising over time. I made a graph of the Southern Poverty Law Center.Malcolm Collins: WhatSimone Collins: it actually seemed to go down a little bit after Occupy Wall Street and then it blow down. No,Malcolm Collins: we down during Occupy Wall Street.Yeah. So this, this is the period during Occupy Wall Street. 2015, it explodes to like five times the rate. It used to be.Simone Collins: Yeah, because, so from like 2000 to 2015, it made between 30,000,050 5 millionMalcolm Collins: Theos.Simone Collins: And then in 20 16, 20 17, especially by the time momentum was built, it was making 136 million, 132 million.Then 2018 to 2024, it peaked at 170 million in 2023. And this is just around the time that they’re doing things like, you know, donating 3 million to their sources, right, their sources. And then I was like. Also like, okay, well then who are the donors to these organizations? You know? Yeah. [00:32:00] Might have more weight.The donors would be uniquely uncomfortable with Occupy Wall Street related sentiments. So who are some high profile Southern Poverty Law Center donors? Well, there’s George Clooney and Amal Clooney via the Clooney Foundation for Justice. They donated a million in 2017. There’s George Soros via the Open Society Foundation, Tim Cook.Then Apple, CEO, on behalf of Apple, pledged a million. JP Morgan Chase, a large American bank. OpenAI has also donated to SPLC, Chick-fil-AMalcolm Collins: OpenAISimone Collins: mgm,Malcolm Collins: by the way, do not use OpenAI models. Like if, if they’re donating to organizations like this one, they’re not very good. And two evil, evil, evil, evil.You know what? I might even charge a premium. Well, hold on. We had somebody who’s gonna give us open AI tokens to test. No, you don’t. So they give us open AI tokens. I won’t charge a premium on open AISimone Collins: model. Look, people should have freedom to use AI as they want, but look at the next graph. ‘cause it isn’t just the Southern Poverty Law Center.[00:33:00]This next one is the N-A-A-C-P. What?Malcolm Collins: OhSimone Collins: myMalcolm Collins: god. SoSimone Collins: Simone, they also saw a massive, massive spike. And this is all from their, their tax filing. This isn’t just like conjecture. We, nonprofits in the United States have to make pretty public disclosures of the amount of money that they got. Also, who’s donating to the N-A-A-C-P Wells Fargo 50 million grant in 2023.At and t. Large corporation, others? Bank of America, JP Morgan. Chase, McDonald’s, Walmart. Hyundai, UPS. Oh my God. FedEx, Coca-Cola, Eli Lilly. The Ford Foundation, the Kellogg Foundation, the Robert Word, Johnson Foundation the Open Society Foundation, that’s George Soros again. The Atlantic Drops the companyMalcolm Collins: you should buy from.Oh, no. Did Coca-Cola donate to them?Simone Collins: Yeah. Sorry. Malcolm. OhMalcolm Collins: no. Oh,Simone Collins: no. Sorry. Malcolm. All. Let’s go to another identity politics [00:34:00] nonprofit. Here we have the HRC funding graph. Again, something, you know, you, you see the normal, like steady,Malcolm Collins: oh my God, it’s so obvious here.Simone Collins: It, it just, it just spikes up. You wanna see another one?What’s, what’s another one? Glad. How about glad you wanna look at glad. Let’s look at glad.Malcolm Collins: Yeah, let’s look at Glad.Simone Collins: What happens? They’reMalcolm Collins: not in on the conspiracy.Simone Collins: Surely nothing happens. Suddenly, ohMalcolm Collins: my God. Gladys said what?Simone Collins: Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, they were, they were, they were so, they were so modest,you know, 20 15, 5 0.1 million, 20 16, 5 0.4 20 17, 7 0.7 2018, 19 million, 20, 20 20 million, 24 million.2022. Oh, it, it’s just like, it’s, it’s insane. It’s insane. Let’s look at, let’s look at Occupy Wall Street. Our owner ofMalcolm Collins: glad’s, one of the funders of the KKK as well. I wouldn’tSimone Collins: be surprised. God. Well, I mean, it would, it wouldn’t hurt. So, just so you know, occupy Wall Street, it, it didn’t survive beyond 2012.They, they were evicted. Like you remember, they just took out the [00:35:00] camp, the, the trackable fundraising data for Occupy Wall Street. Effectively ends in 2012 as the movement’s organizational structure fragmented when the encampment got removed. AndMalcolm Collins: infiltrated by socialists, by the way.Simone Collins: Yeah. So let’s, let’s just take a look at their, their fundraising.Surely, you know, some huge, you know, calm interests were involved, but no, the, it, it peaked out at 800 k.Malcolm Collins: 800 K.Simone Collins: 800 k. And okay, wellMalcolm Collins: maybe companies don’t want Occupy Wall Street because they took over our institutions.Simone Collins: Yeah, theyMalcolm Collins: took over our largeSimone Collins: companies. Yeah. They, yeah, they, they were too busy taking over.And also I was like, well, maybe, maybe I was going too far with being like, oh, all these banks and like rich people donating to like the Southern Poverty Law Center and the N-A-A-C-P. Like, maybe that’s just kind of how it is. Right. You know, rich people donate to things ‘cause it’s like a, some kind of tax thing and they have to, you know, donate a certain amount of their trusts.Otherwise they can’t maintain trust status or something. Right. Like, I know [00:36:00] there’s all these weird tax rules, so they have to make donations. Maybe they donated to occupy Wall Street too. But the people who donated, and there were very few obviously ‘cause they like raised nothing. The most prominent corporate founders are the most anti-corporate corporate founders you could possibly imagine.Ben and Jerry of Ben and Jerry’s ice cream. They, they led to remember what DonatorsMalcolm Collins: through Occupy Wall Street?Simone Collins: Yeah, yeah. They, they, they wanted to be super supportive. And then there’s also just like Danny Goldberg, a former Nirvana manager and music executive. Norman Lee or a television producer, like, no, no one we would know, aside from Ben and Jerry oh wait, actually, no.Susan Sarandon and Kanye West, Michael Moore, Russell Simmons, Cornell West. P Seeger and others. Brad Pitt commented positively. He didn’t donate money,Malcolm Collins: commentedSimone Collins: positively. No wishes. No wishes.Malcolm Collins: I love that. That counts as a donation these days. People are like, oh, Elon, he must have donated to your prenatal list movement.I’m like, no.Simone Collins: HeMalcolm Collins: commented positively.Simone Collins: So heMalcolm Collins: gets footnote,Simone Collins: yeah, [00:37:00] thoughts and prayers. So I thought maybe like there was just some weird, spike. And, and there kind of was with some organizations I used. And I’ll, I’ll have all the numbers in the show notes, a bunch of environmental nonprofits as my control to kind of see like, well, is this just something that happened like after 2016, like when Trump got elected?Did people just like put all of their Trump derangement syndrome into donations? And there were modest spikes, but nothing like with these. Really big spikes with the identity politics related organizations. And what’s notable to me is when you look at the, the, the amounts of money that the environmental nonprofits have raised is just orders of magnitude more, and this is actually what makes me the most suspicious.Okay. So the Natures of Conservancy just, just insane to me. They’re raising like 400 million, 500 million in the early two thousands. Already In the early two thousands.Malcolm Collins: [00:38:00] Yeah.Simone Collins: Like keep, keep in mind the, the Southern Poverty Law Center. Do you remember how much they were raising in the early two thousands?It wasMalcolm Collins: like 11 million, right?Simone Collins: It was like 35 million.So we’re just talking huge orders of magnitude more for environmental nonprofits. And that makes me feel like a small number of wealthy people. Throwing a little bit of money toward those organizations and encouraging outsized like sort of propaganda results is, is something that just, I don’t know, it gives me pause.That basically just environmental nonprofits had slightly more steady increases, like more what I would expect from a nonprofit. And also they just, they clearly had much more broad based support, whereas these more niche, more out there, more radicalized, identity politics based nonprofits just kind of got very significant changes in donation patterns after a very specific event.Aspen Gold also argued that COVID and the internet were this perfect storm, accelerating [00:39:00] the, the identity politic. I can’t use bad words.Malcolm Collins: Oh yeah. Perfect storm. Not an engineered storm. It’s not like, it’s not like, theySimone Collins: were, that’s good pointing out though, like it forced every idiot online all day, which massively amplified outrage dynamics and fringe narratives because just people were just sitting online.Online. ItMalcolm Collins: made my life so much better. COVID has been like the turning point in my existence where the world, I, it really reminds me of this anime Zam 100, where the world, yeah. It is overrun by zombies and he’s like, loving it. He’s like, this is so much better than having a day job. Yeah. And post COVID so many people that come to me, they go, everything’s been terrible since COVID.Speaker 2: Starting today, I don’t have to go to work anymore.Speaker 3: I am.[00:40:00]Speaker 2: Until yesterday, I saw the world in monochrome, shrouded in a black cloud of despair in hopelessness, loose skies, green trees. I Red Blood. I’ve been zoned out for so long, I’ve forgotten. The world was so beautiful. Oh of so many beautiful colors. Who cares if there’s zombies chasing me?Malcolm Collins: Like, now Trump’s in power and look at all the crazy stuff that’s happening in politics and look at all the, and I’m like, bro, it has just been a blast for me. It was,Simone Collins: yeah. I, that, that one song that we kept listening to during the pandemic with the, like, I’m just gonna. Be inside theMalcolm Collins: [00:41:00] Caer song like I’mSimone Collins: song Yeah, that just like captured everything that I felt.I do wanna point out though, and I’m gonna bring back the same graph that I showed for my argument about male female speciation. I don’t know, that episode may not have run yet, but that the, the male female political divide, which is very much associated with this identity politics, insanity.Really it does.Malcolm Collins: Oh, you found this, that it all started with Tinder.Simone Collins: It started with Tinder, but it accelerated after COVID. And I think that really feeds, it plays into Aspen Gold’s argument that COVID was an accelerant for extremism by forcing all these people online.Malcolm Collins: Tinder plus COVID is what? COVID.Simone Collins: Tinder Plus COVID. But okay. Like I, I, I’ve presented all of this, right? So we had differences in, like, changes in the way that police were trained. There was a, a very clear and measured. Nadir in hate crime and in perceptions of racism before occupy Wall Street and then suddenly, somehow inexplicably and for [00:42:00] no apparent reason.It started to get bad and, and I really can’t understand aside, like I don’t have any alternate, here’s, here’s my three theories as to what this could have been. If it wasn’t the Corpo saying, oh my gosh, we have to engineer. Okay, go for division, that’s not concerned about us. One is. It could just be the urban monoculture reaching critical mass.Okay? And the urban monoculture is more predisposed toward identity politics. So this was just a separate cultural mimetic virus running out of control. And of course, all these things could be happening at the same time. Two, it could be just Trump derangement symptom. Because funding for many of these identity politics orgs and some of the environmental nonprofits as well spiked after Trump Trump’s election.It was 2016. That was one of the periods. Now this doesn’t explain, for example, the shift in the New York Times language toward woke. Stuff well before Trump was elected. But, [00:43:00] but the Southern Poverty Law Centers funding did skyrocket with Trump’s election. Now, that could just be when their team really got product market fit and found out how to like tap into really good veins because of that.And they had already picked up momentum before, but still.Malcolm Collins: I have another thesis,Simone Collins: Uhhuh,Malcolm Collins: is that you’re looking at it wrong.Simone Collins: Okay.Malcolm Collins: That it was explicitly the death of Occupy Wall Street that caused the explosion in identity politics. Let me explain. Okay. In our book, the Pragmatist Guided of Crafting Religion, I actually explicitly go over this.I say. That the urban monoculture is not a parasite, it’s this parasitoid. It has to kill its post.Simone Collins: Yeah.Malcolm Collins: The way that it spreads, that takes control of a company or a movement, and it then begins to look for any node within the movement or company that is unaffected in an in uninfected. And it attempts to flip them or infect them.And if they appear to be un infect or immune to it, it then expels them so that it’s [00:44:00] easy to affect the nodes that are effect just harder to affect. Right? And so it, it goes throughout an organizational movement until it can capture as many nodes as possible. The problem with this mecca and how does it do this?It does this with HR training. It does this with, you know, group struggle sessions. It does this with, you know, the few woke people, they, they use words that they know that you don’t know, and then you’ve gotta learn more and more of their lingo to not accidentally offend them, and then you get kicked out, right?Like, this is how they maintain the purity. But once an organization is fully infected there’s a problem from the perspective of the mimetic evolution of the urban monoculture. Mm-hmm. All the infected nodes are stuck inside the infected organizationSimone Collins: and have to disperseMalcolm Collins: and it has to disperse.That is part of its lifecycle. And so it has to kill the host through angry infighting is what it typically looks like. Yeah. The captured nodes to be released into the atmosphere and begin to infect new companies. [00:45:00] What we might have seen with Occupy Wall Street is the first large infected entity dying and spreading all of the infected nodes to the wind where they infected tons of bureaucratic positions within companies.Ah,Simone Collins: because they, they were extremely woke. Like I remember. Yeah, I remember thinking of them as being pretty freaking intolerable. And it’s not because. Like I, I, I don’t think that there’re really serious things to question about, like the bailouts that took place after well, and especially the lack of justice.After the 2008 financialMalcolm Collins: crisis. What gives to me a belief that this is what’s happening Yeah. Is if you look at a lot of your graphs, the funding. Two, this stuff started about two and a half years after W Occupy Wall Street. That’sSimone Collins: true there, there was a pause, things retooled for a while.Malcolm Collins: Just enough time for them to begin to build influence within other companies.Simone Collins: But this is also just enough time for theoretically, you know, wealthy people’s donations to start kicking in too, for the [00:46:00] change to start enacting, for the trainings to start leading to different numbers for the reporting to come through. All of this stuff takes time to build.Malcolm Collins: True, true,Simone Collins: true. And again, all of these things can be true at the same time.Like absolutely. It could be that, you know, the Occupy Wall Street movement then exploded into these other things. SoMalcolm Collins: my question is to the comments, whose theory is right? Malcolm Siri or Asma Gold Theory, who’s the. More clever cultural commentator on this particular issue. I like asthma Gold, Siri. I like it because the narrative that it paints is Occupy Wall Street was actually noticing a real problem and attempting to solve it in a meaningful way.Yeah. And and that, that makes it seem like, oh, and then they crushed it and then turned us against each other. My theory is more just like a cultural evolution theory. Like, well you had Occupy Wall Street died and then you have all these infected nodes that mm-hmm. You know, come out of college recently ‘cause that’s who a lot of Occupy Wall Street was filtering into major companies in college campus.Yeah. But taking over the HR departments, once [00:47:00] you take over the HR department, it’s very easy to decide who gets hired next. And this was the problem that a lot of these companies had that we’ve talked about before, is they were like, oh God, we’ve gotta hire like minorities, like trans, gay, black people.Okay. Well, we don’t wanna risk that on like our engineering team, right? ‘cause we need them to actually be competent. So I guess put them in hr, right? Like, no, that’s not gonna hurt anything. But now they’re in control of who’s hired.Simone Collins: Yeah, for real. Oh, Mr. Woke up. Yeah, I mean, I think maybe the other issue is that the growing class divide and all these just like the, the, the, the lack of accountability that, that various people who caused the 2008 crash had and, and on the bailout and everything like this is just stuff that like individual people maybe just couldn’t feel like they could do anything about.Whereas there were many different, there were many easier ways to virtue signal identity, politics related things. Like putting your pronouns in your bio and all these otherMalcolm Collins: [00:48:00] words. It also could be here’s the final hypothesis.Simone Collins: Yeah.Malcolm Collins: Is a lot of this is in opposition to the new right. Beginning to gain more power.And the left not knowing how to react.Simone Collins: Hmm. And then Right. Really didn’t come until after.Malcolm Collins: Yeah. I suppose you’re right. Yeah, they came later. Alright. Could it, could it all be downstream of Tumblr? Did Tumblr destroy society? I think that could be a fun video.Simone Collins: BLR, I mean,Malcolm Collins: TumblrSimone Collins: society. It wasMalcolm Collins: great, kinda.Anyway I love you Simone. I love you. So for tonight, I want something easy.Simone Collins: Okay.Malcolm Collins: So what’s easy? Mac and cheese, I guess.Simone Collins: Prob probablyMalcolm Collins: pizza if you’re doing pizza.Simone Collins: Yeah. Okay. I’ll do either pizza or mac and cheese or grilled cheeses. I guess. Any one of those works for you.Malcolm Collins: Yeah, the grilled cheeses you make are fantastic.I’llSimone Collins: see with kids support,Malcolm Collins: but the mac and cheese is really good too. And I learned [00:49:00] about pep black pepper in mac and cheese, but the pieces you make allow me to put Indian spice on top, which as is a little.Simone Collins: Some razzle dazzle.Malcolm Collins: Some razzle dazzle. That’s what I’m all about, Simone, the razzle dazzle. Okay. You honestly, this week’s videos are just like a string of absolute bangs in terms of like. Unique research. I cannot believe that you took this theory that asthma gold had, that all of these sort of anger that we’re seeing over increased racial anxiety in the United States.Well,Simone Collins: I just didn’t know, like I wanted to gaslight myself like, oh no, like racism was. It can’t have been like everything was fine then, right? Like,Malcolm Collins: and then Occupy Wall Street happened. The court post freaked out and Admiral posts the theory, and then Simone here, the theorist comes in with like a hundred graphs and funding charts and being like, no, no, no, no, no.So don’t understand like [00:50:00] every one of these orgs funding increased like. 13 fold near the end of Occupy Wall Street, and we know who the donors were, and it was all the Corpo. And we can also see how they changed training in police stations. As a result that caused a spike in the number of, and I was like, whoa, Simone, too much, too much cooking in there.Simone Collins: A lot interesting stuff going on. But yeah, I, I love, I love getting a good conspiracy theory that I haven’t heard before. May we get many more in the days to come? Well,Malcolm Collins: I mean, mine with the crash out that the assassin had about the freaking,Simone Collins: I cannot, that, that is so hilarious. It’s, I just, I love that we live in a timeline where like, you know, assassins after they manifest us have like ps oh my God, the security, thisMalcolm Collins: is terribleSimone Collins: here.It’s just like, it’s like a comic book joke, you know, like of like also kind of, it’s like the thing that they put in to like lampshade the fact that like. Clearly no president would have such bad, you know, so we’ll just, [00:51:00] we’ll just lampshade by having the villain talk about how ridiculously bad it is and then that will kind of hand wave away.YouMalcolm Collins: might might as well edit a ps. You should really probably go ahead with that new ballroom.Simone Collins: I know. You really should have. Yeah. People gotta get better with their their manifesto trolling, but,Malcolm Collins: Right, right.Simone Collins: Good stuff. I love it.Malcolm Collins: Anyway, I love you too, Simone. I have a spectacular day. The, by the way, the website’s getting better and better.I’ve added vibe coding features to it. Right now. What I’ve really been focused on is reducing the cost of the agent feature and improving the card game.Simone Collins: You guys check out our Fab AI forMalcolm Collins: really cool. You wanna try like magic the gathering, but like. Played by ai. So like the, the effects, like fire doesn’t do like five points of damage.It like modifies a card by being lit on fire.Simone Collins: It’s fun. It’s fun. And any just AI adventures, AI companions, AI agents, it can make phone calls, all the cool stuff. Definitely check it out. PhoneMalcolm Collins: call feature is hard to do and it confuses people. SoSimone Collins: I was, I dunno, I found it like, you know how I just always [00:52:00] find bugsandMalcolm Collins: stuff.You found it easy to use. Have you used it?Simone Collins: Yeah. And it called me and I was like, oh. That’s really crazy. YouMalcolm Collins: have to whitelist the phone number by the way. You have to go, you have to click, have it call you while you’re looking at your phone. Whitelist it.Simone Collins: Yeah, IMalcolm Collins: did. Long government reason as to why this is the case that I can’t do anything about without having you pay like a hundred dollars for a phone number.I love you, Simone. You are amazing. I think that you are beautiful and I am really glad we’re gonna be at DC for most of this week doing meetings. So, but we have a good backlog, so don’t worry about it guys.Simone Collins: Love you.All right.Speaker 4: What do you, you gotta, you gotta wear this on the channel more often. If it’s sunny and I’m going outside, I’m gonna put it on you. Look Adorkable and I love it. This is, this is what our fans are in this for Toasty. You are gonna get, we.[00:53:00]What are you doing, girl?Speaker 5: She just saw somebody to hug. Yeah, I just attack dogs all the time.Speaker 4: Oh my.Are you building a bridge? Toasty. Testy. Build a bridge. I mean, can I have that? I wanna throw the French. So under there, what it’s like under there? Yeah. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit basedcamppodcast.substack.com/subscribe

Did hookup culture and swipe apps like Tinder create the massive political and cultural divide between young men and women? In this Based Camp episode, Malcolm and Simone Collins break down shocking new polling data showing young women are far more negative toward men than vice versa, explore how Tinder supercharged resentment and radicalization, and discuss everything from MeToo to artificial wombs and potential speciation between the sexes.They cover:• The timeline correlation between Tinder’s rise and women shifting hard left• Why short-term mating markets destroy long-term relationship prospects• Male vs female responsibility in modern dating chaos• The anime that predicted male/female civilizations splitting• Practical advice for men seeking real partners and why “high value” looksmaxxing can backfireA raw, data-heavy, and unfiltered conversation on one of the biggest societal fractures of our time.BTW, here is Revy the MGTOW’s Google Doc guide to having kids via surrogate as an unattached man. Show NotesThe LandscapeNew polling conducted for the New Statesman in the UK in early 2026 found that young women (esp 25–30) have significantly more negative views of men than young men have of women.* The New Statesman poll was carried out by pollster Scarlett Maguire and colleagues on attitudes between young men and women in Britain, published around 14 April 2026.Here’s the polling (archive link): Revealed: the new radicalism among young womenMerlin Strategy’s exclusive polling reveals a growing gender divide among under-30sWhat they found:* About 72% of young men report a favorable view of young women, and only around 7% report an unfavorable view.* Among women under 30, only about half report a favorable view of men, and around one fifth (about 21%) report an unfavorable view.* Among women under 25, only about 35% express a positive view of men at all, and just about 11% describe their view as “very positive.”* Commentary around the poll notes that young women are “three times as likely” to hold a negative view of men as young men are to hold a negative view of women.* 40% of young women say men don’t share their understanding of consent in relationships (only 25% of men say the same about women).* Young women are twice as likely as young men to say they don’t want children (15% women vs. 8% men). Among white women under 30, it’s 20%.* 1 in 4 young women say a partner’s different political views is a red flag.* 60% would find it difficult to date someone who disagrees on Palestine/Israel or Trump.* 74% say the same about disagreements on social justice.* Young women are more likely than men to rule out partners over immigration views.The ThesisOn X, Rae (@dystopiangf) wrote: “Casual sex is unironically a huge part of why so many women have become politically radicalized. If you ask a random woman why she hates men, 95% chance it boils down to sexual grievance, accumulated from embarrassing experiences like the OP. In other words, women are the real incels (in spirit).I witnessed this myself in college: one too many bad situationships, and they begin to carry this feeling of being a piece of meat everywhere, projecting it onto “society” despite there being zero material evidence of structural misogyny in the West. The bitter irony is that hookup / situationship culture is a byproduct of feminism; they fought for the ability to be treated like pieces of meat, to be equal to men sexual the way gay men are with each other, but the attainment of this freedom has done nothing but foment an even deeper hatred of their father’s civilization”This is in response to someone sharing a screenshot from a post-hookup story a woman posted on tiktok.* The caption OP had put was: “situationship breakups are so crazy bc why did this man just tell me the only person he wants to be with is his ex and then immediately make me eggs on toast. He nutted in me like 10mins after this. what in god’s name is happening”* Moe Bible chipped in: “Women will post this s**t and then wonder why the entire planet and every major religion has imposed strict social restrictions on their sovereignty since the dawn of time in every place humans have ever lived”The Shadowbanned wrote: “Let’s at least sympathize here - the man does not need to do this to her. Just because a girl is willing to put out doesnt mean you have to take her up on the offer.”* To which Rae responded: “I do tend to think that volcels are the most noble of men”More discourse for the interested: https://x.com/i/trending/2046981384204358126Did Hookup Culture Predate Male-Female Political Polarization?Yes. Yes it did.Timeline of Hookup Culture / Casual Sex NormsCasual, non-committed sexual encounters have deep historical roots but became more normalized and visible in specific eras due to social and technological changes:* Early 1800s–1920s: Historians trace elements of casual sex and shifting courtship to the early 19th century, with acceleration in the 1920s. Automobiles, movie theaters, and urban youth culture allowed mixed-sex socializing away from parental supervision. This marked a shift from formal courtship to “dating.” Fraternity culture (from the 1820s) also played a role in college settings.* 1960s Sexual Revolution: A major inflection point. Feminism, the birth control pill, declining stigma around premarital sex, and college party scenes decoupled sex from marriage/relationships. This era saw widespread acceptance of casual encounters, especially among young adults.* 1970s–1990s: Premarital and casual sex became more common and visible. By the mid-1990s, “hookup” behaviors were established on campuses. The term “hookup culture” gained prominence around 2000, but data shows similar (or even higher) rates of sexual activity in earlier decades (e.g., comparisons of 1988–1996 vs. 2002–2010 college students).Hookup culture isn’t entirely new—casual sex existed before—but modern forms (peer-driven, alcohol-fueled, decoupled from courtship) crystallized post-1960s and were amplified by media and apps later.Timeline of Male-Female Political PolarizationThe partisan gender gap (women leaning more Democratic/liberal, men more Republican/conservative) is relatively recent in its modern form:* Pre-1960s: Minimal or inconsistent gaps. In the 1950s, women were sometimes slightly more Republican.* 1960s onward: Divergence began as men and women’s party identifications shifted (linked to civil rights, Southern realignment, and cultural changes). Men moved toward Republicans faster in some cases.* 1980s–present: Clear and growing gap. Noticeable in the 1980 Reagan election (women less supportive). It widened through the 1990s–2010s, with women more Democratic. Among young people (18–29), the divide has sharpened dramatically in recent years (e.g., post-2016/2020), with young women shifting left and young men moving right or away from Democrats.Polarization overall increased from the 1970s/1990s (elite sorting, Gingrich era), but the gender-specific aspect accelerated later.The Swipe-Based Dating AccelerationHas gendered political polarization intensified even faster following the introduction of swipe-based dating (E.g. tindr)?Yes, the gendered political polarization—particularly the ideological and partisan gap between young men and women—has shown signs of intensifying at a faster rate in the period following the widespread adoption of swipe-based dating apps like Tinder (launched 2012, mass popularity by 2014–2015).Obviously swipe-based dating is just one sign of hookup culture on the rise, but it largely facilitated hookup culture at scale, which could arguably have fuelled the resentment that built up and fuelled things like #metoo (which was founded in 2006 by activist Tarana Burke to support survivors of sexual violence but did not gain global, viral momentum until October 2017 after Alyssa Milano encouraged survivors to use the hashtag following Harvey Weinstein sexual abuse allegations).Episode TranscriptSimone Collins: [00:00:00] So 2015 is when Tinder launched. Oh, and about two years later is really when it started to pick up, . The thing that really made hookup culture run out of control was the technology introduction of swipe based dating, which made hookup culture something that could run at scale.And that’s when women who were eights and below suddenly had access to these higher quality men on their lazy nights and started to believe that this was the type of man who eventually would become their boyfriend or marry them.And this is where the resentment really starts.Malcolm Collins: you listen, you can’t see good graph. I mean, it is, it is striking. Like as soon as Tinder gets popular bam, women explode.You get me too. You get BLM you get huge rates of, of additional liberal tendencies in the female voting pool, particular in the single [00:01:00] female voting pool.Would you like to know more?Malcolm Collins: Hello Simone. I’m excited to be here with you today. Today we’re gonna be talking about an interesting question and an interesting theory. The theory coming from Simone is, did hookup culture create the current and continually growing divide between young men and young women?And we’ll be going over a bunch of stats that signify this divide. Because it’s, it’s way bigger than you would imagine. And then the second I wanna go over comes from an anime I was watching recently.Simone Collins: Oh no. OnlyMalcolm Collins: because I was on a leaflet stream and somebody on the leaflet comment, they go seeing leaflet and Malcolm Talks makes me not as afraid that we’re gonna end up with an X future.And I was like, I haven’t heard of this anime. So I went to look it up and watch it and it’s old and not very good. But it is an interesting concept, which is. After artificial wombs are developedSimone Collins: mm-hmm.Malcolm Collins: Because already with humanity one of the thought experiments I often [00:02:00] have is like, wouldn’t it be cool if like crow mags continue to exist today?So like, we could talk with and converse with a human with like a completely different sociological physiological perspective on reality. Right? Yeah. OrSimone Collins: Neander falls. Yeah.Malcolm Collins: Yeah. We, we, we basically. Have that, which is human females. Right. BecauseSimone Collins: goneMalcolm Collins: human females are probably more different from human males than Neanderthal males are from human males and Neanderthal females.Were from human females. Like as hominids, we’re quite different from each other. In terms of our, our sociological perspectives, the way we would want government, the wor the way we would want the prisons in so many different ways. We’re very, very, very different from each other. Scale,Simone Collins: you know, structure and Yeah.Muscle mass.Malcolm Collins: People have different roles. Yeah. And it asks it, it sort of takes this, this guess is that, well, once we have artificial wounds, the core political divide, which we’re kind of seeing already, is going to be between men and women. And eventually they split into different civilizations. One [00:03:00] is a descendant civilization of males and other is a descendant civilization of females.Hmm.And obviously the, the very fun thing is how they mythologize why the other was so bad, like all of the cruel ways that women used to treat men. And it’s like a list of like men’s rights grievances. Like did you know that men died at like 98% the rate of women when they worked together? Did you know that?Like, and it says, what, what would those two differing societies be like? And honestly and I, I, I want to talk with you. Do you think that happens? Because I hadn’t actually thought through how strong the political wins may be for a divide between men and women. We’re already seeing people in both camps talking about wanting to do it right.Like Sandman, who we’ve had on the show has talked about doing that himself, you know,Simone Collins: having a bunch of guys. Yeah, actually,Malcolm Collins: yeah, a bunch of guys. We talked to other guys who were doing it. EvenSimone Collins: when I was in Austin, there [00:04:00] were people like talking about it. Like, well, I wish I could just do this. And I’m like, oh, actually you can, I’ll share the Google doc with you.Of that, that other guy who,Malcolm Collins: oh, yeah, you should put that GoogleSimone Collins: document, if you remember, shared his guide to getting a surrogate and just doing it on your own, on a budget. IMalcolm Collins: mean, a bunch of women have talked about wanting to do this to the extent that there’s been a number of instances where women have, like when they, with their lesbian partner, whatever, accidentally conceived a male child, like wanted to sue the clinic when they found out they couldn’t have an abortion, they said it felt likeSimone Collins: there’s also a couple there’s a, a, a prominent case of a gay couple having done this too,Malcolm Collins: to have only gay kid, only male kids, I mean.Simone Collins: Mm-hmm.Malcolm Collins: Yeah. So, well, I mean, this is like a thing on Tumblr. Like, let’s just create what, what do we even need men for? What do they, we can have birth without them. Right. You know.Simone Collins: Well, but same, same with gay couples, you know, and if they’re doing it without women and they just wanna have a boy kid.Yeah. AndMalcolm Collins: people can be like, well, you at least need like sperm or eggs. And it’s like, not anymore. Like IVG [00:05:00] technology is getting pretty good at this point. Yeah. We’ve helped fund it with our foundation.Simone Collins: Mm-hmm.Malcolm Collins: So we’re maybe 10 years away from IVG just being you know, an easy way to, that, that means being able to create sperm and egg cells from other types of cells in your body.Simone Collins: Yeah. But to be, to be clear, a a lot of this is couched in for context, a new polling that was conducted for the new statements in new statesmen in the uk in, in early in this year that found that young women, especially in the 25 to 30 range, are way more negative on men than young men are toward women.So, as much as I cited this, this example of a gay couple suing because they didn’t have the boy they hoped for and selected. This is more about female hate and, and female pushing away. No, I, I could see reactive male speci should of just being like, I’m gonna throw my hands up and wash my hands with a situation.But what people have been discussing a lot online is this new statesman polling. I’m gonna, in the show notes link to an [00:06:00] archive link, so not paywall of the actual polling results. But some highlights of it are that about 72% of young men report a favorable view of young women. So most, right? But only around 7% report an unfavorable view that, again, this is a very friendly approach, but then women under 30, only half report a favorable view of men.And one fifth, like 21% versus 7% for men. Have a favorable view, and among women under 25, only about 35% express a positive view of men at all. And just about 11% describe their view as very positive.Malcolm Collins: Wow. So only one in four women under 25Simone Collins: Yeah.Malcolm Collins: Has a positive view of men. Wow.Simone Collins: Yeah. And young women are three times as likely to hold a negative view of men as young men are, to hold a negative view of women, put other ways.And then 40% of young women say men don’t share their understanding of consent in relationships. So only 25% say [00:07:00] the same amount about women, which makes sense. Young women are twice as likely as young men to say they don’t want children. Something we’ve discussed at length, and this shows up in a lot of polling.So 15% of women versus 8% of men. And among white women under 30 it’s 20%. And young one in four young women say it partners different political views as a red flag. So God forbid we consider alternate views, which is actually,Malcolm Collins: hold on, hold on, hold on. Simone. Yeah. Would you have said that back when you were a progressive?When I first met you,Simone Collins: I really liked. Talking with people who are different. When I, when I found ‘em on ok. Keep, that was kind of a selling point. Okay. But maybe I was weird. I would’ve thought that it was normative because I thought, you know, women love enemies to lovers. They love a bad guy. They love novelty, they love new views.Malcolm Collins: Well, we all saw the, the Ice Romance books pop off.Simone Collins: So, so yeah. That, that is, I actually find that very surprising. Like, why, why would women be so into enemies to lovers and, [00:08:00] and like to view men as these like, ooh, like powerful age, agentic, whatever. And, and leftist views broadly, which is what women, women are holding on average.Like I don’t think this is young conservative women saying that they wouldn’t date a progressiveMalcolm Collins: maleSimone Collins: partner.Malcolm Collins: I think what’s really interesting here is a few things. So one is obviously this changes the framing when people are like in cells or like angry young men or, or the problem in society, it’s very clear that angry young women are astronomically more of a problem in society than angry young men.Yeah. Men’s reaction is mostly. I don’t want to deal with this. Right. Like these, these harpies are nightmarish. Have you ever had to interact with one?Simone Collins: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.Malcolm Collins: And they are, they are. You know, I, yeah.Simone Collins: I mean, the old saying, women can’t live with them, can’t live without ‘em, but increasingly you can live without them.And will that allow for speciation, is your question?Malcolm Collins: Yes. No. No mandate speciation. So, yeah. I, I, I also wanna pointSimone Collins: out people. We also found, though, I just wanna say that women also, 74% said the same about disagreements on social [00:09:00] justice. So it’s not just politics, it’s also social justice. And also they’re more likely than men to rule out partners just over immigration views.Alone. Like, not like, oh, you’re a republic. Even if you’re a progressive man who believes in social justice, but then you, you know, you’re like, you know, maybe we should curtail immigration. Nope, you’re out. So anyway, it, it just, it check out the survey, there’s a ton more. And also women have way more negative views, for example, on economics.They’re more pessimistic on life in general. They honestly sound like bummers to be around.Malcolm Collins: Well also I, I note on your enemies to lover thing, which I do think is right. I think women honestly go for that. It’s, you can date with a strategy like that without as much trouble as you would imagine. Yeah. The a a lot of male dating advice is really messed up.And this is in part because of hookup culture. So we’re gonna go into that conversation a little.Simone Collins: Yes.Malcolm Collins: Are still sort of red pill cued around what women are looking [00:10:00] for. And it’s something that I had pointed out before. But I, I, I want to point it out again because I, I, it’s like really important that guys gr this because I was watching a home math video and I really respect home math.I think he’s a, a greatSimone Collins: same home math isMalcolm Collins: awesome. But he was going over the studies that show oh, well, you know, these guys who say that you don’t really need to work out, you don’t really need to be buffed. There’s better things to invest your time in. In terms of securing a, a partner of the opposite gender they’re, they’re wrong about this, right?Like, look at these studies. And so he goes over a number of studies and then he, he mentions a line that he sees a sort of a throwaway line, but it misses the entire point. He’s like, well. Of course the studies found that women really prefer you know, buff guys when they’re looking for a short-term partner, but not so much when they’re looking for a long-term partner.But he is like, but of course, because we’re all downstream of the red pill community, you want to be the short-term partner, right? Like, you want to be the sex [00:11:00] boy, right?Simone Collins: No. No.Malcolm Collins: And it’s like, that’s not what anyone in our community wants. Oh, we’re looking for a long-term partner, right?Simone Collins: Yeah. Mm-hmm.Malcolm Collins: And so, the men so frequently q to what women are looking for in short-term partners, because it’s something that’s very easy to test.Like I go to a club, I go to a night ball, I’m surfing on apps. Am are, are women like flocking to me, right? And the answer is, is yes. If you’re buffer, they are. But that can, once you go above certain levels, actually lead you to problem securing a partner. If, if we look in the manosphere sort of wider influencer space, right.And this is I think a good way to like sanity test ideas in your head. Yeah. Be like, okay, of the influencers I know who have X body type or y body type. Mm-hmm. How has, so in that video home as your picture that looks Oh he in real life, [00:12:00] home as apparently quite a, a buff very muscular looking guy.Simone Collins: All that illustrating, you know, really, so it works you out?Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Okay. So like, let’s think of like buff. Manosphere, you’ve got home math.Yeah.Malcolm Collins: You’ve got Chris Williamson. You’ve got I’m thinking Ry Nationalists. Yeah. Did, did any of these guys have kids or even a spouse?Speaker: Sorry, forgot a few Here. You also have Andrew Huberman, Myron Gaines, and , bronze Age pervert.Malcolm Collins: And then, oh, Weasley, little Malcolm here.How did I, how did I end up with, with five and counting kids?Speaker 7: Who else in the new right intellectual influencer space has a wife and kids? Uh, well, we have pictures of traditional masculinity like Curtis Jarvin and Ed Dutton. I.Malcolm Collins: Oh, the point I’m making is it’s very important to not invest. The hard parts of life in the wrong area. If I was to spend a [00:13:00] portion of my day, for example, exercising that would be time I’m not spending building.Simone Collins: Yeah.Malcolm Collins: Or, or, or writing,Simone Collins: building wealth, building a family, finding a wife, et cetera.Yeah. Well, and and more broadly, you know, the advice that you get from anyone is going to get you where they are broadly, you know, if it works. Yeah. In the best case scenario. So,Malcolm Collins: by the way, the thing that I’ve built recently that I’m quite excited about, I, I’ll try to get this episode, I’ll get it live for this episode.I’ll get it live for this episode is on reality fabricator we’re building, this is in conjunction with Leaflet who’s providing me, like, advice on this, a card game. And what the game will do is it’ll be like playing actual, like yugi. So like in, in, in like the anime, right? We’re like, cards have like abilities, but like if a dragon is like breathing flame, right?Well that has the effects that a dragon breathing flame would have. It doesn’t have like numbered effects. It doesn’t have a health bar or [00:14:00] something like that.Simone Collins: Right, right.Malcolm Collins: And so you play your cards onto a deck and you give actions like in words like, I want the card to do XI want the card to do y knowing what the environment is.Mm-hmm. And then an AI runs to decide you did this, your opponent did this. Obviously we have an AI opponent you can work with or you can go with human opponents. And. Then based on what happens based on both of your choices, changes the individual elements of that scene. So the images on the cards get changed based on what happened to them.The environmentSimone Collins: that’s so funnyMalcolm Collins: gets changed. The,Simone Collins: it’s like if this were Pokemon and they were Pokemon cards, like Pikachu would look all beat up and stuff.Malcolm Collins: Yes. Pikachu would look all beat up after he hit. Right. Like that’s the idea.Simone Collins: That’s great thing. Yeah. That’s great. I love that.Malcolm Collins: By the way, you can turn off the feature that constantly changes the images to save money.If you’re like, I don’t like, that’s a little too, you don’t needSimone Collins: that. Yeah.Speaker: Holy, raw,Speaker 2: real [00:15:00] monsters.Actually, they’re just super advanced holograms created for the sole purpose of enriching the experience of a children’s card game.Speaker: Okay. Seriously, you’ve got to be kidding me. Who wastes all their money on something like that.Simone Collins: I still love that. I wanna see my, okay. I don’t wanna see Pikachu beat up, but. I, I wanna see pickup troopSpeaker 8: Sadly about the only element that’s not working very well right now, at least the last time I tested, was the image redraw feature. So, , I hope to have that done by the end of the week, but we’re stuck in DC right now, so we’re not getting as much done as normal.Malcolm Collins: and I’ll eventually make that part of the feature. Like obviously I’ve been working on, the big thing we were working on was agents recently was making them cost a lot less and now there’s a video telling you how to use the agents.It’s like the top agent card if you wanna use agents, so you can watch that because they, they’d rack up costs way too quickly the way they were structured before. And so I came up with a number of options you can use to really specialize your task with an agent and cut down their cost.Speaker 9: They also have a vibe coding mode, which basically means they create [00:16:00] either a task list and work until the end of the task list is done. Or they just work until they don’t make a tool or an action call, uh, like typical vibe coding software does, which also has them just not run as long and rack up the same cost.Malcolm Collins: What else? Yeah, but yeah, building constantly, right?Like women, like guys who. Do stuff and have missions.Simone Collins: Well, let’s talk about this thesis on sort of the, the trigger of this divide, because I think it’s, it’s interesting and I’m kinda like, Ooh, I see, I see, I see where this is going. So on X ray, a, k, a at dystopian, GF wrote. Casual sex is unironically a huge part of why so many women have become politically radicalized.If you ask a random woman why she hates men, 95% chance, it boils down to sexual grievance accumulated from embarrassing experiences like the op. In other words, women are the real incel in spirit. I witnessed this myself in college. One too many bad situation ships and they begin to [00:17:00] carry this feeling of being a piece of meat everywhere, projecting it onto society, despite there being zero material evidence of structural misogyny in the west.The bitter irony is that hookup and situationship culture is a byproduct of feminism. They fought for the ability to be treated like pieces of meat to be equal to men and sexual. The way men are with each other. But the attainment of this freedom has done nothing but foment an even deeper hatred for their of their father’s civilization.And she posted this in response to someone sharing a screenshot from a post hookup story a woman posted on TikTok. The caption that Ope had put was situationship. Breakups are so crazy because why did this man just tell me the only person he wants to be with is his ex? And then immediately make me eggs on toast.He nutted in me like 10 minutes after this, what God’s name is happening. Which is just gross. And then MOA Bible on X chipped in, . Women will post this beep and then wonder why the entire planet and every major [00:18:00] religion has imposed strict social re restrictions on their sovereignty since the dawn of time in every place humans have ever lived.Also the shadow band wrote, let’s at least sympathize here. The man does not need to do this to her. Just because a girl is willing to put out doesn’t mean you have to take her up on the offer to which Ray responded. I do tend to think that vol cells, like in like voluntary incel are the most noble of men.And I’ll link in the show notes to the discourse, but I’m like, oh my God, is this true? Like, is the political polarization that we’re seeing between men and women. Something that really accelerated after hookup culture.Malcolm Collins: We’ll talk about male responsibility in this.Simone Collins: Okay.Malcolm Collins: In truth, I think men have near zero responsibility in this, and I’ll explain why.Simone Collins: Okay.Malcolm Collins: Suppose you saySimone Collins: what they can’t help themselves.Malcolm Collins: Suppose you say men should be vol cells. Right? And the vast majority of men decide to be vol cells, [00:19:00] right? Okay. So you, you get out there and 75% of men are like, yeah, I’m gonna be V cells.Simone Collins: Yeah. Like, I’m not going to sleep with you. I will be a gentleman.I will ask to be your boyfriend. I will meet your parents.Malcolm Collins: The problem is, is that the men who don’t sign up for that, right? Mm-hmm. So easy for them to get sex now because of this huge arbitrage that’s been created.Simone Collins: Mm-hmm.Malcolm Collins: Women who are open to sleeping around are just going to have such a big audience because they can sleep with one girl one night, one girl the next night, one girl the night after that.Right.Simone Collins: Yeah.Malcolm Collins: The, the amount of women sleeping around does not actually decrease dramatically if you increase the number of all cells unless you can get to total So prohibition.Simone Collins: That’s true. Basically. Yeah. 1, 1, 1 or two bad actors can cover a lot of ground. A lot of ground.Malcolm Collins: Exactly. Yeah. So this is fundamentally like the woman is not thinking about the, the pattern.Like the guy has told her, I have no interest in committing to you, and then she sleeps [00:20:00] with him, right. And she’s like, well, he’s not being actively unpleasant to me, so I guess I’m gonna sleep with him. Right. Like obviously this causes externalities right to, to structure society this way. And the core obviously we haven’t gone to this yet, but you know, any of our audience who has watched our previous videos on this notes, the core challenge this creates is because all of the women are chasing after so few men, this is just statistically true.And I’m, I’m really perplexed when women are like, well, that’s a, a sexist talking point. And I’m like. Maybe Really? Okay, here’s a chart of a hundred men that, you know, how many of them are you willing to sleep with, right? Yeah. You know, like, they’re like, well, these two, and I’m like, you see, that’s the f*****g problem, right?Mm-hmm. So, or they might have who, who, who’s, who, who else are people sleeping with? Right? You know, that women have a phenomenon where they will find somebody more attractive the more other people sleep with them, by the way another thing, if you’re thinking of the like. I’m like, guys, you are wrong.About who? [00:21:00] Women actually like go after in, in a meaningful context.Simone Collins: Yeah.Malcolm Collins: Which YouTuber recently had a major scandal where it turned out he was sleeping was tons of women this Waso the one they tried to cancel.Simone Collins: Oh, that guy who failed to be canceled. Yeah. Whose girlfriend like, came out in defense of him despite the fact that she had been cheated on multiple times.Malcolm Collins: Yeah. That is ultimate. But this is what I’m talking about. Right. You know? Yeah. You’re not, you’re not getting these other influencers this that’s happening to them. No, it’s, it’s little Twinky Sexo or whatever his name is. But. It’s like his belief women over, I was thinking about doing an episode in that one because everyone after that, like basically defended him and they’re like, Hey, a guy should be able to cheat.Like, what are you talking about?Simone Collins: What was most fun to watch is just all the guys covering him, being like, oh my God. Like he did it guys. He pulled it off. What a moment for men.Malcolm Collins: Amazing. The, the woman who I, I attacked him came off as so f*****g [00:22:00] petty. She was like, she’s like, well, I went to Vegas to a hotel room with him.Mm-hmm. And we stayed up late watching a horror movie together. And then we hooked up and had sex and it’s like. Hold on, but she’s like, but that’s not why I went, that’s not what my intention. I was like, wait, you went alone with him to Vegas to watch horror movies in a shared hotel room? That is consent.Okay. I’m sorry. Like they say, 40% of women have a different idea of consent than what men have. Why the F else did you go there? What else did you think was supposed to happen, you think he wanted to fly? Do do, do you think that he was supposed to think that that’s what you wanted was to just watch horror movies?Especially when you didn’t actively deny consent or tell him, I’m not interested in SexSimone Collins: Well and went forward with it.Malcolm Collins: Yeah, that was,Simone Collins: that’s a key partMalcolm Collins: of Absolutely. [00:23:00] Affluent multiple times. By the way, first giving him head then having sex with him head isn’t something that you can easily accidentally do.Simone Collins: Yeah. It’s not like she slipped in the shower.Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Come on. People. Like, I think that that was the other thing where people were like, that she thought that this was some big, like reveal on him is so egregious. It shows such a sense of entitlement, right? Like I wanted a famous guy to commit to me who is al already in a relationship and I will achieve this by getting him to sleep with me.And it’s like, no, it doesn’t work that way. Right? The one place where I think in this scenario that’s been created where I think guys are extremely culpable, is this is guys that signal that they want more serious or more long-term relationships than they actually want. And I think that this is something that, like as men, if we are going to [00:24:00] socially punish a behavior, is the easy behavior to socially punish.And that should be socially punished and seen as extremely bad because I have seen many women who do actually want long-term relationships get screwed over by guys who don’t want long-term relationships signaling that they do want long-term relationships to gain access to these women. And then people can be like, well then the woman just shouldn’t put out in any way.And it’s like, okay, you can say that, but a lot of guys, even guys who are actually interested in long-term relationships just won’t seriously date them then.Simone Collins: Yeah.Malcolm Collins: But anyway, continue is where you were going with this.Simone Collins: I sent you two graphs on, whatsApp that you can include in this episode if you so please.They show the political ideology divide as it grows over time between men and women. One starts at 1975.Malcolm Collins: Wow. After 2015, women went off the deep end with liberalSimone Collins: well, so two. So 2015 is when [00:25:00] Tinder launched. Oh, and about two years later is really when it started to pick up, which you can really actually see on the graph.Like two years later and it’s like young and it, what’s clear is that throughout history, like starting in the 1960s, you know, there was the sexual revolution. Definitely morays around sexuality and dating got looser and looser and looser over time. But the thing that really I think made hookup culture run out of control was the technology introduction of swipe based dating, which made hookup culture something that could run at scale.It made it very, very possible for lazy eights, nines and tens to access as many women as they wanted. Like that’s when the unlimited women on tap apps came out, basically.Malcolm Collins: Yeah.Simone Collins: And that’s when women who were eights and below suddenly had access to these higher quality [00:26:00] men on their lazy nights and started to believe that this was the type of man who eventually would become their boyfriend or marry them.And this is where the resentment really starts. I think that hookup culture was not a, as much of a problem and certainly didn’t breed resentment and then ferment political pol polarization before. Women had this experience of being jilted by men who never expected to invest in them as people from the GetGo.And then when swipe based dating happened suddenly that that was facilitated. Yeah. Well,Malcolm Collins: so it’s really clear here. Mm-hmm. You. Have to understand how bad, so Simone said that these apps are women on demand for high value men.Simone Collins: Yeah.Malcolm Collins: And they really are women on demand for high value men. Mm-hmm. It is just a constant flow for as many women as they want whenever they feel like it.And that leads them to treat these women incredibly poorly. [00:27:00] Mm-hmm. It’s like those old northern factory guys, and they’d be like, but your employees could die in these conditions. And it’s like, well, you know, I’ve got 10 other people. Right. Yeah. You want someone to care about you be a slave. Right.And again, this is sort of what we’re dealing with here. Which, and I have said this in other videos. Men owning their wives gave the women more value. Like it, it caused them to become protected by those men in the same way that in many times in the north, factory workers were treated worse than slaves because at least you had a reason to keep the slave alive.Mm-hmm. But a better. Dynamic here is property ownership in communist countries versus capitalist countries. Mm. In capitalist countries properties are generally very well up kept. Like you drive through a neighborhood, you’re going to see a bunch of nice houses. In fact, the only place where you really see super rundown houses is government housing, where people do not own it.You go to communist countries, [00:28:00] typically everything’s falling apart. Yeah. And the reason is, is because if you don’t own the property you’re living in, then you don’t benefit from maintaining it or invest.Simone Collins: You only stand to lose. Yeah.Malcolm Collins: Yeah. You only stand to lose. And it’s the same as a partner, a man who doesn’t.Own his women or wife. Right. And he was just going through, lots of them actually stands to lose from attempting to invest in improving her, whereas,Simone Collins: right. Because then he’s almost cing himself. You know, he’s improving some woman that eventually some other man is gonna end upMalcolm Collins: Yeah, yeah.Simone Collins: With, yeah.Malcolm Collins: Yeah.And these women have shown that that’s the way that they act, right? Mm-hmm. And now I’d also say do not take an overly harsh approach to women over this, which is to say that women are just behaving in relation to their biology in the same way that men are, right? Like, women are one far more communalist in their ideology than men are.And so if they’re in a community that all tells them something. It is. Way, way, way psychologically [00:29:00] harder for them to break out of that. Mm-hmm. So when everyone around them is telling you you know, oh, just sleep around, you know, it’s, it’s no big deal. Get married in your thirties, whatever that.The a a woman is, is gonna have a fairly hard time. And the biggest thing that’s told to them is all women are beautiful. You know, do not judge yourself by reality is basically what that statement is. Do not judge your, you, you deserve whatever you want. It’s like, do not you, you, it’s such a freaking bizarre ideology that’s spread, but it is absolutely commonplace among female circles.And then that your value on the sexual marketplace is the same as your value on the, on the marriage marketplace. Now, they won’t even allow you to have concepts like a sexual marketplace or marriage marketplace. They’re like that. So dehumanizing. What do you mean street market value? What do you mean?Whatever. But if you don’t understand these concepts as a woman you fundamentally won’t understand that the guys you can get to sleep with you on a swipe app are [00:30:00] not the guys who are going to marry you. And the other concept that is heavily shamed in these communities, but is absolutely true. Is that you will be heavily penalized in the marriage marketplace by men based on the number of partners you had before you findSimone Collins: Oh, for sure.Yeah.Malcolm Collins: And, and that in fact, you are even more penalized in the marriage marketplace for past sexual partners than you are on the sexual marketplace for past sexual partners. Oh,Simone Collins: yeah.Malcolm Collins: Well, I shouldn’t be, and it’s like, well, I’m sorry honey. You are right. Like, that’s just the data, right? Like, that’s just the reality.Because in the same way,Simone Collins: and it makes a lot of sense intuitively actually, I mean, the entire reason why marriage was first established as a concept was about securing paternity and property rights. It was about making sure that the female partner was not sleeping with other people, and that the entire community knew that was the point of the, like ceremony.Yeah. It was like, by the way. [00:31:00] No, no one sleep with her. Okay. Do we all agree that no one slept with her before and I I’m the only one to sleep with her after? Like, that was the entire point. Like it was so simple. Yes, it was about property rights and it was about like, promiscuity just I, I think it’s underrated.Under, under understood or misunderstood and underrated.Malcolm Collins: The, the, the, the where, where I’m going with this is, women obey their biology just as men do. And women’s biology tells them, try to secure the highest value partner that you can. Yeah. Right? Like, and it’s, and then this is more than even males feel this, right?Like, for women, it is absolutely important. I secure a a, a high value partner where high value is status or earning et cetera, right? Mm-hmm. And so, when they do not see that they are hurting themselves by being on the sexual marketplace, when they do not see that these relationships have no real chance at becoming stable long-term relationships they, they are, are they, like they, they don’t know how that this is happening to them.[00:32:00] They don’t see this happening to them, and they suffer for this. You see the psychological health of women way lower than the psychological health of men right now, right? Like, especially progressive women who have fully adopted into these ideals. And and I’ve met many women who. Went into this culture and then came out of it and they’re like, it just effed up my life so much.But like, how was I supposed to know there was a nobody in these communities? Like the effect of outsource community is one place where this really happens to women telling me like, actually there’s huge externalities to the choices that you’re making right now that are going to make your long-term life really hard.In the same way that like as a kid, everybody warns you about getting tattoos. Nobody was warning them against this. The other thing that is not, I had mentioned this in another video and I was very interested in the comments on this where I noted that, while body count matters a lot to men mm-hmm.Interracial body count seems to matter significantly more than body count. Eeg sleeping with somebody of a different ethnic group. [00:33:00] And I was wondering, I was like, is that a unique to white men thing or is this something that other ethnicities have? And somebody in the comments was like, actually, you see this a lot in Asian communities where if an Asian woman has slept with white men, that that’s considered worse than if she has been promiscuous with Asian men.Simone Collins: Mm-hmm. That’s interesting. Yeah. And we, we brought this up on another episode and someone even wrote in, ‘cause you and I just didn’t really, we couldn’t empathize with it. And they were like, yeah, I, I, I can’t control it. But it is definitely a feeling of disgust. So I feel like maybe there’s something genetic and inbuilt that some people have where if they know that someone is the product of some form of mixed heritage.Marriage or pairing or no.No.Malcolm Collins: TheySimone Collins: sell.Malcolm Collins: No, no, that is not what I said. I wanna be very clear about this. Oh,Simone Collins: okay.Malcolm Collins: Women are typically not penalized for being mixed race. They are penalized for sleeping with somebody of a different race. Okay. In the statistics you actually see being mixed race [00:34:00] helps you as a female.So we pointed this out in the episode where we reviewed differentYeah.Simone Collins: From attractiveness, it’s better to either marry your second or third cousin or to be mixed race.Malcolm Collins: Yes. Well, not just that, but the white men on average rate, Asian white women. So women that are birthed from Asian white matches as hotter on average than.Fully white women.Simone Collins: Yeah.And we have plenty of people who’ve written to us agreeing to that point.Malcolm Collins: Yeah, that’s obviously true. I like, even though I’m not drawn to,Simone Collins: there are also people though who find that a major turnoff and who’ve also written to us to attest to it. So just pointing that out.Malcolm Collins: Okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But I, I’m just saying like, I, I’m just searching myself, right. Like. I think that they are objectively hotter, but I’m not interested in them as a, a like marriage match. Like there’s a certain look on a female that like, wellSimone Collins: think it depends on what you’re, you’re optimizing for.You’re optimizing for a very specific cultural trope and other people are optimizing for hotness. So it depends on your equation.Malcolm Collins: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. I am, [00:35:00] I YouSimone Collins: didn’t optimize for hotness. I’m s sorry.Malcolm Collins: Noted. This was like the, one of the key most important things I’m always optimizing for is no makeup.Obviously she wears makeup now because like we have a conservative fan base and you’re supposed to do that, but like,Simone Collins: because your mom taught me to Yeah. In,Malcolm Collins: no, in terms of what I think is hot, it’s no makeup.Simone Collins: Yeah.Malcolm Collins: I found that really gross on women. And, and I, I don’t know, like I and Simone has noted this where I’m like, what?I think X person is really hot. Like Pearl Davis. I was like, I think Pearl Davis is pretty hot and a lot of people don’t. And Simone goes, Malcolm is because she doesn’t wear much makeup.Simone Collins: Yeah.Malcolm Collins: And that’s why our fans do not, but I, I, I wonder if this is a genetic thing with me or if it’s a learnedSimone Collins: thing.So this is, I think this is what most men don’t get about makeup. There are two types of makeup. There’s a makeup that women wear for other women, which is when you can tell it’s there like red lipstick and visible eye stuff and contouring. It’s makeup. You can tell it’s. And then there’s the other type of makeup, which men call no makeup, which is the type of makeup that women put on [00:36:00] that is undetectable to the untrained eye.It makes to make you look better. That makes women not look ill. And when they don’t wear it, they look sick suddenly. And you’re like, oh God, are you okay? And it’s like, no, you’ve just only ever seen this woman in makeup and you haven’t realized it. ‘cause you don’t know what to look for because you’re dude.And I think men don’t realize that like, I like women without makeup. No, you like women with makeup. You just don’t like women with makeup for women. You like women with makeup for men. Alright, just, okay. End of end of that.Malcolm Collins: But, but what I’ll note on these two charts that I think is really interesting, especially the second chart that you shared mm-hmm.Is it Tinder didn’t make men more conservative, it made women more progressive.Simone Collins: Mm-hmm. That’s the thing. That’s the thing is, is I really do think that there’s something to raise. On X’s point, which is that this started to just subtly and cumulatively over time build this resentment, which then I think snowballed into things like Me Too.For example me Too was actually founded hashtag Me Too in 2006 by the activist Tarana Burke to support [00:37:00] survivors of sexual violence. But it didn’t gain global or viral momentum until October of 2017 after Alyssa Milano encouraged survivors to use the hashtag following Harvey Weinstein’s sexual abuseMalcolm Collins: survivors.EG The guy I wanted didn’t want me back.Simone Collins: Yeah. But the key thing, remember Tinder launched in September of 2015, but did not pick up until two years later. That is exactly what, when Me Too went viral.Malcolm Collins: You are just feel like right.Simone Collins: Coincidence? I don’t know. But I thinkMalcolm Collins: there’s women really because you know, the, the joke about women in responsibility, they feel very deeply when they thought that they were getting with a guy and that it was gonna be a relationship and he just didn’t want them for that. They feel incredibly used and like it’s not their responsibility. They’re not responsible for failing to win that guy. The guy is responsible for failing to choose them.And I think our society unfortunately has reinforced this, especially with hotter [00:38:00] girls. Like because with hotter girls. They have lived in a society where everyone around them affirms them, like female friends, affirm them in whatever emotional state because they’re just supposed to, and the ones that don’t, then all the girls gang up on them and then males affirm them to get sex.Right. Like, they don’t have a reason. There was recently a, a, a viral phenomenon with a woman being like, I switched from a female psychologist to an old white male psychologist, and the sessions have been so much more useful because he calls me out on my bs.Simone Collins: Yeah.Malcolm Collins: You know,Simone Collins: oh no,Malcolm Collins: havingSimone Collins: a white, that’s, that’s actually very emotionally mature of this woman also like.Correction. Tinder launched in 2012 and then got popular in 20 14, 20 15. Yeah. Which is what would, would be, I think, pretty explanatory for enough time, for resentment to accumulate by 2017 when me, me too went viral. Yeah,Malcolm Collins: but no, you listen, you can’t see good graph. I mean, it is, it is striking. Like as soon as Tinder gets popular bam, women explode.You get me too. You get BLM you get huge rates of, [00:39:00] of additional liberal tendencies in the female voting pool, particular in the single female voting pool. By the way, something I wanna do a separate episode on, which would be really exciting. Yeah,Simone Collins: yeah.Malcolm Collins: Is note on the other graph, this is Malcolm welcoming, noticing something on a graph and being like, I wanna figure this out.Simone Collins: Okay.Malcolm Collins: So looking at the first graph you sent meSimone Collins: mm-hmm.Malcolm Collins: Look, in the 1970s. What was going on then? Why did the female dating population go so left in the 1970sSimone Collins: that was at the tail end of the sexual revolution, and the 1980s was when things kind of clamped down again. And you had this era of like baroque more traditionalism.I think. I mean, just going off ofMalcolm Collins: So you think it’s the exact same phenomenon, women, because as, as ISimone Collins: think that, yeah, I think there was a backlash to sexual freedom that would, that saw its peak in the early seventies. And then I think really started to plummet again in the eighties as people went a little bit more traditional and [00:40:00] gender divergent.Malcolm Collins: As ho math has said, society is constantly a battle of women wanting to be sluttier and men trying to keep them from acting sluttier.Simone Collins: That’s funny. Yeah.Malcolm Collins: I don’t think that that’s what’s really happening. I mean, I think female behavior is not driven inherently by female sluttiness. It’s driven by a combination of factors that leads to an inevitable result in aggregate behavioral patterns.The behavioral patterns are women are communalist in their ideology. Okay. Okay. So they adopt whatever ideology is most common in their environment, and it it, unless they have a strong man to protect them in having an alternative ideology. Mm-hmm. That’s typically the only time, like when women, I think the reason women become more conservative when they get married is they feel they have like a buffer or a protector to have and think different thoughts.That’s the only way you got out of this. And I’ll do a separate episode at some point on how to convert a, a progressive woman.Simone Collins: That would be [00:41:00] useful. Yeah. That’s, that’s because I think a lot of men are like, well, where do I find these conservative women? And you’ve said, well just find, you know, progressive women.Find a progressive.Malcolm Collins: Yeah, what are you, what are you talking about? Where do ISimone Collins: find, but then I think, you know, the, the obvious and intuitive male response is, look, look at the numbers. Like women are broadly progressive and they won’t consider even dating men who are conservative. And I think that’s kind of where the nuance is to be done.No,Malcolm Collins: no, no.Simone Collins: Actually they will considerMalcolm Collins: the same way a woman says, I’d rather meet a bear in the woods than a man.Simone Collins: Exactly.Malcolm Collins: They don’t actually effing mean that they’re signaling something. They’re signaling something to themselves and to the people around them.Simone Collins: Yeah.Malcolm Collins: They still hot conservative guys. They say it all the time.They complain about it all the time. Right? Yeah. They don’t have any consistency in terms of these beliefs. So women believe what the aggregate opinion is, and women are also disproportionately affected by whatever the hottest guys that they believe they can gain access to are who are the hottest guys.They believe they can gain access to. F**k [00:42:00] boys. Why are they boys? Well, because the guys who want longer term relationships don’t want women like this. They don’t date women like this. The guys like me who wanted to lock down partners, I mean, in reality, most guys who genuinely want a longer term relationship locked it down in their early twenties.That’s like when you really have to get it locked in. And if you don’t lock it in in your twenties, then you end up wasting a lot of time on. It, it, it’s, it’s very interesting, like when we talk about something like exercise, the reason why I I talk about something like exercise is you can build this mindset of I’m gonna do X, then I’m gonna go out and do the, the, the thing of of getting a woman, right?And it’s very easy to be like, okay, once I’ve reached X goal, then I’ll go get the woman. But getting the woman is the hard part, right? Like, X goal gives you like a 10% advantage on getting the woman right. But. It wastes way more than 10% of the time that you would’ve spent on getting the woman.It’s like 50% of the time. And then you try to go out and get a [00:43:00] woman, you find out they’re, they’re all terrible or whatever, and then you give up again for a long period and then you, you, you go into a cycle again instead of just being like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, I’m just going to make it work no matter what.Right? Like I am going to so break the door off its hinges, it’s going, it’s going to happen. I am going to make this work. And that was like me, you know, like, red PillarsSorry, I say red pillars a few times here, but what I meant was the hookup artist community. I got the two confused in my head for, I mean, they’re adjacent to each other, so I, I forgive myself.Malcolm Collins: would say like, if you could look at red pill strategy, they’d say that the strategy that I’ve advocated for, like how do you secure a partner, really high throughput, dating you know, being willing to cut somebody off really quickly if it’s clear it’s not a match.Mm-hmm. And just moving, moving, moving. They’d say that’s cheating. Like red pillars actively advocate against that. ‘cause they go, well that lacks skill. You know, that’s just a numbers game. Right. And I’m. Well, you see, here’s the thing, right? Even you admit it works, it just means [00:44:00] they don’t need to play your stupid game anymore.What they need to do is build social resilience, resilience to rejection, and the emotional skills to know how to start conversations with strangers. And I know today if guys are like, well, I’m just gonna go out and meet somebody at a whatever in public, 60% of relationships today begin online. The vast minority of relationships begin in public these days.Simone Collins: Yeah, yeah.Malcolm Collins: So,Simone Collins: and yet so many of the young people that we meet now who are like, I wanna meet someone, or like, well, I just wanna meet them in person. That’s like the, the default. Oh, we’ve talked about this in other episodes that women interviewed for stories. Women polled say that they want to find someone offline.So it’sMalcolm Collins: they do. So there’sSimone Collins: a weird mismatch.Malcolm Collins: It’s not offline, you know. But, the, the, the, you know, leave a girl your number or something to do it. This is the important thing in terms of shooting your shot. Mm-hmm. Do it in a non-threatening way. It’s not that hard to be non-threatening in the way that you flirt with some, I guess it is hard for some people, right?Like, [00:45:00]Simone Collins: I think it scaresMalcolm Collins: Yeah. The, the less attractive you are, especially if you’re unaware that you’re not particularly attractive, the worse it gets to, and, and this is the thing, you go out there and you leave a girl like your number and like a, I’d be open to chatting if you’re interested. You know, I’m new in town on her table or something like that.Totally in offensive look, the girl might go on TikTok and attempt to shame you or something like that. Right. But the reality is, is you just gotta learn to tough that out.Simone Collins: Yeah.Malcolm Collins: Because there were plenty of women who I’m sure attempted to shame me in the communities that I was in. I, I would move really hard on women.But, you know, eventually it worked out with a wife. And the other thing that I YouSimone Collins: moved hard on you.Malcolm Collins: Yeah, you moved on me. She made, she was interested in me. Was that you and I feel like perfect matches to people. People are like, oh, wow, you guys seem like really well matched for each other.You know, that is in part because of the [00:46:00] number of dates that we were going on. Right? Like, we didn’t just randomly end up as perfect matches for each other. Right. We ended up as perfect matches because I tried matching to everyone.Simone Collins: Yeah. And I prolifically reached out to. Guys on OkCupid as well, which of course as a woman is, is very unusual and a very easy way to gain an advantage in dating markets.If you’re a woman and you’re having trouble dating, shame on you because all you have to do is just, just spawn camp like it’s so easy. You, you, you just,Malcolm Collins: Simone, I don’t, I don’t think you’d like that. Implicate. So, spawn camping has a very specific meaning in dating culture.Simone Collins: Oh, it does.Malcolm Collins: It means,Simone Collins: what does it mean in dating culture?Malcolm Collins: Extremely young people.Simone Collins: Ew. Okay. Great. Thanks Malcolm. That’s wonderful. I’m glad that you told me that. Wonderful. Great. Well, so there’s also just the option that we speciate just give up. Just Yeah.Malcolm Collins: SoSimone Collins: should we, you know, children of your own sexMalcolm Collins: With my family and my kids, I [00:47:00] will try to raise a culture of the next generation.I think that many people in our wider community are gonna be doing this with their kids. Yeah. Where they had sane expectations around sexuality and dating. Mm-hmm. And it prevents them from spiraling out like this because parents are having these conversations with them.Simone Collins: Yeah.Malcolm Collins: ButSimone Collins: well arranged marriages, again, super underrated.Unfortunately, that’s not something that we, you know, if you don’t have parents who are invested in your getting married and, and they’re not out gonna go out there and help you and, and really make things happen and, and work on networking. In, in conjunction with you, you don’t have that benefit. So either handle it yourself, do it, it’s gonna be hard, or go your own way.Have kids by yourself. And andMalcolm Collins: so the question that I started with,Simone Collins: yeah,Malcolm Collins: is humanity, get a species eight.Simone Collins: Mm-hmm.Malcolm Collins: One, I think you’re right about this, and I think you found something really interesting here, how Tinder broke society.Simone Collins: Well, what you pointed out, which is interesting and could provide some hope, and this is in against the speciation [00:48:00] argument, is as you saw, there was this great divide right after the sexual revolution exploded between men and women politically, but it healed.And perhaps this was because women went from being incredibly sexually loose. When the sexual revolution exploded and there was some backlash and there were more, there’s a little more traditionalism in the eighties, perhaps. Maybe that will happen again.Malcolm Collins: Oh my God. If, if this next generation, like if female females goes tread, likeSimone Collins: actually goes tread,Malcolm Collins: what’s gonna be so funny is the millennial Whitman, the aging millennial slut women.Oh no. How angry they’re gonna get about that. Yeah. Being shamed for young women for sleeping around, which we’re already seeing happen.Simone Collins: Yeah. Yeah. They’reMalcolm Collins: like, I’m 50 and I was out sleeping around and it’s like, whoa. Like woman, you’re 50 and you’re sleeping around. Like, that’s not something to brag about.That does not make you look cool.Simone Collins: That I think could really happen. It’s more likely to happen also with the rise of AI is women have a more difficult [00:49:00] time. Getting jobs that increasingly don’t exist anymore. And don’t have the aptitude required to engage in AI fueled entrepreneurialism or to go into trade roles that were historically dominated by men that are still going to maintain some relevance and strength over time.So they’re going to turn to being a more traditional homemaker and wife as a career, which I think will also drive, even if this isn’t in, in backlash to hookup culture. I think it’s an economic driver that will make women naturally more sexually conservative and therefore also politically conservative.‘cause I think it’s also very hard to engage in this level of political polarization. If you know a man and are friends with a man and don’t, you know, turn them into straw men and monsters that you never actually engage with.Malcolm Collins: That’s a good point. Well, I I, I, I feel like you’re onto something with this one.And I [00:50:00] appreciate that you know, you made the effort to find me that was really thoughtful of you, that you went out there and you actually tried dating and emailing people. ‘cause I had seen your profile and I was never gonna email it. I, I thought she appeared. Too arbitraged, right? Like it was all the nerd stuff.She actually took pictures from the angles that made it look like she might be fat and trying to hide it. Which she was unaware of the angles, so she didn’t know. But I’d had to deal with that too many times.Simone Collins: Were you actually catfished by rotund people a bunch ofMalcolm Collins: times? Oh, all the time. I actually say it was maybe a quarter of dates were significantly fatter than they made themselves look.Simone Collins: Well, I guess female. What, 60% of American women are obese, correct. Or overweight at least.Malcolm Collins: Yeah, and I’m, I am incredibly sensitive to weight in terms of looks. I think overweight women are very, very unattractive. I, I’d go further is to say, you know, how we talk about arousal to disgusted like pipeline of of systems.I get a very strong disgusted response from obese people of both genders [00:51:00] actually.Simone Collins: So had I not been aggressive we never would have connected because you thought I would catfish you. And to be clear, the reason why Malcolm went on a date with me, even though he thought that my profile may have indicated that I was fat, was he made me friend him on Facebook so that he could see all of the photos that other people had tagged me in.That other people took. Yeah, because that’s a really easy way to tell, like you, you can’t trust a girl’s own photos of her because who knows how face tuned and angled they are. But when someone else, especially a female friend knowing meat blocking material would, would post a photo of them, which is going to be.Less than flattering on average.Malcolm Collins: Yeah. You met a girl later at a party who was like, oh yeah, we were talking on cu okay cubit, but you wouldn’t meet up with me ‘cause I wouldn’t share my Facebook. And I was like, and she wasn’t fat, but I was just like, no, wasn’t hard rule, you know, I do not wanna waste time.This is what high throughput screening is about, right? Mm-hmm. And the, and the reason I was so aggressive about it was how frequently I was catfished.Simone Collins: Yep. [00:52:00] Absolutely.Malcolm Collins: And women, by the way in, in their defense, do not really understand that they’re catfishing a guy. They’re, they’re trying to show you the most flattering images of them that they have.Right. Like, that seems like a natural thing to want to do.Simone Collins: Especially imagine these also have like some level of body dysmorphia, like they don’t actually understand, or they’re not willing to even steer into the void and acknowledge that they look the way they actually look.Malcolm Collins: Yeah. That they’re actually not very attractive.Mm-hmm. Now. To the question of whether humanity will speciate I think we already know the answer. The answer is yes. Obviously, like, obviously there’s gonna be a group of humans that become an all male society. There’s gonna be a group of humans that become an all female society, and there’ll be a group of humans that stay in a society structured similar to the one today is likely what’s gonna happen.Just I thoughtSimone Collins: I, I just heard my take on. I think that we’re gonna self-correct. This will be, there will be a market correctionMalcolm Collins: because there’s always gonna be, the question is, is how big are these fringe groups going to be? Oh God. But I think, you know, could they be 10% of the population? [00:53:00] It depends on how good they are at breeding, how good they are at motivating the next generation coming into existence.They might be significantly better than the mainstream population at breeding, right? Like they may just be able to have kids at a faster rate and motivate caring for kids at a higher rate because they’re not worried about caring about a romantic partner. They’re like the core loving relationship I am having access to in my life, because I wouldn’t even consider a.A male partner or a female partner mm-hmm. Is the relationship I may have between me and my kids one day. The problem kind of with male female society is the core loving relationship that people are taught to, key to is the partnership they’re gonna have with their spouse, not the partnership they’re gonna have with their kids.Simone Collins: Mm-hmm.Malcolm Collins: So, you may actually have a higher motivation to have kids in a all male and all female society. It just depends on how that, that ends up working out. But I would be very surprised if no group ends up doing this. What I can say is that if you have an all female society and the data is gonna show you this.It’s not gonna be able to compete. Like if it ever gets to this stage like it does in this anime where they’re at war [00:54:00] with each other, obviously the all male society would just wipe the floor with the all female society. You can look at IQ distribution curves. You can look at aggressiveness scores, you can look at basically anything, right?Like the chess champions, right? Like there is a reason why, like, it’s not just on like physical strings. Why? I think it’s like only like 10 out of the last thousand. If you, if you rank the top thousand players or women or something it’s, it’s not a lot. They women would be at a, let’s say, heavily leaned into genetic augmentation.They’d be at a massive disadvantage. Mm-hmm. But anyway thoughts, Simone, final closing thoughts.Simone Collins: This timeline’s weird. But yeah, I I just can’t believe that I, I grew up thinking that sexual promiscuity was fine and acceptable. But it’s still bizarre to me that now I, I favor prudishness. And this is also bizarre in light of the fact that you’re the only person I’ve ever had sex with despite, despite [00:55:00] having growing up thought that.So I also feel very, very lucky to have been too autistic andMalcolm Collins: want guysSimone Collins: too disinterested in, in, in general promiscuous sex to like, have fallen for this because the average person, I think really would. And I guess it’s something we’re gonna have to very carefully address with our daughters.Malcolm Collins: Yeah.Well, and our sons in terms of pushing through and how to convert women, so.Simone Collins: Mm-hmm.Malcolm Collins: Love you, Simone.Simone Collins: I love you too, Malcolm.Malcolm Collins: I am feeling, oh, my stomach is hurting so bad right now. And I think I realized why. Well, Dan, DanSimone Collins: sauce, you’re allergic to it.Malcolm Collins: Oh, and I only had one soda today and most days I have like six or seven sodas. SoSimone Collins: you’re going through some kind of,Malcolm Collins: so it could be a caffeine withdrawal.Simone Collins: You sure. ‘cause every time you’ve made yourself Dan, Dan based dishes in the past you’ve had stomach problems.Malcolm Collins: But I didn’t eat Dan Dan yesterday.Simone Collins: Yeah, but you had it two days in a row before.Malcolm Collins: Yeah, but I would’ve noticed that beforehand. [00:56:00]Simone Collins: Hmm. Okay. I was thinking I should use the remaining ground meat that you got when I was in Austin today for your dinner. What would you like me to do with it?Malcolm Collins: My stomach is far tooSimone Collins: queasy.Oh, grilled cheese sandwiches.Malcolm Collins: Yeah, grilled cheese sandwiches would be great.Simone Collins: Okay.Malcolm Collins: I’llSimone Collins: do the,Malcolm Collins: the.Simone Collins: Should I be making just like hamburger patties with that for the kids? Like do you not want it again or should I save it tomorrow?Malcolm Collins: No, I do want it. Just wait.Simone Collins: Okay. We can only wait so many days with ground meat that’s fresh, but tomorrow will be fine though.Just a note.Malcolm Collins: I understand Simone.Simone Collins: Mm. Okay.Malcolm Collins: And yes, I got the statistics here.Simone Collins: As do I. You want me to kick it off? Shall we go?Malcolm Collins: Anything else today? Any news? Let’s see how the episode’s doing.Simone Collins: The episode was, last time I checked, four out of 10. People liked it. People are like, well, obviously this is how it is.[00:57:00]The nonprofits areMalcolm Collins: terrible funded. The kk kSimone Collins: everyone knew this. I love that. Alex Jones had called it once againMalcolm Collins: the, wait, he had, he said that the KKK was funded by Democrats.Simone Collins: No, I think he said the Southern Poverty Law Center funded the really bad protest. I’m forgetting what it was called. The Charlottesville Charlottesville protest.Charlotte. Mm-hmm.Malcolm Collins: Really? That’s a good call, by the way. The,Simone Collins: the, the water’s turning. The frogs gay and Yeah, the Southern Poverty Law CenterMalcolm Collins: Oh no. Gets, gets it a Sandy Hook, uhoh. Oh. Is he gonna beSimone Collins: rightMalcolm Collins: on that?Simone Collins: I hope so. I mean, it’s one of those things where like, I really, I would love a world in which those like innocent children were not shot.And killed. So I would love for that to be true. I would really like throw in all the other stuff. I’ll take that one. I, I really can’t stand children’s.Malcolm Collins: I cannot believe that they were funding the KKK and actual NazisSimone Collins: [00:58:00] high ROI for fundraising.Malcolm Collins: Mm-hmm.Simone Collins: I, I just, I, I can’t imagine how much money they’re raising if the salaries of their leadership team, pretty large leadership team are like $250,000 plus, though I don’t know why their chief legal counsel was making over $250,000 a year and still walked them straight into this.Disaster. You think they would’ve warned them?Malcolm Collins: Well, I mean, I, I don’t think it, I don’t think it was a disaster. I think it was kind of the opposite until they were caught for it. If you remember the KKK and neo Nazi groups of the United States, as I pointed out when we were doing that episode, had basically gone extinct as of like 10 years ago.Like, you’d see one of the rallies and it’d be like two or three old guys walking in a sad suburban town or something like that, and a bunch of people yelling at them.Simone Collins: Yeah.Malcolm Collins: And then they start funding it all, and now all of a sudden we’re getting like giant tiki torch marches and stuff like this, which allowed for them to create BLM, which got them tons of [00:59:00] money.Right. They, they actually benefited enormously for the racial anxiety that they were able to create from this.Simone Collins: No, they super did. Someone had posted a comment linking to two dudes talking on YouTube, who I guess are. Racist ‘cause they were going on about how like, wow, we’ve raised a lot of money for the Southern Poverty Law Center and like they’ve included photos of us in their fundraising documents and like, how much have we, why aren’t they paying?Ow. Oh my God, it’s okay. You just have really sharp teeth. He put my finger, that child who was bit by CharlieMalcolm Collins: Yeah.Simone Collins: Actually took it like really well. Considering how sharp baby’s teeth areMalcolm Collins: and how little they care about using full power onSimone Collins: a finger.Malcolm Collins: Yeah.Simone Collins: They’re like, let’s go, let’s take this thing off.Right?Malcolm Collins: No, no. He’s looking around like, I don’t want that finger.Simone Collins: You want it? He does. You [01:00:00] noodle.Malcolm Collins: We got a one shot that women in our audience and the wanting babies.Simone Collins: Yeah.Malcolm Collins: Hey, there were not a lot of babies on YouTube before us. You know, like, I thinkSimone Collins: there were lots of funny Fridays and all the other, like, Christian YouTubers like to talk about these horrible women who put their babies on, on the videos as they record, I think who’s the couple that’s famously deconstructing now.And one had done all those sex courses. She used to have her baby on the video a lot.Malcolm Collins: Oh yeah. God, what is her, what’s her name? Basically,Simone Collins: no, not classically, Abby. It was, yeah,Malcolm Collins: it wasn’t classically Abby. It wasSimone Collins: those two sisters who went on to,Malcolm Collins: yeah.Simone Collins: Married dudes.Malcolm Collins: I know who you’re talking about.People, the, the left used to love to profile them, and then they, and that’s all I know them from.Simone Collins: Right? Well, I think she started the, the couple, they both started deconstructing and then it was like less interesting I think for people because they started questioning their faith and not being so hard line.Which [01:01:00] I think is probably to their detriment. I don’t know. I, I don’t know.Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Well, I will, I mean, maybe they still have a, a big audience somewhere out there.Simone Collins: Yeah.No, I wish the best for them, but they, they had a baby in their feed and she, you know, she would fuss with the baby just like I do. And I always think I’m, I, I just think of all the criticisms of her when I have texts.You haven’tMalcolm Collins: gotten much criticism for having our children in videos.Simone Collins: Oh, very regularly. People complain about the, the noises, the baby noises. I just can’t watch it with the baby noises where.Malcolm Collins: Reflexively be like, how dare you put kids in a video? How dare you put kids in a video? And like, we just don’t get that very much.I think it’s because they’re, they’re like more mad at us for other things, so they just don’t care. I saw one video where somebody was like, oh, that kid heard you guys talk about sex on the podcast. He’s gonna get messed up. Right? Like, and I’m like, how, how do you think babies work? Right? Like,Simone Collins: you know, [01:02:00] as has been discussed, and this is a conversation that’s kind of come up between me and so many people this week, people just don’t have exposure to babies anymore or children.So they don’t understand them. They appear to believe that they understand full sentences. They don’t understand what it’s like to be around them. They’ve never held a baby. True. Most, you know, most people even who are very social, have not held a baby for like a year at least. Even if they’re around other people who around their age are probably having kids.So, you know. It’s not great.Don’tMalcolm Collins: mess on the internet. Who just wanna criticize people?Speaker 11: There’s the same top, there’s, there’s the dinosaur in there and there’s the beagle, the same beagle. There’s the whole culture. It’s the same little culture like this. There’s dinosaurs just being detected. You sound really excited. Yeah, we got some Mandarins classic books. More side than horse. And what about you?Speaker 10: You got a panda bear? [01:03:00] Well. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit basedcamppodcast.substack.com/subscribe

In this explosive Based Camp episode, Malcolm and Simone Collins break down the shocking PS section of the Trump shooter’s manifesto — a rant that exposes jaw-dropping Secret Service and hotel security failures at a major DC event. The assassin details walking in armed, breezing past checkpoints, and being stunned by the total lack of security.Malcolm and Simone explore how this level of incompetence could have allowed a small Iranian team to wipe out much of the Trump administration. They debunk wild leftist conspiracy theories claiming the attempt was “staged,” examine the shooter’s anti-Trump motivations, information bubbles on the left, institutional rot in the Secret Service/CIA/FBI, and why this event reveals deeper societal breakdowns.Topics also include past assassination attempts, cultural trust, and why bureaucratic security theater keeps failing. A must-watch for anyone concerned about presidential security, deep state dysfunction, and political violence in 2026 America.Episode TranscriptMalcolm Collins: [00:00:00] Hello, Simone. Today we are gonna go into something crazy that as far as I know, is in like our intellectual, conservative talking space we’re gonna be the first channel covering, and I am shocked that no one is talking about this.Have you heard anything about the PS section of the Shooters manifesto?Simone Collins: All I thought was that there were some papers found in his hotel room that expressed displeasure with some of the Trump administration’s policies. That’s it. I don’t know any, I didn’t know there was a manifesto. I didn’t know how to PS section, and I love that there was one, but tell me, it,Malcolm Collins: it makes me believe that somebody in the secret services trying to get Trump killed.Simone Collins: What, what,Malcolm Collins: and we, and, and, and on top of that, if Iran had not been an incompetent country at war with itself, they very easily could have assassinated almost the entire administration at that event. So. Let’s go into it.Simone Collins: Oh. Oh, wow. Yeah. People have been mocking the secret service for letting [00:01:00] the guy Nardo run right past them, butonMalcolm Collins: people haven’t been mocking the Secret Service, the guy, that’s what the PS section is about.It’s him going, let, let’s go into it. PS Okay, now that all the sappy stuff is done, what the hell is the secret service doing? Sorry. Gonna rant a bit here and drop the formal tone like I expected. Security cameras at every bend, bugged hotel rooms, armed agents, every 10 feet metal detectors out the wazoo.What I got, who knows, maybe they’re pranking. Me exclamation mark is nothing. No damn security. Not in transport, not in the hotel, not in the event. Sorry. I’m not even gonna keep going. Now, this is, this is his opposition. He is annoyed at how bad the opposition to what he is attempting to do is. By the way, if you’re a bit confused as to what this guy did, he got some guns, got on Amtrak, so on [00:02:00] transportation into dc.Simone Collins: He took public transport into dcMalcolm Collins: Into dc. He walks to the hotel that the event’s going to happen at. He checks in not like a week before or a month before, the day before the event.Simone Collins: Zero. We’re all on a budget here. Look, hard economic times, he can’t justMalcolm Collins: hard economic times. Zero. Security just chills out in his room with the guns while all the security lines are set up outside the event.Simone Collins: Watching office rerunsMalcolm Collins: w walks down to the event when we’re gonna go because his rant isn’t over yet. By the way, people, he is like actually perplexed at the incompetence of secrets that are security. And you know, a lot of leftists have been like, oh, this was staged because. One person said, there’s gonna be some shots fired at this event.You know, like, which was a hilarious, but wasn’tSimone Collins: that Caroline Lovett? I think that was [00:03:00] her,Malcolm Collins: yeah. Yeah, yeah. Well, that’s a normal turn of phrase in English. And if she did know that this was going to happen, that’s the very last thing she would’ve said. Right. Like, come on, people. Or they’re like.Noting that like Kennedy is just sort of standing there looking sort of dazed like people are, like the Kennedy’s the worst survival instincts ever. Bullets start flying. I I really sort of, it was like him and Trump, like not really caring as bullets. Trump’s sort of looking at the person next to him as the bullets are going, who’s horrified?Speaker: first time.Simone Collins: Oh, Malcolm. You know, I would’ve been the dude who just kept eating his dinner.Malcolm Collins: Yeah. It was like the first time look on Trump’s face, I think.Simone Collins: Yes.Malcolm Collins: You know, just like, oh, again. But but no, it’s, it’s, it’s I, I do not think that this was staged. This guy has a long history of being anti-Trump, of wanting to do something like this.I. The thing that we’re gonna talk about when I get done with the manifesto is I wanna talk about how prevalent the conspiracy theories have become on the left. To an [00:04:00] extent that has really sort of transformed the nature of the left almost completely with this assassination attempt versus the others where there were some conspiracy theories, but this one’s like a complete other reality, right?But to keep going here he goes, like, the one thing that I immediately noticed walking into the hotel is a sense of arrogance. I walk in with multiple weapons and not a single person considers a possibility that I could be a threat. The security at the event is all outside, focus on protestors, current arrivals, because apparently no one thought about what happens if someone checks in the day before.Like this level of incompetence is insane, and I very sincerely hope it’s corrected by the time this country gets an actually competent leadership again. This is the assassin people who’s sitting here like,Simone Collins: you know, it’s bad. Oh man.Malcolm Collins: Get your acting gear. Like if I was an Iranian agent instead of an American citizen, [00:05:00] I could have brought a damn Mod Dee in here and no one would’ve noticed A-A-S-H-I-D actually insane.Oh, and if anyone so think goes how this feels, it’s awful. So you can’t really say he recommends doing something like this. Stay in school kids. But yeah. By the ah, mod Juice for people are running is a Browning M two 50 caliber heavy machine gun. So now, now that I’ve read that, do you think it’s kind of weird that no one else is talking about this? So Simone, had you seen this anywhere in your feeds? I,Simone Collins: I, all I knew was that they found some documents in this hotel room. I didn’t, I’ve not seen this anywhere. I’m shocked that we haven’t been told like anything or that I hadn’t seen.It takes a while though for people to start commenting on stuff. So,Malcolm Collins: so I, I want to explain how insane this is that this is the [00:06:00] case, right? This means that if I ran, had wanted to, right what this guy did, he ran past the layer one of security and was caught just outside the doors that would’ve entered the main room, right?I,Simone Collins: I thought he was one floor above. That was what I heard, that he was in the floor above the main ballroom.Malcolm Collins: I had this in my notes right here, so let’s see what they say.Not inside the ballroom. He was stopped in anelli air foyer area just past the checkpoint before reaching the ballroom doors. The incident happened at the terrace level. The main ballroom is large and subterranean one floor below in some descriptions. So if you watch what an estimates place the breach, dozens of feet to a hundred yards from the ballroom entrance.So, you know, he was, he was he wasSimone Collins: basically, he was right by the door. We’ll just say he was right by the door.Malcolm Collins: Right by the door. Yeah. And if you watch the video of it, a lot of guards are like, huh, look, look at that guy running by us. Is basically what you see. I mean obviously I can understand the shock at the [00:07:00] moment or something like that, but the way that security was set up, if Iran had been there, it was 12 guys, like just 12 guys, they could have easily taken out the entire security team.Simone Collins: Yeah. And all they needed to do was just make a reservation at your friendlyMalcolm Collins: hotel. All they needed to do was make a reservation and they could have made a reservation for a lot more than 12 guys. They could have made a reservation for like 50 guys. Yeah. Come down to that floor, just started shooting.And then they are right at where the president and most of the senior administration officials are. And they could have taken them all out.Simone Collins: Wow.Malcolm Collins: This requires a level of stupidity. Like what I mean by this is, okay, just think like an intelligent person for a second here, right? Mm-hmm. So you’re trying to protect the president.You have near unlimited resources for this sort of thing. What you would do typically is have layered checkpoints further than someone can run, right? So you would go to [00:08:00] whatever hallways led to that particular checkpoint that he ran through.Simone Collins: Yeah. Yeah.Malcolm Collins: And you would have a checkpoint, I would expect at least three layers of checkpoints.Simone Collins: Well, and then you would not be able to make it through a door or elevator. Yeah. Like at those checkpoints.Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Yeah. ButSimone Collins: the idea that, that you would like, there would be a bunch, like a, a table, because that’s kind of what he ran by, right? Like the guys were, he ranMalcolm Collins: through the metal detector. That was the thing where he had to start running Okay.Is when he got to the metal detector.Simone Collins: Okay.Malcolm Collins: Which, and they just like let him get in line. Was everyone else. Pack in heat run through a metal detector. So what I mean here is the, the stage of incompetence, especially after what we saw at the one rally where I pointed out was that assassination attempt that the roof that the kid was on, this was Oh,Simone Collins: in Butler, Pennsylvania.Yes.Malcolm Collins: It’s literally if, if you had takenlike an actual idiot to that event and you’re like, okay, it’s a video game, where would you expect an assassin to be?Simone Collins: Right.Malcolm Collins: There’s literally nowhere else [00:09:00] from that position that is like a raised location that would’ve had an aim on the president,Simone Collins: the gently sloped roof that you can easily climb to.Malcolm Collins: Yes. And when, that’s why no one was there. They go, but it was gently sloped like an agent could roll off of it with our current safetySimone Collins: system, it, it’s a falling hazard.Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Do you know how rotund our agents are? You put them on any sort of an incline plane and they just start rolling. I mean, I saw some of those DEI hires from back then.Ah, yeah. But the point is, is like we apparently have not corrected the situation with the Secret Service. And this is a very, very, very big deal. And I’m not going to like, go further than to be like was something Now people could say, well then the Trump administration did it to lure an assassin or something like that.This seems unlikely for. A few reasons. One is I, so like, let’s go over Leftist conspiracy series. Yeah. One is they said that he was a Mossad [00:10:00] agent. Mo Moad basically has Trump in their pockets. Why on earth are they sending an agent to kill Trump? Right.Simone Collins: And also, when Mossad wants you done, you’re done.I, I don’t know how else to put it.Malcolm Collins: Yeah. But, but, well, I mean, the US president presumably would be harder, but apparently not. But even worse than that, who among the White House officials is the individual who most wants to pull outta the war was Iran. Oh yeah. The next in line to be president JD Vance.Simone Collins: Yeah.Malcolm Collins: Killing Trump is literally the stupidest thing Mossad could do even if they did want to do something like that. So it’s clearly not Mossad. Oh my God. But they’ve, they’ve also been like, oh, it’s the Trump administration to use as justification for the new ballroom. Look. One, Trump can build the new ballroom.Whatever the, you guys think it’s gonna happen now because that wing of the White House was demolished, right? They’re not gonna leave a giant thing hole in the White House, are you?Simone Collins: Oh, they’re trying. No, there was some judge that was like, well, you can’t keep working on the foundation. They’re, they’re really trying [00:11:00] to stop it.I, I guess they just want the gaping hole to be there forever. But clearly it’s needed like, as much as, okay, always be closing Trump. I get it. But also he has a very valid point in that the, the security of. President’s right now is, is lax according to the asse, don’t ask me. Asco would be assassin.Malcolm Collins: ASCO would be assassin moldering in his room about like, you know, when we get a competent president again, I, heSimone Collins: really better finish that ballroom.He basically said thats,Malcolm Collins: he basically, well, okay, no, that puts me on this. He was about the ballroom again. Trump hired the assassin and he’s like, make it theSimone Collins: ballroomMalcolm Collins: and make sure you put a little ad for the ballroom at the end. Oh my god. About how incompetent the hotel security is. But no, this ballroom, but no, the, the, the I do not think I wanna get into like the leftist crash because I heard a bunch of people are saying it’s fake and I’m like, that sounds crazy, but [00:12:00] Okay.It’s not that President Trump is above staging an assassination attempt. I do not think that he is. Nor is it that the CIA or FBI couldn’t stage an assassination attempt. It’s that the CIA and FBI are clearly at odds with Trump right now. Like so they’re not Oh, absolutely. They hate each other.Remember during the last cycle, there was the leak of the texts of people was in the CIA saying they would do anything they could to prevent Trump from being elected.Simone Collins: Oh.Malcolm Collins: Like when we talk about this, ISimone Collins: figure those people have been purged. You know,Malcolm Collins: this point I, no, I mean, those individual ones have, but I’ve heard that this, this attitude is so prevalent throughout these institutions that they now do actively, like, in abs to join.Like as a gay Latina I thought I would be welcome at, oh,Simone Collins: I thought that was Biden era stuff.Malcolm Collins: Oh yeah. But like, that shouldn’t be put out by the CIA go. They hired people through that and they haven’t let them [00:13:00] all go. Right. Like it, the, the, the urban monoculture is very good at capturing these types of bureaucracies.Yeah. Okay. Even within like administration officials when I talk about the, the faction of the Republican party that I find quite dangerous, the Deontological faction The. Whatever you wanna call it. The Romanist faction and is quite at odds with our value set. They have a very deep control of the Republican side of the deep state.And they hate Trump as well. Like they’re very, very anti-Trump generally speaking. And it was because, and this is why they’re all like moldering about Trump’s alliance with Israel and bombing of Iran and stuff like that, and being like, you know, MAGA is dead and what they mean, we did a longer episode on this that we haven’t done live because it, the timing didn’t work out.But what they really meant when they said that is CPEC is our ability to control MAGA is dead. Uh mm-hmm. Because he. Put people, at least within his administration, who don’t listen to people like that, who he got through, like Founder’s Fund instead of the traditional Republican captured Republican [00:14:00] institutions, Uhhuh.But okay. Outside of that the, the, these institutions do not like Trump enough to coordinate with him on something like this. And Trump’s own team does not seem competent enough to organize something like this without it leaking. They look, Trump can coordinate with things like the military when they have a common aim like Venezuela or something like that.But coordinating with a military filled with individuals that don’t really like Trump that much on a fake assassination plot, that seems fairly implausible, especially if you’re converting somebody who has like signaled that they were a leftist pretty much their entire life.Simone Collins: Mm-hmm.Malcolm Collins: . I was saying also if I was the administration, and this was the way I was putting this together, they’re like, well, what if the administration purposely has made secret society secret service really bad to sort of like bait an attack on them.It’s like this attack came way too close to killing potentially a lot of [00:15:00] people. Right? Like, if he had gotten through those doors, likeSimone Collins: he had, you’re right. I guess he probably would’ve not just gone straight for,Malcolm Collins: well, heSimone Collins: didn’t, he have a long range.Malcolm Collins: He rifle, he explicit. He, he explicitly said, I don’t remember.I know he had at least a, I think it was a pistol and a rifle, that he wanted to kill his knee administration officials as he could. And he was gonna choose in order of how high profile they were.Simone Collins: Okay. So, oh, oh.Malcolm Collins: So, yeah, no, he was just going to kill, like, I’m, I’m just gonna get as many of ‘em as I can.Simone Collins: Oh, see, I just figured he was just going for, for just the president. No, but he was just gonna, oh,Malcolm Collins: no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. He wanted to turn the place into a shooting gallery. Anyone he could recognize the moment he recognized him, basically.Simone Collins: That’s a little delusional. I mean, one person,Malcolm Collins: whatSimone Collins: did he, I mean, that’s one person.Did he really think, I mean, he, he was a mechanical engineer. He was quite educated. Presumably he was able to think through the fact that there was abundance. And once you get in the room, like. [00:16:00] The president is still surrounded by heavily armed men who would immediately shoot him.Malcolm Collins: Well, I mean, from his perspective, the president and the administration was constantly killing civilians.Is specifically what he was like. The thing that he was really upset about was the taking out the gunboats you know, which, remember the boats that Trump was taking out? The Venezuelan Yeah. Fishing boats.Simone Collins: Yeah.Malcolm Collins: And, and that, you know, from everything I’ve seen about that, it seems pretty open and shut, that they are definitely drug boats, right?Like if they were fishermen as. Eh, the left keeps saying, presumably you could find like their families or something to go on TV and cry about how their fishermen, husbands were killed. And yet this hasn’t happened.Simone Collins: Hey, drug runners have families too, Malcolm sensitive,Malcolm Collins: right? But they seem less likely to go up and on TV about it, right?If, if my husband was actually a fisherman and the United States actually like gunned down [00:17:00] his boat I would try to call like CNN or M-S-N-B-C. And if I were CNN or MSN bbc, I would take that call in a hot second, right? Like, it seems completely implausible to me that these people aren’t drug runners.Given that, i, I love, people are gonna like, the, the leftists always do this. They’re like, you don’t understand Malcolm. People in Latin America are retarded and don’t know how to use phones and don’t know how to use technology. And I’m like, sorry. As somebody who lived like halftime,Simone Collins: oh, just like black voters couldn’t possibly bring an ID to vote.Malcolm Collins: Yeah.Simone Collins: They don’t know how to get an id.Malcolm Collins: Latin Americans are very technologically competent. I thinkSimone Collins: well often, they’re often more tech forward than many Americans.Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Yeah. I I think what’s a, the cell phone presentation is like,Simone Collins: Venezuelan’s out of necessity adopted crypto way before Americans out.Malcolm Collins: Oh, yeah, yeah. They’re crypto stuff in Peru is fantastic. Right.Simone Collins: They’re not even crypto bros. They’re just like, they were born in the crypto. Like, it’s not even a thing. They’re just like, obviously my, I’m gonna pay you in like [00:18:00] USDC.Malcolm Collins: I, I, I, I love this leftist perspective of like, Latin Americans as like half human, half animal, incapable.I think anSimone Collins: culture, the progressive left treats pretty much any of its favored or protected groups like that. Like, well, obviously, you know, they’re, they’re very dumb.Malcolm Collins: Pat, pat on the head, like the end of that song. Wonderful country, beautiful people.Simone Collins: Yes, exactlyMalcolm Collins: what’s talking about Peruvians. You know, just, yeah.Speaker 2: I was in Africa in Tasna I saw this woman, Malaria And she looked at me with this vacant stare As if to say, despite our differences, you and reminds me of this time, oh my god. Yeah. Yeah. I was in South America. In Prague. Prague. No. Pura [00:19:00] darling, Pura. Peru. Oh yeah, Pura, Pura, yeah.Wonderful country, you know, 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.Simone Collins: Yeah, I mean, there’s very little inherent respect for their, you know, ability to,Malcolm Collins: and, and I love the conservative, like, Hey, Latin Americans are pretty smart. They can figure this stuff out if somebody randomly murdered their family. Like, come on man. Like, but anyway, completely implausible. But that’s, you know, so his perspective is, well, I’ve gotta do anything because this government represents me and they’re out there killing random civilians left and right.You know, he’s in a complete information bubble. But what I think this attack has shown is how much of the left is in a complete [00:20:00] information bubble. Mm-hmm. Specifically the number of people who said like, this was obviously staged. One, it just seems completely implausible to me that this was staged.But two, in addition to just, just, I’m, I’m, I’m just looking at like motivations of the people who could have staged it. The most likely person to have staged it. If, if somebody could have staged it, motive means an opportunity would’ve been Putin. But nobody wants to admit that he’s actually the person.Let,Simone Collins: let wait, just walk me through the, I guess, dumb leftist take on this is, this is staged, so this guy, the, the Secret Service and, and Trump and this guy could have coordinated. All in an attempt to both boost polling numbers, which are low for Trump right now, leading into the midterms because this, well, they’re actually not particularly lowMalcolm Collins: for se, for a second term president’s first cycle leading intoSimone Collins: midterm.I know they’re not, but I mean, maybe he wants to look good to go into the midterms or something and they’re not great. So that, andMalcolm Collins: actually they’ve gone up [00:21:00] since the beginning of the war in Iran. They’re, they’re like, sellSimone Collins: theMalcolm Collins: ballrooms. Simone. Actually, this is, sorry, you keep repeating something that’s factually wrong, but a lot of leftists keeps saying, yeah.Speaker 3: So for context, this to what I’m talking about here, , Trump’s second term approval has been hanging around 44% versus 40 to 41% during this time in his first term, which is insane to be more popular in your second term. . If you look at recent presidential numbers, Obama in his second term was around 41%, so lower than Trump, Bush, 38% at comparable moments.Speaker 4: For more context. Right now, the Democratic Party Unfavorability rating is at historic highs, 64% versus 33.9% see them favorably. If you look at even Obama, who was historically popular in his second term, the Republican said a 34% favorability rating, so higher than the Democrats right now. .Malcolm Collins: Trump’s polling numbers have gone up since the beginning of the war in Iran. And they are [00:22:00] unusually good for a president at this part in the presidential cycle. The left wants to keep like freaking out and moldering about how bad the numbers are, but when you compare his numbers to democratic favorability right now they’re unusually good.NotSimone Collins: unusual. That’s stupid. They should be saying that instead of that his numbers are low because yes, I’m just parroting what leftists are saying. But two. The best way to drive turnout is to be like, we seriously need to fight back. They’re beginning to win. And if we don’t take this seriously, we’ll lose big time.And they’re acting like it’s gonna be a bloodbath in the midterms, and it’s a, it’s a given. So that seems like a really stupid tactic. But anyway, that’s a narrative and he’s trying to sell his ballroom. So in theory he coordinates with this guy and with the Secret Service, and I mean, keep in mind, this guy did not get killed.This guy did not get hurt. And he doesn’t have that much of an online footprint. And the Secret Service also. Nobody got hurt. One guy was shot at, but in a [00:23:00] very, very good bulletproof vest. So he’s fine.Malcolm Collins: So let, let’s talk about this. He does have a long and, and, but, but not like super extensive online footprint.He does have an online footprint. He has been a leftist activist for a long time. Two. The evidence because I decided to go to an AI and see what’s the, like full leftist argument as to why this was set up how a lone gunman was a manifesto got as far as he did as a hotel guest. I think that this is more an indictment that somebody was in the Secret Service is trying to get Trump killed than that Trump would allow that because Trump could have actually gotten killed, right?Trump’s calm demeanor and quick evacuation of others. The evacuation actually seemed fairly slow given the severity of the situation. Yeah. And Trump’s calm demeanor, bro. This is like his force assassination attempt at this point. At this point, the, the pirate to the Caribbean meme of first time when he’s looking to the person next to him kind of makes sense.In addition, when there has been an assassination against Trump in the past, he [00:24:00] has not reacted with panic. I mean, famously, the after he got his ear partially fight, fight, blown off the fight, fight, fight thing if anything you think that he would if this was preplanned, do some sort of a staged fight, fight, fight or something like that, like that looks more preplanned than this.Like at least milk it if you’re gonna preplan it, right?Simone Collins: Yeah.Malcolm Collins: Next pre. Pre-event comets, specifically here, Caroline Levitt’s phrasing, you would never do phrase it like that if you knew this was gonna happen and you were trying to hide it. Yeah. And then rapid pivot to political messaging instead of pure shock or grief.What, what time? This is the forced assassination attempt. Do you know like what republicans, like the world we’re living in right now, you Democrats haven’t had this happen. And the thing that all the Republicans keep mentioning is the Democrats who are like, nobody would actually attempt to assassinate the president or engineer for his assassination to be easy as I’m suggesting they might have done at the same time.In the next phrase they’ll say, and someone should assassinate the [00:25:00] president. Right? Like,Simone Collins: well that’s because democratic presidents are really part of a bureaucratic deep state coalition. If you were to kill any president recently in, in sort of democratic. Like, if you were to kill Biden, it would matter, right?Because he was being puppeted by a series of people and it would’ve been basically meaningless.Malcolm Collins: No, no, no, no, no. The, the levels of calls to violent from the left don’t mirror anything that the right did, even when they believe that the election was unfairly stolen against Biden. I, I have regularly on talk shows, like after this one.It was on I can’t remember. One of the only remaining talk shows where the guy was making a standup routine about how you know. Oh, or, or what do we call Trump now, but a target,Our first lady, Melania, is here. Look at so beautiful Mrs. Trump. You have a glow, like an expectant widow, you know?Malcolm Collins: right? Like, you know,Simone Collins: oh good Lord,Malcolm Collins: we’re seeing [00:26:00] destiny make a joke about he wants to see people stop, quote unquote trying to kill the president.You know, mainstream figures on the left are saying like, this is good. This should happen. Why do they keep failing? And it has become mainstream on the left to say that this is fake. Mm-hmm. But what’s really interesting to me is what’s the second part of this? Which is in saying that it’s fake, they often attempt to say, and we know that the two other assassination attempts.Actually been four other assassination attempts because they’re forgetting about the two Iranian attempts that were foiled earlier in their pipeline before somebody actually got to shooting. But the, the, oh no, there was the other one on the, the lawn. Remember when the, he was at the golf course and there was, yeah, soSimone Collins: there was the, the, the golf course one Butler, Pennsylvania, and then this one.Malcolm Collins: Oh yeah, four. Four. BecauseSimone Collins: I guess an IranianMalcolm Collins: golf course in Butler, Pennsylvania were not the two Iranian attempts.Simone Collins: Oh, okay. Oh,Malcolm Collins: so, so the, those,Simone Collins: that’s five. That’s [00:27:00] five total.Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Okay. So anyway so I think we’re trying to figure out how many assassinated, I don’t remember any on Biden, by the way. I don’t remember any on Obama.I don’t remember any on Clinton. I, I think we need to be honest here that there is a problem in terms of calls to violence on the left. And yet recently as McGold did a clip on this and I was mortified a, a guy was being questioned by the FBI for in cell posting, you know, saying that like, he wanted violence against women.Where you regularly see women on Twitter posting, they want violence against men. You know, like kill all men and stuff like that is practically a slogan on the left. It’s like you have to say something extreme and Right. Is to have anyone investigate you. ‘cause these organizations are so deeply institutionally captured.Mm-hmm. And that’s why I think if I was Trump. One of the next things I might do is just shut down and reform the Secret Service, or shut down and reform C-I-A-F-B-I. You know, let me tell you what the right’s gonna be. Pretty happy if you do that. Our army is doing a pretty good job right [00:28:00] now. Our Marines, our Navy, our Air Force, let’s split something out of them to become a new secret service arm, a new CIA arm.And just admit that the institutional NSA as well, that these organizations are corrupt beyond redemption at this point, because they had been operating outside of the public light. And like Trump should have known this when people was in those organizations, said that they were gonna try to prevent him from being elected, right?Like, that should have been the sign of, oh, this is what we’re seeing on the surface of the iceberg. How deep did the iceberg go? But my point here being is they keep saying that these previous attempts were all right. Wing advocates that Butler was a rightwing advocate, that Tyler was a right wing advocate.And like, if you have looked into these to any extent at this point, you now know they were both far leftist. You know, one was literally deeply dating a trans person, which is not something a right-wing advocate is often going to do. Right. And wrote about why he wanted to do this, which again to his [00:29:00] trans partner.And the other one people have accused him of being furry. He does not appear to have actually been a furry, but he does appear to have been a gooner. And he does appear to have been a, a real weirdo and far leftist who the FBI appeared to them to cover up and like, this is what I’m talking about, like FBI in the Secret Service, when they said like, we don’t have a lot of information on this guy.This guy’s a ghost online. And literally like random people are liter able to find his dvn art accounts and give them to Alex Jones and or who did they give those to? This was. Tucker Carlson, I think, broke this one.Simone Collins: He did? OhMalcolm Collins: yeah. Back when people still trusted Tucker Carlson to back before Mossad poison him.By the way, if you don’t know, our conspiracy theory drop on this, I, I actually might do a whole video on the plausibility of our Mossad poisoning theory. So it goes like this, if you haven’t heard it, every time a mainstream figure begins to question Israel funding Israel, anything like that within like two to three years, they start going completely off the reservation and making random insane [00:30:00] takes.Like we’ve seen from Nick Fuentes against the IRN War, you know, wanting the United States to lose Tucker Carlson. You know, you could see our whole video on the crazy stuff. He said Candace Owens would completely n her bananas when she used to be really cogent and interesting. And like when I look at these three figures, the pattern of Zahi and these three figures, like, I’m gonna be honest, this isn’t like a joke conspiracy theory in my brain anymore.They seem to be saying stuff that is so off the reservation. It like breaks plausibility for me. I’m like because like even Nick Fuentes, somebody. Recently was like, whoa. And I mentioned this last time episode. They’re like, well, as Nick Gold said that he agrees with Nick Fuentes on 99% of things.Like, what do you think of that? And I was like, yeah, there was definitely a time when I felt that way too, right? Like Nick Fuentes didn’t used to be this crazy. He’s definitely had a some form of psychotic break or something. I think it’s really been made apparent since the beginning of the Iran War in his very anti-America stance that he’s now taking.Mm-hmm. In a sense it’s like [00:31:00] really clearly against American long-term interests. And or like the pro Venezuela, like Tucker comments and stuff like that. Like, oh, there are good ally in the region. ‘cause they also kill gay people. Like any conservative cares about that anymore like I was, I’ve, I’m like, those aren’t like normal saying thing, but to see our individual videos on that.But I guess, I guess the point I’m making here is I originally threw that conspiracy theory out as a joke, but the more I think about it, oh no, is it happening to me? The more I’m like. But they do have the technology for it, and they probably could easily gain access. Oh, no. And it would be a coherent strategy to discredit people who think that we should stop giving Israel tons of money every year.And it would definitely, probably be worse, the cost benefit trade off in terms of the amount of money. I mean, it’s, it’s not a ton of money as we pointed out in previous videos. It’s like about the amount we give to like Egypt and Jordan combined. Right? Like, and you don’t hear people complaining about that, but it still would be like financially beneficial to keep it up.I mean, it’s [00:32:00] weird that we’re giving it to a first world country, but like before we question that, we should probably be questioning the astronomically more that we give to nato.Like Trump’s not insane to say we should think about pulling out a nato, but that’s for set video.Simone Collins: Yeah.Malcolm Collins: Anyway thoughts, Simone?Simone Collins: I, I, I wanna see how this unfolds with time. Like, I wanna see how the trial goes. I, I wanna see if this just becomes something that we just collectively forget. That’s my first expectation, honestly, is just that this is gonna blow over and people are gonna forget about it. And is, this is just the normal now and no one’s going to treat this like a big deal, even though it is.So I’m a little worried that that’s what it is. But it, it is, it is baffling how on, on the one hand, people are talking about Palantir having all this really. Impressive tech and ability [00:33:00] to, can we replace the CIAMalcolm Collins: and NSA with Palantir?Simone Collins: I mean, well, right. Like, it’s just how, how can that be a thing?And yet there are people who just get extremely close to the president and the entire leading administration with multiple guns and knives and plans to take them out. It, it seems implausible to me.It’s just sad too though that like a society is broken down enough where this is just normative.Whereas in the past, you know, what was it? It was Andrew Jackson basically threw a rager at the White House after he won. Right? Like people, I think he jumped out a window to get away from everyone. Eventually they just trashed the place. He had that giant wheel of cheese. Yeah, very. HewasMalcolm Collins: the first president from the backwoods cultural group, which is our cultural group.Very backwood thing to do. Like, let’s throw a rager at the White House andSimone Collins: jump on. We’re probably not getting all the details right, but like people would just show up. Like it was, it was a house. And [00:34:00] it was less secure than most of the houses now with like their ring cams and everything else.Malcolm Collins: Well, you know, maybe be, maybe, maybe we as a country were, we were not, and I, I point out to people ‘cause people get this really wrong.We were not particularly more. Culturally homogenous than we were now. The Quaker backwoods cavalier and Puritan cultural groups that existed in the 13 colonies were dramatically more different from each other than, for example, American culture is from Latin American culture. But what was the case is that those cultural groups we’re all trustworthy to each other.Mm-hmm. Like for example, if we land in like a bunch of Japanese immigrants, I’m not worried about them shooting me on the street or something like that. Like they may be culturally different from me but they are from a culture that I trust. Whereas we are letting in people from cultures that I do not trust.And I think that it’s important to recognize that as an American, like not every outsider, doesn’t work within the multicultural American system, but [00:35:00] some outside cultures do not work within the multicultural American system. And when we pretend that everyone doesn’t, then we just look sort of crazy, right?Like, obviously there are groups that can perfectly well you know, integrated leaflet, for example is, is ethnically Japanese and has perfectly integrated into American culture. From everything I’ve seen, like I I I, I do not think that we benefit from just kicking out everyone who’s not one of the original cultures.But we need to be aware that like we have materially changed things by letting in groups that are, you know, that create these sort of externalities. I mean, have created this sort of hive the, the urban monoculture also didn’t exist, and the urban monoculture seems to be able to completely cook people’s brains.The thing that I was trying to. Like synthesize that has changed between this and other assassination attempts Is everybody saying really untrue stuff? But like at a really high level now, like that all the previous assassination attempts were . Right. [00:36:00] Is is just so on. Its face untrue.And yet I see this a ubiquitous opinion on Reddit. I see it as ubiquitous opinion on X. Even within some like. Griper circles like the infiltrated parts of like the right wing which I think more shows that these are bad actors. And I think what this shows is on the left, in the groups that have allied themselves with the urban monoculture, whether it’s the groupers or the far leftists there is no longer an interest in even being adjacent to truth.Like, like it’s no longer even like I want to hedge, so like a reasonable person isn’t gonna call me out. There’s now almost this sort of cachet with like blatantly being unaware of reality. And I think that, or, or signaling that you’re unaware of reality almost to a tip to manifest this alternate world framework.And there is no call out, no internal, like, Hey, you make us look stupid when you say things like every other assassin was right wing. Or all of the attempts were [00:37:00] obviously staged. Yeah. That, that, that is, is a change that I’m noticing, and I think it’s one where we need to understand that our enemy and the force that we are collectively fighting against has transformed into something holistically more nefarious than it was in the past.Simone Collins: Hmm. Yeah. It’s, it’s dark. I, I, I, I don’t,Malcolm Collins: I,Simone Collins: I don’t, I guess maybe it was a short term odd period where things were cohesive and people trusted each other, and that this idea of a cohesive, high-trust society was just never gonna last. Though it still exists in places like Japan. I just, it’s, it’s kind of dark to think that that’s how things used to be, but we don’t, we don’t get to see that.Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Well, it’s, it is not in Japan anymore. They let in a bunch of immigrants and Japanese people are freaking out. But I think in, in Japan they’re a bit more ruthless in how they ultimately deal with things like this. [00:38:00] So, you know, I, I don’t know if I’d wanna be one of those immigrants in a generation or so because yeah, Japan has a history.Okay. And they, they all haveSimone Collins: history.Malcolm Collins: They, they, no, no, no, no. They have a history. But like, they relate to it differently. You go to Germany and you’re like, oh, what do you think about like, the atrocity in the war? And they will bend over backwards to be like, oh, it’s so horrible. I can’t believe we did that.What, what nightmares. And you go to Japan and you go like, what are you think? And they go, well, first of all, that was a war of aggression by the United States against Japan. That’s the way it’s taught in the Japanese school system. And, they, they, and if you’re like, how could they possibly teach it that way if they bombed Pearl Harbor first?And they’ll say, well, the United States was Blockading Japan. Which put them in an existential situation that forced them to bomb Pearl Harbor. And they then say, and all that medical experimentation some of our groups did, and all the grapes they did, I mean, that was normal for war. And then, yeah, we still think about it.I mean, I’ve seen the anime gate. They did, they, they plan when they go [00:39:00] conquer some of these countries to pick up a fu Wi Fus along the way.That’s still very part of Japanese culture. They may not frame it as grape, but you know. GA game. We, we don’t have there is no equivalent us movie I’m aware of where we go to war and whenever we kill somebody, we pick up their wives in our harem.Like that is a, that is a very unique, I I am, no, I’m like, genuinely. Even Vietnam War where like prostitution and marrying American soldiers was, was, was somewhat common. Mm-hmm. I’m not aware of that many wars where like somebody goes out war movies in the US that are very like gung-ho, like all happy and then end up with a big harem coming back to the United States.But that’s the plot of Gate, by the way, way. Mind you wait. Are you unfamiliar with this anime? Ha hasn’t even been criticized by the way. No one in Japan has been like, it’s a bad thing that gate, especially given our history in wars, frames war this way.Simone Collins: God, [00:40:00] well, back on the topic of the correspondence, dinner shooting, you know, the, the friend from college that I mentioned and I was like, oh, she was probably there.She was at, she was not just there, but I just found video she took when she was there. ‘cause she was there, she was at the head table. And there’s video of just like, what’s really interesting and I sent you a link. You can look at the video that she took. Okay. What’s really weird is that it’s super clear.People don’t really know how to respond. Like a lot of people are crouched and acting panicked, whereas other people are just kind of like sitting there and chatting. And isMalcolm Collins: she, wait, is, are we allowed to post this in the video?,Speaker 5: Where’s it at?Get out. Get out. Get [00:41:00] out.Simone Collins: It’s just super clear that she, people just don’t know how to act. And like, there’s, there’s one guy with fancy go, well, a couple guys with fancy goggles and like big guns pointing, and like a lot of people with cool military equipment running around.But people are very clearly just absolutely clueless as to what to do. I, I really think this is in, in, in a post. Societal co a societal cohesion phase of America that it just makes so much more sense to have an uber secure reinforced ballroom for parties.Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Also, keep in mind when I talk about the Iranian Strat that they could have used, another one they could have used is just bring in a bunch of bomb material and just put it like a few floors above or below this.Simone Collins: Yeah. ‘cause I’m looking at this room and I’m looking at all these people here, and I’m just thinking like this, this really does look very not secure. At all. At all. I’m seeing all these doors. I’m seeing [00:42:00] some, some people kind of maybe getting rushed out like this. This could have been a, I, I’d likeMalcolm Collins: to say to this leftist assassin, do you now see how incompetent government bureaucratic structures can be and why we don’t want to give them more power?Simone Collins: This, this is why we need the Trump administration.Malcolm Collins: This is why we need Doge. This is why we need the Trump administration anyway. Love you, Simone.Simone Collins: Also like the, the, the glasses and dinnerware there. Just look like, you know, bad hotel conference, dinnerware and you know, Trump would make it fancy. He wouldn’t do that.He wouldn’t do them dirty like that.Malcolm Collins: Be,Simone Collins: I’d be nice. I loveMalcolm Collins: rfs. Like tweet after this is like, I’m really hungry. Like him just looking around sad that he’s not getting hisSimone Collins: meal. That’s why that one dude just kept eating that. I, I’m, I think a lot of people just really identify with that guy, that they would be that person, like look.They didn’t, whoever’s coming didn’t come for me. I’m just gonna finish my dinner. That’s like Asman Gold. When he talked about this was talking about like the two instances in which he had had a gun pulled on him or something, or a gun was in his, [00:43:00] like in the area and someone had shown up to, I think Emory’s dream or something, or I can’t remember exactly what it was, but he just like walked out and just walked away.Passed the guy with the gun, but just decided to stay like six feet away and out of his aggro zone as he put it, I’m like, yeah,Malcolm Collins: his aggro zone.Simone Collins: Just like just, I just fed up with this. Like I’m not, I’m just not gonna participate in this to just walked past him and away from the situation and yeah, that was the guy eating the food.Just like, look, just let me eat my food. I can super relate.Malcolm Collins: Well, I love you es Simone. Me too. And crazy World out there. Somebody died just in front of our house last night or the night?Simone Collins: Last night.Malcolm Collins: Last night, yeah. A car crash and we’re on a busy road.Simone Collins: Yeah.Malcolm Collins: People need to, so, you know, you could die at any moment.Make the most of your life. People.Simone Collins: Yeah. Guys, please, please be careful out there. Okay. Love you Malcolm.Malcolm Collins: And, and you’ve made the most of my life, Simone, so thank you for that. If I don’t, let’s not. And I would say that I was satisfied with my life. It was because of Simone.Simone Collins: Okay. Don’t, don’t say [00:44:00] that because let’s be very clear someone mentioned, commented this on, on the video you ran today.We are not depressed.Malcolm Collins: Yeah. We are not depressed. I’m not questioning things about Israel.Simone Collins: So yeah. Okay. We’ll just end with that. Bye.Malcolm Collins: Bye. any fun in news today? Hopefully the episode didn’t cause too much of a riot.Simone Collins: No, no. Nobody disagreed with it. Aside from people being like, it’s not going to work. So that’s so, oh,Malcolm Collins: micro post solution.Simone Collins: Yeah, that, like, they would never do that. I mean, some people rightfully pointed out, and I think this wasmy whole setup, went weird. Some people pointed out that the way that Judaism worked before was there were all these, you know, isolated [00:45:00] Jewish communities and being. Rejected from one would be really meaningful. It was like being thrown out of your village, like your livelihood, your family, your support network.All of it was gone. NowMalcolm Collins: there really isn’t that muchSimone Collins: pain experienced by anyone who runs against it. Like even if, even in the past when that practice was common and people weren’t thrown out for bad behavior, it was too easy because Jewish communities were so decentralized for bad actors to just leave one and show up at another and not necessarily face super negative repercussions from rejection.This is not to say that this,Malcolm Collins: This is why Jews used to have such a negative stigma against Bal Shim because that’s what they often did, is they would move between communities when they were kicked out of one.Simone Collins: I think that’s the word that someone used, actually. Yes.Malcolm Collins: And, and yeah, no, actually very fascinating that you [00:46:00] do see a lot of these institutions really begin to permanently die off with the mul from top.And as I’ve said like historically, people know my stance on this. I think he’s like the negative inflection point in Jewish history.Simone Collins: Wow.Malcolm Collins: Where things really begin to fall apart. But you can go to our other writings on that. I don’t wanna get too into it. But yeah, I, I think you have a point There is this, this distrust.So many things that Jewish communities used to have that they really transformed over the ages. But I, I think that there are still some interdenominational religious rabbinic councils mm-hmm. Within Judaism for deciding on specific rules like what a, what, what’s, like the Jewish take on abortion or something like that.Like right now, Uhhuh. And I think one of these councils could establish a secondary council that focuses on secular matters for the protection of the wider Jewish community, right. Even to explicitly call out some sub sex or something like that. You know, [00:47:00] like this group is doing x in a bad way, so that there would be some inter Judaism shame for action that leads to negative externalities on sort of reputation for a sect even, or an individual.And it, it, it’s, it’s, the reason I mentioned the history of it is because at least you would’ve a historical reason for setting something like that up.Simone Collins: Yeah. Another thing that people pointed out was my utter ignorance about the Anti-Defamation League. I didn’t, I didn’t know about its founding story.I didn’t know why it was created and by whom. I thought it was just to. Be against defamation. I didn’t, I didn’t think about it. I also, like, I figured that if there was some group that was just about like protecting a single group’s reputation, it might be the, like protect the Jewish reputation league.Malcolm Collins: I, I’d also note that there is I saw in the [00:48:00] comments something that it first seemed very reasonable to me and then I thought about it more and I was like, actually that doesn’t really work as a analogy because I was pointing out that almost no group seems to protect their bad actors. Like the Christians don’t like, no, no group of Christians I’m aware of.Simone Collins: It was an issue with trans. We talked about that more prominently.Malcolm Collins: Well, but yeah, the trans community does where, you know, you get actual like sex PEs and people will defend them.Simone Collins: Yeah.Malcolm Collins: But you don’t, you don’t get this with most ethnic groups. So one exampleSimone Collins: actually, someone pointed out in the comments that this was actually a really big thing that happened with the black community and with hip hop music that a lot of, a lot of people in, in the early ages of hip hop were like, this is bad. We don’t like this as an influence. And that actually, apparently, according to this person, a lot of even famous hip hop artists now, were like, yeah, I regret promoting certain things. Yeah. And or this lifestyle also. I was reading that comment while listening to this four hour takedown of Tyler Perry by this one guy, and he was talking about, I think, how did he word it?Small C conservative black [00:49:00] men especially. And how like, they’re not conservative like Republicans, they’re conservatives, like, pull your pants up, like dress neatly, et cetera.Malcolm Collins: Okay. What, who’s Tyler Perry?Simone Collins: Tyler, he’s like a prolific director and actor and writer.Malcolm Collins: Is he black?Simone Collins: He’s the one, yeah, he’s black.He’s the one who like makes all those, those comedies where he dresses. Oh, I’m so sorry. Dresses like a fat woman. Like madina.Malcolm Collins: Anyway, what, what was the point of your comment onSimone Collins: this? The point was the black there’s, there’s a really established history of black Americans being like, we need to show.Our best example and actually, actually attacking bad, sorry, bad actors within their community and being like,Malcolm Collins: yeah. The, the other, but the, the one community I’m aware of that does actively do this, other than trans and Jews are Romani Romani are famous for doing this protecting bad actors.And obviously they’ve earned you know, an equal stigma to Jewish people, right? Like theySimone Collins: were, oh, so, oh, protecting, not attacking, but protecting,Malcolm Collins: protecting, bad act known bad actors within their community that victimize outsiders. The, the one [00:50:00] counter example that somebody. Mentioned, and it doesn’t work really.And I’ll explain why it doesn’t work. Is there like, well, like conservatives do this, right? Like political parties do this, like the, the, the, the, the conservative movement will sometimes protect people when they’re acting like bad actors. This would be an example like Donald Trump doing things like, it could be seen as like scams or like sexually predatory.This is actually a very different phenomenon. This is when a group protects the bad actions of the group’s institutional leadership. And you actually see this across, almost. Every group. So a good example would be like Mormons. I’m not aware of any examples of Mormons protecting bad actors who were low level people, but they absolutely went to bat for Joseph Smith when he was obviously a bad actor.They absolutely went to bat for Brigham Young when he did things that were obviously bad actor things. You, you see this in the Catholic community for example, when there were institutional higher ups who were griping people they institutionally [00:51:00] went to bat to cover it up. People can say, whoa, why do, why do institutions so often protect higher up bad actors rather than regular bad actors?And it’s because they lose institutional power and momentum if they allow their higher ups to be swept out of power. So if you demand moral purity from your higher ups and you don’t. Put some effort into protecting them. Like imagine if, like we, as a conservative movement wiped out every leader as soon as a scandal was found on them, right?Like you wouldn’t be able to build up a movement really easily or stay in power very easily. And no, you see this in Jewish history as well. A lot of the Jewish leaders during the periods when Jews did punish bad actors like if you go back to, you know, some of the leaders from, from biblical period were demonstrably bad actors.You know, be they, you know, king David for example, right? And I, I don’t think that that’s, that’s not what I’m talking about. I’m not talking about Jews ignoring when their kings did bad things. Everybody ignores when their kings [00:52:00] do bad things. I’m talking about Jews going to help people who are, you know, regular members or low level communities who have been caught doing something bad.That’s actually incredibly unique to the only three communities I’m aware of that do it are Jews, romanis and trance.Simone Collins: Yeah. And that’s like the case that people pointed out with the, the sort of founding case of the Anti-Defamation League in 1913 was the case of this man who allegedly. Attacked sext, a female worker, I think and, and then killed her.And then they wasMalcolm Collins: about to try to save himSimone Collins: was was lynched by a mob. So, and, and then I think there’s some following,Malcolm Collins: right?Simone Collins: Legal case. And I think he had tried, sorry, I like read this really quickly while trying to respond to comments. He had tried to blame it on a black man. Like he was, wasn’t me, it was this black dude.And thenMalcolm Collins: that’s extra bad. That’s extraSimone Collins: bad. Well, no, I know. The ADL was like,I think founded as part of some legal case to because the court [00:53:00] case surrounding it I think drew a lot of like antisemitic hate, or sorry, just, sorry. That’s a. Misnomer it, it drew a lot of antisemitism or, or fomented.A lot of it. I feel like the ADL’s actions around it probably would make that worse, would make the antisemitism worse. Trying to hear this man’s name instead of just being like, dude, I mean, un unless they were insistent that he was innocent. But even then it’s like probably like, let’s just let this go.This doesn’t seem, you know, whatever. But anyway, like whether or not he was innocent that that is apparently the founding of the a DL, like their first big case. And I had no idea and I was like, oh my God. And that’s a really good example of like, this wasn’t a leader as far as we know, you know, it was just a factory supervisor.Speaker 6: So for context, , historians would disagree with Simone here. Obviously, historians may have some bias that the black guy was the actual rapist in this situation. However, the fact that as racist [00:54:00] as that region was during that period that the mob said, no, no, no, it wasn’t the black guy, it was this other guy. It does make me doubt that a little bit, but , yeah.Simone Collins: So to your point, yeah, this is people who were like, you gotta look into circumcision and how the practice was brought to the United States and how one man tried to expose it and stop it and then was. Was effectively like cast away and thrown out. So it can be done but it was only done by someone questioning the practice of circumcision as practiced in the us.So I kind of wanna look into that because it’s one of those hot button issues among new parents as, as you know, base campers who are having kids who, you know, may or may not be circumcised have, have written to us and been like, Hey, why don’t we talk about this?Malcolm Collins: I mean, I’m very against banning super circumcision, by the way.It is, you, you cannot be Jewish without being circumcised. The, the Bible is incredibly clear on this. It’s, it’s like not even a vague thing. It’s not [00:55:00] something where there’s multiple interpretations.Simone Collins: Yeah. What’s questionable is when and how it happens, right?Malcolm Collins: No, it’s supposed to be done to infants.Simone Collins: It is,Malcolm Collins: yeah. Yeah. The case was Moses makes that incredibly clear. When, it’s, I don’t want to go into the whole story, but, you know, it was Moses’s kid and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Almost killed on the spot for not circumcising. V very bad to not circumcise. We, we actually go over it in our, in our track, the the question that breaks Judaism.So it’s, it’s it’s something that we have gone over andSimone Collins: I know. I’m so sorry. Oh my God.Malcolm Collins: But yeah, that’s a, a, a fun one. But yeah, that was a very interesting episode to film. And do All right, I’ll get started here.Speaker 7: I can pull. Yeah, you’re very strong. Octavian.Speaker 8: Very strong.[00:56:00]Good job.All right, is Daddy. Hello and Professor River. Thank you. Good teamwork. Thank you, Titan. Professor, say whoa. There you go. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit basedcamppodcast.substack.com/subscribe

In this spicy Based Camp episode, Malcolm and Simone Collins tackle a sensitive but urgent topic: why Jews must stop defending bad actors within their communities — and why failing to do so is fueling rising antisemitism in America.With 24% of young Americans now endorsing antisemitic tropes (vs. just 5% of those in their 80s), the Collinses examine welfare fraud in Orthodox Jewish communities, the ADL’s deplatforming of critics like Tyler Olivier, the Chabad-linked push to pardon a $33M healthcare fraudster whose actions killed elderly patients, and the collapse of historic Jewish self-policing institutions (kehillot and beit din) that once prevented exactly this problem.They argue that protecting bad actors creates massive negative externalities, damages alliances with the new right, and threatens the long-term survival of Jewish communities — especially as ultra-Orthodox populations grow rapidly. A blunt, data-driven conversation about group accountability, cultural self-preservation, and why every community (Jewish, Somali, or otherwise) must police its worst members.Episode TranscriptMalcolm Collins: [00:00:00] Hello Simone. Today is going to be a spicy conversation and it’s going to piss off a lot of people, but it is one that needs to be had right now in America. We, we mentioned this on another episode, but Jews need to be paying attention to this.24% of young people in America today endorse anti-Jewish tropes, right? Like are what you would be seen as antisemitic. Oh, oh, no. If you go to people in the, their eighties, it’s around 5%. Oh. So it’s one in four versus one in 20. This is a massive generational change.Simone Collins: Wow.Malcolm Collins: And I would point out here that the sentiment against Jews among use higher than it is against groups like blacks in the United States.Now where it is 17% have anti-black resentment in the United States where it’s 24% anti-Jewish resentment.Simone Collins: That’s so [00:01:00] funny because I grew up on like seventies, eighties, and nineties content that pretty heavily made fun of Jews. Like, I’m thinking about Mel Brooks Films, the Princess Bride all these shows that would have like a ton of like, seenMalcolm Collins: it as safe because nobody actually, when I used to, ‘causeSimone Collins: no one believed it.No oneMalcolm Collins: edgy fake humor, like racist humor. I would make racist jokes about Inuits. That was like the core commun Eskimos, you know, they, you know, make OhSimone Collins: right.Malcolm Collins: Make, make fun of their fake kisses. They don’t even know how to love, you know, like, everybody thinks Eskimo jokes are funny because nobody is aware of Eskimo discrimination.At least if you’re in the United States, like it’s not something that you are around or you see. So it comes across as funny. Sure. The idea of Jews being actually discriminated against in the eighties and the nineties was actually comical. It, it was,Simone Collins: right. So we, we, we could make fun of them because we knew that they were [00:02:00] fine and they weren’t.Doing anythingMalcolm Collins: sauce. It was so comical that when Jewish directors and producers were making the Star Wars prequels, they literally made this characterSimone Collins: Oh God, yes. No,Speaker 14: My trick don’t work on, I make only money.Simone Collins: andMalcolm Collins: thought nothing of it. Yes. Alright. They didn’t think this could one day be a problem for our community. And the, the problem, like the thing that makes this entire conversation so dangerous for the Jewish community long term, like when I’m projecting what happens long term with JudaismSimone Collins: mm-hmm.Malcolm Collins: Is that somebody comes out there and says, Hey it looks like antisemitism is exploding right now. And then the obvious next question is, is why. Right? Yeah.Simone Collins: Yes.Malcolm Collins: And then the obvious next question is. Okay. Is it entirely due to some sort of external social contagion that has nothing to do with Jewish communities?Simone Collins: Which could be possible, orMalcolm Collins: it [00:03:00] could be possible, but that’s actually much worse for Jewish communities, if that’s true, because it’s much harder to change the behavior of people other than yourself, than inSimone Collins: yourself.Yeah, it’s preferable. And I, I’m, I’m giving the example because after I brought up a bunch of theories around why there’s so much Indian immigrant hate one person wrote to us, and I, I’m gonna try to put an episode together about it, but they wrote to us and shared fairly abundant evidence indicating that a lot of the.Indian immigrant hate is actually AstroTurf by Muslim Indians and Pakistanis who just really freaking hate Hindi Indians. Andthat andMalcolm Collins: CanadiansSimone Collins: that like, even, like, not even so, I mean, there is some job resentment, but like, not nearly to the level that you see online.Malcolm Collins: Yeah, yeah, yeah.Simone Collins: But like, that’s, that’s an example of something that could be at least in large part external and not caused by internal activity.‘cause you know, like there’s a very large immigrant community here that is Indian and [00:04:00] there’s not. There’s not a lot of like hate a about it, people likeMalcolm Collins: them. There is not I, but I can, yeah. I, and I can say this very concretely. So we live outside of Philadelphia. Mm-hmm. We live in a majority Indian neighborhood.Our neighborhood is 70% Indian. Mm-hmm. And I have not seen any anti-Indian sentiment amongst any of my neighbors, any of the, the friends at Octavian school.Simone Collins: Well, and keep in mind, I ran for office in our, in our area. Right. I attended a ton of conservative Republican events. I knocked doors on the houses of hundreds of Republicans who lived here.Only once. Only once. ‘cause I will say that there was one time when one person said one thing and they’re just like, well, I don’t like all these kids running around in the streets. And that was it. It was, oh, God forbid that these people actually are happy and have children that run in the streets like I would want my kids to do.And this is like a safeMalcolm Collins: place. And keep in mind that you might be like, well, you don’t participate with the edgy conservative groups. No, we participate with the edgy. We, we are like friends with the people who ran a lot of [00:05:00] the Trump campaign stuff. Mm-hmm. And, and as we’re known as like rightwing influencers, we get and edgy rightwing influencers, we get invented to the edgy parties where people make.You know, racialist jokes and stuff like that. Even, even just to be educated,Simone Collins: anyone wanted to say something about resenting Indian immigrants in our Indian immigrant heavy community? They would’ve told me immediately because all of the like, attacks made against me were like, look at this evil, racist woman.So they would’ve told me ‘cause they would’ve thought that, like the, the, the rumors were true. So I just wanna, I wanna illustrate that anyway. So, but this does not seem to be something, one thing where the Jew hate is endogenous or It doesMalcolm Collins: seem to be, but the, the side point I wanted to make to the Indian comments, I do think that there is actual Indian resentment talking to the United States.I just don’t think it’s in our region verySimone Collins: much. Yeah. Yeah.Malcolm Collins: And it’s important and, and especially in Canada, there are actual communities where it is normal, but Canada’s getting a completely different type of Indian immigrant than we’re getting here.Simone Collins: Well, and I’ll, I’ll add that it’s, I think especially among tech workers where they [00:06:00] see that.People are actually just hiringMalcolm Collins: IndiansSimone Collins: Non Yeah. They’re firing qualified American citizens and hiring, honestly less qualified Indian immigrants. There is obvious resentment, but yeah, the pocket,Malcolm Collins: we need regulations around that. That’s a whole other thing that we can get to in another video where you could go watch the video where she crashes out about Indians because she goes on a 30 minute rant about all of the valid complaints people have about Indians.But in this episode, we’re talking about you, Simone, just to, just to, great. Yeah.Simone Collins: Just out of the frying pan into the fire. Let’s go.Malcolm Collins: If we often talk about the trans community, right? And I’m like, basically in the group that has ended up becoming the new right. Many of, or the majority of whom used to be leftists.We sort of originally approached the trans thesis was the idea of, okay, we can give this community some additional rights so they can do their weird, whatever thing that they want to [00:07:00] do. And so long as they don’t abuse those additional rights it’s fine. Right? And, and of course, if they did abuse those additional rights that would be punished within the community first and most aggressively,Simone Collins: right?‘cause that would threaten their sovereignty and rights and acceptance.Malcolm Collins: Exactly. And when we saw that the opposite was happening, that the community kept from the most institutional levels, from the highest levels of the community, protecting their worse actors and going out of their way to protect their worse actors it then creates a situation where the, any, any community that’s abutting them has to attack the entire community to deal with the negative externality of that community’s worst actors.If I’m going to word this a different way, okay. Let’s suppose we’re not talking about trans people or Jewish people here. We’re talking about blurbs and TURs. Okay. Either two [00:08:00] groups and some blurbs, sometimes grape. Little TURs. Okay? And so a turb mob comes over to the blurbs, right? And they’ve all got pitchforks.And they say, that man right there, great. One of our children. And we can prove it. And then the blurb leader comes out and says if you wanna pull him out of our community and put him in a prison, you need to go through all of us and put us all in prison. Now, if I’m a blurb who’s not that particular elected leader, I am likely like the evilest person in that room right now, the person I am most terrified of is that leader, right?It’s not even the mob, because that leader is turning me and the entire community into grist over something that obviously, if somebody in our community is acting like a bad actor and we are preventing them from being punished. [00:09:00] We, we make our entire community an a negative externality to anyone we’re around.And recently, on multiple occasions, the Jewish community has done this in spades. And when I say in spades, I mean to an attempt that he is so egregious that I would ask. And like I, I know we have Jewish friends, I’m gonna, I’m gonna put together a plan to stop this because Jews used to have cultural institutions that were entirely designed to stop exactly this phenomenon.Okay. But these cultural institutions basically failed in the, I wanna say 1600 or 17 hundreds. Oh. What happened after the 15 hundreds for Jews? Oh, is that when Pogrom started picking up? All I’m saying is there, wait,Simone Collins: what existed before then that stopped this? What, what is this magical dance?Malcolm Collins: So there are multiple Jewish institutions that when a Jew [00:10:00] would scam or go out of their way to hurt non-Jews that were living alongside the Jewish community mm-hmm. The Jewish community would heavily financially punish them, shun them, and expel them. Wow. And, and that is very, very useful thing to do.Speaker 3: To give an idea of how severe these were. , We have recordings of Jews for minor, and note this wasn’t just for major things. It’s noted that for even minor scams or misrepresentations to gentiles, , something was applied to them. It’s a Jew word. I don’t know what it means exactly. , Jews will know it, but it meant that that person’s kids were not even considered marryable.So it didn’t just apply to you, it applied to your entire genetic line.Speaker 7: So just with some research in front of me here, , these institutions were calledKeala and Bit din, , or in English communal councils and rabbinic courts. , They were specifically active between.[00:11:00] 1017 50 ce. , And if you do an analysis, so you look for pogroms, this is mass Jewish killings, pre 1750. , You do have some and some that were, were very large. , Like the Commensally uprising, however. , If you just on average look at pogroms per year and how severe those Prague groms were during that period, and then contrast it with the period after these institutions had collapsed, , you see enormously more like it’s an order of magnitude more in terms of violence and frequency that you had pogroms after these institutions had collapsed.So, , just an AI’s thoughts on this. , Pre 1750 violence was often tied to existential crises, plagues, crusades, uprising with fewer, but sometimes larger single events. EEG, kaminsky’s rivaled or exceeded many later waves in raw death Hold. Post 1750s saw more frequent repeated [00:12:00] waves of pogroms, hundreds per wave.And this, , you know, culminating with the Holocaust, right? So these institutions actually appeared to serve their role. They appeared to significantly reduce. Antisemitism and the Jewish community has ever since they collapsed, been demonstrably, I think weakened in their ability to operate.And the reason I put so much , emphasis on you used to have this technology is Judaism as a religion. If they want to adopt something, they can’t just go up and be like, I have a new idea about how we should do something. If they can say, here’s how we used to do it. Look at the pogroms per year when we did this.Look at the pogroms per year after we did this. , That can be pretty persuasive because you have both a mathematical, a historic, and a religious argument for reinstituting. These, .Malcolm Collins: But today you have an instance where the two of the big instances that we’re gonna go over that are really emblematic of this is major YouTube streamer ends up covering a [00:13:00] community of,Simone Collins: Orthodox Jews living, I think somewhere in New York City.Malcolm Collins: Yes. Tyler Olivier, like would videos. This guy goes along. He goes to various groups that are doing bad things, immigration fraud throwing poo at each other in India, which is just like a cultural festival.Simone Collins: And even just general crime in New York that is not specific to a, a group.Malcolm Collins: Right. But the point is, is that he has targeted other specific sub ethnic groups in the past four things that are a, a group doing a local traditional festival around like feces throwing is far more racially inflammatory because that’s a, just a traditional festival that’s really only hurting that community potentially.ThenSimone Collins: it’sMalcolm Collins: strict giving theirSimone Collins: immune system. It looked fine.Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Welfare fraud by Orthodox Jewish communities in New Jersey. Right? Like this, the, the fraud that he was pointing out has been historically documented. It’s been documented in multiple Orthodox Jewish communities. It is even [00:14:00] in this case, extremely well documented.Like this is not a going out there and promoting some sort of stereotype or something like this. This community is acting as genuine bad actors in a way that is hurting the quality of life. Like our economic system. The people around them are suffering because of the way that this community is abusing the US tax system and welfare system.And we’ll go into other instances of this, but in this instance, what was so wild about this is the a DL, you do not get more mainstream of a Jewish organization. Then the A DL?Simone Collins: No, this was news to me. I didn’t think the Anti-Defamation League was Jewish per se. I thought they were just broadly progressive,Or not.Malcolm Collins: I’ve always thought of them as a predominantly Jewish organization.Simone Collins: Really.Malcolm Collins: What’s the, what’s the other Jewish organization? Let’s see if they also went out against him.Simone Collins: I don’t know. I don’t know of any big Jewish [00:15:00] nonprofits aside from, I don’t know, whoever, whatever foundation made the Holocaust museums possible or whatever foundations.I didn’t think there were like Jewish led charities that had big leading names.Malcolm Collins: It’s the a DLSimone Collins: Really? It’s just known for being Jewish.Malcolm Collins: The mainstream Jewish, quote unquote protection nonprofit is the Anti-Defamation league, the A DL.Simone Collins: Okay, so that’s like the main organization, famous for fighting antisemitism explicitly.Malcolm Collins: Yes. The mission, the official mission of the A DL is to stop the defamation of Jewish people. Oh. And secure justice and fair treatment for all.Simone Collins: Oh, okay. I didn’t know, sorry.Malcolm Collins: So the A DL comes out okay.Simone Collins: Mm-hmm.Malcolm Collins: Attacks him and he is immediately de platformed. From, from platforms like Patreon in meSimone Collins: after having, yeah.He’s posted things that are inflammatory. So it’s not like this was just too [00:16:00] spicy for people. Wow.Malcolm Collins: No, it was, it was that the Jewish community, when he spotted real fraud went out and, and, and this is now, if you are a Jewish person, the Jews at the A DL that did this, they are an existential threat to the Jewish community.Simone Collins: Hmm.Malcolm Collins: Because they, they have now said is, as long as Jews have cultural and political power in the United States, we will not allow you to punish or even notice or talk about bad actors within our community. But this wasn’t the only instance recently. Another egregious instance is there was $33 million of healthcare fraud by an Orthodox Jewish individual.Obviously like we freak out when the Somalians do this, like Trump and the administration should be freaking out when an Orthodox Jew does this,Simone Collins: right? It doesn’t matter who you are. Any, any form of especially fraud using people’s taxpayer money,Malcolm Collins: this fraud was killing people. [00:17:00] Old people were dying because of this fraud.This is like on record, okay? This guy was a monster, and that is not disputed even by the organizations that attempted to defend him. But a large organization that we’ll be going intoSpeaker 4: Note, not a fringe or extremist Jewish organization either. This is the mainstream CHABAD Jewish organization for protecting Jewish prisoners.Malcolm Collins: that’s entire purpose is to fight for freedom for Orthodox Jewish individuals. Convince the Trump administration to give this person a pardon.Not because they do not think that his actions led to people’s deaths, not because they do not think that he stole from the American taxpayer through fraud, but because he’s an Orthodox Jew.Simone Collins: Wow,Malcolm Collins: this is really existentially bad for the Jewish community.Simone Collins: Yeah, that is bad. I had no idea. [00:18:00] That’s terrible.Malcolm Collins: That is. That’s really,Simone Collins: really bad.Malcolm Collins: That’s terrible.Speaker 8: If you are wondering how they could conceivably signal that this was an okay thing to do. The core argument that the administration made, , when releasing him is that he didn’t personally, financially benefit from his fraud. That it was mostly to keep a failing business alive, which is factually untrue.He stole, we know he stole at least $5 million personally as a ghost salary. I think the argument is that he had to pay it back in fines or something after he was caught, but it’s like, yeah, but he intended to steal it. Right. , And, , there’s still people fighting for money from this, so No, it’s not that everyone has been reimbursed or anything like that, uh, but that most of the fraud was done to try to protect a failing business that had overextended., But that doesn’t, , if you have a. Failing business, especially a hospital that’s caring for elderly and in affirmed individuals. And you, because of the way that you are conducting fraud, to try to keep that alive [00:19:00] are leading to people’s deaths. And for people suffering, at a large scale, , you need to let that fail.Like not being able to let your business fail in committing fraud at this scale is not, , an ethical thing to do. Especially while stealing to the tune of $5 million from the failing company exacerbating the problems like this. This picture of somebody who just let things get a bit out of hands doesn’t work when you consider the 5 million that he stole during this process that’s on record.,Speaker 8: And people are like, oh, he had a external accounting group that was handling the fraud on his behalf. I mean, it’s shown in court records. He knew and he pleaded guilty to knowing the fraud was happening. , But in addition to that, like I, I’m actually okay, like if, if somebody was like, look, if employees were doing this, he just then wanted to protect their jobs.Okay, fine.I have helped cover for my own employees moral Laughes in the past as a boss. It’s something that just happens and [00:20:00] comes up, and if that was what he was going through, then I would understand. But that doesn’t explain the $5 million that he took out in ghost salaries, and that’s what we know of. That’s the fraud. We were able to prove $5 million, , that requires active action on his behalf. Not an external accounting firm or anything like that, like I’m trying here. Okay. But this was just a bad actor who didn’t care about the lives that he destroyed.And people are like, well, he’s old. He would’ve died in prison. Good, good. , This is why we have a prison system, right? I want the Somalians who do this stuff going to prison. I want Jews who do this stuff to go outta prison. I, it shouldn’t matter what community someone is from. And the simple effing optics of this, that habad an organization that is staffed by otherwise saying intelligent people, knowing the sentiment in America right now against the Jewish people growing in negativity, knowing.What a hot button [00:21:00] issue because of the Somalian fraud stuff that we’re dealing with because of Nick Shirley’s reporting fraud of exactly this type is that they would go out of their way to almost pathologically attempt to free, an obvious bad actor and do it successfully. Did no one in the organization stop to ask what are the optics of this?. And I think that, well, apparently not. , And. That was because there was no institution for causing or creating any sort of reward mechanism for asking that, because it doesn’t matter to them if they do an action that on the whole hurts the Jewish people, if it helps their status within their circles of Jewish society, which this did and reinstating these old courts would allow that.And I think that this is , really important for individual like. The Jews who are hearing this and want to yell at me for this right now, these individuals did not ask, how is this action going [00:22:00] to reflect on the way that broader Jews are treated within society? , Antisemitism more broadly, , the.Question in their head is, how does this affect my standing within my circle of Jewish society? , And that’s really bad that that’s the case, but it can be fixed.Speaker 10: Also another externality that Jews should think of when they’re thinking about the importance of building a system to address these issues is how something like this affects non-Jews who defend the Jewish community. , When we saw Charlie Kirk near the end, say something like, I’m thinking about turning against the Jewish community, or having Candace Owens gone on.Because I am sick of after I do X, Y, or Z to defend them, then this comes out after me. Then I get accused of X, Y, or Z. . I, I think that like there isn’t an internal thinking of, we have people, we, Jews have people [00:23:00] outside the Jewish community like Simone and I are often accused of being overly pro jewish. , We’re, I mean, the reason we’re proje is because we’re pro strengths and Jews are out competing other groups in many fields, right?Like, we like groups that do well and are technologically and economically productive, especially high fertility groups. Like there is a. Existential reason we are pro jewish,, which is very instrumental if they weren’t those things. Then we would be anti-Jewish. , , , it’s not like for some biblical reason or something like that, or even because I like individual Jewish people., There’s a lot of groups where I have a lot of friends from that group. But I still think in aggregate that group, , is, , an economic and technological drain on the global world, but. The point I’m making here is take somebody like Simone and I’m, , who get flack.You know, we do burn some of our credibility, , when we are seen as defending Jewish interests. , And. Then we see something like this happen. Mainstream [00:24:00] organizations like the A DL and Habad, , going out of their way to, , protect bad actors within Jewish communities instead of working to address in themselves., Because then people who have heard me defend Jewish things in the past, they come to, they go, Malcolm, you see this is proof that you’re wrong about. Helping the Jews, defending the Jews, seeing the Jews as a group that we can have as good actors in American society. , And it makes me look stupid and it makes me and all of the other non-Jewish people who defend the Jewish community less likely to do it in the future.The externalities from actions like this are manifold.Speaker 12: And for those viewers on the other side who hold a more anti-Semitic sentiment and are upset at us for always coming off as overly , philio, semetic, keep in mind. We are willing to criticize. We have a number of episodes that are quite critical of Jewish community and history. , Our support for the [00:25:00] Jewish community, as we have said, is instrumental to my goals for civilization.And if actions of that community make it look like that is no longer the case. Then my opinion changes if portions of that community grow fast. Because there are definitely portions of the Jewish community that, , are extremely low technology, extremely hostile to outsiders and very high fertility. If those portions end up becoming the dominant Jewish population or controlling Jewish institutions, , didn’t.Obviously I would not continue to take actions that are as supportive to the wider Jewish people. , I’m not like a, you know, whatever, who was it? Ted Cruz or whatever, who’s like, oh yeah, I’ll support Israel for whatever, because the Bible told me to. I’m like, no, it’s useful for my goals as things are right now, but if things change, then it may no longer be useful to my goals.Malcolm Collins: And so many Jews are gonna go because every time we do a video like this, they come into the comments [00:26:00] and they say something like, because they feel like this is a normal thing to say. When somebody says something like this or brings up topics like this, that I am being anti-Semitic by saying this stuff, you are the problem.You are the reason why Now 25% of young people have decided that they are anti-Semitic. Okay? Because the dominant culture, like different cultures react to injustices in different ways. But the dominant culture, especially within the right in the United States. When they see somebody calling out genuine bad action, and then another person attempting them to, attempting to silence them by saying something like, you are being racist, or you’re being transphobic, or you’re being homophobic, or you’re being anti-Semitic because Wokes use that for so long.So we developed cultural technologies against that, right? Like, this is one of the core things that has changed within the new right, is people can no longer go to us and say, oh, you like anime? That’s nerdy. I’m like, suck it. Or you, you, that’s degenerate. Or that’s a against alike people are like, oh, how do, how do you police behavior without being able to [00:27:00] shame people for this, this, or that? It’s like, we do not allow that at always in our communities anymore. Mm-hmm. Because Wokes then grabbed that social technology and realized they could use it, right? They could reclassify what these categories were and they could use it.And that a better way to promote good actions is through modeling it. Right? Like in the way I treat my wife, in the way I live, in the way I’m having kids, in the way I try to interact with others. I try to model good behavior and that is how we, because we were like, oh, how could you ever have good behavior unless you shame de degeneracy?And it’s like, look, I understand that that used to work when we were more culturally uniform, but Wokes figured out how to use that. And so we haven’t been using that as a cultural technology for a while. In fact, we’ve been reflexively being like, Ew, what a loser. Like anybody who attempts to shame people along these categories, Jews are, because it worked for them for a long time, still reflexively attempting to use this social technology.And what they do not see is it is isolating them. From the one group [00:28:00] and from the, the wider, like of of, of the groups in the United States, the group that is most open to one allying with Israel and helping Jews within the United States is the new. Right. Just like without, like Wokes, when you see Jewish students running from people on campus and locking themselves in the library because they’re afraid of being beaten up.Mm-hmm. These are leftists who are doing this. You, you are aware of this, like the leftists regularly host rallies in the United States where they say from the river to the sea, they, they want you exterminated. Right? Like this is not, you have one group you can go to, right. That you can farm an alliance with and is open to that alliance.Right. And that group is the wider new right coalition, but we’re also not effing stupid one, you come to us with this. Oh, you’re being antisemitic when clearly what I’m saying is not antisemitic. This is factual evidence. Or clearly, you know what Tyler Olivier. was saying when he made his video is not antisemitic.Right? This was [00:29:00] like clear evidence Right. Of this stuff. And, and Jews know this stuff is happening. No, they’re not f*****g stupid Jews know about the fraud in or orthodox Jewish communities.Simone Collins: Yeah.Malcolm Collins: Right. And you can be like, well we have trauma because of a genocide.And it’s like a lot of groups have had genocides against them. Okay. None of those groups come to me and attack us for saying, oh, you’re anti, ‘cause we attack all the groups on this, this, we have anti Quaker videos, we have anti-Catholic videos, and the only group that regularly reflexively freaks out and it is this reflexive freakoutSimone Collins: Yeah.Malcolm Collins: That is causing the drift even within the right. And if you look at the political breakdown, you can see the anti-Semitic sentiment is growing in the right at the same rate. It’s growing in the left. Right. But ideologically we’re not mulching in the streets saying from the river to the seas yet.Right. Is to be aware where we are with you. I think Jews, because they are [00:30:00] used to perceiving themselves as having an alliance with the left, which is just not going to work going into the future.Simone Collins: Mm-hmm.Malcolm Collins: They listen to leftist criticism about stuff like Gaza, about stuff like the war in Iran. When I don’t care about this stuff, you’re helping us with this f*****g good.Like, I kill him, whatever. Right. Like, yeah, you, I, I feel like the woman from south ParkSpeaker 2: Really? That’s great! You mean you don’t mind? No! I hateMalcolm Collins: Gaza,Speaker 2: you go rightSpeaker: ahead and plow down this whole f*****g thing! That’s swell!Malcolm Collins: That’s the way I feel about all of that. But when you set up communities in the United States and actively scam our tax system and kill our elderly people, and then when our justice system attempts to do it things, or when our citizen reporters attempt to do the, the just thing and attack them.Then how, how can I say that this is Toler. This is no longer a minority Jewish position. This is not a minority. Like the [00:31:00] people on the right will sometimes be like, oh, they randomly bombed some old church in whatever country. It’s like, yeah, it was in a fricking Muslim majority country. They were like, no Christians there anymore.Whatever. Right? Like, I do not care about that. That that population had already wiped out the Christian population there. So, I’m wondering where all the Christians went over the past 20 years. Maybe I’m okay with them being bombed a little bit. Or they’ll be like, oh, look at this video of Jews spitting on Christians.It’s like, and I can find videos of Christians spitting on Jews, right? Like, there’s plenty of Christians who hate Jews. That doesn’t mean that our two people cannot be allied with each other. But the very centers of Jewish power acting in this way that does prevent a meaningful alliance as well as Jews in stuff like the comments under this video saying, this is anti-Semitic to say.That does prevent a durable allianceSpeaker 5: And don’t give me, oh, this is a woke Jews problem. We are discussing two organizations that have done this recently. One of them is the A DL. Okay. Maybe the A DL, but the other is a Habad [00:32:00] charity. Okay. If you are unfamiliar with who the Habad are, they are an Orthodox Jewish group. Okay. They’re, I think, the most mainstream sort of accepted by wider society, Orthodox Jewish group.I.Malcolm Collins: because the first people who should be going after the people who, who go into the comments and be like, this anti-Semitic, should be other Jews, right? Because that hurts the Jewish community. That is the person who says, when you come after bad actors and obvious bad actors, documented bad actors, I’m going to defend them.Simone Collins: Well, so if I, my impression of when I, I think about comments I’ve heard from Jewish friends about groups like these is, they’re like, oh, that’s this subgroup. You know, they’re not mine. And I think there is this problem of Jewish communities being very sort of disconnected and balkanized to a certain extent and, and not centrally governed, of course.[00:33:00]So it’s not like there’s some Vatican that could be like, we disavow this, this is wrong. It’s more like, well, there’s this, they’re this set that’s entirely sovereign and we have no control over them. I mean, I, I guess what you’re saying isMalcolm Collins: right, and this is, this is you, you know, how you deal with that.Simone Collins: How,Malcolm Collins: There, there, so there’s really a few solutions to this from the perspective of Jewish populations. Okay. Solution number one, it’s create genuine group differentiation. If somebody was to go to me because I regularly do this on air, criticize the Vatican, and they were to say, well, you’re a Christian, like, how do you criticize the Vatican?Or how do you criticize like this Protestant sect or that Protestant sect? It’s like, I’m not that sect. I don’t like that sect. I think that sect is an act like, and, and people do not confuse me with those sex.Simone Collins: Do you not think that Jewish friends of ours have done that? To be like, that’sMalcolm Collins: absolutely not.Absolutely not.Simone Collins: Yeah.Malcolm Collins: This is, this is a huge problem that Jews have. And there is a way around it, but [00:34:00] it is a huge problem when in like suppose. A Unitarian Universalist, a a a branch of Christianity mm-hmm. Acts as some super bad actor as they often do. Yeah. Pushes some woe nonsense. Right. And nobody would think of comparing us techno puritans or like evangelical Protestants.Yeah.Simone Collins: We,Malcolm Collins: because we would say that group is heretical. That group is not like us. That group is not one of us, and it wouldn’t make sense to compare us. Right. Whereas Jews, they fastidiously do not do this. They say, Hey, even if you don’t follow the practices of Judaism anymore, even if you left, even if you blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, you’re still Jewish.If you are Matrilineally Jewish. Mm-hmm. This creates a major, major problem. And even worse, if you’re like two a Jew, right. Like. An Orthodox Jew, right, like a, a reformed Jew is still a Jew, right? To an evangelical Protestant, a Unitarian Universalist is [00:35:00] not a Christian. And this is why they don’t get blamed as much because the Jewish community themselves, like the people who are in this video who are going to be claiming, oh, Malcolm, you’re being anti-Semitic.The vast majority of them are probably gonna be reformed Jews because those are the people who react this way the most. Yet they are protecting an Orthodox Jewish community. These two communities are not the same community. It is the active lack of being willing to split and internally criticize that is, is causing ultra orthodox Jews to be blamed for what woke Jews are doing in Hollywood.Mm-hmm. That have like culturally very few similarities to them. And it’s what’s causing woke Jews in Hollywood to be blamed what Ultraorthodox Jews are doing in Israel. Right. Like, but I actually would not advise the Jewish community to remove this tendency was in Judaism. It has a number of positive externalities for the Jewish community, basically making it very [00:36:00] hard for them to permanently split and allowing them to recombine whenever they want.You can look our video on why don’t Jews have guns? It goes really deep into Jewish culture and why it is particularly resilient. And this is, this is one of its big superpowers. And you couldn’t even do it if you were a Jew. Like even if you were a Jew and you, and you tried to create like a splinter group of Judaism, it’s just so embedded in the Jewish mindset that all Jews are Jews that it would eventually recombine.And in the mind of the general public, it wouldn’t happen.Simone Collins: Hmm.Malcolm Collins: There’s the second cultural strategy. How do most groups prevent this? How did Jews prevent this historically speaking?Simone Collins: Right.Malcolm Collins: Well, they have either. Cultural traditions or legislative bodies for punishing people within their communities so that they can, like if within the Jewish community there was some sort of a council or something like that, that could pass judgment on high profile individuals, like individuals within the [00:37:00] A DL offer some kind of exy communication or financial fines or some other punishment that shows we, the Jewish community, do not approve of this behavior.We do not approve of defending these individuals or what these ultra Orthodox communities are doing.Simone Collins: Mm.Malcolm Collins: And keep in mind, how did my cultural tradition handle this historically, because this is actually well documented. How did backwood people handle historically when somebody in our culture was making themselves a pest to people of surrounding cultures?Oh they typically tortured and killed them and left their body somewhere public. So everybody, ohSimone Collins: God. Wait, what is it? The backwards people in America did this. OhMalcolm Collins: yeah. They would, I mean, this is what like the regulators were, right? Like,Simone Collins: the regulators, is this some formal societal term?Malcolm Collins: Yeah. They would have basically groups of, of young men would get together.If somebody had gone out and like griped a girl or something like that. And they would, torture them and, [00:38:00] and kill them and leave them hanging from a tree. And everyone would see and everyone would be like, I guess I’m not gonna do that again.Speaker 6: And I think this is one of those places where you can see my cultural biases, where they may, , clash with some other cultural groups we have in the right wing coalition show. Like when the United Healthcare CEO was killed, my first reaction was, oh, well that’s good, right? Like the legal system didn’t work.So, , you know, now we do step two. , I’d also note here that this idea of communities policing themselves. Is actually very normative. Most communities do the exact opposite of this instead of. Attempting to protect their own bad actors. They make a point of going out of their way to punish their own bad actors.So take rather than a cultural community. Let’s talk about like the whiter YouTube streamer community. Right? We have a bad actor like Johnny Somalia, , and Johnny Somalia. Is going to high trust countries and going around and [00:39:00] effing with people and pretty much the entire streamer community has been on board with doing everything that we in the wider community could to get this guy locked up.Okay. When he was arrested in Korea. The community donated a legal fund for his prosecution, alright? Sent people over there to help with that fund to help make sure he saw jail time, right? This is what Jews should be doing when a Jew acts like a bad actor. Not the exact opposite.Malcolm Collins: Now I’m not saying that this, that that Jews need to go as hard.Jews didn’t do that historically. They did the Jewish version of that, which is taking away someone’s money. Which I have avatar. I have to wait to actually actually yes, that is historically how these Jewish cohorts worked.Simone Collins: But no, you’re, you’re just, you must be describing though Jewish communities who are living in close [00:40:00] proximity, you know, like a, an insular Jewish community and that that is still what exists now.I think the problem is that an entire Jewish community is being criticized for, for exploiting the US government essentially. No,Malcolm Collins: no, no, no,Simone Collins: no. For leveraging open loopholes.Malcolm Collins: Welfare, welfare fraud is rampant among ultra orthodox Jews in the United States. Both welfare and housing Fraud is, Uhhuh is very widely reported.It’s very rampant bad acting.Simone Collins: Okay. Can I, can I steal, man, this, can I steal, man? This.Malcolm Collins: Okay, go.Simone Collins: Like, they’re only having the most Jewish response, right? What is Judaism? But like, okay, here’s the law, right? And then they’re like, great, okay. How am I gonna work around this? Oh, I’ll just put like a piece of metal thread around things or, or golden thread.Or I will you know, switch the, around this, this lampshade to work this way. Or, oh, I’m not allowed to let my hair. Show. Well then I’ll just wear a wig over my hair. And then that’s gonna be fine.Malcolm Collins: Totally [00:41:00] understand what you’re saying.Simone Collins: I totally understand. And so what, what they’re doing with the welfare fraud here is they’re like, oh, so the government has these rules.Okay, so the government’s giving this money to these organizations. Well, then I will run the organization and you’ll buy from it. And then we were all, and from it just leveraging laws and they just need to close these loopholes. Totally, totally. Only reason they exist, Simon, is they’re, they’re faulty.Malcolm Collins: I know you, you’re saying this, but you’re not thinking in the wider cultural context.Okay. I even promoted the idea of I’m okay if you can screw over the system and get away with screwing over the system, that is completely fine. Like culturally. Yeah. ShameSimone Collins: on the system,Malcolm Collins: shame on the system, but. If you get caught or shamed for exploiting the system. And then because this is, this is the system working as it’s supposed to.The guy who got arrested, the Jewish guy who got arrested mm-hmm. That was the system working as intended. The guy, the, the community that was being shamed by the YouTuber. That was the system working as expected.Simone Collins: Yeah.Malcolm Collins: But then when your community says, oh, we got caught, the system tried to [00:42:00] prevent our fraud, and then you attack the agents of the system that tried to shut you down, now you make it the entire community an existentially damaging thing to have operating within that system.Simone Collins: That’s true. It it’s a bad strategic move. Yeah.Malcolm Collins: It’s, it’s not a bad, it’s a, it’s a move that they can get around. So Judaism has like high councils of rabbis and stuff like that that they still use,Simone Collins: that exist betweenMalcolm Collins: Yes.Simone Collins: Among sects.Malcolm Collins: Yes.Simone Collins: Oh,Malcolm Collins: I,Simone Collins: I didn’t know that. And what’s,Malcolm Collins: what’s even more important is that these high rabbi councils and everything like that, the people who are going to listen to them the most are the ultra Orthodox Jews who have the biggest problem with these sorts of frauds.Simone Collins: Mm-hmm.Malcolm Collins: So if they said, look, antisemitism’s exploding right now, and where antisemitism matters most is in the right, because the rights, the community that is looking like it’s allying was Israel over [00:43:00] Europe. Mm-hmm. It looks like it’s the long-term natural ally for the Jewish people. If it’s exploding within our community because of like an existential thing that there just doesn’t like Jews, what would you do if there was a subpopulation living within Jewish communities regularly screwing you over?And when you tried to do anything about it, they rounded the doors and tried to prevent you from doing anything about it. It’s like. Yeah, I’m pretty sure we know what you would do, right? Yeah. It’s not, ‘cause we’ve seen it, it’s not good before.Simone Collins: Good. Yeah.Malcolm Collins: You deal with it and I respect you for dealing with it, but know that I hold myself to those same standards, right.And you would want allies that held themselves to those same standards. And this isn’t, again, Jews used to do this, which we’re gonna go over in a second. This isn’t even like, like you as a Jew could say, let’s go to one of these councils and promote the creation of some Jewish body mint for handling Exactly.This kind of thing. Right. And I’m gonna note this is actually existential for Judaism [00:44:00] to survive. AndSimone Collins: people say it’s, it’s a, I I totally get what you’re saying. I just don’t really know how to navigate around it. If, for example, so here’s this community, like what, I guess what you want the rest of, of all the Jewish communities to do is be like, oh.We’re not with them. We condemn their actions. They should not do this. It’s wrong. And of course, certainly not censor anyone who’s bringing to light what they’re doing.Malcolm Collins: You know, what they need to do is they need to. Be punishing and have a system for punishing, but also just in their own lives, socially punish the individuals who attempt to use the antisemitism card when something is clearly not antisemitism.Simone Collins: Okay. That’s fair. I, I, I, because I was like, I don’t know how you think this, this community for example, that wasMalcolm Collins: No, no. The bigger problem than this community mm-hmm. Than the fraud of this community is the individuals who are trying to stop the system from working as it’s supposed to.Simone Collins: Yeah.Malcolm Collins: They are the people who [00:45:00] got spent millions of dollars getting Trump to pardon a guy who had killed people.Right. Yeah. They are the people for a type of fraud that everyone on the right is pissed off about right now. Yeah. You can’t just let a guy sit in jail for doing fraud. Like, why, why is that such a problem? Right? Yeah. Like, they’re not even denying that he did it.Simone Collins: Yeah.Malcolm Collins: And let’s go over, because I wanna go over like what the a DL is saying here.The point I’m making, it’s the bigger problem isn’t the individual bad actors, it’s the larger community level organizations like the a DL, the meta conversation protect the bad actors from the system working as intended,Simone Collins: right? Yeah. And honestly, it goes against at least my like, stereotypical outsider take of Jewish law.Like if the game is work within the rules to your best advantage, you know, make the rules work for you, but then, you know, you get caught, then you, you, you lost the game. You need to be better at playing the system. They weren’t good enough. They got caught. Was yourMalcolm Collins: hand in, [00:46:00] in,Simone Collins: in, so like, my bad, I’m gonna have to try again.And, and the, the reaction isn’t. Oh no, definitely don’t catch me. Like that’s not how it works you to follow the rules. That’s the whole point. You follow the rules.Malcolm Collins: Well, and and the thing is, and the reason I keep pointing out is that Judaism used to have systems for dealing with this.Simone Collins: IMalcolm Collins: see. Is this is the law of Judaism.It just, these institutions collapsed a few centuries ago. Mm-hmm. Right? Like that doesn’t mean. That they are not historically accurate Judaism, right? Mm-hmm. And because of that, if you are a stickler Orthodox Jew, and we have a lot of Orthodox Jewish fans of this, you can work your way up. And I’m, we have a number of Orthodox fans who are Jewish Orthodox Jews, who are in positions of authority with, within these communities, do something about this, like advocate for recreating one of these institutions.Because if you don’t, and the reason I said that this is so existential for Judaism is it is not just existential for Judaism working alongside [00:47:00] right wing culture in the United States. It is existential for Judaism because we are your best long-term ally, right? Like we created the state of Israel basically, and we funded it up until this point and we regularly help you guys out, right?Like it is really stupid to piss us off. But in addition to all of that. If you cannot deal with this, Israel itself is going to collapse.Simone Collins: Hmm.Malcolm Collins: Because right now, ultra orthodox communities in Israel scam the state of Israel. Right. And, and OhSimone Collins: yeah. And that, that is a huge problem within the state of Israel itself.For sure.Malcolm Collins: And they are using that to out breeded their more economically and technologically conductive.Simone Collins: That’s a really, I didn’t even think about that. Yeah. That’s like, and already known in existing and very serious problem that does eventually need to be dealt with within the own Jewish community.That’s that. Oh, huh. And,Malcolm Collins: and worse than that, not only are they economically and technologically unproductive, [00:48:00] but they don’t even fight in your wars. Mm-hmm. They said you are economically and technologically productive people to die, to defend. Your land, they are scamming you. That is in any other country we would call that a scam.Okay. Now you can say, well, you know, it’s not technically a scam because they’re following all the rules. That thinking like Simone said, like it’s you, like follow in any other system we’d be calling a group that was doing that, scamming the system. We’d be like, this seems like a problem. They’re a negative externality on society.They disproportionately are involved in scams and welfare and living off the state and they don’t even fight in wards for us. Like what are we even doing here? Right. That community, because of their birth rates, is eventually going to make Israel irrelevant, right? Like Israel with its bright futures, Jews with their bright futures because of this homeland of Israel that they’ve been able to sort of create as a fortress nation.It has that bright future because of its [00:49:00] technologically and economically productive high fertility population. But if that population is drowned out in a democracy because it is a democracy in Israel by a population that doesn’t share their values that’s existentially threatening. And note here, I’m not talking about all Hawaii Jews, all ultra orthodox Jews.Many are sane and understand the problem but it is a, a, a, a good chunk of them. And if you could create a religious institution that was designed with exactly these two issues in mind, how do we prevent this one population in Israel from eventually tanking the state, state with the understanding that it’s in that population’s best interest as well.Like I’ve even talked to Jews in this population, just about the math that they are well aware of, of how effed they are when they become the majority of Jews in Israel. Like, they’re like, oh, well, it’s good for this reason and good for this reason, but obviously we’re going to have major military problems when that happens.We’re gonna have major economic problems when that happens. And, and they’re like, and then we will reform [00:50:00] parts of the system, but they’re not stupid. Okay. Looking ahead and being like, okay, maybe it worked. Like even if I’m only thinking from a proje perspective, I literally don’t care about how IF over outsiders or anything like that.Even if, I only think from Proje perspective, even if I’m only thinking from a proje perspective from one of these ultra orthodox communities that is living off of welfare.Simone Collins: Yeah.Malcolm Collins: Right. I still care about the future of the Jewish peopleSimone Collins: and I Well, do you think so? Is this an issue ofMalcolm Collins: percent of antisemitism in youth?I could. This is a f*****g problem, right? Especially among your best and longest term allies.Simone Collins: Well, so is is, could this be then that the A DL. Isn’t actually trying to like advocate for or fight for Jewish safety or protection, but rather they, they’re experiencing mission creep and they’re just blindly and without any bigger picture, just reflexively going [00:51:00] after anyone who’s say Jew bad.And then they just like,Malcolm Collins: well, if that is the case, that there needs to be some institutional Jewish system to punish them. Okay. As people, not even as an organization, as individuals,Simone Collins: like all the donors to the AD L who are Jewish need to say, Hey, knock it off. This isMalcolm Collins: making No, no, no, no, no. That’s not, that’s too hard to do.What you need is an external Jewish legal body. Jews love legal bodies. That is meant to hunt down these types of anti-Jewish crimes, ag crimes that lead to the Jewish community being less secure, that are being performed. By individuals at organizations like the adl. Mm-hmm. And publicly be able to say, this individual is committing these acts, which are demonstrably dangerous to the Jewish community at large.And that they shouldn’t face x, y, and Z punishment for it to be on good terms with the Jewish community going forwards, likely fines or something like that. So let’s go over like what the A DL said, just so you understand [00:52:00] how they tried to frame this.Simone Collins: Yeah,Malcolm Collins: I’m in frame, interested frame. They said it was anti-Semitic to frame some Orthodox Jewish communities as welfare, ECT addicted, welfare addicted.Simone Collins: But they are like, it seems like there are, it’s well known that many, many Orthodox Jewish communities are kind of like literally built around leveraging welfare systems because they can. I don’t blame anyone for like, to a certain extent, if, if the system is that broken where you can exploit it that much, then it’s, you know,Malcolm Collins: on the system Yeah.Mean overall Jews still pay more into the tax system than they disproportionately take out because there’s so many rich Jews. Mm-hmm. So like, there’s still useful to have around. They then said that, oh, using tropes about Jewish insularity greed slash money or dual loyalty, like, go back to Israel comments in the video is, but they are, they were demonstrably exhibiting.Greed and dual loyalty in the video and [00:53:00] these Orthodox Jewish communities going back to Israel and committing fraud against other Jews, would demonstrably fix the problem in, in the United States of this being a legitimate grievance. Mm-hmm. Right. Like the, these are not that, that’s one of the coolest things about Israel.You know, Jews have a place they can go if there being a problem now. Right. Other Jews even have a way to be like, okay, if this community is becoming too much of a problem in the United States and causing too many issues, then we can relocate them back to Israel, where at least they’re only causing these negative externalities among other Jews.If people are wondering why I am so existentially interested in, that’s what this video is, is me trying my best to come up with a solution to prevent what I see as extreme rates of antisemitism.Simone Collins: Yeah. And I wanna highlight just what you pointed out at the very beginning, just the proportion of young people today who actively harbor.anti-Semitic views because of this stuff that is happening now, and it’s only going to get worse. And definitely this is the sign to take action. I, I get that.Malcolm Collins: By the way, you’re, you’re looking for other instances if you’re like, well, this is [00:54:00] just one case. There’s a crazy case. Have you heard about the East Ramo Central School District in Rockland County, New York?Simone Collins: That’s the one that he, that that guy went to visit, isn’t it?Malcolm Collins: Mm. This wasn’t the one that he got in trouble for,. No, this was the one where an ultra orthodox population grew rapidly due to high birth rates. And their synagogue had them all vote in the local elections. And they ended up, even though they were a minority population, having control of the local school board and when I say they were a minority, the, the local school district was 91 to 95% black or Latino, and served 9,000 students.They then began to cut. All of the extracurricular and athletic activities. They then reduced kindergarten from full day to half day ended summer school, cut business electives and professional development by 75%. They then tried to sell a school building to a Jewish Yeshiva at under the costSimone Collins: of thatMalcolm Collins: building.OhSimone Collins: no, that’s terrible. That’s not a good look. That’s [00:55:00] not gonna make you friends. That’s really not gonna make you friends. Oh gosh,Malcolm Collins: no. This is one of the things where we need to be able to talk about this, like they’re playing within in the rules of the system. But part of the way the system works is when somebody is playing within the rules, but being a bad actor, that they are able to be called out by citizen journalists.If elements of the Jewish community attempt to stop citizen journalism,Simone Collins: that’s not playing by the rules. Yeah’sMalcolm Collins: existentially bad because now that person is saying. To target these individuals, you have to go through all of us. And all of us means a lot of Jews that want nothing to do with this and for those Jews, the bad actor that they need to target.And this is very important and very difficult than the way Jews typically react to. This is not like the worst actor here. The person who is most dangerous to the overall Jewish community is not the people doing this fraud. It is not the people taking control of the [00:56:00] school districts. It is not the people selling the school dis buildings to Yeshivas.It is the people trying to shut down the system from operating as it’s intended to. It’s the a DL. The a DL is at a, a level of magnitude, existentially worse for the Jewish community because they are the ones who makes this a problem for every Jew instead of just these Jews. Okay. The case I was talking about earlier of the, was the case of Philip Ethermore, a Miami Beach nursing home who did $33 million in fraud. Yeah. Really bad.Simone Collins: That’s impressive.Malcolm Collins: Yeah.Simone Collins: Yeah. Wow. Wow. Okay. How in what, sorry. Keep going.Malcolm Collins: Well, I mean, if you wanna go into it what he did and, and no, Trump didn’t fully pardon him, but he shouldn’t have done anything for this guy. It’s good for the Jewish community that this guy faced punishment, right? Yes. Yes. That this guy [00:57:00] faced punishment before the Somalians did.Jews could go like, look, our community isn’t receiving special treatment.Simone Collins: Yeah.Malcolm Collins: Don’t then advocate explicitly for special treatment.Simone Collins: Yes.Malcolm Collins: Right?Simone Collins: Mm-hmm.Malcolm Collins: Prosecutors described him as driven by almost unbounded greed. So what really got me more than him, because again, I don’t really care what he did, he did something bad.The citizen, the system caught him like Somalians do something bad. The system catches him uhhuh. It’s when they then try to say, and now you have to arrest every Somalian if you want to arrest these Somalians, that it becomes existentially unworkable. Right. And alliance was the group becomes existentially unworkable.Simone Collins: Correct.Malcolm Collins: So specifically what happened is the organization is the Alpha Institute, a Habad Litic affiliated 5 0 1 C3 nonprofit, founded in 1981 by Rabbi Shalom Lisker at the direct action of Leav Rebe. Its core mission is to provide religious, spiritual, educational and advocacy for support for [00:58:00] Jewish inmates in the United States, of which there are roughly 85,000.This is really, really, really bad, right? If you are an organization that is doing something like this, you need to be asking their motto is, no one alone, no one forgotten, right? Like, we don’t leave our troops behind. We don’t let our people face jail time. You need to be asking as an organization, like before you go after and try to free a guy like this, you need to be saying, okay, but did he actually hurt people?Did he actually do something bad? Because if he actually did, and I now say you can’t jail any Jew unless you jail all Jews, you now are a much bigger threat to the wider Jewish community than this guy was. And again, this is about thinking. And, and Jews can be like, oh, well because of our traumas, we reflexively attempt to do X, Y, and Z.I understand that. Okay. [00:59:00] But the problem is, is this pattern of behavior. Ha And other groups don’t do this. Catholics don’t try to get people outta prison just ‘cause they’re Catholics. Okay. Yeah. The, the Protestants,ISimone Collins: thought when, when you described the organization, I figured it was like, well, we will, you know.Provide you with visitors while you’re in jail, serving time, you know, like build community for you or maybe like go in and provide education to people in jail and just do good PR for Jews in jail, but not like, get you out. That, that surprises me that that’sMalcolm Collins: what they do. Yeah. The core reason that this group did this, right?Or, or they say they did this. Okay. Is his father Morris Semus, an orthodox rabbi and nursing home magnate, donated 65,000, $65,000 to Alpha over several years starting after his indictment, by the way, so. To work on his case. But the family has long supported Habad causes. [01:00:00] And Jared Kushner, who oversaw much of the clemency, has longstanding personal ties within these habad networks.Mm-hmm. Now, Habad people who I have met have generally been pretty smart and forward thinking. They should have known how this was going to look, given how mad the right is right now over Somali stuff, they are anyone involved in this an existential threat to the Jewish community? They, they weren’t able to think for two seconds.How mad is the American right, right now about the Somali case? How are they gonna feel about this case?Simone Collins: Hmm.Malcolm Collins: Right. And they didn’t feel that way. They didn’t have a fear about this because there’s no Jewish institutional organization or anything that could have come out and been like hey guys, do not do this right now.This is going to damage, could, could this, could this come damage to the Jewish community?Simone Collins: What if Jewish organizations neverMalcolm Collins: felt like they had the, the to, to go into the [01:01:00] final thing here, which is, okay, how Jews historically handled this stuff, how they should handle this stuff in the future,Simone Collins: though, I, I do wanna ask what if, what if Jewish organizations like these never thought they had allies on the rightMalcolm Collins: or left?And, and a note here when I’m like, when I was talking about like Jews being like, oh, well, you know, historically we had this stuff and we just don’t have it anymore. And, and, you know, trauma, sorry. But you say stuff like, oh, trauma in our community, like we can’t not do it, blah, blah, blah.I’m like, look, I understand it’s hard to to create institutions to change your culture, but Jews have done it before you can do it again. And if you look at the rise and the speed of the rise of antisemitism, it is existential that you find a way to do it. This is not me ragging on the Jewish community.This is me saying Jews are useful allies for many reasons to me and my personal agenda. But you are also from the position of populations like [01:02:00] this fertility rate was in Israel and this phenomenon in the United States and the rise of antisemitism in the US at an existential risk. Right now, if this continues a 25% antisemitism rate, that could be 50, 60%.Oh yeah. And if it continues to rise at this rate in like 20 years, like you don’t have time to deal with this. Okay.Simone Collins: Yeah.Malcolm Collins: You have people marching through American streets saying from the river to the sea, you need the other side. That doesn’t mind that stuff still in your camp. Okay.Simone Collins: Yeah.Malcolm Collins: Now to to note here you had organizations like the Kelly organized Jewish councils and rabbinical courts bit din, which actively provided and policed economic crimes against Gentiles.The motivation was practical self-preservation. If you committed fraud against Christian or a Christian government, obviously that could trigger pogroms or expulsions or even collective punishments. Yeah. Examples includes, so this is how they [01:03:00] did it. Fines or Sherman and shaming, repeated or notorious fraud.Dishonest business practices, counterfeiting or overcharging non-Jews could result in monetary fines paid to the victim or the community. Public shaming or full serum, a social and religious ban that was devastating. No one could do business with you, marry your kids, et cetera. Nice Jewish legal codes and communal records from the period show that this was done precisely to deter action against their group.And DIC and medieval enforcement that tel food and later codes, EG maimonide and shall arch record bit din handled cases of theft and fraud from gentiles stealing even trivial amounts from non-Jews as a Torah level. Theft In practice, communities would impose severely strict penalty penalties on Jews who performed.Even trivial fraud or misrepresentation against Gentiles. And they did this [01:04:00] not because they wanted to protect Gentiles, but because they wanted to protect Jews.Simone Collins: Well, yeah, because they, they think evenMalcolm Collins: news atSimone Collins: thatMalcolm Collins: pointSimone Collins: did a lotMalcolm Collins: of, why Malcolm, can you not hear me? To break down? A large part of this had to do with the the Jewish, tite levy thing, and he basically destroyed the Jewish community for like a century. If you’re not in the Jewish, like Judaism almost died like at the end of this period. And the rabbinic circles sort of lost a lot of their institutional power and things began to fall apart. And a number of these organizations essentially weren’t even able to pay the taxes that they owed to like the government because the government was supposed to be handling stuff from them.And so they essentially fell apart. And that’s, that’s bad when you still have Jewish organizations who attempt to protect every Jew. Any final thoughts? Simone?Simone Collins: I don’t think you can hear me.Malcolm Collins: You’re muted, by the way.Simone Collins: I’m not muted. That’s theMalcolm Collins: problem. You’re muted still. You’re stillSimone Collins: I know. I’m not muted.I’m, I’m actually notMalcolm Collins: muted. I can’t hear anything. Can’t hear anything.Simone Collins: I [01:05:00] know, I know. Can’tMalcolm Collins: hear anything.Simone Collins: I think it’s are, are youMalcolm Collins: unable to unmute? I, it’s okay. Is there’s sun in theSimone Collins: Look. I. Muted. I’m notMalcolm Collins: muted. Okay. Still can’t hear you.Simone Collins: It’s, it’s a, it’s a mic problem.Malcolm Collins: Do you think you’re unmuted? Can you hear me?Simone Collins: I know I can hear you. Yeah.Malcolm Collins: Okay. Come in here and give your final thoughts.Simone Collins: Well, I think actually I can be heard, soMalcolm Collins: I can, I have no idea what you’re saying. You are completely muted.Simone Collins: I’ll call you, I’ll call you. Hold on.Malcolm Collins: Yes.Simone Collins: So I, my mic is being picked up in the recording. You just can’t hear me for whatever reason from your computer, so, okay.Malcolm Collins: I’ll just let you talk then.Simone Collins: Yeah. I agree with you that this is really important to address and I really hope that something can be done, but I feel like maybe things have gotten balkanized to the point where Jewish communities feel like they, they can’t actually control this.Maybe I’m wrong.Malcolm Collins: I think you’re wrong. I [01:06:00] think from what I’ve seen Jewish communities can adapt. They’re not stupid. They at least realize the problem of growing antisemitism. Mm-hmm. And Jewish communities cannot control, or they can try to, but it’s increasingly not working because unfortunately they’re using the tools that the wokes adopted.And now the woke tools work in reverse. They, they cannot control the actions of people outside their community, especially when they are genuinely becoming. A threat to those external communities, right? SoSimone Collins: basically if, if a critical mass of influential Jewish leaders recognize that this is an existential threat to all Jewish communities and that every time something like this gets planned, threatened, whatever, pulled that immediately, they all collectively descend upon this person and are like, this is not cool.Undo right now we’reMalcolm Collins: gonna cut you off with some form of actual punishment that is agreed upon wide scale through like inter rabbinic courts. That, [01:07:00] that, and, and again, the core thing that needs to be punished is not the fraud itself, it’s the defense of the fraud.Simone Collins: Yeah. No, I, I agree with you and it’s, it’s really bizarre.Again, why was this, why was this terminated? Why did it ever end?Malcolm Collins: The courtsSimone Collins: people just got disorganized?Malcolm Collins: No, no, but basically they were too organized to the extent that they were in charge of like tax collection from the Jewish people. Oh. On behalf of the governments that they were part of. And some of them got like shut down when they can no longer had the authority to collect those taxes anymore.So they basically became too bureaucratic and they broke.Simone Collins: Okay, so yeah, basically a new practice has to be getting and a new, A new precedent and it would be better if it was a lightweight, reflexive reaction to defensive bad actors instead of some complicated, larger governing body. Per my, yeah, per my view then.Malcolm Collins: Okay.Simone Collins: Wow. I mean, I didn’t know how egregious some of those cases were and [01:08:00] I fully welcome anyone. I mean, I think that many cases of welfare fraud could be construed as like white cat hacking. They’re hacking the system, they’re showing vulnerable. Absolutely. AndMalcolm Collins: again, I’m not, the keySimone Collins: thing to make it white hat is when the vulnerability is exposed, the vulnerability gets fixed.You caught me. We’re good. Cat and mouse game continues. But like the whole point of a cat and mouse game. Is it when the cat finds a mouse, cat eats mouse mouse gone.Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Yeah. You don’t then say, as the mouse, you have to eat all the mice if you want to eat this one mouse, because now you are a problem for all mice.Simone Collins: Well, I feel like the metaphor falls falls apart at that point. I, I see what you’re saying. Yeah. Yeah. I, I, I think that that maybe, you know, as much as we didn’t really talk about it, this issue also extends to the Somali community. I think that, for example, Elman oar, sorry, Elman. Han Omar. Yeah. It was, was a huge problemMalcolm Collins: for the SomaliSimone Collins: community, but I don’t care about, ‘cause like, they need to be like, [01:09:00] we, we disavow this, this is disgusting, but like, I think this, this, but your advice applies to all communities.You know, any community that’s like,Malcolm Collins: yeah. I mean obviously Aidan’s a Somali community, the, the, the Somalians who defend the obvious Somalian fraudsters need to be punished more like as a cultural strategy for survival more than the fraudsters themselves.Simone Collins: Mm-hmm.Malcolm Collins: That, yeah,Simone Collins: because the fraudsters, it’s easy to like write off anyone who did bad thing and, and be rid of them.But the ones who tried to defend that are the ones that put everyone at risk. Yeah.Malcolm Collins: Yes.Simone Collins: I guess it’s not too dissimilar from the covenant of the sons of men the AI alignment proposition you present, which is basically we attack anything that becomes an existential threat to all of our ability to be free to exist.And this is a micro version of it. When you see someone is posing an existential threat, all bets are off. We drop what we’re doing, we stop them and then we can move forward once [01:10:00] that threat has been dealt with. And that’s what you’re seeing here and that’s why you pay so much attention to it because you are uniquely attuned to existential threats arising.And now you see it arising like you didn’t care about it when it was Somalians. ‘cause what investment do we have in that community? But when you see it, this happening with, I don’t care what happens to theMalcolm Collins: Somalians, likeSimone Collins: Somalians, I mean, we don’t have an association. We have no investment, we have no like interest.We don’t feel like they’re gonna take to the stars. And, and you know, whatever. They don’t seem to be very involved with anyone who’s not their own community.Malcolm Collins: They’re not, are, they’re not culturally aligned with me. I have no cultural similarities to them. I have a lot of cultural similarities to Jews.Yeah. Like obviously I, and, and Jews produce a lot of technology and economic benefits for the United States and have a lot of military strengths, which is useful for our future plans if we stay allies. Yeah.Simone Collins: Yeah.Malcolm Collins: I get it. The, so like, obviously I care what happens to the Jew. I Somalians are doing this too, but like I just said, I’m like, okay, well then get rid of all the Somalians, right?Like if they’re, if they’re gonna defend this, like, and, and at the rates that they’re [01:11:00] doing it at like this, but the, it’s a little different from the Somalians. So the Somalians, it, it looks like within some Somalian communities it is the majority of the Somalian, it was something like 65% were on welfare or something like that.Within Jewish communities, it is actually an extreme minority that are these types of I Orthodox Jews.Simone Collins: I disagree because they’re like some cities where the entire way of life is built upon this kind of economicMalcolm Collins: system.Simone Collins: Yeah. So you’re wrong about that. I think it, it may be even worse in some of these, in some of these cities where, because like literally the entire economy runs off of those dynamics, which is why I was like.Maybe this is an issue. Like we can’t, you can’t be like, well knock it off guys. ‘cause it, it’s literally like, like, what, what do you want them to do? Like, they, they literally will do this to the death, I guess. ‘cause like they, they have no other way of making money now. They all have like nine kids. What are you gonna do?Like,Malcolm Collins: right. But I mean, we, we, we, we’ve, we’ve, and I, and I point out here [01:12:00] when a, a Jews who’s watching this has been like, what do you mean your people just go out and shoot someone when they’re one of your own people and they’re screwing people over. What about the healthcare? CEO? That was a white guy.Mm-hmm. Right? Like he, he, the guy who shot him was a white guy. That’s the American way. Right? Like the people know in our video, I was not against that. I was like, yeah, this guy’s applying extra. Yeah.Simone Collins: I guess that’s, that’s a very salient example of that form of justice. Yeah. That was at least. I don’t know.It was an, an Italian right. Kid. And then a, I don’t know what the United Healthcare,Malcolm Collins: well, I mean, adopted American culture. Right. You know, I think that this, this that, that when somebody from our community is effing over our community and outsiders deal with it,Simone Collins: I guess we could say that, that their shared culture was relatively affluent, educated American.Malcolm Collins: Yeah. The guy who did it was a affluent, educated, wealthy like [01:13:00] kid who went to like boarding school and stuff like that, as far as I remember, like same basic cultural group. But it was that group policing itself.Simone Collins: Well, and the future is gonna be self-policing because government based policing is not gonnaMalcolm Collins: happen.Well, and yeah, and, and because groups that don’t police themselves, everyone is going to hate them, right? Like as, as people begin to see people more as groups, right? Like, as your individual identity of your community gets larger people are going to, like I will say right now within the techno puritan community, that is how we should police as extremely aggressively as possible.Simone Collins: And it’s not just about policing, it’s also about your reputation as a culture and as we’ll say possibly even like a techno fiefdom, right? Like in the future, let’s say if many mainstream governments fall apart, different contingents and groups are going to, like Venetian City states, trade with each other, engage in business with each other or not, like isolate each other from each other.And if [01:14:00] your community builds a reputation for exploitation. You will not be able to do trade. Like everyone’s gonna wanna work with the Mormons. Everyone dunks on the Mormons, but they’re all gonna wanna work with the Mormons.Malcolm Collins: Yeah,Simone Collins: that’s aMalcolm Collins: good point.Simone Collins: And I think the problem with building reputations like these is people are in the future when everyone just runs off of cultural stereotypes and reputations be like, well, I’m not gonna work with the Jews.Whereas in the past when you, there was this policing system that you described, it was like, well sure I go to the Jews to get like money lending services and these other things because they’re trustworthy for that. They self-police. Like I can, I can predict that they will provide the service as as expected.And I think that that’s the thing is you have to think about what cultural stereotypes you are going to cultivate for your group in a post world police environment. Because that’s what we’re entering with demographic collapse. Right,Malcolm Collins: exactly. Okay. And it, and it can be done. That’s, that’s the other thing, just throwing up your hands and being like, no, Jews could [01:15:00] never fix this problem.You used to self-police, you used to have. Institutional solutions.Simone Collins: Well, and and they, this was when they operated in a system of no work police. HigherMalcolm Collins: threat.Simone Collins: Yeah. Yeah. Higher threat. Different groups needing to interact with each other and trade with each other and, and, and yeah. Interact in a low trust environment.We’re, we’re entering a very low trust future, meaning that you need to cultivate high trust, and if you defend bad actors, that’s destroying it. So I, now I get the bigger picture even more. And I mm-hmm. Appreciate you covering this even though we’re totally getting in trouble for this.Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Well, because it is, it’s there, there are the bad actors out there and they are pervasive within Jewish communities.But we are signaling this, not because we want to hurt these communities, but because we’re trying to shock them into like, you, you actually, if somebody as Philio, Semitic as me is like, this is actually a problem, guys, then it’s actually a problem.Simone Collins: Yeah. [01:16:00]Malcolm Collins: And it’s not like a problem that like you can scratch your chin about and be like, that’s a very interesting problem.It’s like, if you care about the future of the Jewish people, you care about finding a solution to this problem.Simone Collins: Yeah. Well, I’m gonna go get the kids and make dinner. AndMalcolm Collins: what am I doing?Simone Collins: If we were make your Burmese chicken. Oh yeah.Malcolm Collins: Burmese McChicken.Simone Collins: If ever we were criticized for being the weird husband and wife who speak to each other in different rooms.It’s just highlighted now by the fact that we’re like, I’m talking on a phone. Hello.Malcolm Collins: Oh mygosh.Simone Collins: This is so bad. I don’t work out your mic. Because I’m seeing, andMalcolm Collins: it’s not of my mic problem, it’s clearly a stream yard problem because Stream yard’s Picking up my mic. Fine.Simone Collins: I I see that stream yard’s picking gum.Your mic. And do you see that it’s picking up my mic because it isMalcolm Collins: no,Simone Collins: the green dots be moving.Malcolm Collins: We’ll figure it out. I love you so much, Simone.Simone Collins: I love you too.Malcolm Collins: You’re amazing. And I actually would not at all be surprised given the number [01:17:00] of Habad because that seems to be the organization that would be best able to fix this.Jews that watch our show that one of them is gonna be like, yeah, reviving one of those institutions is probably a pretty good idea. Like, let’s get on that. Because, you know, if you, if you bring that idea to the right people with the right packaging and you’re able to set something like that up, that’s also a path to power for you and institutional power for you, right?Like, it’s, it’s not a bad play. It’s not like a cross that you have to die on. It’s a very useful thing to set up. ISimone Collins: know. It’s just, you know. Politicking be politicy. It’s not that easy, but this is an existential threat to your point, so I get it. Anyway,Malcolm Collins: yeah,Simone Collins: the kids are being All right. Love you suspiciously quiet, so, all right.Byebye.Simone Collins: I cannot, I still though, I, I can’t get over Torsten Seeing [01:18:00] Wannabe by the Spice Girls a music video of it, you know, like, you know, the OG music video and then coming up to me and being like, mommy, this is a song about friendship.Malcolm Collins: He said that.Simone Collins: Yeah.Malcolm Collins: This is a song about friendship,Simone Collins: song about friendship.Malcolm Collins: If you be my lover, you gotta get with my friends. Yeah. Which is also,Simone Collins: it is like, it really is a song about friendship. It’s true.Malcolm Collins: It is a song about friendship. Yeah. Yeah. I I,Simone Collins: no one’s gonna meet the, that’s that specification for being yourMalcolm Collins: love. What’s funny is, is that it is still true for like, progressive culture.Like, you wanna have sex with someone, you gotta have sex with their friends. Like, that’s the way those communities work these days.Simone Collins: Oh God. Yeah. If you, the Polly Reed of wanna be Girls. Yeah. They’re all, they’re all allMalcolm Collins: Polly. If you wanna be my love No,Simone Collins: that’s like, that’s like the Dallas Poly community that we knew.Yeah. Where it was just this like matriarchy where they would switch out studs.Malcolm Collins: No, no. That was, she’s talking about this was really interesting. So, like. As Simone and I had mentioned like earlier when we were more progressive [01:19:00] we were like technically open to sleeping with other people. We just didn’t really indulge in it.But we like hung out with these communities and so we were very familiar with the various poly communities in the areas where we lived. There’sSimone Collins: someMalcolm Collins: ofSimone Collins: those fun people, like typically if you meet someone who’s poly, they’re probably also. Pretty smart in doing some interesting work. I don’t know what toMalcolm Collins: say.Some of them, I mean, this is, this is the ones who we met who were like that keep in mind that we sort of filter who we meet. And it depends on the area. The poly people I’ve met in like San Francisco and like Portland and stuff, they’ve all like total burnouts, a lot of them. ISimone Collins: don’t know, as far as I know, the people I know in, in the Bay Area who are poly are some of the smartest and highest achieving people, so,Malcolm Collins: oh.So I also know some smart ones and stuff like that, but they’re not on the typical poly dating scene, whereas the poly dating scene in Dallas was actually more like smart high agency people, was really good jobs.Yeah.Malcolm Collins: But it was incredibly interesting because it was basically run by a cabal of very attractive women who just [01:20:00] controlled, who was invited to the parties, who got to do what, who, you know and they would just like, and, and I think that that’s one of the reason why.So high, high status. Mm-hmm. Because these women, they approached it very much with sort of like a backwoods because, you know, Texas is, is part of, specifically Dallas is often seen as the capital of the greater Appalachian region, even though it’s not in the Appalachians because it’s the largest city and economic hub that’s in that cultural region.And they approached it very sort of ruthlessly and economically, which is really interesting, where they’re like, well, we are hot women. We can control access to sex. If other hot women decide to become polley in the Dallas area, they basically join our cabal and we will use this cabal to ensure that only really competent, successful, and attractive guys are sleeping with anyone in the poly space.Simone Collins: Yeah, actually that’s, that’s a really good point, is all the guys we met that were in that space. We’re very pro-social, whereas you often get a lot of bad [01:21:00] actor dudes. Not, not universally obviously, but there are more bad actor dudes in other poly circles who are just exploitative and, and messed up and like manipulative.And these guys were just like, just. Kind of nice. We can,Malcolm Collins: dynamics are entirely different. You look at the polys scene in, in San Francisco, and it’s like super toxic because it’s basically a bunch of like effective altruists. Watch our episode on the ea to who pipeline who attempt to groom young women who first enter the movement with like logic.Like, well, it gives me pleasure and it gives you pleasure. How could it be wrong? Right. And it begins to look cool to these young women and they get into it and then older women in the space come up to them and they’re like, Hey I think this guy is using you. And then they’re like, oh, this older woman’s just trying to make guard.You know, like, and because that’s what the guys will say, or something like that. Yes. TheySimone Collins: won’t listen. Yeah. EvenMalcolm Collins: when they try to protect each other, the guys have moved up in this community through some other means, like they’ve gotten high level positions and like that’s some effective altru org, so it’s hard to kick them out or something like that.And so it creates [01:22:00] this dynamic where you get bad actors all over the place and because the community isn’t ruthless about expelling people. Yeah. And. Dine if a guy tried to say, because most of the guys in the Dine are like, finance bros and stuff like that. Tried to say something like oh, well she’s just mate guarding this, you know.Attractive woman who’s higher status than you in the community telling you not to get with me. That woman would then be like, okay, now you guy who just said that, like it goes through the Whisper network really fast, you’re not invited.Simone Collins: Yeah. It was kind of like the Bachelor, you know, you get handed Rose or something.Yeah.Malcolm Collins: And everyone knows not to engage with you. So it’s weird that in this one scenario, like matriarchy seems to keep the entire system stable.Simone Collins: Yeah. It was so cool. It was so weirdMalcolm Collins: and cool. Matriarchy and hyper gamy, keeping a system stable in a non-traditional structure. Okay. Whatever.Simone Collins: Yeah.Malcolm Collins: That was fascinating.I wonder if it’s still stable or if it’s basically collapsed at this point. It says,Simone Collins: I know, I know. Well, some of the people in it that, that I, we, we had known had moved away, you know, moved to other [01:23:00] cities and gone on to become parents and stuff. So I, I doubt that they’re still that involved in it. ButMalcolm Collins: yeah,Simone Collins: I don’t know.And I, I think I got the impression when we were hanging in that circle too, that there were a lot of really new entrants who were just young and kind of having that experience. For a while and you kind of get through it. Like maybe for some people being poly, is this postgraduate equivalent of being briefly lesbian in college?You know, and then you kind of get it outta your system and move on and enter committed relationships. I don’t know. Yeah.Malcolm Collins: Oh, hold on. I need to ask a question, but you can keep talking.Simone Collins: I also love watching our kids dance too. Gangnam style. That is just God tier entertainment so good. But yeah, I’m trying to think if there’s anything that I haven’t told you yet about my trip to Austin.I, [01:24:00] I do have to say I really like the network of people there. You know, like I wish I could just tap into that social network all the time. I. That and like hang around Light Haven in Berkeley. I think it would be lovely. But I don’t want to fly out to these places and I don’t want to live in either of those places.So this is the price we pay. It’s just us and the chickens over here, and that’s okay.Malcolm Collins: All right.Speaker 11: We’re just about to head back from Austin where we filmed a round table, uh, with Chris Williamson and two other demographers, line Stone and well documentarian Steven Shaw and I can’t wait to get back and get home to the kids. It was good to be in Austin, but I really like our home in Valley Forge.It’s pretty great there and. Travel just isn’t as [01:25:00] fun as it used to be. I don’t know. The appeal has worn off, so I’m glad I was able to make it out. I’m glad I was able to do it all for one backpack for the, the two of us because you got a lot of stuff, all the formula, all the diapers. There’s a lot there.Um, and the elevator in our hotel broke. This morning, so there was hauling this car seat down 11 floors, which was not my favorite moment. Yeah, it was not the best, but that’s over. And the round table, which was supposed to go for two hours, I think went for four. So hopefully that means it went well. Who knows?But, uh, it was really, really fun to have that conversation. Um, and I love that we get to do work that has us talking with really interesting, fun people and that yields opportunities like these, um, [01:26:00] ‘cause it’s a, it’s a perk. It’s, it’s not comfortable, but it’s interesting. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit basedcamppodcast.substack.com/subscribe

🚨 The Southern Poverty Law Center — one of America’s largest “anti-racism” organizations — was caught funding the KKK and neo-Nazi groups with millions of dollars. In this explosive Based Camp episode, Malcolm and Simone Collins break down the shocking DOJ indictment revealing how the SPLC used money laundering, fake entities, and paid plants to keep cartoonish racist organizations alive. Why? Because the “racism industrial complex” needs visible villains to keep the donations flowing.Topics covered:• How the SPLC funded the Charlottesville “Unite the Right” rally• The economics of fear-based nonprofits• Why much of today’s “far-right” extremism appears AstroTurfed• Nick Fuentes botting & relevance farming• The difference between real policy discussion and performative racism• How genuine conversation on race, immigration, and culture gets sabotagedThis is must-watch content for anyone tired of the endless outrage cycle.Show NotesThe Department of Justice’s Bombshell NewsThe Indictment* According to the indictment, some Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) donor funds were used to secretly pay leaders and members of racist, violent extremist groups, and at least part of that money was used to support their organizing and activities, including the 2017 “Unite the Right” rally.* The indictment alleges that, contrary to donor-facing representations about “dismantling” hate groups, SPLC used donor funds to pay a covert network of informants (“field sources” or “Fs”) who were themselves leaders or members of extremist racist organizations.Key uses of funds described:* Covert payments to informants embedded in or leading groups such as the Ku Klux Klan, Aryan Nations, National Alliance, National Socialist Movement, and American Front.* More than $3 million in SPLC funds were secretly funneled between 2014 and 2023 to these Fs associated with various violent extremist groups.* Funds were routed through fictitious entities and disguised bank accounts (Center Investigative Agency, Fox Photography, North West Technologies, Tech Writers Group, Rare Books Warehouse) to conceal that the money came from SPLC donor funds.* After those accounts were shut down, SPLC allegedly continued to pay Fs via ACH transfers labeled with disguised monikers such as “Rarebooks050” and “IPResearchCON050.”Examples of specific racist/extremist activities supportedThe document gives concrete examples where SPLC funds allegedly enabled or facilitated racist organizing or demonstrations, not just passive “information gathering.”* Unite the Right rally (Charlottesville, 2017)* F‑37 was a member of the online leadership chat group that planned the 2017 “Unite the Right” event in Charlottesville.* F‑37 attended the event at SPLC’s direction, made racist postings under SPLC supervision, and helped coordinate transportation for several attendees.* SPLC secretly paid F‑37 more than $270,000 between 2015 and 2023.* This means SPLC funds, as alleged, were used to pay someone who actively participated in planning and logistics for a major racist demonstration.* Support to the National Alliance (neo‑Nazi organization)* F‑9 was affiliated with the neo‑Nazi National Alliance and served as an SPLC F for more than 20 years.* F‑9’s activities included fundraising for the National Alliance, while being paid more than $1,000,000 by SPLC between 2014 and 2023.* The indictment states that SPLC donation money was used “for the benefit of the individuals as well as the violent extremist groups,” which in this case includes a fundraiser for a neo‑Nazi organization.* Payments to leaders of other racist groups* F‑27: reported officer in the National Socialist Movement and Aryan Nations‑affiliated Sadistic Souls Motorcycle Club, secretly paid more than $300,000 (2014–2020).* F‑42: former chairman of the National Alliance, featured on SPLC’s “Extremist File” donation page, paid more than $140,000 between 2016 and 2023.* F‑30: leader of the National Socialist Party of America, former director of a faction of Aryan Nations, former member of the Ku Klux Klan; paid more than $70,000 between 2014 and 2016 while SPLC simultaneously used his “Extremist File” page to solicit donations.* F‑43: reported National President of American Front and convicted federal felon for participation in a cross burning; paid more than $19,000.* Another F described as Imperial Wizard of the United Klans of America, and another as a Ku Klux Klan member married to an Exalted Cyclops, also received SPLC payments; one Klan‑connected F received more than $3,500 during litigation about Klan participation in an Adopt‑a‑Highway program.* Indirect funding to additional extremist leaders* The SPLC allegedly funneled more than $160,000 from a fictitious entity to F‑11, who then sent funds to various violent extremist group leaders, including a former Grand Wizard of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan.The press release“Between 2014 and 2023, the SPLC secretly funneled more than $3 million in donated funds to individuals who were associated with various violent extremist groups including the Ku Klux Klan, Aryan Nations, and National Socialist Party of AmericaA Grand Jury in Montgomery, Alabama, today returned an indictment charging the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) with 11 counts of wire fraud, false statements to a federally insured bank, and conspiracy to commit concealment money laundering. The United States Attorney’s Office for the Middle District of Alabama Northern Division filed two forfeiture actions to recover alleged proceeds of the organization’s fraud scheme. The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) investigated this case with assistance from the Internal Revenue Service Criminal Investigation (IRS-CI).“The SPLC is manufacturing racism to justify its existence,” said Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche. “Using donor money to allegedly profit off Klansmen cannot go unchecked. This Department of Justice will hold the SPLC and every other fraudulent organization operating with the same deceptive playbook accountable. No entity is above the law.”“The SPLC allegedly engaged in a massive fraud operation to deceive their donors, enrich themselves, and hide their deceptive operations from the public,” said FBI Director Kash Patel. “They lied to their donors, vowing to dismantle violent extremist groups, and actually turned around and paid the leaders of these very extremist groups - even utilizing the funds to have these groups facilitate the commission of state and federal crimes. That is illegal – and this is an ongoing investigation against all individuals involved.”The SPLC is a non-profit organization headquartered in Montgomery, Alabama, whose mission, according to its website during the relevant time period, was to be a “catalyst for racial justice in the South and beyond, working in partnership with communities to dismantle white supremacy, strengthen intersectional movements, and advance the human rights of all people.”According to the indictment starting in the 1980s, the SPLC began operating a covert network of individuals who were either associated with violent and extremist groups, such as the Ku Klux Klan, or who had infiltrated violent extremist groups at the SPLC’s direction. Unbeknownst to donors, some of their donated money was being used to fund the leaders and organizers of racist groups at the same time that the SPLC was denouncing the same groups on its website.“Donors gave their money believing they were supporting the fight against violent extremism,” said Acting United States Attorney Kevin Davidson. “As alleged, the SPLC instead diverted a portion of those funds to benefit individuals and groups they claimed to oppose. That kind of deception undermines public trust and social cohesion.”Between 2014 and 2023, the SPLC secretly funneled more than $3 million in donated funds to individuals who were associated with various violent extremist groups including:Ku Klux KlanUnited Klans of AmericaUnite the RightNational AllianceNational Socialist MovementAryan Nations affiliated Sadistic Souls Motorcycle ClubNational Socialist Party of America (American Nazi Party)American FrontAccording to the indictment, the objective of the scheme and artifice was to obtain money via donations through materially false representations and omissions about what the donated funds would be used for.In order to covertly pay the individuals, the SPLC opened bank accounts connected to a series of fictitious entities. The covert nature of the accounts allowed the SPLC to disguise the true nature, source, ownership, and control of the fraudulently obtained donated money the SPLC paid the individuals. In order to keep the scheme going, the SPLC made a series of false statements related to the operation of the accounts.A conviction will result in the forfeiture of financial gains from the alleged illegal activities.Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche and FBI Director Kash Patel made the announcement in Washington.The details contained in the civil forfeiture complaint are allegations only.Updated April 21, 2026”The Southern Poverty Law Center’s ResponseThey stopped posting on X in 2024 but in hindsight their posts look like reports of all the “alt-right hate” they’re funding lolTheir response on YouTube* In a pre‑indictment video statement, interim CEO Bryan Fair said SPLC had been informed it was under a federal criminal investigation focused on its “prior use of paid confidential informants” to infiltrate “extremely violent groups.”* He framed the paid‑informant program as a dangerous but necessary tool to gather credible intelligence on white supremacist and extremist groups that pose serious threats to communities.SPLC leaders have said they will “vigorously” defend the organization, its staff, and its work against what they describe as baseless or politically driven accusations.They characterize the program of paid informants as a longstanding effort to infiltrate extremist groups in order to monitor threats and prevent violence, not to support or promote those groups.Interim CEO Bryan Fair has publicly defended the payments as necessary to place people at personal risk inside violent organizations and said information from informants was shared with law enforcement and “saved lives.”The Southern Poverty Law Center’s Salaries* Margaret Huang – President / CEO* Reportable compensation from SPLC: 466,934 USD* Other compensation from SPLC/related organizations: 55,806 USD* Derwyn Bunton – Chief Legal Officer* Reportable compensation from SPLC: 264,277 USD* Other compensation from SPLC/related organizations: 37,801 USD* Lashawn Warren – Chief Policy Officer* Reportable compensation from SPLC: 256,191 USD* Other compensation from SPLC/related organizations: 37,435 USD* Seth Levi – Chief Program Strategy Officer* Reportable compensation from SPLC: 251,745 USD* Other compensation from SPLC/related organizations: 36,151 USD* Ann Beeson – Chief Program Officer* Reportable compensation from SPLC: 249,191 USD* Other compensation from SPLC/related organizations: 47,519 USD* Sybil Hadley – General Counsel* Reportable compensation from SPLC: 242,869 USD* Other compensation from SPLC/related organizations: 47,089 USD* Cherry Gamble – Chief Development Officer / Interim Chief of Staff* Reportable compensation from SPLC: 240,721 USD* Other compensation from SPLC/related organizations: 47,208 USD* Arun Kandel – Chief Information Officer* Reportable compensation from SPLC: 239,894 USD* Other compensation from SPLC/related organizations: 46,924 USD* Twyla Williams – Chief Human Resources Officer* Reportable compensation from SPLC: 237,861 USD* Other compensation from SPLC/related organizations: 47,505 USD* Erika Mitchell – Treasurer / CFO* Reportable compensation from SPLC: 225,020 USD* Other compensation from SPLC/related organizations: 45,658 USD* Shannon Farley – Interim Chief of Staff* Reportable compensation from SPLC: 210,108 USD* Other compensation from SPLC/related organizations: 43,710 USD* Julian Teixeira – Chief Communications Officer* Reportable compensation from SPLC: 190,894 USD* Other compensation from SPLC/related organizations: 28,552 USDEpisode TranscriptMalcolm Collins: Hello, Simone. I am beyond thrilled to be here with you today because we got the craziest of crazy news.Oh my God. The KKK was funded by the Southern Poverty Law Center. For people who don’t know, that is one of the largest Anti-Defamation. Anti-racism organizations in the United States. This is the core leader and shield bearer of wokes with the only organizations that even come close being things like I wanna say the, the, like a DL right.And, andSimone Collins: they’re worse than the a DL. They’re, they’re more, they’re more extreme and active than the a DL, fromMalcolm Collins: my view. Yes. This is like the leaders of the woke. This is, this is woke Kings of America,Simone Collins: the ultimate fighters of racism, presumably,Malcolm Collins: and not to a small amount. It was literally millions of dollars, multiple.Millions of dollars. And when you consider the amount of funding that something like the K, k, K [00:01:00] is likely actually getting from people, because if you’re employable or the type of person who can make millions of dollars, you typically don’t fund the K, KK.Simone Collins: No,Malcolm Collins: because well, one thing, you wanna keep your source of income even if you secretly agreed with them.And even if you didn’t, very few people who are like. Competent and make a lot of money are that level of racism in in the brand of the K, k, KSimone Collins: oh yeah. And also if, if you are actually super racist and you have a lot of money. You would secretly fund acts of racism in other ways? Like these organizations are notMalcolm Collins: effective.Simone Collins: Yeah, they’re not actually effective in driving racism. Like maybe you’d buy like Russian bot farms to fuel, like racist hate or something. Maybe pay some like Pakistani people to like, you know, spam with a lot of clips that are racist. X and YouTube and Instagram, but not. Not the K, k, K. It’s so weird.Not like the National Socialists in in America. [00:02:00] What are you doing?Malcolm Collins: This may have been, and we’ll be going into this the core thing, keeping the lights on at the KKK. Mm-hmm. And note here, it wasn’t just the KKK, you know, the Charlotte V riots that the left freaked out at forever. And then they play that clipped piece of Trump saying good people on both sides, and then saying very explicitly, but I do not mean the racist.Right. Like obviouslySimone Collins: they leave that out. No, no one knows about thatMalcolm Collins: party. No, they leave that out, right? Because they lie. That’s the only way that their side seems like the good guys. But it turns out that the racists who were at that rally were bused there. By the Southern Poverty Law Center’s dollarSimone Collins: and or were paid plants by the Southern Poverty Law Center.Malcolm Collins: Well, they say paid plants, but I wanna go into how plausible is it that these people were actually paid plants and that they were not paying to just keep the lights on within these organizations so that they would have a reason to protest, to ask for more power, to ask for more money to [00:03:00] accumulate.You know, government and bureaucratic resources in power,Simone Collins: because this exemplifies something we say about nonprofits over and over. If you see a nonprofit that makes its money from donations and has survived for any non-trivial period of time. This is not something that exists to, to serve its mission.This is an organization that specializes in raising money. And if you’re raising money, presumably for a cause, the bigger and badder and scarier, the, the battle you’re fighting seems the more effective you will be at your actual functional purpose, which is raising money. So the Southern Poverty Law Center, it, it’s existentially dependent on the existence of.Cartoonish racism in the United States. And this really exemplifies just how terrible it is to be an organization that depends on donations for survival.Malcolm Collins: Well, I mean, I think, and I’ve said this and this is one of the things we’re gonna go over in this episode, is that [00:04:00] most of the cartoonish racism w.States, it’s now clear is actually AstroTurf by leftist. Yeah. And we’re gonna go into evidence of, for example, Nick Fuentes. Over half of his viewership maybe around 75% looks to be Botted. Oh. Really? Yeah. I mean the, the left has basically made him relevant again by continuously publishing pieces on him and doing, which we will go into.A huge amount of botting of him, because obviously this isn’t right wing people botting him, he keeps telling people to vote against Republicans, right? Like he’s one of the biggest annoyances to the Republican party. The group that benefits the most from his voice going silent is Republicans, right?Mm-hmm. And so what we’re basically gonna point out is, is this is just not a, a widely held position among any portion of the base. There aren’t these cartoonish racists out there anymore. Yeah. At least in terms of like any, any organized capacity, any large ground swell capacity, there [00:05:00] are people with specific racial grievances.Like the tearing down of historic statues. But anyone could see why that would cause somebody to be upset or people taking jobs for undermarket rages or certain groups acting in ways that are unfair, like, promoting their own over outsiders, like happens sometimes with Indian immigrants and people can complain about that.Or crime waves associated. With Catholic immigrants, which we have another wave of right now. And every time we get a wave of those, we get a huge organized crime. Boom. Point out like the mob, the mafia, just a Catholic immigrant thing. But these are all, these are all his like just things that we, the US have done historically.The cartoonish racism. And again, people will be like, oh, cartoonish racism is historic to America. That might be a whole other episode is, is how actual were people in the past? Yeah. And we’ve pointed out when you actually go to writings and stuff like that during the period of active slavery, there was a lot of cartoonish [00:06:00] racism.But the average person was probably significantly less racist than you would imagine from what you are taught in schools today. Mm-hmm. And after slavery was over you know, you go to the 1950s and stuff like that. In some ways the average, like if you’re contrasting it with the white economic situation.Today is significantly better when compared to the black economic situation than the two were in like the 1950s, for example. Mm-hmm. Same with racially motivated violence. If you look at black people who were killed from 1950 to 1960, I go to 1950. ‘cause that’s when people see as like the, the cartoonish.You know, whatever period.Simone Collins: Exactly.Malcolm Collins: And you contrast that and we have other videos where we like go into all the numbers on this with a number of black people who were killed or racially motivated crimes in the past 10 years. It’s something like five x higher in the last 10 years. Yeah. Which I think thingsSimone Collins: have not improved.Malcolm Collins: Surprise a lot of people. Well, no, it’s not that they’ve not improved. It’s that we might have been sold a false history about. Racial tensions in the United States. Mm-hmm. Which [00:07:00] some people and I, I’ve noted a lot of people who are these young men who are cued and tricked by these leftist campaigns into believing things that work against the broader rights goals.Is, is they sort of adopt a conservatism that isn’t a indicative of any real historic thought pattern, but is much closer to what a woke progressive Cartoonishly depicts their conservative villain to be. Mm-hmm. You know, that’s, that’s like I point out like, nick Fuentes ideology is completely incoherent.He’s a Catholic integralist who is upset about Catholic, Hispanic immigration into the United States. If you are unaware of what the end goal of Catholic nationalism is, it’s that the whole world is under one Catholic government, right? The the Vatican, right? If he. You [00:08:00] cannot want borders to stop existing and all be under one giant global Catholic government and be upset about a majority Catholic immigrant population.That makes no sense. That is completely incoherent,Speaker: Specifically, what I mean by that is the entire world existing underneath a Catholic government being the ideal form of government, presumably means that the United States would only be better from your perspective as it became more Catholic. And you can’t say, well, they’re a different type of Catholic from a different region.Because the end goal is all regions under one government,Malcolm Collins: but. Catholicism is seen as like the most bog standard christiany form of Christianity to Wokes. So I’m gonna go with that. And being racist, well, I’m scared of racist, so I’m gonna go with that. And I bet these cartoonist racists really hate Mexicans, so I’m gonna go with that.And I also [00:09:00] point out here Catholicism more broadly. Generally like institutionally, one of the least racist forms of Christianity. And it has had to be given the way that it proselytizes. Yeah. So even the idea of being Catholic and a racial supremacist is a totally incoherent ide ideology.Simone Collins: Yeah. Like, have you. Seen how Catholicism has spread, how there’s this constant interest in trying to be like, oh, you know, you’ve always been Catholic. You’re one of us. Like it’s one of the most inclusive religions in the entire world. Insane.Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Like all your local gods we’re actually saints and you just made a mistake.And we can, we can work with that. Yeah.Simone Collins: Yeah, yeah.Malcolm Collins: So that is. And, and this is us. People who are typically on the show are seen as anti Romans or anti Catholics, right? You know, saying this right? Like it is not a racist religion. The Vatican is constantly putting out tracks about how we need no borders.We need, you know, let more immigrants in. This is [00:10:00] constant, like this is constantly coming from this pope. The last Pope. This is like mainstream. So what, what, the point I’m making here is a lot of these young people. And I, when I, when I talk about somebody like Nick Fuentes or some of these people who are funded by these organizations I’m not saying that they didn’t come to these positions on their own but Nick Fuentes even talks about how he came to his position.It wasn’t through logic, it was through feeling pushed into these positions. Mm-hmm. By what’s his name?Simone Collins: Ben Shapiro.Malcolm Collins: Ben Shapiro, and other people who constantly went after him. And it’s like. I can,Simone Collins: how seemingly out of nowhere before he was famous or big.Malcolm Collins: Oh, we’re gonna do a different episode on the Jews where we go into, like, the Jews are causing a lot of problems for themselves right now and Jewish.Communities need to like they are minting, antisemites. And if you look at Nick Fuentes history and how he was turned into an antisemite, you can see how any like young person could have been [00:11:00] radicalized by the way that. Ben Shapiro using e enormous power compared to what Nick had at the time attempted to isolate and freeze him out.And there’s some people who back down when you do that to them. But there’s a lot of people, especially people from young white male cultures in the United States that if you do that to them, they are only going to double down you, you that, that, that is, that it like definitionally, there is nothing you could have done to him that would’ve forced him to double down more.Simone Collins: Huge tactical mistake.Malcolm Collins: Yes. A massive tactical mistakes that’s being made across Jewish issues right now, which, separate episode, because that one’s going to piss off a lot of people. It’s, it’s bad. It’s bad. But I wanted to go into this because what I wanna understand is one, who are they funding?What were they doing right? How did they think this would work for people who wanna say no? No, no. Genuinely they were just trying to get information on these organizations. That, that’s the biggest question I have. Were they, like, were they doing what they’re [00:12:00] saying they were doing, or were they actually just trying to fund the opposition?So, and, and opposition existed so that their stupid flywheel of money could go on forever. Right. Have you looked into the, the cases of this Simone? Like, are you familiar? I have like, what’s your takeSimone Collins: on it? Yes. Yeah. BeforeMalcolm Collins: we go,Simone Collins: what’s my take on, like, what’s actually going on? I, I think that they, they reasoned internally to themselves that they were.Putting plants and informants inside these organizations and or working with people who said that they would be willing to serve as such for them. Mm-hmm. But I do not think that functionally that’s what they ended up doing. And it really. Maybe without fully consciously acknowledging it, they were just fueling the racism themselves.We, we had experienced personally someone who was acting as an undercover plant for the UK’s equivalent of the Southern Poverty Law [00:13:00] Center called Hope Not Hate.Malcolm Collins: Yeah.Simone Collins: And so we know that organizations do this. They make up fake identities and they, yeah. Clearly, you know, fund these people. They give, they give them budgets to go and try to embed with racists.But then we see, we saw the other end of it in the most charitable interpretation of this. You know, one in which funding wasn’t used to fuel bad activity. Right. Which we know it was, we know it was used to transport people to the, the Charlottesville protests. We know it was used to do actual concrete, naughty things as it were.But still what we were, what what, what happened with us was the, the plant from Hope, not Hate, that interacted with us acted like they were a prospective investor. But they were like super racist and kind of like kept dog whistling to us about sort of being some kind of supremacist. And like they wanted to give us money now.They never gave us money. They never funded us. So Hope [00:14:00] not hate was not doing that, but they were still actively like shifting what could have been an Overton window. Like our world, they were trying to communicate like,Malcolm Collins: yeah, they,Simone Collins: I have money and if you guys lean into my racist messaging, then you can have money too.Malcolm Collins: Which, yeah, but they were basically actively trying to make the prenatal list movement a more racist movement in ev in everything that they did at everything that they went to.Simone Collins: And this is the most charitable interpretation where no money was actually given, where this wasn’t used to fund any, any naughty, bad stuff.It was stillway,Malcolm Collins: It’s, this is stuff that we, you know, we’ve already seen from organizations like hope Not Hate that they. Embedded people in the prenatal movement to try to make the movement with promises of future funding more racist. Now we pushed back against that. That is clear in the hope not hate documentation of what happened here, where we’re like no.Obviously they don’t, they don’t. Publish that part, but it’s pretty obvious given that they weren’t able to get us saying anything racist. [00:15:00] That we pushed back pretty hard on his racist stuff.Simone Collins: But let’s look at, so in terms of this Southern Poverty Law Center, did, did you look at the indictment from the Department of Justice?Malcolm Collins: Yeah.Simone Collins: And the claims madeMalcolm Collins: so.Simone Collins: Because the indictment shows that this is just so much worse than what we had experienced from an embedded, you know, again, charitably interpreted, embedded plant trying to exposeMalcolm Collins: things. Well,Simone Collins: no, it’s soMalcolm Collins: much worse. And, and to me, I think it’s implausible that they were just trying to get information.Simone Collins: Yeah. So in the indictment, they, they they anonymize the secret plants, you know, that were put and they give them, theyMalcolm Collins: probably are because we found thatSimone Collins: Oh, that’s great. But in terms of the Charlotte, the Charlottesville plant. There’s just no way that they didn’t fuel things happening. So they call this one F 37 in the indictment.Mm-hmm. And F 37 was. Okay, if allegedly, they’re a Southern Poverty Law Center, they, nevertheless were a member of the online Leadership chat group [00:16:00] that planned the 2017 Unite the Right Event in Charlottesville. They, they participated in planning it. They attended the event at the Southern Poverty Law Center’s direction.They made racist postings under their supervision and helped coordinate transportation for several attendees without their participation. It is plausible that maybe the event would not have happened. Because I could even see, again, if I go back to the, you know, our interaction,Malcolm Collins: a plan, no, I mean, it’s, it’s worse than that.It wouldn’t have happened. What would’ve happened is it would’ve just been a normal right wing event, right wing protest against racialist overreach against. Whites in America, which the leftists regularly do, and is something worthy of protesting.Simone Collins: Mm-hmm.Malcolm Collins: But they come in with this explicit racist messaging so that they can discount a a protest.It’s over an issue that a lot of people care about.Simone Collins: Yeah. And it’s, it’s, [00:17:00] it’s been shown in so many different psychological studies that people. We’ll lean into norms set in a group. So if you have someone coming in and they’re just like saying all these racist things and stuff like. Especially if they’re charismatic.And, and funny and otherwise like genial you know, people might be like, yeah, sure, like whatever. Like, it makes me kind of uncomfortable, but I’m trying to fit in here. This is also a very known issue, like I think plants with the FBI and and other government organizations that have also been embedded to try to.Root out bad things like this then sometimes get implicated in crimes happening that would not have otherwise happened because they’re like supplying guns and they’re, they’re supplying other things and they not going too far.Malcolm Collins: The thing that makes it implausible for me is so like, okay, so they, they have these plants in these organizations?Simone Collins: Yeah,Malcolm Collins: well, there are a few. Innocent things you could argue. Now, first note that it, the big red flag for me that, that this is not an innocent [00:18:00] explanation. Okay. Is they were funding fund fund funding this through money laundering.Simone Collins: Oh, yes. Yeah. So the Southern Poverty Law Center created these separate bank accounts with different names that were so, you know, like, oh, what were the names of some of them?They were so suss. They, they were, they created fictitious entities called the Center Investigative Agency and Fox Photography, and Northwest Technologies and Tech Writers Group and Rare Books Warehouse to conceal the money that came from the donor funds from this, this nonprofit. And then after the accounts were shut down they claim in the indictment at least.That the Southern Poverty Law Center then continued to pay these, these secret informants through Aach H transfers, which they labeled with disguised monikers, like rare books, 0 5 0, and IPR Research con 0 5 0.Malcolm Collins: So wait, they were caught and they went back to doing it after being caught.Simone Collins: I didn’t pick up [00:19:00] from the indictment, which I’m gonna link to in the show notes.I’ll put show notes in. It why they were, why those accounts were shut down. But I think at that point they were trying to hide it. Keep in mind and I don’t know, like in the response that they have posted to this indictment, it is an interim CEO giving the response. And the, that means that, like there’s the, the, the former CEO whose salary I have ‘cause I also wanna discuss how much of this leadership is, is making for this nonprofit.HowMalcolm Collins: much, how much?Simone Collins: So I think something happened with leadership. Maybe they saw this coming or they knew about the indictment. They must have known about the indictment and that this was coming. So the previous CEO, who was Margaret Huang, she made $466,934 in reportable compensation per the, the nine 90 nonprofit filingMalcolm Collins: half million dollars a year,Simone Collins: half a million dollarsMalcolm Collins: she was making.Simone Collins: And then other compensation from Southern Poverty Law Center related organizations, another $55,000. [00:20:00]Malcolm Collins: So,Simone Collins: which is like, you know, a year’s salary for a normal person. But no, that’s just her extra,Malcolm Collins: extraSimone Collins: compensation.Malcolm Collins: So what I wanna go over here is, is to continue going through this thought experiment. Yeah.So, we know that they were willing to go to great lengths to attempt to hide this, which keep in mind you can do this sort of stuff without needing to hide these trails. Right. Like the k, k, K does not have a very sophisticated financial investigation wing. To track this stuff. The, the guy who was embedded in the prenatal orgs by hope, not hate, he didn’t have to launder money to do that.So the fact that they went out of their way to launder money to do these sorts of operations against technologically unsophisticated. Groups that are dramatically underfunded certainly wouldn’t be able to track them. Shows that this was about hiding it, not from those groups, but from stuff like the federal government.Simone Collins: Well, no, from donors is, and that’s what this indictment is about. It’s, it’s not like a. Oh, you’re trying to hide this from us. It’s that you lied to [00:21:00] donors. These people thought that they were funding ‘cause they’re very clear about their mission, that they’re trying to, you know, bring an end to racism in the south and to create a very inclusive, you know, non-racist America.What they were ending up doing was funding the most racist organizations in the United States, like cartoonishly, racist, not even efficacious organizations.Malcolm Collins: Well, we keep seeing this like the BLM fraud, right? Where, you know, they, they ran off with all the money. But, okay. So could they plausibly?Actually another tangent I wanna go on before I go into this.Simone Collins: Okay.Malcolm Collins: This is why we on the right need to be very guarded against people who come off like this, right? Or against people who have been fooled by people who come off like this and be like, no, that’s not what we stand for. And you really shouldn’t say things like that.You, it. It’s not even to say like. It’s wrong, which I don’t say. I say, well, I can understand how somebody could [00:22:00] have these perspectives. It doesn’t help us win. Okay. Including that in the panoply of things that we are fighting for does not help us win. Mm-hmm. And this is where somebody. On the leaflets red, they wanted me to address this Asma Gold saying that he agrees with 99% of what Nick Fuentes says, right?And I’m like, yeah, I do too. Nick Fuentes says a lot of stuff. But when you say it’s, it’s the 1% of stuff that’s absolutely crazy that I’m like. That’s obviously meant to sabotage the wider movement. You say 99% of things. Okay. And then you say that 1%, like, I, you know, I want US troops to die, right? Like, what I want the US to lose in Iran.How, how are you on our side in any of this? Right. Or when I talk about like the things that the right just can’t accept when he is like, I, you know, I can’t support Trump anymore because he took JD Vance to the can, a VP candidate JD Vance a. [00:23:00] Anti-war. He’s the most anti-Iran war guy right now in the White House?Catholic.Simone Collins: Yeah.Malcolm Collins: But because he’s in an interracial relationship actually having, is thatSimone Collins: his stated reason? Is that his statedMalcolm Collins: reason? That was his original stated reason. He’s in an interracial, oh Lord. I don’t think, bro, that will not win elections. We will never, and people are like, well, if we could get all the whites to vote this way, but they won’t.Okay. You know, they won’t, I know they won’t becauseSimone Collins: they just, they don’t care. Most people don’t care.Malcolm Collins: Yeah. So if you culturally want to have some, some bias against that, fine, whatever. But we are in this to actually win, not get money from the what it is or Southern Poverty Law Center. SPCL is that SSimone Collins: plc.Malcolm Collins: SPLC. SPLC Nick? Yes from the, the Southern Property Law Center. And I, and I, and I note that like, you, you guys need to stop being so gullible about this stuff. Like, I, [00:24:00] it kind of gets me, because I wonder when we do some comments are these like page shows trying to make us look at, it’s very clear that on like our subreddit recently, a bunch of people have been coming in creating stupid straw band arguments that nobody who’s like actually trying to win would be makingSimone Collins: really.Malcolm Collins: And it’s like. Why is somebody doing this? Oh, you’re probably trying to get this rubber band entirely, you know, you already got it. Shadow banned when it, when it previously had made its way up to one of the top 50 easily subreddits on the website. Mm-hmm. Which was very frustrating. But that’s where we are.But okay. Back to plausible. Is their explanation good enough? So it was over the course of nine years mm-hmm. It was over $3 million with soSimone Collins: much money,Malcolm Collins: 1 million alone going to just one guy in organization. So enormous amounts, concentrating, going to individuals, keeping this stuff alive involved in the biggest flash points in organizing the biggest racial flash points.And so you could say, well, why could they have been [00:25:00] doing this? Like, what are the plausible other reasons to do this? Reason number one is they wanted to sabotage these organization’s efforts, right? Like that could have been a good reason to do this. Completely implausible. Like, the, the, the guys made no actions to sabotage anything and repeatedly advanced the efforts of these organizations and then got more money, like you could say, like maybe we gave him some money and he said he was gonna sabotage it and then he didn’t sabotage it and then we stopped giving him money.But no, they like went outta the way to even change how they were funding the guy. Right. Or, or various of these guys. So that’s, that’s not in thisSimone Collins: Well, yeah, you’re, so the, the, just to be a little more concrete, the over 1 million that you’re referring to was for not the unite the right, like the unite the right rally that we referred to earlier, but rather a different informant that was associated with the neo-Nazi National Alliance and.They, the indictment at least states that the [00:26:00] donation money was used, quote for the benefit of the individuals as well as the. Violent extremist groups. End quote, which in this case includes a fundraiser for neo-Nazi organization. They’re, yeah, just, I just wanna be super clear when Malcolm says like, help them, you know, perpetuate themselves and, and survive that, that, that is what was actually going on.Which is. Unhinged. And, and also just to be clear,Malcolm Collins: so let’s go to other potential reasons, okay? Okay.Simone Collins: Okay. SoMalcolm Collins: no, it wasn’t to sabotage the organizations ‘cause they were doing the exact,Simone Collins: no, they were helping them raise money. Okay. Right. They were helping them raise money and they were, they were filling the pockets and sustaining the lifestyle of basically people who served as free volunteers for these organizations, keeping them alive.Malcolm Collins: So, we have the plausible, they are infiltrating these organizations to sabotage them not happening. Okay? It could be that they were infiltrating these organizations to gather evidence. And this is one of the, the, the things that they’ve claimed. One of these [00:27:00] guys rated an opposing white nationalist organizations offices and stole documentation.The problem is, is this super doesn’t hold up. Let me explain why. So what information might you have wanted to get from these organizations? The key reason you would want to implant yourself in a potentially racist organization like Hope Not Hate did with us was to try to find evidence of, or create evidence of that organization being racist.Yes. The problem is, is that the organizations that they were implanting themselves in. Are clearly on their face racist. You don’t need a secret informant to know that the KKK is racist.Simone Collins: I hadn’t even thought about that. Yeah, right. Guys, guys, we found out the KK, K, they’re kind of racist.Malcolm Collins: They, they do racist.Tough and have a racist view. Yes, that’s good’s, that’s completely implausible. Amazing. So you could say, okay, [00:28:00] well it might be to track their operations or to look for like, are they gonna do anything violent in the future or anything like that, right?Simone Collins: Yeah. And, and to be clear, the interim CEO. Response to this indictment press release is the, the information we found saved lives.They’re, they’re trying to argue that just, just to, againMalcolm Collins: Yeah. Share their thought. The problem is, is that this is also completely implausible. So first of all, the information that they gathered from these organizations the, the files that they stole and stuff like that were of. Past actions of the organization.They weren’t of future plans of the organization, they were of past receipts, et cetera, right? Like they were about what the organization had did historically. That is a very little utility. Of saving lives or preventing future terroristic action. Secondarily, the people that they were giving money to within these organizations [00:29:00] seemed ideologically aligned with these organizational visions, right?They were only using this money to advance the causes of these organizations. If there was some terroristic action in the planning, these people simply wouldn’t tell them. They would have no reason to tell them. They would actually have an even easier time occluding that some terroristic action was happening.If you wanted to search out that, what you would do is embed somebody in these organizations like Hope Not Hated with views that are. Actually leftist views just pretending to be a rightist. You don’t actually give the money to somebody who wants to say, exterminate the Jews, right? Like that. What, what, what else could they plausibly have, have put them in for?And I’d note here if they’re like, oh, this information saved lives. Point to it. What operation did you run based on this? What? [00:30:00] Nothing.Simone Collins: No. All they said was that they gave information to law enforcement that saved lives. They weren’t explicit about it. It’sMalcolm Collins: not illegal for them to be explicit about it, so why aren’t they?Oh, because theySimone Collins: lying. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That’s true. If I were them, I’d be like, look, there was this one instance where they were like, we’re gonna take out this guy, and then we told the police and that guy was put in a safe house and now he’s Okay. I wanna say that. Yeah. It’s, it’s much better story. Yeah.Malcolm Collins: The, the final and this, this is the like, okay. Maybe, maybe is they were just trying to get people involved in these organizations arrested get enough information from people within this wider sphere who might have been hostile to other people that is you. You note the people that they were targeting is people who had lots of beefs within these spaces and get them to attempt to wipe people out of these spaces.That. That is plausible. But then why, why aren’t they, why aren’t they noting wins on [00:31:00] that front? Like presumably they should have been able to get multiple arrests with, with that much money and that time in? Well,Simone Collins: the, the narrative they’ve presented though, because they’re saying, well, we’re not doing it anymore.And when we did do it. It was in order to gather credible intelligence on white supremacist and extremist groups that pose serious threats to communities. So I think the story they’re trying to sell is, well, we thought that if we paid these people to be spies and moles inside these organizations, that we would be able to protect vulnerable communities that might be victimized by them.And that was the whole point. When I mean that it’s flimsy, but when you look at the reporting. On very left-leaning organizations or media outlets that are covering this, they’re just running with it. Like, well, obviously the Southern Poverty Law Center needed to embed with evil groups to keep people safe.And they sort of hand wave with that. And so, I mean, [00:32:00] it’s not great, but I think if you, if you don’t pay enough attention, it’s okay. WorksMalcolm Collins: well. Yeah. If you’re, if you’re not paying attention, this seems plausible, but if you actually look at the on the ground facts, we don’t have any meaningful information that was ever transferred to the Southern Poverty Law Center.Now, let’s look at the counterfactual, right? Mm-hmm. They would put that information out there. There’s legally no reason why they shouldn’t.Simone Collins: Well, they kind of do. So they, they went off, they went off off Twitter, ex, formerly known as Twitter in 2024. With Elon Musk, I think really rising on it. Yeah. They just, they left their account there, but they stopped posting.And that was the period in which this whole activity was very active. And now all of their posts, which they just, you know, left up. Feel like just a report on all of the racist activity that they funded. They’re like, look at the racism across America. And they like proudly have, you know, their whole like racist maps of America and all this stuff.And [00:33:00] it now when you look at it and you scroll through it, knowing this it just reads so different active hate in anti-government groups in the US in 2023. And then it like gives this like animated map. And it just seems like. This proud count of things that they’ve funded. It’s really bad. No,Malcolm Collins: but the the funny thing is, is that, the, if you, if you think about this from their perspective.Simone Collins: Mm-hmm.Malcolm Collins: Okay. So you are them. Let’s go back 10 years when this started, right?Simone Collins: Yeah.Malcolm Collins: If you guys remember what the KKK was like 10 years ago or what racist groups were like in America 10 years ago, they would do like a KKK rally and it’d be like four old men like walking through.Yeah, it made you actually feel kind of sad for them. You’re like, wow. Like, they’dSimone Collins: be like, oh buddy. Like, do you want, do you want me to join you?Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Like, come on man.Simone Collins: I’ll put on a blue pillow and some khakis and they’reMalcolm Collins: not a threat toSimone Collins: anyone. Teammate, torch and walk with you. Yeah, it’sMalcolm Collins: okay. Giant crowd yelling at them was of course, [00:34:00] always happened as well.Now you look at like the tiki torch rallies and stuff like that during the period that this was being funded. I can totally see what’s going through their heads. They look at these protests and they’re like, this is why nobody’s giving us money anymore because there aren’t cartoonish racists in America anymore.Simone Collins: Mm-hmm.Malcolm Collins: And we need to create them. And. Note here, like you can talk about like, and this is what the new right. People are like, oh, I don’t like you speaking on the values of this new right movement. It’s like, I’m, I’m sorry. There’s few people who more embody the tech right than like us, right? Like we we’re, we’re not only that, but we have a pretty loud voice in the space as well.So like it’s easy for us to, on a loud. Large scale and intellectually articulate because that’s one of the things we do on the show is anthropology and political strategy. So for us to be talking about it only makes sense, right? And through talking about it and [00:35:00] through defining and helping understand it better we can develop.You know, you could, you could summit it into being, to an extent, which is what we’ve been seeing more and more is this community of content creators who represent this movement. And in this movement we try to have honest discussions about race, about genetic differences, about rare interracial integration is not working where we need to, uh uh, because these conversations.Need to be had. There are way when somebody’s like, oh, there are racial, yeah, there’s racial conflicts. And that means that interracial integration isn’t going the way that like the urban monoculture wants it to go. So we need to talk about how we actually long-term could resolve these issues. And, these conversations that absolutely need to happen, get shut down by the person who’s just making like racial slurs or secret Nazi signs to like troll reporters or you [00:36:00] know, although it was hilarious. Nick’s your body. My choice thing, right? LikeSimone Collins: that was well done. Yes,Malcolm Collins: that was well done. Also, his Pierce Morgan interview was very well done.Mm-hmm. Like he hasn’t done everything, but like when somebody’s like, I agree. Like that entire Pierce Morgan interview, I was like. Clearly Paris Morgan is a buffoon compared to Nick Fuentes on these part. Well,Simone Collins: as you pointed out elsewhere, people just really like people online. One in in IRL who are vitalistic and happy and optimistic, and though I would argue he has a fairly whiny message, sometimes he comes across in his delivery as someone who’s having a lot of fun and is passionate and is vitalistic, and people just like watching that and being around it.Malcolm Collins: Yeah, and then there’s our fact, funny is our faction of the right, and you can watch our video on the woke, right, is the faction that. People call the woke. Right? Right. Like it is, it is not the deontological nick faction that people [00:37:00] call the woke. Right. Which is funny because they’ve tried to claim that people are referring to them, but if you actually read the long breakdowns on who is this new woke Right.Contingent they’re very clearly talking about us. See our video on that if you’re, if you’re interested in it. And, and sort of our wider intellectual sphere. And, and when I say us, I don’t mean us specifically. I’m talking about like this wider community that isn’t obsessed with creating a sort of.Theocracy in the United States, but instead wants to win on same policy issues because we can do that now. Right? Well, and, and push very hard against really dangerous cults that are growing in our country. Like the cult that’s growing under the banner, under the guise of a part of the trans movement that I think a lot of people can see that is behaving more like a cult.And we can work to address this, but we can’t work to address this. When somebody comes in the worm and then starts shouting you know, slurs at [00:38:00] these groups and stuff like that, or starts berating gay people or something, right? Like, that prevents us from having the same conversations that we need to have to get realistic policy implemented, because presumably that’s all of our goals, right?Mm-hmm. It’s many to build a large enough coalition that we can actually change the cultural window. And I think that they, they frankly, were effective at doing this. And, and worse, this galvanizes the left when you had the left go out and do the BLM movement and everything like that. Obviously funded by Russia.See our episode on that. If you’re unfamiliar with it being funded by Russia, like the receipts are. ManifoldSimone Collins: that blew my mind. I was like, this can’t possibly even beMalcolm Collins: literally the, you know how the left was like, oh, Russia funded like Donald Trump’s election, literally of the money they were spending to try to manipulate American public opinion.For every $1 that went to help Trump win the election [00:39:00] or was presumably went to help Trump, they spent on all spoiler candidates. They also spent on Bernie Sanders. So like, clearly it wasn’t a left versus right thing. They spent for every $1 on Trump, it was $9 on BLM. Right? So when people are like, oh, Russia Putin buddy, buddy.I’m like, if you don’t like BLM, they’re like, these people are effing with us. Right? But in regard to the, the, the BLM stuff. But I think it was Russia’s funding of that in, in coalition with stuff like this group that allowed for this perception on the left. They need to see these large crowds doing these racist things,Simone Collins: but you can’t raise money if all you have is photos of pathetic.KKK rallies with like five old men showing up, right? You, you need, you need good photos, you need good stories, you need good anecdotes. And if they did not invest that $3 million, they would’ve had a harder time raising [00:40:00] however million, million dollars they’ve raised. I actually only looked at.Leadership salaries. I didn’t look at how much they’ve raised historically, but no doubt it’s a lot. Because while their top CEO was a paid almost $500,000 on almost half a million basically the next five leadership people were each paid around 270, $250,000. Like a lot of money. These are huge salaries for nonprofit.So they, they must be raising a ton of money. Oh,Malcolm Collins: oh, by the way, if you just wanna go over quickly on the Nick Fuentes being widely AstroTurf.Simone Collins: Sure.Malcolm Collins: So, what we see, it’s in the first 30 minutes after posting Fuentes routinely gets retweets at amounts 10 to a hundred x more than his followers Were suggest outperforming individuals.Elon Musk, which just does not make sense. Who has 200 million plus followers in raw numbers from Nick Fuentes tweets. Now, the [00:41:00] accounts that were doing this, when they did the thing where they revealed what countries these accounts were from, oh no, they were predominantly from India. Pakistan, Nigeria, Malaysia, and Indonesia.Not famously. Countries with a bunch of you know, like anti-Indian racists and stuff like that. Well, that’s Pakistan, right? They get all the Pakistanis who hate Indians and all the Indians who hate Pakistanis to, to retweet, to, no, obviously this is a, this is a, a, a faking it campaign. 60 to 92% of that initial birth.Comes from a small cluster of accounts that retweet him within multiple minutes. 92% of these repeat early retweeters were fully anonymous, and it was only revealed that they were from these countries when the, the, the big leak came, came out. So, very likely that if, if we’re seeing his ex account being heavily faked this says to me that his viewers are probably heavily faked as well.Mm-hmm. Which is almost sort of sad because [00:42:00] like I, I don’t, I don’t think that he isn’t bringing something valuable to the conversation. I think that there are some areas that are worth digging in further. You know, it is worse being more critical, and we’ll definitely be doing that in a, in a near future episode of Jewish relations with the right in the United States and how those can be best addressed given some recent events.And, that that is absolutely. That is absolutely something that is very hard for people to surface. And when I say hard, I mean logistically hard. Mm-hmm. You bring that stuff up, your account gets banned as we saw happen. To who that giant creator. Who was, who found that Jewish city in New Jersey, and they removed him from patriarch.Simone Collins: Oh yeah. I don’t know his name, but yeah. He, he also has looked at Indian communities. He is just looked at crime in New York. It’s not as though his entire account is, I hate Jews.Malcolm Collins: Remember [00:43:00] what’s crazier is like. His attack on the Indian community was over a cultural festival, right? Like that they’ve been doing for a long time.Like that’s just part of their culture that is significant.Simone Collins: Oh, no. He, he also did a separate one on, on a primarily Indian community, I think in, in Texas. Maybe it was in Tyler. Where he, he walked, walked around.Malcolm Collins: TheySimone Collins: were doing fraud, but No, no. A lot of it was like, he, he would ask people, he’d like, go into like a seven 11, like, I’m gonna find the Indians.And then he’d walk into a seven 11 and be like, Hey, on what visa are you here? Do you plan on staying here? Where’s your family? You know, he would just ask those kinds of questions because the premise of it, of the video was this Texas town or city is being taken over by Indian immigrants. Okay, I will go talk with them.But anyway,Malcolm Collins: but the point being is that both of these attacks on Indians were significantly more unfounded. Okay. Because one was a very cultural ceremony and the other was people being here [00:44:00] illegal then demonstrably large amounts of welfare fraud by Hasidic Jews, right? Like this is a well recorded phenomenon.Right? And it was apparently, particularly egregious in the town and. Documented, egregious. This wasn’t like a, he figured this out thing. This is a, like a well-known phenomenon in this region.Simone Collins: Yeah. I mean, he went to the town because it was famous for it. He went to all these places because they were famous for these things.Malcolm Collins: But in, in the episode on that, what we’re basically had to point out is then the a DL went to have him banned. So he couldn’t, like, they moved against him. They spoke against him rather than just admitting. Like, oh or, or better, like most communities should do, go after the, the, the Jews who were committing the welfare fraud be like, Hey this is the problem and they shouldn’t be doing this.And we’re glad that he brought this to our attention so that this can be addressed was in because there used to be Jewish courts for handling this. But we’ll go over this in our [00:45:00] episode on that. But the point I’m making here is it’s important that we as a wider movement, do not fall for what is AstroTurf or like what is fake and the sort of performative racism of youth that doesn’t move these conversations forward in a productive manner.Mm-hmm. There are a lot of people who are able to finally, after years, after decades, move the conversation around genetics, around birth rates, around immigrants. Communities not integrating with local communities able to move these conversations forwards to the part where we are seeing policy downstream of these implications actually being implemented, actually being plausible.Mm-hmm. And these other groups are just spoilers for our ability to achieve these. Its and I mean, we’re, we’re winning. We’re winning on restricting abortion access. We’re winning like this, [00:46:00] this stuff is moving forwards, right? We’re currently winning against the, the trans ideology. We’re currently winning against other demonstrably harmful ideologies, but we only keep winning.If we don’t allow ourselves to be cued by the groups, like hope not hate that, want to create the actual cartoonish racism. And I think it’s important that, that we see these people as one and the same. These are their foot soldiers. The, the KKK are foot soldiers of the Southern Poverty Law Center, not us.And that’s why, as we pointed out, and how the white laws are racist, the heads of the KKK, if you, if you didn’t know this. But going into the last Trump election, like this Trump election cycle said, do not vote for dumb Donald Trump. They said, vote for Kamala Harris. David Duke said this. Richard Spencer said this, and Nick Fuentes said this.They were pro Kamala Harris winning, and can you imagine the nightmare our society would be in? [00:47:00] Had that happened, X probably would’ve been taken down, put under.Simone Collins: Well, honestly, like that’s what, that’s what the Southern Poverty Law Center should be. Should be toting. They’d be like, that was us. That was us.We, we made them turn left. We made them contribute votes to our side. That would be aMalcolm Collins: win. Yeah. Well they’re, they’re acting like intentional spoilers, right? Yeah. You know, they’re acting in a way that I think shows their real agenda. And because yeah, there’s no other like, real plausible reason you would tell people to vote against Republican candidates.If, for example, I said, you believes that life really begins at conception and Republican candidates are successfully making it harder to get abortions.Octavian Collins: Hmm.Malcolm Collins: But oh, well, I love you Simone. You are an amazing woman. And one thing that I note at the end of all this, tying all this up, is if you’re like, but I, I want.You know, more racism to solve my racial grievances dying, white populations, dying, white [00:48:00] identity, whatever. Even if you’re one of these people, only you can save the white population, right? Like you, you, what I mean by that is you have to find a white woman and have children, and. Pass your culture onto those children in a way that work, like is intergenerationally stable?You know, who doesn’t have children over replacement rate? Richard Spencer, David Duke, and Nick Fuentes. None of them do. This isn’t real for them. Laura suer also no children. Even though she’s been engaged nine times, I’m like, that’s a you problem lady. Like people don’t get engaged nine times actually.But the point I’m making here is we need to not fall for this, right? I think you’re, think someone need to understand that you can. You can understand all of these problems, but still at the end of the day, you are the only one who can solve themSimone Collins: well. Yeah, and also just hating on other groups isn’t really gonna get you very far.It matters more that you’re able to make your group strong. If you really care about, like, if you’re a [00:49:00] supremacist, then okay, be a really good parent. Give your kids a great upbringing. Make them excited to pass on your culture to a lot of kids of their own. And, you know, impart advantages to them that give them advantages in terms of wealth and technology, because if you don’t, they will not have outsized influence and they will not matter and they will not shape the world.The fact that the, a lot of people are focusing so outward on these things of like, well, I don’t want them here and I don’t want this, and I, these people need to go away or whatever. Like, this is so stupid. Everyone is, everyone’s deleting themselves right now. This is, which all you have to do is just be chill and raise your kids well.Like this is not that hard.Malcolm Collins: Yeah. And it’s, and it’s like, and they’re like, well, if I don’t say like, I hate this group in a very angry way, then like, they’ll, they’ll not be leaving. I’m like, Trump’s successfully deporting people right now. Right. And, and at about as fast a speed as he can. In fact, he is deporting people so aggressively.That [00:50:00] Nick Fuentes has complained about it on multiple occasions, as has he, one of his grievances. Yes. He says that ice is acting like cartoonishly evil and stuff like that, and like too aggressively. This is how you have to act when you’reSimone Collins: getting bad actor. You cant make him happy. Oh my goodness.Malcolm Collins: Oh, and he’s just a bad actor.You know, you, you can’t complain about ice handling. F*****g problem. You say you want handled well, not understanding that people are going to resist and that’s going to look bad, that people are going to have children and that’s going to look bad. Right? LikeI just, it’s insane. Don’t understand how people fall for this. But apparently not a lot of people are. It’s just faked. It’s AstroTurf, it, it’s, it’s not a thing.Simone Collins: Well, I love you. I love that we live in a timeline where literally the most racist groups in America are funded literally by the Southern Poverty Law Center.They’re keeping it alive. The beating part of racism. Thank you.Malcolm Collins: They were funded by the Democrats when they were founded, andtheySimone Collins: all the, [00:51:00] all the donors, all the donors who are like, I’m donating to end racism.Malcolm Collins: I love you so much and have a spectacular day.Simone Collins: You too gorgeous.All right. I will see you on the next room.Malcolm Collins: How these companies, I get my site working for every browser, but no, they don’t get their sites working for every browser. I don’t want to though. When somebody enters an error on like a really obscure browser, I’m like, why don’t you use a normal f*****g browser, like a f*****g human adult?And they’re like, but people are tracking my theater. And I’m like, everyone’s tracking your data anyway. You dumb. But like, what century do you think we live in here?Simone Collins: So it goes,Malcolm Collins: it’s like if, if you use an obscure browser, it’s like you, you, you do it because you only want to use the biggest and largest and most mainstream of websites and products because those are the [00:52:00] only ones that are gonna be optimized for you. Which is very frustrating.Simone Collins: I. People have all sorts of weirdMalcolm Collins: things.You use a niche browser, you use the perplexity browser, right?Simone Collins: Yeah. But I really like it ‘cause I can just tell it to do things, to control my browser and do things that I, I need it to do that save me a lot of time.Malcolm Collins: What are we doing for dinner tonight?Simone Collins: I was planning on just making the kids something simple, but I don’t know quite whatis there anything you wanna add?Octavian Collins: Yes, the train. Lego, you love Legos?Simone Collins: Okay. Love you buddy.Malcolm Collins: Alright. What are we eating for dinner?Simone Collins: I don’t know. I can make you Burmese chicken with rice. I can make you. Some vermicelli noodles and those bun, let’s doMalcolm Collins: amusement chicken.Simone Collins: Amusement chicken of rice I think would be really nice. You haven’t had it in forever. [00:53:00] Yeah. Fried. So it’s crispy. Yeah. Let’s do it.Speaker 2: Okay. Andy. Andy, is it your birthday? It’s a I. Okay, so it’s your second birthday, right? Yes, it’s birthday. Birthday. Okay. And what is this? A birthday cake. What cake? I’m asking Andy. Andy, what is this? I got the taste, the ing. Andy. What? What is it? We can add? Taste only purple. Only purple. It’s only purple. Do you like the color purple?Speaker 3: You like it? Put the ing on on the cake.Speaker 5: Do not touch the cake. Okay,Speaker 2: wait.Speaker 5: Candles. Only purple birthday cake. Yeah.Speaker 2: Okay, so you only want purple birthday cake, right?Speaker 3: Jack has purple my white. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit basedcamppodcast.substack.com/subscribe

In this Based Camp episode, Malcolm and Simone Collins dive deep into robust, replicated studies on fertility, intelligence, politics, and religion. They explore why progressive (”dysgenic”) fertility patterns are clearing out high-IQ individuals faster than conservative ones, while certain religious groups — especially Latter-day Saints (Mormons) — show neutral or even eugenic selection for intelligence.Key topics include:- The landmark study “Will Intelligent Latter-Day Saints and Smart Conservatives Inherit the Earth?”- New 2024 findings from the Vietnam Experience Study on how conservative religiousness reverses the typical negative intelligence-fertility link- Why “moderately” religious people often have the highest fertility (not the fanatical ones)- Cultural and structural reasons behind Mormon success in building high-trust, low-corruption institutions- The Quaker origins of modern “woke” culture- Enlightenment ideals vs. 1960s–1970s cultural shifts- Implications for civilization, space colonization, and the future of humanityThey also discuss Techno-Puritanism, corruption in religious institutions, and why fanatical, high-agency groups are best suited for building utopias (including on Mars).If you’re interested in pronatalism, dysgenics, cultural evolution, or long-term civilizational strategy, this episode is packed with data, graphs, and unfiltered analysis.Watch the full conversation and let us know in the comments: Which religious or cultural group do you think has the strongest eugenic fertility patterns today?Studies referenced:- Kirkegaard & Dutton (2022) on LDS and conservatives- Dutton (2024) on conservative religiousness and intelligence selection (Vietnam Experience Study)Subscribe for more Based Camp episodes on the future of humanity, fertility, and culture.Episode TranscriptMalcolm Collins: [00:00:00] Hello Simone. I’m excited to be here with you today. Today we are going to be talking about a number of studies that were reconfirmed recently. Mm-hmm. So this is the, the third time that these studies have been tested and reconfirmed. So this is a, a very robust finding at this point.And I wanna talk about them and talk about the, the implications of this for civilization. It is strategies, culture, and how society’s going to change in the future. So, a study that a lot of people are aware of is the study titled will Intelligent Latter-Day Saints and Smart Conservatives Inherit the Earth?And what this study looked at, ‘cause a lot of people were familiar that it looked at Latter Day Saints versus Non Latter Day Saints. And when I heard the results of this study initially. Some people misframed it as saying Latter day Saints are one of the few religions that has eugenic effects. Like the, the culture of the latter day [00:01:00] saints has eugenic effects on the people who follow that religion.This is not actually what it showed it just, just looked at latter day Saints versus non latter day saints. And now newer studies have looked at other religious groups and they have a similar effect. Mm-hmm. Well, at least Christian groups. More that a second. And, and there’s been some people who said that this effect has died down in Latterday Saints.I, we actually had a fan who did a really cool thing. He, he went through Utah and then went by region to find the of effects of earning and IQ by looking at it regionally. And the amount that the region was. Sort of fanatically latter day saint. And, and this guy can pin his results if he wants to.In, in the, in the comments. He did this sort of recreationally himself. And he found something very interesting which we’ll also talk about in this because I think it adds to this a lot which is in his findings at least, was in the latter day [00:02:00] Saints, the very, very, very most religious individuals actually began to have lower fertility rates.Now they, they weren’t below the non-religious individuals, but the highest fertility rates are in the. Kind of religious individuals, like the, the, yeah, I’m, I’m really into that, but not super into that. Mm-hmm. And, and it’s interesting I point this out because at least anecdotally, this is what I see in other cultures.This is what I see with like the Catholics, for example. Of the Catholics I know who are like super high fertility. And I’ve pointed this out before. It’s not the fanatical ones. It’s the ones who are enjoyably culturally Catholic. Like they really have fun being culturally Catholic, but they don’t really mm-hmm.Care about the theology stuff that much. Let’s see, let’s get into the data here and then we can go into what might be causing that phenomenon. I mean, I think that phenomenon is kind of obvious. If you’ve seen the two groups, I don’t know how much I need to go into it. But well, [00:03:00] within Catholicism you’re gonna be like, well, obviously, you know, the most Catholic people are gonna be nuns or priests, so they’re not gonna have any kids at all.But the fact that you don’t see that in the letter they saints and, and they also have a fewer number of kids. I think it’s because they are just. Not particularly like the more you get heady about religion, the less you care about the concerns of this earth and the less interested you are in playing out those roles.You’re more interested in, i, I mean, I think that the Opus Day are a perfect example of this. Like they should be one of the, the coolest and most based groups of Catholics, and yet 30% of them are, are celibate. Like just to be celibate, right? Well,Simone Collins: you can be based and celibate, but yeah, I mean, it’sMalcolm Collins: Or the, the, I mean with the Mormons like the most religious of them might have trouble operating in society.They may be too basically nerdy to date. Or find partners fast enough, and they may not even care that they’re not finding a partner because they have so much belief in sort of the, [00:04:00] the theological backdrop is going to protect them.Simone Collins: Hmm.Malcolm Collins: But let’s continue with this study, because this study didn’t plot the graphs like that.It was just plotting like straight lines, like, does this matter or not? So, the first study, the, the one that most people are aware of, it looked at expected fertility rate versus intelligence and then divided people into extremely liberal, centrist and extremely conservative.And what we can see very, very interestingly, is that when they are very unintelligent being progressive actually leads you to have a higher fertility rate than being conservative.Simone Collins: Aha. Why would that beMalcolm Collins: Dumb? Conservatives have fewer kids than dumb progressives.Simone Collins: Why? Why? Why? Why? I guess maybe to successfully marry, also conservative, you have to be [00:05:00] smarter.And then if you’re progressive though, you’re not getting married to have, like before having kids, you’re just having kids kind of by mistake. Yeah. Okay. So if you’re conservative, if you’re having kids. Presumably it’s because you’re getting married it that requires that you are attractive enough to get married.You’re ambitious enough to get married. You have enough conscientiousness to do it. Then you’re having kids.Malcolm Collins: Oh, actually, that’s a good point. Especially for conservative men. Yeah. Because conservatives have children in wedlock. Mm-hmm. What that means is that if a man doesn’t have money, he can’t find a partner and he can’t get married.Mm-hmm. And therefore he doesn’t have kids, which is a much healthier way for society to act than just do whatever you want. Yeah. Which unfortunately, I mean, I really, it is so wild to me that and I, I think that. What, what’s his name? Ho Math has a very interesting episode where he goes into thisSimone Collins: OhMalcolm Collins: yeah.Where he talks about how. Basically, [00:06:00] Western civilization reached a place on like the, the hierarchy of like their own thoughts and, and the way that they were structuring society where they actually thought like you could just be like, yeah, do whatever you want. Like of course that’s gonna work. Rules are all basically bad because everybody I know if they didn’t have rules, it’s like when, when we as a society like.First had this idea, most of the places of power where it was being spewed from, and even, even still that that spew it to some extent. It seemed like a perfectly reasonable thing to say. Like, of course we can just have people do whatever they want and that will have no negative repercussions. Mm-hmm.Right. Everybody I know if you just said do whatever you want, they wouldn’t, you know, go out and slut it up. You know, they wouldn’t go [00:07:00] murder people or rob stores or grape children. And I think what we’re seeing in our society now is like. Okay. We unfortunately, and what he pointed out there is it’s sort of ironic that it was a very level of civilizational development that we had reached that allowed us to even conceive of such a stupid idea.That caused the civilization to collapse. And he argued within that video, I think very interestingly that, you know, this has happened multiple times. He’s like, this is basically what happened with Islam. If you watch our video on how Islam went from one of the strictest moral cultures to one of the most debauched moral cultures you, you could argue.I mean, maybe this was part of that. Right. They basically hit a point where it was such a de botch society. And like in that video we go over a number of examples of this. I think people today sort of forget that Islam was ever seen as the Java, the Hut society [00:08:00] the endless harems and parties and drinking and everything like that.That it basically just collapsed out of any form of efficiency.Simone Collins: Hmm.Malcolm Collins: And I’d also note here that a lot of people misattribute all of this, like many of the, the, the falling apart of civilization to the ideals of the enlightenment. And not to the ideals of. The 1970s and or even let’s say the 1920s to 1970s is really where things begin to, to break apart.And when people began to say, oh, you could do whatever you want, whatever you want, in the ideals of the enlightenment. For those who like haven’t studied this cultural period the idea that you would give people something for like not hard work was a complete anathema. Their [00:09:00] utopias were very like.Many people throughout the enlightenment tried to create utopias. But you today, these utopias would not be recognizable to any modern progressive. They’d be like, I’m gonna create a factory city where, you know, every day people will spend this amount of time praying and this amount of time studying science.And no one will be allowed to drink or sing. And you know, we’re, we’re going to have, no sex before marriage and everyone will live in strict communal housing, you know, the strictly gendered communal housing and everything like that. It was a societal view of order, right, of we can build society like that.That’s how they, that’s what the enlightenment was, was how can we structure and order society better? And when the thinkers of the Enlightenment attempted to build a country on the ideals of the [00:10:00] Enlightenment the, it was a country where most people couldn’t vote, right? Like America was not like a, oh, we, we’ll just do whatever the masses want.It was No, no, no, no, no, no, no. Like. Obviously poor people are tarred, so like, it should be like,Simone Collins: it was, it was obviously, I mean, that’s what representative democracy was. It was, we will have the people vote for the smartest aristocrats or landed gentry, essentially like in in their local area. Trust that person to make the best choice for say, who will be president.They were never expected.Malcolm Collins: No, it wasn’t, it wasn’t the people, Simone. It was Well, weSimone Collins: should, okay. Sorry. Land, land donning white men. Sorry, sorry.Malcolm Collins: No, no, no, no, no. It wasn’t just land. As I’ve pointed out, Catholics could only vote in two states. Half the number of states that Jews,Simone Collins: no one Catholic land owning white men.So, okay. There, there,Malcolm Collins: so, so, oh, sorry. Not. It’s colonies. But the, the ideal was, and, and note here, you say that in a bunch of ways that if you look at it from the perspective of the urban monoculture, [00:11:00] ooh, but no, this was their way of saying what we want. It’s society to be structured where we take the aggregate opinion of educated people who have proven their competence and are culturally aligned with us.Simone Collins: Well, I mean, the, the equivalent of it today, if we were to sort of apply more of our modern values, would be like, look, I respect MG Gold. I’m just gonna select him as my representative, and then he’s just gonna decide who’s gonna be president and who’s gonna, you know. What laws we pass and stuff, and, and it has become abstracted from that.Like nowMalcolm Collins: it is just, no, you’re talking of the electoral system. I’m talking about I am. All the various colonies decided who could vote.Simone Collins: Oh.Malcolm Collins: And and that’s very different than the electoral system becauseSimone Collins: No, but what I’m talking about Yeah, I know. You’re, you’re changing the subject. I am, butMalcolm Collins: I’m not, I’m talking about how democracy actually worked, how it was supposed to work, how American democracy,Simone Collins: but it was never democracy.It was representative [00:12:00] democracy.Malcolm Collins: Right. Representative democracy, you are getting stuck on the representative part, which I think can be used to obscure the fact that the ideals of the enlightenment were never. Society should be run on the aggregate opinion of the average person because people would be like, but isn’t that person average and could they be culturally misaligned with me?Right.Simone Collins: Well, I think if we look even further in history though, like to Athenian democracy to other like very, very, very old forms of democracy, what fundamentally people came to conclude was. We will give a vote to the people we need to do important things. And that evolved over time when they needed people to help them.You know, row try reams in military conflicts, guess who got the vote? You know, like basically if you’re contributing something useful to society, if, if you’re needed to make society work, you should have a say. And if not then. [00:13:00] We don’t really care to hearfromSimone Collins: you.Malcolm Collins: And this was transform and when people look for like, where was the origin of the rot before I go into all the dysgenics research the origins of the rot happened before anything that looks like modern wokeness.And if you wanna trace it back, you can trace it back very easily to one of the four original cultural groups of the United States, which was the Quakers. They always wanted the vote to be for everyone. The Quakers did. They always wanted everything that Wokes want today. Even the way that they’re, we pointed this out, even the way that they’re like, celebrations happen where they do like the, the hand signals so that nobody feels too or like something just moves them and they stand up and start talking. It looks exactly like, you know, occupy Wall Street or something, or one of these protest movements. And it’s because it’s the same value set.Speaker: So I, when we record, this is from before we did the Quaker episode. , So we did the Quaker episode and I was unaware of this just as an idea of , how right we were on this. Quakers we’re actually the origin of woke. [00:14:00] Somebody’s like, do you not know about the public universal friend? And I was like, I, I do not know about the public universal friend.They’re like, I hope you go into that. I was unaware of this when we filmed the episode. So for context, the public universal friend, this was, . Someone who in 1776, the friend that means is a Quaker. That’s what they call themselves because they’re psychopaths and that’s like the wokes thing you can call yourself.Claimed to have died and been reanimated as a genderless evangelist named the public universal friend, and afterwards shunned. Her birth name and pronouns and, , dressed in androgynous clothes. The friend preached through the Northeastern United States attracting many followers who became the Society of Universal Friends.The friend theology was broadly similar to most other Quakers. And the most committed members of the Universal Friends were a group of unmarried women who took leading roles in their households, basically dominated the men in their lives. , And in [00:15:00] 1790s, members of the society acquired land in Western New York, where they formed the town of Jerusalem near Penn, Yan, New York., By the way, still there. The Society of Universal Friends ceased to exist around the 1860s. Some writers have portrayed the friend as a woman, or either a manipulative fraudster or a pioneer for women’s rights, while others such as Scholar Scott Larson have viewed friend as a. Transgender, although note, never experienced any gender dysphoria as believe Note this was never experienced before in the 1920s., Absolutely crazy. , The woke them very clearly came directly from this movement, not like tangentially from this movement.Speaker 2: So the next time that a Quaker EG Ruby Yard slash what of Alt Hiss tries to tell you that Puritans were the creation of woke, , I would ask you to kindly look at your history because Quakers have always [00:16:00] attempted to manipulate history to not paint themselves as what they truly are. , And check out that episode by the way.Malcolm Collins: And if you, if you’re a watcher of the show. And you haven’t read Albian seed I would strongly suggest you read Albian Seed because when you read Albian Seed one, it can help you better understand like American culture and get in touch with your own cultural roots if you’re from America. Or if you don’t have cultural roots look at the ways that the four founding cultures are different from each other, and it can help you model who you want to be and the culture you want to adopt.But a lot of the things that pushed the, the proto movements that allowed our society to begin to collapse in the way that it is collapsing were largely Quaker movements. But. That’s for a different tale. I, I, I promise you guys some graphs. Let’s get some graphs.So here I’m putting a graph on screen here of political ideology versus fertility rates.And what you can see is the fertility rate difference for intelligent conservatives and intelligent progressives is [00:17:00] quite extreme, which means they will have even disproportionately less power in the future, economically speaking because that’s where they’re being cleared out the most, right?But note. Even here this is still a discogenic pattern. Intelligent conservatives are just less discogenic than progressives because they are still having less kids than unintelligent conservatives. And then with Mormons, you actually see a purely eugenic pattern. And this, this Mormon study that they found was hugely, it’s, it’s slight, but it’s definitely there, right?So to continue with the new study that they have here, which expanded it to other religious traditions. Sometime ago, ed Dutton and I published a study showing that the USA being a member of the Mormon Club seemed to protect one against having dys genetic fertility pattern for intelligence in plain language.The total population, more intelligent people have somewhat few in. In children on average. Although this varies by country however, this negative [00:18:00] correlation is absent and maybe even reversed positively among Mormons. Due to the small number of Mormons and the need for complex cohort and age controls, the exact slope of the fertility intelligence for Mormons was harder to estimate precisely.Hence, they had a big confidence interval. The Mormon study was based on the general social survey, GSCS. GSSA large American dataset. There were some problems with this. First, the intelligence measure is a poor to mediocre being the tin item, wood drums, vocabulary test. Second . Religiousness was not measured as a continuous construct, but by self-reported membership of different religious beliefs, their subdivisions, denominations.Thus, the power is much reduced as mere membership is a proxy of a more relevant. Trait of general religiousness or perhaps some specific religiously related traits in the new study they sought to remedy this. So the new study, this was, came out in 2024. [00:19:00] Does conservative religiousness promote selection for intelligence and analysis of the Vietnam Experience study?And here they say this, this study was done with a dataset of 4,602 Vietnam era veterans. So unfortunately it was done a while ago, so we can’t necessarily say that this was the same trait, but they actually looked at religious nu here. And this one showed something different than the Mormon study that I was showing before where it showed that sort of.Perfectly here. The less religious you are the, the fewer kids you have, the more religious you are, the more kids you have. And the, the most religious people have the most what’s the word, theSimone Collins: most kids?Malcolm Collins: Yes, the most kids. When they are intelligent. And what was interesting about this study is it found, and, and statistically relevantly too that the highest rate of religiosity was in a population was found with being strictly eugenic.It, it was eugenic. They, they, the, the most religious people had more kids when they were [00:20:00] more intelligent.Simone Collins: Hmm.Malcolm Collins: With, withSimone Collins: being much of this, do you think though, might come down to. Out of wedlock marriage, or sorry, out of wedlock, childbirth for non-religious progressive people, which I think leads to lower lifetime fertility because it’s just very difficult to raise a child in as a single parent.Malcolm Collins: I mean, I think one of the, the things at play mm-hmm. Is that if you are, and, and this, I think especially in the conservative versus progressive. Fertility difference for poor people is if you are conservative and you are poor, you are less likely to be living off of welfare or to be like a welfare king queen, trying to maximize the number of kids you have to get more checks from the government.Yeah. Whereas many poor, progressive people, just like, that’s their cultural life strategy and they’ve been doing that for like three generations and it’s all they know and it’s literally like [00:21:00] just how they survive.Simone Collins: Mm-hmm.So you think it has more to do with leaning on social services and not making your own way in the world or supporting yourself financially and less to do with out of wedlock, child rearing?Malcolm Collins: Yeah. I think, I think both of those things are, are relevant.Simone Collins: Hmm. For sure. Yeah.And they, I think also there’s the, the factor that just how I think that ultimately affirmative action and DEI.Not favoring. Ba, basically there’s like this reverse effect of affirmative action in DEI, whereby people think it’s gonna help the people who are getting extra boosts or favoritism when it actually hurts them, both reputationally and in terms of cultivating strength. And in the long run, it helps the people that it’s discriminating against like white males because they have to [00:22:00] force themselves to be more disciplined, to work harder, to be smarter.And overall that’s going to, I mean, while some people just get totally wiped out in this equation, there is an overall, I guess you could say like per, per the perspective of this kind of long-term human tendencies, it, it has eugenic effect on the discriminated against group. I think similarly when you look at religious families, there is a eugenic.Element, for example, with the LDS church or any group for example, that that tithes because not only do you need to be successful enough to, for example, in many cases, have a single breadwinning family. So one man that is earning enough to support an entire family by him himself. Oh God,Malcolm Collins: yeah.Simone Collins: Two parents who are, you know, both working and raising children.It’s not just that they’re also. Spending a non-trivial amount of time engaged in religious worship wearing, they can’t be making money or resting [00:23:00] really. And also where they’re tithing with Mormons are tithing 10% of their income. So this is, this is a, you know, you’re putting a lot of spoilers on your car or you’re putting a lot of drag on your car more accurately.I think it,Malcolm Collins: it forces the peacock feathers to have weight.Simone Collins: Yeah. And well, and then, then you end up a lot ultimately stronger. And that’s that eugenic effect where like if you are in a very non-religious family either that’s leaning very heavily off of social benefits or both partners are working and you know, your kids are going, you know, going to public school and just not really.Spending that much time with you, you’re not going to church on weekends and you’re not tithing. You don’t have the same headwinds that are forcing you to be stronger, harder, faster, and better. Does that make sense? So like, because religious life is logistically and financially harder, technically speaking, because I do not [00:24:00] think that non-religious.Families. I mean, I, I remember looking at the stats before, I’m pretty sure from what I remember, non-religious families do not donate. More religious families and especially poor religious families donate the most, which is crazy, like in terms of per percentage of income. Because they don’t have those headwinds, they are not forced to become stronger.And that could be an effect here as well. What do you think?Malcolm Collins: Yes. Well, I mean, I think that’s a way that you relate to money when you’re poor is very different from the way you relate to money when you’re middle class. And in, in a way, poor people can afford to donate more than middle class people.Because well,Simone Collins: especially if you’re on social benefits. Yeah. Yeah. There’s that. Sure.Malcolm Collins: So I, I, I think that that’s another thing is you can feel wealthier there, butSimone Collins: but that’s not the case for Mormons. Oh, yeah, yeah. Tithing is, is huge. And, and I mean, the more you earn, you’re still tithing 10% and then you’re paying progressively more and more in taxes.So you’re paying [00:25:00] 40% in taxes and then another 10% half of your income that you make. Because keep in mind, tithing is pre-tax. It’s not post-tax, it’s pre-tax. 50% of your income functionally not yours, taxes and tithing, which is crazy. Plus you’re expected to donate a significant amount of your time.Tracing wood grains has that really good Subick article that really goes into this on just how much is expected of you from the LDS Church, especially if you are high achieving like the more professionally successful you are. The more you’re gonna be promoted within the church to be a bishop, to, to do more and more and more.Malcolm Collins: Well, I think that that’s why the church compared to other churches has been so adaptive.Simone Collins: Mm-hmm.Malcolm Collins: This, this is one of the things that we’ve talked about before, but like, why is it that, I mean, and, and the LDS started from a much harder place than say the Vatican did. In terms of like polygamy, black people can’t go to heaven, that sort of stuff.Right? Or, or they turn white when they go to heaven. I think they, they, they did,Simone Collins: theyMalcolm Collins: got [00:26:00] black in because they, they were, they were neutral in the war between Satan and Jesus. And, and so they, oh, andSimone Collins: then, so they were marked with darkness and not white delights.Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Anyway what, but you know, they had a lot, they had a lot of differences to, to start.And the church was able to you know, sort of build a PR campaign which has been incredibly successful. We have some other videos on this, but like compared to their percentage of the population, the amount that Mormons have been able to capture the public mind share, and in a way that’s not holistically negative has been incredibly impressive when contrasted with the way that the Catholic and church in the Vatican is adapting now.And I think that the core reason of that is because the hierarchy of the Mormon church is made up of people who. Succeeded in real world activities and lived real world lives, like, I don’t even think you would have much of a chance of being appointed to a high level position if you didn’t have a large [00:27:00] family in the Mormon church.And so they’re going to be able to relate to the average person more, but be a lot less theologically rigorous. But it, I, I mean, for a long time. You could do that. That’s, that’s actually an interesting, you know, talking about democracy and different democratic in institutions and how they end up affecting things.The system that the, the Catholic church versus the Mormon church runs on we can see how the democratic structure of each of those led to incredibly different outcomes. In terms of like practice, right? Catholicism really tried to run like a dedicated technocrat institution where, you know, you become a specialist in this your entire life.And that was an institution that I think worked really well and was sort of needed when. Basically no one was educated like the medieval period. I mean, what, what other choice did they have? You know, were they [00:28:00] gonna allow local leaders to be like elected or something like that? Oh. Or you could have them be appointed, but then you’re just gonna get tons of corruption.Right. Actually one of the interesting questions is, why don’t you get more blatant corruption in the Mormon church?Simone Collins: That is a really good question. I mean, even the most critical people that we, we watch talk about it, they’re not really, they’re obviously like, well, the Mormon church is raising a ton of money, and it may be in a, a way that they insinuate is exploitative toward members of the LDS church, and that is insufficiently transparent, but they do not imply at any point that they believe there’s corruption.That is quite interesting.Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Even, even the head, likeSimone Collins: Alyssa has never suggested thatMalcolm Collins: the head guy in the Mormon church he’s like. Basically their prophet like more than ‘cause he can update the religion at any, theSimone Collins: president.Malcolm Collins: Yeah. He’s not like the pope where like he needs to be aware of what previous popes have said and what the Bible says.In Mormonism you can just like be like, yeah, I know that’s written there, but like, we got, got new rules. But he makes from what I’ve heard, 150,000 a year. [00:29:00] Like literally the voice of God. It’sSimone Collins: basically you, you don’t make money from. Serving in the church. Yeah.Malcolm Collins: And, and the big scandals that I’ve heard about is like the church investing in like a mall.And I’m like, I mean, that’s what they should be doing, right? Like they’re supposed to. What, what did you think they were gonna do? Give away all the money. Like, no, they should be investing it in building financial security in case things change. You know, they could have huge declining membership in the future and then need to to work like they’re acting responsibly.Why are you mad at them? Yeah. And so, but you know, progressives be progressive, right? Oh, how dare they have money? But why, why isn’t it had any corruption issues? I actually, I, you know, I’ve heard of sex scandals in the Catholic church, but I’ve never heard of corruption issues. You know what?I’m actually gonna ask ai, do either of them have major monetary corruption scandals?Simone Collins: Yeah, good question. ‘cause there’s a lot of money sloshing around.It could [00:30:00] have to do with the transparency required of tax filings of, of nonprofits, including religions in the United States, like perhaps based on the tax filing structure. It’s just, it would be harder, but I don’t know, you know, like harder to hide. I, but I, I, that can’t be it. No.Malcolm Collins: Okay. I I say this because I know that they’re, he’sSimone Collins: normallyMalcolm Collins: very common in evangelical churches.Simone Collins: Oh, yeah. Yeah. Well, the whole Prosperity doctrine thing, and like, you know, the, the, is it people on YouTube or Instagram who like tell you the price of one preacher’s shoes whenever he comes out wearing insanely expensive sneakers?Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Well, I mean,Simone Collins: some ofMalcolm Collins: it’s just so blatant as, as forSimone Collins: why that happens.Yeah. It’s especially trope now is yeah, like the evangelical Christian preacher who exploits members typically through some kind of document. SoMalcolm Collins: Protestant culture leads to that more, even though you have less corruption overall, as I’ve pointed out in Protestant [00:31:00] societies. And, and this is just like a factual thing, you can just look at a map and do correlations is because Protestantism is entirely decentralized.You have a, a thing where if somebody can grift, then there’s nothing really, no central organization that can come down and say, Hey, stop grifting. So if you’re particularly good at grifting, you’re just gonna grift.Simone Collins: Mm-hmm.Malcolm Collins: Okay, so let’s go through this Catholic Church versus Mormonism. So it says The gap is large Catholic incidents number in the dozens, historically with several high profile ones in 2024 to 2026 alone.Well, in the LDS church, there’s essentially zero personal grift that has been proven by leaders.Simone Collins: Wow.Malcolm Collins: Why? I wanna know why. Why?Simone Collins: Yeah. That’s so interesting. Because there’s plenty of money. Good for them. I mean, honest. I mean, I think a, a lot of people’s reaction might just be like, well, yeah, we just haven’t found it.You know, no one got caught. But I, I think it’s perfectly reasonable to expect that the, that just, it hasn’t happened. [00:32:00] Mormons,Malcolm Collins: Cannot have a Mormon, I, this, this, it says, the main reason is the Mormon church. Okay. I, I’m gonna have two, two answers to this one actually. One, I think many people in the Catholic Church rise but do not really care about Catholicism.It’s just like you’re born in a Catholic country. Joining the priesthood can be a pretty good deal for a lot of people. Or joining in nunnery. I mean, this even historically was, was. Cool profession if you’re like nerdy about stuff. And then you you get invested in the bureaucracy of it and you attempt to climb the bureaucracy of it, right?So, but within Mormonism because the, even on the ground, like individual rewards for joining. The priesthood, like you can’t even get like an income from joining the priesthood. They, they expect you for most Mormon things to do the work for free. So you can’t even enter a position.Simone Collins: Whoa, whoa, whoa. No, no, no.You pay to go on your mission.Malcolm Collins: Oh yeah. I’m sorry. They, they have you [00:33:00] pay to do stuff for them.Simone Collins: Yeah.You,Malcolm Collins: you can’t even enter a position where grift is possible on your part until you have already demonstrated that you are. Pretty invested in actually what’s in the church’s best interest. Whereas in Catholicism it’s very easy to get to high level positions without that proof.I pointed out this is why Catholicism never adopted allowing priests to have kids because then they just have even a higher reason. The second reason is likely cultural differences. If you look at Mormonism historically, I mean, it’s the one instance in the United States where something. Close to communism has ever worked.Right. For people who aren’t aware of, like the way the original Mormon colonies were set up you would, one, you’d have to think that it was a good idea to move to a place like that. So you already have a strong genetic selection filter. And they’d be like. Okay, here’s where you’re living. Here’s what your job is, here’s who you’re gonna be married to.Like, they basically set up your entire life for you. When you [00:34:00] showed up. It actually sounds pretty cool, you know? I, I think for a lot of people that’s a, a decent way to live life, right? And, and they, they did this to also acqui, acquire mini’s genetically better people. The, the way that they did that is they went to guys around Europe and were basically like, Hey, if you’re rich and come to our settlement, you know, we’ll set you up.And so they got, we’re like, we’ll get you like three, four wives. How does that sound? Right? You don’t even need to believe it. Four wives, how does that sound gonna live in the American frontier? Live a, a hard, honest life. And so they, had a culture that needed a lot more trust historically to survive.And that was like really eugenically selective, like Mormons also would kick out the guys because they had multiple wives who didn’t look good enough. This is where you have the lost Boy problem wasSimone Collins: look good enough.Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Huge. Problem, even today within the polygamous Mormon sex is you know, obviously the birth ratio of males to females is 50 50.But not [00:35:00] all of the guys can have four wives. Oh, sure. Yeah. So that means. One guy marries for every four guys born into the community. And the three guys that were not successful enough or not good enough, or not faithful enough get kicked out which creates a really strong eugenic pressure. Whereas Catholicism basically grew up in the rotting bureaucratic corpse of the Roman Empire.I, no, I mean, it, it, it did the, the, he’sSimone Collins: just always, always hanging on the Catholics. Come on,Malcolm Collins: Malcolm. Go. I even Catholics would say this. That’s where the church came from. It, it grew out of a Roman empire in decline. I mean itSimone Collins: did,Malcolm Collins: yeah. It had a few bumps like w Constantine and stuff like that, who was really cool.But the majority of the period where the Catholic church was basically running the empire, the empire was falling apart. And that means that there was institutionally. Like even trying to [00:36:00] fight grift in those sorts of environments would’ve been incredibly difficult. Also I think even the idea that the church wouldn’t have grift is almost a modern idea.If you look, if you read about the Catholic church historically, grift almost seems like the point. If you get what I mean, like,Simone Collins: no, I don’t. Idon’t.Malcolm Collins: Okay. So if you read about. Any point of Pope in history, you know, you would have like a Pope making his son who he had outside of wedlock because Popes around all the time.Oh, that period,Simone Collins: right?Malcolm Collins: Yeah. And he’d make him like the, the, the Duke of Venice or something. Right. And the, no, the Popes were always doing corrupt stuff. Sure.Simone Collins: No, no. I, yeah. I, I know.Malcolm Collins: They were like and, and it, and it wasn’t even seen as like a weird thing for a pope to do. It was just like, I mean, obviously he’s the pope, he’s gonna corrupt.Right? And, and then you had this going down. All the, all the cardinals were corrupt, or the vast majority of them were, I mean, that’s why they [00:37:00] elected the corrupt popes, because then the popes would give them. Handbags. And you had this going down to the local levels. I mean, if you went to like a cardinal from this period they, they, the, the cliche was they lived in a giant mansion and had lots of mistresses and were incredibly lot wealthy.How did a cardinal afford a giant mansion? Right? Like, today, I think if a cardinal afforded a giant mansion, you’d be like, the Catholic church would be like. You’re not supposed to like have any other jobs, right? Like how do you have a giant mansion, Mr. Cardinal, this seems like a problem. So I think part of the problem that the Catholic Church is dealing with is even an expectation towards a lack of corruption is a new idea within the Catholic Church.The Mormons. Interesting. The Mormons had corruption in the early church, but then they just theologically defined it as okay. Right. Like, what I’ll mean by this is in the Catholic church you know, you take. Five mistresses and people would be like, well, you’re not supposed to [00:38:00] do that, but you know, whatever.In the Mormon church, oh, they’re like five miga. Like, and God told me to, and then the next leader does something against the rules and he is like, ah, but God told me to. So it’s the new rule. But they never seemed to be particularly avarice for money. Mm-hmm. Potentially because they already had such high status or their commu, I don’t know.Simone Collins: Yeah, I don’t know. I don’t know.Malcolm Collins: Well, it’s important to study this. It’s important to ask this question. Yeah. How else did the Mormon church historically have much corruption at the top levels?Simone Collins: I think there’s, there’s, the issue for me is, my understanding is there’s not much transparency as to how the wealth of the LDS church is spent, but it’s clearly not spent on salaries or on directly benefiting anyone. So I just, you know, we, we think some is spent on ads. It was kind of weird that they, they tried to influence legislation.Gay marriage bills in California. That [00:39:00] just was odd. It doesn’t, one, I don’t think a religion should try to influence legislation.Malcolm Collins: That actually does seem odd. Well, like why would Mormons care about that?Simone Collins: Yeah. Like look, if other people are debauched and lost,Malcolm Collins: I mean, the people aren’t,Simone Collins: you know, invest money in trying to win them over.Yeah. Like tend to your own flock. That’s my big thing. Just your people hand handle your people. Okay. If, if you don’t want them. Do get married to same sex people, then convince them that there’s a better way. I don’t know, but don’t. Force non-Mormons to do the Mormon thing. Don’t force non-Catholics to do the Catholic thing.Don’t force non-Muslims to live by or non, non-Islamic adherence to.Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Okay. So this basically explained how the Mormons ended up building their culture of no corruption. Okay. So what happened was Joseph Smiths was a famously very corrupt and Brigham Young, who then. I consider to be the real founder of Modern Mormon tradition.He, he, [00:40:00] he basically put everything inSimone Collins: place. He was the ray crock of the LDS church.Malcolm Collins: Yeah, he, he, bigSimone Collins: crock bought McDonald’s from its founder just in case you were not,Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Yeah. So anyway but Brigham Young he apparently, because remember how I said how he operated in almost like a communist society.Like you go work here, you do this, you do this. Okay. That put him into a position even without having to do self-dealing or grift to become the wealthiest person in the settlement by, by farSimone Collins: sure.Malcolm Collins: And because he was already in a position to effortlessly be the wealthiest person, he had no reason for corruption.And was able to put systems in place that prevented corruption from ever happening.Simone Collins: Hmm. Okay. I suppose I could see that.Malcolm Collins: And now one of the questions that I have for you is sort of a closing out question.Simone Collins: Mm-hmm.Malcolm Collins: Is the way that techno Puritanism is structured, would it have eugenic. Fertility practices or would it have anti eugenic fertility practices?Because [00:41:00] interestingly it doesn’t have as many protections as some of the other religion systems do. You know, it’s like, find out how to have kids find out how to improve those kids. I think the mere mandate of genetic selection along with genetic augmentation when the technology is available means that it would be.Like the most eugenic of the religious groupings, because even people,Simone Collins: well, I think it also is important that there’s a rule that you, you can’t make your income from being a religious leaderMalcolm Collins: that never got baked in. I actually never read that track.Simone Collins: You didn’t? That’s kind of important.Malcolm Collins: It’s one of the tracks we have never read.So, there’s like five tracks that I’ve, or maybe more, maybe like 10, I’ve never read. Hmm. So we gotta get back to doing tracks, if I’m gonna be honest. I mean, piss off part of our audience, but we’ve pissed off so much of them recently by being like,Simone Collins: do you keep going for their sacred cows? Carl Young Tucker Carlson.Apparently people care about these things.Why? But go on [00:42:00] CarlMalcolm Collins: Young one. I do not know why anyone was surprised that Carl Young is like the heart and soul of the urban monoculture. And I. It’s, it is weird to me. It’s like, woo, psychiatry, like feel good, positive psychiatry and aSimone Collins: lot of people, yeah.But you know, Jordan Peterson really promoted a lot of his ideas and he was the Internet’s daddy for a long time, so,Malcolm Collins: yeah. Well, and this caused people to make a, a big mistake. They, they had this perception of like. These ideas helped me at this point in my life and I’m like, I’m not arguing that it didn’t help you, that you might not have been at like a lower optimum.The problem is, is that the ideas of Carl Young are not a global optimum. They are a local optimum. So they may be able to get you. If you don’t know the difference between a global and a logo optimum, it’s like standing on a hill and looking at a mountain. You have to first go down before you can get to a higher place.And if we’re speaking of mental health yes, there are ways of seeing the world and problems that you can have that would make your life worse than adopting the ideas [00:43:00] of coral young and attempting to work on yourself from his perspective. Unfortunately, to get to a global optimum, you have to.Give up many of the ideas that you accepted while you were the student of Carl Young. So an example of what one of these would be is something like believing that you have like a bunch of unconscious trauma from your childhood or something like that. Being able to frame and con mentalize, stuff like that may have helped you deal with a life view where you were, because Carl Young is saying you have trauma.And that trauma can be dealt with. And this collection of toolkits he gave you for dealing with the trauma could get you to a, a higher place. But then we come along and say, actually the science says trauma is mostly a fictional concept. It doesn’t exist. And you would be better off, you would lose the trauma that you have if you simply didn’t believe in it.But [00:44:00] unfortunately, now that’s harder for you. Because you both adopted the belief in trauma and the belief of the fix in trauma. So you need to dig out both of those now before you can get to the globally optimum place of I am responsible for my own mental state in any given moment, and I actually largely have control over it.And I have control over the way I contextualize anything that’s happened to me throughout my entire life.Simone Collins: Yeah.Malcolm Collins: And of course that’s gonna you know, freak some people out who have adopted ideas and that’s you know, shame because Yeah. Yeah, a lot of people in the conservative movement, they, they were genuinely helped by these like, sort of proto frameworks when they had nothing else.And it’s, it’s damaging to them to point out, well, the proto frameworks may be better. The nothing. But I think that, you know, other, other people probably feel that way about our religious beliefs, for example. They’re like, well, your religious beliefs are better than the urban monoculture. But you know, they’re not the true [00:45:00] often, right?They’re not at the end. So, okay, you’ve got the eugenicist question, but then also the corruption question. The way the index is set up, because we actually worked really hard on creating the governance system for technical parent if it ever got large. Yeah. And the way that funding is set up was in it, and money is managed within it basically makes corruption organically impossible.If you are interested in how we did that you can read, I think we talk about it both in the Pragmatist Guide to Crafting Religion and the Pist Guide to Governance how we structured the techno puritan framework or the index system to avoid the possibility of corruption. Because it, or basically organically down weights, the power of any faction that is acting in a corrupt manner immediately and aggressively.So, that is. Fun. But would it work as well as the Mormon system? Probably [00:46:00] not because it does allow living off of the money as it is structured right now.Simone Collins: It doesMalcolm Collins: as it’s structured right now. I mean, you would be removed if it appeared that you were living in a way that was irresponsible or you were managing the money in a way that was irresponsible.But the goal of the way the system was set up was maximum flexibility for the person in charge at the moment, was also maximum ability to remove them. I’ve always felt that’s the optimal government type dictator, but very easy to remove is what you want.Simone Collins: Yeah, I guess the, the, the votes were structured such that if you made your income or had any benefits from the governing structure, be it a government or I don’t know, like some city state you’re a part of, then that would.Like force you to recuse yourself from voting. Yeah. You cant, you’re not allowed to vote in, you’re making money offMalcolm Collins: the foundation.Simone Collins: If you’re a government worker and you make a salary from the government,Malcolm Collins: doSimone Collins: not get to vote about how the [00:47:00] government works.Malcolm Collins: Yeah, and this is something I strongly believe. I don’t think anyone who’s making money off the government, I don’t think any government worker, I don’t think any elected official.I don’t think anyone on well, should. Fair should be allowed to vote if you are a net drain. Yeah. There’s just too much of an,Simone Collins: I mean, so a lot of people would argue, well, I work in the government, I know how it works, therefore I am more qualified to make a a, an informed vote. But we would still argue that the adverse incentives are such that no, you’re, you’re really just gonna vote yourself more money and more, more secure.Malcolm Collins: Yeah. And we’ve seen this with teachers unions have teachers unions made teaching better. Like, of course not like giving, giving people power over their own employer is always a stupid thing to do.Simone Collins: Yeah. They vote themselves better benefits, less work, more money. It’s, it’s, yeah. I mean, they, they may know how things work.Malcolm Collins: But it doesn’t mean they have any incentive to improve them with their votes.Simone Collins: Yeah, like you can know how an organization works, but the thing that you’re gonna vote for is how that organization can improve your life as an employee. That’s [00:48:00] unmoored from an organization’s core mission, which either is, you know, maximize shareholder value or, you know, pursue some kind of nonprofit mission.And it can be either, but it, I’ve rarely seen employees act in accordance with. An organization’s true mission or an organization’s imperative to drive, share shareholder value, unless literally their compensation is contingent on those things. Like, you know, they, they make more money when the, when the organization makes more money, so, yeah.Malcolm Collins: Yeah. So very interesting very interesting. Obviously the big question that I think a lot of people have, and if one of our fans wanted to dive into this. And do more research is, is this true across religions and across religions. Do we see any other patterns where high, high religiosity people might actually see a hit to, to this pattern?I’d be very, very interested.Simone Collins: Yeah. I’m so,But it is very, very interesting.Malcolm Collins: But yeah, well, it means that these groups [00:49:00] are going to, in the future, be able to increasingly outcompete the progressive groups. But I think what people miss is, what does conservative mean? What does intelligent conservative mean?‘Cause like, obviously if you were rating us, we would come off as extremely religious and extremely conservative in any of these tests. And yet I think part of the conservative movement wants to frame us as being non-religious and non-conservative. Because the way that we are conservative doesn’t align with what they historically saw conservatism to mean.Which I’ve always found to be very funny. They’re, they’re always like, oh, you, you are nothing like the founding fathers. You’re some weird form of Calvinism that tries to blend reli geos. Like Christianity was modern science. And I’m like, I’ve got bad news for you about the founding fathers buddy. But yeah.But anyway, if you’re interested in our thoughts on that stuff, look up our track series. It’s, it’s crazy. We’re completely nuts. Well, that’s why I think some people, they’re, they, that’s one of the areas where I think many of our fans just don’t, they don’t [00:50:00] fully grok how materialist we are in our understanding of reality.But anyway or, or how fanatical we are in our religiosity, which is something that just grows year over year.Simone Collins: People don’t associate religiosity with materialismMalcolm Collins: to be Yeah. But they’re not necessarily incompatible you know, as we’ve shown, which is weird.Simone Collins: Yeah, 100%.Malcolm Collins: TheSimone Collins: question is, it’s nice, it’s nice to hear.I think a lot of progressives think that religion is discogenic. So I guess I, I like this in in that sense because I think a lot of progressives are like, oh, those like disgusting stupid people who believe in God. Having all these children or like, you know, uneducated 20 something, married, couples having children, those swine or is it, it, it, you know, that is that is not true.Malcolm Collins: I just wanna get into space. I’ll tell you about that. Like civilization is seems to have a ticker on it these days, and it is us and the various religious [00:51:00] groups that are obviously going to be taking to the stars. So.Simone Collins: Yeah, and I’m excited for that. It’s gonna be great. People aren’t gonna go to space because they, they, you know, I think there’s this really weird trend, and that’s just because everyone’s so anti-capitalist now.But there’s this, this trend it seems in sci-fi movies where if it’s not some like space hero going into space, it’s some beleaguered, you know, victim of, of capitalism going into space to, you know. Make their way or whatever or, you know, just try to like survive. And no people aren’t gonna be going into space because it’s like getting a job at McDonald’s.They’re gonna be going into space because they’re like the pilgrims who went to the colonies who wanted to build a city upon.Malcolm Collins: Yeah. They have a, a vision of a, of a. Nobody’s gonna want a beleaguered person on a spaceship. No. You only want fanatics on a spaceship. Everybody on it believes that they’re building a utopia.Yeah. That is gonna be hard in the short term and incredibly beneficial in the long [00:52:00] term. And this is why these beliefs of like, oh, well, Elon’s just gonna take all the power after he gets to Mars, or something like that. And it’s like, one of one of my favorite things is like the guy who was like, yeah, I, I was paid consultant money by some billionaires.They’re like, yeah, I built these like. Post, you know, civilization collapse compounds. Oh that, gosh. Yeah. They have these like giant staffs and how do I keep the staff from like, turning on me and killing me and taking over, you know, after the apocalypse happens. And the obvious answer is you should already be acting in their best interest.And in the best interest of the shared mission of this post apocalyptic settlement. And you should already have a shared value system so everybody knows what the shared mission is. And if you haven’t done that, then somebody will create one and they will kill you. Right. Like nobody’s going to live just so that you can continue your Playboy lifestyle style.Simone Collins: Yeah. In so far as you can have one of those in a post-apocalyptic environment.Malcolm Collins: Well, I mean, I think that that’s something that, that even, people like Elon may, may miss, like even if [00:53:00] like we’re pretty fanatical about the idea of like, I would love to build a stable colony on Mars. Even if we became like, or Roger Stend became some of the first martians and they held to our religious beliefs if he wasn’t acting in the best interest of the colony I think he’d be killed pretty quickly.By the, the colonists because in a colony environment like this, everybody’s lives are hanging on by a threat in any sort of space, colonization environment. And you really don’t have time for anyone who’s self-dealing. It is just not worth the risk. To invest one ounce in a leader’s luxuries that’s not going to life support and expansion and the birthing center and you know, whatever is needed.Simone Collins: Yeah, yeah. Well, we’re for a really interesting. Next few centuries. So now that we’re gonnaMalcolm Collins: see them, well, I, I, I [00:54:00] hope that we get off planet and our descendants can come to form the, the, the clan people out in the distant space. I mean, that’s pretty much the way that we treat this. We know that our vision for the future of humanity is incompatible with many of our allies in the conservative movement.And so get off, getSimone Collins: going. Well, and space is big. Space is big. There’s, there’s room, space is big. Yeah. Okay. It’s okay. AllMalcolm Collins: right. Love you, Simone.Simone Collins: I love you too, Malcolm.I will start your grilled cheese. I’m still excited to record this. I’m hitting record just so we know.Malcolm Collins: That means a bunch of actions are not going to work. And did the front end build work this time? It did. So I just need to wait for it to finish now.Simone Collins: Yay.Already, people who are using the h ancient AI for just fun are realizing like, oh, this could be used in. You know, some business applications, they’re not. I’m not the only one who’s like, [00:55:00] oh my gosh, please let me,Malcolm Collins: well, I mean, that’sSimone Collins: where I’m tryingMalcolm Collins: get it. I’m trying to get it to a point where I can use it for the things I want to use it for.Mm-hmm. And the thing that I want to use it for most is building video games, because I’ve always wanted to make video games and I would be vico video games right now if I wasn’t building this. And so I wanna build this to a place where I can build video games because hopefully it’s, it’s better at building large scale things than what I’m working with right now.And there we go. It is updating.Simone Collins: Excellent.Malcolm Collins: What are we doing for dinnertime Steak?Simone Collins: I only just started thawing it out this afternoon. I don’t know if it’sMalcolm Collins: okay. ISimone Collins: mean, I can, I can, I can take and leave it on at room temperature, grilled cheese, maybe it’s grilled cheese. Okay. And then tomorrowMalcolm Collins: I can get rid of it last of my, my lunch meat that I’ll put on top of it.Simone Collins: Yeah,Malcolm Collins: don’t, don’t put the, the lunch meat in the grilled cheese, although,Simone Collins: no. [00:56:00] Okay. So you’ll just kind of plop it on top.Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Because I think grilled cheese doesn’t cook as well when you cook it as a melt. Actually, no. Let’s try cooking it as a melt.Simone Collins: Oh, I mean, I can make new,Malcolm Collins: no,Simone Collins: I’ll do it afterwards. I mean, also you seem to like things deconstructed anyway, so why would I not just give you grilled cheese and you have some meat on the side?Malcolm Collins: That’s a good idea.Simone Collins: Okay. Than favorable.[00:57:00] This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit basedcamppodcast.substack.com/subscribe

Russia’s Health Ministry just issued new guidelines: during routine reproductive health checks, doctors are now supposed to ask women how many children they want. If a woman says “zero,” the recommendation is to refer her to a medical psychologist to help form “positive attitudes toward childbirth.”In this episode of Based Camp, Simone and Malcolm break down the policy, Russia’s broader pro-natal cultural offensive (including the new ban on childfree propaganda, revived Mother Heroine medals, and “Year of the Family” initiatives), and whether framing voluntary childlessness as a psychological issue worth treating is a smart move or dystopian overreach.They explore:* Why this targets culture rather than just throwing money at the problem* The surprisingly recent history of “aspirational childfree” as a celebrated lifestyle* How societies throughout history viewed women who didn’t want children* Whether therapists could actually help shift mindsets (or if the real power is in the framing)* Bold ideas like no income tax for parents, school choice, and normalizing motherhood againProvocative, data-rich, and unapologetically pro-family. If you’re tired of the “childfree is empowerment” narrative and want to talk seriously about reversing fertility collapse, this one’s for you.Episode TranscriptSimone Collins: [00:00:00] Hello Malcolm. I’m excited to be speaking with you today because Russia has introduced a new health ministry guideline saying that women who say they don’t want children should be referred for psychological counseling.And, and Russian officials present this as a prenatal measure to address, you know, their,Malcolm Collins: and I was like, I heard it and it generally was multi totalitarian things. I don’t like this much. This when I’m like. My gut says yes, I like this. I like framing it as a psychological disorder for a woman to not want children.Simone Collins: Yeah. Yeah. And you, you actually like it, it was fairly late at night. You just burst into my room and you were like, Russia’s making like aspirational dinks, go to see therapists. And we both had a good laugh about it, but then I, I went and I looked up what the policy actually does. So basically during reproductive health assessments, doctors have been told.That they should ask women how many children they want to have, which is a little dystopian. And then if a woman [00:01:00] says that she does not want any children, the guideline says it is recommended or advisable to send her to a medical psychologist, quote, you know, from Russian quote, to form positive attitudes toward childbirth and reports so far.Describe this as part of clinical guidelines from, from the health ministry and, and not, they’re not like a formal criminal or administrative mandate with explicit penalties for refusing counseling.So this isn’t some dystopian thing. In fact, I think that this is. This is important for us to discuss and interesting because this is just one of many Russian measures that are targeting. The one thing we say actually matters when it comes to prenatal laws policy, which is culture. To your point that you’re building this cultural precedent around a.Shifting the way that women contextualize their choices around not having children. And I think that that’s really super interesting. By the way, men are they, they’re not asked equivalent questions.Malcolm Collins: What? That, that’s where they’re [00:02:00] failing. But I do also like that they frame this as like an explicit problem for women.Mm-hmm. Like women. What is wrong with you? That you do not want children? All women want children, right? Unless there’s something seriously psychologically wrong with you.Simone Collins: Yeah.Malcolm Collins: It’s what they’re saying.Simone Collins: It is 100% what they’re saying. So, so what we’re gonna go over in this podcast is, is we’re, I’m gonna give you a little refresher on Russia’s larger landscape of prenatal culture investment.Because while they’re doing some of the, the typical things of like, oh, here’s money if you have a child and here’s some limitations on abortions. Again, I think they’re leading somewhat in the cultural initiative. So we’re, we’ll do a quick briefing on that ‘cause they’re actually doing a lot. And we’ll discuss whether or not we think this is actually a smart development.And then, you know, can, can, for example, psychologists actually be trusted to help women form positive attitudes toward childbirth. And and then kinda look at at how recent, actually the concept of not seeing women as [00:03:00] crazy for wanting to be childless is ‘cause it’s actually. Super. Like it’s a crazy aberration when you look at history.So anyway it, here’s what Russia is currently doing culturally, aside from the abortion and like money stuff to encourage. More children. So one, the government has revived the symbolic hero, mother medals for women, which I valiantly attempted to get the Trump administration to consider making an executive order around.Still waiting on that one. I’m ready. Anytime, guys. TheMalcolm Collins: hero medals from other come on.Simone Collins: Six plus kids, you get a medal. It’s, it costs basically nothing. It can just, you, you don’t even, it could be a Zoom meeting for all the, justMalcolm Collins: come on. Yes. And then all the press would freak out. It would be great for the administration because of all the press freaking out about it.Mm-hmm. And people being like, it’s fascist to wanna be a mother.Simone Collins: Yeah. You and else [00:04:00] is like, wait, but so you reward. People for being war heroes and for contributions to science and for putting, you know, their lives on hold, to move forward the arts or technology or academia. But you don’t reward people for setting their, their lives aside to raise productive citizens.Excuse me. It’s, it’s so anti-feminist. But anyway. Anyway, I’m just putting it out there guys. Any, any moment now can bring back the, the medal of motherhood. But anyway, Russia at least is on it. But also they’ve done some more, some more extreme, and I mean, man, if you did these in the US it would be insane.It’s, it’s not, it’s never gonna happen here. We’re not even talking about it here. But what Russia has done is they have anti dink. That’s dual income, no kids propaganda rules. So in November of 2024, and this was their year of the family, like they had this big propaganda year of the family where they’re like, this [00:05:00] isMalcolm Collins: okay, okay, okay.Simone Collins: All about traditional values. They basically tried to reframe Russia as like, well, Russians believe in traditional families and traditional values and having children and the rest of the world is debauched and gross. And they actually even got some, and we did an episode on this at one point. They got some families.To move out to Russia to pursue their traditional values. ‘cause they’re like, yeah, I mean, I guess America’s not the country of traditional values anymore. So Russia even managed to convince a bunch of Americans that they were the, i they’re notMalcolm Collins: liking it that much.Simone Collins: I mean, to be determined. They there, what we covered in that episode was one particular like, village that was being developed, still is being developed. If you wanna buy a plot of land within my links to their website they’ll help you build the house, they’ll help you with your paperwork. I mean, it’s a, a full service business. You, you, you can live in this little village with other expats.And you know. Yeah, there’s Canadians, there’s Americans. It’s a, it’s a whole thing. But anyway in, in [00:06:00] that year of the family the, the Duma passed a law banning propaganda of child free or deliberately childless lifestyles, which covered media, films, and online content. So even if you’re like an influencer, you can’t be like, I’m proudly child free.I’m a dink. I get to go to bed whenever I want, whatever, you know. And because they’re, they’re seen as basically discouraging people from having children because they are the law introduces administrative fines for individuals, officials, and organizations with possible suspension of activities or even deportation for foreign nationals if they’re judged to promote a child-free ideology.So, while the traditional family values. Of foreigners who’ve moved to Russia to pursue them. I guess any like dink influencers who are out there living it up or, or getting deported in the media, the, the state promotes an, like, actively promotes like an ideal of heterosexual family with at least two, but preferably three children, and they use state media and [00:07:00] films and education campaigns to normalize this as the approved model.Which again, I can’t imagine ever happening in the United States. There’s also a much more strict, and this has been around for much longer than the dink ban, an LGBT propaganda ban. So Russia’s, LGBT, and this, there’s like several laws, it’s like a, a constellation of laws. This is, this is like, it’s a whole thing.In in 2013, Russia adopted a law. So this happened, it started so long ago that banned the propaganda of non-traditional sexual relations to minors. Adding Article 6.21 to the administrative code and framing, LGBT content is harmful to children. And it was used to block pride events and shut down LGBT organizations and fine individuals for public support or visibility even before later expansion.So even in the very early beginnings of this 13 years ago, it was pretty strict. Then in December of 2022, Putin signed amendments that expanded the ban from [00:08:00] minors to everyone. So now any propaganda of non-traditional sexual relations information that makes them seem normal. Or that promotes gender transition is prohibited for all age groups.And that that scope covers the internet and media and films and books and advertising public events or even neutral or factual information about LGBT people counts as propaganda.Malcolm Collins: Just, you just cannot talk about gayness being aSimone Collins: thing. Don’t say like literal, don’t say gay people. Like, oh, like literal.Don’t say gay, but it’s thing. No, no, no. Like actually in Russia. Just don’t say gay. Okay? Just should be safe. And even on November of 2023, Russia’s Supreme Court labeled the so-called International LGBT movement as an extremist organization, which effectively made any organized LGBT activism, potentially prosecutable under anti extremism laws, and then a separate 2023 law banned gender affirming medical [00:09:00] care.Legal gender change. And it also, well, I mean, what’sMalcolm Collins: funny is that in the United States, we’re probably going there. If we look at demographic trends right now and who’s having kids in, in their politics, I would not be surprised if we have laws on the books like this was in our lifetime.Simone Collins: It’s so funny because when we started prenatal list.org, the website was all like.Hey, you know, you know, we’ll help, you know, gay and lesbian couples, you know, become parents. We really wanna make this a, a very inclusive world because, you know, if if these groups don’t manage to be high fertility, we’re not gonna see it anymore. And already, like another element of of, of like the Russian law is if you’ve changed your gender, you can’t adopt or foster children.Like, yeah, exactly what we said. Basically, like if these people don’t have kids. You’re not gonna have these values supported. Yeah. You’re not gonna have this option in the future.Malcolm Collins: Well, I mean, well, sorry. The reason why I think the, the trans adoption thing is just really high rates of, of a child molestation in that [00:10:00] community.Simone Collins: Yeah. Yeah.Malcolm Collins: So, it makes a lot of sense to not, and, and specifically of adopted children historically. There’s, there’s been a number of cases of that, so,Simone Collins: yeah. No, I mean, I, I get Yeah, I get that. And we, we can’t go there because I’m too triggered by it. By children being hurt. So moving on in terms of just like, actually the, the health ministry’s guidelines, I, I did have to ask myself like.Can psychologists actually be trusted to help women form healthy views? Because the, the health ministry text simply says, women who say they do not want to have children should be referred to a medical psychologist or clinical psychologist to form positive attitudes toward childbirth. And it doesn’t prescribe any special training or method for this.And so I checked to see if like Russia has like some sort of different. Psychology track that might support this. And while they do have perinatal psychology and psychotherapy programs and associations that train specialists in preparing families for pregnancy and birth and dealing with [00:11:00] fears, maybe helping people grow in mothers and fathers roles, the programs focus on people who are already pregnant or planning children and that they use techniques like informational counseling and family therapy and resource-based art therapy to support hood.But that’s. As people who wanted to have kids already. So I don’t think that like repurposing these types of therapists. To change people’s attitudes about wanting kids at all?Malcolm Collins: No, no, no. Even therapist and therapy culture is one of the triggers in our society of so much of the toxic parts of the urban monoculture.Yeah. To weaponize that very faction of society, even just to normalize with therapists if they are not normalizing. The idea that a woman should want children to their patients. That their job is at risk that they could lose. You know, because this, keep in mind, it doesn’t just normalize it as the women, it normalizes it with the therapist.This is how they have to approach childless [00:12:00] women in therapy.Simone Collins: Well, no, no, no. It only normalizes it with the doctors and its guidelines, not laws. So this doesn’t actually say the therapists have to be the same way. And it, it’s different. And so I could see this shifting where it does shift it where like you have to go to a.Government employed therapist who, who does have that skew, for example. This is happening with the way that abortions work in Russia. So Russia one of the ways that they’re trying to sort of discourage abortions without like outright banning them is they are forcing the closure of many. Private abortion clinics and instead directing them to government based clinics where there are a lot more delays and where you have to listen to a heartbeat and undergo counseling.And so when you have government controlled systems like that, you have more of that. But right now, that’s not happening with the psychologists. They’re just like. What what’s really happening is just the doctors are supposed to be like, well, you need to get that checked out. What’sMalcolm Collins: interesting is in Russia, they decrease abortions by trying to do more taxpayer funded abortions.Simone Collins: Yeah. That, and [00:13:00] that’s, that’s actually quite novel and interesting, isn’t it?Malcolm Collins: Yeah, it is. It is.Simone Collins: Especially coming fromMalcolm Collins: AmericaSimone Collins: where, but but, but, so there is one thing where I’m like, well, maybe because. Basically, poor mental health is linked in several studies to lower childbearing intentions or lower fertility.Like actually both can be affected.Malcolm Collins: Well, I, I would, I would argue that seeing a psychologist is, is gonna be linked with these because it’s linked with more and, and self-perceived lower mental health is gonna be linked with seeing a psychologist and that’s gonna be linked with infection by the urban monoculture.Simone Collins: I mean, I don’t know if it’s the same in Russia though.Malcolm Collins: I mean, I, I wouldn’t be surprised if it wasn’t. And, and you still got the same, you know, wider global education system, wider global, urban monoculture of like the educated elite. I dunno.Simone Collins: I mean, the education system in Russia now is built into their propaganda machine which is very oriented around becoming apparent.And they’re, they’re even like, you know, encouraging.Malcolm Collins: I, I would, I would go further and you know, if somebody’s like, well, I’m [00:14:00] already seeing a psychologist you could do something like psychologists, if, if they report that psychologists go on a register for the number of, childless people who are seeing them.So if they have too many childless people seeing them then they basically get a talking to by the state in some form of repercussions.Simone Collins: Oh, like your license might be under review if like. You have a lot of,Malcolm Collins: yeah, so basically it forces mainstream psychologists to be more pro guiding women in this direction.Simone Collins: I could see that, but, but the, the point I was also trying to make is that if you resolve people’s depression, anxiety, et cetera, it can one, help their overall fertility, because fertility can be depressed by things like stress. And also it could increase their intentions of having children. In fact, when you hear.Well, well, even when we look at movements like Antinatalism Yeah. And we, we talk with people who don’t wanna have kids, it’s, they’re often clearly obviously suffering from [00:15:00] clinical depression, clinical anxiety, like genuine mental health problems. And I do wonder if, like, if we treated those, do you think that would go away?Like, do you think they actually, and I mean many people who don’t wanna have kids directly cite that,they’re like, well, how can I bring children into this world?And maybe if they didn’t feel that way. They’d wanna be parents. I’m just saying like maybe, maybe it could actually help even if it doesn’t directly help, but, but I think the really big thing, and you pointed this out at the very top, you pointed this out at the very top, is that the big cultural shift here?Is not the therapy or the lack of therapy or whether the person actually goes to the referred clinical psychologist. It is that it is being framed as a problem like, Hey, I don’t wanna have children. Wow. You better get that checked out. And that is the important thing, is the cultural reframing of not wanting to have kids as like a form of insanity, a kind of disease that might need treatment.Because it, it’s, it’s really [00:16:00] important to just contextualize this narrative that, that not wanting kids is like, okay. Has, has only existed and, and one has existed, like at all as, as, as a, as a minority view since the 1960s. And in terms of existing as, as a more broadly acceptable thing, really post the two thousands before that.Basically you were crazy if you did not want to be a mother as a woman. So in ancient Rome, motherhood was seen as like the core sign of respectability, marriage and childbearing were just core to what it was to be an honorable woman. And then of course, also there were things like the, the Augustinian birth incentive and honors for bearing several children.Malcolm Collins: And youSimone Collins: can see our episode on medals for motherhood. Go way back. Okay, this, come on, Trump administration. You can do this. Thanks.Malcolm Collins: Well, you, you, you, we did an episode on why Roman [00:17:00] Tism failed. So interesting to see if you’re interested in that topic, but continue.Simone Collins: Yeah. Then in the Christian Middle Ages motherhood was seen as a, a, a spiritual and religious vocation.And really the, the only reason why you, you might not be a mother in, in a sort of justifiable religiously or societally acceptable ways if you like, chose to be a nun. So that was kind of one of the few ways where you could be. A full human as a woman and, and not have children, but you were a spiritual mother then.And then in the early modern to 19th century, a motherhood turned to be something patriotic. So enlighten, enlightenment, and revolutionary era discourse in places like the United States and France, it actually recast women instead of making it like a religious vocation. Like, you know, the cult of the Virgin Mary and all that.Yeah. They, they were reframed as Republican mothers who said, I like this.Malcolm Collins: I like this framing.Simone Collins: Yeah. Civic duty was to raise and bear virtuous citizens. So motherhood became sort of a patriotic role. And in, in contrast, [00:18:00] women who did not marry in bear children could be labeled as Unfeminine Idol or unpatriotic.And in some context, their childlessness was treated as some kind of social. In societal betrayal, which I, I dig. I, I like,Malcolm Collins: I love you. You’re fantastic. But no, I, I agree. In, in Australia, there was a campaign I, in the eighties even that said one for the dad, one for the mom, and one for the state.Oh,Simone Collins: I love that. Yeah. One for the, I mean, that’s, I mean, that’s three, that’s, that’s the number that Russia’s going for. So Yeah. Still, still hanging onto that though, in the, in the 20th century, so starting in the 19 hundreds, motherhood shifted from. You know, respectability and reli, religious virtue and patriotism to this like scientific management.So with the rise of industrialization and urbanization and new professions, this, there was this like intensive, expert driven model of motherhood with scientific, childbearing advice and emerging welfare states. And the everything sort of framed [00:19:00] mothers as, as managers of children’s physical and psychological development.You even saw this kind of starting with the Victorian era where like women were in charge of the household and like managing all these things. And this is where you actually get the, the first cracks, but only starting in the 1960s where women were starting to critic. The, the concept of compulsory motherhood.And, and they were like, oh, well this limits my education and my work and my autonomy. And this is of course, the result of families starting to atomize everything and no longer look at families as this cohesive unit, but rather look at everyone as individuals and when, when. Everyone starts leaning out of the family, then it suddenly becomes, well, what about me?What about my education? What about my identity? When really everyone should be leaning into this one thing which is, you know, this unbroken chain you’ve been a part of for millions of years. It shouldn’t terminate with you, but whatever. And then you finally get the rise of the child free movement only really in the early 21st century.So after the year 2000 is when suddenly you start getting things. I mean, the term dink is [00:20:00] super new. Dual income. No. Yeah. Like that’s, yeah.Malcolm Collins: Yeah.Simone Collins: This, this concept of like being proud of it and identifyingMalcolm Collins: of aspirationally child freeSimone Collins: Yeah.Malcolm Collins: Is really modern. It was not true even when I was growing up.Nobody, nobody was aspirationally child free.Simone Collins: Yeah. It was still, still sad. It was like, oh, you know, this is, like it, it was viewed as some form of misfortune or, or, or selfishness or coldness or career obsession. And like, oh, you know, she’s a little off. Like it was still, she’s a little off. And thenMalcolm Collins: you could brag about it.Like it’s not that nobody bragged about it, but they came off. The same way that like a militant lesbian would today or something like that. Right? Like yeah. Somebody who is incredibly detached from society and its values. Yeah. And is attempting to aggressively signal to youSimone Collins: detached they’re societal norms and like mainstream respectability and sort of proudly so.But now this concept of childlessness. Or, or child family [00:21:00] size limitation is something that people even use to virtue signal. Like, you know, Harry and Megan back before they became disgraced being like, well, we’re never gonna have more than two children because it’s bad for the environment. You know, so even people having children.Trying to virtue signal their choice to not have more children. And that, that is really the tipping point. And so here you see with this policy, Russia trying to subtly change that default of, no, this is not virtuous. Something is mentally wrong with you, go see a shrink. Which I think is actually pretty good.I, I like it. It’s favorable. What do you think?Malcolm Collins: Yeah,Simone Collins: it’sMalcolm Collins: good. No, I mean, I, I of all of the strategies I have heard around this, I think this is a very good strategy for multiple reasons. I think that there are better ways it could be implemented Yeah. Than the government shrinks. Like if you implemented this.Through mainstream shrinks. But you said if X percent of your patients, like, you know, we have a registry. Right. And if somebody’s like, I’m [00:22:00] already seeing a shrink, and then you, you, your license was under review. Mm-hmm. You get enormous pressure as a psychologist to talk your patients in to this particular life path.Yeah. And I think that there are, and, and to glorify and normalize being a mom, like, have you thought about it? What’s holding you up? Why don’t you have a partner yet? Right. So it’s like going to your parents’ house every time you go to a shrink. So why don’t you have a partner yet? And did you, did you follow through with the things you were gonna follow through with?And the other thing that I think it could also be expanded into other environments, like high school life counselors evenSimone Collins: bring back those dating instructional videos.Malcolm Collins: Yes. Simone loves thoseSimone Collins: so good.Malcolm Collins: But I think. Yeah, and, and, and, and I think in. Posters in advertisements to talk about the disease of childlessness.Like to frame it [00:23:00] as the way it used to be framed, like a barrenness and pitiable. You know, like having people gossiping about somebody being childless or something. Right. You know, like, oh, do you think, you know, and that would do a lot to,Simone Collins: here’s my thing though, is I kind of. I feel like a lot of these cultural efforts, when you look for example, at what Russia has done it and, and when you see China too, like China’s statues of one child family suddenly turning into three child families and stuff.I feel that that has a very distinct dystopian ring to it. And as much as I love motherhood medals because of that, because it causes the extra buzz, but then causes people to be like, well, but yeah, actually, what’s wrong with rewarding people who sacrifice their lives for, to raise good citizens? I, I.I don’t know, like and may tell me if I’m crazy here. I just feel like over time, intuitively I know it will never happen, and this is why I still lean on culture most as the most feasible intervention. But if I were Empress of the world, the one and [00:24:00] only thing I would doMalcolm Collins: added to the dsm.Simone Collins: No, I would just, for the period when parents are raising children, so they have children in their households that are under 18 years, no income tax.Malcolm Collins: Yeah, I think the, we should do that. The reason why it would never pass like that is you would need to say no income tax until you get to a certain level, becauseSimone Collins: Sure. That’s, that’s fine.Malcolm Collins: Actually, no, that’s not exactly because they, because then people also,Simone Collins: keep in mind, Malcolm, the wealthiest people don’t have income.Malcolm Collins: Yeah, true.Simone Collins: It’s all, it’s all investments and stuff, so I even, I am like, I’m fine with capping it at like, you know, up to whatever, like $500,000 or 200. Like I don’t care, like 200,000. Like whatever. I don’t, I don’t like. But here’s the thing is middle class families are the ones that are hit hardest by the costs of raising children, but they’re also the ones that are producing the highest [00:25:00] tax paying children and citizens who are gonna prop up the social programs.Right. Well, okay,Malcolm Collins: this is the way I would handle this if I was gonna do it. Okay. It would be a progressive thing where you need to have five kids to have no income tax.Simone Collins: Oh yeah.Malcolm Collins: And you get a one fifth of that with every kid that you have potentially scaling. So like, not aSimone Collins: lot. Yeah. I just, I think that people should be rewarded by it more as they make more income.And this is like income generated by work done, you know, not investment income ‘cause you’re not doing work. To,Malcolm Collins: oh, people would freak out so much at that. Would people freak out about having to pay into a tax system that supports other people’s kids? LikeSimone Collins: we do that already. It just happens to be children of people who are not generating any taxes.Malcolm Collins: And we can fix this by shutting down public schools.Simone Collins: Yeah, that’s never gonna happen. But anyway yeah, I mean, I bring it up a lot because it’s never gonna happen and I don’t like talking about should haves ‘cause that’s just, it’s pointless. There’s no pragmatism to it.Malcolm Collins: Well, I mean, public schools do [00:26:00] need to be shut down though.Like, I, I, I feel very strongly that they are one of the biggest forces of social negative disruption at this point. And that they are basically torture for children. And that with AI, they become increasingly less relevant.Simone Collins: They kind of always have been though. Like even when you look back at actually I think one of the Bronte sisters died after attending a, a girl’s school.Like ever since external schools existed they’ve been brutal and terrible. I, in, in general, what I’ve learned from the, the people in the base camp network. Who are better at this than I am more informed about all these things, and they’ve introduced me to all of this stuff. Basically when kids start being raised by people who are not related to them by blood stuff goes wrong, they’re not as invested.And when you go back to the very earliest schools as we understand them, sort of this industrial schooling model, it’s just not good. And you know, you have these Dickensian schools, they’re just horrible. You’ve got. [00:27:00] WBS or AKA do The boys school in Nicholas Nickleby, just horrible places. I mean, they always have been terrible.And now they’re, they’re still terrible, but things are so complicated you can’t really shut them down because they’re also a means of distributing a form of childcare in the United States where you’re gonna get arrested if your kid isn’t being minded. So a lot of parents. Can’t function without the public school system because also they’re gonna like,Malcolm Collins: yeah, well, I mean, we need an alternativeSimone Collins: toMalcolm Collins: it somewhere where kids can go and learn by themselves during the day.Simone Collins: I know that’s, that was the whole model we were developing with the Collins Institute is just that you, you, you can’t get support for anything that’s not like some kind of underprivileged child with hepatitis program or, you know, some form of. I don’t know, likeMalcolm Collins: if you wanna try out the Collins Institute, it’s operational, you can try it at paraia doo or collins institute.org.It is inexpensive [00:28:00] and it is a great AI educational thing for slightly older kids, like once they can read fluently. And if you wanna try out our project right now our fab.ai, which is ai like adventure chatbots, companion chatbots, and a agentic models which we are constantly,anyway. I thought this was a interesting one, Simone.Simone Collins: I find it fascinating too.Malcolm Collins: I love the Trump administration even just using this like the next time we do things to the administration. I would 100%, like if, if I could go back and, and do those pitches to the administration, I would include this, because obviously the administration’s not going to, oh,Simone Collins: the, the health health guidelines encouraging.Malcolm Collins: Encouraging single women, women whiz without children to see a therapist about being childless because the media would freak out. ISimone Collins: feel like I like the metal hood mother. Sorry, the metal hood, the motherhood metal more. It’s because this is more positive [00:29:00] and cool.Malcolm Collins: I agree, but it’s less funny. The I mean they did go completely epileptic about that.They were just likeSimone Collins: apoplecticMalcolm Collins: app, whatever, the app, the Apple word. They went apples. They went apples. And they said, oh no. And it’s proof. We finally found the proof that they’re Nazis. Oh mySimone Collins: God.Malcolm Collins: They’re, they got the Nazi medal. They’re, they’re Nazis. TheySimone Collins: always, yeah. TheyMalcolm Collins: love,Simone Collins: they just loved that when we submitted that executive order.Well,Malcolm Collins: thank you. I, I love our public profile, Simone. It’s dead.Simone Collins: It’s great. It’s great.Malcolm Collins: I’m, I’m, I’m scooting on it. I love it. I’m having fun with it. More of that,Simone Collins: more of that always.Malcolm Collins: All right. And for dinner tonight, we are doingSimone Collins: Rendang.Malcolm Collins: Yes. Rendang. Very excited for that. Mm-hmm. Oh, and you can even mix in some peppers if they’re still good.Simone Collins: Yeah. I’ll check. I’ll check.Malcolm Collins: Okay. Okay.Simone Collins: Love [00:30:00] you.Malcolm Collins: Love you. And great episode, Simone. Thank you so much. Do you wanna do another or do you want to,Simone Collins: What do you want for dinner? I’m making Octavian and, and Titan giant pancakes because they’ve demandedMalcolm Collins: giant pound of cakes,Simone Collins: pancakes. Yeah. So this one day I made like normal sized pancakes and then I made one super giant one, and Octavian just thought it was the best thing in the world and like, like a perfectly round Japanese looking one, you know, like.You don’t watch that. I’llMalcolm Collins: have Ang and RiceSimone Collins: Instagram, so I guess you would never knowMalcolm Collins: you’re, you’re pan faring stuff. So I’ll have reang and rice and the, the reang cooked with coconut oil toSimone Collins: coconut milk.Malcolm Collins: Coconut milk, yeah, whatever. To make it a bit less thick. AndSimone Collins: do you want me to put, do you want me to add hoisin sauce or some.SambolMalcolm Collins: Reang. Yeah, I think reang could deal with some hoist and sauce [00:31:00] and a bit of symbolic actually. Yeah. Not as much as normal, but I think that that’ll add a bit of a kick to it.Simone Collins: Alright, we’re on. Okay. Okay. Let me get my. Right. Okay.Speaker: You found flower petals. What? Oh my God. Are they coming from the tree? They’re coming from all these flowers. Wow. Have you ever seen anything like that before? Yeah, but what day is it? Well, it’s spring. That’s why. There’s flower petals everywhere. Yeah. Do you like spring? Yeah. ‘cause I get to.Speaker 2: Flower twice. Okay. I go in flower.Speaker 3: Wow. That’s a lot of flower petals. [00:32:00] I’ve never seen anything like this. This is crazy. I.Speaker: You having a flower pedal fight? Yeah. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit basedcamppodcast.substack.com/subscribe